Daylight flotsam Venice

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

Selected to represent New Zealand at the 2013 Venice Biennale, Bill Culbert devised an exhibition entitled Front door out back. One of nine site-specific installations for the show, Daylight flotsam Venice was positioned in a central room at the Istituto Santa Maria della Pietà. The work played with the architecture of the space, flowing under the arches of the room and lapping at its edges, in direct relationship with the canal that could be glimpsed outside. Displayed back on New Zealand soil at Te Papa, the work changed with its new environment: the architecture of the gallery space softening in the fluorescent river of light and the water of Wellington Harbour seeming to flow in from beyond the walls.

Culbert has been working with light since the late 1960s. He describes self-lighting things as having their own independence.1 By using light to animate and transform everyday domestic objects like plastic bottles, tables and chairs, he challenges the viewer to re-evaluate their perceptions of the purpose of these objects and the potential they hold.

Daylight flotsam Venice is made of one hundred and fifty fluorescent tubes and two hundred and fifty-seven repurposed plastic bottles. Transformed, these functional objects spill together — the white tubes roll in waves as the coloured bottles diffuse and deflect the light. This flow creates a gentle tension, like bobbing in a sun-sparkled sea with a dark expanse lurking beneath; the light and bottles become flotsam and jetsam washing across the floor. And here the work might bring to mind the vast floating islands of plastic detritus that are choking our oceans, or rising sea levels and global warming. But the work’s aesthetic beauty transcends these readings. Another look and the tubes take on a starkly minimalist quality, the bottles an organic one: nature and artifice are in quiet contradiction, the work in a constant state of flux. Paradoxically, Culbert’s authority over the materials brings everything together as a perfect harmony.

Lizzie Baikie

1 Justin Paton, Bill Culbert: Front door out back: The New Zealand Pavilion, 55th International Art Exhibition, La Biennale di Venezia, Christchurch Art Gallery, Christchurch, 2013, p. 98.