Haunting improvisations

Philip Dadson & Richard Nunns: Blood and Stone
Auckland Arts Festival (Red Square)
The Festival Club, Aotea Square
Thursday 5 March, 7.30 pm

Last evening, on the miserably wet, opening night of the Auckland Arts Festival, a small but appreciative audience was given a stunning set of extended improvisations – four delicately nuanced ‘conversations' - by Richard Nunns and his Maaori instruments, chiefly flutes, and Phil Dadson with his varied set of usually percussive and stringed devices.

The concert started with Nunns demonstrating the different acoustic properties and uses of nga taonga puoro, mainly the flutes, accompanied by Dadson delicately picking and bowing the strings of a grand piano. I am familiar with most of Dadson’s unusual instruments and methods, but Nunns’ playing and sonic repertoire was new. I was amazed how often the flutes (one incorporated a conch) sounded more like reed instruments with a fat, less hollow, woody sound. Less like say Herbie Mann and more like Coltrane – but just as haunting and stark.

The second piece was focused on percussion, the third on bowing, and the fourth on the use of holed river rocks as flutes or whistles – though putting it this way grossly over simplifies. Dadson’s strange looking, unusually named instruments (nummdrum, zitherum, gloopdrum etc.) intrigued visually as well as sounded fascinating. But it was his snappily percussive use of flat stones dipped in water that really penetrated your mind. They were caressed, tapped, scraped and rhythmically ground – like over-sexed, excitable crickets. They sounded like temple blocks, the orchestral percussive instrument, not like rocks at all.

Most of the time these ‘dialogues’ worked well. Now and then Nunns would inadvertently drown out Dadson’s restrained contributions with slightly shrill playing, but that was rare. He, like Dadson, is a wonderful listener as well as initiator. Usually his use of heaving breath and murmured humming in some of his flute playing provided much contrast to Dadson’s finely patterned, shimmering drones and staccato clicks. The whole event was beautifully understated. You really had to attend closely to detect the many barely perceptible, parallel textures and aural flourishes. Hopefully these two terrific players will do a new collaboration again, soon.

Collective minds

The Swarm: a peek into the hive-mind of group dynamics
Curated by Andrew Clifford
Gus Fisher
11 July -16 August 2008

Here is a juicy question:

When you assess a show, how much of it is from analysing the overarching curatorial premise (if that is stated), and the relationship of the ingredients to that – and how much is dependent on the quality of the individual items, regardless of curatorial intent?

After all, a viewer can ignore the intention of a curator if they wish, or the artist, or both – and the curator can ignore the artist (and maybe viewer) too. The axiom ‘Trust the art, not the artist’ is pretty sound commonsense if you believe art should have its own internal logic and independent semiotic life, most of it accessible visually. Perhaps the creator is the last person to ask about an artwork. There are likely to be unconscious components clear to outsiders that the artist is blissfully unaware of, and things that the artist thinks are glaringly obvious, which somehow, have mysteriously evaporated.

Okay, back to curatorial premises, as with this show. Some of the work supports Andrew Clifford’s interest in ‘a group infrastructure that wields more power than the some of the parts’ and some of it doesn’t. He references films like The Birds and The Swarm where wild creatures decide to organise themselves against humans.

When he succeeds in presenting a case for his premise, Clifford’s choices are brilliant. The music is very clever as a source of persuasion. From Scratch’s recording of Gung Ho, and Clifford’s discussion of Phil Dadson’s interest in hocketting (overlapping melodic phrases or rhythms from different sources) is fascinating - as is Douglas Bagnall’s Music Industry Simulator, which breaks down into formulae the melody structures of pop tunes to make them reconstitutable into ‘originals’ like building blocks. Also very witty in this context is Ani O’Neill’s collection of communally made, woollen knitted circles that could also be colourful bacterial colonies.

Not so ambiguous, but perfectly apt nonetheless, are Gregory Bennett’s sci-fi videos and images of thousands of little naked men, scampering in an unleashed tide through buildings. Louise Fong’s 1995 painting Cluster, with its satellite paintings encircling a central ‘mother’ canvas, is also an extremely clever element picked by Clifford.

With the other works, I felt they were dominated by too many different ‘atomic particles’ rather than ‘linkable’ elements that had a commonality. The art that depicted insects, that of Richard Killeen and Elizabeth Thomson, seemed to present too varied a range of species to suggest the existence of a communal mind. And Matt Molloy’s rickety bookcase of Christine Hellyarlike plaster and latex casts of egg-covered surfaces again seemed too unfocussed in content to fit the theme.

Now, as I suggested earlier, you could say ‘bollocks’ to the curator and just enjoy the show for its separate individual items, forgetting the theme. We all know that even one work, if it really excites us, is worth a visit to an otherwise tedious exhibition.

Rest assured there is nothing tedious here. There’s plenty to enjoy. Plenty of engaging parts for only a partially resolved whole. That doesn’t really matter, for it’s really an excuse to put some stimulating art out for an audience that might enjoy it. And they will. Nothing wrong with that.

(Above images from Richard Killeen, Ani O'Neill and Gregory Bennett.)