I visited the Auckland Art Gallery the other day.
A collection of thoughts.
It’s a regular thing for me, I guess. Being in town all the time is great for that sort of thing; only a few minutes away from university is an art precinct, consisting of the city gallery and a few smaller dealer galleries. This particular trip, I saw a few things that made me stop and take note. The specifics are unfortunately probably irrelevant to those unfamiliar with the gallery itself and/or Modern New Zealand art, but the principles are still interesting, I think.
1067 x 2745 mm.
On one of the walls in one of the New Zealand collections, there was once a Colin McCahon piece, On Building Bridges. After studying McCahon in a Visual Culture course, seeing the piece itself in person was wonderful, as only seeing a piece you’ve studied in print can be. It’s not there at the moment, replaced by a work for the Auckland Triennial — for the life of me, I can’t find the work itself on the site, but it’s a video and sound work paired with a painted wall. I enjoy this piece, for reasons that are somewhat beside the point, and I find it even more interesting because it involves images of construction work — and I have forever associated that spot on the gallery wall with McCahon’s On Building Bridges.
It’s strange how much influence context has over these things.
Like any gallery, the Auckland Art Gallery swaps out pieces in their permanent display exhibitions, and so I saw Michael Illingworth’s Painting With Rainbow I for the first time. I had no real reaction to it — it’s an interesting piece of modern New Zealand art, but that’s about it. And then, all of a sudden, I couldn't see anything about it other than the image of a painting I had in my mind — one that had been described to me a year earlier by my Visual Culture teacher. It was one of her own, and I never saw the actual work, but she emphasised the sections and categories that were part of it, the same sort of thing visible in the Illingworth piece.
I think that’s one of my favourite things about art. The pieces that hit you hard and make you stop are fantastic, and I’ll never stop loving them. Nor will I ever stop loving the subtle ones that slowly but surely get to you, but I really do love it when a piece that otherwise would have no effect or relevance to you, would mean nothing to you otherwise suddenly does something interesting, not necessarily of its own accord, but because of something you associate with it or something about it, be it an element of the piece itself or simply where it’s placed.
Finally, there’s a section to the Triennial in the gallery called the Lab. It’s one of the more interesting parts of the event (not to say the entire Triennial isn’t interesting, it’s just that the Lab is rather different). It’s a series of installation projects undertaken by architects and students. Not all of it is good — they often seem cluttered and lacking a clear conceptual drive. The work in there at the moment, however, Andrew Barrie’s Disasters, Fires, and Slow-Motion Earthquakes is the best I’ve seen by far, proving that the clutter and lack of drive isn’t due to the Lab itself. One wall in particular got to me, hard. It’s a series of newspaper prints around the Christchurch earthquakes. Paragraphs and lines are highlighted, talking about the future of the Christchurch Cathedral, the iconic focus of the Christchurch city centre. The series of prints goes from the beginning — slight damage, possibly repairable, right up through the second, larger quake.
And then it’s gone. The Cathedral loses its spire, and hopes of repairing it are essentially thrown out overnight. The series continues on, highlighting discussion around what to do — suggestions of repair, rebuilding, creating something new.
I live in Auckland. I love living here. It’s home to me, but I grew up in Christchurch. That city is as much my home town as Auckland is. I lived there most of my life, my family live there, I have friends there, both old and new.
So the work got to me. It was always going to. I stopped, read all the articles (there must have been 20+ front pages) and had to leave. Right away. I had trouble handling it. I’ve been quite disconnected from the quakes and the aftermath, being in a different city — but even when I was down and found myself in the midst of one (about 4 or so on the Richter scale) I still felt disconnected from it all — even kind of bemused.
Barrie’s piece managed to get through that, and for a Triennial based around the theme of “if you were to live here…” that is exactly what it needed to do.
As much as I enjoy the subtle works and the ones that take an input of your own to really connect to, it’s pieces like Disasters, Fires, and Slow-Motion Earthquakes that really, solidly, undeniably remind me that art has power, and it’s sitting in an experimental exhibition of the top floor of the Auckland Art Gallery, New Zealand.
