Discreetly activist

Comb a schooner like a comet: Annie Bradley, Matthew Crookes, Peter Madden, Charles Ninow, Beth Orton, Ralph Paine, Martyn Reynolds, Daniel Webby, Tao Wells
Newcall
1 December - 19 December 2009

Seeking work that was opinionated, inclined to agitation and direct, the Newcall curators for this exhibition have approached nine artists who according to the blurb, have practices oriented towards 'activism or confrontation.' At the same time, the curators are sensitive. They are cognisant of Free Will, that of the artists and their own in selecting them. So nothing can be assumed in terms of product.

That last bit is crucial because this is not really a placard waving show – though Tao Wells’ invitation of audience participation in placing photographs (with the word WAR) of the gallery neighbourhood in the gallery neighbourhood, and Ralph Paine’s large wall of paintings and drawings on paper, come closest to that lack of nuance in that their subject matter is obvious.

Wells’ project involves a box of 24 photocopied images of the gallery and the streets around it over which is placed WAR in bold yellow caps. He asks the viewer to either stick them up inside the gallery and/or outside, or to sell them as books. A couple ended up on Newcall walls, including one of some colourful birds placed over a power socket, folded so the word WAR was hidden. I didn’t spot any outdoor versions, except an Obama /Bush hybrid on the front door.

Ralph Paine’s wall-sized offering shows off his superb skills as an illustrator: images of jets, medieval battles, lots of explosions, curling waves, agonised skeletons and burning cities - the latter alluding to say, Beirut or Baghdad. All beautifully rendered in an understated fashion with no fine detail. And surprisingly for Paine – no text.

I didn’t see Peter Madden’s ‘para-performance’ on opening night – a found suitcase opened to reveal found photographs, but on a nearby wall is a small solitary photograph of what seems to be a group of sportsmen - maybe cricketers. A standing figure on the right has superimposed over half his body a military uniform, suggesting somebody killed in the Second World War.

Matthew Crookes has three works. One is a suite of sticky, peel-off letters that repeat the phrase In Loving Memory on a top corner of the glass front door. A second is a row on the floor of empty plastic book covers, all blood red. The third is a dessert spoon resting on a short piece of four by two. On its scoop are the stickered words: lick me disease.

Martyn Reynolds has a DVD presentation of a short looped film showing an old wooden chair standing in an empty field. It is projected onto a thin wall from an outside studio which when you look, contains the same chair holding the projector. The evocative flickering image is blue, that most poignant of colours; the chair a symbol for absence; the field perhaps a trope for European soil. We have pathos, yet a construction that is calculatedly knowing in its reflexivity.

Beth O’Brien’s single framed photograph of a young woman soldier struggling in a park to control an unwieldy, wind-dragged parafoil. Quiet Decisions, Specific Intentions seems to be an anti-military statement of considerable understatement, snorting at the notion of ‘managed’ intervention.

Uncontrollable process is showcased also in Daniel Webby’s installation, where a sloping ‘hammock’ of clear, wrinkled, cling film is suspended across the width of the gallery space between two towel holders. On it Webby has attempted to balance a gooey line of soaked dehydrated potato flakes, which has then fallen to the concrete floor. Attracting mould and smelling, the spud glop was later removed –though traces remain.

Annie Bradley contributes a two channelled video showing the artist and (I think) her father placing some household items in a trailer to be transported overnight. They need to be very securely tied down so they don’t slide around and get damaged. If you only know one knot… has one camera positioned on the van roof filming the trailer from above, while the other is partially aimed at a reflective window in the van’s door. The title advocates multiple approaches to problem-solving.

The last item is Charles Ninow’s sculpture that consists of two white trapezoid plywood forms on the floor. They seem to refer to the sloping eaves of a house and the demarcated proportions - measured out with steel brackets – of a sheet of a single bed. To speculate: the sheet in this context could be a shroud, and the ceiling, the ascension of a soul escaping from a corpse. An oblique and clinical, but also oddly evocative, work.

Shortly after writing and posting the above I was chatting to Dan Arps at Te Tuhi. He pointed out that the 'steel brackets' on the sloping upper surfaces of Charles Ninow's work are in fact anti-skateboarding blockers - an allusion to social control and American foreign policy perhaps.

Talking Tao

Tao Wells: Space Jam 1996
A drawing and painting sale selected by Nick Austin
Gambia Castle
14 November - 28 November 2009

November is an interesting part of the art year calendar, with many of the main tertiary art institutions around the country briefly presenting public displays of their students’ work. Most of what is shown is invariably inconsequential, work made cloning their teachers or pages of international art mags, or a hybrid. Those few with any substance will become apparent in 3 - 4 years after their paper chase, when they develop strategies of survival, shake the teachers out of their hair, and find their own voices.

In Gambia Castle Tao Well’s show suggests the opposite process, as if his best work is the very early stuff, even before he went to university. Such a premise might be accurate - might even be obviously so if his practice in general is conspicuously unremarkable to start with.

So how can we be persuaded either way? No meritable quality, in my view, is apparent from just looking at the exhibition and unfortunately Nick Austin, the selector of the exhibited work, has no essay advocating its merits. Although he is not listed as curator (only ‘selector’), he is known as an eloquent verbaliser of ideas, one who is exceptionally articulate. A wasted opportunity.

Instead we have Dick Whyte (of Wayfarer Gallery) writing a little introductory text to the show. It is nicely written and in three sections.

The first starts with: Tao Wells is a terrible artist. But he is a good person. This writer is impressively candid it seems, although perhaps too generous about the artist’s personality. Whyte then distinguishes between moral behaviour (externally imposed codes, as with legal or religious injunctions) and ethical (internal and from reflection).

In the second paragraph he puts forward a second definition of ethics in which “we must become adept at talking with ourselves. We are always two, rather than one.” He wants to lead the discussion to the possibility in the third section that Tao Wells is both a terrible artist and a terrific artist. However I can't get that far. For a start I have problems with his use of the word must.

Amongst his many attacks on the notion of prescriptive moral rightness and attempts to systematically provide criteria for it, the British philosopher Bernard Williams claimed that ethical conviction about what one ought to do is not actually a kind of decision (not from a group or from the individual concerned): Ethical conviction, like any other form of being convinced, must have some aspect of passivity to it, must in a sense come to you. (Ethics and the Limits of Philosophy, p.169). However this conviction ends up being mixed in with reflection, discussion and theorising to form the individual’s ethical norms.

In other words, one might as well stick with the ‘one mind’ idea that Tao Wells is simply just a terrible artist, especially as there is no articulated evidence here by his Gambia colleagues (or Wellington dealer, Whyte) to counter that, let alone claim he is a ‘terrific artist’ as well or instead. If they are convinced there are arguments for the latter, it might be a good idea for them to elucidate them.

Forget Art

Tao Wells: Three Ideas for the State
Gambia Castle, Auckland
25 April - 17 May, 2008

Should artists get involved with politics? Of course they should - like any other citizen who wants to be a lobbyist, if that’s their inclination. After all, art can be anything. Anything at all.

So what is Tao Wells up to here? He has three ideas that have been gnawing away at him, that he feels passionate about, that he reckons could improve our community. One of them could even improve Australia. They argue for cyclists’ rights on the road (divide each direction of the road in half, the left side prioritised for bikes /cars have to pass on the right); flags for local iwi on community flagpoles (include an online logo and url so passers by can find out more); and regional koori greetings on Australian television news (start with Melbourne).

To help get these proposals discussed, he places them in a gallery to reach an audience of Gambia Castle regulars and newcomers. Prints them in sloping pencil on A4 and pastes them to the wall. Presents them as saleable items, packages of activity that include the costs of his researching their further development, and his attempting to persuade more people to enthuse over their content.

However is being artist-initiated, here a help or a hindrance? Why not set up a website and elucidate the concepts in detail, letting people print out discussions to take home and read. The project is more likely to gain support being presented in other non-art communities. Presenting it as art undermines the ideas’ efficacy.

After all, why expect potential supporters to read wall statements carefully while standing on a hard gallery floor in a poorly lit room? In Wells' installation, you have to strain to discern the art. It tends towards invisibility. It is a little like a blend between Robert Barry (who once used released gas and radio waves as art) and Ian Wilson (his art is conversations that are never documented). You can’t take anything ‘physical’ home from Gambia Castle. What you do get you obtain from reading on the spot.

In Wells' 'post-object’ experience visitors may not be persuaded about the value of his projects because their bodies are under tension. The show is not user friendly. The work pretends to be about community interests but is half-hearted about communication. It is not really about building a better world. It is about an individualist who wants to make a statement that will impress art lovers.

Goosestepping through the whorehouse

Dan Arps’ Gestapo Pussy Ranch at The Physics Room, Christchurch. 15 November - 15 December 2007

Like many of the artists in the Gambia Castle group, Dan Arps in his installations is known for a freewheeling, unstructured mode of visual organisation that celebrates a lack of palpable order. As a dishevelled, freeform exhibtion, Gestapo Pussy Ranch is richly keyed into product that poses as process. The result is a funny, extremely wonky, satire on life management programmes - with personal coaches and analyses of interpersonal organising skills. Although the space is deliberately incongruous, with an old mattress, photographs of peculiar rituals in sleeping bags, cat boxes, scattered disintegrating clumps of straw, foil covered ventilation shutes, geometric forms made of twisted plant roots, surveillance cameras, and hilarious inverted pinup posters smeared with finger painting, the key elements seem to be a laminated pie chart and two typed lists of strategic corporate procedures. The project has an underpinning logic consistent with its brilliantly evocative title - from a Bret Easton Ellis novel - that suggests a Nazi brothel. Implying connections with Human Resource personnel perhaps.

Arps is a clever artist whose work is getting more interesting and less eclectic as his career progresses. He is moving away from his earlier Australian sources to developing his own sensibility. His humour is more hammy and anarchistic than the deceptively academic and systematic approach of Simon Denny, close to Tao Wells in its anarchistic mood, and though subtle, not understated like Nick Austin.

However, this is the sort of show you really have to negotiate yourself in terms of examining the elements, if you want to extract pivotal and considered components from the vaguely rhetorical and nihilistic elements. The anonymous blurb on the Physics Room website is depressingly uninformative and facile, clearly the result of being written long before the artist had decided what he would do in the space, and the images present with it give you no idea of the work’s experiential nature. Worth calling in and checking out for yourself, nevertheless.