The Given As An Art-Political Statement

Here is TV3 's news programme about the Dane Mitchell work and the TWNCAA.

Here is also TV1's take on the winner.

I'm curious to know more about the artist's instructions: the details, like plinth size, quantity of discarded packaging etc. Was the rubbish selected or did it all get included? If you look at the photographs with my article, you will notice they are not consistent.(Like the different shots of the TV3 programme). The physical properties of the work keep changing.

Snatch the cash and run

Trust Waikato National Contemporary Art Award 09
Curated and judged by Charlotte Huddleston
Waikato Museum of Art and History Te Whare Taonga o Waikato
5 September - 25 January 2009

With Charlotte Huddleston of Te Papa awarding Dane Mitchell the TWNCAA prize of $15000 for his work Collateral, we have a fascinating situation where one more the ‘non-art’ public is indignant and the ‘art world’ is laughing. Yet both are correct to do so.

The wall label – with its opaque quotation from Louise Garrett – when applied to this ‘pile of rubbish’ says very little to the lay person, and on the night of the announcement the judge made no effort to provide an argument about why Mitchell stood out over the other forty-two finalists.

Her reticence was understandable. His work consists of a sample of the used packaging originating from the various finalists to this exhibition, mainly crumpled envelopes that contained technical information and hanging instructions. Its cleverness lies in its showcasing of the competitive nature of the event (its malicious glee) and its exposure of the collusion of the museum. The institution and the judge had to select from the trash what to display as they couldn’t possibly present all of it (actually they could if the number of other ‘saleable’ contestants was cut down and the plinth made bigger). Waikato Museum participates in the making of this self-ridiculing artwork.

Mitchell’s exposure follows the late seventies work of Billy Apple, Michael Asher’s career, and recent writings by scholars like Lynn Zelevansky. It is one of Mitchell’s best ever works: so successful in its manipulation of the institution’s and WSA’s fingerprints; utterly perfect to pay for the expensive costs of taking a year-long residency in Berlin.

Mitchell wizardry

Mitchell Wizardry
Dane Mitchell
Starkwhite
10 March - 4 April 2009

The last time Dane Mitchell had a show of work in Starkwhite he used the large downstairs space by the Karangahape Road entrance and was about to go to London. Now he is about to go to Berlin, but before he leaves he is taking advantage of part of the gallery’s storage facilities - in upstairs premises in a separate building out the back. As you can see from the above photographs, though it relies mostly on natural light, the presentation has been very successful: the space is not too small, but bigger than the stock display rooms in the main building.

The show has four pencil drawings, a sculpture in the centre of the space on a plinth, and a framed up interview on one wall. When I say sculpture and interview, I mean ‘sculpture’ and ‘interview’. The sculpture is really a footnote to the interview, the latter being a Mitchell variation of the famous Michael Craig-Martin ‘interview’ that accompanies ‘An Oak Tree’, a 1973 Craig-Martin artwork which is ostensibly a tumbler of water placed on a glass shelf. He insists – in a conversation with himself – that the filled glass is the outward appearance of an oak tree. In that conceptual sculpture, the label–interview (a statement more about the artist’s belief than any object) is the main ingredient. Same here with Mitchell.

His sculpture is a double-layered chemist’s flask with nozzles on the bottom. It is on a stand, and half filled with water. Into this Mitchell has immersed a pencil. Its image, as one would expect, is bent by the laws of refraction.

Not so, says Mitchell in his interview. “I have changed the direction of the light inside the vessel.” It's not refraction he insists. He says that it is not an illusion.

So what is Mitchell telling us? Is he a wizard with supernatural powers? Does he think he is God? Can he achieve miracles, and that he himself controls the laws of nature? Or is he putting us on? Is he secretly laughing at the artworld’s propensity for delusion? That almost anything that is stated can get accepted as gospel.

If we imagine a number of invisible tubes leading from the nozzles at the bottom of the jar and going across the room to the wall of drawings - each tube containing ‘pencil juice’ – we can see a series of reflexive links that discuss their own process.

One drawing renders the experience of refraction, depicting how a line looks bent when immersed in liquid. Another is a diagram of light rays, presenting the law of physics that explains the phenomenon of refraction. It, very wittily, looks like a pencil tip. A third seems to abstractly refer to the process of evaporation of water from the unsealed flask, how the water level lowers, or - put another way - how the pencil rises. It seems to be about the oscillation of viewpoints.

The fourth diagram is about three worlds that invariably overlap: Reality, Unreality, and Illusion, and their relationship to those areas we accept as True on good faith. While many of Mitchell’s projects engage with mysticism and the spirit world as a source of invisible reality, they hint at parallel processes within art history and art institutions, and their apparent lack of ‘objective’ transparency. Like Craig-Martin, he teases out, by implication, a sort of nominalism where things denominated by the term ‘art’ share nothing except that fact. It is only a coating of declarative language that gives them a definition. No substance beneath that coating is necessary.

His show plays with belief structures, implying that if you are sceptical of witchcraft (something he has occasionally used in his projects), then why not treat art assumptions based on what artists say, the same way. Artists are striving to achieve certain ends for their work via the use of artists' statements or writing, and these are like spells that need to be efficacious to succeed.