Rights and liberties

Article 27: Xin Cheng, Kah Bee Chow, Majlinda Hoxha, Tui Kerehoma, Jasmine Lockheart, Christina Read, Daniel Webby
Curated by Richard Dale
Northart Gallery, Norman King Square, Northcote Shopping Centre
10 December - 22 December 2009


This December is the sixtieth anniversary of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. The title of this modest little exhibition in North Shore examines the fundamental human rights expressed in Article 27 in particular. It focuses on firstly the right of individuals and smaller communities to have a voice that is not drowned out by larger, more dominant communities, and secondly, the right of authors, scientists, inventors and artists to gain material reward and/or moral recognition for their labours. The Human Rights Commission in this country approached Richard Dale, the Auckland freelance curator normally known for his work with videos of Chinese performance art, to assemble this show.

The seven individuals he has picked from the Auckland region make up a display that is not finger-wagging or tub-thumping. It is much more nuanced. And although their cultural backgrounds are varied, that issue is not forced. There is no enforced template through which the exhibits have been squeezed. The show has a nice relaxed flow to it.

Two artists that have created installations using books, provide conceptual ‘bookends’ for the show. One is about how books, their content, titles, authors and publishers can sometimes be perceived – so they end up being banned. The other is the practical use of their content. How they can help us make useful objects.

Christina Read’s shelf of various banned books reveals not real publications but hard-covered mock ups made from other books painted with bright colours, applied hand lettering and white pages. This assortment is more fascinating than if say she had just got all the books out of the library, or bought them. They look exuberantly quirky, as if handmade. However one has to be really curious to find out why they were ever banned and by whom. The artist doesn’t explain, but most Google searches provide clear explanations for innocuous books like Black Beauty, Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland or publications by Dr.Seuss. Read’s display looks at freedom of written speech, and how vulnerable that possibility is.

Daniel Webby turns that vulnerable relationship between one individual and a wider community to a videoed game, a recorded performance where two blindfolded people toss uncooked eggs to each other to catch. The exercise explores the limits of telepathy, where actions are based on some knowledge, and also intuition or instinct. It examines justification for actions, and the relationship of responsible decision making to intelligent guesswork.

The five works by Jasmine Lockhart oscillate between a bushy-tailed innocence and a moody cynicism. The utopian visions of universal love and peace (with the peace v-fingers sign in a glass box) and a cut-out masonite shrub give way to doubts where all objects are smothered with an anaemic, pale ‘snifter’ green (from silage covers).It is akin to hospital wall green, designed to calm patients down and lower the heart rate. Around the corner, away from the chirpy Kiwi outdoors, is an All Blacks carry bag, its logo lit from a fluorescent light inside. It refers to the conflict of the 1981 Springbok tour, the year of the artist’s birth, the split between the ideal harmonious Aotearoa and its acrimonious underbelly.

Majlinda Hoxha and her family recently came to New Zealand from the troubled republic of Kosovo. Her poignant photographs are unusual in that they reference the Serbian massacres of Albanians and the NATO bombing, by photographing the Auckland swimming pools at Parnell and Panmure. In one Hoxha and her family stand with closed eyes at one end of an empty pool as if it was a site of some terrible atrocity, and in the other we see a public sign in front of stagnant water that says ‘Bombing allowed’ – referring of course to ‘dive bombing’ where idiot jumpers try to make noisy splashes and spectacular waves.

More remote historical events are referenced by Kah Bee Chow in her One Day Sculpture project which was set in Wellington’s Haining St. The three videos show the discussions within the local community about the history of the street, particularly in the ‘Chinatown’ region. There is some discussion of the racially motivated murder of Joe Kum Yung by Lionel Terry in 1905, and also the role of the Sister Aubert Home for Compassion.

Historical events are also examined in the photograph by Tui Kerehoma of ‘mummified’ heads carried on the back of a gliding glass swan that seems to be an ashtray. These don’t appear to be moko mokai. Though they look emaciated they are not tattooed. They are made of white soap and because of that seem to refer to Europe not the Pacific. The material has overtones of fat from concentration camps that was made into soap, and the washing away of guilt from various atrocities. Below the image is a cup, on which are engraved lyrics from the Kenny Rogers song The Gambler.

For me personally the highlight of the show is the Reading Room by Xin Cheng. On a table is an assortment of unusual books teaching or demonstrating how to make needed utensils out of recycled rubbish, and completed examples are presented on the walls. A major theme is prison life, but not all. Bush survival is included, as are urban on-the–spot modifications or inventions improvised by city dwellers. There is even a SAS military handbook. It is a fascinating collection.

Dale has constructed an intriguing exhibition that deserves a bigger audience, as it has been under publicised. Fortunately it is going to The Physics Room in Christchurch. Hopefully other venues will pick up on it.

Photographed works from top to bottom are by Christina Read, Daniel Webby, Jasmine Lockhart, Majlinda Hoxha, Kah Bee Chow, Tui Kerehoma, and Xin Cheng.

Newcall show

Group Show: NSFW
Newcall
6 December - 20 December 2008

This is a Christmas show that has no interest in sales. It is more a communal installation/video exhibition with a few unpriced knick/knacks in the office, a display that focuses on the architecture and history of the Newcall building, and the social interconnections between and around the nine participants who, in 2004-5, shared a large studio in Achilles House.

It is not an overly user friendly show – nothing is labelled. You have to ask the (admittedly very obliging) people minding the gallery who made what and where the artworks are. What exists is more of a collective identity where curators and artist friends are part of a team, and where on the catalogue, the work places (ie. jobs) of the participants are listed alongside their names. This is to help you grasp the imagery in a Fiona Connor video displayed in one of the studios, showing these artists’ work stations within various institutions.

The prevalent theme though is the Newcall building and the changes since it first opened as Eden House thirty years ago. To further this examination the gallery space has been physically expanded by unscrewing all the inside doors that open into recently added side-rooms (now studios) and leaning them together in the middle. This freestanding stack is another Fiona Connor artwork – where you try and see if there are ‘fake’ doors amongst the genuine. There is also a Kah Bee Chow video projected onto it of a written countdown to now of the years and months since 1978.

Within the main space is a huge drinking straw by Ben Tankard, and in the office Tankard’s other work, a video of Santa’s famous creepily beckoning finger - that scares adults more than children. The straw is next to a huge stagelike, inverted box, covered in grey carpet, by Leah Mulgrew – a piece of fluffy, tatty minimalism - and outside, hanging off the staircase landing, is a recently made Newcall sign created by Nell May.

My favourite works are the two earnest collections of weathered man-made and natural objects (one of them rocks and chunks of concrete) organised by Finn Ferrier - their classifying names dutifully written on in white ink as all good museum registration practice apparently insists. There is also a still-working commemorative ‘Eden House clock’ embedded in a brick dug up by Ferrier, and Clara Chon’s photocopied, hand-printed and coloured transcripts of mini-conversations between herself, teachers and friends. The latter’s half-uttered bits of light chat fill up several pages in a plastic folder and are entertainingly inane. They are more successful than her Ed Ruscha influenced text works currently seen across town in City Art Rooms' Young Blood Salon II show. Those seem comparatively mannered and over-thought.

Countering the Public Good

Public Good: Itinerant responses to collective spaceEd. by Paula Booker and Marnie Slater
110 pp, illustrated b/w, colour
Published by Enjoy Public Art Gallery, Wellington, July 2008

Up the hill a couple of blocks from where I live in Kingsland, is the experimental art space JAR, a venue devoted to long term quality installations that can be viewed by anybody who happens to be passing down New North Road. The plaque on the front proudly announces “Art for the public good.”

My feelings about this are a little ambivalent. On the one hand I applaud the JAR trust for providing these exceptional exhibitions out of their own pocket. That’s fantastic. On the other I wonder to myself, who is this “public” that so benefits? (Me and who else?) What is this “good?” Do the regular frequenters of the nearby Morningside shops gain much, if anything, out of it? I doubt it.

Of course the slippery notion of ‘public’ has been under scrutiny for some time now. One forum I went to in Auckland on this was part of the Public/Private Triennial (2004), where the history of this spatial/social concept was discussed by media lecturer Misha Kavka in a memorable preamble to a discussion on reality television. Her observations about the history of the term ‘public sphere’ (looking at Habermas and others) were extended later that day when AAG Curator Ron Brownson delivered a paper by Nick Perry (who was away sick) about the social consequences of the invention of the telephone. Both discussions made me realise how little is widely known about such a ubiquitous term. This little book helps change that.

The achievement of Public Good lies in the way it questions its title. A beautifully designed anthology of essays, prose, poems and images, very aptly chosen and usually lucid, it has lots of surprises. One pithy (albeit obvious) question it asks on the back cover is whether the title phrase is used to maintain order and deny plurality. Such a theme is particularly well explored in what seems to be a ‘keynote’ essay by Simon Sheikh who makes parallels between preconceived notions of public sphere and the changing sites and practices of the contemporary art community. He develops Michael Warner’s Foucauldian concepts of counter-public (the ‘conscious mirroring of the modalities and institutions of the normative public….to address other subjects …other imaginaries’), stressing the fragmentation, and swinging the discussion to Chantal Mouffe who in her notion of ‘an agonistic public sphere’ sees the opportunity for group antagonisms to be repositioned so that the separated pieces are connected within a ‘conflictual consensus’ to form ‘chains of equivalence’.

Christina Barton’s paper looks at Rosalind Krauss’ ccncept of the expanded sculptural field and modifies it by blending in the social and temporal, which after considering Dario Gamboni’s ideas on the vandalism of public monuments, she sees as offering a counter-narrative to art through the notions of action and event. She regards the current repudiation of public monuments as part of a dematerialization made apparent in videos like Eric Baudelaire’s Paris metro video/poster installation/performance, Sugar Water – this work of course being recently discussed in Reading Room by Tan Lin. Barton’s comments on anti-monumentalism are paralleled later on by a wonderful suite of photos (introduced by Chaitanya Sambrani) showing an itinerant colonial monument (replicated in Portland stone by Tushar Joag) being moved across Bombay overnight, and posing in selected sites in transit.

Oddly though, in this book, the theme of the demise of monumental commemorative sculpture is a bit of a red herring, especially if it is seen as symptomatic of a scattering of social fragments anyway, but most obviously it scrutinises public space. Clearly most of the articles examine this - and some ‘porous’ private space too: you have a wonderful, richly detailed piece of writing by Shuddhabrata Sengupta (of the Raqs Media Collective) on telephone booths in New Delhi; a sprawling but excellent article (with great photographs) by Harold Grieves critiquing Christchurch suburbia; Rudolph Hudsucker excoriating the political control of inner city Wellington; and Dane Mitchell on streets as the mechanisms use to maintain and enforce urban control, and barricades to resist it. A photograph of Mitchell’s red flag (in Starkwhite) also provides a very striking cover for the book.

Paralleling these are artists commenting on the materiality of the physical social space (Kate Newby), or within a published zone the overlapping, off registered or even splayed relationship of constructed documentary image with fictitious interview (Fiona Amundsen / Tim Corballis).

Kate BrettKelly-Chalmers examines artist Kah Bee Chow’s public performances in downtown Auckland (Britomart) and Canary and Special Galleries, while Spiros Panigirakis elucidates on different alternative varieties of public art practice in Melbourne. Each typology he provides (research; the taught; the salon; the community; the commission) is accompanied by a wildly imaginative, mischievously humorous, finely detailed diagram – Panigirakis synthesizing image and text together perfectly.

Where Public Good morphs into Private Good can be seen in the prose of JC Borrelle. She has devised a fanciful meditation on creative endeavours such as photography and their relationship to private memories (especially those of childhood), skilfully mixing theoretical issues in with whimsy to create an intriguing, very entertaining, little fable.

The book’s theme drifts back to the Public Good with the humorous poem by Rachel O’Neill on the death of Socrates. His death is taking longer than expected (“the shiver of parliament”) and he is worried about his chickens - especially his activist ones (like Plato). A clever inclusion here from O’Neill.

Thoughtfully assembled with a snappy array of images to escort the texts into your mind, Public Good is a very fine contribution to art debate in this country. Any didactic polemic that you might expect from Enjoy is incredibly discreet. It feels light but not frothy. There is plenty of substance, but it doesn’t grind you down. The varied but stimulating contributions lock together well to create a publication of lasting value.

You are where?

You Are Here: Fiona Connor, Finn Ferrier, Kah Bee Chow, Alex Monteith, John Ward Knox – curated by Ariane Craig-Smith

ARTSPACE, Auckland
2 February - 1 March 2008

I must be confusing it with another street name?... It happens rather often this way, that we believe in things that are quite false: it is enough that some fragment of a memory, come from elsewhere, enters into some coherent pattern open to it, or else that we unconsciously fuse two disparate halves, or still that we reverse the order of the elements in some causal system, to fashion in our minds chimerical objects, having for us all the appearances of reality.
Alain Robbe-Grillet (Djinn)

ARTSPACE’s current curatorial intern, Ariane Craig-Smith has taken an innovative approach to this ‘art mapping’ exhibition, for although it is entitled ‘You are here’ it has very little obviously in common with those city maps that feature that locating phrase, nor has it much in common with the book of that title by Kitty Harmon that deals with images made by artists incorporating maps or alluding to them.

There are no maps at all in this show, save a floor plan of ARTSPACE that shows you where the eleven works are positioned. The exhibition is more about bodily sensations of movement, movement’s traces, those speculative processes that assist us in finding a direction, and certain correlations we use to determine location. The focus is really the thinking behind maps rather than maps themselves, in particular the correlation of the indexical where connections are matched up and parallels found linking the artefact with the outside world. In other words, the nature of those representations that help us move through space and understand it.



The artworks take several approaches. Some record traces of their audience’s movement as they explore the exhibition. Kah Bee Chow and Finn Ferrier have created a raked sand garden at the bottom of the stairs that gallery–goers step into and disturb when they go to examine Fiona Connor’s replica of the ARTSPACE circular noticeboard. Finn Ferrier has also created a fake parquet surface by stencilling a zigzag motif with varnish onto ARTSPACE’s concrete floor. Pehaps this layer will wear out as people walk over it so a path becomes detectable.



Other works, like John Ward Knox’s small biro drawings, are textured rubbings taken off embossed wallpaper. Two of these ‘correlations’ tease the audience because the top halves are identical but their bottom halves differ. They are remote cousins of Fiona Connor’s replicas of an imagined ‘ripped up’ ARTSPACE foyer staircase, mysteriously dumped in the main gallery.





Filmed records of artist movements are seen in John Ward Knox’s video of himself in Aotea Square performing like a ‘dancing bee’ various stepping movements modelled on three small drawings pinned to the wall. Similar are parts of Kah Bee Chow’s video spoof on Irma Vep and The Phantom of the Opera, especially when the catwoman-like protagonist is self consciously moving over the ARTSPACE roof. The viewer thinks of the building they are standing – or sitting – in, the movie referents for the satire, and puzzles over some Photoshopped scenes of Chow’s parents and their garden (see above) which incongruously appear as if transported from another location.




The motion of a racing motorcyclist’s body circumnavigating the Taupo Racetrack is recorded by Alex Monteith in her project that uses cameras facing both forward and backward. The resulting looped projections screened in a corner, cause a particularly physical response from the viewer, especially when the rider leans over while turning into bends. Viewers also have the opportunity to move their own vertical bodies through normally unreachable sections of the main gallery if they use a specially raised, large platform provided by Fiona Connor, Kah Bee Chow and Finn Ferrier. Its height allows the audience to look through temporarily installed clear glass panes in the horizontal windows at the top of the walls, and study Auckland’s urban landscape afresh.

This unique chance to explore the geographical and social meanings behind ARTSPACE’s municipal location is a special self-reflexive opportunity unique to this exhibition, a declaration that subtly announces to the show’s continually changing audience that they are there – these chances are rare - so make the most of it.