Acting Out
Jack Body
John Miller
Edward Bullmore
VALIE EXPORT
Sarah Lucas
Sarah Lucas
Sarah Munro
Glen Otto
Pipilotti Rist
Signe Rose
Sorawit Songsataya
curated by Stephen Cleland
05 May – 09 July 2017
What then are the stereotypical characteristics of that typical New Zealander? He belongs to a ‘passionless society’ where people are reticent, where sensuality is suspect, where men do not cry … Much of New Zealand music is characterised by an emotional restraint that borders on inhibition.
–Jack Body
Acting Out surveyed a selection of New Zealand and international artists who address the physicality of the body. The exhibition presented art works produced over the past four decades that in various ways exhibit relations between bodies and forms. Situating the body as both the subject and means of producing their work, these practitioners investigate the ongoing entanglement of the body with the making of art. Acting Out offered a range of gendered perspectives, bringing to the fore artists who express the raw physicality of sex with varying degrees of candour.
Acting Out’s starting point was the liberal context of the 1960s and 1970s, when conservative attitudes towards sexuality were questioned and overturned. In New Zealand, as elsewhere, these shifting attitudes towards the body began to appear in performance-based art practices which at times mixed with other live disciplines. Two such historic performance events were referenced and partially reconstructed here. Both were instigated by the late composer Jack Body, a key figure at Victoria University’s school of music. Known for his energetic collaborations, the first of these was initiated in 1972 when Body invited choreographer Jennifer Shennan to work with him to produce Sexus, an erotic and gritty stage-performance presented at the Maori Community Centre and Auckland’s Mercury Theatre as part of that year’s University Arts Festival. This brought together six scantily clad dancers, a filmic projection and Body’s own sonic score. This little-known work was fortunately documented by photographer John Miller who captured, in a series of still photographs, the performance’s dyadic structure, where dancers were paired to represent a spectrum of bodily encounters—male/male, male/female, female/female. Their movements were enacted in conjunction with the projected image of an ambiguously gendered man, who repeatedly performed a series of gestures and actions that confused the coded behaviour of conventional masculinity.
Sexus was a vital precursor to the second event documented here. This was an installation of paintings by Edward Bullmore that originally formed part of the six-hour suite of simultaneous sound environments and live activities that inaugurated Body’s influential Sonic Circus, a multimedia festival bringing together composers, musicians and artists staged at Victoria University in 1974. Body invited Bullmore to suspend a group of his highly sexualised shaped canvases within his ‘Dream Room’ to set the scene for Body’s erotically charged soundtrack and works by fellow composers Annea Lockwood and John Cousins. Bullmore’s paintings were not made for this purpose, but their intense physical qualities made them tangible surrogates for the experiential states the composers sought to arouse in their listeners.
Acting Out brought Body’s Sexus and a selection of Bullmore’s Astroforms into focus, recalling their previous iterations at Victoria and reconceiving them in a gallery context. Bullmore’s and Body’s sexual yet ambiguous forms are echoed and extended in paintings and sculptures by Sarah Lucas, Sarah Munro, Glenn Otto, Signe Rose and Sorawit Songsataya. These artists variously treat surfaces as ‘skin’ and marks as gestures, updating and resignifying the body as a material site of gendered, sexual, social and political investment. Together with this treatment of the body-as-sculpture, the show featured image-based works by VALIE EXPORT, Pipilotti Rist and Sarah Lucas. The thread that linked these works was a self-reflexive and sometimes humourous negotiation of the charged terrain of the gendered and sexual body, the orifices and protrubences of which invite attention and connection, even as they challenge propriety and complicate social convention.
Glenn Otto, An honest means to a dishonest living, 2017, acrylic on wall. Installation view, Acting Out, Adam Art Gallery Te Pātaka Toi, Victoria University of Wellington, 2017. Photo: Shaun Matthews
Glenn Otto, An honest means to a dishonest living, 2017, acrylic on wall; Sorawit Songsataya, Sad, 2017, 3D printed plastic, log. Installation view, Acting Out, Adam Art Gallery Te Pātaka Toi, Victoria University of Wellington, 2017. Photo: Shaun Matthews
Sorawit Songsataya, Sad, 2017, 3D printed plastic, log. Installation view, Acting Out, Adam Art Gallery Te Pātaka Toi, Victoria University of Wellington, 2017. Photo: Shaun Matthews
Sorawit Songsataya, Sad, 2017, 3D printed plastic, log. Installation view, Acting Out, Adam Art Gallery Te Pātaka Toi, Victoria University of Wellington, 2017. Photo: Shaun Matthews
Sorawit Songsataya, Good Kissers, 2017, 3D printed plastic, wool covered custom stand. Installation view, Acting Out, Adam Art Gallery Te Pātaka Toi, Victoria University of Wellington, 2017. Photo: Shaun Matthews
Sorawit Songsataya, Good Kissers (detail), 2017, 3D printed plastic, wool covered custom stand. Installation view, Acting Out, Adam Art Gallery Te Pātaka Toi, Victoria University of Wellington, 2017. Photo: Shaun Matthews
Installation view, Acting Out, Adam Art Gallery Te Pātaka Toi, Victoria University of Wellington, 2017. Photo: Shaun Matthews
Sorawit Songsataya, detail of Hugging, 2017, 3D printed plastic, acrylic, rope. Installation view, Acting Out, Adam Art Gallery Te Pātaka Toi, Victoria University of Wellington, 2017. Photo: Shaun Matthews
Installation view, Acting Out, Adam Art Gallery Te Pātaka Toi, Victoria University of Wellington, 2017. Photo: Shaun Matthews
Sarah Munro, Surface Detail – Grey Scale, 2012, automotive paint over custom made fibreglass support. Courtesy of Page Blackie Gallery, Wellington. Installation view, Acting Out, Adam Art Gallery Te Pātaka Toi, Victoria University of Wellington, 2017. Photo: Shaun Matthews
Installation view, Acting Out, Adam Art Gallery Te Pātaka Toi, Victoria University of Wellington, 2017. Photo: Shaun Matthews
Sarah Munro, Surface Detail – Gloss Red, 2012, automotive paint over custom made fibreglass support. Courtesy of Page Blackie Gallery, Wellington. Installation view, Acting Out, Adam Art Gallery Te Pātaka Toi, Victoria University of Wellington, 2017. Photo: Shaun Matthews
Sarah Munro, Surface Detail – Gloss Red, 2012, automotive paint over custom made fibreglass support. Courtesy of Page Blackie Gallery, Wellington. Installation view, Acting Out, Adam Art Gallery Te Pātaka Toi, Victoria University of Wellington, 2017. Photo: Shaun Matthews
Sarah Munro, Surface Detail – Gloss Red, 2012, automotive paint over custom made fibreglass support. Courtesy of Page Blackie Gallery, Wellington. Installation view, Acting Out, Adam Art Gallery Te Pātaka Toi, Victoria University of Wellington, 2017. Photo: Shaun Matthews
Signe Rose, Bondage Jewel 2016 and Bondage Egg 2015, gold leaf, leather, chain, jewellery findings. Courtesy of the artist. Installation view, Acting Out, Adam Art Gallery Te Pātaka Toi, Victoria University of Wellington, 2017. Photo: Shaun Matthews
Signe Rose, Bondage Jewel 2016 and Bondage Egg 2015, gold leaf, leather, chain, jewellery findings. Courtesy of the artist. Installation view, Acting Out, Adam Art Gallery Te Pātaka Toi, Victoria University of Wellington, 2017. Photo: Shaun Matthews
Signe Rose, Bondage Egg (detail), 2015, gold leaf, leather, chain, jewellery findings. Courtesy of the artist. Installation view, Acting Out, Adam Art Gallery Te Pātaka Toi, Victoria University of Wellington, 2017. Photo: Shaun Matthews
Installation view, Acting Out, Adam Art Gallery Te Pātaka Toi, Victoria University of Wellington, 2017. Photo: Shaun Matthews
Pipilotti Rist, Pickleporno, 1992, single-channel video, 12min 0 sec, Courtesy of videoart.ch, Zofingen, Switzerland. Installation view, Acting Out, Adam Art Gallery Te Pātaka Toi, Victoria University of Wellington, 2017. Photo: Shaun Matthews
Pipilotti Rist, Pickleporno, 1992, single-channel video, 12min 0 sec, Courtesy of videoart.ch, Zofingen, Switzerland. Installation view, Acting Out, Adam Art Gallery Te Pātaka Toi, Victoria University of Wellington, 2017. Photo: Shaun Matthews
Installation view, Acting Out, Adam Art Gallery Te Pātaka Toi, Victoria University of Wellington, 2017. Photo: Shaun Matthews
Installation view, Acting Out, Adam Art Gallery Te Pātaka Toi, Victoria University of Wellington, 2017. Photo: Shaun Matthews
Signe Rose, Belladonna (detail), 2017, gold leaf, boiled leather, chain, crystal beads, jewellery findings. Installation view, Acting Out, Adam Art Gallery Te Pātaka Toi, Victoria University of Wellington. Photo: Shaun Matthews
Jack Body, Sexus, 1971-72. Installation view, Acting Out, Adam Art Gallery Te Pātaka Toi, Victoria University of Wellington, 2017. Photo: Shaun Matthews
Jack Body, Sexus, 1971-72. Installation view, Acting Out, Adam Art Gallery Te Pātaka Toi, Victoria University of Wellington, 2017. Photo: Shaun Matthews
Jack Body, Sexus, 1971-72. Installation view, Acting Out, Adam Art Gallery Te Pātaka Toi, Victoria University of Wellington, 2017. Photo: Shaun Matthews
Jack Body, Sexus (still), 1971-72.
Jack Body, Sexus (still), 1971-72.
Jack Body, Sexus, 1971-72. Installation view, Acting Out, Adam Art Gallery Te Pātaka Toi, Victoria University of Wellington, 2017. Photo: Shaun Matthews
Jack Body, Sexus (performance still), 1972 mixed media performance, Old Māori Hall and Mercury Theatre, Auckland, 1972.
Jack Body, Sexus (performance still), 1972 mixed media performance, Old Māori Hall and Mercury Theatre, Auckland, 1972.
Installation view, Acting Out, Adam Art Gallery Te Pātaka Toi, Victoria University of Wellington, 2017. Photo: Shaun Matthews
Installation view, Acting Out, Adam Art Gallery Te Pātaka Toi, Victoria University of Wellington, 2017. Photo: Shaun Matthews
Edward Bullmore, Astroform Descending, 1967, painted canvas on fibreglass, wood, metal, Collection of Tauranga Art Gallery Toi Tauranga, Gift of Jacqueline Anne Bullmore. Installation view, Acting Out, Adam Art Gallery Te Pātaka Toi, Victoria University of Wellington, 2017. Photo: Shaun Matthews
Edward Bullmore, Astroform 12, c.1974, mixed media, canvas, fibreglass construction, Collection of Tauranga Art Gallery Toi Tauranga, Gift of Jacqueline Anne Bullmore. Installation view, Acting Out, Adam Art Gallery Te Pātaka Toi, Victoria University of Wellington, 2017. Photo: Shaun Matthews
Installation view, Acting Out, Adam Art Gallery Te Pātaka Toi, Victoria University of Wellington, 2017. Photo: Shaun Matthews
Installation view, Acting Out, Adam Art Gallery Te Pātaka Toi, Victoria University of Wellington, 2017. Photo: Shaun Matthews
Sarah Lucas, NUD CYCLADIC 1, 2009, tights, fluff, wire, concrete blocks, MDF, Collection of Christchurch Art Gallery Te Puna o Waiwhetu. Purchase enabled by a gift from Andrew and Jenny Smith, made in response to the generosity of Sarah Lucas, Sadie Coles, London and Two Rooms, Auckland to the people of Christchurch on the occasion of the Canterbury Earthquake, February 2011. Installation view, Acting Out, Adam Art Gallery Te Pātaka Toi, Victoria University of Wellington, 2017. Photo: Shaun Matthews
Sarah Lucas, Chicken knickers, 2017, PVC-free wallpaper print, Courtesy of Sadie Coles HQ, London. Installation view, Acting Out, Adam Art Gallery Te Pātaka Toi, Victoria University of Wellington, 2017. Photo: Shaun Matthews