Playing chasing with paint

Simon Ingram and James Cousins: TAG
Gow Langsford
9 January - 23 January 2010

This is a clever idea: putting Simon Ingram’s complex systems but optically stable results alongside James Cousins' comparatively simple processes and convulsively frenetic outcomes; especially if the two painters (two friends who share the same dealer) play chasing (or tag wrestling) with application techniques, darting around each other’s inversely related work methods – testing unexpected approaches and extrapolating out and around their regular procedures.

We have here eight experimental works sorted into four sets of two. Because the artists have organised the hang so their work goes abbabaab, no one personality dominates. Ingram (a) leads in from the left, Cousins (b) from the right.

So after deciding to start from Gow Langsford's street front window and move in pairs towards the inner space, the first two we find deal with over and under the grid or the applied masking tape. Cousins’ Closed Cast has its zigzagging, spastic masking tape configuration left intact with its chromatically modulated plane of brown and blue paint lying on top undisturbed. What lies underneath is a mystery. Could even be the same colours.

Ingram’s much smaller, earlier work nearby, Empire, suggests this might be the case. His rule based grids of wee squares have the same colours applied underneath and on top, with some rectangular edges crisp and clean, others wobbly and covered by brushmarks.

The second two paintings play with movement. Ingram’s Untitled has its yellow daubs of oil paint disturbed by a bumped canvas while his Lego robot is actually applying the pigment. The support is methodically manipulated by hand in conjunction with the activity of the machine.

Cousins’ accompanying YF4 is wild. He has taken the masking tape off and while the surrounding top coat is still wet, and frenetically agitated it with a brush – blending it into the underlying layer. The angular masked lines are mixed with a more fluid tumbling movement.

The third pair look at subtractive and additive processes. Ingram’s Riser has thick red paint applied on to a linen stretcher on which is drawn a pencilled grid. In some areas that paint has been later removed with turps so you can detect white squares beneath and blue underpainting.

Cousins’ nearby pink Drought is a lot simpler. An L-shaped blue line follows the left and bottom edges while in the top left-hand corner a large square of blue paint has been blurrily removed.

The last couple of works look at manual application. In Jardin Moderne, Ingram has made a series of dramatically sweeping red diagonal and horizontal lines brushed on by hand and not using his robot. It looks like a very delicate Franz Kline.

In response Cousins has added an extra layer of thick yellow paint over an old work completed two years previously, so you can see slivers of the earlier painting peeking through at the stretcher edges. The sticky oily pigment of Cool Yellow has been applied vigorously and agitated with a narrow brush.

This exhibition is the start of a new Initiative series for Gow Langsford, one devoted to experimental painting projects. It’s a great idea. If they are all as good as this, we have a lot to look forward to.

Brilliantly evocative

Florence Wild & Clara Chon: Waterfront morals / Fatherly functions
Window, AU library foyer
23 December 2009 - 19 February 2010

In this exhibition within the narrow but high glassed-off gallery of Window there are three main items presented for scrutiny. One is a hessian mat draped across two low trestles or saw-horses. Stitched into it in different shades of green thread (for different walls) is the floor plan of a possibly Romanesque, rectangular fortress. We can see it has only one doorway at one end of the stone construction and regularly positioned buttresses going up the outside. The internal space is taken up by a complex maze, turning around the inner space so that the ‘target’ in the very centre is a long oblong hallway.

Another object is suspended from the ceiling on a hanger, and is perhaps a more mysterious and overt fetish item: a black woman’s top. It is covered with diagonal rows of pinned on silver safety pins - hundreds of them, all overlapping. Identifiable as a Punk fashion accoutrement it could be an oblique reference to Giovanni Intra’s famous studded suit. A type of armour that is both contemporary and medieval, it is a chain mail version of ‘cool’ perhaps.

The third item is a pair of austere hand-painted posters, not identical, stating the title of the musical revue ‘Jacques Brel is alive and living in Paris.’ They are positioned on the right-hand transparent end wall, over some of the vertical fluorescent tubes that illuminate the show.

So these three elements, what do they concoct when combined together? How do they relate to the show’s enigmatic title which seems to be about generational conflict?

The two sculptures allude to inaccessibility - unassailability perhaps – resulting from the separation caused by geographic, chronological and generational distance. Military and psychological protection is a murky metaphor mixed in with the stretch in taste between music and theatre from different decades – along with a smearing reference to ethical responsibility.

However you might speculate on their meaning, these intriguing exhibits work well collectively. A fine, nicely resonating exhibition at Window.

New Gallery summer holiday show

Taste: Food and Feasting In Art
Curated by Ngahiraka Mason
Auckland Art Gallery
21 November 2009 - 14 February 2010

Christmas holiday exhibitions are usually seen by municipal institutions as opportunities to notch up their door numbers while visitors to the city are looking for things to do with their families. It’s a shrewd way of placating councils worried about getting value for ratepayers’ money. Such projects do not have to involve a dumbing down, but with regular monotony they do - even though it is possible to have exciting and informative summer exhibitions, as Christchurch Art Gallery’s current The Naked and The Nude, or the present array of shows at Te Tuhi, prove. However Taste at Auckland Art Gallery, is almost everything an exhibition should not be.

This collection show of approximately 94 artworks by 74 artists is more about anthropology and social studies than art. Anthropology and social studies are of course part of art, for any analysis of human behaviour patterns will play a crucial role in its interpretation and appreciation - particularly within the loci of the communities it springs from - but in shows like Taste art plays a secondary role, that of providing illustrations for another discipline’s more dominant journalistically treated theme.

The fact that the objects on display are carefully constructed visual artifacts seems to be inconsequential. Their methods of production and formal properties are never analysed in any depth – in terms of design. In fact they could be written figures of speech, metaphors or symbols in a novel or poem, and the discussion in the wall labels would be almost exactly the same. Their visual dynamic, a crucial element in grasping their appeal (admittedly one aspect of many) is never elaborated on in any detail. There is no educative process on the joys of careful looking.

Of course you have to be sure it is the art you’ve come for that is in fact in front of you. In this show’s organisation, the way different categories of object are indiscriminately mixed up is quite confusing. You have the artworks (fine or applied), intended by their creators to be seen as such; you have contextual material examining the show’s theme – like recipe books – in vitrines; there are diversions for children like toy tea sets on tables in the centre of the viewing spaces; there is material to direct an audience towards exhibits, like cardboard boxes on the stairs bearing the title’s stencilled name and pointing upstairs; and there is conservation equipment that has its own explanatory label, like a light data logger next to a painting by Pieter Brueghel the Younger.

Sometimes it is difficult to decide where one exhibit finishes and another begins. A woven Anatolian rolling pin cover is so closely positioned to a Patrick Hanly placed below it that its tassels are actually touching the painting. (Puzzlingly its unknown Greek creator is listed as New Zealand American). Or a work continues after you thought it had finished. An Ani O’Neill woven octopus is placed on a plinth one side of a gallery and hidden far away up near the ceiling on the opposite wall above a Boyd Webb are scattered its progeny, mysteriously separated. Amusingly clever for sure, but difficult to identify unless you ask a guard.

Most inconsistent of all is the content of the labels and signage. Most of it is written for eleven year olds (below a Brian Brake photo of Picasso and his daughter at a café we read: a café is an informal restaurant, offering a range of hot meals, sandwiches and occasionally alcohol. The café culture here in Aotearoa New Zealand has become a popular place to breakfast and lunch. They are meeting places for conversations between friends, colleagues and family); some is nonsensical (the colours shapes and textures found in art are often based on references to the kitchen pantry, the ocean or the soil), or else is academic, out of context and not adequately connected to the exhibit (Next to a Dutch Bourjinon and quoting Norman Bryson: Still Life at the table is structured around an anxious polarity, with vice and pleasure beckoning at one end and abstention admonishing at the other ).

Though the show is shockingly trite in its concept and poorly elucidated, if you rake through it carefully you can find some very good art – a lot of it purchased by the Chartwell Trust. It is worth avoiding the outrageous door charge by coming on a Monday so you can enjoy such knockout works.

My top six would include Robert Jahnke’s lettering of ‘Koha’ made with chocolate fish on offer to the gallery audience, a perhaps sarcastic comment on Maori fishing rights; Boyd Webb’s lightbox Wrack Wring showing a toxic phosphorescent soup bubbling around a strips of bacon skewered on a piece of barbed wire; Billy Apple’s sequence of three stages of a chomped on green bronze apple - entitled 2 minutes 33 seconds, the time it takes to eat it; Anne Noble’s gorgeous black and white rectangular photo of a meticulously arranged table setting for a nun; John Daly’s image of Steve’s Fish and Chip Shop with the rear reflection of one of the customers wearing white shirt and braces bent over the counter; and Daniel Malone’s clever comment on ‘local’ identity: a gourd on which is painted the Lemon and Paeroa logo, and a plastic L&P bottle on which he has incised in koru–style lettering the brand name in full, as if a sort of moko.

That's the thing. A show's presentation might be woeful but if some of the art is superb and memorable, you forget the sound of your grinding teeth and get involved with it. Despte the shoddy context.

Impressive teamwork

Ian Wedde: Bill Culbert / Making Light Work
270 pp, colour and b/w illustrations
hardcover
Auckland University Press 2009

This book is the result of a collaboration between expat artist Bill Culbert with poet /novelist/ critic Ian Wedde. It is an inspired pairing for the result has to be one of the most visually sophisticated art books this country has ever put out. It exudes intelligence, not just the erudition and verbal dexterity of Wedde’s richly layered writing, and the sensuality and wit of Culbert’s extraordinary drawings, photographs and documented light sculptures – but also the sequencing and placement of images and text on every double-page spread. It’s a high class publication: impeccably elegant and concentrated in its density of information.

Also, for a Wedde book, this one is highly accessible. Maybe not as easy a read as his Fomison publication but nevertheless enticing. An exceptionally knowledgeable and versatile wordsmith, he is not only intellectually agile with a professorial grasp that effortlessly connects hitherto seemingly unrelated subjects, he is also a great verbal craftsman, with vivid powers of description for people, place and the outdoors. In the past I have often found find his rich and often convoluted texts exhaustingly heady but this book I couldn’t put down.

This is partly because Culbert’s images are alluring, and partly because Wedde here though intricate, is also very clear. I’ve always thought Wedde was a specialist in the Pacific region and its history but this book shows how global his interests in fact are. He writes effortlessly about Culbert’s life in France and England, giving precise and evocative descriptions of Culbert’s art, family and social life - there and back in New Zealand where he was born and educated and which he visits annually. Also because Wedde is obviously passionate about Culbert and his work, his enthusiasm is infectious. He knows Culbert’s personality and quirky traits well (such as his hatred of the metaphysical and metaphorical) – and describes them brilliantly.

The information crammed into this publication ranges from details about Culbert’s secondary school art education at Hutt Valley High with the amazing teacher James Coe, and his Canterbury years at Ilam as part of the Armagh St set in the mid fifties, to his shift to London to study and live and then to Southern France to also live. It makes the most of his early impressive semi-cubist paintings and their interest in light, and his enthusiasm for Duchamp’s readymades, plus it places a high emphasis on conviviality and the importance of his friendship with other artists like Simon Cutts, Ralph Hotere, Stuart Brisley, Ted Bracey and Quentin Macfarlane. And of course his wife Pip is crucial – a very significant artist in her own right.

It is also liberally peppered with Culbert’s exquisite preparatory pen drawings that like his photographs are effective aids for research. As you’d expect there are also many images from his trusty Rolleicord camera, recording a vast range of phenomena - such as dramatic shapes created by harsh light or dark shadow, or delicate punning shadow-like forms made by light passing through transparent solids or coloured liquids. Plus spectacular documentary images of public commissions and unexpected works like his unusual light-box tip-trucks, which look extraordinary.

Wedde is impressively thorough in his elucidation of Culbert’s various methods and underlying ethos, one that embraces humble, easily available, commonplace materials. The artist’s constant use of various ‘objects of affection’ such as his aforementioned camera, his Citröen 2CV car and his Parker 51 drawing pen is also lucidly explained.

If the writing has a weakness it is that Culbert is too strong a personality. While it is inevitable he dominate – after all he is the book’s subject – there is possibly too much about him and not enough about the wider sweep of art history and other contemporary artists who also study (or have studied) the properties of light. It could have done with some detailed contextualising, comparing Culbert’s practice with the endeavours of related artists such as David Batchelor, Robert Irwin, James Turrell, or Spencer Finch. There is some good discussion about Dan Flavin but overall Wedde has kept too closely to Culbert’s circle of friends and admirers, and not explored the wider context of his visual research and of the international art scene as it is now.

After all for all the hard work Culbert has put in constantly travelling back and forth between hemispheres putting up shows, you wonder why someone like David Batchelor (a writer as well as an artist) has such a high profile in London while Culbert, a seemingly obvious influence, is comparatively invisible. Maybe it is as Culbert once drolly described himself, because he is ‘the older guy at the party.’

There are two other aspects I find disconcerting – and both (like the artist’s role in this book) are irresolvable.

One is that sometimes Culbert’s light sculptures and installations are not as satisfying in real life as their photographic documentation indicates. Photographs in books tend to spatially condense and be composed in their making, often with the picture being taken from high up - whereas in galleries the peripatetic viewer sees the work from different less dramatic angles. This is a commonplace problem for documentation within art publications.

The second is that b/w photographs of objects in rural settings in France, even if made to aid thought and illustrate natural properties or humorous substitutions, invariably look quaint, simply because the ubiquitous wooden and stone textures look so romantic and charming. As with French pop music there is an all pervading sweetness in the culture, although when you spend time there, a parallel coarse brutality (as evidenced by the Rainbow Warrior’s sinking) also becomes obvious. Yet where else should Culbert make his photographs – but at home? It is inevitable and sensible he does that.

This publication is a significant accomplishment for Wedde, Culbert and AUP. Despite my quibbles this beautiful, exceptionally well made and interesting book needs to be looked at, read closely and discussed. Hopefully that will happen.

The riff raff invade Te Tuhi

Tony de Lautour: B Sides and Demos
Te Tuhi
Toured by The Physics Room
12 December 2009 – 31 January 2010

This hang of Tony de Lautour’s works-on-paper show (unframed preparatory drawings for his paintings) is considerably different in feel from the version he had early last year at The Physics Room in Christchurch. That was denser and more compact, fitting many in a horizontal slot format - like a community noticeboard in a school corridor.

At Te Tuhi the presentation is not so claustrophobic. The walls are far apart and several rooms are used. Oodles of air. In one gallery only one wall is used.

The first room you enter is L-shaped with seven A4 sized works on paper, canvaspaper and cardboard, using paint, ink and glitter. They are evenly spread apart - each to be considered in isolation. On one nearby wall is just one image, a skull painted on a Workshop bag. The rest of the show has images butted together friezestyle.

The second gallery is round the corner through a door, and with the one wall. Ah but what a wall - for on it in a packed row are forty-five very small drawings / paintings, rendered in surprisingly fine detail on box lids, old envelopes, beer coasters, and canvaspaper. All sorts of portable surface are used to present a mixed assortment of de Lautour’s characteristic grimacing profiles and emblematic animals.

The third room is more immersive, and wittily set up so you stand in the centre of the space and gaze at three walls where the works’ bottom edges of each row are flush. This creates the impression of a nearby city with skyscrapers that surround you. You seem to be positioned in isolation within an unbuilt flat area – like that of Hagley Park in Christchurch.

These three walls vary. The left one with thirteen medium sized images features quick raggedy sketches on torn fashion magazine pages and folio paper, emphasising colour, pattern and abstraction. The middle has seventeen graphic portraits on unusual supports like Chinese newspapers, and the righthand frieze has eleven items on heavier black paper. The overall mood is feral, gritty and fast execution: very casual but unsettling too.

Nothing in this show is slick, which de Lautour paintings, particularly the large ones, can on occasion be. In fact that is the point of this show - its roughness. It has a take it or leave it indifference to prissification.

With the exhibition comes a very fine catalogue put out by The Physics Room containing a well researched essay by Mark Williams that I have already discussed. It looks at de Lautour’s and historical and sociological content.

De Lautour’s images here of course are more than just warm-ups for oil paintings. These cartoonlike mug shots have an independent life of their own, especially when seen in bulk. You don’t need to worry about not seeing the later ‘unscruffy’ versions because the early ones have an energy that perhaps disappears when re-rendered in another medium or scale.

Examining such portraits, most Maori visages included tend to radiate dignity and calm, whereas the more ubiquitous Pakeha countenances reflect their being what Charles Darwin referred to in his 1835 visit to the Bay of islands as ‘the very refuse of society’, later paraphrased as ‘white trash.’ Their faces look uncouth and brutal, and the setting of New Zealand / Aotearoa a harsh and hostile place to live, with not much tenderness or generosity to be found. Images that though often referring to stock mindsets of participants in this country’s history, seem focussed on the grim realities of the turbulent present as well.

God’s ginormous cube-shaped spaceship

Richard Grayson: The Golden Space City of God
Te Tuhi
12 December 2009 – 31 January 2010

Richard Grayson is one of those extremely rare creatures who started off as an artist, became a municipal gallery director, then even an international Biennale director, yet still managed to sustain his own art practice. He is highly regarded in both roles. He even has a work in the Chartwell Collection.

His show at Te Tuhi is a remarkable installation, a small darkened cinema set up in the main gallery space, showing a forty-five minute film of a choir of 26 men and women singing under the guidance of a conductor, Kristin Roach – and filmed in San Antonio, Texas.

Working with the composer Leo Chadburn, Grayson has written a libretto based on the prophecies of an unusual American religious organisation, The Family. Here is his source material, and here in this link is a description of his writing. The startlingly detailed narrative he has taken from this unorthodox Christian group looks like the Book of Revelations blended into a Science Fiction fantasy.

Grayson presents their dramatic prediction in ten stages: (1.) It starts with the total collapse of the dollar based economy, followed by world chaos, famine and terror. Then the Antichrist arrives (with UFOs) to bring peace and a One World government. (2.) He redistributes the world’s resources, sets up a one-world economy, and after initially helping both Jews and Muslims, forbids all traditional varieties of religious worship. (3.) He declares himself to be God and builds a robotic statue to be worshipped, and starting to execute or starve all those who refuse. Possessed by Satan, he brands a bar code onto all his followers or a chip implant. (4.) God’s people resist, leading the struggle, helped by believers in other faiths. (5.) For three and a half years, God lets loose a series of plagues and monsters upon the earth – followed by a time of constant darkness. (6.) Jesus returns bringing more terrible plagues and natural catastrophes. (7.) The Battle of Armageddon occurs and the Devil is defeated. The climate then improves, the world population becomes vegetarian, animals are used for all transport, and goods are exchanged so banks and money disappear. (8.) Resurrected saints who can fly, change their bodies, become invisible and indestructible now appear to help God keep his enemies under surveillance, but after a thousand years the indefatigable Satan eventually remerges to have another attempt at gaining power. Happily God wins out, incinerates all his enemies and cleans up the planet, making it into a New Earth. (9.) He then brings down a massive Golden Space City in which to live. That craft will then be used to take the Saved off to colonise other galaxies. (10.) When that happens they’ll go off into outer space, not knowing what challenges lie ahead.

Much of the appeal of this work lies in its deadpan humour – based on Grayson assuming his art audience is not convinced these events are very likely. The singers enunciate the words with utter indifference to their content, aiming instead at aural clarity. And because the music, a blend of Minimalism with old English choral music like Byrd and Tallis, is not particularly varied in its structure, that evenness creates a foil to allow Grayson to mix the tone of his appropriated texts, something only detectable by reading – not by listening. This you get by reading the lines of libretto at the bottom of the screen; these nuances are just like reading any novel or play script.

Here are some examples to illustrate this variation:

He will brand his followers with their own credit barcode – or inject them with a pre-programmed sub-skin PIN 666 chip implant. He will put this in their right hands or foreheads to make a fool-proof identification system that cannot be falsified. (Section 3)

And for three and a half years, the leading nations of the European Union will unite with Russia and turn on America with a nuclear first strike. It will destroy her and burn her with fire in one hour and after that, Capitalism and its merchants are finished. (Section 5)

The Great Space City is 1,500 miles long, 1,500 miles wide and 1,500 miles high. The greatest space vehicle ever created, the most wonderful spaceship ever conceived, built by the Lord and on its way down to Earth now. (Section 9)

And compare those with these more informal lines:

God’s People, the Lord will take care of us, even if He has to drop bread from Heaven supernaturally. (Section 4)

God knows how much more we’ll have to conquer after we’ve conquered the Earth and all the souls who have ever lived on it and all their problems. (Section 10)

The sheer incongruity of having a choir sing such texts is a vital component to its success. Being straight-faced is essential, as is the clothing of the singers crucial to ensure the visual mood doesn’t distract from the precision and complexity of the various interweaving musical threads. (There are 2 soprano parts, 2 alto, 2 tenor and 2 bass – distributed amongst the 26 voices). Formal dress is avoided: no white shirts, frilly ruffles, ties, cuffs or jackets. The singers wear casual clothing that is instantly forgettable, with subdued colours via t-shirts, unpatterned shirts or blouses, and jeans. They look relaxed (and alert) and seem to be enjoying the occasion.

So the experience we get from Grayson is a mix of reading from the screen, listening and watching. Reading the libretto by itself doesn’t cover it, nor does just attending to the music or observing the expressions of the choir. Those elements can’t be separated out. The film in its totality, within its specially prepared venue, provides a complete experience - for there are no DVDs or CDs for sale at the door - and it is rich enough to repay several visits. This fascinating project, one not to be missed, is easily the best show on in Auckland over the holiday period.

William Blake visits Pakuranga

Gavin Hipkins: The Billboards Project
Te Tuhi
12 December 2009 - 7 March 2010

Hot on the tail of his ‘Bible Studies’ project at the Adam in Wellington, Gavin Hipkins presents with three billboards on a roadside wall, an aphorism from William Blake’s Proverbs of Hell: drive your plow over the bones of the dead.

Blake meant don’t pay too much mind clinging to past traditions, but engage instead with the present - as a proudly independent radical spirit. In his site specific version Hipkins makes it more about Auckland traffic density, local history and danger to Pakuranga pedestrians. It becomes black humour and not as Blake had it, an early Romantic, anti-Classical mini-manifesto.

When you look at this sequence of images across the street from Te Tuhi’s front door you see the background linear configurations, but not the fact that the letters are embroidered and then photographed. You also miss the fact that the Art Deco style geometric backdrops are made using a stencil-like photogram technique.

The three sequential backgrounds for the pried apart, 3-word phrases are: a diamond in front of a rectangular frame; a sun with radiating slat-like beams; a Spirographic rosette. When combined with the intact grim message these decorative motifs (and folksy stitching) seem incongruously frivolous, if not comical, their delicate filigree at odds with the pragmatic 'get on with it' imperative.

Poor old William Blake, suffering the indignity of being processed through a classic post-modern filter and having his liberating, iconoclastic credo chopped up and wildly recontextualised so. Like his mad subject, King Nebuchadnezzar, I weep for him.