Disappointing

I’ve wandered much of late: Vivien Masters, Olga Tuzhba, Chloe King, Jennifer Mayer, Philip Good
St. Paul St 3 (in Symonds St)
AUT
13 – 16 August 2008

This is a small group show of final year AUT students doing BVAs, in a space that has been recently acquired by the institution. It is currently in a makeshift state but hopefully St. Paul St 3 will soon be brought up to scratch with proper lights and lining - so it can compete with other university galleries around town, like say the George Fraser.

It’s a very uneven exhibition. Jennifer Mayer’s photographs, organised in two sets of three, owe a lot to Sam Taylor Wood, but at least they look like a substantial body. Some other artists, like Olga Tuzhba, only have two photographs (of shrubs digitally blended into spare interiors) where more are needed.

Vivien Masters has a projection where the wall looks blank most of the time. Then suddenly without warning, a sequence of 12 -15 coloured images are rapidly fired onto the screen, after which we get a blank screen once more. The process is then repeated. The staccatoed shots of blurred faces, mouths, parts of clothing or meals, seem to be about intimate relationships and the bombardment of human emotion through the senses.

Chloe King, in collaboration with Olga Toujba, has built a shelter of cardboard boxes accompanied by a voiceover describing the civil war between Georgia and Abkhazia, a conflict that has been raging since 1962. Most of us don’t know about this fight. It seems the artists are attempting to arouse international interest, perhaps even ultimately UN intervention. However using rambling, tentative, unedited voice-overs like this is pitiful, and too derivative of Nova Paul as a method. A cohesive balanced package with images, maps and careful historical explanations would be far more effective than relying on one individual’s commentary to get the gist across.

Philip Good’s panels of thinly applied oil paint, depicting suburban backyards or abandoned lots are also disappointing. The tonal weight within his images is inconsistent and unresolved spatially. Parts jump out with no logical reason why.

This is not a good exhibition. It’s too derivative and undistinctive. Perhaps the earlier two shows in this series were better. Anyway, hopefully AUT can get the space cleaned up before long, so that a superb venue matching the other two galleries opens soon.

Trophies

Steve Carr: a Shot in the Dark
Michael Lett
13 August - 6 September 2008

Just two works in this Carr show, but they’re goodies. One is a beautifully carved, painted bearskin rug, intact with wooden head, positioned on the floor down towards the office. The other - on the wall by the front door - is a photograph of a somewhat hairy gentleman with his t-shirt lifted up, exposing his chest and pushed out, but moderately trim, paunch. Apparently (according to the invite's blurb for this show) he is pretending to be a moose, thereby giving this presentation thematic unity.

Ha! Don’t you believe it. Carr delights in clowning and slapstick gags and this is typical. He is shameless. It is just as likely to be ‘about’ the silliness of distended guts – though he could have found a more genuinely disgusting example. And it could also be a reference to mischievous women spontaneously flashing their tits. Or a meditation on hairy blokes, the patterns their frontal hirsute regions create. An exercise in abstraction, featuring a male pelt set in front of a beautiful plywood woodgrain, it's entitled 'The Bachelor'.

Thick bearskin rugs? Aren’t they meant to be used – alongside roaring midnight fires – as settings for romantic coital activity? Rolling around on this one with your beloved might be a little painful. It seems to allude to folk art, maybe that of Eastern Europe, but perhaps also the many carvings presented by Jeff Koons. It’s a clever idea and the two very funny works deserve your attention. Don’t miss them.

Religious landscapes

Tony Lane
Anna Bibby
26 July - 16 August 2008

The ten paintings here (two in the ‘shop’ window, eight in the gallery proper) make up a typical Tony Lane exhibition. The faded, mock-fresco, worn patina with delicate layers of thinly applied oil paint; the allusions to altarpieces and the sacramental with the gold and aluminium leaf; the heavy-handed use of religious symbolism that shrewdly fuses Italian art history with McCahon; the skimpily (read ‘sensitively’) drawn line rendering those symbols; the pompous, wide, gilded frames – all the classic Lane trademarks are there.

In earlier years he took more chances – such as making oddly proportioned paintings that were long and very skinny – so his unorthodox compositions provided surprise. Even if they didn’t work you could tell he was trying to take religious painting somewhere new. However then, as now, the parts usually didn’t seem to add up to a resolved whole. You got details of sections (like repeated folds of fabric) that looked intriguing in isolation as a horizontal McCahonesque slice, but which didn’t end up within a cohesive unity with any impact. The dynamic initially gained somehow dissipated so the finished work looked anaemic.

Lane’s main problem is the palaver he creates around the physical objects he has painted on, using wide frames and screens that isolate his image-laden rectangles within cocoons of otherworldliness. They seem like a compensatory mechanism to distract from the ordinariness of his symbolic material. He needs the intrusive framing for a pumped up presentation to overcook the images. It parallels the overkill within the image production itself, the use of more glittering underpainted surfaces than necessary to support the desperate decorativeness of his symbols.

Sometimes, on rare occasions, his images are interesting, even fascinating. This artist is good at making tablecloth folds look like cliff-faces or repeated parts of tree trunks. Natural and cultural forms blend, while flimsy forms end up looking rock-solid and the normally robust become spindly. Lane is in essence a landscape painter. Even domestic interiors use landscape conventions. That is part of his attraction, a vulnerable and tentative dreamlike poetry – mixed with an unlikely (but now obvious) combination of a clunky Giottoesque mass with a weedy, flimsy, Kleelike line.

(The teaching of) House Painting as Art

Night Art School at Gambia Castle
Andrew Barber lecture: How to paint a window frame in three easy stages
Held in conjunction with Rirkrit Tiravanija: magazine station no.5, ARTSPACE, NZ
Monday 11 August 2008 7-9 pm.


Night Art School is a collective of energetic Auckland artists that often use for lectures the Grey Lynn Community Hall, a building I can see - when I look over my computer and out my window – across the Western Motorway. They often do classes on wet wintery Tuesday nights.

One of their friends, Andrew Barber, is an accomplished painter well known in Auckland for his shows at Gambia Castle and Starkwhite. He is also a part time barman and a skilled professional house painter. Last night he gave a demonstration of the finer points of the latter, as part of the preparation of the Gambia Castle space for Kit Lawrence’s show, the next one after Kate Newby. Newby had painted the walls and windows overlooking K’ Rd bright yellow. Barber very thoroughly went through all the nuanced details of surface preparation, sanding, dusting, undercoating and paint application - shimmying up and down a ladder and illustrating techniques while talking.

I came along because I was curious. Any DIY ‘handyman’ renovation-type activity is something I will do only if blackmailed by somebody I desperately want to impress. It’s activity I ordinarily loathe, and will usually disappear if I ever get the slightest inkling of its impending occurrence. I came only because I thought maybe there is a science to such work, and Andrew could educate me. In the sense of ‘knowing that’ more than ‘knowing how’. I’ve no intention of ever applying such knowledge to beautify a living space. The idea is absurd.

I also turned up because of a bigger meta-issue. Perhaps this stuff was really meant to be art? Some sort of relational project that was a provider of community services (teaching being like free music or cooking) and which broke down the distinction between life and art. Something in the tradition of Cage or Beuys. After all it was being presented in a gallery as part of a programme under the auspices of an internationally esteemed art star - someone known for focussing on simple acts of social generosity as art - and all the people on the Night Art School’s mailing list are artists and art students.

This meant that if it was art, its conceptual membrane as such wasn’t being totally dissolved. This was knowledge only partially being provided as a public service – it was still strictly within the art community, not outside it in the ‘life’ world. To go beyond that parameter would mean renouncing art, the provider purging all ‘artistic’ thoughts from their mind, and severing all social connections to the art world and aspirations for artistic kudos. It would be a sort of potlatch devoid of ulterior motive tainted with careerism. It would involve radiating an altruism that has in its core a purity extraordinarily hard to imagine.

Here is another take on the touring Close Up show (toured by McNamara Gallery) - from Peter Dornauf

CLOSE-UP Contemporary Contact Prints
Ramp Gallery; Wintec
Hamilton
4 August - 22 August 2008

It was Duchamp who once said an art work that didn’t shock, wasn’t worth making. That would immediately rule out ninety-five percent of the current stock. But then that was a Dadaist speaking, and speaking at a time of crisis – civilization going down the tubes and all that, with the need for the artist to raise the voice a tad. A little hyperbole never hurt no one.

Still, sometimes it’s the inside voice that can cause a double take. It happened at Wintec’s Ramp gallery recently, which is currently showing a truncated version of Contemporary Contact Prints earlier seen at Gus Fisher.

The work in question that caused a ripple was New Zealand Playing Cards by Ben Cauchi (8x10 gold print). On a flat matt background are presented two images; one a playing card and next to it, a slightly worn playing card box (of antique vintage, perhaps late nineteenth century). On the cover of the cardboard box (manufactured by AD Willis Ltd Wanganui) is a picture of a Maori chief, someone looking a little like King Tawhiao. The card itself presents a Maori warrior in battle cry stance, the word, Joker, inscribed in cursive script running at an angle behind the figure.

After the initial shock, there are so many layers of meaning afforded the viewer, both historical and contemporary in this work.

Among others in the show are Laurence Aberhart doing Laurence Aberhart with stark mysterious interiors and Darren Glass doing Laurence Aberhart using a wide angled pin-hole camera to capture in an equally moody and mysterious way images of an old abandoned machine gun post.

Fiona Pardington offers us something from her series, Proud Flesh, (role reversal of the male gaze) and a sequence referencing the Huia bird, ironically owned by Whanganui Museum; Wanganui with an H. Judicious placement by the curator next to the Cauchi piece.

Mention must also be made of a local Wintec student, Chloe Ferguson, whose close-up dual image of a female head (sepia print) rivalled that of the main attraction. Titled Vencie’s Box, it evoked things Renaissance, Raphael and stuff otherworldly. A nice contrast to the ‘made in New Zealand’ look in the other room.

Above images from Cauchi and Pardington.

Hide and seek

I close my eyes and count to ten
Selina Foote
A Centre For Art, Achilles House
30 July – 17 August 2007

Selina Foote’s paintings at first take appear to be interested in kitsch or sentimental subject matter, a distant cousin of say the paintings of Robin Neate or Saskia Leek. That impression is mistaken for the work really is about the processes of obscuring and revealing, covering and exposing. The depicted subject matter itself is not that crucial.

Foote’s painterly, not over-finished images are characterised by a soft palette where the chroma has a greyish tinge. Saturation is skilfully muted and kept under control. No intense colouration leaps out at you.

Harriet Wild, in a natty little essay positioned on the wall of the corridor outside the ACFA entrance, talks about Foote’s five small canvases as demonstrating a symbiotic relationship between realism and abstraction. However symbiosis is a partnership between equals and in Foote’s work, realism dominates. The oblique geometrical components seem tangential to something else.

One painting shows a demonstration at a karate tournament where one competitor with a high kick smashes a solid panel held by two men. The bottom sixth of the image is obscured by a semi-opaque triangle blocking out details of the scene. Another of a Christmas tree has two large triangles covering portions of the image on both sides. One other work, a portrait, is partially covered by flat, pale, mauve twigs sprouting all over its lower and peripheral facial features.

Two others, Monster and Santa, use attrition. They feature a sanding off some of the pigment surface, a picking away of selected encrustations of paint, or hiding large areas of the body or face behind dry-brushed, dappled leaves or mottled sandy textures. These ‘subtractive’ works are not abstract but surreal and suggestive. And disturbingly nightmarish. Creepy little paintings that initially seem sweet but which hint at deformity. A bit like very early Francus Bacon they are far superior to the ones with overlaid geometry, and show Foote to be a skilled image maker. Someone to watch.

Here's a look at the new Rita Angus book, from Peter Dornauf in Hamilton

Rita Angus: An Artist’s Life
Jill Trevelyan
Te Papa Press
RRP $69.99

The lives of those in the creative arena can be as fascinating and compelling as the work of their imaginative output. Byron is a cause celebre; mad bad and dangerous to know.

Rita Angus could never rival that tripartite tag, yet as Jill Trevelyan reveals in her recent book, there are idiosyncrasies at work here which make this life one that matches in intensity that of the poet.

The author had already traversed a little of that life in an earlier slim volume (2001) but seven years on and with newly available archives and letters (400 in total) Trevelyan has returned to her subject and written a substantial biography (420 pages) courtesy of Te Papa to mark the 100th anniversary of Angus’s birth.

Angus lived, by the standards of the time, an unconventional life, although as Trevelyan points out, some of this was foisted on her by the very nature of those conservative times. An uncompromising woman, strong willed and single minded, she carved out a space for herself in a predominantly male preserve, sacrificing all for the cause of her art. Shades of Frances Hodgkins.

An idealist with pacifist, feminist and socialist sympathies, a divorcee from an unconsummated marriage of four years, who remained single all her subsequent life, took lovers but later, following a miscarriage, assumed a vow of chastity; these are some of the charged elements that wove in and out of a fraught life which faced a censorious world as the artist struggle to forge a modernist aesthetic.

One of the interesting facets of Angus’s life that Trevelyan examines is how seriously the artist took her role as painter. It was a calling, not a career option, which today would be regarded as overly romantic. She regarded it as her destiny. Along with that vision, came a strong sense of duty to fulfil the special role she would play in society. Regarding art as a moral and spiritual force and in the context of the nineteen forties in New Zealand with its imperative to build a national identity, Angus unreservedly accepted the role.

What made this problematic was the indifference, even hostility New Zealand society at the time visited upon its practitioners, especially if one was a woman. The burden exacted a high price. Isolation, poverty, paranoia, and final mental collapse brought on partly by her own severe ascetic philosophy, saw her admitted to the same psychiatric hospital Janet Frame would enter a few years later, with the same ECT results.

Trevelyan takes us on a fascinating personal journey, through art, through loves, friendships, feuds, quarrels, conflicts, government confrontations at the same time revealing how much of this motivated, invigorated and played itself out in her paintings.

An Artist’s Life is a major contribution not only to the history of New Zealand art but also a telling insight into the evolution of New Zealand society as it grew up in the first half of the twentieth century.

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