To undertake a project with an indeterminate outcome could be argued as a poor use of time, but I seem to be doing something even if it is seemingly ‘wasting time.’
Kalisolaite ‘Uhila often mentions the notion of ‘wasting time,’ the phrase ‘wasting time’ can be understood as an absurd use of time, defined as the lack of a legible product or outcome, but ‘to waste’ is merely a verb. The notion of actioning a verb, exploring ways of doing something, being and engaging in the world, taking time to exist in the moment while understanding that an action may lead to an undetermined, non-guaranteed outcome, a response to Shoshana Zuboff’s description of surveillance capitalism’s, and capitalism in general, desire for guaranteed outcomes.
I understand this notion of the non-guaranteed as setting a stage for possibilities of framing efforts that can exist within the ever fleeting present moment. Looking over the harbour of Tamaki Makarau, the notion of a boat sailing with wind in its sails becomes the capturing of a fleeting energy, moving through time, moving across water, existing within the potential of a waxing, waining, ebb or flowing tide. I think of the poetics of Maddie Leach’s work Perigee #11 (2008) in relation to the pseudo - scientific experiments of Paul Cullen’s Falsework (2007), measuring a shifting moment’s relevance to past obfuscated intentions, provisional plans, tide charts, the potential in determining considerable change. I would like to explore the fleeting moments that give precedence to something never finalised, something bearing visible traces of formal qualities, but never complete in its cycle.
This project has come to engage with Helen Escobedo’s sculpture Signals, 1971, a construction with a seemingly stagnant view, very much pressed against the ceiling, existing in time, but continually coming face to face with a shifting view, standing, wasting time.
For the past fifty years the sculpture has witnessed the Hauraki Gulf enter the Waitematā Harbour, and the Waitematā Harbour enter into the Hauraki Gulf twice daily, watching unamenably these continually shifting bodies of water. While emphatically looking out towards the harbour, Signals prompts a romantic outcome that sits in the ebb and flow of the tide. The site stands aloft with its own determined ontological threads. The flow of time has brought forward the question Escobedo suggests in the form of the statement, “…I’m interested, not in putting up a sort of monument to somebody, but to making the city more beautiful. And I’m not really afraid of using the word function in sculpture — I believe sculpture should be functional.” How does Signals function or what does the sculpture mean? What makes a sculpture functional? “What or whom [controls] the meaning and content of the work, and how much does its meaning derive from this new time and space realisation. Or how stable is the content of the work and where does its meaning lie- in the mood or “theatre” of the scene, the textual references, the site, or the characters invoked either through authorship of staging?”
Four Shapes for Four Spaces, 1972. (Helen Escobedo standing on the field at Fred Amber Lookout, the site Signals is now located.)
video still: 2:12.
https://www.nzonscreen.com/title/four-shapes-for-four-spaces-1972/overview
Retrieved 21-10-20.
Conland, N. (2018) The Politics of Erasure: The Artists et al., Reading Room, Politics of Denial, Issue 08.18 E.H. McCormick Research Library, Auckland Art Gallery Toi o Tamaki. 88.