Seeking trouble

By Mary Parker, March 22, 2007 @ 9 am

Idealog March/April 2007, page 60. Photographs by Ian Robertson

What’s behind the $6 million redevelopment of Lower Hutt’s Dowse gallery? A vision for a creative city

Lower Hutt is a nice town. Not especially ugly or pretty. It has no vineyards, skifields or sandy beaches nearby. The Hutt River is picturesque in spring and featured in The Lord of the Rings (the death scene of Boromir). Perhaps Lower Hutt’s most notable feature is that it’s slightly bigger than the nearby Upper Hutt. And there’s Wainuiomata.

How odd then to find The Dowse gallery, a bubbling source of creative endeavour and experimental art. The Dowse is blurring the lines between ‘fine’ and ‘commercial’ art and introducing new ideas about creativity and culture. Since its founding in 1971, The Dowse has been shocking neighbours and making schoolboys giggle with its edgy exhibitions, from nude sculptures to hip-hop documentaries replete with 50,000 spoken obscenities. “Every now and again we’ll get a complaint from someone who’s been through and hasn’t seen a painting,” says director Tim Walker.

Odder still is that the Hutt City Council has dug deep to fund a $6 million redevelopment of the valley’s most incongruous citizen. The New Dowse integrates two existing buildings, creating seven different exhibition spaces, function spaces, a cafe, retail outlets and places for business meetings.

This year at the new Dowse

The opening show, ‘The Human Touch’,  features design by Dutch company Droog and runs until April 2007. Alongside ‘The Human Touch’ is an exhibition called ‘Domestic Futurists’ that runs until May 20. Design students in Victoria University’s Design Led Futures Programme forecast what sort of designs might exist to help with household chores in 2015.

Other highlights later in the year include ‘When Philip Met Isabella’, a collection of 32 hats commissioned by Tatler fashionista Isabella Blow by notorious Irish milliner Philip Treacy. Both Treacy and Blow will be at The New Dowse for the opening in October.

Look out also for an exhibition focusing on the works of Peter Jackson and Weta Workshop and an internationally-touring show covering 50 years of fashion photography from Germany.

What gives?

“Our redevelopment was devised very much on the understanding that Lower Hutt isn’t a rich city—it doesn’t have an airport or a port,” says Walker. “So always we’re pragmatic about the issue of going to the council with a proposal for a major extension of a public facility. We’re not saying ‘culture deserves it’ or ‘you owe us’ or that sort of thing.

“But I think that, properly thought through, developments like Te Papa or The Dowse can have quite a significant effect on galvanising people’s sense of a CBD. It can also create an energy that connects things.” And so the way the Dowse has been redesigned is that it’s shifted so the whole front door moves right into the CBD and the whole front of the Dowse is retail.”

The Dowse as a lightning rod for sparking the ‘Creative Hutt City’? Why not?

If it were just another gallery perhaps it wouldn’t deserve the column space. Walker’s agenda is lofty. He wants to redefine what a gallery means and how it’s accessed by ordinary people. “The key idea is to show how innovation and creativity drive human progress socially, spiritually, economically and culturally,” he says. “It’s quite an unusual model for an art gallery. Actually, forget art gallery, forget museum—this new space defies description.”

Oh, they all say that. But maybe he’s right. Already, The Dowse is internationally recognised for its collection of design artefacts. In practice, The Dowse does anything that stirs the creative juices, from futuristic design shows and graphic design retrospectives to art competitions, education and training events and, heck, maybe even some traditional exhibitions.

A good example of The Dowse at its most challenging is the 2003 exhibition of hip-hop culture, ‘Respect’. The show initially attracted no sponsors and no other venue in the country was interested. But ‘Respect’ ended up touring more than any previous Dowse show, exhibiting in nine venues around the country over two years.

“In that show there was a 48-minute DVD of talking heads. I think the word ‘fuck’ must appear 50,000 times—every second word. We had everyone from four-year-olds and 80-year-olds go through that, the whole 48 minutes, and there was never a single complaint. I think because they had a context that was safe, it was okay. We had a lot of comments in the comments book from that show—I remember one 75-year-old saying they were so gratified to understand what this generation was really about.”

“In that show there was a 48-minute DVD of talking heads. I think the word ‘fuck’ must appear 50,000 times—every second word. We had everyone from four-year-olds and 80-year-olds go through that, the whole 48 minutes, and there was never a single complaint.”

In the gallery world, Walker’s approach is unusual—and often disliked. The only previous show on hip-hop was held at a museum in Brooklyn, New York. “They did the classic thing of putting Tupac’s sneakers in a glass case and so were viewing them as a historical commodity,” says Walker. “Whereas we worked with the hip-hop community to find out what was the model or structure to keep it true and generative.”

In 1998 he was the curator responsible for placing a 1950s Kelvinator fridge beside Colin McCahon’s Northland Panels in the exhibition ‘Parade’ at the newly-opened Te Papa. Dismayed Christchurch academic Denis Dutton, writing for The Australian, suggested the fact that both the painting and the fridge were from the late 1950s “… is as significant as learning that Lord Rutherford and Mae West were both Virgos. But whinge about Te Papa’s charmless degradation of a New Zealand icon, and you’re just being ‘elitist’, trying to maintain an outdated, snobbish caste system that still believes works of art are better than refrigerators.”

Walker shrugs off the criticism and threatens more of the same.

“Very often an art gallery will make many people reaffirm the fact that they’re not really creative or that their creativity doesn’t have value. The New Dowse is the sort of place that once you’ve visited there you want to go home and make something.”

Good luck to him. And go the Hutt.