Bringing It All Back Home: Part Two

Francis Upritchard: Save Yourself
New Zealand at the 2009 Venice Biennale
Te Papa Tongarewa
26 February - 15 August 2010

Francis Upritchard’s Te Papa version of Venice’s Save Yourself accentuates a mindset extremely different from that provided by the Judy Millar installation. Her presentation celebrates inwardness, contemplating the interiority of The Self whilst fixating on acquiring an awareness of the parameters of the body. Her self-absorbed figures - with their slow solitary dance routines - explore tactility, various haptic sensations from the tips of various appendages (penises, metacarpals and metatarsals) and the covering surfaces of skin itself.

One sage lies on his back masturbating, others tap their palms with forefingers, explore the sensations of velvet cushions with their toes, blow across the narrow openings of vases, or gently move their limbs through the air, testing proprioceptive awareness of arm and leg placement and balance. Round shouldered, pot bellied and bow legged, the eyes of these unglamorous but perhaps wise introverts seem unseeing, except for one seated monk in sunglasses studying a palm held close to his eye.

Inner worlds, solipsistic mental states that caress the felt outside edges of each sentient creature’s living carcass, dominate. Even Upritchard’s silently balancing individuals, with decorative patterns painted delicately on their skin, seem unmotivated by the desire to appear attractive. Instead there is a need to activate the epidermal layer as neural sensation – the pleasure of cutaneous body surface, and the weight of thin fabric on the nape of the neck and the head and shoulders. Ornamentation here is paradoxically driven by reasons anti-social. For the dancer’s private delight only.

The interest in surface seems to be a metaphor also for an epistemological search, the desire for a reliable foundation for knowledge - not only for each person’s own grappling with experience but also all existence. The beautifully veneered, long wooden tables on which Upritchard’s figures stand seem to be a calculated trope for the world of material substance that sustains them both mentally and physically.

One figure, by itself on the last of the three tables, even mimics the painted branches of a truncated tree-trunk near which it stands, suggesting a family connection. This is the only occasion where one of these inner-body fixated, solo dancers acknowledges a presence beyond itself - an odd, amusing exception.

This is the best, most focussed Upritchard show I’ve seen, one that works better than the Venetian version with its inclusion of a Christ figure, many mirrors and a distracting 'Given' painted ceiling. Its inward ‘mental’ space is a perfect contrast to Millar’s architectural domination. To have these two very different artists together side by side is a better combination than I – for one – ever could have imagined.

Bringing It All Back Home: Part One

Judy Millar: Giraffe - Bottle - Gun
New Zealand at the 2009 Venice Biennale
Te Papa Tongarewa
26 February – 15 August 2010

Most people in New Zealand’s art world snort when you mention the galleries of Te Papa, namely the long skinny corridor on Level Five that has ended up partially replacing the many varied spaces of the old National Gallery. How odd then that for this show, involving the bringing home of the two exhibitions representing this country last year in Venice, that that same narrow space looks apt, even superior, to the original Italian venues.

Even though the ceiling is tilted, the projects have been placed in – what best can be described as - modernist ‘shoe boxes’, long rectangular rooms: divided into three with an artist at each end and in the middle, an account of the history of Aotearoa New Zealand exhibitions in Venice.

Te Papa’s austere white spaces, with their direct straight planes and ‘clean’ lines, are completely devoid of baroque ornamentation, undulating surface, religious ambience and competing Italian artists. They are much much simpler than the Venetian interiors. And it works beautifully.

In their psychological impact on the viewer the two shows are direct opposites. Therefore, instead of making point-by-point comparisons, I'll discuss Upritchard's contribution in Part Two.

Millar’s Giraffe - Bottle - Gun is overwhelming in its scale. It doesn’t aggressively and confusingly compete with the architectural interior of the venue as it did in Venice, forcing the viewer to move close to the outer walls, but is focussed instead on Millar’s huge sculptural objects that are covered with photographically enlarged, dramatic paint marks. These undermine the solidity of the forms’ surfaces. The massive baroque-inflected arabesque lines have on occasion dissolving edges, a quality you don’t get with paint but do with enlarged photocopies.

This display draws out Millar’s debt to Richard Serra, especially the huge central cylinder that curls within itself and is raised up and gently tilted to one side. Its curved surfaces dominate the room, and provide an intriguing foil for the leaning and overlapping rectangular and trapezoid forms, and of course the various ‘giraffes’, ‘bottles’ and ‘guns’ – the unusual right-angled shape Millar has invented with its distinctive concave, inner edge.

There is a strong sense of the sublime here, for the puny size of the viewer is accentuated. It is extroverted work that sucks the visitor’s attention away from themselves and out into the flame or water-like parallel lines, layered clusters of specks and exploding angular scrapes dwelling on the stretched skin surfaces.

What is impressive is the stunning physicality of Millar’s presentation. It shows what a great idea her use of digitally enlarged paint marks has turned out to be when mixed with architectural intervention. However her inclusion of four conventional ‘subtractive’ paintings on paper, and framed under glass, is a backward step. They are admittedly gorgeous but ruin the effect of the bigger digital components, and should have been omitted. They don’t fit in at all well into the space.

It is extremely rare to have an installation as immersive as this in Te Papa, one that is also optically painterly and bodily sculptural. It is not perfect – the four works on paper prevent that – but it is easily the most significant achievement of Millar’s career so far.

The above images are not in situ but made from preparatory models.