The art of making unseen visible
Mitchell focuses on what we can’t see and what we’ve lost
For Dane Mitchell, art is not about what we see in front of us. The Auckland artist, New Zealand’s representative at the 2019 Venice Biennale, is fascinated with the invisible, the intangible and the indiscernible. How does this translate to the visual arts?
For an example of how he looks at art, visit Auckland Art Gallery to see Iris, Iris, Iris. His solo exhibition plays on meanings of the word iris.
A multi-part installation, it includes an iris flower in a glass dome, iriscoloured incense sticks, a rice paper/ iris umbrella, a camera lens, a screen print of Mitchell’s eye and a bottle filled with the synthetic essence of the iris rhizome, released by a hidden magnetic spinner. It permeates the room, engaging the sense of smell and creating a marriage between “the ocular and olfactory”.
Iris, Iris, Iris and his Venice work, Post Hoc, come from interests and concerns about how we’re influenced by the intangible and how he can make that tangible.
“Iris, Iris, Iris does it by way of thinking about emanations, spirited forms and fragrance, so think about when you smell something — you’re encountering . . . a molecular object that is entering, penetrating your body . . . it has weight, mass, shape, form, so what I’ve done, and have done with fragrance in the past, is to think about a way to materialise the immaterial . . . ”
For Venice, Mitchell is doing this with “vanished stuff”. Post hoc, from the Latin meaning “after this”, is an inventory of things now gone.
The list(s) will be fed into a computer and broadcast from the NZ Pavilion — also home to a “sculptural form” — across Venice via seven 7m-tall “trees” which Mitchell likens to stealth cellphone towers.
Recitation of these lists begins when the Venice Biennale opens next May and continues six days a week, eight hours a day, for the six-month duration of the world’s largest art fair.
“So far, it includes a list of former nations, ghost towns, cured diseases, superseded medical procedures, withdrawn drugs, destroyed artworks, closed museums, underground stations, lost archives, extinct insects, disbanded political parties, destroyed mosques, destroyed churches, destroyed historical sites, dinosaurs, things that melted, discontinued photographic film, dead words, dead religions, closed nuclear facilities, contaminated sites, former currencies . . .”
It’s 175 pages long. Sobering.
He says it’s as much about what the act of speaking the names of these extinct entities means to us today.
“The project asks what our relationship might be to these things that have disappeared — lists of the vanished and bygone things of this world — and what our responsibility to this information is, leaving the question open.
“There is power in speech . . . Spells, prayers, naming things, naming children — these things have a force in the world, so the idea is to use this form of utterance to call this material back up to the present moment.”