Around the Window

Anya Henis: Soft rocks stainer
Window, University of Auckland Library foyer
24 February – 25 March 2010

We have here something admirably unusual for Window, an impressionistic abstract wall drawing by Henis that is an installation around and in the Window gallery 'box'. It has been made with what looks like coloured ink, but with spaced apart lines that have been brushed on. The artist has used only the three primary hues (i.e. paint primaries, not light) and this has been applied directly on the wall at the back of the gallery ‘proper’, and the two walls on each side  –  one adjacent to the wide stairs going up to the library; the other on the side of the courtyard and Alfred Street.

Before I describe the work in more detail, let’s speculate over the contextual information Henis has provided. Her poster (see above) shows a dozen eleven-sided polygons containing what seems to be marbling from Victorian book covers or pages. The title? I know I’ll be accused of having a one-track mind but I reckon testicles. What else can ‘soft rocks’ be? And a penis is ‘the stainer’.

So we have (despite Foucault’s opposite view) the repressive Victorians and the randy permissiveness of our current age: poster and title together as opposites. A sort of oxymoron

In a leaflet available on the gallery wall Henis publishes a poem:

Soft rocks stainer
a sound from one to the other

strokes of the sun
stream through glass
in layers of incandescent tone

waves of restlessness

throw your words away and practice keeping secrets

freedom forms
everything at once and all the time

It’s pretty oblique isn’t it? Or is it? Let’s describe the painted drawing. It uses a vocabulary of five sorts of mark spread out like an ancient cave painting. They don’t compose as such, but are dissipated and unconnected. They are quickly applied, and so not sensitively considered in their application, as say her paperworks are.

First of all there are the fainter and smaller, yellow vertical or diagonal curves that look like eyebrow hairs. These are usually aligned in thick vertical configurations that mainly are, by themselves, under the window that faces outside. (Perhaps these are strokes of the sun…stream through glass. Perhaps even a reference to John Donne’s The Sun Rising.) There are also a few on the opposite wall adjacent to the library.

Then there are the same sort of vertical ‘hairy’ mark constellations but in blue – found mainly on the library wall and a few on the righthand end of the gallery Window backwall.

Thirdly there also is a scattering of small blue dots under the window facing out.

Fourthly there is a much heavier variety of dark blue line that looks like inverted eyebrows. They gather in groups mainly near the top edge of the ‘library’ wall and separate more and more moving down. There is definitely a wave like quality present, not only literally but also in a sense of increasingly urgent dynamic. (waves of restlessness)

Lastly there are some bright red squiggles, short single twisting lines a bit like the edge of a mouth – scattered along the library and Window walls.

So what can we make of all this – the whole thing, the total package?

Well there do seem to be coital references here, and orgasmic ones too – especially in coordination with the ‘stream’ ‘strokes’ ‘waves’ and ‘secrets’ of the poem. But talking about it like this seems pretty crass. Yet Henis doesn’t seem to be a prankster or provocateur. The work is a serious project. And the drawing does appear preoccupied with the body as scattered floating repeated fragments - resulting from a process that seems unfinished or unresolved.

It is an interesting failure I think - this spatial experiment on three planes with coloured lines. The squiggly marks don’t draw you in to their surfaces and the dynamic overall is almost incoherent. Yet it is an exciting thing to attempt and I admire Henis's courage. It’s great to use these walls, so hopefully it is the start of more spatial experimentation to come.

Brilliantly evocative

Florence Wild & Clara Chon: Waterfront morals / Fatherly functions
Window, AU library foyer
23 December 2009 - 19 February 2010

In this exhibition within the narrow but high glassed-off gallery of Window there are three main items presented for scrutiny. One is a hessian mat draped across two low trestles or saw-horses. Stitched into it in different shades of green thread (for different walls) is the floor plan of a possibly Romanesque, rectangular fortress. We can see it has only one doorway at one end of the stone construction and regularly positioned buttresses going up the outside. The internal space is taken up by a complex maze, turning around the inner space so that the ‘target’ in the very centre is a long oblong hallway.

Another object is suspended from the ceiling on a hanger, and is perhaps a more mysterious and overt fetish item: a black woman’s top. It is covered with diagonal rows of pinned on silver safety pins - hundreds of them, all overlapping. Identifiable as a Punk fashion accoutrement it could be an oblique reference to Giovanni Intra’s famous studded suit. A type of armour that is both contemporary and medieval, it is a chain mail version of ‘cool’ perhaps.

The third item is a pair of austere hand-painted posters, not identical, stating the title of the musical revue ‘Jacques Brel is alive and living in Paris.’ They are positioned on the right-hand transparent end wall, over some of the vertical fluorescent tubes that illuminate the show.

So these three elements, what do they concoct when combined together? How do they relate to the show’s enigmatic title which seems to be about generational conflict?

The two sculptures allude to inaccessibility - unassailability perhaps – resulting from the separation caused by geographic, chronological and generational distance. Military and psychological protection is a murky metaphor mixed in with the stretch in taste between music and theatre from different decades – along with a smearing reference to ethical responsibility.

However you might speculate on their meaning, these intriguing exhibits work well collectively. A fine, nicely resonating exhibition at Window.

Geological museum window

Finn Ferrier: Basalt and Asphalt
Window
9 October - 5 November 2009

Though Finn Ferrier in his art works tends to present himself as an earnestly zealous rock hound/archaeologist there is a lovely gentle humour throughout this installation in Window, adjacent to the Auckland University Library foyer entrance. While he as avid collector seems to like to obsess over the origin, movement and use of quarried mineral types around the Auckland region, assiduously labelling for his own museum in tiny white print the original location and time of finding for each geological sample, he also loves to mix into his table top display unexpectedly ludicrous ingredients.

These include a ‘rock candy’ sugar stick, a packet of yellow ‘river rocks’ – coloured gravel for aquaria, a ‘rock key holder’ still unopened, thermal mud soap, and packets of ‘collectable’ rocks for junior learners. Plus pieces of broken orange indicator-light glass, metal bottle tops, bits of wooden post, bits of coloured soft chalk, chunks of pebble encrusted tar, slices of concrete pipe – even a stone with a broken match on top of it, both securely wrapped in Gladwrap. There is also a sign, written in grey stones, expressing some homespun, optimistic folk philosophy.

Ferrier’s peculiar jokes, besides generating an initial gut-level response of laughter, can also be a quieter meditation on the nature of collecting as a compulsive drive – a magpielike, driven action of reflex that demonstrates the constant need to pick things up while moving around a city.

His wooden table is flanked by two spiky pot plants, while on the floor are several open flat wooden boxes crammed with match boxes bearing more smaller samples. The trays raise questions of classification, of how Ferrier stores and orders these samples – sorting them through place of origin, or place found, geological type, time when picked up, colour, texture, or functional use maybe.

Window here is turned into an amateur science and history museum, an outpost you might find in a small remote township, a rural display with no fancy technological gizmos, just sorted artefacts or natural objects. Something unexpected that sparks off your curiosity - that gets you to start making connections.

Looped to shred, shred to loop

Daniel Webby: For to all those who have, more will be given, and they will have an abundance; but from those who have nothing, even what they have will be taken away.
Window
31 July – 28 August 2009

This onsite installation by Daniel Webby in the foyer of the university library walks a sort of high-wire act between the conceptually rich text he has carefully prepared, and the gallery’s online work by Michael Kontopoulos (Removal Studies) - where an unseen machine constantly removes bedding from a sleeping figure, the machine's creator.

In the narrow Window gallery space Webby has constructed an upright headless torso from wire netting and white plastic shopping bags. It has upraised arms and is standing in a pile of shredded paper. For Webby, this is a clumsily made sculpture - one that is heavy-handed compared to say his ACFA installation last year or the earlier work he made with Boris Dornbusch for Room 103 – but it is funny, in a grim black sense, with its references to mindless wastage.

It raises the question of the relationship between the slivers of paper and the figure. Is the paper from the absent head, or from other figures destroyed by a rapidly encroaching virus? Maybe it is from Kontopoulos’s bed.

Webby’s takeaway text – which is partially shredded - discusses three elements of research:

Firstly, sociologist Robert Merton’s interest in self-perpetuating, snowballing systems of economic and cultural capital that favour the advantaged and which he links to the Biblical quote from Matthew that is the title for this show.

Secondly, new types of influenza that prey not on the weak but the healthy, that have a feedback looping system where a pathogenic virus can feed on immune systems that strengthen instead of weakening it.

Thirdly, David Bohm’s attempt to blend recent quantum notions of subject-dependent strategies of observing matter with earlier Newtonian subject-object principles, by inventing the verb form the rheomode. This concept incorporates movement in thinking and has the verb itself, not nouns, determining declensional structuring.

Webby’s project looks like it is based on a predetermined narrative about looping that determines his imagery. His Window display is not as complicated (or as satisfying - to me anyway) as his earlier work, though his notes replace visual complexity with semantic layering. An unusual show.

Placing trust

A.D. Schierning: Honesty
Window
University of Auckland Library entrance
April 17 – May 15 2009

This beautifully made little display stand – with a cute little box-roof to keep the goods dry - is cobbled together from sawn up lengths of lichen-covered planks. It presents cans and pottles of herbs and growing veges for sale in the library foyer, in front of the gallery ‘window’. Initially it had several jars of delicious looking jams and chutneys on offer, but by the time I got to see it they had been taken, one assumes (one hopes) with appropriate financial recompense placed in the honesty box.

While this interactive sculpture is part of a wider project involved with helping starving artists, it is intriguing to see the word ‘honesty’ used in an art world context. Often it seems it is the socially circulated ‘story’ about the art that counts (eg the ODS Pivi goldfish work) and if dishonesty perpetuates that aim, then dishonesty will do. Okay, I’m now starting to sound like a cracked record…

On a red gingham table cloth on the bench top, Schierning has stitched a very clear message to the buyer: give all that you can; take only what you need.

I imagine her thinking probably goes something like this: please don’t exploit my trust by ripping me off to profit yourself through resale or hoarding of these products. If you genuinely don’t have much money I am happy to accept a small amount. This is not a commercially viable enterprise but an artwork where I am gracious enough to gift you a certain amount of my costs in preparing these products, in return for your needed social involvement. Enjoy the food by participating in this project, but acquire it knowing you have a clear conscience.

It would be interesting to find out how just honest A.D.Schierning’s student audience in fact is - when the sums are done and the remaining stock tallied after the show has finished. Did great quantities of jam or relish disappear without financial acknowledgement? Perhaps some buyers were excessively generous, contributing funds without even taking anything? It would be good to discover if firm conclusions could be established either way. After all the show is entitled ‘honesty’, so a final appraisal does seem a natural thing to do.

Menzies show

Louise Menzies: Gut Feeling
Window
12 March - 10 April 2009

As teaching aids go the hinged particle board stand with four legs looks striking in the Window space. Normally it supports pinned up sheets of paper to be written or drawn on by a teacher – as Menzies’ preparatory collaged drawing above shows – but this time it presents one piece of light canvas on which are positioned 21 soft black fabric letters, cut out in solid caps. Nicely proportioned, they look good. The words they say: HISTORY LOSES ITS APPEAL.

That aphorism has a Jenny Holzer ring to it. It could almost be a ‘Truism.’ It has a witty layered quality that draws out different nuances.

History loses its attraction to any student who might study it. History is on trial and has lost its case. History that once spoke only of a Eurocentric master narrative has lost its credibility. Losing this credibility has helped history regain its appeal.

The phrase swirls around, weaving in and out all the implications that post-colonialism brings to bear on a once rigidly orthodox account of past narratives. It frees the way for overlapping but parallel clusters of new histories. Ones where words transmute: His Story becomes Her Story; Lose Loosens; Appeal becomes A Peel, A Peal. A celebration of a new order.

In the above drawing Menzies has a sheet of newspaper positoned under the upper green sheet. Her project extends that newspaper to the Library's Level 1 with the journal and periodical collection. Two flyers bearing the same four words again, at each end of a shelf. They prod us to examine the contents of that shelf: the printed discussions' staying power, their appeal.

Not remotely feral

Various Artists …Continued
Raised by Wolves performance
(Windows) Auckland University Clocktower
Monday 2 March, 6 pm

It was good to see Raised by Wolves do a work in Auckland, as I had missed a much earlier Newcall gig. This time they presented work in the beautiful neo-Gothic Clocktower of Auckland University.

Amy Howden-Chapman and Biddy Livesey presented a well-researched lecture on the history of that particular building, built in 1921-26. They also spoke about the university itself, especially as seen from the tower windows. Immaculately polished in their delivery, indeed like university lecturers, they told anecdotes on how the edifice was perceived, and how the university (and also the wider Auckland community) has subsequently changed over the years.

Their very accessible lecture lasted about twenty-five minutes and then was deliberately disrupted by noisy visitors with a ghetto-blaster coming up the stairs. The end was formalised by the scrolling up of blinds at the top of the building to reveal children’s drawings on transparent sheets, an image of a geodesic dome and – in true primary school teacher fashion - a scattering of gold stars. (Remember this is the generation of ‘Don’t Misbehave!’, and ‘Mostly Harmless.’)

As it is typical of performance artists of this vintage, no irony was intended. And here I have a gripe. I appreciate its professional finesse and energy, but find it too earnest and ‘goody-two-shoes’. What I think of as ‘Sunday School Teacher Art’. Conceptually dull as an idea for an artwork, and drearily wholesome and worthy in tone. And with more than a whiff of privilege. Take a look at Raised By Wolves' webpage here... ‘they have five university degrees between them.’ Says it all.

In a silent way

Tahi Moore, Kate Newby: Run!
Window
23 November - 28 January 2009

Moore and Newby are two well known Gambia Castle artists. Moore seems particularly interested in the ambiguities of the reconstructed moving image, and Newby, the spatial and corporeal possibilities of 'treated' found or given form.

For this collaboration we see stretched across the inside of the plate glass window of the university gallery, a large rectangular piece of translucent muslin, stained with yellow and red blobs. It is similar to the suspended screen in Newby’s August ‘Thinking with your Body’ Gambia Castle exhibition.

Behind it, on a monitor discretely placed to one side, screens a looped, silent video in slow motion – presumably made by Moore. It shows two male figures (occasionally a woman replaces one of them), dressed in black, chatting about what they come across as they walk around the public spaces of an inner city area. The image is blurred by the milky material, though you can peek through a small gap on the far left side to see the screen from an angle.

The show is about thwarting the viewer’s desire for clarity and assessable meaning. The obstructing painted fabric screen seems to serve several purposes.

Firstly as a symbol for cultural mediation when attending generally to art, it denies ‘the innocent eye’, representing other sources of ‘pertinent’ or ‘necessary’ knowledge such as conversations, essays, wall labels, magazines, books etc.

Secondly it represents mood shifts and fluctuating abilities to concentrate, on the part of the viewer. Looking at energy levels, not knowledge sources. Also, its unique marks can stand for the problems of a particular experience – as presented by this exhibition only. The contingent nature of this library foyer encounter on one particular day.

For all that, this installation is not a satisfying experience. Its obliqueness is clearly deliberate. It is also a poor show, one that seems insufficiently thought through. It is not that it is difficult; it is that it lacks structure, and needs more coherence. The painted fabric and the narrative of the video seem so disconnected, that any linking logic is doomed to remain vague. Yet such logic is implied but not underlined. It doesn’t convince, or even wish to.

As artworks go, Ash Kilmartin’s wall essay on the silence of a portrait of a mime (poirot) is a far more resolved project, beautifully executed but not helpful for those looking at Run! A sceptic might argue Kilmartin's involvement is a smart-aleck joke about detective stories and Agatha Christie, but that is excessively cynical (like a novel with its last page ripped out) and convoluted. The essay is not integrated into being part of Run’s discussion, but remains separate. That's a pity, but is a common situation for galleries like Window and Newcall, where provided texts often undermine and not assist comprehension of the presented artwork.

Devouring envelope

Sonya Lacey: From what position do you speak and in the name of what or whom?
Window, Auckland University Library foyer
16 October - 14 November 2008.

Recent Elam graduate, Sonya Lacey, is normally associated with sculpture or drawings, so this interactive, conceptual project is unusual. The title implies an interest in the political positioning of the viewer through their background demography – economic status, race, gender, education, sexual orientation and so on – looking at characteristics of privilege and power relationships within the Window audience and examining what they might assume about themselves in relation to the wider community.

Yet ostensibly, at first glance, her project is more about public speaking as a performative skill, sourcing material from various online questionnaires in teaching programmes to form questions which when answered, feed into the Window project and shape it. You yourself, if you wish, can click into the online component here and participate by answering the twenty or so questions.

In the Window gallery there is no direct reference to the online questionnaire, only a large papier maché ball on the floor and a stack of essays in the foyer by Cherie Lacey (The artist’s sister perhaps?) Her wordy meandering text centres around Emmanuel Levinas’ ideas on face–to–face encounters, while exploring the anthropological notion of ‘the gift’ as presented to the artist, a theme that vaguely continues within the online project, with the free use of other people’s questionnaires, and the reader’s possible contribution to her project. Basically though, the work seems to be this dull and indulgent essay - not what is in the gallery – that hogs the spotlight.

In other words the frame is the art in this show. The contextualising supporting material has usurped the exhibit. What was the footnote has gobbled up the essay, smacked its lips with a quiet burp, and caused the art to disappear, only to take its place. Like a cuckoo in a sparrow’s nest.

See what you make of the online questionnaire? Though hardly riveting, it is more absorbing than the gallery project. Only slightly.

What is interesting is the existence of galleries like Window, and how non-art students using the library might feel about such esoteric presentations. They probably, like me, believe in knowledge for knowledge’s sake, and that – as in any field - experimental research, no matter how inaccessible or dry, is a good thing. However it is only a small community that enjoys this kind of practice and its very public presence in the foyer probably antagonises the rest, turning off any empathy they might have hitherto had for art.

There is a case that this ostrich-like attitude is damaging, this confrontational stance that deliberately ignores an opportunity to win a new audience. It prefers to waste it in favour of an agonistic rhetoric that only a few highly educated extremists will understand and where there is no artwork at all to be considered. Only family musings.

A beautiful thing

Things that you didn’t know you were enjoying: John Ward Knox and Fiona Gillmore
Window, foyer of the Auckland University Library
31 July – 23 August 2008-08-02

Fiona Gillmore and John Ward Knox present here – away from Newcall - a striking combination of stridency and understated subtlety, a complex collaborative display complicated further with auxiliary texts from Knox and Fiona Connor. Connor writes about Gillmore and Knox’s project (‘A willingness to work together is a beautiful thing a willingness to listen is too’), and Knox’s text is a meditation on the title as applied to listening to music.

Gillmore uses thick, dark blue, vertical stripes on a white wall, vaguely like Buren or Dashper, not referencing awning as a metaphor for shelter (as you could suspect) but providing an optical code for a vertical figure walking up the adjacent steps towards the library entrance. There the same blue can be found discreetly on sliding doors, windows and lined shelves. The stroboscopic mural tinkers with the walker’s sideways glance, ensnaring their peripheral vision and synchronizing it with their peripatetic movement. It plays with memory processes while they are in the library and while they are leaving the building, or returning.

Gillmore’s contribution might be visually punchy but Knox’s you can barely see. It consists of a line of very thin necklace chain coming from opposite ends of the glass pane’s bottom edge, meeting in the centre of the floor and held off in mid-air by springy wire. This very clever work implies the chain is around the viewer’s neck and they are being pulled into the exhibit. It creates a hilarious ideational tension where the viewer’s head is being yanked towards the gallery while their feet are being propelled straight ahead up the steps. Very smart work indeed.

More barricades

Charles Ninow: Effective Campaign Heroics
Curated by Ash Kilmartin
Window gallery, Auckland University Library entrance
July 9 – July 26 2008

Charles Ninow’s Window exhibition seems to reference Dane Mitchell’s Barricades exhibition at Starkwhite last year (and a little Daniel Malone thrown in as well) - such are its allusions to street barriers and Molotov Cocktails (see online video). The display consists of the glass space loaded up with dozens of paper posters folded into paper bags and filled with air. A cynical comment on revolutionary rhetoric perhaps, especially as barricades are usually made of sandbags (and a photo of some is on the webpage). Air filled bags may be good for bluffing at a distance, but they aren’t going to block bullets or tanks.

The same sarcasm seems prevalent in the video. Shaking a SUMMIT ginger beer bottle with a breadknife in it references petrol bombs, spray paint, and hoons spraying each other with beer. The results though, are only a lot of rattly noise. When the knife slips out to fall on the floor it is termed a ‘breakthrough’. Such spillages happen six times.

The online video and gallery display seem calculatedly vacuous. The latter has a European look about it, especially that of the great French artist Arman, who in the early sixties filled vitrines with consumer items, and sometimes dry rubbish. Just as Piero Manzoni canned and sold his own shit, Ninow with his fake Arman, seems to be provocatively marketing ‘hot air’ as ‘political’ content. Deliberately insubstantial - and adroitly droll at that.