Obstructions / Patrick Lundberg & Richard Frater, Untitled, 2007
Roman Mitch >

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While thinking about what kind of proposal I could write, and what I had to offer to the conversations around Window, I naturally browsed the Window website to make sure that I didn’t double-up, or cover something too closely to any previous projects from Window’s exhibition history. I was reminded how much I loved Patrick Lundberg and Richard Frater’s untitled Window show from 2007. I only saw the show retrospectively through photographic documentation and conversations and have always been disappointed by that. It was such a perfect show.

The way we relate to art work is always so intertwined with what it is that we do. Personally, as an artist, I cannot understand art works without attempting to step into the artist’s shoes – to look at what is there and imagine what to do next – what kind of work does it suggest to me – what would I do if I were them?

Meanwhile, I recently watched Lars Von Trier’s collaboration with Jørgen Leth The Five Obstructions. It is a generous film, and if you’ve not seen it I thoroughly recommend it. The basic idea is that Lars Von Trier asks Jørgen Leth to remake his 1967 fi lm The Perfect Human, 5 times, with different sets of restrictions or obstructions. The conversations between the filmmakers are heated and invigorating. In each attempt the idea is not to make a better film, but a different one. (Plot spoiler warning) The piece ends with Von Trier remaking the film for Leth.

Taking this way of working as curatorial premise, obstructions is an attempt to reinvestigate Lundberg and Frater’s original untitled Window project within a special set of rules which will obstruct their work, but also open out the potential for interesting diff erence in the act of reinterpretation and reconstruction. The obstructions will be set by myself and will include: material limitations, time constraints, and following from the final logic of The Five Obstructions, myself as the labourer actually installing the work.

I envisage the ordering of information to flow: old work > obstruction > instruction > installation. So, the artists will generate instructions for how to install the work after I’ve set up the obstructions.

The complex relationships which form between audience, curator, artist, work and site is what obstructions has the potential to unpack. This is further intensified by the multitasking which is so necessary for most arts practitioners. We are not only artists, but also writers, curators, technicians, assistants, educators and designers. This very phenomenon is what Wystan Curnow seeks to communicate in his 1973 essay High Culture in a Small Province. In this essay, the problem for New Zealand art is that critics and artists do the jobs of educators. The two are at odds with one another.

Rather than seeking to avoid or side-step the apparent conflict of interests — my working as an artist, and a technician and the move to curate work — obstructions develops these points of contention into itself, and revels in the points of crossover.


Roman Mitch