Daivd Cross is intrigued by the Mangano Twins in Wellington

Gabriella and Silvana Mangano
Square 2, Wellington City Gallery
Curated by Andrea Bell
19 October - 15 November 2009

If…so…then, DVD, 2006 duration 7 minutes 44 seconds
Falling Possibilities, DVD, 2009 duration 20 minutes 30 seconds looped

I am as guilty as the next person in often treating the Square 2 screens at City Gallery as entranceway eye candy. It’s partly the glare that bounces off the monitors during daylight hours that renders sustained viewing challenging and there is also the not insignificant issue of wind literally pushing you in to the more hermetic confines of the gallery foyer. While not the carefully sanitised environment we often expect for engaging with video, Square 2 has been quietly developing a more ambitious programme under the direction of Abby Cunnane and the recent work has warranted pushing through the discomfort barrier.

Melbourne-based curator Andrea Bell has put together a suite of works by Australian artists, including Gabriella and Silvana Mangano and Laresa Kosloff whose practices while based in video have strongly performative bases. While Kosloff’s work is yet to screen, there is a very interesting overlay of her quietly manic abstract sculptures invaded by human bodies with the Mangano sisters’ deceptively simple choreographed actions. Both involve the performance of acts in which the artist’s (Kosloff, hidden underneath her Ellsworth Kelly inspired costumes) are front and centre. What also connects these projects is the idea of performance as an activity heavily mediated by rules, guidelines and, crucially, constraints, leading to the staging of repetitive actions where there is a genuine tension between individual agency and instrumentality.

The Mangano sisters are twins who over a series of works since 2002 have investigated the im/possibilities of shared agency in the undertaking of certain tasks and gestures. Each work re-presents a basic setup of a stationary camera documenting in a completely straightforward way, their choreographed routines. In If…so…then, the sisters face off each other in a constrained corridor space. Dressed identically and with drawing implements in both hands they perform a series of movements that are part experimental dance, part gestural drawing and part adolescent girls’ playground game. The routine/process they enact is very compelling based on the curious symmetry of two ‘identical’ people mirroring each others action. Added to this is the fact that they are very good at seamlessly working together to make the routine flow. Very good but crucially, not perfect.

While it is easy to get lost in the rhythm of ducking, weaving and mark making, what is most interesting are the glitches, albeit small, in timing and movement. Undertaken in silence, the sisters watch each others actions with great concentration but like any synchronised activity small fissures of difference are continually woven into the system. The profundity of the work is that these small deviations - and they are very small - highlight subtle differences in each personality in the form of slightly different timing, touch and confidence. The sisterly dynamic is performed for us and it is fascinating catching the barest filaments of difference.

Falling Possibilities 2009 extends the investigation of choreographed action and drawing in space but with a more refined aesthetic. In this recent work the artists use a length of soft tape to move in and out of each other’s space almost as if they are weaving fabric. Unlike If…so…then which has a slightly gritty quality through its black and white, this work employs chiaroscuro for dramatic effect. While it does not play out the full suite of Baroque bells and whistles, the result is still suitably theatrical.

Yet in refining the aesthetic, the work is more formal and less psychologically tense than its predecessor. The ideas of shared decision making and Pollock-like gestural perfomativity are still there but it feels too refined. It is as if their increasingly honed working method has started to buff the rawer edges and they have at the same time become better at disguising the compelling idiosyncrasies prevalent in earlier pieces. Perhaps it is because they have a schtick, not a formula as such but a tight field of investigation that it is increasingly hard to unfold new layers. It will be interesting to see how they continue to explore what is a narrow but compelling premise for interrogating the idea of authorship.

Images are from top to bottom are from If…so…then (2009) and Falling Possibilities (2009). Courtesy the artists and City Gallery, Wellington.)

Captain Oates comes to Rangipo

S J Ramir: Journeys
Orexart
25 October - 14 November, 2009

Kiwiborn Melbourne-based video artist S J Ramir is presenting three short digital loops at ORex – using two plasma screens and one wall projection - and a row of eight framed 6 x 8 inch stills. Ramir is rapidly acquiring an international following. He works in the bleak landscape tradition developed by European filmmakers like Tarkovsky, Sokorov, Bergman and more recently Albert Serra, specialising in lonely figures of indeterminate gender slowly wandering in blizzardlike conditions through a hostile environment. Occasionally a silhouette of a building or quarry machinery looms up, or poles or other people. The mood is constant repetition, frustration and despair. Often filmed in the central North Island.

There is no music behind this emotionally intense but slow moving imagery. Only howling winds, some distant aircraft sounds, and muffled percussive thumping. The blurry colour is a dark greeny black with whispers of umber. The bleary distorted imagery is like that of very old film: constantly flickering, its contours undulating. Though solid, the barren ground ripples like the sea.

These grainy or misty films are clearly about mental states and connect with writers like Handke, Bernhard or Beckett in their sense of withdrawn psychic isolation. Yet they are not savagely excoriating. They deal in a plodding impedance of movement and are Romantic in the way this steadfast determination is accompanied by inner loneliness.

Distinguishing between the three films, The Passage has a solo figure struggled through a misty landscape, encountering the occasional shed. Departure is much more Pointillist, using clouds of tiny vertical bar bars that hover around the blobby figure like blowflies - higher in contrast and more abstract through the loss of middle tones (alluding also to those ghastly human silhouettes of atomised people found in Nagasaki), plus more shots of clouds and wind blowing through open fields. Our Voices Are Mute on the other hand has a line of eight meandering stragglers in a dusty haze, and the occasional little ghostly building glowing within looming dark hills.

This is a sensual atmospheric show, but not the overwhelming experience you'd get with say, Susan Norrie or Daniel Crooks, where the architecture of the space is seriously modified for their presentation. Two of the three Ramir moving images are small, and would be more effective if made more bodily immersive. Even the framed stills seem a little cramped, too much like domestic photos and not sufficiently like movie images. Nevertheless, it is exciting that Orexart has brought Ramir’s work to Auckland. It’s emotional and it's haunting, and it’s well worth a visit.

From top to bottom, the images are from The Passage (2009), Departure (2007), and Our Voices are Mute (2008).

Mark Amery reports on the big Wayne Youle survey at Pataka

Wayne Youle: 10 Down – A Survey Exhibition
Pataka Museum of Arts and Cultures, Porirua
Until 15 November

Rather than establish and then explore an aesthetic, Wayne Youle established a character - an identity and a role - which over the ten years his survey exhibition at Pataka covers, he has continued to play-act out and play up to.

Youle has refused to let any statement become three dimensional – all his works are like signs to be pushed over – as if he were a marksman taking target practice on a cardboard dummy. In Have You Seen This Man? (Why Yes in His Studio) from 2004 as cheap poster he presents rows of bad identikit images of his face with a range of wanted statements: ‘Wanted for being a shit stirrer’, ‘ Wanted for the apparent copying of some other artists fucking style’ ‘Wanted for impersonating a Maori artist’, Wanted for impersonating a Maori’ etc.

In actual fact the only person accusing him of anything is himself – his is a self-referential game using ploys long-used up in their offence value by other artists. A fantail perches on the head of an upended Walters’ koru stick. Tiki are presented in a range of colours as lollipops (are Rangi Kipa’s brightly coloured corian tikis still the rage?), Ricky Swallow’s skulls are also represented as lollipops - brought neatly into touch with the appropriation and collection of preserved Maori heads, mokomokai. Yet Youle’s touch is often as delightful, light and musical as that of the fantail.

Youle’s work is so very noughties (this is the most of-its-time survey show I can recall seeing) – what one can build with the empty husks of what others have left you. His recent eyeball constructions are clever DNA models that suggest the only personal aesthetic he has is one of treating the work of others like lego brick building blocks. Recently he’s extended that by making family crests from assemblages of others’ icons (notably from a constant influence over ten years, Peter Robinson). In a time when familiar objects and icons have been coming at us digitally faster and more repetitively, Youle has been a man to put a spin on it. With a furious Warholian work ethic, he’s our pop artist of the decade.

His aesthetic is slick and thin – like his pop art parent Dick Frizzell he relies on impeccable design technique, and on moving with the speed and wit of the adman: unapologetically and overtly picking over others’ ideas, and spinning them into smart, flat new combinations.

He plays at being the student – imitating, mixing and matching. This survey is a room of bold experiments, with few limits on the media or style he’ll co-opt. One of his favourite motifs (borrowed from another favoured teacher Michael Parekowhai) is the brightly-coloured Cuisenaire rod, used in the Atarangi method of teaching Maori. Like a very smart secondary school art portfolio, he acknowledges others have already broken the ground and that his job is to makes stamps of identity out of the familiar. One particularly throwaway work here is entitled Parekowhai Park, and I couldn’t help muse that if you wanted to design a contemporary New Zealand art themepark (a miniput course perhaps) Youle would be your first port of call.

There’s nothing remotely deep about a Wayne Youle show. In fact he delights in being profoundly shallow – bringing the contemporary into the realm of the popular. It’s all about surface and shadows. About being able to skate quickly across a slick surface to find fresh takes on the familiar and, like Peter Pan’s shadow, connect the man with the freewheeling imaginative playfulness of the boy. Youle fiddles with things and makes toys and emblems of them.

The arrangement of this survey is smart and says a lot about Youle’s practice. The work is numerous and arranged salon-like, swarming across the walls. It’s reminiscent of the cut and paste cornucopia of the internet - Youle’s own intranet. Just as Youle flattens his sources into placemats, this arrangement refuses to give shape or order to his oeuvre. It amounts to a wall of caught, mounted and stuffed trophies of the collector (a crest mounted set of plastic antlers features in one work, a wall of mokomokai in another).

Then again it could also be the photographs on the back wall of the marae, building on one of my favourite of Youle’s works, 12 Shades of Bullshit (featured in Prospect 2004). Here cameo images of Maori and Pakeha are thrown up flattened to blank shadows on the wall, as if from as slide projector, but in varying shades of brown. Like a dozen other works in this show, this piece demonstrates Youle can step outside of himself sometimes and deliver works with more complex resonances. Some of his most successful works are the less self-referential.

Another analogy for the exhibition hang is the tattoo parlour, with Youle the tattooist appropriating designs and grounding them in popular culture. In this way at its heart Youle’s work is about what we wear as badges of identity. Another favourite of his early work (with several featured here) is a series of brightly coloured Miss Maori New Zealand sashes – Miss Kaikohe 1974, Miss Waimangaroa 1955 - laid out like kowhaiwhai and American abstractionists stripes on the wall (or perhaps the fly curtain going into the fish’n’chip shop).

Presenting quantity over quality (there must be 100 works here) feels intrinsically part of Youle’s practice. You could make a show of brilliance out of this free for all, but he’s probably elected not to be edited. The survey constantly cheekily disrupts gallery expectations – acting like a 21st century advertiser in providing pop up messages in unexpected places.

That means there’s plenty of sloppy work here too. The recent large painting Stay Still… Don’t Move is simply stencil art painted up badly large. Other works like the video work Night Crawler goes off in new directions with little strong effect beyond clever craft. Much of Youle’s dalliances with photography I find ineffectual and unoriginal – from the misty ode to his maunga (a rip off of Natalie Robertson) to action figures copulating (perhaps a reference to his birth as a kind of toy action-man artist, knocking out work based on pre-existing models). Cruising the suburban streets, you sense in the past Youle’s been too busy moving onto the next thing to look back.

A school report statement in a recent work suggests Youle also is prepared to own such an approach: “Wayne shows an interest and flair for arts and crafts. His skill with macaroni and glitter is excellent. He has papermaché ability beyond compare’. This is stenciled large on hessian canvas, with a nod in its flat dry wit to Ronnie Van Hout. Yet it has an honest intelligence and wit that continues to tickle me.

A knockout recent solo show at Suite Gallery which is well represented here and which I’ve previously reviewed suggests however he’s been hitting the mark with increasing strength, able to balance different elements and ideas with more accomplishment. It’ll be interesting to see where Youle goes in the next ten years. In that whirl of borrowed imagery and cheap shots there’s a genuine interest in the complexity of truth and what we identify in.

Contesting finality

Julian Dashper
Sue Crockford
3 November - 22 November 2009

The eight works here from the late Julian Dashper are in a display he organised to close on Sunday November the 22nd - the same time that the 2009 Venice Biennale shuts down. This is because several of his works focus on a theme he established with a video made for a Film Archive exhibition in February. It records a sideways view down a darkened Venetian lane during the last 15 seconds of the previous Biennale. Dashper probably realised the current presentation would be a posthumous show, for there is a black, rueful humour in its ‘lastness’ fixation. The Biennale snippet he clearly saw as a grim simile for himself; these brief works, for the last few months of his life.

A possible sequence of the list of works goes like this. We have the Film Archive work – Untitled (the last 15 seconds of the last Venice Biennale) – a DVD. Then another DVD, Untitled (the last second of the last Venice Biennale), plus a clear 12 inch record of that same last second. And another related clear record, Untitled (Leaving Venice).

There is also a framed record cover of a third, unseen record, Untitled (Persuasive Percussion). The shape of that cover is mimicked by the three paintings on stretchers, lined up on one wall.

I much prefer these three paintings to the other ‘time’ work because they help the artist get away from himself. They let him forget he is Julian Dashper who is dying. Instead he is having fun with language, for the titles and carefully worded information in the catalogue listings are their point, not what’s on the wall.

Two of these paintings are identical twins, with identical tiles (Untitled) and both described as ‘acrylic on canvas’. However one has extra information. It is also described as ‘black on white square’ - suggesting the square canvas was painted white first, and then the internal, black, six-sided shape imposed. With its replica, the inner form could have been painted before the outside one, or simultaneously. Different processes at work: different sequences of paint application.

The third painting swaps tones within the application procedure to become ‘white on black square’. Its paint applied by Dashper himself or a tradesperson. It doesn’t matter. The preposition and the adjectives are the point. It is a foil to the second work, visually and in tonal details of process, as it is a different sort of method to the first.

These three paintings, with their interest in negative / presence, become parallels for LP covers that remain when the loved records they usually protect have gone. Artworks that make us wonder about their creator long after his driving ‘persuasively percussive’ life is over.

HMS on the Shin exhibition debate

mdickie asks about the Terry Urbahn film

Here is a review by Andrew Paul Wood of XXXXX XXXXXXXX's latest show in Christchurch

A great Place For boats Except in SW Winds
XXXXX XXXXXXXX
The Physics Room
21 October - 15 November 2009



The exhibition A Great Place for Boats Except in SW Winds at The Physics Room presents itself as an obscuratan enigma – the artist’s name is blacked out, but given the quasi-Beuysian use of asphalt, various Duchamp references, and the use of woven video tape leads me to confidently attribute the exhibition to Christchurch artist Scott Flanagan, who seems to be placing himself in the bloodline of Dada and Surrealism.

A Great Place consists of three separate installations that echo each other in the found/improvised nature and general poverty of their materials, and the autodidactically emphatic philosophical themes. The premise is straightforward enough: a self-referential meditation on the semiotics of communicating ideas. Art about art, by any other name, and a refutation of the history of modern art as conceived and presented as a chronological progression of enshrined stylistic innovations. That kind of deterministic and axiomatic teleology has no place in this show.

The smallest of these is The Uncarved Philosopher – a full black polythene rubbish bag (presumably filled with rubbish) perched on an ad hoc plinth of wood and chipboard discards. This is perhaps the least successful work, being that it is the bluntest and Flanagan is usually more subtle and thoughtful. It is uncertain whether this is meant to suggest that “all philosophy is bunk”, or the truth that philosophers from Plato to Heidegger carry some very unpleasant political baggage. It is, however, possible that this is some sort of parody of the earnestness of the European avant-garde of the early twentieth century – such groan-inducing puns were fairly typical of Dada. Indeed, the overall effect of the exhibition is as an individualised mend-and-make-do No. 8 wire variation on Kurt Schwitters’ Merzbau.

Codex is the large installation in the centre of the gallery space, an inverted raft (an Antipodean reference perchance?) constructed from refuse and suspended from the ceiling. The sail is woven from shredded texts and an ocean of sorts is alluded to by the complex woven grid of glossy black video tape stuck down to the gallery floor (rumoured to be old VHS porno) with pragmatic sticky tape – the resulting interference patterns give the impression of a crossword puzzle (a motif Flanagan used very successfully in works from earlier in the decade). Clearly this random information, rendered in inaccessible but suggestively ordered formats, has a symbolic value in the work. A codex is a primer key for ordering information, so perhaps this raft represents the fallibility of any attempt to apply order to apparently random and arbitrary information – but that is purely speculation on my part.

Against the far wall rests the third component work The Sign Laid Bare by its Logic, Even. The title is an obvious reference to Marcel Duchamp’s The Bride Stripped Bare By Her Bachelors (the “Large Glass”. The work consists of a large, deliciously tactile asphalt surface supported on a wooden armature. At the top of this structure is a photographic triptych depicting a book open on a passage about Colin McCahon, a demolition site – perhaps whence some of the materials used in these works were sourced, and some abandoned rail tracks. Scrawled across the asphalt like graffiti are the words “Ceci n'est pas Rrose Sélavy”. This is obviously an allusion to the Belgian Surrealist René Magritte’s painting La trahison des images (1928/9) – ‘the treachery of images’, depicting a tobacco pipe with the inscription “Ceci n’est pas une pipe”, ‘this is not a pipe’. It wasn’t a pipe, but a naturalistic painting of a pipe – an image, and The Sign Laid Bare is clearly not Rrose Sélavy or by Rrose Sélavy.

Rrose Sélavy was a drag persona adopted by Marcel Duchamp (it sounds like “Eros, c’est la vie” or ‘Eros, such is life’ in French, get it? Or possibly even “arroser la vie” –‘to make a toast to life’) in 1921, a pseudonym under which he constructed several assemblages. Flanagan (assuming of course that he is the artist) similarly has, in the past, adopted personae to work under (their names being anagrams of his own), and would appear to be constructing a genealogy for his own assemblages with Duchamp as an ancestor. And Magritte as well, for that matter, though more in terms of the Belgian’s impeccable semiotic logic rather than his style or medium. The juxtaposition strikes me as deliberately sophomoric.

It is quite possible that these allusions are simply pegs to hang the formal elements from, and that I am reading far too much into the references. On one level the Chinese Box-like system of allusions, the distancing mechanisms and feints are somewhat frustrating for the viewer – especially as they require a specialization of knowledge that would confound even the expert. At the most basic visual level, this ludic irreverence is irrelevant to appreciating the work in a purely formal way, especially Codex – which is fun and engaging at the immediate visual level – and The Sign Laid Bare – which is very attractive as an assemblage with an innovative use of materials without worrying too much about what it might mean.

Ultimately this is a skillful union of art, avant-garde history, popular culture and quotidian object. While from a future perspective these are unlikely to be among the major works in the artist’s oeuvre, at the same time they are a significant achievement, and suggest the high standards that the artist imposes on himself.

(Thanks to The Physics Room for the above images, and the photographer Mark Gore.