John Hurrell – 15 November, 2013

Judy Darragh is usually known for her passion for exuberant colour (often fluoro) in her sculpture and paintings, so it is something of a surprise to see her exhibit photographs of comparatively drab, handwritten, brown cardboard signs. Blown up so they still look striking on the upstairs Two Rooms gallery walls, these seven images are of messages seeking financial assistance, written by homeless mendicants seated on the footpaths of downtown Auckland. (‘Mendicant’ is a word often with religious connotations, but not always; ‘beggar’ to me sounds pejorative.)

Darragh’s exhibition is motivated by indignant anger that Auckland Council is - as she sees it - banning begging on the streets. The trouble is, that is not what Auckland Council is doing - it is banning ‘Beggars who are deemed intimidating or causing a nuisance’. Something quite different. Okay I guess it depends on who is doing the ‘deeming’, and people like say the managers of Smith & Caughey‘s are a worry, but I suspect Darragh is overreacting. If begging were in fact being banned outright, I’d be marching alongside her. It is a fundamental right to be able to ask your fellow citizen for help if you need it, just as it is their right to decline if they wish.

These battered cardboard images, as attempts at self promotion and attracting donations, provide a lot to think about - albeit via rudimentary means. You have the expressive qualities of the language, its tone, register, phrasing and cadences; you have the type of letter font or writing (printing or cursive), upper or lower case, perhaps in bold or drawn over; there is the arrangement of the words - their selection and organisation - plus punctuation, underlining and smiley faces; and there is the medium - biro or felt-tip usually - on torn corrugated carton flaps. Mostly formal aspects that have emotional resonances that are accentuated by the increase in scale.

However it is all very well being analytical and showing the hallmarks of a good (for me in the late-sixties / early seventies, relatively inexpensive) education, but writing and thinking investigatively this way somehow (inadvertently) insults the people who made these functional artefacts - even though Darragh paid them so she could take away their artwork and use it to promote their cause. It (the enormity of this urgent social issue) turns them into things instead of ‘thous’ - to think in terms of Martin Buber.

Even though 10% of sales goes to the Auckland City Mission, talking about these signs seems trivialising. Maybe a higher percentage should be donated. Obviously there is a dilemma, a massive gulf between the artworld, its educational facilities, and dealer galleries that rely on those with surplus funds, and those living on the street with next to nothing; a divide between those with names, brands, reputations and ‘dignity’, and those who are destitute and nameless but who - quite rightly - refuse to become invisible.

John Hurrell

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