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.

Non-textual (mostly blue) Reynolds

John Reynolds: Along these lines
Sue Crockford
1 December - 24 December 2009

It's a nice, cunningly ambiguous title by John Reynolds for this Crockford show, and one that showcases his strengths – for there are no words anywhere. I dislike his dictionary-obsessed works that use written texts (I hate the pomposity of many of them, the look of the spindly printing and I’m irritated by the monotony of the evanescent silver paint) while I am fond of his paintings that emphasise drawing. Especially his linear, unravelling stringy, scrubbed and scratchy marks of chalk or charcoal of his old works. But naturally he has moved on.

So what is here amongst these six recent paintings?

Most conspicuous is the big, four panelled work on the main wall – a painting that works. Nomadology, succeeds not only because of its lyrical, wistful sky blue and wisps of sprayed cloud and vapour trails, but also because of its dots (in that silver paint that I invariably find so loathsome), which though scattered have a compositional structure that is in essence linear. The painted specks are like flocks of migrating birds, or herds of caribou. They thankfully link up in diagonal alignments. It’s when they don’t, as in some of the small canvases, that he runs into problems. They lack direction.

The main ‘lines’ in this show are three teetering stacks of small, mark-free monochromes that crawl up the wall to the ceiling and which seem to allude to the earlier brick work in this space by Kate Newby.(A nice ‘tip of the hat’ from an older artist to a much younger one.)

Because they are monochromatic and vertically link up, the choice of colour in these Birdsong works is crucial. The metallic copper and silver stretcher ‘lines’ are insipid and flat, but the Klein blue on the work by the gallery entrance is astounding in its penetrating vibrancy. It also has different edges from the other two - they have skinny drips running down the sides. This one has thick oozy blobs that lazily meander halfway down the stretcher sides – seepages from a weedy watery ladder to the heavens.

Other blue works are a single solo dotty work (Sad Song #7) on the wall in isolation, and, Refrain, a group of about fifteen small stretchers (again silver dotty) arranged on a plinth in a sort of balanced stack, that you can walk around.

However it is the two largest 'linear' blue works that are the highlights of this show: one wall-sized, the other like a piece of wobbly down-pipe from your guttering. Both are buoyant in mood and sensual. Cool and refreshing in the summer heat.

Auckland 08: Walters Sweepstake

The Walters Prize 2008
New Gallery
13 September - 23 November 2008

It is hard to believe it is six years since the inaugural Walters Prize exhibition opened at the New Gallery with its line up of Michael Stevenson, Gavin Hipkins, John Reynolds and the then unknown, Yvonne Todd. For a country that doesn’t have a national gallery the occasion was something all Kiwi contemporary artists were ecstatic about - a ray of hope that this country might see its artists not as 'dole bludgers' but as creative people with vocations. This new show reveals a lot about the event at this point of its short history, and the weaknesses of its organisational structure. For an Auckland-based prize that is meant to be championing the excitement of New Zealand contemporary art to the rest of New Zealand and the world, it is clearly floundering.

When I was at art school in the early seventies there were only four tertiary art education institutions in the whole country. Now there are more than that in Auckland alone, and the number of artists has escalated astoundingly. So when the selection committee for this year pick two past finalists (Reynolds and Robinson) to resubmit, something has to be wrong. The message is that Aotearoa doesn’t have the quantity and range of exciting practices to keep the exhibition continually fresh. In this country the inherent vibrancy needed doesn’t exist.

That is clearly not the case. More likely the committee didn’t do their homework and thoroughly scour through all the dealer exhibitions the length and breadth of the land. But with no South Island curator on the panel there was no incentive to ensure that. And with two of the four selectors from Auckland alone, the result seemed predestined to ensure Auckland parochialism, especially when the two repeating artists live in Auckland.

Enough about the politics. What about the work? The four exhibitions?

My personal favourite of the four line-ups of different years (so far) is the second one of 2004, with et al and von Sturmer. The other two exhibitors, van Hout and Fraser, though unquestionably superb artists, somehow couldn’t do themselves justice in their allocated spaces. That seems to be the regular pattern in all of the four biennial shows: in each - two crack shows; two forgettable ones.

Edith Amituanai’s Déjeuner, with its four photographs, seems only half an exhibition. She seems to have drawn the short straw in terms of space, but it shows her inadequacies as an artist as well. She is a consummate documenter of Samoan living spaces and rugby players living in France, but not an exciting thinker. Her approaches to photographic presentation are dull and conventional, even though the details of her recorded living rooms are rich and engaging. When clearly superior artists like Simon Denny (at Michael Lett) and Fiona Connor (at Gambia Castle) are ignored her inclusion looks like tokenism. I’m not saying it is, I know the panel is smarter than that, but it looks suspect.

(To briefly digress, am I here directly contradicting what I said earlier about a South Island panellist? I don’t think so. I’m not saying a South Island artist must be included, only that the panel has a South Island representative who can do the research and initiate a discussion of the issues – like what I’m doing here.)

Cloud, the work of John Reynolds, was shown in the AGNSW in the 2006 Sydney Biennale and consists of over 7000 little canvases bearing written phrases taken from Harry Orman’s ‘Oxford Dictionary of New Zealand English.’ Occupying the stairwell space and first room on the New Gallery's first floor, this sprawling installation of row upon rippling row of small stretchers, from floor to ceiling, looks pompous - in the tradition of overkill exemplified by the installations of Ann Hamilton and Anthony Gormley. It’s an academic exercise about language that if chosen well could be interesting, but instead ends up all surface and triviality. As few of the paintings can be read anyway it becomes the dumbest sort of spectacle.

Lisa Reihana’s Digital Marae uses her two darkened rooms of glowing spot-lit photographs, moving image and sound to really stir her audience. It’s not subtle but it is innovative and entertaining - especially her images of mythic personalities within the Māori cosmology that in her hands become Neo-Gothic and Sci-Fi. There is even a hint of Hollywood productions like Batman. Though at times fragmented (her elegant images of a cane carrying dandy wearing tailored colonial attire and moko look out of place) her installation has considerable impact and will be the crowd favourite.

As I’ve said, Robinson like Reynolds should not be here - but seeing that he is, his installational revamping of his 2006 ARTSPACE project is my favourite anyway. It is all class, a polystyrene intestinal phallus run rampant, running down corridors and bursting through walls like an angry blind worm. Conceptually layered to include references from Tex Avery (Looney Tunes)and early Giacometti to Wittgenstein (duck-rabbit diagram) and Stephen Hawking (universe model), Robinson’s inclusion of blue beaks, rabbit ears, willies and doughnuts brings a festive chromatic musicality to his exuberant project.

So who will Catherine David give the $50,000 prize to in late October? David is not a person one would attempt to second-guess. Even as an expert on modernism’s relationship to - and blending with - post-colonialism, she is vehemently anti-formulaic. Though I think AAG messed up badly in the processes of this year’s exhibtion selection, I congratulate them on their selection of David as judge – an inspired choice that will help our profile globally if she relates to the diversity of our culture and the art made within it. And how can she not? Roll on October!

Small works appeal

Nice small works
John Reynolds: Ballet Mécanique
Sue Crockford
24 June -15 July 2008

John Reynolds presents three sorts of painting in this show: A large gridded arrangement on the main wall (45 coloured paper sheets covered with wobbly diagonal paint-stick lines) that alludes to the recording of George Antheil’s soundtrack for Leger’s and Dudley’s 1924 film; double-sided card works presented on freestanding stanchions like signs in a hotel restaurant, and two sets of small canvases (10 x 10 cm each).

The best thing you can say about the big wall work is that it is portable. You can easily stash the 45 pages away. As a grid painting it lacks dynamism or visual tension. It is dull, oversized and forgettable – nothing like Antheil’s exciting modernist music that was cut as grooves into shellac cylinders, and which Reynolds here seems to be referring to with his lines.

The stanchion works don’t hold your interest either, except that they are two sided so the two captions comment on each other quite effectively when referring to the art in the room. What are interesting are the two sets of small texted canvases, stacked on a trestle: one with a grey background, on which are handwritten their prices; the other bright pink, with short gossipy headlines taken from New Idea magazine.

The lurid trumpeting captions are very funny. The hot pink adds to the humour and gives them credence as palpable objects. The work is a tip of the hat to the devious minds of magazine sub-editors.

The ‘Cheap Money’ works are related in that they too are tributes, this time to Billy Apple, particularly his ingenious ‘Sold’ series of the early eighties. They are highly aesthetic receipts for the transactions of their own sale. Reynolds is much cheaper than Apple, a lot later and more abundant, but like with him, the painting declares the price of its original purchase.

By acquiring these bargains though, you broadcast your fondness for a second degree idea appropriation, a watered down ‘Apple’ that is zanier than the original but not bogged down with details like vendor and buyer’s names, place of sale, and time. The title implies a little dig the purchasers have to wear. ‘Cheap Money’ hints that the buyer is parsimonious, and that buying a canvas by Reynolds is buying money underpriced. Despite the subtle humiliation, it is still a bargain. And plenty will jump at the chance.

Missed opportunity

John Reynolds: Works End
Starkwhite, Auckland
26 May - 21 June 2008

John Reynolds is well known as an artist who is represented by Sue Crockford . However in this show he is presenting an experimental work in the much larger Starkwhite space. Because it is freestanding you could call it a sculpture, but in essence it is more a painting. The front side is more attractive than the back. It is a prefabricated painting about the painting market.

This is because the work consists of the sort of road signs you find on motorways, these being made by a professional road signage company, and its subject-matter is the high prices reached at auction from 1988 to 2007.

The work is a list of paintings titles, listed from 1 to 10, but shuffled in position so they fit on the large metal supporting frame properly. McCahon has more works than anybody else, but the other artists are Walters, Hotere, Hodgkins and Chevalier. The information comes from the New Zealand Book of Lists

This is a clever idea for Reynolds to pursue. It is an interesting concept to wittily treat the direction of the market with the road as a simile, and much better than the handmade paintings he has made in recent years which have eschewed his earlier joy in mark-making.

The trouble with Works End is that it needs to be taken further. A distinctive property of these signs is that they are iridescent. Their colour takes on peculiar glowing properties when it reflects and Reynolds should have capitalised on that. It requires a theatrical treatment where the work is presented in darkness and spotlit. More drama would have transformed the visiting experience. There are ways of extending the idea into the ‘real’ world he could have pursued as well. He could have made photographs with the sign Photoshopped onto images of real motorways, for example.

So what does the title allude to? The end of a boom? The end of Reynold’s career? Obviously the former. Everybody is watching the developments at Webbs and Art+Object with great interest. But as Andrew Jensen has stated in the Herald recently, what is public is quite different to what goes on privately.

I wonder what a ‘private’ Works End would list? How would you ever get information about such confidential negotiations? Would it make a good artwork? You betcha! Maybe that is Reynolds’ next project.

Welcoming Cave

John Reynolds: Under Milk Wood by Dylan Thomas
Christchurch Art Gallery (Burdon Family Gallery)
14 February - 27 April 2008

This show is based on Reynolds’ set design for the Court theatre and so, naturally, is theatrical. It mixes lighting contrasts with a range of scales - from tall ladders to very small drawings pinned to the wall – and a variety of complexities, most involving overlaid grids. The spot-lit drama gives it oomph far beyond Reynolds’ other projects of recent years.

The sculptural props here don’t really need moving, verbalising people to enliven the space - for they work very effectively, statically, in the gallery on their own. They might not be so successful though, in actual performances of Thomas’s play. The mix might be overcooked and destroy the narrative –but perhaps that might not matter.

The best elements are grids projected on to the walls over pencilled grid drawings, or sprayed balls of silver suspended within bright spots. The gallery is turned into a sort of cave, and the bright areas interact beautifully with various ladders and planks on trestles draped with netting and rope or small paintings. This installation has great atmosphere. Not as visceral as Darryn George’s project next door but amazing nonetheless.