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Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781775588962 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Auckland University Press |
| Publication date: | 09/19/2016 |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 252 |
| File size: | 23 MB |
| Note: | This product may take a few minutes to download. |
About the Author
Read an Excerpt
This Model World
Travels to the Edge of Contemporary Art
By Anthony Byrt
Auckland University Press
Copyright © 2016 Anthony ByrtAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-86940-858-9
CHAPTER 1
Clammy Pipes, and Other Monsters
At a sushi shop in a Birkenhead strip mall, Yvonne Todd has a pair of tongs, a flimsy plastic container and a doubtful expression.
'I suppose I should have one of those carrot rolls,' she says.
'That is a lot of carrot.'
She nods and takes one anyway. Todd, a vegan, also takes one deep-fried piece, for the novelty as much as anything else. In thirty minutes' time, she'll spit it out mid-interview when she discovers the meat inside it.
We get back in her car and drive to the Northcote house she shares with her husband Colin and their three cats. Although I've known Todd since 2004, this is the first time I've been to her home, which doubles as her studio. When we arrive, we pull into a carport next to a pond of toxic-looking sludge.
'Sorry,' she says. 'Colin hasn't cleaned the pool for a while.'
'That could be the title for your next show.'
She snorts. We go inside and sit down for lunch. 'Fuck!' she yells. 'Look how much wasabi they gave you!'
This tends to be the shape of conversations with Todd. She is a committed swearer and a consistent side-tracker. One of her most endearing traits is her ability to laugh at herself – so much so that it's difficult to know whether she ever takes herself seriously. There's a close correlation between this quality and the humour of her photography.
For the first couple of years I knew her, I was never quite sure whether I was talking to Yvonne Todd or 'Yvonne Todd', a constructed persona developed as a way to divert and disrupt journalists. It isn't completely implausible; Todd was a child actor. She is also an outstanding mimic, channelling the voices of various curators and dealers whenever she recounts amusing or scandalous anecdotes.
Yet for all that, and despite creating some of the strangest images in New Zealand's photographic history, Todd is pretty normal. In her early forties, she has been with Colin for over twenty years. She hasn't travelled much, and has lived almost all her days on Auckland's North Shore. Her work does have some international traction, though, particularly in Australia.
In late 2014, City Gallery Wellington held a major mid-career retrospective of her work. It was a shame the exhibition didn't also travel to Auckland, because the North Shore is more than just home for Todd; it has also played a huge role in her practice. The last and arguably finest example of this was 2009's 'Wall of Man' series: faux-corporate portraits of men in their sixties – the kinds of things that hang in boardrooms all over the world – except that Todd's men weren't captains of industry. They were well-intentioned locals with time on their hands. Todd had placed an advertisement in the North Shore Times for men of a certain age to take part in a photographic project. After receiving an enormous response, she met the applicants one by one in a local coffee shop. The shortlisted men then came to her home, changed into suits she provided, and posed to her specifications.
The results were as absurd as they were remarkable. Some were captured standing awkwardly behind vice-presidential chairs; others with a fountain pen raised or a suit jacket tossed over one shoulder after a satisfying day of fictional capitalist endeavour. In Todd's hands, average North Shore granddads and retired loners turned into International Sales Director, Image Consultant and Independent Manufacturing Director. 'It was the most fun series I've ever made,' she says. 'I've done quite a few series now where I've advertised for participants. I find casting the net into the wider community to see what returns really interesting, like beachcombing after a storm.'
In many ways, the photographs in 'Wall of Man' are typical Todd images: the studio lighting, the costumes, the impeccable technical detail, the weird emphasis on hands and teeth. But they also signal a radical shift within her practice. Most obviously, they are, as the title expresses, all of men – the first, and so far only, series Todd has dedicated exclusively to the opposite sex. Up until that point, her gaze had been focused on young women, at most in their mid-twenties but often as young as twelve or thirteen. With 'Wall of Man', she'd gone to the opposite end of the gender and age spectrums: not just guys, but old guys. It was, she says laughing, her least successful series sales-wise. Collectors were far more comfortable having her creepy adolescent girls on their walls than successful doctors and former CEOs.
There is also something economically aspirational, and distinctly Freudian, in Todd, the daughter of an accountant, framing older men as models of long-term success and distinction.
'I did spend a lot of time as a child listening to mind-numbingly boring conversations about tax,' she says. 'But I was more interested in the fact that corporate photography has to convey a sense of infallibility and paternal love. I wanted to see if I could replicate that, using ordinary blokes from the North Shore. Although, when I was installing the photos at Christchurch Art Gallery, the installation team had a game called "Whose dungeon" as in, "Whose dungeon would you least like to be captured in?" For some reason, that series always makes people talk about sexual deviancy, even though they could pass for corporate portraits. That wasn't intentional – it's just what people hook into.'
This isn't Todd dodging the question about her dad so much as offering a kind of implicit shrug. Freud is in everything she does; as she admits, she 'sees deviancy everywhere'. Her photographs exude the energies of natural-born suburban troublemakers: they are passive-aggressive, hysterical and hypersexual. They also seem to demand a biographical reading; we need and want to know the correlation between Todd dressing up old North Shore men and her dad's job. Or we want to see her extensive use of fake hair in light of the fact that, while a student, she worked at a shop called Wigworld.
'I had to work Sundays,' she recalls, 'so I was often incredibly hungover, if not still pissed. There was a little room where women could try wigs in private, and I'd shut myself in there and lie on the floor. There was a gap at the bottom of the door, and if I saw any feet come in, I'd stagger out with sleep-creases on my face.
'David Sedaris wrote about working as a Christmas elf in Macy's, and he describes how the adults who sat on Santa's knee always asked for the same things – a goldcard or a BMW – as if they were the first person to think of it. It was like that at the wig shop. Women would come in and say one of two things. Either: "I want to see what I look like as a blonde" or "My husband wants to see me as a blonde". That was endless. Then there were groups of teenage girls who'd come in and try wigs on and scream at themselves in the mirror like packs of chimpanzees, pointing. That was constant too. Not many genuine customers though; I sold fuck-all wigs.'
The shop wasn't her first encounter with synthetic hair. 'When I got my first job – it was at a warehouse that distributed bicycle componentry – I bought a wig with my first pay cheque. It was quite expensive – $330. Which, in 1991, was like a grand or something. I used to go out wearing it.'
I remind her that she'd previously revealed her eight-year-old self had compulsively plucked out her hair, strand by strand, until she gave herself a bald spot.
'Jesus, you're psychoanalysing me,' she says, laughing. 'But I don't feel like I have any mental problems, because I have an outlet for all my anxieties and eccentricities. There's a place to funnel them, to channel and manage them. The process is quite healthy. Also, I have to interact with people to get the results I want: the people who process and scan the work, models, modelling agencies and so on. There has to be a professional element that means I can't lose myself in problematic behaviour.'
WRITERS AND CURATORS have been trying to get to the truth of Todd ever since she won the inaugural Walters Prize in 2002. The Auckland Art Gallery had secured Harald Szeemann, one of the most influential curators of the late twentieth century, as the judge. The shortlist was a field of three well-established men – Gavin Hipkins, John Reynolds and Michael Stevenson – and Todd, not yet thirty and hardly known. She was the rank outsider. Despite this, Szeemann chose her series 'Asthma & Eczema' as the winner, and the media-bait was laid.
The New Zealand Herald opened its coverage of her win with the following paragraph:
A 28-year-old Auckland photographer [she was actually 29 at the time] who used to moonlight as a wedding photographer and waitress at strip joint Showgirls has tonight won the inaugural $50,000 Walters Prize for contemporary art.
The intro was a statement of facts, all notionally true. But the implications, here and across subsequent media coverage, were insidious. It could just as easily have read: 'Ex-strip club worker wins big money for bad photographs.'
The truth is, I'd been horrified by Todd's victory too, not because of her backstory but because of the work itself – I just didn't get it. I didn't understand why anyone cared about her wheezy, brittle, Hallmark-gone-off photos. Even the title suggested something scrofulous and listless in both its concept and content.
But the blatantly dumb coverage of her success was more offensive. Eighteen months or so later, I also realised I was completely wrong.
My about-face came when I saw Todd's exhibition '11 Colour Plates' (a typical Todd title given that there were only ten photographs in the show). I still remember walking into Ivan Anthony Gallery on K Road and being confronted with Roba, an enormous sepia image of a woman wearing a flowing dress and unflattering glasses, with a petrol can at her feet. There was also Bo-Drene: a demented-looking teenager with Coke-bottle specs and good legs, sitting stiffly on a dining chair. Fractoid was a faceless blonde on wooden crutches standing heroically in a speckled studio. Resulta was a horrific portrait of Todd herself as an anorexic. And Methylated Puddle was an innocuous, boggy patch of grass transformed into a noxious purple trap.
These are still among Todd's best works, and for me, made one of the defining shows of the early 2000s. So I made my declaration in print: Todd was the best New Zealand artist of her generation. Szeemann had been bang-on; he'd recognised that the wheeziness of 'Asthma & Eczema' was also its problematic strength, and that its twenty-nine-year-old author had seen something in the world the rest of us had missed – something that had been hiding in shadows the whole time. Todd, right from the start, was an artist who revelled in digging up, and showing us, our monsters.
I THOUGHT A LOT about Todd towards the end of 2013 when I spent a few months at Cranbrook Academy of Art, just north of Detroit. Detroit was at that moment starting its bankruptcy proceedings – the largest municipal insolvency in US history. It is also, statistically, one of America's most dangerous, and poorest, cities. Despite this, I was safely ensconced twenty minutes up the road on the Cranbrook campus, in one of Michigan's wealthiest suburbs, Bloomfield Hills.
Driving south along Woodward Avenue from Bloomfield Hills to Detroit is like sliding down a perfectly paced graph of American socio-economics. After the leafy McMansions surrounding Cranbrook, you pass through the almost-as-well-heeled but slightly denser neighbourhood of Birmingham, then through aspirational-young-family Royal Oak, and finally gay-friendly, hipster-ish Ferndale.
But just after that, you cross 8 Mile Road, the deep gouge of freeway that marks Detroit's northern limit, and the universe changes. Woodward's asphalt becomes scarred and torn. Henry Ford's Model T factory – the factory that transformed Western industrialism forever – slowly collapses under its own, unmaintained weight. Magnificent apartment blocks and mid-century churches look like the damaged remnants of London's Blitz.
Look left and right and you glimpse desolation in the cross streets: multi-storey, middle-class redbricks falling down, stripped of their copper wiring, plumbing and anything else that can be sold for scrap. Drive all the way to the end of Woodward and you arrive in a semi-deserted metropolis, where GM's Renaissance Center looms like the Death Star over the straits that separate the US from Canada. A giant monument to Joe Louis's fist points across the water. On the other side, Kenny Rogers glares back, just outside Joe's reach, from the looming billboards of Windsor's cheesy casinos.
Detroit is in bad shape, but it's not alone. The United States, and particularly the Midwest, is strewn with similar medium-sized industrial cities struggling to redefine themselves in the early twenty-first century. The fight to keep Detroit solvent is classic domino theory – if it goes, others will tumble too. Detroit is also America's most definitively 'American' city: the place where the birth of the automobile laid the groundwork for several interconnected, culture-shaping forces: the freeway, the suburb, and Motown music among them. Detroit changed the way all of us moved, and with it the way we lived, what we ate, what we listened to, what we watched, what we bought. Its contemporary decline is a deep wound in the American psyche.
But it isn't all doom and gloom. Art in particular is countering Detroit's woes. Young artists are moving into the city, attracted by ludicrously affordable studio space. The Detroit Institute of the Arts (DIA) is still one of America's great art museums. And there is MOCAD – the Museum of Contemporary Art Detroit – which is trying to energise the city's contemporary art scene.
At the back of MOCAD, just next to its parking lot, is a white mobile home which, attached to a permanent structure, mimics the suburban gravitas of a textbook middle-class house. There are planters out front, a welcoming veranda, a garage for the family car, a manicured lawn. No one lives there though. It's the last major commission by the artist Mike Kelley, who died in 2012. Called Mobile Homestead, it's a replica of the Detroit house he grew up in.
Kelley arguably did more than any other artist of recent decades to expose the psychic cracks in America's modern condition. Seeing suburbia, consumption and repression as connected forms of cultural infection, Kelley cooked up a remedy of Freudian catharsis. He made complex installations out of stuffed toys and crocheted blankets, which, far from evoking childhood safety, hinted at the formation of sexuality, separation anxiety and object fetishism. He made abject performance and video works with fellow artist Paul McCarthy, in which the pair enacted bizarre Oedipal rituals and restaged the children's classic Heidi as a decidedly adult horror film. And he made Educational Complex, 1995: meticulous scale models of every school he attended, as well as his childhood home.
Mobile Homestead is a late extension of the Educational Complex models – a piece in which architecture is recreated not just for its internal spaces but for its formative power. Here, it's done at 1:1 scale. It's also classic Kelley. At ground level, the house behaves like a model citizen: home to free medical check-ups, community exhibitions, a library and various forms of social support for Detroit's impoverished residents. But beneath its surface – literally – is is a subterranean world that Kelley intended for 'private rites of an aesthetic nature'.
Mobile Homestead has two below-ground levels that mirror the floorplan of the space above, except the below-ground rooms are linked by ladders, rather than doorways. It isn't open to the public. The only people who can access it are select artists, musicians and arts groups. It was Kelley's final gift to his peers – a mini-labyrinth for them to get lost in, confront their own monsters, and figure out how to give them form.
In Kelley's house, Todd's suburban visions start to make a different kind of sense. Created half a world away, they tap into the same histories, the same forces of capital and the same archetypes. They act as a kind of mirror to Kelley's body of work, too: his examination of the relationships between Freud, suburbia and the formation of American masculinity given a feminine flip.
Todd hasn't been to Detroit, but it is nonetheless where many of the contemporary desires that shape her world – to be a consumer, to lust after inanimate things like cars, gadgets and houses, to live the safety of a suburban half-life – were created. Detroit may be in ruins but despite its troubles it still speaks back, showing us how monstrous and fragile our aspirations, of the type that sustained us throughout the twentieth century, can be.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from This Model World by Anthony Byrt. Copyright © 2016 Anthony Byrt. Excerpted by permission of Auckland University Press.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
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Table of Contents
Prologue: The First of May 1
Clammy Pipes, and Other Monsters: Yvonne Todd 17
Luke Willis Thompson/Kalisolaile "Uhila, The Walters Prize 2014 43
Death in Palmerston North: Shane Cotton 53
Fiona Pardington, Moonlight de Sade 81
Live Forever: Billy Apple 87
Steve Can; Transpiration 113
Scattered Pieces: Peter Robinson 123
Shannon Te Ao, two shoots that stretch far out 153
Parallel Worlds: Judy Millar 161
Ruth Buchanan, The weather, a building 187
No Place to Hide: Simon Denny 193
Postscript: 4 January 2016 225
List of Illustrations 231
Sources and Further Reading 234
Acknowledgements 241