Kate Brettkelly-Chalmers recently visited Sriwhana Spong's exhibition at Michael Lett

Sriwhana Spong: Channeling Mr B
Michael Lett
27 January - 6 March 2010

Dance has a remarkable ability to exist in the present moment. Blistered feet and hours of sweat soaked practice immediately give way to an instantaneous gesture, the fleeting yet brilliant moment in a performance when the body moves with perfect precision. Similarly, Sriwhana Spong’s latest film Costume for a Mourner offers moments of choreographed enchantment that are underpinned by a range of historical and legendary references. The film’s ballet dance is briefly and enjoyably captivating, but the multitude of conceptual references threaded throughout asks for a more lingering consideration from viewers.

Costume for a Mourner is the centrepiece of Spong’s first exhibition at Michael Lett gallery, Channeling Mr B. The film re-creates a small section of the ballet Le chant du Rossignol (The Song of the Nightingale) composed and choreographed by the legendary duo Igor Stravinsky and George Balanchine. It follows the performance of a solo dancer wearing a large black and white smock that expands and collapses with his movement. Spong’s beautifully realized film captures the momentary theatrical power of this choreography but also alludes to other narratives.

As the film’s title suggests, a sense of loss or distance from this ballet exists. Without any filmic documentation to work from, Spong has reconstructed Le chant du Rossignol from a contemporary standpoint, a position that can only rely on historical research, legend and anecdote. In this way, she has “re-imagined” a film that never was.

As with Spong’s earlier works, Costume for a Mourner owes as much to cinematic traditions as it does to theatre performance. It seems to sit somewhere in between the two, reminding us of the breathless physicality of cinema and offering a neat manifestation of the term jump cut. In this regard, I was disappointed that Spong had chosen the wall-mounted flat screen of a brightly lit gallery over a darkened cinematic space.

But perhaps that would be too much, too grand a statement. This show is about balance, after all. The hanging sculpture Field Figures finds a careful equilibrium in the combination of its components: circular and diamond steel shapes, blue squares of film filters and lengths of necklace chain. This balancing act is also echoed in the myriad of references Spong presents us with, from Balinese reverent offerings (the diamond and circle shapes which appear throughout the exhibition refer to Balinese visual traditions) to the Hans Christian Anderson parable of The Nightingale. Behind the physical immediacy of Spong’s sculpture and film lies a conceptual mesh of fact and fiction.

What is notable here is Spong’s use and incorporation of referenced material. In an environment where “research” is lauded and workbooks full of edifying clippings are held under the arm of every savvy art student, Spong does not go in for an information overload. Nor does she pepper her work with the ironic allusions or knowing winks of art practices that would have once been described as postmodern.

However, a danger still exists in this play of multiple citations. Spong is at risk of having these references simply bounce about like echoes in a cave without any substance. There is something critically hollow about this practice, but I think Spong has successfully avoided it. A kind of richness is emerging in her work: a carefully considered play of overlapping and interlocking themes. It is what happens when reference, research and citation are taken one step further, when something unique emerges. It is simply good choreography.

Nevertheless, I have a niggling feeling that Spong’s distinctiveness is having its edge taken off. For what it’s worth, Channeling Mr B felt like a “dealer show.” [Even as I tentatively write this statement I’m not sufficiently sure that I can describe what a “dealer show” is. But, this is precisely the point. Its meaning is currently in flux as the traditional differentiation of exhibition spaces in Auckland is changing. The ambition of many dealer shows over the past few years is challenging the standing, aspirations and resources of other galleries. Dealers are keeping up with the ambitions of their artists - as illustrated by Spong’s recent move from Anna Miles Gallery to Lett’s - and this is shifting our context for viewing art].

It was nice to have a breather from Michael Lett’s recent suite of block buster shows (Michael Parekowhai and Fiona Connor were memorable), and yet Spong’s peculiar charm seems a little clipped by the gallery’s tight ship aesthetic. The small photographic collages offering momentary glimpses of Balanchine’s historical legend were a little at odds with their large, gleaming white frames. Channeling Mr B is an elegant and perfectly materialized show, but sometimes greater or more interesting things come from the rough around the edges. It is a tricky balance and I am being a little pernickety here. Spong is on the brink of something great (no pressure!), let’s hope she gets a chance to spread her wings at Basel.

City keepsakes

For Keeps: Sampling recent acquisitions 2006-2009
Curated by Natasha Conland
New Gallery
18 June - 12 July 2009

In the upstairs part of the New Gallery Conland has prepared a snappily elegant new acquisitions show which looks spare and understated, but where there is a lot more work than you think. Some of it was purchased by AAG, much of it is loaned by the Chartwell Trust, and a few choice items were donated by the artists. The smallest work is a clay, spaghetti and putty concoction by Dan Arps and the largest ones by Michael Parekowhai (a fibreglass sculpture) and John Reynolds (a metallic and chroma spray painting). There are 26 artists here, including the Australian photographer Bill Henson who has a whole room to himself to display eight night-time images.

Here is the line-up: Vyasheslav Akhunov (Uzbekistan), Hany Armanious (Australia), Dan Arps, Nick Austin, Mladen Bizumic, Julian Dashper, Simon Denny, Denise Kum, Alicia Frankovich, Bill Hensen (Australia), Allan McDonald, Daniel Malone, Richard Maloy, Monique Jansen, Annette Messager (France), Dane Mitchell, Ryan Moore, Michael Parekowhai, Margaret Turner Petyarre (Australia), Layla Rudneva-Mackay, Marie Shannon, Sriwhana Spong, John Reynolds, The Estate of L. Budd, Sergey Tichina (Uzbekistan), and Rohan Wealleans. Note the paucity of artists from below the Bombay Hills. Zilch in fact. It is really a regional, not a national, focus. (Mind you Christchurch is the same, but they openly state it - as Collection Policy.)

I don’t think all the individual items are good (the Malone /Kum and Dashper videos pall quickly. They are irritatingly juvenile), but the work is hung really well, with lots of shrewd interconnections between the different projects. Some of the work here looks seductively beautiful in a way that was unapparent when it was first shown in a dealer gallery. For example: Dan Arps’ three works look particularly gorgeous with lots of room around them, especially a translucent pink anorak thrown onto a piece of polystyrene on the floor, and an inverted surfie poster gesturally activated with silver paint and goobers of smeared Blu-tack.

Nick Austin - Arps, Denny and Malone’s Gambia Castle colleague - has a set of delicate paintings of unmatched solo socks rendered with feathery brushstrokes on vertical sections of newspaper. It’s an amusing comment on the vagaries of washing machines and daily wear and tear.

The two collaborating Uzbekistan artists, Vyasheslav Akhunov and Sergey Tichina do well with two videos that were shown in the Turbulence Triennale. One work in particular about meditating or praying while pressing the body in inaccessible corners (high up in precarious ruins, or on top of ancient archways) is very simple, but with a lot of emotional power as bodily gesture.

Bill Henson’s haunting room of images features nocturnal landscapes and bungalows - with naked or semi-clad teenagers sexually experimenting in a darkened park, or riding BMXs. Each image is superbly staged and lit with shimmering pools of light, so that even a bare mud road looks sensational. The skinny, very delicate boys and girls look emotionally uninvolved, almost stunned in their indifferent embraces.

On one gallery wall Allan McDonald has eight images of illuminated opportunity shop ceilings – mainly with fluorescent fittings. They act as a reference for two Simon Denny photographs on the opposite wall of a framed poster he found in a Germany burger bar. It was of the Chrysler and Empire State buildings in New York. The poster was flanked by small neon tubes, so Denny has placed tubes in boxes with his own images in their deep frames, according to the angle of his camera to the original poster.

Of the other two walls of that room one has a set of three photos by Richard Maloy that show him with large plastic bags over his head, of different colours. The blue one resonates nicely with a Sriwhana Spong collage about Nijinsky on the far wall, where she has placed deep blue colour correction filters over a photocopied section of the great dancer’s biography.

What Conland has done with lights and colour as small details in one room she repeats with vertical columns of pencilled numbers in another. Monique Jansen’s gridded graph book with its skeletal rows and columns framing lines of removed squares has a line of scribbled numbers on one page. Similar numbers are found on the ‘blonded’ awning from The Estate of L. Budd, Unity of Appearance, on the opposite wall. With thin paint on its top surface and the original coloured stripes left underneath, it references conflicting interiorities, and the need for a self’s protection from social factors demanding consistency, ‘raining down’ upon them.

Like Budd’s wall projection, Julian Dashper and Rohan Wealleans’ paintings are remarkably evocative. Dashper has seven works in a row on one wall that seem to reference the letters of his own name. Most are linen stretchers stacked in multiples and reversed, but some are plastic records or tondos. Wealleans has only one work, a large white rectangle where the thin outer skin of paint has been cut away and pulled back to reveal chipped away stratified facets of solid white carved pigment, like geometric, crystalline mountain peaks.

It is good to see two Alicia Frankovich photographs from her earlier Starkwhite show presented here: images of a bunch of tomatoes hanging from a ceiling, and a strange rope ladder/hammock from which fabric is falling out at the top. These images were baffling at the time, but after her recent series of performances and talks they make a lot more sense with their references to height, gravity and temporary suspension.

Margaret Turner Petyarre’s work is unusual for Aboriginal dot painting. It looks from a distance like concentric circles made out of spiralling wire netting, but in fact is made up of thousands of small curved lines of ten dots each. These decrease in size from top to bottom and are carefully painted in position. The painting looks surprisingly industrial.

The Hany Armanious wall sculpture is a cast piece of polyurethane that looks like a battered slab of polystyrene, bearing patterned indentations from its past life as protective packing. It looks incongruous hanging on the wall, this chunk of foam plastic waste declaring itself to be art. Perhaps it should be leaning up from the floor.

One of the two main sculptures is a huge Michael Parekowhai dancer in a black leotard lying on the floor in a recovery position. She looks serene as she dominates the small gallery with considerable physical and psychological impact. The other large sculpture in another room is a Peter Robinson polystyrene work of crumbled blocks and flowing cascading chains, a brilliant work in its invention and exploration of a new materiality, and its evocation of lichen or grass covered rocks and hairy animals.

Auckland Art Gallery has a great display here of its new contemporary acquisitions (and I’ve picked out a few samples) but it needs a catalogue of some kind for the public to take home and read. Much of this art also needs skilled explanations in special artist folders to help win the venue new audiences, for the wall labels aren’t sufficient. If ARTSPACE has a reading room, then why not AAG where the need is far more pronounced? They should throw away the junk-filled card and wrapping paper shop downstairs and give the public the educational facility they need.

This is an excellent show, yet oddly it is only up for a month. Make sure you see it.

From top to bottom, the images are by Henson, McDonald, Spong, The Estate of L. Budd, Dashper, Parekowhai and Robinson.

Nine miles apart

Group Show: Christmas Party
Anna Miles
27 November - 20 December 2008

This show of nine Anna Miles artists has a dense (but not distracting) salon hang of mostly small works. There are also other items in the drawer cabinet and table, and on the lightboxes between the windows.

As the title suggests the exhibition has a celebratory air – but no thematic focus. Few Xmas shows do.

Personally for me, the biggest surprises are the large Kim Meeks’ works that are earlier than his recent show. They have obvious affinities with Andrew McLeod and Gavin Hipkins with their use of sourcing book illustration and fine digital detailing, and much more concise than his colour work.

Janet Green’s urns impress with their simple shapely elegance and delicate, almost translucent colouration, while Richard Stratton’s ceramics, through ornate, don’t cloy but amuse through an insistently light but bold graphic touch.

The circular images by innovative photographer Darren Glass show his use of motion to create blurry spirals. They coincidentally seem related to Paul Hartigan’s recent neon sculpture, but are mysterious as traces.

Sriwhana Spong’s flat lacquer ornaments, with bits of embedded mirror and chain, are refreshingly organic and unpristine. Their squashed, casual lumpiness gives them an aesthetic of manual vulgarity that stands out in Miles’ gallery, an unexpected but scintillating crudeness.

Works illustrated – descending from top to bottom - are by Octavia Cook, Kim Meeks, Janet Green, Richard Stratton (urn and plate), and Darren Glass.

More Spong

Swriwhana Spong: Solar Midnight
Anna Miles
1 October - 25 October 2008

Hot on the heels of her recent Newcall gallery show we have this new presentation from Sriwhana Spong. This one has some of the same hanging beaded thread sculpture and blobby lacquered fetish panels as Newcall, but there are also other new mobiles, collages and digital photographs referencing the great Russian dancer Vaslav Nijinsky.

Overall, though wider in thematic content, this display suffers from the limitations of Anna Miles’ awkwardly cramped and distracting, glary windowed space. A lot of the work does not succeed visually, especially the collages on cardboard and free-hanging mobiles which seem compositionally indecisive and don’t draw you in. The new video in particular is indulgently solipsistic in its referencing of Javanese artefacts in some American museums - blurrily filmed with a furtive pinhole camera as some kind of pathetic protest at having cameras officially banned.

Of all the items presented, the lacquer focussed projects work best – like in the Newcall show. Old 78 rpm records have been melted down to make black paint that’s been applied thickly to wooden struts or panels, or thinly to filmy muslin shawls. Spong’s puddle-shaped blobby forms hold assorted items like poppy seeds, hairclips, mirror fragments, butts, chains, pins and thread within their hardened viscous ooze, and allude to the eclipse of the show’s title and Nijinsky himself. Being from records, the paint has an implied aural and historical component conceptually built in.

Particularly striking is Spong’s new use of blue filters, which brings an air of melancholy to her photographs and collages, linking them in mood to Joseph Cornell or Lindy Lee, and of course, Nijinsky’s own depression and mental collapse.

The links Spong makes connecting the Russian dancer’s hand movements, in the photos of her collages, with Javanese performers help a little to explain her interest in him, though one wonders how far the thematic links extend with the painted lacquer. Is the music linked to Diaghilev’s productions that Nijinsky danced to in the melted grooves of the black puddles? How tight is the significance of the history of the particular items (not substances) in grasping the nuances of Spong’s collected assortments. How focussed are the details? Perhaps I am being too literal in such a narrative based interpretation?

Spong sculptures

Sriwhana Spong: Backdrop
Newcall, Auckland
July 22 – August 9, 2008

I’ve always thought the New Zealand art world has been somewhat gullible in its rapid embrace of Sriwhana Spong’s videos, works particularly eclectic in their use of techniques by Lynch and Hitchcock, dropped into a Balinese context and plonked into poorly thought out installations of badly made props (as in her Turbulence ARTSPACE show).

However this artist learns fast, and her Newcall show has no moving image at all but some nicely made wall works and minimal sculptures. There is also a collaborative musical work (based on birds on telephone lines providing a musical score, an old Fluxus idea). Now she seems more in control of what she is doing. Her placement of elements seems more exact.

Most of the exhibition features lacquer in various forms, and is in fact a sort of meditation on it and shellac as substances. Both varnish products were once derived from lac, a resin found in certain beetles, but today the more durable lacquer is a nitrocellulose polymer that is dissolvable in certain solvents, and shellac the insect product once commonly used to make 78 records. Vinyl was invented in 1935, but shellac was used for records till the fifties, with some factories continuing in non-western countries till the seventies.

Some of Spong’s works are wooden panels, stained with dissolved shellac (from records), and sometimes combined with small make-up paintings. Others are rolled up balls (from melted pieces of records) placed in a chalk circle on the floor, but most impressive are two shiny black puddle shapes on the wall. Into these lac fetish objects have been set elements found in her earlier installations and videos: cigarettes, pins, string, cinnamon sticks, silver foil, burnt matches, necklace chains, bobby clips, pencil leads.

Two other works use rows of small tubular glass beads threaded on to nylon in a way similar to her use of strings of cigarettes in previous exhibitions. In one work four highly reflective lines make up a square cross-sectioned vertical column. In another, ‘Symphonic Variations’ (like the image on the invite) a curtainlike arrangement of overlapping parabolas and black beaded lines is suspended from the ceiling to make a ‘musical’ drawing in space.

Nice to see Spong’s various spatial explorations in this show. I enjoyed its understatement. Lots of air.