15/04/2011
Figure 1: Natural Sciences Dry Store #1, Otago Museum, 2008. Image: Neil Pardington
Stag heads and mannequins; Polynesian spears and preserved snakes; stacks of film reels and a lone polar bear all find themselves at City Gallery, Wellington this month in Neil Pardington’s The Vault.
In this series of large-format, high-focus photographs, Wellington-based photographer Pardington takes the viewer into the spaces of galleries and museums across New Zealand usually off-limits to the public. These hidden places – the storerooms, or vaults – of a diverse range of institutions from the Museum of New Zealand Te Papa Tongarewa, to Christchurch Art Gallery Te Puna Waiwhetu (where The Vault was first exhibited, 6/11/09 – 14/03/10), to the University of Otago collections, all provide radically differing opportunities for Pardington to ‘raid the icebox’; to explore the curious encounters and juxtapositions of stored objects; and to subject to a critical gaze the spaces and things that are not usually a visible part of the official museum discourse.
In exhibiting explicitly objects that are Not On Display in their respective home museums, Pardington’s project can be seen as a challenge to museum culture, subverting the narrative didactic History that exists in the official, public spaces of these museums. By venturing behind-the-scenes, recording and displaying not only the objects that remain in storage, but also the techniques used in storing and cataloguing these objects, The Vault problematises museum collecting and our understanding of Aotearoa New Zealand’s national history.
For Pardington, the central theme of The Vault is, ‘the collected culture and history of those things we deem important enough to keep, and what they tell us about ourselves,’ and this theme is apparent throughout the project. Why have these objects – whether stuffed birds, Samoan clubs, or eighteenth-century paintings – been selected and recorded for the representation of history, as opposed to any other examples now lost to time? Why are these objects not on public display? What does the way in which these objects exist physically within the museum, although conceptually outside of its discourse, tell us about our understanding of history, and by implication, our understanding of ourselves?
This discussion that Pardington’s project sets up within the paradox of these objects that museums have assessed as valuable enough to acquire and to keep, and yet not valuable enough to exist in the public domain of the museum display – that is, until they become the artist’s photographic subject – is exemplary of Susan Sontag’s assertion that ‘photographs alter and engage our notions of what is worth looking at and what we have a right to observe.’
The Vault challenges our own experiences of these collections, and also forces us to question the images that we are looking at – why are these the photographs on display? And what might exist within Pardington’s own vault?
Figure 2: Taonga Maori Store #2, Whanganui Regional Museum, 2006. Image: Neil Pardington
The City Gallery exhibition is divided into three broadly thematic sections, asserted by a wall plaque in each of the three rooms.
The large central room is the first that the visitor enters – ‘Cabinets of Wonder’ – a plethora of taxidermied natural history arranged by species, which raises questions of ecological loss and human intervention in our natural landscape, not to mention the implicit imperial categorizing impulse.
Natural Sciences Dry Store #1, Otago Museum, 2008, (Figure 1) affronts the viewer with a pseudo-diorama of marsupial life in storage boxes. The hyper-real appearance of this image (and the others of the project) forces the viewer to do a double-take of these strange encounters between various objects, characters, and spaces, which appear simultaneously familiar and strange in their juxtapositions and suggested relationships. Throughout the exhibition, and particularly in this section, potential comparisons to other artists are abundant: collections from Joseph Cornell’s boxes to Damien Hirst’s Pharmacy are apparent sources; the objet trouvé aesthetic forges links with Kurt Schwitters, Cornelia Parker, and others; and the critical dialogue with Aotearoa New Zealand heritage institutions has echoes in the work of Pardington’s associate Laurence Aberhart.
The second section, ‘Taonga Maori’, similarly raises questions of loss, although this time, of cultural loss.
Throughout his oeuvre, Pardington has asserted his identity as a Maori artist, and The Vault is no different in this respect. These images attest to both a colonized past and to a present concerned with preservation and guardianship for the future.
The City Gallery’s wall text for this section asserts that here, taonga Maori is ‘freed from a charge of being “colonial loot”, and instead speaks as objects protected for present and future generations, providing knowledge and a highly valued cultural resource.’ However, the institutional critique provoked by this section remains strong.
Figure 3: Art Store #2, Christchurch Art Gallery Te Puna Waiwhetu, 2007. Image: Neil Pardington
The two images that Pardington himself identifies as the very heart of his project, Taonga Maori Store #2, Whanganui Regional Museum, 2006, (Figure 2) and Art Store #2, Christchurch Art Gallery Te Puna Waiwhetu, 2007 (Figure 3) positioned at opposite ends of the exhibition, incite a discourse about Maori and Pakeha tradition and the way in which, under a bicultural arts policy, we choose to collect our past.
Every object photographed in this section is, at the insist of museum guardians and local iwi, individually listed both in the wall labels and in the catalogue entries, which highlights the different approaches to museum collections of each culture, both in terms of institutional practices, and of Pardington’s own practice.
Figure 4: Art Store #1, Museum of New Zealand Te Papa Tongarewa, 2006. Image: Neil Pardington
The final section of The Vault, ‘Collecting Systems’ - both a close examination of systems of collecting and a collection of systems of collecting in itself – is implicit throughout the series.
Many of the photographs in this section draw on Pardington’s earlier projects such as his Tunnel series, which relies on the graphic possibilities of architectural features. Art Store #1, Museum of New Zealand Te Papa Tongarewa, 2006, (Figure 4) uses the contrast of horizontal strip lights across the ceiling, and the tightly packed vertical racks of stored paintings to emphasize, by their formal incongruity, the details of the small laminated cards that hang at the end of each rack, thumbnail reproductions of the historical artworks contained within.
In this photograph, and in others within the same theme such as Textile Store #1, Auckland Museum, 2008, (Figure 5) and Card Catalogue #1, Hocken Collections Uare Taoka o Hakena University of Otago, 2008, (Figure 6) the heavy formal emphasis in the composition is interrupted by small details that puncture the image, such as skewed angle labels or gaps in storage structures, provoking a reaction like Lacan’s Tuché, a sense of the void, Barthes’ punctum.
This sense suggests a potential space for the present in the future, and, by implication, the uncertain material future for Pardington’s own work.
Figure 5: Textile Store #1, Auckland Museum, 2008. Image: Neil Pardington
In fact, to return to Barthes, La Chambre Clair, ‘the illuminated chamber’, is conceptually an idea very close to Pardington’s own view of his project, which he describes through the use of the Italian/Latin word camera – room – and the idea that the photographer’s camera is literally a room of images, a storehouse of ideas, an illuminated chamber.
In the catalogue for the exhibition, Ken Hall, Assistant Curator at Christchurch Art Gallery, describes the hidden places of The Vault: ‘their corners are briefly illuminated and then returned to blackness; each space, like the camera’s interior and the shutter’s close, a darkroom state from which the image appears.’
This notion of the fleeting glimpse offered to us by a photograph is instantly countered by our feeling that these places in The Vault are static entities, which will look the same today as they did when Pardington visited them five years ago, hidden places now returned to blackness.
Figure 6: Card Catalogue #1, Hocken Collections Uare Taoka o Hakena University
of Otago, 2008. Image: Neil Pardington
The institutional practices of collecting revealed in The Vault provide a fascinating sub-plot to the series.
For museologist Susan M Pearce, the museum collection should be systematic, which ‘works not by the accumulation of samples, as fetishistic collecting does, but by the selection of examples, intended to stand for all the others of their kinds and to complete a set’.
The museum collections of The Vault, however, apparently tell a different story: these are the collections of objects that were not selected for the ‘set’. If we consider the museum storeroom collections as fetishistic - and this is the category that Pearce recognizes objects Not On Display as belonging to – then this creates for the viewer a very different relationship to the images, and to their own museum experiences.
As the City Gallery exhibition only contains 45 of the 60 photographs in The Vault, and Pardington’s camera doubtless collected many more images throughout the course of the project, The Vault asserts itself as a collection in its own right. Pardington has become a collector himself, and the visitor is forced to consider the implications of these objects actually being On Display here.
Pardington’s system of collecting seems to be a critique of every one of Pearce’s systems: in the open and close of a camera’s shutter, Pardington’s photographs become ‘samples of events which can be remembered but not relived,’ and are souvenirs; the excessive contents of the images themselves imply a fetishistic nature; and by the impulse to accumulate one of every type, The Vault is a systematic collection. Pardington’s awareness of the institutional collecting practices and how we understand them reveal that ‘always we are dealing with attitudes, not facts.’
The City Gallery exhibition of The Vault challenges the viewer’s understanding of and conscious relationship to museum discourse, forcing us to question not only the institutional practices documented in these photographs, but also the very nature of the images themselves.
Pardington’s project challenges notions of heritage of the past, present, and future, and offers a critical viewpoint from which to witness our collective national history. The images and experiences that Pardington has collected in his camera are played out across the walls of City Gallery, provoking encounters between images and objects that further this critical standpoint.
As a collection of collections, The Vault offers an insight into Aotearoa New Zealand’s museums and galleries, problematizing collecting systems and provoking a new museological discourse. The Vault is on show at City Gallery Wellington until 25th April 2011.
References:
- Neil Pardington, ‘The Vault,’ in The Vault: Neil Pardington, Exhibition Catalogue (Christchurch: Christchurch Art Gallery Te Puna o Waiwhetu, 2009)
- Susan Sontag, ‘In Plato’s Cave,’ On Photography, (London: Allen Lane, 1978)
- Roland Barthes, Camera Lucida, trans. Richard Howard, (New York: Hill and Wang, 1981)
- The Vault: Neil Pardington, City Gallery Resource Card (Wellington: City Gallery, 2011)
- Ken Hall, ‘From Hidden Places,’ in The Vault: Neil Pardington, Exhibition Catalogue (Christchurch: Christchurch Art Gallery Te Puna o Waiwhetu, 2009)
- Susan M Pearce, ‘Collecting Reconsidered,’ in Pearce (ed), Interpreting Objects and Collection, (London and New York: Routledge, 1995)
