July 2007
Meg Cranston - The Pleasure of Obvious Problems
Exhibition dates: 4 August – 15 September 2007
Opening reception: Friday 3 August 6pm
ARTSPACE is proud to present The Pleasure of Obvious Problems, the first survey exhibition of the work of Californian
artist Meg Cranston.
The exhibition will include a selection of Cranston’s work in sculpture, performance and mixed media installation,
spanning her twenty-year career (1987- 2007). It will also include new works created especially for the ARTSPACE
exhibition. The title reflects Cranston’s theory about art. “Art makes abstract concepts tangible.
It makes problems, love or death or power or whatever it is, it makes those issues visible. The best art makes complex
ideas obvious. That’s the pleasure of art’. Of the abstract ideas, Cranston has gone for some of the biggest, albeit
usually in an absurd way. In the work Volcano Trash and Ice Cream, a giant pistachio ice cream cone is shown projected
on the wall. It drips slowly until all the ice cream has sluiced away.
Cranston sees the work to be about the nature of life. She says “How the forces of nature are effecting us, how we
reflect on our mortality, that’s just too big, too abstract, for visual art. A melting ice cream cone is easier to see
and to relate to.” For Cranston, it is more obvious in the best sense.
One of Cranston’s best-known works, The Complete Works of Jane Austen (1991) gives form to the invisible experience of
reading. The large inflatable sculpture was designed to contain the amount of air the artist’s lungs would exchange
while reading the complete works of the English author (100,000 liters). She describes the work as “a monument to the
impact Austen’s writing had on me”.
In the work The Last Magical Death, a sculpture/performance piece made especially for the exhibition, Cranston
considers the cultural function of ritual violence and masochism. The piece is a life size self-portrait in the form of
a piñata (a papier mâché effigy). The term Magical Death comes from a film by Timothy Asch and Napoleon Chagnon about
the Yanomamo tribesmen of Brazil who use of ritual violence to circumvent actual blood shed.
The difference in The Last Magical Death is that the violence will not remain abstract. It is a real piñata, which
during the exhibition will be used as such – it will be beaten and destroyed. Or least that is Cranston’s plan. “I have
made other piñatas but no one has taken my challenge and actually used the work. I hope that will happen in New Zealand.
The violence has to occur so the figure (my doppelgänger) can symbolically triumph.”
ARTSPACE will publish a substantial full colour catalogue which will be designed and distributed by the New Zealand
publishing group Clouds.
The catalogue, to be titled Hot Pants in a Cold, Cold World, includes installation images and essays by Nico Israel,
Carole Ann Klonarides, Tirdad Zolghadr and writing by the artist. In conjunction with the exhibition at ARTSPACE, Meg
Cranston is the Artist in Residence at Elam School of Fine Arts (Elam), National Institute of Creative Arts and
Industries at The University of Auckland from 16 July until 17 August 2007. The Elam Residency Project is generously
supported by arts patron Jenny Gibbs.
Meg Cranston’s work has been shown internationally since 1990. Museum exhibitions and performances include: Museum for
Contemporary Art, Seigen; Witte de With Center for Contemporary Art, Rotterdam; Kunstmuseum Düsseldorf, Düsseldorf; Haus
der Kunst, Munich; P.S.1, New York; Henry Art Gallery, Seattle; Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles; Carnegie Museum
of Art, Pittsburgh; Landesmuseum Joanneum, Graz; The New Museum, New York; The Whitney Museum, New York, and Open ‘93:
Emergency, Aperto in the 1993 Venice Biennale.
ENDS