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Welcome In
Telecom Prospect 2004: New Art New Zealand
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Lists
A curious thing happened once I accepted the task of developing
the next Prospect biennial. From the moment my feet
touched the Wellington tarmac to begin working on the show,
people all around me started offering me lists - their personal
selection of who they would like to see included in a New
Zealand survey show. People I had barely met offered their
particular take. I began to realise that inside everybody
such a list is just waiting to emerge into the world: a
Top Ten, a Wish List, a Who's Who, a Top of the Pops.
This, then, is my list. Or one of them. 43 artists, spanning
a 50 year age gap between oldest and youngest, who work
variously across painting, drawing, sculpture, installation,
performance, video, film and computer software.
Welcome
The Prospect show as a model was designed by Lara
Strongman, curator of Telecom Prospect 2001: New Art
New Zealand, to be generous and flexible enough to be
taken up each time by a different curator and given their
individual slant. Strongman's own Prospect was elegantly
playful in its execution, laying the foundation for each
successive exhibition to provide a subsequent snapshot of
time, place and personality in New Zealand contemporary
art.
Telecom Prospect 2004: New Art New Zealand is an
unruly beast, designed to sprawl across the city like an
exuberant infection, across galleries, cinema, a hall, the
local bus service, your cell phone, your home PC. It has
a sociable bent. The exhibition has a celebratory quality,
an inclusive nature and would like to welcome you in. Without
being driven by one over-arching theme, Telecom Prospect
2004 is a show located around a series of connections
which weave through the artworks. This is a show located
in something quite real: it's a show about people, networks,
relationships and conversations.
Where we're from
The artists in Telecom Prospect 2004 live on Great
Barrier Island, in Porirua, Te Aro, Havelock North, Hamilton
and Port Chalmers. They also live in London, Melbourne,
Bangkok and Auckland.
In 2004 most New Zealand artists are sophisticated gypsies,
moving across cities and countries to make and show their
work. The sense of geographic isolation and preoccupation
with this island landscape which marked out New Zealand
art so strongly in the 1980s and early 1990s (as illustrated
in exhibitions such as Distance Looks Our Way, Headlands,
Putting the Land on the Map), no longer seem so dominant.
An electronic squeezing of distance is leading, as promised,
to that virtual global village. On one level maybe it still
hovers as a utopian dream before us, on another level it
is an increasing reality. One consequence of this shrinking
sense of space has been increasing numbers of New Zealand
artists exhibiting overseas, not just in large-scale institutionally
supported touring shows of national art, but increasingly
as individuals in commercial, public and alternative spaces
around the world.
We may still be uniquely adrift at the very bottom of the
world, but we are no longer immune from the ravages of a
wider world beyond. Yet, at the same time, we can still
assert a desire for locality, a need for the regional and
the personal. Not entirely rootless, we are still stuck
firmly in our own patch of (shifting) dirt which brings
its own conflict and joy. As arts commentator Mark Amery
has said: 'Our history young, our geographical position
isolated, issues of distance and cultural identity continue
to be keenly felt no matter how fast we can dial up our
modems. They are issues that still have a strong impact
on the kind of art we make.'[i]
Increasing numbers of New Zealand artists are basing themselves
elsewhere, sometimes permanently. Therefore, in making shows
which examine the stick-in-the-ground benchmark of national
identity, as institutions and curators we need to think
in the most fluid sense. Included in Telecom Prospect
2004 are many artists who live away from New Zealand,
but still consider themselves New Zealanders; as well as
those whose work maintains an active dialogue with this
country. While London-based artist Francis Upritchard is
established enough in the UK to be included as a finalist
in the British contemporary art award The 2003 Becks
Future, she also exhibits her work here, where it is
read within particularly local modes of reference. Under
the same rationale, I have also included several artists
who are not of New Zealand citizenship, but who base themselves
here for some of the time. Waroonwan Thongvanit, an artist
based in both Bangkok and Christchurch, makes videos which
chart the unease she often feels as an artist whose home
stretches across two countries.
The younger artists in this exhibition were, like myself,
raised in a particularly fervent time of New Zealand politics
- just children at Springbok marches and CND rallies. Teenage
years spent in the tight grip of new-right policies, de-regulation
de rigour, an art school education notable both for its
post-modern styles of teaching and its ability to generate
us many thousands of dollars of debt before we left our
early twenties. Like me, these artists are largely urban
creatures; clustered around the locust heart of galleries,
movie theatres, long blacks and ready access to broadband.
At the same time, they are probably equally as at home on
marae as they are at a club and as likely to seek corporate
sponsorship to enable them to execute their work as they
are to apply for arts council funding. In addition to being
visual artists, they work variously as designers, stylists,
writers, singers, performers, dancers and educators.
As New Zealand continues the awkward process of becoming
a truly multi-cultural nation, the changing nature of this
wider community has begun to stamp its mark upon the art
world. New voices have made their way into the mix; new
ideas must be considered. This process of change and shift
cannot help but produce a collusion of visual culture which
is rich, complicated and diverse. In addition, after six
years of additional governmental investment into the arts,
New Zealand artists are, if not lavishly flourishing, certainly
operating in an increasingly professionalised environment.
De-regulation of tertiary institutions has seen a major
explosion of art schools and, even more recently, a corresponding
emergence of new commercial and community galleries. An
artist graduating in 2004 from an art school has 'Professional
Practice' classes under their belt; they are prepped and
readied for the 'market', somewhat differently to an artist
graduating in the 1980s.
After the passionate engagement of artists with political
and environmental concerns in 1970s and early 80s addressing
the Springbok tour, the Aramoana Smelter and Nuclear Free
New Zealand; the 1990s saw a shift to a far more insular
approach to art-making. Slowed perhaps by a less fervent
political environment, a desire to make work that was commercially
viable and a growing interest in the kinds of post-modern
debate which favoured irony over earnestness, artists began
to move away from direct political stances in their practice.
Recent years, however, have seen a return to the active
engagement of the 70s and 80s by some artists, albeit in
more subtle and strategic forms. Artists working today are,
by necessity, media savvy, operating in a post Ad Busters
environment, able to insert themselves into a commercial
environment where advertising executives regularly steal
the very strategies of subversion and deconstruction deployed
by artists.
The complexities and concerns reflected in Telecom Prospect
2004 mirror those of a wider New Zealand community.
Threaded within the exhibition are strands of discussion
around the nature of social structures, ownership of the
seabed and foreshore, the fragile state of our environment,
racial tension, sexual and gender politics, the impact of
new technologies, the increasing reliance on drugs in mental
healthcare and the growing commercialisation of both our
film and television industries. This list could seem like
a stern programme for social improvement, were it not for
the warmth and lightness of presentation; a series of topical
concerns presented in user-friendly packages that are as
pleasurable as they are provocative. Telecom Prospect
2004 offers both personal and social realism with a
sassy, sexy gloss. Russell Campbell, writing for the Telecom
Prospect 2004 website about the burgeoning film industry
in New Zealand, comments: 'Our lives are worth digging into,
documenting, telling tales about. That's authenticity and
a refusal of Hollywooden alienation.'[ii]
As with the inaugural Prospect exhibition, the artists
in Telecom Prospect 2004 are not placed in discrete
generational groupings; rather, the senior artists of the
show are shown in dialogue with younger artists with whom
their work has strong links. Homage is, therefore, paid
to the extensive career of Don Driver by placing his art
alongside mid-career artists et al. and Ronnie van Hout
and emerging artist Dan Arps. The mark of Driver's eclecticism
and love of the ready-made registers across generations.
In this way, individual practices are seen in light of a
wider series of circular connections and relationships.
Softly Softly
And let it also be noted that these are somewhat sweeping
generalisations. This is certainly not a watertight manifesto.
A template such as Prospect must be open enough to
accept works which slip outside one's tidy definitions.
The temptation is to write about the show in a way which
presents it as slightly too ordered, like a bundle tied
up with string and labelled 'contemporary'. The intention
with Telecom Prospect 2004 is to respond to the works
themselves by placing them in relevant groupings which acknowledge
the relationships artists and their work engage in, whilst
leaving enough room for each work to breathe, so that, as
curator Francesco Bonami puts it, 'different practices can
share the same skin but not the same focus'.[iii]
To make a show
Lara Strongman described her exhibition Telecom Prospect
2001 as a 'Babel tower of voices'.[iv]
It's a wonderfully apt description of the cacophony that
fills a survey show. At times, the soundtrack involved in
actually creating Telecom Prospect 2004 was as loud
as the eventual show itself; an ongoing series of conversations
between myself, City Gallery Wellington staff, a curatorial
advisory panel, staff from partner venues the Adam Art Gallery
and the New Zealand Film Archive and, of course, the artists
themselves. Telecom Prospect 2004 was designed to
incorporate and feed off a range of voices. Different spaces
accommodate different works, allowing for the presentation
of a physically diverse range of practices, as well as bringing
additional ideas, opinions and experiences into the mix.
The exhibition, as it sprawls across different venues, offers
people the opportunity to experience what curator Hans Ulrich
Obrist calls 'unexpected encounters' with artworks.[v]
Moving across the city, Telecom Prospect 2004 offers
each section as a complete show in itself, yet, at the same
time, each suite also functions as one sentence in a much
larger conversation.
More People Please: City Gallery Wellington's Gallery One
Consider this as the portrait gallery of Telecom Prospect
2004. The works in this gallery span a broad range of
ideas about the body, sexuality and sensuality, beauty,
fashion and desire. There is a narcissistic flavour to some
of these works, a focus on both notions of the self and
the wider role of the artist, while other works refer back
to historical modes of depicting the human body.
Ian Scott is positioned as the godfather of naughty-but-nice
pop, his Playboy pin-ups posing provocatively next
to famous modernist paintings, as though they were selling
us cars in a showroom. A major figure in New Zealand painting
since his early days as one of the few local Pop artists
in the 1960s and, subsequently, his interest in post-modernism
and appropriation, his paintings are stamped with a celebration
of the ordinary and the banal, as well as a wilful pleasure
in the ridiculous. It's the playfulness of the juxtapositions
that Scott makes in his work and his often gleeful humour
as he prods the boundaries of acceptable taste, which sees
Scott taking centre stage in a line-up which is savvy, slick
and assured.
Like Scott, Liz Maw and Scott Eady share an interest in
the representation of the body. Drawing on themes from ancient
mythology, Maw reworks these to create her own stories in
paintings which exude a sleek sensuality. In Honeymoon
on the Pigroot, Eady's ongoing interest in masculinity
and male stereotypes leads him to investigate Dunedin, a
southern city caught between its rural heritage and its
rising reputation as a fashion centre. Eady's work moves
between notions of High Country and High Fashion: his Southern
Man wears a Drizabone, but it's made by fashion designer
Nicholas Blanchet and the horse he leads is an enormous
My Little Pony toy.
Underlying the glossy fun in this gallery, there is a discernible
sense of unease. We hear it in the shrillness of Jacqueline
Fraser's drawings, the high pitched squeals of the society
women whose lifestyles she depicts ('Really, I was a teeny
bit late because my make-up man was useless') and their
inner emptiness implied by the backhanded jab of titling
each of the works after anti-depressant drugs. Similarly,
the cuteness of Peter Robinson's googly-eyed creature is
a bit like Disney-on-acid, a grotesquely funny reminder
of what long-term cigarette use really does to your insides.
A Convulsive Beauty: City Gallery Wellington's Gallery
2
In contrast, Gallery 2 offers a more contemplative realm.
The works selected for this gallery demonstrate an interest
in history, memory, real and imagined places. This is a
space intrigued with beauty, dreaming and the surreal. It's
a space which asks you to take a breath and contemplate.
In stealing the title of this section from André Breton's
famous 1928 quote about Surrealism ('Beauty will be convulsive
or will not be at all'), I am possibly doing the works a
disservice as there is nothing convulsive in these slow-smooth-slippery
surfaces. However, the Surrealist preoccupation with both
the overcharged fetish and the sublime is relevant to the
works in Gallery 2. Their aesthetic of convulsive beauty
transgresses all boundaries of rationality or formal logic,
bringing instead their own winding logic of myth and seduction.
Lonnie Hutchinson's exquisitely crafted wall-mounted sculpture
Sista7 plays off light and shadow in seven cones
constructed from building paper cut into a series of unfurling
koru patterns, referring back to the seven peaks of the
Port Hills in Lyttleton, where the artist is based. Of these
works Hutchinson has said she is 'passionately fortunate
that I make art in such an environment. For me this is a
spiritual journey of returning to the landscape of my tipuna.'[vi]
Peter Madden has also had the scissors out, building an
entire miniature city from pictures carefully cut from the
pages of National Geographic, creating a fantastical
world which unfolds like a paper fan. Maryrose Crook's paintings
each present a mysterious world filled with personal iconography,
rendered with the most intricate detail. Complexly layered,
her symbols and imagery tease us with their implied codes
and elusive beauty. Shigeyuki Kihara could also be seen
as creating new worlds by inserting herself into Samoan
history, reinterpreting myths with herself as the central
character. The dreamy exteriors of her photographs belie
their edgy nature, as Kihara, a 'Fa'fafine' (a Samoan term
which translates most closely as transsexual), continues
to explore issues of identity.
This room may offer time-out for the viewer, but it's not
so much an escape from reality as a hopeful take on what
the world could be. In her sculpture Welcome to Paradise,
Bekah Carran provides a glimpse of nature in the midst of
urban sprawl, drawing on time spent working on a community
art project for psychiatric outpatients. In Carran's own
words, her art provides something 'hopeful and gentle, tinged
with idealism, sentimentality and sadness'.[vii]
To assist the contemplative mood of the piece, she offers
a park bench as an invitation to viewers to sit before the
work and reflect.
On The Run: City Gallery Wellington's Gallery 3
While Gallery 2 may offer utopia, Gallery 3 delves into
more dystopian territory. If there is an idea that binds
the chaotic hubbub of works in this gallery, it is that
they grapple with reality. Located firmly in the everyday,
the works included here take an interest in the wider world
- the environment, social groupings and behaviours, science,
architecture, medicine and the interesting banalities of
real life. Some of these works may seem confrontational,
but they also display a sense of wilful humour in their
dissection of our lives and environments.
Ronnie van Hout continues his interest in a multiplicity
of identities in a major work which offers audiences the
chance to assume the very identity of the artist himself,
becoming one with the work via text messaging and email.
A small shack sits in the gallery, simply built from raw
plywood. The door is open. Once inside the shanty, it becomes
obvious that we are in a prison cell, but the artist, or
prisoner, has escaped his bounds, leaving only a dummy of
himself behind to fool the guard. But the artist keeps mysteriously
reappearing to taunt the guard, leaving a virtual trace
of his whereabouts as he (and gallery visitors on his behalf)
posts regular messages from exotic locales. 'I was attracted
to the idea', says van Hout, 'that it would be possible
for me to interact with the work when I was away from the
gallery. This creates a further depth to the work, increasing
the image of the escaped artist, somewhere in the world,
on the run.'[viii]
Grand and mysterious: the Adam Art Gallery
An architectural feat built to span the space of a stairwell
between buildings, the Adam Art Gallery is not your average
white cube, but a series of unique and original rooms which
flow into one another. Telecom Prospect 2004 at the
Adam Art Gallery places an emphasis on the emotional and
the experiential. Working with the architecture of the space,
the works at the Adam Art Gallery play with scale, running
the gamut from the large epic through to the intimate and
personal. The organic lyricism of Bill Culbert's and Judy
Darragh's sprawling installations engages with the gallery
space itself. Culbert's Tupperware containers and fluorescent
tubes spill over the floor and metal grating, while Darragh's
luridly coloured cobwebs wind their way over gallery windows
and right through one of the walls and out the other side.
In contrast, Francis Upritchard brings the conversation
down a notch, her simple display presenting museology the
DIY way, with hand-made papier maché preserved heads, complete
with false teeth and real hair. Waroonwan Thongvanit's DVD
True Confessions is her ongoing video diary, infused
with all the confessional ethos of reality TV - the work
moves in the ambiguous space between truth and fabrication.
Click Click Beep Beep: the New Zealand Film Archive
The New Zealand Film Archive turns the very notion of the
biennial survey show on its head, offering, in lieu of the
static three month display, four solo artists' projects
during this time frame. This altered structure, as well
as the very nature of the venue - a moving image institution
with exhibition gallery, a cinema, screening rooms and a
24 hour public access outdoor screen - means that the works
at the Archive have been selected for their focus on the
temporal, presenting moving image pieces which are performative
and subject to change.
During the course of his exhibition, VJ Rex will perform
a public gig in the cinema with his collaborators, devising
new sound and visuals which will form the content for the
rest of the exhibition. Much of the footage has been culled
from Western and sci-fi movies - both preoccupied with the
exploration and occupation of so-called uncharted territories,
these two strands of popular culture form an ongoing fascination
for the artist. The sound and visuals generated at these
events then form the content for his ongoing exhibition.
Collaborating with other artists complicates the notion
of exclusivity implied by a survey exhibition. By drawing
in other artists to work with him on this project VJ Rex,
in effect, bends the rules and opens the doors to allow
more artists into the inner sanctum. As he has said, 'making
work collaboratively on one level is a political act and
on other levels it operates to open up the possibilities
of what I can achieve - and most importantly it's fun to
work with other people'.[ix]
Hye Rim Lee's cyborg entity Toki is technology at its most
seductive, a feminine creature who flirts with us within
the boundaries of her electronic construction. In contrast
to this whimsy, Douglas Bagnall's robot has evolved to such
a useful extent that it can actually work as a film-maker;
as Bagnall says 'it makes sense to make a robot that performs
the role of the artist, freeing the artist to dwell on something
else'.[x]
Glide time: Massey University's Great Hall
The day after being offered the chance to curate Telecom
Prospect 2004, I was on a plane headed for San Francisco
for two months work. During my time away, I received an
enthusiastic email about a new work by Maddie Leach. An
actual working ice rink, read the email, 18 metres long
and able to be skated on... Far away from the ice chill
of a New Zealand winter, without seeing a photograph, without
knowing more, I immediately began to locate this work as
a centrepiece for Telecom Prospect 2004. A major
piece in physical scale and conceptual scope, The Ice
Rink functions both as an aesthetically beautiful artwork,
and, at the same time, as a community project - in a sense
a gift from artist to gallery visitors.
Activated when audience members don skating boots and glide
(or more often stumble) up and down the ice, the gallery
is transformed into an inclusive zone for recreation. Placed
in Massey University's Great Hall, a vast space loaded with
the memory of its former existence as the central core of
the original Museum of New Zealand, the grandiosity of the
building is softened by playful occupation. Bringing into
the art gallery the rules and procedures for an entirely
different realm of social interaction, Leach's project,
in the words of arts writer Christina Barton, 'explores
the nature of contemporary experience as it is played out
in the arenas of public life'.[xi]
Welcome In
This brings me back to the phrase 'Welcome In', with all
its implications of invitation and participation. This is
the crux of the Prospect series, its very impetus:
to open up a discussion around contemporary art to wider
audiences. Over time, the ongoing Prospect series
will become a kind of barometer - of taste, ideas, perspectives
- what people were doing and thinking and wondering. Quirky,
eclectic and opinionated, Telecom Prospect 2004 provides
a platform for a generous range of voices to be heard, celebrating
the sometimes messy hybridity of these times.
NOTES
i Mark Amery, ‘Tauiwi [1]’,
Techno Maori: Maori Art in the Digital Age, (CDRom
exhibition catalogue), Wellington: City Gallery Wellington
and Pataka Porirua Museum of Arts and Cultures, 2001, p.3.
ii Russell Campbell, ‘Viewpoints’,
Telecom Prospect 2004: New Art New Zealand website:
http://www.telecomprospect2004.org.nz
iii Francesco Bonami, cited in. ‘Global
Tendencies: Globalism and the Large-Scale Exhibition’,
Artforum XLII, No.3, November 2003, p.157.
iv Lara Strongman, ‘Curatorial Statement’,
Telecom Prospect 2001: New Art New Zealand website:
http://www.prospect2001.org.nz/cgi-bin/index.pl
v Hans-Ulrich Obrist, cited in Tony Bond,
‘Biennales Strategies. The Theme or the Curatorial
Strategy?,’ available online at http://home.iprimus.com.au/painless/street/tony.htm
vi Quoted in Felicity Milburn, ‘Lonnie
Hutchinson’, Te Puawai o Ngai Tahu, Christchurch:
Christchurch Art Gallery, 2003, p.56.
vii Bekah Carran, personal communication
to the author, 2004.
viii Ronnie van Hout, personal communication
to the author, 2003.
ix Emma Bugden & Eugene Hansen, Port
Replicator, Wellington: Michael Hirschfeld Gallery,
2003, available online at http://www.city-gallery.org.nz/mainsite/InterviewwithEugeneHansen.html
x Douglas Bagnall, personal communication
to the author, 2003.
xi Christina Barton, ‘Out of the
Deep’, Gallery Six: The Ice Rink and The Lilac
Ship, Hamilton: Waikato Museum of Art & History,
2003.
© City Gallery Wellington and the author,
2004.
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