Kate Brettkelly-Chalmers adds to the continuing discussion of the Triennial

The 4th Auckland Triennial: Last Ride in a Hot Air Balloon
Various Auckland venues
12 March - 20 June 2010

The 4th Auckland Triennial: Last Ride in a Hot Air Balloon was launched a few weeks ago with a suite of gallery openings, artists’ talks and panel discussions. Curator Natasha Conland’s umbrella theme of risk and adventure engages with a diversity of current art practices. As other Eyecontact reviews already give summary impressions of the whole Triennial, this piece focuses on a group of artists and the talks they gave during the opening weekend.

What characterizes Last Ride in a Hot Air Balloon is the multiplicity of interpretations that can be made of its themes of risk and adventure. Where other triennial or biennial events might develop a rigid curatorial concept, Conland offers a more porous conceptual framework. The twenty-eight artists selected investigate various dynamics of risk-taking, from explicitly looking at our current financial recession to examining the physicality of risky activity or simply exploring various material conditions.

The multifarious nature this Triennial might exasperate those who would like an explicit pairing of artist and curatorial concept. In some instances, such as Martin Boyce’s fantastic sculptural pieces at St Paul St, ideas of risk taking and adventure do not seem appropriate or useful as a means of engaging with the artworks on show. I found that the curatorial premise was most effective where it articulated relationships between different art practices.

During the opening weekend I was particularly fascinated by the relationship between Alicia Frankovich’s sculptures and the films of Mike Parr. Frankovich’s series of sculptural pieces at the New Gallery investigates the form of the human body in relation to everyday materials. In the centre of her space hang two Martini bottles attached to a pump circulating a red coloured liquid. Clearly a reference to body fluid, this booze-bottle water feature humorously hints at the presence of alcohol in our systems. Like her memorable performances at ARTSPACE last year, Frankovich creates potentially risky bodily engagements and reveals that they are not without ethical implications.

At her artist’s talk I was intrigued to hear Frankovich speak of her sculptures as performances. Works such as Lover, a human form vaguely traced in neon tubing hanging from a coat hanger, or Piston, a round ball suspended precariously from the ceiling, do not immediately speak of performative concerns. But the lightness of their construction does suggest an agile physical quality. At her talk we were also reminded that Frankovich was once a competitive gymnast. Indeed, her engagement with the effects of gravity has an athletic flair—these works could topple over at anytime.

Where Frankovich’s ARTSPACE performances were powerfully simple and coherent, these Triennial pieces function more like a series of drawings, experiments that explore the space between sculpture and performance.

Performative parameters were also discussed at Mike Parr’s artist talk. Parr spoke about his significant career as an Australian conceptual and performance artist as he discussed his early works on show at the George Fraser Gallery. This talk even tended toward performance in itself. At one point the artist read out a list of actions for possible works that he’d written in the 1970s. Directives such as ‘Hold your breath under water for as long as possible,’ or ‘Drip blood from your finger onto the lens of a camera...until the lens is filled with blood’ varied from the torturous to the mundane. As Parr finished reading each page of directives he let these papers drop one by one on the ground. Whether this was intentional or not I couldn’t help but associate these discarded pages with the artist’s video One Hundred Breaths being projected in the next room. In this video Parr sucks pieces of paper onto his face until he runs out of air and needs to take a breath. What gives this slightly ferocious work its poignant overtones is that each piece of paper bears a self-portrait of the artist. Parr is elevating his own image with all the air in his body, creating a tangible link between self-image and physical reality.

Alongside Parr and Frankovich, the body’s movements are also explored in Tino Sehgal’s work Instead of allowing something to rise up to your face dancing bruce and dan and other things. Known for his ‘constructed situations’ — choreographed movements or exchanges involving one or many people — Sehgal does not allow any documentation to be made of his work, nor does he use the term ‘performance’ to describe it. At St Paul St a man dressed in casual jeans and a jacket made a very purposeful wriggling movement along the concrete floor of the gallery. His unusual sliding actions had the precision and attentiveness of a professional dancer — someone who is acutely aware of their body.

Derived from Bruce Nauman and Dan Graham videos, Sehgal’s piece has been reenacted in galleries across the globe. Anna Macrae is the New Zealand dancer who facilitated Sehgal’s piece. At a panel discussion on the opening weekend she spoke about the process of developing this work in New Zealand. Macrae, who is currently living in Berlin, happened to be coming back home during the period of the Triennial. Seeking to avoid any unnecessary travel, Sehgal and Conland arranged for her to ‘learn’ the choreography in Berlin and teach it to six professional dancers based in New Zealand, who would in turn reenact it at St Paul St.

Macrae’s remarks at the panel discussion revealed that the scope of Sehgal’s work goes beyond what occurs in the gallery, beyond a single person moving across a concrete floor. It is a constructed situation comprised of a series of incidental actions and connections—small movements across space and time.

Although this Triennial’s themes of risk and adventure may seem tenuously linked to the artworks on show, Last Ride in a Hot Air Balloon does offer a myriad of smaller, intriguing relationships between different art practices. It presents constellations of artists whose share subjects and modes of investigation across gallery spaces. It is a show that requires an attentive approach to viewing—something that is well worth the time.

The images above ascend from Mike Parr's video One Hundred Breaths, shown at his artist's talk at the George Fraser opening.
Then there is Parr's Facts About The Room (1970), and three details from Alicia Frankovich's presentation in The New Gallery.

4th Auckland Triennial -1

Last Ride in a Hot Air Balloon: (Looking at the themes - Part One) Bodies at Risk
Mike Parr, Alicia Frankovich, Robert Hood, Martin Boyce, Laresa Kosloff, Richard Bell
28 artists in various Auckland venues.
12 March - 20 June 2010

The 4th Auckland Triennial curated by Natasha Conland has been with us for over a couple of weeks now, so what does one make of it? It has a great poetic and metaphorically loaded title, a superb hardcover catalogue with three excellent essays, and a new large downtown venue, but what of the art? Is it memorable? Does it provide examples that stick in the mind like say – to look at the earlier exhibitions – Ashley Bickerton and Roni Horn did in Bright Paradise, or Ilya and Emilia Kabakov and William Kentridge in Public / Private, or Willie Doherty and Issac Julian in Turbulence?

The show is less overtly finger-waggy than Turbulence, but you still sense Conland is very much a schoolmarm – only more circumspect. She has a lighter touch than Victoria Lynn, allowing more whimsy and humour to mix with her didacticism. (Comparing the two titles shows that.) Yet for my money, that side of her intelligence, her appreciation of wit and irony, came out much more in Mystic Truths, a much smaller, non-Triennial show than say Earth Matters, a Triennial warm-up. Nevertheless Last Ride in a Hot Air Balloon is impressively focused. It doesn’t feel sprawling or scattered in its content. There are about five themes that reveal themselves (often several overlapping) in all of the works, but which may not be at first obvious. They are Bodies at Risk; The Journey; The Imagination; The Economy; and Dialogue.

Therefore I want to take a look at the Triennial in a manner that ignores the placing of the twenty-eight artists within the separate venues and elaborate on these five overarching themes instead. I want to briefly provide some interpretive possibilities, putting five or six artists in each category, and then looking at each in turn.

The first theme is 'Bodies at Risk’. Although the theme of risk is discussed constantly throughout the essays and catalogue entries, it is more global economic vulnerability (Conland’s essay), or explorative navigational risk (Doryun Chong’s text), or linked to the artist’s body (Leonhard Emmerling’s discussion) – not that of the viewer. While artists like Mike Parr and Alex Monteith have made films or performances where the viewer empathises with the artist’s or film-maker’s body in pain or in danger, there is no sense of implied audience peril anywhere in this exhibition. None of the sculpture for example is menacing in its ambience in the way that sculpture, like say the kinetic works of Len Lye or Peter Roche, can be.

With Parr’s work at George Fraser the outside windowed gallery is the site of a very early (1970) text work where he describes in a hundred vinyl-cut sentences attached to the wall, the properties of a room, its space and what is seen through the windows. At his artist’s talk this work was linked to a film of his 'Hundred Breaths' (Breathless) performance of sucking self-portrait prints to his face one by one till on each occasion, his oxygen runs out. The room becomes a trope for his interiority, his ruminating self enclosed within his body as he looks out its windows. This in turn is paralleled in one of the films he shows in the darkened inner gallery, where he is rolling a recording movie camera up and over a hill. The camera lens swishing through blurs of long grass could be Parr’s decapitated head.

Alicia Frankovich’s AAG installation shows a hospital ‘drip’ made out of two end-to-end Martini bottles pouring orange liquid into a small swimming pool, to be then repumped up and recycled. The fluid could be a cocktail of blood, urine, sweat and tears, and seems to be alluding to artists recycling earlier art. In a corner is a Duchampian rack holding orange shopping bags from the Pergomon Museum in Berlin, on one wall is a neon that seems to allude to very early Richard Serra, and a ball suspended in a ‘testicular’ harness refers to her own history and mindset. With the rack of shopping bags entitled Woman, and a pinned up skirt displayed with a found drawing of graphite traces, Frankovich has with her installation and bodily absence created one of the more witty and visually compelling works in the Triennial.

Inanimate objects representing the human body are explored further with Robert Hood driving his Cortina from Christchurch up to Auckland earlier this year where it was taken to a shredder and ‘atomised’. The remnants are laid out on the gallery floor like a large bed. A real time audio recording of the trip is provided alongside Hood’s appropriated (and inserted) self-portrait version of Yves Klein’s famous ‘leap into the void’ photograph. In such a grouping, driver and vehicle symbolically merge.

With Martin Boyce we have the large gallery at St. Paul St blindingly illuminated by a weblike structure of white fluorescent tubes suspended from the ceiling. A black construction of broken wooden chair parts hangs like a Calder mobile, but seems to also reference (perhaps be a substitute for) Bruce Nauman’s turning wax dog corpses and decapitated white male heads. On a remote wall is a black, wire-mesh cubist/tribal mask watching in silence.

Aboriginal activist Richard Bell may smile sweetly during his videoed games of free association, but his critique of white Australia, with its youthful blonde representatives attired in gold laméd bikinied splendour, is excoriating. He is of course, deeply body conscious – as they are too of him, though he is fully dressed. With his dangerous charm he coaxes out a series of racist jokes for our delectation. If in the normally dismal Shed 6 we stay and listen, we become complicit – especially if we laugh: as Bell himself does. If we walk away, we (physically, hopefully not mentally) desert the artwork.

Fellow Australian Laresa Kosloff films bodies in action, airborne as a clowning trapeze act, or climbing over public sculptures in a park as bored children, or groups of adults exercising. Like Mike Parr’s rolling camera, Kosloff also films as if the camera were a moving figure – in her case while ascending and descending in a lift, looking out through a tall building’s windows. Her subject matter is contemporary for the looping footage we see at ARTSPACE is recent, yet the super 8 black and white film makes it look much older. You wonder if these people are still alive now, but of course probably they are, very much so.

It is difficult, naturally, to separate the human body from the activity of travel. ‘The Journey’ - and the Triennial's title - will be the subject of Part Two.

Jennifer French’s documentary photographs and DVD stills are of works by Robert Hood, Martin Boyce, Richard Bell and Laresa Kosloff.

International group show at Lett

Angels & Demons
Michael Lett
14 October - 21 November 2009

Ten artists make up this group concoction at Michael Lett’s. As some of them, being based in Europe or the States, are rarely shown in this part of the world, one would expect it to be memorable – but not so. A lot of the painting is peppered with references to modernist painting styles like those of analytic cubism (Hansjoerg Dobliar), Warhol and Basquiat (Chris Lipomi), or Larry Poons' poured paintings (John Armleder). While these art historical references are very knowing, many of the resulting images are not fresh. They don’t really add up to much despite the layering. They seem dry, tired and bookish.

Others are livelier because of their anger (like Manuel Ocampo’s scathing caricature of an Inland Revenue official) or adolescent shock tactics - Matthew Griffin has a turdlike waffle floating (but now disintegrating) in a bucket of water. A lot of it is forgettable.

The three artists who have created something that lingers in the mind are Dan Arps, Mike Parr and Jim Allen. Arps’ The Dark Times, made with what seems to be a photograph drawn over and smeared with acrylic umber and viscous resin, is beautifully ambiguous in its dark muddy confusion. It could be a doorway in a building, could be a newspaper title-face, might be a modernist mausoleum. The streaky image is graphically compelling and mysterious.

Down by the gallery entrance, Mike Parr’s three c-type photographs, based on films documenting some of his excruciating performances of thirty-seven years ago, still have impact – even when put in a row high up near the ceiling. Paul McCarthy’s performances, made around the same time as Parr’s, and videoed, also involve confrontational activities using his body parts - and body fluids too. These Black and White Tapes, were screened on Wednesday night.

In the front entrance by the big window, Jim Allen’s sculpture has an advantage by being isolated from the rest of the exhibition which is bizarrely hung and organised in strange clusters. His work shows a male puppet head on a stand looking at a music stand on which is played a large clumped lock of curly hair, nestling between open folds of two, thin, crinkled wax sheets. Behind the hair is a thin palm tree trunk in a narrow glass vase. From it are suspended various tinted photocopies of illustrated internal organs and viscera.

My theory is that the work is an ironic meditation on Courbet’s The Origin of The World. Hetero male sexual voyeurism (or desire for a fetish substitute) is mischievously conflated with musical pleasure, while the unseen bodily mechanics of a living female person are backgrounded, despite being inseparable from the genitals. As is usual with Jim Allen’s practice, the work invites speculation. It is the highlight of a largely humdrum show.

Reactions as videos and painting

Campbell Patterson: Work and Exercise
Michael Lett
10 September – 4 October 2008

This show pairs the videos and paintings by Campbell Patterson in an odd hybrid of darkened installation with white walls. Most of the moving image material is in a black polythene-lined space (the main gallery) and front entrance, while the four paintings are in the wee nook round the corner leading into Lett’s office.

Putting it simply, the videos are tedious oneliners, but the paintings are good. The filmed treatment of the jokes doesn't engage like say those of Steve Carr, which though also silly, have a slickness that intrigues via the work's meticulous construction. Many of Patterson's videoed wise-cracks are about process art, where the camera is set up and left running to record whatever might occur.

A good many of these quips seem focussed on Australian artist Mike Parr’s filmed performances in particular: Parr’s Holding my Breath for as long as I Can (1973) is transmuted into Patterson’s Holding My Mother for as Long as I Can. Parr’s lighting fires in his mouth with matches is turned into Patterson setting toilet paper on fire in a lav. Even the black plastic lined room seems a reference to Parr’s Black Box theatre made for the first Sydney Biennale in the late seventies.

Patterson’s Compilation paintings at first glance seem to be made of children’s transfers but in fact the images are painted. The categories and assorted jostled positionings make them intriguing. Many of the rendered clothes, animals, household objects, vehicles, toys and body parts are upside down or sideways, so the square works seem capable of being hung any way up. In other words you have four options. Some images contain blended doublings where detailed parts are repeated within an image, creating an amusing sort of 'double-vision'.

Compared to the flippant videos you could spend a lot of time with the paintings. They have a Killeenlike interest in categorization and how connections can be produced between randomly placed images. They might even have started as a send-up of Richard Killeen but they have gone off somewhere else. They are sweeter, more intimate and domestic, more literal in the sort of mental narrative they encourage. Jokey, but yet worthy of serious attention.

(Thank you Michael Lett for the images).