Outing of Erewhon
Forum > ReviewsOut of Erewhon: New Directions in Canterbury Art
Jennifer Hay and Felicity Milburn at Christchurch Art Gallery26 Nov 2006 - 5 Feb 2007
by John Hurrell 15 Jan 2007 5:33 pm
2 Comments
Article of the Month January 2007
We have here an extremely disparate but absorbing show of fourteen Christchurch trained artists who have been asked to draw on themes from Samuel Butler’s 1872 satirical novel Erewhon. That seems like an intriguing undertaking for a gallery to organise, doesn't it? After all, Butler is widely regarded as a fascinating historical personality. Yet somehow the project hasn't really taken off.
Very few of these invited individuals have been so excited by his story that they have made his ideas central to their displays. Most have just ignored him and his novel altogether [like the local online writers have done] and simply made good contemporary art that is a product of this time and only that - with no anxiety about historic baggage or encouraging overly determined interpretations from the curators. When artists have worried about the brief, the results seem forced in their literalness, with normally remarkable talents like Langford or Parkes trying in vain to fit in with - for example - a mountainous landscape theme.
Some exhibitions are presented under a banner that can include anything at all, for an irrelevant title is a common phenomenon in group exhibitions, and cannot in itself stop the creation of an exciting line up. Here though the wide variety of included genres does introduce a certain lack of cohesion. Yet because most of these artists - though not widely known - are very good, the 'fragments' make the exhibition exceptionally interesting and well worth visiting.
There is a story I want to bring up about Butler, a celebrated author, colonial farmer and notorious atheist, who had an affair with Press newspaper writer Charles Pauli. This is not well known, yet it should be. It is one of the great classic love stories, infused with passion and betrayal - on a par with Oscar and Bosie; or Rimbaud and Verlaine - and began in the original Carlton pub on Papanui Road in 1863. A year after they met Pauli persuaded Butler to suddenly sell Mesopotamia, his huge sheep station, and return with him to England. Of this abrupt departure the curators’ account is annoyingly circumspect – they allude to ’considerable speculation’. This reduces the conceptual scope of the discussion and ignores a chance to make this period of history more relevant to contemporary discourses. Butler’s life was in fact much more interesting than what this exhibition indicates. Not because he was bisexual, but because of his self-torment and vulnerability to blackmail. Some artists, like Peter Trevelyan and Ri Williamson, happen to accidentally connect with this by referencing Foucauldian concepts of social control and surveillance. If they have done so deliberately, there is little hint of such in the online support material.
The show’s seemingly ironic title is also ambiguous in its treatment of Canterbury as a site. On the one hand the title alludes to Christchurch’s chip on its shoulder resulting from its isolation from ‘over-populated’, northern New Zealand and the rest of the world, seeing itself tarnished as ‘nowhere’. On the other, when explaining that some of the included artists are currently living in Europe, the ‘outness’ of Erewhon goes beyond an ‘anywhere but Canterbury-ness’. Those individuals subvert the inferiority complex by showcasing a new ‘nowhereness’ located far beyond Christchurch. They are anonymous, living invisibly in densely populated urban centres with few friends or relatives to support them.
There is a lot to comb through in this show, and my visit to Christchurch and its public gallery was short. However four works I found myself repeatedly returning to were by Hannah and Aaron Beehre, Robert Hood, Phil Murray and Grant Wylie.
DeArmond is a mini installation that is part Planetarium, part camera obscura, part early cinema. For me it is
You rightfully pick out Robert Hood's video work, which drowns out the silence with a twee western tune, whistling in the wind that scrambles the still reflection. I agree that it's a highlight of the exhibition, and is far superior to his accompanying work outside the gallery. I give him credit for attempting to do something with the concrete monstrosity on Montreal Street, and hope it's the first in a series of pieces to enliven that zone, though it seems somehow invisible to many people, and it's inaccessability to those who do notice it renders it as a sculpture that we want to see inside of, but cannot possibly do so. This seems a real shame, and it is perhaps this frustration that makes me dislike the work. The video piece, on the other hand, invites us in (as you say, long before we even see it), and takes us to Erewhon without us having to leave the city.
So, we're in agreement over that highlight, but I'm much less convinced by your personal favourite, 'DeArmond'. Presumably named after the guitar brand (Hannah and Aaron are both accomplished musicians after all), there is a kind of musical allusion, in that one must remain absolutely silent for the work to engage. Movement or noise cause the projections to halt, and thus the installation is a simple reversal of a previous Beehre work, where the more noise one made, the more leaves rained down the wall. Fun, if not entirely thought provoking. As a totally enclosed room DeArmond is more complex, enriched, and satisfying than it's predecessor, but the whole thing falls over with the ridiculous revolving glass ball placed on the floor in the middle of the space. It's all very disco-fever-soothsayer-lordoftherings-tarotcard-sci-fi-celestial-elysian-battle-for-middle-earth-i-don't-know-what-the-hell-it's-doing-there-awful. It undoes all the good work and shows some really poor decision making. Do I seem incensed? That'll be the incense....
OK, they didn't have any Sandlewood burning, but wow that revolving ball is straight outta Isengard.
As for Langford and Parkes, I'm not sure there was any pained, overarching response to the exhibition brief. Parkes' work didn't seem particularly different to anything else she's shown in the past eighteen months, except for perhaps being a little better realised and benefiting from a bit more room to move, The 'normally remarkable' Langford may have made her most remarkable piece yet, and at least it did seem to encapsulate the Erewhon theme, which you rightfully point out was a pretty dismissable idea as far as the overall show was concerned.
Anyway, there are other artists in this exhibition who have gone unmentioned in John's review - Scott Flanagan, Cat Simpson - neither of whom is represented by their best work, Clare Noonan, carrying on strongly from her excellent Physics Room show (which was reviewed on Artbash last year), Richard van der Aa's exceptionally subtle contribution, and the oddly out-of-place Joanne Moar.
Quickly skimming the rest, Murray, Wylie, and Trevelyan all offer strong sculptural pieces that really add a lot of flavour to the show, and are all well deserving of more widespread attention in the future, and it would be great to see some further discussion about their works, but I'm a little worried that my response is going to be longer than John's review soon (maybe it already is), so I'll leave it at that. But lets get some dialogue going on this exhibition, it's a really good show, though not without faults
By the way, write as much as you like. The longer the better as far as I'm concerned - especially if you want to discuss artists I have ignored. Or if you disagree over things I have said about certain artists.
All opinions welcome.
