Dane Mitchell. Barricades
Starkwhite, Auckland.
November 13 – December 9 2007
Images of protestors standing behind barricades and hurling rocks or Molotov cocktails at government forces are monotonously common in our newspapers and television screens. Dane Mitchell is so fascinated by them he has collected over three hundred such photographs. A large part of his current installation at Starkwhite consists of pencil drawings of barricades based on the newspaper clippings he has collected over the last two years - part of a proposed but uncompleted project researched for a venue at Sao Paulo university. The images come from a wide range of confrontations between police and demonstrators in a number of countries at different periods.
Mitchell is intrigued by the engineering of these obstacles, their spontaneous and makeshift nature, and patterns of the different varieties. Some of the drawings are words placed over traced maps of Paris, and refer to the fifties group of radical Marxists, the Situationists. The maps also allude to the boulevard layout of Paris, designed by Baron Haussmann under instructions from Napoleon III. The narrow streets were replaced by wide roads so that it was impossible for dissidents to erect barricades to block troop movement.
Mitchell’s installation mixes drawing with sculpture and some sound so that everything interpenetrates. Rectangular sections of the front wall by the K’ Rd entrance have been cut out and converted into riot shields. The remaining holes look like gun pits and you peer through them when you enter the gallery. Close to the entrance gap is a shovel with its blade embedded high in the wall and a red flag hanging from its handle. The project references the recent police raids on Tuhoe, and police suspicion of nationally co-ordinated, armed insurrection.
With the last two or so shows he has had at Starkwhite, Mitchell demonstrated what a fine producer of elegant drawings he can be. These are a little like Sam Durant in theme and method, but show a big interest in shape and considered placement on the page. And they look elegant framed and lined up on the wall.
Still there was a time – only five years ago - when Mitchell was the bane of Auckland curators and directors, when his conceptual investigations into museum and gallery systems and politics made him serious enemies, and when his presentation was clumsier than what it is now. Has his work become too stylish and marketable? There seems to be less risk in his aestheticized, recent projects.
There is also the question of rhetoric about revolution on white dealer gallery walls. Mitchell has to be careful he is not over-commodifying these images of anti-government resistance; they could become like ‘Che’ coffee beans, cultivating a superficial ‘revolutionary’ ambience for a young, easily impressed, artworld audience.
And what do the drawings say about their potential purchasers? They seem to extol an assumed political position, with a sneaky pinch of anthropological voyeurism thrown in. Maybe this is what Dane the Bane intends? That these works are like Trojan Horses. Decoys that ask hard questions about his own practice and his art collecting audience.
(Images courtesy of the artist and Starkwhite.)
