Self-referential Killeen bores

Richard Killeen: The Presence of Objects
Ivan Anthony
21 April -22 May 2010

This quite large show of Richard Killeen’s digitally inked paper prints and larger canvas ‘paintings’, occupies both ends of the Ivan Anthony Gallery. These ‘objects’ reference many parts of his very varied career, particularly his earlier cut-outs, those silhouetted single-coloured shapes (1978-81) designed to be hung side by side within compositionally arranged groups created by the exhibition hanger.

With these recycled images now being fixed in position within portable rectangles - juxtaposed, overlaid or sometimes bodily interwoven - the metallic looking, computer-rendered forms look as if they have been made with an airbrush. Gone are the flat monochromatic primary or black hues: these have a sheen and are often mottled. Absent also are the thin, perpendicular in cross-section, edges of each shape. The drawn contours curve over into the top plane like a sanded bevel, and accentuate the shapes’ highly ornamental properties as animals, utensils or plants, with painted highlights added. They look like decals found on heavy industrial machinery.

The shapes thus are softly rounded, with no spiky geometry or threatening sharp edges – and are always accompanied by fuzzy shadows so that they have a thickness. The shallow tray-like space, because it references the wall on which the cut-outs were hung, though illusionist, is a vaguely modernist picture plane that repudiates the depth of his other digital, more densely packed and highly decorative images.

The hermetic reflexivity of Killeen’s practice has been going on for some time now, going round and round, spiralling in on itself. Sometimes it leads to fresh, unexpected surprises; on other occasions he seems too preoccupied with his own umbilicus, and the work (for Killeen – one of the indisputably great NZ artists of the seventies and eighties) becomes disappointingly tired.

Here you can see the artist’s mind ticking over with new spatial and stylistic treatments of his image–bank but the constant revamping is now becoming lacklustre. I visited this show with excited anticipation, because Killeen is an artist with an exceptionally interesting painting history, and he of course knows he has that drawing power. However there are signs within this self-referential exhibition that the work is getting jaded, too conceptually repetitive. He needs to escape from his standard now over-utilised repertoire, take a holiday, and start reinventing.

Anthony shows Graham

Graham (a group show): Tony de Lautour, Rohan Wealleans, Michael Harrison; Yvonne Todd, David Cauchi, Richard Killeen
Ivan Anthony
3 February - 20 February 2010

This six-person group show at Ivan Anthony’s - a suite of mini-exhibitions by artists normally well known to Anthony visitors - is unusual in that it introduces to Aucklanders the work of Wellingtonian newcomer David Cauchi - many of whose wall drawings adorned the public toilet walls of the Adam Art Gallery during Wall Works last September.

Cauchi’s occasionally mock-Mayan graffiti looks best directly on architectural planar surfaces and not on pinned up pieces of white paper but the latter ink drawings are easier to sell and indicate a witty, albeit cynical (realistic?) sensibility. Of the 37 works, my two favourites are: 'The World' with its two percentage bar graphs of ‘good shit’ and ‘bad shit’: and 'The Critic' with one hand on his erect member and the other gouging out his eyeballs with a dagger – the pleasures and dangers (power and self-hatred) of what Martin Jay calls the ‘scopic regime’ of the modernist gaze.

Killeen’s three digital ‘paintings’ around the corner in the hall, though also graphic, are highly patterned and spatial, and less immediate. Surface here is illusionistically sculpted by ink-jet programming and is densely ornamental. In contrast, a line of sixteen raw Tony de Lautour drawings in the office - on scrap paper and card - are very similar to his recent Te Tuhi show and like Cauchi, also satirical, but less about the art world and more about New Zealand history and white working class frustrations.

While de Lautour likes to render brutal, swaggering oafs with coarse scruffy brush marks that hint of incipient violence, Harrison focuses on delicately rendered, ethereal young women in thin acrylic washes that dwell in another more imagined and longed for world of floating forms. De Lautour bruises and shoulder-charges the viewer into entering his imaginary space while Harrison caresses and coaxes.

Rohan Wealleans’ wall work Horrogami is a simplified version of another work of the same name in the Chartwell collection – but without collaged photographic elements this time. It features yellow and orange spiky cut-paper and glued-on slices of blue marbled paint so that the projecting folded image looks part vulva, part sea anemone, part jeweled but prickly bush – in a curved glass case.

Yvonne Todd’s The Menthol Series (1999) is in five identically sized parts, with a cat with peculiarly rounded ears in its centre. Like with Harrison’s images there is a haunting and restrained gravitas, except that Todd uses an approximate symmetry. Her work’s outer extremes have gentle diagonals (manicured hand holding a white die and chain necklace versus a lily-shaped glass vase toppled over a hardened pool of spilt candle wax); those second in have four verticals (white carnations versus white recently snuffed candles); and the sleepy feline in the middle eyes us with amused suspicion.

While much of this show has been displayed before (like all of Todd and some of Harrison) it is still good to revisit. Cauchi though is a refreshingly surprising component. Hopefully his contributions to the Auckland art scene will be now more frequent.

Sensitivities

Feelings (a group show)
Ivan Anthony
23 May - 1 July 2009

Ten Ivan Anthony artists here present sixteen works for our thoughtful deliberations - in the ‘office’ part of the gallery to the left of the top of the stairs. While some of the items have been exhibited before there is enough new work here to make this show an exciting display to spend some serious time with.

In Anthony’s office, a tiny Matt Hunt matchbox-sized painting faces two recent, considerably larger, Richard Killeen ink-jet works on the opposite wall. Killeen’s printed objects and creatures are so dense in illusory space and patterned planar surfaces that looking at them is like using a knife to cut one of those super rich Italian cakes jammed with nuts and fruit. It requires considerable ability to optically navigate around all the detail embedded in the wildlife floating before us. The air is thick with suspended fauna and intricate playthings, so much so that the composition seems holistic, without a dominant structure behind the placement of elements.

One surprise is a Roger Mortimer painting showing a plane flying low over (or within) a sea which doubles as topographical map. It is like a varnished over transfer, with a delicate, brown, brittle quality, and similar to a child’s encyclopaedia illustration with lots of unexpected detail. There are also incongruous additions – like the plane’s shadow turning into a bending hammerhead shark, or an underwater pheasant.

The title of this show is apt. It points to the visceral side effects of emotions, almost a pre-linguistic state where sensations from images and the relationships between them acquire their own power. A small Michael Harrison acrylic on paper carries the subtlest, yet most effective of punches: a delicate stalk of bamboo leaves hovering above four rocks in a pool, its downward spikey tips foils to their heavy undulating curves.

There is a sense of piercing stillness in the Harrison that mentally moves, yet the Saskia Leek in the adjacent room, of a rocklike cubist formation, is also riveting. In odd contrast to the static Harrison, Leek’s superbly constructed image seems a fragmented mound at full gallop - a sprinting tanklike animal.

Dior, the Yvonne Todd portrait, shows an immaculately tailored and impeccably made up young woman with long tousled and unruly hair. That aspect is slightly unnerving - something uncanny and disorienting - a detail that dominates the image so that (unusual for a fetish substance) its tangledness takes on an independence. It seems disembodied, with emotional properties that lash out against ‘correct’ grooming. Hair that is 'angry'.

Brendan Wilkinson’s mauve watercolour of death taunting a beautiful young woman intrigues with an inventive synthesis of fragmented skull parts, cobweb, necklace and tassels. Its drama is a cleverly placed foil to the superbly drawn Francis Upritchard dancing girl (a hand coloured lithograph) in the hallway, an image like the Harrison mentioned earlier that is calming and serene. Her languid arms and meticulous hands have an ancient Egyptian profile that offsets a peculiar but haunting impassive gaze, and implied but invisible coloured veil.

Recent and not so recent cutouts

Richard Killeen: Cutouts 1981 - 2008
Ivan Anthony
4 February - 28 February 2009

In this wonderful little show six cutouts give you the chance to see how Killeen has explored not only different ways of organising ‘narrative’ or ‘literal’ subject matter under various titles, or exploited emotional mood, but also to examine his experiments with scale, number, surface, shape, line and pigment saturation. The clusters of painted, shaped, aluminium components are surprisingly varied.

His emotional content achieves different tones. Dew (1996) is a meditation on death and grieving, in particular the loss of his friend, the artist Gordon Walters. Sunset, Sunrise (2000) is very different. It is celebratory and buoyant, about the pleasures of the sun and its consistent diurnal course, and how we bodily respond to it. Each image is like a syntactical phrase in a sentence.

Other works are more cerebral, and contemplate the mechanics of certain verbs like that of ‘flying’ or ‘punctuating’. Using only three shapes, Three Fliers (2008) makes us ponder the wonders of aerial motion as achieved by insects, aircraft and birds. Punctuation Space makes written language’s structuring marks into three-dimensional forms, chunky solid glyphs that hover in space waiting for sequences of letters to accompany them.

Insect Inside (1997) explores Killeen’s continual obsession with insects, showing us his love of drawing and a whimsical graphic style that is distinctive even in his early Realist paintings. Tools and Instruments (1981) has a delicate brusherly surface imposed on its large jagged shapes. It makes us wonder what kind of tool, what sort of instrument, could create such turbulent, sweepingly expressive marks that contradict the restraining angular contours.

If you ever missed Killeen’s touring survey, Stories We Tell Ourselves, or would like to see some more variations, this is a nice opportunity. It is so different from the digital mages he is currently making.

Reactions as videos and painting

Campbell Patterson: Work and Exercise
Michael Lett
10 September – 4 October 2008

This show pairs the videos and paintings by Campbell Patterson in an odd hybrid of darkened installation with white walls. Most of the moving image material is in a black polythene-lined space (the main gallery) and front entrance, while the four paintings are in the wee nook round the corner leading into Lett’s office.

Putting it simply, the videos are tedious oneliners, but the paintings are good. The filmed treatment of the jokes doesn't engage like say those of Steve Carr, which though also silly, have a slickness that intrigues via the work's meticulous construction. Many of Patterson's videoed wise-cracks are about process art, where the camera is set up and left running to record whatever might occur.

A good many of these quips seem focussed on Australian artist Mike Parr’s filmed performances in particular: Parr’s Holding my Breath for as long as I Can (1973) is transmuted into Patterson’s Holding My Mother for as Long as I Can. Parr’s lighting fires in his mouth with matches is turned into Patterson setting toilet paper on fire in a lav. Even the black plastic lined room seems a reference to Parr’s Black Box theatre made for the first Sydney Biennale in the late seventies.

Patterson’s Compilation paintings at first glance seem to be made of children’s transfers but in fact the images are painted. The categories and assorted jostled positionings make them intriguing. Many of the rendered clothes, animals, household objects, vehicles, toys and body parts are upside down or sideways, so the square works seem capable of being hung any way up. In other words you have four options. Some images contain blended doublings where detailed parts are repeated within an image, creating an amusing sort of 'double-vision'.

Compared to the flippant videos you could spend a lot of time with the paintings. They have a Killeenlike interest in categorization and how connections can be produced between randomly placed images. They might even have started as a send-up of Richard Killeen but they have gone off somewhere else. They are sweeter, more intimate and domestic, more literal in the sort of mental narrative they encourage. Jokey, but yet worthy of serious attention.

(Thank you Michael Lett for the images).

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.)

Cute but complex

Richard Killeen: Butterfly Evening
Ivan Anthony, Auckland
14 May - 14 June 2008

These works continue Killeen’s transition from works on paper to large canvases with his computer assisted, densely detailed images that usually reference past projects. There is a jewel-like quality and plenitude of detail that recalls International Gothic. In some ways they are a two dimensional version of Peter Madden’s paper sculptures in that they are almost self-contained universes.

The use of varnish and more substantial size creates a better depth than previously. Very decorative, they are also obliquely abstract in their organisation, playing off different methods of dealing with volumetric space. Some depicted forms contain flat, but extremely complex patterns. Others are rounded and use light to convey plasticity.

The drawing of faces, figures, toys, buildings and wildlife recalls Killeen’s early ‘realist’ pre-cutout paintings, but now combined with mind-boggling detail on every imaginable surface. They are wondrously obsessive in their preoccupation with form–describing ornament. They are almost like Art Brut (especially someone like Adolf Wolfli) in that Killeen seems compulsive and really really driven to keep adding detail.

Their use of fairytale fantasy makes them obviously like nursery art, but as I’ve said before, there is a creepy sci-fi and industrial component too - though I think this aspect is diminishing. Personally, this current Killeen period fascinates me – despite the work’s cuteness. There is so much within each canvas. So much recycling of past motifs too. They are utterly engrossing.