Residency

Notes toward a residency:
As regards 'the work':

The contemporary world is the field of enquiry. At it's best it might transcend the present and sustain engagement for some further time. It might even allow engagement or meaning or content to emerge in another time. For other individuals. That is where the magic and mystery dwells. There are always politics, once the use of margarine was an expression of the politics of poverty. Now, the reverse may be true. Labour, at it's best once sustained at best a healthful engagement with the world. Now the luxury of health is an industry in itself, and the bogus lures of labour engender malnutrition and disaster for individuals and communities alike, despite the quaint notion of 'progress'.

Within and without the process, even when the work appears benign, I would wish worms of doubt or unease to permeate the experience. It is always for me a speculative practice which might take the bleeding obvious and look for other nuances, other reasons or other possibilities. Through the experience of 'doing', and then of being there, the possibility of transcendence or a new realisation might ensue. For the audience but not least for the artist. This necessary unpredictability; poised on recognised arenas of engagement, acknowledged context, physical space, chemistries of personality, and the recognition of emotions as unalienable forces, are necessary energies for the work to survive. It is also counter to a disturbing drift to the "art-of-affirmation" wherebye the only challenge is to meet the expectations of "gallerist", pundit, or purse-string.

This survival of the work is optimistically measured in terms of the changes within the perceptions of those who allow that experience to mediate with a priori knowledge. As through technology and mega-commerce, we consume diversity as novelty, we become more divorced from our perceiving. In the war-zone of Northern Ireland, cronic-unemployed street kids still swig Mexican beers with citrus jammed in the bottle-neck. The ubiquitous sun-dried tomato balances on a burger-bun. While in Glasgow deep fried Pizza slides it's topping into the boiling fat alongside the frozen cod.

As academic shorthand - footnotes - quotations - become signs for a club of pseudo-intellect; conference-culture masquerades as culture, personal sensibility and the poetic imagination becomes wider in referral but thinner in substance, the bastardisation of language eases individual responsibility and understanding becomes an irrelevance which conflicts with ÒMission statements' and corporate goals, now happily adopted by academies - in -peril, and major public venues paternally reject the challenge of contention to protect the paying public, through fear of losing comfortable sponsorship...

Concience is blurred by bottom lines, abstract constructs become reified, and economic abstractions become absolutes which cannot be questioned. There has been much to lament as 'the industry', sets self-seeking goals, the development of professionalisms based on bombast or yuppie concepts of order and control, and 'style'. Even irony is coopted to serve the aquisitive urge, another form of curatorial colonisation, vis. Above the Sofa . . the cute but self-deprecating title of the Gitte Weise Xmas (present) Show.' Sydney, Dec. 1999.

If this sounds bleak - then there is more to say about the absolute urgency of a contemporary art-practice which allows for a thoughtful and complex experiential engagement. There is as much to be said for as against, the naive idealisism of the 60's, clumsy attempts to recognise real needs and clarify real truths, a mess of pottage with some inevitable nutrition, amongst the mess. And a deal of courage in the face of the then utterly incomprehending status-quo. Not to mention Duchamp, Beckmann, Judd, and Yoko too, where are you all? Can we meet their challenge?

Proposed activities for this residency will attempt to make use of such facilities as exist at Tekotago in order to develope new work. As with all my histories recognition will be given to the particulars of the place, as they may be perceived by such a vagrant as myself, in order to surface recognitions which might connect with contexts and audiences beyond the gestative situation. Commonalities across the particularities of cultures, are critical to our time I believe, whilst the particularities of issues serve as markers from which to measure each of our own scars of passage. The proof of the theoretical pudding; magic or not; needs to be tested in the arena. In this instance in Christchurch in a formal venue, while more flexible situations will be saught in Dunedin. I would hope a small published document will emerge from this working opportunity, and will I hope mark another shift of my own learning, inevitable through the process and imporant and exciting through engagement in new encounters and debate. Outside the group-think and power-plays of larger centres.

Likely media will inevitably draw upon the digital, for many reasons, but a down-to-earth attitude to mundane materiality and the physical, and the gestural, will in turn mediate with cold-manipulated imagery. This will in turn will attempt to delicately confront, while allowing splinters of doubt to trigger other layers of content. Objects and structures always offer immediate relationship between people and their histories and their pleasures and fears. Scale and physical properties of material directly engender deep perceptions and murky triggers of awareness, and other layers of reference and referral. Our blase acceptanceof complex imagery and new media use within the commercial worlds, needs to be tweaked, and in all ways we need to be reminded of own own humanity and weaknesses and above all of our strengths and individual powers through self-responsibility .

Adrian Hall, January, 2000.