Boundless Energy: Ashlin Raymond and Zhoe Granger

Collapsing art into public relations brand-building, Granger and Raymond’s “Auckland based PR firm” PB PR—under whose umbrella the exhibition was presented—rubs at commonsensical notions of what it means to be a cultural agent today, suggesting not just the futility of resisting corporate-speak but rethinking it as a source of personal empowerment.

The centrepiece of the show is undoubtedly the very HD video work Boundless Energy. Depicting Granger and Raymond in various states of rejuvenation, relaxation and energisation to a soundtrack of breakbeat hardcore rave, the video explores the relationship between empowerment and the objects and images that help us attain it. The motifs deployed will be familiar to anyone who has ever felt the peculiarly advertorial combination of abstracted motivation/inspiration and the pressure to surpass yourself that are seemingly codified into the majority of corporate, bureaucratic and even cultural communications. Yoga, a cellphone conversation on-the-go, vitamin pills and a revitalising splash of water to the face all evoke the constantly-projected busyness, radiance and health that is essentially a prerequisite for survival in an era of public relations.

From the swirling, crystalline blue vortex that bookends the video, to the aforementioned water on the face, liquids and fluids are constantly referenced in Boundless Energy. This is even more the case in the installation Working To Create A Sensation of Infinite Freedom, Energy + Passion, which dominates the small gallery space and consists of a bowl of vitamins on a glass coffee table, ottomans and bottles of Kiwi Blue mineral water dotting the floor. Finally, the easily overlooked print No Smoke and Mirrors Here is comprised of the repetition of an abstract shape that could only be a corporate logo of some kind, coloured with aqua blues.

As a recurring motif, water—much like the brands that are attached to it—takes on a quasi-mystical quality in Granger and Raymond’s hands. A source of vitality and inspiration, branded bottled water is both natural and packaged, and indeed through the wonders of its branding is made more pure, more natural. Much like the vitamin pills freely dispensed at the opening, water is ingested to enhance performance, to transcend the bodily limitations (dehydration, etc) that constantly threaten to obstruct the optimisation of our social and cultural performances.

Taken as a whole, the exhibition proposes a redefinition of social and cultural agency that elides any clear distinction between, say, an art practice and other cultural practices such as advertising. Rather, all such forms of cultural practice are collapsed into exercises in personal brand building, unified by the amorphous concepts of ‘inspiration’, ‘freedom’ and ‘passion’. In doing so, the show highlights the body as the site through which this vague corporate language is absorbed, reflected in the images of ingestion its objects (vegetables, vitamin pills, bottled water) evoke, and then translated as the enhancement of personal performance. The result is an all-too contemporary blurring of the natural and unnatural, where optimal physical health is not only obtainable, but readily augmented through the language of branding and PR. Cultural agency is a feeling, once the social has been wholly absorbed by the corporate.