We’re editing a third edition of Enjoy’s Occasional Journal! The theme is trees, so get your thinking cap on and send us your ideas for writing/art. More information on how to submit can be found here.
Alice Tappenden – Untitled from Milk and Honey, 2010
A little interview I did with Peter Madden, one of the artists in Headcount. It was the perfect work to film this way – the close-ups are stunningly beautiful.
Woohoo! Today Enjoy Public Art Gallery in Wellington published a beautiful catalogue of Headcount, an exhibition Ann Shelton and I curated last year. It features work by Richard Orjis, Peter Madden, Greg Semu and Christian Thompson. You can download the PDF here.
Victoria Singh’s “Waiting Room”
Yesterday, we popped in to visit Waiting Room, an installation/performance piece by artist Victoria Singh. Held at the site of the old Ferret bookshop on Wellington’s Cuba Street, Singh has been performing in the transitory space since March 9. She’s set it up to resemble a non-specific waiting room, with semi-comfortable chairs, old magazines and paintings from junkshops on the walls. Participants are invited to come in off the street, sit down, and wait, while they fill out a form and perhaps conduct a video interview detailing their past experiences of waiting. Given that Matt was reviewing the show for a (slightly) more illustrious publication and that Singh was aware of this, I’m not sure that our experience was a typical one. It did, however, give me a rather genuine experience of what it’s like to wait.
This morning, I had a read through this ArtNews article, in which several artists discuss when they think their works are truly “finished.” One of my favourite statements came from Mona Kuhn, who commented: “When you feel that you are ready, you want to separate from it. You can’t take it anymore, and you have to push it out. And once it’s out it takes on a life of its own.”
Kuhn’s words acknowledge one of the most interesting issues surrounding art and art history: that while, on the one hand, there are artists, thoroughly invested in their works and their meanings as they see them; on the other, when works are released to the world, artists themselves can’t necessarily control their reception, interpretation, and even evolution. In some cases, they don’t even want to.
Two artworks that experiment with this idea come from our own (tiny) collection. Both untitled, they’re editions by Dane Mitchell that we purchased from Artspace: one, a sculpture, and the other, a print from their 21st birthday editions.
Dane Mitchell, “Untitled”, 2011,
Perfume, photographic paper, perspex, g-clamps
After a roaring start, things have been quiet around here, I know. I won’t blame this entirely on a certain large telecommunications company refusing to take our money and give us broadband, but this has been an influencing factor. For that I apologise, and promise that there’ll be good thoughts coming your way soon.
A short post is better than no post at all, though, and the other day when I was ploughing up and down the lanes at Thorndon (if you haven’t been before, get there before it closes for winter in April), I was thinking – ever so imaginatively – about art that features swimming pools. This small selection, mainly of photographs, showcases the way in which pools not only provide subject matter for artists’ exploration of form, light and space, but reflect society – whether as social hubs, abandoned sites or luxurious private spaces.
Rather bizarrely, when I was at high school, my parents brought home a painting from an art auction that Mum announced was “abstract”; and asked if I could make out the swimmer. A year later, a friend did a presentation on Kertesz and I realised that Mum’s painting is a complete copy of this photograph, but instead of the black and white, it’s teal green in tone. Sorry I don’t have a pic of that great masterpiece, but here’s the original:
Andre Kertesz, “American”, 1917
It can be easy for me to fall into the trap of over-thinking art. All too often I find myself in galleries reading wall labels from top to bottom, pausing briefly at the full stops and glancing at the object in an attempt to match words with work. Sometimes, I think my habit of speed-reading takes something away from interacting with the art itself. I’ll freely admit that I’m not the most patient person in the world, and this year my gallery-going resolution is to stop reading so much and look a whole lot more.
Every now and then, though, I come across art that speaks clearly of its own accord. Art that I’m immediately drawn to, that for whatever reason, I just like. Lauren Redican and Annsuli Marais’s exhibition at 30 Upstairs, Whatever you want, fits into that category.
Lauren Redican and Annsuli Marais, “Possibly”, 2014, Latex ink on german etching paper, 865 x 565 mm
In art+feminism news, this video might be a little cheesy, but if I were a tutor again, I’d totally be showing the students this before the Linda Nochlin class (and not just because I’m a fan of Girls):
A blog! We finally have a blog – a proper one, ready to be announced to the world. To be honest, though, we’ve actually ‘had a blog’ for nigh on a year now. We’ve been thinking about the blog, we’ve been talking about the blog, we’ve been writing notes for the blog. We’ve even been telling people about the semi-existent blog in an effort to motivate ourselves; in fact, we’ve been doing everything except actually writing the blog. Obviously, this is the most difficult part and generally, my writing time has tended to coincide with getting another cup of tea or watching The Wire.
The blog has also been somewhat hindered by my own desire for perfection and how hard I’ve found it to switch from long-form thesis and article writing to shorter and snappier bites of opinion. All of my ideas seemed too half-baked, unworthy of publication. As Matt said, though, half-baked ideas are exactly what blogs are good for – meant for, even. And what better title for such thoughts than Mixed Messengers? It might, at the very least, allow us to get away with being contradictory and/or hypocritical on occasion.
So, in the spirit of time passing, I’m going to start off by going back to the very first thing I wanted to write about on here – the exhibition, in fact, that spurred the blog idea in the first place: Gregory Crewdson’s In a Lonely Place. I’d seen the images countless times in book form, but wasn’t sure what their effect would be when they were placed on the walls of Wellington’s City Gallery. Neither, it seems, did anyone else; once it had opened the critical reception was minimal (feel free to correct me, but the only New Zealand article I saw published was in the Sunday magazine). Could those haunted, cinematic photographs not attract someone who cared enough to review them here in New Zealand? I cared, of course; I just wasn’t sure how to articulate it until now. What, exactly, did I think about In a Lonely Place?
mixed messengers 