Nau mai, haere mai, welcome to EyeContact. You are invited to respond to reviews and contribute to discussion by registering to participate.

MA

The Stubbornness of Sculpture 1

AA
View Discussion
Scott Eady, But you know what will happen, you’ll knock the world off its axis! And then I’ll say, but Scott, we’re falling.  And you’ll say, it’s okay it’s just space, 2012, bronze, enamel paint. Courtesy of the artist. Image Kate Whitley Glen Hayward, Open circuit, 2012, wood, acrylic, dimensions variable. Courtesy of the artist and Starkwhite Gallery. Image Kate Whitley    Maddie Leach, H and B, 2012, rare-earth magnet, steel and plinth. Dimensions variable. Plinth made by Tim Larkin. Image Kate Whitley    Scott Eady, Dear Jonathan, you were wrong, 2010, bronze, enamel paint, biscuit tin. Courtesy of the artist and RH Gallery. Image Kate Whitley.    Foreground: Brett Graham, Ringfence, 2011, horse feces, resin, MDF, 2000 x 2000 x 800mm  Collection of the artist.  Background:   Wayne Youle  If Dad says no ask Mum and if she says no ask Her Majesty, 2010,  bone, 22 yards. Private collection    Ben Pearce: Cavern, 2009, black walnut and steel. Coll. Paul Nache Gallery; Curse control 2009, sandblasted black walnut, support rod  Collection of Ros Stewart and John Gommans, Napier; Curse 2009  black walnut anwalnut and polymer clay  Private coll. Wayne Youle, If Dad says no ask Mum and if she says no ask Her Majesty, 2010, bone, 22 yards.  Private collection, Christchurch. Image Kate Whitley     Glen Hayward, Open circuit, 2012, wood, acrylic. Dimensions variable.  Courtesy of the artist and Starkwhite Gallery. Image Kate Whitley     Alicia Frankovich, I'll teach you about parameters, 9 Overhead Safety Belt System, Acromat 2007  mixed media  Dimensions variable  Courtesy of the artist and Starkwhite Gallery. Image Kate Whitley    Lisa Walker, BROOCH, 2012, mild steel, 30,000mm. Courtesy of the artist. Image Kate Whitley   Glen Hayward,  The covers, self-titled album, 2012, wood. Courtesy of the artist and Starkwhite Gallery. Image Kate Whitley.    Alex Mackinnon, Reconstruction of A Deaf Piano, 2012, audio speakers, tape loops, tape channels, digital audio channels, various tape and CD players and amplifiers, speaker wire. Dimensions variable. Courtesy of the artist. Image Kate Whitley     Alex Mackinnon, Reconstruction of A Deaf Piano, 2012, audio speakers, tape loops, tape channels, digital audio channels, various tape and CD players and amplifiers, speaker wire. Dimensions variable. Courtesy of the artist. Image Kate Whitley

The curators state from the outset that, as a sculpture exhibition this isn't about bronzes on plinths. Meaning: it's also not principally about the freestanding form that most of us associate with the word sculpture. Rather than a survey of sculpture, it's a show about the relationship between the viewer and the object, and the object's refusal to become irrelevant.

Wellington

 

Group show

The Obstinate Object

Curated by Aaron Lister and Abby Cunnane.

 

24 February - 10 June 2012

En route to City Gallery I popped in to see the recent additions to the Collecting Contemporary collection show at Te Papa. This proved apt.

When I saw some of these additions to the national collection in other galleries last year - Jim Allen at the Adam Art Gallery and Karl Fritsch, Francis Upritchard and Martino Camper at Hamish McKay’s - they thrived on your encounter with them. They held their spaces as environments. Here, in this hangar of an attic space at Te Papa behind white lines, they’re deadened. Security restrictions and architecture leave you with the impression that this is where great art goes to retire.

In contrast, my first encounter with The Obstinate Object is with an ugly, soccer ball-sized, luridly painted lump on the grass outside. My first instinct was to kick it, as marks suggested others had done before. I did, rather satisfyingly, and found it as solid to the foot as bronze. Then, lo and behold, when I entered the gallery the first thing I see is an identical ball on a circular gold plate, fenced off by white rope and stanchions. On its back is a scrawled, handwritten sign saying ‘kick me’. Yet an accompanying official looking plaque instructs ‘Please do not kick Ivan’.

This work by Scott Eady is an amusing multifaceted prank. It’s a good scene-setting opening joke (if not much else). For more than anything else, The Obstinate Object is an exploration of the complications of interaction between viewer and object in the public gallery today. With an open, eclectic approach the exhibition opens up conversations about the role of the gallery with a wide range of strong artists, emerging and established.

It’s a mixed success. While refreshing in the way it mixes things up, stepping outside the usual closed loops and coteries of artists and also out into the city, The Obstinate Object is better at opening things up than following them through to satisfying outcomes. Post-Prospect and at a time of significant gallery staff changeover it’s as if for such an ambitious and spread undertaking curators Aaron Lister and Abby Curnane simply ran out of time.

The curators state from the outset that, as a sculpture exhibition this isn’t about bronzes on plinths. Meaning: it’s also not principally about the freestanding form that most of us associate with the word sculpture. Rather than a survey of sculpture, it’s a show about the relationship between the viewer and the object, and the object’s refusal to become irrelevant.

If a work isn’t on a plinth or behind a white line, what exactly are the rules of interaction with it? Following on from Eady’s work the gallery plays a guessing game of ‘can I touch this/ can’t touch this’ with the visitor throughout. This is alternately interesting and frustrating.

A huge part of the power of objects today is our ability to touch them and have free movement around them (something the digital environment lacks). Here you long to touch Glen Hayward’s replica of an upset cheap plastic office chair to confirm it is actually, astonishingly, made of wood. Nearby, at waist height - replicating the sort of circular tabular roadside 3D topographical map people love to run their hands over - Brett Graham’s Ringfence begs to be touched, particularly when you discover it’s made of resin coated horse shit. Yet in both cases attendants are kept busy telling people not to.

Wouldn’t it actually be better in some cases for galleries to let the public have a guided, gentle feel? If these were public works in the street you could rub them all you liked. Are we just treating art as a commodity on temporary loan from the private art market?

Upstairs Maddie Leach (an artist who has previously let us dance and ice skate in the gallery) like Eady actively plays with this issue presenting a ‘rare earth magnet’ on a plinth, surrounded by a white line. A sign on the wall informs: “Maintain your distance. If you have on your person: a pacemaker, an electronic device, an analogue watch, a compass, MOs, MDs, credit cards or heavy jewellery.” This notice is both disturbingly and delightfully vague. What if Leach actually gave people the chance to break the white line and hold something precious, or at the very least got the attendants to be active in discussing the dilemma with them?

With so much denial of experience in the exhibition, the upper level of the gallery has an air of negation and death, rather than of warmth and involvement. With the dreary drone of Alex McKinnon’s ‘Reconstruction of a Deaf Piano’ filling the gallery (beyond its striking visual appeal it offered me little), sculptures in bone (Wayne Youle) and walnut (Ben Pearce) and empty harnesses (Alicia Frankovich), plus wooden security cameras (Hayward) looking down on the set up, it’s as if this were a mausoleum for the modern art gallery. Frankovich does provide one brilliant intervention - air is occasionally shot into the gallery through a tyre valve in a hole in the wall, as if valiantly trying to revive a giant flaccid beast.

Considered more simply: there are also far too many unresolved works here for a big public gallery show. Interesting playful ideas that haven’t developed into powerful works: from Lisa Walker’s giant piece of number 8 fencing wire jewellery in the foyer to the Youle, Pearce and Graham works upstairs, and Regan Gentry’s waterfall on the building’s side.

Downstairs is generally a far stronger, warmer experience. This and a range of works that operate either fully or partially outside the building as part of an ambitious extended exhibition programme form part two of this review.

Mark Amery

Print | Facebook | Twitter | Email

 

This Discussion has 3 comments.

Comment

Owen Pratt, 1:16 p.m. 9 April, 2012

Thanks for another thoughtful piece on the 3-D Mark. It is good to raise issues of what is an art object and where and how does it sit in the world.

Might take issue with this work not being 'bronzes on plinths' but.

Bronze is just a plastic medium to manifest the sculpted object, a reproductive technology, which over time has acquired the mana of the objects it has reproduced. I would argue that each object here is being privileged in a similar way by being surveyed in a public gallery.

The same can be argued for the plinthage, several of the works do actually use this very device, otherwise they use the gallery to 'plinth' and support the work as art. Without the gallery some of this work could be 'stuff in the alley behind the bankrupt theatre'.
By their curation they have become privileged objects held in a privileged space.

The business of touching / kicking, its just bad manners, even to this work which is trying not to be so special. Why not scratching or graffitiing or adding your own bits to that assemblage all valid 'viewer interaction' under this egalitarian policy perhaps.

Reply to this thread

Andrew Paul Wood, 2:07 a.m. 10 April, 2012

I don't understand the need to reiterate that sculpture doesn't need to be a bronze on a plinth etc etc. Isn't that rather preaching to the choir. Surely it is a fairly safe assumption that the sort of people who would go to this show are already aware of that. It's been thirty years since Rosalind Krauss wrote "Sculpture in the Expanded Field"
http://iris.nyit.edu/~rcody/Thesis/Readings/Krauss%20-%20Sculpture%20in%20the%20Expanded%20Field.pdf

 In reply

Owen Pratt, 3:24 p.m. 15 April, 2012

...perhaps it is part of the mythology, or received wisdom, that says that art progresses in a Darwinian way. (See S.Gablik, Progress in Art published in the same year as Krauss set out her territory, which is essentially the same), privileging, the work of autonomous shamanistic object makers and failing to register “its interweaving with a multifaceted and all-pervasive media culture, historical amnesia and the commodification of everyday life.”

Reply to this thread

Recent Posts by Mark Amery

MA
Michael Stevenson, This Is the Trekka, 2003–5, Collection Te Papa Tongarewa Museum of New Zealand. Part of This Is New Zealand, City Gallery Wellington, 2018

Is There a ‘Real’ New Zealand?

CITY GALLERY WELLINGTON TE WHARE TOI

Wellington

 

Group show
This is New Zealand

 

3 March - 15 July 2018

MA
Poster image

Thick Cinema

Screenings in three cities

Amundsen, Di Stefano, Pieters, Hamilton, Campbell

Thick Cinema

Christchurch Art Gallery, 25 August 2017; Embassy Cinema, Wellington, 1 November 2017; and Te Uru, Auckland, 12 December 2017.

 

 

MA
Lorene Taurerewa and Leo Bensemann works as presented in Occulture: The Dark Arts at City Gallery Wellington, 2017.

The Occult in NZ Art

CITY GALLERY WELLINGTON TE WHARE TOI

Wellington

 

Group exhibition
Occulture: The Dark Arts

 

12 August - 19 November 2017

MA
Josephine Cachemaille's 'Us, Us, Us' as installed at The Suter Art Gallery Te Aratoi o Whakatu. Photo: John-Paul Pochin

Another look at ‘Us, Us, Us.’

THE SUTER ART GALLERY TE ARATOI O WHAKATU

Nelson

 

Josephine Cachemaille 
Us, Us, Us

 

June 10 - August 6 2017