Mark Amery visits the Seymour show at McLeavey's

Ava Seymour: Tree songs
Peter McLeavey Gallery,
until Saturday 17 April 2010

Photographing Ava Seymour’s latest exhibition at Peter McLeavey’s is quite unnerving. These exquisite dark, dark works almost disappear when shot, lit only by natural light and the aura of McLeavey’s sole ancient domestic lighting fixture. Instead, as the above images well demonstrate, you and the room are reflected. The large triptych that dominates this exhibition comes to resemble a set of mirrored wardrobe sliding doors.

In the act of photographing a photograph of an enlarged collage behind glass, it is almost as if all these dimensions have neatly folded in on themselves like cubist origami. How aware was this experienced and subtle photo collagist of the effects of siting these works - created during Seymour’s recent McCahon House Residency in Titirangi - in these rooms?

The spectral spookiness of these work’s presence is echoed by their nocturnal mystery and play in abstraction with capturing light and the prismatic colour spectrum. As McLeavey noted on my visit, photography can be considered painting with light. Here in photographing A3 sized paper collages, blowing them up to figure height, and then placing them at a distance from us behind glass, Seymour plays adventurously and with a degree of complexity with painting and photographic techniques, and the space in between them.

Even up close the work is difficult to read, affected hugely in McLeavey’s space by what the sun is doing outside. The viewer and their environment’s reflection in the work appears a deliberate wish. The experience of looking at these works under direct light as most other galleries provide with their purpose-made gallery lighting systems (and as you can do here by holding up one small unhung work to the light) is radically different. The choice of McLeavey’s rooms to first show them sees their muted nocturnal softness amplified without any need to darken the space.

The McCahon residency studio is, I understand, surrounded by tall Kauri and Kahikatea, and to look at the large triptych here is to feel you could be sitting in a darkened space in the thick of the forest in the middle of the night. You appreciate for example the play of moonlight as it travels a dappled leafy path into your inner chamber, broken in its dimensional throw by tree trunks like cubist shards.

Suitably the exhibition is entitled Tree Songs, and I was immediately reminded of the immersion of McCahon’s large series The Wake. A poetic lament, it features the dim vertical strokes of the Kauri, and was completed at night on McCahon’s return to Titirangi from his visit to the States.

Like a midnight garden of musky perfumes, Seymour’s work is also a dreamy nocturne. Intensely musical, it is a work of dark sensual delights playing with a majestic but hazy rainbow of purples, greens, scarlets, gold and silver. Shadowy vertical bands and circles make the work resemble a dense thicket of musical notes on a giant stave. Yet, at the same time as having the microscopic immersion of prisms of light in the forest, the work is also suggestive of the cosmos.

The works are unusually, defiantly dark, demanding you to step up close and move across the surface to appreciate the work. And just as you have to move to pick up shifts in the work against the glass surface glare, streams of circles have subtly lit edges from various different directions. These and Malevich-like small square patches provide pretty much the only strong lighting from within the work.

Those still hoping Seymour will return to the terrain of her punk figurative photo montages of the mid 90s are left wanting. Content is not at stake in the same way here. Instead the beauty of the montage and how it might see photography operate like abstract painting as visual music is explored.

The most aggressive thing about these works is how you’re made acutely aware of the awkwardness of looking - peering in and shifting your placement to detect the colour modulations, trying to get past yourself staring back in the glass. It’s irritating to be sure, but it sets up an interesting tension between viewer and abstraction. The reward is that this work manages to rise above its swish of the trails of modernism to encourage a new way of looking at photography and two dimensional work in general.

McLeavey’s rooms also come filled with other artists’ shadows. While McCahon’s influence is clear in the mood and size of the work, it’s devoid of his signs, symbols and personal questions. Formally its far more akin in rhythm and music to another McLeavey stablemate and collagist, Gordon Walters. This is particularly the case in four small works’ strong play with one or two circles and a wide vertical strip on another colour field. The vertical strip could again allude to the trees. The mood is nocturnal, lit dimly by the moon. The tension in these works lies in the delicacy with which Seymour plays with the edge of her cutout shapes, providing some bite in the formation of a dimensional space. Yet they don’t hold the mystery of the large triptych.

The work swims in the pool of modernist abstraction and the influences McCahon brought to bear on his work in Titirangi. Here you might find many echoes. The schemes and colour play of Sonia Delaunay and Kandinsky, the collage of Braque and Picasso, the shapes of Malevich and Mondrian, and mood boards of Rothko, all shifting across each other and rising up to the surface like bubbles. In this way the work is the most interesting consideration of abstract painting through photography, and indication of its painterly potential, I can recall.

Elvis replies

I’ve got a huge amount of admiration for Peter Ireland as an art critic. We used to know each other when I began reviewing in Christchurch in the mid-eighties. He used to send me irate letters then and he’s doing it now here – and I’m flattered, for his articles would come close to the top of my list of personal favourites over the last fifteen years of Art New Zealand. I like his erudite and acerbic style (though he has mellowed a little). I like it even when it is me he is roasting, for despite his sneering comments here about the ‘uncritical’ blogosphere he is demonstrating exactly why online dialogue is so good. It’s democratic in a way that hardcopy magazines can never be.

But now he seems to be acting as a spin doctor for the Bieringa film company, or as Leon Narbey’s public relations officer, writing no longer like a critic but as a human interest newspaper reporter, giving us a background story about ‘actual achievers’ instead of looking hard at the film in itself (especially its cinematography) when evaluating my review. Yet he accuses me of not attending to the film as ‘actual subject’.

Ireland, despite his seductive phrasing, entertaining wit and skilled avoidance of using McLeavey's name, is more than a little two-faced. He takes great pleasure in telling me I’m school-masterish (he who started his review with a story about Napoleon before getting round to the ‘critic’s responsibility to the subject’), that I make unsubstantiated assertions (as if his view that ‘the critic’s responsibility is to examine the actual subject’ wasn’t) or unexamined assumptions (unlike say his view that the film subject’s deep privacy compelled his considerable achievements to be kept secondary to his interest potential for the film-maker).

In my article I think I provide more constructive argument than he acknowledges, though his criticism of some of my Popelike pronouncements is correct. However Ireland is too protective of this film crew. My discussion of Narbey’s contribution was insensitively worded perhaps, but he’s not a sacred cow, and even though I could have delicately said ‘Perhaps Leon could have…. etc.’ there was a crudely expressed but valid rationale behind my thoughts. As for the three film references, I set up a scale to get the discussion started. They are not crucial elements in the argument, though I later briefly provide some justification of my negative view of Mita’s Hotere by comparing her with Bieringa in having an agenda, that both these directors are consistently following previous projects, but that his agenda doesn’t dominate over his subject.

Ireland likes to think that only this film-maker can have access to McLeavey’s personality and that the viewer’s knowledge of him is somehow irrelevant, that any personal experience they’ve had with the subject of the film doesn’t count in its evaluation. However it is a documentary we are talking about and it is reasonable to compare points of view, to see if Bieringa’s view and that of a viewer like me coincide or overlap at all. My view is not an imagined one. It is not fantasy. I’ve known McLeavey for many years, not with anything like the depth that Ireland and Bieringa have for sure, but enough to have some clear notions about his personal qualities. My list of questions was not a check list of essential topics but a demonstration of how broad his interests are, and how much richer the film might have been.

That is why Ireland’s repeated view that only the ‘actual subject’ be reviewed is unrealistic. It assumes such a thing is easy to determine, that the filmic experience has clearly definable parameters controlled by the director, and ignores the outside appraisal that any viewer informed about the subject might provide.

I don’t want to get into repeating what I’ve already said in my review about McLeavey’s complexity, his art historical importance or the film’s odd branding, but if Bieringa has the material to make three more films, The Man in The Hat shows he was thinking like a timid Kiwi and not the adventurous Dutchman he could have been. It is true we have a small population base here for such a film’s audience, but the current crowds at the touring Rita Angus exhibition (her second survey) show that audiences do change with skilled marketing, that interest in NZ culture does snowball and people do become educated. It is not a view that this horse ‘was bound to come in second’ that I have argued. It is that track conditions are changing and a better trained nag could have anticipated them.

Peter Ireland has some thoughts here on my review of

The Man in the Hat.

There's a nice story about Napoleon. As with anyone in a position of power and influence, he was besieged by people recommending others for jobs. He had one question of them: What have they done? He didn't ask about their pedigree, who they knew or what their aspirations were. This military genius was interested only in actual achievement. Actual achievement is, I think, the issue at the core of this discussion about this recent film. There are some associated issues too, some of them being the function of the critic and the critic's responsibility to the subject.

I'll start with this last-named. The subject is a much abused notion in the practice of critical enquiry, the one central element whose focus is most likely to be blurred soonest. The subject - the film, the play as written, the performance of it, the latest album, the new solo show, the institutional group show, the novel, etc - is the actual thing made by its creator, not the thing the critic might have done had they the opportunity. The critic's primary responsibility is to examine the actual subject, not an imagined one. The critic's secondary responsibility is to determine the difference between the two and maintain the distinction throughout any subsequent enquiry.

Failure of responsibility in these areas must, I think, reduce the aspiring critic to the role of perhaps interesting commentator, as the growth of the blogosphere so amply demonstrates. The overwhelming amount of comment on it that so confidently occupies the critical chair is not so much criticism as a demonstration of the principle of freedom of speech. Ironically, more often than not, it's also a demonstration of the failure of critical enquiry. No amount of self-belief will turn an Elvis impersonator into Elvis.

For every one person out there who does something - particularly in the arts, it would seem - there are dozens who could have done it better. If only they'd had the opportunity. There's a slightly school-masterish attitude detectable here. An assumption of the right to be a one-person tribunal, marking one's inferiors out of ten. An assumption, too, that such judgements matter, that their division into good and bad somehow accurately mirrors the nature of the world. But even the Pope limits his infallibility to matters of faith and morals. Perhaps in the institutionally closeted world school-masters occupy this delusion may be sustained. But there's just too much oxygen in the world of actual achievement to require the respirators these assumptions resemble.

The Man in the Hat - the actual object - came to be made because someone of considerable actual achievement believed that someone else of considerable actual achievement was the source of potentially interesting filmic coverage. The subject of the film is an essentially private man. The film got made because the subject and the film-maker trusted each other, a trust built on some shared human experience but mostly on a mutual respect for the other's actual achievement. The film is about an essentially private man allowing himself to be filmed. This is what Bieringa's film is about. That the subject of the film's considerable actual achievement is of intense interest to anyone connected with the development of the visual arts in this country is a secondary consideration. But this is what Hurrell's review is about. The horse the critic backed was bound to come in second. His review is a protest to the stewards.

Add up all the comments made and you are left with the impression that the critic is operating from a firmly outlined notion of what constitutes the subject of the film. Where the film confirms this notion - such as the subject's nomadic childhood, Catholic education etc - he is approving. Where it doesn't - for instance, the matter of the hat - he is irritated. (For the record, I have a photograph of the hat being worn dating from the late 1980s. The critic needs either to pay more attention or simply get out more.) When comments are so consistently based on what the writer already knows, it's legitimate to ask what a film such as this has to offer him, and relevant to ask how any criticism worthy of the name can survive in such an airless atmosphere.

These are not qualities usually associated with that standard of criticism, but the review is a litany of unsubstantiated assertions and unexamined assumptions. Some instances. Against Merata Mita's Hotere, Leanne Pooley's Being Billy Apple and Judy Rymer's McCahon film Victory Over Death, The Man in the Hat is judged to be "Just so so", but no comparisons are made, no reasons given. The critic's word, apparently, is enough. To follow "The film's photography though is disappointing" with "Some of the interviews were held when he was slumped in a chair and filmed from below, making him look facially a bit squat or froglike. He should have been filmed at eye height. ... Show him as normally seen" is not to have the critic's eye focused on the actual film but a marker's pen poised over an exam paper, with an unspoken "must try harder" the obvious subtext.

Hurrell asserts that "too much is made of Wellington and its inhabitants" and that "Bieringa wastes too much time showing life on the streets of the capital, and his subject's daily wanderings between home and gallery." Here we have an assumption of the values of geographic coverage when the film's whole point is an intense focus on an individual. Never mind the depth, feel the width. The subject of the film is a Wellington phenomenon, both a product of the place and a shaper of it - at his 70th birthday party he began his speech by stating that his gallery was "a love letter to Cuba Street" - and to describe his daily peregrination as "wandering" is to overlook the fact that this is as deliberate and as central to his being a dealer as the selection of his stable. The film is an auto-biography not a travelogue.

The most significant assumption in the review concerns the cinematographer. The critic places great emphasis on the apparent fact that "only three days were spent filming". Try "only three days were spent painting" - as in McCahon's Northland Panels - and you'll get the idea. McCahon had spend months in the US beforehand; those panels didn't come from nowhere. Bieringa and his team, including Leon Narbey, spent months beforehand examining the archive, discussing various approaches, plotting the route. Narbey hit the tarmac running. His legendary eye and, yes, considerable actual achievement gave those three days a focus beyond the realm of any time and motion study. Bieringa has said there's enough material to make three more films. The subject does not feel misrepresented or short-changed.

There's a working-class suspicion of art that it's a "have"; too easy, not involving enough hard, real work. Is, say, a two-minute portrait drawing by Matisse involving about eight lines less "important" or less "valuable" than, say, a laborious watercolour of the Roman Forum by Bill Sutton? According to the critic's scale of values, probably. Matisse will just have to try harder too.

They say an unexamined life is not worth living. For a critic, the unexamined piece is not worth writing. Maybe all right for the bloggers though - at least it keeps them off the streets. Hurrell titles his piece Rushed job. I think he meant the film.

Rushed job

The Man in the Hat
Directed by Luit Bieringa
Produced by Jan Bieringa
Photography by Leon Narbey
73 minutes

There must surely be no more revered contemporary art personality living in this country than the historically pivotal art dealer, Peter McLeavey. There has been some brilliant journalism about him and his hugely significant contribution to our visual culture (by Bryan Staff, Grant Smithies and others) but so far - until this year - no movie documentation. So when Luit and Jan Bieringa’s film about him was announced as being included in this year’s International Film Festival, there was considerable excitement. Yet my impression after seeing it is that it is a bit of fizzer. Lovely to hear the man talk, but as art docos go, not as appalling as Merata Mita’s Hotere, but nowhere near as good as Leanne Pooley’s Being Billy Apple or Judy Rymer’s Victory Over Death. Just so so.

So what went wrong? Why wasn’t it as good as those last two? With the co-operation of a tirelessly loquacious, charismatic personality like McLeavey, and an esteemed cinematographer like Leon Narbey it should have been superb. Why wasn’t it?

First of all only three days were spent filming. Somebody like McLeavey, whom everyone knows is a complex individual, will always tell great stories (even to strangers) about his childhood, family and friendships with certain key artists - but that is just the surface. He needs to be gently prodded so that he is continually recorded at length to make a substantial document. Something over a couple of hours with real depth. He is so engaging he is always watchable.

There are many unpresented questions that could have been asked: I’d like to know what was it like to fill a Morris Minor up with paintings (as I’ve heard he used to do in the sixties) to take them to motel rooms in distant cities to try and sell them? Why and how did he persuade Woollaston to make the wonderful panoramic landscapes? Where did he learn to become a salesman? Did he ever consider that the role of spiritual themes might be over-rated in this country? Why did Hammond’s prices go up after the Auckland Island trip and not before? (What was it about the imagery?) Why did he get upset with L. Budd ‘blonding’ his chaise longue? And most importantly, when did he start wearing a hat? The McLeavey brand is actually his silvery (Warholesque) hair, his round ruddy (babylike) face, and those alert blue eyes behind stylish glasses. Always instantly recognisable. No hat.

Much of the film, as you’d expect, is fascinating, especially when our subject is talking about his nomadic childhood, his Catholic education, Freudian psycho-therapy and his bouts of depression. Or his passionate collecting of internationally sourced photography or publications of New Zealand poetry. The excerpts of letters from or to him from McCahon, Woollaston and Walters are the highlights.

The film’s photography though is disappointing. Some of the interviews were held when he was slumped in a chair and filmed from below, making him look facially a bit squat or froglike. He should have been filmed at eye height. After all, he is a salesman of infinite persuasion and charm, a great communicator who is very expressive and direct. Show him as he is normally seen.

Furthermore, in this film, too much is made of Wellington and its inhabitants. McLeavey, perceived by many as a national treasure, is admired everywhere in this country and beyond, but Bieringa, in my view, wastes too much time showing life on the streets of the capital, and his subject’s daily wanderings between home and gallery. Such subject matter is consistent with Bieringa’s earlier film on Ans Westra, and as director it is natural he follow his own creative humanistic impulses – though his agenda is not overbearing to the cost of his subject as Mita’s was in her Hotere. Yet despite his comparative restraint, for documenting such a significant player in our visual heritage it is regrettable that he did not play ‘David Sylvester’ to McLeavey’s ‘Francis Bacon,’ and develop some extended, really pithy conversations over three whole months, instead of only three short days.