Recent comment from Tao Wells on

Not Remotely Feral.

Market wars

David Ellis: Ox Blood
Webbs
3rd March - 18th March 2009

It seems visual artists who are also renowned musicians or deejays very rarely succeed in straddling both camps to make two successful careers simultaneously. Ellis is not a superstar, but he does seem to have parallel audiences in both, and the content of his visual and aural practices are clearly interwoven. Despite this, because of his infatuation with vinyl discs and record sleeves as raw material with which he can create symbolic meaning in his work, Ellis will invariably always be compared with Christian Marclay, who in my view, as an innovator is infinitely superior.

Ellis is primarily a graphic artist. He is not a painter. His sense of colour is too unsophisticated for that and not particularly integrated spatially, as it floats in disconnected layers. However his practice is rich in references to painting, like that of British Op Artist Bridget Riley - with its swirling waves of stratified clouds, compacted in a churning but ordered mass. These billowing arabesque flows become a metaphor for the cumulative power of music as it spreads and gains market and/or social momentum.

Other images are like undulating lines of overlapping discs – they are visually related to the recent paintings of Noel Ivanoff – and become the swelling ribs of a giant snake. Ellis in many of these has wittily added a turntable stylus for a head, referring to the swaying movement that a pickup arm has when it reaches the end and centre of a record.

The snakes, like the smoky clouds and spilling rivers, are ominous. They help create the sense that music can be socially dangerous, that it can menace and threaten some communities, that it has a compressed energy and violence waiting to be released.

But what of this exhibition’s venue? It is odd seeing this kind of work here, yet Webbs as an established auction house often has dealer shows like this from overseas (mainly NYC) artists. They don’t really have much impact on the Auckland or national discourse because few people see them. No-one is excited sufficiently to publicly comment. However with the open rivalry between Webbs and Art+Object in chasing secondary sales, perhaps Webbs needs to pump up this program and use it to upstage competitors. Art+Object are known for more elegantly designed exhibitions that accompany their auctions, and more selective lists of works, but Webbs’ diversifying for the primary art market has little impact. I suspect the shows aren’t classy enough (or artists famous enough) to get the necessary profile.

Interesting times for investors and collectors, observing strategies, in Auckland.

Haunting improvisations

Philip Dadson & Richard Nunns: Blood and Stone
Auckland Arts Festival (Red Square)
The Festival Club, Aotea Square
Thursday 5 March, 7.30 pm

Last evening, on the miserably wet, opening night of the Auckland Arts Festival, a small but appreciative audience was given a stunning set of extended improvisations – four delicately nuanced ‘conversations' - by Richard Nunns and his Maaori instruments, chiefly flutes, and Phil Dadson with his varied set of usually percussive and stringed devices.

The concert started with Nunns demonstrating the different acoustic properties and uses of nga taonga puoro, mainly the flutes, accompanied by Dadson delicately picking and bowing the strings of a grand piano. I am familiar with most of Dadson’s unusual instruments and methods, but Nunns’ playing and sonic repertoire was new. I was amazed how often the flutes (one incorporated a conch) sounded more like reed instruments with a fat, less hollow, woody sound. Less like say Herbie Mann and more like Coltrane – but just as haunting and stark.

The second piece was focused on percussion, the third on bowing, and the fourth on the use of holed river rocks as flutes or whistles – though putting it this way grossly over simplifies. Dadson’s strange looking, unusually named instruments (nummdrum, zitherum, gloopdrum etc.) intrigued visually as well as sounded fascinating. But it was his snappily percussive use of flat stones dipped in water that really penetrated your mind. They were caressed, tapped, scraped and rhythmically ground – like over-sexed, excitable crickets. They sounded like temple blocks, the orchestral percussive instrument, not like rocks at all.

Most of the time these ‘dialogues’ worked well. Now and then Nunns would inadvertently drown out Dadson’s restrained contributions with slightly shrill playing, but that was rare. He, like Dadson, is a wonderful listener as well as initiator. Usually his use of heaving breath and murmured humming in some of his flute playing provided much contrast to Dadson’s finely patterned, shimmering drones and staccato clicks. The whole event was beautifully understated. You really had to attend closely to detect the many barely perceptible, parallel textures and aural flourishes. Hopefully these two terrific players will do a new collaboration again, soon.

Some clear glass, rusted iron and blue light

Cat Auburn and Karena Way: Little Rain
City Art Rooms
3 March -28 March 2009

City Art Rooms is a venue with shows I have always been reluctant to review because of my own professional relationship with the gallery. This is because of the perhaps dubious credibility of whatever I say. Praise shows, I’m promoting my friends; damn them, and I’m asserting some position in the in-house pecking order. That, and the fact that I value my right to openly express any views without worrying about offending my dealer, makes it easier to declare the venue a ‘no-go’ zone.

With the above comment I have hopefully pre-empted the avalanche of letters poised to follow, because there are some topics here worth looking at.

The main one is that of technique and verisimilitude, with 'transparency' in this case being literal not metaphorical. Here with Cat Auburn, the focus is on casting (like Akiko Diegel on occasion). Glen Hayward uses carving. Other artists like Fiona Connor are more complex in their methods of replication. Painting is sometimes involved.

But to be easily impressed by all this is, in my view, missing the point of art. It limits it to something shallow. It is ‘craft’ in the worse sense of the word. Something is glorified which actually should be invisible. Its reason for occurring needs to be carefully thought through, so that more than showing off is involved. The viewer needs to ask why.

Cat Auburn makes long lashed whips and riding crops out of glass. They are fastidiously detailed, clear as tap water, and look as if they’d break if you looked at them too long. They remind me of the glass intestines Asta Gröting made in the early nineties, but much, much more fragile. Which is their point, being whips. Attempted use might inflict bodily damage on the user.

This artist has also made two decoy ducks made of heavy cast iron. These are just as funny, having a propensity to rapidly sink. You have to walk around them carefully so you don’t trip or break your toe. They are not as visually beguiling as the sparkling glass whips. They intrigue, but don’t cause you to keep returning.

Karena Way makes excellent, subtly disturbing, photographs but I prefer her installations with light and moving image. The two Paradise works here are time-based in two quite different ways. One presents ‘time’ as the duration of a glass tank (backlit in blue) being slowly filled and emptied of water while being filmed. She has edited so some sections speed up and others slow down.

The other presents time as the viewer’s perception independent of the actual work, which in this second case is a blue spot casting a fuzzy circle upon the wall. The top quarter of the static blue ball catches the lower edge of a rafter traversing the ceiling. However when you walk across the room the blue light reflects on a long low horizontal steel rod positioned below, moving along it. Your body and this shifting line of blue are in sync.

Such a duration is in contrast with the artist controlled time of the DVD. Way’s bodily actions and her mind there affect the period of the disc – as distinct from the viewer’s roaming body and their mind interacting with the glowing wall and its highly nuanced spatial contents.

Superb videos

Yinka Shonibare MBE
Toured by the MCA, curated by Rachel Kent
New Gallery, Auckland Art Gallery
February 28 – June 1, 2009

This is a rare opportunity to see a substantial body of work from this well known English/Nigerian artist, with his distinctive, Dutch conceived, Indonesian-influenced wax-resist fabric trademark - and accompanying post-colonial, centre-versus-margins discussion. The only other time Shonibare's work has been seen in Aotearoa was in the mid-nineties at Te Papa in Pictura Britannica. Like this, that was a MCA (Sydney) initiated exhibition.

The show’s title is very odd. Is Shonibare winking at us with his MBE used as a supplementary part of the title, or is he serious? We can’t accept the former as self-evident – despite his context of post-colonial issues – because vain strutting artists are commonplace. To accept and promote an Award that embodies the notion of Empire does seem to want to have an intact cake and eat it too. However the mocking humour of his videos, especially The Masked Ball, does indicate he is pulling our collective leg.

Shonibare’s videos, his most recent projects in the show, are vastly superior to the earlier photographs and painting. For example his paint handling on the circular stretchers (those without ‘African’ fabric) within the wall mural is crude, looking as if applied over thick plaster-of-Paris. The use of gold makes it especially tacky, though that probably is deliberate when going with the nasty-looking painted drops of splashed oil.

Also the photographic works based on Goya and Hogarth fail because the original source material, with its vicious satire and indignant anger, gets to the point more effectively with paint or graphic line. Shonibare’s versions seem so insipid. Sure they are funny, but they are not devastating like his videos. They have a flat mat surface and that literal dullness works against their humour. They look dreary.

The videos resonate because of their movement mixed with high definition acuity and great depth of field. This clarity, with the swirling formations of the dancers, witty editing of alternating positions, and music-like repetitions and reversals, provides a kinetic drama we do not normally associate with this artist. The rich sensuality of the lavish costumes, the entertaining pantomime-like facial expressions of the dancers (behind their ornate masks), and the tremulous limbs and fluttering hands, all make Shonibare’s videos unforgettable.

This show though is very good, but not great. It is too piecemeal for that, despite the inclusion of some wonderful sculpture. The two video projections connect more with works that are not included than those which are present; not in the area of colonial history but more in the zone of Victorian sexuality. This is the area discussed by Foucault in The Will to Knowledge, where he points out that they were no more repressed than we are.

Shonibare has explored this theme of 18th and 19th century sexual mores brilliantly with sculptures like The Swing (After Fragonard) 2001 and Gallantry and Criminal Conversation (2002), the later about the Grand Tour as an opportunity for sexual experimentation - works unfortunately not included.

Looking at the static, lavishly decorative, free-standing headless sculptures that are here, few are in the hysterically comic vein of The Masked Ball, the main video which theoretically is about the assassination of Gustav III. Both victim and murderer are played by women, and despite being shot at close range, the Swedish King keeps on recovering. Maybe that constant maintenance of the aristocracy is something Shonibare finds mischievously amusing. Like the perpetuation of the MBE.

Not remotely feral

Various Artists …Continued
Raised by Wolves performance
(Windows) Auckland University Clocktower
Monday 2 March, 6 pm

It was good to see Raised by Wolves do a work in Auckland, as I had missed a much earlier Newcall gig. This time they presented work in the beautiful neo-Gothic Clocktower of Auckland University.

Amy Howden-Chapman and Biddy Livesey presented a well-researched lecture on the history of that particular building, built in 1921-26. They also spoke about the university itself, especially as seen from the tower windows. Immaculately polished in their delivery, indeed like university lecturers, they told anecdotes on how the edifice was perceived, and how the university (and also the wider Auckland community) has subsequently changed over the years.

Their very accessible lecture lasted about twenty-five minutes and then was deliberately disrupted by noisy visitors with a ghetto-blaster coming up the stairs. The end was formalised by the scrolling up of blinds at the top of the building to reveal children’s drawings on transparent sheets, an image of a geodesic dome and – in true primary school teacher fashion - a scattering of gold stars. (Remember this is the generation of ‘Don’t Misbehave!’, and ‘Mostly Harmless.’)

As it is typical of performance artists of this vintage, no irony was intended. And here I have a gripe. I appreciate its professional finesse and energy, but find it too earnest and ‘goody-two-shoes’. What I think of as ‘Sunday School Teacher Art’. Conceptually dull as an idea for an artwork, and drearily wholesome and worthy in tone. And with more than a whiff of privilege. Take a look at Raised By Wolves' webpage here... ‘they have five university degrees between them.’ Says it all.

More on Awards for and

screenings of Shustak.

Here are links to Page's YouTube Shustak trailer and the Doc. Festival.