Gone in 24 hours

Drove en famille out to Sumner yesterday to take in Thomas Hirschhorn's Poor-racer, an event in the One Day Sculpture series perfectly conceived for Christchurch, the unabashed boy-racer capital of New Zealand. The sound of the suburbs is no longer lawn-mowers and leaf-blowers, as the recent promotion of the Ellerslie Flower Show would have you believe, but instead the "Psssht! Pssht! Varoommmm" of a customised Mazda Familia accelerating at speed. (Rather appropriate, I felt, that they turned Hagley Park into an enormous grassy carpark for the occasion of the garden show.) The small guy had complained about coming to see the sculpture, suggesting that a car covered in cardboard would be boring. "What is it? A car covered in cardboard? Did he use blue-tack or sellotape to stick it? It's a car, and it's cardboard. Not interesting."

But when we saw it, it was. Actually, the small guy's eyes lit up. It was parked nonchalantly about halfway along the Esplanade towards Scarborough Hill: a lowered modified car pimped with gigantic cardboard sideskirts, spoiler and insanely large hood scoop (or perhaps intercooler? I'm no expert, I just live here), and tin foil mags plus internal stabilising bars made out of what looked like toilet roll inners sellotaped together. The bonnet was raised to show engine parts 'chromed' with more tin foil. It looked driveable, but only just. Ridiculous and entirely wonderful, its obvious painstaking labour out of all proportion with the results, Hirschhorn's low rider was like a school project on steroids, its materials unfit for its ambitious conception. I couldn't decide if it was a monument to heroic failure, or just plain heroic. It reminded me a lot of Marie Shannon's photographs of her own 'unworthy objects', like her model house or the 'museum of cat fur'.

A coldish easterly had blown up along the beach, so the usual hordes of girls in bikini tops and board shorts and guys in wet suits a size too small queueing for the sole public dunny were conspicuous by their absence. We parked a couple of spaces down from the work and got out. A car slowed down as it passed by on the Esplanade, pale faces pressed to the windows.

There were a few people milling around the pimped cardboard car with a vague sense of purpose as we approached. An unlikely and diverse group. Half a dozen puzzled elderly punters who'd cut their Sunday constitutional short. A plump young guy with a curly mullet and nylon soccer shorts. The cultural attache from the Swiss Embassy; curator Danae Mossman; a couple of bleary-eyed young artists who'd assisted with gaffer tape and tin foil through the night, sitting on a tartan picnic blanket; the artist, tall and thin and dressed in black, chatting with all-comers.


You can always feel a tension at that kind of moment, looking at a new public work of art. The people already there have already bonded in a purposeful kind of way; as spectators or fabricators, they have formed themselves into a group united by mutual interest in the physical proximity of a peculiar object; the person who made it is standing there too; you arrive in their midst as a stranger; what will you bring to the mix? To get my bearings I walked round the car, and had a look at the detail -- the cardboard steering wheel, the fruit tray like a little mat on the passenger's side floor, the flames emblazoned in magic marker -- and took a few photos, and thought about it for a bit, and then was introduced to the artist. "Great work," I said. "Thanks for coming out." "Thank you," he said. I opened my mouth to speak, trusting that something vaguely intelligent and penetrating would come out. Suddenly I was aware of a strange sensation behind me. It was the small guy, who'd momentarily escaped from his father and had crept up to ping the elastic of my underpants. "Snap! Snap!" it went.

Hard to sustain the serious art thing after that, and probably just as well.

Here's the detail.

Passenger footwell. Windows taped for a crash.

Intercooler, mags, and fork flame pimping.

Customised upholstery and racing steering wheel.

Skirts and sponsors branding.

Here what the artist has to say. Thomas Hirschhorn:

"I am interested in the Form which is created by customising or tuning a car. The fact of personalising one’s own ordinary car in order to give it a unique individual touch is the revolutionary gesture of everybody, without exclusion. Customising or tuning is an act of resistance to the non-written laws of all kinds of exclusion. In the desperate and useless act of car-tuning I see a form of resistance throughout form. And as an artist - what can interest me more than Form?"

(Perhaps I should consider the underpants tweak as the small guy's own personal act of resistance to looking at art in the weekends.)

Against representation

A couple of international items related -- at least tangentially -- to New Zealand art, which have popped up in my feed reader overnight.

Firstly, there's 'Code Share', an interesting-sounding show opening in a couple of days at the Contemporary Art Centre, Vilnius, Lithuania, curated by Govett-Brewster Art Gallery alumnus Simon Rees.

The title of the exhibition is taken from the partnership arrangements made by commercial airlines to share passengers on a single flight in order to maximise profits. As the press release notes, this isn't to everyone's taste:

"Often travellers book a flight upon one airline and arrive at the gate to find that the plane and its staff is wearing the livery of a different partner airline – and serving food and drink associated with another national culture when we were looking forward to a specific set of flavours or the taste of 'home’! This might come as a pleasant surprise for the adventurous traveller but disappoint that flyer wanting to relax to familiar sounds and flavours two hours ahead of touching down. "

Rees relates the airlines' practice of code-sharing -- dominated by the major carriers -- to the backroom arrangements which have grown up around biennales, whereby the movements of global art audiences and artists' circuits are sewn up by the big players and where there is a definite worldwide hierarchy of events based on "colonial and capitalist" order.

All this is pretty interesting, but what I particularly like about Rees's concept is his desire to have a bob both ways (he describes it as "double agency"). While the artists in his show have been selected following their appearances in many of the top-end global biennales (the Whitney, Istanbul, Sydney, etc.), their work is concerned with "processes of cultural and socio-political displacement and alienation". Effectively, turning one of the usual biennale platforms on its head, the works are being produced "in denial of [national] representativeness."

No idea what the show will look like (maybe they'll put photos on their website in due course?) -- but I like the nature of the thinking behind it, very much. I was also interested to see that one of the contributing artists (down as coming from Malaysia/Indonesia; kind of ironic they'd include the artists' nationalities in the list of contributors) is Nadiah Bamadhaj, who went to art school at the University of Canterbury in Christchurch, and whose work I last saw in a group sculpture show at the old CSA Gallery in the early 90s.

The second item that's caught my eye overnight is news of the death of Coosje van Bruggen, Claes Oldenburg's artistic collaborator and wife. Time's Richard Lacayo has a nice short piece about their large-scale sculptural collaborations here. A sculpture by Van Bruggen and Oldenburg at Donald Judd's Chinati Foundation in Marfa, Texas, was the inspiration for one of my favourite works by NZ photographer Marie Shannon. In this series, Shannon rephotographed drawings made by her then 4 1/2 year old son of works the family saw at Marfa, including Oldenburg and Van Bruggen's Monument to the Last Horse.

Here's Marie Shannon's version, Leo's Sketchbook: Claes Oldenberg and Coosje van Bruggen, Monument To The Last Horse (2002), a digital ink jet print on watercolour paper, from the Chartwell Collection at Auckland Art Gallery.


And here's Oldenburg and Van Bruggen's original, in Texas, marking the grave of a cavalry horse named Louie. (An essay about the work by Donald Judd can be read here.)

High-handed

I have a great partiality for photographic facsimiles of documents, something I've blogged about before. Whether it's Ronnie van Hout's school reports, Marie Shannon's love notes or the contents of Marilyn Monroe's filing cabinets, there's something entirely different about the experience of looking at a document up on the screen or the wall than reading the same thing on a page. You become aware of all a document's incidental visual properties when you view it as a picture; and somehow this additional information gives colour and context to what you read, steeping it in the style of its own history.

I also have a terrible sneaking weakness for disgraceful high-handedness, wherever it might manifest itself: a personal amusement which is probably due to an early obsession with Evelyn Waugh's novels of British aristocracy in decline. I can never quite bring myself to act like that, but I greatly appreciate a withering put-down when I hear one.

I was intrigued, then, to see the unusual collision of these two somewhat peculiar personal proclivities in this facsimile of a rejection letter from novelist Kingsley Amis to Granta magazine (a neat reversal of the usual order of things), which Granta have just posted on their site. Nice work.

P.S. I Play Lead Guitar if Required

Thinking again about Stephen Shore's project of collecting and documenting ephemera from his road trip reminded me of the slightly more downmarket Found project. When an angry (but nonetheless hopeful) note meant for someone called Mario was left on his windscreen in Ann Arbor, Davy Rothbart (and his collaborator Jason Bitner) thought that other people might be interested to see it. On showing it to friends, they found that almost everyone had picked up a similar scrap from someone else's life at one time or another, and shared a similarly nosy fascination for found notes. So they started an annual magazine dedicated to the subject, and encouraged people to post their finds in, which they now do from all over the world: poetry on napkins, lost polaroids, bizarre shopping lists, diary entries, love notes written on homework paper.

There are a few New Zealand artists who've been interested in using this kind of material. In the early 1990s, Ronnie van Hout made embroideries on canvas, using handwritten texts taken from student noticeboards. This is his Untitled (Male Rock/Pop Singer) (1993) from the Chartwell Collection.

In 2005, Marie Shannon collected and photographed notes written by members of her family to one another. The prints are beautiful and reveal all the tiny crumples and creases of the notepaper. This is Sorry for being grumpy.


I have made a few bizarre street-level finds over the years. I found this note -- which is xeroxed, suggesting it must have been required on more than one occasion -- blowing down a residential street in central Wellington.

These vaguely threatening musings on the end of a relationship were tucked into a guest compendium of an Auckland hotel I stayed in a few years ago.




There's something about found texts that's so sad and futile and evocative, but like the note to 'Mario' above, hopeful somehow. New Zealand poet Jenny Bornholdt uses them from time to time. One of my favourites is this poem from her 2000 collection, These Days:

(Notice in our letterbox)

Have you lost a rabbit?
I have found a rabbit.
I found it on Waipapa Road.
I found it late on Monday night.
It was running all over the road.
It is white with brown spots.
Is it yours?
Phone Erik on 386 3641