Community Values: The Walters Prize 2014

This Walters Prize engages with the public in notable ways. A number of the artists’ projects originally took place in public, outdoors and beyond gallery walls. Additionally, some involved members of the public and were not created for gallery audiences to view in the conventional sense.

In what ways might we consider that these projects engaged with communities or with ideas of community?

Simon Denny, All You Need is Data: The DLD 2012 Conference REDUX (installation view), 2014

Simon Denny’s exhibition All You Need Is Data – The DLD 2012 Conference REDUX literally represents the ideas and aesthetics of a talkfest undertaken by international leading-edge technology thinkers. Denny quotes from the presentations of each of the conference’s participants – politicians, corporate luminaries, scientists and leaders from varied professions, including curator Hans Ulrich Obrist. Set out as a labyrinth of signage in the gallery space, All You Need Is Data re-presents 89 talks from the three-day synthesis of thinking. Denny’s work suggests that the idea of a ‘public sphere’ has been overtaken by dialogue between a select group of society. Nevertheless, evidence of this high-level platform for discussion suggests the possibility for a public or community based around ongoing and unresolved dialogue and debate, as upheld by philosophers Chantal Mouffe and Jean Luc-Nancy. In this way, Denny’s project speaks to such intellectual understandings of our social existence. 

Luke Willis Thompson, inthisholeonthisislandwhereiam (installation view), 2014

In contrast, by inviting audiences of the 2014 Walters Prize to take a taxi ride Luke Willis Thompson’s inthisholeonthisislandwhereiam confronts the viewer with the question ‘Who is your community?’ The nexus of suburban location and house with its evidence of lived experience stands in stark contrast to the Auckland Art Gallery where the viewer begins and ends their journey. Departing from the architecturally award-winning Auckland Art Gallery, Thompson’s restaged inthisholeonthisislandwhereiam plays out across a set of conflicting social values and cultural existences related to public and private spaces. If community is an interrelation of commonalities – family ties, friendships, shared interests, cultural background, histories etc – inthisholeonthisislandwhereiam reminds the viewer of the exclusive boundaries of community membership.

Maddie Leach, If you find the good oil let us know (installation view), 2012–2014

The individuals who were part of Maddie Leach’s If you find the good oil let us know could be understood to form a temporary community existing for the duration of the project. Leach’s artist’s book and website of the same name reveal traces of individuals who took part in her original art project beginning in 2012. Scientists, technicians, sign writers, photographers, newspaper editors, and letter writers to the local Taranaki newspaper, amongst others, played a part in Leach’s investigation of the composition of a barrel of ‘whale oil’. These diverse individuals were connected via the persuasive skills of the artist and the poetic spirit of her project. This commonality, amongst other communities that pre-exist for these individuals, lives on in the extension of Leach’s project for Auckland Art Gallery’s Walters Prize exhibition.

Kalisolaite ’Uhila, Mo’ui tukuhausia (installation view), 2014

 Finally, Kalisolaite ’Uhila’s Mo’ui tukuhausia, an action of living in and around the Gallery 24 hours a day, potentially engages with as well as represents local identities. ’Uhila’s project, as I understand it, questions the very nature of community. Living in and outside the Gallery for the three months of the Walters Prize exhibition, ’Uhila is a being-in-common with the group of local rough sleepers. While raising awareness of homelessness by its enactment, there is more going on in this project than an identification between ’Uhila and his co-inhabitants.

’Uhila’s project troubles stereotypes of community and belonging. On one hand, ’Uhila is an aberrant figure amongst the typical gallery demographic, a Tongan man and a potential breadwinner who is not living the urban dream. For this reason, his presence raises the question for each of us, not least myself and other Gallery staff, as to how we offer him the hospitality that means we share something in common?

These artworks ask audiences to engage with the question of how we generate our individual and formal communities, and how a public is formed at a personal and local level. Dynamic, open-ended and generative of debate, the projects in the 2014 Walters Prize open conversations about ways we live, and could live, together.

– Zara Stanhope, Principal Curator

Image credits: 

Simon Denny
All You Need is Data – The DLD 2012 Conference REDUX (installation view), 2014, from the Walters Prize 2014 exhibition at Auckland Art Gallery Toi o Tāmaki, Photo: Jennifer French 

Luke Willis Thompson 
inthisholeonthisislandwhereiam (installation view), 2014, from the Walters Prize 2014 exhibition at Auckland Art Gallery Toi o Tāmaki, 12 July – 12 October 2014. Photo: Jennifer French

Maddie Leach
If you find the good oil let us know (installation view), 2012–14, from the Walters Prize 2014 exhibition at Auckland Art Gallery Toi o Tāmaki. Photo: Jennifer French 

Kalisolaite ’Uhila
Mo'ui tukuhausia (installation view), 2014, from the Walters Prize 2014 exhibition at Auckland Art Gallery Toi o Tāmaki, 12 July – 12 October 2014. Photo: John McIver

Engaging with our neighbours in South America

Guayaquil, Ecuador

What do we generally know about South America? In April I was able to spend a month researching art in three countries in South America in preparation for an exhibition at Auckland Art Gallery. This was a long awaited trip as my last visit to the continent was in 2006 when I co-managed the project TRANS VERSA, artists from Australia and New Zealand, with Danae Mossman, which resulted in the presentation of artworks at the Museo de Arte Contemporáneo, Galería Metropolitana and Centro Cultural Matucana in Santiago, Chile. Apart from my ongoing research into art from that area from afar, my understanding of the South American continent was second hand. It had largely remained known to me though its ancient history (Rapa Nui, Incas), colonial settlement, the authoritarian regimes of the recent past and natural wonders that include the world’s longest mountain chain (the Andes) and features including the Amazon River, Atacama Desert and Galapagos islands.

I was eager to be reintroduced to art from neighbouring countries across the Pacific Ocean, and hope that this future exhibition project will find a similar sentiment amongst the New Zealand public. An exhibition of recent art from South America answers the Gallery’s vision of offering transformational experiences that strengthen and enrich our communities. While obvious cultural differences exist between New Zealand and South American countries, the South America–Pacific nexus is growing. Economically, both regions have thrived while most of the world is still under the throws of the global financial crisis. There is an increasing flow of South American citizens to New Zealand, especially from Brazil, and close trade partnerships exist between New Zealand and Brazil, Chile and Argentina. Yet New Zealanders have not been exposed to art from this region. Alongside the growing sense of collaboration in trade and policy on both sides of the ocean, collaborative art projects raise the possibility of enhanced cultural understanding between neighbouring countries.

My itinerary was devised to coordinate with my colleague in this project, independent Chilean curator Beatriz Bustos. We began at the SP-Arte Fair in São Paulo, Brazil, where over 120 galleries show their wares in the Biennial Pavilion in Ibirapuera, the fabulous pavilion designed by a team of architects including Oscar Niemeyer. Like all art fairs, SP-Arte only gave a taste of the rich and varied contemporary art practice represented by commercial galleries from around the continent. Photography and three-dimensional or installation based work was most attention grabbing, despite the presence of works demonstrating the legacy of geometric abstraction in Brazil and surrounding countries. The strong sensibility of memory, so present in the work of artists practising in the 1970s and 80s, had been replaced with new foci in the work of a younger generation.

Sp-Arte, São Paulo, Brazil

Evident from this fair, and from our research in galleries, museums and visiting artists’ studios in Brazil, Argentina and Chile was the varied and exciting mix of artwork being undertaken by artists. While it remains impossible to categorise art being made in one city, let alone by country or continent, many works showed a clear engagement with local issues – including contemporary lifestyle, public and private corruption, the tension between religion and new freedoms, Indigenous issues, the changing state of the environment – alongside art that conveyed abstract and universal themes. Each country has its own distinct blend of cultures and Indigenous peoples, historical and contemporary culture, and rapid urbanisation in which raw life is intersected by new aspirations for lifestyle and different attitudes toward history. Demian Schopf’s image of one of the many homemade designs for a festival parade in northern Chile, Jukumari, 2011, clearly combining components from Asia with popular culture, gives a sense of the cultural mash-up at large.

Joana Vasconcelos, Casarão (installation view), April 2014, Casa Triangulo

The art of younger contemporary artists, growing up in the new ‘democracies’ in South America, naturally reflects their context, which includes greater access to and communications with the rest of the world. The sense of change is palpable in art as much as it pervades daily life and the broader political and economic spectrum. Transformation is precarious at the same time, as the situation in Argentina indicates and as was evident in the growing voice of the underclass in Brazil unhappy with their treatment in the lead up to the World Cup which acerbated the lack of public services and wealth inequalities in that country. Nevertheless, there is also much art which engages with beauty, pleasure and aspects of tradition, as evident in the new work by Joana Vasconcelos which we experienced at Casa Triangulo in São Paulo.

This research visit raised as many questions as it loaded us up with encounters with artists and artworks. Bustos and I have much to discuss in regard to the how we frame art from South America for audiences in New Zealand and which artists, writers, performers, film makers, poets and philosophers can join the project and enrich its experience in Auckland. We propose that an introduction to the recent history of the countries involved in the exhibition is as important as the public programme of film, music and discussion that accompanies the exhibition. I hope you will follow us on our journey of discovery over the coming months...

– Zara Stanhope, Principal Curator

Vale Gordon Bennett (1955–2014)

Gordon Bennett Home decor (Algebra) Daddy's little girl 1998

Australian artist Gordon Bennett broke new ground with his distinctive images which commented on local and global issues and questions of contemporary existence. Art offered a means of communication for Bennett that was not possible through other channels. He sought out art, undertaking a Bachelor of Arts in Fine Art in his hometown of Brisbane at Queensland College of Art. He developed a language in painting and printmaking to interrogate the colonial history of Australia, which was significant in Bennett’s own life. A prolific outpouring of images during the late 1980s and 1990s tapped into postcolonialism and poststructural rethinking of established histories and discourses.

Both commercial and institutional representation were important for the public awareness of Bennett’s practice. Thanks to his gallerists, Bennett’s work had regular presentations in Brisbane and Melbourne, as well as Sydney and Adelaide. His paintings, works on paper and videos were the subject of solo exhibitions in Australia, the United Kingdom and the Netherlands. Bennett’s works appeared in major exhibitions including dOCUMENTA 13, Germany (2012); the 9th and 12th Biennale of Sydney (1992 and 2000); The Third Asia Pacific Triennal, Brisbane (1999), and a long list of other significant exhibitions.

Bennett’s art was significant for its stand on big issues, as well as its ability to get highlight elements of everyday existence. His reflections on the myths perpetuated in Australian history, such as terra nullius, and attitudes towards Australian Aboriginal people, raised audience awareness of identity politics and the need to re-examine colonial and modern narratives. Bennett’s images of lost explorers seeking the apocryphal inland sea, references to the perspectival tools and mapping of European Enlightenment and the negation of Indigenous presence remain imprinted on viewers. Bennett’s practice was important for artists as well as audiences, setting a significant example of an artist unafraid to engage with the contemporary issues of race, sovereignty and citizenship for emerging Australian Indigenous artists.

Gordon Bennett Notes to Basquiat: Double vision 2000

Bennett remained attuned to the ideological effects of language, images, media and other forces on contemporary life. In recent years, works such as the Camouflage images or the seminal Notes to Basquiat paintings engaged with newer currents in our existence – fear and terror as they were amplified after 9/11 and the Second Gulf War. In these, like his abstract grid paintings of the last decade, Bennett invited viewers to identify undercurrents of meaning and create broader associations.

Bennett’s art was contemporary in more than just its subject matter. In larger series of paintings he worked in a cut-and-paste mode, drawing on other artists’ imagery, and also recycling motifs across time and works. This strategy of appropriation and self re-deployment could be interpreted as a reversal of appropriation – an act on behalf of a people whose history includes the loss of land and the ‘Stolen Generation’. References to the paintings of Piet Mondrian and de Stijl artists in Bennett’s Home Decor works, in which images from Australian modernist artist Margaret Preston’s designs also figured, operated in this way. Aspects of Jean-Michel Basquiat’s imagery regularly reappeared, in homage and sympathy, in this case.

In recent years Bennett also painted under the name John Citizen, a nom de plume that suggests the everyman. Citizen was the artist of the Interior paintings, images abstracted from photographs published in lifestyle magazines. Strangely coloured (often painted with leftover studio paints), these urban interiors evoke the banality of material culture resulting from regarding one’s consumer status as a contemporary social aspiration.

Art and ideas are poorer with the loss of Gordon Bennett on 3 June 2014. His practice stimulated thinking across many areas of the humanities and broke new ground in art engaging with contemporary issues in the West. Bennett’s practice will continue to provide a productive challenge to audiences and evidence the social value an artist can bring by mining untold narratives and visualising under-represented histories.

– Zara Stanhope, Principal Curator, Head of Programmes

Image credits: 

Gordon Bennett
Home decor (Algebra)
Daddy’s little girl 1998
synthetic polymer paint on canvas
182.5 x 182.5 cm
Private Collection, Melbourne

Gordon Bennett
Notes to Basquiat: Double vision 2000
Synthetic polymer paint on canvas
152.3 x 182.7 cm
National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne
Purchased through the NGV Foundation with the assistance of Henry Gillespie, Governor, 2000.

Images courtesy of Sutton Gallery, Melbourne

Meanings We Share

Bindi Cole, I  forgive you 2012

Two exhibitions at Auckland Art Gallery Toi o Tāmaki give prominence to histories and ideas in which viewers can find shared commonality with the art. Numerous artworks in both My Country: Contemporary Art from Black Australia and Five Māori Painters convey deep and strong connectedness to place and people. These exhibitions from Australia and Aotearoa New Zealand cross cultural boundaries, and indicate that no matter what our background is, as viewers we can connect with the ideas found in the art.

Many artists in both exhibitions make art as a way of ‘keeping culture strong’ or passing down culturally specific ideas and practices to younger generations or others in their communities. Alick Tipoti, senior artist from the Torres Strait Islands north of Queensland, is the creator of one of the first works to greet visitors to My Country. Tipoti’s print illustrates the seafaring culture that is historically part of the Torres Strait Islands people. However, his image, Kuyku Garpathamai Mabaig, 2007 also resonates with the classical warrior figures from ancient Greece, Rome and other places. Tipoti employs a marvelous technique in his linocuts, which he has developed on the basis of formal art training, and has led to his works winning accolades such as the Telstra Art Award. However, for Tipoti, the songs that he sings in the presence of such artworks are equally as important as the images for passing on cultural knowledge.

Vernon Ah Kee’s large scale portraits draw the viewer into a close and personal engagement with the life-like figures. A man and child look directly at us from Ah Kee’s canvases in My Country, beautifully rendered in charcoal and conté. Strength of character is evident in the gaze of the sitters. Ah Kee has made more than 30 such images of his relatives, based on early 20th-century photos now stored in national archives and libraries. In Neither Pride nor Courage, 2006 Ah Kee depicts his great grandfather, who was photographed by anthropologist Norman B Tindale as part of scientific studies of the genealogy of Australian Aboriginal people. Ah Kee revives the documentation of the relative he never knew with the intention of reinstating his grandfather’s humanity. The artist also adds the face of a new generation – his son – in a drawing redolent with persistence and hope for a future that will be different for Indigenous and white populations in their relations with each other.

Emily Kame Kngwarreye is one of the senior artists with works in My Country. Kngwarreye has now passed away but her work set a precedent for Australian Aboriginal women in remote locations in the creation of art that explored the application of traditional ideas and forms in conventional media that was new to Indigenous artists at the time. As with works by the artists in Five Māori Painters, in her paintings Kngwarreye has synthesised ancestral stories and historic cultural meanings with aspects of contemporary life. Kngwarreye described works such as Wild Potato Dreaming, 1990 as ‘containing the whole lot, everything’, recalling the worldview expressed by Robyn Kahukiwa. Kahukiwa’s art is imbued with the Māori belief that the past lies before us; the present day connects to the past.

A number of artworks in My Country can be thought of as political, in the ways that artists reflect on contemporary events or assume that art has a role to play in producing the world today. A final work is important to note in reflecting on the connectivity between viewer s and art in My Country and Five Māori Painters. Visitors to My Country leave the exhibition with their senses filled by Bindi Cole’s installation and video I forgive you, 2012. Cole, like several other artists in the exhibition, reflects on the apology that was made to Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islanders by Prime Minister Kevin Rudd in 2008. Although Indigenous Australians continue to hope for ongoing change beyond this apology, which they feel has been slow to occur, Cole’s work asks the viewer to reflect on attitudes of forgiveness toward others at a personal level. Cole’s I forgive you generously reflects on the individual rights and responsibilities of pardoning others, a moving point on which to leave the intersections of these two exhibitions.

– Zara Stanhope, Principal Curator, Head of Programmes

Image credit:
Bindi Cole
Wathaurung people
Australia VIC b.1975
I forgive you 2012
Emu feathers on MDF board 11 pieces: 100 x 800cm (installed, approx.)
Purchased 2012. Queensland Art Gallery Foundation