'Ice' is nice

Paul Hartigan’s Ice Ball
Whitespace window display in Crummer Rd, Auckland
4 March - 28 March 2008

This neon work of Hartigan’s is part of Whitespace’s ‘Political World’ show, and can only be seen from the street. In fact Ice Ball is the exhibition’s highlight, and looks best at night when the gallery is closed. (It is the highlight in the daytime too; the rest of the work is, I think, forgettable).

It is worth driving past in the evening to have a close look. While not as overtly spectacular as Colony, Hartigan’s persimmon Symonds St work at the University, Ice Ball is still a treat. Small and intimate, it is like a loosely tangled knot in the middle of vertical piece of stiff cord that is positioned against a small, white, reflective disc. If you move from the centre of the window to the far right, the complex core unflattens to become more spatially imposing and quite angular. It springs out at you and looks like a jumbled assortment of crescent shapes.

The best thing though is the soft colour, especially when reflected off the pale concrete backdrop. Plastic wiring sheaths at each end of the white glass tubing contain glowing bands of violet blue, and on the last ten inches of the upper vertical section the colour is greeny blue. It sends a gorgeous ‘baby-blue’ wash across the wall.

Magical light sculptures like this are worth a squiz. A bonus for the changing of summer hours into autumn.

Cuddly turns voodoo

Chris Lipomi: Maa-Nupi Waikipi
Michael Lett, Auckland
5 March - 5 April 2008

Lipomi has about seven pieces in this show, but it is the eponymous installation in the main gallery that overshadows all else. He has done a small version of Mike Kelley’s famous ‘Craft Morphology Flow Chart’, a work Kelley made for the 1991 Carnegie International. The last of his ‘stuffed animal’ projects, it consisted of 32 folding tables displaying 114 used handmade (fabric or knitted) dolls, arranged according to size and iconography. On the walls were 60 ‘documentary’ photographs of the dolls positioned next to rulers, and one drawing.

Lipomi’s reduced version is fascinating. There is none of the initial sweetness that Kelley’s soft cuddly sculptures would have had. Lipomi’s are feral and deeply creepy, like tribal fetishes or magic images where ‘sympathetic’ (with indexical correlations) or ‘contagious’ (touched by the victim) processes are attempted.

Shortly after he created his original project Kelley became immensely interested in Freud’s notion of the Uncanny and wrote an extremely scholarly essay on the subject, but the Uncanny, as New Zealand artists like Gavin Hipkins often show, is an extremely subtle thing.

The dolls made by Lipomi though aren’t subtle. They are scrappy objects made of toys, bits of real animal fur, plastic, bark, cane and fibre that often disturb. They look tribal, raw and primal – even though they are fake (in the sense that they are not meant to be functional, only look it). What is subtle is the use of archaeological layering Lipomi has added, using texture rubbings. This sort of conceptual-sandwiching effect was once demonstrated by the French artist Daniel Spoerri famous for exhibiting food scraps he glued onto plates left by guests who had eaten meals he had cooked. Once he cooked a big banquet in France and re-served the same feast in Sydney using for tablecloths, blown up photographs of the dishevelled, soiled tablecloths left after the earlier meal.

So what does Lipomi do? He has large, categorising, ‘primitive’ texture rubbings lining the flat table-like vitrines onto which the fetish dolls are placed. Then from the framed photographs of those same dolls that he has on the walls, he also makes ink-transfer rubbings - by photocopying the photographs and soaking the photocopies with a spirit-based solvent. These he then rubs with a pencil to put the images on the wall. Each image is represented three times: sculpture, photo, drawing. Rubbings are under the object on one occasion, then upon the wall, over it, the next. A sort of club sandwich.

In the series of shows that used soft toys Kelley was (according to curator Mark Francis) interested in the prehistory of the objects he reused ‘so that repressed meaning are allowed to come to light.’ By the time he came to ‘Craft Morphology’ his interest had shifted. Previously he had regarded them – because of their use as gifts - to be embodied with ‘guilt hours’ or ‘emotional usury’ and objects of projection where missing details in their blobby shapes were mentally filled in by the viewer. In his 1990 series ‘Empathy Displacement: Humanoid Morphology (2nd and 3rd Remove)’ Kelley examined processes of identification, placing a painting of each doll above the actual doll hidden in a box – confusing viewer participation and encouraging empathy with the missing ‘humanoid’.

‘Craft Morphology’ avoided this empathy and focussed instead on the materiality of the craft production, categorising through formal properties and method.

Well what does Lipomi’s recent version achieve?

Firstly there is no hint of craft or ‘gift’ in these objects at all. They will repulse many people. You’d freak if you found one in your letterbox.

Secondly they are ‘tribal,’ and ‘natural’ unprocessed materials dominate.

Thirdly they focus attention on the producer and not the viewer. There is no identification or projection here. It is more death of the reader and birth of the author. It explores a slightly different kind of prehistory than what Kelley was interested in. More James Frazer than Sigmund Freud; an older form of structuralism.

This is a much layered exhibition, visually and conceptually rich, that invites a lot of speculation. One of the best ever shows presented at Michael Lett.

Exhibition with two balls

Boris Dornbusch & Daniel Webby: I always say the contrary to what you say. I always say the same as you.
rm103, Auckland
28 February - 15 March 2008

The title of this show is one of those riddle-like exercises in paradox that searches for meaning in the face of illogical contradiction, like the famous example, a philosopher from Crete who announced ‘all Cretans are liars.’

The two rooms at rm 103 are thematically linked, but not in a manner that is overtly super-tight. Dornbusch's video is hilarious: at the centre of its bottom edge we see a basket-ball hoop, around which are repeated shots at goal, all failures.

Webby’s adjacent room shows a basket-ball on the floor surrounded by broken glass. It has come through the window, and left a large hole in its centre.

Taped to the ball is a mobile phone, which when rung – using a number provided on the wall – tells you ‘this number is not permitted to receive calls.’

Oddly, parts of the blurb on the gallery site seems more appropriate for Gambia Castle than rm103:
Two like things may be considered members of a set, thus the body which emerges is that of the set, with the constituent members lost.

Like the current Tahi Moore show at Gambia Castle, lack of success is a theme here, but encased within a riddling title. The video in particular is quite wonderful. Even funnier than Steve Carr. Well worth a visit.

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.

Too rigid

Darryn George: Pukapuka
Gow Langsford, Auckland
4 March - 28 March 2008

Darryn George is well known as a Maori painter in this country, but you know what, his earlier sculptural works are so much better. In the mid nineties he made a series of red/black/white sculptural wall reliefs, heraldic in nature, depicting motifs that examined colonial history from the Māori point of view. They had a fluidity of line and an organic quality that has long been lost.

George’s paintings in comparison have a busyness and rigidity, a harshness induced by their tonal contrast and geometry. Overcooked and wooden, they seem too earnest and too literal in their symbolism (a strange thing to say about ‘abstract’ works, I know.) Their excessive narrative layering makes them try too hard, and consequently they flounder.

Let me give an example: his use of thick white 3D paint in the borders is awkward – visually a mix of Jonathan Lasker and Max Ernst’s decalcomania. In the gallery’s very fine discussion of this show by Shelley Jahnke-Bishop, she mentions it is done to emulate the chisel marks of carving, but they actually don’t look chisel-like. The work is spoiled by its symbolic intent, which even if rendered impeccably, would still only overload the content. The ‘footnotes’ would have replaced the ‘essay’. The show’s title means ‘book’ so my literary comparison is apt.

The odd thing is that the best work of the show is in the gallery’s Wellesley Street window (bottom image above). It has an intriguing literal quality, looking like two rows of panels leaning against a wall. It also is comparatively simple, having no complicated background kowhaiwhai or tukutuku patterns. Plus there are grey panels that in the context of all the red, black and white, suddenly become visually refreshing.

This sounds like I’m trying to remove all the Māori components from George’s work, but not at all. I’m just advocating visual subtlety, and hinting that he could come at it from another direction. To my pakeha eyes it seems a bit heavy-handed and market-driven; devoid of intellectual risks. The earlier wave of ‘Māori painters’ like Peter Robinson and Shane Cotton are much more adventurous in comparison.

Don't apologise

Martin Poppelwell: Please excuse the mess
Anna Bibby, Auckland
4th March - 22nd March 2008

The last two spaces of Anna Bibby’s were particularly striking as places to visit to enjoy her chosen artists, yet this new Jervois Rd venue is just so forgettable. It‘s hard to imagine it is the same dealer. While on an obvious level this is clearly not my business, the building's pokey, mousey ambience affects a visitor’s perception of the art. It makes no effort to excite.

And Martin Poppelwell is normally a whizzo draftsman, clever designer and wonderful ceramicist but this is a lacklustre show. (For any space.) The paintings are typically eclectic - Tom Kreisler here, Carroll Dunham there, dashes of Guston thrown in – but holey-moley, the display lacks focus. It’s a jumble of bits. Not a mess though – just disparate.

However the small etchings are interesting with their garbled texts, geometric shapes and delicate detail. A room of them alone would have been great. They and the ceramics represent Poppelwell’s truest voice.

One of the two calligraphic pots has written on it: bad artists always admire each other’s work. You can say a lot about that statement, which implies good artists are somehow different, but they are not, are they?

So whom is Poppelwell thinking of as ’bad’? Kreisler, Guston and Dunham were/are very good artists, right? So while he has gifts….

Excellent recent comments from Nancy Sutherland and Mike

on Dat dwatted wabbit.