Reflective fluorescent Culbert

Bill Culbert: Light State
Sue Crockford
27 April – 22 May 2010

For this new Bill Culbert show at Crockford’s we have his characteristic use of the illuminative and reflective properties of light, demonstrated through a suite of works using fluorescent tubes positioned along the edges of large squares of shiny glass or placed across their centres. These are displayed on the walls of the front gallery, while an assortment of white tubes threaded through groups of plastic bottles are presented on shelves in the small back room.

The glass sheets and aligned glowing fluorescent tubes make a wonderfully nuanced presentation but its effect depends largely on the time of day you visit. When I called it was about 4.45 on a cool clear autumn afternoon when the sky (seen through the ‘waterfront’ windows) was a dark blue, giving the right-angled and diagonal lines and their multiple reflections (from the floor too) added impact – by virtue of contrast. Having the sun low in the sky was an advantage.The work looked more striking than the above photographs indicate.

As you moved around the space the precisely angled lines caught in the shiny squares were mirrored in the floor’s reflective parquet surfaces, to mix with the dark azure window rectangles. The way Culbert had positioned the tube brackets on the glass edges or flat plane of each glass sheet was a crucial element: sometimes on their backs in an inverted, diagonal T-formation in the square’s middle so that the light faced the viewer frontally bordered by two fuzzy shadows; sometimes on their sides on the lefthand and bottom edges so that a softly illuminated wall side was contrasted with an opposite parallel shadowy edge.

These seven Light States collectively force the strolling visitor to think about their movement, getting them to notice the shifting relationships between the different reflected works coming and going between the vertical glass edges before them. For a Culbert installation, this organisation of different carefully placed elements within a series, is unusually participatory and immersive – quite different with its self awareness from say any passively observing of glowing objects on a wall, like that found in the other gallery.

Those particular translucent screwtop container works (for which Culbert is now quite famous) make you think about the internal properties of each horizontally repeated hollow form, the nuances of colour, the different densities of the plastic shell and how they were originally made. Here is light partially passing through substance, not completely so as with glass and not lying on top of it as with an opaque wall. You experience these levels of transparency along with the shadows that they might cast and the white light that goes from the frosted glass of the projecting tubes directly to your eye.

The immersive front gallery experience, with the reflective glass and fluorescent tubes on the walls interacting with the shiny floor, shows Culbert at his very best. Worth a late afternoon trip down town to investigate for yourself.

Revamping, revitalising stock

From The Stockroom
Sue Crockford
1 April - 27 April 2010

This stock show presents seventeen works from ten artists. It includes some surprises and some revitalisations within a new group context.

The Billy Apples haven’t been displayed before, three small Xeroxes (from 1966) on coloured canvas that looks like gingham tablecloth patterns. The smudgy photocopied ink shows a grinning apple positioned alongside an inert Idaho spud, while the title ‘Apple in Idaho’ refers to the (now) proper names of people, vegetables, and of course, North American states.

Next to Apple are three Ava Seymour framed photographed collages with super finely-tweaked edges. The outer contours of her paper shapes you need to examine closely to grasp the nuanced precision with which her scalpel has moved. From a cutting virtuoso.

Peter Robinson’s two large calligraphic paintings look better in a group show than in a solo display where they don’t stand out as black and white statements, with so much white around them. Here with some colourful Mrkusichs nearby, they seem activated spatially and become highly energised grotesque landforms - quoting earlier, non-landscape, ‘quantum’ Peter Robinsons.

Julian Dashper’s solitary illuminated neon tube on a white wall with hanging wires on either side presents itself as a delicate – but glowing - linear drawing. The wires could almost be pencil lines within a calculatedly 'minimal' statement.

Opposite the gallery entrance is an early Gordon Walters koru painting from 1965. It intrigues because of the awkward top and bottom edges which explain the title, Black on White. It is definitely not vice versa, like the more resolved and spatially ambiguous works he later arrived at.

Of the two very different Mrkusich works, the smaller single-panelled blue painting (as opposed to the three panelled, three coloured one) has an intriguing tension by virtue of a symmetry at the top and an asymmetry at the bottom. It oddly twists the central field.

In the back room a mid-seventies Albrecht is a gorgeous stack of floating, horizontal stains, oddly divided into two halves, one placed above the other, while nearby a big black Hotere of shiny corrugated steel has its two panels spaced apart to form the vertical beam of a cross. Its arms consist of horizontally cut slots peeled away to reveal bright orange painted on the back.

There is also an oddly sinister Boyd Webb, with the clustered stamens of an ochry brown fabric flower in a shadow - exuding menace.

In thinking about shows like this, I tend to prefer solo exhibitions over group displays, and of the latter, thematically tight presentations over promotion of unsold stock. Yet the latter often allow us to spot things we might have originally missed, a chance to stumble on new connections – especially with more historic work that may be owned by an artist’s family, not an institution. A good opportunity.

Hoist that rag

Mladen Bizumic: From Cube to Ball (Chapter 1)
Sue Crockford
2 February 2010 - 27 February 2010

One of the distinctive characteristics of the practice of Mladen Bizumic, a salient feature that underpins almost everything he does, is an interest in modernist architecture and its history. He loves examining pavilions and civic spaces, and combining images that by themselves are quite dry and clinically analytical, with other elements like music, that are emotionally stirring. Often there is an attempted balancing act going on.

For example, his last show at Crockford’s of European photographs, presented in deliberately reflective glass to include the New Zealand viewer, was dry and somewhat distant. But the work he has in the Chartwell Collection, with its video of digital drawings of Little Barrier Island, is blended with a stirring soundtrack of a slowed-down, orchestrated version of The Rolling Stones song Under My Thumb that always aurally dominates any gallery it is presented in.

The current Crockford show has a similar tension between emotional immediacy and cool cerebral logic and focuses on Bizumic’s admiration for Ernst Plischke, the Austrian émigré who was one of New Zealand’s first modernist architects and theoreticians, living here between 1939 and 1964. It is the first of three exhibitions Bizumic is having looking at this architect, the others being in Wellington and Vienna.

There are four works, starting with an unprepossessing framed pencil rubbing, by the gallery entrance, that was taken from the inaugural stone for Massey House (1957), Wellington’s first skyscraper. It shows the words ‘NZ Meat’ and ‘Plischke and Firth Architects’ peeking through the scribbled lines.

Satin and Air Composition looks at first glance to be a very large ‘seam’ drawing by Pip Culbert, until you realise it is a ‘soft’ floor plan of an apartment, meticulously constructed out of coloured ribbon and pinned up on the wall. With black satin ribbons for walls, parallel white lines for doors, black and white lines together for windows, and a grid of red linear squares for floor tiles, it is based on one of Plischke’s Dixon Street Flats that he designed with Gordon Wilson in 1947. Its sagging wobbly lines make it humorous and vulnerable and like some kind of bizarre and very flimsy national flag that oddly enough, looks incredibly beautiful.

The main work is a sound installation which references five coloured lamp shades Plischke designed for St. Martin’s Church in Christchurch. The blue, red and green plastic shades hang in an intriguing entangled cluster from the ceiling, but instead of bulbs Bizumic has positioned inside them audio speakers that intermittently play native bird song: in sequence and also overlapping. These twittering and chiming bird calls have been transcribed to sheet music by composer Hermione Johnson, but like the frottage by the front door, they are not very exciting visually – being coded for aural not ocular sensation.

In Crockford’s back room are two small shelves holding silver framed, black and white collages of interiors from Massey House. The added overlaid fragments are either prismatic or circular, play with and subvert the initial austerity of the space, and are seductively intimate in the way they draw you in, though I find the metallic framing too chilling.

Bizumic’s Dixon St Flat floor plan is the killer work in this show, being loaded with more ambiguities and cross connections than the sound or photographic pieces. Its flag-like quality is especially compelling because it can be seen as an espousal of Bourdieu’s notion of ‘distinctive’ taste as a political act for defining class superiority; how we surround ourselves with objects (that includes spaces where we live) in order to construct an identity. I’m mentally riffing here for sure, improvising on aspects the artist probably hasn’t intended, but the ribbon drawing as a ‘flapping’ extrapolation of modernist house design turned into a skeletal pennant is an interpretative notion I find perversely appealing.

Non-textual (mostly blue) Reynolds

John Reynolds: Along these lines
Sue Crockford
1 December - 24 December 2009

It's a nice, cunningly ambiguous title by John Reynolds for this Crockford show, and one that showcases his strengths – for there are no words anywhere. I dislike his dictionary-obsessed works that use written texts (I hate the pomposity of many of them, the look of the spindly printing and I’m irritated by the monotony of the evanescent silver paint) while I am fond of his paintings that emphasise drawing. Especially his linear, unravelling stringy, scrubbed and scratchy marks of chalk or charcoal of his old works. But naturally he has moved on.

So what is here amongst these six recent paintings?

Most conspicuous is the big, four panelled work on the main wall – a painting that works. Nomadology, succeeds not only because of its lyrical, wistful sky blue and wisps of sprayed cloud and vapour trails, but also because of its dots (in that silver paint that I invariably find so loathsome), which though scattered have a compositional structure that is in essence linear. The painted specks are like flocks of migrating birds, or herds of caribou. They thankfully link up in diagonal alignments. It’s when they don’t, as in some of the small canvases, that he runs into problems. They lack direction.

The main ‘lines’ in this show are three teetering stacks of small, mark-free monochromes that crawl up the wall to the ceiling and which seem to allude to the earlier brick work in this space by Kate Newby.(A nice ‘tip of the hat’ from an older artist to a much younger one.)

Because they are monochromatic and vertically link up, the choice of colour in these Birdsong works is crucial. The metallic copper and silver stretcher ‘lines’ are insipid and flat, but the Klein blue on the work by the gallery entrance is astounding in its penetrating vibrancy. It also has different edges from the other two - they have skinny drips running down the sides. This one has thick oozy blobs that lazily meander halfway down the stretcher sides – seepages from a weedy watery ladder to the heavens.

Other blue works are a single solo dotty work (Sad Song #7) on the wall in isolation, and, Refrain, a group of about fifteen small stretchers (again silver dotty) arranged on a plinth in a sort of balanced stack, that you can walk around.

However it is the two largest 'linear' blue works that are the highlights of this show: one wall-sized, the other like a piece of wobbly down-pipe from your guttering. Both are buoyant in mood and sensual. Cool and refreshing in the summer heat.

Contesting finality

Julian Dashper
Sue Crockford
3 November - 22 November 2009

The eight works here from the late Julian Dashper are in a display he organised to close on Sunday November the 22nd - the same time that the 2009 Venice Biennale shuts down. This is because several of his works focus on a theme he established with a video made for a Film Archive exhibition in February. It records a sideways view down a darkened Venetian lane during the last 15 seconds of the previous Biennale. Dashper probably realised the current presentation would be a posthumous show, for there is a black, rueful humour in its ‘lastness’ fixation. The Biennale snippet he clearly saw as a grim simile for himself; these brief works, for the last few months of his life.

A possible sequence of the list of works goes like this. We have the Film Archive work – Untitled (the last 15 seconds of the last Venice Biennale) – a DVD. Then another DVD, Untitled (the last second of the last Venice Biennale), plus a clear 12 inch record of that same last second. And another related clear record, Untitled (Leaving Venice).

There is also a framed record cover of a third, unseen record, Untitled (Persuasive Percussion). The shape of that cover is mimicked by the three paintings on stretchers, lined up on one wall.

I much prefer these three paintings to the other ‘time’ work because they help the artist get away from himself. They let him forget he is Julian Dashper who is dying. Instead he is having fun with language, for the titles and carefully worded information in the catalogue listings are their point, not what’s on the wall.

Two of these paintings are identical twins, with identical tiles (Untitled) and both described as ‘acrylic on canvas’. However one has extra information. It is also described as ‘black on white square’ - suggesting the square canvas was painted white first, and then the internal, black, six-sided shape imposed. With its replica, the inner form could have been painted before the outside one, or simultaneously. Different processes at work: different sequences of paint application.

The third painting swaps tones within the application procedure to become ‘white on black square’. Its paint applied by Dashper himself or a tradesperson. It doesn’t matter. The preposition and the adjectives are the point. It is a foil to the second work, visually and in tonal details of process, as it is a different sort of method to the first.

These three paintings, with their interest in negative / presence, become parallels for LP covers that remain when the loved records they usually protect have gone. Artworks that make us wonder about their creator long after his driving ‘persuasively percussive’ life is over.

Oi, hop it, skedaddle!

Kate Newby: Get off my garden
Sue Crockford
6 October - 31 October 2009

It has a clever title this exhibition: sounds like Newby is yelling at some stray dog that’s treading on her vegie patch. And so, apart from a set of six ceramics in the back office, all the works (in Crockford’s or in nearby carparks) are about the delineation of private space or the protection of property - as exemplified by walls or fences.

Plus there are formal links (through colour and plane) to Newby’s last Gambia Castle show – which though also referencing the public/private distinction, was nowhere as pristine as this one. For this Crockford presentation is stunningly austere. A big surprise in its minimalist ethos. Let me give you some detail.

The works that initially catch your eye are two added walls (a small one of concrete blocks, the other larger of plywood sheets) placed at diagonally opposite ends of the main exhibiting space to create narrow doorways. Running down the main white mdf wall by the window, directly below a beam in the ceiling, is also a column of single bricks, a vertical slightly wonky line, with the occasional droopy succulent hanging out of its mortar joins. There is nothing on the spacious, polished parquet floor.

Near the big window and beyond the concrete block wall in the smaller back room, Newby has placed a large, pollen yellow, woollen carpet. It is deliberately not tight-fitting, but sits on the floor casually with a couple of inches to spare on one side.

Within this exhibiting space, two photographs sit on opposite walls - on each side of the rug. One, with a young woman bent over a low concrete wall, could refer to the concrete block installation nearby. The other of the artist lying on the road, sprawled beside her fallen bike, has her prone shape repeated by a drawing in red wine spilled onto the carpet.

Outside the Endeans building Newby’s two public carpark works, horizontal ‘paintings’ of coloured concrete slabs or spread out mortar, are both quite close. They have various crystals, rocks and coloured stones set in, and are sited close to footpaths. The Customs St. East one, in the Wilson Parking Lot, can only be seen through the wire-netting fence it is butted up against, for it is placed on top of a high wall and so can only be examined from above.

The other carpark item, made of orange mortar, is placed at the bottom of a high wall – the side of a building – regularly used by taggers. In fact two such artists were busy with their project while I was looking at Newby’s piece – this being mid-afternoon Tuesday in Shortland St. - and had started underpainting with black enamel spray above her work.

So what does all this add up to, these two types of site, their properties showcased by her inclusion of three photographs taken on public streets, and Crockford’s very private venue in a building that has a surveillance camera above its admission-by-application door?

First of all, the ‘street’ works have quite a high chance of being damaged, though that factor (their potentially transitional nature) seems to worry the artist if her exhibition title is anything to go by. Impossible to steal and left alone for pedestrians to accidentally come upon, the 'gardens' probably will baffle as decorative objects. Crystals are after all an unorthodox ingredient. You usually only see them in science museums.

Secondly, in the Crockford gallery space, Newby loves to present ‘damaged goods’. One of the ceramic pieces (a ‘Patti Smith’ plate) is cracked in half, and the gorgeous carpet is ‘ruined’ by the ‘spilt’ wine. She likes to mix coincidence and calculation together so eventually they become indistinguishable. And in the public space, chance actions by other people seem to serve her purposes too.

Thirdly, with the walls there is an inventive playfulness in Newby’s choice of materials and her formal manipulation of them. The column of bricks turns out to be an unexpected third added wall with properties that dawn on you gradually, a horizontal wall attached to a vertical one, projecting out from it.

Lastly, due to the above context the woollen carpet takes on a new meaning, for it becomes a constraining metaphorical wall, a barrier of social decorum that the artist is indifferent to. The poured wine becomes bloodlike, the result of a seemingly ‘wounding’ act that in contaminating the sunshine yellow field, is privately conceived but public in its consequences. Though in fact a drawing, one that is incredibly careful in its meticulous carelessness, it is also defiantly existential as an action that is capable of shock.

This is a remarkably cohesive, multi-layered exhibition that provides many nuances to ponder over. Downtown carparks included. Don’t miss it.

Positioning this, placing that

Collage: Mladen Bizumic, Ava Seymour, Richard Maloy, John Nixon, Gordon Walters
Sue Crockford
16 September - 3 October 2009

Collage is one of those techniques we tend to think of as a classic twentieth century method of image construction, but the fact that the Victorians were also entertained by it hints at its flexibility as an application for many different mind sets. This show presents several approaches, most as finished objects for contemplation, but not all.

With Gordon Walters it was an aid for visualising the planned musicality or rhythmic cadences of a koru composition, a means of mentally grasping vertical, horizontal, or diagonal formal connections, and their cumulative weight. Collage for him grew out of his early passion for Surrealism but became not the final artwork but a stage in a process that led to a later more polished result. Placement and scale were gradually worked on simultaneously.

Ava Seymour’s expertise focuses on collages that are constructed in order to be photographed. With the current work her nuances of edge are crucial: tiny shapes harboured inside the scalpel incised contours are formed by overlaid pieces cut out of furnishing or fabric catalogues. While there are delicate textural, patterned and tonal contrasts going on internally, it is along the perimeter, where colour meets the white background field that things get really interesting. Your eye scoots around the edge like a racetrack, enjoying each new corner or projecting bump it encounters.

Richard Maloy, like Seymour, is a gifted photographer, but how his images of improvised sculpture, using his own body with silver foil, fit in here I’m not sure. They don’t appear to be collage at all - whereas Mladen Bizumic’s images for example (on another wall) of sky inside strings of triangular pennants floating in front of Mies van der Rohe buildings are Photoshopped. They definitely have a collage sensibility.

Collage is normally linked to the substance of paper, but because of its twentieth century tradition that developed from Schwitters through Rauschenberg and others, that particular material has been replaced by other possibilities. Collage, it might be argued, is now more about a certain attitude to space, pictorial or real. Jessica Stockholder is a good example of this.

The fifth artist at Crockford's, John Nixon, has paintings from his Experimental Painting Workshop that are often with no added paper. Instead they incorporate other evocative materials like plastic packaging or aluminium strips. These, combined with his buoyant orange panels that allude to early modernism, help create a seductive physicality.

I just can’t imagine contemporary art, literature, or music existing without collage. It is a fundamental disposition inherent in most practice that accentuates the propensity for play - via juxtaposing various properties (semantic or formal) of materials. Since Freud we have been aware of its similarities with dreams, and the pleasures (or terrors) of being surprised by unforeseen connections. Artists who ignore such portable intricacies of placement are almost nonexistent.

(In descending order: Seymour (2),Walters(2), Maloy, Bizumic, Nixon. The Gordon Walters koru collage above (fourth down) is not in the show. However it is a good example of this stage in his painting process.)