Stalling Obsolescence

Eve Armstrong
Michael Lett, Auckland
15 January - 9 February 2008

Eve Armstrong is quite a colourist and inventive manipulator of 3D form. Examining ‘Shake Up’, her piece of Tony Cragg\David Mach style floor sculpture at Michael Lett - with its references to Tomoko Takahashi - is immensely pleasurable. Shiny steel shelving brackets, propped up display stands and floppy rubber sealing strips in one part play off against deliciously translucent, green plastic clip boards and folders in another, while floor mats, rolls of layered linoleum and carpet underlay spread on the floor act as foils for vertical beams of plastic shelving and rectangular rubbish bins. The work is about an assortment of binary contrasts. It is also about placement (in several meanings of that term) and juxtaposition: not about physically or permanently modifying the ingredients. No paint brushes, hammering or welding here.

Yet most of us know Armstrong has two parallel practices that deliberately overlap – but just how successfully they connect I’m not sure. Her Trading Tables promote an ethos of recycling and finding appreciative owners for items normally destined for the dump, and her gallery displays espouse visual sensuality with spatial organisation, while focussing on obsolescence of (in this case) office fittings and equipment.

But it is only when art is sold so its ingredients get a new home that a gallery sculpture can recycle its contents. I don’t think Armstrong keeps the unsold items -unlike say Pauline Rhodes, who recontextualises and reuses the installation materials she stores. The unsold packing or office products from Armstrong’s shows go back to the source – which means their fate is ultimately the tip. The function-driven economy behind the Trading Table is different by virtue of Armstrong’s charismatic personal skills as a negotiator and her ability to think on her feet. The material there therefore has a better chance of surviving than the aesthetic-driven counterpart.

The gallery projects seem in comparison a futile stop-gap measure to delay the inevitable. The items that aren’t included within a successful (ie sold) sculpture face the fate that their owners had decided before the artist came along. They don’t have the good fortune to ‘sink back into the world’ (as Armstrong’s artist statement puts it) but face damnation as unrecycled waste products in landfill.

You are where?

You Are Here: Fiona Connor, Finn Ferrier, Kah Bee Chow, Alex Monteith, John Ward Knox – curated by Ariane Craig-Smith

ARTSPACE, Auckland
2 February - 1 March 2008

I must be confusing it with another street name?... It happens rather often this way, that we believe in things that are quite false: it is enough that some fragment of a memory, come from elsewhere, enters into some coherent pattern open to it, or else that we unconsciously fuse two disparate halves, or still that we reverse the order of the elements in some causal system, to fashion in our minds chimerical objects, having for us all the appearances of reality.
Alain Robbe-Grillet (Djinn)

ARTSPACE’s current curatorial intern, Ariane Craig-Smith has taken an innovative approach to this ‘art mapping’ exhibition, for although it is entitled ‘You are here’ it has very little obviously in common with those city maps that feature that locating phrase, nor has it much in common with the book of that title by Kitty Harmon that deals with images made by artists incorporating maps or alluding to them.

There are no maps at all in this show, save a floor plan of ARTSPACE that shows you where the eleven works are positioned. The exhibition is more about bodily sensations of movement, movement’s traces, those speculative processes that assist us in finding a direction, and certain correlations we use to determine location. The focus is really the thinking behind maps rather than maps themselves, in particular the correlation of the indexical where connections are matched up and parallels found linking the artefact with the outside world. In other words, the nature of those representations that help us move through space and understand it.



The artworks take several approaches. Some record traces of their audience’s movement as they explore the exhibition. Kah Bee Chow and Finn Ferrier have created a raked sand garden at the bottom of the stairs that gallery–goers step into and disturb when they go to examine Fiona Connor’s replica of the ARTSPACE circular noticeboard. Finn Ferrier has also created a fake parquet surface by stencilling a zigzag motif with varnish onto ARTSPACE’s concrete floor. Pehaps this layer will wear out as people walk over it so a path becomes detectable.



Other works, like John Ward Knox’s small biro drawings, are textured rubbings taken off embossed wallpaper. Two of these ‘correlations’ tease the audience because the top halves are identical but their bottom halves differ. They are remote cousins of Fiona Connor’s replicas of an imagined ‘ripped up’ ARTSPACE foyer staircase, mysteriously dumped in the main gallery.





Filmed records of artist movements are seen in John Ward Knox’s video of himself in Aotea Square performing like a ‘dancing bee’ various stepping movements modelled on three small drawings pinned to the wall. Similar are parts of Kah Bee Chow’s video spoof on Irma Vep and The Phantom of the Opera, especially when the catwoman-like protagonist is self consciously moving over the ARTSPACE roof. The viewer thinks of the building they are standing – or sitting – in, the movie referents for the satire, and puzzles over some Photoshopped scenes of Chow’s parents and their garden (see above) which incongruously appear as if transported from another location.




The motion of a racing motorcyclist’s body circumnavigating the Taupo Racetrack is recorded by Alex Monteith in her project that uses cameras facing both forward and backward. The resulting looped projections screened in a corner, cause a particularly physical response from the viewer, especially when the rider leans over while turning into bends. Viewers also have the opportunity to move their own vertical bodies through normally unreachable sections of the main gallery if they use a specially raised, large platform provided by Fiona Connor, Kah Bee Chow and Finn Ferrier. Its height allows the audience to look through temporarily installed clear glass panes in the horizontal windows at the top of the walls, and study Auckland’s urban landscape afresh.

This unique chance to explore the geographical and social meanings behind ARTSPACE’s municipal location is a special self-reflexive opportunity unique to this exhibition, a declaration that subtly announces to the show’s continually changing audience that they are there – these chances are rare - so make the most of it.

Reaction Replay

Fast Forward
Vavasour Godkin, Auckland
20 November 2007 – 9 February 2008

This group show of thirteen works from nine artists is a good mix of different generations. Geoff Thornley goes back to the seventies and Petar/James gallery, while Andrew Drummond is an important figure in the history of this country’s performance art, especially also of the seventies. Plus there is a John Panting linear ‘suspension’ sculpture as well from that time – a late addition that looks a bit cramped near the wall, but very unusual. (Here is an image from the VG archives.)


The two large Thornley abstractions look better here than they did in his recent Gus Fisher show. They need lots of wall space and the chance to draw you in close when you are ready. Their fascinating synthesis of canvas with board plays with prepositions like ‘above’ or ‘under’ in their interaction. Unlike related artists such as Kelly (shaped canvases) or Mangold (shapes on canvas), with Thornley you examine the bevelled edge of the hardboard contours or cut out holes and think about their planar surfaces and implied spatial twists.




Andrew Drummond presents a suite of four documentary images from his 1978 Ngaraunga Set of performances at the Artists Co-op in Wellington. (I think Ngauranga is the correct spelling, but both are prevalent on the web even though they would be pronounced quite differently.) Drummond has made inkjet images from slides taken of his actions in the spacious co-operative, performances that referred to the demolished Ngauranga freezing works, that spoke of a ‘conversation’ between him and the slaughtered animals. (This example below is not in the show.)


I personally don’t feel comfortable with the Beuysian shamanism here, but they are fascinating images from an ideologically innocent era. In his excellent article on Drummond in Art New Zealand Wystan Curnow talks of the images being artworks in themselves (‘the documentation is not for the record, it is the work’) but times have changed and today’s digital technology forces us to reassess all that. I think the performances have an ontology irrespective of the static photographs or the filmed video Drummond also made, and can’t be replaced by the images.


Speaking of digital technology and video, Gregory Bennett’s two small screens of moving animated figures are interesting. The lefthand LED shows two humanoids (male and female) joined at the lower chest that twist and turn as they enter each other’s torso and pull apart. They are like a cyber version of some of Marina and Ulay Abramovic’s seventies performance works where the two artist-lovers are physically joined by their breathing mouths or hair, and strain to separate before merging together again. The other righthand screen in contrast shows small figures in a circle performing ritualistic dances and creating expanding and contracting, kaleidoscopic configurations.

Back to the abstract paintings in the show, André Hemer’s work is immensely beguiling, with its pool of exactly repeatable splashes, scrawled loops and swirls – each carefully computer cut in its paint-masking process and juxtaposed with an occasional dollop of collage. And carefully controlled so the elements don’t lose their clarity and smother each other.


Matthew Dowman’s large stretchers are related to the work of Seung Yul Oh, but bigger, less intimate and less comic based. They have less allusion, and added graffiti spray - and are reliant on a dominant colour for their mood, making them more conventionally abstract and physical.

Miranda Parkes has three works here. Of these, the most intriguing is the biggest one. Its scale lets her experiment with different grids, daubs and splashes, all mixed up on the one large, crumpled, billowing canvas surface.


The last two works are slightly different from the others. There is a delicate fragility within Lianne Edwards’ grid of used penny postage stamps, for the individual stickers are pinned up like collected insects, and create through repetition a gridded version of Elizabeth Thomson's much larger metal sculptures of insects. These are stamps though and their shadows push them out so they hover in space like a suspended plane.


Monique Jansen’s framed sheet of obsessive rows of very fine pencil lines shimmers optically, and looks as if it has been drawn with a machine. The lines look like regularly undulating strata of hair-thin crêpes, or layers of large peeled off skins in cross-section. Impossible to photograph, they demand close proximity to appreciate.

Seven by Five

Woke Up This Morning: Sarah Hillary, Johanna Pegler, Kate Small, Isobel Thom and Barbara Tuck.
Anna Miles, Auckland
1 – 23 February, 2008

Five painters present their work in Anna Miles’ intimate little suite in High St. Some might make something of the fact all the artists are women. I’m not so sure. There is a lot of variation here. Still the show's title comes from The Sopranos theme song "Woke up this morning, got yourself a gun" - apparently about a woman who killed her husband after twenty years of violent abuse - so there is a political edge intended by Miles to be a mental frame. You wouldn't think so though, from the paintings alone. In this millenium more than ever, it is foolhardy to make assumptions about the gender of an artist just by examining their work.

Kate Small at first glance seems to be a slightly more realist version of Riduan Tomkins – an artist well known in Christchurch where he taught painting at Ilam - but her works are without the modernist figurescape. Her similarly understated paintings instead allude to deep space through perspective, though seen through a haze achieved by an even manipulation of tones.


Her square painting depicts a scene at the Parnell baths, with two slightly elongated figures, women in swimsuits in a waterless pool. There is a suggestion of psychological interaction between the two women, and a palpable tension between them and the enclosed space, with its ceiling, walls, furniture and floor. The pastel tones suggest heat more than water.

Johanna Pegler’s painting has a psychological dimension too, but about nature as a spiritual force, and not humans. Instead of two people Pegler has two trees, a pine and a lemon, placed on a bank with the former towering over the latter. The drama in the work comes from the cracklike lines formed by the dark pine branches set against the pale sky. There is a found expressive quality in these jagged lines alluding to an emotional intensity that seems to come from nature as an everwatching moral power. This is pantheism of which Wordsworth would be proud.


Barbara Tuck’s painting connects with this, but in a more Blakean or Huxleyan manner, using the structure of the molecular (like Hanly) but with imagery from nature that is not microcosmic. Her work uses mapping shapes to enclose vistas from landscape or plant details, utilising a human scale and references to culture like cartography or particle physics. Tuck’s oil application is particularly sensual and painterly with this recent work being slightly larger than previously. The lush and delicately coloured shapes butt against each other like little islands of rendered rock or vegetation, huddling together in a sea of melting blossomy snow.


Sprigs of blossom also figure strongly in Sarah Hillary paintings, providing an implied grid on which to place seashells, fish, vases and the occasional scrawny bird. With her work the chunky white ornate frames dominate, bringing a needed physical presence to boost her small panels. Her rhythmic images are curious in the way they treat (or don’t treat) pattern, for the two panels divide the field up so regular repetition doesn’t take hold. The result is like a tantalising tune that doesn’t quite have a melody but is half suggested. Her placement of two panels side by side similarly creates peculiar tensions where the suggested patterns avoid a strident dynamic and remain anaemic, circumnavigating the muscular.


In Isobel Thom’s paired paintings her imperious gaze (at herself in the mirror) provides the structure for her grey and black marks. Her self portraits have a touch of Gabo’s constructivism without being hollow shells. They look almost like they are made from pieces of torn paper with their glowing, finely delineated edges. The work is admirably clinical and seems to be the result of some industrial process, especially in the modelling around the neck and head, where there is a complex but planned colliding of multi-sided and interconnecting planes. From her very limited palette, Thom manages to achieve an especially rich and absorbing image – mixing early twentieth century modernism with a very contemporary sense of the cybernetic.



While not a tight show, the connections between Pegler and Small, Tuck and Hillary, and Thom and Small (with their sense of alienation) prevent it from being too fragmented. There is plenty to think about. A cleverly nuanced exhibition.

Scratch 'n Sniff

Summer Show
John Leech, Auckland
12 December 2007 - 2 February 2008

It is always worthwhile having a good nose around in places that deal a lot in secondary sales like John Leech - or the various auction houses that have pre-auction exhibitions to draw in potential bidders. You often discover early work by artists you like that has not been shown in major municipal institutions or the artist’s local dealer gallery. Sometimes you find examples that are unusual, that differ in some way from their accepted style, or are hybrid images between styles.

There are lots of works here I really like: the wild brusherly Mrkusich; the cool, lacquered black-blues of Hotere; the bizarre McWhannell car; the early folk-arty Stevenson.(see above)

But two works in this show I’m really wild about. They utterly intrigue me.

First of all there is this little Terry Stringer. He is an artist I don’t generally admire, for I find his bronze mock-cubist/deco figures and faces a bit stuffy and formuliac. However his image of a hand plucking the head off a small figure really surprised me. It is mesmerising in the intensity of its violence: like something from Goya. It is very funny, witty and terrifying on several levels. The vanity of the body language of the headless figure is very entertaining. It looks like a soccer player about to kick off - to begin a match in a crowded stadium – but the ball under his left foot could also be a head, another one perhaps. And the proportions of the armless figure look very contemporary. With his short legs and long torso the scene looks comical, with the body slightly twisted as if posing for a photograph.


The other work is a McCahon painting of a Northland landscape. To me it is quite suggestive. It seems very sexual and not about landscape at all. The lower half seems to be a woman’s crotch with her pubis and thighs. Above them hovers the head of a penis and a cloud of spurted ejaculate.

Okay I do wonder if my twisted imagination here is playing tricks on me. Maybe I’m just oversexed and need a cold shower. But maybe also an artist like McCahon could create images he didn’t fully understand himself.

On the other hand, maybe he did? We can’t assume he had no sense of humour or mischievous perversity. It is very likely he was interested in the primal, and that he viewed carnal desires as a legitimate layering he could mix with landscape forms and the eroticism of rounded geological formations. I think it was intended. Dirty Colin. How wonderful.

Three decades on

In Good Form: the Abstract Art of Roy Good 1967 - 2007, curated by Edward Hanfling
Lopdell House, Titirangi.
14 December 2007 - 10 February 2008

Ed Hanfling does the Auckland reviews for Art New Zealand, but he is also nationally known for his Ferner publications on Ian Scott, and his involvement with the Gus Fisher show ‘Vuletic and his Circle’. He obviously has a serious passion for geometric abstraction, especially that coming out of Auckland, so it makes sense that he has put together this small survey of Roy Good’s paintings.

Though a painter, Good also worked as a designer and teacher after he graduated from the Ilam School of Fine Arts in the early sixties, and many of the paintings show a designer’s sensibility. He had exhibitions at Petar/James, New Vision and Barry Lett, amongst others. He lives in Titirangi, hence the presentation in Lopdell House.

The best work in this mini-retrospective was made in the early to mid seventies. In fact the whole show reeks of the seventies, even paintings made this millennium. Alas there is too much work here for the moderately-sized Lopdell space. The twelve best works would have made an excellent exhibition by themselves, paintings which emphasise Good’s interest in shaped canvas, are architectural in the way their contained forms interact with the surrounding room, and which downplay his interest in transparent overlapping planes.This last area of research, I think, has not been as successful as his use of 'solid' forms.

These successful works are influenced by early Mrkusich, mixed in with a bit of Kenneth Noland. Their interest lies in their avoidance of Mrkusich’s Jungian symbolism, and eschewing the square or horizontal rectangle for the stretcher: using T-shapes, or triangles or I-forms instead. The smaller works peppered throughout of spirals, Perspex boxes and linear geometric forms seem too complicated and comparatively slight.

It would be interesting to do a national survey of geometric abstraction from the seventies. In Christchurch for example, the 20/20 Vision group with John Coley, Michael Eaton (and I think Carl Sydow) had a lot in common with Good. As did others like Ray Thorburn with his modular paintings (Good has modular screenprints).

In Good Form helps focus on this fascinating period and resurrect images that might end up being long forgotten – often for sound reason, because for those of us who lived through that period many of these works do look dated. Those that don’t though – like the ones I’ve mentioned - look terrific and have a convincing presence; so a trip out to Titirangi is worth the effort. However because you need to grasp the total picture beyond what is on the Lopdell walls, buy or borrow Hanfling’s excellent scholarly catalogue. With his thorough discussion and various copious illustrations, you get a much needed background context.

More is never more

Ghost Guest Host - James Robinson
Lopdell House, Titirangi
14 December 2007 - 10 February 2008

Some artists in this country achieve a profile far beyond what their talent deserves – the result of our small undiscerning population. In my view James Robinson is one of those: an over-rated individual who recently inexplicably won a James Wallace Art Award and a residency in New York. Yet in his current show at Lopdell, though Robinson’s individual works are clichéd and cornball, overall it is a well conceived hang (better than the crowded arrangement of Roy Good works next door), with eight vertical canvas hangings, a group of much smaller paper drawings in the window alcove (see detail above), and some computer animation on a monitor. The spatial organisation is a success, but the artworks themselves are facile.

Why my antagonism to these paintings? Well his work is all body and no brains, equating thoughtless energy and abundant accumulation from frenetic obsessiveness with quality. It is an angst-ridden hybrid of Twombly, Basquiat and (perhaps) Dieter Roth, an unrelenting visual torrent of scribbled, scratched and painted marks, scrawled texts, stitches, slashes, collages, and assemblages that attempts to perpetuate the belief that because the artist is a genius all that he creates is of interest: the denser and more prolific the output the better. The process of psychic outpouring is the thing, a matter of purgative ‘soulful’ elimination that is almost bodily. The result is densely packed work that lacks air. Surfaces are there to be crammed with marks or glued on objects – to the max.

Robinson appeals to people who in the eighties would have purchased Philippa Blair (or Emily Karaka) paintings with their overloaded – but less brainless - cacophony of lines and colour. At least he limits his colour options, mainly I think because he tends to use paint as a means of drawing. He is a Basquiat addict big time – far more than what that other Robinson dauber (and vastly superior artist) - Peter – used to be.

Some artists who work in an overcooked fashion can still imbue their work with a keen sense of design and wit (like Jonathan Meese) but Robinson’s practice lacks that kind of control. But as I’ve said, he activates the Titirangi space nicely. It is a nifty piece of walk-in installation that impresses as long as you don’t get up too close to the surfaces and accidentally look at them.