PART ONE: 1970–91
SETTING THE SCENE IN THE 1970S
If, on 2 April 1971, you had journeyed out across the unsealed metal roads to the west coast of the Tāmaki Makaurau Auckland region of the North Island of Aotearoa New Zealand, venturing as far as the remote Karekare Beach, to the north of Whatipu Beach and the great Manukau Harbour and south of Piha Beach, you would have come across the mystifying scene of ten people arduously sweeping the beach with long-handled yard brooms. Karekare is a long, black, iron-sand beach. Quite a lot of sweeping to do, then.
According to his art school lecturer Jim Allen, twenty-five-year-old sound and performance artist Phil Dadson had returned to Elam School of Fine Arts at the University of Auckland after ‘a year off’ in Europe to study with Cornelius Cardew. As described by Andrew Clifford and Rachel Shearer in Chapter 6 of this book, Dadson then established an Aotearoa splinter group of Cardew’s Scratch Orchestra (soon to evolve as Dadson’s From Scratch), which Allen recalls first performed in the lecture theatre at Elam.
In this hothouse moment of what was to become known in New Zealand and Australia as post-object art, Allen recalls a beach ‘swept with yard brooms [involving] groups of people knitted together in common endeavour’. Allen was one of the sweepers (and photographers), along with other sculpture staff, Dadson himself, and a number of Dadson’s student colleagues at Elam, including Maree Horner, Malcolm Ross, Nigel Brown and Bryony Dalefield.
The sweepers arrived at Karekare in the late morning and swept, as Dadson describes it, ‘from late morning thru to mid’ish afternoon . . . as long as it took from one end to t’other’. As noted by Blair French in his survey of performance art of the 1970s (Chapter 1), Purposeless Work 1: Beach sweeping (1971) was the first in a series of ‘purposeless work’ projects, a category inspired by Cardew and Scratch Orchestra activity. Dadson recalls: ‘This was work for the sake of the work, no particular purpose, no rewards’ across a ‘pointless-to-sweep stretch of beach’ in ‘communion with the elements and the place’.
I write this, fifty-three years on, from my art school office at Auckland University of Technology (AUT), having just returned from a studio ‘crit. session’ with second-year students. Toni Lochead, a promising performance art student, has made an artwork titled Stopping the Tide (2023). Dressed in a bright green bodysuit, Lochead mopped the incoming tide at Te Atatū Peninsula beach in Tāmaki Makaurau with a standard domestic mop, to halt rising sea levels. Deploying forms of humour and futility in the public sphere, Lochead approaches climate activism by scaling problems down to tasks that she can
perform. She was unaware of Dadson’s 1971 performance. On my smart phone, I googled ‘purposeless work’ while she looked on with surprise, noting the artwork for her blog.
As an art educator and artist, I am aware of how preoccupied our current art students are with the ‘now’, accentuated by social media platforms. My hope is that this anthology will encourage further interest and research into a range of performance art practices in Aotearoa. It joins recent projects like Natasha Conland’s significant 2018 exhibition, Groundswell: Avant-garde Auckland 1971–79, at Auckland Art Gallery Toi o Tāmaki and Christina Barton and Gregory Burke’s 2023 exhibition at Te Pātaka Toi Adam Art Gallery, In Relation: Performance works by Peter Roche & Linda Buis 1979–1985 (the subject of Chapter 5 in this book), which were focused case studies of moments in Aotearoa’s post-object and performance art history. Without these efforts, students will continue to suffer from the historical amnesia that leaves them unaware of the practices that have taken place on their doorstep. We hope not.
The Waitākere Ranges and Karekare Beach were features in the poetry of Allen Curnow, father of Wystan Curnow. The Curnows built a holiday home on Lone Kauri Road near Karekare Beach in the early 1960s.11 Young Wystan would have known the place well. Allen Curnow’s poem ‘Looking West, Late Afternoon, Low Water’ dates from the 1990s and begins with a curiously current concern for climate change: ‘Our beach was never so bare. Freak tide,/ system fault, inhuman error, will it// never stop falling? . . . A wall of pale green glass miles above/ head high alongside, complete with fish// crossing . . .’
When Wystan Curnow returned to New Zealand in 1970 after doctoral study in the United States, he found himself in a country where ‘painting was the dominant medium, landscape the dominant subject, and national identity the dominant idea’. By mainstream accounts, artists were painting the landscape, not sweeping it. That country is now immeasurably different. When invited by the New Zealand Listener to write a review of Auckland’s first 100 years, Curnow began with a mention of Dadson’s Purposeless Work 1: Beach sweeping, noting the importance of the beach for New Zealanders: ‘The beach is a line between land and sea, society and not-society, this country and the great elsewhere.’ He contrasted Dadson’s artwork with what he called the ‘ulterior motives’ and ‘bad faith’ of organised outdoor sport, saying that Dadson’s art celebrated the beach: ‘the ebb & flow, come & go of currents, air & water & stone & to neither impose nor impinge upon its nature’.
Curnow’s pivotal position when recounting the first decade and more of this book’s story is found in his dedication to what was referred to at the time as post-object art. Curnow began writing art criticism in the early 1970s ‘largely out of an intense interest in post-object art’ and due to Jim Allen’s inspirational advocacy of contemporary art at Elam. He attended ‘crit. Sessions’ at Elam, and noted: ‘recruiting me as house critic was one of many things he [Allen] did to make the School the base of a scene’.
We are honoured to include a chapter in this book co-written by Jim Allen and his friend, artist James Charlton. Chapter 3, ‘Getting It Straight’, grew from conversations between the two men about re-enactments of Allen’s performance art practice; Charlton had assisted in re-enactments of Allen’s Contact (1974) at the Govett-Brewster Art Gallery in 2010 and at Artspace Aotearoa in Tāmaki Makaurau in 2011. Contact’s semi-mythical status for subsequent generations of artists is based partly on a reprisal of Allen’s work by Michael Lett Gallery in Tāmaki Makaurau. Their chapter here discusses Allen’s views on the drawbacks and benefits of re-enactments and offers insight into the planning and realisation of Contact.
1973: ECONOMIC CRISIS AND POLITICAL UPHEAVAL
The 1970s was a decade of extraordinary economic crisis coupled with political protest. Global economies were reeling from the oil shocks of 1973 and 1978–79. New Zealand relied heavily on imported oil, and soaring oil prices resulted in a worsening balance of payments coupled with increased unemployment and inflation. Britain joined the European Economic Community in 1973, and within four years New Zealand’s exports of butter and cheese there had halved. In 1973, Prime Minister Norman Kirk ordered the naval frigate Otago, with a cabinet minister on board, to enter the French nuclear testing zone at Mururoa Atoll in the South Pacific. The publicity, together with a successful case in the world court, forced French nuclear tests underground. Robert Muldoon became prime minister in 1975, and by 1976 the country was in recession.
Since the early 1970s Dadson has been a key proponent of group, collaborative and improvisational performance art practices, and as such has had a huge influence over the art scene. Dadson’s From Scratch gave its first public performance at the inaugural Sonic Circus festival at Victoria University of Wellington in 1974. Eight years later, on 27 September 1982 at Auckland Town Hall, they performed the preview performance of their nuclear protest work Pacific 3, 2, 1, Zero (Part 1), which was destined for the 1982 Paris Art Biennale. As Andrew Clifford and Rachel Shearer describe in Chapter 6, ‘Sound and Performance Cultures in Aotearoa’, the group’s arrangement of PVC pipe percussion racks imitated the symbol for nuclear disarmament, and their vocals resembled a protest chant that comprised the names of islands across Te Moana-nui-a-Kiwa, including Mururoa. I witnessed this performance at the age of twenty, and it confirmed my desire to be an artist. I recall vividly the energy of the performers (Geoff Chapple, Wayne Laird, Don McGlashan and Dadson) in their combined lament for and warning of impending nuclear disaster, and the dynamic sculptural installation that was, quite literally, being performed.
In 1973 the poet Hone Tūwhare convened what was to be the first of the annual hui of the Māori Artists and Writers Society (later Ngā Puna Waihanga), held in that first year at Te Kaha marae in the Eastern Bay of Plenty. Thereafter, with prominent Māori artist Para Matchitt as president, annual marae-based hui showcased the often groundbreaking work of Māori visual, performing and literary artists within an inclusive, affirming cultural environment. Also during this period, the 1975 Māori land march or hīkoi led by Ngāpuhi leader Whina Cooper protested the loss of Māori land. On arrival at Parliament in Te Whanganui-a-Tara on 13 October, the marchers presented a petition with 60,000 signatures. In the same year, the Treaty of Waitangi Act established the Waitangi Tribunal, which, for the first time, gave Te Tiriti o Waitangi recognition in New Zealand law.
Standing on the shoulders of these remarkable predecessors, contemporary Māori and Moana performance artists have pursued dynamic forms of performance art that are explored in no fewer than 12 chapters of this book. These include Chapter 8 by Layne Waerea and Chapter 10 by Lana Lopesi and Waerea, the latter exploring the emergent, adaptive and fluid nature of lived social difference in Māori and Moana performance art. Both of these chapters trace whakapapa to the activist ‘performances’ of the 1970s (and earlier) and relate Māori and Moana artistic performance to concepts such as whakapapa, gafa, mana, mana motuhake and mau.
1976: NEW ART
It was in this financial crisis, coupled with dynamic political and cultural activity, that Curnow and Allen co-edited the 1976 publication New Art: Some recent New Zealand sculpture and post-object art, which included the artworks of Phil Dadson, Bruce Barber, Don Driver, Kieran Lyons, Greer Twiss, Leon Narbey, Maree Horner and Allen, as noted by Allen and Charlton in Chapter 3 of this book. New Art was a landmark publication for New Zealand in that it included new ways of writing about art, such as transcriptions of taperecorded interviews and discussions, thus expanding how artworks and performances might be contextualised.
As Blair French discusses in Chapter 1, in New Art Curnow included his 25 June 1973 text ‘Mt Eden Crater Performance’, on the work of Bruce Barber, whose performance was part of Solar Plexus, an annual winter solstice dawn-to-dusk drumming event in the crater of Maungawhau Mount Eden, initiated by Dadson in 1970 (discussed in Chapter 6). This was Curnow’s first attempt at in situ experimental writing, which allowed him to become immersed in the experiences of the works he encountered; ‘a stream-of-consciousness, phenomenological account’ as Robert Leonard writes. By Curnow’s account, the text is a poetic collage account that ‘enacts the relation of Barber’s performance to language’. Put another way, it enacts the performance through writing as performance:
Cover-cover . . . the filling with . . . pip, pip (electronic) . . . New York . . . great crater at my feet . . . beyond the North rim: cranes, the inner harbour, the North Shore and the islands are sharply outlined dark shapes . . . 10.25, Saturday morning, June 25, day following wintersolstice . . . and so on . . . the pudding has? . . . cover-cover . . . sky a light blue, morning mist mostly dissipated by now leaving behind some lowlying cloud in the . . . the bowl carefully with . . . the bowl carefully with . . . the sun’s warmth, it’s a good day . . .
Curnow’s broken phrases responded to what he was hearing and seeing and deliberately challenged the division between critic, writer, audience, performer and documentation — which is characteristic of the performance art discussed throughout this book. As explored in Chapter 5 by Christina Barton and Gregory Burke on the performance art of Peter Roche and Linda Buis, and in Chapter 13 by myself and Victoria Wynne-Jones, on secret, unannounced performances, Curnow emphasised a shift from viewers as passive observers to viewers as persons who assisted in the construction of the artwork. As he wrote for the first edition of Parallax in spring 1982: ‘Content is to be discovered not in the work, but in our interaction with the work. All observations are participations.’ Curnow had his finger on the Euro-American pulse and took issue with the formalist modernism of Clement Greenberg in the 1960s. American art historian Rosalind Krauss published Passages in Modern Sculpture in 1977, in which she argued for similar phenomenological understandings between artworks and viewers.
Chapter 1, ‘A Place, a Question, a Challenge, a Call to Action’, by Blair French offers a comprehensive survey of performance art of the 1970s, walking us through the performances of Jim Allen, Phil Dadson, Bruce Barber, Andrew Drummond, Gray Nicol, David Mealing and Nicholas Spill. This male-dominated period of performance art history in New Zealand is counterbalanced, however, by Natasha Conland’s writing on Kimberley Gray (Chapter 2). The latter is an important analysis of Gray’s archival material, now held at the E H McCormick Research Library, Auckland Art Gallery Toi o Tāmaki, where Conland curated the overview exhibition of performance art of the 1970s in Auckland, Groundswell (2018), which included Gray’s performance art. As Conland notes, Gray’s self-reflexive performance and installation engagement with ideas of time and place on this earth adds another dimension to an overview of performance art in the 1970s.
ALTERNATIVE NARRATIVES
As French notes in Chapter 1, Northern Irish artist and curator Ian Hunter, who arrived in New Zealand in late 1970 — he served as education officer and later curator of painting and sculpture at the National Art Gallery in Te Whanganui-a-Tara and co-founded the Artists Co-operative in the city in 1978 — has famously criticised New Zealand performance art of the 1970s for its lack of engagement with Māori artists and writers. Albeit in hindsight, in 2000 Hunter identified the period of the 1970s ‘as the time of the long (white) silence’ (a word-play on the Māori name for New Zealand, Aotearoa, which translates as ‘the land of the long white cloud’).
Hunter recorded a sense of ‘personal loss and a professional failure’ in not attempting ‘a sustained dialogue or exchange with fellow Māori artists and writers’; he and others were ‘too preoccupied with notions of legitimacy in the international art community’ rather than the ‘challenges and opportunities for cultural dialogue and exchange that awaited us at home’. This major point of criticism for key artists of the period requires ongoing attention. It has fuelled one dominant narrative about performance artists of the 1970s as ambitiously intent on turning towards international trends, and as making prolific documentation to enable international outreach with less concern for political issues including Indigenous land rights. This book goes some way to counteracting such a narrative, asserting that these artists were, in fact, politically engaged.
An overly narrow reading of artworks of the time is one factor in reinforcing generalisations about the period. For example, Allen’s 1974 Contact and his 1976 Poetry
for Chainsaws, at the Experimental Art Foundation in Adelaide, carried anti-war meanings that have not been adequately contextualised. Furthermore, Allen’s employment between 1952 and 1956 with the Art and Craft branch of the Department of Education in the Far North of Aotearoa as a field officer, under Gordon Tovey’s Northern Māori Project, has recently been discussed by curator and writer Charlotte Huddleston.
Yet, it is also the case that some artists, such as Fiona Clark (who attended Elam from 1972 to 1975), made work that focused differently on current politics of gender and body image. As part of a panel discussion titled ‘Out of Time’, on the occasion of the Groundswell exhibition on 31 March 2019, Clark commented on the fact that her 1973 performance at the Pink Pussycat Club in Tāmaki Makaurau, exhibited in Groundswell, had been criticised at Elam as ‘immature’. She commented, ‘I never took my clothes off and never participated in Jim Allen’s works’, and insisted, ‘I kept my integrity’: ‘There were some women at Elam that wouldn’t be involved, but some works did talk about gender.’
I do not believe that Clark’s comments downplay the significant contribution that Allen and others made to art education and post-object and performance art. But they do remind us that making generalisations about a decade of performance art is a mistake. One problem, which this book goes some way towards addressing, is that the history of performance art of this era was largely lost from institutional records, even by the 1980s. An alternative narrative we propose is that there was a porous division between visual art performance (sometimes esoterically conceptual) and other forms of performative art practice, including photography, sound and film.
Contrasting Dadson’s Purposeless Work 1: Beach sweeping or Earthworks (1971–72) with his From Scratch protests at nuclear testing in the Pacific or his sound work for the documentary Te Matakite o Aotearoa, The Māori Land March (1975) is one way of contextualising this 1970s division between performance art in its art-schoolinduced manifestations and other forms of politically inspired art practice (while always remembering that this division is untidy and generalised).
1970–85: RE-THINKING ART HISTORY
In re-thinking a history of New Zealand art between 1970 and 1985, Christina Barton has not only sought an alternative to that mainstream painting narrative (put forward, for example, by Michael Dunn’s New Zealand Painting: A concise history, published in 2003), but also seeks ‘an alternative, critical, socially inflected account of art practice’ in this period. With a focus on politically critical photographic and film practices in the 1970s, Barton proposed that films such as Geoff Steven’s Te Matakite o Aotearoa, The Māori Land March (1975) — about the hīkoi led by Whina Cooper, with camerawork by Leon Narbey and sound by Phil Dadson — point to key links between experimental post-object art and a highly politicised non-mainstream deployment of camera and sound that closes the distance between filmmakers and participants.
While Barton does not explicitly refer to performance art, she argues that films like Te Matakite o Aotearoa developed film and sound formats that refuse ‘representation’s objectifications’ in favour of establishing ‘different relations between artist and subject, art and its audiences’. This is a common thread in discourses on performance art, such as in Amelia Jones’s 1998 Body Art/Performing the Subject, which argues for a ‘contingency of enactment’ between the artist/self and audience/interpreter. By Barton’s account, ‘The all-Pakeha crew travelled with the marchers, from their first steps up from the beach at Spirits Bay in the Far North, to their final entry into Wellington.’ The handheld camera ‘was constantly on the move’ registering ‘rhythmic motions of bodies in action’; Dadson’s soundtrack featured ‘the raw sounds of marchers’ feet crunching over gravel’, and marked the film as profoundly different from coverage by the mainstream media. In arguing for contingency across art forms and activities, Barton’s discussion conjures up a sense of walking and performing-as-film.
In a footnote, Barton also indicates her intention at the time to continue researching ‘structural linkages’ between the documentary Te Matakite o Aotearoa and these artists’ ‘artworks’, including Dadson’s Earthworks (1971–72). Dadson’s recorded performance event coincided with the autumn and spring equinoxes, on 23 or 24 September 1971 (depending on the longitude of location). For an instant in time at 1800 hours GMT, he aimed to bring together participants at fifteen diverse locations around the world. The New Zealand part in the event was recorded at 6 a.m. on 24 September on the central North Island volcanic plateau.
The resulting film, Earthworks, edited by Dadson in 1972, was filmed continuously onto a 10-minute roll of 16mm film by I. B. Heller and Leon Narbey. The film featured in Curnow’s curated exhibition Putting the Land on the Map in 1989 at the Govett-Brewster Art Gallery, and is indicative of his interest in post-object art establishing New Zealand’s relationship to the land, not just painting. Reviewing for Art New Zealand the same year, Allan Smith wrote: ‘The . . . video provided some strangely poetic images of figures in black raincoats on a “darkling plain”, chirruping and muttering into recording equipment and taking photographs.’
Earthworks featured large in Conland’s exhibition Groundswell and was the subject of a fifty-year anniversary project at ST PAUL St Gallery, EQUINOX_1:03PM NZST_23-9-22, which opened on the 2022 southward (vernal) equinox at 1.03 p.m. New Zealand Standard Time on 23 September. The project attempted to listen for a radio signal broadcast fifty years ago, exploring Jones’s theory of a contingency of enactment across immeasurable time and space. This was proposed through artistic actions such as Ziggy Lever’s Time Announcements (2022), composed of intermittent sound recordings of announcements by fifteen participants worldwide commenting on time and weather conditions, and a Zoom autumn and spring equinox opening dialogue event at 1.03 p.m. on a huge orange mat titled Conversation Mat.
Lever’s sound performance echoed Curnow’s poetic collage account of Barber’s Mt Eden Crater Performance, and bears similarity to Smith’s description of ‘chirruping and muttering’ in Earthworks. In these ways, EQUINOX_1:03PM NZST_23- 9-22 transposed the significance of Earthworks within current virtual Zoom interactions across the globe, influenced by the Covid-19 pandemic, and in relation to local time, gathered on a mat designed to induce conversation.
This sets the scene as a vast sweep across our fifty years of anthology: an alternative narrative of porous division between performance art ‘proper’ (albeit contentious in classification) and other forms of performative art practice that include: politically inspired walking-as-film in Te Matakite o Aotearoa, reaching for an instant in time across Earth’s longitudes in Earthworks, and quantum contingency in time and dialogue in Time Announcements and Conversation Mat. These ‘performances’ refuse representation’s objectifications in favour of an altogether different set of coordinates.
