1988 Impossible Dialogue

Media: painted plate steel.

At the end of the Dowse residency and exhibition, parrot poles taken down and packed away, a trailer filled with various figures irreverently stacked, there remained the problem of the transition from teaching to full time artist.

Although some of Paul’s concerns with monumentality and weather endurance had been solved, there were commercial issues that were not much changed. Two of the works from the Dowse show were gifted to friends over time, one work, Fury in the Garden went on to the MAG show in the following year, and was sold at cost, but largely the show was dismantled and destroyed.

Impossible Dialogue was considered the most durable of the artworks for a public site, made of a greater thickness of steel so stronger and with only one rod with its single parrot attached so less vulnerable to vandals. It was also favoured in aesthetics, artistically probably the most successful of this body of works. Paul was reluctant to cull the work. A solution of sorts came with an arts festival at the Palmerston North Teachers’ College which Paul had set up on a yearly basis at the school. The idea of the festival was to get artists onto the campus to interact with students. It involved all matter of different arts - buskers, performers in music and theatre, storytellers and educationalists giving performances and visual artists, sculptors primarily, who were paid to come down to the College for a week or so, and build works on the grounds, often using student help, which would then be left behind. Artists that came included, in various years, Jeff Thomson and Warren Viscoe.

Paul proposed Impossible Dialogue could become a part of this on-going Collection that the College was building up, if the cost of his materials could be covered (a sum of $1000). This didn’t go simply, with local controversy entering the discussion, the mayor speaking out against such spending in Council meetings and reported in various articles in the local newspaper (The Manawatu Standard). The matter was eventually settled, with the Teachers’ College funding it without Council help and it was installed on the student quadrant as part of this collective grouping of sculptural works. Deepwater, another work from the Dowse show, was later added in one area of the concord on a unspecified permanent loan.

Impossible Dialogue had the right pitch for a student campus. The figure strides in energetic enthusiasm while maintaining a madcap dialogue with a parrot perched on a rod that springs from the figure’s abdomen. The simplified face with demonic smile, seems to shout or laugh in jubilation with his excited conversation, arms stretched as if actively demonstrating some political argument. The figure has three legs so stands on a tripod, a practical way to balance the work, but also giving the futurist sense of movement to further add to the frenetic energy of the piece. The fact that his companion, that he talks to is a parrot, makes the work into a parody or jest.

Unfortunately, the sculpture wasn’t well received by everyone. A group from the College library saw within it instead an attitude of male dominance, the long rod that the parrot perched on they took to be phallic, and they mounted a petition for its removal. Paul was bewildered by the response, and the argument kicked around for a while. An episode of drunken students pulling the pole out of shape, sealed the deal, leading him to re-structure the support by instead projecting a shorter stand from an arm, alleviating both concerns.

The work became something of a maintenance problem though – several times we repainted it, on site, never able to get it integrated into the institution’s maintenance systems. There were early days for sculpture in New Zealand and people hadn’t yet figured out the practical details of outdoor art. Basically put gardeners did the gardens, building maintenance looked after the buildings and ground areas and sculpture seemed to fall outside everyone’s job description.

The Teachers’ College campus was eventually shut down, the courses, in altered form, moved to the main Massey campus and they became the new official owners of the art. Impossible Dialogue was put into storage for several years until finally, in 2016, led by local gallerist Bronwyn Zimmerman, it was properly repainted using tough industrial baked spray-paint and reinstalled in a new site outside the Humanities building. There it sits today, still in animated conversation.