Can do academy #3

Artist Fiona Connor made this work after coming across a grubby sink unit and wall inside an empty daycare centre near her apartment in the Miracle Mile district of Los Angeles. The sink was surrounded by a warm pink glow, multi-coloured paint splatters and finger marks where a succession of people had tried — and failed — to scrub it clean. She described the scene as a kind of ‘incidental painting’ — one made up of all the casual, day-to-day traces or marks we all make as we move through and occupy spaces, yet rarely pay much attention to.1

Connor’s works often involve the precise reconstruction of sites and objects originally located elsewhere and serving different purposes. Here, she has carefully recreated the daycare scene, meticulously copying each accidental drip and splatter, mark for mark. The work prompts viewers to think about the physical process of art-making. As the artist notes, ‘seeing [these] marks of use in a more formal way begs the question of what constitutes a meaningful or valuable mark, and the hierarchies of who can make those marks’.2 Although Connor worked from a particular site, she has created a scene to which anybody can relate — it could be taken from any artist’s studio, art school or classroom. It’s as simple and banal — or as complex and beautiful — as the viewer wishes to make it.

When the work was displayed at Te Papa in 2015 it attracted a lot of attention. It was inserted into the gallery’s wall and some visitors did a double-take, thinking perhaps that they had stepped into a classroom or hands-on studio space rather than an exhibition. Others saw it as a contemporary take on one of the great artworks — or, depending on one’s perspective, ‘jokes’ — of the twentieth century: Marcel Duchamp’s notorious ready-made, Fountain, 1919.

Sarah Farrar

1 Fiona Connor, ‘Fiona Connor talks about her work Can do academy #3’, Off the Wall, Arts Te Papa, http://arts.tepapa.govt.nz/off-the-wall/357487/8862/media/fiona-connor-talks-about-her-work-em-can-do-academy-3-em (accessed 8 March 2017).

2 Fiona Connor, quoted in Sarah Farrar, ‘Artist Fiona Connor’s Can do academy’, Te Papa Blog, 13 April 2015, http://blog.tepapa.govt.nz/2015/04/13/artist-fiona-connors-can-do-academy/ (accessed 5 December 2017).

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Fiona Connor, from her home in the Miracle Mile district of Los Angeles, spoke to Sarah Farrar, Senior Curator Art at Te Papa, about this work and her 2014 Can Do Academy exhibition in Auckland.

Fiona Connor: “I think of painting as like a trace of a performance or like a document of a series of marks. The exhibition Can Do Academy, in general, was based on a compendium of marks that I saw in used spaces, like abandoned day-cares, or art schools, printing shops … out of that I sampled certain elements and inserted them into the gallery space.

Can do academy #3 is generally all from an abandoned day-care, which is round the corner from my apartment in Miracle Mile. And that was actually the starting point for the body of work. I was walking by the shop front on the street and I saw this sink and I thought, ‘What an exciting premise for a show.’ I guess it was this, like, incidental painting: students and teachers washing out brushes with a too-high-pressure spout, causing the paint to splash up on the wall, and then repeated attempts at trying and clean it – reactivating the paint.

I found an equivalent sink, screen-printed the stickers – in that process there is certain things that go on. There is a play with value, taking things from a mass-produced format of web sticker production to more of a silk-screen – or realm of art production. Through the representation, it offers a new way of looking at it.

We are all really familiar with reading the marks, or the traces of the body when it uses a space. And we’re used to making a mess and cleaning it up, and generally denying, or trying to rub out, those sort of things. So, seeing those kind of marks of use in a more formal way begs the question of what constitutes a meaningful or valuable mark, and the hierarchies of who can make those marks.”

February 2015