New Zealand-born, and now Berlin-based, artist Simon Denny has long orbited the strange world of Silicon Valley with his work mapping out economic, social and technological forces reshaping the world. He talks with Matt Nippert about critiquing, and selling to, billionaires, and his new exhibit at Auckland Gallery teasing out what RocketLab and the new, private, space race means for our futures.
Simon Denny’s art has taken him to Venice and New York, and even the lairs of Silicon Valley billionaires, but now he is going to space.
Denny, aged 40, grew up in Newmarket in what he says was a “very creative household”.
“My father and mother met through music - they’re classical music enthusiasts and my father, among other things, studied composition at the University of Auckland and was part of the choir in its heyday,” he says.
After studying at Elam and then Frankfurt, Denny has been based in Berlin for more than a decade and carved out an international presence, having presented New Zealand’s entry to the Venice Biennale in 2015 and exhibited at New York’s Museum of Modern Art.
“I really take the contemporary, and contemporary art, very seriously. So I really like to deal with what’s happening now and materials of now,” he says.
He dabbled in digital spaces, but his physical works take advantage of the same technologies he critiques and at present they rely heavily on 3D printers.
“I guess it’s more about addressing the world as it is now and making something that reflects how it feels to live today. And I think that’s more important to me than any particular medium.”
His latest work - Optimism, now on show at Auckland Art Gallery - is a pair of huge rocket engine components sourced from drawings in RocketLab patents, suspended from the ceiling and transformed with augmented reality (AR) into a pair of space stations beaming down collages and soundscapes of differing visions of humanity’s space future.
In a nod to Elon Musk, one of the key players pushing the final frontier with his company SpaceX, the guides for visitors on how to use the AR app are displayed on whiteboards bought from Twitter at a fire-sale auction held after the company was purchased by the mercurial billionaire.
Optimism opens just as New Zealand got its first Minister for Space, with Judith Collins KC appointed to manage the growing legal, technological, commercial and national security risks and opportunities of the great beyond.
The effect of the AR in a busy gallery atrium can be disconcerting: The day the Herald visited, a touring group of kindergarten students were sitting and enjoying morning tea oblivious to the tractor beams triggering visions of Cowboy Martians and space suburbia splashing down around them.
The rise of RocketLab - paradoxically touted as a home-grown No 8 wire success story but now a listed US company whose main clients included the US Department of Defence - provided a launching pad for Denny to excavate the singular utopian dreams of nation-states in space from the 70s and contrast them with today’s almost Wild West grab for space by competing private operators.
He says Nasa literature from the glory days of the space race - all soft curves, yellow sunlight and idealised suburban sprawl - remains influential, but the imagining of space has now fractured.
“There’s been a shift from kind of a US Government focus, almost a monopoly on space, to something that’s more like international, but also more in the private sphere,” Denny says.
“So the companies are now working for the Department of Defense, but they are starting their own kind of idiom, and they’re developing things, also, in some ways independently from states. This notion of living beyond Earth is not led by a national conversation, but rather it’s led by companies and the companies’ visions of what it could be. And, you know, RocketLab is a part of that”.
RocketLab’s international and private ownership tells much of the contemporary story of space, says Denny.
“I find it just very compelling where space is going, what that industry is all about, and the fact that it dovetails to a certain extent in business with New Zealand. But I think more interesting to me is what we as New Zealanders think we are and where the kind of like projection culturally that goes on.”
Denny’s previous work has found some surprising fans and homes.
In 2018, sparked by revelations in the Herald that technology billionaire Peter Thiel had been granted citizenship by ministerial edict despite having spent only 12 days in the country over the previous five years, he produced The Founder’s Paradox at Auckland’s Michael Lett Gallery.
A mind-bogglingly complex range of board games charting different visions of New Zealand, it included a Dungeons & Dragons-esque reimagining of libertarian Thiel as a green-skinned elvish knight seeking to slay the monsters of democracy and fair elections and escape first the laws of nation states, then the confines of Earth.
That work - whose appeal even Denny admits to doubting, “I was like, who’s gonna be interested in crazy board games?” - caught at least one interested eye. Thiel himself, during one of his infrequent visits to New Zealand, dropped by the gallery in late 2017.
He praised the “phenomenal detail” on display and left his contact details. Denny chased up, leading to the artist and the billionaire meeting in San Francisco in early 2018.
“I was a bit of a fish out of water in that meeting, because I’m an artist. And I also got the sense of just how different my reality is than somebody in his position,” Denny says.
He tried getting to the bottom of just why a Silicon Valley billionaire wanted a New Zealand passport, and recalls Thiel’s admiration for our domestic politics, particularly those of the fourth Labour Government.
“I asked him about why he was interested in New Zealand, and got the chance to speak to the person that I’d been imagining what they were like. It was a very uncanny experience in that sense,” Denny says.
In a curious twist, Thiel then bought the work - which is sharply critical of the man who signed the cheque - and today it is installed as a display in his investment fund’s Los Angeles headquarters.
“The business structurally is making expensive things that take a lot of effort and time to produce, a lot of research time, and then have logistical costs like no other. The business is a tough one, I’ll be honest,” Denny says of the business of art.
“When the outcome is the person that’s part of the subject matter finds it so compelling that they also want to think about that every day and they are people that have capital to allocate to cultural production, that’s definitely a good outcome.”
Matt Nippert is an Auckland-based investigations reporter covering white-collar and transnational crimes and the intersection of politics and business. He has won more than a dozen awards for his journalism - including twice being named Reporter of the Year - and joined the Herald in 2014 after having spent the decade prior reporting from business newspapers and national magazines.