This major book surveys Arps’ recent work but through a peculiar lens. This is an artist known for making spaces – dystopic, uncomfortable, decrepit, paranoid, aspirational – that are in their own reality. Here, they are reconstructed as parts of one overarching space, the ‘affirmation dungeon’, in which self-help is crow-barred off its pedestal, along with other forms of normative shaming. This book has been put together with the logic of dungeon mapper or game builder, a temporarily liberated reality forming around the viewer as avatar. What is really pictured is unclear, but this space can be looked at as indexing or growing out of pressure-intensive neoliberal New Zealand – a society hollowed out into which one is compelled to amass rubbish as a way of claiming space or enacting sovereignty. The way in which Arps has consistently worked with and altered found materials is echoed in the way in which text material has been assembled for the book, involving pieces taken from the Internet and earlier publications, and slippages and glitches in language; language, time, and architectural space being sites for resistance to measurement, authority, conservatism, simplification, homogenisation, and gentrification.
This project is supported by Creative New Zealand and by Saatchi & Saatchi through their association with The Walters Prize, organised by the Auckland Art Gallery Toi o Tamaki.
Jon Bywater’s essay ‘Work-Life Balance’ was originally published in the ‘Art Goes On’ issue of Reading Room: A Journal of Art and Culture, Auckland Art Gallery Toi o Tamaki, 2009.
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- Dan Arps - Affirmation Dungeon
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Sriwhana Spong
Nijinsky
Nijinsky relates to a series of Sriwhana Spong films that are a re-imagining of a George Balanchine ballet, The Song of the Nightingale, originally choreographed in 1925 for the itinerant Ballet Russes. Based on the only fragments remaining of the original (the Stravinsky score and documentation of the Matisse designs for set and costumes, and some of the costumes themselves) Spong’s films and the book’s contents exhort the Balanchine maxim, “Before is over. Performance is now”.
Nijinsky channels the presence of the famous chimeric dancer for whom the book is named, and involves stills from the films along with collage works that overlay geometric forms onto ballet photographs cut from picture books. It also features writing by Sarah Hopkinson, Gwynneth Porter, ballet photographer and author Keith Money, and the artist herself.
This book project has been supported by Creative New Zealand, and was co-published with the Auckland gallery Michael Lett on the occasion of the screening of Spong’s Lethe-wards at Art Basel in June 2010.
Texts by Sarah Hopkinson, Gwynneth Porter, Keith Money, Sriwhana Spong.
Published by Clouds and Michael Lett
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- Sriwhana Spong - Nijinsky
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PX: Thoughts On Painting
PX: Thoughts on Painting was published following the two-part PX exhibition at St Paul Street Gallery, AUT University, Auckland – A Purposeless Production: A Necessary Praxis, curated by Leonhard Emmerling, and Snow Falls on Mountains Without Wind, curated by Jan Bryant.
This book functions both as a theoretical study of painting practice – two opposed essays disagreeing about the supposed purpose or operation of contemporary painting – and an exhibition catalogue, illustrating in full the wide variety of practices that made up this show of the work of painters (in the widest sense) from New Zealand, Europe and the US:
Whitney Bedford, Richard Bryant, Amelia Harris, Dil Hildebrand, Colin Lawson, Saskia Leek, Patrick Lundberg, Michel Majerus, Fiona Macdonald, Isobel Thom, Barbara Tuck, Genevieve Allison, Guy Benfield, James Cousins, Simon Glaister, Kerstin Gottschalk, Katharina Grosse, Simon Ingram, Imi Knoebel, Tumi Magnusson, Paul McCarthy, Judy Millar, Ben Morieson, Gerhard Richter, Nedko Solakov.
Bryant and Emmerling’s essays pay particular attention to the legacies of conceptualism and the diverse relations that contemporary painting holds with various art-historical, philosophical and political discourses. Here we find the figure of painting radically expanded for the twenty-first century.
Fusing Kant’s definition of art as ‘purposeless’ with Adorno’s notion of the autonomous work of art as the only one with utopian potential, Emmerling’s text considers painting’s complete uselessness as the basis of its inalienability. Bryant adapts Jean Paulhan’s ideas on cliché and terror and attempts to delineate a certain genealogy that might account for aspects of contemporary painting practice that can’t be folded neatly into dominant art-historical discourses, even when a dialogue with art history is being carried out.
Texts by Jan Bryant and Leonhard Emmerling
Designed by Tana Mitchell
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- PX: Thoughts About Painting
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Ruth Buchanan
Lying Freely
Lying Freely is the 4th and final part of the itinerant project by artist Ruth Buchanan. Here the 3 previous stages of the project meet within and are also confronted by the space of the book. The book was made in close collaboration with designer David Bennewith and developed accumulatively as each stage of the project was ‘completed’. Over the course of 2 years Buchanan investigated questions surrounding the tension between private need and public appearance, individual agency and collectively received legacy, producing a series of works that each dealt with particular constellations of figure, location and format. The 3 stages consisted of a guided tour, theatre piece and installation. The book behaves on the one hands as a schematic or script for the body of work, drawing boundaries – and on the other hand it proposes a method, an approach, that suggests constant repetition and following, constant reconfiguration. The book becomes an experiment in sharing material, sharing space; absorbing and reflecting its own conditions and the conditions under which it becomes public.
Design and editing by David Bennewith and Ruth Buchanan
Texts by Ruth Buchanan and Marina Vishmidt
Typesetting by Colophon
Co-published by Jan van Eyck Academie and Casco Office for Art, Design and Theory.
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- Ruth Buchanan - Lying Freely
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