David Cross visits New Plymouth

John Reynolds
Nomadology: Loitering With Intent
Curated by Rhana Devenport
Govett-Brewster Art Gallery
27 March - June 13

Standing on the pavement of the White Hart Hotel in New Plymouth looking at John Reynolds’ LED road sign I was flummoxed. Flashing in front of me were repetitive textual bytes that listed a litany of dead philosophers and the ways in which they had died. It was hard to view the sign in the late afternoon light and the passing cars would barely have sensed its presence, but this was not ultimately what troubled me.

Having spent a few hours grappling with Reynolds' many and varied interrogations of the discursive permutations of text in art, I had become inured to the potential power/value of the texts. Song lyrics, New Plymouth street names, the index to Deleuze and Guattari’s A Thousand Plateaus, writing on the Middle East conflict by Robert Fiske, these were just some of the many and varied sources for the artist’s various artistic iterations. Ambitious in scope, and demonstrating a heightened level of cultural capital, the exhibition looked slick and savvy but ultimately the nagging question was what greater purpose did these textual meanderings serve?

Reynolds’ sweep through philosophy, popular culture, New Zealand art history and the New Plymouth vernacular in the fourteen works on show suggested a firm belief in the possibility of synthesising eclectic content around his signature aesthetic/sensibility. The Reynolds touch - his distinctive graphic style and refined use of language - more than a broader coherent critical schema, was seen as the requisite glue to pull the show together. Dexterous as he is as a painter, it is the absence of a larger programme that makes this major survey flaccid. It’s as if the artist has constructed a range of discrete sketches across a multiplicity of fronts believing that that the sum will somehow equal the parts. The cult of personality angle was certainly perpetuated in the galleries supporting material where the artist is described as a ‘trickster’. Yet it is hard to see where in Nomadology: Loitering with Intent Reynolds disobeys normal rules and conventional behavior. Mixing philosophy, politics, street names and the lyrics to an AC/DC song seems to this writer to be a recipe for a very trickster-lite identity at best.

Reynolds is too sunny to be a trickster and certainly too family friendly. His excursion into participatory art Hells Bells, gave the audience an opportunity to make their own sentences from lyrical fragments of an assortment of songs used by the America military to torture detainees. While an acerbic political statement, the caustic undertone was largely usurped by the relational setup and candy coloured modules. Of course this sharp incongruity was the point of the work, but in a room with mariachi lighting and every street name in New Plymouth chalked on the surrounding walls, the statement was buried in an overload of signifying systems. Everywhere you looked the artist was riffing on something different, the phenomena of twitter in Twitterature: The Iliad by Homer, a meditation on the Arabian Nights, the vagaries of acronyms. Each had at least a kernel of interest as a discrete component but experienced as a whole the effect was one of conceptual pot pourri. While the artist clearly loves the elusive possibility of words I found myself beginning to doubt their capacity for any real profundity. Juxtaposing so many different literary modes against one another rendered them flatly equivalent, making it harder to care about both the edgier political dimensions, or the fandom obsessions of a rock band’s set list.

The best work in the show was the least demonstrative, allowing Reynolds to use his modular modality to its best effect. Birdsong (Corner of King and Queen) consisted of small monochrome canvases with clearly prefaced drips of paint, stacked floor to ceiling. The work played cleverly with the architecture of the gallery linking the bottom and top spaces together while also building a compelling connection with the rectangular component of Len Lye’s rectangular kinetic sculpture Trilogy. The work spoke volumes about the languages of painting, architecture and their assorted materialities without requiring a single word to preface its meaning.

It says a lot about the Govett-Brewster’s belief in John Reynolds’ standing that not only did he secure the majority of the gallery spaces, he did so to mark the 40th anniversary celebration. This was something of a missed opportunity. Perhaps a smaller, tighter showing of his work in tandem with other connected practitioners might have been a better bet. Failing that at least a much tighter curatorial focus was required so that there was significantly more coherent intent to the artist’s loitering.

The above photographs were taken by Patrick Reynolds. In descending order these installation images are as follows:
1. 1001 Nights 2010 (detail). 2. To Die Laughing 2010.
3. To Die Laughing 2010 at the Govett-Brewster hits 40 pARTy. 4. Foreground: Works End 2008. Background Nomadology 2009. 5. & 6. Hells Bells 2010. 7. John Reynolds working on By The Roads And Fields 2010. Photographs courtesy of the Sue Crockford Gallery, Starkwhite, the Govett-Brewster Art Gallery, the photographer and the artist.

David Cross has some comments on the recently opened Auckland Triennial. eyeCONTACT will be posting several articles looking at it.

The 4th Auckland Triennial: Last Ride in a Hot Air Balloon
Curated by Natasha Conland
New Gallery, ARTSPACE, St. Paul St.Gallery, and Shed 6
12 march - 20 June 2010

It’s a very brave venture to examine risk as a trope of contemporary art. We immediately expect to be challenged, to see the status quo punctured or picked apart and to at least interrogate the possibility of new modes of social/cultural transformation. Of course risk is an elusive concept and one that does not neatly align with the rhetoric of avant garde transgression. There is a profound elasticity to the term that extends well beyond being shot in the arm for art or masturbating under the gallery floor. Such 1970s ideas about risk still resonate in the popular consciousness when risk is aligned with contemporary art even if the modes seem fundamentally old school and historically specific. While the mechanisms have shifted with our more complex globalised world, risk is still a staple component of art practice both as a subject matter to be dissected and as a critical mode of operation. Natasha Conland has decided to put a ruler under this terrain with her chapter of the Triennial choosing a targeted suite of artists for whom risk and adventure are fundamental concerns.

Trying to get a handle on how Conland locates risk is not however a straightforward enterprise. She is careful to articulate a number of registers by which artists rub against the grain and these straddle the overtly political through to the barely visible. Conscious of not privileging but at the same time not excluding an activist mode, Conland lays out a breadth of practice to suggest the multifarious nature of risk in recent art. At one axis we get the grating in your face posturing of Australian artist Richard Bell tearing at the flimsy veneer of multiculturalism. His hilarious gangsta/gonzo/psychiatrist persona performed in Scratch an Aussie and Broken English is a razor sharp dissector of aboriginal stereotypes and white ignorance. The didactic message of black resistance is couched in Bell’s work through an accessible, if incendiary, satire that takes aim at the breathtaking indifference of white Australia to black identity and history.

This overtly polemical strategy sits in a different space to the practice of a number of Middle Eastern artists who couch risk in far more delicate ways. The work of Iranian artist Mahmoud Bakhshi for instance, is potentially riskier, if superficially appearing to be more politically inert in its content. His sculptural installation Sunsets consists of a series of cigarette shaped cylinders each of which emits a recitation of a different chapter of the Koran. The audience are able to move the cylinders to create different sonic arrangements. While the work initially feels benign in its critical aspirations, the powderkeg politics of contemporary Iran and the fact the artist is based in Tehran provides a crucial context to the work. The idea of individual agency and decision making is clearly subversive in the context of the crackdown against the so-called Green revolution upping the stakes of the work considerably.

A similar though ultimately more successful edge pervades the work of fellow countryman, Shahab Fotouhi. The artist restages a number of the components of the famous helicopter ride of Ayatollah Khomeini on his triumphant return to Tehran in 1979. Employing scaffold-mounted floodlights together with neon tubing that physically plots out the route, the artist also displays documentary footage of the messianic event on a small monitor, using a mixture of found and crafted objects to investigate the staged spectacle of Khomeini’s return in a highly understated way. His comparative lack of partisan editorialising - the deadpan matter-of-factness of the installation - is ultimately a nuanced device to shut down one-dimensional interpretations of political subversion. By allowing us plenty of space to join the dots, the work suggests a whole lot while making it difficult to pin a fixed meaning down.

The attempt to establish a balanced tone between big picture politics and the poetics of objects and sound permeated a number of the works in the Triennial including Shilpa Gupta’s microphone cloud, airport display board, Sharon Hayes’ Everything Else Has Failed Don’t You Think It Is Time For Love, and Tom Nicholson’s beautifully layered deconstruction of the Burke and Wills story Monument for the Flooding of Royal Park. Yet positioned in relation to these works were a number of pieces that seemed to stretch the curatorial parameter too far. Michael Stevenson is certainly an artist known for skewering an extraordinary array of cargo cults but his video work On How Things Behave seemed to be more about the vagaries of artistic philosophical meditations with a poke at Daniel von Sturmer than about adventure or risk. Likewise the very chic relational aesthetics poster boy Philipe Parreno seemed out of place with his Marquee which in no way destabilises the conventional art viewing experience as claimed in the exhibition brochure but functions as a kind of low-fi, low-impact, largely lame entranceway.

One of the things the triennial highlights is that risk and adventure are not the same thing. Mostly the works embody one but not both of these traits. Marine Hugonnier’s evocative videos of markedly different locales are a rare example of the curatorial synthesis, being both potentially dangerous in outcome yet redolent with the excitement of discovering new places. Other work like Johanna Billings This Is How We Walk on the Moon says nothing of any substance about risk and evacuates most of the joy out of adventure.

I was completely captivated by Alex Monteith’s four-screen surfer treatise Red Sessions which might be one of the best surfer movies ever made partly because it was so immersive and transfixing and partly because the Beach Boys were not tinting the experience with cheese. Laresa Kosloff’s super eight film Trapeze was similarly compelling capturing the rhythmic pleasures and synchronised movements of two trapeze artists practising in the main street of Melbourne.

My desire to comment on the work of Tino Sehgal and Martin Boyce, two of the bigger names in the triennial was unfortunately thwarted by St Pauls St galleries wisdom of closing on the Sunday of the first weekend while so many people were in town meaning my knowledge of the work was confined to dancer choreographer Anna McCrae’s description in the panel discussion on Saturday. I hope to be able to revisit this down the track.

Compared to the previous bloated, and largely inane Triennial, Last Ride In A hot Air Balloon has achieved liftoff. Of course it is not without its flat spots and inconsistencies but show me a similar event that nails every aspect. The vagaries of artists changing course late in the piece nearly always ensures the best laid plans go flaccid in places and there is a lot of really good work here to enjoy regardless of the overall schema. The new venue Shed 6 is a bit rough and ready and a long way from the Sydney Biennale’s Bond Stores or Cockatoo Island. It feels like a glorified artists studio in an industrial area and seems a bit too small and light to hold all the work that it does. While I hope we do not see it utilised in future manifestations, I concede the mutli-site aspect adds a range of flavours to the Triennial's connection with Auckland. This fourth edition has ramped up the ambition and relevance of the event and set out a polemical and carefully layered matrix for drilling into key strands of global contemporary art practice. That in itself is a high risk strategy.

Images from films by Laresa Kosloff, Marine Hugonnier, Johanna Billing and Richard Bell.

David Cross visited the Turbine Hall while at the Tate Modern. The Balka show was on.

Miroslaw Balka: How It Is
Tate Modern
13 October 2009 – 5 April 2010


Of all the things you can say about the Unilever series of temporary commissions in the Turbine Hall at Tate Modern, subtlety has never been a strong suite. From Olafur Eliason’s 'Ben Hur' style manipulation of natural elements to Carsten Holler’s theme park slides, the ten commissions have nearly always been severely monumental and overtly spectacular. To a large extent this is understandable given the sheer magnitude of the space that seems to require a heroic counterpunch from the artist simply to keep the architecture from usurping the sculpture.

At first sight Miroslaw Balka’s latest instalment How It Is suggested more of the same. Sitting snugly in the Turbine Hall, a huge brutal industrially fabricated steel box mounted on legs was anchored to the space. Walking towards it there was the sense that this was a post-minimal object very much in keeping with the former power stations modern architecture and as such was a critical attempt to form an inter-play with the building. Yet a surprising denouement awaits the audience member as they reach the far end of the structure. On arriving at the far wall it is apparent that the box is only three sided and an enormous ramp leads up inside the structure. Crucially you cannot see what is in the box, as a perfect envelope of darkness engulfs the interior. If you want to know what is inside the structure there is no choice but to take your chances and enter the void.

Walking up the ramp towards the unknown is an existential challenge designed to test the psychological mettle of the participant. While certainly bracing as a kind of quest/ordeal, it is hard not to think you are entering the mother ship of Close Encounters of the Third Kind and that annoying keyboard descant was very much wafting through my head with each step. Once inside the structure the extremity of blackness is overwhelming and each footstep feels modest and hesitant. The trepidation is accentuated by the fact that there are people in front of you but you have no idea where. The floor underneath feels solid, no sounds emanate from the act of moving and this is also unnerving. It’s as if the structure is capable of completely absorbing your bodily presence, reducing it to a silent and blind entity in space.

Unexpectedly and blithely I walk head first into the wall and realise the limits of the structure. At this point the work takes on an extraordinary quality as you crash into the threshold and subsequently turn around and look back towards the light. Amazingly the whole interior space is revealed by this illumination, especially the myriads of slow shuffling people moving towards you arms flailing willing themselves to reach the end. Heading back towards the light all of the tension is released and you are able to enjoy the paroxysms of others on what is only a short walk to reach the ramp and exit the structure.

While How It Is is very much an encounter with self and a brilliant manifestation of intimacy rubbing against the grain of the objects scale, the other audience members frame the work in very particular ways. At the time I was there a group of Down’s Syndrome children were enjoying the work by running at full speed into the darkness. The sense of utter danger was phenomenal and their inability to foresee the possible consequences was seat-of-the-pants profound. No amount of screaming from the teachers had any effect and this out of control quality pushed the work into a very disturbing space whereby pure unadulterated freedom nestled against that awful sense of foreboding.

As is the case with such a simple scenario there are a huge number of possible readings of the work. Paula Herkenhoof writing in the catalogue highlights darkness as a language of silence or the ‘ill-heard’, as a cut in reality, as the vibrant signifier of the unsayable - and such readings are without doubt compelling and speak of a grand ambition in the work. Yet ultimately all the allegory and metaphor that is no doubt thoughtfully imbued takes a back seat to something simpler: the all too infrequent experience of an art work carefully, yet emphatically, shifting our experience of what we know and how we clumsily come to know it.

David Cross was in London recently and so...

Pop Life: Art in a Material World
Curated by Alison Gingeras
Tate Modern
1 October – 17 January 2010

With all the best of intentions I went to Tate Modern specifically for the Pop Life show. This blockbuster draws together a selection of trans-generational heavyweights from Warhol to Murakami and Hirst from the curious perspective of new millennium marketing theory and more than a touch of relational aesthetics. I was not convinced of the burning need to revise / rewrite the Pop canon, but the exhibition blurb promised an investigation of a select group of artists most working since the 80s who have used commerce to build there own ‘brands’. From this I thought (naively) that there might be a bit more to say about the pop/commerce/brand continuum from Koons to Murakami, but aside from clearly ticking these boxes the show was jaw-droppingly self-indulgent and bloated. Try-hard retro dance music blaring across spaces, more monitors than I have ever seen in an exhibition pumping out every Andy Warhol TV show seemingly ever made, and a side dressing of Pop porn were just some of the ingredients in this hubristic excuse for what was really a curatorial ruse to build a pat historical bridge between the YBA’s and American postmodernism.

Some of you might immediately reply that there is nothing wrong with any of that, and in fact a high octane Pop show that nudges some of the darker sub-cultural edges of Pop-based practice, connecting the work of Richard Prince and Koons with the less well known British punk group COUM Transmission, expands the connective tissues of Pop into a range of highly relevant low-fi areas - from porn to the prurient British tabloid media. The problem with Pop Life however was that the bridges established between Koons’ ersatz porn adventures with Ciccolina, rendered here in a whole room of Baroque titillation, and COUM member Cosie Fanny Tuttie’s earlier cheesecake porn, shown in the ICA exhibition Prostitution in 1976, is that while historically interesting these ideas were never adequately drawn out. Perhaps the Pop/Punk connection is another show in the making, for here it felt added on and secondary to all the bells and whistles of Keith Haring’s Pop shop/disco where you could dance and pickup goodies (trinkets) at the same time, or Murakami’s cloyingly dumb Japanese manga characters, sexed up and ready for purchasing in the gift shop.

Any sophistication in dissecting the body as commodity was largely railroaded by the broader investigation of shock and the ways in which certain Pop-focused artists have sought to manipulate scandal as a principal component of the work. As if on cue, the Tate had its very own publicity juggernaut when the police demanded the censoring of Richard Prince’s rarely seen and still explosive pre-pubescent portrait of Brook Shields. Titled with black irony Spiritual America, the work which consisted of a naked ten year old Shields made up and veneered with baby oil, was removed from the exhibition and replaced with a recent photograph of Shields recreating the same pose in 2004 - this time wearing a bikini and sans the contentious oil. The revised work is actually quite curious - as if Shields through her revisiting the original is carefully working to rewrite the work's meaning. To a significant extent she succeeds in redirecting our consumption of her away from the murkier depths Ciccolina was coaxed into and back towards her safer Hollywood-lite personae.

Pop Life annoyed me for a range of reasons - partly because its premise, the artist as brand, while potentially interesting, never managed to fly, and partly because it did not even begin to interrogate the mechanism of shock as a critical device. Rather Pop Life reformulated and re-packaged Pop and Neo-Pop for a Generation-Y audience to consume. Yes, it reinforced the idea that strategies of banality and excess are staple features of contemporary practice. Yes, it might be an interesting idea on paper to turn the volume on these devices up to full, thereby challenging the cloistered separation of the gallery from the material world. And yes, Tate marketing department would have had a field day putting to use all they learned in product promotion 101.

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.