Improv drummer from Japan

Shoji Hano concert
Wine Cellar
Sat 10 October, 8.45 - 10.45 pm.

This was the last concert of Shoji Hano’s New Zealand tour organised by Martyn Reynolds (of A.C.F.A.) and D.P.A.G. (there is a final Vitamin S-organised workshop this evening). Hano, a super fast but extraordinarily precise Japanese drummer who is part of the global Jazz/ Noise/Improv scene, did five sets with members from a pool of five local musicians.

The event was held in the cosy, intimate, environs of the Wine Cellar’s gig-room. Paul Buckton did the initial warm up for early (ie. punctual) arrivals with a strolling Baileyesque acoustic guitar. He was the replaced by a stunning, understated, but highly nuanced duo performance with Chris O’Connor (drums) and Dean Roberts (electric guitar). O’Connor’s use of scraped and tapped skins, plus clicking sticks rattled against his own molars was a wonderful foil for Robert’s quick bursts of strangled chopped flurries that suddenly erupted only to just as rapidly disappear.

Hano’s performances with O’Connor, Buckton, Jeff Henderson (baritone), Paul Winstanley (electric bass),and Clinton Watkins (electric guitar/electronics) were dazzling displays of concentrated listening and technique. He is an amusing drummer to watch because he appears slightly myopic, looking with intense concentration at the tips of his drumsticks and whatever he is hitting, his head half cocked. You get the sense every nano-second is an aural discovery, yet the total effect is a swirling maelstrom of layered, interlocking hovering sound, a meticulously devised cacophony of constructed-to-be-broken-up patterns.

I’d never been to the Wine Cellar before. Hano and all the other contributors made it a real ear-opening experience. A very special Saturday night.

Restrained, even for watercolours

Richard Bryant’s watercolours
Martyn and Rose’s living room
30 August - 20 September 2009 (visits were by appointment)

Both Richard Bryant and Martyn Reynolds are part of the ACFA group, so as Bryant is currently living in London, it made good sense to me when I heard about it, that he was showing some work in Reynold’s Newton flat. Previously I had only seen his paintings in Jan Bryant's section of the PX St. Paul St. painting show, three oil paintings exploring the materiality of collage, with sections of each painting copying pages torn from fashion mags.

After hearing from Martyn that collage still underpins the structure of his friend’s work, these recent, seemingly unrelated, extremely understated watercolours became pretty interesting. In fact preferable to the oil works. The connection though was certainly not obvious.

They were shown pinned up by their corners on the austere lounge walls, or lying flat on a varnished wooden table. Because they were more delicate than delicate, if you happened to own one it would have to be float-mounted. Kept well away from its frame.

There seemed to be two types. One had regularly patterned rhythms on a flat picture plane. The other had a deeper, receding space, using perspective and a vanishing point. Bryant’s project seemed to be all about qualities of edge where the liquid colour and minute granules interacted with shapes formed by the untouched A4 sized w/c paper – particularly with the patterned works. The perspectival pieces often had fields of descending mist where there was less density towards the bottom edge.

This private (semi-public) show is over now, but if you are curious about seeing these minimal but nevertheless intriguing works, you can always yak to Martyn, contactable via the ACFA.

Lonely at the top

Jason Lindsay: i am a mysterious loner who knows how to howl at the moon
ACFA
18 June - 17 July 2009

Jason Lindsay has had a few shows in Auckland, exhibiting in Rm 103, George Fraser, Window and Enjoy in Wellington, though he is not particularly well known. Judging from these links, his beer sculptures look pretty funny, and the work that he constructed in 2006 for Window was an impressive spatial configuration. His grids of interwoven and suspended linear wooden vectors there look amazing.

This current show at ACFA, again very focussed on the location itself, is a tower of ostensibly Huntly bricks that ascends to the ceiling and up which you can climb via a spiralling path. It is made of thick board and plywood, seems to vaguely allude to Tatlin, and though not skeletal and airy like his earlier more abstract work, is more like a three dimensional theatre prop, facades you can clamber over. The structuring frames are now hidden by a veneer of laminated wood and compressed board.

Lindsay’s tower is a fake brick chimney but it also has a black (paper covered) flue winding round it up to the top, following under the steps. At its base it is locked into a model of a building that could be a crematorium, or perhaps even, a wood chipper. I say that because lying across its roof is a large figure of a dead man – a bit like an Anthony Gormley sculpture – covered in sawdust. So the work has sinister overtones. Good reason to howl at the moon.

There also seems to be something reflexive at work here, with the wood chipper / sawdust references and the fact that compressed chipboard dominates the surface as fake brick. Adding to the hints of atrocity with the crematorium, there is a seat at the top where you can perch to look out over Wellesley St through the window. Maybe it is a cynical view of success and what is necessary to attain it.

Aerobics and ballet for artists

Holly Wilson: The Hardest Talent to Cultivate
A Centre For Art
11 November – 29 November 2008

A free-standing hoop propped up by clay chocks greets you as you step through the door of the ACFA gallery. But who is expected to jump through it? The artist, the visitor, or the filmed actors? This sculpture, one chalk on duraseal sign and three videos make up Holly Wilson’s exhibition.

The red sign says ‘Looking Forward’ and the videos ostensibly are about practising skills, looking forward to gaining strength or improved motor co-ordination. Or the young women dressed in black leotards doing these highly repetitive, monotonous exercises could be sending up Dan Graham or Bruce Nauman. Only the whole project seems totally serious.

The videos are of a ‘Simon says’ follow-the-teacher kind of lesson, aiming to tone up the arms and (I think) learn to swim; two women rolling in opposite directions on a rice mat and then returning to meet together in the middle; and someone learning ballet poses from a book lying on the floor.

Not overly exciting all this. Not memorable at all. You’d get more entertainment watching dead fish float in your granny’s goldfish tank than these videos. Whilst all the works in the room are tightly related they don’t add up to much. Not one of ACFA’s highlights.

Floral Impasse

Daniel Webby: Stalemate Bloom
A Centre For Art
10 September – 4 October 2008

I’d seen Webby’s work before at R103, but that was a collaborative project, a film with an installation, and this new work took me by surprise.

The main component is a vaulting horse (the type you find in a gymnasium) made of split punga posts. It has one side removed so you can see there is a square hole cut in the floor. It obviously references the War World Two prison camp film, ‘The Great Escape’, perhaps with the artist seeing himself as Steve McQueen, but with a crack at the hermeticism of the art world and Webby wanting to tunnel his way out.

In one corner of the small ACFA room is a video loop of the Romanian Olympic gymnast Nadia Comaneci performing her legendary ten out of ten routine on the parallel bars. She obviously has caused her local gymnastic (artistic) rival to mentally collapse. Perhaps she is a symbol for Duchamp (the title referring to chess.) The stress of competing with perfection has made him want to flee.

The vault’s padded top consists of a couple of bags of potting mix with several sprouts of parsley growing out. From one end of the vault is a small mattress impaled by a grid of wooden pegs like the boxing laid for foundations of a building. On the other side, where normally a springboard would go, is a small pile of dirt with two basketball boots sticking out, as if the artist were buried head first. The whole thing is strikingly enigmatic and funny.

Webby probably has narrative explanations for all these elements, but you don’t need the artist’s exegesis to enjoy the work or even understand it. The whole thing is dripping with poetic paradox: a secret tunnel being dug which is open to view; removed dirt instead of being hidden is in potting mix growing parsley; a tunnel digger plonked vertically in the ground by mysterious forces.

A terrific piece of sculpture worth traipsing up to the third floor of Achilles House for.

Robot Daubers on Film

Simon Ingram - Drawing for an autopoetical painting: Monochrome in C (2005) with Monochrome in K (2008)
A Centre for Art, Level 3, Rm 5 Achilles House
21 August - 6 September 2008

Here we have videos of two Simon Ingram paintings being made by his programmed Lego robot devices. One is part of a piece of sculpture now, shown on the installed box monitor on the floor. The show's title is floor sculpture's name - note, not the name of the actual painting that was made.

The other work, Painting Assemblage No.6 is from last year’s Adam Art Gallery group show Four Times Painting. You can see a similar version on YouTube with a sumptuous soundtrack from the Dead C. In the ACFA version that's on a monitor fixed to the wall, the movement of the machine’s descending paint-loaded platform is slow and hauntingly beautiful. Sometimes the horizontal bars have a blurred ghosting effect, as if the movement trips, stops, reverses and then readvances to progress. It looks like a cleaning box on the side of a huge building and has a futuristic Sci/Fi feel. Nice cinema.

The earlier work is more a piece of sculpture, with the monitor placed on the floor and a shiny black monochrome placed opposite the screen, tilting away at the top to lean against a wall. If you stand over the monitor and look down onto the canvas you can see the moving video. The details are hard to decipher and the suggestion is that the shiny canvas is the actual support that the programmed robot is working on. If so the work is reflexive, cleverly documenting its own manufacture.

I really like the graininess of the later work. The movement is sensual and hypnotic, and the dark brown of the filmed linen locks well into the ACFA environs and decor. One small gripe: a handout on the two paintings (and the notion of ‘autopoietical’) would have been useful.