10 reasons to scrap Quasi
Warren Feeney offers up 10 reasons why Ronnie van Hout’s sculpture should be removed from the Christchurch Art Gallery’s roof.
It has only been there since June, but it feels like forever. Ronnie van Hout’s five-metre high mutant sculpture of his face and hand, Quasi has spent the past four months on the Christchurch Art Gallery’s roof, soliciting public feedback; ‘‘puzzling’’, ’’provoking’’, ’’funny’’, ’’lewd’’, ’’terrible’’ and ‘‘awesome’’.
Yet, it now looks as though the response meter has shut down. Every reaction and idea Quasi was capable of provoking has been revealed. This is a genuine surprise. Van Hout is the artist whose 2003 touring survey exhibition I’ve Abandoned Me, featured him in conversation with various doppelgangers, leaving gallery visitors entertained, but also forever uncertain about their sense of wellbeing and identity. Van Hout’s art has always been finely tuned to serving up equal measures of absurdity and scepticism. So what has gone wrong with Quasi? There are numerous problems, and here are 10 for a start.
1. Quasi is a one-line joke. Quasi was welcomed to the central city by at least a third of its residents with the good news that here was a public artwork that really was a bit of fun and mischief. And therein resides a difficulty. This was all it had to offer. Christchurch residents generally warmed to Quasi . An unexpected, unimaginable, genetic practical joke. Here was a creature beyond comprehension. The problem is that Quasi keeps on repeating this mad-scientist punchline, again and again on every encounter.
2. Quasi proves that Photoshop is not necessarily an artist’s best-friend. Quasi has all the qualities of a working drawing on paper. That is; the beginning of an idea conceived, but not fully resolved for the public arena of the corners of Gloucester and Montreal streets. Now larger than life on the CAG’s roof, it remains, in spirit, a manipulated digital image not quite ready to deliver its full potential on such a grand scale.
3. Quasi does van Hout’s arts practice few favours. It is not just the legacy of van Hout’s I’ve Abandoned Me exhibition that shines more brightly in relation to Quasi, but also that other figure by the artist on the roof of the former Post Office building on High and Tuam streets. Van Hout’s Coming Down and its apocalyptic celebrity with arm outstretched, pointing to the sky every day for the past three years, has sustained and renewed its presence each and every day. In 2013, it looked like Mel Gibson from Mad Max as the last person on a devastated Earth, and as the city rebuilds, it has adopted the persona of a sci-fi ‘‘watcher’’ from outer space, casting doubt on the human activity it sees taking place, as buildings, streets and residents return to the central city.
4. Quasi has been accompanied by a media release that seeks to influence public response. Do a Google search on this sentence: ’’Ronnie van Hout elevates the hand of the artist to monumental status in the regenerating city.’’ The first 15 hits directly quote this statement. Quasi embodies one further example of the increasing authority of the marketing departments of New Zealand’s public galleries, defining Western art and culture with an excessive and unnecessary public optimism.
5. Quasi is in the wrong place. It may be a strangely formed creation and representative of humanity, but it possesses enough of the qualities of a human to foster more personal engagement. Positioned high above the pavement and out of reach to the more immediate attention and curiosity of the public, a modest and human scale at ground level would have made Quasi a more informal and personal experience.
6. Quasi would have been perfect as the opening for a local festival. Public artwork often operates more successfully as part of a temporary event. The scale, the weirdness, its potential for announcing the new and unexpected, are all fundamental to Quasi‘s larger-than-life persona, perfectly suited to the opening of an inner city festival. Even better for Quasi, once it was over, Christchurch would still be buzzing with its memory as a defining moment of the occasion.
7. In its larger than life fleshcoloured pinks, Quasi (unintentionally) draws attention to the uninspired and unwelcoming, grey concrete and glass buildings currently constructed or being constructed in the city.
8. Historical precedents for Quasi diminish its ranking and status in the visual arts, film and comic books. The best of popular culture has already been there on many occasions, bringing together and reconciling the humour, alienation and pathos that is largely missing from Quasi. For the real thing see Tod Browning’s disturbing and touching cinematic milestone, Freaks (1932), American comicbook artist Basil Woverton’s Mad No. 11 (1953), or David Lynch’s first major film, Eraserhead (1977). Quasi belongs to a history of freakshow features, but it puts on their style, rather than their uncomfortable and touching realities.
9. Viewed from Worcester St, Quasi‘s ring finger appears to be inappropriately and belligerently pointing at pedestrians and office workers on Worcester Boulevard.
10. Quasi stretches the meaning of the word ‘‘temporary’’. The Christchurch Art Gallery states that it commissioned van Hout to create Quasi specifically for temporary installation on its rooftop. This broadens the English Oxford Dictionary’s meaning of the word ‘‘temporary’’, which it describes as ‘‘lasting for only a limited period of time’’. Quasi still has 14 months left on the Christchurch Art Gallery’s roof before it comes down. Please, surely now is the time for Quasi to leave the building.