Language matters

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Two Rooms
11 September - 10 October 2009

Six artists from Australia and New Zealand present a varied language-fixated show in the large downstairs Two Rooms space, demonstrating a wide range of approaches and materials for text manipulation.

Anne Noble’s photograph of her daughter’s Ruby’s imaginative spell for attaining invisible flight are a big surprise and a good laugh: a recipe that could almost come out of Macbeth, carefully written out in pencil in a school notebook. The work looks a little like a Marie Shannon, but less sweet and longer, written on several open pages. As a document it seems authentically private as a genuine fantasy, not constructed to be documented.

The two white neon works from Mary-Louise Browne are gorgeous looking with their snappily elegant letter shapes, and clever references to Alexander Pope (just nine short words make up one long line) or popular parlance (three short words), but their self referentiality makes them cling to the media of Kosuth and the syntactical structures of Weiner. Browne’s method of technical presentation here is unwisely derivative, the sixties conceptualist art historical connotations blocking off access to her genuinely witty content.Perhaps she should have left the original Pope quote (and ten low words oft creep in one dull line) intact?

Rose Nolan’s wall paintings (like those recently seen at Te Tuhi) are a lot better than her two free-hanging Hessian banners shown here, dense with oval perforations through which you apply the language. Their mangy reverse sides make you wish they were on a wall, and the declared sentiments of Less Is More or (the opposite) Less Is Over Rated are hardly earth-shattering - despite the humour of the 'subtracting' holes. Nolan is not in form with these clumsy red and white hangings that double as conceptual filters.

Nolan is Australian, as is Mikala Dwyer who presents a long, blue, river-like carpet that spills down the wall and across the floor. It features phrases in coloured felt letters naming parts of the moon, features discovered by Giovanni Batista Riccoli in the seventeenth century. This list has a poetical flavour not necessarily accentuated by the rolled-out carpet format. Dwyer is famous for her formidable powers of invention with ‘non-art’ materials but here her contribution seems decidedly ordinary.

The exhibition’s highlights are three drawings by English artist Fiona Banner, framed drawings of (or studies for) larger wall texts. They come from Banner intially describing the actions of a stripper she hired so she could verbally describe her. Earlier she had also treated a sexually explicit movie as a source for ‘life model’ descriptions. Her studio writing - made in live peformances - is in short staccato-like phrases, bursts of disconnected factually described body parts, strung out in a ribbon of pencilled language. A bit like Robbe-Grillet in its clinical precision.

One Banner drawing has the written planes make up a corner, the others are frontal spatially - one like a tall heap (an allusion to Smithson?), the other a low rectangle laid over another painted over, much fainter, written oblong. The text is printed, not cursive, and quite scratchy and raw.

Denis O’Connor presents a series of slate Chinese inkwells bearing relief-carved images based on literary texts that he loves. These small paperback-sized, framed annotations are visual footnotes that for him are quite small, and simpler than usual. The intimacy works, drawing you in close, plus there is an added sensual bonus of muted, wax-coated colour which has an extraordinary softness.

Banner and O’Connor are worlds apart, but they (and Noble) make this group exhibition a good visit.

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.