26 – 28 August 2011

I first saw Agatha Gothe-Snape’s Crest 1967 (2008) in 2008 as part of a group exhibition Performing for the Camera, curated by Diana Smith and Kelly Doley, at Firstdraft. The work lingered with me long after, becoming a continuing reference point over the ensuing years. A similar moment occurred in 2010, when through the Asia-Pacific Triennial I became familiar with the practice of New Zealand artist Campbell Patterson, and more specifically his ongoing series Lifting My Mother For As Long As I Can (2006 – ongoing). In this exhibition, Mother, Gothe-Snape’s Crest 1967 and the latest instalment in Patterson’s series sit side by side in order to consider both the value of returning to existing work and the possibilities of their re-configuration.

In Crest 1967, Gothe-Snape films the rise and fall of her breath beneath one of her trademark striped tees. Cropped by a close up, this action creates an ad-hoc optical effect reminiscent of Bridget Riley’s painting from which the work derives its name. In Lifting My Mother For As Long As I Can, Patterson repeats an annual task that he began in 2006: holding his mother for as long as he can within his family’s domestic setting. What interested me across the works was how the simplicity of the artists’ actions belied a complex collapsing of forms, disciplines and histories within a single frame. This was matched by their shared concern for the body as a site of universal signification, abstract possibility, emotional and sensual life and in particular as a unique identity, with both artists placing themselves at the centre.

Earlier this year, with the exhibition firmly set in mind and Agatha growing increasingly concerned about my seeming obsession with her breasts, I announced to her over a fever spiked Skype call from The Philippines that the show would be called Mother. A loaded term “mother” speaks directly to both the content of Patterson’s work and the gendered aspects of Gothe-Snape’s. It also summons an enduring connection between the universal and the individual, a tracing of historical and personal genealogies and the origins of creation.

Conversation with Agatha Gothe-Snape conducted in her studio August 2011 

Susan Gibb: What do you think the exhibition is about? 

Agatha Gothe-Snape: I don’t know what it is about from your perspective but from my perspective, that work [Crest 1967] was my way of trying to connect a really simple gesture like breathing - which is something that I learnt to do a lot at acting school - with my painting practice. I am often thinking about breathing as I am making paintings. I was looking at a lot of Bridget Riley, and thinking about the optics of her paintings. It made a lot of sense to film what I did as it made an optical illusion [laughs]. Then I guess Bridget Riley is a very seminal artist in the twentieth-century. When you said that it would be a good idea to call the show Mother for me I connected that to the iconic image of Bridget Riley but also the idea that it was my deeply female body being filmed and my breasts which are a very central part of being a female. I guess I hoped the work would in some ways feminise the picture-plane, which I always saw as a very male domain - that the picture plane and the exploration of abstraction has been the role of a heroic male artist. Of course there are many incredible exceptions but growing up that was really the strong image I had, that it was the male task to go into the studio and explore the depth or shallowness, the illusion or non-illusion, or the pictorial space of the picture plane. 

SG: I guess how I can respond, and from my own background working at Penrith Regional Gallery & The Lewers Bequest and looking at modernism and abstraction, that there are a lot of female artist who work through abstraction in various ways, with Bridget Riley being one of them, but that many of these artists have fallen out of the more male dominated art histories of these “styles”. I think though, what I was really interested in was thinking about that period [the 60s] where there were a whole lot of things happening – abstraction, performance, video was emerging as a popular medium, post object art etc - and how often they have been broken down into opposing dichotomies based on gender, or abstraction versus figuration, painting versus performance, and how there is actually a natural blending between them.  I was wondering how those histories are dealt with in a contemporary manner and how a lot of people negotiate these dialogues and sandwich them all together. I think with ‘Mother’ I was thinking in terms of the act of creation, the universal and the individual, the abstract and the everyday, as well as obviously something to do with gender relations.

AGS: One of the most influential moments, before I went to art school, was seeing a Guy Benfield work. It was Om Supreme Bhagavan 2004, where he is painting a spinning canvas with his hair and his assistant’s hair and it is a kind of parody of sixties abstraction and performance. I thought it conflated ideas of painting and performance so well because they are so innately involved with each other and always have been. The gesture is always a performative act. I was also thinking that the work connected so strongly with another very influential work for me by Justene Williams Photo Me 2006, where she is breathing the magazine cover in an out. Again it becomes about her breath and her occupying a space. So coming from a performance background finding your breath is the thing you do before making, so when I am doing my striped paintings or any gouache it is about breath really. Those works by Justene and Guy really synthesise something for me.

SG: One of the things I was quite interested across both Campbell and your works was an interdisciplinary approach to making that displays an understanding across disciplines or mediums. In all of these the role of you body is a concrete feature that unifies what otherwise could look like disparate practices. How do you see the role of your body in your practice?

AGS: Crest 1967 is very central to my practice and everything I think about as an artist. I guess because it does place my body at the centre of it. It is an attempt to communicate my experience and an attempt to process so many things at once - a breadth and depth of historical understanding, the emotional aspects of being in a body and being a human, my phenomenological crisis wether my attention is inwards or outwards. My practice is so over the top, it’s trying to deal with so much at once. I guess I work across mediums as it allows me to dip into different aspects of my experience. If I am doing a striped painting or a really fine gouache work, it becomes about the experience of making that painting, and the breath, and making historical reference to other types of those practices. If I need to call upon performance I am interested in evoking that sense of crisis I am always having in my body. I am not explaining it very well. I was saying to Kathy [Kathryn Gray] the other day, I kind of feel that my practice is like I am walking around in a room and there are all these different fogs everywhere. The fogs are like different knowledge’s and experiences. I walk into a fog and try to express that fog. So if that fog is say art history I will do Every Artist Remembers and if that fog is me dealing with a crisis in my life or an emotional thing I will try and make something that expresses this through colour and emotion. It is probably the same with every artist. I guess it is so much about trying to navigate the crisis of being human.

SG: When thinking about Crest 1967, one of the other things I started to think about was the name of Dienna Georgetti show at MUMA, The Humanity of Abstraction. Often abstraction, art making or philosophy can be talked so much beyond the everyday when actually it very much relates to those very embodied ways of feeling your way through the world.

AGS: Dienna Georgetti is another artist that has been so influential to me. I love reading that Dienna Georgetti catalogue as she talks about the humanity of making abstraction and how you put it in your house and it speaks to you, and if it is still speaking to you after a certain amount of weeks it is an effective painting. It’s this real lived in experience of abstraction, which is a highly rarefied, highly stylistic and specific mode. I connected with this as I have grown up around abstraction my whole life, around seeing art, and after all of the deep knowledge of art, what I am shocked by is the constant lack of understanding and bemusement I feel when I look at it. It always comes back to this crisis in the body. How do you synthesise all this cultural experience. How do you get the outside in and the inside out?

Interview with Campbell Patterson conducted over emails 

Susan Gibb: Who or what are your influences?

Campbell Patterson: Ummmm. I really want be influenced by anybody and anything. Some artists I keep coming back to are, Martin Creed, Carl Andre, Kate Newby, Daniel Munn, John Bock and Robert Morris, along with some non-visual artists like Dennis Cooper (writer) and Mitch Hedberg (comedian). My influences are really all over the place.

The music I play in the studio or the book I’m reading at the time are always a big influence on what I do. Everyday life influences me, things like going to work or doing the dishes. My dad is probably a big influence. He loves structure.

SG: How did the work originate/what was the basis for the idea?

CP: A lot of my ideas for videos come out of a sculptural idea. For this particular work I think the idea started out as one object carrying another object. The idea of the object being my mother came later. The first thing I thought about was people carrying really heavy objects and I think the first thing I actually filmed was a friend lifting me.

I think also I wanted to make another work about family awkwardness, I had recently made a video where I swapped chewing gum with my two brothers and I wanted to explore that more. I am quite close with my family and I see them getting older and changing yet there is a touch barrier. Hugs are a funny thing, like how you can sometimes really feel the body of the person you are hugging. I never initiate hugs with members of my family.

SG: Across both Agatha and your work I am really interested in how your individual identity comes to play within your practice. Could you please discuss the use of your body as a distinctive identity in your art making practice?

CP: I am interested in the personality of specific objects and the way they behave on their own, whether it is a body, or a more static object. I want my work to live in the space between a generalisation and a specific example. My work can usually be remade to a set of simple rules and with this work, I remake it every year. The tension between the rigidity of those rules and the autonomy of the body is what I am interested in. Its just like the tension between the way an idea is when it is still in my head and the reality of that idea when I actually get down to perform it. For this work in particular I liked how the work can be remade at different times and it will always be different.  It will always have its own personality depending on what has happened in a year.

SG: Another thing that both Agatha and your practice share is a complication of mediums, you both work across various forms – performance, sculpture, painting. In your answer to the question about your idea for this work, you mentioned how it began as a sculptural idea. Could you elaborate on how you approach mediums or how you might understand a term such as “multidisciplinary”?

I like to use what is at hand. I like materials that I come across in my life. I don’t feel particularly tied to one medium because I’m not particularly skilled at anything. I don’t really have much interest in exploring video as a medium any further that putting the camera on a tripod and pressing the record button. I want my films to be as immediate as possible. I like film because it’s small and compact, but I don’t like working on computers. I like painting because it’s a longer slower process, I like to sit in a room and concentrate on a picture. Sculpture can be either fast or slow. In that way making paintings and videos works well together. Different ideas suit different mediums; sometimes the medium is the idea. I can’t imagine just using one medium.

SG: Is there an end date for this series?

No.

Images: 
Installation view. Photo: Susannah Wimberley
Campbell Patterson, Lifting My Mother For As Long As I Can, 2011, video still. Courtesy the artist and Michael Lett Gallery, Auckland, New Zealand
Agatha Gothe-Snape, Crest 1967, 2008, video still. Courtesy the artist