Hoist that rag

Mladen Bizumic: From Cube to Ball (Chapter 1)
Sue Crockford
2 February 2010 - 27 February 2010

One of the distinctive characteristics of the practice of Mladen Bizumic, a salient feature that underpins almost everything he does, is an interest in modernist architecture and its history. He loves examining pavilions and civic spaces, and combining images that by themselves are quite dry and clinically analytical, with other elements like music, that are emotionally stirring. Often there is an attempted balancing act going on.

For example, his last show at Crockford’s of European photographs, presented in deliberately reflective glass to include the New Zealand viewer, was dry and somewhat distant. But the work he has in the Chartwell Collection, with its video of digital drawings of Little Barrier Island, is blended with a stirring soundtrack of a slowed-down, orchestrated version of The Rolling Stones song Under My Thumb that always aurally dominates any gallery it is presented in.

The current Crockford show has a similar tension between emotional immediacy and cool cerebral logic and focuses on Bizumic’s admiration for Ernst Plischke, the Austrian émigré who was one of New Zealand’s first modernist architects and theoreticians, living here between 1939 and 1964. It is the first of three exhibitions Bizumic is having looking at this architect, the others being in Wellington and Vienna.

There are four works, starting with an unprepossessing framed pencil rubbing, by the gallery entrance, that was taken from the inaugural stone for Massey House (1957), Wellington’s first skyscraper. It shows the words ‘NZ Meat’ and ‘Plischke and Firth Architects’ peeking through the scribbled lines.

Satin and Air Composition looks at first glance to be a very large ‘seam’ drawing by Pip Culbert, until you realise it is a ‘soft’ floor plan of an apartment, meticulously constructed out of coloured ribbon and pinned up on the wall. With black satin ribbons for walls, parallel white lines for doors, black and white lines together for windows, and a grid of red linear squares for floor tiles, it is based on one of Plischke’s Dixon Street Flats that he designed with Gordon Wilson in 1947. Its sagging wobbly lines make it humorous and vulnerable and like some kind of bizarre and very flimsy national flag that oddly enough, looks incredibly beautiful.

The main work is a sound installation which references five coloured lamp shades Plischke designed for St. Martin’s Church in Christchurch. The blue, red and green plastic shades hang in an intriguing entangled cluster from the ceiling, but instead of bulbs Bizumic has positioned inside them audio speakers that intermittently play native bird song: in sequence and also overlapping. These twittering and chiming bird calls have been transcribed to sheet music by composer Hermione Johnson, but like the frottage by the front door, they are not very exciting visually – being coded for aural not ocular sensation.

In Crockford’s back room are two small shelves holding silver framed, black and white collages of interiors from Massey House. The added overlaid fragments are either prismatic or circular, play with and subvert the initial austerity of the space, and are seductively intimate in the way they draw you in, though I find the metallic framing too chilling.

Bizumic’s Dixon St Flat floor plan is the killer work in this show, being loaded with more ambiguities and cross connections than the sound or photographic pieces. Its flag-like quality is especially compelling because it can be seen as an espousal of Bourdieu’s notion of ‘distinctive’ taste as a political act for defining class superiority; how we surround ourselves with objects (that includes spaces where we live) in order to construct an identity. I’m mentally riffing here for sure, improvising on aspects the artist probably hasn’t intended, but the ribbon drawing as a ‘flapping’ extrapolation of modernist house design turned into a skeletal pennant is an interpretative notion I find perversely appealing.

Positioning this, placing that

Collage: Mladen Bizumic, Ava Seymour, Richard Maloy, John Nixon, Gordon Walters
Sue Crockford
16 September - 3 October 2009

Collage is one of those techniques we tend to think of as a classic twentieth century method of image construction, but the fact that the Victorians were also entertained by it hints at its flexibility as an application for many different mind sets. This show presents several approaches, most as finished objects for contemplation, but not all.

With Gordon Walters it was an aid for visualising the planned musicality or rhythmic cadences of a koru composition, a means of mentally grasping vertical, horizontal, or diagonal formal connections, and their cumulative weight. Collage for him grew out of his early passion for Surrealism but became not the final artwork but a stage in a process that led to a later more polished result. Placement and scale were gradually worked on simultaneously.

Ava Seymour’s expertise focuses on collages that are constructed in order to be photographed. With the current work her nuances of edge are crucial: tiny shapes harboured inside the scalpel incised contours are formed by overlaid pieces cut out of furnishing or fabric catalogues. While there are delicate textural, patterned and tonal contrasts going on internally, it is along the perimeter, where colour meets the white background field that things get really interesting. Your eye scoots around the edge like a racetrack, enjoying each new corner or projecting bump it encounters.

Richard Maloy, like Seymour, is a gifted photographer, but how his images of improvised sculpture, using his own body with silver foil, fit in here I’m not sure. They don’t appear to be collage at all - whereas Mladen Bizumic’s images for example (on another wall) of sky inside strings of triangular pennants floating in front of Mies van der Rohe buildings are Photoshopped. They definitely have a collage sensibility.

Collage is normally linked to the substance of paper, but because of its twentieth century tradition that developed from Schwitters through Rauschenberg and others, that particular material has been replaced by other possibilities. Collage, it might be argued, is now more about a certain attitude to space, pictorial or real. Jessica Stockholder is a good example of this.

The fifth artist at Crockford's, John Nixon, has paintings from his Experimental Painting Workshop that are often with no added paper. Instead they incorporate other evocative materials like plastic packaging or aluminium strips. These, combined with his buoyant orange panels that allude to early modernism, help create a seductive physicality.

I just can’t imagine contemporary art, literature, or music existing without collage. It is a fundamental disposition inherent in most practice that accentuates the propensity for play - via juxtaposing various properties (semantic or formal) of materials. Since Freud we have been aware of its similarities with dreams, and the pleasures (or terrors) of being surprised by unforeseen connections. Artists who ignore such portable intricacies of placement are almost nonexistent.

(In descending order: Seymour (2),Walters(2), Maloy, Bizumic, Nixon. The Gordon Walters koru collage above (fourth down) is not in the show. However it is a good example of this stage in his painting process.)

Interconnected reflections

Mladen Bizumic: Global Truths vs Local Reflections
Crockford
31 March - 25 April 2009

This exhibition of seven coloured photographs by Mladen Bizumic is interesting because of his determination to avoid them being seen as separate, unconnected, discrete objects. Like many other artists like say Tahi Moore (with several simultaneously playing videos) or Sam Rountree Williams (with works of other artists in close proximity to his own paintings) he is keen to merge his work with new environs. He has deliberately put super reflective glass over his images so that the rest of the room the work is presented in, gets visually mixed into them.

The images from the gallery site above, show this well. But optically, it is like sprinkling a handful of sand into your sandwich before eating it. It destroys the singular framed images. Makes them unpalatable. You automatically ignore the artist’s eccentric subversions and position your body so that the calculated irritations are minimised. You reflexly move so you can examine the photographed images clearly.

What Bizumic tries to do in the gallery space he also does with the catalogue. Seven quotations about ‘Truth and Perception’ are presented as a numbered list so their meanings, out of context, bleed into each other as well. And into your thinking about the images positioned before you. Perhaps.

Bizumic calls the photographs Global Truths, in contradistinction to the Local Reflections in situ component of the Crockford space. Of course this is art and art has little to do with truth. It is all about contrivance, and truth has a separate imperative. The seven photographs though – in isolation - make excellent viewing. They look slightly Culbert-like, are all C Prints and are only distinguished by a number each. No other information.

One image (#50) is of a row of double stacked storage containers positioned on the edge of a young beech forest. These green, blue and white metal boxes have windows and are obviously people’s homes hidden away out of sight. Next to that is (#7) a foreshortened facade of what seems to be an Italian building with a fake brick pattern delineated by deep troughs. The oblongs are covered with large pit marks, small craters eroding the tilework. The two images seem to be about functionality and decoration in architecture, and related ethics of housing.

On the main Crockford wall are four photographs. On the left, one (#3) shows three large pumpkins placed on a flimsy table in the middle of an overgrown back yard – solid golden forms that dominate the delapidated setting. In contrast to food: on the far right a green screw-on bottletop from an absent drinking bottle is balanced on a rusting steel girder (#25). Between the two above images is a shot of an empty, cavelike, storage shed built into an earth bank (#44), and a beautiful evening view (#26) of two advertising hoardings silhouetted in the half-light, facing each other across a silent motorway.

Separate in isolation on its own opposite wall, the last image (#77) shows a chair-o-plane, swinging seats with people in them photographed from below, rotating on thin chains attached to twelve points on a whirling star. Tucked into the bottom left-hand corner of a square pale blue sky, we have here a symbol, a cosmology of planets revolving around a giant sun, all orbiting parts interconnected, each component aware of all others.

Here is a contribution from Rhondda Bosworth about a New Gallery show.

In Shifting Light
Curated by Ron Brownson
New Gallery
8 October 2008 - 12 April 2009

This stimulating show, using mostly paintings from the collection of the Auckland City Art Gallery, explores the concept of landscape as both external and internal. The show’s curator, Ron Brownson asserts “. . . the differences between interior and exterior space affect what we contemplate as landscape.” This curatorial concept is useful because of its potential for inclusiveness. Almost any artwork can be described as a “landscape” in these terms. In Shifting Light gives us an opportunity to see some fine works.

I enjoyed the room containing paintings by Charles Goldie, Petrus van der Velden, James Nairn and Raymond McIntyre. These vintage works, of landscapes in the orthodox sense, were all wonderful paintings that grabbed my attention. My favorites were Charles Goldie’s The story of the Arawa canoe (c 1938) a tiny painting of great beauty executed on a cigar-box lid, Van der velden’s sublime Stormcloud (1907-09) and Raymond McIntyre’s stunning Evening (1905). I have to mention too, the rivetting colour of James Nairn’s Sunset (1903).

McCahon is represented of course, in top form, demonstrating a spirituality that I hope we never take for granted. His iconic works Takaka Night and Day (1948) and A Candle in a dark Room (1947) are most familiar to me as postcards. The latter is simple and modest in form, yet it effortlessly accesses the spiritual self. I couldn’t help comparing its success with Peter Robinson’s visually breathtaking Strategic Plan (1998). Meticulously executed in red, black and white, with a distinctly Maori feel, this large painting could have been so wonderful, but its texts (I could only understand the ones in English), a banal and cynical critique of the chattering classes and the art world, bring this viewer down with a disappointed clunk.

There was a good photography room with works by Daley, Oettli, Morrison, Baigent and Westra, but they are all dwarfed by the power of Ava Seymour’s photo-collages. I must confess there was a time when I couldn’t come to grips with Seymour’s work, but this time they got me round the throat and gave me a good shaking. The works were selected from her series Health, Happiness and Housing (1997) in which beautiful photographs of pastel-coloured state houses are juxtaposed with inhabitants in the grip of horribly visible dementia. Her diptych Exotica (2004) which depicts a sleazy corner of K’ Rd, is a surreal, psychological tour de force.

Other works I appreciated were John Hurrell’s elegantly cryptic Conan’s Head (1989) a large painting in which fragments of maps create an electric psychological energy, and Bill Hammond’s Buller’s Tablecloth (1947) – brilliant, tantalizing, disturbing. I am usually unresponsive to video works, but Mladen Bizumic’s Hauturu doc (with soundtrack Adagio – Under My Thumb by the Rolling Stones) 2003blew me away. A lyrically beautiful work of shifting fabric-like forms that create a land/sea scape, accompanied by achingly sad music, it went straight to the heart.

(Above, images by Seymour, McCahon and Bizumic.)

Welcoming The Ignorant

Mladen Bizumic: Everyone is welcome
Te Tuhi billboard project
13 December – 25 January 2009

An excerpt from Kafka’s posthumously published novel ‘Amerika’ is here repeated in three small hoardings in different languages. Pitched to speakers of English, Maaori and Korean. The source of the quotation is not mentioned in any of them, so they will be taken at face value as advertisements – for that is what they seem. Take a look at the language. Click on the images. It is stirring stuff.

In Kafka’s book Karl Rossman, a poor depressed unemployed immigrant, gets hope by seeing a poster seeking artists for a theatre production. On the fence-lined streets outside Te Tuhi the poster’s text takes on new different meanings and Clayton and Oklahoma become mysterious local places, their whereabouts worth speculating over. They could be newly available housing divisions, or satirical mockeries of American globalisation. There is a hint of menace when we are dramatically told ‘If you miss your chance now you will miss it forever. If you think of the future you are one of us…Down with all those that do not believe in us.’

The text rails against outsiders, those who don’t support the particular community that is speaking and for whom the words are totalitarian propaganda. It offers instant employment for all artists, as long as they enlist ‘by midnight.’ For those readers on the streets of Pakuranga who don’t grasp it is in fact an artwork and part fairytale, and who aren’t aware of its connections with the large building across the road, it offers false hope.

Bizumic is currently residing in Berlin, so he can’t directly observe his impact on his audience. With this clever project he has created a mischief-making - but thoughtful – artwork, one that destroys the barriers between fiction and the 'real' world by changing the physical and conceptual context and so, the readership.