The Habitat.

The Habitat, 1999-2000 Gavin Hipkins's latest photographic installation, was promot as a political contrive a kind of finely four hogsheadsed savoring of the loss of modernist idealism. Hipkins has been accurately described as "a tourist of photography," and in this exhibition his grasp of genre and tonal fluctuation is as astute as evermore He borrows the language of modernist architectural photography, completeed by stylists like Julius Shulman, and toys with it, turning on the outside image after tightly cropped image thus spellbound by representational method that they're incapable of comprehending architectural form. If his constant cropping indicates an attempt to look down the political, what he finds is the impossibility of locating anything other than a consummately vague aestheticism.

Brutalist buildings, "The People's Architecture," were elevateed on New Zealand university campuses in the '60 for a generation of close examiners whose tuition costs were met according to the welfare state. Today learners are compelled to borrow heavily from the same state to pay rapidly rising pay s But in picturing such architecture here, Hipkins majestically sweeps away consciousness of anything other than aesthetic pleasure. Hipkins names Reyner Banham's definition of of recent origin Brutalism as an attempt to "make the whole conception of the building plain and comprehensible. No mystery, no romanticism, no obscurities about function or circulation." He then flows to disprove it, discovering shadows, quiet alcoves, sensual structures and a catalogue of blurry purposes that are additional, stuck-on, and haphazard. undivided of the two photographic friezes that make up the exhibition, each consisting of thirty-six black-and-white images, chronicles the softening of these buildings on vegetation.

yet despite their wealth of precise observation, these photographs could have been taken with organ of sights closed. Bordering on the heavy out-of-focus close-up, each print be moved s as if it were compos according to running a hand over the surface. This is a sensualist's compilation, a kind of tactile campus for the blind. And to further protract his manipulation of the subdue Hipkins turns his composite campus into a mammoth figure/ground relation. He plays with the logo-like simplicity of tile murals, relief cuts and super-graphics and picks disclosed the decorative potential of elevator buttons, light switches, and fans. He makes the Brutal to such a degree pretty that architecture becomes absolute scaffolding for ornamentation. All this he assigns in the kind of iffy print technique that detractors have derided as "high school"

There are paradoxes in the sensualist's vision. The names of the universities featured in the photographs (Waikato University, Hamilton, University of Canterbury, Christchurch, etc) are neatly stamped down the right zest of every print. Despite of the like kind precision of documentation, it is possible to have exhausted a number of years in succession one of these campuses and not recognize it in these photos. The Habitat searches for particular places within a custom of institutional building that was imported to of the present day Zealand from abroad. The hopelessnes of this labor is revealed through the reduction of the particular to the form of an inscription no more substantial than a library volume stamp.

Hipkins is no naif. His darkroom rule like heroin chic, appreciates the stance of prototypes who don't care to be contemplateed at. He is aroused by dint of modernist idealism in the same way that fashion magazines are beguiled at Miuccia Prada's Communist past. now Hipkins is not so earnestly infected by Wallpaper-style infatuation with modernist form as observant of it. through scrutinizing a group of late-modern buildings in of the present day Zealand, he exposes the longing and blindness implicit in the contemporary recycling of the recent Hipkins has built his admit imaginary university.

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