Memories mismatched with reality

Ronnie van Hout with pieces from his exhibition The Disappearance. Picture / Dean Purcell

During his Creative New Zealand residency at Kunstlerhaus Bethanien, Ronnie van Hout earned the tag "the hardest working artist in Berlin".

While other artists sipped coffee and arranged for technicians and craftspeople to turn their deathless ideas into physical objects or videos, van Hout was in his studio making works.

"It was only the New Zealanders who had been in residence in Berlin who actually made work. It's a different attitude," says van Hout. "It's seen as strangely old-fashioned that the process is an important aspect of what I do.

"I would find it quite difficult to have people make my work because in some ways the idea is important, but it is by making that I learn. Though there is a point where it just becomes labour and it is no longer interesting, just tedious."

The Berlin works, which continued van Hout's long-running exploration of memory and identity, were hijacked for a show of New Zealand and Australian art touring Poland and Lithuania.

So on his return to Melbourne he had to quickly produce new work for the Ivan Anthony show.

The result is a recreation, drawn partly from memory and partly from measurements of the remaining foundation, of the house at Aranui near Christchurch where he was brought up.

There are photos of the site, a short video clip of van Hout digging there - amateur archaeology, action art, recovering memory syndrome - and a recreation in painted polystyrene of a metal bucket and broken concrete block. The centrepiece is a roughly-built, scaled-down reproduction of the building, the inside mocked up in polystyrene as the interior of a cave, with a small screen at the end playing another tape.

The overall effect is to convey some of the disquiet we feel when our memories of a landscape don't match what we now see in front of us.

In this way it harks back to some of the themes of time and the natural environment explored by American Robert Smithson, one of the pioneers of earthworks art, whose retrospective van Hout saw in Los Angeles on his way to Berlin.

"I didn't realise Smithson was so funny. There were also a lot of references to popular culture in there, as well as the big influence of natural history," van Hout says.

He has worked in a wide range of materials over the years, including painting, printmaking, videos, embroidery and sculpture.

Some of his early efforts were done as record sleeves or posters for early Flying Nun bands - the two Pin Group singles, 25 Cents, Sneaky Feelings' Be My Friend, the Great Unwashed EP and others.

"I got caught in the whole do-it-yourself thing. I had just learned to do silkscreening, so I got caught up in it. The Great Unwashed sleeve was printed from the actual block. I took it down to Caxton [printers], and the guy said, 'I haven't done this for a while,' and made a project of it. He really enjoyed it. Then Hamish [Kilgour] and I spent a few afternoons with the watercolours colouring them in."

Van Hout's own band, Into the Void, was described by Kiwi music site thebigcity as "a caustic, chaotic, sprawling mess of a band".

His multi-disciplinary approach, the pop culture references and his use of an often-sly humour didn't go down well at art school - he failed his final year - but it proved to be far more in keeping with turn-of-the-century concerns than what his lecturers were trying to instil.

Van Hout gets the last laugh though, last week picking up a $50,000 Arts Foundation Laureate Award.

* Disappearance, by Ronnie van Hout is at the Ivan Anthony Gallery, 312 Karangahape Rd, to Nov 26