Pleasures of the Bodily and Binary

Richard Frater: So Long The Difficulties of Being Single Newcall 11 November – 29 November 2008 When does a collection of seemingly disparate sculptures become an installation so that an overall coherence is apparent where all the parts interconnect? Where there is a sense of only one work engaging the visitor? I’m not sure if that happens in this show, but it is certainly close, though the separate components retain a strong individuality. Into the T-shaped Newcall space Frater has carefully positioned ten varied sculptures. These heighten a viewer’s (self) awareness of bodily dynamics between Newcall’s walls, window, door gaps, floor and ceiling - and the light (or lack of) on those surfaces. Despite his droll exhibition title about ‘being single’ – a bachelor or single artwork perhaps - the show seems really about binary combinations, the tension between pairs, and movement around, over, under and through them. This is a meticulously deceptive and extremely subtle show that needs time to absorb because the links are not at first obvious. From two calls to Newcall, here’s some of what I spotted: (1.) The title seems to be about getting married, but is nothing of the kind. Other appearances deceive too. Frater has a video loop which seems initially to be of walls of ice bricks slowly dissolving in a large tank of water. These on reflection probably are plastic or polystyrene sheets collapsing in a mineral solvent. Their behaviour is subtly different from dissolving ice. (2.) There are two fabric rectangles on which Frater has printed large photographs. One is folded, the other spread out. The folded one by the window is grey and mottled like the gallery’s concrete floor. The other spread image is silvery and of rumpled sheets on a bed. It is itself creased and rumpled. (3.) An isolated freestanding door is placed in the centre of the entrance to the stem of the gallery’s T-shape, coming from a nearby wall at the base. Its chrome doorknob sparkles in the light from two panels in the ceiling, as does a similarly sized, silver-plated, mirror egg standing on the floor. (4.) There is a glowing fluorescent tube on the floor with one end raised by a vertical strip of plastic packaging tape going to the ceiling. The tube’s length seems to be the same length as a projecting wooden shelf on the opposite wall. (5.) That shelf has been planed to strip off its topmost weathered surface. On it are scattered nearly thirty tags, thin plastic strips that seem to have come from the sticky sides of band-aids which they used to protect. On the adjacent wall in large letters is the name Andrei, possibly referring to the great Russian film director, Tarkovsky – famous for his use of natural elements and long pans. The letters have been shaped by cutting out and peeling off the skin of the gib surface. As Matt Harris warns in an excellent accompanying essay that advises against interpreting Frater’s exhibition, these works need to be moved through and experienced, not thought about as semaphores or codes that require translation. To do that though means being aware of connections like those I’ve mentioned. They provide a pleasurable tension and keep the mind active. The show has not been built for robotic blockheads with legs on ‘automatic pilot’ but viewers willing to engage with, analyse, and compare the carefully placed ingredients.

Discreetly activist

Comb a schooner like a comet: Annie Bradley, Matthew Crookes, Peter Madden, Charles Ninow, Beth Orton, Ralph Paine, Martyn Reynolds, Daniel Webby, Tao Wells
Newcall
1 December - 19 December 2009

Seeking work that was opinionated, inclined to agitation and direct, the Newcall curators for this exhibition have approached nine artists who according to the blurb, have practices oriented towards 'activism or confrontation.' At the same time, the curators are sensitive. They are cognisant of Free Will, that of the artists and their own in selecting them. So nothing can be assumed in terms of product.

That last bit is crucial because this is not really a placard waving show – though Tao Wells’ invitation of audience participation in placing photographs (with the word WAR) of the gallery neighbourhood in the gallery neighbourhood, and Ralph Paine’s large wall of paintings and drawings on paper, come closest to that lack of nuance in that their subject matter is obvious.

Wells’ project involves a box of 24 photocopied images of the gallery and the streets around it over which is placed WAR in bold yellow caps. He asks the viewer to either stick them up inside the gallery and/or outside, or to sell them as books. A couple ended up on Newcall walls, including one of some colourful birds placed over a power socket, folded so the word WAR was hidden. I didn’t spot any outdoor versions, except an Obama /Bush hybrid on the front door.

Ralph Paine’s wall-sized offering shows off his superb skills as an illustrator: images of jets, medieval battles, lots of explosions, curling waves, agonised skeletons and burning cities - the latter alluding to say, Beirut or Baghdad. All beautifully rendered in an understated fashion with no fine detail. And surprisingly for Paine – no text.

I didn’t see Peter Madden’s ‘para-performance’ on opening night – a found suitcase opened to reveal found photographs, but on a nearby wall is a small solitary photograph of what seems to be a group of sportsmen - maybe cricketers. A standing figure on the right has superimposed over half his body a military uniform, suggesting somebody killed in the Second World War.

Matthew Crookes has three works. One is a suite of sticky, peel-off letters that repeat the phrase In Loving Memory on a top corner of the glass front door. A second is a row on the floor of empty plastic book covers, all blood red. The third is a dessert spoon resting on a short piece of four by two. On its scoop are the stickered words: lick me disease.

Martyn Reynolds has a DVD presentation of a short looped film showing an old wooden chair standing in an empty field. It is projected onto a thin wall from an outside studio which when you look, contains the same chair holding the projector. The evocative flickering image is blue, that most poignant of colours; the chair a symbol for absence; the field perhaps a trope for European soil. We have pathos, yet a construction that is calculatedly knowing in its reflexivity.

Beth O’Brien’s single framed photograph of a young woman soldier struggling in a park to control an unwieldy, wind-dragged parafoil. Quiet Decisions, Specific Intentions seems to be an anti-military statement of considerable understatement, snorting at the notion of ‘managed’ intervention.

Uncontrollable process is showcased also in Daniel Webby’s installation, where a sloping ‘hammock’ of clear, wrinkled, cling film is suspended across the width of the gallery space between two towel holders. On it Webby has attempted to balance a gooey line of soaked dehydrated potato flakes, which has then fallen to the concrete floor. Attracting mould and smelling, the spud glop was later removed –though traces remain.

Annie Bradley contributes a two channelled video showing the artist and (I think) her father placing some household items in a trailer to be transported overnight. They need to be very securely tied down so they don’t slide around and get damaged. If you only know one knot… has one camera positioned on the van roof filming the trailer from above, while the other is partially aimed at a reflective window in the van’s door. The title advocates multiple approaches to problem-solving.

The last item is Charles Ninow’s sculpture that consists of two white trapezoid plywood forms on the floor. They seem to refer to the sloping eaves of a house and the demarcated proportions - measured out with steel brackets – of a sheet of a single bed. To speculate: the sheet in this context could be a shroud, and the ceiling, the ascension of a soul escaping from a corpse. An oblique and clinical, but also oddly evocative, work.

Shortly after writing and posting the above I was chatting to Dan Arps at Te Tuhi. He pointed out that the 'steel brackets' on the sloping upper surfaces of Charles Ninow's work are in fact anti-skateboarding blockers - an allusion to social control and American foreign policy perhaps.

Skimpy fragments add up

To Say The Least: Ruth Buchanan, Ash Kilmartin, Sarah Rose, D. M. Satele, Holly Willson
Newcall
15 October - 31 October 2009

This five artist show at Newcall has austere tendencies towards not so much minimalism, but rather, dematerialisation. Often this consists of traces that allude to earlier states that are fuller and denser with information, fields from which a selection has been made. Prying elements free of their original context.

Sarah Rose has two works that draw this out. One is a series of thirty A4 sheets with typed nouns pinned to the main wall. The words descend from left to right in the formation they would be positioned in within their original context: various Emily Dickinson poems.

Oddly Dickinson (1830 -1886) is a poet where there has always been a lot of conjecture about her original drafts - because of the many versions she left with variant wording, spelling, line length, punctuation and of course ultimately, meaning. The fact that Rose has worked with Dickinson’s ‘final’ texts is amusing because of their slippery nature - and variable interpretations that seem to change with each new anthology editor.

Brevity of fame is the content of Rose’s other work. On an outside window is a page with ‘as long as a rainbow lasts’ typed on it. Inside, on a timer so it plays only intermittently, is a nearby video clip of Nadia Comenici, fourteen year old Romanian gymnastic star of the 1976 Olympics, performing some of her perfect scores – memory flashes (for some) of thirty-three years ago.

Holly Willson’s two aural works are related to Rose’s visual contributions. One is a crashing piano chord that comes through the office door, and the other a selection of four fast snippets taken from a vinyl record. (Though it is highly unlikely, to me the samples sound like bits of Dylan’s ‘Blonde On Blonde’.)

Willson has a third work of a wide strip of muslin extending down from the ceiling, but twisted (flipped over) halfway down, and neatly folded on the floor. The stretched material seems to be a metaphor for time, and perhaps spatial context.

Related to both Willson and Rose’s projects is the display of residue from D. M. Satele’s opening night performance: two chairs; a video of some guy sitting on a bed in his underwear yakking on the phone; and two bound transcripts of six jokes from comedienne Wanda Syke’s ‘Tongued Untied’ TV series. More than props that remain from a past event, the joke transcripts seem a poignant trace of the television comedy - its shadow.

The works of Ruth Buchanan and Ash Kilmartin seem to have quite different sensibilities. Kilmartin has a small pile of paper pages on which he has written in pencil a text that diminishes in size as the pages get closer to the floor. It declares the work to be ‘self sustaining sheets’ and its logic seems to be that as the paper pile gets lower, the text is supported less by the paper and more by the floor. The accuracy of the text alters according to the position of each page in the pile.

Buchanan’s project is a fake lecture about problems of architectural relevance to local needs, that you listen to through headphones resting on a mirrored shelf. On part of it the speaker refers to buildings on the Chatham Islands that have specially designed flexible joinery. This lets them sway under pressure from the ferocious winds, thus providing a source of relaxation for the inhabitants.

Like Kilmartin’s sculpture where you have to look at several sheets to get its point, with Buchanan you need to listen to most of the recording to get its humorous drift. Looking at too few components won’t help you much.

This is a finely nuanced exhibition, probably Newcall’s best ever group show. The five contributors work beautifully together. Well worth a visit.

Multi purpose

Benjamin McManus: In search of lost time
Newcall
23 September – 10 October 2009

Ben McManus is one of the initial founding artists of Newcall. His studio is one of those adjacent to the venue. For that collective, his is an unusual show in that there is no writing about it available at all on the premises. (Sometimes Newcall have two essays.) However the artist’s comments on his emailed invitation provide this function – and an exhibition that might initially seem minimal and austere actually is not so.

Look at this quotation he includes from Li Po, the eighth century Chinese poet:

The natural world provides all things with temporary residences. Time is a wayfarer for hundreds of generations traveling among temporary residences.

Suddenly work that in the gallery looks akin to early Richard Serra, Bruce Nauman or Richard Tuttle seems functional and isn’t just formalist or process–oriented at all. Some of it doubles as architecture; providing possible homes for little creatures - insects, spiders or rodents perhaps - but isn’t being cute. More a Taoist awareness.

The main work on the floor is a baked ‘rock’ made of clay and chalk dust, created to be kicked around on a polished concrete surface. Where that has happened it has left a snail-like trail, or delicate wobbly white lines like those traces the foamy sea leaves at the high-water zone.

There is also a cluster of glued together shells - from Cockle shellfish – that form the basis of an improvised sculpture on a plinth that looks a little like a Futurist marching figure. The reference to portable houses with shellfish, and snails with the rock on the floor, seems calculated.

The wooden plinth here is made of four vertical pyramids glued tightly together, and on the floor nearby the artist has stacked eight similar wooden wedges, of two widths, so they form a ramp with the splayed flat tips overlapping together. This creates diagonal ledges and little jutting roofs and seems set aside for some much larger engineering purpose.

Over by the large window, tucked into a corner on the floor, McManus has placed a right-angular shaped piece of silver aluminum piping that little critters might investigate for accommodation. Around one end he has wrapped a page from the Herald’s racing supplement, suggesting it is part of a track.

On the other side of the main room is a clever sculpture made of three vertically positioned, leaning rectangles of clear glass. Two shorter sheets are directly against the wall, with one placed on top of the upper, very narrow edge of the other so that it looks like one very long sheet that is buckled. The third rectangle leans against the top inside one so it doesn’t topple over or slide off. With the plane of the wall they become shelters.

McManus’s last work is a vellum sheet hanging loosely on a far wall so that it covers a large dinner-plate sized, circular hole. From a distance the deeply cut aperture looks like a disc in shallow relief, but as the bending vellum shifts in the breeze, the edges of the background circle move in and out of focus. The sculpture looks as if it could also be a nesting box.

When you first encounter this show it seems too minimal, too underwhelming, for one large area looks quite unused, but when you realize the function of the ‘kickable rock’ in relation to the floor-plan it makes more sense. The floor, after all, is here a sort of community drawing board.

This under-stated exhibition rewards patience with its gentle, low key humour and restrained, very considered use of industrial or construction site materials. Looking forward to seeing what this artist does next.

Weird or 'weird'?

Christina Read: The Psychologist’s Bookshelf
Newcall
26 August - 12 September 2009

At the beginning of a short discussion he has prepared to accompany this exhibition of installed sculpture by Christina Read, Matthew Crookes writes of Foucault’s Madness and Civilization and Will Self’s The Quantity Theory of Insanity, telling us a little bit about them as if these tomes could be connected to Read’s assorted collection of objects in the Newcall space. Apparently she thinks of her sculpture ‘weird’ and he calls them ‘grotesque’, yet in the context of her exhibition’s title they are as ordinary and as normal as you could possibly imagine. They are what you would expect them to be under such a heading. Especially being ‘art.’

That is the interesting thing about this display. The five vitrines bolted to the wall of toys and wee fetish objects; the three brightly coloured, freestanding, organic, papier mache sculptures; the board of hanging soft felt strips and offcuts; the assorted blob or tiddlywink-covered paintings on easels or music stands: they seem to coincidentally fit the research dealing with children’s play and the patterns of creating art – particularly as propounded by Anton Ehrenzweig when developing the Object-Relations theories of Donald Winnicott and Marion Milner – and their illustrious predecessor Melanie Klein. In particular they seem to connect with a manic-oceanic fusion, Ehrenzweig’s second stage dealing with the baby’s illusory oneness with its now separated mother where it feels can control the world. (See Nicola Glover’s very informative online treatise here on the British tradition of psychoanalytic aesthetics.)

All this might be deliberate: according to the Crookes essay she began with her interest in Pop psychology sceptical but became ‘absorbed’. Yet judging from the start of Crooke’s text, she does seem to be having a laugh at psychoanalysis’s expense (following the Foucauldian anti-psychiatry position) – trying desperately to be strange and revealing in all the clichés. This sculpture is cocklike, that one is like poo, here’s one that’s a tit, and oh there goes a womb. However as I’ve said, there is nothing remotely disturbing about any of it. Nothing ‘mad’ for example, though I’m not sure how you could ever accurately represent such a state.

Add to this Read’s psychologist bookshelves of fake, title-less publications, and scrolling electronic lists of self-help book titles, without bodies, and you end up with a sense of mockery, though her poppy colour sense brings a ‘happy’ ambience that perhaps is intended to be inane. It might be flippant but it is not vacant – there is a permeating (but oscillating) logic present, something that in the seriousness of most Newcall projects, contextually makes her work quite distinctive.

A new talent

Looking at you with contempt
A film by Sean Grattan
Newcall
29 July - 16 August 2009

Sean Grattan is a young (well he’s 28; not so old either) film-maker, trained at Elam, and about to start a course at Cal Arts - for which he has won a scholarship.

The daily screenings at Newcall (at 12, 2, & 4) of this his most recent project reveal him to be a talented director with a thorough knowledge of the history of the medium and its different genres. Whilst his previous endeavour Work And Not Work was narrative-based with an interest in an Antonioni–influenced urban landscape, Looking At You With Contempt of course alludes to Godard’s Contempt (1963), and has a lot of Akerman and Lynch thrown in. And its construction seems to have come from a process of juxtaposing different genres together and seeing what sort of narrative could emerge. In other words, the ‘plot’ wasn’t rigidly predetermined at the very beginning.

There is an odd symmetry with this film, for the title references the beginning (its Godardian jump cuts) and the end (its withering look). Between the two it blends film noir, factory documentary, ‘realism’ and an industrial metaphor for the construction of the protagonist-subject, oscillating between the narrative conventions of fiction and non-fiction and using long silences or ambient sound. Grattan knows how to pick good actors and elicit superb performances. The drift of his emerging story is never overstated, yet when a detail is established he is prepared to abruptly twist it around and startle his audience – in this case using unexpected dialogue or sound.

What is striking about Grattan is his confidence with a ‘European’ sensibility. His interests are unusual for a New Zealand director. It will be interesting to see if that changes in California, how he intellectually grows, and the big yawn-inducing question – will he return? He certainly deserves support for his studies and hopefully potential sponsors will recognise that and significantly contribute.

Join those zigzagging dots

Daniel Munn: Plaza
Performance and installation
Newcall
29 July - 13 August 2009

In Newcall Wellington-based artist Daniel Munn is presenting an installation of eight items that as residue (used props) partially come from his opening night performance where he was serving coffee from a van outside the gallery entrance. The nine demitasse cups and saucers (made in Thailand) he used are there, but not the white wrought-iron table – that has been replaced by a circular frottage on the floor (made by Martyn Reynolds under Munn’s instructions) of a Japanese manhole cover. And there are extras, like sections of veneer-covered corner shelving, leaning against walls or fitted into corners – that the artist has named as Plaza (as a form of public space) that accompany the sipping of coffee. Plus the photographs.

The handles of the small cups are vaguely related to two key photographs on one wall, of a marble statue of a young Christopher Columbus. In this carved work by Guillo Monteverde (1837-1917), the youth has one of his feet absent-mindedly twisted around the handle of the urn he is sitting on. Impatiently anticipating the oncoming New World while celebrating the death of the Old one, perhaps.

This statue is currently in Boston, but at one time it was in Vancouver, in an enclosed courtyard (also photographed) consisting of a small amphitheatre with circular, tiered, public seating. There is a vertical rectangular column in its centre that may have been the sculpture’s plinth, and near its ruined top a tagger has left their signature.

Munn has been so intrigued by this he has had that graffiti tattooed on his right hip. He is obviously interested in how images (all sorts) physically travel around the globe, and reproduce (in form or in quantity). They run in flows like dispersing streams of Japanese train carriages or poured coffee.

With his show Munn has two texts by pals to help confuse (Tao Wells – who else?) or clarify (Martyn Reynolds) what he is up to. Great reads if you are interested in travel in Japan or Tao Wells.

I guess Munn here is really the rich man’s Seth Price or the poor boy’s Christopher Williams. It’s a conceptual jigsaw that you really need to badger the patient people behind the desk at Newcall about if you (like me) want more clues. In the meantime (before I have a think about Sean Grattan - Munn's co-exhibitor) I’m going back to the exciting new site I’ve found on Japanese manholes.

Imparting knowledge

Erica van Zon: Take this with you
Newcall
2 July - 18 July 2009

Confounding expectations of a handmade ceramic installation with handmade posters or performances on video, Erica van Zon’s latest show presents one work only, tucked in the small stem in the T of Newcall’s exhibiting space. Using industrial technology she has created a rosy-pink neon text. Written in a flowing cursive script and arranged in glowing stacked rows is an English expression translated from the original Dutch adage: Don’t let your heart be a lion’s den.

It’s a bold work that effectively dominates the whole space with its pink glow and sizzling electrical crackle – even though it is tucked away to one side. It looks Naumanesque but is more like Holzer; a piece of kind-hearted advice, a compressed lecture about the corrosive properties of hatred. Addressed to herself or another.

Van Zon likes aphorisms (and cliches as in the ‘Dog Eat Dog’, ‘People Come People Go’ texts of her ceramic tiles) but this is a clever choice in that its ‘heart’ reference alludes to her earlier sculptures, and the Newcall space creates its own quite intimate ‘den’, but one not strewn with bones. Such an ambiguous text is fun to think about, especially with its Biblical references and the fact that lion’s don’t actually live in dens, prides move around. Perhaps artists live in dens?

Sooo…how do we respond to the content here? Maybe the artworld would be better if more viewers were contrary to van Zon’s sentiments, and had hearts like gory scenes from bloody massacres. What exactly do I mean? Only that passion about art surely is good, both raves and dislikes – especially dislikes - and that (to be a little preachy) more people should speak their minds. Timidity of opinion curtails conversation. Such activity is not the primary impulse behind art’s existence but it certainly helps.

Pinned fabric pieces and slides

Amy Howden-Chapman: I used to think the only lonely place was on the moon
Newcall
3 June - 20 June, 2009

Amy Howden-Chapman is well known as half of the Wellington based performance group Raised By Wolves. Here at Newcall where she has performed on an earlier occasion, she presents a number of items: a carousel of sequenced slides projected on one wall; another projector on the floor, lightless with the carousel rotating while covered with rumpled plastic; a narrow catalogue of four brief, but beautifully constructed, essays from different authors; and eight fabric paintings made of triangles of striped cotton, pinned in angular configurations on the walls. The latter dominate the room.

Howden-Chapman’s slide projection however catches your eye first. It shows the lush green vegetation of the Amazon rain forest, blurrily photographed from the river. One salient lengthy sequence shows a large tree falling and crashing through the dense undergrowth. There are no signs of millers.

The Irish Empiricist philosopher George Berkeley (1685-1753) once argued that if something is not perceived it does not exist. If a tree falls in an isolated forest it not only does not make a sound if there is no one around to hear it, but it doesn’t exist either. If it does exist, the reason is because God watches over the forest too, and He perceives it.

These two carousels seem to comment on Berkeley - as do the fabric constellations which look like kites or geometric birds in the sky. They seem to represent a spiritual dimension, an all pervading omnipresent power. There is also something slightly Native American about the motifs.

To construct these forms the various striped cotton triangles, diamonds and skinny parallelograms have been cut from bedspreads or tablecloths made up of stitched coloured bands, and as such are related to quilts such as those made by Amish and other religious communities in America. The pulsing bands in these sections when pinned up are mostly aligned horizontally, occasionally diagonally, and very rarely vertically.

When contrasting striped tones are alternated and not too harsh, the chroma glows softly and is reminiscent of sections of paintings like Rousseau’s The Sleeping Gypsy. However Howden-Chapman in her positioning of these linked (but never overlapping) snipped triangles is not precious about finish. The borders are left as cut, a little ragged with some loose threads not tidied up. Some of her geometric configurations look improvised on the spot, and others seem carefully preplanned. With these very portable works, the larger combinations tend to be symmetrical; smaller ones not.

In an included essay she herself has written, Howden-Chapman looks on grunge as “an attempt to protect the ability to feel in amongst a deluge of manipulation” and in a discussion about overhype, says this:

Back in the nineties…people were ‘Friends of The Earth and conservationists. People were still chaining themselves to trees, and hugging without irony. The same impulses are still being played out now with a new language… attempts by governments to implement the ‘greening’ of the economy’ has come with ‘green washing’ the environmentalist values for profit. Cars that are just slightly more fuel efficient than regular cars are being advertised as having the ability ‘to protect your family and the earth.

I think her idealism is reflected in the fabric wall paintings, art which Laura Preston in her essay compares to Tomma Abts’ practice – as being ‘uncertain documents’ that come from ‘an intuitive approach’. These works though, being of fabric, are closer to the art of seventies feminist 'craft' painters like Joyce Kozloff or Miriam Schapiro, and don’t seem so time–based in process as Abts. They are not like say, Dorothea Rockburne, where the procedures in thinking are laid out in detectable stages. They may be improvised to a degree, but unlike Abts the processes are not embedded in the final visual statement.

This exhibition works as an intriguing cohesive statement rather than as a collection of honed individual parts. With three excellent essays and one inflammatory interview in the catalogue (Anna Sanderson and Genevieve Michaels are included) it is a classy well articulated presentation about craft, changing taste, cynicism and eco-politics.

Body Artist

Campbell Patterson: Ambient 3
Newcall
6 May - 23 May 2009

This Newcall show is a variation of the exhibition Campbell Patterson had at Michael Lett’s last year. Lots of moving image, some paintings, and unlike Lett , a couple of sculptures.

Patterson is known for his videos. Despite his goofy bushy-tailed enthusiasm and overt - yet charming- narcissism his recorded performances (private activities involving only himself) wear thin after a while.

Climbing around the fittings of a hotel bathroom whilst clinging to the walls and not touching the floor; chewing up several pottles of fried chips, never swallowing the mush and then calming placing the accumulated chomped up sludge into a paper bag; clambering up over a sedan and a station-wagon parked head to tail, slithering like a snake over their roofs and bonnets and wearing only undies so as not to scratch the paint: these activities only initially amuse as a sort of domestic gymnastics. They are similar in many ways to the works of Steve Carr but without the obvious gags. Patterson tries for giggles whilst avoiding overt humour.

As his Lett exhibition showed,Patterson is a gifted painter.There is a beautifully made grey work in this exhibition that is very unusual. Within a dominant pattern he has incorporated the leaf and flower motifs of a brand of toilet paper alongside curving lines of tablets. Nearby on a wall two such referenced toilet rolls prop up a large Perspex sheet. On this other work are positioned in two rows of thirty stamped loyalty cards – all used up with twelve freshly made fruit juices drunk for each.

Such a panel tells a bodily focused narrative, 360 drinks imbibed and (as implied with the toilet paper) partially expelled. It tells a story more succinctly than any video could. It seems Patterson works better away from filmed documentation of actions.

It is no surprise then that his artist’s statement at Newcall, a sheet of writing describing its own production processes and created while he was taking a shower, is the best item in the show. This artist has a real instinct for language and keeping it fresh. He knows how to adapt, shape and effectively pace his written thoughts, thoroughly keep track of all his various senses, and incorporate precise detail.

Few artists have that ability. (Tahi Moore does - but he is more about processes of interiority). Perhaps Patterson will develop this writing talent further. The next show will tell.

Priapic phantoms

Sean Kerr: Ghost in the Machine
Newcall
April 8 -24 April 2009

It’s a great title Kerr has come up with, this reference to Arthur Koestler and Gilbert Ryle, and tying the whole philosophical package into sex on the smuttiest of levels. I love artists (and audiences just like me) who refuse to grow up. To realise its infantile virtues is to grasp the whole point of art as play.

Let me elaborate a little. The show features a massive pink ‘sleeping bag’ that lies flat on the floor - but when you enter the space it slowly fills up with air like a wobbly but tumescent penis. There is an electric eye on a camera aimed across the floor that the visitor’s movements triggers. It also switches on something on a table that looks like an agitated, erect willie under a sheet, wiggling back and forth in anticipation of lord knows what.

So on one level Kerr is clearly alluding to Vito Acconci’s Seedbed, his (oops I nearly said ‘seminal’) masturbation performance. On another he is being cute, pretending the table work is about comic book ghosts like Spooky or Casper, and having a pathetic whimpering ‘boo’ occasionally come out of a hidden speaker. Yet the main ‘pink torpedo’ sculpture is definitely threatening, despite its early Woody Allen overtones. It is more than a schlong. It is also a rather nasty finger (with nail), giving the viewer ‘the bird’. There’s lotsa aggro in the air.

I like to see an artist admit he hates his audience, and tell them so. Yet even beyond such love-hate ambivalences (after all he is trying to make them laugh) the tumescence theme is intriguing as a comment on dualism. It spot-lights that simple, apparently causal connection between thinking Thought A, and generating Bodily Response B that all growing boys love to discover. It also suggests a Central State Materialist argument that all spirit (or in this case, desire) is matter.

This is the best show I’ve ever seen from Kerr. I don’t say that because I’m pathetically infantile and am easily entertained by the basest of 'body humour' (yup, it's true), but because the show's well organised and has a structure that is simple, one that is loaded with complicated, contradictory resonances that you are likely to remember and think about for a long time.

Free-falling, while looking for your parachute

Broken Fall
Newcall, A Center For Art (temporarily in St Paul St, Gallery 2)
10 February - 28 February 2009 (Newcall)
10 - 13 February 2009 (ACFA)

Broken Fall is a clever idea developed by AUT lecturer Jan Bryant, of asking three Melbourne artists (Katie Lee, Lou Hubbard and Susan Jacob) to come over to Auckland and adapt their practices for two spaces in that city. To get a response to this recontextualisation she has also asked two New Zealand sound artists (Tim Coster and Richard Francis) to use the Australian shows to generate new works to be performed in the exhibition spaces.

Of the Australian displays, Lou Hubbard’s projected video grids are the most physically imposing. She uses the matrix as a structure while also slyly undermining it. At ACFA she has a group of seven toy Japanese soccer players, each attached to a hexagonal plastic section of playing field, standing in a sink so that they collapse and separate when the tap is turned on.

Her Newcall work is more interesting, wittily comparing the scaling of a fish with the scraping off of film from gambling cards, and in opposition, the manual completion of a grid by crossword. These actions are performed by an elderly woman who in one of the grid's four rectangles, stands alone in a corner of the room. The tension between the actions of her hands and her impassive face holds your interest.

The most intriguing work in the Newcall exhibition is Susan Jacob’s dried up Christmas tree projecting from the inner side of a door leaning into a wall. It has its branches reversed so they point up instead of down. Its subtle transformation draws you back to look at how Jacob broke off and realigned the various twigs, something that is not obvious.

This sculpture is not tightly connected to Jacob’s working drawings (at ACFA) and drives home the point that good art is often impulsive and about play, about fooling with materials – where hands are almost separated from the mind.

Of Katie Lee’s two videos (and related horizontal floor sculpture), the ACFA one without her figure balancing in a square taped to the floor is the more successful. The time lapse photography of the room’s flickering sepia light and artist’s absent body makes it a compelling – albeit austere – spatial statement that effectively references her works in the other space. The Newcall video though, intrigues more through being set in a low cupboard, than through the content of its moving images.

How did the Kiwi sound artists respond? They differed in that Coster used recordings of the Australians installing their projects as a starting point, and Francis experimented with the ACFA space itself and a variety of sound sources (modulator, computer, and portable objects).

Of the two live gigs, Coster’s thirty minute performance was the more dramatic and satisfying – less monotonous. His build up of an even drone of looping rumbling hums, delicate fluttery rattles and hissing wipes maintained a consistent tension until about five minutes before the end. Then suddenly samples of a sweeping operatic aria emerged, fused with peals of laughter and the occasional squawk. What was dry and abstract suddenly erupted into unexpected lyricism and humour, a poignant flowering that just as abruptly stopped – leaving the audience stunned and wishing for more.

Top three images from Newcall Gallery, bottom three from ACFA at AUT, then invite.