The proof of the pudding

New Artists show: Fresh Gallery Otara, Newcall, None
ARTSPACE
5 September - 10 October 2009

We have here one of those classic scenarios where a show is tortured by internal philosophical conflicts that disrupt pragmatics: an exhibition which normally involves a yearly curation of work from new (hitherto comparatively unknown) artists - selected from a national pool so they can be exposed to a big Auckland audience. However this time, for reasons of hoping to embrace a wider democratic participation so she is not a ‘gatekeeper’ (though if you take on the job, I think it is something you can’t escape) the director/curator has delegated the responsibility to three artist collectives. They do the inviting and are part of a process where the Means is more important than the Ends.

Despite the honourable philosophical intentions, this is not a happy result – for Ends count, and Art and philosophy are not interchangeable. The curator should not have got sidetracked by artist communities and sub-committees. She is paid to make decisions that achieve certain outcomes - like quality shows; not to share power.

Yet although the curatorial deferral achieved by passing the baton to Fresh, Newcall and None hasn’t worked, there are some good things. A few.

First of all Fresh Gallery Otara handle the situation really well. The film Small Axe 09 made by Tanu Gago, Leilani Kake, Visesio Siasau, Serene Tay, and Angela Tiatia is a fascinating series of conversations between Pacific Island and Maori women about the pros and cons of hair straightening, and its relationship with the dominant Eurocentric culture. It is related to some of the projects that some American black artists, like Lorna Simpson for example, have created, but using direct spoken language and music instead of poetic written texts or rarefied, elegant images. The issues raised seem to include freewill, personal taste, self esteem, changing community codes of ‘ethnicity’ perhaps, and new mores for ‘authentic’ or ‘natural’ bodies.

Fresh present a united front and have come up with a good product, an excellent ‘Otara’ brand. They save this exhibition from being a total disaster. Newcall in contrast to Fresh seem split by different factions. Their work is fragmented in its content and aspirations. The reading library in the main space is excellent – but those books and magazines were always available in the ARTSPACE office previously anyway, and more of them. Newcall’s idea of splicing a trimmed page of a theoretical text into each shelved book, and then reselecting some such books to be taken to the English collective Form Content in London via hand luggage is inane with its decontextualization. It is a trans-global group grope where the ARTSPACE gallery visitor is forgotten, because the best books disappear.

The theme of democratic process is the content of much of the purple ARTSPACE brochure, particularly in the Newcall section, and this continues with some significant discussions in the publication of Matters 3, now edited by John Ward Knox. However writing and art that awakens enthusiastic reader/viewer interest doesn’t achieve that through bald content alone. It requires layers provided by style, tropes, and poetic inflection - so that audiences are not excited primarily by political rhetoric, guilt, or desire to be pious, but through pleasure – mental or bodily. Information or argument by itself is tedious.

There are certain artists in the Newcall ‘team’ whose work I personally hold in high regard but this ‘democratic’ project turns their conspicuous talent to slush. Everything gets muddied up with incompatible elements made into a sort of thematic cold porridge. Scrape away that conceptual sludge and Clara Chon’s vertical glass slot in the wall, Sunday Minimalist, is witty as a self-portrait (it is like a negative version of Robert Morris’ Box For Standing In), as is Layla Rudneva-Mackay’s semi-autobiographical computer audio-text, A Wire To Fire Into His Heart, with its changing loop structure and vivid language.

None is a studio collective in Dunedin with a space set aside for projects that are implemented when the need arises. Consequently putting a live stream into their gallery when all they can think of is solving storage problems in the basement is like a lot of this show, a waste of time and money. Instead of being paralysed by fears of being perceived as a ‘benevolent auteur’ Emma Bugden should have accepted her salaried role as ‘Prime Mover’ more fully, travelling high and low seeking out under-exposed artists from all over the country (some connected to collectives, some not) and who are in fact ‘new’ – very few here are. A tragically wasted opportunity caused by a failure of nerve.

Dissolving distinctions

Alicia Frankovich: A plane for behavers
ARTSPACE
May 2, 3-4 pm

Let me start with an account of a work experienced many years ago. In August 1981, while watching an international performance festival (called ANZART) I saw a work by Marina and Ulay Abramovic called ‘Witnessing.’ It featured the two artists in the Great Hall of the Arts Centre in Christchurch, a huge room, with one of them standing in a corner and the other in another corner diagonally opposite. Both wore immaculately tailored ‘karate’ suits, and looked like gymnasts.

The work was an endurance piece. The man would raise his arm and point directly at the woman, holding his arm horizontally for as long as he could bear it. Then let it fall. Then repeat. At a certain point they would swap around and the woman would take over the pointing. The work was at least six hours long. It was about love. It was also about art making, the work itself as obsession.

That work has similarities with yesterday’s performance at ARTSPACE. Have a read of ARTSPACE's text about the event and throw it away. I think the art was really about cruelty and sadomasochism. With performer being victim and ‘behaver’. It’s very clever…and mean.

The piece consisted of two ‘work horses’ – one performer in a harness like the famous work by Maurizio Cattelan of a life-size horse suspended high in the air; the other like an animal working in a field, lifting the droopy inert figure up on a pulley by yanking on a long rope. So in this work, the limp dead weight in the air was the Artist, and the poor sucker doing the physical work was the Director of the institution.

Thus every four minutes, Bugden would hoist the Artist (a taller, bigger person) up towards the ceiling, struggle to the door, open it and let some people leave and outside visitors in – clinging to the rope so the artist didn’t fall. Then she would carefully lower her, the two would pause, catch their breath, drink a little water, and then in a couple of minutes repeat the action.

Bugden did not find the activity easy. It required genuine exertion and an hour of such rope pulling and weight lowering would have been really tough. As on any other day, focussing on the service she normally provides for any artist, helping her in her art production.

However the project was also about the audience and their complicity in her suffering. They stood and watched and could have offered to help. They allowed her to exhaust herself because after all, she was the Director, and she acquiesced to the Artist’s wishes that she participate in the work. No one forced her. In fact the work was a clear collaboration. And in that relationship who was active and who was passive became confused. It became paradoxically reversed. The seemingly inert artist became the driver. The director became the directed.

My need is such I pretend too much

F is for Fake
Curated by Emma Bugden
Te Tuhi
7 March - 12 April 2009

This group show examines the notion of authenticity as applied to the art experience, and the difficulty of ascertaining its presence. It includes a suite of pencil drawings (and a poker-work box) by G.F.Goldie (once known as Karl Sim); some purloined but genuine gallery signage nicked over the years by the then light-fingered Dane Mitchell; some seemingly genuine correspondence between the said Mitchell and the Crockford gallery about wall preparation; some hand carved tins of paint, rollers, boxes, fire extinguishers and furniture from Glen Haywood; a replica by Warren Olds of a Hotere mural proposal; and three fiddled with, collaged NZ Heralds from Fiona Connor. And more...Great also it was concurrent with Pivi’s ODS project.

All together there are works by thirteen artists. Not all of it succeeds. Shigeyuki Kihara’s parodies of corporate logos on 28 T-shirts, arranged in a three walled installation - are clumsy and over stated, the worst sort of histrionic knee jerk art, and far removed from the sophistication of her best projects. Ronnie van Hout’s self portrait as ranting cow-cockie, is a great sculpture, very funny, but oddly out of place here. Like Connor’s newspapers too, it doesn’t push the viewer, doesn’t fool anyone, doesn’t really employ verisimilitude to deceive.

The best works do – particularly the star acts from overseas: Rod Dickinson and Tom McCarthy, and Les Liens Invisibles. Dickinson’s and McCarthy’s faked historical paraphernalia around an envisaged, successful, anarchist bombing of the Greenwich Observatory in 1884, is fascinating – a wonderful array of pseudo documentation. And Les Liens Invisibles subversive websites are extraordinary in the sheer inventiveness of their cunning and the derisive nuances they manage to incorporate. Many who arrive at their site must get a rude shock once they realise its mischievous intent.

Gelatin is a Belgian art group whose account of a fake balcony they made to project from a window on the 91st floor in one of the Twin Towers is a great read, but its existence remains uncertain, the documentary images (photos from a helicopter) are so grainy. You are never entirely convinced. Is this ‘fake’ Photoshopped?

The title of this show comes from an old 1975 Orson Welles movie that reflexively undermines itself, but the real philosophical underpinning of this show’s mixture of attitudes, values such as those cheerfully upended by artists like Karl Sim, can be found in Denis Dutton’s book The Forger’s Art: Forgery and the Philosophy of Art. In this 1982 anthology he and other philosophers examine those arguments used to uphold the higher status idea and originality have over craft and manual dexterity. For those interested, here are a couple of pieces of writing on this theme by Dutton himself.

Flickers of comic anxiety

Peter Stichbury: The Alumni
Curated by Emma Bugden
Te Tuhi, Pakuranga
12 July - 21 September 2008

On an intuitive bodily level, there is no more immediately compelling image to the human gaze than another human being’s face. Even a belligerent misanthrope will instinctively seek out an ordered semblance of a visage’s vital components – eyes, nose, mouth – when confronted with ambiguous stimulatory images. But such subject matter for artists is ancient, so it is a substantial challenge for contemporary artists like Stichbury to make it fresh for new audiences. Yet few works here are based on real people whom the artist knows. Most of the portraits here are fictitious creations, hybrids of magazine or online images blended with shots of friends and family, with titles and identities constructed as well.

Te Tuhi, with its four connected galleries, is a perfect space for Bugden’s assembled collection of Stichbury’s work, and amenable for the orchestration of a powerful visitor experience. Stichbury’s visages are extremely precise graphic renditions with ultra-fine detail. They work well in groups where they become families or coteries. Varying between illustration and caricature, and blending the maudlin with the gut-shakingly comical, they avoid the devastatingly tragic or the truly vicious. This is wry humour, a gentle kidding.

In a show like this, with a lot to compare, you become conscious of Stichbury’s mannerisms: lots of blonde babes with huge bambi-like eyes and triangular mantis heads, with glistening irises and moistened lips. Some are frontal, other three-quarter view; some at eye-height, others slightly below.

The most realistic faces are on bowling balls. Here the artist has curtailed his impulse to distort because painting on a sphere will do that spatially. For all his images of delectable women they exude very little individuality. The most strikingly personable images are of men. Stichbury excels at male character studies, whereas women become abstractions of hetero male desire. This is magazine and movie culture where make-up and hairstyles are set strictly within glamour templates. Femmes and dudes rule the roost. There are no effeminate men or butch women.

The most recent works are the flatter more graphic images, not the plasticised sculptured heads that look so solid and super-intense. Stichbury's earlier images are more connected to digital animation whereas the latter ones seem to be out of graphic novels or comics. It is fun to study his methods of cropping and experiments with scale to see how they affect the psychological impact of each facial expression. Stichbury’s titles and Bugden’s wall labels (based on conversations with the artist) weave imaginary narratives around personalities constructed to accompany the faces, but that, though clever, overdetermines the reader’s interpretations. It is attempting to further enrich already extremely layered work. It just semantically clogs up images that are already easily sufficiently engrossing.

It is interesting to compare Stichbury with the photographer Yvonne Todd. Both construct elaborate names for the characters they create and depict, but Tood is about desperate control of emotion, whereas Stichbury renders fleeting expressions that rapidly flicker across his subjects’ faces during periods of intense anxiety. Stichbury’s Swoon (Stendhal Syndrome) (see top) on the poster is ostensibly about over-identification with an artwork in a gallery, but in reality is more about a growing realization of horror. Perhaps it is both, about the dangers of art and its power to transform (or corrupt) the mental life of its viewer.

Two Te Tuhi performances

Louise Menzies: Talking while Swimming
Riverside Ave Reserve
Harrell Fletcher: Come together - Manukau City 2008
Te Tuhi Centre of the Arts, Pakuranga
14 June 2008

These two performances were organised by Emma Bugden as part of Te Tuhi’s continuing Land Wars exhibition, and co-ordinated with a free Saturday bus trip out to Te Tuhi from ARTSPACE. I was curious to see what was going on, so I came along for the ride.

I don’t know the outer suburbs of Auckland at all, and had never been to Riverside Reserve or the Tamaki Estuary. Panmure was a foreign country as well, but the spacious beauty of the park and estuary was quite a thrill.

The suddenly inclement weather though, wasn’t. Before she started her routine, Louise Menzies wisely shepherded the 15 or so artlovers off the open parkland to under a tree on the shoreline, to gingerly step over the ubiquitous discarded condoms and keep out of the biting offshore wind.

Her carefully prepared talk was a mixture of anecdotes about parks, an analysis of Antonioni’s sixties film ‘Blow Up’ (a movie in which a park was a crucial element), the Parisian novel on which the film was based, the history of parks in general, and a commentary on the features of the Riverside reserve and its context. From the work’s title (Talking while Swimming), she might have originally planned to deliver her oratory while submerged – wearing a wetsuit perhaps. It’s a shame that she didn’t because the work needed theatricality. This despite it being extremely informative and at times funny. Menzies is not a charismatic speaker and the project was a bit like a school lesson. Not art that was particularly memorable, unless it was ‘Listening while Shivering.’

American artist Harrell Fletcher couldn’t make it as planned to attend his Te Tuhi performance, but his absence might have improved it. I like the idea of artists placing physical and psychological distance between themselves and their work, incorporating a ‘disembodied’ practice.

Fletcher’s project was a request to have an introduction by a group of Manukau residents to the region. Six people linked to Te Tuhi approached six local residents (whom they subsequently introduced to the audience) to speak for ten minutes on some subject they were passionate about, some topic that also reflected the region. The resulting six subjects were conservation of the Tamaki wetlands (Ros Nicholson), coaching a school soccer team (Harry Jekel), Pacific Island visual and community arts (Ema Tavola), the relationship between religion and science as elucidated by Swedenborg (Susan Heeps), and the complexities of beekeeping and honey harvesting (Terry McColl).

Both Menzies and Fletcher’s works tangentially raised questions about quality. The work was indisputably art (the roots of Relational Aesthetics go back via Fluxus to dada) but was it interesting? Could one care about it as Art, as distinct from caring about its subject matter? Can one separate the two? I certainly think so.

Information alone is not sufficient to engage an art public. The method of conveyance, the ‘conduit,’ the works’ materiality, is all important, its structure and efficacy. In these performances the speakers were the keys to any success the work might have, as were the frameworks for the works’ recognition and enjoyment as Art.

The distinction between Art and Life was not obliterated, or even attempted to be. The two are normally assessed differently with separate expectations, but in these works Art got in the way of Life. More so in Menzies’ case than Fletcher’s because Te Tuhi is, after all, a community centre. In Menzies’ project she had a specific art audience who would not have attended if she were not an artist. The work was more about delivery of style and persona, than information, though what she said was certainly interesting – but it was clearly bracketed as Art.

In Te Tuhi, the situation seemed to be the opposite, with an artist planning procedures which lacking his bodily participation, soon seemed invisible. Yet most of Fletcher’s speakers would have been indifferent to his absence, or to being elements of his artwork. They performed because friends connected to Te Tuhi had asked them to, and they could use their passion to convert others to their interests. A commonplace life situation where art was forgotten.

Images above are from Louise Menzies' poster for 'Talking while Swimming' (top) and Harrell Fletcher's 'Come Together' performance in Los Angeles last year (below).

Conflict and terrain

Land Wars Part 2: Build
Curated by Emma Bugden
Te Tuhi, Pakuranga
3 April - 28 June 2008

As trends go, there are an awful lot of exhibitions focussing on global politics being presented at this time – from the recent Auckland Triennial’s Turbulence, AAG’s current Earth Matters to the up-and-coming Sydney Biennale with its theme of Revolution. And the art world seems to accurately reflect the ‘real’ world. Our papers and television are full of third world issues. The moral issues embodied in our colonial history and the ecological consequences of our privileged western lifestyle are now being examined as never before. And land is a crucial part of those debates.

Land Wars: Part 2 Build incorporates a curious mix of media, with Michael Shepherd’s three botanically focussed paintings looking strangely static and old fashioned amongst all the photography and occasional exuberant drawing. Moving image dominates.

Some of the work is preoccupied with conveying pungent information - but is not that exciting as art. It is too direct, with no tropes, no inventive use of materials, no layering. In this matter-of-fact and one dimensional category, I’d put Ayreen Anastas and Rene Gabri’s videos about the plight of Palestinians living in Ramleh and Lod, where the Israeli’s have demolished Arab housing and driven out the inhabitants. Excellent documentaries, but dull art.

An example of work with wit and layering is the filmed Hausbau project by Folke Köbberling and Martin Kaltwasser, where the two artist/architects and their families erected the basic structure of a very small house using recycled materials. They did this overnight, outside the Turkish district of Berlin, giving it protection by an ancient Ottoman law so it couldn’t be torn down. They furnished it the next day and lived there for a week, welcoming curious visitors who came out from the neighbouring housing development blocks to look.

Another highlight, also showing an inventive use of recycling but on a much bigger scale, is a 35 minute film by aaa, a collective of architects and residents in La Chapelle, a northern suburb of Paris. They shared resources while squatting, and so were prepared in case they had to leave at short notice. Even the vege gardens were on pallets so they could be quickly shifted to a new site. The film focuses on ECO-box, a special designed communal kitchen.

Kim Paton’s simple shed made from recycled materials is a lovely sculptural component to the show, and its interiors are used to provide a noticeboard for the documentation of the development of Manukau’s Flat Bush town centre. Paton shows how the agenda of the Auckland Regional Council has shifted from wishing to provide cheap housing to that of providing housing for those with above average incomes. This is a feisty, surprisingly sensual work, but its documentation needs careful attention to follow the debates about various property developers associated with the township.

The eleven polemical drawings by Marjetica Potrc, with bright fluoro colours and slick ink lettering, are pretty intriguing. Her Rural Practices Future Strategies (series 1-11) advocates that fragmented rural communities link together so they become self sustainable. Opposing cities as a basis for citizenship and replacing them with ‘Florestania’, Potrc’s colourful diagrams are peppered with epigrams like ‘a citizen is the smallest state’, ‘being connected is what matters”, and ‘democracy is particles’.

Though some of the exhibits are a bit predictable (like Andrew Ross’s photographs of disappearing urban landscapes) this is a lively and stimulating exhibition. If you spend some quality time closely watching the videos and examining the static works, you will be well rewarded.

(Images by Michael Shepherd, Folke Köbberling / Martin Kaltwasser, and Kim Paton.)