Bricks in Aspic

Adrian Hall’s 1971 exhibition at Barry Lett Galleries, PlasmaCastIronFoamCo. (P.C.I.F.Co) Presents Adrian Reginald Hall is remembered as one of the earliest and most thoroughly conceptual projects to be undertaken in New Zealand. Art critic Wystan Curnow commented that the exhibition appeared to come out of the blue, with nothing preceding it in our own art history. Hall treated the exhibition as something closer to an event. With his driver’s licence printed along with a letter from an old art school, artists dressed in serving maid outfits with tee-shirts with PCIFCo printed on them, he created an identity for himself through the exhibition medium. The range of artistic modes he employed in one space seemed to wholly destabilise the art object. Bricks in Aspic, 1971 was exhibited alongside another stack of bricks, Life Size, 1971, which was equivalent to the artist’s height and weight. Life Size was, in Hall’s words, ‘a giant paper weight’; whereas Bricks in Aspic, also known as Pillar, was a test for gravity, a challenge to the impossible, made in a giant fish tank. Hall’s use of bricks also referenced his work on building sites, connecting his exhibition identity with his life experience.

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