This insidious wraparound…this seamless scroll

Gary Hill, James Casebere, Jude Rae: The Estrangement of Judgement
Jensen
21 July - 22 August 2009

Site recite (a prologue) was one of the highlights of Gary Hill’s wonderful exhibition held at St. Paul St earlier this year but you could only see it on Fridays. Whilst you can see a diminished version online here, that is obviously inferior in image and sound quality. Therefore Andrew Jensen is re-presenting this work in Auckland, as well as shrewdly curating a show from his other artists around it. Rae and Casebere’s rendered images (bird skulls, things on tables, and skull-shaped rooms) resonate with the videoed objects that come in and out of focus on Hill’s jerkily revolving (but constantly filmed) table.

The voice-over is a text written by Hill himself, a superb prose poem about the reflexive nature of consciousness that riffs on aspects of Beckett, Blanchot, Jabès and others in its deliberations. Like Hill’s assorted bones, shells and papers that come in and out of focus, patches are hard to hear, but sonorous with a stagey actor’s delivery (imagine Anthony Hopkins) – superbly recited by Lou Hetler. He has a bit of Irish brogue in his enunciation of Hill’s finely crafted cadences.

In Jensen’s space there is a sense of a homunculus peering out through the eyes of an invisible skull, the outside world (Hill’s video) on one wall (Hetler reads: this insidious wraparound, tied to the notion “I have eyes in the back of my head”, binds me to my double…), and on the opposite back wall Casabere and Rae provide approximate mental simulacra: Rae with assorted industrial objects on a table, Casebere with his skull-domed room symbolising the mind itself - and the space within which it dwells.

Hill’s possibly over-wrought language may seem to be impenetrable but it is not. It perfectly matches the camera work which to and froes between objects, sharpening on their forms for a second or two only to dissolve and then flick on to another. This happening while we hear:

A seamless scroll weaves my view back into place – back to back with itself – the boomerang effect, decapitates any and all hallucinations leaving (lo and behold) the naked eye, stalking each and every utterance that breaks and enters the dormitories of perception.

It celebrates the pleasures of looking at the world with a relish that comes close to voyeurism, creating a parallel internal monologue that takes pleasure in its own existence, gazing at itself and revelling in its own constantly reperpetuated commentary.

Okay, this is heavily cerebral work for sure, but it also is highly sensual, and engaging, as a visit to Jensen’s will easily confirm.

Georgie Hill goes mellow - with spring light

Georgie Hill: Cold Shoulder
Ivan Anthony
24 March - 17 April 2010

Georgie Hill has built up quite a following through the intensity of her tortured symbolism and claustrophobic, 3-walled enclosed spaces, as seen in her two previous shows. Those works had a particular kind of ambience with their dominant blood red and dark hues, but with this new exhibition, the mood changes.

Her new works of bedroom interiors are filled with air, more light, less intense and less Gothic. There are lots of pale blues and greys, and the manner of her highly obsessive drawing with watercolour and faint pencil has altered. There is less sense of mass – though there still remains a characteristic tension between geometric control and enclosed, churning wavelike forms.

These works technically seem to defy genres. They look like some odd printing hybrid with sugarlift blended with a lithographic process, but it is nevertheless predominantly watercolour – only more delicate than before.

That is really saying something, because this work is surprisngly much more fanatically precise now in its linear acuity of strictly positioned hair-thin lines. It is so unbelievable that you wonder if she has used computers, but no, it is all watercolour with the characteristic attendant, petal-like unfolding of blossomy gradated arabesques and tiny rivulets.

Hill’s images are also more narrative and less trope-based now. They are not the expected obscure metonymic symbols, but include more easily recognisable female forms (representing herself) with exposed spinal columns encased in what seem to be violet or sweet pea petals. These signs are less inner or private, having more outer natural–world correlations that are easier to decode. They include domestic furniture such as chests of drawers, items of clothing like plaid shirts, toppled horizontal vases, or posters of Rita Angus exhibitions.As with her earlier shows, there are often little roots wiggling skywards out of the ground, seeking sustenance out of the air.

Like Angus, Hill revels in self-portraiture – not that of facial physiognomy but solely chosen objects in a domestic space. They create a sort of declaration of personal identity, using room as metaphor - infused with a warm spring light. While this exhibition rams home Hill’s technical brilliance with tiny marks and fine lines, and I have gone on about it, that alone cannot make memorable art. Technique is only a small part of any art practice – if at all – for assistants with manual skills can be rented. With Hill the ambiguous forms which seem to change each time you briefly look away, maintain an interpretative richness. They are what keep her imagery hauntingly enigmatic and her stagey interiors compulsive viewing.

Dramatic video installations

Gary Hill: Voice Grounds
Curated by Leonhard Emmerling and the artist
St Paul St
12 March – 24 April 2009

Voice Grounds presents a range of work from the wide-ranging corpus of Gary Hill, a most remarkable, innovative American artist – a video pioneer. In this rare programme of legendary and unusual projects, all are screened on walls; no monitors, or monitor tubes out of their cases – as he has sometimes done – but some split screens, and the sound is impeccable. Individual day screenings are with a single channel in Gallery 2, all week screenings with five channnels - in Gallery 1. Two works on every day.

Here is the list of works arranged chronologically – paralleling the images above:

1984 Why do things get in a muddle? (Come on Petunia) Wed. only
1986 Mediations (Towards a remake of Soundings [1979]) Tues. only
1987-8 Incidence of catastrophe Thurs. only
1989 Site Recite (a Prologue) Fri. only
1995-6 hanD hearD Tues – Sat after April 7
2001,July, Accordians (The Belsunce Recordings) Tues – Sat before April 4
2001 Goats & Sheep (from Withershins [1995]) Sat only

So seven works spread out on different week days are quite difficult to get to. You have to be keen – especially if you don’t work in town – but so you should, they are worth it. Six are currently screening at present. The seventh starts in the second week of April.

The most visceral installation, the five channel Accordians, features the faces and occasional movement of the inhabitants of Belsunce, a city in Algiers. The sound track is loud, random and staccato, very short bursts of sliced up spoken voices. The images of people in the street are similarly brief. They abruptly zoom in and then out: unloading of goods from vans; beggars on the footpath; busy passers by; dense crowds and a lot of faces. There is an all pervading paranoia, a sense of an outsider intruding – maybe a tourist with camera – a mood of hostility. It’s a disturbing, powerful experience.

Site Recite is a particularly carefully and precisely written work that uses Hill’s own slightly Beckett-like text and an actor’s voice. The soothing voiceover reveals a mind examining its own ocular and verbal limitations – literally a ‘head-trip’ scrutinizing its own physiology of senses outwards from within. Meanwhile the camera briefly focuses one at a time on bird skulls, insects, nuts, shells, crystals and unexpected natural objects on a flat round table, searching for parallel visual metaphors in the outer non-body world. We see quick glimpses amidst focussing and unfocussing blurs. Now and then the text and image synchronise. Usually they vaguely overlap, one hovering over the other and not really connecting, yet creating a peculiar haunting beauty.

Incidence of Catastrophe shows us Hill’s interest in Maurice Blanchot, using his novella Thomas the Obscure to riff in a long video about the collapse of the self, a mental breakdown. It dwells on a consciousness that scrutinises the act of reading with close-ups of the turning and scanned pages. It expands on Blanchot’s story, a strange, looping, condensed blend of Edgar Allan Poe and Beckett.

What is interesting about this film and another, Why do Things Get in a Muddle, is how similar they are to aspects of David Lynch’s Twin Peaks TV series, made five years later. A panicking reader running through the ferociously dense, moonlit woods; an animistic gushing river; the bizarre voices and movements of Alice (from ‘Alice in Wonderland’) and her father - these actors had to recite the script backwards while being filmed normally - all seem big influences on Lynch’s brand of filmic surrealism.

Interiority is the main preoccupation of Hill’s in all these works. Inner mental processes, self examination, and how they fit in with our social interaction – if and when that happens - and of course it does. The theme of reflexivity so apparent in Site Recite is made more obvious in Mediations (Towards a Remake of Soundings), where the voiceover comes out of the black flicking speaker being filmed. The commentary describes the artist’s actions (which we see occurring) pouring grains of sand over the undulating cone so that the accumulating layer muffles the sound quality. Oddly, it becomes more distant but then clearer.

In this cross-referencing suite of works the actions of the tongue or gestural movements of clasping, folding or pointing hands often serve as signing devices for language attempting to link signifier with signified, or study itself. The vulnerability of The Self is indicated by collapsing banks of sand worn away by foaming waves, or mouths of molars being picked at by dental probes searching for decay.

Any show of successive video installations like this, featuring such a programme of quality works, is a rare event. Of these dramatic and engrossing St. Paul St presentations, usually it is the shorter ones that are the most haunting (Site Recite, Mediations). Others are particularly intense (Goats and Sheep), if not exhausting (Why are Things in a Muddle). The last, seventh work, a soundless one with five projections, begins on the second Saturday morning in April. For any lover of quality contemporary art, several visits to this very special exhibition are essential.

Hill interiors

Georgie Hill: Watchtower
Ivan Anthony
11 November – 6 December 2008

It is about a year since Georgina Hill’s first show at Ivan Anthony’s. She was in the back rooms that overlook K’ Rd then. Now she is in the front space by the staircase and foyer.

So what has developed in her work? It seems to have got bigger. The pages on which she does her watercolour and graphite drawings are larger now, and there is a more delicate colour sense using a pale blue. With the red less dominant things are less claustrophobic. There is still an odd disjointed spatial sense where the rendered wall-like planes and wavy, unpainted pencilled areas sit uneasily with the picture plane, but there is also a new expansiveness that lets her negative root/veinlike forms wander more over the page.

Hill’s images are totally obsessive and technically fastidious. Now there is a pulsing, rhythmical sense creeping in with the sections of delicately patterned pavingstone shapes, and the more imposing, red, pencil-hatched petal forms. The compositions seem less random and more orchestrated than previously.

With her strange negative wreaths and red heraldic motifs Hill successfully avoids cliché to create something quite individualistic. There is an odd unresolved quality that hints at a continuing process which keeps the work fresh. Nothing is too balanced, yet they don’t look unfinished either. They puzzle with their enigmatic, very private symbolism, while also remaining satisfying.

This artist deserves to be better known for these unusual, intriguing watercolours. Well worth investigating.

Two peas

Christopher L G Hill + more: You can’t steal a gift
Gambia Castle
10 October – 1 November 2008

Spring Catalogue Exhibition
Gow Langsford with John Leech
19 September - 10 October 2008

These two exhibitions might seem worlds apart in terms of ideologies and attitudes to presentation and market - but they are closer than you think. Hugely different in the spending power they aspire to attract, both seem to celebrate a visual shambles in a perverse effort to lure buyers. (One is a stated dealer show; the other is not). Each is a ‘dog’s breakfast’ accompanied by promotional reading material - a purchasable, glossy catalogue from Gow Langsford and a free newsprint poster from Gambia Castle. Like peas in a pod, no one is better than the other. Yet both are hard to take seriously.

But if you insist that one do so, and one also wanted to acquire, then there are intelligently conceived items in each, worth sifting through the ‘detritus’ to seek out.

There is a particularly fine Killeen canvas from the early seventies amongst the selection of mainly wall works at Gow Langsford, a diagonally aligned spine of quivering elongated triangles from a taut ‘Pacific’ design. On the opposite side is an intriguing Simon Ingram canvas made by his daubing, robotic Lego, paint applicator. One work is about visual dynamics and nuanced tension, the other a planar programming that results in the most peculiar of mark alignments and placements. It has an oddity that beguiles.

The ‘Hill and friends’ show at Gambia Castle, a mix and Australian and New Zealand artists, is mostly polystyrene beads, found objects (often discarded clothing and leaf blowers), some publications, bits of trees with shower caps and a couple of paintings rendered directly on to the walls. Visitors are not meant to help themselves to the work, despite the show’s title and Barrett’s essay on the poster.

However there are some treats here too if you look closely. Hill’s tiny image of a tap pouring dollar signs out in a gushing torrent (‘Capitalism is a waste of time [drought of d-beat discourse]’) is surprisingly gripping, while Evergreen Terrace Vol.2#, a folder of articles by Hill, Olivia Barrett and James Deutscher, is a fascinating anthology placed near a chair for easy browsing.

These exhibitions look awful. Some shambolic shows can still exude intelligence, but not so here. The disorder for Gambia Castle is calculated – a pinch of humour mixed with a lot of rhetoric - but for Gow Langsford it is more apathy.

Eight plus one painters

Cloud 9
Curated by Jennifer Hay
Christchurch Art Gallery
29 August - 29 November 2009

This is a very odd selection of new painters picked from up and down the country, nine as the title says, all apparently sharing a common state of euphoria. Yet Elliot Collins, Mike Cooke, Ruth Thomas Edmond, Georgie Hill, Eileen Leung, Marie Le Lievre, Tim Thatcher, Telly Tu’u and Pete Wheeler collectively make up a very mixed bag. There is little stylistic cohesion.

Looking at the nine artists: Pete Wheeler contributes two vultures whirling in space, snapping at each other in a frenzied duel; Elliot Collins has a large text suspended over a cloudy backdrop; Eileen Leung, some multi-component, coloured Perspex and delicately paint-drawn wall reliefs; and Mike Cooke, pop-arty faces of humans and animals oddly positioned against a top edge. Marie le Lievre has ‘baggage’ paintings of glazed surfaces; Telly Tu’u, abstractions of mechanical shapes and contours floating in fluffy space; Georgie Hill, large drawings of ornate botanical motifs fixed on stark walls; Ruth Thomas Edmond, butted together coloured fields of feathery brush strokes; and Tim Thatcher, vaguely cubist hybrids of architectural and pastoral folk elements.

Of these Marie Le Lievre is probably the most well known, because of her extraordinary ability to manipulate liquid paint into mesmerising sensual surfaces on canvas. Her highly textured, darkly glazed forms are obviously remarkable but she seems compelled to supply a narrative component to her paintings, turning all images to handbags or suitcases, as if obliged to supply a story. To make the identifiable shape she blocks around its edges with a much lighter tone, creating a different sort of surface from the rest of the painting, one that is chromatically comparatively unmodulated. The jump between the two sorts of ‘paint zone’, the lack of integration, seems to be a result of an easy option, rather than resolving compositional problems early on.

The question of a different sort of integration arises with Elliot Collins’ painting, The sparrows. It is really a sort of short story as told by a thinking living canvas, a musing, an address superimposed over images of fluffy clouds in a blue sky. Collins’ text is very long, and when quoted in a blog like this its awkwardness becomes really obvious - but in a painting the words can only be read in short bursts. Reader behaviour is quite different. Thoughts are piecemeal and slowly assembled. Lines get disconnected and mistaken flow-ons occur, creating accidental meanings.

Processes of integration is quite different too, oscillating between mental picturing and ocular picturing – trying to blend the two together, merging imagination with the 'outside' physical environment.

The painting’s rambly but somewhat sweet text says this:

This painting is really very good but only because it loves you and is proud of everything you have achieved so far, and it can’t wait to see what you’ll do next. It’s been hovering over you with the sparrows and dust and oxygen molecules your whole life. It has watched in awe while you were courageous and brave and kind when necessary, and sometimes it is necessary even when difficult. It has seen you reach the outer limits of yourself and watched in wondrous amazement as you fell from the greatest of heights loving you all the more. This painting pines for your love in return. Not in that desperate needy way but in the way you want to be pined for, like the wind for the clouds. Sadly I am the only one who can know this because of my unfortunate ability to see such things. Others will fail to see what I have time to observe, because as you know I will outlive them all and the future seems unsure and distant. But still, I suppose all is not lost, at least we’ll always have each other.

Now you can tell by its earnest, sensitive tone it is the writing of a young person. And of course it does go on far too long. I mean I almost toppled out of my zimmer frame trying to laboriously transcribe the damn thing, but it interests me in the way mental images replace physical ones – outside of its elucidation of the properties of states of mind like love. There is some sort of deferral going on; a delayed anticipation.

Perhaps though, the work might have been better not painted at all. Instead it could have been a typed sheet pinned to the wall, with the above text prefaced by a detailed description of a large canvas covered with clouds on a blue sky, onto which the prepared words were then to be positioned. Or even better, an audio recording of a voice describing a typed piece of paper….

Image by Tim Thatcher.

The spiritual symbolism and teaching aids of Abdullah Dougan are discussed in this book review by Keith Hill

The Paintings of Abdullah Dougan
Editors: Maree Green, John Searle, Kitty Godwin, Pat Field
Designer: Jill Godwin
378 pp, hardcover, 23.5 cm x 24 cm, 168 colour illustrations
Gnostic Press, Auckland, 2009

Abdullah Dougan was an Auckland spiritual teacher who was self-educated, proudly working class, and definitely an iconoclast. Yet beneath his rough-hewn exterior was an approach to spirituality on both the theoretical and practical levels that was, for those who explored its implications, insightful, pragmatic and, in its depth and scope, revelatory.

Dougan presented his teachings in three forms: writing, music and the visual arts. These consist of a series of books, headed by the three volume The Quest, musical compositions collected as Solar Suite, and over 200 paintings and screen prints. The majority of the paintings are collected in this volume, which presents work from the period 1970 to 1979, and a handful from 1987.

In recent decades, spiritually oriented art has been viewed sceptically by the academic and commercial art world, due to a secular discomfort with the concept of spirituality, and to the way sentimentality seems so easily to creep into spiritually and religiously inspired work. However, what is surprising with Dougan’s work is not just the large number of intriguing images on display, but the surprising number that are striking, even stunning. Works such as Ecstasy (1975 – it also provides the book’s cover), Negative Anticipation (1975), North: Midday (1974), and The Koran (1974) are powerful in any context.

As is clear from those titles, these are abstract paintings that are inspired by abstract concepts, historical figures, or emotional or spiritual states. Abdullah Dougan’s overall intent, as he is quoted in the introduction, was “to use paintings to teach his own ideas as well as other people’s, and to show objectively man and his place in the universe.”

This didactic intent is well served by the way the editors have structured the book, dividing the paintings (and a small number of screenprints) into thematic groups, such as The States of Man, The Virtues, The Vices, Taoist Teaching, Negative Attitudes, and Positive States. A brief statement accompanies each painting, indicating its conceptual context. A weakness of didactic art is that it can easily become simplistic or reductive, being satisfied to merely illustrate an idea. On the whole, Dougan’s paintings avoid this trap. He does so by adopting two strategies.

The first is he uses colours to represent different concepts. Black represents the negative aspect of the Absolute, blue represents mankind, purple is humanity’s passions and negative emotions, green represents the Earth, orange is the Sun, red is the centre of the Galaxy, and white is God conceived of as the Absolute, which embraces everything that exists in the cosmos. These colours are intended to represent humanity in a cosmic context.

The second strategy is through the use of shapes. The spiral is the basic shape that appears repeatedly. But the spiral also includes the circle and the arc. And the number of spirals – primarily one, three or seven – offers further significance.

Applying these strategies to a painting such as Greed (1975), the background consists of shades of green, which represents the Earth, and indicates that humanity’s desires are Earth-bound. In the centre of the painting are seven interlinked hooks, purple in colour, which stretch from the top to the bottom of the frame. Purple symbolises mankind’s passions, and seven is significant because it refers to the Law of Seven, a concept drawn from the teaching of G.I. Gurdjieff, one of Dougan’s principle spiritual influences. Gurdjieff considered that the Law of Seven manifests in endlessly repeating cycles of birth, growth and decay, as embodied in the seasons. In this painting, the cycle is of desiring, getting, and desiring again. Adding further meaning to the painting is that the purple hooks have touches of black and white in them, representing the positive and negative aspects of the Absolute, suggesting that greed has both positive and negative spiritual outcomes.

Another intriguing aspect is the way that the colour and shape strategies are used consistently throughout. This results in one painting illuminating another. The same colours used in Greed are repeated in Death to the Ego (1975). But this time the seven purple hooks are reiterated as seven spiral arms, while the green of Earth, the blue of humanity, and the black of the negative aspect of the Absolute are presented in different relations to one another. All this implicitly suggests how greed, a primarily negative state, may be transmuted into a positive spiritual state.

A principle objective behind Dougan’s paintings is to consider humanity in a cosmic context. An idea he shared with Gurdjieffian and Sufi thought (the Sufis were another of Dougan’s spiritual influences) is that the cosmos, and everything in it, originates from the Absolute. After forces emanate from the Absolute they are deflected down into lower levels of the cosmos. In the process their power also diminishes, until they either dissipate completely in the negative aspect of the Absolute, or they reach a nadir, gather their powers, and begin the journey back up through the levels of reality towards the Absolute.

In Dougan’s cosmic outlook, Ahura Mazda, historically known as the God of Zoroastrianism, is conceived of as being the centre of the Milky Way Galaxy. In Dougan’s scheme, red is the colour of Ahura Mazda. In the painting Ahura Mazda (1975), the only colours are red, white and black, indicating that the centre of the Galaxy deflects the Absolute down towards the negative Absolute. The number three is repeated in this painting, a reference to the Law of Three, another of Gurdjieff’s ideas. The Law of Three refers to the activity of creation, which is considered to require three forces working in unison. Thus impregnation requires male, female, and the act that brings them together. The Law of Three can also be thought of as involving positive, negative and neutralising forces. In the painting of Ahura Mazda, then, the positive and negative aspects of the Absolute are reconciled in Ahura Mazda, which functions as the creative and transformative force that deflects the power of the Absolute into the Milky Way Galaxy.

What is interesting about all this is that red is also at the centre of the painting War (1975), and that it permeates Hate (1970) and Violence (1971). This implies that the violence in our existence comes to us from the centre of the Milky Way Galaxy. This is certainly true in a cosmic sense, because suns and planets originate from supernova explosions. But the suggestion that the centre of the Galaxy is also the origin of the violence that exists in us physically and psychologically is an observation of another order.

As might be expected from a self-taught painter, the work presented here is uneven. In the very earliest work, the painting is sloppy, suggesting the idea was more important than the execution. Also in the early work, the use of house paint shows an admirable number-8 wire mentality, but the smeared effect, resulting from the lack of control of the brush, is to the paintings’ detriment. But by the mid-1970s, when Dougan had his materials under control and his ideas were flowing, he produced a series of powerfully suggestive works.

Dougan’s work was exhibited in public only once during his lifetime. It attracted little critical notice, but it did sufficiently impact on Colin McCahon that he visited Dougan, intrigued by his approach. Perhaps this book will engage a wider audience, and draw to Abdullah Dougan’s paintings the level of attention they undoubtedly warrant.


Keith Hill is a writer on spirituality, a film-maker, novelist and film editor. He attended Abdullah Dougan’s group meetings from 1975 to 1987.

Images in descending order are Ecstacy; Violence; North (Midday); Lord Hazrat; Greed; Death to the Ego; Ahura Mazda

Jensen group show

Kelly Knoebel Roeth Bambury Innes Judd
Jensen
4 February - 6 March 2010

In the big downstairs space this six person show of regular Jensen artists, has mixed in some surprises - including some spectacular works on paper by legends Ellsworth Kelly and Donald Judd. The work as a collective body of geometric abstraction coheres well, though varying in its use of painted materials, the key chromatic (and dramatic) component in many items being a vibrant orange.

The 2 row 10 unit woodcut by Judd sets the tone. Typically it is permutations on a theme, with a five variation outer frame lined up on top and its removed rectangular centre positioned below. Both types of woodgrained orange shape, framed but not under glass, are traversed by single or double horizontal and vertical lines - the logic being tight, all possibilities intact.

Callum Innes has two wonderful ‘additive-subtractive’ paintings where orange and black oil paint has been applied (along with various other colours underneath) with sweeping horizontal arm movements, and then the righthand half of each vertically hung canvas slowly removed via the vertical application of turps. The process is very evident from the coloured stains and rivulets on the stretcher sides, and the ghostly smudges and scrubbed blurs on the canvas proper.

The only New Zealander here is Stephen Bambury. His single rectangular painting is related to pitted panels in his recent Jensen solo show. Here overlapping matt blue-grey and white-glazed black oblongs create a tension with a shiny black section in the centre, while two adjacent orange rectangles glow on the top left and bottom right corners.

The layers of thin white washes on the top right black rectangle have dark blurry edges and are comparatively abandoned, loose even (they could almost be sprayed) – with a very faint orange horizontal streak peeking through underneath near the top. This makes the work devoid of the tightly interlocking (and – I think - much superior) structure apparent in other similar, more recent works.

On the large wall by the office are two panels, one blood orange, the other soft Prussian blue, by Winton Roeth that are arranged one above (but not touching) the other. They are affected by gold lines bordering their outer edges, for the metallic colour is comparatively unstable – deepening and paling as you move past; disturbing their perimeters – unlike the intransigent velvety, paired oblongs enclosed within.

Imi Knoebel’s six sets of overlapping, paint-brushed, paper sheets play off qualities of hue and Albers’ Law of Simultaneous Contrast against directional striations caused by brush bristles agitating the wet painted surface. The striations within both the large and small sheets of each pair vertically descend above one stroke that horizontally traverses along the lower edge.

Each pair is positioned so their bottom edges are flush, and their optical qualities are difficult to determine - ie. is the colour the result of careful mixing by the artist, or the result of a very considered choice of painted background? Is the colour we perceive actually on the paper or in our brain? The large sheets alternate in their tonal qualities, also exploring nuances of chromatic temperature. They and their companions are under glass, and within stainless steel, welded burnished frames.

Ellsworth Kelly’s works from the mid–seventies provide the deliciously vibrant and eloquent flat shapes he is known for. One is a screenprint, the other a lithograph. The latter is a horizontal curve over two metres long. There is barely detectable embossed, straight edge above it that seems to enclose the hill-like form as if in a delicate, flat box.

This is a good introduction to the overseas artists in this show. The Kelly, Judd, and Knoebel paper works are particularly unusual.

(As in order of discussion, the images are by Judd, Innes, Bambury, Roeth, Knoebel and Kelly.)

Countering the Public Good

Public Good: Itinerant responses to collective spaceEd. by Paula Booker and Marnie Slater
110 pp, illustrated b/w, colour
Published by Enjoy Public Art Gallery, Wellington, July 2008

Up the hill a couple of blocks from where I live in Kingsland, is the experimental art space JAR, a venue devoted to long term quality installations that can be viewed by anybody who happens to be passing down New North Road. The plaque on the front proudly announces “Art for the public good.”

My feelings about this are a little ambivalent. On the one hand I applaud the JAR trust for providing these exceptional exhibitions out of their own pocket. That’s fantastic. On the other I wonder to myself, who is this “public” that so benefits? (Me and who else?) What is this “good?” Do the regular frequenters of the nearby Morningside shops gain much, if anything, out of it? I doubt it.

Of course the slippery notion of ‘public’ has been under scrutiny for some time now. One forum I went to in Auckland on this was part of the Public/Private Triennial (2004), where the history of this spatial/social concept was discussed by media lecturer Misha Kavka in a memorable preamble to a discussion on reality television. Her observations about the history of the term ‘public sphere’ (looking at Habermas and others) were extended later that day when AAG Curator Ron Brownson delivered a paper by Nick Perry (who was away sick) about the social consequences of the invention of the telephone. Both discussions made me realise how little is widely known about such a ubiquitous term. This little book helps change that.

The achievement of Public Good lies in the way it questions its title. A beautifully designed anthology of essays, prose, poems and images, very aptly chosen and usually lucid, it has lots of surprises. One pithy (albeit obvious) question it asks on the back cover is whether the title phrase is used to maintain order and deny plurality. Such a theme is particularly well explored in what seems to be a ‘keynote’ essay by Simon Sheikh who makes parallels between preconceived notions of public sphere and the changing sites and practices of the contemporary art community. He develops Michael Warner’s Foucauldian concepts of counter-public (the ‘conscious mirroring of the modalities and institutions of the normative public….to address other subjects …other imaginaries’), stressing the fragmentation, and swinging the discussion to Chantal Mouffe who in her notion of ‘an agonistic public sphere’ sees the opportunity for group antagonisms to be repositioned so that the separated pieces are connected within a ‘conflictual consensus’ to form ‘chains of equivalence’.

Christina Barton’s paper looks at Rosalind Krauss’ ccncept of the expanded sculptural field and modifies it by blending in the social and temporal, which after considering Dario Gamboni’s ideas on the vandalism of public monuments, she sees as offering a counter-narrative to art through the notions of action and event. She regards the current repudiation of public monuments as part of a dematerialization made apparent in videos like Eric Baudelaire’s Paris metro video/poster installation/performance, Sugar Water – this work of course being recently discussed in Reading Room by Tan Lin. Barton’s comments on anti-monumentalism are paralleled later on by a wonderful suite of photos (introduced by Chaitanya Sambrani) showing an itinerant colonial monument (replicated in Portland stone by Tushar Joag) being moved across Bombay overnight, and posing in selected sites in transit.

Oddly though, in this book, the theme of the demise of monumental commemorative sculpture is a bit of a red herring, especially if it is seen as symptomatic of a scattering of social fragments anyway, but most obviously it scrutinises public space. Clearly most of the articles examine this - and some ‘porous’ private space too: you have a wonderful, richly detailed piece of writing by Shuddhabrata Sengupta (of the Raqs Media Collective) on telephone booths in New Delhi; a sprawling but excellent article (with great photographs) by Harold Grieves critiquing Christchurch suburbia; Rudolph Hudsucker excoriating the political control of inner city Wellington; and Dane Mitchell on streets as the mechanisms use to maintain and enforce urban control, and barricades to resist it. A photograph of Mitchell’s red flag (in Starkwhite) also provides a very striking cover for the book.

Paralleling these are artists commenting on the materiality of the physical social space (Kate Newby), or within a published zone the overlapping, off registered or even splayed relationship of constructed documentary image with fictitious interview (Fiona Amundsen / Tim Corballis).

Kate BrettKelly-Chalmers examines artist Kah Bee Chow’s public performances in downtown Auckland (Britomart) and Canary and Special Galleries, while Spiros Panigirakis elucidates on different alternative varieties of public art practice in Melbourne. Each typology he provides (research; the taught; the salon; the community; the commission) is accompanied by a wildly imaginative, mischievously humorous, finely detailed diagram – Panigirakis synthesizing image and text together perfectly.

Where Public Good morphs into Private Good can be seen in the prose of JC Borrelle. She has devised a fanciful meditation on creative endeavours such as photography and their relationship to private memories (especially those of childhood), skilfully mixing theoretical issues in with whimsy to create an intriguing, very entertaining, little fable.

The book’s theme drifts back to the Public Good with the humorous poem by Rachel O’Neill on the death of Socrates. His death is taking longer than expected (“the shiver of parliament”) and he is worried about his chickens - especially his activist ones (like Plato). A clever inclusion here from O’Neill.

Thoughtfully assembled with a snappy array of images to escort the texts into your mind, Public Good is a very fine contribution to art debate in this country. Any didactic polemic that you might expect from Enjoy is incredibly discreet. It feels light but not frothy. There is plenty of substance, but it doesn’t grind you down. The varied but stimulating contributions lock together well to create a publication of lasting value.

What's in a Face?

Yvonne Todd: The Wall of Man
Ivan Anthony
26 August – 26 September 2009

When meeting any stranger for the first time - even before the mandatory handshake and icebreaking vocal greeting - how do we respond during that split-second interaction of eye contact, a flash within which we appraise each other’s facial physiognomy, demeanour, hairstyle and clothing? What preconceived notions kick in to overwhelm us initially, only to then perhaps be gradually adjusted or abandoned over the next few minutes or hours? And can an interpretable face ever be ‘natural’ without extras, cosmetic or surgical, anyway? Does such a ‘pure’ visage exist in reality, ever?

The Yvonne Todd portraits here are unusual in that they are all of men, middle aged to elderly, who are very formally dressed and thus ‘corporate’. To construct the photographs she has picked out models, chosen their clothing and organised various props, like fountain pens or leather sofas. Then she has picked backdrops, considered methods of lighting, and composed ‘career-status’ titles.

Yet these works are in a sense abstractions, formal not just in their tone or degree of solemnity, but also in their manipulation of visual dynamics. Many have strategically placed white hair, white collars and white cuffs, with glowing McCahonesque morning light emanating from behind their hill-like, besuited executive shoulders.

Others are conceptual clichés, Hollywood stereotypes: a Retired Urologist in dark glasses could really be a hitman from The Sopranos; his neighbour, a blue-eyed International Sales Director, is actually a professional gigolo and part-time porn star from Beverley Hills; the wizened ‘Mr. Magoo’ Hospital Director is in fact a fiendish Nazi medical ‘experimenter’ hiding in Argentina.

Apart from facial templates that could be fancifully derived from the entertainment industry, or more prosaic business models ubiquitous downtown, you can tell Todd has had fun picking out accoutrements like gorgeous silk ties and heavy shirt fabrics. She seems to enjoy the sensuality of these materials, almost for their own sake and not for sociological coding. And everything is believable - there is no satirical excess as is often found in her use of women models wearing voluminous apparel, oddball make-up or excessive wigs.

Perhaps though, the believability of these male business portraits is a problem. Even though some are large and unusually detailed compared to other studio photographs, chances are most people, even art lovers familiar with Todd’s practice, wouldn’t be able to pick her examples out from a selection of ‘normal’ images taken of prosperous individuals by other professionals. Her images of selected models blend so well into a pool of documented ‘authentic’ subjects that Todd seems to be shooting herself in the foot in this project. The work seems excessively bland. Unless she wants to be a hard-core conceptualist where the idea has priority over visual attributes, and optical qualities are not of value. That is a possibility, but one that I think – from looking at her track record - is highly unlikely.

Inside this world: the limits of faith

Out of this world
Curated by Leonard Emmerling and Stephen Bambury
St. Paul St Gallery
17 September – 16 October 2009


The title of this international exhibition Out of this world refers to the well known, 1888 anonymous line engraving (made from a wood block) of a pilgrim poking his head through the bubblelike membrane that encloses the natural world , the enclosing sphere made of scientific explanation, in order to see the divine and inexplicable forces in action beyond. The experience of encountering the incomprehensible, a magnitude so vast we cannot grasp it, what we also call ‘the Sublime’, is the theme here.

The show examines artists’ attempts to capture this – some sincere, others humorous – and whether it can be upheld as proof of a Supreme Being. It also introduces unjustified belief, the notion of ‘leaps of faith’, dividing the artists into two camps: believers and sceptics.

Actually McCahon is the only ‘believer’ here, apart from the anonymous wood engraver, and the only New Zealander. What that suggests I’m not sure. Certainly that such mystics are outnumbered, particularly in today's art world - judging by this exhibition. However it is a great McCahon work, with impeccably handled dry paint on jute, showing the comet Kohoutek streaking across the sky in three separate, butted together, charcoal coloured hangings. The word ‘Jump’ on the far left declares McCahon's risky faith. It seems to mean let your imagination leap across the void of common sense to grasp the significance of this wondrous event. Like the kneeling man in the wood engraving, ignore the world of logic.

The prints by Vija Celmins of night skies or expanses of ocean come closest to McCahon in terms of an intimate sized work that confronts the viewer with enormity. These small works draw you in close but they could be pro-Mystic or pro-Science. The two viewpoints are not necessarily in opposition.

One artwork that implies that it is the viewer alone who is generating any mystical being ‘out there’ is the hologram by James Turrell. It alters its soft, vivid green, rectangular shape as you approach or move around it, depending on your bodily relationship to its glass slab and the illuminating spotlight.

Another particularly gorgeous work connected to the body is a deep velvety black, horizontal rectangle by Peter Rösel. He has lightly flicked specks of white toothpaste over it from a toothbrush. In this way the painting becomes an open mouth, implying God has an oral orifice and is a human creation that mimics ourselves.

Thomas Ruff plays a similar sort of game with his enormous glossy photograph of a night sky, where he states he is prone to adding one extra hand-painted star. Unlike Rösel where God imitates people, Ruff imitates God, yet giving him the human attribute of mischievousness.

Ben Rivers has a grainy five minute film of snippets made with a hand-held camera showing lines of pilgrims apparently ascending the Irish volcanic hill of Station Island on Lough Derg where St. Patrick lived. The added soundtrack plays the noise of incessantly trampled scoria, yet Catholic pilgrims are meant to go barefooted around certain shrines on the way. This hints that perhaps that the film is faked. The Purgatory pilgrims in this film keep their boots securely fastened.

Such fakery is further explored in Linda Quinlan’s two channel film of her version of McNaught's comet seen two years ago over Tasmania. Her film is a double exposure that seems to include a Milky Way of oil droplets floating on water. The main image is based on a lamp placed in a forest with a cloth thrown over it that has a circular hole cut in. This creates a diagonal beam of light amenable to being crossed by dust clouds. In the background stars are formed from the surrounding, reflecting, glossy leaves.

Modernist art history and the so-called Death of Painting is laughed at by Jorge Molder through his film of what seems to be Malevich’s famous 1913 Suprematist work, Black Square. This ‘full void’ that established a ‘supremacy of pure feeling’ representing God (‘I search for God. I search within myself for myself’) is lampooned when it becomes a trapdoor in a ceiling that opens so that a besuited gentleman can then escape.

The fleeing gent could be a Suprematist painter or he could be God. He could be a modern version of the observer poking his head through the firmament, reversing, pulling his head back out and coming down to earth. This is a wonderful, exceptionally cohesive, exhibition that is witty and light, yet absorbing in the way it counters the position of say, Natasha Conland’s Mystic Truths of two years ago, in relation to ‘outer-worldly’ states of mind. An important show to see.

Images from top to bottom: anonymous, Colin McCahon, Vija Celmins, James Turrell, Ben Rivers, and Linda Quinlan.