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.

Forty years on

Darryn George / Shane Cotton / Ralph Hotere: Black to Black
Gow Langsford
16 September - 10 October 2009

In this mixture of primary and secondary selling opportunities through sampling almost three generations of Maori painters we see three Georges, three Hoteres and one Cotton.

The solo Cotton looks odd in this company because of its colour, figurative imagery, and number. The Georges seem grandiose and pompous. Too much extended shiny black surface and not enough substance. But the Hoteres. They are a very good reason to visit this show. Forty years old they look like they were just made yesterday. Impeccable. Made when this artist was at his peak. He used the influence of Ad Reinhardt to create, via added glowing linear colour, something remarkable.

His three works are so compact, and devoid of pretension. The one with the Manhire text of ‘Melody’ organised in a vertical column on the left - with alternating words of dark blue and matt black - has vertical tear-like, cascading coloured lines as a foil on the right.

Hotere's lacquer on board work with subdued circle and vertical lines is also worth spending time with - due to its remarkable gloss and impenetrable depth. It is thankfully free of the buffing that ruined (in my view) many of his similar works – such as those in Taranaki.

The third one, a warmer grey-black work with delicate, pulsing concentric circles is a treat too. There is something about the fineness of the curved, arching lines and knocked-backed hues that thrills. Christchurch Art Gallery have one that is very similar.

The Gow Langsford catalogue notes for this show talk a great deal about McCahon, but McCahon when glossy was never pristine - always gritty. Hotere with his industrial lacquer was quite different. New Zealand art was never to be as pure as this again.

Early Hotere works on paper

Ralph Hotere: This Land
Art & Object
18 September - 24 September

This is a preview exhibition for an auction of sixty Hotere items that make up a collection of work he gifted to Annette Ferguson. They are mostly works on paper, namely drawings and prints, with a couple of very early shaped canvases. The earliest work is 1957, the latest 1968.

1969 was his Frances Hodgkins year and his career really too took off after that – especially with the glossy black lacquer, minimalist panels with glowing lines (they are the peak of his career), and the wonderful textual collaborations with Tuwhare and Manhire. However he did do the Sangro (1962-3) and the Polaris and Algerie series during the earlier period of these about-to–be-auctioned works.

The trouble with Hotere is you have pick really carefully through his work to get to the good stuff. Over the years he has produced an awful lot of dross, particularly on paper, and in that way this collection is typical - especially with works that owe a lot to his friend McCahon. However you can tell he is experimenting to find a voice, indeed struggling - testing out ideas, looking at Kelly, Pasmore, Frost and others. So although most of the work here does not age well – it looks like shabby design - it is interesting to see it as samples of a process (some unsigned) that did occasionally lead to brilliance.

Art & Object’s little catalogue of essays is useful for a group of short texts by David Eggleton, Kriselle Baker, Oliver Stead and house staff that elucidate the context, especially the different series of protest paintings. Yet looking at larger survey publications like the recent Baker/O’Sullivan tome is also a good way to supplement this material, examining the non-paper paintings that developed at the same time and seeing where Hotere’s testing of new formal and political ideas led him.

However that approach denies the unique qualities that a handful of these paper works possess. Their surface properties are not found on soft canvas or hardboard or metal panel, especially those sheets with light and feathery, painted brush marks, scumbled monoprinting, or deliberately out of register screenprinting. You have to go to the Art & Object space yourself, zero in on what catches your eye, ignore the copious rubbish and look closely.

Portraits of Hotere

Martin Ball: Carey’s Bay
John Leech
28 April - 22 May 2009

These portraits of Ralph Hotere from 2000 are a mystery. Why would anybody want to make one - let alone eight? They tell us so little. Hotere’s head and face don’t provide the right sort of visual stimulus that an artist like Ball needs to make a grippingly successful image, like he has done with say John Hood.

This exhibition showcases Hotere as subject-matter. One could debate the nature of (what I think is ) his grossly inflated reputation, how his best painting came out of the period between the early seventies and mid eighties, and how his vast output of mediocre works on paper tarnished a once dazzling aura – but that would be churlish. He is a much loved figure because of his personal generosity and well known hospitality, but hardly worthy of the sycophantic flattery that this very dull, sentimental show exudes.

And even if you disagreed entirely with all of the above, would you really buy a Ball portrait instead of a Hotere original - if the latter were affordable? And as of course, for most they are not, is there some process of osmosis going on here, some infusion into Ball’s reputation, by virtue of touching the hem of St. Ralph’s garment? A little of the old contagious magic can work wonders for the market. Is that the real reason for this very peculiar display? The cult of the artistic personality, an array of eight ‘sensitive’ physiognomies, here makes very sound commercial sense.

Connecting Then with Now

Tūruki,Tūruki! Paneke, Paneke! When Māori Art became Contemporary
Auckland Art Gallery
24 May - 24 August 2008

This show, curated by Ngahiraka Mason, celebrates the 50th anniversary of an exhibition assembled by Matiu Te Hau in 1958 for the University of Auckland. It featured five Northland school teachers: Katarina Mataira, Ralph Hotere, Muru Walters, Arnold Manaaki Wilson, and Selwyn Wilson. Obviously the original exhibition was an event that clearly deserves commemoration, yet somehow this display has ended up a fizzer. It doesn't sparkle. The project has been too ambitious, with too much space devoted to it, and fallen over. Worse still, the background context has completely overshadowed the art, ending up with a dominantly sociological and historical presentation.

There is nothing wrong with contextual information. The trouble is all the newspaper facsimiles and various publications of the time swamp the art. There is too much fifties history, and not enough gallery material. And there is insufficient about the overall careers of the five individuals. The reasons for that are obvious. Ralph Hotere overwhelmingly dominates as a significant national figure but the curator has attempted a balanced account so all five are treated equally. However at least two of these artists were not exhibiting long. They pursued other careers. So the bio accounts are averaged out and Hotere is downplayed.(His images aren't even included on the show's media kit - which is why I haven't included an image for him above.)

Another issue is its incessant looking back. That has been disastrous, for it doesn’t give the visitor a clear idea of the adventurous and dynamic developments within Māori practice in recent years. It could have tied in the past in a more overt fashion to the present, asking (perhaps) contemporary Māori artists who work in different media to comment on the events of 1958 - so that the pioneers' contributions are examined through the lens of the ‘contemporary’. It could have elucidated their part in the overall development of contemporary Māori art itself, examining, say, what later artists were inspired by the five here. Without a contemporary framing, set in its own time and not 2008, the work simply looks dreary.

Maybe I’ve got it wrong? Perhaps some of you think this show is really exciting? That you were transported back to that earlier period, and as a cultural synthesis the displayed work still seemed to be really radical. If so, it would be great to hear a counter-argument.

{Works from top to bottom are by Arnold Wilson, Muru Walters, Selwyn Wilson, and Katarina Mataira.)