Menzies film at Gambia

Louise Menzies: Move your arm in circles
Gambia Castle
4 December - 19 December 2009

The set up is the simplest I’ve ever seen at Gambia Castle: a projector on a stand in the main room with a 16 mm film. The person in the office comes out when you arrive and switches it on. It runs for about four minutes, with no sound. Easy-peasy. They then rewind the film when you leave.

Louise Menzies is normally known for performances that focus on social history and community, but now she is making films. This one shows a young woman in her early twenties, standing naked on the veranda of an old villa doing exercises related to body posture and limb manipulation: stretches and bends. The house, called Peloha (a compression of ‘peace, love, harmony’) is located in Havelock North, and in the late 1930s it was the international headquarters for the then highly influential and radical School of Radiant Living, founded by the charismatic Herbert Sutcliffe.

In the eighties a related company that specialises in homeopathic medicines, Weleda New Zealand, took over the property when the S.R.L. slowly fell out of favour and eventually collapsed. To enrich the film’s context, the Wellington writer Anna Sanderson has written a short text mainly about the current inhabitant of the Peloha house, Phillip Melville. She used a photograph Menzies took of assorted crystals, Peloha photographs, Renaissance art reproductions and a cloth elephant on the original Peloha mantelpiece, and quotes from an interview Louise Menzies did with Melville.

So what of Menzies’ film? Well, it is fascinating for a number of reasons.

First of all the soft yellowy-green light which seems to be that of a late spring afternoon. With the young woman the film has a gentle eroticism akin to that of Balthus(1908-2001), the Polish-French painter, but not salacious (or demonic) as he can sometimes be. She is vertical, poised and confident, and mostly in profile. Formally positioned in the centre of the screen, she is enclosed by the house wall, screen windows and balustrade of the porch. She is also androgynous, having small breasts and large shoulders. She could be a guy.

It is not only the presence of an unclothed young woman that brings Balthus to mind. As a painter he was on occasion very influenced by Quattrocento painters like Piero Della Francesco and Massacio, and Menzies’ film has a similarly thin, scrubbed light like that of a faded fresco. The figure, oddly enough, could also be a fighting warrior in a battle engraving by Pollaiolo.

Although Peloha is a film about the history of healthy body maintenance, due to the movement of the exercises it seems to be presenting a variety of contemporary dance, and in that way is quite hypnotic. Because it is screened from a centrally positioned projector on to the side wall of the gallery, the motion of the projector reels become a surrogate for another observing, but mentally energetic, human form.

My impression from her publicity though is that Menzies intends her film to be noticed for other, more social history-focussed reasons – namely that the house is a reference to certain international movements of the thirties and forties that eventually grew out of the much earlier American-based New Thought movement and other concepts developed by Phineas Parkhurst Quimby (1802-1866), and that the exercises came indirectly from pioneer reseachers like Bess Mesendieck (1864 -1958) and others.

In other words, she is excited by certain antecedents, various precursors who developed various medical concepts that many take for granted nowadays. These she has inserted as footnotes to her film – referenced through the exhibition’s flier and through Sanderson’s short, published article. However, there is no stated link between the film’s location and the young woman’s regime of exercises, but it is implied that they come from the School of Radiant Living. We don't know for sure.

However Menzies does say she wants her audience to consider the importance of exercise-movements and their connection to 'the physical, the mental and the spiritual'. Yet the soft light, art historical references, eroticism and movement are also of interest too – perhaps even more than the discussions of medical history mentioned in her blurbs. Whatever the case, this is a richly layered, immensely intriguing short film. As an exhibition, one of Gambia’s best.

Menzies show

Louise Menzies: Gut Feeling
Window
12 March - 10 April 2009

As teaching aids go the hinged particle board stand with four legs looks striking in the Window space. Normally it supports pinned up sheets of paper to be written or drawn on by a teacher – as Menzies’ preparatory collaged drawing above shows – but this time it presents one piece of light canvas on which are positioned 21 soft black fabric letters, cut out in solid caps. Nicely proportioned, they look good. The words they say: HISTORY LOSES ITS APPEAL.

That aphorism has a Jenny Holzer ring to it. It could almost be a ‘Truism.’ It has a witty layered quality that draws out different nuances.

History loses its attraction to any student who might study it. History is on trial and has lost its case. History that once spoke only of a Eurocentric master narrative has lost its credibility. Losing this credibility has helped history regain its appeal.

The phrase swirls around, weaving in and out all the implications that post-colonialism brings to bear on a once rigidly orthodox account of past narratives. It frees the way for overlapping but parallel clusters of new histories. Ones where words transmute: His Story becomes Her Story; Lose Loosens; Appeal becomes A Peel, A Peal. A celebration of a new order.

In the above drawing Menzies has a sheet of newspaper positoned under the upper green sheet. Her project extends that newspaper to the Library's Level 1 with the journal and periodical collection. Two flyers bearing the same four words again, at each end of a shelf. They prod us to examine the contents of that shelf: the printed discussions' staying power, their appeal.

Nice surprises

Elam Art Upfront: The Foyer Art Project
Curated by Sonya Korohina and Mythily Meher
Various windows and foyers in Shortland St
6 March - 20 March 2009
Auckland Festival

Here we have five downtown corporate venues in the upper reaches of Shortland St – spaces that are often visible from the street - and nine artists. Good artists who because they are immensely varied, make this a show worth making the effort to get to. Lots of unexpected things to ruminate over.

Let’s start near the top of the street and zigzag our way down.

Shortland Street Chambers (#70) has three artists. Firstly there is Florence Wild in the window. She likes to write out a cursive script by draping lines of cassette tape across a space so you can read words. The lines are suspended in the air by invisible threads of nylon. She seems to be a bit of a punster who loves anagrams. This one says Live Evil, and as it is audio tape it is likely to be of commercially recorded music. Perhaps it is from a cassette of Miles Davis’ live recording of the same name. Behind the window glass the wrinkled, brown, skinny ribbons shimmer in the sunlight.

In the foyer, leaning against the wall near the lifts are two photographs (Work is Work) presented by Fiona Gillmore and Louise Menzies. The images of a stream in some lush tropical bush are blandly dull, but the nearby wall label is immensely interesting. It tells us that the artists purchased the images from the national Geographic Image Library via Getty Images, who laid down three strict stipulations. (1.) Only to be displayed internally, i.e. indoors. (2.) In one location only. (3.) For six months only, then the licence expires. These terms intrigue as they ensure obsolescence and likely renewal of purchase. Not much generosity there.

Also at this address was a Timothy Chapman sculpture which I didn't see but which is pictured above. It had a sibling I discovered at AXA.

Across the street just inside the door leading up to the NZ Post office (#69) we can see Tiffany Singh's presentation: moulded wax effigies from India placed on interlocking triangles of spread rice and herbal powders. Fruit and flowers dipped in wax can be seen from the street on the window ledge but hidden on the floor below are ines of the mentioned plump elephant gods and pointy angular Madonnas. The beeswax has a penetrating aroma that is quite overpowering when you go inside.

In the WHK Gosling Chapman Tower (within The Shortland Centre at #51-53) is a dramatic display of six hollow fibre-glass spheres by Priscilla Brown that vary in size. These have been suggestively stained with undulating organic patterns of black ink and areas of ‘skin’ removed. They seem to have a printmaker’s graphic sensibility, and so are unusual when seen on large sculpture. Brown’s orbs have a real presence, successfully competing with the Bing Dawe sculpture attached to the low ceiling above them.

In the AXA centre (#41) we can see works by three artists. A very special treat is provided by the moving image and sound installation of Katie Theunissen. Her three projections dramatically exploit blurred motion created by tumbling rolls of bandage, jerking bags of spilling flour and suspended but stationary, testicular pear-shaped forms. Theunissen knows how to make compelling viewing out of the most simple of methods. She has a real instinct for strikingly lit movement that holds your attention, has ocular appeal but which is also theatrical and vaguely profound.

Roisin Moore’s three photographs of plants growing alongside the AXA building comment on the sterility of AXA’s foyer area where they are placed, as they do the external sites being documented. On her label she compares her photos with fake plants but actually they lose out in the comparison. Fake plastic pot plants have more appeal than her dry, somewhat icy, photographic images.

On the outside of a skylight just around the corner, but viewable from below, is a giant plunger created by Timothy Chapman. The handle trembles and flickers through the glass like a stamen on a flower. Its movement brings a nervousness that makes the sculpture anthropomorphic, denying any possible reading as Pop Art but showcasing the airy environment affecting it.

At 34 Shortland Street Warren Childs manages to upstage Dick Frizzell’s nearby mural of rippled Australian bottle glass. Childs’ black tubular plinths have flat mirrored tops that look like whopper guitar picks. They hold bizarrely shaped, glass-tanked mini-motorcycles with large chrome exhausts. These small choppers seem like colourful rocket-ships that have morphed into insects. They seem inseparable from the shrewdly constructed plinths that possibly were once plants conceived by J.G. Ballard. It’s an unusual pairing of gently lumbering botany meeting a delicate but abruptly stilled velocity.

Two Te Tuhi performances

Louise Menzies: Talking while Swimming
Riverside Ave Reserve
Harrell Fletcher: Come together - Manukau City 2008
Te Tuhi Centre of the Arts, Pakuranga
14 June 2008

These two performances were organised by Emma Bugden as part of Te Tuhi’s continuing Land Wars exhibition, and co-ordinated with a free Saturday bus trip out to Te Tuhi from ARTSPACE. I was curious to see what was going on, so I came along for the ride.

I don’t know the outer suburbs of Auckland at all, and had never been to Riverside Reserve or the Tamaki Estuary. Panmure was a foreign country as well, but the spacious beauty of the park and estuary was quite a thrill.

The suddenly inclement weather though, wasn’t. Before she started her routine, Louise Menzies wisely shepherded the 15 or so artlovers off the open parkland to under a tree on the shoreline, to gingerly step over the ubiquitous discarded condoms and keep out of the biting offshore wind.

Her carefully prepared talk was a mixture of anecdotes about parks, an analysis of Antonioni’s sixties film ‘Blow Up’ (a movie in which a park was a crucial element), the Parisian novel on which the film was based, the history of parks in general, and a commentary on the features of the Riverside reserve and its context. From the work’s title (Talking while Swimming), she might have originally planned to deliver her oratory while submerged – wearing a wetsuit perhaps. It’s a shame that she didn’t because the work needed theatricality. This despite it being extremely informative and at times funny. Menzies is not a charismatic speaker and the project was a bit like a school lesson. Not art that was particularly memorable, unless it was ‘Listening while Shivering.’

American artist Harrell Fletcher couldn’t make it as planned to attend his Te Tuhi performance, but his absence might have improved it. I like the idea of artists placing physical and psychological distance between themselves and their work, incorporating a ‘disembodied’ practice.

Fletcher’s project was a request to have an introduction by a group of Manukau residents to the region. Six people linked to Te Tuhi approached six local residents (whom they subsequently introduced to the audience) to speak for ten minutes on some subject they were passionate about, some topic that also reflected the region. The resulting six subjects were conservation of the Tamaki wetlands (Ros Nicholson), coaching a school soccer team (Harry Jekel), Pacific Island visual and community arts (Ema Tavola), the relationship between religion and science as elucidated by Swedenborg (Susan Heeps), and the complexities of beekeeping and honey harvesting (Terry McColl).

Both Menzies and Fletcher’s works tangentially raised questions about quality. The work was indisputably art (the roots of Relational Aesthetics go back via Fluxus to dada) but was it interesting? Could one care about it as Art, as distinct from caring about its subject matter? Can one separate the two? I certainly think so.

Information alone is not sufficient to engage an art public. The method of conveyance, the ‘conduit,’ the works’ materiality, is all important, its structure and efficacy. In these performances the speakers were the keys to any success the work might have, as were the frameworks for the works’ recognition and enjoyment as Art.

The distinction between Art and Life was not obliterated, or even attempted to be. The two are normally assessed differently with separate expectations, but in these works Art got in the way of Life. More so in Menzies’ case than Fletcher’s because Te Tuhi is, after all, a community centre. In Menzies’ project she had a specific art audience who would not have attended if she were not an artist. The work was more about delivery of style and persona, than information, though what she said was certainly interesting – but it was clearly bracketed as Art.

In Te Tuhi, the situation seemed to be the opposite, with an artist planning procedures which lacking his bodily participation, soon seemed invisible. Yet most of Fletcher’s speakers would have been indifferent to his absence, or to being elements of his artwork. They performed because friends connected to Te Tuhi had asked them to, and they could use their passion to convert others to their interests. A commonplace life situation where art was forgotten.

Images above are from Louise Menzies' poster for 'Talking while Swimming' (top) and Harrell Fletcher's 'Come Together' performance in Los Angeles last year (below).