Kate Brettkelly-Chalmers looks at last week's Week of Goodness

Living Room 2010: A Week of Goodness
Various outdoor sites in Auckland's CBD
9 - 17 April 2010

Public art can be a tricky enterprise. Buoyed by the noble premise of engaging the masses, it can succumb to the pitfalls of pernicious advertising, forcing an unsuspecting public to see stuff that they might not want to. Art in civic spaces boasts a medley of different audiences each with their own motives and opinions when it comes to what we see in our daily commuter walks or sit-in-the-sun lunch breaks. Which is why the Auckland City Council’s Living Room project, an annual weeklong series of performative events that is now in its fifth year, should not be greeted with the kind of apathy or indifference it often engenders.

A Week of Goodness is the title of this year’s Living Room series, curated for the second time by the Council’s public art manager Pontus Kyander. Citing the Surrealist Max Ernst’s 1934 series of collaged books, Une Semaine de Bonte, this programme of performances and film screenings is said to explore notions of ‘giving and kindness’ in civic squares around the central city.

This altruistic theme relates somewhat tenuously to Ernst’s strange and intriguing collages—surreal fantasy scenes the artist constructed from clippings of pulp novel and encyclopedia illustrations. It is also difficult to see a purposeful correlation between these ideas and the Living Room performances themselves, at least the ones I witnessed.

Nevertheless, Kyander’s commitment to developing temporary public art projects and engaging international artists is strongly evident in this year’s programme. The curator has brought together a somewhat chaotic selection of artists and choreographers, both from New Zealand and abroad, to collaborate and produce performances.

Located in the fountains of Freyberg Place, Isobel Dryburgh and artist/dancer Mark Harvey’s project Beige involved a group of people clad in cardboard boxes dancing to a gradually sped up version of Tom Jones’ You Can Leave Your Hat On. The performance was invitingly anarchic—cardboard boxes got delightfully drenched, bits dropped off the dancers’ costumes, and the considerable crowd giggled at Jones’ ominously languid vocals.

Sarah Jane Parton’s audience also responded with tentative chuckles to her piece The Collection III. Parton staged her performance amongst the kauri trees of QEII Square where piles of snow had been dumped either side of a wooden walkway. A group of people dressed as giant fruit played nursery games while two children dutifully recited a sketchy version of Chariots of Fire on their recorders. Nearby, bored teenaged girls wearing 80s ball gown dresses sat on benches listening iPods.

I have a hunch that Parton knew it was school holidays and, while adult audience members tittered somewhat nervously, their kids took charge of the scene relentlessly grabbing handfuls of snow to throw at the giant fruit. Chaos ensued: the giant fruit returned a hail of snowballs, the young musicians giggled into their recorders and the teenaged girls managed to look even more disinterested.

Both Parton and Dryburgh/Harvey’s charmingly kooky works were reminiscent of fringe-festival performances. It was fun to see such playful and quirky activities occurring in ordinarily straight-laced public squares. Nevertheless, these artists and their participants had none of the street-savvy of fringe-festival performers or buskers—they basically didn’t know how to work a crowd.

I was reminded of bands like Auckland’s Golden Axe or Evil Ocean whose seemingly ad-hoc style of makeshift show biz is underpinned by an engagement with their audience. Watching these aimlessly rambling Living Room performances I couldn’t help but wish that at some point Evil Ocean’s Liz Maw would turn up dressed in her God outfit. I wanted a grander kind of theatre and a greater commitment to the drama and incongruity of it all.

Lilibeth Cuenca Rasmussen did not fare much better. After seeing a video of hers in Mash Up at ARTSPACE last year I was excited to attend her performance The Future is already way behind the Present doesn't exist in my Mind…. Having already staged this as a solo piece at several international venues, Cuenca Rasmussen collaborated with performer Charles Koroneho and extended the show to include a large troupe of dancers from Unitec’s School of Performing and Screen Arts.

The result was a full-scale sound and light performance that involved Cuenca Rasmussen singing passages of contemporary feminist prose while dressed in a cleverly designed skin-tight lycra costume. Her hour-long show was a concoction of theatre, female sexuality and slow-paced endurance performance. It drew on an assortment of genres reminding me variously of Grace Jones music videos, brazen Peaches gigs and Warwick Broadhead costumed spectaculars. While this collision of performative tropes might sound quite exciting its unpolished execution ultimately left me somewhat indifferent. I couldn’t help but think of the Smokefree Stage Quest, the annual high school performing arts competition.

Unfortunately, none of the Living Room performances I experienced left an impression that went beyond an initial amused chuckle. For the most part artists treated their allotted civic space as a bare stage on which to present their activities and this inspired a somewhat superficial experience. The sometimes contentious history and current social use of Auckland’s public plazas offers an artistic potential that none of these artists chose to engage with.

Although Cuenca Rasmussen’s gleaming white costumes were notably juxtaposed against the formal plaza of St Patrick’s Square, I didn’t see the need to have these works performed in outdoor public spaces at all—they would have had a comparable effect in a theatre or gallery. Ultimately, an opportunity was missed to develop performances that were richer than the brief fanciful strangeness they engendered.

Nevertheless, the superficial impression I was left with may have been due to the lack of contextual information offered for each artist and performance. I would love to know how Parton’s The Collection III related to her previous ‘Collection’ performances that took place in locations as diverse as Rarotonga and Christchurch. Was her choice of Auckland’s QEII Square significant in relation to these other venues? Did kids throw snow at giant fruit in balmy Rarotonga?

What the Living Room series seriously lacked is the publicity machine employed by One Day Sculpture, the similar series of temporary art projects that took place across the country during 2008 and 2009. The latter’s yearlong series of projects was promoted through a deluge of advertising. From txts and emails to postcards and a fantastically organized website, One Day Sculpture covered as many forms of media as it could to publicize its single day events.

Although the better part of their budget would have been funnelled into this advertising hyperbole (and away from individual art projects), One Day Sculpture successfully garnered a greater public engagement with their projects. The point here is that our conception of ‘public space’ is no longer limited to physical sites. To successfully exist in the wider public realm art projects must also exist in the virtual realm, in web and media based platforms. In this regard, the Living Room series holds onto an overly confined vision of the public sphere that works to the great detriment of both audiences and artists. Hopefully next year they will finally get it right.

Scrolling down, most of the photographs are by Rebekah Robinson. The third and fourth however are by Kate Brettkelly Chalmers.

Performance in downtown Auckland

Living Room
Curated by Pontus Kyander
Auckland CBD
19 - 26 April 2009

Tellervo Kalleinen and Oliver Kochta-Kalleinen: Complaints Choir (arranged and conducted by Sean Donnelly)
Gaia Alessi, Richard Bradbury: Cargo/Host
Cho Duck Hyun: Dark Water – The Antipodes Project
Aki Sasamoto (assisted by Arturo Vidich): Secrets of my Mother’s Child
Wen Yau: i-(s)wear – Tena Koe

Pontus Kyander is the current Manager of Public Art for the Auckland City Council. Pontus comes from Sweden, has been in Auckland for little under a year, and has become a well-known council figure among artists - approachable and friendly and regularly seen at gallery openings around the city. Here is a discussion of five of the dozen events he organised for Living Room, a week long, international performance fest held downtown. Any readers who attended those other performances I’ve left out - I’d be keen to hear your impressions.

First of all, a couple of gripes to clear the air.

The event was badly publicised. Most art enthusiasts didn’t know about it and I only found out by accident. This was the opposite of the Auckland Festival earlier in the year which was amazingly efficient in communicating with prospective audiences.

Also details for the artists’ talks at the end of the programme were not effectively communicated. I went to AUT on the Monday to hear the talks promoted in the handout and nothing was happening. No one knew what I was talking about.

Of the events I saw, the most amazing was the Complaints Choir - as witnessed in Kitchener Place, Vulcan Lane and Aotea Centre. The uniquely Auckland musical arrangement and performances were superbly polished, playing off delicious harmonies and witty lines (about the trials and tribulations of living in the City of Sails) through alternating male and female voices. However despite having about 23 singers the work needed a good sound system to really broadcast dramatically the achievements of the enthusiastic performers and Sean Donnelly the composer, and to compete with traffic noise and pedestrian chat. I hope recordings of this hilarious (but also gorgeous) song are played by the media - for the piece deserves to be heard nationally and internationally. Even non-JAFAs will love it.

On a less sensual but more ideational level, the two works by Gaia Alessi and Richard Bradbury were impressive as exercises in mischievous anti-ocular perversity; Fluxus style events that had a Dadaesque feel. Using the onsite shipping container as a sealable metal box they organised for the mid-day lunchtime crowds a invisible, very muffled performance by a suitably enclosed, small orchestra (a dozen members) of Handel’s ‘Music for the Royal Fireworks’ – apparently 260 years after it was first performed. The sequence of movements for brass and strings were clearly set out over a twenty-five minute period, the musicians filing in at the beginning, playing their baroque melodies exquisitely within the confines of the container, and then filing out after completion.

The night-time fireworks display was, despite itself, spectacular. White smoke billowed out of apertures in the cordoned off, fireman-guarded container and phosphorescent flares could be discerned through the horizontal door cracks. Now and then some irresponsible, sparking and whizzing jumping jacks would leap out and attempt to make a getaway, but to no avail.

This performance within the echoey metal box seemed cunningly arranged, using the aural properties and sound textures of the explosives in a knowing manner. Rockets would regularly ricochet off the clanging metal walls, and strings of cacophonous crackers make surging rumbling sounds. This work was impressively stupid. I loved its boneheaded disdain for common sense – denying its audience all that eye-shredding colour and dazzling white light they’d be longing to see.

Another artist who made good use of the available container format was Cho Duck Hyun with his installation. It featured a third-sized version. Using graphite and charcoal, he skilfully copied onto canvas enlarged photographs from his own Korean family history, incorporating into the installation European and Japanese images too. The container was then immersed in the sea for a few days so that the effects of saltwater on the images become a metaphor for time, physical decay, suffering and memory loss resulting from the cataclysmic forces of history.

After this dunking the box was hoisted up on to Princes Wharf for Living Room’s official opening. The works were then displayed in the Project Room at Starkwhite in a black replica box, with good lighting.

Nothing particularly dramatic resulted to the images from the saltwater, apart from the occasional streak and various migrating flakes of paint that came off the walls. The emphasis throughout was on the artist’s manual skills, and that the ideas potentially produced by juxtaposing different photographs from different cultural contexts, depended really on the viewer’s understanding of Korean history. Somehow, despite the ablution process, the works seemed dry.

Aki Sasamoto and Arturo Vidich’s performance in Khartoum Place was a lecture to the crowd about the search for personal happiness in life, starting with a discussion of categories of pupil in class and degrees of social success and goal reaching. Starting her talk by drawing chalky Beuysian diagrams on the back of a chest of drawers (she retreated inside those bottomless drawers later on) Sasamoto - in green jumpsuit – blended good advice with autobiographical anecdotes. At one point she elucidated about her own conflicted relationship with her mother, whom in the symbolic form of juicy grapefruit, she proceeded to chop up with blades on her boots, on the pretence of making chutney.

Vidich, taking the role of an oppressed self impeded by psychological baggage symbolised by a rickety stack of chairs, crawled around the space in a suit, dragging the useless furniture with him until it was pulled off him by invisible strings. The work was reminiscent of performances by the German artist John Bock, but without his wildly extravagant props, and had a refreshing looseness and spontaneity that endeared the performers to the largely non-art world bystanders.

The interactive performance by Wen Yau was more mysterious, obliquely about the transmission and loss of culture, involving initially a friendly chat at a desk in Khartoum Place about the passer-by’s family and where they are based. I told her about my sister who is living in Hong Kong (where the artist lives). After I had chatted for a short time about this she invited me to write my surname on any part of her body, and she would stamp her name on the same part of mine. She pulled back the collar of her blouse and showed me her neck and shoulder painted with several inked pictographs.

It occurred to me then that this work had overtones similar to Yoko Ono’s famous scissors and cut clothing performance where she provocatively invited people to cut and remove sections of her garments, but I wondered if I was being overimaginative. Thinking that writing on the neck or shoulder of a complete stranger would be alarmingly intimate (even if she did offer) I wrote my surname rather clumsily on her right cheek, and she stamped her name on mine. We were then photographed by her assistant, and I left to make my way home where I later I looked at her website. I found that Wen Yau is a ‘guerrilla’ critic who challenges (male?) supremacy with ‘her unusually tender and meandering writings’. Wen Yau's texts range from ‘perversion in the sexually seductive stories’…to ‘cultural reviews and other writings.’ It appears her interactions via artworks serve as some sort of catalyst for her literature. She sets up these situations that spark off her writing.

I hope Kyander does more of these performance based festivals. Next time he needs to circulate a lot more pre-show publicity about who is on their way here, and why. The event needs to be bigger in scope so that the art institutions beyond the Council’s footpaths get involved. That way a wider range of performance practice – a sort that is more varied in mood and concept, beyond entertaining coincidental pedestrians on the street but aimed at the art community already familiar with the genre – would get looked at.