Occasions & Situations for Seeing
pon the water, before the distinct sight of an attenuated volcanic cone, in a photograph taken by Pamela Allen in 1974, Jim Allen and Bruce Barber sit aboard a yacht with American art critic Lucy Lippard. Five years earlier, in an essay written with John Chandler, Lippard observed ‘a profound dematerialization of art, especially of art as object’. Lippard and Chandler wrote of a breaking up of traditional art media together with the ‘introduction of electronics, light, sound, and, more important, performance attitudes into painting and sculpture’. Lippard would go on to extend this thesis in and it was this 1973 publication that, as Allen recalled, was devoured and debated by Auckland-based artists. Lippard wrote of the way in which artists, rather than systems, began to allow materials, even ephemeral materials such as ‘time . . . space, nonvisual systems, situations, unrecorded experiences, unspoken ideas . . . perception, behaviour and thought’ to determine the form of artworks. At the time of this maritime jaunt, Allen hosted Lippard together with artist Mel Bochner in his capacity as Elam’s Head of Sculpture at the University of Auckland. Tying into Lippard’s thesis of dematerialisation, Allen recalled that upon his arrival at the school the plaster casts students had been drawing from were found discarded in Grafton Gully. Having developed the opinion that so-called ‘teaching’ could only lead to ‘gross inhibition and distort natural aptitudes’ Allen instead focused upon creating a ‘supporting environment, encouraging experiment and exploration’. He reflected ‘people have said I didn’t seem to teach Australian art historian Blair French summarised that Elam sculpture students were highly responsive to open and interdisciplinary teaching which led to ‘a growing interest in propositional forms of environmental and spatial engagement and site-specificity’. presents a selection of artworks created in Auckland during this time, with Allen and his own artistic practice forming the spine of the exhibition.
