We Will Work With You! Wellington Media Collective 1978-1998

Martha Rosler, The Bowery in Two Inadequate Descriptive Systems

The Consumers of the Future, a commissioned project by White Fungus

23 October – 21 December/22 January – 10 February 2013

Wellington Media Collective (2012). Design: Philip Kelly, Illustrations: Dave Kent.

We Will Work With You! Wellington Media Collective 1978-1998

Curated by the Wellington Media Collective with the Adam Art Gallery

The Wellington Media Collective was established in 1978 as a confederation of graphic designers, printers, photographers, and associates. Underpinned by a belief in the power of media arts to intervene in social space, their activities over two decades have involved the production of posters, magazines, catalogues, and leaflets for community and political groups, ranging from trade unions to arts and activist organisations. This retrospective exhibition examined the politics of style implicit in the Collective’s substantial body of graphic work, and through this lens, surveyed a history of public culture in Wellington and New Zealand. The Collective’s graphic archives interweave a story of political activism with a cultural history of performance and art, both located against a changing economic environment, new networks of distribution and communication, and the technological shift from page to screen. Comprising original prints, posters, publications and ephemeral material, as well as oral histories provided by members of the Collective, the exhibition drew on an archival project undertaken in collaboration with the Alexander Turnbull Library and the Department of Museum and Heritage Studies, Victoria University of Wellington. A major book project documenting the Collective’s history was launched at exhibition’s close. Coordinated and edited by Ian Wedde with Mark Derby and Jenny Rouse, and designed by Wellington Media Collective, the extensively illustrated monograph is co-published with Victoria University Press.

The Adam Art Gallery acknowledges the sad passing of Dave Kent (1946-2013) and extends its warmest sympathy to his family and friends. Dave was a key figure in the Wellington Media Collective, the graphic history of which the Adam was very pleased to present in the exhibition We Will Work With You! in 2012-13. The extraordinary warmth and generosity shown towards Dave from his many colleagues and collaborators will be remembered as fitting tribute to his qualities as an artist and as a person of great commitment and courage.

The exhibition was accompanied by an illustrated catalogue published by Victoria University Press in 2013. It features contributions from Polly Cantlon, Jean Clarkson, Emory Douglas, Mary Ellen O’Connor, Flor De Lis Lopez Hernandez and Xavier Mead.

 

Martha Rosler, The Bowery in Two Inadequate Descriptive Systems

1974-75, Series of 45 gelatin silver prints of text and images on 24 backing boards
Kirk Gallery

The Adam Art Gallery was proud to present a one work exhibition of Martha Rosler’s The Bowery in Two Inadequate Descriptive Systems (1974-75). A seminal piece of photo-conceptual art and a reference point in traditions of socially-oriented creative practice, The Bowery offers a portrait of what was once New York City’s most archetypical skid-row. Pairing images of derelict storefronts and empty street corners with a descriptive poetics of drunkenness and vagrancy, Rosler’s photo-text installation refuses the direct representation of an implied human subject in favour of a layered interrogation of the adequacy of both visual and literary modes to the experience of social marginalisation. Nonetheless, the work insists upon the political resonance of the material settings of urban blight. Images and text are interspersed with occasional blank panels in the space of a photographic image, and it is this dialectic between concreteness and the incommensurable which lends The Bowery its enduring critical charge. Martha Rosler works in video, photography, text, installation, and performance, and as an essayist and social commentator. Her preoccupations centre on everyday life and the politics of the public sphere, often with an attention to women’s experience. The Adam Art Gallery hosted a series of public events to support this exhibition, including two fora on documentary practice co-sponsored by the Elam School of Fine Arts, University of Auckland. Martha Rosler participated in the inaugural Adam Art Gallery Skype Conversation series in early 2013, discussing politics, activism, and the digital commons in the context of her recent projects.

 

The Consumers of the Future, a commissioned project by White Fungus

Window Gallery

Ron and Mark Hanson, the editors of Wellington and Taipei based White Fungus magazine, were invited to prepare a series of posters to accompany the Wellington Media Collective and Martha Rosler exhibitions. Unfolding over the eight week duration of the exhibition in the Adam’s Window space, this poster sequence and its associated free newsprint publication took this remark by current Prime Minister John Key as a point of departure: “Our children are important… They are the consumers of the future.” Reflecting upon the concrete impact of neo-liberal thinking on Wellington’s urban and architectural fabric over recent decades, the White Fungus brothers talk back at local brandings of the city as New Zealand’s ‘Creative Capital.’ An emphasis on print publication ties the magazine’s zine aesthetic to a legacy informed by the Wellington Media Collective, and the project proposed the protest poster as at once a mode of still-contemporary activism and the formal expression of a local style. The Adam Art Gallery ran a Poster Competition to accompany the White Fungus commission, judged by Wellington Media Collective, White Fungus, artist John Lake, and Kate Daellenbach, School of Marketing and International Business, Victoria University of Wellington.

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Mark Amery reviews the exhibition on RNZ

For a list of the full public programme click here.