Sometimes it is good to get more than one opinion on a single show…

Unpacking My Library: Dan Arps, Xin Cheng, Bill Culbert, The Estate of L. Budd, Peter Madden, Daniel Malone, Elizabeth McAlpine, Neil Pardington and Ann Shelton.
Curated by Stephen Cleland
Te Tuhi
13 February - 11 April 2010

This show spirals around the distinction between a library and a collection, for although the two are obviously very different, in many people’s minds they often end up becoming interchangeable. Especially if you believe that objects and the sensations they provide can have their codes read as if they were newly opened books.

Is a library something like a wine cellar (the objects contained use–up-able eventually) or is it more like a wardrobe, a source of references in your conversation that you put on like wearable tactile garments? The roles of favourite sensations, reliable ideas, and certain zones in between – can all these be noted and stored to be savoured again in the future?

To introduce this theme in-house curator Stephen Cleland has had printed on a poster a beautiful passage from the well known essay that provides this show’s title. Written by Walter Benjamin, the patron saint of, indeed the founder of, art theory, and published first in 1931, it discusses the pleasure of building up a collection through pursuing individual items. Much like say, stories about the great Russian novelist Vladimir Nabokov running through country fields with his net, chasing butterflies - a lifetime obssession.

Cleland’s show though is only partially about books. Much of it is about catalogues, taxonomies, and how we classify things. That aspect pertains more to another great figure in theory, Michel Foucault than to Walter Benjamin, and Foucault’s amusement (as discussed in his preface to The Order of Things) at Jorge Luis Borges’ account of a particular Chinese Encyclopaedia where animals are classified by being: (a) property of the Emperor, (b) embalmed, (c) tame, (d) suckling pigs, (e) sirens, (f) fabulous, (g) stray dogs, (h) included in the present classification, (i) frenzied, (j) innumerable, (k) drawn with a very fine camelhair brush, (l) et cetera (m) recently the cause of a broken water pitcher, (n) similar from a long way off to a row of flies.

Of the nine artists here only two specifically use books: Ann Shelton and Xin Cheng. Room stalwart Cheng also presented a library in last year’s Article 27 show in North Shore curated by Richard Dale. Her space this time in Te Tuhi is bigger and less cell-like, with a large square plywood table and four boxlike plywood chairs. On the table are nineteen hardcover publications, many from local libraries. Most are about architecture, design, clothing and cooking.

This sort of exhibition promotes the notion of art being research, so it invites gallery visitors to dig out information and become artists themselves. For example I have personally decided to seek out certain books at various libraries after they have been returned. Four in particular are especially appealing: one, The Architect, The Cook and Good Taste connects building with cooking; another looks at chair designer Rolf Fehlbaum and how chairs are conceived; a third presents coloured photos by Albert Kahn taken around the world during the second decade of last century; and a fourth examines Scandinavian knitting patterns.

The theme of books continues in five small video screens from Ann Shelton set in a line on a long wall. They feature her continued fascination with Frederick Butler, whose archive of thousands of cards and books (many of which are old novels he used as scrapbooks for local newspaper cuttings) are kept in the New Plymouth public library. Her nine videos show the pages of volumes left out of the 'spinal' photographs but included here, turning through each volume one at a time, and revealing scribbled annotations, lists, dates, charts, cartoons, headings and more. They, especially the clippings, are very hard to read but they attempt to whet your appetite.

It is difficult to pin down the value (if any) of Butler’s unusual obsession, and if he fits as an artist (he probably doesn’t because he didn’t think of himself as such) or as a social historian (again probably not, for in this field he may have done more damage than good - for the newspapers would be more useful intact.) Shelton’s earlier well known series of life-sized photos of the spines of Butler’s archive, as seen on the library storage shelves, is amazing, but these page-turning videos ram home a connection with Borges’ Chinese encyclopaedia. The headings of four consecutive pages in one notebook on medical conditions go as: pimples; prunes; potassium broth; potatoes. There may be a coherent logic here, to do perhaps with bio-chemistry, but it is not very clear.

The three Neil Pardington Lambda/C-prints displayed come from the basements of Te Papa, Auckland Museum and the Hocken library. These very detailed images show items of mammal and marine life, rolled up textiles stored on steel rods, and a box of catalogue cards.

How does one 'read' these? Well the long triptych from Te Papa reveals masses of mounted deer heads that most likely will never be displayed, and what seems to be a killer whale skull that probably will. Auckland Museum’s rolled up rugs are stored slightly over on the left hand side of the racks bearing horizontal bars – perhaps a vague comment on some bias of sorts, and the Otago cupboard of filing cards with labelled catalogue drawers makes a gorgeous grid that obscures (but potentially confirms) the rationale of the enclosed register for the art collection.

The logic of organising such inventories is tested to opposite extremes by British artist Elizabeth McAlpine and The Estate of L. Budd. McAlpine continually collects postcards of Big Ben and the Houses of Parliament – of different periods and sizes. To present them on a wall she uses a huge 12 x 60 matrix of 720 plastic pockets. She has about a third of that number of cards in total.

The system she uses to position each card in the grid for display depends on the time shown on the clock dial: vertical co-ordinates equal hours; horizontal equal minutes - so you place the card where they cross. Day and night are blended, and McAlpine plays on the fact that in some images the time is indecipherable, or one hand at least is hidden by shadow. Therefore her system, which looks impressive at first glance, is not totally reliable, for she has to make arbitrary decisions sometimes. Some cards are repeated three times.

The contribution of The Estate of L. Budd to Cleland’s exhibition is to turn one of the gallery rooms into a little warehouse, bringing in for this show (but not ‘displayed’) various works made by that artist stored in different locations scattered around the country. On the temporary shelves we see bulky storage boxes daubed in characteristic grey with scribbled crayon, heaters, turntables, suit-cases, cabinets, and sound gear. And various rolled up awnings and paintings lean against an end wall.

A catalogue for The Estate’s ‘Extant Works’ hangs off one shelf, and its pages are also pinned to one wall. An ambiguous blue taped line runs between the shelving and the space where the viewers enter, half suggesting they go no further. A surveillance monitor watches from one corner.

More importantly, The Estate of L. Budd monitors itself. Problems of authenticity are adjudicated where collectors are invited to submit ‘applications of registration and authentication’ for possible Budd works not yet listed. The Estate shows caution in instigating such bureaucratic procedures, exhibiting samples of blue Approved or Denied stamps and being forever vigilant, in case dubious ‘L. Budd’ works appear in the future - possible forgeries attempted maybe by P. Mule, Arthur Craig and Sons, Blanche Readymade, et al. and others.

Daniel Malone’s work is a catalogue attempted by memory alone, listing all the personal possessions (including cardboard rubbish he refused to discard) that he left behind when he moved to Poland, where he now lives, and which made up a Gambia Castle exhibition he sold to the Chartwell Collection.

The recounted, shorter list was written on a long wall in Paintstik by an assistant using a ‘tagger’ script with upper case printing and vertical bars through S’s and O’s. It vaguely relates to Douglas Gordon’s list on a wall of everybody he has ever met since 1990 that he can remember. Malone’s attempted inventory, with its graffiti form of presentation, seems out of place within a municipal gallery where it looks compromised. It would make a far more interesting project if it were ‘defacing’ Te Tuhi’s outer walls and genuinely drawing on the urban politics of the text ‘font’.

Eight freestanding sculptures by Dan Arps fill one small gallery, and demonstrate the merits of recycling elements from disparate exhibitions, scattered in time and place, to make something new. Some aspects of this show refer to Arps’ TWNCAA entry in Hamilton for 2005 (Creation Myth), others to Telecom Prospect in Wellington a pinch later, and others still to a Gambia Castle show held last year.

Arps’ sculptures use office swivel stools, bookcases, and old clothing dressers as plinths for hybrid versions of kitsch ceramic garden ornaments, and are very entertaining. They revel in messy and dribbly sculptural processes, with say, bits of paper decals on desks alongside bits of cardboard Buckminster Fuller models or resin/ceramic goblins or toadstools.

This is a restrained show for Arps, one that is oddly elegant with its uncluttered calculated placements. It is the highlight of the nine Te Tuhi exhibitions, a sort of ‘Dan Arps’ Greatest Hits’ with a surprising accessibility.

Using a darkened annex and revolving carousel of eighty slides with a translucent wall, Peter Madden presents a set of installations and collages that are tightly connected as a sample of his practice. The shots are taken from a variety of positions and display his usual subject matter of exotic tropical wildlife, Southeast Asian Gods, hands and expressive facial portraits. Like Arps (and often Budd and Malone) there is an interest in recycling forms that can subvert standard cataloguing procedure and which perhaps drives registrars worried about provenance of ingredients frantic. With Madden, there are so many parts to each installation that one is overwhelmed by numerical plenitude, a plethora of (usually small) components to be listed and documented.

Bill Culbert’s double-row of sixteen black and white photographs butted together provides a good inventory of his visual interests and modes of thinking. In this sampler we see a number of approaches to light’s effect on surfaces – or lack of, as darkness. There is behind, on top, emitting from within, and through transparent layers. Then there is the visual punning: jokes about fake table and chair legs, or concave pot surfaces and convex bulbs. These square images are like chapter headings in a book, or subfolders of files within a larger computer folder for research – guides to thematic approaches that are part of an artist’s brand; unpacked slices of their oeuvre.

Cleland has put together here a clever and unusual show that illuminates not so much specific examples of collecting as its relationship to maintaining types of certain art practice, while commenting on collecting’s general ordering principles and common administrative procedures.

In descending order the images are of works by Xin Cheng, Ann Shelton, Neil Pardington, Elizabeth McAlpine, The Estate of L. Budd, Daniel Malone, Dan Arps, Peter Madden and Bill Culbert.

Stephen Cleland has put together a new show for Te Tuhi. Here is a review from

Kate Brettkelly-Chalmers. (I've some thoughts of my own I hope to post next week.)

Unpacking My Library: Dan Arps, Xin Cheng, Bill Culbert, The Estate of L. Budd, Peter Madden, Daniel Malone, Elizabeth McAlpine, Neil Pardington, Ann Shelton.
Curated by Stephen Cleland.
Te Tuhi Centre for the Arts
13 February – 11 April, 2010

There’s something quite amusing about staging an exhibition that looks at collecting during the height of Auckland’s humid summer. Anyone who has watched a treasured artwork or book expand and warp with moisture during these months understands the difficulties of preserving a collection here. Nevertheless, the latest group show at Te Tuhi Centre for the Arts Unpacking My Library brings together artists who contemplate the trials and pleasures of collecting; of keeping objects and ephemera that one can’t quite let go of.

The stage for this exhibition is duly set with Neil Pardington’s large-scale photographs of museum storage rooms and equipment. Much like nocturnal creatures, artworks and museum objects have another, somewhat unseen life away from exhibition spaces and studios. Pardington documents this air-conditioned world of careful packaging and specialised storage devices, looking at the storerooms of collections held by New Zealand institutions including Te Papa Tongarewa and the Hocken Library. A ‘behind the scenes’ look is always fascinating, especially when the means of collecting become just as curios as the collection itself, but the themes of this exhibition gain greater traction in other artist’s work.

The entire Estate of L. Budd, deceased member of the et al. collective, is stored in one gallery and reminds us that the packaged life of an artwork often outlasts that of the artist who created it. The coils of bureaucracy are relished in this gallery-turned-storage-room where viewers might peer through tediously detailed (and probably meticulous) catalogue records and carefully crated artworks. The white paint of several of the Estate’s ‘blonded’ objects, presumably dating from the 1990s when L. Budd was said to be active, can be seen through their bubble-wrap enclosures.

Not surprisingly, the relationship between the et al. collective and the Estate of L. Budd is not articulated. Rather than aiding clarity, the Estate’s bureaucratic mechanisms — its intimidating sheafs of records and methods of categorisation — seem to perpetuate an ongoing ambiguity. It is the very promise of perpetuity that is at stake here. Not only does an art practice gain an ongoing presence in a carefully preserved collection, so does its means of organisation. The prescient and troubling character of L. Budd’s Estate lies where its systems step away from their formative functions and start to take on lives of their own.

These concerns are nicely echoed in Daniel Malone’s wall work in Te Tuhi’s largest gallery, Black Market Next to My Name: From Warsaw, From Memory. It acts as a postscript listing all the items the artist can remember including in his fantastic show at Gambia Castle in 2007. This pseudo-catalogue, a graffiti scripted list covering the breadth of one wall, is pretty tame compared to the chaotic undertaking of Malone’s 2007 work which saw him install a massive collection of possessions in Gambia Castle’s five rooms. Individual objects on the list seem banal, but in their collected grouping cigarette packets, plastic bags, records or knitted jumpers became fascinating; a documentation of a life of unfettered accumulation.

Rumour has it that some of the objects appearing in Malone’s 2007 show didn’t even belong to the artist (it’s understandable: who doesn’t have a book or beach towel belonging to someone else at their house?). It does, however, provide problems for institutional cataloguers who need to record and account for every part of an artwork. The acquisition of Black Market Next to My Name in its entirety by the Chartwell Trust/Auckland Art Gallery adds another intriguing layer to this work; an amplification of its absurd qualities.

Unpacking My Library is a show that allows these and many other perceptive connections to be made between artists’ work. Nevertheless, within the terms of the curatorial theme, the most interesting work for me was Dan Arps’ installation of found and remodelled objects. Arps showed a collection of small sculptures carefully presented on and around defunct pieces of furniture. Originating somewhere between an office and a bedroom this collection of shelves, chairs and other fixtures retain layers of dust and other signs of disuse.

Arps’ precise placement of individual pieces gives a prop-like appearance to this installation: a stagey minimalism of found objects. But props for what? These sculptures, both forlorn and comical, imply a personal narrative but evade a clear-cut story. I immediately recognised a set of drawers from my childhood covered in scuffed and torn Garbage Pail Kids stickers from the 1980s (they were a bad-taste parody of the saccharine Cabbage Patch Kids dolls). Arps’ work invokes a kind of nostalgia that is heavily laced with abjection—a grimy element that undermines any sense of sentimentality.

Unpacking My Library operates at a similarly nostalgic distance. Aside from the marvel of Ann Shelton’s digital documentation of the Fredrick Butler Archive, most of the works in this show have a distinctly analogue character. It feels all the more distant given the presence of digitised archives and collections in our daily lives. Years worth of email correspondence, blogs publically cataloguing their subjects’ daily movements and masses of snapshot photos available through social networking sites like Facebook offer an instantaneous form of collection and archival preservation. Instead of this continual murmur of information and images, curator Stephen Cleland creates a highly considered, quiet and controlled environment. The usually bustling gallery has windows shaded, doors closed and the sticky Pacific air brought to a temperate level. It is as though Te Tuhi, a non-collecting gallery, has temporarily tried on the shoes of a stately institution offering viewers a dry and studious relief from the humidity outside.

The images, in descending order, show works by Pardington (2), The Estate of L. Budd, Malone, Arps, Shelton, Culbert, and McAlpine (on the lefthand wall).

Go on, take a nibble...

Dan Arps: Shallow Relief
Gambia Castle
I October - 17 October 2009

Dan Arps is a sculptor and installation artist well known within this country’s art community, a regular exhibitor here and in Australia whose name often polarises regular gallery goers: not for any objectionable personal defects but simply because his shows agitate audiences. They often get furiously indignant.

This exhibition is probably no different, though it does seem a little repetitive. It is very similar to his last Gambia show, with its corner of pinned up web-page threads, a sculpture with glowing ‘lightning’ ball, a recorded you-tube video - and one re-exhibited polystyrene-and-cardboard sandwich board. This time though there appears to be less going on.

Yet what we find here is still classic Arps. The space is occupied with what appears to be abandoned detritus. There is a pervading sense of delirium, all sorts of peculiar things thrown around, most being fake ready-mades that look like rubbish. Amongst it we can discern some shapeless sculptures made from various mixed up resins, putties, fillers and paints, so that their baked bases look like lumpy mounds of burnt poo, and paintings (or bookcases) smeared with flecks of what seems to be stringy snot. Plus the occasional film prop on the floor - like a chopped up, severed hand - or a sculpture shown last time in the same space. Calculated to provoke.

Although a sculptor, Arps is really in his aesthetic a descendent of painter Cy Twombly. Like a mad scientist in a laboratory using his formula of calculated perversity (always do the opposite of the norm), he seeks out inventive ways of devising marks or substance juxtapositions that are deliberately puzzling or ugly. This is in order to spring them onto a world that will not only eventually embrace them for their novel method of manufacture, but also admire them for their radical beauty. They don’t stay repulsive or confusing for long.

Interspersed within this shambolic array of ‘repellent’ sculptures and paintings are scrawled, partially legible texts and images that comment on various addictions or consumerist obsessions. These range from cars to drugs to computer chat rooms. They all provide the ‘shallow relief’ of the title. Various repeated symbols abound. The prism is one, through a videoed magic trick of a hollow, glass pyramid where a pretty girl materialises, or through symbols for wealth or the occult, or negative versions in split flags of a demonic dragon. A wiggling worm on a hook is another. Predators like ferocious wolves are one more.

If you put these two aspects together – the strange and nutty methods of using materials and the critique of addictive consumerist compulsions – then you get a prism's unity that comes with a chromatic split. In it Arps seems to laughing at the artworld and its desire for novelty. He plays this little game that attracts an audience that can’t help itself (for it likes to be shocked), but his propensity for ‘inventiveness’ is just another worm on the hook.

Or is there another parallel dimension, maybe the reverse? Is notoriety and attention itself the bait, and he himself the sucker who craves it?

There is one scribbled text here that declares the words ‘Dirty Sandwich’. Does this refer to the re-exhibited sandwich board? Or is it about what Arps is offering his gallery visitor, something edible but dangerous - something harmful that will only satisfy briefly before the desire for more returns? Or is it you and me (the artist’s audience) who is offering it to him, and he is chewing off the corner?

READING ROOM THREE

Reading Room: A Journal of Art and Culture
Issue 3: Art Goes On
Ed. Christina Barton, Natasha Conland and Wystan Curnow
pp.183, illust. colour and b/w
Pub. E. H. McCormick Research Library of Auckland Art Gallery, March 2009

They say, third time lucky, and this year’s Reading Room is especially good. In the past, because of editors Curnow and Barton being particularly passionate about sixties and seventies art, it has slightly been out of sync with a contemporary ethos. But no more. This issue is particularly current in some of its featured New Zealand artists (notably Gambia Castlers, Dan Arps and Fiona Connor – the latter with some drawings of Auckland Art Gallery as demolition site: a witty comment on the theme of newness); pertinent also in its discussion of the recession and the reduced market. And it is comparatively accessible – is not turgid. Still academic but comparatively clear and focussed.

The issue kicks off with a twenty-four page roundtable discussion where the editors trade emailed thoughts with invited guests Peter Brunt, Damian Skinner, Greg Burke, Gavin Hipkins, Robert Leonard and Emma Bugden. In response to Tina Barton asking what characterises the current moment, Peter Brunt and Damian Skinner talk about Ngahiraka Mason’s re-presentation of Turuki! Turuki! Paneke Paneke - 50 years after this pioneer exhibition of Maori art in Auckland. Brunt sees the included artists as creating a variety of western modernism, but Skinner perceives Mason as intending a repudiation of modernism and the achievements of nineties artists like Michael Parekowhai or Peter Robinson, saying the show “demonstrates the reality of what I would call Maori art history – art history that is conceptually different to Pakeha art history, a kind of writing that conceives of history and art differently.” (p.10).

There are many threads moving in and out of this complicated conversation, but the most exciting section is when Robert Leonard laments the oppressive attributes of social and cultural history when applied as “the dominant narratives or concerns of art”. He points out that they result in “denying art any wiggle room, the chance to make its own case.” (p.24). Damian Skinner agrees, praising the way “art exceeds and confounds the struggle of political decolonization and denies easy or obvious definitions.” In a deft bit of double-speak he says “I’m hoping art will muddle decolonisation as much as decolonisation will order art.”

Gavin Hipkins then makes a series of damning observations about the conformity and avoidance of risk-taking by graduates and post-graduates in New Zealand art schools, and in the shows curated by this country’s top municipal institutions. There is a lack of critical dialogue and a self-constraint that ensures content is kept away from over ambitious extremes, a voluntary flattening out of artists’ agency. (p.25). One wonders if some of these criticisms can even be directed at Reading Room itself in terms of some of its content.

This round-table discussion has an amusing ending when almost everybody jumps down the convenor Tina Barton’s throat, for asking “what is art for?…what purpose does it serve?” Greg Burke is troubled by “the rush of many to declare art’s functionality” (p.26) and Natasha Conland finds Barton’s question “troubling, as (she doesn’t) believe in (art’s) utilitarian dimension.” Emma Bugden too admits that she “harbours great suspicion of the term ‘useful’ ” and is critical of defining “the worth of an action purely by outcome.” (p.28).

Burke praises the uses of images that make no sense in isolation, suggesting that Deleuze’s term ‘any-space–whatever’ is valuable for linking cinematic moments “removed from the rest of the narrative”, while Wystan Curnow lashes out at the confining character of contextual meaning, for “narrowing art’s sphere of action”. Rightly so I think.

This long and richly layered discussion bears repeated readings to draw out the many responses and counter-responses. It’s a good start for the magazine.

Of the very experienced art writers contributing to this publication, Wystan Curnow, Terry Smith and Adrian Martin go back to the seventies and even earlier. Curnow’s text on Keiran Lyons 1975 Welder’s Weakness installation is a much needed supplement to an article he wrote on Lyons’ Superimpression (1973) for the New Art: Some recent New Zealand sculpture and post-object art book he put out with Jim Allen in 1976. It is not Curnow at his very best (for that you need his writing on Apple, Lye or McCahon), but it is more informative than its companion piece in the New Art anthology.

The Adrian Martin article here is his second contribution to Reading Room. It is about modernist film sequels (post WW2) and a whole range of ‘linked’ paired movies that he explores with characteristic precision. Martin does not talk about sequel in the usual sense of the word but as ‘gesture’ (a term also referenced by Jon Bywater in his essay on Dan Arps, and Anthony White in his discussion of Fontana) – not as continuation ‘of a coherent, mappable fictional world’ (p.50).

He emphasizes the fragmented nature of cinema, denying its often claimed coherency, and discusses Raúl Ruiz’s book series Poetics of Cinema, particularly his notion of ‘a film with 300 shots is 300 films’ as a fundamental discontinuity. There is an issue, Martin explains, for if film itself cannot have an internal continuity then how can a sequel be a continuation?

He points out how films like the Mad Max series shift as the central figure’s body and narrative context alter over time, this changing being also characteristic of documentary sequels. With their heterogeneous quality of film stock, black and white often mixed with colour, their inconsistencies create patterns within a bigger montage.

Martin’s main interest is to show how in over the last decade film-makers like Hal Hartley or Wong Kar-wai have let their characters stay static in certain sequels while the actors are allowed to age. Tone and genre alter drastically, links between films deliberately disconnected, and information methodically withheld. Displacements are created, and incongruous casts used with unrelated cinematic histories. Sometimes actors are recast to replay old roles; or there is a retelling and restarting of each sequel from scratch; a deliberate blurring between remake and sequel; or a rupture between the original film and its ‘contemporary correspondence’; or the retention of the same sound track – all these devices crating a new sort of mischievous adventurousness in a non-Hollywood film history.

Another Australian, Terry Smith has contributed a meticulously structured, highly inventive essay that deals with Walter Benjamin and his ownership of the 1920 Paul Klee watercolour ‘Angelus Novus’, a symbolic ‘angel of history.’ Starting with a discussion of this painting, and a poem about it by Benjamin’s friend Gershom Scholem, Smith looks at the forces of history, the global community and the current recession, using three models of listed concepts and economic realities to display the forces of social circulation.

One is based on a diagram by Thomas Friedman of the New York Times, of a top-down spread with globalization the key player at the top and agents, families and citizens at the bottom. Another is an inverted version of Friedman’s chart so that globalization becomes only one of many forces active in the world today, and the third is with the elements configured by nodal connections so that vectors move in all directions simultaneously, and any two elements can link up.

Smith then talks about the ‘civil society’ in global terms and starts to refer to various artworks that draw out a celebration of the values it upholds. Of particular interest are two works by Daniel Martinez, one a convulsing prosthetic humanoid, twitching frantically on the floor as if undergoing torture. Another is a gridded display of 121 gold-painted wooden panels presenting the names of various military organisations endeavouring to enforce a political position through violence. Such work Smith sees as espousing the vision of Klee’s Angel, and Jeff Koons’ Puppy as art that is operating contrary to it.

One of the difficulties of reading a text-dominant magazine like Reading Room is trying to get a clear picture of the art described, and then deciding if you will run with the writer in their discussion. Often the visual information (photographs and/or drawings) and the text don’t convince you. This is the case for many of the works in Helena Reckitt’s espousal of feminist and queer artists who search through art history (especially the seventies) for precedents that they can build upon - despite the rich content of her discussion. Such interactions Reckitt sees as a form of negotiation or conversation, not nostalgic celebration or fetishization. For me personally, only one work, Kajsa Dahlberg’s A Room of One’s Own / A Thousand Libraries, a massive printed edition of texts made by duplicating scribbled annotations found in a number of 1958 editions of Woolf’s book, really excites as a project.

In the archive section Liz Eastmond’s description of Fan (Feminist Art Networkers) projects in the eighties is highly informative and detailed, as is Mary Kisler’s account of the life and activities of the second AAG Director, the art historian Peter Tomory. I remember reading his and Hamish Keith’s pioneer set of three small books on NZ painting in the early seventies – long before Keith and Brown’s own historic publication appeared - and noticed then that he had disappeared.

Eastmond’s account of Fan though is unusual because of the breezy cadences of her written delivery. Most art historians use a standard tone which is ubiquitously standard in its emotional pitch, and a little dreary, but her crisp phrasing and buoyant expression here keeps the reading lively.

The highlights of RR3, in my view are the essays by Jon Bywater and Anthony White. Bywater has written several variations of an exegesis on Dan Arps and this version is the fullest and most richly layered. In it he analyses several recent Arps shows, documenting the themes and ingredients carefully.

Bywater considers that Arps’ practice reflects a ‘deep pessimism about the convergence of …the logics of artistic modernism and industrial or technological invention’ and that it ‘cynically parodies aspirations for art’s value’ by using ‘the market’s demand for novelty’ to coincide ‘with artistic invention’ as another symptom of a hegemonic capitalist mode of production.’ (p.107)

Bywater takes Giorgio Agamben’s notion of a sphere of aesthetic gestures (‘those means that emancipate themselves from their relation to an end while remaining means’) which Agamben sees as the ‘proper sphere of politics’ and applies them to a view that ‘the duty of the (film-making) director is to introduce…the element of waking.’ He sees Arps as doing something similar.

Though personally I think Arps’ work is more about a laboratory of semiotics (and not politics), Bywater has constructed an important document to be discussed. Yet Arps is more nihilistic than what Bywater indicates, though he does seem to have a programme where he systematically tinkers with meaning.

If there is any prevalent uniting theme in his exhibitions, it is more likely to be about the attaining of happiness. As for ‘the new’, he seems to be buying into it, and not critiquing it at all. I am not convinced Arps is a satirist.

Of the two remaining articles, Lee Weng Choy’s interview with Donna Ong is accompanied by some impressive black and white matt photographs of her installations. Choy is an exceptionally articulate and elegant writer but the conversation is too biographical and not sufficiently concentrated on Ong’s work. More on career than say practice, even though the notes with the images are richly detailed.

In commenting on the new, Choy says:

“Where I have been critical of the ‘new’ and how it is framed by the logic of relentless consumption… I’ve (also) wanted to point out how difficult it is to resist that. Criticism in general should attempt to slow things down and open up a space to reflect on the many processes we all get so caught up in.(p.86)”

Anthony White, in his lucid discussion of Fontana and Oldenburg’s attitudes to the new, points out that Lucio Fontana claimed his perforated canvases were devoid of gesture, and contained only cuts made mechanically without expressiveness. The ubiquitous egg shape Fontana used was often featured in the design of early sixties chairs and other European household items, and the bright hues he liked (emerald green, canary yellow and hot pink) were newly available fashion and design colours. He wanted to show his dismay at ‘inventions which follow one after the other’, and his alarm at ‘the speed of life’. His perforated ‘eggs’ had much in common with seventeenth century Dutch Vanitas paintings, intended as an allegory about life’s transience.

Claes Oldenburg’s 1961 installation The Store, with his enamel coated plaster ‘edible’ items had a similar theme. It was about a melancholic pining for the forties, the time of his childhood. The fake food products displayed in vitrines were based on what had been superseded by later novelties, only to disappear.

I enjoyed the pithy focus of this issue of Reading Room, and I say that (in contrast to much of its discussion) as someone who readily enjoys flux, the new and changes that regularly occur in art and social history. If art were static, I can’t imagine that I would be interested in it as a phenomenon, but possibly such a view is ideologically inculcated.

This Auckland Art Gallery publication is getting better and better. Looking forward to Number 4.

Coping with the stressful rat race

Dan Arps: Explaining Things
Gambia Castle
5 December - 20 December 2008

Joseph Beuys’ legendary performance was called How to Explain Pictures to a Dead Hare. Dan Arps’ Explaining Things though is to live humans. One interpretation is that it is about the fundamental properties of the self and how to cope with the many tensions of modern daily life. Aspects of the show connect with the satirical HR parts of last year’s Gestapo Pussy Ranch at The Physics Room, and the much more recent Fractal Tears at Michael Lett – with its appropriated and inverted Helm Ruifrok imagery.

As Arps exhibitions go, this Gambia Castle display is a comparatively retrained affair, without the sense of mayhem and unpredictability many of his other exhibitions have had. Initially baffling (as usual) one means of access is to use the newsprint poster sent out as an invite, and Reader #6, the accompanying Gambia-published set of anonymous writings (a downloaded chatroom thread) called Ecce anon, in conjunction with the major work in the room: a sequence of blurry video recordings on meditation.

This video is about an hour. Some of its recordings include American ‘trance’ personalities like April Crawford, and clips discussing astral projection, how to get rid of inner demons, and basic meditation procedures on reaching a ‘no thought’ state.

Around the room are objects that seem related, such as a set of empty vertical shelves (a figure, a self as vessel?) with a blank rectangle of card for a head, a collage with inter-racial pornography (demonic desires?), a paint encrusted photo of a tropical beach (‘paradise’ as spiritual symbol?), and a sculpture of an owl next to a mystic, glowing globe (wisdom and cosmic truth?). Most intriguing is a framed photo of a woman practising her golf swing. Pasted over her head so we can’t see her face is a scrap of paper bearing doodled letters and scribbled phrases such as ‘motivational sales’ and ‘promotional marketing concepts’. There is also a table and chairs to help watch the video.

The poster Arps sent out as an invite is a large diagram of the different elements that channel into the individual human mind, represented by a triangle with the empirical world facing its open side. At its back, behind its tip, is a vertical plane, an underpinning space-time energy-mass continuum.

The published thread in the Reader is even stranger still. Much stranger. At the centre of the discussion is an anonymous contributor who is striving to attain a state of Godhood through hypnosis and meditation. He tells us that on a modular shelf he has stacked twelve monitors so they can play continually and simultaneously, week long recordings taken from various television channels - with all sound on. They have been recorded at four times normal speed and are all connected to a computer and a single wireless keyboard. Under hypnosis he hopes to process all these multiple inputs simultaneously, and attain Enlightenment.

Such a project is the opposite of John C. Lilly’s famous sensory deprivation chambers, where participants float in a warm saline solution in darkened soundless tanks, and start hallucinating within an hour. This project instead deals in cacophonous sensory overload.

I’m not sure what Arps is trying to do with all this (it doesn’t seem like he is trying to promote meditation – only look at it as a social phenomenon), but I admire the way all these elements fit together. His show is not a visual treat – it is scruffy and consciously unattractive - but it is also a stimulating catalyst. As a collection of ideas, it holds your attention and is memorable.

Bow down to the Word

Dan Arps: Fractal Tears
Michael Lett
23 May – 5 July 2008

Gambia Castle artist Dan Arps is well known nationally as an exhibiter and a teacher. He is also co-editor of the very informative and energetic online magazine Natural Selection.
What he presents at Michael Lett’s gallery is not really a cohesive installation like Gestapo Pussy Ranch which he showed in The Physics Room last year. Instead it is more an assorted collection of assembled sculptures and collages that revel in a kind of nihilistic surrealism, with an extra fixation on the materiality of language.

Arps works inside that wilfully shambolic zone where untouched found rubbish and carefully manufactured detritus come close to being interchangeable. Many untampered-with, sculptural ready-mades are included. Usually he is not interested in devising an articulate meaning, only the placing of certain items or substances together – as if he had typed out the catalogue of works (all called ‘untitled’) and listed their contributing materials and objects long before he began work on the actual exhibits. There is a strange fetishization of common names where linguistic content dominates over the experiential. While the show does delight in the ‘actual’ and in ‘presence’, we also see language putting material substance in a headlock and bringing it to its knees. Words (particularly nouns) rule.

Arps' passion seems to be for incongruous sculptural items that have been crudely thrown together or maliciously damaged in some way, paper collage, and experimenting with printing methods. Arps is a very different collagist from say Seymour, Madden, Driver or Jenkinson. He has a loathing for prissiness, is far wilder in his compositional formats and has a real taste for mayhem. He likes to use posters or art reproductions (in this show, he is particularly fond of those of the Christchurch painter Wilhelmus Ruifrok) and has a penchant for smeared finger painting, paint and blu-tak providing squishy material for random marks that look deranged and which can also be slyly photocopied.

Although some of the flat collages look like traditional Ernst-style surrealism, but inverted, others using inverted or sideways Ruifrok posters (who is influenced by Dali) are not so coherent, being more abstract and about texture combinations. Much of the work, especially the sculptures, is really a sort of optical list, not visually aesthetic and not involving semantic manipulation as in a rebus. The activity of grouping seems to intrigue him, putting clusters of items in close proximity and then joining them in a fashion that is almost reluctant –or if decisive, unthinking.

The recycling of surrealist imagery into a show that is also at times surrealist gives credence to the show’s title. It is preoccupied with process, not finally completed objects. Arps focuses on describable qualities and how they can be organised and contrasted through language, more than pleasing visceral sensation.

Goosestepping through the whorehouse

Dan Arps’ Gestapo Pussy Ranch at The Physics Room, Christchurch. 15 November - 15 December 2007

Like many of the artists in the Gambia Castle group, Dan Arps in his installations is known for a freewheeling, unstructured mode of visual organisation that celebrates a lack of palpable order. As a dishevelled, freeform exhibtion, Gestapo Pussy Ranch is richly keyed into product that poses as process. The result is a funny, extremely wonky, satire on life management programmes - with personal coaches and analyses of interpersonal organising skills. Although the space is deliberately incongruous, with an old mattress, photographs of peculiar rituals in sleeping bags, cat boxes, scattered disintegrating clumps of straw, foil covered ventilation shutes, geometric forms made of twisted plant roots, surveillance cameras, and hilarious inverted pinup posters smeared with finger painting, the key elements seem to be a laminated pie chart and two typed lists of strategic corporate procedures. The project has an underpinning logic consistent with its brilliantly evocative title - from a Bret Easton Ellis novel - that suggests a Nazi brothel. Implying connections with Human Resource personnel perhaps.

Arps is a clever artist whose work is getting more interesting and less eclectic as his career progresses. He is moving away from his earlier Australian sources to developing his own sensibility. His humour is more hammy and anarchistic than the deceptively academic and systematic approach of Simon Denny, close to Tao Wells in its anarchistic mood, and though subtle, not understated like Nick Austin.

However, this is the sort of show you really have to negotiate yourself in terms of examining the elements, if you want to extract pivotal and considered components from the vaguely rhetorical and nihilistic elements. The anonymous blurb on the Physics Room website is depressingly uninformative and facile, clearly the result of being written long before the artist had decided what he would do in the space, and the images present with it give you no idea of the work’s experiential nature. Worth calling in and checking out for yourself, nevertheless.