ARTS REVIEW: BTM Live
04.02.2023 at Auckland Old Folks Association Hall
This review is part of the Auckland Pride Review Project - a collaborative project between four local publications (Pantograph Punch, Theatrescenes, Bad Apple Gay and Rat World) to provide more discourse around queer theatre and performance work, while also uplifting new and emerging writers. We will be reviewing a range of shows throughout the month of Pride - so keep a look out and go support our local queer performers!
Power in Process: A Response to BTM
Clay fisting
Penetration as an act of creation
Process
This isn’t a review, and it’s hard to say this is even a commentary about the occasions of BTM Live &/or BTM Exhibition, & truthfully it might be better labelled as my official response to Art Chemist, but that feels rude to BTM, since it is Sung Hwan Bobby Park that helped me see what I needed to see in the Artist’s relationship with their work.
I made several attempts to describe BTM Live in my own words, and even with the help of others, but in the end my mind slid back into a simple “you had to be there.” In lieu of being at the Auckland Old Folks Association Hall, at 8pm, on Saturday the fourth of February, twenty twenty-three, you might find something evocative in the powerful and provocative writing that time and place inspired, 凹 A Drained Volcano 凹: Response to BTM Live, by Danny Lam, for The Pantograph Punch.
“Are you feeling high or low right now?”
“High.”
“And is this feeling in your mind or in your body?”
“Body.”
“I have a prescription for you. In Western Park, not far from here, you’ll find some mosaics on the ground, by John Botica. I want you to take your shoes off, and sit or stand in the middle of one of these, and think about the importance of process.”
A friend, a favoured friend, recently said to me,
“There’s something compelling about somebody asking me to be in a place, at a time. It means they want me there.” It means you are wanted.
It is this sentiment that made Art Chemist so touching to me, although my experience of it began and ended in the space of just a few minutes. I was asked, “be at this place.” There’s no set time. I have in fact, not been at the place as of yet. That’s because I’ve not been asked to be at the place for anybody else, I’ve been asked to be at the place for myself.
And perhaps for the art.
Have you ever been wanted by a piece of art?
//in
It was a desperate scramble to make it to BTM Live. Recovering from an induced delirium, I missed the absolute beginning—much to my dismay. The ontological act of creation, by which a hole was moulded.
Entering late had it’s own pleasures. The slight panic subsiding upon it’s encounter with a room pressed tight with hushed observers, clinging to the margins.
Fortunately, I arrived in time for the ultimate act of artistic foreplay, the donning of the rubber gloves, before things got truly messy. A committal to no longer teasing at the edges but diving in. The length of the gloves held the most exciting denotation; This clay was about to get fucked elbow deep.
\\\\\out
In and out, in and out, show after show after show after tell.
New connections, brief exchanges, a sharing of names gets pushed and pulled into shape; a knowing nod perhaps a week later.
“Hi again. I’m sorry, I tried to write about it, but the best I could do was “you had to be there.” A smile.
“Are you coming to the exhibition?”
“Yes, absolutely, I’ll be there.”
//in
Many, many evocative sounds.
To me the way the gloves hung from the arms suggested the vinyl ones I worked ingredients with during my employment at a chain-kitchen. Though to produce the sound they must have been rubber, latex is a much more fun descriptor for me. Rubber/latex/vinyl any/all take it and make of it what you will.
Latex. And clay. And something, at times two things, vital, forcing their way in and out, empowering both to create their sweet, squeaky music.
\\\\\out
The memory that stays with me from Audio Foundation is I think from 2019. May day. A scene full of friends and fellow left-leaners and liabilities gathering to make something of a holiday that feels invisible in purpose. Rooms served to enable cliques and myself to spiral between them in search of camaraderie.
Today, on Friday the twenty fourth of February, twenty twenty-three, I’m walking up Grey’s Avenue to return to Audio Foundation for the BTM Exhibition. I’ve committed myself to being there, and in this way I feel involved.
The rain is pelting, but we have an umbrella this time, but there’s a swelling of upset. I read more flooding is predicted.
I’m glad I wore my boots, they keep me dry, elevated. I’m tired. My feet do not want to participate in the stream that is forming underneath me. Cascade after cascade after cascade. I’ve not the patience or stamina to continue being moulded, this way or that. I’m sick of water. I’m sick of air. I’m sick of sickness. Sick of pushing up and out.
We round to Poynton Terrace, and there is relief. I am carried by instinct, not quite memory. I’m falling in, descending the steps of Audio Foundation.
An exhibit at Audio Foundation.
I bring with me my partner, an old friend, and a favoured friend. I’ve asked them all to be here with me in this place and time.
I take a back seat to the exhibit.
Photo credit: Marzia 🌙 Solarian
The full set of rooms is not open, meaning there is less variety in how BTM is exhibited than I would have wished. I hope I did not miss something, and I hoped there would be video, but in saying that, video would have robbed some of the impact of what I say when I say “you had to be there.”
I take my time admiring the photographs. They capture the artist, Sung Hwan Bobby Park. I give him a brief hug and spare him a conversation. On the walls he is wearing a harness and hat, leather chaps, ass protruding. In the hallway he is wearing what I’ve come to understand is his trademark linen shirt and the smile an artist has for people who’ve come to appreciate their work.
The centrepiece is incredible. A dark room, painted black, featuring a dozen speakers surrounding what Danny Lam described as a pommel horse, the unique wooden structure that suspended a pile of clay at shoulder height during the creation, and a finished sculpture formed from quick-set plaster poured into the clay before being pried free from it.
I stand close to the walls and try to return to twenty days ago, and find myself unable to. Time is a hole that has been filled and we’re left to make sense from the objects at its wake.
There is comfort in the fact that in this room, this dungeon, that day continues. Absent clay is still being carved, scooped, blown out, sometimes with delicacy and care, and sometimes roughly, messily, bits and pieces slipping and slapping on the struts and collecting in a bucket.
//in
I’m carrying around this pill-bottle with a handwritten note about art inside it. It’s gone almost everywhere with me for at least a week. It’s become a totem for me, a reminder to think about art in terms of process.
Process, procedure, mechanism, consequence.
A friend described to me his approach to philosophy as being about working out what the “moving pieces” are. I didn’t take to philosophy in quite as analytical a manner.
I’m thinking about things in terms of what they’re doing to us, and I’m learning about us through the lens of myself. How does a doorknob shape my grip? How does this feel? How often am I doing this? What’s making me do this? Does my hand change between the first, hundredth, or thousandth time it assumes this position?
There’s a love that takes place within familiarity, but there’s an obsessive acuity that comes with things I get to do only once. I only get to be in this time and place, doing this thing, with this emotional landscape as backdrop, the one time.
I think of it often.
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Check out more about BTM Live here!
Presented by: Sung Hwan Bobby Park