Revamping, revitalising stock

From The Stockroom
Sue Crockford
1 April - 27 April 2010

This stock show presents seventeen works from ten artists. It includes some surprises and some revitalisations within a new group context.

The Billy Apples haven’t been displayed before, three small Xeroxes (from 1966) on coloured canvas that looks like gingham tablecloth patterns. The smudgy photocopied ink shows a grinning apple positioned alongside an inert Idaho spud, while the title ‘Apple in Idaho’ refers to the (now) proper names of people, vegetables, and of course, North American states.

Next to Apple are three Ava Seymour framed photographed collages with super finely-tweaked edges. The outer contours of her paper shapes you need to examine closely to grasp the nuanced precision with which her scalpel has moved. From a cutting virtuoso.

Peter Robinson’s two large calligraphic paintings look better in a group show than in a solo display where they don’t stand out as black and white statements, with so much white around them. Here with some colourful Mrkusichs nearby, they seem activated spatially and become highly energised grotesque landforms - quoting earlier, non-landscape, ‘quantum’ Peter Robinsons.

Julian Dashper’s solitary illuminated neon tube on a white wall with hanging wires on either side presents itself as a delicate – but glowing - linear drawing. The wires could almost be pencil lines within a calculatedly 'minimal' statement.

Opposite the gallery entrance is an early Gordon Walters koru painting from 1965. It intrigues because of the awkward top and bottom edges which explain the title, Black on White. It is definitely not vice versa, like the more resolved and spatially ambiguous works he later arrived at.

Of the two very different Mrkusich works, the smaller single-panelled blue painting (as opposed to the three panelled, three coloured one) has an intriguing tension by virtue of a symmetry at the top and an asymmetry at the bottom. It oddly twists the central field.

In the back room a mid-seventies Albrecht is a gorgeous stack of floating, horizontal stains, oddly divided into two halves, one placed above the other, while nearby a big black Hotere of shiny corrugated steel has its two panels spaced apart to form the vertical beam of a cross. Its arms consist of horizontally cut slots peeled away to reveal bright orange painted on the back.

There is also an oddly sinister Boyd Webb, with the clustered stamens of an ochry brown fabric flower in a shadow - exuding menace.

In thinking about shows like this, I tend to prefer solo exhibitions over group displays, and of the latter, thematically tight presentations over promotion of unsold stock. Yet the latter often allow us to spot things we might have originally missed, a chance to stumble on new connections – especially with more historic work that may be owned by an artist’s family, not an institution. A good opportunity.

Alchemical encoder or formalist?

Milan Mrkusich: Seven Colour Alchemical Spectrum
Sue Crockford
5 May - 30 May 2009

It is only a short while since the Mrkusich survey at Gus Fisher finished and Sue Crockford has cleverly capitalised on the momentum of that exposure with this dealer show. The seven, smallish paintings on display on her main wall are in essence about chromatic juxtapositions and horizontal sequences – though they are also rich in nuances of delicate underpainting. As an installed group, and within horizontal bands at the top and/or bottom of individual works, the artist uses rules of alchemy where hues are placed in blocks in rows, (mostly) in strict order.

From left to right the sequence goes: black, red, white, grey, green, blue and yellow, yet those names of colours are approximate. Various chromatic tweakings, plus calculated underpainting and inflections of rhythmical finger painting on top, introduce violet and gold for example.

The heights of the seven coloured panels also vary so that over half have double bands at the top, like strata. They are all aligned very precisely so that the tops and bottoms of some are flush with the horizontal strip-edges of others. A few of the bottom strips have a double thickness.

The various bars and blocks on the bands sometimes optically flicker, but usually they function as symbolic sliding doors or chunky barcodes. Mkrusich has mystical intentions. He believes his works are more than just assembled materials - that they connect to some deeper reality.

However he doesn’t rigorously always follow the alchemical spectrum. Principles of balance and spatial extension matter greatly to him, and so often the white blocks end up on the top righthand side – out of position with other colours in the series, but balancing. Here Mrkusich’s use of symbolism is pretty hard to separate from his formalist aesthetic, for the significance of the individual colours is their part in an evolving continuum. The process is not so much about turning the base and putrid into glistening gold (or the acquisition of prosperity) but more about intellectual growth and self-realization.

Derek Jarman, a film-maker and painter who collected Alchemical Treatises, explains it like this:

It was believed matter was animated by the soul. It took science to do away with that. Lead, for instance, was saturnine and melancholic. Mercury, quicksilver and the mirror of life itself….Sol the sun, masculine and gold. Gold was the aim of the pursuit, fired by learning rather than greed. In this universe, everything had its place though no one quite agreed on the order. The quest for the philosophic and incorruptible gold was a journey of the mind, mirror of the saviour. (Chroma p.75-76)

I think Mrkusich is a formalist, despite his denial of that in various catalogues over the years. He is a formalist to be much admired. You don’t need to grasp the early history of science and philosophy to appreciate the elegance and contemplative serenity of these works. The symbolic content is a footnote, not the main essay.

Magnificent Mrkusich

Trans-Form: The Abstract Art of Milan Mrkusich
Curated by Alan Wright and Edward Hanfling
Gus Fisher
6 March – 2 May 2009

This remarkable exhibition is co-ordinated with the long overdue publication of a book on Milan Mrkusich’s painting practice put together by Auckland University Press. Both show and substantial tome excel, but the show, as a visceral and cerebral experience, is glorious. An absolute knockout.

For never has the Gus Fisher looked as good as it does right now, presenting twenty Mrkusich works. Each of the three galleries has an optically and numerically restrained selection, with every individual item perfectly positioned to resonate with the rest of the room. It makes you want to go and fetch your sleeping bag and boy-scout cooker so you can live permanently on the premises. It is painful to leave.

What is particularly exciting is the varied range of painting formats Mrkusich has invented within the fifty years he has been exhibiting work: unusual combinations of panel placement and spacing, distinctive treatments of surface, new ways of suggesting space and methods of confining that aether – he dazzles with his inventive and consistent investigations, his ongoing preoccupation with Jungian geometry and painterly process.

The significance of that theme as content is a matter of debate. This show’s curators claim, as has the artist always, that the work’s visual properties as design elements are firmly embedded within a symbolic intention. This is contrary to the usual popular reading of these works as ‘formal’, as here, but of course such protests have been commonly expressed by many artists such as Newman, Mondrian or Malevich.

Maybe at the time Mrkusich over-reacted – for since the late seventies his temperament hasn’t seemed particularly ‘mystical’ or transcendent. In hindsight it now seems more clinically rationalist if anything, with his colours and paintwork more industrial and poppy – less brooding and ominous – and more about surface and the immanent. Perhaps he was worried that the notion of ’beauty’, which he clearly was exploring, along with musicality, would attract criticism as ‘vacuous’. Yet one could argue that it is impossible anyway for art of any type – no matter how rigorously formal - not to have content. There is no such thing as art being ‘empty’ of subject matter. Its status as ‘art’ ensures content is always present. The residue of some kind of denotation always remains as a trace. It never totally evaporates. So he was being over-anxious.

In their meticulously researched book, Wright and Hanfling point out the artist’s frustration with the difficulties of gaining acceptance, how he perceived the public as searching for easy narratives, national symbolism or recognisable landscapes in their images. Yet it is intriguing that Mrkusich early on trenchantly insisted on his alchemical content. Aware of Duchamp’s criticism of retinality, he wouldn’t overreact against storytelling, take an extreme position and overtly embrace formalism. It is as if that could be a bad thing. As if visual pleasure for its own sake was harmful. His aims instead were to intuitively arrive at archetypal forms that speak of an underlying TRUTH, forms that alluded to harmonious mental states and which could be found in images like the Buddhist mandalas discussed by Jung.

I’m fascinated by the occasional role of the critic in this book’s discussion. With his very early exhibitions, some of the comments by Wystan Curnow and Gordon Brown about his brushwork being ‘aimless, ’uncontrolled’ or ‘ambiguous’ attracted the artist’s ire, and he fiercely responded in a later catalogue. Yet any commentary at all must have been even rarer then than what it is now. It is fascinating that pioneer commentators like those two attracted such bitterness for their honest observations. Great they were forthright and that their bluntness stung. Great also that Mrkusich responded. That’s the way it should be.