The art of bodily immersion

Jim Allen: Small Worlds
Michael Lett
17 March - 17 April 2010


Designed to help break down any separation or distinction between viewer and art object, Jim Allen’s Small Worlds – a recreation of a pioneering and highly influential project (in Australasia) from 1969 - provides an immersive experience of tactile sensations for your body to enjoy.

Just inside the doorway of the darkened space, an inflated cube of shiny transparent plastic tells us that here, where the eye can go, the body cannot follow. It’s a teaser and not penetrable. Further inside is a gap between two horizontally suspended squares near the ceiling, supporting densely hanging lines of thick nylon thread and tubes radiating ultra-violet ‘black’ light. In this gap alternatively the body follows where there is ‘nothing’ for the eye to see. It is the opposite of the inflatable cube.

The main attractions however are the two suspended cube-shaped, fibrous sculptures. They glow internally from the UV, while their translucent stringy sides are raked by the diffuse light coming in from the entrance. You are offered the chance of stripping down to your underwear and walking through them, experiencing the straggly vertical filaments, shiny plastic strips and swinging wooden balls as they tickle, scrape, flap or bang against your chest, shoulders and bare legs. At the same time you can feel the crunchy shredded flax or smooth cold floor under your bare feet.

In one of these works Tribute to Hone Tuwhare, Allen has the early Tuwhare poem 'Thine Own Hands Have Fashioned' transcribed on to long strips of paper that, with the long nylon ‘hair’, are hanging from the platform ceiling so that they glow under the purple light. A celebration of the senses, the rich language enunciates the flattering words of Delilah as she calls to her lover Samson:

thine hands drop with golden flowers from the lion’s maw:
thine hands contain the splendid fire of poised lances:
they are exquisite pinnacles of light o lord…

The original version of this work was made for Barry Lett Galleries while Allen was Head of Sculpture and Associate Professor at Elam (1960-1976). He made it just after he got back from a trip to Europe, England and the States where he had been visiting art schools and meeting various innovative artists. He had become interested in more open-ended notions of sculpture where the viewer’s sense of self began to merge with a sculptural environment they entered into, so that they were overwhelmed by the visual, tactile, aural and olfactory sensations it provided.

This sort of project made sculpture is (as Christina Barton has described in an informative article in the first issue of ‘Midwest’) ‘an activity rather than an object’ and lead to a series of interactive performances with groups of students. This new version of Small Worlds continues a series of recreated exhibtions presented in 2006 at Michael Lett Gallery (Poetry for Chainsaws and Hanging By a Thread) and St. Paul St, AUT (O-AR).

Of the original installations made in 1969 and 1970 in this series, only New Zealand Environment No.5 remains, a work which Allen showed in Mildura in Australia in 1970 and which is now part of the collection of the Govett-Brewster in New Plymouth. Its lightly covered scrim enclosure and contents is more rurally focused than the earlier works because of the olfactory sensations it generates, presenting oily wool, resiny woodchips and woolbale hessian – along with a few hanging nylon threads, barbed wire and a pale green neon light. I think I like these Small Worlds works more. They, in comparison, seem more urban, if not slightly nightclubby or industrial, with the black light, shiny plastic strips and dense nylon lines.

Like the earlier Emmerling curated version of O-AR at St. Paul St, this is a wonderful exhibition - not so much an object as an experience or ‘situation’. One of the year’s highlights and not to be missed.

A Call for Action (Beyond Art)

Jim Allen: Hanging by a Thread II
Michael Lett
4 February – 7 March 2009

The strangest of images greets you through the glass doors when you enter Jim Allen’s latest exhibition at Michael Lett’s: a photograph of a collage of an angel. It seems to be a life-sized self portrait, made up of flayed body parts from medical text books and collaged newspaper texts. This thin-skinned and ‘sensitive’ artist-angel has winged feet like Mercury, is wearing a halo in which is embedded the word ‘saboteur’, and carrying at crotch height a small Greek temple in which is burning the flame of liberty.

I thought at first this image was laden with irony, that Allen was doing some kind of self critique (especially with the nimbus and flame) that re-evaluated his earlier interventionism - but now I think it is more complicated. Though there definitely is humour, a lot of self-mockery, this is still serious. Very much so.

This is confirmed by the urgency of the show’s title and by the fact that below the collage on the right-hand side is a small inverted photograph of a hooded Iraqi prisoner of the American forces, being tortured at Abu Ghraib. The ‘real’ world here is presented in vivid contrast to that of the sincere but sheltered realm of art-activism and pedagogical models.

Going past the collage and entering the inner gallery, we find three types of presentation: three coloured photographs at eye-height on two of the walls; four small sculptures on long sticks at eye height in the middle of the oblong room; and on the floor two small LCDs with videos connected to earlier performances.

There is a hierarchical structure here in this multilayered installation. As you would expect from such an influential artist and teacher, Allen has positioned his components with eloquent precision. The photographs show a bandaged tree (‘heal our ecosystems’ it seems to say), some bones stacked on a chair (inaction leads to disaster?) and a hospitalised Arab boy sitting up in bed (protect the innocent).

This last image has an abstract formula placed on the wall alongside it, taken from a cybernetic coursebook. Here Allen seems to be ridiculing art that is over-academicised and deterministic. The dry, impenetrable theorem seems motivated by sarcasm.

Even more in your face are the sculptures. They are about human agency and the viewer’s ability to act. A bloody bandaged finger (the nurtured body’s power to heal) and a piece of hair (the body’s ability to replenish) are in juxtaposition with a quote from Brazilian artist Lygia Clark about righteous anger (“the mouth which is transformed into a language of itself to the bite of rage”) and a dirty cloth (power to wipe away ignorance and clarify?).

At some distance below eye height and comparatively isolated on the floor, the two LCDs let Allen comment on the gap between art and life, elaborating on the ironic heroics detectable in his collage. The right-hand one shows the movements of Peter Wareing, a flim-maker who was recording Allen’s recent performance of News, the newspaper crumpling work, in New Plymouth, but reveals nothing of the performance he was documenting. The other on the left shows a section of Parangole Capes, an older work where four tied up and blindfolded performers, swaddled in layers of calico and hessian, try to wiggle and roll their way to the centre of the gallery where they can help release each other.

The first seems to be about losing sight of a clear objective, about not being cognisant of a ‘bigger picture’; the second about the inability to feel (physically and emotionally), about desensitisation. Both LCDs refer to art’s remoteness from global issues currently acknowledged as urgent. Allen appears to be implying that art is irrelevant now, it is ossified and dead and political action should move on without it. He is using art to reprimand itself, perhaps even repudiating his own past as artist and teacher – and waving the flag for much bigger issues instead.

Against interpretation

Noli me legere
Michael Lett
8 October – 1 November 2008

The Latin title of this show can be translated as ‘Don’t read me,’ and is usually understood as linked to the influential philosopher, Maurice Blanchot whose writings attacked the conventional notions of author, literature and interpretation by introducing the aspect of death. “Don’t read me” means assume nothing. Don’t try and decipher. There is a clear sense in all the works included – cleverly selected by Sarah Hopkinson – of obliqueness, of disrupting a coherent narrative, of blocking the possibility of interpretation.

Particularly memorable is a wonderful short film ‘Ben’, by English film-maker Emily Wardill. Here two voice–overs alternate, while maintaining continuity across blank screens or sequences of seemingly unrelated images, many of which include black and white props with coloured backdrops. One voice is that of a professional hypnotist. Seductive, creamy, and masculine, it coaxes acquiescence from a group of women on stage with their eyes shut. The other voice is from a West Indian or African woman speaking English as a second language in hesitant, faltering bursts. She reads a divided up text, a psycho-analytic case study, about a 52 year old delivery van driver, a loner whose unorthodox social and sexual habits are getting noticed by his neighbours and workmates. The voices hold our attention and propel us along as try to connect their words with the images and interwoven themes.

The highly regarded German photographer Wolfgang Tillmans has four enigmatic coloured images in the show. Two look at hazy light coming through the flopped-over end of a sheet of photographic paper, one makes formal connections between different sized and patterned eggshells on a table with pods and strange cones, and the other has long dried leaves protruding from a small vase comically intertwining with a floral tie.

Influential artist and educator, Jim Allen contributes a very mysterious photograph, taken doing one of his pioneering performances at Auckland Art Gallery in the mid seventies. Black and white, with glossy coal blacks, and dramatic lighting, it shows a group of stooped figures, wearing hooded smocks of crumpled paper, standing like statues huddled over a greasy, dishevelled floor. A memorable image.

Hany Armanious‘s contribution is a cast, limited edition, wall-sculpture with unusual components like a photograph of a granite modernist sculpture of male and female forms, their bowed heads mimicking the curved toes of two feet in an adjacent leaning image. Hanging from its right-hand end are two identically cast, pink forms that are partially pig’s trotter and partially boxing glove. The whole work intrigues. It seems to revolve around assorted visual puns on fingers and toes.

A glassed over aluminium box mounted on the wall by Simon Denny, contains three painted vertical strips of MDF, one boxed fluro tube and some junk-mail advertising, but mainly two elegant black and photographs of a saloon car. These could, by themselves, almost be mistaken for a conceptual work by Christopher Williams. The images are nearly identical but not, even when de-reversed, and relate to the b/w Jim Allen positioned on the opposite wall.

Finally, Ava Seymour’s pristine photographed collage which greets you at the gallery entrance, is more complicated than usual with its clusters of triangular forms. Yet her work is now so tasteful it seems hard to connect Seymour’s present imagery with earlier controversies like her rubber-fetish and ‘Hannah Hoch visits state-housing’ projects. ‘Jubilee’ fits in well with the Hopkinson’s theme, despite its comparative blandness. It is an icy, blemish-free configuration; attractive, though bafflingly hard to locate semantically.