David Cross: Hold

MASSEY UNIVERSITY SCHOOL OF FINE ARTS

Litmus Research Initiative

PRESS RELEASE
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

David Cross: Hold

A Performance/ Installation
Five days only
From May 16 – 20
2 – 8 pm

Great Hall
Old Museum Building
Buckle St
Wellington

Would you trust a total stranger?

Would you help a stranger in return?

Would you enter an artwork designed to test our fears of dark, tight spaces and our limits of trust?

David Cross invites you to enter his gigantic inflatable fun house to test your mettle. It’s a long way down if you fall. It’s hard to move down an inflated platform in the dark holding on to someone for dear life, but it’s even harder to let go.

Hold is a giant performance/installation event occupying the Great Hall of the Old Museum building at Massey University over five days from May 16-20. This major new work by Wellington artist and Massey Associate Professor Cross is part bodily ordeal, part children’s playhouse, which works to draw the audience into a dynamic relationship between play, interaction and phobic space. Consisting of a 25 metre by 8 metre purpose built structure the work demands unusual levels of physical and psychological interaction from the audience.

Hold examines the fluid divide between our experience of pleasure and fear by juxtaposing the visual and sensory languages of minimalism, pop and the body with that of children’s recreational structures. Through suggesting the possibility of radically transforming the audience’s experience of the art/entertainment divide, Hold turns from performance to sculpture to spectacle as it considers a number issues to do with architectural space, performance art, participation and aesthetics.

Specifically, Hold asks us to consider the nature of trust in the context of current participatory art forms. By limiting the audience’s knowledge of the performer to the act of touching or ‘holding’, the work questions whether trust can be established without a clear understanding of the identity of the performer. To this end the work seeks to explore the relationship between current particpatory art practice, with its focus on exchange and the individual agency of the audience member, and the more assertive and often agitational methods of performance art.

Both playfully and oddly occupying the significant historical site of the former Dominion Museum building’s Great Hall, Hold asks us to consider the nature of children’s play structures, the fairground and games of physical challenge (recall The Kypton factor?) within the context of an art experience.

David Cross has exhibited widely across New Zealand, Australia and Eastern Europe. His work was selected for inclusion in Perspecta 99 at Performance Space in Sydney and the Australian Centre for Contemporary Art, Melbourne. A major performance project was developed for the leading performance festival Interactions 5 in Poland in 2003. More recently his work was included in Play: Performance and Portraiture in Australian and New Zealand Performance Art and the critically acclaimed performance series Mostly Harmless at the Govett Brewster Art Gallery, New Plymouth in 2006. He is well known for his often confrontational and challenging performances that place particular emphasis on the audience as collaborators. Presently he is Head of the School of Fine Arts, Massey University, Wellington.

Closing Event
David Cross and Marcus Moore in Discussion
Wednesday May 24, 5.30pm
10A02 Lecture Theatre
Old Museum Building (via Main Entrance)
Buckle St

ends

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