Window Shopping in Brick City
Daniel Malone >

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Essay by Andrew Clifford for the NZ Herald

Auckland artist Daniel Malone has little time for much more than making art at the moment.

Within a week of opening his exhibition at Window, he left the country to participate in the inaugural Singapore Biennale, which opened last weekend.

This weekend he is taking part in a performance event in New Plymouth and, before September is over, he will also have work at the SCAPE Biennial of Art in Public Space in Christchurch.

In the months to come, he will appear in Chile and at the Auckland Art Gallery.

For SCAPE, Malone had a 3m neon sign made, resembling a tag of his own name.

"It's not a tag but based on one in its form," he clarifies, "and it is equally based on commercial signage in its choice of material - neon. Its resonance is basically played out between these two positions in contesting public space."

With recent works that use empty soft-drink bottles and shopping bags to discuss the power structures of place and production, Window Shopping in Brick City makes Window's window the subject of his exhibition.

The show began with Malone spray-painting a Chinese character on the large window outside the Auckland University library entrance, where Window is located, before he removed it to the gallery's exhibition space and replaced it with a new one.

Malone, with a long interest in graffiti and Orientalism, was inspired for this work during a six-month study trip to Beijing in 2002.

He recalls catching a crowded bus and being surprised to find what he thought was a familiar feature of an urban environment.

"My interest in graffiti had kept my eyes peeled since my arrival for local examples. I had seen nothing.

"Then suddenly, in one area, a run of calligraphic gestures, all the same form, in a range of materials - some sprayed, some in inky splattered lines, on a range of walls. Could this be a lone tagger?"

After copying down the recurring hanzi (character), he discovered it was a common abbreviation for chai hui, "to demolish". Malone says it signalled that something else was to be built in its place.

Malone sees this as a symbol for China's "hyperactive modernisation" and the rapid rate of construction (and demolition) taking place.

Performance art had its heyday in the politically motivated era of happenings and sit-ins in the 1960s.

The fact it had fallen from fashion made it attractive to Malone in the mid-90s when he was a student of Elam, where he now teaches.

"I think this perceived defunct position - and certainly there were no local artists actively working in this field that I knew of when I was starting art school - was exactly what attracted me to it.

"It seemed to me more an open field than burdened by having run its course."

Performance, it seems, is back on the map. It is the focus of a series at the Govett-Brewster Art Gallery, curated by Charlotte Huddleston who has just been appointed curator, contemporary art, at Te Papa.

"I think it is back in the sense that artists use it as one particular method of working," says Huddleston of a new generation of artists incorporating performance into multi-disciplinary practices.

"I think it is more of a way of researching for artists, which is why it is just one aspect of practice for a lot of them."

Malone's contribution to the Singapore Biennale also incorporates a performance piece, which was part of last weekend's opening events.

Referencing American icon Abbie Hoffman's 1960s attempt to levitate the Pentagon with the power of communal positive thinking, Malone assembled 250 volunteers to lead a crowd in silent concentration while circling the Biennale venue hand-in-hand.

"In this brief interval from the hustle and bustle of everyday life, this disparate group of people, drawn together from Singapore's rich cultural persity, will experience a sense of connectedness and, in the symbolic unity of their circle, share a single magical thought."

Malone says the piece is intended to be humorous, but also have "a non-denominational, prayer-like quality".

His commentary is meant to complicate the way the West perceives and portrays cultural identity.

However, he says his work doesn't change dramatically when taken to Asia.

"I'm no more or less Asian here than in Aotearoa," says Malone, who is Pakeha but has collaborated with Auckland-born Chinese artist and make-up specialist Denise Kum to portray himself as an Asian.

"I am always more interested in working or thinking as 'another other' to complicate what I see as an ultimately conservative dialectic - albeit well intentioned.

"I never presume to work from a position of authenticity."