Auckland 08: Walters Sweepstake

The Walters Prize 2008
New Gallery
13 September - 23 November 2008

It is hard to believe it is six years since the inaugural Walters Prize exhibition opened at the New Gallery with its line up of Michael Stevenson, Gavin Hipkins, John Reynolds and the then unknown, Yvonne Todd. For a country that doesn’t have a national gallery the occasion was something all Kiwi contemporary artists were ecstatic about - a ray of hope that this country might see its artists not as 'dole bludgers' but as creative people with vocations. This new show reveals a lot about the event at this point of its short history, and the weaknesses of its organisational structure. For an Auckland-based prize that is meant to be championing the excitement of New Zealand contemporary art to the rest of New Zealand and the world, it is clearly floundering.

When I was at art school in the early seventies there were only four tertiary art education institutions in the whole country. Now there are more than that in Auckland alone, and the number of artists has escalated astoundingly. So when the selection committee for this year pick two past finalists (Reynolds and Robinson) to resubmit, something has to be wrong. The message is that Aotearoa doesn’t have the quantity and range of exciting practices to keep the exhibition continually fresh. In this country the inherent vibrancy needed doesn’t exist.

That is clearly not the case. More likely the committee didn’t do their homework and thoroughly scour through all the dealer exhibitions the length and breadth of the land. But with no South Island curator on the panel there was no incentive to ensure that. And with two of the four selectors from Auckland alone, the result seemed predestined to ensure Auckland parochialism, especially when the two repeating artists live in Auckland.

Enough about the politics. What about the work? The four exhibitions?

My personal favourite of the four line-ups of different years (so far) is the second one of 2004, with et al and von Sturmer. The other two exhibitors, van Hout and Fraser, though unquestionably superb artists, somehow couldn’t do themselves justice in their allocated spaces. That seems to be the regular pattern in all of the four biennial shows: in each - two crack shows; two forgettable ones.

Edith Amituanai’s Déjeuner, with its four photographs, seems only half an exhibition. She seems to have drawn the short straw in terms of space, but it shows her inadequacies as an artist as well. She is a consummate documenter of Samoan living spaces and rugby players living in France, but not an exciting thinker. Her approaches to photographic presentation are dull and conventional, even though the details of her recorded living rooms are rich and engaging. When clearly superior artists like Simon Denny (at Michael Lett) and Fiona Connor (at Gambia Castle) are ignored her inclusion looks like tokenism. I’m not saying it is, I know the panel is smarter than that, but it looks suspect.

(To briefly digress, am I here directly contradicting what I said earlier about a South Island panellist? I don’t think so. I’m not saying a South Island artist must be included, only that the panel has a South Island representative who can do the research and initiate a discussion of the issues – like what I’m doing here.)

Cloud, the work of John Reynolds, was shown in the AGNSW in the 2006 Sydney Biennale and consists of over 7000 little canvases bearing written phrases taken from Harry Orman’s ‘Oxford Dictionary of New Zealand English.’ Occupying the stairwell space and first room on the New Gallery's first floor, this sprawling installation of row upon rippling row of small stretchers, from floor to ceiling, looks pompous - in the tradition of overkill exemplified by the installations of Ann Hamilton and Anthony Gormley. It’s an academic exercise about language that if chosen well could be interesting, but instead ends up all surface and triviality. As few of the paintings can be read anyway it becomes the dumbest sort of spectacle.

Lisa Reihana’s Digital Marae uses her two darkened rooms of glowing spot-lit photographs, moving image and sound to really stir her audience. It’s not subtle but it is innovative and entertaining - especially her images of mythic personalities within the Māori cosmology that in her hands become Neo-Gothic and Sci-Fi. There is even a hint of Hollywood productions like Batman. Though at times fragmented (her elegant images of a cane carrying dandy wearing tailored colonial attire and moko look out of place) her installation has considerable impact and will be the crowd favourite.

As I’ve said, Robinson like Reynolds should not be here - but seeing that he is, his installational revamping of his 2006 ARTSPACE project is my favourite anyway. It is all class, a polystyrene intestinal phallus run rampant, running down corridors and bursting through walls like an angry blind worm. Conceptually layered to include references from Tex Avery (Looney Tunes)and early Giacometti to Wittgenstein (duck-rabbit diagram) and Stephen Hawking (universe model), Robinson’s inclusion of blue beaks, rabbit ears, willies and doughnuts brings a festive chromatic musicality to his exuberant project.

So who will Catherine David give the $50,000 prize to in late October? David is not a person one would attempt to second-guess. Even as an expert on modernism’s relationship to - and blending with - post-colonialism, she is vehemently anti-formulaic. Though I think AAG messed up badly in the processes of this year’s exhibtion selection, I congratulate them on their selection of David as judge – an inspired choice that will help our profile globally if she relates to the diversity of our culture and the art made within it. And how can she not? Roll on October!