Jeena Shin's stairwell wall

Jeena Shin
ARTSPACE stairwell Project
2009 – 2011

Jeena Shin is known for her fastidious wall paintings and portable panels that feature tightly interlocking or overlapping triangular shapes, all rendered with tonally matched sets of some selected hue. They look like fractals or tangrams masked off with tape so that the edges of the painted geometrical forms have become raised.

This particular work is sited on a high wall adjacent to a staircase that provides the entrance to Auckland’s ARTSPACE. Since the project began in 2009, Shin has been working on it in occasional (and deliberately unpredictable) bursts, devising complex evanescent configurations in light tones of grey, and later adding slightly darker geometric forms on top. The underlayers are never obliterated totally because of the ridges of the edges – brought out by the light raking across them from the two skinny vertical windows facing K’ Rd.

The result is a strangely unstable tension between flickering tonal triangles or diamonds lying over faintly visible pin-lined edges of painted forms that look like glued-on sheets of angularly cut paper. The two levels work independently of each other, sometimes hovering or floating free, or often interwoven and locked together. Overall – bearing in mind it is impossible to stand back and survey the wall in its entirety – there is a sense of faceted and tumbling flat prisms spreading out across the vertical, rectangular plane like a tree of multiplying crystal slivers, sometimes in sync with the layers beneath, sometimes contrary to them.

Besides having little space to move away from it in, the wall itself is an oddly awkward, lopsided shape that surprisingly, instead of being a nuisance, gives Shin an advantage. Its very eccentricity, with two very different viewing spots at top and bottom - and the diagonal stairs in between - allows her to create a striking downward movement with paler but modulated negative forms. A more obvious and more exciting dynamic appears here than with conventional rectangular formats. ‘Dead’ non gallery spaces such as this may be where her talent shines most.

The images above are not much help unless you have a very clean computor screen which is large. The tones on the wall are very subtle.

Class politics of musical and artistic education

Daniel Knorr and Prisoners of New Zealand: Block
ARTSPACE
4 November - 28 November 2009

One of my favourite examples of sixties ‘conceptual art’ (so-called) is by the Dutch artist Jan Dibbets, a project discussed in Lucy Lippard’s well known book Six Years: The Dematerialization of the Art Object. In this work Dibbets positioned three poles on the edge of a forest in an attempt to extend the territory of a robin. The sculpture (Robin Redbreast Territory/Sculpture 1969) only came into existence when the small bird happened to fly into the triangular space between them.

In his current exhibition at ARTSPACE Berlin-based Daniel Knorr has a similar approach to making transient and temporary sculpture. In the main square gallery he has built an elegant circular cage of bars and curved roof. In it he has placed six classical instruments: a harp, double bass, cello, violin, timpani, and flute. The door providing access to them is locked.

This construction looks great in the gallery but despite its attractiveness and its location, it is not an artwork. Knorr has decided that it only becomes an artwork when a visitor who is not a trained musician goes to the office, gets the key to the door, enters and starts to experiment with the instruments. Once they start testing the sounds within each one, learning how to manipulate the aural qualities they discover, their actions and sounds are an art experience for other visitors.

If an educated (or knowingly gifted) musician gets in the cage and performs – it won’t be art. Knorr clearly is after a certain kind of chaos and dissonance. He is searching for a quality where initially there is no evident knowledge, skill or control. Where ‘ugliness’ and ‘ignorance’ (according to the classical aesthetic) are embraced via amateur performances.

The other two works at ARTSPACE brilliantly contextualise this ‘levelling’ and ‘non-educated’ aural sculpture. One is a film made with prisoners taking the art classes at Paremoremo, but learning musical skills. Like visitors to the cage, these real-life (unidentifiable) prisoners are documented discovering qualities in the instruments they explore – making sounds that happen to fit into the genres of punk, improv or free noise.

The third is an exhibition of paintings and pencil drawings made by prisoners from Auckland prison and Northern Region Corrections. It is work that varies between the visual equivalents of classical and jazz. Some is mimetic and realistic in aspiration, akin perhaps to classical music that references natural phenomena like landscapes or bird and water sounds. Others are more abstract and grid like. They reference machinery as drawings but also coincidentally mimic jazz and electronic music with their percussive rhythms and parallel rectangular structures.

Knorr’s interest here in physical and pedagogical accessibility reflects an earlier work in the Venice Biennale where visitors were shut out of the Romanian pavillion, or the opposite in Manifesta, where gallery doors were removed. His awareness of other issues such as loss of identity (as enforced with the filmed prisoners) has been demonstrated by other works where black balaclavas were placed over the heads of public statues.

With this show there is an assumption that musical (or artistic) talent only becomes clearly manifest in those privileged enough to have had a good education – but that is not always the case. Some people have an innate biological ability to copy or invent melodies or make accurate representations of things - a talent acquired by (genetic) nature not (social) nurture. This fact perhaps helps make the issues of class levelling that Knorr raises here, irrelevant. A superbly thoughtful exhibition nonetheless.

(Above image, Self-portrait by Dave, charcoal on paper, 2009.)

The proof of the pudding

New Artists show: Fresh Gallery Otara, Newcall, None
ARTSPACE
5 September - 10 October 2009

We have here one of those classic scenarios where a show is tortured by internal philosophical conflicts that disrupt pragmatics: an exhibition which normally involves a yearly curation of work from new (hitherto comparatively unknown) artists - selected from a national pool so they can be exposed to a big Auckland audience. However this time, for reasons of hoping to embrace a wider democratic participation so she is not a ‘gatekeeper’ (though if you take on the job, I think it is something you can’t escape) the director/curator has delegated the responsibility to three artist collectives. They do the inviting and are part of a process where the Means is more important than the Ends.

Despite the honourable philosophical intentions, this is not a happy result – for Ends count, and Art and philosophy are not interchangeable. The curator should not have got sidetracked by artist communities and sub-committees. She is paid to make decisions that achieve certain outcomes - like quality shows; not to share power.

Yet although the curatorial deferral achieved by passing the baton to Fresh, Newcall and None hasn’t worked, there are some good things. A few.

First of all Fresh Gallery Otara handle the situation really well. The film Small Axe 09 made by Tanu Gago, Leilani Kake, Visesio Siasau, Serene Tay, and Angela Tiatia is a fascinating series of conversations between Pacific Island and Maori women about the pros and cons of hair straightening, and its relationship with the dominant Eurocentric culture. It is related to some of the projects that some American black artists, like Lorna Simpson for example, have created, but using direct spoken language and music instead of poetic written texts or rarefied, elegant images. The issues raised seem to include freewill, personal taste, self esteem, changing community codes of ‘ethnicity’ perhaps, and new mores for ‘authentic’ or ‘natural’ bodies.

Fresh present a united front and have come up with a good product, an excellent ‘Otara’ brand. They save this exhibition from being a total disaster. Newcall in contrast to Fresh seem split by different factions. Their work is fragmented in its content and aspirations. The reading library in the main space is excellent – but those books and magazines were always available in the ARTSPACE office previously anyway, and more of them. Newcall’s idea of splicing a trimmed page of a theoretical text into each shelved book, and then reselecting some such books to be taken to the English collective Form Content in London via hand luggage is inane with its decontextualization. It is a trans-global group grope where the ARTSPACE gallery visitor is forgotten, because the best books disappear.

The theme of democratic process is the content of much of the purple ARTSPACE brochure, particularly in the Newcall section, and this continues with some significant discussions in the publication of Matters 3, now edited by John Ward Knox. However writing and art that awakens enthusiastic reader/viewer interest doesn’t achieve that through bald content alone. It requires layers provided by style, tropes, and poetic inflection - so that audiences are not excited primarily by political rhetoric, guilt, or desire to be pious, but through pleasure – mental or bodily. Information or argument by itself is tedious.

There are certain artists in the Newcall ‘team’ whose work I personally hold in high regard but this ‘democratic’ project turns their conspicuous talent to slush. Everything gets muddied up with incompatible elements made into a sort of thematic cold porridge. Scrape away that conceptual sludge and Clara Chon’s vertical glass slot in the wall, Sunday Minimalist, is witty as a self-portrait (it is like a negative version of Robert Morris’ Box For Standing In), as is Layla Rudneva-Mackay’s semi-autobiographical computer audio-text, A Wire To Fire Into His Heart, with its changing loop structure and vivid language.

None is a studio collective in Dunedin with a space set aside for projects that are implemented when the need arises. Consequently putting a live stream into their gallery when all they can think of is solving storage problems in the basement is like a lot of this show, a waste of time and money. Instead of being paralysed by fears of being perceived as a ‘benevolent auteur’ Emma Bugden should have accepted her salaried role as ‘Prime Mover’ more fully, travelling high and low seeking out under-exposed artists from all over the country (some connected to collectives, some not) and who are in fact ‘new’ – very few here are. A tragically wasted opportunity caused by a failure of nerve.

Cao Fei Survey

Cao Fei: Utopia
ARTSPACE
11 July - 22 August 2009

Cao Fei is one of China’s high profile animation artists, one who has gained a lot of exposure in Biennales in recent years with her spectacular video installations. This survey was initiated by the IMA in Brisbane, and it is also travelling to TheNewDowse in Hutt City and the DAG. Obviously it is perceived by those institutions as a crowd-pleaser and it is easy to see why. It is sensual, filled with fantasy, yet also thoughtful. A richly layered, sexy but intellectual practice. Not eye candy.

Utopia has five sections that lock together to make a tightly connected whole. The themes interact, repeat and further elaborate on earlier threads that spiral around leisure, escapism and labour and which sometimes tie in intriguing religious ideas about reincarnation and cosmic illusion with those of digital technologies – in particular the virtual world inhabited by avatars known as Second Life.

The earliest work is COSplayers, a 2004 DVD on a LCD in the Long Gallery that shows teenagers dressed in elaborate manga or videogame hero costumes acting out choreographed duels on the outskirts of Guangzhou. Some of this work was shown in Te Tuhi’s Who’s Afraid of the Big Bad Wolf a couple of years ago and at the time I remember being puzzled by it. It works better here with Cao Fei’s later projects positioned around it.

There is also a suite of large C-type coloured photographs made two years later with similarly dressed characters in tableaux set in city streets and construction sites. Bizarre poses and fantasies of the videogaming imagination are mixed with the mundane realities of daily existence.

A documentary film Whose Utopia also made in 2006 and screened in the adjacent Small Gallery, draws out this aspect - heightens this contrast. It shows workers in an Osram light-bulb factory in the Pearl River delta region performing their monotonous daily tasks: counting wires, pulling levers, packing bulbs etc. The recording of machinery in the early stages of producing filaments and glass tubes is interesting viewing because the brand is so ubiquitous. Those images are then combined with lyrical footage of solo workers performing ballet or dancing in the factory aisles.

Whilst Whose Utopia is poignant, informative and gently didactic, things technically get cranked up several notches in the Main Gallery with the intricacies of digital animation and virtual world construction.

Made in 2006-7, I-Mirror is a three part documentary about the Sci-Fi environment of Second Life. It is amazing, with hypnotic music, gorgeous colour, deep space, the poetry of Octavio Paz, and wonderful dialogue between Cao Fei’s digital persona (China Tracey) and her avatar boyfriend Hug Yue. You can get a sense of it from this Youtube clip of the second section, though the definition is crap. Better to see it properly on a large LCD screen.

This imaginative dreamlike world is so absorbing, and the sensuality of the visual forms and sound so caressing it becomes highly addictive. The fact that it is highly inventive and the stories very smart makes it difficult to leave. You get hooked.

As a projection on a much bigger screen, RMB City is similarly spectacular. The title refers to China’s currency and the DVD features a booming futuristic city that is modelled on Beijing, constructed like a giant oil rig in the middle of the ocean. This wondrously complex cluster of buildings, cranes, flying animals and roads is circled around, dived down on and flown through. The site is thoroughly explored while the viewer is taken on an exuberant joy ride.

There is a viscerality about this variety of animation, a bodily manipulation of space that goes back to early Disney and Warner Brothers. However with this recent technology it is the new detail and consistency behind the complexity that amazes.

The five sets of work this Chinese artist presents make up a remarkable survey. Hopefully Aucklanders will cotton on early and get on up to K’ Rd to see it.

Mind the gap

SUPERFLEX: Today we don’t use the word dollars
ANZ Bank, 312 Karangahape Road
One Day Sculpture Project, commissioned by ARTSPACE
27 May 2009

Georges Perec, the great French writer of the seventies and co-founder of OULIPO (an influential experimental society of European scientists, mathematicians and artists) once wrote a detective novel entirely without using the letter ‘e’. He was an innovative intellectual who loved to work within restrictions. Another of his novels (Life: a User’s Manual) has a chapter sequence organised like a knight making L-shaped leaps around a chessboard, where each square is a room in a boarding-house. Such artists adore prohibitions. They relish creating difficulties for themselves, and for others.

So what if a group of artists specifically forbade bank tellers to say the word ‘dollars’ during their daily transactions with customers or other banks?

It sounds sadistic doesn’t it? Except the ANZ Bank staff I spoke to in Newton, on the receiving end of this particularly mischievous behaviour modification, were totally non-phased. Didn’t worry them a bit. Loved to have a diverting and entertaining challenge over what turned out to be a pretty quiet day anyhow. They even put balloons up. Made it a party game.

In a contract drawn up with the Danish art trio, SUPERFLEX, the bank staff agreed to use other words instead. If they forgot, they were fined $1 for each infringement. This embargo affected four tellers, the manager and a few other admin staff, plus the receptionist.

The funny thing, in my view, is that the contract was a bit vague. The staff could if they wished, have said ‘bucks’, or ‘greenbacks’. Even had a drawn $ sign on a pad, as one person did. I would have expected them to use words like ‘cash’, ‘revenue’, ‘monies’, or ‘funds’.

In fact most managed happily to count out notes without saying the dreaded D-word, or paused seemingly absent-mindedly in mid sentence leaving an aural gap. One even just said ‘beep’ if it were a swear word. Wonderful! (Ever heard that 1965 Bob Dylan line: Money doesn’t talk, it swears?).

That is exactly SUPERFLEX’s point: they are showcasing an all pervading fiscal obsession that corrupts our global culture, an acquisitive drive that goes beyond the commonsense necessities for survival or human contentment. Some people and organisations are forever greedy – no matter how damaging the cost is to others or the planet. This artwork makes a game out of mocking a mindset so ubiquitous it has become invisible. It throws out the challenge that maybe there are other ways of looking at things.

In the morning business was subdued, but in the afternoon things got livelier. Curious artists called in partially because of the bank’s location – very close to ARTSPACE, MIC, Ivan Anthony and Room. Some tellers attracted very few art buffs while others were like lamps attracting moths – who just zeroed in to try and trip them.

In my visit I was amazed how gracious everybody was and how undisruptive the prohibition turned out to be. I’m starting to wonder if even banning all synonyms would have had any impact. It is a bit like strangers who have no common language meeting for the first time. Because humans are innately inventive, if there are predetermined assumptions of purpose, communication is effortless.

Planar modification

A Plane For Behavers (discussion continued)
Alicia Frankovich
ARTSPACE
16 May – 27 June 2009

We have here three public indoor performances, and another private outdoor event at Kitchener Place, documented on video. The four connect a bit like the installation placed in the main ARTSPACE gallery, its four monitors on chairs positioned to make up a square, a square plane suspended by its corners with remnants from the first work hanging above.

Frankovich is a gymnast preoccupied with linear vectors. She thinks in terms of vertical drops or lifts, horizontal conveyancing and diagonally angular ascents or descents. Her body is a point in motion co-ordinating with other point/bodies. Dot becomes line which transmutes into plane.

Such elements take on poetic metaphor. Plane becomes aircraft guided by pilots who are accountable for their actions above ground. Notions of responsibility are embedded in space. Dimensions within the aether acquire social properties.

Using limited means Frankovich has created a surprisingly layered presentation. Each of the three ARTSPACE rooms elaborates on different vector combinations: horizontal movement with no people is presented in the long space off to the far left with a stationary ‘dumb waiter’ shuttle that has a moving cable; in the big square gallery we see vertical/horizontal movement involving one person hoisting or many people carrying the artist; and horizontal motion (live but not videoed) and diagonal movement (videoed but not live) are enacted in the smallest room by pilots as agents for all three vectors.

There is also a fourth performance created several times a week where people sit in the four chairs in the main gallery for an hour, clutching the functioning monitors to their chests and resting the weight on their knees. They are here carrying not the artist but the moving image of the artist being carried. Their presence in the gallery makes viewing those screens more disquieting and confrontational, involving an unanticipated social dimension. The visitor remains a passive observer with some difficulty.

This artist is a shrewd manipulator of different logics. The video documentation, gallery sculpture (living or otherwise) and even undocumented works (not in the building, but on the website) are tightly meshed together so their relationships seem inevitable. A superbly planned and executed exhibition.

Ultra Intra

Beginning in the Archive: Giovanni Intra 1989 - 1996
Curated by Kate Brettkelly-Chalmers
ARTSPACE
31 January - 28 February 2009

It is a little over six years since the tragic, stupid death of Giovanni Intra and since then his work has been regularly seen as part of the Chartwell Collection, and his estate of uncollected items auctioned off. An energetic, startlingly articulate artist and curator who effortlessly wrote with a witty, agile, fluid turn of phrase about anything that caught his eye, ARTSPACE is now presenting his archives – mainly Auckland and Christchurch material that he left with his mother before he went to Los Angeles in 1996 to study theory and eventually become a dealer.

This selection of posters, drawings, photographs, jottings and notebooks is presented in four flat vitrines in the main gallery - in a manner similar to the Tom Kreisler exhibition of a year ago. Whereas the Kreisler show had many paintings on the ARTSPACE walls, only one major Intra artwork is presented, while documentation of others is shown with projected slides. Some of the drawings are photocopied and presented in two bound volumes with the vitrines. Other bits of correspondence, to and from Intra, also bound, are in a back gallery on a table of assorted publications (such as those by the collective Teststrip) that he wrote for or else collected. There is also supplementary material generously lent by Ann Shelton and Jim and Mary Barr.

The best account of this archive, now stored by Auckland Art Gallery (in the E. H. McCormack Research Library) is by Robert Leonard in Reading Room 2. However Kate Brettkelly-Chalmer’s essay accompanying this show is very informative, clear and perceptive –though perhaps at times a little too accepting of Intra’s rhetoric. It is a beautifully constructed text that whets your appetite for the varied contents of this exhibition, cajoling you into using this rare opportunity to examine his ideas through his writing and images, and speculating if he will ever be remembered.

People usually of course change as they adapt to new situations, and I suspect the later Giovanni selling for the LA artists of China Art Objects was a different personality – more mellow - than the prickly young firebrand of this time capsule. Here he is infatuated with Bataille, Debord and Boiffard, and hostile to medical practices and forensic photography. He is impulsive, at times jealously territorial and quick to find fault with colleagues. He easily takes offence with anyone who disagrees with his (then radical) ideas about ‘The Clinic’ and surveillance. However he was also very loyal to those in his inner circle. Much of his correspondence shows that for all his erudition, he was also highly emotional. This display shows his kneejerk responses, as does the one artwork on show.

That work, 365 days (1991), a suite of ‘daily’ photographs, is a sarcastic nose-thumbing at conceptual artists like Billy Apple. It is a silly light-weight project that is only a fraction as interesting as his Nature Morte fetish masterpiece owned by the Govett-Brewster, or Chartwell’s ‘pharmaceutical’ Untitled - currently displayed in Ron Brownson’s In Shifting Light exhibition at the New Gallery.

This archive, though certainly fascinating, isn’t as interesting as his completed, more resolved artworks and essays. Its value lies in what it tells us about the processes behind his thinking, but finished results are – in the end - what count. These documents show us the exhibitionism and posing common to both his images and texts, glimpses of his unrelentingly penetrating intelligence and quick responses, and his voracious appetite for researching those theoretical areas he was passionate about. They give us a taste of what he was on about, but they don't show his talent at its very best.

I think an anthology of Intra’s liveliest and most lucid writings would be the best way to represent him. There are many more texts that he created than artworks, and so a sample of those would be more interesting than say, a touring selection of works. Maybe one day that will happen.

Vanished headlands

Fiona Jack and Ngati Whatua o Orakei: Kohimaramara
ARTSPACE billboard project on Karangahape road

Mixing up or blending together images from the past and present is one of the obvious characteristics of digital photography where physical cutting and pasting (collage style) is no longer needed. Two photographs of the seafront at Bastion Point, taken 107 years apart, provide the raw visual material for an exciting new panorama on a huge billboard on the Langham Hotel car park on K’ Rd. These images by Haruhiko Sameshima and James Richardson have been combined to create a spectacular land, sea and skyscape, supervised by Fiona Jack (lecturer at Elam) and Ngarimu Blair (the Heritage Manager of Ngati Whatua o Orakei).

The massive horizontal hoarding mourns the destruction in 1908 of Kohimaramara, a large rock (called ‘Sugarloaf’ by Europeans) that was linked symbolically to the various peace agreements between Maori tribes in the Auckland area. It has a ghost-like presence in the centre of the rectangle. There is also an odd wit in this image's placement on the side of a hotel car park to subtly critique ‘progress’ and 21st century modernity. It shows lines of parked cars on the foreshore as a symbol for the present.

The image and title allude to an oral tradition where place names were used by Maori as a sort of mapping structure preserved not by visual means but through stories and language. No persons who have seen this rock are alive now but historical photographic archives provide a valuable resource that supplements verbal and written records.

It would be good to know why the rock was destroyed. Plain ignorance? Malicious vandalism by the pakeha authorities maybe? Perhaps it was seen as a hindrance to shipping, or as aesthetically unsightly?

This billboard is a subtle work that prods us to look closely at the past and how it effects our assumptions about the landscape of the present. In a lively, very evocative text Layla Rudneva-Mackay speculates about what happened to Kohimaramara, suggesting that it could have been ground up to help build the causeway or even used to make a foundation for the Shortland Street Post Office.

Kohimaramara reveals a particularly smart use of the panoramic properties of the elongated billboard format, making it the most successful so far of the several works ARTSPACE has organised. The image plays with us like the recent lenticular photographs by Megan Jenkinson of ‘phantom’ Antarctic islands. Both sorts of work deal with evanescence - one physical, the other mental. You ponder presence and absence simultaneously. In Kohimaramara’s case, the large scale of the image makes both past and present equally palpable, super-assertive and hard to pull apart.

Better late than never

1: Daniel Malone, Francis Alys, Mark Adams, Eve Armstrong, Fiona Banner, Ann Veronica Janssens
Brian Butler Ed.
Designed by Warren Olds, Studio Ahoy
Colour, b/w illustrations
Softcover 132 pp
ARTSPACE and Clouds, August 2008

This Volume publication looks at Brian Butler’s first six months as Director at ARTSPACE, his term being from 2005 to 2008. It presents the work of six artists, has essays by five writers, plus it has another publication (Eve Armstrong’s) enclosed within. The book is quite eccentric. One artist has two essays (Francis Alys), two artists have none (Malone and Adams), and one of those never even showed at ARTSPACE - yet strangely their images are I think the highlight of the book (Adams).

Butler is not a very good editor: some of the articles are too long, digress wildly and need shaping - especially Allan Smith on Armstrong and Nathalie Robertson on Alys. They simply don’t capture what is exciting about the artists they’re discussing, but Butler’s own short piece of writing on Fiona Banner is the best we’ve seen from him. Hopefully we will see of his writing in future Volumes.

The most successful texts are by Matthew Crookes and Stella Brennan. Crookes looks at myth-building as part of Alys's practice while Brennan’s text is extraordinarily focussed and tells us a great deal about actually experiencing Janssens’ various projects in the ARTSPACE rooms. As mentioned Robertson’s discussion meanders away from Alys but an examination of Maui as ‘trickster’ in her text is informative and entertaining. Her writing becomes more attentive to Alys in the second half.

Of the artists, Eve Armstrong’s inserted book on How To Run Trading Tables is so brilliant visually and conceptually that it is clearly to Volume 1’s advantage to include it in its entirety. The best writing linking Armstrong’s sculpture with her interactive performances, and giving an accurate overall account, seems to have been by Natasha Conland, so a chance was missed with her omission. Allan Smith’s essay focuses unduly on the notion of ‘stack’ or ‘pile’, contextualising it with various excerpts from novels and poetry, but ignoring the fact she is an accomplished colourist and shaper of sculptural form. His text is really about him not her, showing his ability to pull material from unexpected literary sources, and seamlessly blend it as a series of crammed riffs exploring semantic themes.

Daniel Malone’s four opening photographs of his ‘graffiti’ wall by ARTSPACE’s K’ Rd entrance are not particularly interesting in their own right, and could have done with a verbal analysis to explain the details of the frontage’s changes. They seem to be there because they showcase ARTSPACE’s street signage, and cannot compete with the wonderfully compelling images by Adams (Cook’s Sites) and Armstrong (as documented by Richard Orjis) in the publication’s centre.

Although this is a good looking publication with much informative material, it needs an explanatory introduction, and at $70 is somehat overpriced. (Compared to say Reading Room at $50.) Nevertheless we look forward to further issues in this series.

Connecting to the 'Real' World

SUPERFLEX: If value then copy.
ARTSPACE
23 October - 22 November 2008

SUPERFLEX is one of those politically motivated art groups that kicks into motion certain processes that function in the zone between the ‘art world’ and ‘life world’. This is exemplified by the concept of the littoral, a term not linked to them specifically but which nonetheless is related to their practice. (It is discussed and promoted by theoreticians and artists like Bruce Barber, Grant Kester and Ian Hunter.) However the littoral is originally a late seventies concept that is regional in focus. Contemporary art collectives like SUPERFLEX on the other hand are resolutely global in aspirations, and comparatively less altruistic and more anarchistic. They mix a wild nihilism into the commercialism of their aims.

Keen to have a palpably subversive influence in a capitalism dominated world, to intercede within it economically (though not solely on behalf of economically disadvantaged communities as in littoral), the Danish group have come on their second visit to New Zealand, this time for a show in Auckland. (The first was to do a Govett-Brewster project with Greg Burke.)

Their ARTSPACE display involves two projects that explore copyright issues, and are anti–monopoly and anti-private ownership. There is also a third component which promotes the other two by enabling the screening onto t-shirts the slogan (in Māori or in English) that is the title of the show.

FREE BEER presents the local manufacture of a beer that is brewed using a recipe circulated by SUPERFLEX, and modified as a local variation (Version 4.1) with its own uniquely coloured label. In readiness for the closing party, Auckland artist Simon Cuming is making a new variation (Version 4.2) that will be available then. Most of the profits will go to ARTSPACE.

The other project, COPY LIGHT, is more humorous: the photographing of famous brands of lampshades, and the duplication of those images so the photos can be positioned on cubes to become new ‘box’ lampshades. Though the gallery blurb says that the borders between originals and their copies are being tested this is not really the case. The new lampshades would never be mistaken for their source originals, even if legally the process is not permitted.

This is a clever exhibition that deals conceptually with ‘ownership’ in an unusually forthright manner. Since Napster became popular though, such themes are hardly revelatory. Good to ponder over nonetheless. Especially if you are thirsty and have two dollars of loose change in your pocket.

Prepare

Chris Kraus: Plastic Is Leather, Fuck You (Films and Videos 1983-1995)
ARTSPACE
11 September – 18 October 2008

Chris Kraus is probably more known for her theoretical books than her experimental films. We have eight of the latter here - ranging in length from 5 mins to 90. Some are grainy, almost inaudible, replete with bad acting (mostly kiwi artists, cos they’ll do it for free), incoherently fragmented, and well past their use-by date. Yet there is good stuff. It is worth sifting through, but you need a lot of time. And buckets of stamina, because some of it dreadfully pretentious. It should be just literature. Being on film doesn’t help it.

My favourites are the Artaud films (Voyage to Rodez, and Fool Proof Illusion) which I’d rather listen to with my eyes shut, pretending they are radio docos. Anything to do with Artaud is interesting. He is like William Blake or Laurence Sterne – utterly astounding on all levels. “Original” doesn’t do him justice.

Of the rest, How to Shoot a Crime, with its chatty dominatrix and grisly corpses from police documentary films is a standout. Pretty good, provided you are stout hearted. And curious about when violence can go too far, when for some the pleasure/pain threshold is hard to determine.

What you should do before coming to ARTSPACE is look on You Tube at Martin Rumsby’s wonderful series of interviews with Kraus. Great material Rumsby has generously placed in the public domain. There are also sections of Kraus films online there too.

Before you leave your house though, read first the article by Sylvere Lotringer (Kraus’ hubby) on Artaud and Uccello in Midwest Five. (It should be in the Elam library). It is a good introduction to the complexities of Artaudian Gnosticism.(That and the famous Susan Sontag essay) Useful as background research.

Freedom from words

Isabel Nolan: Trance in Inaction
ARTSPACE
12 September - 18 October 2008

Isabel Nolan is an Irish artist currently spending some time in Auckland, working in the Museum and apparently studying its large collection of lichens. Especially interested in drawing she seems to work in a varied range of graphic media, plus fabric and embroidery. As the included animated video shows, she is an exceptional writer. In fact, her language skills make her visual imagery seem comparatively ordinary. I think in fact it is.

Nolan is interested in the state between sleep and wakefulness, that almost narcoleptic transition where you are almost unconscious on your feet, though still aware you are not, but experiencing hallucinations. However the video deals with another area, a series of letters from somebody wishing to withdraw from social contact and its accompanying speech, and then from all language, including traces of the written. Her remarkable epistolary text shows us somebody scrutinising her own interiority, trying to determine the essential elements within the self after discarding possibly irrelevant ingredients like linguistic or social components.

If Nolan’s character seeks a voluntary isolation that is free from words, that state (taking all the works as a cohesive installation) doesn’t help the resulting images. Her delicately coloured pencil drawings that are mystical in content, her (ironically?) cut-out words and neuronlike watercolours, don’t have a compelling placement on the page and deliberately look unfinished. They seem academic as referencing pointers, vague quotations serving as faux art brut, but not rivetting as drawings. They are the opposite of say, Antonin Artaud’s famous drawings, which through lacking in technical facility, have great power through his positioning of lines and shapes. He was obviously a man who was wide awake (in pain even) when making them, while Nolan’s are deliberately soporous. Her work is meditative but consciously lacking energy. Very precise, but strangely dull and cramped. Anality and stasis: hand in hand.

Hood the Hoon

Robert Hood: Cyclical Adjustment Vacuum Manifold
ARTSPACE
11 September – 18 October 2008

In the main ARTSPACE gallery Robert Hood, from Christchurch, presents an installation that partially celebrates and partially critiques boy racer larrikinism. A pile of about forty crumpled car windscreens sprawls across the floor, the shattered green glass buckled and bent.

On a nearby wall is a large coloured photograph of the end of a country road overlooking Harewood Airport. The macadam is black with the rubber-streaked remnants of repeated burnouts. The site is obviously a social space that regularly attracts its own community.

Adjacent on the same wall is a pinned up assortment of paper WOF pockets, dates printed on, plus a variety of squashed cans that once held alcoholic drinks. There are also flattened cigarette cartons displaying gruesome carcinogenic photographs and written warnings.

These three components make a wonderful synthesis. Collectively they resonate powerfully, with the flattened objects, anti-smoking language and medical imagery spreading their aura over to the rest of the gallery. This is grim visual poetry of the utmost sophistication.

Yet there is humour too, even empathy. On a video monitor is the hilariously wagging tail on what appears to be a dog, but which is in fact a kunekune, a New Zealand native pig.

So the tail is wagging the ‘dog’? What is Hood saying if he is articulating anything? What compels boy racers to gather into groups and compete with their cars? Obviously they are having fun (and perhaps that is all Hood intends as a comment) but perhaps there are wider issues at stake about the masculinity of our culture in general. Maybe the use of a pig is in itself loaded.

Hood’s calculatedly ambiguous installation is remarkably evocative, a real treat. Auckland art lovers are lucky ARTSPACE has chosen to present it.

Impressive sound

Ryoji Ikeda: data.tron.2007
MIC Toi Rerehiko
11 July - 15 August 2008

This installation is not the first time Ryoji Ikeda has presented work in Auckland, but it is the first with visual material. In 2001 he provided sound compositions for Toyo Ito’s Blurring Architecture, a memorable show at ARTSPACE that NZ architect Andrew Barrie organised.

Here in the MIC, it is his sound that dominates – so crisp, razor-sharp, intricate and penetrating that it causes the visual image component to seem comparatively dull.

Ikeda works with rows of data that he transmutes into sound and image and projects at a frenetic rate four times faster than film. Yet despite the use of deep receding perspective and rapidly rising and descending columns of digits, you are not drawn in. It is only on one wall. The immersive sound though encompasses you. Your body tingles as swirling aural sensations snap, crackle and pop their way into your skull. Their staccatoed, vibrating sonic stutters are what you remember.