Smaller better

Harvey Benge: Big work, small worksBath St
6 June - 20 June 2009

The two main parts of this show are a long narrow grid of coloured digital prints on the main bath St. wall - 240 of these butted together in a bank - and round the corner at the back, a suite of six very much smaller works from the series (and book): You won’t be with me tomorrow.

Benge’s small images, the framed photos separated out on one modest wall, are considerably better than the lumbering 8 x 40 grid that is ostensibly a single item. This one work is a dud: its proportions are wrong for the module size used, and it is packed with far too many images – urban shots to do with the sex industry, advertising, sentimental death, architecture and food – taken in Paris, Auckland, Genoa and Hong Kong.

It is all indiscriminate overkill, and apart from the issue of a high proportion of dross, even if these highly saturated images (reds and blues dominate) were all stunning by themselves, crammed into a long horizontal slot they merge into pictorial sludge.

The small vertical works are vastly superior, though Benge is hardly exploring the medium and going beyond conventional magazine fodder. Still he has done the right thing here in picking out quality works (with mystery or intensity) for viewing in isolation, and his ability with composition and scale is made obvious. He should have presented the whole exhibition in this manner.

Shot counter-shot

Harvey Benge: I look at you, you look at me
Book of paired photographs
Hardcover, pp 146
FAQ Editions 2008

In this book, one of many Benge has published presenting his photographs, the format is a little different from usual. He has asked the sitters of his portraits to take photographs of him – to go alongside his images of them. A sort of visual conversation.

This approach makes sense. Benge is an affable, gregarious Kiwi who partially lives in Paris and obviously enjoys meeting people. But where they live is important too. Some of his pictures are in New York, but most are in Europe – so part of the fun for the antipodean viewer (if they happen to have travelled widely) is figuring out which cities provide the backdrops. Looking for clues: like snippets of written language on posters, or details of architecture or clothing. Or national facial or body types, if you believe they exist.

How did Benge select these people? Are they friends, strangers, products of a random system? Is there a pattern? Is it facetious to analyse according to class, age, gender, race, sexual orientation, religious beliefs, choice of music, drug of preference?

I guess he could have asked them to photograph anything they like, then and there, on the spot – let them be conceptually creative if they had the inclination. But he insisted they photograph him. Many of the images are boring (by both Benge and guests), but the good ones have a mischievous sense of conspiracy between the two photographers. For example curtains from a nearby window might wrap around both heads, or a sitter might hide their face or show only the back of their head.

I don’t like portraits much as a rule. I find them predictably bland – and I’m a misanthrope anyway - so I was surprised that some of these images made me quite curious about the sitters. Certain qualities made me want to return to these people. Facial expression, exotic background, bodily demeanour, peculiar clothing, an unanticipated prop, an unexpected detail.

I wondered what would I ask them if I had the chance? Looking at a photograph gives you opportunities to examine somebody in a way you don’t have in a face to face situation where you don’t want to be intrusive and stare. Do they have secrets that are wickedly strange? Perhaps I would photograph them another way to make them more interesting than Benge’s sometimes rather dull effort.

What of his process here? Did Benge end up with duds that he thought unpublishable? Did he reject any images? Perhaps even technical cock ups are interesting. With his camera, was it possible for things to go wrong? I wish he had included more bad tempered people. I wish he’d made himself less perky and friendly. Some unguarded, accidental – even disturbing - images would have been great. More truthful than making ‘good’ or ‘normal’ appearances.

With that in mind I find there is one image I really love: of some skinny little guy in a sleeveless jersey standing by an open door. He looks like he’s just fallen out of bed. His eyes are half shut, his hair is a mess and he can barely stay vertical. He seems as if he is patiently indulging Benge, humouring him so he’ll just go away. It’s hilarious and very sweet. A non-photograph that’s a winner.

Spirtual codings

Signs: the painted word of Abdullah Dougan
2 March - 22 March 2009

Expressions: Phil Dadson, Brent Wong, Melissa Martyn, Ross Ritchie, Harvey Benge, Peter Shearer, Pauline Thompson
2 - 19 March 2009

North Art, Norman King Square, North Shore

These two exhibitions celebrate the life of Abdullah (Neil) Dougan (1918 -1987), an influential teacher who lived in Auckland and made symbolic paintings that functioned as teaching aids for his pupils. His lessons blended the ideas of Sufi thinkers such as Hazrat Inayat Khan with the discussions around the theosophical doctrines of Gurdijieff.

One exhibition features about thirty paintings by Dougan from the early seventies. The other is a tribute show presented by seven of his pupils.

Abdullah Dougan’s paintings look abstract but are not formalist in function. They are heavily coded diagrams for psychological states, with every colour, shape and line having a specific purpose in guiding the viewer. They look akin to the works of Kenneth Noland or Len Lye but these visual parallels are coincidental. Dougan was not an innovative stain painter like Noland or interested in theories about ‘The Old Brain’, as Lye was. Yet formally many of his images make good viewing. He had a flair for image construction and placement, an intuitive talent despite his main preoccupation being spiritual symbolism. The show is linked to a book about to be published about the intended content of these images, paintings and prints he created over a period of seventeen years.

The other show is a collection of works that show how varied as artists his pupils could be. Paintings, music, videos, pottery, and photographs all are presented here. If one strained for a visual commonality one might start with Brent Wong whose works are clearly influenced by his teacher and not like the surrealist realism he is generally known for, though related chromatically. They have a flickering quality like light on water, and this theme, of sun speckled water with a canoe (as Self) travelling on it, is taken up in a video by Phil Dadson.

The circle motif occurs again with the clayware by Peter Shearer and the small drawing pin paintings by Ross Ritchie. Like Dadson’s canoe, symbols for the individual soul’s search for happiness can be speculatively guessed at in the birds on Melissa Martin’s jug-shaped paintings and Harvey Benge’s photograph of a jet high in the sky. Pauline Thompson’s imagery on the other hand, seems a little Blakean stylistically, though light again is of great significance.

My discussion here, clearly contrived, does point out the refusal by most visitors (like me) to accept that is no ‘artistic’ connection at all, except that the show records the fact of a search by seven individuals (a community of friends) for a psychological structure to underpin their daily lives. However exhibiting collectively as a group somehow implies a visual and symbolic meaning will be made apparent. That is part of the deal, as visual artists - or else seven names could have just been typed on a piece of paper and left on a table with testimonials provided.

The top three images are by Abdullah Dougan, while the bottom three are by Peter Shearer, Melissa Martyn and Brent Wong.