Art
Unreal estate
by Ian Wedde
In which Gavin Hipkins – a visitor from Wellington, a “tourist of photography” – stalks New York, tracking its histories of modernism and mass production.
Gavin Hipkins has been back a while now from his four-month residency in New York with the International Studio and Curatorial Programme (ISCP). Not long after his return we met in Mojos, a café on Wellington’s Kent Tce. The idea was to sit somewhere without piped music, but Mojos has given in to ambient sound (generic modern jazz). In addition, the coffee roasters are hurling hot beans around the insides of stainless-steel drums. No matter, the micro-cassette stays in its bag and we impersonate the crowd-piercing, nasal intonations of New Yorkers, albeit rather soft-spoken ones.
So how was his time in that loud, talkative city? It was great, Hipkins says, but no way long enough. Let’s get this out there early in the piece. Creative New Zealand does a tremendous job supporting the biennial residency. But four months turns to three by the time you’ve got organised and got up some project momentum. The ISCP arranges studio meetings with curators and gallerists every two weeks. Over three months, that adds up to something like six encounters from which some ongoing connection might emerge. The probability is something like one in five. A residency of six months could double that.
In New York, it’s all about making connections. It takes work: meeting, talking, pitching. Getting gallerists interested is hard. Getting a line in through an interested curator improves your chances. Getting connected through a collector is what makes the room go quiet long enough for you to get heard. Hipkins’s best chance in New York in future will be through such a collector encounter (she walked in, bought work) – his best one-in-five shot.
The law of averages says that, on this basis, New Zealand artists on the ISCP scheme will make one sustainable connection about every two years. This could double if the residency extended to six months and quadruple if it was annual. Most countries participating in the ISCP programme do six months. The Australians do six-monthers back-to-back. Needless to say, a year would be wonderful. Why go all that way just to make work? It’s about total immersion.
For Hipkins, New York’s still the art capital of the world. Never mind the southern hemisphere and especially Asian behemoth biennales that have sprung up: the Brisbane Art Gallery’s Asia Pacific Triennale; the Kwangju Biennale of Contemporary Art in Korea; Fukuoka Asian Art Triennale; Shanghai Biennale; the Auckland Triennial; Taipei Biennale; Yokohama Triennale …
Who needs them? In New York, contemporary Chinese art comes to town. In 2005, the astounding Takashi Murakami showed Little Boy, his exploration of Japan’s otaku world of geek pop-culture fanaticism. Down on Church St, apexart offers artist residencies that forbid you to make work – the time is to be spent talking and connecting. At the other extreme, the capitalist involution of art is announced with cheerful rage in Paul Werner’s Museum, Inc: Inside the Global Art World (2005), in which he parses the proposition that art behaves like money because money behaves like art. This is the capital of the America Werner dubs “the Living Museum of Wild Capitalism”. Or perhaps that’s Out West.
In Art Journal, summer 2001, Hipkins published “Pleasures of the State”, a very funny and sharp account of Disney’s California Adventure in Anaheim, especially the section dealing with the “Grizzly Park Recreation Area”. Hipkins is an accomplished tourist – a flâneur of the weird and uncanny, a canny imaginative opportunist, stalking the talk of the town and its dealers and museums of art, sampling their wares and words, buttonholing the city’s frontierists.
Describing the West Coast’s artefactual “Grizzly Peak”, he wrote that “it must ultimately be read as a perverse and telling photograph”. He might equally have been describing New York in 2006, though when that did happen the photographic suite he made borrowed its title from the affectionately surreal Sapphic erotics of Gertrude Stein’s 1914 classic Tender Buttons (“A sight a whole sight and a little groan grinding …”) rather than the covert pornography of Grizzly Peak (“with its mine shafts, waterways, and virgin forests, Grizzly Peak could easily be renamed Beaver Hill”, wrote Hipkins).
That’s not to say he’s a snob. Preferring New York to Anaheim, Tender Buttons to Grizzly Peak, doesn’t mean he doesn’t find the unhomely space between them the location of real fascination. The richly ambiguous zone that opens up between the barely repressed sexualising of “Beaver Hill” as a West Coast theme-park experience, and the linguistically flirtatious sexuality of Stein’s Tender Buttons as a key modernist (honorary) East Coast work of avant-garde literature, is just the place to take “perverse and telling” photographs.
In an essay published in Art New Zealand (summer 2003-04), curator William McAloon asserted that Hipkins had been “frequently described” as a “tourist of photography”. The term “tourist of photo-graphy” was coined by Giovanni Intra, an art-school friend and subsequent co-conspirator, in the catalogue for Signs of the Times: Sampling New Directions in New Zealand Art at City Gallery, Wellington, in 1997.
The “tourist of photography” descriptor aptly classifies Hipkins’s diverse excursions. As a curator-tourist, he explored the uncanny and disregarded photographic record of New Zealand identity in the Alexander Turnbull Library’s collections, in the exhibition The Unhomely (1997).
Page 1 2 
