Comic compulsion

Comic Art
Bath St
7 - 25 April 2009

Comics are one of those cultural phenomena it is hard to imagine any artist not being passionate about. They are palpable, colourful sources of small but visually intense graphics that can be poured over for hours. Easy to transport, their blending of text with graphic form allows the vividness of precise detail to be coupled with a compressed narrative that can be unravelled at will.

Several ‘gallery’ artists here have long histories of making paintings that reference what are called ‘comics’ (before the mid-sixties) or ‘comix’ (after that, and perhaps ‘underground’) - artists such as Denys Watkins, Dick Frizzell, Mark Braunias and Robert McLeod.

However the real surprise of this exhibition is the inclusion of four comic book creators, authors who also draw. The preparatory work for their creations is displayed on the gallery walls, often larger than the final published versions, not trimmed or bound, and often rougher with hand painted or inked surfaces.

In New Zealand it is unusual to see comic page work in galleries up for sale. In places like France, where ‘band dessinée’ has serious status as an art form, shops where you can buy publications to read often also have statues of comic characters for sale in limited editions, and framed, purchasable artists’ working drawings up on the walls.

With these works by Dylan Horrocks, Tim Bollinger, Barry Linton and the Sheehan Brothers, nothing is under glass. The pagework is simply just pinned up on white mdf. It looks quite stark, especially as most of it is black ink on white paper or ivory board. With the two artists who use coloured pencil or watercolour, Horrocks and Linton, the chroma is gorgeously delicate.

And of course it is a different experience standing in a gallery reading these on a wall. Not at all like having them at home bound and in a proper sequence - with you sitting in a chair with your feet up, perhaps with a glass of whisky or dubious cigarette resting nearby, and you closely following the story.

While both virtuoso graphic artists with amazing drawing and conceptualising skills, Horrocks and Linton provide such sensual treats with their colour that they tend to upstage the other artists: Horrocks with one of his ‘Milo’s Week’ strips from the Listener, Linton with an amazing assortment of material looking at the history of Central America that he actually only has one copy of - it has not been published.

However even without colour Darren and Kelly Sheehan's Go Gorillas pages pack an amazing graphic wallop, and seem to allude to British ‘bad boy’ fiction writers like Martin Amis and Will Self. Their vital Signs of Life sequence alongside them seems to reference Auckland Art Gallery, with humorous nods to Giovanni Intra, Francis Upritchard and Judy Darragh amongst a crowd of party-goers.

Tim Bollinger will be well known to readers of White Fungus. His Noa (h) story is not as impressive graphically as the others, but perhaps more entertaining in its humour. His images of a Thurberesque face of God peeking through the clouds while conversing with Noah are some of the many reasons why this show is worth catching.

(The top three images are from the Sheehan Brothers, then Robert Mcleod and then Denys Watkins.)

Cushla Donaldson raises some curious questions

about the word "project".....

Dear John,

I am very much enjoying reading your blog. It allows me to keep up with what is be produced at home and some of the debate and critisim around it, which has spilled over in to converations I have with my friends. So it seems it is performing to its mission statement.

I have found that I would like to make a comment. Not on any particualar topic or exhibition but concerning the use of a particular terminology that has been used more than once in the writing on the blog. That is concerning use of and around the term "project".

It was some time ago a fashion to term the general practice, and even the "themes" or research of a single artists practice by this phrase. It was often used for the function of reduction by the interviewer, critic or artist themselves. Two fictitious examples would be:

"So would you say your project is linked to the other artists in that it is research based?"

"My project is grounded in the formal qualities of the objects that surround us daily."

I sense, from my general discussions and reading that it has now, fortunately gone out of fashion. Perhaps from overuse by those, who on more in depth questioning couldn't expand successfully on a reduced "project". Or perhaps, I would like to think, it's temporal, closed, lightweight and vaguely dismissive connotations could not stand next the practical, visual qualities of the term "practice". Or perhaps even "life's work". As an aside I don't think I have, nor will, see a sentence beginning with "Munchs project was..." Nor would it be possible or correct to say "Kippenbergers project…" unless you were about to say "Kippenberger had a multiplicity of projects unlike other artists with their single projects". I'm sure as an arts writer you can see that this not only lazy, but also incorrect and where I'm going with this.

I have avoided using the specific examples I have found, as it is an issue of wider concern and not one of personal techniques or vocabulary.

Best wishes,

Cushla Donaldson

Concert at Starkwhite

Dean Roberts and collaborators: Red Memory song cycle
Starkwhite
15 April, 2009 @ 8.15 pm

This unusual event, a forty-five minute recital played by five musicians, held the attention of a large crowd in the big downstairs gallery at Starkwhite. Dean Roberts strummed acoustic guitar while singing his brooding turbulent lyrics, backed by cello (Paul Williams), another singer (Mathew Sunderland) and two drummers (one of them, Chris O’Connor). They presented a sinuous and elegantly arranged pop music infused with the avant-garde sensibilities of Wire magazine

Robert’s voice is light and sweet, but not saccharine – between Nick Drake and Cat Stevens. He is not a crooning growling torch song singer with power and theatrics like Nick Cave, a neurotic whiner and splutterer like David Thomas, nor a strangled, choking throat-clencher like Bonnie 'Prince’ Billy. His vocal phrasing presents a calmness and serenity that belies the churning resentment of his written expression.

That is the point. The rhythms and pacing of his tunes are very measured. With this meticulous control you get a constant sense of restraint – a pulling on the reins. Only towards the end of the cycle did the pace increase. With histrionics and frenzy creeping in Sunderland and Roberts then turned up the volume.

This only happened right at the end. For a group with two drummers the sound was wondrously delicate and understated. William’s cello provided a great foil to Roberts’ guitar, but never dominated. Dramatically lit by a single bedside lamp on the floor, these five amazingly gifted individuals made it an aural event to remember.

Good at Artis

Roy Good: the Rhombus Suite
Artis
25 March - 19 April 2009

This show of Roy Good’s is about a year after his Lopdell House exhibition in Titirangi and shows his development since. It also shows the dangers of clinging to the past (I say this knowing that ‘the new’ is also widely under attack, esp. in journals like the latest Reading Room), of being besotted with the seventies and certain artists like Kenneth Noland, and formats like Noland’s elongated horizontal diamond.

Such ghosts haunt Good’s current practice. Whereas Noland used wide parallel lines running from top to bottom, regularly moving across the stretched out picture plane, Good inserts rectangular or triangular forms that float in front. He works on canvas or wooden ‘rhombi’, and the works don’t succeed. Their internal forms don’t work well spatially – especially when they ignore the edges. They suffer from a squashing compression, an inevitable result caused by short height combined with wide horizontal girth.

My view is that Good needs to have a radical rethink, and reinvent his approach to painterly materials and methodologies, if he wishes to be taken seriously as a still active painter. Perhaps he needs to abandon the stretcher and paint directly on the wall. Working with diamond shaped supports and thin glazes to render (or accentuate) planes like this is suicidal. Too derivative, far too tight, too prissy and impossibly designy.

Superb installation in K' Rd

Fiona Connor: Something transparent (please go around the back)
Michael Lett
15 April -16 May 2009

We have here one of the most amazing pieces of public art Auckland has seen for a long time. The daylight and night-time experiences it provides can both be savoured from the K’ Rd footpath, looking into the gallery windows and locked front entrance on the Edinburgh St corner. The back door will be in use for the duration of the show, and once inside the gallery, there awaits another view from within.

Through the windows, at first glance it looks like you are peeping into an infinity chamber, a piece of trickery done with mirrors. Seventeen glass windows and doors are presented perspectivally receding into the distance, each one a diminishing replica of the outside entrance. Look again and you realise there is no reversal of images – so no wizardry with reflection is involved. The transfer lettering on the door of business hours remains constantly correctly aligned. The doors are made of metal, wood, cardboard, paint, paper and glass. Close inspection shows that each one is different.

On one level this is a bizarre pun on art world accessibility, on the desire for comprehension on the part of the public, and the need for exposure on the part of the artist. However visually it is complex; but easy to grasp – and even enthralling with its wit. By the street front leans out a piece of smashed window glass that seems dangerous and lethal at leg height. It is not, being safe behind an outer plane of glass which is very hard to see.

This great, mischievous work can be admired 24 hours a day. I imagine it will attract a lot of attention. Right now, Fiona Connor is the toast of the town.

From Maps, here is a post-colonial critique of

the Waikato paintings of Ted Bracey.

Interconnected reflections

Mladen Bizumic: Global Truths vs Local Reflections
Crockford
31 March - 25 April 2009

This exhibition of seven coloured photographs by Mladen Bizumic is interesting because of his determination to avoid them being seen as separate, unconnected, discrete objects. Like many other artists like say Tahi Moore (with several simultaneously playing videos) or Sam Rountree Williams (with works of other artists in close proximity to his own paintings) he is keen to merge his work with new environs. He has deliberately put super reflective glass over his images so that the rest of the room the work is presented in, gets visually mixed into them.

The images from the gallery site above, show this well. But optically, it is like sprinkling a handful of sand into your sandwich before eating it. It destroys the singular framed images. Makes them unpalatable. You automatically ignore the artist’s eccentric subversions and position your body so that the calculated irritations are minimised. You reflexly move so you can examine the photographed images clearly.

What Bizumic tries to do in the gallery space he also does with the catalogue. Seven quotations about ‘Truth and Perception’ are presented as a numbered list so their meanings, out of context, bleed into each other as well. And into your thinking about the images positioned before you. Perhaps.

Bizumic calls the photographs Global Truths, in contradistinction to the Local Reflections in situ component of the Crockford space. Of course this is art and art has little to do with truth. It is all about contrivance, and truth has a separate imperative. The seven photographs though – in isolation - make excellent viewing. They look slightly Culbert-like, are all C Prints and are only distinguished by a number each. No other information.

One image (#50) is of a row of double stacked storage containers positioned on the edge of a young beech forest. These green, blue and white metal boxes have windows and are obviously people’s homes hidden away out of sight. Next to that is (#7) a foreshortened facade of what seems to be an Italian building with a fake brick pattern delineated by deep troughs. The oblongs are covered with large pit marks, small craters eroding the tilework. The two images seem to be about functionality and decoration in architecture, and related ethics of housing.

On the main Crockford wall are four photographs. On the left, one (#3) shows three large pumpkins placed on a flimsy table in the middle of an overgrown back yard – solid golden forms that dominate the delapidated setting. In contrast to food: on the far right a green screw-on bottletop from an absent drinking bottle is balanced on a rusting steel girder (#25). Between the two above images is a shot of an empty, cavelike, storage shed built into an earth bank (#44), and a beautiful evening view (#26) of two advertising hoardings silhouetted in the half-light, facing each other across a silent motorway.

Separate in isolation on its own opposite wall, the last image (#77) shows a chair-o-plane, swinging seats with people in them photographed from below, rotating on thin chains attached to twelve points on a whirling star. Tucked into the bottom left-hand corner of a square pale blue sky, we have here a symbol, a cosmology of planets revolving around a giant sun, all orbiting parts interconnected, each component aware of all others.