Brilliantly inarticulate Polish conceptual art

Oskar Dawicki: the last Polish artist
Gambia Castle
26 February - 27 March 2010

This exhibition organised by Daniel Malone (who now lives in Warsaw) brings the work of Polish performance artist Oskar Dawicki to Gambia Castle. Dawicki specialises in an ironically morose art that features carefully crafted inarticulate wisecracks coated in a dour or hangdog veneer - asides sometimes muttered between sobs (sending up grovelling self-abasement) or questions answered with ‘I don’t know’ (ridiculing lacklustre passivity).

Often presenting himself as a rakish dandy wearing a glittering blue jacket, Dawicki exploits his urbane demeanour by making gentle – calculatingly self-effacing – murmurings about art, his many inadequacies, and visual culture in general.

The ten works he has chosen for Auckland vary. Three are amusing videos in the manner of those he and a performance group he is part of (Azorro) present on YouTube. One is the tearfully apologetic I’m Sorry (click here), and another (in the GC office) is computer-based, about opening folders to images of an increasingly turbulent sea - with the sound of The Doors’ 'Riders Of the Storm' gradually morphing into thunder and splintering glass.

The third video, The Unbearable Lightness of Meaning, is a sarcastic meditation on Lenin’s comment that film is the most important of the arts. On top of the monitor is a small china Madonna being mutilated by an American eagle. On the screen we see interminable, never ending credits from several Hollywood films like Coppola’s ‘The Godfather’, which occasionally tilt and veer off to the right like a drunken driver - mixed in with acerbic quips about the triviality of the movie industry. Dawicki likes to have fun manipulating subtitles.

Other works are more about ambiguities of language and identity. A work in the street-front window (normally used by Sue Crockford) taunts passersby with 10,000 Polish Zloty (about $NZ2000) as bait for a smash and grab, but actually – as you’d expect- it is just photocopied notes: though the catalogue listing says they’re authentic. A second work of images of cannabis plants on window sills, shows fake marijuana specimens made from recut and reassembled plastic bushes. Dawicki’s photos of these ‘plants’ on Polish window ledges are now positioned in Gambia Castle’s New Zealand windows.

Another presents a section of a famous Polish epic poem, but deliberately untranslated as something impossible to correlate - its identity and content being too unique. A fourth exploits paradox by having a sentence I’ve never made a work about the Holocaust, written on the gallery wall in pencil; this action of course making it a lie. A fifth uses the Gambia Castle door where Dawicki, like Bruce Lee, has seemingly hurled his body through the solid wooden panel, leaving a spreadeagled silhouette with a large body and small head. We know it is cut with a jigsaw, yet it smirks at film props and provides a visually witty introduction to this artist’s ‘corpus’ of work.

There is an even more slippery evasiveness about some other works, where visual properties are not supported by any confirmed underpinning physical or chemical structure. For example, a churning, gestural oil painting, made with vaseline mixed in with linseed oil and paint, has its hardening, oxidising process put on hold. It is a work literally about its own, seemingly never attainable, never completed, chemical process. Or a multiple, made of green rat bait laid out on paper, spelling out the term OD. Apart from being a joke about what art can do to the mental metabolism of its consumers, its poison is not that which relies on conventional overdosing, but is a gradually cumulative anticoagulant that is slowly absorbed, not relying on large single hits.

Dawicki’s art has a high quota of discreet cunning that goes beyond sly corner-of–the-mouth quips. It needs several visits for the thematic connections linking different works to become apparent, and YouTube is a great introduction. Gambia Castle is only open on Fridays and Saturdays and the show finishes this week.

Malone beats Malevich

Daniel Malone: Barbarian in the Garden
Sue Crockford
2 March - 27 March 2010

Daniel Malone has been living in Poland for a while now, and is about to marry the Polish woman who successfully persuaded him to move from Auckland to Warsaw, so he obviously is enamoured with the culture and its people. He has organised two superb shows of Polish conceptual art for Gambia Castle and made that country a central ingredient for one of his own Gambia Castle performances. It is no surprise then that the title of this show Malone has taken from a book of travel writings by the Polish poet Zbigniew Herbert.

In the videoed performance and installation Hotel Polonia that has pride of place in his Crockford show, Malone is indeed a ‘barbarian in the garden’. He is severely beating - on a rack - some fake [modified) ‘Maleviches’ which he has changed from abstract Suprematist paintings to weapons - in the form of angular and geometric cannons. (Malevich – by the way - was not a Russian but a Pole, something the Polish are understandably proud of. He exhibited at Hotel Polonia in Warsaw in 1927 and returned to Russia where he was tortured and imprisoned. He died in 1935 of cancer.)

Malone's ferocity in his backyard with a couple of racquet-like carpet beaters on these ersatz Maleviches is loaded with interpretative possibilities. He could be commenting on the brutality Malevich suffered bodily at the hands of the Russian state police who felt threatened by his non-representational symbolism. He could also with his videoed aggression be commenting on the competitiveness of most art practice – it has a rivalry with other works of the present and of the past.

He is also pummelling the dust out of these ‘artworks’, cleaning up and rejuvenating them – perhaps thumping them into life as central African artists used to hammer nails into fetish ‘power sculptures’: to energise the spirits that dwelt within.

Malone loves testing out metaphors by swapping unusual materials around, inserting them where they are least expected. There is a series of patterned images here where he has photographed the designs of fabric on passenger seats on Polish buses and trains, and superimposed them on floor mats that you wipe your feet on. On a train you would not place your filthy boots on a passenger seat, but here Malone is wilfully making such a juxtaposition. He seems to be thumbing his nose at the various logos for the transport corporates that have resulted from the new ‘liberated’ Europe. He is expressing his scorn for those private enterprises that replaced the collective amenities of Eastern Block communism – mourning the loss.

Sometimes it is good to get more than one opinion on a single show…

Unpacking My Library: Dan Arps, Xin Cheng, Bill Culbert, The Estate of L. Budd, Peter Madden, Daniel Malone, Elizabeth McAlpine, Neil Pardington and Ann Shelton.
Curated by Stephen Cleland
Te Tuhi
13 February - 11 April 2010

This show spirals around the distinction between a library and a collection, for although the two are obviously very different, in many people’s minds they often end up becoming interchangeable. Especially if you believe that objects and the sensations they provide can have their codes read as if they were newly opened books.

Is a library something like a wine cellar (the objects contained use–up-able eventually) or is it more like a wardrobe, a source of references in your conversation that you put on like wearable tactile garments? The roles of favourite sensations, reliable ideas, and certain zones in between – can all these be noted and stored to be savoured again in the future?

To introduce this theme in-house curator Stephen Cleland has had printed on a poster a beautiful passage from the well known essay that provides this show’s title. Written by Walter Benjamin, the patron saint of, indeed the founder of, art theory, and published first in 1931, it discusses the pleasure of building up a collection through pursuing individual items. Much like say, stories about the great Russian novelist Vladimir Nabokov running through country fields with his net, chasing butterflies - a lifetime obssession.

Cleland’s show though is only partially about books. Much of it is about catalogues, taxonomies, and how we classify things. That aspect pertains more to another great figure in theory, Michel Foucault than to Walter Benjamin, and Foucault’s amusement (as discussed in his preface to The Order of Things) at Jorge Luis Borges’ account of a particular Chinese Encyclopaedia where animals are classified by being: (a) property of the Emperor, (b) embalmed, (c) tame, (d) suckling pigs, (e) sirens, (f) fabulous, (g) stray dogs, (h) included in the present classification, (i) frenzied, (j) innumerable, (k) drawn with a very fine camelhair brush, (l) et cetera (m) recently the cause of a broken water pitcher, (n) similar from a long way off to a row of flies.

Of the nine artists here only two specifically use books: Ann Shelton and Xin Cheng. Room stalwart Cheng also presented a library in last year’s Article 27 show in North Shore curated by Richard Dale. Her space this time in Te Tuhi is bigger and less cell-like, with a large square plywood table and four boxlike plywood chairs. On the table are nineteen hardcover publications, many from local libraries. Most are about architecture, design, clothing and cooking.

This sort of exhibition promotes the notion of art being research, so it invites gallery visitors to dig out information and become artists themselves. For example I have personally decided to seek out certain books at various libraries after they have been returned. Four in particular are especially appealing: one, The Architect, The Cook and Good Taste connects building with cooking; another looks at chair designer Rolf Fehlbaum and how chairs are conceived; a third presents coloured photos by Albert Kahn taken around the world during the second decade of last century; and a fourth examines Scandinavian knitting patterns.

The theme of books continues in five small video screens from Ann Shelton set in a line on a long wall. They feature her continued fascination with Frederick Butler, whose archive of thousands of cards and books (many of which are old novels he used as scrapbooks for local newspaper cuttings) are kept in the New Plymouth public library. Her nine videos show the pages of volumes left out of the 'spinal' photographs but included here, turning through each volume one at a time, and revealing scribbled annotations, lists, dates, charts, cartoons, headings and more. They, especially the clippings, are very hard to read but they attempt to whet your appetite.

It is difficult to pin down the value (if any) of Butler’s unusual obsession, and if he fits as an artist (he probably doesn’t because he didn’t think of himself as such) or as a social historian (again probably not, for in this field he may have done more damage than good - for the newspapers would be more useful intact.) Shelton’s earlier well known series of life-sized photos of the spines of Butler’s archive, as seen on the library storage shelves, is amazing, but these page-turning videos ram home a connection with Borges’ Chinese encyclopaedia. The headings of four consecutive pages in one notebook on medical conditions go as: pimples; prunes; potassium broth; potatoes. There may be a coherent logic here, to do perhaps with bio-chemistry, but it is not very clear.

The three Neil Pardington Lambda/C-prints displayed come from the basements of Te Papa, Auckland Museum and the Hocken library. These very detailed images show items of mammal and marine life, rolled up textiles stored on steel rods, and a box of catalogue cards.

How does one 'read' these? Well the long triptych from Te Papa reveals masses of mounted deer heads that most likely will never be displayed, and what seems to be a killer whale skull that probably will. Auckland Museum’s rolled up rugs are stored slightly over on the left hand side of the racks bearing horizontal bars – perhaps a vague comment on some bias of sorts, and the Otago cupboard of filing cards with labelled catalogue drawers makes a gorgeous grid that obscures (but potentially confirms) the rationale of the enclosed register for the art collection.

The logic of organising such inventories is tested to opposite extremes by British artist Elizabeth McAlpine and The Estate of L. Budd. McAlpine continually collects postcards of Big Ben and the Houses of Parliament – of different periods and sizes. To present them on a wall she uses a huge 12 x 60 matrix of 720 plastic pockets. She has about a third of that number of cards in total.

The system she uses to position each card in the grid for display depends on the time shown on the clock dial: vertical co-ordinates equal hours; horizontal equal minutes - so you place the card where they cross. Day and night are blended, and McAlpine plays on the fact that in some images the time is indecipherable, or one hand at least is hidden by shadow. Therefore her system, which looks impressive at first glance, is not totally reliable, for she has to make arbitrary decisions sometimes. Some cards are repeated three times.

The contribution of The Estate of L. Budd to Cleland’s exhibition is to turn one of the gallery rooms into a little warehouse, bringing in for this show (but not ‘displayed’) various works made by that artist stored in different locations scattered around the country. On the temporary shelves we see bulky storage boxes daubed in characteristic grey with scribbled crayon, heaters, turntables, suit-cases, cabinets, and sound gear. And various rolled up awnings and paintings lean against an end wall.

A catalogue for The Estate’s ‘Extant Works’ hangs off one shelf, and its pages are also pinned to one wall. An ambiguous blue taped line runs between the shelving and the space where the viewers enter, half suggesting they go no further. A surveillance monitor watches from one corner.

More importantly, The Estate of L. Budd monitors itself. Problems of authenticity are adjudicated where collectors are invited to submit ‘applications of registration and authentication’ for possible Budd works not yet listed. The Estate shows caution in instigating such bureaucratic procedures, exhibiting samples of blue Approved or Denied stamps and being forever vigilant, in case dubious ‘L. Budd’ works appear in the future - possible forgeries attempted maybe by P. Mule, Arthur Craig and Sons, Blanche Readymade, et al. and others.

Daniel Malone’s work is a catalogue attempted by memory alone, listing all the personal possessions (including cardboard rubbish he refused to discard) that he left behind when he moved to Poland, where he now lives, and which made up a Gambia Castle exhibition he sold to the Chartwell Collection.

The recounted, shorter list was written on a long wall in Paintstik by an assistant using a ‘tagger’ script with upper case printing and vertical bars through S’s and O’s. It vaguely relates to Douglas Gordon’s list on a wall of everybody he has ever met since 1990 that he can remember. Malone’s attempted inventory, with its graffiti form of presentation, seems out of place within a municipal gallery where it looks compromised. It would make a far more interesting project if it were ‘defacing’ Te Tuhi’s outer walls and genuinely drawing on the urban politics of the text ‘font’.

Eight freestanding sculptures by Dan Arps fill one small gallery, and demonstrate the merits of recycling elements from disparate exhibitions, scattered in time and place, to make something new. Some aspects of this show refer to Arps’ TWNCAA entry in Hamilton for 2005 (Creation Myth), others to Telecom Prospect in Wellington a pinch later, and others still to a Gambia Castle show held last year.

Arps’ sculptures use office swivel stools, bookcases, and old clothing dressers as plinths for hybrid versions of kitsch ceramic garden ornaments, and are very entertaining. They revel in messy and dribbly sculptural processes, with say, bits of paper decals on desks alongside bits of cardboard Buckminster Fuller models or resin/ceramic goblins or toadstools.

This is a restrained show for Arps, one that is oddly elegant with its uncluttered calculated placements. It is the highlight of the nine Te Tuhi exhibitions, a sort of ‘Dan Arps’ Greatest Hits’ with a surprising accessibility.

Using a darkened annex and revolving carousel of eighty slides with a translucent wall, Peter Madden presents a set of installations and collages that are tightly connected as a sample of his practice. The shots are taken from a variety of positions and display his usual subject matter of exotic tropical wildlife, Southeast Asian Gods, hands and expressive facial portraits. Like Arps (and often Budd and Malone) there is an interest in recycling forms that can subvert standard cataloguing procedure and which perhaps drives registrars worried about provenance of ingredients frantic. With Madden, there are so many parts to each installation that one is overwhelmed by numerical plenitude, a plethora of (usually small) components to be listed and documented.

Bill Culbert’s double-row of sixteen black and white photographs butted together provides a good inventory of his visual interests and modes of thinking. In this sampler we see a number of approaches to light’s effect on surfaces – or lack of, as darkness. There is behind, on top, emitting from within, and through transparent layers. Then there is the visual punning: jokes about fake table and chair legs, or concave pot surfaces and convex bulbs. These square images are like chapter headings in a book, or subfolders of files within a larger computer folder for research – guides to thematic approaches that are part of an artist’s brand; unpacked slices of their oeuvre.

Cleland has put together here a clever and unusual show that illuminates not so much specific examples of collecting as its relationship to maintaining types of certain art practice, while commenting on collecting’s general ordering principles and common administrative procedures.

In descending order the images are of works by Xin Cheng, Ann Shelton, Neil Pardington, Elizabeth McAlpine, The Estate of L. Budd, Daniel Malone, Dan Arps, Peter Madden and Bill Culbert.

Malone lives

Daniel Malone: The English Teacher (exhibition)
The Dead Class (performance - 17 July)
Gambia Castle
18 July - 8 August 2009

Daniel Malone’s performance on Friday evening began with him being dressed in a worker's cloth cap (under which his hair was tucked into a stocking), with shirt, waist-coat, jeans, and shoes - and his face in pale stage make-up. There were six main props: an apple placed on a portable table near the window opposite the entrance to the room; a black, hard–covered photocopy of a Polish translation of Beckett’s Malone Dies on a white shelf; a hexagonal mirror on the opposite wall; and on the floor scattered posters positioned under a solitary light-bulb suspended on a long lead. The audience stood or sat close to the walls.

Standing behind the desk the artist addressed his audience as if he was gong to give a language teaching lesson, and pass around a book to be read aloud. However instead he began to talk of his interaction with the artist Billy Apple, by whose name he was officially known in Poland - as he has a New Zealand passport legally stating that name as his identity.

Elucidating further, Malone spoke of Apple’s contributions to the lighting of the TestStrip space (the same room as Gambia Castle) when it was first established, and then mentioned me by name, mentioning briefly our later conversations when he legally changed his name to Billy Apple. This was as an artwork contributing to the (Sharp and Shiny) fetishism exhibition I curated for the Govett-Brewster in 1997. He then spoke of a performance he did at the Polytechnic in New Plymouth that had similarities with the current work we were then witnessing.

The artist spoke concisely and with purpose, showing his considerable experience as a teacher, yet often interrupting his flow with retractions such as ‘that wasn’t what I meant to say, I should have said ...’ The overall content was a bit like a tentative ongoing newsletter to family and friends, like what some people send out yearly with Christmas cards. He began by telling us about his life in Poland where he now works and lives as ‘Billy Apple.’

Malone’s gallery invitation for this performance contained four informative sentences (reproduced below) that elaborated on four types of object in the gallery space: exhibition posters illustrated with death notices, a Polish translation of Beckett, a coffin shaped mirror, a single light bulb.

A klepsydra is a kind of death notice, a standard format published in Polish newspapers and pasted around appropriate sites - like the apartment building, local church, and workplace - of the deceased.

Malone Umiera is a Warsaw City Library copy of a book written in French by Samuel Beckett in 1951, translated by him into English and published as Malone Dies in 1956.

Portret Trumienny are portraits dating from the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth of the 17th and 18th centuries that were hexagonal in shape and placed on the head-end of a coffin during elaborate funerals of the time which also included actors playing the part of the deceased and extravagant constructions known as castrum doloris (castles of grief).

The Dead Class, 1975, is the best known play by Tadeusz Kantor, one of Poland’s most esteemed neo-avant-garde artists and most internationally celebrated dramaturge. Malone explained that Kantor’s plays are often illuminated by a single light bulb.

Malone then told us he was happily in love and about to return to Poland in his original ‘Daniel Malone’ identity to marry a Polish woman. This ultimately explained his long sequence of actions in the performance, starting with his moving the table so it was positioned under the coffin-cross-sectioned mirror, taking off his clothes and lying on it for a few minutes in a ‘shroud’ of exhibition ‘death’ posters he had scooped up from the floor.

After getting up and redressing, the artist then discussed the publication Malone Dies, how in Beckett’s play Malone does not in fact expire, and how he (D. M.) borrowed and photocopied the Polish translation using his ‘Apple’ identity.

Using the single light bulb, Malone then moved around the audience with the mirror, showing them the presence of three documents hidden behind the reflective glass - but detectable if illuminated at the right angle. They were his ‘Billy Apple’ library card with photo, a written application to take the book out on loan and out of the country, and an application for photocopying it.

There was a clever layering of parallel tropes in all this, between original and copy, between the two ‘Billy Apples’, between one 'Malone' identity dying and another being born, between Malone’s reflected talking face disappearing and his photographed ‘Apple’ ID variation appearing in the evanescent glass.

To underscore these aspects he removed all superfluous ‘residue’ from The Dead Class performance site – like apple, bulb, bed and posters - leaving just mirror and book to make up The English Teacher exhibition. Other crucial information was still apparent embedded contextually, such as the death notice of the invitation, and Kantor’s play (‘reflecting’ Beckett’s) having its name in Malone’s performance title.

Malone’s skill is to make a series of casually interconnected actions seem ad hoc, almost accidental. It is only when you start analysing his procedures by letting the resulting austere exhibition serve as a memory guide, that the various conceptual strata and cleverly placed, linking poetic threads become apparent.

I've seen the Future (Brother), it is Murder

The Future is Unwritten
Curated by Laura Preston
Adam Art Gallery, University of Victoria, Wellington
11 July - 30 August 2009

Over the last few years one of the subjects increasingly brought under close scrutiny by writers such as James Elkins is that of the relationship between academia and art, especially within the structure of a PhD study programme. What is this thing called ‘art practice’ and how does it fit in to the requirements of a university. More particularly, what is ‘research’? Should I say ‘Research’ (with a capital R) for doctorates? Is that word accurate for what artists (post-graduate or otherwise) do? In a studio or out of it. Does it correlate with Research carried out by those in other disciplines, with its necessary (and copious) reading and writing?

Now the following discussion is not a review. It is a speculative pre-amble (my ‘Cohen’ to Laura Preston’s ‘Strummer’) that appears two days before this Adam exhibition opens. I’ve been invited by the curator to post some comments in advance. It’s an interesting idea for a number of reasons, one of them being the relevance of the above paragraph. She is interested in guest artists doing interdisciplinary 'research' within Victoria university, and has sent me a gallery invite containing a mini-essay and various background bits and pieces. Preston’s essay is more detailed and more interesting than what you get on the gallery website.

Click on the Press Release here and you will get a somewhat simplified version of what she is up to. The project involves turning the Adam Gallery into a sort of research centre for ‘critically thinking’ conceptual artists that mostly inhabit the thread that runs from Art and Language to Thomas Hirschhorn. Its curatorial ethos appears to be based in part on Charles Esche’s discussion of A Modest Proposal, and partially on the ideas of Simon Sheikh, and it briefly looks at Jacques Rancière’s espousal of a certain kind of critical art that experiments with form (see March 2007 Artforum), or structure as reflected in Paola Virno’s analysis of jokes. The antecedents of the interdisciplinary curatorial emphasis are easy to find. Hans Ulrich Obrist’s Laboratorium, and several decades earlier the late Billy Kluver’s E.A.T. projects with Rauschenberg and others.

All with the aim of acknowledging the current time of crisis (G.F.C. and ecological) and using the university as “a place for interdisciplinary thinking” for achieving “a critical analysis of the current climate.” So in this period of post-postmodernism, where irony is rejected and a belief in meaning re-asserted, the seven artists and two designers, through their conversations with the curator and other university staff, might (they are free to fail to produce) “shift the idea of what a ‘work’ constitutes and what it should deliver.”

Preston points out that Rancière believes that the political in art resides in the power of its form. His term “the distribution of the sensible” refers to the restricted divisions of place and forms of community participation that centre on apprehended modes of perception, not only what is visible or audible but also what is thought, said, made or done. He sees artistic practices as ‘ways of doing and making’ that intervene in this general distribution as well as in the relationships they maintain to modes of being and modes of visibility.The curator sees Rancière as placing value on “what is felt, (re-engaging with) art’s affect.”

In Artforum Rancière says “For me the fundamental question is to explore the possibility for play. To discover how to produce forms for the presentation of objects, from for the organisation of spaces, that thwart expectations. The main enemy of artistic creativity as well as of political creativity is consensus – that is, inscription within given roles, possibilities, competences.” (p.263)

When you look at his examples it is clear the playfulness is within certain forms of interventionist practice, within works that involve critical thinking. It is clearly not wildly fooling around for its own sake, but has a set out, contextualised political agenda.

In her search for empathetic practitioners I wonder though if Preston’s emphasis on ‘young artists’ in the Press Release (though Malone is not young) might severely hamper the success of this project. Older artists like Bruce Barber, Jim Allen, and Ralph Paine, university teachers (or retired ones) who know the politically intricate departmental infrastructures of such institutions well, might get greater use out of its interdisciplinary facilities. Their experience might achieve more conceptually exciting results, and draw out the rich possibilities of Victoria University as a pedagogical site.

That aside, Preston has an inspired range of artists here (who might consider themselves ‘critical thinkers’ though that can’t be assumed) that represent a wide variety of practice morphologies.

To speculate on the show one would have to speculate on the bodily experience of entering the Adam architecture to discover the location of each individual and the form of presentation each artist embraces, or the gallery websites, which I happen not to see as ‘dematerialized’. Such sensations are crucial to their content; the means they provide of access to their conceptual material.

In other words, though Preston considers these artists ‘conceptualists’ it is a word that nowadays has become meaningless through overuse and contradictory inclusions. Even early ‘conceptual artists’ like Kosuth or Sol Lewitt (Wittgensteinians or mystics, not necessarily Marxists) use sensuality and form as a carrot to draw their audiences in towards the ideas. They never abandon the aesthetic, the physicality of visual appeal. So with this show’s artists, whilst some may be enthusiastic readers of theory, that doesn’t mean the results of their research will be automatically interesting - visually in terms of concrete materiality experienced by the senses, or visually in terms of linguistic description experienced in the imagination.

However the nature of the research Preston is advocating here (what she calls ‘propositional’), some might argue is not really research at all. That the term is inappropriate when applied to most artists, even those thought ‘conceptual’.

Certainly the open-endedness of this socially hermetic project worries me. The lack of accountability and refusal to assess itself I see as irresponsible. (I feel the same about Esche and Sheikh – see the latter’s Constitutive Effects: the Techniques of The Curator in ‘Curating Subjects’ ed. Paul O’Neill.) Preston describes a win/win situation where the exhibition cannot fail. She doesn't acknowledge any criteria through which she must evaluate the project, and allow for the possibility of its collapse - or that certain individuals cannot contribute effectively and she has misjudged them, or expected too much.

What of the role of the curator in her ‘conversations and collaborations’? I would hope that she not try to be an artist herself, that she is a facilitator, a nurturer, a provider of introductions and available means, but not a puppetmaster using the Adam as a theatre where the artists are manipulated by her. A ‘collaboration’ should not imply Preston is an artist. Here though, I think it does.

As a quick glance, it is easy to see why these nine individuals were picked: Amit Charan has a finely tuned, subtle mind, as indicated by his use of a videoed actor to recite with manual sign language definitions from some of Joseph Kosuth’s artworks, or his insertion of marginal codes, such as floral arrangements, into exhibitions; Fiona Connor is well known for her interest in subverting the physical properties of architecture – and the Adam is the prefect building for her to be set loose on; William Hsu has an established interest in science and various global environmental issues; Daniel Malone for his enthusiasm for Situationist practice and for Giorgio Agamben’s The Coming Community as indicated by the pamphlet Autonomous Anonymous: On Being Whatever that he co-wrote with Ralph Paine; Narrow Gauge is known for elegantly designed publications and posters; Kate Newby for her interest in fashion, the poetical properties of language (allusions to early conceptualists like Lawrence Weiner) and her ability to sculpturally intervene in unusual spaces; Martyn Reynolds has eloquently indicated his interest in the writings of theoreticians like Rancière and the practice of Jason Rhoades; Kelvin Soh is known for innovative commodity design, posters and comics; Peter Trevelyan has an interest in mathematics, dystopian devices and systems of surveillance.

Hopefully on Friday evening there will be a lot happening (or starting to happen) with the beginnings of various processual strategies in and around the Adam Art Gallery building, and online. Call or log in to follow the much anticipated, but as yet unarticulated, 'unwritten' developments.

Three in one

Julian Dashper, Daniel Malone, John Nixon
Sue Crockford
13 March - 28 March 2009

This is an excellent stock show where three well known, but very individualistic, artists could get in each others way – but they don’t. Lots of space keeps them apart so that their different visual and conceptual characteristics are accentuated.

The main Crockford gallery wall has a particularly elegant arrangement of fifteen Dashper paintings. His palette is restrained and understated and often doesn’t involve paint at all, just simple stretchers made of canvas, linen, jute, plywood, hardboard or drum skin, that are sometimes stacked on top of each other so they subtly project out into the room, or paired placed side by side, flat on the wall. Textured surfaces and clearly elucidated shape and thickness dominate here over chroma.

On the other side of the gallery and pushing into a corner between two smaller walls, John Nixon's paintings indicate a different approach to colour that is often strident or jewel-like with complementary combinations. His earlier works were much closer to what Dashper's are now, but even more object-like. Nixon currently investigates thin supports, saturated hues, more complex juxtapositions, and often structures that have framing borders that compress - instead of expanding a field that runs off the edges. Unlike Dashper he is not keen on circles. Corners rule.

Of the three Daniel Malone works, two come from a performance in Santiago Chile, where he baked a batch of clay kumara in an indigenous oven similar to a hangi. A modified poster, a DVD, and the vegetable ceramics show Malone’s interest in a theory that kumara came initially from South America, bought here by Polynesian navigators.

Malone’s neon signature, sitting glowing in an open package case, is more ideationally convoluted, quoting from an Auckland tagger who amazingly once put it on the ARTSPACE frontage and for whom ‘Malone’ is not his real name. The pink signature is packed in two halves so you have to imagine how they’d look together. It references Billy Apple as well as tagging, and is a curious example of disparate sensibilities perfectly blended to achieve gorgeous results.

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.

Aotearoa / Poland site collaborations

Daniel Malone and Ralph Paine
Make History Poverty
Gambia Castle
12 September – 4 October 2008

Daniel Malone is a well known New Zealand performance artist linked with the Auckland collective Teststrip in the early nineties, now living in Poland, and here collaborating with his old friend in Auckland, Ralph Paine - best known for some shows in ARTSPACE and in SIAP projects in Christchurch.

This Gambia Castle presentation has a published essay for sale in the office and some Malone drawings from a recent exhibition in Poland, and most of the exhibition in the front gallery. There are five sections: two separate groups of works on paper from Malone and Paine individually; a collaborative screenprint; collaborative drawings; collaborative paintings made of stitched fabric.

Paine showed a large body of drawings a couple of years ago in RAMP in Hamilton and his current solo works (watercolour and gouache) are not so graphically loose (being more wash based, less linear, less hatched). In the context of Gambia Castle they are oddly conservative and illustrative, inclined towards nineteenth century social realism, and without the use of written theoretical language which is usually a Paine characteristic. Their clusters of figurative imagery and saturated transparent colours bring a sensuousness rarely seen in this space.

Malone’s Polish drawings are frottages referencing the revolutionary rhetoric of Situationism and the events of May 68, and the surface textures of streets (flagstones and manhole covers) as weapons. They have a different flavour from his older Auckland works with their references to pop consumerism and nomadism.

When working together these artists create an effective synthesis more dynamic than that found in their solo elements. The screenprint, Delivery, with the text ‘we the artists’, not only references Billy Apple colours but his reflexive concept of artwork as a hyper-aestheticised receipt – though this time in plural and with a wonderfully elegant cursive script.

The collaborative drawings (Two Cities: One World) show Paine’s slogans added to by Malone. They are the highlight of the show, for Paine seems to have inspired exceptional inventiveness from his friend in the diversity of his added references (eg. Latin texts, maps, stickers)and the way they interact. The stitched canvases of black denim and felt, with their blending of Debord with Beuys, are a tad domestic and bland. They lack the physical scale and rawness to be truly memorable.

This exhibition is well worth seeing. The evocative collaborative drawings in particular are very special.

Worse than impotence

Tahi Moore: Various Failures
Gambia Castle, Auckland
29 February - 22 March 2008

There are two flyers for this show that provide contradictory explanations for its title. Moore is an extremely skilled writer, and the first flyer details his lack of confidence in the work, his second thoughts and lapses of faith in the ‘mechanics’ of pairings that he has made – binary combinations, by the way, being also a dominant theme in Simon Denny’s last Gambia Castle / Michael Lett show.

Here is what Moore writes:
So I see something and it has some kind of significance, and then I stick it with something else and that makes it a mechanism. I think the problem here is that if you can work it all out, half an hour later, everything's different again. I guess you might not notice so much if you're also moving, but if you're good at being still or fixing things, you might get irritated at this intuitive reflexive dynamic that's altered by any examination of it, and seems to be easy enough to go along with if you don't think about it.

The second flyer plays on an old Jeff Koons gag from his early Artforum advertisements, showing the artist lounging around a pool surrounded by bikinied babes. This Moore has turned around into a sexual reference about physical or emotional failure. As part of a pairing itself, it is clever, self–reflexive stuff.

Actually it is more than clever, it’s brilliant. The connections between the pairings over time reveal themselves to be deeply considered. If you read the two flyers together they become a meditation on the transience of desire, the numbness and futility of attraction. The word ‘mechanism’ becomes Duchampian.

I’m going to be accused of being over-interpretative after writing this, but let’s look at the installation.

Note firstly the pair of old blue jeans discarded on the floor. Then the video of a watch advertisement on a monitor placed under a watch pinned to the wall. With these elements, could the work be about the passing of time – specifically aging – and its consequences for (male) desire?

Checking out Moore’s grouping of images: first thing you notice in the room is the image of two perky young women sitting on toilets having a chat. The image seems to be about female bonding, the nature of friendship, and the exasperation of some heterosexual men at not having close women friends (as shown in Marco Ferreri’s dramatic 1976 film 'The Last Woman’ when the over-horny, depressed and unloved male character, played by Gerard Depardieu, cuts off his John Thomas with an electric meat-cutter).

Ferreri’s film is not alluded to in this installation, but its subject matter is. Moore obviously loves movies, so what does he do with them in the loops he shows here.

Next to a static photograph of a naked woman, supine and sexually available, is Moore’s treatment on an adjacent monitor of the Sci-Fi film Ultraviolet, now sepia toned and played backwards. It shows the interaction between the attractive heroine and a young male character and indicates a pining for lost time, a mourning that this youthful (and now in hindsight, erotic) period can never be recaptured.

Then there is the other pair of videos: one shows Moore’s Gambia Castle colleague, Nick Austin, contemplatively walking through the gallery space. Next to it on another monitor are sections of Derrida nattering about being framed on drug charges by the Czech police in Prague, mathematician John Nash explaining some theorem, and Daniel Malone, another Gambia Castle artist, being mock ferocious. All men note, being active and ‘intellectual’.

So I read this show as a meditation on male/female relations as filtered through the lens of heterosexual male aging. His earlier Gambia Castle show seems connected to these themes too. I’m arguing a case that this work is very knowing and very structured. If my discussion is a load of cobblers, please drop this site a line and tell me so.