Anthony Byrt characterises Kim Pieters’ work as possessing a feeling of “wintry, subantarctic cool.” This description suggests the chill environs of the artist’s home in Dunedin, but is also representative of a more studied, intellectual coolness: a willingness to engage with ambivalence and to investigate the potentialities of paradox, uncertainty and, above all, chance. In the Mallarmé Suite, large hardboard panels salvaged from a building site form the basis for delicate fields of colour, their ragged edges and holes speaking of a previous existence as parts of an architectural whole.

Pieters is an artist who works primarily in series, creating groupings of works that function together to elaborate on a particular theme, mood or approach. Language plays an important role in this methodology, as does its absence or failure. With the Mallarmé Suite, Pieters undertakes a meditation on the poet’s most difficult and arguably most important work: Un Coup de Dés Jamais N’Abolira le Hasard, first published in 1897, a year before Mallarmé’s death in 1898. This poem—in English, A Throw of the Dice Will Never Abolish Chance—describes the conflict between being and nothingness, as it relates to art’s ability to engage with the universe. Mallarmé’s poem describes the plight of a mariner-artist, the “Master,” rolling dice in the midst of a “shipwreck on the shoals of meaninglessness or contingency,” in the words of Henry Weinfield’s commentary. More generally, Weinfield sees the poem as addressing the problem of “how to establish meaning in an essentially meaningless universe,” a dilemma towards which Pieters, by invoking Mallarmé, also gestures. Although it is tempting to view these paintings as flotsam and jetsam that has been, at least in part, uncovered or stumbled upon rather than created, the randomness embodied by the found panels themselves is merely a starting point. For Pieters, these found materials serve as “a throw of the dice,” a raw act of chance from which new meanings can be generated. The choices the artist makes, in the face of a phenomenal universe functioning seemingly at random, become her necessity, and become the foundation upon which meaning can be built and understood.

One of the more radical departures from nineteenth-century lyric practice in Un Coup de Dés is its form. The poem’s individual lines and phrases are unevenly dispersed over double-page spreads, which are intended to be read from left to right across the two leaves. Because of this unorthodox typesetting, the white of the paper itself assumes a vital role in organising and framing the reader’s response to the poem. Although, as Mallarmé himself notes in his preface, “versification always demanded them as a surrounding silence,” the way Un Coup de Dés deploys these empty spaces constitutes a radical emphasis on the physicality of the page itself. Pieters is likewise concerned with physicality and presence in her work, citing Yoshihara Jiro’s Gutai Art Manifesto, which speaks of the beauty of art and architecture that has succumbed to decay and entropy: “it may be that the innate beauty of matter is reemerging from behind the mask of artificial embellishment. Ruins unexpectedly welcome us with warmth and friendliness.” The paintings of the Mallarmé Suite are beautiful in this way: they speak of that which is abandoned, of the interstitial spaces of the city where the remains of physical culture pile up and are forgotten. Ignaci de Solà-Morales defines these spaces as the “terrain vague,” the empty or unproductive zones existing within the urban environment that constitute a kind of counter-city. However, these paintings are not themselves unproductive; they are working to reclaim the terrain vague, to allow the viewer to navigate these spaces in a way that is productive of meaning.

Although Pieters cites Mallarmé through the titles of her works, her paintings advance a position that does not necessarily align with that of the poet himself. In an interview with Hamish Clayton, Pieters suggests that Mallarmé “did a sorrowful thing in opposing chance and necessity” in Un Coup de Dés. Rather than adopting an oppositional approach, Pieters’ works “fuse the two” concepts, making “chance and necessity work together.” Unlike Mallarmé, who laments the loss of a higher order (such as God or Fate) that would ascribe meaning to the events of the phenomenal universe (the rolling dice), Pieters deals with the world as it is, creating ideas and meanings that can coexist with chance itself. These paintings are not a lament for an ordered universe that no longer exists (and perhaps never existed), but neither are they an affirmation of the supremacy of chaos. They are a negotiation, an act that seeks to transform the materials of raw chance into something useful to the world. Pieters is, in some sense, a pragmatist.

This negotiation between chance and necessity, between randomness and meaning, is consequential not only for the artist herself, but also for the viewer of these works. According to Pieters, “the viewer is confronted with a throw of a dice. The meaning any one person may make of it is the result of their choices, is contingent on what is necessary for them at any one time.” Pieters’ inquiry, into the relationship between that which is the product of chance and that which is the product of necessity, is not limited to a dialogue between the artist and the universe: it includes us too, and the possibilities and options that are open to us.

Andrew Clark Bowerbank Ninow Gallery re:Kim Pieters’the mallarmé suite’Oct. 26 – Nov. 19, 2016

John thank you for your review. Apologies about my delayed reply, I have been travelling south to the sun! I was most curious about your experience with my titles. For me, the relationship between language and image is an important, if not exclusive aspect of my work, so your response was a little unfortunate; but perhaps one that I need to consider.

The titles never illustrate the image, they are never analogous, they are always supplement: evocative, often poetic, as you say, sentences, lines of language or quotes taken from their original context and relocated (very small I have to say, along the lower edge of my painting or drawing. They actually do not have to be engaged with and often they are not). However by making the placement I am presenting two autonomous moments, one literary and one visual. It is what happens at their junction which interests me a great deal. What may then come into being.

I am always looking for the generation of something new in that gap. Something that cannot entirely rely on what can be identified: the work is not a named representation, it has no end. The disjunction between language and image is purposeful; it can be a type of shock or intrigue. The space that is offered here, almost a type of clearing, asks for sensibility and thinking to be put into play. It is a call to the individual who pays attention, to generate meaning for themselves, from their own sensitivities and knowledges and in their own way.

The work in this perspective acts as an impetus, an initiator of moments. Of course I cannot answer for what is found, sometimes obviously it will be unpromising. I am happy to take that risk, for more often something else happens; something rich and sensate and thoughtful. This may provide discussion amongst friends; it could be an entirely private experience. It can be repeatable and ongoing, reconsidered, rethought, felt differently at different times, a bit like the things of life. It is a world.

May I refer you and anybody interested to the Hamish Clayton writing on my work in Art New Zealand’s autumn2011 edition. This is a close and considered reading which I like very much. There is also a beautiful discussion about titles by Roland Barthes in his ‘The Wisdom of Art’ essay on Cy Twombly of which I am entirely in sympathy with. Gosh, it is such elegant, informative writing I will quote the piece in full for you. All best Kim (kfpieters august2012)“

..The paintings function like a pictograph, where figurative and graphic elements are combined. This system is very clear, and although it is quite exceptional in Twombly’s work, its very clarity refers us to the joint problems of figuration and signification. Although abstract painting (which bears an inaccurate name, as we know) has been in the making for a long time (since the later Cezanne, according to some people),each new artist endlessly debates the question again: in art, linguistic problems are never really settled, and language always turns back to reflect on itself. It is therefore never naive (in spite of the intimidation of culture, and above all of specialist culture) to ask oneself before a painting what it represents. Meaning sticks to man: even when he wants to create something against meaning or outside it, he ends up producing the very meaning of nonsense or non-meaning. It is all the more legitimate to tackle again and again the question of meaning, that it is precisely this question which prevents the universality of painting. If so many people (because of cultural differences) have the impression of “not understanding” a painting, it is because they want meaning and this painting (or so they think) does not give them any.

Twombly squarely tackles the problem, if only in this, that most of his paintings bear titles. By the very fact that they have a title, they proffer the bait of a meaning to mankind, which is thirsting for one. For in classical painting the caption of a picture (this thin line of words which runs at the bottom of the work and on which the visitors of a museum first hurl themselves) clearly expressed what the picture represented; analogy in the picture was reduplicated by analogy in the title: the signification was supposed to be exhaustive and the figuration exhausted. Now it is not possible, when one sees a painting by Twombly bearing a title, not to have the embryonic reflex of looking for analogy. The Italians? Sahara? Where are the Italians? Where is the Sahara? Let’s look for them. Of course, we find nothing. Or at least – and here begins Twombly’s art – what we find – namely the painting itself, the Event, in its splendor and enigmatic quality – is ambiguous: nothing “represents” the Italians, the Sahara, there is no analogical figure of these referents; and yet, we vaguely feel, there is nothing, in these paintings, which contradicts a certain natural idea of the Sahara, the Italians. In other words, the spectator has an intimation of another logic (his way of looking is beginning to operate transformations): although it is very obscure, the painting has a proper solution, what happens in it conforms to a telos, a certain end.

This end is not found immediately. At first stage, the title so to speak bars the access to the painting because by its precision, its intelligibility, its classicism (nothing strange or surrealist about it), it carries us on the analogical road, which very quickly turns out to be blocked. Twombly’s titles have the function of a maze having followed the idea which they suggest, we have to retrace our steps and start in another direction. Something remains, however, their ghosts which pervade the painting. They constitute the negative moment which is found in all initiations. This is art according to a rare formula, at once very intellectual and very sensitive, which constantly confronts negativity in the manner of those schools of mysticism called “apophatic” (negative) because they teach one to examine all that which is not-so as to perceive, in this absence, a faint light, flickering but also radiant because it does not lie….”

kfpieters response toJohn Hurrell —eyecontact review http://eyecontactsite.com/2012/07/painting-show-at-artspace 21July2012 Sensual Painting Show at ArtspaceKim Pieters and Anoushka Akel Hop Scotch. Curated by Caterina Riva 13 July – 18 August 2012. ARTSPACE.AucklandNZ.

As Pieters writes, “in this work the two modes continuously weave into and away from each other, allowing each their autonomy without denying relation.” The resulting viewing/listening experience is one that roots the eye in the body, emphasizing bodily immersion, drift, and reverie. Veering away both from Cartesian perspectivalism and representative/narrative tradition, as installed works in a gallery context, they both extend and unravel cinematic codes, the optical space becomes a place of transformation, the holistic experiential space which Deleuze refers to when he writes “…it is through the body that cinema forms its alliance with the spirit, with thought.” In these works, Pieters extends the thoughtful and responsive relation with musicians she has worked with in live contexts, by editing visual footage to sound provided by invited practitioners, in her methodology the image is treated as malleable, stretchable material, to be cut to size, slowed to a treacle-like pace, fine-sifted for detail. The long-take is pulled to infinity alongside desolate, beautiful guitar drones and electronic soundscapes are set deep into the distance of south island horizons.

Sally Ann McIntyre a New Zealand based writer, curator, broadcaster and radio artist with a curatorial interest in the intersection of art and sound.

…Kim Pieters’ paintings encode memory in a different way. The board on which she paints suggests the walls of vacated rooms, scarred by human habitation. Le mal d’archive might be seen, then, as a reflection on our obsessive desire to retain information, to read the traces of history with certainty and make them visible. It also reflects on the impossibility of total recall, and our futile attempts to freeze time in collections and archives. The marks and blurs in the surface may be dust, marking an attention to the kind of details that are found in the seldom-visited corners of libraries. If there are stories to be found in these surfaces, they do not, to use Jean Baudrillard’s phrase, ‘have a day after; they are made to be used up’. Each new viewing yields a new story…

…In all of these painted spaces, the certainties of the ‘real’ —of the found board surfaces on which Pieters paints, of the seemingly solid landscapes in which Crook and Pick stage their dramas–are destabilised by drifts of memories and associations, patterns and dreams. The works have an evanescence, a quality of shimmering. No sooner have stories and meanings appeared than they are swept away by our next glance. The exhibition explores the hesitation and uncertainty of the partially spoken thought. Half-whispers pervade. Pieters explores this poetics of absence and silence in ‘the lover who does not forget sometimes dies of excess, exhaustion and tension of memory.’ Across the multiple panels there is unexpected movement. Shapes emerge and travel. Within this continual flux, meaning and knowing become difficult terms to grasp. The ‘lover’ might be the artist, the viewer, or a body evoked by Pieters’ ambiguous markings. There is nothing superficial to this surface. Trajectories can be traced without a need for their source, and our desires become the subject of the work…

…Each painting becomes a time-zone, slowing the act of looking to a distinctive pace. Some works clamour for attention, while others wait their turn. Kim Pieters’ nasturtium is the miniature made large. Colour is spread and amplified across metres of softly scarred board. This chromatic field engulfs for a second before focus shifts and it fades to nothing. Almost invisible in its detail, nasturtium raises the question whether colour is ever meant to be viewed on this scale. The painting discloses a process of simultaneous expansion and evaporation. Flickering between tiny lyrical events and an immersive vapour of colour, it becomes both a single flower and an entire summer…

Susan Ballard, from ‘perfume’, catalogue to the ‘beyond the surface’ exhibition. Beyond the surface was exhibited at the Dunedin Public Art Gallery from 21 April until 26 June 2001 and at the Hawkes Bay Museum August until October 2001.

“Kim Pieters and Michael Morley both have a consistent grasp of gestural opportunity, which fits, in whatever arcane way, into my notion of what a painting should be. Lines suggest, delineate, don’t end too soon, don’t overstate. Spaces advance, retreat, offer expansion, don’’t lose it in vacuity. Kim Pieter’s scribbled insignia suggest codings of language and body alike, in a congruence of experience that denies dualities.”Bridie Lonie reviewing ‘Blue Blood’, Dunedin Public Art Gallery. Art New Zealand, Summer 1994.

Kim Pieter’s lyrical and speculative drawing in particular is well worth studying. The line seems most intimate in her three small works, but two huge ones hung side by side upstairs on a wall painted imperial purple (or is it suffrage violet?) dispel dismissal of this as decorative doodling, and invite contemplation.Linda Tyler review ‘Blue Blood’ show, Dunedin Public Art Gallery. ODT 1994.

Motivations of illusion and dream fill the paintings of Kim Pieters; the spaces between her lines take on the velocities of the vacuum. The line itself expresses something nearing the modulations of music as it traces a path through the image.”Susan Ballard reviewing ‘Dunedin Dialogues’ Milford House. ODT August 1995.

It was dark, wine-dark one might say, and as clouded as mind inevitably is, awoken, though, by the attraction of the bottles of some ‘classic red’ and the promise of time to pass…..I like the BOG, and most especially, I like it in its abbreviated or (perhaps) its inebriated form; it seems always to promise something sticky (like Peter Madden’s gooey little public toilet find we all had the pleasure of almost tasting in the paper anniversary exhibition a few months back – I must say that one will never leave me). I always wonder what delectable treasures will be dredged up and, after all, a few glasses of dirty red down early evening’s path is often the perfect accoutrement to ones own BOG journey…. the first wall, at least, was dark.

It was all a little disorienting until I located the refreshment table which contrary to my expectations was not conveniently located at the door but to draw the crowds in (one might speculate), was in the centre of the room attended by an ‘angelic’ waiter in a cuff-linkless shirt, a halo of milling onlookers who, I should think, were also a little disorientated by the daring table placement, and to keep their balance, centred attention upon that most beautiful of sights attending to the refreshments. A little invitation to ‘Shimidsu Sakura’, like some exotic butterfly fluttering its way through the postal service and into my tenuous consciousness, had drawn me to the Caroline McCaw/Kim Pieters exhibition, and to the wondrous sight of that ‘waiter’ whom I’m sure, were he not dead and in Limbo like the rest of us, God would have blessed with the immaculate conception of the new Messiah. Can we not picture it? It is such a thought, such a deserving thought, which could almost justify the unjustifiable; it leaves me at least with a certain sense of well-being and hope…

In limbo, of course, although denied the vision of God proper, we are blessed or cursed as the case may be with such hypothetical visions of hope – of an exotic if unobtainable elsewhere – and where indeed would be more appropriate that the BOG to have such a glorious confirmation of this. Shimidsu Sakura was, likewise, the perfect setting. After orienting myself firmly with a drink in my hand and marvelling at the golden light of the ‘Madonna of the red wine’ I looked fixedly about ‘to discern the place where I was’ My eye was drawn into the cloudy darkness which had flickered through my first impression upon entry, and into which my severally filled glass would eventually leave me – the wine-dark work on the wall opposite the door. It was looking toward this that I realised the gravity of the BOG and McCaw and Pieters’ winter fruit, behind the ambiguity of the coppery hues (one could almost see oneself on the surface of the metallic paint and wondering if it too will corrode into a fungal green) was the dark coarse texture of building paper with which, perhaps, winter builds her products in the new subdivision down the “woeful valley of the abyss” -or early evening’s path.

Of course, from limbo’s cusp, there is always another border and BOG too has several walls. Rotating around the centrepiece my vision came to the gate where hope may fly. Confronted with the pastels of thousands of little postage stamps, blossom-petals on the stringy boughs of the cherry-tree or in small piled on the floor or again, in great sheets ($109.20 a set), inscribed with the murmurings of one barely awake and dazzled by glistening white (for example), all of springs hearkening to life temporarily outstaging the darkness of winter, and promising a sending on, a posting to summer (?) or to the fringe festival perhaps, a ‘line of flight’.

I knew, however (how could I not with ‘classic red’ in hand?) that this was a strange hearkening, one that pointed everywhere but to itself. The waiter’s halo mumbling down its several paths looked, as is the prerogative of those of us in Limbo, not at the present, but to an elsewhere. Most of the talk was, of course, of the fringe festival and its rich promisings, the McCaw/Pieters exhibition taking an inevitably secondary role as a precursor on the cusp of the festivities. Limbo’s ambiguity (like this week’s f*nk straddling the before and the during of an extravaganza, a literal circus, of the arts) gives rise to those spectacular visions: ‘Madonna of the red wine’ and the most lavish of events that begins this Friday -the ‘Fringe Festival’ in all its glory.

Rise erect, then, and look toward your Festival Program, perhaps you too will be blessed with the sight of that ‘angelic’ waiter!

Gilbert May reviewing ‘Shimidsu Sakura”, f*nk, Dunedin September 2000.

return to menu