References
http://books.google.co.nz/books?id=bWhH1fjliCwC&pg=PA123&lpg=PA123&dq=barry+thomas+a+city+for+sculpture&source=bl&ots=qVmaU2gln9&sig=hAKcy5jjKFYMSt2m2ddypTkdVZU&hl=en&sa=X&ei=knZlU4mD8_88QXCyoKYAg&ved=0CGwQ6AEwCA#v=onepage&q=barry%20thomas%20a%20city%20for%20sculpture&f=false
http://books.google.co.nz/books?id=bWhH1fjliCwC&q=barry+thomas#v=snippet&q=barry%20thomas&f=false
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Title
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An
Urban Quest for Chlorophyll
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Authors
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Publisher
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Rim
Books, 2013
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ISBN
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0473266431,
9780473266431
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Barry Thomas – a bit
Planting
cabbages as an intervention in a disused block of land in the central city
(January 1978), or using a long length of rope threaded through a neighborhood block
of houses in Clairemont Grove (1979) are social sculptures. Photographic
portraits of the Cuba Street precinct also concern the artist outside the
gallery. Interfacing with people, making and recording social document: Barry
Thomas works with people not about them.
Through the
1990’s Thomas’s experiences within and outside of the mainstream film and
television industries trained in him collaborative skills toward the end-game, humility.
The innovative RADZ® series was art as time-based projects intervened
within advertising space on TV – placing art into that most widespread of
public mediums – first thought of by Thomas in the late 1980s, what Alan
Brunton later called ‘art dancing in the devil’s playground’ (Illusions, Issue 17, Spring 1991).
His collaborative
skills extend beyond industry. When working with underprivileged community
groups in New Zealand, and between 2000 and 2004 with community groups in
Manchester and London, narratives are mutually work-shopped, then are acted out
– or made into ‘clay’ animations – and filmed by Thomas. These are matter of
fact films to disclose the contestations faced by the subjects in and of their
everyday life.
Thomas’s
narratives tell life scenario: an account told by an 18 year old about a kid
who was killed when a steel door collapsed off its hinges crushing him, this
incident in a Manchester housing project occurs due to a sub-standard
maintenance programme; a girl who loves soccer – the boys on the team believe
girls can’t play soccer – and she scores the match-winning goal while wearing a
monster disguise (a deft touch). Or a Maori youth who interviews the local MP over
why the Mangrove trees were ripped-out in his town: the youth makes a clay
representation of his subject and distends her facial features pending his
(dis)trust of her answers (the interview is a voice-over to animation). So
Barry Thomas does not ever overstate, or lead either his subject or the viewer
to moments of grandeur. He guides response, does not manipulate in this current
moment.
Dr. Marcus Moore,
Massey University September
2009
“I do remember your cabbage patch. it
always seemed to me to reflect a special Wellington spirit, which grew over the
next few years and contributed to making Wellington the liveable, human city it
became.” Rosslyn Noonan (ex WCC councilor and Chief commissioner – Human Rights
Commission NZ)
Two
Openings
STRIDING down Auckland’s Wellesley Street
in the golden glow of an autumn evening the flags atop UNITE House were hard to
miss. Bright red, and emblazoned with the UNITE union’s logo, they declared to
all the world that capitalism’s monopoly over Queen Street was about to be
contested by a merry band of entrepreneurial socialists. In celebration, the
new tenants of 300 Queen Street’s twelfth floor were having a party.
As Matt McCarten, the Organising Director
of UNITE, and his new partners from Te Wananga O Aotearoa and the United Credit
Union, were welcoming a broad cross-section of the Auckland Left to their
proletarian penthouse atop the old ASB building, another entrepreneur – this
time in the arts – was preparing for an opening of his own.
Just a few miles away, on the other side of
the Waitemata, Barry Thomas, and his fellow painter from the Coromandel,
Evelyne Siegrist-Huang, were putting the finishing touches to “Di-Vested
Interest” the joint exhibition they were due to open the following day at the
Depot Artspace in Devonport.
What’s the connection? Well, apart from the
fact that I’ve known both men for more than twenty years, it’s their
extraordinary talent for breathing new life into very old ideas.
In McCarten’s case, it’s the idea that, to
make a real difference to workers’ lives, working class organisation must go
beyond the “bread-and-butter” fixations of traditional trade unionism.
McCarten’s key insight, at the very beginning of his career, was that the only
way to avoid being seduced by, and eventually joining, his capitalist opponents
(as one of their industrial “minders”) was to beat them at their own game.
With Thomas, it’s an even older idea: that
art can change society – and that one of the artist’s primary roles is to
represent people’s desire for change through creative media. With personal
links going all the way back to the merry pranksters and film-makers of BLERTA (Bruno
Lawrence’s Electric Revelation & Travelling Apparition) in the 1970s,
Thomas’s modus operandi has always
been to laugh and/or embarrass ‘Korporate Kapitalist Kulture’ off the artistic
stage.
And Thomas knows whereof he speaks. It
takes a special appreciation of the adman’s art to win a Golden Axis Award for
the best automotive commercial – when the automobile being advertised is a
Lada. Winning his award with the slogan ‘Nothing But Car’ – “because there
wasn’t anything else!” – was something of an epiphany for Thomas. “I suddenly
realised, I don’t have to do this anymore.”
With characteristic chutzpah, Thomas decided to stand the whole idea of advertising on
its head. In collaboration with other like-minded “artist provocateurs”, he
somehow persuaded Television New Zealand to pay for the privilege of inserting
miniature artistic manifestos called “rADz®” (Radical Art Advertisements) into
the network’s programme schedules. Popping up at random in the middle of
genuine ad’ breaks, these frequently bizarre examples of guerrilla art caused
many viewers to doubt the evidence of their own eyes: “Did I just see that?”
There is, however, nothing remotely
electronic about Thomas’s contributions to “Di-Vested Interest”. Trained at of
the Ilam School of Fine Arts, where he studied under the notorious Rudi Gopaz
(who also taught Tony Fomison and Philip Clairmont), Thomas has always revelled
in the experience of covering canvasses with paint. Three large examples of
these: “Market Forces in the Shadow of the Long Black & White Cloud”,
“Conscience Serving Life” and “Between Moa, Man, Sheep, Cabbage Tree &
Rail” dominate his half of the exhibition.
Executed in pigments he has personally
extracted from the Coromandel clays, these are paintings of stern didactic
purpose and haunting imagery. Not for Thomas the elaborate explanatory
infrastructure normally required to carry the ideas of “conceptual” and
“installation” artists. The meaning of these three works is plainly rendered –
and the message is unmistakable.
We have marred this landscape, says Thomas,
and in doing so we have marred ourselves. But before we can heal our ravaged
environment we must heal the wounds we have inflicted on each other.
In the words of one of Thomas’s youthful
compositions: “Come to the country – be
rained on.”
* *
* * *
THERE’S not a lot of countryside to be seen
from the twelfth floor of UNITE House, but the ideas of redemption and
mutuality are in no way foreign to the two institutions McCarten has invited to
flesh out his vision of a new trade unionism. Redemption through education, and
mutual financial support, are the core businesses of Te Wananga O Aotearoa and
the United Credit Union.
UNITE’s focus on young, Maori, Pacific
Island and immigrant workers – many earning no more (and often less) than the
minimum wage – made its innovative approach to trade union organising
inevitable. In most developed countries such people constitute a stealth
workforce, operating beneath the organisational radar of the traditional unions.
Indeed, most of the “experts” in the field have argued that workers in the vast
service industries of mature economies are simply not interested in joining
unions. McCarten never bought it. “My secret weapon,” he chuckles, “was to ask
them.”
The UNITE union’s highly successful
“Supersize-My Pay!” campaign to organise young workers in the fast-food
industry has already acquired semi-legendary status among those who keep an eye
on such developments. But, in an industry with close to 100 percent staff turnover
annually, something more was needed to keep the kids on board.
Having battled on behalf of Rongo Wetere
and Te Wananga O Aotearoa against Trevor Mallard and Michael Cullen in 2005,
McCarten was well-placed to initiate discussions about linking UNITE’s mission
to organise young workers with the Wananga’s mission to educate them.
Bentham Ohia was there at the opening to
celebrate a deal which brings the Wananga’s tutors face-to-face with young
Maori, Pacific Island and Pakeha workers in language, computing, and basic
business courses. For most of these low-paid workers it is their first
encounter with anything remotely resembling a tertiary institution.
Phil Todd, CEO of the United Credit Union,
was also there at the Friday 23 March opening. The 65 year-old,
Wellington-based UCU is a not-for-profit financial institution dedicated to
providing full banking-type facilities to its 10,000 trade union members.
Naturally Todd was thrilled to be given the offer of office space in the CBD of
New Zealand’s largest city.
The person who got McCarten really
interested, though, was the UCU’s National Development Manager, Mark Griffiths,
who successfully pitched the idea of a special UNITE “loyalty” card that offers
“massive” discounts to union and UCU members. Recorded at the point-of-sale,
their savings are aggregated and posted to UNITE members two weeks before
Christmas in the form of a cheque from McCarten himself. “What could be better
than that?”, demanded the UNITE leader of his mostly young audience. “A letter
from your union boss which says “Merry Christmas! Oh, and by-the-way, here’s
five hundred dollars for being a loyal union member!”
Old hat, you might say. Union discount
cards have been around for years. Which is true. What’s different about the
UNITE-Wananga-UCU combination, however, is that, in the past, the main
recipients of such services were sensible public servants, and all those other
employees-for-life who grew up in the stable industrial environment of the
post-war boom. UNITE’s flash new card is going to patty-flippers, baristas and
pop-corn sellers: the new, casualised, and consumption-driven workforce of the
21st century.
But, if the audience is new, the script is
at least a century old. Because what’s being pulled together on the twelfth floor
of UNITE House is something very like the trade union organisations which set
the pace of collective bargaining at the turn of the 19th Century.
They were unions which harboured ambitions much larger than winning a few extra
pennies on the hourly rate. Their goal was the emancipation of an entire class.
And it’s this emanicipatory – this
transformative – impulse, which, finally, brings the “openings” of Matt
McCarten and Barry Thomas together. This gleaming office complex: with its
Maori and trade union iconography; its rooms filled with state-of-the-art
computer technology; and its UCU officer, Siu Armstrong, ready to lift the
burden of South Auckland’s loan sharks from the shoulders of the poor – is
McCarten’s work of art. And, like Thomas’s paintings, it has a power in and of
itself: a power to move and inspire.
Not long before the opening, McCarten
noticed one of the UNITE staff – his first recruit, Rima Taraia – just standing
and looking at the bright new premises. This staunch, working-class woman had
been with him at the very beginning, when the organisation ran on sweat, hope
and aroha – and not much else. As she
stood there, quietly taking in what she and her comrades had built, a single
tear welled up, and rolled slowly down her cheek.
Oh, why don’t you break away?
You weren’t born to obey.
Come to the country – be rained on.
-
ENDS -
(1,468
Words)
In art history terms – to our knowledge – Joseph Beuys (Germany’s most
important artist of the 2oth century) was the first artist in Europe to use
living plants as works of art but he did this four years after the Cabbage
Patch… in the Documenta show of 1982
when he planted his “7000 oaks”… our
Cabbage Patch – a by far more complex, open, political and participatory work
has reached much further into multiple generations of artists and is embedded
in the very psyche of the capital… the
capital that now calls itself the ‘creative capital’ was most certainly a long,
long way from that in 1978. Chris Lipscombe has recently described it as “ sitting at the intersection of so many lines of
enquiry… art, history, urban living, community development, sustainability,
health, even economics. For me, urban foraging presents a similar
intersection.”
As noted above – the capital’s well regarded vacant buildings art
initiative - Letting Space – (headed by
Sophie Jerram and Mark Amery) again, follows in the wake of the Cabbage Patch waka
– writing in the Listener(March 2013) Amery says “If you need an official marker
that contemporary art’s role as a politicised community change agent is now
centre stage …Te Papa’s purchase of the cabbage patch archive could well be it.
Ever greater numbers of artists are doing planting projects, increasing the
public commons and collaborating with communities, industries and businesses,
well beyond the confines of the gallery. .. This is art that deals with the
complexities of life. It is a movement, I predict, that will see artists this
century recognised as key public players in experimenting with the different
ways society might operate.”
Thomas himself has even gone to the extent of providing his own
definition of art that has come in part from his own studies and long
reflection into the workings and growth of the cabbage patch and many others of
his works: “Art is only leading – seeding radical new memes in the pavement
cracks of culture… framing elephants in rooms.” Thomas’s other largely under critically
examined and curatorially side-lined major initiative - radical art
advertisements rADz® was in part described in Rome’s largest newspaper Il
Messaggero – by the very chap who ‘discovered Peter Jackson’ whilst he was a
critics week selector at the Venice film festival – one Fabio Ferzetti
described Thomas’ rADz and their arrival in Rome’s Festival of Brevity thus:
“And so “short form, long thought” (here
again condensing things into a slogan). But maybe Giacomo Maramao was right
when, quoting Nietzsche and Schopenhauer, La Bruyere and Valery, (“A philosophy
has to be portable”) he eulogised about the aphorism as a form of
anti-systematic thinking, above all capable of reconciling the Orient and the
West.
Thereby, anticipating that, the most left of
field of the contributors to the conference (Rome’s Festival of Brevity) (the
New Zealand Producer Barry Thomas – the inventor of lightning shorts rADz of
less than one minute duration, which in his distant country were scheduled in
TV advertising breaks) should land in Europe with his latest project: a
collection of filmed proverbs which are to be made drawing upon the traditions
of every country in the Old Continent. Ancient and modern. Striking and
genius.”
As the readymades of Marcel Duchamp
directly informed the conception of the Cabbage Patch it recalls words written
about Duchamp (and how he engaged the media into the rejection of the urinal)
and how in the complex ways Thomas deliberately chose to invite both media and
the public into the work… On the front page of the Dominion under the headline
“Phantom cabbage ‘artist’ appears” he said “I have planted the cabbages now
it’s up to Wellington what will happen to them”
and react and contribute they did – and in describing Duchamp’s legacy
Caroline Cros (Curator with France’s National Museums and professor of
Contemporary Art - Ecole du Louvre) said “he systematically reversed the
relationship between the artist, the artwork and the public.” It also recalls
for Thomas the legendary defining of Duchamp by Guillaume Apollinaire “Just as a work by Cimabue was paraded
through the streets, our century has seen Blériot’s airplane, bearing the
weight of humanity, of thousands of years of endeavour, and of necessary art
triumphantly paraded through Paris to the Arts-et-Métiers museum. It will
perhaps fall to an artist as free of aesthetic considerations and as concerned
with energy as Marcel Duchamp to reconcile Art and the People.” The cabbage
patch has arguably achieved much of what Apollinaire foresaw…
Giovanni continues… “Six months
is how much time it bought: six months during which a delimited section of the
city remained open to intervention and reinvention. ..
there is the question of how to preserve the memory of the work: where is the
archive, where are the curators that will ensure that information about
events and projects such as this one are available to scholars, reporters,
artists and activists? The documentation concerning the Cabbage Patch is
not kept at Te Papa (it may be worth speculating as to why) or by any of
Wellington’s universities, and for this post I have relied almost exclusively
on Barry Thomas’ own archive and recollections. But personal networks and the
efforts of individuals aren’t enough: sites of institutional memory are fundamental
to preserve the genealogy of socio-political criticism and activism. There is a
very plausible genealogy here, one that connects the movement against the
extension of the motorway through Thorndon to the one against the Inner City
bypass through Te Aro, but also the Springbok Tour protests and the Cuba Street
Carnival, and the cabbage patch is likely linked in some way to all of them.
Just as significant are the severed connections, for instance between the
Cabbage Patch and Tao Wells’ Beneficiary’s Office – two works with much in common but sealed off from one
another due to the lack of access to past local practice as a meaningful
resource.” (our highlights). Add to this the now legendary occupation of Aro
Park c. 1982) – which is now the most used park in the city.
