Neil Pardington

Operating Theatre #8,
2005






McDonald, Ewen. "Neil Pardington." Contemporary New Zealand Photographers. Ed. Strongman, Lara. Auckland, NZ: Mountain View, 2005. 48-49.

Ewen McDonald is a New Zealand fine arts writer and curator. This essay was written for the book ‘Contemporary New Zealand photographers’ that was supported by an exhibition at Starkwhite gallery in Auckland to launch the book celebrating 20 of the country's most significant photographers. This chapter is about Neil Pardington’s photography. Neil is an artist, designer and filmmaker based in Wellington and studied at Elam School of Fine Arts.

McDonald writes in this essay that Neil Pardington’s photography encompasses two kinds of truths. The ”Truth as in fidelity to circumstance” and truth as a kind of essential, “elemental truth that emerges in the looking” that reinforces a certain identification with the subject, where we all may rediscover aspects of our own space and time (McDonald, 48).

I am interested in if and how I can discover aspects of my own space and time in Pardington’s work and at what level, and how this resonates with Pardington’s intentions. I additionally read the book ‘The Vault’ and ‘Camera Lucida’ to inform my findings.

McDonald writes; Pardington’s photographs are not only ‘objective’ representations but also something more that can be experienced or sensed. They allude to something, the images evoke and act as metaphors for every viewer differently. Pardington sets us up to project our own experiences onto the photograph and whatever we project comes from our own personal history, reinforcing the photograph’s ability to function as a symbol. He constructs this deadpan aesthetic, a fidelity to circumstance, utilising realism to invite the senses (the subjective truth). He facilitates the making of meaning in his photographs, by clever use of a key element: ‘emptiness’. This ‘emptiness’ or ‘nothingness’ makes room for the viewer to create, to give meaning to the photograph (McDonald, 48).

Pardington’s notes state that he is looking past the obvious, to how the image fits into other lives and other stories. His subject matter is of great importance for us to give meaning. Pardington writes the reason for ‘The Clinic’ series is simple: “It is a subject that engenders strong reactions and emotions, because whatever happens, it is about life and death, and we know the stakes could not be higher”( McDonald, 49).

When I first experienced the photograph ‘Operating theatre #8’ I thought the work as a stylized and a tame cold registrational exercise and decided my appreciation was because of the formal qualities as the clean lifeless elegant aesthetic and recording and ordering of the world around us. I wasn’t quite sure where to fit in the subjective meaning. To find out more about these other meanings I read Roland Barthes Camera Lucida, which is about the photograph’s ability to function as a symbol rather than a mere representation. Barthes reflects on the relationship of the studium and the punctum, on the complicated relations between subjectivity, meaning and cultural society. Whether or not the punctum is triggered, it is an addition; Barthes writes, “it is what I add to the photograph and what is nonetheless already there” (55). The punctum works within us and could accommodate a certain latency. Ultimately, to experience a photograph well, we do it best by closing our eyes, to make the image speak in silence, to allow detail to emerge (54-55). Barthes reveals why photography’s is able to speak, what at first sight seems to be purely naturalised and registrational experience, can have fabricated and highly structured meanings.
Strongman writes the human presence is rather virtual and yet the image has a narrative function. She also finds Pardingtons’ objects and spaces are saturated with a “radical subjectivity” (13). I feel almost relieved with Pardington’s answer that his “approach is actually even more objective than the Neue Sachlichkeit” and it is not as much about him “making the images that affects the reading but about how people now see photographs”, because it’s not imperative to find this subjective meaning.

Intrigued I read more about the ‘Vault’ series. As a subject matter this series contains not only an underlying idea that the camera is a storehouse of ideas and images (a metaphor for memories if you like) but vaults also have this paradoxal function, they are a place where we store things that are precious, yet obsolete and unwanted for example archives, museums, art galleries, banks and libraries have vaults, which adds to the invitation of establishing an empathetic relationship (McDonald, 48). The Vault’s spaces address larger cultural concerns as opposed to personal as in ‘The Clinic’ series (Pardington,13). Resonating the collected culture and history of those things we deem important enough to keep, and what they tell us about ourselves (Pardington,19).

I found these readings very useful for my own practice in which I feel I sometimes utilize similar aspects to make room for the viewer’s own possible projected meaning.

Bibliography

Bathes, Roland. “Camera Lucida, reflections on Photography”, translated by Richard Howard, Hill and Wang, New York, 1981

McDonald, Ewen. "Neil Pardington." Contemporary New Zealand Photographers. Ed. Strongman, Lara. Auckland, NZ: Mountain View, 2005. 48-49.

Hall, Ken, Lara Strongman, White, Anna-Marie. "The Vault: Neil Pardington" Ed. Simpson, David. Christchurch Art Gallery Te Puna o Waiwhetu, New Zealand, 2009. 7-19.

http://www.starkwhite.co.nz/exhibitions/previous/contemporary-new-zealand-photographers.aspx

Rober Morris

Morris, Robert. Notes on Sculpture 1-3, Art in theory, 1900-2000: An Anthology of Changing Ideas, edited by Charles Harrison and Paul Wood. Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2003, pp. 828-835



Robert Morris, «The Box with the Sound of its Own Making»
© Robert Morris


Robert Morris (1931) is an American artist and art theorist. Morris articulated his ideas of Minimalism in “Notes in Sculpture” an essay published in Art Forum in 1966. Morris's style and media have changed many times during his career, his works imply that art can be made of anything, interested in the relationship between viewer and object. With pre war avant gardists Kasimir Malevich and Marcel Duchamp as his guideposts (Rose, 132). He made contributions to conceptualism, minimalism, performance art, land-art, process art, installation art. His later work is described as neo-Gothic, maximalist and symbolist (web, medienkunstnetz)

In part III, Notes and Nonsequiturs, Morris argues painting as such has become antique. “Specifically, what is antique about it is the divisiveness of experience which marks on a flat surface elicit”. Antique not because of its inescapable illusionism but its ability to imply which causes subjectivity and divisiveness. The mode of painting is in default; most paintings have not been shaped to emphasize actuality or literalness. For a long time the duality of thing and allusion sustained itself, but it has worn thin and its ability to satisfy on a flat surface has come to exhaustion (Morris, 833).

In this essay Morris describes the taking of reductive aspects of late modernism to react against abstract expressionism by stressing the importance of ‘the new three dimensional’ work’s ability to encompass his ideal of the work as a ‘whole’ (Gestalt effect) and by doing so forming a bridge to Post Modern art practices.

I was curious to find out what motivated Morris to reject the two dimensional surface for his ideals. In his view the new work differs not through the use of new materials, and not in the non compositional structuring of the work. The difference lies in the kind of ordering of the work, that lies not in previous art orders, but in an order based in the culture. The cultural infrastructure of forming itself, which comes together and becomes palpable in the technology of industrial production (Morris, 833).
To me it sounds almost like pop-art but Morris claims it connects to a different level of the culture. This new three dimensional art refers to manufactured objects, even the set parameters are the same as common elements in industrial production: “Symmetry, lack of traces of process, abstractness, non-hierarchic distribution of parts, non anthromorphic orientations, general wholeness” (Morris, 835).
These industrial processes lead to a somewhat reductive style with simple lines and forms. Resulting into the removal of the traces of the maker, the work is self referential and therefore referring to the culture instead of the artist (relinquishing authorship).
Morris continues these clear decisions form lots of positives i.e. the work is literal, has openness and is accessible. Most probably boring for those who seek exclusiveness, but this is art for everyone and not only for the happy few who are seeking specialness, “the experience of which reassures their superior perception” (Morris, 835).

Rose writes that in the late 1950s in the US, there was an emergence of a new generation called “the silent generation”. Artist like Morris, Donald Judd, Sol le Witt and Carl Andre refused to express what they were thinking. Not only because they found gesture and expression of emotional state was no longer viable, but also because they were unimpressed with the political repression at the time. Having to serve the Korean War they chose not to express any ideology and they became active members of the anti-war resistance during the Vietnam war (Rose, 59). Morris focuses in his art, on the decline of industrial society in time of late capitalism, examining the dynamics of the industrial social order, re-creating instability to provoke the viewers’ sense of unpredictability and hostility. (Berger, 15)
I wonder if Michael Fried was simply provoked by Morris’s ‘new three dimensional work’ when he referred to it as being “a new genre of theater” (Fried, 153)? Maurice Berger also refers to theatre when writing about Morris and Minimalism: "Robert Morris's art is fundamentally theatrical. Yet, as 21.3 demonstrates, his theater is one of negation: negation of the avant-gardist concept of originality, negation of logic and reason, negation of the desire to assign uniform cultural meanings to diverse phenomena; negation of a worldview that distrusts the unfamiliar and the unconventional" (Berger, 3).

I think the difference with Fried’s observation is that Berger is hereby referring to Morris’s oeuvre, and to a performance work (21.3) of him in particular, justifiably illustrating Morris’s independency, unconventionality, and his sensitivity to greater social issues (Berger, 5). Morris’s writings and work have stimulated interest in the ‘new art’ because of similarities in surface and reductive style but on a deeper philosophical level he would not fit in with the Minimalist. Berger’s comments about theatricality make much more sense to me then Fried’s. Lastly I would like to state that the new three dimensional work is not only to be defined as art, but is even more relevant as art for me because of it’s innovative reflection of the culture at the time.

Bibliography

Berger, Maurice. Labyrinths: Robert Morris, Minimalism, and the 1960s” Introduction: Robert Morris outside art history, New York: Harper & Row, 1989. Print

Fried, Michael. “Art and Objecthood” Art and Objecthood(1967). Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1998. 148-179. Print.

Rose, Barbara. “Monochromes From Malevich to the Present”. University of California Press, 2006. Print.

www.medienkunstnetz.de/.../biography/