Kate Brettkelly-Chalmers recently visited Sriwhana Spong's exhibition at Michael Lett

Sriwhana Spong: Channeling Mr B
Michael Lett
27 January - 6 March 2010

Dance has a remarkable ability to exist in the present moment. Blistered feet and hours of sweat soaked practice immediately give way to an instantaneous gesture, the fleeting yet brilliant moment in a performance when the body moves with perfect precision. Similarly, Sriwhana Spong’s latest film Costume for a Mourner offers moments of choreographed enchantment that are underpinned by a range of historical and legendary references. The film’s ballet dance is briefly and enjoyably captivating, but the multitude of conceptual references threaded throughout asks for a more lingering consideration from viewers.

Costume for a Mourner is the centrepiece of Spong’s first exhibition at Michael Lett gallery, Channeling Mr B. The film re-creates a small section of the ballet Le chant du Rossignol (The Song of the Nightingale) composed and choreographed by the legendary duo Igor Stravinsky and George Balanchine. It follows the performance of a solo dancer wearing a large black and white smock that expands and collapses with his movement. Spong’s beautifully realized film captures the momentary theatrical power of this choreography but also alludes to other narratives.

As the film’s title suggests, a sense of loss or distance from this ballet exists. Without any filmic documentation to work from, Spong has reconstructed Le chant du Rossignol from a contemporary standpoint, a position that can only rely on historical research, legend and anecdote. In this way, she has “re-imagined” a film that never was.

As with Spong’s earlier works, Costume for a Mourner owes as much to cinematic traditions as it does to theatre performance. It seems to sit somewhere in between the two, reminding us of the breathless physicality of cinema and offering a neat manifestation of the term jump cut. In this regard, I was disappointed that Spong had chosen the wall-mounted flat screen of a brightly lit gallery over a darkened cinematic space.

But perhaps that would be too much, too grand a statement. This show is about balance, after all. The hanging sculpture Field Figures finds a careful equilibrium in the combination of its components: circular and diamond steel shapes, blue squares of film filters and lengths of necklace chain. This balancing act is also echoed in the myriad of references Spong presents us with, from Balinese reverent offerings (the diamond and circle shapes which appear throughout the exhibition refer to Balinese visual traditions) to the Hans Christian Anderson parable of The Nightingale. Behind the physical immediacy of Spong’s sculpture and film lies a conceptual mesh of fact and fiction.

What is notable here is Spong’s use and incorporation of referenced material. In an environment where “research” is lauded and workbooks full of edifying clippings are held under the arm of every savvy art student, Spong does not go in for an information overload. Nor does she pepper her work with the ironic allusions or knowing winks of art practices that would have once been described as postmodern.

However, a danger still exists in this play of multiple citations. Spong is at risk of having these references simply bounce about like echoes in a cave without any substance. There is something critically hollow about this practice, but I think Spong has successfully avoided it. A kind of richness is emerging in her work: a carefully considered play of overlapping and interlocking themes. It is what happens when reference, research and citation are taken one step further, when something unique emerges. It is simply good choreography.

Nevertheless, I have a niggling feeling that Spong’s distinctiveness is having its edge taken off. For what it’s worth, Channeling Mr B felt like a “dealer show.” [Even as I tentatively write this statement I’m not sufficiently sure that I can describe what a “dealer show” is. But, this is precisely the point. Its meaning is currently in flux as the traditional differentiation of exhibition spaces in Auckland is changing. The ambition of many dealer shows over the past few years is challenging the standing, aspirations and resources of other galleries. Dealers are keeping up with the ambitions of their artists - as illustrated by Spong’s recent move from Anna Miles Gallery to Lett’s - and this is shifting our context for viewing art].

It was nice to have a breather from Michael Lett’s recent suite of block buster shows (Michael Parekowhai and Fiona Connor were memorable), and yet Spong’s peculiar charm seems a little clipped by the gallery’s tight ship aesthetic. The small photographic collages offering momentary glimpses of Balanchine’s historical legend were a little at odds with their large, gleaming white frames. Channeling Mr B is an elegant and perfectly materialized show, but sometimes greater or more interesting things come from the rough around the edges. It is a tricky balance and I am being a little pernickety here. Spong is on the brink of something great (no pressure!), let’s hope she gets a chance to spread her wings at Basel.

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.