Whilst all this activity of the early seventies
was obviously taking place within broader
contexts of social and political activism,
and particular works were driven by political
imperatives (or as applied more acutely to
Allen’s work were interventionist, challenging
or disruptive in form and action rather than
content) there appears to have been little
sense of an over-arching ideological project
being pursued. In fact, one source of the
energy of the time appears to have been a
sense of inventive possibility of making ‘art’
itself anew in each work or action (which
itself, of course, does bear political implications).
And in this in fact we can perceive an individualism
underpinning this more apparent sense of communality
or collective action. With the work of Philip Dadson (including
Scratch Orchestra and From Scratch) the notable
exception, the collective action or activities
of the period don’t necessarily correlate
to a collective ethos or manifesto—an
important point given the appearance of collectivity
engendered in retrospection by New Art.
What I’m trying to convey here, however
loosely, is a sense of the context in which
Allen’s New Zealand work was undertaken—the
tensions in that context between a small community
and the energies such intellectual and creative
relationships gave rise to, alongside otherwise
disparate, quite individual sets of concerns
and impulses around which various critical
or theoretical interests clustered. The stress
here should be that critical issues or trajectories
very much emanated from rather than led work.
…to the EAF
It would be deceptive to simply claim the
inverse to the above as conditions in Australia
at this time, however it is clear that there
were more specifically determined organisational
frames and networks which provided support
as well an ideological impetus to post-object
practices. And the EAF was one the most important.
Formed by artists and academics in Adelaide
in 1974 with Australia Council support, the
EAF provided, in Anne Marsh’s words,
“a venue and a critical forum within
which experimental art could develop”,
and for founding board member and influential
art theorist Donald Brook in particular, “a
kind of theoretical laboratory where he could
test out his theory of experimental art.” Founding director Noel Sheridan brought
with him a library of documentation of American
and European conceptual and performance work,
and under his stewardship the EAF was committed
to national and international networking and
exchange, including acting as host to the
work of a number of important visiting artists
and theorists.
It’s easy to see the appeal of this
situation to Allen—the opportunity for
new conditions of dialogue within just the
form of supportive and internationally engaged
context for experimental practice that he
had been seeking to establish at Elam. Whilst
Adelaide like Auckland contained a very small
contemporary or experimental art scene, it
was a focal point within far larger Australian
and international networks, and furthermore
in the form of the EAF had become a site insisting
upon the overt intersection of artistic and
polemical activity. Crucially, Allen was resident
at the EAF during a particularly active moment
in its history: performances, screenings,
and presentations such as an important lecture
by Donald Brook on post object art
took place on an almost weekly basis, whilst
a major exhibition, Australian and New
Zealand Post Object Art: A Survey was
put on during May.
Marsh’s discussion of performance
art at the EAF during the seventies is useful
for imparting a sense of the dynamic creative
and intellectual environment Allen was entering
in 1976. It also infers something of its compatibility
to his own general concerns as well as the
manners in which his new work may have set
out to negotiate it. Marsh rehearses a discrimination
between three modes of performance—body
art, ritual performance, and conceptual performance
—whilst clearly marking the inter-determinacy
of these modes. As she notes, Brook was most
interested in conceptual art modes, in art
“more inclined to explore intellectual
systems than sensory experience,”
but in his own writing on early performance
work by Imants Tillers recognised the crucial
meeting of intelligence and imagination that
activated the propositional nature of much
performance (and certainly that of Allen.)
Allen’s work, as we shall see, traverses
these categorisations (although they remain
useful tools for its exegesis). Allen’s
Contact (1974), for example, which
did pursue concentrated bodily and psychic
states (body art), was fundamentally located
at a nexus of experiential and intellectual
investigation—at the productive intersections
of sensory experience and formalised, repeated
action structures or patterns. In Allen’s
performance work the intuitive, pragmatic
and intellectual always met in discursive
play.
Also of interest is the manner in which
Marsh points to a key issue of intellectual
conflict fermenting at the EAF: the meeting
of Brook’s determination for an art
of and interventionist within the social—an
art of social ethics—and Sheridan’s
equally determined separation of art from
social or political responsibility. There’s
an oscillation between these poles within
Allen’s work itself, right from the
beginning, with the social coming strongly
to the fore in Adelaide works such as On
Planting a Native and There are Always
Elephants to be Made Drunk, particularly
when compared to his most recent New Zealand
works, the O-AR exhibitions of 1975.
However, as we shall see, all Allen’s
work was in part based on responses to immediate
social situations. The EAF work illuminates
this to some degree, but any clear reading
of an art of social politics within Allen’s
work is also complicated by On Planting
a Native which actually disrupted the
masquerade-as-progressive of a politically
comfortable response to a contentious issue
of the day.
Pursuing Contact
Contact (1974) was a performance work
in three sections undertaken as part of the
Four Men in a Boat project at the Auckland
City Art Gallery. It was Allen’s first
important performance work, but marked an
extension of rather than rupture with many
of the key determining characteristics, questions
and impulses of his preceding (and subsequent)
installation work: the setting up of a system
or structure within which acts of exploration
(on part of both artist and spectator) take
place, often in terms of physical articulations
of space to be moved around and through; the
enclosure as a (porous) boundary; the triggering
of interaction between dynamic clusters of
bodies, space and material forms; the investigation
of material occupations and articulations
of space as fluid dialogues or ever-changing
relations of corporeality; the determinacy
of spectorial presence upon the work; the
relation of the individual to the collective
or the social; and the cognitive capacity
of the sensory body and its relation to linguistic
utterances, structures and meaning.
The four environmental structures of Small
Worlds (1969) functioned, as Christina
Barton has noted, as proposed situations “which
invited actual or implied participation on
the part of the gallery visitor.” As
such, Barton claims, “they fulfilled
Allen’s new conception of sculpture
as an activity rather than an object...” New Zealand Environment
#5 (1969) involved a total enclosure separating
viewers from both gallery and normal social
environment and immersing them in almost overwhelming
sensory stimulus. Arena (1970) was
a set of barbed wire barriers (or enclosures)
running at eye, crotch, and knee levels that
posed problems regarding spectorial apprehension
of inside/outside relations. A later work, O-AR
2 at the Auckland City Art Gallery in
1975 involved the division of each of two
gallery spaces (side by side to each other)
into corridor like spaces with a single, large
hanging sheet of plastic: black plastic for
one gallery, clear plastic for the other.
In one gallery a viewer could see others moving
through the space on the other side of the
plastic, in the other gallery viewers were
hidden from each other. However in both spaces
the disturbance of air caused merely by the
movement of people on either side of the plastic
was enough to cause it to shift, sway and
ripple and so the presence of others was conveyed
and ‘perceived’ sensually.
The relation of Arena to O-AR 2
is in a sense emblematic of what was an ongoing
dialogue or oscillation in Allen’s work.
O-AR 2 was the most experientially
subtle and open-ended of Allen’s installation
work to this point. Its phenomenological exploration
of subjectivity differed from that of Arena
in that it was stripped of obvious social
reference other than that of the specific
context of the institutional gallery. On the
other hand Arena (exhibited with a
work comprising small tent-like structures
entitled Community ) was deeply sourced
in the social conditions of lived experience,
in part like New Zealand Environment #5
via the cultural metaphoricity of its utilitarian
materials, but more specifically in reference
to the alienation engendered by life in state
housing environments. Arena was an
attempt to manifest the barely suppressed
aggression and indeed actual conflict experienced
living in such an environment, as well as
to explore (in both phenomenological and metaphorical
terms) the means by which people protect themselves
(practically and emotionally) within such
environments. Indeed, all Allen’s installation
works of the period operated in some way as
defensive structures (barriers) involved in
this exploration of the aggressive (yet on
occasion protective) controlling of space
(and so relations within space).
In wishing to attribute to Allen’s
work (and working spirit) an exploratory openness
Wystan Curnow, writing in the mid seventies,
down-played both the aggressiveness of the
work and its scope of social reference, preferring
to emphasise in the first instance a contained
phenomenological encounter, on occasion prompting
a further linguistically negotiated reflection
upon individual cognition. Curnow’s
critique promoted a structural reading of
Allen’s installation work (as, almost
paradoxically a self-contained structure for
the opening out of sensible perception) rather
than one seeking to embed the works’
materiality and metaphoricity within a broader
world of material and social reference.
Curnow used the figure of irony (the conscious
attribution of a double-experience of positioning
within the work’s structure) to redeem
Allen from the charge of over-determining
both Arena’s phenomenological
and metaphoric dimensions through tight social
reference: the active passage through the
spatial dimensions of the work supposedly
resulting in a pacifying enclosing within
those dimensions—that which is protective
is also restrictive. This allowed Curnow to
refute a criticism that might otherwise be
made of Allen’s enclosures, that they
“may seem machines for processing the
viewer” and so subvert the viewer’s
freedoms (which Curnow held dearly).
Christina Barton has raised similar concerns
regarding aspects of Allen’s practice,
primarily by concentrating upon a distinction
between ‘environment’ and ‘installation’
works. The former, she has claimed, were involved
in the “exploration of spatial and temporal
concerns within the bounded confines of a
closed situation” rather than in “an
open-ended interplay with the phenomenal world.” The
environment was “essentially retroactive
in intent.” It risked “denying
the potential for the participant to enter
into a dialectical relation with the work
which might, by offering insights into the
real environment beyond its confines, provide
an opportunity for the viewer to re-examine
their own relation to the world at large.” On
the other hand an installation (of which she
claimed Arena as Allen’s first),
“rather than generating its own spatial
and temporal parameters, functions in relation
to the specifics of real space…The spectator,
co-existing in this newly charged situation,
was therefore, invited to physically and perceptually
explore her/his own relation to the dialectical
interplay between container and contained.”
Whilst I don’t believe that it’s
quite so easy to distinguish between environment
and installation as precise critical models
for Allen’s practice, Barton’s critique does place
a model of interplay between viewer and work
within a broader socio-spatial context that
assists in moving analysis beyond Curnow’s
problem of social reference being treated
as by necessity leading to the viewer’s
over-determination as subject (and does so
without Curnow’s recourse to the de-centring
effects of irony).
Contact might in one sense be construed
as having put into actual motion the elements
already at play in Allen’s installation
work. Contact was indeed sculpture
“as activity” and thus subject
to similar models of analysis, particularly
with regard to an oscillation between open-ended
exploration and overt phenomenological determination
within the work’s structure. The overall
work involved three parts or activities. The
first, Computer Dance, took place within
an area delineated by metal tubing and hanging,
weighted nylon and subject to bright, flashing
lights. Four pairs of performers operated
hand-held emitter/receiver devices connected
to audio speakers. A narrow beam of light
was sent between the emitter/receiver devices.
When the two devices were in alignment (in
perfect ‘contact’) a perfect high-pitched
tone was heard from the speaker (the devices
also vibrated slightly to give a greater sense
of ‘contact’ to the performers).
In Paragole Tapes four performers were
assisted in dressing in layers of calico and
hessian (each performer in a different colour).
The final layer completely enclosed them in
a sack-like structure. Each of the four then
began to move to the centre of a cube-structure
in the gallery, articulating strange sounds
as explorative (pre-linguistic) communication
and testing what movement was left available
to them by their garments (or enclosures).
Once they had met in the middle (after around
an hour) they used their teeth to free each
other, hanging their garments or capes over
the frame, enclosing themselves in a protective
cube. Finally, in Body Articulation/Imprint
six performers each took up position
on a large sheet of polythene over white paper
next to a bucket of paint (a different colour
for each performer). Each performer smeared
paint over their joints and began to move,
the colour indicating the movement of their
body. They each then covered the rest of the
body with paint and made a body imprint on
the plastic covered floor (at its peripheries),
now recording the movement of their body.
Then the performers moved closer to the centre
of the proscribed space, formed into pairs,
and explored colour changes through dual movement.
Contact was clearly concerned with
seeking some form of transcendence of or release
from both societal alienation and individual
anxiety through collective action. The
overall work was, however, highly structured
in conception and confined within an institutional
space. There was a substantial difference
between the structuring and location of this
work and that, for example, of Philip Dadson’s
“Purposeless Work” actions where
although given an initial direction and set
of parameters (a plot or score) individual
performers were presented with a more fluid
context and environment for improvisation
or autonomous action. Yet neither could Contact
be too closely equated to other complex,
structured gallery-based performance works
such as those undertaken by Bruce Barber and
Kieran Lyons as the latter two artists generally
also assumed the role of (sole or principal)
performer within more theatrical or narrative-based
situations, thus testing the propositions
via their own sensual experience. Barton,
I think, was accurate in her criticism of
Contact as risking over-determination
of the limits and conditions of its participants’
experiences. There’s a social laboratory sense
to the work, an exploration of social dynamics
within a controlled field of spectacle. Such exploration continued in Allen’s
EAF performance works but in more direct manners
in terms of artist/audience relations and
with a more specific focus upon communication
acts or vectors as primary means of relation.
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