Unusual drawings

Peter Gibson Smith: Buried
Bath St Gallery
31 March - 24 April 2010

At Bath St, Peter Gibson Smith presents nine landscapes that are startlingly distinctive as images. They look like antique photographs that close up appear to have been made into line engravings and then transferred on to thin paper sheets supported by curved cross-sections of balsa and cardboard bracing.

Most of these works are in two or three vertical sections butted together. They have alternating curved ends that either project out into the room, or else bend towards the wall. These generate shadows that tonally liven up the austere fissure lined volcanic backgrounds of the work, for these pale landscapes incorporate famous Burton Brothers photographs of bare tephra-caked hills just after the 1886 Mt.Tarawera eruption. In their centres they have superimposed dramatic images of ancient monuments or earlier Gibson Smith sculptures.

The artist has digitally bended these images together, often including small human forms, or ladders constructed from HB pencils - with shadows. There is a reflexive humour here because these scanned images are in fact drawn with a computer using parallel pencil lines. They are then coated with brown encaustic that softens the pencil tones by mottling and darkening the graphite hatching. Sometimes rare touches of colour are added to the paper surface, or painted on the sides.

Because the paper is thin and stretched over the ribbed struts of the balsa stretcher, the delicate waxy images look, and are, frail, with the supporting trellis being clearly detectable behind the marks. The pencil lines are horizontal and vertical in the pale grey zones, with gaps along the lengths and spatial variations sometimes between them. Like a printing method, extra diagonal hatching is superimposed for the darker areas.

All this makes Gibson Smith’s images intriguing. They are haunting in a classic surrealist sense; a landscape hybrid of Max Ernst and Joel Peter Witkin. This is easily the best work of his career so far, possibly because he is avoiding colour (for which in my view he has no aptitude) but also because there is a relaxed looseness about the blotchy forms and overlaid rectangles. They are ambiguous spatially and far less fiddly than his previous projects.

Although there is an amusing logic in his rendering of massive monuments on wobbly paper on fragile supports, the fact they are in sections is a weakness – creating an irritating distraction through their painted edges. The vertical divisions seem to be the result of the width limitations of his drawing machine.

Where Gibson Smith succeeds is in establishing a humour where the works appear at a distance to be screened photographs sourced from museum collections. As mentioned, the precision and regularity of the pencil lines are akin to line engravings, though he teases with methods of registration too by having some layers of dark hatching deliberately out of sync.

I personally tend to be indifferent to technical innovation - because that aspect is invariably besides the point with good art - but these images do fascinate as complex systems of rendered marks, and as dreamlike narratives. Their programming makes them distantly related to Simon Ingram with his ‘robot’ painting, and also Stephen Greenwood, an artist who exhibited the products of his drawing machine in Christchurch’s Gingko gallery in the mid-eighties. (Before computers were available, he invented a machine that used an electric eye to scan still lifes, rendering them with horizontal lines made with coloured marker pens.)

With Gibson Smith the ominous darker works are especially memorable, especially a small image of some rocks (and ghostly traces of an airborne contraption) in a cloud-filled sky, and two large drawings, one of a shed-like, ruined arch of stacked books, the other of a statue of a lion attacking a horse (related to George Stubbs).

The method of mark making builds on their enigmatic character by amplifying the oddness of the shockingly destroyed New Zealand landscape now coping with new unexpected insertions dropped into its midst. It makes compelling viewing to see drawing, photography, painting and sculpture blended in such an innovative fashion.

Smaller better

Harvey Benge: Big work, small worksBath St
6 June - 20 June 2009

The two main parts of this show are a long narrow grid of coloured digital prints on the main bath St. wall - 240 of these butted together in a bank - and round the corner at the back, a suite of six very much smaller works from the series (and book): You won’t be with me tomorrow.

Benge’s small images, the framed photos separated out on one modest wall, are considerably better than the lumbering 8 x 40 grid that is ostensibly a single item. This one work is a dud: its proportions are wrong for the module size used, and it is packed with far too many images – urban shots to do with the sex industry, advertising, sentimental death, architecture and food – taken in Paris, Auckland, Genoa and Hong Kong.

It is all indiscriminate overkill, and apart from the issue of a high proportion of dross, even if these highly saturated images (reds and blues dominate) were all stunning by themselves, crammed into a long horizontal slot they merge into pictorial sludge.

The small vertical works are vastly superior, though Benge is hardly exploring the medium and going beyond conventional magazine fodder. Still he has done the right thing here in picking out quality works (with mystery or intensity) for viewing in isolation, and his ability with composition and scale is made obvious. He should have presented the whole exhibition in this manner.

German photography

Presentation Representation Part 2
Curated by Thomas Weski of the Haus de Kunst (Munich). Toured by the IFA and Goethe Institut.
Bath St
17 March - 28 March 2009

The five photographers in the second half of this German show are so good I cursed myself for missing the first half. Superbly installed by its own globe trotting technician, this display is a remarkable flagwaver for German culture. The work is pristine, elegant, remarkably fresh and fastidiously hung. It looks as if the curator lived in Auckland instead of Munich, and had the L-shaped Bath St Gallery in mind right from the start.

Weibke Loeper’s dozen Perspex mounted images look magnificent with no frames; the colour is oddly pure like lollies - vaguely piercing in its fruity, lickable intensity. The artist focuses on a small city (Wismar) where all the young people have gone, and shows us the streets and buildings’ exteriors. When we see a handful of people moving around the city centre and the toylike houses, they are all elderly. Everything is immaculately tidy with nothing unseemly anywhere.To Kiwi eyes it all seems rather surreal and dreamlike

Laurenz Bergan’s eight photographs are much larger, framed and all indoors – inside abandoned buildings that have been used by squatters, if at all. Everything is unloved and seedy but the squalor of the images is oddly appealing. The floors are covered with dead birds, cigarette butts, dust and feathers; children’s drawings provide a refreshing innocence on the grimy walls. The glimpses out through windows of the adjacent countryside are even more depressing than inside.

Heidi Specker’s ten images of a friend’s home and garden in Switzerland are really a cumulative portrait, using textures and odd portions of things to describe her friend. With bits of log cabins, patterned woolly jumpers, fungi close up, smooth glass windows, prickly pine needles and creaking ice, it is as if the images are not to be looked at but only felt by hand or cheek. The tactility provides a strange immediacy, something startlingly elemental.

One artist who avoided hanging pictures on the wall is Claus Goedicke. His photographs are printed into wallpaper which is pasted on inside the gallery. The seven images are incorporated on to a vertical green field with decorative filigrees of repeated crossed arms and hands, silhouettes of birds of prey, and alternating pink flowers. It’s a wonderfully strange way of exhibiting photographs, digitally processed of course - and adaptable for galleries with high studs.

The last artist is Uschi Huber. His nine C-prints record the actions of Cologne shop keepers just prior to the marching of any big parade through the city. They fit large sheets of plywood over all windows and doors to protect them from hooligans. The results are refreshingly beautiful with the patterned laminated wood lining the streets. The shops look like temporary movie sets before paint. Or an oddly scaled toy city made for children.

(The photographic images are in the order of the artists discussed.)

The trouble with hoses

Denys Watkins: Outside In
Bath St Gallery, Auckland
14 May - 7 June 2008

Death to everyone is gonna come
And it makes hosing much more fun

Those extraordinarily strange lyrics are part of a well known song from the late nineties by Will Oldham aka Bonnie ‘Prince’ Billy, of the Palace Brothers. By an amazing coincidence, they are also extremely applicable to the latest dealer gallery show by Denys Watkins. I say ‘coincidence’ because for all the various artworks (mostly paintings) – all rubbery and tubular in theme - listed on the catalogue, the artist has included as a title only one ‘hosing’ tune, Joni Mitchell’s ‘Hissing of Summer Lawns.’ No Bonnie ‘Prince’ Billy.

These acrylic paintings, like a lot of Watkins’ works, are drolly amusing. But sufficiently loaded so that one wonders what was going through the artist’s mind? I think he had been looking at Paul McCarthy’s Spaghetti Man sculpture. Was he really thinking about ‘speculation and rebirth’ as John Wales in the gallery hand-out suggests? I doubt it. One thing’s for sure. He wasn’t too preoccupied with botanical dehydration.

One is loathe to speculate (of course), but if compelled to (I am, I am), one might wonder if Watkins is anxious about certain bodily performance skills often linked to infestations of spam. Maybe he can’t get enough? Maybe he gets too much? Look at the Roswell work, a seated skeleton. It pretends to be about aliens but in fact is clearly about shame. The paper bag over the artist’s head confirms that. Continuous sex has made him lose a lot of weight, and the metal tub is for washing away the guilt.

Perhaps such talk is being ludicrously and pathetically sex obsessed. Let’s try another angle. Maybe the artist has a bladder problem. Perhaps he likes to pee higher on the urinal wall than other men. Hell, it is possible he can’t piddle at all, or too much, or is apprehensive of that future possibility.

Ok! Enough! The truth probably is that Watkins hates plants, doesn’t yearn to suffer from priapism and like everybody else, dreads becoming elderly. The work actually seems to refer to certain motifs in comic art (such as Mad’s Alfred E. Neuman), or key personalities in art history - like McCahon (making waterfalls with his hose) and Pollock (Jack the Dripper) dribbling paint onto a canvas laid out on the floor. These look like rebuses waiting to be decoded.

Watkins is no fool. He knows his images are loaded and that his audience loves to talk about what they might mean. Maybe with the rubber tubing entangling itself around the gardener’s body there are profoundly existential (and fetishistic) interpretations I haven’t thought of. Maybe you can? It is worth you hopping out to Parnell and checking these deliciously nutty paintings out for yourself.