Maloy, Patterson, Steyerl

Richard Maloy: Raw Attempts / Campbell Patterson: floorshow / Hito Steyerl: After the Crash
ARTSPACE
12 December 2009 - 27 February 2010

ARTSPACE’s director, Emma Bugden, has organised a trio of related exhibitions for 2009’s last slot, presentations that explore processes of continual change and transmutation. Each of the three artists has a project that is engaging in isolation, and the shows can thus be approached separately, but the challenge for the visitor is to also figure out how the three interact collectively. Do they link up? If so, how?

Firstly, looking at the three solo components, the most dramatic is Richard Maloy’s use of the big square ARTSPACE gallery. Maloy is known for his series of photos and videos where he either applied chunks of gooey butter to his head and face, using his physiognomy as an armature, or lumps of sticky wet clay to his torso and arms - to be smoothed over and incorporated as an extension of his body.

For ARTSPACE Maloy starts by treating the ceiling of the gallery the way he used to treat his body, but with cardboard not clay. It functions as a armature/support, not a surface on which to rest or lean things but a plane to which they can be attached, that supports all their weight. Working at night or in daylight hours when the gallery is shut, he uses a staple gun with which he can fasten opened out and dismembered cardboard boxes, later painted orange.

His first experiment was a huge continually spiralling wall, a thin wonky shell designed like a massive orange peeling – held up by the roof. If you look at the long sequence of online photos here you will see where he has tested other structures too, letting some fall down by overloading or else deliberately pulling them down – only to try hanging up something new. Each time, fastening forms to the ceiling and working his way down by adding to each suspended sheet with sticky tape, or else using the floor to reconfigure the fragile walls when collapsed, to see what shapes can hold up their own weight when folded or buckled around.

Campbell Patterson has used the long narrow gallery to display initially six, now five, projections on the walls. He films his body as he carries out various tasks that often set out the spatial limitations of each site. The dozen or so actions you see him perform include using no hands but soaping his head by rubbing it into a mound of aerosol foam sprayed on the floor, pulling a camera attached to string towards his face by chewing up and ingesting the string, turning another camera with another piece of string as he moves around a small bathroom with a shower going that soaks his clothing, crawling along a tiled floor by dragging the tripod and filming camera behind him, licking up swept dirt or soap powder from piles on the floor, mashing up bananas with his stockinged feet, squeezing through a ventilation shute, and lying on the floor with a pointed stone under his belly.

Of the three Patterson show I’ve seen in Auckland so far, this presentation is the most successful, due to the restricted focus of his material and its self-deprecating humour – despite its knowing art historical references to sixties performance art.

These two Auckland artists specialise in working within specially devised rules, difficult restrictions put in place to shape the form of their projects – vaguely related to the early (pre-performance) poems of Mike Parr and Vito Acconci in the sixties and seventies, or European Oulipo writers like Georges Perec, or Raymond Queneau.

In After the Crash, Hito Steyerl’s film, when placed in this ARTSPACE context, presents dismantled airplanes in an aircraft junkyard in the Californian desert as a metaphor for a morgue with human bodies, with their recyclable parts as tropes for human organs. Though critiquing capitalism and its recent collapse it also marvels as how such an ethos survives, how even discarded waste can be swiftly turned into substantial profit - through being made into exploding film props. The mutilated skeletal aircraft parts however radiate poignancy, part of an ongoing process that parallels those of Patterson and Maloy in terms of inventiveness.

Though Steyerl’s film is quite different to the projects of Patterson and Maloy, and about documented process, not improvised or procedural events, as Bugden puts it ‘the planes take on an oddly human subjectivity.’ The inclusion of this German-based artist is important because of that, as an inverse foil to some of the machinelike, relentlessly unwavering and obsessive aspects of the two highly energetic Aucklanders. A thoughtfully clever package.

Positioning this, placing that

Collage: Mladen Bizumic, Ava Seymour, Richard Maloy, John Nixon, Gordon Walters
Sue Crockford
16 September - 3 October 2009

Collage is one of those techniques we tend to think of as a classic twentieth century method of image construction, but the fact that the Victorians were also entertained by it hints at its flexibility as an application for many different mind sets. This show presents several approaches, most as finished objects for contemplation, but not all.

With Gordon Walters it was an aid for visualising the planned musicality or rhythmic cadences of a koru composition, a means of mentally grasping vertical, horizontal, or diagonal formal connections, and their cumulative weight. Collage for him grew out of his early passion for Surrealism but became not the final artwork but a stage in a process that led to a later more polished result. Placement and scale were gradually worked on simultaneously.

Ava Seymour’s expertise focuses on collages that are constructed in order to be photographed. With the current work her nuances of edge are crucial: tiny shapes harboured inside the scalpel incised contours are formed by overlaid pieces cut out of furnishing or fabric catalogues. While there are delicate textural, patterned and tonal contrasts going on internally, it is along the perimeter, where colour meets the white background field that things get really interesting. Your eye scoots around the edge like a racetrack, enjoying each new corner or projecting bump it encounters.

Richard Maloy, like Seymour, is a gifted photographer, but how his images of improvised sculpture, using his own body with silver foil, fit in here I’m not sure. They don’t appear to be collage at all - whereas Mladen Bizumic’s images for example (on another wall) of sky inside strings of triangular pennants floating in front of Mies van der Rohe buildings are Photoshopped. They definitely have a collage sensibility.

Collage is normally linked to the substance of paper, but because of its twentieth century tradition that developed from Schwitters through Rauschenberg and others, that particular material has been replaced by other possibilities. Collage, it might be argued, is now more about a certain attitude to space, pictorial or real. Jessica Stockholder is a good example of this.

The fifth artist at Crockford's, John Nixon, has paintings from his Experimental Painting Workshop that are often with no added paper. Instead they incorporate other evocative materials like plastic packaging or aluminium strips. These, combined with his buoyant orange panels that allude to early modernism, help create a seductive physicality.

I just can’t imagine contemporary art, literature, or music existing without collage. It is a fundamental disposition inherent in most practice that accentuates the propensity for play - via juxtaposing various properties (semantic or formal) of materials. Since Freud we have been aware of its similarities with dreams, and the pleasures (or terrors) of being surprised by unforeseen connections. Artists who ignore such portable intricacies of placement are almost nonexistent.

(In descending order: Seymour (2),Walters(2), Maloy, Bizumic, Nixon. The Gordon Walters koru collage above (fourth down) is not in the show. However it is a good example of this stage in his painting process.)

An excremental vision

Richard Maloy: Nothing, nothing, something
Sue Crockford
30 June – 18 July 2009

Allan Smith, in the excellent series of notes he provides for this show, points out Freud’s comment that “dirtiness of any kind seems to us incompatible with civilisation.” Its relevance is because the exhibition consists of ten colour photographs of white toilet paper. In pristine condition, fresh off the roll, the tissue is unnervingly delicately beautiful.It has a faint hint of pink, barely perceptible rippled patterns, and different textures that distinguish recto from verso. Set on a field of grey, each life-sized documented portion is not quite the perfect square. The torn feathery serrated edges are detectable on the sides.

In the infantile stage of anal eroticism within Freud’s wider theory of human sexuality, the child attaches symbolic meaning to faeces, something that is the equivalent of its own child or creation and which can be used (amongst other things) for narcissistic pleasure in play or to obtain love as a gift.

If Maloy exhibited real toilet paper (not photographs) it might be as if he wants us to inspect it – and perhaps show disappointment at the paucity of offering. Compared to his earlier photographic and video projects involving clay and butter, there are no sticky substances on show. Instead this work is impeccably tasteful in its fastidious presentation. The humour is that the brand is Home Brand, the cheapest such tissue available, and it is great for decor.

The show is also remarkable for the clarity and logic of its layout. Four walls used for four kinds of photograph: one piece of serrated paper within one image on the first; two variations of two pieces (joined and separated) on the second; three versions of three portions for the third; four versions of four for the last. It’s a well conceived installation which prods you into working out which possible permutations he has ignored.

Because intimate bodily functions are such an emotional and personal subject, any material or product associated with them is difficult to neutralise. Just because something is physically absent it doesn't mean it is forgotten. It is hard to ignore the paper's purpose and treat it as a beautiful substance recorded on film.

Maloy's methodology is akin to that of Marie Shannon and the composed images to those of John Nixon, Julian Dashper or Stephen Bambury. And his use of mid-tone grey in the background and framing links these objects to the sprinkler pipes on the ceiling and the charcoal fittings of the windows. Crockford’s gallery looks really sharp.

This installation is ingenious, entertaining, and rarefied visually. The above images don’t really capture the subtle warmth of the colour. Essential viewing.

Out the Window

Various Artists: Raised by Wolves, Richard Maloy, Sam Rountree Williams, Holly Willson, John Ward Knox, Annie Bradley
Window
Curated by Holly Willson and Sam Rountree Williams
Design work by Nell May
11 February – 6 March 2009

This is one of those shows that is all about context, about the art ‘frame’ or what is outside it – rather than what is within, though that can’t be ignored either.

This time there is nothing actually inside the Window window in the library foyer. Works are located at various spots around the university, or in Annie Bradley’s case, online. Some are easy to find. Others aren’t (despite the terrifically designed info sheets by Nell May that have maps), and after several attempts I gave up searching. This writing is about what I found.

So how important is this issue of context? What happens when you rip art out of the white cube (my violent metaphor is deliberate) and plonk it down in the so called real world. This show examines that. It is a theme Sam Rountree Williams has long been preoccupied with.

Personally I think the significance of context is exaggerated. This is because ultimately the declaration that something is art can never release it from an art context. If defined as such, that frame is always there and will never dissolve. Whatever the physical environs a work is put in, saying it is ‘art’ or knowing it is such, helps shut out many distractions that might intrude. The only thing that really makes that process difficult is putting it close to other art works. It is like putting two different cake mixtures, based on two different recipes, together in the same baking pan. Something very peculiar happens when they mingle.

That is the logic behind Sam Rountree Wiliams’ placement of one of his three oil paintings below an early Richard Killeen cutout in the library foyer. The two works play off each other but in my view both suffer. (If I was Killeen I’d be annoyed he put his work so close). It’s like pouring a can of Pepsi into a tin of baked beans and expecting the resulting concoction to taste good.

With his two other placements Rountree Williams uses other university buildings, those of business schools, and again plays off against the university collection in one building, making a comment perhaps on the prestige of acquisition. Does the work’s meaning change when it pretends to be included in an important collection? Well maybe not its meaning, but certainly its value. (In the northern hemisphere collectors often have to prove the pedigree of their collection before a dealer will sell to them.)

What about the business schools? Is this artist slyly trying to interest future corporate CEOs in his practice while they are in his age group and still studying? And what of the actual architecture of the buildings? His small painting displayed in the brick Old Choral Hall looks quite different from what it would look if hung in the same space as his other work – in the new Owen G. Glenn Building, a huge modernist glass tower.

Richard Maloy has his videos of private performances positioned in varied spaces within the library building. You really have to move extensively around the different floors to see them. His three recorded actions of building up accumulations of clay over his ear, nose and hand, and torso and arm, attempt to create bodily extensions or corporeal substitutes, and seem in this context to be a comment on the library as a repository of knowledge, an adding to of the mind’s resources, an extension of accumulated mental faculties.

Annie Bradley’s online spread page takes a lot of scrolling to explore properly. It is a meandering Photoshop–style collage, with various snaps of pedagogical spaces, like the School of Medicine, with long bland corridors and pokey lecture theatres. Interspersed throughout are configurations of stacked, unravelling files that become floating snowflakes or tumbling sheaves; sliding toppling reams of information. Most dominant is a geometric frieze of folded, interwoven ribbonlike lines that doubles as a complex maze of alternating pathways and corridors for the student.

Bradley’s sprawling field makes her compressed and layered forms take on the structures of microscopic plants and crystalline minerals, mixing them into the interior images of architecture. In her vision of knowledge accumulation and dissemination, culture and nature blend and become interchangeable.

There is more to come in this exhibition. A performance by the Wellington group Raised By Wolves will be presented at the Clocktower on 2 March.

Cholesterol-laden 'paintings'

Richard Maloy: Yellow Grotto/Raw Material
Sue Crockford
22 July - 16 August 2008

This is a show of photographs of temporary butter paintings, an exploration of dairy product as raw material - with much of its physical attributes also examined in two DVDs.

The ‘paintings’ explore the properties of butter (warmed and softened by the artist’s hands) when applied onto a mid-toned grey board and combed and poked by fingertips. We think about the marks made by raking and prodding, patting with palms, and the shape of the flattened sticky mass: what they might add up to. No metaphor for butter as substance seems intended.

I wonder whether these four attempts are Maloy’s sole corpus of attempted butter paintings, or if they are the end of a long line of investigations. If he keeps going, they might get a whole lot better. The yellow gives them an aura of purity, and pattern and rhythm provide an immediacy for the simpler compositions. The unsuccessful ones are where he tries to draw, to represent or depict things.

There are also portraits of the artist with hunks of ‘expressively’ kneaded butter applied to his face. He applies the greasy goop to his visage and it just manages to adhere. And perch absurdly on the top of his head. And splatter all over his clothing.

Round the corner in the back room is a suite of related work from last year using wet clay. It is a very interesting point of comparison because while this year’s butter portraits look comical, these earlier clay ones look monstrous. Quite gross. A different mood entirely. The clay is heavier and bulky, and looks dark and evil. More helmet-like in the way it covers his whole head. It even covers his neck and shoulders.

There is also an earlier video of Maloy smearing clay over the leftside of his torso and waist, and left arm, melding the two together, smoothing over the join. The work has an intriguing Naumanesque quality, but creepier because it suggests a burn or deformity. It’s my pick of the butter/clay Maloys. They are a intriguing body of research that fit in with his earlier, but not so interesting, bag-over–head self-portraits. Well worth a visit.