David Cross is intrigued by the Mangano Twins in Wellington

Gabriella and Silvana Mangano
Square 2, Wellington City Gallery
Curated by Andrea Bell
19 October - 15 November 2009

If…so…then, DVD, 2006 duration 7 minutes 44 seconds
Falling Possibilities, DVD, 2009 duration 20 minutes 30 seconds looped

I am as guilty as the next person in often treating the Square 2 screens at City Gallery as entranceway eye candy. It’s partly the glare that bounces off the monitors during daylight hours that renders sustained viewing challenging and there is also the not insignificant issue of wind literally pushing you in to the more hermetic confines of the gallery foyer. While not the carefully sanitised environment we often expect for engaging with video, Square 2 has been quietly developing a more ambitious programme under the direction of Abby Cunnane and the recent work has warranted pushing through the discomfort barrier.

Melbourne-based curator Andrea Bell has put together a suite of works by Australian artists, including Gabriella and Silvana Mangano and Laresa Kosloff whose practices while based in video have strongly performative bases. While Kosloff’s work is yet to screen, there is a very interesting overlay of her quietly manic abstract sculptures invaded by human bodies with the Mangano sisters’ deceptively simple choreographed actions. Both involve the performance of acts in which the artist’s (Kosloff, hidden underneath her Ellsworth Kelly inspired costumes) are front and centre. What also connects these projects is the idea of performance as an activity heavily mediated by rules, guidelines and, crucially, constraints, leading to the staging of repetitive actions where there is a genuine tension between individual agency and instrumentality.

The Mangano sisters are twins who over a series of works since 2002 have investigated the im/possibilities of shared agency in the undertaking of certain tasks and gestures. Each work re-presents a basic setup of a stationary camera documenting in a completely straightforward way, their choreographed routines. In If…so…then, the sisters face off each other in a constrained corridor space. Dressed identically and with drawing implements in both hands they perform a series of movements that are part experimental dance, part gestural drawing and part adolescent girls’ playground game. The routine/process they enact is very compelling based on the curious symmetry of two ‘identical’ people mirroring each others action. Added to this is the fact that they are very good at seamlessly working together to make the routine flow. Very good but crucially, not perfect.

While it is easy to get lost in the rhythm of ducking, weaving and mark making, what is most interesting are the glitches, albeit small, in timing and movement. Undertaken in silence, the sisters watch each others actions with great concentration but like any synchronised activity small fissures of difference are continually woven into the system. The profundity of the work is that these small deviations - and they are very small - highlight subtle differences in each personality in the form of slightly different timing, touch and confidence. The sisterly dynamic is performed for us and it is fascinating catching the barest filaments of difference.

Falling Possibilities 2009 extends the investigation of choreographed action and drawing in space but with a more refined aesthetic. In this recent work the artists use a length of soft tape to move in and out of each other’s space almost as if they are weaving fabric. Unlike If…so…then which has a slightly gritty quality through its black and white, this work employs chiaroscuro for dramatic effect. While it does not play out the full suite of Baroque bells and whistles, the result is still suitably theatrical.

Yet in refining the aesthetic, the work is more formal and less psychologically tense than its predecessor. The ideas of shared decision making and Pollock-like gestural perfomativity are still there but it feels too refined. It is as if their increasingly honed working method has started to buff the rawer edges and they have at the same time become better at disguising the compelling idiosyncrasies prevalent in earlier pieces. Perhaps it is because they have a schtick, not a formula as such but a tight field of investigation that it is increasingly hard to unfold new layers. It will be interesting to see how they continue to explore what is a narrow but compelling premise for interrogating the idea of authorship.

Images are from top to bottom are from If…so…then (2009) and Falling Possibilities (2009). Courtesy the artists and City Gallery, Wellington.)

Both Mark Amery and David Cross will be covering Wellington shows for eyeCONTACT readers. Here is a post from Mark.

Ngaahina Hohaia
City Gallery Wellington
27 September 2009 – 10 January 2010


Far be it for me to begrudge Wellington some dotty fun with the excellent Yayoi Kusama exhibition, but it can’t go unremarked that there’s some tension around the City Gallery reopening programme.

When the gallery last reopened in 1993 (after the move into the refitted old city library) the waka Te Raukura - a representation of the mana and history of local mana whenua - was housed for three months in the foyer. This time round, to see work grounded in this place until February you’re going to have to pay an admission fee and find your way past the dots and mirror mazes to two new cell-like galleries up at the top, far end of the building.

What the Michael Hirschfeld Gallery for Wellington artists has gained in getting a purpose-built space within the mainframe, it’s lost in accessibility - the old ex-bar space next to ever-humming Nikau Café felt like part of the membrane that separated gallery from city; a vent that circulated fresh air into the institution.

Meanwhile next door the new Roderick and Gillian Deane Gallery dedicated to Maori and Pacific Island artists (do patrons insist on these naming rights? Surely soon it will no longer be seen as tasteful?), together with the appointment of a Maori curator, Reuben Friend, provides some welcome representation. Hopefully however in both cases it will lead to increased presence in City Gallery curated exhibitions in the main spaces, rather than these galleries resembling privately funded chapels for local denominations within the grand international church.

This tension is all the more apparent for how strong the Deane Gallery opening installation is. Ngaahina Hohaia’s two works may not be brand new – Roimata Toroa (Tears of the Albatross), 2006 is from the Govett Brewster collection and was first shown to coincide with the first Parihaka Peace Festival, and Paopao ki tua o rangi (Reverberation beyond the heavens) has been touring in the lower North Island this year - but they could have held their own up front at the gallery. Together they are magnificent.

Amplifying the enduring vision of peace of the 19th century Parihaka settlement led by Te Whiti o Rongomai and Tohu Kakahi, and recharging the lightning rod that was the moment in 1895 when government troops entering the settlement were met by passive resistance, this installation of hundreds of hand embroidered poi is both a powerful and politically savvy opening selection.

Local iwi Te Ati Awa are also based in Taranaki, and the installation recalls arguably City Gallery’s finest moment, the Parihaka exhibition co-curated with Parihaka Pa and Hohaia’s father Te Miringa. Ngaahina worked as a guide on that show and this installation would have held its own amongst the other commissions for the exhibition. It is in a sense a return home; Parihaka’s own contemporary response to these other artists’ works.

Hohaia’s achievement is that the work seamlessly brings together the high public storytelling art of articulating a shared visual iconography, as you might find in wharenui or church, and the deeply personal. As a textile artist she has found her own way to recite her whakapapa and state her foundation, whilst representing visually the traditional Parihaka waiata and poi her whanau have played a strong role in reviving.

Embroidered onto the head of hundreds of white poi in lines on the wall are insignia that provide strong storytelling shorthand for not only the events of 1895, but the richness of this period’s cultural cross-fertilisation and its many assertions of political independence. The hau hau handprint, a girl skipping, handcuffs, a teapot, the bugle, the ruru, the Ratana crescent and star, the Christian cross and the three albatross feathers (that the work’s title refers to), are just a few.

This period of history continues to provide rich inspiration for artists. The motifs here celebrate the raft of symbolism to be found on Maori flags and in the figurative painting of the painted marae as a distinct language. Hohaia writes of Parihaka 19th century oratory as rich too with such crosscultural symbolism, with the poi traditionally part of the performance of chants, with a complex meld of terms, phrases and names. The lines of poi become like lines of verse to be read as you wish in patterns across the walls, like tukutuku. Running along one line, a word per poi, are inspirational words from Tohu himself from 1895. The title ‘tears of the albatross’ also reminded me of Harry Dansey’s description of a poi dance in his play Te Raukura: “It is a single long poi – slow in time with the sweeping movements of the albatross skimming the waves.”

The installation is a contemporary take on the Parihaka tradition of poi-manu, which Hohaia explains as “the ceremonial application of poi that maintains the timing of reciting whakapapa (genealogy) and karakia (ritual incantation), with the movement of the poi carrying the story line.” The works find a way to translate both the content and the time-based performative aspects of this artform.

The newer work, Reverberation consists of poi flying towards a central circle like tadpoles, evoking its circular performance in different lengths of flight. Woven patterns are activated across the poi by a complex light show. It’s like a glorious baroque starburst church altarpiece radiating shafts of light, or a large drum (an important instrument with Parihaka waiata) surrounded by tomtoms. Descendants flooding back to this core magnetic source of knowledge and inspiration, to continue to bang the reverberant drum. The circle provides a screen for the projection of a slide show of images of the pa and ancestors with the accompaniment of a soundtrack (the sound of children, approaching troops, the burning of buildings, the whir of the poi). It’s conceptually grounded enough to just avoid the hamminess such sound and light shows have been guilty of at Te Papa.

If I’m reminded of a church, the whole installation also alludes to the readable architecture of the wharenui - reminiscent of curator Reuben Friend’s structuring of the excellent Plastic Maori at the Dowse earlier this year – with the slide show providing the photographs of ancestors on the back wall of the house.

As a textile artist Hohaia is interested in the meanings inherent in her material and the forms she employs. She brings together craft traditions from both Pakeka and Maori in a very sophisticated way. The poi are made out of that most loaded of New Zealand textiles, the woolen blanket: used for land barter, created off the back of the land (sheep), and providing shelter and warmth – the land itself is considered a blanket.

The blankets used on the heads of the poi in Roimata are, like the albatross feathers, white - but it’s woven in beautifully with other colours in their tails to animate them. These tails are woven, evoking weaving traditions but also children’s pigtails, and are finished off with tassels, resembling the frills on Victorian furnishings. With gold and silver thread used for the embroidery, as objects they resemble royal bellpulls attached to pin cushions as much as they do poi.

What makes Hohaia’s installation strong ultimately however is that it remains ripe for interpretation no matter your knowledge base. For me the rows and rows of white poi were powerfully representative of the force of Parihaka’s passive resistance - a fence or palisade of poi, like the rows of children that met the invading troops.

(Above, Roimata Toroa (detail) (2006): images courtesy of the artist and City Gallery [top], and the artist and Govett-Brewster Art Gallery [two below, photography by Bryan James].)

David Cross visits the Yayoi Kusama show

Yayoi Kusama: Mirrored Years
City Gallery Wellington
27 September - 7 February 2009

Wellington artist Bec Coogan once told me she had Yayoi Kusama’s name tattooed on her body. While unable then (and still) to vouch for the veracity of this, Coogan’s demonstrably clear Kusama obsession led me to believe it was likely she was not just winding me up. Kusama, whose ambitious survey show has opened at Wellington City Gallery, is clearly a cult figure for many artists who are drawn to her distinctive language of dots, inflatables and mirrored forms employed across a stunning variety of media. Massively libidinal and at the same time strangely asexual, Kusama is an artist whose practice has interrogated the psychic and sensory possibilities inherent in repetitive forms and motifs. Yet for every space of child-like pleasure she has created, there is a disturbing edge, a sense of obsessive excess born of a desperate compulsion. A Hansel and Gretel-like quality is ever-present in Kusama’s work, which has ensured that underneath the candy colours there has always been a brooding disquiet keeping the frivolity in check.

The City Gallery show brings together a range of work from all periods with a particular focus on recent work since 2000. It does not have the sweep of a retrospective but develops particular threads across different bodies of work. There are a few choice mirror installations together with the dot rooms, and a number of films from her libertine Happenings in the 1960s where, following Carolee Schneemann, her performers recreate action painting as sexually lived experience. These ‘seminal’ pieces are especially compelling and it is impressive to see them recreated in a broader context of related work.

Mirrored Years is a particularly taxing show on the gallery guards. It’s not just the legion of kids wanting to put the slipper into each biomorphic inflatable they come across, but nearly every adult I observed could not resist prodding the objects: searching for concrete evidence that the visual cacophony is more than a trompe l’oeil. The resultant tension of haptic denial in works such as Dots Obsession Day/Night (2009) ratchets up an already peculiar ambience so that pleasure is kept at a sanitised distance. In many of the works Kusama perversely builds spaces that envelop the senses, suggesting the possibility of complete immersion without allowing such an immersion to ever be sufficiently consummated through touch. This division has clearly become more pronounced in the later work. Earlier happenings captured on film such as Self-Obliteration (1968) highlight an interest in drawing performers and audiences into a total work of art, erasing the boundaries between body, object and space. Yet such an imperative gradually leeches out of the work to be replaced by a lexicon of repetitive shapes, objects and spaces that while visually discordant, are highly controlled and controlling.

Certainly the earlier installations feel more engaging and less programmatic. Infinity Mirror Room originally made in 1965, is a classic piece capturing that 60s alignment of phenomenology, minimalist reflective surfaces and proto-psychedelic mind games. Even in our world of ever increasing spatial simulation, the antiquated devices of light and mirrors transport the viewer to a weirdly compelling space. Only the 45-second time limit and the incursion of the soundtrack from a video next door limit the experience.

When Kusama’s work takes on more mundane dimensions such as in the installation I’m here, but Nothing (2000), a recreated 50s Japanese lounge room with fluroresecent light and dots, the results are disappointing. The work is buried in a literalism that is heavy-handed and visually underwhelming. Similarly problematic is Walking On the Sea of Death (1981) an installation which employs the artist’s famous soft sculpture boat made up of phalluses and bundles of grapes. Instead of locating the work in a closed off/immersive space, the boat is marooned in a half annexed open space that feels too contingent and literally open to connote anything of real significance.

Perhaps this is the rub with Kusama. The work functions best when it is both immersive and seperated from its surroundings and literal connections to the ‘real’ world: when it is configured as a world unto itself. Her unfortunate tree dots outside the Hayward Gallery in winter this year are a salient reminder of the pitfalls of overextending a vocabularly.

Mirrored Years, while being too focused on the weaker late works of the artist, covers a lot of valuable ground. Its strength as an exhibition lies in the way it locates Kusama as a great trans-disciplinary artist whose breadth of practice is perhaps only matched by Nauman, Beuys and Warhol. Working at the forefront of so many disciplines, especially installation, Kusama is an artist whose appeal to other artists transcends any one generation. Having said this, the long queues at City Gallery in the first week suggest her greatest success is in successfully bridging the notorious chasm between critical acclaim and popular appeal.

The images of works are in descending order: Dots For Peace and Love (2009); Dots Obsession Day (2009); Infinity Mirror Room (Fireflies On The Water)(2000); I’m Here, But Nothing (2001); Walking on The Sea of Death (1981); Invisible Life (2001). (All images courtesy of the artist, Kusama Studio, Victoria Miro Gallery London [except for the Yayoi Kusama public artwork at the top] and Ota Fine Arts Tokyo.) Dots Obsession Day is at Kennedy Centre, Washington. The rest are in the Kusama Studio.