e y e C O N T A C T

Dear eyeCONTACT reader

2010-05-17T17:04:00.003-07:00

This blog is pleased to announce it is now EyeContact the website, at www.eyecontactsite.com.

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The new site is designed to provide the reader with easier access to both current and past reviews, as well as offering a guide to visual arts venues, institutions and service providers throughout New Zealand and Australia. This intersects with our articles to provide useful and relevant local information.

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Judy Millar currently has a show at Hamish Morrison's in Berlin. Anthony Byrt tells us all about it.

2010-05-12T03:48:00.006-07:00

Every year, Berlin’s galleries team up to coordinate Gallery Weekend: three days of openings that attract curators, critics and collectors from all over Europe. This year, people flew in for what promised to be a pretty exciting few days. There was a buzz about the fact that some of the biggest names in the art world were having shows in the city: people queued almost round the clock to get into the new Olafur Eliasson show; and out on Heidestrasse, crowds gathered outside Damien Hirst’s opening, trying to get a peek at some of the works he didn’t sell at his Sotheby’s auction in September 2008. Other big names, though not quite as stratospheric, were also opening around town: Gursky, Wallinger, Bonvicini and Peyton among them.

In the middle of all this hype (and right next to Hirst’s exhibition), Judy Millar opened at Hamish Morrison Galerie. Millar’s show, A Better Life, is her first major installation since representing New Zealand at Venice last year. As with Venice, she hasn’t backed away from either the high-profile context or the size of the space she’s been given: it’s an all-or-nothing project, for an all-or-nothing weekend.

Extending the concerns of her Venice show, giant strips of billboard material printed with her blown-up marks collapse over each other and spill through the gallery. There’s more colour than at Venice. Complex negative curves make the piece more dynamic too, and there’s a sharper interplay between form and content. In the past, I’ve written that at ten times their actual size, her marks become graphic rather than expressive. But here she’s managed to make them architectural too, designing them to follow the curves of the structures that support them. She’s also resisted the temptation to put too many paintings on the walls, so there’s nothing to distract viewers from the main event; as one artist said to me at the opening, the work is like a single breath through the gallery.

I’ve worked with Millar many times before: so people can take or leave the fact that I think it’s a great exhibition. The more important issue is what it represents for her career. It’s no secret that the New Zealand art world has had an uneasy relationship both with her international rise and with her work for a while now. I think this is caused by three factors. First, her work demands time, and a lot of people either don’t want to, or don’t think they need to, give it the extended attention it asks for. Second, there’s a fixation with the idea that her work is primarily about abstraction, which it isn’t, and it’s therefore written off as decorative and out-of-date. Third, and perhaps most importantly, it looks out from New Zealand rather than in, participating in a global conversation about the relationship that painting has with the real world it both seeks to represent and be a part of. While there aren’t many artists in New Zealand exploring similar ideas, there are plenty of very good ones around the world who are: Katharina Grosse, Sterling Ruby, Arturo Herrera, Thomas Scheibitz and Richard Wright, to name a few. I’m not suggesting that these artists have exactly the same motivations as Millar, but there are parallels.

The fact that Millar is now participating in this conversation points to her own determination to be part of it. But it also says something about the platform that Venice has given her. Like her predecessors et al, Michael Stevenson and Peter Robinson, Venice has brought her work to the attention of international curators, collectors and writers. That’s why this exhibition with Hamish Morrison is so important: it’s her first chance to confirm that Venice wasn’t a one-off, and that she really does belong on a big stage.

There’s also a lot riding on the show for the gallery. Expatriate New Zealander Morrison was one of the first gallerists to move to Heidestrasse, which is now one of Berlin’s most important gallery strips. Over the past few years, he’s built up a diverse stable of artists including: Iceland’s Gabriela Fridriksdottir (also a Venice veteran); The Netherlands’ Ronald de Bloeme; Dresden-based painter Paul Pretzer; Britain’s Andrew Cranston; Australia’s Mikala Dwyer; and Millar. Morrison has taken a leap of faith by giving Millar the Gallery Weekend gig – one of the two most important slots in Berlin’s art calendar (the other is the start of the gallery season in September, which he’s given to Dwyer). But if reaction at the opening is anything to go by, the gamble is paying off.

Morrison, and Millar’s other dealers Mark Müller (Zurich) and Gow Langsford (Auckland), will all have been perfectly aware that once Venice was over it was up to them to push the artist’s career forward. This raises a challenging question for CNZ though, about who benefits most from their massive investment in the bi-annual event. Obviously the artists do well out of it. Their dealers do too: Venice, for any artist from any country, still serves as a quality-mark for collectors. However, there might still be questions about the value it creates for New Zealand; the old ‘home or away’ debate that causes CNZ – and New Zealand artists based overseas – endless amounts of grief. The anachronistic ‘national’ structure of Venice doesn’t help. But the harsh truth is, this national angle doesn’t really matter much any more. In a global art world, there’s nothing inherently interesting about an artist being from New Zealand: it only becomes interesting when that artist harnesses their point of cultural difference to make work that contributes in a worthwhile way to international conversations. This is exactly what Millar has done, and what et al, Stevenson and Robinson did before her.

Millar’s show with Hamish Morrison then, is exactly the sort of thing that CNZ should be pointing to as a positive outcome from their investment in Venice. A Better Life, and the results that will likely come from it – museum shows, big collections, residencies – illustrate that there is life after Venice for New Zealand artists, even if that life doesn’t play itself out at home.

Images courtesy of the artist and Hamish Morrison Gallery

Andrew Paul Wood visits Eve Armstrong's show at The Physics Room

2010-05-11T22:11:00.005-07:00

Eve Armstrong: After
The Physics Room
21 April - 23 May 2010

Eve Armstrong’s installation After coherently and holistically fills an entire gallery space, but consists of sub installations which makes for a visually interesting and engaging environment without diluting the web of associations and connections (song lines, ley lines, lines of sight) of meaning or becoming inarticulate. On a basic level it can be read as a Romantic landscape constructed from the found detritus of modern consumer society, seemingly after the apocalypse and in carefully selected shades of pastel pink, grey and black. As with movies like Planet of the Apes and Logan’s Run, it is difficult to guess how future humans might interpret and seek to enshrine the relics of the present, even though After is clearly here and now.

The colours are essential in providing a harmonising and homogenising matrix for all of these objets trouvé. Using colour as the means for the unification of the whole is a clever strategy, remaining true to the minimalist aesthetics of modern consumer goods and avoiding the sensation for the viewer that they are surrounded by a less consciously selected, random or pastiche-seeming clutter - lacking refined meaning and significance. The muted nature of the palette enhances an overall minimalist sensibility that does not distract from the important physical relationships between zones and sub-installations within the gestalt whole. The focus is not on nostalgia, the beautiful, kitsch nor sentimentality, neither does it seek to revise art history. Rather After seeks to redress a new place to stand for artist and audience that metronomes between yearning and anxiety. Armstrong is obviously as aware of the debates within contemporary art as she is of art historical predecessors.

The Romantic spirit which reached its full flowering where the eighteenth century becomes the nineteenth is, I think, key to teasing the intellectual threads of meaning out of the complex fabric of After. Romanticism in art, has in recent years come back in force – one might consider the 2005 survey exhibition Munschwelten: Neue Romantik in der Kunst der Gegenwart (Ideal Worlds: New Romanticism in Contemporary Art) at the Schirn Kunsthalle, Frankfurt am Main. The ‘landscape’ effect is strongly suggested by Outlet; a towering ‘alp’ of concrete blocks studded with electric lamp stands in which candles have been inserted (consider the opposition of technological levels) overlooking Display; a small ‘lake’ constructed on the floor from mirror off-cuts. The classic Romantic landscape is represented at scale and in metaphor, a visually stimulating accumulation of altitudes and voids. Silvered glass and concrete seem as natural as this landscape will get, and yet that also seems to be enough.

Casper David Friedrich-like lone figures in a landscape is intimated in two seats; Vying to return – a bathroom stool upholstered ad hoc with a fluffy pink bath towel seen better days, and de rigueur – an insubstantial tube aluminum chair (picture a cheap collapsible ironing board folded into a chair, ugly and tacky as sin) atop a plinth covered in carpet off-cuts. A third ‘figure in the landscape’ seems to be represented by Bystander – a metal standard lamp stand sans lamp – a skeletal pole rising out of its base, trying to be casual and insouciant in its relationship with the other components. These suggestions of isolated observers, staffage really, are in of themselves quintessentially Romantic with a capital ‘R’.

Unlike the various variations on Classicism, Romanticism does not propagate any absolute set of ideals, but rather sought to create individualised alternate counterworlds through which to escape the violently accelerated tenor of contemporary life. Whereas the Romantics of the nineteenth century tried to find escape in an idealised pastoral fantasy of the past, Armstrong has eliminated the present altogether. The modern world is represented through discarded, obsolete objects aesthetically associated with the 1970s and 1980s (thus aligning the installation with Armstrong’s X-generation youth, the important aesthetic developmental period) as they might be found in the ruins of Western civilisation after some terrible global man-made natural disaster.

At one end of the gallery is Future you – a minimalist shower door mounted monolithically and architecturally atop a sheet of linoleum, the marble pattern of which suggests a sculptural plinth. Leaning against a wall, Passing consists of a glacial wall of glass off-cuts, some of which are slathered with a gestural plain of white acrylic paint. Posted to these are laser prints on newsprint depicting collages of consumer appliance and white goods superimposed on landscapes associated with the Sublime (volcanoes, mountains, geysers) and the Picturesque (forest). These prints (including to the one stuck to the shower door of Future you) represent primers to understanding this alluded to world of capitalist technocrat consumerism, with a historical vision of nature as metaphor for the human world.

The installation grows crystal-like from a ground of culture, dispersed around horizontal and vertical surfaces like something organic, coaxing high drama and a sense of becoming out of the mundane and otherwise static surfaces of the gallery space staged independent of space or time. These are very much interlocking tableaux functioning like an ambient organic machine to evoke deep and unexpected emotional states in the viewer – another trait of Romanticism. There seems to be an innate desire on the part of After to undergo transformation and dissolve boundaries, confounding our sensibilities of mind and scale. Scale is important here, because only when taken as a whole does the Lilliputian nature of this indoor landscape become apparent.

This really is a delicious assemblage that has real depth, meaning and interest, and a refreshing delight when all too many installations of found objects seem merely to be going through the motions.

Images courtesy Mark Gore and The Physics Room.

Reflective fluorescent Culbert

2010-05-11T21:35:00.005-07:00

Bill Culbert: Light State
Sue Crockford
27 April – 22 May 2010

For this new Bill Culbert show at Crockford’s we have his characteristic use of the illuminative and reflective properties of light, demonstrated through a suite of works using fluorescent tubes positioned along the edges of large squares of shiny glass or placed across their centres. These are displayed on the walls of the front gallery, while an assortment of white tubes threaded through groups of plastic bottles are presented on shelves in the small back room.

The glass sheets and aligned glowing fluorescent tubes make a wonderfully nuanced presentation but its effect depends largely on the time of day you visit. When I called it was about 4.45 on a cool clear autumn afternoon when the sky (seen through the ‘waterfront’ windows) was a dark blue, giving the right-angled and diagonal lines and their multiple reflections (from the floor too) added impact – by virtue of contrast. Having the sun low in the sky was an advantage.The work looked more striking than the above photographs indicate.

As you moved around the space the precisely angled lines caught in the shiny squares were mirrored in the floor’s reflective parquet surfaces, to mix with the dark azure window rectangles. The way Culbert had positioned the tube brackets on the glass edges or flat plane of each glass sheet was a crucial element: sometimes on their backs in an inverted, diagonal T-formation in the square’s middle so that the light faced the viewer frontally bordered by two fuzzy shadows; sometimes on their sides on the lefthand and bottom edges so that a softly illuminated wall side was contrasted with an opposite parallel shadowy edge.

These seven Light States collectively force the strolling visitor to think about their movement, getting them to notice the shifting relationships between the different reflected works coming and going between the vertical glass edges before them. For a Culbert installation, this organisation of different carefully placed elements within a series, is unusually participatory and immersive – quite different with its self awareness from say any passively observing of glowing objects on a wall, like that found in the other gallery.

Those particular translucent screwtop container works (for which Culbert is now quite famous) make you think about the internal properties of each horizontally repeated hollow form, the nuances of colour, the different densities of the plastic shell and how they were originally made. Here is light partially passing through substance, not completely so as with glass and not lying on top of it as with an opaque wall. You experience these levels of transparency along with the shadows that they might cast and the white light that goes from the frosted glass of the projecting tubes directly to your eye.

The immersive front gallery experience, with the reflective glass and fluorescent tubes on the walls interacting with the shiny floor, shows Culbert at his very best. Worth a late afternoon trip down town to investigate for yourself.

Andrea Bell tells us about the recent Richard Orjis / LA Lakers / Death Throes performances in Christchurch

2010-05-09T05:08:00.005-07:00

Richard Orjis: Silver Park (with LA Lakers and Death Throes)
HSP
Christchurch
16 April – 8 May

Dirt, heavy metal and pyrotechnics: what more could you want from an exhibition?

After a long wait on the stairwell outside the gallery we were finally let in. The lights were out, and any natural light was banished with the windows sealed in shiny black plastic. The gallery’s candle lit floor was littered with straw, crumpled tinfoil, the occasional photograph, amongst other detritus. At the end of the room, someone (something?) was throwing clods of dirt through an open window into the gallery. To the right of the window sat a robed shaman-like figure. A tinsel wig covered his face, disguising his identity. A small circular stage sat in the centre of the room, set up with a drum kit, microphone and amps.

The first performance was by LA Lakers (the robed figure). Crouching near the stage, his low-tech cassette tape and a-lyrical vocal performance echoed the pagan sentiment of the setting. Bells were rung and Walkmans were methodically flung across the floor. Following the performance, LA Lakers shuffled blindly around the gallery, lighting sparklers and offering them out to members of the audience, marking the close of the initiation. After a short interlude Death Throes took the stage. At this point, some of the audience there for the art left, replaced by an influx of teenage metal fans. This was my first metal gig. Although I couldn’t make out any of the lyrics, the throaty vocals and sustained power and aggression was hypnotic.

Coupled with the music, the Silver Park installation suggested the same dark anthropological sense of ritual and contemporary gothic that Orjis’ is known for. Having only ever seen Orjis’ Empire of Dirt photographs of young men, smeared in mud, and adorned with phallic flora garlands, Silver Park was not quite what I’d expected. Described on the gallery’s website as a “crepuscular ceremony” rather than an exhibition, Orjis’ installation set the scene for a performance-based manifestation of his interest in mysticism, and transcendence.

The performance aspect of Silver Park showed certain continuities with Orjis’ 2008 Physics Room show Welcome to the Jungle (For this work Orjis invited Christchurch locals to cover their bare skin in soot and be photographed in the gallery. On opening night bodies writhed in the black coal while the portraits of coal-faced individuals were projected on the wall. Meanwhile a black station wagon parked below the gallery, brimming with orchids in lush fushias, purples and marigolds alerted those at street level to the activity above.)

Formally, the circular stage in Silver Park echoed the circular mound of coal central to Orjis’ earlier show. Circles are ubiquitous in pagan rituals, symbolizing the changing seasons, wheel-chart of astronomy and the cyclic nature of life itself. Orjis’ act of casting a circle creates a place suggestive of earth worshipping and ritual in the gallery.

The relationship between the performative and installation based elements inherent to Orjis’ work is one of evolution. Whereas in Welcome to the Jungle, the relationship between the material and performative aspects of the exhibition was cohesive and unified, here Orjis’ stage, dirt, foil, candles and floor-based photos were less polished, and more open and anarchistic. This is perhaps suggestive of a desire to move away from the formal and thematic aspects that he has become known for.

Mark Amery has been reading One Day Sculpture - the book

2010-05-08T15:52:00.003-07:00

One Day Sculpture
Ed. David Cross and Claire Doherty
Book Design. A Practice For Everyday Life
276 pp, coloured illustrations
Kerber Verlag 2009

One Day Sculpture saw twenty works occur for one day each, spread over more than a year, across the country. How to assess something where only a few handfuls of people actually witnessed more than a handful of projects?

The answer is not to. Rather, how such a web of time-based activity is documented becomes crucial. Editors of this book and managing curators David Cross and Claire Doherty show they’ve given this a lot of thought. This title is a guidebook, providing some handy contemporary context and then gathering together with excellent photography disparate eyewitness accounts and curatorial perspectives of the projects. It’s the Lonely Planet of art publishing.

Whatever your assessment of One Day Sculpture’s success its impact has been significant. Artists, writers and curators will be sparking off for years to come the questions it raised, models it set up and the work, good, bad and indifferent. This is the quick reference book for that continuing enquiry, and its smart clear design makes it feel like one.

Given that most people’s experience of the work has been through documentation or discussion (signaled as an issue by the inclusion of an essay by Daniel Palmer on the photographs relationship to temporary work), how the book is led editorially is very important. This was one of the more interesting aspects of the whole enterprise - where and when the viewing point for work began and stopped – and writing around specific works here is kept principally subjective, with eyewitness accounts.

The book is a very self-aware exercise in keeping interpretation open, and for the most part that’s very welcome. That is taken to a fairly fruitless extreme however by the inclusion in the back of a transcript of an uneven conversation between various curators, better left in the public programme.

After a very readable summary from the editors of the entire programme, the book opens with what is titled a Reader: short essays on issues pertinent to temporary work. These texts provide general context from a distance rather than a response to the works, some more clearly than others (as with her address at the symposium Jane Rendell’s is full of fascinating insights but pretty impenetrable).

It’s uncomfortable that all bar one of the Reader writers (and he, American Martin Patrick, a recent addition to Massey staff) hail from outside of New Zealand. They give the work international ballast and attention (which I’m sure is a smart move academically), but it's disturbing that the project ends up feeling like it has that old hierarchy of being framed from the outside, while the writers on the actual work are in the great majority local.

Handy as it is it’s also a rather dense beginning to the book. Placed at the back these writers could have been given more room. As it is you sense they are just getting going on their topic before they have to wrap it up.

As for the overseas artists, while some visitors created works that were charged by and the whole concept of being brought to the other end of the world for the briefest of projects, others it seemed to me left behind not just light work but lightweight work. It was hard to see how brief visits were conducive to making good work. Some of my favourites were by artists local to their locations, able to understand the complexities of their context. I simply didn’t buy ODS’s championing of actions with only fleeting engagement with their sites.

Whether the different writers felt the events they write upon successful can be hard to gauge from their impressions. They often keep a passerby’s distance, and criticism becomes implicit rather than stated.

On Roman Ondak’s Camouflaged Building, Max Delany starts by suggesting on first glance the work might seem disappointing, but then after thoroughly discussing its context doesn’t really offer enough to suggest a change in that judgement (it was disappointing). Cheryl Bernstein also seems initially unimpressed by Thomas Hirschhorn’s cardboard-dressed car, and her writing goes on to mostly avoids the subject by meditating on the difficulty of seeing art with children. Jon Bywater writes of the camouflage implicit in the title of the work by Bik van Der Pol, but his text itself feels like an act of camouflage against actually saying how he was affected by the work. Having seen neither of those last two works I find myself trying to read between the lines to get a real impression of the work.

Generally however I found this first-hand account approach useful and refreshing. One of the book’s strengths is the diversity of writers brought together. Dylan Horrocks’ account of Paola Pivi’s work for example is an articulate piece of storytelling - the story being his experience of the work. Horrocks allowed me to consider the complexities of what at a distance seemed like a memorable work on all sorts of levels. Given we can’t say we’ve seen the work through documentation, this sort of thorough first hand account feels like the best next viewing area.

Likewise Anna Sanderson, Ian Wedde, David Cross and Lara Strongman do well at reliving the experience of following an artwork over a one day period. Implicit here is that the test of a One Day Sculpture is to be with it, or thinking about it over an entire day. And while some writers seem reticent about their experience (and in being so critical), there are also equally strong responses to what sounded like great works – I came away from John Di Stefano’s consideration of Javier Tellez’s Intermission kicking myself I wasn’t there, but glad for having this reflection of it in words and pictures.

One Day Sculpture’s principle weakness, and one that I felt is an undercurrent of comment through the book, is the fact that so few works paid strong attention to the time component. It felt like a better marketing device for temporary art series than it was actual conceptual framework. So many of the works I saw get a ‘yes’ answer when I ask the question as to whether the work would have been more effective staged over a longer period, to a wider audience. Nor was the word sculpture interrogated enough to warrant its use (Scape in 2008 was far better on this). What we had more was an interrogation of the notion of the event, which is written about by Mick Wilson in the Reader and the book as a whole conveys.

Conversely One Day Sculpture’s openness and focus on collaboration between artists, curators and institutions was a great strength. And ultimately it’s the openness of this publication to a diverse array of responses to the work that helps make it an essential item for the bookshelf, not to mention a really good read.

A final note. Crucial to the book’s success is Stephen Rowe’s colour photography and the plentiful space given to it. Rowe doesn’t pretend to mimic the experience of the visitor to the work, but rather step away and record the interaction with clarity and precision.

Mystic panoramic sandwiches

2010-05-06T19:51:00.005-07:00

Barbara Tuck: Habits of Paradise
Anna Miles
7 April – 8 May 2010

The six recent Barbara Tuck oil paintings displayed here were made during a trip to the South Island’s McKenzie Country, that sparsely populated, high altitude basin that straddles the border between Canterbury and Otago.

These paintings are quite impressionistic – in the sense of mental impressions, not qualities of light on surfaces. They contain collage-like fragments of landscape or clumps of terrain, botany or sky, usually aligned within horizontal strata. Earlier shows of hers have been more vertical or diagonal with their organisation of vista portions – as if looking up through or down into treetop canopies. These compositions have a sense of looking across austere grass-covered landforms towards dominant mountain ranges. There is a sense of loosely stacking multiple views on top of each other that is vaguely related to a famous Cental Otago Rita Angus painting, where the sky at the top is replaced with a new imposed landscape foreground – like a club sandwich. Or like McCahon’s Six Days in Nelson and Canterbury which is like a sequence of film story-boards made by a cycling traveller.

Tuck’s organic images however have a wild spontaneity that is totally different from Angus or McCahon. She seems to enjoy riffing with certain repeated brush lines that often reference landforms, foliage or patterns on chinaware. Her oil paint is thin and runny, providing an oozy, bubbly sensuality that lets the underpainted gessoed board shine through.

Tuck obviously delights in mark making, and there is a strong sense of obsessive process where the aim is not a refined, compositionally perfect product but an outpouring of restless energy and felt response to the environs. This is strangely related to Alan Pearson’s squiggly improvisations painted while listening to Italian opera, Bill Hammond‘s early suburban interiors made while grooving to rock music, or Phil Clairmont’s excitement with Hendrix: an intoxicatingly bodily drive that results in experiments with shape and line. Except Tuck’s ‘music’ is the McKenzie Basin location itself and the wonder of its particular geology, climate, flora and fauna.

Sometimes she has pale blobby forms floating in front of the picture plane, flat curved shapes hovering in a space all their own and painted with thin blue twitchy lines. These slightly foetal decorative forms disrupt the image like a floating Brent Wong architrave and their oddness undermines even the discordant collaged feel of painted fragmentation – as if symbolic in intention and slightly at odds with the surrounding space. However such shapes, like the rest of her spontaneously arranged textures, patterns and rendered vistas, are kick-started by an intuitive response to an unusual location. Their unpredictable properties, dwelling on interiority and spiritual preoccupations (as indicated by her titles) reinforce the subjectivity of her method.

The paintings, in descending order, are: O Maramu. Ahuriri Augellus; Unfurnished Eye; About Fleeing; Pour and melt of Distances; Soul’s Neural Tekapo.

Exquisite watercolours of calamities

2010-05-06T13:59:00.006-07:00

Linden Simmons: In the passing of a night
Tim Melville
13 April - 8 May 2010

This selection of works by Linden Simmons showcases his extraordinary dexterity with watercolour, for his finely intricate, life-size copies of New Zealand Herald images really draw you in close so you can admire their delicate detail.

What is interesting about them is the combination of the sensuality of the transparent gum medium – made palpable with its nuanced overlaying of planes and forms – with the ramifications of the images he chooses. Though his titles are deliberately vague the information about each image source is easily coaxed out of his very approachable dealer, or seen in nearby filed photocopies of pertinent newspaper pages.

Why the indeterminate titles? Well obviously he wishes to emphasize the bodily experience of the image, and feels mental imagery within a label might overwhelm it. So why divulge the image origins to his dealer? Because he wants contextual information circulated – to eventually get embedded within the social matrix of the art world audience - even though he doesn’t want to appear too brazen about directly presenting it, or wants it to dominate so that the images become illustrative.

Simmons picks a certain kind of image to copy. Firstly they come from faded newsprint where the ink seems to have soaked in and not kept to the surface. They do not have the saturated colour or spatial depth of a glossy photograph.

Secondly these images are of a particular type. All taken overseas most feature calamitous highly destructive events that have resulted from the forces of nature. Of course now ‘forces of nature’ are no longer perceived as always isolated from human stupidity. Often there are direct ecological causal connections.

Simmons’ rendered images include the destructive results of tidal waves, volcanic eruptions, earthquakes, and storms of land and sea. Sometimes the site or activity of a future disaster is implied, such as locations where uranium is planned to be mined. The pervading theme is mass human suffering – usually in third world countries.

What Simmons seems to be doing is commenting on the desensitisation of readers when they come across accounts of catastrophic tragedies in ‘foreign’ lands while relaxing at home or at work. He offers a form of escapism in the form of beauty and virtuoso technique while at the same time undercutting that release. This ‘reality trip’ occurs not so much through the descriptive properties of his painting as through the eventual dawning of the initial context through word of mouth or reading – gradually eroding the built-in mental distance. The beguiling works become disturbing.

How significant that is I’m not sure. The visual appeal of the work dominates, and while perhaps a sense of helplessness is caused by the enormity of these disasters, or feelings of guilt at one’s own comfortable privilege or security, ultimately nothing changes except perhaps personal contributions to aid relief.

Perhaps that is enough, and the precise point. That is all that can be expected, for the work is not just about manual finesse but a meditation on economic and geographic separation, and the psychology of an art-lover's self-awareness.

Work titles in descending order: Mosque; Princess Ashika; Legazpi; Forensics; Thursday January 7, 2010, Page A3; Tuesday January 19, 2010, Page A12.

Running out of time

2010-05-03T14:44:00.009-07:00

Darryn George: Rarohiko
Gow Langsford
28 April - 22 May 2010

With this new Gow Langsford exhibition Darryn George carries on with some compositional aspects of the ‘abstract’ wall painting that he presented last December at Te Tuhi. With that work the image (entitled Rehita) could be described as a diagrammatic drawing of a bookcase, with books lying on their sides on its shelves.

George is interested in systems of knowledge and how cultures accumulate and store it. With Rarohiko (the Maori word for computer) there are similarities to the earlier show but the ‘Maori’ red is mostly gone, as is the wide airy flat space. Instead the motifs are stacked on top of each other within a boxlike computer screen and allude to systems of stored files (digital or in cabinets) or to tabs attached to folders.

The alignment of space within each work varies. Sometimes it is conventional perspective, occasionally aerial perspective, now and then orthogonal. The same sized rectangular tabs are stacked vertically, or descend moving to the bottom right, or else they recede. There is a sense of these precisely arranged oblongs being symbols for containers of information.

With the Countdown series there is a focus on ten recited numbers that seems a tribute to McCahon’s 1965 Numerals series, plus a visual tip of the hat to the English Gothic ‘Gang-patch’ lettering of Shane Cotton and perhaps the delicate ink drawings of John Bevan Ford.

As the title states, George here is using a line of small canvases to list their numbers backwards in diminishing denominations. He is not using them to surprise the eye with unexpected placements (as McCahon might do) - only showing them decreasing within a sequenced row. This creates a sense of the apocalyptic.

There is an abstract distancing with this predetermined arrangement, supplemented by a pulse of alternating red and black footers and the alternating arepa/omeka (alpha/omega) names of Jesus from the Book of Revelations. They are ominous whilst also decorative. Furthermore the subtle (though I suspect coincidental) optical mixing of finely linear coloured koru forms in their backgrounds introduces a pleasing chance component – makes the work less icy and more spontaneous.

I think the Rarohiko canvases work better than the more intricate, much smaller Countdown paintings. Their size has more impact, while the varied experiments with a stark compositional layout and the ideas about digital information storage - blended with traditional Maori motifs - are more satisfying and unique.

What is interesting is the tension created by George’s presentation of these two series together. One type seems to be about building a better future through the accumulation of knowledge, and the other is saying that time is running out, that the benefits of using such knowledge may never get the chance to be appreciated. George might be referring to the planet’s ecological demise or he might be thinking of The Second Coming. Perhaps both.

Self-referential Killeen bores

2010-05-03T14:12:00.007-07:00

Richard Killeen: The Presence of Objects
Ivan Anthony
21 April -22 May 2010

This quite large show of Richard Killeen’s digitally inked paper prints and larger canvas ‘paintings’, occupies both ends of the Ivan Anthony Gallery. These ‘objects’ reference many parts of his very varied career, particularly his earlier cut-outs, those silhouetted single-coloured shapes (1978-81) designed to be hung side by side within compositionally arranged groups created by the exhibition hanger.

With these recycled images now being fixed in position within portable rectangles - juxtaposed, overlaid or sometimes bodily interwoven - the metallic looking, computer-rendered forms look as if they have been made with an airbrush. Gone are the flat monochromatic primary or black hues: these have a sheen and are often mottled. Absent also are the thin, perpendicular in cross-section, edges of each shape. The drawn contours curve over into the top plane like a sanded bevel, and accentuate the shapes’ highly ornamental properties as animals, utensils or plants, with painted highlights added. They look like decals found on heavy industrial machinery.

The shapes thus are softly rounded, with no spiky geometry or threatening sharp edges – and are always accompanied by fuzzy shadows so that they have a thickness. The shallow tray-like space, because it references the wall on which the cut-outs were hung, though illusionist, is a vaguely modernist picture plane that repudiates the depth of his other digital, more densely packed and highly decorative images.

The hermetic reflexivity of Killeen’s practice has been going on for some time now, going round and round, spiralling in on itself. Sometimes it leads to fresh, unexpected surprises; on other occasions he seems too preoccupied with his own umbilicus, and the work (for Killeen – one of the indisputably great NZ artists of the seventies and eighties) becomes disappointingly tired.

Here you can see the artist’s mind ticking over with new spatial and stylistic treatments of his image–bank but the constant revamping is now becoming lacklustre. I visited this show with excited anticipation, because Killeen is an artist with an exceptionally interesting painting history, and he of course knows he has that drawing power. However there are signs within this self-referential exhibition that the work is getting jaded, too conceptually repetitive. He needs to escape from his standard now over-utilised repertoire, take a holiday, and start reinventing.

David Cross visits New Plymouth

2010-05-01T17:34:00.005-07:00

John Reynolds
Nomadology: Loitering With Intent
Curated by Rhana Devenport
Govett-Brewster Art Gallery
27 March - June 13

Standing on the pavement of the White Hart Hotel in New Plymouth looking at John Reynolds’ LED road sign I was flummoxed. Flashing in front of me were repetitive textual bytes that listed a litany of dead philosophers and the ways in which they had died. It was hard to view the sign in the late afternoon light and the passing cars would barely have sensed its presence, but this was not ultimately what troubled me.

Having spent a few hours grappling with Reynolds' many and varied interrogations of the discursive permutations of text in art, I had become inured to the potential power/value of the texts. Song lyrics, New Plymouth street names, the index to Deleuze and Guattari’s A Thousand Plateaus, writing on the Middle East conflict by Robert Fiske, these were just some of the many and varied sources for the artist’s various artistic iterations. Ambitious in scope, and demonstrating a heightened level of cultural capital, the exhibition looked slick and savvy but ultimately the nagging question was what greater purpose did these textual meanderings serve?

Reynolds’ sweep through philosophy, popular culture, New Zealand art history and the New Plymouth vernacular in the fourteen works on show suggested a firm belief in the possibility of synthesising eclectic content around his signature aesthetic/sensibility. The Reynolds touch - his distinctive graphic style and refined use of language - more than a broader coherent critical schema, was seen as the requisite glue to pull the show together. Dexterous as he is as a painter, it is the absence of a larger programme that makes this major survey flaccid. It’s as if the artist has constructed a range of discrete sketches across a multiplicity of fronts believing that that the sum will somehow equal the parts. The cult of personality angle was certainly perpetuated in the galleries supporting material where the artist is described as a ‘trickster’. Yet it is hard to see where in Nomadology: Loitering with Intent Reynolds disobeys normal rules and conventional behavior. Mixing philosophy, politics, street names and the lyrics to an AC/DC song seems to this writer to be a recipe for a very trickster-lite identity at best.

Reynolds is too sunny to be a trickster and certainly too family friendly. His excursion into participatory art Hells Bells, gave the audience an opportunity to make their own sentences from lyrical fragments of an assortment of songs used by the America military to torture detainees. While an acerbic political statement, the caustic undertone was largely usurped by the relational setup and candy coloured modules. Of course this sharp incongruity was the point of the work, but in a room with mariachi lighting and every street name in New Plymouth chalked on the surrounding walls, the statement was buried in an overload of signifying systems. Everywhere you looked the artist was riffing on something different, the phenomena of twitter in Twitterature: The Iliad by Homer, a meditation on the Arabian Nights, the vagaries of acronyms. Each had at least a kernel of interest as a discrete component but experienced as a whole the effect was one of conceptual pot pourri. While the artist clearly loves the elusive possibility of words I found myself beginning to doubt their capacity for any real profundity. Juxtaposing so many different literary modes against one another rendered them flatly equivalent, making it harder to care about both the edgier political dimensions, or the fandom obsessions of a rock band’s set list.

The best work in the show was the least demonstrative, allowing Reynolds to use his modular modality to its best effect. Birdsong (Corner of King and Queen) consisted of small monochrome canvases with clearly prefaced drips of paint, stacked floor to ceiling. The work played cleverly with the architecture of the gallery linking the bottom and top spaces together while also building a compelling connection with the rectangular component of Len Lye’s rectangular kinetic sculpture Trilogy. The work spoke volumes about the languages of painting, architecture and their assorted materialities without requiring a single word to preface its meaning.

It says a lot about the Govett-Brewster’s belief in John Reynolds’ standing that not only did he secure the majority of the gallery spaces, he did so to mark the 40th anniversary celebration. This was something of a missed opportunity. Perhaps a smaller, tighter showing of his work in tandem with other connected practitioners might have been a better bet. Failing that at least a much tighter curatorial focus was required so that there was significantly more coherent intent to the artist’s loitering.

The above photographs were taken by Patrick Reynolds. In descending order these installation images are as follows:
1. 1001 Nights 2010 (detail). 2. To Die Laughing 2010.
3. To Die Laughing 2010 at the Govett-Brewster hits 40 pARTy. 4. Foreground: Works End 2008. Background Nomadology 2009. 5. & 6. Hells Bells 2010. 7. John Reynolds working on By The Roads And Fields 2010. Photographs courtesy of the Sue Crockford Gallery, Starkwhite, the Govett-Brewster Art Gallery, the photographer and the artist.

Kate Brettkelly-Chalmers looks at last week's Week of Goodness

2010-04-30T13:44:00.012-07:00

Living Room 2010: A Week of Goodness
Various outdoor sites in Auckland's CBD
9 - 17 April 2010

Public art can be a tricky enterprise. Buoyed by the noble premise of engaging the masses, it can succumb to the pitfalls of pernicious advertising, forcing an unsuspecting public to see stuff that they might not want to. Art in civic spaces boasts a medley of different audiences each with their own motives and opinions when it comes to what we see in our daily commuter walks or sit-in-the-sun lunch breaks. Which is why the Auckland City Council’s Living Room project, an annual weeklong series of performative events that is now in its fifth year, should not be greeted with the kind of apathy or indifference it often engenders.

A Week of Goodness is the title of this year’s Living Room series, curated for the second time by the Council’s public art manager Pontus Kyander. Citing the Surrealist Max Ernst’s 1934 series of collaged books, Une Semaine de Bonte, this programme of performances and film screenings is said to explore notions of ‘giving and kindness’ in civic squares around the central city.

This altruistic theme relates somewhat tenuously to Ernst’s strange and intriguing collages—surreal fantasy scenes the artist constructed from clippings of pulp novel and encyclopedia illustrations. It is also difficult to see a purposeful correlation between these ideas and the Living Room performances themselves, at least the ones I witnessed.

Nevertheless, Kyander’s commitment to developing temporary public art projects and engaging international artists is strongly evident in this year’s programme. The curator has brought together a somewhat chaotic selection of artists and choreographers, both from New Zealand and abroad, to collaborate and produce performances.

Located in the fountains of Freyberg Place, Isobel Dryburgh and artist/dancer Mark Harvey’s project Beige involved a group of people clad in cardboard boxes dancing to a gradually sped up version of Tom Jones’ You Can Leave Your Hat On. The performance was invitingly anarchic—cardboard boxes got delightfully drenched, bits dropped off the dancers’ costumes, and the considerable crowd giggled at Jones’ ominously languid vocals.

Sarah Jane Parton’s audience also responded with tentative chuckles to her piece The Collection III. Parton staged her performance amongst the kauri trees of QEII Square where piles of snow had been dumped either side of a wooden walkway. A group of people dressed as giant fruit played nursery games while two children dutifully recited a sketchy version of Chariots of Fire on their recorders. Nearby, bored teenaged girls wearing 80s ball gown dresses sat on benches listening iPods.

I have a hunch that Parton knew it was school holidays and, while adult audience members tittered somewhat nervously, their kids took charge of the scene relentlessly grabbing handfuls of snow to throw at the giant fruit. Chaos ensued: the giant fruit returned a hail of snowballs, the young musicians giggled into their recorders and the teenaged girls managed to look even more disinterested.

Both Parton and Dryburgh/Harvey’s charmingly kooky works were reminiscent of fringe-festival performances. It was fun to see such playful and quirky activities occurring in ordinarily straight-laced public squares. Nevertheless, these artists and their participants had none of the street-savvy of fringe-festival performers or buskers—they basically didn’t know how to work a crowd.

I was reminded of bands like Auckland’s Golden Axe or Evil Ocean whose seemingly ad-hoc style of makeshift show biz is underpinned by an engagement with their audience. Watching these aimlessly rambling Living Room performances I couldn’t help but wish that at some point Evil Ocean’s Liz Maw would turn up dressed in her God outfit. I wanted a grander kind of theatre and a greater commitment to the drama and incongruity of it all.

Lilibeth Cuenca Rasmussen did not fare much better. After seeing a video of hers in Mash Up at ARTSPACE last year I was excited to attend her performance The Future is already way behind the Present doesn't exist in my Mind…. Having already staged this as a solo piece at several international venues, Cuenca Rasmussen collaborated with performer Charles Koroneho and extended the show to include a large troupe of dancers from Unitec’s School of Performing and Screen Arts.

The result was a full-scale sound and light performance that involved Cuenca Rasmussen singing passages of contemporary feminist prose while dressed in a cleverly designed skin-tight lycra costume. Her hour-long show was a concoction of theatre, female sexuality and slow-paced endurance performance. It drew on an assortment of genres reminding me variously of Grace Jones music videos, brazen Peaches gigs and Warwick Broadhead costumed spectaculars. While this collision of performative tropes might sound quite exciting its unpolished execution ultimately left me somewhat indifferent. I couldn’t help but think of the Smokefree Stage Quest, the annual high school performing arts competition.

Unfortunately, none of the Living Room performances I experienced left an impression that went beyond an initial amused chuckle. For the most part artists treated their allotted civic space as a bare stage on which to present their activities and this inspired a somewhat superficial experience. The sometimes contentious history and current social use of Auckland’s public plazas offers an artistic potential that none of these artists chose to engage with.

Although Cuenca Rasmussen’s gleaming white costumes were notably juxtaposed against the formal plaza of St Patrick’s Square, I didn’t see the need to have these works performed in outdoor public spaces at all—they would have had a comparable effect in a theatre or gallery. Ultimately, an opportunity was missed to develop performances that were richer than the brief fanciful strangeness they engendered.

Nevertheless, the superficial impression I was left with may have been due to the lack of contextual information offered for each artist and performance. I would love to know how Parton’s The Collection III related to her previous ‘Collection’ performances that took place in locations as diverse as Rarotonga and Christchurch. Was her choice of Auckland’s QEII Square significant in relation to these other venues? Did kids throw snow at giant fruit in balmy Rarotonga?

What the Living Room series seriously lacked is the publicity machine employed by One Day Sculpture, the similar series of temporary art projects that took place across the country during 2008 and 2009. The latter’s yearlong series of projects was promoted through a deluge of advertising. From txts and emails to postcards and a fantastically organized website, One Day Sculpture covered as many forms of media as it could to publicize its single day events.

Although the better part of their budget would have been funnelled into this advertising hyperbole (and away from individual art projects), One Day Sculpture successfully garnered a greater public engagement with their projects. The point here is that our conception of ‘public space’ is no longer limited to physical sites. To successfully exist in the wider public realm art projects must also exist in the virtual realm, in web and media based platforms. In this regard, the Living Room series holds onto an overly confined vision of the public sphere that works to the great detriment of both audiences and artists. Hopefully next year they will finally get it right.

Scrolling down, most of the photographs are by Rebekah Robinson. The third and fourth however are by Kate Brettkelly Chalmers.

Andrew Paul Wood goes GalleryGallery-Gallery visiting

2010-04-29T23:50:00.007-07:00

GalleryGallery-Gallery
SOFA Gallery
Christchurch
until 16 May 2010

Some ideas, like Freddy Kruger, shoulder pads or a dodgy curry, just seem to keep coming back again and again. GalleryGallery is a portable scaled down 2.4x1.6m white cube conceived as a guerrilla (a word that sets my teeth on edge) intervention by Christchurch artist Matt Akehurst. Since March 2009 GalleryGallery has been popping up around the South Island like a mushroom, hosting a number of (mostly student) artists in its mock mini gallery, and even poetry readings and live music performances.

The project has been something of a mixed bag; some engagements have been witty and engaging, while others have seemed little more than half-arsed opportunism. My personal favourite deployment was OpeningOpening at the University of Canterbury School of Fine Arts where for opening night it became a bar (and let’s face it, isn’t that the main reason two thirds of people go to gallery openings anyway?) but I have to say that it’s concluding incarnation GalleryGallery-Gallery at Christchurch’s SOFA Gallery left me rather cold.

The gallery space is abruptly curtailed by a nicely joined wall and short flight of stairs. The door leads to GalleryGallery itself, which overlooks the now hermetically blocked off gallery space like a duck hide or a tree house – or perhaps even the Seraglio of the Ottoman sultans. The lights go on... And the lights go off... Like the famous Martin Creed work played at half speed and just as ephemeral. On. Off. On. Off. I think they used to do similar things to prisoners at Guantanamo Bay.

To be fair, it is beautifully constructed with a very nice wooden floor, and should Akehurst ever grow weary of being a struggling artist he can always fall back on carpentry, but the idea of ‘guerrilla gallery interventions’ into the white cube is hardly a new one and back in the 1970s when it was fashionable to equate being successful to selling out it was pretty much done to death. Every generation of students seems to feel the need to raise the floor, move the walls around or build partitions. Even the idea of a portable container that can be transported around as an ad hoc venue, whether it be called a pod, a capsule, a kiosk or whatever, has been the staple of Arts Festivals, Biennials and Triennials for decades.

Even back in 2002 when Maurizio Cattelan unleashed The Wrong Gallery on New York, and later Sergei Jensen’s Waiting Room in Berlin, 2006, the concept was getting a little tired. One can also talk about artists like Daniela Brahm, Markus Draper, Anton Henning, and that’s just Germany. It may even ultimately go back to the sort of enclosures Joseph Beuys used to fashion in gallery spaces in order to act like a bit of a side show twat with a coyote. Unless you are a claustrophobe, there is a womb-like security in such odd little hermitages – something we learn the first time we made a tent by throwing a sheet over two chairs as a child.

Of course Akehurst is being ironic – how could it be otherwise – but by stripping it of its collaborative trappings it seems about as much of an experience as the Orana Park giraffe feeding platform without the giraffes. An empty gallery is not really much of a metaphor in a context where Marcel Duchamp had been playing around with similar ideas a century earlier. Meta-meta-art goes off quicker than milk that’s been left out of the fridge overnight.

So, if you know something about the history post-modernist art, you feel a little blasé. If you are a tourist off the street who doesn’t know what the gallery looks like in the first place it is somewhat meaningless. If you don’t know anything about the history of these kinds of interventions, you are not going to get the irony of the references. It feels something of a letdown after an entertaining journey.

Or perhaps it is an appropriately poignant and elegiac retirement of a worn-out warhorse, and I salute it. As one might imagine, in that reduced space opening night was like the Black Hole of Calcutta.

Images courtesy of the artist.

Lydia Chai agrees

2010-04-28T15:31:00.003-07:00

with my take on the Sharon Hayes work, while Pauline Dawson disagrees with my reference to Natasha Conland's pregnancy.

The last theme of the Auckland Triennial

2010-04-28T14:53:00.012-07:00

Last Ride In A Hot Air Balloon: Part Five - Dialogue
Shigeyuki Kihara, Alex Monteith, Zheng Bo, Shilpa Gupta, Sharon Hayes, Mahmoud Bakhshi
Curated by Natasha Conland
Various Auckland venues
13 March - 20 June 2010

Now we have the last of my five examinations of the various themes from this event: dialogue – kinds of conversation between individuals, cultures, communities, artwork and audiences that reference all sorts of values, such as notions of ‘family’, sexual orientation, sporting competitiveness, even global foreign policies.

Shigeyuki Kihara for the official opening of this event, presented a work that paired musical representatives of two cultures together (Maori Kapa Haka and Japanese drumming), not to make a musical hybrid or blend where difference is covered over, but rather a kind of splicing where separate cultural identities alternate. In this taking of turns there is a good natured competitiveness openly expressed between two eaily identifiable cultures and two quite different forms of musical expression. It is a little like sport, but without clear cut winners; more like a lively discussion where no clear conclusions are reached but where the pleasure is in the chat. At ARTSPACE you can see documentation of six pairings showing the spirited interaction of Chinese, Scottish, Cook Island, Brazilian, Samoan, Hindu, Aboriginal, Maori and Japanese musical/dance performance groups.

Alex Monteith’s massive screen in Shed 6, showing surfies at Stent Road wave break in Taranaki, is not the viscerally engaging work one would expect from her for the type of 'risky' event Conland has organised. Like Mike Parr’s project, it seems a perverse tactic by Conland to deliberately confound expectations of bodily risk. It is an anti-avantgardist gesture where the gallery goer here has no bodily empathy or engagement but instead is a remote and passive spectator watching the many rubbersuited figures calmly glide through or over the water.

The artist’s friends are seen wearing red shirts to replace the individualistic identification colours that are characteristic of competitive surfers. Of course instead of individual rivalries we now have team ones – the ‘art crowd’ versus the ‘life crowd’, for the two communities make a vivid contrast.

Zheng Bo presents an installation at ARTSPACE looking at the official Chinese view of marriage and what it entails. His film depicts life on an imaginary location called Karibu Island where time occurs backwards. The elderly suddenly arrive and gradually ‘advance’ to become babies who finally re-enter their mothers. Nearby are six panels to be examined by gallery visitors and voted on through beans being placed into bowls.

The options displayed for consideration about marriage are not clear in their demarcation. It is not just a matter of whether homosexuals should marry.(That issue is not clearly confronted. The words ‘homosexual’ or ‘heterosexual’ are nowhere to be seen) There are several other issues. These include should marriage be for life or is divorce permissible, is a partnership satisfactory without marriage’s legal sanction, and can arranged marriages work where lovers don’t choose each other? The murkiness seems to be the result of these panels being planned by a committee of heteros, gays and lesbians. The proposed lifestyle options are somewhat convoluted.

Shilpa Gupta’s black ‘cloud’ of 4000 microphones in the New Gallery refers to the Mumbai bombings of 2008 when 171 died. The mikes are clumped together with complex speaker systems hidden within, yet the sound is near inaudible because of various ‘noisier’ works nearby and the echo from the concrete floor. This bad location however accentuates an odd dialogue with her other contribution, a split-flap display board of the type often seen in airports. Such a whirling blurring noticeboard is an intriguing object in its own right. Almost like a living creature, it responds with phrases like YOURMINEOUR DEAD to the sounds of a singing girl’s voice wishing to fly high in the sky, emanating deep from within the adjacent, ominous, knobby black brain.

I found Sharon Hayes’ installation in the New Gallery too shrill and histrionic as a declamatory mode of recorded performance to take her political and personal content seriously – despite her inclusion of worthy texts from Martin Luther King’s denunciation of the Vietnam War and the private letters of lesbian writers like Radclyffe Hall. Her idea of mixing such material with her own correspondence to an ex-lover in order to harangue the US Government about their foreign policy in Iraq would probably succeed better if expressed in print, not spoken verbally. Hayes’ speech comes across as bleating and over agitated, although if shown as a text her appropriated thoughts may indicate the contrary. In the New Gallery her ‘speeches’ are played through five speakers on stands, but here you can see her for yourself on youtube. What do you think? Perhaps I am too easily irritated? I think the work needs distance. It is too personal.

Mahmoud Bakhshi’s work in Shed 6 was only functioning properly for a very short time. Apparently it features adjustable speakers playing recordings of different calls to prayer in Tehran at sunset, each one based on a different chapter of the Qur’an. Visitors were meant to modify the sound by turning the vertical columns around, constantly changing the overall aural mix. It sounds like a fascinating comment on interpretative communities, so for this Triennial its breakdown is highly unfortunate, if not calamitous. Shed 6 badly needs more obvious energy, otherwise it remains a gloomy black hole.

In summing up, this year’s Triennial is not an overwhelming success, though it is definitely more exciting than Turbulence. However the first two, organised by Allan Smith for 2001, and Ngahiraka Mason and Ewen McDonald for 2004, though with less overseas art stars, seem in hindsight to have been more consistent with more sparkle. Maybe AAG got caught out by Natasha Conland’s pregnancy, although the abysmal failure of Shed 6 is balanced by the success of St. Paul St and George Fraser, and some exciting surprises in the New Gallery. ARTSPACE is also worth exploring. Be sure to do that before it closes at the end of this week.

After K comes L

2010-04-27T02:05:00.026-07:00

Chris Lipomi: Interactive Visual History Compression (the Ks)
Featuring work by Mike Kelley, Kieran Kinney, Martin Kippenberger, Alice Könitz, Paul Kos, Michael Krebber, George Kuchar.
Michael Lett
21 April - 15 May 2010

Chris Lipomi is one of those artists interested in the merging of creative identity and blending of artistic content or style. We have here an exhibition that is a sort of voluntary cuckoo-host, where an artist has devised his own show to include several other artists whom he admires, generously inviting them to pop their eggs into his own (gallery) nest. Whilst it could be seen as a shrewd way of clinging to their shirt tails if they are superstars and advancing himself, if the show is exciting enough as a curated project and attracts attention, those guests get introduced to new audiences who perhaps buy work. The other artists appreciate the new contextualisation. They enjoy the support.

Lipomi’s installation at Michael Lett incorporates parallel railway sleepers as seats for looking at videos. It gives us the chance to investigate several artists (all with names beginning with K) mostly not seen here before, mixed in with some fake Kaprows, and Kawaras.There are lots of surprises.

For example, there is a wonderfully verbose, double-sided Mike Kelley poster, The Great Tragedy of the Bill Clinton Administration…(under glass but on a hinge), which attacks America’s fixation on celebrity culture and on sexual desire. As a remedy he recommends that all Hollywood stars be compelled to do medical work in clinics for sexual diseases. Kelley’s poster and a silkscreened, coloured cotton table cloth are blended into a row of imitation Lipomi ‘Kelleys’ in a mash up of artistic identities.

Other works make the presence of ‘authentic’ individuality much clearer. There is a Martin Kippenberger set of nine wooden frames converted with Mylar and black tape into a game of noughts and crosses. To perpetuate his hang dog ‘loser’ image, there is never a winner (i.e. a line of three) in its hanging arrangement.

There is also a riddlelike Paul Kos with a coathanger hanging off the top of a broom handle, balanced by a bell one end and a candle at the other. It seems to be a meditation about thought and action, the activity of sweeping seen as generating ideas - symbolised by the lighting of the candle or the ringing of the bell.

Cologne conceptual painter Michael Krebber once worked for Martin Kippenberger as his assistant, and Kippenberger often used his ideas. He displays here a black and white painting showing an excerpt of a smeared photocopied comic where sections of teenage action are densely overlaid with confusing text. The year later (2008) he showed at Maureen Paley in London, a similar series of images based on French cowboy comics.

Krebber also has a slice of a red windsurfing board on Michael Lett’s wall. The tilted, sawn off parallelogram seems to be a metaphor for the adventurous side of an art career, a journey over the waves where work is fun, a recreational, even escapist, activity. Another interpretation (on an online blog) is that it is created to mock ‘sculpture’s bodily immediacy’. That seems farfetched. The work embraces immediacy – even as a mutilated readymade.

Kieran Kinney contributes a dramatic, completed oil painting. Men Are Back is a send up of the film ‘Men In Black’ and seems an amusing photorealist comment on gender balance in the art sector, saying that the current apparent dominance by women is changing. Maybe that is accurate in Melbourne, the city where Kinney lives, or Australia.

Los Angeles artist Alice Könitz has two tightly geometric, formally elegant, cardboard masks that link to a nearby video where similarly masked actors balance on tree trunks and mumble lines from Genet, Brecht or other playwrights. The masks are great but the video is superfluous.

The videos of New York underground film-maker George Kuchar are less pretentious. He has two low budget, low tech, richly layered works about variable weather patterns and places he visits when travelling. They are structured around what seems to be Kuchar himself playing the bored out-of-towner, either cleaning filthy bathrooms in sleazy motels or gazing anxiously out of grubby windows - pondering the local wildlife or contemplating changing cloud formations. Apparently he used to earn a living painting weather maps for television studios.

This is one of those shows you need to look at in the space, go home and do some Googling or ferreting around with your stack of favourite art mags, and then return for another squiz - with some new contextual background under your belt. There is a lot here to ruminate over - particularly with Kelley, Kos, Krebber, Kuchar and Kinney. It’s an unusual, extremely interesting exhibition.

Process and perception

2010-04-25T23:40:00.015-07:00

Sculpture Season 2010
Curated by Melissa Laing
St.Paul St Gallery Three
Anthony Cribb and Agnes So
22 April – 1 May 2010

In this last (sixth) presentation of a series of sculptural projects by mainly recent AUT graduates - organised by Melissa Laing - Agnes So occupies most of Gallery Three’s bunkerish space while Anthony Cribb has a large lidlike tray at the far end, suspended high up near the ceiling. His flat shallow box is held there by wooden struts and slightly spindly legs, and contains a mini-landscape of hillock forms projecting out of a pool of black water. The lumpy forms are made of sand and bitumen.

Cribb’s dark gritty mounds are built with the expectation they’ll soon subside. The saturated sand will shift under the crumbly bitumen and the moving sludge will slowly even out. This impending collapse is exacerbated by small vibrations from the passing Symond Street traffic which continually shake the laden structure. At the end of the month the swampy ‘geology’ should look notably different from what it does now.

Cribb likes to tease his audience though, for the height will prevent many (less tall people) from seeing the tray’s contents. They will have to imagine the details. Because this comparatively (visually) inaccessible component of Cribb’s work is not stable anyway, that makes such reliance on mental fantasies extra perverse – if not sadistically funny. He seems to be mocking elucidated ‘factual description’ and spotlighting the limitations of language.

Agnes So’s items, in contrast to Cribb's elegant raised platform, are Heath Robinsonish and rickety. However, like his they demonstrate an interest in the laws of physics, using the weight of her precariously balanced materials to hold something in place - or taut lines (traversing space) to exert tension. Often she teases with decoys, deliberately misleading her audience. For example many of her physically slight constructions seem to be vertically held up by long lines of glistening nylon that sparkle under the gallery lights. You are meant to see them.

One of these threads goes through a circular hole in an almost teetering board, implying that it exerts an antigravitational tension, but in fact it doesn’t touch the opening's sides. The rectangle’s equilibrium is actually securely maintained by chocks at the base. In another work, a brown cardboard oblong is taped on its edge to a long vertical line of joined balsa sticks that help it balance on the top edge of a wall that partially blocks out the windows. The line of attached sticks runs down to the floor and across it – far longer than necessary to keep the cardboard stable. The horizontal part of the balsa line is superfluous, a deliberate overstatement, as the vertical length – though light - has sufficient weight on its own to do the job.

At the other end of the same top edge of the same long wall a un-nailed baton of timber pinions down a loose photocopy hanging down the side. The image shows a solid mapping pin resting on top of a sheet of paper with its sharp tip almost touching a folded paper crease but not impaling it.

Nearby is a weighed-down, balsa-sticked ‘flag’ with a photograph attached at its top. It looks like a dark hole in its centre until you realise it is a solid grey rock attached to yet another inverted (perhaps the same) flag. So enjoys making reflexive jokes about the work's own construction.

She also presents a short film projected onto a low, small L-shaped wall. It shows a brown plastic rectangular cushion cover that has been squished up into a tight ball and released to slowly unravel. In parts of the film it seems to be speeding up and even inflating and ballooning out with pumped in air - not just relaxing into its natural uncompressed form. Eventually it topples off its stand which happens to be an inverted cardboard carton for a reading lamp, making some sort of pun about ‘lightness’ and instability. The process of a moving body gradually changing as it approaches stasis makes a nice link to Cribb’s project down the other end of the space, and its high placement on a supporting structure.

Laing has made an exceptionally interesting combination pairing these two artists together. While So is about observation and perception and Cripp the duration of time and gradual geological motion, they both delight in examining instability and temporality, mixing their interest with a mischievous humour. Well worth a visit.

Many thanks to the artists for their images.

Andrew Paul Wood tells us about Miranda Parkes' new show in Christchurch.

2010-04-25T03:54:00.000-07:00

Miranda Parkes: Cracker,
Jonathan Smart Gallery
April 13 – May 8 2010

Followers of Miranda Parkes’ career may recall that the first of her work to gain notice were the rouched and rumpled canvases that resembled technicolour sheets left bundled rather than folded by a lazy homemaker. They sagged from their stretchers in blatant defiance of the conventions (or clichés) of traditional painting and suggested a space between painting and sculpture, or even an eventual transition to the third dimension.

Then gradually over time the canvases stretched, flattened and tautened in response to some unseen exercise programme instituted by the artist. The Op/Pop Art paintwork remained hard-edged and geometric, but as the current exhibition Cracker reveals, this too has undergone exploratory evolution to become more expressive and biomorphic, and in some cases exploiting Op Art effects even more extensively than earlier work. But what does this signify? What new directions does this body of work suggest about Parkes’ practice?

Although there is a bunched-up work (Tanker in silver orange and blue cheques like some over-the-top Vivienne Westwood fabric print) and a video work (Jetty, filmed at Akaroa on Banks’ Peninsula) in the exhibition, this is primarily a show of grid painting. The individual works have, as a foundation, poured and dropped paint to provide textural interest, and in turn loose grids are built up in translucent layers and gestural strokes of translucent bubblegum colour. These most directly remind of the Byzantine decorative effects of Austrian painting – specifically Gustav Klimt and Friedensreich Hundertwasser. The latter, of course, has very specific inferences for New Zealand, and was deeply influenced by the former.

One large work, Doozer, achieves unity through a dispersed pixilation of small yellow oval motifs throughout the composition. This binds the painting together like egg binds together a cake and the effect is reminiscent of the visual tests for colour blindness. Another protean work, Mozer, coaxes interest from the nooks and crannies of a loosely painted grid. It reminds me slightly of the topological “three colour map problem” in which any pattern overlapping outlines cannot be filled using just three colours without two adjacent zones eventually being filled by the same colour. It is predominantly variants of fleshy pink with windows of tallow on green and purple on red.

A small ceramic work called Zapper – roughly ashtray size and shape – forms the basis of an Op Art grid pattern in red and blue that sets up interesting interference pattern buzz when viewed from a distance. It lacks, however, Op Art’s technocratic aesthetic programme. The ceramic basis lends a homey and eccentric roughness – little patches of insecurity and vulnerability scattered throughout the overall confidence of the handling.

A further work Jiggle Grid interprets the grid as a matrix of irregular, roughly circular blobs of paint on a silver plain, with each blob being carefully worked up as a sub-grid in hard candy colours and patterns. A further grid called Blob Grid consists of a loose, colourful matrix in which circular areas have been cut and rotated. The simplicity of that strategy might at first seem like a liability in a context that favours the conceptually more elaborate, but aesthetically it brings its own formal strength.

Perhaps the most interesting interpretation of the grid is Jetty, with its shaky hand-held digital video projection of a metal grating submerged in rippling water. However I am not entirely certain that this adds much to the paintings. And because the paintings are dispersed through two gallery spaces, and the projection shares room with just two modest sized works, it seems a trifle distracting and even diluting in the overall exhibition context.

In a sense, these polychromatic spiderwebs and mazes represent a flâneur voyage around the painterly plain, wearing strata, trace and art-historical reference openly on their sleeves. The visual impact is at once bold and simultaneous in a visual equivocation of style, media and process. I can’t help thinking that Cracker represents a transitional phase in Parkes’ career. I doubt we will be seeing baggy paintings again for a while.

Images in descending sequence are Tanker, Mozer, Doozer, Jiggle Grid, Blob Grid.

Kate Brettkelly-Chalmers tells us about the last show at Newcall

2010-04-22T02:27:00.005-07:00

Richard Bryant
Newcall
9 - 24 April 2010

An exhibition of paintings by Richard Bryant is the final show for Newcall Gallery, the Auckland artist-run-space located in Grafton’s Newcall Tower. After a short run of two years the gallery’s collective of artists is disbanding and moving onto other projects.

Although it is sad to see Newcall and its fantastically spacious gallery go, the temporary character of many of Auckland’s artist-run-spaces is not a necessarily a bad thing. Apart from the enduring presence of rm (the K’Rd incarnation of what was most recently called rm103), Newcall is very much part of a legacy of short-term galleries that emerge to meet the particular needs of new groups of artists. From Teststrip in K’ Rd/Vulcan Lane to Special in the Britomart precinct, longevity is not the focus of these collectives so much as providing a hub for a deft mixture of critical thought and collegiality. Just as Newcall’s cohort of artists is moving on, other groups will undoubtedly see the need to develop new exhibition prospects.

It is fitting that Newcall’s swan song exhibition is by Bryant, a founding member of fellow artist-initiative A Centre For Art (ACFA). Bryant’s show presents a highly considered collection of intriguing paintings and paper works. Small in scale with muted hues these works draw attention to the subtle nuances of painted surfaces. The artist takes an unassuming and restrained approach to the material pleasures of liquid brush marks, paper crinkles, fabric weaves and various inky washes. These are quietly compelling paintings that encourage time spent peering at the edge of a canvas or pondering simple material traces.

This understated cleverness is also extended to Bryant’s use of basic collaging techniques. He creates frames or margins within paintings by overlaying different rectangular surfaces. The artist’s exhibition invite offers a curious coupling of presumably found images: a painting of a surreal grandiose space is laid over a somewhat dubious massage instruction chart.

Lest we forget that they are paintings Bryant’s peripheral borders subtly refer to the medium’s more historically loaded concerns. Are we looking at an image within a frame or an image of a frame? The canvas surface of one painting is so thin that the ghostly form of its stretcher shows through the weave. Although Bryant’s works don’t overtly engage with the conceptual ins and outs of contemporary painting (as painters like Simon Ingram or Andrew Barber might) a whisper of a painting discourse is apparent.

What I find most interesting about Bryant’s works is the way they are hung. Although they offer an investigation of similar materials and surfaces these paintings carefully avoid being serialised. The artist does not simply present a series of experiments in painterly delights but a selection of distinctly individual works. Bryant hangs his paintings in careful groupings that refer much more to the visual language of installation than they do to painting traditions. He considers the space between individual works in the same way that an artist like Kate Newby might pay careful attention to the space between different sculptural forms.

In the collegial spirit of artist-run-spaces it seems appropriate to acknowledge the similar practices of other Newcall/ACFA members such as Patrick Lundberg, Anya Henis, Richard Frater or John Ward-Knox. These artists have an affinity for materials and engage with historically hefty formal concerns in fresh and interesting ways. Their artist-initiatives encourage a coalescence of ideas and critical thought alongside a kind of chummy art school camaraderie. These galleries are not only offering alternative exhibition opportunities to those of dealers or institutions, they are also offering an alternative ethos, a space of thought where artists might share and debate similar artistic concerns. It is an unabashedly earnest endeavour, but one that has fruitfully sustained these new art practices beyond their art school beginnings.

Revamping, revitalising stock

2010-04-21T17:04:00.011-07:00

From The Stockroom
Sue Crockford
1 April - 27 April 2010

This stock show presents seventeen works from ten artists. It includes some surprises and some revitalisations within a new group context.

The Billy Apples haven’t been displayed before, three small Xeroxes (from 1966) on coloured canvas that looks like gingham tablecloth patterns. The smudgy photocopied ink shows a grinning apple positioned alongside an inert Idaho spud, while the title ‘Apple in Idaho’ refers to the (now) proper names of people, vegetables, and of course, North American states.

Next to Apple are three Ava Seymour framed photographed collages with super finely-tweaked edges. The outer contours of her paper shapes you need to examine closely to grasp the nuanced precision with which her scalpel has moved. From a cutting virtuoso.

Peter Robinson’s two large calligraphic paintings look better in a group show than in a solo display where they don’t stand out as black and white statements, with so much white around them. Here with some colourful Mrkusichs nearby, they seem activated spatially and become highly energised grotesque landforms - quoting earlier, non-landscape, ‘quantum’ Peter Robinsons.

Julian Dashper’s solitary illuminated neon tube on a white wall with hanging wires on either side presents itself as a delicate – but glowing - linear drawing. The wires could almost be pencil lines within a calculatedly 'minimal' statement.

Opposite the gallery entrance is an early Gordon Walters koru painting from 1965. It intrigues because of the awkward top and bottom edges which explain the title, Black on White. It is definitely not vice versa, like the more resolved and spatially ambiguous works he later arrived at.

Of the two very different Mrkusich works, the smaller single-panelled blue painting (as opposed to the three panelled, three coloured one) has an intriguing tension by virtue of a symmetry at the top and an asymmetry at the bottom. It oddly twists the central field.

In the back room a mid-seventies Albrecht is a gorgeous stack of floating, horizontal stains, oddly divided into two halves, one placed above the other, while nearby a big black Hotere of shiny corrugated steel has its two panels spaced apart to form the vertical beam of a cross. Its arms consist of horizontally cut slots peeled away to reveal bright orange painted on the back.

There is also an oddly sinister Boyd Webb, with the clustered stamens of an ochry brown fabric flower in a shadow - exuding menace.

In thinking about shows like this, I tend to prefer solo exhibitions over group displays, and of the latter, thematically tight presentations over promotion of unsold stock. Yet the latter often allow us to spot things we might have originally missed, a chance to stumble on new connections – especially with more historic work that may be owned by an artist’s family, not an institution. A good opportunity.

Enlarged bleached maps on telly

2010-04-21T16:34:00.002-07:00

Sue Novell: Bionica
Antoinette Godkin
8 April - 8 May 2010

The seven paintings displayed by Sue Novell at Antoinette Godkin’s feature a colourful pixelated line where paint is applied in linear formations of small squares. They are a sort of grid painting (with tiny modules) where three varieties of overlapping map, representing topographic landforms, global contours, and inner city streets, coalesce with a form of aerial perspective that seems to show a high up, three-quarter view of city buildings.

So while they are highly abstract, and hint of the gesturally random and jumbled, you still think of maps, perhaps television screens, and rug or basket weaving - while also spotting the occasional rooftop, courtyard, park or waterfront. While at the first glance these paintings may seem formulaic, it doesn’t take too long to realise that the works greatly vary in canvas size, pixel size, chroma range, tonal range and density of mark. Some have surprises like double lines that look like knitted bike chains, or rectangular jutting forms near the bottom edge that look like fuzzy wharves or jetties.

Within these apparently competing systems the ones that aesthetically work best seem to be the densest in terms of surface covering and layering, and which feature fluid compositional movement and dramatic use of dark tones. The ambiguity of various interwoven amorphous forms is not undermined by too much openly airy space or perpendicular geometry.

Novell’s largest work here is the pale and less griddy P926000 VI. It has an all pervading looseness, and is the earliest of the series. The pastel squares are in fact blobby dots, whilst the whole surface is more painterly as a series of marks and less referencing of electronics. In contrast the middle sized works often have a diagonal movement of shimmering organic shapes while the smaller paintings have a nuggety compactness caused by relatively large dark pixels. That makes them somewhat graphic, bringing a crisp concision, an appealingly robust energy.

Last Ride in a Hot Air Balloon: Part Four - The Economy

2010-04-19T15:29:00.001-07:00

The 4th Auckland Triennial: The themes
Learning Site, Michael Stevenson, Olivia Plender, Garrett Phelan, Jorge Macchi
Various Auckland venues
12 March - 20 June 2010

Of the five themes I have selected, the one of global economy is the aspect I think Natasha Conland handles more adroitly than any other. The above set of five artists makes a nice bundle that explores the nuances of this subject, with lots of interconnections. And even though I personally am not particularly interested in this topic, the work drew me in and to some extent, changed that. I got hooked.

Take a group like Learning Site for example – from Denmark and Sweden. I tend to dislike ‘school teacher art’, work which goes all out to educate and which openly presents information – usually historical – in the form of an installation or performed lecture, with the expectation that the audience will absorb it. Good education (most of us know) is far sneakier than that. It entertains so that the ‘student’ is unaware that they are learning. They become interested and take stuff in by virtue of having fun.

With Learning Site it wasn’t so much the disintegrating, mushroom seeded, ‘termite mound’, clay sculpture (House of Economy) at the base of the two gallery escalators that appealed to me - though it did - as the elegant little pamphlet made available with it. Anthony Iles’ text Crises, Ruin, Allegory is very informative and the illustrations helpful. The content, especially the discussion of economics as ‘the dismal science’, and his examination of the 1720 South Sea Bubble phenomenon, locks in tightly with the wonderfully poetic and visually nuanced Michael Stevenson video and the satirical posters and board game of Olivia Plender.

Stevenson’s On How Things Behave highlights global economics as ‘things’ and has an appropriately lugubrious mood set by the voice over, provided by Suzanne Mārtens. Her fourteen minute long, monotonously gloomy reading is offset by the skilful and witty linking by Stevenson of a wide range of texts. These range from philosophical treatises by David Hume and Nelson Goodman (on grounds for prediction and categorisation of qualities) to accounts of Issac Newton’s investment losses in 1720. They also include visual allusions to the economic-sunspot theories of W.S. Jevons. Stevenson’s imagery is meticulously thought out, with tracking shots of a long wall featuring a mural by Manfred Gnādinger, a hermit who died after his home was wrecked by the Prestige oil spill, and various incorporated circular (solar) symbols, such as hollow Russian, spherical, wooden dolls.

Plender’s set of snappily designed, parodic ‘Victorian’ posters is particularly amusing. One features a 2006 whale sighting in the Thames Estuary as an ominous economic omen, another references the suffragette Mary Richardson’s attack on Velázquez’s Rokeby Venus in 1914 in the National Gallery, a third posits an imperialist British seizing of Iceland’s bank assets, and one more warns of the availability of carved wooden nutmegs and other fraudulent comestibles on the market.

Her board game Set Sail For the Levant grimly sets out crime as the only viable alternative for the poor tenant farmer enduring increasing rents at the time of the Industrial Revolution. Faced with increasing debt, he steals the landlord’s gold and attempts to get to the Eastern Mediterranean where the law can’t touch him, and letting others pay the cost. Plender’s game is based on the sixteenth century Royal Game of the Goose, a early precursor of Snakes and Ladders or Ludo.

Garrett Phelan’s installation is much rawer visually and more openly abrasive in mood. It features a looped animated DVD, framed drawings, a separate but simultaneous crackling audio component picked up by a radio from a nearby broadcasting transmitter, and a purchasable comic (Selflessness in the Face of Adversity) in which Phelan’s wild ink drawings are positioned alongside Free Trade and Human Rights in a Sustainable Environment, an essay (handwritten by Phelan) by the curator and collector Jobst Graeve.

‘Free’ trade of course means not the liberty of people but the unimpaired flow of goods and services within a relationship of exchange that is often not balanced or equal. As a means of bypassing the self-interest of banks and corporates, Graeve has devised a formula for calculating a fair pricing system for all goods and services, taking into account the energy necessary for the production and fabrication of raw materials, the effect on workers’ health, the recycling potential and time taken, along with the effects on energy, wealth, and the environment for both production and consumption.

The last artist in this group has a contradictory lightness of touch and far less intense ambience. Jorge Macchi’s videos of manually wound music boxes playing cardboard strips of punched holes stating sentences of economic catastrophe from newspaper headlines, are surprisingly pretty and buoyant. They don’t sound random or grimly chaotic as you might expect, but are perversely melodic – as if these events’ calamitous significance has been exaggerated. They seem oddly celebratory and uplifting, even optimistic, thumbing their noses at fiscal preoccupations and any search for prosperity.

The fifth and last Triennial theme coming up: Generating Dialogue.

Young Sun Han performance

2010-04-18T14:15:00.004-07:00

Young Sun Han: Dance Of The Cockatrice
City Art Rooms
6 April – 8 May 2010

Artist, Curator and gallery sales-person of City Art Rooms (where I myself exhibit - I need to declare that), Young Han Sun here presents an installation of photographs made in anticipation of a performance in front of a live audience. These eight images were taken with a ‘practice’ mock up using a painted end wall - with the artist’s body carefully painted as well. Mounted and framed under glass, they are accompanied by a new painted wall created for the second ‘proper’ performance presented a week into the exhibition.

The hot cadmium yellow ‘camouflaged’ wall, being slightly darker in the photos, is quite overwhelming when experienced directly in the gallery. The pattern doesn’t so much reference popular youth fashion as Andy Warhol and his paintings of the mid-eighties. Instead of incorporating mottled landscape forms with subdued ‘earth’ colours as the army does, these were deliberately synthetic, bright and inorganic. Warhol eventually incorporated these motifs into his self-portraits, and here lies a connection with Young Sun Han’s project. Just as Warhol attempted to balance his fame as a popular ‘American’ artist with his need for privacy, coming from a family of Polish immigrants and being gay, Sun Han focuses on his own (North Korean) ethnic and sexual difference and how such otherness can be ‘camouflaged’ so he fits in as a ‘mainstream’ American / New Zealander.

To this end he uses the painted blobby pattern to blur the edges between figure and ground, his naked body and the background wall. The applied acrylic paint becomes a metaphor for cultural and sexual suppression, and his performance of stretching his body in order to crack and peel off the rubbery wrinkly skin a gesture of resentment and resistance. The discarded, shredded bits of dried paint scattered on the floor (also ‘camouflaged’) or stuck to the wall become futile attempts at conformity and ‘normalization.’

There is another layer to this activity which suggests far more than a resentment / disguise component – despite the work being entitled Dance of the Cockatrice, that being a mythological rooster/lizard creature with a intense gaze that can turn people to stone.

During the paint peeling process the artist holds a variety of poses as if in a tableau vivant, turning himself into a mock marble sculpture and object of desire. He also systematically locks the various members of the audience one at a time in a directly confrontational glare, perhaps as a withering ‘fuck you’ gesture scorning the pressures of social conformity, but maybe even more as a brooding but beckoning homo-erotic ‘cruising’ gaze for attracting lovers.

This makes the paint-peeling process a kind of strip-tease involving seductive poses and enticing body movements that turns the painted fabric helmet Sun Han is wearing not only into a way of hiding his head without shaving off all his hair, but also a jaunty fetish item that showcases his eyes. It is an unexpected accoutrement for generating arousal, like white socks or long gloves.

So Dance of the Cockatrice is a double game which both encourages and scorns voyeurism, reeling it in with a moving decoy while also slapping it down - perhaps in sadistic humiliation. The stringy sticky residue scattered on the floor from the performance is presented for the rest of the show as discarded erotic ‘clothing’ or else as remnants of abandoned symbolic social pretence. It is highly ambiguous. The meaning of this cleverly layered and thoughtful installation / performance continually oscillates, teases, confronts and entertains.

The first three images are from the photographs on the gallery walls. The rest are from the performance of April 13, documented by Zac Arnold.

Walter Stahl has some thoughts on the work

2010-04-17T05:32:00.001-07:00

of Peter Madden

The spiritual symbolism and teaching aids of Abdullah Dougan are discussed in this book review by Keith Hill

2010-04-16T01:18:00.009-07:00

The Paintings of Abdullah Dougan
Editors: Maree Green, John Searle, Kitty Godwin, Pat Field
Designer: Jill Godwin
378 pp, hardcover, 23.5 cm x 24 cm, 168 colour illustrations
Gnostic Press, Auckland, 2009

Abdullah Dougan was an Auckland spiritual teacher who was self-educated, proudly working class, and definitely an iconoclast. Yet beneath his rough-hewn exterior was an approach to spirituality on both the theoretical and practical levels that was, for those who explored its implications, insightful, pragmatic and, in its depth and scope, revelatory.

Dougan presented his teachings in three forms: writing, music and the visual arts. These consist of a series of books, headed by the three volume The Quest, musical compositions collected as Solar Suite, and over 200 paintings and screen prints. The majority of the paintings are collected in this volume, which presents work from the period 1970 to 1979, and a handful from 1987.

In recent decades, spiritually oriented art has been viewed sceptically by the academic and commercial art world, due to a secular discomfort with the concept of spirituality, and to the way sentimentality seems so easily to creep into spiritually and religiously inspired work. However, what is surprising with Dougan’s work is not just the large number of intriguing images on display, but the surprising number that are striking, even stunning. Works such as Ecstasy (1975 – it also provides the book’s cover), Negative Anticipation (1975), North: Midday (1974), and The Koran (1974) are powerful in any context.

As is clear from those titles, these are abstract paintings that are inspired by abstract concepts, historical figures, or emotional or spiritual states. Abdullah Dougan’s overall intent, as he is quoted in the introduction, was “to use paintings to teach his own ideas as well as other people’s, and to show objectively man and his place in the universe.”

This didactic intent is well served by the way the editors have structured the book, dividing the paintings (and a small number of screenprints) into thematic groups, such as The States of Man, The Virtues, The Vices, Taoist Teaching, Negative Attitudes, and Positive States. A brief statement accompanies each painting, indicating its conceptual context. A weakness of didactic art is that it can easily become simplistic or reductive, being satisfied to merely illustrate an idea. On the whole, Dougan’s paintings avoid this trap. He does so by adopting two strategies.

The first is he uses colours to represent different concepts. Black represents the negative aspect of the Absolute, blue represents mankind, purple is humanity’s passions and negative emotions, green represents the Earth, orange is the Sun, red is the centre of the Galaxy, and white is God conceived of as the Absolute, which embraces everything that exists in the cosmos. These colours are intended to represent humanity in a cosmic context.

The second strategy is through the use of shapes. The spiral is the basic shape that appears repeatedly. But the spiral also includes the circle and the arc. And the number of spirals – primarily one, three or seven – offers further significance.

Applying these strategies to a painting such as Greed (1975), the background consists of shades of green, which represents the Earth, and indicates that humanity’s desires are Earth-bound. In the centre of the painting are seven interlinked hooks, purple in colour, which stretch from the top to the bottom of the frame. Purple symbolises mankind’s passions, and seven is significant because it refers to the Law of Seven, a concept drawn from the teaching of G.I. Gurdjieff, one of Dougan’s principle spiritual influences. Gurdjieff considered that the Law of Seven manifests in endlessly repeating cycles of birth, growth and decay, as embodied in the seasons. In this painting, the cycle is of desiring, getting, and desiring again. Adding further meaning to the painting is that the purple hooks have touches of black and white in them, representing the positive and negative aspects of the Absolute, suggesting that greed has both positive and negative spiritual outcomes.

Another intriguing aspect is the way that the colour and shape strategies are used consistently throughout. This results in one painting illuminating another. The same colours used in Greed are repeated in Death to the Ego (1975). But this time the seven purple hooks are reiterated as seven spiral arms, while the green of Earth, the blue of humanity, and the black of the negative aspect of the Absolute are presented in different relations to one another. All this implicitly suggests how greed, a primarily negative state, may be transmuted into a positive spiritual state.

A principle objective behind Dougan’s paintings is to consider humanity in a cosmic context. An idea he shared with Gurdjieffian and Sufi thought (the Sufis were another of Dougan’s spiritual influences) is that the cosmos, and everything in it, originates from the Absolute. After forces emanate from the Absolute they are deflected down into lower levels of the cosmos. In the process their power also diminishes, until they either dissipate completely in the negative aspect of the Absolute, or they reach a nadir, gather their powers, and begin the journey back up through the levels of reality towards the Absolute.

In Dougan’s cosmic outlook, Ahura Mazda, historically known as the God of Zoroastrianism, is conceived of as being the centre of the Milky Way Galaxy. In Dougan’s scheme, red is the colour of Ahura Mazda. In the painting Ahura Mazda (1975), the only colours are red, white and black, indicating that the centre of the Galaxy deflects the Absolute down towards the negative Absolute. The number three is repeated in this painting, a reference to the Law of Three, another of Gurdjieff’s ideas. The Law of Three refers to the activity of creation, which is considered to require three forces working in unison. Thus impregnation requires male, female, and the act that brings them together. The Law of Three can also be thought of as involving positive, negative and neutralising forces. In the painting of Ahura Mazda, then, the positive and negative aspects of the Absolute are reconciled in Ahura Mazda, which functions as the creative and transformative force that deflects the power of the Absolute into the Milky Way Galaxy.

What is interesting about all this is that red is also at the centre of the painting War (1975), and that it permeates Hate (1970) and Violence (1971). This implies that the violence in our existence comes to us from the centre of the Milky Way Galaxy. This is certainly true in a cosmic sense, because suns and planets originate from supernova explosions. But the suggestion that the centre of the Galaxy is also the origin of the violence that exists in us physically and psychologically is an observation of another order.

As might be expected from a self-taught painter, the work presented here is uneven. In the very earliest work, the painting is sloppy, suggesting the idea was more important than the execution. Also in the early work, the use of house paint shows an admirable number-8 wire mentality, but the smeared effect, resulting from the lack of control of the brush, is to the paintings’ detriment. But by the mid-1970s, when Dougan had his materials under control and his ideas were flowing, he produced a series of powerfully suggestive works.

Dougan’s work was exhibited in public only once during his lifetime. It attracted little critical notice, but it did sufficiently impact on Colin McCahon that he visited Dougan, intrigued by his approach. Perhaps this book will engage a wider audience, and draw to Abdullah Dougan’s paintings the level of attention they undoubtedly warrant.

Keith Hill is a writer on spirituality, a film-maker, novelist and film editor. He attended Abdullah Dougan’s group meetings from 1975 to 1987.

Images in descending order are Ecstacy; Violence; North (Midday); Lord Hazrat; Greed; Death to the Ego; Ahura Mazda

Andrew Paul Wood checks out two shows at the Brooke Gifford

2010-04-16T00:51:00.008-07:00

Kim Lowe: 9 Dragons
Eileen Leung: Radiance
Brooke/Gifford Gallery
30 March - April 24 2010

Christchurch-based Kim Lowe’s exhibition 9 Dragons is a small but perfect exhibition in that underrated medium of printmaking. Lowe has been practicing for twenty years, and her experience shows in her delicacy of colour (coral/lacquer red, celadon green and slate grey), the cunning interlocking patterns and the subtlety of the embossed surfaces through the use of woodblock printing.

Why the contemporary art world should look down its nose at printmaking, I don’t know. It requires considerable training and skill to achieve high quality work, which this is, with its own culture and technical vocabulary. Perhaps it is the suggested taint of That Which Must Not Be Named By Serious Artists – craft. Bollocks to that. Art is when craftsmanship meets imagination.

Lowe draws on her Chinese heritage for traditional leitmotifs to create a matrix within which to reworking symbolic forms representing the identities of other cultures making up New Zealand. For example 9 Red Celtic Luo Shu Forms mixes the traditional Chinese Luo Shu pattern (reminiscent of the Greek key meander) modified by the aesthetics of the Celtic knot to form a splendid abstract pattern and United Tribes of Dragon (a nod to Ralph Hotere perhaps like the grid sans dragon 9 White Jacks) take the overlapping crosses of the British Ensign to form a constellation around a classical flying Chinese dragon that also suggests the cloud-scrolls of the early Han period. The print Red Peony Moon strikingly resembles the Chinese lacquerwork dishes of the fifteenth century.

Three of the prints use the deliciously evocatively named ghost technique to great success in creating images of difficult execution. One of these, the titular 9 Dragons employs draconian forms that seem to also suggest the taniwha of the so-called “Moa Hunter” rock drawings of the Canterbury High Country, created by the ancestors of Maori around the time of Polynesian settlement. And yet this sits very naturally with Chinese visual traditions.

All of these different threads would appear to be pulled together in a definitive statement of melting pot Kiwiness in Four Kiwi Blessings: Good Food, Good Sex, Good Work & Good Kids (or no kids, whichever your preference) which almost sounds like cod Confucius but seems highly appropriate to the Aotearoa of the quarter acre kultis.

I particularly like the positivity and generosity of spirit inherent in the works and their celebration of New Zealand’s true diversity where so much contemporary art of a political bent is full of anger. These gentle pieces make a soothing alternative, and also remind us that the Chinese have been contributing to our society for as long as there has been a European presence – and as Pakeha is normally used exclusively to refer to those of European descent, again and again we fail to recognise the fact.

What is perhaps most intriguing is that here is a restrained and delicate counterpoint to what usually happens with ‘nationalism’ themed art in New Zealand, especially when intended for an international audience (you will recall Creative New Zealand’s latest catch-cry “International Ready”, though no one is entirely sure what that means): scenic landscape porn or ethno-kitsch (the latter resulting in some hideous work by a minority of Maori artists who are never criticised for it because the Auckland and Wellington art scenes regularly confuse pandering to exoticism as mana). These prints can hardly be described as ethno-kitsch because they are clearly interested in the nature of identity; they don’t waste their time trying to tick preconceived boxes.

Serendipitously, the other exhibition sharing the gallery is Eileen Leung’s Radiance. Leung is a young Auckland-based artist originally from Hong Kong, thus offering another Chinese-inflected perspective on contemporary New Zealand art practice.

Leung’s chosen methodology is a kind of pop and rococo version of Constructivism which she uses to reinterpret the traditional Buddhist/tantric motif of the mandala. These are constructed out of various materials, but particularly Perspex, and then elaborately decorated in a manner distantly recalling traditional porcelain painting. Other influences behind these delicately feminine and girlish works would appear to include Pia Fries and Jessica Stockholder.

These works are decidedly less subdued and more colourful than Lowe’s, but the same formalism and patient dedication to practice and process are just as evident. New Zealand’s art melting pot continues to be interesting and produce surprises.

The 4th Auckland Triennial: a 3rd look at its themes

2010-04-13T05:11:00.005-07:00

Last Ride In a Hot Air Balloon – Part Three: The Imagination
Bundith Phunsombatlert, Gerard Byrne, Tom Nicholson, Tove Storch, Walid Sadek, Philippe Parreno
Various venues around Auckland
12 March -20 June 2010

With the various international Biennales and Triennials that most of us are familiar with, when faced with the daunting task of reviewing such large shows, most writers tend to examine the exhibited art venue by venue and work their way through one address at a time. However this year with this event the much anticipated new space, Shed 6 is so depressing in its lack lustre spatial organisation, broken equipment and generally dull content that (I’ll confess) looking over themes in general is a more buoyant and evasively positive method of discussing the displays.

The theme of the imagination is a more prevalent aspect than what initially it might seem. The most obvious demonstration is found in the kinetic sculpture of Bundith Phunsombatlert, located in a narrow corridor-like space upstairs in The New Gallery. His contribution becomes apparent when the wandering visitor triggers an electric eye and various perches start swinging as if a bird has taken off. We never see such a bird but we do detect its moving presence as it flies from perch to perch and squawks above our heads.

By positioning the perches at heart height the artist brings the imagination, emotions and intellect together. The work is corporeal in the sense that the swings’ movement at chest height spark off a visceral empathy – we are startled as well as amused. And almost assaulted. We can figure out technically what the artist is doing but our mental facilities also generate an exotic creature with which we can playfully fantasise in terms of its appearance and why it might exist.

Gerard Byrne’s installation deals with the media coverage of the Loch Ness Monster, examining the history of the sitings, the language of the descriptions, and the cultural rise of newspapers and television. The audio readings of ‘field observations’ from printed matter, enunciated in a thick Scottish accent, bring a sardonic humour that is a vivid foil to the relentlessly dry visual presentation. Consequently I greatly enjoyed the audio but found the visual material too clinical. It was the smart-aleckly male reader of the texts that gripped my imagination, not whether a floating stump might be mistaken for Nessie’s head or if a ripple from a boat created the back of a Plesiosaur.

Tom Nicholson’s account of the deaths of Australian explorers Burke and Wills is fascinating reading, showing a vivid example of colonial stupidity where their racism assisted their own demise. Positioned on screens in the shed at an awkward angle, with a sound system set up on an odd little stage adjacent to a sequential line of images and text, it is the outer large image of waving red warning flags that grips – not the sound track. That and Nicholson’s notion of a flood in Melbourne one day causing the flowering of red nardoo in Royal Park to create a true memorial. The explorers were starving when they ate the sporocarps of the plant, ground into flour and made into cakes, but they died anyway - for the sporocarps remain indigestible and innutritious unless roasted a certain way. Burke and Willis scared off and abused the Aboriginal people who ate the plant and who could have saved them.

The freestanding sculptures of Tove Storch attempt to lure the imagination into interpreting the ambiguous shapes inside translucent vitrines of engraved silicone lined with varnish. These tall vertical, rectangular containers have walls that, appearing initially to be frosted glass, vary in opacity according to where you stand in relation to the natural light pouring in through the skylights. However they are not sufficiently compelling to make you want to stick around and puzzle over what is partially hidden. They lack genuine mystery, for Storch’s determined attempts to be super-subtle end up making them lack-lustre. Her technical wizardry falls flat.

Walid Sadek’s contribution is a walled–off shrine that contemplates the life of the only surviving terrorist of the 1972 Lod Airport massacre in Tel Aviv. Kozo Okamoto, then a member of the Japanese Red Army, now lives in Lebanon after being released by the Israelis in 1985. Sadek’s minimal space, with a circular pencil drawing on the floor and carefully prepared wall labels, has a nice meditative feel to it - being a understated reference to prison confinement and the ability of the imagination to transcend physical barriers. I’m not sympathetic to Okamoto at all - he's a cold blooded murderer - but I found Sadek’s austere installation quietly moving.

Philippe Parreno for The New Gallery, provides an dazzling bulb-lined entrance, a sort of glowing burlesque lintel or pediment that visitors pass under, and which suggests the Triennial is a huge sideshow. It is a shame he didn’t create several of these for all the venues, for then his project would make much more sense and not favour Auckland Art Gallery as a site. Its exuberant razzamatazzy mood doesn’t really match the ambience of the total event which is much more subdued and anti-celebratory. His work is far too uplifting, optimistic and joyous for this show.

The next part of my thematic Triennial discussion – the fourth – will look at The Economy.

Mark Amery visits the Seymour show at McLeavey's

2010-04-11T23:48:00.004-07:00

Ava Seymour: Tree songs
Peter McLeavey Gallery,
until Saturday 17 April 2010

Photographing Ava Seymour’s latest exhibition at Peter McLeavey’s is quite unnerving. These exquisite dark, dark works almost disappear when shot, lit only by natural light and the aura of McLeavey’s sole ancient domestic lighting fixture. Instead, as the above images well demonstrate, you and the room are reflected. The large triptych that dominates this exhibition comes to resemble a set of mirrored wardrobe sliding doors.

In the act of photographing a photograph of an enlarged collage behind glass, it is almost as if all these dimensions have neatly folded in on themselves like cubist origami. How aware was this experienced and subtle photo collagist of the effects of siting these works - created during Seymour’s recent McCahon House Residency in Titirangi - in these rooms?

The spectral spookiness of these work’s presence is echoed by their nocturnal mystery and play in abstraction with capturing light and the prismatic colour spectrum. As McLeavey noted on my visit, photography can be considered painting with light. Here in photographing A3 sized paper collages, blowing them up to figure height, and then placing them at a distance from us behind glass, Seymour plays adventurously and with a degree of complexity with painting and photographic techniques, and the space in between them.

Even up close the work is difficult to read, affected hugely in McLeavey’s space by what the sun is doing outside. The viewer and their environment’s reflection in the work appears a deliberate wish. The experience of looking at these works under direct light as most other galleries provide with their purpose-made gallery lighting systems (and as you can do here by holding up one small unhung work to the light) is radically different. The choice of McLeavey’s rooms to first show them sees their muted nocturnal softness amplified without any need to darken the space.

The McCahon residency studio is, I understand, surrounded by tall Kauri and Kahikatea, and to look at the large triptych here is to feel you could be sitting in a darkened space in the thick of the forest in the middle of the night. You appreciate for example the play of moonlight as it travels a dappled leafy path into your inner chamber, broken in its dimensional throw by tree trunks like cubist shards.

Suitably the exhibition is entitled Tree Songs, and I was immediately reminded of the immersion of McCahon’s large series The Wake. A poetic lament, it features the dim vertical strokes of the Kauri, and was completed at night on McCahon’s return to Titirangi from his visit to the States.

Like a midnight garden of musky perfumes, Seymour’s work is also a dreamy nocturne. Intensely musical, it is a work of dark sensual delights playing with a majestic but hazy rainbow of purples, greens, scarlets, gold and silver. Shadowy vertical bands and circles make the work resemble a dense thicket of musical notes on a giant stave. Yet, at the same time as having the microscopic immersion of prisms of light in the forest, the work is also suggestive of the cosmos.

The works are unusually, defiantly dark, demanding you to step up close and move across the surface to appreciate the work. And just as you have to move to pick up shifts in the work against the glass surface glare, streams of circles have subtly lit edges from various different directions. These and Malevich-like small square patches provide pretty much the only strong lighting from within the work.

Those still hoping Seymour will return to the terrain of her punk figurative photo montages of the mid 90s are left wanting. Content is not at stake in the same way here. Instead the beauty of the montage and how it might see photography operate like abstract painting as visual music is explored.

The most aggressive thing about these works is how you’re made acutely aware of the awkwardness of looking - peering in and shifting your placement to detect the colour modulations, trying to get past yourself staring back in the glass. It’s irritating to be sure, but it sets up an interesting tension between viewer and abstraction. The reward is that this work manages to rise above its swish of the trails of modernism to encourage a new way of looking at photography and two dimensional work in general.

McLeavey’s rooms also come filled with other artists’ shadows. While McCahon’s influence is clear in the mood and size of the work, it’s devoid of his signs, symbols and personal questions. Formally its far more akin in rhythm and music to another McLeavey stablemate and collagist, Gordon Walters. This is particularly the case in four small works’ strong play with one or two circles and a wide vertical strip on another colour field. The vertical strip could again allude to the trees. The mood is nocturnal, lit dimly by the moon. The tension in these works lies in the delicacy with which Seymour plays with the edge of her cutout shapes, providing some bite in the formation of a dimensional space. Yet they don’t hold the mystery of the large triptych.

The work swims in the pool of modernist abstraction and the influences McCahon brought to bear on his work in Titirangi. Here you might find many echoes. The schemes and colour play of Sonia Delaunay and Kandinsky, the collage of Braque and Picasso, the shapes of Malevich and Mondrian, and mood boards of Rothko, all shifting across each other and rising up to the surface like bubbles. In this way the work is the most interesting consideration of abstract painting through photography, and indication of its painterly potential, I can recall.

Unusual drawings

2010-04-10T20:46:00.012-07:00

Peter Gibson Smith: Buried
Bath St Gallery
31 March - 24 April 2010

At Bath St, Peter Gibson Smith presents nine landscapes that are startlingly distinctive as images. They look like antique photographs that close up appear to have been made into line engravings and then transferred on to thin paper sheets supported by curved cross-sections of balsa and cardboard bracing.

Most of these works are in two or three vertical sections butted together. They have alternating curved ends that either project out into the room, or else bend towards the wall. These generate shadows that tonally liven up the austere fissure lined volcanic backgrounds of the work, for these pale landscapes incorporate famous Burton Brothers photographs of bare tephra-caked hills just after the 1886 Mt.Tarawera eruption. In their centres they have superimposed dramatic images of ancient monuments or earlier Gibson Smith sculptures.

The artist has digitally bended these images together, often including small human forms, or ladders constructed from HB pencils - with shadows. There is a reflexive humour here because these scanned images are in fact drawn with a computer using parallel pencil lines. They are then coated with brown encaustic that softens the pencil tones by mottling and darkening the graphite hatching. Sometimes rare touches of colour are added to the paper surface, or painted on the sides.

Because the paper is thin and stretched over the ribbed struts of the balsa stretcher, the delicate waxy images look, and are, frail, with the supporting trellis being clearly detectable behind the marks. The pencil lines are horizontal and vertical in the pale grey zones, with gaps along the lengths and spatial variations sometimes between them. Like a printing method, extra diagonal hatching is superimposed for the darker areas.

All this makes Gibson Smith’s images intriguing. They are haunting in a classic surrealist sense; a landscape hybrid of Max Ernst and Joel Peter Witkin. This is easily the best work of his career so far, possibly because he is avoiding colour (for which in my view he has no aptitude) but also because there is a relaxed looseness about the blotchy forms and overlaid rectangles. They are ambiguous spatially and far less fiddly than his previous projects.

Although there is an amusing logic in his rendering of massive monuments on wobbly paper on fragile supports, the fact they are in sections is a weakness – creating an irritating distraction through their painted edges. The vertical divisions seem to be the result of the width limitations of his drawing machine.

Where Gibson Smith succeeds is in establishing a humour where the works appear at a distance to be screened photographs sourced from museum collections. As mentioned, the precision and regularity of the pencil lines are akin to line engravings, though he teases with methods of registration too by having some layers of dark hatching deliberately out of sync.

I personally tend to be indifferent to technical innovation - because that aspect is invariably besides the point with good art - but these images do fascinate as complex systems of rendered marks, and as dreamlike narratives. Their programming makes them distantly related to Simon Ingram with his ‘robot’ painting, and also Stephen Greenwood, an artist who exhibited the products of his drawing machine in Christchurch’s Gingko gallery in the mid-eighties. (Before computers were available, he invented a machine that used an electric eye to scan still lifes, rendering them with horizontal lines made with coloured marker pens.)

With Gibson Smith the ominous darker works are especially memorable, especially a small image of some rocks (and ghostly traces of an airborne contraption) in a cloud-filled sky, and two large drawings, one of a shed-like, ruined arch of stacked books, the other of a statue of a lion attacking a horse (related to George Stubbs).

The method of mark making builds on their enigmatic character by amplifying the oddness of the shockingly destroyed New Zealand landscape now coping with new unexpected insertions dropped into its midst. It makes compelling viewing to see drawing, photography, painting and sculpture blended in such an innovative fashion.

Boris Dornbusch on

2010-04-08T02:30:00.000-07:00

Intriguing tension

2010-04-07T16:48:00.021-07:00

Boris Dornbusch: Phantom Limb Construction Sites
Starkwhite
31 March - 1 May 2010

‘Phantom limbs’ are those invisible legs that amputees feel are still attached to their bodies and which provide sensations of pain or itching. The legs or arms don’t exist yet the neural systems within the brain don’t seem to acknowledge the original limb’s separation and absence. They create illusions which are related to other sensations of music and taste that can be generated through exposed surfaces of the brain being stimulated with electricity or chemicals.

With his ‘construction sites’ Boris Dornbusch appears to be referring to the Duchampian notion of the viewer creating a large part of the artwork themselves; that they actively participate in the conceptual construction of the art. Their mental creativity generates meanings that almost like a sticky substance attach themselves invisibly to the object of their attention.

Dornbusch here has come up with an exceptionally clever and evocative title, yet strangely very little of the actual art fits in with the ambiguity of the Duchampian concept. Instead of being open-ended and welcoming of mixed interpretations, almost all works are tightly thought through, and seem the opposite. They provide definite clues that anticipate the ‘correct’ answers of these riddlelike artworks.

With these two types - decipherable puzzles that tease with ‘crackable’ codes, and works that are vaguer and which generate more ‘poetic’ impressions – there appears to be little overlap. One is viewer-driven whilst the other is artist-based and more controlling of possible readings, with certain correlations that have high priority. Artist and viewer in other words compete over imaginative control of the work’s meaning.

For ten chosen works Dornbusch has a wide array of clues carefully laid out for his well–educated audience. Two pieces are based on art historical references. Clear Moods and Crashpad (right door) allude to Malevich’s famous perpendicular black square and tilted white one - with jokes about Malevich’s paintings being vandalised by the art-going public. In Dornbusch’s versions one is liable to be scratched by opening car doors or Starkwhite’s audience running up the stairs, and the other they walk over coming in the door.

Three others use semantic logic and witty paradox. In In almost every season there can be a singular moment when something unexpected fails to materialise the title contradicts itself, an unopened canvas is shown facing the wall and a Braille text is screened off and made unusable by a sheet of Perspex.

Skalinada is similar. It shows a b/w photocopy of two dark derelict skyscrapers in the Dalmatian city of Split. They look joined but ‘split’ and the paper has tearable tags on its bottom edge with vertical cuts. The tile refers to an internationally famous Croatian pop song and the sheet is attached to the wall with sickly bubblegum.

The third work coded in this way is Fighting An Old Problem. On a white jersey tied around a column, Dornbusch has painted a white jersey with a sweaty armpit and more importantly, short and long sleeves. They allude to the difficulty of putting on the garment while the sleeves are tangled.

Three other works have a logic that is media-based.

Directions for a Visiting Friend shows us a makeshift map of Berlin or Split (the two cities where Dornbusch lives) made by photographing objects on a kitchen table placed in a ‘cartographic’ diagrammatic arrangement. This photograph has been made into a paper photocopy and then folded like a store-bought city street-map. It’s very witty.

Slow Change presents an image on a LCD of three coin impressions fading from the palm of Dornbusch’s hand. The title refers to digital motion on a DVD, the difficulty of retaining cash, and the fading of ink in photocopies.

With 330 ml we see a running tap recorded on a short DVD loop. Because it is in Auckland, the water is paid for by the user, so Dornbusch amusingly has an energy meter fitted to the gallery power point to show the running costs to Starkwhite.

One large ‘blank’ sheet of white PVC features the use of vernacular language - like you would find in a cryptic crossword. The unfinished title The great white is completed by a tiny painted shark you have to look for, under a horizontal slit.

The tenth work involves the phenomenon of ekphrasis where words are used to describe a visual artwork and even replace it. In this case Dornbusch has written out a line from a Sonic Youth song that describes a paintable vista featuring foreground, figures, and trees used as compositional framing devices. He has translated A view through the trees to a couple standing in the snow into Braille and you can touch the embossed aluminium. However you don’t need to because the title tells you roughly what to visualise in the scene. The details of what you mentally see fit in perfectly with Duchamp’s theory, as you yourself provide the descriptive particulars for a sentence that is essentially vague.

Good art doesn’t have to be brainy, and often intellectual artists make work that is infuriatingly smug and convolutingly rarefied –particularly if the display is short on sensual appeal. Such art needs a carrot to draw the audience in, so that the ideas and materials strike an emotional chord that makes the work memorable and not sterile.

With Dornbusch, the fascinating exhibition title sets the scene for how you receive the display. Some items are indisputably one liners but that is not necessarily a bad thing. A good idea that is very simple can linger long in the imagination and provide continual pleasure and engagement.

So while this show at first glance does seem to be too cool for words, it is not really that icy. It will reward a couple of visits as various cross links – often to do with tactility – readily become apparent. Dornbusch’s ideas become much clearer in a solo presentation, far better than in say, previous Starkwhite group exhibitions. Here, with a little patience and a close examination of the printed list of works, patterns become detectable.

4th Auckland Triennial – Themes Part 2

2010-04-06T02:30:00.015-07:00

Last Ride in the Hot Air Balloon (Making The Journey)
Marine Hugonnier, Johanna Billing, Shahab Fotouhi, Tino Sehgal, Nick Austin
Assorted Auckland venues
12 March - 20 June 2010

Continuing our look at the Triennial themes, this one is about the excursion; the journey. I could say ‘adventure’ but of course that can happen even if you don’t leave home. I want to skimpily draw out the notion of movement in some of these works – a trajectory. In this exhibition it ties in with the notion of the balloon being a symbol for the earth and its inhabitants, and its limited resources (paralleling the balloon's heated air) running out.

Marine Hugonnier’s tripartite video installation (with three-coloured, matching carpet) featuring films of Afghanistan, the Amazon jungle and the Matterhorn seduces despite its attempts not to flaunt (or to subvert) exoticism and spectacle. The first shows various attempts to film the desolate landscape blocked by the military, the second shows a railroad being built by the Brazilian dictatorship that jeopardises the inhabitants and vegetation of the rain forest, and the third fabricates the documentation of an anticipated ‘last tourist balloon flight’ over the Swiss mountain, with spliced in black and white images of dramatically lit stuffed ‘Swiss’ deer in Disneyland. The work mourns the destruction of our planet, exuding a sense of despair and tragic inevitability.The balloon here becomes a symbol for freedom of thought and the unconfined body.

Johanna Billing’s more positive installation presents a video of four Scottish musicians in a band, learning to sail a yacht for the first time and developing their co-ordinating skills as a water-mobile team. They manoeuvre the craft out of Edinburgh harbour into the open sea and their increasing confidence as they return is accompanied by a haunting song by American cellist Arthur Russell, This is how we walk on the moon. The point here is the learning of navigational skills of course – that interactive process - not the distance travelled.

Iranian artist Shahab Fotouhi presents a linear sculpture made of black and white neon that shows the helicopter route taken by Shiite Muslim leader Ayatollah Khomeini on his triumphant return from exile after the 1979 revolution that toppled the Shah. The six stops that make up his itinerary result in a high curved doorway that becomes an ambiguous symbol for the country’s future, while the accompanying looped video shows Khomeini’s supporters attempting to clear a space in the dense crowd for the helicopter to land by whipping the edges of the packed multitude with leather belts. In Fotouchi’s hands, such imagery is a hint of the brutal ruthlessness to come.

For his contribution Tino Sehgal employs solo dancers to slowly move on their backs across the St. Paul Street gallery floor, using a repertoire of movements that reference details from a historic Dan Graham video (Roll, 1970) and two Bruce Nauman works (Floor-Wall Positions, 1968, and Elke Allowing the Floor to Rise Up Over Her, Face Up, 1973). The Graham element ensures there is more than a writhing motion involved that pinions the performer to one spot, but that there is some kind of lateral direction as well – initially away from the righthand edge of the gallery - to the lefthand side and back again.

Conland’s inclusion of Nick Austin’s sequence of paintings is amusing because painting is deliberately ignored in this Triennial. He here is not so much a painter as a maker of a sequence of story-boards or comic-strip frames for an imaginary animated DVD. Austin wittily toys with clashing notions of time by rendering a snail chomping through the yellow pages of a book so that these eventually are transmuted into the shape of an ice skating boot with blade.

This snail thus alters a time consuming book so it becomes a high velocity projectile capable of great acceleration and, in the context of this show, risk. There seems to be some sort of paradoxical pun going on about immediacy of communication, verbal language and narrative imagery – a subversive joke that gives the finger to (now slow moving) dexterity with words in order to favour more laboriously layered (but incongruously speedier) signs or semaphores. On a more straight forward level it advocates the digestion of ideas and the power of thought.

Next Triennial theme: the Imagination

Paired images in descending order from Hugonnier, Billing, Fotouhi (1) and Austin. Thank you AAG, Kate Orgias, Jennifer French and the artists.

Kate Brettkelly-Chalmers adds to the continuing discussion of the Triennial

2010-04-02T12:45:00.012-07:00

The 4th Auckland Triennial: Last Ride in a Hot Air Balloon
Various Auckland venues
12 March - 20 June 2010

The 4th Auckland Triennial: Last Ride in a Hot Air Balloon was launched a few weeks ago with a suite of gallery openings, artists’ talks and panel discussions. Curator Natasha Conland’s umbrella theme of risk and adventure engages with a diversity of current art practices. As other Eyecontact reviews already give summary impressions of the whole Triennial, this piece focuses on a group of artists and the talks they gave during the opening weekend.

What characterizes Last Ride in a Hot Air Balloon is the multiplicity of interpretations that can be made of its themes of risk and adventure. Where other triennial or biennial events might develop a rigid curatorial concept, Conland offers a more porous conceptual framework. The twenty-eight artists selected investigate various dynamics of risk-taking, from explicitly looking at our current financial recession to examining the physicality of risky activity or simply exploring various material conditions.

The multifarious nature this Triennial might exasperate those who would like an explicit pairing of artist and curatorial concept. In some instances, such as Martin Boyce’s fantastic sculptural pieces at St Paul St, ideas of risk taking and adventure do not seem appropriate or useful as a means of engaging with the artworks on show. I found that the curatorial premise was most effective where it articulated relationships between different art practices.

During the opening weekend I was particularly fascinated by the relationship between Alicia Frankovich’s sculptures and the films of Mike Parr. Frankovich’s series of sculptural pieces at the New Gallery investigates the form of the human body in relation to everyday materials. In the centre of her space hang two Martini bottles attached to a pump circulating a red coloured liquid. Clearly a reference to body fluid, this booze-bottle water feature humorously hints at the presence of alcohol in our systems. Like her memorable performances at ARTSPACE last year, Frankovich creates potentially risky bodily engagements and reveals that they are not without ethical implications.

At her artist’s talk I was intrigued to hear Frankovich speak of her sculptures as performances. Works such as Lover, a human form vaguely traced in neon tubing hanging from a coat hanger, or Piston, a round ball suspended precariously from the ceiling, do not immediately speak of performative concerns. But the lightness of their construction does suggest an agile physical quality. At her talk we were also reminded that Frankovich was once a competitive gymnast. Indeed, her engagement with the effects of gravity has an athletic flair—these works could topple over at anytime.

Where Frankovich’s ARTSPACE performances were powerfully simple and coherent, these Triennial pieces function more like a series of drawings, experiments that explore the space between sculpture and performance.

Performative parameters were also discussed at Mike Parr’s artist talk. Parr spoke about his significant career as an Australian conceptual and performance artist as he discussed his early works on show at the George Fraser Gallery. This talk even tended toward performance in itself. At one point the artist read out a list of actions for possible works that he’d written in the 1970s. Directives such as ‘Hold your breath under water for as long as possible,’ or ‘Drip blood from your finger onto the lens of a camera...until the lens is filled with blood’ varied from the torturous to the mundane. As Parr finished reading each page of directives he let these papers drop one by one on the ground. Whether this was intentional or not I couldn’t help but associate these discarded pages with the artist’s video One Hundred Breaths being projected in the next room. In this video Parr sucks pieces of paper onto his face until he runs out of air and needs to take a breath. What gives this slightly ferocious work its poignant overtones is that each piece of paper bears a self-portrait of the artist. Parr is elevating his own image with all the air in his body, creating a tangible link between self-image and physical reality.

Alongside Parr and Frankovich, the body’s movements are also explored in Tino Sehgal’s work Instead of allowing something to rise up to your face dancing bruce and dan and other things. Known for his ‘constructed situations’ — choreographed movements or exchanges involving one or many people — Sehgal does not allow any documentation to be made of his work, nor does he use the term ‘performance’ to describe it. At St Paul St a man dressed in casual jeans and a jacket made a very purposeful wriggling movement along the concrete floor of the gallery. His unusual sliding actions had the precision and attentiveness of a professional dancer — someone who is acutely aware of their body.

Derived from Bruce Nauman and Dan Graham videos, Sehgal’s piece has been reenacted in galleries across the globe. Anna Macrae is the New Zealand dancer who facilitated Sehgal’s piece. At a panel discussion on the opening weekend she spoke about the process of developing this work in New Zealand. Macrae, who is currently living in Berlin, happened to be coming back home during the period of the Triennial. Seeking to avoid any unnecessary travel, Sehgal and Conland arranged for her to ‘learn’ the choreography in Berlin and teach it to six professional dancers based in New Zealand, who would in turn reenact it at St Paul St.

Macrae’s remarks at the panel discussion revealed that the scope of Sehgal’s work goes beyond what occurs in the gallery, beyond a single person moving across a concrete floor. It is a constructed situation comprised of a series of incidental actions and connections—small movements across space and time.

Although this Triennial’s themes of risk and adventure may seem tenuously linked to the artworks on show, Last Ride in a Hot Air Balloon does offer a myriad of smaller, intriguing relationships between different art practices. It presents constellations of artists whose share subjects and modes of investigation across gallery spaces. It is a show that requires an attentive approach to viewing—something that is well worth the time.

The images above ascend from Mike Parr's video One Hundred Breaths, shown at his artist's talk at the George Fraser opening.
Then there is Parr's Facts About The Room (1970), and three details from Alicia Frankovich's presentation in The New Gallery.

Vary and Umberg at Jensen

2010-03-31T22:27:00.008-07:00

Gϋnter Umberg & Elizabeth Vary: New works
Jensen Gallery
16 March - 1 May 2010

We have here a visual ‘conversation’ between a German couple using different ‘sentences’ that consist of groups of paintings - something vaguely related to the earlier interesting project Gow Langsford did with Simon Ingram and James Cousins, but not using sequences of pairings.

Umberg and Vary don’t mingle their paintings physically in clusters, or collaborate on single works, or even juxtapose them. Instead – with the help of a new temporary wall Andrew Jensen has installed in the centre of his very large gallery – they talk to each other across space, chatting through various salient similarities and contrasts and even mimicries.

Both these painters make sculptural objects that project out from the wall. In Umberg’s case he shows you from the side the supporting screws sticking out from the wall - they are not hidden inside the painted panel they hold up. He paints on solid wooden panels that present the painted rectangular front plane parallel to the wall, with the sides tilting back diagonally and hidden from the front. Vary on the other hand, tends to paint on chunky blocks or slabs made of cardboard. Occasionally her separate components lock together, like in a puzzle.

Umberg’s paint is highly light-absorbent, dark, powdered pigment, applied repeatedly on to alternating layers of sprayed on dammar varnish. In contrast Vary uses thin liquid oil glazes that dribble over the sides and which sometimes are mixed with smeared or daubed thick paint. She prefers a glossy surface with a full range of chroma and tone, often using metallic and fluorescent paint as well. He likes matt velvety monochromes: in this show, subtly varying blacks or greens. Her sides are just as important as the fronts, whereas he paints only the occasional narrow strip of the side-angled, laminated strata.

The details of their painting placements are such that Umberg occupies the centre of the long wall opposite the gallery entrance, with Vary having an unusual projecting tray-like work positioned near the righthand corner. She also occupies the two shorter end walls of the huge gallery while on the new moveable partition bisecting the gallery space, he has one side and she the other.

As you'd expect the dialogue between these two painters incorporates various lines of sight, sideways viewing of the wall reliefs, and overall vistas – as well as of course, close ups. Some of her dark planes at a distance could be muddled with his, and sometimes she has made fake Umberg bevelled panels. While he never touches block forms, she occasionally paints on little angular chunks with dark colours, and spikey angular slabs with pastel hues. She also likes to cut into the sides of thick rectangles and remove geometric shapes.

Umberg and Vary here have created an intriguing and whimsical hanging arrangement that is fun to explore. It is a visually rich and intelligent exhibition you could spend a lot of time with, moving around the five walls and zeroing in on the paintings from unusual angles. For a Jensen experience, with the new wall, it forces you to be quite mobile. One of their best.

Andrew Paul Wood tries to get provoked by Christine Webster

2010-03-31T04:11:00.004-07:00

Provocations: The work of Christine Webster
Curated by Anne Kirker
Christchurch Art Gallery
26 March – 7 June 2010

No one could deny that the time for a Christine Webster survey and reconsideration is well and truly due – though just as one shouldn’t presume that David Bain’s acquittal equates with innocence, one shouldn’t automatically think that a big survey sets a reputation in stone. One of the difficulties in assessing the overall effect is that because in the successive decades her tropes and influences have become very familiar through the work of other artists and popular culture, and this must be taken into account when assessing Webster’s position in New Zealand (and Australian) art history.

There has, for instance, been a revival of burlesque performance, Mikhail Bakhtin’s notion of the Carnivalesque has become widely familiar, plastic breasts tend to make us think of Cindy Sherman, feather boas and recherché historicism have returned to fashion design and the World of Wearable Art. There are echoes of Pierre et Gilles, Cocteau and others – even Picasso. Does subversive voyeuristic and fetishistic eroticism really have any currency in a world that since the 1980s has quite honestly seen everything? In fact, we really must struggle to distance ourselves from the expectations of a mass of intervening culture in order to give Webster’s body of work its impartial worth, without larding it with second wave feminist and French post-structuralist theory.

Visually the photographic prints are not as shocking to us as they once were, and a younger audience is unlikely to experience any of the frisson the works once held, especially when the art world was smaller and the models were frequently known to us socially. Indeed, the Black Carnival aesthetic in particular has become the commonplace of advertising and marketing. But this gives us greater opportunity to interrogate the images unfettered by novelty and prurience.

For me, some of the most interesting work is the earliest in the show, Albert Park (1983) and the self-portrait Devouring a Persimmon in the Back Yard (1985) with their energy and expressive camera distortions. Also of this period is Craigwell House where the artifice starts creeping in – a made up ephebe, pretty in a tawdry way, emerging from what looks like the (yellowed and cracked) tiled plunge pool of a disused hospital. The light is the rich amber of electrical light, reminiscent of Fassbinder’s film Querelle. There is a sort of Ovidian beauty to this – an inverted Narcissus picked up on a street corner or low rent Hylas abducted by the nymphs.

Then we hit the middle period, the best known series: Black Carnival, Possession and Mirth, Circus of Angels, all the way through to Serious Dolls House. I want to like them, but I can’t work up the enthusiasm. Firstly, the work suddenly becomes formulaic and repetitive: models, performers and art worlders posed stiffly in tableaux vivant, flashing their pink bits like they’ve just been mugged by a tag team of Donna Demente and Trelise Cooper, and plunged into a Caravaggio-inspired chiaroscuro. Secondly this sameness lingers on for far too long, literally decades, with only minor variations.

Possession and Mirth from the early 1990s, represented here by Vein (1992), takes up the trope drawing on historical paintings and subverting the details. Vein, for instance, would appear to be based on seventeenth century Italian painter (and one of the few women) Artemisia Gentileschi’s Judith and Holofernes (itself in the typical chiaroscuro of the Caravaggisti – the followers of Caravaggio). But again, comparisons with Cindy Sherman are unavoidable as she also exploited the idea (as did many, many other contemporary photographers). Without wall labels it would be difficult to determine which series individual works would belong to, and the lack of any hard edge or realism (here I’m thinking of milder Mapplethorpe) leaves me feeling ambivalent about the image.

It’s a bit like a sandwich that you've put so many condiments in that you don’t notice that the meat or cheese or whatever has fallen out, and then all those ingredients give you indigestion. I am not convinced that the middle period rises to an exceptional point above the international average, however in a local context it shook things up enough to spin a number of new directions in New Zealand art – for which Webster earns her laurels. With time and a greater public jadedness, some of the lustre has been lost, but we must place things in context; something that this exhibition should have tackled more directly in the gallery space.

At the far end of the exhibition, the most recent work, things become interesting for me again – although to say that the Quiet series with its fluffy textiles counterpointed in diptych with sweaty male close-ups “addresses masculinity in a way that is counter to that promoted by media representation” (quoted from the wall text) is to suggest that someone has spent the last twenty years in a cave on Mars with their fingers in their ears and their eyes closed. Possibly this might be true if there was a harder, more shocking edge, but the reality is that particular conceit is well-tilled earth as a glance in most photography magazines will confirm. Doug Inglish and Michael Baumgarten come to mind. I could probably pick up any issue of (not only) blue at random and find something similar.

I am much more interested in the most recent work Le Dossier, a series of modestly sized images of details and nudes that have this underlying Bluebeard/120 Days of Sodom theme of sexual violence against women in a French Chateau. I love a bit of Angela Carter/Marquis de Sade tension, provided it is handled as well as it is here. These are beautifully executed as fantasy, but with that essential connection to the real world and natural light that adds the extra tremble. The images are delicate and lyrical – a full circle reminiscent of those fresh early works. After touring the show, I felt reinvigorated by this pot of gold at the end of a slightly exhausting rainbow.

And there is video work – often the last dance of the desperate for senior photographers, but here interesting, intriguing and occasionally risqué. I would have to say, however, not exceptionally so – one gets the feeling, thought, that this is quite a new medium for La Webster, and she’s still feeling it out, though judging from the credits she is keeping to a directorial role rather than getting behind the camera herself. This will be an interesting area to watch, as Webster is nobody’s fool and will fully develop this new arrow in her quiver.

None of this is to condemn the show, because interesting pieces are scattered throughout and it serves an important didactic purpose. I am left wondering, however, whether Christine Webster’s importance lies more in the precedents she set for younger (and particularly female) artists in this part of the world, rather the work as it stands today. Nonetheless it is a visual dialogue well worth having, and will be especially informative to a younger generation of artists for whom the 1980s especially are another country. This is primarily art history, but I’m itching to see where Webster goes next.

The image is Black Carnival #18 1993. Cibachrome. Collection of the Museum of New Zealand Te Papa Tongarewa. Reproduced courtesy of the artist

Georgie Hill goes mellow - with spring light

2010-03-31T03:42:00.007-07:00

Georgie Hill: Cold Shoulder
Ivan Anthony
24 March - 17 April 2010

Georgie Hill has built up quite a following through the intensity of her tortured symbolism and claustrophobic, 3-walled enclosed spaces, as seen in her two previous shows. Those works had a particular kind of ambience with their dominant blood red and dark hues, but with this new exhibition, the mood changes.

Her new works of bedroom interiors are filled with air, more light, less intense and less Gothic. There are lots of pale blues and greys, and the manner of her highly obsessive drawing with watercolour and faint pencil has altered. There is less sense of mass – though there still remains a characteristic tension between geometric control and enclosed, churning wavelike forms.

These works technically seem to defy genres. They look like some odd printing hybrid with sugarlift blended with a lithographic process, but it is nevertheless predominantly watercolour – only more delicate than before.

That is really saying something, because this work is surprisngly much more fanatically precise now in its linear acuity of strictly positioned hair-thin lines. It is so unbelievable that you wonder if she has used computers, but no, it is all watercolour with the characteristic attendant, petal-like unfolding of blossomy gradated arabesques and tiny rivulets.

Hill’s images are also more narrative and less trope-based now. They are not the expected obscure metonymic symbols, but include more easily recognisable female forms (representing herself) with exposed spinal columns encased in what seem to be violet or sweet pea petals. These signs are less inner or private, having more outer natural–world correlations that are easier to decode. They include domestic furniture such as chests of drawers, items of clothing like plaid shirts, toppled horizontal vases, or posters of Rita Angus exhibitions.As with her earlier shows, there are often little roots wiggling skywards out of the ground, seeking sustenance out of the air.

Like Angus, Hill revels in self-portraiture – not that of facial physiognomy but solely chosen objects in a domestic space. They create a sort of declaration of personal identity, using room as metaphor - infused with a warm spring light. While this exhibition rams home Hill’s technical brilliance with tiny marks and fine lines, and I have gone on about it, that alone cannot make memorable art. Technique is only a small part of any art practice – if at all – for assistants with manual skills can be rented. With Hill the ambiguous forms which seem to change each time you briefly look away, maintain an interpretative richness. They are what keep her imagery hauntingly enigmatic and her stagey interiors compulsive viewing.

Nell May on Anya Henis's

2010-03-29T21:55:00.000-07:00

exhibition at Window.

Andrew Paul Wood on Heather Straka's photographs

2010-03-29T03:04:00.001-07:00

Heather Straka: Do Not Resuscitate,
Jonathan Smart Gallery, Christchurch
20 March - 17 April 2010

Familiar from manga, anime, street fashion and pop art is the Japanese concept of ero kawaii – that disturbingly paedophilic hybrid of Sanryo kitschy Hello Kitty cuteness and kinderwhore Lolita coquettishness that along with Japan’s economic power has spread throughout Asia to varying degrees. Perhaps it was an unconscious strategy for appearing non-threatening to preeminent Russian and American interests during the Cold War, or a parallel to the perverse obsession of a certain type of British Conservative with public school girls in uniform. The jury remains out.

It is an aesthetic that pervades every aspect of the photographic works making up Heather Straka’s Do Not Resuscitate at the Jonathan Smart Gallery. Straka is best known as a painter of intense detail, the canvasses worked up from carefully posed photographs. Recently the strain of the detailed brushwork has caused Straka to reconsider her process and move back a step to work on photography.

The exhibition falls naturally into two sections. The first is a wall of individual portraits of young female Japanese, Chinese and Korean models, saucily posed mid pouty puff of cigarette smoke like a shoddy faded Pat Pong advertisement for sexual services, dressed in immaculate and slightly tacky uniform of a manicurist, hairdresser or train attendant. Their perfect, exaggerated makeup, hair, poreless skin and the Preraphaelite sharpness of image emphasise the natural tendency of young Asian women toward a kind of porcelain doll neoteny (retention of childlike features, such as those exaggerated in manga and anime).

There is, too, a tacit dig at the cliché of many Westerners being unable to tell people of Asian descent apart either as discrete ethnic groupings or individuals. Straka makes a fetish of this with the consistent styling of these individual portraits, but at the same time goading us with subtle differences in pose, hair and features to recognise the distinct personalities striving for a kind of kinky mass-produced and standardised uniformity one might expect from the commercialisation of the erotic. Such subversion is the bread and butter of Straka’s oeuvre.

On the opposite wall is a tableau vivant reminiscent of the work of advertising-inspired neo-Baroque photographers like Jeff Wall. The same girls are gathered, still smoking, around a blonde and decidedly western (female, but boyish) half-draped nude ‘corpse’ on a gurney in a shabby, nondescript room. Is this the behind the scenes at a downmarket funeral parlour, some bizarre Third World hospital, a backroom organ-legging chopshop, or what? The air of neglect and decay is further enhanced by the ropey, leggy ivy strategically winding through the scene, which along with the draped sheet/shroud, strongly suggests the tropes of nineteenth century Academic painting – something that Straka has long delighted in playing naughty games with.

Is it a sort of self-conscious ironic revision of Orientalism? Perhaps that is going too far. The visual pleasure of the retinal candy is more than sufficient without trying to draw out readings. Yummy.

Thomas Ruff in Auckland

2010-03-29T02:21:00.005-07:00

Thomas Ruff: Photographs
Gow Langsford
26 March – 24 April 2010

Internationally acclaimed German photographer Thomas Ruff rarely has his work exhibited in New Zealand though he gets a lot of coverage in the international art press, and so most art lovers here know of him. This Gow Langsford exhibition brings eight examples from his back and more recent catalogue. They demonstrate in a limited way (because you don’t see each series for background context) not only his interest in strict procedural method, but also for the viewer, the value of direct experience in a gallery. What the works have to offer because of their scale and (in some cases) acuity simply doesn’t transmit to reproductions in magazines or online.

Despite the inclusion of three recently treated images of partially clad women that Ruff has taken from porn sites and digitally treated to become blurred as if the camera has been furiously shaken, it is the 1997 portraits that are pornographic, not the nudes.

What am I getting at here? Well, because of their size (2010 x 1650 mm), you are free to really look at these faces. You can linger and dwell on their detail in a way that you never could with a living human being standing in front of you – unless you don’t care about being rude. Here your voyeuristic intrusion is welcomed, with the end result that you can’t help but notice that these people up close and enlarged are not pretty.

You can see inflamed red patches of skin, mottled blemishes, epidermal bristles, infected striations and tiny pustules. It is like reading Jonathan Swift’s Gulliver describing the bodies of the giant people of Brobdingnag, or in turn, the Lilliputians’ previous description of him. The human physiognomy magnified becomes repulsive. There seems to be a malicious glee behind Ruff’s ‘objective’ honesty and the fact you will keep coming back to zero in for another look.

In terms of impact and sheer ocular escapism however, it is Ruff’s very large (2600 x 1880 mm) picture of a night sky, borrowed from an observatory archive, that is the star (so to speak) of this exhibition. It is mesmerising in its evocation of the infinite, even with a few fake stars the artist has mischievously added. You can really immerse yourself in its ambiguous tunnelling space of thousands of glowing pin points.

The appropriated images from erotic web sites amuse because of their vibrating edges – from a deliberately placed tremulous arousal on the part of the artist; a digitally induced fibrillation within the mechanism of the camera. Ruff’s ‘nudes’ look like overlapping double exposures where the smudged movement is that of the shaking photographer more that that of the cavorting models.

His initially crisp found images now go beyond blurring. It is not just a matter of vague, soft edges, as if vaseline has been smeared on the lenses; the quiver is horizontal, a slight shadowy aura – a calculated overreaction where Ruff seems to be laughing at the fickle vagaries of desire, and his attempts to capture it. With digital technology altering the acuity he sends up priapic-lensed photographers like say, Thomas, the leading David Hemmings character in Antonioni’s ‘Blow Up.'

Oddly the most interesting works in the show are small, some blurry 1994 portraits that are halfway between the above two extremes. They were created using a pre-computer Minolta montaging technology where hybrid ‘identikits’ were developed by the German police so that ethereally blurry portraits of new identities were constructed out of old ones (a ‘magic mirrors’ system of blending) with strange ghostly auras - like genealogies with children replicating the individual features of their same-gender parents. There is an appealing mix of antiquated (Flash Gordonish) sci-fi in this primitive portrait cloning.

This show is a good introduction to Ruff’s practice but it really barely scratches the surface. There is one photograph of a building included I haven’t discussed, while not shown are themes such as his schematic abstract ‘drawings’ of mathematical parabolas, profiles of the rings of Saturn, and swirling images of intensely saturated coloured light on what seems to be the surface of rippling water. Ruff’s curiosity in unexpected subjects is part of his appeal, but even a genre as traditional as the portrait he has succeeded in transforming.

Don Peebles (1922 - 2010)

2010-03-27T16:50:00.004-07:00

eyeCONTACT mourns the loss of this great New Zealand pioneer: a wonderful artist and teacher who was an inspiration to many. Our thoughts are with Prue and the family.

Hot vertiginous pleasures

2010-03-26T17:40:00.006-07:00

Amber Wilson: The Bends
Anna Miles
3 March - 1 April 2010

A couple of months ago I visited a group show out at Unitec’s Snowwhite gallery and commented on the watercolours of Amber Wilson. The year is passing quickly and her new oil paintings – now showing at Anna Miles – are understandably quite different, though still very much preoccupied with pattern and rhythm.

Whereas the watercolours were restrained, Wilson’s eight oil paintings are, in contrast, as you might expect, ‘full on’. They revel in loud garish organic patterns, yet when you study them, there is a lot of nuance. First impressions can be deceptive, and the colour is not as saturated as you might suppose - though it certainly is heated. In fact it is not shrill, but highly insistent and at times muted. More importantly, Wilson’s use of shape is extremely inventive.

These richly patterned canvases look like they are a hybrid of Ed Paschke and Elizabeth Murray, or made by Howard Hodgkin on acid. Their backgrounds seem to also allude to Victorian book marbling, fabric design, underwater sponges and lush beds of rampant tropical flowers. The inner shapes floating in front, containing plain or swirling colours in silhouette, hint of items as varied as animal parts, Moorish architecture or rubber stamps. There seems to be no embracing logic, but appear to have evolved through intuition.

If anything they are linked by humour that plays across the figure - ground relationship. There pervades a nutty ambiguity so that shape is always generating multiple interpretations. It is always loaded and rarely ‘pure’ abstraction. The vertiginous psychedelic wackiness is tempered by meticulous control of tone and a subtly serrated edge, especially when rendered by tiny multiple brushstrokes.

Wilson’s inventively decorative paintings are rich heady concoctions that celebrate ocular pleasure. They might overwhelm, but with their very considered placement and knowing pattern alignment, they are not out of control.

Superb paintings

2010-03-26T17:26:00.003-07:00

Johl Dwyer & Schaeffer Lemalu: Milk waterfall
A Centre for Art
16 March - 3 April 2010

Here we have five paintings by two very different artists in a somewhat small space. Two textured and gestural panels are by Dwyer, one of which is much much bigger than all the others. Lemalu’s works on the other hand are ‘minimal’, and all about delicate and faintly detectable colour fields.

Lemalu’s three small ‘white’ canvases emphasise concentrated perception, and are subtle indeed. So much so that the degree of soft natural light through the Wellesley St window in the afternoon seems to be crucial to grasping the processes behind their production, as does where you stand to one side. He has applied gouache to their surfaces and later washed it off. In fact he has soaked it in water, scrubbed it off and then restretched the canvas. Sometimes he has put a more paint on its surface a second time, and left it.

His colour is so understated that you wonder if it is an afterimage you are looking at. Some floating yellow blur, a hint of a chromatic smudge that comes perhaps from you looking at something dark or saturated. A couple of the gallery walls are a wooden ochre brown, and that affects your perception of the two works’ overall rectangular surface. They seem tonally at odds with the work on a white wall.

Dwyer’s paintings are extremely different from Lemalu’s in their wild tactility and traces of dramatic hand movement. They incorporate glued-on rectangles of painted canvas or plastic vinyl, and lots of scraped on modeling paste that has left ripped horizontal ‘gashes’ as you might often see in a Gerhard Richter painting. The work is very physically layered, with tiny dark Christopher Woolish squiggles, sweeps of sprayed colour and intricate David Reed smears. One work is quite sculptural, with thick zigzagging lines of solid blue paint squeezed straight out of the tube.

These two artists make a great combination because the juxtaposition of such opposite methodologies is so refreshing. This dynamic creates an exceptionally exciting painting show, and probably the best show I’ve seen at ACFA. It may be one of the best ever local painting shows in Auckland as well.

4th Auckland Triennial -1

2010-03-25T15:57:00.015-07:00

Last Ride in a Hot Air Balloon: (Looking at the themes - Part One) Bodies at Risk
Mike Parr, Alicia Frankovich, Robert Hood, Martin Boyce, Laresa Kosloff, Richard Bell
28 artists in various Auckland venues.
12 March - 20 June 2010

The 4th Auckland Triennial curated by Natasha Conland has been with us for over a couple of weeks now, so what does one make of it? It has a great poetic and metaphorically loaded title, a superb hardcover catalogue with three excellent essays, and a new large downtown venue, but what of the art? Is it memorable? Does it provide examples that stick in the mind like say – to look at the earlier exhibitions – Ashley Bickerton and Roni Horn did in Bright Paradise, or Ilya and Emilia Kabakov and William Kentridge in Public / Private, or Willie Doherty and Issac Julian in Turbulence?

The show is less overtly finger-waggy than Turbulence, but you still sense Conland is very much a schoolmarm – only more circumspect. She has a lighter touch than Victoria Lynn, allowing more whimsy and humour to mix with her didacticism. (Comparing the two titles shows that.) Yet for my money, that side of her intelligence, her appreciation of wit and irony, came out much more in Mystic Truths, a much smaller, non-Triennial show than say Earth Matters, a Triennial warm-up. Nevertheless Last Ride in a Hot Air Balloon is impressively focused. It doesn’t feel sprawling or scattered in its content. There are about five themes that reveal themselves (often several overlapping) in all of the works, but which may not be at first obvious. They are Bodies at Risk; The Journey; The Imagination; The Economy; and Dialogue.

Therefore I want to take a look at the Triennial in a manner that ignores the placing of the twenty-eight artists within the separate venues and elaborate on these five overarching themes instead. I want to briefly provide some interpretive possibilities, putting five or six artists in each category, and then looking at each in turn.

The first theme is 'Bodies at Risk’. Although the theme of risk is discussed constantly throughout the essays and catalogue entries, it is more global economic vulnerability (Conland’s essay), or explorative navigational risk (Doryun Chong’s text), or linked to the artist’s body (Leonhard Emmerling’s discussion) – not that of the viewer. While artists like Mike Parr and Alex Monteith have made films or performances where the viewer empathises with the artist’s or film-maker’s body in pain or in danger, there is no sense of implied audience peril anywhere in this exhibition. None of the sculpture for example is menacing in its ambience in the way that sculpture, like say the kinetic works of Len Lye or Peter Roche, can be.

With Parr’s work at George Fraser the outside windowed gallery is the site of a very early (1970) text work where he describes in a hundred vinyl-cut sentences attached to the wall, the properties of a room, its space and what is seen through the windows. At his artist’s talk this work was linked to a film of his 'Hundred Breaths' (Breathless) performance of sucking self-portrait prints to his face one by one till on each occasion, his oxygen runs out. The room becomes a trope for his interiority, his ruminating self enclosed within his body as he looks out its windows. This in turn is paralleled in one of the films he shows in the darkened inner gallery, where he is rolling a recording movie camera up and over a hill. The camera lens swishing through blurs of long grass could be Parr’s decapitated head.

Alicia Frankovich’s AAG installation shows a hospital ‘drip’ made out of two end-to-end Martini bottles pouring orange liquid into a small swimming pool, to be then repumped up and recycled. The fluid could be a cocktail of blood, urine, sweat and tears, and seems to be alluding to artists recycling earlier art. In a corner is a Duchampian rack holding orange shopping bags from the Pergomon Museum in Berlin, on one wall is a neon that seems to allude to very early Richard Serra, and a ball suspended in a ‘testicular’ harness refers to her own history and mindset. With the rack of shopping bags entitled Woman, and a pinned up skirt displayed with a found drawing of graphite traces, Frankovich has with her installation and bodily absence created one of the more witty and visually compelling works in the Triennial.

Inanimate objects representing the human body are explored further with Robert Hood driving his Cortina from Christchurch up to Auckland earlier this year where it was taken to a shredder and ‘atomised’. The remnants are laid out on the gallery floor like a large bed. A real time audio recording of the trip is provided alongside Hood’s appropriated (and inserted) self-portrait version of Yves Klein’s famous ‘leap into the void’ photograph. In such a grouping, driver and vehicle symbolically merge.

With Martin Boyce we have the large gallery at St. Paul St blindingly illuminated by a weblike structure of white fluorescent tubes suspended from the ceiling. A black construction of broken wooden chair parts hangs like a Calder mobile, but seems to also reference (perhaps be a substitute for) Bruce Nauman’s turning wax dog corpses and decapitated white male heads. On a remote wall is a black, wire-mesh cubist/tribal mask watching in silence.

Aboriginal activist Richard Bell may smile sweetly during his videoed games of free association, but his critique of white Australia, with its youthful blonde representatives attired in gold laméd bikinied splendour, is excoriating. He is of course, deeply body conscious – as they are too of him, though he is fully dressed. With his dangerous charm he coaxes out a series of racist jokes for our delectation. If in the normally dismal Shed 6 we stay and listen, we become complicit – especially if we laugh: as Bell himself does. If we walk away, we (physically, hopefully not mentally) desert the artwork.

Fellow Australian Laresa Kosloff films bodies in action, airborne as a clowning trapeze act, or climbing over public sculptures in a park as bored children, or groups of adults exercising. Like Mike Parr’s rolling camera, Kosloff also films as if the camera were a moving figure – in her case while ascending and descending in a lift, looking out through a tall building’s windows. Her subject matter is contemporary for the looping footage we see at ARTSPACE is recent, yet the super 8 black and white film makes it look much older. You wonder if these people are still alive now, but of course probably they are, very much so.

It is difficult, naturally, to separate the human body from the activity of travel. ‘The Journey’ - and the Triennial's title - will be the subject of Part Two.

Jennifer French’s documentary photographs and DVD stills are of works by Robert Hood, Martin Boyce, Richard Bell and Laresa Kosloff.

Locked-down black; floating white

2010-03-23T19:09:00.002-07:00

Jonathan Jones
Tim Melville
10 March - 10 April 2010

Jonathan Jones, an Aboriginal artist (Kamilaroi / Wiradjuri) who works in light with bulbs and neon tubes in a manner vaguely related to Bill Culbert (to set a New Zealand context), has exhibited in Auckland before. He was in Good Company Flash Lights - curated by Jim Vivieaere - which a few years ago came to Bath Street.

Jones currently presents at Tim Melville’s a suite of geometric, linear, graphite (pencil) drawings and a wall installation of glowing neon tubes arranged in a pattern of repeated diamonds.

The neon formation alludes to carved patterns on weapons and trees, painted body decorations, or configurations put on the inside of possum-skin coats. You could read these as stacked up spread-eagled (or star-jumping) figures. However if you wish to ignore such symbolic narrative, even on a formal level Jones is extremely inventive. His diamonds are rendered in single, double or triple parallel lines to create odd lopsided tensions and a curious asymmetric geometry. Just when diagonal, horizontal or vertical rhythms start to become a pulse, they abruptly tease by switching to a new sort of line that is attractively irregular.

The austere drawings of black angular and straight lines seem to reference Mondrian and van Doesberg. Apparently however they are based on desiccated riverbeds Jones has seen in India that sparkle with incrustations of dried salt. Like the neon work they subvert repetition with an odd wonky tension that dissipates at the paper edges.

Jones’s tightly executed drawings remind me of the time-based (and encoded) painted works on paper by Simon Morris, but Jones seems not interested in systems or transparent process. His images vary in their use of space: some deep, others flat and schematic; some with skimpy cursory description, others apparently fully resolved. Their peculiar inconsistency comes from their source as found lines seen from the air.

These drawings are all beautifully made but viewer preferences will inevitably be subjective, a form of free association. It’s an interesting show with the precise sharp black edges providing a vivid contrast to the blurry glare of the bright white tubes. Two opposite senses of spatial location – dark and crisp (but locked down) with light and soft (but floating) - placed side by side. A delicately understated political metaphor.

Kim Finnarty has some thoughts on Jim Allen's

2010-03-22T23:49:00.000-07:00

Small Worlds.

Brilliantly inarticulate Polish conceptual art

2010-03-22T22:04:00.006-07:00

Oskar Dawicki: the last Polish artist
Gambia Castle
26 February - 27 March 2010

This exhibition organised by Daniel Malone (who now lives in Warsaw) brings the work of Polish performance artist Oskar Dawicki to Gambia Castle. Dawicki specialises in an ironically morose art that features carefully crafted inarticulate wisecracks coated in a dour or hangdog veneer - asides sometimes muttered between sobs (sending up grovelling self-abasement) or questions answered with ‘I don’t know’ (ridiculing lacklustre passivity).

Often presenting himself as a rakish dandy wearing a glittering blue jacket, Dawicki exploits his urbane demeanour by making gentle – calculatingly self-effacing – murmurings about art, his many inadequacies, and visual culture in general.

The ten works he has chosen for Auckland vary. Three are amusing videos in the manner of those he and a performance group he is part of (Azorro) present on YouTube. One is the tearfully apologetic I’m Sorry (click here), and another (in the GC office) is computer-based, about opening folders to images of an increasingly turbulent sea - with the sound of The Doors’ 'Riders Of the Storm' gradually morphing into thunder and splintering glass.

The third video, The Unbearable Lightness of Meaning, is a sarcastic meditation on Lenin’s comment that film is the most important of the arts. On top of the monitor is a small china Madonna being mutilated by an American eagle. On the screen we see interminable, never ending credits from several Hollywood films like Coppola’s ‘The Godfather’, which occasionally tilt and veer off to the right like a drunken driver - mixed in with acerbic quips about the triviality of the movie industry. Dawicki likes to have fun manipulating subtitles.

Other works are more about ambiguities of language and identity. A work in the street-front window (normally used by Sue Crockford) taunts passersby with 10,000 Polish Zloty (about $NZ2000) as bait for a smash and grab, but actually – as you’d expect- it is just photocopied notes: though the catalogue listing says they’re authentic. A second work of images of cannabis plants on window sills, shows fake marijuana specimens made from recut and reassembled plastic bushes. Dawicki’s photos of these ‘plants’ on Polish window ledges are now positioned in Gambia Castle’s New Zealand windows.

Another presents a section of a famous Polish epic poem, but deliberately untranslated as something impossible to correlate - its identity and content being too unique. A fourth exploits paradox by having a sentence I’ve never made a work about the Holocaust, written on the gallery wall in pencil; this action of course making it a lie. A fifth uses the Gambia Castle door where Dawicki, like Bruce Lee, has seemingly hurled his body through the solid wooden panel, leaving a spreadeagled silhouette with a large body and small head. We know it is cut with a jigsaw, yet it smirks at film props and provides a visually witty introduction to this artist’s ‘corpus’ of work.

There is an even more slippery evasiveness about some other works, where visual properties are not supported by any confirmed underpinning physical or chemical structure. For example, a churning, gestural oil painting, made with vaseline mixed in with linseed oil and paint, has its hardening, oxidising process put on hold. It is a work literally about its own, seemingly never attainable, never completed, chemical process. Or a multiple, made of green rat bait laid out on paper, spelling out the term OD. Apart from being a joke about what art can do to the mental metabolism of its consumers, its poison is not that which relies on conventional overdosing, but is a gradually cumulative anticoagulant that is slowly absorbed, not relying on large single hits.

Dawicki’s art has a high quota of discreet cunning that goes beyond sly corner-of–the-mouth quips. It needs several visits for the thematic connections linking different works to become apparent, and YouTube is a great introduction. Gambia Castle is only open on Fridays and Saturdays and the show finishes this week.

The art of bodily immersion

2010-03-22T02:07:00.012-07:00

Jim Allen: Small Worlds
Michael Lett
17 March - 17 April 2010

Designed to help break down any separation or distinction between viewer and art object, Jim Allen’s Small Worlds – a recreation of a pioneering and highly influential project (in Australasia) from 1969 - provides an immersive experience of tactile sensations for your body to enjoy.

Just inside the doorway of the darkened space, an inflated cube of shiny transparent plastic tells us that here, where the eye can go, the body cannot follow. It’s a teaser and not penetrable. Further inside is a gap between two horizontally suspended squares near the ceiling, supporting densely hanging lines of thick nylon thread and tubes radiating ultra-violet ‘black’ light. In this gap alternatively the body follows where there is ‘nothing’ for the eye to see. It is the opposite of the inflatable cube.

The main attractions however are the two suspended cube-shaped, fibrous sculptures. They glow internally from the UV, while their translucent stringy sides are raked by the diffuse light coming in from the entrance. You are offered the chance of stripping down to your underwear and walking through them, experiencing the straggly vertical filaments, shiny plastic strips and swinging wooden balls as they tickle, scrape, flap or bang against your chest, shoulders and bare legs. At the same time you can feel the crunchy shredded flax or smooth cold floor under your bare feet.

In one of these works Tribute to Hone Tuwhare, Allen has the early Tuwhare poem 'Thine Own Hands Have Fashioned' transcribed on to long strips of paper that, with the long nylon ‘hair’, are hanging from the platform ceiling so that they glow under the purple light. A celebration of the senses, the rich language enunciates the flattering words of Delilah as she calls to her lover Samson:

thine hands drop with golden flowers from the lion’s maw:
thine hands contain the splendid fire of poised lances:
they are exquisite pinnacles of light o lord…

The original version of this work was made for Barry Lett Galleries while Allen was Head of Sculpture and Associate Professor at Elam (1960-1976). He made it just after he got back from a trip to Europe, England and the States where he had been visiting art schools and meeting various innovative artists. He had become interested in more open-ended notions of sculpture where the viewer’s sense of self began to merge with a sculptural environment they entered into, so that they were overwhelmed by the visual, tactile, aural and olfactory sensations it provided.

This sort of project made sculpture is (as Christina Barton has described in an informative article in the first issue of ‘Midwest’) ‘an activity rather than an object’ and lead to a series of interactive performances with groups of students. This new version of Small Worlds continues a series of recreated exhibtions presented in 2006 at Michael Lett Gallery (Poetry for Chainsaws and Hanging By a Thread) and St. Paul St, AUT (O-AR).

Of the original installations made in 1969 and 1970 in this series, only New Zealand Environment No.5 remains, a work which Allen showed in Mildura in Australia in 1970 and which is now part of the collection of the Govett-Brewster in New Plymouth. Its lightly covered scrim enclosure and contents is more rurally focused than the earlier works because of the olfactory sensations it generates, presenting oily wool, resiny woodchips and woolbale hessian – along with a few hanging nylon threads, barbed wire and a pale green neon light. I think I like these Small Worlds works more. They, in comparison, seem more urban, if not slightly nightclubby or industrial, with the black light, shiny plastic strips and dense nylon lines.

Like the earlier Emmerling curated version of O-AR at St. Paul St, this is a wonderful exhibition - not so much an object as an experience or ‘situation’. One of the year’s highlights and not to be missed.

Mark Amery on two new art spaces in Wellington

2010-03-19T01:50:00.006-07:00

Over The Net, 6 College St.
JJ Morgan and Co, 3 Cruikshank St, Kilbirnie

News of the Auckland launch of a publication documenting the life of Wellington artist space Show, rubs in not just how much that particular space is missed (the beautifully designed catalogue testament to Show’s curatorial quality), but how bereft many in Wellington feel of programmes highlighting the best or freshest contemporary art.

For a small city, that may seem greedy. It’s now the tenth anniversary or thereabouts of the establishment of The Adam, Michael Hirschfield, Film Archive and Enjoy galleries, and more recently the council-run Toi Poneke Gallery. Certainly we don’t lack for institutions. And yet there’s no more popular conversation topics in the circles I pass through than the drought of bigger group shows of excellent new art in public galleries, or the lack of artist project spaces outside the institutions.

Jim and Mary Barr’s On the Table physical space (a corollary from virtual space Over the Net and On the Table) is a positive response to this. While their current second group exhibition is from their own collection, their first of Dan Arps, Campbell Patterson and Sriwhana Spong in November last year was arranged with Michael Lett. There are plans for other initiatives to cuckoo in their nest this year.

JJ Morgan and Co in Kilbirnie is another self funded initiative that’s recently opened, with the current exhibition series brought together by Lovelab Projects and its curator Melanie Moreau. While the Over the Net space is a first floor rectangular gallery (about the same size as Toi Poneke), JJ Morgan is basically a small mechanics or panelbeater’s garage, offering a nice and grungy concrete shell with good drive in access and plenty of height. Perfect for projects. They welcome submissions.

The Lovelab Projects focus is stated as working towards strengthening local connections, and their first exhibition (its title a nice analogy for this focus: Spreading Blankets on the Beach) involved partnerships with local dealers Suite and Mary Newton. Allowing a single curator to put together a programme of exhibitions seems like a smart model. I note (unlike Show and the Hirschfield) that there doesn’t appear to be a selection committee assisting the owners in steering future programming. A good thing or not? Committees can be a tiresome sign of institutionalisation in action, but the spaces’ wish to network might warrant continued wider consultaton.

First up at Over the Net is Slow Dance. It feels like a run-of-the-mill strong Barr collection show, as is seen with the DPAG initiated touring exhibitions Good Work and Reboot. Indeed it is one that feels all the better for being able to do away with the public gallery’s insistence on elaborate explanations of the groupings of works and endless labels. The art is left is talk to us and between itself.

That the show resembles something I feel I’ve seen before is a little dissapointing - albeit tempered by the rewards that excellence provides. It’s a superior mixtape. Whether it’s a cracker Rohan Wealleans, from what was I thought a rather variable last Hamish McKay show, or a Sarah Jane Parton video Slow Dancer (which gives the show its name), previously presented at City Gallery, they do show a great eye.

There are only a few surprises and challenges. It features some firm Barr favourites, who were (from memory) well represented in these collection shows and have had plenty of exposure at Wellington public galleries with solo projects: Dashper, et al., Parekowhai, Killeen, Armanious, Van Hout and others. Dwyer and Wealleans meanwhile have been well represented in Wellington by Hamish McKay.

Of the most interest are the three artists who haven’t had the exposure in Wellington you’d hope for. Martin Creed’s Work number 312 a lamp going on and off, positioned nicely in a small closet room under the staircase, infects through modest domestic means the whole character of the exhibition. Its determined slow metronomic click plays to the exhibition title, encouraging the slowing down of pace to dance with the works – in particular to let the time dependant video works get under your skin. And it’s nice to have the sole ‘overseas work’ sitting quietly in the corner shedding intermittent light on the locals.

It plays nicely in tandem with Parton’s video which depicts the artist, crutches by her side, left dance partner-less amongst the otherwise empty seats in a corner of the hall at a school disco, balloons and the flecks of the mirror ball playing over her desolation. Perfectly pitched, I very much like how Parton’s work doesn’t shy from playing out time or hinting at a narrative happening both here and elsewhere.

I also can’t help but find the hint of a narrative to the entire exhibition. As you enter there is Mikala Dwyer’s plaque of gold star stickers to the right (it gave its title to the Good Work touring show), and as balance a Ronnie Van Hout silver spacesuit hanging to the left. These together with the Parton, Campbell Patterson, Dashper and et al. works made me feel like I was in some high school student’s surreal dreamlife, of mixed hopes and frustrations. I imagine the small Armanious and Wealleans sculptural works as some bastard children of the subconscious from the kiln in the school art room.

Campbell Patterson’s work reminds me of the awkward and embarrassing New Zealand coming-of-age ritual of having your photo taken with your date for the school ball in all your lurid get-up before you leave – usually, as here, in front of the living room ranchslider curtains. Except here, Patterson films himself, as the title tells us, ‘Lifting my mother for as long as I can’.

There are four versions of Patterson lifting his mother (once was enough for me, unless 7up-like he came back 10 years, rather than one year, later). In each, a beautiful tension is physically balanced between love and pain, performance and intimacy, and between tenderness and ‘the things I do for my strange son’. It’s utterly charming, magnetic, and in its own way as full of empathy as the Pieta, which it reverses.

The best is to be found around the corner, with a Simon Denny video Deep Sea Vaudeo from 2009. Screened on a ‘90s style large screen TV I was first drawn in by a slow dodgy tracking shot of a conga line of television sets (facing each other's backs and showing us their girth), which also tracked the evolution and thinning of the television set over 20 years. The video turns out to be on the set of some showroom, with an array of cheap audiovisual presentation techniques, including the deep sea marine life images on screen that are ubiquitous with these displays.

Then, just as I’m ruminating on how the shallowness of this technology and how it has to be balanced from something from the deep, and the death of two dimensional space, Denny starts running a critical commentary on the work that echoes my own. Cleverly employing a range of stock commercial sales techniques, it completely and brilliantly undercuts your attempts to be deep yourself and reduce you to shallow voyeur. The work has the ability to zombie you in while keeping the brain ticking over. Here’s one artist we don’t see often enough in Wellington.

Meanwhile at JJ Morgan are two glitter carpets and a pile of fake roses from Mark Curtis (The Diana Suite, Burnt with Tea Mix). Deliciously gaudy and dirty all at the same time, these work are all the better for inhabiting corners in a grimy garage. I’d last seen a Curtis glitter carpet as part of Prospect 2004 (R.I.P) at the Adam Art gallery, and this is far stronger for its interesting meditation on the emptiness of the Princess Diana fetish and the swept up leftovers of the ‘80s camp era. The work remains principally decorative however rather than really involving, but nevertheless is beautifully executed, well placed (other than the pile of roses, which is poked round a corner far too politely when they could have been strewn) and utterly bedazzling. I love the dissolving edges to the work here, plus its slow accumulation of grit and dust.

Both of these spaces are open for limited hours over this weekend (11am to 5pm Saturday only, followed by an artist talk at JJ Morgan, 1-4pm both days at Over the Net). Then these particular exhibitions close.

Images from Over The Net:

First image: From the left, Sarah Jane Parton Slow dance ‘92, Julian Dashper Untitled 1991, Michael Parekowhai The moment of Cubism 2009, (rear) L Budd Untitled (No 1) 1995 (obscured) The Estate of L. Budd EE100.2 Edition released by The Estate of L. Budd 2009, L Budd Sticky label 1992, Hany Armanious Turns in Arabba 2005, Rohan Wealleans Aqua bike stand 2001, Rohan Wealleans Beast head gem holder 2005, et al. Untitled (model) 2002 and Rohan Wealleans Big square brainy painting 2009

Second image:Left Simon Denny Deep sea vaudeo 2009 right, et al. Untitled (model) 2002

Third image: Campbell Patterson Lifting my mother for as long as I can 2006, 2007.2008, 2009

and JJ Morgan and Co with two works by Mark Curtis.

Many thanks to the artists, Jim and Mary Barr and Justin Jade Morgan.

Brad Lochore paintings at Two Rooms

2010-03-19T00:43:00.004-07:00

Brad Lochore: Roughs
Two Rooms
11 March - 19 April 2010

London based / Wellington born painter Brad Lochore presents six white/pale grey paintings in the Two Rooms studio space just down Putiki Street from the Two Rooms gallery.

In the past Lochore has gained international recognition for his images of cast shadows from flimsy grids or plants. In this show he explores glossy reflection and the sagging surfaces of clear or white polythene, which he has placed on stretchers and photographed. He has then used the slides as a starting point for his paintings.

They are called ‘roughs’ because they are not brush-mark free, nor smoothly ‘photographic’. They are subtly painterly in the way Lochore has rendered the properties of a shiny surface raked over by light. Sometimes the polythene has stretch marks, little blips, tears or striations in lines, as if the soft plastic sheet has been stressed or pulled in opposite directions.

A couple of the paintings are so white and glary that they look more like cotton sheets than polythene. This is because the material dazzles in its entirety without catching reflections on any wrinkles. In other words they look freshly laundered, and without the twinkling highlights that come with shiny plastic.

Lochore is obviously fascinated by the nuances of illuminated surface that can be created through the manipulation of very pale greys, when carefully put in contrasting juxtapositions. He likes the restrained drama of scattered – but considered - specks and flicks that advance or retreat through the dominant picture plane of stretched, glossy and translucent skin, or skitter across it. Occasionally they seem to be landscapes in disguise, with bleached cloud formations over milky beaches and streaky seas.

This is intriguing work, an austere form of photorealism that flirts with monochromatic abstraction by replicating sheets of synthetic materials and lingering over properties of surface. These paintings are strangely beautiful and sensual, for all their insistent severity.

Malone beats Malevich

2010-03-19T00:25:00.006-07:00

Daniel Malone: Barbarian in the Garden
Sue Crockford
2 March - 27 March 2010

Daniel Malone has been living in Poland for a while now, and is about to marry the Polish woman who successfully persuaded him to move from Auckland to Warsaw, so he obviously is enamoured with the culture and its people. He has organised two superb shows of Polish conceptual art for Gambia Castle and made that country a central ingredient for one of his own Gambia Castle performances. It is no surprise then that the title of this show Malone has taken from a book of travel writings by the Polish poet Zbigniew Herbert.

In the videoed performance and installation Hotel Polonia that has pride of place in his Crockford show, Malone is indeed a ‘barbarian in the garden’. He is severely beating - on a rack - some fake [modified) ‘Maleviches’ which he has changed from abstract Suprematist paintings to weapons - in the form of angular and geometric cannons. (Malevich – by the way - was not a Russian but a Pole, something the Polish are understandably proud of. He exhibited at Hotel Polonia in Warsaw in 1927 and returned to Russia where he was tortured and imprisoned. He died in 1935 of cancer.)

Malone's ferocity in his backyard with a couple of racquet-like carpet beaters on these ersatz Maleviches is loaded with interpretative possibilities. He could be commenting on the brutality Malevich suffered bodily at the hands of the Russian state police who felt threatened by his non-representational symbolism. He could also with his videoed aggression be commenting on the competitiveness of most art practice – it has a rivalry with other works of the present and of the past.

He is also pummelling the dust out of these ‘artworks’, cleaning up and rejuvenating them – perhaps thumping them into life as central African artists used to hammer nails into fetish ‘power sculptures’: to energise the spirits that dwelt within.

Malone loves testing out metaphors by swapping unusual materials around, inserting them where they are least expected. There is a series of patterned images here where he has photographed the designs of fabric on passenger seats on Polish buses and trains, and superimposed them on floor mats that you wipe your feet on. On a train you would not place your filthy boots on a passenger seat, but here Malone is wilfully making such a juxtaposition. He seems to be thumbing his nose at the various logos for the transport corporates that have resulted from the new ‘liberated’ Europe. He is expressing his scorn for those private enterprises that replaced the collective amenities of Eastern Block communism – mourning the loss.

Simon Glaister and Andrew Paul Wood discuss

2010-03-17T21:32:00.000-07:00

Nature Morte

Cornelia Parker comes to Auckland

2010-03-17T14:17:00.007-07:00

Cornelia Parker: No Man’s Land
Two Rooms
11 March - 10 April 2010

Cornelia Parker is highly regarded internationally for her ability to think up projects that unexpectedly startle, usually because of some process of violent transformation that alters a fairly commonplace object so it takes on unexpected shapes. She is also esteemed because of her ability to infuse it with a metaphor via that transmuting process.

This Two Rooms show has four varieties of work from this English artist that bring out these qualities well.

The first is two silver bugles hanging from the gallery ceiling. Once they were identical, now they are very different, for one is flattened and very thin, squashed by some kind of roller or press and arranged parallel to the floor. The other hangs vertically. They are enigmatic because the flat version is not a shadow of the rounded one. They are opposites in alignment as well as morphology.

There is humour because bugles are meant to awaken, to call troops to rise up out of bed and become active. The flattened one, as Monty Python would put it, is ‘extinct’, and ‘one ex-bugle’. Decidedly dead and unplayable, it exudes lifelessness.

The second variety uses rattlesnake venom and its antidote, the former mixed with black ink, the latter with white paint - to make five framed glassed-over paintings hanging on the wall, for with folded paper they end up as Rorschach-style mirrored blobs. The poison is folded and squeezed in the paper first - and then that paper is opened out to dry. Then globs of antidote are painted over the ink, squeezed together and reopened again.

With these ‘pelvic butterflies’ of thin black ink and thick white paint you get different tactile qualities. The deadly ink is runny and softly fluid while the healing squashed paint forms veins and capillaries that look like slices of hardened brain. They become fluttering insects emerging from an autopsy tray.

Magnum bullets provide the raw material for the third sort of image, their individual leads being extruded so that the mineral substance becomes like thin fuse wire. This metal thread is made into varieties of mesh with different sorts of overall shape and width of rectangle. The woven pieces of lead netting are like a snare for death, a lethal web for the unwary that is compacted and crushed in certain areas like a folded, twisted veil. Each of the eight expressive gauzes are crammed between two sheets of glass when framed, so that shadows create a second striking image behind them.

Most of Parker’s exhibition is taken up with three black-dyed tents of double–layered netting, pinioned to the floor with cords and bags filled with lead shot. Originally Red Cross tents used for disaster relief they have become malevolent traps with added camouflaging spirals made from recycled clothing. They are hopeless for providing shelter and would only entangle hapless nosey visitors. With these loose and sinister grids these freestanding constructions cleverly echo the ‘bullet net’ works on the walls and their shadows.

Parker here presents a beautifully hung and wittily selected show, each item having some quality of built-in menace. Hopefully we’ll see more such displays from her here again.

Andrew Paul Wood calls in on The P Room

2010-03-16T13:18:00.007-07:00

Roger Boyce and Marie-Claire Brehaut: Nature morte
The Physics Room
10 March - 11 April 2010

I have been getting in the mood to write this review. To my left is Hunter S. Thompson: The Gonzo Papers Anthology (2009), and to my right Tom Wolfe’s The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test (1968). The former is pretentiously unbearable and the latter is unbearably pretentious. I’ve been thinking about the art of the tableau vivant and the nature of still life, or as the French say Nature Morte – thus providing the title of Roger Boyce and Marie-Claire Brehaut’s installation at The Physics Room.

The media loves panic hypes – it sells newspapers. The latest crisis of choice du jour and cause celebre is P (a unique kiwi-ism for pure methamphetamine – highly addictive and with a tendency to make people go medieval with sharp objects). Why New Zealand has given it such a ridiculous moniker when the international ‘ice’ sounds so much harder? I don’t know, but P labs are being uncovered all over the country with tedious regularity, cold medications are a hot item smuggled in from China via the Pacific Islands, and there’s even a pretty, tragic, pretty tragic celebrity ‘victim’ in the form of Millie, daughter of ‘media personality’ Paul Holmes. Still, it gets the kids interested in chemistry, I suppose.

Nature Morte is topical then, sort of. The centrepiece is a mock-up P lab on a bedroom dresser. A P lab for the P Room. This is played for narrative and, perhaps, laughs, as much as shock value, down to the rubber gloves poking out of the table drawer. Definitely not a readymade... Maybe. This is surrounded by the paint impastoed paraphernalia of the painter – yes, I’m afraid so, a slightly obvious joke; art as addictive, mind-altering substance – yawn – studio as lab – sigh - but the cliché is intended by the artists ironically. It would appear to be the point. Paint lab, no less. The artists hammer home their jadedness – or at least Boyce does; Brehaut is a mere slip of a girl to be getting all bitter and cynical, but appears to be enjoying it. Let’s see what she can do on her own.

The two sections are divided by a large canvas on an easel, which transforms the P lab installation into a still life – or perhaps more accurately a vanitas or memento mori (perhaps even an ex voto, but I wouldn’t care to speculate) – executed in meticulous trompe l’oeil style. That puts things straight into the same basket as those smug Dutch buggers like Cornelius Gijsbrechts who in the seventeenth century painted the reverse of the canvas on the front, dear old Courbet depicting his own studio as grand realist epic, and that peculiar self portrait of the young Reubens standing before his easel – the one Simon Schama witters on about in great length in his book on the artist. Art about art. Art about art about art.

In terms of installation, I like it. Bad installation metastasises to fill all of the space available to it, trying to assimilate everything like the Borg from Star Trek. Good installation is well behaved, compact, concise and articulate – as this does – or it sprawls casually yet efficiently, undiluted and on message.

So Brehaut gets some experience – an apprenticeship with the grizzled veteran, if you will – and Boyce proves again that he is more than just an impressive Curriculum Vitae from the late afternoon of New York’s golden age. Alas, O Babylon. This is good timing; little birds inform us that Boyce has a much larger showcase of his particular brand of razzle-dazzle in the not-too-distant offing. We look forward to it with interest. Rock on.

Photographic documentation courtesy of the artists, Mark Gore, and The Physics Room.

Around the Window

2010-03-16T12:51:00.008-07:00

Anya Henis: Soft rocks stainer
Window, University of Auckland Library foyer
24 February – 25 March 2010

We have here something admirably unusual for Window, an impressionistic abstract wall drawing by Henis that is an installation around and in the Window gallery 'box'. It has been made with what looks like coloured ink, but with spaced apart lines that have been brushed on. The artist has used only the three primary hues (i.e. paint primaries, not light) and this has been applied directly on the wall at the back of the gallery ‘proper’, and the two walls on each side – one adjacent to the wide stairs going up to the library; the other on the side of the courtyard and Alfred Street.

Before I describe the work in more detail, let’s speculate over the contextual information Henis has provided. Her poster (see above) shows a dozen eleven-sided polygons containing what seems to be marbling from Victorian book covers or pages. The title? I know I’ll be accused of having a one-track mind but I reckon testicles. What else can ‘soft rocks’ be? And a penis is ‘the stainer’.

So we have (despite Foucault’s opposite view) the repressive Victorians and the randy permissiveness of our current age: poster and title together as opposites. A sort of oxymoron

In a leaflet available on the gallery wall Henis publishes a poem:

Soft rocks stainer
a sound from one to the other

strokes of the sun
stream through glass
in layers of incandescent tone

waves of restlessness

throw your words away and practice keeping secrets

freedom forms
everything at once and all the time

It’s pretty oblique isn’t it? Or is it? Let’s describe the painted drawing. It uses a vocabulary of five sorts of mark spread out like an ancient cave painting. They don’t compose as such, but are dissipated and unconnected. They are quickly applied, and so not sensitively considered in their application, as say her paperworks are.

First of all there are the fainter and smaller, yellow vertical or diagonal curves that look like eyebrow hairs. These are usually aligned in thick vertical configurations that mainly are, by themselves, under the window that faces outside. (Perhaps these are strokes of the sun…stream through glass. Perhaps even a reference to John Donne’s The Sun Rising.) There are also a few on the opposite wall adjacent to the library.

Then there are the same sort of vertical ‘hairy’ mark constellations but in blue – found mainly on the library wall and a few on the righthand end of the gallery Window backwall.

Thirdly there also is a scattering of small blue dots under the window facing out.

Fourthly there is a much heavier variety of dark blue line that looks like inverted eyebrows. They gather in groups mainly near the top edge of the ‘library’ wall and separate more and more moving down. There is definitely a wave like quality present, not only literally but also in a sense of increasingly urgent dynamic. (waves of restlessness)

Lastly there are some bright red squiggles, short single twisting lines a bit like the edge of a mouth – scattered along the library and Window walls.

So what can we make of all this – the whole thing, the total package?

Well there do seem to be coital references here, and orgasmic ones too – especially in coordination with the ‘stream’ ‘strokes’ ‘waves’ and ‘secrets’ of the poem. But talking about it like this seems pretty crass. Yet Henis doesn’t seem to be a prankster or provocateur. The work is a serious project. And the drawing does appear preoccupied with the body as scattered floating repeated fragments - resulting from a process that seems unfinished or unresolved.

It is an interesting failure I think - this spatial experiment on three planes with coloured lines. The squiggly marks don’t draw you in to their surfaces and the dynamic overall is almost incoherent. Yet it is an exciting thing to attempt and I admire Henis's courage. It’s great to use these walls, so hopefully it is the start of more spatial experimentation to come.

Two Rooms residency show

2010-03-16T12:38:00.003-07:00

Joachim Bandau: New watercolours
Two Rooms
11 March - 10 April 2010

The seven large watercolours shown here by Joachim Bandau - the result of last year's residency in Putiki St - explore different degrees of transparency using diluted black. They look like aerial views of piles of tinted glass rectangles that get darker in the centre where the stack is higher. This experienced German sculptor makes these watercolours using wide but very finely bristled brushes. The granule free, overlapping oblong washes are delicate and consistently even, with a very fine line at the edges.

These works are technically exquisite in the control of the thin ink washes but there is too much work that is almost identical in its very centrally composed design. The show gets a little samey. The best ones are atypical. These are either lopsided stacks or spread apart between the top and bottom of the paper sheet.

The greatest, most refreshing surprise is one work totally different, without the dark tones of the others. It is not so extreme in its blackness, and consists of diagonal shafts of grey light, as if Bandau has gone out into the New Zealand landscape, or perhaps (gasp!) squizzed at a McCahon or two. It has a fragility all its own because of the tightly controlled and very limited tonal range, and the leaning vectors of its parallel lines. It is more nuanced.

Bandau is a fine artist but he needs to think about selection and how to engage his audience with a more varied, less ‘production line’ range of options. However his watercolours are unusually attractive with their dark compelling, transparent voids - if not repetitive.

David Cross has some comments on the recently opened Auckland Triennial. eyeCONTACT will be posting several articles looking at it.

2010-03-15T12:45:00.016-07:00

The 4th Auckland Triennial: Last Ride in a Hot Air Balloon
Curated by Natasha Conland
New Gallery, ARTSPACE, St. Paul St.Gallery, and Shed 6
12 march - 20 June 2010

It’s a very brave venture to examine risk as a trope of contemporary art. We immediately expect to be challenged, to see the status quo punctured or picked apart and to at least interrogate the possibility of new modes of social/cultural transformation. Of course risk is an elusive concept and one that does not neatly align with the rhetoric of avant garde transgression. There is a profound elasticity to the term that extends well beyond being shot in the arm for art or masturbating under the gallery floor. Such 1970s ideas about risk still resonate in the popular consciousness when risk is aligned with contemporary art even if the modes seem fundamentally old school and historically specific. While the mechanisms have shifted with our more complex globalised world, risk is still a staple component of art practice both as a subject matter to be dissected and as a critical mode of operation. Natasha Conland has decided to put a ruler under this terrain with her chapter of the Triennial choosing a targeted suite of artists for whom risk and adventure are fundamental concerns.

Trying to get a handle on how Conland locates risk is not however a straightforward enterprise. She is careful to articulate a number of registers by which artists rub against the grain and these straddle the overtly political through to the barely visible. Conscious of not privileging but at the same time not excluding an activist mode, Conland lays out a breadth of practice to suggest the multifarious nature of risk in recent art. At one axis we get the grating in your face posturing of Australian artist Richard Bell tearing at the flimsy veneer of multiculturalism. His hilarious gangsta/gonzo/psychiatrist persona performed in Scratch an Aussie and Broken English is a razor sharp dissector of aboriginal stereotypes and white ignorance. The didactic message of black resistance is couched in Bell’s work through an accessible, if incendiary, satire that takes aim at the breathtaking indifference of white Australia to black identity and history.

This overtly polemical strategy sits in a different space to the practice of a number of Middle Eastern artists who couch risk in far more delicate ways. The work of Iranian artist Mahmoud Bakhshi for instance, is potentially riskier, if superficially appearing to be more politically inert in its content. His sculptural installation Sunsets consists of a series of cigarette shaped cylinders each of which emits a recitation of a different chapter of the Koran. The audience are able to move the cylinders to create different sonic arrangements. While the work initially feels benign in its critical aspirations, the powderkeg politics of contemporary Iran and the fact the artist is based in Tehran provides a crucial context to the work. The idea of individual agency and decision making is clearly subversive in the context of the crackdown against the so-called Green revolution upping the stakes of the work considerably.

A similar though ultimately more successful edge pervades the work of fellow countryman, Shahab Fotouhi. The artist restages a number of the components of the famous helicopter ride of Ayatollah Khomeini on his triumphant return to Tehran in 1979. Employing scaffold-mounted floodlights together with neon tubing that physically plots out the route, the artist also displays documentary footage of the messianic event on a small monitor, using a mixture of found and crafted objects to investigate the staged spectacle of Khomeini’s return in a highly understated way. His comparative lack of partisan editorialising - the deadpan matter-of-factness of the installation - is ultimately a nuanced device to shut down one-dimensional interpretations of political subversion. By allowing us plenty of space to join the dots, the work suggests a whole lot while making it difficult to pin a fixed meaning down.

The attempt to establish a balanced tone between big picture politics and the poetics of objects and sound permeated a number of the works in the Triennial including Shilpa Gupta’s microphone cloud, airport display board, Sharon Hayes’ Everything Else Has Failed Don’t You Think It Is Time For Love, and Tom Nicholson’s beautifully layered deconstruction of the Burke and Wills story Monument for the Flooding of Royal Park. Yet positioned in relation to these works were a number of pieces that seemed to stretch the curatorial parameter too far. Michael Stevenson is certainly an artist known for skewering an extraordinary array of cargo cults but his video work On How Things Behave seemed to be more about the vagaries of artistic philosophical meditations with a poke at Daniel von Sturmer than about adventure or risk. Likewise the very chic relational aesthetics poster boy Philipe Parreno seemed out of place with his Marquee which in no way destabilises the conventional art viewing experience as claimed in the exhibition brochure but functions as a kind of low-fi, low-impact, largely lame entranceway.

One of the things the triennial highlights is that risk and adventure are not the same thing. Mostly the works embody one but not both of these traits. Marine Hugonnier’s evocative videos of markedly different locales are a rare example of the curatorial synthesis, being both potentially dangerous in outcome yet redolent with the excitement of discovering new places. Other work like Johanna Billings This Is How We Walk on the Moon says nothing of any substance about risk and evacuates most of the joy out of adventure.

I was completely captivated by Alex Monteith’s four-screen surfer treatise Red Sessions which might be one of the best surfer movies ever made partly because it was so immersive and transfixing and partly because the Beach Boys were not tinting the experience with cheese. Laresa Kosloff’s super eight film Trapeze was similarly compelling capturing the rhythmic pleasures and synchronised movements of two trapeze artists practising in the main street of Melbourne.

My desire to comment on the work of Tino Sehgal and Martin Boyce, two of the bigger names in the triennial was unfortunately thwarted by St Pauls St galleries wisdom of closing on the Sunday of the first weekend while so many people were in town meaning my knowledge of the work was confined to dancer choreographer Anna McCrae’s description in the panel discussion on Saturday. I hope to be able to revisit this down the track.

Compared to the previous bloated, and largely inane Triennial, Last Ride In A hot Air Balloon has achieved liftoff. Of course it is not without its flat spots and inconsistencies but show me a similar event that nails every aspect. The vagaries of artists changing course late in the piece nearly always ensures the best laid plans go flaccid in places and there is a lot of really good work here to enjoy regardless of the overall schema. The new venue Shed 6 is a bit rough and ready and a long way from the Sydney Biennale’s Bond Stores or Cockatoo Island. It feels like a glorified artists studio in an industrial area and seems a bit too small and light to hold all the work that it does. While I hope we do not see it utilised in future manifestations, I concede the mutli-site aspect adds a range of flavours to the Triennial's connection with Auckland. This fourth edition has ramped up the ambition and relevance of the event and set out a polemical and carefully layered matrix for drilling into key strands of global contemporary art practice. That in itself is a high risk strategy.

Images from films by Laresa Kosloff, Marine Hugonnier, Johanna Billing and Richard Bell.

Erratic (classically pomo) McLeod

2010-03-13T11:52:00.015-08:00

Andrew McLeod
Ivan Anthony
24 February - 20 March 2010

Andrew McLeod is a regular exhibitor at Ivan Anthony and this show is typical – in its varied range of work types. There are large and small digital prints, also the ubiquitous small white stretchers with unravelling orthographic black box shapes, and then there are the big canvases. Plus various smaller painting experiments.

The prints show McLeod at his most inventive and eclectic – today Richard Killeen, tomorrow Peter Madden. The works that reference Durer and Fuseli are particularly rich in their layered complexity, as is another that contains amongst other things, darting squid-girls that glow like jellyfish zigzagging through an undersea murk. The quoting methodology succeeds in the prints but not the paintings because the prints manipulate the space with much more finesse. They make the paintings look oafish.

Painting is obviously not McLeod’s forte. The deliberately incestuous ultramarine and gold Auckland series are coarsely rendered and look like the digitally animated imagery of Cao Fei interpreted by Julian Hooper and Liz Maw. McLeod is not an artist methodically exploring the parameters of painting as a discipline; he is not interested in its materiality or organisation like say Simon Morris, James Cousins or Simon Ingram. There is one Abstract Triptych of black box shapes framed in three wide intricately inlaid frames that has a curiously memorable dynamic with its angular shapes, but few other successes.

Yet for all his faults, there is one work from this ‘non-painter’ that I find remarkable: a large painting called Pink and Green Abstraction with Dragon.

This last work has an intricate rendered surface of horizontal trellislike bars arranged like a wall of stacked up batons with angular ends that look based on Chinese architecture. In the middle of what from a distance seems to be a coloured wooden Venetian blind made by Gordon Walters - but which actually is far more complicated - is a pewterish/bronzy Chinese dragon that is like a jelly-mould. Below it (again in dead centre) is an enigmatic tropical pot plant: a peculiar symbol alluding to the dragon.

The delicate pale green and rosy light flickering through the slats is gorgeous. This is a radiant stunning work, which in the context of his other grosser efforts like the Auckland series, shows his activities with oil to be exasperatingly directionless. McLeod's practice seems so scattershot and unfocused.

So there we have it: the occasional inspired cracker of a painting, surrounded by unresolved experiments that I think should not leave his studio. Usually the best McLeods are the digital prints that pulse with intriguing pockets of spatial depth and resonate with the acuity of photographic – not painterly - detail. They draw your eye in so it doesn’t want to leave - such is their capture of your imagination.

The half-remembered landscape of capitalism,

2010-03-11T13:02:00.005-08:00

Andy Tolhurst: Slow Burning
Antoinette Godkin
3 March - 1 April 2010

Andy Tolhurst’s computer designed vinyl paintings examine globally famous logos, and reshuffle or alter some of the visual elements to make a new image that is usually much larger than the original. Those original brands include beer bottle-tops and labels, cigarette papers, bubblegum labels, chocolate bars and local dairy chains.

They connect with Pop Art, yet are different. They retain links to their sources of advertising or branding inspiration, retaining the same colours and many of the shapes or images, yet they also have these odd mutated shapes, often squared off. The compact symmetrical ones have a compelling iconic look about them.

Usually you try and puzzle out what has changed and if the differences are an aesthetic improvement. They don’t veer towards abstraction so that the sources become hidden, like say perhaps the much vaguer and more poetic Jim Speers glowing and translucent abstract lightboxes – which often allude to art history as well.

Tolhurst’s paintings are usually high in colour saturation, as a result really of something small and optically punchy made much bigger. They seem sort of eighties in mood (despite the digital technology), like a variation of Matt Mullican and his use of logos. They are not a critique of consumerism and its promotion in any way, nor an endorsement of marketing’s processes. They accept and comment on a ubiquitous mental commercial panorama (remembered or still seen) that accompanies us all wherever we go – and from which we can’t escape.