Andrew Paul Wood on Heather Straka's photographs

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.

Here's Andrew Paul Wood on Pete Wheeler's show in Christchurch

Pete Wheeler: All Bets Are Off
Jonathan Smart Gallery
18 November – 19 December 2009

Whopping great canvasses of nature red in tooth and claw – Pete Wheeler appears to be once more in love with paint. The scale of the paintings can best be described as romantic/heroic. The technique is starling and often technically daring. The subject matter is less certain: the Discovery Channel meets velvet painting – occasionally just a Native American or dreamcatcher shy of being a polar-fleece bedspread as in the case of a painting of a bald eagle. As a rule of thumb neither actors nor artists should probably work with children or animals. Risks are involved. Wheeler does it OK.

Lions and tigers and bears, oh my! Are the soft focus beasts simply arbitrary excuses to slap the paint down on canvas? Are they being knowingly ironic about kitsch (a bit trite these days)? Are they genuinely sentimental and naïf celebrations of nature’s predators? I suspect the truth lies somewhere in-between, though the artist is not being forthcoming. Each has a certain plausible deniability to it should it become a liability if and when the fashion changes.

In some ways, however, the subject is irrelevant to the act of mark making itself. A painting of a leopard functions as a good metaphor for this. Convincing leopard spots are damned difficult to pull off convincingly on this kind of scale (without looking like something from Bette Lynch’s wardrobe), requiring a certain amount of chutzpah, but Wheeler seems to manage it with big hairy-chested neoexpressionist gestures and drips and restricted palette in grungy autumnal greens and browns. It’s overwhelming in its sheer massiveness. Indeed, in the 1990s the roaring boys of Dunedin painting – including Wheeler and James Robinson - very much went in for a sort of paint-slathered punk Basquiat-esque variant on neoexpressionism. While Robinson seems to have turned into an ersatz Julian Schnabel, Wheeler has gone a different route.

There is something very German about what Wheeler is doing now – and there is, perhaps, little surprise in that given that Wheeler spent a longish period in Berlin (which is a very sensible thing for any aspiring artist to do). The kinds of artists I am thinking of specialise in smeary figuration in low key or off key palettes. Consider Gerhard Richter, Sigmar Polke, Georg Baselitz, Martin Kippenberger and Neo Rauch – the whole kit and caboodle from Capitalist Realism to the Leipzig school. It was, after all, East Germany that kept figurative painting alive while everyone else was following New York up the garden path to Ab Ex land. I’ll even chuck in Luc Tuymans too, even although he’s Belgian. I suppose you could call it Contemporary Mittel-European style twenty years on.

More to the point, the artist admits to being reinvigorated by Francis Bacon in the flesh (pardon the pun). Mind you, you would have to have the soul of a battery hen not to feel significantly moved by Bacon’s use of paint and general sense of existential anguish.

Wheeler’s paintings are, however, only vaguely comparable to Bacon in style; and no-one alive today (prove me wrong) is anything like as good as Bacon, therefore comparisons are probably futile. Wheeler strives for a similar sense of motion, and sometimes even the brilliant crimson slash of blood, but it comes out looking more like Sickert than Bacon which probably has more credibility for him in the long run. Sickert has been less done to death, despite all that Jack the Ripper nonsense.

I think, in general, I am somewhat ambivalent about the whole exercise. I like the paint, but there is a certain deadness to the subjects that doesn’t quite gel for me. Even a painting of some ambiguous big hyena ripping apart a wildebeest doesn’t really make me feel much when it probably should, and might have benefited more from the sensitive, almost fetishistic interpretations of Stubbs and Turner rather than David Attenborough – and this is the most Bacon-like of all the works. The positive side effect of this figurative fatigue is that it does put you off asking such empty, jaded old hat questions as “How far has the idea of art progressed from straight mimesis?” and “Is perception governed more by subjective conventions or ideological manipulation?” and forces you to look at the brushwork, which is the interesting bit.

The paint itself is full of energy and intensity, gesture and precision that suggests it knows where it’s going, but may not quite have got there yet. It’s still, however, entirely worth looking at. In the broader scheme of things, it’s hardly cutting edge stuff, but then again I get the impression Wheeler doesn’t intend it to be – he’s painting for himself rather than an audience. Generally the best painters do.

Here is a second review of the Pauline Rhodes show in Christchurch - this one by Andrew Paul Wood.

Pauline Rhodes: Fluid Connections
Jonathan Smart Gallery
September 09 - October 11, 2009

Pauline Rhodes is a highly significant figure in New Zealand art and something of a doyen of Canterbury installation art with a practice covering four decades. She somehow manages to hover below the radar – yet at the same time her exhibitions are always striking.

Fluid Connections is rather typical of her recent work of the last decade – working and reworking a formal language that owes much to Louise Bourgeois and Joseph Beuys. In fact, it is so recognisably Indoors Rhodian that the style might be considered trademark – the careful alignments and groupings of objets trouvés (reminiscent, I’ve always felt, of the carefully-arranged-to-seem-random conglomerations used for still life drawing in high schools and art schools the world over), and the newsprint carefully foxed with delicate contagions of rust which wrap around the objects and hang on the walls.

The temporary and the Kristevan abject are present everywhere – plastic hosing, sticks, folding camp tables, and newspaper which provides many things with a skin. But this isn’t ordinary newspaper, but rather Le Monde Diplomatique, the Washington Post and the Guardian Weekly, providing only partly readable windows into global politics on both sides of the year 2000 (a similar trick to that frequently deployed by et al). The newspaper also provides a welcome lightening and confining element, which has a counterpoint in the minimalism of Rhodes' outdoor installations, but also plays against the white walls of the gallery. Newspaper ultimately harkens back to modernist neutrality and the minimalist grid.

Rhodes’ oeuvre is founded in the 1960s and 1970s rejection of the hegemonic ‘rules’ of modernism, and a turning to the nature of materials, ephemerality, the time based, the space specific and personal enquiry. In a way I think that makes it delightfully old-fashioned in the sense that it rejects the interactive and electronic and is refreshingly honest to the historical origins of installation art.

Leaning against one wall white-painted logs seem to prop it up like a flying buttress, as if the installation had become architecturally one with the gallery space (one thinks of invasive nanotechnology gone rogue) while at the centre is a large water-filled black plastic container, papered on the outside. This forlorn ‘pond’ was deliberately encouraged to stagnate and scum over, and provides a kind of omphalos/cosmic navel to the whole dispersed composition. The rust and the scum, the nurtured weathering of objects, provide a connection to the outdoor environment and the natural world.

In some ways it is ironic (or paradoxical) that art like this that rejects commodification should be installed in a dealer gallery, but then of course we must keep in mind that Jonathan Smart is no ordinary gallerist. He very much likes to support contemporary practice with his gallery used as a venue as much as a salesroom. Fluid Connections is an example of the Rhodian intensum (her terminology) – an intensification of a space, as opposed to her outdoor works which are frequently extensums, or extensions of space.

..ooooph!

Richard Reddaway - Light, Sound: Built
Jonathan Smart, Christchurch
May 12 – June 7, 2009

Three sprawling, but varied, installations make up this Richard Reddaway exhibition in Jonathan Smart’s back gallery: one wall based, another floor fixated, a third – in a corner – both.

The wall work is like a series of modernist box-buildings set on a cliff face, with different sizes and projecting depths. But these are not model houses but wired up, super sharp, music speakers, made of chipboard and covered with veneer. The five speaker clusters emit a soundtrack that is part of the sculptural experience, for the noises energetically move around and come and go. We hear simple sounds like a dripping tap, laughter, whistling, or solo violin. Or more those more complex like the murmuring and roaring of a crowd in a big sports stadium. Often also there are several speakers in each box, so you have to listen carefully to discover which is the source. You need to move around a bit.

On the floor is a wooden desk used normally by the gallery proprietor. On its wide top and around its feet, and out into the middle of the space, are about a dozen lamps glowing against the dark wood grain. The work is a bit too Bill Culbertish for comfort, yet Reddaway’s choice of glass lamps is interesting. They are oddly ornamental. A few are severe, like truncated cylinders, but others are organic, like shells or seeds, some angular and spikey, and others still have scalloped frilly edges. Their peculiar mix of decoration intrigues.

The highlight though is really Reddaway’s collection of Swandri droopy blob creatures. Part club-footed people, part tartan-clad amphibians, but also woolly and podgy, they cling to the walls and slither downward in crumpled heaps – yet they are actually held off the floor by very low tables. They have a Rob McLeod or Elizabeth Murray look about them, and have speakers built in that for this show are not working. As lumberjack androids they are wonderfully ambiguous in their activity. As if there is some kind of orgy or beating on the floor of the wood shed we have just interrupted.

Wild cards

Neil Dawson - Deck: First Cut
Jonathan Smart, Christchurch
May 12 – June 7 2009

In Jonathan Smart’s front gallery Dawson presents two sets of six card replicas: greatly enlarged playing cards of screen printed powder coated paint on stainless steel. Just under knee height they are curved so they can stand upright on the floor. Or, using holes in the corners, they can also be hung on walls. The patterns and designs on both sides are meticulously reproduced from the smaller originals

Actually they are a lot more than just highly ornate, enlarged playing card facsimiles. They have been very cleverly cut so that – in one case - there are three concentric rectangles (plus a circle) bent in alternating concave or convex alignments. For six types of card Dawson has invented six permutations of cut-out and bent formation.

Some are sliced rectangles (frames inside frames); others are circles or diamonds inside rectangles; others still are sets of lines radiating from points. Usually they play with the elaborately intricate ornamentation on the card’s back, delineating some of the dominant motif contours.

With these inventive works, Dawson takes something terribly commonplace and makes it extraordinarily interesting. All of a sudden you want to examine playing cards and their Arts and Crafts designs. You start to wonder about their history.

As an installation Deck: First Cut works well. A room full of these works on only the walls would look tediously regular - for as relief sculpture you don’t want to see too many in succession. However on the floor as part of a ‘pack’, a large number (i.e. over three) seem more unpredictable. Looking down on the curved planar edges helps enormously. It is also interesting looking through the holes at what the curved stainless steel reveals of its own form.

Placed this way with one on the wall and eleven on the floor, they look better than they would suspended in mid air on invisible wires, a possibility which Dawson might have considered. They seem like a herd of animals, originally two by two as in Noah’s Ark but now intermingling. An excellent sculpture show.

Substance and light

Neil Dawson at Jonathan Smart Gallery, Christchurch. 27 November -22 December 2007

It is easy to see why Neil Dawson is exhibiting his latest set of wall works in the front room at Jonathan Smart’s, the space with the big window overlooking High Street. The light is so intense there, especially in summertime, and it brightens noticeably as the day progresses. The work changes accordingly. It becomes more evanescent and shimmering, more holistic and less composed. Figures merge into ground. The metallic green and grey colours in particular become even more iridescent.

Dawson has six works on display: five on walls, one hanging suspended from the ceiling. The hanging work (Pointer) is a spray-painted, double cone that turns horizontally like a swivelling compass needle. The two halves are coloured grey and red while the opposing cones are made of a curved steel mesh with patterns of flying darts that diminish in size as they approach the two tips.

Two other cones (Vanishing Points) are on the walls, pointing to the floor. One pattern is of crevasses, the other of vertical crosses. The two motifs are linked with the two cones being side by side. Dawson has a black wit.

While the cone works are great, the rest of the show is made of three arcs (Sweeps) that hang on the walls. I like these even more. Curved with the centres projecting out, they look like sweeping brushmarks sliding across the wall. One is patterned with inverted darts among scudding clouds, another is with just clouds, and the third with I-beams suspended in the cumulus. They have a lightness of touch the cones lack, partially because of their interaction with the walls, the way they cling to the vertical planes of the architecture. There is a nice teasing of the volumetric, a nuanced agitation of the space that accompanies the eddies turning the double-cone and the shifting light coming in the window.

By the way, the images I have pasted here are not from the Smart show, but very similar.

Dangerous mouths

I wish to thank CNZ for a grant that greatly assisted the writing of these early articles (November 2007 - May 2008).





Anne Noble’s Ruby’s Room 1998-2007 at the Jonathan Smart Gallery, Christchurch. 27 November - 22 December 2007

I have always thought Anne Noble’s coloured inkjet prints to be the best work she has made so far, especially the images of her daughter Ruby’s mouth, chewing lollies. Noble’s previous black and white documentary photographs have never interested me at all. I find them far too ordinary, even the elegant ones.

Her ‘mouth photos’ though, are mentally intriguing as well as optically sensuous. They have a bizarre eroticism that is reminiscent of the work of French photographers like Boiffard. Noble’s shots of her daughter chomping on assorted, brightly coloured sugary substances have disturbing associations with other orifices leaking secretions, and the blotchy quality of her saturated hues look vaguely like diseased or rotting bodies.

That these images are disgusting on a certain level is part of their appeal. They tease the viewer, for they are also about innocence and youthful energy with their celebratory, exuberant colour and occasional frenzied movement. They are dubious and pure.

Noble’s display is a selection of 9 taken from a portfolio of 28 images currently being presented at the Musée du Quai Banly in Paris, the recently opened museum normally devoted to African and Pacific tribal art. Her show is part of PhotoQuai, an international biennale of contemporary photography.

Of the 9 works in Christchurch, some are a bit sweet, as in cute: using soap suds and bright red lips for example, or black lips shaped like a butterfly. A half chewed strawberry makes an interesting violent image viewed through an open mouth. This is also the case with a yellow disc – with a hole in the middle - crammed down in front of the front teeth so that the lower lip containing it is stretched as if it is going to split.

Another has yellowy-green slime running down past the mouth over the chin, and one more has patterned fabric jammed tightly between the lips. Noble here seems to be getting mannered with her props, but then, she says she always works in series. Maybe such contrived explorations are necessary for her to kick start new ideas. From them, seeds can germinate: a nourishing of processes and testing of new possibilities.

http://www.ambafrance-nz.org/IMG/pdf/Anne_Noble_Photoquai.pdf
http://www.nzartmonthly.co.nz/bartley_001.html
http://www.nzlive.com/en/nzlivecom/anne-noble-rubys-room