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Bowler and Flower 1993
First published on the occasion
of Greer Twiss: Theatre Workshop
Auckland Art Gallery Toi o Tamaki 8 March –
2 June 2003
Guest Curator: Allan Smith
Allan Smith is a contemporary curator and critic;
he lectures in the painting department at Elam
School of Fine Arts. Exhibitions include Fear
and Beauty, The Crystal Chain Gang and Bright
Paradise.
© Auckland Art Gallery
Toi o Tamaki, Greer Twiss, Allan Smith and Robin
Woodward
All rights reserved. Apart from fair dealing
for the purposes of private study, research,
criticism or review, as permitted under the
Copyright Act, no part of this publication may
be reproduced by any process without prior permission
from the publishers.
ISBN 0 86463 250 9
Published by Auckland Art Gallery Toi o Tamaki
PO Box 5449, Auckland 1, New Zealand
Telephone: (64 9) 307 7100
Fax: (64 9) 302 1096
Email: shop@aucklandartgallery.govt.nz
PO Box 5449 Auckland, New Zealand
www.akcity.govt.nz/artgallery
TABLETOP THEATRE:
HALF AN APPLE AND A PAIR OF SPECTACLES
ALLAN SMITH
Along with the table-top,
Degas, for one, explicitly projected his scene
of action against a bare floor or stage …
To arrange the action upon either table or floor
allows it to be seen both as three-dimensional
and as a flat silhouette of itself, and it permits
it to be seen as in front of or on top of an
absolute barrier to sight, a table-top or floor
that marks an end to the space of the picture.
Philip Fisher, Making and effacing art
Faussone’s hands …
illustrated and glossed his tales, imitating,
as required, a shovel, a monkey wrench, a hammer.
In the stagnant air of the mess hall they designed
the elegant catenaries of the suspension bridge
and the spires of the derricks, coming to the
rescue of speech when it stalled. They had reminded
me of distant readings of Darwin, of the artificer’s
hand that, making tools and bending matter,
stirred the human brain from its torpor and
still guides and stimulates and draws it ahead,
as a dog with a blind master.
Primo Levi, The wrench
THEATRE OF OBJECTS
In Greer Twiss’s collection
of clippings pertaining to his youthful activity
as a locally renowned puppeteer, there is a
photograph of him in his Auckland Grammar School
uniform operating the two-handed rig of a marionette.
The intensity of concentration is obvious as
Twiss manipulates a set of sticks and strings,
controlling the jerky actions of a puppet on
the stage below, outside the photograph. With
a lifetime of making and investigation in between,
there are both overt and subtle links between
the preoccupations of the young puppeteer and
Twiss’s most recent exhibition of small-scale
soldered struts, ladders, movie cameras, birds,
guns and boats, held at the 40 George Street
gallery late last year. It became clear to me
when I was writing about his 1993 installation
Decoys and Delusions how, in one way
or another, the dexterous manipulation of objects
and a language of theatrical staging has always
been of central importance in Twiss’s
art. [1] Twiss’s
sculptural œuvre has developed as an ongoing
narrative of theatrical contrivances, as a series
of skillfully fabricated and self-consciously
staged events. Subject to this theatrically
shaded aesthetic, elements drawn from an everyday
world of people and things are made strange,
undergoing various forms of disassembly, reconstruction
and re-presentation as elegantly formal set-pieces.
A persistent feature of
Twiss’s practice has been the devoted
attention he has paid to the spatial deployment
of figural components and objects on a stage-like
platform, plane or base-plate. Twiss’s
characteristic method for setting things out
has most very often involved a tense play between
spatial diagramming and the corporeal reciprocities
of touch; between the optical organisation of
the ensemble and the density of its physical
traits. Severed hands and sections of bronze
fingers point and push at key places in the
work, enacting a discontinuous grammar of touch
within a rationalized geometrical space. The
linearity of tilted struts, angled brackets,
ropes and diagonal lines of sight is constantly
opposed to cast or modelled objects and to the
emphatic materiality of lead, bronze or steel.
Implements and devices such as spectacles, rulers
and string-lines are presented as highly tactile
objects that invite our prehensile grasp, as
if to remind us that such aids for seeing and
measuring the world are prosthetic tools which
extend the capability of the body in the physical
world. Twiss’s groups of objects or partial
objects always appear as if they have just been
moved into their current configuration to test
out their dynamic interaction. They trigger
the impulse to pick them up, handle, inspect
and rearrange them, as we would the scaled-down
props of a set designer’s model. The sense
that we could almost remake, rearrange or go
to work on the components in Twiss’s sculptures
is heightened by the variations on the language
of artisanal effects he has played out over
the years, in parallel with his adoption of
varying spatial formats.
Twiss’s attention
to the solutions of joining and surface-finishing
required by different materials is that of an
artist whose models are machine-shop specialists,
carpenters, metalworkers or pragmatic repairmen
as much as other artists. His chosen materials
and predominantly oily-grey, black and silver
colour schemes (a number of late 1960s and 1970s
pieces notwithstanding) have kept the aesthetic
tenor of his work close to the worlds of the
light-industrial factory floor and the metal
workshop. However, his use of rolls of lead
sheet, precut steel plate, sections of tread-plate,
industrial fastenings and sheets of galvanized
steel can be contrasted to the brute literalist
use that American artists like Robert Morris
and Richard Serra made of such materials in
Minimal art. No matter how heavy and resistant
the material – be it lengths of square-section
steel or dull grey lead – Twiss always
introduces an elegant lightening of its inert
physicality through deft applications of the
artisanal touch or gesture, even when he is
not fashioning resemblances from it. By accentuating
the manual processes of small-scale workshop
techniques, such as cutting with snips or guillotine,
folding, grinding, soldering and welding, staining,
hand-painting, scouring and filing, Twiss insinuates
the mark of the private craftsman into the industrial
matrix of mechanization and abstraction.
Tools have always held a
special fascination for Twiss, because they
are, as he puts it, ‘objects that humans
had been dealing with’. [2]
He has a collection of tools, some of which
belonged to his father, a cabinet-maker and
builder; he still has a saw which his grandfather
sawed wood with. The megaphone on the table
of his 1989 work Anonymous Builder: A Renaissance
Dreamer [3]
is based on one that has been in the family
since it was used on a ship of the line in Nelson’s
fleet. As a child Twiss was always playing in
his parents’ workshops and took a short
cut to primary school through the cluttered
yard of Auckland sculptor Richard Gross, whose
bronze Athlete (1936) sits atop a gate
of the Domain. Not only does Twiss concern himself
with variations on the theme of artisanal processes,
but often in his art he also turns the tools
of his trade into virtual fetish-objects. Hand
tools he has modelled or used as ‘found
objects’ in his work include: a ball-peen
hammer, claw hammer, trowels, dividers, pocket
knives, saw-horses, soldering iron, drill, chisel,
wooden plaster floats, steel rules, a wooden
folding ruler, axes, brooms, telescope, binoculars,
G-clamps and carry-straps.
For any artist who makes
physical objects and retains intimate physical
control, rather than merely creative jurisdiction
over their production, the studio workshop with
its equipment is obviously of central importance,
as both an actual locale and an imaginary plenum.
Even so, only a few artists incorporate or index
the language of the workshop in their finished
work in the way that Twiss has done repeatedly
during his career. Twiss’s studio workshop
serves as a storehouse, a properties room, and
a clearing-house for ideas in the making. It
is both a densely laden physical site and an
originary psychic space. This double orientation
is characteristic of Twiss’s sculpture,
only with changing emphases at different junctures
in his career: it pulls toward the robust, the
literally physical and the objectively present,
and it withdraws into a complex interiority.
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