Two Rooms residency show

Joachim Bandau: New watercolours
Two Rooms
11 March - 10 April 2010

The seven large watercolours shown here by Joachim Bandau - the result of last year's residency in Putiki St - explore different degrees of transparency using diluted black. They look like aerial views of piles of tinted glass rectangles that get darker in the centre where the stack is higher. This experienced German sculptor makes these watercolours using wide but very finely bristled brushes. The granule free, overlapping oblong washes are delicate and consistently even, with a very fine line at the edges.

These works are technically exquisite in the control of the thin ink washes but there is too much work that is almost identical in its very centrally composed design. The show gets a little samey. The best ones are atypical. These are either lopsided stacks or spread apart between the top and bottom of the paper sheet.

The greatest, most refreshing surprise is one work totally different, without the dark tones of the others. It is not so extreme in its blackness, and consists of diagonal shafts of grey light, as if Bandau has gone out into the New Zealand landscape, or perhaps (gasp!) squizzed at a McCahon or two. It has a fragility all its own because of the tightly controlled and very limited tonal range, and the leaning vectors of its parallel lines. It is more nuanced.

Bandau is a fine artist but he needs to think about selection and how to engage his audience with a more varied, less ‘production line’ range of options. However his watercolours are unusually attractive with their dark compelling, transparent voids - if not repetitive.

David Cross has some comments on the recently opened Auckland Triennial. eyeCONTACT will be posting several articles looking at it.

The 4th Auckland Triennial: Last Ride in a Hot Air Balloon
Curated by Natasha Conland
New Gallery, ARTSPACE, St. Paul St.Gallery, and Shed 6
12 march - 20 June 2010

It’s a very brave venture to examine risk as a trope of contemporary art. We immediately expect to be challenged, to see the status quo punctured or picked apart and to at least interrogate the possibility of new modes of social/cultural transformation. Of course risk is an elusive concept and one that does not neatly align with the rhetoric of avant garde transgression. There is a profound elasticity to the term that extends well beyond being shot in the arm for art or masturbating under the gallery floor. Such 1970s ideas about risk still resonate in the popular consciousness when risk is aligned with contemporary art even if the modes seem fundamentally old school and historically specific. While the mechanisms have shifted with our more complex globalised world, risk is still a staple component of art practice both as a subject matter to be dissected and as a critical mode of operation. Natasha Conland has decided to put a ruler under this terrain with her chapter of the Triennial choosing a targeted suite of artists for whom risk and adventure are fundamental concerns.

Trying to get a handle on how Conland locates risk is not however a straightforward enterprise. She is careful to articulate a number of registers by which artists rub against the grain and these straddle the overtly political through to the barely visible. Conscious of not privileging but at the same time not excluding an activist mode, Conland lays out a breadth of practice to suggest the multifarious nature of risk in recent art. At one axis we get the grating in your face posturing of Australian artist Richard Bell tearing at the flimsy veneer of multiculturalism. His hilarious gangsta/gonzo/psychiatrist persona performed in Scratch an Aussie and Broken English is a razor sharp dissector of aboriginal stereotypes and white ignorance. The didactic message of black resistance is couched in Bell’s work through an accessible, if incendiary, satire that takes aim at the breathtaking indifference of white Australia to black identity and history.

This overtly polemical strategy sits in a different space to the practice of a number of Middle Eastern artists who couch risk in far more delicate ways. The work of Iranian artist Mahmoud Bakhshi for instance, is potentially riskier, if superficially appearing to be more politically inert in its content. His sculptural installation Sunsets consists of a series of cigarette shaped cylinders each of which emits a recitation of a different chapter of the Koran. The audience are able to move the cylinders to create different sonic arrangements. While the work initially feels benign in its critical aspirations, the powderkeg politics of contemporary Iran and the fact the artist is based in Tehran provides a crucial context to the work. The idea of individual agency and decision making is clearly subversive in the context of the crackdown against the so-called Green revolution upping the stakes of the work considerably.

A similar though ultimately more successful edge pervades the work of fellow countryman, Shahab Fotouhi. The artist restages a number of the components of the famous helicopter ride of Ayatollah Khomeini on his triumphant return to Tehran in 1979. Employing scaffold-mounted floodlights together with neon tubing that physically plots out the route, the artist also displays documentary footage of the messianic event on a small monitor, using a mixture of found and crafted objects to investigate the staged spectacle of Khomeini’s return in a highly understated way. His comparative lack of partisan editorialising - the deadpan matter-of-factness of the installation - is ultimately a nuanced device to shut down one-dimensional interpretations of political subversion. By allowing us plenty of space to join the dots, the work suggests a whole lot while making it difficult to pin a fixed meaning down.

The attempt to establish a balanced tone between big picture politics and the poetics of objects and sound permeated a number of the works in the Triennial including Shilpa Gupta’s microphone cloud, airport display board, Sharon Hayes’ Everything Else Has Failed Don’t You Think It Is Time For Love, and Tom Nicholson’s beautifully layered deconstruction of the Burke and Wills story Monument for the Flooding of Royal Park. Yet positioned in relation to these works were a number of pieces that seemed to stretch the curatorial parameter too far. Michael Stevenson is certainly an artist known for skewering an extraordinary array of cargo cults but his video work On How Things Behave seemed to be more about the vagaries of artistic philosophical meditations with a poke at Daniel von Sturmer than about adventure or risk. Likewise the very chic relational aesthetics poster boy Philipe Parreno seemed out of place with his Marquee which in no way destabilises the conventional art viewing experience as claimed in the exhibition brochure but functions as a kind of low-fi, low-impact, largely lame entranceway.

One of the things the triennial highlights is that risk and adventure are not the same thing. Mostly the works embody one but not both of these traits. Marine Hugonnier’s evocative videos of markedly different locales are a rare example of the curatorial synthesis, being both potentially dangerous in outcome yet redolent with the excitement of discovering new places. Other work like Johanna Billings This Is How We Walk on the Moon says nothing of any substance about risk and evacuates most of the joy out of adventure.

I was completely captivated by Alex Monteith’s four-screen surfer treatise Red Sessions which might be one of the best surfer movies ever made partly because it was so immersive and transfixing and partly because the Beach Boys were not tinting the experience with cheese. Laresa Kosloff’s super eight film Trapeze was similarly compelling capturing the rhythmic pleasures and synchronised movements of two trapeze artists practising in the main street of Melbourne.

My desire to comment on the work of Tino Sehgal and Martin Boyce, two of the bigger names in the triennial was unfortunately thwarted by St Pauls St galleries wisdom of closing on the Sunday of the first weekend while so many people were in town meaning my knowledge of the work was confined to dancer choreographer Anna McCrae’s description in the panel discussion on Saturday. I hope to be able to revisit this down the track.

Compared to the previous bloated, and largely inane Triennial, Last Ride In A hot Air Balloon has achieved liftoff. Of course it is not without its flat spots and inconsistencies but show me a similar event that nails every aspect. The vagaries of artists changing course late in the piece nearly always ensures the best laid plans go flaccid in places and there is a lot of really good work here to enjoy regardless of the overall schema. The new venue Shed 6 is a bit rough and ready and a long way from the Sydney Biennale’s Bond Stores or Cockatoo Island. It feels like a glorified artists studio in an industrial area and seems a bit too small and light to hold all the work that it does. While I hope we do not see it utilised in future manifestations, I concede the mutli-site aspect adds a range of flavours to the Triennial's connection with Auckland. This fourth edition has ramped up the ambition and relevance of the event and set out a polemical and carefully layered matrix for drilling into key strands of global contemporary art practice. That in itself is a high risk strategy.

Images from films by Laresa Kosloff, Marine Hugonnier, Johanna Billing and Richard Bell.

Erratic (classically pomo) McLeod

Andrew McLeod
Ivan Anthony
24 February - 20 March 2010

Andrew McLeod is a regular exhibitor at Ivan Anthony and this show is typical – in its varied range of work types. There are large and small digital prints, also the ubiquitous small white stretchers with unravelling orthographic black box shapes, and then there are the big canvases. Plus various smaller painting experiments.

The prints show McLeod at his most inventive and eclectic – today Richard Killeen, tomorrow Peter Madden. The works that reference Durer and Fuseli are particularly rich in their layered complexity, as is another that contains amongst other things, darting squid-girls that glow like jellyfish zigzagging through an undersea murk. The quoting methodology succeeds in the prints but not the paintings because the prints manipulate the space with much more finesse. They make the paintings look oafish.

Painting is obviously not McLeod’s forte. The deliberately incestuous ultramarine and gold Auckland series are coarsely rendered and look like the digitally animated imagery of Cao Fei interpreted by Julian Hooper and Liz Maw. McLeod is not an artist methodically exploring the parameters of painting as a discipline; he is not interested in its materiality or organisation like say Simon Morris, James Cousins or Simon Ingram. There is one Abstract Triptych of black box shapes framed in three wide intricately inlaid frames that has a curiously memorable dynamic with its angular shapes, but few other successes.

Yet for all his faults, there is one work from this ‘non-painter’ that I find remarkable: a large painting called Pink and Green Abstraction with Dragon.

This last work has an intricate rendered surface of horizontal trellislike bars arranged like a wall of stacked up batons with angular ends that look based on Chinese architecture. In the middle of what from a distance seems to be a coloured wooden Venetian blind made by Gordon Walters - but which actually is far more complicated - is a pewterish/bronzy Chinese dragon that is like a jelly-mould. Below it (again in dead centre) is an enigmatic tropical pot plant: a peculiar symbol alluding to the dragon.

The delicate pale green and rosy light flickering through the slats is gorgeous. This is a radiant stunning work, which in the context of his other grosser efforts like the Auckland series, shows his activities with oil to be exasperatingly directionless. McLeod's practice seems so scattershot and unfocused.

So there we have it: the occasional inspired cracker of a painting, surrounded by unresolved experiments that I think should not leave his studio. Usually the best McLeods are the digital prints that pulse with intriguing pockets of spatial depth and resonate with the acuity of photographic – not painterly - detail. They draw your eye in so it doesn’t want to leave - such is their capture of your imagination.

The half-remembered landscape of capitalism,

Andy Tolhurst: Slow Burning
Antoinette Godkin
3 March - 1 April 2010

Andy Tolhurst’s computer designed vinyl paintings examine globally famous logos, and reshuffle or alter some of the visual elements to make a new image that is usually much larger than the original. Those original brands include beer bottle-tops and labels, cigarette papers, bubblegum labels, chocolate bars and local dairy chains.

They connect with Pop Art, yet are different. They retain links to their sources of advertising or branding inspiration, retaining the same colours and many of the shapes or images, yet they also have these odd mutated shapes, often squared off. The compact symmetrical ones have a compelling iconic look about them.

Usually you try and puzzle out what has changed and if the differences are an aesthetic improvement. They don’t veer towards abstraction so that the sources become hidden, like say perhaps the much vaguer and more poetic Jim Speers glowing and translucent abstract lightboxes – which often allude to art history as well.

Tolhurst’s paintings are usually high in colour saturation, as a result really of something small and optically punchy made much bigger. They seem sort of eighties in mood (despite the digital technology), like a variation of Matt Mullican and his use of logos. They are not a critique of consumerism and its promotion in any way, nor an endorsement of marketing’s processes. They accept and comment on a ubiquitous mental commercial panorama (remembered or still seen) that accompanies us all wherever we go – and from which we can’t escape.

Mark Amery visits 'Shapeshifter'

Shapeshifter
Civic Gardens and The New Dowse, Lower hutt
26 February - 21 March 2010

John Hurrell used the words ‘sculpture garden’ in a review title on this site earlier this week. Usually the conjunction of these two words leads to a range of associations in terms of the type of art produced, not all of them good. All of which and more are on display in the festival exhibition Shapeshifter, outside the walls of the Seung Yul Oh “sculpture garden” installation (on which Hurrell wrote) at the Dowse.

Principally when I think of garden sculpture I think of inoffensive decorative standalone work, designed to reflect or work in elegant concert with its setting. As has been horribly apparent at events like the Ellerslie Garden show, national excellence in garden design often doesn’t carry over to innovative and distinct contemporary garden sculpture. With no disrespect to the wide range of excellent artists producing work in this field, too often garden sculpture exhibitions reveal a lower tier of borrowed visual ideas put into cottage production line.

I say this because if there isn’t a market for contemporary sculpture in gardens, then artists and our cultural appreciation are in trouble. The relationship between artists and garden owners, designers and developers needs to be fostered at a level of excellence.

Exhibitions like Shapeshifter are important then. Now a regular feature of the biennial New Zealand Festival programme, it’s billed as Wellington’s preeminent outdoor sculpture exhibition. That’s because it’s pretty much Wellington’s only such exhibition.

Despite (and perhaps because of) the outstanding work of the Wellington Sculpture Trust in permanent public art commission, there are no equivalent temporary group events on major pieces of land, and Shapeshifter is firmly presently fixed on the domestic garden scale, rather than the larger public or private landscape.

It shares an affinity in its scale, community basis, charity fundraising through entry fee and open submission policy with NZ Sculpture On Shore in Devonport Auckland (this year curated by Rob Garrett). With both events there is an inherent tension between their community fundraising inclusiveness (over 70 works by over 50 artists trumpet Shapeshifter) and aspirations for the artform. Their breadth is both their charm and their weakness, and no doubt problematic for the curators charged with quality control.

Shapeshifter 2010 curator is New Dowse director Cam McCracken and he’s done a solid job with this balancing act. He’s helped enormously by the setting, which was moved from the confined small garden of a Hutt Valley house in 2008 to the Lower Hutt Civic Gardens, adjacent to the Dowse and around it.

This sees for example a strident Leon Van Der Eijkel 3D aluminum cross form interplaying nicely in colour and form with the Dowse’s façade, and David McCracken ‘Incendiary Artwork’ rocket sitting symbolically in its central outdoor atrium.

The gardens themselves provide a many and varied ground for sculpture to relate to. They make for an interesting sculpture garden. It’s one of those semi-Liliputian pieces of public garden design, squeezed into an acre with lots of different levels and spaces, a meandering stream and several hothouses for plants. This leads to you being offered a range of perspectives on the sculpture in situ as you move around the compact space.

Back to those garden sculpture associations. The bad ones are kept relatively under control - the odd glass-cast toi toi feather and field of giant poppies. The borrowings from other artists are relatively accomplished – a Virginia King rip-off vessel here, a Phil Price kinetic tower there, a Gregor Kregar-like colony of rabbits all over the rose garden. Then there are the occasional classic community charity show faux pas. It couldn’t get much worse than the dance of red sold stickers put on the back of Christine Cathie’s pretty cast glass Butterflies on metal rods that flitter as a flock down the stream.

But with this inclusiveness there are also lots of nice surprises from lesser-known artists - from Franz Josef to Foxton. Based in the former is Hannah Kidd. Her mother and child made from corrugated iron in a cubist fashion, with the beatific maternal glow of a Michelangelo Madonna is strangely affecting. It’s the one spinoff from Jeff Thomson’s work I’ve seen over the years that hasn’t looked like a ripoff. It also has a emotional tenderness and dynamic twisting physical interaction with the passerby which in this public garden setting is rather effective.

Grant Palliser creates a tower out of galvanized aluminium buckets that echoes Brancusi, perforating them with occasional clusters of holes. These on closer inspection reveal that the interior is bathed in blue LED lights. It’s a neatly succinct comment on our misuse of national water resources.

I always love the incidental accidents with shows like this. Where you’re not quite sure whether some peculiar feature is supposed to be art, or not. The most interesting aspect of Oliver Stretton-Pow’s large macrocarpa work Key to the Greenhouse (itself rather lovely) is the circle of bark nearby, as if it has bounced off its bed and buried itself in the ground. Then there’s the portable barbecue out the back of the conservatory that looks fetching in relationship to the surrounding architecture…

With a paucity of public group exhibitions in Wellington you at least here get to see a spread of work. John Edgar’s small basalt sculpture Float, whilst awkwardly placed, is rich with associations: a volcanic stone that would sink as a fishing float, a spindle, a lava bomb, spinning top or a colonial architectural detail, reflective of the stone having been sourced from a lintel from an old brewery building. There are strong works by other well-established artists like Para Matchitt, Matthew Browne, Tanya Ashken, Bronwyn Cornish, Don Driver and Graham Bennett.

What is missing is more work suggestive of the directions outdoor sculpture at this scale could go (the temporary Peter Trevalyan work outside Te Papa for example). With its strong Dowse connection Shapeshifter has the potential to grow in this direction in being more proactive, but only if it wants to. Its fundraising remit is firmly tied to selling work to the small private buyer, rather than supporting the growth of the artform. In the meantime there remains plenty of room for the growth of temporary outdoor contemporary art in Wellington.

In descending order, works by Graham Bennett, Saskia Baetens-Van Gil, Aaron Frater, and in the last photo, Para Matchitt (left) and Ben Caldwell (right).

Paterson at Gow Langsford

Reuben Paterson: Dear Beauty, Dear Beast
Gow Langsford
24 February – 20 March 2010

The ten glitter paintings by Reuben Paterson currently on show at Gow Langsford feature several portraits of big cats such as lions, tigers and panthers - along with some carpet-like square paintings and the occasional design loaded with floral motifs.

The works seems to reference kitsch, not only sentimental animal portraits that are painted but also woven rugs and towels. However, in contrast, the titles allude to something quite different - the animal-like cravings of sexual desire, with loaded titles such as (obviously) The Passion, The Nether Regions, Estrous, The Bed’s Spread of Provocation and The Erotic Champions of The World.

With the glitter as a ‘queer ‘signifier one would assume this references homo horniness, more than hetero. They celebrate the frenzied bodily frictions of same sex carnality. Danger and violence, by implication, is part of that.

That is of course if you emphasise the titles. Otherwise the works are just technically accomplished feline portraits, pitched to those who love the big ferocious carnivores of Africa or India. And maybe the tropes in the titles are a bit heavy-handed.

Certainly in the Gow Langsford statement for the show the claim that “Paterson views these works, in part, as a personal homage to the victims of murder cases which have successfully used the provocation or "gay panic" defense. The work suggests that in the same way that we have an underlying culture of racism, there is also an underlying culture of homophobia.”

Paterson, on radio for example, is normally an immensely gifted artist interviewee – one extremely eloquent and articulate. Here though, we have the worst kind of inane motor-mouthed rhetoric. While it is indisputable that our culture is indeed homophobic, making a connection between the murdered victims of gay bashing and these animal portraits is bizarre – to put it kindly. The signals are very confusing – almost a celebration of homophobic violence rather than a condemnation.

With a title of Dear Beauty, Dear Beast, go figure.

David Cross has a look at Peter Trevelyan's sculpture outside Te Papa

Peter Trevelyan: Mimetic Brotherhood
Four Plinths Te Papa Forecourt, Wellington
Early 2010 – early 2012


One of the curious aspects inherent in large-scale public sculpture projects are the shifts between the drawings used to pitch the project and the actual realised form. For instance, when you look at the Photoshopped images of Peter Trevelyan’s recently launched Mimetic Brotherhood on the Wellington Sculpture Trust website, there are three almost oblong mirrored sculptures that cogently reflect the buildings around it. These blobby forms also suggest an amalgam of aerodynamic engineering, tempered by a slight flaccidity in keeping with some kind of amorphous sci-fi matter. Yet in the flesh these qualities are literally bent out of shape. Instead of being formed for horizontal speed each of the forms have the inertia of large beanbags that have vertically crashed to earth. Furthermore, the reflective panels do not, as the image suggests, coherently mirror the space around Te Papa at all, but do something far more interesting: they warp the environment into a lexicon of shattered and conflicting pieces.

Of course not quite nailing the original schema, or having to tweak it on the run, might suggest that technical issues have compromised the work in particular ways. After all the immaculate styling of the original image/conception seems hugely ambitious and the kind of project that would stretch the capacity of Weta workshop. Yet for whatever reason, the finished sculpture is much more engaging than its CAD generated formative sketch. Its rougher, a bit more hand crafted, and because of this a lot more elusive in its meanings.

Sitting in the entrance way to a museum that is utterly transfixed by technology, Trevelyan’s forms suggest a laconic DIY sci-fi aesthetic employing a technology more in keeping with the sets of the original Dr Who than the digitised bling of CGI. The ever so slightly dishevelled quality of the forms (their handmadeness) tempers and challenges the Te Papa technology-at-all-costs mantra. It also plays with a range of other contexts from Minimalism, to 70s sci-fi television, and even a nod to a slightly glammed-up Rubik’s triangle. All of these references, combined with a finish that suggests an amateur panel beater with an expressionist bent, has been employed to forcefully customise each form, and pushes the work into strange territory for public art.

The result is a sculpture that somehow aligns repetition and spontaneity, off the shelf components and customised form, the minimal and the gestural, while also activating a raft of issues to do with place and the dynamics of Wellington’s waterfront. Essentially there is a lot going on in these blobby forms, and crucially the ideas are presented with an economy of means that is a mixture of both homage to the key reference points - cited with at all times a tongue firmly planted in cheek.

These traits however have proven to be a double-edged sword in terms of audience response. It’s as if the artist’s gestural customisations have given licence to wannabe sculptors to apply their own embellishments. While the works were conceived to move and contort according to changing weather patterns, the chance encounter of a mindless cretin’s foot with the artwork is more relational interaction than the artist had conceived of. Of course the objects are shiny and vaguely anthropomorphic in a children’s television kind of way. This encourages the base instinct to touch, but the generosity of the work, the way it lures audiences towards it using light as a mechanism of fantasy has resulted in strategic acts of destruction.

It should be some consolation to Trevelyan that the work has pierced the wider community ambivalence about public sculpture and activated a litany of tactical responses. The bill for the upkeep might be significant if the sculptures are to avoid looking like oversized spent beer cans but in this case the extra costs of preservation seems like money well spent.

Images courtesy of the artist.