The inaugural New Zealand Film Archive Curator At Large 2012.
Co-curators - Jenny Gillam & Eugene Hansen
We proposed a suite of four exhibitions which commissioned contemporary New Zealand artists to produce new work. Two of the exhibitions, Remixed and Remade invited selected artists to directly respond to materials housed in The Film Archive. The other two exhibitions, Te Hiko Hou and Still operated as surveys of particular trends in current media arts practice.
Te Hiko Hou was also exhibited at the New Zealand Film Archive in Auckland in 2013.
STILL
Still presents work made using a video camera in a fixed point of view. Often this device is used to create a sense that the camera represents, or stands in for, the viewer. Alternately it’s an attempt to create an un-manipulated, neutral or authentic document of an activity. Wide ranging in scope, from the formal and minimal to political documentary, the exhibition includes performance made for video, works that consciously critique the cinematic or photographic record, and works by photographers who might instinctively use the video camera in this way.
Marie Shannon’s monotone inventory of an artist’s studio, What I Am Looking At, floats between the dispassionate artefact and the personally engaged. Those familiar with Shannon’s practice will recognise the artist’s critique of the descriptive limitations of the visual and her adeptness at seeing the significance in small gestures, giving weight to everyday details in an almost self-deprecating manner. They might also assume the studio described is that of her late husband, artist, Julian Dashper. Shannon’s work has often presented affectionate details of her domestic and artistic life through photographic means, including black & white photographs of small-scale cardboard and pipecleaner models of artists’ studios, text-based photographs, and photographs of hand-written, short-hand notes between Shannon, Dashper and their son. Here Shannon brings together these threads of her practice creating a work that is movingly austere.
Recessional, by Murray Hewitt, documents sixty-one publically accessible battle sites where Maori and the crown fought, and where life was lost during the New Zealand land wars of the 1800’s. The title of the work makes reference to a poem by Rudyard Kipling written in 1897 for Queen Victoria's Jubilee, later sung as a hymn on Anzac Day. The words ‘Lest We Forget’ form the refrain, offering a warning about the inevitable decline of imperial power. Rather than producing the rarefied, photographic document so often used to record historic sites, Hewitt’s use of a stationary video camera presents viewers with a ‘living’ site, emphasising the relationship between historic events and contemporary socio-political concerns. While not photography, Hewitt’s work isn’t conventional video either – the duration of each shot stretches beyond what we might normally expect of documentary footage. Rejecting transitions, the video cuts between each site treating the scene as factual evidence to be witnessed and not as the elements of a narrative construction.
In Being-here, Melissa Irving creates a site specific work in a single take. A silhouetted figure moves through the Film Archive’s foyer heightening our awareness of the space, the motion is both contemporary dance and a formalist exploration of space. This on first glance is a simple equation, a translation of the scene framed by the foyer windows played out in the gallery, where vehicles and pedestrians traverse the frame in a linear manner and the tentative response of the dancer creates tension. However this framing creates a layered multiplicity of screens. In vivid contrast to the dancer’s silhouette, the backdrop of the large window looking onto the street shows members of the public going about their daily business, unwittingly they become both actors and audience within the work.
Daniel von Sturmer’s The Cinema Complex (Sequence 6) is from a series of vignettes exploring materiality and perception. Inhabiting the space between scientific experiment and DIY invention the work references the historical role of the modernist and minimalist artist as the interrogator of formal visual language. von Sturmer’s employment of such limited and ubiquitous materials, in this instance seven squares of coloured card on a white rotating platform, speaks knowingly of a peculiarly antipodean form of these histories, DIY modernism. This deadpan humour results in a work that is simultaneously beautiful and ironic, allowing for the limits of these languages to be acknowledged but still usefully explored.
John Lake’s The Talley Ban Song, documents a group of locked-out Affco freezing workers singing a protest song to the tune of Day-O (The Banana Boat Song). At the time of filming 934 Meatworkers Union members throughout the country had been locked out of their place of work for seven weeks by their employer, Talley’s Group Ltd. The Banana Boat Song, made famous by Harry Belafonte in 1955, is a traditional Jamaican workers’ song in which lyrics were often improvised by workers as they sang. Alongside the ironic re-working of this iconic song, Lake’s work also features a parallel series of interviews with people affected by the lockout. While there has been media coverage of this on-going industrial dispute, Lake’s documentation allows those he interviews time to articulate their situation beyond the news media’s conventional nine second sound bite.
What I Am Looking At, 2011
Marie Shannon
Courtesy of the artist and Sue Crockford Gallery
Recessional, 2010
Murray Hewitt
Courtesy of the artist
Being-here, 2012
Melissa Irving
Courtesy of the artist
DANCER - Emma Coppersmith
The Cinema Complex (Sequence 6), 2010
Daniel von Sturmer
Courtesy of the artist and Anna Schwartz Gallery
The Talley Ban Song, 2012
John Lake
Courtesy of the artist
Te Hiko Hou
Te Hiko Hou presents the work of three Maori male artists exploring aspects of contemporary ethnicity, its politics and its relationship to a cultural identity which is becoming ever more diverse and individually specific.
Shannon Te Ao’s works in this exhibition have him exploring the Waimea estuary in Whakatu and a domestic residence in Waitakere (The McCahon House). Performing in front of the camera Te Ao takes on a multiplicity of personas ranging from the over-energised bored teen, through the housebound new parent, to the prophetic shaman. The works evoke an unnerving psychological intensity while charting the interplay between exploration, boredom and play as everyday experience.
Rangituhia Hollis explores relationships between Kai Moana, trade and inhabitation. Tuna kuwharuwharu swim through the sky above a digital reconstruction of the now derelict Waipiro Trading Company on the East Coast of the North Island and mangopare swim through the sky above Manukau Harbor, bathing all below them in streams of silver light. Hollis employs a combination of live camera, digital animation and black and white film aesthetics to remind us of the delicate balance required to maintain our environmental, economic, social and cultural ecologies.
Nathan Pohio has worked extensively between video and photography in the past ten years. In this work he marries his recent body of portraits with his practice of videography. Shot in portrait format, with deadpan irony Pohio delivers a formal report on conversations he had with migrant taxi drivers on journeys between airports and art museums in Australia. These discussions point to the ubiquity of the diasporic experience but are particularly poignant given the number of Maori (and currently Maori from Christchurch, Pohio’s home town) who are moving across the ditch.
The work of these urban based, university educated artists is an ironic and knowing rejection of the commonly presented stereotypes of Maori male identity. Working in an increasingly technologically-engaged and globally-networked context, each approaches the construction of identity differently yet they all point to the psychologically charged space between our individual and communally lived ethnic experience of Aotearoa. Each artist is of the age to be the grandchild of members of the 1960’s Maori urban drift, they neither wear their ethnicity on their sleeves as a middle class badge - the new noble warriors, nor have they succumbed to the perils of the growing underclass of our society where Maori are depicted as some form of “Jake the muss” cardboard cutout. Each of these artists’ work evokes a highly individuated sense of Maori identity (which is knowingly ironic given its traditional tribal nature). It is the coupling of these resistances and the individuals’ nuanced positions on what it is to be Maori now that make these works both compelling and playfully political, constituting a quiet activism.
Nathan Pohio (Kati Mamoe, Ngai Tahu and Waitaha)
Spyglass Field Recordings Vol.3: Notes towards accessing material from the universe and de-briefing an agent of inner space, 2011
Courtesy of the artist
Shannon Te Ao (Ngati Tuwharetoa) collaborating with Iain Frengley
Temporal actions for new arrivals, (after Rākaihautū), 2012
&
Untitled (McCahon House study), 2011
Courtesy of the artist
Rangituhia Hollis (Ngati Porou, Ngati Kahungunu)
Kei mate mangopare, 2012
Courtesy of the artist
Waipiro Trading Company, 2008
Courtesy of the artist
REMIXED
In ’Remixed’ four artists were invited to directly respond to material housed in The Film Archive’s collection. By sampling and re-editing source material the artists question preconceptions of authenticity and originality and acknowledge the significance of historical archival material in contemporary visual culture’s endeavor to produce new meanings. While increasingly present in contemporary art the remix is most prevalent in music culture. With this in mind the artists commissioned for this project all have a history of working with audio as well as video, the resulting works while visually compelling, are equally sonically engaging.
Daniel Shaw’s montage of Erskine College nuns and school girls has been made using contemporary technology designed to mix moving images in time to nightclub music. Shaw first became familiar with this footage when he digitized it while working for The Film Archive, having previously worked in the Erskine College building (a building that locals are currently trying to protect from demolition). For Shaw work becomes the link between these two institutions and he decided to use the data embedded in old work emails as drivers for the audio composition in this project. The VJ software used to record a real-time remixing of the footage lends itself to both a psychedelic and sci-fi aesthetic which Shaw uses to bring to the surface the complicity of education in the advancement of the historical cult of religion and now the contemporary cult of work.
The seamlessness of image and audio in Rachel Shearer’s re-edited 1930’s South Island hunting trips allows the viewer to enter the slower, quieter, contemplative world of the hunter on horseback. Re-editing material from two hunting expeditions documented by amateur film maker, Ernest Adams, Shearer’s process is a refinement of the existing footage. By adjusting the tempo in one or two segments, sometimes flipping the footage so that the movement is consistently from right to left across the screen and adding an eerie, ambient soundtrack, Shearer heightens the lyrical narrative of the source material. Re-writing the personal historical document in cinematic tropes she accentuates the relationship between landscape, riverbed, animal and man, and reminds us that, as predators, humanity strives to assume divine powers in order to sustain some kind of agency over the natural world.
Shannon Reed’s use of the micro sample reflects current trends on the internet where two or more photographs are animated to produce small looping files which mimic video of repetitive motion. His choice of a spinning slice of lemon from a 1980’s detergent advertisement points to the repetition of advertising and its current insidious penetration of web space. The droning audio made by ‘no-input mixing’ could also be read as an ironic comment on the substantive emptiness of media in popular culture. The reductive nature of the video and audio in this work open an interesting tension between formalism and the re-contextualization of historical content.
Terry Urbahn uses footage of his father, Roger ‘Spider’ Urbhan, playing for the All Blacks against The Lions in 1959. Inviting his son, Lewis, to produce the audio track they have developed an intergenerational re-writing of national history as personal. Selecting only the footage which follows his father, the pace and flow of the game is shifted and compressed into 6mins, the movements of his father are lovingly enhanced through flipping the film, repetition and the use of pauses. The result is a staccato rhythm that is reflected in the audio, a remix of an instrumental version of ‘Riders in the Sky’, occasionally punctuated by the excited voice of the game’s commentator calling the name Urbahn. The use of a delay effect causes the audio and visual rhythms to fall in and out of sync enhancing a sense of disconnection and loss in memoriam of a loved one.
Daniel Shaw, Dupe (2012) 3.10mins
Source material: Erskine College Activities 1, 1949. (F34870)
Rachel Shearer, Bringing in the Heads (2012) 3.56mins
Source material: Canterbury Museum Group 2 Compilation from Ernest Adams hunting trips c1930. (F50632)
Shannon Reed, Limbo (2012) 6.00mins
Source material: Breeze Soap, Wild and Cool 1978 (C2790)
Terry & Lewis Urbahn, and the Spider (2012) 5.45mins
Source material: The Lion and the Kiwi, National Film Unit, 1959. (F6013)
REMADE
In this final exhibition of the 2012 Curators at Large series we presented the artists with a simple provocation – choose a title from the Film Archive’s collection and remake it. Given the open ended nature of the curatorial premise and both the diverse range of artists and the enormous range of materials housed in the collection it is unsurprising that the results are a series of idiosyncratic works. While some common themes emerged, most interesting to us was the diversity of approaches, each artist developing a different method in response to the invitation. Some have produced a contemporary version of the original footage while others have reflected on the archive and its mechanisms, or used the project as a springboard to develop a new narrative which reflects on the socio-political conditions that gave rise to their chosen title in the first place. In each, a small part of our world is re-envisioned, revised and then remade.
Ray Tat Tan’s Flexible Tripod reflects his interest in pirated moving image material, particularly the material captured in a cinema with a handheld camera subsequently made available in the market before the film’s local release date. As Tat Tan explains, ‘there’s something about this parasitic relationship between the consumer-grade device and the cinematic spectacle that informs Flexible Tripod’. During a visit to the archive Tat Tan shot footage of the screens as he browsed the personal records of highly regarded film maker and inventor, Ted Coubray. Pointing to the relationships between mechanisms of recording and screening, the audience is implicated as viewer and subject of both the archive and the artwork. By performing with this footage at the opening Tat Tan further questions what happens when the experience of immediacy is mediated by an institution that authorises history.
With a seemingly effortless light touch Faamanu Vaofusi has remade a 1960’s Brylcreem advertisement. This work humorously plays with stereotypes of 1960’s good grooming and masculinity, however Vaofusi has translated the overdubbed sales pitch into Samoan. While still a light hearted joke about 1960’s sartorial etiquette, the work also points beyond the issue of smooth vs frizzy hair to the politics of representation, to the role of pacific migration in the formation of our national identity, to the hidden histories of migrant workers and to the attendant on-going pressures of assimilation.
Shannon Te Ao + Iain Frengley’s Figure on ground (colour field dispersal) developed as a response to a selection of home video compilations stored within the film archive. The remade sequences are based on simple notes taken during a small number of repeated viewings of each compilation. The artists were taken by how the compilations brought disparate histories alongside each other, opening up new understandings through the re-contextualisation of the personal document in a public archive. This work simultaneously appropriates the language of the historical home movie while using surrealist pastiche to develop the hallmark psychological tension and liminal notions of self as gendered-race-class often seen in the work of Te Ao and Frengley. Yet as the title suggests these (personal) concerns might easily be subsumed within a formalist interpretation of the archived.
Slipping from the introductory monologue of a documentary or a science fiction movie to a dense philosophical discord Andy Thomson’s Film Theory Standard Model humorously refers to ‘Views of Murchison After The Earthquake Filmed by a Wellington Visitor’. This amateur black and white film made in 1929, attempts to show with text and images, what the aftermath of an earthquake is like. Subsequently Thomson has written and appropriated both text and image to contextualise this representation of the dramatic and sometimes tragic consequences of the tremor, within a far broader cosmological, deconstructed philosophical discourse around the very nature and fabric of reality itself.
Gemma Syme has re-enacted scenes from Shortland Street as remembered by her friends. In a strategy typical of Syme, this is a playful reflection on the role of popular culture in our lives and specifically here, how it informs the construction of our identity. Two versions of a 2004 scene with The Chills’ ‘Pink Frost’ as the soundtrack were made based on Syme’s and her friend’s uncertainty of the character in the scene. These bookend the re-enactment of a 1995 scene in which two teenage characters dance to The Chicks 1960’s hit single ‘Timothy’ (in the original scene Suzanne Lynch from The Chicks made a guest appearance). Given that Syme performs in several alternative bands it is unsurprising that memories of music have a pivotal role in these works. This embracing of popular culture and the inherent loss of fidelity in memory might be a comment on the role of the film archive in a contemporary context and its non-hierarchical collection policies. Or perhaps for Syme, recollections are more important than collections and it is enough to know that probably somewhere in the archive Shortland Street is safe.
Sarah Jane Parton’s approach to searching the archive was to start by looking for herself, looking for things about her world that can't be found elsewhere. She came across footage of the remote atoll where her grandmother was born, Penrhyn/Tongareva in the Northern Cook Islands and an episode of ‘Heartland’ where a group of Aitutakians returned to their home village, one woman taking a large box of KFC on the two plane trips from Auckland to Aitutaki. Typically Parton responds with self-depreciating humour, part autobiographical and wholly abject Parton, explores this stereotype of the pacific people’s unhealthy obsession with fatty food. However, doomed to fail in her attempts to connect with her heritage through these explorations, Parton’s attempts reveal the deep seated nature of the social norms we grow up in and that inevitably the tyranny of distance eventually serves a cultural disconnect.
Ray Tat Tan
Flexible Tripod
Faamanu Vaofusi
Brylcreem makes the most of a man
Actors - Daniel Boobyer, Shannyn Boyd
Iain Frengley & Shannon Te Ao
Figure on ground (colour field dispersal)
Andy Thomson
Film Theory Standard Model
Gemma Symes
The Shortland Street Series:
Chris chilling out to The Chills, misremembered by Jana & Gemma;
Lulu and Minnie dancing to The Chicks - as remembered by Claire and Gemma
Performed by Claire Harris (Lulu), Gemma Syme (Minnie) and Bek Coogan (Suzanne Lynch from The Chicks);
Dom listening to Pink Frost about to kill girl in bathtub – as remembered by Jana and Gemma
Sarah Jane Parton
Potato and Gravy