Here's some information from Stuart Page on up and coming screenings of

his doco Stustak. Thank you Stuart.

Good start

Selina Foote: FIRE RIOT MEAT
Newcall
13 January - 31 January 2009

Selina Foote had a striking little exhibition in ACFA in August last year, and I was expecting more of the same – lead on a little by the invite blurb which described how she altered found online images. Actually this show is quite different. Her practice has radically changed. It is now closer in thinking, oddly enough, to the Newby / Moore installation now on at Window.

Foote’s earlier paintings were more graphic tonally - with more ‘realistically’ saturated chroma too - but now she is knocking that back with milky or mauve washes. The work was more surreal and as such disturbing. Now it has a cooler, more icy, cerebral quality – as if examining representation but not chasing ‘affect’. There is a new distance apparent in these eight works, with a chalky quality as seen from through a diaphanous screen. The show's title seems to allude to Mary Louise Browne's use of magic squares and transmuting words.

I miss the creepiness of Foote's earlier mutilated images. These new ones are a pinch bland with their bleached hues, but not all of them. The method of placing the pale layer varies from work to work. Some just flatten out the space – as with Racing Cars, Singer and Diorama – and deaden the underlying photo-based images. In others the layer looks like a rippling curtain and repeats the orientation of the form (as in Cactus), or is in brusherly streaks (as in Fire).

The best ones are when the washes are not consistent in density but uneven and splotchy. Some areas are opaque and reveal nothing underneath, others are transparent and provide you with clues. This teasing effect can be amusing, as shown with Meat (as selection of salamis and hams that could occasionally be cheeses) and Riot (you can just detect the flailing arms and punching fists). Horse is also buried under a puddle of purple but the image is so static and banal nothing gets generated. It stays forgettable though it is perhaps a little more maudlin.

It is good Foote presents these paintings as a coherent group, because if you saw them individually (in isolation) you might think she had had temper tantrums and impulsively thrown a jarful of paint at each canvas. That she has had some sort of crisis and suffered a failure of nerve.

If one wanted to interpret these paintings (if that were necessary - it may not be, but it is fun to try) how would one go about it? In a very interesting little essay which discusses the process of pressing flowers within the pages of a book, John Ward Knox mentions the faint coloured indexical traces left by the crushed petals and leaves on the paper. Though her images are found online Foote’s might allude to memory and how some aspects fade and others are vividly retained.

The works might also be a critique of realism itself – and also photography - as a putative method of correlated semblance. The obliterating white screen might hold the position held by Nelson Goodman, Roland Barthes, Rosalind Krauss and others (contrary to Peirce) that all signs or codes of representation are arbitrary. Perhaps Foote agrees and feels a deep dissatisfaction with her method.

Anyway, hats off to Newcall for kicking off a new year of Art in Auckland. This is a stimulating beginning. The city is particularly empty and dull this time of year, so it’s great to see energetic and fresh gallery projects now happening.

Vanished headlands

Fiona Jack and Ngati Whatua o Orakei: Kohimaramara
ARTSPACE billboard project on Karangahape road

Mixing up or blending together images from the past and present is one of the obvious characteristics of digital photography where physical cutting and pasting (collage style) is no longer needed. Two photographs of the seafront at Bastion Point, taken 107 years apart, provide the raw visual material for an exciting new panorama on a huge billboard on the Langham Hotel car park on K’ Rd. These images by Haruhiko Sameshima and James Richardson have been combined to create a spectacular land, sea and skyscape, supervised by Fiona Jack (lecturer at Elam) and Ngarimu Blair (the Heritage Manager of Ngati Whatua o Orakei).

The massive horizontal hoarding mourns the destruction in 1908 of Kohimaramara, a large rock (called ‘Sugarloaf’ by Europeans) that was linked symbolically to the various peace agreements between Maori tribes in the Auckland area. It has a ghost-like presence in the centre of the rectangle. There is also an odd wit in this image's placement on the side of a hotel car park to subtly critique ‘progress’ and 21st century modernity. It shows lines of parked cars on the foreshore as a symbol for the present.

The image and title allude to an oral tradition where place names were used by Maori as a sort of mapping structure preserved not by visual means but through stories and language. No persons who have seen this rock are alive now but historical photographic archives provide a valuable resource that supplements verbal and written records.

It would be good to know why the rock was destroyed. Plain ignorance? Malicious vandalism by the pakeha authorities maybe? Perhaps it was seen as a hindrance to shipping, or as aesthetically unsightly?

This billboard is a subtle work that prods us to look closely at the past and how it effects our assumptions about the landscape of the present. In a lively, very evocative text Layla Rudneva-Mackay speculates about what happened to Kohimaramara, suggesting that it could have been ground up to help build the causeway or even used to make a foundation for the Shortland Street Post Office.

Kohimaramara reveals a particularly smart use of the panoramic properties of the elongated billboard format, making it the most successful so far of the several works ARTSPACE has organised. The image plays with us like the recent lenticular photographs by Megan Jenkinson of ‘phantom’ Antarctic islands. Both sorts of work deal with evanescence - one physical, the other mental. You ponder presence and absence simultaneously. In Kohimaramara’s case, the large scale of the image makes both past and present equally palpable, super-assertive and hard to pull apart.

Better late than never

1: Daniel Malone, Francis Alys, Mark Adams, Eve Armstrong, Fiona Banner, Ann Veronica Janssens
Brian Butler Ed.
Designed by Warren Olds, Studio Ahoy
Colour, b/w illustrations
Softcover 132 pp
ARTSPACE and Clouds, August 2008

This Volume publication looks at Brian Butler’s first six months as Director at ARTSPACE, his term being from 2005 to 2008. It presents the work of six artists, has essays by five writers, plus it has another publication (Eve Armstrong’s) enclosed within. The book is quite eccentric. One artist has two essays (Francis Alys), two artists have none (Malone and Adams), and one of those never even showed at ARTSPACE - yet strangely their images are I think the highlight of the book (Adams).

Butler is not a very good editor: some of the articles are too long, digress wildly and need shaping - especially Allan Smith on Armstrong and Nathalie Robertson on Alys. They simply don’t capture what is exciting about the artists they’re discussing, but Butler’s own short piece of writing on Fiona Banner is the best we’ve seen from him. Hopefully we will see of his writing in future Volumes.

The most successful texts are by Matthew Crookes and Stella Brennan. Crookes looks at myth-building as part of Alys's practice while Brennan’s text is extraordinarily focussed and tells us a great deal about actually experiencing Janssens’ various projects in the ARTSPACE rooms. As mentioned Robertson’s discussion meanders away from Alys but an examination of Maui as ‘trickster’ in her text is informative and entertaining. Her writing becomes more attentive to Alys in the second half.

Of the artists, Eve Armstrong’s inserted book on How To Run Trading Tables is so brilliant visually and conceptually that it is clearly to Volume 1’s advantage to include it in its entirety. The best writing linking Armstrong’s sculpture with her interactive performances, and giving an accurate overall account, seems to have been by Natasha Conland, so a chance was missed with her omission. Allan Smith’s essay focuses unduly on the notion of ‘stack’ or ‘pile’, contextualising it with various excerpts from novels and poetry, but ignoring the fact she is an accomplished colourist and shaper of sculptural form. His text is really about him not her, showing his ability to pull material from unexpected literary sources, and seamlessly blend it as a series of crammed riffs exploring semantic themes.

Daniel Malone’s four opening photographs of his ‘graffiti’ wall by ARTSPACE’s K’ Rd entrance are not particularly interesting in their own right, and could have done with a verbal analysis to explain the details of the frontage’s changes. They seem to be there because they showcase ARTSPACE’s street signage, and cannot compete with the wonderfully compelling images by Adams (Cook’s Sites) and Armstrong (as documented by Richard Orjis) in the publication’s centre.

Although this is a good looking publication with much informative material, it needs an explanatory introduction, and at $70 is somehat overpriced. (Compared to say Reading Room at $50.) Nevertheless we look forward to further issues in this series.

Some new comments from

John Ward Knox on In a silent way.

Crockford on K' Rd

Patrick Lundberg
Sue Crockford Gallery Project Space
Dec – Jan holidays

This window display by Patrick Lundberg, the recent winner of the TWNCAA in Hamilton, takes his interest in subtraction as a method of historical analysis (when applied to gallery wall surfaces) and transmutes the frame motif he has used previously into a Peter Halley-like cell or circuit. Here the space it is in is a crucial component (though not in a site-specific sense). It is the window by the entrance to the old Teststrip space on K’ Rd - now Gambia Castle. It has been for some months a little annex for Sue Crockford and this is its fifth or sixth show.

In this glass ‘tank’ Lundberg uses the worn doors of a small cupboard. It looks like a fusebox, and that reference makes it reflexive, alluding to the hermeticism of the art world as an isolated cell. On the doors is a vertical lozenge and a smaller wheel form, and together the two seem to allude to Crockford’s downtown gallery and this street frontage. Other meanings could be different art world circuits that are separate communities.

Lundberg’s cleverness is that there is more than morphology involved. The image’s significance goes beyond shape, for there is a chronological element where historical traces are implied through scraped away paint. Change is built in as Lundberg exposes where old layers have been covered over by new ones.

This window gallery is a shrewd tactic by Crockford to catch the eye of those traipsing Auckland’s ‘art mile’ along K’ Rd. A good way of luring prospective clients from the top down to the bottom of Queen Street.

In a silent way

Tahi Moore, Kate Newby: Run!
Window
23 November - 28 January 2009

Moore and Newby are two well known Gambia Castle artists. Moore seems particularly interested in the ambiguities of the reconstructed moving image, and Newby, the spatial and corporeal possibilities of 'treated' found or given form.

For this collaboration we see stretched across the inside of the plate glass window of the university gallery, a large rectangular piece of translucent muslin, stained with yellow and red blobs. It is similar to the suspended screen in Newby’s August ‘Thinking with your Body’ Gambia Castle exhibition.

Behind it, on a monitor discretely placed to one side, screens a looped, silent video in slow motion – presumably made by Moore. It shows two male figures (occasionally a woman replaces one of them), dressed in black, chatting about what they come across as they walk around the public spaces of an inner city area. The image is blurred by the milky material, though you can peek through a small gap on the far left side to see the screen from an angle.

The show is about thwarting the viewer’s desire for clarity and assessable meaning. The obstructing painted fabric screen seems to serve several purposes.

Firstly as a symbol for cultural mediation when attending generally to art, it denies ‘the innocent eye’, representing other sources of ‘pertinent’ or ‘necessary’ knowledge such as conversations, essays, wall labels, magazines, books etc.

Secondly it represents mood shifts and fluctuating abilities to concentrate, on the part of the viewer. Looking at energy levels, not knowledge sources. Also, its unique marks can stand for the problems of a particular experience – as presented by this exhibition only. The contingent nature of this library foyer encounter on one particular day.

For all that, this installation is not a satisfying experience. Its obliqueness is clearly deliberate. It is also a poor show, one that seems insufficiently thought through. It is not that it is difficult; it is that it lacks structure, and needs more coherence. The painted fabric and the narrative of the video seem so disconnected, that any linking logic is doomed to remain vague. Yet such logic is implied but not underlined. It doesn’t convince, or even wish to.

As artworks go, Ash Kilmartin’s wall essay on the silence of a portrait of a mime (poirot) is a far more resolved project, beautifully executed but not helpful for those looking at Run! A sceptic might argue Kilmartin's involvement is a smart-aleck joke about detective stories and Agatha Christie, but that is excessively cynical (like a novel with its last page ripped out) and convoluted. The essay is not integrated into being part of Run’s discussion, but remains separate. That's a pity, but is a common situation for galleries like Window and Newcall, where provided texts often undermine and not assist comprehension of the presented artwork.