Mitchell wizardry

Mitchell Wizardry
Dane Mitchell
Starkwhite
10 March - 4 April 2009

The last time Dane Mitchell had a show of work in Starkwhite he used the large downstairs space by the Karangahape Road entrance and was about to go to London. Now he is about to go to Berlin, but before he leaves he is taking advantage of part of the gallery’s storage facilities - in upstairs premises in a separate building out the back. As you can see from the above photographs, though it relies mostly on natural light, the presentation has been very successful: the space is not too small, but bigger than the stock display rooms in the main building.

The show has four pencil drawings, a sculpture in the centre of the space on a plinth, and a framed up interview on one wall. When I say sculpture and interview, I mean ‘sculpture’ and ‘interview’. The sculpture is really a footnote to the interview, the latter being a Mitchell variation of the famous Michael Craig-Martin ‘interview’ that accompanies ‘An Oak Tree’, a 1973 Craig-Martin artwork which is ostensibly a tumbler of water placed on a glass shelf. He insists – in a conversation with himself – that the filled glass is the outward appearance of an oak tree. In that conceptual sculpture, the label–interview (a statement more about the artist’s belief than any object) is the main ingredient. Same here with Mitchell.

His sculpture is a double-layered chemist’s flask with nozzles on the bottom. It is on a stand, and half filled with water. Into this Mitchell has immersed a pencil. Its image, as one would expect, is bent by the laws of refraction.

Not so, says Mitchell in his interview. “I have changed the direction of the light inside the vessel.” It's not refraction he insists. He says that it is not an illusion.

So what is Mitchell telling us? Is he a wizard with supernatural powers? Does he think he is God? Can he achieve miracles, and that he himself controls the laws of nature? Or is he putting us on? Is he secretly laughing at the artworld’s propensity for delusion? That almost anything that is stated can get accepted as gospel.

If we imagine a number of invisible tubes leading from the nozzles at the bottom of the jar and going across the room to the wall of drawings - each tube containing ‘pencil juice’ – we can see a series of reflexive links that discuss their own process.

One drawing renders the experience of refraction, depicting how a line looks bent when immersed in liquid. Another is a diagram of light rays, presenting the law of physics that explains the phenomenon of refraction. It, very wittily, looks like a pencil tip. A third seems to abstractly refer to the process of evaporation of water from the unsealed flask, how the water level lowers, or - put another way - how the pencil rises. It seems to be about the oscillation of viewpoints.

The fourth diagram is about three worlds that invariably overlap: Reality, Unreality, and Illusion, and their relationship to those areas we accept as True on good faith. While many of Mitchell’s projects engage with mysticism and the spirit world as a source of invisible reality, they hint at parallel processes within art history and art institutions, and their apparent lack of ‘objective’ transparency. Like Craig-Martin, he teases out, by implication, a sort of nominalism where things denominated by the term ‘art’ share nothing except that fact. It is only a coating of declarative language that gives them a definition. No substance beneath that coating is necessary.

His show plays with belief structures, implying that if you are sceptical of witchcraft (something he has occasionally used in his projects), then why not treat art assumptions based on what artists say, the same way. Artists are striving to achieve certain ends for their work via the use of artists' statements or writing, and these are like spells that need to be efficacious to succeed.

Lacey sculpture and drawings

Sonya Lacey: In & Outsides
Newcall
10 March - 28 March 2009

This splendidly arranged presentation of Sonya Lacey’s graphite drawings and sculpture shows the architectural qualities of Newcall gallery’s T-shaped floor plan at its very best. Four framed graphite on paper drawings and three sculptures that resonate with each other and the room.

The drawings are superb. They are of clouds or layers of murky mist letting through softly glowing light. Its radiance is controlled by floating smudgy layers and borders that allow shimmering pale banks of exposed sunlight to hover afar. The rubbing of the graphite fits in with Lacey’s work in This Much is Certain in May last year at George Fraser - the burnishing in those drawings and sculpture. Those works though were more abstract and minimal.

Certainly the three sculptures in this show continue that. One is a low ‘bowl’ of thin, spun steel that has been polished by being scoured with sandpaper. Another is a long strip of flexible pine that has been bent so that half lies on the floor while the rest is clamped vertically to the wall through a neat circular hole. The third work is the strangest of them all. It looks like the outer frame of a handleless drawer propped up on the floor. On it are resting what seem to be two ear plugs. These objects are made of compacted blue newspaper dust made by obsessive rubbing of blue skies in photographs. It’s an amazing piece of sculpture.

Lacey’s drawings, being impressively evocative and sensual, will attract quite a following, but her sculpture – despite being more austere – will attract a lot of respect. It reveals a sensibility that is much more unusual in its wit. An exceptionally strong exhibition.

Entangled striated layerings

James Cousins: Signal
Gow Langsford
10 March - 3 April 2009

James Cousins used to paint landscapes looked at through a grid that repeated a regularly sized, horizontal module. Now he uses an overlaid, asymmetrical, striated ‘screen’ that zigzags in circular sweeps with spiky parallel lines. It references Op and Pop - Vasarely’s ribbony, shallow grids spliced into Lichtenstein’s (or Johns’) sprawling brushstrokes.

Peeking through these angular masked curtains are landscapes or close–ups of trees. Sometimes on top or in (the curtains that is) are oily Baconlike smears and flicks; three overlapping spatial fields that interweave and coalesce. Unlike say Andrew Barber’s romantic landscapes, the spiky forms make Cousin’s vistas oddly threatening and crystaline hard – as if mutilated metallic sheeting were suspended in front of the depicted scene. The confusion from blending the foreground and background spaces brings forward the picture plane while also offering slices of a receding ‘window’.

This tension has similarities to some of Escher’s images, where reflections in a puddle compete with the textures of the muddy road around it. With Cousins there is a shattered fragmentation of the painted field which nevertheless remains intact. These very visceral works are also oddly cerebral in their premeditated order, especially the bigger examples. The sharp angles that make them menacing and violent look peculiar when combined with chocolate box scenes that could have come from the Kelliher Art Prize. Cousins is on to something unusual here with this mix of sentimentality with the most brutally industrial of scratch marks. It will be fascinating to see where it takes him.

Spirtual codings

Signs: the painted word of Abdullah Dougan
2 March - 22 March 2009

Expressions: Phil Dadson, Brent Wong, Melissa Martyn, Ross Ritchie, Harvey Benge, Peter Shearer, Pauline Thompson
2 - 19 March 2009

North Art, Norman King Square, North Shore

These two exhibitions celebrate the life of Abdullah (Neil) Dougan (1918 -1987), an influential teacher who lived in Auckland and made symbolic paintings that functioned as teaching aids for his pupils. His lessons blended the ideas of Sufi thinkers such as Hazrat Inayat Khan with the discussions around the theosophical doctrines of Gurdijieff.

One exhibition features about thirty paintings by Dougan from the early seventies. The other is a tribute show presented by seven of his pupils.

Abdullah Dougan’s paintings look abstract but are not formalist in function. They are heavily coded diagrams for psychological states, with every colour, shape and line having a specific purpose in guiding the viewer. They look akin to the works of Kenneth Noland or Len Lye but these visual parallels are coincidental. Dougan was not an innovative stain painter like Noland or interested in theories about ‘The Old Brain’, as Lye was. Yet formally many of his images make good viewing. He had a flair for image construction and placement, an intuitive talent despite his main preoccupation being spiritual symbolism. The show is linked to a book about to be published about the intended content of these images, paintings and prints he created over a period of seventeen years.

The other show is a collection of works that show how varied as artists his pupils could be. Paintings, music, videos, pottery, and photographs all are presented here. If one strained for a visual commonality one might start with Brent Wong whose works are clearly influenced by his teacher and not like the surrealist realism he is generally known for, though related chromatically. They have a flickering quality like light on water, and this theme, of sun speckled water with a canoe (as Self) travelling on it, is taken up in a video by Phil Dadson.

The circle motif occurs again with the clayware by Peter Shearer and the small drawing pin paintings by Ross Ritchie. Like Dadson’s canoe, symbols for the individual soul’s search for happiness can be speculatively guessed at in the birds on Melissa Martin’s jug-shaped paintings and Harvey Benge’s photograph of a jet high in the sky. Pauline Thompson’s imagery on the other hand, seems a little Blakean stylistically, though light again is of great significance.

My discussion here, clearly contrived, does point out the refusal by most visitors (like me) to accept that is no ‘artistic’ connection at all, except that the show records the fact of a search by seven individuals (a community of friends) for a psychological structure to underpin their daily lives. However exhibiting collectively as a group somehow implies a visual and symbolic meaning will be made apparent. That is part of the deal, as visual artists - or else seven names could have just been typed on a piece of paper and left on a table with testimonials provided.

The top three images are by Abdullah Dougan, while the bottom three are by Peter Shearer, Melissa Martyn and Brent Wong.

Reuben Paterson on Isaac Julien

Recent Revisionists

Tony de Lautour: Prize-fighter
Ivan Anthony
4 March - 28 March 2009

This is an unusual dealer gallery show in that not all the work is for sale, and some of it is about six or so years old. Yet these ‘Revisionist Paintings’ are a section of de Lautour’s practice that some consider his ‘golden’ period: a time when he bought various amateur landscape paintings from ‘junk’ shops, works made by other, unknown artists, and modified them by superimposing his own imagery. He inserted into the given panoramas his own motifs that he had been developing in the years prior to this idea.

He had a show of them in Hamish McKay’s and I organised an exhibition at Waikato Museum of Art and History Te Whare Taonga o Waikato while I was working there.So a few of those older paintings are combined here with newer ones, plus some recent ceramics. In fact a few of the slab ceramics are rendered on the recent paintings as tombstones.

In the earlier paintings of this type de Lautour often depicted kiwis as pot-bellied, drunken hooligans brawling and smashing bottles in remote scenic areas, where sometimes one could see lakes, mountain ranges or ditches shaped as maps of Aotearoa. The paradox with the vandalism is that it might be argued De Lautour is desecrating these acquired paintings through his additions. And that I am being two faced in even mentioning it – as if I am particularly highly principled. After all, I am praising the work. I think it is remarkable, and that the original ‘un-de-Lautoured’ canvases were probably dreadful in their unmutilated state. I’m arrogant enough (like the artist) to assume that is the case.

How does one interpret the scrapping protagonists in these works: the lions and the kiwis? What do these key motifs mean? The lions could represent the British Imperial forces and the kiwis, resisting Maori tribes. Or they might be referring to something wider, like cultural tensions within our art history. Could they be the traditional British tradition of art practice be warring with a new post-colonial or nationalist sensibility?

Be warned. De Lautour does have a mischievous sense of humour. Things are often rarely what they seem at first glance. Take a look at the recent painting shown above. It looks like grave robbers have been at work. The individual graves of the lion and kiwi are left untouched on either side, but in the centre, out of an empty excavated tomb is sprouting a huge tree. It is white, and ghostly, and happens to look unnervingly like a gum. Is de Lautour depicting the burial of a white-only consciousness (quite a plausible interpretation), or is he saying NZ art is turning into Australian art? (That is alarmingly cynical!) Perhaps it means something else again?

Wander up to Ivan Anthony’s and take a closer look.

Peter Gregory on

Len Castle