Andrew Paul Wood
Resetting the Coordinates: An anthology of performance art in Aotearoa New Zealand edited by Christopher Braddock, Ioana Gordon-Smith, Layne Waerea and Victoria Wynne-Jones (Massey University Press, 2024), 392pp, $65
Resetting the Coordinates provides a survey of performance artists and post-object art in Aotearoa New Zealand from the last half-century or so, dating from its emergence here around 1970. It’s a vital and entirely accessible chronicle of a transformative art movement. Some of the artists covered, like Michael Tuffery, Lonnie Hutchinson and Andrew Drummond, are well-known. Others are less well-known—Ivan Lupi, David Cross, Emma Bugden—and are often less well served, gleaning only a passing mention. But there’s no denying how important and valuable this book is overall, though we probably needed it at least a decade ago. In a lovely gesture, the book is dedicated to the late Jim Allen, probably better known for his collaboration with John Scott on the Futuna Chapel in Wellington than for his pioneering post-object performance pieces in the 1970s, made when he was a lecturer at Auckland’s Elam School of Art. Loaded with honours, including Art Foundation Icon, Jim Allen died last year aged 100.
One of the delightful things about Resetting the Coordinates is that performance pioneers like Andrew Drummond, Annea Lockwood, pre-neon Peter Roche, Jim Allen, Linda Buis and Phil Dadson finally get some context for their early years, though at times it feels a little rushed. A whole book could, and should, be written about the rampant artistic experimentalism in both islands in the 1970s and 1980s, but chronology matters less in this publication than an atomisation into identity-based themes. If it were otherwise, Christopher Braddock, writing the introduction, wouldn’t have needed to dedicate this to providing a highly compressed chronological overview. He says:
As the title asserts, this anthology contributes to an alternative history of New Zealand art. It “resets the coordinates” and questions dominant narratives in two ways: first, by affirming performance art as a significant part of New Zealand’s turn towards international and contemporary artistic concerns, especially in the 1970s and 1980s; and second, by exploring Indigenous Māori and Moana approaches to performance that make performance art in Aotearoa different from anything else in the world.
While such a statement might have been considered somewhat radical in the early 1990s, these days it seems a little self-congratulatory. Nonetheless, although parts of the story have been written about before, often in specialist or ephemeral publications, this is the first overview of the big picture. As such, it is a valuable book for any reader interested in contemporary art, but some of the chapter breakdowns are unwieldy or clumsy, and there are also occasional jawbreakingly long sentences like:
If, on 2 April 1971, you had journeyed out across the unsealed metal roads to the west coast of the Tāmaki Makaurau Auckland region of the North Island of Aotearoa New Zealand, venturing as far as the remote Karekare Beach, to the north of Whatipu Beach and the great Manukau Harbour and south of Piha Beach, you would have come across the mystifying scene of ten people arduously sweeping the beach with long-handled yard brooms.
Thus Christopher Braddock introduces Jim Allen’s 1971 Beachsweeping, a work intended to illustrate the futility of labour, literally sweeping the sand with brooms. It should be noted that this was an action appropriated from Zen Buddhism about mindfulness, not just wilful weirdness.
Blair French’s chapter on the 1970s is essential reading, though perhaps overly invested in the Auckland scene. While writing about Andrew Drummond’s Crucifixion (1978), with the artist in a gas mask and hooked up to a heart monitor and bound to a St Andrew’s cross, the fact that this somewhat blasphemous performance took place in conservative Christchurch at the CoCA gallery under the auspices of the staid and steady Canterbury Society of Arts, is not mentioned. The Canterbury Society of Arts was actually an important incubator for early performance work in Aotearoa, often at Drummond’s instigation. French does mention it in the context of its hosting of Nicholas Spill’s Survival that same year, but he erroneously calls it the Christchurch Society of Arts.
Natasha Conland dedicates an entire chapter to the little-known artist Kimberley Gray, active in the first half of the 1970s. This is a study that is long overdue, and it stands out as unusual in a book where every other chapter addresses two artists at minimum. Gray illustrates one of the difficulties in the book, the lack of a clear definition of what performance art is. While Gray had some performances in her oeuvre, most of her work is installation, admittedly participatory, or the record of a performance as artwork (graphs, maps, notes, slides). And yet Billy Apple, who also specialised in participatory installations and records of experiences, only gets a few grudging and cursory mentions in some of the other essays in the book. So, is this a book about performance art or post-object art, and what is the difference? However, Conland’s prose manages to be both atmospheric and lucid in conveying the conceptual complexity of Gray’s work. Of the Draughts (1974) performance at the Epsom Showgrounds, Gray’s first true performance piece, Conland writes:
The photographic documents from Draughts show Gray wrapped in white bandages like a mummy, with a candle at her feet. It is austere and atmospheric. Jim Allen remembered her performance … as a “very spectacular thing” because her presence was mysteriously positioned in relation to the audience. As the performance began, she whistled to the four points of the compass and recited an incantation while appearing fully wrapped in the white cloth of the bandage. When the lights came up again Gray had disappeared: in her place the white wrapping she had worn was streaming out from an industrial fan in the corner of the room and trailing across the floor.
Like most of the writing in Resetting the Coordinates, Conland’s essay is mercifully free of obscure theory and technical jargon, despite coming from a sector and a subject usually rife with both. Gray describes Draughts as her using her body as an indicator in the present, recording the changing elements of light and wind, which is perhaps a little abstract considering the burlesque flourish of the denouement.
Melanie Oliver’s thorough and insightful chapter on women, feminism and body politics in the 1980s is forced to cover a lot of territory, rightly identifying the national significance of ANZART (Australia and New Zealand Artist Encounters) and celebrating leading figures such as Di ffrench, Rosemary Johnson (who pivoted to performance in late stages of a terminal diagnosis until her death in 1982) and Juliet Batten. Batten is an example of the ambiguity of performance art in those heady days, being more of a facilitator of communal consciousness-raising than a declared performance artist. ‘Women’s art’ as a category was still tentative and exploratory at the beginning of the 1980s. While some women artists adopted a clinical deconstruction of the body-as-medium approach, others embraced their bodies and the theories of Julia Kristeva. Oliver writes of Batten:
Also interested in ritual and healing, Auckland-based Juliet Batten’s works are best described as collaborative projects rather than performance, though they are prominent examples of a woman working in a performative mode. The Menstrual Maze (1983), facilitated by Batten at the old Greer’s Factory in Auckland, was a collaborative art environment in which people were invited to participate in a ritual journey celebrating menstruation, or to experience the maze as exhibition. For the former, women who were menstruating were asked to wear a red band of wool; performers or ‘sentinels’ dressed in black facilitated a journey through the space. The first parts of the maze intended to represent the vagina, were lined with red cloth and coiled black tubes that recalled the cramps that occur during menstruation. This was followed by a lighter passage of white gauze fabric, which clung to those walking through, and where messages were pinned to the wall or tucked away in envelopes.
It is difficult to imagine something that courageous being accepted in today’s judgemental social climate. The ringfencing of Māori and Pasifika practitioners in other chapters puts Oliver in something of a bind as it unfortunately leaves her chapter feeling Pākehā-centric, through no fault of her own. I’m not convinced Māori and Pasifika women should have been so totally cordoned off from the broader feminist movement when, in fact, the picture was much more complex, and one may finish Resetting the Coordinates feeling that women performance artists have been inadequately represented. A more generous approach might have benefitted the creation of a more accurate narrative. Oliver notes, for example, that ‘feminism in Aotearoa is complicated in that the movement is generally associated with middle-class, Pākehā, heteronormative women and fails to acknowledge other groups, ideas and politics, such as Kaupapa mana wāhine, or queer and intersectional gender.’ It was never that simple, particularly then. It was still possible in those days to be working class and go to art school; fierce queer women artists were prominent in the Circle and Spiral collectives; and only a few sentences later Oliver writes of Keri Hulme (Kāi Tahu, Kāti Māmoe) performing readings and presenting installations at the Women’s Gallery exhibition Women and Violence in Wellington in 1980.
Oliver is circumspect about the collaborative and personal relationship between Linda Buis and Peter Roche: ‘Linda Buis, working in partnership with Peter Roche from 1979 to 1985, contributed to performances that explored the artist’s relationship with each other as well as endurance and institutional contexts.’ The next chapter, by Christina Barton and Greg Burke, focuses exclusively on that relationship. This leads me to wonder if the editors could have arranged for a more coordinated telling of this story. Barton and Burke, old hands at this, remove the gloves entirely:
Roche had endured forty-eight hours of self-imposed exile, deprivation and self-mutilation, having shut himself in an empty room with only a camera and a tripod, a full-length mirror, typewriter and paper, a razor blade and various stimulants, including wine and cigarettes. With the typewriter, he recorded his increasingly sleep-deprived and psychologically altered state before cutting his arm badly with the blade, a wound that had to be stitched before the performance continued.
Talk about blood, sweat and tears: this is probably the only chapter in the book that doesn’t feel haunted, to some degree or other, by editorial apologetics or an assumed need to protect the sensitivities of the hypothetical reader. There’s some body-shock-trauma deliberativeness exposed here that signals what early performance art was really about: taboo, transgression and catharsis.
Rachel Shearer and Andrew Clifford’s chapter on sound art is very engaging, but while it directly asks the question, ‘When does extreme musicianship and virtuosity become performance art?’, it doesn’t really get very far in answering it. ‘Not all performance art is primarily concerned with sound,’ they write, ‘except that it is usually present, even if only as an incidental by-product. Conversely, not all sound practice is specifically concerned with performance dynamics, even if performance is embedded in the production of sound.’ This is waved away by asserting: ‘In this chapter we consider the overlapping cultures of performance and sound practices from Aotearoa New Zealand, and examine live performance strategies as well as the use of sound to produce art.’ A lot of equivocation then, but the chapter itself ends up being very inclusive, if a little flabby. We get a grab-bag that encompasses the performance-to-video work of Shannon Te Ao; composer Jack Body’s organising of Sonic Circus for the NZBC in 1974; Phil Dadson’s Scratch Orchestra; drive-by mentions of Red Mole and Blerta; along with the post-punk-meets-Dada grim-pop of Fetus Productions in the 1980s; and assorted sound art projects like Project Programmes at Auckland Art Gallery and Static Mansion and The Auricle in Christchurch. Then there’s a segue from avant-garde composer Douglas Lilburn to avant-garde composer Annea Lockwood, and so on.
Layne Waerea’s chapter on the relationship between Māori Mātauranga and Māori performance art is enlightening reading, as is Ioana Gordon-Smith’s chapter on Urban Pasifika and the Pasifika diaspora. The rather wordily-titled chapter by Lana Lopesi and Layne Warea, ‘Constellations of Subjectivity: Engaging the Emergent, Adaptive and Fluid Nature of Lived Social Difference in Māori and Moana Performance Art’, successfully explains itself. ‘Mātauranga Māori,’ Waerea tells us, ‘can be described as the explanation of human behaviour that is based on traditional concepts handed down through the generations … within a continuous and ever-evolving whakapapa.’ Today, performance art provides opportunities for a particular focus on identity and whakapapa, tino rangatiratanga, mana whenua and kaitiakitanga, as in the various performance-related works of Rachel Rakena, Louise Pōtiki Bryant, Moana Nepia, Shannon Te Ao, and Charles Koroneho.
Gordon-Smith’s account discusses how the Moana Pasifika population of Aotearoa had to find ways to express a sense of duality and diasporic otherness. Pacific Underground will likely be familiar, but in his chapter we also get a rare mention of Lonnie Hutchinson’s Can You See Me? (1997)—in which the artist lay motionless in various public spaces to draw attention to Pacific people’s relative invisibility. Lana Lopesi and Layne Warea throw the net wider to include artists as various as Cora-Allan Lafaiki Twiss, Cat Ruka, and Leafā Wilson/Olga Krause. Even so, these three chapters are not encyclopaedic: they omit artists as prominent as Ioane Ioane and Tame Iti, who do however get brief mentions elsewhere in other essays.
As for Te Waipounamu, the estimable Audrey Baldwin and Khye Hitchcock provide a comprehensive look at performance art in Christchurch since the Canterbury earthquakes in 2010 and 2011. In the aftermath, when all the galleries closed and the studios collapsed, several Christchurch performance artists emerged to provide a counter-narrative to anodyne bureaucratic urbanist notions of ‘resilience’. There was Baldwin, already a noted performance artist (body and durational art with a burlesque twist), and Gaby Montejo, Nina Oberg Humphries, plus the emergence of interventionist groups reclaiming public space, such as Gap Filler, FESTA, Life in Vacant Spaces, and The Green Lab. Looking back now, it almost seems utopian just how much was going on and the huge community support it had.
I would like to see Gordon-Smith and Hitchcock’s chapter on LGBTQIA+ performance, entitled ‘Threads: Musings on Queer Performance Art in Aotearoa’, expanded into a book in its own right. Linda Lepou, Richard Orjis, Sam Ducktor-Jones, Louie Zalk-Neale, FAFSWAG and others are discussed, but with more space, many of the things this chapter touches on—the different cultural attitudes to sexuality and broader Polynesian spectrums of gender and the questioning of US-centrism and white-dominance of discourses around queer performance and performativity, for example—could have been given fuller treatment. There’s no mention of Carmen and Wellington’s vibrant drag cabaret scene in the 1970s, nor of dancers prominent in the 1980s, like Michael Parmenter and Douglas Wright; and it’s a bit startling that there’s no mention of Nigel Gearing’s short essay on queer performance from the catalogue for the Implicated and Immune: Artists Responses to AIDS exhibition, held at the Fisher Gallery in Auckland in 1992.
Given the edgy and adrenalized nature of performance art, Resetting the Coordinates tends to err on the side of caution rather than cross over to the wild side. Multiple pages are dedicated to Daniel Malone, for example, but there is zero recognition of his more problematic work, such as the 1997 collaboration with Denise Kum, Kum of Sum Yung Gai, which would almost certainly get you cancelled today. Ivan Lupi gets a brief paragraph in the section on LGBTQIA+ artists, where there is mention of his allowing audience members to tattoo his skin, but there is no mention of the cutting and the blood of his other performances, or indeed of his less visceral durational work. Juanita Hepi’s Ariā I (2022) performance at Canterbury Museum is described, but it is not acknowledged that it took place within the hotel lobby installation (testified to by the illustration), which was created by Heather Straka as a context for her own work Isolation Hotel.
Finally, I wish the editors had made more of an effort to establish definitions between what is new media/moving image/video art and what is the record of a performance. Or, for that matter, what is the difference between performance art and, say, a participatory ‘happening’, or experimental performances in more traditional forms. The introduction should clearly justify what gets into this book and what doesn’t. To my mind ‘performance’ implies something done in the moment for an audience reacting to it in real time, yet Resetting the Coordinates stretches ‘performance’ to include things I would define as collaboration, video work and relational aesthetics, without explanation.
ANDREW PAUL WOOD is an art writer, literary reviewer and historian living in Te Tihi-o-Maru, Te Waipounamu. His last book was Shadow Worlds: A history of the occult and esoteric in New Zealand (Massey University Press, 2023). He is currently working on a book about the nineteenth-century New Zealand architect F.W. Petre.
Leave a Reply