Santa isn't always bad

A Greater Plan: Works on Paper. Gow Langsford, Auckland. 11 December 2007 to 2 February 2008.

I detest most dealer gallery Xmas shows: they seem so grasping, so transparent. I hate in principle the idea of galleries behaving like shopping mall retailers. And while group shows can be innocuous and reveal surprising connections between normally disparate items, most of the time they seem to compromise the integrity of solo works, works that would be more comprehensible surrounded by others made by the same individual in the same series. At Xmas time when all the stylistic smorgasbords suddenly materialise, the commercial vulgarity of the art world is just all too much.

Yet some Xmas shows are thematically focussed and surprisingly restrained, even containing….(gulp)..rigorous works of quality. Items that are not overtly easy to sell. This Gow Langsford show of five artists is an interesting example. No tacky junk here. The prices are not cheap, but the product is excellent. Some works could be better – as I’ll explain – but damn good nonetheless. Some of it is very expensive. You have to ask to find out the price of a dazzling Frank Stella print (a hybrid screenprint, aquatint and etching), and the very unusual Maddox of gridded crosses painted in oil on a scroll map of Matakaoa is 38 grand.

The stuff that really interests me in this exhibition is in the three mini shows by Martin Ball, Judy Millar and Simon Ingram.

Martin Ball’s graphite studies render three strips of paper sellotaped to a larger sheet. They are a meditation on representation and manual dexterity that follows a tradition of such illusionistic image making (painting and drawing) in Auckland that includes John Lethbridge and Ross Ritchie, and often depicts simple objects such as drawing pins holding tightly stretched string against the flat plane of a wall.

I personally don’t warm to these drawings, preferring in this genre images with more nuance and sense of the infinite - like those by say, Vija Celmins, who is famous for her renderings of the sea, spider-webs, and the night sky. Nevertheless in this show, Ball's drawings do provide some lind of strange foil to the other works in their examination of the papery picture plane.

The paintings on paper here by Judy Millar feature finger painting where a top coat of dark paint is wiped off to expose a highly saturated undercoat. These seem less holistic than earlier works, having a dynamic pictographic quality that alludes to not only the Roman alphabet but also to Chinese brushed characters. These 'negative marks' hover in front of a field of horizontal bars. Millar here seems to be edging slowly towards a new sort of narrative in her work, hinting at something we normally don’t think of as occurring in her practice: spoken and written language and its codes.

Simon Ingram’s group of small gridded paper works are surprisingly loosey goosey and gestural with their use of thin paint. The best mix regimented order with chaos, with patterned sections that might have been painted by a slightly tipsy Gordon Walters, alongside middle portions that disintegrate into randomness. They are not as courageously challenging as Ingram’s robot painted works, but they are nevertheless beguiling. The black and white works are especially intriguing. They really improve the more you examine them.

Despite this I tend to think it is a shame Ingram doesn’t limit himself only to the latter projects, especially the oil on linen paintings. The hand painted works conceptually compromise the programatic /anti-manual/anti-improv ideology of his cybernetic project. (Imagine if Billy Apple started exhibiting his private working sketches after all the years of hiring craftsmen to make his paintings.It would pull the rug out from under his fanaticism.) It irks me Ingram’s practice has no hardheaded rhetoric that disdains hand-applied marks because of their overtones of visionary individuality. Instead of dabbling in cliches of painterly expressivity (even within the tiny modules of graphpaper) he should be severe. Tough uncompromising stances are a European phenomenon that is, alas, utterly unknown in this country.

Art School? What Art School?

Art School 125: 125 years at the School of Fine Arts at the University of Canterbury, Christchurch Art Gallery. 9 November 2007 – 17 February 2008.

It is a terrific idea for the Christchurch Art Gallery (as a replacement for the old McDougall) and the University of Canterbury art school at Ilam to work together to celebrate 125 years of tertiary education. The two have long been the main art institutions in the city with lots of historical interaction and it makes good sense. Yet for a partnership that looks significant, especially when touted in an online introduction to the exhibition on the CAG website, this is a sorry affair. The show feels lacklustre and not at all satisfying. The presentation overall on the floor and online seems indecisive and troubled by an irritating ad hocism that perhaps reflects the current crisis in Ilam - with the university administration dismembering courses once considered vital to the health of the national art community.

That it looks skimpy and unambitious is maybe passable for a touring show – which it is. On its home turf it needs a lot more floor space so themes can be explored properly, for it could have been a lot bigger and better if it had really wanted to get its importance across to Cantabrians. It could have occupied the whole of the upstairs floor by dismantling the current permanent collection exhibit – which has been up far too long – and using those galleries.

With what we have, references to the art school are dispersed through other exhibitions too, with a strange doubling up within the collection exhibits. The Canterbury graduates there have extra cards pointing out their period of study placed alongside the exhibit labels. This method seems makeshift, as does the online catalogue which goes through the history of the place year by year, only to grind to a halt at 1959 and be replaced by a series of assorted interviews with ex-students. It is as if the curators ran of out of steam.

This incohesion and lack of focus makes 125 desperately seem to be trying to be all things to all people. It could have compared Ilam with other tertiary art institutions and for example, instead of including artists like Maddox and Hammond (who though successful actually attended Ilam for very short periods) focussed on those more committed to exploring the courses on offer, and what they benefited from the School.

The website points out that the gallery is carrying out ongoing research around this show and that is admirable. Hopefully we’ll end up with a proper publication containing a series of thoughtful essays about topics such as Ilam’s contribution to the national scene. It would be good to have some speculation on why it has been so successful at exporting talent to Auckland. Or discussions about the formidable intellectuals of the seventies like Tom Taylor and Ted Bracey, with their considerable contributions to Canterbury’s cutting edge art practice and national art education, and continuing influence. Or some analysis – and gender breakdown - of the assorted art careers that Ilam graduates end up with. Fingers crossed.


Images are, top to bottom, by Joyce Campbell, Saskia Leek, Robin Neate, Ronnie van Hout, Don Peebles, and Margaret Dawson.