Urban panoramas from Shanghai

Jin Jiangbo: Shanghai, Ye! Shanghai,
Starkwhite
15 February – 20 March 2010

With a population of over 20 million, Shanghai is the most enormous of Chinese cities, one of the largest metropolitan areas in the world. In 73 days it launches World Expo 2010, the largest event in China since the 2008 Olympics. Currently in Starkwhite the Chinese installation and multi-media artist Jin Jiangbo has presented a set of eight panoramic images of this city, the images the result of digitally enhanced, medium format, analogue photographs.

Since 2007 Jiangbo has been creating works like the series The Great Economic Retreat, which scoffed at the notion of China’s ‘economic miracle’ and examined the fragility of the labour market, notably the consequences of corporations moving their enterprises around in search of the cheapest labour source possible - and the devasting effect that has on the migrant labour supply. He recorded the architectural detritus left when such factories are abandoned.

Last year he came to New Zealand as a recipient of the Govtt-Brewster Art Gallery’s International Artist Residency Programme and made work for a New Plymouth show using the dilapidated freezing works and processing plant (now recently demolished) at Patea that closed in the early eighties as a consequence of Britain entering the EEC.

The Shanghai images at Starkwhite are a stark contrast to the hauntingly quiet Patea photographs of rural isolation. They are taken from much higher elevations and are more spectacular as outdoor vistas of urban chaos. These large (but not huge, as Jiangbo's work can be) smokey blue-grey images, with their tightly controlled, muted colours, look like the results of some sort of camera obscura or ancient plate camera, with their softly darkening edges. They are a blend of fact with fiction. Despite their initial use of film, many are not strictly documentation – some elements are digitally repeated or distorted - though you might be easily fooled into not noticing that.

Packed with detail, Jiangbo’s delicately hued panoramas raise questions about a manic building programme that is being propelled along to reach the Expo deadline - ripping down whole suburbs to erect new architectural marvels for a potentially profitable, but temporary, fair. They examine the global recession and its consequences on the Chinese industrial landscape, critiquing the ruthless destruction implemented in the communist government’s pursuit of capitalist prosperity. Within these stunning panoramas the glories of contemporary architecture linger in the distance, while it is ruins and collapsed structures that we tend to scrutinise close-up.

What is interesting is that the Chinese government helped Jiangbo create these strangely moving images, assuming he would be glorifying the economic growth, and giving him easy access to construction sites and demolished city blocks, as well as remarkable vantage points like the tops of arched, steel-girdered bridges. It is a double game because contemporary art is now a highly profitable and respected industry in China.

Two vertical photographs by the Starkwhite office look at the Bund, the old part of Shanghai, now thoroughly modernised with colourful modernist buildings and towers on a bank of the Huangpo River.

The more common horizontal images are surprisingly varied. One has no people in it at all, another has distorted walls and tilted towers, while another still is almost perfectly symmetrical. They intrigue because of their hybrid technologies – imagine Laurence Aberhart combined with Andreas Gursky. Yet the result is an aura of romantic nostalgia mixed with an acerbic attack on economic ‘realism’.

Jiangbo is known primarily for his skill in multi-media. He has a reputation as a New Media wizard with an ability to create electronic spectacles to entertain large audiences, so this sort of show is quite modest - almost subdued - as a static, non-interactive display. It is immensely subtle work, chromatically and philosophically, requiring careful looking. It's sensational, but quiet and dignified.

Thank you Starkwhite and the artist for the images.

Best Lye book ever

Len Lye
Edited by Tyler Cann and Wystan Curnow
Essays by Guy Brett, Tyler Cann, Wystan Curnow, Roger Horrocks, Tessa Laird, and Evan Webb
Designed by Kalee Jackson
184 pp, b/w and colour illustrations, paperback
Govett-Brewster Art Gallery and Len Lye Foundation 2009

It has taken a little over thirty years but it has been well worth the wait: here at last is the first Len Lye coffee table book, with decently sized colour illustrations and substantial discussions on individual themes. Something to go alongside Roger Horrocks’ wonderful biography and Figures of Motion, Curnow and Horrocks’ exuberant anthology of the artist’s writings. Three decades have lapsed between Lye’s first show at the Govett-Brewster and the large exhibition currently on the Australian Centre for the Moving Image in Melbourne, and there have been one or two remarkable publications in between (like Horrocks’ and Jean-Michel Bouhours’ 2000 Pompidou anthology), but this attractive and highly informative, yellow tome is very striking. It should really do something to spread the Lye 'gospel' overseas. Especially in the northern hemisphere.

Most of the six essays are superb. Accompanied often by images of recently made works they offer new perspectives on hitherto undiscussed areas, or fresh overviews.

Wystan Curnow’s contribution skilfully intertwines the series of fifty photograms Lye made in New York in 1947 with a writing project he was obsessed with: Individual Happiness Now – a postwar thesis about correcting the ills of the world. With the group of artists, musicians, tradesmen, friends and intellectuals that Lye asked to pose in profile for ‘portraits’ on sheets of light sensitive paper, Curnow speculates briefly but most interestingly about a group of baby images and the portrait of Nina Bull. Bull was a research associate in psychiatry at Columbia University whom Lye met through Louise Bates Ames, a curator at the Yale Clinic of Child Development. Ames he met when doing Life with Baby a March of Time newsreel assignment.

Lye was interested in human biological development and Bull’s published article Attitudes: Conscious and Unconscious, an account of how unconscious inclinations deep within the central nervous system, transmute via a particular three stage neuromuscular sequence into a certain kind of physiological orientation and positioning. This then through visceral feeling becomes a conscious act. He was intrigued by the origins of bodily dispositions and their relationship to language use and images that the subject might empathise with. Such an interest was obvious in the emotional and bodily properties of his films, and in the fifties it was to extend into kinetic sculpture.

On another tack, Evan Webb takes a brilliant observation made by the French film curator Jean-Michel Bouhours in 2000 and develops it into an elucidation of how the materiality of film and the mechanics of film projectors influenced Lye’s kinetic sculpture. Webb discusses Bouhours’ unusual installation of Lye’s work in Le Fresnoy where he placed projectors running with films alongside kinetic sculptures in a large exhibition hall, and how the projectors seemed to become kinetic ‘tangibles’. He points out Bouhours’ enthusiasm for the very early (1930) photogram Self Planting At Night which has an image of a blindly stumbling light-house, walking with a beam projecting from its head. It is also a tree ‘planting’ itself, a theme resurrected seventeen years later with Bull and the derivation of individual ‘attitudes’ - as discussed above.

Webb then goes on to describe the processes of posthumously contructing works like Water Whirler and Ribbon Snake, highlighting their projector-like properties: one using rollers (Ribbon Snake), the other an undulating, spinning wand emitting horizontal jets of water like a convulsing vertical filmstrip or writhing lighthouse (Water Whirler).

Lye’s fraught and highly ambivalent relationship with Surrealism is examined in depth by Tyler Cann, the curator of the Len Lye Collection and Archives. Lye participated in several Surrealist exhibitions and mixed in their milieu, but was often offended whenever he was classified as one. He felt that Surrealism excessively emphasised a literary dimension with an interpretative or narrative dimension that blocked the immediacy of the visceral sensations he was striving to achieve. This conflict Cann then elaborates on (possibly with unintended irony), discussing Lessing’s famous treatise on Laocoön where he champions poetry and text over the visual arts, seeing the serpents in Greek statues as improperly mixing symbolic language into sculpture. Quoting the art historian W.J.Mitchell’s use of William Blake to repudiate Lessing’s purity of genres, Cann then says Lye works like Ribbon Snake deliberately blur over such distinctions.

In another shorter essay Cann looks at Lye’s use of scale, coloured light, sound and motion within five versions of Fountain, the well known cluster of splayed rods on a turning disc, how the Len Lye Foundation came to be formed and the activities of himself, Evan Webb and John Matthews. Cann’s and Webb’s writings about processes behind the current posthumous creation of Lye’s art are an excellent introduction for those unfamiliar with the aims of the Foundation.

Roger Horrocks’ contribution goes back in Lye's career to 1939, presenting a detailed account of his use of direct painting and synchronised music in his film Swinging the Lambeth Walk. It discusses his use of music from Le Quintette du Hot Club (with Django Reinhardt and Stephane Grapelli) and the Milt Herth Trio. The records of these two jazz bands provided most of the soundtrack for its three minutes twenty second duration. Horrocks analyses how Lye pulled together solos from different recordings, put them into eight bar blocks, and sometimes repeated them. He would match certain repeated alignments of coloured shape or line with specific instruments, and plan the co-ordination (helped in sound editing by Ernest Meyer, a German composer friend) by listing in sequence descriptions of solos in instrument-coded, coloured pencil.

Guy Brett, the English curator who did a residency at the Adam Art Gallery last year, a well-known enthusiast for Brazilian art and seventies kinetics, has an essay that provides an international context for Lye’s sculpture, looking at his practice alongside others such as Vantongerloo, Takis, Soto and Tinguely. While it’s informative, there’s nothing revelatory that you can’t already get from the Horrocks bio or Brett’s own brilliant Force Fields publication - though it is a successful condensation.

Similarly Tessa Laird’s contribution is a little limited. She unfortunately focuses solely on film and colour, and perhaps this is what the editors asked her to do. What she says about younger Lye-influenced New Zealand film-makers like Lisa Reihana, Nova Paul, and Veronica Vaevae is accurate and a good read, but this publication should have also included some discussion of related contemporary New Zealand kinetic sculptors (like Andrew Drummond, Marcus Moore, Evan Webb and Tony Nicholls) and other artists influenced by his concept of ‘doodle’ – like Paul Hartigan. Lye’s influence has travelled through younger generations of artists in this country on several levels, and this book should have been able to tap that.

The only other quibble I have is that, although there is a good biographical chronology, there is no index. You can always use the Horrocks book for many such queries but here, with new research being showcased, easy accessibility to fresh information is important. However overall, this publication is clearly a huge success. It’s gorgeous and it’s thrilling. The sexiest Lye publication yet.

The Robinson theory of Art History

Peter Robinson: Snow Ball Blind Time
Curated by Rhana Devenport
Govett-Brewster
13 September - 23 November 2008

This extremely unusual exhibition at the Govett is the first time the whole building has been handed over to one artist for an installation since the inaugural Leon Narbey Real Time show of 1970. It is a clever and ambitious project because it allows a particularly innovative and versatile individual to create something spectacular that will bodily thrill his audience, while also showcasing the very unusual spatial qualities of this adventurous, open-planned/multi-tiered New Plymouth gallery. The results are likely to attract many out of town art pilgrims to Taranaki.

Robinson has taken the linear wormlike form from ACK and blended it with the multiple chain links that feature prominently in the current work still on view in Jar in Kingsland. Seven varied sizes of joined polystyrene chain are intertwined to make an intricate but tumbling, baroque mass akin to a thickly streaming torrent, as if an ice version were possible. He has also used some of the crumbling polystyrene block presentations that he utilised in recent shows at Crockford,Brooke/Gifford, McLeavey, and Sutton (in Melbourne). The winding, lumpy but entangled, polystyrene snake weaves its way through all the exhibiting spaces, zigzagging between high balconies and low floors, squeezing through narrow corridors and out of look-outs to plummet past mezzanines only to double back upwards again. It starts in a corner of Gallery 2 by the front door and finally ends in Gallery 4, the large hangar-like room normally kept for Len Lye shows.

The worm’s direction is unpredictable as it clambers up to create spilling mountainous landscapes that can be viewed through vistas flanked by buckled chunky forms and doorway edges. These heaped rubble-like lines loop around and pile over disintegrating stratified blocks, and surprisingly sometimes, when seen from below, seem akin to Piranesi etchings. Somehow the gallery is transformed into a twisting subterranean cave with chasms and pillars, yet the venue is not smothered nor blindingly white. The amount of opaque white mass is carefully judged and not excessive. The architecture is interacted with, teased and scrutinised, but not hidden. The building is celebrated, not critiqued.

Mixed in with this is the treatment of the icelike polystyrene by the physical limitations of the connected chain links, where their design makes it almost a new substance, a material that is fluid and floppy and suggestive of fur, foliage and crystalline minerals.

Such an intensely experiential exhibition like this doesn’t need an interpretation or explanatory narrative that gives a predetermined rationale for every element, yet some aspects draw out other levels of meaning beyond spatial and optical sensation. For example Robinson has incorporated in his show a number of polystyrene stanchions holding up delicate polystyrene chains. Most of these are placed in groups within the small galleries at the bottom of the stairs near the entrance. They seem to stand for some quality like the ‘limitations or boundaries of art’, physical or conceptual. Their very literal presence helps make the giant meandering worm a metaphor for western art history, and the seven interwoven ‘threads’ within it disappearing and re-emerging themes or tendencies.

Without these ‘gallery barriers’ one could concentrate solely on a purely visceral response to Robinson’s fascinating show, but the stanchions’ unambiguous existence places other demands on the gallery visitor – pushing their capacity to speculate about what is before them and their own role, as viewers, in its creation.