OK a KO

OK (Hany Armanious, The Estate of L. Budd, Julian Dashper, Richard Frater, Patrick Lundberg, Campbell Patterson)
Curated by Sarah Hopkinson
Michael Lett
27 May - 4 July 2009

The six works from six artists that make up this exhibition - assembled by Sarah Hopkinson - all tend to be understated visually (lots of white), but with plenty going on conceptually. The theme seems to be a vague examination of essences and how we codify phenomena such as ‘identity’.

The voices quoted in the work from The Estate of L. Budd set the stage. Written on a painted wallpaper sheet with a dilapidated hifi speaker sitting on some battered scales on the floor, the quotes deny their own corporeal origins, and initial sense too. Signifier and signified get swapped around, entity and idea, subject and object get reversed so that part of the scrawled text reads: …by the objective reality of an idea I understand the entity or being of the thing represented by the idea, in so far as this entity is in the idea…

Meaning turns to sludge, certainties disappear. Entities transmute into ideas, expand and spread.

OK’s other artworks parallel this slippery amorphousness. Richard Frater has a video of walls made of sugar cubes slowly dissolving in a tank of agitated water, Campbell Patterson has a low square landscape of small undulating hillocks made of Persil washing powder, so that the smell dominates the room far beyond its source. The perfumed soap particles seem to be spreading out into K’ Rd.

The theme continues. Hany Armanious has a portrait made of cut locks of hair spread thinly on a page so we can see a face. Some parts of a visage also hover above it. It’s spreading like Persil aroma. There is an uncertainty factor built in here, for how much is coincidence, how much calculation?

A very unusual Julian Dashper work features a cluster of half inflated balloons pinned by their mouths to the wall, with the artist’s photograph glued on one. As their air gradually seeps out, there is a sense of isolated selves living their transient existences - their lives ebb away and their bodies shrivel. Dashper’s artist’s breath, referencing Piero Manzoni’s balloons, mixes with Patterson’s soap molecules to be then carried in the draughts circulating within the gallery.

Even a gallery wall cannot claim permanence or stasis. Patrick Lundberg’s portable section of plaster gib shows how a precise archaeological excavation might reveal a history of wall paint application. He exposes myths of wall insusceptibility to change; he showcases their illusory solidity. Like soap powder that moves to a far corner as olfactory particles, or the tumbling snipped hairs of a portrait, or dissolving sugar bricks, or breath from a balloon, or entities that once represented ideas (but now reversed) - layers get scraped away and discarded as dust, to be picked up and redeposited by passing zephyrs.

This is fascinating show shouldn’t be missed.

Spot the difference

l. budd /untitled /N.D. (c.1997)/ awning, acrylic paint /1350 x 5500 x 1100 mm (extended)


disputed (et al) / National Park (sorry) / 2008 / wood, cork, tarpulin, perspex, paper, speaker, rock, amplifier, rubber, fabricated trolley, foam, found image, acrylic paint/ edition of five / 1200 x 1120 x 900 (overall, approx) / courtesy of Starkwhite


lionel b (l. budd) / unity of appearance / 1997 /awning, acrylic paint, pencil / 1400 x 2800 x 1170mm


l. budd / untitled / 1992 / hand-poured silicon, plaster, wallpaper / 130 x560 x 300 mm (each,approx.) multiple released by the Estate of L. Budd


The Estate of L. Budd
Michael Lett, Auckland
15 April - 17 May 2008

This show is about the pleasures of language, the joys of mischief-making, and the limits of identity. Revelling in ambiguity, it forces the visitor to examine lists of materials and names, to check their accuracy and to ask if their leg is being pulled. It is the type of show that museum registrars must dread because the most basic procedures become slippery, evanescent and untrackable. Items and their accompanying definitions move around. Things are never where you left them last.

In recent months L. Budd appears to have died. The et al collective will have to carry on without his/her contributions. But looking at the list of four works Lett has provided, the titles don’t seem accurate.

The untitled work, for example, of a dozen multiple scroll holders and three pieces of wallpaper, has no trolley listed and according to et al’s Govett-Brewster survey publication, was made by Merit Gröting anyway (see arguments for immortality, p.96).

Yet above it on the catalogue is another work which has disputed authorship, one called National Park (sorry), a fish tank covered with bubblewrap (unmentioned) on a trolley, and containing a speaker which occasionally plays Arabian music.

As for the likely meaning of these objects: the scrolls and awnings in this show double as possible paintings (‘blonded’ surfaces) and symbolic shelters from hostile elements. The unity of the collective ‘self’ is both disparaged and embraced by contradictory components. Different personas are showcased but they have unifying commonalities which remain.

Plus the main work here, the scroll holders, seems to be about art collections, archives, and storage facilities. It is reflexive, about the care of itself and other et al artworks. It’s a minimal, tough work (especially if the trolley is not included), one that gives the finger to various clipboard–ticking museum bureaucrats, government officials and collectors who want their art and artists easily defined and properly housetrained.