David Cross was in London recently and so...

Pop Life: Art in a Material World
Curated by Alison Gingeras
Tate Modern
1 October – 17 January 2010

With all the best of intentions I went to Tate Modern specifically for the Pop Life show. This blockbuster draws together a selection of trans-generational heavyweights from Warhol to Murakami and Hirst from the curious perspective of new millennium marketing theory and more than a touch of relational aesthetics. I was not convinced of the burning need to revise / rewrite the Pop canon, but the exhibition blurb promised an investigation of a select group of artists most working since the 80s who have used commerce to build there own ‘brands’. From this I thought (naively) that there might be a bit more to say about the pop/commerce/brand continuum from Koons to Murakami, but aside from clearly ticking these boxes the show was jaw-droppingly self-indulgent and bloated. Try-hard retro dance music blaring across spaces, more monitors than I have ever seen in an exhibition pumping out every Andy Warhol TV show seemingly ever made, and a side dressing of Pop porn were just some of the ingredients in this hubristic excuse for what was really a curatorial ruse to build a pat historical bridge between the YBA’s and American postmodernism.

Some of you might immediately reply that there is nothing wrong with any of that, and in fact a high octane Pop show that nudges some of the darker sub-cultural edges of Pop-based practice, connecting the work of Richard Prince and Koons with the less well known British punk group COUM Transmission, expands the connective tissues of Pop into a range of highly relevant low-fi areas - from porn to the prurient British tabloid media. The problem with Pop Life however was that the bridges established between Koons’ ersatz porn adventures with Ciccolina, rendered here in a whole room of Baroque titillation, and COUM member Cosie Fanny Tuttie’s earlier cheesecake porn, shown in the ICA exhibition Prostitution in 1976, is that while historically interesting these ideas were never adequately drawn out. Perhaps the Pop/Punk connection is another show in the making, for here it felt added on and secondary to all the bells and whistles of Keith Haring’s Pop shop/disco where you could dance and pickup goodies (trinkets) at the same time, or Murakami’s cloyingly dumb Japanese manga characters, sexed up and ready for purchasing in the gift shop.

Any sophistication in dissecting the body as commodity was largely railroaded by the broader investigation of shock and the ways in which certain Pop-focused artists have sought to manipulate scandal as a principal component of the work. As if on cue, the Tate had its very own publicity juggernaut when the police demanded the censoring of Richard Prince’s rarely seen and still explosive pre-pubescent portrait of Brook Shields. Titled with black irony Spiritual America, the work which consisted of a naked ten year old Shields made up and veneered with baby oil, was removed from the exhibition and replaced with a recent photograph of Shields recreating the same pose in 2004 - this time wearing a bikini and sans the contentious oil. The revised work is actually quite curious - as if Shields through her revisiting the original is carefully working to rewrite the work's meaning. To a significant extent she succeeds in redirecting our consumption of her away from the murkier depths Ciccolina was coaxed into and back towards her safer Hollywood-lite personae.

Pop Life annoyed me for a range of reasons - partly because its premise, the artist as brand, while potentially interesting, never managed to fly, and partly because it did not even begin to interrogate the mechanism of shock as a critical device. Rather Pop Life reformulated and re-packaged Pop and Neo-Pop for a Generation-Y audience to consume. Yes, it reinforced the idea that strategies of banality and excess are staple features of contemporary practice. Yes, it might be an interesting idea on paper to turn the volume on these devices up to full, thereby challenging the cloistered separation of the gallery from the material world. And yes, Tate marketing department would have had a field day putting to use all they learned in product promotion 101.

Picnic on the top floor

Andrew Barber: Picnic
Gambia Castle at Britomart Masonic House, Level 3
9 December – 12 December 2009

The title Picnic seems to refer to spacious park or estate grounds for a location, and a plaid or tartan blanket on which the food to be consumed is placed. For these openly slick (rough whilst elegant) ‘unfinished’ landscapes are in fact two contradictory paintings – on both recto and verso. Painted tartans (ie. crisscrossing perpendicular and horizontal bands) on one side, and very brusherly but sweet vistas, modelled on real estate brochure photographs, on the other.

Andrew Barber’s elegant presentation of eleven such mischievous – but not really subversive – paintings in three linked artists’ studios on the top floor of Britomart Masonic house has a touch of the Scottish rebel about it - a fantasized claymore prodding the side of the wealthy landscape purchaser, an imagined dirk pricking their throat with its implied (but fake) symbolic ‘abstract’ violence. The tartans don’t look that Scottish. They look like Burberry and quite different from the tartans of say, Rob McLeod or Kenneth Noland paintings.

The presence of two paintings back to back on the same canvas also slows down the chemical process of paint hardening – not drying, using the principles of evaporation as with acrylic, but oxidizing so the skin solidifies, as with oil. The works have to hang around the studio longer and so tease the artist with their quick execution but slow stabilization.

The best works are the big landscapes, with lots of wild uncovered scumbling and lower strips of exposed primed canvas - presented to mock commerce but in fact embracing it. One enormous work is stunning and it alone is the worth the effort of clambering wearily up the stairs. It’s a good looking show in an impressive, attractively raw, venue.

Almost forgettable

Milli Jannides: Keeping Still
A Centre For Art
9 December - 24 December 2009 (and Jan and Feb by appointment)

Five small oil-painted canvases are currently displayed by Milli Jannides in the small ACFA space: five semi-figurative works on five walls.

Most of these are unresolved – works that are inappropriately small in relation to their marks, not cohesive as a group, and with their turps-washed underpainting not integrated with the fuller-bodied top layers. Many seem abandoned in mid-process, as if the artist has given up seeking any image that has compelling power.

Some contain whispers of famous artists Jannides seems to have been thinking about: Keeping Still has trees that speak of Mondrian, Thickets of Diebenkorn’s parks, Caresses of Howard Hodgkin. There is no decisive voice here; in fact the show oozes indecision and wavering – no clear purpose in the image structure. No consistent pattern of thought.

The best work is The Magician’s Assistant where we see bars of golden sunlight raking across a centrally positioned, wooden staircase. The ceiling is converted into a grey, vertically descending wall and brown walls on either side, when hit by the sun, seem to strangely dissolve into floors. Nevertheless, this roughly executed work intrigues with its warm glowing light. An exception.

Images courtesy of the artist and ACFA

Mark Amery reviews the current Gerda Leenards show at City Gallery

Following the Blue Ribbon: Recent Work by Gerda Leenards
Michael Hirschfeld Gallery, City Gallery Wellington
27 November 2009 - 24 January 2010


If you can stomach the City Gallery compulsory admission fee that comes with the Yayoi Kusama exhibition, do also see Gerda Leenards’ impressive series of paintings in the Michael Hirschfeld Gallery upstairs. With Following the Blue Ribbon Leenards’ reaches a rhapsodic abstract high-water mark, after a several decades’ long practice of watery atmospheric landscape painting.

Leenards’ work has its inspiration in the water-soaked Netherlands of her birth, with attention to the light from the gloom in the work of the old masters, mingled with the salt spray coating her home in Wellington’s Breaker Bay and abstract expressionist movements out on the South Coast’s horizon line.

This last five years or so Leenards’ has raised her game significantly, finding her creative plein air match in the light-filled and saturated gothic grandeur of Fiordland. Lying beyond the picturesque veil we’re so familiar with conditioning our view of the south-west, she identified a landscape in paint with layers of ghostly sensation that shadows the fluid rhythm of our body’s internal movement.

This new series sees her inspired to work bigger and more rhythmically, responding to the new Michael Hirschfeld Gallery space. The work is also inspired by a landscape that tops Fiordland for sublime power: the mountain-lined Li River and Yulong in China she visited in 2008. Clearly also inspired by classic Chinese landscape scroll painting in fluidity and ribbon-like rhythm, Leenards’ synthesises a wide variety of influences into what is now a mature and distinctive style that revitalises landscape painting.

To visit the gallery space with blue mirrored light-bathed peaks beating around you is to feel be-stilled and gradually aware of your own body’s rhythms. Amongst slowly shifting cadences of green and blue, the surround-sound landscape is an abstracted sensual experience of being in a small boat at dusk, hemmed in all around by dark hulks of hills.

The installation is a realisation of Greg O’Brien’s description of Leenards' work once as providing echo chambers. My experience of this work, similar to that with some of the finest abstract expressionism, is of entirely entering the rhythm of a world and my energy being shifted as a result.

Whilst the opening Hirschfeld exhibition in the new gallery by Regan Gentry seemed almost built to emphasise the gallery’s limitations in presenting installation work, Leenards' series emphasises the space's great intimacy for painting. Fenced off from the rest of City Gallery with a well-placed antique painted screen, the intimate experience of painting offered here is rare in public galleries. This show has been very thoughtfully curated by the artist and gallery curator Abby Cunnane.

Emphasised is the sound and time based nature of Leenards’ painting. Karst Reflection (Yulong Panels) is a work of 30 panels, lining the two longest walls of the gallery. Above and below a time-smudged horizon line the undulation of peaks is akin to a heartbeat monitor and the flicker of the cinema, as line and colour move across vertical ribs of canvas. The landscape resembles sonic waves or a written piece of music - melody moving across the beats of the bars of a stave. The momentous mountain peaks are animated, nodding their heads this way and that. Teasingly their reflections never quite meet their original images, the paint sliding and shimmering away.

Most often when painters use multiple panels to break up a landscape it comes off as a rather banal technical trick masking their lack of talent, but here it actually works to lift the work further out of a realist reading.

Even better is the triptych Solitude on the far end wall. The three-panel structure, with a centralised large bush shape resembles an enormous Rorschach psychoanalytic ink blot test, or a diagram of a blossoming sound wave (a nod in both cases perhaps to fellow senior Wellington artist Vivian Lynn).

Far less successful is the painting on the large folding antique screen, Blue Silk Ribbon. More simple in its beauty and technically impressive, it is moodily picturesque. Working over six panels, jarringly the components don’t marry up. No doubt it would look extraordinary in any domestic boudoir, but as art it lacks the abstract sonic power of the others and is something of a disappointment by comparison.

Images of Gerda Leenards' Following the Blue Ribbon installation, Hirschfeld Gallery, November 2009. Photo: Andrew Beck.

Before and After

Anya Henis: Raw Feels
RM
26 November - 12 December 2009

This display of a dozen watercolours inside the gallery and five on the outside noticeboard in the corridor, reveal Anya Henis to be capable of making works totally different from the tightly composed, representational oil on canvas works she has presented at Newcall and The Physics Room. The marks on these pinned up pieces of paper, in contrast to her earlier work are fluid and loose, working the zone between order and chaos. They happen to be her best work yet I think - by far - having a generous expansive quality, free from the pinched compression of the canvases.

Some of the most exciting examples are based on wet skeletal grids that peek through the over-painted colour. The strong and frenetically applied chroma plays off against the watery underpinning that somehow retains a compositional focus through a dominantly structured pattern. These works are turbulent as clusters of frenzied marks - though not in the emotional mood of the actual colour - yet control is never too far away. The six large works have real impact. Their delicate washes are impossible to photograph but the interwoven tangled and patterned forms intrigue.

I’ve no idea why Henis has switched to such a different visual style and technique. Perhaps she maintains (or has maintained) two sorts of practice simultaneously: one carefully preplanned and tight; the other improvised, loosey-goosey and spontaneous. If Raw Feels is this show’s title, then perhaps the other work is Cooked Thinks? As a foil, this 'under-heated' exhibition is an exciting development.

(Thanks to Nick and William for organising images.)

Sliding between microcosm and macrocosm

Joe Sheehan: Slide show
Tim Melville
9 December – 22 December 2009

The genre of using a slide carousel for the purposes of an art installation is a rare and intriguing phenomenon, an art-historical genre in its own right. The best example I’ve seen is the site-specific work of John Dunkley-Smith (part of Paul Taylor’s 1983 Tall Poppies show held in the University of Melbourne’s art gallery), where the sequences of slides referred to the collection of aboriginal art displayed in same room but hidden in darkness. Another favourite is Fritz Balthaus’ work in QUOBO, the show of contemporary art from Berlin shown in Waikato Museum about five years ago. It wasn’t so much a carousel that got your attention but the automatic focus into which was placed a slide containing bubble wrap. The machine continually attempted to adjust to the two simultaneous focal points of the plastic bubbles, never stabilising or staying in one or the other – and so seemed in a constant state of exasperation.

Joe Sheehan is well known as a virtuoso carver of marble or jade, and famous for making things like solid greywacke versions of crunched up plastic milk containers washed up on the beach. Slide show is a conceptual project of sorts in that its replaces slides with sequences of slide-sized pieces of pounamu (greenstone), a jade found only in the South island and attributed by Maori with spiritual properties. Now and then other less precious rock types are used as well.

The geological slides are cut thin so the carousel can hold about eighty of them. Sheehan also drills in with a wide bit to make domelike indentations that are wafer thin. The veiny, watery-looking rock, also containing angular black specks and misty amber clouds, often looks like streaky or crumpled tissue paper – or even vigourous and moody watercolour studies of sky forms.

It is very strange to see a substance like rock, normally equated with solid mass, ‘dematerialised’ so that properties such as liquidity and transparency are emphasised. Sheehan’s problem is to make this go beyond facile gimmickry, so it has gravitas – although it might be argued that such effects of light-transmuted rock are more than enough for a memorable ‘art’ experience.

Sheehan has chosen to avoid digital PowerPoint technology, and so the Luddite carousel he relies on is noisy in its operation within the darkened Melville space. You never forget this clattering projector – and that fact is obviously calculated. The artist doesn’t want you too transported by optical sensation alone.

Perhaps with these thoughts in mind, he has devised three sorts of carousel program. One is the ‘plain’ variety described above. Another is with areas of the rock slide masked off with paint or tape so that triangular slivers of light peek through edges dramatically, like light under a shut door. The third is with slides that have maplike coastal contours, filled with black ink, engraved into the rock. The contours come from North Auckland islands and beaches.

I confess I’m not really sure about this installation, and the last two carousels particularly seem over-contrived. I’m greatly impressed by the inventive use of rock as a transparent medium for light to pass through to create richly layered associations with botany, astronomy and art history, but the use of drawing to refer to exploration, and the creation of a cavelike environs to achieve a theatrical ‘mysticism’, makes me a little wary. I tend to be cynical of all notions ‘spiritual’ so my temperament is not sympathetic to this sort of presentation – while I’m also hostile to science museum-type displays (showcasing information) in galleries too.

Yet the final experience here is so indisputably evocative, and unusual, transporting the viewer far away from the world of minerals and geological processes, that each visitor tends to experience it viscerally and instinctively, like that of privately watching a full moon on a cloudy night. It is sufficiently enjoyable on that level.

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.