Joys of diluted acrylic

Harrison paintings
Michael Harrison: Sun Square Saturn
Ivan Anthony
30 July - 22 August 2009

Harrison’s nine works here are characteristically small and intimate, yet varied in tonal mood. Most are works on paper, using diluted acrylic with a little pencil, though there is one work on canvas. There is not so much positive/negative interaction of form this time around.

The darker works on paper have more presence, exuding nuances of moodiness and greater spatial depth. The Devil Reversed is the exhibition’s peak, composed a little like a movie or video poster, with the male and female stars in the background and a very odd leaf-nosed bat head hovering in the middle of the foreground. This could also be mistaken for the foreshortened head of an old bearded Chinese gentleman.

Probably Harrison likes to tease his audience, so they speculate on how such an image might be connected to the main protagonists that inhabit his devised ‘theatre’. Another tonally dark work shows reflecting puddles of rain or possibly jissom, with another (much randier) couple in a clinch in the background, and a man's head below. The work is dodgy but also intensely beautiful in its surrealist ambience.

Not all the paintings on paper work. A blue naked girl with long hair hanging down over her face looks rigid and awkward. Another, with a cuddling couple shown twice in silhouette - above as a contoured roof of a sort of hollow mosque, and inside it - has hovering sky-borne birds on one side and a hill of trees on the other; but the latter's triangle of foliage and trunks seem too regularly positioned and dull.

The real surprise in this show is the single canvas work of a couple of horses, with one delicately rendered as if it could be part of a fresco. This larger animal has a rippled, slightly combed or caressed quality to its grey flank, an intricate texture that is quite different from Harrison’s more usual liquid acrylic application.

It will be interesting to see if this artist explores this tighter, more opaque form of imagery further. His work seems to be moving towards a different sort of surface, a new sort of tactility.

It's been a sad week:

the passing of Julian Dashper and Diggeress Te Kanawa. Both were innovative in their fields and both were gifted teachers. Their parting is a substantial loss to the collective creative energies of this country.

Topsy-turvy

Dare. Truth. Promise
St. Paul St Gallery 3 (39 Symonds St)
29 July - 1 August 2009

This exhibition is based on the supposition that there is no separation between an art work and the contextual envelope made from the history of the artist, their inspirations, background circumstances and her or his intentions.

In fact it goes further. It says lets have six artists prepare six catalogue entries for a show, record them reading those six statements, play it in a designed space with a sound system, and make that a ‘collaborative’ sound work. Forget the original impetus being discussed - which was video, painted or collage artworks. Let the auxiliary replace the primary. The footnotes replace the essay. Descriptive spoken words are substituted for the initially envisaged art experiences.

In my view, this is hogwash. Pure piffle. That there is a state of infinite regress here where research and mental imagining becomes an ever-receding surrogate for a finite physical construction.

I’m not denying that the six recordings are a collaborative artwork because if artists choose to make such declarative claims involving ontological status, who am I to contradict them? I will say though that the work is conceptually and experientially poor. That Natalia Birgel, Alan Joy, Sam Leitch, Lee McGarva, Seilala Sini and Vaimaila Urale have wasted their energies doing this. They’ve been sidetracked when they should have concentrated on their original non-aural projects, perhaps constructing them separately in isolation.

Thank you to the artists for the images.

Mhairi-Clare Fitzpatrick on the review of

Words Fail You . Ralph Paine also on Joe Strummer and The Future is Unwritten.

La femme à tête de chou-fleur

Mhairi-Clare Fitzpatrick and Robyn Hoonhout: Words Fail You
George Fraser Gallery
30 July - 1 August 2009

The pairing of these two Elam photographers is an interesting one because they are so different. One makes lightboxes for her images (backlit duratrans) that even when featuring living people, still in this context look like consumerable commodities for sale. The other shows pairs of women at work, in their places of employment, or in clubs, or neutral public spaces. There is no consistent pattern. The lighting conditions and the contextualising visual narrative keeps abruptly changing.

The most accessible images by Mhairi-Clare Fitzpatrick are of two young women in a freezing-works. An update of Darcy Lange perhaps, and in this show, they become positioned images of ‘authenticity’. Her other images seem overtly preoccupied with fakery, with odd smocks and wigs. They are bizarrely futuristic, as if off the set of A Clockwork Orange, but in ultra-violet light.

Robyn Hoonhout’s duratrans have pairs of objects (images of elderly women included) is if in a promotional campaign that might go in bus shelters. She seems to be contrasting human individuality with Fordist factory production - and deliberately mixing consumer with the consumed.

The essay by Lucille Holmes that goes with this show is in this context inappropriate, for like every other student theorist who has been writing over the last twenty-five years, she is obsessed with Roland Barthes’ Camera Lucida and his use of the term punctum. She is also keen to show her erudition with the writings of Lacan and exactly how Barthes derived punctum from Lacan’s eleventh seminar. This is precious little use for anybody trying to grapple with Hoonhout and Fitzpatrick’s imagery – and will probably send them fleeing screaming from the George Fraser, never to return.

Cerebral and muted

Yuk King Tan: Drummer
Sue Crockford
21 July - 8 August 2009


This current display by Yuk King Tan at Crockford’s consists of two videos on opposite walls, a large corrugated cardboard sculpture of a drum kit resting on a trolley, and a suite of ten computer drawings (modified by ink washes and spontaneous splashes) used in making of sculpture - and eventually, the video.

The drawings are topographical – like the well-known tramping maps - showing stratified layers from above. These particular ones have been used to computer cut corrugated cardboard that has been stacked and glued to make a drum kit and a lion. These light, three dimensional works are the key components in two ‘videoed performances’ made on the streets of Hong Kong.

One of these shows a young Hong Kong drummer using the sculpture as a real drum kit for some night-time practice, the dull thudding sound being similar (to be somewhat esoteric) to the occasion Ringo played a packing crate on Words of Love in Beatles For Sale (1965). Close inspection shows us that the drummer’s enthusiasm has left multiple indentations, crushing and tearing the paper ‘skin’ of the thin but hollow cardboard. The videoed ‘silence’ of this energetically played drum kit is a cynical comment on the communist take over of Hong Kong, the lack of public debate - and the disregard for the precious object is like King Tan’s red and green firecracker drawings (of the nineties) that were glued to gallery walls and then detonated.

The stratified cardboard drums are also interesting because of horizontal slicing of packed sections to render diagonal forms like snares or cymbals, or tilted stands, pedals and clips. The compressed forms are complex, the parallel lines relating to the vertically hanging tassels and threads of her early red and white wall masks as well.

Yuk King Tan’s second video features an elderly Chinese woman employed by the city to help keep the streets tidy by collecting waste cardboard and transporting it on a trolley to a rubbish recycling depot. Using a trolley she tows through the crowded streets the artist’s hollow, cardboard, life-size replica of one of the two bronze lions positioned by the entrance to the famous HSBC bank. The artist has asked her to take it to the rubbish depot, this action being a comment on last year’s banking crash, the plummeting of the RMB, and the superficiality of a ‘solid’ internationally reputable institution.

Of course the cardboard lion is not really abandoned in the depot to be crunched up, but neither does it find its way to New Zealand. We see it only as an image in half the drawings or as the much admired sculpture within the video. The printed and brushed drawings are intricate, surprisingly modelled and vaguely exuberant. Their graphic nature and lack of saturated colour is unusual for this artist, as is the brown cardboard in its chromatic restraint. Like the drummer’s attempts at percussion, a slightly muted exhibition. More cerebral and contemplative than visceral.

Here's a contribution from Lumiere Reader reviewer, Andy Palmer

Haruhiko Sameshima - Bold Centuries: a photographic history album
With essays by: Kyla Macfarlane, Ingrid Horrocks, John Wilson, Tim Corbalis, Aaron Lister, Damian Skinner, Fiona Amundsen and Claudia Bell
Published by Rim Books and Photoforum, with assistance from the University of Auckland and CNZ 2009
$59.95

We’ve all seen the plethora of New Zealand’s scenic landscape books which present a certain skewed depiction of our nation. Even when photographers tackle this theme as a reaction to the stereotype (as shown most recently by Derek Henderson), they often just reproduce this brand, albeit with a different photographic approach.

With Bold Centuries, Haruhiko Sameshima has produced his own skewed depiction of our nation. As the subtitle suggests, this isn’t a straight photographic journal of a roadtrip a lá Derek Henderson’s The Terrible Boredom of Paradise (2005) or Robin Morrison’s The South Island of New Zealand from the Road (1981); this is a photographic history. The photos, largely made by Sameshima, include numerous historical images from various photographers from various decades, and other historical artworks.

What is both fascinating and frustrating is that many of Sameshima’s works are a knowing nod to works by other NZ photographers (Adams, Barrar, Peryer). Sometimes I did question whether I was looking at a homage, or a copy, though its not necessary to know the references to understand the images. The main frustration for me was that the captions (many of which are history lessons in themselves) are in the appendix. However, this does mean that the images are unencumbered by distracting text, allowing us to read the images as a whole.

Auckland-based Sameshima was born in Japan, and moved to New Zealand in 1973 while in his teens. He has been exploring ‘New Zealand’ for many years, looking at the “incongruous set of cultural mores called ‘this country’.” His 1996 work The Shopping mall as a place of contemplation was a series of television images and shopping mall brandings that examined our everyday reality. His more recent series Eco-Tourism, some of which appear in Bold Centuries, isn’t an investigation of ecotourism in the usual sense, but a study of the tourist industry and its relationship with the environment.

Bold Centuries continues Sameshima’s exploration of the concept that is New Zealand. The works flow from the natural environment to the urban environment and seem to be questioning not just how New Zealand has been represented in the past but how we are currently and how we will continue to be. Unsurprisingly there is an emphasis on the impact of foreign influence, historically from the British, but more recently from the US – photos of recent Central Otago developments could almost be Colorado or Montana.

Years ago a local photographer told me that all photographers are collectors – of their own images if nothing else. Sameshima, it seems, is a collector of representations of this country, whether photographed by himself or found objects (other’s photos, cigarette cards, postcards, etc.).

The eight texts discuss specific elements of this collection without explicitly referring to Sameshima’s work. Covering topics such as the archive, photographic practise, Manapouri, Rotorua and the representation of Maori, and shopping. By not obviously referencing the works in the book, this allows space for the reader to interpret as they choose, while giving a context in which to read, not just Bold Centuries, but Sameshima’s work in general.

This is an important book in the canon of New Zealand photographic books. Bold Centuries is not merely an artist survey book, nor just a collection of loosely related images; it is a curated exhibition placing the artist in context with his forebears and his contemporaries. A description Peter Ireland wrote about Robin Morrison can equally be applied to this work by Haruhiko Sameshima; his “work instance, intensifies, and expands our sense of place.”

If you happen to be a paid up member of PhotoForum you will receive this book as issue #77-78. PhotoForum has been around since the 1970s and has helped nurture many contemporary New Zealand photographers. They publish an irregular journal, a member’s only portfolio showcase, and the occasional book. The next one on the cards is a long overdue John Johns retrospective due next year. The membership fee will be worth it for this alone.

Ralph Paine has a warning for

Simon Esling, while Tim thinks artists thrive when it's tough.

When video was radical

Darcy Lange: Study of an Artist at Work
Edited by Mercedes Vicente, with contributions by Benjamin Buchloh, Guy Brett, Lawrence McDonald, John Miller, Geraldene Peters, Pedro Romero, Dan Graham and Mercedes Vicente.
Softcover, 208 pp. b/w and colour illustrations
Published by Ikon, Govett-Brewster Art Gallery 2008

New Zealand’s pioneer video documenter of working life, Darcy Lange (1946-2005) was often included in small group surveys of seventies practice, exhibtions that usually ended up with skimpy catalogues. He now has a substantial document about his projects, a publication that accompanies the New Zealand show (organised by Mercedes Vicente, the Govett-Brewster’s curator) presented at the Govett-Brewster and Adam Art Galleries, and the English version (curated by Helen Legg and Mercedes Vicente) at the Ikon in Birmingham. The achievement of Vicente, its editor, is that she has managed to rustle up an amazing group of authorative scholars, curators and artist /friends from around the world to contribute a suite of varied but highly informative, accessible essays; all about an artist whose videos – being in real time and unedited - many in the art world consider unwatchable. The detailed research poured into this publication impresses and the (usually Marxist) writers are shrewdly picked for their different areas of focus.

Vicente’s own essay is a comprehensive biographical and historical overview of Lange’s work in Spain, the U.K. and Aotearoa that sets up a thorough introductory context for the endeavours of the other contributors. In the preceding but illuminating preface she tells us a little about her own Spanish background and what attracted her to Lange’s work, introducing the notion that his performances as a flamenco musician were an extension of his video practice.

October co-editor, Benjamin Buchloh, is an art historian who always has a forthright point of view. His immensely interesting essay is about the history of documentary photography, in particular the period of the mid-seventies when certain ‘progressive’ artists such as Burgin, Wall, Roster and Sekula began through their practice to criticise conceptualist photography because of its prohibition against referentiality and representation and emphasis on deskilling - and open up an interest in particular historical, social and political conditions. The artists they reacted against – Ruscha, Graham, Huebler, Baldesarri and Smithson, sometimes were their friends, as was Graham with Lange – for Buchloh subtly aligns Lange to the critiquing group (though he is very different in not having an interest in theory, as Vicente points out) because of his ‘recovery of the working body’, his ‘persistent interest in the conditions of social class’, and his recognition of ‘the universal permeation and presence of skills in every member of the working collectivity.’ (p.60)

Lawrence McDonald extends this side of Lange’s thought when he points out that Lange considered Polynesians to do “everything as creatively as they can”, and that “creativity in schools is not necessarily confined to the art class (p.124).” Much of McDonald’s discussion in a superbly researched essay is taken up with the ideas of education theorist Paul Willis that he posits as parallel to Lange’s methodology. He refers to two of Willis’s books, the first being The Ethnographic Imagination (2000) which asks “..what are the consequences of viewing everyday relations as if they contained a creativity of the same order as that held to be self-evidently part of what we call the arts?”

The second Willis book, Learning To Labour: How Working Class Kids Get Working Class Jobs (1980), McDonald spends more time on - firstly in connection with Lange’s interest in middle class subjects in the UK (unlike say the New Zealand working class projects), and secondly in Lange’s move going beyond the observational to the more interactive. He and Guy Brett both write about Lange’s possibly most important project, Work Studies in Schools (1976-7), a documentation of teaching in Birmingham and Oxfordshire – important because of Lange’s process of showing his videos to the teachers and pupils later so they could separately assess their performances and behaviour (while being filmed). Intriguingly, Brett compares this work to Dan Graham’s transparent / reflective mirrored pavilions and Oiticica’s hammocks for sound and projected collages where social solitude and social interchange were fused.

McDonald is interested in the dialogical aspect of these Work Studies, how someone like Willis (who used transcribed audiotapes for his book) or Karl Heider (with his related publication Ethnographic Film [1976]) might analyse them. He points out that Lange blended his observational data collection into the interpretative process, that there was no editing or selection process separating the two - or devices like voice-over commentary, written titling or sound design. Only long takes, uninterrupted real time, and the unfolding of social processes which the viewer can work at to analyse if they wish.

Ngapuhi land rights activist John Miller, a friend and collaborator of Lange’s, with Media Studies lecturer Geraldene Peters writes a thorough account of his Maori Land Project (1977-80) a set of documentaries examining the Ngatihine Block and Bastion Point land claim disputes, of which a short 25 min version was shown on Dutch television in 1980 (but without Maori participation in the editing - due to travel funding difficulties). Miller and Peters’ impressively detailed account also covers some of the early eighties, and in it you get a sense of Lange’s personality and life style, his characteristic traits while working - such as his restless energy and political commitment, an ad hoc interview style, the fragmented, ongoing, unfinished nature of many of his projects and his financial hardships.

Pedro G. Romero’s contribution is the biggest surprise of the publication. It folds Lange’s musical passions into the fabric of his video documentations. In particular he elaborates on Lange’s flamenco discipleship of the legendary Diego del Gastor, and amusingly (as a touch of authorial wish-fulfilment) makes comparisons between certain guitar styles and Lange’s camera rhythms (p.172-3). He also points out the tragedy of Lange’s failure to complete a proposed Art of Flamenco As Work as a form of resistance to the commercial banalisation of consumer culture.

Dan Graham’s contribution about his friendship with Lange is brief but moving, and works well with the commentaries by Brett, Vicente, Romero and Buchloch that spasmodically allude to similarities and oppositions between the two artists.

This diverse set of writers clearly see Lange as using video as a means of social activism, yet whilst his imagery is loaded with historical, technological and political information about the seventies, and intimately connected to the different communities he worked with, it is hard to imagine contemporary audiences showing much empathy for its real time methodology, even when displayed in sophisticated gallery installations. However while I’m thus not sure about the efficacy of Lange’s practice as strategy (does it provide more than what any observant person would see walking round a city watching working people; or is it really about fetishizing video as a medium?) I did find this book an informative, thoughtful and very pleasurable read. Well designed and easy to scan (its font doesn’t make readers over forty have to squint) and packed with surprises, it deserves a wide international readership.

Simon Esling responds to

Forget Watercolour. Gnute also has some observations on his show.

Rushed job

The Man in the Hat
Directed by Luit Bieringa
Produced by Jan Bieringa
Photography by Leon Narbey
73 minutes

There must surely be no more revered contemporary art personality living in this country than the historically pivotal art dealer, Peter McLeavey. There has been some brilliant journalism about him and his hugely significant contribution to our visual culture (by Bryan Staff, Grant Smithies and others) but so far - until this year - no movie documentation. So when Luit and Jan Bieringa’s film about him was announced as being included in this year’s International Film Festival, there was considerable excitement. Yet my impression after seeing it is that it is a bit of fizzer. Lovely to hear the man talk, but as art docos go, not as appalling as Merata Mita’s Hotere, but nowhere near as good as Leanne Pooley’s Being Billy Apple or Judy Rymer’s Victory Over Death. Just so so.

So what went wrong? Why wasn’t it as good as those last two? With the co-operation of a tirelessly loquacious, charismatic personality like McLeavey, and an esteemed cinematographer like Leon Narbey it should have been superb. Why wasn’t it?

First of all only three days were spent filming. Somebody like McLeavey, whom everyone knows is a complex individual, will always tell great stories (even to strangers) about his childhood, family and friendships with certain key artists - but that is just the surface. He needs to be gently prodded so that he is continually recorded at length to make a substantial document. Something over a couple of hours with real depth. He is so engaging he is always watchable.

There are many unpresented questions that could have been asked: I’d like to know what was it like to fill a Morris Minor up with paintings (as I’ve heard he used to do in the sixties) to take them to motel rooms in distant cities to try and sell them? Why and how did he persuade Woollaston to make the wonderful panoramic landscapes? Where did he learn to become a salesman? Did he ever consider that the role of spiritual themes might be over-rated in this country? Why did Hammond’s prices go up after the Auckland Island trip and not before? (What was it about the imagery?) Why did he get upset with L. Budd ‘blonding’ his chaise longue? And most importantly, when did he start wearing a hat? The McLeavey brand is actually his silvery (Warholesque) hair, his round ruddy (babylike) face, and those alert blue eyes behind stylish glasses. Always instantly recognisable. No hat.

Much of the film, as you’d expect, is fascinating, especially when our subject is talking about his nomadic childhood, his Catholic education, Freudian psycho-therapy and his bouts of depression. Or his passionate collecting of internationally sourced photography or publications of New Zealand poetry. The excerpts of letters from or to him from McCahon, Woollaston and Walters are the highlights.

The film’s photography though is disappointing. Some of the interviews were held when he was slumped in a chair and filmed from below, making him look facially a bit squat or froglike. He should have been filmed at eye height. After all, he is a salesman of infinite persuasion and charm, a great communicator who is very expressive and direct. Show him as he is normally seen.

Furthermore, in this film, too much is made of Wellington and its inhabitants. McLeavey, perceived by many as a national treasure, is admired everywhere in this country and beyond, but Bieringa, in my view, wastes too much time showing life on the streets of the capital, and his subject’s daily wanderings between home and gallery. Such subject matter is consistent with Bieringa’s earlier film on Ans Westra, and as director it is natural he follow his own creative humanistic impulses – though his agenda is not overbearing to the cost of his subject as Mita’s was in her Hotere. Yet despite his comparative restraint, for documenting such a significant player in our visual heritage it is regrettable that he did not play ‘David Sylvester’ to McLeavey’s ‘Francis Bacon,’ and develop some extended, really pithy conversations over three whole months, instead of only three short days.

This insidious wraparound…this seamless scroll

Gary Hill, James Casebere, Jude Rae: The Estrangement of Judgement
Jensen
21 July - 22 August 2009

Site recite (a prologue) was one of the highlights of Gary Hill’s wonderful exhibition held at St. Paul St earlier this year but you could only see it on Fridays. Whilst you can see a diminished version online here, that is obviously inferior in image and sound quality. Therefore Andrew Jensen is re-presenting this work in Auckland, as well as shrewdly curating a show from his other artists around it. Rae and Casebere’s rendered images (bird skulls, things on tables, and skull-shaped rooms) resonate with the videoed objects that come in and out of focus on Hill’s jerkily revolving (but constantly filmed) table.

The voice-over is a text written by Hill himself, a superb prose poem about the reflexive nature of consciousness that riffs on aspects of Beckett, Blanchot, Jabès and others in its deliberations. Like Hill’s assorted bones, shells and papers that come in and out of focus, patches are hard to hear, but sonorous with a stagey actor’s delivery (imagine Anthony Hopkins) – superbly recited by Lou Hetler. He has a bit of Irish brogue in his enunciation of Hill’s finely crafted cadences.

In Jensen’s space there is a sense of a homunculus peering out through the eyes of an invisible skull, the outside world (Hill’s video) on one wall (Hetler reads: this insidious wraparound, tied to the notion “I have eyes in the back of my head”, binds me to my double…), and on the opposite back wall Casabere and Rae provide approximate mental simulacra: Rae with assorted industrial objects on a table, Casebere with his skull-domed room symbolising the mind itself - and the space within which it dwells.

Hill’s possibly over-wrought language may seem to be impenetrable but it is not. It perfectly matches the camera work which to and froes between objects, sharpening on their forms for a second or two only to dissolve and then flick on to another. This happening while we hear:

A seamless scroll weaves my view back into place – back to back with itself – the boomerang effect, decapitates any and all hallucinations leaving (lo and behold) the naked eye, stalking each and every utterance that breaks and enters the dormitories of perception.

It celebrates the pleasures of looking at the world with a relish that comes close to voyeurism, creating a parallel internal monologue that takes pleasure in its own existence, gazing at itself and revelling in its own constantly reperpetuated commentary.

Okay, this is heavily cerebral work for sure, but it also is highly sensual, and engaging, as a visit to Jensen’s will easily confirm.

Forget watercolour

Simon Esling: Constructs
Anna Bibby
8 July - 2 August 2009

The ten A4 sized watercolour works Esling presents here (occasionally with collage) could be illustrations on pages for a book, they seem so consistent, so purposeful and loaded with intent – and not open in interpretative possibility, or surrealist. The presence of sinews or bone in most implies the artist has a narrative in mind, some sort of reading involving bodily, muscular sensations.

If this is so, perhaps making delicate illustrative watercolours is not the bravest way of approaching a phenomenological content, to think about the mover’s prioperception. Why not consider Robert Morris, or Maurice Merleau-Ponty, and make an installation an audience can directly experience? Make a practice that embodies a theory (literally and viscerally incorporating movement), rather than trying to picture it. Something working with agency, and not passive or detached.

About half of these works on paper are framed and under glass. The rest are positioned under suspended clip-boards, with no logic distinguishing the two. The artist is sending out contradictory signals because frames and glass mean 'hands off' and clip-boards imply you can remove from the clip if you so wish.

There are also two sorts of image. One is collage-based and integrated spatially so that the picture plane and different depths of field lock in well together. The other has shallow and deep spaces awkwardly juxtaposed so that the transitions across edges are abrupt and jarring. Often there are images of trucks or planes as symbols for human bodily motion.

I don’t think this show is an aesthetic success but I admire its consistency and quality of exploration. There is a sense of a mind at work testing different symbols or codes with different illusory spaces. However the work is hampered by the restrictions of illustration, which it needs to abandon in order to be much more immersive. If only artist and audience could start wallowing in real space, to be consciously considering that, and aware of itself consciously considering that.

Malone lives

Daniel Malone: The English Teacher (exhibition)
The Dead Class (performance - 17 July)
Gambia Castle
18 July - 8 August 2009

Daniel Malone’s performance on Friday evening began with him being dressed in a worker's cloth cap (under which his hair was tucked into a stocking), with shirt, waist-coat, jeans, and shoes - and his face in pale stage make-up. There were six main props: an apple placed on a portable table near the window opposite the entrance to the room; a black, hard–covered photocopy of a Polish translation of Beckett’s Malone Dies on a white shelf; a hexagonal mirror on the opposite wall; and on the floor scattered posters positioned under a solitary light-bulb suspended on a long lead. The audience stood or sat close to the walls.

Standing behind the desk the artist addressed his audience as if he was gong to give a language teaching lesson, and pass around a book to be read aloud. However instead he began to talk of his interaction with the artist Billy Apple, by whose name he was officially known in Poland - as he has a New Zealand passport legally stating that name as his identity.

Elucidating further, Malone spoke of Apple’s contributions to the lighting of the TestStrip space (the same room as Gambia Castle) when it was first established, and then mentioned me by name, mentioning briefly our later conversations when he legally changed his name to Billy Apple. This was as an artwork contributing to the (Sharp and Shiny) fetishism exhibition I curated for the Govett-Brewster in 1997. He then spoke of a performance he did at the Polytechnic in New Plymouth that had similarities with the current work we were then witnessing.

The artist spoke concisely and with purpose, showing his considerable experience as a teacher, yet often interrupting his flow with retractions such as ‘that wasn’t what I meant to say, I should have said ...’ The overall content was a bit like a tentative ongoing newsletter to family and friends, like what some people send out yearly with Christmas cards. He began by telling us about his life in Poland where he now works and lives as ‘Billy Apple.’

Malone’s gallery invitation for this performance contained four informative sentences (reproduced below) that elaborated on four types of object in the gallery space: exhibition posters illustrated with death notices, a Polish translation of Beckett, a coffin shaped mirror, a single light bulb.

A klepsydra is a kind of death notice, a standard format published in Polish newspapers and pasted around appropriate sites - like the apartment building, local church, and workplace - of the deceased.

Malone Umiera is a Warsaw City Library copy of a book written in French by Samuel Beckett in 1951, translated by him into English and published as Malone Dies in 1956.

Portret Trumienny are portraits dating from the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth of the 17th and 18th centuries that were hexagonal in shape and placed on the head-end of a coffin during elaborate funerals of the time which also included actors playing the part of the deceased and extravagant constructions known as castrum doloris (castles of grief).

The Dead Class, 1975, is the best known play by Tadeusz Kantor, one of Poland’s most esteemed neo-avant-garde artists and most internationally celebrated dramaturge. Malone explained that Kantor’s plays are often illuminated by a single light bulb.

Malone then told us he was happily in love and about to return to Poland in his original ‘Daniel Malone’ identity to marry a Polish woman. This ultimately explained his long sequence of actions in the performance, starting with his moving the table so it was positioned under the coffin-cross-sectioned mirror, taking off his clothes and lying on it for a few minutes in a ‘shroud’ of exhibition ‘death’ posters he had scooped up from the floor.

After getting up and redressing, the artist then discussed the publication Malone Dies, how in Beckett’s play Malone does not in fact expire, and how he (D. M.) borrowed and photocopied the Polish translation using his ‘Apple’ identity.

Using the single light bulb, Malone then moved around the audience with the mirror, showing them the presence of three documents hidden behind the reflective glass - but detectable if illuminated at the right angle. They were his ‘Billy Apple’ library card with photo, a written application to take the book out on loan and out of the country, and an application for photocopying it.

There was a clever layering of parallel tropes in all this, between original and copy, between the two ‘Billy Apples’, between one 'Malone' identity dying and another being born, between Malone’s reflected talking face disappearing and his photographed ‘Apple’ ID variation appearing in the evanescent glass.

To underscore these aspects he removed all superfluous ‘residue’ from The Dead Class performance site – like apple, bulb, bed and posters - leaving just mirror and book to make up The English Teacher exhibition. Other crucial information was still apparent embedded contextually, such as the death notice of the invitation, and Kantor’s play (‘reflecting’ Beckett’s) having its name in Malone’s performance title.

Malone’s skill is to make a series of casually interconnected actions seem ad hoc, almost accidental. It is only when you start analysing his procedures by letting the resulting austere exhibition serve as a memory guide, that the various conceptual strata and cleverly placed, linking poetic threads become apparent.

Compelling paintings

John Pule: Nothing must remain
Gow Langsford
22 July - 15 August 2009

This presentation of twenty illustrated poems on paper and eight grey painted canvases continues the themes of earlier Pule shows. The hiapo canvases (their structures based on Niuean barkcloth) now have portions of polyurethane varnish mixed with enamel paint. The densely ornamental, gridded images are becoming more complicated, with the graphic linear areas contrasting with painterly sections of swirling honey coloured resin.

The interaction of land and sea - bays and estuaries around North Auckland, with cloud dotted skies – enrich these composite paintings that are also laden with sailing ships and sea monsters, octopuses, serpents, and copulating Gods. It is a rich panorama that includes chopped up beached whales and narwhals - and crowds of bystanders that might include the ghosts of whalers. Historic and contemporary time (before the Europeans came to the Pacific, and after) are happily mixed together.

With Pule’s drawing the thin, weedy pen and ink lines don’t work as well as the thick, smoky, oil-sticked configurations. The lines are too spidery and anaemic - for he is not a skilled draughtsperson: his shapes are often casually trite and cack-handed. This lack of drawing ability is easily hidden within the complex canvases (that from a distance look like huge prints) but not with the pages of handwritten poems. Their pen and ink and watercolour drawings reveal a great deal.

For this reason, the gridded canvases with their differently sized comic-like frames containing internal narratives, and unusual blending of different media, hold your interest. The looseness and spontaneity of Pule’s graphic and painting style works well mixed with changing grid modules and inserts of runny, oozy enamel-streaked varnish and smudgy paint stick. When he avoids delicate inked lines in bald isolation, his images stay compelling.

Architectural drawings

From perfumery to radio station: The evolution of an Auckland architectural practice
(Plus) New Zealand architecture in perspective: 150 years of architectural drawing
Gus Fisher
3 July - 12 August 2009

These two shows examine the role of drawing – nondigital in this point of architectural history – in building design. One looks at one firm close up, using the plans and elevations it submitted to clients. The other looks at rendered building proposals from several, using perspectival drawing methods.

The ‘perfumery show’ is the better one, having a tighter focus and a site specific installation using the inlaid marquetry toolbox owned by Henry Greensmith Wade. He was a partner in Wade & Bartley who in 1934 designed 1YA which later became the Kenneth Myers Centre in which the Gus Fisher is now housed. The exhibition features many delicate, detailed, ink and wash working drawings for that project, plus others from the 130 year history of Matthews and Matthews into which Wade & Bartley become incorporated.

For the other exhibition Canterbury art historian Ian Lockhead has selected an assortment of perspectival drawings created using various media. The drawings are quality artworks in themselves, especially the looser Scott and Pascoe ones which I particularly enjoyed. There are however too many, and the display is completely upstaged by the works in the adjacent rooms next door.

Even though the drawing structure there is different planarly, the similarities with line and wash, and the presence of each proposed building’s unity of concept and interlocking drawn graphic components, make the Matthews and Matthews show much much richer. Plus – as in the case of the beautiful Kenneth Myers Centre - you are actually in the building under scrutiny. You can wonder at the imaginative use of drawing as an essential aid to its construction, and enjoy the textures, forms, and prioperceptive bodily sensations of the final spatial result.

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.

Corroding global corporate power

SWAMP: Fire sale
MIC Toi Rerehiko
3 July - 22 August 2009

Like Les Liens Invisibles, the Yes Men and Cildo Meireles, SWAMP (Studies of work Atmospheres And Mass Production) is an artist collective - a couple of electronic/cybernetic boffins committed to undermining the global power of high profile corporations like Coca Cola, McDonald’s, Starbucks and Wal-Mart. They (Matt Kenyon and Doug Easterly) make a wide range of disruptive projects, but the efficacy and ultimate impact of what they do in terms of practical consequences, probably doesn't amount to much. However palpable disruption doesn’t seem to be the point - rather it is the spreading of subversive ideas, a rallying protest against corporate greed.

Some of the projects are deliberately half baked: Matt Kenyon sneaking around Wal-Mart with a wire going through a hole in his cheek to power a cam hidden in his mouth with which he tries to scan the bar code of every product in the store; a machine with a needle strapped to an American soldier’s arm that stabs them each time another U.S. casualty occurs. The work is really about political rhetoric and symbolic action rather than practical intervention. It is knowingly farcical – satirising consumerism or the military.

In fact it is the feather-brained silliness of some of these projects that gives them their appeal, the fact that SWAMP have these nutty ideas that they can built their machines around, and then construct a political argument to justify their existence. They obviously love making these electronic gizmos, irrespective of their real impact in the profit-making global world of corporate capitalism. They are gestures.

Some of them are also very funny (though like film-maker Mike Moore, SWAMP cheat when it suits to gain the advantage) - like the robot that greedily sucks up puddles of Coca Cola which it then stupidly sprays on itself so that the ‘corrosive’ properties incapacitate it. Or a rubber plant purchased from a hardware franchise that is automatically watered (or neglected) according to the firm’s fortunes on the stock market, and which they have guaranteed to replace if it dies.

SWAMP’s show takes up the whole of the MIC Toi Rerehiko space, and is a sparse hang. A couple of the exhibits (Puddle and P.O.P. Portraits) weren’t functioning properly when I visited, and the foldout catalogue information is a little skimpy (though the interview is excellent), but these artists have a superb website containing lots of ‘promotional’ videos. Some of what they do has lost currency with Obama’s election, but is still intriguing. Like the yellow letter-writing paper with rows of micro-dotted data on the Iraqi civilian death toll in its lines, that was sent in correspondence with Bush and the U.S. Congress.

The advantage of the exhibition is that SWAMP’s gadgetry is there to be examined closely if you wish. You can explore their website first to whet your appetite, zero in their repertoire of delicately engineered cybernetic devices and various electronically encoded receipt or note papers, pick out your favourites and if intrigued further, call in on the show for a closer inspection. An unusual exhibition.

A 'story'...

André Hemer: The real bad painter and the story of everything in real time
Antoinette Godkin
8 July - 1 August 2009

Flush irony down the dunny and listen: André Hemer is not usually a ‘real bad painter’; he normally is a very good one. But this is a dreadful installation. No doubt about it.

The reasons are formal. The visual dynamic of parallel striped lines placed on a large wall (the optical rush they create) kills any paintings hung there – even if some reflexively refer to their own installation. They are impossible to look at with such a backdrop. It creates nausea.

Hemer nevertheless has some good works here: those that are round or oval and without any parallel lines. You can enjoy the pool of masked painted or negative shapes that he likes to repeat: the slashing stroke lines or flicked on masked drips. The way the different complicated elements all interweave and lock in together. Hemer is very good at that – at making painted objects that intrigue.

His awful hang reminds me of Judy Millar’s first installation in a New Gallery show curated by Robert Leonard. Some of the massive paintings were the best works she has ever made, but the installation - with the partially painted walls behind them – was appalling. However for her the show was part of a learning process of how to jump from making discrete paintings to making installations that lash out at architecture. There was a logic that gradually came to reveal itself – even though she still straddles both sensibilities. But she got a lot better at subverting interior space.

Maybe this exhibition is transitional for Hemer. That he is heading in a particular direction, searching for an as yet unarticulated discovery. As his title says: a story to be unfolded in real time.

Rubber-craniumed rascal

Rohan Wealleans: Rogue
Ivan Anthony
4 July - 25 July 2009


Rohan Wealleans is one of those artists whose best work inhabits the space between sculpture and painting, and between narrative and abstraction. He gets into trouble with freestanding sculpture or easy narratives using animal life, tribal figures or women’s orifices. The great work comes out of ambiguity; stuff that is vague, nebulous, sculptural and wall based.

This current Wealleans’ exhibition shows once more how technically and formally innovative this artist can be – reinventing sculpture; reimagining painting.

Once it was the intricate marbling revealed when rubbery layers of stratified paint applied over bits of furniture were sliced into, peeled back, exposed and pinned down. Then it was carved into angular formations of latexy acrylic, crystalline prismatic growths on a geological paint surface. Now he has blended the two: angular prismatic offcuts are embedded in deep veins of rubberfied paint to be re-exposed when like the large ball in this show, the form is bisected and pulled apart.

Other things are happening as well, especially with the works on paper – a material out of which he has made great finned/open-book page formations in the past, wildly trippy versions of mid-career Don Peebles with none of the puritanical (though still compelling) austerity.

The works on paper in this show are of two types. One is of large, pale glued on pipi-shaped slices, each one ringed with concentrically diminishing fine-lined contours. The other is of butted together clusters of encrusted coloured pimples, hundreds of little pointed knobs that seem to be the start of small stalagmites - all glued to the paper.

The paintings also are of two types. One is of bits of encrusted or carved paint (or stratified strips) glued on to heavy denim so they look a bit like those plaster walls (or concrete floors) with pieces of smashed china or tiles embedded in them, or Schnabel plate paintings. They look folk-arty, as Wealleans’ work sometimes does, like something you’d find at a church fair. They have an amateurish crafty look about them, as if made by an eccentric aunt to be forgotten and later discovered in a dusty attic. They also look like Licorice Allsorts shoved into the rich icing of a cake.

Wealleans’ other painting type seems a sly joke about John Reynolds and his use of small canvases en masse in Clouds to create an installation. Wealleans’ Silver Lining version has six hundred small stretchers, each one a mini-painting of glued-on chunks of solid acrylic. They are very varied and the work seems not to necessarily need a ‘shaped hang’ like a Tony Cragg coloured plastic ‘painting’ – as shown here. All six hundred acrylic assemblages in a long row at eye height could just as easily hold your attention. Maybe more.

As I indicated earlier, my favourite Wealleans are the more sculptural ‘paintings’ (or painted ‘sculptures’) that really project out from the wall. I like their lumpy pachyderms with strange warty gall-like or testicular growths. This current work, like that of the past few years, is fiddlier. Nevertheless this is an excellent, high-energy, characteristically inventive Wealleans exhibition. Not to be missed.

I've seen the Future (Brother), it is Murder

The Future is Unwritten
Curated by Laura Preston
Adam Art Gallery, University of Victoria, Wellington
11 July - 30 August 2009

Over the last few years one of the subjects increasingly brought under close scrutiny by writers such as James Elkins is that of the relationship between academia and art, especially within the structure of a PhD study programme. What is this thing called ‘art practice’ and how does it fit in to the requirements of a university. More particularly, what is ‘research’? Should I say ‘Research’ (with a capital R) for doctorates? Is that word accurate for what artists (post-graduate or otherwise) do? In a studio or out of it. Does it correlate with Research carried out by those in other disciplines, with its necessary (and copious) reading and writing?

Now the following discussion is not a review. It is a speculative pre-amble (my ‘Cohen’ to Laura Preston’s ‘Strummer’) that appears two days before this Adam exhibition opens. I’ve been invited by the curator to post some comments in advance. It’s an interesting idea for a number of reasons, one of them being the relevance of the above paragraph. She is interested in guest artists doing interdisciplinary 'research' within Victoria university, and has sent me a gallery invite containing a mini-essay and various background bits and pieces. Preston’s essay is more detailed and more interesting than what you get on the gallery website.

Click on the Press Release here and you will get a somewhat simplified version of what she is up to. The project involves turning the Adam Gallery into a sort of research centre for ‘critically thinking’ conceptual artists that mostly inhabit the thread that runs from Art and Language to Thomas Hirschhorn. Its curatorial ethos appears to be based in part on Charles Esche’s discussion of A Modest Proposal, and partially on the ideas of Simon Sheikh, and it briefly looks at Jacques Rancière’s espousal of a certain kind of critical art that experiments with form (see March 2007 Artforum), or structure as reflected in Paola Virno’s analysis of jokes. The antecedents of the interdisciplinary curatorial emphasis are easy to find. Hans Ulrich Obrist’s Laboratorium, and several decades earlier the late Billy Kluver’s E.A.T. projects with Rauschenberg and others.

All with the aim of acknowledging the current time of crisis (G.F.C. and ecological) and using the university as “a place for interdisciplinary thinking” for achieving “a critical analysis of the current climate.” So in this period of post-postmodernism, where irony is rejected and a belief in meaning re-asserted, the seven artists and two designers, through their conversations with the curator and other university staff, might (they are free to fail to produce) “shift the idea of what a ‘work’ constitutes and what it should deliver.”

Preston points out that Rancière believes that the political in art resides in the power of its form. His term “the distribution of the sensible” refers to the restricted divisions of place and forms of community participation that centre on apprehended modes of perception, not only what is visible or audible but also what is thought, said, made or done. He sees artistic practices as ‘ways of doing and making’ that intervene in this general distribution as well as in the relationships they maintain to modes of being and modes of visibility.The curator sees Rancière as placing value on “what is felt, (re-engaging with) art’s affect.”

In Artforum Rancière says “For me the fundamental question is to explore the possibility for play. To discover how to produce forms for the presentation of objects, from for the organisation of spaces, that thwart expectations. The main enemy of artistic creativity as well as of political creativity is consensus – that is, inscription within given roles, possibilities, competences.” (p.263)

When you look at his examples it is clear the playfulness is within certain forms of interventionist practice, within works that involve critical thinking. It is clearly not wildly fooling around for its own sake, but has a set out, contextualised political agenda.

In her search for empathetic practitioners I wonder though if Preston’s emphasis on ‘young artists’ in the Press Release (though Malone is not young) might severely hamper the success of this project. Older artists like Bruce Barber, Jim Allen, and Ralph Paine, university teachers (or retired ones) who know the politically intricate departmental infrastructures of such institutions well, might get greater use out of its interdisciplinary facilities. Their experience might achieve more conceptually exciting results, and draw out the rich possibilities of Victoria University as a pedagogical site.

That aside, Preston has an inspired range of artists here (who might consider themselves ‘critical thinkers’ though that can’t be assumed) that represent a wide variety of practice morphologies.

To speculate on the show one would have to speculate on the bodily experience of entering the Adam architecture to discover the location of each individual and the form of presentation each artist embraces, or the gallery websites, which I happen not to see as ‘dematerialized’. Such sensations are crucial to their content; the means they provide of access to their conceptual material.

In other words, though Preston considers these artists ‘conceptualists’ it is a word that nowadays has become meaningless through overuse and contradictory inclusions. Even early ‘conceptual artists’ like Kosuth or Sol Lewitt (Wittgensteinians or mystics, not necessarily Marxists) use sensuality and form as a carrot to draw their audiences in towards the ideas. They never abandon the aesthetic, the physicality of visual appeal. So with this show’s artists, whilst some may be enthusiastic readers of theory, that doesn’t mean the results of their research will be automatically interesting - visually in terms of concrete materiality experienced by the senses, or visually in terms of linguistic description experienced in the imagination.

However the nature of the research Preston is advocating here (what she calls ‘propositional’), some might argue is not really research at all. That the term is inappropriate when applied to most artists, even those thought ‘conceptual’.

Certainly the open-endedness of this socially hermetic project worries me. The lack of accountability and refusal to assess itself I see as irresponsible. (I feel the same about Esche and Sheikh – see the latter’s Constitutive Effects: the Techniques of The Curator in ‘Curating Subjects’ ed. Paul O’Neill.) Preston describes a win/win situation where the exhibition cannot fail. She doesn't acknowledge any criteria through which she must evaluate the project, and allow for the possibility of its collapse - or that certain individuals cannot contribute effectively and she has misjudged them, or expected too much.

What of the role of the curator in her ‘conversations and collaborations’? I would hope that she not try to be an artist herself, that she is a facilitator, a nurturer, a provider of introductions and available means, but not a puppetmaster using the Adam as a theatre where the artists are manipulated by her. A ‘collaboration’ should not imply Preston is an artist. Here though, I think it does.

As a quick glance, it is easy to see why these nine individuals were picked: Amit Charan has a finely tuned, subtle mind, as indicated by his use of a videoed actor to recite with manual sign language definitions from some of Joseph Kosuth’s artworks, or his insertion of marginal codes, such as floral arrangements, into exhibitions; Fiona Connor is well known for her interest in subverting the physical properties of architecture – and the Adam is the prefect building for her to be set loose on; William Hsu has an established interest in science and various global environmental issues; Daniel Malone for his enthusiasm for Situationist practice and for Giorgio Agamben’s The Coming Community as indicated by the pamphlet Autonomous Anonymous: On Being Whatever that he co-wrote with Ralph Paine; Narrow Gauge is known for elegantly designed publications and posters; Kate Newby for her interest in fashion, the poetical properties of language (allusions to early conceptualists like Lawrence Weiner) and her ability to sculpturally intervene in unusual spaces; Martyn Reynolds has eloquently indicated his interest in the writings of theoreticians like Rancière and the practice of Jason Rhoades; Kelvin Soh is known for innovative commodity design, posters and comics; Peter Trevelyan has an interest in mathematics, dystopian devices and systems of surveillance.

Hopefully on Friday evening there will be a lot happening (or starting to happen) with the beginnings of various processual strategies in and around the Adam Art Gallery building, and online. Call or log in to follow the much anticipated, but as yet unarticulated, 'unwritten' developments.

Simon Esling on

Making Visible and Thomas Finn on Gallery Three, AUT.

Darragh at Two Rooms

Judy Darragh: Studio of exhaustion for diligent service
Two Rooms
3 July - 1 August 2009

The nine works Judy Darragh presents in this show make excellent use of the generous downstairs Two Rooms space: lots of air around each item and a clever division down the middle that lines up two plinths (each half the stud height) to mimic the two central columns.

As a colourist Darragh’s chromatic combinations in her wall and floor works often are too brash, especially with her use of fluoro, or with too many hues. She succeeds therefore when the palette is dead simple. So in this show it is the stained wooden pieces with no applied colour that are the more intriguing – lathed column forms mixed with squelchily glued-on animal carvings, corkscrews, candlesticks and furniture. Between the joins the hokey-pokey toffeelike glue oozes down the sides.

In the middle, two wooden lathed champagne bottles on the white plinths appear pierced by copper bullets. The stands below the ‘wounds’ are splashed with yellow ochre ‘blood’. These trickling marks could also be urine from exuberant hunters. The copious quantities of alcohol they seem to have quaffed could be connected to the hundreds of pinned up, paint-dunked wine corks spread like an angry swam stretched out across the long wall.

Near the wall by the gallery entrance are two stacked up silver painted cabinets crammed with amusingly tawdry goblets, made from plastic bottles and covered with thin silver tape. Like the corks and wooden bottles these pantomime-like props allude to excessive consumption; they are a comment on waste. Yet they have a pathos, a sense of being tragic as well as didactic and funny. Also amusing is a stiffened, brightly coloured Turkish rug, rearing up high off the floor as if it was a Cobra. For a simple idea this unexpected sculptural form has great impact.

Near the opposite corner of the room is a pink banner projecting out from the wall, hung high and attached to an ochre ‘flowing paint’ cut-out canvas. Like the rearing rug, this is very simple, but the two colours combine well with the oddly shaped hanging and shredded looking 'brushmarked' material. So whilst I normally dislike Darragh’s colour combinations, this one turns my knees to jelly. I like the controlled chromatic restraint (contextually the fluoro works), the nutty but mesmerising shapes, their peculiar trickling down associations. It's a strangely lopsided, badly shredded, candy coloured flag seemingly pulled in two directions by competing vectors of gravity. My favourite.

Painting by numbers

Ruth Watson: Platforms
Two Rooms
3 July - 1 August 2009

Sudoku is one of those games that requires a strong sense of strategy in figuring out how to get those nine sets of nine numbers to co-operate within the requirements of a grid. In your matrix of 81 squares you have not only vertical and horizontal alignments in which to place each of the nine digits, but you have the nine larger squares that divide up the board. Tricky stuff – a bit like making art (co-ordinating the elements), or the politics of making art (pitching to the constituency of its audience).

Ruth Watson clearly sees this numbers game as a metaphor for art practice, but she, as a regular player, might be addicted too. (Like artmaking?) These highly sensual encaustic paintings allude to her very early graduate show in the CSA in Christchurch in the mid-eighties, which I happened to see and write about. At that time the encaustic technique of applying thin melted wax to plywood panels was highly unusual - and still is. The only other artist I’ve ever heard of using it is Jasper Johns. Another numbers guy.

In our culture the ultimate ‘numbers guy’ is Colin McCahon, with his different counting series encompassing the late fifties to mid-seventies, and superbly written about by Wystan Curnow, Gordon Brown and others. With Watson, the Platform works demonstrate a similar enthusiasm for mental processes. With McCahon you jump around with your eye from number to number, following the sequence as you count (or recite) it. And with earlier board game art works that Watson has made (like Snakes and Ladders), you mentally count squares, move your imaginary counter and recreate the playing process.

With Watson it is more complicated because with this Sudoku project you have a game which is not so much about sequencing as filling in gaps within a series – and mentally testing alternative possibilities. It blends counting with the structural logic of crosswords. (And an earlier series of enlarged Scrabble pieces.) However these works, if they are to be more than sensual treats, need your mental participation and maybe physical too – ie. grabbing pencil and paper and responding to the challenge, grappling with filling the gaps. Few people will do that unless they become obsessed with Sudoku or already are. That is Watson’s risk – of being too obscure to really engage.

Another area of discussion is the relationship between medium and content. Some of the numbers have more overlaid encaustic layers than others, making them fainter - as if being placed earlier only to now fade in the player’s memory. This could allude to the chronological process of filling in the board. The extra layering on some numbers might also indicate lack of confidence in their placement, an attempted erasure.

Despite Sudoku being widely prevalent in newspapers, magazines and websites, there is something extremely introverted about these paintings – something inaccessible and withheld. This is because the sentient processes alluded to remain out of reach, those necessary little cognitive twists and turns that shuffle tested numbers around within such a game’s progression. They lie buried in the cumulative distribution of digits and wax so that the movement of placing rejected or accepted numbers around the board is not fully charted.

Because the nine 'puzzles' are nowhere near completion, the procedure is too open to provide a sharpened conceptual focus – to tease the viewer into finishing rows or columns. Their lack of information makes them intimidating – especially to Sudoku novices. Despite being highly attractive objects with their layered, milky, translucent wax, they only allow the reader limited mental participation.

Gallery Three, AUT

Bypassed territory
St. Paul St, Gallery Three (39 Symonds St)
25 - 27 June 2009

This, the third exhibiting space of St. Paul St, just round the corner from the other two, less raw, international venues, is getting more usage now from AUT’s senior students – though only for short bursts. Last week six 3rd year BVA candidates presented an excellent sampling exhibition of their respective interests - six very different individuals showing floor sculpture, photographs, a wall drawing, wall sculptures of folded prints and one screened wall painting.

Emma Fraser’s large wall painting ‘Noise” had overtones of Rauschenberg’s ink-transfer and silk-screened works. Her array of screened on overlapping blotches, squiggles and smudged stains, that then had added fine ink lines delineating chosen contours, dominated a large wall with its delicate greys and scrubbed browns. This small mural alluded to decay and attrition and not narratives with recognisable images, and was by far the largest two-dimensional work in the gallery.

Lyn Guinibert’s cluster of latex-stiffened beach towels and tablecloths on the floor was intriguing for each unit was like an unopened umbrella, the fabric being left to harden while draped over the tip of a pole. Inert when single and isolated, they became active as a group, suggesting strange angular birds or shattered geological forms. This very simple idea seemed rich in explorative possibilities. It will be interesting to see where Guinibert takes it.

Printmaking methodology and folded paper sculpture were blended together by Emma Macfarlane. One work had the partially cut out but now folded, box element still attached to the original large sheet along its bottom edge, so that the two were still one work on the wall – a less sophisticated version of the eighties snipped-and-folded whiteware sculpture by British artist Bill Woodrow. The other was a grid of 9 x 7 paper boxes with an identically embossed formation on each frontal plane. The grid was a little dull; repetition for its own sake without a knowing tension. The con-joined sheet/folded form variation had more resonances.

Natasha Pearl’s photographs used expired film as strategy, aspiring to remind ‘us of a practice once dependent on scientific process and light sensitive paper.’ There was a pathos about her conscious embracing of raggedy imperfection, with images out of focus, having odd depths of field, inconstant light levels and sudden horizontal changes of hue. Without going too far the other way and lashing out at current digital ‘slickness’, these images of bush paths cleverly mixed the ‘formlessness’ of dense vegetation with a methodology that examines decay. They didn’t seem to be about nostalgia, more a wry acceptance of the history of the camera.

This gallery space seems to have been tidied up considerably since I last visited, and it has some unusual features like raw concrete columns that give it personality. Caitlyn Porteous did a wall drawing that wrapped its patterned web around a corner. Her silver-lined drawing of linked hexagonal and triangular shapes worked well overall but it could just as effectively have been on any flat wall, or better still modified for a column. As a flowing crystalline bed it didn’t have an architectural dialogue with its own site; no morphological nuance with its right-angled cross-section.

Thomas Stewart’s two works interacted in the architecture as foils. One was an installation that cleverly used the internal space by creating the skeletal framework of a room, and the other was a self-reflexive sculpture that used the space outside the gallery in the street to depict its own internal image to passers by. Stewart’s installation had a flat undulating plaster square on the floor that reflected similar oblong slabs stacked in a vertical wooden box in the wall frame. The simple box form was repeated in the second work with a larger version covering a corner window and facing out into the street. From outside the contents were revealed through the glass as a mini wall holding a mini box. It depicted itself.

Hopefully AUT will do more shows like this with senior students - and perhaps have an ongoing dialogue with Elam’s George Fraser Gallery, with longer exhibiting periods. The quality of the room is very apparent now, the location very accessible. It just needs a consistently maintained programme.

Many thanks to the artists for their images. From top to bottom, the works are by Fraser, Guinibert, Macfarlane, Pearl, Porteous and Stewart.

Imparting knowledge

Erica van Zon: Take this with you
Newcall
2 July - 18 July 2009

Confounding expectations of a handmade ceramic installation with handmade posters or performances on video, Erica van Zon’s latest show presents one work only, tucked in the small stem in the T of Newcall’s exhibiting space. Using industrial technology she has created a rosy-pink neon text. Written in a flowing cursive script and arranged in glowing stacked rows is an English expression translated from the original Dutch adage: Don’t let your heart be a lion’s den.

It’s a bold work that effectively dominates the whole space with its pink glow and sizzling electrical crackle – even though it is tucked away to one side. It looks Naumanesque but is more like Holzer; a piece of kind-hearted advice, a compressed lecture about the corrosive properties of hatred. Addressed to herself or another.

Van Zon likes aphorisms (and cliches as in the ‘Dog Eat Dog’, ‘People Come People Go’ texts of her ceramic tiles) but this is a clever choice in that its ‘heart’ reference alludes to her earlier sculptures, and the Newcall space creates its own quite intimate ‘den’, but one not strewn with bones. Such an ambiguous text is fun to think about, especially with its Biblical references and the fact that lion’s don’t actually live in dens, prides move around. Perhaps artists live in dens?

Sooo…how do we respond to the content here? Maybe the artworld would be better if more viewers were contrary to van Zon’s sentiments, and had hearts like gory scenes from bloody massacres. What exactly do I mean? Only that passion about art surely is good, both raves and dislikes – especially dislikes - and that (to be a little preachy) more people should speak their minds. Timidity of opinion curtails conversation. Such activity is not the primary impulse behind art’s existence but it certainly helps.

An excremental vision

Richard Maloy: Nothing, nothing, something
Sue Crockford
30 June – 18 July 2009

Allan Smith, in the excellent series of notes he provides for this show, points out Freud’s comment that “dirtiness of any kind seems to us incompatible with civilisation.” Its relevance is because the exhibition consists of ten colour photographs of white toilet paper. In pristine condition, fresh off the roll, the tissue is unnervingly delicately beautiful.It has a faint hint of pink, barely perceptible rippled patterns, and different textures that distinguish recto from verso. Set on a field of grey, each life-sized documented portion is not quite the perfect square. The torn feathery serrated edges are detectable on the sides.

In the infantile stage of anal eroticism within Freud’s wider theory of human sexuality, the child attaches symbolic meaning to faeces, something that is the equivalent of its own child or creation and which can be used (amongst other things) for narcissistic pleasure in play or to obtain love as a gift.

If Maloy exhibited real toilet paper (not photographs) it might be as if he wants us to inspect it – and perhaps show disappointment at the paucity of offering. Compared to his earlier photographic and video projects involving clay and butter, there are no sticky substances on show. Instead this work is impeccably tasteful in its fastidious presentation. The humour is that the brand is Home Brand, the cheapest such tissue available, and it is great for decor.

The show is also remarkable for the clarity and logic of its layout. Four walls used for four kinds of photograph: one piece of serrated paper within one image on the first; two variations of two pieces (joined and separated) on the second; three versions of three portions for the third; four versions of four for the last. It’s a well conceived installation which prods you into working out which possible permutations he has ignored.

Because intimate bodily functions are such an emotional and personal subject, any material or product associated with them is difficult to neutralise. Just because something is physically absent it doesn't mean it is forgotten. It is hard to ignore the paper's purpose and treat it as a beautiful substance recorded on film.

Maloy's methodology is akin to that of Marie Shannon and the composed images to those of John Nixon, Julian Dashper or Stephen Bambury. And his use of mid-tone grey in the background and framing links these objects to the sprinkler pipes on the ceiling and the charcoal fittings of the windows. Crockford’s gallery looks really sharp.

This installation is ingenious, entertaining, and rarefied visually. The above images don’t really capture the subtle warmth of the colour. Essential viewing.