Culture
The thinking machine
by Sally Blundell
A large nugget of coal sits on a makeshift plinth. It’s been polished to a pupil-like sheen, transformed from a dark lump of extracted carbon – or, a few million years before that, some swamp foliage sliding into a peaty grave – into something beautiful, incendiary, meteoric.
It’s that transformation – from dark to light, from dank to dazzling – that intrigues kinetic sculptor Andrew Drummond. The fact of its slow metamorphosis un-derground. Its very useful combustibility above ground. Its dirty, dusty ordinariness that can be converted into the elegant jet jewellery of the Victorian era, or its natural evolution into diamond.
Every day up to eight coal trains thunder past Drummond’s home and studio – a converted power station on a wedge of land between Christchurch’s Heathcote River and the railway tracks – on their way to the port of Lyttelton.
“Why coal? It’s such an arcane thing to be interested in, but there’s so much meaning – potent energy, volatility,” says Drummond. “It’s one of those really banal things, things that people walk past and don’t even see. I find that really fascinating.”
In 2002, the Dunedin Public Art Gallery showed Devices: rotating displacing assigning, an exhibition of things glass and brass and conductive. The gentle clockwork of these machines translated the mechanisms of industry into the rhythms of nature – the earth turning, the sea breathing, the underground arteries of coal or water shifting and sifting through time and matter, the human form traversing the landscape. Part science, part fiction, part 19th-century basement invention, part clandestine alchemy, the exhibits were self-absorbed, busy in their inexplicable missions.
Take the titles of his work: Assignation device, Counter rotating and earthing device, Listening and viewing device – the superficial logic of usefulness, real or otherwise, productive or emulative.
“Yeah, the titles are important. If you want to use the language of reading.”
Right.
Born in Nelson, Andrew Drummond grew up in Palmerston North, a highly opinionated high-school activist, an anti-war protester emerging out of a strongly religious background.
He went on to teachers’ training college where he was introduced to the kinetic sculpture of Len Lye – an encounter that would continue to influence Drummond’s career as a leading sculptor, a master of provocative, compelling kinetic art recognised here and internationally.
To study art he headed overseas, to the University of Waterloo in Ontario, a quiet campus in a quiet city, a day’s trip to the artistic hubs of Toronto, New York, Buffalo. Here he encountered the work of kinetic sculptors Alexander Calder and Yves Tinguely, artists who creatively and controversially explored the 20th century’s fascination with machinery.
He stumbled across a copy of the recently released Almost Complete Works of Marcel Duchamp – an artist of huge importance to Calder and Tinguely, as well as to the young Kiwi art student hungry to experience the new aesthetics of alternative sculptural practice.
In Duchamp he found a poetics of impersonality, a separation, as the French artist once wrote, of “the man who suffers from the mind that creates”.
“I always believed Duchamp was an important artist, but I didn’t realise how important he was. Later on, the depth of his work became really apparent. He was making observations out of a socialised, democratised world where mass production existed and technology was going through a huge shift. He embraced that, and turned art upside down. He enabled art to start again in the 20th century. He was a huge, towering figure. I’d put him in the same league as Leonardo.”
And then there was an eight-week stint in Edinburgh where he met Joseph Beuys, renowned political activist, sculptor, teacher and adherent of the new body-art movement sweeping across Europe.
“I was seeing these artists who had already broken boundaries, who were looking at new ways of working, amazing people with incredible attitudes towards making art, making works out of machines, doing performances that used technology, paint, materials like skin and blood. It was like being touched with an electric rod. It changed my life. I know I was lucky to go to Canada. I was even luckier to go to Scotland. I went away as an art-school student. I came back as an artist.”
Drummond returned to New Zealand in 1976 to find a country already exploring more experimental art forms. After a stint teaching, he worked at the education office of the National Art Gallery. After hours, he began working on the landscapes, drawing with candles, painting with dyes in snow.
In 1977, in a Wellington garden, he donned what was to become a trademark white suit and performed his Ritual for Summer Solstice. It was Easter, a high point in the pagan and Christian calendars. He was tied to a cross in a staged exhibition that would pre-empt the controversial work at Christchurch’s CSA Gallery the following year.
As part of the Christchurch Arts Festival, he re-enacted the crucifixion of St Andrew (itself a re-enactment of Christ’s crucifixion). He was naked. He was tied to a wooden cross. As Drummond later told Art New Zealand, “As much as anything else it made people think about the role of witnessing. It wasn’t nice. But then it wasn’t supposed to be.”
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