John Ward Knox Works/projects

Update

2009-10-24T22:04:00.000-07:00

Hello all -

This blog will no longer be updated. Please visit my new site at:

www.johnwardknox.com

toward a still life

2009-08-19T20:37:00.001-07:00

Nothing ever turns out just how you want it. When I was carving this piece into the wall I faced many problems. During one of these periods I was sanding furiously, trying to overcome a particularly stubborn fact. A fine dust filled the gallery, and it was very beautiful to turn around and watch the slow waltz of particles in the light. I was reminded that in chemistry, a solution is when a gas, liquid, or solid is dispersed homogeneously in a gas, liquid, or solid. I felt grateful for the creation I was unwittingly making, but I was also aware that the dust would eventually settle, that this was only a temporary solution.

It was a real relief to clear away what wasn’t needed, to figure out that sometimes the solution is just rearranging the problem. In this case, working toward a still life meant turning my back on the thing that was most pressing for me at the time. Sometimes you just need to focus on something different.

2009-05-26T16:14:00.000-07:00

A picture of the stars walked around the city in my pocket.

gains on losses. John Ward Knox at Enjoy Gallery.

2009-05-26T15:55:00.000-07:00

Butter paper screen over windows. Also Gabriel Orozco's 'Estella'

Events that happened at Enjoy while 'gains on loses' was exhibited

2009-05-26T15:52:00.000-07:00

John Ward Knox artist talk.

Greg Malcolm's musical set and Peter Trevelyan's light installation. As a part of the White Fungus Relocation Party
images by Kimberley Lorne-McDougall Gustavsson

Hue & Cry Issue Three launch party, Readings by: Airini Beautrais, Bill Nelson, John Summers
Including performance by Raised by Wolves.
images by John Lake

Native American contemporary artist James Luna public talk.

gains on losses reviewed by Thomasin Sleigh in The Lumière Reader
http://lumiere.net.nz/reader/arts.php/item/2108

2009-05-26T15:25:00.000-07:00

Keng Pin Hsu and John Ward Knox at 448

2009-05-26T15:18:00.000-07:00

2009-04-27T23:27:00.000-07:00

2009-02-17T01:09:00.000-08:00

2009-02-17T00:40:00.000-08:00

2009-02-17T00:38:00.000-08:00

2009-02-16T23:43:00.000-08:00

Essay for Selina Foote's show 'Fire Riot Meat' at Newcall

2009-01-20T02:07:00.000-08:00

An early attempt.

When I was a child I tried once to capture the image of a flower. Casting across the yard I sought the most vivid punctuation, a small mark of glory. In the shadows attested itself just such a colourful defiance, soon snatched up.

Emulating actions observed somewhere previously I prepared a heavy tome and two leaves of paper, placed the flower between the leaves and closed the case. Having never seen the results of this process I had presumed that the object of the undertaking was to translate directly the image of the flower from the actual article to the paper. I had thought that the flower would reproduce itself in death, leaving its legacy in perfect reproduction.

I was dismayed then, upon opening the book several weeks later to find a flattened ochre flower and a pale pastiche of colours soaked into the white sheets. Where a petal had lain red, it’s remnant an almost-green brown. Its ghosted fragrance released and risen the second surprise, a thin but accurate trace of the flower in life. While the flower had held onto its hue unto death, it seemed I had caught its bouquet.

The scent of the flower is the thing it willingly projects, the part of itself that is cast out in a carefree dance of emancipation, particles suspended in the air to entice sentience to company. Pause the world at any given moment and witness a billion lines of smoky enquiry.

In my attempt to take the image of the flower, I had instead received only that which the flower had already decided to relinquish. It was an early challenge to my presumed right to take an image from the world. What I had thought of as a concise vivid object to be chosen and framed revealed itself as a complicated and open realm of revelation and obscurity.

2009

2008-12-07T02:27:00.000-08:00

Matters.

Corporeal, social, theoretical; matters are always about context. In the universe, there are only ever temporary pools of gravity, where an object/subject can acquire weight. Material values fluctuate according to the breadth of interstice between availability and need and as such, any given material will most likely spend 99.999999% of its cohabitant life alongside judgemental beings as worthless, and 0.000001% as supreme commodity.

Notions of value are notions of gravity. Every matter; every material has latent energy. Art at its best can transform latent gravitational matters into nascent social ones. This comes about by deferring meaning from singular occurrences or arrangements to spaces of plurality. Corporeal, social, theoretical: catalytic agents implicate their surroundings.

Reading into matters means reading a city through the universe. Using Sherlock Holmes’ deduction technique, you can tell what something is by what it isn’t. A rock isn’t a rumour, and yet the striking thing is that every material is potentially analogous to an infinite array of ideas.

A valuable thing happens when the catalytic agent/object/situation becomes a mirror, and you realise that it is your own temporary pool of gravity that is generating all the weight around you, and that the agent of change is never an estranged object, but is always you, latent, nascent.

It is my privilege to cast proxy agents into any public space, and I don’t take this privilege lightly.

MFA Exhibition 2009

2008-11-23T16:29:00.001-08:00

In the background is an untitled work by Boris Dornbusch.

Last photo courtesy of Agnes at The Paint and Bake

Futures

2008-11-14T16:51:00.000-08:00

Sometimes all you are thinking is nothing. Or at least, sometimes all you are doing is rhythm. There is this amazing solo piano piece by Chopin. It starts off in F minor, two slow deep notes, then some more, maybe it's Rakhmaninov, but then it isn't and it lightens and you hear the motif and you can kind of discern the timbre of the piece. Your brain stops trying so hard because a lot of the work is done. The rest is easy, the rhythm becomes you. Or at least, you can tap your hand or nod your head without new calculations. Maybe you adjusted your stride a little, maybe you noticed a particular colour that is on that sign and on that thing there. One sense filters another and you keep moving. But then something different happens. Things are always happening of course: there is somebody you've seen before; there is a cascade of notes. It is just that sometimes all you are thinking is nothing, and sometimes you are already not there. On the one hand, nothing much has changed, the rhythm is maybe a pinch slower, but the key hasn't changed. You are in the same space as before and all the motions are familiar. But there is more. Not more like somebody puts a cube of ice into your drink and it overflows, but more like you look down and notice 'Hey, my drink has ice in it…' The new situation isn't really a new situation, it is the same as before, but there is more. In the piece of music there are now individual notes that sit amongst but distinct from all the rest. They seem to be at odds, but they still make sense. They are fundamentally similar, but colder, like ice in water. They float at the top, alien, at home.

to the you who is

Now you are aware of difference. Now your rhythm is intertwined with an offset counter-melody, something that is like being pulled in contrasting directions. When you thought you were moving right you realise you must also be moving left, you realise you must be moving forward but spinning. Let me repeat, nothing has changed, your actions are exactly as they were, but now everything is different, because you realise that these new notes have always been latent in your understanding. If you think of the word 'drink', ice is a latent component. These things are part of the picture, part of the rhythm even when they are invisible. But this isn't the remarkable thing: so there is ice in your drink, ok, so what? The remarkable thing is that then the notes stop as suddenly as they began, the whole thing lasted maybe ten seconds. The music continues. You know that the latent notes are still there, but your ability to hear them has gone. It is like knowing that there is ice in your drink but not being able to look or check in any way to make sure. You have to believe in echoes. You have to believe in matter to exist without confirmation. You have to believe that things are deeper than they appear. The song goes on being a song, and you can almost fool yourself that what you hear is everything again, that only the things that are happening are happening. But there is that echo that is right there. It doesn't exist in the present. It exists in the past. But now you are aware of your breathing, or of where you know that person from and this is like being overly self-conscious. If you don't do something with this awareness it can feel like something in you becomes paralysed. Knowledge is ability, but knowledge without action can disable. So you really want those notes to come back so you can move that way or act that way or say that thing, but the moment is gone and if you do that's called being crazy. But it isn't crazy, it's only latent. There is ice in every 'drink'. But only if you don't check. So stop thinking about it and keep on moving like it doesn't matter. The song is back to 'normal' and there is plenty to enjoy. It really is a good song. You can slip back into it's rhythm comfortably, and because it is only music that's fine. Semantics, A, D, C, F, drink, ice, whatever. Everything can be erased by examining its language.

everyone already

Unless it is repeated often enough. In the Chopin song, twice suffices to be often enough to persuade you that you are always thinking about something, even if sometimes all you are thinking is nothing. Because it happens again. And it is sort of devastating. Not devastating in that it causes any sort of destruction, but devastating because your suspicions are confirmed, you take a look and the ice is still there. But now you are guilty because you needed evidence to prove true to yourself what you knew must be. Your joy is tempered by your need. And that is like realising you are an addict, because you are acknowledging a power that isn't reason (like pure mathematics). It is evidence (like applied physics). You can take heart though, because luckily it is only a song and is therefore temporal by nature. Everyone is crazy. And everyone is devastated sometime. It is the devastations that frame our rhythms that allow us to move forward, even with the awareness that forwards is sometimes backwards. That sometimes all you are thinking is nothing. Or at least, sometimes all you are doing is rhythm.

futures

John Ward Knox

Wed 22 October 6pm

A Centre for Art. Level 3 Achilles House.

23 October – 8 November. 1-6pm Thursday, Friday, Saturday

futures

2008-10-18T05:26:00.001-07:00

simple matters

2008-09-13T21:37:00.000-07:00

2008-09-13T21:16:00.000-07:00

photograph 2008

2008-09-13T20:57:00.000-07:00

photograph 2008

slow motions

2008-09-04T00:12:00.000-07:00

Wed 3rd September 2008. 6-8pm One night only

Butter paper screens suspended over window bays an a room between lease.

2008-08-31T22:36:00.000-07:00

2008-08-31T22:14:00.001-07:00

2008-08-31T22:03:00.001-07:00

2008-08-31T21:20:00.000-07:00

2008-08-31T02:04:00.000-07:00

2008-08-31T01:54:00.000-07:00

2008-08-31T01:38:00.000-07:00

2008-08-28T20:50:00.000-07:00

2008-08-22T22:46:00.000-07:00

book, chain. 2008

2008-08-22T22:21:00.000-07:00

book, chain. 2008

2008-08-19T04:57:00.000-07:00

0

2008-08-19T04:50:00.000-07:00

Batteries 2008

2008-08-19T02:20:00.000-07:00

Photograph 2008

2008-08-13T18:40:00.000-07:00

Paper 2008

Our eyes are our hands

2008-08-04T02:46:00.000-07:00

Our eyes are our hands.

One thing that Arte Povera artists were very good at was finding out how a material can express itself in a most basic way, whilst also hosting an external realisation. I’m thinking mostly of Giovanni Anselmo whose concrete was concrete, whose lettuce was lettuce, whose gravity was gravity and whose nature was not simulated but self-evident. These are lessons that are perhaps now not exemplary but are part of an understanding of the fabric of the word art. Nonetheless I believe the benefits of this awareness stretch beyond sculptural understanding to encompass an understanding of represented form as well.

At a molecular level, there are no boundaries to materials, atoms hold hands until they don’t. Like chemistry between a circle of friends. This way, though a material may have a concise form, there is always the option for the chain to be extended or reduced – size is a relatively arbitrary and primitive unit of measurement. A lettuce is lettuce-size because that size is effective to the propagation of the species, marble and granite can be any size because there is plenty of room under a mountain.

Giovanni Anselmo knew that in the material world, scale is function, and he used this to generate his particular brand of affect. Though I am far from a scholar on the period I suspect that to Anselmo making art was a philosophical position, not in that there was a particular doctrine to follow, but that the manipulation of materials and the loading of potential meaning into these new configurations is an act of philosophy. An applied philosophy, where the word philosophy becomes material, like clay, or like coal; full of individual units holding hands or pulling the finger. Because when you invest meaning into material you are dealing with molecules rather than surfaces, relationships amongst distinctions.

In thinking about a lot of contemporary art it seems that one large focus of concern is how we receive images rather than the images themselves. The figure is superceded by the field in a sort of claustrophobic sublime. As a believer in images this abandon into ether strikes a discord because I don’t believe that images are quintessentially flat signifying planes, instead they can be more akin to the material world of Povera, where an acknowledgement of form is based upon the complicity of molecules. This mode of knowledge generates a three-dimensional model of meaning, where a material carries a haecceity-like weight through it’s being, concurrent to the weight ascribed to it’s surface appearance.

I believe a drawing can carry weight as a philosophical undertaking. A drawing can be a commitment to an understanding of materiality in that it can share a common organ of reception; the eyes. When we look at something we are seeing molecules, but we can’t understand a world where we swim amongst a trillion individual points of information so our eyes trace out finite distinctions between things. At a molecular level the boundaries between objects are far more porous and open to interaction than we can really comprehend so our eyes make things easier for us by describing boundaries and creating planes upon which we can operate. Graphically, this information is traditionally represented by lines, which become a substitute for the eyes, fulfilling the function of dividing form into understandable portions.

I think about Matisse and how his cut-outs and line-drawings operate. I think as his eyes wandered so did his lines, but regardless of the accuracy of these marks to their subject they still manage to describe an amazing idea of form. Then I think about Gabriel Orozco, who is completely different, but whose eyes are the central character in his creation of meaning, whose work allows us to describe meaning into chance encounters with form.

In a period that seems obsessed to describe the outermost limits of art as a form, I think an understanding of what Matisse, Anselmo and Orozco offer is an important undertaking. While Matisse described form graphically, what he offered was open spaces into which the eye pours form and depth and substance. What Anselmo offers is a chance to encounter form as function, the chance to let the eyes rest momentarily from describing form and to let his objects achieve this description autonomously, without assistance and by using their own inherent properties. What Orozco offers is another thing again; what he offers is an update of the old Beuys adage that ‘everyone is an artist’ by expanding the notion of art as what people physically make to art defined as how their eyes describe the world.

Operating with an awareness of the world inspired by the work of Orozco, it is possible that the eyes are the central character in the creation of form. The hands are the heart, and the eyes are the hands. It is this understanding which allows us to fill the vacuous void left by arts rapidly expanding outline with three-dimensional meaning. Because I believe we need depth to survive, and depth comes about by having a commitment to the things you see, to seeing things as objects whose surface is an indicator of a far greater volume beneath.

Essay and image by John Ward Knox. from Matters a Newcall Publication

2008-08-03T05:45:00.000-07:00

2008-08-03T05:41:00.000-07:00

Photograph 2008

Things you didn't know you were already enjoying

2008-08-02T22:13:00.001-07:00

Check out Fiona Connors writing, plus images of the show here:
http://www.window.auckland.ac.nz/archive/2008/08/onsite.php

Notes on music.

2008-07-30T03:15:00.000-07:00

Recently I was listening to music, music I had once enjoyed a great deal but had since neglected. At one point of my life I would have known all of the lyrics but now everything was vague. As I listened I knew that I knew the songs already, but couldn’t make them out ahead of time, so was always suspecting what was to come next, a sort of slow burning, exciting anxiety which is like flirting, or waking up from a good sleep.

I noticed a spider had taken up residence in the cone of one of the speakers and was moving in and out with the music, engaged in an unwitting duet. To the spider, the music that caused such a specific resonance within me mustn’t mean much as noise. What I hear as melody and rhythm and meaning must come across as a functional part of its landscape, more akin to weather than to meaning. To the spider, a bass riff may be like being buffeted by a strong wind. To the spider, a treble note may be like a breath on the shoulder.

There is this wonderful thing that happens sometimes with music when you are listening to what you think is a simple but elegant song where the singer is singing a note with a long sustain, and it is a pretty nice note, and then it seems like half of the voice changes and becomes something different, but what has happened is that what you were hearing was an instrument that you didn’t even really know was there play the same note as the singer and then in a moment one or the other drops away or ascends into a different note and creates a harmony and you realise that what you thought was one beautiful thing was actually two beautiful things and you were enjoying them both the whole time without realising it, and it is sort of like finding out you are in love with an old friend and then you are so happy and surprised that you want to go back instantly and relive the moment but then the new harmony is so good also that you cant stop for the pleasure it keeps bringing and you are caught in a sort of paradox where you want it to be over as soon as possible so you can begin again but also want it to last forever.

Between tracks the spider gains a small reprieve before again being waltzed into a landscape. I think perhaps that all the really good songs have finished but the next one is a song with this neat bit where the singer goes na-na-na-na, which sounds naff when you read it on a page but is really good when you hear it.

Outside the window a tree moves barely. To the tree, the music that reaches it must be similarly abstracted from meaning. To the tree, the things we hear as notes and beats and choruses must be barely perceptible fluctuations in a much larger and slower environment, like a skipped heartbeat to the Grand Canyon or an indrawn breath to a rocky mountain or an artwork to life. To the spider and the tree this music is environmental, but to us its something we can understand.

Essay by John Ward Knox to accompany the show 'things you didn't know you were already enjoying' at Window gallery.

2008-07-27T16:54:00.000-07:00

2007

2008-07-27T16:40:00.000-07:00

2007

2008-07-17T05:56:00.000-07:00

Sometimes when you're photographing something you come across a specific angle and then all of a sudden the thing you are taking pictures of almost looks like everything.

simple hearts #12

2008-07-17T03:00:00.001-07:00

2nd state

Toilet paper, copper mesh. 2008

simple hearts #11

2008-07-17T02:59:00.001-07:00

Copper mesh, wood. 2008

I

2008-07-17T02:54:00.000-07:00

Table tennis balls, blinds. 2008

P.S Similar to Sean Kerr's work I know.

simple hearts #10

2008-07-17T02:46:00.001-07:00

Silver chain, steel wire. 2008

simple hearts #9

2008-07-17T02:42:00.000-07:00

Satin, steel wire. 2008

quality bakers

2008-07-17T02:37:00.000-07:00

photograph. 2008

2008-07-14T08:20:00.001-07:00

at night time even rain kind of looks like stars if you take a photo of it

2008-07-14T08:09:00.000-07:00

2008-07-13T19:37:00.001-07:00

Byro pen on A4 paper. 2008

2008-07-13T19:35:00.000-07:00

Byro pen on A4 paper. 2008

2008-07-13T19:25:00.000-07:00

Byro pen on A4 paper. 2008

2008-07-13T19:24:00.000-07:00

Byro pen on A4 paper. 2008

2008-07-13T19:22:00.000-07:00

Byro pen on A5 paper. 2008

2008-07-13T19:15:00.000-07:00

Byro pen on A4 paper. 2008

2008-07-13T19:13:00.000-07:00

Byro pen on A4 paper. 2008

2008-07-13T05:26:00.000-07:00

Byro pen on paper. A4. 2008

2008-07-13T05:18:00.000-07:00

Byro pen on paper. A4. 2008

notes on music

2008-07-10T01:32:00.001-07:00

There is this wonderful thing that happens sometimes with music when you are listening to what you think is a simple but elegant song where the singer is singing a note with a long sustain, and it is a pretty nice note, and then it seems like half of the voice changes and becomes something different, but what has happened is that what you were hearing was an instrument that you didn’t even really know was there play the same note as the singer and then in a moment one or the other drops away or ascends into a different note and creates a harmony and you realise that what you thought was one beautiful thing was actually two beautiful things and you were enjoying them both the whole time without realising it, and it is sort of like finding out you are in love with an old friend and then you are so happy and surprised that you want to go back instantly and relive the moment but then the new harmony is so good also that you cant stop for the pleasure it keeps bringing and you are caught in a sort of paradox where you want it to be over as soon as possible so you can begin again but also want it to last forever.

they synth ballet images

2008-07-09T02:34:00.001-07:00

Images by John Ward Knox and Richard Frater. 2007

echo

2008-07-09T01:47:00.000-07:00

2008

Matters

2008-07-07T21:04:00.000-07:00

2008

constellation

2008-07-07T20:36:00.000-07:00

2008

Gravity. Published in Hue and Cry Journal.

2008-07-07T20:30:00.000-07:00

A cat knows what gravity is, much more than you and I do, or can ever hope to. When on the prowl – when a cat is quintessentially a cat – a cat understands gravity well enough to pretend to be water, that to remain innocuous to perception, you must flow silently over the rocks, that the bird will escape if it perceives you as something alien to its surroundings, something unnatural. And water is natural – it obeys gravity, it is constantly moving in two directions, down and forward, sometimes quickly and sometimes slowly. Water always seeks the least prominent place available. A cat knows this, as much as a cat can know anything, so a cat mimics water – it flows quietly and unassumingly until it is as close as it can get, and then WHAM it explodes back into cat form again, and the bird sees that it isn’t water but a cat, but by then it is too late.

So a cat knows what gravity is – much more than I do, and much more than a rocket scientist can do. If you throw a cat up in the air it will land on its feet, because it knows gravity, knows where down is.

I’ve never been to a ballet, but I like to think about dancing. I think all movement is just controlled falling. In fact, I think even staying still is controlled falling. A concrete brick on a concrete floor is controlled falling. All the structure of the brick is working against falling – all the grains or fibres or trace elements or whatever – they all are saying ‘UP!’ Staying together, staying upright or multi-dimensional is all about working against gravity, attempting to stay up when everything falls down. I think just staying upright is for all the elements of some thing to move upwards at the exact same pace as they are being pulled down.

It is in this light that I like to think about dancing. For me dancing isn’t an embodiment of emotion or snow or anything interpretive like that, but a basic expression of our desire to stay upright in existence. I think dancing is beautiful – not because it contains beauty, but because to dance is to be joyful while vertical. To express ‘UP!’ in any way is to enjoy what we can, while we can.

There is a scene near the end of the Jean-Luc Goddard film Hail Mary where the frame is fixed on the agitated surface of a swimming pool. The frame shows little but reflected blues and whites until the character Mary emerges, in a slow and languid half-twirl, holding her baby, Jesus, in her arms. The water parts without heroism for the simple upwards movement. It is plain, entirely ordinary, and yet somehow remains one of the more arresting and compelling things I have seen. While the figures moved upwards, the water moved down.

When I think about dancing, I don’t think about Swan Lake or Nutcracking, I think about dance as something to do. I think about dancing as one of the happiest and most natural ways to enjoy being human. When I go dancing I put on shoes with slippery soles, soles that make contact with the ground as fleeting and unstable as possible. and in this way I am always finding myself unbalanced in unexpected ways, and needing to invent new ways to make myself vertical. It is like this with sculpture. I like sculpture like I like music. The songs/sculptures are tangible abstractions of things too large, too small or complex or simple to understand in their entirety at any one time. They have hooks and progressions and drops and movements; they are finite and you can dance to them. What they suggest is a new way of being upright. Once you learn the brick dance from a sculpture, the gangster lean from a pop song, then you can see the brick dance everywhere, and dance the human dance alongside the dancing buildings in the dancing streets.

There was this young Polynesian girl leaning against a downtown bus stop sign as I walked past the other day. She was wearing a very large tee-shirt that covered her from her neck to her shins. It was white and in the sunlight reminded me instantly of Greek sculpture.

Hip-hop and rap culture is essentially a celebration of the body. Previously I had thought it to be a celebration of the word, but now I think quite otherwise. You can see it in the dancing, in the lyrics, in the mannerisms and foibles that make up the culture. I think that despite its insertion onto the realm of commodity, in its inception ‘urban’ culture was antithetical to consumer culture because it was all about aggressively inhabiting your own body. Inhabiting, not just using it as a vehicle to transport your head around, but as a home to live in. The massively oversize shirts act as an awareness of form, as an awareness that clothes are a social function, primarily designed as a signifier. The real form is always the body underneath the clothes.

What this girl knew, like a cat knows to be water, is something akin to what the Greeks must have known: that a loose cover is more celebratory of the form underneath than a tight cover. Her covering herself in the massively oversize shirt is a sign, a taunt that announces that she has a body and she has clothes, that the two are separate though intertwined. This is a taunt to those whose clothes mimic the shape of their body, whose clothes are so confused as to their role that what they cover is not the flesh, but the personality.

I think the Greeks understood that when covered, a form is most beautiful when it reveals itself in little moments – the intense beauty when a thigh or buttock impresses its form into the surrounding fabric, only to fall away again, mid stride. It is like a comment from a moving car: ‘You’re gay!’ or ‘I love you!’ or ‘Wooo!’ It is said and done and gone in an instant, but its impression is almost indelible. ‘I am not gay, dick!’ or ‘Wait! Who are you?’ or ‘Wooo what?’.It is these fleeting impressions that let the mind do what the mind does – fill the gaps. It is the space between the flesh and the fabric that the mind slips into, occupies briefly before it is pushed out again at the next step.

This is why it knocks my socks off when girls wear dresses. Sexy, to me is not having everything bare, revealed - that’s porn and science (the two are synonymous). Sexy is letting the mind explore the potentials of the body. Sexy is not just having clothes that mimic the skin – replacing the form with façade, like a hollow computer animation – but in knowing what you’ve got, and then being coy enough to keep it just that far from reach. Close, certainly, almost touching, but not quite. It’s like catching a glimpse of the ocean through the trees.

Sexy is about gravity, when the clothes literally hang on or off a form. Sexy is about up(form) and down(cover), about a leap and a landing, about dancing.

Essay by John Ward Knox

two things captured once

2008-07-07T20:19:00.001-07:00

2008

One thing captured twice

2008-07-07T20:06:00.000-07:00

2008

2008-07-07T19:56:00.000-07:00

Rock, vase. 2008

echo

2008-07-06T04:32:00.000-07:00

echo

blue as silver as gold

2008-06-14T21:13:00.000-07:00

poster by Kate Newby

Installation shot

John Ward Knox

The Gallery was full of people. The stone was resting at the far end of the room, while the small mound of sand was in the midst of groups of people chatting.
The stone was greeny gray in colour, a rounded form, suggesting to me that it was plucked out of its place among the ebbs and flows of watery surroundings.

Just after 7pm, in a casual and non-sensational manner, but with focus and conviction, John picked up the weighty stone, and with some effort carried it closer to the mound of sand.
People around in turn noticed this action and while some attempted to interact with him, he was polite but carried on with the action. Standing over the sand, straining against gravity to keep the stone in his hands, he aligned it with the sand.

Suddenly he let go, and the stone fell quickly and gracefully. A silnence ensued among the audience, to allow the sound made by the impact to disseminated though the space and enter the being of everyone present. It was a personal, yet collective experience for each person in the room.

The energy of the precise yet muffled sound dispersed around the stone, moving the sand in all directions from the center, which made visible the form of the sound.
The artwork happened instantaneously and simultaneously in several physical realms; visual, aural and corporeal. Two forms of experience which would naturally occur without clear distinction from each other were allowed to divide and exist in parallel realms. The energy of the impact propagated through sound and permeated the space. Its physical counterpart was allowed to act as a visual reminder, a trace, thus enabling the audience to have a heightened experience of both within one instance.

as recalled by Sasha Savtchenko-Belskaia

Patrick Lundberg

Sasha Savtchenko-Belskaia

Moving in time (notes on Blue as silver as gold)
Essay by Sonya Lacey

1. What is time well spent? In this action, time is occupied with resolve, like the occupation of a building. & thinking about time taken: I’ve watched the process of painting and repainting over approximately a month, but the time taken spans decades. My experience of the work comes through an imagined understanding of the action; paint gives an account of the art, the art an attempt to be in time. I understand that reflecting on the past implicates the present, and that it involves the projection of this moment into the future; I am aware of being present, actively here and now. I understand the temporal interconnections forming are determined by my subjective experience.

2. Each practice is filled with the presence of people across time. I had never thought of conversation in terms of tactility.

3. In this action, there are raw materials and the staging of making or unmaking, or at least of un-differentiation. It involves travel – energy and distance decreasing organisation and, along with that, loss of distinctiveness. A phrase comes to mind written by Mario Merz: REPERCUSSIONS OF MATERIALS IN THE SOLVENCY OF THE MOMENT. The enaction of interactions, relationships, reciprocities. This work begins like a diagram; physics then metaphysics. The materials will just be themselves, heavy and light, and always susceptible to physical laws. It is arrogant to believe ourselves outside of these systems.

4. The body has learnt along the way, streamlined the process, become fatigued in points and misjudged in others. The work has been made (a structure set in place, a task completed), but the work is happening. And once a thing is done it can’t be undone (even when it’s gone).

5. As I remember it, in the book Silence John Cage suggests the art gallery’s relationship to art was one of preservation. He likened this to the relationship refrigerators have with milk – both white cubes are designed to separate a lively thing from life, an act that slows down its changing and makes it digestible over a longer period of time. Cage’s criticism – I could be misattributing here – was that this gave a dishonest account of the nature of the work. Gabriel Orozco seems concerned with keeping his work similarly close to life experience. Unlike Cage, he seems to see the gallery as a useful way to frame the moment of communication, (selection/exhibition), but I’m struck by how weak the gallery is to hold the expanse of that work, how ineffective it is in slowing it down.

For more information visit www.newcallgallery.org.nz

Writing for Alexandra Savtchenko's Ω

2008-06-14T21:07:00.000-07:00

Ω

Recently I found myself at a café, drinking a hot beverage, chatting to an inquisitive stranger, who drank a cool one. Pierre - a Parisian, as I found out - had arrived in the country a day or two prior to our encounter and was enthusiastic to engage people he met. A few minutes into the conversation however, it became clear that Pierre and I would have trouble in communicating more than rudimentary concepts, as his English was mostly utilitarian, and my French close to non-existent.

In astronomy, the symbol Ω – omega – is used as a hypothetical variable to express the possible density of the universe. The ramifications of the value of this density parameter inside of these equations are vast. Assuming a zero vacuum energy density, if Omega is larger than unity, the geometry is closed; the universe will eventually stop expanding, then collapse. If Omega is less than unity, it is open; and the universe expands forever.

We are all fluent with our own thoughts, but to express them so that others can hear what you mean it is always necessary to mediate your ideas through a system of universalised abstraction – language. In my conversation with Pierre, our ideas and opinions and all the things we sought to express had to be conveyed using much simpler words than we would usually use. Using simpler words reduced the space between what I meant, and what he heard, and visa-versa.

In her work ‘Ω’ Sasha has made a gesture of abstraction. She has removed a letter from the middle of two identical signs. She has placed these objects inside a gallery. One of these signs – sans ‘C’ - can be seen from the office of the gallery. The other sign is also without the cipher and can be seen by many others, as it faces away from the gallery.

Having been tempted by the cool beverage Pierre had been drinking, and having finished my coffee, I decided to buy myself a beer. It turned out that Pierre had been similarly influenced, as he returned to the table a short while after with a coffee.

In communicating with Pierre, I had tried to reduce the space of concepts by fitting them into less complex words, so that they became compact, concrete, and could travel between us with a lesser risk of misinterpretation. In communicating with us through her artwork however, Sasha has done the exact opposite, she has purposefully exaggerated the distance between a sign and it’s meaning.

Fundamentally however, Sasha has not used this gesture as way to destabilize the weight of either the sign on the building, or the sign in the gallery. The meaning of the signs and of the gesture remains in flux, the act of the artist becoming something in definitive. What the artist seems to be doing is presenting us with a chance to each decide on a value for Omega, a theoretical concept based upon ideas about material reality and with ramifications that encompass the universe.

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For Images, and to download the catalogue for the show, please visit:

http://www.artspace.org.nz/exhibitions/2008/architectureforthenation.asp

Strangers

2008-05-21T22:42:00.000-07:00

A Middle aged man sometimes unexpectedly finds himself with a chunk of spare time amongst the activities of his day. A rare occurrence, he makes certain when this happens that he uses this time in the best way he knows how – by doing precisely nothing. We find him sitting on the kerb idly tossing pebbles amongst autumn leaves at the back of an inner city hotel. His thoughts run.

There is a tree roughly opposite his seating place, nearly empty of leaves but laden with a city of birds. The man has never seen so many birds condensed into a single location. Each branch droops under the weight of its occupants. The man thinks that the tree is like a kaleidoscope of chittering shapes and colours. He spots fantails and sparrows and finches and blackbirds and native pigeons and waxeyes and thrushes, loosely assembled into specie-based factions. He feels for the braches that support a large group of heavy looking birds, blackly silhouetted against the sky.

A woman stands underneath the tree by the road dressed in a vivid Cobalt blue coat, black leggings, black boots. She has a felt beret pushed rakishly over the side of her shock of auburn hair. Her eyes are furtive. The man notices the sky behind her melting slowly from azure to light pink to something more like her coat.

Overhead the birds continue their recreational politics, preening, or jumping from branch to branch. The man wonders if he is foolish to consider that two birds sitting snugly against one another may be in love. Love in high branches, a concentric safety, where two hearts orbit each other.

Just then an old car pulls up and the woman gets in without a word. As she does she casts her gaze across the scene, something between a survey and a goodbye. Her eyes pass over the spot where the man sits but they don’t linger. As the car starts up and crawls forward there is a sharp retort from the exhaust, a gunshot-like backfire. The tree explodes in a squall of tawny arrows as birds flee the sound in every direction. For a moment the air is filled with a haphazard firework as the fleeing birds exodus radiates them outwards. The flight of individual birds appear random but the combined shape of their flight makes the sky look like a black firecracker has exploded – silhouettes against a steadily more blue sky. Crazy cinders drop and swerve as like finds like. Out of the initial chaos small bands become groups become packs. Only a few seconds have passed and a small haze of blue smoke hangs lazily over the road.

The tree is shivering its relief, every bough lightened, like a spring released. As it quivers an organic dancing the man thinks that it must momentarily feel like a sapling again, light and joyous. He is reminded of the way he felt when he heard his partner had become pregnant – two years ago.

Asteroids

2008-05-14T19:48:00.000-07:00

I guess that humans are just pretty complex things. Either screaming bloody everything’s into nothing, or whispering hollow nothings into everything. Perhaps we can think for a moment of humans as celestial bodies – stars, planets, asteroids, dust. “dust as dust as dust” as Sylvia Plath so eloquently and frankly writes. Perhaps our own situation in the cosmos is actually pretty rare… a number of spinning globs of matter in near perfect arrangement around our star, concentric circles, galactic ripples. Maybe this is like our version of the nuclear family, the way things settle into place and start to produce that happy illusion of inevitability, when really, we are much more akin to those chance beings – bodies in elliptical orbits – like Hailey’s comet. We perhaps only skim in and out of these temporary pools of gravity, changing and being changed by them.

I think perhaps we find ourselves surprised when entering into relationships we expect to be concentric – nuclear – to find out that actually this gravity is only a temporary affair. What felt irresistible is a force that will propel you just as far away as you were before. The same force that attracts will also eventually sling you away, so gracefully and carelessly as to feel unfathomably cruel – such simple beauty – inflicted.

What appeared to be a singular attraction is shown to be a mere miracle of gravity – the thing that so comforts, so anchors us – that calls us towards home, cosy terra-firma is actually equally a force of repulsion. The thing that draws you inwards, that we perceive to be a singular calling, is actively pushing you outwards, into the cold of the world. Excruciating beauty. A glimpse of the ocean through the trees. A siren forever wailing… Dust as dust as dust.

It is a curse that in sadness there is great joy, that in joy there is profound sadness, that in relationships you are alone, and alone are companioned with humanity. It is a curse that we have the ability and freedom to think abstract thoughts, to link things alien to one another, with nothing more than words – inadequate ciphers! It is a curse that we cannot possibly condemn this to evil, because it is this curse in which we show our greatest possibility, our greatest wealth, our proverbial philosophers stone, creation.

No divine thing, creation, entirely human. Creation from silver tongues, from honeyed lips, from lithe fingers and livid flesh, from the darkest demon filled recesses and the most fragile sun bleached realisations. Forever Sisyphus, forever happy, forever sad, lonely elliptical asteroids.

many one thing

2008-05-10T20:41:00.001-07:00

Sand, Pillow. 2008

The last show at Happy. Images of this work of mine, and of the rest of the show can be found at:

http://www.happy.net.nz

From black - yellow

2008-04-28T03:33:00.000-07:00

Fiona Gillmore
Newcall Gallery 29 April - 20 May

Yellow:

Oftentimes at twilight I find myself seated at a bus-stop awaiting carriage home. I generally frequent the same stop, where the seats are placed generously to afford a view of the city, though not from any great distance. Across the broad street from my position buildings rise – teeth, battlements or monoliths – thirty flights against the vaster reach of sky.

I have no pressing matters I can attend to whilst sitting there – no goals to achieve nor expectations to meet. Accomplishing little but witnessing the passage of time, I often get to wondering about the value of things, the way we think. For example there is a point where day becomes night, where a switch occurs between opposites. And yet as I sit there I find it difficult to tell with any conviction whether what I am experiencing is part of the period called day, or the period called night. If there is a switch that takes place between two opposing forces, say when black becomes white – one could be forgiven for expecting a violence to evidence itself, some moment of trauma to signal the inversion which turns one concrete existence into its opposite.

This moment somehow never arrives to announce itself, so I have to read the herald of night into inconspicuous details. My current system is somewhat clinical. There in the office buildings facing me, there are invariably rooms or whole floors left fully lit, projecting their own approximation of daylight for the benefit of those working inside, the better to pursue daytime goals. This provides me with a standard measurement upon which to base my calculation. During actual daylight hours the light from the windows – being still an imperfect approximation – pales in comparison to the natural radiance of the sky, but as nighttime steadily approaches the artificially lit rooms acquire more impact. As the sky darkens I have come to believe that the transition between night and day happens at that point when the light from the windows seems to become more luminous than that from the sky.

Black:

And yet that point is infinitely reducible and infinitely escapable. To make use of such a definition is hardly possible within the fluid structure of language, where words are replaceable and their meaning alters according to their context. Because we have developed this flexible system of abstraction we are no longer required to make experiential judgements. By your definition we can only know when day turns to night by seeing it happen, by some system we devise and in relation to a given constant. But the only reason those buildings and that channelled electricity can exist is because of language, because we can reduce physical things down to concepts and vagaries, so we can use the knowledge of their existence without ever coming in contact with the thing itself.

The language we use is a system with an inbuilt schizophrenia, where the meanings of words overlap, so that the word ‘twilight’ includes both ‘night’ and ‘day’. In this way we make easier for ourselves our interaction with the world. By interacting with porous concepts, rather than concrete realities we can make these periods of transition less traumatic and be free to pursue activities that would otherwise be forbidden by our subservience to natural cycles.

Yellow:

Perhaps then let me offer another definition of change.
I was sitting on a pier facing the city one night recently, the harbour between us. The lights of the buildings and of the streets and the dock machinery glimmered over the horizon, a thin band made up of individual points. The night was overcast so the lights seemed to emerge in the distance from black depth. As I sat there a huge tanker entered the harbour, a slow and silent leviathan. The tanker carried few lights of its own, so appeared mainly as a giant moving shadow, a silhouette against the city. From left to right the tanker past by, it’s presence causing an insidious eclipse swallowing the city lights in front, and depositing them behind.

I think this is perhaps a better way of understanding change. Where once a light can be said to exist in front of the ship, after the ship has past the light can be said to be behind. This is like the difference between night and day. Because things exist inside of a continuum the only thing that changes drastically is our way of classifying them. Behind the silhouette of the ship is the point that one thing changes to another. When looking, we can never see this happen, because for one thing to become another, at some point it has to be invisible, it has to be neither one nor the other.

What Fiona is offering to us is a chance to slow down our expectations for gratification, to relish time spent during periods of transition. What we encounter is not a transaction, we do not enter the gallery and leave having made a cultural purchase, an intellectual product akin to “I came, I saw, I conquered”, but the opportunity to witness a series of infinitely different scenarios, played out inside of a continuum that purposefully eludes classification. Like finding ourselves in the shadow of a passing ship.

Essay by John Ward Knox

Glasses

2008-04-05T20:01:00.000-07:00

2008

At a point overlooking the city.

2008-04-02T01:21:00.000-07:00

At a point overlooking the city, a car park at 9pm. Looking upwards, through the open sunroof of a parked car, the clouds lit from beneath by the glow of the city.

(…)

Grace:

Thank heavens, else they recede with the sky and we lose them til tomorrow, as if they were history. Only in the city do we capture the clouds – we hold them in an immobile and insidious spotlight, lest they slip beyond our recognition into darkness. In the age of reason we have to be sure at all times that the clouds exist. It is reassuring but saddening too. An affirmation of sentience that somehow forbids sleep?

Estella:

There are no silver linings to be found with clouds above a city at night, instead the city provides something akin, a mirror perhaps. The horizon lit by a thousand points of light providing a golden lining between the earth and the sky – a delineation that is most obvious at the edges, where humanity hugs the ground, an insidious urban sprawl. Aspiration breaks this artificial lining though, where humans have struck upwards with sky-rises that create a lattice of lights like the facets of a crystal – refracting our perception of form as something that belongs to the earth. Human aspiration is like the atmosphere turning into a cloud to announce its presence. In one moment it is a wandering mass of individuals – carefree and restless – the next a union of effort, a confluence of wills and a cloud – the city – is produced.

Grace:

It seems to me that people climb a hill – right to the top – to seek distance. This then, is the real point. When you achieve distance you achieve momentary independence. What then? What does one seek in isolation?

Estella:

Beneath us our compatriots, our families, our enemies and lovers. Above us the compassion and benevolence of a world apart. People seek the point because reaching any point is to see the intention of humanity. To see that as a tool humanity is a blade gliding through thin air – in contact with nothing – swung by a species fighting shadows.

The drunks and the druggies see this, see the millions of blinking lights and perceive of them hostile in their ability to remain distinct from one another. The drunks see that they are receiving a thousand individual bullet points in a lecture in manners from a superior they do not respect. They can never conceive of all the conflicting rules as being something they can understand so they seek to blur the boundaries – to turn the city into the heavens – until they become a single celestial cloud in which it is safe to sleep.

The lovers see this - they are in contact with nothing, and as such, even in company are alone. So the lovers turn to one another and seek solace not in each other’s words but in one another’s breathing.

The lonely see the harbour, the boats moving slowly to sea, the trees moving barely. The lonely hear the wind and the motorway and think of them sisters. They hear the chirping of thousands of crickets; see the blinking of thousands of lights and think of them brothers. At the point the lonely find thoughts like fireflies, incandescent sparks swimming through black depth. They grow entranced at the beauty of these glowing spectres, adrift and disembodied hopes. At the point of the world the lonely find siblings in nature, unusual comfort in strangers.

At the point everybody finds solace in nothingness, see in the distance the ancestors of their thoughts, hear in the wind the sermons of some estranged teacher they once respected, but had long since forgotten.

Grace:

At the point I think people become a body apart, whether in the interior euphoria of teens marching side by side or of lovers momentarily staring at the same point in the distance, or as a drunk who becomes a cloud – less presence but more impact – or even the lonely who are already apart, but who find in themselves a million potential relationships.

Grace and Estella depart the point.

Grace:

At the very tip it becomes pointless to ignore others – one feels perhaps a renewed drive to engage with others in ways that convey some of the meaning gleaned from seeing the stars and the city mimic one another. Descending though the lights all change – the city no longer twinkles but it glares – the heavens retreat behind looming constructions of brick and concrete and glass. The beautiful separation seems somehow less applicable, and the lack of recognition on the faces of those whom you meet makes you pine again for existence on the point.

(…)

2008-03-22T04:41:00.000-07:00

Attention to detail

2008-03-22T04:31:00.000-07:00

A small stoat is taking a drink at the edge of a stream. A leopard approaches, with a glint in it’s eye.

Leopard: I always find that writing something down is a way of instantly forgetting it. It is all taken care of and you don’t need to worry about forgetting it later. Don’t you think?

Stoat: Please don’t eat me.

Leopard: You don’t need to worry, I’m never very hungry when I’m thinking..

Some small talk.

Stoat: So you’re saying that in Hollywood love is a fade to black, then cigarettes?

Leopard: At least it used to be, back when Hollywood respected it’s audience enough to hide things from them. Now it’s all copulation and flesh, teasing and gratification. Funnily enough, the fade to black is more generous to our perversions and fantasies than flesh caught on film ever is. The bride stripped bare is no longer a bride, but an animal, the groom a fauve too. Our minds have little work to do in such an encounter – all of the work is being done for us, in our place. So the fade to black used to be much more risqué in a way.. by letting our own fantasies bloom. Now it is no longer possible to engage in my own personal fantasy – to apply my desires to the situation in front of me – instead a predetermined piece of choreography is dictated to me, preaching generosity and democracy, while practicing authoritarian fascism.

Personally I believe the old adage that love is blind. It is like standing back to back with someone you trust. You are unable to see them, but when the back of your hand touches the back of theirs you know that you are both there because you want to be. When facing away from each other, at any point one or the other of you could walk away and leave the other completely exposed. This cannot happen when you are looking someone in the eye – face to face – body to body, flesh on screen. It is that unspoken agreement the fade to black that stands for something. Maybe I am old-fashioned, but I get more kicks from Alfred Hitchcock than from Takashi Miike. Let me elucidate a little..

I think that the pain and beauty of being alive lies in our inconsolable loneliness; our universal singularity, and in our innate drive to find the miracle that will reverse this condition. Supposedly the answer to this loneliness has existed in the solidarity of workers, in the solidarity of belief, in the solidarity of religion and class. But solidarity is not happiness, it is temporary euphoria. It is the feeling of marching side by side towards a common goal. But solidarity cannot last forever. March too long and fatigue sets in, euphoria turns to ideology. March farther still and ideology turns into doctrine. And if the march stretches out longer still doctrine turns into hegemony.

So solidarity is an impermanent phenomena relying on constant propulsion, an increasing or at least steady velocity. As soon as it slows the essence of solidarity is lost, when euphoria turns into ideology it requires more and more fuel to reach that joy of initial and unmediated euphoria. It is this way with capitalism, with drugs, and with relationships too. We enter into a relationship with the hope for communion, but what we find is solidarity. We enter into a relationship with the hope of finding a self propelling something that exists in a natural state – just because we will it so. But we find that to keep the engine running there must be a constant feeding of fuel into the fire. What we expect to be ease - our own private utopia – we see is actually work, just as much the dysfunction as the thing we hope to take solace from.

So in love unless your backs are turned to one another, unless you are facing opposite directions and remaining perfectly still, you will always be walking slowly away from each other even though you travel in the same direction.

Stoat: I think I know what you mean. Love can be hard to find sometimes, so sometimes we need to look a bit harder. When we are looking harder, we take notice of things that we may otherwise miss; a fallen tree balanced gingerly across two rocks, a light yellow sheet caught on a wire. When we are not possessed of a single love but are looking, we take notice of these things and somehow they make sense and we realise that actually we are already in love.

Some smalltalk.

2008-03-22T04:21:00.000-07:00

Houses

2008-03-08T01:18:00.000-08:00

A dinosaur and a human are at an airport waiting for a flight – which has just been delayed.

Dinosaur: Damn.
Human: Damn.

Some Smalltalk.

Dinosaur:

I also don’t understand why you humans don’t like spiders – why you eliminate bugs. Don’t you know that bugs eliminate each other much more effectively then you do? You wipe spiders out of your house and then act surprised when the place fills up with flies. Death is not one off and final, not extermination. It is cyclic and essential and joyous. I don’t understand you humans – you hate death so much that you spend your life fighting instead of living. It is always a joyous thing when somebody dies. Sad, certainly, but overwhelmingly joyous. A death acts as an affirmation of life. When somebody dies the shocking thing is not that they are gone, but that you are still there. This must be joyous no? A death is not a realisation of death itself, but of life. If all your loved ones were to live forever you would end up hating them, because you would know them too well.

We dinosaurs lived for some billions of years, I’m not sure how many, we didn’t bother to count. We lived that long because we enjoyed it. You humans live at a pace that exceeds that of the universe. And as such – you will all be dead before the various gods you worship can even realise you exist, let alone help you.

Lets pretend we can call all your objects of worship ‘god’, it doesn’t matter what they are. Lets pretend that this god is an animate being. God is sexless, in as much as that it is made up of all the men and women that worship it. This sexless god is a sum of its parts. The parent is only a parent because of the child. God is only god because of the worshipper. Each devout human is an individual cell in the body of this god – entirely not god – but entirely a part thereof. This is how you do things I think. What you struggle to realise is that there can be no communion between a human that is part of god and god that is made of humans. Being human, god cannot exist, being god humans cannot exist. They are the same thing because they are entirely different. So a human is a cell in this god, in whatever god. The funny thing is that you have hundreds of words for this god – the most common being ‘God’ and ‘Humanity’ where the word humanity acknowledges that humans exist as humans because of their ability to communicate and to exist individually inside of multiplicities. If there were only one human there would be no humanity.

You can never talk to god. You exist at a much faster pace. All that god, humanity or otherwise hears from your entire existence is a tiny blip – a fragment that cannot make sense on its own. It is only by juxtaposing thousands, millions of these blips, one following another that god can make sense of anything that is being sent to it. Maybe after stringing millions of these blips together it hears ‘damn’.

You cannot commune with humanity because you exist at a much faster pace. You can never understand anything in it’s entirety because you are a part of a whole. You can never understand anything in isolation because it is part of the same whole that you are.

In the body of your god, if you If you try too hard to survive you become either a thought or a cancer, either way it is risky business, but you humans cannot live without these stakes it seems.

A long time ago we dinosaurs realised these things, and this is why we became so happy, stopped trying to communicate with things intangible and once again started to enjoy life. We dinosaurs were so happy because we understood enough to know that understanding isn’t everything. We used to build houses, great houses, made of granite and thatch, but soon we no longer bothered, because we found we would rather dance in the rain then sit inside. When we dance in the rain we warm up from inside, with heat and with rhythm. When we dance in the rain we cool down from the outside, with chill and with melody.

When we sat inside during the rain we would sit and stare, and wait for the rain to stop. While we waited for dry we would think too much and grow angry, because thinking is useless without doing. It is pointless to grow angry at the rain. Even when it stops the anger stays, because it isn’t anger that stops rain. Anger from thinking too much, anger that is no solution.

So we abolished the construction of houses and instead when it rained we would dance and be happy, because the feeling of heat is best when it is cold, rhythm is best with melody.

I do not mean that you should abolish your own houses - you are not dinosaurs yet – just that you should live outside as well as in.

Human:

Yes, we are not dinosaurs yet, and I am not sure we ever will be. We do not have the same lethargy of ages, instead the virility of youth and of viruses. I think we are unable to live as intensities, we would then be apes again. I think we need to know things in order to change them, but the things we most commonly get to know are our criteria for knowledge, so we are constantly changing our concept of concepts. This is our survival scheme – like a virus will constantly evolve and grow resistant to vaccines, we will constantly become resistant to truth, because with truth is death. And as you say, we are more scared of death than anything, so we spend our time trying to pre-empt life. I think we have touched on some of what you are saying, dinosaur. Have you ever seen a human tragedy?

Tragedies are fundamentally happy things I think, the tragic element of a tragedy is not so much the death or demise of one or all of the main characters (which is sad), but the fact that though the character is dead, life will continue (which is happy), regardless of this woe. A tragedy cannot be a sad thing unless the central woe is lesser than the implicit joys of being. The tragedy is tragic because the implication is there that though death may be profound; it is only meaningful in the greater significance of life. A tragedy has to be truly and fundamentally happy, to be truly and fundamentally sad.

It is the same with our houses, we can only appreciate one thing in relation to another. We can only appreciate outside because inside exists.

Dinosaur:

That seems a bit tenuous to me.. So what you are saying is that all your buildings are houses. There are two types that I can see, your houses called home, by which you will always be at war with your neighbors, and your houses called railway stations, called mosques and airports and churches, which provide the ammunition and mobility to make war from your home.

For your houses space becomes impressive only when you can define it’s limits. This is how you operate yes? You build a great hall which can hold much space, but you do not appreciate the space itself – only the structure that encapsulates it. You determine value by separation. You have the capacity to build fluid structures – I have seen you do it – but constantly you revert to concrete after thinking thoughts filled with helium.

The flight is now boarding.

Human:

You are such a hippie. Did you know that dinosaurs evolved into birds? See that pigeon? That’s you in the future.

Dinosaur:

That’s a bit depressing.

Some Smalltalk.

Gravity Dance Sexy

2008-03-08T00:54:00.000-08:00

3-16 Feb 2008
Dep_art_ment
Auckland

Dance Baby flyer

2007-11-28T17:39:00.000-08:00

Dance Baby

2007-11-26T22:59:00.000-08:00

Dance Baby

John Ward Knox at A Centre for Art

Essay by Sam Rountree Williams

John calls what he does a dance. His movements are slow and ordered, perhaps even cautious: this is a funny kind of dance, particularly in light of the show's title, Dance Baby. For me, such a title neither evokes John's dance, nor ballet, ballroom. Instead, what it suggests is something more creative and intuitive, something rhythmic and intensive (possibly even something smutty. I hope not).

John dances outside the Aotea Centre, which is the hub of Auckland's performing arts community. A lot of dancing goes on in there, too, but I don't imagine a lot of it would evoke comments such as “dance baby”. What goes on in there is a form of dancing that reinforces the apparatus of the State, and has a privileged status as official Culture.

As I understand it, dance which comes under the official `Arts' umbrella consists of two primary components; intertwined and inseparable though these may be. The first component involves the order; the time structured by intervals; the choreography which describes the precise arrangement of limbs and dancers at any given point, as in a Muybridge series. The second component sees the first as illusory: it understands time as duration, and the dance as indivisible rhythmic movement and intensity. It cannot see the trees for the woods, so to speak. The second is precisely that which cannot be systematised in the dance; is in excess of the dance's structure; and is always where the truly creative and subversive elements of dance reside.

Dance at a rave, at a concert, or impromptu in the street all seem to revolve around this intensive component of State dance, excluding the order entirely. There is no planning, are no steps; there's just rhythm, movement and feeling. While State dance is an outlet for the subversive currents in society though (more significantly) a reclaiming of territory - bringing such movements back under State control - the other kind of dance (the one that just makes you wanna dance, baby) can be a bit uncomfortable for the State apparatus. It is unpredictable, contagious (it runs individuals into multiplicities), unreasonable and is often associated with more dangerous subversions such as illegal drugs (!).

With all this talk (mine, not John's) of the State and subversive forces, one might almost be fooled into thinking that John's dance is some sort of activism, or a `political statement' (though I can't imagine what he would be saying). The particular public space he has used in conjunction with the title might suggest as much as well - even if the statement was not an entirely serious one. If this were the case however, John has gone about it in exactly the wrong way - what he has done has been to reverse those interlocking terms of State dance.

Instead of taking the established Newtonian model of time as ordered intervals as his starting point, John has begun with Deleuze and Guattari's subversive notion of the diagram: he has not set out to trace a pre-conceived plan onto a chosen space, but instead the dance is a creative mapping of a drawing made in relation to a ready-made arena. Ironically, what should be a rhythmic and intuitive process is overcoded; pulled back towards State control in its slow and structuring steps. Watching him is often the inverse experience from watching State dance: it is the order that impresses itself upon our sensibility, rather than the creation.

If this were some form of activism it surely would have to aspire to the conditions of Dance Baby dance, rather than make such a humorous hash of State dance's subversion. Remembering that John's dance, like that which takes place inside the Aotea Centre, does live in the shadow of the 'Arts' and 'Culture' umbrellas (though his subheading might be 'Fine Arts' rather than 'Performing', his gesture (on one level) reveals a kind of hopelessness in the subversive endeavours of the Arts. He has the right intentions, seemingly the right approach, but some invisible force reins him in and sucks out the rhythm, the intensity, the movement. Though he tries to map a flower, the organic integrity of this image is lost as the nature of his architectural environment (based on a spatial grid) bears down upon him.

But hey, let's not get hung up about it: this isn't a sad thing in John's work. Why call the show Dance Baby? Maybe it is enough to know that to explain would be to kill the joke - what it does is throw the whole project into a peculiar light and opens it to new registers of meaning. And it is here that the beauty of the thing lies: in holding together related (or not so related), though partially contradictory, elements. As much as there is a register of meaning involving try-hard activism, there is a footnoted wink from the artist, and then several other registers to grapple with also. John's alchemy uses non-resolving elements in a way that generates quirky tensions. He wants to have his cake and eat it too: affirming the artist as shaman - someone who can reveal the absurdity of reason and the oppression of the State apparatus, and discover something lost on the Western individual - while simultaneously parodying that romantic notion.

In particular, John's gesture uses dance (among other things) to make transparent the funny tension in which we are held as contemporary practitioners, between a cynicism born of a distaste for early Modern ideas of primitivizing in art (he wears a generalised `tribal' outfit); for late Modern ideas of creative, expressive, transcendent subjectivities; for the politicised projects of many (70s) artists in their distaste for the first two; and at the same time, a will to embrace all the above for its unflinching enthusiasm and, in some cases, its mysticism. Above all, though, it is the funny, beautiful moments which result from holding all of the above together that create the magic one is drawn to.

Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, trans. Brian Massumi, Athlone Press, London, 1988.

they synth ballet

2007-11-25T16:24:00.000-08:00

Equal to the love you make.

J. I’ve never been to a ballet, but Ritchie has, and he says it’s like break-dancing, but more beautiful, and less intense. I think that all movement is just controlled falling, and to me ballet feels like it’s trying to trick us into ignoring this. Ballet is like trying to pretend that we don’t have a human form, and instead can embody some ethereal quality, like the wind, or a bird, or love. But maybe that’s interpretive dance, I don’t know, I’ve not been to an interpretive dance either.

R. It was nothing spectacular, a rehearsal, no costumes and noticeable mistakes. They wore a used off-white that softened the contours of their flesh, making their bodies uniform. With little expectations, I remember a motion where the appearance of lightness proved seamless a line of taut, precise steps.
It is no longer a performance for an elite. An elite may attain superior seating but rest assured this kind of play is on the streets and dance floors. All things are in motion. The most loaded and weighted of materials are put to use here un-apologetically. If you want ballet you will need to dance.

2007-11-25T16:18:00.000-08:00

2007-11-25T16:16:00.000-08:00

2007-11-25T16:08:00.000-08:00

2007 Elam installation shot

2007-11-25T15:40:00.000-08:00

John Ward Knox. Curriculum Vitae

2007-07-09T08:53:00.000-07:00

John Ward Knox: Curriculum Vitae.

1984 Born Auckland, New Zealand. Lives and works in New Zealand
2002 Studied for Bachelor of Fine Arts, Elam School of Fine Arts (2002-2005)
2006 Bachelor of Fine Arts, Elam School of Fine Arts
2007 Studied for Post-Graduate Diploma, Elam School of Fine Arts
2007 Critical Studies Tutor, Elam School of Fine Arts
2008 Studied for Master of Fine Arts, Elam School of Fine Arts
2008 Drawing Program Tutor, Elam School of Fine Arts
2008 Critical Studies Tutor, Elam School of Fine Arts

Selected Solo Exhibitions

2009 toward a still life. Tim Melville Gallery, Auckland
2009 Gains on Losses. Enjoy, Wellington
2008 MFA Exhibition. Elam School of Fine Arts
2008 Futures. ACFA, Auckland.
2008 Slow motions. Room 102 Achilles House, Auckland(Intervention)
2008 Simple Matters. Open Window Project, Govett-Brewster Art Gallery, New Plymouth
2008 Gravity dance sexy. Dep_art_ment, Auckland
2007 they synth ballet. (with Richard Frater) Room 103, Auckland
2007 Dance Baby. A Centre for Art, Auckland
2006 Our Decision. Seed Gallery, Auckland

Selected Group Exhibitions

2009 Fresh Gallery, Newcall, None. Artspace, Auckland.
2009 Modern Physics. Te Tuhi, Auckland
2009 Keng Pin Hsu + John Ward Knox. 448 Gallery, Auckland.
2009 Various Artists. Window, Auckland.
2008 National Drawing Award. (recipient) Artspace, Enjoy, Physics Room.
2008 It's No Matter. Ariki Gallery, Hamilton.
2008 Things you didn't know you were already enjoying. Window, Auckland
2008 Last show. Happy Gallery, Auckland.
2008 Blue as silver as gold. Newcall Gallery, Auckland
2008 You Are Here Artspace. Auckland
2007 Young Blood Salon City Art Rooms. Auckland
2007 Between. George Fraser Gallery, Auckland
2006 Act Normal. Seed Gallery, Auckland
2006 Origins and Originality. Seed Gallery, Auckland
2004 National Drawing Award. Artspace Auckland / The Physics Room Christchurch

Essays/Writings in Publications

2009 Editor of Matters 3
2009 In Dialogue. In conversation on artist-run spaces. Matters 3
2009 An Early Attempt. Text to accompany the show Fire Riot Meat by Selina Foote at Newcall Gallery
2008 Dialogue with Dinosaurs, Elam Graduation Catalogue
2008 Our Eyes are Our Hands, Matters
2008 ACK, Ack catalogue
2008 Gravity, Hue & Cry Journal
2008 Notes on Music. Text accompaniment to the show things you didn't know you were already enjoying.
2008 Omega. Artspace New Artists Show, text to accompany Alexandra Savtchenko Belskaia's work.
2008 Futures. To accompany the solo show Futures at A.C.F.A
2008 From Black - Yellow. To accompany Fiona Gilmore's show Black - Yellow at Newcall Gallery