Object Classrooms #1 (Finding John McLaughlin)

Object Classrooms #1 (Finding John McLaughlin)

Object Classrooms #1 belongs to Fiona Connor’s larger body of work Object Classrooms, which was commissioned by the Govett-Brewster Art Gallery in 2016, curated by Sophie O’Brien and Tendai Mutambu.

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. At some point during the exhibition, the painting was spat on by a visitor. The work was sent to Auckland Art Gallery for conservation and, at some point during its travels, was lost. It has not been located since.

The moving-image work Object Classrooms #1 (2018) follows the path of the painting through various institutional architectures. Showing stationary shots of empty galleries, collection stores, conservation labs and staircases, the shots are framed in a way that cannot help but gesture to the pared-back, hard-edged geometric abstraction McLaughlin was known for. The artist claims she is interested in asking whether objects might linger in spaces they might have inhabited.

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