Intriguing tension

Boris Dornbusch: Phantom Limb Construction Sites
Starkwhite
31 March - 1 May 2010

‘Phantom limbs’ are those invisible legs that amputees feel are still attached to their bodies and which provide sensations of pain or itching. The legs or arms don’t exist yet the neural systems within the brain don’t seem to acknowledge the original limb’s separation and absence. They create illusions which are related to other sensations of music and taste that can be generated through exposed surfaces of the brain being stimulated with electricity or chemicals.

With his ‘construction sites’ Boris Dornbusch appears to be referring to the Duchampian notion of the viewer creating a large part of the artwork themselves; that they actively participate in the conceptual construction of the art. Their mental creativity generates meanings that almost like a sticky substance attach themselves invisibly to the object of their attention.

Dornbusch here has come up with an exceptionally clever and evocative title, yet strangely very little of the actual art fits in with the ambiguity of the Duchampian concept. Instead of being open-ended and welcoming of mixed interpretations, almost all works are tightly thought through, and seem the opposite. They provide definite clues that anticipate the ‘correct’ answers of these riddlelike artworks.

With these two types - decipherable puzzles that tease with ‘crackable’ codes, and works that are vaguer and which generate more ‘poetic’ impressions – there appears to be little overlap. One is viewer-driven whilst the other is artist-based and more controlling of possible readings, with certain correlations that have high priority. Artist and viewer in other words compete over imaginative control of the work’s meaning.

For ten chosen works Dornbusch has a wide array of clues carefully laid out for his well–educated audience. Two pieces are based on art historical references. Clear Moods and Crashpad (right door) allude to Malevich’s famous perpendicular black square and tilted white one - with jokes about Malevich’s paintings being vandalised by the art-going public. In Dornbusch’s versions one is liable to be scratched by opening car doors or Starkwhite’s audience running up the stairs, and the other they walk over coming in the door.

Three others use semantic logic and witty paradox. In In almost every season there can be a singular moment when something unexpected fails to materialise the title contradicts itself, an unopened canvas is shown facing the wall and a Braille text is screened off and made unusable by a sheet of Perspex.

Skalinada is similar. It shows a b/w photocopy of two dark derelict skyscrapers in the Dalmatian city of Split. They look joined but ‘split’ and the paper has tearable tags on its bottom edge with vertical cuts. The tile refers to an internationally famous Croatian pop song and the sheet is attached to the wall with sickly bubblegum.

The third work coded in this way is Fighting An Old Problem. On a white jersey tied around a column, Dornbusch has painted a white jersey with a sweaty armpit and more importantly, short and long sleeves. They allude to the difficulty of putting on the garment while the sleeves are tangled.

Three other works have a logic that is media-based.

Directions for a Visiting Friend shows us a makeshift map of Berlin or Split (the two cities where Dornbusch lives) made by photographing objects on a kitchen table placed in a ‘cartographic’ diagrammatic arrangement. This photograph has been made into a paper photocopy and then folded like a store-bought city street-map. It’s very witty.

Slow Change presents an image on a LCD of three coin impressions fading from the palm of Dornbusch’s hand. The title refers to digital motion on a DVD, the difficulty of retaining cash, and the fading of ink in photocopies.

With 330 ml we see a running tap recorded on a short DVD loop. Because it is in Auckland, the water is paid for by the user, so Dornbusch amusingly has an energy meter fitted to the gallery power point to show the running costs to Starkwhite.

One large ‘blank’ sheet of white PVC features the use of vernacular language - like you would find in a cryptic crossword. The unfinished title The great white is completed by a tiny painted shark you have to look for, under a horizontal slit.

The tenth work involves the phenomenon of ekphrasis where words are used to describe a visual artwork and even replace it. In this case Dornbusch has written out a line from a Sonic Youth song that describes a paintable vista featuring foreground, figures, and trees used as compositional framing devices. He has translated A view through the trees to a couple standing in the snow into Braille and you can touch the embossed aluminium. However you don’t need to because the title tells you roughly what to visualise in the scene. The details of what you mentally see fit in perfectly with Duchamp’s theory, as you yourself provide the descriptive particulars for a sentence that is essentially vague.

Good art doesn’t have to be brainy, and often intellectual artists make work that is infuriatingly smug and convolutingly rarefied –particularly if the display is short on sensual appeal. Such art needs a carrot to draw the audience in, so that the ideas and materials strike an emotional chord that makes the work memorable and not sterile.

With Dornbusch, the fascinating exhibition title sets the scene for how you receive the display. Some items are indisputably one liners but that is not necessarily a bad thing. A good idea that is very simple can linger long in the imagination and provide continual pleasure and engagement.

So while this show at first glance does seem to be too cool for words, it is not really that icy. It will reward a couple of visits as various cross links – often to do with tactility – readily become apparent. Dornbusch’s ideas become much clearer in a solo presentation, far better than in say, previous Starkwhite group exhibitions. Here, with a little patience and a close examination of the printed list of works, patterns become detectable.

Urban panoramas from Shanghai

Jin Jiangbo: Shanghai, Ye! Shanghai,
Starkwhite
15 February – 20 March 2010

With a population of over 20 million, Shanghai is the most enormous of Chinese cities, one of the largest metropolitan areas in the world. In 73 days it launches World Expo 2010, the largest event in China since the 2008 Olympics. Currently in Starkwhite the Chinese installation and multi-media artist Jin Jiangbo has presented a set of eight panoramic images of this city, the images the result of digitally enhanced, medium format, analogue photographs.

Since 2007 Jiangbo has been creating works like the series The Great Economic Retreat, which scoffed at the notion of China’s ‘economic miracle’ and examined the fragility of the labour market, notably the consequences of corporations moving their enterprises around in search of the cheapest labour source possible - and the devasting effect that has on the migrant labour supply. He recorded the architectural detritus left when such factories are abandoned.

Last year he came to New Zealand as a recipient of the Govtt-Brewster Art Gallery’s International Artist Residency Programme and made work for a New Plymouth show using the dilapidated freezing works and processing plant (now recently demolished) at Patea that closed in the early eighties as a consequence of Britain entering the EEC.

The Shanghai images at Starkwhite are a stark contrast to the hauntingly quiet Patea photographs of rural isolation. They are taken from much higher elevations and are more spectacular as outdoor vistas of urban chaos. These large (but not huge, as Jiangbo's work can be) smokey blue-grey images, with their tightly controlled, muted colours, look like the results of some sort of camera obscura or ancient plate camera, with their softly darkening edges. They are a blend of fact with fiction. Despite their initial use of film, many are not strictly documentation – some elements are digitally repeated or distorted - though you might be easily fooled into not noticing that.

Packed with detail, Jiangbo’s delicately hued panoramas raise questions about a manic building programme that is being propelled along to reach the Expo deadline - ripping down whole suburbs to erect new architectural marvels for a potentially profitable, but temporary, fair. They examine the global recession and its consequences on the Chinese industrial landscape, critiquing the ruthless destruction implemented in the communist government’s pursuit of capitalist prosperity. Within these stunning panoramas the glories of contemporary architecture linger in the distance, while it is ruins and collapsed structures that we tend to scrutinise close-up.

What is interesting is that the Chinese government helped Jiangbo create these strangely moving images, assuming he would be glorifying the economic growth, and giving him easy access to construction sites and demolished city blocks, as well as remarkable vantage points like the tops of arched, steel-girdered bridges. It is a double game because contemporary art is now a highly profitable and respected industry in China.

Two vertical photographs by the Starkwhite office look at the Bund, the old part of Shanghai, now thoroughly modernised with colourful modernist buildings and towers on a bank of the Huangpo River.

The more common horizontal images are surprisingly varied. One has no people in it at all, another has distorted walls and tilted towers, while another still is almost perfectly symmetrical. They intrigue because of their hybrid technologies – imagine Laurence Aberhart combined with Andreas Gursky. Yet the result is an aura of romantic nostalgia mixed with an acerbic attack on economic ‘realism’.

Jiangbo is known primarily for his skill in multi-media. He has a reputation as a New Media wizard with an ability to create electronic spectacles to entertain large audiences, so this sort of show is quite modest - almost subdued - as a static, non-interactive display. It is immensely subtle work, chromatically and philosophically, requiring careful looking. It's sensational, but quiet and dignified.

Thank you Starkwhite and the artist for the images.

Vaguer than nebulous

Jim Speers: Crystal Spirit
Starkwhite
21 November - 24 December 2009

We have here an enigmatic but ambitious installation of fourteen images under glass on the walls of Starkwhite’s large downstairs gallery. Elam lecturer Speers has also added a new white vinyl–covered floor on which he has placed converging red, white and blue lines, disappearing into a corner.

The odd floor design could be referring to the diminishing economic and political power of the U.S.A. while the exhibition’s title seems to be alluding to a George Orwell poem about an Italian soldier slain in the Spanish Civil war, where the last two lines go: no bomb that ever burst shatters the crystal spirit. Plus the different glassed-over images could be interpreted as faceted planes in a crystal.

The language within the images and title is rich in other references too, varying from football clubs, rock bands, methamphetamine use and Allan Smith to John Steinbeck’s non-fiction book, The Log of the Sea of Cortez which involved a marine–specimen expedition made in the waters of California in 1940. It is really an inventory of footnotes Speers expects you to figure out (Google each listed phrase perhaps?) and structure into some overarching cohesive sense, like a detective.

In other words the specific meaning of these framed factory photographs, Elsworth Kelly-like abstractions, snippets of text, and images of the sea and sunken ships, is calculatedly obscure - a tease. It is part poem and part encyclopedia with its many fragments of image, sentence and word. These juxtaposed visual, historical and verbal allusions are all geared up to both frustrate and pleasantly evoke.

But evoke what? About two thirds of the individual images are sufficiently compellingly on their own to hold your interest as you try to guess their origins. These, those of the sea and factory machinery especially - would look good in isolation.

Unfortunately the total experience for the viewer falls flat. There doesn’t seem to be enough cohesive focus to consistently engage an audience so that they really want to construct their own speculative account. The images end up too psychologically detached because of their size, lacking the impact that say Gavin Hipkins’ banner photographs had in the same space a couple of years ago - and the slashing trail of ‘American’ colours diagonally traversing the gallery (as if passing through a prism) isn’t sufficient to centre the visitor’s experience.

It is all too disparate and dryly cerebral, without sufficient physical (and emotional) involvement. Plenty of crystal; not enough spirit.

Love is just a four lettered word

Derrick Cherrie
Starkwhite
2 November - 28 November 2009

Derrick Cherrie is most well known for his series of witty furniture sculptures (Supraluxe Suite,1992) that slickly blended beds, swimming pools and gymnasium accoutrements into hybrid, body-sized, fetish objects. (The funniest, most entertaining sculptures ever created in this country, in my opinion.) His new show at Starkwhite’s backroom annex is infinitely more serious, though in parts, hinting he still has his tongue firmly in his cheek.

Framed two dimensional collages, with a surprisingly raw and gritty finish, these wall images make acerbic comments on the institution of marriage as perpetuated by romantic love – more specifically its commodification. The six works on paper, made with glossy pages from bridal gown catalogues, cigarettes, plastic gold-sprayed chains, and rendered peace logos and cagelike trellises, give out hard-hitting messages - firmly rejecting ideals of eternal conjugal devotion. The notion of a continuing partnership is rejected not so much for widely accepted, commonsense reasons like the fact that people change, but because for it to succeed, it involves the attendant proviso of male compromise.

The work seems antifeminist because there is no woman’s voice expressed. KING is an oft repeated noun here, and in one work, behind a heart of chain are the words HE WEARS. It seems to be angrily lashing out at loss of masculine sovereignty. If love and marriage go together like a horse and carriage, Cherrie’s horse swiftly ends up as dog tucker and the carriage, as splinters and kindling. His assault is merciless.

So much so, you wonder: (a.) Is this personal and genuinely emotive? Some hitherto private unhappiness in Cherrie’s own domestic relationship that’s bubbled to the surface. Or is it really (b.) just an abstract concept, a meditative art work about the ideas behind marriage, putting forward a ‘male viewpoint’ to generate debate – with no biographical input at all. Maybe it is about marriage’s marketing and selling to women. The consumerist side of public vow-taking that many men aren’t so enthusiastic about.

Or is it perhaps (c.) some much broader sociological statement about the institution; an anthropological examination of those human behavioural mores that underpin the social structure of families? Or is it (d.) - as part of the Starkwhite exhibition blurb suggests - really a specifically honed critique of the Eurocentric tradition of bridal glamour in high fashion? Or a homosexual attack on the heterosexual convention - when exclusive.

Like Bob Dylan with his song title that I head this review with, is Cherrie being ironic or deadly serious? Perhaps he is having a laugh at the artworld’s eager propensity for gossip and scandal? Hoping that his audience reads the work as somehow confessional and misogynistic. And that his partner will find it a bit of a hoot too?

According to Wayne C. Booth (A Rhetoric of Irony, Chicago 1974) and his analysis, for irony to be grasped it must have clues inserted by the artist; signposts that through calculated contradiction state to the viewer – ‘don’t take all that is before you at face value.’

There seems to me to be at least two distancing devices within Cherrie’s imagery: the Longbeach and Holiday cigarettes that he uses to write ‘King’ or render spiked dog-collars, and the lavender paint already alluded to (as a homosexual colour code) used in the top half of one work. To my knowledge (and general art-public knowledge too I think) neither he or his partner is gay or smoke, so these codes are deliberately placed to separate artist from art, as well as to enrich the theoretical content. Cigarettes could mean ‘love addiction’ and fear of loneliness, their brand names allude to honeymoons, and lavender could mean bisexual (‘pink’ and ‘blue’ mixed) non-marital distractions.

There are other possible meanings too. The spunk-like silicone portcullis of overlapping inverted and upright hearts present in one image could, like the cigarettes, refer to Stephen Heath’s famous essay The Sexual Fix and his discussion of our society’s construction of the desire for romance. It could also refer to Norman Mailer’s anti-feminist book The Prisoner of Sex.

Cherrie has created a clever exhibition that teases his audience on an autobiographical and anti-progressive level (if they want it), while providing other alternative examinations of philosophical and social issues too (if they want those instead). Much like his Supraluxe sculptures in fact – but with greater ambiguity and not so immediate experientiality. This work is more obviously coded, more complicated because of its back flips. Ostensibly it is angry not cool. You spot a trope and have to pause to evaluate if the work is joking or serious, is it from the viewpoint of an unreconstructed redneck or a SNAG? It forces you to mentally engage.

Bloodless

Richard Orjis
Starkwhite
12 October - 7 November 2009

Richard Orjis is well known for his luscious coloured photographs that with their botanical props and oil-stained faces, are half portraits, half still lives. This show has the orchids as images, but it is in essence an installation, and the photographs are black and white.

The exhibition shows Orjis moving away from the overt theatricality and chromatic and tactile sensuality of his earlier photography to attempt something new. It is comparatively austere in its lack of colour and more about process as an image, rather than process as content or an ongoing sequence of events. It is a sort of contemplative tableau, an arrangement of symbolic props to be pondered over.

Central to the display is a circular podium on which is presented a fake gym with a weight-lifting bench, a stand for bodybuilding gear, and assorted barbells on the floor. These are all made of wood, painted white and on the night of the opening they served as supports for burning candles. Molten white wax has therefore poured down their sides and set hard.

On the nearby Starkwhite walls are three black and white photographs. One is of dispersing wisps of smoke, and the two others are of orchids – as young, unflowered, leafy bulbs in rows in a nursery, and later as fully developed blooms. On another wall is a large disc painted gold that is slightly smaller than the circular stand for the mock gym.

So what is Orjis up to with this array of symbols that he clearly wants the visitor to decode. In this puzzle, how do the various components interconnect?

First of all the photographed smoke could be candle derived, as an evaporating or disappearing gaseous substance, and the two discs some sort of alchemical process, with the smaller one ending up as condensed gold – residue from some sort of distillation perhaps?

The presence of the candle wax implies stasis and inertia over a fixed period of time. So with the gym symbolism, the implied ‘no pain no gain’ ethos is thwarted. The gold is not attainable. Unlike the orchid bulbs that eventually over time reach a state of bloom, the process necessary to reach that goal has not begun. The sequential chain of causal events has not been kick started.

Orjis here seems to be thinking about human agency and drive. The fact that the candle flame could incinerate the gym implies perhaps that ambition is useless and that maybe passivity (even fatalism) is a good thing. There is a strange conceptual oscillation going on in this work where a certain path is embraced, rejected, and then advocated again, then re-rejected.

While this wavering idea is intriguing, this show is missing something visually. It doesn’t have that necessary finish that Orjis normally has to resolve the whole project in a compelling way. This could be because there is a tackiness about the wooden gym that extends to the golden disc. It might be deliberate, but even his black and white photographs (especially the orchids) lack memorable impact.

Here I’m guessing, but Orjis seems to be resisting his natural inclinations for full throttle sensuality – as if by wanting his work to be ‘conceptual’ he is frightened of being too visually seductive. Yet many conceptualists, from Kosuth to Apple, don’t hesitate to use visual seduction to draw their audiences in towards their ideas.

It’s an odd show, disappointingly anaemic but admittedly adventurous with the tropes which were always in his colour photography anyway. It’s clever but dry. It doesn’t thrill.

Between Culture and Nature

Stella Brennan: The Middle Landscape
Starkwhite
7 September – 3 October 2009

This installation by Stella Brennan features three nylon tents - two of which have videos on large screens playing inside them - surrounded by layers of damp gardening bark. The work references an earlier polystrene ‘igloo’ she installed at RAMP a few years ago. The star though, despite the moving images, sound and sculptural form, is the sweet smell of the chipped bark mulch. Its moist vegetable aroma penetrates everywhere.

The tent with no screen has names ‘carved’ into its internal sides, monikers from different cultures, boys on one side, girls on the other. Could be a reference to Tracy Emin, could be segregated lists of hetero lovers, could be simply non-horny campers who wanted to snooze. Whatever the case, it is more the ragged mode of rendering cut-out letters, its mutilating modus operandi, that is the point. It is creepy and violent, as if the people recorded are victims of some monstrous crime, their names recorded by the perpetrator.

Brennan’s two videos are quite different in mood. One is a loop of an auger drilling into the ground, creating holes for long posts. It seems to refer to the encroaching intrusion of urbanisation into unprotected nature, with perhaps a sexual and violent metaphor thrown in.

The other is a more complicated film about our mediation of the natural world, and processes of cultural bricolage that are part of its indirect comprehension. It uses a carefully crafted written text like some of the films Brennan has shown at Two Rooms. Her installation seems to distract from the film’s multilayered structure which I think would work better presented in isolation.

While that work (and the whole show) leans towards conceptual complexity, the omnipresence of the crushed bark throughout the whole space fits in nicely with Brennan’s examination of our treatment of ‘nature’. It is a cleverly loaded trope (using nature to contain or destroy itself), one that is powerful with its pungent olfactory and tactile associations. It helps link up the tents physically and thematically; pull the initially disparate elements together, introduce an unexpected unity.

So cool you could burn youself

Matt Henry: Flatline
Starkwhite
7 September – 3 October 2009

Matt Henry’s two paintings in Starkwhite’s exhibiting annex out the back are ultra meticulously made and uber fastidiously installed. They tease us by oscillating back and forth in our minds between early modernist abstraction and consumer luxury items such as rectangular plasma screens and pristine oil heaters. There is an understated humour in the site with unnegotiable wall fittings like light switches and a fire alarm that get successfully incorporated anyhow - by being balanced with the paintings. All the placement (signage and artworks) is carefully considered. Nothing smack dab in the middle.

The black rectangle, hovering on a white canvas, is at eye height and draws you in like a screen – possibly just after the closing credits have finished (the end of art perhaps?). And conveniently near the fire alarm, a hot orange oblong you could almost warm your shins and knees against: great for powercuts on icy frosty mornings.

The Starkwhite room is smaller than the images above suggest, and the work more intimate than you might think, with its emphasis on commodity fetishism which it critiques but knowingly perpetuates. It is also very much about Henry’s manual skills at crafting immaculate surfaces and razor-sharp edges, and elegant positioning.

Henry is part of a school of RMIT (David Thomas influenced) conceptualist, neo-minimalist abstraction that we are seeing more and more of here in Aotearoa. He is exploring an interesting area that seems based on the display rooms of Harvey Normans. Images of perfect blindness and music of impeccable silence.

Snatch the cash and run

Trust Waikato National Contemporary Art Award 09
Curated and judged by Charlotte Huddleston
Waikato Museum of Art and History Te Whare Taonga o Waikato
5 September - 25 January 2009

With Charlotte Huddleston of Te Papa awarding Dane Mitchell the TWNCAA prize of $15000 for his work Collateral, we have a fascinating situation where one more the ‘non-art’ public is indignant and the ‘art world’ is laughing. Yet both are correct to do so.

The wall label – with its opaque quotation from Louise Garrett – when applied to this ‘pile of rubbish’ says very little to the lay person, and on the night of the announcement the judge made no effort to provide an argument about why Mitchell stood out over the other forty-two finalists.

Her reticence was understandable. His work consists of a sample of the used packaging originating from the various finalists to this exhibition, mainly crumpled envelopes that contained technical information and hanging instructions. Its cleverness lies in its showcasing of the competitive nature of the event (its malicious glee) and its exposure of the collusion of the museum. The institution and the judge had to select from the trash what to display as they couldn’t possibly present all of it (actually they could if the number of other ‘saleable’ contestants was cut down and the plinth made bigger). Waikato Museum participates in the making of this self-ridiculing artwork.

Mitchell’s exposure follows the late seventies work of Billy Apple, Michael Asher’s career, and recent writings by scholars like Lynn Zelevansky. It is one of Mitchell’s best ever works: so successful in its manipulation of the institution’s and WSA’s fingerprints; utterly perfect to pay for the expensive costs of taking a year-long residency in Berlin.

The edges of sincerity

Grant Stevens: Fazed
Starkwhite
3 August - 29 August 2009

Sydney and LA–based artist Grant Stevens is currently having an exhibition of video and static wall works in the large downstairs space at Starkwhite. It consists of two videos (akin to earlier works he has presented upstairs in Starkwhite stock shows), three lambda prints, one lenticular work, a shaped mirror, and a sound/light piece.

Stevens is a man obsessed with the nuances of language, how it works and the emotional consequences it sets up. For this show he explores post-affair depression and the concept of a ‘brave face’, looking through a veil of tears that results from a broken heart. Words play a crucial role in elucidating this, especially in his videos.

The ambience of the room however, set by the eponymous work of blue fluorescent light and lilting but mournful pedal steel guitar, is not to be taken at face value. With these exhibits he pokes fun at the notion of sincerity in such a restrained way you are not quite sure. You thought you saw a hint of a smirk but perhaps you didn’t really.

His key video, Crushing, is a written account of a terminated relationship, with single words precisely positioned for short time periods on different sides of the screen. They hover around to be read, in groups or by themselves, and then fade away. I get a sense Stevens is informed by some Reader Response theory - ideas for example from Iser or Jauss - the way information to the reader (and their expectations) is constantly modified. He seems interested in how texts are scanned: mental imagery absorbed only to be gradually altered.

In this work Stevens begins the story with a few easy to connect words, but then makes linking the components more difficult as the vocabulary pops up on different parts of the screen. Old and new phrases start to mingle, generating confusion that matches the speaker’s torment. Then as the affair crumbles in its last stages, he restores linear clarity by simplifying the connections and providing a poignant longing – all accompanied by a lush soundtrack on stereo headphones, some deliciously moody cello and piano.

Swell is Stevens’ other video. The words are verbally spoken, mainly lists of phrases, accompanied only by a circular image of gently pulsing, fuzzy petal shapes. Daily tasks, social responsibilities, bodily beautifications and cleansings are set out and recited, but with a seething anger gradually seeping in. The work seems to be about existential resentment.

Of the failed love theme, the lambda prints include Flow, an image that has the clasped hands of two lovers, their pointing index fingers and vertical forearms making up a steeple that confirms a relationship made in heaven. Next to it is a mirror that is heart-shaped but blended with puddle forms made by fallen tears.

Looking at the non-romantic works, Blow Out depicts a long burger, with all sorts of savoury, fatty and sugary foodstuffs jammed between two slices of bread roll. It demonstrates Stevens’ characteristic ambivalence, for it is repulsive but also delectable, disgusting while causing your stomach to rumble.

Stevens’ lenticular image consists of a group of eight three-dimensional portraits of a shaggy dog, involving I think some sort of pun about perpetual narrative. Likewise his lambda print of a gridded, bottomless, electric kettle seems to be a joke about molecular motion dissolving the notion of solid mass.

This is a richly layered show where the significance of things depicted emerges slowly over time. If like me, you are constantly fascinated by the materiality of language and how different artists continue to inventively re-examine it and its structures, this show is essential viewing.