Kate Newby & Nick Austin
Western Park, Auckland, New Zealand
Fake seagulls, a folded newspaper and a telescope in an inner city park were the basic elements of ‘Hold Still’, Kate Newby and Nick Austin’s project for ‘One Day Sculpture’, a series of temporary public commissions taking place throughout New Zealand over the next year. Part of a strongly curated series of one-day events, the day drew together features of Austin’s quizzical assemblages and paintings (which borrow from vernacular forms such as the sandwich and the crossword puzzle) and the gestural energy of Newby’s personalized messages made as actions (for example, Thinking with My Body, 2006 saw the artist work with a length of rope, tied to the gallery window sill and fixed across street). The artists’ collaborative response to the 24-hour brief maintained a lightness and rigor that local audiences have come to expect from their practices.
Developed by the Litmus Research Initiative at the Massey University School of Fine Arts, Wellington, ‘One Day Sculpture’ is the outcome of curator Claire Doherty’s 2006 curatorial residency in New Zealand and aims to ‘stretch the format of a scattered-site exhibition over time and place’. Doherty has previously criticized the biennal model, and this programme - of 20 commissions over 12 months, each existing for a maximum of one day only - purposefully offers an antithetical move, allowing the work produced and its reception to operate on a cumulative scale. The upshot is a scenario where it is difficult, practically, to visit every commission; an intentional situation, given that, here in New Zealand, the local is necessarily often acknowledged as the primary site of engagement.
Newby and Austin’s title, ‘Hold Still’, suggested a way through these concerns. Existing from 9.00am to 9.00pm, in Western Park in central Auckland, the work created a kind of diorama in situ. The mannered yet visually quiet tableau of a ready-made seagull decoy (made from polystyrene and chicken feathers) placed on top of a park bench, and perching on the day’s paper - the quintessential single-day artefact, perhaps? - was framed in the viewfinder of a brand new telescope to create a kind of Étant donnés (1946-66) en plein air. To break the short circuit affect of the viewer’s position, the telescope and the object given to view, some oddly balanced rocks under the table, and a couple of other gulls on another bench across the park expanded the work from the view through the lens.
Through detailing a view of the park, this simple construction gave a kaleidoscope-like effect to the act of looking. The idea of looking at a work through a telescope literalized a frame and a perspective, and joked about the difficulty of being quiet contemplation outside the white cube - perhaps poking fun at those who aren’t looking for art within a public context. As a limited-time-only event, the work was often surrounded by viewers watching other viewers’ viewing. (Of course, in the tradition of English landscape gardening, the park itself is an invented view, a picturesque space for aesthetic contemplation.) Once you got to have a turn, there was an unexpected kick in that the magnifying lens made an already absurdly artificial scene look even more unreal - something like a stereoscopic postcard. The surprise of the sight through the viewfinder amplified the comedy of concentrating on a common seagull. In this way ‘Hold Still’ was the best kind of joke, creating an occasion out of the transformation of the familiar, and asserting with a casual confidence art’s great potential to shift our awareness - even just for a day - of that which already surrounds us.
Louise Menzies
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