Anthony McCall, Installation view of Breath (The Vertical Works) at Hangar Bicocca, Milan, 2009 (Photograph: Giulio Buono). Courtesy of the artist and Sean Kelly Gallery, New York.

[A solid light film] exists only in the present: the moment of projection. It refers to nothing beyond this real time. It contains no illusion. It is a primary experience, not secondary: i.e., the space is real, not referential; the time is real, not referential. No longer is one viewing position as good as any other…every viewing position presents a different aspect. The viewer therefore has a participatory role in apprehending the event: he or she can, indeed needs, to move around relative to the slowly emerging light form. Anthony McCall, 1974

Anthony McCall is a key figure in the history of avant-garde cinema. He has carved a unique position in contemporary art by bridging the gaps between the cinematic, the sculptural and the pictorial by means of his extraordinary ‘solid light’ films, which manifest as immersive installations made by drawing in real space with projected light.

The Adam Art Gallery is bringing McCall and his ‘solid light films’ to New Zealand for the first time. Anthony McCall: Drawing with Light, a major exhibition timed to coincide with the 2010 New Zealand International Arts Festival, will be an opportunity to experience McCall’s ‘solid light ’ installations in the complex and labyrinthine spaces of the Adam Art Gallery, and will offer insights into the full range of his output and working process showing a range of drawings, films and photographic works produced across the entire history of his practice.

A public programme of artist talks, film screenings, and discussion will expand on the exhibition to place the works of this British-born, New York-based artist in context.

A highlight of this programme includes the one-off opportunity to view Line Describing a Cone (1973), McCall’s first ‘solid light film’. This will be presented at the Wellington Town Hall, in conjunction with the New Zealand Film Archive, at 7pm on Monday 15 March 2010.

You will also be able to hear the artist speak about his work. The first lecture in McCall’s tour of New Zealand and Australia will take place in Wellington at the Denis and Verna Adam Auditorium, City Gallery, Wellington at 6pm on Wednesday 24 February 2010. This will be followed by lectures at the Govett-Brewster Art Gallery, New Plymouth at 6pm on Thursday 25 February; the Conference Room at the University of Auckland hosted by Auckland City Council’s Public Art Team at 6pm on Tuesday 2 March, and at the Institute of Modern Art in Brisbane at 6pm on Thursday 11 March 2010.

Anthony McCall’s works feature in major international collections including Tate Gallery, London, England; the Museum of Modern Art, New York, USA; the Musée National d’Art Moderne, Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris, France; the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, USA; the Museu d’Art Contemporani de Barcelona, Spain; and the Museum für Moderne Kunst, Frankfurt, Germany.

Anthony McCall currently lives and works in New York. He is represented by Sean Kelly Gallery, New York; Thomas Zander, Cologne and Galerie Martine Aboucaya, Paris.

This exhibition has been made possible with the generous support of Chartwell Trust; Keystone Trust; David and Libby Richwhite; The Clark Collection; Fulbright New Zealand; Spyglass; Interface; Metro Productions; John Herber Ltd; Auckland City Council Public Art Team; Atlantic Pacific American Express; the Govett-Brewster Art Gallery; the New Zealand Film Archive; LUX, London and the New Zealand International Arts Festival.

Source Material: Five Conversations with the Past was a suite of five discrete projects, each with their own approach to the re-visioning of historical material.

The Labours of Herakles, the touring exhibition of lithographs and etchings by Marian Maguire which casts the archetypal Greek hero as New Zealand colonist was replaced in December 2009 by a group show of recent acquisitions from Victoria University of Wellington’s Art Collection. Featuring work by Vivian Lynn, Hye Rim Lee, Gavin Hurley, Daniel Malone, Billy Apple and Mary-Louise Browne, this diverse group show provided a snapshot of the current collecting activities of the University.

Alongside this, the Adam Art Gallery was proud to host seven precious Attic vases, illustrating scenes from the life of Herakles and selected from various collections by Victoria University’s Senior Lecturer in Classics, Judy Deuling.

Downstairs an exhibition curated jointly by David Maskill, Senior Lecturer in Art History at Victoria University, and his honours-year postgraduate students looked closely at the artist prints published in the 19th-century French journal Gazette des Beaux-Arts from 1859 to 1933, held in the university’s library. This curatorial project was the first to address the journal’s key role in the survival, revival and dissemination of European printmaking.

The fourth exhibition presented Bible Studies (New Testament) a major new body of work by leading New Zealand artist Gavin Hipkins that brought literary and religious sources into play to produce a rich commentary on the lasting power of iconography as its shapes us personally and collectively.

Finally the Adam Art Gallery paid tribute to New Zealand artist Julian Dashper by presenting two recent acquisitions to the Victoria University of Wellington Art Collection which also recall the past in unexpected ways.

The Adam Art Gallery published two catalogues to accompany the exhibitions. One has been prepared by David Maskill and his students to accompany their selection of prints from the Gazette des Beaux-Arts. The other documents Gavin Hipkins’ Bible Studies (New Testament) and features a new essay by leading Australian art historian Rex Butler and an interview with the artist conducted by contemporary art writer Allan Smith.

On 3 February 2010, the Adam Art Gallery held a forum to complement Source Material: Five Conversations with the Past. Academics from the fields of literature, religious studies, art history and classics shared their disciplinary approach on the re-use and re-interpretation of historical material to discuss what is at stake in the interpretation of texts and images from the past. Panellists included Judy Deuling, Anna Jackson, David Maskill, Glyn Parry. Chaired by Ian Wedde

In realising these projects the Adam Art Gallery gratefully acknowledges the support of Creative New Zealand Toi Aotearoa, Photography by Woolf, Victoria University’s School of Art History, Classics and Religious Studies, Exhibition Services, and Coopers Creek.

Line Describing a Cone (1973) is famous in the history of avant-garde film for its reduction of the cinematic experience to its core ingredients: projected light in physical space. For 30 minutes a beam of light from a 16mm film projector draws a perfect circle on a distant screen. In the space between, a solid cone takes shape as light particles cling to a haze filled room. Transforming the viewer’s usual passive relation to the film medium, this work invites an active engagement with the cinematic experience.

Don’t miss this one off opportunity to experience the first of McCall’s extraordinary ‘solid light films’.

Wellington Town Hall
Monday 15 March 2010
Performance commences promptly at 7pm
(Doors open 6.45pm. Doors close 7.00pm. No late entry).
$5 entry

FILM SCREENING
Messages from the Co-op:
British Avant-garde Film 1967-76
An evening of British avant-garde film of the 1960s and 1970s, introduced by Mark Williams, Curator, New Zealand Film Archive

Mediatheatre, New Zealand Film Archive
84 Taranaki Street
Wednesday 31 March and Thursday 1 April 2010
7pm
$8/$6

The 1960s and 1970s were a defining period for artists’ film and video. As collective and informal groups flourished worldwide, personal film makers were challenging cinematic convention. In England, much of the innovation took place at the London Film-Makers’ Co-operative, an artist-led organisation that incorporated a distribution agency, projection and film workshop.

In search of new and critical ways of working with film, several of the Co-op artists made the materiality of celluloid their subject. Other works undercut audience expectations for cinematic escapism with duration, repetition and humour. This programme collects several films which embody the critical and creative spirit that informed the work of Anthony McCall and his contemporaries.

This special screening of filmic explorations has been brought to New Zealand courtesy of LUX, London
Duration 60 minutes.

FILM SCREENING
“Are you making sculpture or are you making films?”
A curated screening of film works that document sculptural encounters in the city, introduced by Laura Preston, Assistant Curator, Adam Art Gallery.

Mediatheatre, New Zealand Film Archive
84 Taranaki Street
Thursday 15 April 2010
7pm
$8/$6

As a direct homage to Anthony McCall’s ‘solid light film’ Line Describing a Cone (1973) the film document of American artist Gordon Matta-Clark’s sculptural intervention Conical Intersect (1975) is a fascinating study on urban re-development, the power of architecture and the loss of community. This 16mm film will be shown along with the works of British film maker John Smith and German duo Clemens von Wedermeyer and Maya Schweizer. Like McCall, these artists question what cinema can be. They also test documentary conventions and use the architectural spaces of the city as a stage for weaving historical and socio-economic narratives. This programme will be a unique opportunity to consider what film offers both as a moving document and as a form of sculptural practice.

VICTORIA STUDENT MEDIA LECTURE SERIES
How Do We Make Ourselves a Student Body Without Organs?

Foucault, Ethics & Fearless Speech
Tony Schirato
(Associate Professor, School of English Film Theatre and Media Studies, MA (Sydney) PhD (Sydney))
Tuesday 23 March 2010
Adam Art Gallery
5pm

“The Groundings with my Brothers”: Knowledge Production Outside of the Academy in the Academy
Robbie Shilliam
(Senior Lecturer, School of History, Philosophy, Political Science and International Relations, MA (Sussex) DPhil (Sussex))


Monday 29 March 2010
Adam Art Gallery
5pm

Students, the University, Social Contestation, and the ’60s
Chamsy El-Ojeili
(Senior Lecturer, School of Social and Cultural Studies, MA (Hons) PhD (Massey))

Wednesday 21 April 2010
Adam Art Gallery
5pm

Nomad Thought, Global Capital and The War Machine in Deleuze and Guattari
Robert Deuchars
(Lecturer, School of History, Philosophy, Political Science and International Relations, MA (City U London), PhD (VUW))

Thursday 22 April 2010
Adam Art Gallery
5pm

Shoji Hano
Adam Art Gallery
3 October 2009
6pm

Born in 1955, based in Tokyo, Shoji Hano is one of free-jazz, noise and psychedelic rock’s most preeminent percussionists and brilliant all-round sages. Widely regarded on the same consecrated plane as celebrated jazz heavyweights, the late Rashied Ali, Milford Graves, and his own mentors Max Roach and Art Blakey, Shoji’s solo drumming is a mesmerizing feat to witness, and displays a bewildering dexterity that’s both physically and psychically difficult to attribute to the motions of one individual player.

Sketching and tracing moiré-like patterns with his limbs, Shoji’s flurrying percussive vernacular is disciplined and virtuosic, while remaining spirited and idiosyncratic. Intricate cross-patterns and superimposed timings bubble up and collide with furious detail, subsiding in cyclical and funky grace before erupting again with colourful exuberance.

His adroit Octopus-like beats and fizzy punk rhythms have been heard in a countless array of collaborative recordings with the esteemed likes of late pioneering guitarist, Derek Bailey, Acid Mothers Temple’s Kawabata Makoto, Fushitsusha’s Keiji Haino, Eugene Chadbourne, and cult Japanese psychers High Rise. His work has also appeared on renowned labels, P.S.F. and Improvised Music from Japan.

PERFORMANCE
SOUND CHECK

Chris Watson
Sound Recordist
Saturday 10 October 2009
Adam Art Gallery
8pm

Chris Watson’s work as a wildlife and environmental sound recordist is unparalleled. He has worked with the BBC recording and editing sound for many of David Attenborough’s great wildlife series such as The Life of Birds (1998), The Life of Mammals (2001), Life in the Undergrowth (2005) and Talking with Animals(2001) and has won numerous awards for these and other TV and radio documentaries. As well as his work as a documentary sound recordist, Chris Watson is an artist in his own right and has produced three solo albums and many collaborative sound works. He constructs collages of sounds, which evolve from a series of recordings made at the specific locations over varying periods of time.

Watson’s exploration of sound environments has taken him all over the world and has led to many bizarre and unconventional recording situations. He has recorded glacial shifts in Iceland, massive storms in the Baltic Sea, the voices and rhythms of the Humboldt current around the Galapagos Islands. Chris Watson’s performances take listeners to places hidden and inaccessible. It is cinema for the ears.

Chris Watson’s visit was made possible by alt.music and kindly supported by, Adam Art Gallery, New Zealand School of Music and Frederick Street Sound and Light Exploration Society.

FILM SCREENING
Hercules on screen

Adam Art Gallery
Thursday 12 November 2009
6-7pm
Presented by Arthur Pomeroy, Programme Director of Classics, Victoria University of Wellington

Professor Arthur Pomeroy delved into the history of Hercules (Herakles) on screen accompanying his presentation with movie excerpts, television clips and anecdotal stories from the history of film. This was an opportunity to explore how the character of Hercules has adapted and changed within the evolving context of the moving image.

PERFORMANCE
SOUND CHECK

John Wiese
Frederick Street Light and Sound Exploration Society
46 Frederick Street, Wellington
Wedneday December 9 2009
8pm
$10.00
with Our Love Will Destroy the World

John Wiese is a Californian artist and composer. Both a prolific collaborator and solo performer, Wiese has worked with the likes of Sunn O))), Merzbow, Wolf Eyes, Lasse Marhaug, and C. Spencer Yeh. Well known and highly respected in the ‘noise’ community, Wiese has performed across Europe, America, and Scandinavia at events such as Colour Out of Space (Brighton, UK), DEAF (Dublin Electronic Arts Festival) and the 52nd Venice Biennale.

Wiese’s tour of New Zealand and Australia at the end of 2009 came after the recent release of his solo album Circle Snare, described by one reviewer as ‘yet another stunning example of exacting noise construction’. Supported by Our Love Will Destroy the World, Wiese’s Wellington performance was an unique evening of disrupted musical forms.

www.john-wiese.com

FORUM
Source Material — Five Conversations with the Past

Lost and found?
Understanding history through art
Judy Deuling, Anna Jackson, David Maskill, Glyn Parry. Chaired by Ian Wedde
Adam Art Gallery
Wednesday 3 February 2010
5pm

As the first public programme for 2010 and in conjunction with the current exhibition Source Material: Five Conversations with the Past, the Adam Art Gallery invited four academics to introduce their disciplinary approach to the re-use and interpretation of historical material.

Academics from the fields of literature, religious studies, art history and classics discussed what is at stake in the interpretation of texts and images from the past. Departing from the exhibition Bible Studies (New Testament) by leading New Zealand artist Gavin Hipkins, each scholar reflected on their own methodologies and their relationship to the past, raising questions about the creative nature of historical (re)construction and the truth-value of academic discourse.

This forum was chaired by Ian Wedde, Wellington-based poet, writer, and Arts Foundation Laureate.

Thursday 16 July 2009
6pm

Ray Spiteri - Art history and the political
Raymond Spiteri, Lecturer in Art History explored the role of the institution in creating a space for the event to take place, and how in doing so also seeks to contain and incorporate the unforeseen consequences of that event.

Thursday 30 July 2009
6pm

Paul James - Architecture and latency
Paul James from the School of Architecture discuseed two questions raised by the exhibition project The Future is Unwritten. How can artworks activate the latent cultural content of a site? And, how have the artists in this exhibition negotiated the legacy of institutional critique generated by conceptual artists and art theorists during the 1960’s and 70’s?

Thursday 13 August 2009
6pm

Minette Hillyer - Media after modernity
Minette Hillyer, Lecturer in Media Studies asked the question: What is at stake in claiming an ‘after’ to modernity, politically and historically? While modernity, or rather the myth that it has become, depends on the idea of a rupture, or radical break with the past, an experience of the modern also suggests the persistent significance of local interventions. Hillyer used the specific context of New Zealand, founded on a process of colonisation, to consider other ways to represent narratives of historical change.

Thursday 27 August 2009
6pm

Ralph Chapman and Andrew Wilks – The environment and energy use
Ralph Chapman, Director of Postgraduate Environmental Studies, and Andrew Wilks, Environmental Manager of Facilities Management at Victoria University of Wellington discussed how their research and work on energy efficiency, renewable energy and other sustainability actions is both aligned with, and addresses different questions from, the intentions of contemporary art. In keeping with the premise of the exhibition project, this talk considered how the implementation of their work looks to various timeframes – including a long future that we may not get to see.

WORKSHOP
State of curatorial practice in New Zealand

Adam Art Gallery
6 August 2009
4-6pm

Heather Galbraith, Megan Tamati-Quennell, Mercedes Vicente, Hamish Win
Chaired by Christina Barton and Laura Preston

This workshop on curatorial practice was intended for students of Art History and Museum and Heritage Studies at Victoria University of Wellington and Critical Studies, Massey University. It was also open to students from other programmes, as well as members of the public interested in the subject.

The aim of the discussion was to bring together a range of perspectives and approaches to the role of the curator, and provide insights into the practicalities, theoretical concerns and developing methodologies that inform curatorial practice in Aotearoa, New Zealand today.

WEB CAST
Ice Melt

Adam Art Gallery
Sunday 30 August 2009
7pm

“What’s the alternative to optimism? Unless we act as if we can sort this out you might as well just get a hat and some sun tan lotion and write a letter of apology to your grandchildren.” Nicholas Stern

A series of performances at the Adam Art Gallery featuring Martin Poppelwell (Napier), Murray Hewitt and Andy Hummel (Wellington), Sarah Jane Parton (Rarotonga) and Sam Hamilton (Auckland).

Curated by Sophie Jerram and Dugal McKinnon.

David Cauchi, Michael Harrison, Patrick Lundberg, Julia Morison. Simon Morris, Reuben Paterson, Kim Pieters, Jeena Shin

To mark the occasion of the Adam Art Gallery’s first ten years, eight artists were invited to spend ten days working directly on the walls of the gallery. Their works provided a context for the Gallery’s 10th birthday party on 19 September 2009.

The gallery doors opened to the public on the first day the artists started work, allowing visitors to see the wall works in process. The exhibition provided an opportunity to see how artists respond to a space and go about realising their work within the tight constraints of a particular timeframe and an actual context.

The exhibition provides an opportunity to celebrate the gallery’s history without dwelling on our past; the temporal projects and their relationship to the site will present instances of the mobility and responsiveness to which the Adam Art Gallery aspires.

Review David Cauchi’s blog for insight into one of the artist’s working process http://pointlessandabsurd.blogspot.com/

In keeping with the format of the Wall Works exhibition, students from the New Zealand School of Music were invited to produce a new sound installation between the two sets of sliding doors at the entrance of the gallery. They took field recordings and developed their composition while the wall artists were at work. The finished sound work was on exhibition from 21 September-4 October 2009.

The gallery officially celebrated its birthday with a party on Saturday 19 September. The evening was orchestrated by the performance collective Full F**king Moon of Bek Coogan and Torben Tilly, along with acts by Double Ya D.

On the night the gallery was filled with specially-commissioned temporary structures designed and built by interior architecture students of Victoria University’s School of Architecture and Design.

The student radio station VBC broadcast the event live to the city of Wellington.

Adam Art Gallery 10th birthday party
Saturday 19 September 2009
8-11pm

Thanks to Resene, The Watusi, Coopers Creek, The International Office, City Timber, Ullrich, PSP, Murray & Taylor, Bungy Extreme, Calvert Plastics, Coastal Fasteners and Anton Berndt for the Wall Works artwork at the Kelburn Parade lightbox and reproduced on all the exhibition posters.

Daniel Malone Bricks break dialectics 2009

Onsite: Fiona Connor, William Hsu, Daniel Malone, Kate Newby, Martyn Reynolds, Peter Trevelyan

Online: Amit Charan, Narrow Gauge, Kelvin Soh

Curated by Laura Preston

The starting point for this exhibition project was to invite nine artists, designers and writers to consider how art can engage, by means of its forms and structures, in the political realities of this moment. The artists’ projects acted as a series of proposals for embracing this time of uncertainty, where structures and systems that we have come to know are being brought into focus and re-defined. Using the gallery as a place of proposition, the works presented both in the building and online, questioned the political efficacy of contemporary art by suggesting other ways to claim space and be resourceful within it. Furthermore, the exhibition employed the university as a place for interdisciplinary thinking, to ask whether a pedagogical site can re-think art’s purpose and affect. Accompanied by a public programme of night talks, a workshop and sound event, the Adam Art Gallery became an active site of discussion and a resource for the future.

WEBSITE PROJECT
www.adamartgallery.org.nz/thefuture

CURATORIAL BRIEF

Another form of the three-act structure

Proposal

I’d like to propose that the exhibition is a beginning rather than the culmination of the event. I wanted to address the difficult, perhaps even irresolvable question, of art’s political efficacy by using the gallery as a place of proposition. Given its location at the university – a site of ‘higher’ learning and an ideal model where disciplines co-exist – and the idiosyncratic character of the building, I thought it a useful site to consider the shape of power, and the appeal to ‘un-write’ and model alternatives to the institutions we know.

We are currently facing a time of transition. There is much rhetoric in the air and talk of crisis. This has both perceived and real, lived effects – economic, social, and political. It is indicative of the insidious power of capitalism that it has affected so many arenas of our lived experience. In the attempt to critique capitalism’s strong hold and to move beyond an individualistic apathy, there seems to be an increased desire for social renewal. This is evident in the proliferation of online social network infrastructures, which use the capitalist structure and idea of exchange but perform within this to shift its usual function to trade, to one of fostering social interaction. This model, in turn, is also being co-opted. Much of the rallying activity and effort at community building has been based on a shared concern for and awareness of the environment. This is informed and supported by an industry dedicated to developing and marketing sustainable technologies. Yet, whether personally determined or based on media manipulation there is a visible change of behaviour towards sustainable measures that look to recycle and conserve energy. The recognition of the need to conserve energy has also extended to other aspects of our lived experience within this just-in-time milieu, even as far as to critique how we perform our daily roles and the expectation to deliver in outcome-oriented ways. It is a time to take stock and to recognise just how far we have come (and let things go).

In acknowledging that we are experiencing a time of crisis there is simultaneously an interest in understanding the course of change. A pertinent example of this, in the year of the 20th anniversary since the fall of the Berlin Wall, is the case of how the wall eventually fell. The actual act came about rather unexpectedly. Although the long-awaited unification was in preparation and much consultation had been in play behind the scenes, the final decision came from a public slip up, a mistaken command that released the border too soon, presented before the world’s media to verify. With some distance now from this event and in this time when the European Union continues to take form and neo-liberalism questioned, interestingly, there is a renewed interest in the ideology of Communism. However, the nostalgic investigations of these histories seem to be more a reckoning with the situation of capitalism and an attempt to locate strategies for moving through this power structure.

Again, it is from history that the methods of change can be reviewed. History proves that revolution and its abrupt overhaul only end up with a shifting back to the same model of power. How then does any re-writing of the status quo occur and avoid being co-opted, marketed back to us, and used by the powerful? If the collective was to rally against the system once more, how might a sense of politicised collectivity and, in effect, a new form of institution be shaped presently? Would it be possible even, considering the hyperlinked, immaterial environment we have come to communicate within?

Proposition

It is in keeping with this climate of transition that the architectural framework of the Adam Art Gallery will be engaged. The building follows the structure of a pre-existing stairway; a site that invites perambulation and an expectation that you arrive somewhere else to where you began. The building itself isn’t meant to really be here and acts as an intervention between two others. It is as though the building opens up the jump cut between two frames, making visible the operations of constructing narrative by placing two images side by side.

In my curatorial brief it was also asked that the artists respond to the notion of the university gallery as a site for research and critical thinking, and as a forum for the re-visioning of art histories. Responding to the institution of the gallery within the institution of the university provides a double framework with which to contend. The evidential weight of this structure invites the artist to draw an alternative, an escape plan that reaches beyond art’s inherited politics and the knowledge hegemony of the university yet simultaneously embraces the possibilities that each can offer. Furthermore, by directly engaging with the university as a place for interdisciplinary thinking, critical analysis of the current climate can be brought into consideration. Thus, this project asks whether a pedagogical site can reposition art’s purpose and affect.

The artists I have invited to work with me on this project were selected because of their sculptural intent on framing the performativity – made visible by the legacy of institutional critique – latent within a site. Not always working with the ‘material’ of the gallery and not necessarily interested in undertaking a mannered exposé of the institution, each of the nine artists and designers utilise a context responsive approach. They have inherited the critical tradition of conceptualism that treats art as a mode of thought, and they are conversant in presenting process as part of their work. These practitioners do not have conventional studio practices; rather the way they work is indicative of the increasingly common practice of responding to the curatorial call of the institution, and for their work to be generated out of conversation and collaboration. Further still, what links each of them is their interest in moving beyond, or perhaps it is better to say sidelining, the ironic impasse of postmodernism and its insular re-enactment of art history, to re-assert a belief in meaning and the possibilities for art to tap the tenor of experience that includes knowing without knowing [1].

Reflexivity

Philosopher Jacques Rancière positions the political in art as not residing in the effectiveness of transmitting messages, but in the power of form itself [2]. The formal arrangements, tangible and intangible, that art produces provide an abstract language that cannot be written; yet too often this language is read as exclusive either because it requires conceptual decoding or it is presumed to. Ranciere offers a means to consider the embrace of art’s broader intellectualism by placing value again on what is felt, to re-engage with art’s affect. Marxist philosopher and semiologist, Paolo Virno, who has recently been picked up by contemporary art discourse, also asserts that form can build new structures of thinking [3]. Although it is precarious to believe that art can aspire to utopian models (or even anarchic) and produce new systems to live by, it seems timely to be reminded that art can provide a practice of reflexivity and point to the realities of political experience. With these ideas in mind, I propose that the gallery is the site of rehearsal for these action, but one not predicated on anticipation and working towards resolution.

Thinking back to the Wall and considering that significant change may happen incrementally or by surprise when you least expect it, this exhibition proposes that art has the ability to suggest the un-writing of known structures by bringing attention to other ways of claiming space and being resourceful within it. In negotiating the call for change, the artists in this project also resist the expectation to produce. The propositional is a political strategy, not necessarily punk, yet a constructive and an affective approach critical of the incessant call for progress. In the interest of forming an exhibition that is resourceful and which may in fact become a resource for future activity, what you may find at the gallery and what you may see online are forms and structures unfolding.

Laura Preston

[1] W. G. Sebald’s fiction creates unarticulated connections between words and images that elucidate on the ways in which we know without knowing, and remember without memory.

[2] Jacques Rancière, The Politics of Aesthetics: The Distribution of the Sensible. London: Continuum, 2006

[3] Paolo Virno interview in Open 17:A Precarious Existence Vulnerability. Rotterdam: Nai Publishers, 2009

The Adam Art Gallery receives sponsorship support from The Quality Hotel and Comfort Hotel Wellington. Photography: Michael Salmon.

The exhibition Billy Apple New York 1969-1973 documented activities undertaken by artist Billy Apple in New York between 1969 and 1973, including works never before seen in New Zealand.

The exhibition focused on a short but intense period in the artist’s career, when he operated a small not-for-profit gallery at 161 West 23rd Street. Over the course of four years he created a venue for artists to produce works that tested and re-defined the nature of sculpture, at a time when the art scene in New York was beginning to be galvanised by such radical gestures.

Billy Apple New York 1969-1973 documented an important period in Apple’s career and recognised the vital contribution he made to the history of art in New York. It also addressed the relation between ‘live’ action and documentation, setting out to offer various solutions to the problem of how to re-present ephemeral, site-specific work at the same time as exploring how this was already a concern of the artist at the time of his work’s production.

Significant works on show included a re-staging of an iconic window cleaning action originally undertaken with the assistance of Geoff Hendricks at 112 Greene St in 1971, the 1968 film Gaseous discharge phenomena with soundtrack by artist Nam June Paik, and a large-scale installation of arranged coloured neon tubes reconstructed to address the remarkable architecture of the Adam Art Gallery. These works were shown alongside other reconstructions, artefacts, photo-documentation and archival material relating to the Apple space and its programmes.

The exhibition was timed to coincide with a major international symposium organised in conjunction with One Day Sculpture, a New Zealand-wide series of temporary public art works, conceived by British curator Claire Doherty for the Litmus Initiative at Massey University.

It also provided the context for Apple’s contribution to the One Day Sculpture series. The Adam Art Gallery commissioned Apple to undertake a new work over one 24-hour period on Saturday 28 March 2009. This translated his 70s’ activities to a new time and place, enabling Apple’s conceptual practice to confront an iconic work of public sculpture: Henry Moore’s Bronze Form (1985-6) which is located on Salamanca Lawn in Wellington’s Botanic Gardens.

Billy Apple studied graphic design in London and made a contribution to early pop art in Britain before leaving for New York in 1964. He lived in New York between 1964 and 1990 before returning to New Zealand where he continues to work and exhibit internationally. He has consistently devoted himself to testing the boundaries between art and life, exploring the social, economic and architectural contexts within which art is made and circulates.

This is the first of a series of curated exhibitions designed to explore some of the intersections between sound and art. It will bring together four major works produced in the 1990s by leading New Zealand contemporary artists who each use aspects of popular music as a metaphor for thinking about art and art history, together with a newly commissioned work that engages this same conceptual territory from a perspective in the first decade of the 21st century. This will see Michael Parekowhai’s Ten Guitars, Julian Dashper’s Big Bang Theory, Michael Stephenson’s Slave Pianos and Terry Urbahn’s The Karaokes brought together for the first time, asking the question: why did artists use popular music in this way at this time? Auckland based photographer Ava Seymour is the fifth artist who will be invited to produce a new body of work based on her own research into the history of popular music.

23 July—3 October 2010
Sound Check 2

This is the second of a series of curated exhibitions designed to explore some of the intersections between sound and art. It will explore the work of visual artists in relation to the Flying Nun Record label and will be guest curated by Flying Nun founder, Roger Shepherd.

15 October-18 December 2010/19 January—6 February 2011
Long Live the Modern: New Zealand’s New Architecture, 1904-1984

Curated by Julia Gatley and Bill McKay, School of Architecture and Planning, The University of Auckland. Surveying New Zealand’s extant modern buildings, this exhibition focuses on a smaller number of the published projects and brings together original drawings and period books, journals and photographs, as well as new architectural models and recent photographs. Increasingly, the modern buildings are being recognised for their heritage values. But many people remain unaccustomed to hearing ‘modern’ and ‘heritage’ in the same sentence. Long Live the Modern uses the word ‘modern’ in a very broad way, pursuing twentieth-century architectural initiatives concerned with the new – new technologies, new materials, new forms, new building types, new ways of living – initiatives embedded with the belief that the new would necessarily change lives in positive ways.

Mladen Bizumic, The Importance of Being Ernst
A new body of work by Vienna/New Zealand based artist Mladen Bizumic that draws on the architectural legacy of Ernst Plischke which will include a model of one of his great examples of domestic architecture, the Sutch House, which is located in Wellington, suspended in space and accompanied by other installational elements. This project will highlight the contradictions and reversals of Bizumic’s practice, in its relocation of European modernist principles to this Antipodean setting. This project will  also be presented at the Kunsthalle Vienna, and at CAC, Vilnius, Lithuania.

Lisa Crowley National Projects
An exhibition of new photographs by Auckland-based artist, Lisa Crowley that revisit the legacy of modern architecture in New Zealand.

These projects will be complemented by a one-day symposium dedicated to the work and legacy of Viennese architect Ernst Plischke organised by Robin Skinner at the School of Architecture and Design.