Fleshly Worn

ASA Gallery, Auckland

24 November - 14 December 1995

Fleshly Worn

Richard McWhannell Monique Redmond

Louise Bourgeois Giovanni Intra Peter Madden Yuk King Tan Darren Glass Lucy Harvey CITY GROUP Esther Leigh

Robert Jahnke James Charlton

Patricia Piccinini John Puhiatau Pule

Christopher Braddock Lesley Kaiser & John Barnett

Catalogue essay by Vanya Kovach Co-ordinated by Christopher Braddock

Fleshly Worn is supported by:

ASA Bachelor of Visual Arts Programme, School of Art & Design, Auckland Institute of Technology

ASA Gallery, Auckland Society of Arts

ti Apple Computer

This catalogue is published on the occasion of Fleshly Worn at the ASA Gallery, Auckland, New Zealand, 24 November -14December1995 in association with the University of Auckland Symposium Bodies in Question, 23 - 26November1995.

This catalogue was made possible by the generous assistance of:

Gow Langsford Gallery, Auckland

Gregory Flint Gallery, Auckland James Wallace Charitable Arts Trust, Auckland

Aberhart North Gallery, Auckland

Grierson Consultants: Art & Education, Auckland

Christopher Braddock wishes to thank the artists and Vanya Kovach for their enthusiastic involvement in Fleshly Worn.

Thanks are also due to Elaine Mayer, Gallery Manager at the ASA Gallery, for her support.

ISBN 0 - 473 - 03562 - 6

©ASA Gallery, the artists and Vanya Kovach, 1995

Acknowledging and Resisting the Divided Self

A philosophical response to Fleshly Worn

Vanya Kovach

1. The Self Contained. Here is something that can be said - we wear our flesh. Our body is presented to us through the eyes of others, and by our own uses of it, as raiment, as apparel. To the eyes of eighteenth century Europeans, the flesh of Pacific Islanders was the costume of the Pacific; expressive, representative, acceptable and thereby available to the eye. And for all of culture that has stemmed from Europe, from the decisive split between body and mind carved by Descartes, our self is the self contained and clothed in the body. The increasingly visual bias of twentieth century culture has made us even more distanced from our outer selves. We are_ all, and women most, sights to each other. Some claim that the history of consciousness is just the story of how we learn to feel other than ourselves and other from the present. If this is true, then the most obvious and powerfully intimate contrast to the transcendent self is the body.

Using and Losing the Body. We wear our bodies and we use them. Using and experiencing the body as a tool both cuts across our distance from it, and adds to it. The action of my body is an extension of myself. For John Locke, our right to our bodies allows us to also make claim to, to make possessions of, those things that we mix our bodies wit!}, the fruits of our labour. We write upon the world with our bodies, leave our especial mark which makes the world our own. But the products of our bodies can stand in opposition to us, deny our involvement, our belonging. When no personal mark is left on a product, it stands alone. We are left with the task of remaking a relationship, trying to forge a tie between the thing and its origin, between our self and the work of our body or the bodies of others.

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Inscribing the Flesh. We work and write upon the world - and the world writes on us. The inscription of experience on the body connects and disconnects us to it. It disconnects most where we experience ourselves as a sight, most particularly, a sight for others, the wearing of our body a performance or betrayal.

But the body is also an objective record; it cites the past to us in readable terms, life made flesh. In this way the body is a text. This fashionable statement is dangerous, since it can seduce us too wholly into the reflective and distanced state that divides us into body and self, and makes other people more other. A body in pain or exhilaration is only text if it is someone else's.

What Cannot be Said. Shall we reject dualism, reject the separation of self and body? To do this we must make claim to the identity of a unified self - we must say "I am my body". But within the net of language, this cannot be said.

Take this from Wittgenstein. The solipsist attempts to say that she or he is the single real entity in existence and that which constitutes all experience. But to say this, to say "the world is my world" is to grant the independent existence of the world with those words. The position of the solipsist cannot be said.

So it is with the claim to be identical to the body. When I say "I am my body", the "my" commits me to assigning to my body the status of a possession, or at most a mere part of a whole. I cannot say that I and my body are a whole and self-identical thing. Language separates us.

2. What follows from this is not that my body and self cannot indeed be identical; ontology may follow language, but it may not. I need not conclude about what is real from how I am forced to speak. But even though what is may not flow from language, self conceptions do, and in enunciating our relation to the body (see again how speaking parts us) we are placed in a position of alienation from it.

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Location of the Body. The body is the central site of experience. The consciousness of this is what is missing from our picture of body as clothing, tool, text, externality, other. Our flesh locates us as selves, provides an index against which spatial and temporal relations are created. The body is the here and the now. Its mere physical presence, rather than its character, gives us the most primary and the most minimal identity. It is the aspect of self that gives quantitative, and not qualitative difference. It makes us what we are, not who. It is what makes us this thing in the world, and not another, for all our resemblances to everything else.

The complexities of self-reflexive, hyper-conscious identifications of self fall away from the plain being of the body located as itself.

The Integrity of the Senses. If reflection can separate us from the body, then action and sensation can make us whole. The senses make body and self continuous: a responsive unit. They place us, distinct but engaged, in the world. ·

David Hurne maintained that the self did not exist, because it could not be found. Everywhere we look inside our selves, he said, all we see are thoughts, memories, desires, beliefs, sensations. The self is nowhere, and is not. We are nothing but bundles of d isparate bits.

What holds us together then? Obviously, the body. And the senses, the means by which the body is in the world, give what we choose to call the self its integrity. We find ourselves most whole, not when we introspect, when we turn inwards, but when we are flooded with the world through the senses, in sex or skydiving or the unthinking sensual life of the infant. There the experience of embodied self through the senses is our original condition, our sincerity.

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Richard McWhannell was born in Akaroa, Banks Peninsula. He completed a Diploma of Fine Arts at Canterbury University in 1972 and has been living in Auckland since 1977. In 1982 he travelled to Europe on a QEII Arts Council grant and in 1985 began working full time as a painter-sculptor.

Female Nude 1995, oil on canvas on board

courtesy of Aberhart North Gallery

Monique Redmond has been working as a sculptor since 1991. She has exhibited extensively in group exhibitions including: Space Fictions; Cross Pollination; Home Made Home; Vogue/Vague - New Sculptors, New Sculpture; and in the Auckland City Art Gallery Window (1992). Adam was no fool at the Fisher Gallery in 1994 incorporated traditional techniques and processes in an installation of seven tapestry stools. This was followed by In the Night Kitchen at New Work Studio, Wellington in June 1995. Monique Redmond lives in Auckland.

The Magician's Nephew 1995, appletons tapestry wool, 7 to the inch canvas and rimu

Louise Bourgeois was born in Paris in 1911 and lives in New York.

For over fifty years Louise Bourgeois has been giving shape to memory. Her childhood is the source of much of her imagery and all of her motivation. Robert Storr,Dislocations, 1992

Untitled 1947, ink on paper

Untitled i948, ink on paper

Giovanni Intra was born in May, 1968, and graduated with an MFA degree from the University of Auckland in 1993. He is a founding member of TESTSTRIP, Auckland, and is .the New Zealand correspondent for Art & Text, Sydney. 1995 exhibitions include: No More Hospitals, at the Manawatu Art Gallery; Notes On The Future of Vandalism, at TESTSTRIP; Support Terroism, at the Galerie Dessford Vogel; and Ray, at Hamish McKay Gallery. Recent articles: The Poetics of Modern Reverie (Teststrip Micrographs); Discourse on the Paucity of Clinical Reality (Midwest); and A Syringe Pencil (Minge).

Not titled 1995, engraved plastic sign, edition of three

courtesy of TESTSTRIP

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Peter Madden was born in 1966 and completed a BVA at the ASA School of Art, Auckland Institute of Technology in 1994. Adopts a chameleon 1996. Feels insecure about security. People let him show the things he calls Art*. Decides he will keep making these things until at some time later when there is no need reinvents the word love (for himself) and decides to do it to every thing.

*The biggest small word he knows

Imminent Fields and Absent Places 1995, bubbles, carnivalesque mirror, ice and mixed media

Yuk King Tan is an artist whose practise articulates personal explorations into the continuous process of translation and integration. By manipulating ready-made, found and bought objects, Tan's work is an intimate analysis of the preoccupations about identity, exploring notions of multiple perspectives from dual-cultural heritage to national psyche.

Untitled 1995, tiger bairn and mixed media

Darren Glass is an Auckland based photographer who finished a BFA at Elam in 1993. He recently exhibited in Currency: Contemporary Photography at the ·Auckland Museum. His work is exclusively black and white and since 1992 he has experimented with multi-aperture pin-hole cameras. The camera employed to produce Bed/Settee, Volcanic Street September uses two pinholes separated at approximately the same distance as human eyes, simulating binocular vision.

Bed/Settee, Volcanic Street September 1995, gelatine silver print

Lucy Harvey was born in England in 1967 and lived in New Zealand from 1979-1995. She graduated from the ASA School of Art, Auckland In stitute of Technology in 1994. She is currently living in London.

The Constancy Of My Longing Unnerves And Depletes Me 1995, paper constructed installation with pen drawing

CITY GROUP have produced photo and video installations for more than a decade. The results of these projects have been exhibited both nationally and internationally.

CITY GROUP's art is distinctive in the way it combines a strongly intellectual or conceptual form

with highly sensuous, physical details ... Roger Horrocks

Original Sin 1995, video installation (for Gregor Nicholas)

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Esther Leigh lives and works in Auckland. She completed her BFA at Elam School of Fine Arts in 1989. After travelling abroad for some months, she returned to Elam and completed an MFA (First Class Honours) in 1992. The following year she was awarded a Queen Elizabeth II Arts Council grant to conduct research in the United States. She has been named the Olivia Spencer Bower fellow for 1996. Her present imagery involves residual traces of forms and surfaces in a process akin to that of frottage.

Lock 1995, graphite and enamel on board.

courtesy of Anna Bibby Gallery.

Robert Jahnke Te Whanau a Rakairoa, Ngati Porou, is an artist whose work addresses the dynamics of ownership and habitation on the body of the land. He has completed an MFA at both Elam School of Fine Arts and the Californian Institute of the Arts . Jahnke currently lectures at Massey University.

Transplanted Culture 1995, steel, wood, synthetic grass, ready lawn, weed killer

courtesy of Fox Gallery

James Charlton was born in England and immigrated to New Zealand in 1973. He completed a BFA at Elam School of Fine Arts, Auckland in 1982. In 1984 he was awarded a Fulbright -Hays Travel Grant to undertake postgraduate studies at the State University of New York, Albany ( 1984-86). After graduating with an MFA Charlton took up lecturing positions in sculpture at the University of New Hampshire, Durham, and Montserrat College _of Art, Boston. Returning to New Zealand in 1991 he has continued to exhibit in New Zealand and the USA and curren tly shows with Aberhart North Gallery, Auckland.

Mixer 1995, M.D.F and paint, 32 individual units

Patricia Piccinini is an artist based in Melbourne, Australia. Her work is mainly concerned with the changing nature of the body as it is seen via the medical and technological gaze. The Mutant Genome Project (TMGP) is an ongoing work that examines these issues, focusing on genetic research and consumer medicine. TMGP has been exhibited in four components to date. Patricia Piccinini is the co-ordinator of an artist run exhibition space in Melbourne called The Basement Gallery where two of the components have been shown. The third is part of a travelling exhibition currently touring Asia called Alternative Realities, and the fourth was exhibited at the New Media Network, Melbourne.

The Mutant Genome Project -CMS® Genetic Manipulation Simulator 1994-5, CD ROM and digiprint

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John Puhiatau Pule is a Niue artist living in Auckland. He is the author of the first Niuean novel entitled Ko e Mago Ne Kai e La (The Shark that Ate the Sun). The suit exhibited in Fleshly Worn was purchased by Pule's father for his baptism by American Mormons in Papatoetoe, Auckland.

Pacific Holiday 1995, performance at the opening of Fleshly Worn

Does This Suit You? 1995, suit and hanger

courtesy of Gow Langsford Gallery

Christopher Braddock is a sculptor whose work primarily focuses on the body and is mainly concerned with issues of sexual representation and politics. Between 1986 and 1992 he studied and worked in Europe. In 1993 he was the recipient of a Pollock-Krasner Foundation grant and in 1994 his work was included in Station to Station: the way of the Cross at the Auckland City Art Gallery. Braddock is a lecturer in Art History & Theory on the BVA Programme, School of Art & Design, Auckland Institute of Technology.

Midmost 1995, customwood and paint

courtesy of Gow Langsford Gallery

Lesley Kaiser and John Barnett have worked together since 1991. Their projects include:

Like They Are Now, an exhibition of artwork texts that they curated and displayed on electronic signs in Auckland and Wellington (1991); page works in a number of publications, for instance, Art New Zealand and Landfall (both 1992); several editions of textworks on self-adhesive labels distributed with magazines and on supermarket rollouts; and You Saw It On TV, an exhibition of artwork texts shown on TV3 (1993). Kaiser and Barnett's publications include:Like Wrecks of a Dissolving Dream (1993); The River Sticks and Post Art (both 1994); and Where We Are Now (1995). John Barnett and Lesley Kaiser live in Auckland.

Burn Time 199S, cibachrome prints mounted on black perspex.

Burn Time 1995, cibachrome prints mounted on black perspex.

courtesy of the Gregory Flint Gallery

Vanya Kovach is a working class girl from the west who got a free education and a Ph.D. in Philosophy. Now at large in Auckland as a philosopher for hire; works with undergraduates (University of Auckland), artists (ASA/ AIT), teachers, professionals and children of all sizes. Committed to making conceptual thinking both useful and delightful, and to achieving the best possible combination of clarity and complexity in all her thought.

all works courtesy of the artists unless otherwise indicated.

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ASA Gallery

ISBN 0 - 473 - 03562 - 6