Simon Denny
“The Founder’s Paradox” was Simon Denny’s first solo exhibition in his native New Zealand since 2014. For this ambitious project, the artist commandeered the entire gallery space for a complex of interrelated floor- and wall-based works that riff on classic board games to address a new chapter in his ongoing dissection of the intertwining of technology, neoliberal ideology, and capitalism, and of its consequences for the individual and the nation-state. The exhibition took New Zealand as a test case for a mythic struggle between libertarian and social-democratic values and, in the show’s most reflexive moment, for a self-analysis in which Denny acknowledges his connection to a local artistic lineage and hints at the dilemma of his own entanglement in the systems he anatomizes. “The Founder’s Paradox” spoke of origins and destiny with an unexpectedly personal caveat about artistic agency caught between innovation and redundancy.
Denny’s modus operandi was elegantly evident. He begins by choosing his subject, this time in collaboration with writer and journalist Anthony Byrt, a regular contributor to Artforum. They selected Peter Thiel, an early Facebook investor, a cofounder of PayPal and big-data start-up Palantir, and an arch-libertarian and venture capitalist who has identified New Zealand as a suitable bolt-hole, gaining citizenship and buying land in the picturesque, remote, and relatively unpopulated South Island. For Denny, Thiel is archetypal: a Silicon Valley entrepreneur whose future-oriented thinking offers a chilling vision of the “sovereign individual” and who seeks to live beyond the reach of government or society, perhaps even beyond the bounds of earthly existence and the span of biological life. Against him and others of his ilk, Denny identified a suitable adversary: Max Harris, author of The New Zealand Project (2017), which argues for a reinvestment in the nation state, social democracy, and the politics of love. Then Denny identified a format to carry his content. Here it was party games: Ascent, Catan, Descent, Founders, The Game of Life, Jenga, Operation, and Twister. Denny has brilliantly co-opted these amusements, rewriting their rules, redrawing their characters, and reimagining their settings to convey the artist’s real-world research in scaled-up versions that double as paintings and sculptures. Next, Denny outsources production: in this case, to his preferred designer, David Bennewith (who designed the catalogue); Shenzhen’s painters for hire; and a raft of fabricators and technicians tasked with replicating the games’ various elements down to the smallest counter or playing card. Finally, Denny distributes his pieces in a gallery’s spaces as a single ensemble made up of discrete elements. Exploiting Michael Lett’s architecture—a converted bank complete with a brick-walled vault in a dungeon-like basement—the artist used the entry level to arrange his versions of games, such as Twister and pick-up sticks (the latter a bronze scatter piece by his art-school teacher Michael Parekowhai), that represented collectivity as a mode of intimate cooperation. Downstairs, in Thiel’s domain, he set out the dastardly board games dedicated to competition and accumulation.
The exhibition’s coda was Operation, 2017, a life-size cast of the artist’s full body dressed in black Nike clothing and presented in a coffinlike crate. Here, Denny reconceives Hasbro’s eponymous battery-operated game, in which players compete to extract organs without triggering an alarm, so that his torso contains not heart and lungs, but a cracked iPhone and a dead Kindle. Pitched to an audience who knows where he comes from, this piece takes an autobiographical turn to implicate and embed the post-internet artist as prey to the very “operations” that are his stock-in-trade. Such self-reflection is new to the artist’s practice. In a system of rapid and disruptive change, Denny may be searching for a reparative purpose that might make sense of the momentum of his artistic trajectory.