Please Don’t Go
Please Don’t Go
Peter Robinson, KC and the Sunshine Band, & March’s Angel-of-the-Month
“I want to give you a problem,” Peter tells me, laughing, on the boat back from Waiheke. It's dark and drizzling by the time we step off, catching a cab up to his studio at Samoa House. Safely inside, under the florescent lights, Peter turns on sugary synthy pop, KC and the Sunshine Band — Everybody wants you / Everybody wants your love. Without a word he methodically sets up, ripping a sheet of A1 paper from the pad, carrying it across the room onto a low table. One hand holds a stick of charcoal, the other presses down, securing the paper. He closes his eyes and carefully writes out the day's date in a sequence of lines slightly overlapping, a gently mis-registered “20 November 2022”. Watching him, the nonsense chorus, Na-na, na-na, na-na, na-na-na-na now! Baby, give it up!, becomes a kind of manifesto: give up control, give up visuality, give up your ideas about of art — whatever it is you’re clinging to, just give it fucking up.
Before he finishes the song changes to the slow jam, Babe / I love you so / I want you to know / That I’m gunna miss your love…It’s just so good. I flash to a little low-rent pilgrimage I took to a park in Hialeah a few years ago, where the Sunshine Band formed in 1973. “KC Park,” as it is officially named, turned out to be just a strip of manicured lawn with a few palm trees, benches and a stone walk. There’s no statue or anything, but still, it seems like a slightly better world knowing it’s there. I’m shaken out of this reverie when Peter abruptly balls the sheet up in his two hands. He then walks to a table and grabs a plastic one gallon ziplock bag and puts it inside, giving it to me. The song is still in the middle, he’s closing up and turns it off, and it feels like Don’t Go is playing forever inside the crumbled volume of the drawing. The whole event — less than five minutes.
The next day I fly home from Auckland, eighteen hours direct, with the drawing stuffed into the corner of my suitcase. Unpacking it, realizing the “problem” is now what to do with it. Does one flatten it back out, take to the framer and have it floated, the charcoal smeared, to show off this drawing by the eminent New Zealand artist Peter Robinson? Or tack it up on the wall with a kind of devastating understatement, the way I saw so many of these works displayed in his studio? For the moment this one is sitting on the bookshelf, an object in a bag so close to being trash, denying access to the markings that make it special, instead keeping it as an event, a presence and an absence, a meeting and a parting, a reminder: Please don't leave me, baby, please don’t go…
And now, without further ado, I’m proud to announce March’s Angel-of-the-Month:
