Review: Dummies & Doppelgängers, by Felicity Milburn

Dummies and Doppelgängers by Felicity Milburn: a catchy title, and a highly enjoyable book, even if you can’t make it to the corresponding exhibition in Christchurch Art Gallery Te Puna O Waiwhetū. Ranging through amusing, challenging, and confronting, the book holds a gentle touch and an inviting physicality.

The book is made up of relatively short, easy to read texts interposed with images of selected works from the exhibition, which is also curated by the author. There is commentary from Milburn, as well as essays, an original poem, and words from some of the artists themselves.

Books produced for exhibitions act as a contextual support. Texts assist art enthusiasts to access and explore the ideas in the artwork, and offer a take-home resource for gallery viewers, a way to remind themselves and re-engage with the work and ideas they encountered. In a best case scenario, the book will also stand alone as a creative work in its own right.

Dummies and Doppelgängers certainly succeeds in this respect; from the start it is pleasing to both the eyes and fingers with a woven textile hard cover and shiny contrasting inlaid title. Flick randomly through the pages and you’ll find an abundance of high-quality colour images depicting, for the most part, delightfully creepy artworks. The back-cover blurb tells us Milburn 'takes a lively look at assumed identities in contemporary art from Aotearoa New Zealand and Australia. Full of humour, surprise and heart, Dummies and Doppelgängers explores what it means to be human.'

As the title hints, the overall concept revolves around the less apparent aspects of what’s happening inside us in our human experience, through artistic use of the 'proxy identity', or stand-in. If you wanted to get Freudian you might throw the term 'uncanny' in there. The works on display are bursting with that push-pull quality we encounter when we see something that echoes with intimate familiarity – uncomfortably so. Their vulnerability is at times magnetic, challenging and powerful; being a human with other humans is not straightforward or easy, and we are soft, fallible creatures with many, many feelings. Plenty of us will be familiar with the work of Ronnie van Hout from his piece Quasi (2016) which has been displayed on top of art galleries in both Ōtautahi Christchurch and Pōneke Wellington, to a diverse range of opinion from the public. Whether you love it, or love to hate it, it certainly got people talking about art and their feelings.

Not all the work featured in the book is as easy to digest as the Quasi series. The photographic work Taniwha (2020) by Tia Ranginui is a response to the intentional twisting of certain Māori myths into pro-colonial alternative theories, in order to undermine the authenticity of Māori as tangata whenua. Although the artwork holds a playful and surreal power in its imagery, it also directly confronts some very uncomfortable home truths that exist in Aotearoa today.

When subject matter is discomforting like this – playful imagery or no - it can be easy to slip into a romantic or cynical mindset, depending on your state of mind or current affairs at the time. Milburn helps us out here and sets the tone with a sensitive, grounded sense of humour, something much of the art in the text also offers.

'We’re taught as children not to stare, yet anyone who has shared a changing room with a wide-eyed toddler knows how strongly that runs against our natural inclination... So when artists deploy the human form, and imbue it with the suggestion of consciousness, they offer us the rare opportunity to look until we’ve had our fill, far longer and closer than good manners allow.'

In this way, Milburn invites us to take a light-hearted approach to ourselves: 'for now, let’s start at the mirror and work our way out.' She uses relatable mundane experiences to remind us how art reaches right through the constrictive social rules we live by, to access our deeper more existential fears and desires. We see that others also hold deep fears and desires – and that sometimes it’s okay to stare, and okay to laugh at ourselves.

The book also contains text from some of the artists. This is refreshing, given that much of what we normally read about art comes from critics, dealers and promoters, and curators. It’s great to read more than brief quotes, direct from the source, within the context of a curated publication. Louisa Afoa’s words about her magnificent photo-image artwork Blue Clam (2018) ring with honesty and allow us generous insight into her personal experience and creative process: 'I always try to approach documentary with ‘a lens of love’, and it was difficult to use that same lens on myself.'

So whether you’re able to get to the exhibition in Ōtautahi Christchurch or not, don’t worry, this book will give you a highly satisfactory experience along with plenty of feelings. Leave it in your living space where all your friends and loved ones get to enjoy it too. Sam Dollimore is an exhibiting artist, art lover, and long time book enthusiast based in Porirua, Aotearoa.