365 days

This essay originally appeared in New Zealand Art at Te Papa (Te Papa Press, 2018).

Given the title of Giovanni Intra’s 365 days, we could be forgiven for thinking that the artist dutifully took a photograph of his hand every day for an entire year. His fingers are splayed or drawn together, depending perhaps on mood or daily circumstance. These prints are arranged in a simple grid with the final hand dangling at the bottom, suggesting the work is unfinished and that the fingers could keep going for another day, week, month or year …

The truth is that these photographs were shot in just a single night. 365 days represents not the course of a year, but quite the opposite: a flash of nocturnal activity. The occasional double exposure suggests a hand quivering with excitement — a repetitive, almost mystical energy.

Although Intra was well aware of the Christian symbolism of the hand of God and ritual gestures of devotion, his primary target was more satirical: the repetitive and serialised processes adopted by an earlier generation of conceptual artists. In the 1970s the New Zealand artist Billy Apple documented his own bodily excretions by collecting ear wax, nasal fluid and semen on tissues that were exhibited in Body activities in 1971. While Apple’s pieces were socially transgressive, Intra took aim at the earnest, arty seriousness underlying his work. In a 1994 interview, he said: ‘The rigorous morality of this kind of conceptual work, the ethic of its truthfulness, its scientific feel, all of it’s easy to manipulate, and quite manipulative. I faked it.’1

In his witty take on conceptual art practices, Intra embraced the jocular irreverence of surrealism. His camera functioned less like a mechanism for documenting the truth of what ‘really happened’ and more like a photocopier reeling off multiple prints of the same cheeky left hand. Created just before the demise of film photography, 365 days anticipates something of the easy playfulness of the digital image. Intra’s work might remind us of that other great 1990s guerrilla medium: the black and white ’zine, furtively Xeroxed on the work photocopier just after the boss has gone home.

Kate Brettkelly-Chalmers

1 Barbara Blake and Giovanni Intra, ‘Giovanni Intra: Germ-free adolescence’, Art New Zealand, no. 70, Autumn 1994, p. 71.