Wk 10 // diary notes - thinking about stones, local and family histories
- annabensky
- Apr 19, 2023
- 5 min read
This blog is really starting to function mostly as a diary for me around my practice. I'm glad to have a space to record random thoughts as well as studio work (sorry to those who read it for how wordy it can be!).
I've been reflecting a lot on the idea of being of and from a place over the past few days. I think there's a somatic connection that takes place when one spends time in a space; if we think of our bodies being mostly made up of water, it makes sense to me that we are on some conceptual molecular level partially "of" the place we are physically in or from... Thinking about the material connections between both Rangitoto's iron-rich rock and that on Mars which I was looking into last year, and the shared connection between the quarried maunga around Auckland and the stones dispersed around the city, the concept of material/molecular/etc. connection is pretty central in my mind at the moment...
From a personal family history stand point, stones also have a different meanings. My father's side of the family is Jewish can can trace an Ashkenazi lineage back through Ukraine and what is now Belarus (Bensky is an Anglicised Ukrainian name, originally "Budinsky"). While I was raised non-religiously with only small elements of Jewish culture as part of my upbringing, that cultural line is something that still interests me strongly. Through it, stones have always been something I associate with funerals and graves.
In Jewish tradition, the act of placing visitation stones, small pebbles and rocks one chooses, on headstones and graves is a common practice. It is uncertain how this tradition came about - some think it may have been a way of building up or protecting a grave; others think it is the result of a pun as the Hebrew word for pebble ("tz'ror") is the same as the word for "bond"; some believe it is a way of physically weighing the soul of the deceased down to earth so as to keep there here a little longer with us; and other see it as a hilariously pragmatic approach to remembrance, because flowers will wilt and die but stones last much longer. Whatever the origin or the custom, it's an act of remembrance and care - a way of saying "hello, I remember you, we are still here and we haven't forgotten".
This week, I visited an old Jewish family friend who who lives in Mount Eden. Now in his early 70s, he went to school with my father and has lived at his property for some 30-plus years; the garden he and his wife keep is built on part of Maungawhau's lava flow. While looking at the scoria and basalt walls that they have built during their time there, he remarked that "each rock you see has been held in my hands at one time or another", consciously stacked and rearranged as their garden grew to shelter, warm and contain the plants growing there. There are many layers of history there - personal, material, ecological, geological, cultural,... When I mentioned my interest in the stones and the history of Mount Eden as a suburb, he gave me a copy of a book that the local council published before it was amalgamated into what is now the wider Auckland Council group - I have only read the first few sections, but it has a lot of information about both Māori and non-Māori settlement in, on and around the maunga.
Misc notes and resources (TBA throughout the week)
Michael Stevenson on his exhibition Disproof Does Not Equal Disbelief, Kunst-Werke Institute, Berlin 2021
On research-based practices:
how much of "it" - the research knowledge - is needed for a view experience of the work? No one is ever going to understand all the detail of the research, but how should "it" be communicated? Is it embedded in the artwork as an artefact (or placeholder for one) or is it external to the artwork somehow (wall text, leaflet, label, etc.)?
reading =/= viewing
intelligibility of the artwork - how do we communicate?
is the work only understood through the encounter, or are there other things that can be put together to inform the viewer? Does other material (text, etc.) interfere with the direct experience or can they work together?
Lucy Suchman - Plans and Situated Action: The Problem of Human Machine Communication
introduces two forms of navigation:
European (beginning with a plan and charting with universal principles, remaining on course; if something unexpected happens, you change your plan)
Micronesian (beginning with an objective rather than plan, and responding to the condition as they arrive at them in an ad hoc fashion)
Ambition to place a series of research-based artworks in to the KW Institute environment - navigation itself builds a narrative or mise-en-scene
installation based - made up of various technological devices; serialised newspaper headline posters (on the 1987 global market crash from a NZ perspective); an inflated building space capable of housing one person at a time
the context of the digital devices (each game indicating a swim of a door, battling against each other) isn't clear from simply seeing it in person, but there is an internal logic there
a sort of repository for paintings constructed from a plastic sheeting and scaffold is built, which viewers can walk into and around; the back wall of a vitrine inside it is formed by the back of a giant cheque, the front of which appears at the structures entrance - taking viewers around in a circle round in a circle; illusory division of space and separation
looks at the history of telethons in a NZ context and the construction of messages via television/televised content (how the medium becomes the message in a way)
On the exhibition:
The exhibition Disproof Does Not Equal Disbelief by the Berlin-based artist Michael Stevenson (born in 1964, NZ) presents an unconventional invocation of his practice over the past 35 years. Since the 1980s Stevenson has developed an artistic language that operates at the juncture of economy, technology, education, and faith, exploring the infrastructural systems that condition these disciplines and their entanglement. The exhibition marks Stevenson’s first institutional solo presentation in Berlin and presents a focused revision of his work, in which early paintings are brought into dialogue with more recent expansive installation. Fragmentation becomes the default mode to display older bodies of work akin to the boneyards of industry. Navigation in these galleries is through analogy—that of a great fish or a whale’s digestive tract. In this way, architecture becomes anatomy and, by extension, the contents therein, on the floor, on the wall, studies in its entrails. With this exhibition, Stevenson provides insights from the belly of our constructed world to raise awareness that disproving rational theories does not automatically and irrevocably equal disbelief.
Unfortunately I missed Stevenson's talk in Auckland recently but was glad to have found this lecture online. Am really interested in how he thinks through exhibitions and the interconnection of different elements. His question around how much of the research needs to be present in a work (or around it) in order for it to make sense to a viewer is something I've been thinking about, especially following critique and the feedback I got - both groups suggested they liked sitting with the work, reading the statement, and returning to the work again with that added knowledge...
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