4th Auckland Triennial
Natasha Conland, curator of the 4th Auckland Triennial, argues that two tendencies can be found in contemporary art: a romantic yearning for an unimpeded perspective on the world and a self-conscious awareness of the risks this desire entails. It’s this thesis that her title, ‘Last Ride in a Hot Air Balloon’, invokes: a nostalgic kind of adventure coupled with a potentially disastrous end. The ‘balloon’ in the title refers to the story of Jean-François Pilâtre de Rozier, the world’s first human aeronaut, who, in October 1783, ascended in an untethered hot air balloon. (As with early space travel, the balloons were tested beforehand with various animals before any humans could be persuaded.) Pilâtre de Rozier was also the victim of the world’s first air disaster less than two years later.
Installed at the Auckland Art Gallery, Shilpa Gupta’s Untitled (2008–9) consists of a portion of the kind of outmoded airport departure board in which white letters painted on black metal flaps flip over on a rotary dial, making a susurration like cicadas on a hot day. Instead of announcing departures, the board displayed a kind of prose poem, mostly a terribly sad one, nominally about fear and terrorism, with lines such as: ‘EVERYONE WANTS PEACE’; ‘I WANT TO STOP COUNTING / YOURMINEOUR DEAD’. It seemed fitting that an airport departure board should be anxiously preoccupied with terrorism, but Gupta exploited the logic of the mechanism to its limits: the text proceeded by stumbles and leaps, with small changes, completions and elisions on each line. She intentionally programmed suggestive spelling errors and had single letters flip in the self-correcting way that such machines have. Each rotary dial had a full complement of alphanumeric characters, a full-stop and finally a black empty space. Unlike LCD displays, there is no shortcut to moving mechanically through a deck of letters to a blank space. There was a genuine pathos in watching the machine rush from A–Z and through 1–9 to freeze in blackness on a phrase like ‘CAN YOU BE DAED’.
Directly opposite the departure board was Gupta’s amorphous black mass, Singing Cloud (2008–9), made entirely of hundreds of microphones. Instead of picking up noise, they had been reverse-wired to function as a host of tiny loudspeakers. Moving around the black cloud, one heard the sound of an aeroplane taking off, a girl singing and ambient crackles. It took a double-take to realize the close connection between the artist’s two works: while the departure board functioned as a premonition, a Ouija board or a clockwork angel of history, the cloud suggested a catastrophic event. Both were caught in stillness and monochrome, doomed to repeat themselves endlessly in that cruel loop that often characterizes contemporary art.
It was a mark of the thoughtful and understated presentation of the Triennial, which included 28 artists, that Gupta’s work was so able to reward sustained inspection. Perhaps because of the lack of a central exhibition space (the new Auckland Art Gallery is still wreathed in scaffolding and not due to open until next year), the arrangement of works was intellectual rather than spectacular, attentive rather than polished. The curation was notably cerebral: Michael Stevenson’s On How Things Behave (2010), a meditation on David Hume’s problem of induction, was juxtaposed with Gerard Byrne’s Case Study: Loch Ness (2001–ongoing), a meditation on the repeated and surprising failure of the Loch Ness monster to appear. Mike Parr’s Three Weeks Annual Leave (1971–2) showed a sequence of holiday slides in which the performance artist, known for his extreme physical feats, did not hack his arm off or engage in any self-mutilation whatsoever. Outside one small gallery situated in a public garden, I came across a small circle of quiet students, so solemn and still that I initially mistook them for members of a prayer meeting. They were sculpture students from the local university discussing Parr’s work. ‘I don’t see what’s supposed to be so risky about going on vacation’, one quietly demurred. It’s a credit to the Triennial that it was interesting without being astonishing, and that it carried criticism so well.
In an essay published in the exhibition catalogue, art historian Leonhard Emmerling gently took apart the underlying conceits behind the exhibition: that art is dangerous and that the presentation of such art in a triennial is – in some indeterminate way – politically progressive. Firstly, Emmerling argues (with reference to Niklas Luhmann) that ‘risk’ and ‘danger’ are not allied concepts. Rather, they are antonyms: risks are consequences of decisions made within social systems, whereas dangers are external, and their causes are not to be found in the social sphere – art and the stock market may involve risk, but tigers and earthquakes are dangerous. Secondly, on the benevolent political effect of art, Emmerling argues: ‘Art that obeys the demand to be socially “useful” makes itself indistinguishable from conventional practices of social intervention, regardless of how much current rhetoric is dominated by empty talk about defying conventions or breaking with habits’, and ‘in adopting normative measures – even those of social responsibility – art becomes what it wants to avoid more than anything in the world: mainstream.’ Financial meltdown and environmental catastrophe are not a threat to art, Emmerling reminds us. Rather, they are a threat to humanity. The greatest threat to art is posed by Occupational Health and Safety regulations. The 4th Auckland Triennial may not be convincingly risky in any sense, but it is intelligent and sober, and that’s worth more.
