Unitec show

Kathy Barry / Sarah Munro: and happy the world so made
Snowwhite - Unitec
20 March - 17 April 2009

Here we have two artists, a grid-obsessed watercolourist and a relief sculptor who uses industrial spray-lacquering technology, both using diamond-like polygonal forms to investigate a shallow tray-like space. Kathy Barry dominates the exhibtion with five drawings. They are watercolour on ruled pencil on paper – with some holes cut out and a little paper glued on. There only one Munro work in the gallery: a bright red wall relief with many parts. However she has another, a lime green work in one unit - from a different series - outside in the foyer. Though it seems like an after thought, it is the best thing there.

Despite their interest in a common form Munro and Barry have quite different sensibilities. Barry seems to like symmetry and order that can only be reluctantly disrupted, while Munro prefers asymmetry and lopsided spatial disintegration. Barry uses a very limited palette of synthetic (non earth) transparent colour that alternates hot and cold to code and organise her modules within a larger holding pattern. Munro is more chromatically nuanced. Despite her chosen limitations using saturated sprayed layers applied to planes and edges to optically accentuate her fibreglass and wood forms, what at first glance seems all glossy red, soon becomes various tonally controlled browns, purples, and siennas.

Barry’s best drawings are Wood in the centre of one room, and Everyday Daylight, by itself in another. They let a lot of airy white paper surround the solid, petal-like diamond forms that bisect each 2:3 proportioned, horizontal rectangle, so they float radiantly in a clear interconnecting space. These configurations act as a foil to another finer grid system of much smaller horizontal and vertical strips that is less conspicuous and which flickers like a delicate Piet Mondrian/Rita Angus hybrid, peeking through from behind vertical trickles of green and red watercolour dribbling down from above.

Barry’s other drawings are a bit formulaic and rigid but the two mentioned move towards an attractively causal loosey-goosiness - even a relaxed unpredictability. Having said that, of the two Munros the horizontal, single unit, green work inside the vitrine in the hall is preferable to the meandering ‘wild’ wall work of the gallery. It is compact in its blocklike but curved form, somehow condensed though of little weight, and astonishing in its glowing chroma. It has a steady inner light that draws you back. Delicious colour that is enhanced by the nuances of its sensitive contours. Almost disembodied. A real treat.

Admirable Russian idiocy

Gluklya & Tsaplya (Factory of Found Clothing): The Greatest Idiot in New Zealand
Snowwhite (Unitec): 9 March - 20 March 2009
MIC Toi Rerehiko 7 March - 18 April 2009

Marcus Williams, the lecturer and curator at Unitec has done Auckland a real service in bringing out these two Russian women to introduce us to their Neo-Marxist and feminist interventionist practice. The last time we had Russian artist visitors was when Greg Burke brought Brodsky and Utkin to Wellington's City Gallery in 1992. So now, with this their utopian project that encourages peace and harmony, Gluklya and Tsaplya function in a littoral way, with one foot just barely touching the art community (like a tag-wrestler’s corner) and the other more firmly in the much larger ‘life world’ (the ring). It is so ambitious.

I’m also impressed by the thoroughness of this Unitec - MIC collaboration and how the two exhibitions both need to be seen for the whole project to be understood. (The Snowwhite show has far too short a duration.)

Now personally, and here is a point of contention, unlike these utopian, vehemently political artists, I don’t believe art has to be compassionate or ‘on the side of the weak.’ I’m not saying it shouldn’t, only that moral behaviour and good art don’t always march to the beat of the same drum. I accept that wonderful artists can be morally dubious. They don’t have to be noble. They can even be despicable – and so be deserving of derisive comment for their actions as people. However I see personal behaviour and private beliefs as separate from quality in art. Some artists – like Lena Riefenstahl, have done amazing work that had evil consequences. Great thinkers like Heidegger and de Man wrote dreadful things at certain periods of their lives, yet their contributions to the history of philosophical debate live on. When Gluklya and Tsaplya say ‘Compassion is an understanding of the weakness of others’, and we apply it to artists, that is exactly right.

Okay, the shows. Each has two parts. One focuses on The Idiot project in Auckland; the other on contextual material that sheds light on the modus operandi of the Factory of Found Clothing. In Snowwhite that is a display of modified women’s clothing made in Russia and not for sale, and in MIC it’s a selection of terrific, surprisingly entertaining videos.(The ones with the marching sailors and posing businessmen holding white dresses show just how persuasive these artists can be.)

The Auckland project is centred on finding somebody comparable with Dostoevsky’s Prince Myshkin, somebody who is totally forgiving, selflessly compassionate, and magnanimously generous to all. (Sounds impossible doesn't it?) All five nominated individuals who made up a short list from which one was to be chosen, are highly esteemed because of their openhearted community service, but are not necessarily innocent of the ways of the world like Myshkin.

So which one of the five was voted to be the ultimate, the ‘greatest’ Idiot? A community worker, Ivy Smith, won for her care of multi-cultural youth in New Lynn, and so she has a 'minishow' in MIC where she discusses her work, personal background, and what motivates her. The organisation she is linked to will receive the proceeds from sales of garments donated by the four other finalists, and proceeds from other sales from the Utopian Shop at Snowwhite. These articles of clothing have been modified by the artists and their helpers with stitched symbolic emblems, printed fabric photographs and personal motifs like tattoos. Her own modified garments will also be gifted to her.

There is something quite fascinating about these Russian intellectuals committed to building a better world by incorporating methods that sometimes suggest white magic and very ancient ritual. The Russian garments on display at Snowwhite are intriguing - even hilarious - with sewn on ambiguous references to sex and motherhood (such as nipples/teats or phalluses/rusks), or working groups in factories and families (with photographs or stitched on newspaper clippings).

Yet for me, it is not the social value or moral worthiness of the endeavour that makes it good art (such questions about it as ‘art’ are irrelevant to its pragmatics anyway) but the clever organisation of its interlocking components on different sites, the humour and energy of the clothes and video, and the depth of the knowledge and passion behind the project. We have so little involvement with Russian art anyway (if that is what it is?) so it is a great chance to see what the Unitec residency can do. Explore both venues if you can.

UNITEC show

Kirstin Carlin, Michael Harrison: Destination
Snowwhite, Unitec School of Design
20 October - 14 November 2008

In the two narrow rooms of Snowwhite gallery are eight Michael Harrison acrylic-on-paper works, and six oil paintings by Kirstin Carlin; alternating in small groups. They are an odd couple, Harrison and Carlin, brought together by Snowwhite’s curator Mary-Louise Browne: his delicately precise edges and gently mottled surfaces acting as a foil for her ragged contours and under-painted, broadly-brushed streaks.

Harrison is the more accomplished artist by far, judging his intimate scale carefully in relation to the carefully aligned, meticulously positioned shapes that he constructs with considerable finesse. With Carlin, the small vistas she creates are often crammed, having no tension with the edges of their modest stretchers. Her symmetrical landscapes are underworked with their thin sweeping strokes, though one asymmetrical image of woods around a lake is better because of its isolated, vibrant squiggles for trees. Of her selection, her paintings of castles work best due to her weaving together of perpendicularly opposed brush strokes. They have a sense of controlled construction that her blander landscapes lack.

Where symmetry fails for Carlin it succeeds for Harrison. Because brushstrokes are not his subject-matter, he can pull his audience in close and not need to make largish works. He concentrates on perfecting nuances of shape so that birds in the sky become logos - like out of a Batman movie – as if positioned in front of the moon.
Harrison creates psychological drama in the tradition of the Siennese painter Sassetta, with divine signs in the sky, but using a modernist simplicity.