Here is a discussion from Daniel Munn on

Laura Preston's curatorial projects

Placing trust

A.D. Schierning: Honesty
Window
University of Auckland Library entrance
April 17 – May 15 2009

This beautifully made little display stand – with a cute little box-roof to keep the goods dry - is cobbled together from sawn up lengths of lichen-covered planks. It presents cans and pottles of herbs and growing veges for sale in the library foyer, in front of the gallery ‘window’. Initially it had several jars of delicious looking jams and chutneys on offer, but by the time I got to see it they had been taken, one assumes (one hopes) with appropriate financial recompense placed in the honesty box.

While this interactive sculpture is part of a wider project involved with helping starving artists, it is intriguing to see the word ‘honesty’ used in an art world context. Often it seems it is the socially circulated ‘story’ about the art that counts (eg the ODS Pivi goldfish work) and if dishonesty perpetuates that aim, then dishonesty will do. Okay, I’m now starting to sound like a cracked record…

On a red gingham table cloth on the bench top, Schierning has stitched a very clear message to the buyer: give all that you can; take only what you need.

I imagine her thinking probably goes something like this: please don’t exploit my trust by ripping me off to profit yourself through resale or hoarding of these products. If you genuinely don’t have much money I am happy to accept a small amount. This is not a commercially viable enterprise but an artwork where I am gracious enough to gift you a certain amount of my costs in preparing these products, in return for your needed social involvement. Enjoy the food by participating in this project, but acquire it knowing you have a clear conscience.

It would be interesting to find out how just honest A.D.Schierning’s student audience in fact is - when the sums are done and the remaining stock tallied after the show has finished. Did great quantities of jam or relish disappear without financial acknowledgement? Perhaps some buyers were excessively generous, contributing funds without even taking anything? It would be good to discover if firm conclusions could be established either way. After all the show is entitled ‘honesty’, so a final appraisal does seem a natural thing to do.

McLeod matters

Andrew McLeod: Ocean
Ivan Anthony
1 April - 23 April 2009

We have here a varied range of oil paintings (and one digital print) from this Auckland artist - among them a few surprises. The very recent McLeod paintings are interesting in that they show a moving away from the playschool, Killeen influenced, ambience of earlier works, towards a more sensual, lush painting.In other words, they are less illustrative, being instead Romantic, elemental and other worldly. Very physical. They have a sweeping, immersive rawness, mostly without his 'normal' finicky, anal fastidiousness. They are very dramatic, particularly the images of the sea, and indicate a serious interest in the paintings of the German artist Arnold Böcklin (1827 -1901).

I find these images of McLeod’s intriguing. I warm to them more than his other paintings – this is surprising for I personally don’t like Böcklin’s work very much. I find it somewhat histrionic. McLeod’s images though have a gruntiness and comparative roughness which I enjoy. And the symbolic content doesn’t seem in earnest. McLeod here loves drama. It is the blatant theatricality and hammy humour he is going for (er, this is what I assume), and it works.

Placed in the same rooms though are the odd, very small geometric paintings he has been doing for some time – modernist works influenced by LeWitt, Vasarely, Albers and others. These experiments in reductive geometry and perspective are humorous too, because of their extravagantly ornate frames, not because of the geometry. Ostentatious and vulgar the incompatible borders are perversely placed around the dynamic geometry so that many viewers (like myself) grind their teeth. The format is maddeningly irritating, for the distracting frames set out to obliterate the carefully designed spatial contents of the internal canvases.

In that sense they are funny – if you get amusement from seeing an exemplary talent like McLeod mock his own compositional abilities. Yet this artist always has enjoyed excess and plentitude. Modernist restraint and understatement are not something he happens to empathise with. His ratbag hybridity – in his own terms (not mine) – makes a lot of sense.

(McLeod images above, except for bottom three from Bocklin.)

Double vision, double vision

Matt Henry: Doppelgänger
Starkwhite
16 April - 14 May 2009

This exhibition by New Plymouth artist Matt Henry teases out the confusing similarities between minimalist sculpture and elegant sound systems, or monochromatic minimalist painting (under glass) and flat plasma screens. These ambiguous geometric forms are presented in the two upstairs rooms that overlook K’ Rd, approximately mirroring of each other in their placement within the adjacent spaces.

These pristine box-or-slablike sculptures on the floor have a remarkable finish. They look sharply crisp, each edge or plane of their form looking almost hallucinatory in their hyper-reality. More perfect than perfect in their formality.

The leadless ‘sound systems’ are accompanied by a painting/sculpture hybrid where painted, glass covered canvas panels are float-mounted and framed. In one room the panel is a fluro lime green that has associations with outdoor TV sport broadcasts. In the other, the colouration of that panel is a very dark grey. You could confuse it with black caught in a raking light.

While they look vaguely like plasma screens, they are really thick and clunky in comparison. Closer to paintings that ridicule the presentational formats of ‘sensitive’ painting by being deliberately gross in their proportion and frame colour, they become bizarre fetish objects, items devoid of function that look store bought and not obviously ‘art’. They look impressively expensive.

Probably these works are best in a home where their ambiguity is most pronounced. At Starkwhite they are clearly ‘art’ and highly aesthetic. No one is likely to go looking for the missing remote control in the gallery space. In a house surrounded by other domestic accoutrements on the other hand, the box forms – not the wall components - would throw you. They are harder perhaps to worship as surrogate status symbols, and obviously mischievous.

A planetary object

Chris Cudby: Smooth places
A Centre for Art
17 April – 2 May 2009

Chris Cudby is an artist-musician now presenting a sculptural installation in the new ACFA space in Wellesley St.

Cudby has prepared the room so it is dominated by a complex tower sitting on a base of two chrome scissor-legged stools. Using a set of frail wooden platforms the sculpture is a spindly slatted structure that incorporates a very large pot plant raised up high. There are other things too in the space. On one wall is a computer abstracted aerial photo, on another are some delicate pen and ink cartoons and a watercolour, on a low stool is a glowing red, plastic pyramid lamp (apparently alluding to a Gary Numan LP sleeve), and a black sixties ‘sci-fi’ amp and speakers (all curved pyramids) can be seen on the window ledge, playing soft music from a (now) antiquated i-pod. There are lots of formal interconnections between the understated drawings, pyramidal objects and stacked-up sculpture.

The tall plant (I think it’s an azalea) in the complex vertical sculpture is in a long, white, triangular slab pot. It has several elegantly braided, narrow trunks. The projecting platforms and structures, horizontally lined with thick brown cardboard, hold three types of object. One is an open LCD ‘book’ showing a loop of the artist (I’m guessing here, never met him) blowing cobwebs off the braided plant trunks. Another is a very small revolving turntable on which is a delicately dotted, plastic airlines ‘glass’ - filled with sparkling mineral water. A third, high up, is an orange globe of the world on a stand - though not actually ‘on’ a stand but hovering in mid-air, held in space by unseen magnets. The ball and ‘stand’ are positioned out above the leaves.

To enjoy this installation, you don’t need an underlying narrative; it works so well formally with many interconnecting parallel levels. The show has an appealing airy, linear quality that repudiates weighty density - a lightness of touch. Yet there clearly is a theme behind this arrangement of various elements – that of global and ecological issues. The images on the walls, the aerated water in the turning glass, the hovering globe, the tree, the image of its being cared for – all focus on planetary concerns. It is conventional subject matter for sure but it is done with considerable inventiveness and panache. This is a classy presentation that succeeds in spite of its theme, and not because of it.

A question of Faith

Boris Dornbusch: In all applications: in all departments
Te Tuhi
7 March - 12 April 2009 (This show is over now.)

Boris Dornbusch is one of those artists who seems to regularly think in terms of tropes, especially when he is working with moving image that he is presenting in an installation. The DVD is presented in a sort of austere theatrical setting, a few props that comment on the content of the film. Recent works at Starkwhite and Room 103 confirm this.

For the Te Tuhi show, the DVD was projected over a floating helium balloon hovering in front of a wall. It showed somebody from a seventies American TV show I would term a ‘faith healer’ more than a magician, somebody with allegedly paranormal powers who can push or pull people (or objects) through space with invisible forces radiating from his fingertips.

In one scene he is attempting to lift a ‘patient’ lying on a bed, by running his hands over his sides and above, without touching. Trying to get him to float weightlessly, like the balloon onto which much of the image is projected.

In another scene the standing patient is seemingly pushed and pulled backwards and forwards without physical contact. Though his eyes are shut, the patient seems to be coordinating his leaning with the movements of the ‘doctor’ behind and in front of him.

So what is Dornbusch up to here? Is he commenting of the degree of faith in our lives, our gullibility perhaps? Is he being rude about the artworld that he himself is part of, like you or me? Is he saying don’t believe all you are told or shown, or is he saying the exact opposite, that isn’t this great, it’s gotta be good for you?

The balloon indicates scepticism I think. It establishes the presence of irony. It could also have a metaphysical intent, like perhaps the broken window in Room 103’s installation, alluding (like Magritte) to a world of illusion with a false veneer that is suddenly exposed.

Lots of interpretative layers.


(Image courtesy of Starkwhite and the artist)

Priapic phantoms

Sean Kerr: Ghost in the Machine
Newcall
April 8 -24 April 2009

It’s a great title Kerr has come up with, this reference to Arthur Koestler and Gilbert Ryle, and tying the whole philosophical package into sex on the smuttiest of levels. I love artists (and audiences just like me) who refuse to grow up. To realise its infantile virtues is to grasp the whole point of art as play.

Let me elaborate a little. The show features a massive pink ‘sleeping bag’ that lies flat on the floor - but when you enter the space it slowly fills up with air like a wobbly but tumescent penis. There is an electric eye on a camera aimed across the floor that the visitor’s movements triggers. It also switches on something on a table that looks like an agitated, erect willie under a sheet, wiggling back and forth in anticipation of lord knows what.

So on one level Kerr is clearly alluding to Vito Acconci’s Seedbed, his (oops I nearly said ‘seminal’) masturbation performance. On another he is being cute, pretending the table work is about comic book ghosts like Spooky or Casper, and having a pathetic whimpering ‘boo’ occasionally come out of a hidden speaker. Yet the main ‘pink torpedo’ sculpture is definitely threatening, despite its early Woody Allen overtones. It is more than a schlong. It is also a rather nasty finger (with nail), giving the viewer ‘the bird’. There’s lotsa aggro in the air.

I like to see an artist admit he hates his audience, and tell them so. Yet even beyond such love-hate ambivalences (after all he is trying to make them laugh) the tumescence theme is intriguing as a comment on dualism. It spot-lights that simple, apparently causal connection between thinking Thought A, and generating Bodily Response B that all growing boys love to discover. It also suggests a Central State Materialist argument that all spirit (or in this case, desire) is matter.

This is the best show I’ve ever seen from Kerr. I don’t say that because I’m pathetically infantile and am easily entertained by the basest of 'body humour' (yup, it's true), but because the show's well organised and has a structure that is simple, one that is loaded with complicated, contradictory resonances that you are likely to remember and think about for a long time.