Materials published

Matters
Ed. Sam Rountree Williams
Contributors: Matthew Crookes, John Ward Knox, Sam Rountree Williams, Mythily Meher, Nell May (Cover: Alexandra Savtchenko-Belskaia)
pp.20, b/w drawings
Newcall, August 2008
$5.00 (from Newcall directly)

Matters 2
Ed. Sam Rountree Williams
Contributors: Jan Bryant, Amy Howden-Chapman, Sarah Hopkinson, Andrew Clifford, Laura Preston (Cover: Alexandra Savtchenko-Belskaia)
pp.50, b/w and colour photographs
Newcall, August 2009
$10.00 (from Newcall directly)

These two Newcall publications are out just as a third (edited by John Ward Knox) is about to appear within the Newcall component of the next ARTSPACE show. The first one, a thinner, blue-covered booklet with no photographs, has apparently been out for a while. It is, apart from a Rountree Williams article on a Martyn Reynolds and Marnie Slater performance, mainly writing not linked to specific shows. The short texts are well chosen, all having not only informative content, but also a fluid sensual style – to be read for pure pleasure in itself.

In fact it is a superior publication in terms of writing to the second Matters which is technically more advanced with its coloured illustrations. Over the last two years I have read many texts by most of the first Matters contributors, and Rountree Williams presents them here at their very best. All the writing is pitched perfectly, and can be enjoyed over and over.

In comparison Matters 2 has three stand-out contributions: Andrew Clifford on the convoluted university procedural requirements behind the setting up of Window’s Various Artists exhibition, Amy Howden-Chapman on Fiona Connor, and Sarah Hopkinson on Richard Frater.

Clifford is a great art journalist (and excellent curator) who can effortlessly explain the most complicated art-political scenario in lucid language. Here he has a thorough understanding of the conceptual intricacies underpinning the enforced bureaucratic paperwork and manages to turn the various hoops the curators and artists (particularly Rountree Williams and Holly Willson) had to jump through into quite a gripping and entertaining yarn.

Amy Howden-Chapman on Fiona Connor’s Half The Page exhibition at Gambia Castle is another superb article where she discusses Connor’s research material and how this show of replicas came together, mixed with her own concise observations about newspaper display racks, their duplicates - and one’s thinking habits when encountering them.

Sarah Hopkinson’s article fascinated me because of the way at a certain point in her discussion about Frater’s work she admits some components of his Newcall exhibition So long the difficulties of being single cause misgivings. I admired the honesty of her ambivalence (it is extremely rare for curators to say such things) as she attempted to articulate the complexities and contradictions of her analysis.

The writing by Jan Bryant and Laura Preston I did not admire, simply because – irrespective of content and authorial candour - they should not be writing about shows they organised (or helped organise) themselves: in these cases, Broken Fall (AUT and Newcall) and Vincent Grocery (at Enjoy). It was irresponsible for Rountree Williams to include them, for their participation trivialises Matters and turns it into a public relations rag, much like an Air New Zealand magazine you read on a plane. It was a wrong call. Publications like this should avoid overt flag-waving by self–interested participants, and at least attempt a little objectivity.

The Cost of Power

AC/DC: The Art of Power
Gus Fisher
21 August - 3 October 2009

This exhibition put together by Andrew Clifford looks at the role of electricity in our lives, and its attendant eco-politics. One might at first glance make the mistake of thinking it was about light (Bill Culbert is quite a presence) but its focus is on the benefits and negative consequences of power and the national grid. It is an interesting show because it allows Clifford to play with certain slippages of meaning, to calculatedly revel in ambiguities not present in some works when they were initially created (outside the electrical context) but present now. Such are the pleasures of being a curator.

Clifford’s title is clever. It comes from the two competing systems of current transmission invented by Nikola Tesla (Alternating Current) and Thomas Edison (Direct Current) and in the middle ‘courtyard’ space is a small yellow AC/DC Billy Apple painting. It examines not electricity and corporate power but the distribution of profit from an art selling transaction, referring to the Artist’s Cut and Dealer’s Cut within a Golden Ratio. Of course here in this show that meaning alters.

Another example of contextual alteration of meaning is the large Bill Culbert work with two large, vertical, nylon fabric boxes that gradually swap illumination levels. Light is treated like water being slowly transferred backwards and forwards between two tall glasses. Culbert’s minimalist oblongs look like the Twin Towers here, especially when placed near to a striking Joanna Langford installation of skyscrapers made from recycled computer keyboards. The keys are taken out so they look like Gustonesque windowed buildings. Electricity is present in the form of twinkling LED lights spread across the city at night.

The rhythmic electrical brain pulses from a sleeping human body take on parallels with this city when a 1972 snoozing Billy Apple is filmed in a semi-conscious state. Documented as an artwork having a very light sleep, a crackling soundtrack comes from recording his alpha waves. Apple’s body and mind here are on automatic pilot, but his partner Mary Morrison has a white neon sign next door that suggests a different principle. It flashes the word ‘breathe’ eighteen times a minute, instructing the reader to inhale at the correct rate to efficiently absorb oxygen. The use of blinking commands and the conscious will, bring a black humour to this body maintenance - with its reliance on orders via electricity.

The processes of providing this country’s electrical needs are referred to in Wayne Barrar’s two superb photographs of Huntly miners extracting coal for the nearby thermal station, Disinformation’s throbbing electromagnetic noise loop (accompanied by Barry Hale’s twitching video of power lines and insulators), and Brett Graham and Rachael Rakena’s eight circular Aniwaniwa photographs. The latter’s watery images show historic Waikato sites lost from the flooding necessary to create the Horahora Power Station and the displacement of local Maori communities like Ngati Koroki.

Joe Sheehan’s fake battery packs have battery casings made out of greenstone, greywacke or jade, sterling silver connecting caps and Craig Potton landscape imagery as backdrops. Entitled Non-Rechargeable they are an effective, very compact protest at resource wastage; an unusual yet shrewd synthesis of different media.

Two other works in the show are Mary-Louise Browne’s LED signs, moving texts based on her (in my view) superior granite inscribed word sequences. However these electronic noticeboards undermine her earlier method of presenting such texts where the eye is forced to move vertically to search for altered letters and extract each new word’s meaning; the LED format destroys the pleasurable eye movement associated with her original stone block format. Remarkable twelve word loops (like ‘cold bold bond bone bore born worn warn warm worm word cord’) work better as a single-word-wide vertical column than as six sets of pairs in a horizontal line.

Nicely organised, with each contributing component thoughtfully positioned, this unusual group show is well worth a walk down to Shortland Street to see.

Images in descending order are from Billy Apple, Wayne Barrar, Joanna Langford, Joe Sheehan (2), Brett Graham and Rachael Rakena (2)

Aural Feast

Speed of Sound: Motion and Journeys
A festival of sound installations curated by Andrew Clifford
Gus Fisher
21 August - 24 August 2008

Aural art has long been embraced by the visual arts community and regularly heard in galleries, so it’s a great idea to have this sonic fest involving Auckland Uni’s School of Music and Elam Art School.

I couldn’t get to everything, and maybe Friday’s events were the pick of the crop, but here’s what I did check out:

In the small room on the right was Stephen Matthews’ a three part video installation which I quite liked, especially sections where the falling water of Waikoropupu Springs was an intense blur that looked like fabric. The sound, using the tāonga puoro (Māori flute) played by Richard Nunns, I found completely overwhelmed by the imagery. The flute as an instrument is too sweet for my tastes. Basically I dislike it. I’d prefer hearing the water by itself.

Kaleb Bennett’s Santiago tour in the big left-hand room I couldn’t get into. Maybe I hit a dull spot when I happened to walk in, but I’d rather see a Kiarostami movie (shot in a car) than hear a cabbie rattle on about a city’s tourist delights. I wasn’t prepared to invest a lot of time in it, but if I missed something good, then readers, tell me so.

The festival’s highlight was James McCarthy’s Recent History. On the main ‘dome-room’ wall, above the staircase that goes downstairs, McCarthy had positioned a large relief drawing made of tightened piano wire, depicting Rangitoto Island. He used this image as an instrument, first of all plucking and scraping the middle section with long poles that had metal tips, then the lefthand side with bluesy ‘bottlenecks’ or lipstick holders, and then later the right using a violin bow.
He proceeded to give a very accomplished recital using a couple of small fans on each side that strummed the wires, incorporating also some subtle Eno and Fripp type sound loops that repeated delicate little phrases.

Immediately after McCarthy’s Saturday morning performance, DJN played a work called PIANOKIK by repeatedly booting a white soccer ball at the back of the specially exposed wires of a stand-up piano. The artist got more variety from this technique than you might expect, emitting different degrees of resonating, rumbling, harmonic sound. It would be interesting to see what a professional football player (a fit person who can consistently kick with accuracy) could do with this instrument.

On Sunday afternoon in a large downstairs hall, Sam Hamilton performed SONAR REALIDAD INTERIOR: Mapping the Transient, using a large collection of field recordings he has made in the Amazon rainforest. He also incorporated modulating sonic structures - so it was really Attenborough meets Stockhausen, with the occasional Hendrix feedback coming out from under a mossy log. The experience was very sculptural as Hamilton moved sections of twittering and honking frog or bird noises, muffled Spanish voices, or roaring trains, around the six to eight speakers, exploring different intensities and mixes.

Exasperatingly short though the event was, mostly crammed around one weekend, this rich assortment of sonic delights was much enjoyed I’m sure by all who braved the miserable weather to explore it.

Collective minds

The Swarm: a peek into the hive-mind of group dynamics
Curated by Andrew Clifford
Gus Fisher
11 July -16 August 2008

Here is a juicy question:

When you assess a show, how much of it is from analysing the overarching curatorial premise (if that is stated), and the relationship of the ingredients to that – and how much is dependent on the quality of the individual items, regardless of curatorial intent?

After all, a viewer can ignore the intention of a curator if they wish, or the artist, or both – and the curator can ignore the artist (and maybe viewer) too. The axiom ‘Trust the art, not the artist’ is pretty sound commonsense if you believe art should have its own internal logic and independent semiotic life, most of it accessible visually. Perhaps the creator is the last person to ask about an artwork. There are likely to be unconscious components clear to outsiders that the artist is blissfully unaware of, and things that the artist thinks are glaringly obvious, which somehow, have mysteriously evaporated.

Okay, back to curatorial premises, as with this show. Some of the work supports Andrew Clifford’s interest in ‘a group infrastructure that wields more power than the some of the parts’ and some of it doesn’t. He references films like The Birds and The Swarm where wild creatures decide to organise themselves against humans.

When he succeeds in presenting a case for his premise, Clifford’s choices are brilliant. The music is very clever as a source of persuasion. From Scratch’s recording of Gung Ho, and Clifford’s discussion of Phil Dadson’s interest in hocketting (overlapping melodic phrases or rhythms from different sources) is fascinating - as is Douglas Bagnall’s Music Industry Simulator, which breaks down into formulae the melody structures of pop tunes to make them reconstitutable into ‘originals’ like building blocks. Also very witty in this context is Ani O’Neill’s collection of communally made, woollen knitted circles that could also be colourful bacterial colonies.

Not so ambiguous, but perfectly apt nonetheless, are Gregory Bennett’s sci-fi videos and images of thousands of little naked men, scampering in an unleashed tide through buildings. Louise Fong’s 1995 painting Cluster, with its satellite paintings encircling a central ‘mother’ canvas, is also an extremely clever element picked by Clifford.

With the other works, I felt they were dominated by too many different ‘atomic particles’ rather than ‘linkable’ elements that had a commonality. The art that depicted insects, that of Richard Killeen and Elizabeth Thomson, seemed to present too varied a range of species to suggest the existence of a communal mind. And Matt Molloy’s rickety bookcase of Christine Hellyarlike plaster and latex casts of egg-covered surfaces again seemed too unfocussed in content to fit the theme.

Now, as I suggested earlier, you could say ‘bollocks’ to the curator and just enjoy the show for its separate individual items, forgetting the theme. We all know that even one work, if it really excites us, is worth a visit to an otherwise tedious exhibition.

Rest assured there is nothing tedious here. There’s plenty to enjoy. Plenty of engaging parts for only a partially resolved whole. That doesn’t really matter, for it’s really an excuse to put some stimulating art out for an audience that might enjoy it. And they will. Nothing wrong with that.

(Above images from Richard Killeen, Ani O'Neill and Gregory Bennett.)

University Treasures

Artspeak: Works from the Auckland University Art Collection
Gus Fisher, Auckland
11 April – 24 May 2008

There are well over 800 works in the University of Auckland Art Collection which was started almost fifty years ago - and Andrew Clifford (Gus Fisher’s curator) has selected twenty-seven of them. Apart from all being 2D, static and silent, his choices are surprisingly varied. While a handful of historic paintings, such as the McCahon, Hodgkins and Goldie, look peculiar surrounded by more contemporary endeavours, this is a great assortment to regularly dip into if you are fortunate enough to work close by. Much that you won’t notice on first acquaintance, creeps under your skin and excites you several days later when you are compelled to return. Despite there being too much work in the two rooms, the remarkable diversity – especially of recent acquisitions – keeps you tingling.

There is wonderful humor in having a show entitled after a Paul Hartigan neon which is ridiculing an over-academicised art vocab and discourse that many think is ossified, too hermetic and discouraging of new ideas. Perhaps nervousness is what prevents this show from having a catalogue essay. Delicious irony of course that the venue is a university one.

Some of the works can be linked by chains of formal compositional devices or themes that go across media. For example, the snowflake motif is explored by Yuk King Tan who has made fifteen elaborate configurations using tiny images from online newspaper sites. The symmetry of a snowflake is reflected in Jae Hoon Lee’s extraordinary digital image of a square computer keyboard that at first glance seems to be some kind of demented scrabble board.

James Cousins has a painting that looks like Duchampian waterwheel and windmills stencilled over images of flowers, while Boyd Webb’s photograph of artificial flowers made from fabric, makes them also look vaguely like a misshapen head. Julia Morison’s work from ‘Gargantua’s Petticoat’ on the other hand seems to be a Maori and Celtic hybrid spiral based on interwoven plant tendrils. These are some of the art works worth speaking about in Artspeak.