A Rock That Was Taught It Was A Bird

A Rock That Was Taught It Was a Bird offers four very different perspectives on the intersection of human and sculptural form.

Auckland artist Dan Arps reconstructs fragments of what has become known as the world’s worst theme park — Fantazy Land, in Alexandria, Egypt. Playing ‘Dungeon Master Formalist’ Dan Arps gives sculptural form to the recurrent monsters of imperative enjoyment and global capitalism, by riffing off, as Arps says, ‘a really bad fun park where you’re not allowed to touch anything and none of the attractions are attractive’. The resulting installation, Arps provocatively suggests, is ‘more or less the same as what might commonly be found in an art gallery’.

The title for this exhibition comes from a work by Korean artist Kim Beom. In A Rock That Was Taught It Was A Bird, a rock is earnestly given lessons on flying in an effort to defy the logical rules of physics and gravity. A Rock That Was Taught It Was A Bird is part of a series The Educated Objects which looks at the structures and limitations of pedagogy.

Layla Rudneva-Mackay’s photograph, titled Taking a moment to lose himself, when found most unexpectedly squashed between a mattress and its base, is from a series in which the subjects are literally masked by their interaction with simple domestic elements—a curtain, a bed, a sheet. A tableaux is performed, one in which the protagonist is somehow consumed and integrated into the environment.

Koki Tanaka describes the process of making his work as ‘objective observation’. His films and installations document a series of performative actions enacted by the artist, from inserting a very large tarpaulin into a car to creating a circle from squirted tomato sauce. Part serious investigation of object and action, part a choreographed dance of slapstick, his works form a curious narrative that emphasises ‘looking carefully, looking clearly at things which seem ordinary’.

A Rock That Was Taught It Was A Bird has received funding support from the Asia New Zealand Foundation towards Koki Tanaka’s visit.