Capturing the performance of life
On a wall facing the Adam Art Gallery’s front window, a grainy black and white video plays of a couple’s mouths, tongues in active slippery embrace.
On the other side of the wall, inside, a video plays of the woman’s face, grimacing as she responds to being hit by the man. In an audio soundtrack heard through headphones the woman alternately ridicules and praises the man.
The work is called Oh Shit No, On the Contrary and is credited as by the man, Peter Roche.
Yet in performance back in 1979 the woman, Linda Buis, controlled which of her verbal responses played in response to a performance by him.
This work was presented just ahead of a series in both Buis and Roche’s names in Tāmaki Makaurau, as performance artists and partners, that took place over the next six years.
Until 1985, they explored together the psychological extremities of the relationship space between people: between a couple, and with audiences.
In a form of social sculpture (a term coined by German artist Joseph Beuys), Roche and Buis tested the boundaries of performance.
The extremities in the work can be disturbing, but they explore the question of who is in control: the documentor, the documented or the spectator.
In this survey of this work, In Relation, carefully curated by Adam gallery director Tina Barton and curator Gregory Burke, I longed for the warmth and immediacy of the voice of Buis that I heard in my headphones to be broadcast throughout the space. A counter to the dryness of presented black and white photography and typed and handwritten reports on their performances.
Yet this is performance art, not entertainment. Buis and Roche deliberately pushed their own and their audience’s endurance.
And key to the choreography of work for them was the considered placement of the still camera and its operator as principal spectator. Photographs are acutely subjective. What they tell us is controlled by their taker and the relationship in space between camera and subject.
Likewise, how we view our past can be led by the exhibition maker. Whose picture is this?
While Barton is an art historian with a deep interest in Aotearoa’s post-object art, Burke as a young artist and film-maker took a number of these photographs. This is also his legacy.
Roche and Buis passed away in 2020 and 2015 respectively.
In Relation is an experimental documentary archive, exploring how to honestly, visually re-present the past. How to bring authentic but vibrant life to the performance of life? This university gallery is a research space, and this is a smart but dry assemblage of research towards what will be a fascinating book, podcast series or film.
After that initial window work, I recommend you go first to the small gallery library to view part one of a terrific new documentary on Roche by Bridget Sutherland. A full screening is eagerly awaited.
We all bring our relationships to photographs. As a student in the early 1990s I loved the mezzanine at the University of
Auckland’s fine arts library where boxes of loose documentation of 70s performance work was held. I found this art that took social relationships and the body as its material enormously inspiring.
Striking was the dominance of the media by men. Brash and brilliant, aggressive, sometimes frightening, Peter Roche himself continued a public career as an artist, wielding chainsaws and fluorescent tubes.
Buis, like so many women, appears to have had to step away.
So, while a big survey of Roche’s practice seems imminent, this relationship work feels more attuned to our times.
Back in the front window, the earliest work documented here is You are Invited to be Accepted.
Roche shut himself up in an empty room with a camera, mirror, typewriter, paper, and various stimulants for two sleep-deprived days, with self-mutilation seeing him carted off to hospital at the end.
He also had exhibited a photograph of Buis, taken by her father, Simon Buis, himself a documentary photographer.
Roche invited a guest list to visit at specific times and take his photograph. The artist begins to let the light in.
In Relation is paired beautifully at the Adam with the annual Circuit Artist Moving Image artist commission series. Brought together by Thai/UK curator May Adadol Ingawanij, for Legacies five artists respond in film to her question: ‘‘What does a legacy taste, smell, sound, feel, or look like?’’
Memory opened out beyond the sensorial limits of a fading black and white photograph.
These works are diverse and rich, from Sriwhana Spong’s stunning digital animation of her Balinese grandfather’s spirit through a swarm of bees and text, to Edith Amituanai’s whip-smart documentary tribute to a remarkable friend, Epifania.
In an elegant meditative film by Martin Sagadin, photographs of potter Caitlin Clarke’s mining ancestors give way to her scooping clay from a glistening stream bank to throw a pot. Conveyed is time running and constantly reshaping memory, as water rubs away the muddy banks.
Legacies plays at under 50 minutes. Make time for a few hours at the Adam, then, before the end of July.
In Relation: Performance Works by Peter Roche and Linda Buis; and Legacies, both at Adam Art Gallery until July 30.
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