Meeting Billy Apple, And This Year's Prominence Of Sport-Related Art In Dunedin

On a Friday night a few months ago, a group of us hit up the opening for Billy Apple's "The Bruce and Denny Show" at Brett McDowell Gallery. I should make it clear here, in case you don't know me, that I'm seriously not into sports. I'm almost anti-sport. But from my childhood, Formula 1 has demanded a different sort of respect from me….

And as for art by a world-renowned New Zealand pop artist, combined with the one sport I've found tolerable, let alone enjoyed? This certainly set the exhibition up to be an interesting one. 

Apple used the gallery space nicely. Three works based around Bruce McLaren faced three Denny Hulme works on the opposite wall, the middle space projecting their race and victory footage from the 60's. I would dare say 'that was about it', but for me what proved incredibly interesting was that the best label for this body of work was 'pop art'. The reason for my interest here lies in the fact that the imagery was actually from 50-odd years ago, yet the art itself was recently created. Billy Apple had here used iconography which would suit the New Zealand pop consciousness decades ago but is now more of a retro image. Because of the connotations of its very name, Pop Art should (in my mind) be of a contemporary concern when it's made. Yet still, the best label I can find for Apple's retrospective art here is still pop - perhaps signifying to some extent an inherent ridiculousness in some elements of Art History and theory - that a work can be described in a certain way purely because we have no way of describing what it really represents. Regardless, it was interesting to see this exhibition using a sporting subject other than rugby as our country started going crazy over this looming, primitive display of masculinity and anti-intellectuality. 

Talking to Billy was an amazing experience, and thanks to my naivety, not what I expected. One thing I must first say is that, having been a contemporary of Andy Warhol's, I'm damn impressed he still turns up to his own shows! He had little to say on the meaning of this particular exhibition - it transpires that to Billy the exhibition is merely a display of his interest in vintage motor sports, a continuation of his famous exhibition which involved painting up a vintage McLaren Formula One car with the technicolor rainbow of past Apple computer logos. In fact, he came across as an artist who is extremely and primarily concerned with the idea of intellectual property and copyright. His use of the vintage McLaren logo was direct bait for the now British-owned company - although no longer in use, they still own the copyright and aren't particularly happy with him. This is another continuation of his pre-existing activities as an artist; back when he was first operating under the pseudonym Billy Apple, he had constant problems with the Apples of Steve Jobs and Paul McCartney. To be honest, I found Apple a bit difficult as a person, but the wonder of chatting to someone with such a legacy is undeniable. Plus, it was cool that he had a bottomless bag of pamphlets to help explain anything we asked him!

Now, to further the sports theme becoming apparent in Dunedin - about a week later I went to the opening of "Art vs. Rugby" at the Blue Oyster Art Project Space. First and foremost - I still maintain that I intensely dislike rugby. Yet the three artists in this combined exhibition create perfectly sound ideas. I'll primarily deal here with my favorite - James Oram's commentary on the media's role in sports in our country.

Oram's work consisted of three elements - a mirror with a mouthguard stuck to it, a slow-motion video of a handshake, and a sportsman's portrait covered by RGB stripes. The latter I found particularly interesting. By masking the player with RGB stripes it was profoundly stating that the people you feel you know through the RGB pixels of your TV are in fact masked by it. They're performers and you don't know them at all, no matter how well you feel they're portrayed and how well you know their game skills. The mirror and mouthguard built on top of this in a way - are players protecting themselves from the mirror of media reflection/representation? Do they guard their mouths and moves carefully enough to have some sense of normality and personality on the other side of the mirror? Lastly, the slow-motion handshake was a sensual, moving and homo-erotic commentary on masculinity. Subverting slow-mo action replays showed the hands each slide over and massage the other oh-so tenderly and lovingly.

Holding the middle ground in my preference was Edith Amituanai’s photography. Featuring two youth facing off across the gallery, her work showed the competitivity implied in the exhibition's name. The backdrop was a typical small-town rugby field and as such she showed the community importance of having a collective past-time such as rugby. Particularly appealing also was that her photography itself was quite beautiful.

Some of the other works were, ideologically, a little depressing to me - Scott Eady's 15 black pillars holding up the gallery roof to suggest that the All Blacks are the pillars of our country, and his photos showing kids dressed up in rugby gear. But having said that, I guess he's speaking a truth. In New Zealand we really are brought up to be rugby heads, even if I wish I could disagree with that. So as frustrating as they may be, these works were really just a commentary on stereotypical New Zealand life.

Having found positives in the ideas of Blue Oyster's "Art vs Rugby", and appreciating Billy Apple's "Retro Art", I still remain critical of the few remaining intellectual spaces in our meat-headed country - that is, art galleries - succumbing to sports-related art. I accept that sport is an important part of our culture for most people - just as art is for me. But when I was in Wellington for a day to chat to gallery owners about a web start-up I'm working on, I even noticed that the lawn next to Civic Square has this huge, hideous (and apparently permanent) metal sculpture of rugby players. Personally, if I was inclined to travel around the world to watch the rugby (or just happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time), and I went in pursuit of a bit of an intellectual sanity-hunting escape, the very last thing I'd want to find in the safe-haven of an art gallery is work about fucking rugby. Just saying.

Large Scale Painting by Lindsey Horne

From the 2011 Art Week Magazine - will post a pdf and photographs soon. It was so exciting picking them all up!!!

Lindsey Horne's large-scale painting is impossible to miss. Hanging just inside the Richardson building, her portrait of a boy with braces was almost imposing.

"I've kind of always just done art," she explains as we sit down. But it was only when she went on exchange to California that she started doing a lot of it. "It was there that I had the studio space and the time to get into it."
The incredibly large scale of her canvases comes from when she started stapling them to the wall because she "felt really claustrophobic within the small canvas", and is largely influenced by her admiration of "that duality of going up really close and seeing a texture or a pattern, then having that really zoomed-out effect as well." Surprisingly, they're not very hard for her to paint, taking two eight-hour sessions to get through. "I don't really paint up close, I get sore arms from my style which is big and fast and swipey. I like working on the whole thing at once, so I use lots of linseed oil to keep the paint runny. I like how I don't let myself have rules when I paint."

Influenced by Jenny Saville, Horne's exhibited portrait has a similarly striking beauty, but not quite the same element of grotesque. Rather, the work is only slightly disturbing insofar as it looks sickly; the colours of the boys' face unnatural and feverish, his eyes longing and emptying.

A huge contributor to Art Week, Lindsey also made a fascinating presentation for the Pecha Kucha night on personification and how faces can represent something purely because of people's super-sensitivity to them. "Faces can be a really powerful tool no matter what realm you're going into. I was talking about that and how if you don't see a face people act differently. I just like faces."

They said that when Lucien Freud died earlier this year, it was the death of painting. But thanks to the likes of Lindsey Horne, I beg to differ. In the contemporary art world where portraiture has been almost exclusively replaced by photography, it's refreshing to see a painter so inspired by faces yet not entrapped by classical representation.

P.S. I found and changed an editorial faux-pas in this piece - particularly embarrassing as the writer AND editor!

A Short Film by Spike Jonze

Spike Jonze: Mourir Auprès de Toi on Nowness.com.

A short animated film by Spike Jonze in my favourite Paris book store :)

Wonderful and slightly creepy in a Tim Burton sort of way

David Merritt - Poet And True Role Model

Surrounded by his books, David Merritt sits on the bench by Rob Roy's. Buying us coffee, I sit down for a yarn and proceed to establish this unfortunate-looking man as a true role model, an intellectual who is kind and reasonable.

Merritt's work is astounding - a poet and artist in the traditional sense of both these words. His poetry; I can't help but go back later with a tenner for a few of his pieces. His art; the recycled book covers he uses are sustainably genius, cut and staple-bound with poetry glued in as he works on piece after piece while seated at the bench.

We chat about everything. At 52, Merritt was even active on the web development scene as it boomed in the 1980's. He actually started off as a student newspaper editor and politician in the mid-to-late 70's, but moved to Christchurch where he worked with Flying Nun Records after he "got the sex, drugs and rock n' roll bug". Five or six years later he went on to work as a tour manager for bands including The Herbs. But 'The Herbs were a fucking hard band to look after", and around 1985, after thinking "fuck this, I'm sick of looking after other people's creativity," he moved to Dunedin to do something he'd wanted to do for a long time: "become a Bohemian poet." Here he even did a stint as a guitarist for a noise band; it turns out he'd spent so much time stage-left watching performances that he'd somehow learned to play guitar. But then children started to arrive and his marriage fell through because he "was the wrong sex and the wrong colour all of a sudden".

Nowadays, when not hanging out in Dunedin and other New Zealand centers, he lives a humble and self-stocked country life in the central North Island, "sixty k[m's] from anywhere". He's a 1970's Land Rover enthusiast, too - his collection of 9 (down from 18) is his own kind of super-annuation plan.

Art Week was a small shift for Merritt. Parking one of his vintage Land Rovers in front of the OUSA lawn every day, he made and sold his poetry from a table by the bonnet. I daresay I hope people took notice; his poetry chalking around campus was only a small, but inspirational, taste of what David Merritt has to offer us all.

"You need to do what you like to do," he says. "There's no such thing as a rich poet."

*thanks to Lucy Fulford for the first photo*

Messy Performance/Visual Art

Two stunning pieces of really messy performance art… I'd love to explore this

I never realised that vomiting could be so visually appealing. Millie Brown beats Jackson Pollock any time!

http://vimeo.com/18999606

^^ Ten minutes of having chocolate poured on your face? Well… Why not?
Also, just try to pronounce this artists name. Go on. I challenge you.

Harry Potter and the Media

Over the last week I watched every single Harry Potter film from start to finish with Loulou, culminating in the grande finale (!!!) last night at the cinema. 


It sounds lame, I know. 


But with the mind-set that my current Contemporary Media paper has put me into, it's been hard not to notice some of the clever and consistent digs at politics and the media which JK Rowling and the ever-changing directors have put into the stories.  
First of all is the very obvious example of Rita Skita. Aside from the fact that she'd drive anybody potty, she epitomizes the unethical journalist who twists quotes and events to portray a false sense of reality. The media, in essence, has an obligation to the public to provide a balanced and un-weighted portrayal of contemporary facts; leaving it to the public to interpret events in coordination with their ideologies and viewpoints. Yet journalists, like Rita Skita, very rarely do this. Most of them eventually even publish books (poor Dumbledore) to mind-wash, dictate, and corrupt the public into seeing their narrow-minded viewpoint (or, at least, the viewpoint of their mass media corporation *cough cough* Fox News, *cough cough* The Daily Prophet). 
There's also the political agenda. For instance "Undesirable Number One" = Harry Potter one minute, Death Eaters another, briefly followed by a mugger and robber, then back to Harry Potter. I mean seriously, just try to interpret that in a way that doesn't relate to the seriously confused propaganda bullshit that most governments (particularly the American Republicans) try to spoon-feed us. 
A similar point is the consistent portrayal of Sirius Black as a notorious mass-murderer who's on the loose. This is echoed in the phase of ridiculing Dumbledore while promoting Umbridge, followed by ridiculing Umbridge when she completely fucks up. Her hatred of "progress for the sake of progress", combined with corporal punishment, is a clear (and totally fair, of course) attack on conservative government. And their denial of the very existence of Voldemort until way too late reeks of the governmental cause of almost everything that's ever gone wrong on a large scale in our world.


So next time your English teacher tells you that Harry Potter isn't a very deep text, give them a lecture.

Careers?

I am officially a Health Sciences dropout. Yet as everyone else in my position at the beginning of this semester are feeling disastrous, I'm stoked. Their predefined career plans as they came to university was to go through medical school and become a doctor, but now that's gone. Now they have to do an undergraduate degree first and go from there back into the medical school...

Not me. 

I'm now doing what I want. 

But what's got me thinking is that I have absolutely no career plan in front of me. I've been brought up in a world to think that this should be concerning, yet somehow it's the single best aspect of where I'm at now. 

It's not the fact that I'm studying Biochemistry, Communications and Visual Culture, all of which I find fascinating. 

It's not that these have exciting prospects for the future- from biochemistry aiming to increase longevity drastically, to communications promising a vastly different media landscape in the future with the likes of Murdoch gone, replaced by a grounding in online social networking. 

Nor is it any of the other myriad prospects of our future, such as the "singularity", where the exponential growth of computational ability surpasses humanity, promising to aid both the biochemistry and communications I'm studying now. 

It's not even the fact that, yes, I am rebelling to an extent.

Rather, I recall Chris McCandless of Into The Wild. 

"Careers are a twentieth century invention, and I don't want one."

Thinking about it, I'm happy to regard this statement as totally true. And I'm more than happy to entertain the thought that we could, in fact, head back to the time known by our grandparents where you took life and work as it came. Our parents have created a world where we feel it's compulsory to, say, do a BCom and become an accountant, or an LLB and be a corporate lawyer, just because this supposedly enables us to have a 'comfortable' life. We have even been taught to 'know' that if you do a BA you'll probably become a teacher. Yet as I approach this semester, the last thing on my mind (if it's even on my mind at all) is a long-term 'career' plan. Sure, I'm taking papers that are vaguely related to where I think the world is heading, but this is only a general self-made guideline I'm using which combines my abilities, enjoyment, and some crystal ball gazing (or something of the like).

Loulou and I have been talking about it a lot, and what I'm doing instead of career planning is looking forward to the times when I'm earning money just to live. Enjoying experiences and writing about them. Living in China, America, Europe; settling down after a good twenty years or so overseas. I'll be over-qualified for the jobs I'll inevitably put up with in fast food chains and theme parks, but who cares! And if I somehow find myself in the journalism school in Florida, or a media office in China, then that'll be a lovely turn of luck. 

But until then, I'm searching for jobs to pay for the "college life" I'm now experiencing in Dunedin. I'm investing in shares so that when I do try to settle down in twenty years time I might actually have something to set me up. I'm pursuing Biochemistry and learning computer programming because I could even create diagnostic machines to replace doctors.

But most of all, I'm enjoying not knowing what's ahead. Life's a theme-park ride on which we have a front-row seat.