Object Classrooms #2 (Correspondence)

Object Classrooms #2 (Correspondence)

Object Classrooms #2 belongs to Fiona Connor’s larger body of work, Object Classrooms, which was commissioned by the Govett-Brewster Art Gallery in 2016.

Connor’s project tracked the movement and eventual disappearance of an artwork as it was transported around galleries, art institutions and conservation departments in Aotearoa New Zealand in the mid-1970s. Thinking through the inheritances of modernist abstraction, Connor’s project asks where the art object ends and where the infrastructures necessary for art’s safety, presentation and distribution begin. Playfully dwelling on an historic institutional mishap, Connor conjures the painting within a network of relations—and in doing so, insists that authorship is always conversational, and meaning always multiple and contingent.

The painting, created by Los Angeles artist John McLaughlin—a pioneer of minimalist abstraction on the West Coast of the United States—was included in the exhibition State of California Painting, organised by then-director Bob Ballard for the Govett-Brewster in 1972. Object Classrooms #2 takes the form of silkscreened reproductions on foil of correspondence from the New Plymouth District Council archives and the John McLaughlin Papers, held by Louis Stern Fine Art in California. This correspondence between gallery employees, the artist and his representatives reveals that, during the exhibition in New Plymouth, the work was spat on by a visitor. It was then sent to Auckland Art Gallery for conservation. The work was then damaged in transit. At some point later, the correspondence reveals, the work went missing, and has not been located since.

In one of his letters regarding the possibility of repairing his damaged painting, McLaughlin quotes poet Jean Cocteau, writing, “Reproductions and worked over art objects are exactly the same as the originals except in all respects.” Connor arranges this correspondence to narrate the journey of the work, but also to summon the network of relationships this work—and all artworks—are embedded in. Connor frequently employs reproduction as an artistic strategy, and here, the artist troubles the modernist assumption of the artwork’s autonomy or separation from a social world. In doing so, the artist suggests that meaning is made as much by the infrastructures things appear—or don’t appear—in, than by their physical form.

— Simon Gennard, 2023
Adapted from the Fiona Connor: Object Classrooms (2018) exhibition text, by Sophie O’Brien and Tendai Mutambu