Exhibition

Kingsley Baird

31 May – 20 September 2015

Kingsley Baird Gallipoli & Serve: a new recipe for sacrifice

Gallipoli Gallipoli (2015) is the first in a new series of ‘memorial’ artworks by the artist concerned with conflict from antiquity to the present. These 'still life' sculptures draw on personal history as well as fine arts, literature, and popular culture. Gallipoli conflates Ancient Greek and New Zealand martial mythology located in the Aegean. The sculpture comprises a bronze lemon squeezer hat and Lego ‘Trojan Horse’. The hat is physically representative of the Gallipoli peninsula of flat plains and razor-sharp hills. Its extended, pinched peak also references exaggeration, tales of heroism and superhuman efforts, and a child’s perspective.

Colonel William Malone, commander of the Wellington Rifles at Gallipoli, is said to have adopted the lemon squeezer for his troops because it reminded him of the mountain near where he lived, Taranaki-Egmont. The badge of the Taranaki Rifles (which was under Malone’s command) depicts Mt Taranaki.

The Lego Trojan Horse connects Anzac mythology with a much earlier tale from Homer’s times, set across the Dardanelles at Ilium. It also alludes to childhood war toys and games from antiquity to the present.

The sculpture is made from bronze, a material associated with antiquity and warfare. Serve: a new recipe for sacrifice Serve: a new recipe for sacrifice (2010) is an exhibition comprising 2 sculptures, 'Picnic' and

'Serve'. 'Serve' consists of 13 steel WWI mess tin replicas, New Zealand soldier cookie cutters, soldier Anzac biscuits, and gold leaf. 'Picnic' is a wooden trestle table, with 13 bronze World War 1 'Brodie' helmets, silver leaf, iron oxide, and natural rope fibre. The exhibition was first shown at the National Army Museum, Waiouru, in 2010. Serve: a new recipe for sacrifice' is an example of the artist's 'New Memorial Forms' project in which he critiques conventional notions of a memorial through the themes of ‘consumption’ of martial sacrifice, and Anzac mythology and its celebration / commemoration in the formation of national identity. These themes are investigated ‘cross-culturally’ through the conflation of military and Christian symbolism, and the aesthetic ‘beauty’ of war. Exhibiting Serve originally in National Army Museum was integral to the interpretation of the works: the formation of New Zealand’s national identity is essentially intertwined with involvement in external conflicts, the primary focus of the army museum. Central to the expression of the exhibition’s meaning was direct public involvement: by purchasing and consuming soldier-shaped Anzac biscuits from the museum cafeteria, it was intended to reveal the responsibility and complicity of individual citizens in the human cost of war. Picnic , Serve , and Gallipoli are intended as portents, warning that pride in sacrifice and heroism of the past should not be used to encourage nationalist tendencies and overseas escapades in the present.