The official Te Pātaka Toi Adam Art Gallery podcast! This podcast channel is for material outside the exhibition space, be it recorded public programme, random series, occasional ponderings or curated content. If it is heard it may well end up here. Te Pātaka Toi Adam Art Gallery is the purpose-built gallery of Te Herenga Waka—Victoria University of Wellington. It initiates, produces and presents a highly-regarded programme ...
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Every second Tuesday lunchtime, Christina Barton, Director of the Adam Art Gallery and co-curator of In Relation: Performance Works by Peter Roche & Linda Buis 1979–1985, selects a performance in the exhibition and reads the relevant original notes drafted by the artists or compiled by their most assiduous audience member, the critic and curator Wystan Curnow. Her idea is to bring a live dimension into the gallery as a way of animating the documentation on display and sharing first-hand insights in their unedited form. Each reading is between 15 and 30 minutes in duration with some comments before and after.In this final session Tina reads an extract from the raw notes Wystan Curnow compiled about the performance by Peter Roche & Linda Buis in October 1982 in which they sit opposite each other raising their arms in a form of unrequited greeting at RKS Art in Auckland. She follows this by reading the published text, ‘A Fine How Do You Do’ Curnow wrote for the New Zealand Listener that gave a fuller account of the performance and was published on 26 February 1983. With grateful thanks to the author for allowing this reading.
Every second Tuesday lunchtime, Christina Barton, Director of the Adam Art Gallery and co-curator of In Relation: Performance Works by Peter Roche & Linda Buis 1979–1985, selects a performance in the exhibition and reads the relevant original notes drafted by the artists or compiled by their most assiduous audience member, the critic and curator Wystan Curnow. Her idea is to bring a live dimension into the gallery as a way of animating the documentation on display and sharing first-hand insights in their unedited form. Each reading is between 15 and 30 minutes in duration with some comments before and after.In this session Tina reads three texts by Peter Roche & Linda Buis that describe performances at Auckland City Art Gallery (December 1981), Auckland Museum (March 1982), and Manawatu Art Gallery (August 1982), documentation of which is displayed in one vitrine in the Upper Chartwell Gallery. These three texts share a focus on the role of the audience in the unfolding of each work, proving how contingent each performance was on the actions and reactions of the people who happened upon or came to watch each piece.
Every second Tuesday lunchtime, Christina Barton, Director of the Adam Art Gallery and co-curator of In Relation: Performance Works by Peter Roche & Linda Buis 1979–1985, selects a performance in the exhibition and reads the relevant original notes drafted by the artists or compiled by their most assiduous audience member, the critic and curator Wystan Curnow. Her idea is to bring a live dimension into the gallery as a way of animating the documentation on display and sharing first-hand insights in their unedited form. Each reading will be between 15 and 20 minutes with time for questions after.In this reading Tina sat in the Lower Stairwell Gallery, the dimmest area of the exhibition where several works by Roche & Buis that played with light and dark, visibility and blindness were presented. She read Peter Roche & Linda Buis’s account of their performance at 100m2 which started at 10pm on 14 April 1981 and was illuminated only by candles and the ambient street lighting that entered the space once they had opened the doors to the old building in Federal Street. She also read accounts by two audience members, Wystan Curnow and Tony Green to give different perspectives on the occasion. She finished by reading an extract from a letter written by Wystan Curnow to Tony Green describing their performance at Space in Auckland on 27 January 1983. We are grateful to the authors for allowing us to share these direct thoughts with our audience.
A conversation with writers Tina Makereti, Gregory Kan, and Gwynneth Porter, chaired by Thomasin Sleigh.Writers are inspired and challenged by the visual arts, whether it be for its politics, its abstraction, its humour, or through creative and productive friendships with the artists themselves. But what does ‘responding’ to an artwork really mean? What are a writer’s specific considerations for different commissions and publications? Beyond the essay, what is the potential of fiction, poetry, and other literary forms to respond to a work of visual art? And what is the role of the reader, as the third party in a collaboration between a writer and artist?This episode was recorded at Te Pātaka Toi Adam Art Gallery on 24 May 2023, in conjunction with the CIRCUIT exhibition ‘Legacies: Five Short Films for Cinema’ by Edith Amituanai, Martin Sagadin, Ukrit Sa-nguanhai, Pati Tyrell, and Sriwhana Spong, 13 May - 30 July 2023.A starting point for this kōrero is the accompanying Legacies reader edited by CIRCUIT’s 2022 Writer in Residence, Thomasin Sleigh. The conversation begins with Thomasin Sleigh inviting Tina Makereti to read an excerpt from her short story, Black Milk (2016), which is republished in the reader. This story was written in response to a photograph by Fiona Pardington and went on to be the Pacific Regional Winner of the Commonwealth Short Story Prize in 2016.Tina is joined in conversation by writers Gregory Kan and Gwynneth Porter to discuss their writing and its dynamic and evolving relationship to the visual arts.Please note there is a brief microphone malfunction from 36-39 minutes.
Every second Tuesday lunchtime, Christina Barton, Director of the Adam Art Gallery and co-curator of In Relation: Performance Works by Peter Roche & Linda Buis 1979–1985, selects a performance in the exhibition and reads the relevant original notes drafted by the artists or compiled by their most assiduous audience member, the critic and curator Wystan Curnow. Her idea is to bring a live dimension into the gallery as a way of animating the documentation on display and sharing first-hand insights in their unedited form. Each reading will be between 15 and 20 minutes with time for questions after.In this reading Tina reads both Peter Roche’s and Wystan Curnow’s original notes written soon after the Night Piece performance, executed in the Old Gasworks in Freemans Bay in Auckland. This was undertaken in the dark without the permission of the site’s owners and entailed Linda crawling along the length of a 60-foot wall, a surviving fragment of a much larger structure, while Peter lit candles at points along the wall’s base. Wystan was the only audience member. The two accounts were later integrated and published in 1983 in the first issue of Parallax, a new journal dedicated to postmodern art and literature. We are grateful to both authors for allowing us to share these direct thoughts with our audience.