Mystic panoramic sandwiches

Barbara Tuck: Habits of Paradise
Anna Miles
7 April – 8 May 2010

The six recent Barbara Tuck oil paintings displayed here were made during a trip to the South Island’s McKenzie Country, that sparsely populated, high altitude basin that straddles the border between Canterbury and Otago.

These paintings are quite impressionistic – in the sense of mental impressions, not qualities of light on surfaces. They contain collage-like fragments of landscape or clumps of terrain, botany or sky, usually aligned within horizontal strata. Earlier shows of hers have been more vertical or diagonal with their organisation of vista portions – as if looking up through or down into treetop canopies. These compositions have a sense of looking across austere grass-covered landforms towards dominant mountain ranges. There is a sense of loosely stacking multiple views on top of each other that is vaguely related to a famous Cental Otago Rita Angus painting, where the sky at the top is replaced with a new imposed landscape foreground – like a club sandwich. Or like McCahon’s Six Days in Nelson and Canterbury which is like a sequence of film story-boards made by a cycling traveller.

Tuck’s organic images however have a wild spontaneity that is totally different from Angus or McCahon. She seems to enjoy riffing with certain repeated brush lines that often reference landforms, foliage or patterns on chinaware. Her oil paint is thin and runny, providing an oozy, bubbly sensuality that lets the underpainted gessoed board shine through.

Tuck obviously delights in mark making, and there is a strong sense of obsessive process where the aim is not a refined, compositionally perfect product but an outpouring of restless energy and felt response to the environs. This is strangely related to Alan Pearson’s squiggly improvisations painted while listening to Italian opera, Bill Hammond‘s early suburban interiors made while grooving to rock music, or Phil Clairmont’s excitement with Hendrix: an intoxicatingly bodily drive that results in experiments with shape and line. Except Tuck’s ‘music’ is the McKenzie Basin location itself and the wonder of its particular geology, climate, flora and fauna.

Sometimes she has pale blobby forms floating in front of the picture plane, flat curved shapes hovering in a space all their own and painted with thin blue twitchy lines. These slightly foetal decorative forms disrupt the image like a floating Brent Wong architrave and their oddness undermines even the discordant collaged feel of painted fragmentation – as if symbolic in intention and slightly at odds with the surrounding space. However such shapes, like the rest of her spontaneously arranged textures, patterns and rendered vistas, are kick-started by an intuitive response to an unusual location. Their unpredictable properties, dwelling on interiority and spiritual preoccupations (as indicated by her titles) reinforce the subjectivity of her method.

The paintings, in descending order, are: O Maramu. Ahuriri Augellus; Unfurnished Eye; About Fleeing; Pour and melt of Distances; Soul’s Neural Tekapo.

Exquisite watercolours of calamities

Linden Simmons: In the passing of a night
Tim Melville
13 April - 8 May 2010

This selection of works by Linden Simmons showcases his extraordinary dexterity with watercolour, for his finely intricate, life-size copies of New Zealand Herald images really draw you in close so you can admire their delicate detail.

What is interesting about them is the combination of the sensuality of the transparent gum medium – made palpable with its nuanced overlaying of planes and forms – with the ramifications of the images he chooses. Though his titles are deliberately vague the information about each image source is easily coaxed out of his very approachable dealer, or seen in nearby filed photocopies of pertinent newspaper pages.

Why the indeterminate titles? Well obviously he wishes to emphasize the bodily experience of the image, and feels mental imagery within a label might overwhelm it. So why divulge the image origins to his dealer? Because he wants contextual information circulated – to eventually get embedded within the social matrix of the art world audience - even though he doesn’t want to appear too brazen about directly presenting it, or wants it to dominate so that the images become illustrative.

Simmons picks a certain kind of image to copy. Firstly they come from faded newsprint where the ink seems to have soaked in and not kept to the surface. They do not have the saturated colour or spatial depth of a glossy photograph.

Secondly these images are of a particular type. All taken overseas most feature calamitous highly destructive events that have resulted from the forces of nature. Of course now ‘forces of nature’ are no longer perceived as always isolated from human stupidity. Often there are direct ecological causal connections.

Simmons’ rendered images include the destructive results of tidal waves, volcanic eruptions, earthquakes, and storms of land and sea. Sometimes the site or activity of a future disaster is implied, such as locations where uranium is planned to be mined. The pervading theme is mass human suffering – usually in third world countries.

What Simmons seems to be doing is commenting on the desensitisation of readers when they come across accounts of catastrophic tragedies in ‘foreign’ lands while relaxing at home or at work. He offers a form of escapism in the form of beauty and virtuoso technique while at the same time undercutting that release. This ‘reality trip’ occurs not so much through the descriptive properties of his painting as through the eventual dawning of the initial context through word of mouth or reading – gradually eroding the built-in mental distance. The beguiling works become disturbing.

How significant that is I’m not sure. The visual appeal of the work dominates, and while perhaps a sense of helplessness is caused by the enormity of these disasters, or feelings of guilt at one’s own comfortable privilege or security, ultimately nothing changes except perhaps personal contributions to aid relief.

Perhaps that is enough, and the precise point. That is all that can be expected, for the work is not just about manual finesse but a meditation on economic and geographic separation, and the psychology of an art-lover's self-awareness.

Work titles in descending order: Mosque; Princess Ashika; Legazpi; Forensics; Thursday January 7, 2010, Page A3; Tuesday January 19, 2010, Page A12.

Running out of time

Darryn George: Rarohiko
Gow Langsford
28 April - 22 May 2010

With this new Gow Langsford exhibition Darryn George carries on with some compositional aspects of the ‘abstract’ wall painting that he presented last December at Te Tuhi. With that work the image (entitled Rehita) could be described as a diagrammatic drawing of a bookcase, with books lying on their sides on its shelves.

George is interested in systems of knowledge and how cultures accumulate and store it. With Rarohiko (the Maori word for computer) there are similarities to the earlier show but the ‘Maori’ red is mostly gone, as is the wide airy flat space. Instead the motifs are stacked on top of each other within a boxlike computer screen and allude to systems of stored files (digital or in cabinets) or to tabs attached to folders.

The alignment of space within each work varies. Sometimes it is conventional perspective, occasionally aerial perspective, now and then orthogonal. The same sized rectangular tabs are stacked vertically, or descend moving to the bottom right, or else they recede. There is a sense of these precisely arranged oblongs being symbols for containers of information.

With the Countdown series there is a focus on ten recited numbers that seems a tribute to McCahon’s 1965 Numerals series, plus a visual tip of the hat to the English Gothic ‘Gang-patch’ lettering of Shane Cotton and perhaps the delicate ink drawings of John Bevan Ford.

As the title states, George here is using a line of small canvases to list their numbers backwards in diminishing denominations. He is not using them to surprise the eye with unexpected placements (as McCahon might do) - only showing them decreasing within a sequenced row. This creates a sense of the apocalyptic.

There is an abstract distancing with this predetermined arrangement, supplemented by a pulse of alternating red and black footers and the alternating arepa/omeka (alpha/omega) names of Jesus from the Book of Revelations. They are ominous whilst also decorative. Furthermore the subtle (though I suspect coincidental) optical mixing of finely linear coloured koru forms in their backgrounds introduces a pleasing chance component – makes the work less icy and more spontaneous.

I think the Rarohiko canvases work better than the more intricate, much smaller Countdown paintings. Their size has more impact, while the varied experiments with a stark compositional layout and the ideas about digital information storage - blended with traditional Maori motifs - are more satisfying and unique.

What is interesting is the tension created by George’s presentation of these two series together. One type seems to be about building a better future through the accumulation of knowledge, and the other is saying that time is running out, that the benefits of using such knowledge may never get the chance to be appreciated. George might be referring to the planet’s ecological demise or he might be thinking of The Second Coming. Perhaps both.

Self-referential Killeen bores

Richard Killeen: The Presence of Objects
Ivan Anthony
21 April -22 May 2010

This quite large show of Richard Killeen’s digitally inked paper prints and larger canvas ‘paintings’, occupies both ends of the Ivan Anthony Gallery. These ‘objects’ reference many parts of his very varied career, particularly his earlier cut-outs, those silhouetted single-coloured shapes (1978-81) designed to be hung side by side within compositionally arranged groups created by the exhibition hanger.

With these recycled images now being fixed in position within portable rectangles - juxtaposed, overlaid or sometimes bodily interwoven - the metallic looking, computer-rendered forms look as if they have been made with an airbrush. Gone are the flat monochromatic primary or black hues: these have a sheen and are often mottled. Absent also are the thin, perpendicular in cross-section, edges of each shape. The drawn contours curve over into the top plane like a sanded bevel, and accentuate the shapes’ highly ornamental properties as animals, utensils or plants, with painted highlights added. They look like decals found on heavy industrial machinery.

The shapes thus are softly rounded, with no spiky geometry or threatening sharp edges – and are always accompanied by fuzzy shadows so that they have a thickness. The shallow tray-like space, because it references the wall on which the cut-outs were hung, though illusionist, is a vaguely modernist picture plane that repudiates the depth of his other digital, more densely packed and highly decorative images.

The hermetic reflexivity of Killeen’s practice has been going on for some time now, going round and round, spiralling in on itself. Sometimes it leads to fresh, unexpected surprises; on other occasions he seems too preoccupied with his own umbilicus, and the work (for Killeen – one of the indisputably great NZ artists of the seventies and eighties) becomes disappointingly tired.

Here you can see the artist’s mind ticking over with new spatial and stylistic treatments of his image–bank but the constant revamping is now becoming lacklustre. I visited this show with excited anticipation, because Killeen is an artist with an exceptionally interesting painting history, and he of course knows he has that drawing power. However there are signs within this self-referential exhibition that the work is getting jaded, too conceptually repetitive. He needs to escape from his standard now over-utilised repertoire, take a holiday, and start reinventing.

David Cross visits New Plymouth

John Reynolds
Nomadology: Loitering With Intent
Curated by Rhana Devenport
Govett-Brewster Art Gallery
27 March - June 13

Standing on the pavement of the White Hart Hotel in New Plymouth looking at John Reynolds’ LED road sign I was flummoxed. Flashing in front of me were repetitive textual bytes that listed a litany of dead philosophers and the ways in which they had died. It was hard to view the sign in the late afternoon light and the passing cars would barely have sensed its presence, but this was not ultimately what troubled me.

Having spent a few hours grappling with Reynolds' many and varied interrogations of the discursive permutations of text in art, I had become inured to the potential power/value of the texts. Song lyrics, New Plymouth street names, the index to Deleuze and Guattari’s A Thousand Plateaus, writing on the Middle East conflict by Robert Fiske, these were just some of the many and varied sources for the artist’s various artistic iterations. Ambitious in scope, and demonstrating a heightened level of cultural capital, the exhibition looked slick and savvy but ultimately the nagging question was what greater purpose did these textual meanderings serve?

Reynolds’ sweep through philosophy, popular culture, New Zealand art history and the New Plymouth vernacular in the fourteen works on show suggested a firm belief in the possibility of synthesising eclectic content around his signature aesthetic/sensibility. The Reynolds touch - his distinctive graphic style and refined use of language - more than a broader coherent critical schema, was seen as the requisite glue to pull the show together. Dexterous as he is as a painter, it is the absence of a larger programme that makes this major survey flaccid. It’s as if the artist has constructed a range of discrete sketches across a multiplicity of fronts believing that that the sum will somehow equal the parts. The cult of personality angle was certainly perpetuated in the galleries supporting material where the artist is described as a ‘trickster’. Yet it is hard to see where in Nomadology: Loitering with Intent Reynolds disobeys normal rules and conventional behavior. Mixing philosophy, politics, street names and the lyrics to an AC/DC song seems to this writer to be a recipe for a very trickster-lite identity at best.

Reynolds is too sunny to be a trickster and certainly too family friendly. His excursion into participatory art Hells Bells, gave the audience an opportunity to make their own sentences from lyrical fragments of an assortment of songs used by the America military to torture detainees. While an acerbic political statement, the caustic undertone was largely usurped by the relational setup and candy coloured modules. Of course this sharp incongruity was the point of the work, but in a room with mariachi lighting and every street name in New Plymouth chalked on the surrounding walls, the statement was buried in an overload of signifying systems. Everywhere you looked the artist was riffing on something different, the phenomena of twitter in Twitterature: The Iliad by Homer, a meditation on the Arabian Nights, the vagaries of acronyms. Each had at least a kernel of interest as a discrete component but experienced as a whole the effect was one of conceptual pot pourri. While the artist clearly loves the elusive possibility of words I found myself beginning to doubt their capacity for any real profundity. Juxtaposing so many different literary modes against one another rendered them flatly equivalent, making it harder to care about both the edgier political dimensions, or the fandom obsessions of a rock band’s set list.

The best work in the show was the least demonstrative, allowing Reynolds to use his modular modality to its best effect. Birdsong (Corner of King and Queen) consisted of small monochrome canvases with clearly prefaced drips of paint, stacked floor to ceiling. The work played cleverly with the architecture of the gallery linking the bottom and top spaces together while also building a compelling connection with the rectangular component of Len Lye’s rectangular kinetic sculpture Trilogy. The work spoke volumes about the languages of painting, architecture and their assorted materialities without requiring a single word to preface its meaning.

It says a lot about the Govett-Brewster’s belief in John Reynolds’ standing that not only did he secure the majority of the gallery spaces, he did so to mark the 40th anniversary celebration. This was something of a missed opportunity. Perhaps a smaller, tighter showing of his work in tandem with other connected practitioners might have been a better bet. Failing that at least a much tighter curatorial focus was required so that there was significantly more coherent intent to the artist’s loitering.

The above photographs were taken by Patrick Reynolds. In descending order these installation images are as follows:
1. 1001 Nights 2010 (detail). 2. To Die Laughing 2010.
3. To Die Laughing 2010 at the Govett-Brewster hits 40 pARTy. 4. Foreground: Works End 2008. Background Nomadology 2009. 5. & 6. Hells Bells 2010. 7. John Reynolds working on By The Roads And Fields 2010. Photographs courtesy of the Sue Crockford Gallery, Starkwhite, the Govett-Brewster Art Gallery, the photographer and the artist.

Kate Brettkelly-Chalmers looks at last week's Week of Goodness

Living Room 2010: A Week of Goodness
Various outdoor sites in Auckland's CBD
9 - 17 April 2010

Public art can be a tricky enterprise. Buoyed by the noble premise of engaging the masses, it can succumb to the pitfalls of pernicious advertising, forcing an unsuspecting public to see stuff that they might not want to. Art in civic spaces boasts a medley of different audiences each with their own motives and opinions when it comes to what we see in our daily commuter walks or sit-in-the-sun lunch breaks. Which is why the Auckland City Council’s Living Room project, an annual weeklong series of performative events that is now in its fifth year, should not be greeted with the kind of apathy or indifference it often engenders.

A Week of Goodness is the title of this year’s Living Room series, curated for the second time by the Council’s public art manager Pontus Kyander. Citing the Surrealist Max Ernst’s 1934 series of collaged books, Une Semaine de Bonte, this programme of performances and film screenings is said to explore notions of ‘giving and kindness’ in civic squares around the central city.

This altruistic theme relates somewhat tenuously to Ernst’s strange and intriguing collages—surreal fantasy scenes the artist constructed from clippings of pulp novel and encyclopedia illustrations. It is also difficult to see a purposeful correlation between these ideas and the Living Room performances themselves, at least the ones I witnessed.

Nevertheless, Kyander’s commitment to developing temporary public art projects and engaging international artists is strongly evident in this year’s programme. The curator has brought together a somewhat chaotic selection of artists and choreographers, both from New Zealand and abroad, to collaborate and produce performances.

Located in the fountains of Freyberg Place, Isobel Dryburgh and artist/dancer Mark Harvey’s project Beige involved a group of people clad in cardboard boxes dancing to a gradually sped up version of Tom Jones’ You Can Leave Your Hat On. The performance was invitingly anarchic—cardboard boxes got delightfully drenched, bits dropped off the dancers’ costumes, and the considerable crowd giggled at Jones’ ominously languid vocals.

Sarah Jane Parton’s audience also responded with tentative chuckles to her piece The Collection III. Parton staged her performance amongst the kauri trees of QEII Square where piles of snow had been dumped either side of a wooden walkway. A group of people dressed as giant fruit played nursery games while two children dutifully recited a sketchy version of Chariots of Fire on their recorders. Nearby, bored teenaged girls wearing 80s ball gown dresses sat on benches listening iPods.

I have a hunch that Parton knew it was school holidays and, while adult audience members tittered somewhat nervously, their kids took charge of the scene relentlessly grabbing handfuls of snow to throw at the giant fruit. Chaos ensued: the giant fruit returned a hail of snowballs, the young musicians giggled into their recorders and the teenaged girls managed to look even more disinterested.

Both Parton and Dryburgh/Harvey’s charmingly kooky works were reminiscent of fringe-festival performances. It was fun to see such playful and quirky activities occurring in ordinarily straight-laced public squares. Nevertheless, these artists and their participants had none of the street-savvy of fringe-festival performers or buskers—they basically didn’t know how to work a crowd.

I was reminded of bands like Auckland’s Golden Axe or Evil Ocean whose seemingly ad-hoc style of makeshift show biz is underpinned by an engagement with their audience. Watching these aimlessly rambling Living Room performances I couldn’t help but wish that at some point Evil Ocean’s Liz Maw would turn up dressed in her God outfit. I wanted a grander kind of theatre and a greater commitment to the drama and incongruity of it all.

Lilibeth Cuenca Rasmussen did not fare much better. After seeing a video of hers in Mash Up at ARTSPACE last year I was excited to attend her performance The Future is already way behind the Present doesn't exist in my Mind…. Having already staged this as a solo piece at several international venues, Cuenca Rasmussen collaborated with performer Charles Koroneho and extended the show to include a large troupe of dancers from Unitec’s School of Performing and Screen Arts.

The result was a full-scale sound and light performance that involved Cuenca Rasmussen singing passages of contemporary feminist prose while dressed in a cleverly designed skin-tight lycra costume. Her hour-long show was a concoction of theatre, female sexuality and slow-paced endurance performance. It drew on an assortment of genres reminding me variously of Grace Jones music videos, brazen Peaches gigs and Warwick Broadhead costumed spectaculars. While this collision of performative tropes might sound quite exciting its unpolished execution ultimately left me somewhat indifferent. I couldn’t help but think of the Smokefree Stage Quest, the annual high school performing arts competition.

Unfortunately, none of the Living Room performances I experienced left an impression that went beyond an initial amused chuckle. For the most part artists treated their allotted civic space as a bare stage on which to present their activities and this inspired a somewhat superficial experience. The sometimes contentious history and current social use of Auckland’s public plazas offers an artistic potential that none of these artists chose to engage with.

Although Cuenca Rasmussen’s gleaming white costumes were notably juxtaposed against the formal plaza of St Patrick’s Square, I didn’t see the need to have these works performed in outdoor public spaces at all—they would have had a comparable effect in a theatre or gallery. Ultimately, an opportunity was missed to develop performances that were richer than the brief fanciful strangeness they engendered.

Nevertheless, the superficial impression I was left with may have been due to the lack of contextual information offered for each artist and performance. I would love to know how Parton’s The Collection III related to her previous ‘Collection’ performances that took place in locations as diverse as Rarotonga and Christchurch. Was her choice of Auckland’s QEII Square significant in relation to these other venues? Did kids throw snow at giant fruit in balmy Rarotonga?

What the Living Room series seriously lacked is the publicity machine employed by One Day Sculpture, the similar series of temporary art projects that took place across the country during 2008 and 2009. The latter’s yearlong series of projects was promoted through a deluge of advertising. From txts and emails to postcards and a fantastically organized website, One Day Sculpture covered as many forms of media as it could to publicize its single day events.

Although the better part of their budget would have been funnelled into this advertising hyperbole (and away from individual art projects), One Day Sculpture successfully garnered a greater public engagement with their projects. The point here is that our conception of ‘public space’ is no longer limited to physical sites. To successfully exist in the wider public realm art projects must also exist in the virtual realm, in web and media based platforms. In this regard, the Living Room series holds onto an overly confined vision of the public sphere that works to the great detriment of both audiences and artists. Hopefully next year they will finally get it right.

Scrolling down, most of the photographs are by Rebekah Robinson. The third and fourth however are by Kate Brettkelly Chalmers.

Andrew Paul Wood goes GalleryGallery-Gallery visiting

GalleryGallery-Gallery
SOFA Gallery
Christchurch
until 16 May 2010

Some ideas, like Freddy Kruger, shoulder pads or a dodgy curry, just seem to keep coming back again and again. GalleryGallery is a portable scaled down 2.4x1.6m white cube conceived as a guerrilla (a word that sets my teeth on edge) intervention by Christchurch artist Matt Akehurst. Since March 2009 GalleryGallery has been popping up around the South Island like a mushroom, hosting a number of (mostly student) artists in its mock mini gallery, and even poetry readings and live music performances.

The project has been something of a mixed bag; some engagements have been witty and engaging, while others have seemed little more than half-arsed opportunism. My personal favourite deployment was OpeningOpening at the University of Canterbury School of Fine Arts where for opening night it became a bar (and let’s face it, isn’t that the main reason two thirds of people go to gallery openings anyway?) but I have to say that it’s concluding incarnation GalleryGallery-Gallery at Christchurch’s SOFA Gallery left me rather cold.

The gallery space is abruptly curtailed by a nicely joined wall and short flight of stairs. The door leads to GalleryGallery itself, which overlooks the now hermetically blocked off gallery space like a duck hide or a tree house – or perhaps even the Seraglio of the Ottoman sultans. The lights go on... And the lights go off... Like the famous Martin Creed work played at half speed and just as ephemeral. On. Off. On. Off. I think they used to do similar things to prisoners at Guantanamo Bay.

To be fair, it is beautifully constructed with a very nice wooden floor, and should Akehurst ever grow weary of being a struggling artist he can always fall back on carpentry, but the idea of ‘guerrilla gallery interventions’ into the white cube is hardly a new one and back in the 1970s when it was fashionable to equate being successful to selling out it was pretty much done to death. Every generation of students seems to feel the need to raise the floor, move the walls around or build partitions. Even the idea of a portable container that can be transported around as an ad hoc venue, whether it be called a pod, a capsule, a kiosk or whatever, has been the staple of Arts Festivals, Biennials and Triennials for decades.

Even back in 2002 when Maurizio Cattelan unleashed The Wrong Gallery on New York, and later Sergei Jensen’s Waiting Room in Berlin, 2006, the concept was getting a little tired. One can also talk about artists like Daniela Brahm, Markus Draper, Anton Henning, and that’s just Germany. It may even ultimately go back to the sort of enclosures Joseph Beuys used to fashion in gallery spaces in order to act like a bit of a side show twat with a coyote. Unless you are a claustrophobe, there is a womb-like security in such odd little hermitages – something we learn the first time we made a tent by throwing a sheet over two chairs as a child.

Of course Akehurst is being ironic – how could it be otherwise – but by stripping it of its collaborative trappings it seems about as much of an experience as the Orana Park giraffe feeding platform without the giraffes. An empty gallery is not really much of a metaphor in a context where Marcel Duchamp had been playing around with similar ideas a century earlier. Meta-meta-art goes off quicker than milk that’s been left out of the fridge overnight.

So, if you know something about the history post-modernist art, you feel a little blasé. If you are a tourist off the street who doesn’t know what the gallery looks like in the first place it is somewhat meaningless. If you don’t know anything about the history of these kinds of interventions, you are not going to get the irony of the references. It feels something of a letdown after an entertaining journey.

Or perhaps it is an appropriately poignant and elegiac retirement of a worn-out warhorse, and I salute it. As one might imagine, in that reduced space opening night was like the Black Hole of Calcutta.

Images courtesy of the artist.