Thursday 30 July 2015

Word of the Week: Semiotics

By Kari Schmidt

To begin with a quote by Mieke Bal, “Semiotics is the theory of signs and sign use, including seeing signs… Semiotics focuses on construction and representation, considering ‘texts’ as specific combinations of signs yielding meaning.”[1] Semiotics originated in linguistics but it can also be used to assist us in understanding visual images in that it recognises that what is depicted in a painting, for example, functions as a code – we see a certain object, depicted in a certain way (a sign/signifier) and in our minds it refers to a real object (the signified) with certain connotations. In regards to art, semiotics challenges traditional approaches to art history and image analysis, in that it encourages us to think about our act of looking, to not take anything for granted in an image and to question historically made assumptions about the meaning in any given work.

In this respect, semiotics encourages a sustained, detailed analysis of what is actually in the painting. So too, it also recognises that in interpreting a work and making meaning, we don’t need to be absolutely limited by the artist’s intentions, or by what would historically have been considered the meaning at the time of the painting’s production. One example of this is Girodet’s The Sleep of Endymion (Fig. 1) which, while it may not have been perceived as homoerotic in its time, can – according to semiotics - be said to have that connotation in the present day.


Fig. 1 The Sleep of Endymion, Anne-Louis Girodet, 1791

In this sense I think semiotics is supremely useful – as opposed to an empirical approach to history, it recognises that meaning making is a fluid, evolving process and accounts for the subjectivity inherent in the art-viewing experience – at the same time as recognising that the meaning we ascribe to an image is to some extent social and based on a common ground. For example, Bal interprets Gentileschi’s Judith Slaying Holofernes (Fig. 2), as symbolising castration – in this interpretation Holofernes’ head is actually his penis. While initially this may seem a tenuous interpretation, when you consider the image as a part of a lineage of Judith paintings where women are associated with fear it starts to seem more tenable, and also allows us a richer metaphorical insight into/experience of the painting.


Fig. 2 Judith Slaying Holofernes, Artemisia Gentileschi, 1611-1612

In this way the meaning-making which semiotics facilitates for us is a playing, which can result in a confusion of contradictory meanings but which also recognises the inherent complexity of visual images, and makes richer our experience of reading them. 

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[1] Mieke Bal, ‘Seeing signs: The use of semiotics for the understanding of visual art’ in Cheetham, Mark; Holly, Michael Ann; and Keith Moxey (eds). The subjects of art history: Historical objects in contemporary perspective. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998, p. 74.

Wednesday 29 July 2015

Adam Art Gallery Seminar Series 2015

Check out the programme for the Adam Art Gallery seminar series here. Tonight's seminar (Thursday 30th July, 5.15 at the Adam) will be featuring Stephen Cleland, Curator at the Adam. We can't wait!

30 July
Stephen Cleland, Curator at the Adam Art Gallery, will discuss his current research into Canada-based New Zealander Bruce Barber’s post-object works from the 1970s. Cleland argues that Barber’s drawings produced in this period can be read as open-ended scores which sit between fluxus and conceptualist models of art making.

Living Cities 2011: Adam Art Gallery

25 April - 28 June, 2015
By Georgina Keyse

Richard Frater’s exhibition Living Cities 2011 at the Adam Art Gallery explored Frater’s experiences of Wellington city as an industrial site, as well as the nature of birdlife spreading from Zealandia to the city. The exhibition took place across two sites; an installation in the Kirk Gallery of the Adam, and an installation in a university flat. Art is superimposed on a setting that is for most an artless realm, a place where they perform the mundane tasks of living; eating, sleeping, watching TV. The spectator can view the city at the same time as they view the art, the two temporalities exist together, feeding meaning to one another. The exhibition asks; are art and life separate entities? Where do they intersect? How do we experience the city, and how do these experiences shape the way we interact with the work?
In the Kirk Gallery Frater performed an architectural modification by uncovering a window in the otherwise unlit room. The window, which overlooked the city, highlighted the objects in the room. A lead lined pestle and mortar were placed on the windowsill, and a nail gun was mounted on a pedestal in the corner of the room. This scene replicated a cinematic experience for the viewer. The room is often used by the gallery as a cinema, hence the total darkness without the addition of the window. The window acted in the same way as a projector, illuminating the objects on display. The addition of the window also had consequences for the meaning of the space as a gallery. It opened up the gallery to the outside world, allowing elements from each space to enter the other. It provided a form of mediation between the viewer, the art, and the city.

The installation continued in a university house, a space used for student accommodation. Inside the flat we were met by the audio component of the exhibition, a soundtrack created by Frater and sound artist Richard Francis, interspersed with birdsong. Another nail gun is mounted in the centre of a room, accompanied by a view of Wellington. Further into the house a box of lead roofing nails rests beside the entrance to one of the rooms. The impact of the industrial soundtrack is compounded by the presence of these building materials. Lead nails were used in much of the roofing during the housing boom in Wellington, and have an adverse effect on native birdlife for whom it is poisonous. Zealandia’s roaming representative, the kaka, ingest these toxins, returning to excrete them into the sanctuary.


Between these two spaces the viewer experiences several filmic qualities; the projected light and soundtrack, as well as the narrative of the walk to the second site. Our position as active participants in the installation mirrors the role of an actor. Frater is encouraging the participant to play this role and form our own experiences of the city. He explains, “The chronology of a walk can generate and perform a map of Wellington, triggering a range of casual and orchestrated experiences.”[1] In Living Cities 2011 Frater investigated the experience of industrial Wellington, the housing boom allowed by technological innovations such as the nail gun and the coinciding experience of kaka living in the city. He investigates how these two facets of the city interact, impacting on one another and the landscape they exist in.


Contemporary art practice has been interpreted as emerging as a response to a “multiplicity of relationships between being and time.”[2] Frater’s work shows similar concerns with the relationships between us, and our experience of place and time. Of Wellington he says, “It’s tempting to privilege one experience of the city over another as being less superficial, but the city was and is all of these multiple temporalities simultaneously.”[3] The use of gallery and non-gallery sites introduces a dialogue between art and life.  The addition of the window into the Kirk Gallery allows the outside world to enter into the pristine gallery space. As a viewer our experiences are invited to play a part in understanding the work; our interaction with the city and the exhibition are all part of the story.

[1] Richard Frater, Laura Preston, catalogue for ‘Living Cities 2011 –‘, Wellington: Adam Art Gallery Te Pataka Toi, 2015
[2] Terry Smith, What is contemporary art?, Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2009, p. 4
[3] Richard Frater, Laura Preston, catalogue for ‘Living Cities 2011 –‘, Wellington: Adam Art Gallery Te Pataka Toi, 2015

Image 1. Richard Frater, Living Cities 2011–, 2015, installation view at the Adam Art Gallery, Victoria University of Wellington (photo: Shaun Waugh)
Image 2. Richard Frater, Living Cities 2011–, 2015, installation view at the Adam Art Gallery, Victoria University of Wellington (photo: Shaun Waugh)
Image 3. Richard Frater, Living Cities 2011–, 2015, installation view at the Adam Art Gallery, Victoria University of Wellington (photo: Shaun Waugh)

Monday 27 July 2015

Drawing Is/Not Building: Adam Art Gallery

25 April - 28 June, 2015
By Bryar Clayton
Drawing Is/Not Building was comprised of works by three architects; Sarah Treadwell, Roland Snooks and Simon Twose (who additionally curated the exhibition). Each conceptualised drawing as not just a preliminary stage of the design process, but as an instrumental means to determine the way in which matter is formed; a means which they argue is often hidden away during the execution and after completion of a final product.
On the top floor were two works by Sarah Treadwell. The first, Oceanic Section 1 & 2, paid homage to the Rena disaster of 2011. Treadwell documented the incident on unstretched canvas by a process of paint layering. The colour palette was moody; predominantly grey, with lashes of charcoal and a faint hint of orange. Not only was this reflective of the incident itself, whereby the colour acted as a direct representation of the oil that had leeched into the Pacific, but it also referenced the damaging environmental effects that came as a result of the disaster. Her second work was, again, comprised of two parts. Oceanic Foundations: Rising Water 1 and Oceanic Foundations: Rising Water 2, the latter being an exact reproduction of the former only in a negative version. These more experimental works were fashioned in a very geographical, grid-like manner which served to illustrate the continuous tidal movements in the Pacific Ocean.

Snooks exhibited a single, yet impressive, piece AgentBody Prototype; an amalgamation of steel and aluminium, suspended behind the front window of the gallery. The three-dimensionality and sheer size of the structure invited visual attention, however, the austere frigidity of the sculpture, with it’s stark, jagged edges, demanded space, and in this way created a haptic distance between itself and the viewer. Snooks sought to explore the relationship between human and computer authorship. So, despite it being constructed by the human hand, the form of AgentBody Prototype was conceived of by a computer algorithm. Snooks wished to highlight the importance of acknowledging the origins of design processes, which are not always blatantly obvious upon viewing the final product.


Twose exhibited three separate works which occupied the lower floor in its entirety; a collection of photographs, a series of miniature wax models and his monumental Concrete Drawing. The photographs and wax models provided context for, and collectively depicted, the design process for the spectacle which resided in the Lower Chartwell Gallery. Concrete Drawing, took up the majority of space in the Lower Chartwell thus dwarfing all of its spectators, much like any building does. In saying that, the lack of space between the structure and the walls created an engaging intimacy. Additionally, the indentations on the concrete blocks alongside the protruding rectangular walls provided a tactile three-dimensionality. By using concrete at such a scale, Twose was able to blur the lines between building and drawing.


The pieces by Treadwell, Snooks and Twose were neither drawings nor buildings; but that is the point. They were not created with the intention of pitting drawing against building; rather, they served as an explorative means to determine how matter is formed, and also as a way of exposing the experimental nature of architectural design.

Photo 1: Sarah Treadwell, Oceanic Foundations: Rising Water 1 & 2, 2014, mixed media on unsretched canvas, in the exhibition Drawing Is/Not Building at the Adam Art Gallery Te Pataka Toi, Victoria University of Wellington (Photo: Shaun Waugh)
Photo 2: Roland Snooks, AgentBody Prototype, 2015 (detail), cut steel, aluminium, In the exhibition Drawing Is/Not Building at the Adam Art Gallery Te Pataka Toi, Victoria University of Wellington (photo: Shaun Waugh)
Photo 3: Simon Twose, detail view of Concrete Drawing, 2014-5, concrete, polystyrene, wax, photographs and graphite, in the exhibition Drawing Is/Not Building at the Adam Art Gallery Te Pataka Toi, Victoria University of Wellington (photo: Shaun Waugh)
Photo 4: Simon Twose, detail view of Concrete Drawing, 2014-5, concrete, polystyrene, wax, photographs and graphite, in the exhibition Drawing Is/Not Building at the Adam Art Gallery Te Pataka Toi, Victoria University of Wellington (photo: Shaun Waugh)

Sunday 26 July 2015

Up and Adam: Salient Interview with Adam Art Gallery's Stephen Cleland

Check out Stephen Cleland introducing the Adam Art Gallery to students, in an interview with Victoria University’s Salient Magazine

While the Adam "is in a position where we want to acknowledge depth, because that's something we value within our field, we are also in a role where we're trying to open up contemporary art... people should feel like they're welcomed when they come to the Adam, that there'll be information on hand and it won't be patronising or pretentious."



Friday 24 July 2015

Word of the week

Art vocab to impress your friends

by Eleanor Lee-Duncan

Chiaroscuro “key-are-oh-skur-oh”

‘(Ital. light-dark). As generally used, chiaroscuro (or the French clair-obscur) means the balance of light and shadow in a picture, and the skill shown by the painter in the management of shadows.’
                                        -The Penguin Dictionary of Art and Artists
In other words, when we look at an image, whether a painting, photograph, film still, drawing, or engraving and can clearly see an interplay between areas of light and darkness, we are looking at chiaroscuro. This can be used as soft, smoky blended areas to create a sense of subtle three-dimensionality, or it can be used boldly in clear, crisp areas of light and shadow which contrast within an image to create a sense of dynamism or drama. Sometimes chiaroscuro is used to highlight or bring attention to a certain area or aspect of a work.
The current exhibition at the Adam Art Gallery, called The Specious Present, is fairly monochromatic: most artists limit themselves to shades of white and black in the works displayed.
Image credit: Adam Art Gallery 
For example, in this work by Colin McCahon, currently on display at the Adam Art Gallery, titled Walk (Series C), we can see that McCahon has used different gradients of painted shade in each strip of canvas. In the first panel on the left, McCahon has used chiaroscuro to create a jet black, vivid ‘T’ shaped cross, which cuts down through the entire composition with force. The ‘T’ stands out especially because the horizon line which intersects it is lighter as it gets closer on either side. Because of this, the lower half of the ‘T’ seems to stand out more – this is because the fading horizon line behind it emphasizes it, and seems to push the ‘T’ towards us.
Image credit: caravaggio.org


In a more traditional sense, chiaroscuro is used in art history to refer to this interplay between light and shadow especially in Baroque art, for example in Caravaggio’s paintings. Like his painting above, Judith beheading Holofernes, Caravaggio uses chiaroscuro as a strong compositional device. He has used bright, harsh light on the three figures which contrasts with dark areas, defining the muscular contortions of Holofernes as he dies. Judith in the centre seems to radiate with this light, which illuminates her face and collar. Also, you can see that the shadows in the background are incredibly dark, making the figures appear like spot lit actors frozen in a film noir scene.

Thursday 23 July 2015

Gone with the Wind: The Story of a Changing Art Culture

By Ashleigh Hutchinson
 
With the arrival of sculptures including Morpheus 2 by Phil Price, Blenheim is being dragged into the 21st Century. For those of you in Wellington, if you don’t recognize the name, you will certainly recognize Price’s sculptures including the ‘Space Needle’ that was famously shot down by lightning in Wellington last year, called Zephyrometer. You may also have seen the sculpture consisting of four oscillating green discs on Lambton Quay called Protoplasm and been enthralled by its mesmerizing wind-driven cyclical movement. Price also has some very impressive work on display in both Sydney and Melbourne. Nelson-born Price was recently commissioned by Marlborough Lines to create a kinetic sculpture for a pocket park opened in Blenheim. Pocket parks are part of an initiative to bring more communal green spaces to the Blenheim Town centre, small enough to fit in a car park, but big enough to facilitate 20 or so people. As a distributor of power, Marlborough Lines saw it fitting to commission a sculpture that relied on an energy as renewable and endless as the wind, the same way some of their suppliers rely on dams and wind turbines for energy. The synergy between these two outlets of power forms a truly seamless connection when channeled into a sculpture.
Aptly named Morpheus 2, this sculpture can induce a dreamlike state, much like its namesake- the Roman God of sleep and dreams. With its flawless confluence of machine and living organism, Morpheus 2 inspires contemplative reflection whilst relaxing in one of the many pocket parks that have recently popped up around Blenheim. Its hypnotic shifting through horizontal and vertical planes is something the likes of Blenheim has never seen before. With only about 5 sculptures on display in public spaces, Blenheim is behind the times with the significant absence of a Sculpture Trust. Years in the making, the Marlborough Sculpture Trust constantly faces the conservative nature of Blenheim citizens, and the political enmity of handing over power to only one source. Currently, decisions are difficult to come to due to the sheer number of people wanting to weigh in on the decisions. By having a Sculpture Trust, a select number of people with the town's best interests in mind and equipped with the knowledge and tools to make the best choices involving public space and council collections. The trust will prioritize the monitoring of donation of sculptures to the council collection based on their practicality for future public projects. This saves the pileup of unnecessary pieces in the council collection, and encourages more artwork to be taken out of storage for the public to see and enjoy. Unfortunately it has not succeeded thus far in realising these ambitions. In my opinion, Morpheus 2 marks the impending modernisation of the small town, along with the emergence of pocket parks, it signifies a forward-thinking, art-appreciating and contemplative mentality being adopted by most of its inhabitants.
Price demonstrates the universality of sculpture designed for nature by which his art can feel at home in urban jungle Wellington, and equally so in rural small-town Blenheim. For the first time, we see a prominent, bold sculpture that does not conform to any sort of stereotypical, patriotic form. Far from the classic grapes Marlborough is known for, Morpheus 2 brings a sophistication to the town and association with more advanced urban centres such as Wellington.  Ultimately, Morpheus 2 represents a paradigm shift in Blenheim’s artistic sphere, which is equally exciting and terrifying for its conservative citizens. It is a beautiful piece that has sparked discussion and growth- which is exactly what a good piece of art should achieve.


Photo taken by Germari Hersleman for the Marlborough Express. Phil Price with his sculpture Morpheus 2.

Courtesy David Shrigley

Monday 20 July 2015

Drawing Is/Not Building: EyeContact Review

Check out this review on EyeContact for the previous exhibition showing at Adam Art Gallery, Drawing Is/Not Building (25 April - 28 June, 2015):
“The act of encounter between artwork and viewer encouraged by the work of Twose, Snooks and Treadwell is particularly well highlighted by the placement of each piece within the distinctive architecture of the Adam. Whilst these works may be neither drawings nor buildings in the strictest sense of either term, they each prompt an engagement not only with these creative processes themselves, but the ways in which we encounter them in our daily lives - if we choose to look closely.”

Sunday 19 July 2015

Adam Art Gallery Seminar Series: ‘In Absentia: The Politics of Cameraless Photography’ by Geoffrey Batchen

This was the first paper presented at the Adam Art Gallery’s ‘Art History in Practice’ seminar series, on Thursday the 16th of July, 2015. Click here to view the calendar. 
By Lucy Jackson 
‘Cameraless photography’ is not a phrase you hear or read often.  To the common ear it almost seems like an oxymoron - how can there be a photograph without a camera? It is fair to say when reading the title of Geoffrey Batchen’s paper, a certain level of skepticism, coupled with curiosity, was already present. In addition to the mystery of cameraless photographs, the title ‘The Politics of Cameraless Photography’ also implies these items may have a political agenda. But what could that be?  
Batchen began his presentation by placing his paper in context, as part of a larger project that surveys cameraless photography as a medium. He then sought out to prove that this medium conveys its own unique set of ideas, by providing a chronological history of the cameraless photographer, the context they have worked in, and the politics their work conveyed. An outcome of his research will be an exhibition at the Govett-Brewster Art Gallery: New Plymouth, opening in April 2016.
Although surrounded by the works of contemporary artist Andrew Beck in the Adam Art Gallery, Batchen took us back nearly 200 years, with cameraless photographs by Henry Fox Talbot. At first glance, the contact prints of lace that Talbot produced may appear to be nothing more than photographs of beautiful needlework. But Batchen suggests these images can be interpreted as a very deliberate choice by Talbot — to pictorially depict the industrialization of the time in which he was working. The lace matrix was a symbol for industrialization entering everyday life, as would photography in years to come - and this is reflected in the mechanical process of cameraless photography’s capturing of the material. Batchen proposes that with cameraless photography Talbot realised a truth to presence, even if it wasn’t a truth to appearance itself.
Batchen also discussed the importance of considering other artists such as Bronislaw Schlabs and Běla Kolářová who experimented with the medium of cameraless photography. Their work produced the terms ‘absolute photography’ and ‘anti-photography’, terms which encapsulate a sense of ambiguity and trepidation, reflecting the political situation of the time (i.e. cameraless photography as set up in opposition to the realistic, camera-oriented photography of the Soviet Union). 
Batchen then jumped to the present and local, introducing the art of New Zealander Joyce Campbell (whose work will be in the Govett-Brewster Art Gallery exhibition). Campbell works in a range of photographic processes, but the examples shown by Batchen were again of cameraless photographs, which pictorially describe bacteria, fungi and other physical specimens. The physical contact creates a connection between the object and the image, the image and us. Batchen states that cameraless photography has a powerful, direct connection that promises to get us even closer to what is represented, narrowing the gap between image and observer.
One of Batchen’s final examples was Japanese photographer, Shimpei Takeda. Influenced by the tragedy of the 2011 tsunami and its damage of the nuclear power plant Fukushima Daiichi, Takeda collected soil samples from areas around Fukushima, and then placed them each on photographic film for a month. Batchen admits that about half of the film remained black, but some of the film was speckled with photographic evidence of radiation – a direct confrontation of environmental and political issues to the viewer. Batchen suggests that cameraless photographers today, like Takeda, accept that photography has always been politically charged in one way or another, and he has used the medium to showcase an important environmental and political problem.
Batchen concluded by stating that cameraless photography has always been seen as inferior, while the camera has been used as the ‘auto correct’. However, he posits that in cameraless photography we have an approach and an experience of the object which is direct and connects us with the world in a way that cameras do not.
I think it is fair to say the audience had reservations about this and especially the political nature of such works, either on entrance, during, or at conclusion of Batchen’s talk - as evidenced by the healthy debate that ensued. However, it cannot be denied that Batchen had succeeded in getting people to think; about both the nature of photography, and the position in which cameraless photography sits as a politically charged art form. In an age where the majority of people have a camera on them at all times, it was pleasantly refreshing to learn of contemporary photographers that were making art without one. Ironically, while listening to Batchen’s paper, we were presented with photographs taken with a camera, of photographs taken without one, suggesting that on another level, each is essential to the other. 

Thursday 16 July 2015

Word of the Week: Haptic

By Kari Schmidt

There are two contexts in which I've encountered the word haptic recently. Firstly, in an essay by Adam Jolles entitled The Tactile Turn: Envisioning a Post-Colonial Aesthetic in France ((Yale French Studies 109, 2006: 17-38). This article discussed the 'tactile turn' in French avant-garde art of the 1930s, with leftist artists producing increasingly tactile work to anti-imperialist ends. Without going into this argument too much, we see an example of such work in Meret Oppenheim's Luncheon in Fur - the fur on the cup, saucer and spoon is so anomolous to what you'd expect on usually functional objects, and so rich in texture, it immediately evokes a sense of touch and touching, even when seen in a photograph. 
 

Secondly, Geoffrey Batchen used the word haptic to describe the resulting aesthetic of many camera-less photography processes - because the photographic paper is in immediate contact with the object it is representing, there is a sense of intimacy in the work between object and viewer, created in part by the ostensible tactility of what is represented. Batchen referenced the 'Vegetages' of Bela Kolarova as one example, her works consisting of onion peelings and (as below) peach pits placed on photographic paper and exposed. Through simply looking at the image we experience something of the rough texture and the feel the pits' indentations.


This is what is meant by the haptic - it is a way of perceiving artworks through touch or rather, given that a literal touching does not occur in such works, through the sense or perception of touch.

Wednesday 15 July 2015

Here and There and Nowhere


by Simon Gennard
The Specious Present, Adam Art Gallery

11 July - 20 September 2015

Surveillance Awareness Bureau, 1 Grey Street

27 May - 13 June 2015


Before Anderson Cooper came out, before he confirmed what everyone already knew about him, a photo of the journalist carrying a Haitian child to safety during looting following the 2010 earthquake made the rounds on Tumblr. The photo was accompanied by a long, impassioned comment. I can’t remember it verbatim, and I can’t find this particular post, but I do remember the image being used as evidence for the sturdy and compassionate moral fibre of homosexuals everywhere.
It’s kind of inane, as arguments go, but I’ve been thinking about it recently (as if Anderson Cooper were not eternally in our hearts and dreams) after reading Nicholas de Villiers’ ’Afterthoughts on Queer Opacity’. In the essay, de Villiers muses on what queer visibility means now. It can be read as a kind of addendum to his book Opacity and the Closet: Queer Tactics in Foucault, Barthes, and Warhol. De Villiers is interested in the kind of mechanisms developed by these figures to evade demands to ‘come out,’ to attach themselves to a politics of queer representation and exceptionalism that now seems inescapable. He writes:
Rather than seeing Foucault, Barthes, or Warhol’s 'opacity’ as symptomatic of 'the closet’ and internalized homophobia—where opacity would be merely a reactive desire for 'privacy’ that is ultimately complicit with homophobia and repressive silence—I was interested in their tactical negotiation of their public personas in interviews and published texts where they are visible, but opaque (not 'see-through’ or easily deciphered).
De Villiers’ essay is an attempt to discuss this evasion outside of the queer canon. He applies his arguments to Cooper, Jodie Foster, Queen Latifah, Ellen Page, and Lana Wachowski. Escaping the canon, I guess, takes baby steps. De Villiers’ draws a direct route between the necessity for queer public figures to come out, to be visible and transparent, to perform as brave and worthy examples for queer youth to follow, a la Cooper’s act of heroism, and the project of legal recognition that governs the discourse of mainstream queer rights - marriage equality, equal access to serving in the military. The same state towards whom these demands are made relies on visibility, on recognition, in another, fundamentally more sinister, way. The state relies on surveillance technologies - on its subjects being seen and known - to police movement, to combat displays of collective resistance, to criminalise individuals who belong to certain racial, cultural, class groups.
I suppose I am thinking about Anderson Cooper saving that Haitian child because the argument that accompanied the image posited, implicitly, queerness as a moral deficit, and public, documented acts of compassion such as this one as a necessary reparation to be made before the state is able to recognise queer subjectivities. It implies, further, that the aspirational good life for queer subjects is one necessarily comprised of these reparative acts; that to be a good queer citizen is to embody this kind of decentness, to be married, to be loyal to the point of being willing to go to war. This discourse obfuscates that these reparative acts seem to be so easily ascribed to the bodies which are pale, ruggedly handsome, beefy-forearmed, unquestionably and quite comfortably masculine. As for bodies which refuse to comply with this model?They might be lucky to appear as a footnote.
De Villiers ends his essay by discussing Zach Blas’ ongoing project, Facial Weaponization Suite, a video from which was included in the Surveillance Awareness Bureau exhibition held on Grey St last month (the video is also available on his website). Blas’ video takes as its point of departure the rapid embrace of facial recognition and biometric technologies by state security operations, as well as advertisers hoping to cater content according to normative categories of gender, race, and class. The video then turns its attention to a recent study published in the Journal of Experimental Social Psychology which suggested people are able to distinguish between heterosexual and homosexual men based on photos of their faces, even when exposed to the photos for only half a second. The video’s call to arms is somewhat facetious, and incredibly important. The question at the heart of the video, 'How do we flee this visibility into the fog of a queerness that refuses to be recognised?,’ takes its cue, maybe somewhat ironically, from the Guy Fawkes mask adopted by Anonymous. The video calls on queer citizens to don a 'fag face’ - a pink mask, said to be a distorted amalgamation of faces that 'cannot be read or parsed’ - as a means of binding citizens into a shared project of resistance. It treats invisibility not as suppression - in the way that a closet might - but as a weapon.
I want to think about what images surface as a result of this widespread embrace of surveillance technologies. I want to think about these images as the result of an ongoing attempt to see and be seen from all angles. I want to think about how we learn to read these images, and in particular what omnipotent vision does to a sense of time. How it can protract a single moment. How it can efface everything before and after and call itself whole. I like to think of the work of David Claerbout, whose presentation The Quiet Shore is currently on display at Adam Art Gallery as part of their exhibition The Specious Present, as the manipulated detritus left over from seeing too much of a scene. Writing on The Algiers’ Section of a Happy Moment, a 32 minute slide presentation detailing the instant a football game is interrupted by a flock of seagulls from every angle imaginable, Claerbout places this work within a project of examining the 'suspicious gaze.’ In some ways, Claerbout’s work avoids an association with what we might think of as surveillance imagery, through the deployment of crisp, heavy contrasts, a welcome rhythm between the close-up and the distant. These poetic elements only serve to make the work more hypnotising.
There’s an odd kinship between Claerbout’s and Blas’ work. It might not seem immediately obvious; Blas’ intervention is directed towards a particular public whose historical relationship with seeing and being seen is being renegotiated in a very particular way. Both artists redeploy the mechanisms of surveillance, but where Blas relies on irony and recruitment, Claerbout opts for the kind of dullness granted by holding one’s gaze for too long, and in doing so illuminates the inadequacy of dense masses on images in revealing nuance. It’s not an intimacy, so much, because intimacy might require a narrative, some kind of investment, a beginning and an end. Instead, it hovers in a kind of threshold, somewhere between seeing and knowing.

Tuesday 14 July 2015

Then and Now, Here and Nowhere

By Eleanor Lee-Duncan

The More You Know: The Victoria University of Wellington Art Collection in Context
Adam Art Gallery

February 02 – April 12, 2015



Figure 1 ‘Then and Now, Here and Nowhere’, Installation view by Shaun Waugh Photography, shaunwaughphotography.blogspot.co.nz
The More You Know was comprised of three self-contained suites spread over the three floors of the Adam Art Gallery, which showcased art works from the collection of Victoria University.
On the top floor, the exhibition ‘Then and Now, Here and Nowhere’ re-contextualized the works of Brent Wong against contemporary local Wellington artists, woven together by the thematic thread of flat, geometric or abstracted shapes impossibly juxtaposed against landscapes to provoke a sense of the ‘uncanny’. Whilst emphasizing the continued relevancy of the University Art Collection, it also placed importance on the education through art it presents, as the title ‘The More You Know’ suggested, and then conveyed this to the viewer through the rich text-heavy information throughout the gallery.
‘Then and Now, Here and Nowhere’ contained an array of works by Gavin Hipkins, Peter Trevelyan, Shaun Waugh, Kate Woods, and Brent Wong, spread across several artistic mediums. Wong’s traditionally realist acrylic paintings sit alongside a younger generation of artists who utilize modern or unusual artistic mediums.



Figure 2 Shaun Waugh, ‘Covenant cut-outs’, Image by  Shaun Waugh’s Photography  shaunwaughphotography.blogspot.co.nz


Shaun Waugh’s ‘Covenant cut-outs’ works are created using photos which he has digitally manipulated to blot out or ‘mask’ large areas of landscape with abstract, flat areas of colour. Seemingly erasing areas of bush growth, these works are concerned with the native tree and bush preservation on private farming land through a landscape project initiated by the Queen Elizabeth II National Trust, which ensures the ongoing preservation of natural and cultural features. 1



Figure 3 Kate Woods, Knin, Image by  katejwoods.co.nz

Situated next to these works in the exhibition are Kate Woods’ pieces, which incorporate both traditional and digital media. In this series of three works she has created cardboard sculpted shapes of Spomenik war monuments (Russian post-war sculptures), then painted the faceted surfaces. Finally she photographed them set against found constructed images of New Zealand landscape ‘non-sites’, thereby transforming them from a three-dimensional sculpture into a two-dimensional digital image.2 While Shaun Waugh’s works emphasize the formal removal of, or screening over, a space in a landscape, Kate Woods’ works create layers of imagined fields and fantastical created realms, which the geometric Spomenik shapes sit within. Woods describes the ‘non-sites’, the mysterious worlds within her works as ‘places you will never physically arrive in … yet seem so familiar’- constructed images which appear realistic, yet are artificial.3





Figure 4 An example of Peter Treveyan’s works, 'The art of modern fiction’, image by Bartley and Company, bartleyandcompanyart.co.nz


Peter Trevelyan similarly deals with geometric forms but instead of situating them within a landscape or earthly environment, he sets them aside against a blank white paper background, devoid of context. The works themselves are incredibly small, and arranged out of pencil leads finely glued together. This creates linear sculptures, ‘drawn’, as it were, from pencil, and then situated in cut out paper hollows within vintage, slightly worn books. As an interactive installation, they are intended to be picked up and ‘discovered’ by the viewer, with the novels becoming vessels of information and wonder. Through each of these artists’ works, the uniting theme is of the abstracted otherness of geometric, faceted or flat forms compared to the reality of complex plethora within nature and reality.



Figure 5 Brent Wong, 'Misconception’, image by the Adam Art Gallery, adamartgallery.org.nz


When considering ‘Then and Now, Here and Nowhere’, we could conceptualise the exhibition as presenting us with a non-linear narrative of art history. Rather than reading Wong as a John the Baptist figure or forerunner in a linear art historical narrative, we could read this suite as a cross-generational exhibition in which a small group of artists are interested in the same theme, at different moments in New Zealand art history. Although executed up to 50 years prior to the more recent artists, Wong was considering aesthetics which people are still interested in and preoccupied with. Both Waugh and Woods’ works seem to recall the fascination with impossible, abstracted and unreal shapes within a natural landscape which Brent Wong’s works typify. This is supported by the publicity statements of the exhibition, which state that the exhibition is ‘an occasion to reassess the ongoing potency of [Brent Wong’s] imagery, through the lens of contemporary art that seems to echo Wong’s aesthetic.’4



Here we are presented with an art history that is a continuous, contingent, and non-linear progression. Art history is portrayed to the viewer through this suite by a series of thematic and aesthetic strands that link the artworks together, in a very tightly curated way. The geometric forms seem to correlate against one other across the gallery space. Here, we see a series of artists examining similar themes within their own ideas, preferences, approaches, and preferred media. This art historical stance is further supported with the layout in which the works are hung; Woods’, Waugh’s and Trevelyan’s works are hung together in their series, but Brent Wong’s two works are separated and interspersed at different ends of the gallery. This physically supports a view that they are interlinked and situated against the contemporary artists.


Furthermore, this exhibition shows the reality that artists exist in conversation with each other, and their styles and concerns impact, stimulate, and influence one another. Another thing which I noticed about this exhibition was how closely this key aesthetic strand throughout the exhibition – the geometric forms and faceted shapes – was particularly timely in light of the current popularity and fashion for these aesthetics in contemporary pop culture. Just a few examples of the pervasiveness of this trend, may be seen in articles in Vogue, Design Platform, and Decoist, as well as being readily available for purchase in many shops.5 In an interview about ‘The More You Know’, Adam Art Gallery director Christina Barton discusses this contemporary feel to Brent Wong’s works:

They were anomalies when they were painted in their own time, but pulling them out now and putting them alongside contemporary artists they kind of look really contemporary. And it’s partially because the elements in the work don’t fit together – we have these strange buildings on the landscape and then these hills, and then these clouds and sky, and then these giant forms. . . much more of a drag-and-drop, cut-and-paste approach to putting a painting together, and yet it’s laboriously hand-painted. And I’m really fascinated by the degree to which his works resonate with younger artists…6


As an exhibition centred on shared thematic and aesthetic links, geometric forms, and a pick-and-choose method of selecting juxtaposing elements, ‘Then and Now, Here and Nowhere’ also asserts an art historical relevancy to, and alongside, contemporary visual and popular culture.



1- Enjoy Art Gallery, ‘Breckon and Shaun Waugh: Two photographers’, 2014. http://www.enjoy.org.nz/node/3296 accessed 16.04.2015
2- Kate Woods, Tjentište, 2011, framed photographic print.
Kate Woods, Knin, 2011, framed photographic print.
Kate Woods, Sanski, 2011, framed photographic print.
3- Kate Woods, quoted in Warwick Brown, Seen This Century: 100 Contemporary New Zealand Artists_, Random House, 2009, pp. 408-411.
4-Adam Art Gallery website homepage, ‘The More You Know: Then and Now, Here and Nowhere’, 2015.
http://www.adamartgallery.org.nz  accessed 09.04.2015
5-For articles on the current trend of geometric, faceted forms, please see the below webpages:http://www.vogue.it/en/trends/vogue-manias/2012/05/colorful-geometric-prints#ad-image187766
http://www.designplatformllc.com/blog/2014/9/12/trend-alert-the-70s http://www.decoist.com/2013-04-11/design-trend-spotlight-geometric-forms/
All
pages accessed 01.05.2015

6- Christina Barton, ‘Interview with Radio Active: The More You Know exhibition’, Wellington, 14.02.2015
https://m.mixcloud.com/Radioactive_FM/adam-art-gallery-interview/ accessed 24.04.2015