The Ninth Asia Pacific Triennial of Contemporary Art

145 ARTISTS Fools, gold, swarf and silver gimp (installation view) 2018 Photograph: Alex North / Image courtesy: The artist; Hopkinson Mossman, Auckland and Wellington Born 1966, Hakatere, Ashburton, Aotearoa New Zealand Lives and works in Auckland, Aotearoa New Zealand Whether monumental or modest in scale, Peter Robinson’s installations and sculptures have a light touch — the result of long periods of experimentation with materials, creating forms, situating them in spaces, and investigating the languages they create. His works also reflect his wry sense of humour and ambivalent attitude towards the art scene. Robinson’s APT9 work This place displaced 2018 — a group of slight, metal objects — shares this experimental genesis. Its material subtlety is nearing a point of invisibility, as is the case with many of his recent works, but, rather than an ending, this suggests the start of something new. Robinson’s process is to worry away at unsolved questions, and at the insatiate potential of forms in space. He returns to ideas, recycling and generating those within his own practice, as well as appropriating from the world around him. At times, his work has critically referenced the context of existing in bicultural New Zealand. Certain early work related to Māori historic cultural objects, and to larger questions of heritage, identity and sovereignty — questions of cultural capital in a society still determining how to be both Māori and European. These works had organic forms and tactile surfaces, which later reappeared in scatological sculptures resembling doughnuts and hot dogs, and at times cohabited in unwholesome congress. Other figurative works, such as The Great Plane Race 1998, played on the country’s cultural politics and race relations, and the situation of a New Zealand artist working internationally in the postcolonial mid 1990s. 1 In effect, Robinson has been testing how varied cultural and art histories can coexist, and how they resonate with different audiences. The shiny, acrylic, ovoid sculptures, the prints, the suspended chains and ‘universe’, and the traditional colours of taniko , tukutuku and kōwhaiwhai , which were part of his work in ‘Divine Comedy’ for the Venice Biennale in 2001, were a confluence of references to Māori creation myths, as well as Western concepts of existence and cybernetics: a cohabitation of disparate knowledges and languages. In Robinson’s practice, this coexistence of difference has taken many forms, from toolboxes that spill out floor-based installations; organic- or industrial- scale blocks and chains of polystyrene, such as Snow Ball Blind Time 2008 and Gravitas Lite (at the 2013 Biennale of Sydney); to room-sized installations that bring together a disparate world of felt, wood, metal and perspex objects. Each is the exploration of what Robinson has described as ‘being lost in language. A sculptural language is a language in its own terms. We recognise it as such, but we can’t understand it as we usually understand language’. 2 The manipulated magnets and metal in This place displaced is a return to an industrial, even domestic, authenticity, and signals a more contemporary mode of thinking about the principles of organising material, and, by association, the relationships between people and space. Combining seriousness and absurdity with formal and spatial experimentation, Robinson’s objects converse with other vocabularies. They are part of the story of contemporary art, having assignations with North American Robert Morris’s attention to the physical properties of felt, Donald Judd’s propositions for the operation of forms in space, the sensibility of Eva Hesse, Philip Guston and Austrian Franz West, or the French artist François Morellet’s explorations with wire. Robinson shares the egalitarian aspirations of minimalist artists, asking how each object and its form or language can speak to us across the space of the installation and time of viewing. And how should we think of these forms — as distinct parts, or as a whole, as one? Beyond this, or maybe because of it, Robinson’s abstraction holds myriad cues for everyday behaviours, as well as social and cultural symbols. This returns us to Peter Robinson’s spirit of defiance, or decolonisation, in our region’s postcolonial context. Situated in various locations around the Gallery, his objects provoke questions (particularly, in this case, asking what it means for an artist to take ownership of a gallery space — a place of state authority). Robinson continues to unravel a number of Western art histories, quietly indicating how the minimal, the light and the marginal can offer salient critique or resistance to power. Zara Stanhope Endnotes 1 The Great Plane Race 1998 was an aeroplane form covered in a patchwork of red, white and black grids, and suspended upside down, seen in ‘Toi Toi Toi: Three Generations of Artists from New Zealand’, Auckland Art Gallery Toi o Tāmaki and Museum Fridericanum Kassel, 1999. 2 Peter Robinson, email to the author, 20 March 2018. PETER ROBINSON