4th Auckland Triennial – Themes Part 2

Last Ride in the Hot Air Balloon (Making The Journey)
Marine Hugonnier, Johanna Billing, Shahab Fotouhi, Tino Sehgal, Nick Austin
Assorted Auckland venues
12 March - 20 June 2010

Continuing our look at the Triennial themes, this one is about the excursion; the journey. I could say ‘adventure’ but of course that can happen even if you don’t leave home. I want to skimpily draw out the notion of movement in some of these works – a trajectory. In this exhibition it ties in with the notion of the balloon being a symbol for the earth and its inhabitants, and its limited resources (paralleling the balloon's heated air) running out.

Marine Hugonnier’s tripartite video installation (with three-coloured, matching carpet) featuring films of Afghanistan, the Amazon jungle and the Matterhorn seduces despite its attempts not to flaunt (or to subvert) exoticism and spectacle. The first shows various attempts to film the desolate landscape blocked by the military, the second shows a railroad being built by the Brazilian dictatorship that jeopardises the inhabitants and vegetation of the rain forest, and the third fabricates the documentation of an anticipated ‘last tourist balloon flight’ over the Swiss mountain, with spliced in black and white images of dramatically lit stuffed ‘Swiss’ deer in Disneyland. The work mourns the destruction of our planet, exuding a sense of despair and tragic inevitability.The balloon here becomes a symbol for freedom of thought and the unconfined body.

Johanna Billing’s more positive installation presents a video of four Scottish musicians in a band, learning to sail a yacht for the first time and developing their co-ordinating skills as a water-mobile team. They manoeuvre the craft out of Edinburgh harbour into the open sea and their increasing confidence as they return is accompanied by a haunting song by American cellist Arthur Russell, This is how we walk on the moon. The point here is the learning of navigational skills of course – that interactive process - not the distance travelled.

Iranian artist Shahab Fotouhi presents a linear sculpture made of black and white neon that shows the helicopter route taken by Shiite Muslim leader Ayatollah Khomeini on his triumphant return from exile after the 1979 revolution that toppled the Shah. The six stops that make up his itinerary result in a high curved doorway that becomes an ambiguous symbol for the country’s future, while the accompanying looped video shows Khomeini’s supporters attempting to clear a space in the dense crowd for the helicopter to land by whipping the edges of the packed multitude with leather belts. In Fotouchi’s hands, such imagery is a hint of the brutal ruthlessness to come.

For his contribution Tino Sehgal employs solo dancers to slowly move on their backs across the St. Paul Street gallery floor, using a repertoire of movements that reference details from a historic Dan Graham video (Roll, 1970) and two Bruce Nauman works (Floor-Wall Positions, 1968, and Elke Allowing the Floor to Rise Up Over Her, Face Up, 1973). The Graham element ensures there is more than a writhing motion involved that pinions the performer to one spot, but that there is some kind of lateral direction as well – initially away from the righthand edge of the gallery - to the lefthand side and back again.

Conland’s inclusion of Nick Austin’s sequence of paintings is amusing because painting is deliberately ignored in this Triennial. He here is not so much a painter as a maker of a sequence of story-boards or comic-strip frames for an imaginary animated DVD. Austin wittily toys with clashing notions of time by rendering a snail chomping through the yellow pages of a book so that these eventually are transmuted into the shape of an ice skating boot with blade.

This snail thus alters a time consuming book so it becomes a high velocity projectile capable of great acceleration and, in the context of this show, risk. There seems to be some sort of paradoxical pun going on about immediacy of communication, verbal language and narrative imagery – a subversive joke that gives the finger to (now slow moving) dexterity with words in order to favour more laboriously layered (but incongruously speedier) signs or semaphores. On a more straight forward level it advocates the digestion of ideas and the power of thought.

Next Triennial theme: the Imagination

Paired images in descending order from Hugonnier, Billing, Fotouhi (1) and Austin. Thank you AAG, Kate Orgias, Jennifer French and the artists.

Talking Tao

Tao Wells: Space Jam 1996
A drawing and painting sale selected by Nick Austin
Gambia Castle
14 November - 28 November 2009

November is an interesting part of the art year calendar, with many of the main tertiary art institutions around the country briefly presenting public displays of their students’ work. Most of what is shown is invariably inconsequential, work made cloning their teachers or pages of international art mags, or a hybrid. Those few with any substance will become apparent in 3 - 4 years after their paper chase, when they develop strategies of survival, shake the teachers out of their hair, and find their own voices.

In Gambia Castle Tao Well’s show suggests the opposite process, as if his best work is the very early stuff, even before he went to university. Such a premise might be accurate - might even be obviously so if his practice in general is conspicuously unremarkable to start with.

So how can we be persuaded either way? No meritable quality, in my view, is apparent from just looking at the exhibition and unfortunately Nick Austin, the selector of the exhibited work, has no essay advocating its merits. Although he is not listed as curator (only ‘selector’), he is known as an eloquent verbaliser of ideas, one who is exceptionally articulate. A wasted opportunity.

Instead we have Dick Whyte (of Wayfarer Gallery) writing a little introductory text to the show. It is nicely written and in three sections.

The first starts with: Tao Wells is a terrible artist. But he is a good person. This writer is impressively candid it seems, although perhaps too generous about the artist’s personality. Whyte then distinguishes between moral behaviour (externally imposed codes, as with legal or religious injunctions) and ethical (internal and from reflection).

In the second paragraph he puts forward a second definition of ethics in which “we must become adept at talking with ourselves. We are always two, rather than one.” He wants to lead the discussion to the possibility in the third section that Tao Wells is both a terrible artist and a terrific artist. However I can't get that far. For a start I have problems with his use of the word must.

Amongst his many attacks on the notion of prescriptive moral rightness and attempts to systematically provide criteria for it, the British philosopher Bernard Williams claimed that ethical conviction about what one ought to do is not actually a kind of decision (not from a group or from the individual concerned): Ethical conviction, like any other form of being convinced, must have some aspect of passivity to it, must in a sense come to you. (Ethics and the Limits of Philosophy, p.169). However this conviction ends up being mixed in with reflection, discussion and theorising to form the individual’s ethical norms.

In other words, one might as well stick with the ‘one mind’ idea that Tao Wells is simply just a terrible artist, especially as there is no articulated evidence here by his Gambia colleagues (or Wellington dealer, Whyte) to counter that, let alone claim he is a ‘terrific artist’ as well or instead. If they are convinced there are arguments for the latter, it might be a good idea for them to elucidate them.

Reprise?

More jokes with strangers: Nick Austin, Sarah Gruiters, David Hofer, Martin Jakowitsch, Sam Rountree Williams
A Centre For Art
6 August - 22 August 2009

The enigmatic title of this exhibition refers to an earlier ‘Jokes with Strangers’ show at ACFA curated by Sam Rountree Williams and Patrick Lundberg a year ago. A show I wrote somewhat dismissively about at the time.

ACFA have a better lit, less claustrophobic space now, and this display is a less provocative hang. I think it’s superior. Not so gimmicky. Much easier to try and think about what each artist is up to.

Martin Jakowitsch provides the work most obviously ‘a joke’ in the non-sarcastic sense of being giggly funny. It is an old thin silver teaspoon lying on the window ledge. He has taken the concave scoop part, cut off half of it and reattached it inverted – with a tiny metal wall linking the two cross-sectioned scoop portions. It looks very strange and is oddly surreal. It is in the tradition of gags like those teaspoons that have their ends hidden in bowls of sugar, that have holes in their scoops or scoops with hinges attaching them to their handles.

Nick Austin contributes a wonderful wall sculpture, a hanging, soft, grey pullover that seems to have broken eggshell attached to the inside elbow part of its arms. It’s not eggshell, but some sort of very thin white rubber lining that’s brittle and jagged. It’s got all the understatement mixed with iconic impact so characteristic of this artist.

Of the ‘paintings’ David Hofer’s is the most interesting because it plays with the conventions of compositional organisation. His two horizontal canvas-boards project from the wall as if joined by a hinge like a folder. The top one almost mirrors the bottom with its placement of minimal watery stains and soggy smudges. It incorporates some spongy Ernst-like decalcomania, mixed with non-mirroring smears and pale bands of green wash. It looks deliberately unfinished with its unintegrated elements staying fragmented.

This sense of raw abeyance, a process in suspension, continues with Sam Rountree Williams’ large canvas covered with small cockle shells. The very pale dominant field has patches of delicate silvery pink or creamy yellow, interrupted by a sprayed calligraphy of slashing black verticals, undulating blue arabesques, and red diagonals - with green bushy shapes appearing in the top lefthand corner. Some of the lower shells contain punctuating dark wispy blobs. They introduce a nice scattering counterpoint to the vertical.

Sarah Gruiters has a handmade singlet of heavy plasticy material drawn over with coloured fibreglass-tipped markers on both sides. It’s on a hanger that can be turned around. The drawing is rough and gross, calculatedly ugly like say S. Clay Wilson (the misogynistic sixties comics genius) but less sophisticated. On one side is a pair of gnarled and knobbly legs and feet, and on the other an inverted cartooned head with bulging bug-eyes and grinning mouth of yellow teeth.

Gruiters seems at odds with the rest of the show. Austin, Jakowitsch, Rountree Williams, and Hofer have sculptural and painterly sensibilities, but she seems more graphic and linear. It’s a strange exhibition. Worth taking the trouble to visit for the knock-out Austin.

Compelling images

Nick Austin: Paperwork
Gambia Castle
29 May - 27 June 2009

A nose loitering around a greasy shower curtain; a blue pencil abandoned on a wood grained paper plate; a large magnet in the back pocket of a pair of jeans. Such enigmatic images - like the ingredients of a rebus or coded glyph – are the regular elements of Nick Austin’s current exhibition at Gambia Castle. As with his earlier shows.

Austin's six paintings, in the emblematic style of Eion Stevens or Peter Dornauf, or (overseas) perhaps late Magritte, invite the viewer to speculate – as all good art should. Some are surreal, while others are drier and less visceral (as if part of a sentence broken into syntax) yet usually with a humorous aspect somewhere.

Let’s look at some of these peculiar images. Have a squiz at the ones above this text first. The blue painting with the pocketed (smiling?) magnet could be about sexual attraction, assuming that the jeans when worn are tight, and that the artist is referring to buttocks. However it could also be about wallets that often go in such pockets, and the ability some people have to earn money quickly. Nothing is clear cut.

Likewise the one with a cone of yellow spotlight and magnifying glass. Could be about tiny floorplans and worrying over architectural detail, or perhaps the works of Malevich and the Russian Suprematists, or maybe the black blocks within crossword puzzles? The magnifying glass points to us, the viewers, thinking about Austin’s paintings. It could be a joke about art historians too.

The newspaper painted on a sheet of corrugated plastic is another beauty. The ruled horizontal pencil lines dictate the delicate form of vertical newsprint columns and where the rectangular photos should go, diagonal lines of rain. It’s a wonderful abstract image, one that perhaps suggests we care about the weather more than the daily news.

The title is mischievous. Only one work is on paper: newspaper with paint applied both side to stiffen it. The rest are on glass, plastic, denin, softboard, and waxed paper plate. The best of all these, a vertical skinny painting, shows a black cane with the curved handle turned to the right, and at the bottom, what seems to be a wire coat-hanger turned to the left. Then you realise there is a cigarette painted along the bottom horizontal edge, and that the question mark/coat-hanger handle is in fact its smoke. Now the cane is starting to look ominous. Linking smoking with bad health perhaps.

There is a freshness about this show, a sense of pervasive energy, that is due to the variety of vibrant image Austin is presenting. The room has impact. The different meanings sneak up on you after you’ve left the space, for the images themselves are memorable. Exceptionally good.

A couple of Larus dominicanus and one Larus bulleri

A couple of Larus dominicanus and one Larus bulleri
Kate Newby and Nick Austin: Hold Still
Te Rimu Tahi / Western Park, Ponsonby
Sat 30 August 2008 (9 am - 9 pm)
A One Day Sculpture Event

It’s a lovely treat to be tricked into exploring the ferny bushy gullies of Western Park, while checking out the art – despite it being a bitterly cold (but at least dry) day.

Austin and Newby’s installation is a lot of fun, even if you are not interested in little bush walks. From the circular viewing platform (see top photo) they’ve set up a couple of bird watching telescopes on tripods. From a distance you can observe three tirelessly standing Black Backed and Black Beaked Gulls, cheekily perched on two nearby picnic tables. Furthermore you can saunter down the paths and get a closer peek. They seem to like people coming up and peering at them. They don’t flinch a bit. Maybe ornithology is a big thing in Ponsonby.

There is a meaning I’d like to propose for all this: the viewing platform is called Arohanui: still an abundance of love.

Abundance of love? Here is what it says on a small plaque:
Mauri tu, mauri ora, mauri noho, mauri mate.
Those who choose to stand will live; those who choose to do nothing will perish.

The text seems to be an attack on pacifism. Maybe it was put there in the seventies during the Vietnam War. If you think the gulls are stuffed (actually they're are not, they are fabricated), well think about it. They chose ‘to stand’, and look where it got them. In this world it's the quick and the dead. Standing still is definitely unwise.

Worse than impotence

Tahi Moore: Various Failures
Gambia Castle, Auckland
29 February - 22 March 2008

There are two flyers for this show that provide contradictory explanations for its title. Moore is an extremely skilled writer, and the first flyer details his lack of confidence in the work, his second thoughts and lapses of faith in the ‘mechanics’ of pairings that he has made – binary combinations, by the way, being also a dominant theme in Simon Denny’s last Gambia Castle / Michael Lett show.

Here is what Moore writes:
So I see something and it has some kind of significance, and then I stick it with something else and that makes it a mechanism. I think the problem here is that if you can work it all out, half an hour later, everything's different again. I guess you might not notice so much if you're also moving, but if you're good at being still or fixing things, you might get irritated at this intuitive reflexive dynamic that's altered by any examination of it, and seems to be easy enough to go along with if you don't think about it.

The second flyer plays on an old Jeff Koons gag from his early Artforum advertisements, showing the artist lounging around a pool surrounded by bikinied babes. This Moore has turned around into a sexual reference about physical or emotional failure. As part of a pairing itself, it is clever, self–reflexive stuff.

Actually it is more than clever, it’s brilliant. The connections between the pairings over time reveal themselves to be deeply considered. If you read the two flyers together they become a meditation on the transience of desire, the numbness and futility of attraction. The word ‘mechanism’ becomes Duchampian.

I’m going to be accused of being over-interpretative after writing this, but let’s look at the installation.

Note firstly the pair of old blue jeans discarded on the floor. Then the video of a watch advertisement on a monitor placed under a watch pinned to the wall. With these elements, could the work be about the passing of time – specifically aging – and its consequences for (male) desire?

Checking out Moore’s grouping of images: first thing you notice in the room is the image of two perky young women sitting on toilets having a chat. The image seems to be about female bonding, the nature of friendship, and the exasperation of some heterosexual men at not having close women friends (as shown in Marco Ferreri’s dramatic 1976 film 'The Last Woman’ when the over-horny, depressed and unloved male character, played by Gerard Depardieu, cuts off his John Thomas with an electric meat-cutter).

Ferreri’s film is not alluded to in this installation, but its subject matter is. Moore obviously loves movies, so what does he do with them in the loops he shows here.

Next to a static photograph of a naked woman, supine and sexually available, is Moore’s treatment on an adjacent monitor of the Sci-Fi film Ultraviolet, now sepia toned and played backwards. It shows the interaction between the attractive heroine and a young male character and indicates a pining for lost time, a mourning that this youthful (and now in hindsight, erotic) period can never be recaptured.

Then there is the other pair of videos: one shows Moore’s Gambia Castle colleague, Nick Austin, contemplatively walking through the gallery space. Next to it on another monitor are sections of Derrida nattering about being framed on drug charges by the Czech police in Prague, mathematician John Nash explaining some theorem, and Daniel Malone, another Gambia Castle artist, being mock ferocious. All men note, being active and ‘intellectual’.

So I read this show as a meditation on male/female relations as filtered through the lens of heterosexual male aging. His earlier Gambia Castle show seems connected to these themes too. I’m arguing a case that this work is very knowing and very structured. If my discussion is a load of cobblers, please drop this site a line and tell me so.

With raking light

Nick Austin: echoes, echoes, echoes
Gambia Castle, Auckland
2 - 3 February 2008

Nick Austin’s four paintings at Gambia Castle are made on rectangles of translucent rippled plastic sheeting, with a horizontal A4-sized piece of paper glued in the centre of each one. He uses acrylic paint that is matt, stippled on occasion, and tonally precise, and though his images flirt with abstraction, they also ‘echo’ the textures and reflected surfaces of nature and certain human-processed materials.

They reference (in paired combinations where one element is enclosed or framed within the other): mottled rippling water (in light and shade); knotty wood-grain; metal sheeting; stones and pebbles; smeared mud; shammy leather; newspaper print. The supporting plastic the painting is on provides a soft glow. Without sounding glib, it is as if Juan Gris had decided to insert his synthetic cubist textures into the format of Josef Albers’ ‘Homage to a Square’, but on the way got distracted by the evanescent properties of light. You have the textural visual signifiers placed on undulating planes so that the rendered image is mixed into light’s transient properties.

Inevitably these works will get compared with Ralph Hotere’s various corrugated iron series (black or unpainted) but Austin’s project is hugely different in mood. Its ‘framing’ is closer to Howard Hodgkins in its espousal of the daily ordinary, but incredibly restrained of course in its choice of mark and hue.

Austin’s title provides the key: echoes. The ripples or vertical corrugations could be moving first left to right, and then bounce back right to left. However these reverberations are not of sound but of light, light which besides hitting the ripples from the side also bounces off the wall behind the painting and comes out through the work’s thinly painted surface. The viewer considers the interaction of illumination, image and referent together, the blending of nature with culture, the materiality of the paint, and the way the panels are held on the wall.

Goosestepping through the whorehouse

Dan Arps’ Gestapo Pussy Ranch at The Physics Room, Christchurch. 15 November - 15 December 2007

Like many of the artists in the Gambia Castle group, Dan Arps in his installations is known for a freewheeling, unstructured mode of visual organisation that celebrates a lack of palpable order. As a dishevelled, freeform exhibtion, Gestapo Pussy Ranch is richly keyed into product that poses as process. The result is a funny, extremely wonky, satire on life management programmes - with personal coaches and analyses of interpersonal organising skills. Although the space is deliberately incongruous, with an old mattress, photographs of peculiar rituals in sleeping bags, cat boxes, scattered disintegrating clumps of straw, foil covered ventilation shutes, geometric forms made of twisted plant roots, surveillance cameras, and hilarious inverted pinup posters smeared with finger painting, the key elements seem to be a laminated pie chart and two typed lists of strategic corporate procedures. The project has an underpinning logic consistent with its brilliantly evocative title - from a Bret Easton Ellis novel - that suggests a Nazi brothel. Implying connections with Human Resource personnel perhaps.

Arps is a clever artist whose work is getting more interesting and less eclectic as his career progresses. He is moving away from his earlier Australian sources to developing his own sensibility. His humour is more hammy and anarchistic than the deceptively academic and systematic approach of Simon Denny, close to Tao Wells in its anarchistic mood, and though subtle, not understated like Nick Austin.

However, this is the sort of show you really have to negotiate yourself in terms of examining the elements, if you want to extract pivotal and considered components from the vaguely rhetorical and nihilistic elements. The anonymous blurb on the Physics Room website is depressingly uninformative and facile, clearly the result of being written long before the artist had decided what he would do in the space, and the images present with it give you no idea of the work’s experiential nature. Worth calling in and checking out for yourself, nevertheless.