The Lightship: Simon Bowerbank on public art without labels
In this week’s Off Script column, Simon Bowerbank, curator of The Lightship, asks what happens when we allow art to speak for itself.
Public art galleries go to considerable lengths to construct cavernous white rooms, place an object in them for you to look at, then, at the critical moment, position a small card at eye level telling you exactly what you are looking at.
In psychological research, if you deliberately introduce information intended to change someone’s experience of an object, you would have to do some kind of ethics application, get informed consent and create a control condition. But in public art galleries, this is called “interpretation”.
For the past four years, I have curated public art video projects for a 110m-long, 13m-tall digital light wall called The Lightship. Built by Port of Auckland, the wall runs along the side of a car-handling building by Bledisloe Wharf. Its location means that, if you’ve been around the waterfront at night, you’ve probably been exposed to 1430sq m of contemporary art without your informed consent.
For me, this is one of the best parts of the project; the public’s encounter with an artist’s work comes first and the explanation later – or not at all. Someone might notice something happening on the side of the building before they have any reason to call it art: work by a great artist such as Sean Kerr or Tamsen Hopkinson, Turumeke Harrington or Oscar Perry.
It’s witnessed without the usual signifiers that tell us to call it art and value it accordingly. No artist biography or authority explaining why it deserves our attention. The work has to fend for itself and, by the time you discover what you have been looking at, you have already looked.
I recently organised a Whangārei Art Museum exhibition of 156 drawings by artists from throughout the country. Titled A DRAWING FOR A GROUP SHOW, it displayed the works without labels, only the names and titles that appeared on the drawings themselves. Another curator described this as “sadly ‘careless’ and irresponsible toward entirely normative expectations”. I suppose that was partly the point.
A large enough student loan was accumulated 20 years ago for me to know that there is no such thing as an unmediated encounter with an artwork. What interests me is whether an artwork has to rely on its status as art, and the institutional framing that comes with that status, to secure the viewer’s attention.
A public art gallery can never quite do what The Lightship does. The moment you walk through the door, the game is already up. But perhaps it can occasionally resist explaining so much, so quickly.
- First Light, The Lightship’s new year-long public art programme, launched on September 1 and includes new commissions by Ashleigh Taupaki, Ana Iti and Nova Paul, three leading wāhine Māori artists whose practices explore language, whenua, whakapapa and ecology.