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

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.

4th Auckland Triennial -1

Last Ride in a Hot Air Balloon: (Looking at the themes - Part One) Bodies at Risk
Mike Parr, Alicia Frankovich, Robert Hood, Martin Boyce, Laresa Kosloff, Richard Bell
28 artists in various Auckland venues.
12 March - 20 June 2010

The 4th Auckland Triennial curated by Natasha Conland has been with us for over a couple of weeks now, so what does one make of it? It has a great poetic and metaphorically loaded title, a superb hardcover catalogue with three excellent essays, and a new large downtown venue, but what of the art? Is it memorable? Does it provide examples that stick in the mind like say – to look at the earlier exhibitions – Ashley Bickerton and Roni Horn did in Bright Paradise, or Ilya and Emilia Kabakov and William Kentridge in Public / Private, or Willie Doherty and Issac Julian in Turbulence?

The show is less overtly finger-waggy than Turbulence, but you still sense Conland is very much a schoolmarm – only more circumspect. She has a lighter touch than Victoria Lynn, allowing more whimsy and humour to mix with her didacticism. (Comparing the two titles shows that.) Yet for my money, that side of her intelligence, her appreciation of wit and irony, came out much more in Mystic Truths, a much smaller, non-Triennial show than say Earth Matters, a Triennial warm-up. Nevertheless Last Ride in a Hot Air Balloon is impressively focused. It doesn’t feel sprawling or scattered in its content. There are about five themes that reveal themselves (often several overlapping) in all of the works, but which may not be at first obvious. They are Bodies at Risk; The Journey; The Imagination; The Economy; and Dialogue.

Therefore I want to take a look at the Triennial in a manner that ignores the placing of the twenty-eight artists within the separate venues and elaborate on these five overarching themes instead. I want to briefly provide some interpretive possibilities, putting five or six artists in each category, and then looking at each in turn.

The first theme is 'Bodies at Risk’. Although the theme of risk is discussed constantly throughout the essays and catalogue entries, it is more global economic vulnerability (Conland’s essay), or explorative navigational risk (Doryun Chong’s text), or linked to the artist’s body (Leonhard Emmerling’s discussion) – not that of the viewer. While artists like Mike Parr and Alex Monteith have made films or performances where the viewer empathises with the artist’s or film-maker’s body in pain or in danger, there is no sense of implied audience peril anywhere in this exhibition. None of the sculpture for example is menacing in its ambience in the way that sculpture, like say the kinetic works of Len Lye or Peter Roche, can be.

With Parr’s work at George Fraser the outside windowed gallery is the site of a very early (1970) text work where he describes in a hundred vinyl-cut sentences attached to the wall, the properties of a room, its space and what is seen through the windows. At his artist’s talk this work was linked to a film of his 'Hundred Breaths' (Breathless) performance of sucking self-portrait prints to his face one by one till on each occasion, his oxygen runs out. The room becomes a trope for his interiority, his ruminating self enclosed within his body as he looks out its windows. This in turn is paralleled in one of the films he shows in the darkened inner gallery, where he is rolling a recording movie camera up and over a hill. The camera lens swishing through blurs of long grass could be Parr’s decapitated head.

Alicia Frankovich’s AAG installation shows a hospital ‘drip’ made out of two end-to-end Martini bottles pouring orange liquid into a small swimming pool, to be then repumped up and recycled. The fluid could be a cocktail of blood, urine, sweat and tears, and seems to be alluding to artists recycling earlier art. In a corner is a Duchampian rack holding orange shopping bags from the Pergomon Museum in Berlin, on one wall is a neon that seems to allude to very early Richard Serra, and a ball suspended in a ‘testicular’ harness refers to her own history and mindset. With the rack of shopping bags entitled Woman, and a pinned up skirt displayed with a found drawing of graphite traces, Frankovich has with her installation and bodily absence created one of the more witty and visually compelling works in the Triennial.

Inanimate objects representing the human body are explored further with Robert Hood driving his Cortina from Christchurch up to Auckland earlier this year where it was taken to a shredder and ‘atomised’. The remnants are laid out on the gallery floor like a large bed. A real time audio recording of the trip is provided alongside Hood’s appropriated (and inserted) self-portrait version of Yves Klein’s famous ‘leap into the void’ photograph. In such a grouping, driver and vehicle symbolically merge.

With Martin Boyce we have the large gallery at St. Paul St blindingly illuminated by a weblike structure of white fluorescent tubes suspended from the ceiling. A black construction of broken wooden chair parts hangs like a Calder mobile, but seems to also reference (perhaps be a substitute for) Bruce Nauman’s turning wax dog corpses and decapitated white male heads. On a remote wall is a black, wire-mesh cubist/tribal mask watching in silence.

Aboriginal activist Richard Bell may smile sweetly during his videoed games of free association, but his critique of white Australia, with its youthful blonde representatives attired in gold laméd bikinied splendour, is excoriating. He is of course, deeply body conscious – as they are too of him, though he is fully dressed. With his dangerous charm he coaxes out a series of racist jokes for our delectation. If in the normally dismal Shed 6 we stay and listen, we become complicit – especially if we laugh: as Bell himself does. If we walk away, we (physically, hopefully not mentally) desert the artwork.

Fellow Australian Laresa Kosloff films bodies in action, airborne as a clowning trapeze act, or climbing over public sculptures in a park as bored children, or groups of adults exercising. Like Mike Parr’s rolling camera, Kosloff also films as if the camera were a moving figure – in her case while ascending and descending in a lift, looking out through a tall building’s windows. Her subject matter is contemporary for the looping footage we see at ARTSPACE is recent, yet the super 8 black and white film makes it look much older. You wonder if these people are still alive now, but of course probably they are, very much so.

It is difficult, naturally, to separate the human body from the activity of travel. ‘The Journey’ - and the Triennial's title - will be the subject of Part Two.

Jennifer French’s documentary photographs and DVD stills are of works by Robert Hood, Martin Boyce, Richard Bell and Laresa Kosloff.

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.)

Andrew Paul Wood tells us about Bronwyn Taylor’s new show in Christchurch

Bronwyn Taylor: From Kaituna to Kaitorete
SoFA Gallery
10 November – 29 November 2009

Bronwyn Taylor’s exhibition From Kaituna to Kaitorete is essentially a show of charcoal drawings on gessoed paper and some stuff on the floor by way of two installations. I can’t see much point in the latter – if anything they’re rather distracting and not especially interesting – but the drawings are splendid. Gestural and expressive counterpointing harsher geometries, Taylor demonstrates her entitlement to be called a senior artist, having graduated from Canterbury (DipFA) in 1968.

Drawing has been highly underrated for a long time, and yet it is probably the most difficult of all artistic skills to master. I delight in examining good drawing, and although the repetitions and similarities occasionally become a bit monotonous, this is da shizzle. There is a confidence and subtlety, fuelled by a striking earnestness, that requires close up investigation. The titles are specifically geological: Pyroclastic, Plate Motion and Sea Floor Spreading, and Caldera, suggesting an analogy between natural processes like continental drift and erosion, and the making of art, particularly sculpture.It also refers to the volcanic morphology of the artist’s Kaituna Valley home.

Sometimes the lines (expressive even when they are perfectly straight) seem to continue on beyond the paper – a modernist trope in defiance of the classical desire for compositional boundaries. This enhances the illusion of the projected fixed perspectival grid frequently over shadowed by ambiguous forms that may be landscape or even something far less tangible. The vanishing point is likely to be obscured by one of these forms, or else be off the edge of the paper somewhere.

The drawings refer to the landscape Taylor inhabits, making frequent references to landscape and the geometry of perspective, and show off the versatility of charcoal as a medium. Taylor makes her own from willow, and clearly the materiality of the medium is important to her. Understandably Taylor is primarily a sculptor. One of the floor works is a tidy and symmetrical pile of charcoal bundled up in charred and heat-warped tinfoil – no doubt a reference to the manufacture – but that is all it is; a footnote and not a very compelling one.

The other floor work is a sort of Carl André grid of casts taken from the rock face of Kaituna Hill Quarry – and I don’t quite see the point. It’s okay I suppose, indexing the geology, but even by the standards of land art it seems a bit twee and sophomoric in concept, and more than a little out of place when the drawings are so mature and deft. The minimalism of the installations jars with the textural and formal richness of the charcoal. Process as performance, is, I suppose, important to acknowledge, but in this case it’s just not as important as the drawings and should be left out of the picture. The installations simply haven’t got the presence to impact on the viewer’s space and make a point. The drawings do all the talking, and it is self evident that they are charcoal.

Images by Tim Veling for SOFA Gallery. Thank you Coralie

Trans-Tasman collaboration

Gambia Castle/Joint Hassles: Cross ColouringCurated by Sarah Hopkinson and Harriet Kate Morgan
Gambia Castle
22 October - 7 November 2009

We have here the Kiwi hang of a two show partnership involving Gambia Castle and Joint Hassles, a Melbourne collective. The first presentation was in Hell Gallery in Richmond over September and early October, and so this is the Auckland version. There are twenty-two contributors.

The work is as varied as you can possibly imagine in finish and content, ranging from Rob McHaffie’s sweetly sensitive ceramic portrait of Buster Keaton to Daniel Malone’s coarse boot nugget-on-newspaper drawings of a man shining people’s boots. Some are substantial in size, like Alex Vivian’s clothes rack dressed in the apparel it displays; others are ‘dematerialised’ like Christopher L.G. Hill’s scattered bits of confetti-like paper and sand - or Dan Arps’ window display of painted yellow cord (referencing Kate Newby) and bits of glued on curled brown paper.

Nick Austin’s two delicate blue panels, one of a drawing of flames, have a cool detachment that sticks out like a sore thumb in this somewhat frenzied, abandoned context – and are half–hidden behind the door. On the other side of the room Kate Newby has a small, lumpy ceramic figure, crouching and bearing written descriptions of clothing and hair, while in the middle Tao Wells provides a battered little chair made of kindling and sagging fashion magazine photos.

Overall the Aussies seem more varied in attitude than the Castlers, ranging from ‘realistic’, illustrative paintings like Kain Pickens and Rob McKenzie’s hilarious portrait of celebrities wearing identical sunglasses and right-handed gloves, to James Deutsher’s amazing assemblage incorporating paint-splattered starbursts on black corrugated plastic with a dead plant pinioned under Perspex – positioned over a green, ‘blow-Soccer’ playing field.

Although this show is primarily a social event, both these groups want to reach new audiences, so the trans-Tasman partnership is a shrewd way of achieving that. While the display has the characteristic Gambia rhetoric of décor decided by bomb explosion, it’s worth picking through the indifferent placements, trying to decipher the catalogue listing - figuring out who made what – and discovering new things about these energetic Melbourne and Auckland art communities.

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.

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.

Here is a review by means of an essay, generously donated by Andrew Paul Wood.

et al: That’s obvious! That’s right! That’s true!
Christchuch Art Gallery Te Puna o Waiwhetu

Non enim excursus hic ejus, sed opus ipsum est.
- Pliny the Younger

And once you have walked the length of your mind, what
You command is as clear as a loading-list
Anything else must not, for you, be thought
To exist.
And what’s the profit? Only that, in time
We half-identify the blind impress
All our behaving bear, may trace it home.
But to confess,
On that green evening when our death begins,
Just what it was, is hardly satisfying,
Since it applied only to one man once,
And that man dying.
- Philip Larkin

Art, by its very nature is a frivolous occupation – much as the poet WH Auden said that “poetry makes nothing happen” – which is to say it just inexplicably is. Beyond existing, the work of et al also has an ironic sense of humour to it – something that has often been misinterpreted and mocked in the long war between Philistia and Bohemia – and which lends itself well to this approach. And as there is a lot of theory that is overly burdened with style and its own pretentious jargon, I will try to keep such terminology to a minimum – as Dr Johnson said to Boswell, “you must clear your mind of cant – you may talk that way in society, but do not think in it”.

Any discussion of et al is not going to be possible without some sort of explanation of postmodernism. Where modernism was all about clean lines, abstraction, elimination of the human from art, a generally patriarchal and humourless worldview, and a faith in utopian scientific social progress, postmodernism got fed up with this in the 1960s. Postmodernism sought to do away with pedestals and picture frames by spreading the art throughout the gallery through installation (the crap on the floor option), bringing the audience into the artwork’s space and not the traditional vice versa. Artists began to reintroduce a human element in art through performance and reference to decay, entropy, the organic and the scruffy. Postmodernism made room for feminism and indigenous cultures in a real and meaningful engagement rather than merely as window dressing.

There are three artists to acknowledge in this change: the German installation artist Joseph Beuys who exploited ritual, performance, social memory and abject materials to heal the post-war wounds of German society, and declared “everyone is an artist”; Andy Warhol, who believed art, like TVs and automobiles, was for everybody – and probably didn’t deserve its elevated status; and French conceptualist Marcel Duchamp, who considered the idea more important than the object, and showed anything could be art if put in an art gallery, before he gave up art to play chess.

Marcel Duchamp had a go at that Cubism stuff at the end of the Nineteenth Century, but he was only going through the motions. He didn’t get it. He suspected it was a con on the part of the galleries. In 1917 Duchamp put an unplumbed urinal in a New York art gallery as a critique of the power of dealers and galleries to dictate trends in art (coinciding with the rise of the avant-garde, cubism etc). He called the urinal Fountain and signed it R. Mutt.

It became the iconic original of all conceptual art – art in which the ideas generated are more important than the object itself. et al’s portaloo Rapture, exhibited in Telecom Prospect 2004, refers back to Fountain. Portaloos suggest a more democratic and Kiwi alternative to the urinal. This is not the work that went to the 2005 Venice Biennale. It has no relationship to the argument . As it happens, Paul Holmes became the subject of an art work after he referred to the then Secretary General of the United Nations as a “Cheeky Darkie”. The work was called “White Drip” by Ralph Hotere. It happens to now be in Paul Holmes’ personal collection.

The donkey braying emanating from the cubicles may represent French intransigence on the issue, but also one of the constituent personae of et al: p. mule – also responsible for That’s obvious! That’s right! That’s true! p. mule is a direct nod to R. Mutt.

As with the enjoyment of a play, a novel, or any fiction, we have a tacit obligation to accept the pretence or pretext – suspend our disbelief and cynicism in order to embrace a metaphorical and metaphysical reality. The same can be said of religion – we must have faith that there is a God in order that we participate in that belief system. It has frequently surprised me how often some very intelligent, worldly people seem to think that art should be any different – that somehow art should be as easily digestible and understood as a soap opera or commercial. There is a reason that high-end food critics do not tend to review family steak houses, and it's because they need to challenge their own sophistication, the public’s sophistication and the restaurant’s sophistication. The critic is not an underfunded extension of any PR and marketing division, regardless of what others may think or desire.

et al installations are obstinately and cussedly difficult things to read, as is et al itself – the trick is not to try so hard. A lot of people have difficulty dealing with the ambiguous nature of et al – is it one person who like Voldemort must not be named (yes), is it a whole bunch of people (yes). The media got their knickers in a twist about this aspect of et al (notably Paul Holmes) because journalists as a species generally default back to black and white worldviews they picked up as court reporters. Their tabloid circuits detected fraud and potential scandal where, of course, there was none. The important thing was that this wasn't actually important – at least, not in a way they understood it.

Portuguese poet Fernando Pessoa, who died in 1935, was probably the greatest poet in twentieth century Portugal – though snubbed for the Nobel Prize for many of the same reasons that hack journalists give et al a hard time. Pessoa liberated his creativity from societal constraints by writing under 72 different names – each a distinct character with a name, a personality and a biography. Pessoa – whose own name translates as ‘person’ or ‘persona’ – called these familiars heteronyms, a word previously used to denote different words for the same thing. For the works he wrote under his own name, he used orthonym – the real name.

Among these diverse entities are included the romantic Bernardo Soares, the modernist Alvaro de Campos, and the romantic Maria Jose – a hunchback girl. Each is substantial, distinct and speaks with a consistent and individual voice, allowing the poet to explore all genres and the various fragments of his psyche.

Another comparison is the scandal that erupted over the Ern Malley/Angry Penguins affair in wartime Melbourne. Two young poets sought to highlight what they saw as the absurdity of emerging (specifically Surrealist and Symbolist-influenced poets like Slessor) Australian modernist poetry and together concocted a late, fake poet – Ern Malley – who apotheosised these mannerisms. The irony was that the Malley poems were far more interesting and alive than any of the serious material either had written individually.

Frequently middlebrow commentators accuse et al and its fans to be elitist. I tend to regard that as a compliment. Surely being an elitist only means being a connoisseur of the best – even if it’s the best kitsch. The nature of elitism. Deception is not always malicious. That’s obvious! That’s right! That’s true! gives the appearance of being some kind of setting for something official, a rally of the New Zealand Communist Party perhaps. It pretends to be something and invites you to participate, whereupon the lack of function and purpose becomes apparent. Only people of monumental stupidity should feel cheated by this, in as much as only the naive would believe that Shortland Street is a documentary about a hospital. This is not a practical joke so much as a superfiction.

A superfiction is a visual or conceptual artwork which uses fiction and appropriation in order to feign the appearance of the corporate and official institutional world. The term was coined by artist Peter Hill in 1989. This is a way of subverting the non-art world, and bring art out of the straightjacket of the art gallery context. Superfictions explore the interaction between the observer's concepts and the actual "objective" evidence that is presented. This is like drawing lines on a piece of paper to create the illusion of perspective. Would you call perspective a lie?

et al/p. mule’s superfiction in That’s obvious! That’s right! That’s true! appears to be a kind of interactive parody of grass roots anarcho-communist socialism that only survives among the earnest and truly naive in New Zealand who failed to learn from the examples of Stalin, Mao, Pol Pot and Fidel Castro. The installation, having learned many of its lessons from Mona Hartoum and Louise Bourgeois, is shabby, utilitarian, and make do – like some sort of community hall in a working class suburb. The viewer – or rather participant – must wind through a labyrinth of meaningless propaganda notice boards, and insubstantial artworld/bureaucratic psychological barriers (tape on the floor) – which I read as a kind of critique of totalitarian mindsets – up to a platform. It’s the sort of scruffy thing Lenin would have spoken from when exhorting the peasants in villages to rise up, not the exquisite constructivist nonsense dreamed up by Tatlin. Also on the platform – which doubles as a bridge connecting the two halves of the labyrinth – are copies of a fictional utopian party agitprop newspaper, completing the content empty illusion.

American philosopher the late Richard Rorty was probably one of the most provocative thinkers of our time. Central to his primary theme was the irrelevance of truth. He argued that the existence of an ultimate ‘Truth’ was almost entirely irrelevant. What is interesting, Rorty suggested, are the almost infinite intellectual and metaphysical strategies people employ in searching for that elusive and probably non-existent Truth. Rorty – as I would suggest et al does – argued that twentieth century philosophy, psychology and politics, Nietzsche, Freud and Wittgenstein have revealed human society as historical contingency rather than a product of underlying human nature or the realisation of a historical/cultural or racial destiny.

The ironic perspective of both Rorty and et al, while enlightening and valuable on the personal level, does not attempt to advance the social and political goals of Rorty’s liberalism, or the philosophies and movements that et al seeks to parody and subvert through shoddy appearances and superficial suggestions.

et al would seem to fit Rorty’s definition of an ironist. An ironist is someone who fulfills three axiomatic conditions, though it might be claimed that the ironist is an elitist, but that presupposes that elitism is a negative quality:

1. Radical continuing doubts about the final vocabulary he/she currently uses because he/she has been impressed by other vocabularies taken as final by people or books he/she has encountered;
2. He/she realizes that argument phrased in her present vocabulary cannot resolve these doubts;
3. Insofar as he/she considers about his/her situation, he/she does not think that vocabulary is closer to reality than others, that it possessed of some kind of authority or power.

Rorty was, in fact, on the side of the artists, believing that art and literature – not philosophy at all – specifically the suitably cynical Orwell and Nabokov (and I would add et al) succeed in the cruelty and humiliation inherent in society and the individual. All express a utopian hope for a liberal culture aware of its own historical contingency, combining ironic and private individual freedom with society’s public goal of human solidarity. That’s obvious! That’s right! That’s true! is relentless in sending up the hollowness of the totalitarian regimes that cannot fuse culture with civilisation, preferring to align zeitgeist with authority. Or at least, that’s how I read it.

As Oscar Jaszi wrote in The Dissolution of the Habsburg Monarchy: “I regard the chief utility of all historical and sociological investigations to be to admonish us of the alternative possibilities of history”. That’s obvious! That’s right! That’s true! suggests what the French Revolution taught us just over two hundred years ago – that the whole social spectrum of institutions and relationships can be overturned almost overnight – consequently European politics became idealistic and utopian, romantic. This Romanticism is a frequent target for et al – but et al is paradoxically Romantic in its own idealism, mixed with an additional heady cocktail of German idealism from Kant and Hegel. Or is that merely what one or other manifestation of et al would have us believe?

et al’s is an art of ideas, and those ideas’ fear of dying, of extinction and the potential liberation of the self from the individual sense of what is possible and what is important. Inevitably et al does this by offering a role model in playful superfiction and heteronym. et al goes to great lengths to achieve a similar liberation in order to be creatively free from what critic Howard Bloom calls “the strong poet’s anxiety of influence ... the horror of finding himself to be only a copy or replica”.

The installation is essentially a theatrical space – a space that is itself the actor. The installation is a ritual place wherein the audience must participate. The function of the installation, like Baroque church architecture or a theatre set, is to pull us out of our everyday worldly thinking and mindsets by creating a new creating a special environment for existential thoughts. As an art gallery to a certain extent already does this, the meditative so-called temple of the Muses model – et al cunningly fashions a second ‘other place’ within the first. This second other place is so mundane and shabby – it is what the French philosopher Baudrillard calls a simulacrum – a hyperreal near parody of the real world but intensified and concentrated. This and bricolage appear to be among the few ways artists make sense of Benjaminian proliferation and Lyotardian fragmentation of signs that represent contemporary life. One suspects someone has been closely reading Pierre Bourdieu and Hans Haacke’s Free Exchange (Stanford University Press, 1995).

And it is political. et al is an Orwell disguising a critique of totalitarianism as dystopian science fiction (and the typical et al installation is frequently dystopian) in 1984 and as a parody of storybook allegory in Animal Farm. et al is Kafka turning bureaucracy into Dante’s Hell, is Dickens on the poverties and miseries of public life, is Charlie Chaplin parodying Hitler in The Great Dictator, is a celebration of the littleness of life, is all of these things and more.

Most of all, this is art.



This essay is based on the lecture “Exploring et. al.” given by the author at Christchurch Art Gallery, August 12, coinciding with the et al exhibition That’s obvious! That’s right! That’s true! until November 22, 2009.















.

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.