Ultra Intra

Beginning in the Archive: Giovanni Intra 1989 - 1996
Curated by Kate Brettkelly-Chalmers
ARTSPACE
31 January - 28 February 2009

It is a little over six years since the tragic, stupid death of Giovanni Intra and since then his work has been regularly seen as part of the Chartwell Collection, and his estate of uncollected items auctioned off. An energetic, startlingly articulate artist and curator who effortlessly wrote with a witty, agile, fluid turn of phrase about anything that caught his eye, ARTSPACE is now presenting his archives – mainly Auckland and Christchurch material that he left with his mother before he went to Los Angeles in 1996 to study theory and eventually become a dealer.

This selection of posters, drawings, photographs, jottings and notebooks is presented in four flat vitrines in the main gallery - in a manner similar to the Tom Kreisler exhibition of a year ago. Whereas the Kreisler show had many paintings on the ARTSPACE walls, only one major Intra artwork is presented, while documentation of others is shown with projected slides. Some of the drawings are photocopied and presented in two bound volumes with the vitrines. Other bits of correspondence, to and from Intra, also bound, are in a back gallery on a table of assorted publications (such as those by the collective Teststrip) that he wrote for or else collected. There is also supplementary material generously lent by Ann Shelton and Jim and Mary Barr.

The best account of this archive, now stored by Auckland Art Gallery (in the E. H. McCormack Research Library) is by Robert Leonard in Reading Room 2. However Kate Brettkelly-Chalmer’s essay accompanying this show is very informative, clear and perceptive –though perhaps at times a little too accepting of Intra’s rhetoric. It is a beautifully constructed text that whets your appetite for the varied contents of this exhibition, cajoling you into using this rare opportunity to examine his ideas through his writing and images, and speculating if he will ever be remembered.

People usually of course change as they adapt to new situations, and I suspect the later Giovanni selling for the LA artists of China Art Objects was a different personality – more mellow - than the prickly young firebrand of this time capsule. Here he is infatuated with Bataille, Debord and Boiffard, and hostile to medical practices and forensic photography. He is impulsive, at times jealously territorial and quick to find fault with colleagues. He easily takes offence with anyone who disagrees with his (then radical) ideas about ‘The Clinic’ and surveillance. However he was also very loyal to those in his inner circle. Much of his correspondence shows that for all his erudition, he was also highly emotional. This display shows his kneejerk responses, as does the one artwork on show.

That work, 365 days (1991), a suite of ‘daily’ photographs, is a sarcastic nose-thumbing at conceptual artists like Billy Apple. It is a silly light-weight project that is only a fraction as interesting as his Nature Morte fetish masterpiece owned by the Govett-Brewster, or Chartwell’s ‘pharmaceutical’ Untitled - currently displayed in Ron Brownson’s In Shifting Light exhibition at the New Gallery.

This archive, though certainly fascinating, isn’t as interesting as his completed, more resolved artworks and essays. Its value lies in what it tells us about the processes behind his thinking, but finished results are – in the end - what count. These documents show us the exhibitionism and posing common to both his images and texts, glimpses of his unrelentingly penetrating intelligence and quick responses, and his voracious appetite for researching those theoretical areas he was passionate about. They give us a taste of what he was on about, but they don't show his talent at its very best.

I think an anthology of Intra’s liveliest and most lucid writings would be the best way to represent him. There are many more texts that he created than artworks, and so a sample of those would be more interesting than say, a touring selection of works. Maybe one day that will happen.

Building a Future

Architecture for the Nation: New artists show 2008
Curated by Brian Butler and Kate Brettkelly-Chalmers
ARTSPACE
14 June – 19 July 2008

This show debunks the traditional notion of architecture to make it something principally collective like national identity. It posits the idea that “architecture has little to do with the construction of a shelter or dwelling. It is an arrangement of social thoughts.” An interesting concept to confuse its qualities with that of nationhood. Next time it is stormy, cold and wet, and you are caught in an icy downpour, just stand underneath ‘an arrangement of social thoughts’ and you will stop feeling miserable.

Despite the nuttiness of the wording of the introduction, the six artists are worth looking at.

Richard Frater’s has two sets of sculpture. One is a couple of twisted, wonky hoses forms that look like massively distorted hula hoops. They are lines suspended in space that are deliberately devoid of refinement. Their ugliness makes them funny – like say the works of Francis Upritchard – so that grotesque charm in fact reinvents beauty. Their lack of gracefulness is their point.

Out in the ARTSPACE office Frater has rearranged the ‘drop-in’ reading room to present a texturally rich carpet work with an ear motif. His way of commenting on contemporary art’s ‘arrangement of social thoughts.’ Strange looping tapeworm forms made of knitting wool are scattered over the floor, making the work beautifully rhythmic like a painting or piece of music but creating something that also suggests William Burroughs’ notion of language being a virus.

Rangituhia Hollis has a line-up of four DVD projections, butted together in a row to explore iwi identity. They represent his pepeha, a matrix of interlinking communal references such as relatives playing piggyback in the local swimming pool, his first student flat, animations of ancestral axes flying around a room and dancing in clusters, and virtual eels being jettisoned out of the window of the Waipiro Trading Company to cruise over the rooftops. Hollis has a flair for editing and image movement. There is a nice restless energy that underpins the excitement of his videos. He has an excellent text by Anna-Marie White accompanying his entry in the online catalogue.

Alexandra Savtchenko uses the neon signage on top of the Newcall building (on the Khyber pass Rd, Symonds St intersection) where the gallery she exhibits in is set up. She has removed the two ‘C’ letters from the top of the tower and transported them to ARTSPACE so you get ‘cc’ (‘carbon copy’ or ‘closed circuit’) there and ‘new all’ when you look at the building out of the ARTSPACE office window. A lovely poetic link to the social and utopian vision of the show.

Ash Kilmartin’s concise pencil drawings on long sheets of paper are single-point perspective, tilted orthogonal diagrams of walls with deep apertures - but with peculiar vertical parallel lines. You have to stand close to see them. They are like the anamorphic charcoal drawings of Mike Parr or the nineties paintings of James Ross in that they are deliberately optically unresolvable. They border on incoherence. This riveting, intelligently supersubtle work is based on two modernist buildings she has photographed, examined and documented. There is a superb mini-essay by Sam Rountree-Williams about it in the catalogue.

The two works by Simon Lawrence use seemingly disparate components with which the viewer needs to make connections. One is a map of the world, showing countries and dominant land formations, that is leaning against the wall. Nearby on the floor are some china animals (a squirrel and a kangaroo), a ‘Chinaman’ puppet head, and two photographs of a rabbit and elephant. The work seems an ironic dig at anti-Asian racism.

Lawrence’s main piece of sculpture is a variation of a work he showed last year in Christchurch Art Gallery in the Another Destination show. It has a flash-gun that fires regularly on a timer, and thin taped-together plastic tubes that extend up from a reversed vacuum cleaner to the ARTSPACE ceiling. They have paper streamers that move when the machine is turned on. There is also a video of a long spiralling shot from a moving helicopter, circling above a big city at night. The movement of the air near the ARTSPACE ceiling relates to the moving aerial camera pan on the video, and the flash to the twinkling city lights.

This work also has a social interpretation, the flash implicating the gallery visitor, the video the wider community, and the air in the tubes, breath from conversations bearing thoughts. It is cunningly ambiguous.

Tuafale Tanoa’i (Linda T)’s contribution is an ongoing programme of interviews made on the site in a back gallery that is used as a studio. She chats with various Māori and Pacific island artists and media personalities, such as Fiona Clark, Edith Amituanai and Paora Maxwell, and plays the conversations on a bank of monitors that have user-friendly headphones and accompanying armchairs. Tanoa’i is good at picking charismatic thoughtful individuals who hold the viewer’s attention, and who have a vision for this country’s future.

Architecture here (and so the gallery itself) is clearly a metaphor, a structure for the construction of a harmonious society, like a whare or church that shelters its communities from destructive elements, and this work is a key component in understanding the exhibition’s title. The exhibition overall is cohesive but with stimulating variety. The six artists have provided a particularly interesting group of works to spend time with. Don't miss it.