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I like to think of Alex Monteith as a stunt artist. Not the conventional film industry kind, and not the Mike Parr body politic kind either, but nonetheless, an artist who demonstrates a pointed assessment of risk, and a desire to play with the conventional rules of physics. Monteith’s works take performance into an expanded field of activity.
She describes her on-site performance at a Taranaki surf beach as ‘a large-scale performance intervention’. Breathlessly announcing the work to me on the phone before the event, Monteith is full of enthusiasm; the art jargon and surf jargon collide. The location is a beach west of New Plymouth. It is a dramatic black sand beach, peppered by the ‘sugar loaf’ islands, which create an enduring surf break.
Monteith interrupted the normal course of a six day surfing festival by customising the Expression Session, what you might think of as the freestyle surfing contest. Her midday intervention was leveraged off the presence of the world’s best professional female surfers who were in the region for The Subaru Pro. The festival was the third in a series of six international contests that comprise the Association of Professional Surfers Dream Tour circuit. Her work, entitled Chartwell Red Session Expression Session 2011, was an integral part of the Festival during which a series of titles were contested, including the New Zealand Women’s Open and Junior National titles.
Monteith’s point was to challenge the parameters for performance art—making her work a competitive contest outside of sanctioned institutionalised art spaces. Enthusiasts viewed the work from the beach or the carparks, but the documentation brings another dimension to her interventions. The video footage and stills that Monteith assiduously