e y e C O N T A C T

Daivd Cross is intrigued by the Mangano Twins in Wellington

2009-11-11T16:31:00.000-08:00

Gabriella and Silvana Mangano
Square 2, Wellington City Gallery
Curated by Andrea Bell
19 October - 15 November 2009

If…so…then, DVD, 2006 duration 7 minutes 44 seconds
Falling Possibilities, DVD, 2009 duration 20 minutes 30 seconds looped

I am as guilty as the next person in often treating the Square 2 screens at City Gallery as entranceway eye candy. It’s partly the glare that bounces off the monitors during daylight hours that renders sustained viewing challenging and there is also the not insignificant issue of wind literally pushing you in to the more hermetic confines of the gallery foyer. While not the carefully sanitised environment we often expect for engaging with video, Square 2 has been quietly developing a more ambitious programme under the direction of Abby Cunnane and the recent work has warranted pushing through the discomfort barrier.

Melbourne-based curator Andrea Bell has put together a suite of works by Australian artists, including Gabriella and Silvana Mangano and Laresa Kosloff whose practices while based in video have strongly performative bases. While Kosloff’s work is yet to screen, there is a very interesting overlay of her quietly manic abstract sculptures invaded by human bodies with the Mangano sisters’ deceptively simple choreographed actions. Both involve the performance of acts in which the artist’s (Kosloff, hidden underneath her Ellsworth Kelly inspired costumes) are front and centre. What also connects these projects is the idea of performance as an activity heavily mediated by rules, guidelines and, crucially, constraints, leading to the staging of repetitive actions where there is a genuine tension between individual agency and instrumentality.

The Mangano sisters are twins who over a series of works since 2002 have investigated the im/possibilities of shared agency in the undertaking of certain tasks and gestures. Each work re-presents a basic setup of a stationary camera documenting in a completely straightforward way, their choreographed routines. In If…so…then, the sisters face off each other in a constrained corridor space. Dressed identically and with drawing implements in both hands they perform a series of movements that are part experimental dance, part gestural drawing and part adolescent girls’ playground game. The routine/process they enact is very compelling based on the curious symmetry of two ‘identical’ people mirroring each others action. Added to this is the fact that they are very good at seamlessly working together to make the routine flow. Very good but crucially, not perfect.

While it is easy to get lost in the rhythm of ducking, weaving and mark making, what is most interesting are the glitches, albeit small, in timing and movement. Undertaken in silence, the sisters watch each others actions with great concentration but like any synchronised activity small fissures of difference are continually woven into the system. The profundity of the work is that these small deviations - and they are very small - highlight subtle differences in each personality in the form of slightly different timing, touch and confidence. The sisterly dynamic is performed for us and it is fascinating catching the barest filaments of difference.

Falling Possibilities 2009 extends the investigation of choreographed action and drawing in space but with a more refined aesthetic. In this recent work the artists use a length of soft tape to move in and out of each other’s space almost as if they are weaving fabric. Unlike If…so…then which has a slightly gritty quality through its black and white, this work employs chiaroscuro for dramatic effect. While it does not play out the full suite of Baroque bells and whistles, the result is still suitably theatrical.

Yet in refining the aesthetic, the work is more formal and less psychologically tense than its predecessor. The ideas of shared decision making and Pollock-like gestural perfomativity are still there but it feels too refined. It is as if their increasingly honed working method has started to buff the rawer edges and they have at the same time become better at disguising the compelling idiosyncrasies prevalent in earlier pieces. Perhaps it is because they have a schtick, not a formula as such but a tight field of investigation that it is increasingly hard to unfold new layers. It will be interesting to see how they continue to explore what is a narrow but compelling premise for interrogating the idea of authorship.

Images are from top to bottom are from If…so…then (2009) and Falling Possibilities (2009). Courtesy the artists and City Gallery, Wellington.)

Captain Oates comes to Rangipo

2009-11-11T15:57:00.000-08:00

S J Ramir: Journeys
Orexart
25 October - 14 November, 2009

Kiwiborn Melbourne-based video artist S J Ramir is presenting three short digital loops at ORex – using two plasma screens and one wall projection - and a row of eight framed 6 x 8 inch stills. Ramir is rapidly acquiring an international following. He works in the bleak landscape tradition developed by European filmmakers like Tarkovsky, Sokorov, Bergman and more recently Albert Serra, specialising in lonely figures of indeterminate gender slowly wandering in blizzardlike conditions through a hostile environment. Occasionally a silhouette of a building or quarry machinery looms up, or poles or other people. The mood is constant repetition, frustration and despair. Often filmed in the central North Island.

There is no music behind this emotionally intense but slow moving imagery. Only howling winds, some distant aircraft sounds, and muffled percussive thumping. The blurry colour is a dark greeny black with whispers of umber. The bleary distorted imagery is like that of very old film: constantly flickering, its contours undulating. Though solid, the barren ground ripples like the sea.

These grainy or misty films are clearly about mental states and connect with writers like Handke, Bernhard or Beckett in their sense of withdrawn psychic isolation. Yet they are not savagely excoriating. They deal in a plodding impedance of movement and are Romantic in the way this steadfast determination is accompanied by inner loneliness.

Distinguishing between the three films, The Passage has a solo figure struggled through a misty landscape, encountering the occasional shed. Departure is much more Pointillist, using clouds of tiny vertical bar bars that hover around the blobby figure like blowflies - higher in contrast and more abstract through the loss of middle tones (alluding also to those ghastly human silhouettes of atomised people found in Nagasaki), plus more shots of clouds and wind blowing through open fields. Our Voices Are Mute on the other hand has a line of eight meandering stragglers in a dusty haze, and the occasional little ghostly building glowing within looming dark hills.

This is a sensual atmospheric show, but not the overwhelming experience you'd get with say, Susan Norrie or Daniel Crooks, where the architecture of the space is seriously modified for their presentation. Two of the three Ramir moving images are small, and would be more effective if made more bodily immersive. Even the framed stills seem a little cramped, too much like domestic photos and not sufficiently like movie images. Nevertheless, it is exciting that Orexart has brought Ramir’s work to Auckland. It’s emotional and it's haunting, and it’s well worth a visit.

From top to bottom, the images are from The Passage (2009), Departure (2007), and Our Voices are Mute (2008).

Mark Amery reports on the big Wayne Youle survey at Pataka

2009-11-11T03:36:00.000-08:00

Wayne Youle: 10 Down – A Survey Exhibition
Pataka Museum of Arts and Cultures, Porirua
Until 15 November

Rather than establish and then explore an aesthetic, Wayne Youle established a character - an identity and a role - which over the ten years his survey exhibition at Pataka covers, he has continued to play-act out and play up to.

Youle has refused to let any statement become three dimensional – all his works are like signs to be pushed over – as if he were a marksman taking target practice on a cardboard dummy. In Have You Seen This Man? (Why Yes in His Studio) from 2004 as cheap poster he presents rows of bad identikit images of his face with a range of wanted statements: ‘Wanted for being a shit stirrer’, ‘ Wanted for the apparent copying of some other artists fucking style’ ‘Wanted for impersonating a Maori artist’, Wanted for impersonating a Maori’ etc.

In actual fact the only person accusing him of anything is himself – his is a self-referential game using ploys long-used up in their offence value by other artists. A fantail perches on the head of an upended Walters’ koru stick. Tiki are presented in a range of colours as lollipops (are Rangi Kipa’s brightly coloured corian tikis still the rage?), Ricky Swallow’s skulls are also represented as lollipops - brought neatly into touch with the appropriation and collection of preserved Maori heads, mokomokai. Yet Youle’s touch is often as delightful, light and musical as that of the fantail.

Youle’s work is so very noughties (this is the most of-its-time survey show I can recall seeing) – what one can build with the empty husks of what others have left you. His recent eyeball constructions are clever DNA models that suggest the only personal aesthetic he has is one of treating the work of others like lego brick building blocks. Recently he’s extended that by making family crests from assemblages of others’ icons (notably from a constant influence over ten years, Peter Robinson). In a time when familiar objects and icons have been coming at us digitally faster and more repetitively, Youle has been a man to put a spin on it. With a furious Warholian work ethic, he’s our pop artist of the decade.

His aesthetic is slick and thin – like his pop art parent Dick Frizzell he relies on impeccable design technique, and on moving with the speed and wit of the adman: unapologetically and overtly picking over others’ ideas, and spinning them into smart, flat new combinations.

He plays at being the student – imitating, mixing and matching. This survey is a room of bold experiments, with few limits on the media or style he’ll co-opt. One of his favourite motifs (borrowed from another favoured teacher Michael Parekowhai) is the brightly-coloured Cuisenaire rod, used in the Atarangi method of teaching Maori. Like a very smart secondary school art portfolio, he acknowledges others have already broken the ground and that his job is to makes stamps of identity out of the familiar. One particularly throwaway work here is entitled Parekowhai Park, and I couldn’t help muse that if you wanted to design a contemporary New Zealand art themepark (a miniput course perhaps) Youle would be your first port of call.

There’s nothing remotely deep about a Wayne Youle show. In fact he delights in being profoundly shallow – bringing the contemporary into the realm of the popular. It’s all about surface and shadows. About being able to skate quickly across a slick surface to find fresh takes on the familiar and, like Peter Pan’s shadow, connect the man with the freewheeling imaginative playfulness of the boy. Youle fiddles with things and makes toys and emblems of them.

The arrangement of this survey is smart and says a lot about Youle’s practice. The work is numerous and arranged salon-like, swarming across the walls. It’s reminiscent of the cut and paste cornucopia of the internet - Youle’s own intranet. Just as Youle flattens his sources into placemats, this arrangement refuses to give shape or order to his oeuvre. It amounts to a wall of caught, mounted and stuffed trophies of the collector (a crest mounted set of plastic antlers features in one work, a wall of mokomokai in another).

Then again it could also be the photographs on the back wall of the marae, building on one of my favourite of Youle’s works, 12 Shades of Bullshit (featured in Prospect 2004). Here cameo images of Maori and Pakeha are thrown up flattened to blank shadows on the wall, as if from as slide projector, but in varying shades of brown. Like a dozen other works in this show, this piece demonstrates Youle can step outside of himself sometimes and deliver works with more complex resonances. Some of his most successful works are the less self-referential.

Another analogy for the exhibition hang is the tattoo parlour, with Youle the tattooist appropriating designs and grounding them in popular culture. In this way at its heart Youle’s work is about what we wear as badges of identity. Another favourite of his early work (with several featured here) is a series of brightly coloured Miss Maori New Zealand sashes – Miss Kaikohe 1974, Miss Waimangaroa 1955 - laid out like kowhaiwhai and American abstractionists stripes on the wall (or perhaps the fly curtain going into the fish’n’chip shop).

Presenting quantity over quality (there must be 100 works here) feels intrinsically part of Youle’s practice. You could make a show of brilliance out of this free for all, but he’s probably elected not to be edited. The survey constantly cheekily disrupts gallery expectations – acting like a 21st century advertiser in providing pop up messages in unexpected places.

That means there’s plenty of sloppy work here too. The recent large painting Stay Still… Don’t Move is simply stencil art painted up badly large. Other works like the video work Night Crawler goes off in new directions with little strong effect beyond clever craft. Much of Youle’s dalliances with photography I find ineffectual and unoriginal – from the misty ode to his maunga (a rip off of Natalie Robertson) to action figures copulating (perhaps a reference to his birth as a kind of toy action-man artist, knocking out work based on pre-existing models). Cruising the suburban streets, you sense in the past Youle’s been too busy moving onto the next thing to look back.

A school report statement in a recent work suggests Youle also is prepared to own such an approach: “Wayne shows an interest and flair for arts and crafts. His skill with macaroni and glitter is excellent. He has papermaché ability beyond compare’. This is stenciled large on hessian canvas, with a nod in its flat dry wit to Ronnie Van Hout. Yet it has an honest intelligence and wit that continues to tickle me.

A knockout recent solo show at Suite Gallery which is well represented here and which I’ve previously reviewed suggests however he’s been hitting the mark with increasing strength, able to balance different elements and ideas with more accomplishment. It’ll be interesting to see where Youle goes in the next ten years. In that whirl of borrowed imagery and cheap shots there’s a genuine interest in the complexity of truth and what we identify in.

Contesting finality

2009-11-10T17:24:00.000-08:00

Julian Dashper
Sue Crockford
3 November - 22 November 2009

The eight works here from the late Julian Dashper are in a display he organised to close on Sunday November the 22nd - the same time that the 2009 Venice Biennale shuts down. This is because several of his works focus on a theme he established with a video made for a Film Archive exhibition in February. It records a sideways view down a darkened Venetian lane during the last 15 seconds of the previous Biennale. Dashper probably realised the current presentation would be a posthumous show, for there is a black, rueful humour in its ‘lastness’ fixation. The Biennale snippet he clearly saw as a grim simile for himself; these brief works, for the last few months of his life.

A possible sequence of the list of works goes like this. We have the Film Archive work – Untitled (the last 15 seconds of the last Venice Biennale) – a DVD. Then another DVD, Untitled (the last second of the last Venice Biennale), plus a clear 12 inch record of that same last second. And another related clear record, Untitled (Leaving Venice).

There is also a framed record cover of a third, unseen record, Untitled (Persuasive Percussion). The shape of that cover is mimicked by the three paintings on stretchers, lined up on one wall.

I much prefer these three paintings to the other ‘time’ work because they help the artist get away from himself. They let him forget he is Julian Dashper who is dying. Instead he is having fun with language, for the titles and carefully worded information in the catalogue listings are their point, not what’s on the wall.

Two of these paintings are identical twins, with identical tiles (Untitled) and both described as ‘acrylic on canvas’. However one has extra information. It is also described as ‘black on white square’ - suggesting the square canvas was painted white first, and then the internal, black, six-sided shape imposed. With its replica, the inner form could have been painted before the outside one, or simultaneously. Different processes at work: different sequences of paint application.

The third painting swaps tones within the application procedure to become ‘white on black square’. Its paint applied by Dashper himself or a tradesperson. It doesn’t matter. The preposition and the adjectives are the point. It is a foil to the second work, visually and in tonal details of process, as it is a different sort of method to the first.

These three paintings, with their interest in negative / presence, become parallels for LP covers that remain when the loved records they usually protect have gone. Artworks that make us wonder about their creator long after his driving ‘persuasively percussive’ life is over.

HMS on the Shin exhibition debate

2009-11-10T01:06:00.000-08:00

mdickie asks about the Terry Urbahn film

2009-11-09T23:21:00.000-08:00

Here is a review by Andrew Paul Wood of XXXXX XXXXXXXX's latest show in Christchurch

2009-11-08T21:31:00.000-08:00

A great Place For boats Except in SW Winds
XXXXX XXXXXXXX
The Physics Room
21 October - 15 November 2009

The exhibition A Great Place for Boats Except in SW Winds at The Physics Room presents itself as an obscuratan enigma – the artist’s name is blacked out, but given the quasi-Beuysian use of asphalt, various Duchamp references, and the use of woven video tape leads me to confidently attribute the exhibition to Christchurch artist Scott Flanagan, who seems to be placing himself in the bloodline of Dada and Surrealism.

A Great Place consists of three separate installations that echo each other in the found/improvised nature and general poverty of their materials, and the autodidactically emphatic philosophical themes. The premise is straightforward enough: a self-referential meditation on the semiotics of communicating ideas. Art about art, by any other name, and a refutation of the history of modern art as conceived and presented as a chronological progression of enshrined stylistic innovations. That kind of deterministic and axiomatic teleology has no place in this show.

The smallest of these is The Uncarved Philosopher – a full black polythene rubbish bag (presumably filled with rubbish) perched on an ad hoc plinth of wood and chipboard discards. This is perhaps the least successful work, being that it is the bluntest and Flanagan is usually more subtle and thoughtful. It is uncertain whether this is meant to suggest that “all philosophy is bunk”, or the truth that philosophers from Plato to Heidegger carry some very unpleasant political baggage. It is, however, possible that this is some sort of parody of the earnestness of the European avant-garde of the early twentieth century – such groan-inducing puns were fairly typical of Dada. Indeed, the overall effect of the exhibition is as an individualised mend-and-make-do No. 8 wire variation on Kurt Schwitters’ Merzbau.

Codex is the large installation in the centre of the gallery space, an inverted raft (an Antipodean reference perchance?) constructed from refuse and suspended from the ceiling. The sail is woven from shredded texts and an ocean of sorts is alluded to by the complex woven grid of glossy black video tape stuck down to the gallery floor (rumoured to be old VHS porno) with pragmatic sticky tape – the resulting interference patterns give the impression of a crossword puzzle (a motif Flanagan used very successfully in works from earlier in the decade). Clearly this random information, rendered in inaccessible but suggestively ordered formats, has a symbolic value in the work. A codex is a primer key for ordering information, so perhaps this raft represents the fallibility of any attempt to apply order to apparently random and arbitrary information – but that is purely speculation on my part.

Against the far wall rests the third component work The Sign Laid Bare by its Logic, Even. The title is an obvious reference to Marcel Duchamp’s The Bride Stripped Bare By Her Bachelors (the “Large Glass”. The work consists of a large, deliciously tactile asphalt surface supported on a wooden armature. At the top of this structure is a photographic triptych depicting a book open on a passage about Colin McCahon, a demolition site – perhaps whence some of the materials used in these works were sourced, and some abandoned rail tracks. Scrawled across the asphalt like graffiti are the words “Ceci n'est pas Rrose Sélavy”. This is obviously an allusion to the Belgian Surrealist René Magritte’s painting La trahison des images (1928/9) – ‘the treachery of images’, depicting a tobacco pipe with the inscription “Ceci n’est pas une pipe”, ‘this is not a pipe’. It wasn’t a pipe, but a naturalistic painting of a pipe – an image, and The Sign Laid Bare is clearly not Rrose Sélavy or by Rrose Sélavy.

Rrose Sélavy was a drag persona adopted by Marcel Duchamp (it sounds like “Eros, c’est la vie” or ‘Eros, such is life’ in French, get it? Or possibly even “arroser la vie” –‘to make a toast to life’) in 1921, a pseudonym under which he constructed several assemblages. Flanagan (assuming of course that he is the artist) similarly has, in the past, adopted personae to work under (their names being anagrams of his own), and would appear to be constructing a genealogy for his own assemblages with Duchamp as an ancestor. And Magritte as well, for that matter, though more in terms of the Belgian’s impeccable semiotic logic rather than his style or medium. The juxtaposition strikes me as deliberately sophomoric.

It is quite possible that these allusions are simply pegs to hang the formal elements from, and that I am reading far too much into the references. On one level the Chinese Box-like system of allusions, the distancing mechanisms and feints are somewhat frustrating for the viewer – especially as they require a specialization of knowledge that would confound even the expert. At the most basic visual level, this ludic irreverence is irrelevant to appreciating the work in a purely formal way, especially Codex – which is fun and engaging at the immediate visual level – and The Sign Laid Bare – which is very attractive as an assemblage with an innovative use of materials without worrying too much about what it might mean.

Ultimately this is a skillful union of art, avant-garde history, popular culture and quotidian object. While from a future perspective these are unlikely to be among the major works in the artist’s oeuvre, at the same time they are a significant achievement, and suggest the high standards that the artist imposes on himself.

(Thanks to The Physics Room for the above images, and the photographer Mark Gore.

Love is just a four lettered word

2009-11-08T17:31:00.000-08:00

Derrick Cherrie
Starkwhite
2 November - 28 November 2009

Derrick Cherrie is most well known for his series of witty furniture sculptures (Supraluxe Suite,1992) that slickly blended beds, swimming pools and gymnasium accoutrements into hybrid, body-sized, fetish objects. (The funniest, most entertaining sculptures ever created in this country, in my opinion.) His new show at Starkwhite’s backroom annex is infinitely more serious, though in parts, hinting he still has his tongue firmly in his cheek.

Framed two dimensional collages, with a surprisingly raw and gritty finish, these wall images make acerbic comments on the institution of marriage as perpetuated by romantic love – more specifically its commodification. The six works on paper, made with glossy pages from bridal gown catalogues, cigarettes, plastic gold-sprayed chains, and rendered peace logos and cagelike trellises, give out hard-hitting messages - firmly rejecting ideals of eternal conjugal devotion. The notion of a continuing partnership is rejected not so much for widely accepted, commonsense reasons like the fact that people change, but because for it to succeed, it involves the attendant proviso of male compromise.

The work seems antifeminist because there is no woman’s voice expressed. KING is an oft repeated noun here, and in one work, behind a heart of chain are the words HE WEARS. It seems to be angrily lashing out at loss of masculine sovereignty. If love and marriage go together like a horse and carriage, Cherrie’s horse swiftly ends up as dog tucker and the carriage, as splinters and kindling. His assault is merciless.

So much so, you wonder: (a.) Is this personal and genuinely emotive? Some hitherto private unhappiness in Cherrie’s own domestic relationship that’s bubbled to the surface. Or is it really (b.) just an abstract concept, a meditative art work about the ideas behind marriage, putting forward a ‘male viewpoint’ to generate debate – with no biographical input at all. Maybe it is about marriage’s marketing and selling to women. The consumerist side of public vow-taking that many men aren’t so enthusiastic about.

Or is it perhaps (c.) some much broader sociological statement about the institution; an anthropological examination of those human behavioural mores that underpin the social structure of families? Or is it (d.) - as part of the Starkwhite exhibition blurb suggests - really a specifically honed critique of the Eurocentric tradition of bridal glamour in high fashion? Or a homosexual attack on the heterosexual convention - when exclusive.

Like Bob Dylan with his song title that I head this review with, is Cherrie being ironic or deadly serious? Perhaps he is having a laugh at the artworld’s eager propensity for gossip and scandal? Hoping that his audience reads the work as somehow confessional and misogynistic. And that his partner will find it a bit of a hoot too?

According to Wayne C. Booth (A Rhetoric of Irony, Chicago 1974) and his analysis, for irony to be grasped it must have clues inserted by the artist; signposts that through calculated contradiction state to the viewer – ‘don’t take all that is before you at face value.’

There seems to me to be at least two distancing devices within Cherrie’s imagery: the Longbeach and Holiday cigarettes that he uses to write ‘King’ or render spiked dog-collars, and the lavender paint already alluded to (as a homosexual colour code) used in the top half of one work. To my knowledge (and general art-public knowledge too I think) neither he or his partner is gay or smoke, so these codes are deliberately placed to separate artist from art, as well as to enrich the theoretical content. Cigarettes could mean ‘love addiction’ and fear of loneliness, their brand names allude to honeymoons, and lavender could mean bisexual (‘pink’ and ‘blue’ mixed) non-marital distractions.

There are other possible meanings too. The spunk-like silicone portcullis of overlapping inverted and upright hearts present in one image could, like the cigarettes, refer to Stephen Heath’s famous essay The Sexual Fix and his discussion of our society’s construction of the desire for romance. It could also refer to Norman Mailer’s anti-feminist book The Prisoner of Sex.

Cherrie has created a clever exhibition that teases his audience on an autobiographical and anti-progressive level (if they want it), while providing other alternative examinations of philosophical and social issues too (if they want those instead). Much like his Supraluxe sculptures in fact – but with greater ambiguity and not so immediate experientiality. This work is more obviously coded, more complicated because of its back flips. Ostensibly it is angry not cool. You spot a trope and have to pause to evaluate if the work is joking or serious, is it from the viewpoint of an unreconstructed redneck or a SNAG? It forces you to mentally engage.

Class politics of musical and artistic education

2009-11-08T11:16:00.000-08:00

Daniel Knorr and Prisoners of New Zealand: Block
ARTSPACE
4 November - 28 November 2009

One of my favourite examples of sixties ‘conceptual art’ (so-called) is by the Dutch artist Jan Dibbets, a project discussed in Lucy Lippard’s well known book Six Years: The Dematerialization of the Art Object. In this work Dibbets positioned three poles on the edge of a forest in an attempt to extend the territory of a robin. The sculpture (Robin Redbreast Territory/Sculpture 1969) only came into existence when the small bird happened to fly into the triangular space between them.

In his current exhibition at ARTSPACE Berlin-based Daniel Knorr has a similar approach to making transient and temporary sculpture. In the main square gallery he has built an elegant circular cage of bars and curved roof. In it he has placed six classical instruments: a harp, double bass, cello, violin, timpani, and flute. The door providing access to them is locked.

This construction looks great in the gallery but despite its attractiveness and its location, it is not an artwork. Knorr has decided that it only becomes an artwork when a visitor who is not a trained musician goes to the office, gets the key to the door, enters and starts to experiment with the instruments. Once they start testing the sounds within each one, learning how to manipulate the aural qualities they discover, their actions and sounds are an art experience for other visitors.

If an educated (or knowingly gifted) musician gets in the cage and performs – it won’t be art. Knorr clearly is after a certain kind of chaos and dissonance. He is searching for a quality where initially there is no evident knowledge, skill or control. Where ‘ugliness’ and ‘ignorance’ (according to the classical aesthetic) are embraced via amateur performances.

The other two works at ARTSPACE brilliantly contextualise this ‘levelling’ and ‘non-educated’ aural sculpture. One is a film made with prisoners taking the art classes at Paremoremo, but learning musical skills. Like visitors to the cage, these real-life (unidentifiable) prisoners are documented discovering qualities in the instruments they explore – making sounds that happen to fit into the genres of punk, improv or free noise.

The third is an exhibition of paintings and pencil drawings made by prisoners from Auckland prison and Northern Region Corrections. It is work that varies between the visual equivalents of classical and jazz. Some is mimetic and realistic in aspiration, akin perhaps to classical music that references natural phenomena like landscapes or bird and water sounds. Others are more abstract and grid like. They reference machinery as drawings but also coincidentally mimic jazz and electronic music with their percussive rhythms and parallel rectangular structures.

Knorr’s interest here in physical and pedagogical accessibility reflects an earlier work in the Venice Biennale where visitors were shut out of the Romanian pavillion, or the opposite in Manifesta, where gallery doors were removed. His awareness of other issues such as loss of identity (as enforced with the filmed prisoners) has been demonstrated by other works where black balaclavas were placed over the heads of public statues.

With this show there is an assumption that musical (or artistic) talent only becomes clearly manifest in those privileged enough to have had a good education – but that is not always the case. Some people have an innate biological ability to copy or invent melodies or make accurate representations of things - a talent acquired by (genetic) nature not (social) nurture. This fact perhaps helps make the issues of class levelling that Knorr raises here, irrelevant. A superbly thoughtful exhibition nonetheless.

(Above image, Self-portrait by Dave, charcoal on paper, 2009.)

Martyn puts me on the spot about an omission

2009-11-08T02:56:00.000-08:00

in my review of Lett's International Group Show.Elliot adds some speculative thoughts, and Patrick thinks I'm confused.

International group show at Lett

2009-11-05T15:18:00.000-08:00

Angels & Demons
Michael Lett
14 October - 21 November 2009

Ten artists make up this group concoction at Michael Lett’s. As some of them, being based in Europe or the States, are rarely shown in this part of the world, one would expect it to be memorable – but not so. A lot of the painting is peppered with references to modernist painting styles like those of analytic cubism (Hansjoerg Dobliar), Warhol and Basquiat (Chris Lipomi), or Larry Poons' poured paintings (John Armleder). While these art historical references are very knowing, many of the resulting images are not fresh. They don’t really add up to much despite the layering. They seem dry, tired and bookish.

Others are livelier because of their anger (like Manuel Ocampo’s scathing caricature of an Inland Revenue official) or adolescent shock tactics - Matthew Griffin has a turdlike waffle floating (but now disintegrating) in a bucket of water. A lot of it is forgettable.

The three artists who have created something that lingers in the mind are Dan Arps, Mike Parr and Jim Allen. Arps’ The Dark Times, made with what seems to be a photograph drawn over and smeared with acrylic umber and viscous resin, is beautifully ambiguous in its dark muddy confusion. It could be a doorway in a building, could be a newspaper title-face, might be a modernist mausoleum. The streaky image is graphically compelling and mysterious.

Down by the gallery entrance, Mike Parr’s three c-type photographs, based on films documenting some of his excruciating performances of thirty-seven years ago, still have impact – even when put in a row high up near the ceiling. Paul McCarthy’s performances, made around the same time as Parr’s, and videoed, also involve confrontational activities using his body parts - and body fluids too. These Black and White Tapes, were screened on Wednesday night.

In the front entrance by the big window, Jim Allen’s sculpture has an advantage by being isolated from the rest of the exhibition which is bizarrely hung and organised in strange clusters. His work shows a male puppet head on a stand looking at a music stand on which is played a large clumped lock of curly hair, nestling between open folds of two, thin, crinkled wax sheets. Behind the hair is a thin palm tree trunk in a narrow glass vase. From it are suspended various tinted photocopies of illustrated internal organs and viscera.

My theory is that the work is an ironic meditation on Courbet’s The Origin of The World. Hetero male sexual voyeurism (or desire for a fetish substitute) is mischievously conflated with musical pleasure, while the unseen bodily mechanics of a living female person are backgrounded, despite being inseparable from the genitals. As is usual with Jim Allen’s practice, the work invites speculation. It is the highlight of a largely humdrum show.

Trans-Tasman collaboration

2009-11-05T14:06:00.000-08:00

Gambia Castle/Joint Hassles: Cross ColouringCurated by Sarah Hopkinson and Harriet Kate Morgan
Gambia Castle
22 October - 7 November 2009

We have here the Kiwi hang of a two show partnership involving Gambia Castle and Joint Hassles, a Melbourne collective. The first presentation was in Hell Gallery in Richmond over September and early October, and so this is the Auckland version. There are twenty-two contributors.

The work is as varied as you can possibly imagine in finish and content, ranging from Rob McHaffie’s sweetly sensitive ceramic portrait of Buster Keaton to Daniel Malone’s coarse boot nugget-on-newspaper drawings of a man shining people’s boots. Some are substantial in size, like Alex Vivian’s clothes rack dressed in the apparel it displays; others are ‘dematerialised’ like Christopher L.G. Hill’s scattered bits of confetti-like paper and sand - or Dan Arps’ window display of painted yellow cord (referencing Kate Newby) and bits of glued on curled brown paper.

Nick Austin’s two delicate blue panels, one of a drawing of flames, have a cool detachment that sticks out like a sore thumb in this somewhat frenzied, abandoned context – and are half–hidden behind the door. On the other side of the room Kate Newby has a small, lumpy ceramic figure, crouching and bearing written descriptions of clothing and hair, while in the middle Tao Wells provides a battered little chair made of kindling and sagging fashion magazine photos.

Overall the Aussies seem more varied in attitude than the Castlers, ranging from ‘realistic’, illustrative paintings like Kain Pickens and Rob McKenzie’s hilarious portrait of celebrities wearing identical sunglasses and right-handed gloves, to James Deutsher’s amazing assemblage incorporating paint-splattered starbursts on black corrugated plastic with a dead plant pinioned under Perspex – positioned over a green, ‘blow-Soccer’ playing field.

Although this show is primarily a social event, both these groups want to reach new audiences, so the trans-Tasman partnership is a shrewd way of achieving that. While the display has the characteristic Gambia rhetoric of décor decided by bomb explosion, it’s worth picking through the indifferent placements, trying to decipher the catalogue listing - figuring out who made what – and discovering new things about these energetic Melbourne and Auckland art communities.

Three films

2009-11-05T13:31:00.000-08:00

Annie Bradley, Cellulite Rose, Susie Thomas: Lending Looks To Other People
The Film Archive
17 October - 21 November 2009

I like the crazy ambiguities of this title. Is it about misspelt 'books', lending supportive glances, or the activity of borrowing or sharing? This confusion is not just me being a bit thick. It’s deliberate. It’s a little tricky figuring out who does what in this show. Even the writer of the accompanying text, Matthew Crookes, is not very sure for example, of what Cellulite Rose is going to contribute. He never really finds out.

What turns out to be her work, was I initially thought, a second part of Annie Bradley’s. And a soundtrack I imagined was Cellulite Rose’s, ends up being made by Susie Thomas. Yet in a perverse way all this scrambled muddle makes sense, for the show’s theme - if there is one – seems to be about slippery identity (Rose), false decoys (Thomas), and the reliably stable self (Bradley).

Rose, with her two tiny screens propped up in the centre of the floor, has a young woman (the artist?) addressing the camera about the nature of the self, causality and identity – pondering some of the issues an empiricist philosopher like David Hume raised three hundred years ago - and attacking viewer assumptions about any fixed essence behind her corporeal presence, and inanimate objects like light switches.

Bradley’s film, on the end wall, is about the attempted transmission of knowledge from a patient teacher to a pupil trying to learn to whistle, but who is getting nowhere. He can’t get the mechanics of manipulating his lips and cheeks correctly. The funny thing is that the coach, though long suffering, is no musical virtuoso. Technically she is quite clumsy. However she is also a rock of dependability, constantly encouraging and supportive.

Susie Thomas’s film seems to be a satire about claustrophobic reflexivity, a joke about art that obsesses over its own production processes as content. It is a long scrolling text about copyright and legal stipulations, with her own name appropriately inserted. Designed I think to make you irritated and groan, it has a sound track that in contrast is quite gorgeous, espousing the natural world outside the gallery through the recorded clicks and whirrs of what sounds to me like a flock of starlings.

Their chirruping voices sound electronic, even metallic, but they bring to mind the world of non-art, unless you are thinking of John Cage and his use of 'given' ambient sound. This densely textured birdsong seems to be the real point of Thomas’ project, and the moving legalese a droll excuse for some accompanying visual material needed to pull an audience. The film is the bait to which you will ‘lend a look’, but the solid work – the ‘art’ part which you are initially not aware of (and for which you need the headphones) - is the avian soundtrack.

This is a clever, subtle little show that these three artists have organised. Worth viewing on your way into ARTSPACE.

Stephen and ..... have comments on the Youle show.

2009-11-04T00:54:00.000-08:00

Giovanni asks about

2009-11-04T00:31:00.000-08:00

Images of Rapid Economic Transformation

Cohesively brilliant

2009-11-03T20:50:00.000-08:00

Wayne Youle: Token
Tim Melville
13 October - 7 November 2009

Wayne Youle now having his fourth solo show at Tim Melville’s. Highly regarded for his domestic-sized, inventive wall sculptures and images, he follows in the footsteps of Peter Robinson with an interest in post-colonial politics that is accompanied by a fierce scrutiny of bicultural assumptions. He likes to challenge both ‘Maori’ and ‘Pakeha’ givens, often using advanced industrial technology that is subcontracted - in a similar manner to some other artists, like say Eddie Clemens.

This seems a particularly focussed Youle exhibition , without the wider range of art forms and content-types he has often shown in the past. Here there are eight works: four are DNA sculptures made of snooker balls, two are of screenprinted paper bag ‘ethnicity’ masks – a photograph and a set of paper bags, one is a horizontal cross of large granite scrabble tokens, and the last is a postcard of a ‘Maori maiden’ evenly perforated with holes. Four sorts of image only.

With a suite of snooker ball sculptures for DNA molecular structures, Youle demonstrates his characteristic wit. In his proposed genetic ball and stick models for Maori and mongrel (‘pure’ and ‘impure’) genes, the Maori structures use only red, black and white spheres – the traditional Maori colour scheme. The humour has unexpected layerings with the snooker balls of the ‘mongrel’ gene incorporating European eyeball ‘iris’ hues and circular airplane decals. The Maori DNAs float like little balloons hovering above their shiny black granite plinths, whereas the Mongrel one has no impeding weight, and is fastened to the wall.

Another work, Token Maori is a horizontal cross of black granite scrabble tokens that look like tombstone markers, and seems a pithy comment on Maori literacy levels, scrabble being linked to higher education. The plane shape is perhaps an aside on social mobility. With the granite being linked to death and weight, for economic ‘flight’ tokenism is perhaps seen as counter-productive.

With the I am what you make me photograph of the artist wearing the two types of paper bag, with their screened-on labels of Maori and Pakeha, Youle is commenting on his own changing mind sets over the course of one day, vacillating between the two community positions, and also referring to the preconceptions of the people he encounters. Some Maori will consider him fair skinned and a Pakeha, while many Pakeha will view him as dark and Maori.

This interest in light and dark continues further in his use of a tourist postcard. It depicts a beautiful young Maori woman in traditional attire seated amongst specimens of native bush. Not only is she radiant (as a drawcard for tourists) but the postcard with its grid of circular perforations, is too. It is float-mounted in front of white backing so that reflected light from behind bounces through the holes, making the image ethereal and dazzling. Youle calls it Star Light – Star Bright.

Token is a shrewd, super tight, multi-layered exhibition that has lots of conceptual links between the different artworks and their materials - teasing out the connotations of light versus dark and light versus heavy, and applying these as metaphor to historical socio-economic circumstance. It’s admirable mix of vitality, cohesion and observant commentary make it one of the best shows on in Auckland.

Geological museum window

2009-11-03T12:52:00.000-08:00

Finn Ferrier: Basalt and Asphalt
Window
9 October - 5 November 2009

Though Finn Ferrier in his art works tends to present himself as an earnestly zealous rock hound/archaeologist there is a lovely gentle humour throughout this installation in Window, adjacent to the Auckland University Library foyer entrance. While he as avid collector seems to like to obsess over the origin, movement and use of quarried mineral types around the Auckland region, assiduously labelling for his own museum in tiny white print the original location and time of finding for each geological sample, he also loves to mix into his table top display unexpectedly ludicrous ingredients.

These include a ‘rock candy’ sugar stick, a packet of yellow ‘river rocks’ – coloured gravel for aquaria, a ‘rock key holder’ still unopened, thermal mud soap, and packets of ‘collectable’ rocks for junior learners. Plus pieces of broken orange indicator-light glass, metal bottle tops, bits of wooden post, bits of coloured soft chalk, chunks of pebble encrusted tar, slices of concrete pipe – even a stone with a broken match on top of it, both securely wrapped in Gladwrap. There is also a sign, written in grey stones, expressing some homespun, optimistic folk philosophy.

Ferrier’s peculiar jokes, besides generating an initial gut-level response of laughter, can also be a quieter meditation on the nature of collecting as a compulsive drive – a magpielike, driven action of reflex that demonstrates the constant need to pick things up while moving around a city.

His wooden table is flanked by two spiky pot plants, while on the floor are several open flat wooden boxes crammed with match boxes bearing more smaller samples. The trays raise questions of classification, of how Ferrier stores and orders these samples – sorting them through place of origin, or place found, geological type, time when picked up, colour, texture, or functional use maybe.

Window here is turned into an amateur science and history museum, an outpost you might find in a small remote township, a rural display with no fancy technological gizmos, just sorted artefacts or natural objects. Something unexpected that sparks off your curiosity - that gets you to start making connections.

Images of rapid economic transformation

2009-11-03T00:08:00.000-08:00

Stefan Koppelkamm: Ortzeit- Local Time
George Fraser
28 October - 4 November 2009

West German photographer Stefan Koppelkamm happened to be in East Germany in 1990 just after the collapse of the Berlin Wall (but prior to reunification), and so thinking that the architecture looked as it might have been before the Second World War, he began documenting it. After the reunification of Germany, he decided to revisit those same buildings eleven or twelve years later to see what changes had occurred, and to record them from exactly the same position as the original images.

As this exhibition testifies, the differences were profound. This show of ten pairs of b/w images, selected samples toured by the Goethe Institut, illustrates a transmutation from decrepit slums to what seem to be areas of gentrification. The initially crumbling facades of these buildings have not only been transformed but in some cases, the architectural structures have been knocked down and completely replaced.

In most examples it is an odd feeling looking at images where time seems to have gone into reverse, where decay is manifest in older versions but absent in recent ones. With the progress of time they have become more youthful. Like a movie running backwards where dilapidation is repairing itself.

With each pair you continually compare wall surfaces, window positions, spaces between structures, roof levels, street paving, curb edges, lamp-posts and models of car. Sometimes the buildings originally photographed were ruins abandoned for 45 years after the war. A few have even been left alone, ignored.

With this exhibition the Goethe Institut has published a nice little (pointedly) red-covered book of twenty-three sets of these historical photographs - with excellent commentaries by the artist and Ludger Derenthal, the Director of the Museum Für Fotografie for the Staatliche Museen Berlin. It’s an interesting show about the demise of the GDR, and superficially, the success of capitalism. At least in 2001-3. What the mood is like in these places now, six or seven years later, in the current economic climate is bound to be much more pessimistic.

Contemporary Physicals

2009-10-30T20:59:00.000-07:00

Modern Physics: Alex Monteith, Bas Jan Ader, Eddie Clemens, Hanna Schwarz, John Ward Knox, Philip Dadson, Shaun Gladwell. Curated by Stephen Cleland
Te Tuhi
10 October – 29 November 2009

The moving mass of a muscular human body is the theme of this mainly video international exhibition: firstly in how it senses its external relationship to its immediate spatial environment; secondly how it is internally aware of its own various extended components.

Such phenomenological themes might sound a bit dry, but in this show they are not at all. It is an inspired piece of curating by Stephen Cleland where the assembled artworks are deftly positioned in a convincingly cohesive sequence, and where there is an abundance of humour and aural and visual delight. This exhibition is so intriguing and so full of pleasant surprises you won’t want to leave.

In a newly furbished space opposite the Te Tuhi entrance Shaun Gladwell’s stunning video installation presents an inverted film of Og de Souza, a Brazilian skateboarder with stunted legs, sitting cross-legged on his board as he races through a carpark upside down - propelled only by his exceptionally strong arms. This imagery (with audio) is a foil to another (silent) film screened simultaneously at rightangles on another wall. In a nightclub in front of a bar, the glamorous leggy transvestite Grace O’Hara, an erotic pole dancer, gyrates alone in a tasselled bikini and high heels.

The contrasts between these two films (both with dominant horizon lines) are utterly absorbing: one with pulsing strobe-lights, other lit soft and even; the strip club with reflective steel, the carpark with matt concrete; the dancer leggy, the skateboarder legless; a ‘naked’ black ‘female’, a clothed white male; 'she' is upright, he inverted; one comparatively stationary, the other ‘pursuing’ at speed; the club referencing Francis Bacon’s theatrical cages, the boardrider alluding to Velasquez’s court dwarves.

In the rest of Te Tuhi, in the main viewing area that you access between the bookshop and the library, are works by the six other artists. Just inside the double-glass doors are three b/w seventies videos by the legendary Dutch conceptual artist Bas Jan Ader (1942 -1975), exploring the body’s limitations with gravity. They try to hilariously construct T-shapes by attempting equilibrium.

In one film he tries to balance a large slab of concrete high up in the air on one hand while standing above glowing light bulbs positioned on the floor; in another he attempts to hang vertically from a tree branch over a running stream; in the third he tries to balance on his right leg so his left leg and torso are horizontal. In all three, gravity inevitably defeats him. These actions seem on film to be Buster Keatonish – funny but tragic. Even Bas Jan Ader’s most famous image, of him weeping with tears trickling down his face, is connected to the themes of failure and gravity.

Nearby Cleland has positioned another b/w film, a recent, very elegant work by German artist Hanna Schwarz. It shows her dressed in white shirt, androgynous eighties rockstar haircut, grey jeans and boots, making quick walking motions or foot actions, or holding careful Nijinsky-like positions with her torso, head and arms in profile like a hieroglyphic. These sections are all sequenced to be accompanied by a soundtrack of tap dancing or clacking temple blocks, sometimes in sync, but mostly not. Often she takes up minotaur poses with her head pulled under and her arms extended like horns. With the soundtrack the images have a Spanish flavour.

In one scene, she like Bas Jan Ader, balances on one leg, not frontally, but like a reaching ice skater – in profile. In another she adopts a golf putting pose. Tongue in cheek humour permeates every image she presents.

With the room of installed ‘dematerialised’ sculptures by John Ward Knox we move from a trajectory of sequential filmic experiences (where we are stationary) to an awareness of our own bodily movements. We now circle within a space shared with understated static objects that modify the architecture - and so lock into our own perceptions of form, light, shadow, as demonstrated by his intervening materials that play with the sides and corners of the classic white cube.

Using the first gallery wall just inside the door, Ward Knox mocks the materiality of paint by carving into plaster on its surface to render in relief a slashing streaky mark made by a horizontally moving housepainting brush. It also has little vertical dribbles running off its bottom edge. Gentle plasticity, light and shadow create this shallow-relief, meticulously sanded drawing that forces us to closely examine the brightly-lit wall’s plane and the subtle projection of its surface.

The two corners Ward Knox treats with bent wire and delicate silver chain, one with the two joined to form a continuous arabesque, the other with the two curved materials straddling the gap between the intersecting planes separately. Shadow in this artist’s hands becomes another substance which accentuates traces from materials that in bright light almost become invisible.

Nextdoor inside the main Te Tuhi gallery space, we find spotlit in its centre a small circular wooden stage with steps. This serves as a seat for the huge five screen Alex Monteith panorama on three walls, and is also the platform for the Eddie Clemens interactive kinetic sculpture.

In its middle is a spinning Scalextric slot-car track, complete with mini safety fence that surrounds a bowl of black oil. The track starts moving when you step on to the stairs. On its upper curved slot is a small blue and white sedan (with its own tiny orange light under its chassis) that moves independently of the backwards turning track – so that it can even accelerate forwards faster.

Clemens’ project is mesmerising through the way you automatically attempt to analyse the paradoxical relationship of the moving track with the motion of the toy car, but in the context that Cleland has constructed around it, it also becomes a brilliant metaphor for the movement of the viewer doing the circuit in the Modern Physics space. A witty, schematicised, God’s eye view.

It is also a perfect foil to the spectacular acrobatics of the Monteith display, with the five cameras set looking out over each of the five pilot’s tracer streaming tails as the RNZAF Red Checkers stunt team perform a highly choreographed series of double loops, barrel rolls and ‘spaghetti-breaks’ – all co-ordinated with synchronised sound and simultaneous action.

The synchronised DVD loops start when the five planes take off in sequence and finishes after they’ve landed and manoeuvred to park on the runway. Not only is the work’s churning visceral sensation extraordinary (though personally I found the ‘firecracker’ aural component of her motorbike videos at AUT last year more bodily penetrating) but the colourful cloudscape and changing light is rivetting.

Philip Dadson’s DVD project is also aeronautically focussed, but using balloons - not speeding aircraft. Part of a much bigger version he made last year with seventeen colourful balloons and twenty-four musicians, this small two channel version with two balloons (and six green uniformed brass band members) focuses on the aerially viewed patchwork landscape more than the much faster Monteith work, with the two cameras aimed either across or down.

The thin, mournful, drawn out notes of the musical performances from tuba, trombone and trumpet players, with little melodic variation, make Dadson’s hovering music quite haunting. Like the leisurely moving balloons the music gently drifts - sometimes stopping, then restarting. Occasionally he has dubbed undertoning over the brass, using his own voice.

Dadson’s two screens are positioned at rightangles to each other, like the screens in the Gladwell work. In fact his moving coloured aerial images fit perfectly in the sequence between the Monteith and the Gladwell works, cleverly completing the ambulatory loop. Cleland has come up with something exceptional with this very special Te Tuhi show. All the individual ingredients individually and collectively add up to a great total experience. Everything is strong and memorable. A wonderful treat that you would be an absolute nitwit to miss.

Taipei comes to Auckland

2009-10-29T13:55:00.000-07:00

Szu Han Chen: The room is too small to store memory
Snowwhite gallery (UNITEC)
20 October - 6 November 2009

Szu Han Chen is an artist in residence from Taiwan who has studied at St. Martins College of Art and Design in London and at Cheng Chi University in Taipei. Her interactive and relational projects often incorporate videoed documentation of the various social exchanges or interpersonal negotiations she sets up. That aspect (of two earlier works) dominates the large front room, with her current ongoing interactive project occurring in the smaller back space at Snowwhite.

Her three channel installation Make a Wish (2009) shows abandoned objects (that can serve as containers) placed in front of a fountain in Washington Square in New York and filled with water as a symbol of hope for the homeless. It is hoped passers-by will throw money in. That way the needy can help themselves from these improvised ‘wishing wells.’

In Then I said ‘Have a Nice Day' (2009) the artist approaches various individuals handling out flyers on the very crowded streets of New York. Because the activity is filmed secretly from a hidden camera that is far away it is hard to see (or hear) precisely what it is she is up to when she chats to the distributor, takes their promotional flyer, makes an origami plane out of it, and hands it back. While she sees her activity as transforming a ‘purposeful thing’ to something economically ‘useless’ and also poetical or contemplative, they being busy are likely to be puzzled or exasperated. Though her manner is sweet and charming, her actions can be taken as peculiar or ‘oddball’ at best, or at its worst, a veiled form of insult. Her actions imply she is taking something ‘useless’ and adding value. However nobody ever gets offended. Just perplexed.

The 'Room' work that is continuing now until the end of next week refers to storage problems in its title, and how to recycle old memories for new. The artist’s role here is that of facilitator. She co-ordinates the exchanging of abandoned items and their contextual narratives, the details of which she records and passes on.

Szu Han Chen here serves as a conduit for snippets of information and history. Invariably she will be compared to local artist Eve Armstrong and her Trading Table performances but my impression is that Armstrong is more proactive in suggesting solutions for fair swaps. She will broker (I think) transactions so that equivalent balancing occurs between giver and receiver. She will insist on exchanges that she thinks are equal.

Chen on the other hand seems to be quite happy for the value to be lopsided. She doesn’t directly bring contributing parties together, nor does she refuse any offer. In fact economic or social depreciation (like say potlatch) might be more her point, along with a poetic sensibility. Her attention is focussed not so much on the objects changing hands and their matching worth, but the flicking on of stories. Of course I’m saying here these two things are separable, and maybe that can be disputed. You might argue the only value that these items have is the narrative that accompanies them from usage, but that that narrative cannot be pried apart from their (re)saleable value – it just gets reabsorbed.

So how do you assess this kind of work? It has of itself no detectable visual aesthetic, but maybe the conveyed anecdotes, the sequences of past ownership (and linked events) as imagined mental pictures replace that? However the quality of such stories seems to be not the point either, nor is it the quality of Chen’s channelling of information - which appears to be striving for invisibility anyway?

In the end you look at the treasures you brought home to put on your shelf or workbench, briefly think about what useless things you discarded to get them, and forget about the artist and exhibition to get on with your life. Just like that pot of homemade chutney you got from some school fair eight months ago that is sitting around half eaten in your fridge. It’s not going mouldy for it tastes good, but where did you get it, and who served you, on that autumnal Saturday morning? You are not sure.

(The above images show the artist in her show, chatting to Abby Woolcombe, a student of the Design School. Photography by Karen Crisp.)

Andrew Clifford and Jennifer French on Jeena Shin

2009-10-27T14:28:00.000-07:00

Skimpy fragments add up

2009-10-27T13:44:00.000-07:00

To Say The Least: Ruth Buchanan, Ash Kilmartin, Sarah Rose, D. M. Satele, Holly Willson
Newcall
15 October - 31 October 2009

This five artist show at Newcall has austere tendencies towards not so much minimalism, but rather, dematerialisation. Often this consists of traces that allude to earlier states that are fuller and denser with information, fields from which a selection has been made. Prying elements free of their original context.

Sarah Rose has two works that draw this out. One is a series of thirty A4 sheets with typed nouns pinned to the main wall. The words descend from left to right in the formation they would be positioned in within their original context: various Emily Dickinson poems.

Oddly Dickinson (1830 -1886) is a poet where there has always been a lot of conjecture about her original drafts - because of the many versions she left with variant wording, spelling, line length, punctuation and of course ultimately, meaning. The fact that Rose has worked with Dickinson’s ‘final’ texts is amusing because of their slippery nature - and variable interpretations that seem to change with each new anthology editor.

Brevity of fame is the content of Rose’s other work. On an outside window is a page with ‘as long as a rainbow lasts’ typed on it. Inside, on a timer so it plays only intermittently, is a nearby video clip of Nadia Comenici, fourteen year old Romanian gymnastic star of the 1976 Olympics, performing some of her perfect scores – memory flashes (for some) of thirty-three years ago.

Holly Willson’s two aural works are related to Rose’s visual contributions. One is a crashing piano chord that comes through the office door, and the other a selection of four fast snippets taken from a vinyl record. (Though it is highly unlikely, to me the samples sound like bits of Dylan’s ‘Blonde On Blonde’.)

Willson has a third work of a wide strip of muslin extending down from the ceiling, but twisted (flipped over) halfway down, and neatly folded on the floor. The stretched material seems to be a metaphor for time, and perhaps spatial context.

Related to both Willson and Rose’s projects is the display of residue from D. M. Satele’s opening night performance: two chairs; a video of some guy sitting on a bed in his underwear yakking on the phone; and two bound transcripts of six jokes from comedienne Wanda Syke’s ‘Tongued Untied’ TV series. More than props that remain from a past event, the joke transcripts seem a poignant trace of the television comedy - its shadow.

The works of Ruth Buchanan and Ash Kilmartin seem to have quite different sensibilities. Kilmartin has a small pile of paper pages on which he has written in pencil a text that diminishes in size as the pages get closer to the floor. It declares the work to be ‘self sustaining sheets’ and its logic seems to be that as the paper pile gets lower, the text is supported less by the paper and more by the floor. The accuracy of the text alters according to the position of each page in the pile.

Buchanan’s project is a fake lecture about problems of architectural relevance to local needs, that you listen to through headphones resting on a mirrored shelf. On part of it the speaker refers to buildings on the Chatham Islands that have specially designed flexible joinery. This lets them sway under pressure from the ferocious winds, thus providing a source of relaxation for the inhabitants.

Like Kilmartin’s sculpture where you have to look at several sheets to get its point, with Buchanan you need to listen to most of the recording to get its humorous drift. Looking at ‘The Least’ components won’t help you much. You need to be aware of ‘The Max.’

This is a finely nuanced exhibition, probably Newcall’s best ever group show. The five contributors work beautifuly together. Well worth a visit.

Here's Stephen on the Bath St review

2009-10-27T01:42:00.000-07:00

Here are some thoughts from Andrew Paul Wood on a Clare Noonan show in Christchurch

2009-10-26T20:38:00.000-07:00

Clare Noonan: Field Work
SoFA,
18 October – 7 November 2009.

And do you see, I said, men passing along the wall carrying all sorts of vessels, and statues and figures of animals made of wood and stone and various materials, which appear over the wall? Some of them are talking, others silent. You have shown me a strange image, and they are strange prisoners. Like ourselves, I replied; and they see only their own shadows, or the shadows of one another, which the fire throws on the opposite wall of the cave? [Plato, Politeia VII, 515b]

Clare Noonan’s Field Work is the product of the artist’s tenure as the Olivia Spencer Bower artist-in-residence in the Christchurch Arts Centre. Noonan’s work is singularly concerned with mapping the artist’s body located in geographical, historical and cultural space in a manner bordering on the Situationalist. In the Field Work installation, this is counterpointed with the history and nature of photography, and specifically its virtual relationship with light. One is reminded that Karl Marx once compared the function of ideology to the mechanism of a camera obscura:

If in all ideology men and their relations appear upside-down as in a camera obscura, this phenomenon arises just as much from their historical life-process as the inversion of objects on the retina does from their physical life-process. [Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, The German Ideology(1976)].

In this sense a camera is like an ideology because it produces an image of the human relationship with the world, but further themes must include the relationship between the viewed and the viewer, what is visible and what is obscured, and the ephemeral and transitory reality of occupying any space.

Field Work feels a little like a minimalist stage set representing a sort of camp site – diagrammatic, illustrative, allusive and suggestive with just a hint of a steampunk aesthetic. From tripods that look like they might be from some ancient surveying kit, hang hurricane lanterns fitted with moon-glow black-light tubes. These light sources provide numinous accents to counterpoint the minimal concrete nature of the other artefacts. Something like a photographer’s hide or maimai hangs off two tripods. A half open suitcase emits a mysterious light (like the trunk of the car at the end of Repo Man). The whole is connected by a baroque tangle of electrical cable.

On one long wall a kind of backdrop is formed by hanging three hide sheets, which in one sense suggest animal skins (if we think of a maimai as a sort of animal), but on the white wall of the gallery also conjure up art-historical memories of the iconoclasm of modern monochrome field painting: Arnulf Rainer, Allan McCollum, Imi Knoebel, Ad Reinhardt, and Kasimir Malevich…the list is endless.

On the opposite corner of the gallery hang what appear to be four monochrome prints or mechanical drawings alluding to photography text book diagrams depicting overlapping circles of light on flat surfaces. In fact these are connected to a picture in the accompanying catalogue of a drawing in one of the artist’s notebooks. The drawing is a Venn diagram that attempts to place the role of ‘Explorer’ where ‘Artist’, ‘Scientist’ and ‘Entrepreneur’ intersect.

That would appear to be the key to understanding the installation – it is a metaphorical camp site (abandoned Marie Celeste fashion) in the re-contextualising sterile white cube of the art gallery setting. Another picture in the catalogue (and really, the catalogue must be considered intrinsic to the installation, complete with a rather nice essay by Paula Booker) shows a number of those plastic name tags ubiquitous at corporate functions, announcing the presence of Joseph Banks, Walter Buller, Alfred Burton, Samuel Butler, Charles Heaphy, William Travers and others.

This connects back directly to the Claude glass in Noonan’s exhibition Pilgrim Tourist at Enjoy Art Gallery, Wellington and the compass references in Landscape Portrait at The Physics Room, Christchurch in 2007.

Dasein (literally ‘being there’ in German) is Heidegger’s term for the way beings relate themselves to the world that surrounds them, but from which they are existentially alienated. It seems the perfect definition of the Pākehā context and the mood evoked by the representation of landscape.

Heidegger divides Dasein into three modes of possible existence — factuality, existentiality and fallenness. The first of these could be used to describe the status of the first European colonists in New Zealand, the first generations of Pākehā, or even the Pākehā experience of Europe. The second refers to the state in which beings achieve knowledge of their purpose in life and the resultant authenticity – arguably the current historical phase. The third refers to the inauthentic existence of those who do not realise their purpose – the reality of many Pākehā whose lack of knowledge blinds them to the nature of their anxiety and the urban Māori who have become divorced from their status as tangata whenua.

In any discipline field work is carried out either unobtrusively in situ on location, or in a controlled laboratory environment. Which of these two options applies to Field Work? Or is it even a case of qui custodiat – “who watches the watchers?”

(Above documentary images: Tim Veling for SoFa Gallery)

Comment from ..... on Music/History/Painting

2009-10-26T02:31:00.000-07:00