Sweeping painting

Alberto Garcia-Alvarez
Curated by Leonard Emmerling and Alan Joy
St. Paul St.
16 July - 11 August 2009

Alberto Garcia–Alvarez is a Spanish painter who taught at Elam between 1972 and 95, a lecturer held in particularly high esteem by students and colleagues alike, and whose work I can remember a friend from the North Island raving about when I lived in Christchurch during the eighties. Despite this, his profile since his retirement has been virtually non-existent. Consequently this show is an important event.

This painter works all the time, every day. For him praxis is a spiritual, philosophical, ever-continuing intellectual search where theory and action are one. So what have the curators done with the results of all this activity?

For a start this is not a chronological survey, sampling all the varieties of visual investigation he has explored over the years. It is highly selective. Joy and Emmerling have basically picked seven kinds of work that they find interesting. Some of it overlaps so that at first glance it looks like three or four types.

First of all there are the painted assemblages of angled wooden batons where the colour on the side planes of the timber differ according whether you are positioned on the right or the left. Mostly made in the seventies they have similarities with the metal sculptures of John Panting and Polynesian navigation grids made of bound slivers of wood and shells. Their use of side planes and colour is derived I suspect from Don Peeble’s Victor Pasmore-influenced constructions of the mid sixties.

Second there are the large expressionistic works on heavy paper: vigorous, gestural interwoven marks made with what seem to be brooms with stiff straw bristles that create parallel lines. The surface is matt, with the richly tactile, striated and flicked paint consisting of ground pigment mixed with latex. Made in the nineties, these contain glimpses of Richter, but with earthier, more organic colour, and wilder wider vectors.

Third there are more large works on paper but with rectangular (black) or triangular (white) shapes created with narrow housepainting brushes or the occasional squeegee and with the paint a little more fluid and puddled than with the ‘broom’ works.

Fourth, photolitho metal panels with brushed on lines of paint. Hints of Polke but a lot smaller.

Fifth, folded cardboard rectangles with brushed on or sprayed paint. Clever ideas with form, folding and direction - alluding perhaps to Dorothea Rockburne.

Sixth, small panels on board with dripped on, poured glossy paint.

Seventh, pinned up canvases of brushed on perpendicular black rectangles or receding corners of right-angled lines.

I have numbered them in order of their success as paintings. (In my opinion, obviously). Nos. 1-2 categories are by far the most successful. 6-7 in turn are disasters but useful because they provide links between other series. They are ‘duds’ which help unify the whole project. They don’t work as composed paintings but as ciphers loaded with formalist and processual information they provide clues to Garcia-Alvarez’s thinking.

For the two St. Paul galleries Emmerling and Joy have mixed up the different varieties of work and different scales in their hang. This is a mistake. Gallery Two should have a long wall down its centre and that space only used for small works – so that the two scales can be kept apart. That way they can be analysed as sets and the degree of appropriate spatial intimacy consistently sustained throughout. However the hang does draw out connecting threads between different experiments.

The wooden wall reliefs show Garcia-Alvarez’s ability as an innovator trying to manipulate the movements of the viewer as they examine the planes, unlike the large paintings on paper that are flush with the wall and which although wonderful as providers of a bodily experience, are not ground-breaking. They are too reminiscent of Richter, Kline and de Kooning.

It would be an interesting exercise to bring to St. Paul St the Ilam Honours exhibition of another painter, Philip Trusttum, presented in 1964. It was reshown in the Mair gallery in Christchurch’s CSA in the late seventies - that was when I saw it. These huge works (well over 3 metres high) were panels layered with sweeping slashes of oil paint mixed with shaped sections of corrugated cardboard that had been doused in turps and set on fire. You could see the influence of his teacher Rudolf Gopas with the collage, but they were extraordinarily raw – with a hint of the apocalyptic. They almost make Garcia-Alvarez’s nineties work here look timidly genteel in comparison – because of their brutal physicality.

With that national art-historical context in mind, Garcia-Alvarez’s is nevertheless a refreshing show, one that is very unusual in the current art climate. His works remind us of how exciting paint can be as an applied, modulated, thoroughly integrated substance, and how nuances of bodily empathy can flicker through our minds recreating the artist’s movements. They stir us physically in a way that merely analysing say, spatial depth of tone or hue can’t. Like watching Len Lye films or kinetics or listening to rock and roll.

[Of the above three images, only the centre one is in the exhibition.]

Repression or indulgence?

Clara Chon: Repression Revisited
A Centre For Art
16 July - 1 August 2009

Let’s start by having me set the scene, for this is one of those ‘conceptual’ projects where the imagination is the main material. Chon’s ‘work’ consists of ‘sketches’ for a One Act play called Photoshop Layaz: an ongoing and partly fictitious play in many episodes, written by Tim Coster and Ash Kilmartin.

In the ACFA exhibiting space the props are strictly minimal. Only three.

On one wall there is an unfolded sheet of blank brown paper. A grid of nine sections demarcated by creases. On the floor is a bare foam mattress on a beat up divan frame with castors. It is in a pink cover that matches the pink underpainting around the entrance to the ACFA studio/office. And on the opposite wall is a pinned up painted canvas depicting the back of a head of strawberry blonde hair. No face, neck or shoulders. Could be a wig. Could be a fetishist’s fantasy.

More important than any of these is a transcript of the play on the window ledge that you can help yourself to. It's jumbled. Scenes are printed in random order, Scene Four is split between the action and the description of the set, as is another with no number at all that has two alternative stage directions. And there is no dialogue - only laughter.

The dozen characters (some of which are intact families, romantic couples, and groups within the audience) act out a ‘plot’ which as the title implies, focuses on innuendo, aided by the presence of course of the mattress. Most of them are easily identifiable Auckland artists – visual and sound, or art writers – interacting in various Auckland clubs, bars and restaurants.

What of Chon’s psychoanalytic title? It tells us that these aren’t in fact sketches at all, but the remnants of a play once completed - but now with the embarrassing meaty bits pushed into hiding, leaving only the acceptable shuffled bones of a skeleton. The content pertaining to the handful of props in the ACFA space has been collectively censored. Those meagre props were once part of a larger, more lavish stage production.

Or ignoring that possibility, what if a work could be developed beyond these putative ‘sketches’ - by mentally correcting the sequencing and putting in dialogue? I can’t imagine it being particularly interesting as an ‘unrepressed’ project. Would it be less insular and giggly, less an inhouse clique of pals - all twenty-somethings - absorbed only with themselves?

Not that older generations of artists would be any different. It’s the nature of so much art practice right now to be preoccupied with its own social matrix. Celebrating its own perpetuation. Occasionally also critiquing it.

It is possible Coster, Kilmartin and Chon have a satirical intention - that they are lampooning a certain art coterie, or the idea of repression itself. Hard to say; they could also be boasting. Whatever the case the short transcript is a visually attractive little document, and fun to think about – up to a point. It’s probably not worth an arduous hike up to ACFA solely to retrieve a copy, but if you are going to the Civic or to SKYCITY for a Festival movie, and happen to be passing, you can always drop in.

For Auckland readers who like me, are film nuts

(hey, most art lovers are) Saturday afternoon (1.00) is your last chance to see Albert Serra's brilliant Birdsong. It's part of the International Film Festival, and I think critic/curator Richard Dale lobbied for its inclusion. Thank God he did.

Steve Garden (a wonderful film writer on The Lumiere Reader) also loves it. It's easy to see why. It's exceptional. The best of the eight I've seen so far. A mysterious, moody, yet hilarious, spectacularly beautiful movie about three bumbling Kings traipsing across the barren Icelandic landscape in search of the baby J. It has overtones of Pasolini, Rossellini and others. It also includes superb night-time photography. It's b/w and digital, transferred to film. And the Catalan director is at the screenings to answer questions. Very special.

Also being screened on Saturday (3.30) is Mark Peranson's movie about Birdsong's making, Waiting For Sancho. Peranson is in Auckland with Serra. They came to Daniel Malone's performance on Friday night at Gambia Castle.

The Festival seems quite remarkable this year and is well supported. Lots of packed houses. In times of recession, films are a substitute for travel perhaps? It's also good for the imagination and you don't screw up the ozone layer or waste global resources. More importantly, some of it is great art. Stuff to think about for years to come, that often will never get to your local video/DVD library. A great opportunity.

Cao Fei Survey

Cao Fei: Utopia
ARTSPACE
11 July - 22 August 2009

Cao Fei is one of China’s high profile animation artists, one who has gained a lot of exposure in Biennales in recent years with her spectacular video installations. This survey was initiated by the IMA in Brisbane, and it is also travelling to TheNewDowse in Hutt City and the DAG. Obviously it is perceived by those institutions as a crowd-pleaser and it is easy to see why. It is sensual, filled with fantasy, yet also thoughtful. A richly layered, sexy but intellectual practice. Not eye candy.

Utopia has five sections that lock together to make a tightly connected whole. The themes interact, repeat and further elaborate on earlier threads that spiral around leisure, escapism and labour and which sometimes tie in intriguing religious ideas about reincarnation and cosmic illusion with those of digital technologies – in particular the virtual world inhabited by avatars known as Second Life.

The earliest work is COSplayers, a 2004 DVD on a LCD in the Long Gallery that shows teenagers dressed in elaborate manga or videogame hero costumes acting out choreographed duels on the outskirts of Guangzhou. Some of this work was shown in Te Tuhi’s Who’s Afraid of the Big Bad Wolf a couple of years ago and at the time I remember being puzzled by it. It works better here with Cao Fei’s later projects positioned around it.

There is also a suite of large C-type coloured photographs made two years later with similarly dressed characters in tableaux set in city streets and construction sites. Bizarre poses and fantasies of the videogaming imagination are mixed with the mundane realities of daily existence.

A documentary film Whose Utopia also made in 2006 and screened in the adjacent Small Gallery, draws out this aspect - heightens this contrast. It shows workers in an Osram light-bulb factory in the Pearl River delta region performing their monotonous daily tasks: counting wires, pulling levers, packing bulbs etc. The recording of machinery in the early stages of producing filaments and glass tubes is interesting viewing because the brand is so ubiquitous. Those images are then combined with lyrical footage of solo workers performing ballet or dancing in the factory aisles.

Whilst Whose Utopia is poignant, informative and gently didactic, things technically get cranked up several notches in the Main Gallery with the intricacies of digital animation and virtual world construction.

Made in 2006-7, I-Mirror is a three part documentary about the Sci-Fi environment of Second Life. It is amazing, with hypnotic music, gorgeous colour, deep space, the poetry of Octavio Paz, and wonderful dialogue between Cao Fei’s digital persona (China Tracey) and her avatar boyfriend Hug Yue. You can get a sense of it from this Youtube clip of the second section, though the definition is crap. Better to see it properly on a large LCD screen.

This imaginative dreamlike world is so absorbing, and the sensuality of the visual forms and sound so caressing it becomes highly addictive. The fact that it is highly inventive and the stories very smart makes it difficult to leave. You get hooked.

As a projection on a much bigger screen, RMB City is similarly spectacular. The title refers to China’s currency and the DVD features a booming futuristic city that is modelled on Beijing, constructed like a giant oil rig in the middle of the ocean. This wondrously complex cluster of buildings, cranes, flying animals and roads is circled around, dived down on and flown through. The site is thoroughly explored while the viewer is taken on an exuberant joy ride.

There is a viscerality about this variety of animation, a bodily manipulation of space that goes back to early Disney and Warner Brothers. However with this recent technology it is the new detail and consistency behind the complexity that amazes.

The five sets of work this Chinese artist presents make up a remarkable survey. Hopefully Aucklanders will cotton on early and get on up to K’ Rd to see it.

Fashion/Art as Stalag Nuft Nord

Jacqueline Fraser: The Great Escape (in a Falsetto)
Michael Lett
11 July - 1 August 2009

It’s an unusual approach to exhibition titling to reference a sixties POW Escape film (artist as Steve McQueen?) while your voice is up a few octaves, but as I am often told by friends when my own voice gets a little squeaky, falsetto means you are lying. Your subconscious nervousness uncooperatively constricts your vocal chords.

Why would Fraser tell us she is lying? Let’s say she is a leg-puller. You enter the exhibition space through the layered, heavy brocaded curtains and you find yourself in a dark black box, but blinded by a searchlight from above the entrance to Lett’s office. The walls are painted black and on them are pinned up piecemeal collages. Most use figures taken from fashion and skin mags, plus family snaps, found ones, old images and new - some life size. Plus swathes of plastic, tulle, fur, and reflective shiny paper.

Yet it is all very hard to see. Not at all like the above images from Lett’s website. The gallery is dark and there is a second light near the first very dazzling one - a motorised spot that jerkily sweeps around the paper and fabric-laden walls. It zigzags rapidly so it is hard to focus on any one image. You only get glimpses. However it gives off a faint tangential peripheral light through the side of its lamp. When your eyes adjust, that moving ring helps you gradually take in some of the room’s details. Only some though. Most of the space stays murky - and within it peek out disconnected fragments, textural islands, dislocated tactile sensations - all spaced apart and isolated.

In her last show at Lett there were hints that Fraser was chafing at the hermeticism of the art world. The fashion world too. Feeling claustrophobic and glancing away from them towards the outdoors, the prosaic and the unglamorous. Yet the current installation is highly ambiguous. The Great Escape could be a gesture, one that is not about the artist at all but about the viewer. Perhaps it references the need for art to provide fantasy, a vortex to entice its audience in so they can never withdraw. This Michael Lett show could be a warning. What you think might be an escape could be a fib, a decoy - and might be a ruse, a set-up, a trap.

Enlarged folk art

Seung Yul Oh: Oddooki
Starkwhite.
6 July - 25 July 2009

Seung Yul Oh is currently presenting in the large downstairs Starkwhite space five interactive sculptures that he recently exhibited in Te Papa’s Sculpture Terrace. They look like huge toys based on abstracted birds and have been repainted, having suffered some brutal wear and tear from the visiting public. The chips and striations are now gone. They look impeccable.

These pristine oval forms, with their stubby beaks and delicate wings in slight relief, are a sort of synthesis between Eskimo art and Kinder Eggs (or Russian Nesting Dolls). They shine like creamy porcelain and have glossy coloured bases of different hues. Each one has a mechanism hidden inside that with different sorts of movement will make sounds. One tinkles, another clangs, a third a grinding rumble. They vary. Each is unique.

In their bases are weights of sandy ballast so that they cannot topple over. They can be swung, spun, swivelled or gently prodded, rocked and softly shaken – preferably several ‘birds’ at once.

The Starkwhite Press Release says the wind managed to rock (and ‘play’) these sculptures but even in Wellington and on the sixth floor of Te Papa, that is hard to imagine. They seem too heavy and too streamlined.

Perhaps they swayed a little. However it is a pity the paint surface isn’t much tougher so that Aucklanders could really tumble them about to create an aural and kinetic cacophony. It would be good for such folk-arty objects to belie their serene, somewhat cute, appearance, to startle their admirers; make them less like excessively sweet contemplative objects and more raucous or vulgar – less like twittering sparrows and more like cawing crows.

The lair of the white worm

Tiffany Rewa Newrick: New work
Essay by Matthew Crookes
The New Zealand Film Archive Nga Kaitiaki O Nga Taonga Whitiahua
Karangahape Rd
11 July - 15 August 2009

We have here an interesting b/w film installation positioned in the NZFA room next door to ARTSPACE: two projections on opposite walls, with cameras aimed down two narrow corridors that are ostensibly linked up to be a continuing long narrow space. It has small roller doors on one side and hinged locker doors on the other.

Standing in the middle and swivelling your head from left to right and back again, you can see that one corridor is slightly shorter and lit at the far end, while the other is longer and dark. Each has brief puddles of light intermittently spaced throughout.

For a lot of the time, nothing happens. While you are twiddling your thumbs, shuffling and getting ready to leave, suddenly with no warning, an amorphous transparent thing appears from nowhere and slowly glides and wobbles its way down the corridor on the left. This soft, air-filled creature is compared by Matthew Crookes in his useful on-site essay to the sinister guard balloon in Patrick MacGoohan’s sixties Sci-Fi TV series The Prisoner. However I think it is less ball-shaped or opaque - and more sausage-like. It is long, squat and membranous.

It reaches the far end, turns off to the right and after briefly disappearing comes back, advances towards you and then carries on on the other screen.

Same thing happens. It retreats to the far end, briefly turns to the right to disappear and then returns. Only this time when it reaches you it disappears. It doesn’t continue on down the other corridor.

The conclusion you reach from all this is that there is a T-shaped set of corridors, not a linked rectangle as some might suppose, which perhaps would be more rational in a building.

The screening room is the cross-bar of the T so that no cameras are aimed down the stem. It is from this unseen space that the ‘thing’ appears and to which it returns, before coming back again later.

So what does it all mean, if ‘meaning’ is something other than the experiential? A joke about surveillance perhaps? A rueful comment on white colonial expansionism maybe? Or just a Sci-Fi experiment?

Considering there is no sound, this is a highly successful example of mood manipulation. It’s got real atmosphere attained only by visual means. It also plays with the viewer’s sense of logic. Bring a thermos and collapsible stool.