This copyright debate that's furiously raging...

Have a look at what Lee Cunliffe (Artbasher) says about it, and the excellent links. I think I agree with a lot of what he says. I'm worried about sites run by responsible people like myself being shut down by disgruntled dealers or artists, without any fair adjudication or discussion.

That possibility is very scary. It kills off any open art debate or public criticism in the culture. It's horrendous.

A Call for Action (Beyond Art)

Jim Allen: Hanging by a Thread II
Michael Lett
4 February – 7 March 2009

The strangest of images greets you through the glass doors when you enter Jim Allen’s latest exhibition at Michael Lett’s: a photograph of a collage of an angel. It seems to be a life-sized self portrait, made up of flayed body parts from medical text books and collaged newspaper texts. This thin-skinned and ‘sensitive’ artist-angel has winged feet like Mercury, is wearing a halo in which is embedded the word ‘saboteur’, and carrying at crotch height a small Greek temple in which is burning the flame of liberty.

I thought at first this image was laden with irony, that Allen was doing some kind of self critique (especially with the nimbus and flame) that re-evaluated his earlier interventionism - but now I think it is more complicated. Though there definitely is humour, a lot of self-mockery, this is still serious. Very much so.

This is confirmed by the urgency of the show’s title and by the fact that below the collage on the right-hand side is a small inverted photograph of a hooded Iraqi prisoner of the American forces, being tortured at Abu Ghraib. The ‘real’ world here is presented in vivid contrast to that of the sincere but sheltered realm of art-activism and pedagogical models.

Going past the collage and entering the inner gallery, we find three types of presentation: three coloured photographs at eye-height on two of the walls; four small sculptures on long sticks at eye height in the middle of the oblong room; and on the floor two small LCDs with videos connected to earlier performances.

There is a hierarchical structure here in this multilayered installation. As you would expect from such an influential artist and teacher, Allen has positioned his components with eloquent precision. The photographs show a bandaged tree (‘heal our ecosystems’ it seems to say), some bones stacked on a chair (inaction leads to disaster?) and a hospitalised Arab boy sitting up in bed (protect the innocent).

This last image has an abstract formula placed on the wall alongside it, taken from a cybernetic coursebook. Here Allen seems to be ridiculing art that is over-academicised and deterministic. The dry, impenetrable theorem seems motivated by sarcasm.

Even more in your face are the sculptures. They are about human agency and the viewer’s ability to act. A bloody bandaged finger (the nurtured body’s power to heal) and a piece of hair (the body’s ability to replenish) are in juxtaposition with a quote from Brazilian artist Lygia Clark about righteous anger (“the mouth which is transformed into a language of itself to the bite of rage”) and a dirty cloth (power to wipe away ignorance and clarify?).

At some distance below eye height and comparatively isolated on the floor, the two LCDs let Allen comment on the gap between art and life, elaborating on the ironic heroics detectable in his collage. The right-hand one shows the movements of Peter Wareing, a flim-maker who was recording Allen’s recent performance of News, the newspaper crumpling work, in New Plymouth, but reveals nothing of the performance he was documenting. The other on the left shows a section of Parangole Capes, an older work where four tied up and blindfolded performers, swaddled in layers of calico and hessian, try to wiggle and roll their way to the centre of the gallery where they can help release each other.

The first seems to be about losing sight of a clear objective, about not being cognisant of a ‘bigger picture’; the second about the inability to feel (physically and emotionally), about desensitisation. Both LCDs refer to art’s remoteness from global issues currently acknowledged as urgent. Allen appears to be implying that art is irrelevant now, it is ossified and dead and political action should move on without it. He is using art to reprimand itself, perhaps even repudiating his own past as artist and teacher – and waving the flag for much bigger issues instead.

Free-falling, while looking for your parachute

Broken Fall
Newcall, A Center For Art (temporarily in St Paul St, Gallery 2)
10 February - 28 February 2009 (Newcall)
10 - 13 February 2009 (ACFA)

Broken Fall is a clever idea developed by AUT lecturer Jan Bryant, of asking three Melbourne artists (Katie Lee, Lou Hubbard and Susan Jacob) to come over to Auckland and adapt their practices for two spaces in that city. To get a response to this recontextualisation she has also asked two New Zealand sound artists (Tim Coster and Richard Francis) to use the Australian shows to generate new works to be performed in the exhibition spaces.

Of the Australian displays, Lou Hubbard’s projected video grids are the most physically imposing. She uses the matrix as a structure while also slyly undermining it. At ACFA she has a group of seven toy Japanese soccer players, each attached to a hexagonal plastic section of playing field, standing in a sink so that they collapse and separate when the tap is turned on.

Her Newcall work is more interesting, wittily comparing the scaling of a fish with the scraping off of film from gambling cards, and in opposition, the manual completion of a grid by crossword. These actions are performed by an elderly woman who in one of the grid's four rectangles, stands alone in a corner of the room. The tension between the actions of her hands and her impassive face holds your interest.

The most intriguing work in the Newcall exhibition is Susan Jacob’s dried up Christmas tree projecting from the inner side of a door leaning into a wall. It has its branches reversed so they point up instead of down. Its subtle transformation draws you back to look at how Jacob broke off and realigned the various twigs, something that is not obvious.

This sculpture is not tightly connected to Jacob’s working drawings (at ACFA) and drives home the point that good art is often impulsive and about play, about fooling with materials – where hands are almost separated from the mind.

Of Katie Lee’s two videos (and related horizontal floor sculpture), the ACFA one without her figure balancing in a square taped to the floor is the more successful. The time lapse photography of the room’s flickering sepia light and artist’s absent body makes it a compelling – albeit austere – spatial statement that effectively references her works in the other space. The Newcall video though, intrigues more through being set in a low cupboard, than through the content of its moving images.

How did the Kiwi sound artists respond? They differed in that Coster used recordings of the Australians installing their projects as a starting point, and Francis experimented with the ACFA space itself and a variety of sound sources (modulator, computer, and portable objects).

Of the two live gigs, Coster’s thirty minute performance was the more dramatic and satisfying – less monotonous. His build up of an even drone of looping rumbling hums, delicate fluttery rattles and hissing wipes maintained a consistent tension until about five minutes before the end. Then suddenly samples of a sweeping operatic aria emerged, fused with peals of laughter and the occasional squawk. What was dry and abstract suddenly erupted into unexpected lyricism and humour, a poignant flowering that just as abruptly stopped – leaving the audience stunned and wishing for more.

Top three images from Newcall Gallery, bottom three from ACFA at AUT, then invite.

Serious looking

Winston Roeth: New WorksJensen
4 February – 12 March 2009

One of the great ironies of conceptual art is that despite the anti-retinal position stated by the influential Marcel Duchamp, many of the first generation conceptualists like Weiner, Kosuth and Bochner adored painting and were big fans of artists like Ad Reinhardt and Barnett Newman. And even an artist like Robert Rauschenberg, a close friend of John Cage, was very influenced at Black Mountain College by Josef Albers in his theories of colour perception. He was taught how to look, despite his practice being so different.

Albers’ Bauhaus-based theories list various laws of colour interaction, discussing optical phenomena like after-images and the complementary hue-tinged washes that effect planes of neutral colours like grey. Albers and his teacher Johannes Itten wrote wonderfully informative books studying the retina’s neural behaviour in response to juxtaposed planes of contrasting hue.

I mention all this because though colour optics have been out of fashion for a while they seem to be returning. Consummate colourists now are gaining more recognition, particularly those like English artist Bridget Riley and (in this present case) American painter Winston Roeth, who create colours in the brain that are not on any painting. What you see is often not what you get. Strange things happen between the eye that looks and the vision that is experienced, especially when the light is natural and strong.

Roeth’s coloured tempera planes place pressure on the lines of white gallery wall between grids or pairs of panels. They also chromatically influence painted iridescent frames that delineate outer edges. Usually the patina on his flat aluminium or rough slate panels has a soft matt velvety quality with no sheen at all. However this artist is also very interested in lustre and the pearlescent. When he uses a grid, he likes to contrast organic ‘natural’ hues associated with vegetation with synthetic metallic chroma linked to minerals.

Yet Roeth’s work is not formulaic. The combinations are cleverly positioned so each colour resonates effectively with its neighbours while also being gorgeous in its own right as an isolated unit. Photographs don’t come close to representing the sensation of standing in front of these paintings. They demand concentration over time so you can think carefully about what is happening chromatically before you.

Jensen's large downstairs gallery, with its white walls and diffuse natural light is particularly effective in displaying Roeth’s colour skills. The four paintings are meticulously positioned. Upstairs the ambience is different due to the dark red, inner brick walls which really make the panelled works glow. The other white walls are used to present grids of golden lines on coloured paper. They are positioned at irregular intervals for maximum effect to catch the light streaming in from the end window. The arrangement here is about pragmatics, not aesthetic organisation.

It is clear that Roeth as a colourist, is quite unique. The closest talent in terms of colour sensibility we have in New Zealand would be Philip Trusttum whose forms are wildly different and also figurative. His applications are different but his juxtapositions are similar.It’s a very smart show at Jensen that is not flashy but restrained and rich in nuance. The work leaves it to you to approach it with keen curiosity. To extract its treasures at your own pace.

I read no news today, oh boy.

Fiona Connor: Notes on Half the Page
Gambia Castle
13 February – & March 2009

I’m one of those people to whom verisimilitude in artworks means nothing. I make a mental note but it doesn’t impress me. (In fact the mindless labour usually makes me shudder.) Yet I really like this room that’s full of life-size replica newspaper honesty boxes, periodical holders, and magazine racks, along with fake walls with sliding glass display windows. The reason I think it is extraordinary is what is missing. There is not one hardcopy publication, fake or genuine, to be seen anywhere.

I like the idea of this project and its loaded absence, that all of a sudden there is no news to be found. Nothing has happened to report, no developments (worthy or trivial) of any kind. The local populace has evaporated; the nation scattered to the four winds - and the world even further. Imagine sitting in your home with no printed media. No ties to anything 'beyond'. Only family, neighbours and very close friends.

This eschewing of newspapers and magazines implies a rejection of consumerism, the thirst for voyeurism, commerce and the daily or weekly details of sport and celebrity culture. It also suggests an ostrichlike refusal to acknowledge the world beyond the reach of our bodies - almost but not quite, an embracing of solipsism. A turning of one’s back on other minds and bodies. A spit in the eye to the various communities all magazines and newspapers represent.

The density of all these facsimile display stands in the Gambia space is important too, the fact that there are so many visual types from assorted countries all over the world. Their range and cramming in creates an impression. It makes the lack of (apparent) printed paper all the stranger. Even creepy in its media silence. A memorial to the vanished hard-copy perhaps. Farewell to the touch, weight, look, smell and sound of inked-upon paper.

Under the microscope (traces of the heart)

Marie Shannon: Large Still Life
Sue Crockford
10 February – 7 March 2009

There is a rich assortment of photographs, watercolours and oil pastel drawings depicting scribbled notes on paper, gallery and domestic interiors and miscellaneous symbolic objects like screens and candles – all hung in a large salon-style cluster on the main Crockford gallery wall. However the Shannon works that intrigue me above all else, and which I want to talk about here, are the photographs of ‘love’ cards and notes. Little intimate missives of affection that some couples write to each other and which many children write to their parents.

With these images you try and figure out what game Shannon is playing at. On the one hand you are aware that this is art, something embodied in the workings of the human imagination, the leaps of fantasy that artists use to beguile viewers. On the other you may know that she is married to Julian Dashper, another artist, and has at least one child, a son – information which may or may not be contextually relevant. Beyond those basic facts, extra elaborations, other seemingly biographical works can easily be fabricated.

So with such photographic, ostensibly documentary images, the key question is whether Shannon is trying to tell us about private matters of the human heart (notably hers, or Julian’s) ie. deep affection for each other and their offspring and the reciprocation of that love, or is the project more distant? Is it a little clinical, and about what humans do to for the bonding and cohesion of the nuclear family? That public commitment. And could she be pretending to be focussing on particular modes of expression (within her own family) when really she is concerned with the universal or more general sociological – with her own situation being a convenient example.

Shannon has been making this type of image for some time now, and initially I saw them as sentimental and corny. Now though, I am consistently intrigued and amused. They are still sentimental, but I also see them as entertaining props that might never be used as actual notes. For all I know the Dashper-Shannon household could be one of dysfunctional, ferocious belligerence and appalling psychic violence, and no outsider would ever realise. This is art not life - stuff that showcases Shannon’s inventiveness with language, her play with concepts of drawing and photography.

It is about the demonstrative, the showing of emotion as a psychological phenomenon. A very clever, articulated examination of that. It looks at how affective written language functions, without those objects ever necessarily fulfilling their apparently designed purpose. A strange anthropology with collected recorded specimens. Authentic examples or false, it doesn’t matter.

(Thank you Sue Crockford Gallery and the artist for the images.)

Ultra Intra

Beginning in the Archive: Giovanni Intra 1989 - 1996
Curated by Kate Brettkelly-Chalmers
ARTSPACE
31 January - 28 February 2009

It is a little over six years since the tragic, stupid death of Giovanni Intra and since then his work has been regularly seen as part of the Chartwell Collection, and his estate of uncollected items auctioned off. An energetic, startlingly articulate artist and curator who effortlessly wrote with a witty, agile, fluid turn of phrase about anything that caught his eye, ARTSPACE is now presenting his archives – mainly Auckland and Christchurch material that he left with his mother before he went to Los Angeles in 1996 to study theory and eventually become a dealer.

This selection of posters, drawings, photographs, jottings and notebooks is presented in four flat vitrines in the main gallery - in a manner similar to the Tom Kreisler exhibition of a year ago. Whereas the Kreisler show had many paintings on the ARTSPACE walls, only one major Intra artwork is presented, while documentation of others is shown with projected slides. Some of the drawings are photocopied and presented in two bound volumes with the vitrines. Other bits of correspondence, to and from Intra, also bound, are in a back gallery on a table of assorted publications (such as those by the collective Teststrip) that he wrote for or else collected. There is also supplementary material generously lent by Ann Shelton and Jim and Mary Barr.

The best account of this archive, now stored by Auckland Art Gallery (in the E. H. McCormack Research Library) is by Robert Leonard in Reading Room 2. However Kate Brettkelly-Chalmer’s essay accompanying this show is very informative, clear and perceptive –though perhaps at times a little too accepting of Intra’s rhetoric. It is a beautifully constructed text that whets your appetite for the varied contents of this exhibition, cajoling you into using this rare opportunity to examine his ideas through his writing and images, and speculating if he will ever be remembered.

People usually of course change as they adapt to new situations, and I suspect the later Giovanni selling for the LA artists of China Art Objects was a different personality – more mellow - than the prickly young firebrand of this time capsule. Here he is infatuated with Bataille, Debord and Boiffard, and hostile to medical practices and forensic photography. He is impulsive, at times jealously territorial and quick to find fault with colleagues. He easily takes offence with anyone who disagrees with his (then radical) ideas about ‘The Clinic’ and surveillance. However he was also very loyal to those in his inner circle. Much of his correspondence shows that for all his erudition, he was also highly emotional. This display shows his kneejerk responses, as does the one artwork on show.

That work, 365 days (1991), a suite of ‘daily’ photographs, is a sarcastic nose-thumbing at conceptual artists like Billy Apple. It is a silly light-weight project that is only a fraction as interesting as his Nature Morte fetish masterpiece owned by the Govett-Brewster, or Chartwell’s ‘pharmaceutical’ Untitled - currently displayed in Ron Brownson’s In Shifting Light exhibition at the New Gallery.

This archive, though certainly fascinating, isn’t as interesting as his completed, more resolved artworks and essays. Its value lies in what it tells us about the processes behind his thinking, but finished results are – in the end - what count. These documents show us the exhibitionism and posing common to both his images and texts, glimpses of his unrelentingly penetrating intelligence and quick responses, and his voracious appetite for researching those theoretical areas he was passionate about. They give us a taste of what he was on about, but they don't show his talent at its very best.

I think an anthology of Intra’s liveliest and most lucid writings would be the best way to represent him. There are many more texts that he created than artworks, and so a sample of those would be more interesting than say, a touring selection of works. Maybe one day that will happen.