What is it about film?

Tahi Moore: War Against the Self
Gambia Castle
13 March - 4 April 2009

Tahi Moore: Against Other People
A Centre For Art (Suite 206, Level 2, Elliott St apartments)
4 March - 21 March 2009

Lisa Stansbie: Hackamore
(Window online)
12 March - 10 April 2009


These two Tahi Moore exhibitions show his passion for film and moving image in general. ‘Obsessed’ is too strong a word, but he really loves the stuff. No static images are here at all. The monitors function like chords and stacks of notes in a piece of music, clusters of ongoing movement and dialogue that weave in and out of each other’s field. Things are deliberately chaotic, though you can turn the sound down or up on each screen if you wish.

You try to extricate meaning if you can, or wish to. You may not want to. You might prefer just letting the images and sounds wash over you - without analysing. To dissect though, you have to be really keen and believe the artist likes structure, has a focussed purpose.

He certainly likes words, Moore does. He seems to love writing, and using friends for quoting and reciting. Included in the Gambia show with its five monitors are people repeating texts, some apparently written by a Chinese poet, Gu Cheng, who lived on Waiheke Island. And Moore includes as contrast tv clips of short story writer, novelist and poet Charles Bukowski telling stories. Bukowski talks exactly like he writes. Entertaining and vivid. Fast and gritty.

In this show (pictures above) Moore’s two titles from both Gambia and ACFA (they merge) are reflected in the array of screens competing for your attention while you try to focus mentally. There is even a text on the wall about sleep deprivation, implying (with irony I think) that the self (whatever that is) functions best when wide awake.

In the ACFA show we hear and see words too, in text running along the bottom of a monitor screen, from a book Martyn Reynolds is reading, or within a brief conversation he and Moore have about it. The ACFA show has four monitors.

Moore’s shows aren’t slick. They are rough hewn in the way he uses casual readings by friends, or home movies of individuals walking along a beach, or people in a flat dyeing fabric in a bath. These he places alongside Hollywood movies, a DiCaprio film that has been antiqued into black and white, or a Hitchcock silent, Lodger, blended with a later Bowie soundtrack of the same name.

So what is he up to with these installations? War Against the Self seems to be a meditation on the relationship between language and nature (somebody says ‘you have to live in the world and not in language…you could almost mistake this language for nature.’). It seems related to the work of Diane Thater but without her pop arty colours and big production. Moore loves found imagery and making juxtapositions.

Against Other People is more about the Word versus the Body, a very abstract approach to the physicality of thought, one that slides from the separation of dualism to the explicitly corporeal approach of Antonin Artaud. Thought ‘lodging’ in the body.

In contrast to Moore’s installations where you walk around the images straining to decipher the words, on the Window website is an intriguing work by the British artist Lisa Stansbie. If you click on you can see and hear where she has treated three sections of film by adding carefully written audio ‘commentaries’ that only tangentially connect with the ‘action’. You sit in front of your computer at home and concentrate on the three clips one at a time. Even without connecting the disparate narratives and voiceovers - the three ‘club sandwiches’ - on a sensual level, the sound, the language manipulation, and the visual images are remarkable. Unlike Moore's monitors, they don’t overlap. If you wish, you can do that in your head anyway.

Top four images from ACFA show, bottom three from Gambia Castle

In a silent way

Tahi Moore, Kate Newby: Run!
Window
23 November - 28 January 2009

Moore and Newby are two well known Gambia Castle artists. Moore seems particularly interested in the ambiguities of the reconstructed moving image, and Newby, the spatial and corporeal possibilities of 'treated' found or given form.

For this collaboration we see stretched across the inside of the plate glass window of the university gallery, a large rectangular piece of translucent muslin, stained with yellow and red blobs. It is similar to the suspended screen in Newby’s August ‘Thinking with your Body’ Gambia Castle exhibition.

Behind it, on a monitor discretely placed to one side, screens a looped, silent video in slow motion – presumably made by Moore. It shows two male figures (occasionally a woman replaces one of them), dressed in black, chatting about what they come across as they walk around the public spaces of an inner city area. The image is blurred by the milky material, though you can peek through a small gap on the far left side to see the screen from an angle.

The show is about thwarting the viewer’s desire for clarity and assessable meaning. The obstructing painted fabric screen seems to serve several purposes.

Firstly as a symbol for cultural mediation when attending generally to art, it denies ‘the innocent eye’, representing other sources of ‘pertinent’ or ‘necessary’ knowledge such as conversations, essays, wall labels, magazines, books etc.

Secondly it represents mood shifts and fluctuating abilities to concentrate, on the part of the viewer. Looking at energy levels, not knowledge sources. Also, its unique marks can stand for the problems of a particular experience – as presented by this exhibition only. The contingent nature of this library foyer encounter on one particular day.

For all that, this installation is not a satisfying experience. Its obliqueness is clearly deliberate. It is also a poor show, one that seems insufficiently thought through. It is not that it is difficult; it is that it lacks structure, and needs more coherence. The painted fabric and the narrative of the video seem so disconnected, that any linking logic is doomed to remain vague. Yet such logic is implied but not underlined. It doesn’t convince, or even wish to.

As artworks go, Ash Kilmartin’s wall essay on the silence of a portrait of a mime (poirot) is a far more resolved project, beautifully executed but not helpful for those looking at Run! A sceptic might argue Kilmartin's involvement is a smart-aleck joke about detective stories and Agatha Christie, but that is excessively cynical (like a novel with its last page ripped out) and convoluted. The essay is not integrated into being part of Run’s discussion, but remains separate. That's a pity, but is a common situation for galleries like Window and Newcall, where provided texts often undermine and not assist comprehension of the presented artwork.

Art laboratory

Alexandra Savtchenko: Thought Forms
Tahi Moore: Into the blue M. Hulot’s Holiday
A Centre For Art, Room 5, Third Floor, Achilles House
18 June - 5 July 2008

This show of Savtchenko’s carries on themes explored by the work she has in ARTSPACE right now and what she recently exhibited at Newcall Gallery.

The Newcall Gallery work teased the memory of the viewer, their knowledge of art history and what the exhibited copied painting might be, and the ARTSPACE work is in two parts, widely separated across town but both seen in the venue –though not simultaneously.

In the Centre For Art space Savtchenko exploits your memory of the invitation, which has two photos of hands moulding red clay into balls. The actual exhibit is a bucket of water and two sealed plastic bags of bulk clay. Written on one of the bags is ‘Red Sculpture’. This is either an invitation for the visitor to make the work for themselves, or else about mental picturing. The latter in the Savtchenko’s context, is more likely. Like the incomplete Newcall building sign, she is asking you to imagine. She is examining the potential of the material, looking at latent transmutations of clay as substance.

Tucked into one corner of the space (it’s a tiny room) is a small screen showing a recent film by Tahi Moore. It is two films superimposed together, the movies being Into the Blue (2005), a John Stockwell thriller, and the Jacques Tati comedy classic, Monsieur Hulot’s Holiday (1953). Moore has combined two separate genres made 55 years apart in two different countries.

When you watch (there is no sound) the narratives start to blend as you get confused about the people and elements in the parallel plots. Though one film is in black and white and the other in colour, when superimposed the Hollywood colour looks bleached, merging with the pallid greys of the older French film. The intermingling creates a new hybrid storyline as you start to manufacture new connections.

Because standing in front of Moore’s film for the whole screening is an ordeal for most, you can see some of it, go downstairs to the first floor and check out the Room 103 exhibitions, and then wander back to see some more if you wish. You can dip into the screening at any point anytime. The two films start together.

Auckland is very lucky to have such new experimental artist-run spaces like this Centre and Newcall Gallery, where projects can be tested. Exciting times.

Worse than impotence

Tahi Moore: Various Failures
Gambia Castle, Auckland
29 February - 22 March 2008

There are two flyers for this show that provide contradictory explanations for its title. Moore is an extremely skilled writer, and the first flyer details his lack of confidence in the work, his second thoughts and lapses of faith in the ‘mechanics’ of pairings that he has made – binary combinations, by the way, being also a dominant theme in Simon Denny’s last Gambia Castle / Michael Lett show.

Here is what Moore writes:
So I see something and it has some kind of significance, and then I stick it with something else and that makes it a mechanism. I think the problem here is that if you can work it all out, half an hour later, everything's different again. I guess you might not notice so much if you're also moving, but if you're good at being still or fixing things, you might get irritated at this intuitive reflexive dynamic that's altered by any examination of it, and seems to be easy enough to go along with if you don't think about it.

The second flyer plays on an old Jeff Koons gag from his early Artforum advertisements, showing the artist lounging around a pool surrounded by bikinied babes. This Moore has turned around into a sexual reference about physical or emotional failure. As part of a pairing itself, it is clever, self–reflexive stuff.

Actually it is more than clever, it’s brilliant. The connections between the pairings over time reveal themselves to be deeply considered. If you read the two flyers together they become a meditation on the transience of desire, the numbness and futility of attraction. The word ‘mechanism’ becomes Duchampian.

I’m going to be accused of being over-interpretative after writing this, but let’s look at the installation.

Note firstly the pair of old blue jeans discarded on the floor. Then the video of a watch advertisement on a monitor placed under a watch pinned to the wall. With these elements, could the work be about the passing of time – specifically aging – and its consequences for (male) desire?

Checking out Moore’s grouping of images: first thing you notice in the room is the image of two perky young women sitting on toilets having a chat. The image seems to be about female bonding, the nature of friendship, and the exasperation of some heterosexual men at not having close women friends (as shown in Marco Ferreri’s dramatic 1976 film 'The Last Woman’ when the over-horny, depressed and unloved male character, played by Gerard Depardieu, cuts off his John Thomas with an electric meat-cutter).

Ferreri’s film is not alluded to in this installation, but its subject matter is. Moore obviously loves movies, so what does he do with them in the loops he shows here.

Next to a static photograph of a naked woman, supine and sexually available, is Moore’s treatment on an adjacent monitor of the Sci-Fi film Ultraviolet, now sepia toned and played backwards. It shows the interaction between the attractive heroine and a young male character and indicates a pining for lost time, a mourning that this youthful (and now in hindsight, erotic) period can never be recaptured.

Then there is the other pair of videos: one shows Moore’s Gambia Castle colleague, Nick Austin, contemplatively walking through the gallery space. Next to it on another monitor are sections of Derrida nattering about being framed on drug charges by the Czech police in Prague, mathematician John Nash explaining some theorem, and Daniel Malone, another Gambia Castle artist, being mock ferocious. All men note, being active and ‘intellectual’.

So I read this show as a meditation on male/female relations as filtered through the lens of heterosexual male aging. His earlier Gambia Castle show seems connected to these themes too. I’m arguing a case that this work is very knowing and very structured. If my discussion is a load of cobblers, please drop this site a line and tell me so.