Sex Standing Up October 2002. In the mid ‘90s KODAK produced a short-lived magazine called HOT, subtitled A quarterly showcase for New Zealand photography. It was an odd mix, a commercial catchall of a sort that these days Postmodern curators stay up late to manufacture. Issue 2,for instance, featured Polly Walker, Bruce Foster, Di Ffrench, Ian Batchelor, Neil Gussey and a young fella doing photography at the then Carrington Polytechnic, Wayne Wilson. The largest of his three illustrated black and white images showed a couple of - naturally – good looking teenagers posing on a beach in their jeans, the Pakeha guy behind, with his arms around the Maori girl, her right hand resting on his right wrist, the fingers of her left entwined with those of his left hand - the arrangement artfully concealing her breasts - as both youngsters look soulfully at the camera. The accompanying text quotes Wilson: The areas I enjoy working in most are advertising, portraiture and fashion. I try to bring a little funk and movement to my images - something different and interesting to make people look twice. I try to blend 3 different ingredients in all my images - a high technical standard, strong composition and a definite style or mood. This statement remains true for his first solo show in October 2002, at Wanganui’s McNamara Gallery, although the work suggests strongly that Wilson’s aims may have been met - more thoroughly and seamlessly - in ways not envisaged in 1994. The rookie’s awkwardly self-conscious credo has found more convincing statement in the well-oiled machinery of his very contemporary imagery. His teens are still there - though they’ve grown up a lot, they’re more savvy and hedonistic - but the beach and the daylight have gone, as have the staged posing and stilted conventions, and, seemingly in many cases, the jeans have gone too. Wayne’s world 2001/2002 is one of display, abandonment, pleasure, and an instance of the compelling directive power of peer group dynamics.
Any notion of society in the abstract (and the practical social groupings “society” consists of) is predicated on concepts of limitation. Just how far can you go before the stability of the sustaining mechanism is threatened by the spectre of anarchy? The whole legal system proceeds from this basic question. And if letters to the editor columns and opinion polling are any guides, generally perceived threats to the social fabric are more likely to relate to issues of violence and sex rather than bribery and insider trading. Emotional excess wins out over cool calculation every time. Crimes of passion is simply a more glamorous term than White Collar Crime, and therein lies the rub. Fear and fascination as easy bedfellows. Almost fifty years ago when Rock Around the Clock and Heartbreak Hotel first hit the airwaves, religious and civic leaders spoke in such vehement denunciation it seemed Sodom and Gomorrah was at hand, the ultimate rending of a cosy, materialist culture exemplified in the ’50s by Frigidaire and The Four Preps. It’s hard to see now how the bug-eyed Bill Haley with his plastered forehead curl was any threat, or how the gyrating - but admittedly much sexier - Elvis could presage The Decline and Fall of the Christian West. (Ironically, the most significant decay of the times relates to Presley’s own early significance, decomposed as it has been by the parody of his late obesity and drug dependence, and latterly by the writhing white maggot legions of Elvis impersonators, cheered on by a generation for whom Little Richard is more likely to be a brand of felt designer handbag.) It wasn’t the lyrics of Jailhouse Rock worrying the mums and dads, it was the way The King was using his hips. Sex, drugs and rock n roll was a spectre then, and despite the term becoming one of almost jokey endearment, it still encapsulates a perception of a potent trinity of dangerous excess. Too much of it and the sky will fall in, order will succumb to anarchy. There’s an old joke about Methodists disapproving of sex standing up - in case it should lead to dancing. Well, if anything, Wayne Wilson’s Dance Party Culture reverses the order and stands the whole notion on its head. Sex remains the ultimate red rag for a fundamentally Protestant culture such as this, where work and possessions are ranked higher than enjoyment and satisfaction. You’re more likely to be asked by strangers what you do than how you are. But, as they say, no-one on their death-bed confesses to wishing they’d spent more time at the office. Much less than a decade separates George Kohlap’s 1995 book Tribal Dances of the Glitterati and Wilson’s depiction of the ‘rave’ new world out there, but, for a start, they’re in different centuries. Kohlap’s social Auckland was the sphere of the wealthy middle-aged, self-consciously enduring the rituals of convention and fumblingly courting aspirations to celebrity, proof that peer group pressure is not just the yoke of the tribal young. It was the visual equivalent of Felicity Ferret: cruel, relentless, unforgiving - its essential sarcasm lacking any humanist edge of irony. While the project’s point-scoring had its humorous side (who could not respond, for instance, to Paul Holmes and Ilona Rodgers caught in a floundering clinch?), its weight was one of emptiness, boredom and desperation. It was a crowd no-one was allowed to get lost in. In the popular dance culture Wayne Wilson depicts so unforgettably, getting lost in the crowd seems to be a central point. His social Auckland seems also to involve getting lost in yourself, as if such loss might allow a greater melting of a part into the whole. Wanting to belong becoming an almost physical imperative. This need is not unconnected to the emptiness, boredom and desperation Kohlap depicted so memorably. But Wilson’s images suggest something more: that the beat and volume of the music, the rhythmic pulse of the dancing, the environmental or chemical drugged out-of-bodyness, the frisson of sexual possibility, and the release of the self from inhibition all might accumulate into something resembling transcendence. It’s not just a generation separating Kohlap and Wilson, it’s the distance between planets. Peter Ireland Reproduced with permission of the New Zealand Journal of Photography (published Number 49 Summer 2002/3) and the author. |
Dance Party Culture consists of 110 Ilfochrome images (104 of them 12” x 16” plus 6 panoramas 12” x 32”) displayed throughout the two gallery spaces in two continuous friezes 4cm apart. Present in the larger space is a plinth-mounted monitor recycling a 50 image PowerPoint digital slide show featuring Nelson’s New Year’s Eve three-day dance party The Gathering. The soundtrack includes portentous themes such as the opening passage of Richard Strauss’s tone poem Thus Spake Zarathustra, also famously used by Stanley Kubrick in his movie Space Odyssey 2001. Although exactly contemporaneous with the Auckland dance party images, those from rural Nelson look oddly historic - all those paddocks and open skies suggesting an innocent throw-back to those hippie days when ecstasy was a Greenie virtue, not a chemical compound.