Now showing until May 15

After a while, motion sickness sets in. The horizon dips and tilts, the image tumbles and jumps, obstacles—pedestrians, military tanks, men with guns—are navigated around. Emily Jacir’s Crossing Surda (a record of going to and from work) documents a mundane task: a daily walk from Ramallah to Birzeit University (both in Palestine). What we see is a second attempt, filmed through a hole cut into the artist’s bag. The first attempt, shot by a camera held in Jacir’s hands, was confiscated by a member Israeli Defence Force. Under occupation, the mundane is complicated by detours, checkpoints, the closure of transit routes (seemingly at a whim), and protocols around what can and cannot be seen.

Borders are vague and unstable. They are walls, blockades, or checkpoints; heavily policed areas of land where movement is restricted to a select few; lines that when crossed turn people from citizens of a particular place into something else. In Cross-border, on show at Pataka Art Museum until May 15, borders can mean very different things depending on where you look. They appear often as sites of transgression—spaces of reimagined political possibilities—than they do as national boundaries.

Since its initial staging at ZKM in Germany in 2013, Cross-border has spent three years travelling the globe. The original description of the exhibition suggests one impetus for the selection of this particular group of artists (all of whom are based in, or originally come from, the southern Mediterranean region) is the Arab Spring; which, according to the ZKM’s promotional material, Europe witnessed with “hope and skepticism.” It seems belated to speak of the Arab Spring as a contemporary event, but the potency of this arrangement of works is due to their ability to complicate questions of political agency, migration, and sovereignty.

Often, works’ gestures are simple. Amal Kenawy’s Silence of Sheep begins with a group of underpaid labourers, led by the artist, crawling through a busy Cairo suburb on their hands and knees. They stop traffic and interrupt the flow of pedestrians, most of whom seem bemused but not otherwise affected. The majority of the eight minute film, however, documents a confrontation between the artist and a group of angry men. It’s difficult to discern the source of their objection. Whether it’s compelled by misogyny, or differing opinions regarding what art is and should be and where it should take place, or whether the men are outraged at the degradation of the performers. As a gesture of solidarity with an exploited underclass, the performance seems kind of clumsy. Far more interesting is the way the performance’s political utility comes under scrutiny, the way the confrontation spills out, repeats itself. Kenawy is steadfast. She eloquently and repeatedly explains the intention of the piece to men who interrupt her. The implications of performance outlast the image. The footage stops suddenly, and the words “Fight No. 3, Continued till early morning (No more documents [were] collected)” appear against a black background before disappearing, leaving the video to begin again.

In Katia Kameli’s Untitled, a woman crawls out of a cardboard structure, hastily assembles a blank placard and begins marching. Slowly, she’s joined by other women, all marching silently, all holding blank placards. This video was produced in Algeria in 2011, following months of mass protests in Algeria and in neighbouring countries. Kameli’s marchers speak to the difficulty of ambivalence during times of political uprisings. Their silence, their blank placards, act less as a refusal of a position than a rejection of the simplicity of a position that could easily be transcribed upon a piece of card.

Borders mean something very specific now. Probably something different to what the word meant in 2013. We’re an island nation, and relatively isolated from political upheavals happening elsewhere, but we’re by no means immune from the discourses being produced by these upheavals. Conversations about borders seem to happen either at the level of humanitarianism, or around the ability of national economies to absorb an influx of people, or, quite often, they manifest themselves as unapologetic racism. These conversations never seem able to contain the conditions that led us to the present, nor the voices of those caught up in these conditions. The works in Cross-border refuse presupposition, and they refuse to address the political using the language of policy. These artists scrutinise the ordinary, they scrutinise what political agents look like, how political change comes to take place, the capacity of the image to transmit nuance or ambivalence. Things are complicated repeatedly, relentlessly, restlessly.

• In February, Máximo Caminero, a Florida artist, destroyed a painted Ai Weiwei vase (valued at $1 million) on display at the Pérez Art Museum Miami. Caminero said the vandalism was an act of protest against the museum’s neglect of local artists in favour of blockbuster names. Behind the installation of vases was a set of three photographs depicting Weiwei holding and then dropping a Ming-dynasty vase. Caminero said any symbolism was unintended.

• Also in February, a cleaner at the Flip Project Space in southern Italy accidentally threw away a Sala Murat piece. Security guards noticed several items were missing from the installation, which was comprised of pieces of newspaper and cookie-cutters, and reported to gallery administration. BBC News quoted the city’s marketing commissioner as saying, “It’s clear the cleaning person did not realise she had thrown away two works and their value. But this is all about the artists who have been able to better interpret the meaning of contemporary art, which is to interact with the environment… In any case, the insurance will cover the damages caused.”

• On 9 March, criminal charges were filed against El Salvadoran artist Víctor “Crack” Rodríguez for a performance piece in which he is seen eating a ballot paper. No subsequent information about the charges has been published since late March, but if Rodríguez is convicted, he could face up to six years in jail.

• A 61-year-old man in Kingscliff, Australia led police on a 300 m chase on a toy scooter after spray-painting the words “Dumb Cops” and “Kingy Boyz Rule”, as well as other illegible slogans, on the local police station. The man managed to injure two police officers during the altercation. A police representative was quoted as saying, “It’s not our usual type of graffiti suspect, at that age.”

• The Louvre’s Tuileries Garden is infested with rats. Administrators blamed the infestation on litter left by picnicking tourists. Poison has been left in the Garden since July to try to combat the rodent problem, but rat sympathisers have been, for months, removing it.

• In August, Canadian performance artist Istvan Kantor smeared his own blood on the walls of the Whitney Museum where a Jeff Koons retrospective was taking place. The museum was promptly closed for cleaning and Kantor sent to a psychiatric institution for evaluation. Kantor, who is a member of the Neoist movement, has engaged in interventionist performance pieces since the 1970s. In 2004, he threw a vial of his blood at a Paul McCarthy sculpture in Berlin.

• In September, a nine-foot-tall statue of a bright-red-skinned, particularly well endowed Satan posed in a devil-horn salute was, ahem, erected in a park in Vancouver. The statue, which was visible from the main commuter line of Vancouver’s SkyTrain, was promptly removed as it was “not officially commissioned by the city”. As yet, no one has taken responsibility for the piece.

• A Utah man charged with vandalising a Banksy was last month ordered to pay a US$13,000 fine or face jail time. The Banksy murals, which were painted illegally on private property in 2010, were encased in Plexiglas by the city to preserve them. The money is intended to cover the cost of restoring the paintings, and to replace the Plexiglas.

The story is false. The amount of arsenic in the wallpaper was comparatively low by contemporary standards. In 2008, researchers analysed samples of Napoleon’s hair from throughout his life and found levels had remained relatively high since childhood. It is more likely that he died of a combination of a peptic ulcer and gastric cancer.

The story was told to me by Dr Gerald Smith, not in an attempt to convince me of its substance, but to demonstrate the ways in which materials can react in certain atmospheres. Dr Smith directs the master’s programme in Heritage Materials Science at Victoria University, which teaches students to identify fundamental chemical processes in the degradation of cultural artefacts, and the ways in which materials can be stabilised and objects preserved.

Dr Smith, whose research focus is on the chemical makeup of dyes and pigments, initially got involved with heritage sciences after an invitation from a colleague at the British Museum who was preparing to mount an exhibition of taonga.

“I started out there looking at the degradation of Māori flax that had been dyed with a traditional black dye,’ he tells me, ‘whenever this dye has been used, it degrades the substrate: in this case, the flax fibres.”

The degradation, he discovered, was the result of the production of acetic acid in the mud-based dye.

Some things we know by sight: van Gogh’s reds are faded, van Dyck’s browns are smudged, Rembrandt’s whites are darkened and cracked.

Understanding the chemical processes behind these degradations can aid conservators in treatment. Van Gogh, for instance, used a red lake dye, derived from the roots of madder plant. The pigment is translucent and, when used in combination with a darker, more opaque pigment, creates a deep, rich tone. Lake pigments are also unstable under light. The longer they’re exposed to light, the higher the likelihood the molecules in the pigment will break apart, resulting in the fading of colour.

“There’s a famous pigment called van Dyck brown,” Dr Smith explains, “which is obtained by charcoal, but it also contains other substances that prevent the drying oil from drying, so those brown pigments tend to bleed.”

As for Rembrandt, on the surface of The Anatomy Lesson of Dr. Nicolaes Tulp, there appeared a number of red-orange protrusions. These protrusions are called lead soaps, and are caused by the reaction between the lead white paint, linseed-oil binder, and sulfur in the atmosphere.

The ethical considerations of conservation are fraught. The question of cleaning lead soaps, for instance, is incredibly contentious. “When you’ve got protrusions like that occurring, abrasion during cleaning could easily upset [the surface].”

Another issue that emerges is the authenticity of artworks. Our conversation returns to Rembrandt. In 1968, a group of art historians embarked on a 40-year project to assess the 420 known works attributed to Rembrandt across various public and private collections. The aim was to apply exactly the same methods and scrutiny to each work to assess whether they were the product of the artist himself. The plan was contentious: some public and private institutions were reluctant to present their works for analysis. A removal of attribution could knock tens of millions of dollars off the painting’s value.

One of the most obvious ways chemical analysis of pigments aids in the authentication of works is in its ability to help date the work. Dr Smith tells me the story of the Vinland map:

“It’s purported to be a map of a pre-Columbian map of North America, and it was bought for a considerable amount of money… but there have been analyses done on some of the pigment, and it’s claimed they’ve used a substance that is synthetic, and was only available post-1950.”

Authentication is not always so simple. Using synthetic materials is an obvious trap to fall into, he tells me. For works produced in Rembrandt’s studio, their proximity, in terms of their intimacy with the artist and the distance of 300 years, makes authentication a difficult task. “I’ve heard it said,” Smith says, “that it’s impossible to actually prove something’s authentic: the best you can do is to say sometimes that it’s not.”

The conservator operates in the realm of uncertainty. The decision to intervene means navigating not just the degradation of the material but a range of economic (Is funding for ongoing restoration available? How will restoration affect the monetary value of a work?), ethical (How to ensure alterations are reversible?) and practical considerations of restoration. Analysis of the chemical makeup of the materials can never amount to the elimination of doubt; it can, however, reduce it.

There’s a perverse comfort in situating my own social ineptitude within a wider historical narrative. But this isn’t about me (he lied).

The Peter McLeavey Gallery lacked nothing in sincerity. It lacked, rather, the self-confidence to commit to its own project. It so insistently advertised itself as belonging to somewhere else. The descriptor of “industrial, New York style” gallery felt a little embarrassing. As if everyone involved still considered themselves parochial in relation to the metropole. And we do, but that’s not the point. The point is that, to a degree, they were right. Spaces like that – high-ceilinged, wide, airy, concrete-floored spaces – don’t really exist in Wellington.

Consider This an Offering takes place in such a space. The exhibition, which is being staged by four final-year Massey students, describes itself as a “playground for mindfulness” and features four installation works as well as a screening room displaying video work.

At the opening, about three drinks in, I made a note on my phone which read, “David Koch’s sponsorship of the Met is not killing art. Pirate costumes, tie-dyed baggy pants, and animal pants ruin art.” Provided one enters the exhibition at the right time, one is first met with projectiles, bouncy balls, ricocheting off the ground, the walls, other bodies. For all its playful violence, Louise Rutledge’s piece operates most effectively as an interrogation of public space and its uses. The piece’s most interesting element is not its tactile nature, nor in the negation of the commodified art object in the presentation of something so easily dissolvable (and stealable, not that I did), but the ways in which interaction with the object, and the object’s relation to the space, is mediated by one’s comfort in the space. Hence the pirate-costume man, and the tie-dye-pant man, both of whom seemed so jubilous in their attacks by virtue, perhaps, of their existing eccentricity. Rutledge’s object does encourage the momentary dissolution of social order, yes, but it does so in a way that reveals the ways in which breakdown is mediated by gender, by costume, by an awareness of other bodies in a space, and by the lack of awareness of one’s own among others.

Ruby Joy Eade’s billboards, as an anthropological exercise in scavenging disembodied text from break-up forums, can be hostile. There’s a risk that their presence in the gallery space is malicious, ironic, a snide laugh at an abstract other without the right of reply. I choose to believe, however, that there is nothing disingenuous about them. (Full disclosure: I may be biased; I’m friends with the artist’s friends. Ruby and I once yelled at each other at a party. I think about Adorno, or my iPhone. I can’t remember.) They position themselves closer to Miranda July, Jenny Holzer and Koki Tanaka’s unapologetic earnest faith in humanity. There’s something almost invasive in their banality. The profound sadness of decontextualised clichés – “take me back”, “i feel lost and confused”, “it’s tough seeing him so cold” – from a speaker both incorporeal and undeniably present. Eade has previously sewn phrases to garments in op-shop changing rooms, and erected billboards next to election campaigns. All contexts alarm, but in different ways. In a gallery, they offer a sense of the uncanny, born from the ambiguity of the text’s source; it’s unclear whether they act on the presumption of universality, or in the conquest of pathos towards an absent speaker.

The other two works in the show operate both architecturally and ritually. On one side, Elisabeth Pointon’s piles of salt arranged in a circle (the remnants of a performance I missed); on the other, a large sandpit with a rake presented by Robbie Whyte. They’re quieter than the other works, allowing for meditation in the small rearrangements of existing objects. Accompanying the exhibition is a selection of books and zines from Art Print Space, relics of the artists’ research process. The exhibition, more than anything else, is generous, not just for its invitation to participate, but in the ways the works correspond with each other, and the ways in which the additional content provides many different points of entry simultaneously.

PS I rearranged your books so that Alain de Botton was hidden from view. Love your work, sorry.

Consider This an Offering is on display at 24 Marion St until 24 September.

Of the four pieces nominated for the 2014 Walters Prize, only one, Simon Denny’s All You Need is Data, translated easily from its initial staging to the Auckland Art Gallery exhibition of nominated works. Even then, Denny’s gauche, post-internet aesthetic hardly seems at home. Perhaps, then, when we speak about New Zealand’s “grandest”, “toughest”, most visible art prize, a caveat might be necessary. What the Daily Mail’s clarification illuminates is the disjuncture between the names we give things, and how we visualise them in spatial terms. More than anything else, the four nominees are united by their positioning of the gallery space as at once peripheral and central to the work. It’s parochial, anachronistic by now, to ask what art is, but when viewed together, from a safe distance, all four works seem to motion towards an examination of where art belongs.

Maddie Leach’s If you find the good oil let us know began in New Plymouth two years ago after Leach stumbled upon what she thought to be 70 litres of whale oil. The substance, it turned out, was mineral oil, and was subsequently used to produce a 2.4-tonne (about the size of a sperm whale) block of concrete, which was dropped into the ocean off the Taranaki coast. Leach, whose work is often site-based and often develops out of research and collaborative engagement, continues to refer to her work as sculpture. In an interview with curator Abby Cunnane, she writes: “my practice employs processes of construction and arrangement, and an interest in materiality and transformation that is allied to a sculptural mode of thinking.” The product of If you find the good oil contains letters written to the Taranaki Daily News (and the Noel Leeming advertisements that run alongside them) and documentations of the events outlined, all archived on Leach’s website. The weakness of the work, and here I am paraphrasing Janet McAllister’s argument published on The Pantograph Punch, is that situating it outside of the gallery does not necessarily mean the work is available to a different (or any) audience. The published letters are impenetrable, the website itself is not easy to navigate. I probably wouldn’t have found it had I not been looking.

Perhaps even more elusive is Luke Willis Thompson’s inthisholeonthisislandwhereiam (2012). Initially presented at Hopkinson Cundy (now Hopkinson Mossman) in Auckland, viewers were first met with an empty gallery. They were then directed outside, and led towards a waiting taxi, which drove them 20 minutes outside of the city to a suburban home. When inside, it soon dawned on the viewer, after examining family photographs, books and letters scattered on the floor that this home belonged to the artist’s family. The gesture is modest, a subtle reimagining of the contemporary public self, and an exercise in endurance and trust that extends beyond the artist himself, to his family, to the dealer with nothing on sale, to the viewer willing to accept what is on offer.

Simon Denny’s work is often invested in the changing ways we process and materialise information. All You Need Is Data, exhibited in Munich and New York, is made up of 89 canvases, merchandise and other paraphernalia from a 2012 technology conference, Digital Life Design. Denny’s work is mounted uneasily, as a chronological document of an exclusive invitation-only conference that concerns itself first with comprehending future technologies and later with utilising them for particular gains. The unity of such a project falls apart under the scrutiny. Deliberately ugly ink-jet printed placards are piled at all angles, mounted on metal piping that guides the visitor through the space, to an eventual dead end. Denny’s work makes itself physically available, certainly more so than the other three nominees, but there is something repellent about it.

In the very staging of an exhibition of the Walters Prize nominees, Auckland Art Gallery highlights the shortcomings of the physical gallery in dealing with contemporary art. Perhaps a caveat is necessary, when the prize’s website states its aim as “to make contemporary art a more widely recognised and debated feature of our cultural life.” What needs to be clarified is where this debate is to take place, and, if all of the nominees are so quick to efface themselves, to make themselves hostile to the viewer, who is invited to take part.

Simon Denny’s The Personal Effects of Kim Dotcom opens at Adam Art Gallery, 3 October.
This article is the second in a two-part spotlight on this year’s Walters Prize. For part one, and for our coverage of Simon Denny’s upcoming exhibition, visit salient.org.nz

1) Could you tell me what work of yours we can expect to see in the show?
There will be three images of mine in the show; Pipe Study, 2008, a large photograph of an anonymous female figure in a beaded evening gown, flanked by outsized plastic plumbing pipes; Pipe Face Prototype, also 2008, a close up of the model from Pipe Study’s face, with digitally collaged protruding teeth and starburst eyes; and Sand Forms, 2014, a new still life image of a sand-encrusted sphere, cone, and cylinder, placed in a manufactured studio environment. These familiar, quasi-mathematical forms are rendered enigmatic and obscure, their inexplicable nature amplified by a language of slick product photography that insists that they are significant. However, this insistence is impotent—nothing is revealed. Sand Forms is my first attempt at shooting on an 8×10 camera, which means the quality of the image is (hopefully) extremely sharp and detailed. I haven’t yet seen the final print, but it should go to plan.

2) How were these particular works chosen, and how do they interact to the other artists featured in the show?
The works were chosen by Olivia and Peter McLeavey, to be viewed alongside three other female artists work; Sherrie Levine, Barbara Kruger, and Ava Seymour. As for how they interact, I guess that will be revealed when the show opens on August 26.

3) Can you discuss your artistic training, how and why you decided to be an artist, who are some of your major influences?
I studied photography for three years, hoping to be an editorial/advertising photographer at the culmination of my training. It became apparent that I had no aptitude for this. Realising other people’s dreams and visions wasn’t really working out for me. I began exhibiting in artist-run spaces in Auckland and things fell into place from there.

During my formative years as a photography student I was a big fan of Diane Arbus, Mary Ellen Mark, Inez van Lamsweerde, Richard Avedon, and Robert Mapplethorpe. I have also always enjoyed social documentary photography, probably because it’s not something I do myself. And studio portraiture from the Victorian era. Mainly because of the clothes. Another favourite is Mike Disfarmer, a little-known American photographer who ran a portrait studio in a small rural community in Arkansas in the 1940’s. His portraits have a hardscrabble austerity that really appeals to me. I also love the work of August Sander and Bernd and Hilla Becher. And Irving Penn’s hard, chic still life photographs. I also enjoy commercial photography and advertising imagery, no matter how bad. Especially if it’s bad, actually.

4) In 2002, Peter McLeavey described you, along with Andrew McLeod, Brendon Wilkinson, Lis Maw and Ava Seymour, as ‘Our art Datsuns … I do feel that the tectonic plates are shifting here and a younger (hungrier and gifted) group are now claiming their birthright.’ How did you first meet McLeavey?
My connection with Peter came about after he purchased one of my photographs in 2000 and contacted me soon afterwards by formal, typed letter to enquire about a possible meeting. Fortunately I was rather naïve and had no idea of his importance and stature, so I didn’t try too hard at the meeting and blow it by being desperate and needy. We didn’t really talk about art or photography at all. It was like catching up with someone I’ve always known for a casual chat. About a year afterwards, I had my first exhibition at the McLeavey Gallery.

5) The press release for the show frames I Like Girls as an overtly political exercise. What is the role of politics in your work?
My work usually stems from something that resonates in my memory or imagination. Often it’s vague and fragmentary. It isn’t specifically driven by politics, but there are by-products of it pervading my images. My 2009 series The Wall of Man, for example, speaks to corporate culture and identity, the senior male, rendered infallible, and why this may be problematic. I’ve recently photographed a series of portraits of vegans, which is more politically centred, especially as New Zealand’s economy is entrenched in animal protein and live animal exports. I’m asking the viewer to consider another perspective when looking at the work. Why are vegans regarded as fringe weirdos? Why is the consumption of animal flesh and cow’s milk normalised? I would also like to photograph Fonterra executives but that’s probably never going to happen.

I Like Girls opens at the Peter McLeavey Popup (cnr Webb St/Torrens Tce) 26 August.

Related: Ava Seymour interview

In the 1990s, Seymour gained notoriety for a series of collages that traced the state house’s trajectory from symbol of postwar egalitarianism to its contemporary uses as a means to disempower and demonise communities. Since then, Seymour’s work has adopted more formal concerns. Seymour has drawn from collage’s bringing together of disparate elements, layering various materials on top of each other to examine abstraction and incongruity in seeing.

Seymour will be exhibiting at the Peter McLeavey Pop Up later this month, alongside Yvonne Todd, Barbara Kruger and Sherrie Levine. I recently emailed Seymour to discuss her recent work, her relationship with McLeavey, and the role of politics in her work.

“Two of my larger works will be in the show. Triptych Lumiere, which was produced during my 2010 McCahon House residency and is perhaps best described as a work made in response to McCahon’s French Bay paintings of the 1950s. The second work is titled Tablet: it is a hybrid form of photography and sculpture; it is freestanding and leans against the wall.”

After spending a year at Prahran College in Melbourne in the late 1980s, Seymour travelled to Europe. It was here she began producing art. Her early work was influenced by artists such as Diane Arbus, Henri Matisse and Edvard Munch. She places emphasis, however, on the musical influences that informed her artistic direction.

“I was listening to bands such as Pere Ubu, The Fall, Throbbing Gristle, Einstürzende Neubauten… I saw The Birthday Party perform in Auckland in 1982: the gig was legendary, they were a complete shambles, glorious in every sense; it was a real awakening. It is worth noting that the art that was intrinsic to many of these bands (their slogans, album covers, posters etc), borrowed a lot from Dada’s more political strand.”

Dada’s legacy hung around Seymour. Hannah Hoch is often used as a reference point in descriptions of her early work. Seymour described being cognisant of Dada’s influence, while never straying so far as to identify with the term explicitly.

“I lived in Berlin in the early 1990s and I’ve always assumed this is why people have been so quick to make that connection… The political history of Berlin always fascinated me, I ended up there in January of 1992; it was a tough place back then, the scars of war were still visible because I lived in the former East.

“I saw large exhibitions on both Munch and Grosz while I was in Berlin at the National Gallery; I went to St Petersburg and visited the Hermitage Museum; then after my bleak European experience, I went to New York, where the mood was much lighter. I remember being quite confused: everywhere I looked, there was big advertising saying ‘.com’; I didn’t know what it meant, I was really out of touch.”

Seymour met Peter McLeavey in 2000, after moving to Wellington.

“I used to drop in to see his shows. One day, he suggested a visit to my studio to look at some work… I always found Peter to be warm, quirky and interesting. Our relationship strengthened over time, and I was even asked to dinner one night at his home, but it wasn’t until about a year-and-a-half after that I received a letter inviting me to join the gallery.

“The change in my artistic direction came about because I got older. My focus changed; I was looking at more art, and reading about it, and I worked out that the key to survival as a contemporary artist is to stay relevant. I started to learn how to work with computer software, and this resulted in a new approach to art-making.”

The intersection between Kruger, Levine and Todd may seem more immediate. All three artists have spent decades employing languages, both visual and oral, to provoke, to unsettle, to unearth the means by which representation (especially female representation) is discursively assembled. In spite of Seymour’s insistence that her work is no longer political, an unearthing does take place. The kauri was a figure in New Zealand’s cultural mythology long before McCahon, and her layering of discordant shapes, the dark yellows and browns and blues in response to him, seem to act to upset the notion of landscape as site of spiritual renewal. Tablet might be considered complementary to the more polemical work in the show, for in its perpendicular relation to the gallery space, in the deliberate positioning of the clamps as a means of preventing the work from disintegration, the work might perhaps serve as a monument to the precariousness of representation itself.

Ava Seymour’s work will be on display as part of I Like Girls at the Peter McLeavey Pop Up, from 26 August.

This is what happens. The economy tanks. Investors pull money from risky opportunities. Governments cut and cut some more. The art market, meanwhile, does just fine. Investors want something safe, something tangible, and so they invest in objects. Those without the means to enter the art market, those most affected by massive cuts, can’t do much.

May 1st, 2012. Edvard Munch’s The Scream is sold at Sotheby’s for $119.9 million, becoming the most expensive painting ever to be sold at auction. Months later, across Europe, tens of thousands of citizens took to the streets to protest massive cuts to public services. These two events collide in Angela Tiatia’s Cream, currently on show at Enjoy. Pixelated images of police brutality are interspersed with images of the polite, suited battleground of an auction house.

Tiatia’s critique, at first, seems obvious. So used are we to bemoaning the excesses of the rich that complaints become noise. This is what happens. The people get angrier. The rich get richer.

Such a reductionist reading is denied by the eight television screens that make up Shahriar Asdollah-Zadeh’s 2012 work Michael Jackson Motorcade piled in the opposite corner of the gallery.

June 26th, 2009, sometime after 9.26 am. I’m sitting in Maths class, a tweet is sent to my phone informing me of Michael Jackson’s death. I tell the friend sitting next to me. He doesn’t believe me. He says if it were true, the major news outlets would be reporting it.

Footage of Jackson’s funeral motorcade occupies five of the screens. Static plays on another. The others are blank. Suggesting something is not being revealed. The shots are shaky and awkward; at times the reflection of a camera is visible, behind which stands an ominous figure. There is something peaceful about the languorous unfolding of black cars in even motion, filmed from above.

Meanwhile, in Iran, following the re-election of President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, protests were taking place in major cities around the country. These were met with state violence. Protesters were arrested, beaten, killed. Official news channels were blacked out. Protest organisers used Twitter to engage with masses of people.

Western media outlets dubbed the protest the ‘Persian Awakening’. Like the Arab Spring, or the less popular Twitter Revolution, these terms act ahistorically. Emphasis is placed on the role of technology, rather than on dissent. They displace the ownership of these moments.

The role of social media is significant, obviously, as a means of bypassing outlets already co-opted by the state. But there is something evaluative about these terms, an implication that these far-off places were shaken from their slumber not simply by technological advance, but by a specifically American brand of innovation.

Like Tiatia’s work, Asdollah-Zadeh offers a simplistic reading at first, a work concerned with celebrity obsession. But this falls apart under scrutiny.

Both of these works can be considered as attempts to navigate how we process information now. There’s something of Robert Heinecken’s layering of news footage, the bringing together of disparate elements to disorientate. Where Heinecken used the televising of war as a point of departure, both Tiatia and Asdollah-Zadeh are concerned with newer forms of proliferation.

This is how it happens. Everything is equally as important as everything else, and everything happens all the time. We filter, as a means of comprehending, as a means of accessing only the most relevant information. Images of the world, like Asdollah-Zadeh’s screens, are left lacking.

The museum is a tomb. Implicit in the assumption that the museum acts as a final resting place for objects is the assumption that the museum operates outside of a capitalist economy. That the museum acts only to document unrest, that it is never the site of it.

Suppose the modern museum is in a state of crisis. It isn’t difficult. The Detroit Institute of Art narrowly avoided having to liquidate its entire collection thanks to an $800 million endowment for the bankrupt city contingent on the collection staying in place. Closer to home, Te Papa just revealed an $8 million deficit. Devon Smith recently suggested in an article on Medium titled ‘We Should Allow Failing Arts Organisation to Die’ that allowing institutions that refuse to adapt to change to remain on life support is detrimental to the entire culture landscape.

Smith’s argument relies on the application of social Darwinism: “The healthy can’t stay that way surrounded by a crowd of the sick.” Smith attributes the growing sense of crisis among arts organisations as a symptom of changing tastes. She argues that patrons are more interested in “nontraditional” experiences, among which she lists: “appreciating the aesthetic design of an especially beautiful video game, the art of pulling a great shot of espresso, and the craft of a great pair of raw denim jeans.” What these experiences have in common is the necessity of currency. Smith seems to argue that the allocation of funding should be made by the individual, rather than the state. It seems utopian, naïve even, to argue that the museum is a public space not dependent on the purchasing of goods or services. It costs $25 to get into MoMA. Te Papa’s touring exhibitions cost up to $20. Not to mention the kind of acquisition of cultural capital certain institutions demand. But what is most significant about Smith’s argument is its transference of neoliberal absolute faith in the market to decide who sinks.

Smith writes generally. She considers only the institution’s ability to deliver content. Allowing floundering museums to fail would risk scattering collections across a range of private buyers. And, of course, the flooding of the market would affect the return. The first piece from the Delaware collection, William Holman Hunt’s Isabella and the Pot of Basil, was sold to an unidentified buyer, for $4.9 million, well below its estimate of between $8.4 and $13.4 million.

The state shrinks. Arts institutions turn to the private sector for funding. Sponsorship provides companies with a way of shaping their brand. Associating with the right kind of people. Transfield, for instance, has for two decades been the principal sponsor of the Sydney Biennale.

Transfield Services holds the government contract to operate Australia’s refugee detention centres.

The museum must be ethically compromised. Public funds are always precarious. Adapting means either accepting funds from questionable sources, or committing sacrilege by selling items to stay afloat.

These strands converge in Hito Steyerl’s stunning lecture Is the Museum a Battlefield?. Using the 1917 Bolshevik storming of the Winter Palace and the 1792 storming of the Louvre as points of departure, Steyer examines the death of her childhood friend Andrea Wolf – a member of the Kurdish Women’s Army who was killed in Turkey in 1998. Her investigation leads her to the battlesite to examine the detritus. She traces a bullet shell backwards, to its manufacturer, and it is here, in the lobby of General Dynamics, that she discovers something. “Imagine my surprise when I found my own artwork being installed there,” she said. “This artwork was actually showing the battlefield, which… I was following the bullet back from the place it came from, and I ended up in a sort of weird feedback loop, as if the bullet wasn’t flying straight, from one point to another, but actually it was flying in a circle.”

The image of the circulating bullet sustains Steyerl’s lecture. Until it stops. She concludes by calling for an acknowledgement of the museum as a site of conflict, stating that the only way to break free of the feedback loop she describes is to “storm the museum again”.

Hito Steyerl’s Is the Museum a Battlefield? is on display at Adam Art Gallery until 10 August.