Unusual drawings

Peter Gibson Smith: Buried
Bath St Gallery
31 March - 24 April 2010

At Bath St, Peter Gibson Smith presents nine landscapes that are startlingly distinctive as images. They look like antique photographs that close up appear to have been made into line engravings and then transferred on to thin paper sheets supported by curved cross-sections of balsa and cardboard bracing.

Most of these works are in two or three vertical sections butted together. They have alternating curved ends that either project out into the room, or else bend towards the wall. These generate shadows that tonally liven up the austere fissure lined volcanic backgrounds of the work, for these pale landscapes incorporate famous Burton Brothers photographs of bare tephra-caked hills just after the 1886 Mt.Tarawera eruption. In their centres they have superimposed dramatic images of ancient monuments or earlier Gibson Smith sculptures.

The artist has digitally bended these images together, often including small human forms, or ladders constructed from HB pencils - with shadows. There is a reflexive humour here because these scanned images are in fact drawn with a computer using parallel pencil lines. They are then coated with brown encaustic that softens the pencil tones by mottling and darkening the graphite hatching. Sometimes rare touches of colour are added to the paper surface, or painted on the sides.

Because the paper is thin and stretched over the ribbed struts of the balsa stretcher, the delicate waxy images look, and are, frail, with the supporting trellis being clearly detectable behind the marks. The pencil lines are horizontal and vertical in the pale grey zones, with gaps along the lengths and spatial variations sometimes between them. Like a printing method, extra diagonal hatching is superimposed for the darker areas.

All this makes Gibson Smith’s images intriguing. They are haunting in a classic surrealist sense; a landscape hybrid of Max Ernst and Joel Peter Witkin. This is easily the best work of his career so far, possibly because he is avoiding colour (for which in my view he has no aptitude) but also because there is a relaxed looseness about the blotchy forms and overlaid rectangles. They are ambiguous spatially and far less fiddly than his previous projects.

Although there is an amusing logic in his rendering of massive monuments on wobbly paper on fragile supports, the fact they are in sections is a weakness – creating an irritating distraction through their painted edges. The vertical divisions seem to be the result of the width limitations of his drawing machine.

Where Gibson Smith succeeds is in establishing a humour where the works appear at a distance to be screened photographs sourced from museum collections. As mentioned, the precision and regularity of the pencil lines are akin to line engravings, though he teases with methods of registration too by having some layers of dark hatching deliberately out of sync.

I personally tend to be indifferent to technical innovation - because that aspect is invariably besides the point with good art - but these images do fascinate as complex systems of rendered marks, and as dreamlike narratives. Their programming makes them distantly related to Simon Ingram with his ‘robot’ painting, and also Stephen Greenwood, an artist who exhibited the products of his drawing machine in Christchurch’s Gingko gallery in the mid-eighties. (Before computers were available, he invented a machine that used an electric eye to scan still lifes, rendering them with horizontal lines made with coloured marker pens.)

With Gibson Smith the ominous darker works are especially memorable, especially a small image of some rocks (and ghostly traces of an airborne contraption) in a cloud-filled sky, and two large drawings, one of a shed-like, ruined arch of stacked books, the other of a statue of a lion attacking a horse (related to George Stubbs).

The method of mark making builds on their enigmatic character by amplifying the oddness of the shockingly destroyed New Zealand landscape now coping with new unexpected insertions dropped into its midst. It makes compelling viewing to see drawing, photography, painting and sculpture blended in such an innovative fashion.

Playing chasing with paint

Simon Ingram and James Cousins: TAG
Gow Langsford
9 January - 23 January 2010

This is a clever idea: putting Simon Ingram’s complex systems but optically stable results alongside James Cousins' comparatively simple processes and convulsively frenetic outcomes; especially if the two painters (two friends who share the same dealer) play chasing (or tag wrestling) with application techniques, darting around each other’s inversely related work methods – testing unexpected approaches and extrapolating out and around their regular procedures.

We have here eight experimental works sorted into four sets of two. Because the artists have organised the hang so their work goes abbabaab, no one personality dominates. Ingram (a) leads in from the left, Cousins (b) from the right.

So after deciding to start from Gow Langsford's street front window and move in pairs towards the inner space, the first two we find deal with over and under the grid or the applied masking tape. Cousins’ Closed Cast has its zigzagging, spastic masking tape configuration left intact with its chromatically modulated plane of brown and blue paint lying on top undisturbed. What lies underneath is a mystery. Could even be the same colours.

Ingram’s much smaller, earlier work nearby, Empire, suggests this might be the case. His rule based grids of wee squares have the same colours applied underneath and on top, with some rectangular edges crisp and clean, others wobbly and covered by brushmarks.

The second two paintings play with movement. Ingram’s Untitled has its yellow daubs of oil paint disturbed by a bumped canvas while his Lego robot is actually applying the pigment. The support is methodically manipulated by hand in conjunction with the activity of the machine.

Cousins’ accompanying YF4 is wild. He has taken the masking tape off and while the surrounding top coat is still wet, and frenetically agitated it with a brush – blending it into the underlying layer. The angular masked lines are mixed with a more fluid tumbling movement.

The third pair look at subtractive and additive processes. Ingram’s Riser has thick red paint applied on to a linen stretcher on which is drawn a pencilled grid. In some areas that paint has been later removed with turps so you can detect white squares beneath and blue underpainting.

Cousins’ nearby pink Drought is a lot simpler. An L-shaped blue line follows the left and bottom edges while in the top left-hand corner a large square of blue paint has been blurrily removed.

The last couple of works look at manual application. In Jardin Moderne, Ingram has made a series of dramatically sweeping red diagonal and horizontal lines brushed on by hand and not using his robot. It looks like a very delicate Franz Kline.

In response Cousins has added an extra layer of thick yellow paint over an old work completed two years previously, so you can see slivers of the earlier painting peeking through at the stretcher edges. The sticky oily pigment of Cool Yellow has been applied vigorously and agitated with a narrow brush.

This exhibition is the start of a new Initiative series for Gow Langsford, one devoted to experimental painting projects. It’s a great idea. If they are all as good as this, we have a lot to look forward to.

As Simon Ingram’s show at Gow Langsford continues,

more and more works are being painted by his system of robots, replacing the original ‘manual application’ paintings on the walls, and resulting in an unexpected diversity of mark and spatial form types.

Both method sorts look good, but they do buy into the ‘retinality’ that Duchamp, for one, despised. Clearly they are meant to be about so much more, but the sense of shallowness is because (in my opinion) Ingram makes no intelligent use of the convention of titling. As ‘games with rules’ the details are not publicly elucidated as they could – and I believe should – be. A conceptual artist like Christopher Williams, for example, puts all particulars necessary for a viewer’s grasping of the making process behind his photographic images onto labels, and Ingram clearly needs to do likewise. Without that information lucidly presented alongside the paintings, they remain ‘eye candy’.

The trouble is that to do this Ingram has to reveal that not all his paintings (esp. the hand-painted ones) are programmatic. Indeed some are impulsive, where he got bored with a system, changed his mind, and switched to a new process. That is why I acerbically said in one of my comments that he was a ‘closet’ de Kooning. To quickly change course is like a gestural mark reflexly flipped by the arm into a new direction. It is emotional, bodily and unthinking.

In my comments I also said that Ingram fed drawings into the programme. He has quite reasonably pointed out to me that is a mistake and very misleading. In fact, the image above (from the invite) shows part of the on-going process on the LCD screen after the ‘game’ rules have been set up in the programming of the robot. This blue-lined image however seems to be a red herring that muddys the conceptual waters behind Ingram’s methodology. Better, maybe, not to show it.

I have written this second post because this is an excellent, constantly evolving exhibition to visit, think and write about. I wanted to clarify my thoughts about the processes and end results here.

Yummo retinality

Simon Ingram: Boing Boom Tschak
Gow Langsford
4 February - 28 February 2009

Last year I stamped my feet and had a little tantrum about Simon Ingram’s work - saying his two lines of enquiry undermine each other. I said Kiwi artists don’t have the nerve of Europeans to make consistently rigorous work. If only he’d just stick to the machines.

I was right in what I argued and it still applies now. Because this show looks intriguingly gutsy, with each ‘manual’ painting drawing you in closer to admire their complicated composition, and because the ideas of placement, shape or hue are not laid out with clarity in the titles or within the visually detectable structure of the marks, he is clearly not a conceptual artist. These works are tweaked to look good.

Having said that, Ingram can claim this is a seductive show and not blush. These paintings are visually and spatially fascinating and designed to sell. And what is a ‘conceptual artist’ anyway? Such creatures are extremely hard to identify – for the more research one does within recent literature on the subject and its history, the more you discover just how fragmented and disparate the varieties of ‘conceptualism’ are, and how many of the artists linked to the term disagree.

Interspersed amongst the ‘pretty’ works Ingram has a number of large linen canvases set up with rails aligned at their edges so that his robotic gizmos can work away, applying paint over the duration of this show. That will be interesting to watch, even though he does not tell us in his gallery statement what formulas guide these performances. And how they differ from work to work. Their rationales appear to be over convoluted and can’t be expressed simply. That’s a weakness.

I also know that Ingram, like me, loves a good argument. (He is giving a public talk on Thursday at 6.30). I am confident he will respond to these words, and look forward to the unfolding of the exhibition and the discussion it generates.


7/2/09
When you see the machine applying paint to the linen it intrigues because the technical process (as recently developed by Ingram) looks so fluid and spontaneous. The robot really does appear to be thinking, even though Ingram has figured out a compositional drawing beforehand that is a rough basis of what is to come. The machine provides entertainment as a performer, though it is in essence a tool like any other implement in the artist's studio.

The results, what of them? Well hopefully we can judge at the end of the show, provided Ingram doesn't vet them and leave only the aesthetically pleasing ones. It would be a shame if he made the selection purely subjective and unexplained. The process for both types of work is still kept hidden, for the formulaic details are not made public in the works' titles. Unfortunately this keeps the project trivial because all Ingram seems to want in the end is to make seductive saleable canvases. The titles could really elucidate the so-called 'decision making' of the machine, unlike some of the manual works where the artist got bored in mid-stream and changed his procedure.

Three by three

Julian Dashper: 1994, 2001, 2008
Simon Ingram: 1996, 2002, 2008
Salvatore Panatteri: 1998, 2003, 2008
Newcall
18 September - 6 October 2008

This unusual show of two Kiwis and an Aussie consists of three works for each artist. Dashper, the eldest of the three, has his works spaced seven years apart; Ingram the middle guy, has six years between each; and Panatteri (from Sydney) the ‘baby’, five years separation. Pretty clever.

The great thing is that within each year the artists have chosen their pieces carefully. The nine items though varied, really resonate and interconnect. All three artists are interested in conceptualism, monochromes and photography, though two technically are painters and the other uses photographic processes instead of pigment or canvas.

Panatteri has a large square piece of blue card that is in fact a protective layer covering light sensitive paper. It is called Untitled (Infinite Monochrome Black for Kazmir Malevich) and plays off against Ingram’s Spirit Level Painting, a yellow square fastened to a yellow vertical spirit level. Both works converse with Dashper’s Untitled (Self portrait as French Peasant) – a pair of small stretchers sandwiched together in a double thickness.

Another work of Dashper’s is a horizontal and vertical bar leaning against the wall as a potential ‘half’ painting. It reflects a work of Panatteri’s that consists of two thin brown triangles that seem identical but which are not. They are positioned to imply a third negative triangle placed between them, and are made of exposed photographic paper. Their shaped sharp edges catch the room’s fluorescent light, and are called Untitled (Incandescent series II).

This is an elegant understated show, perfectly installed in Newcall’s T-shaped room. Perhaps the work’s materials could have been listed in the catalogue in greater detail – the information is a bit skimpy and sometimes doesn’t really explain the production processes clearly. Nevertheless, the show is an exceptionally fine one.

Robot Daubers on Film

Simon Ingram - Drawing for an autopoetical painting: Monochrome in C (2005) with Monochrome in K (2008)
A Centre for Art, Level 3, Rm 5 Achilles House
21 August - 6 September 2008

Here we have videos of two Simon Ingram paintings being made by his programmed Lego robot devices. One is part of a piece of sculpture now, shown on the installed box monitor on the floor. The show's title is floor sculpture's name - note, not the name of the actual painting that was made.

The other work, Painting Assemblage No.6 is from last year’s Adam Art Gallery group show Four Times Painting. You can see a similar version on YouTube with a sumptuous soundtrack from the Dead C. In the ACFA version that's on a monitor fixed to the wall, the movement of the machine’s descending paint-loaded platform is slow and hauntingly beautiful. Sometimes the horizontal bars have a blurred ghosting effect, as if the movement trips, stops, reverses and then readvances to progress. It looks like a cleaning box on the side of a huge building and has a futuristic Sci/Fi feel. Nice cinema.

The earlier work is more a piece of sculpture, with the monitor placed on the floor and a shiny black monochrome placed opposite the screen, tilting away at the top to lean against a wall. If you stand over the monitor and look down onto the canvas you can see the moving video. The details are hard to decipher and the suggestion is that the shiny canvas is the actual support that the programmed robot is working on. If so the work is reflexive, cleverly documenting its own manufacture.

I really like the graininess of the later work. The movement is sensual and hypnotic, and the dark brown of the filmed linen locks well into the ACFA environs and decor. One small gripe: a handout on the two paintings (and the notion of ‘autopoietical’) would have been useful.