toot floor

When Campbell Patterson was asked to address the audience attending the opening of his Hocken Library exhibition toot floor, he ambled up and said pretty much nothing—which spoke volumes. In the excruciatingly long course of his ‘speech’, he seemed to be trying to think of something to say, but could muster only a few ‘um’s and a ‘thank you’. It was either an inadvertently profound attack of stage fright, or one of the best performances of his career. For the significance of Patterson’s 2017 Frances Hodgkins Fellowship in Dunedin lies not so much in the objects that ended up on the walls and floor of the Hockenin things made or found—nor even in the process of making or finding them. Patterson’s work is really about various states of anxiety, boredom, semiconscious rumination and minute observation of inane goings-on that constituted his residency, the chasms of time spent wondering what he might make or find.

Patterson is the chap who picks up his mother every year. is an ongoing series of videos, one for each year since 2006. It is a wonderfully simple concept that adds a twist to the countless art-historical mother-and-child images. Think (2015), in which the artist rips sticking plasters off his hirsute body. While Burden’s performances earnestly point to endurance and suffering in a wider social context, they are also, Patterson’s parody seems to imply, idiotic. Patterson has a knack for showing that art-making is often far from artistic. His exhibition revels in the ‘lowness’ of an artist’s life, the extent to which it corresponds with modes of living that are not deemed ‘art’.