Old Entertainment System
Simon Denny >

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Excerpt from Gallery Watch, November 2006
Written by David Levinson

With one swift uppercut of administrative perversion, public art turns the hierarchy of creation on its head. Which means that here site will always assume precedence – as an outside set of demands to be met –, forcing the artist into the position of weary negotiator. In essence, this is just another splint in the wound of a dead avant-garde; no longer a shimmering avatar on modernism’s horizons, the artist must now break his ass for a paycheque just like every other dirtbag. But not everybody’s convinced; and for those who continue to buy into the artist’s cache, each submission to a space becomes a test of their ability to retain shape. Currently showing at the University Library space (Window), Simon Denny’s Old Entertainment System doesn’t readily align itself with either fate, but instead teeters self-expression on the lip of in-house protocol.

Typically, Denny’s work has expressed an almost total interest in material propensity – a fact which begs faith in the artist’s subsumption in their practice. Yet, to a proposed audience of “bored Arts and Commerce students,” the assumed symbiosis is cracked, leaving no room for formal vinework. Hence, Denny has been forced to moonlight his method with a more conceptual bend – the result being a piece which, in a grand act of pre-emption, alights, and then reclaims, viewer boredom. How it does that exactly is by measuring the efficacy of boredom-as-response; for instance, used as an artist’s statement is a piece of action writing by Wyston Curnow, produced during a Peter Roche self-mutilation performance. In the piece, Curnow openly concedes to being bored by what’s happening before him; but rather than have that reaction encroach harmfully on Roche, it’s relayed into autonomous action.

Similarly, Denny’s work at Window involves gestural stopgaps that encompass not just the boredom of watching but the boredom of doing as well. And because, in the end, boredom represents a negation of the moment, there’s a conscious tension between presence and non-presence; almost in direct opposition to the pounded imprints of Pollock et al., the impression that remains here is of a self having just ‘passed by.’ Yet, rather than commit the viewer to this (non-)realisation, Denny offers an out: Projected on the wall adjacent to the work is a constant TV3 feed. Purists may scoff at those addled by the blowup, but in reality it’s the most adequate response, because it completes a triptych (Curnow, Denny, viewer) of instances where boredom has been deflected into neutral activity. In a climate such as this, to claim to know the work would only be to betray it.

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David Levinson is a regular fly-on-the-wall at openings around Auckland.