Some eighty years ago the German Dadaist Kurt Schwitters (1887-1948) embarked upon Merzbau (The Cathedral of Erotic Misery), a sprawling and eccentric twenty year project that accreted itself as mountainous accumulations of discarded materials within the homes of the artist as he moved from Hanover to Norway to England. The work took on a life of its own as it teetered on the brink of limitless self-generating physicality – a psychosis of materiality. Three decades later in 1952, the visionary architect, artist, theatre designer and director Frederick Kiesler-a pal of Schwitters, the Surrealists and De Stijl artists- presented his work Galaxies at the Museum of Modern Art in New York. This was one of the first examples of environmental sculpture. Kiesler’s principle of the ‘endless house’ and his manifesto of ‘correlation’ concerned the intimate relationships among space, people, objects and concepts. Kiesler helped articulate notions of art as an experiential totality and environmental sculpture as a seamless conjoining of temporal, spatial and phenomenological moments.
“The environment becomes equally as important as the object, if not more so, because the object breathes into the surrounding and also inhales the realities of the environment no matter what space, close or wide art, open air or indoor… No object, of nature or of art, exists without environment.”
The third in Govett-Brewster Art Gallery’s series of Break exhibitions exploring the practice of new generation artists from Aotearoa New Zealand, Break: Construct assumes the guise of both construction site and playground. The assembly and disassembly of our surroundings into things comprehensible, experiential or fantastic is its departure point. The artists offer perspectives and experimentations that encircle and perhaps unsettle this strategy of assembly/disassembly. Their diverse practices share a concern for the ‘objectness’ of things.
The nine artists in Break: Construct toy with scope, scale and substances, using strategies of accurnulation and association that in turn alter the character and meaning of objects, phenomena and spaces. New relationships are drafted amongst the materials and sensibilities that inhabit our world. This reconfiguration of environs occurs in idiosyncratic ways; Seung Yul Oh and Peter Madden have adopted an expansive, obsessive and somewhat frisky approach in their collaborative work, Vein of the black stone. Madden’s exquisite Lilliputian collages accrete themselves in the space in jaunty communion with Oh’s massive kinetic toy animals. More attenuated and specific interests in mathematics and the spectral inform the work Prayer/lightning machine by Simon Lawrence. Ben Cauchi, meanwhile, alludes to the arcane live capturing of assembled things in his unique photographs. For Cauchi, the construct takes place within the camera itself as an extension of a contrived vision. Resuscitated from previous contexts. materials and substances are reassembled to create new provocations. The artists highlight the potential for materials to live another life. Multiple histories – of the materials themselves and of modes of representation – are referenced.
Relational processes are at play in Break: Construct as interactions between material interventions and the presence of audiences are envisaged. Marnie Slater plays off existing architectures in Any Moment, to provide spectators with unexpected vistas over gallery spaces and other artists’ works. Yvonne Todd conjures new psychologically portentous personalities into the world and provokes a double-take on photographic truth as she invites the viewer to construct their own explanatory narrative. Simon Denny, in Less stale attachment, challenges our perceptual routines as he holds materials and our attention in time and space. Cortina’s engagement with the exhibition occured on opening night in the form of Final fantasy, a musical pastiche of retro glam-rock, a time-based musical construction with a spacey, psychic undertone. Sam Morrison, through his theatricalised stagings in Drawings with air, provides an avenue for audiences to breathe life into his expectant and acoustically-charged constructions or ‘situations’, all connected within the gallery space to an air-compressor that, on cue, forces the potential sound out of these relocated objects.
Reconstituting the mundane, these artists shift our experiences of familiar substances, sounds and scenarios to render the ordinary peculiar and playful whilst revealing unexpected associations. While there are points of commonality, convergence and communication within Break: Construct, there exists a wide arc of private investigations. All artists however, interrogate the ‘correlation’ of space, people, objects and ideas. The works also exist as invitations to consider how we perceive, experience and adjust our environment. In so doing, meaning finally rests with the audience, becomes personal and, like Schwitters’s Merzbau, perpetually regenerative.
EXHIBITING ARTISTS: Ben Cauchi, Cortina, Simon Denny, Simon Lawrence, Peter Madden and Seung Yul Oh, Sam Morrison, Marnie Slater, Yvonne Todd.
