cropmagazine

ISSUE TWO LAUNCH THIS THURSDAY 30th JUNE!

2011-06-28T16:39:00.000-07:00

This Thursday the 30th June at 5.30pm the Blue Oyster Gallery will host the launch of the second issue of CROP MAGAZINE.

Lamentably smuggled in under the cover of the Christchurch Earthquake, the Key Government's Copyright Amendment Bill came into draconian force under 'urgency' a couple of months ago. In dire need of contextualisation and critique, Crop2 investigates issues of intellectual property, copyright, copyleft, art and the 'commons' with articles and reviews by Ana Martino & Branden Wesseling, KRAUS, Malcolm Denes, Ana Nimmus, and Oliver van der Lugt. In addition to an effective, even if slanted, primer on property and art, you can look forward to an interview with Dane Mitchell on the Occult and reviews of TripleAAA, Nina Katchadourian, Ben Pearce, Anna Terry, Don Hunter and Angela Lyon at the Blue Oyster, Rachel Taylor, Operation 8 and the World Cinema Showcase, Antonio Negri, Paul Taylor's Zizek and the Media and a selection of appropriations from Kerry Ann Lee, Dick Whyte and Motoko Kikkawa.

Join Crop Magazine, contributing artists and writers to celebrate the launch this Thursday and also share in the Blue Oyster Gallery's grand opening of its new reading room. Refreshments provided.

ISSUE ONE IS HERE, NOW!

2011-04-21T18:23:00.000-07:00

crop issue one has arrived. The launch party took place at the SAG on the 21st of April, and was an extraordinary celebration. Copies are now available absolutely free in various locations around dunedin and further afield, but be quick, they are disappearing with unexpected haste. If you want to secure yourself a copy you can get a subscription and have one posted for a nominal fee (just email crop at r1 dot co dot nz).

Articles are now also available online here.

Guidance Council: Futurians ‘Chaos Manner’ Reviewed Dwayne Zarakov and Friends

2011-04-21T18:15:00.000-07:00

ISSUE ONE - CONTENTS

2011-04-21T17:39:00.002-07:00

I am Sitting in a Room, Different From the One You Are in Now: Some Thoughts on the Auditory Life of Art, and the Experimental Life of Radios -- Sally Ann McIntyre

2011-04-21T17:39:00.001-07:00

Just as sound’s existence as spatially fleeting, transient and liminal has continued to pose a set of problems for its framing in traditional (visual) art contexts, even as such contexts increasingly accept sound as one of its recognised mediums (lest we forget, a ‘sound artist’ won the Turner prize this year), musicians working with more abstract or experimental sonic forms and histories have found it fruitful to drive their own spaces, their own record labels and radio programmes, outside the constraints of anything resembling commercially oriented networks. Project-based gallery spaces and independent, university-based or community radio stations have been some of the cultural locations where innovative sound and new, experimental music has been both developed and heard. However it is often the case that the existence of more ‘underground’ self-organising networks within the functional worlds of sound practice (including the rise of their own forms of artist- run, or studio-based spaces) can give rise to pragmatic rather than aesthetically aligned relationships to both of these ‘venues’ or ‘vehicles’.

It is not so much a question of what happens to particular sound cultures when they are situated within the gallery, or on the radio, rather the question originates in the idea of contexts for experimental music, and how this music might best be recieved. How, historically, has such music has been nurtured, framed, brought into being, taken to an audience? Such discussions have come and gone in New Zealand, flaring up periodically, if not literally in the same room, then in the interconnected network of rooms which galleries, performance venues, radio programmes, pubs, public sites, and, more recently, websites and email discussion lists can provide.

The creative frissons and confluences which arise with such discussions, as with the hybrid projects that seem to skate between contexts, which remake or re-think radio, art site, ‘public space’, social and community involvement, create a variety of art practices which, in investigating an aesthetics of sound, also demonstrate intricate ways of thinking though an expanded notion of New Zealand’s place within an increasingly communicatively linked globe. In effect, they do what any critically engaged contemporary art practice will do, whatever its medium, that is : question the assumptions within which it is placed, and in that way illuminate those very assumptions, as such projects are both enabled by and critical of the technologies they use, and the spaces they operate within.

To speak about an ‘artist run space’ is to borrow the terminology of a certain strand of visual arts culture, specifically a kind of contemporary arts framework which has arisen directly from the desire to nurture non-commercial avenues for art’s presentation and dissemination. Such spaces arrived en masse in the early-to-mid 1990s in New Zealand, as a response to a perceived lack of opportunities in the art-world for non-commercial presentation of work. They are connected to the development of youthful, critical, experimental work in this period, often the idiosyncratic brain-children of specific individuals and groups, with specific ideas about art and how it functioned socially and aesthetically. This led to the development of a variety of artist-driven platforms where, as much as was possible, the artists themselves controlled the frames and means of their work’s reception by audiences, where transmitters and receivers of artworks could meet in a more vital, generative social space, and where non-sales driven, non-object based, performative, ephemeral or temporary project-based work, relieved of the pressure of sales-driven constraint, could be shown: Teststrip, the High Street Project, Fiat Lux, the Black Cube, Enjoy Gallery, the Honeymoon Suite, the Blue Oyster Contemporary Art Space, Room 103, to name just a few. Whether these spaces remained in existence beyond their first two years or their first few projects, and, if they did, whether they remained ‘artist run’ after securing project funding is a different kind of story – they were, and remain, models of cultural production that have had lasting impact and fostered practice through an alternative modality of working. For sound cultures, artist run spaces must sometimes seem to skate a curious, and perhaps useful borderland between access and exclusion, community and the rarified, criticality and openness.

There are some affinities with so-called ‘student’ radio stations. Despite the alleged decline in listenership in recent decades, and the contemporary privatisation of many stations in New Zealand, student radio is still often one of the only sources for local programming, alongside other forms of community and independent radio. Presenters and specialist DJs have links to communities making music locally, and are often knowledgable about their field, fostering the growth of music cultures by giving airtime, and therefore audiences, to this music without the need for emphasising commercial imperatives, or playing music which is obscure or hard to come by within a knowledgeable, personable context, a situation which designates the late night zones of airspace as fertile breeding grounds for intelligent contact with interesting sound.

If we look to the discussion list of the Audio Foundation, a charitable trust set up by Zoe Drayton in Auckland in 2002 under the auspices of supporting the development of audio culture in New Zealand, we can see, in seeming direct response to the need for a space for practices ‘that fall between art and music’, a virtual room where there is a lot of talking going on. The discourse which has emerged as diverse members discuss practical and technical issues, publicise events, contest and cohere histories, test the limits of their context with their various tools and ideas, suggests that even among such diverse practices as list members have, much can be gained through the coherence of having a ‘venue’ for such discussions.

Zita Joyce, in her article, “Can We Post Gig Announcements Here? Community Connections in the Audio Foundation Mailing List”, published in a special issue of Art Monthly Australia focusing on Sound (issue 225, November 2009), wrote about it as just such a venue, and unpicked its similarities to, and focus on the medium of radio:

As a means of disseminating information and forging connections and allegiances the closest analogue to the AF list is perhaps the community radio station, particularly in its role as an extension of music practice. New Zealand’s student radio stations have long been the primary, if reluctant and sporadic, point of aural connection between practitioners, each other, and their audiences. A recurring thread of discussion on the list has been the dwindling of support for experimental and challenging music by student radio, signified by the cancellation in 2003 of Auckland station bFM’s Solar Furnace Hour, and rdu’s Rotate Your State in Christchurch.

Danni Zuvela, in her article “Artist Run Initiatives and Sound Art in Australia”, included in the same issue of Art Monthly Australia, also reminds us, while introducing her discussion of Brisbane-based artist run sound space the Audio Pollen Social Club, that the emails left after highly ephemeral events often function as one indicators or traces of their existence to those not present or involved directly. As Danni puts it, “Initiatives like the APSC represent a ‘current of work’ that develops both outside of galleries dealerships and salesrooms, and in a non-unilateral relationship with such structures’, and emphasises ‘lived practices (performances, events, happenings, behaviours, sociabilities, communicational acts) [which] supplant … fixed objects in the primary insistence of the work.” (quoting Matthew Fuller, ‘Media Ecologies : Materialist Energies in Art and Technoculture”, MIT Press, Massachusetts, 2005, pp. 73-74.) Interestingly, Audiopollen started life as a weekly, late night experimental music programme on student / community radio staion (4ZZZ FM) – both the liveness of the radio show and the differently live embodiment in performance leaving few footprints on written culture, perhaps more in the minds of performers and community participants.

Radio Kiosk was a project exhibited from 29 June – 18 July 2006, in a small, self contained public art site on the corners of Lichfield and High Streets in central Christchurch. A Mini-FM radio station with a two-week duration, the project placed a sound library of archival experimental radio shows, sourced from stations and individuals who had either been contacted via mailing lists or through direct discussion with the curators, back into the public space and the sounds of the wider city. Arriving at roughly around the same time as iTunes-connected portable mp3 players were starting to be streetwear for the ears, Radio Kiosk did something interesting in hybridising the scrolling, automated playlist with the history of Christchurch experimental radio, placing it back into those very streets via the airwaves. The show functioned, as Zita wrote,

…[as] an experimental radio compilation [which] gathers together experimental radio shows and music labels from around New Zealand and Australia, into a single programme broadcast from the Kiosk Public Art Site on the corner of High and Lichfield Sts in Christchurch. It is a radio station made up of other radio stations, an adventure in adventurous radio, channelling the sounds of other times and places.

These shows – originally heard once, live, at the time of broadcast a week, a year, or a decade previously, and then stashed away in digital or analogue storage (computer harddrives, C90 tapes in shoeboxes) – came alive again in their new context.

By becoming a temporary sound library for the long lost annals of creative radio practice, Radio Kiosk was a curatorial project which also functioned as a temporary meeting point of various strands of discourse, practice and critical thinking around media and experimental music. For instance, there was a workshop held the week before at the Physics Room by media artist Adam Hyde, which involved a group of people gathering together to build their own simple, small but functioning radio transmitters, whose eventual transmission area of a few hundred meters each would perhaps empower their makers into creating their own artistic and/or communicative futures for narrowcast radio. The transmitters were based on a design by Tetsuo Kogawa, and packaged inside an artist project called ‘Broadcast Your Podcast’ by Lotte Meijer, along with the manuals Adam had written for transmitter construction. One of the transmitters was then used to narrowcast the Radio Kiosk programme of radio art, audio art and experimental music - the former gathered from fragments of other radio stations and the latter from self-distributed music labels. The programme itself was curated from Auckland by ((ethermap (Zita Joyce and Adam Willetts). There was also a discussion, which the project was partly a response to, on the New Zealand Audio Foundation email list about experimental radio shows in New Zealand in the early 1990s. This began with an AF member asking about a Christchurch show called Rotate your State which broadcast on student radio station RDU. Being one of the host DJs I was interested and inspired by the discussion of a show which, at the time, received little or no feedback. I was in fact inspired enough to revisit my own reasons for playing experimental music on the air, and to dig around in my tape archive.

The shows I found on dusty shoebox-housed C90 cassette tapes were then converted to mp3. Rather than putting these newly digitised files alongside others by experimental music makers on the internet as a series of podcasts, their insertion in the airwaves via Radio Kiosk’s mini FM transmissions preserved the sense of ephemerality and tenuousness which the making of such radio had originally exhibited. Both a database and also its opposite, Radio Kiosk explored the functionality of restriction and curatorial selection as a way of delineating and making meaning around the sometimes disorientatingly large amounts of information available on the internet. Not a nostalgia for a prior, less networked world but an interest in the possibilities of more strategically restrictive mediums for their unique properties within their world, as co-curator Zita Joyce’s description of how Mini-FM functions in the project:

(to) deliberately restrict its transmissions to its immediate surroundings, so that it physically draws its listeners in.2

This interest in small bounded spaces as a form of ‘microscopic’, or translocal response to Globalisation, which emphasises tangible community can be seen performatively in the entire history of Mini FM. Just as during playback Mini FM transmissions gather listeners as embodied presences in the same room, Mini-FM’s performative and collective method of construction, via workshops held by the likes of Tetsuo Kogawa or those following on from his practice, further underlines the ‘authorless’ social nature of the medium. Kogawa’s words on the movement he set in motion and still explores emphasise this drive toward the intimately scaled listening experience:

…today’s technology is going to remove every difference that defines the human body as well as the objectified body and the physical world. Geographical and spatial distances have been shrinking with global media. Digital technology erases the distance between the original and the reproduction. But I don’t think these trends homogenise everything. We need to change our conventional epistemology and macroscopic approach and we need to differentiate distances, or else everything might seem to be the same. The fact is that global media create “translocal” enclaves of cultures. They are very local as well as going beyond locality. It is difficult to understand such a translocality unless we insist on a microscopic approach, in order to find the diverse differences in the shrinking but increasingly dense distance. Mini-FM would be merely one example of such a microscopic approach.3

The first use of the word ‘telematic’ to describe artworks involving distance communication, was by Simon Nora and Alain Minc in their 1980 book The Computerisation of Society.4 “Above all,” they write, “insofar as [computerisation] is responsible for an upheaval in the processing and storage of data, it will alter the entire nervous system of social organisation. This increasing interconnection between computers and telecommunications – which we will term ‘telematics’ – opens radically new horizons.” They continue with a prescient nod toward future challenges: “Are we headed… toward a society that will use this new technology to reinforce the mechanisms of rigidity, authority and domination? Or, on the other hand, will we know how to enhance adaptability, freedom, and communication in such a way that every citizen and every group can be responsible for itself?”

As early as 1971 Phil Dadson was using radio link-ups to connect performers in locations on opposite sides of the globe, emphasising alternative communicative channels to create an informality, person-to-person signalling and connectivity. One such event, called From Auckland, NZ to Angelsea, North Wales, by Air (1971), a mail-art and precursory telematic art project, was staged when Dadson moved back to New Zealand after his time in the UK participating in the Scratch Orchestra. The piece took form through the interaction of performers in Northern and Southern Hemispheric locations, situated in “Auckland : 8pm in a hall, and Angelsea: 8am in a field where the London group was camping.” Of the work Dadson writes:

The event was co-ordinated by mail with a pre-arranged time set for the long-distance event, which lasted approx an hour, with silent spaces incorporated in both sets of instructions for ‘listening’ long-distance to the group on the other side of the world doing whatever they were doing. A flag was hoisted at each end when a listening period was enacted. It was an extreme sound event (chainsaw, large sheets of corrugated iron etc) at the Auckland end, more gentle at the other…5

Dadson’s purely analogue process would eventually find a coversation with Nora and Minc’s ‘computerisation’. Artists working in the field of telematics in New Zealand in the mid-late 1990s engaged with the rapid development of global communicative technologies, and began analysing how these affected social spaces, and other mediums, including radio. Projects such as Radioqualia’s Frequency Clock (1998) converged the possibilities of analogue and digital into hybrid time-space conjunctions: “The Frequency Clock creates aural portals into the creative spaces of the contributors. It recontextualises net.radio within an inventive exhibition environment allowing gallery audiences to explore net.radio spatially, as well as jettisoning net.radio onto the airwaves, opening up new possibiilities for dialogue between ‘old’ and ‘new’ technologies. Radio and net.radio overlap, the functions of both dissolve into each other.”6 This brought net.radio into conversation with older forms of broadcast, activating their different spatiality's.

In 2005, expat New Zealander Dion Workman staged a collaboration with Alex Baghat through transmission art organisation : free103point 9 – this was called Brooklyn to Paris 10.02.05 (2005): “Over two days teams in New York and Paris synchronised sound interventions in real time from the two different space-time contexts, linked by radio communications devices. This enabled each team to modify the other’s environment through the construction and activation of a third element, an independent actor enabling simultaneous interfacing : a digital automated device operating in a network. The collected sounds were transformed and diffused into each performance context through mobile radio devices, thus building a spatialization in constant movement. (Note : the project was intended to be heard in real time, spatialised across streets in Paris and New York so these recordings are rather poor representations of our interventions).”7

Workman has since moved toward an increasing interest in minimalism and the live situatedness of sound, works which emphasise smaller scale place and slowness, and are more meditative in their apprehension of listening experiences. In a project he staged in March 2008 as part of a series of public art sound works called Sound Circuit, run by the Adam Art Gallery in Wellington, the scale was stripped back to the immediate and the space of communication deliberately limited to what was possible via bodily involvement. This lead to a focus on bounded spaces, on the smallest sounds, like the strange electrical hums that exist on certain street corners. Perplexing, slightly menacing, almost beautiful, Workman’s project cast the particiant in the space of privileged listener, the one who has noticed and isolated the sounds around them. Fully substituting the author as producer fot that of the active receiver, Workman regards the activation of the soundworlds around the listener as sufficient to constitute ‘production’. Interested in the artist’s role as creator of situations, frameworks and spaces, Workman prefers to hand over the solo authorship of his practice to a collaborative process. In an interview following the project’s completion he said:

a lot of the time what I’m doing is happening completely anonymously, without anyone except myself, or when I’m working with other people maybe one of two other people even knowing what’s going on, and that situation’s fine for me, it’s quite interesting to work in that way, I don’t feel that I need anything more than that

[…] although working with others really does shape the project, and oftentimes I really am just one of the participants in the larger project. It can be difficult to arrange it like this, but even when I’ve instigated the project I like it when I can slip into the background a little and just be one of the participants, so it takes on a life of its own […] what I’ve found now is that I work in a space which is really outside the music world, and it’s outside the art world, and there are some wonderful people that I come across that also work in this space, but for the most part you feel like a little bit of an outsider.

[…] to someone else it might not seem I’m making any art at all. I don’t feel the need… to make, I don’t want to produce anything actually, that’s the last thing I want. I will continue to do these ephemeral type of projects, where and when it seems like a good idea to do them.

In the project itself, the small audible moments, as points of contact, are untethered from referentiality. Signal and noise are confused in an un-immersive sound walk which is Brechtian in its effect of unsettling the soundscape from an assumption of acoustic naturalism (a bit like David Clegg’s strategies around the acousmatic, which I’ll talk about a bit later). Small hand-make electronic buzzers are inserted in the pockets of ten people, who walk through the city in something like a ‘formation’. Playing with the notion of the Situationist dérive, these walkers move like a flock of lazy birds across the city, engaging with shop assistants, clustering in bus shelters, where their buzzing is either dissipated or concentrated by space and air and their proximity to each other. Part performance, part deep-listening exercise, part guerrilla intervention, the walkers’ perambulations are caught on a cusp of heightened present-ness, a jittery subjectivity. The buzzers, perhaps because of their non-specificiable and alien tone, are somehow disconnected tfrom their their embodied location(s), and fail to be identified with the people involved and therefore become a high-pitched ambience somewhere in the air. Significantly, the buzzers’ interpretation shifts dramatically with context. In a natural setting they are interpreted as the sounds of insects, and in a cityscape it is heard as more menacing, - an alarm or electrical disturbance, something connected to surveillance, technical malfunction, or audible electromagnetic disturbance and/or the ephemerality of the moment in the era of small portable electronic devices (cellphones, mp3 players, tiny laptop computers). In effect the buzzers act as an aural mirroring device, a sonic Rorschach blot. What then happens when this enters the gallery space is equally telling – the confusion of unwanted noise, taken as the sounds of malfunction, perhaps the blandest intervention possible. The ten people walk into a large public gallery space. Gallery technicians are sent scurrying to wall panels, to find the source of the noise, unaware that the sound source is right beside them – masquerading as receivers of art, these spectators are in fact also transmitters.

Workman, with his interest in wandering, surveillance, and the outsider’s position, and a desire to work beyond art-world codes, here casts an ear back to the gallery to catch it unawares:

I think the art world’s interest in sound is going to be the death of it. It’s going to die a horrible institutional death, but that’s actually probably not such a bad thing, because it wasn’t doing so well anyway… really, what’s interesting to me about it is… I mean, there’s really nothing interesting about a lot of the way sound art is approached or music is approached, but on the other hand, it can give a lot to the people that listen to it. They can get a lot from it, and I think it’s great when people realise that it’s really the way that they’re perceiving it that makes it what it is, and therefore, if they can carry that kind of perception to all sounds, everywhere, that can result in a very rewarding experience, a sort of deep experience of sound. It would be great if everyone just started listening intently, to the sounds around them, and listening with a sustained awareness, and then you wouldn’t really need anyone making the stuff.

Started in Europe in April 2005, the Radia network is an international informal network of community radio stations that share radio artworks produced week-to-week by member stations. Radia is artist-driven radio, an artist run space which works with radio as a medium, also using the internet for its potential for specialised ‘communities of interest’ to develop across geographical and national boundaries - something already familiar from underground music networks of tape exchange, small label distribution, and associated pre-internet cultural practices. As the Radia Wikipedia page states “Usually each member radio station commissions an artist from their local artistic community and gives him/her carte blanche for producing a show. In that sense, radia uses radio as a gallery for sound art pieces.”

In April 2007, the Radia network received an honorary mention, in the category “digital communities”, at the Prix Ars Electronica of the Ars Electronica Festival. According to the Ars Electronica website, “The Radia Network is a community of independent radio stations who have combined to facilitate an ongoing shared cultural initiative. The stations, based throughout Europe, share in weekly commissioned pieces that explore radio as an art form. Each station produces a piece in turn, which all of the partners then publish. The pieces do not seek to promote a common language but to celebrate the diversity of the breadth of their contributors. It uses the possibilities opened up by the net to share the work and ideas not only of the stations but also of the artistic communities that themselves represent the audience of each contributor and then, through extension, of the whole.”

Radia is a project that, essentially, taps into the radio art and experimental sound communities of twenty (at the time of writing) radio stations worldwide. Its New Zealand presence, through Radio One 91FM, Dunedin, has, since joining the network in August 2009, explored various aspects of local and national sound practice, through experimental documentaries made around festivals and sound spaces which themselves nurture contexts for various experimental music practices, commissioning artist projects which engage critically with radio as a medium, and staging related live radio projects with other members of the network. Documenting artist run spaces for sound is supplemented with the idea of the radio as a specific sound-space of its own. The initial Radia broadcast by Radio One was sent over the airwaves, and streamed live from the website of Dunedin’s Radio One 91FM in August 2009. Simultaneously it was narrowcast by the Mini-FM station Radio Cegeste to a live audience at Enjoy Gallery, a project space in central Wellington. The documentary Lines of Flight: a Sonic Community, mixed recorded interviews, audio and ambient sound from the performers and spaces involved in the 5th instance of Lines of Flight, an experimental sound festival held every two years in a variety of locations in Dunedin and nearby Port Chalmers. Starting as a festival which gave space to a conentrated bandwidth of practice connected to the Metonymic label run by Peter Stapleton, aligned with a type of abstract music influenced by free jazz and drone called by some at the time ‘free noise’, the festival has since become a more eclecic snapshot of various strands in the experimental sound world. Equally as importantly, perhaps, is its function as a community get-together.

Communication between far-flung Dunedin and the other Radia network member stations is enabled by Radia’s use of an email list, digital file sharing and streaming - the internet becoming crucial in supporting links between these communities of local radio makers. Here, use of internet based digital software has not become a mediumistic replacement for radio but an everyday tool which supplements these radio spaces’ existence in their bounded localities. This tool kit includes ftp filesharing for distribution of shows, as well as permanent archiving of historic shows at archive.org, and sometimes live streaming via icecasting software for associated projects. In these ways, Radia is broadcast radio in an age of global connectivity. Despite this, Radia can also be read as a form of mail-art project, in the sense that it emphasises the localities of particular situations, the materialities of communication, and the fact that it is a specific network of exchange wholly operated by the participants.

The networks of radio makers which Radia fosters have facilitated various events which link one location and time zone to another, such as Port-O-Port, a live streaming radio show/performance at Chicks Hotel, Port Chalmers, at 8pm NZ time/8am PT time on the 16th October 2009. Port-O-Port presented a live breakfast show for Lisbon’s Radio Zero, which was part of the programming for a radio set up as a project station for the Futureplaces Media Arts festival in Porto, Portugal. I introduced and interviewed artists who performed a variety of works related to the theme of place and locality in a digitally networked world: Pete Gorman whose mains hum tapped the Port Chalmers earth co-mingled with the shunting of the port at night; Alex Mackinnon’ whose guitar and processing of room sounds and feedback was a noise-culture homage to Alvin Lucier; and a revised version of an artist project called the Dunedin Shortwave Radio Orchestra (last seen twiddling the dials in the 1990s but who now, in the age of the cellphone and various other forms of electromagnetic noise, were listening into airwaves which were far busier the last time they tapped them).

I Am a Strange Loop was a radio programme by Full Fucking Moon, a group comprised of core members Bek Coogan and Torben Tilly, joined at times by Andy Wright, as well as other members. The piece was commissioned by the Blue Oyster Contemporary Art Project Space, Dunedin, for their biannual performance series in late 2010. Questioning the presence of the live performer in a kind of ‘radio séance’ which playfully unpicked the notion of spiritual presence in the radiophonic realm, the artists broadcast sound separately from the studios of both a local community AM and an FM station, whilst the ‘audience’ was invited to a performance in another location again, the Otago Pioneer Women’s Association Community Hall. Radio waves were used musically to create a live ‘mix’ that had many potential forms of reception depending on the choices of the listener (to physically go to the space, to stay at home listening either to one frequency or the other, or to tune between both). The two radio frequencies converged in the performance space (with multiple reception devices) and met with that particular audience, who were free to engage with the building and the radios placed within it. The form of the piece was therefore not fixed, and shifted depending on one’s position, in time and space. One striking thing about the performance were the points at which its disembodiment and its exploration of distance collapsed when embodied performers arrived in the space. Firstly, a medium channelling a spirit presence, who spoke of waves, and the spirituality of the radio, and then again at the end, when the band arrived for a coda, dressed in homage to outsider girl group The Shaggs and wearing identical dresses and wigs. The song they performed, called ‘The Litany of the Oceans,’ involved singer Bek Coogan reciting the names of the craters of the Moon. I am a Strange Loop explored the notion of the radio as an occult and psychedelic medium. Appropriately, one of the small radios of the many placed throughout the space was innocently commercially branded a ‘dream machine’. Commissioning an edit of the programme for Radia shifted the work into a form which was surprisingly less linear than miasmic, and placing back into Radio One 91FM, the original signal which it broadcast as part of the original performance.

David Clegg’s The Miserable Idea of Measurement (refrain), (Radia Show #312, Season 25), is the most recent contribution to Radia by Radio One. It began life as an installation at Artspace, Auckland, in a newly opened and starkly minimal space in the gallery. Recontextualising the spatially responsive nature of his exhibition for the space of radio, Clegg built a series of recordings into a sound-library or database which mirrored the jarring territories of the sounds of the gallery’s surrounding cityscape. The Miserable Idea of Measurement might itself be said to be a comment on the standardisation of experience in digital culture, the presence of silences in the radio broadcast, serve as markers which underline the ‘dead time’ of digital silence, as opposed to the Cagean absence of it in the world of the field recordings it brackets. For such pieces, Clegg uses binaural microphones to capture the sounds of environments he traverses on foot, capturing the listening and the recording, reception and transmission process in the one gesture, reception and transmission as one and the same. As in previous works The Imaginary Museum and Café Republic, Clegg activates the headphone-spaces as a domain of acousmatic listening, an engagement with modalities of space rather than an exclusion from them. In formal presentation and playback this gets around, as other works of Clegg’s also have, the use of headphones as isolating devices, the aural equivalent of art’s “white cube”.

Commissioning an edit of this work for Radia from David opened the work into a new dimensionality for the radio. As Brandon Labelle puts it in his essay ‘Phantom Music’:

In contrast to the Walkman and iPod (and other mp3 players) user, the radiophonic witness selects no soundtrack to the drifts of everyday life; the audible experience is not pre-selected, nor is the contacts of daily life softened by a sought after isolation. Rather, soundtrack is always only heard at the given moment of memory-making, provided by the very stage and scene of the event itself.8

At this moment, perhaps more so than others, it feels there are no definitive statements. It is not useful, here, to sketch a monographic notion of ‘sound art’ (or perhaps better, simply ‘sound’). It is not useful, for the purposes at hand, to ask : is sound a medium and is it interesting to talk about it in mediumistic terms? Rather, one can only talk about particular events and incidences, however ephemeral, unrepeatable, unspectated. Seeing local histories of art practice as clusters of such events, understanding how they have been explored in particular contexts and venues, is perhaps the first step in beginning to understand the perpetuation of a living culture which works as an ongoing series of moments, evolving practices and questions, until something changes these trajectories into another form. Recently, many rooms I have spent hours of my life sitting in, have become inaccessible, either through destruction, demolition, or restrictions around movement in the Christchurch inner city. Many streets in which I walked and listened have been changed beyond recognition, the old buildings, fertile territory for the proliferation of art project spaces, artist studios, and even a small radio station or two (Mofo FM on Lichfield St, for example), as well as other grass roots cultural endeavours, knocked down forever. Perhaps here, there is a need less for a timeline than a toolkit, as this is also about the ongoing extension of these possibilities via understanding what has happened formerly, if we also understand that the possibilities of Art Histories are never fully explored at the time, and continue to live on in the present as collections of strategies.

NOTES:

1 -- Alvin Lucier, I am Sitting in a Room (for Voice on Tape), 45:21 [1970], (Lovely Music Ltd. 1990).

2 -- http://www.ethermap.org/radiokiosk/

3 -- Tetsuo Kogawa, “Mini-FM; Performing Microscopic Distance,” in Chandler & Neumark [eds.], From a Distance: Precursors to Art and Activism on the Internet, (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2005), p209.

4 -- Nora & Minc, The Computerisation of Society, Cambridge: MIT Press, 1980), pp4-5.

5 -- Personal email correspondence with the artist, 19/7/2008.

6 -- http://subsol.c3.hu/subsol_2/contributors3/harger-hydetext.html

7 -- http://ruccas.org/wiki.pl?Dion%20Workman

8 -- Brandon LaBelle, “Phantom Music”, in LaBelle & Jensen, Radio Territories, (Los Angeles/Berlin: Errant Bodies Press, 2007), p101.

"The Lies We Lie Behind…" - Carl A. Mears

2011-04-21T17:39:00.000-07:00

Carl A. Mears hailed from New Haven, Connecticut, U.S.A. sometime in the mid-sixties. He gleaned a lot in the ambiance of a great university, and from it’s superior art-collections and libraries gained a love of culture, learning and librarians. He is a Veteran of a Foreign War, and served in a junior officers’ mess somewhere or elsewhere. Until recently peripatetic, he lives now at Walden Pond. He enjoys his own micro-radio commentary on life and on the arts where he hypothesizes and hyperventilates fortnightly on a local radio station. Sometimes he writes things on paper, sometimes on walls. Reiterating as of habit, he ponders how it should be. Assembling fragments in his mind, he takes his perspective on the mirror, and realizes there is no hiding. Today he is only his Father’s son, and Carl is not his name, nor that his history.

On Time and John Borley Returns Again.

At the beginning of March, 2011, John Borley returned for a brief visit to Aotearoa during which time he revisited Dunedin. As it is with his art practice generally, he was anxious to observe traces of time past - identify markers - while revisiting and re-observing places and people he knew. He was an artist in residence at the Blue Oyster Gallery Dunedin during 2007. Later in on Melbourne, Australia, he was selected for the city funded, Lane Ways ’08, Project as a participating artist after proposing “Time and Again”. That high profile Project allowed him to advertise very simply in a free public advertising sheet, for eight volunteers. Those people were to meet with him at identical times, once per week, for a period of eight weeks. On each occasion they were to repeat with John, identical walks through the Laneways area of downtown Melbourne. They did, and they did it differently.
A set of eight writers was selected, to partner each volunteer. One,
Marg Roberts happened to live in Sydney, but met her walk-partner in Melbourne and communicated frequently from Sydney. Adrian Hall in Dunedin, did not meet but talked with his walker sporadically by telephone, between and after the walks. Others were more local and met frequently or not, and occasionally with other writers.
After much cogitation, Marg Roberts concludes :
“Time and Again” mirrors the everyday - the rest of the city-population re-enact to go to work or to school, or to the shops or even the walk up the passageway to go to bed at night. These walks are also subject to random disturbance. But in the temporal and spatial containment of the system of eight walks, the Time and Again walks maintain some of the relative autonomy of art as a distinct social form. The time and again walkers walk with a less defined and more open intent than other city walkers, even though this would not be evident to others. It is not subsumed as a means to a known end - to move from one location to another - and neither is it the aimless walking of the flâneur. The walking and the relationship that develops between walkers and the locations they cross is framed loosely as an ‘art-walk’, made mysterious because it is not without purpose but its purpose is unknown or undecided. In mirroring the everyday therefore, it is also distinct from it, inviting reflection on walking as a type of art-material as well as a mode of transport integrated and subsumed into the wider experience of ‘life’. “
There were no rules on length or ‘style’ in the writings; despite there being, thanks to the Melbourne Council and to the decisive generosity of the artist a substantial standard fee. The eight pieces of writing were required to be part of a publication, “On Time and Again” which appeared commendably rapidly after the Project. The variety of style and word count was distinct and intense. The publication was placed for access on line, at . Copies of the printed edition were deposited in academic libraries across New Zealand, Australia, the U.K. and the West Coast of the U.S.A. were also graced by hard copies of “On Time And Again.”
While in Dunedin in late February 2011, John talked to Carl and Gilbert, about that particular work and the others, which he undertook during his Blue Oyster residency. That conversation on the DPAG Late Breakfast Show, Radio One - 91fm, is available online here. The following essay was written by Otago artist and Cornishman, Adrian Hall and is reproduced by permission of John Borley from the publication “On Time and Again.”. Currently John lives near, and works from Adelaide, South Australia.

Carl A. Mears.

Today, now, here.

Teeth again this morning. How many times for them? Even forgetting the forgotten times. I strike again with the electric brush - jittering and splashing - blood shows this time. Just a little. The head turns again gazing out the window dwelling pensively on the on the grey sky and cold rainy bushes. A slight drizzle splatters from the dull clouds. Pearl Drops spatter the mirror. The two minute timer blips and I can relax. Time to focus again tonight but maybe tomorrow there will be a clear view again. Two minutes can be eternal.

Belfast N.I. 1972

Darkness - no street lights, Army patrols and bricked up buildings. Walking out in the open under the moon, hoping the flickering camouflage of the soldiers will not galvanise with my movement. The agora open and myself phobic because of it. The alleyways glint like coal chips and the patrol flickers across, hiding in the shadows. Why are they dressed in old rags and twigs in this red brick Victorian Market place? Two minutes is enough to pass swiftly across and disappear. The squaddies continue unfazed in blackface: another tour of duty: another set of patrols. This time they ignore me.

Aramoana N.Z. July 2008

I have marked John’s Monday Melbourne walks. Eight times eight. I dwell on the distance and try to visualize the tram-cars. Perhaps the other Adrian, my avatar, is the knight? Out on sorties, out on patrol. I’m a pawn though. I dwell on his voice. Gentle against the background of city street noises, this is a rare telephone conversation of which I am not sure. I like it but like the mystery better. I’m glad he seems to like the idea of neo-Plato, a white Saarnen goat who chances his luck against the two dogs and the International cat duo, who live here with us, at the mouth of Dunedin Harbour.

On the telephone I heard a tram bell I think. The goat bleats here against the raindrops, that would sound different in the City. The radio conjoins with Kiwi accents and the whirl of hard drives. I wait for the auto back-up. A dog barks somewhere else. The radio follows it’s own path, the hourly time signal, incessant non-news. ‘Nine to Twelve’ just like yesterday, and the day before. I hear the surf and the wind and at high tide a low throb of a freighter, chugging down Scott’s passage from Port Chalmers. Once there were whales calving down there. Aramoana means, ‘The Pathway of the Sea’. Sometimes there are orca, and even an elephant seal. Today there are just the sheep. And one goat. And one old man.

Dunedin. August 2008

Every other week on the Saturday morning the radio show comes around, I panic, the day before and from early in the morning too, what other words can be said about A.R.T . A Winter Ale can help when I get there, and a strong black coffee just for a kick first thing. Later another Winter Ale. and a Guinness at the Eureka Bar. A full pint glass, mild and cool. There were many of those too - in Ireland especially, two pints at once, another for in a minute and some cashew nuts please. Most nights we were there for a while, many nights chugging Guinness, sometimes Jameson’s. Waiting for the bombs to finish. Waiting for the smoke to clear. Not thinking casualties. Running my fingers idly under the bar, feeling the splintered cavities of the machine gun bullets from the week before.

Aramoana, NZ August 2008

When I polish these shoes again, my mind wanders off. Saturday mornings was for shoe polishing. Monday, wash-day. Saturday was for tripe. They appear newish and burnished now. Everyday then was for walking. To work, to School. If I were a Laneway walker, I would think deeply about my shoes. I am content with the way these appear, and I would wear them with their crisp click of leather soles. Although they seem a little old they do have an old fashioned sense to them of deliberation and style. No bouncy athletic shoes for me on the Laneway walk. I would walk the Cityman walk, the Salaryman walk. And when I thought of a meeting point, I remembered the Nepalese Resturaunt and remember clicking back then on the maroon tiles. Like a cart-horse.

Sydney, 1998

I was immersed in a terrible time then, when my lawyers were working for me. They were ecstatic, bubbling over inconceivable sums of money which meant little to me, for at that time I could hardly afford the shuttle from the International Airport. They, the lawyers, kindly recommended me to an Hotel in Melbourne, it was large, and refurbished industrial. The attendent was clad in tails and a top-hat, he was polite. The cost per night was more than the value of my car. Like a London Department Store in the sixties it dazzled me. Puddled in a wealth of nostalgia, it just waited to be reminded of the reality which exists for some folk, of not needing to think of such tedious trifles as budget. I found somewhere else, and also discovered the Ghurkha Resturaunt which I entered because of my late Father.

Melbourne, Summer 2004

In the cool of the Ghurkha resturant. I was sipping a beer slowly to make it last, and not impressing the young woman looking after my order for I was too calculating. She knew that if there was to be a tip, it would be the minimum. And if I got it wrong then there would be big embarrassment. With this lumpy white man in his cheap, sweaty clothes, for he seemed to be counting the coins in his pocket, I needed the rest though, I was hungry, and I needed to sit in the cool for a little. I found myself inside that cafe salivating because of my Father. He was a Navy man: the Royal Navy of course, shoulders back and set like clamps on a lathe. Discipline.

Aramoana, August 2008

In the years since he had died, I had continued to chat with him as I was right then. Amongst all his hard living and School of Hard Knocks fables, he had built up a fund of mixed histories, which buttressed his old authority as Chief Petty Officer. If he had not been known as ‘Knobby’ Hall, I think he might have been pleased to have been called ‘Doc’, on account of his military knowledge. And somewhere in all that reading was an admiration of the Ghurkha people of Nepal, and their Second World war escapades with the Allies. As with all servicemen, there was a brutality which crudely camouflaged a profound sentimentality, and his respect for those people was based on mythological bravery, and fiercely admirable fighting of the most bloody kind. The thought of which made him chuckle with a patronising glee. I remember his stories of their traditional weapon, the Khukri and it’s bloodletting.

Melbourne, 2004

So there I was without my Father. He had never been East to the sub-continent, or places more glamorous than the rusting Mediterranean, so I don’t know what exactly fascinated him about such histories, but I think knowledge of the secrets of metals contributed to his peculiar Freemasonry, and the knowledge of the old ways of metals and machinists gave him strength. Among service men there is mate-ship but also the mystique of Trades.

Aramoana, August 2008

I would have liked to eat with him there in Melbourne, as he always regretted not immigrating. I know he had wanted to become a Ten Quid Pom. He would have gravely investigated the menu, teasing his palates with unfamiliar favorites, maybe looking for an unfamiliar mountain-climbing fish. Maybe he would have been reminded of his Ghurkha histories and start to tell me again about how that traditional knife was formed. Damascened steel I believe, and then he would go off about Damascus and Rommel, and T.E.Lawrence, Monty and the glorious Desert Rats of Tobruk, and before long we would be back again in Cornwall, wondering how much my Aunt’s few Jersey cows were worth, and how come farmers never seemed to have any money. Cattle and pigs seemed to go and come, sometimes with a trailer, but often through the shed which had no back door. Which reminds me too of that last time there, when we saw the spout of blood up the wall. In the Laneway.

Summer, 2004 Melbourne, Victoria.

There was not a lot to see. There was not a lot of space, it was a coincidence. No other activity was connected with the radio report we had heard while driving into the city. People dodged and ducked, parcels, carry bags and cameras. We brushed against, and scurried on. The tube of the light shaft cut deep into the Federation structure, and became confused by iron stairways, drain pipes and conduit. Mildewed stains, and damp-rot festered the stratae of old paint. There was just the curve of dried blood. Just a vicious gout of dull brown stuff at shoulder height to the lanky delivery guy in his Stubbies. There was no cordite in the air under the monoxide, just steady throbbing of diesel engines and the mixed stench of persons unknown. The crime scene crew had cleaned up after a fashion. Of the fifty or so beings in this alleyway, there must be other firearms to hand. My own small knife, was firm and friendly, I could feel it at my hip. I could slice tomatoes, or cheese, or sharpen a pencil, or there were times before when I had grasped it in the darkness in my pocket, just in case. In Belfast in fact, and in Brooklyn.

Destructo the Mouse gaped at the brown stain, knowing blood full well. It runs and falls and measures by the beat even when still. Connotations of life-force arise and subside with the change of colour. With the flow. Half-cracked breathing, cut and sudden dried, and when the gurney leaves tyre tracks in the rain, that team of rueful specialists seem to soak the brief excitement from the fear amongst those still present. There is the dull ache. We try to imagine the unimaginable and there it is. That brown arc from that dumb diver. And within an hour other lives go on regardless, and everything except the rust parabola is as was. Any more fares please - move along there please. In myriad ways, in flux.

Tokyo 1982

I went to Japan a few times, on the run it seemed. Frantic exhibitions with remote connections to older memories. Japhy was in there somewhere. Kerouac on the road and up in the forest. He was up a fire look-out, alone of course and writing madly. He was spacing out and sensing his isolation. Haiku functioned to a degree but self-consciousness inhibited his poetic growth. The stasis he sensed within himself did little to help his ease of constructing verse, red wine and reds neither. Blank or rhyming, all words splattered wide and meant little. Somewhat vague, nevertheless a sense of solidarity helped through Yoko. It was twenty years before I would find myself there, on my fortieth birthday. She had never handled cash money until she was seventeen years old, she said. The height swam for me and I counted up the years, and then I was thinking of throwing myself off the twelve floor, but rescued myself in time by organising a haircut and shoulder massage. It cost more than my car. Now of course I am gratefully sixty-five years old and moving forward slowly, but not so slowly as John.
Two days later, I found my way there again. I recognised the roast coffee aroma, but did not remember the Mykonos blue paint on the window. Nor the petit point cushions. Two uniformed constables seemed not to notice anything, not the faint stain still on the wall. I wondered how many people had noticed any thing at all in that small entryway. Some of these folk were walking to their day jobs, after the tram ride. Conceivably some were hurrying off-shift, to rest and salvage something of the day and then to return again to work that coming night.

Melbourne, 2006

Strangely, during the weeks which slithered slowly through the lawyer’s fingers, leaving me wandering and wondering about my own time, I had time to speculate about that spark of hemoglobin against the wall. I peered at my own blood trail in the shaving mirror, thinking of progress and technologies. Multi-blade razors make small, precise, multiple scars which bleed copiously.

Tokyo, Summer, 1983

Japan was fine. I would have wished to visit again, and would have cherished making more work there. I travelled to Tokyo first with mammoth extra luggage. There was a huge welcome and we were all made much of, I tried to sleep alongside a garrulous holographer, on the flight over. She terrified me with her incessant stories, jammed into the centre of a Skyliner seat. She was blabbering but anticipating everything, even the marriage proposal from MegaDashi San - on his knees in the backseat of a limousine for Chrissake. For myself, I was fed there by my art dealer, with hashi while I struggled to savour the minute flavour of the tiny petals of the Chrysanthemum. Then she presented me with a small piece of something, maybe wallpaper glue, my throat contracted and tried to expel everything it could sense. My throat whipped into some kind of discipline - and it chose to swallow the impassible. Discipline over reflux.

Coronet Peak, Otago, N.Z. July, 2008

The small blonde woman turned to me, chatty in suspension, flurries of snow spun about us. Nervously she blurted out her affection for Victoria’s State capital. “It’s the best city in the world she said. And I have been to a lot of places. I teach in a Catholic School. Next winter I’m going to Japan so I’ve got to work on my Snowboarding-for-powder-slopes.” I nodded, and fortunately the cable-car lurched into motion again. Gobs of snow fell twenty metres, I grasped my ski poles. “Last week I got concussed on that big slope there.” she said, “And I was wearing my helmet.” That same day my tiny Granddaughter did fourteen rides up to the top of the mountain and down, I only managed six. Each one was memorable though. I was not concussed. I later sat beside an Italian boy from Melbourne, he liked what he saw of New Zealand but wished there were more Italians. Me too - I was thinking of Smoked Buffalo Mozzarella. We both fell getting off the lift.

AAP | Thursday, 14 August 2008
Man shot in head, drives himself to hospital

A man jumped in his car and drove himself to safety after being shot in the head while on his way to buy cigarettes in Melbourne.The 25-year-old man told police he was “jumped” by two men when he left a female friend’s home in Melbourne to walk to a petrol station for the cigarettes.
The victim had been visiting the friend in St Albans before he was shot at about 9.30pm yesterday, armed crime Detective Senior Constable Andrew Tait told reporters today. Blood stains from the incident covered the footpath outside the unit today.
“During a scuffle that broke out, a shot was fired and he fell to the ground and received a single gunshot to the back of the head,” Det Snr Const Tait said. “He is extremely lucky the bullet has gone in just behind the left ear. The fragment is still there.”
The man ran to his car and drove off, despite his wound While driving to Werribee Hospital, near his Hoppers Crossing home, the man rang a relative who picked him up and drove him the rest of the way, Det Snr Const Tait said. “He is a very lucky man and it is beyond belief that he drove himself to hospital,” he said.
The friend, a young mother, said she knew the victim from school days but said she did not know he had been shot. “I don’t know anything about what happened, I don’t know, was he shot?” she asked AAP. “If he was shot, it is not unusual for this area.”
Det Snr Const Tait said the victim did not have a criminal record and had told police he did not know his attackers. “We have no indication of any motive, we don’t have a description because the victim was attacked from behind and he has not been able to say much,” he said. “We are hoping to speak to him (again). We have spoken to the woman and investigations are continuing.
“We are hoping there are witnesses that have heard or seen something at around 9.30pm in the area.”
The victim was taken to Royal Melbourne Hospital but had since been discharged, a hospital spokesman said. Police believe the two offenders fled on foot south down Kings Road towards Gillespie Road. Just 24 hours earlier there had been another shooting in the area, with Victorian police and commuters witnessing a gunman shoot himself dead moments after shooting his estranged partner in the face.
The 65-year-old Keilor Downs man shot his former partner, a 49-year-old Sydenham woman, after she walked to her car at Watergardens railway station.
She is recovering and is in a stable condition.

Winter, Cornwall, U.K. 1950

My grandfather shaved with a cut-throat razor. He patched himself with a torn-off corner of Daily Mirror, and was able to repeat the circus each Sunday afternoon to my fascination when we visited. And to my Mother’s horror. He enjoyed his control over the razor, stropping it against the patent leather formula, and testing it against his arm. Clearing the dishes off the kitchen table for his shaving bowl, flicking Erasmic foam into the scullery sink behind him, he made the gas heater pop and blow, as a part of the drama which was his world. The thin world of carbon steel was his treasure, machine steel, lathe-beds, micrometers, mechanical controls and the mathematics of screw threads all counted in his world. Electricity was a fierce horror of demonology, which he wisely bequeathed to his son, my Father. But that honed blade burring against his bristles with soap, water, blood and steel was the guts of it. Independence was his own, and it was proudly held in the workingman’s hand.

Devonport Dockyard,U.K. Winter 1955.

At day’s end when he and the other Dockyard workers streamed through the Great Gates, Jack London roared in my ears, and I sometimes gave out pamphlets on behalf of International Socialism. The chiaroscuro of stained work clothes, rags really; soot streaked faces and scarred limbs, left fit young men stumbling after their ten hours of labour. This is true: my Grandmother would change, into ‘best’ and freshen herself to greet him. Then he would fall asleep without noticing before he had finished his ‘tea’, or half way through a radio serial, “The Archers - an Everyday Story of Country Folk.”

London, 1964

It was many years before I would encounter “Metropolis”, by the great German director Fritz Laing and I would recognise my Grandfather and his colleagues in the Weimar Republic of the nineteen-twenties, twenty-years before their time and in another country. But non-the-less, there they were. That was when you could find good labour. When ‘trade’ always delivered around the rear, when one thousand, or two thousand, or five thousand hired hands, would be grateful for what you could provide. And not only that, but they would travel at your convenience. At the rear - deliveries were in daylight, and collections were made in the darkness of early dawn, clanging bins and sharp smells in the crisp air. Then slowly the scents would change throughout the day, as the temperature would funnel new ones in from traffic and citizens.

Malta, 1948

There was a time when air-fares allowed only the most urgent journeys. Even ocean liners allowed for slum-dwellers to cross the high seas, as there was always ‘steerage’, while airplanes served only the military and the wealthy. Or both. My mother and I, flying to Valetta with a tiny baby sister were military, on our journey right after the second world war to meet my Father and to take up residence in the suburb of Gzira, on the island of Malta. I was 4½ years old. A new flashlight was held firmly in my new school macintosh pocket and I could see the peer of orange bulb through the cloth as it began to fade, even from the first moment. Oddly it was possible to see the rivets swivelling and turning in the aluminium channel and the skin of the plane, but holding my small torch in my pocket was some kind of strength. The rivets rattled. My mother looked firmly and straight ahead into the noisy darkness. She may have been praying. We could see the city lights below, around Blackheath, they spiralled emulating the greater spiral nebula far above us. I was starting to become frightened and the new blue school mac was heavy and itchy and cold. We were to land in Italy, at Milan to refuel. This was a Vickers Viscount transport ‘plane, limited mileage and manual navigation. I remember the bright yellow lights in the Mediterranean darkness. Milan they said. When we swooped onto the landing strip my ears popped, and just too late a yellow barley-sugar sweet was delivered. It tasted soapy. The ‘plane landed and taxied across irregular tarmac. But it was not tarmac, it was 6 inch rusty steel mesh - ready for rebuilding, slumped over the bomb damaged runways. We bumped over the stacked sheets of mesh and when we disembarked, tottering over the mesh stacks. My new school shoes were scarred, for my small feet had been stumping down into the steel hollows. The new School uniform mac was now hot and scratchy. I was given a paper cup of orange liquid to drink. It tasted soapy. Orange drink, and orange nightlight, and hot, dark, air. Military aircraft. Military men. Military smells. Two hours later we were in Valetta. My Father met us in his number one uniform, with medals, he would have been in his mid twenties.

Melbourne, Vic. Summer, 2002

Sixty years later the F1 restyled international Airport in Melbourne is as familiar as any number of coffee shops anywhere in the world. No money is needed even, no paper, just plastic and faith. No, not faith, just ‘belonging.’

Aramoana, Winter, 2008. Melbourne, Spring 1978.

The most secret place in the world they said; I heard of it on the radio. We weren’t told where it was, just that nuclear materials were stored there. The most secret place in the world. I think it may be here in my head though - this is it, the one without the bullet. I had been thinking of the secret Adrian in Melbourne. His walks round the Laneways. His fun times in Frank Hardy’s unrecognisable glass and global centre. His clever girlfriend: she would have to be, and pretty too. I remember Kenny’s Cup Day, O Vanitas! And I remember the first time I was there, Melbourne. I remember the train from Sydney. A sleeping compartment overnight with maybe kangaroos glimpsed in the waxing, paddock light. I found accommodation which suited. Eight dollars a night, near the Railway Station, by the Laneways. Including breakfast. I had never ever seen boiled mince, rice and onions for breakfast. I had never even thought about the noise of old men at night. Now I am one and know I fail the noise criterion. Cornflakes still work for me, but never the mince. I had been embarrassed, but not now, I could merge with those old men invisibly and without embarrassment over cornflakes, scraping the plates and managing not to drool. I am aware of my own noises too, how could it have happened? This body is so less tuned, and so much more - less! O Vanitas!

Cornwall, U.K. 1953

Of course my grandfather’s house had a back lane. I had heard that in the North of England they were called ‘ginnels’. There was a Sally of whom my Mother sang in a pastiche of a Lancashire accent to the vast amusement of her sisters: ‘the Pride of our Alley!’. Our mouldy, mangy, Victorian cobbled laneways were redolent of steel tyre wheels, and ‘night-soil collection’ from worker’s dwellings. Dray horses; steel shod and sparking from the granite, defecated and pissed in those back laneways. The carts barely had room to pass between the slate and rubble walls - of my grandfather’s work shed, and the next door ‘office’, where he would spend a good half hour alone each morning. Sometimes it would be my job to fold up the newspapers and cut them trimly into squares with a dinner knife, to hang on the rusted hook by the cistern. We artisans took pride in our skills no matter what. It was the Royal Navy tradition.

Those were the ways of men and horses at the rear of the terraced houses; in the Laneways, for the delivery and collection of echoing tanks and long oak boxes. In the front room though, the parlour with heavy, faded curtains and net drapes, dried flowers, and souvenirs of two world wars; brass shell casings, and model lead airplanes; my tidy, tiny, wizened and vicious Grandmother, who also smelt of moth-balls, kept watch on her village through the yellow lace. She metered the monthly, meter men. And them from th’Insurance - who called weekly for the funeral money.

O Vanitas!

CENTREFOLD: Adrian Hall, The Three States...

2011-04-21T17:38:00.003-07:00

CENTREFOLD: This ‘centre-art’ image/text, was produced especially for Crop by Adrian Hall. Born Cornwall, UK, 1943 - living in Otago since 2002. Currently he is Artist-Adjunct to the School of Art, Dunedin. A version of this work was shown in early February, 2011, in an exhibition “Inheritance”, curated by Stella Rosa MacDonald, at MILS Gallery, Sydney, Australia. It was then printed on a plastic base, 2 metres X 2 metres, and shown as a wall hanging. “Three States” considers political and subjective states, from the experience of a peripatetic artist, and acknowledges some of the debts he has accrued over the years.

Matt Middleton Reviews Lines of Flight

2011-04-21T17:38:00.002-07:00

One will bolster oneself directly on a line of flight enabling one to blow apart strata, cut roots, and make new connections.
– Deleuze and Guattari

Thursday, 24th of march: Seht – Lee Noyes & Radio Cegeste – Sign of the Hag – Eye

Every second year it happens. A line of flight for the sound practitioners. The event is connected to the annual Dunedin fringe festival but in reality Lines of Flight transcends the fringe to become something in itself, attracting punters from all over the country and the world.

I reviewed the previous Lines of Flight in 2009 and bleated it was the ‘best ever’. But this one.... this one topped it.

The series seems to inspire peak performance. It is less ‘gig’ than demonstration, best example, peak sample. Showcase. And you would wouldn’t ya, especially with those machines aimed at ya. This year the series had attracted filmmakers with cameras en masse, big ones, little ones, fat ones, wide angle lenses, beards and wind-breakers, long-shots and cut-aways. They stood on tables all stealthy and objective, they crouched , they pounced and panned, they hid in corners. It’s that phenomenon again – live events becoming less and less live events – more vacuum , a space for capture and archive. Ensnaring these....these lines of flight. De-deterroritorialization anyone?

Oh well. Big deal. So what. Thats just how it is ‘these days’. And performances such as theeez are certainly worth capturing. I guess its a little claustrophobic and invasive at times. Its difficult to play the part of real-time audience member. But oh!! ON stage! The lights! The cameras!!!! Must’ve been glorious.

Arrived in good time for the first session, maybe a little too early. Took the time to sample the curry house next door to Chicks and was blown away. This was quality Indian cuisine. Reasonably priced too. Sustenance for the soul . The eternal , unchanging jiva. Sustenance for the intellect would be a fermented drink, a strange, bitter brew made from hops and barley...a little like mead.... And for the imagination – ganja.
In way over my head I seat myself in the (naughty)corner. The atmosphere is taut. Almost unfriendly. The locus of higher arts and unfamiliar faces. Familiar faces are engaged and strangely unapproachable. Its a loaded nonchalance. Networking mode. Austerity measures. Then I remember – I just smoked pot.

Seht is one Stephen Clover from Wellington, a sound artist who’s work is captured on no less than 14 different albums. Drones, keyboards, synths and treated digital sound seem to be Sehts core artillery, key examples are his recent Dead Bees album and The Green Morning from 2006. For this show he performed music to/with/underneath/alongside a new Kim Pieters film. Slow...slow shots. Unmistakable echoes of the Ennio Morricone score for The Thing heaved alongside alpine imagery slowed to a geologic pace. Tonal blending was like silk. This was soundtracking, pure and simple. Bleeding . Slow pulse. Depth. Density. A sound perhaps inspired by, perhaps even referencing the magic work of Thomas Koner. The alpine imagery shifted with Daoist grace into what looked like a long shot off the coast of Thailand or Vietnam? Spinelike buildings resembled alien structures in the visual swoon and morass. Sehts sound is that of ether.

Clap.

The radio-art tradition met avantgarde improvisation in the form of Radio Cegeste and Lee Noyes. The second show for the duo since their stint supporting Jason Kahn in January, their set effectively progressed the gurgling conversational spatter of drum-scratch-cat fever & radiophonic sonic. Another set of sanguine dynamism. And downright weird ways to make noise with drums. Sally tunes all spheroid calculus. Copper wires fire and it hertz. Suite for percussion and radio. Magnets and shuffling anthroposophists. Mentalism and quantum entanglement. The closest thing in the series to Free Jazz. Especially liked the vertical bow that Lee stroked. Over and over again. Told the cameraman to focus on it.

Clap.

Something of this 20s/30s avantgarde flavour is evident as two spinning wheels are hoisted onto the stage. I sense references to the craft...witchcraft that is...cottage industry....means of production...I had no clue what amazing futuristic sounds would be coaxed out of these antiquated artefacts. Sign of the Hag (Daniel Beban and Erica Sklenars) is a duo from Wellington with connections to the town’s avant gardist hub/venue Freds and Alt/Music Wellington. Contact mics were attached to the spinning wheels, which were in turn connected to signal processors of some sort – I did try to decode the delicate process with one member of the duo but it was a little technical to recall. But, can you imagine it, an action akin to placing a credit card up to bicycle spokes,, ,a rhythmic clickety click . The clicks triggered digital bleeps whose pitch and tone could be adjusted with pedals. What resulted was a relentless pulsing clickscape, voodoo-esque, odd, neuronal. Bleep’n’glitch’n’afro-beat. Loved it. Similar in its minimalist spirit to Thomas Brinkmann. Real time video was projected behind them, on stage cameras zoomed onto different spinning parts of the wheel , the samsaric repitition hypnogogic, wheels within wheels, yin/yang, day/night.

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Lines of Flight wouldn’t be complete without Eye. Peter Stapleton (drums, radio, tapes) and Peter Porteous (guitar/tibetan bowl) both play in Eye and organize Lines of Flight and the Alt/Music shows here in Dunedin. The band has grown from a trio into a quartet (Nathan Thompson and US expat Jon Chapman) recently and a beautiful array of instrumentation and electronic-treatments have enhanced the bi-polar moods Eye recreate. Stapleton drumming is like a storm. A fine end to a fine night.

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Friday, 25th of March: Mela – Our Love will Save the World – Kusum Normoyle – the Dead C

One of the big nights. The Dead C. Heres a kiwi band that regularly travels the world and performs at esteemed events. I mean – come on – if the old ‘the last band is the big act’ crap is to be taken as a model , then Iggy Pop had supported them at All Tomorrows Parties a couple of years back. These guys know people.

Waltz on in. That strange unfriendly vibe lingered on the second night. I suppose we cant all be beaming tipsy Southlanders.

Mela was first up . Hailing from Lyttleton, Helen Greenfield was one of several artists present at the series from the quake sticken region. I chatted with David Kahn (Hi Asobi) about the quake and he mentioned how reassuring it was to be in Dunedin, out of the way , experiencing no aftershocks, able to sleep soundly. With many venues damaged in Chch here was a great oppurtunity for these artists to let off some steam . David spoke of a earthquake syndrome – a type of madness, a delerium of sorts. Melas set was less blowing off steam than quietly watching it rise and coil. Soft delicious keys/synths, treacle / liquorice. Ambient electronic with fragile percussive patterns rising and falling. Warmth.

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Campbell Kneale is a noise god, pure and simple. Here is a diligent, driven yet unassuming and friendly artist/human who has boldly taken his music to the world , performing in the USA, Canada, Japan and Europe in several waves. He had come to Lines 2011 fresh from one such tour and so his performative fervour was at a refined peak. He was on form. On fire. Our Love will Destroy the World was a blitzkreig . Wailing electronics, ecstatic guitar, post-modern psychedelia, apple crumble, vishnu, john lennon. Here was an artist talking to God, right up close. His audience was willingly held captive. Stockholm syndrome.

I shrugged my shoulders and submitted to his might. Oh my bruised ego, how irrational art thou. Thing is - if one experimental artist does well, its a boon for the whole scene.

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Lines of Flight included an Australian import for the first time this year, one Kusum Normoyle from Sydney. As I wiped sweat and pride off my brow after Our Love.. I noticed a woman pacing, stretching, centering....ah....this is the vocal artist. And whammo. Tourrettes. Hate. Spitting tacks. A frightfully nasty barrage of cuss words and gargling, semiotic slurries, garrulous growls, screeches,(primal) screams. Such immediacy and such frustration. And her delivery – assumption of martial forms, the word as fist, defenestration of personal space. And you got the feeling this was a toned down performance. Of course Massonna comes to mind. But so what. I ask myself if this intensity would be exorcised after years of performance , would she still thrash in 10 years? I think back to my own past and recall furious demon-fuelled acts on stage and beyond...mellowing gets us all in the end.

The assault continues for 5 minutes or so. Kusum Normoyles performance elicits a wild response from the audience, especially from one group of women who congratulate her loudly. The phenomenon of female aggression (and other relative instincts) has another mouthpiece.

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Dead C time. The audience regroups and swells. Dead C time folks. Bang on a gong. Morley riffs - warm and heavy, Russell feeds back - that classic tell-tale Dead C feedback, constant, dead-pan. And those unmistakeable voices. The rich tenor of Morley, the richer tenor of Russell. 2 or 3 drawn out pieces were performed, Robbie Yeats on fire and shifting beats at a whim...his drumming is unpredictable and lurid. Slam ,Slap slap. Heavy metal. Grunge. Bring that beat back. Hallowed be thy name. Indomitable. Pusilanimous. Chary. Forks. Doom Metal. L and P. Melted cheese. Guilt. Pain. Salt. Pepper. Audience appreciates. Its a free noise holiday.

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Saturday, 26th of March (afternoon session): The Forgotten Guests – Alastair Galbraith – Hi Asobi

And its a pretty afternoon in the prettiest little port in the whole wide world. We’re back in the old Masonic Lodge, now someone’s residence, I remember fun gigs there 3 or 4 years ago. Its a great place to play during the day. Bring your kids .

I must confess – I missed the majority of The Forgotten Guests. I heard the last remaining refrain. And it was classic . Harp and electro-acoustic sound. Delicate. Very delicate. These people are aesthetitians. Epicureans. Eaters of grapes. Greek.

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Alastair Galbraith was next. He had a large portion of his fire organ on stage. What an impressive thing to behold. The pipes! The pipes! Glass pipes! Like a crack-heads wet-dream. And we get a seminar. This instrument is Alastairs obsession. And the research – the research he must’ve put into the project. We hear stories of its history, of physics, of scientists, of acoustics, of pressure and gauge and heat and entropy, of bells and whistles and vapour and gas. Alastair first performs on a strange singing string instrument which reacts to being stroked. Like something else I know of. A tone with a metallic sheen was emitted from each string. Later he gets the gas going and the fire organ is illumined. We behold a creepy science fiction soundtrack. Very odd. Arcane, old world, and as always – alchemical.

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Next was Hi Asobi, 2 shattered citizens from Christchurch – David Kahn and Nigel Wright, and Wellingtons Antony Milton. Milton had prepared a film for the piece. Kahn mans a 90s synthesiser (akai?) and a sinister drone pukes forth. Wright is on guitar and effects . A deep narcotic hum. The film seems to show opaque shots of South East Asia to begin with, then dimantles itself into a strange flickering of orange squares and rectangles, and it makes me think of Hindu India. The vedas, the upanishads, shiva. A beautiful piece of film. The drones peak and trough,,,and to conclude Milton lets the Atman take over and he chants ‘aum ‘ like mantras - unheard of vowels, aum, errr, oooor – his face furrowed with deep shamanistic concentration. He concludes with bells, walking in a circle around the room as if to purge it of bad spirit. A ritual. No doubt there was a bit of creepy shite going on there in the 19th century. A wonderful ritual. I loved every minute of it, and I appluad Milton for tapping into such selfless realms (in public).

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And we all get pissed.

Saturday, 26th of March (evening session): Stanier Black Five – Pumice – Rosy Parlane – The Futurians

THIS IS the big one folks. And I commit social suicide and miss most of Stanier Black Five’s set. But not to worry, there is commentary everywhere on punter’s lips and video footage for miles. Jo Burzynska, from London and based in Lyttleton is another quaker and not content just to live through it she turns the nightmare into art. Sound art. A topical, gritty, geo-desic exercise in environmental recording. Music-Concrete indeed. Liquifaction’n’all. And so her performance involved sounds of distressed locals phoning into radio , car alarms and sirens, the sinister throb of military choppers , actual recordings of actual aftershocks . Stuff breaking.

Extreme field recordings. A fantastic idea, and a frighteningly real/unreal way of bringing the quake experience to the ears of those not …there.

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Pumice is another kiwi artist who tours like a machine. Stefan Neville has toured europe more than twice, and played the northern hemisphere several times. He is someone I respect very much as an artist and as a business man. His set begins with a Harmonium – he plays it with a charming celtic bent , these a sea shanty type tunes – but I hear India. Indian devotional music. His tunes are gorgeous and ‘Galbraithean’ .
He infuses sections of his set with tape noise or loops. Some songs are appalacian, some stomp and honk, some croon. But its true, there’s something hindu about his music. Maybe its just me.

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At this point a friend buys me a deadly drink called a ‘quadruple’. I dont ask.

So the gig gets mighty blurry. But thats probably for the best because Rosy Parlane is on and its a lap-top based drone-scape. Drawn out mono-pitched crystaline Lines of flight. The Line in the drone . That was the point . Drones and their close relatives the drone and drone are the royal family of the drone. So drone on, drone-head. Ping ping ping. Seht wears a t-shirt in the early 80s ‘slogan tee’ style that reads ‘Drinks after work’. The drone speeds on and high pitched synths sting and put little needles in yr nipples. Butch. Great set . Aka-daka-demic.

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...And THEN...THE FUTURIANS STEAL THE SERIES.

Everyone dances . Everyone. Beth is menacing, the sound is like black metal , theirs is a brown sound. Black brown. And lime green. Iso12 the Korg pilot is the space jockey from alien, or some sort of reference to a gas-mask-bong or Ganesh the elephant god.

They absolutely dominate with their nothing-wave rock, and I see little brains go pop! Pop! Pop,twenty-something eyeballs go back inside their heads as they realize.,.this is the new sound. Its nihilistic – but funny. Its sci-fi, but not anal. Its guitar, but not too guitar.
Its sleazy – but sound. Its heavy – but bopping. What’s humping? The futurians. Triple D, move over.

They perform with a sense of ‘this is it’ . Cameras everywhere. The audience knows its cooler than auckland. Wild and science concious. And zombie fixated.

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And so, Lines of Flight is over for another 2 years. With each series the performances get stronger and stronger and more and more recognition for the talent of the artists floods in.

Pissed. Atman. Instalments. Pectin.

Scandinavian Jumpers and Police Vests - Campbell Walker

2011-04-21T17:38:00.001-07:00

Campbell Walker reviews Kutomo, Horsehead Nebula, Moth Loves Flame, Whiskey and the Wench and Nick Graham live at Buller Street
after which he is remnded of being accosted in the street by the boys in blue

An earnest young man in an alarmingly accurate-to-cliché Scandinavian patterned jersey is sitting on the floor of someone's lounge, picking up instruments in turn and playing plaintive but focused melodies through a digital delay, then singing along to the newly created microtune before discarding it for the next one. Instead of the traditional layering/building effect familiar from this sub-genre of digital folk-psych, what comes across is more akin to a musical round. The moments are not held for long, guitar makes way for flute, flute makes way for keyboard, songs sung in (presumably) Finnish hang on the air, defying their creator's categorisation of them into a suggested proffer of “Do you want to hear a happy or a sad song next?” The obvious answer comes quickly from beside me: “Both”.

It's quickly apparent that this earnestness is deceptive, foreign... a mode of being that is refreshingly alien against the awkwardness of New Zealand culture, a direct but not ostentatious emotional frankness, formality, seriousness, rather than a twee affectation. And this is a long way from what gets called twee: Despite the jumper and despite explanations of songs about the sensation of putting one's feet back under the duvet, the effect – admittedly possibly gained in lack of translation – of Brisbane-based Finnish performer Veli-Matti Ikavalko's Kutomo project is almost Galbraithian in its celestial/ pastoral weightiness.

This earnestness sits interestingly alongside the culture of the venue. To this recent arrival to the city, Buller Street is the most informal of venues in a town driven by informality. Tonight's gig is an effective example: I arrive to Yick, two young people sing/shouting sweet/political folksongs, followed by an effectively structured and controlled solo noise drone piece performed by Nick Graham from the traditional Dunedin position of crouching on the floor – in other New Zealand cities, drone musicians tend to stand up from time to time, but I'm seriously (almost) yet to see it here.

Whiskey and the Wench play an acoustic, Irish inflected variant on anarcho-punk, easily inveigling those (generally younger) members of the sparse crowd not clustered terminally into the armchairs and sofas scattered around the periphery of the room into getting up and shouting along – and somehow managing to be quite charming about it. This provides an awkward but striking segue into Horsehead Nebula's dense, murkily roiling space-psych, the only performers of the night to use drums - or volume, really. In an otherwise impressively quiet night, this exception was effective.

After Kutomo, Moth Loves Flame – Richard Scowan, essentially the host for this evening along with fellow Buller St resident Chris Schmelz, who accompanies him with Super 8 projections, mixing found footage and scratch film work – rolls out static-y, sustained drones largely generated from lock grooves and radios, then lies down on the floor to watch the films. The lateness of the hour and the temporal freezing of the moment proves too much for a couple audience members, as what could be heard as a momentary pause becomes the kind of applause that functions as a full stop.

A quiet and companionable walk home through the ghost town of the waterfront reminds me of my “favourite” experience of this end of town in maybe 8 weeks of living here, of walking along a deserted Fryatt St at just before 9 in the morning – walking the streets is a regular default position of mine in any town – on a gloriously bright summer morning, slowly making my way to the dump shop, a little early for it's opening... and being stopped by a policeman, who seemed to fail to believe that anyone could have any good reason to walk around Dunedin at all, let alone as far as I had come – maybe 20 minutes from home. It became quickly apparent that we weren't going to have a meeting of minds, which is maybe not unusual in such conversations, but I was struck by the surrealism of being pulled over for the egregious act of enjoying walking slowly along the streets on a bright sunny day. I am informed later this is not an isolated experience around the wharf area right now, and I got off lightly in being bemused rather than assaulted, as several other local artists have been.

I decided to interpret this in the context of the rather striking structure of the experimental music and arts cultures I'm finding myself in here. Something that's distinctive – even unique - in this town is the way there seems almost nothing at all in between the mainstream and the extreme. Within the complex and often cynical (if internally under-appreciative) experimental music and art scene, there seems little or no acknowledgement of any of the usual “independent” or “alternative” scenes that might exist in what would be seen in another city as back along the way towards the centre – there's no sense of a continuum or even hierarchy along which things move back and forth. It's not so much an elitist or closed community – this kind of warm, diverse and casual evening is the opposite of elitism. Rather, there seems a kind of unbridgeable void directly between this tightly loose scene and the alarmingly conservative, macho-dominated, sports-obsessed and intolerant world just outside.

Tonight this is manifested in the walk back home. By the time we re-enter the city major, there's a shift, a struggle to remain suspended in the musical space while weaving through the detritus of a mainstream culture's night out. Pulled out of the spell of Dunedin's erratic, drained romance by this proximity, I'm made uncomfortably aware of where the division and the cynicism come from.

Philip Frost: works on paper at A Gallery - Naomi Boult

2011-04-21T17:38:00.000-07:00

Philip Frost’s show Paper Work which ran until the 2nd of April at A Gallery proved to be a cohesive exhibition of the artist’s recent work, complete with the customary pop-culture references as well as more personal themes. The uniformity of his style works particularly well in the gallery, the austerity of the walls and space being the perfect foil for Frost’s bold colours and chaotic collage.

At times Frost’s work can be exceptional, when he seems to possess an instinctual ability to work with composition and colour to make something that has inherent beauty. The most striking example of this in his latest show is Head in a Box; a work that brings to mind taxonomical classifications, phrenology and deranged collectors of the macabre. As dark and unsettling as it is, the work has a strange allure created by exquisite use of shadowy, muted shades and the off center configuration of the imagery. This work, although it sits rather uncomfortably with his others, exemplifies the admirable work Frost is periodically able to deliver.

The collaged works in Paper Work can occasionally appear formulaic, but Frost avoids saturating his audience with stale imagery by including a few compositions of varying technique. One such example of his departure from rote is his piece Untitled (2011) which depicts a cosmonaut adrift in a sea of fingerprints which evoke the stylistic legacy of the late Sigmar Polke.

This show predominantly consists of works that we have come to expect from Frost, containing allusions to contemporary culture with varying levels of success. It is the inclusion of pieces which signal a different direction for the artist, however, that prevents this show from becoming overly predictable and lead to its meriting a trip to the Princes Street locale for a view.

The Grass is Still Growing - Emily Harris

2011-04-21T17:37:00.002-07:00

This year, 2011, marks the twenty-fifth anniversary of the nuclear power plant disaster at Chernobyl. For those of us who were children at the time this event, all the more so if only dimly understood, represented an ultimate terror. It became the source of the very worst in twilight cold-war nightmares, cultivating a fear all the more potent because it was based on something real.

Even as far away from Chernobyl as New Zealand, the disaster had at least one tangible consequence beyond its insidious and invisible diffusion of radioactive waste - a type of onion seed that had been imported from the area was no longer available. It may seem to be a minor, but this nevertheless represents a loss. which, among other things, Violet Faigan’s new installation Venn Diagram With Tears and Onions commemorates. Faigan’s work is a kind of monument to this and other such forgotten losses, losses which may turn out not to have been so minor after all.

Venn Diagram With Tears and Onions weaves together living grass with a variety of man-made materials and objects to an effect which is immediately charming. This charm is located not solely in its exquisite composition, however, but also in the sincerity and seeming innocence of its intentions and expression.

The Russian onion to which the installation’s title refers (the story which, as it were, seeded the piece) gives the work much of its shape and texture. The very shape of the onion is echoed in the bulging roof of a striking striped and tassled tent and its anatomy is recalled as we peel away the semantic layers (of varying opacities) from which the work has been constructed. The onion might even be considered as nature’s version of a fanciful Venn diagram, one that represents the ideal of perfect inclusivity.

Aside from the tent the work deploys three other structures. These are variously constructed from belts, socks and other found objects but most notably from grass and various containing boxes. That this grass is still growing means that, for the duration of the show, the installation was literally a work in progress which was also ultimately ephemeral (as, indeed is all life –a realisation the gravity of which surely informs this work). The artist herself noted that, through its growth the grass had been responsible for altering the shape of the work—not just its own length but even the forms of the other materials. Constructed from argyle socks and suspended like stalactites from the ceiling, a formation opposite the tent is activated by the grass inside poking through the weave—but the organic growth seems also to have permeated the woollen socks themselves. The viewer is likely reminded of the relationship between host and parasite with the living grass acting as if spreading infection or invasion through the manmade which provides an ironic reversal of the reality of pollution.

Environmental concerns have always informed Faigan’s artistic practice and the ethical rigour of her outlook is confirmed by her use of recycled or organic materials (also consistent in her work is its impeccable aesthetic, Venn Diagram is no exception). Environmental pollution also serves usefully as a metaphor for the show’s other key theme, that of empire and colony. Not even a metaphor, really, for the process of colonisation has often been that of cultural pollution. Intimations of Empire are summoned by the aforementioned tent with its stripes, flourishes of braid and affixed symbols (hair from a judges wig, military style patches etc). Its tattered and windswept appearance and its flimsy poles imply that the empire has risen and fallen. Still, the Imperial imprint remains. The fear therefore persists the damage done will never be repaired, the imprint is indelible.

On consideration of this installation as a conceptual whole it becomes apparent that what on the surface might appear to be a sort of gently nostalgic evocativeness is (as the layers of the onion become transparent) revealed to be a reflection on things more crucial to survival than the mere attractiveness of the vaguely remembered. Despite its historic reference the work does not simply evoke memories and nostalgia but attempts to recall the innate strengths necessary for the survival of both the emotional being and the bodily one. And as might be clearly demonstrated by use of a Venn diagram, these two beings are not, however, mutually exclusive.

Such diagrams might also be drawn to illustrate the contradictions, the areas of lapse, between what we are taught and what we learn, what we know and what we feel, what we expect and what comes to pass. Faigan illustrates the ways in which we use private symbolism to filter our perceptions of historical events and scientific facts. The tears which the onion brings forth help us to blur the sharpness of the contradictions we find it uncomfortable to look at. Perhaps these difficulties signal denial, or perhaps just the necessity of protecting ourselves from the too-sharp edges of things, but despite the pollution, the radioactive fallout, the colonial scars and parasitism it is essential to mention one further feature of the work—a rainbow, faint, painted child-like on the horizon of the gallery wall. An expression of hope, persistent despite the well-founded fear that informs the show’s themes. To continue to hope is at least one thing we can do to protect the viability of a future drenched in the past.

Richard MacFarlane Reviews Oliver van der Lugt’s In Active Idle State a one day show in the Bedroom of 50 Williamson Ave, Grey Lynn, Auckland. Monday 28th March 2011.

2011-04-21T17:37:00.001-07:00

Oliver van der Lugt’s choice of location stems as much from practicality and ease (and perhaps some interest in a “why-not” use of non-commercial space) as it does from some site-specific statement. Even if objects like his crumpled duvet doubled its nearly perfectly re-drawn pattern on a sheet of paper (obviously found in a young person’s bedroom), the three sculptures inside would remain as lucidly explorative were they placed in a dedicated gallery space. It’s not exactly the teen drawer stagnance of say, Alex Vivian’s sweatsocks, but it’s probably the Vitamin Water-drenched towel that is most indicative of the lived-in. Draped over a windowsill, the towel gradually soaks up the contents of six brightly coloured bottles which sit upside down on it. With tops removed, blurred lines of the liquid run through the old and very “flat” sort of towel (both scratchy and welcoming in texture). The colours and “flavours” of the running drinks cast the impression of a scruffy sort of zen, something along the lines of Michael Rother or maybe the New Age of Joël Fajerman. Certain flavours are quicker than others to drip down, suggesting there may be different truths to the respective flavour/vitamin combinations in each bottle. There were once 15 different flavours sold in New Zealand, a range that has gradually diminished to only four or five, meaning van der Lugt had to actually import two of the more recently discontinued flavours in order to form the subtle, ephemeral gradient of tones backgrounded by the neighboring home’s broken guttering and a low, pre-Autumn light that extended the temporal pathos and fleeting, downtrodden beauty running through the once off-white towel.

At opposite end of the spectrum is van der Lugt’s Monster energy drink sculpture, a found/purchased Lo-Carb Blue flavour Monster can carefully dotted with with epoxy resin to mimic the outer-can condensation of television/print advertisements. The can is displayed as a delicate assemblage with two printed photographs (A1 and A2) of the same can on the same piece of floor. The latter are pinned low into the wall, curving down over the skirting and floorboards they depict, while the ‘glistening’ can is placed on top of its own image(s) to hold the aggregation together. Those familiar with the mass cultural trappings of Monster (recall the RateMyInk.com level of Monster tattoos and the brand’s menacing opposition on the past (and obviously deeply ingrained) soft-drink ideologies of Coke or Pepsi) would recognise a deeper level of cultural resonance. This is furthered via the Tumblr-ized visual outsourcing and .jpeg culture implied by the low-quality photos of the physical object, which converts the bedroom into a kind of “IRL” Google 3D warehouse in which such objects float in an ambiguous stasis as serene as it is ominous or darkly comic. At this stage it is perhaps also important to mention the complimentary bottles of Ch’i “herbal drink”, the sponsored beverage of the evening, inciting a chorus of nostalgic exclamations from the predominately twenty-somethings in attendance and layering a light sugar high over the proceedings…

All of the objects involved here are as present in real life (ie. shop fridges) as they are in the free-form data realm of virtual representation. This parallel is similarly pointed to by the real duvet/replica paper duvet with its superimposed crumpled geometric patterns posing a live figure/ground problem. It seems, though, that there is a certain digitality to Vitamin Water itself, in both its futurist promises of elixir-like qualities (customized to a modern, high performance age) as well as in the general aesthetic of its branding, logo and typeface, suggestive of medicinal qualities belied by its soft-drink style status and high sugar content. I’m still unclear whether manufacturer Glaceau’s prolonged, yet seemingly incredibly poorly devised, advertising campaign (infinite promo girls and slabs of complimentary stock for creative businesses and fashion outlets...) is in any way successful. Auckland bus advertisements (like the one featuring the potentially dated “alternative” stereotype of a bleached dreadlocked male wrestling and noogie-ing a slightly more ‘Alpha-male’ figure with the tag-line - “go from Mate to Maaaaaaate”) suggest a corporation at once extremely deft and affluent but also almost hilariously misguided. Apart from the possibility of recognising something sobering in the gulf between (or proximity to!) the branding of jocular office-clerky Vitamin Water and darkly totemic Monster, the obvious disposability of the drinks and the everydayness if the other objects is a cause for reflection beyond futurist ideologies. There is a quiet feeling of ritual, and a orientation that is part celebration and part lament in van der Lugt’s show - both of which affects are compounded by the knowledge that, as the sun sinks on the one-night-only exhibition, the towel will have to go into the washing basket, the empty bottles into the recycling bin, and the duvet back to its usual function on the artist’s bed.

On the first show at ABC Gallery in CHCH: Robert Hood's Leap into the Driveway and Other Rejoinders - Andrew Paul Wood

2011-04-21T17:37:00.000-07:00

Robert Hood is one of Christchurch’s most innovative and versatile emerging artists. His installations are unvaryingly fascinating and complex, taking up the found detritus of pop and consumer culture and transforming it into something beautiful, intellectual, context-specific, and meaningful. His work is of emerging national significance and universal humanity in an increasingly alienating, fragmented and isolating world.
Visually Leap is total eye candy – balanced, harmonious and retinally well judged. “The Northland Flannels Not the Northland Panels” - the row of facecloths strung like washing above the windows of the exhibition bring humble middle class domesticity into the realm of the gallery and also play with the tropes of geometric modernism – repetition, grid, colour and area and a tongue in cheek aside to New Zealand’s most insurmountable cultural edifice Colin McCahon. This kind of playfulness is typical of Hood’s work. Being serious without being pretentious is one of its defining features. The blokey-ness of colour fields and regular squares recalling Mondrian and Malevich seems humorously at odds with the relative femininity and everyday qualities of these pieces of towelling.

The two Honda Nifty Fifty scooters, “Docking” are just as varied in their possible readings: as engineered objects, they are sculptural in their own right; they carry the La Dolce Vita baggage of youth and freedom – perhaps a counterpoint to the suburban “washing line” component; and perhaps also a riposte to those (superst)artists who appear to have sold out to multinational luxury product corporations to become little more than highbrow annexes of the marketing and PR division. An anti-materialism and distrust of endgame capitalist games seems to pervade Hood’s oeuvre to date. In that context, the scooters come as something of a surprise given Hood’s preference for the humble readymade and discarded objet trouve.
The hard metal carapaces and relative largeness of the scooters contrast sharply with the softness of the flannels in what is a deceptively simple installation. The carefree, narcissistic life represented by the scooters stands in opposition to a loaded symbolic washing line: the tension between artistic bohemia and the responsibilities of settling down and bourgeois reality – something that Hood, an artist with a young family, must surely be aware of, though of course it is always dangerous and often fallacious to read anything autobiographical into a creative work. As a work, though, Leap seems to ask the contemporary artist be seen not as a member of a small and elite group, but as part of a large and quite ordinary community in which everyone puts their pants on one leg at a time and with the same life considerations.

Swiss curator Harald Szeemann, wrote of sculptor Robert Gober as the first of a generation of artists who began to make work in which: “thoughts and feelings circle, as if spellbound, around crucial childhood experiences, around first impressions and perceptions, first painful encounters with violence, constricting jealousy, and injustice.” This seems equally applicable to Hood, though his work is even more detached, reserved and considerably more opaque in possible readings for an audience.
It is fascinating to observe how the male artists who emerged during the 1990s are so comfortable with the vernacular of the feminist installations that first broke moulds in the mid 1970s. Lucy Lippard writing of Louise Bourgeois in the March 1975 issue of Artforum: “Any approach – non-objective, figurative, sexually explicit, awkward or chaotic; and any material – perishable latex and plaster, traditional marble and bronze, wood, cement, paint, wax, resin – can serve to define her own needs and emotions. Rarely has an abstract art been so directly and honestly informed by its maker’s psyche.” Post-Pop, commodity art, and Neo Geo in the 1980s made that feminist vocabulary available to male artists. This, I think, plays into Hood’s work. The artist is allowed to feel, and express the insecurities that fall below the high drama level of existential angst and the human condition, but are still significant to us as modern beings.

New, entrepreneurial Ilam graduate start-up ABC Gallery deserves a big ups for soldiering on out in the industrial suburb of Addington with opening in this difficult post-quake Christchurch “new normality” as the city tries to reconnect around the damage like the brain of a stroke victim. The art is making us feel better and I wish them all the best for the future. We need that kind of balm for our stressed out raw nerves right now. Art has a role in that regeneration.

Hamish Jones: Toys as Everyday Objects - Vanessa Eve Cook

2011-04-21T17:36:00.001-07:00

Toys are revealed as everyday objects of an adult life; a modern life where objects are standardised and difference is limited, yet human intervention reveals that there are some aspects of the world that remain out of our control.

Imagine for a moment about being a child again (can you remember?). Games that lasted weekends, a bedroom full of colourful and animated objects, birthday parties, innocence and carefree days - no stress about money, work and general day-to-day survival. Oh to be young again!
When walking into a room filled with Jones’ art work, one is instantly taken back. Large toy-like objects fill spaces and the experience of reacting to life-sized toys is rather uplifting. The feelings of childhood start to tingle in the body—not just because, compared to the objects, one appears small and child-sized again but also because they are familiar figures that are instantly recognisable. The longing for days immersed in a seemly real imagined world is readily experienced.

Walter Benjamin talks of toys as an escape from the adult world. They are mass-produced objects that are based around play as opposed to work. He describes them as objects that “set off magical experiences, Erfahungen, venting a concealed reality subtending everyday subject/object commerce.”1 This may account for the instant attraction to Jones’ forms—his ‘toys’ are easily associated with childhood days, when money, production and financial gain were not the priorities of life.

But Jones’ objects are not playthings—they are objects of the adult world and without the naivety of innocent eyes, these ‘toys’ become signs of a grown up reality. The objects are ‘adult-size’, rather than miniature- in fact they are larger than life. Each part exaggerated, grown exponentially - a toy gun becomes the size of a bed, a Lego shaped tree equivalent to an Xmas pine and a Duplo styled man, a literal size of a child - making one feel small and bringing significance to these objects. Basalla writes in his essay Transformed Utilitarian Objects:

To enlarge an object is to make it appear more important than it is…. Pop artists, of course, have made extensive use of the exaggerated and immense scale in order to call attention to the formal, the humorous, and at times the grotesque aspects of everyday objects.2

And one thing Jones brings to attention is how closely they relate to everyday adult life and adult situations. Untitled, seemingly soft and harmless, transforms the comfortable, snugly, kids bedspread into a very adult object. When confronted with this over-sized newly constructed object, the subject of the duvet covers imagery is highlighted: human destroying robots, so aptly named ‘Transformers’ their catch phrase ‘Robots in disguise’. Jones’ work takes off the disguise, revealing these toys as objects of violence (something that seems to have been glossed over in the latest adaptation of the Transformer movie, where the former leader of the Decepticons has changed from his robot gun form to an airplane).

It seems perhaps many toys can be seen as miniature representations of everyday adult life and objects. Basalla explains toys as being “a microcosm of the material culture of adult life”3. He talks of the transformation of utilitarian objects into toys, teaching children how to act in the modern adult world. Miniature shopping counters, petrol pumps and ovens show children how to conduct their affairs and are items they will more than likely manipulate and own as adults.

Jones’ toys exist within the adult material world. They reveal the role of toys as signifiers of work, material gain and modern day living. Larger-than-life size Lego inspired figures stand in a group in his work Fit The Mould, dressed in white shirts with a black tie and black trousers; working men - executives, waiters or pilots. Michael Paraekowhai’s Kapa Haka springs to mind. His fifteen security guards, standing staunch displaying authority, but not their own, of their employee. Jones’ figures too are like everyday workers, and they are manipulated and possessed by children, reflecting the actions of an adult world. Like these modern day workers, the toys become a commodity—something that can be bought and used to its owner’s devices.

Jones explicitly presents his works as objects to be owned - a commodity reflecting a modern world. As art objects, he has a price on each - one can purchase these works and take them home for their own pleasure. And with their mass produced qualities, everyone can have their own figure or tree. This reflects all to closely on the capitalist culture of our modern world where toys are produced in large quantities and marketed to children and parents as new, unique and collectible.

These objects bring to light the all to common serial production of toys, and the differences that occur within repetition. He shows us that although each work is different; a unique name, a slight alteration in colour, the objects are fundamentally the same. From Barbie dolls to McDonald’s Happy Meal toys, match box cars to Teletubbies, the mould and structure repeats itself, and each subtle difference is treated and marketed as something new. Why have one when you can have them all?
Allan McCollum exposes the consumption of quasi-same objects in his repetitive art practices. Whether large concrete earns, computer generated patterns or small, framed paintings (called ‘Surrogates’) each serially reproduced object can substitute the one before. Owens writes that while the variables of each of his surrogates can be seen as singular, “the potentially endless repetition of essentially identical objects prevented us from mistaking the difference for uniqueness.”4 Jones makes it clear that the serial production of toys, (marketed as the new and improved), are essentially the same as the one before. As with many everyday objects we are not really consuming a different object, but the same object with subtle differences.

As Baudrillard observes … no object appears on the market today in a single type, but with a range of strictly marginal differences—of colour, accessory and detail—which create the illusion of choice. Consequently, what we consume is the object not in its materiality, but in its difference - the object as sign. Thus, difference itself becomes an object of consumption, and the agenda of serial production becomes apparent: to carefully engineer and control the production of difference in society.5

In this sense McCollum and Jones’ objects suggest that it is not uniqueness we are consuming, it is difference. However the agenda of Jones’ work is not about controlling difference, so much as revealing differences that are out of ones control. When viewed together as part of a serial repetition, differences become more explicit. Jones’ objects show the intervention of the human hand and reveal that even within serial repetition, there are uncontrolled elements. Through repetition, something unknown reveals itself and each object can potentially develop into something beyond the original- beyond the standardized stereotyped product.

Like Warhol’s serial prints, it is the systematic process that reveals the differences in Jones’ Fit The Mould. No two figures are the same. Hand painted, cast and fished, each work is subtly different. Paint has a range of thicknesses, hands are of slightly variable size and shape, arms are at marginally different angles and seams may still be apparent from the sides of the mould in places. Dyer writes when a series of Warhol’s work are viewed together, the differences are obvious. He uses the example of Warhol’s flower prints where while the basic design is repeated, no two of the prints turn out to look the same. Slippages in the colour or format make each work unique. “The structure of Warhol’s series is a structure of repeated differentiations. Here, the processes of repetition generates differences.”6

Jones’ work Evergreen shows nature as something that also generates difference. It is not immediately obvious that each of these seemingly identical trees has a unique quality. They all stand at the same height, and of the same mould but a differentiating element is revealed when the repeated works are viewed together. Through similar coloured stains the wood grain of each piece of laminated wood can be seen. An ironic form, the trees have been taken through many processes of industry and manufacturing to result in a mass-produced, standardised and stylised representation of its original form.

Deleuze writes in Difference and Repetition:

The more our daily life appears standardized, stereotyped, submitted to the accelerated reproduction of consumer goods, the more art must become part of life that operates between levels of repetition… and reproducing esthetically… the illusions and mystifications which are the real essence of this civilization- so that in the end, Difference can express itself…7

Revealed through these repeated works are puzzling factors that continue to perplex and mystify. Evergreen shows the uncontrollable aspect of nature, and Fit The Mould the realities of human intervention as each seemingly mass-produced object is varied slightly resulting from its hand-made production. Jones’ re-introduces human intervention, from manufactured to man-made, and suggests that these objects have the potential to change and transform. Jones’ art works reveal that as our world becomes more standardised, more stereotyped and more regimented the simple act of human interaction can open up the potential for difference beyond our control.

Hamish Jones will be exhibiting in Sculpture in Central Otago 2011 at Rippon Vineyard and Winery, Wanaka from 5th February until 1 May 2011.

NOTES

1 Esther Leslie,”Walter Benjamin: Traces of Craft,” Journal of Design History, Vol. 11. No. 1, Craft, Modernism and Modernity, (Oxford University Press, 1998), p11.

2 George Basalla, “Transformed Utilitarian Objects,” Winterthur Portfolio, Vol. 17, No. 4, Winter, (The University of Chicago Press, 1982), pp195-96.

3 Ibid, p187.

4 Craig Owens, Repetition and Difference, Beyond Recognition: Representation, Power and Culture, (University of California Press, 1992), p2.

5 Ibid, p3.

6 Jennifer Dyer, “The Metaphysics of the Mundane: Understanding Andy Warhol’s Serial Imagery,” Artibus et Historiae, (Vol. 25, No. 49, IRSA, 2004), pp. 33 - 47.

7 Gilles Deleuze, Difference and Repetition, (Presses Universitaires de France English translation, Paris; 1994).

Shouting in the Evenings: Theatre Reviews by Jim Currin

2011-04-21T17:36:00.000-07:00

As this Indian summer rolls on, feebly yet bravely, I’ll sometimes crack a broad smile and reflect, “Too much, already!” re: the state of Theatre in Dunedin so far this year. Before I attempt to cram all the shows I have seen into this column, I first tender my sincerest apologies to those shows that scheduling problems have excluded me from: The Road Has No Name, A Very Potter Musical, StageSouth’s first reading of the year, Pip Hall’s Up North, the re-jig of Sunday Roast, and several new dance works: ____, I Heart, and Footnote’s Best-of-Fringe winning Hullopolloi. It’s these last few that I really kick myself over as it becomes more and more apparent that if you’re not making the effort to see new dance works, then you’re missing out on some of the best theatre that’s going. Footnote’s program last year, seen all too briefly at Allen Hall was, next to Wuthering Heights, easily the cream of 2010 — both sense-maddening masterworks showing what it’s all really about; what happens when great artists truly let loose; and why TV ain’t no substitute.

Rarotimu (Allen Hall) was an awesome example of artists taking a chance and really reaping the payoff. A dance piece that grew out of a scholarly paper, I worked (a little) on this and so cannot review it, but, as a local piece of unique and unusual character, it should be mentioned with added encouragement to go and see strange, chance-taking works like this when they crop up.

I did not enjoy The Wonder Of Sex at the Fortune, and I want to be as honest and constructive as possible about why, because the commitment and skill of the performers was truly intense. The writer, Patrick Barlow who also wrote the slapstick-tinged The 39 Steps, utilizes an idiom for which I simply have little taste. Perhaps for a British audience, or one of more sober mores, this sort of thing is the bomb; but my viewing experience was highly uncomfortable, as I sat through the entire show wondering what was supposed to be so funny. I couldn’t work out who these two guys, delivering a deeply non-erudite lecture about sex, were meant to be. It seemed as if we were just meant to read them as classic types: the bullish, overblown alpha male and the wispy, self-deriding offsider. Blackadder and Baldric; or perhaps Bunsen and Beaker. This is fine – indeed, classic – for sketch/situation comedy, but as a theatre show, it was thin and unsatisfying. Here’s the rub – constantly, situations arose which could have been used to uplift the concept, to fill it with interesting subtext and edges, to keep us guessing at what the deeper relationship of these two rather odd men was meant to be. But, constantly, they were thrown away – and on we go to the next one-liner! – and while that may be true to the script and the original spirit of the show, it seemed like a terrible waste. I do believe the true flaw of the piece is the writing – this sort of nudge-nudge business has been old for some time, and I truly could not detect anything in it that could not conceivably have been delivered during a 1970s Morecome and Wise television special. Yes, it’s funny that some blokes are a bit awkward when it comes to discussing the old in-out, but it’s also fairly weightless stuff when it’s meant to be the backbone of a whole show. It tends to make one think this about the characters – huh, what a couple of jerks (especially when strategies like the suggestion box are employed. Some audience members gleefully filled a box with questions during intermission, hoping to become part of the show, but there was never any intention of reading them out. You could hear the sound of deflating in the rows). I kept expecting that a real moment, about their true feelings, would happen, soon, but it never did. A shame, because men’s true – and I mean, true – feelings about these matters is something which doesn’t get much air-time.

But on to less weighty matters. Merz And More at Allen Hall was like what I imagine, having never seen it, public-access cable TV is like in the states. A driven, rather strange presenter spins the hits as he or she sees them and, as the night wears on, starts to forget where they are and bursts into song, or even gets nekkid. Although obviously structured in some wise, Jonathan Marshall kept his timing loose and his pants looser as the audio-visual ducks lined up – butoh, noise music, art film, bad theatre, slick beats. In all, it was the purest example of anti-performance I’ve seen in some time and as such, was rather refreshing. A Model Millionaire, the next week at Allen Hall, was equally light but in stark stylistic contrast – a deftly-designed chamber piece based on a short moral tale for children by Oscar Wilde. All the beats and nuances were nicely played and displayed, but it was epicly short – it would good to see talented director Vicky Cross tackle meatier fare. A nice comic turn from Kathryn Hurst as the artist-dandy Alan Trevor, also.

For meatier fare, pre-Fringe, Hush (Fortune Studio) was probably the ticket. Having toured the country and been presented at the Reading (UK) documentary theatre festival, this is a local production that has paid some dues, and – rightfully – been repaid with no little acclaim. The cast interviewed a selection of Otago people who have been affected by domestic violence, and speak their words, exactly, onstage for 70 minutes – that is, in a nutshell, what you get. What that description doesn’t convey is the heart-rending, unspeakably human involvement that the documentary technique forces you to have with it’s subject/s. I was so worried that the words would be forced into an agenda, made to walk a party line by the unavoidable editing process, but I couldn’t have been more relieved – and elevated by the experience. Uncanny and unique.

Then… Fringe arrived; and in opening the festivities Love You Approximately was perfect, inspiring heated discussion all round. In fact I feel like throwing this review open to my friends and acquaintances who have actually had a Skype relationship (I have not), and reporting the one thing they all said – that their real experience trumped the situation in the play, easy, in terms of dramatic relationship weirdnesses. Ok, it’s unfair to compare in that way, but it made me think of one of my tutors who once said “theatre isn’t really about characters, it’s about relationships”. In this play, a Kiwi woman leaves her Skype open, having been chatting with a former one-night-stand from Spain, and he ends up becoming her virtual flatmate. All good; but as their tete-a-tete progresses, it becomes more and more about them, and less about the ramifications of it in the wider world – and this tended to force attention on the one physical character, Imogen (the others all being projected onto the marvellously designed set), who spends much of the play resisting having any emotions at all. She is, in fact, so irritatingly shut-down that it drastically limits the directions the story can go in. Why doesn’t she grab her laptop and march off down the road, showing her lover the sights? For a play with a lot of projections, obviously taking the virtual world as almost a character in itself, it made me wonder if a somewhat alienated relationship to technology is even nearly as interesting as a grateful, joyous one. This was an extremely well-done play that ruffled a lot of thoughts and feathers – really great stuff, and a reminder that a play that annoys you can be more valuable than one that entertains.

The Visitor (The Globe), however, was just frustrating. Not because it was bad; this very young cast somehow managed to take some rather typical, familiar material and strategies (I won’t give them away; this play actually qualifies as a real thriller) and make something quite gripping out of them. But then it... ended. From a slow start, I became very involved in how things would play out, and couldn’t believe it when it just dribbled away. Again, for being so young, the cast had an neat grasp on how to twist naturalistic action into the psychological, so please, please, bring a finished version of this play back sometime. Apparently the earthquake soured some of their plans for this project, and if that was reflected in the play’s premature end, then I hope they’ll take this review as the appreciation that it is.

But now to the sublime. Winner of Best Theatre at the Fringe awards was a play I had a heavy hand in, Once Was (As Is Performance Space) (and we’ll pause here so you can draw a sharp breath of surprise – or not - at the cravenness of my self-advertising), but please believe it; the standard this year, generally, was exceptional. I’ve written at length about Drowning In Veronica Lake (The Globe) in the pages of *INK – masterly solo acting from Alex Ellis in a piece that dives deep into 40s film genre, with wild dances of fractured personality that never lose sight of the true heart of the writing – the true heart of the woman in question.
Walking out of Mates & Lovers (Fortune) we wondered, why is this in the Fringe festival? Why not the Arts Festival, and proclaimed a work of genius nation-wide, discussed on every corner? Oh... is it because it’s about men who have sex with each other...?? If you are someone who in the version of Somewhere Over The Rainbow is devastating. Tendernesses and woes that don’t skirt the issues, but also know how to suck it up... I could go on. Thank god this show, at least, was well attended... unlike my favourite show of Fringe, Capturing Other (Fortune Studio). I don’t have room to fully unpack this; instead, here’s a rant. Fringe is meant, everyone, as a chance for you to go and see unusual and wonderful things by people who are really putting themselves out on a limb. With minimal profile and less money, they are giving you their all. If you don’t show up - if you cross your arms and go “Hmmpff! What’s in it for me?” - then you have missed the point entirely. This beautiful, bewilderingly creative dance program infused everyone who saw it with joy. These talented dancers, who have travelled the world and worked their arses off, gave 100% for their tiny Dunedin audiences, who paid beans. And you missed it. Why?

Mates & Lovers - Aaron Hawkins

2011-04-21T17:35:00.000-07:00

The release of Chris Brickell’s landmark text Mates & Lovers in 2008 managed to evoke, with incongruous concurrence, despair that his history of gay New Zealand was the first of its kind, and relief that it was such a well crafted and sensitive affair. In an historical narrative that is marked by social persecution and legal prosecution, Brickell celebrated the lives and loves of his protagonists, and told of their struggles without making them victims. The saddest element of Brickell’s queer history was the realisation that the struggle for acceptance hasn’t been a linear one. Homosocial cohabitation, and the attendant sexual ambiguities, barely raised eyebrows in colonial New Zealand. The giant strides backward are still being reclaimed, and hopefully the dialogue - socially and academically - Brickell’s work should fire can go some way towards smoothing that path.

Three years later and Mates & Lovers the book is Mates & Lovers the play, a queer history in one act coming to a town near you. Any worthwhile historical fiction - biographical, speculative or both - has its origins in the work of historians, but putting said historians front and centre hardly excites one’s creative passions. But Brickell is no Michael King, or Sir Keith, and his anecdotal social anthropology makes for easy dramatic interpretation. Writer and director Ronald Nelson cherry picks his way through Brickell’s chronological assortment of man love moments and brings them to the stage, a beautifully staged cross-section of its source text, and it is the movement within the piece – quite literally the glue holding it together – that is its great strength.

Opening with Taiaroa Royal’s wonderfully expressive pas de deux, easily one of the best pieces of dance I have seen on a local stage in recent years, the bar was set high, and it is a credit to Nelson’s direction and his two actors – Simon K Leary & Paora Taurima – that this was maintained in the transition sequences throughout, without (the occasional song & dance number aside) forcing itself upon you or making too much of a fuss. With minimal set and wardrobe adornments – two chairs, two shirts, two trou between them – Leary & Taurima weaved together a complex cast of characters seamlessly, and I would have loved to have seen the same team approach Mates & Lovers primarily as a dance piece rather than a dramatic one, because all involved showed they had the chops to elevate the physicality to something that transcended, rather than interpreted, the material it was based on. The acting was generally sharp, but for an actor to give depth to so many half-formed personas is a difficult ask, and even Leary, who’s talent for character acting carried much of the load, looked a little overstretched when the show got away on him.

Occasionally, Nelson’s attempts to superimpose a master narrative onto Brickell’s cast of characters undermined the beauty of the work. Originally inspired by the portrait (two men & a dog) on Brickell’s cover, Nelson has the portrait sitting as an ongoing motif, but it isn’t clear whether they are the same couple throughout, which made for a jarring obstacle in the way of his historical drift. Sometimes they were ‘everymen’, other times they served as cultural markers, the more recent couple not being allowed the ‘Just Married’ discount because they had only had a Civil Union. The recurring character worked better as reincorporation than forced device, and the portrayal of Sgt Wally Prictor is a fine example of this. First appearing as an enthusiastic drag act entertaining servicemen abroad in WWII, Prictor returns rehashing the same routine decades later in the 1980s; bitter, disillusioned, drunk and angry at the height of the Homosexual Law Reform movement. In one scene Leary (as Prictor) goes from sad washed up drag queen, a tired punchline to his peers, to a moving picture of despair. Forty years later, and for what? It was a true highlight of the performance, and even the gags at the expense of our current Speaker of the House (Lockjaw, as he was known to Prictor) didn’t feel overly worked. Sadly, the same can’t be said for the overcooked exposition of the Wanganui/Whanganui debate that gets lumped in about half way through.

Any art that purports to be about queer history is political by design, and it would be remiss for the political struggles of recent times (law reform, AIDS, gay marriage) to not be covered here, but they seemed to get rattled off towards the end, as if their place in recent memory was reason to not labour the point. At these times, and occasionally earlier, too much is made of the naive country boy as an expositionary device, existing solely, it would seem, to teach us about AIDS, or the historic passing of 1986’s Homosexual Law Reform Bill. The strongest moments were when the attention was focussed on the relationships between the characters, rather than any greater political context. Tender moments between real characters, rather than hamming it up to hammer home the point. The naked bathing scene towards the end was extremely powerful because it was about one man caring for a person he loves. The fact that they were a gay couple, and one was on the downhill slide of ‘the virus’, weren’t foregrounded, because people in real relationships don’t, and the characters (actors & audience) benefitted from them not being reduced to 2D stereotypes. Because behind the stories, the court reports, the late-night rendezvous in Queens Garden, Mt Vic, or The Domain, none of the characters are.

Capturing Other - Anna Paris

2011-04-21T17:34:00.000-07:00

Towards the end of the Fringe Festival I found myself part of a small audience at the Fortune Theatre, anticipating an experimental evening of dance performance in contrast with the venue’s usual middle-of-the-road fare. In their series of four duets, Auckland-based Beautiful Sake Productions brought their exploration of liminality to Dunedin: a search for the conceptual spaces between humanness and wildness, the inside and the outside of the body.

Choreographed and performed by Julie Van Renen with Geoff Gilson, the evening began with Still Lives, danced upon a piece of floral 1950s carpet. This acts as both a moving sea/flying carpet and as the foundation of a cosy domestic space. It is both exotic and familiar (I realise I have the exact same carpet in my sitting room). Bananas as bunting are strung up above the dancers, and an old fringed lamp completes the picture of tired, but charming, domesticity (golly I have the lamp too!). Within this space the two lovers gaze at their surroundings and each other as a snapshot slide projector frames them within different exotic locations. The dancers move languidly, leaning into and over each other, she climbing on to his shoulders, balancing delicately. It is an old-time romance, kooky and tender, each aware of the other but gazing into the distance, in awe of the landscapes around them. It is evocative and atmospheric, but I can’t help wanting to see more movement, more use of space … and less of everything else. Eventually the carpet becomes a blanket which the lovers crawl under, disappearing completely to Lucky Seven’s tender ‘oh beautiful!’

Between this piece and the next, a white laptop is placed onstage like an inverted triangle, belting out the electronic tones of Clubfoot and creating a complete change of scene and pace. Josh Rutter’s Dance Like a Butterfly Dreamboy is a humorous, frantic comedy in which two athletes (Rutter and Gilson) clad in see-through teal raincoats and satin shorts, and clutching plastic skipping ropes, are desperately competing for the attentions of their coach. Stephen Bain, complete with whistle and two-tone brown nylon tracksuit, is wonderful in this role: he conducts and wills his boys into increasingly frenetic and mesmerizing shapes and taunts: ‘Getting on well?’ ‘I am not here to make friends!’ and ‘If you want to make friends you need to be friendly with them!’ The boys dance-off, circuit-train on chalk-marked stations, squatting and skipping, gulping orange berocca in between, as tension grows. They don boxing gloves, and ‘dance like a butterfly, sting like a bee’ around their coach. I loved the pace, the humorous quips, the crazy energy, the sparring, culminating in lascivious homoerotic posing, and the coach finally jumping on one of the athletes (the winner?). Amusing, although again, dammit, not enough dance. I want to see more technical prowess, more agility, and less dialogue.

Anna Bates’ The Adventures of Ghost Heart and Still Horse delves into the grotesque or monstrous female body, and draws on Mikhail Bakhtin’s theories of the fluid/open and contained/closed body binary. Bakhtin argues that while the bodies of medieval carnivals were grotesque, with no clear delineation between their inside and outside, between the individual and the collective, the modern body is, by contrast, closed, controlled, unidirectional and regulated.1 Said piece, danced by Bates and Van Renen, plays on this open/closed body binary. To the sounds of Cocorosie, Battles and Nine Inch Nails, Bates and Van Renen are like mesmerized dolls as they slowly don red rubber gloves, a woolly mammoth wig and some sort of red scrunchy paper, staring determinedly out to middle distance. A video projector provides the backdrop, and the dancers ritualistically rearrange miniatures on a small table in order to isomorphically manipulate the dance landscape, thus demonstrating the search for the space between bodies and landscapes, between self and other. There is very little movement, and finally the dancers become one, blending together…. God I’m frustrated. And I wonder if some of the problem is the actual heftiness of this philosophical preoccupation: exploring the notion of the monstrous feminine is perhaps a subject more suited to a full-length piece? This is a brave attempt though, but one which is not fully realised.

We end the evening with Geoff Gilson’s Lightspeed Love, danced with Sarah Iwaskow as a depressed geisha in sneakers and traditional cape, who meets and then falls in love with a lonely sex robot (Gilson). Josh Rutter crouches as a hooded figure upstage, performing original music with microphone. The geisha is disturbing and mesmerizing, a modern day shaman, her face grotesquely underlit, as she shuffles and dances forlornly with a cheap plastic dinosaur toy. Enter robot, clad in a blond wig and cool silver robot suit adorned with impressive flashing and scribbling lights. The dancers tentatively, shyly connect and duet (‘Hey love, there’s only you in my life/the only thing that’s right’), energy picks up, and things get hot and wild. The music, singing and choreography are discordant, staccato, deliberately off-key, slightly uneasy. The performance culminates in the geisha and robot stripping off, and the tension is heightened with the help of spectacular lighting and some rather beautiful entwined movements.

Overall I am left entertained, confused, exhilarated and somewhat unsatisfied. This is a brave and ambitious set of duets, some more successful than others, but a performance that leaves me wanting more. I fully embrace the experimentation of dance with other media forms, and enjoy the unexpected juxtapositions that this can create. In this case, however, with the exception of Josh Rutter’s piece, the technical and evocative elements of the dance choreography and performance were somewhat lost in the noise of the other effects.

Intersecting Lives: A review of François Dosse's 'machine biography' of the 20th Century's greatest philosophical duo - Henry Feltham

2011-04-21T17:32:00.000-07:00

In 1969, one year after the turbulence of May 1968, and a few months before his 39th birthday, Felix Guattari drove to Limousin to meet Gilles Deleuze for the first time. It was always going to be this way round, hard to imagine the phlegmatic, stay-at-home Deleuze making the trip to visit Guattari where he worked at the La Borde clinic in the Loire valley. It was the peripatetic Guattari, the wanderer, the circum-thinker who had already made pilgrimages to Yugoslavia and China, organised protests, and inspected the barricades in ‘68, that made the journey, and began one of the 20th century’s most glamorous intellectual collaborations.

Lacan had been the touchstone of Guattari’s psychoanalytic practice at La Borde. He had attended Lacan’s seminars and gone into analysis with him. Just as Lacan described himself as a Freudian, so Guattari when he first arrived at La Borde was a Viennese disciple of sorts. His time there, however, saw him stray from what he would, with Delueze, come to condemn as ‘Mummy-Daddy’ psychoanalysis. Instead, he immersed himself in the ‘transversality’ of La Borde’s programme, where to disrupt the alienations of capitalism, doctors might mop the floors while the maids provided treatment. The unrest that followed was predictable, as was Lacan’s failure to appoint him as his successor, and too Guattari’s resultant depression, morphing at times into an irrepressible mania. Already quoting Deleuze in his work with Lacan, Guattari’s meeting with his future co-author was arranged by a colleague, frustrated at his friend’s seeming inability to focus his energies.

The Deleuze painted in Intersecting Lives sits at the opposite pole to Guattari – an invalid child for whom philosophy became a hermetic respite. He was drawn to Hegel’s thinking on the will, and Neitzsche’s positivity, and from there to Spinoza’s veiled determinism. As radical in his writings as he was pedestrian in his everyday life, he found a co-conspirator in Guattari, who was equally happy to revolt against Platonic thought, and reformulate the negative desires of psychoanalysis into the relentless, transformative forces of Anti-Oedipus. Their first meetings were reported to be electric, the only issue being how to get Guattari to sit still long enough to write anything down. Their first book was the result of Deleuze’s determination to turn sprawling, inchoate correspondence into something more solid. A puzzling implication here is that the Dolce-Gabbana of modern philosophy produced prose that was, at first, even more obscure and rootless.

Desire is the heart of it. Everything, the pair proclaimed, is a machine seeking to transform the world in some way. Desire is aroused, as it was by the Nazis, through ‘flags, nations, armies’, or as capitalism does by eroding traditions and permitting newer, bolder forms of desire to take hold. At worst, it explodes in a kind of schizophrenic shattering of the self. On D&G’s reading, this is capitalism’s true surplus product – madness.

To read D&G is to feel a little of that madness. To read Intersecting Lives is to see it played out. Anti-Oedipus was a phenomena, renouncing reason itself and so, the story goes, freeing the manifold, contradictory spirit within. Connected to everything from the PLO to the Chelsea Hotel, D&G reshaped the dialogue of the ultra-left, then let it seep back into center via the rhizomatic forces they sought to describe. Their jargon has permeated disciplines as various as post-colonial studies and counter-insurgency theory, urban planning to arts festivals, film, and perhaps most notably provided us with ways to speak about cyberspace without needing to fully understand it.

Delueze was perhaps the happier of the two, content to watch his star wane, only to see it pick up again in other, more subtle ways, whereas Guattari’s urgency – the energy that infected the early work – suffered when the vogue for their brand of ‘bad poetry’ faded. More than anything else, this fading suggests some truth to the accusations of their detractors. D&G were as subject to the perilous social forces they identified as the minority groups they analysed. The vagueness of their expression, the shifting, involute, fractured language – all of it may have been as much a symptom of the era as an attempt to revolt against it, their popularity grounded in indeterminacy, and the restless, inconclusive style no more than glad cleaving to an anxiously overdetermined brand of Nothing. On the flip-side, they remain for many the seminal prophets of uncertainty and multiplicity. Maybe there is no great contradiction here. Intersecting Lives attempts to answer the question – what kind of machine were Delueze and Guattari?

François Dosse’s Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari: Intersecting Lives (translated by Deborah Glassman, 652 pages) is published by Columbia University Press and is now available at all good book stores.

Celebrity culture and Depression .org Corp. - Tao Wells

2011-04-21T17:31:00.000-07:00

People tell me that I can't criticize what I myself want to be, namely I can't be critical of celebrity culture if I am attempting to use celebrity culture to engage with the public on issues of the day. I'm here to say that, yes I can. Politicians can criticize one another, in fact you don't even have to be in politics to be critical of the politics and engage in politics to express that criticism. Celebrity culture or mass media is no different. The means of expression are open to criticism by anyone just as they should be available to anyone, the difference between John Kirwan and I in terms of celebrity is obvious and although my suggestion that celebrity culture, and in particular the use of celebrity ex-All Black John Kirwan to promote depression dot org, when Celebrity culture in my and in many experts opinion induces depression with its narrowly defined presentation of acceptable models of success. The fact that Depression dot org sought to reduce the social stigma of being depressed through the reinforcing display of celebrity Powers of success is proof of the total fraud this organization is perpetuating on the NZ public and represents one of a dozen corporate entities that suck at the golden nipple of public wealth creating the conditions for their perpetual employment.

World Cup and the Wealth Gap.

issue one release

2011-04-10T03:23:00.000-07:00

Issue one will be released this evening, 21st April, at 5.30pm at the Art School Gallery Foyer on Riego St, Dunedin! Please come along and enjoy our hospitality and get yourself a copy of crop issue one!

cropmagazine

ISSUE TWO LAUNCH THIS THURSDAY 30th JUNE!

ISSUE ONE IS HERE, NOW!

Guidance Council: Futurians ‘Chaos Manner’ Reviewed Dwayne Zarakov and Friends

ISSUE ONE - CONTENTS

FEATURES

CENTRE FOLD

MUSIC REVIEWS

ART REVIEWS

PERFORMANCE REVIEWS

BOOK REVIEWS

ART WORK

I am Sitting in a Room, Different From the One You Are in Now: Some Thoughts on the Auditory Life of Art, and the Experimental Life of Radios -- Sally Ann McIntyre

"The Lies We Lie Behind…" - Carl A. Mears

CENTREFOLD: Adrian Hall, The Three States...

Matt Middleton Reviews Lines of Flight

Thursday, 24th of march: Seht – Lee Noyes & Radio Cegeste – Sign of the Hag – Eye

Friday, 25th of March: Mela – Our Love will Save the World – Kusum Normoyle – the Dead C

Saturday, 26th of March (afternoon session): The Forgotten Guests – Alastair Galbraith – Hi Asobi

Saturday, 26th of March (evening session): Stanier Black Five – Pumice – Rosy Parlane – The Futurians

Scandinavian Jumpers and Police Vests - Campbell Walker

Philip Frost: works on paper at A Gallery - Naomi Boult

The Grass is Still Growing - Emily Harris

Richard MacFarlane Reviews Oliver van der Lugt’s In Active Idle State a one day show in the Bedroom of 50 Williamson Ave, Grey Lynn, Auckland. Monday 28th March 2011.

On the first show at ABC Gallery in CHCH: Robert Hood's Leap into the Driveway and Other Rejoinders - Andrew Paul Wood

Hamish Jones: Toys as Everyday Objects - Vanessa Eve Cook

Shouting in the Evenings: Theatre Reviews by Jim Currin

Mates & Lovers - Aaron Hawkins

Capturing Other - Anna Paris

Intersecting Lives: A review of François Dosse's 'machine biography' of the 20th Century's greatest philosophical duo - Henry Feltham

Celebrity culture and Depression .org Corp. - Tao Wells

issue one release