Tony de Lautour's current show in Christchurch is visited by Andrew Paul Wood

Tony de Lautour: New Paintings: 2009-2010
Brooke-Gifford Gallery, Christchurch
March 2-27, 2020

In Tony de Lautour’s work over the last two decades, there has been a discernable distancing from the figurative ‘lion and kiwi’ and mountainous logo years. In the last ten years this leaning to abstraction has resolved itself in two distinct and oppositional ways; an all-over decorative surface and a more constructivist approach.

In Tony de Lautour: New Paintings 2009-2020, we see much of the latter. Frequently these are pop-cubist images reminiscent of the mid-period collaborations of Braque and Picasso, with familiar wood grain elements and a startling palette of Jeyes Fluid pink, pale lemon and eau-de-nil which is harmonised by the black backgrounds. Sometimes, as in Anna and Anita (the names of two friends) it is a stylised word that provides the composition. At other times there are references to the cubist collages of found items as in Spread, an overpainting of a real estate catalogue.

As if to give some context to these recent developments, the work Us v Them (named, true to de Lautour’s rock ‘n’ roll attitude, after a song by LCD Sound System) retains the black plane sprinkled with a grid of white dots like a cross between the Manhattan skyline at night and a Pac Man labyrinth. The symbols the artist once scattered through these grids have now become the dominant form. This is almost a revision and dissection of de Lautour’s past oeuvre, casting about the old lightning bolts, mashed potato alps and spiderwebs Killeen-wise, and mixing them up with Gordon Walters’ pitau forms and dribbling clouds that seem to recall Bill Hammond and John Pule. Of these latter forms, at the opening the artist mentioned to me that he thought that these had a resonance with Peter Robinson’s baroquely incontinent polystyrene sculptures.

In the painting Tower the symbols pile up in a tottering Tatlin-esque Tower of Babel (one is rather reminded of Maeterlinck’s The Blue Bird in which the souls of babies not yet born construct towers representing their future lives and vocations). The effect chimes with Pencil Case painter roots when one recalls the scaffolding/pigeon holes of Shane Cotton and the piled up portmanteaus of Seraphine Pick. It must also be remembered that de Lautour actually studied sculpture at Canterbury, which may explain something of this compositional trope.

The all-over surface works, on the other hand, are more organic in their exfoliation of disc shapes. In both cases this would seem to be closely related to Deleuze and Guattari’s phenomenon of the “body without organs” – an anonymous and non-differentiated surface – to which various “desiring-machines” and “paranoiac machines” attempt to attach in “counter-investment” (investissement). The plane/ground becomes a socius as a full body, forming a surface: “where all production is recorded, whereupon the entire process appears to emanate from this recording surface” which is little more than a self-adjusting mirror to society, resulting in new syntheses.

What is really most evident in these new works is that de Lautour has (dare I say it?) entered the mature phase of his career. Most of the punk rocker vibe aesthetic that dominated his work throughout the 1990s and early 2000s was a kind of Magic Christian kind of trip – pose as something other than a nice, middle-class white boy to lure the bourgeoisie into a psychic maze and then relentlessly bombard them with surreal and endlessly new experiences until they come around to your way of thinking. De Lautour seems, apart from the occasional miniature tattoo lightning bolt or spiderweb, the odd song reference in a title, to have taken up the call of a purely aesthetic approach to composition. The maze is now formal, visual, compositional, rather than political or philosophical. The emphasis is off the pop cultural tics and bad white art/rebel without a cause, and even the monochrome alp/logo inspired critiques of art/land commoditisation have retreated into the background – though something of that remains in one painting in the exhibition of a dollar sign.

This new work is quieter, more thoughtful, subtler and less striving for the currency of effect. Perhaps it is true of all painters that eventually composition ultimately becomes nothing more than an excuse to apply paint to a surface. But yet, this is no simplistic and reductive descent into pure abstraction – the work remains resolutely and recognisably de Lautour (despite his occasional magpie cherry-picking of other artists’ leitmotifs) – and to me (and the audience, the connoisseurs, the market) that is what is truly important.

Images courtesy of the artist.

Indoor sculpture garden

Seung Yul Oh: Bogle Bogle
The New Dowse
13 February - 30 May 2010

Seung Yul Oh first attracted attention at Elam in the early 2000s as an amazingly drawer of whimsical fairytale cartoons that combined the saccharine with the intestinal and excretory - as well as being a maker of flowing resin sculpture with bizarre bubbly, pockmarked warty textures. Since then his work has become less organic and less process-oriented and much more industrial, with an impeccable finish and delicate pastel colouration.

The current sculptural installation at The New Dowse features capsule-like forms that are akin to ‘kinder eggs’ that have taken on appetising confectionary hues. These are a variation of the work he recently exhibited in Te Papa’s sculpture terrace and Starkwhite, that were ‘egg-birds’. Bogle Bogle is more theatrical and staged in three connected rooms, with three small inquisitive rats made of resin that sometimes balance on the ‘egg’ tops.

There are also some large vertical matchsticks, an abstract headless elephant made of curved arch forms, to one side a 3D sculpture of a cube covered with a white sheet, and several brightly coloured cubes, these being drawn orthographic forms that have had their sides intensely coloured and then their shapes cut out of flat metal sheets, on stands so they remain vertically positioned on the floor.

I tend to prefer this artist’s nastier and messier earlier work for here he seems to be chasing Michael Parekowhai. Yet this show is not bland or too cute. It has a pattern that intrigues too.

First of all the doubled-over title. Is it a portmanteau word that blends bugle with ogle? Is it like the display, something that has an oblique logic? To do with binaries perhaps?

I say that because looking at the sculptural elements, there are match heads (symbols perhaps for revelatory epiphanies?) that look like the giant capsules, two sorts of cube (flat and with body) and two sorts of colour (pastel and saturated). Plus two varieties of spectator: rats and living humans.

What can one make of it? The show seems to be about passivity and action and the agency of the gallery visitor. Something about thinking as an activity? The rats and people seem to indicate curiosity, the capsules props to be ingested, the matches lit (ideas maybe?), while the elephant is memory and the sheet covered cube the hidden past. The cut-out Platonic forms can be interpreted as hypothetical actions, while the 3D ones are actions of profound consequence.

Bogle Bogle is a buoyant, entertaining show, an indoor, walk-through ‘sculpture garden’ that holds up well against the fiddly architectural trimmings of the New Dowse arches, fake walls and doorways. It is worth investigating on your way down the corridor to Bill Viola.

Enjoying the light

John Ward Knox: a projection of light
Newcall
6 March - 13 March 2010

Only a week long, this short Newcall show by John Ward Knox involves a minimal installation, a couple of photographs and some potential socialising. The T-shaped gallery is apparently empty - apart from a group of three or four chairs and a box that serves as a table for some biscuits. It anticipates some chat over a nibble and a cuppa, if the visitor is so inclined. This furniture is by the far wall opposite the glass door.

There is no electric light and the large windows by the entrance (facing north) are all uncovered so that daylight ‘projects’ in – direct sunlight or glare reflected off buildings or the sky. Because light cannot bend around corners, the smaller, inner, rectangular space extending to the side of the main gallery is much darker.

This arrangement emphasises the light coming in the window and changing over the passing of the day. This point is emphasised by the artist installing two photos of a cloudless sky, taken two hours apart at Miranda on the Coromandel Peninsula, with the lighter one placed on a light wall, and the much darker one on the darkest wall. Their presence seems to serve as signs to visitors to be mindful of the changing illuminative properties and how they effect the room’s architectural features. It also makes sense considering the artist’s interest in Seurat-like biro drawing and undulating sculptures carved directly into plaster-covered walls.

John Ward Knox seems to offering an immersive phenomenological experience where the role of ‘spectator’ and ‘art object’ breaks down, where the very act of visiting as a participatory element contributes to a total environment. Any conversation had with the Newcall gallery minder or other visitors feeds into this. The three ‘items’ of gallery light, photographs and conversation are more calculated and cohesive than what was at first apparent.

That might be a weakness, for it could be that the relational aspects overstate the obvious and that a quietistic private experience with just the light and space and photographs is sufficient. However we are not living in the seventies: the drinks and food are pragmatic and encourage lingering and return visits. A shrewd strategy.

Julie McCabe on Mark Amery's discussion of

Jeremy Diggle's exhibition.

Sometimes it is good to get more than one opinion on a single show…

Unpacking My Library: Dan Arps, Xin Cheng, Bill Culbert, The Estate of L. Budd, Peter Madden, Daniel Malone, Elizabeth McAlpine, Neil Pardington and Ann Shelton.
Curated by Stephen Cleland
Te Tuhi
13 February - 11 April 2010

This show spirals around the distinction between a library and a collection, for although the two are obviously very different, in many people’s minds they often end up becoming interchangeable. Especially if you believe that objects and the sensations they provide can have their codes read as if they were newly opened books.

Is a library something like a wine cellar (the objects contained use–up-able eventually) or is it more like a wardrobe, a source of references in your conversation that you put on like wearable tactile garments? The roles of favourite sensations, reliable ideas, and certain zones in between – can all these be noted and stored to be savoured again in the future?

To introduce this theme in-house curator Stephen Cleland has had printed on a poster a beautiful passage from the well known essay that provides this show’s title. Written by Walter Benjamin, the patron saint of, indeed the founder of, art theory, and published first in 1931, it discusses the pleasure of building up a collection through pursuing individual items. Much like say, stories about the great Russian novelist Vladimir Nabokov running through country fields with his net, chasing butterflies - a lifetime obssession.

Cleland’s show though is only partially about books. Much of it is about catalogues, taxonomies, and how we classify things. That aspect pertains more to another great figure in theory, Michel Foucault than to Walter Benjamin, and Foucault’s amusement (as discussed in his preface to The Order of Things) at Jorge Luis Borges’ account of a particular Chinese Encyclopaedia where animals are classified by being: (a) property of the Emperor, (b) embalmed, (c) tame, (d) suckling pigs, (e) sirens, (f) fabulous, (g) stray dogs, (h) included in the present classification, (i) frenzied, (j) innumerable, (k) drawn with a very fine camelhair brush, (l) et cetera (m) recently the cause of a broken water pitcher, (n) similar from a long way off to a row of flies.

Of the nine artists here only two specifically use books: Ann Shelton and Xin Cheng. Room stalwart Cheng also presented a library in last year’s Article 27 show in North Shore curated by Richard Dale. Her space this time in Te Tuhi is bigger and less cell-like, with a large square plywood table and four boxlike plywood chairs. On the table are nineteen hardcover publications, many from local libraries. Most are about architecture, design, clothing and cooking.

This sort of exhibition promotes the notion of art being research, so it invites gallery visitors to dig out information and become artists themselves. For example I have personally decided to seek out certain books at various libraries after they have been returned. Four in particular are especially appealing: one, The Architect, The Cook and Good Taste connects building with cooking; another looks at chair designer Rolf Fehlbaum and how chairs are conceived; a third presents coloured photos by Albert Kahn taken around the world during the second decade of last century; and a fourth examines Scandinavian knitting patterns.

The theme of books continues in five small video screens from Ann Shelton set in a line on a long wall. They feature her continued fascination with Frederick Butler, whose archive of thousands of cards and books (many of which are old novels he used as scrapbooks for local newspaper cuttings) are kept in the New Plymouth public library. Her nine videos show the pages of volumes left out of the 'spinal' photographs but included here, turning through each volume one at a time, and revealing scribbled annotations, lists, dates, charts, cartoons, headings and more. They, especially the clippings, are very hard to read but they attempt to whet your appetite.

It is difficult to pin down the value (if any) of Butler’s unusual obsession, and if he fits as an artist (he probably doesn’t because he didn’t think of himself as such) or as a social historian (again probably not, for in this field he may have done more damage than good - for the newspapers would be more useful intact.) Shelton’s earlier well known series of life-sized photos of the spines of Butler’s archive, as seen on the library storage shelves, is amazing, but these page-turning videos ram home a connection with Borges’ Chinese encyclopaedia. The headings of four consecutive pages in one notebook on medical conditions go as: pimples; prunes; potassium broth; potatoes. There may be a coherent logic here, to do perhaps with bio-chemistry, but it is not very clear.

The three Neil Pardington Lambda/C-prints displayed come from the basements of Te Papa, Auckland Museum and the Hocken library. These very detailed images show items of mammal and marine life, rolled up textiles stored on steel rods, and a box of catalogue cards.

How does one 'read' these? Well the long triptych from Te Papa reveals masses of mounted deer heads that most likely will never be displayed, and what seems to be a killer whale skull that probably will. Auckland Museum’s rolled up rugs are stored slightly over on the left hand side of the racks bearing horizontal bars – perhaps a vague comment on some bias of sorts, and the Otago cupboard of filing cards with labelled catalogue drawers makes a gorgeous grid that obscures (but potentially confirms) the rationale of the enclosed register for the art collection.

The logic of organising such inventories is tested to opposite extremes by British artist Elizabeth McAlpine and The Estate of L. Budd. McAlpine continually collects postcards of Big Ben and the Houses of Parliament – of different periods and sizes. To present them on a wall she uses a huge 12 x 60 matrix of 720 plastic pockets. She has about a third of that number of cards in total.

The system she uses to position each card in the grid for display depends on the time shown on the clock dial: vertical co-ordinates equal hours; horizontal equal minutes - so you place the card where they cross. Day and night are blended, and McAlpine plays on the fact that in some images the time is indecipherable, or one hand at least is hidden by shadow. Therefore her system, which looks impressive at first glance, is not totally reliable, for she has to make arbitrary decisions sometimes. Some cards are repeated three times.

The contribution of The Estate of L. Budd to Cleland’s exhibition is to turn one of the gallery rooms into a little warehouse, bringing in for this show (but not ‘displayed’) various works made by that artist stored in different locations scattered around the country. On the temporary shelves we see bulky storage boxes daubed in characteristic grey with scribbled crayon, heaters, turntables, suit-cases, cabinets, and sound gear. And various rolled up awnings and paintings lean against an end wall.

A catalogue for The Estate’s ‘Extant Works’ hangs off one shelf, and its pages are also pinned to one wall. An ambiguous blue taped line runs between the shelving and the space where the viewers enter, half suggesting they go no further. A surveillance monitor watches from one corner.

More importantly, The Estate of L. Budd monitors itself. Problems of authenticity are adjudicated where collectors are invited to submit ‘applications of registration and authentication’ for possible Budd works not yet listed. The Estate shows caution in instigating such bureaucratic procedures, exhibiting samples of blue Approved or Denied stamps and being forever vigilant, in case dubious ‘L. Budd’ works appear in the future - possible forgeries attempted maybe by P. Mule, Arthur Craig and Sons, Blanche Readymade, et al. and others.

Daniel Malone’s work is a catalogue attempted by memory alone, listing all the personal possessions (including cardboard rubbish he refused to discard) that he left behind when he moved to Poland, where he now lives, and which made up a Gambia Castle exhibition he sold to the Chartwell Collection.

The recounted, shorter list was written on a long wall in Paintstik by an assistant using a ‘tagger’ script with upper case printing and vertical bars through S’s and O’s. It vaguely relates to Douglas Gordon’s list on a wall of everybody he has ever met since 1990 that he can remember. Malone’s attempted inventory, with its graffiti form of presentation, seems out of place within a municipal gallery where it looks compromised. It would make a far more interesting project if it were ‘defacing’ Te Tuhi’s outer walls and genuinely drawing on the urban politics of the text ‘font’.

Eight freestanding sculptures by Dan Arps fill one small gallery, and demonstrate the merits of recycling elements from disparate exhibitions, scattered in time and place, to make something new. Some aspects of this show refer to Arps’ TWNCAA entry in Hamilton for 2005 (Creation Myth), others to Telecom Prospect in Wellington a pinch later, and others still to a Gambia Castle show held last year.

Arps’ sculptures use office swivel stools, bookcases, and old clothing dressers as plinths for hybrid versions of kitsch ceramic garden ornaments, and are very entertaining. They revel in messy and dribbly sculptural processes, with say, bits of paper decals on desks alongside bits of cardboard Buckminster Fuller models or resin/ceramic goblins or toadstools.

This is a restrained show for Arps, one that is oddly elegant with its uncluttered calculated placements. It is the highlight of the nine Te Tuhi exhibitions, a sort of ‘Dan Arps’ Greatest Hits’ with a surprising accessibility.

Using a darkened annex and revolving carousel of eighty slides with a translucent wall, Peter Madden presents a set of installations and collages that are tightly connected as a sample of his practice. The shots are taken from a variety of positions and display his usual subject matter of exotic tropical wildlife, Southeast Asian Gods, hands and expressive facial portraits. Like Arps (and often Budd and Malone) there is an interest in recycling forms that can subvert standard cataloguing procedure and which perhaps drives registrars worried about provenance of ingredients frantic. With Madden, there are so many parts to each installation that one is overwhelmed by numerical plenitude, a plethora of (usually small) components to be listed and documented.

Bill Culbert’s double-row of sixteen black and white photographs butted together provides a good inventory of his visual interests and modes of thinking. In this sampler we see a number of approaches to light’s effect on surfaces – or lack of, as darkness. There is behind, on top, emitting from within, and through transparent layers. Then there is the visual punning: jokes about fake table and chair legs, or concave pot surfaces and convex bulbs. These square images are like chapter headings in a book, or subfolders of files within a larger computer folder for research – guides to thematic approaches that are part of an artist’s brand; unpacked slices of their oeuvre.

Cleland has put together here a clever and unusual show that illuminates not so much specific examples of collecting as its relationship to maintaining types of certain art practice, while commenting on collecting’s general ordering principles and common administrative procedures.

In descending order the images are of works by Xin Cheng, Ann Shelton, Neil Pardington, Elizabeth McAlpine, The Estate of L. Budd, Daniel Malone, Dan Arps, Peter Madden and Bill Culbert.

The International Arts Festival: Anthony McCall

Anthony McCall: Drawing with Light
Curated by Christina Barton
Adam Art Gallery
24 February - 25 April 2009

Anthony McCall is a British artist living in New York who in the early seventies, made a series of systems-based performances involving grids of small fires on open fields - set alight at dusk in strictly planned (‘scored’) sequences and time schedules. He was interested in the optical qualities of light and smoke and their spatial relationship to a viewer who might move around or through them.

Most of the works he made at that time involved light, often involving spaces such as dusty studios where beams of sunlight could be manipulated through incisions in paper placed over windows. Another particularly unusual project was a film made using hand-made animation, where a projected dot metamorphosed into a curved line which then grew into a self-joining complete circle. It was not so much the image on the screen that was interesting as the horizontal line/cone formed in space between screen and projector that the viewer could bodily interact with and which required smoky or dusty air to take shape. In clean air, the sculpture was disastrously invisible.

In the eighties and nineties McCall withdrew from gallery activity and worked as a catalogue and magazine designer. However in the early part of this millennium his work was rediscovered by some key curators and placed in highly visible, international shows. This prodded him into adapting his sculptural ideas for digital technology, and doing things that were impossible with reel to reel projectors - such as making vertical light cones. He also did some technological research and discovered ‘haze machines’. These can fill a room with a foggy ‘chalk dust’ mist that makes traversing light visible.

With digital know-how McCall’s more recent projects therefore have become more complicated. Sometimes they have three evolving linear elements side by side, such as a straight line and two turning parabolic wave forms that are like U’s. At one point in the cycle they join up to become a complete circle, before sliding apart and becoming independently turning, slowly writhing, components once more.

When you visit the current survey Christina Barton has put together for the Adam, you realise that the online documentation of McCall’s sculptural work often looks slick, as if digitally tidied up and possibly a little bland. The actual experience though is far better, for there are accidental components that bring an unanticipated richness. These include swirling highly ‘expressive’ eddies of fog that cling to the cordlike edges of each projected cross-section, and ‘white’ lines on the black planes of plinths that are not white at all but pastel yellow, pink and green.

From the titles that McCall gives his cones of light, he seems to regard the sculpture as a simile for the standing human presence. He sees himself as a humanist–structuralist, an odd hybrid of opposites, yet the work is sufficiently exciting in its own right. It doesn’t need clumsy conceptual overlayering - that makes him look like a Gormley wannabe. It works best trope free.

In an essay about McCall that Luke Smythe contributes to the Adam’s poster/catalogue he points out a number of writers like George Baker and Branden Joseph who think that McCall’s films of the 1970s continue the interests and “phenomenological concerns of minimalist and post-minimalist sculpture…(displacing) the emphasis of sculptural spectatorship away from the internal dynamics of the artwork itself, toward the moment-to-moment perceptual dynamics of the temporally-extended encounter between sculpture and viewer.”

This is an interesting issue. If one looks at examples of minimalist geometric sculpture of the mid-sixties, such as Robert Morris’s arrangements of square slabs or L-forms through which his audience moved, the gallery experience seems very different as a bodily sensation from what McCall offers. Most obvious is the fact that the minimalist work is made of painted plywood that the human form can move around and between, but not into – unlike a single cone made of light on dust that can be walked through.

So the question is, is standing within McCall’s conical shell of gradually moving blinding light, comparable to standing between identical wooden modules in different stationary positions that have solid planes? I don’t think so. Yet for sure, both are immersive and both have temporal-perceptual aspects – but one is overwhelming optical and ‘head’, whilst the other is more bodily in a far more general proprioceptive sense. It seems very odd to compare them.

This is an unusually immersive show, though the presence of drawings on some walls also ensures an overtly analytic component where the viewer has to mentally link moving images with stationary marks. McCall’s light sculptures surprise also because there seem to be plentiful allusions to earlier films like Len Lye’s Tusalava and Hans Richter’s Dreams That Money Can Buy.

The five vertical cones are smallish, on plinths, and so are called 'maquettes'. They are not cathedral-like as in some installations (like in the image above) but they give you a good idea of the principles at work. The highlight is a long horizontal projection in the Kirk Gallery, You and I, Horizontal (2005), which though claustrophobic on a humid day (the air conditioning has to be turned off) is extraordinarily mesmerising. It has formal drama mixed with tantalisingly slow movement.

As with Viola and Cardiff at The New Dowse and City Gallery, this McCall show is an essential visit.

The International Arts Festival: Janet Cardiff

Janet Cardiff: The Forty-Part Motet
City Gallery
20 February - 16 May 2010

Thomas Tallis (1505-1585) is one of those great English choral composers loved by many who normally ignore classical music. His complex melodic arrangements have a penetrating emotional quality that continues to haunt, especially in the case of one popular work, Spem in alium nunquam habui (1573). At the City Gallery in Wellington, we can see and hear how the sound artist Janet Cardiff treats this almost five centuries old music for forty voices.

The work doubles as a visible and aural sculpture. For the former, the viewable elements are forty B & W speakers, held high at head height by firm stands and positioned in a large inward-facing circle, but divided into eight mini-choirs of five singers each. In these groups, each Bowers and Wilkins speaker looks anthropomorphic, like a standing figure converted into a vertical ‘tribal’ sculpture.

For the latter, the forty recordings from the forty singers that in 2001 made up the required proportions of basses, baritones, tenors, altos and sopranos, are not blended but stay separate. That means you can experience not only at least forty versions according to where you stand, but that the concrete columns and glass windows or skylights particular to the space also affect the acoustics.

Not only do you hear the eleven minutes of Tallis’s brilliantly constructed and unabashedly gorgeous motet, but you also get the previous three minutes of chatter, clowning, coughing and hawking amongst the boys, girls and men of the Salisbury Cathedral Choir, just before the conductor prepares them to start. Hearing the whispered snippets of local Home Counties English before they launch off into even ‘purer’ ecclesiastical Latin is fascinating for most New Zealand listeners.

I’m tempted to say that if you love most music then you’ll adore this aural exhibition, but of course that might not be the case. You might find Elizabethan choral music repulsively ethereal. If though you are fascinated by the properties of sound and how different strands can mix in the air, or bounce off walls, then this is the show for you. You’ll find it utterly wondrous.

The images show six examples of earlier settings for Cardiff’s The Forty-Part Motet.