Dane Mitchell talks to Cityscape about his new creation for SCAPE Public Art Spring Season 2020, and how art can serve as a ‘Trojan horse’ for new perspectives and ideas.

Can you describe the artwork for me?

The work comes directly out of 'Post hoc’, my Venice Biennale, New Zealand Pavilion exhibition, in that it seeks to extend the central language of that work and think about vanished, extinct and gone things in new, extended ways. It’s an oversized ‘object mount’, an apparatus to hold an object in a museum. This establishes the vague form of a (missing) non-human species – something akin to a mammoth in scale, even larger.

The shape of the mount also suggest something that’s perhaps rigid, or technological, sitting somewhere close to an extinct or lost species, yet entangled in a fiction by which it might be imagined to have held aloft some sort of technological apparatus. Museums and their displays are, in their very nature, scaffolding the world. You could think of it as the mount to hold up the elephant in the room. It holds the invisible contours of a missing object.

How will people view or interact with it?

They will view it at a distance, perhaps as though protected from it. It might have the feeling of a zoo enclosure, as the viewer peers through a large glass viewing window. The work will also have the watchful eyes of six surveillance cameras on it. These will not be recording, but provide a live feed to be viewed.

What message are you trying to get across with this artwork?

That’s not an easy question to answer, but the work is titled ‘Lacuna’, which is a term used to describe gaps both culturally and biologically (in bones and in knowledge). Hopefully as I answer these questions, its meaning will be revealed a bit.

The theme of this SCAPE season is Secrets and Lies – how does your work fit that theme?

The work mobilises a technique for supporting material reality – a museum mount – yet it is the apparatus holding it that is the thing we see here: the artwork is the object generally intended to support. An object mount is a technological apparatus that seeks to recede and support seeing, not be the thing seen. So this object points to both the act of seeing and, more broadly, the cultural functions of collections and their attempts to contain and hold the world. The museum, collection, or library operates just as the mount does.

Can you tell us about the process of coming up with this idea?

This was a seed of an idea about two years ago when I was working on ‘Post hoc’, thinking about unseen entities, and the apparatus that hold such things. Extinction was on my mind also, given the vast numbers of names of gone things I was amassing as part of that work.

In November last year I visited the Gallery of Paleontology and Comparative Anatomy in the French National Museum of Natural History in Paris to specifically pay attention to the physical apparatus holding the bones of so many breathless sentient beings. This collection and its form of presentation represent a high point of enlightenment thinking and the ‘order’ of the natural world that we as a species have ascribed to it. This really set things in motion for my thinking about how Lacuna should take shape.

I have worked for a number of years with an incredible fabricator, Stephen Brookbanks of Object Support in Auckland and I knew he’d be the only one who could make this with me. The next step was to take a large portfolio of images to a+df workshop and work with a 3D programmer to take various forms I had drawn and photographed and build them in a 3D space. Then, much to the consternation of the programmer, I used him as a drawing tool for a couple of days and had him move things, re-draw, re-size and re-work them until I had something that I was happy with. Stephen then set about working the drawings up into physical reality. We made many changes as we went, but ostensibly, that’s how it was built.

Is there something special about mammoths that drew you to this particular creature?

The mammoth is only the seed. It’s the beginning of the work. Certainly the way mammoths are writ large in our imaginings of both a gone world, and our experience of them in museums was something I was thinking about, but perhaps more so, that for us, the mammoth’s natural habitat is the museum, being more at home in that context than the natural world.

What’s the importance of public art in communities?

It’s vital. It allows for new perspectives to be considered and supported. It allows for physical difference in our built environment. It allows for experiences rather than consumption. It can be a Trojan horse.

Can you tell me about a piece of public art in your life that’s impacted you?

Richard Serra’s Tilted Arc: the object and its incision in space; the response to it; the legal documents that now replace it; Serra’s adamance of its site-specificity.

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