Reading and Writing Rooms
I first encountered expatriate New Zealand artist Bruce Barber’s work in ‘After the Situation: Moment Making’ at Artspace, Auckland, in 2007. Arriving just too late to see his Saturday afternoon performance of I Am an other to myself.com, and finding its aftermath—the words ‘no difference without singularity’ scrawled repeatedly in chalk on pavement and building, people milling on the footpath and Barber still in his shaggy arctic camouflage suit—I experienced a twinge of regret at having missed the moment.
Visiting ‘Reading and Writing Rooms’, the survey exhibition of Barber’s work at Te Tuhi Centre for the Arts, Auckland (coinciding with an exhibition of the same name at Artspace, Sydney), was a similar experience. Looking through the remnants and replications of work from almost forty years of practice, I could not shake the feeling that once again I had arrived too late, although this time it was an experience intrinsic to the show.
‘Reading and Writing Rooms’ explored, through a combination of photographic and video documentation, written text and re-staged installations, the development of Barber’s impressive body of work, from Talking to Myself: Walkie Talkie Tape Performance (1971) and Bucket Action (1973) through to recent situational projects. Now based in Nova Scotia, Barber has only occasionally exhibited in Australasia since his move to Canada in the mid-1970s, so a survey of his practice was timely, especially in light of rising local and global interest in situational practices.
As a self-described ‘littoral’ artist Barber creates a space for the artist as social agent.1 Barber uses the littoral, a geographic term for the shifting zone between sea and land, to describe the possibility of an artist acting between the institutional art world and