The Sixth Asia Pacific Triennial of Contemporary Art

161 Campbell Patterson Intimate videos There is a disarming moment in Old clothes 2009, by New Zealand artist Campbell Patterson, when his performance before the camera is momentarily disrupted. Someone passes by and he must feign a casual stance, halfway through removing his clothing and dropping it into a rubbish bin in a quiet corner of a public space. The possibility that he may be sprung in the act haunts his videos — for they are mostly made in secret. Like the adolescent reader consuming something scandalous by torchlight under the bedcovers, Patterson works furtively in an intimate relationship with his camera. It’s important for me to perform to the camera only. If there is someone else watching it may change the way I act (unless this is part of the work). In a way the secrecy takes the performance directly to the audience. I don’t do live performance. 1 However, the work is not confessional, revelatory nor expressly exhibitionistic. It does not share these intentions — the capture of something ‘real’ — with user-generated content found in abundance on the internet. What it does share is that style: an uncontrived use of the camera that is rough and immediate. Patterson is also heir to the performance art tradition of Vito Acconci, Bruce Nauman and Marina Abramović, and the videos documenting their actions. His work draws on the possibilities opened up by post-object art, but synthesises them with the DIY aesthetic of YouTube. As he says: It is my job as an artist to think of ways to turn myself and my surroundings into compositions/art works. The way I behave in a situation, the things in my room, the interiors that belong to my life all can be used. It’s a process of turning nothing into something. 2 Patterson’s compositions are therefore abstract, with little narrative beyond task accomplishment or repetition. This emphasis on action over narrative and the treatment of his body as an object are both approaches that Patterson identifies with pornography. His videos also do not suture the viewer into an illusion of reality, because the presence of the camera is constantly registered by direct glances and adjustments while the camera is running. Nor do they present reality in the manner of ‘gonzo porn’, for example, because his actions are devised for the camera rather than sourced from the repertoire of daily life. 3 The paradox of his work is that its stylistic references speak of contemporary ‘realism’, while its content is formally artificial. Patterson’s actions take place between real life — the nearest to which might be Tickle 2005, where he is tickled until he rolls out of shot — and the extreme examples of performance or endurance art in which the artist’s wellbeing is compromised. The latter starkly separates the performer from the audience, dividing the one who does from those who could, or would, never do. Patterson’s actions, however, are simple enough for the viewer to feel that he or she could take his place, lending a particular intimacy to his work. The viewer can also feel drawn in by the latent eroticism of works such as Glue balls 2004, in which Patterson rubs white glue between his hands. As the glue dries, its sound becomes less and less allusive, until finally it becomes a sphere in his palms. Again, Patterson suspends the work between the carnality of life and the abstraction of art. So, while the act of undressing, and all that it implies, is conventionally understood to lead to nakedness rather than nudity, in Old clothes Patterson is nude. Patterson performs his nudity, wearing it like a layer to be imparted to the digital medium, recalling Balzac’s notion of a spectral sphere transferred to the photographic plate like a shed skin. 4 Patterson’s camera effects the transformation of bodily experience into abstraction and, accordingly, he sees his filmed self as a separate entity rather than an extension of his own persona. . . . when I’m in the same room as the works while they are playing I don’t feel embarrassed, in fact I can kind of relax as if the video body is doing my work for me. 5 Campbell Patterson’s videos are a tender transfer of the real into the artificial, of life into performance and, as in the photographic darkroom, they must be made in isolation. Francis E Parker Endnotes 1 Campbell Patterson, email to the author, 3 August 2009. 2 Patterson, email to the author. 3 Taking its name from ‘gonzo journalism’, an innovation in journalism pioneered by Hunter S Thompson in 1970 in which the reporter is a participant in the story, gonzo porn derived from amateur pornography where the camera is operated by the participants. 4 See Anne Marsh, The Darkroom: Photography and the Theatre of Desire , Macmillan, Melbourne, 2003, p.92. 5 Patterson, email to the author.