Untitled - Artspace

Billy Apple ,
Art & Language,
Bruce Barber,
Ayşe Erkmen, Natalia LL,
Len Lye, John Miller,
Yoko Ono, Martha Rosler,
Law
Lawrence
Weiner,
Stephen Willats
A sceptical approach to exhibition making
IMAGINARY
AUDIENCE
SCALE
March 27 - May 23
Level 1/300 Karangahape Road
Newton, Auckland, Aotearoa NZ
Tuesday – Friday 10am – 6pm
Saturdays 11am – 4pm
FREE ENTRY
Please note: this exhibition contains
content which is not suitable
for a younger audience
For more information and events
calendar: www.artspace.org.nz
1.
8.
1982, videotape converted to digital video, 25:21
min. Courtesy of the artist.
9.
10.
8.
3.
5.
4.
2.
1.
1.
6.
1.
7.
Billy Apple®
1. Posterior, 1963, offset photo-lithography on canvas.
Billy Apple® Wall (Red) for Artspace, 2015, painted
wall.
SUCK, 1961/2014, automotive paint on steel tubing
Body Works, NYC, 1965, silver bromide emulsion on
Argenta photo-linen.
Banana Split, 1962, bronze and painted wood.
Courtesy of the artist & Starkwhite.
Yoko Ono
2. Film No. 4 (Bottoms), 1966, Fluxfilm version, 16mm
film converted to digital video, 5:30 min. Courtesy of
the Yoko Ono Collection, © Yoko Ono.
John Miller
3. Polynesian Panthers protest, 1972, digital
photographic print. Will ‘Ilolahia (Polynesian
Panther leader) in foreground, Patrick Te Hamara
(Ngā Tamatoa member) pictured far right.
Protest outside the Paremoremo Maximum Security
Prison, Albany, 1973, digital photographic print. Will
‘Ilolahia (Polynesian Panther leader) on loud hailer,
following right to left; Roger Fowler (Ponsonby
People’s Union); Miriama Rauhiri; Elaine ‘Ilolahia
and Paddy Minola (Polynesian Panther members)
and Brian/ Morehu McDonald (Te Huinga Rangatahi
o Aotearoa).
New Lynn Shopping Mall dance hall protest, 1973,
digital photographic print. Courtesy of the artist.
Behind placard left to right: Hana Jackson/ Te
Hemara (Ngā Tamatoa member), Brian/ Morehu
McDonald (Te Huinga Rangatahi o Aotearoa), Andre
Raihman (Socialist Action League) and “Snow” Parr
(Ngā Tamatoa member) seated centre with guitar.
Martha Rosler
4. Martha Rosler Reads Vogue: Wishing Dreaming,
Winning, Spending (with Paper Tiger Television),
11.
Art & Language
5. Terry Smith for Art & Language (P), Cur, Piggy,
Prefect poster, 1976, silkscreen on paper, designed
with the assistance of Chips MacInolty.
Terry Smith for Art & Language (P), Cur, Piggy,
Prefect poster, 1976, silkscreen on paper, designed
with the assistance of Chips MacInolty. Censored
version. Courtesy of Terry Smith.
Archival press material courtesy of Auckland Art
Gallery Toi o Tāmaki and the E H McCormick
Research Library.
Natalia LL
6. Consumer art, 1972-74, 16 mm film converted to
digital video, 16:01 min. Courtesy of the artist and
lokal_30 gallery, Warsaw.
Stephen Willats
7. Wall Drawing, Homeostat Drawing No 1, 1969,
pencil on wall, size variable, 2015. Courtesy of the
artist.
Bruce Barber
8. UD,UDS (urine dispersal/urine dispersal stasis) An
exercise in myth formation, 1972, DVD NTSC dub
from Super 8 mm film, 12 min, camera P.C.I.F.Co Adrian Hall and limited edition artist book.
Whittler’s Soliloquies, 1974/1976, a collaboration
between Billy Apple and Bruce Barber.
Statement Concerning a Drawing, 1975, On the
collaboration between Billy Apple and Bruce Barber.
Courtesy of the artist.
Len Lye
9. Untitled Sketchbook, 1924, pencil, ink and gauche
on paper, 230 x 360 mm converted to digital images.
Courtesy of the Len Lye Foundation Collection,
Govett-Brewster Art Gallery.
Ayşe Erkmen
10. Coffee, 2006, digital video, 25:18 min. Courtesy of
the artist and Galerie Barbara Weiss, Berlin.
Lawrence Weiner
11. AS FAR AS THE EYE CAN SEE, 2015, LANGUAGE
+ THE MATERIALS REFERRED TO. Courtesy of
the artist and Marian Goodman, New York.
Billy Apple®
Installation view, centered around SUCK by Billy
Apple®, 1961/2014. Courtesy of the artist,
Starkwhite and Artspace.
A psychology test from the late 60s becomes a research tool to unfold an
exhibition form. Social science perspectives combine with art languages,
through a map of pioneering conceptual artists. The exhibition entitled
IMAGINARY AUDIENCE SCALE brings together diverse artistic strategies
for abstracting, conceptualising, documenting, editing, and rendering, to foster
critical perspectives on developing audiences.
The test Imaginary Audience Scale (IAS) assesses subjects’ willingness, to
believe that they are under constant, close observation by peers, family, and
strangers. Playing with these associations of human development, mostly
identified in adolescent behaviour, this exhibition departs from the perception
of being continuously followed, observed and watched by others. The research
process clearly decodes the links between artistic practices that have dealt
conceptually with body, identity and politics as well as their innovative
strategies of communicating with their audience. Focusing on some key
historical points of view, the exhibition defines a sceptical filter through which
to speculate on how conceptual thinking and the development of audiences
share similar roots.
The installation brings together various forms of gestures, linguistic
expressions, mimicry, conversations and dialogues which focus on leading
conceptual proposals that deal with self-perception, conception of body and
language of expression. The works include specific examples of how artists
define their position, relate to their community, and to the presence of their
audience.
As an experiment in method, the exhibition process includes a specific spatial
transition from a solo presentation into a group exhibition. The initial iteration
of the exhibition at Artspace, a solo presentation by Billy Apple® of works from
the 1960s entitled SUCK, will remain for the second iteration, but move into
another structure. The pieces in SUCK are unexpected early experiments from
the artistic practice that has moved to the carefully defined Billy Apple® brand
of today. This exhibition will also celebrate Billy Apple®’s new architectural
intervention, which will abstract the next three years of institutional
programming, in collaboration with the curatorial team, with RGB colour
space; red, green and blue. It reflexively engages with the gallery architecture,
specifically the wall measurements, creating an open discussion around
exhibition making and institutional space.
IMAGINARY AUDIENCE SCALE seeks out a critical review of how the
transformative role of audience is problematised through selected works,
varying from research material to experimental forms. The proposed framework
intends to alternate retrospective looks and analytical readings of an ideal
viewer, a potential audience or target group; whom we communicate, though
which tone we speak and what (art) language(s) we use.
Artspace is an intersection between contemporary art practices, exhibition
making and critical thinking in Auckland, New Zealand bridging the universal
with the contextual. As an independent art institution, Artspace receives
generous core funding from Creative New Zealand, and is kindly supported by
ASB Community Trust, Dame Jenny Gibbs, Chartwell Trust, Artist Alliance as
well as the ARTSPACE Benefactors Programme+. This Autumn programme at
Artspace is part of the Auckland Arts Festival, and the exhibitions run parallel
to the retrospective Billy Apple®: The Artist Has To Live Like Everybody Else at
Auckland Art Gallery Toi o Tāmaki.
Public
Programme
April 1, 2015, 6pm
#ReadwithArtspace presents a conversation with Dr Lucille
Holmes, the University of Auckland. The reading club
#ReadwithArtspace initiates exercises, ideas and thoughts on
reading and writing today.
May 28, 2015, 6pm
Finissage: Screening Audience Shocking Moments of NZ
In collaboration with Ngā Taonga Sound and Vision
The works from Billy Apple® in this exhibition were produced during the 60s.
The pieces are powerfully evocative of a reflexive relationship with time, which
is retrospectively evolving. This retrospectively evolving relationship with the
perception of time is also engaged with an art historical need to re-consider
these works, bringing a contextual shift in the abstraction of the exhibition
venue.
The works have been shown within a solo presentation that has also promised
a group show, and are now displayed in another setting – moving in between
black and white walls, in relation to the other pieces in the show, in close
relationships with some pieces from Yoko Ono, Bruce Barber or Natalia LL
sharing a beautiful feeling of zeitgeist.
Billy
®
Apple
Experimentally speaking, the photographic prints - black and white, sexually
explicit - touch on many historical references, from Man Ray to Mapplethorpe,
and as a cinematic approach, a sort of conceptual play with the abstraction
of the pornographic eye, it forms a direct link with the address of Artspace.
Karangahape Road comes in to focus as a perpetually youthful, never-aging
adolescent of Auckland: a still-not-clean enough environment where the dark,
drag, druggy, uncanny and queer actors of Auckland’s night life, sex industry
and entertainment cultures have a home.
Apple® restaged these photographs from a private collection in Greenwich,
which still stays as a secret. The bodies are anonymous, their faces are cut off
and there is only nudity abstracted through the male body as a reflection of our
object of desire. They are not post gender, maybe body art, but still Apple®
works.
Typographically sculptural or sculpturally typographic, the installation located
in the middle of the gallery, rotating through the exhibition programme, is
based on four letters, S-U-C-K, which are a direct reference to psychoanalytical
thinking; a reminder of the oral stage of development where one needs to suck
in order to live, grow, and survive. Another “art object” is a form of a banana
made of bronze.
The works strongly create a space for the combination of the “Swinging
Sixties”, the cultural period of the production of the work, and the epoch we find
ourselves in today, a time and place perhaps best described as the ‘browsing two
thousands’. This action encompasses the blurred movements and negotiations
we experience today between social and cultural territories. It is still about this
economy of attention, or politics of desire regarding the everyday circulation of
male bodies; men on the street, men in the closet, and men on Grindr.
MAY
Billy Apple®
Installation view, Posterior, 1963, offset
photo-lithography on canvas, 380 x 380 mm.
Exactly a week before the opening night of IMAGINARY AUDIENCE SCALE,
news started coming in that Malcolm Fraser had died. Fraser—the “Prefect” of
these posters and the former Prime Minister of Australia—was the last surviving
member of Art & Language’s Piggy/Cur/Prefect trifecta. Cur—Australia’s
former Governor-General John Kerr, remembered for his 1975 dismissal of
Gough Whitlam’s Labor government, which installed Fraser as PM—died
in 1991; Piggy—New Zealand’s former National Prime Minister, Robert
Muldoon—died in 1992. For Terry Smith, the Australian organiser of the show,
these political figures embodied a mid-1970s trans-Tasman turn to the right. The
posters themselves were to be used as publicity outside the gallery and hung
inside it, as part of an installation that included walls of newspaper clippings,
a library of Art & Language’s past work, and a series of discussions open to
members of the public.
//
“Three words on posters advertising a political art exhibition at the City Gallery have
been censored by the Mayor, Sir Dove-Myer Robinson. The words are ‘cur, piggy, and
prefect’, the title of the exhibition.” (Auckland Star, front page, 6 August 1975)
The circulation of the censored posters in the media produced the delicious
impression that the exhibition itself was only completed—the mysterious,
blotted-out slurs only revealed—in the forum of the media itself.
//
“I installed three displays of newspaper posters, one along each wall of the gallery.…
Each of these, but particularly the latter [“The Story of Piggy, Cur and the Prefect”],
was conceived as a ta tze pao, a wall newspaper on the model of the Democracy Wall in
China, to which anyone could add their views. Some did.” (Terry Smith, Now See Hear!)
As the news of Fraser’s death flooded social media, my Facebook wall lit up
with the mixed feelings of my parents’ generation, for whom Fraser had, over
the years, morphed improbably from the reviled Prefect of the 1970s into a kind
of hero, the last “small-l liberal” of the Howard years (1996-2007). One 1970s
activist reminisced: “‘Export Fraser, not uranium’, we were wont to chant. And
yet Malcolm ended up left of Labor on several fronts.” My father lamented: “Oh
Mal – didn’t think I would miss you – but I will.”
//
“Sir Dove-Myer said the words would not be censored in the exhibition ‘because in the
gallery they are in quotation marks.’” (Auckland Star, 6 August 1975)
On 27 March 2015, as Artspace launches IMAGINARY AUDIENCE SCALE
in Auckland, Australia will be holding a state funeral for Malcolm Fraser in
Melbourne. The coincidence sets Art & Language’s posters down in the midst
of a new trans-Tasman conversation about the political legacies of the 1970s in
the context of our own turn to the right. Setting the original posters alongside
documents from the Auckland Art Gallery’s research library, Artspace examines
how Art & Language’s political intervention has been memorialised in the
archive. If the original 1976 exhibition strained against the “quotation marks”
that neutralised political speech within the gallery, in 2015 the conversation
between the gallery and its outside has developed a temporal dimension, as the
once-new audiences of Conceptual Art’s first wave become historical, and the
political conversations they generated become inter-generational.
AM
Art &
Language
Art &
Language
Art & Language
Installation view, Terry Smith for Art & Language
(P), Cur, Piggy, Prefect poster, 1976, silkscreen
on paper, designed with the assistance of Chips
MacInolty.
Terry Smith for Art & Language (P), Cur,
Piggy, Prefect poster, 1976, silkscreen on paper,
designed with the assistance of Chips MacInolty.
Censored version. Courtesy of Terry Smith.
Art & Language
Back: Installation view, Terry Smith for Art &
Language (P), Cur, Piggy, Prefect poster, 1976,
silkscreen on paper, designed with the assistance
of Chips MacInolty.
Archival press material courtesy of Auckland Art
Gallery Toi o Tāmaki and the E H McCormick
Research Library.
Billy Apple®
Front: Installation view, Banana Split, 1962,
bronze and painted wood. Courtesy of the artist &
Starkwhite
At the foot of Rangitoto’s extinct volcano was once a bronze plaque that
read ‘Urine Dispersal Stasis.’ Buried beneath it were five test tubes filled
with samples of Bruce Barber’s urine. Encased in concrete, they marked
the culmination of the artist’s performance UD,UDS (urine dispersal/urine
dispersal stasis). Barber collected his urine for a week and split it into two sets
of five test tubes; five were tossed into the sea during a boat trip from Auckland
City to Rangitoto Island and the other five were sealed in the ground. The
plaque on Rangitoto is now long gone and two of the test tubes were ruptured
after it was removed, leaving only three embedded in the concrete adhered to
the lava rock that makes up the geology of the island. The video and facsimiles
of Barber’s documentary book presented here are all that really remains of the
artist’s action.
Bruce
Barber
Rangitoto erupted about 550- 600 years ago, although it may have been erupting
for longer than we can know. The volcano is now extinct and is an obvious and
fitting choice of resting place for the ‘stasis’ samples. While the volcano is not
expected to become active again, future eruptions are likely within the Auckland
volcanic field. Bruce Barber’s work explores the radical potentiality of
performance. His work often takes the form of an intervention into the ordinary,
sometimes resulting in a ‘gift’ that is not required to be reciporocated and that
might be an alternative to money or power. There is a design in his practice
to rupture and awaken, as if we were drowsy, in a deep sleep like a dormant
volcano.
Unlike similar works in this exhibition Barber’s approach to body-based
explorations have a pseudo-scientific quality. But the combination of the
mundane urine sample and the mystical journey to Rangitoto compute into an
action that is a strange mixture of science and magic, of human and nature.
UD,UDS explores human relationships to land, a line of inquiry important to
artists working in the period when the piece was made. After much conservation
work Rangitoto is today considered pest free and a sanctuary for endemic
wildlife. Barber’s exercise in myth making is missing from this place and
perhaps it’s only residue, in this book, on this screen is fittingly so.
HD
Bruce Barber
Installation view, UD/UDS Urine Dispersal,
Urine Dispersal Stasis: An Exercise in Myth
Formation, 1972, limited edition artist book.
UD/UDS Urine Dispersal, Urine Dispersal
Stasis: An Exercise in Myth Formation, 1972,
DVD NTSC dub from Super 8mm film, 12 min,
camera P.C.I.F.Co - Adrian Hall and limited
edition artist book.
Istanbul-Berlin based artist Ayşe Erkmen’s work is not poetical itself as an
artistic promise, nevertheless it is based on a certain quality of abstraction of
location, a sense of materiality and mathematics of aesthetics; by coincidence,
all define poetry in a shortcut. Some of her works stand on strong artistic
intuition, research methodology, and site-specificity whereas contextuality
unfolds their conception. Mostly they depart from a location, site, feeling, a
form of physicality, a ritual or a material.
One of her experimental film works, Coffee portrays a common Istanbuloise
custom, coffee ground reading as a way of fortune telling. The reader is in the
center, and we witness the whole session through a third camera angle, which is
mostly located close to the artist’s perspective excepts few moments of gaze on
the dog. They talk about what is happening at the time, what could happen in the
near future, and what happens in life on the basis of what the reader associates
with the traces of the coffee ground, or what is left and dried in the cup after
the coffee is consumed. It is a kind of psychological interpretation or free
association of things, like a Rorschach Test without any rational measure scale.
Ayşe
Erkmen
Brought to Old Constantinople in 1555 by two Syrian traders as “milk of chess
players and thinkers”, coffee became immediately popular, and stayed part of
the traditional culture including state court and palace ceremonies. It is still
common that Turks say ‘to drink one cup of coffee together brings an intimacy
that can establish a life long friendship’. The tradition states that after the
hot coffee being consumed, the cup is turned upside down on the saucer and
allowed to cool, the ground reading is then performed, a sort of fortune reading
from the coffee grounds remaining in the cup.
Ayşe Erkmen’s Coffee brings us a term that is used when Fredric Jameson
described pastiche as blank parody1 (Jameson, 1991), especially with reference
to the post-modern parodist practices of self-reflexivity and inter-textuality.
Rather than being a jocular but still respectful imitation of another style,
pastiche in the postmodern era has become a “dead language”, without any
political or historical content, and so has also become unable to satirize in any
effective way. Whereas pastiche used to be a humorous literary style, it has, in
postmodernism, become devoid of laughter.
Through her analytical, rational and critical approach to such a custom,
considering especially her comments, Erkmen stages, performs and softly
directs a conceptual set up, which decodes how culture shapes gaze, theory of
others, and self awareness.
Jameson, Fredric (1991). Postmodernism, or, the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism.
Durham: Duke University Press.
1
MAY
Ayşe Erkmen
Installation view, Coffee, 2006, digital video,
25:18 min. Courtesy of the artist and Galerie
Barbara Weiss, Berlin.
The heroes of pop art are mostly all men. And the content of pop art of the
sixties and seventies is mostly that of women; their faces and bodies, their
material possessions. The story of western art history has always gazed upon
and appropriated women: as objects of desire and ridicule, as objects deserving
of violence. In Natalia LL’s Consumer Art, female models delight in licking,
sucking and eating food items, literally consuming the objects of pop art’s
gaze as active performers. In this piece Natalia LL and by proxy, a female
subjectivity, take ownership of desire and pleasure. Men in this equation
are reduced to crude signs of the penis; a banana, a sausage. The women
in Consumer Art mock male fantasies of pornographic oral sex; their eyes
aghast in slapstick surprise at the girth of a frankfurter. The video consists
of repeated sequences that create a loop in which the gaze the artist parodies
loses any eroticism and becomes ridiculous. Consumer Art has relevance today
amidst concerns that increasing numbers of teenagers (and other people) are
learning how to have sex from watching hardcore internet porn. Consumer Art
revels in lived, experiential sensuality while at the same time critiquing the
pornographer’s gaze. And the money shot? Natalia LL has no need for a man.
Consuming mouthfuls of ice cream she lets the melting white ooze run back out
her mouth and down her face, grinning, slurping, drooling.
Natalia
LL
HD
Natalia LL
Consumer art, 1972-74, 16 mm film converted
to digital video, 16:01 min. Courtesy of the artist
and lokal_30 gallery, Warsaw.
IMAGINARY AUDIENCE SCALE
installation view, Artspace New Zealand.
Whilst studying in the Wellington Public Library Len Lye made sketches of
decade old works by French sculptor Henri Gaudier-Brzeska. The detailed
drawings were accompanied by Lye’s transcription of a manifesto written as part
of the London-based, anarchistic and artistic movement known as Vorticism.
Gaudier-Breska asserted that only so-called primitive sculptors created art with
‘intensity,’ a ‘direct energy’ and a true ‘feeling for form.’1 The manifesto Lye
copied out tells an erroneous and prejudiced developmental story that spans
the birth of civilisation to the modern sculptors of the avant-garde. From ‘an
intensity of existence that reveals to man a truth of form’ to a modern ‘mastery
of the elements’ where sculptors such as Gaudier-Brzeska ‘have made a
combination of all the possible shaped masses, concentrating them to express
[an] abstract thought of conscious superiority.’ At the end of the manifesto Lye
then notes to himself: ‘Since then psychoanalysts have shown a new path to
follow.’
The same notebook contains reading notes Lye made whilst reading the 1913
publication Totem and Taboo, in which psychoanalyst Sigmund Freud reveals
points of correspondence between a warped ‘psychology of primitive races’ with
that of modern neurotics utilising nineteenth century so-called ethnographic
research as mode with which to conceptualise subconscious structures, relations,
prohibitions, beliefs and drives. Lye himself notes: ‘primitive mechanisms’
of ‘projecting inner perceptions to the outside;’ the power of association;
‘contagious magic’ and animism or a belief in the souls of things.
The illustrations in Lye’s notebooks are deft renderings of artworks from a wide
range of indigenous cultures. The majority of these are figures and particular
attention is paid to their augmentation, attenuation and postures, as Lye tracks
these in first pencil then ink. Using mostly blue, red and brown gouache he
then experiments with faceting, the fall of light, different profiles and angles. In
documenting these objects Lye literally moves them around his page, probing
their forms from multiple perspectives. Many of the sculptural forms are taken
from New Zealand Maori art, indeed examples of these in the national museums
of both Paris and London were inspiration for much of Gaudier-Brzeska’s
sculpture too. Both artists would have felt they were gazing backwards in time,
patronising and salvaging remnants of visual cultures they believed to be either
extinct or in decline. From the imperialist repositories of imperial plundered
goods and knowledge, Gaudier-Brezeska and Lye paid particular attention to
the tilted heads, their heart-shaped tongues, peaked foreheads, angular limbs,
exaggerated knees and elbows as well as three fingered hands found in Maori
pendant forms, lintels, gateways, and architectural supports.
Such visual research into the art history of New Zealand and further afield
was part of Lye’s constant search for certain forms and energies that he might
feed into his own practice. Often sleeping with such images under his pillow,
Lye also practiced automatic drawing and doodling in search of pre-conscious
concepts and images that might ‘twang the chromosomes.’2 For Lye, an old
brain was a repository for information that could date back to time immemorial
where a myriad of forms, structures, processes and events could be found.
Lye’s yearning to connect with old-brain inspiration did not stop at the forms
of indigenous art, it stretched backwards to flashes of childhood memories: the
sight of marine life in rockpools; a baby rabbit thrown into the sunshine; a wink
of light reflecting off a kicked tin-can. A primitivism of self, or a primitivism
that is cosmological - stretching further and further, both temporally and
spatially Lye also found inspiration in forms that were microscopic, sub-atomic,
even cosmic.
1
Mark Antliff Sculptural Nominalism / Anarchistic Vortex: Henri Gaudier-Brzeska,
Dora Marsden and Ezra Pound in Mark Antliff and Vivien Greene (eds.) The Vorticists:
Manifesto for a Modern World. (London: Tate Publishing, 2010) 56.
2
Len Lye: A Personal Mythology (Auckland: Auckland City Art Gallery, 1980) 14-23.
VWJ
Len Lye
Len Lye
Len Lye
Untitled Sketchbook, 1924, pencil, ink and gauche
on paper, 230 x 360 mm converted to digital
images. Courtesy of the Len Lye Foundation
Collection, Govett-Brewster Art Gallery.
Installation view, Untitled Sketchbook, 1924,
pencil, ink and gauche on paper, 230 x 360 mm
converted to digital images. Courtesy of the Len
Lye Foundation Collection, Govett-Brewster Art
Gallery.
Forty-three years ago when it wasn’t possible to take a photograph on your
mobile phone, upload it to Facebook, Twitter and Instagram letting the world
know what you had for breakfast, twenty two year old John Miller was
documenting left wing activists and protests against oppression in New Zealand.
Miller’s black and white analogue photographs depict The Polynesian Panther
Party marching and demonstrating their frustrations about the political
landscape of the 1970s, ready for social change and fed up with institutional and
subtle racism towards Pacific Islanders. The photographs exude determination
and angst, a stark contrast to the saturated and smiling photographs usually
associated with the term Polynesia today.
John
Miller
In the two Lynn Mall Dance Hall protest photographs Miller has captured
the diverse community of youth from inside the gathering and out. From the
outside looking in, the mass group could look potentially threatening as a young
head hunter and storm trooper parole the outskirts. In another photograph the
source of the protest is revealed through signage. On the bottom left a sign that
originally read End Police Racism Against Polynesians but was changed to End
Polite Racism Against Polynesians leads you into the crowd. The young faces
are not threatening at all from the inside especially with a toddler in the center
of it all.
“street or dancehall? You choose!!”
It seems extreme in today’s society to protest against the closure of a dance
hall, more than likely another would pop up, perhaps just more expensive and
rebranded to cater to the masses. IMAGINARY AUDIENCE SCALE talks about
the public self-consciousness that is associated with adolescence. Miller’s
photographs represent a generation of teenagers that where fighting for equal
rights. How do you initiate change if you wont speak about the problems? When
do you speak out?
“right now while you a teenager, while you still strong or while you still wanna lift
weights, while you still wanna shoot back. Cause once you turn 30 it’s like they take the
heart and soul out of a man.. and you don’t wana fight no more” (2pac).
Looking at John Miller’s images we glimpse an important story about
multiculturalism in New Zealand, our own history not taught in mainstream
schools but integral to understanding where we have come from. Where we are
now and where do we go from here?
LA
John Miller
Polynesian Panthers protest, 1972, digital
photographic print. Courtesy of the artist.
Some thoughts on Yoko Ono’s Film No. 4 (Bottoms) 1966
1. A gentle transgression, softness, something a little bit naughty.
2. Stripping everything right back. Your birthday suit.
3. Recently, Yoko Ono reflected that early on in her career ‘ideas came to me
like I was tuning into some radio from the sky.’ 1
4. Alternatively titled ‘Four.’ A series of bottoms filmed in extreme close up so
that the clefts and creases of flesh divide the screen into quarters. Bottoms that
have been geometricised and abstracted. Bottoms and upper thighs as the seams
of the body.
5. Strolling, walking on the spot, marching, a comical tattoo, keeping time.
6. A movement study, an exercise, like those of Eadweard Muybridge (18301904) except from the back. A third-person perspective.
7. Difference and repetition. Taut, firm, flabby. Freckles, hairs, moles, wrinkles,
folds of flesh, dimples.
8. Nudity as protest. Naked youngsters strolling hand in hand with flowers
in San Francisco during what is known as ‘summer of love’ in 1967. MAKE
LOVE NOT WAR! The album cover of Two Virgins (1968).
9. Bottoms and buttocks. Singular or plural? Together and apart.
10. The joy when you quickly peel your clothes off, laughing with friends at the
moment when you all decide to swim naked in the sea (usually at night). For
a spell all you can see of them is their sun-deprived buttocks flickering as they
splash through the waves.
11. The inclusion of this film is a cheeky curatorial decision, a mirroring of Billy
Apple’s Posterior, 1963.
12. A kind of mirror? Lacan? You can’t ever really see your own bottom, it is
somewhat unknowable. You probably know your lover’s or your child’s bottom
better than your own.
13. Jen Selter, Bart Simpson and the art of photographing your own butt.
14. When art historian Mignon Nixon saw this film screened at London’s South
Bank in 1998 she witnessed a small band of young children touching the projection, mimicking it, marching in time with the images. One little girl took this a
step further, slipping off her tights and ‘mooning the museum’ as Nixon put it.2
15. An absurd sort of portraiture, this film features the buttocks of: Susannah
Campbell, Philip Corner, Anthony Cox, Bici Hendricks, Geoffrey Hendricks,
Kyoko Ono, Yoko Ono, Ben Patterson, Jeff Perkins, Susan Poland, Jerry Sablo,
Carolee Schneeman, James Tenney, Pieter Vanderbeck and Verne Williams.
16. The anonymity of bottoms, whose is whose?
Yoko
Ono
Hans Ulrich Obrist, The conversation series, Number 17 - Yoko Ono (Köln: Verlag der
Buchhandlung Walther König, 2009), p. 10.
2
Mignon Nixon, After Images, October, Vol. 83 (Winter, 1998), pp. 114-130.
1
VWJ
Yoko Ono
Film No. 4 (Bottoms), 1966, Fluxfilm version,
16mm film converted to digital video, 5:30 min.
Courtesy of the Yoko Ono Collection,
© Yoko Ono.
what is vogue? what is fashion?
These are the first incantations we hear from Martha Rosler’s distinctive
Brooklyn accent.
it is glamour, it is excitement, romance, drama, wishing, dreaming, winning,
success
Her voice has an intonation that is neutral but somehow manages to
communicate a critical distance. It is a specific voice: “The voice of a specific
person who grew up in a specific time, place and social class.” 1
what is vogue?
In Martha Rosler Reads Vogue: Wishing, Dreaming, Winning the artist performs
for a segment of the subversive New York public-access cable program, Paper
Tiger Television. Rosler recites a poetic monologue as she thumbs through
the luxury magazine Vogue. Her fingers trace the outlines of models, linger on
pouted lips and seem to read a secret code embossed on the glossy pages.
What is vogue? it is luxury, it is allure, mystery, romance, excitement, love,
splendour, it is fashion, it is clothes, exercise, diet, accessories, it is loving
and losing, loving and winning, it is career, it is travel, it is knowing how and
knowing who and knowing when
In Rosler’s repetitive, lyrical prose, she identifies Vogue as an addictive, desiregenerating machine, aimed particularly at women. A publication for those who
identify with their ‘social betters.’ Her words seem to shift between vacancy and
criticism, or rather, they are made of “a potent mix of rage and ambivalence”.2
Rosler’s spoken text breaks into sections, each punctuated by her poetic
overture. Some appear to be directly quoted from the magazine; a photo-essay
detailing Cy Twombly’s ‘stark and luscious… summer house in the Italian
country side,’ and an interview with American novelist Judith Krantz. Other
‘readings’ take on issues that Vogue would seemingly not publish; statistics
detailing the magazine’s corporate ownership and a woman’s confessions of her
relationship with Condé Nast, the millionaire businessman who transformed
Vogue from a small society magazine into an international franchise and who
had ‘a smile that seemed like a gleam of wintery sunshine on the brass handles
of a coffin.’
Rosler’ balances this dark humour with the pedagogical aesthetic of the
slideshow through which she reams off more and more images culled from
Vogue. Rosler’s critical reading opens further when the piece moves into footage
of a garment factory and the screen is overlaid with information detailing the
realities of production in the fashion industry, facts that have become far more
gruesome, and far more common knowledge, today. But Rosler’s work is never
quite that didactic, although it always reminds us, especially those of us who
work in the culture industries, that we are complicit with capital. As workers
toil at sewing machines and industrial steamers, Blondie’s Die Young and Stay
Pretty belts out, the scene warped into some kind of bizarre music video. The
inability to reconcile our knowledge with our desires echoes through Rosler’s
repeated refrain, layered over top of this strange montage: It’s about having it
all, all, ALL.
Laura Cottingham Crossing Borders: Martha Rosler Frieze. Issue 13, NovemberDecember 1993.
2
Ariella Budick, A Pure Artist Is Embraced by the Art World, Newsday, July 21, 2000.
1
HD
Martha
Rosler
Martha
Rosler
Martha Rosler
Martha Rosler Reads Vogue:
Wishing Dreaming, Winning,
Spending (with Paper Tiger
Television), 1982, (Stills), videotape
converted to digital video, 25:21
min. Courtesy of the artist.
Installation view, Martha Rosler Reads Vogue:
Wishing Dreaming, Winning, Spending (with
Paper Tiger Television), 1982, videotape
converted to digital video, 25:21 min. Courtesy of
the artist.
The text works from Lawrence Weiner with their powerful, old-school,
bold, colourful and poetically vicious typographic impact on the perception
of audience have appeared all around the world from 1960s up until today
redefining many aspects of conceptual thinking.
Weiner always positions himself as a sculptor first, and then defines his medium
as ‘language and the material referred to’ referring to the linguistic experience as
a form of materiality.
His artist book Statements (1968) contains 24 typewritten descriptions of works,
where only a few had actually been made, suggesting that a work’s existence
requires a readership rather than a physical presence. Weiner’s Statement of
Intent (1969) even more clearly identifies ‘universal availability’ as a guiding
principle:
Lawrence
Weiner
1. The artist may construct the piece.
2. The piece may be fabricated.
3. The piece need not be built.
Weiner’s practice has been developed through a critical perspective on public
access, and artistic imagination. The New York based self-taught artist talks
about origins of his artistic imagination remembering his earlier memories in
South Bronx: “I didn’t have the advantage of a middle-class perspective. Art
was something else; art was the notations on the wall, or the messages left by
other people. I grew up in a city where I had read the walls; I still read the walls.
I love to put work of mine out on the walls and let people read it. Some will
remember it and then somebody else comes along and puts something else over
it. It becomes archaeology rather than history.” 1
His contribution to this exhibition has been formed through a playful
conversation with the artist reconsidering an application of an earlier work,
which titled a retrospective and a publication by itself, into an outdoor piece
at the car park of Artspace. The staff who work at the office, neighbours, and
drivers who pass by the location everyday will experience fragmented moments
of this piece at different times of the day, and will inevitably remember again
and again, whatever in their head is AS FAR AS THE EYE CAN SEE.
1
http://www.lissongallery.com/artists/lawrence-weiner
MAY
Lawrence Weiner
Installation view, AS FAR AS THE EYE CAN
SEE, 2015, LANGUAGE + THE MATERIALS
REFERRED TO. Courtesy of the artist and
Marian Goodman, New York.
British artist Stephen Willats is one of the earlier pioneers of conceptual art,
and his practice has investigated the role, function and reception of art in the
contemporary society. His modular abstractions with diagrams, pictures, and
texts combine a complex, multi layered artistic vocabulary, which generates
interdisciplineary perspectives derived from intense research from different
fields such as sociology, semiotics, philospohy, systems analysis and politics.
Willats investigates the role of the artist, the position of the viewer, and the
impact of the context as part of his artistic research and production, which take
various forms from installations to writings. For this exhibition, Artspace has
produced a large scale wall drawing installation adapted from an earlier drawing
including diagram stickers and a text by the artist.
Stephen
Willats
For Willats, the diagram is a critical tool that illustrates dynamic flows of
information, systems and relationships within social networks. He redefines the
traditional role of the artist expressing themselves via the medium of the work
of art, into a contrasting series of relationships between the artist, the work, and
the viewer and, in particular, the linking of the meaning of the work to the active
conception/response it generates within the viewer. 1
The artist here is a constructor of models, his work is related with self
organisation and counter consciousness and the homeostatic model he proposes
is ‘a fundamental vision of a system that is self-organising, continually seeking
to find stability, internally and externally between itself and its environment’.
The homeostat means the state of agreement between the artist, the work and the
viewer. Willats describes the term, “context” much earlier than the word gains
more contemporary meaning and critical content during the late 60s
“It is both an intention and an outcome that the development of my art practice
encompasses the polemics and issues of our contemporary culture and society as a means
of consciously examining the function and meaning of art in society. This necessarily
takes it beyond the norms and conventions of an object-based art world, rather seeing it
as a function of my work to transform peoples’ perceptions of a deterministic culture of
objects and monuments, into the possibilities inherent in the community between people,
the richness of its complexity and self-organisation. The artwork having a dynamic,
interactive social function.
Some of the polemics and issues that impact on my work involve seeing culture and its
society as fluid, transient, relative and complex. I view the world we live in as a multichannel experience in time, that our encountered fragments of reality are in themselves
random variables, that we create the order we choose to see, and in this respect art
practice itself becomes a social phenomenon.
For me these concepts have remained a constant, as I wrote in the 1960s:
- A work of art can itself constitute a societal state, a model of human relationships
Stephen Willats
Wall Drawing, Homeostat Drawing No 1, 1969,
pencil on wall, size variable, 2015. Courtesy of
the artist.
- A work of art can consist of a process in time, a learning system through which the
concepts of the social view forwarded in the work are accessed and internalised
- A work of art must acknowledge the relativism inherent in perception and the transience
of experience, there being no right or wrong, it taking the form of an open-ended process
- A work of art has the possibility of operating as its own institution and as such is
independent of art institutions
- A work of art can engage anyone meaningfully, being available to whoever wishes to
enter its domain, only through embodying in its presentation the means by which people
are able to acquire the necessary language and procedures to receive and internalise its
meaning
My work engages the audience in a new way of encountering art in society. I am not
talking about a compliance, but something more active, a mutual understanding, an
interaction between people – similar to the dynamic image of the homeostat where all the
parts of the network are equal and equally linked.
Ultimately I am interested in the idea that reality is our own construction, that we build it
and we create the reality we want in our life. There is not only one way of viewing reality.
My work is an open work, based on agreement and open agreement.”
1
http://stephenwillats.com/context/
MAY
Installation view, Artspace, Wall Drawing,
Homeostat Drawing No 1, 1969, pencil on wall,
size variable, 2015. Courtesy of the artist.
SUCK
A Solo Presentation by Billy Apple®
March 6 - 20, 2015
IMAGINARY AUDIENCE SCALE
A sceptical approach to exhibition making:
Billy Apple®, Art & Language, Bruce Barber, Ayşe Erkmen,
Natalia LL, Len Lye, John Miller, Yoko Ono, Martha Rosler,
Lawrence Weiner, Stephen Willats
March 27 - May 23, 2015
Curated by Misal Adnan Yıldız
Artspace, New Zealand
Texts by #ReadWithArtspace
Alys Moody (AM), Victoria Wynne Jones (VWJ), Henry Davidson (HD)
Louisa Afoa (LA) and Misal Adnan Yıldız (MAY).
Exhibition production team
Anna Gardner: Administration Manager, Leah Mulgrew: Communications
Coordinator, Henry Davidson: Curatorial Assistant, Ahilapalapa Rands:
Project support, Louisa Afoa: Education Intern and Tim Wagg: Technition.
Installers & Volunteers
Patrick Lundberg, Amy Blinkhorne, Giulio Laura, Josh Hamilton, Tom
Hackshaw, Yasmin Chan, Magdalena O’Connor, Joseph Nerney,
Tash Kennedy and Seth.
Installation Photograhy
Sam Hartnett
Profile Plus
Terry Maitland
Aalto Colour
For enquiries contact
Misal Adnan Yıldız, Director
[email protected] for touring programme
Anna Gardner, Administration Manager
[email protected] for publication
Leah Mulgrew, Communications Coordinator
[email protected] for media and press.
Artspace
Level 1/300 Karangahape Road, PO Box 68418
Newton, Auckland, Aotearoa New Zealand
www.artspace.org.nz
THANK
YOU