The art of bodily immersion

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.

Kate Brettkelly-Chalmers recently visited Sriwhana Spong's exhibition at Michael Lett

Sriwhana Spong: Channeling Mr B
Michael Lett
27 January - 6 March 2010

Dance has a remarkable ability to exist in the present moment. Blistered feet and hours of sweat soaked practice immediately give way to an instantaneous gesture, the fleeting yet brilliant moment in a performance when the body moves with perfect precision. Similarly, Sriwhana Spong’s latest film Costume for a Mourner offers moments of choreographed enchantment that are underpinned by a range of historical and legendary references. The film’s ballet dance is briefly and enjoyably captivating, but the multitude of conceptual references threaded throughout asks for a more lingering consideration from viewers.

Costume for a Mourner is the centrepiece of Spong’s first exhibition at Michael Lett gallery, Channeling Mr B. The film re-creates a small section of the ballet Le chant du Rossignol (The Song of the Nightingale) composed and choreographed by the legendary duo Igor Stravinsky and George Balanchine. It follows the performance of a solo dancer wearing a large black and white smock that expands and collapses with his movement. Spong’s beautifully realized film captures the momentary theatrical power of this choreography but also alludes to other narratives.

As the film’s title suggests, a sense of loss or distance from this ballet exists. Without any filmic documentation to work from, Spong has reconstructed Le chant du Rossignol from a contemporary standpoint, a position that can only rely on historical research, legend and anecdote. In this way, she has “re-imagined” a film that never was.

As with Spong’s earlier works, Costume for a Mourner owes as much to cinematic traditions as it does to theatre performance. It seems to sit somewhere in between the two, reminding us of the breathless physicality of cinema and offering a neat manifestation of the term jump cut. In this regard, I was disappointed that Spong had chosen the wall-mounted flat screen of a brightly lit gallery over a darkened cinematic space.

But perhaps that would be too much, too grand a statement. This show is about balance, after all. The hanging sculpture Field Figures finds a careful equilibrium in the combination of its components: circular and diamond steel shapes, blue squares of film filters and lengths of necklace chain. This balancing act is also echoed in the myriad of references Spong presents us with, from Balinese reverent offerings (the diamond and circle shapes which appear throughout the exhibition refer to Balinese visual traditions) to the Hans Christian Anderson parable of The Nightingale. Behind the physical immediacy of Spong’s sculpture and film lies a conceptual mesh of fact and fiction.

What is notable here is Spong’s use and incorporation of referenced material. In an environment where “research” is lauded and workbooks full of edifying clippings are held under the arm of every savvy art student, Spong does not go in for an information overload. Nor does she pepper her work with the ironic allusions or knowing winks of art practices that would have once been described as postmodern.

However, a danger still exists in this play of multiple citations. Spong is at risk of having these references simply bounce about like echoes in a cave without any substance. There is something critically hollow about this practice, but I think Spong has successfully avoided it. A kind of richness is emerging in her work: a carefully considered play of overlapping and interlocking themes. It is what happens when reference, research and citation are taken one step further, when something unique emerges. It is simply good choreography.

Nevertheless, I have a niggling feeling that Spong’s distinctiveness is having its edge taken off. For what it’s worth, Channeling Mr B felt like a “dealer show.” [Even as I tentatively write this statement I’m not sufficiently sure that I can describe what a “dealer show” is. But, this is precisely the point. Its meaning is currently in flux as the traditional differentiation of exhibition spaces in Auckland is changing. The ambition of many dealer shows over the past few years is challenging the standing, aspirations and resources of other galleries. Dealers are keeping up with the ambitions of their artists - as illustrated by Spong’s recent move from Anna Miles Gallery to Lett’s - and this is shifting our context for viewing art].

It was nice to have a breather from Michael Lett’s recent suite of block buster shows (Michael Parekowhai and Fiona Connor were memorable), and yet Spong’s peculiar charm seems a little clipped by the gallery’s tight ship aesthetic. The small photographic collages offering momentary glimpses of Balanchine’s historical legend were a little at odds with their large, gleaming white frames. Channeling Mr B is an elegant and perfectly materialized show, but sometimes greater or more interesting things come from the rough around the edges. It is a tricky balance and I am being a little pernickety here. Spong is on the brink of something great (no pressure!), let’s hope she gets a chance to spread her wings at Basel.

The ascent of the suppressed

Michael Parekowhai: The Moment of Cubism
Michael Lett
28 November 2009 - 23 January 2010

This show is dominated by Parekowhai’s oblique but clever title which refers to the fraught relationship between early modernism (particularly cubism) and various ‘primitive’ African cultures that influenced it (or which were ‘appropriated’). The eponymous work consists of seven bronze-cast lemon saplings standing on or around a bronze pallet, as if in a nursery. The plants, all of different heights, bear none of their characteristically bitter fruit, but the lemons’ absence is artificial and so, conspicuous – a negative symbol for suppression. (As opposed to ‘repression’ which is an organism’s internal mental or bodily restraining mechanism. Why do I mention this? Because the show is about the politics of art history, not modernism critiquing itself. If it were the latter, my title would have been 'the rise of the repressed'.)

Lemons are also a symbol for power – as in electrical energy. They (because of their acid) can literally be used to create batteries that generate electricity. The missing fruit can also become a metaphor for the ‘missing’ African sculpture that was essential in the growth of cubism.

In Parekowhai’s hands they take on the meaning of political power too. That of the colonised, which many might claim was not properly acknowledged, and so made invisible - but now asserting its presence. (See the famous, very heated Thomas McEvilley versus William Rubin and Kirk Varnedoe Primitivism debate in artforum Nov. 1984 and Feb. 1985)

The two other works are more physically imposing - three dimensional, African animal forms linked to ebony bookends. These are creamy, off-white, hugely enlarged elephants and impala and the bookends are symbollically what contain the documentation and interpretation of western art history and its visual culture.

Whereas the original small black ‘African’ bookends are usually slightly angular with crisp wooden edges, these fibreglass whoppers have a soft, liquidly flowing quality, as if made of oozing custard or cream. The antelope works Seldom is Herd, has three parts – strange for bookends (one grazing deer is duplicated) but linked to the title which of course plays off the fruitless lemon trees.

The two very large elephant bookends are called Te Ao Hurihuri which apparently means ‘The World Keeps Turning’. Perhaps it is saying 'nothing changes'? The title might refer to the fact that one is horizontal, (exasperatedly?) pressing its head against the wall, and the other is tipped up so its head is against the floor, as if the gallery has been spun around. These straining hefty beasts also allude to The Moment of Cubism and seem to be attacking the modernist ‘white cube’ – as exemplified by Lett’s gallery space. The revenge of the colonised. A counter-attack by the appropriated.

This is a particularly clever show from Parekowhai in the way all the components conceptually interconnect. Visually however the dark brown bronze plants seem a little strange juxtaposed with the milky fibreglass animals, despite the common historical socio-ethnic content. They look almost an afterthought but one rescued by the brilliantly pithy title. Yet if you think through and around the elements, as I think I have done, it all adds up – a very successful (but entertaining) post-colonial critique of modernist gallery architecture and its attendant art history.

(Since I wrote this it has been pointed out that the animals are based on Wedgwood ornaments, so any mention of ebony statues is obviously mistaken. The whole discussion needs a rethink.)

International group show at Lett

Angels & Demons
Michael Lett
14 October - 21 November 2009

Ten artists make up this group concoction at Michael Lett’s. As some of them, being based in Europe or the States, are rarely shown in this part of the world, one would expect it to be memorable – but not so. A lot of the painting is peppered with references to modernist painting styles like those of analytic cubism (Hansjoerg Dobliar), Warhol and Basquiat (Chris Lipomi), or Larry Poons' poured paintings (John Armleder). While these art historical references are very knowing, many of the resulting images are not fresh. They don’t really add up to much despite the layering. They seem dry, tired and bookish.

Others are livelier because of their anger (like Manuel Ocampo’s scathing caricature of an Inland Revenue official) or adolescent shock tactics - Matthew Griffin has a turdlike waffle floating (but now disintegrating) in a bucket of water. A lot of it is forgettable.

The three artists who have created something that lingers in the mind are Dan Arps, Mike Parr and Jim Allen. Arps’ The Dark Times, made with what seems to be a photograph drawn over and smeared with acrylic umber and viscous resin, is beautifully ambiguous in its dark muddy confusion. It could be a doorway in a building, could be a newspaper title-face, might be a modernist mausoleum. The streaky image is graphically compelling and mysterious.

Down by the gallery entrance, Mike Parr’s three c-type photographs, based on films documenting some of his excruciating performances of thirty-seven years ago, still have impact – even when put in a row high up near the ceiling. Paul McCarthy’s performances, made around the same time as Parr’s, and videoed, also involve confrontational activities using his body parts - and body fluids too. These Black and White Tapes, were screened on Wednesday night.

In the front entrance by the big window, Jim Allen’s sculpture has an advantage by being isolated from the rest of the exhibition which is bizarrely hung and organised in strange clusters. His work shows a male puppet head on a stand looking at a music stand on which is played a large clumped lock of curly hair, nestling between open folds of two, thin, crinkled wax sheets. Behind the hair is a thin palm tree trunk in a narrow glass vase. From it are suspended various tinted photocopies of illustrated internal organs and viscera.

My theory is that the work is an ironic meditation on Courbet’s The Origin of The World. Hetero male sexual voyeurism (or desire for a fetish substitute) is mischievously conflated with musical pleasure, while the unseen bodily mechanics of a living female person are backgrounded, despite being inseparable from the genitals. As is usual with Jim Allen’s practice, the work invites speculation. It is the highlight of a largely humdrum show.

Aqua (mass) media

Aqua-media
Simon Denny: Starting from behind
Michael Lett
9 September - 10 October 2009

For this show the title is clever in at least three ways. First of all, the artist is using Michael Lett’s office as a display space, so Lett’s desk is now presented close to the Karangahape Road window - in the entrance space on the corner. The back room’s main contents are now in this front room and the first thing you see.

Secondly, the works in the large middle room are presented as four large trays standing vertically on the floor. In them are the backs of various TV sets - the plastic casings that enclose the tubes. The gallery visitor examines them from behind. And thirdly, the large room has four rectangular holes cut into the gib of the Edinburgh St wall – the same size as the trays - exposing the normally hidden outer wall of the gallery building; the inside plane of the double weatherboarded outer wall that is. Again, we are looking at it ‘from behind’.

The four vertical trays lined up on the floor have textured aluminium sides, mdf backs, and wrinkled or torn plastic fronts. For three of these trays, there are single, screen-printed, tropical fish on the plastic and mdf. These works are called backwards aquarium videos, and have either Grundig or Telefunken casings. The fourth has two suspended towels, each showing a screen-printed TV announcer with a monitor TV image behind him.

Denny’s dominant simile here is that of the goldfish bowl or tropical fish tank. His towels seem to allude to Marshal McLuhan‘s theory of ‘the medium is the massage’ where the tactility of various methods of mass communication has considerable physiological impact on our bodies and hence our minds.

The hermetic, watery world of the mains-stream media could perhaps be intended to parallel the ‘art world’ too. Beyond through the rectangular holes in the wall, there exists the so-called ‘life world’. Where folks like you and me fit in – in terms of these options - huddled over our various computers, I’m not quite sure.

In the end room, in a large cabinet holding a Philips television, is a DVD. Deep Sea Vaudeo is ostensibly a promotional video for selling televisions of different varieties of screen, one that extends the watery connection by having some ripples and a dark permeating tone as if immersed. We see these appliances on stands, or stacked, or on tables, about fifteen set up on a small stage in a showroom. Each screen depicts tropical fish and we see a camera crew filming the display.

Using slow pans and a background soundtrack of bubbling, bland muzak and softly spoken Japanese, it presents these televisions in the dark with glowing screens, or illuminated in a warm reddish glow. Sometimes they are lined up so we can see them in cross-section; other times we see them frontally.

With these televisions Denny includes some magazines and newspapers on stands. He seems to be making jokes about his Gambia Castle colleagues Fiona Connor and Nick Austin, the former with her exhibition of fake newspaper stands, the latter with his paintings of tropical fish on newspapers.

Late last year at Center in Berlin Denny had a small exhibition with Austin where he exhibited earlier Aquarium paintings in the same aluminium trays, but enclosing the front screens of televisions, not their backs. The properties of mass media is obviously a theme he is much preoccupied with.

As also shown by the Recent Haircuts show at Gambia Castle last year, his work is getting tighter and tighter as focussed gallery installations. And subtly funnier too in the way he alludes to the art community’s self reflexivity and sealed containment. Like Fiona Connor he is here making great use of the windowed frontage of Lett’s gallery, and the fact that it is situated on a corner like a sort of glasshouse. A structure easier to look into (like a fish tank) than look out of.

Emotional distance, ethical objectivity

James Lynch: Always in our thoughts
Michael Lett
5 August – 5 September 2009

Melbourne artist James Lynch’s paintings are conceptual works that play with historical narrative and community protest by illustrating the contents of the daily news by placing it in an imaginary doll’s house or child’s mini-theatre. In these sets cardboard cutouts of pickets are the main props.

The work begins with the artist making such props which he then arranges in a large room and photographs. Those photographs are used to make the oil paintings.

The work is extremely ambiguous with its use of mental distance and avoidance of empathy with the political content. It is really about conflict and not about specific issues, though some might see it as ‘progressive’ – as a collection of images motivated by a desire for unspecific political change. Others might see it as a form of black (or sick) humour, looking at the social conflict that continually surrounds us and using that anger as a suitable provider of decorative images to sweeten up our lounges. A disturbingly cynical interpretation.

Not only does Lynch play with emotional distance by rendering angry people (and the various Australian Prime Ministers who are the objects of their scorn) as cardboard cut-outs, but the way he paints these props onto the final picture-plane of each canvas is peculiar. The edges of each fragment are raised, as if they are from pieces of glued-on collaged canvas – which they are not. He seems to be making jokes about unity of surface as well as the notion of cohesion between the props themselves and their possibly disparate source material.

These works then are the opposite of ‘protest paintings’. They observe the conflict coolly through several strategically placed filters – without urging you to participate or get too involved, or without actually opposing the contested ideas either. They remind me of some of the notions of the British ethics philosopher Bernard Williams who argues against the views of Kant or Utilitarianism, saying that you cannot objectively determine the answers to moral dilemmas, that it is impossible to find resolved positions that can consistently be normative. Lynch’s art, like Williams’ writing, seems to take a pessimistic position on ethical debate and watches ideological clashes from afar, going right against the prevalent politically-driven tendencies of the contemporary art world.

Lynch also has sculptures. Some of these are highly entertaining. One is a wardrobe painted in camouflage colours, perhaps for storing military fashion apparel or to disguise a fashionista mindset. Another is a burnt chair that might be a design object, a chic furniture item cynically nodding to ‘the Revolution’, the world in turmoil far beyond the owner’s hypothetical grilled gates, surveillance cameras and security guards.

There are three chairs in the show in total, symbols that collectively stand for the artist’s ambivalent self perhaps, an embracing of no movement, of stasis - a trope for calculated inaction. Maybe they mean a sitting-on of hands. They seem to work as clever extensions of the paintings, sculptural props that enrich the show - taking the 2D content to another level.

Fashion/Art as Stalag Nuft Nord

Jacqueline Fraser: The Great Escape (in a Falsetto)
Michael Lett
11 July - 1 August 2009

It’s an unusual approach to exhibition titling to reference a sixties POW Escape film (artist as Steve McQueen?) while your voice is up a few octaves, but as I am often told by friends when my own voice gets a little squeaky, falsetto means you are lying. Your subconscious nervousness uncooperatively constricts your vocal chords.

Why would Fraser tell us she is lying? Let’s say she is a leg-puller. You enter the exhibition space through the layered, heavy brocaded curtains and you find yourself in a dark black box, but blinded by a searchlight from above the entrance to Lett’s office. The walls are painted black and on them are pinned up piecemeal collages. Most use figures taken from fashion and skin mags, plus family snaps, found ones, old images and new - some life size. Plus swathes of plastic, tulle, fur, and reflective shiny paper.

Yet it is all very hard to see. Not at all like the above images from Lett’s website. The gallery is dark and there is a second light near the first very dazzling one - a motorised spot that jerkily sweeps around the paper and fabric-laden walls. It zigzags rapidly so it is hard to focus on any one image. You only get glimpses. However it gives off a faint tangential peripheral light through the side of its lamp. When your eyes adjust, that moving ring helps you gradually take in some of the room’s details. Only some though. Most of the space stays murky - and within it peek out disconnected fragments, textural islands, dislocated tactile sensations - all spaced apart and isolated.

In her last show at Lett there were hints that Fraser was chafing at the hermeticism of the art world. The fashion world too. Feeling claustrophobic and glancing away from them towards the outdoors, the prosaic and the unglamorous. Yet the current installation is highly ambiguous. The Great Escape could be a gesture, one that is not about the artist at all but about the viewer. Perhaps it references the need for art to provide fantasy, a vortex to entice its audience in so they can never withdraw. This Michael Lett show could be a warning. What you think might be an escape could be a fib, a decoy - and might be a ruse, a set-up, a trap.

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.

Snap, Crackle....

POP: Sean Kerr
A hardcovered artist’s book published by Michael Lett/Clouds
Essay by Natasha Conland
66 pp. and colour images
May 2009

This snazzy exuberant publication showcases the talents of Warren Olds as book designer and Natasha Conland as essayist. Just as much as Sean Kerr the inspiring artist. Olds and Conland are in top form, Olds with his design placement, sense of colour and brilliant sequencing, Conland with her observations, clarity and unusual quoted references, and they both have wonderful material to work with.

I usually find Kerr’s interactive googly eyed or gunshot works more irritatingly trivial than engrossing. I am far more entertained by Tony de Lautour (I like mischievousness) or Tom Kreisler (and appreciate absurdity) but Conland’s essay is so persuasive I‘ve started to doubt my own attentiveness. I’ve obviously missed something in those earlier sculptures – especially as his recent Newcall show was very striking in its conceptual layering and deliciously silly vulgarity.

This is a great little book. It presents Kerr’s working drawings so that their varied interconnections seep into you slowly, but Conland’s text attempts to analyse the humour in narratives based on moving images.

Kerr’s preparatory drawings are not comic strips. He doesn’t elaborate much via sequential graphics, so the static images exasperate if you allow yourself to get excited by Conland’s ideas. Drawing as such she tends to ignore. Her essay, though splendid, is in the wrong context. It needs an accompanying survey of noisy interactive sculpture to resonate properly.

Superb installation in K' Rd

Fiona Connor: Something transparent (please go around the back)
Michael Lett
15 April -16 May 2009

We have here one of the most amazing pieces of public art Auckland has seen for a long time. The daylight and night-time experiences it provides can both be savoured from the K’ Rd footpath, looking into the gallery windows and locked front entrance on the Edinburgh St corner. The back door will be in use for the duration of the show, and once inside the gallery, there awaits another view from within.

Through the windows, at first glance it looks like you are peeping into an infinity chamber, a piece of trickery done with mirrors. Seventeen glass windows and doors are presented perspectivally receding into the distance, each one a diminishing replica of the outside entrance. Look again and you realise there is no reversal of images – so no wizardry with reflection is involved. The transfer lettering on the door of business hours remains constantly correctly aligned. The doors are made of metal, wood, cardboard, paint, paper and glass. Close inspection shows that each one is different.

On one level this is a bizarre pun on art world accessibility, on the desire for comprehension on the part of the public, and the need for exposure on the part of the artist. However visually it is complex; but easy to grasp – and even enthralling with its wit. By the street front leans out a piece of smashed window glass that seems dangerous and lethal at leg height. It is not, being safe behind an outer plane of glass which is very hard to see.

This great, mischievous work can be admired 24 hours a day. I imagine it will attract a lot of attention. Right now, Fiona Connor is the toast of the town.