Archaeologist of Suburbia
It was the result of an inevitable break in the surface of things, as if a fire from the centre of the earth or a volcano beneath its skin had at last been forced through into an overtaking of the visible world.
Janet Frame, Living in the Maniototo
Stella Brennan’s early works coincided with the birth pangs of the Internet age and the messianic phase of neoliberalism. They mark the decade when the world changed. By 1990 New Zealand, Japan and Australia had joined the magical mystical tour named the Internet, and packets of data were flying through deep underground cables and across starlit southern skies. A Labour government was well along the path of a neoliberal reformation of the country’s economic and social policies. The market had won out over equality and solidarity, and we were immersed in a new language of ‘return on investment’, ‘choice’, and ‘deregulation’. The global concentration of carbon dioxide in the earth’s atmosphere reached 350 parts per million by volume. Walls and stocks had fallen, the Exxon Valdez ran aground, and the earth became a little warmer.
In this context, Brennan’s consumerist love and desire is somehow misdirected—it is not for the product, but for the box it comes in. One of her first works for the new century, Studio Monitor (2000), saw the polystyrene boxing of a fresh Apple computer emit a fluorescent glow, like some new form of designer domestic lighting. The beautiful throw-away had generated its own material world. In Second Child (2007) we watch the artist invigorated by the commodity form, introducing a shiny new laptop to its now obsolete older sister. These works are small gestures, but they set... The rest of this article is available to subscribers of Eyeline
The Middle Landscape, 2010–2015. Tent, video, pine bark. Photograph Sam Hartnett. Courtesy the artist.
