Arts
One day at a time
by Sally Blundell
Ranging from lions prowling the stalls of a historic cinema to a massive pile of urban junk blocking an inner-city street, the __One Day Sculpture__ series has expanded New Zeaalnders' notion of art and where you might find it.
The sound of bells came in waves – approaching and receding, washing up on the streets of inner-city Wellington for no apparent reason that Naomi O’Connor, lying on a couch in an osteopath’s clinic, could discover.
“That’s all I could hear – these ringing bells. You’d hear it softly, then the sounds would get closer, then would go off down the road like a really slow wave. It was like that Doppler effect of hearing something approaching, then suddenly right near you, then moving away. I loved it. I love things that get people wondering. That’s what art is about, isn’t it? Making you pause, then the course of your whole day is slightly altered?”
O’Connor was one of many Wellingtonians within earshot of The Flood, My Chanting, a performance work by Wellington artist and writer Amy Howden-Chapman in which antique bells, placed in a circuit around the city areas most at risk from flooding, were consecutively rung over a period of two hours.
“I wanted to get an emotional response to this idea of future flooding, which is something that is very hard for people to think about,” explains Howden-Chapman. “I’m interested how sound affects people emotionally, and in this whole idea of narrative, and how narrative can be used to talk about big issues. It is a fact – flooding will happen – but I did want that initial moment of fiction.”
It is such moments of fiction, brief what-if scenarios encountered in the public arena without warning and with minimal explanation, that epitomise One Day Sculpture, a series of 20 commissioned artworks by national and international artists staged in selected sites around the country for a maximum 24 hours each. The idea is that such chanced-upon encounters – outside the gallery, beyond the permanent plinth – will remain in our collective memory far longer than the bronze monarchs and stone-faced explorers that gaze out from our civic spaces at a generally inured audience.
The series ends this week, and over the past 10 months such deliberate acts of artistic myth-making have left audiences mystified, amused, irate or oblivious as they stumbled across a series of spirals by American artist James Luna in Te Papa, a fake tableaux of seagulls, tables and chairs in Auckland’s Western Park by Nick Austin and Kate Newby, or a temporary dwelling by Kah Bee Chow in Wellington’s Haining St (the former heart of Chinatown), in memory of a Chinese migrant killed in 1905.
Some of the works verged on the carnival-esque – in Hawera, New Zealand artist Liz Allan organised a one-day Ronald Hugh Morrieson festival (called, naturally, Came a Hot Sundae), while in Opunake half the town queued up to see two lions prowling the stalls of the historic Everybody’s Theatre as part of Venezuelan artist Javier Téllez’s spectacular celebration of cinema’s former glory days.
Other works were monumental. Last December, Wellingtonians awoke to a massive pile of discarded furniture, old cars, bikes and other urban junk blocking an inner-city street. The work – Journée des barricades by UK artists Heather and Ivan Morison – was unnerving in its unexpectedness, evocative of the clamour of street protests and civic strife, remindful of our usually unseen accumulation of waste.
There were frustratingly reticent works. Slovakian artist Roman Ondák’s Camouflaged Building comprised small buttresses of sawdust piled up against Wellington’s Old Government Buildings. Although traipsing around the old edifice did invite renewed admiration for the historic extravagance of a kauri and rimu version of a Renaissance-style stone palace, the work itself was barely noticeable and, as with Howden-Chapman’s bells, unmarked.
“We haven’t gone for a big brand with a big One Day Sculpture sign beside each work,” says David Cross, director of Massey University School of Fine Arts’ Litmus Research Initiative, which organised the project. “If you go for lots of marketing, you’re going to diminish that opportunity to have a fairly unmediated engagement with contemporary art practice.”
Even if that lack of mediation leaves people bewildered?
“Maybe that’s the nature of contemporary art – our experience of it is always to some extent fleeting, we’re never fully aware of the context. Maybe that creates space for the imagination, rather than for us having to close the meaning of the work down by dotting all the i’s and crossing all the t’s.”
Although few people saw all the works – and many have seen none – Cross says increasing numbers of people “outside the conventional art world” have engaged in the series. This is how the works will live on, will become “permanent” – not just through the comprehensive One Day Sculpture website and not just in the forthcoming book, but in the collective imagination of the hundreds of people who, like Naomi O’Connor, experienced an unexpected departure from both the predictable course of their days and their understanding of the word sculpture.
In March, Auckland artist Billy Apple staged a billboard-sized protest against the protective layering applied in 1987 to Henry Moore’s sculpture Bronze Form in Wellington’s Botanic Garden – a conservation process clearly at odds with Moore’s wishes. Less is Moore was confrontational, convincing and long-lasting (although in place for only 24 hours, it has provoked an ongoing discussion over the treatment of Moore’s work).
But was it sculpture?
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