History seeking reconnoitres and sorties

William Hsu and Nick Spratt: A lot or a little might be said but in the end there will be something to pass on
Newcall
4 February - 20 February 2010

This is one of those projects which eschews displayed objects on a gallery wall or floor in favour of verbally transmitted information discovered through fastidious research. It showcases historical narratives that revolve around the communities located near to the Newton gallery site and uses social occasions to generate conversation that might be added to the growing pool of knowledge.

To this end Hsu and Spratt organised series of events, each of which involved a retelling of some aspect of the Newcall site’s local history.

The first was a picnic that replaced an orthodox gallery opening, held in a small triangular park, Glenside Reserve South, very close to the gallery. The park is a site most Aucklanders would be unaware of. It is surrounded on two sides by two high-rise apartment blocks. Spratt and Hsu sent out a letter to the residents asking them to come down and share sandwiches, and to place a pot plant in the centre of their private, but easily seen, balconies. Some of the recipients were indeed sufficiently intrigued by the strange missive to put out a plant and join in the soirée. Photographs of that picnic can be seen above.

The next event was a dinner held in the nearby St. David church hall for Newcall artists and friends, where Spratt and Hsu elaborated on their research, briefed some of the Newcall artists on their explanations to visitors to the empty gallery during the show, and where food prepared by various Basque cooking societies was served.

The connection to the latter activity became more apparent in the third event, a cycle tour that left another nearby park, Basque Road Reserve, and – looking at garden sites - moved along a cycle track besides the North Western Motorway, through Kingsland and out towards Mount Albert. Basque Park was famous for its Community Garden, an activity that became an inspiration for other smaller horticultural activities in the greater Auckland region.

Event number 4 was another picnic, on the top of the car park built on the corner of Khyber Pass Road and Burleigh Street. Apparently one community group used to meet monthly at Glenside Reserve South, park their cars here and bring doughnuts – so doughnuts and ginger beer were delicacies provided for the dozen guests (like myself) who turned up. Hsu and Spratt spoke at length of the social contributions made by the different church communities in the locality, such as St. David, St. Benedict’s, The Church of the Holy Sepulchre, and the City Mission.

Apparently there is one more event planned in this series, even though the gallery is now about to have a new exhibition installed. The space has served its purpose, as a kind of hub from which investigative sorties can emerge.

This sort of project, with its keen interest in local history, is related to other performances I’ve attended - like those by Louise Menzies, or Raised by Wolves – that have been also driven by historical research. It’s a genre that here has a relational component added where it is less a lecture and more a bit of a friendly chat over food. It was a lecture but without the distance between performers and audience. An informal talk within a group rather than at it.

Myself, I’m not that big on history, except if I happen to be hooked by a film or novel some friend has pressed upon me. I’m not big on food preparation either, but if an artist like William offers me a crunchy sugar-coated doughnut and there's some lemon juice I can taste that reminds me, say, of my father’s pancakes, then there is a bodily experience I can remember, and - as a comparative newcomer to Auckland who lives in neighbouring Kingsland - also an opportunity to grasp some of the design and historical context of buildings and landscaping I walk past nearly every day.

When outside is in and inside is out

William Hsu
St. Paul St- Gallery 3 (39 Symonds St)
First show of Sculpture Season 2010
Curated by Melissa Laing
11 February - 20 February 2010

In her introduction to this series of AUT shows Melissa Laing writes about the project as ranging from ‘the laborious hand production of the sculptural object’ to ‘its dematerialisation’. Hsu’s project is inclined towards the latter, being mostly pencil drawings on tracing paper – with a couple of functional readymade objects.

The bunkerlike gallery has two halves, one lower than the other and joined by a railed concrete ramp. The higher half was empty but for a standing gas cylinder labelled ‘balloon gas’ and a silver torch resting on a window sill with its narrow beam aimed at an opposite wall that is visible from outside. Outside the building, trapped under the brick archways overlooking the Symonds Street footpath, was a floating white balloon - detectable through the tops of some partially walled over windows.

Most of Hsu’s activity was directed to the lower floor levels, and was a meditation on the flowing properties of water as envisaged through a set of speculative drawings leaning against the wall, of the space being flooded. Calculations of the amount required to fill the space (and time taken - 10 days) were scribbled alongside sketched images of expanding puddles generated by taps located on hypothetical sites on four different floor plans.

The theme of the liberated gas-filled balloon on the top half of the gallery was alluded to in other pencil drawings – made outside - of water leaking out from under the door and iron grill on the Mount St corner, flowing down stone steps, across the footpath and into the drain. Other sketches showed the AUT building towering above the space, it being the source of waste water flowing down through plastic pipes and audible within.

Hsu’s images make us examine the gallery space and its outer environment closely. The rendered concentric puddles look at first glance to be a metaphor for the spreading of ideas and circulation of information. However the pressurised water, constant torch beam and compressed helium also coincidentally seem to refer to a conversation Ross Birrell, the editor of the Scottish online publication Art & Research, had recently in that magazine with Jorge Heiser, the editor of frieze, about Heiser’s paradoxical notion of Romantic Conceptualism and the relationship of the individual to the wider community.

In their discussion Birrell quotes the writer Carl Schmitt’s comments that just ‘as the romantic emotion moves between the compressed ego and expansion into the cosmos, so every point is a circle at the same time and every circle a point. The community is an extended individual, the individual a concentrated community.’ Heiser responds by describing Susan Hiller and the unknown community of artists who made the readymade ‘Wild Sea’ postcards she exhibited in the mid seventies, saying that a single individual can be the ‘medium’ through which an anonymous community speaks.

It might be argued that the porous and interchangeable nature of these two entities is also brought out in Hsu’s show, where ‘compressed’ insides and ‘expanded’ outsides mingle, water leaks through doorways, released gas expands and light (at night) can be seen in distant rooms.

Thank you to the artist for the images.

I've seen the Future (Brother), it is Murder

The Future is Unwritten
Curated by Laura Preston
Adam Art Gallery, University of Victoria, Wellington
11 July - 30 August 2009

Over the last few years one of the subjects increasingly brought under close scrutiny by writers such as James Elkins is that of the relationship between academia and art, especially within the structure of a PhD study programme. What is this thing called ‘art practice’ and how does it fit in to the requirements of a university. More particularly, what is ‘research’? Should I say ‘Research’ (with a capital R) for doctorates? Is that word accurate for what artists (post-graduate or otherwise) do? In a studio or out of it. Does it correlate with Research carried out by those in other disciplines, with its necessary (and copious) reading and writing?

Now the following discussion is not a review. It is a speculative pre-amble (my ‘Cohen’ to Laura Preston’s ‘Strummer’) that appears two days before this Adam exhibition opens. I’ve been invited by the curator to post some comments in advance. It’s an interesting idea for a number of reasons, one of them being the relevance of the above paragraph. She is interested in guest artists doing interdisciplinary 'research' within Victoria university, and has sent me a gallery invite containing a mini-essay and various background bits and pieces. Preston’s essay is more detailed and more interesting than what you get on the gallery website.

Click on the Press Release here and you will get a somewhat simplified version of what she is up to. The project involves turning the Adam Gallery into a sort of research centre for ‘critically thinking’ conceptual artists that mostly inhabit the thread that runs from Art and Language to Thomas Hirschhorn. Its curatorial ethos appears to be based in part on Charles Esche’s discussion of A Modest Proposal, and partially on the ideas of Simon Sheikh, and it briefly looks at Jacques Rancière’s espousal of a certain kind of critical art that experiments with form (see March 2007 Artforum), or structure as reflected in Paola Virno’s analysis of jokes. The antecedents of the interdisciplinary curatorial emphasis are easy to find. Hans Ulrich Obrist’s Laboratorium, and several decades earlier the late Billy Kluver’s E.A.T. projects with Rauschenberg and others.

All with the aim of acknowledging the current time of crisis (G.F.C. and ecological) and using the university as “a place for interdisciplinary thinking” for achieving “a critical analysis of the current climate.” So in this period of post-postmodernism, where irony is rejected and a belief in meaning re-asserted, the seven artists and two designers, through their conversations with the curator and other university staff, might (they are free to fail to produce) “shift the idea of what a ‘work’ constitutes and what it should deliver.”

Preston points out that Rancière believes that the political in art resides in the power of its form. His term “the distribution of the sensible” refers to the restricted divisions of place and forms of community participation that centre on apprehended modes of perception, not only what is visible or audible but also what is thought, said, made or done. He sees artistic practices as ‘ways of doing and making’ that intervene in this general distribution as well as in the relationships they maintain to modes of being and modes of visibility.The curator sees Rancière as placing value on “what is felt, (re-engaging with) art’s affect.”

In Artforum Rancière says “For me the fundamental question is to explore the possibility for play. To discover how to produce forms for the presentation of objects, from for the organisation of spaces, that thwart expectations. The main enemy of artistic creativity as well as of political creativity is consensus – that is, inscription within given roles, possibilities, competences.” (p.263)

When you look at his examples it is clear the playfulness is within certain forms of interventionist practice, within works that involve critical thinking. It is clearly not wildly fooling around for its own sake, but has a set out, contextualised political agenda.

In her search for empathetic practitioners I wonder though if Preston’s emphasis on ‘young artists’ in the Press Release (though Malone is not young) might severely hamper the success of this project. Older artists like Bruce Barber, Jim Allen, and Ralph Paine, university teachers (or retired ones) who know the politically intricate departmental infrastructures of such institutions well, might get greater use out of its interdisciplinary facilities. Their experience might achieve more conceptually exciting results, and draw out the rich possibilities of Victoria University as a pedagogical site.

That aside, Preston has an inspired range of artists here (who might consider themselves ‘critical thinkers’ though that can’t be assumed) that represent a wide variety of practice morphologies.

To speculate on the show one would have to speculate on the bodily experience of entering the Adam architecture to discover the location of each individual and the form of presentation each artist embraces, or the gallery websites, which I happen not to see as ‘dematerialized’. Such sensations are crucial to their content; the means they provide of access to their conceptual material.

In other words, though Preston considers these artists ‘conceptualists’ it is a word that nowadays has become meaningless through overuse and contradictory inclusions. Even early ‘conceptual artists’ like Kosuth or Sol Lewitt (Wittgensteinians or mystics, not necessarily Marxists) use sensuality and form as a carrot to draw their audiences in towards the ideas. They never abandon the aesthetic, the physicality of visual appeal. So with this show’s artists, whilst some may be enthusiastic readers of theory, that doesn’t mean the results of their research will be automatically interesting - visually in terms of concrete materiality experienced by the senses, or visually in terms of linguistic description experienced in the imagination.

However the nature of the research Preston is advocating here (what she calls ‘propositional’), some might argue is not really research at all. That the term is inappropriate when applied to most artists, even those thought ‘conceptual’.

Certainly the open-endedness of this socially hermetic project worries me. The lack of accountability and refusal to assess itself I see as irresponsible. (I feel the same about Esche and Sheikh – see the latter’s Constitutive Effects: the Techniques of The Curator in ‘Curating Subjects’ ed. Paul O’Neill.) Preston describes a win/win situation where the exhibition cannot fail. She doesn't acknowledge any criteria through which she must evaluate the project, and allow for the possibility of its collapse - or that certain individuals cannot contribute effectively and she has misjudged them, or expected too much.

What of the role of the curator in her ‘conversations and collaborations’? I would hope that she not try to be an artist herself, that she is a facilitator, a nurturer, a provider of introductions and available means, but not a puppetmaster using the Adam as a theatre where the artists are manipulated by her. A ‘collaboration’ should not imply Preston is an artist. Here though, I think it does.

As a quick glance, it is easy to see why these nine individuals were picked: Amit Charan has a finely tuned, subtle mind, as indicated by his use of a videoed actor to recite with manual sign language definitions from some of Joseph Kosuth’s artworks, or his insertion of marginal codes, such as floral arrangements, into exhibitions; Fiona Connor is well known for her interest in subverting the physical properties of architecture – and the Adam is the prefect building for her to be set loose on; William Hsu has an established interest in science and various global environmental issues; Daniel Malone for his enthusiasm for Situationist practice and for Giorgio Agamben’s The Coming Community as indicated by the pamphlet Autonomous Anonymous: On Being Whatever that he co-wrote with Ralph Paine; Narrow Gauge is known for elegantly designed publications and posters; Kate Newby for her interest in fashion, the poetical properties of language (allusions to early conceptualists like Lawrence Weiner) and her ability to sculpturally intervene in unusual spaces; Martyn Reynolds has eloquently indicated his interest in the writings of theoreticians like Rancière and the practice of Jason Rhoades; Kelvin Soh is known for innovative commodity design, posters and comics; Peter Trevelyan has an interest in mathematics, dystopian devices and systems of surveillance.

Hopefully on Friday evening there will be a lot happening (or starting to happen) with the beginnings of various processual strategies in and around the Adam Art Gallery building, and online. Call or log in to follow the much anticipated, but as yet unarticulated, 'unwritten' developments.