Bird of unknown affinities, Manu antiquus
Words 2912 FinalDane Mitchell
Art Bite August 11th 2023. noon.
Stephanie Beth
Te puna o waiwhetu: bird of unknown affinities, Manu antiquus 1
Here are a few ideas I have been thinking as I browsed around writings on Artist Dane Mitchell. My interest was struck when I knew his work was coming down here fromItaly in 2020 when he assembled Post hoc. So, here is a second chance for me to think a little and write a little about how his oeuvre prompts some of us.
Mitchell is an international artist. Unknown Affinities was the original title for an exhibition in which this armature sat in Two Rooms. Auckland. in 2022. It is an anonymous gift here.
I do think that we are able to get to what gives Mitchell joy. This is his aesthetic. This, the times we are in are times of extinctions. We are feeling these. Don’t forget , they have always been going on. Mitchell makes value for Art Galleries on this matter, foregrounding the topic as inherent long term fact. Besides and physically foregrounded by all of this laying of facts, is his true interest in his specialty. It is to delve into fascinating variables of human perception. I see him as an Artist who pivotally reads Philosophy.
He stirs some mind bending. With his vast data project, Post Hoc, he arrived. He tapped out data for two years for this key work there. The result was a ‘List of Lists’. This list was all about losses. It read for thousands of hours. He has a long research history in the study of losses and how losses might be represented in time. He makes use of vials, and audio systems, and has also with vapours. His research has been deepened by specific tooling since the invention of Gigabyte storage computers. Quite specifically, his considerations of human involvement with characteristics of the unseen, is a forte achievement. About birds he has been able to overstretch geophysical time.
It is an honour to bring Mitchel to the fore today, thanks to the positioning that Senior Curato Felicity Milburn has made by accepting bird of unknown affinities into this spot . This is a piece out of what Mitchell calls a monument. In whole it was at Two Rooms, “mounts, or armatures, each made to scale, to grasp every known extinct Aotearoa New Zealand bird species; holotype, fossil and full skeletal remains alike. “ An image from Two rooms of all of Unknown Affinities is in the essay written by Milburn, on page 22 of Bulletin 211.
Look at the Denise Copland etching and aquatint on your right in this room of objects. Have we all not been amazed, when we are in the bush somewhere, to see the internal guts of dead trees? Life cycles happen. Solidity to rot to decay. Yet, predation and changing of landscape is a sobering and different tale. We are helped by the delicate wording in Milburn’s essay,Something’ Missing: The Power of Absence’. .Mitchell finds discipline in a pursuit with thoughts. Mitchell works very hard with thoughts, refining them. The results allow him to be playful, to be bemused, amused, sincere and considerate. This Is what gets him up every day. He touches ideas with fancifulness and courtesy. As well he steps forth with a very open attitude towards the audience as having a sense of reciprocity. He has even stretched to ’ liminal states’, that moment when transitions in perceptions sometimes occur. He has touched upon magic for this purpose and in this light 8
He is also a willing participant in honestly coming to terms. This is his contribution. This is his historical hue. His work also suggests by alliterations, how we all , in various ways, like him, live to live and cope. He looks into cultural provision for cultural ideas, for example, the museum, or a vessel, or transmissions. Then there is the matter of impact: who, what, where, when and why the impact might be foregrounded. Let's not get our knickers in a twist. This evolutionary propositioning is characteristically philosophical. More interesting to Mitchell, then, when he stood in the Two Rooms, Two Rooms being of these motifs of his bird lines at scale, in that exhibition opening, I think, it was his remark, “ I like how all the black outlines are black lines on white.” - something to that effect that cinches what he thought he achieved there as a visual success. That old graphic art lesson, positive and negative spaces highlighted by the gallery white tone. Up there in Auckland Unknown Affinities, were placed implicitly. The result was that the objects had mass. We need to acknowledge why just one armature was donated here, with this realisation in mind.
Art of contemporary time reflects complexity as a particular patterning of quite new vocabularies. .I read somewhere that Mitchell ( b 1976) had gone to eighteen schools before he was 18. ( it was New Zealand geographic, writing by Catherine Woulfe, Oct . 2022. 9 Woulfe wrote ,‘ Mitchell is one of the few artists in the country to have ditched the day job.’’
He’s an Auckland boy. Does that mean anything to you? Roaming free on the edges of the sea across the mangroves to hillside flanges during the mid 1980’s? That’s running free and laterally by the sea, across the gullies; not the CBD downtown…. being a kid outside in the landscape, his suburbia, landscape by the water, exploring free. What part of individuality did Mitchells’parents trigger in him to set him up with curiosity and pleasure in this? He cites Charlotte Grimshaw, daughter of Karl.C.Stead. Charlotte Grimshaw had run around on the Auckland inlet edges as had he. Kids left alone by their parents in natural safe places. Grimshaw, he noticed, to the national geographic writer, went “ roaming, sprawling nightwalking…’10 as had he. Then she decided to be a writer. Was that a hard act to follow? Grimshaw’s one? Child of an author? In her opening of her memoir, Grimshaw later wrote that she decided to get to the truth. She wrote about, I quote: ’ the destructive effect of silence, and the restorative power of narrative’. 11
Mitchel’s work catches momentary abstracts about narratives. His ideas are about the specifics of human thoughts that we may all grasp. His energy with the task gives us a sense of being alive. There was the big bang. Then evolution. Then we made stuff. We wrote stuff. We titillated the senses. We sang songs. We are here as humans. We are here with all the birds left after the dead birds. Look at what we know about existence. What we see. What we don't see. What we record. What we forget. What we smell. Mitchell did one exhibition that went to France. It was titled Iris. Looking at Mitchell is more about thinking about him liking to stay in gallery spaces and then confidently, also spread himself out. It is why he gave up the day job.
He is 100% playing around in Art as a communicator exploring. He may draw upon vessels and vapours, then articulate material ideas in forms that nudge at recognitions. The forms nudge perhaps alongside the perfumer or the archeologist. Recently , we meet him chatting with Marconi. Then he left home. I will continue. Born in 1976. When he found art school he was home. He did art there. He picked up his philosophy degree later, in 2012. It appears that his mother and father warmly encouraged his mind of inquiry.
He exhibited Dust particles, ongoing, from 2003. He collected dust in petri dishes. 13 Well, remember going up to Wellington to see the new floor at Te Papa, the one Michael Parekowhai was invited to take to a star spot by opening that new space there? Did you do that? It was in 2018. There was a gifted to New Zealand suitcase miniature of the famous Large Glass by Duchamp, selected by Parekowhai to be put out in his exhibition. The Bride Stripped Bare by Her Bachelors, Even (The Large Glass), 1915-23, oil, varnish, lead foil, lead wire, dust, two glass panels. 14 Mitchell is in this non-traditionalist territory too, in this kind of intellectual consciousness, knowing that dust tells a story, as Man Ray said and Duchamp concurred one hundred years ago. Mitchell has found a way to have influence with other than rational ways of knowing. He did an exhibition using witchcraft. Conjuring Form, it was called. This one went to Switzerland. He had constructed a metal edged frame in cube shape. It was metal pipes' linear geometric boundary, with, inside, a void of air. Beside it stood a sign, PLEASE DO NOT ENTER. A spirit has been summoned to this space. One question to Mitchell in 2008 was, “So ultimately does the project facilitate knowledge, or is that presumption itself erroneous?” Mitchell replied, “I use the phrase ' other ways of knowing' to identify forms and practices that manipulate, counter or utilise knowledge systems. Measurable mystery is another form of knowledge. Like 'unknowing', it foregrounds absence and the validity of that position' 16 ‘For his solo presentation at Art Basel, Switzerland, Dane Mitchell commissioned a self-described witch to craft a portal to the spirit world in order to call up the ghost of Anna Göldi, the last person executed in Europe for witchcraft.’17 I read you the Epilogue from that exhibition.Epilogue Just months after Dane Mitchell’s exhibition at Art Basel, the Swiss parliament acknowledged Anna Göldi's case as a miscarriage of justice. Fritz Schiesser, as the representative for Glarus in the Swiss parliament, called for Anna Göldi's exoneration, which was granted 226 years after her death, on 27 August 2008 on the grounds that she had been subjected to an illegal trial: “the murder of an innocent, deliberately, and with all the pomp of holy Justice”. (17. ditto)
It’s subtle stuff, his Art practice. He had drawn so many ideas out of observations and thinking. Here is one aside. Have you been to visit St Bathans? A text describes that Mitchell knew that his migrant ancestry family arrived in New Zealand to St Bathans. There would have been quite a few people down there that still used Ouija boards in the 19th century. I went there with a couple of children to visit the old post office in 1993. My son fainted there whilst writing a postcard with real pen and ink. Was this just because he had not eaten enough breakfast?
I think we have to get a little closer to the mind and the power of senses and perception.
It is a matter of how long we spend with motifs. Also what we do with our time, besides what Mitchell offers. In my Art Bite on Post hoc that I put on here in the Phillip Carter, September, 2020 about Mitchel, I wrote:‘ This Artbite looks at an artist who has now made Art objects as transmitters for data’. That was his thing then. Not vapours or magic or dust. It was data that he wished to amplify. And some of the data list was Southern Hemisphere birds. He had a lot to say in Venice. Well, in the black wire sets of display in Auckland of Unknown Affinities, there was the laughing owl. An article for the Biennale 2019 stated about ‘ The List of Lists’:
‘New Zealand’s moa, laughing owl, Te Wairoa, discontinued newspapers, giant Haast’s eagle and the full paleontological record of Aotearoa are included in a list of disappeared, extinct or lost things that will be broadcast to a global audience across Venice at a rate of over 10,000 per day, for eight hours every day, over the seven months of the exhibition.’23. Mitchell commented there,” “This is the biggest, most ambitious work I have ever produced and I feel like I have been swimming, and sometimes sinking, in a churning ocean of information over the past two years,” said Dane. “I think this is the first time that a work of art will attempt to demonstrate the momentous scale of what has disappeared, or is disappearing, from our world and it’s appropriate that it’s being shown in the ‘sinking’ city of Venice.”24
The recent Auckland exhibition, then, is Mitchell having created time for himself to work more with that researched data. So, an extinct bird simplified to black wire lines, white board multiplied by x 20. In the whole display in the photo you see Mitchel standing amongst the New Zealand/ aka Gondwanaland historically feathered non population. He lives and works in Melbourne currently. He is still pondering losses.
Mitchell graduated in Art at AUT. Over a decade later, he received Masters of Phil from AUT, Auckland.
Mitchell is quite clear about his use of integrity. All art is a form of thinking existentially. What, to each and every one of us, is the journey? I get the impression that the predicament of being all knowing through artistic practice weighs enough upon him that he moves in directions of serious wit. His work has wit. Afterall, life is tragic/comic.
Are you starting to get insight about Mitchell? In an interview held at Dunedin I quote here from 2011, he said, ' I'd rather work in the space between scepticism and earnest enquiry’.25
I think I will finish with Mitchell’s response to Dr Zara Stanhope when interviewed about what his deepening interest might be that had got him to Post hoc. The interview took place in 2020.Mitchell:“My work attempts to be dynamic in activating the spaces between substances, images, and the body. In this way, the work might become more than the sum of its parts. Elements continue to synthesise internally, within the work itself, and externally, within the viewer, opening up a complex network of possible interactions. Much of this is due to employing liminal, near-invisible materials that are sometimes unknowable, such as my use of dust in Dust Archive (2003–ongoing); perfume, as in Let us take the air (2015); and sorcery, as in Celestial Fields (2012/2017). The experience of such material at the limits of perception heightens awareness, mental analysis, and our proclivity for asking questions about what we see, know, and experience.Some of these artworks I think of as being viscous, in the space where images, responses, ideas, memory, and feelings interact. Viscosity is a certain kind of medium, one that is elastic and sticky, the experience of which I liken to the metaphor described by Merleau-Ponty as 'being honeyed'.26It is a reflection for us all that Felicity Milburn has given us a great deal over these last two months in this assembly for Absence. I enormously wish to commend her. Several works shimmer as absorbing worlds, whether the Shane Cotton, Dust, or Claudia Kogashi’s take on a popular movie, that slides into delightful sensuality. It is Milburn’s curatorial prowess that has brought us into a very special set of contemplations. Millburn filled these rooms for Absence like with the deep heartedness of a whimsical piano player. The Mitchell non bird rather feels like it did hitch hike here, but Milburn also knows, when she selected, with a committed knowledge, items from the Te puna o waiwhetu collection, she knows Mitchell’s metaphorical stature. The giveaway is his inclusion in the particularly stellar essay from Bulletin 211.
I supply now, from Mitchell, a sound recording that plays in Australia. IT is part of a current exhibition there. It is the sounds of ghosts of extinct birds.
Play MP3. Title. Lost Bandwidth.
( cuts made but references intact)
Readings.
Danto. A. After the End of Art. Contemporary Art and the Pale of History.Princeton Academic Press. 1997https://www.danemitchell.co.nz/copy-of-christian-rattemeyer https://whitewall.art/art/the-future-is-already-here-its-just-not-evenly-distributedReferences.1.https://christchurchartgallery.org.nz/collection/2023008/dane-mitchell/bird-of-unknown-affinities-manu-antiquus2.https://www.instagram.com/p/CqMC4vlsGTm/?ref=PRHF3F90ADEAE9B3.https://christchurchartgallery.org.nz/exhibitions/dane-mitchell-post-hoc4.https://www.danemitchell.co.nz/copy-of-post-hoc-15.The huia vanished from the northern and western North Island following Māori settlement in the 14th century, due to over-hunting, forest clearance, and introduced kiore preying on nests.[28], https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Huia#worhol6.Bulletin 211.Christchurch Art Gallery. p 177.https://christchurchartgallery.org.nz/events/saying-goodbye-to-florence-by-robin-white8.https://www.odt.co.nz/entertainment/arts/mystery-and-magic9.https://www.facebook.com/tworoomsgallery/posts/5516589708384339/?_rdrhttps://www.nzgeo.com/stories/dane-mitchells-art-is-all-about-lost-things/10. ditto11. Grimshaw. C. The Mirror Image Book. p 7. Vintage Books. 202112. The Physics room includes booklets. https://www.instagram.com/physicsroom/?hl=en13. https://www.danemitchell.co.nz/bacterial-dust14.https://www.tepapa.govt.nz/about/press-and-media/press-releases/2018-media-releases/te-papas-new-art-gallery-game-changer-for15.https://www.danemitchell.co.nz/conjuring-form16. Interview with Natasha Conlan. https://www.danemitchell.co.nz/copy-of-christian-rattemeyer17.https://www.danemitchell.co.nz/conjuring-form18. https://www.danemitchell.co.nz/tuning19.https://hopkinsonmossman.com/exhibitions/dane-mitchell-4/20.Berman. M. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/All_That_Is_Solid_Melts_into_Air. 1982. https://www.google.com/search?q=moses+the+architect+of+new+yourk+roads&rlz=1C1GCEA_enNZ917NZ917&oq=moses+the+architect+of+new+yourk+roads&gs_lcrp=EgZjaHJvbWUyBggAEEUYOTIJCAEQIRgKGKAB0gEJMTA3OTFqMGo3qAIAsAIA&sourceid=chrome&ie=UTF-821.https://www.cbsnews.com/news/robert-moses-the-man-who-rebuilt-new-york/22.https://www.bl.uk/learning/timeline/item106572.html23. https://ocula.com/magazine/conversations/dane-mitchell/24. ditto25. https://www.odt.co.nz/entertainment/arts/mystery-and-magic26. https://ocula.com/magazine/conversations/dane-mitchell/
Art Bite August 11th 2023. noon.
Stephanie Beth
Te puna o waiwhetu: bird of unknown affinities, Manu antiquus 1
Here are a few ideas I have been thinking as I browsed around writings on Artist Dane Mitchell. My interest was struck when I knew his work was coming down here fromItaly in 2020 when he assembled Post hoc. So, here is a second chance for me to think a little and write a little about how his oeuvre prompts some of us.
Mitchell is an international artist. Unknown Affinities was the original title for an exhibition in which this armature sat in Two Rooms. Auckland. in 2022. It is an anonymous gift here.
I do think that we are able to get to what gives Mitchell joy. This is his aesthetic. This, the times we are in are times of extinctions. We are feeling these. Don’t forget , they have always been going on. Mitchell makes value for Art Galleries on this matter, foregrounding the topic as inherent long term fact. Besides and physically foregrounded by all of this laying of facts, is his true interest in his specialty. It is to delve into fascinating variables of human perception. I see him as an Artist who pivotally reads Philosophy.
He stirs some mind bending. With his vast data project, Post Hoc, he arrived. He tapped out data for two years for this key work there. The result was a ‘List of Lists’. This list was all about losses. It read for thousands of hours. He has a long research history in the study of losses and how losses might be represented in time. He makes use of vials, and audio systems, and has also with vapours. His research has been deepened by specific tooling since the invention of Gigabyte storage computers. Quite specifically, his considerations of human involvement with characteristics of the unseen, is a forte achievement. About birds he has been able to overstretch geophysical time.
It is an honour to bring Mitchel to the fore today, thanks to the positioning that Senior Curato Felicity Milburn has made by accepting bird of unknown affinities into this spot . This is a piece out of what Mitchell calls a monument. In whole it was at Two Rooms, “mounts, or armatures, each made to scale, to grasp every known extinct Aotearoa New Zealand bird species; holotype, fossil and full skeletal remains alike. “ An image from Two rooms of all of Unknown Affinities is in the essay written by Milburn, on page 22 of Bulletin 211.
Look at the Denise Copland etching and aquatint on your right in this room of objects. Have we all not been amazed, when we are in the bush somewhere, to see the internal guts of dead trees? Life cycles happen. Solidity to rot to decay. Yet, predation and changing of landscape is a sobering and different tale. We are helped by the delicate wording in Milburn’s essay,Something’ Missing: The Power of Absence’. .Mitchell finds discipline in a pursuit with thoughts. Mitchell works very hard with thoughts, refining them. The results allow him to be playful, to be bemused, amused, sincere and considerate. This Is what gets him up every day. He touches ideas with fancifulness and courtesy. As well he steps forth with a very open attitude towards the audience as having a sense of reciprocity. He has even stretched to ’ liminal states’, that moment when transitions in perceptions sometimes occur. He has touched upon magic for this purpose and in this light 8
He is also a willing participant in honestly coming to terms. This is his contribution. This is his historical hue. His work also suggests by alliterations, how we all , in various ways, like him, live to live and cope. He looks into cultural provision for cultural ideas, for example, the museum, or a vessel, or transmissions. Then there is the matter of impact: who, what, where, when and why the impact might be foregrounded. Let's not get our knickers in a twist. This evolutionary propositioning is characteristically philosophical. More interesting to Mitchell, then, when he stood in the Two Rooms, Two Rooms being of these motifs of his bird lines at scale, in that exhibition opening, I think, it was his remark, “ I like how all the black outlines are black lines on white.” - something to that effect that cinches what he thought he achieved there as a visual success. That old graphic art lesson, positive and negative spaces highlighted by the gallery white tone. Up there in Auckland Unknown Affinities, were placed implicitly. The result was that the objects had mass. We need to acknowledge why just one armature was donated here, with this realisation in mind.
Art of contemporary time reflects complexity as a particular patterning of quite new vocabularies. .I read somewhere that Mitchell ( b 1976) had gone to eighteen schools before he was 18. ( it was New Zealand geographic, writing by Catherine Woulfe, Oct . 2022. 9 Woulfe wrote ,‘ Mitchell is one of the few artists in the country to have ditched the day job.’’
He’s an Auckland boy. Does that mean anything to you? Roaming free on the edges of the sea across the mangroves to hillside flanges during the mid 1980’s? That’s running free and laterally by the sea, across the gullies; not the CBD downtown…. being a kid outside in the landscape, his suburbia, landscape by the water, exploring free. What part of individuality did Mitchells’parents trigger in him to set him up with curiosity and pleasure in this? He cites Charlotte Grimshaw, daughter of Karl.C.Stead. Charlotte Grimshaw had run around on the Auckland inlet edges as had he. Kids left alone by their parents in natural safe places. Grimshaw, he noticed, to the national geographic writer, went “ roaming, sprawling nightwalking…’10 as had he. Then she decided to be a writer. Was that a hard act to follow? Grimshaw’s one? Child of an author? In her opening of her memoir, Grimshaw later wrote that she decided to get to the truth. She wrote about, I quote: ’ the destructive effect of silence, and the restorative power of narrative’. 11
Mitchel’s work catches momentary abstracts about narratives. His ideas are about the specifics of human thoughts that we may all grasp. His energy with the task gives us a sense of being alive. There was the big bang. Then evolution. Then we made stuff. We wrote stuff. We titillated the senses. We sang songs. We are here as humans. We are here with all the birds left after the dead birds. Look at what we know about existence. What we see. What we don't see. What we record. What we forget. What we smell. Mitchell did one exhibition that went to France. It was titled Iris. Looking at Mitchell is more about thinking about him liking to stay in gallery spaces and then confidently, also spread himself out. It is why he gave up the day job.
He is 100% playing around in Art as a communicator exploring. He may draw upon vessels and vapours, then articulate material ideas in forms that nudge at recognitions. The forms nudge perhaps alongside the perfumer or the archeologist. Recently , we meet him chatting with Marconi. Then he left home. I will continue. Born in 1976. When he found art school he was home. He did art there. He picked up his philosophy degree later, in 2012. It appears that his mother and father warmly encouraged his mind of inquiry.
He exhibited Dust particles, ongoing, from 2003. He collected dust in petri dishes. 13 Well, remember going up to Wellington to see the new floor at Te Papa, the one Michael Parekowhai was invited to take to a star spot by opening that new space there? Did you do that? It was in 2018. There was a gifted to New Zealand suitcase miniature of the famous Large Glass by Duchamp, selected by Parekowhai to be put out in his exhibition. The Bride Stripped Bare by Her Bachelors, Even (The Large Glass), 1915-23, oil, varnish, lead foil, lead wire, dust, two glass panels. 14 Mitchell is in this non-traditionalist territory too, in this kind of intellectual consciousness, knowing that dust tells a story, as Man Ray said and Duchamp concurred one hundred years ago. Mitchell has found a way to have influence with other than rational ways of knowing. He did an exhibition using witchcraft. Conjuring Form, it was called. This one went to Switzerland. He had constructed a metal edged frame in cube shape. It was metal pipes' linear geometric boundary, with, inside, a void of air. Beside it stood a sign, PLEASE DO NOT ENTER. A spirit has been summoned to this space. One question to Mitchell in 2008 was, “So ultimately does the project facilitate knowledge, or is that presumption itself erroneous?” Mitchell replied, “I use the phrase ' other ways of knowing' to identify forms and practices that manipulate, counter or utilise knowledge systems. Measurable mystery is another form of knowledge. Like 'unknowing', it foregrounds absence and the validity of that position' 16 ‘For his solo presentation at Art Basel, Switzerland, Dane Mitchell commissioned a self-described witch to craft a portal to the spirit world in order to call up the ghost of Anna Göldi, the last person executed in Europe for witchcraft.’17 I read you the Epilogue from that exhibition.Epilogue Just months after Dane Mitchell’s exhibition at Art Basel, the Swiss parliament acknowledged Anna Göldi's case as a miscarriage of justice. Fritz Schiesser, as the representative for Glarus in the Swiss parliament, called for Anna Göldi's exoneration, which was granted 226 years after her death, on 27 August 2008 on the grounds that she had been subjected to an illegal trial: “the murder of an innocent, deliberately, and with all the pomp of holy Justice”. (17. ditto)
It’s subtle stuff, his Art practice. He had drawn so many ideas out of observations and thinking. Here is one aside. Have you been to visit St Bathans? A text describes that Mitchell knew that his migrant ancestry family arrived in New Zealand to St Bathans. There would have been quite a few people down there that still used Ouija boards in the 19th century. I went there with a couple of children to visit the old post office in 1993. My son fainted there whilst writing a postcard with real pen and ink. Was this just because he had not eaten enough breakfast?
I think we have to get a little closer to the mind and the power of senses and perception.
It is a matter of how long we spend with motifs. Also what we do with our time, besides what Mitchell offers. In my Art Bite on Post hoc that I put on here in the Phillip Carter, September, 2020 about Mitchel, I wrote:‘ This Artbite looks at an artist who has now made Art objects as transmitters for data’. That was his thing then. Not vapours or magic or dust. It was data that he wished to amplify. And some of the data list was Southern Hemisphere birds. He had a lot to say in Venice. Well, in the black wire sets of display in Auckland of Unknown Affinities, there was the laughing owl. An article for the Biennale 2019 stated about ‘ The List of Lists’:
‘New Zealand’s moa, laughing owl, Te Wairoa, discontinued newspapers, giant Haast’s eagle and the full paleontological record of Aotearoa are included in a list of disappeared, extinct or lost things that will be broadcast to a global audience across Venice at a rate of over 10,000 per day, for eight hours every day, over the seven months of the exhibition.’23. Mitchell commented there,” “This is the biggest, most ambitious work I have ever produced and I feel like I have been swimming, and sometimes sinking, in a churning ocean of information over the past two years,” said Dane. “I think this is the first time that a work of art will attempt to demonstrate the momentous scale of what has disappeared, or is disappearing, from our world and it’s appropriate that it’s being shown in the ‘sinking’ city of Venice.”24
The recent Auckland exhibition, then, is Mitchell having created time for himself to work more with that researched data. So, an extinct bird simplified to black wire lines, white board multiplied by x 20. In the whole display in the photo you see Mitchel standing amongst the New Zealand/ aka Gondwanaland historically feathered non population. He lives and works in Melbourne currently. He is still pondering losses.
Mitchell graduated in Art at AUT. Over a decade later, he received Masters of Phil from AUT, Auckland.
Mitchell is quite clear about his use of integrity. All art is a form of thinking existentially. What, to each and every one of us, is the journey? I get the impression that the predicament of being all knowing through artistic practice weighs enough upon him that he moves in directions of serious wit. His work has wit. Afterall, life is tragic/comic.
Are you starting to get insight about Mitchell? In an interview held at Dunedin I quote here from 2011, he said, ' I'd rather work in the space between scepticism and earnest enquiry’.25
I think I will finish with Mitchell’s response to Dr Zara Stanhope when interviewed about what his deepening interest might be that had got him to Post hoc. The interview took place in 2020.Mitchell:“My work attempts to be dynamic in activating the spaces between substances, images, and the body. In this way, the work might become more than the sum of its parts. Elements continue to synthesise internally, within the work itself, and externally, within the viewer, opening up a complex network of possible interactions. Much of this is due to employing liminal, near-invisible materials that are sometimes unknowable, such as my use of dust in Dust Archive (2003–ongoing); perfume, as in Let us take the air (2015); and sorcery, as in Celestial Fields (2012/2017). The experience of such material at the limits of perception heightens awareness, mental analysis, and our proclivity for asking questions about what we see, know, and experience.Some of these artworks I think of as being viscous, in the space where images, responses, ideas, memory, and feelings interact. Viscosity is a certain kind of medium, one that is elastic and sticky, the experience of which I liken to the metaphor described by Merleau-Ponty as 'being honeyed'.26It is a reflection for us all that Felicity Milburn has given us a great deal over these last two months in this assembly for Absence. I enormously wish to commend her. Several works shimmer as absorbing worlds, whether the Shane Cotton, Dust, or Claudia Kogashi’s take on a popular movie, that slides into delightful sensuality. It is Milburn’s curatorial prowess that has brought us into a very special set of contemplations. Millburn filled these rooms for Absence like with the deep heartedness of a whimsical piano player. The Mitchell non bird rather feels like it did hitch hike here, but Milburn also knows, when she selected, with a committed knowledge, items from the Te puna o waiwhetu collection, she knows Mitchell’s metaphorical stature. The giveaway is his inclusion in the particularly stellar essay from Bulletin 211.
I supply now, from Mitchell, a sound recording that plays in Australia. IT is part of a current exhibition there. It is the sounds of ghosts of extinct birds.
Play MP3. Title. Lost Bandwidth.
( cuts made but references intact)
Readings.
Danto. A. After the End of Art. Contemporary Art and the Pale of History.Princeton Academic Press. 1997https://www.danemitchell.co.nz/copy-of-christian-rattemeyer https://whitewall.art/art/the-future-is-already-here-its-just-not-evenly-distributedReferences.1.https://christchurchartgallery.org.nz/collection/2023008/dane-mitchell/bird-of-unknown-affinities-manu-antiquus2.https://www.instagram.com/p/CqMC4vlsGTm/?ref=PRHF3F90ADEAE9B3.https://christchurchartgallery.org.nz/exhibitions/dane-mitchell-post-hoc4.https://www.danemitchell.co.nz/copy-of-post-hoc-15.The huia vanished from the northern and western North Island following Māori settlement in the 14th century, due to over-hunting, forest clearance, and introduced kiore preying on nests.[28], https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Huia#worhol6.Bulletin 211.Christchurch Art Gallery. p 177.https://christchurchartgallery.org.nz/events/saying-goodbye-to-florence-by-robin-white8.https://www.odt.co.nz/entertainment/arts/mystery-and-magic9.https://www.facebook.com/tworoomsgallery/posts/5516589708384339/?_rdrhttps://www.nzgeo.com/stories/dane-mitchells-art-is-all-about-lost-things/10. ditto11. Grimshaw. C. The Mirror Image Book. p 7. Vintage Books. 202112. The Physics room includes booklets. https://www.instagram.com/physicsroom/?hl=en13. https://www.danemitchell.co.nz/bacterial-dust14.https://www.tepapa.govt.nz/about/press-and-media/press-releases/2018-media-releases/te-papas-new-art-gallery-game-changer-for15.https://www.danemitchell.co.nz/conjuring-form16. Interview with Natasha Conlan. https://www.danemitchell.co.nz/copy-of-christian-rattemeyer17.https://www.danemitchell.co.nz/conjuring-form18. https://www.danemitchell.co.nz/tuning19.https://hopkinsonmossman.com/exhibitions/dane-mitchell-4/20.Berman. M. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/All_That_Is_Solid_Melts_into_Air. 1982. https://www.google.com/search?q=moses+the+architect+of+new+yourk+roads&rlz=1C1GCEA_enNZ917NZ917&oq=moses+the+architect+of+new+yourk+roads&gs_lcrp=EgZjaHJvbWUyBggAEEUYOTIJCAEQIRgKGKAB0gEJMTA3OTFqMGo3qAIAsAIA&sourceid=chrome&ie=UTF-821.https://www.cbsnews.com/news/robert-moses-the-man-who-rebuilt-new-york/22.https://www.bl.uk/learning/timeline/item106572.html23. https://ocula.com/magazine/conversations/dane-mitchell/24. ditto25. https://www.odt.co.nz/entertainment/arts/mystery-and-magic26. https://ocula.com/magazine/conversations/dane-mitchell/