Overview
Curated by Natasha Conland, this courageous and enigmatic
exhibition explores the unknown and opens up questions about the
role of the artist.
The title is taken from artist Bruce Nauman's groundbreaking
1967 neon work
"The true artist helps the world by revealing mystic
truths".
A fresh new generation of artists has renewed the search for
abstract truths. Their works play on the tension between our desire
to experience the unknown and our inherent scepticism.
As part of the work by artists Mikala Dwyer, draw a tree and
have your future told by a "tree reader".
The exhibition is accompanied by a comprehensive catalogue and
programme including talks, films and events including an opening
weekend performance by UK artist Olivia Plender.
Artists:
Mikala Dwyer (Australia)
Omer Fast (Israel)
Laurent Grasso (France)
Loris Greaud (France)
David Hatcher (NZ)
Joachim Koester (Denmark)
A.P.Komen/Karen
Murphy (Netherlands/Ireland)
Maria Loboda (Germany)
Liz Maw (NZ)
Annette Messager (France)
Dane Mitchell (NZ)
Bruce Nauman (USA)
Olivia Plender (UK)
Jennifer
Tee (Netherlands)
Mungo Thomson (USA)
Barbara Visser (Netherlands)
Thomas Zipp (Germany)
Mikala DWYER (born 1959) Australia
How can plastic plants and branches tell the secrets of the
unknown? Dwyer's materials are not divine in origin; rather, their
structures are indicative of the attempt of the material world to
transcend matter.
In Superstitious Scaffolding, as with many of Dwyer's
sculptural installations, the viewer is compelled by the transition
of recognisable, playful and even popular symbols of other
worlds-spirits, ghosts, vortexes-to act as guides beyond the
framework of the real. By imbuing form with belief, the emphasis
shifts away from individual belief systems and onto the external
world, to the arena of experimentation. In this work, the
invitation is direct, as a professional medium sits within the
structure ready to guide you 'into spirit'. Nonetheless, the
challenge is larger than the trade in experience-our so-called
rational minds, the things we use to evaluate and inform, are
forced to work via the language of unreason.
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Omer FAST
(born 1972) Israel/Germany
The footage in Godville was compiled from interviews
Fast made with actors resident in Colonial Williamsburg-a city
founded in 1699 as a model for ideal living in the new world, and
today a living museum of this history and ethos. He began the
interviews as if in the past, with the actors in costume and
character, and then moved to the present, capturing their lived
experience of this place, and their thoughts and beliefs related to
contemporary existence.
The strange disjuncture of watching a woman dressed in
eighteenth-century costume discussing Bush's America is further
exaggerated by Fast's re-editing of the scripts and narrative. By
weaving past and present together, he distorts time and place so
the viewer has few ways of getting a bearing on the content and
context. Reality loses hold and the result is an eerie sense of
fear and confusion around the medium of documentary, and its
ability to create a point of true reference.
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Laurent
GRASSO
(born 1972) France
When conversing with Laurent Grasso, he calls up an archive of
facts about the paranormal which are drawn out in the hope of
proving the fantastical is existant. He works with the idea that
science itself might lead to a paranormal belief. Grasso has a
particular interest in the science of perception, pointing
out that 'neuroscience shows that when we watch something on
cinema, our brain believes we are also physically involved'.
Grasso's cinematic works often distil movement down to one
action slowing time so that there is a disconnection between the
object on screen and the usual conventions of space and time. In
Projection, an hypnotic effect is achieved through the
digitisation of a simple cloud mass rolling very slowly down a
street. Partly due to our expectation of the force and speed such a
mass might carry, this cloud appears to defy the physics of motion.
Its force comes from an immeasurable space of poetics and future
probabilities.
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Loris GRÉAUD
(born 1979) France
Gréaud's objects and performances are like generators employed
to shift our metaphysical condition. In the opening to his 2005
exhibition, Silence Goes More Quickly When Played
Backwards, a drum kit was played continuously for three hours,
activating enough power for the exhibition lighting. Gréaud's point
was as much to experiment with an action that caused effect long
after the music stopped...
In Topsy, Gréaud makes reference to the aberrant and
anti-utilitarian history of the machine. Mechanical devices have
been used throughout modernity to attempt contact with the 'other
dimension' through the benefits of scientific developments.
Although a newly fabricated telephone, Topsy masquerades
as a melted-down device from this previous generation. However upon
lifting the handset, the receiver calls up an electronic voice from
the ether, whose characterless tone recites a haunting blend of
1980s pop and art house lyrics and sensibility, inviting a
response: 'call me!'
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David
HATCHER
(born 1973) New Zealand
Om Message
is a new extension of Hatcher's project Oedipal
Manouvres in the Dark. OMD began as an archive of
drawings by philosophers, which Hatcher pushed into the context of
counter-culture with his first experimentation with
blotter art. Blotter art is the cult of illustrating
sheets of LSD paper tabs. Hatcher borrows the form of tab-art,
subjected these small philosophers' drawings to their conventions
until we get a kind of Wittgenstein on acid.
Hatcher's ongoing work with the OMD archive finds
affinities for these sketches with unlikely candidates from IKEA
wrapping, to Mr Men books, to a baby's ceiling painting. In Om
Message, he takes Wittgenstein's sketch of the human face and
transfers it to the visual language of comic art and commercial
sign-writers' paint. Wittgenstein is most famously renowned for his
book Philosophic Investigations, which was of enormous
importance to Bruce Nauman amongst others. Here Hatcher uses his
simple facial outline and transposes it into a Mr Potato head
character with empty speech bubbles. The mysterious genealogy of a
'man's mind' and thought is reborn to effect in the hungry language
of popular culture.
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Joachim
KOESTER
(born 1962) Denmark
Joachim Koester's three-part work for Mystic Truths, is
part of his ongoing artistic investigation into Occult activity.
Morning of the Magicians centres around Koester's
exploration of cult leader Alister Crowley's occupation of The
Abbey of Thelema in Cefalù, Sicily. Crowley and a small group of
devotees lived in Cefalù in the early 1920s where they lived in
bleak conditions, aspiring to 'ideal life' via Crowley's version of
hedonism, magic, drugs and sexual rituals. The cult group's
activity was eventually shut down by Mussolini-although they were
largely tolerated by locals-after the death of a member due to a
fever contracted by impure drinking water. After initial public
notoriety, the house and activity faded into obscurity until
avant-garde film-maker Kenneth Anger uncovered the murals again to
use as a film set for his Children of Paradise (1945).
Koester's photographic essay deploys the technical clarity of
documentary realism to reveal what remains of the house and 'room
of nightmares' today. However, further to his presentation of the
factual remnants is the inescapable haunting of the activity which
took place in this house. His film and video work extrapolate from
a realist mode, proposing a further abstractions and fictional
happenings in a timeless zone of the present. Koester says
'everything around us is designed to appear in a certain way... I
believe most human activities leave traces in space. In one way or
another, spaces are transformed by human action, and in my work I
am, if you like, ghost-haunting spaces.'
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A.P. KOMEN /
Karen MURPHY
(born 1964 and 1968)
The Netherlands and Ireland
In Too much reality the conventions of popular
television are turned on the subject of a superstitious
experience-a haunted beach hut in Thailand. The story is of a group
of friends who are each asked to spend a night in the hut with the
camera and decide themselves whether the hut is haunted. What
emerges in the meantime is soap-like narrative with character,
motive and plot, and, in the end, their total story has a chaotic
result. The open question is what influence has the hut had on the
outcome?
The visitors to the exhibition are asked to physically inhabit
the story by entering a one-to-one replica of the hut. The hut is a
conduit to both the narrative and the repeat experience of
superstition-the visitor has their own unwritten question to
answer: are you a believer or a cynic? Our navigation of this
question is forced through the conduit of sculpture and 'reality'
TV-the pop-culture medium for unmediated experience.
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Maria LOBODA
(born 1980) Poland/Germany
Common to mystic thought is the mystery of the other world and
potential state of being that resides there. Secrets are there,
things that we cannot understand through everyday means. The
question is: what tools, forms and practice will provide the access
points? Maria Loboda plants the secrets within our reach, offering
a guide or vocabulary within the known and recognisable language of
decorative form-a bouquet of flowers.
By supplanting our world with the rules of the 'second world'
she corrupts known logic but provides a key (if you can find it) to
that eternal question-what will happen? In her works
Guide to Insults and Misantropy and HE, Loboda
embeds the mystics of everyday society into a simple book of
colloquial expressions and bouquet of flowers based on the
Victorian art of flower arranging, which communicates secret
messages to the initiated. She laces the flowers in insults rather
than messages of love, so that the bouquet develops a toxic
bloom.
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Liz MAW
(born 1966) New Zealand
In the quiet areas of Liz Maw's paintings, you will find
mysterious dusting-droplets, beads, shadows, stardust. It creeps
into the shadows or sensitive parts of the body, hands, or soles of
the feet, or highlights a concentrated area of symbology.
The people in her portraits are hybrids of living and symbolic
characters, already part this world and part another universal
order. She finesses them with techniques drawn from the displaced
traditions of kitsch realism, pop culture and symbolism-drafting
contemporary icons from life and affording them surreal affect.
Although they are mostly universalised, her subjects are also
friends, a lover, or figures she admires. They are then distilled,
and offered up to myth, to the material of religious story, and to
archetypal matter, some of her own invention. Maw ascribes fantasy
as wielding a certain kind of power, a new order with its own
reason and logic
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Annette
MESSAGER
(born 1943) France
Towards the end of the 1990s, Annette Messager's words began to
get a physicality to them which exaggerated their body-big words in
animated fabric, netted, stuffed and accompanied with images and
objects. Messager views these words as images which evoke sound and
feeling. The spidery hand of Secret refers to the mythical
unknown which is ritually explored in children's stories of spiders
in association with places of uncertainty.
Messager is keenly aware of what we do with language, how we
make it, how we weave it into substance. She has said that all her
work speaks solely about the body, yet it connects to culture
through the language of myth. In 1988, Messager wrote the words
'ruse', 'secret', and 'promise' out of strands of hair which she
framed and suspended. This new Secret is more playful, and
less directly associated with the real world or
real meaning. It is charactered enough to be a cartoon
rather than a fetish, but retains human association through its
hand rendered materiality.
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Dane MITCHELL
(born 1976) New Zealand
For Mystic Truths, Dane Mitchell pulls together devices
to measure and account for the hard facts of the exhibition
structure-the walls, the floor, the architecture, the storage
facilities. He demarcates and amplifies them for the audience using
thermometers, microphones, lights and... a good witch. In
order to move beyond the physical structure and test the spiritual
resonance of the space, Mitchell moves to the services of a guide,
someone professionally capable of opening up a portal to the other
side. It is difficult to adjust to the tone of his exploration
because we assume his tests will fall short of results, so it
appears as a cynical endgame. We assume his entry point is a
rational overview of the irrational, yet the artist hasn't prefaced
his work with a smile. The experience of the work is more
foreboding and it is there that we test our
assumptions.
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(born 1941) United States of America
Bruce NAUMAN
This street sign is addressed to you-pay attention.
Originally made by American artist Bruce Nauman as a personalised
street sign, exhibited outside his storefront studio and in direct
competition all public and commercial signs. It is a sign not a
sculpture, but a statement. We are used to statements of truth in
advertising. Even forty years after this work was made, it is
uncommon to find a proclamation of a genuine belief, in this
instance that an artist can achieve the unachievable. How will you
read this?
At the time that Nauman made this sign, neon was associated with
the cheap and tasteless-motels, bars and beer signs. He toughened
this phrase by rendering it in a once-kitsch material not in
keeping with 'genuine' belief. However, the grandiose suggestion of
the word 'mystic' and its contrasting neon form is both troubling
and reassuring, so that we do pay attention. Greater than
these together is the confusion over what the statement appears to
offer-a simple solution to the nature and function of an artist's
role, a working definition for the believers or sceptics.
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Olivia
PLENDER
(born 1977) United Kingdom
Olivia Plender's interest in the modern Spiritualist movement
traverses into the development of the romantic movement and the
position of the modern artist. Within romantic thought it was
accepted that Spiritualists, like artists, were to transgress
certain social norms in order to do divine inspiration.
The title for Plender's installation The Medium and
Daybreak is taken directly from a nineteenth-century
Spiritualist newspaper, while the contents are reconstructed
materials from the People's History Museum and the Museum of
Science and Industry in Manchester. In the context of the
exhibition, they are recreated as a fictional interior of a
Spiritualist church. As a museum display, these objects and stories
have a renewed legitimacy not afforded to the history of spiritual
movement.
The unusual happenings of spiritual encounters are further
fictionalised by Plender in her comic strip The
Masterpiece, which has been re-enacted in a performance for
Mystic Truths. Plender draws a tangible thread between
this late modern performance, happenings of the late 1960s, and
devices used by spirit mediums to connect audiences with the
unobtainable.
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Jennifer
TEE
(born 1973) The Netherlands
In the preamble pages of Jennifer Tee's Sao Paolo Biennale
catalogue, where Covert Entwined Heart was first
exhibited, there are notes sitting in amongst the illustrations
which read: 'making a sculpture out of a moment. Moment: outburst
of passion in de tussenstaat. Tussenstaat: a soul
in the state of limbo.' Tee's moment is pre-activity, and
pre-art-making. It's a fragmented state which sends the soul into
limbo-the in-between land. The sculpture, then, might be described
as a form and series of actions to call back the soul and this
moment of passion.
Tee's Covert Entwined Heart is the ritual form which
guides us to and from limbo. Its aesthetic form takes shape
according to a host of existing matter from 'our' world. this
entwined heart borrows from universal totems for dance, passion and
mystery-things used across cultures to signal a shift in mental and
physical being. Small and enticing things like chandeliers,
seed-pods, tattoos, gardens and rhythm.
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Mungo
THOMSON
(born 1969)
United States of America
Bumper stickers usually support definitive beliefs, political
imperatives, or non-partisan wit. But Mungo Thomson's decision to
put the phrase from Bruce Nauman's The true artist helps the
world by revealing mystic truths on a bumper sticker
rearranges the typical context for such statements. In its new
location, the reading of the phrase is all wrong. Bumper stickers
are deliberately read at face value, because in keeping with their
consumption, they are absorbed in 30-second traffic bites. But this
sticker is too inconcusive for traffic-light consumption.
If neon tubing was once the language of commercial culture,
Thomson goes a step further by introducing Nauman's phrase into the
contemporary culture of throwaway belief. Nonetheless, it is still
possible to read it as a political statement-is the artist
empowered in contemporary culture? Thomson's work frequently
creates this kind of disorientation. Taking everyday objects and
altering their prior use and context until they obtain an aura of
the occult.
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Barbara
VISSER
(born 1966) The Netherlands
Both works in the exhibition, Actor and Liar and
Mystic Truth (Calling Bruce), involve kinds of searching
and myth-making which interrogate the logic of an idea-rational or
irrational-to conclusion. The effect of the psyche on perception
has been a working problem for Barbara Visser through many aspects
of her multi-disciplinary work. Visser's exploration of myth and
counterfeit reality provides a platform from which to explore just
how differently ideas are interpreted and explained.
In Actor and Liar, she began with the extraordinary
story of a man who sold the moon. The journey finds her documenting
his interview, then re-scripting it for an actor to read once as
the fraudster, and once as himself. The grounds for understanding
the story are completely distorted and distanced from fact, yet all
of the pieces are still in place-we read character, plot, and
emotion-as if we were watching the real man at the heart
of the story. In Mystic Truth (Calling Bruce) is a
torn-out page of a telephone book listing Bruce Nauman's phone
number. The page was collected in America while Visser was
travelling in New Mexico as a graduate. Not expecting this somewhat
mythical figure to be listed, she backed out of calling, but
retained the paper. The page retains a charge, as Visser says,
because it holds the possibility of information and connection with
someone admired but assumed to be absent and unavailable. Here
Nauman is himself an idea, sought and subjected to the laws of
unknown psyche.
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Thomas
ZIPP
(born 1966) Germany
The title Samoan Christ, like many used by Thomas Zipp
for his paintings, seems to signal something obvious and evident,
yet there is no personification in the image, and no place to
search in history. There are not many clues in the painting, except
mood as defined by colour and a clear horizon. The guide for our
wondering mind is this simple landscape motif-the horizon.
Zipp's Samoa is undergoing an anarchic psychic expansion into
the mind of historic Europe. In the series of paintings from which
this work emerges, bombs drop in the form of pills, botanic
specimens flower from scarred landscapes, explosions form the tune
of futurist cries, and the faces of anonymous men in black and
white photographs are given dadaist reconfigurations, crying the
mechanised sounds of eee and rrrrr and
tumb. This vision of history falling back on itself
rewrites one of the most imaginative moments of modern
exploration-the idea that Wonderland really was somewhere in the
antipodes.