spinofflive
A crowd, but distanced. (Photo: Getty Images)
A crowd, but distanced. (Photo: Getty Images)

ArtMay 23, 2020

Bubble art: A socially distanced new show of videos from lockdown

A crowd, but distanced. (Photo: Getty Images)
A crowd, but distanced. (Photo: Getty Images)

From a Ronnie Van Hout take on The Breakfast Club to James Oram carving a rendition of his own face out of soap, Christchurch Art Gallery’s show of new video art in response to Covid-19 isolation is worth championing, writes Mark Amery.

Commissioning artists in uncertain times makes sense. For, uncertainty for artists is typical habitat. When new thinking is needed, welcome an artist into your workplace!

Theirs is a livelihood based on endless hours making connections between things no one else has yet made, unsure if anyone will appreciate it (or, to quote a 1976 Colin McCahon painting, “AM I Scared Boy (EH)”). 

Like those dark times of struggle in lockdown which prove ultimately rewarding, artists swim daily through the murk, exploring the spaces in between, questioning contexts and the currency of accepted tropes. Hopefully, they come out the other side having bridged a few things. 

Which is one big reason why an award for Public Gallery Best Coping with Covid-19 should go to Christchurch Art Gallery. For online video art project Spheres, curators Nathan Pohio and Melanie Oliver commissioned five artists to create new video works in their bubbles about social distance and their personal environment, and paid screening rights to artists for a further seven works to put online. 

Forget so-called 360-degree virtual walkthroughs of exhibitions using cursor arrows and trackpads, looking one digital step removed at digital reproductions of artwork; they deaden art’s visceral charge. Spheres is work made for the fabric of your computer screen. 

Such award news will come as no surprise to those who follow the comms work of our public art institutions. Christchurch Art Gallery has the finest art publishing arm in the country, and its website is a cut well above the pack, with its user-friendly version of the gallery’s magazine Bulletin providing a dynamic reading experience. 

Commissioning should be a vital part of any public gallery’s work, particularly these days when so many of our finest artists focus principally on projects aimed at public conversation, rather than objects for the art market. And the artists that a gallery picks to commission and show – their concerns, the selection’s diversity, and its mix of local and global reach – is naturally a test of a gallery’s understanding of both artists and its public. 

In all this, Spheres passes with flying colours. It might help that Pohio (Ngai Tahu), Christchurch born and raised, is a leading moving image artist who has travelled widely with his own work, while Oliver recently co-curated a substantial, radical Māori moving image exhibition. I’ve never really come to grips with the suitability of the gallery space for watching video art. To me if it’s not suited to a seated alcove or cinema, it’s best on a personal device. Spheres (like the web platform for New Zealand artist film agency Circuit) demonstrates the suitability, when well presented, of much of this work for your personal screen. 

Ronnie van Hout Ghosting (The Breakfast Club) 2020. Single-channel digital video, colour, sound, duration 12 min 25 sec. Courtesy the artist and Ivan Anthony Gallery.

Don’t you forget about me. The Simple Minds chorus could have been a lockdown cry as we attempted to fill our social voids online. The song from the iconic John Hughes movie The Breakfast Club introduces Ronnie van Hout’s solo homemade take on the film, Ghosting (The Breakfast Club), in which a group of students are stuck at school at their desks for nine hours on a Saturday on detention. In the original, each has been asked to write an essay about “who they think they are”. They are swimming through the teenage murk and, naturally, over the course of the movie we see stereotypes challenged, perceptions changed.

Van Hout has made a career out of making sardonic self-portraiture using doppelgangers dwelling on anxieties about identity, often drawing from the well of his own suburban Christchurch childhood. This then is a movie made for him. Indeed, at first I assumed this was one of the works commissioned by the gallery from an artist in lockdown. It turns out Ronnie the artist is forever in lockdown – it was first shown in the exhibition Ghosting at Ivan Anthony Gallery in Auckland, which opened in March and closed prematurely.

In van Hout’s work the characters remain at their desks, with a back screen colour and simple costume changes used to denote changes in character (naturally above the waist). It’s a Zoom! Ghosting is that modern digital act of cutting all communication with someone. And this could be the sort of work you’d be driven to make in the absence of invitations to group chats.

Van Hout pares the script down to 12 minutes of bickering challenges issued from one personality type to another, chopping quickly between them. There are only light changes in tone to his stand-up persona. There are no wigs. Instead it’s like one lengthy heated internal monologue. A classic schizophrenia skit, one person role-playing with themselves. It’s not unlike one you might hear from someone with mental issues, or simply a partner sleep-talking beside you. Then again, I’ve seen many Facebook comments threads as ridiculous as this, with their usual cast of baiting cranky characters. ‘Ghosting (The Breakfast Club)’ reminds me that social media is where our teenage frontal lobe development lives on. It provides a wry take on the self-commentary bubble lockdown threw us into. The sense – to quote Billy Idol – of “dancing with myself”.     

Janet Lilo and Courtney Sina Meredith I love being in a crisis with you 2020. Single-channel HD digital video, colour, sound, duration 9 min 23 sec. Courtesy the artists

Among the lockdown profusion of online photo challenges and social media video diary entries a rather lovely diaristic love letter was made by two new lovers together in lockdown in Auckland. Poet Courtney Sina Meredith and visual artist Janet Lilo’s I love being in a crisis with you is a loose, languid sketchbook-style conversation between images and words. Blocks of words shuttle onto the screen interspersed by what resemble gifs, animated collaged compressions of buildings and staircases, folding in on themselves like MC Escher drawings, or Covid cages. 

Poetry, spoken and written, here feel vital in nailing the profundity found among the daily domestic mundanity. “On Saturday we stopped counting the dead,” runs one line. “My lover painted the front room lilac”. We are, writes Sina Meredith, “lost little children outrunning the monster”. And again: “The internet told me to go for a run”. 

The work sprawls in the way diaries do. I found it hard to see the connections between images and text, or an overall shape; a beginning and end. Yet shapelessness felt part of the point, day-in day-out. The concrete nature of the images gave symmetry and architecture to the words echoing domestic experience. Here two artists explore new shapes in a way the time-based media allows them to do richly.  

James Oram Simulacrum 2020. Single-channel HD digital video, colour, sound, duration 22 min 2 sec. Courtesy the artist.

Stick on Simulacrum by James Oram while you’re handwashing, or doing the dishes. It’s a great example of how video art can work strongly with time and narrative in a way so different to popular film and television. The camera comes in close from above on a rectangular bar of soap on a stainless steel reflective bench. A format like a Mark Rothko painting. As we begin, the artist’s face is reflected before blue surgical gloves and scalpel come into frame to precisely carve a copy of a face over one quiet, patient 22 minute single take. This meditative work resonated with the delicate cotton-woolled mental state I’ve felt myself in with closer proximity to others in lockdown.

Slow acts of making, using the domestic things around us, have never made more sense. With attention to the screen, and the antiseptic nature of computer viewing and wearing gloves at the supermarket, ‘Simulacrum’ heightens the importance of the tactile. It made me more aware of my own skin, and my own bad body hygiene habits. 

Sione Monu Mangēre Bridge 2020. Single-channel digital video, colour, sound, duration 3 min 55 sec. Courtesy the artist.

Canberra-based New Zealand artist Sione Monu found himself back with whanau in Māngere during lockdown. ‘Māngere Bridge’ softly, wittily expresses the search for space and a little glam and glitter in confinement. With the aid of a fuzzy cellphone and new wave buzz-cut editing, Monu films raw and up-close small moments of cosmopolitan thrill among the drollery. A wonky digitally corrupted ‘Lili Marlene’ features in the headphones in a trip on public transport, interrupted by gifs like a cartoon Alice in Wonderland falling down the rabbit hole, representing internal “life during wartime”. 

Monu is also a maker, here seen making and wearing brightly beaded and lei woven masks. Evocatively, he wears one of a raincloud, brightening up a windy grey day up the maunga. ‘Mangere Bridge’ relishes the sweet, simple joys of making in lockdown: learning with a friend online how to successfully double a carrot cake recipe; the almost sexual tension of unwrapping and getting to touch and sniff an Apple Pencil with the words ‘Hairy Bussy’ stenciled on it, before drawing red love hearts on a hot iPad pinup.  

Conor Clarke Reservoir Romanticism 2020. Single-channel HD video, colour, sound, duration 1 min 28 sec. Courtesy the artist and Two Rooms Gallery. With thanks to Krzysztof Wysocki and University of Canterbury Campus Security.

The fourth commission is a rapid fire minute-and-a-half of letting off of steam from the reservoir of lockdown emotion through the simple action of turning on taps. In ‘Reservoir Romanticism’ the sublimity of the grand waterfall is wittily evoked through small punkish acts of rebellion. Every few seconds the artist’s hand comes into frame to open up a valve full, and let water gush satisfyingly loud and free. Aurally there’s a satisfying constant flash-cut change in tone and timbre as water hits different surfaces in different ways. Is there any more immediate mundane way to revolt and vent in isolation than this? The work also made me think about the giant reservoir of water below our feet, and how we treat it. Naturally, the last shot is of a tap being turned off.

Bridget Reweti Tunnel Beach 2020. Single-channel digital video, re-coloured photographs, colour, sound, duration 50 sec. Courtesy of the artist.

Finally, the fifth commission, ‘Tunnel Beach’, is from Bridget Reweti, shot on her lockdown walks to this nearby popular Ōtepoti location. It’s a short, surreal slide show of slowed moving images of sea and headlands recoloured from black and white, recalling the 19th century colonial photographic technique.

Reweti co-opts this technique to create a new kind of magic, a delirious, hallucinogenic psychic daze where light overexposes details and creates an aura around things. I felt warmed, but uncertain, questioning of reality. This is an effect greatly amplified by the soundtrack, a bright churning oversaturated industrial guitar loop from musical outfit Flogging A Dead One Horse Town. While both band and Reweti ((Ngāti Ranginui, Ngāi Te Rangi) originally hail from Tauranga, sound and image are both readily identifiable with Dunedin’s long-running experimental music and art scene. ‘Tunnel Beach’ is reminiscent of the videos of Dunedin artist Kim Pieters, which pair an instrumental sound image to a single moving visual image – a kind of shimmering sound painting, expressing in abstraction an experience, rather than telling a story.

Naturally, I interpret ‘Tunnel Beach’ as an expression of heightened and disturbed awareness during lockdown. Yet it’s one visitors to Tunnel Beach probably often experience. You enter the beach descending steps down through an actual tunnel (roughly hewn through the rock at the commission of a local politician back in the 1870s), with enough light at both ends to go through without a torch. In other words, it is like being in a kind of camera, the landscape a haloed window. Reweti’s use of recolouring directs us to the colonial reconstruction of the landscape through art and engineering; the unreliability of any universal truth or reality to be drawn from the camera’s window.

 Spheres: An Online Video Project is showing now on Christchurch Art Gallery’s website.

Te Papa CEO Courtney Johnston with Visitor Host Roger Gascoigne. (Photo: Jack Fisher/Te Papa)
Te Papa CEO Courtney Johnston with Visitor Host Roger Gascoigne. (Photo: Jack Fisher/Te Papa)

ArtMay 16, 2020

Courtney’s Place: Te Papa’s CEO on leading the national museum out of Covid

Te Papa CEO Courtney Johnston with Visitor Host Roger Gascoigne. (Photo: Jack Fisher/Te Papa)
Te Papa CEO Courtney Johnston with Visitor Host Roger Gascoigne. (Photo: Jack Fisher/Te Papa)

When Te Papa reopens shortly, it’ll mark the end of the first big test of new tumu whakarae/chief executive, Courtney Johnston. Jeremy Rose spoke to Johnston about her vision for the museum, the impact of the pandemic, the return of taonga and making good on the Treaty. 

In 2016 a Hawaiian delegation came to collect two of the rarest, most precious items from Te Papa’s collection: an ‘ahu’ula (a cloak made from more than four million feathers) and its matching mahiole (helmet) gifted to Captain James Cook by the high chief Kalaniʻōpuʻu, aliʻi nui in 1779.

Officially the taonga are now on loan to the Bishop Museum, Honolulu, but at the handover ceremony Marques Hanalei Marzan, a cultural advisor at the Bishop, told me the cloak and helmet were going home for good.

Courtney Johnston, who took over as Te Papa tumu whakarae/chief executive in December, agrees that’s likely. It’s the way things should be, she says.

A scene from the powhiri for the Hawaiian delegation during the handover of the Hawaiian taonga at Te Papa, March 16 2016. (Photo: Norm Heke/Te Papa)

The return of taonga is a sign of just how much New Zealand museums are changing, and how they are now at the forefront of an international movement for museums to rethink their relationship with their collections. 

In March I sat down with Johnston to talk about those changes, her vision for Te Papa and the wider museum and gallery community. The full impact of Covid-19 hadn’t yet hit. Preparations were underway for what looked like a period of extra hygiene vigilance, but nothing like the coming shutdown.

Six weeks later, it seemed a good time to resume the conversation and take a look at what the post Covid-19 world might look like for museums. As a former director of Dowse Art Museum in Lower Hutt, a past chair of umbrella group Museums Aotearoa, and an astute thinker and writer on the arts and museums, she’s uniquely well placed to explore the topic.

The epidemics of the 19th century transformed the world’s cities, as town planners and architects responded to public health disasters. I asked Johnston: will the pandemic have similarly long lasting impacts on museums and art galleries? 

“There’s a lot of international chatter about the move over the last 20 or 30 years towards the more interactive hands-on participatory museum and whether that will or won’t stay a feature of museums [post Covid-19],” she says.

“There are some people who very definitely say ‘it’s over, you’re going to have to think of something else’ and then there’s others who say ‘humans are humans are humans and they want to do things like this.’ So that’s the crystal ball gazing my design team is already thinking about.”

For Johnston, the most important change won’t be physical but philosophical. “What we do now shouldn’t be just about the next six months but about adapting in such a way it will take us forward for the next 10 years. It has to be bigger than hand sanitiser and cleaning regimes.

“The language of the last 10 years has been about return on investment and that’s usually in terms of numbers through the door, hotel nights – your economic benefit. If return on investment can look more like partnership and shared outcomes, then the investment that’s going on at the moment becomes about making everything and everyone better. That would be a positive outcome for me.”

That might, she seems to be suggesting, require a rethink of how galleries are funded. 

“At the moment wherever you are in New Zealand your access in terms of physical spaces to our culture is very dependent on the mood of your local council. So it’s really uneven. You have some cities and towns that do amazing jobs and others that are quite strongly anti art. If some sort of evening-out can come out of this that would be kind of amazing.”

The reality right now is that museums and art galleries around the country are seeing their budgets slashed. Johnson says she’s hearing of museums and galleries being asked for budget cuts of between 10 and 20%.

New Zealand is lucky, she says, with most cultural institutions receiving the bulk of their funding from the public purse, be it local or central government. But that core public funding varies “from, say, 20 to 80%”.

And the philanthropic and sponsorship funds that make up the bulk of the difference are drying up. Airlines, for example, have been enthusiastic sponsors in the past. It’s hard to see that funding returning any time soon.

Johnston says drops in core funding combined with falls in other revenue means some galleries are facing budget cuts of up to 50%. “It would be a rare museum that’s not facing some sort of economic pinch at the moment.”

With slashed budgets, pandemic hygiene requirements, and the prospect of a very different visitor profile for the foreseeable future, Johnston thinks there will be a trend towards more locally focused exhibitions. 

In a normal year 50% of Te Papa’s visitors are international tourists, 20% New Zealanders from out of town, and the remainder Wellingtonians. At this stage Te Papa hasn’t cancelled or postponed any shows, but it still might, Johnston says, suggesting the much-hyped Surrealist exhibition set to arrive from Rotterdam in December could still be pushed back.

Freight could prove a problem, but Johnston says the bigger issue is the restriction on crowd sizes. “It’s not just the economic side of it, it’s also the social side. I’m aware of projects that are about celebrating the life contribution of senior artists, so you kind of don’t want to do that under level two when people from all over the country can’t fly or drive to congregate somewhere and share in that moment. So projects like that are getting pushed out further.

“Every museum is shuffling its programme around at the moment. Extending shows, pushing shows out, going for cheaper shows rather than more expensive shows.” 

On a positive note, Johnston thinks creative people often like having to work with limitations. “There’s something quite nice about not having the pressure of having to put a blockbuster on and instead go ‘OK, what can we do within these parameters?’” 

Before the Covid storm

Te Papa CEO Courtney Johnston examines an object in one of the museum’s many back rooms (Photo: Jack Fisher/Te Papa)

Before the Covid storm hit, Courtney Johnston was plainly enjoying herself in her new role. In January, happily tweeting from the vertebrates storeroom, she sounded like a kid finding herself in charge of a lolly shop.

“Collections are magical,” she says now. “And the people who work with them are pretty magical too. When I was out at the Dowse I had all the access I liked. If I was having a bit of a shit day often I would go down to the collection store and kind of fossick around and find something that would lift me outside of what was going on inside my head – and reinforce that feeling of being a temporary part of what’s here to last forever: here to sustain a community and a public for a long time.”

There’s a sense of wonder and delight that animates Johnston’s conversation. It’s a common quality in artists, but not so much chief executives. Knowledge and thoughtfulness about the place of museums and galleries in the world also sets her apart from her immediate predecessors, Geraint Martin and Rick Ellis, who came to Te Papa from jobs at a DHB and a telco respectively. 

Her appointment is a hopeful sign that others share her view that museums aren’t just another business.

From tour guide to chief executive

Photo: Jack Fisher

Twenty years ago, as a university student, Courtney Johnston had a part-time gig as a visitor host at Te Papa. It was then she first became aware of the significance of the three boulders that stand outside the entrance.

“Most people just walk past and don’t notice them but they’re the founding concepts of Te Papa: Papatūānuku, Tangata Tiriti and Tangata Whenua. And in that space is everything that Te Papa has to foster for the nation. How do we come together as cultures? How do we come together as people within this environment?”

Johnston says Te Papa is in a continuous process of returning taonga to their iwi. “A taonga gets its mana – its power – from its connections to its people. Which is different from how museums were set up, where objects get their power from the authority that researchers place on applying their knowledge to that object.”

Te Papa’s Māori collection is now considered to be on loan. “The hapū or iwi have easy access to whatever they want to. And Te Papa is negotiating all the time about repatriating taonga back to their communities.”

The Hawaiian ‘ahu’ula and mahiole are far from the only taonga being returned to their rightful owners. Te Hau ki Turanga – Aotearoa’s oldest wharenui and a masterpiece of carving – will be heading home to Tairāwhiti in the near future, more than a century and a half since it was stolen from the Rongowhakakaata iwi by James Richmond, the minister of native affairs, and placed in the Colonial Museum in Wellington.

The Ministry of Culture and Heritage is even facilitating the return of an Egyptian mummy, gifted to the Colonial Museum in 1885.

It’s a major point of difference with one of Te Papa’s tīpuna, the British Museum in London. Famously, that museum insists it is the rightful owner of the Elgin Marbles taken from Greece by a British nobleman in 1801. So if the Elgin Marbles had found their way into the Te Papa collection? “I’d return them home,” says Johnston.

“The British Museum will say, ‘no actually the best place for all of these things from all over the world is here. Because we can create the context from which people can understand them.’ And you’re like: ‘What about the context that they were made in and the people they were taken from?’.”

Johnston notes that the legislation behind Te Papa, unlike that for Auckland Museum, does not mention the Treaty of Waitangi. “I think in some ways our bicultural kaupapa – the way that it was baked into our foundation, the structure of the building, our co-leadership model, which is not legislated – is something that was opted for.”

Pictured centre Arapata Hakiwai and Courtney Johnston at Spread the Love! A Combined Community Service for Samoa at Te Papa, January 2020. Image: Andrew Matautia.

But is the co-leadership model really a sign that Te Papa is bicultural, when the chief executive position sits above the kaihautu Māori co-leader position – currently filled by Arapata Hakiwai – in Te Papa’s power structure?

“The State Sector Act as it stands doesn’t recognise the co-leadership model. The system that we operate in is a western system that goes: one person, one job title, one signature.” 

Johnston would like to see the legislation changed to allow for co-leadership roles. “I think that would be such a useful, challenging conversation to have on a wider level,” she says.

In a sign of things to come perhaps, the press release announcing Te Papa would be opening within two weeks of the start of level two quoted the co-leaders, rather than just the CEO.

Then there’s Aotearoa’s crucial relationship with the Pacific. Where does Te Papa’s internationally important Pacific collection sit in terms of the bicultural model?

Johnston starts to respond by describing the structure of the level four history galleries, where the Māori and Pacific galleries sit on either side of ‘Passports’, the European migrant history exhibition. “So Māori and Pasifika are separated by the building, by the way it’s set up. And I think that’s something that if we were rebuilding… We are at the very beginning of the redevelopment of level four. That will be a very different conversation now.”

“Our Matauranga Māori and our Pacific curators work together really tightly and they awhi each other. It’s that whanaungatanga that is different, that is special.” 

Art and its troubled past at Te Papa

Opening day at Te Papa, 1992. Far right, Cliff Whiting, who would go on to become Te Papa’s inaugural Kaihautū in 1995, and Cheryll Sotheran, the museum’s founding CEO. (Photo: Michael Hall/Te Papa)

After years of criticism of its commitment to fine art, in 2018 Te Papa opened Toi Art, an $8.4 million gallery space spanning two floors of the building. 

Johnston, an art historian by training, is the first Te Papa head since founding chief executive Cheryll Sotheran to have a strong background in the visual arts. So can we expect to see any changes in direction when it comes to Te Papa and the arts? 

“Cheryll was an art person and I feel she had to suppress that a little bit. I’m clearly an art person. And I’ll need to monitor myself too. I need to give the art curators the same respect as I give to all the other curators. It’s not my job to run an art gallery any more. It is my job to have an opinion.”

One of the clearest guides to those opinions was her time at the helm of Lower Hutt’s Dowse, a position she took up in 2012 aged just 33. 

“At Dowse we were very focused on turning down some of the voices that have had a lot of airtime and turning up some of the voices that have less airtime. You can’t dispute that anyone other than white male artists had less air time in New Zealand, Western art history, exhibition, publication history… Just look at the size of the books that have been published. There are not as many big books on women artists as there are on men.”

And it’s the same story with artists from minority and outsider communities. As the country’s national museum, Te Papa has an important role in amplifying those historically silenced voices, Johnston says.

She’s keen too to see an increasing focus on climate change and the environment at the museum. “How we live together is an environmental question as well as a social question.”

When asked to nominate a couple of international museums that have inspired her, she opts not for a famous national museum but for Sir John Soane’s House in London and Baltimore’s American Visionary Art Museum

“Personally, as a visitor I love extremely focused, jewel-like experiences that you can think into. That are often quite mad.”

But, as if to reassure us that her heart is in what amounts to a wildly overflowing jewellery box: “They’re not museums I would want to work in, they’re not my passion.

“I work in New Zealand because I think our museums are better than museums in any other country in the world. Otherwise I would be trying to work at one of them. But I don’t. I love big scale impact and the complexity of trying to be almost everything to almost everyone.” 

How ‘shovel ready’ are the arts?

A 2018 school group visit to Hinatore, Te Papa’s Learning Lab (Photo: Kate Whitley/Te Papa)

In the past there’s been talk of a Te Papa North for Auckland or a new national art gallery. Could we see development on those sorts of projects as a result of the government’s call for shovel-ready projects to help kick-start the economy?

In short: no. Courtney Johnston doesn’t think there’s any appetite for a major expansion of Te Papa’s physical site. But she’s been disappointed by the response of local bodies when museum projects have been “punted up in that kind of speculation phase and people have written them off as being non-essential”.

She let’s out a heavy sigh. “I do understand that water, waste and sewerage come up as the big triumvirate, and transport, parks, libraries, pools, museums, galleries and community art – those all get shunted into the nice-to-have.” 

One area of the museum that is likely to see an ongoing boost due to Covid-19 is the online space.  

“In lockdown everyone has shifted their focus online. So for example we’re working quite closely with the Ministry of Education on producing content for their education channels. It could be a whole new way in which museums intersect with learning, maybe a step change in the way that they do things.”

In her job interview Johnston committed herself to a 10 year term. What are her hopes for the Te Papa of 2030?

“It’s that community involvement, that co-sharing of responsibility for the collections, that sense that people have that the things here are meaningful for them and they have a meaningful relationship with them, whether they’re in the collections, out on the floor or out of our collections and back in the communities they came from.

“And it will be a museum where people are confident coming and having conversations with each other about who we are and where we’re going.”