Newcall Gallery

14.10.09 | Tamsen Hopkinson writing in To say the least

2009-12-15T15:58:00.000-08:00

Tamsen Hopkinson for to say the least

14.10.09

how to build:

If you really want to know someone, STEP INSIDE their home.

Browse the books on the shelves, peer into the picture frames on

the wall and snoop around the medicine cabinet if you’re so

bold. This is our home. An area known for its poor soil, thrifty

attitude and HARD WORKING PEOPLE. Stubborn, even.

Because you can’t farm thin soils the same way you can a fertile

field. YOU HAVE TO WORK HARDER, ADAPT YOUR

IDEAS AND DO THINGS DIFFERENTLY. And, well, that’s

not so different from making FLAT-PACKED, SELF-

ASSEMBLED furniture in an industry long known for

‘CUSTOM MADE’ and ‘HIGH END’. We’ve come a long way

from being a one-store company in the stony fields. And, at the

same time, it feels like nothing at all has changed. It’s still about

doing more with less, challenging convention, being careful

with MONEY and not letting a single thing go to waste (GOOD

FOR PRICES AND THE PLANET).

We’ve never lost sight of our dream to give everyone the chance

to have a better everyday life at home. That’s why we pack

things in flat boxes, and ask you to LEND A HAND by driving

your own purchases home and ASSEMBLING them yourself.

And why we design our products from SAWMILLS and DOOR

FACTORIES and anywhere else you wouldn’t expect HIGH-

QUALITY home furnishings to be produced – all in order to get

prices lower. We’ve found people all over the world who, deep

down, are at heart, JUST LIKE US. People who hate to throw

money down the drain. People who know the value of money

and are prepared to WORK A LITTLE HARDER for what they

believe in. TOGETHER WE ARE. Transformations can be

QUICK AND SIMPLE. Change the covers on your sofa for an

easy update. Or create your very own carpet from layers of rugs

– you get A NEW LOOK EVERYTIME you rearrange them.

And why not show off your creative side. Just GRAB A

FRAME and head for the textile department – and let your

guests (and your wallet) admire your creative talents.

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Play with textiles, lighting and rugs to create room within a

room – and everyone gets to enjoy their own space. Luckily,

budgets don’t dictate creativity, and a great bedroom can spring

from a thin wallet. START WITH THE BASE in simple white

and then paint the place with textiles. They’re an easy way to

liven up a room without killing your budget. And since textiles

are a snap to change, that basic white bedroom can end up

GIVING YOU HUNDREDS OF OPTIONS. Just because you

want to cut the clutter, doesn’t mean you want to toss the stuff.

With boxes up high and storage below the bed you get to keep

every soppy love letter and holiday souvenir, while keeping

your room UNDER CONTROL. Why STICK WITH

TRADITION when you can make it better- and brighter? Start

with black or white and then give your bedroom a burst of

colour. Mix the pieces and finishes for a bedroom that’s

practical but never dull. WE ALL NEED OUR SPACE. Shelf

space. Sink space. Breathing space. The double sink solution

helps make your bathroom a functional and harmonious

workspace. TWO LANES, NO WAITING and plenty of

organised storage space at your fingertips.

For a professional quality office at home, start with a desk in a

shape that suits how you work. Add legs which can be adjusted

to the height you like to sit at, and some smart storage for the

things you need nearby. AS YOUR NEEDS GROW JUST

KEEP ADDING. Choosing the right work chair is easier than

you think. Although it does require a little thought. Think about

the ACTIVITIES YOU WILL DO in the chair- work, drawing,

etc – and how much time you’ll sit in it. A basic height-

adjustable chair offers all the comfort you’ll need for shorter

periods of time. But for full-time work you may want to vary

sitting positions. Make sure you MAKE THE PERFECT

CHOICE. Let’s face it, kid’s don’t exactly love shopping.

They’ve got FAR MORE IMPORTANT THINGS TO DO. Like

playing. Let your room work for you 24/7. Mix it. Match it.

Who knew storage could be this fun?

Tamsen Hopkinson 2009

11-20-09 | Winsome Wild in response to 'To Say The Least'

2009-11-20T23:04:00.000-08:00

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“To Say The Least”: Ruth Buchanan, Ash Kilmartin, Sarah Rose, D. M. Satele, Holly Willson, Tamsen Hopkinson
Newcall
15 October - 31 October 2009

Getting to Newcall on a cold and rainy Wednesday night turned out to be more complicated than I had anticipated. The traffic was bad and the rain was bad, and my 1986 Mitsubishi started to overheat so I sat at lights, staring at the end of the bonnet, waiting anxiously for the first waft of steam. Then I got there and I thought the other doors would be open, but they weren’t, and I drove around and around. The meter would only take $3 minimum, and I had a dollar and ten. And then I found a free park. These everyday occurrences are both banal, and potentially movie-worthy. As I struggled through the rain I could see how, with a little spicing up, it could form the beginning of a film. And of course Newcall itself is somewhat stage-set-like. Perhaps not out the front, but if you have ever been out through the back room, down that hallway and into the bathroom with a code on the door, you will know the Hitchcock-like potential of the space, the hallway set just waiting for a suspense sequence set in the 70s.

The reason behind recounting my small feat of arriving, is that the night was balanced between the everyday and the theatrical. When I arrived, I was greeted by yells and possibly, or was it my imagination, catcalls and whoops. This atypical art-opening behavior signaled the beginning of a performance by DM Satele, The police I fuck & never fuck where I fuck & never fuck the police. Performed by the artist and another, each read from a transcript of Wanda Syke’s comedy series ‘Tongue Untied’. Unfamiliar with Sykes (yes, where HAVE I been) I initially thought it was a play the artist had written, one called “Tongues United”. This error turned out to be serendipitously appropriate given performance’s format. Each man read, at the same time but rarely in unison, from the text. Meaning filtered through, but was obscured by the two competing voices. And what started out to my ear as a joint reading, moved into a theatrical competition. One man, on the left, playing the woman, (or was the other performer playing a woman too?) elicited laughs from the audience and the performance took a turn in which the higher, more outrageous voice, obscured the deeper monotone of the other performer. He finally moved into the audience, interacting with a few of the audience members, and then, finishing on a note about something about a tree house, the performance, he declared, ‘was over’. Later, on my return from the bathroom I ran into one of the pair, who, mollified when I explained I had not actually missed the performance asked me if I ‘loved it’. I said yes and he said that he loved ME.

Relaxing into hearing voice as noise rather than as meaning is difficult. Like a foreign language, when the meaning of spoken language is not straightforward, it is intriguing, but can also be frustrating. There is a certain expectancy that language will be transparent – there for us to use and to enjoy, no strings attached. Yet at the same time, this belief in the straightforward nature of language is of course naïve. Derrida for example proposed that our reliance on the systems of language meant that we could never really come to grips with the reality of things, and that this led to a fragmented self. Meaning in language is really always shifting, dependant on what precedes and succeeds it. The exhibition’s focus on the potential of language, or of sound, to evoke so much more than is ostensibly there, may be why the show appeared to me somewhat filmic or theatrical. Not theatrical as in phony or even showy, but evocative - almost wistful, and involving. By employing the essence of something, or even a silence, the works left a space for the viewer.

Holly Willson’s audios were poignant. Although it was difficult to hear them in among people talking, intermittent strains did drift through. I discovered later that this intermittency was part of both works, not due to the art opening noise factor. The irregularity made the pauses between the sound, full. It also meant that sound was present before you fully realised it. It was there on the edge of consciousness, and was haunting. White Shroud, also by Holly, was pinned in a twist from ceiling to floor. It looked like a waterfall of light as it descended from the overhead fluro. It is melodramatic to say that it came from the heavens, but there was something like a shaft of light about it, and an other-worldly component in the title. Holly’s third piece, an audio like the first, was titled Blonde/Blonde. This consisted of two speakers facing each other, emitting an intermittent crackling and the beat of deep sound every now and then. Like a heartbeat I strained to hear it, I waited to hear it. The anticipation - the gaps, were, like the work’s original title, like holding breaths. Blonde on Blonde is the title of Bob Dylan’s infamous 1966 album. Holly’s work is a recording of the gaps between the songs, recorded from record onto a tape. We catch the edges of notes, and the stop start of the record. The speakers facing each other create a little space between them, enclosing, bracketing the sound, enclosing the viewer, speaking to each other.

Sarah Rose’s works were similarly evocative. The first work to greet the viewer was (Should you think it breathes). This work consists of three groupings of A4 paper, with small clusters of words floating about the page. The groups of words, nouns from several of Emily Dickinson’s poems, seemed to drift into the mind and gather there, sitting in the same visual constellation as they occupied on the page. I felt myself reaching for meaning, which wasn’t exactly there, though could be felt. The nouns, though ostensibly more abstract both in sound and form than the ‘full’ poem, were also active agents, striking out on their own. Sarah Rose’s second piece, Memory's Photogenic, included a piece of paper stuck on the outside window which fluttered in the wind and read: ‘as long as a rainbow lasts’, and footage playing on a small television on a small table of gymnast Nadia Comenici at the 1976 Olympics. Comenici was the first gymnast to achieve perfect tens. The almost alien quality of gymnastics is something I always find captivating – the poise and the performance, but this moment in gymnastics in particular is imbued with a singular significance. Playing on the old tv, there is strong sense of nostalgia in the old footage. There is also a fleeting quality, a brief moment of mysticism in the beauty of perfection.

Other works in the show looked at language and structures or building. Ash Kilmartin’s work for example consisted of a stack of paper on the floor with ‘self supporting structures’ written on each piece in pencil in diminishing size. Tamsen Hopkinson’s writing is familiar as the pitch of a large furniture corporation which advocates that we ‘LEND A HAND by driving your own purchases home and ASSEMBLING them yourself’. The almost evangelical tone of the piece is disturbing out of context - somehow an advertisement extends to a mantra on how to live life.

Ruth Buchanon’s audio, Build a wall or be a Room was accessed through headphones on a mirror shelf. Entering in the middle of a looped monologue, it takes a while to become attuned to what is being said. Buchanon’s serious voice sounds as though it is reading from an architectural manual, with a focus on the relationship between people and their environment. There is an increasingly anthropomorphic and metaphorical quality in the descriptions on the architecture. I really liked for example, the idea of the house as a protector for people from the elements, the idea that the human exterior and the architectural exterior are not dissimilar, but the house can apparently withstand outside forces better – the person can hide inside the house. In the Chatham Islands we hear that the architecture has been designed to work with the elements, rather than designed to withstand forces - joins are built to move with the wind – and the inhabitants find this movement soothing.

The Newcall exhibition is titled ‘to say the least’. This explained by the artists as: ‘a phrase which stands in for something larger - it is used to describe an under exaggeration, or something which is glossed over and not fully explained’. First recorded in 1809, common usage of the phrase, as found on the net, includes examples such as: ‘when the ring turned up in the lost and found, she was delighted, to say the least’ (as in exaggeration) or to show that something is worse or more serious than you are actually saying: ‘teaching methods were strange, to say the least’. The works in the exhibition weren’t fully explained, yet they spoke quite loudly. In using the smallest amount to imply to a whole lot more, one could say that an essence was employed, which is of course, much stronger than something diluted.

25.08.09 | Matt Crookes writes about The Psychologist's Bookshelf

2009-08-24T16:43:00.000-07:00

Christina Read
The Psychologist's Bookshelf

The central thesis of Michel Foucault's Madness and Civilization was that behaviours thought 'mad', and indeed the concept of insanity itself, is a relatively recent invention, and that such behaviours are relative. What's crazy to you is quite normal for us, and vice versa. Elsewhere, British writer Will Self's novella The Quantity Theory of Insanity describes a world wherein madness is a finite quality, and in certain circumstances, one that can be exchanged, rationed, or offset against moments of sanity. An economy of madness, as it were.

We are presented with a variety of juxtaposed yet somehow related objects. There are common qualities here, mainly in the colour scheme, which, with its baby blues, lime greens, cream and pink and beige, seems to evoke a childhood that occurred somewhere between the 1950s and 1970s. The muted colour scheme is carried through to a video work, played on a small monitor very much from the present day, featuring some ambiguous footage of what looks a blanket with movement underneath, perhaps someone rousing from sleep, or of a dreamer dreaming. Scattered around are other elements; cheap faded photographic prints, now beyond even any decorative value they may once have possessed; they stand in merely as a counterpoint to the blobs of enamel. A pair of extracted teeth covered with white emulsion. A black matchbox toy car, all on display in neat box like compartments on the walls.

There is a suggestion of a fairy tale here, in much the same way that the toys leap out of the toy box to embark on adventures, except that here it is the demons and phobias have leaped off the shelves and out of the pages of the Psychologist's notebook and are running amok. Like fairy tales these events happen away from the hard rational eyes of the adults; but, crucially, here the physical evidence is very much on display. We don't know for certain whether the tiddlywinks blue-tacked onto the cheap print is the outcome of a child's diversion, the product of a thoroughly disturbed individual, maybe even a work of art.

Are the cheap ornaments, the tatty, faded prints 'despoiled' or augmented with splatters of vivid colour, part of a (none too successful) attempt on the part of the absent Psychologist to provide a relaxing, perhaps homely environment? Or have they been provided by the subjects, perhaps as material for sessions, or the outcome of some assignment?

If the latter is the case, then some of these assignments have profoundly disturbing outcomes. While the Anxiety Ball is – supposedly – self explanatory, elsewhere a grotesque set of objects, a sphere mounted on an ornate stand like an alien prosthetic, painted in a uniform orange colour with a rectangular opening onto its black interior. It appears to be in some kind of staring-down contest with a cheap plaster bust of a woman, placed on a circle of orange within a blue table top, which echoes the orange of its opponent. A more graphic materialization of childhood nightmares this viewer has yet to encounter...

A Little Bit of Weirdness

As a starting point to this project, Read began researching the 'pop' Psychology contained within self-help books, and gravitated towards Psychology's more 'classical' writers as her own approach shifted from one of skepticism to one of growing absorption. It is apparent from this sequence of titles and names that start with Freud and Jung and descend down the line of specialisation or obscurity, that a dual hierarchy exists, one external, based on familiarity outside the profession, which has little or no relation to any reputation within the Psychology profession's own hierarchy. The book title, taken in isolation, whose emblematic qualities Read has explored in earlier works, is taken one step further in the video work featuring a sequence of titles of Psychology textbooks, together with their authors. These have been presented as though they were the opening credits for a movie or upmarket TV production. What becomes apparent, as we watch the names and titles fade in and out, is of how obscure “Psychology” remains to most of us. A singularly nebulous subject, there are degrees of familiarity with Psychology and Psychologists. The term 'Freudian Slip' like 'Catch 22', has descended from intellectual life into cliché, but Psychology remains a field which a great many encounter superficially, but very few can claim genuine familiarity with.

Read says she is looking for an 'emotional response, not too specific, through juxtaposition of things or evocation of colours', to this new series of works. And so with the muted, pastel childhood colours - 'sickly child colours'- familiar to those who grew up before the advent of day-glow. She talks of spreading a little 'weirdness' around here and there, maybe as one might cultivate a garden. Moments of madness, little pockets of eccentricity. Read's work addresses ambiguities within apparently familiar objects. In this work there are shifts in time, between past and present, or more specifically between childhood and adulthood, as though a subject were being asked to plumb the depths of their memories for answers to present-day anxieties.

Text by Matthew Crookes
August 2009

25-08-09 | Matters 2 | journal for contemporary art discourse in New Zealand.

2009-08-20T09:00:00.000-07:00

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Newcall Gallery is pleased to announce the launch of Matters 2:

Matters is a journal for contemporary art discourse in New Zealand.

Matters has been instigated as part of Newcall Gallery’s broader programme of developing more robust discourse around New Zealand art. It will be released intermittently, varying in format from issue to issue and responding to the perceived needs of the local art community in a flexible manner.

Excerpt from forward by Sam Rountree WIlliams:
“Matters itself has been designed to shift in response to changes within the local art community. Across issues, it will represent no fixed agenda (or even format). Its ongoing aspiration is simply to stimulate discussion, particularly in those areas perceived to be undernourished by contemporary discourse in New Zealand—this issue focuses on in-depth engagement with specific recent projects staged locally."

This second issue within the over-arching Matters journal project is powered by intelligent critical reflection on
several recent exhibitions staged locally, and maintains a focus on emerging practitioners. Matters 2 contains essays by Jan Bryant, Andrew Clifford, Sarah Hopkinson, Amy Howden-Champan and Laura Preston.

To order Matters 2, visit the gallery or email us at newcallpublishing@gmail.com. Once your order has been confirmed, we'll post it to you.

Price: $10.00
cash or cheque to:

Newcall Gallery Trust
42 Scanlan St
Grey Lynn, Auckland 1021

Newcall is a registered charitable trust. We would like to acknowledge the generous support of Creative New Zealand in the production of Matters 2.

28-07-09 | Tao Wells | PLAZA

2009-08-07T17:12:00.000-07:00

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Tao Wells for Daniel Munn's PLAZA
28 July 2009

“At one point they asphalted the roads in our area and it was either too hot or they messed up the asphalt mix, and there was a really expensive car with asphalt on its tires immobilized in our cul de sac. People had to walk through the forest at the back of their properties to park their cars on another road.” – Daniel Munn

Daniel Munn, Daniel Malone, doesn’t mean much less you know who and one of them is,
Francis Uprichard at Venice just made a book called Bart Wells, My name is Tao Wells, it could be about me, people I think are often referencing or using ideas I’ve established.. Amy Howden – Chapman, for one, Louise Menzies another, Simon Denny I could go on, It helps if your practice is not interested in being artisan and to plough the one field but are an aristocratic citizen of the world, full of the rich possibilities, of not emulating the habits peaked in previous centuries… then having like minds catching the warmth of your works open veins naturally would occur and naturally it is something of a pleasure to see acknowledged, names out or not.

Not like Matt Hunt whose Poisoned shit of an attitude going around bad mouthing a Fellow painter for stealing his ideas his work his mojo, some how Picaso’s idea of the best artists steal the best ideas.. not borrow, no insincere flattery here but just BRILLIANT take, (Daniel Malone is Billy Apple, but Billy Apple still needs Warhol to return from the dead and tell everyone how impt he is) is lost on this religious Fanatic, Beating down the door to McLeavey fighting for the last peg in a 100 New Zeland artists History book.

That’s not going to help Daniel Munn, No he’s Canadian, (photograph of a Plaza in Vancouver) who the fuck gives a shit about a fuck whose not even from here. He doesn’t understand, what it’ s like living on an island who everyone wants to steal from, who threatens us with their existence cause it might teach us something new that we’ll have to change. AND NZERS don’t change that’s what the rest of the world does, here we absorb smother and ignore you. YOU ARE A KIWI NOW. we paint on to the face of every brown head, don’t call me nigger, I ‘ll never be a Kiwi, NEW Zealand the South of the south pacific. I’ll always be glad that others saw something in my work to emulate steal or reference.
Fucking painters.

Munn’s work is a daily meditation of details of a constructed culture, do you know your renaissance sculpture, there are stories behind them, David and Goliath, how bout Daniel’s stolen Christopher Columbus what’s it saying) I feel looking imagining his work reminds of the empty spaces where the action really is happening just not right now. When you sit at a food court and notice that the concrete beams overhead have only been painted up to the wires leaving a raw line of concrete, that the whole thing has been made already and it’s too late to consider fine details, a love of life, or pride in ones work. DAM IT these details add up you know they do, and it hurts!!! They tell a story. Do you understand, that tell you a story with out to much direct religious references or imagery, and so possibly though I have not seen the work installed perhaps there will be a conclusion to the story that is not “Kill your self or kill others” YET.

One day Daniel Munn will be famous and you’ll come again to one of his shows and reflect over what you didn’t get then you equally didn’t get now.. how bout getting off that beat now, and just refuse to be like that, let it flow over you and get angry about “this is the best a Daniel Munn can do”. Some where in the coffee and the photographs is a point that Munn said see. Try respecting that and giving it the time of day, try respecting this stranger who one day will be famous.

Isn’t that nice. You are an expert.

Time is an expert it has already written the rules for your iinclusion in it. It is these stories little confusion that is so richly rewarding to anyone who like a nice walk through the woods, fearing no darkness with out need of an avenging angel to give them strength, you 3 people will enjoy this how it is for you , you’ve been given a little food , and unfortunately will be left to wonder why others don’t get it why the world isn’t like getting this.. and how It want’s Mat Hunts Paintings of Fantastic violence for ever. Which I’d buy if I was a slave or I’d copy. Who’d want to copy something, it must be over priced to begin with if you can’t afford an original, perhaps it is fun to translate a new version. Add value.

Translate Munn you Kiwi fuckers… BAnkk of New Zealand

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01.07.09 | Harold Grieves on Take This With You / Erica Van Zon

2009-07-05T16:37:00.000-07:00

Before I ever knew Erica I had a role trawling through the HSP archive and in the dusty storeroom I found a pile of Styrofoam cups. By pile, I really mean column. They were covered in dust and leant up in the corner of a backroom. It seemed odd, but not too odd. I did wonder why the cups weren’t being used, or hadn’t been used. So while that was a bemusing mystery, it was still far too much of a struggle to get at them, so I simply left them alone. It was only a couple of weeks later though that I came across a text about a group show Erica had been in. She’d made a water-cooler work and well, yeah, these were the cups. Curiously, and rapt to have a piece of the jigsaw puzzle, that is HSP’s exhibition history so easily fall into my lap, I decided to rescue the cups from their stalagmite existence. This is when I discovered they all had a peculiar long-winded phrase printed on each and every single one of them.

That was the first work I ever saw of Erica’s, not that this was really a work at all, more just a fragment of a work and a small piece of text describing the situation in which the cups were displayed along with a water cooler. While I can’t remember the exact quote any longer, I can recall the cups were hand-stamped, some of them smudging but most of them totally legible. I’m not sure what exactly the point of bringing all this up in relation to the new neon work at NEWCALL is, it’s quite different. I mean, the long-winded quote has vamoosed in favour of the adage, and the size of the text is now something like fifteen times the size. Perhaps you wanna say its still using the language of advertising, only that the neon-sign is more like the loud-hailer than the intimate dispersal of the hand-held object – which would mean you could also say the neon work’s more honest – at least in regard to the insidious sublimation the water-cooler fount supposes. Anyway, while I suppose this could construe a progression, from humble material, hand stamped to outsourced object, it'd be misleading to dead-end the neon sign as a concluding statement but it does let me suggest that perhaps a productive way to read the neon sign is to think about how the Delft tiles Erica made a few years back might intercede.

Like the cups, and the neon sign, the Delft tiles were objects used to carry an adage or quote. They were also, quite obviously hand-made, what with their dimples and exaggerated signs of personalised caress. This carefully staged appearance allowed the tiles a certain mobility, which turned their centre-pieced adages into petite slogans. Of course this had everything to do with their tactility as small objects, but I also mean it in relation to the serialisation of the slogans which I think the neon work continues. I think this mobility has everything to do with the way the adages are treated, which tends not to empty their content as mere pastiche, but instead tactfully approaches a form of sentimentality that is attentive to both the anxious and self-assuring qualities of the pop-psychology lexicon. What we get then is neither a derogative cynicism, nor an emotional caterwauling, but a reassured and almost sympathetic equilibrium that whilst being quite blasse about its almost laissez fair sample approach contains enough critical integrity to neither take itself too seriously nor too indulgently.

I think my favourite show of Erica’s that I’ve seen was at HSP in 2006. Like the work on show at NEWCALL it too was an adage spelt out in sculptural form. Back then it was the phrase, ‘people come, people go’ which was spelt out in soft black fabric cushions. Slouched up against the wall and forlornly spread across the floor, the work’s slumping carried with it a charged abandonment that postured a readiness entirely complicit with its comfortable laconic drool. This turned the adage less into that commiserating doorstep for passing travellers or wayward friends, but instead encoded a tactical abeyance, the type of layabout ruses which are capable of seizing upon opportunities as they present themselves. Of course that fits the type of temporising subjectivities I envisage as an articulate response to consumer culture, but it also pieces together what I mean about Erica's use of pop-psychology as neither a sentimental indulgence nor an emotional catch-cry response.

NEWCALL’s neon phrase is a translation of the Dutch proverb, “Maak van je hart geen moordkuil”. I really like how scary that word moordkuil sounds, and I think, from what Erica’s told me, its translation into English as 'lion’s den' just doesn’t cut it. Then again the translation itself is pretty glib at passing off what it gets by and that makes it seem kind of safe, so maybe it doesn’t need to be so scary after all. Most of the time I think it’s a phrase about regret or perhaps about forgiveness. Then again I think maybe it’s about relationships or maybe not, maybe it’s just about being an open-minded person. I’m not entirely sure; I mean I can imagine the contexts it might get used in, as a sort of pop-sage piece of advice, a kind of throwaway comment at the end of a consultation – perhaps? I mean that’s the point. These adages oscillate into cliché, but sometimes, and when it does it’s all about timing and context, they actually carry a type of meaning that’s hard to garner in a thousand words. That I think is the brunt of Erica's ongoing serialisation of such adages and it’s beholden to the context they appear in. That’s why I think it’s quite apt that this particular adage appears in an almost red-light context, or a least taunts with a birthday pink hue, both codings suggest a bemusing innocence gone awry, but then, how we interpret these signs is dependent on the fostered phrases and lexicons that make up the temporising and momentary meanings we inherit.

Harold Grieves

27-03-09 | MATT CROOKES WRITES ON IN & OUTSIDES

2009-02-26T18:17:00.000-08:00

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Sonya Lacey
In & Outsides

In one of Jorge Luis Borges' short stories, a prisoner condemned to death prays to God for one more year to put his thoughts into order. The following day, he is led out to the execution site, tied to the post, and as the firing squad raise their rifles, they slow down and appear to freeze – the prisoner has been granted his year, in the final moment before his execution...

Perception of time is subjective. Time and space, after all, do not belong to us; we surf them, as it were. When we measure clock time we are talking of arbitrary points on an artificial scale. How can you ever waste my time, if it was never mine to begin with? The British artist John Latham formulated an elaborate theory around 'event structure'; he believed this could be mapped by what he refered to as 'flat time' (a graduated scale of possible events), and that the basis for the universe was the 'least event' (the smallest possible movement from a state of nothing) rather than the molecule. Are we again being asked in this case to reflect on what constitutes an 'event'? Not a sudden, dramatic explosion necessarily, but a geological timescale, the current physical state being just one more permutation in the process.

The phrase 'in and outsides' brings to mind a Klein bottle, a geometric form with only one surface, a three dimensional development of the Moebius strip. Is the title pointing out the meaninglessness of such terms as 'in' and 'out', if we break things down to an atomic level, one in which everything is composed of the electrical forces and resistances among molecules? If that is the case, this show could be seen as an attempt to pinpoint a moment of transition. Lacey insists that in these works she is not privileging either the process or the outcome. Her most introspective works to date, the interest now is in the transition. The emphasis here is as much on the phenomenon of time and space itself, as in its manifestations.

Robert Smithson was another who worked with epic scales of time. He was particularly interested in capturing the elusive point at which the past and the future meet. Smithson is perhaps responsible for the specialised use of the term 'entropy' in the way that artists now use it; as a slow decay or dissipation of energy, and more recently (within art criticism at least), by extension a more psychological state of
progressive ennui – a great investment of energy and effort, with ever diminishing, unstable returns. There is no guarantee, as we now know, that any investment will deliver on its promise. And in physics 'entropy' can also refer to the unused potential energy in a system, expressed in randomness and chaos.

Matthew Crookes
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03-12-08 | NSFW

2008-12-18T14:36:00.000-08:00

NSFW

NSFW is a sort of "reunion show" of a group of friends who shared a studio in rm404 of Achilles House in 2005. Like thousands of other art school graduates freshly-milled through the system each year, we sought out our independent art-school substitute; an idealized hub of relentless art-marking activity, a commune with like-minded friends in our artiste community. We staged collaborative efforts, presented group shows, some of us got drunk and had sex with each other, and sometimes we also made art, when we found the time.

If there is a shared proclivity amongst most, if not all artists, it is our limitless capacity to extensively bitch about our jobs. Whilst no one goes to art school un-warned about our limited money-making prospects after, my friend Marcus insists we all privately harbour delusions of grandeur, of the frenzied worship of our unique genius and its attendant rewards – and real life inevitably disappoints. We shriek at this monstrous routine that drains us of our true vocation; we are asked to do too little, to do too much, we are too bored! We are not realizing our full true potential! We are intelligent beings deprived of stimulus! We graduated top of our class!

But we grew up watching Winona Ryder in Reality Bites, where we learnt being a valedictorian couldn't even get you a job at McDonald's? Horrors! I'd be driven to compulsively shoplift at designer boutiques too. What to do but to commiserate at our various self-sympathies.

It is true, it turns out I am not the secret love-child of Aga Khan, and I took "Ne Travaillez Jamais" too literally, that I'll have bills to pay that I will not be spared the hours spent on mind numbing tasks, feeling as though your head might literally explode, that no one awards you an A+ for giving up your lunchtimes to go on art missions. All I can do is cry silently into my pillow while my cat coughs up furballs next to my face. But I will not be defeated! Like Lindsay Lohan, I, too, am "a fighter"! Oh what a marvellous brilliant career awaits me (if I could make art full-time)! What a cruel world! What cruelties inflicted upon our frail unflexed creatived bodies!

My pain is one-thousand fold x your average pain. You ordinary beings might suffer a sharp mid-life crisis, recession-induced suicide, you might have parents at their deathbeds but my art-making time is compromised, oh my art-making time so compromised it aches in my bones, my genius never shines; this is a greater tragedy than your meek minds could ever understand! So today, at work, the air-conditioning wasn't on and the whole floor was over-heated and we were all so dehydrated and we were all so hot we had to take off our cardigans even though all I had on underneath was a chiffon see-thru top and I kept having to drink water just to stay alive and people wouldn't stop asking me questions and I was so exhausted beyond belief. Oh god help me.

11-11-08 | FRATER / OPACITY, Matt Harris writes on Richard Frater's show

2008-11-12T19:28:00.000-08:00

FRATER / OPACITY

The Russian novelist Vladimir Nabokov once dismissed his reviewers for mistakenly assuming that 'seeing through things' was his professional function, as if the prescribed role of the novelist was to probe hidden meanings or to delve into the historicity of his subject. For Nabokov (at least, for this incarnation of Nabokov – he had many faces) someone approaching a work of art with these intentions is distracted, even hazardously distracted, from its real and immediate significance. “A thin veneer of immediate reality,” he writes in Transparent Things, “… is spread over natural and artificial things, and whoever wishes to remain in the now, with the now, on the now should please not break its tension film. Otherwise the inexperienced miracle worker will find himself no longer walking on water but descending upright among staring fish.” His point is, I guess, that if you stop and stare at any one spot for too long, you’ll crack the surface of the ice and fall through. Things pretty much are what they are, and when you start reading into them too much they lose their immediate meaning. Or to put it another way, someone who over-analyses can be in as precarious a position as a complete dim-wit. I mean, I might be able to read all sorts of brilliant things into a dog turd on the pavement, but if I step in it my foot’s still going to stink. Sometimes it’s better to look once and keep moving on, sliding over the surface, than it is to stop and plunge right into something. At least if you want to stay dry and keep your feet clean.

Anyway, I think Nabokov’s principle is a good thing to keep in mind when looking at art sometimes, especially if it’s the kind of work that an artist like Richard Frater makes. Frater’s objects are a lot like a sheet of ice in some ways - they’re pretty ‘thin’. And I don’t mean ‘thin’ in a pejorative sense; I don’t think they lack conceptual substance. I mean they’re transparent – they work in the opposite direction to the sorts of art that Nabokov's reviewers expected. Looking back over Frater’s recent work this is pretty obvious: a fridge made of paper, several empty aluminium frames, various curls of hose-piping…and you don’t get much thinner (or more transparent) than his brick incident which had all of it’s materials removed. These works don’t ask you to spend too much time studying their detail. They don’t have a lot. And when they do they tend to frame something beyond the work itself. Empty space. Gallery space. Snow. Water. For the most part, you're more likely to start looking past the pieces into the area surrounding them. To stop and look too closely at the works, as though they might be laden with all manner of political and cultural ideas, might tempt you away from their immediate significance, the materiality of their present. They’re purely incidental.

I kind of agree with something Sam Rountree Williams said about Frater’s work. Talking about one of his rug pieces, R.W. wrote that the work “is both useless and non-informational, and must be thought of as much more than an aesthetic phenomenon: it is question of the work’s role within a greater immanent system.” Well, I don’t know much about immanent systems or aesthetic phenomena, but I do agree that if you look at Frater’s work for information and utility (as Nabokov’s reviewers did his novels) you’re probably looking for the wrong things. You might be about to drop through the ice. Better, I think, to glide through the works, appreciate their dimensions, take in the gesture as a whole.

Matt Harris, November 2008.

14-10-08 | Emma Phillipps writes on Sam Rountree William's show

2008-10-18T22:42:00.000-07:00

Sam Rountree Williams
Newcall Gallery
15 October – 1 November

The experience is distinct from viewing per se.

The experiencing subject is described through its own spatial relation, and attention to, objects as they are occurring – spatially – in the present time of observation. Imagining that one’s observation itself is (re)articulating forms and their own spatial configuration, that which articulates, or is presenting, painterly forms to one. That is also formations occurring. Forms are made present through one noticing continual changes and shifts – form is never the same as itself, even for an instant. The spatial relation – forms as distanced or proximate to other forms – is constantly fluctuating, following these ‘inner’ motions. One’s inner motions is one noticing form as constantly shifting, these changes or motions of form are not exterior or outside of that subject’s observation. Change is said to occur interiorly – as if the motions of form’s occurrence could not be differentiated as ‘inner’ or occurring outside of that, range. One ‘seeing’ what is occurring as collapsing with an awareness of that (mind’s activity). “Collapsing” divergent ways of apprehending (and noticing that, as apprehension, too) becomes a singular plane.
“What's there” (on the surface, immediately visible) – on two planes – is distinct from the ‘collapsing’ that occurs as one is constituting (‘inner’) and yet only noticing (aware exteriorly) the form’s motions – seeing that motion (“what’s there”) and one’s own awareness of it. A basic figurative space (two planes) is employed, though not to stabilise any form that occurs there. The visual properties of particular marks are a physical suggestion of surface only to indicate forms as present in a figurative space. They are only processes of layering surface, as in both additive and peeling back, that is the painted surface, to create depth.
Objects are suggested and are in the process of revealing their own formations which is distinct from imagining objects as constructions because that implies “completed” forms. Forms are themselves a process of relations (as constituting), and yet these are continually changing, so both the forms, and relations constituting them, are indeterminate. These (form’s motions) are communicated in the blurring, obscuring and abstracting process.
Form, as it appears obscured and abstracted, is not a result of direct manipulation of materials. The formal relationship is as if one happened (painted?) across it, spatially, which is similar to, or in the process of mirroring, forms themselves, as they are indeterminate. There is painting from the standpoint of watching what is happening and just finding out what’s occurring there, on the surface of the canvas. Forms are not said to be occurring prior or elsewhere (seen before or in the past, that is ‘copied’), typically characterised by representational (as a kind of mimesis, looking toward something outside of oneself) and expressive (content projected outward from within) modes. Recognisable fragments emerge, but that is a separate action (not expression or representation).
I am visualising ‘definitive chance’: forms emerge and are recognised only in the sense that they are taken up as occurring in a particular relation. Decisions to abstract form are then distinct from imagining form as fundamentally abstract and intending to communicate that. These decisions are also distinct from making use of abstraction – as an aesthetic or stylistic method – because they provide one with a stance that may be interpreted as reactionary toward form - as either ‘observable’ or ‘occurring’ – itself. This is also distinct from a process aimed at formal distillation to achieve a state of total purity or non-specificity or the attempts to capture the essence of a form (static interiority). As if a purely abstract form is not attached to any specific instance or representative of any particular position. Though this “unattached” is a particular position in itself.
The artist states that, “the understandings exhibited in the work arrive[d at] through process, discovery and contingency.” Abstraction as a painterly strategy is meaningful as the material formations of paint itself are exposed. Just as the eye moves, repeated action.
What is aptly recognised is that a full experience of the “object” – it does not exist, there. There is no fuller view. The apprehension of form as occurring in present time is shifting and multiple. This is not accumulation or epiphany’s motions (as mind’s activity and construction).
Forms are interdependent as relations are constitutive of form itself – though is similarly distinguishable, individually (that is each form), through this same set of relations.
The experience is distinct from viewing per se. Always sensitive to the tension in which forms are held (as tonal responses) when the work is “resolved” or configured interiorly (mind’s activity) it is only momentarily or individual. Potential is conflated (reconfigurations simultaneously occurring). “Where the viewer puts things together” – phenomena is the content of one’s scrutiny – “and that's where consciousness could be expanded” – the viewer seeing their scrutiny as phenomena, too. Evoking an art experience – that is the slowness and awareness of one’s observatory patterns - where historical time not only flattens but becomes present. Observatory patterns in a singular present moment are constitutive of form and change in the next moment, and are always re-articulating the work entirely.
The perceiving subject’s experience as meditative is, not of, forms. Forms becoming “graspable” – becoming something perceivable in space - and can be “held” there.

Emma Phillipps

20-08-08 | Not necessarily here, not necessarily now | Ruth Watson on Jungle Television

2008-10-02T23:02:00.000-07:00

Not necessarily here, not necessarily now:
Anya Henis’ Jungle television at Newcall Gallery,
August-September 2008.

Aldous Huxley, author of Brave New World, one of the twentieth century’s great futuristic dystopias, also portrayed its opposite – a futuristic utopia – in his 1962 novel Island (island vs. world- do we detect a pessimist?) In the novel the main character finds himself on an island where daily life is organised quite differently to what he’s used to. Alongside the radical social reformations he encounters are some smaller ones, such as local parrots trained with the catchphrase ‘here and now, here and now boys’ that they squawk out wherever they land, which often seems often to be close to people in need of some helpful mantra. The phrase has been deliberately utilised to remind people of what the islanders believe they need to do to live a healthy life – to actively focus on the here and now. Infused with Buddhist ideals, Huxley’s Island conjures a pragmatic utopia that sits in an interesting counterfoil to the institutional horrors of Brave New World. Anya Henis’ seven paintings at Newcall Gallery would be unlikely candidates to be on show in Island’s gallery, although it’s something of a challenge to say exactly why. There are several outdoor scenes, one a skyscape of scudding clouds, lit with a duskish sky, titled innocuously Sunset. A small painting of a tepee would seem a cheery invocation of innocent childhood. Other paintings show fantastic architectures that seem vaguely aspirational and one small work shows a stage set, curtains open to reveal a field of flowers. Sounds harmless enough – so why do I think the inhabitants of Huxley’s island would not be happy?

The paintings concerned with architectures, or most often, their interiors, would seem to have their own strange logic. The largest painting in the show – Love Hotel – depicts a mélange of the almost-kitsch, like a hotel of a past decade (literally?) that has attempted to make a space that is simultaneously cosy and impressive. There’s a podium, some columns and planters, decorative nets and a feature ‘window’ in the centre of the painting that has either star-like or watery patterns. The paint itself cheerily mitigates against us believing that this is for real, having its own highlights and lowlights that don’t necessarily make the spaces sit quite where you expect them to be. The depicted space with its peculiar public-private mix makes you wonder about the people who have constructed it or use it – whatever their ideals, they don’t seem to expect to gel with anyone else’s. Or they ask us, how much do we actually recognise? There’s a teasing of tastefulness in operation, although not head-on like Judy Darragh, or plumbing one aspect like Saskia Leek. Henis gets close to a variety of almost-nice and just-wrong, moving from one non-specific place and non-specific time, to another.

The absence of people is palpable, creating a sense of stillness that draws us in to look closer at these non-specific places. One of the other interiors seems like a medieval cloister translated through a 1970s design magazine. The space of the painting isn’t one that can be navigated except by the eye, although there’s a sense of the real that tantalises. Titled Texas, the space is indeed a church building and was sourced from a photograph in an architectural magazine. Henis here seems more engaged with the paint than its source, the provenance of which has become attenuated, even lost. The name of the magazine, its year and country of origin, what actual function the building and for what religious group are all long forgotten, not collected, held on to or trumpeted as the artist’s freshly-minted arcana. Perhaps the paint alone has become a truer sign of the here and now. Another architecturally based painting (Untitled) is fey and oddly compelling, depicting a mosaic-clad space of much indoor-outdoor flow. Ceilingless, with an intense blue sky visible above the wall tops and with paving stones trotting through what might be water, there’s a sense of peeking into an Ottoman bathing house- had it been made in the recent past, outdoors, and built for effect rather than actual use. This image too was derived from a photograph of someone’s home, this time somewhere in New Zealand. Something was definitely lost in translation, by the architect and their client, I suspect the photographer too, and Henis happily continues the process. There’s a strange wall where a doorway leads off elsewhere that doesn’t quite convince, and in the foreground another wall is finished off in a manner that seems to be provisional. The whole thing appears like a tentative proposition, which in itself sits in an interesting tension with architecture. You don’t quite trust these buildings.

The tiny mosaics have been painted with a carefully light touch. Surfaces appear to be prioritised over structures, although for Henis, painting and architecture do have an entangled relationship as painting usually relies on walls and often rooms for its material support. These works do suit the freshly scrubbed-up seventies architecture of the Newcall gallery, with its occasional veneer feature and artificial compound ceiling. Perhaps expectations around contemporary constructions of space or place, the species of desirable spaces, have become too serious. The exhibition title Jungle Television conjures up some particularly specious spaces, although Henis’ work seems more fragile and elusive than the robust pleasures of an Elvis-like world. Back in Huxley’s Buddhist jungle, the birds could relax a little. Constant attention to the here and now is an impossible ideal, anyway, so in the meantime, why not go visit some other painted spaces where the mutable and the fey might just be markers to other possible realities.

- Ruth Watson, September 2008

20-08-08 | Jungle Television: Anya Henis at Newcall Gallery | Harold Grieves

2008-08-19T00:39:00.000-07:00

Jungle Television: Anya Henis at Newcall Gallery

There’s a kaleidoscopic and regenerative feel to Anya Henis’s paintings that makes me remember that nature isn’t cordoned off by the city, but is actually quite often thriving as the opportunistic behemoth it ought to be. There’s something entirely obvious about her sprawling confusion of reclamation and decomposition in which flowers and gardens entwine urban debris, rendering a charming jumble from what could have been a desolate site. Likewise, her portrayal of deteriorated buildings and urban structures that are propped open or paved over, constantly in states of both physical and conceptual re-combinations (posters placard idealisms of what could be, scenic curtains part to reveal what could just be representations). These processes, these reconstitutions grind out narratives which face up to the everyday corrosions of urban life. Such narratives are for me a constant reminder that the urban environment operates more as a network of corridors, which as the authors of The Green City suggest, aren’t just ‘permeable to nature’ but also to people as well[i]. One way of reading that – and it’s especially prone wherever capital-flows accentuate difference – is to conceive of the city as a competitive environment which breeds a multitude of winners and losers. At least, that’s the logic of Tim Low’s encyclopaedic cataloguing of the adaptations nature’s fauna and flora have made to coexist within the urban terrain of contemporary society[ii]. Though why I’m saying ‘nature’s’ fauna and flora, when the whole argument turns around a breakdown of that city-country, nature-culture divide, I don't know. That said, if you haven’t heard enough about nature-culture pacts working out as hybrid composite systems then well, I hate to say that its just one short step to the gravy train of “nature” as redemptive-yet-indifferent, deep-ecology manifestation. Geoffrey Bowker’s gloss on ‘biodiversity’ as ‘the feel-bad word for the new millennium’, that all-domain capture which is constantly hammered above our heads as the one thing we all simultaneously know we need and can’t have, certainly gains purchase on the low-rent status of nature’s prostitution to anyone and anything which will save it[iii].

I can’t help but hope that Henis’s paintings are a million miles from that plague of idealism and despair. Actually their whole make-over plan, especially their filigree of nature detailing seems to me to have far more to do with the neo-pagan rites that have surged back into circulation through the reconstitution of rave culture as cathartic, hedonistic release, especially through its borrowing from the neo-rural oddities of freak-folk. You don’t need to look too far to find a really clear example of the widespread popularity, or at least acceptance of this model, in the near instant mainstream saturation of MGMT to realise how desperate the reress of nature-culture symbiosis is becoming. Reoccupying a peculiar hybrid of narcissistic, self-conscious stovepipe stature, with the controlled ecstasy (mdma) of an albeit Janus-faced psychedelic moment, MGMT’s resurrection of a form of nature-shamanism monopolises a purely urban, cosmological, future-tense beatification of contemporary society. Thus, whilst MGMT’s over-saturation seems more than likely to castigate them as candidates for an almost immediate backlash, one only needs run through the warm up lineage, that sees them splicing the farcical exuberance of the Flaming Lips and the Polyphonic Spree as an obsequious make-over for the shoe-gaze shuffle, a la Interpol, Strokes, Shocking Pinks. Acting as a dynamic retrogressive antidepressant, the prolix vitality of MGMT serves up a generational sensation that marks them out as blithe, spirit-pioneers volleying through a knowing, laissez faire “Retreat” programmed perfectly to go with the hip-sensationalism of ECO-awareness, that has, especially over the last year or two, suffused the media-music-art-fashion circus. But then, as Bruce Sterling so brilliantly pointed out, that sudden surge of eco-porn was never about ‘averting’ crisis, more just a sudden awareness that ‘fashion is in for revolution not just because the weather’s all screwed up, but because a failed polity has to abandon its clothes’[iv].

I’m not entirely sure that was the right path to take Henis’s paintings down. Most of the time when I look at them I keep thinking of Phillip K Dick’s ‘jiffy-view company’, which would come by every six or so months and create the view you wanted to see from your bedroom window as an immaculate and immersive 3-D image[v]. Then again, they also keep reminding me that we’re still a generation or so from that biologically determined world and so really most of the time, I feel quite excited about Henis’s portrayal of the urban terrain. Just generally, I’d like to say they remind how much we seem to be on the cusp of something else. Quite often they really do feel like a conceivable and adventurous form of an urbanised-nature-aesthetic that could potentially be a quintessentially post-industrial form of redress that finally puts to bed all that nature-culture dichotomy the paralysing synthesis of biodiversity still ensures.

Harold Grieves

_______________________________________________________________

[i] Nicholas Low, Brendan Gleeson, Ray Green and Darko Radovic, The Green City: Sustainable Homes, Sustainable Suburbs (Sydney, UNSW Press, 2005); 40.
[ii] Tim Low, The New Nature (Penguin, Camberwell, 2003).
[iii] Geoffrey C. Bowker, ‘Time, Money, and Biodiversity’, Global Assemblages: Technology, Politics, and Ethics as Anthropological Problems, eds Aihwa Ong & Stephen Collier (London, Blackwell, 2005); 107.
[iv] Bruce Sterling, ‘Hot Trends’, Artforum (Summer, 2006); 145
[v] Philip K. Dick, Galactic Pot-Healer (London, Pan Books, 1972); 15.

24-06-08 | Two or more systems, Annie & Ashton Bradley on Eyedrops from Upstairs

2008-07-31T01:48:00.000-07:00

Two or more systems for Eyedrops from the Second Floor

“For the spider, nearly blind, the web is a vibrating extension of its senses.1”

On the night before the opening I attempt to talk to my brother , who is a quantum physicist about the various systems operating on different scales in Eyedrops from the Second Floor, but due to a storm our phone line is not reliable, people cannot call in and now we cannot call out, thanks TELSTRA, so I rely on free minutes on cell phones from all of my flatmates to call him in Dunedin.

Ashton Bradley: Oh a lightning storm? I’m just about going to bed, I got up early to watch the cup final and eat pancakes. Hmmm maybe tomorrow when the lines not crackling, oh the show is tomorrow? What did you want to ask me?

Annie Bradley: Can you hear that chhkk, chhkk on the line? Oh well, I’ll make it up, you know give you a Steven Hawking voice.

Ashton Bradley: Ok I’ll get into bed with Ina, she can pipe up too.

Annie Bradley: One thing I was thinking of was how when we were kids and we put those mice in the fish tank, in the jar with the click clack lunch box tube for air and sealed it with blue tack, looking out at the fish, under water what a great time we thought they were having !

Ashton Bradley: Oh I forgot about that

Annie Bradley: I think maybe that’s what the work is more about, a system or pseudo science about having a new experience.

Annie describes the work Jamie and Kentaro made without having seeing it, Ashton has heard about it already but would like to see it…

Ashton Bradley: Well the dust work…have you heard of Brownian motion? Robert Brown looked at pollen grains in water with a microscope. He observed that the pollen grains moved around quite rapidly. There was some speculation at the time that they could even be alive, as they seemed to move on their own accord, but the motion also seemed very random. Einstein wrote a famous paper on it in 1905. The motion of the dust was due to individual water molecules hitting the grains from all sides.

Ina says I’m letting cold air into the bed…

Ashton Bradley: With the fish… how random is the actual signal coming off the fish motion? Has he done a Fourier transform of the signal to look for the periodic components?

Annie Bradley: I’m not sure, I can find out how random it is. Jamie says the fish stay still and then sometimes they go into a frenzy and circle the tank a lot.

Ashton Bradley: Maybe they patrol the tank so we might expect some kind of periodic motion determined by the size of the tank, so I think you might find some strong frequency components if you looked at the spectrum, heheehehe, I think you’d find some periodic behaviour in the time it takes to cross the tank, heheehe. I’d like to run some numbers.

Annie Bradley: You’d like to do a simulation?

Ashton Bradley: yes, some numerical modelling, see what the data set was like. You would take the periodic component and take away the random component and listen to the music of that part only, like a tank symphony.

[Dr Ashton Bradley, Research Fellow, Jack Dodd Center for Quantum Technologies, Department of Physics, University of Otago, Dunedin.]

27-05-08 | Moving in time (notes on Blue as silver as gold) | Sonya Lacey

2008-04-01T17:00:00.000-07:00

Moving in time (notes on Blue as silver as gold)
Sonya Lacey

1. What is time well spent? In this action, time is occupied with resolve, like the occupation of a building. & thinking about time taken: I’ve watched the process of painting and repainting over approximately a month, but the time taken spans decades. My experience of the work comes through an imagined understanding of the action; paint gives an account of the art, the art an attempt to be in time. I understand that reflecting on the past implicates the present, and that it involves the projection of this moment into the future; I am aware of being present, actively here and now. I understand the temporal interconnections forming are determined by my subjective experience.

2. Each practice is filled with the presence of people across time. I had never thought of conversation in terms of tactility.

3. In this action, there are raw materials and the staging of making or unmaking, or at least of un-differentiation. It involves travel – energy and distance decreasing organisation and, along with that, loss of distinctiveness. A phrase comes to mind written by Mario Merz: REPERCUSSIONS OF MATERIALS IN THE SOLVENCY OF THE MOMENT. The enaction of interactions, relationships, reciprocities. This work begins like a diagram; physics then metaphysics. The materials will just be themselves, heavy and light, and always susceptible to physical laws. It is arrogant to believe ourselves outside of these systems.

4. The body has learnt along the way, streamlined the process, become fatigued in points and misjudged in others. The work has been made (a structure set in place, a task completed), but the work is happening. And once a thing is done it can’t be undone (even when it’s gone).

5. As I remember it, in the book Silence John Cage suggests the art gallery’s relationship to art was one of preservation. He likened this to the relationship refrigerators have with milk – both white cubes are designed to separate a lively thing from life, an act that slows down its changing and makes it digestible over a longer period of time. Cage’s criticism – I could be misattributing here – was that this gave a dishonest account of the nature of the work. Gabriel Orozco seems concerned with keeping his work similarly close to life experience. Unlike Cage, he seems to see the gallery as a useful way to frame the moment of communication, (selection/exhibition), but I’m struck by how weak the gallery is to hold the expanse of that work, how ineffective it is in slowing it down.

29-04-08 | Darkly minded lightly hearted | John Ward Knox writes for Fiona Gillmore

2008-04-01T15:00:00.000-07:00

Yellow:
Oftentimes at twilight I find myself seated at a bus-stop awaiting carriage home. I generally frequent the same stop, where the seats are placed generously to afford a view of the city, though not from any great distance. Across the broad street from my position buildings rise – teeth, battlements or monoliths – thirty flights against the vaster reach of sky.
I have no pressing matters I can attend to whilst sitting there – no goals to achieve nor expectations to meet. Accomplishing little but witnessing the passage of time, I often get to wondering about the value of things, the way we think. For example there is a point where day becomes night, where a switch occurs between opposites. And yet as I sit there I find it difficult to tell with any conviction whether what I am experiencing is part of the period called day, or the period called night. If there is a switch that takes place between two opposing forces, say when black becomes white – one could be forgiven for expecting a violence to evidence itself, some moment of trauma to signal the inversion which turns one concrete existence into its opposite.
This moment somehow never arrives to announce itself, so I have to read the herald of night into inconspicuous details. My current system is somewhat clinical. In the office buildings facing me, there are invariably rooms or whole floors left fully lit, projecting their own approximation of daylight for the benefit of those working inside, the better to pursue daytime goals. This provides me with a standard measurement upon which to base my calculation. During actual daylight hours the light from the windows – being still an imperfect approximation – pales in comparison to the natural radiance of the sky, but as nighttime steadily approaches the artificially lit rooms acquire more impact. As the sky darkens I have come to believe that the transition between night and day happens at that point when the light from the windows seems to become more luminous than that from the sky.

Black:
And yet that point is infinitely reducible and infinitely escapable. To make use of such a definition is hardly possible within the fluid structure of language, where words are replaceable and their meaning alters according to their context. Because we have developed this flexible system of abstraction we are no longer required to make experiential judgements. By your definition we can only know when day turns to night by seeing it happen, by some system we devise and in relation to a given constant. But the only reason those buildings and that channelled electricity can exist is because of language, because we can reduce physical things down to concepts and vagaries, so we can use the knowledge of their existence without ever coming in contact with the thing itself.
The language we use is a system with an inbuilt schizophrenia, where the meanings of words overlap, so that the word ‘twilight’ includes both ‘night’ and ‘day’. In this way we make easier for ourselves our interaction with the world. By interacting with porous concepts, rather than concrete realities we can make these periods of transition less traumatic and be free to pursue activities that would otherwise be forbidden by our subservience to natural cycles.

Yellow:
Perhaps then let me offer another definition of change.
I was sitting on a pier facing the city one night recently, the harbour between us. The lights of the buildings and of the streets and the dock machinery glimmered over the horizon, a thin band made up of individual points. The night was overcast so the lights seemed to emerge in the distance from black depth. As I sat there a huge tanker entered the harbour, a slow and silent leviathan. The tanker carried few lights of its own, so appeared mainly as a giant moving shadow, a silhouette against the city. From left to right the tanker passed by, it’s presence causing an insidious eclipse swallowing the city lights in front, and depositing them behind.
I think this is perhaps a better way of understanding change. Where once a light can be said to exist in front of the ship, after the ship has past the light can be said to be behind. This is like the difference between night and day. Because things exist inside of a continuum the only thing that changes drastically is our way of classifying them. Behind the silhouette of the ship is the point that one thing changes to another. When looking, we can never see this happen, because for one thing to become another, at some point it has to be invisible, it has to be neither one nor the other.
What Fiona is offering to us is a chance to slow down our expectations for gratification, to relish time spent during periods of transition. What we encounter is not a transaction, we do not enter the gallery and leave having made a cultural purchase, an intellectual product akin to “I came, I saw, I conquered”, but the opportunity to witness a series of infinitely different scenarios, played out inside of a continuum that purposefully eludes classification. Like finding ourselves in the shadow of a passing ship.

Essay by John Ward Knox

25-03-08 | Episodes from an online conversation, Martyn Reynolds and Marnie Slater

2008-04-01T14:00:00.000-07:00

Martyn Reynolds and Marnie Slater

Episodes from an online conversation 25 March 2008

Marnie Slater: … I was listening to a pod-cast of a lecture Jacques Ranciere gave about art, politics and popularity, and he began by defining his idea of politics as what we can say about what we see that is shared, and that aesthetics is what frames this shared given.

Martyn Reynolds: I think that is an excellent way of expressing what I was struggling to in the talk last Thursday [at Enjoy Gallery, Wellington], in terms of my use of the notion of politics.

Marnie: Ranciere talked about art as a potential re-distribution of the aesthetics of politics, which I think is a tad problematic because it assumes that art suspends power.

Martyn: I'm not sure that I understand art or aesthetics having such a direct relationship with a concrete notion of politics.

Does the assertion that 'aesthetics is what frames the shared given' assume a shared experience maybe? I would suggest that these things have much more to do with an interaction of things that are at odds.

Marnie: I think it is claiming a level of shared experience, like a language, or a commonality. But he was very careful to acknowledge that the network of politics is one of power.

Martyn: I wonder if there is no political discourse necessary if experience is shared, but maybe I’m missing the point.

If I could bring it back to the work, I would consider how this may operate in your intended work for the exhibition, in the sense that the tension between a desire for a shared experience and the apparent distance that this reveals is the reality of our situation.

Marnie: I think that there is something worth pausing on in that process of tension. Could that be something that both of our works do? I don't mean to strive overly for common ground, but is there a kind of arrest we are interested in? Like when Fiona Connor talks about freezing architecture or objects through a process of replication.

Martyn: Like the art experience has a great potential for slowing things down.

Marnie: But what can it slow down?

Martyn: Perhaps it slows down our assumed relationships with things. I mean that when something is known we relate to it in an almost instantaneous way, unless we are children. But if something has been altered then we are forced to generate new associations, and therefore our absorbing it as a part of our experience has a potential to be spaced out differently.

Marnie: I have always had in the back of my mind some really big questions about how ‘art’ and ‘life’ mingle in the exhibiting of objects and the engaging of architecture. Mostly I decide that those kinds of questions fail to acknowledge the specific and the particular.

Martyn: Do you mean that to seek an intermingling of art and life is a utopian desire? I suppose it is mostly for this that Beuys is derided.

Marnie: Well, perhaps the seeking not so much, but perhaps the presumption that it is possible… or actually that those lines exist at all might be the problem!

Martyn: Such as how in a pragmatic way, art always exists within life.

Marnie: Enjoy is a good space like that, i.e. the wall of windows, particularly in relation to your recent solo project.

Martyn: I guess that art’s existence within life is a simple point which relational practices have gone to some lengths to elucidate.

Marnie: Yeah. I think for this project we are posing works that let you sneak in unannounced and leave like nothing happened.

Martyn: Nick Austin speaks eloquently about art viewing being a solitary experience and excellent for that reason. Judy Millar’s recent interview in Art New Zealand also touches on this.

Marnie: I was reading a text about Daniel Buren and the writer was talking about how the museum as public space addresses you as a singular agent, unlike the potential for the ‘mass’ in urban public space.

Martyn: I think the gallery is a public space as equally as a square, or mall. We negotiate each place with the same experience of community and isolation I think…