Sexual relief

Edward Bullmore: A Surrealist Odyssey
Curated by Penelope Jackson for Tauranga Art Gallery Toi Tauranga
Gus Fisher
30 January - 28 February 2009

Surrealism – with its interest in the theories of Freud and the role of sexual desire in the unconscious mind - is one of those art genres that has never sparked off much interest amongst New Zealand artists. This is surprising because after all, sexual passion plays just as big a role in many people’s psychic landscape as say hills and rivers play in their physical one. Our artists tend to blend surrealism with other artistic preoccupations (eg, Don Driver or Julia Morison), for rarely do its dreamlike properties come under close scrutiny. Wilhelm Ruifrok did it for a time in the early seventies. And Edward Bullmore did it much longer in the late fifties, sixties and some of the seventies.

Bullmore (1933 - 1978) is the subject of a touring exhibition organised by the Tauranga Art Gallery. Most of it consists of works gifted to that institution by his widow.

When I was a student in Christchurch in the seventies I can remember occasionally seeing his ‘stuffed’ and stitched constructions in the CSA as part of exhibitions by The Group. Rich in references to intimate body parts and made by stretching canvas tightly over sections of dismantled chairs, these works also referred to clothing, sailing and landscape. Because he spent a decade successfully creating work in England his most developed work was initially rarely seen here, even though he studied at Ilam and taught in Tauranga and Rotorua. What little was here was always talked about because of its provocative allusions or the sheer strangeness of his assemblage, but when he died prematurely at 45 he was still comparatively unknown.

The interesting thing is that today his early more conservative work – the portraits of himself and his wife Jacqueline - holds up better than his wall reliefs. Despite their references to (James) Gleeson, Dali, Raphael and Messina, they fascinate because of their connections to Canterbury artists like Bill Sutton. We see the blending of New Zealand landscape and skies with conventions taken from European Art History.

Bullmore’s fetishistic wall reliefs are brilliant because of the fact they say the unspeakable (cocks, cunts and tits) but he needed to be in London to get the empathetic environment necessary to construct them. New Zealand's art community was far too repressive a place to allow their creation and public display, even though they were sometimes subtle, even discreet.

As hybrid artworks they were often, I think, also too fiddly and decorative. Overloaded with references to seventies drapes and wallpaper, or clothing’s zips and straps, some stylised ornamental elements undermine the raw physicality of the sagging or tumescent biomorphic forms. It might be argued this very tension is their essential point, so that the straining of fabric over padded ‘flesh’ goes beyond titillation to become a societal metaphor about control. The ‘smut’ is strangely naturalised with the curved taut chair shapes, synthetic colours and frayed bandage/sail forms so it becomes decidedly unerotic - almost drearily prosaic. The references to the land and geological strata emphasise the ordinariness of sex, demystifying it.

Some of the didactic anti-nuclear paintings made in London also do not last well as images – unlike his friend Pat Hanly’s Chagall-influenced work of that time which holds up convincingly. Bullmore’s narrative paintings look corny, preachy and contrived, particularly with their mantis skull-like faces which seem like the heads of Michael Illingworth paintings. However curator Penelope Jackson has done the right thing in including them for they explain the early development of the reliefs.

This is a very unusual show about a very unusual artist. The display and its excellently researched publication say a lot about this country and its more recent history. Even the work that has dated is interesting for what it tells us. Try not to miss it, and bring the kids. Something to talk about during the car-ride home.

Sophisticated drawings

Works on Paper: Kevin Appel, Joachim Bandau, Frank Gerritiz, Jane Harris, Noel Ivanoff, Simon Morris, Geena Shin
Two Rooms
30 January - 28 February 2009

This is a tightly selected show that uses the whole gallery, with Frank Gerritiz providing some ‘drawings’ in the traditional sense of leaded graphite on paper, and Geena Shin and Kevin Appell creating collages. Joachim Bandou and Jane Harris explore the limitations of watercolour inside demarcated, repeated shapes that overlap – as does Simon Morris with liquid acrylic – while Noel Ivanoff makes ‘paintings’ in a sticky Judy Millarish way, with viscous coloured substance stamped with a grinding disc onto free-hanging sheets of dacron. Only three of the seven artists here are Kiwis.

In this shrewd, elegant and varied exhibition stock is made fresh in a new context. The works interact beautifully, with many cross connections made via similar colours and use of negative shape.

The most obsessively fastidious works are Gerritz’s carefully positioned squares and rectangles. These meticulous black blocks are stacks of dark rippling lines measured into thirds or sixths of the pages’ surface area. The harshness of the precise edges created by this German artist could lacerate your eyeball if you lingered too long over their razor-sharp, geometric contours. The mottled pencil lines seduce with their subtle horizontal wobbling motion and beguiling depth.

Geena Shin’s angular tangram forms are less optically stable, not being anchored with a sense of weight. Their pointy diamond forms seem to flutter and flip across the page, being like Gerritz ultra crisp, and exploiting negative gaps. Carefully pre-planned, these are made with rigorously positioned, glued on, painted card.

Whilst this is clearly an ‘abstraction’ show that examines nuances of surface, it is not only preoccupied with figure-ground relationships of shape or suggested volumetric form. Simon Morris and Noel Ivanoff deal with these, and the concept of process-driven time as well. Both use wormlike shapes that meander across the page, rising and descending - and stopping when they seem about to double back.

Morris’s inventive stencil-based configurations explore a delicate and flat, thick twisting line that snares unexpected but repeated white shapes within its airy looping course. Ivanoff’s line though is much fatter and denser. Because it is created from a printed disc application of slimy coloured pigment it looks telescopic and modelled, like a ventilation tube. It is squeezed into a compressed structure where negative forms cannot be a consideration.

These works have a nice looseness as well: Ivanoff where the squashed paint has oozed out and thickened beyond the confines of the overlapping, pressing circle, and Morris with the occasional flick of dripped paint. British artist Jane Harris capitalises further on such accidents, mixing her watercolour pigments in subtle chromatic combinations and placing them in rows of overlapping elongated ovals so that the drying hues start to separate and form dark surging waves peeking through paler fields.

There is another German artist in this show besides Gerritz, mentioned earlier. Joachim Bandau exploits the properties of diluted black pigment and only that, his overlapping rectangular washes looking like aerial views of stacked up sheets of tinted glass. Each faint rectangle has a thin undulating edge, a tiny line of linear black residue, and the ones in the centre, being positioned over many more layers, are darker and deeper in dramatic depth.

Upstairs the collages by American artist Kevin Appel show us his interest in synthetic cubism and architectural forms. On one wall his pencil drawings of patterned sheltering planes, airily aligned within the branches of trees, amuse with their whimsical inventiveness. On the other, appropriated photographs of landscapes have tent or hut forms inserted, with similarly decorative planes. This floor is in marked contrast to the austerity and lack of ornamentation on the ground floor below. Unlike the other artists, Appel’s work has a celebratory exuberance, a joyfulness in decoration, possibly even prettiness – without getting wild. It is still intrinsically cool.

Summing up, overall the works in this show are strictly controlled - with nothing really too abandoned or remotely frenetic. Yet though there is an emphasis on craft and technique, it somehow sustains interest without drifting into dry exercises or showing off. The visual properties, often fluid in the physicality of the medium, greatly intrigue. In their clever combinations of sensibility, they compel further looking.

[In descending order, the illustrated works above are by Frank Gerritz, Geena Shin, Simon Morris, Noel Ivanoff, Jane Harris, Joachim Bandau and Kevin Appel.]

Viva la commonality

Assume Nothing: Celebrating Gender Diversity
Photography and films by Rebecca Swan and Kirsty MacDonald
MIC Toi Rerehiko
24 January - 19 February 2009

Like with last month’s Article 27 exhibition the chief sponsor of this show is the Human Rights Commission, but unlike that presentation this display is educational and documentary in focus – rather than about innovative art per se. Though immensely informative and moving, especially in the eloquence of its interviewees, it is not about experimental projects or radical intervention, but mainstream consolidation – a positive reflection of how times have changed for this country’s transsexual and cross-dressing communities for the better. Georgina Beyer’s prominence and parliamentary contribution is proof of that.

The static and moving gallery images and associated publication here are certainly very elegant, yet Assume Nothing lacks the raw intensity of say the pioneering work thirty–five years ago by Taranaki artist Fiona Clark. The public hysteria that then greeted her intensely raw images of transsexuals (and their written texts) in the touring Active Eye exhibition resulted in the police confiscating her photographs. Those works though were confrontational and calculatedly provocative. This show has none of that. The personalities, though assertive, are immensely charming, designed to win ‘conservative’ viewers over. The project is constructed to remove fear of the unknown, as well as provide a sensibly dignified discussion of topics often kept hidden. Its frankness celebrates difference whilst in a sense, physiological and psychological distinctions are also dissolved. These individuals may be unusual, but what citizens of Aotearoa have in common is also clearly demonstrated.

The exhibition provides a great opportunity for viewers to think about the way some of those interviewed can present themselves as male or female, changing not only their attire when so inclined, but also their body shape and facial ornamentation. Such actions challenge the mental baggage carried by many of those whom transsexuals and cross-dressers regularly encounter – the preconceived assumptions they might have about ‘male’ or ‘female’ behaviour patterns and core identities.

All this links up to the fascinating ideas of a ‘queer theorist’ like Judith Butler, whose discussions raise questions about the nature of role playing and self perception in identity, and their seemingly arbitrary links to the physiological. A show like this tells us not only how little we know about the range of gender types that exist (with their varieties of accompanying desire) but also how little we understand the causes of reactive hostility that can be so damaging. An excellent exhibition.

The above mixed media image is ‘Ola, Aitu, Mauli, the inner person’ (2008) by Rebecca Swan and Shigeyuki Kihara.

Here's a comment from Skipper on

Goodbye Randolph St. And David Boyce on Can Art ignore beauty.

Goodbye Randolph St

Whitecliffe MFA exhibition
Randolph St Gallery
17 January - 22 January 2009

This is the last exhibition Whitecliffe Art College present before they move to new premises in Parnell. Five artists showing their work in the large pristine, white space. Five varied mini-exhibitions by MFA candidates.

Colleen Collins’ practice involves videoed performances, photographs and installations that depict aspects of the forest wilderness of Ontario, Canada. One installation of blinding headlights comments on deer /driver collisions on forest roads; most of her other images refer to trees and/or night-time hours.

One particularly interesting work flaunts a moral ambiguity: a video showing the artist ringbarking a poplar, stripping away sections of bark while knowing this is likely to kill it. (She then nails the pieces back on again.) Although there is a very remote chance the tree will recover – and one dying tree in the woods is not hugely significant anyway – the documentation is disturbing: it is hard to determine a rationale for the action. It is memorable because it seems incongruously destructive, though it might not be. The moral doubt is the subject-matter here, the unease, the lack of certainty in motivation.

Linda McKelvie’s paintings of poured pigment mixed into varnish blend billowing Helen Frankenthaler forms with Dale Frank’s methodology. The sensuous, glossy colour is not stained but floats on the white canvas surface.

These works are competent but not memorable. There is no exciting research here, exploring new subject matter or techniques that take painting to new places. McKelvie’s works are shallow, conventional and trite. Pretty décor only.

Also clichéd are the drawn portraits by Simon Vine in pencil and white wash on vertical plywood oblongs. There is no detectable logic justifying the unusual support, while the sentimental images (some taken from statues) that feature a classically draughted line with suggested undulating planes, seem incongruous competing with the patterned knotty wood. The plywood seems a vacuous gimmick.

The most successful exhibition here is by Ann Fletcher, one exploring dismantled chair and table shapes as sculpture. She uses three rooms. In one some mutilated and dismembered painted chairs have been stacked up on a line of skinny unpainted wooden tables to make a convincing and imposing installation, while in another she has constructed a bizarrely swelling, towering stool blended into a table.

Fletcher constructs austere and refined sculpture that combines a Shaker sensibility with the use of found furniture. The work is well thought out in its organisation. She knows how to manipulate a gallery space and impose mental and bodily pressure on the ambulating gallery visitor.

Of the five Whitecliffe artists the sound and visual work of Lee Harrop seems the grittiest and most contemporary - even though her installation here is too minimal to create any serious impact. This Randolph St project features a music box into which is threaded a looped cardboard score repeating the words ‘Dead Beat.’ The letters are in the form of holes repeatedly punched in to create notes. The sound is surprisingly tuneful, delicate and melodically contained – a cleverly buoyant contrast to the despair of the words that ‘play’ it.

Harrop has other installations on at the moment too - in Manukau Police Station and at Waitakaruru arboretum. They focus on texts. In projects such as these, she presents political nuances within word plays and ambiguous readings, gained by butting words together in spirals or circles. Though intriguing, they seem a tad dated and not as unusual as her exploration with text-generated abstract sound. That is a richer field, to be possibly mined in the future.

Things Russian

Last month when I was looking at Richard Dale's Article 27 show and the table of books organised by Xin Cheng, there were two books in particular that I found especially rivetting. One was Vladimir Arkhipov's Home-Made: Contemporary Russian Folk Artifacts and the other was Half-Letter Press's Public Phenomena.

Half-Letter Press (Chicago) look startlingly impressive as a small publishing firm that focus on very unusual community projects, and the Arkhipov book not only has terrifically clear photographs of each home-made utensil but the writing on each by their creator (or creator's relative) is beautifully vivid and informative. You really get a sense of a crumbling economy and how hard it is to get many things that we in Aotearoa take for granted.

All this brings to mind the visit next month by two Russian artists (representing the Factory of Found Clothing collective) for a UNITEC residency where they show work at MIC Toi Rerehiko and Snowwhite. They also have a project where there is a search for a saintly person similar to Dostoyevsky's Prince Myshkin (The Idiot). I wonder...do such people exist, and if so, would they want to be identified?

Their visit is part of this year's Auckland Festival and the visual arts component looks remarkably strong. Usually theatre, dance and music dominate in such events but this time round there seems to be an exceptionally good line up of art shows. Of course we have to wait and see how the dozen or so exhibitions/performances turn out, but from the online blurbs, the selection committee have done a very good job. Auckland art lovers are in for a real treat.

Can Art ignore beauty?

I see there is a new book just out by University of Canterbury's Philosophy of Art lecturer and Arts & Letters Daily founder, Denis Dutton. Called The Art Instinct, it is apparently a Darwinian approach to the evolution of art, modelled on Steven Pinker's The Language Instinct.

I gather it is not so much about an 'Art' as an Aesthetic instinct. The two are very different - and although a lot of art ignores beauty and visual seduction, it clearly retains the status of art and is part of its history. Most of us would agree I think, but would Dutton?

Is he being sloppy equating art with aesthetically pleasing artworks, or is he just being provocative? Is he being ignorant or calculating? Has anybody out there (in the US) read his tome? I'd love to hear some opinions. Get some reviews even? His book is now out in the States where he is currently promoting it, and it will be here next month.

Now there are some books examining notions of a biological basis for art that are highly regarded - like Morse Peckham's Man's Rage For Chaos - but I suspect Dutton's book will not be one of those. Take a look at this lecture and you'll see why. As a philosopher he is highly emotional, with an intense dislike for contemporary art (he even fumes over Chuck Close) and a real loathing for continental theory. He longs for a conservative resurgence of pre-modern art that is representational and skill-based.

Normally such personal opinions wouldn't matter, but Dutton spends much of this lecture telling jokes and not providing a cohesive argument. The main flaw as I've suggested above is that real 'art' as he sees it is pre-Duchampian and a mixture of disciplines - he mixes up music (eg. Beethoven), literature (Austen) and art (Rembrandt) so that the three disparate traditions become one. Over the long course of time the 'artist' sexes have perpetuated a pleasure seeking, cross-cultural 'art gene' that assists the survival of our species.

What he doesn't explain is how this went wrong, why over the last 1-200 years did art become so different? Why is it that the majority of tertiary art education institutions, concert halls, libraries and museums promote works with values Dutton despises? Why is he a 'relic' out of step with his time? Modernism and post-modernism are here to stay and certainly there is no hint of any future reversion to pre-modernism - though those values are certainly not obliterated.

Take a look...