DIMENSIONS VARIABLE

Neil Pardington, The Vault, Christchurch Art Gallery Te Puna o Waiwhetu, in partnership with Eyework Production Ltd, Christchurch, 2009

Photography is haunted by the ghost of painting, Barthes said. It's not so spooked these days though. It's left the seance room and is making its own way in the cool, hard light of day. A lot of visual art is about making a statement. Photography's more about collecting the evidence. There's something forensic about the medium that no other visual expression shares or comes close to. The mythologies and dreams that painting is often - richly - addicted to have, since 1839, been mocked by photography's stolid detective work. Sherlock Holmes may yet turn out to have been a more reliable art historian than Jakob Burkhardt.

So, photographs about collecting have got to have something going for them. Neil Pardington has eschewed the curatorially-determined museum displays out front and has gone behind the scenes where storage has been organised by mere collection managers on the basis of practicality. Things hang where they fit - the mundane juxtapositions sometimes more illuminating than the consciously curated. Looking at these images of stored collections gives a greater sense of the impulses driving collecting and the melancholy attendant on these pirated,
isolated objects than any finely-engineered exhibition could do. Pardington is curating his own show, more tellingly, out the back. This aspect of his project is covered in Ken Hall's accompanying essay From Hidden Places, an accessible and informative piece backgrounding the work and making useful connections with other photographers such as the Bechers and Mark Dion, sculptors Damien Hirst and Tony Cragg, and the collagists Kurt Schwitters and Joseph Cornell.

In The Vault's series of images Pardington is retailing a potent story of objects as stored. They've been acquired, for whatever reason. They may or may not ever be exhibited, depending on prevailing curatorial ideology. In the meantime, they wait. Some of them are physically suspended, like the alligator in the Auckland Museum storeroom (p.23), but in fact they're all suspended in time and place. In this vacuum questions arise. What project lead to their capture? What commitment validates their conservation? What purpose might they demonstrate in the future? What are we doing with all this stuff?

Two photographs on facing pages (pp 74 & 75) show Samoan clubs in Pacific stores 1 and 2 at Te Papa. Attached to a metal grid, held there by loops of flexible metal straps and cushioned by strips of inert foam these objects, designed to kill or satisfy a tourist market, now tidy and labelled, could hardly be further from the intentions of their makers. What does this separation mean? What could it mean? The collection management description of "variable dimensions" has a larger voice outside the air-conditioned environment these mute objects inhabit. We can measure them with a tape all right, but by what other means can we get the measure of them here and now? Although mute, these objects are part of a two-way conversation that says as much about our relationship with them as theirs with us.

At a material and rather basic level these images provide evidence of just how much museum storage conditions have improved over the past twenty to thirty years. Less than twenty years ago at least one major provincial museum still had assorted collection items just piled up in heaps on the storeroom floor. Storage, though, seems the most progressive aspect of contemporary museum culture. In the same time-frame have the philosophic bases of collecting and exhibiting policies changed all that much? Despite the vanguardist claims of, for instance, Te Papa, the 18th century is still a palpable presence in the public and storage spaces of institutions. The shinier surfaces Pardington so expertly portrays are still, fundamentally, only surfaces

The book's second major essay is Whose Logic? Different Cultural Perspectives at work in The Vault by Anna-Marie White. It's less focused on Pardington's imagery than on the context it occupies, and internally reflects the kinds of tensions implicit in museum culture when adapting to a supposedly bi-cultural situation such as our own. The author quotes uncritically Cannon-Brookes' 1992 statement that The fundamental role of the museum in assembling objects and maintaining them within a specific intellectual environment emphasises that museums are storehouses of knowledge as well s storehouses of objects, and that the whole exercise is liable to be futile unless the accumulation of objects is strictly rational. Well, a creature of the Enlightenment would say that, wouldn't he? Institutions claim rationality for credibility, but examination of actual practice won't reveal much in the way of the rational underpinning their operations except in hindsight. Did, for instance, reason drive the whole Te Maori project? There was an awful lot of planning and negotiation involved, but little of it was instigated or resolved by reason. Pride, emotion, tribal competition and the rest of what made Te Maori the phenomenon it was were never children of the Enlightenment.

White's essay begins with the claim that Pardington's project is significant in New Zealand art and museological history in its unprecedented focus on museum and art gallery storerooms throughout the country. That "unprecedented" is not quite true. Pardington's series is certainly the most extensive to date, but it was preceded by Laurence Aberhart's work in museum storerooms in the mid 1990s, images widely known. If a writer feels the need to make such privileging claims there's a certain obligation to have the statements fit the facts. In any case, Pardington's work doesn't need propping up.

The Foreword by the Christchurch Art Gallery's Director features the phrase "artist photographer" (p.4) and repeated by her curator in his essay (p.9). C'mon guys, it's 2010. It's been a long time since the culture accommodated the distinction between house painter and fine art painter. In their labelling and publications would the Christchurch Art Gallery ever refer to, say, Gretchen Albrecht as an "artist painter", just in case you thought she could be hired to do up the spare room? Of course not. Plain "photographer" will do. Relax guys, the sky's unlikely to fall in over Montreal Street as a result.

Other texts in The Vault are a short personal essay by the photographer and an interesting conversation between him and Lara Strongman further backgrounding the project. There are 63 full-page colour reproductions, followed by a four-page chronology illustrated by 27 small colour images of the photographer's work tracking back to 1984. These latter form an admittedly sketchy but nonetheless telling record of Pardington's stylistic history to date. He was finding his feet right through to the later 1990s, oscillating between photography and film on projects that sometimes came perilously close to what Peter Schjeldahl once chillingly called "period decor". Around 2000 Pardington hit his stride and now, a decade later, he's cruising at 40,000 feet.

The Vault is beautifully designed and paced, and is expertly produced, a pleasure to have and to hold - even if the quality is to be expected when Pardington himself is in the design and production driving seat.