Oi, hop it, skedaddle!

Kate Newby: Get off my garden
Sue Crockford
6 October - 31 October 2009

It has a clever title this exhibition: sounds like Newby is yelling at some stray dog that’s treading on her vegie patch. And so, apart from a set of six ceramics in the back office, all the works (in Crockford’s or in nearby carparks) are about the delineation of private space or the protection of property - as exemplified by walls or fences.

Plus there are formal links (through colour and plane) to Newby’s last Gambia Castle show – which though also referencing the public/private distinction, was nowhere as pristine as this one. For this Crockford presentation is stunningly austere. A big surprise in its minimalist ethos. Let me give you some detail.

The works that initially catch your eye are two added walls (a small one of concrete blocks, the other larger of plywood sheets) placed at diagonally opposite ends of the main exhibiting space to create narrow doorways. Running down the main white mdf wall by the window, directly below a beam in the ceiling, is also a column of single bricks, a vertical slightly wonky line, with the occasional droopy succulent hanging out of its mortar joins. There is nothing on the spacious, polished parquet floor.

Near the big window and beyond the concrete block wall in the smaller back room, Newby has placed a large, pollen yellow, woollen carpet. It is deliberately not tight-fitting, but sits on the floor casually with a couple of inches to spare on one side.

Within this exhibiting space, two photographs sit on opposite walls - on each side of the rug. One, with a young woman bent over a low concrete wall, could refer to the concrete block installation nearby. The other of the artist lying on the road, sprawled beside her fallen bike, has her prone shape repeated by a drawing in red wine spilled onto the carpet.

Outside the Endeans building Newby’s two public carpark works, horizontal ‘paintings’ of coloured concrete slabs or spread out mortar, are both quite close. They have various crystals, rocks and coloured stones set in, and are sited close to footpaths. The Customs St. East one, in the Wilson Parking Lot, can only be seen through the wire-netting fence it is butted up against, for it is placed on top of a high wall and so can only be examined from above.

The other carpark item, made of orange mortar, is placed at the bottom of a high wall – the side of a building – regularly used by taggers. In fact two such artists were busy with their project while I was looking at Newby’s piece – this being mid-afternoon Tuesday in Shortland St. - and had started underpainting with black enamel spray above her work.

So what does all this add up to, these two types of site, their properties showcased by her inclusion of three photographs taken on public streets, and Crockford’s very private venue in a building that has a surveillance camera above its admission-by-application door?

First of all, the ‘street’ works have quite a high chance of being damaged, though that factor (their potentially transitional nature) seems to worry the artist if her exhibition title is anything to go by. Impossible to steal and left alone for pedestrians to accidentally come upon, the 'gardens' probably will baffle as decorative objects. Crystals are after all an unorthodox ingredient. You usually only see them in science museums.

Secondly, in the Crockford gallery space, Newby loves to present ‘damaged goods’. One of the ceramic pieces (a ‘Patti Smith’ plate) is cracked in half, and the gorgeous carpet is ‘ruined’ by the ‘spilt’ wine. She likes to mix coincidence and calculation together so eventually they become indistinguishable. And in the public space, chance actions by other people seem to serve her purposes too.

Thirdly, with the walls there is an inventive playfulness in Newby’s choice of materials and her formal manipulation of them. The column of bricks turns out to be an unexpected third added wall with properties that dawn on you gradually, a horizontal wall attached to a vertical one, projecting out from it.

Lastly, due to the above context the woollen carpet takes on a new meaning, for it becomes a constraining metaphorical wall, a barrier of social decorum that the artist is indifferent to. The poured wine becomes bloodlike, the result of a seemingly ‘wounding’ act that in contaminating the sunshine yellow field, is privately conceived but public in its consequences. Though in fact a drawing, one that is incredibly careful in its meticulous carelessness, it is also defiantly existential as an action that is capable of shock.

This is a remarkably cohesive, multi-layered exhibition that provides many nuances to ponder over. Downtown carparks included. Don’t miss it.

I've seen the Future (Brother), it is Murder

The Future is Unwritten
Curated by Laura Preston
Adam Art Gallery, University of Victoria, Wellington
11 July - 30 August 2009

Over the last few years one of the subjects increasingly brought under close scrutiny by writers such as James Elkins is that of the relationship between academia and art, especially within the structure of a PhD study programme. What is this thing called ‘art practice’ and how does it fit in to the requirements of a university. More particularly, what is ‘research’? Should I say ‘Research’ (with a capital R) for doctorates? Is that word accurate for what artists (post-graduate or otherwise) do? In a studio or out of it. Does it correlate with Research carried out by those in other disciplines, with its necessary (and copious) reading and writing?

Now the following discussion is not a review. It is a speculative pre-amble (my ‘Cohen’ to Laura Preston’s ‘Strummer’) that appears two days before this Adam exhibition opens. I’ve been invited by the curator to post some comments in advance. It’s an interesting idea for a number of reasons, one of them being the relevance of the above paragraph. She is interested in guest artists doing interdisciplinary 'research' within Victoria university, and has sent me a gallery invite containing a mini-essay and various background bits and pieces. Preston’s essay is more detailed and more interesting than what you get on the gallery website.

Click on the Press Release here and you will get a somewhat simplified version of what she is up to. The project involves turning the Adam Gallery into a sort of research centre for ‘critically thinking’ conceptual artists that mostly inhabit the thread that runs from Art and Language to Thomas Hirschhorn. Its curatorial ethos appears to be based in part on Charles Esche’s discussion of A Modest Proposal, and partially on the ideas of Simon Sheikh, and it briefly looks at Jacques Rancière’s espousal of a certain kind of critical art that experiments with form (see March 2007 Artforum), or structure as reflected in Paola Virno’s analysis of jokes. The antecedents of the interdisciplinary curatorial emphasis are easy to find. Hans Ulrich Obrist’s Laboratorium, and several decades earlier the late Billy Kluver’s E.A.T. projects with Rauschenberg and others.

All with the aim of acknowledging the current time of crisis (G.F.C. and ecological) and using the university as “a place for interdisciplinary thinking” for achieving “a critical analysis of the current climate.” So in this period of post-postmodernism, where irony is rejected and a belief in meaning re-asserted, the seven artists and two designers, through their conversations with the curator and other university staff, might (they are free to fail to produce) “shift the idea of what a ‘work’ constitutes and what it should deliver.”

Preston points out that Rancière believes that the political in art resides in the power of its form. His term “the distribution of the sensible” refers to the restricted divisions of place and forms of community participation that centre on apprehended modes of perception, not only what is visible or audible but also what is thought, said, made or done. He sees artistic practices as ‘ways of doing and making’ that intervene in this general distribution as well as in the relationships they maintain to modes of being and modes of visibility.The curator sees Rancière as placing value on “what is felt, (re-engaging with) art’s affect.”

In Artforum Rancière says “For me the fundamental question is to explore the possibility for play. To discover how to produce forms for the presentation of objects, from for the organisation of spaces, that thwart expectations. The main enemy of artistic creativity as well as of political creativity is consensus – that is, inscription within given roles, possibilities, competences.” (p.263)

When you look at his examples it is clear the playfulness is within certain forms of interventionist practice, within works that involve critical thinking. It is clearly not wildly fooling around for its own sake, but has a set out, contextualised political agenda.

In her search for empathetic practitioners I wonder though if Preston’s emphasis on ‘young artists’ in the Press Release (though Malone is not young) might severely hamper the success of this project. Older artists like Bruce Barber, Jim Allen, and Ralph Paine, university teachers (or retired ones) who know the politically intricate departmental infrastructures of such institutions well, might get greater use out of its interdisciplinary facilities. Their experience might achieve more conceptually exciting results, and draw out the rich possibilities of Victoria University as a pedagogical site.

That aside, Preston has an inspired range of artists here (who might consider themselves ‘critical thinkers’ though that can’t be assumed) that represent a wide variety of practice morphologies.

To speculate on the show one would have to speculate on the bodily experience of entering the Adam architecture to discover the location of each individual and the form of presentation each artist embraces, or the gallery websites, which I happen not to see as ‘dematerialized’. Such sensations are crucial to their content; the means they provide of access to their conceptual material.

In other words, though Preston considers these artists ‘conceptualists’ it is a word that nowadays has become meaningless through overuse and contradictory inclusions. Even early ‘conceptual artists’ like Kosuth or Sol Lewitt (Wittgensteinians or mystics, not necessarily Marxists) use sensuality and form as a carrot to draw their audiences in towards the ideas. They never abandon the aesthetic, the physicality of visual appeal. So with this show’s artists, whilst some may be enthusiastic readers of theory, that doesn’t mean the results of their research will be automatically interesting - visually in terms of concrete materiality experienced by the senses, or visually in terms of linguistic description experienced in the imagination.

However the nature of the research Preston is advocating here (what she calls ‘propositional’), some might argue is not really research at all. That the term is inappropriate when applied to most artists, even those thought ‘conceptual’.

Certainly the open-endedness of this socially hermetic project worries me. The lack of accountability and refusal to assess itself I see as irresponsible. (I feel the same about Esche and Sheikh – see the latter’s Constitutive Effects: the Techniques of The Curator in ‘Curating Subjects’ ed. Paul O’Neill.) Preston describes a win/win situation where the exhibition cannot fail. She doesn't acknowledge any criteria through which she must evaluate the project, and allow for the possibility of its collapse - or that certain individuals cannot contribute effectively and she has misjudged them, or expected too much.

What of the role of the curator in her ‘conversations and collaborations’? I would hope that she not try to be an artist herself, that she is a facilitator, a nurturer, a provider of introductions and available means, but not a puppetmaster using the Adam as a theatre where the artists are manipulated by her. A ‘collaboration’ should not imply Preston is an artist. Here though, I think it does.

As a quick glance, it is easy to see why these nine individuals were picked: Amit Charan has a finely tuned, subtle mind, as indicated by his use of a videoed actor to recite with manual sign language definitions from some of Joseph Kosuth’s artworks, or his insertion of marginal codes, such as floral arrangements, into exhibitions; Fiona Connor is well known for her interest in subverting the physical properties of architecture – and the Adam is the prefect building for her to be set loose on; William Hsu has an established interest in science and various global environmental issues; Daniel Malone for his enthusiasm for Situationist practice and for Giorgio Agamben’s The Coming Community as indicated by the pamphlet Autonomous Anonymous: On Being Whatever that he co-wrote with Ralph Paine; Narrow Gauge is known for elegantly designed publications and posters; Kate Newby for her interest in fashion, the poetical properties of language (allusions to early conceptualists like Lawrence Weiner) and her ability to sculpturally intervene in unusual spaces; Martyn Reynolds has eloquently indicated his interest in the writings of theoreticians like Rancière and the practice of Jason Rhoades; Kelvin Soh is known for innovative commodity design, posters and comics; Peter Trevelyan has an interest in mathematics, dystopian devices and systems of surveillance.

Hopefully on Friday evening there will be a lot happening (or starting to happen) with the beginnings of various processual strategies in and around the Adam Art Gallery building, and online. Call or log in to follow the much anticipated, but as yet unarticulated, 'unwritten' developments.

In a silent way

Tahi Moore, Kate Newby: Run!
Window
23 November - 28 January 2009

Moore and Newby are two well known Gambia Castle artists. Moore seems particularly interested in the ambiguities of the reconstructed moving image, and Newby, the spatial and corporeal possibilities of 'treated' found or given form.

For this collaboration we see stretched across the inside of the plate glass window of the university gallery, a large rectangular piece of translucent muslin, stained with yellow and red blobs. It is similar to the suspended screen in Newby’s August ‘Thinking with your Body’ Gambia Castle exhibition.

Behind it, on a monitor discretely placed to one side, screens a looped, silent video in slow motion – presumably made by Moore. It shows two male figures (occasionally a woman replaces one of them), dressed in black, chatting about what they come across as they walk around the public spaces of an inner city area. The image is blurred by the milky material, though you can peek through a small gap on the far left side to see the screen from an angle.

The show is about thwarting the viewer’s desire for clarity and assessable meaning. The obstructing painted fabric screen seems to serve several purposes.

Firstly as a symbol for cultural mediation when attending generally to art, it denies ‘the innocent eye’, representing other sources of ‘pertinent’ or ‘necessary’ knowledge such as conversations, essays, wall labels, magazines, books etc.

Secondly it represents mood shifts and fluctuating abilities to concentrate, on the part of the viewer. Looking at energy levels, not knowledge sources. Also, its unique marks can stand for the problems of a particular experience – as presented by this exhibition only. The contingent nature of this library foyer encounter on one particular day.

For all that, this installation is not a satisfying experience. Its obliqueness is clearly deliberate. It is also a poor show, one that seems insufficiently thought through. It is not that it is difficult; it is that it lacks structure, and needs more coherence. The painted fabric and the narrative of the video seem so disconnected, that any linking logic is doomed to remain vague. Yet such logic is implied but not underlined. It doesn’t convince, or even wish to.

As artworks go, Ash Kilmartin’s wall essay on the silence of a portrait of a mime (poirot) is a far more resolved project, beautifully executed but not helpful for those looking at Run! A sceptic might argue Kilmartin's involvement is a smart-aleck joke about detective stories and Agatha Christie, but that is excessively cynical (like a novel with its last page ripped out) and convoluted. The essay is not integrated into being part of Run’s discussion, but remains separate. That's a pity, but is a common situation for galleries like Window and Newcall, where provided texts often undermine and not assist comprehension of the presented artwork.

A couple of Larus dominicanus and one Larus bulleri

A couple of Larus dominicanus and one Larus bulleri
Kate Newby and Nick Austin: Hold Still
Te Rimu Tahi / Western Park, Ponsonby
Sat 30 August 2008 (9 am - 9 pm)
A One Day Sculpture Event

It’s a lovely treat to be tricked into exploring the ferny bushy gullies of Western Park, while checking out the art – despite it being a bitterly cold (but at least dry) day.

Austin and Newby’s installation is a lot of fun, even if you are not interested in little bush walks. From the circular viewing platform (see top photo) they’ve set up a couple of bird watching telescopes on tripods. From a distance you can observe three tirelessly standing Black Backed and Black Beaked Gulls, cheekily perched on two nearby picnic tables. Furthermore you can saunter down the paths and get a closer peek. They seem to like people coming up and peering at them. They don’t flinch a bit. Maybe ornithology is a big thing in Ponsonby.

There is a meaning I’d like to propose for all this: the viewing platform is called Arohanui: still an abundance of love.

Abundance of love? Here is what it says on a small plaque:
Mauri tu, mauri ora, mauri noho, mauri mate.
Those who choose to stand will live; those who choose to do nothing will perish.

The text seems to be an attack on pacifism. Maybe it was put there in the seventies during the Vietnam War. If you think the gulls are stuffed (actually they're are not, they are fabricated), well think about it. They chose ‘to stand’, and look where it got them. In this world it's the quick and the dead. Standing still is definitely unwise.

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.

Newby installation

Kate Newby: Thinking with your body
Gambia Castle
18 July - 9 August 2008

It’s an interesting speculative problem to try to locate Kate Newby’s art practice (which has a large language component) as a form of literature. If it is legitimate to consider Lawrence Weiner a poet of sorts (to read his texts off the catalogue page or to see them as 'poetry’ on the streets) - and certainly in poetry anthologies like Douglas Messerli’s American collection “From the Other Side of the Century” there are several poets communicating with texts supplemented by added photographs or diagrams – then maybe when Newby paints a mural on a brick wall that just says ‘Plants songs food clothes’ she is presenting a poem. The same when she writes on a vase that is about to be fired, “Go and put on an album of Gillian Welch and try to remember a time before all this crap filled your mind.”

The fact that she uses words on banners, murals and ceramics this way is what makes her practice interesting, rather than her being a consummate wordsmith. It’s not academic language at all, not sophisticated or erudite - just very plain. Downright ordinary. Close to banal even – especially with her lists of nouns.

However the really odd thing in this show (outside the question of poetry) is that seemingly despite her best efforts to resist it, Newby is turning into a painter – not the portable canvas stretcher variety but a maker of surprisingly sensual props in installations.

The thin muslin hanging across the Gambia Castle gallery is in front of a newly painted, narrow section of yellow floor, walls and window panes. Trying hard to be on the periphery of the Gambia space, it looks as if the traditional position of a yellow sun suspended within a blue sky has been reversed. The blue hanging is enclosed by, and framed by, yellow. In the horizontal blue/grey strip at its top are delicately stained textures that look like bicycle tyre or shoe sole prints, softly smeared and mottled. Beautifully understated these wisps of colour float on the gauze that ripples and sways in the breeze, catching the light that streams in the window.

The other interesting artwork is the one made by leaving the staircase door to the street-front ‘Crockford window’ open. Of course from out on the K’ Rd footpath it beckons to pedestrians to come upstairs and check out Newby’s show, but its main feature is also to confuse you when you are leaving the building. If you are a little absent-minded (er like me) instead of turning right to the outside entrance at the bottom of the stairs, you find yourself attracted by the daylight and stepping out towards the window glass. It is a bit like a flytrap for day-dreaming reviewers and novice Gambia visitors, a ruse that shows you just how dangerous 'thinking with your body' can be. A warning to concentrate when you leave the rarefied world of art and creative imaginations and walk into the ‘real world’ of rowdy passers by and speeding smelly traffic.