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PAT HOFFIE: Skatebowl in a Gallery, Ipswich Essay by Julianne Schultz

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PAT HOFFIE: Skatebowl in a Gallery, Ipswich Essay by Julianne Schultz PAT HOFFIE: Skatebowl in a Gallery, Ipswich essay by Julianne Schultz MONA – the Museum of Old and New Art – is a glamorous curiosity box on the banks of the Derwent River at Glenorchy in working class Hobart. In just a few years it has been the catalyst of and economic and social transformation – crystallising the cultural essence of early twenty-first century Tasmania, and changing notions of productive work. In the process it has put the state on the global tourism agenda, providing opportunities for artists, craftspeople, performers and thinkers to find like minded souls and develop new businesses and to stretch the horizons and possibilities for countless others. Similar interventions are occurring around the world, as artists, entrepreneurs, local administrators and communities stretch the boundaries of engagement, creativity and art. Skatebowl in a Gallery, Ipswich is the most recent move into this space by the important Brisbane artist, Pat Hoffie. That this work, titled Immaterial Labour: Skatebowl Prounspace has found a home at the Ipswich Art Gallery is itself important – it is the juxtapostion of works like this in unexpected places, and with people who may not routinely visit a gallery, that adds to their power and impact. MONA is a great example. It is itself arguably as much a work of art – of genius – as some of the works assembled in its subterranean galleries and inspiring spaces. It is a product of vision and skill of one man, David Walsh, executed with unstinting precision using the proceeds of a form of work (gambling), which is more often thought of as play. MONA and its associated activities and facilities is not an end in itself but a marker on a journey, in much the same way as an artist’s ouvre captures a distils and captures a moment. As Austrian sculptor Erwin Wurm could have been describing Walsh’s vision when he told World Sculpture News 29 last winter: ‘I also like some of the ideas of Michel Eyquem de Montaigne who described the world by describing himself, which is more or less what artists do. You create something and then time goes by and you are overruled by new ideas and new pieces of work and so this is a challenge, but then you are able to think and reflect and reflect yourself and your world and this is something I like very much.’ Walsh has created a museum, a precinct and something bigger than the sum of its parts in Hobart. It is a heady mix of art, commerce, design and community. It is popular and esoteric, elite and accessible, a showcase that invites interaction and that is itself a source of work and an expression of the profits of work. Again, the parallels with Pat Hoffie’s work in Ipswich are easy to see. Insofar as it is possible for an outsider to judge, MONA, is a mirror on the soul and mind of one of that city’s most extraordinary citizens – as he wrote in Griffith REVIEW 39: Tasmania:The Tipping Point? Page | 1 last year. ‘The Hobart of my youth was mostly working-class Glenorchy…People weren’t black, or alcoholic, or rich…Everybody was just somebody. We believed in shades of grey because our forebears were convicts and we were in no position to judge... Somehow MONA is imbued with the hubris of a man who was inadvertently taught by his community not to respect boundaries, and the humility of a little boy who often walked past the peninsula on which it now resides, but who never ventured in, because he didn’t understand that it was okay to have a look.’ Walsh is a man with extraordinary gifts, a strong sense of where he came from, and a commitment to people and place which he had the means and inclination to enrich, stretch, cajole, amuse, entertain, tease and provoke. This was embodied, in the early years of the gallery’s life, by the location of Erwin Wurm’s Fat Car near the entrance. The beautiful lines of the obese, shiny red Porsche invite people to come closer, to be captivated, to wonder about technique, to reflect on meaning and to smile. Hobart audiences were as intrigued by the distended fibreglass vehicle as audiences around the world by Wurm’s vehicles. For Walsh, the placement of Fat Car near the entrance was no more accidental than any of the other as decisions he has made. MONA is designed to be accessible, and particularly to be accessible to Tasmanians – who as a group make up a disproportionate number of the poorest and least educated Australian citizens. Entry is free, and the promise of exotic, slightly risqué works, helped to lure many first time gallery visitors. Fat Car in particular, worked like a charm – luring people in, removing fear and intimidation, making them laugh. The process of making the fat vehicle in 2005, involved buying the Porsche and padding it with foam before covering it in fiberglass and World Sculpture News noted, ‘The resulting obese mounds and folds are both enticing and repulsive. People laugh at this work because cars shouldn’t be fat, cars don’t have obesity problems. But this is just the surface. [Wurm said,] “When I made this work, it was very much about criticism, consumerism, our health system. The rich are aware of health issues and are able to take care of their appearance while poor are often only able to afford junk that causes obesity. This is a work that is about social issues. For me the main point is to make sculpture – to work with mass and volume – but also to change the content. I very much believe that philosophical ideas and points of view and different aspects of a society at a certain moment are fascinating. This is what makes it so interesting. If someone learns to laugh, it may help him to survive better even though it doesn’t solve the problem or change the world.”’ This informed playfulness shapes the MONA ethos. Staff are quick to tell the story of the local Glenorchy family who turned up to have a look at the gallery during the first school holidays it was open. They were ordinary folk who had not been exposed to the routines of galleries – and lingered cautiously after receiving their complementary electronic guide, the beefy, tattooed father showing the Page | 2 signs of being uncomfortable, the young mother was preoccupied with little kids. Then the older boy ran ahead and straight into the car. He stopped, eyes widening, circled Fat Car and then ran out to his parents, ‘Dad, Mum there is a car, a fat car, quick come and have a look, it’s awesome!’ He dragged them in and they stayed exploring the gallery for hours and have returned since. The work and the gallery spoke to them – and the circle of David Walsh’s Glenorchy childhood was squared. Wurm could have been channeling Walsh when he said, ‘I am not trying to make jokes. I just try to interpret my surroundings, my time, my world, my society and that is what makes people laugh... I work with humor because it attracts people and gets people closer to the piece and then, when they realise that there is something behind it, another layer or a second or third layer behind that, and that is interesting to me. My work does not just attract people from the art world but people who are not connected to that world because it is easy to get and is mostly connected to reality and to certain problems of life combined with humor.’ PAT HOFFIE’S WORK grows from a similar sensibility; it is at once highly intellectual and extremely playful and located in place, tied to people and the complex relations that bind them. It tests the limits of art and work. She explores meaning, and enhances it with layer on layer of interpretation, provides pathways to participation and then disrupts them, she makes you think, and makes you smile, she puts the artist at the centre and then invites others to engage. The beautiful collection of her work, Fully Exploited Labour, published by University of Queensland Gallery to accompany her exhibition there in 2008, captured the way Pat Hoffie has pursued her vision, intruding images of herself into the great works, collaborating with artisans to create large scale and technically demanding works, adapting and adopting technology to push the boundaries of established practices, exploring Australian history, including the often unspoken binaries of class, race and gender, and engaging deeply with the diverse cultural traditions and skills of the region. As she told me: ‘In the series Fully Exploited Labour I’ve been considering the role of ‘labour’ in terms of visual art production for around three decades. In the foreground of this ongoing series, using different media and working in and with different countries, the role of art in cross-cultural engagements has been a focus, especially in the Asia-Pacific region. The work has critically examined the way ‘value’ is ascribed to artwork. As artists have moved towards outsourcing the production of their work – either through technology or through employing artisans, craftspersons, helpers, fabrication teams, or working with teams of experts, city planners, architects and so on – the question becomes ‘where the work lies’. The value of that effort of production is a question that floats around but rarely gets directly addressed. In the hierarchies of production within the art world, outputs that are labelled ART are valued more highly than craft or artisanal production.
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