Darryn George at Te Tuhi

Darryn George: Rehita
Te Tuhi: The Drawing Wall
12 December 2009 – 10 March 2010

If you put a gun to my head and demanded to know what my favourite form of visual art was, and I was forced to come up with something, I’d probably say “Grid paintings.” Used to make them centuries ago, and still enjoy looking at (and thinking about) the genre. Mercifully there is still a bit of it about.

So this matrix by Darryn George is one that’s features a deep matt red wall. It's organised around what seem to be twelve modules of four vertical units by three horizontal ones. Except these twelve units aren’t identical. They have small skinny horizontal rectangles alternating between the bottom left and bottom right corners of the larger oblongs.

Have a peek at the above photos. You might think, why didn’t John describe them as a grid of six flipped double-units that is two by three? Well look again, it is actually quite complicated. There is a thin ‘frieze’ of three linked slivers of rectangle at the very top, right where you least expect to see them. That’s a cunning device to accentuate the upper and lower edges, bring in vertical symmetry and lock the design optically onto the wall. Otherwise with the dominant retinally advancing red, the top edge you'd get from a solely twelve unit combination would seem to float away while the bottom remained anchored. Those three upper white and black motifs are essential.

Being Nga Puhi, George has used the traditional Maori colour colours of red, white and black, and if you really, really insisted on a rudimentary narrative, you could say they represented bookshelves with the smaller lower motifs depicting books lying flat on their sides so that you see only their spines. A comment about the desirability of recording traditional knowledge before it disappears, perhaps?

The work is beautifully designed, taking advantage of thin elegant white lines to bring a quality of light and delicate exuberance. Executed by a technician it has none of the deliberately stippled and encrusted paint found on George’s usual canvases. This is a notably flat surface.

This is a wonderful multi-layered work; visually not too busy but not too empty either. It’s precisely and airily balanced so that there is no possibility of clutter at intersecting vertical and horizontal white lines. It’s expansive too. The perfect dynamic of minimal patterning to hold your attention.

Zoological hide and seek

Rachel Walters: Spoor
Te Tuhi
12 December 2009 - 31 January 2010


It’s in the Project Space that is separate from the main suite of Te Tuhi galleries (closer to the café) that Rachel Walters has a very entertaining installation, one featuring her interest in ceramics and kitsch. Neither of these subjects I find particularly enthralling but with Walters, her essential characteristics are humour and inventiveness. Lots of artists make exhibitions out of found objects resulting in lots of artists being boringly predictable. This show though has an exhilarating freshness. Its static wooden and china objects keep providing surprises.

Most of the chinaware is of animals – cats, elephants and monkeys – and sometimes thin floppy sheets of Super Sculpey are draped over their heads and baked, so they look like ghosts. So entitled Spoor becomes Spook, a telltale track becomes paranormal. Spirit ancestors blend with talismans and totems.

The show has a consistent logic where larger objects are placed over other smaller ones, often making them enigmatic (in the style of Man Ray wrappings) particularly with the obscuring of animal features. Apart from ceramic ‘skins’ being added, a slatted fruit box is put over a speckled grey ceramic elephant, and a decorative rug showing a ferocious tiger covered with black finger and handprints, is tossed over a large wooden screen. Within Te Tuhi’s white space these paired elements are positioned with deliciously perfect precision. Everything is very carefully considered within the three dimensions of the room.

Walters is expert at playing with morphological ambiguities, so that forms can be read in a variety of ways. Two balanced pots leaning on each other (each with two handles that now become legs) look like an advancing pug. A vertical staring monkey/human form with a pot belly becomes a white skittle. A spiky mushroom transmutes into two Parisian cats under an umbrella. Though the totemic images might be seen as tribal and anthropological in reference, the mood is more that of a fifties cartoon with its appealing flippancy and snappy perceptual double-takes.

This is one of those clever exhibitions where the viewer is not bombarded with material but given a carefully organised, pared back selection rich in interpretative possibilities. It should have audiences returning for repeated viewings.

Billy Apple ® paperback

Billy Apple ® : Source Book 7/2009
Edited by Zoë Gray, Nicolaus Schafhausen and Monika Szewczyk
Essays by Christina Barton, William Wood, Michelle Menzies and Bénédicte Ramade
Designed by Kummer and Herrman
112 pp, coloured illustrations
Witte de With Center For Contemporary Art, Rotterdam, 2009
$49.95 (Parsons)

It looks like 2010 is going to be a bumper year for exciting Billy Apple publications. Top of the list will be a sizable monograph from Christina Barton; then a selection of other authors in another Apple tome, and finally an anthology of Wystan Curnow essays on Apple and other artists.

In the meantime, just out in Auckland last month but published a few months earlier in the Netherlands, this small paperback - in English. It is a much needed addition to Wellington City Gallery’s As Good As Gold (ed. by Burke and Curnow, 1991), Tina Barton’s The Expatriates (2005), Leanne Pooley’s remarkable video documentary Being Billy Apple, and various assorted periodicals and catalogues. It is small - but crammed with detailed discussion - and fascinating for Apple enthusiasts because three of the four writers are new to New Zealand readers. And like Barton (the Director of the Adam Art Gallery at Victoria University) they all are exceptionally knowledgeable. The book was designed to accompany last June's two part Apple survey at Witte de With, The History of The Brand, and Revealed /Concealed.

For her contribution Christina Barton has taken nineteen crucial years from the lives of Barrie Bates (b.1935) and his 1962 creation Billy Apple to present a chronology that contextualises for a European audience Apple’s career so far. Each of the selected years has been chosen from within a span of seventy-four years and used to elaborate on various key projects within his conceptual development, drawing out the historical and social contexts within New Zealand, London and New York. Barton’s grasp of Apple’s early life (as Bates) is formidable and her experience as a tertiary educator and curator comes through in the clarity and depth of her writing.

I can’t say the same for Michelle Menzies whose text on occasion is dryly academic and obtuse. Yet the approach she takes, the structure she uses, is clever and very interesting – using Gertrude Stein’s accounts of a masterpiece and selfhood to analyse Barrie Bate’s transformation, and most of it engages. Mixed in is Menzies’ account of her own friendship with Apple, expressing surprise that older artists would be curious about younger ones, as if such transgenerational conversations and bonding were rare for the art community.

What is intriguing about Menzies’ analysis is her discussion of Apple’s tenacity in parallel with Stein’s obdurateness. She compares these two resilient purists, their obsessive excavation and reconstruction of personhood and their very different use of repetition. Her description of Bates’ reification as ‘fossilized’ in the form of Apple is a wonderful foil to Barton’s nineteen ‘slices’ and Stein’s notion of ongoing-ness.

French curator Bénédicte Ramade provides a discussion of one aspect of Apple’s practice, focussing on his gallery critiques and what he calls ‘activities’ - actions maintaining gallery and community spaces and the Apple body as artwork. She gives a detailed account of his Witte de With gallery transformation and then discusses many of the seventies New York works Tina Barton included in the recent Adam show. Ramade’s footnotes, based on her conversations with Apple in Europe, are particularly lively - especially when Apple denounces (other artists') performance and narrative works as the product of failed actors or writers, or when he describes a drive to clean or tidy as a public need or community service. She doesn’t see Apple’s activities here as obsessive compulsive behaviour (which others do, as indicated on Being Billy Apple). Rather it is the result of a partnership with the spectator where “the ethics of his role as an artist are at the heart of this formal research.” A surprising (and I think unconvincing) take on this period of his work.

William Wood - a Vancouver-based art historian - provides essential discussion of Apple’s development of himself as a brand, and his fixation on art’s ubiquitous commercial underpinnings. As a non-New Zealand writer Wood’s take on Apple is highly illuminating, starting with an examination of the artist/patron relationship, Kant’s account of art with his ‘free’ versus ‘mercenary’ distinction, and moving on to Apple’s remarkable Transaction series of the early eighties, his related use of apples cast in solid gold, and his planned use of cultivated fruit to be marketed within the Billy Apple brand (a now registered trademark) – what Thomas Crow calls ‘a service economy’.

Wood's essay discusses the most crucial component of Apple's career in my view, even more important than his creation of himself as Artwork. Apple’s art about procedures of fiscal and other types of exchange is particularly fascinating because it gained acceptance in New Zealand long before anywhere else, and is I think his most unique contribution to Conceptual Art. Apple's desire to baldly present aestheticised receipts or contracts showcasing the commercial machinery of the dealer system (and mechanisms outside it) was too radical to initially gain acceptance with his northern hemisphere dealers. They were reluctant to present them – scared off possibly by the confrontational nature of his 1979 ‘The Given as an Art-Political Statement’ New Zealand tour.

This suggests something interesting about New Zealand in the early eighties, that an art climate had evolved where the Art For Sale and Transaction works could flourish. It might perhaps have been Apple's long friendship with Wystan Curnow that enabled this to occur (their collaborative text and design work in Art New Zealand 15 having positive influence here), or it could have been his friendship with then dealer Peter Webb – or both. Either way, that it happened is quite remarkable. Something extraordinarily special.

Żmijewski publication

Artur Żmijewski
Misha Kavka: Reaching Tentacles into Reality (essay)
Catalogue for the 2008 exhibition Artur Żmijewski
- curated by Emma Bugden and Robert Leonard
Edited By Ben Wilson and Evie Franzidis
Designed by Katrina Stubbs
24 pp, colour illustrations.
Te Tuhi and IMA, 2009

Good art and good people. Most of us realise I think that to be good at their job, artists don’t have to be likable or exceptionally moral human beings. In fact personal charisma and decency might well be a curse – a negative attribute for the job. Artur Żmijewski is known for his powers as a shrewd manipulator of the interviewees and participants of his videos. (See my review of his Te Tuhi show, and another). He can be seen verbally manipulating an elderly Auschwitz survivor into having the tattooed number on his arm redone, or getting Polish political lobbying groups to create slogan-bearing paintings which their inflamed political opponents will soon be encouraged to destroy.

For all his apparent sadism, there is something attractive about Żmijewski. He is prepared to get tainted himself, even if he turns himself into a decoy, a catalyst of entrapment. He can be seen naked sprinting across the floor of a gas chamber, playing tag with other unclothed men and women – having fun in a site of horror where context is deliberately forgotten. Though often touted as being preoccupied with sociological or anthropological content in his projects, such as Misha Kavka does in her essay here in this publication, I think that is a misleading emphasis. His approach is more to do with the psychological complexities of the individual than group dynamics. Though the social forces that play on the individual are indisputably of great interest to him, he really zeros in on the nature of that person’s resistance, the mechanisms they use to avoid succumbing.

Kavka is a Media Studies lecturer at the University of Auckland, an expert on reality television. Her view of Żmijewski is that he is an artist who brings to the surface things that normally remain invisible. He works like a pickpocket (this is the artist’s own term) whose octopus tentacle-like fingers silently reach into what he calls ‘ niches of inattention’ – what she calls the ‘darker corners of the collective psyche, staging encounters of power and history, oppression and subordination, pain and pleasure, shame and exuberance.’ To do this she considers he works like an anthropologist – seeing him as someone trained in his early years at Crzegorz Kowalski’s sculpture studio not as an ‘artist’, but as one committed ‘to study, describe and attempt to understand human behaviour or ritual’, unrestrained by conventional societal ethics.

These projects Żmijewski sees as ‘outbursts of extreme subjectivity’. In this show they make up five sorts. Here is how I distinguish them:

Firstly there are the plainly satirical videos – sending up the military, either Nazi armies ridiculed by two Turkish artists dancing with spades on their shoulders, juxtaposed with sections from Riefenstahl’s 'The Triumph of the Will' (KR WP 2000); or the military in general, through the artist charming a platoon of Polish Honour Guard soldiers to march a ceremonial drill wearing only boots and caps (Zeppelintribune 2002).

Secondly there is an interview where the interviewee is charmed through conversation into revealing beliefs that the artist clearly despises – a strategy often used by comedians like Gary McDonald or Sacha Baron Cohen. In Itzik 2003 the subject expresses his venomous hatred of the Palestinians.

Thirdly, there are videos where the artist uses human bodies, healthy and dysfunctional together, to create new sorts of beauty - in a manner comparable to artists like Dan Arps who mix normally unconnected substances together (like say putty, pasta and clay) to invent something new. Eye For An Eye (1998) shows a naked healthy man assisting a naked amputee to move around a room and up some stairs. The Singing Lesson 2 (2003) presents a choir of deaf children learning to sing Bach with an orchestra. Rendez-vous (2004) reveals two sufferers of Huntington’s Chorea manoeuvring their jerking uncoordinated bodies around a park where they sit at a bench to eat a pizza.

With Żmijewski there is often this ambiguity, an oscillation between for example, nakedness, a trope for vulnerability or unhidden ‘truth’, and voyeurism. Including sometimes a sense of the artist’s own gaze being not sympathetic but exploitive - even indirectly sadistic.

With Repetition (2005) he repeats the famous 1971 Stanford experiment conducted by Philip Zimbardo where paid volunteers are randomly sorted into guards and prisoners and put into a ‘prison’ environs, with one group in total control of the other. In the resulting dynamic, Żmijewski’s ‘warden’ becomes alarmed at his own increasing sadism, worried about his changing personality that altered within ‘the job’. He persuaded the guards and prisoners to join him in terminating the project.

In the fifth variation, I think the artist displays his own sadism directly. 80064 (2004) presents the retattooing of the Auschwitz survivor already mentioned, Them (2007) sets up and exploits conflict between various Polish political factions, and Selected Works (2007), features intrusive filming of ten lowly paid blue-collar labourers in Mexico, Poland, Germany and Italy - at home and at their repetitive and very boring work.

This is an absorbing brochure about a knowingly provocative artist, one expert at winding his audiences up while also retaining their enthusiasm so they become complicit. There are excellent notes on the above works, based on earlier publications, plus Kavka’s essay. While the latter seems at times too respectful of both art and anthropology (simultaneously acknowledging the artist’s callousness in his ‘attempts to understand human behaviour’ whilst also defending it), her superbly crafted, informative text is thorough, complex and richly layered. Here, read it yourself. It repays many readings.

Te Tuhi and IMA have created an important publication. It, like Żmijewski’s videos, deserves a large and appreciative (even if also condemnatory) audience.

Last month Martin Patrick, Senior Lecturer in Critical Studies at Massey, was in Paris - and he visited the Palais de Tokyo.

Chasing Napoleon
Curated by Marc-Olivier Wahler
Palais de Tokyo, Paris
5 October 2009 - 17 January 2010

Recently I was wandering through the unseasonably warm streets of Paris (it was late November), while indoors a marked chill was evident among its public art institutions - many of them preparing for strikes in response to the cultural policies promoted by Nicolas Sarkozy’s right-wing government. Such developments included both the threat of significant job losses and funding cuts, as museums have been urged from above to “do more with less.” The Pompidou Center was the first to close, and remained so for over three weeks, until a sort of holiday cease-fire of their labor dispute occurred just before Christmas. (Even the Louvre - that is to say, the formidable cultural repository that even those who loathe museums make uncharacteristic efforts to attend—closed its doors for a time.)

Thus after staring pointlessly at the darkened Beaubourg, I considered my other options. The ever-so-chic Fondation Cartier was hosting a retrospective of graffiti art, but to my mind the only thing potentially drearier than street art on the street is street art in the museum. So I proceeded on to various commercial galleries, most of them offering high-end tedium as usual, with two notable exceptions: large-scale photo reliefs by the venerable John Baldessari at Marian Goodman and the captivating installations and videos of Su-Mei Tse at Serge Le Borgne.

Finally I found myself amidst the architectural double-whammy of the Musée d’Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris and the Palais de Tokyo. The former hosts an exhaustive and largely turgid permanent collection of the mid-20th-Century French artists whose works one hopes never to see let alone remember, and a worthwhile but oddly selected temporary exhibition of last works by contemporary artists, called Deadline, highlights being Felix Gonzalez-Torres (yet again), Absalon, Jörg Immendorf, Chen Zhen, Willem De Kooning, and the vivid and underrated photographs of Hannah Villiger.

But far more convincing was Chasing Napoleon, a snappy group show at the Palais de Tokyo curated by Marc-Olivier Wahler. The premise of the exhibition (citing the curatorial statement) was to “bring together eighteen artists whose works also read as instruction manuals on how to withdraw into seclusion and take refuge in the limits of the visible.” Despite the portentousness of these remarks the show was consistently hilarious. I must admit that as a guileless American I am a prime target for conspiracy theories, especially having been at work on that particular day pondering both Gallic governmental machinations and the exact number of times I’d overheard Thriller since June.

While literary references from Henry David Thoreau to Don DeLillo were used to contextualize the exhibition, it is the darker iconic persona of Theodore Kaczynski (a.k.a. “The Unabomber”) that took pride of place, in the form of a recreation of his cabin by Robert Kusmirowski, and a reconstitution of his library by Dora Winter. Much like a tabloid journalism/reality TV fix for art geeks, I enjoyed the version of Saddam Hussein’s Spider Hole by Christoph Büchel or Tony Matelli’s Fuck it, Free Yourself!, in which 500 Euro notes stayed alight perpetually. Tom Friedman’s Untitled (a [witch’s] curse), its appearance otherwise indistinguishable from an empty plinth, was scoffed at by a passing couple, eyebrows raised, thoroughly unamused. Meanwhile Ryan Gander’s darkened room installation Nathaniel Knows, featuring both a rough hole burrowed through the exterior wall of the gallery and a ventilation grill, was intended to reference his earlier pieces - but I didn’t care, it was enjoyable all the same.

The more historic components threaded through the exhibition consisted of Dieter Roth’s endless series of slides (purportedly 33,000 images) depicting vernacular architecture in Reykjavik; Paul Laffoley’s simultaneously lurid and schematic paintings mapping the Counterculture; and a nice transatlantic mirroring of Minimalisms: one of Tony Smith’s imposing black geometric sculptures placed alongside Charlotte Posenenske’s galvanized airshafts and ducts. I’d also rank Robert Gober’s sublime pewter Drain, which in a manner of speaking, emptied out the space in-between.

Chasing Napoleon conveyed that particular mixture of perverse fascination and intellectual condescension that characterizes so many European attempts to excavate American mythologies. Though it didn’t avoid this near-inevitable cultural clash, the exhibition itself survived on its considerable curatorial merits. However tendentious its pseudo-argumentation, this altogether elegant display of lively intergenerational approaches was more than effective, combating the more common conspiracy of dull and retrograde artifacts proffered up as if somehow essential and innovative.

[Depicted works, in ascending order, are by Robert Kusmiroski and Dora Winter, Tony Matelli, Charlotte Posenenske, Christoph Büchel, Ryan Gander, Tom Friedman, and Paul Laffoley.]

Maloy, Patterson, Steyerl

Richard Maloy: Raw Attempts / Campbell Patterson: floorshow / Hito Steyerl: After the Crash
ARTSPACE
12 December 2009 - 27 February 2010

ARTSPACE’s director, Emma Bugden, has organised a trio of related exhibitions for 2009’s last slot, presentations that explore processes of continual change and transmutation. Each of the three artists has a project that is engaging in isolation, and the shows can thus be approached separately, but the challenge for the visitor is to also figure out how the three interact collectively. Do they link up? If so, how?

Firstly, looking at the three solo components, the most dramatic is Richard Maloy’s use of the big square ARTSPACE gallery. Maloy is known for his series of photos and videos where he either applied chunks of gooey butter to his head and face, using his physiognomy as an armature, or lumps of sticky wet clay to his torso and arms - to be smoothed over and incorporated as an extension of his body.

For ARTSPACE Maloy starts by treating the ceiling of the gallery the way he used to treat his body, but with cardboard not clay. It functions as a armature/support, not a surface on which to rest or lean things but a plane to which they can be attached, that supports all their weight. Working at night or in daylight hours when the gallery is shut, he uses a staple gun with which he can fasten opened out and dismembered cardboard boxes, later painted orange.

His first experiment was a huge continually spiralling wall, a thin wonky shell designed like a massive orange peeling – held up by the roof. If you look at the long sequence of online photos here you will see where he has tested other structures too, letting some fall down by overloading or else deliberately pulling them down – only to try hanging up something new. Each time, fastening forms to the ceiling and working his way down by adding to each suspended sheet with sticky tape, or else using the floor to reconfigure the fragile walls when collapsed, to see what shapes can hold up their own weight when folded or buckled around.

Campbell Patterson has used the long narrow gallery to display initially six, now five, projections on the walls. He films his body as he carries out various tasks that often set out the spatial limitations of each site. The dozen or so actions you see him perform include using no hands but soaping his head by rubbing it into a mound of aerosol foam sprayed on the floor, pulling a camera attached to string towards his face by chewing up and ingesting the string, turning another camera with another piece of string as he moves around a small bathroom with a shower going that soaks his clothing, crawling along a tiled floor by dragging the tripod and filming camera behind him, licking up swept dirt or soap powder from piles on the floor, mashing up bananas with his stockinged feet, squeezing through a ventilation shute, and lying on the floor with a pointed stone under his belly.

Of the three Patterson show I’ve seen in Auckland so far, this presentation is the most successful, due to the restricted focus of his material and its self-deprecating humour – despite its knowing art historical references to sixties performance art.

These two Auckland artists specialise in working within specially devised rules, difficult restrictions put in place to shape the form of their projects – vaguely related to the early (pre-performance) poems of Mike Parr and Vito Acconci in the sixties and seventies, or European Oulipo writers like Georges Perec, or Raymond Queneau.

In After the Crash, Hito Steyerl’s film, when placed in this ARTSPACE context, presents dismantled airplanes in an aircraft junkyard in the Californian desert as a metaphor for a morgue with human bodies, with their recyclable parts as tropes for human organs. Though critiquing capitalism and its recent collapse it also marvels as how such an ethos survives, how even discarded waste can be swiftly turned into substantial profit - through being made into exploding film props. The mutilated skeletal aircraft parts however radiate poignancy, part of an ongoing process that parallels those of Patterson and Maloy in terms of inventiveness.

Though Steyerl’s film is quite different to the projects of Patterson and Maloy, and about documented process, not improvised or procedural events, as Bugden puts it ‘the planes take on an oddly human subjectivity.’ The inclusion of this German-based artist is important because of that, as an inverse foil to some of the machinelike, relentlessly unwavering and obsessive aspects of the two highly energetic Aucklanders. A thoughtfully clever package.

When dance becomes Movement Art

robbinschilds + A.L.Steiner: C.L.U.E. (colour location ultimate experience) in collaboration with AJ Blandford
The Physics Room
26 November - 20 December 2009

The activity of dance is one of those varieties of human endeavour that occasionally merges with ‘serious’ visual art practice, resulting in projects like those by Robert Rauschenberg or Robert Morris that involved collaborations with dancer friends (Merce Cunningham) or spouses (Yvonne Rainer). Dance has never attracted analytical texts from philosophers (Francis Sparshott is an unusual exception), although the highly esteemed German conceptual artist Tino Sehgal who arranges performances in museums and art fairs initially came from a dance background, and his work is known for its intellectual severity and theoretical rigour.

robbinschild (Sonya Robbins and Layla Childs) recently did a residency in The Arts Centre in Christchurch. They are dancers who call themselves ‘movement artists’ – a bit like musicians who in the seventies, to avoid associations with conventional or romantic musical properties such as lyricism or melody, began to call themselves ‘sonic’ or ‘aural’ artists.

Yet one wonders if there was a satirical motivation behind this work, it seemed so classically ‘trippy-dippy-hippie’ with its trajectory of a rainbow coloured (seven costumed hues in sequence) road trip. It moved west across the United States via a variety of unpeopled rural and urban locations to finish in California. It was intended to be, as the title says, an ‘Ultimate Experience.’ That wording was unfortunate.

At The Physics Room there was C.L.U.E Part 1 in the main space, a large single screened projection with musical soundtrack, and in the smaller end room, another more complicated version - in the form of a bank of a dozen monitors, accompanied by various beanbags for viewers to lounge in. Plus headphones to use.

Looking at the promotional material, this work was intended to be taken seriously – for all its dated (but now deliberately retro) energetic ‘expressiveness’ and clichéd references. The variation with a bank of monitors was the more successful of the two because you could compare vistas and actions. The twelve differently sized rectangles contained more varied landscapes and movement types than the single projection. Some temporarily had blank, intensely hued screens that seemed akin to some of the more colourful projects of the innovative video artist Diana Thater.

In both works the driving impetus came from the hypnotic sound of the hardworking Seattle band Kinski. They dominated and were tight, whereas robbinschild themselves were not – more abandoned in their use of movement. Not improvisatory: rather they were loose with their vaguely co-ordinated flailing limbs and twisting torsos.

Possibly there might have been a coded repertoire of gestures for each colour, mixed in with the dancers’ bodily responses to the physical properties of each space, but I couldn’t detect a system. Maybe several visits might have revealed one.

With its synthesis of music, body movement, clothing and site C.L.U.E. seemed oddly under-ambitious. It failed because the properties of the installation in the gallery were not sufficiently dynamic. The rooms (especially the large gallery) could have been more physically immersive, with colour and movement used in a more compelling fashion. More was promised than what was actually delivered.