Exhibition readings - Squarespace

illculbertfrontdooroutbackExhibition Readings

illculbertfrontdooroutbackA selection of readings from the forthcomingcatalogue of the exhibitionThe New Zealand Pavilion55 th International Art Exhibition, la Biennale di VeneziaIstituto Santa Maria della Pietà (La Pietà)www.nzatvenice.com1 June – 24 November 2013

ForewordJenny HarperNew Zealand CommissionerVenice Biennale 2013It is with great pleasure that AotearoaNew Zealand presents Front Door Out Back by BillCulbert at la Biennale di Venezia. All who wanderthrough this humbly titled but light-filled sculpturalinstallation will be rewarded; I think of its presentationas a rich extension of ‘The Encyclopedic Palace’, thetheme of the 55 th International Art Exhibition. Thisselection of readings further explores Culbert’s practiceand helps amplify our responses to Front Door Out Back.This is the sixth time New Zealand hasofficially presented at the Venice Biennale. On eachoccasion we have taken pride in revealing the varietyof some of our best artists’ work. And whether or not—like Culbert—they now reside elsewhere in the world,we embrace this opportunity to show how proud weare of their achievements. Each time we take part, NewZealand’s presence in the art world is asserted and itscultural reputation enhanced.Few New Zealand artists have sustainedsuch a creative practice over so many years to suchinternational acclaim. Culbert’s transformation ofordinary and often discarded objects into an extraordinary‘otherness’ is uplifting, quite literallyso in the case of the suspended sculptures he hasfashioned for La Pietà. Despite its sometimes cheerfulair of improvisation, nothing in Culbert’s practiceis gratuitous. Combining light and things with rareeconomy, he produces art that is austere, poetic andchallenging in the way it invites us to revalue familiarthings and focus our perceptions.For their contribution to the publicationof this volume of readings and the forthcomingexhibition catalogue I would like to warmly thankRoslyn Oxley9, Laurent Delaye, Fouladi Projects andHopkinson Cundy for their financial support. Deputycommissioner and organising editor of this publicationHeather Galbraith has done a sterling job; thanks toher and curator and co-editor Justin Paton for theirkeen aesthetic and editorial eyes. We thank all thewriters — Yves Abrioux, Andrew Wilson, Justin Patonand Ian Wedde—who have made insightful andfascinating observations which bring Culbert’s workto light in another format. Ian Wedde and AucklandUniversity Press have also been very helpful inassisting with the provision of earlier images ofBill Culbert’s work. Thanks to Jennifer French for theinstallation photography in the forthcoming catalogueand to Anna Brown for her elegant design of theexhibition notes and the catalogue.On behalf of all involved in the 2013Venice Biennale project, I gratefully acknowledge theArts Council of New Zealand Toi Aotearoa and itsVenice project team, led by Jude Chambers, forinitiating and supporting New Zealand’s participationin the 2013 Biennale. Thanks to our institutionalpartners Museum of New Zealand Te Papa Tongarewa,Christchurch Art Gallery Te Puna o Waiwhetu, MasseyUniversity and Auckland Art Gallery Toi o Tāmaki,who have been crucial to the realisation of the 2013exhibition, and to our sponsors who have endorsedour presence here.Immense thanks to our wonderfulpatrons for their generous and unfailing commitmentto the project and the artist. We could not present NewZealand at Venice without their support both as projectchampions in New Zealand and as supporters duringthe vernissage. Special thanks to Dayle Mace and LeighMelville, co-chairs of the 2013 patrons’ group.Finally, I join with the HonourableChristopher Finlayson, New Zealand’s Minister for Arts,Culture and Heritage and all involved in the Venice 2013project in thanking Bill Culbert and his family for theirhuge commitment to this project. We congratulate himon the marvellous result at la Biennale di Venezia andthank all who have worked so hard to give life to thisrich and resonant presentation.5

There, Now!A conversation with Bill Culbertjustin paton: Before your selection for the 2013 VeniceBiennale, what had been your experience of Venice?Bill Culbert: I didn’t really know Venice. I had beena year after I came to London in the summer of ’58,with Murray Miller, a friend of mine from CanterburySchool of Fine Arts, and our teacher John Dudney. Wespent six weeks driving around Europe—Venice, butalso all of France. John was photographing thingsfor his lectures: Lascaux, the cathedrals. It was avery informative time. The Venice Biennale was mega.I’d never seen anything like it. We camped on themainland and went across like daytrippers.JP: So it was a good five decades until you visitedagain in 2011 to look for venues. What were yourimpressions on that trip?BC: A bit in awe of things. We had ten venues to lookat in five days. The Pietà did shine after seeing a fewchurches and another venue which was up on a higherlevel. I wanted to be down on the ground level, whichis sea level. That seemed to be the most sensible placeto work from.JP: Was that something you knew on your way toVenice or did it emerge while you were there?BC: It emerged from there. Walking through the Pietàcomplex and seeing the canal through the doors,straight to the water, was magic. There was alsothe sound—no cars and not many boats either. Mynotebook started filling fast with drawings.JP: People associate La Pietà with the church of thatname, but you discovered very different spaces in thewider complex of the Istituto Santa Maria della Pietà…BC: All very different spaces, and very very strange.A sense of time, wear and tear, the movement of people.Only the entry passage had an air of the church andhistory. The next room, the cavana, is dim but with thisfresh light coming in through the doors. And then goingthrough to the internal courtyard just blew me awaycompletely: grey grey grey all the way up to a big blockof blue sky. It was perfect. I felt also that, in that space,I wouldn’t want to make any changes to the building.No white walls, no alterations. I’m keeping the space asit is and letting the work make what it can.JP: Your materials include fluorescent tubes, old plasticbottles and a lot of second-hand furniture. How willyou play those materials out through the spaces?BC: Before seeing the venue I had been thinking ofmaking one piece but there are now nine pieces.I’m bringing them together by using the samematerials differently in different spaces. These arethe fluorescent light tubes, more than two hundred.And I’ll keep the domestic aspect of my work, withthe furniture I’ve been accumulating. There’s theiconoclasm of putting objects like that in a verydifferent space and varying off its oddities a bit.It’s like putting architecture inside architecture, orart inside art. Venice reeks of art, it really does.And the venue reeks of architecture.JP: The first space viewers enter is also the most‘architectural’, the long former sacristy corridor thatruns alongside the church of La Pietà. How will youbegin things here?BC: To have something like thirty metres with a sixmetre ceiling and that lagoon light at the entry—it’s spectacular, a super space. So I’m suspendingthrough the length of the thing. Many tables andchairs, Formica surfaces, each one with a fluorescenttube. I say chandelier, but that’s just because ithangs from the ceiling really. It is like this vortex ofuseable things that are out of place, where they notnormally are. Kaleidoscopic, as if they’re on their waysomewhere but not knowing where they’re going.Where are theother two? 2013(detail of a workin ten parts).Furniture,fluorescenttubes and fittings,dimensionsvariable.Photograph:©jc.Lett7

Light supported. Upside-down and rolling. I think ofhow a tornado can do it—drag along pianos and carsand everything.JP: You’ve often made sculpture from tables andchairs, but never in quite this volume. Why do youturn so often to these ordinary objects?BC: They are basically what I use. They’re how I live.To sit at a table with a couple of chairs and have aconversation is an experience that can be total. Tablesare where we eat, where we discuss, where we writeor think or draw. If you walk into a room and there’s atable and two chairs and a bottle of wine and a coupleof glasses then you know exactly where you are andwhat you do. And I think the sculptural space I want touse is like that. Everyone has their own interpretationthey bring to those things.JP: You’ve called the major corridor work Bebop,which has me thinking of cafés, fast jazz—anoptimistic, mid-century idea of modern life. Is thatwhere you wanted the title to lead us?BC: The title did come later. We were collecting oneof the Formica dining sets from a family in Caromb,a small town just south of Mont Ventoux. They broughtit with them from Oran in Algeria when they movedto France decades ago, and they still had the receiptwith the name of the furniture—Bebop! It was perfect.Charlie Parker, Dizzy Gillespie. The dancing wasphenomenal. It is really about energy, noise. The lighttubes are still but they will seem to be moving andclattering in that corridor. A very noisy work in avery silent space.JP: Then comes an outdoor space with indoor things,two wardrobes pierced by lights.BC: Yes, reversing inside and outside. I’ve neverowned a wardrobe in my life. These are great, brute,absurd things. And they’ll seem to have walked. Likepersonages outside and wanting to get back in. Aswardrobes they’ve been compromised considerably.They’re transporters now, transporters andstoppages for light.JP: The second major work viewers will encounter,Daylight Flotsam Venice, puts more fluorescentsamong dozens of coloured plastic bottles that you’veaccumulated across two decades. Are you pitchingthis work deliberately against the luxury image ofVenice—Murano glass, Baroque chandeliers?BC: In true honesty, the simplest and cheapest materialto me is often the most stable and the most exciting.The commercial value of materials doesn’t increasetheir potential. I’ve worked with crystal, for instance,and it’s pretty exciting, but I use it in such a way thatthe properties that other people want from crystal arenot emphasised. When you use a material or objectthat’s available, there’s no end of the road for it—nomatter how beaten up it is or how disintegrated it is.Out the front here in Croagnes, for instance, there is adoor with a rusty sardine tin replacing the metal wherethe lock used to be. Someone did that, and we foundit, and we now use the door as a table. It can continueon and on, even if what it’s useful for changes. Somethings do get left behind—well, that’s fine. But it’s nicethat not everything has to be constantly replaced orupdated. A throwaway society. That’s pretty dumb. ArtePovera was pretty good on this too, and it has had anenormous impression I think.JP: There are so many disused things to choose fromthough. How do you make your selections?BC: It’s to do with light as well. The big floor piece is ina brick space right by the doors to the canal. We’ll bringall that coloured plastic in, and feed it with its ownlight independent of the light through the doors, whichis brilliant and will affect it as well. We’ll use the brickwall as a big reflector, and have a kind of celebration ofphenomena. With the tables in the corridor it’s similar.They’re not chunky things drawn down to the floor.They are Formica and they give back light. And thechrome is reflecting every bit of light from around; it’stransmitting information. So they do kind of float off.They have a lightness about them.JP: With light often comes the idea of beauty. How doyou feel when words like ‘beauty’ or ‘splendour’ startto travel towards your work? Do you start to shiftuncomfortably?8

BC: Yeah, they’re funny words aren’t they? What I dolike is the other side of things when you’re talking aboutlight. If you’ve got a hole, light’ll go through it. It justcan’t stop. So back in 1969 I built a box work [Black Box,see page 16] that was completely black. You couldn’t seeany light at all, but on the interior of it I had systemsof light working, ten bulbs there, one bulb there, andI put it on a timer. So in fact you could hear the timerchanging from one panel to the other, you could traceit by the wiring on the outside, and you could feel thewarmth coming off some sides more than others. Somepeople probably found it the ugliest thing they’d everseen, but I found it rich and strong. There was a lot ofinformation. It plugged in, the switch was on, you couldhear the click of the motor changing. You knew therewas light! I learned about some of this earlier from theart room at Hutt Valley High. My teacher Jim Coe putfour or five of us studying art in this little doorway. Heshut the door and darkened it off and only the keyholewas left. Jim went out onto the tennis court in front ofit and waved his arms, and there on the wall was thislittle figure upside down with his arms waving. Oh, itwas super; it was something else. But those other wordsstill don’t come into it. ‘Beautiful’ can be anything. It canbe the simplest thing. You gather up certain things andyou say it, I suppose.Where are theother two? 2013(details of a workin ten parts).Furniture,fluorescenttubes and fittings,dimensionsvariable.Photography:Bill Culbert (top)©jc.Lett (bottom)JP: You used the phrase ‘celebration of phenomena’before to describe your big floor piece in Venice. Doyou think that’s a fair way to describe what yourwork is up to generally?BC: I think art involves real information. Whether ornot it’s old or new, it’s living. I don’t know if it ever getsold really, because the information is transmittable,it’s continuous. And you don’t use art as a researcherunless you’re looking for something that hasn’t beenfound. That was the astonishing thing about coming toEurope in the late 1950s. Seeing works that were fiftyyears old, a hundred years old, but were so there, now!And again they dealt with things that I’d heard aboutand thought about at school. In the drawing class,Jim Coe had talked about bodies not being static, andhow important it was not to simply draw an outlineand shade the inside of that. It’s moving, so we drewmoving figures. So when, later, I saw Duchamp’s9

Nude Descending a Staircase, I felt I understood ittotally. A clatter of shafts of paint, colour, light thatseem to be descending. I was very moved by it. But youhad to see the real thing. The reproduction never gaveyou that quality of walking into a room.JP: That’s very true of your light sculptures too,which seem to exist so much in the now—and to stopexisting for as long as the power’s turned off. I noteyou use words like ‘live’ and ‘transmittable’ too. Whypower your art with electricity? Why make work thatplugs in at the wall?BC: It’s perceptual, but also it’s a very practical thingto do. Give the work its own light, tie it on to it, fix itto it, lean it up against it. When I did that, it changedmy way. There was nothing worse, I found, thanmaking an exhibition of painting and then having toarrange lights around the room. To have self-lightingthings was just a treat. They have their own immediateindependence, a twenty-four hour cycle. The light isin the work.JP: Is it a challenge to keep your work light andindependent when you’re confronted with a settinglike Venice? The Biennale is seen to carry such weight;there’s all the pressure to make a big impression. Andthen there’s the weight of the past in Venice generally—all that history bearing down.BC: There are no rules about what will work there.Every kind of art is present. The extent of it is huge.But some things do go further or last longer becausethey make you want to find out more. I think thesubtlety of the work I make is where its usefulnesswill be. Making it bigger won’t make it easier, andmaking it more expensive won’t make it easier either.I think to be modest but in some way thorough isnot a bad way to go. Venice itself, its history, is allabout power—enormous power of many centuries.The history of western Europe accumulating fromeast through west and north down to south. I feel thesimplicity I want to put in there and in the work isan energy. It has no obvious moral or civilisationattitude, but it does have one.JP: You mean an energy that is different to thepower you see in history?BC: Yes, the simplicity of what we do. The workHUT, Made in Christchurch is one of the pieces todo with that. It’s basically a refuge. Whether you makeone up a mountain or in the bush or on a beach, ahut is about shelter. It has that simplicity, which weall understand. A light bulb is a bit like that too—elemental. HUT is not so much about the domestic.It’s a structure of necessity. In any situation if we’releft exposed for too long then we’re up shit creek.Working in forestry when I was younger, we’d build aplatform each night a foot off the ground. Some lengthsof timber and one big fly sheet strung up above it. Youbuild it in about five minutes and start a fire and that’sit. Putting HUT in Venice like we are has some of that.Out there in the middle of the courtyard, with a sheetof glass underneath, it creates a space, a reflection ofthings. It has its own lighting, which won’t ruin theworld or knock the ecology sideways.JP: Not far from HUT is a work that requires noelectricity, the shelf of glass vessels called Level. The titlemight refer to rising water levels or a state of mind. Butit also presents the work as a tool or instrument, a spiritlevel. Do you see art as instrumental in this way—adevice for orienting ourselves in the world?BC: Yeah. The spirit level there is not the religious one.It’s a little bubble in a piece of wood that goes up anddown, like the gondolas with that rocking motion theyhave. If something’s out of whack, and you put a spiritlevel on it, it still might not look right, and that meansthat what it’s on is out of whack. So the question ofbalance becomes bigger. It moves out, it’s a carry-on.We’re basically vertical, and our equilibrium is thegreatest sense we’ve got. That’s why I’m using groundlevels and sea levels. It’s why the tables are tipping andmoving. Their equilibrium is being pushed around.JP: Lastly Bill, there’s the installation Where arethe other two?, which will fill the innermost roomof the complex. I love the bareness of this piece: tenfluorescents standing in ten pieces of second-handfurniture. With so many kinds of lights available,why do you now work almost exclusively with thefluorescent tube?HUT, Made inChristchurch 2012,installed at SueCrockford Gallery,Auckland, 2012.Metal, fluorescenttubes and fittingsand (in the Venicepresentation) sheetglass. Photograph:Samuel Hartnett10

BC: Well it took me a while to start using it. Theincandescent light bulb was pretty amazing—before itgot genetically modified in the late-twentieth century.The tube I didn’t like much at first, but I soon got veryused to it. It seemed to me to be a very useful line.A light line in space.JP: These lines do look as though they’re ready for use.It’s like a depot or battery with working units rackedup—the supply room the rest of the show has beenbuilt from.BC: Well, you choose your light as you would a pieceof steel or wood—according to what you’re building.One tube can be enough.JP: And it’s remarkable how evocative a simpleshift can be. Here you shift the tubes from horizontalto vertical, and suddenly they read as figures—livestanding presences that address us individually.Were you thinking of them as ‘portrait format’?BC: There is definitely this confrontation between themobile and the immobile. The pieces of furniture areholding the light, trapping it. But then the furniture isoften very fragile, and the strength of the lights is alsoenormous, in terms of the space they fill. So it’s like,after seeing HUT, we’ll move to the back room and findthis bunch of jokers standing waiting. They have anenergy. They’re ready.JP: But you don’t tell us what they should be used for…BC: I’ve always felt the purpose of art was not to beuseful, and that that is what reveals its use.Justin Paton, senior curator at Christchurch Art Gallery Te Punao Waiwhetu, and curator of Bill Culbert: Front Door Out Back11

Walking and Swimming to VeniceIan Wedde1It’s a brilliantly sunny day in midsummerin Auckland, New Zealand. High tide onthe Waitemata harbour is at 10 a.m. I walk from myplace down the hill to a small beach at the bottom ofHamilton Road for a swim. Most days when I do this Ihave a rather contradictory purpose in mind. Walkingis good for thinking, so I’m hoping that some of thatwill happen, especially when (as today) I’ve stalled infront of the admonishing luminescence of my emptycomputer screen. I even have a little notebook in my bagalong with my towel. But while the grounded rhythmof walking is good for mindful thinking, the suspendedmotion of swimming is good for not thinking—formindlessness—and I’m hoping for some of that as well.After swimming for a while back and forth between theboatsheds at either side of the bay my mind seems toempty: neurotransmitters, endorphin release, musclebliss, that kind of thing no doubt. In any case, thoughtis suspended, like my body in the water, somewhatweightless, in touch with a medium but not groundedon anything solid. The mind ‘drifts’, as we say, perhapsin a state of liquid consciousness.Walking down the hill to the beach, I’mtrying to think about Bill Culbert’s installations andhow to describe the distinctive ways in which theyco-opt and subvert perception: how they fix or captureperception in material effects at the same time asthey seem to dematerialise those effects. It’s enjoyable,visualising the works, recalling what Culbert has hadto say about them. But this thinking is also somewhatanxious: I want clarity, precision, an argument orgenerative idea that can become writing—that willproject thought in the form of words. I want somethingsubstantial, material almost, not something fluid.I want the process of thinking and writing to haveconcluded at a result. I’m impatient for this result,partly because I need it, but also because I lookforward to the pleasure it will give me when I can lookat it in one place: dark words fixed on the bright screenof my computer. I want to arrive where these emphaticmarks aren’t drifting away or changing shape. I wantthe result to be unambiguously on message.In the water, though, after a while, thatanxious desire for conclusive thought dissolves, as itwere. My head is sometimes in the water and sometimeshalf out of it. One eye glances sideways as my mouthturns to breathe. Across the glittering surface of thebay in one direction I can see the practical parabola ofthe harbour bridge; lines of flashing car windscreensflicker across it. In another direction I can see theoutrageously whimsical pink Chelsea Sugar refinery, litby hot sunshine, an opulent palazzo. If I stop and lookaround, the surface of the water appears to be movingalong as the receding tide pushes little waves up againstthe breeze. The darker greenish patterns in this surfacelook solid, like floating islands; the refractive glitter ofsunlight is interlaced across the bay.When I get out of the water, these twostates of mind seem to merge happily. The anxiousdesire for clarity encounters the endorphic bliss ofsuspended thought; hard-edged practicality entersthe same field of perception as whimsy; movementand fixity change places promiscuously; surface anddepth cease to be distinct from each other; patternsof light and shade generate the appearance of floatingislands, which at one moment are masses of brightnessand at another of darkness. It’s a condition very like theone produced by looking at Culbert’s work: a perceptualimmersion at once simple and paradoxical. Is this perhapslike the Copenhagen principle used by physicists toexplain why light appears to act like a wave when wethink of it that way, and like a particle when that is whatwe ask of it? Is there a strategy for collapsing that binary;and could it be art?Pacific Flotsam2007 (detail).Plastic containers,fluorescent tubes,electrical cable,dimensionsvariable. Collectionof ChristchurchArt Gallery TePuna o Waiwhetu,purchased 2008.Photograph:John Collie13

I now have a place to start—not withindeterminacy or hesitation but with Culbert’s deliberateproduction of such laminated, tensioned effects asparadoxical simplicity. Weightless mass, solid massdematerialised and pierced by light; light that isspace, not just space’s delineator; light that casts darkshadows of itself; the rigorously practical, used andhomely, whose other profile is extravagant splendour.And now it seems I’m also thinkingabout Venice, a place that fits the description, as wesay. Culbert’s large installations have always beenphenomenally responsive to their sites. How brilliantlysite specific, then, is this opportunity to make workin a place where light, space, horizons, reflections,the solid and the fluid (the particle and the wave), thegrandiose and the homely, the new and the recovered,are always in play, and were so in Venetian art fourhundred years before Impressionism. Giorgione, Titian,Tintoretto, Veronese—the magnificence of this VenetianRenaissance history may give Culbert cause to pushback sceptically, as his previous deadpan rationalsubversions of framing and perspective suggest hecould; but it will also locate him in the art capital oflight, and for that matter along the trajectory of Venetianart’s relish for life and pleasure. Even where the subjectmatter is religious (a thematic Culbert has no interestin) as in Giorgione’s The Adoration of the Shepherds1505/1510 (National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.),the painting’s chief effects are sensuous and celebratory,and even homely; subversive of the kind of pompassociated with patronage: the newborn baby lyingoutside on the ground, the shepherds in rough, workingclothes, and, following the glittering track of a rivuletof water, a subtly lit vista of seacoast, city and sky.Is it preposterous, then, to suggestthat Venice itself is already a site-work merely waitingfor Culbert’s presence? Of course it’s an excessive claim.But Culbert’s previous occupations of what seem to havebeen readymade sites, situations and even histories,have raised the same unlikely question before. Ebband Flow by the great windows and harbour vista atthe Musée des Beaux Arts André Malraux in 1990, forexample, seems to have been inevitable; to have existedalready as perception projected by thought, needingonly the right moment for that concept to materialise,which it duly did when Culbert saw that the time wasright; but materialised in a form one of whose chiefcharacteristics was a kind of evanescence, the lighttubes on the reflective floor surface seeming alwaysto be on the point of reverting to a condition moreconceptual than material, more fluid than grounded;and yet ‘for now’ here, completely in the presence ofthe moment.2For now: another day, another swim.Today it’s cloudy; the surface of the sea is dull, thepink of the sugar works is muted and the industrialtiara of the harbour bridge isn’t glittering. How doI perceive this? Partly through remembering howdifferent the experience was yesterday. I’m now walkingand swimming towards a Venice that is a palimpsest.Walking back up the hill under trees that, today, hardlycast any shadows (while remembering yesterday’sMoorish filigrees) I’m also reminded that the purposeof words is not just in their use (and usefulness)—forexample, their use to narrate meaning. What words‘mean’, what their ‘use’ consists of, is inextricablyentangled in their circumstances. ‘Site specific’ theymay be; but the site may also be as much a product ofmemory as of present use.In 1996, Bill Culbert staged a majortwo-part installation, Light Vessels, Jars and Plains,at Salford and Newcastle upon Tyne. One section,Lampfloat I and II at Zone Gallery, Newcastle, appearedto remember—to be analogous to—the nymphéawaterlilies made familiar by Monet’s paintings in whichthe refractive surface glitter of water, its implicit depthand the materiality of the plants seem to drift togetheracross an ambiguous plane tilted up against the logicof perspective. In Culbert’s version, the light sourcethat dapples the shiny surface is a number of whitelampshades (‘nymphéa’) ‘floating’ on a floor whereelectrical cables resemble tangled plant stems in apond. And yet, of course, the ‘use’ or meaning of the artwork isn’t limited to any kind of banal mimicry, eitherof nature or of art. A component of the larger project,Light Plain, installed a ceiling of lampshades tilted in atrompe l’oeil subversion of perspective made possible bythe severe gallery architecture. Unlike Ebb and Flow at14

Le Havre, however, the ‘site-specificity’ of the completesuite of 1996 Newcastle upon Tyne works seemed tohave as much if not more to do with memory as with thephysical conditions of the place and its architecture.The French critic Yves Abrioux hasused the term ‘paradoxical literalism’ to describeBill Culbert’s work. Abrioux is one of Culbert’s closefriends as well as a close analytical reader of his work.Abrioux’s elegant formulation was applied to the LightVessels, Jars and Plains installations. It captures notjust the adroit physical play of the works, but alsotheir play as palimpsests in which memory—includingthe memory of other works of art—allows the work todrift across time and place. It’s where it is; but it’s alsosomewhere else.3When I speak, the words don’t appear.If I don’t hear what others are saying, their words aregone; they are immaterial, like light without matter onwhich to make colour register. But when I write wordsthey do appear, on my computer screen or on paper.There they are like dark shadows or projections. Seeingthem, reading them, I want to know how they come tobe there. Where, so to speak, does the light come fromthat casts them, these shadowy projections? What is itssource? It’s thought. And where does thought come from— what projects thought? It’s consciousness. And whatprojects consciousness? Perception; the in-comingnessof the world I’m alive in. I perceive: neurotransmittersgo to work. My consciousness lights up: I begin toprocess perception. Now, I’m thinking: language beginsto codify and organise thought. And now I’m writing:the large structures of language are projected as details:as words, as the letters that constitute words, and alsoas the white spaces between letters and words. NowI’m looking at a complex patterning, a web or filigreednetwork of projections.This complex surface, a matrix of darkmarks and light spaces, seems to have stopped. Itseems to be all surface and no depth. It’s motionless:it neither moves onward in time, nor does its surfacealter in the present. It seems that when I return to thissurface at any time in the future it will be the same aswhen I left it in the past. In this way it seems to containGiorgione,The Adoration ofthe Shepherds1501/1510.Oil on panel,908 x 1105mm.Samuel H. KressCollection, NationalGallery of Art,Washington, D.C.Lampfloat I andII 1996, installedat Zone Gallery,Newcastle uponTyne, 1996.Plastic and enamellampshades,light bulbs, electricalcable, dimensionsvariableEbb and Flow,1990, installed atLe Havre, 1990.Fluorescent tubes,electrical cable,dimensions variable.15

Black Box 1969,installed atRottweil, 1976.Black paintedwooden box,incandescent100-watt lightbulbs, electronicswitching system,on a metal stand,1220 x 1220 x1220mmArtist’s drawingfor Lustre withtwo chairs 1997,for Musée Calvet,Avignon, 1997.Mixed mediaits own future, which is the future in which others willlook at it, read it, become conscious of it, begin to thinkabout it, speak about it and perhaps even write about it;they may make copies of it. In this sense, though it maynot seem to move or to have depth, it always containsin its unchanging surface the capacity to be in a future,and to be itself a future moment when it extends itselfinto the depth of another’s consciousness.But wait—isn’t this inherent future likememory: that function of consciousness whereby events(some words, perhaps) travel in time becoming alwayspresent again far from their time of origin and perhapsfar from their place of origin as well? How ephemeral,then, are unwritten words? Their immateriality maydeny writing, but not inscription. We can describeremembered words as inscribed in the consciousnessof someone who has heard them; in a sense they havebypassed or vaulted over the intermediary projectionof thought as writing. But there’s a difference: whilewriting is an unchanging materialisation of thought,having become solid, memory is subject to change:it retains the mutability of thought’s processes andreformulations; it remains fluid. There are powerfultensions between the material solidity of writing andthe conceptual fluidity of memory.It seems to me, walking and swimming,on days that are sometimes sunny and sometimesovercast, that it’s a tension like this between solidwriting and fluid memory that is one source ofthe ‘paradoxical literalism’ of Culbert’s work. It’ssimultaneously ‘written’ in a site-specific present,and ‘inscribed’ in a time and place that might,even now, be moving somewhere else, taking itspresentness with it. It’s at once particle and wave.In 1997 at Avignon, in a complex suiteof installations called Incident in Marlowe’s Office,Culbert staged an occupation (or dérangement) of botha physical and an historical site at the Musée Calvet,with its inscribed memories of medieval princes ofchurch and commerce; and in an abandoned urbanghetto across town in the cité Guillaume-Apollinairehousing complex, with its contemporary memory of themarginalisation of poor immigrant communities andthe physical detritus their evictions had left behind.The total work was a vast complex of tensions16

etween the literal and the paradoxical, betweensite-specificities both immediate and remembered.Distinctions between different registers of thinking anddrifting (walking and swimming), material and concept,seemed to be suspended.Suspended now, that is, in the materialrecord Culbert kept of this event, his own archive; sincethe physical, literal complex of installations at Avignonceased to exist in the autumn of 1997. Might we expectthis memory or archive to become, in turn, an aspectof the site-specific presence of Culbert’s occupation oftime and space at Venice?4Today as I walk and swim to Venice,brief humid showers of rain pass across the city. Steamrises off the hot black asphalt; the surface of the sea isstippled; then, suddenly, the sun glares. It’s too much—too much condition. I want to retreat from thisexcess towards something unconditional and singular.An all too familiar current is dragging my wordstowards metaphor, the seductions of the word ‘like’;towards likenessing, analogy, parallelism, substitutionfor.A similar current drags art towards representation;even a pure white fluorescent tube can be likened to‘illumination’; illumination to an affect, ‘lucidity’,for example; or to a mythopoetic ‘enlightenment’.Culbert’s resistance to such undertows has alwaysbeen unconditional.But now, if I succumb to the metaphoricalflow and go with it, and if I continue to write rather thanjust think about Culbert’s installations, my writing willitself begin to represent and even stand in for Culbert’sart. How can I resist this?A few years ago I asked Culbert whichof his works he considered the most rigorous. Henominated Black Box (1969); he also hinted that itremained his favourite, even a benchmark againstwhich he could measure where his work was going.The work is indeed a plain wooden black box, 1220mmalong each side, nothing more as far as anyone cansee. However, the square black box contains a differentsystem of lighting on each of the six interior surfaces.A time switch lights up each unseen system in turn:we perceive (become conscious of, think about, utteror write words about) this inner light through thesounds of switching and the shifting warmth of theinterior lit surfaces: we hear and touch light. A kindof camera obscura, Black Box is at once a rigorousdenial of likeness, and a reminder that there mayalways be more to such rigour than meets the eye;that perception is never singular.The sun comes out. Across the steamywater, the pink Chelsea Sugar refinery is opulentlylit, Byzantine, excessive. Can I describe it as ‘VenetianGothic’? My sight may be a little blurred with salt,my thoughts are pleasantly adrift, and it’s not hard toimagine I’ve arrived at a Venice projected in effects I’llremember when I get there, when I’m in their sitespecificmoment.Ian Wedde, poet, novelist, critic, and author of Bill Culbert:Making Light Work (Auckland University Press, 2009)17

For the LustresYves AbriouxThe visit starts at the grand entrancecorridor of the Istituto Santa Maria della Pietà,wrapped around the elegant architecture of theeighteenth-century church of the same name. Youenter by a high vaulted vestibule; an altar stands atthe far end. In this space, Bill Culbert has chosento suspend a sequence of assemblages evocativeof chandeliers or lustres (the artist privileges theFrench term). Apparently haphazard accumulations ofFormica chairs and tables, each of which is traversedby a white fluorescent tube, these evoke the moreflamboyant, even disorderly, moments in the historyof decorative styles. There are many magnificentlydecorated religious buildings in Venice. The vastaccumulations of bodies and matters (ranging fromthe mineral to the vaporous) in Baroque churches,for example, come readily to mind. However, GillesDeleuze points out that the high-energy overspillsof the Baroque, emblematised by the ample folds ofpainted or sculpted garments, attain their consistencyand unity from the cupolas that soar above them,bathing them in the ‘spiritual presence’of a heavenlylight. 1 Culbert's lustres are of a different order. WhereBaroque bodies and matter angle up to catch thelight, almost all the tables and chairs in Culbert’schandeliers are tilted towards the floor. Furthermore,the fluorescent lighting accompanies them in asingle frozen cascade whose unstable asymmetricalintricacy is altogether more evocative of Rococostyle. This, of course, treated furnishings and similardecorative objects as its privileged supports. Here,as if by a strange reversal of function, an assortmentof tables, chairs and tubes redolent of late-modernmass-produced purism provides the actual decorative1.Gilles Deleuze, Le Pli: Leibniz et le Baroque, Paris: Éditionsde Minuit, 1988, pp. 169–170.features of an airborne Rococo whose flow hasdivested it of any insinuations of the rock-likeformations of rocaille.The artificial lighting of the lustresis in keeping with the modus operandi that Culbertwas not long in developing when, in the early 1960s,after having established himself as an artist inEngland, he encountered in the south of France thestrong light of Provence which so affected artistslike Cézanne. On his first trip back to New Zealandin 1978 after a twenty-year absence, he began toassociate cast-off objects with the light bulbsand fluorescent tubes with which he had beenworking for a decade. In an influential early essayon the artist, Stephen Bann celebrated the homelyepiphanies—the ‘self-transcendence’ of humbleobjects—effectuated through this ‘technique ofelectricity.’ 2 The notion of an elevating model ofdomestic economy standing against the relentlessentropic drift of mass production has stronglymarked the critical reception of the lustre ofCulbert's oeuvre. However, when Ralph WaldoEmerson insisted that he read ‘for the lustres’, 3 heimplied something altogether more uncanny. AsHarold Bloom has pointed out, the illuminations hetreasured must be understood as bringing with thema surge of power stemming from a (re)encounter,in another's words, with his own most valued butperhaps unformulated thoughts. Or, in Emerson’sown words from the beginning of ‘Self-Reliance’:‘In every work of genius we recognize our ownrejected thoughts; they come back to us with a2.Stephen Bann, [untitled essay], Bill Culbert: Selected Works1968–1986, London: ICA, 1986, unpaginated.3.Ralph Waldo Emerson, ‘Nominalist and Realist’, Essays:Second Series (1844); Essays and Lectures, New York: TheLibrary of America, 1984, p. 579.Lustre withtwo chairs 1997,installed atMusée Calvet,Avignon, 1997.Fluorescent tubes,office chairs, 3000x 500 x 500mm19

Where are theother two? 2013(detail of a workin ten parts).Furniture,fluorescent tubesand fittings,dimensionsvariable.Photograph:©jc.Lettcertain alienated majesty’. 4 His lustres thus alwayscarry a sense of the strangely familiar or familiarlystrange. What we do not know we know is closestto home (for Freud, the unheimlich is heimlich). 5 Isuggest that Culbert’s set of installations in the Pietàcomplex similarly provokes a strange but familiarsensation. Ian Wedde celebrates the ‘incongruoussplendour’ of Culbert’s photographs. 6 What is the keyto the power of his sculptural assemblages?In a recent meditation on drinking,Jean-Luc Nancy pushes us to recognise that bodiesare fluid and gaseous as much as they are solid. Asthe blood flows through us, he argues, it traces outan alternative bodily form whose ‘expansive andtransvasive’ liquidity espouses the contours of ourfamiliar solid selves. For Nancy, psyche just is thisdynamical liquidity coextensive with our bodilybeing, which the effect of alcohol can underline. Theexquisite revelation of ‘spirit’ as ‘liquirious’ (to revivea good old English word) will begin with the subtlesavours of, say, wine. However, it does not reduce tosensual delight. Spirit(s) is (are) not merely a matterof taste buds. Psyche is more properly manifest inthe very arousal (levée) of sensations whose pulse(emportement; élancement) transports you. 7Nancy’s meditation is consonant withCulbert's repeated appreciation of wine as light,epitomised by his celebrations of the produce of thevineyards at Lumières. The implicit proposition isthat an appropriately calibrated exhibition of wine4.Ralph Waldo Emerson, ‘Self-Reliance’, Essays: First Series(1841), Essays and Lectures, p. 259. Emerson wrily comments:‘A man should learn to detect and watch that gleam of lightwhich flashes across his mind from within, more than thelustres of the firmament of bards and sages’ (ibid.). Bloomadds: ‘Self-estrangement produces the uncanniness of“majesty,” and yet we do “recognize our own”.’ Harold Bloom,Agon: Towards a Theory of Revisionism, New York: OUP,1982, p. 170.5.Sigmund Freud, ‘Das Unheimliche’ (1919); Eng. tr., TheUncanny, London: Penguin Books, 2003; p. 132.6.Ian Wedde, Bill Culbert: Making Light Work, Auckland:Auckland University Press, 2009, p. 122.7.Jean-Luc Nancy, Ivresse, Paris: Éditions Payot & Rivages,2013, pp. 25–26, 33, 35–36.20

shows this to be the liquirious light (lumière) thatwilly-nilly transports us when we drink it. What Ihave termed the ‘paradoxical literalism’ of Culbert’sart 8 is keyed to the pulse or syncopation in which theliquirious quality inherent in all bodies manifestsitself in/as a peculiar splendour—the lustre of a‘profane illumination’. This is Walter Benjamin’sexpression for the effect provoked by Surrealism. 9Frederich Hölderlin, whose early Romantic poeticsstressed the radical, and potentially catastrophic,discontinuities within artistic production, might havesensed a caesura in the radical discontinuity inherentin a pulse which surges as if from nowhere. 10 InCulbert's work, this may be evinced by an uncannilyconvincing improbability. I have shown elsewhere thatits repeated play with light sources teases these tothe point of obfuscation, so that the radiation of lightstalls, allowing luminescence literally to lie there. 11The point can readily be reaffirmed by considering themisleadingly simple example of Culbert's exhibitedand/or photographed ‘lamps’ made by balancinglampshades on sundry vessels—typically bonbonnes(demijohns) or brightly coloured plastic pails. In theabsence of light bulbs, there is just a suggestion thatthe truncated cone formed by the shades of thesenon-standard lamps may actually be funnelling lightinto the vessels, so that in the bonbonnes it lies hiddenbehind a wickerwork shield or glistens as the supercooledliquid which is glass, while the coloured pailsare all but transmogrified into congealed exhalationsof chromatic luminosity.8.Yves Abrioux, ‘Passages of Light’, Bill Culbert: LightVessels, Jars and Plains, Salford: Viewpoint Gallery, 1996,unpaginated.9.Walter Benjamin, ‘Surrealism: The Last Snapshot of theEuropean Intelligentsia’ (1929); Eng. tr. One-Way Street andOther Writings, London: Penguin Books, 2009, p. 144.10.Friedrich Hölderlin, ‘Remarks on Oedipus’, ‘Remarks onAntigone’ (c. 1800); Eng. tr. Essays and Letters on Theory,Albany: SUNY Press, 1988, pp. 101–116.11.Abrioux, ‘Incidence of Light’, Bill Culbert: Rouge, jauneet bleu, Annecy: La Petite École, 1997, pp. 157–159; ‘LightStations’, Bill Culbert, Saint-Fons: Éditions Centre d’ArtsPlastiques, 2002, pp. 25–27.Simon Cutts has caught the peculiardynamic involved in such manifestations by adoptinga form of free verse in a minor key to evoke Jug PouringGlass Croagnes (1980, see page 31), one of Culbert'stalismanic mid-career pieces. Congealed as glass sothat it figures the jug’s ‘expansive’ and ‘transvasive’liquid form, the pour lies alongside the actual jug.Cutts phrases its emergence thus: broken glass cut /to an ellipsis / & polished / to the beaded / meniscus/ of a pour. 12 The line breaks function essentiallyas caesuras. Particularly when these precede apreposition, thereby disjoining the continuity of causeand effect, they allow the perfective verbs to capturean improbable pulse coming (Nancy might say) from‘further away’ than anything simply present to thesenses—that of the coming-into-presence of a body’sor an object’s liquid form. 13Culbert’s early dynamical lightworkswere reliant on switch mechanisms. They bent lineartime into cycles. In his later assemblages, change overtime is almost invariably replaced by the arrestedsyncopation which gives them their particular allure.Hence the subtle power of his Venice installations.Can you hear the music of the chairs? What tempoemerges when Culbert’s lustres are keyed so that Dropis played against Bebop? How do tumbling tables,chairs and tubes sound against Walk Blue and WalkReflection, the armoires or wardrobes in the adjacentcourtyard? Or against Daylight Flotsam Venice, thebabble of fluorescent light and coloured plasticcontainers splashed across the floor in the subsequentspace? Or the single chord of the liquid level held bya steady waterline spread across Level, an alignmentof bonbonnes, each of which might almost be bobbingon the lapping water of a canal? How is the sky thendrawn into what, to further develop the musicalanalogy, can perhaps better be phrased as a set of‘responses’, rather than a ‘concert’? How, in theexhibition’s final space, where Where are the othertwo? is sited, do the assorted pieces of furniture, their12.Bill Culbert and Simon Cutts, Six Jugs, Clonmel, Tipperary:Coracle Press, 2011, unpaginated.13.Nancy, Ivresse, p. 36.21

feet this time firmly on the ground, together with theemphatically vertical lines traced by heavy outdoorfluorescent tubes in casings, participate in theseresponses—say, in relation to the metastable lustres orto the horizontal waterlines and expanses of horizonthat can be seen or sensed everywhere in Venice?It is not just the Istituto Santa Mariadella Pietà’s long association with music that suggestsphrasing these installations in such terms. Culbert’srecourse to furnishings and suchlike provides anobvious explanation of his art’s perceived domesticity.However, the strong connection with the ‘minor’decorative arts (shared, as I suggested above, withthe Rococo) can more usefully be taken as a symptomof its adhesion to the principles of the minor—understood in the musical sense where it is totallydevoid of any suggestion of diminishment. Deleuzeand Guattari recall that the ‘minor tone’ in musicimplies perpetual disequilibrium, so that it hasalways to be wrested from ephemeral combinations,and preserved in ‘acrobatic’ positions. 14 Culbert’s waywith non-canonical materials retunes ‘Art’ in thisminor key. This is what distinguishes his lustres fromEmersonian ones, as theorised by Bloom, and the‘incongruous’ splendour of his art from the Freudianuncanny. Where both of these remain wrapped inthe major struggle of/for the affirmation of selfhood,Culbert’s lustre stems from what Nancy has calledthe ‘rhythm’ and the ‘plasticity’—the ‘gloriousmateriality’—of a coming into presence ‘that has nottaken place’ and yet ‘will have no place elsewhere’,since it is neither present nor representable outwiththis ‘coming’. 15The pulse which invests Culbert’s cheapor cast-off objects with luminescent liquidity refiguresthem in sensation. To read this refiguration asredemptive is to downplay its syncopation in favour ofwhatever might be embodied in a stable harmonics—perhaps so as to produce a major chord (Bann’srecourse to the epithet ‘virginal’ invokes incarnation).Voie Lactée1990, installed atTournus, 1990.Enamelled jugs,fluorescent tubes,electrical cable,dimensions variable.Collection FRACCorse, Corsica.14.Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, Qu’est-ce que laPhilosophie?, Paris: Éditions de Minuit, 1991, p. 155.15.Nancy, Corpus, Paris: Éditions Métailier, 2000, p. 57.22

In the case of the Venice lustres, this might be achievedby focusing on how the carefully calibrated chromaticscale of the furnishings plays itself out as one movesdown the corridor. Surely, however, it is the peculiarlypoised tempo of the cascading chandeliers themselves,rather than a melodic line of this order, that sets thetone of Drop and Bebop, carrying over into the white,blue, green, yellow and red of Bebop, so that it readsas a variation on Mondrian’s late Boogie Woogies, andindeed into Culbert's entire series of installations.This is in many ways keyed by the interplay of thearchitectural and the ‘elemental’ which requires—orgenerates—a fictional dimension.Deleuze and Guattari insist on the everfragilearchitectural quality of visual art in the minorkey, whose achievements—their splendour—dependon their capacity to hold the most acrobatic posturesplumb. 16 This is the situation of the series of bobbingbonbonnes silhouetted in a doorway, which do notonly liquefy light in midair but also simultaneouslytrace out a steady waterline. In a manner that is atonce converse and complementary, the solid stabilityof the pieces of living-room furniture in the finalspace is both reaffirmed by the heavy fluorescenttubes which cut through them vertically and absorbedinto the ensuing halo of light, while the hut outlinedin fluorescent light in the second courtyard appearsalmost as a luminescent phantom—an emanation,perhaps, of the tension between the bright expanseof sky overhead and the controlled pool of lightengendered by its reflection, as caught in glass atground level, an incandescent figment of art: a fiction.This fictional dimension providesthe last of the conceptual keys to Culbert’s art thatI wish to set out here. Twinned lightboxes made outof wardrobes occupy a courtyard at the Istituto.The first is surfaced in blue; the second retainsits original mirror. As the alternately electricallyproducedand reflected colour of the sky in Walk Blueand Walk Reflection suggests, their tempo involves aninteraction with the elements: that is, not cosmologicalflux (the site of major warfare for Empedocles orHeraclitus) but simply weather conditions. Weather aslight in the minor mode, forever wresting its tone fromthe chaotic dynamics of climate.Two of Culbert’s 1978 assemblagesof fluorescent tubes and abandoned objects orflotsam generated their own ‘atmosphere’ from thecondensation provoked by the heat of the electricalcurrent. The large Venice floor piece that interminglesfluorescent tubes and coloured plastic vessels (along-tried practice of Culbert’s) treats light itself asflotsam, while hypothesising the phosphorescent foamthat forms on the surface of the sea as yet anotherspecies of pour. As for Walk Blue and Walk Reflection,they are posited on a critical quality of light thatis more often than not absent, since it requirescertain conditions of daylight (dependent perhaps oncloud cover or on the time of day) when it becomesimpossible to determine whether its source is naturalor artificial, so that the luminosity cannot be said tobe simply there as a circumscribable phenomenon.At all other moments, the installation occupies‘real’ states that are more or less distant from theimprobable equilibrium of this intrinsically fictionalluminosity—or rather, the fiction of luminosity that isconstitutive of the lustre of Bill Culbert’s art.Yves Abrioux, Professor of English Literature atUniversity of Paris VIII16.Deleuze and Guattari, p. 155.23

Bill Culbert, Pouring LightAndrew WilsonLight reveals, shows, transforms,transfigures the worlds we inhabit, defining objects asmuch as events. Just as Roland Barthes wrote aboutwine as ‘a converting substance’, 1 in a similar respectlight is always part of a revealing equation. Sincethe early 1960s, Culbert has remained remarkablyconsistent—through work of great variety, whetheras paintings or through an evolving use of light asinstallation and object—in addressing what this‘converting substance’ might mean in terms of apassage of experience. In his paintings of the early1960s blocks of colour describe the movement of aCitroën 2CV journeying through the rural Frenchlandscape of the Vaucluse, where Culbert and hisfamily have spent a large part of each year since 1961.These paintings connect with languages of modernismdeveloped through the early decades of the twentiethcentury, and specifically provide evidence for Culbert’sresponse to cubist form and a futurist expression ofmovement through space. Such concerns might seemanachronistic at a time when pop art was recently inthe ascendant, and yet paintings such as the series Carthrough Trees or Machine in Landscape from 1962declare an interest that has remained constant forhim in expressing direct lived experience understoodboth as an encounter with modernity and as a form ofsensory realism. As the artist Maurice de Sausmarezexplained in 1963: ‘the equation he now attempts inthese works is between the firm unit of the mechanisedbox and the changing fragmentations of landscape. Heparticipates in both and yet is aware of being capableof psychical detachment: participating, robot-like inthe driving seat and by transference of feeling into thepassing landscape, vibrating to the rhythmic pulse of1.Roland Barthes, ‘Wine and milk’, Mythologies, London1993, p. 58.the engine in bodily, visual and auditory experience,and at the same time conscious of the mystery of selfabsorption,of self-centredness.’ 2By the end of the 1960s Culberthad stopped painting in favour of working directlywith electric light. Although it is most often discussedin terms of concealment, Culbert’s Black Box 1969, astatic object, equally embodies—albeit with differentmeans—much of what de Sausmarez had outlined interms of providing for the viewer a sense of detachment(in that it is a black box and there is not much to see)and involvement, where the content of the work unfoldsas an experience conveyed through heat. Each of the sixsides of the cube provide a platform for six differentlighting circuits on the inside, and all that can be seenby the viewer is the wiring for these circuits on theexterior faces of the cube: as Culbert describes, ‘you feelthe warmth coming off. But the box is black; there is nolight. Some people found that frustrating but for me itwas very strong—the idea that all this was happeningand being explained without one having to open thebox. The heat was the key because it was proof—if youneeded proof. It was also about believing.’ 3Experience, in terms of the paintingsfrom the early 1960s or a work like Black Box fromthe end of that decade, is conveyed and realised as apassage from one state to another, an equation betweenthe two; and like all acts of transformation, or eventransubstantiation, is driven by belief. By the mid 1970sCulbert was reaching a moment that in retrospectseems like a turning point identified through two very2.Maurice de Sausmarez, untitled introduction, Bill Culbert,exhibition catalogue, Piccadilly Gallery, London 1963,unpaginated.3.Yves Abrioux and Bill Culbert, ‘An Understanding of Light/ Interview’, Bill Culbert Entre chien et loup—Afterdark,exhibition catalogue, FRAC Limousin, 1995, p. 41.Small GlassPouring Light 1979.Black and whitephotograph,190 x 190mm25

different exhibitions that bracket the period 1976 to1979. Beyond Light was an exhibition he shared withLiliane Lijn at the Serpentine Gallery in 1976/7. Thisgathered together work of the 1970s and late 1960sthat either used electric light to offer abstract fieldsof experience through seriality and installation orexamined properties of electric light, specifically theincandescent light bulb, through the means of a kind ofmirror play. This was realised in his inside-out cameraobscura works such as Celeste 1970 in which multipleimages of a light bulb would be generated from a singlebulb, or Cubic Projection 1968 where the image of abulb’s filament is multiplied from a single source; oralternatively in works such as Reflection II 1975 (inwhich a Perspex box contains two light bulbs—onelit bulb reflects in the black Perspex of one end paneland casts the shadow of the unlit bulb onto the otherwhite end panel of the box) and Shadow and Reflection1975 (an unlit light bulb faces a two-way mirror behindwhich is a lit bulb—the mirror shows the reflectionof the unlit bulb exactly mapped on the lit filamentof the bulb in the black box behind the mirror). Suchworks as these conjured with artifice and contradiction,encouraging the viewer to question what they may belooking at: Stuart Brisley, a friend of Culbert’s sincethe late 1950s, has observed that his work exhibits ‘apersistent search for paradox’. 4 His solo exhibition ofnew work at the Acme Gallery in 1979, in which thefluorescent light tube joined with found discardedobjects and was placed in contrast to natural light,provides the other marker for this watershed moment.There is something tough yetromantic—perhaps idealist is a better word—about theshift Culbert’s practice took as manifested in the AcmeGallery show; a toughness and lyricism that is as muchabout the objects that light is brought into contact withas it is about his approach to the subject of light itself.Culbert’s development through the 1960s and into the’70s suggests a particularly personal understandingof modernism—a reaction both to its history and itsaffects that is worth briefly rehearsing. One of theworks made by Culbert in 1979 was a photograph of asingle wine glass, into which red wine had been poured,placed outside in the open air on a stone slab; sunlightshines onto the full glass casting a shadow that takeson the appearance of a light bulb, its lit filament beingthe base of the glass. Small Glass Pouring Light is, ‘Abistro glass with red wine in the sun. France 1979, ahundred years since the invention of the light bulb.’ 5The work is deceptively simple. As this publisheddescription indicates, it is a work located in France,summoning up an unhurried life of wine drunk outsideon the terrasse, but also a celebration of electric light.In his essay ‘Wine and milk’ that Ihave already alluded to, Barthes wrote that ‘wine is thesap of the sun and the earth … It is above all … capableof reversing situations and states, and of extractingfrom objects their opposites… hence its old alchemicalheredity, its philosophical power to transmute andcreate ex nihilo. Being essentially a function whoseterms can change, wine has at its disposal apparentlyplastic powers: it can serve as an alibi to dreams aswell as reality, it depends on the users of the myth.’ 6Bill Culbert’s bringing together of wine and light inhis photographs Small Glass Pouring Light 1979 orSun, Glass/Wine 1992 transports the glass of wineto the realm of myth that is reflective on particularlyFrench cultural values, as much as on conditions ofmodernity. Electricity, especially electricity defined bythe light that it powers, is one of the enduring myths ofmodernism. Efficient, clean, hygienic, pure, functional;it is an exemplary signal for the harnessing of theforces of nature in a way that defines the changes thatwere being brought about to modern life and cultureat the beginning of the twentieth century.Electricity was one focus of the Parisinternational exhibition of 1937 through the pavilionof electricity and light designed by Rob Mallet-Stevensand Georges Pingusson, inside which Raoul Dufy’s4.Stuart Brisley, ‘Bill Culbert’, Bill Culbert/Ron Haselden,exhibition catalogue, Ceolfrith Gallery/Sunderland ArtsCentre, 1980 unpaginated, quoted Ian Wedde, Bill Culbert:Making Light Work, Auckland 2009, p. 100.5.Explanatory text to Small Glass Pouring Light in Bill Culbert:Selected Works 1968 – 1986, ICA, London 1986, unpaginated.6.Roland Barthes, Mythologies, op. cit., p. 58.26

large mural painting of The Muse of Electricity depictedelectricity’s discovery as part of a wider celebrationof the harnessing of the forces of nature by scientificendeavour. 7 Dufy’s initial notes for the commissiondon’t mention electricity as such but nature thatprovides an analogue: ‘the sea—waterfalls—storms—the rainbow—the sun—pastoral symphony…’ 8 Dufy’sequation, whereby electricity is positioned as partof nature rather than as one of the building blocksof modernity, chimes closely with Culbert’s similarcelebration of the centenary of the discovery of theincandescent light bulb. Indeed, Culbert’s creation ofan image of a lit light bulb, filament glowing, resultingfrom the projection of sunlight through a filledwineglass (or another photograph, Lit Bulb on Road1975, of a real lit light bulb placed outside that casts ashadow rather than light, unable to compete with thestrength of the sun) connects directly with a singularreading of histories of modernity that few artists ofCulbert’s generation addressed, whether in the early1960s or in this moment of change for Culbert towardsthe end of the 1970s.Another image that indicates thetotemic power that electric light held for artists inthe early half of the 20 th century is Giacomo Balla’s1909 painting Street Light (coll. Museum of ModernArt, New York)—the dynamism of the light, outshiningand stealing light from the crescent moon, is renderedby a pattern of coloured chevrons radiating fromthe white heart of the lamp. Where Dufy positionselectricity’s power as a natural force, Balla’s paintingproclaims that the power of nature has been overtakenby the march of science and technology—lighthas indeed been stolen from the moon. This dialogueor conflict between technology and nature is onedefining strand of Culbert’s practice—especially soCeleste 1970(edition of ten).Perspex, lightbulbs, metal,365 x 355 x 355mmCubic Projections1968. Multipleedition, LissonGallery, London,1969. Fibreglass,light bulb, 640mmdiameter7.The 1937 international exhibition in Paris is widelyidentified with the first public display of Picasso’s Guernicain the Spanish pavilion; the horror within Picasso’s paintingis itself illuminated by the image of a shining light bulb.8.Antoinette Rezé Huré, ‘Mural Decorations: La FéeElectricité, 1937 and La Seine, L’Oise et La Marne, 1937– 40’,Raoul Dufy, exhibition catalogue, Hayward Gallery, London1984, p. 110.27

Lampes Facteur1986, installed atLe Havre, 1990.Two yellow 2CVheadlamps, lightbulbs, electricalcable, cut granitestones, 2000 x2000mmsince the mid 1970s—and grew directly out of hisown encounter with modernist art as a young artstudent. Realised most graphically in Small GlassPouring Light, the interplay between natural andelectric light is at the core of understanding Culbert’sengagement with modernism.Although Culbert’s initial training inNew Zealand in the mid 1950s remains an inspirationalperiod for him, his paintings of this period describe afairly conventional attitude to representational realism.However, his view of what would be possible withart would start to change even during his journey toLondon to take up a scholarship at the Royal College ofArt in 1957. During the journey his boat docked for anextended period at Newark because of a dockworkers’strike. This gave him ten days in New York, duringwhich time his visit to the Museum of Modern Art wasa revelation, especially Pablo Picasso’s 75th birthdayexhibition. From New York he travelled to Philadelphiawhere he encountered the work of Marcel Duchamp, inparticular The Large Glass, and also to Washington D.C.where he was especially struck by the works of Vermeerand other Dutch seventeenth-century painters, mostlyfor their evocations of light and space. On arrival inLondon the Tate Gallery’s room of cubism with worksby Picasso, Georges Braque and Juan Gris became ofparticular importance to Culbert. 9Culbert’s surviving paintings datingbetween 1958 and 1960 reveal an artist feeling hisway through the idioms of early modernism, andparticularly the evocation of objects in space foundin the late paintings of Cézanne and the early cubismof Picasso and Braque. In 1961 Culbert’s paintingschange into a hybrid that admits early cubism andfuturism—and yet futurism that is more homely andordinary than the aggressive dynamism found in thework of Balla or the rhetoric of Marinetti. Rather thana hymn to the machine, Culbert concerned himself withthe effect of movement through a sunlit landscape.Though this had started with paintings made in 1960and 1961 of tugs and barges on the River Thames or of9.Bill Culbert: Making Light Work, op. cit., p. 57.28

trains cutting through the landscape, in the autumnof 1961 immediately following a solo exhibition atthe Commonwealth Institute in London, Culbertmoved with his wife and young child to a house in asmall village in the south of France in Vaucluse. Themovement in these paintings—such as Car throughTrees or Machine in Landscape, that I describedearlier—is powered by the workhorse of French rurallife, the Citroën 2CV, on journeys to the local village orthe nearby dump.In 1963, discussing his attitude tofuturism, Culbert explained ‘I am certainly interestedin the kind of visual image used by the Futurists toexpress the power and speed of the machine. But forthe Futurists the machine was the ultimate symbol ofman’s progress. In these paintings I see the machine,certainly, as an important element in the landscape,an object moving on a surface.’ 10 Futurism for Culbertwas not something singular and wholly artificial,trouncing the forces of nature, as it was for Balla, butrather about movement registered as a negotiationwith nature, moving through it and being a part ofit. Certainly, modernism has always traced an arcbetween the city and the country, and Culbert’s workexemplifies that axis. However, Culbert’s concernsare not with a re-casting of rural experience or thetransplantation of the values of an urban modernismto the country. Culbert’s modernism is of the prosaic,functional, make-do-and-mend kind identified withthe Citroën 2CV, each element of which is a synecdocheof the whole—ribbed bonnet, door handles, gear shift,removable seats, steering wheel, headlights, roll-backroof—and is a flexible workhorse. Barthes may havewritten his essay on ‘The New Citroën’ about theDS19 and not the humble 2CV, but his introductionis apt for Culbert. Suggesting that cars might be thecontemporary equivalent of the Gothic cathedral, heproffers the view that they are ‘consumed in image ifnot in usage by a whole population which appropriatesthem as a purely magical object’. 11 For Culbert, the 2CVis indeed a ‘superlative object… at once a perfectionand an absence of origin, a closure and a brilliance,a transformation of life into matter (matter is muchmore magical than life), and in a word a silence whichbelongs to the realm of fairy-tales.’ 12 Culbert, who hastreasured a copy of László Moholy-Nagy’s book Visionin Motion since 1958 similarly reveres his design forthe Parker 51 pen. Culbert’s modernism is one of useand function, as well as romance and fairy-tale. Heuses domestic as much as industrial electric light (bothincandescent and fluorescent), discarded plastic andmetal industrially-formed containers, and finds in the2CV both a tool and a kit of parts for his art.It was at his exhibition at Acmethat the photograph Small Glass Pouring Light wasfirst exhibited and, alongside other works, it clearlyindicated changes that had been taking place withinCulbert’s work. In a move away from a purely abstractdesign of fluorescent strips of light in the late 1960sand those works such as Shadow and Reflection 1975that seem to exist as demonstrations or experimentsof an idea. At Acme the abstract becomes specific andexperiment dissolves in the face of the vernacular. Asingle fluorescent light tube—Through Light 1979—pierced the ceiling of the lower gallery and the floor ofthe upper gallery, locating space at an angle—providinga frame and a light source for the show as a whole.Electric light was presented as portable and as asupport: Glass Shelf 1979 is a glass bathroom shelfsupported by a bracket and by a lit bulb; Handles 1979consists of three two-foot fluorescent light tubes toeach of which has been attached a different carryinghandle, black plastic, chrome and iron; Coathooks III1979 is three metal coathooks that support a five-footfluorescent tube. All of these works show a distinctmove away from his so-called Implement Works—Shovel 1975, Triangular Hoe 1976 and Two Prong Fork1976 in which fluorescent light tubes provide thehandle for farmyard tools—and towards the Bottle10.Bill Culbert interview with Alistair Smart, Paintings: BillCulbert, exhibition catalogue, Nottingham University ArtGallery 1963, unpaginated.11.Roland Barthes ‘The New Citroën’, Mythologies, op. cit., p. 88.12.Ibid.29

Combinations. Where the Implement Works are objectsilluminated by light (and light becomes part of eachobject), with the works in his Acme Gallery show, lightshines from each work, the handles or the coathooksprovide a frame for the light. This exhibition marksthe point at which Culbert’s use of light can berecognised as a negotiation between what was madeand what might be found or salvaged, just as hisinterest in electric light revolved around a mediationbetween a natural and artificial understanding,or explanation, of light. The subsequent BottleCombination works are effectively containers fromwhich light pours and shines as if the fluorescentlight tube is the filament for a sequence of bulbs;with Through Light Acme’s two-floor gallery spaceis itself reconfigured as a lampshade.The genesis of much of this perhapsgoes back as far as his stopover in New York andhis first encounter with the effect of Duchamp’silluminating gas in Philadelphia and the particularchoice of his conjunctions of found objects being‘more magical than life’; light re-animating the object.Perhaps the Light Modulator of Moholy-Nagy mightbe a distant source for Box I 1974, an up-turned melonbox, shafts of light radiating out from the gaps in itsslatted structure. The Light Modulator, as much asMan Ray’s Lampshade/Abat jour 1917, stands besideCulbert’s three lit cardboard mobiles Light Vortex orhis photographs of the wire frames of lampshadessuch as Abat-jour 1993 in which the wire framesof two shades and their shadows act as a sun-dial.And yet for these works the shade directs light orcasts shadow, whereas Small Glass Pouring Lightsets up a very different equation in which the imageof electricity is conjured from the fruits of nature—sun and wine. Jug Pouring Glass 1980 is a sculptureof a white enameled jug lying on its side against abroken sheet of glass that, it suggests, has pouredout of it. Two photographs of the work from the sameyear—Jug, Window, Shadow, Reflection and Jug,Windowpane—both play with the effect of sunlightpouring through glass and in doing so seeming tobe water (a telling sequence in Man Ray’s 1929 filmLes Mystères du Château de Dé concentrates on thesimilar effect as sunlight on the water of an indoorswimming pool is projected as image on adjoiningwalls). Small Glass Pouring Light and these subsequentphotographs suggest that not only is shadow beingtreated as light but also that electric light is, as Dufyrealised, about nature first—sun, air and water.In the window of the Acme Gallery,Culbert had placed Van Gogh I and Van Gogh II 1979,two found jugs (one without its handle) from whichsprouted different lengths of fluorescent light tubes.A wry punning aside about Van Gogh’s paintings ofsunflowers, it is significant that these two works wereplaced together in the gallery window to thrive from thesunlight that they also challenged. From this momentmany of Culbert’s light installations played with sucha meeting of electric light with natural light: 2 CV’s I1985 in which two 2 CV headlamps are suspendedby a gallery window and project their light out to thestreet outside; Zum 1991, in which different paths oflight ran against the window of the Städtische Galerieim Lembachhaus in Munich, attempts ‘to make nightinto day’; Light Stoppages 2001 (a nod to Duchampand his standard stoppages) marks out the cloister ofthe Château Sainte Roseline; and State of Light 2009manipulates the vitrine-like spaces of London’s PEERgallery, windows being something looked through anda frame for light. An Explanation of Light 1984 sumsup this aspect of his work in which fluorescent lighttubes puncture at an angle through a multi-panedglass window—a window that is a double of thegallery window near which it stands. If electric lighthad been largely objectified in Culbert’s work of the1960s and 1970s, since 1979 it became both an objectand an action—a noun and a verb, both lumière andillumination. And it is the equation, signaled by SmallGlass Pouring Light, between nature and artifice thatprovides one explanation of light becoming material.Culbert’s conjunction of founddiscarded objects—rubbish—with electric lightconnects him directly with certain characteristicsof what came to be called the New British Sculpturethat came to the fore following the 1981 Objects &Sculpture exhibition. 13 Although not an identifiablegroup of artists as such, working within a diversityof approaches to sculpture, many of them werecharacterised through their use of found, everyday30

materials, and a concern with the juxtaposition andmanipulation of these materials to create imagesrather than purely formal sculptural statements. Theselectors of Objects & Sculpture explained how ‘thework is neither figurative nor abstract, nor could itsimply be termed as abstracted. It is associative, andin some cases is also symbolic, or metaphorical … [Andit] seem[s] to refer both to objects in the world, and tosculpture given some status as a category of specialobjects separated from the world.’ 14It is in this respect that the practiceof artists such as Bill Woodrow, Richard Wentworthand Kate Blacker can be seen to intersect in part withCulbert’s, and probably the clearest indication of theallegiance Culbert felt with the work of these youngerartists is in the recognition of a shared approach tobricolage. For the critic Nena Dimitrijevic their creationof ‘bricolage sculpture’ 15 was defining of a particularlyurban sensibility—the rubbish that was used wasthe rubbish of the streets—and also connected to agenealogy of twentieth-century art, with Dada as wellas Pop and nouveau réalisme, Fluxus, Arte Povera andconceptual art. Although it is indicative of this sharedapproach to bricolage that Culbert was selected in1983 by Blacker for inclusion in The Sculpture Showat the Hayward and Serpentine Galleries in London,an exhibition that set the New British Sculpture in awider context, the positioning of Culbert’s work in thisway—confirmed in exhibitions such as Assemble Here!Some New English Sculpture at the Puck Building inNew York in the same year, and Britannica: 30 Ans deSculpture at the Musée des Beaux Arts André Malraux,Le Havre in 1988—was not wholly straightforward. Hisuse of image remained less figurative than it did forAn Explanationof Light 1984,St Paulinus,Richmond, 1995.Fluorescent tubes,glazed ‘French’doors, electricalcable, 2400 x2000mmJug Pouring GlassCroagnes 1980.Black and whitephotograph,190 x 190 mm13.Objects & Sculpture included Edward Allington, RichardDeacon, Antony Gormley, Anish Kapoor, Margaret Organ,Peter Randall-Page, Jean-Luc Vilmouth and Bill Woodrow.14.Lewis Biggs, Iwona Blazwick and Sandy Nairne,‘Introduction’, Objects & Sculpture, exhibition catalogue,ICA London / Arnolfini Bristol 1981, p. 5.15.Nena Dimitrijevic, ‘Sculpture and Its Double’, The SculptureShow, exhibition catalogue, Hayward and SerpentineGalleries, London 1983, pp. 138–139.31

artists like Woodrow or Blacker, and yet is often morepunning in its reference with works such as the earliestof his Bottle Combinations, each from 1985, Long WhiteCloud, Engine Room and Tornado, or the later Cascade1987 or Total (Driving) 1990. The ultimate pun is thatwhich exchanges sun for light bulb in, for instancethe sequence of photographs of sunsets framed bylampshade frames, the dipping sun, for instance inSunset II 1992, lighting and taking the place the bulb’sunlit filament would have taken; or there is wineadopting the image of landscape in the anamorphicphotographs such as that of a wine glass set beforean oak tree which appears as an inverted image in thewhite wine (Wine Glass with Oak Tree, France 2002),or a filled bonbonne set in front of landscape, horizonline level with the wine in the container, but the wholescene inverted in the liquid (Bonbonne with Landscape,France 2002). Another pun might be suggested by theproprietary brand names for certain products, so itis with many of the Bottle Combinations as with thephotograph Eclipse, Tin Globe 1983 that shows a tinof Éclipse crème à la cire (beeswax polish) eclipsing asmall toy tin globe set behind it. As these photographssuggest, Culbert’s work is close to nature and theland in its positioning of machine-made waste withinit and, just as significantly, Culbert’s raw materialcomes not from the British city but largely from theFrench country embodied by the Citroën 2CV and theTotal oil container.Revealingly, the critic Anne Tronche,writing about Culbert in 1990, explained how hissculptures ‘link the rigour of abstraction with thesimplicity of the vernacular’ 16 . Tronche here highlightswhat it is that characterises Culbert’s work of the1980s, and especially the Bottle Combinations.However, his use of the vernacular, recognised inhis bringing together of found and standardisedmaterials, is marshalled to create what ispredominantly an image-based sculpture. The image,resulting from the conjunction of everyday materialsand resulting associative metaphor provides the use13.Bill Culbert: Making Light Work, op. cit., p. 165.of light with an emblematic function and purposethat the critic Stephen Bann has identified in termsof the ‘manifestation of light, which the modernistscalled “epiphany”.’ 17Epiphany can take many forms, bothfor artist and viewer, and can resonate on differentregisters, from the everyday to the spiritual. Theepiphanies expressed by Culbert’s work are rooted ina down-to-earth everyday and also reflect the degreeto which their identity fluctuates in terms of theirexistence as objects in the world that have been recastthrough myth described as events or actions; a pointrevealingly alluded to by Simon Cutts in his descriptionof how Culbert’s ‘discarded appliances from certainclassified dumps often implanted with lamps reformthe dependant sense of function’ 18 . Each work tracksa movement that reflects a circulation of ideas asmuch as objects, as the distinct material realities ofthe hardware store or the dump are brought togetherand each object’s implicit function is amplified, alteredand redirected; it is also this passage between statesthat defines them more exactly as bricolage. Worksthat bring light and suitcases together communicatethis movement as travel and dislocation in a directlyfigurative way, for instance the installation at the ICANight Passage 1983–4 in which fluorescent lightsfollow the line of the building’s staircase with theirstarters and chokes contained within suitcasesthat hang beside each light tube; others indicate acirculation and redirection of objects and their pastlives as they are lit up in a very different and moreallusive way. This is perhaps a key to Culbert’s work,its indicative and transformative equation, as YvesAbrioux cogently explained, ‘the recurrence of trash inBill Culbert’s work evokes the breakdown of form, thespecification of light as trash belongs with the artist’sother striking specifications of light—metaphoricallyas wine, but also as a proliferating gleam or as17.Stephen Bann, untitled text, Bill Culbert: Selected Works1968–1986, op. cit., unpaginated.18.Simon Cutts and Bill Culbert, Some Notes on Drinking andDriving, Coracle Press, Docking 1994, unpaginated.32

colour… These constitute so many instances ofaffection, not as form, but event.’ 19In 1983 Small Glass Pouring Lightwas transformed into an installation with the sametitle for The Sculpture Show in London and then forAssemble Here! in New York and Electra, electricity andelectronics in the art of the XXth century for the Muséed’art moderne de la ville de Paris. 20 Twenty-five bistroglasses filled with red wine are arranged on a longFormica table top and illuminated by three shaded lightbulbs. For Electra, Culbert described how ‘I want thework to be real. Electricity is used to change the imagefrom itself (light bulb) to a shadow, which is a kindof reflection on itself. The glass of wine is the vehicle.Pouring is a process as in thinking or doing.’ 21 Althoughhere the electric light bulb has taken the place of thephotograph’s sunlight, the poured wine returns thework to nature’s pouring of light—wine in the sunshinebeing ‘an alibi to dreams as well as reality’, that isfound in light and which illuminates.Andrew Wilson, curator Modern andContemporary British Art, Tate Britain19.Yves Abrioux, ‘Incidence of Light’, Bill Culbert: rouge, jauneet bleu. Works 1986–1996, exhibition catalogue, École d’arts,Annecy 1997, p. 174.20.When first shown in London it was variously titled SmallGlass Pouring Light or Celebration. In 1991 the work wasacquired by the Fonds National d’Art Contemporain for thenational art collection of France and is permanently installedat the Château d’Oiron in the Loire.21.Bill Culbert, ‘Three questions to which participatingartists are invited to reply’, Electra, electricity and electronicsin the art of the XXth century, exhibition catalogue, Muséed’art moderne de la ville de Paris 1983, p. 314.33

Biographical NoteList of WorksBill Culbert was born in 1935 in PortChalmers, New Zealand. He trained as a painter in the1950s at the Canterbury University School of Art inNew Zealand and gained a scholarship to the RoyalCollege of Art in London in 1957. In the 1960s he beganto experiment with light and movement, and since the1970s his art has encompassed photography, electriclight, and found objects.Culbert has had numerous soloexhibitions in New Zealand, England, Europe, theUnited States and Australia, and appeared in manygroup exhibitions. He has also produced major publicsculptures in Christchurch, London, Auckland andWellington. His art is surveyed in Ian Wedde’s MakingLight Work (Auckland University Press, 2009).Culbert resides in London and southernFrance, returning regularly to New Zealand to makeand exhibit work. Recent exhibitions include 180°x 2 Whanganui (2009) and Everyday Irregular(2011) at the Sarjeant Gallery, Whanganui; SingularCompanions at the Govett-Brewster Art Gallery, NewPlymouth; Hut at Sue Crockford Gallery, Auckland;Light Marks at Laurent Delaye, London; and ConcreteParallels at the Centro Brasileiro Britânico and DanGaleria in São Paulo (all 2012).Bill Culbert is represented by HopkinsonCundy, Auckland; Roslyn Oxley9 Gallery, Sydney; LaurentDelaye, London; Fouladi Projects, San Francisco; GalerieMartagon, Malaucène; Catherine Issert, St Paul de Vence;and Galerie Six Friedrich, Munich.Drop, 2013, furniture and fluorescent tubesBebop, 2013, furniture and fluorescent tubesStrait, 2013, plastic vessels and fluorescent tubesWalk Blue, 2001/2013, wardrobe, fluorescenttubes and fittingsWalk Reflection, 2001/2013, wardrobe,fluorescent tubes and fittingsDaylight Flotsam Venice, 2013, plastic vessels,fluorescent tubes and fittingsLevel, 2013, glass vessels, water, shelfHUT, Made in Christchurch, 2012, sheet glass,metal, fluorescent tubes and fittingsWhere are the other two?, 2013, furniture,fluorescent tubes and fittingsWe extend thanks to Blachere Illumination,84400 Apt, France for their donation of electricalcable for Bill Culbert: Front Door Out Back34

New Zealand at Venice 2013Project LeaderCreative New Zealand,Arts Council of New ZealandToi AotearoaKey PartnerMuseum of New ZealandTe Papa TongarewaSupporting PartnersChristchurch Art GalleryTe Puna o WaiwhetuMassey UniversityAuckland Art GalleryToi o TāmakiSupporting SponsorsInvivo WinesAntipodes Water CompanyLimitedProject TeamArtistBill CulbertCuratorJustin PatonCommissionerJenny HarperDeputy CommissionerHeather GalbraithProject ManagerJude ChambersExhibition ManagerTerry UrbahnTechniciansRae CulbertJohn BrantesVenue ManagerDiego CarpentieroAttendant ManagerVeronica GreenExhibition AttendantsAmber BaldockSean DuxfieldLauren GutsellAnne HarlowMarlaina KeyAngela LyonGina MatchittPippa MilneJulia WaiteHutch WilcoDesigner (marketingcollateral and website)Peter BrayInternational PRBurvill & PicklesVideographerColette CulbertPhotographerJennifer FrenchCommunications TeamHelen IsbisterMatt AllenRebecca LancashireSenior Manager, Arts Policy,Capability and InternationalCath CardiffProject Administrator/CoordinatorSabrina LerustePublic Programme/Marketing CoordinatorLibby BrookbanksEducation ProgrammeHelen Lloyd (programmemanaged and deliveredby Te Papa)Exhibition Notes andCatalogue PublisherChristchurch Art GalleryTe Puna o Waiwhetu inpartnership withCreative New Zealand andMassey University, WellingtonEditorsHeather GalbraithJustin PatonTextsYves AbriouxJenny HarperJustin PatonIan WeddeAndrew WilsonImagesBill CulbertAuckland University PressIan WeddeDesignerAnna BrownInstallation Photography(in the forthcoming catalogue)Jennifer FrenchEditorial SupportLibby BrookbanksSarah Pepperle35

Bill Culbert: Front Door Out BackIstituto Santa Maria della Pietà(La Pietà), Riva degli Schavoni, Venezia.La Biennale di Venezia, 55 th InternationalArt Exhibition1 June – 24 November 2013Publication PartnersNew Zealand’s presentation at the55 th Venice Biennale is an initiative ofCreative New Zealand, Arts Council ofNew Zealand Toi Aotearoa, with keypartner Museum of New Zealand Te PapaTongarewa and supporting partnersChristchurch Art Gallery Te Puna o Waiwhetu,Massey University andAuckland Art Gallery Toi o Tāmaki.www.nzatvenice.comBill Culbert: Front Door Out Back exhibitionreadings and catalogue are published byChristchurch Art GalleryTe Puna o Waiwhetu, in partnershipwith Creative New Zealand andMassey University.© Christchurch Art GalleryTe Puna o WaiwhetuCopyright in all images remains withthe respective artists and photographers.Copyright in all texts remains with thewriters. Apart from fair dealing for thepurposes of private study, research,criticism or review as permitted under theCopyright Act, no part of this publicationmay be reproduced without permission.ISBN 978-1-877375-29-9Christchurch Art Gallery Te Puna o WaiwhetuCnr Worcester Boulevard and Montreal StreetPO Box 2626, Christchurch 8140New Zealand Aotearoawww.christchurchartgallery.org.nz