Jodie Dalgleish has some observations about the new hang at the DPAG

Beloved: works from the Collection of Dunedin Public Art Gallery
DPAG
12 December 2009 - 30 October 2011

The Dunedin Public Art Gallery is presenting Beloved, a major exhibition of key historic and contemporary works from its permanent collection and a more fully comprehensive book of the same name. Occupying almost all of the galleries on the ground floor, the exhibition, which is preceded by Christchurch Art Gallery’s Brought to Light: A New View of the Collection, extends a European and American history of radical permanent collection ‘rehangs’. Such a history began at least at the beginning of the millennium with MoMA and the Musée d’Orsay – a history which Karsten Schubert, writer of a history of the ‘museum concept’, has associated with a social and curatorial appetite for novelty.

As clearly stated by the gallery in their introductory exhibition label, Beloved sets out to be ‘contemporary’ in its presentation. As also explained, it highlights a ‘cross-section of works’, according to a ‘series of themes’ and aesthetic choices, on the background of a ‘vibrant set of colours’. Behind decal covered glass doors, a lively red semi-circular gallery collects a small and eclectic group that play on the title. This leads down a few stairs to a large blue gallery dedicated to ‘New Sensations’ and centered on Reuben Paterson’s fan-blown and shimmering bill-board sized work When the Sun Rises and the Shadows Flee (2005). It also leads to a ramp that initiates the theme of ‘Spiritualised’ art works. Around these are galleries dedicated to ‘Sense and Sensibility’ (a bright raspberry pink), ‘Far away so close’ (a pastoral green), ‘Glory Box’ (a vivid yellow), and ‘Proud Flesh’ (a dramatic black). The presentation tends towards over the top, or, as stated by the gallery, it is ‘opulent in its treatment’.

While radical in its approach, Beloved does not set out to shed new light on art history or challenge the assumptions and values of the canon. It is essentially a thematic, rather than historic presentation of key works. Exhibitions such as this have attracted criticism over the last decade or so, for, as stated by Schubert, they take a work out of its cultural and historic context and potentially put it into an interpretive vacuum in which it becomes impossible to gauge the artist’s original intentions. This seems a relevant, but harsh, criticism. Despite its sometimes baffling curatorial connections, Beloved succeeds in drawing attention to each work in an unashamedly visceral way. It highlights the almost hedonist pleasure of seeing iconic works in reality, up close.

Because of its ability to highlight individual works, the experience of the exhibition is likely to be personal. In my case it was in the gallery of ‘New Sensations’ that a group comprising Monet’s La Debacle (1880), Gretchen Albrecht’s Cardinal (1981) and Matthew Smith’s Mixed Roses in Two Jugs (c.1935) made an impression. At first, I stood staring, stumped by the unlikely collection of Monet’s Impressionism, Albrecht’s contemporary staining and her ‘hemisphere’ that echoes her interest in ecclesiastical renaissance painting and architecture, and Smith’s fauvist still life. Then I enjoyed seeing each of the three so starkly. I was taken with the wonderfully free and rich colour of Smith’s painting, especially his use of red and blue - noticeable alongside the same colours made uncompromising by Albrecht. Unexpectedly, given that Cardinal is one of my most beloved works, it was my experience of the Smith that I enjoyed most. More disappointing is the placement of another favourite, Milan Mrkusich’s Construction On Red (1982), with Jeffrey Harris’ Family (1981) and Arthur Boyds’ paint-laden Nebuchadnezzar Running in the Rain. The reasons I could not grasp.

One of the most intriguing themes is that of ‘Proud Flesh’, a celebration of the human body in its many incarnations. Set off by the blackness of the gallery space, a frieze of Christine Webster’s Black Carnival (1993) and Frank Brangwyn’s recently restored Unloading the Catch (1916-17) plays with the idea of flesh-as-spectacle: Webster’s erotic yet somehow-familiar characters and Brangwyn’s display of shirtless men muscling baskets of fish. Such an unexpected and even wicked pairing calls to mind a particularly fitting word – ‘ballsy’. Tony Fomison’s Mug Shot (1971), which I have always associated with his ability to grant those ‘outside’ of society with a kind of mythopoeic grandeur, also relates well to this theme while Fiona Pardington’s Choker (1993) with its troubling yet delicate depiction of necklace-like marks on a woman’s throat is highlighted – as is Heather Straka’s Repeat After Me…Amanda No 4 (2008), a welcome newcomer.

‘Sense and Sensibility’ is interesting for the way it engages historic and contemporary portraits of men and women in a kind of power play. It also includes furniture that might have graced the drawing rooms of certain subjects. Particularly striking is the way in which Thomas Gainsborough’s large portrait of Charlotte, Countess Talbot (c.1784) faces off Robin White’s Sam Hunt at the Portobello Pub (1978). Also a nice touch, Julia Morison’s Fair and Gay goes Lent Away (2005), with its Rococo sensibility and delicate layering of textures, appears above an eighteenth century (but not Rococo) sideboard and knife stand, notable for their luster, delicacy of design, and inlay. As well as highlighting the texture and design of Morison’s work, the furniture also succeeds in highlighting the sumptuous fabric and frills of the dandelion-blowing beauty of Charles Edward Perugini’s He Loves Me, He Loves Me Not. Amongst a group of works by men, including William Orpen in Après le Bain (1929) and Henry La Thangue in Self Portrait (1890), Yvonne Todd’s large colour photograph Founding CEO (2008) makes a jarring comment on what might be a ‘typical’ male subject.

The ‘Far Away so Close’ gallery is more straightforward in the way it depicts nature and the city. Perhaps most notable is Petrus van der Velden’s recently restored A Waterfall in the Otira Gorge (1891) which, appearing in the centre of this gallery’s main wall, is given a long line of sight from the gallery of ‘New Sensations’ and through that of ‘Sense and Sensibility’. It is clearly an icon of New Zealand art. Also recently and expertly restored, Jan van Goyen’s Beach Scene is freed from layers of yellowed varnish. Its thinly painted cloudy sky had to be significantly and painstakingly reconstructed, and it now glows in a landscape with various dark figures going about their work. Other works highlighted by this theme include Andre Derain’s Un Paysage (c. 1930-40), Stanley Spencer’s Melville Garden Village near Belfast (1951), Lucien Pissaro’s Le Moulin de Poulfenc à Riec (1910) and Laurence Lowry’s Lancashire Industrial Scene (1928).

Perhaps the most comprehensible part of the exhibition is the ‘spiritualised’ section where The Bosom of Abraham, the kowhai-covered neon lightboxes by Michael Parekowhai seem to lead inevitably to Colin McCahon’s The Five Wounds of Christ (1977-78). Around the latter are clustered treasures such as Jacopo Del Casentino’s Two Wings from A Triptych (c. 1340-50) – the oldest painting in the Dunedin Public Art Gallery’s collection - Zanobi Machiavelli’s Madonna and Child (1452-53), The Nativity by Pieter Fransz de Grebber (1600-1652) and Madonna and Child Enthroned by Garofalo (1481–1559). Yet as an overarching concept or metaphor for the entire exhibition, the most fitting is probably the small gallery identified as a ‘Glory Box’. In this room objects are ‘gathered together to attract and intrigue viewers’, assembled for their ‘aesthetic appeal’ across time and stylistic periods. Here shine some of the Dunedin Public Art Gallery’s finest watercolours, works by Rita Angus, William Matthew Hodgkins, Frances Hodgkins and Paul Signac, as well as prints by Rembrandt, Titian, Dϋrer, and Della Bella.

Everybody should try and see Beloved to encounter works that have long established the Dunedin Public Art Gallery’s collection as one of the most important in the country. After doing so, they can decide whether or not the exhibition pushes the boundaries of the rehang too far - and then post their thoughts on this site.

Images in descending order.
1.) A woman in the pink ‘sense and sensibility’ gallery in front of Lionel Bawden’s Untitled 2003. Coloured Staedtler pencils, epoxy resin and linseed oil. Collection Dunedin Public Art Gallery.
2.) Jan van Goyen, Beach Scene. Oil on panel. Collection Dunedin Public Art Gallery
3.) A woman and a man in the ‘new sensations’ gallery in front of Reuben Paterson’s When the Sun Rises and the Shadows Flee 2005. Acrylic, shimmer discs on board, industrial fan and nine pairs of electroplated shoes
4.) Frank Brangwyn, Unloading the Catch: Fish Porters with Baskets of Fish 1916-1917. Oil on canvas. Collection Dunedin Public Art Gallery
5.) A man sitting in the green ‘far away so close’ gallery in front of Petrus van der Velden’s A Waterfall in the Otira Gorge 1891. Oil on canvas. Collection Dunedin Public Art Gallery

Here is an edited talk Martin Patrick recently gave in Dunedin about the American photographer, Taryn Simon, who is exhibiting at DPAG.

Taryn Simon: An American Index of the Hidden and Unfamiliar
Dunedin Public Art Gallery
19 December 2009 - 9 May 2010

I feel almost comfortable with the recent photographs of Taryn Simon. And actually, this is quite a disturbing thing to acknowledge, as Simon spends much of her time acting as a kind of pictorial private detective, one who aims to depict extremely uncomfortable, hidden, alienating, and institutional places via her meticulously researched and crafted images. But then again, I am an American and Simon’s subjects, however particularly and sometimes astonishingly chosen, seem to be altogether emblematic and characteristic ones for my rather disunited homeland. I would like to think that these would have a much less familiar and more eerie quality to many people, particularly those not so accustomed with contemporary US Surrealism on a full-time basis.

One could perhaps cite Sigmund Freud’s term The Uncanny which literally translated from the original German means The Unhomely, and I would certain concur ultimately that Simon’s pictures are quite unhomely in many respects, although at the same time, they serve with pinpoint accuracy as evocative and telling representations of little-advertised aspects of the American cultural environment - the sort of topics that seem to overpopulate those “only in America” or “there go those mad Americans again” sidebar stories so frequently found in international newspapers.

Warhol once said: “If you want to know all about Andy Warhol, just look at the surface of my paintings and films and me, there I am. There's nothing behind it.” And so it is with Taryn Simon’s medium, the same one Warhol used in dramatic fashion to transfer into the context of painting such archetypal American horrors as the electric chair, race riots, automobile accidents, and the aftermath of the Kennedy assassination. Surfaces may be initially off-putting or reassuring, but they often act to hide or veil other information difficult to directly represent. Such surfaces can help distance us from intimations of the acts of corruption, and violence that are common undercurrents of each new wave of American culture.

Taryn Simon remarks:

Reality has always been interpreted through layers of manipulation, abstraction, and intervention. But now, it is very much on the surface. I like this honesty about its dishonesty. Every photograph has many truths and none. Photographs are ambiguous, no matter how seemingly scientific they appear to be. They are always subject to an uncontrollable context.

So much is always hidden in American society, just think of all the ubiquitous and secretive acronyms such as FBI, CIA, and the less familiar ICE, the office of Immigration and Customs Enforcement. Or perhaps the attempts by George W. Bush’s government to establish a clandestine bureau of misinformation; the frequent reports of officials such as Vice President Cheney sequestered in an “undisclosed location,” for fear of terrorist attacks. More recently the news that circumstances around the prisoners who had taken their own lives at Guantanamo Bay were suppressed under President Obama’s watch. And so it goes, as another great writer on American conspiracies the late Kurt Vonnegut would say.

Although many photographers come to mind when I gaze at these images I am also cognisant of the connections Simon’s work has with other contemporary artists of the last several years. Such examples would include Luc Tuymans, who painted a portrait of Condoleeza Rice as if seen from a television or computer screen, Thomas Demand’s photographs of his intricate sculptural constructions of historically significant sites, or Jane and Louise Wilson’s scrutiny of now-disused bunkers, subterranean enclaves, and governmental headquarters.

Taryn Simon commented in an interview with photo-historian Geoffrey Batchen:

I prefer to have people continually re-define what [photography] is and may be. Identifying genres in photographic practice often involves a commitment to traditional thinking. Current generations are no longer working in such clear forms [in any domain]. Everything is very quickly becoming interdisciplinary. People are continually trying to place the work in a comfortable envelope and are often confounded by what envelope that may be. It bridges a number of long-established definitions: documentary, political, and conceptual. I prefer that it float between and in and out of everything.

Maybe so, but I would argue that Simon’s practice certainly does not float freely from a constellation of photographic antecedents and contextual referents, and some of the examples brought to my mind include the following: Robert Frank’s road-tripping through 1955 America uncovering many things generally off-limits in the mainstream photographic press, or the direct, unyielding gaze of Frank’s most significant influence, the inimitable Walker Evans. Evans has often been considered a cold, methodical practitioner, but this lends a particular rigour and eloquence to his matter-of-fact images.

Simon’s approach bears similarity to that of Evans as she states:

In confronting loaded subject matter, I often choose to avoid any editorialized, spoon-fed emotion or angle. By doing so, my personal distance from the subject is built into the audience’s experience of engaging with the photograph. I’m avoiding a stance of “understanding” or of having knowledge that others don’t have. It says: “Here it is, and I don’t really know.” In my own work, I avoid that which claims to have a closeness with its subject.

The North American continent in its vast panoramic scope, is impossible to contend with visually except in small doses, even if one wants to somehow account for it all in a representation, such as the genres of the road movie or the travelogue, and of course in such formidable bodies of modern and contemporary photography as those of Frank, Evans, or Stephen Shore, Richard Misrach, and William Eggleston. I also think of anecdotes, one being about playwright and actor Sam Shepherd, who regularly travels across the US in a car as a way of thinking, grounding himself, taking it all in so to speak, or the British songwriter Ray Davies, famous as the singer of the Kinks, who spoke once of how the US seemed to harbor so many possibilities - as it was a place that if one was completely desperate, one could steal some money and a car, and drive across that vast expanse without stopping. Certainly he made this comment rather ironically, and romantically, and in stark contrast with the geographic limitations of any similar gestures taking place in the British Isles.

Simon’s photos in some respects could be confused with the genre of institutional critique, but how do we really determine a specific critical stance from an artist who has stated: “I want to seduce the viewer.” Essentially the formal crispness and coherence of the images is paramount to Simon, above and beyond any perceived ideological messages imparted through them. One could wonder if these images are simply another reification of capitalist excesses, sold back into that very market? Certainly to some degree they are, but the nuances and sophistication of the works emerging from Simon’s curious impulses are indeed impressive. She has remarked that she spends most of her time working through all the bureaucratic steps to gain access to such restricted sites, and that her initial interest in many of her chosen subjects was simply due to her direct curiosity; she makes lists of what she would like to see photographed.

Despite her edgy topics, Simon is an old-fashioned formalist in many respects, although at her ripe young age - Simon was born in 1975 - I would argue that there is a moralism and idealism very much at the core of these images, even if a major catalyst for her process has been the dark and perturbing external realities of the last decade.

In the artist’s words:

Over a five year period following September 11th, when the American media and government were seeking hidden and unknown sites beyond its borders, most notably weapons of mass destruction, I chose to look inward at that which was integral to America's foundation, mythology and daily functioning. I wanted to confront the boundaries of the citizen, self-imposed and real, and confront the divide between privileged and public access to knowledge.

Simon’s images are eminently pictorial, although accompanied by textual captions, and according to the artist:

What I'm most interested in is the invisible space between a text and its accompanying image, and how the image is transformed by the text, and the text by the image. So, at best, the image is meant to float away into abstraction and multiple truths and fantasy. And then the text functions as this cruel anchor that kind of nails it to the ground.

In many respects the more one wants to take pictures in the United States, the more one is thwarted, by one more generic fast food franchise, strip mall, or the clichés recycled yet again from film, television, video games, etc. etc. Nonetheless fine art photography remains one of the last hold outs to potentially challenge the banal hegemony of many other kinds of imagery. Photography can deliver images that cut through our massive indifference if only slightly, sporadically, and momentarily. As viewers we can confront otherness with the hope of realizing that this otherness is more part of us than we previously assumed. The best photographs offer up an opportunity to challenge our complicity with and acceptance of business as usual.

Here is a review by Jodie Dalgleish of the David Clegg show in Dunedin

David Clegg: Rerecordings 2006-2009
Dunedin Public Art Gallery
3 October - 24 January 2009

New Plymouth-based artist David Clegg’s latest project, Rerecordings 2006-2009, has resulted in an exhibition that is an important part of the Dunedin Public Art Gallery’s Summer season, Foreign Exchange, which also includes the touring Tom Kreisler and Miguel Angel Rios.

With the late Argentinian-born and New Plymouth-based artist and friend Tom Kreisler in mind, Clegg brings together photographs and recordings made in Santiago, Chile in 2006 with those made in Dunedin in 2009. There are seven series or ‘Results’, each presenting an indexed line of paired black and white photographs taken in either Chile or Dunedin, and a CD player and headphones with which a visitor can listen to a series of related soundbites. Each pair of photographs ‘bookend’ a particular sited moment with the top photograph of each pair marking the beginning of its related soundbite, and the bottom, the end.

Clegg also presents two cabinets that contain photographs from what were the current Santiago and Dunedin newspapers, along with transistor radios playing concurrent news broadcasts from either country. By relating all of these similar but differently located and culturally inflected moments in this way, he creates a space of “uncanny equivalence” in which signals may cross; a space that seems both ‘here or there’ and ‘here and there’. Time makes and is common to each moment, and yet it is independent of location.

As with previous projects, such as The Imaginary Museum (2002-2004) and archivedestruct (2005-2006), Clegg engages in a process of making strange any idea of a familiar environment. He allows us to see and hear everyday aspects of a city as ‘new’ and intriguing, as if we are encountering them for the first time. Clegg presents snippets of locations he has walked through (or travelled in) while making his visual and audio record: paved park or city square spaces (Result 5); foodcourt or market spaces (Result 9); the city from bus windows (Result 13); plaza or mall-like spaces (Result 3) the city street (Result 12); the city from a cafe window (Result 8); mall-like thoroughfares (Result 6). His black and white photographs are often shot at unusual angles; they are snapped in passing, made oddly artful by their chance effects. In addition, his soundbites allow us to aurally unravel the daily hum of each city. They focus our ability to hear a passing footfall, car, truck or bus, a snatch of conversation and music.

Clegg documents the experience of walking the city, bringing to mind the art of the dérive (drift) practiced in Paris between late 1950 and early 1970 by proponents of the Situationist International (SI), such as Guy Debord. According to him, it involved the pleasure and absurdity of walking/wandering as a ‘calculated action determined by the absence of a proper locus’, and allowed ‘drifters’ to recreate the city for themselves. Although not postulating any SI theory whereby such an experience is a direct act of revolution in response to modernisation, Clegg seems concerned with allowing us to determine our own experience of a city within the quality of particular moments.

Though more overt and subversive in archivedestruct, Clegg also engages in a process that promises, yet never quite delivers, order or coherent continuity in the differently located moments he has collected and created. Each pair of photographs is introduced by an index card that details the location, date and time period related to its photograph and audio track. Within each series, moments occur in similar places, or at similar times of the day (mostly). And we almost find patterns in the way moments are related. Locations alternate in some way, and date and time (sometimes even sound) often seem to move forward. But there are always exceptions, acts of doubling back that seem to also follow some kind of logic. Clegg also creates gaps in three series by providing index cards but no photographs, or, in one case no index card or photographs. While highlighting the absurd and unfulfilled logic of the archive and ‘museumisation’ in general, he also brings to mind what the artist-collector Walter Grasskamp has curiously described as the most free kind of collector concerned with self-evident connections.

Perhaps most notable, and more obvious in Rerecordings than in previous projects, is the particular kind of spatial temporality created by the way Clegg treats and relates sight and sound. Visual images and audio tracks work together while also remaining separate in the eye, ear and mind of the viewer. They are definite in their sensorial reality. Photograph and soundbite become ‘objects’ of experience. They make space and time for singular and individual moments of experience, within and across cultures.


Above: From Result 9: Santiago, Dunedin. Immediately below: From Result 12: Santiago, Dunedin. Images and installation shots courtesy of the artist and DPAG.