Srisri

The New Zealand Modernist Painter

The New Zealand modernist painter Colin McCahon often painted monochrome paintings, and the rumour is that for a while the only way he got to see work from overseas was through black and white photocopies and reproductions[1]. It’s rare that interesting work makes its way down to New Zealand, so we tend to only ever experience work that is mediated through books, magazines and now more commonly through the internet. Objects, choreographies, drawings and events that occurred in traditional main art centres and have been mediated through image, text and recollection have often been used by myself as source material for sculptures and films that question history as a form that excludes, marginalises and ignores.

For The Stranger's House I worked with a theatre design for the Ballet Russes' 1940s production of Icare by the Australian modernist painter Sydney Nolan. The design itself was never realised as Serge Lifar, the director at the time, was put off by Nolan's concept of a stage set that the dancers would potentially become lost in through the use of black and white abstract patterns on both backdrop and costumes. While Nolan was hoping to explore the point at which distinctions between foreground and background, static art and dance might collapse, Lifar was still obsessed with the primacy of dance. Recently I was asked to make a show for a gallery in Sydney. My initial plan for a performance fell apart due to the failure of myself and the dancer I was working with to find a productive space between 'art' and 'dance'. While reflecting on this failure, the Nolan design came to mind and I decided to pursue this connection. The work is a painted enlargement of Nolan's original design and is positioned between two doorways, meaning the viewer must walk past the work to enter and or exit the space and because of this it acts very much like a large mural or a theatre backdrop.

The gallery itself has a contemporary collection that is heavily represented by male artists, Nolan in particular. This also influenced the decision to take something from the practice of an iconic Australian male artist in a way that could read like the breaking and entering of a stranger's house—taking something that was not my own and pulling it into my own practice. This idea of 'breaking and entering' is reflective of how I sometimes feel as an artist who happens to be female when considering the history of art as one dominated by western males. I was also interested in the idea of a backdrop—a thing that is almost a painting, almost an object, in need of the presence of a body to activate it, to fulfil its use function, to complete it.

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Hair, Pastry, Tobacco[2] is a series of objects, each made from a single piece of marble and a single piece of white, air-dried clay. The marble acts as a support for the clay, and has been cut in lines that curve in half circles, and shapes that look like a waves or perhaps stylised clouds. The clay was dried while resting on the marble and now mimics its contours, however, there are gaps where because of the drying process the materials no longer meet. These gaps make the relationship between the clay and the marble appear rather precarious, and there are parts where the clay only just balances on the marble at various pressure points.

I was interested in creating objects that used a hard surface to support a soft surface, which could also be read as a soft surface mimicking a hard surface. At the same time I was writing instructions for a performance and was thinking about the motifs and ideas present in these texts—the translation and mimicry of objects and phenomena through movement that might trace an empathy between things, patterns of breathing that might be part of this process of translation, and objects and phenomena from the park surrounding the gallery the work was being made for; in particular rocks and clouds.

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Rocks in The Sky is a score made from 7 pieces of A3 white paper, on which a text has been photocopied. The first page carries the title of the work and so could be read as a title page. In three of the pages two bodies are identified as Dancer A and Dancer B, using the pronoun ‘she’ or the possessive form ‘her’. These bodies are described as enacting three different performances that transcribe a movement through the gallery and into the gardens outside. The last pages present instructions for breathing exercises that appear directed specifically to the viewer.

I wrote directions for five different performances, or actions that could potentially take place in the gallery and surrounding gardens. These actions were based on an anecdote I heard about Colin McCahon getting lost in the botanical gardens, which surround the gallery, and being found a day later in another park with no memory of what had happened, or how he had got there. I extract ed something from this anecdote by exploring simple ideas of walking without a set direction, the convergence of outside and inside and the border of a performance—when it might begin and end. These ideas were carried into the potential performances described in the texts, coupled with ideas influenced by an exercise described in Simone Forti’s book "Handbook in Motion"[3] where Steve Paxton attempts to mimic a rock, and Merce Cunningham’s description of choreographing Beach Birds for Camera[4], where he explored how a rock formation changes and becomes animated through the shifting position of the person looking at it.

The Exercise Book is a film that originated in a letter written in 1919 by the Russian dancer and choreographer Vaslav Nijinsky and collated in a book called "The Diary of Nijinsky"[5]: a text that documents the experience of someone entering the early stages of schizophrenia. Nijinsky’s choreography performed an abrupt inverse of traditional balletic structure by turning the movements of his dancers inward, rather than outwards. This ruptured the lines of his dancers, creating a greater relationship to the floor/the stage; this sense of physicality was highlighted by his repeated use of the stomp in The Rite of Spring6. In order to learn this choreography a process of unlearning had to take place—the refusal of a specific tradition of movement that most of the dancers would have been instructed in since childhood.

As most of the Ballet Russes' performances were never filmed, many of the original choreographies have been lost. The fact that some have remained reflects the nature of choreography to be transferred from one body to the next, its lines and forms shifting as it encounters each new performer. Nijinsky’s letter, called ‘Letter to Mankind’, was read out and recorded as a simple means of creating a score. I worked with a dancer to transcribe/translate this score into movement. The attempt to translate this text became a conversation about the impossibility of translation, and the need to avoid a translation that had a singular form, instead working with ‘attempts’ at translation; smaller exercises or approaches that might present multiple ways of accessing the text. These attempts were developed into choreographies—some simple, others more complex—that were then filmed in a theatre space.

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In Actions and Remains I created a series of objects one of which was based on a set of stairs used in an Yvonne Rainer performance, where each step is a different height. Stairs have a rhythm that is repeated: as you’re moving up or down them the repetition helps you judge how high to lift your leg. These stairs disrupt that; every step you take you engages your body and your mind. These particular stairs I made out of concrete to encourage the viewer to engage with them. There was also a volleyball that rolled around the space, which came from an Yvonne Rainer performance as well. This got activated a lot by the public who would not realize they were entering the work themselves through using everyday gestures in their interaction with this object. It was about an intimacy with things—a touching, a moving with and around.

I also used performance as part of the material of Actions and Remains as a way of not seeing the parameters of the exhibition as closed but rather the performed choreography as a form that lives on in both the body of the dancer and the sculptures that now exist in my parent’s garden where they’ve taken on the imprint of leaves, moss and dirt, time being constantly enacted and imprinted onto their forms.

There is an attempt at a borderless quality to my work, a shuffling or assemblage or slipping. The works themselves are not fixed. Many of my sculptures are based on the idea of the prop or the backdrop. They sit in limbo. They both, however, share the idea of an object that is part of a system that needs a body to complete it. In theatre, the word prop comes from the word property. A prop is only activated when a person uses it. When you’re holding the prop, it’s your property. But as soon as you pass it on to someone else then it becomes their property. I like this idea of property in relation to a shift from person to person—like choreography, or stories. It’s not about the object being locked away or owned from a distance but rather about the ownership of touch and use and, in the case of dance and voice, not just the surface of touch but the body as a carrier.

I once read that McCahon wanted to make paintings to walk past. An engagement with work both visual and physical, a turning of place from the New Zealand landscape he often painted, into the moment of experience between the work and the viewer. An intense physicality and visuality at odds with the small black and white photocopies and reproductions he had to work from.

A Response

In going over the text above one becomes aware of how easy it is to lie to oneself about how one's practice is operating—it’s nice to talk about the idea of the prop in relation to the work, but in reality these objects don’t enter a rhythm of being passed on from person to person through their use, they function very much as objects situated within ideas of ownership, in the capitalist sense, within the art system. After years of putting words to forms, and sentences to gestures it becomes easy to slip into sound bites that frame a work, a practice. All of these words can distort a practice to a point, where you can no longer see it, or remember what it is, or why you make. A skin, a wall, it protects one from having to dig around.

Maybe lie is too strong a word, or perhaps being someone who enjoys gesture it’s more helpful to think of its verb form, a horizontality, a sleeping, a lolling around, and in assuming this position perhaps reaching a point of atrophy or ruin. Of course the ruin is an aesthetic all its own, a synthesis between nature and the made. The touched, and then the untouched and the touched again. The reawakened, the thing pulled from history and re-examined.

Most of the works spoken about above take as their source a fragment, a sketch, an object from the past. The touched and then the untouched becomes touched again, but never as it was; only as it has been re-imagined. All these re-imagined things are all things that have called to me, and in being called my work became a response. What is my position then as the responder? Am I left to wait for what calls? And what if one day the call was never to come? Or is my position more the responder and the caller—responding to something and calling its new form into being? It makes sense that when one is working from the position of the periphery one is used to understanding work through image, and of course these images come from a centre of power that is able to reproduce and disseminate itself. These images are also material. So if this use of archival material, images and rumour was the call that created these works, this call from a cultural centre, what happens when you move close to that centre? And what happens when you refuse that centre?

And why images and stories, and scraps already in existence, floating somewhere between the centre and the edges of history? And a particular history. These works described above coming specifically from a lineage of dance, and in particular ballet; ballet as reflecting the quintessential epitome of traditional Western aesthetic ideals, of balance harmony and line. A philosophy taken from the eye and embedded in the musculature of the dancer, the dancer as the embodiment of Western artistic thought. Having studied ballet, I often think of my body as one that has been colonised by the philosophy of form and movement at the centre of ballet.

The choreography of both Nijinsky and Nijinska took this Western practice they had been trained in and with a stomp, a turn in, a broken line brought their own cultural history into the heart of this structure, creating a tussle at the heart of their choreographies. One can take for example the Troika, a traditional Russian dance for three that translates as ‘three horses’. The choreography is made to reflect horse-like-movements—feet pawing at the ground, jumps from one foot to the other and stomping, with all positions of the feet and legs turned in and parallel. These elements of groups moving in unison, the turn in, the flat footed stomp, were all elements incorporated into the choreographies of Nijinsky and Nijinska[7], and were elements that when brought into the classical structure of ballet created choreographies that were completely modern.

Homesickness as an impetus to confront a dominant form? As expatriates living in Paris one could perhaps see both dancers turning to what reminded them of home, and in bringing elements of this to meet, on the same stage, the dominant movements of a Western philosophy a modern dance form was created. And by homesickness I don’t mean nostalgia—its more a question of what the body carries with it, what the body remembers. The stories and gestures a body brings. In my character classes when learning Russian dance, I was taught that the flat-footed stomp was a gesture taken from the planting of seeds in the ground—here an example of the appropriation and colonisation that ballet enacts on ethnographic dance. Here Nijinsky’s radical new relationship of the body to the floor, could be read as stemming from a culturally embedded memory of planting seeds.

Is it perhaps this meeting of two different forms (forms once described as the occident and the orient, the setting and the rising) that draws me to the Ballet Russes and in particular the choreographies of Nijinsky and Nijinska? This moment where exile, displacement, and migration, where moving from the periphery to the centre created a point where two forms, and quite traditional forms, tousled together, created something that still resonates today. An example of different temporalities meeting on the one plane. How does this meeting happen? Is it an alongsidedness, or an entering/extracting, what is the temperature of this meeting?

‘Maybe rejecting identity is a good thing, maybe it’s not. I’ve never been sure.’ [8]

Coming in from the margins what does one bring to the centre? And if one talks about home-sickness, what does the cure for this bring? Something close that appeases and perhaps avenges the strangeness of the almost familiar, and vaguely other.

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1 Colin McCahon: A Question of Faith (2002) Ed. Bloem, M and Browne, Stedelijk Museum and Craig Potton Publishing

2 Woolfe, V (1928) Orlando: A Biography, London, Hogarth Press

3 Simone, F (1974) Handbook in Motion, The Press of the Nova Scotia College of Art and Design

4 Beach Birds for Camera, 1993, 28 minutes, colour. Choreography by Merce Cunningham. Directed by Elliot Caplan. Music by John Cage, Four3, http://www.veoh.com/watch/v150357902BFpGeGT

5 Nijinsky, V (Reprint edition 2006) Ed. Acocella, J The Diary of Vaslav Nijinsky, University of Illinois Press

6 Joffrey Ballet’s 1989 recreation of Nijinsky’s ‘Rite of Spring’ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ewOBXph0hP4

7 The Royal Ballet’s staging of Nijinska’s ‘Les Noces’ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yi-5mugSiX4

8 Viber conversation with artist Luke Willis Thompson