Choker (1993) is my favourite Fiona Pardington photograph.¹ It’s so concise, so resolved, so iconic. No fancy collaged matt, no gilt or lead framing, no arcane symbolism, no pictorialist flourishes, no mucking about. A young woman’s neck is decorated with bruises. Everyone assumes she got them from her heterosexual male lover in a moment of grand passion (or lustmord).² In posing for the camera, the woman seems calm and complicit, displaying her necklace with pride—chin up. Her cleavage is not emphasised, so our attention can focus on the love marks, and Pardington records them admiringly. Indeed, we might imagine that, as the photographer, she is adopting the position of the imagined vampiric male lover, compelled to document his handiwork.

The work turns on the question of whether to read the bruises as benign love bites (making the title’s choking reference metaphoric) or as the result of strangulation (making it literal). Pardington keeps both possibilities in play and that’s the point.

Choker was not produced in a vacuum. Pardington was already known for works like Prize of Lilies (1986), Saul (1986), and Bracelet (1987), which celebrated and eroticised an implicitly violent male ideal—Pardington gazing lovingly upon beefy thuggish guys, as if through rose-tinted glasses. Choker begs to be read in relation to such earlier pieces. When it came out, Choker was not controversial. In the 1970s, it would have been hard to imagine a New Zealand woman photographer producing it, let alone it being understood as feminist. Such an image would have been condemned as a celebration of domestic violence. But, by the early 1990s, things had changed.

Choker reminds me of an earlier photograph, whose reception was rather different. Peter Peryer made Anne Noble, Easter in 1979, during his early passion play, psychodrama period. In it, a naked woman lies across a leopard-skin pattern. It wells up beneath her like a torrent, like an altar, or like flames of martyrdom. She seems to be magically levitated by it, recalling Bernini’s Ecstasy of Saint Teresa (1647–52). She is naked, but for two items of jewellery, a bangle (suggesting a handcuff) and a luminous pearl necklace (so tight that it seems to separate the head from the body³). The woman’s face is averted, so we can’t identify her, although the title tells us exactly who she is: Anne Noble, an equally known New Zealand photographer. This photo foreshadows Pardington’s work. The inclusion of the word ‘Easter’ in the title links masochism and martyrdom, sex and spirituality, sin and sanctity—ideas that Pardington will make her own. As a lapsed Catholic, Peryer deftly ties up his woman-issues with his religion-issues in this one-stop-shop image.

At the time, critic Tom Hutchins read the work in terms of an interaction, a transaction, between the photographer and his subject: ‘a female nude, lying as if in some sacrificial rite, offering up her body in a contradictory gesture that shows willing participation … The whole is a private theatre, a ritual of interplay of tensions, of superordination, submission and acceptance, acted out—making accessible its strange significance far beyond the initial transaction of the two participants.’⁴

Seven years later, in 1986, AGMANZ Journal published an article by Merylyn Tweedie (the artist now known as Et Al.)—‘Feminist Issues in New Zealand Art (with Particular Reference to Imaging of the Nude Female/The Naked Woman)’.⁵ In it, Tweedie made a very different reading, based on the idea that the artist simply framed his subject. In it, Tweedie wrote: ‘In portraying women as sexually powerless, passive and available, Peter Peryer in Anne Noble, Easter makes visible his own claim as a sexually dominating presence (even if he himself is absent from the image). Indeed Anne Noble … is reduced to little more than a good fuck.’ Rather ripe language.

Tweedie went on to contrast Peryer’s image with Carole Shepheard’s etching Joyce’s Lilies (1983), from her Body Covers series. Here, the quintessential Woman’s Movement artist presented an ambiguous, suggestive photographic close-up of a woman’s exposed body and juxtaposed it with her own impressionistic graphic depiction of ripening lilies—as if equating the two. Casting Shepheard as good, Peryer as bad, Tweedie wrote: Peryer ‘operates within “historically reinforced codes of male gratification as the privileged user of the language of his culture”’, while ‘Shepheard attempts to undermine/deconstruct dominant forms of representation of the female nude and intervenes as a feminist in the politics of pleasure’. But, regardless of Shepheard’s intentions (or politics), her image hardly sits outside of ‘historically reinforced codes of male gratification’. One could argue that her nice image is at least as reductive and essentialist as Peryer’s nasty one. Actually, the Shepheard and the Peryer have much in common. Both feature women we can’t identify from the images (but who are more or less named in the titles). And both link jouissance with another element—the fabric pattern in the Peryer, lilies in the Shepheard. If Peryer’s image was made by a woman and Shepheard’s by a man (which is not impossible), I think Tweedie would have created a rather different argument for them.

Tweedie’s critique, then, was something of a set-up. It turned on a false opposition. It denied Noble any agency (or potential agency) in the Peryer image, even though Peryer’s subject-naming title prompted us consider how the work might also fit into her oeuvre as well (one which already included sexy female nudes).⁶ Indeed, it raised that question of agency more sharply than a Noble self portrait could have.⁷ Tweedie seemed to assume that male artists necessarily operate at the slugs-and-snails Peryer end and female artists at the sugar-and-spice Shepheard end, failing to mention that, by the time of writing, Noble’s racy sex-fantasy series, Night Hawk, had been touring the country in the 1982 National Art Gallery show, Views/Exposures. One of the images, Rope, was a veritable bondage manifesto. In 1994, Artspace would reproduce it on the catalogue cover for its R18 pornography show, One Hundred and Fifty Ways of Loving, which included Pardington. Noble, then, is a key precursor for Pardington.

Of course, hindsight is a great thing. In 1986, when Tweedie published her essay, the scene was turning. Fiona Pardington made Prize of Lilies and Saul, Nan Goldin published The Ballad of Sexual Dependency, and David Lynch released Blue Velvet. Carole Shepheard’s essentialism would soon be old news, as earth mothers, shields, shells, and tipis gave way to French theory. In the very same issue of AGMANZ Journal that Tweedie’s essay appeared, Lita Barrie published her Francophile attack on old-school essentialist feminists, titled ‘Remissions: Toward a Deconstruction of Phallic Univocality’ (although, on the contents page, they mistakenly called it ‘Toward a Reconstruction’—which shows just how confused everyone was). By 1990, the American feminist Camille Paglia would be hailing cock rock, celebrating sex as a dark force, and suggesting that prissy coeds get over it. By 1991, New Zealand women artists had veered so far into ethical grey zones that the new women-artists book would be titled Pleasures and Dangers, and it wouldn’t even raise an eyebrow. The following year, Madonna and Steven Meisel published Sex and Cindy Sherman arranged prosthetic limbs and mannequins for her obscene Hans Bellmeresque Sex Pictures.

In the 1980s and 1990s, our idea of feminist art stretched to embrace diverse approaches. Now we know that feminist art can be deep and cavernous or shallow and cosmetic. It can be tightly patterned or monstrously organic. It can be confessional and true or feigning and duplicitous. It can be abject or genteel, political or mystical. It can confront gender as deeply contingent, a ‘social construction’, or assert it as fundamental. It can embrace femininity or repudiate it. It can align women with nature or reject the very idea as sexist. It can rail against pornography and prostitution or defend them. While ‘bad girl’ feminists attack middle-class values as patriarchal, preferring the rude and transgressive, other feminists can celebrate politeness and decorum, as if middle-class values were always already feminist. In a 1996 essay, ‘This Is Not a Cigar: On the Feminising of Mikala Dwyer’,⁸ Rex Butler observed that, as feminist art can now take virtually any shape, it is impossible not to make feminist art. I disagree, slightly. It is not exactly that everything in art is feminist, but that utterly polarised and mutually exclusive things are. In art, what one feminism promotes another will oppose. One woman’s feminism is always another’s anti-feminism. Because of this, feminism in art now is not one thing or the other, but one thing and the other. It is works that have questions or issues, rather than answers, in common.

These days, everything is scrambled. It’s hard to work out which way is up. Empowered autonomous females have become ideal sex objects—Lara Croft and Co. are every boy gamer’s wet dream. Meanwhile, the Fifty Shades of Grey books have been translated into fifty-two languages, with over 125 million copies sold—women everywhere asserting their preference for submission fantasies. The customer is always right. On top of this, the rise of genetics has white-anted feminism’s key argument, that gender is a ‘cultural construction’. What’s a girl to do?

After One Night of Love (1996–2001), Pardington stopped making nudes, male or female. She also retreated from the Choker idea and from celebrating violent masculinity. And, recently, on Facebook and in talks, she’s been criticising Jono Rotman for supposedly glorifying violent males in his Mongrel Mob Portraits. Although Pardington has largely left the Choker idea behind, it persists in other artists’ works. I think especially of Sydney painter Fiona Lowry and her airbrushed paintings of the noughties. In 2006, Lowry painted Richard, a romanticised portrait of the ‘Night Stalker’, the American rapist and serial killer Richard Ramirez (who, on death row, had endless female groupies, including one of his jurors). That year, she also made portraits of the women members of the Manson family, based on their high-school-yearbook images. Lowry also made inappropriately beautiful scenes of the bush where vulnerable, naked women await their fate (Ivan Milat territory). As if relayed through their women subject’s eyes, these scenes have a disoriented, wrongly wired, Stockholm Syndrome aspect; as if the subjects—and, via them, we viewers—have become complicit in violent men’s fantasies. This is nailed by Lowry’s plaintive romantic titles, like Anything You See in Me Is in You (2006), For You I have Lived and for You I Will Die (2009), and Will You Speak before I Am Gone? (2009). In such works, Lowry draws out and amplifies Choker’s issues. Can we call her works feminist? And, if we can, what does that mean for feminism? How far can the word stretch and remain useful? And what comes next? Can we, should we, dare we go further?
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[IMAGE: Fiona Pardington Choker 1993]

Auckland is a city of contrasts: a city of change: a city of people. Victorian wooden buildings jostle modern glass and concrete against a background of wharf derricks, silvered oil storage tanks, and the masts of pleasure yachts: a giant motorway sweeps across manicured front gardens and forgotten backyards: mini-skirts walk with lavalavas on pavements cluttered with telegraph poles, potted trees, and parking meters: front doors open onto hustling streets, back doors onto quiet bush.
—The Unseen City, 1967¹

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This exhibition grew out of my longstanding affection for two works from the 1960s by then-young artists—the short film Film Exercise (1966) by Rodney Charters and the photobook The Unseen City: 123 Photographs of Auckland (1967) by Gary Baigent. Both works record a lost Auckland, its geography and culture. They capture a city in transition, contrasting a conservative, older generation with the beautiful people—it was the dawn of the counterculture. Both works cast roads, cars, and motorbikes in leading roles. Intentionally or not, Charters and Baigent left us time capsules.

Originally, my plan for the show was to juxtapose the film and the photos. Robert Ellis came in later, when the discovery of some 1960s drawings revealed how much his enjoyment of Auckland’s new motorways had informed his famous Motorway paintings.²

The works in the show are little known. For me, they have personal resonance. I was born in Auckland in 1963, so most of them were made when I was a small child. Although they tally with my earliest memories, they concern a place I never really knew. I suspect, for others—and in different ways—this show may also be something of a nostalgia trip.
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Auckland has long been our largest city, the big smoke, our closest thing to a metropolis. In the 1950s, its population was increasing fast (in the 1960s, it would pass half a million).³ In response, motorways were built through the 1950s and 1960s, and the Auckland Harbour Bridge was opened in 1959. Motorways enabled suburban sprawl and turned Auckland into a car city. Today, as the population approaches 1.5 million, these monumental structures are associated with congestion and epic commutes, but, back then, they represented speed and access, innovation and growth—urban hygiene.

In 1957, Robert Ellis—a graduate of London’s Royal College—arrived in Auckland. He came to teach at Elam art school. The Motorway paintings he began making in the mid-1960s were informed by two distinct experiences of the city. In the first, the city was remote: in the late 1940s, during his national service in the RAF, Ellis had processed aerial photographs surveying German cities, where the war’s devastation was abstracted into patterns. In the second, the city was immediate: in 1958, he had bought a Ford Prefect and had learned to drive on Auckland’s new motorways. ‘That car altered my ideas about space, movement and time … very exhilarating’, he wrote.⁴

The Motorway paintings look improvised, like abstract expressionism, as if their subject matter might be an alibi for the artist’s painterly adventures. As they were not intended to be representations of any particular city, Ellis had huge freedom with the compositions—he could make his marks anywhere. The Motorway paintings are also ambiguous. For instance, they can be, and were, read both as exuberant celebrations of postwar expansion and as prophecies of congestion, ruin, and apocalypse.⁵ Similarly, the macrocosm of the city suggested the microcosm of the body—forms may be rivers, motorways, or roads, but, equally, could be sinews; arteries, veins, and capillaries; nerves and synapses. Ellis thus conflated the concrete infrastructure with the fleshy beings that inhabit it—and with himself.

Despite their urban subjects, Ellis’s Motorway paintings fitted the dominant paradigm of New Zealand painting, which Wystan Curnow has identified as ‘expressive realism’. Typified by Colin McCahon, expressive realism is a contradiction in terms, conflating the idea that the artist represents the world beyond himself (realism) with the idea that he represents the world within (expressionism). The expressive realist finds the truth of himself in his subject and the truth of his subject in himself; inside and out become as one. Ellis’s Motorway paintings are textbook examples. They offer a God’s-eye perspective on the city, as if it was observed from thousands of feet up, but they are also textured, drawing our attention to the expressive brushwork, to the canvas as coalface, equating the painter’s business with urban bustle itself. Ellis’s city’s structures and flows are his painterly gestures. This identification of the immediate self and the remote city is explicit in Ellis’s painting Self Portrait as a City (1965–6), where the city doubles as the artist’s head—as if the city was happening inside his head.

Ellis’s Motorway paintings may not specify Auckland as their location, but his inventive drawings in this show make the city’s influence explicit.⁶ In some, the city is named (Auckland Motorways, 1963, and Auckland City, 1964). Some feature recognisable sites, including Auckland Harbour Bridge (Pylon with Auckland Harbour Bridge, 1966) and the Dominion Road Interchange (City Suburban Motorways, 1964, and Homage to Pylons, 1968). Part observation, part fantasy, there’s a comic aspect to the drawings—spaghetti motorways veer off at roller-coaster angles. The drawing Motorways Heading North (1962) seems to have begun within a designated frame, but spilled out into the margins, colonising unused space, as motorways do. While the Motorway paintings present exclusively God’s-eye views, the drawings mix it up, offering a range of viewpoints and varieties of information. For instance, Pylon with Auckland Harbour Bridge conflates high and low viewpoints: the Bridge (viewed from on high) and a pylon (viewed from below) share a common blank background. The collision of terrestrial and celestial views—explicit here, but only implicit in the Motorway paintings—is reinforced by two microscopic inscriptions: one addresses the everyday reality of pylons and motorways, the other is the Lord’s Prayer.

Motorways not only enabled cities to expand, they also provided access to the hinterland, changing the relation between town and country. Two Ellis drawings in the show refer not to Auckland but to rural Te Rawhiti, up north, in the Bay of Islands, the ancestral lands of Ellis’s wife-to-be, Elizabeth Mountain. Te Rawhiti Marae with Motorway (1963) depicts Te Rawhiti marae from behind, with a motorway on the horizon. Motor Vehicle Bypassing Te Rawhiti (1964) goes the other way, with a car in the foreground and the marae, small, in the distance. Both imply that modernity threatens to destroy this close-knit rural community’s way of life—and this at a time when Maori were leaving their traditional lands for employment in the cities. And yet, the drawings are also fantasies. At the time, there was barely a dirt road at Te Rawhiti. When the metal road finally came, it would prove to be a mixed blessing. Rates increases forced locals off their lands, and, when it rained, mud and clay run-off from the road flooded properties and killed shellfish beds.⁷ In the 1970s, Te Rawhiti and Maori social, political, and economic issues would become central to Ellis’s work.
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Motorways and roads traverse the city, linking different aspects of life—work and play, culture and nature, public and private. Rodney Charters made Film Exercise (1966) as a second-year Elam student. It’s a road movie—it’s structured around a journey. This eleven-minute, 16mm, black-and-white short film tells a simple story: a gorgeous girl (played by Shelly Gane, in real life an Architecture student) meets an enigmatic boy (Ted Spring, an Elam student) on a windswept West Coast Auckland beach. She strokes his motorbike suggestively, he draws on his roll-your-own cigarette nonchalantly. Following this brief courtship ritual, they drive off together, across the beach, through the Waitakeres, down the motorway, into the city. As night falls, they pass through Queen Street (the main drag). Finally, they head to a party in a run-down villa (in reality, an art-school share house in Mount Eden). There, boy unceremoniously dumps girl, preferring to hang out with his mates. Despite the promising set up, there is no boy/girl consummation. Disappointed, she exits, returning to the parked bike—perhaps the true love object for both.

What is remarkable about Film Exercise is not the story (there barely is one), but the way it is filmed. It is literally a ‘film exercise’. Sequences are shot in distinct styles. The opening beach scene looks like advertising. (At the time, Charters was paying his way through art school by taking photographs for ad agencies and magazines.) A sequence with snaking, strobing road markings, filmed from the bike riders’ point of view, recalls Len Lye’s abstract films (although Charters wouldn’t have known them, back then). The main-drag sequence is a montage, where images pile up so fast that, at points, it looks like the film has been double-exposed. The final sequence, in which the abandoned girl pathetically eyes herself in the mirror, is expressionist, like some Maya Deren psychodrama.

Film Exercise is not only Charters’s first film, it’s probably the first film ever made at Elam. It’s remarkably accomplished and precocious, especially considering there barely was a film industry in New Zealand at the time. After it was shown at the Sydney Film Festival in 1967, it earned Charters a place in the new film school at London’s Royal College, from which he went on to become a Hollywood cinematographer and director.

In Film Exercise, Charters’s technology was basic—he borrowed his dad’s Bolex—but he was inventive. He used a huge variety of shot types, as if exploring every possible approach. In one sequence, for low-angle tracking shots, he took the door off the Fiat 500 he borrowed from his ad-agency boss Bob Harvey, and, for high angles, he opened its roof. At one point, he even turned the camera upside down, to follow the couple on the bike under a bridge. Much of Film Exercise was shot at night, using fast film and available light.

Synchronised sound was too complicated, so dialogue was out (although Charters did make occasional use of scene-setting diegetic ‘sound effects’ that didn’t require fine synching—waves, revving engine, a traffic-lights buzzer, party hubbub, etc). Instead, the film was cut rhythmically to a tailor-made soundtrack provided by West Auckland’s top rock band, the La De Da’s. Heavy on the guitar and organ, it was all instrumentals, except for one song at the end, ‘Don’t You Stand in My Way’, whose lyrics seem to taunt the abandoned girl, adding insult to injury. Film Exercise feels like an extended music clip. Here, Charters acknowledges two key influences. First, Richard Lester’s Beatles film A Hard Day’s Night (1964), which combined a black-and-white cinema verite look with music sequences. Second, the documentary short Snow (1963), by director Geoffrey Jones, with cinematographer Wolfgang Suschitzky, which his Elam photography lecturer Tom Hutchins had shown him. Made for British Transport Films, it showed trains ploughing through snow, edited to the accelerating tempo of a cover version of Sandy Nelson’s 1959 hit rock instrumental ‘Teen Beat’.

Today, half a century on, Film Exercise has social-history appeal. It offers a picaresque cross-section of the city, passing from nature to culture, and from the public space of Queen Street to a private home. The main-drag sequence is remarkable for its kaleidoscopic presentation of pedestrian crossings, shops, and burger bars, neons and flashing lights, with Charters contrasting oldies (an office worker and a prune-faced pensioner) with the young ones (groovers in long hair and striped suits, chicks in miniskirts and berets). And, in the final sequence, it’s fascinating to see how art students partied, swigging beer from big brown bottles, in front of unframed expressionist paintings. The way we were.
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At the end of 1962, after graduating from art school in Christchurch, Gary Baigent drove his motorbike to Auckland. There, he worked part time as a labourer and wharfie to make ends meet and took photographs. He was a ‘street photographer’, carrying a 35mm camera with him and shooting scenes he encountered, documenting close friends and total strangers. He later described his 1960s Auckland as ‘a large number of houses spread about Grafton, Parnell, Mount Eden and Ponsonby, all filled with students, artists, pseudo-intellectuals, layabouts and bums, both bohemian and hobohemian’.⁸

Taken over a three-year period, The Unseen City’s images capture Aucklanders at work and at play. Baigent avoided the beautiful and picturesque, preferring to dwell on bleak, neglected aspects of the city.⁹ He used fast film and pushed it, and printed on hard photographic papers, achieving a contrasty, grainy look. The book includes many ‘bad’ photographs: double-exposed, underexposed, or shot facing the sun. Images of ruin and decay seem to echo Baigent’s attitude to technique. A shot of the head of a bum, passed out, is so illegible that the photographer might himself have been drunk. (I had to go to the illustration list to identify the subject.) Like Charters, Baigent contrasts straights and hipsters, speaking to the emerging generation gap. One image is of a (presumably bewildered) old man looking at some risqué Pat Hanly Figures in Light paintings in Auckland City Art Gallery. Its tongue-in-cheek title—Hanly Admirer. Other images feature youthful revellers and thoughtful beatniks.

Bernard Hill described the Auckland of The Unseen City as ‘an unusual, unexpectedly exotic metropolis’, noting that Baigent’s photos ‘create beauty and design or high drama out of the city’s marked ugliness’.¹⁰ The book is bewilderingly random—a mix of the poetic and the banal, the artsy and the casual. There is no narrative, no logic to the sequence. Images move from style to style, site to site, and subject to subject without rhyme or reason, perhaps evoking the way one loses oneself in a city, experiencing fragmentary ‘chance’ encounters. Subsequent commentators have observed echoes of other photographers, like Walker Evans, Robert Frank, Bruce Davidson, and William Klein, but Baigent hardly knew their works then, except for a few shots of Frank’s and Davidson’s in Esquire magazines. It would be years before he would see Frank’s 1958 book The Americans. Filmmakers were more influential, particularly the gritty hand-held and night photography of John Cassavetes’s Shadows (1959).

Tom Hutchins criticised The Unseen City for ‘mistaking a highly restricted fringe world of decay, social isolation and a kind of scruffy freedom as the only arena of urban life’.¹¹ Certainly, the book was addressed to those sympathetic with Baigent’s down-at-heel, warts-and-all view of the city. It was quickly identified as an antidote to classy ‘beautiful New Zealand’ coffee-table books, with their quality reproductions and texts by eminent novelists and poets. These were exemplified by painter Peter McIntyre’s 1964 book Peter McIntyre’s New Zealand (whose first edition sold out in six days and which remained in print for twenty years), and by the new photobooks, particularly Kenneth and Jean Bigwood’s New Zealand in Colour (1961), with its text by poet James K. Baxter (over 120,000 copies sold), and Brian Brake’s New Zealand: Gift of the Sea (1963), with words by novelist Maurice Shadbolt.¹² While the Bigwoods and Brake books argued the artsy status of photography, Baigent rejected eye candy and supplementary prose (although, early on, Brian Roche had been lined up to write).

The Unseen City was criticised for its careless photography and sloppy production. It was printed on cheap, uncoated paper, which flattened contrast and suppressed detail (many images were already blown-up details, not full frames). Betraying their conservatism, other photographers proved to be Baigent’s harshest critics. In the Auckland Star, Hutchins despaired, ‘Mr Baigent could be too important a photographer not to learn photography.’¹³ In New Zealand Camera, Frank Hofmann also decried Baigent’s lack of craft.¹⁴ In Craccum, Max Oettli wrote: ‘… Mr Baigent worked at a double disadvantage. Firstly he lacked the technical competence to produce good photographs consistently, and secondly his publishers appear to have failed to find a printer who could make adequate reproductions of the pictures.’¹⁵ But, even Baigent’s critics recognised his audacity.

Today, everything about The Unseen City seems classic. The bad printing and paper seem perfect for Baigent’s aesthetic and subject matter. It’s hard to imagine the book being different. But it could have been. Originally, Baigent planned to call it ‘Eyes in a City’ and he wanted the cover image to be a shot he had made through a car’s dirty windscreen. The publishers had other ideas. As a title, they preferred ‘The Unseen City’, and, for the cover, they picked a quintessential ‘bad’ photograph—a pigeon, reduced to an incoherent silhouette, flying over railway yards, against a grey sky. Countering the pop-romanticism of Don Binney’s harsh-lit bird paintings, Pigeon, Parnell became iconic, coming to stand for Baigent’s whole project, while the dirty-windscreen shot was dropped from the project entirely.

Now, The Unseen City looks conventional. This is, arguably, a mark of its influence. At the time, it was new. Its publication coincided with the New Zealand release of Michelangelo Antonioni’s 1966 film Blow-Up, which helped make street photography cool. In the 1970s, street photography would become a dominant idiom in New Zealand art photography. But Baigent got there first.
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Back in the day, Auckland was still small and intimate. People knew one another. At Elam, Charters was taught by Ellis, and he went on to study at the Royal College, where Ellis had trained. In his 1987 Metro article on The Unseen City, Baigent name checks Charters and Ellis, among others.¹⁶ Doubtless, all three crossed paths in the Kiwi Tavern, but none of them were close. While this show might seem to describe a particular milieu, in fact the artists approached their city from very different directions. Born in 1929, Ellis was already an establishment figure—a key New Zealand painter. Born in 1941 and 1945 respectively, Baigent and Charters were outside the art world proper—photography and film were not yet part of that discussion (Alternative Cinema wouldn’t be formed until 1972 and PhotoForum until 1973). Charters was on a trajectory to be part of the film industry, while Baigent was living a hand-to-mouth existence. Their works reflect that difference. It is telling to view Film Exercise alongside The Unseen City. Despite the clear parallels in imagery and treatment, they are radically different in feel. Film Exercise is jaunty—it looks like advertising or a music clip. The Unseen City is disorienting, melancholy, and politically conscious—embracing aspects of working-class life and protest culture.

This exhibition sets out to recover the conjunction and the disjunction of these three artists’ attitudes, and to consider how they triangulate the now-lost city of Auckland.
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[IMAGE: Gary Baigent Pigeon, Parnell 1965]

New Zealand is a relative newcomer to the Venice—our participation began in 2001, with exhibitions by Peter Robinson and Jacqueline Fraser. This year, Simon Denny’s Secret Power is our seventh official presentation. Denny’s show addresses the intersection of knowledge and geography in the post–Edward Snowden world. It investigates new and obsolete languages for describing geo-political space, focusing on the roles played by technology and design. 

The show is split across two sites: one historical, at the heart of Venice; one modern, at its edge. The Renaissance- period Marciana Library in Piazzetta San Marco houses historical manuscripts, maps and globes, and old-master paintings. Here, Denny has created a server room, whose modded server racks double as vitrines, housing material based on selected Snowden slides and on the work of former NSA designer David Darchicourt. The server-vitrines echo the library’s function as a repository for knowledge. The second venue is the arrivals lounge at Marco Polo Airport, where arriving passengers walk across life-size reproductions of the Marciana’s painted ceilings, applied as a ‘skin’ to the floor. 

Opening on 9 May, Secret Power has attracted more press than any previous New Zealand exhibition in Venice, with many commentators calling it a ‘must see’. American publication ARTnews described it as ‘incisive and surprisingly humorous … easily one of the strongest national pavilions in Venice this year’. Virginia Were talked to Secret Power commissioner Heather Galbraith and Secret Power curator Robert Leonard.
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Art News: Heather, as Deputy Commissioner for New Zealand’s two previous Venice exhibitions, can you talk about any differences you’re seeing this time. What is your perception of the buzz surrounding Denny’s show?
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Heather Galbraith: Each New Zealand project has been different, in form, scale, and texture. They have also involved artists at very different points in their careers. Denny is a young artist who has experienced a meteoric rise internationally, and we sought to tap into that. So far, the responses from media, critics, and curators have been overwhelmingly positive. It made so many must-see lists that I lost count!
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Did Secret Power exceed your wildest expectations?
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Robert Leonard: I was expecting a huge success. Interest in Denny has been growing and growing. Venice in 2015 was always gearing up to be a 2001 moment for him, with all his planets coming into alignment. The MoMA PS1 show and the MoMA acquisition were key elements in the build-up.
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Galbraith: My expectations were exceeded. It was not just the numbers (5–6,000 a week, during the first months), but who was coming. During Secret Power vernissage events, like the Frieze launch, it crossed my mind that, if there were some terrible disaster, a large part of the art-world elite would be wiped out.
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Do you think the success this time will impact on New Zealand’s future participation.
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Leonard: Secret Power was a big success. But it’s important for New Zealand not to be overawed by that, not to let that success make everything else seem like failure. The fact is that we always get a lot out of going to Venice. Engaging with Venice has transformed New Zealand art. It’s all good.
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Galbraith: New Zealand is recognised for putting on strong shows at Venice. During the vernissage, I met many people who remembered previous New Zealand pavilions. We have established a profile in Venice, and it’s important that we continue to build on it by returning. The Venice Biennale is 120-years old. This is only our seventh outing. In the scheme of things, we are babies.
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What was the biggest challenge in bringing the exhibition into being?
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Leonard: Logistics. It was a huge, complex, expensive project, installed in difficult venues. It needed to be managed like a military operation.
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Galbraith: There were killer spreadsheets. Big ups to Project Manager Jude Chambers, Project Administrator Cassandra Wilson, and Studio Simon Denny. Denny was a powerhouse during preparation and delivery. His unflagging energy was awesome.
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What is the biggest pleasure in bringing the exhibition into being?
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Galbraith: One of my special moments was seeing how proud Denny’s parents, John and Heather, were. It had nothing to do with art-world politics or achieving our KPIs, but it brought a lump to my throat.
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Leonard: For me, as a provincial antipodean curator, it was amazing to witness the international system—the critics and the curators, the dealers and collectors—responding at full throttle. I felt I was in the eye of the storm. I had one priceless moment. At the opening, someone who wasn’t on the list harangued me saying, ‘But I was personally invited by the curator.’ I said, ‘But I am the curator.’
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Has the fact that Denny’s star is on the ascent made a difference to how his work is being received in Venice?
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Leonard: Of course. Some people have a naive idea of Venice. They assume that if you simply send good art, people coming cold to it will appreciate its quality. But audiences go to Venice with expectations. They are interested in particular artists, and that interest is informed by things they have seen or heard, and by their personal and professional connections. All that informs reception. This year, it went our way. Denny had such strong critical and market support. He was surfing a wave of engagement.
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The Artfacts.net website ranks artists, living and dead, in terms of exhibition and media visibility. Denny is currently at 420. He has the highest ranking of any New Zealand artist. What makes him one of contemporary art’s brightest stars?
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Leonard: The work is distinctive and timely. On the one hand, it’s topical. Denny is involved in Zeitgeist subject matter—ideas and aesthetics the art world is only just catching up with. At the same time, the work has a lot to do with the past—the 1960s. It echoes 1960s obsessions (McLuhanism, computers, media) and conjures with 1960s-art aesthetics (pop, minimalism, and conceptualism). Secret Power makes me think about the connections between our current concerns over Internet mass-surveillance and Cold-War-period anxieties.
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Galbraith: It was hard to do elevator pitches for the project, the threads running through it were so rich and layered. Secret Power is visually commanding, but not easy to digest. The aesthetics Denny works with are not commonly explored within contemporary art—infographics, charts, diagrams, data flows, logos. Some of the imagery is slick; some, frankly, a bit clunky and ugly. This is the visual data that surrounds us, especially online and through corporate Powerpoint presentations.
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With Secret Power, Denny’s starting point was the 2013 Snowden leaks. Denny sees the Snowden slides as important cultural documents—twenty-first-century masterpieces. He said to the Guardian, ‘These images contain a lot of cultural information that we just haven’t been unable to unpack. The attempt with this exhibition is to give people the tools to do that. My skill is as an artist—I’m trying to contextualise this material from my tradition, which is the history of conceptual art.’
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Leonard: Denny was being provocative when he called the Snowden slides masterpieces and when he called David Darchicourt a master, like Titian or Tintoretto. That prompted people to think about the Snowden slides and about David Darchicourt in a different way, but, importantly, it also changed their minds about old-master art. It made them think of Titian and Tintoretto not as masters, but as wage slaves like Darchicourt, as hired hands, illustrators of power. Denny’s comment collapsed the master-slave distinction.
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Robert, you wrote that Secret Power ‘is a complex puzzle. Each element is nested in and reframed by other elements in an expanding allegory, making interpretation potentially interminable. And yet, despite this, Denny gets us close to his ostensible subject—the visual language of western intelligence agencies.’
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Leonard: The show took shape after Denny discovered Darchicourt’s online portfolio and decided to make him a key to the whole project. At the time, I didn’t understand Denny’s fan-boy obsession with Darchicourt. I thought: We already understand the big-picture political issues around the NSA without investigating the minutiae of its design language, so why take this massive digression through Darchicourt? What does it tell us? But, then, it clicked for me. I saw that Secret Power is not simply about giving us information—information we can get from newspapers, Wikipedia, whatever. It is more about toying with the way that that information is framed and toying with us as subjects, in the process of interpreting it. We trawl through the material in the vitrines—through all this data and metadata—only to realise that our interpretative activity mirrors the NSA’s. The NSA is us.
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In Metro, Anthony Byrt wrote: ‘With Snowden and Five Eyes, Denny was in seriously dangerous political territory, on the biggest stage on the world. Snowden, frankly, is not something you muck around with.’ Given that subject matter, how risky was it choosing this exhibition for Venice?
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Leonard: The project was a brave choice for Creative New Zealand. Denny was addressing national secrets in an official national exhibition. The politics turned off some potential supporters, but engaged others.
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Galbraith: When Denny’s project was selected back in 2013, the Snowden leak was breaking news. We were concerned that it might not still be topical by the time the show opened. We need not have worried. Its relevance only deepened, with all manner of further revelations, including some about New Zealand’s role in Five Eyes. We are fortunate to live in a democracy, where artists can engage with charged subject matter without fear of censorship or overriding pressure from government.
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When the selectors chose Et Al. to represent New Zealand in 2005, they probably saw them as ‘edgy’. But, the press and public reaction was so negative that New Zealand’s participation in Venice was put on hold for two years.
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Galbraith: Et Al. weren’t perceived as edgy at the time of their selection. They were influential senior artists, whose work was held in most major New Zealand art museums. The international response was engaged and positive. It was only at home that there were issues, after the New Zealand media got fixated on the ‘donkey in the dunny’—a work which wasn’t even in the Venice show. The public followed the press.
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In the past, New Zealand’s participation in Venice and public perception of its ‘worth’ has been shaky. It’s much debated among the public, politicians, and the press.
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Leonard: I don’t think it has been ‘much debated’, but I do think Venice has become a soft target for the New Zealand media. General reporters can take pot shots at the artist, at CNZ, and at art in general, without engaging in too much research or analysis. North and South titled their Venice story ‘But Is It Art?’. I doubt that they would title an article on the Rugby World Cup ‘But Is It Rugby?’. That would be silly.
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What are the roles of Commissioner and Curator? Do both have a role in selecting the work or does someone else do that?
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Galbraith: Although I had been Deputy Commissioner in 2009 and 2013, it was no foregone conclusion that I would be Commissioner in 2015—but I was very pleased to be asked. I worked with CNZ Chair Dick Grant and Project Manager Jude Chambers to devise the selection process and choose the selection panel. The panel chose Denny unanimously. As Commissioner, I had to be across every aspect of the project, ensuring its artistic integrity remained, while securing the resources to enable it. I worked closely with the artist, curator, and Project Manager. I also worked with Leigh Melville, Head of the Patrons; Denny’s gallerists; the Biennale office; Cath Cardiff and the communications and media team at CNZ; the international PR company; and Karen Mason and Sarah Farrar at Te Papa.
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Leonard: This time, CNZ invited artist-and-curator teams to pitch projects. Some nineteen were received. From those, they picked Denny’s and mine. This time—as in every other time previously—they picked an ‘artist project’, commissioning a major new work from an artist. People often ask me about the role of the curator in such a project, which is necessarily artist-led, not curator-led. Here, the curator operates as the artist’s sounding board, enabler, and agent. In the future, I think CNZ could consider different kinds of projects, including more curator-led ones.
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Who are you selecting the exhibition for—the public or the art-world power brokers?
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Leonard: That’s a false opposition. I don’t think ‘the general public’ goes to the Venice Biennale. I guess tourists may pop in to a few random things, but the Biennale’s ‘public’ is essentially an informed art-interested one. It includes artists and arts professionals, but also art students and other informed and committed art lovers—not tyre kickers.
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Galbraith: The Biennale audience is also an international one, including, of course, the New Zealanders who attend. That is not to say the audience back home is not important to us—we do try hard to engage them. We work with national media to share the exhibition with New Zealand audiences. This time, we received excellent national print and radio coverage. The New Zealand at Venice website and social-media were also important.
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What can success at Venice mean for an artist’s career and a country’s reputation?
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Leonard: It can mean a lot. We don’t go to Venice as an end in itself—it’s always a stepping stone. The ultimate benefit is not immediate, it’s downstream. Exposure leads to bigger and better things. Denny’s already had offers off the back of Venice.
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Did Denny’s concept for the exhibition change dramatically once he knew where his work would be sited?
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Leonard: Absolutely. The project became site specific. The venues operated like mediums.
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Denny played the two venues off against one another. This added enormous richness to the work.
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Galbraith: The counterpoint they offered became central to the project. But there was more to it. The airport provided a threshold context. It’s a space of passage and transformation, surveillance and security; a space where people are sorted and processed. The library was one of the world’s first public repositories of manuscripts and maps. Its architecture echoed the contemporary data collection and analysis activity implicit in the Snowden leaks.
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These sites are easily the most prominent New Zealand has ever secured at Venice. How important is site for an artist at Venice? Why do you think New Zealand had the pick of the venues this time?
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Leonard: The Marciana is a great location. You couldn’t find anywhere more central. It was perfect for Secret Power, but it would be a bad context in which to present other kinds of projects—no white walls! We got in early and made our initial approach before the 2013 Biennale had even closed. And we used the space in a way it hadn’t been used before. In previous biennales, it had been used as part of the Museo Correr complex. Its visitors got to see what was installed there. But, we organised it so visitors could enter directly from the Piazzetta, the Marciana’s front door, which emphasised the specificity of the Marciana and its history. It also meant people could visit for free. As for the airport, I don’t think anyone had ever thought to use it before. And, now that Denny has made it his own, I doubt others will. It’s been done now.
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Why is it so important for New Zealand to be at Venice? And what has our participation achieved—both for individual artists and for New Zealand as a whole?
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Leonard: Venice is the biggest, oldest, and most important biennale. And it’s the only one of significance that still has national representation. We may have our artists picked by curators for other biennales, but we can’t count on it. And, even if we do, we have little say over what is shown and how it is shown. But, at Venice, participating countries have some agency regarding how their art is presented. They are involved. That’s huge.
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Will the funding change? Will there be more money?
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Galbraith: I believe CNZ funding will remain consistent, but there could be stronger support from other individuals and organisations as part of a public-private partnership.
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This year, Australia opened its first national pavilion in the Giardini. Is there a chance New Zealand will ever have its own pavilion, or is this not an aspiration? Is it an advantage to have a national pavilion? Is there is a loss of opportunity and flexibility?
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Leonard: It wasn’t Australia’s first national pavilion—they’ve had one in the Giardini since 1987. But their Philip Cox building was only supposed to be temporary. This year, they knocked it down and built a more permanent one–designed by Denton Corker Marshall–on the same site. After Korea built its pavilion in 1995, there’s been no land in the Giardini for other countries to build on. New countries had to develop off-site pavilions. However, this year, many countries took up long-term leases on redeveloped spaces in the Arsenale, making off-site national pavilions less prominent overall. There are pluses and minuses to having a permanent pavilion. Denny certainly took New Zealand not having one as an opportunity. He said, if he had represented Germany, he would have had to use the German pavilion; he couldn’t have used the Marciana and the airport. In short, he couldn’t have made Secret Power.
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[IMAGE: Simon Denny Modded Server-Rack Display with Some Interpretations of Imagery from NSA MYSTIC, FOXACID, QUANTUMTHEORY, and Other SSO/TAO Slides 2015]

In 1964, Marshall McLuhan came up with a big idea: ‘the medium is the message’.¹ Culture is shaped more by the media people use to communicate than by the content of their communications. Media structure and frame our thoughts, defining our connections with the world and other people, our ways of life. McLuhan saw that times were changing, that new electronic media were linking people and places with greater speed and immediacy, turning the globe into a global village.

Although he would go on to be celebrated as ‘the first seer of cyberspace’, McLuhan was alert to the downside. In 1967, he wrote: ‘Electrical information devices for universal, tyrannical womb-to-tomb surveillance are causing a very serious dilemma between our claim to privacy and the community’s need to know. The older, traditional ideas of private, isolated thoughts and actions—the patterns of mechanistic technologies—are very seriously threatened by new methods of instantaneous electric information retrieval, by the electrically computerized dossier bank—that one big gossip column that is unforgiving, unforgetful and from which there is no redemption …’²

Despite such warnings, we have perfected a rather Pollyannaish view of electronic media. Living online, it is easy to imagine ourselves as part of a network of disembodied, dislocated free spirits engaged in immediate, unmediated communication—heart to heart, mind to mind. As technology becomes faster, smaller, cheaper, and ubiquitous, it also becomes transparent to us. Whimsically, we think of the Internet as a cloud, as ethereal and nowhere in particular, so, when whistleblower Edward Snowden began to leak top-secret NSA documents to the world media in June 2013, it was a rude awakening. We discovered that our intelligence agencies have developed draconian mass-surveillance capabilities, enabling them to snoop on anyone and anything. Snowden’s leaks reminded us that our beloved Internet is a creature of the military, technocrats, and capitalists, and overseen by spooks. It exists firmly on the ground, in particular jurisdictions, in data centres the size of football fields drawing down more electricity than some countries.³ The cloud has a big footprint.

Simon Denny has been called a post-Internet artist. He grew up with the Internet and several of his recent works address, directly and indirectly, its logics and aesthetics, its politics and its personnel (those who produce it and those who police it). McLuhan prompted us to look beyond the content of communications to their delivery systems but also warned us that we could not necessarily understand media from within. He used to say, ‘We don’t know who discovered water, but we know it wasn’t the fish.’ Perhaps this is why Denny uses so many other media in pursuing his inquiry into the Internet.
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Denny’s All You Need Is Data—The DLD 2012 Conference REDUX (2013) is a portrait of the Silicon Valley set, based on a tech conference. The Digital-Life-Design conference (DLD) happens every year in Munich. For three days, elite thinkers in technology, science, politics, design, art, and the media from around the globe gather to gaze into their crystal balls and prognosticate.⁴ From eighty hours of HD video of the 2012 conference, Denny grabbed images and transcribed quotes to provide the basis for ninety inkjet-printed canvases representing each conference session. Uniform in size and format, the canvases combined DLD’s aspirational alpinist design style with the look of iOS5, the then-ubiquitous iPhone operating system, an extreme example of Apple’s skeuomorphic interface design.

Skeuomorphs are familiar features from older forms carried over into new ones, where they have no functional value. Apple used them to make personal computing ‘user friendly’. It started with working on a ‘desktop’ and putting documents into ‘folders’, and evolved into ebooks with pages that turn and shutterless cameras that go click.⁵ But, long after people had made the transition to the new technology, skeuomorphic interface design persisted. With increased processing power and screen resolution, Apple went to absurd lengths with iOS5 and 6, featuring nostalgic gimmicks (Cover Flow suggesting record covers flipping in 3-D space) and real-world textures (green baize in Game Center and wooden bookcases in Newsstand).

Denny’s All You Need Is Data canvases echo that look. Their proportions suggest an iPhone screen while the two background options refer to the conference’s stage sets: one based on abstracted alps (standing for the future), the other on an alpine wood-cabin interior. Speakers are identified by ID tags on lanyards and their images are presented as Polaroids, casually pinned, taped, and paper-clipped at jaunty angles. Although the canvases look like pictures, you feel that you could click on anything. By the time Denny unveils All You Need Is Data at Kunstverein Munich—as a contribution to the 2013 DLD conference—skeuomorphism’s days are numbered. Apple is preparing to launch iOS7, which jettisons skeuomorphic funkiness in favour of chic flat design. Captured in Denny’s canvases, last year’s view of the future already looks outdated.⁶

Denny has said, ‘I’m an acceptor of the world as it is. I’m not out to change the world, I’m out to figure out what it is.’⁷ But one can see a critical dimension to All You Need Is Data. It’s a textbook example of what American artist Dan Graham called an ‘anti-aphrodisiac’.⁸ Capitalism is a culture of perpetual newness, which paradoxically makes newness the status quo. Graham advocated throwing spanners into the works by foregrounding the repressed ‘just past’—that which is no longer novel, but not yet retro—lest we forget.

All You Need Is Data is a group portrait. It presents representatives of the digital creative sector, exposing their beliefs, values, and aspirations: some participants want to make another million, others to save the world, some both. In his TV documentary, All Watched Over by Machines of Loving Grace, Adam Curtis accuses Silicon Valley of scrambling psychedelia with cybernetics, Gaia with technological determinism, and communes with The Fountainhead (dropout with startup), effectively collapsing the traditional political poles of left wing and right. Thus, Silicon Valley and its associates admit no place, no outside, from which critique might come—they have everything covered.⁹ Denny’s installation makes this presumption palpable.

For All You Need Is Data, Denny creates a passageway using metal railings, recalling the queuing stanchions used in banks, passport offices, and Disneyland. Hanging his canvases on the walls and rails, he makes you view them in a prescribed order. Although the work suggests a website expanded into the real world, its structure is hardly interactive, more a book on walls, a dense book on walls. You leave feeling overwhelmed by the quantity of content, the unrelenting blue-sky rhetoric and candy colours, the snappy soundbites. It’s easy to suspect that you are not processing the work, but being processed by it. This compressed, claustrophobic exhibition design—which reminded New York Times reviewer Roberta Smith of a slaughterhouse¹⁰—puts paid to DLD’s sublime alpinist livery.
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Denny’s other big 2013 project, The Personal Effects of Kim Dotcom, is another portrait. Kim Dotcom is the German-Finnish founder of Megaupload, a Hong Kong–based file-sharing service that enabled users to swap big files anonymously, to Hollywood’s chagrin. Since 2010, he has been living in exile in New Zealand. In 2012, local police raided his auckland mansion, arrested him, and seized property on behalf of the FBI, who wanted him extradited to face copyright infringement and money laundering charges. Dotcom’s US Government Indictment included a list of 110 confiscated items, which sounds like something out of Lifestyles of the Rich and Famous. There are bank accounts, millions of dollars, a fleet of luxury cars (Mercedes, Cadillacs, a Maserati, a Lamborghini, and a Rolls-Royce Phantom), a Harley-Davidson, a Sea-Doo jetski, enormous TVs, a Hästens horsehair bed, a Devon chronometer, a life-size Predator sculpture, and numerous other art works expressing gamer taste.¹¹ Wondering how we might understand Dotcom’s situation through his stuff, Denny decided to exhibit the spoils.

Denny knows he can never gather genuine examples of everything on the list, so he makes do with parts, fakes, and stand-ins. Stacks of cash are replaced with shredded notes and a massive flatscreen is mocked up. Cars are represented by wheels, engines, remade vanity plates, and models. For the bank accounts and companies, Denny documents his own thwarted attempts to make similar financial and legal arrangements. Denny calls his exhibits high-res and low-res copies, suggesting the way Megaupload users themselves trafficked in unauthorised copies of dubious quality. Each time Personal Effects is shown, the exhibits are different, depending on what Denny can access. The project is an exercise in substitution and synecdoche. The exhibition feels like a showroom, an evidence room, or Charles Foster Kane’s crates store. Viewers wander around, trying to match objects to their entries on the list. The work is at once about what Dotcom owned and about Denny’s attempt to represent it.

Denny is drawn to topical subject matter, making the context for interpretation volatile. As Personal Effects was presented in successive venues, the plot thickened. Before the raid, Dotcom had lived large, cultivating his image as a wide boy, pirate, gangster, party animal, and playboy—a Dr. Evil type. After his arrest, he became more a family man, DJ, and civil liberties watchdog—a man of the people. Still fighting extradition, Dotcom went on to create a New Zealand political party, the Internet Party, advocating for less surveillance, copyright reform, and cheap Internet. It merged with Mana, an existing Maori-oriented party, to contest the 2014 election. Despite well-funded campaign hooplah, Internet Mana tanked, and Mana’s only MP lost his seat. The electorate was confused. Was Dotcom a self-interested one percenter or a freedom fighter? It seems he wanted to be both, Robin Hood and the Sheriff of Nottingham. Here again, the idea of Silicon Valley’s left-right collapse makes sense.

Two weeks after the election, as Dotcom is licking his wounds, Personal Effects opens at Wellington’s Adam Art Gallery (its third outing). On this occasion, Denny includes a life-size sculpture of a Maori security guard by Michael Parekowhai. It stands in for an item listed vaguely on the seizure inventory as ‘fibreglass sculpture’. The suggestion that Dotcom has engaged a Maori security guard to protect his stuff implies he coopted Mana for ‘protection’. For Denny, who is always at pains to cultivate the appearance of documentarian neutrality, it is a rare moment of editorialising.
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New Zealanders were surprised when their government was found to have illegally spied on Dotcom before the raid. The Government Communications Security Bureau (GCSB) was in cahoots with the Americans. The GCSB would come under increased public scrutiny from June 2013, following the Snowden leaks.

Those leaks included sets of PowerPoint slides for internal training presentations about mass surveillance data-mining programmes, including PRISM and XKEYSCORE. The slides are intriguing both for what they show and how they show it. Never intended to be seen by outsiders, they lack the cautious tone and graphic consistency we expect from government communications. Peppered with acronyms, codenames, jokes, motivational slogans, mission crests, and collaborators’ logos, the Snowden slides have an amateurish clip-art aesthetic. NSA projects may involve billions of dollars and a high-tech infrastructure, but their slides recall the giddy days of DIY desktop publishing. Looking through them, you feel like a spy or a voyeur yourself.

On TV, Stephen Colbert joked about it, saying, ‘Snowden leaked a top-secret PowerPoint presentation that details how the government gathers massive amounts of information on everything but graphic design.’¹² Concerned less by the slides’ political implications than by their inferior design, presentation designer Emiland De Cubber published his improved versions, offering the police state a free lesson in style.¹³ Denny joined in, redesigning two XKEYSCORE slides in the new iOS7 flat style as a pagework for the German newspaper Frankfurter Allgemeine.¹⁴

People asked: Doesn’t the NSA employ designers, and, if it does, what do they do there? Seeking answers, the designer David Bennewith, who often works with Denny, discovered the Behance online profile of graphic designer David Darchicourt.¹⁵ NSA’s Creative Director of Defense Intel from 2001 to 2012, Darchicourt was now pitching for freelance work. His profile made no bones about his former life and concentrated on his facility as an illustrator. Exhibition designs for the NSA’s National Cryptologic Museum, at Fort Meade, Maryland, were included along with graphics headed ‘Counterintelligence Awareness’ and ‘Security’. Through Darchicourt, Denny could put a face to the faceless NSA.

Denny’s Venice show, Secret Power, presents itself as a case study of the visual culture of the NSA. Its central conceit is to compare Darchicourt’s work to a selection of Snowden slides that Denny feels resonates with it. The installation itself takes the form of a server room: an ensemble of nine server racks and a workstation. Pictorial and sculptural treatments of Snowden-slide images and Darchicourt images (some NSA-related, some not) are integrated into the racks and workstation, along with functioning LED-flashing computer equipment containing information we can’t access. Some of Denny’s ‘server-vitrines’ focus on Darchicourt’s work, others on Snowden’s slides.

In creating these displays, Denny made great use of current commercial-printing and prototyping techniques. The aesthetic is garish, vulgar, more trade fair than art gallery. The ensemble suggests a phalanx of wunderkammern—an ethnographic-museum display mapping intelligence-agency culture, whose iconography is grounded in geek-gamer culture and mired in its tropes, myths, and memes. However, it is hard to ascertain if Denny’s bewildering display is supposed to be coherent or confusing, and whether it offers an emic (insider) take on its subject, or an etic (outsider) one—casting the intelligence agencies as an exotic other.

Secret Power riffs off maps as tools and products of the territorial power delivered by systems of knowledge. One vitrine is devoted to documenting maps in the snowden slides. Another features a New Zealand centred world map that Denny and Bennewith commissioned from Darchicourt. Although based on an illustration in Nicky Hager’s book Secret Power, the 1996 exposé of New Zealand’s complicity in US spy work, Darchicourt’s version looks like something from a souvenir shop. Spruiking New Zealand as a tourist destination, it features feel-good national images, including a hobbit. However, there is one particularly telling inclusion—Waihopai Valley, which is in fact the site of a top-secret spy station. Perhaps this map is only masquerading as a tool for tourists. In other vitrines, there are more map references. Images of Positive Press (Darchicourt’s map-like kid’s educational boardgame) resonate with images from NSA slides for the TREASUREMAP program.¹⁶ In this company, you can’t help but wonder if Positive Press is as innocent as it looks. Tellingly, Denny devotes another vitrine to material from Britain’s GCHQ’s training slides for ‘The Art of Deception’, which include images of famous magicians. Might Denny himself be misdirecting us, or is he showing his hand? Denny makes us suspicious.

And then there are the animals. Secret Power features a lot of animal imagery. Inspired by a translucent lizard in Darchicourt’s ‘Security’ poster, Denny commissioned him to create a graphic identity for a tuatara character for what was described as a New Zealand history project.¹⁷ Denny showcases treatments of the creature (cyborg and humanoid) alongside Darchicourt’s cute CryptoKids humanimal characters, made for the National Cryptologic Museum to engage children as would-be future code makers and code breakers. Denny also introduces more biting animal images. One vitrine features a crude rendering of a fox being dissolved in a barrel of acid. It comes from a leaked slide for FOXACID, an NSA malware system used to destroy opponents’ reputations and careers. Here we see a direct contrast between Disneyesque presentations for external audiences (saturated with feel-good ideology) and brutal, sadistic ones for insiders (lacking any such pretence).

Secret Power is also about art. Denny’s projects make analogies between the visual language and design protocols of art exhibitions and those of other kinds of display—PowerPoint presentations, websites, conferences, showrooms, trade fairs, evidence rooms, even cakes.¹⁸ In Secret Power, Denny’s high-spec vitrines frame their contents with fetishistic delight, compartmentalising and integrating different orders of representation. The units are dense with information, with materials displayed inside them and upon them. Nodding to Ashley Bickerton’s work of the late 1980s, the vitrines compete with their contents for our attention.

Denny absents himself to focus on Darchicourt. One vitrine features a life-size image of Darchicourt at his workstation presiding over the show, quite the artist in his studio. This big-headed, wide-eyed caricature was enlarged from a self portrait on Darchicourt’s profile and is accompanied by details from his LinkedIn page. another vitrine is crowned by the David Darchicourt Design logo and his contact details, as if he were in Venice pitching for work (aren’t we all?). Do we take Darchicourt-the-artist as a stand-in for Denny-the-artist? Is Denny identifying with him or distancing himself? Is he presenting Darchicourt as an agent or a fall guy? And what does it mean to single out one former employee to exemplify the visual culture of the NSA (which employs an estimated 40,000 people)?

Denny’s installation frames Darchicourt’s commercial art practice (illustration, largely) within his own contemporary art one (grounded in pop, minimalism, and conceptualism). To some, including Darchicourt perhaps, Denny’s art language may itself bristle with NSA-like occult significance.

Denny not only places the Darchicourt and Snowden materials in counterpoint with each other, he also places them, together, in counterpoint with the installation’s venue, its frame, the Biblioteca Nazionale Marciana, in Piazzetta San Marco. Like the Snowden slides, the Library represents an era of expansionist confidence, globalisation, and empire, but from a very different time. It was built during the Renaissance, when Venice was a major world player. It is home to precious historical manuscripts and books, globes and maps—including Fra Mauro’s iconic world map. The Library’s architecture and decor were conceived as an allegory celebrating knowledge. Walls and ceilings feature paintings by prominent artists, including Titian (depicting wisdom) and Tintoretto (depicting a philosopher). So here, Denny nests a current representation of power-knowledge within a redundant historical one, inviting us to compare and contrast. It’s one inner sanctum within another.¹⁹

Denny prompts us to find links between the Renaissance iconography of the Library’s painted decorations and the contemporary images in his vitrines. Although separated by centuries, they rhyme. Both levels feature representations of bearded wise men, soldiers, weapons, and battles. Ideas about strategy, territory, and conquest, power and knowledge, and social hierarchy and civic duty ricochet between them. For the contemporary images, these affinities owe much to gamer culture, with its love of historical fantasy and power games. (This culture must be alive and well in the nsa, at least among those tasked to make its slides and other graphics.) Implying links between militarism, computers, and gaming, Secret Power nods to game theorist John von Neumann and to Alan Turing, and even, perhaps, to Ronald Reagan—whose Strategic Defense Initiative was nicknamed ‘Star Wars’).²⁰ And of course, the Marciana Library’s decor was itself always already an historical fantasy, cloaking its contemporary Realpolitik with classical mythology.

If all that isn’t complex enough, Secret Power has another twist—a second venue. If the Library is an historical space in the heart of Venice, the other venue is modern and on the edge of town—it’s the arrivals lounge at Marco Polo airport. Denny is the first Venice Biennale artist to use it. While it is not exactly a public space—access is restricted—it’s popular, with millions passing through it each year. In the lounge, passengers transition from Non-Schengen space (subject to international law) into Schengen space (subject to European law). While, in the Marciana Library, the contents of Denny’s vitrines picture the way the globe is policed, his airport installation straddles a literal border, where actual people—his viewers—are actually being processed.

For the work, Denny ‘drags-and-drops’ two 1:1 high-resolution photographic reproductions of the Library’s decorated walls and ceiling across the floor and walls of the lounge. The image is inverted: the Library’s painted ceiling ends up on the lounge’s floor—the gods are brought down to earth. These huge images incorporate inset plaques, reproducing masterpieces of historical cartography from the Library’s collection. The plaques look like notices for what’s on at the Library, so the Airport installation doubles as promotion, directing people to the Library (and Denny’s show), while creating false expectations about the secrets to be uncovered there.

In Secret Power, Denny explores the Library, the Airport, and the Biennale as frames. He presents a contemporary computer server room within a very historic library (completed 1588), within a fairly historic Biennale premised on a now anachronistic model of national representation (established 1895). Then, he re-presents the very historic library within a modern Airport terminal, completed soon after 9/11, at the beginning of a new era of global insecurity. Everything is nested in something else, everything is conditional. The now in the then, the then in the now. Global imperatives from different historical moments link these spaces, and distinguish them.
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In calling it a case study exploring NSA visual culture, Denny deftly casts Secret Power as a research project, where we might reasonably put two and two together. But it’s not really a case study. Although there’s a vast amount of information, there’s no clear methodology for how to deal with it. Denny doesn’t define what he means by visual culture, he simply asserts that the NSA has one. His juxtapositions are speculative, impressionistic, and circumstantial. The vitrines include evidence Denny has found, but also evidence he has commissioned. Indeed, nothing is unprocessed. Denny has treated almost every item, determining scale, sheen, and placement, translating from it from one medium into another. He even makes images—like TREASUREMAP’s skull logo and the NSA Special Source Operations eagle-and-globe logo—into sculptures (prompting us to take their metaphors literally).

In Secret Power, we can see dots, but don’t know how to join them. We don’t know whether to take things at face value or to drill down for subtext. The work presents speculative conspiracy-theorist connections alongside clearly causal ones (for instance, where Denny tracks down an image from the NSA’s QUANTUMTHEORY slide set to its source, the role-player card game Shadowfist). In this exercise of visual Snap, it’s often hard to know whether things are already connected or whether Denny and we are making up connections. Presenting consequential information alongside trivia, corrupting media and mixing metaphors, piling on the complications and frames, Denny makes interpretation never ending. But why?

In 1964—the year McLuhan came up with ‘the medium is the message’—the American social scientist, Bertram Gross, described ‘information overload’: ‘Information overload occurs when the amount of input to a system exceeds its processing capacity. Decision makers have fairly limited cognitive processing capacity. Consequently, when information overload occurs, it is likely that a reduction in decision quality will occur.’²¹

So, information can be too much information. Even the NSA feels the strain. It is struggling to manage the volume of today’s telecommunication, especially with so many new encryption techniques to decode. In 2013, it asked for almost $US50 million to research ‘coping with information overload’.²² As much as it wants to ‘collect it all’ (hoovering up every scrap of our telecommunications), it constantly needs more capacity to ‘process it all’. The NSA does not like complexity. It needs to defeat information overload in order to distill complexity into simplicity, into goodies and baddies, us and them. Denny, by contrast, revels in information overload for the uncertainty it brings. He uses it to exercise us, to stretch us, to make us more suspicious, self-conscious.

The real irony is that—in Secret Power and elsewhere—Denny places himself and us (as artist and viewers) in positions oddly analogous to the NSA’s. We also trawl through data and metadata, engaging in analytics, pattern recognition, and profiling. We also make examples of others—be they DLD conferees, Dotcom, or Darchicourt. With Secret Power, the ultimate risk—for Denny and for us—is being seduced by this contemporary war-machine mindset, by its fascinating semiotic richness, intricacy, and intrigue.

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And the Secret Power brochure blurb …
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In recent years, Simon Denny’s research-based art projects have explored aspects of technological evolution and obsolescence, corporate and neoliberal culture, national identity, tech-industry culture, and the Internet.

His Biennale Arte 2015 project, Secret Power, was partly prompted by the impact of NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden’s leaks of PowerPoint slides outlining top-secret US telecommunications surveillance programmes to the world media, which began in 2013. These slides highlighted New Zealand’s role in US intelligence work, as a member of the US-led Five Eyes alliance. Now in the open, the slides have come to represent international surveillance work and its impact on individual privacy.

The New Zealand pavilion is split across two state buildings: the Biblioteca Nazionale Marciana (Marciana Library), in Piazzetta San Marco, in the heart of the city, and the terminal at Marco Polo Airport, on the outskirts.

In the Library, Denny has installed a server room, with server racks and a workstation. In addition to holding computer equipment, the server racks and workstation double as vitrines, displaying a case study in NSA visual culture, consisting of sculptural and graphic elements based on the work of a former NSA designer and Creative Director of Defense Intelligence David Darchicourt and the Snowden slide archive, suggesting links in iconography and treatment. The server room resonates with the Library’s decorated Renaissance-period interior, with its maps and allegorical paintings—Denny’s inquiry into the current iconography of geopolitical power being framed within an obsolete one.

The Airport terminal—a busy hub for millions of travellers—incorporates restricted spaces, surveillance spaces, and interrogation spaces, and is equipped with high-tech security systems. Denny has ‘dragged-and-dropped’ two actual-size photographic reproductions of the Library’s decorated interior across the floor and walls of the arrivals lounge, traversing the border between Schengen and non-Schengen space. The installation incorporates plaques that reproduce examples of early maps from the Library’s collection, which could be mistaken for advertisements for what’s currently on show there.

Secret Power is site specific, exploring La Biennale Arte di Venezia, the Library, and the Airport as media. Denny hints at geopolitical imperatives that cross-reference and distinguish these frames. Completed in 1588, the Library represents the Republic of Venice as a wealthy world power during the Renaissance. Established in 1895, La Biennale is premised on a model of national representation that seems obsolete today, in a time of cosmopolitan global art. Completed soon after 9/11, the Airport represents a new era of global security.

Denny’s project is a complex puzzle. Each element is nested in and reframed by other elements in an expanding allegory, making interpretation potentially interminable. And yet, despite this, Denny gets us close to his ostensible subject—the visual language of western intelligence agencies. Paradoxically, he places himself and us (as artist and viewers) in positions oddly analogous to these agencies, as we trawl through data and metadata, engaging in analytics, pattern recognition, and profiling, trying to make sense of things.

Secret Power takes its title from investigative journalist Nicky Hager’s 1996 book, which first revealed New Zealand’s involvement in US intelligence gathering.

In America, before the 1920s, cigarettes were a male thing. Few women smoked. It was seen as slutty and unladylike. But, as tobacco companies recognised that women were an untapped market, they set out to change the culture. They enlisted the help of Edward Bernays, a public-relations mastermind and a nephew of Sigmund Freud’s. He asked psychoanalyst A.A. Brill what women’s unconscious motivation to smoke might be. Brill said that cigarettes were symbols of masculine empowerment, little penises, and that ‘penis envy’ could drive women to smoke. Armed with this insight, Bernays staged an intervention during a 1929 New York Easter parade. He organised for a group of fashionable debutants, whom he handpicked (not too pretty, not too plain), to join the parade, then to all light up simultaneously. He tipped off the press, saying the women were suffragettes lighting ‘torches of freedom’. The press took the bait. The photographers were waiting. It was free promotion and an early instance of psychoanalysis being used to shape desires (before the fact) rather than simply analysing them (after).¹

Big tobacco cashed in on the association between smoking and feminism. They recruited modern heroines, like trans-Atlantic aviatrix Amelia Earhart, for endorsements. Smoking was linked to female strength, defiance, and emancipation, and also promoted as a way to stay slim. They created special brands for women, shaping and styling cigarettes and packs ‘for the feminine hand’, turning them into seductive props.² Even after 1964’s damning Surgeon General’s Report, Virginia Slims (introduced in 1968) could still be promoted as defiance of patriarchy: ‘You’ve Come a Long Way, Baby.’ Today, in the affluent west, women are as likely to smoke as men, achieving a dubious form of equality.

As we all know, tobacco’s fantasies contrast with its realities: stained teeth, bad breath, enhanced cellulite, emphysema, heart disease, lung cancer, gangrenous toes, botched babies, etcetera. On average, smokers lose more than ten years of their life to the habit, yet smoking remains a defiant, ‘supermodel’ thing to do. Although Linda Evangelista ended up in hospital with a collapsed lung in 1991 and quit, she soon returned to smoking. And in 2011, Kate Moss lit up while on the runway during No-Smoking Day, joyously defying a ban on catwalk smoking.

The sight of attractive, young women smoking has long provided a nexus for compelling but contradictory ideas we have about sex and gender, glamour and power, illness and death. Auckland artist Steve Carr plays on it all in his 2007 video Annabel. It’s Carr’s longest video to date, an epic single take of one-hour-and-ten-minutes duration—a portrait of a young woman chain smoking. Annabel is slender, with high cheekbones, and long chestnut hair, cut in a fabulous fringe. She has bedroom eyes and full lips. As she smokes, she works though a repertoire of acquired gestures: holding her cigarette like this, like that, bringing it to her mouth, sucking on it, inhaling, exhaling, blowing smoke, looking bored, thoughtful, pensive, eyes watering slightly. The already sedate, flattering lighting is only enhanced by the accumulating haze—a subtle veil of smoke. The woman says nothing, but she becomes a screen onto which we can project our speculations as to what she might be thinking, including what she might be thinking about us watching her in the future. Of course, we can never know what she’s thinking, only speculate.

Annabel positions the viewer as a voyeur. The camera remains static throughout—like a surveillance camera. The filmmaker could have been present during the filming, or not (perhaps he ducked out for a cigarette). Although we cannot know if Annabel was being watched at the time, she is completely aware of being filmed. She avoids making eye contact with the camera, which perhaps shows how conscious of it she is. As a medium close-up, Annabel recalls Andy Warhol’s filmic portraits, his Screen Tests of glamourous sitters, some of whom enjoyed a cigarette, cigar, or joint while being filmed.³ But equally, it recalls smoking-fetish pornography (lots of good stuff on YouTube).

They say that smoking’s erotic appeal is tied to its prohibition, which is probably why, looking back to the 1920s, women smoking is sexier than men smoking. If many men find smoking women sexy, for a few it is acutely, exquisitely so—it is a fetish called capnolagnia. Most capnolagniasts would agree with Brill that cigarettes are little penises, enjoying the female smoker as a ‘phallic woman’. However, everything contains its opposite. Their number also includes ‘black lung’ or ‘lung damage’ fetishists, a sadistic sub-group who get their kicks from the thought of women being damaged by the habit.

Carr wrote a blurb to accompany Annabel on the Circuit website. It’s written in the third person: ‘Annabel documents the performance of one of Carr’s students engaged in the act of attempting to smoke an entire packet of cigarettes one after the other. Like a naughty child being caught [smoking] for the first time and made to smoke the entire packet as punishment, the viewer is witness to Annabel’s endurance and eventual failure.’⁴

The blurb tells us things we could not deduce from the video itself (notably, that the sitter is one of Carr’s students) and suggests that we might consider her chain-smoking here as aversion therapy or as reliving a childhood punishment. After reading the blurb, I felt like a creepy teacher, perving on a hot student I’d held back on detention. The blurb places me in the role of her punisher, albeit benevolent (it’s for her own good, of course). The pretext that she is being punished provides an alibi for my scrutinising her, her hair, her fingers, her lips.

A telling feature of Carr’s blurb is a grammatical error. The first part of the second sentence—‘Like a naughty child being caught for the first time and made to smoke the entire packet as punishment’—should have been tacked on the end of the first sentence, so it refers to Annabel. But Carr made it part of the second sentence, which is about the viewer. This Freudian slip suggests that, while viewers may see themselves as punishers, we may also identify with her as punished, somehow sharing in her punishment through empathy. So, as much as I might take pleasure in Annabel’s slow poisoning, I can also identify with her, as if this is an ordeal we go through together. Perhaps it is ‘hurting me more than it hurts her’.

With Annabel, real-time duration is crucial. It’s a meditative work, a little vanitas. It cross-references our reflection upon it to smoking itself, as a reflective activity. It gives us time to enjoy looking at Annabel, to cruise her with our eyes, and to think about what is at stake in this, for us, for her. It lets us ponder beauty and addiction, desire and death. Its duration allows us to work through contradictory insights, accumulating them, rather than having one erase or supersede the others.

It’s interesting to watch Annabel alongside another Carr video, Smoke Train (2005). Here, a young mother entertains her young daughter on a domestic doorstep. As mum enjoys her cigarette break, she modifies the pack so she can use it to puff out smoke rings to entertain the toddler. We are drawn to this magic, nostalgic, loving scene, but also disturbed by the way mum (who should know better) inducts her wide-eyed daughter into the joys of the filthy habit. Shot on film, Smoke Train looks as though it could have been made decades ago, before there were such taboos around smoking.⁵ Viewing Annabel through Smoke Train, we might fantasise that Annabel is that little girl, now grown up, facing the consequences.

One of Carr’s perennial concerns is pleasures—innocent and guilty. Mostly these pleasures are gendered and many are sexual (albeit sublimated). In his videos, he has a pillow fights with little girls in their jammies; he smashes up a panel van with skater boys; he drinks Tiger beer with a ‘throng of models’ in a jacuzzi; and, in scuba gear, he watches bikini girls swim around him in a pool. In his more recent videos, Carr’s pleasure is often abstracted in the form of cars doing burnouts, paint-filled-balloons bursting, and the fruit of the Tree of Knowledge being obliterated by bullets in orgasmic slo-mo. Carr shares pleasures with the people (and the things) in his videos; he also shares these pleasures with us, his audience. However, his pleasures, their pleasures, and our pleasures are never exactly the same, even if they overlap and reflect one another.

Pleasures may involve identification, but it is one thing for a punisher to identify with his victim, another for the victim to identify back. Identification doesn’t mean equality; indeed, it can mask inequality. Annabel is about our seeing ourselves, in turn, as artist, as viewers, and as subject; but it is also about the difference between being Annabel and filming her, the difference between being Annabel and watching her, and the difference between filming Annabel and watching a film of her. Carr’s work provides opportunities to meditate upon the nuances, mechanics, and politics of these differences. In a relay of compromised identifications, we may share a cigarette, but we can never fully become the other. We can never get inside her head, can never know her. Nor she us. In the end, Carr’s Annabel highlights loneliness: hers, ours. After making Annabel, Carr quit smoking.