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.

The slippery slopes of political meaning

Peter Robinson - SOLD OUT: works from the 1990s
Gow Langsford
19 August - 12 September 2009

It should be obvious to all that re-examining Peter Robinson’s work from a decade ago brings benefits because of (and not in spite of) the many changes within his practice since. This exhibition of a small group of secondary sales can’t be seen in isolation from much later work like say that at Jar still publicly visible from a footpath in Morningside. Gow Langsford here allow us to speculate why via the Venice Biennial route of quantum physics, Robinson moved towards a more formalist, more material-oriented and experiential practice that is much less language-based - far from the double-edged, post-postcolonial critique of national (or, as in the case of much of this show, global) land sales shown here.

Some might consider Robinson to have ‘sold out’ with his ‘white’ polystyrene chain installations, yet there are connections to his future projects even in this show. Looking at this earlier work from an artist who has made works with swastikas and texts like ‘Pakeha have rights too’ and ‘Boy, am I scarred?’ it provides a semantic filter through which we can observe the ‘Pakeha’ chains ‘unbound’.

We can see the outrageously provocative layering of using black, red and white as both Maori and Nazi colours as part of his critique of commercial avarice to convey maximum uncertainty and personal ambivalence. We can ponder over the drawing in a NFS paintings of a ‘Ratana’ plane that (like a 4 in a ‘For Sale’ sign) could almost be a swastika. Such loaded ambiguities (another is an inverted Italy above a pound symbol) have similarities with the less confrontational blue duck/rabbit forms of his ARTSPACE ACK show, and the solid white polystyrene oval form at Jar, and its sister the linear chain link, that reference IO, the Maori Supreme Being.

The large crate ‘world’ with its empty centre leads to the quantum voids of Venice; the geographic leap from Aotearoa to Germany to later sequences of chains, their different sizes - and Robinson’s rapid shift from local to national to international to cosmic. Part of this is the flipping backwards and forwards between northern and southern hemispheres, the upside down and the upright, the high black and low white interest.

Gow Langsford’s website (and hand-out) provides an excellent interpretative commentary on the five works being resold here. A great opportunity to see these immensely metaphorical works once more.

City keepsakes

For Keeps: Sampling recent acquisitions 2006-2009
Curated by Natasha Conland
New Gallery
18 June - 12 July 2009

In the upstairs part of the New Gallery Conland has prepared a snappily elegant new acquisitions show which looks spare and understated, but where there is a lot more work than you think. Some of it was purchased by AAG, much of it is loaned by the Chartwell Trust, and a few choice items were donated by the artists. The smallest work is a clay, spaghetti and putty concoction by Dan Arps and the largest ones by Michael Parekowhai (a fibreglass sculpture) and John Reynolds (a metallic and chroma spray painting). There are 26 artists here, including the Australian photographer Bill Henson who has a whole room to himself to display eight night-time images.

Here is the line-up: Vyasheslav Akhunov (Uzbekistan), Hany Armanious (Australia), Dan Arps, Nick Austin, Mladen Bizumic, Julian Dashper, Simon Denny, Denise Kum, Alicia Frankovich, Bill Hensen (Australia), Allan McDonald, Daniel Malone, Richard Maloy, Monique Jansen, Annette Messager (France), Dane Mitchell, Ryan Moore, Michael Parekowhai, Margaret Turner Petyarre (Australia), Layla Rudneva-Mackay, Marie Shannon, Sriwhana Spong, John Reynolds, The Estate of L. Budd, Sergey Tichina (Uzbekistan), and Rohan Wealleans. Note the paucity of artists from below the Bombay Hills. Zilch in fact. It is really a regional, not a national, focus. (Mind you Christchurch is the same, but they openly state it - as Collection Policy.)

I don’t think all the individual items are good (the Malone /Kum and Dashper videos pall quickly. They are irritatingly juvenile), but the work is hung really well, with lots of shrewd interconnections between the different projects. Some of the work here looks seductively beautiful in a way that was unapparent when it was first shown in a dealer gallery. For example: Dan Arps’ three works look particularly gorgeous with lots of room around them, especially a translucent pink anorak thrown onto a piece of polystyrene on the floor, and an inverted surfie poster gesturally activated with silver paint and goobers of smeared Blu-tack.

Nick Austin - Arps, Denny and Malone’s Gambia Castle colleague - has a set of delicate paintings of unmatched solo socks rendered with feathery brushstrokes on vertical sections of newspaper. It’s an amusing comment on the vagaries of washing machines and daily wear and tear.

The two collaborating Uzbekistan artists, Vyasheslav Akhunov and Sergey Tichina do well with two videos that were shown in the Turbulence Triennale. One work in particular about meditating or praying while pressing the body in inaccessible corners (high up in precarious ruins, or on top of ancient archways) is very simple, but with a lot of emotional power as bodily gesture.

Bill Henson’s haunting room of images features nocturnal landscapes and bungalows - with naked or semi-clad teenagers sexually experimenting in a darkened park, or riding BMXs. Each image is superbly staged and lit with shimmering pools of light, so that even a bare mud road looks sensational. The skinny, very delicate boys and girls look emotionally uninvolved, almost stunned in their indifferent embraces.

On one gallery wall Allan McDonald has eight images of illuminated opportunity shop ceilings – mainly with fluorescent fittings. They act as a reference for two Simon Denny photographs on the opposite wall of a framed poster he found in a Germany burger bar. It was of the Chrysler and Empire State buildings in New York. The poster was flanked by small neon tubes, so Denny has placed tubes in boxes with his own images in their deep frames, according to the angle of his camera to the original poster.

Of the other two walls of that room one has a set of three photos by Richard Maloy that show him with large plastic bags over his head, of different colours. The blue one resonates nicely with a Sriwhana Spong collage about Nijinsky on the far wall, where she has placed deep blue colour correction filters over a photocopied section of the great dancer’s biography.

What Conland has done with lights and colour as small details in one room she repeats with vertical columns of pencilled numbers in another. Monique Jansen’s gridded graph book with its skeletal rows and columns framing lines of removed squares has a line of scribbled numbers on one page. Similar numbers are found on the ‘blonded’ awning from The Estate of L. Budd, Unity of Appearance, on the opposite wall. With thin paint on its top surface and the original coloured stripes left underneath, it references conflicting interiorities, and the need for a self’s protection from social factors demanding consistency, ‘raining down’ upon them.

Like Budd’s wall projection, Julian Dashper and Rohan Wealleans’ paintings are remarkably evocative. Dashper has seven works in a row on one wall that seem to reference the letters of his own name. Most are linen stretchers stacked in multiples and reversed, but some are plastic records or tondos. Wealleans has only one work, a large white rectangle where the thin outer skin of paint has been cut away and pulled back to reveal chipped away stratified facets of solid white carved pigment, like geometric, crystalline mountain peaks.

It is good to see two Alicia Frankovich photographs from her earlier Starkwhite show presented here: images of a bunch of tomatoes hanging from a ceiling, and a strange rope ladder/hammock from which fabric is falling out at the top. These images were baffling at the time, but after her recent series of performances and talks they make a lot more sense with their references to height, gravity and temporary suspension.

Margaret Turner Petyarre’s work is unusual for Aboriginal dot painting. It looks from a distance like concentric circles made out of spiralling wire netting, but in fact is made up of thousands of small curved lines of ten dots each. These decrease in size from top to bottom and are carefully painted in position. The painting looks surprisingly industrial.

The Hany Armanious wall sculpture is a cast piece of polyurethane that looks like a battered slab of polystyrene, bearing patterned indentations from its past life as protective packing. It looks incongruous hanging on the wall, this chunk of foam plastic waste declaring itself to be art. Perhaps it should be leaning up from the floor.

One of the two main sculptures is a huge Michael Parekowhai dancer in a black leotard lying on the floor in a recovery position. She looks serene as she dominates the small gallery with considerable physical and psychological impact. The other large sculpture in another room is a Peter Robinson polystyrene work of crumbled blocks and flowing cascading chains, a brilliant work in its invention and exploration of a new materiality, and its evocation of lichen or grass covered rocks and hairy animals.

Auckland Art Gallery has a great display here of its new contemporary acquisitions (and I’ve picked out a few samples) but it needs a catalogue of some kind for the public to take home and read. Much of this art also needs skilled explanations in special artist folders to help win the venue new audiences, for the wall labels aren’t sufficient. If ARTSPACE has a reading room, then why not AAG where the need is far more pronounced? They should throw away the junk-filled card and wrapping paper shop downstairs and give the public the educational facility they need.

This is an excellent show, yet oddly it is only up for a month. Make sure you see it.

From top to bottom, the images are by Henson, McDonald, Spong, The Estate of L. Budd, Dashper, Parekowhai and Robinson.

The Robinson theory of Art History

Peter Robinson: Snow Ball Blind Time
Curated by Rhana Devenport
Govett-Brewster
13 September - 23 November 2008

This extremely unusual exhibition at the Govett is the first time the whole building has been handed over to one artist for an installation since the inaugural Leon Narbey Real Time show of 1970. It is a clever and ambitious project because it allows a particularly innovative and versatile individual to create something spectacular that will bodily thrill his audience, while also showcasing the very unusual spatial qualities of this adventurous, open-planned/multi-tiered New Plymouth gallery. The results are likely to attract many out of town art pilgrims to Taranaki.

Robinson has taken the linear wormlike form from ACK and blended it with the multiple chain links that feature prominently in the current work still on view in Jar in Kingsland. Seven varied sizes of joined polystyrene chain are intertwined to make an intricate but tumbling, baroque mass akin to a thickly streaming torrent, as if an ice version were possible. He has also used some of the crumbling polystyrene block presentations that he utilised in recent shows at Crockford,Brooke/Gifford, McLeavey, and Sutton (in Melbourne). The winding, lumpy but entangled, polystyrene snake weaves its way through all the exhibiting spaces, zigzagging between high balconies and low floors, squeezing through narrow corridors and out of look-outs to plummet past mezzanines only to double back upwards again. It starts in a corner of Gallery 2 by the front door and finally ends in Gallery 4, the large hangar-like room normally kept for Len Lye shows.

The worm’s direction is unpredictable as it clambers up to create spilling mountainous landscapes that can be viewed through vistas flanked by buckled chunky forms and doorway edges. These heaped rubble-like lines loop around and pile over disintegrating stratified blocks, and surprisingly sometimes, when seen from below, seem akin to Piranesi etchings. Somehow the gallery is transformed into a twisting subterranean cave with chasms and pillars, yet the venue is not smothered nor blindingly white. The amount of opaque white mass is carefully judged and not excessive. The architecture is interacted with, teased and scrutinised, but not hidden. The building is celebrated, not critiqued.

Mixed in with this is the treatment of the icelike polystyrene by the physical limitations of the connected chain links, where their design makes it almost a new substance, a material that is fluid and floppy and suggestive of fur, foliage and crystalline minerals.

Such an intensely experiential exhibition like this doesn’t need an interpretation or explanatory narrative that gives a predetermined rationale for every element, yet some aspects draw out other levels of meaning beyond spatial and optical sensation. For example Robinson has incorporated in his show a number of polystyrene stanchions holding up delicate polystyrene chains. Most of these are placed in groups within the small galleries at the bottom of the stairs near the entrance. They seem to stand for some quality like the ‘limitations or boundaries of art’, physical or conceptual. Their very literal presence helps make the giant meandering worm a metaphor for western art history, and the seven interwoven ‘threads’ within it disappearing and re-emerging themes or tendencies.

Without these ‘gallery barriers’ one could concentrate solely on a purely visceral response to Robinson’s fascinating show, but the stanchions’ unambiguous existence places other demands on the gallery visitor – pushing their capacity to speculate about what is before them and their own role, as viewers, in its creation.

Auckland 08: Walters Sweepstake

The Walters Prize 2008
New Gallery
13 September - 23 November 2008

It is hard to believe it is six years since the inaugural Walters Prize exhibition opened at the New Gallery with its line up of Michael Stevenson, Gavin Hipkins, John Reynolds and the then unknown, Yvonne Todd. For a country that doesn’t have a national gallery the occasion was something all Kiwi contemporary artists were ecstatic about - a ray of hope that this country might see its artists not as 'dole bludgers' but as creative people with vocations. This new show reveals a lot about the event at this point of its short history, and the weaknesses of its organisational structure. For an Auckland-based prize that is meant to be championing the excitement of New Zealand contemporary art to the rest of New Zealand and the world, it is clearly floundering.

When I was at art school in the early seventies there were only four tertiary art education institutions in the whole country. Now there are more than that in Auckland alone, and the number of artists has escalated astoundingly. So when the selection committee for this year pick two past finalists (Reynolds and Robinson) to resubmit, something has to be wrong. The message is that Aotearoa doesn’t have the quantity and range of exciting practices to keep the exhibition continually fresh. In this country the inherent vibrancy needed doesn’t exist.

That is clearly not the case. More likely the committee didn’t do their homework and thoroughly scour through all the dealer exhibitions the length and breadth of the land. But with no South Island curator on the panel there was no incentive to ensure that. And with two of the four selectors from Auckland alone, the result seemed predestined to ensure Auckland parochialism, especially when the two repeating artists live in Auckland.

Enough about the politics. What about the work? The four exhibitions?

My personal favourite of the four line-ups of different years (so far) is the second one of 2004, with et al and von Sturmer. The other two exhibitors, van Hout and Fraser, though unquestionably superb artists, somehow couldn’t do themselves justice in their allocated spaces. That seems to be the regular pattern in all of the four biennial shows: in each - two crack shows; two forgettable ones.

Edith Amituanai’s Déjeuner, with its four photographs, seems only half an exhibition. She seems to have drawn the short straw in terms of space, but it shows her inadequacies as an artist as well. She is a consummate documenter of Samoan living spaces and rugby players living in France, but not an exciting thinker. Her approaches to photographic presentation are dull and conventional, even though the details of her recorded living rooms are rich and engaging. When clearly superior artists like Simon Denny (at Michael Lett) and Fiona Connor (at Gambia Castle) are ignored her inclusion looks like tokenism. I’m not saying it is, I know the panel is smarter than that, but it looks suspect.

(To briefly digress, am I here directly contradicting what I said earlier about a South Island panellist? I don’t think so. I’m not saying a South Island artist must be included, only that the panel has a South Island representative who can do the research and initiate a discussion of the issues – like what I’m doing here.)

Cloud, the work of John Reynolds, was shown in the AGNSW in the 2006 Sydney Biennale and consists of over 7000 little canvases bearing written phrases taken from Harry Orman’s ‘Oxford Dictionary of New Zealand English.’ Occupying the stairwell space and first room on the New Gallery's first floor, this sprawling installation of row upon rippling row of small stretchers, from floor to ceiling, looks pompous - in the tradition of overkill exemplified by the installations of Ann Hamilton and Anthony Gormley. It’s an academic exercise about language that if chosen well could be interesting, but instead ends up all surface and triviality. As few of the paintings can be read anyway it becomes the dumbest sort of spectacle.

Lisa Reihana’s Digital Marae uses her two darkened rooms of glowing spot-lit photographs, moving image and sound to really stir her audience. It’s not subtle but it is innovative and entertaining - especially her images of mythic personalities within the Māori cosmology that in her hands become Neo-Gothic and Sci-Fi. There is even a hint of Hollywood productions like Batman. Though at times fragmented (her elegant images of a cane carrying dandy wearing tailored colonial attire and moko look out of place) her installation has considerable impact and will be the crowd favourite.

As I’ve said, Robinson like Reynolds should not be here - but seeing that he is, his installational revamping of his 2006 ARTSPACE project is my favourite anyway. It is all class, a polystyrene intestinal phallus run rampant, running down corridors and bursting through walls like an angry blind worm. Conceptually layered to include references from Tex Avery (Looney Tunes)and early Giacometti to Wittgenstein (duck-rabbit diagram) and Stephen Hawking (universe model), Robinson’s inclusion of blue beaks, rabbit ears, willies and doughnuts brings a festive chromatic musicality to his exuberant project.

So who will Catherine David give the $50,000 prize to in late October? David is not a person one would attempt to second-guess. Even as an expert on modernism’s relationship to - and blending with - post-colonialism, she is vehemently anti-formulaic. Though I think AAG messed up badly in the processes of this year’s exhibtion selection, I congratulate them on their selection of David as judge – an inspired choice that will help our profile globally if she relates to the diversity of our culture and the art made within it. And how can she not? Roll on October!

Art in Kingsland

Peter Robinson: Closed Cell Construction
Jar, Auckland
Over six months duration

First of all, this is not a ‘drive by’ art show. You’ll see nothing that way. You really have to hop off your skateboard, wander over, press your snout against the big glass window and peer in.

Secondly, the exhibition is about light – natural that is – and form. Light which changes over the course of a day. Form which is crammed into this peculiar, cube-like space.

Robinson’s installation is a heap of polystyrene chains piled up to the ceiling. There are four types: the whopper, hefty, ultra-thick ones which are a new development from his recent Crockford show; the much smaller, more delicate links; and a variety of ‘negative’ lozenges that come in two sizes and which are strewn around the floor and on the occasional big link.

The theme continues Robinson’s interest in the legend of Prometheus, and in chains as a form of substance, an invented ‘material’ with its own unique set of physical characteristics that he can continue to explore.

Jar, with its funny little skylight tucked away on the righthand side, also allows lucky people like me who live close by, to observe the effects of direct sunlight coming in the ceiling and window in the late parts of the day. It will be interesting to see how the polystyrene responds to that, whether it will look opaque or translucent, and if the dark shadows of sunny days will make the forms more pronounced, and if overcast days dissolve them.

The earlier installation by Stephen Bambury was about reflected light in trays of oil, and what it did to the walls of the room. Robinson’s project is quite different in mood. His installation is about the mass he has inserted into the space, and how light can effect that.

(photos courtesy: Over the net and on the table.)

Exciting drawing show

Drawings
Sue Crockford, Auckland
8 April - 28 April 2008

One of the big mysteries of life, more enigmatic than the chemistry of love, more secretive than the movement of magma at the centre of the earth, more puzzling than the selection of the finalists in the Walters Prize, is how to define what drawing is.

Is it a particular support that is the key, something like paper or velum? Maybe it the medium type that is the defining component, an implement like a pen or pencil.

There are other questions too, such as can drawings be reproducible in editions, or are they strictly unique? Are they a method of research that might not be finished, a preparatory process for a later project? Do they have to be about marks on a 2D surface, marks that imply space, and not actually a sculptural item or linear object in itself?

Crockford’s show doesn’t stretch any of these envelopes – it’s conservative in its approach to the discipline – but it is a goodie. There are some great surprises here. Here are my picks:

First of all three very unusual pencil studies by Gordon Walters, with sensitive cross hatching, erased sections, over-inscriptions and smudges, along with small sketches in the margins. Working drawings that came before the preparatory collages that came before the final paintings. Terrific to see.

Then there are a couple of vibrant, wildly abandoned Mrkusich studies, in gouache from 1961, made just before he started to explore Jungian symbolism. The brushstrokes and hot earth colours make these seem of a fiery bush or primal furnace, with no hint of the geometry to come.

There is also a set of seven black ink drawings made by Ralph Hotere and Max Gimblett, seemingly combining Max’s splatter with Ralph’s brush daubs and strokes along the paper edges. With black mounts and 80s framing the resulting images are subtle and sometimes minimal. These images, made in New York in 1980, are more rewarding than what is initially apparent.

Of younger generations, Marie Shannon has two intriguing pastel studies of the space in Esso Gallery in New York, with framed items on the walls, and restrained colour. Peter Robinson also has five very recent hard-leaded pencil drawings of his recent polystyrene/dripping chain sculptures. The understated lines are fine and piercing with descriptive use of contour for the masses, some nuanced spatial inflection, plus a few stencilled links for the chains. After his recent large, loose brush drawings these tight precise works are a wonderful airy surprise.

This is the kind of drawing show I like. No awful portraits or landscapes. Mostly artists honing their ideas, and testing them before a final commitment.

Robinson unbound

Peter Robinson
Promethean Dreams
Sue Crockford Gallery
12 February – 1 March 2008

Of the last three exhibitions Peter Robinson has held in Auckland, probably Ack at ARTSPACE was the one that attracted the most public acclaim. An installation more than a collection of sculpture, it featured fat, snakelike ‘worms’ of looping glued (and cut) polystyrene blocks and blue sponge rubber. More recently he had an exhibition of ‘chain sculpture’ in Christchurch at the Brooke/Gifford, and this current Sue Crockford show is a less fiddly variation of that. Unlike the holistic ARTSPACE project, he is showing discrete polystyrene sculptures, six of them.

Of these it is easy to see why Robinson entitled the exhibition after one of the works, for ‘Promethean Dreams’ is the best one by far due to its imposing height and thickness, a sculpture that looks like a rocky outcrop covered with flattened tussock or lichen, or streaming with flowing water from a recent downpour.

The show is chains galore. Before you decide Robinson is a closet bondage freak, have a wee squiz at the Crockford website here. Look at this adjectivally dense text by Allan Smith, but don’t be fooled. In my view Smith’s speculative inventive riffing begins well but ends barking up the wrong polystyrene tree. It doesn’t really inform about the experience of this show, and though clever in a mimetically visual way (its density mimics the layering of chains in a box), in essence it is more about the word ‘chain’ and not about visiting Crockford’s.

The point it misses is that the show is an examination of the physical limitations of the design of the link. The possibility of ‘chain’ as a devised material outside of it happening to be polystyrene in substance. The show focuses on ‘chainness’ as effected by physical laws, not metaphor, or narrative ingredient or semiotic. It is not about connectivity but reflexively about itself as material and how it can be shaped.

This is no surprise. Over the last two or three years Robinson has moved away from narrative content, any overtly political, scientific or philosophical exegesis in his work, and shifted towards simply having fun with materials and exploring the poetic visual nuances of whatever associations those materials happen to create. He is letting the materials speak to him so he can reveal their possibility, not starting with a notion that he can sculpt an illustration for.

So what can be done with differently sized chains, by themselves or mixed with other elements? Because they are flexible lines you can fasten, suspend, drape, and thread them, or tie them in knots. You can lay them out in lines, crunch them up concertina style, or crumple them into balls. Because they are light and portable they can be improvised according to the characteristics of the site, with decisions made on the spot.

The results we see can interpreted as crystalline or botanical forms, even ruins or hairy animals like yaks or Pekinese. They can refer to Aeschylus’ play and Shelley’s poem that feature figures in Greek myth, footnote contemporary artists like Robert Morris or Richard Serra, or writers like Deleuze and Guatarri – but these are red herrings. At heart they emphasise a process of breaking down the cultural to return it to nature, of making the cooked raw again. They can never of course totally replace cultural elements with the natural – for nature (like a gallery experience) can never be pure – but Robinson here (especially with the two main works) seems to be aiming at an elemental content, something well before the growth of human communities and culture: a bodily condition that is pre-mind and pre-narrative.