Recently contributed reviews and comments from

Andrew Paul Wood
Peter Dornauf
Stuart Shepherd
Stella B
Deborah Cain
Ali Bramwell
Bruce E. Phillips
and Olga Krause.

Many thanks indeed.

Tasty fare

Paul McNamara has just sent me a link to an ‘online exhibition’ of Peter Peryer photographs, based on a selection of framed works on display in Wanganui, so I’ll treat it as a show, and refine it even further by picking out six images. Curate my own little mini-show of Peryers which you no doubt have just perused above.

Here’s the link.

The thing about Peryer is that his image scale is unpredictable. He keeps you guessing as to what mode of presentation, namely its size, he’ll go for, for each print. You have to forget all that when you look at an online display because everything is so evenly sized and spaced. The white background leaps out at you. It is a peculiar sort of 2D installation, a fabrication that kills the individuality of the works. Never mind. Look again at the six images. They are great fun. Let's work our way down;

That startled cat (actually made of china, Peryer tells us), frozen in space with the artificial-looking zigzag markings, looks amazing. The spiky leaves at the top reflect the angular fur pattern. With its low slung back and short legs it could be a corgi.

I hate kitsch chinaware, but the image of figurines and cupids on a table in a ‘junk’ shop is gorgeous. It is strangely flat like a painting, and unexpectedly even in its colour. There is lots of detail to be enjoyed within its saccharine complexity.

The soggy ice cream chucked on to a step is wickedly sexual. The oozing sticky mess is teeth-grindingly disturbing - with 'step' suddenly becoming a metaphor. Perhaps it is my age but this image really worries me.

Now the green buoy hanging from the ceiling, with diagonal wires and shadows, I find quite baffling. I’m not entirely sure what I’m looking at here, but I love the way it is tilted up. It is a wonderful puzzle and deliciously spare.

Glowing rock samples in museum cases are magical when experienced (a timer illuminates them so they absorb the light then makes the space go dark so they radiate), but this is a sensual image that is also oddly funny with the little authorative labels. They try to intrude on the geological samples’ mystery, but lose hands down.

Lastly, the image of the top of a staircase. It is a real wonder. The claustrophobic clamping together of angular-planed wall-paper and the floor’s floral carpet creates a sensation that is extremely visceral. It is immensely strange, with the planes being so distorted.

These are terrific images, I think. If you agree, check out the others.

Actions and Events

Roman Signer: Sculpting in time
St. Paul St Gallery, AUT, 14 March - 2 May 2008
ARTSPACE, 14 March - 19 April 2008
Also window projections at Porcelain World (Karangahape Rd) and Auckland University Library.

‘desires, wantings, urgings, promptings, and a great variety of moral views, aesthetic principles, economic prejudices, social conventions, and public and private goals...these can be interpreted as attitudes of an agent directed toward actions of a certain kind.’ (1)
Donald Davidson

In this piece of writing I want to try something a little unusual. I want to mix into a discussion of the Signer exhibitions some ideas from the American analytic philosopher Donald Davidson (1917-2003) for reasons I hope will gradually become apparent. Davidson is widely known in the philosophy world for his wide ranging, highly influential, short essays dealing with topics such as truth and interpretation, and the belief assumptions behind a social activity like linguistic communication. When he published a couple of essays on ‘Actions’ in 1963, to be followed by four others on ‘Events’ in 1970, he began spearheading a causalist ‘commonsense’ charge against Wittgenstein (and the later influence of Ryle) who had argued that reasons and causes cannot be the same thing. A cause as an event may repeatedly precede an action but reasons cannot be causes because they are not observable mechanisms but mental states.

Davidson developed the notion of a ‘primary reason’ where he paired belief with desire so that an action is explained as a rational activity: a wish to make something happen is blended with an anticipation that it will happen.

His complex argument partially involved seeing causation as a logical connection between event descriptions. ‘Events’ he understood as ‘changes in a more or less permanent object or substance’(2). Actions, to be such, Davidson thought, must be intentional. They need to be rationalised by a reason in order to ‘lead us to see something the agent saw, or thought he saw, in his action – some feature, consequence, or aspect of the action the agent wanted, desired, held dear, thought dutiful, beneficial, obligatory or agreeable.’(3)

Roman Signer is not a philosopher but a Swiss artist interested in the spatial-temporal aspects of sculpture. Apart from the occasional sculpture of comparatively long temporal duration (usually involving running water) such as a drivable truck that when attached to a hose becomes also a fountain, Signer makes ‘Events’ that are movement-based occurrences made in private and filmed by himself or his wife Aleksandra, and ‘Actions’ that are public movement-based displays made for much bigger live audiences. Accordingly his definitions of ‘Events’ and ‘Actions’ are species of sculpture and more about spectator numbers and his own methods, than intentions of an agent.

Curiously there is a strange parallel in the fact that Signer’s Actions are public, while those of Davidson are rational in that some intention is involved and that is comprehensible by others because rationality is normative. Also while Signer’s Events are private, Davidson’s do not require intentions or causes, they are just changes in matter. Yet as Davidson’s two most energetic explicators, Ernie Lepore and Kirk Ludwig elucidate, ‘Actions in Davidson’s view are an expression of our nature as agents, being with interlocking propositional attitudes of different types: beliefs, desire, and intentions. Each is defined by its relations to the others and its mediated relations to actions. We identify a person’s beliefs, desires and intentions by projecting a rational pattern which makes sense of his or her behaviour.’(4) Our linguistic community values rationality.

With the Signer shows, while two of his Events are presented in window projections at the University and on K’ Rd, the other fifteen short films (including some ‘Actions’) documenting his temporary sculptures are shown at St. Paul Street and ARTSPACE. The former’s large gallery is intersected with freestanding screens positioned at acute angles. Eight films are shown on these and the walls using random selection, with up to four films possibly shown at once. Even the same film can be repeated simultaneously – with a slight delay - three times on different screens. The effect is to create surprise by bodily inserting the moving images into the visitor’s field of vision, and to get them to make unexpected connections between works.

At ARTSPACE, the gallery experience is much more stable. In the large square room the films are shown one at a time, moving in an anti-clockwise sequence around the four walls. If you are unfortunately distracted and miss a detail you can wait till the film comes around to be screened again at the same spot.

After you’ve looked at these films a few times you start noticing patterns within Signer’s Fluxus-style activities (as you do within Davidson’s precisely worded, very stylish essays), and the way Signer thinks through transitive verbs. Such verbs need objects (in several meanings of the word) and can be expressed in active or passive forms. In these Actions or Events, the artist’s body is not always being filmed, though he is in most.

Looking at Signer’s films, you start to make paired combinations. I found ten. Here are four:

The helmet wearing artist sits in a booth and waits. When a canister explodes he and the walls are covered with splattered paint.

Wearing a goggle and a gas mask, the seated artist attempts to read a book while being showered with freshly cut hay expelled upwards from a nearby hole in the floor.

The artist marches around three sides of a rooftop in Geneva, firing bursts from a dry-powder fire extinguisher that is attached to a nozzle on his right boot, so that like some sort of fascist robot, his foot ‘goosesteps’ high in the air.

Following a predetermined path and methodically stamping on lines of detonating switches, the artist stomps around a large space in a tobacco factory. These set off beside him explosive flashes and puffs of smoke.

The artist drops large putty balls from out of a tall building’s windows attempting to detonate an explosive device on the street on which is a water-filled bucket supporting a hat. The hat flies high into the air, and wearing a safety harness he tries to catch it so he can wear it.

On a rooftop the artist places a camera in a bucket that has fins, packing around it shock absorbers and aiming its lens through a hole in the bottom. It is turned on and the bucket dropped so that the descent is recorded - as it is ‘experienced’ by the falling projectile.

Some of Signer’s sculptures are related to the sixties conceptual work of artists like Richard Serra, Lawrence Weiner and William Anastasi. American artists of this time such as Nauman, Johns (earlier), Weiner and Serra were influenced by Wittgenstein. Robert Morris though, unusually, knew of Davidson’s work. Davidson later wrote a catalogue essay on his practice as did Morris on his writing.(5)

Unlike say Weiner, Signer’s projects are not just ideas, they need to be implemented, and they are not usually just simple actions - but performances with carefully thought-out detail. And the dispositions that interested Davidson, when activated as causes to become primary reasons, include, in Signer’s case, satire, melancholy, anti-climax and humour.

Here are some examples of his satire, often with anti-climax:

Book readers: one in bed is terrorised by an angry model helicopter, and another, a more preoccupied, seated, hay-fever sufferer, is covered with hay. Signer seems to be saying that first-hand experience takes precedence over recorded second-hand experience, even if you try to deny it and it is his documentary film that tells you so.

The armed forces: the army with his absurd marching antics, the navy with a ‘burial at sea’ (a dead frog is placed in a can to be thrown into a river), and the airforce, with his manic helicopter works.

The police: a tape barrier that says ‘police line: do not cross’ is whisked aloft beyond the street by three balloons.

Even the horrific activity of hanging and its accompanying ghoulish voyeurism is commented on. The artist-victim, standing on an exploding platform that collapses, is given sight by having his black hat yanked off his eyes and head. He is sprung into ‘the light’ instead of the expected darkness, and unexpectedly falls only a small distance.

Both Signer and Davidson work in short units (films and essays) that interconnect within far larger corpora. Davidson’s writing helps provide some insight into the non-psychological ramifications of Signer’s Actions, and those of actions and events (artistic or otherwise) in general.

Signer’s temporary artworks draw out or exploit the event descriptions that a philosopher like Davidson is preoccupied with. The artist drops the putty ball; the hat flies up towards the artist. The performer explodes the tin of paint; the paint covers the seated performer. The platform beneath the man’s feet explodes; the man is separated from his hat.

In the very fine publication that accompanies these shows, there are two essays by Leonhard Emmerling and Brian Butler, the directors of St. Paul St. and ARTSPACE. The two writers have refreshingly distinctive and separate approaches. Butler briefly links Signer’s projects with his life in Switzerland and various twentieth century Swiss literary figures and existentialist thinkers, looking at notions of identity. Emmerling on the other hand sees the work through a ‘French’ filter of Albert Camus and Alain Badiou’s writings on ethics and truth.

Within these discussions Emmerling’s use of Hegel and Badiou, and Butler of Walter Benjamin and Fernando Pessoa (the fabulous Portuguese poet) - when discussing experience - are particularly interesting. Signer’s satirical ‘book readers’ seem to confirm the value of the authenticity Emmerling and Butler are advocating. (Incidentally Bob Dylan’s ‘Highway 61 Revisited’ album is also a fascinating dissertation on this same theme.)

In part of his essay Emmerling discusses Signer’s 1997 work ‘Simultaneous’ in Venice, where he released 117 blue iron balls all at once from a ceiling so they dropped into a grid of damp clay blocks positioned on the floor. To create this rapidly moving spectacle the artist turned an ignition key.

In talking about such a manual action Davidson writes:

‘I flip the switch, turn on the light, and illuminate the room. Unbeknownst to me I also alert a prowler to the fact that I am home. Here I need not have done four things, but only one. I flipped the switch because I wanted to turn on the light and by saying I wanted to turn on the light I explain (give my reason for, rationalize) the flipping. But I do not rationalize my alerting of the prowler or my illuminating of the room….’(6)

‘Because ‘I wanted to turn on the light’ and ‘I turned on the light’ are logically independent, the first can be used to give a reason why the second is true….It is not unnatural, in fact, to treat wanting as a genus including all pro attitudes as species. When we do this and when we know some action is intentional, it is easy to answer the question, ’Why did you do it?’ with ‘For no reason’, meaning not that there is no reason but that there is no further reason, no reason that cannot be inferred from the fact that the action was done intentionally; no reason, in other words, besides wanting to do it.’(7)

If Signer were not a now famous artist, would he still continue with his Actions and Events? I think he would, even if they were not accepted by others as art. Why? Because he wants to. That is a reason.

So why am I saying all this: why have I written this longish article putting these two individuals together? You want to know a reason for this action: a rationale? Because I wanted to. There are intriguing overlaps in their various lifetime preoccupations and it interests me to say so. So I have.


(1) Davidson, Donald, ‘Actions, Reasons and Causes’ in Essays on Actions and Events, Oxford University Press paperback, 1980, p.4
(2) Davidson, op. cit., p.173
(3) Ibid, p.3
(4) Lepore, E. and Ludwig, K, Introduction to The Essential Davidson, Oxford University Press paperback, 2006, p.8
(5) See Morris R. ‘The Philosophy of Donald Davidson’ and Davidson’s discussion of Morris’ ‘Blind Time Drawings with Davidson,’ in Hahn, L.E., The Philosophy of Donald Davidson, Open Court paperback, 1999, pp 127-138
(6) Davidson, Essays on Actions and Events, ibid, p.4
(7) Ibid, p.5

Here is a post from our NYC correspondent, Stuart Shepherd

Symptoms of Now.

Whitney Biennial
Cai Guo-Qiang at the Guggenheim
Courbet at the Met
It occurs to me (as probably occurred to everyone else years ago) that the best and the worst of contemporary art is, in overview (from the perspective of a circling satellite) all merely symptoms of the economies of the states and countries wherein the work is made. This is regardless of the individual cleverness, the pop wit, the degree of social consciousness, the media, the craft, or the art historical relevance of any one work.

My particular satellite vision has been inspired by the current confluence of big shows here in N.Y. (probably fueled too by the nearing end of a long winter of media coverage surrounding the race between Clinton and Obama, and the daily foregrounding of issues)

The first of these big shows is the Whitney Biennial. Here the mood transcending individual works is sober and downbeat, and the mode is grunge. There is a pervasive and familiar kind of documentary anti-glam: a this-is-it / here-we-are / deal-with-it / morning-after reality; cocaine in the 80s, party pills in the 90s.

America has fucked up now, and earnest art school grads, with fresh M.F.A.s, have rubbed their eyes and noticed. There is a peeling back of surfaces at the Whitney, an exposure of insides: a scratching around for truth? But the result is all a bit vacuous.

These days America is full of bad news, and the bad news has been building over the past couple of years. George Bush’s war with its endless list of high level insider trade offs, and public deceptions has taken its toll. The spirit of the times is dispirited. And so is the Biennial.

No-one talks about Bush any more, let alone the awful, numbing fact that he will be in the top job for another 12 months. The American eagle has taken a sucker punch. The dollar is sinking, oil is at historic highs and it hurts. The U.S. has always believed in and loved its reflection in the new chrome trim of the latest big car. Now all over the country people cannot pay their mortgages, health care is only for the rich, the U.S. scores poorly on rates for child mortality and longevity, literacy rates are low, and now the residue of popular pills is turning up in the nation’s water supply: Viagra, Aspirin, birth-control pills, party pills. urgh! And last week a survey showed that 25 % of American girls carry some kind of a sexually transmitted disease. The Republican abstinence approach to sex ed has failed. Believing and teaching the creation myth of the Christian right, as does 40% of this country, has proven to be bad for foreign policy, health and education.

The second show seen from my satellite is on at the Guggenheim. It is titled ‘I want to believe.” A solo show by Cai Guo-Qiang, it features suspended cars and neon, lots of stuffed tigers, and the singed record of fireworks on paper. At first glance that stuff didn’t wow me. I’ve worked in the display industry, I grew up in Hamilton, and I understand cheesy symbolism and the aesthetics of a mediocre window display. What is not mediocre is the spirit of the work. Cai’s mission is to create art events that galvanize myth and ritual out of recent historic moments, to make work that thrills and creates meaningful adventure stories for local people. His work with explosives does all that. As well he claims to be offering up messages to extra-terrestrials. In his spectacular events Cio channels the fantastic spiritual element of Chinese tradition (and Chinese movies), and the idealism and zeal of socialist art. He well deserves the gig to design a snazzy Vegas fireworks display for the 2008 Olympics.

Chinese art seems to be everything American art is not; it has a yabba dabba do-optimism. Party time. Post-socialist-party time. Boy, if I was twenty five I would be off to Beijing, making performances with sound and light and fashion models, and stacks of old Soviet era tanks painted with day glow pink willow patterns, and with MacDonald’s signs attached to the rocket launchers. I’d be getting sponsored by my twenty eight year old billionaire buddies, (in joint deals with Saatchis for new shows in Dubai).
Any messages; runaway capitalism; consumerism; over-whelmed nature, pale behind a new dazzling, liberating, gush of belief.

But N.Y. thankfully still has the chops of a great city, and a great art center, and it still has great depth and diversity. And it has another show, which beams up a flickering signal of life from the past. It is the Courbet show at the Met. A rare collection of rich painting... rich by any measure...by the measure of contemporary punchiness, and by yesteryear’s measures of craft and social propriety. Courbet, after 150 years is still hot.

How many contemporary shows require the building of a special wall to protect sensitive viewers? It requires a little “skirting” detour in order to be exposed to the infamous “The Origin of the World”. At chest height, in fleshy paint, close-up in true -to- life scale, bulls-eye! You get stared down by a young woman’s vulva. Her skirt is raised and her thighs parted for your delectation and challenge. In the 1990s when Jeff Koons exhibited his large, staged, explicit, photos of himself and his porn-star wife, those images elicited a similar viewer caution, (There was a notice and an R18 advisory at the gallery entrance) and that show similarly messed with conventions by mixing outer hi-brow viewer with inner lo-brow voyeur. Vanessa Beecroft’s use of staged nudity maybe confounds art consumers in a similar way.

As a work of art ‘The Origin” has had a great provenance. Looted by the Russians in WW2, bought at auction by psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan in 1955, banned from bookshop displays in Paris in 1994 when it appeared as a book jacket, and now closeted at the Met.

Courbet was politically motivated and at odds with the academe of the day. He wanted to “be in a position to translate the customs, ideas, the appearance of my epoch, according to my own estimation” (1) It was interesting for me to note that his most powerful and enduring images, those that address sex and death head-on; were all commissioned by a Turkish collector Kahlil-Bay. It would seem that despite Courbet’s personal mission to expose the realities of the day, it took an outsider’s taste and budget to enable him to really break from entrenched codes.

As well as the skin of girls, Courbet painted deep forest-shaded rivers and crazily breaking beach surf, powder snow and dying animals. What this show offers is that old and particular pleasure of paint, of being in the place in front of the canvas where the painter stood when he was working, breathing, engaged with his subject; looking and thinking, and risking the sacrifice of trained virtuosity in the application of paint. It is risky when you put down your brush and start slapping away with a palette knife. You sacrifice your control of blending tones and tracing edges, the surface gets messed up, but urgency and energy get trapped. This is no small thing to witness. It can be compared to the experience of seeing 12 glossy, suspended tons of steel and neon at the Guggenheim. Intimacy, energy, human touch, and risk, versus grandiose, metaphoric and costly. It is something when a painting takes you under the skin of an experience by revealing the process of its creation.

Art critic Robert Hughes talks about what he responds to in the work of Lucien Freud, it is a similar experience, an experience by which he measures other kinds of art experience and the kind of experiences offered by other media.

And the art writer Peter Schjeldahl in his lavish review for this weeks New Yorker mag, hits on the power and significance of feeling generated by Courbet’s painting and its tonic relevance for the spirit of these times.

“Vision is addressed but vicarious touch and smell take delivery. Courbet's drenching seascapes should come with towels and his steaming nudes with towelettes.
He revels in the quiddity of paint: moist dirt. His art isn’t about life; it is life precipitated, with raucous panache. Nothing could be better therapy for a bodiless society of cybernetic narcissicisms than the mad wallow of this show”.

An actual mad wallow? Who can disagree? What we all really need right now is to walk away from our laptop screens and go wallow...madly, and with raucous panache. The message comes from Courbet, via Schjeldahl, to today; We need to re-humanize.

Footnote: The day I visited the Whitney show a crane collapsed at a nearby building site in midtown Manhattan. I walked down to ogle. This 20 story high crane had come adrift from the steel stack of cards it was servicing, and toppled like a giant toy across the block, tipping cars on the street and 18 floors up, clipping a classic 50s apt building and scalping 2 or 3 corner ones so that their wallpapered inner rooms, closets, pajamas, were suddenly exposed to the sky and ground. The crane had come to rest at a casual diagonal and was being spot lit by emergency services in the mild evening air. But that brutal, thrilling, rupture of structural stuff and the revelation of private interiors is exactly the kind of thing much of the Biennial seemed to be aiming for. Especially given that this scene was being attended to and framed by troops of handsome, professional, newsmen and women (all wired up to the antiseptic sanctity of the fancy vans with the satellite dishes on top). The reality and consequences of a major structural failure gets mediated (medicated) into evening news and entertainment. I didn’t know until later that several people died in this accident. (I don’t mean to harp on about infra-structural problems in the U.S. but this crane collapse seems awfully symbolic of the moment, and in fact is just the latest in a series of recent mishaps, coming in the middle of an ongoing inquiry into building industry safety and the old payola building consent process in N.Y. The inquiry into national road safety after a big bridge collapsed in Minneapolis was last year.)


In a satellite conclusion then; Chinese art now is John Travolta in Saturday Night Fever. It is disco giddy. Hip hugging polyester swagger, smooth hair and confidence to burn.

American art is aging Sylvester Stallone, in the ring, on the ropes, in Rocky 3 before his implausible, miracle, slo-mo comeback. But get this, if Rocky’s America does make a miracle comeback, maybe this time, for the first time, it won’t come back as a clan of billionaire white guys over 65, it will be back as a bright young black guy, or the voices of millions of Hispanic voters, or as a strong white woman - and these new champs may not even need to be Christians.

America is really changing. and this new year’s class of an expected 30,000 M.F.A. grads, (N.Y.Times statistics) will be challenged to dig deep, and like Courbet, to draw back some curtains around the status quo. At least they finally get away from their colleges and find themselves to be merely symptoms of an old regime...symptoms of then.

(1) Quote from Courbet taken from the exhibition wall text at the Met.

No kiddie-winks

Andrew McLeod: New Works
Ivan Anthony, Auckland
27 February - 29 March 2008

This show of McLeod’s is a curious mixture of several large sumptuous oil paintings, a digital print, and little, black and white, orthogonal, perspective-preoccupied, linear paintings.

Killeen is omnipresent in McLeod’s practice but he has been for a long time now.

I like the digital prints. They are pretty entertaining with their imagistic juxtapositions, densely packed fine detail, and obligations I suspect to Guillermo Kuitica. Their attraction is that you can never get it all on first hit. There is always good stuff you miss.

McLeod’s luscious oil paintings seem so nursery based I find them irritating. Children under 12 should be banned from galleries and all artists (except me) medically ‘corrected’ so they cannot breed, and so be corrupted. I favour art that is about the seriousness and challenge of adult existence, not Rupert Bear type fantasies.

The small black-lined paintings are much better, but very odd in their thick ornate, gold frames. These highly eccentric works are strangely good because they are blatantly hermetic with their perspectival experimentation, referencing with Killeen, Sol LeWitt and Josef Albers. I like the fact they are about art and its own production.

McLeod is one of those artists who even if you loathe all he does, his work nevertheless is distinctive, and worth looking at. I like it even when it gets under my skin. The big paintings I find suffocating but those prints are peculiarly liberating.

Andrew Paul Wood sends us this from Christchurch

Roger Boyce: Tourette’s Hotel
Brooke/Gifford, Christchurch
4 March -29 March, 2008

If Raymond Pettibon, Paul McCarthy, Francesco Clemente, R. Crumb, Hunter S. Thompson and Graham Greene all got together for a peyote and tequila bender in Tijuana on the Day of the Dead, the result might be something similar to "Tourette's Hotel: paintings by Roger Boyce" at the Brooke/Gifford Gallery, Christchurch. What to call it: Grunge Pop? Psycho Povera? It's the misanthropic, apocalyptic stepchild of Greenwich Village hippie art, Late New York, Italian Transavangardia and German neo-expressionism; Baselitz and Grateful Dead poster blended in a cocktail shaker. Hysterical is the new Avant-Garde and no longer the exclusive realm of feminist theory.

The paint is layered up into hard scabs similar to the sculptures of Rohan Wealleans, or weathered and distressed. This combined with the highly-keyed pallete suggests they were painted by an itinerant prodigy Mexican signwriter - Tacoburger Aztec. There is, I suppose, a point where the US West Coast and The Village meet - the rebellion against the titans of New York Abstract Expressionism, and it has a decidedly Californian feel, lighter and more deliberately immediate compared to the perceived profundities of the Pollock drip, harvesting the 'real' everyday experiences of comic book, graffiti and signboard. This brooding hen finally came home to roost in Paul Schimmel's Helter/Skelter exhibition at the Museum of Contemporary Art in El Lay in 1992, and was also apparent in the work of New York artists Sean Landers, Keith Haring, Frank Moore and David Wojnarowicz in the '80s.

Indeed, Boyce studied at the University of California, Santa Barbara when the state still largely consisted of suburban sprawl Neanderthals with power mowers and Goldwater bumperstickers. And whereas New Zealand artists had to imagine the New York art scene like the Goncourt brothers recreated eighteenth century court life in the comfort of their own home, Boyce lived it and knew the players. What we get is a tongue-in-cheek articulation of the experience (and frustration) of a highly developed visual intelligence dropped into territorial waters that only superficially resemble home. The paintings are a war memorial to culture clash - and thank God because it's often all too easy to wonder whether in fact Jean-Michel Basquiat, Philip Guston and Joseph Beuys didn't die and instead moved to New Zealand to father a movement of dull-but-earnest x-gen conceptualist bohos in the ferny gullies of Elam and Ilam circa 1992, who all seem to now gravitate to Freeman's Bay and for whom Giovanni Intra is obsessively both Chatterton and Adonias.

As with many of the canvasses of Nicolas Poussin (1594-1665), Boyce's new works are allegories for painting, and in the postmodern context, the often superficial art world that surrounds it. Praxis has the artist as a sub-Pollock/Picasso demigod (cousin of the vaguely homerotic wrestlers in Pool of Sodom - itself a James Joyce reference - that originally arose early on in Boyce's work before evolving into abstract lozenges in the 1980s), representing 'practice' wrestling the sacred bull of theory, much as the Roman-Persian god Mithras brings new life to the world by sacrificing the celestial bull Taurus. Boyce gently mocks the wannabes and hangers-on in Artsy Twats (a commendable assimilation of Kiwi vernacular) as cartoonishly uniformed army, their heads formed by the letters of the title. The mandala-meets-TexMex restaurant leaflet Balls is fairly self-explanatory, but it helps to remember that randy old goat in impotent decline Picasso was known as El Cojones. Elsewhere the act of making and experiencing art is likened to bodily functions.

Tourette's Syndrome is famous in its extreme form for its spontaneous, uncontrolled outbursts of profanity. In this case it is deliberately adolescent. Much of the charm of these images comes from the frisson of contrast between their generic neo-Helter/Skelter suburban gothic aesthetic, and the cantankerously confessional tone of the textual component. But in that, I suspect Boyce is like the "unreliable narrator" of modernist literature. The blunt, sordid and despairing painter / Joseph Campbell hero (again, how modernist) is a persona to hide behind for one so obviously in full control of his practice. Admittedly some people are still oblivious to irony-masquerading-as-intimism and the joys of potty mouth (particularly in Christchurch where low-bred bodies remain buried) - perhaps explaining the lack of sales in this show. To these cowardly collectors I would appeal in the words of Alexander Pope:

But if in noble Minds some Dregs remain,
Not yet purg'd off, of Spleen and sour Disdain,
Discharge that Rage on more provoking Crimes -

Be victims of Ovid's habit of thought: "Video meliora proboque / Detoria sequor" (Metamorphoses VII, 20. "We scan and approve of the better, we go for the worse").

Boyce's paintings deliberately give every impression of having given in to ramshackle gawkiness, having shed the protective invisibility cloak of irony. He wants you to think he's harmless, pathetic, irrelevant, dead, perhaps even funny - a senile, sullen eunuch masturbating with paint like late Picasso and De Kooning, reliving the kinesthetic brush movements of his hey-day. This is a clever misdirection. What he really wants you to do is to identify with a dysfunctional, paranoid society in decline, the hybrid and anti-aesthetic Edward Gibbon of the empire of painting.

Another contribution from our man in Hamilton, Peter Dornauf.

University of Waikato show

Currently hanging among the large modernists canvases that belong to the James Wallace Collection at the Waikato Art Academy (University campus) is a small modest exhibition of women’s textile craft, curated by Joyce Stalker. Running 11 March - 4 April 2008

The exhibition title, Ladies’ Handiwork; Pretty Patters or Subversive Stitches? puts forward the theory that the conformist embroidery patterns and stitching on doilies, aprons, cushions etc. made during the decades of the 30’s 40’s and 50’s in New Zealand, were somehow subversive.

Examples show images of faceless young women in Dolly Varden/Sunbonnet Sue set patterns surrounded by sweet English flowers and pretty decorative frills.
What we seem to be looking at are the products of conventional female fantasies projecting back to a period one hundred years earlier, produced by women who were still locked up in a “Women’s Weekly” paradigm, aspiring to some pastoral, poodle, upper middle class Jane Austen vision of things.

The women who created these pretty winsome images of femininity, far from being subversive, were still colonized not only by an English class system but also embedded in a pre-feminist world where a woman’s place was clearly demarcated.
Stalker argues that simply allowing women the time to create these works and the fact that they perhaps altered some of the pre-set colours, amounts to a form of defiance.

That seems a bit of a stretch. The real revolution in this area was happening elsewhere and long before in the work of women like the feminist Dadaist, Hannah Hock and the abstract modernist, Sonia Delaunay. As well, during the Russian Revolution, a number of female embroiderers worked on pieces, in a Constructivist style, that attempted to align art and craft with the politics of the period.

Stalker does well to alert us to the historical context of embroidery work via this exhibition, although as one visitor to the show remarked in the comment book, is this research or simply stating the obvious.

A measure of how far we have really travelled in this field in this country is to note that among New Zealand guilds there still persists a strong pull that discourages too much adventure outside the conventional boundaries of the craft.