Aqua (mass) media

Aqua-media
Simon Denny: Starting from behind
Michael Lett
9 September - 10 October 2009

For this show the title is clever in at least three ways. First of all, the artist is using Michael Lett’s office as a display space, so Lett’s desk is now presented close to the Karangahape Road window - in the entrance space on the corner. The back room’s main contents are now in this front room and the first thing you see.

Secondly, the works in the large middle room are presented as four large trays standing vertically on the floor. In them are the backs of various TV sets - the plastic casings that enclose the tubes. The gallery visitor examines them from behind. And thirdly, the large room has four rectangular holes cut into the gib of the Edinburgh St wall – the same size as the trays - exposing the normally hidden outer wall of the gallery building; the inside plane of the double weatherboarded outer wall that is. Again, we are looking at it ‘from behind’.

The four vertical trays lined up on the floor have textured aluminium sides, mdf backs, and wrinkled or torn plastic fronts. For three of these trays, there are single, screen-printed, tropical fish on the plastic and mdf. These works are called backwards aquarium videos, and have either Grundig or Telefunken casings. The fourth has two suspended towels, each showing a screen-printed TV announcer with a monitor TV image behind him.

Denny’s dominant simile here is that of the goldfish bowl or tropical fish tank. His towels seem to allude to Marshal McLuhan‘s theory of ‘the medium is the massage’ where the tactility of various methods of mass communication has considerable physiological impact on our bodies and hence our minds.

The hermetic, watery world of the mains-stream media could perhaps be intended to parallel the ‘art world’ too. Beyond through the rectangular holes in the wall, there exists the so-called ‘life world’. Where folks like you and me fit in – in terms of these options - huddled over our various computers, I’m not quite sure.

In the end room, in a large cabinet holding a Philips television, is a DVD. Deep Sea Vaudeo is ostensibly a promotional video for selling televisions of different varieties of screen, one that extends the watery connection by having some ripples and a dark permeating tone as if immersed. We see these appliances on stands, or stacked, or on tables, about fifteen set up on a small stage in a showroom. Each screen depicts tropical fish and we see a camera crew filming the display.

Using slow pans and a background soundtrack of bubbling, bland muzak and softly spoken Japanese, it presents these televisions in the dark with glowing screens, or illuminated in a warm reddish glow. Sometimes they are lined up so we can see them in cross-section; other times we see them frontally.

With these televisions Denny includes some magazines and newspapers on stands. He seems to be making jokes about his Gambia Castle colleagues Fiona Connor and Nick Austin, the former with her exhibition of fake newspaper stands, the latter with his paintings of tropical fish on newspapers.

Late last year at Center in Berlin Denny had a small exhibition with Austin where he exhibited earlier Aquarium paintings in the same aluminium trays, but enclosing the front screens of televisions, not their backs. The properties of mass media is obviously a theme he is much preoccupied with.

As also shown by the Recent Haircuts show at Gambia Castle last year, his work is getting tighter and tighter as focussed gallery installations. And subtly funnier too in the way he alludes to the art community’s self reflexivity and sealed containment. Like Fiona Connor he is here making great use of the windowed frontage of Lett’s gallery, and the fact that it is situated on a corner like a sort of glasshouse. A structure easier to look into (like a fish tank) than look out of.

Against interpretation

Noli me legere
Michael Lett
8 October – 1 November 2008

The Latin title of this show can be translated as ‘Don’t read me,’ and is usually understood as linked to the influential philosopher, Maurice Blanchot whose writings attacked the conventional notions of author, literature and interpretation by introducing the aspect of death. “Don’t read me” means assume nothing. Don’t try and decipher. There is a clear sense in all the works included – cleverly selected by Sarah Hopkinson – of obliqueness, of disrupting a coherent narrative, of blocking the possibility of interpretation.

Particularly memorable is a wonderful short film ‘Ben’, by English film-maker Emily Wardill. Here two voice–overs alternate, while maintaining continuity across blank screens or sequences of seemingly unrelated images, many of which include black and white props with coloured backdrops. One voice is that of a professional hypnotist. Seductive, creamy, and masculine, it coaxes acquiescence from a group of women on stage with their eyes shut. The other voice is from a West Indian or African woman speaking English as a second language in hesitant, faltering bursts. She reads a divided up text, a psycho-analytic case study, about a 52 year old delivery van driver, a loner whose unorthodox social and sexual habits are getting noticed by his neighbours and workmates. The voices hold our attention and propel us along as try to connect their words with the images and interwoven themes.

The highly regarded German photographer Wolfgang Tillmans has four enigmatic coloured images in the show. Two look at hazy light coming through the flopped-over end of a sheet of photographic paper, one makes formal connections between different sized and patterned eggshells on a table with pods and strange cones, and the other has long dried leaves protruding from a small vase comically intertwining with a floral tie.

Influential artist and educator, Jim Allen contributes a very mysterious photograph, taken doing one of his pioneering performances at Auckland Art Gallery in the mid seventies. Black and white, with glossy coal blacks, and dramatic lighting, it shows a group of stooped figures, wearing hooded smocks of crumpled paper, standing like statues huddled over a greasy, dishevelled floor. A memorable image.

Hany Armanious‘s contribution is a cast, limited edition, wall-sculpture with unusual components like a photograph of a granite modernist sculpture of male and female forms, their bowed heads mimicking the curved toes of two feet in an adjacent leaning image. Hanging from its right-hand end are two identically cast, pink forms that are partially pig’s trotter and partially boxing glove. The whole work intrigues. It seems to revolve around assorted visual puns on fingers and toes.

A glassed over aluminium box mounted on the wall by Simon Denny, contains three painted vertical strips of MDF, one boxed fluro tube and some junk-mail advertising, but mainly two elegant black and photographs of a saloon car. These could, by themselves, almost be mistaken for a conceptual work by Christopher Williams. The images are nearly identical but not, even when de-reversed, and relate to the b/w Jim Allen positioned on the opposite wall.

Finally, Ava Seymour’s pristine photographed collage which greets you at the gallery entrance, is more complicated than usual with its clusters of triangular forms. Yet her work is now so tasteful it seems hard to connect Seymour’s present imagery with earlier controversies like her rubber-fetish and ‘Hannah Hoch visits state-housing’ projects. ‘Jubilee’ fits in well with the Hopkinson’s theme, despite its comparative blandness. It is an icy, blemish-free configuration; attractive, though bafflingly hard to locate semantically.

Pudding Bowl Cuts

Simon Denny: Recent Haircuts
Gambia Castle, Auckland
22 May – 14 June 2008

Having a severe haircut is always a fascinating experience, largely because of the abrupt changes to one’s appearance and the surprise that might generate, the novel temperature changes and tactile sensations one experiences on the highest portion of one’s body, and the discarded by-product - cut hair which always looks disgusting (no matter how clean you are) and which in many cultures is associated with contagious magic and so (to prevent your enemies getting hold of it) is automatically burned or buried.

Simon Denny’s show though is about other things, all connected in some way to the nature of haircutting and its implements. It has four components - photocopied haircut photographs, a freestanding box sculpture, a deep projecting box hung on the wall holding a photograph, and canvas paintings. These link together nicely to make a surprisingly tight exhibition.

By the door on the wall is the deep, glassed over box, with thin sides of painted board. The photograph inside is attached by tape only at its bottom two corners, so it leans forward away from the wall towards the viewer, permanently. This mimics its image of a freshly barbered man, smoking a cigar, seen from the top of his head down, and photographed from a high position.

On one long wall is a line of photocopies from a haircutting manual, encased in a large laminated sheet of plastic, along with several latex gloves. The images, mixed from several haircut types, may obliquely refer to art styles and fashions. The latex gloves imply more than a barber’s concern for hygiene issues or aids. A hint of distance, ‘hands off’ detachment, self-conscious artist aloofness is suggested too.

On the floor is an unusual, freestanding, cardboard box sculpture. It alludes to a haircut’s fringe (or maybe a mullet tail) with small tabs hanging down over the top edge and contained by a protective sheet of clean newsprint.

On the other large wall are a couple of paintings and three more haircut shots. One painting is enclosed in a third box. The canvases, containing marks where paint is spread with a comb or vibrating clipper, are ‘framed’ with carefully folded photocopies that like the wooden frames around the three adjacent haircut photos, decoratively repeat the parallel lines of a comb or clipper head.

This is a very shrewd, but also very funny, exhibition. Funny mainly because of the box on the wall, but also because the paintings, being about process, are compositionally lop-sided, as is his placement of bits of masking tape holding the laminated sheet to the main wall.

Denny’s dominant themes, of haircut documentation and also the sculptural form of boxes, are beautifully organised and integrated. Recent Haircuts is his most accessible Auckland exhibition so far because his wit is obvious and not laden with the obscure footnotes of design history found in his earlier shows. It has an engaging clarity.

Goosestepping through the whorehouse

Dan Arps’ Gestapo Pussy Ranch at The Physics Room, Christchurch. 15 November - 15 December 2007

Like many of the artists in the Gambia Castle group, Dan Arps in his installations is known for a freewheeling, unstructured mode of visual organisation that celebrates a lack of palpable order. As a dishevelled, freeform exhibtion, Gestapo Pussy Ranch is richly keyed into product that poses as process. The result is a funny, extremely wonky, satire on life management programmes - with personal coaches and analyses of interpersonal organising skills. Although the space is deliberately incongruous, with an old mattress, photographs of peculiar rituals in sleeping bags, cat boxes, scattered disintegrating clumps of straw, foil covered ventilation shutes, geometric forms made of twisted plant roots, surveillance cameras, and hilarious inverted pinup posters smeared with finger painting, the key elements seem to be a laminated pie chart and two typed lists of strategic corporate procedures. The project has an underpinning logic consistent with its brilliantly evocative title - from a Bret Easton Ellis novel - that suggests a Nazi brothel. Implying connections with Human Resource personnel perhaps.

Arps is a clever artist whose work is getting more interesting and less eclectic as his career progresses. He is moving away from his earlier Australian sources to developing his own sensibility. His humour is more hammy and anarchistic than the deceptively academic and systematic approach of Simon Denny, close to Tao Wells in its anarchistic mood, and though subtle, not understated like Nick Austin.

However, this is the sort of show you really have to negotiate yourself in terms of examining the elements, if you want to extract pivotal and considered components from the vaguely rhetorical and nihilistic elements. The anonymous blurb on the Physics Room website is depressingly uninformative and facile, clearly the result of being written long before the artist had decided what he would do in the space, and the images present with it give you no idea of the work’s experiential nature. Worth calling in and checking out for yourself, nevertheless.