Ann Shelton: doublethink

BLINK AND YOU’LL MISS IT

In 1982, leaving behind a conventional and promising future¹ in Auckland, 21 year old Neil Roberts became involved in Aotearoa New Zealand’s growing punk and anarchist movements. Intelligent, politically engaged and articulate, Roberts left his recently purchased home², job and family in Auckland, and became itinerant, travelling to Wellington and the South Island. Deeply concerned about social issues under the Muldoon government, he took part in protests for Waitangi Day and the Springbok Tour. Roberts lived for a time in the South Taranaki town of Midhirst, reportedly on a farm³ with a group of punk rockers⁴, his dog named Umbrella and a few possessions (including a book by 19th century Russian anarchist Mikhail Bakunin). He was sometimes seen looking either ‘like a punk rocker, with safety pins in his ears’, ‘a tramp’ or ‘respectably dressed’, and used to drink at the Midhirst Tavern and travel to parties in the nearby ‘City of Monuments’, Whanganui^{5 6}.

A blink-and-you-miss-it rural town, Midhirst stands on State Highway 3 between New Plymouth and Whanganui. Shadowed by volcanic Mt Taranaki, the town is surrounded by green pasture and dairy farms, and populated by a school, the tavern and the towering concrete dairy factory which, in the early 1980s, was on the brink of closing down ⁷.

On Wednesday November 17 1982, Roberts and Umbrella left Midhirst for the last time. After reaching the Stratford Railway Station and sending Umbrella back to Auckland to be looked after, Roberts boarded the bus to Whanganui, having told his friends “I’m off to Wanganui to do something frightful; if I should blow up the ‘Wanganui Computer’, the cops will be around”⁸.

Once in Whanganui, Roberts spray painted the slogan WE HAVE MAINTAINED A SILENCE CLOSELY RESEMBLING STUPIDITY Ⓐ ANARCHY PEACE THINKING in black capitals on the public toilet wall in Pakaitore Moutoa Gardens. This was one of the last actions that Roberts took⁹ before walking up to the doors of Wairere House, the fortress-like building that housed the ‘Wanganui Computer’ – one of the greatest symbols of governmental control in the country at the time. At 12.35am, as the security guard pressed the buzzer to speak with him, Roberts detonated his self-made bomb, six sticks of gelignite wired to a small battery¹⁰. With a blinding flash and huge explosion, this extreme act destroyed the front entrance of Wairere House, claimed Roberts’ own life and altered the course of protest in Aotearoa New Zealand.

GOING DOWN THE LOCAL

The controversial¹¹ National Law Enforcement System known as the ‘Wanganui Computer’ held all records kept by New Zealand Police and Justice departments and the Ministry of Transport¹². For many in Aotearoa New Zealand, the Computer was seen as evidence of the Muldoon government’s creeping fascism¹³ in relation to the widely protested 1977 Security Intelligence Service Amendment Act and increasing control over the populace by the government’s ‘police-state’^{14 15}.

Roberts’ death caused waves of incomprehension and shock in ‘little old conservative New Zealand’¹⁶, his act still lurking in regional and national memory as one of the ‘intangible truths’ that ‘haunt urban spaces like… superfluous or additional inhabitants’¹⁷. Evoking comparisons to Guy Fawkes’ 1605 attempted bombing of the nascent British Parliament¹⁸ – now a symbol for postmodern anarchism – it seems clear that Neil Roberts intended his own attack on the behemoth-like monument as a protest against an oppressive state and society¹⁹.

Ann Shelton focused on this historically significant event in her research for her 2013 artist residency at Tylee Cottage, Whanganui and subsequent exhibition The City of Gold and Lead at the city’s Sarjeant Gallery. Responding to historical rather than contemporary events gives a temporal distance to Shelton’s projects, allowing viewers to see these landscapes ‘as dynamic participants in past behaviours’²⁰. Episodes of violence and human trauma often underscore Shelton’s attraction to place, her photographs enquiring as to how the social, cultural and political contexts of a landscape and event can shift, morph or hold over time.

Shelton’s site-oriented projects necessitate extensive research, consulting archives and historians; and for doublethink, seeking out local knowledge to inform her journey through the landscape this project inhabits. Conceiving particular sites as indexes to the ‘social history of a political act’²¹, Shelton’s work can be seen as a dialogue between art and the socio-historical dimensions of place, ‘unearthing …repressed histories’ and recovering places and events that have been marginalised²².

Echoing Neil Roberts’ movements, visiting the small town where he stayed for a while, the place where he caught the bus, travelling State Highway 3 as it cuts the undulating farmlands from Taranaki to Whanganui, Shelton traverses social terrains, seeking to explore relationships between people, places and histories. While Shelton often utilises landscapes and the ideas they evoke as both subject and object in her work, doublethink engages with a wider, existential idea - the struggle of an individual within social and political realities, played out in a specific landscape.

Seeing representations of history as a ‘series of manipulations on a continuum’²³ Shelton structures the placement of this project as a fragment of a narrative. She creates another ‘manipulation’ by siting the single words of Roberts’ statement as signs on roadside verges in a place tangentially related to Roberts’ historic itinerary. This work turns away from the site of the bombing and Roberts’ self-annihilation, instead shifting to the impetus of the action, the place of his decision-making last journey²⁴. doublethink acts as a prompt; engaging with an iteration of Robert’s accusatory graffiti-ed statement, opening up the possibility that a viewer might remember or narrate the rest of the story.

How does the placement of an image influence its message, power and relevance? If environments affect social space, how does what we put in our environment manipulate the thoughts and conversations we have and the actions we take?

MONUMENTAL GRAFFITI

WE HAVE MAINTAINED A SILENCE CLOSELY RESEMBLING STUPIDITY is translated from the 1809 revolutionary proclamation by the Junta Tuitiva, who led a revolution in La Paz (modern Bolivia), marking the beginning of South America’s liberation from the Spanish Crown²⁵.

Roberts’ graffiti can be read in multiple ways; as a legacy, a last accusatory statement, a reminder to engage through a call to action or as a disjunctive presence among the statues, memorials and monuments of Pakaitore Moutoa Gardens, symbolic as they are of a particular and one-sided view of men, war and victory.

Neil Roberts identified with anti-authoritarian philosophies²⁶ and was influenced by Russian anarchist Bakunin, the founder of ‘collectivist anarchism’ defined as the abolition of state and private ownership. Roberts’ act of graffiti could be seen as anti-monumentalist, a vainglorious manifesto, a subversive message defacing a toilet wall, or an inspirational call to incite a revolution²⁷ by a serious and resolute man. Roberts, an anti­ hero who called himself ‘Null’ (possibly a witty combination of the New Zealand accent and nihilism) had tattooed on his chest THIS PUNK WON’T SEE 23. NO FUTURE²⁸. Is it possible to be idealistic and nihilistic at the same time?

Anti-monumentalism denies the presence of an imposing, authoritative social force in public space²⁹; anti-monuments as artworks have been described as actions or performances which reject ideas of elitist monuments as emblems of power³⁰. Although an anarchist and activist rather than an artist, Roberts’ act turns the idea of monumentalism on its head; his words echoing past revolutionaries and ‘memorialising’ his own actions, yet graffiti-ed on a toilet wall rather than inscribed in marble on a plaque.

RE-ITERATION

Neil Roberts’ graffiti, bombing and death has instigated research and writings by academics, friends, punks and reporters; with further graffiti³¹ poems, blog posts, anniversary ‘punkfest’ festivals³² memorial picnics and gatherings³³, Guy Fawkes parties and a 1984 short film The Maintenance of Silence³⁴. In this work, Shelton re-positions Roberts’ final public statement by re-inserting the name and memory of Neil Roberts in the contemporary public consciousness.

The removal of Roberts’ graffiti-ed statement during the post-bombing clearing of the site helped to eradicate his act from the place of Pakaitore Moutoa Gardens and Wairere House. After a time, this extreme act of protest was absorbed into the shadows of this landscape. Thirty years later, almost to the night, fleeting moments of explosions in the dark sky were recorded as Shelton orchestrated the re-writing of Roberts’ graffiti with sparklers. These photographs of delicate explosions capture the time-lapsed performative act of writing this text, each word sparking and hovering as a separate image in a glossy black void.

Photographs capture a moment, or several moments, in time. Placing these captured moments/images as signs along a road stretches them out into the landscape as constant instances of motionlessness³⁵. Clearly visible, yet glimpsed fleetingly while travelling somewhere, Shelton cleverly plays with the time of a journey, the time of a photograph, the time of a thought process.

Interrupting the roadside verges of Midhirst, Shelton places this work as deliberately as Roberts’ did, inserting these elegiac, dissonant signs into a landscape people drive through every day. Placing any statement in a public space is a social act, aggressively or subtly changing the environment. The experience of this work in the landscape puts the viewer in the same physical place as Roberts was on his last journey to Whanganui, this phrase seeping into the consciousness of passers-by that inhabit the space, possibly stirring responses of curiosity, intrigue, rejection, dismissal or agreement.

Sequential road signs spelling out advertising verses were popularly used by American company Burma-Shave from the mid 1920s. Often subversive, witty, political and sometimes incorporating road safety messages³⁶, these signs turned America’s highways into sites of poetry and humour³⁷. The time and duration needed
to read and remain engaged with the signs, the captive audience of road users, and the catchy slogans were instrumental to the signs’ popularity.

Roadside signs also integrate information, warnings and instructions into the landscape and are located specifically to register in the traveller’s and driver’s consciousness, to alter their immediate thoughts and behaviour. Shelton’s re-location of Roberts’ graffiti-ed statement as highway billboards plays between the locale­ specific languages of advertising and road safety signs. Rather than an Orwellian instruction or advertising gimmick, one can’t help but read Shelton’s project in relation to current debates around increasing global surveillance and governmental access to citizens’ data.

DOUBLETHINK

The term ‘doublethink’ was coined by George Orwell in his dystopian novel 1984 to describe a method of directly controlling thought, ensuring the continual supremacy of a totalitarian, invasive super-state³⁸. The power of holding two contradictory beliefs in one’s mind simultaneously and accepting both of them without conflict³⁹, ‘doublethink’ is also a verb, a potential instruction for us to ‘think again’; and a term that can be related to Shelton’s use of doubled and reversed images in her earlier photographic landscape works.

The sceptre-like ‘Wanganui Computer’ had a certain power; at the time, locals wanted to ignore the fact the computer was there. The city, to some extent, turned its back on its existence⁴⁰. Collectively, people have become inured to today’s television reality shows with a benevolent and authoritarian-at-whim Big Brother. We are now contending with surveillance cameras in our everyday lives. Our personal information is held on unseen servers, and Big Brother’s Big Brother: the omnipresent, never-sleeping, all-scanning, multi-headed programs such as Prism and Five Eyes that pose a gross intrusion on the privacy of citizens, literally able to watch people’s ideas form as they type⁴¹. As American computer specialist and National Security Agency whistleblower Edward Snowden has stated: “We were actually involved in misleading the public and misleading all the publics, not just the American public, in order to create a certain mindset in the global consciousness … but the structures of power that exist are working to their own ends to extend their capabilities at the expense of the freedom of all publics”⁴².

Under the amendments passed in August 2013 to Aotearoa New Zealand’s fundamentally flawed⁴³ Government Communications Security Bureau and Related Legislation Amendment Bill, the apparently all-encompassing new definition of ‘information infrastructure’ enables pervasive domestic and foreign intelligence gathering. Records of everyday communication activity of Aotearoa New Zealand citizens are potentially available for the scrutiny of the Government Communications Security Bureau, aided by the vastly-enlarged scope of the interception capability and security regime provided for in the Telecommunications Interception Capability Act⁴⁴. As anthropologist, author and New Zealander of the Year, Dame Anne Salmond stated at a public meeting on 25 July 2013: “A series of laws have been passed that threaten the rights of New Zealanders” and “Democracy trusts the people, dictatorship does not”⁴⁵.

Twenty-four hours after Aotearoa New Zealand saw nationwide protests on 27 July 2013 against the GSCB and TICS Bills, Shelton’s artist talk at the Sarjeant Gallery in Whanganui was being live- tweeted 6 joining this nationwide debate.

Twitter, with its ability to remain somewhat anonymous, has cultivated a reputation for aggressive defence of its users’ privacy and is conspicuous by its absence from Prism’s provider list. Prism began collecting Facebook content in March 2009⁴⁶. Ironically, there is now a Facebook page for Neil Roberts.

doublethink appears at a moment when the context for debate and protest is most urgent and relevant. Shelton’s project connects unique geographical, discursive, virtual and social spaces⁴⁷ re-positioning Roberts’ philosophy and anarchistic protest against unfolding revelations of the insidious surveillance citizens now face.

ANARCHY PEACE THINKING

Neil Roberts raged against the machine; his target for his act of bombing and suicide a giant, Orwellian computer holding criminal and other data of the citizens of Aotearoa New Zealand. The emerging Muldoon-ist ‘police-state’ feared a potential anarchist Guy-Fawkesian uprising against the government, and increased security around parliament⁴⁸. However, there was no such organisation⁴⁹, the government inquest into Roberts death concluded he had acted alone and committed a ‘bizarre act of self-destruction’⁵⁰. His graffiti was erased as a matter of course by a contractor to the then River City Council in Whanganui 52.

It seems an arcane idea now; the interconnectedness of information in the 21st century having since rendered lone acts of technological destruction useless. Now, people who act do so within the system, fighting for freedom and rights, against policy and control – not physical machines.

Ⓐ and the email @ are both the letter A with a circle around them. Doublethink that.

Published on occasion of the exhibition
Ann Shelton: doublethink
28 September 2013 - 2 February 2014 for the Govett-Brewster Art Gallery,
New Plymouth, Taranaki, Aotearoa New Zealand
© 2013 Govett-Brewster Art Gallery, the artist, writer and contributors.
Apart from any fair dealing for the purpose of private study, research, criticism or review as permitted under the Copyright Act, no part may be reproduced without prior permission of the publisher.