Exposed hides

Helen Calder: yellow orange red black
City Art Rooms
2 September – 26 September 2009

Here we have an unusual show of ‘paintings’ by Helen Calder. However first of all before I start, let me state that I show at City Art Rooms, that Calder is a personal friend, and that she was my co-dealer in Christchurch. So you can treat what I say with suspicion if you wish. That is perfectly understandable.

Yet see for yourselves. These works are very strange, like pelts or hides in a curing shed: smooth rubbery skins of thick chewy paint that glisten - and are covered with delicate striations, stretchmarks, flecks and wrinkles. They are spread over bending stainless steel rods held to the wall with small brackets. True fetish objects that are pure sensation, that you long to touch and rub up against. Each a beckoning surface that is about one and a quarter metres wide, that is almost without any support at all, that has nothing behind it – that is all surface.

Their being draped over the rods means that you can see two drooping, glossy, undulating planes: a near one with convex edges, the other distant surface with concave. And folds in the middle of the rod where the ‘fabric’ is bunched up to form a hint of a vertical line. Some lower edges have a little ribbonlike tail hanging loose.

For Calder these works seem wilder than what she normally presents. Looser figuratively and looser literally. From painted surfaces that have been flayed in some hideously gruesome ritual to extract a trophy. Bizarre animal parts of acrylic and enamel peeled off and left hanging out to dry.

Summer on the Lorne

Summer Group Show
Antoinette Godkin
2 December 2009 – 31 January 2010

Nine artists connected to the Antoinette Godkin gallery present old and new work to be perused over the Christmas holidays. No prints or photography, mainly abstract paintings and drawing.

While the Godkin regulars here do provide excellent contributions, there are few surprises. Andre Hemer has a characteristic predominantly yellow and red canvas laden with vigorous computer-stored gestures and negative slashes, while Miranda Parkes has one of her large, striped, voluminous canvases - plus two small paintings with glued on paint fragments. Though they have been shown before, Esther Leigh has some superbly elegant milky/pink works of translucent film and ink on reflective mirror.

The startling revelations (for me) come from paintings, such as the predominantly blue, shimmering abstraction by Sue Novell, based on a landscape photograph processed digitally. It generates open abstract forms packed with wiggling wormlike strokes. These teeming pockets of energy seem connected to Pat Hanly’s ‘Molecular’ paintings of the seventies inspired by Blake, Huxley and lysergic acid.

Andy Tolhurst has two wonderfully pristine vinyl ‘paintings’ as well, crisp geometric compositions related to Matt Mulligan or Peter Halley. One is based on a squashed Lion Beer label found on the footpath. Its red, grey, black, white and yellow colours have been applied to a squared-off Gordon Walters-like ‘koru’ structure with the panel’s vertical proportions divided into thirds and then sixths. The other work is an elegant arrangement of carefully selected squared signs taken off Japanese noodle packets and placed onto a silvery field.

James R. Ford presents four mono-coloured rectangular jigsaws, under glass with thick black frames. They use colour from colour printing (demonstrating what is termed ‘subtractive’ for the mixing of absorbed light) to reference the three primaries (cyan, magenta and yellow) and the result of their mixing (black). There is a strange humour implied by the interlocking jigsaw pieces because these separate colour units would work only by juxtaposition. This would inevitably result in grey (not the commonly expected secondary hues that come from overlaying and transparency). Perversely, the proportions are those of landscape painting (a different principle again from mixing light ['additive' from reflected colour] and printing with separated primaries).

Ford’s use of jigsaw modules has links with the drawings of Carol Fletcher who repeats tracings of details from discarded wrappers or her own drawings, to construct gridded rectangles with rows of repeated units. These she covers with liquid wax.

Whilst there is a certain droll humour in making faint pencil drawings out of rubbish, that reference industrial mechanization and artists like Warhol, the stacked images seem too understated to me, and not obsessive enough. They need to be more extreme, to be in their thousands, not just under a hundred.

Matthew Dowman makes more convincing works with tone rather than colour in my view, especially with his complicated swirling nets of stencilled and airbrushed black and white lines, overlaid with toothbrush-flicked fine mists. They create considerable impact with their different points of density and clashing directional alignments; so that whilst almost chaotic, they still retain order and invite mental immersion.

Helen Calder’s painting/sculpture of a peeled-off, blue, acrylic/enamel hide hanging off a short rail doesn’t have the impact of the works in her recent City Art Rooms show. The pleasure found in her painting is in the striated, pitted textures of the surface and its edges, so when that skin is repeatedly folded over those chances for scrutiny disappear. A wide fleece then becomes a narrow towel or floppy shower mat in a hotel bathroom, and while such humour about painting’s social after-effects might be intended, I suspect not. The ambiguous, possibly utilitarian function of the portable and very rubbery ‘painta-derm’ in an architectural setting is not really anticipated as a question.

Images of works by Andre Hemer, Sue Novell, Andy Tolhurst (2), Matthew Dowman (2), and Helen Calder alongside James R.Ford. In descending order.

Peter Dornauf, our Hamilton correspondent, sends us this review of TWNCAA

Trust Waikato National Contemporary Art Award 2008
Curated and judged by Natasha Conland
Waikato Museum of Art and History Te Whare Taonga o Waikato
23 August - 30 November 2008

Art competitions seem a little outdated these days. Is one art piece, in such a context, really fifteen thousand dollars better than all the rest? Of course not. But that’s the circus one buys into, the premise on which the whole silly thing is constructed; show biz; oooh, ah, a winner, gold medal, glitz, gaga, brouhaha.

Then there’s the judging. I always want to see the works that have been rejected. Maybe we should resurrect the Salon de Refuse.

Anyhow, the Waikato Art Award threw up its ubiquitous “controversial” winner. We’ve had soap holders, DB crates and now a piece of plaster board indented with squared lines. It’s become almost de rigour for such a selection, becoming a little tiresome and predictable.

But that wasn’t the funniest thing going on here. The real crack-up was reading the artists’ statements, watching them strain and puff their way to some kind of bullfrog profundity. The prize for the most inflated piece of verbal gymnastics must go to Marcus Williams and Susan Jowsey for the explanation accompanying their video work, The Limbic. Here’s a sample:

The uniquely mammalian occurrence of individual endocrine regulation through the interdependence of the group.

Worth 9.75 on the horizontal bars.

Most of the time the works collapsed under the weight of such pomposity.

Speaking of the comic, it was amusing to follow the bureaucratic footwork of a nervous director attempting to appease City Councillors and “patrons” perceived negative reactions to the show with pre-emptive quotations from their own latest strategic document. It apparently “challenges us to be ‘bold and imaginative". Whether such a ploy, obviously felt necessary, is enough to dampen the “sense of unease” as Kate Vusoniwailala anxiously and politically puts it, remains to be seen. It’s obvious which patrons the director feels she needs to pitch her message to, given the shift to the doctrine of populism in recent years at this institution.

Having said all that, there were some standout works of the thirty three selected.

Miranda Parkes, Hourglass. Her work always delights. There is that wonderful contradiction between voluptuous, sculptural form and strict geometry of bright paint. A visual feast.

Clay Heads, by Richard Maloy was a stunner. Echoes of Munch’s Scream together with the mud men of Max Ernst and some African tribe. Primal and cleverly executed.

Censored, by Bruce Connew showed us how political art can be done well. Young Sun Han’s Untitled (collaged appropriated image) was simply arresting and Paused Painting by Helen Calder skilfully reminded us of the viscous qualities of paint itself.

(The above image shows the winning work by Patrick Lundberg.)

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.