Opening speaker Tina Barton talking with friends

Judy Darragh and Joyoti Wylie

Brett Shepherd MD of exhibition sponsors Deutche Bank

John Reynolds

Seung Yul Oh and guest

Andrew McLeod and guests

Michael Lett, Peter Madden and Catherine Hammond

Opening Address

21 July 2006

Christina Barton

Thank you for inviting me to open what are the last artists' projects in these spaces, before the gallery undertakes its major redevelopment. It seems to me to be a particularly historic occasion and I am proud to have been asked to officiate. Thank you in particular Ngahiraka Mason, Ron Brownson and Andrew Clifford, the curators of the project, and congratulations to all the artists for their singular responses to the occasion.

Let me say without equivocation that this gallery and these spaces have played a formative role in the history of contemporary art in New Zealand. They have hosted some of the most challenging and important work to have been made in this country in recent times. I'm not going to list those projects nor single out any for special attention; we are here tonight to celebrate new work and this latest line-up of artists. And, anyhow, the gallery has done a great job - thank you Catherine and Caroline in the Research Library - in pulling together the history and presenting it as documentation. What I am going to say is brief and rather more general.

In all honesty I have mixed feelings about this occasion. On the one hand, I am sad that soon these galleries will be transformed - no doubt beyond recognition. For I have both an academic and a personal investment in them. On the first count the projects that were staged here, especially as part of John Maynard's ground-breaking Project Programme series of the mid 1970s, formed a key part of my history of post-object art in the New Zealand undertaken for my MA Thesis. It was the Auckland City Art Gallery (together with Barry Lett Galleries) that served as the key context for experimental practice in the 1970s. Of course, back then there was nothing like the diversity of venues Auckland now supports, so in a sense at that moment the gallery performed as museum, kunsthalle and artist space all at once. (Now, probably, many of you are on your way to or have come from Artspace, your allegiances are now divided.)

It is important to note I wrote my thesis without having seen any of those projects, but was able to get a feel for them because of the extraordinary documentation that accompanied them. I'm thinking in particular of the elegantly designed Quarterly which hosted the most important critical account of the projects by Wystan Curnow, and the series of project publications which tested the definitions of the exhibition catalogue and challenged conventional art history, proving fitting accompaniments to a new temporary and site-specific mode of working. It is true to say, therefore, that a history of advanced art in the 1970s is inextricably tied to those spaces and can still be accessed via that wonderful resource, your Research Library, even if they never made it into the collection proper (such projects were by definition temporary).

On a personal note, I shall also miss those galleries because this is where I undertook my own first curatorial projects. I shall never forget working on After McCahon, and I'm pleased to think one of the artists, John Reynolds, is here tonight and we are celebrating his new project, and another, Derrick Cherrie, now heads Elam, the crucible for so much of the work that has invigorated those spaces.

I'd also note that my first acquisition for the Museum of New Zealand Te Papa Tongarewa (in my capacity as Curator Contemporary NZ Art) was Pathway to the Sea/Aramoana, the extraordinary work by Bill Culbert and Ralph Hotere made, on the invitation of Alexa Johnston, for the East Gallery in 1991. That elegant meeting of two simple ingredients - stripped paua shells and fluorescent lights -was made to fit the space perfectly even as it evoked an absent elsewhere. Indeed this work sums up what an artist's project can do. If Te Papa ever manages to install the work correctly, Pathway will always bear with it the negative trace of its original setting. Next time you walk its length remember that you are also pacing the exact dimensions of the East Gallery; reconstruct that container and you'll understand what art can do to conjure things for the imagination, and what role the gallery plays in that process.

Which brings me to the other feelings this occasion arouses. As well as regret I also hold out hope. For what I've learnt from the kind of work that has been installed here is that a gallery is not a fixed frame but a living and permeable membrane. It will adapt as the culture moves, it should respond as art changes.

Billy Apple proved this brilliantly in his work Revealed/Concealed of 1979-80, when for part of the project he removed a layer of the modern gallery to show beneath it a Victorian pillar - painted concrete not polychrome marble, as he had been led to believe. In so doing he exposed the history of the gallery as a flexible, historically determined container, proving that art and context are not discrete but act on each other to produce meaning.

I have every hope that the new building will serve new purposes and serve them well, but perhaps it is important to state that whatever the gallery becomes - corporate venue, leisure destination, tourist attraction - it will also keep in mind its history, as a place where art is not only put on display but actually created, where meanings are formulated and contested.

The artists in this suite of projects know what I'm talking about and I thank them for taking the discussion further, in new and interesting directions. Let me end, then, by thanking the gallery for what it has done, saluting the artists for what they are doing. I shall look forward with anticipation to what will happen in the future. Thank you and enjoy the rest of your evening.