“Sculpture is something you bump into when you back up

to see a painting,” Barnett Newman said in the 1950s. But for Antje Barke, it was a stock shelf that ended up falling on her 

head.

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Central to her exhibition Needs is a shelving unit symbolic of the stock shelf that caused Barke’s near fatal accident at the back of her workplace in 2021. Near death experiences are often cause for reflection on one’s life - what was the point of Barke dedicating her time and labour, if not to just scrape by the barely affordable rents in central Auckland, and especially when it might kill her? We can witness these reflections on Barke’s mortality in the strenuous labour and time marked across the rigorously sanded and polished shelves. The shelves are stripped of their original paint job, and with it their personality and history. Needs’ shelves stand like a skeletal, sanitised representation of an aggressively erased history.

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At the beginning of 2018 the University of Auckland

announced its plans to close its Creative Industries

libraries, including the Elam School of Fine Arts library, one of the richest collections and resources of artistic knowledge and practice in Aotearoa. Artists, students and members from the wider community protested the closure, however to no avail. In response, students eventually collectivised and founded an alternative community fine arts library that is now known as Samoa House Library on Karangahape Road.

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The shelving central to Needs is shelving that was discarded by the Elam School of Fine Arts library during its closure. Barke has collected, mended and repurposed these shelves, and in the process sanded off every mark of their identity: every scratch and ding, or words graffitied into the side of the shelves. What once housed books of artistic knowledge now reflect in their shiny new surface an audience lacking decent artistic resources and education. Barke’s shelving unit in Needs, then, is a kind of monument to absence, especially an absence of resources, knowledge and education for art purveyors in Tāmaki Makaurau.

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Despite their shiny newness and sanitation, the shelves are comfortable and familiar, since their form is recognisable from the past. Needs elicits the model of evolution, with Barke’s shelves yearning to be recognised simultaneously as they once were and as they are now, as the same. We stare at the reflective surface of the shelving and think that we both do and don’t know what the sculpture is.

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Perhaps Needs is indeed a monument, which means the shelving units should be a commemorative representation. There might also be a mediation between their actual site and what is being represented. However, given multiple versions of the shelving can still be found in libraries, museums and galleries, the logic of the monument is not so true. The failure of Needs as a monument is also encoded onto the surface of the work: the shelves have been rigorously sanded and stripped back to the point of inoperation.

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Needs therefore enters the space of what Rosalind Krauss terms the negative condition - a sitelessness, or homelessness, an absolute loss of place. The shelves are pure negativity, and reveal to us the problem of explanation, only possible to locate them in terms of what they are not. Thus, Barke encourages us to move away from thinking through history, and to explore the conditions of possibility.