Curator's essay - City Gallery Wellington

Campbell Kneale:
201012.
20 Oct. – 9 Dec.
Campbell Kneale
Our Love Will Destroy the World
Photo: Bryan Spencer, 2011
Courtesy of the artist

Hirschfeld Gallery
20 Oct. – 9 Dec. 2012
City Gallery Wellington
Te Whare Toi
Open Daily 10am–5pm
Free Entry
The Hirschfeld Gallery is
dedicated to exhibiting work
by Wellington-based artists
and designers.
LH: I recently read a quote that reminded me of your
work: ‘it is in the opposite of capture and containment,
namely discharge and leakage, that we discover the life
of things.’ I feel like this quite accurately reflects your
own approach to making – as a compulsion and as
CK: Here’s something to run by you by way of an evolving
concept … Firstly, I think the viewer should make the
links between the sound aspect and the visual aspect.
Although the idea that the music is somehow linked to
painting has always formed a question in my mind, I’ve
never actually attempted to link the two. People seem
to see a link and that’s nice. Being on the ‘inside’ of both
these practices, I don’t see that link so easily. Funny,
perhaps we let people find what they will.
The text that follows is dedicated to the gradual
evolution of this work, traced through excerpts from
on-going email conversations between Campbell Kneale
and curator Lily Hacking.
Usually operating within their own distinct terms of
reference, this exhibition is to some extent an invitation
to encounter Kneale’s unique visual and sound practices
in a way that is not usually possible outside his own
reclusive work environment. Consequently, 201012 is
less about a finite outcome and more about an artist
grappling with his own creative processes in a particular
time and place. This exhibition is full of the possibility
for encounter and transformation; the work equally
extending the prospect of obliteration or revelation;
despair or elation.
This exhibition focuses on one artist’s dynamic
approach to making, with Campbell Kneale bringing
together his painting and sound practices for the
first time in a gallery context.
Campbell
Kneale:
201012
Campbell Kneale
Destroyed Painting 001 (Giza), 2012
oil and acrylic on canvas
915mm x 1220mm
Courtesy of the artist
something that is constantly changing as you yourself
are changing.
CK: Wow … That’s beautiful. I love it. Yeah. I think the
evolution of the work has more to do with the increasing
richness that is found inside the work itself rather than
any conscious attempt to grapple with ideas in the work
from the outside. I don’t really grapple with ideas in
painting or music … I grapple with them in real life. My art
practices are not about ideas – they are an affirmation
of my continued existence and my (inexplicable) desire
to make.
To be honest I don’t know why I make the work other
than pure, unadulterated, compulsion. Perhaps this is the
same reason anybody ever made art? The connections
I make to various themes are usually fleeting, adding to
a raft of ideas and fascinations that I hold that wax and
wane with time. You can probably see from our on-going
email conversations that the meanings and themes
in the work are very fluid and constantly revealing
themselves in real time.
LH: What about the title of the show? We’ve talked about
a few options but the last one simply made reference to
the date of the opening.
CK: Over time I have found the work capable of
containing a pretty diverse range of fascinations and
experiences … forest fires, heavy metal, economic
and environmental collapse, cosmological emptiness,
silence, noise, suburban decay, religious epiphany, high
school teaching … the work has always been about
these things, it’s just that it has taken key moments
or experiences to realise it. But the time and place is
perhaps the true nature of the work. So just like the
paintings are titled with a date and time of their making,
it seems entirely appropriate that this show should be
titled with the opening date.
Bond Street
Central
Library
Harris Street
City
Gallery
Civic Square
P
Wellington Festival
& Convention Centre
Wakefield Street
Town
Hall
City to Sea Bridge
Capital E
Michael
Fowler
Centre
Lagoon
P
Campbell Kneale:
201012
Artist talk
27 Oct. 2pm
Hirschfeld Gallery,
City Gallery
Free entry
Campbell Kneale
Destroyed Painting 004 (Taita), 2012
oil and acrylic on canvas
915mm x 1220mm
Courtesy of the artist
CK: Anything that resembles a sculptural approach
toward the sound (like amps, speakers, electronic music
gear etc) is only going to give people an excuse to turn
their backs on the painting. There should be nothing
of interest to look at – that part of it is not a ‘looking’
experience. I feel that the sound component needs to
‘match’ the painting’s level of intensity, projecting out
into the room as far as it needs to go in order to create
a similar of level of energy and meet the viewer of the
LH: How will the sound component be presented in
the space? I know that in your exhibition HUMDRUM
at Enjoy Public Art Gallery (2005) you had speakers
stacked in the gallery but how do you imagine the sound
will function here? I suppose it depends on the extent
to which you want the sound to function as a physical/
visual component of the work?
CK: Well, being ‘present’ is important to me. It’s almost
code language for being fully alive and fully aware. The
performance will be real and finite and if you see it you
hopefully get ‘more’ from the whole exhibition or at
least have an angle on things that not everybody gets.
What I thought would be nice would be to start the
sound component in the gallery just before the
live performance ends so that when I’m done, the prerecorded
soundtrack to the show will emerge out of
the debris …
LH: And how are you feeling about potentially integrating
a live component into the work? This definitely seems
like it will lend itself to this idea of temporality … but the
performance will also kind of hover over the work, at
least for those who saw or were even just aware of it
taking place.
Cover image
Campbell Kneale
201012, 2012
oil and acrylic
dimensions variable
Courtesy the artist
P
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Some of the works on display at City
Gallery Wellington may contain elements
that may be challenging for younger
viewers. Parental guidance is advised.
P
1. Tim Ingold, Bringing things to life: Creative entanglements in a
world of materials (working paper #15), Manchester: University of
Manchester , 2010, p.8 http://www.socialsciences.manchester.ac.uk
Lily Hacking
Hirschfeld Gallery Curator
CK: I live in Featherston without television, radio, and
if I want to read the newspaper I have to go and buy
a coffee from the cafe at the end of the street. I am
deeply suspect of the internet and its unquestioned
and indispensable status in contemporary society.
‘New media’ has proved profoundly disappointing to
me. I hate most ‘proper’ bands … my performances have
been euphemistically described as being “thoroughly
unnerving in their generosity” which I think is wonderful.
Nothing is held back, regardless of how many (or few)
people are in attendance. In this sense what I do has
never sought to be ‘audience-centric’ but is more like a
snapshot of myself at a particular stage of a lifetime’s
work. With this in mind, I feel like the show should be
focused around the ‘simplest possible gesture,’ like my
work has always been.
LH: The corner location sits well with me – I imagine
it will draw out more of that slight sense of wary
antagonism between these practices. Initially the two
continuously looping tracks will almost be engaged in
a kind of conversation, but as they gradually become
more and more out of sync the lines of communication/
cohesion will start to disintegrate and what emerges will
be something else entirely; something that is even less
cohesive/concrete …
I’d like to somehow encourage each individual viewer
to make their own connections between the painting
and the sound that supports it. I like the idea of new
pieces of music being formed from the overlaps and
deviations that result from out-of-sync sound sources.
This is so analogue and ‘wrong’ in a world where
everything can be synced to the most infinitesimal
degree. Gradually, over a number of days, the building
blocks of sound will shuffle in and out of alignment with
each other, fracturing compositions into a bunch of new
combinations and unique sound pictures. I think the
sound source needs to be removed completely from the
initial field of vision … perhaps in the opposite corner?
visual work. If it was me, I would like to be taken to a new
level of seeing by the added energy of the sound which
encourages a kind of immersion experience without
the sound dominating. I feel like the painting is so
much more fragile and could easily be drowned out
or bullied into a secondary role by a thoughtless misuse
of overpowering sound.