What I really hope is that some people who perhaps had no interest in the visual arts have read one or two of these reviews and enjoyed them. Maybe even felt compelled to go and see the shows themselves, maybe? It is every reviewers dream to inspire and interest their readers.

All the while that I was writing these things I was aware of the fact that the contemporary visual arts are notoriously baffling, frustrating and infuriating for the general public. When most people make the effort to go and see an art exhibition they are often confronted by a confusing array of signs and symbols that they can’t understand and don’t care to decode.

What I hope that I have done this year is untangle these messages for some people, and revealed what I thought some artists were trying to say to their audience. Of course I could have got it completely wrong, there is no way really of saying. I have tried to steer away from being overly critical and dogmatic. Mainly because I’m terrified by the fact that since I live in Wellington, which is really just a little village, I will no doubt bump into the artist that I have torn apart. And not being a confrontational creature, this thought terrifies. But much more constructive I think than to criticize is to try to understand; to try and pull apart and open up art in a way that makes it interesting, stimulating and exciting. I have really tried not to review too many shows that were on at the most well known galleries; Te Papa and the City Gallery, for example. What I wanted to do was reveal the myriad of different art spaces we have in our lovely city, and the plethora of activities that gone on inside them everyday. There are lots of busy people out there and we should appreciate and enjoy the efforts that they go to.

I have sort of measured the quality of the art I have been to see by the amount I amiable to write about it and the level that I am able to engage with it. I normally have to have some time to let a show gestate inside my head, let it settle and move around a little bit. Then, suddenly, things become clearer and easier to understand, and I am able to think of ways to attack the work; ways to get into it and take it apart, and make it more interesting for the reader. Occasionally this isn’t the case and I can write immediately and quickly, the work stimulates all these ideas, and the more I get writing, the more ideas come and the more I can’t stop myself.

Sian Torrington’s work at ROAR! Gallery was a case of this. It was one of the earliest reviews that I wrote and, I was so excited about the installation, entitled It’s a jungle in there, that once I started thinking about this show and the issues that the artist was raising I almost couldn’t stop. I realize that review was quite long. Sorry. I liked the delicacy and control that Torrington exercised; the careful maps of paper that crept across the walls made me feel like I was in a storybook. Most interesting though, was the artist’s use of negative and positive space, and the distortions that she imposed on her material.

Space was also distorted in one of my other favourite shows of the year, Peter Trevelyan’s work Persevertron at the Engine Room in Massey University. Trevelyan’s bizarre monolith stood alone in the middle of the empty room. Mirrors were arranged carefully within the object to extend and manipulate its inner space. You could put your arms and head in, and your body was repeated off into infinity. Not only was the space of the object itself distorted, but the viewer’s own sense of balance and personal space was fractured. This work extended out from its own physicality and impinged on that of its audience; commenting on and examining our spatial perceptions and awareness of our bodies.

What else, what else? Video work that has interested and excited me this year: Murray Hewitt’s work Burnings, which was in the show Smoke Signal at the Michael Hirschfeld Gallery earlier in the year. This piece stayed with me long after I had seen it. Its sense of disquiet and unease played on my mind. Hewitt, whose piece in Performance Week I wrote about last week, is an artist interested in the visual language of Southern America and American consumerism. This work depicted a figure, dressed in garb reminiscent of the Klu Klux Klan, lighting a set of goal posts in what seemed to be suburban New Zealand.

The work was a mass of contradictions and layers of visual vocabulary. “Goal posts = rugby = New Zealand.” “White sheets = KKK = America.” These elements struggled against each other and animated the work for me. The use of the video medium was also salient. (Ed- Wicked bad pun Thomasin! Quite a salient way to end your Salient year, wouldn’t you say?). We could watch in real time the monumental flaming of the goal posts. The use of video also heightened the feeling of voyeurism, as we drove past, spying on this apparently personal ritual.

There are several other artists and shows I have enjoyed; Douglas Crane’s video work at Aaron Laurence Gallery, and Regan Gentry’s piece Common Cold in Islanded at the Adam Art Gallery have stayed with me for a while and were exciting to write about. Len Lye’s Water Whirler down on the waterfront is a great piece of public art for Wellington. I think it is working again after some vandals attacked it. Nice one guys.

Finally, I would like to say thank you to my few contributors, Pippin Barr, Emma Prendergast, and Will Robertson who have all written for the page and their contributions were greatly appreciated. It is nice to have different perspectives and writing styles to mix things up a little bit. So there you have it. Art in Welly. Suck it up.

McCahon was born in Timaru in 1919, and began his artistic career by exploring the South Island landscape that he was surrounded by. It was here that he created the sparse, minimalist, uninhabited landscapes for which he is widely known. McCahon’s art works also grew to be highly symbolic and religious subjects, questions about life, death and morality came to be prominent in his paintings.

Travelling to America in the late 1950s, McCahon was struck by the work of the Abstract Expressionists working there, particularly Jackson Pollock. This trip gave him new confidence to create works on a larger scale, paintings to ‘walk by’, and distort and manipulate forms as he saw fit. Works such as this one, Gate III, are characteristic of McCahon in their magnitude, use of biblical text, dark undertones and atmospheric, reduced shapes.

Colin McCahon is a seminal artist in the narrative of 20th century New Zealand art. He was a pioneer of semi-abstract and abstract art in this country and interestingly does not ever entirely fit into the international art movements which were emerging contemporaneously with him. His use of text in art has also been of interest to post-modernist art historians working today.

I thought it would be interesting, after giving it a promo last week, to write about some of the performances I’ve been able to get to that were part of Enjoy Public Art Gallery’s Performance Week. I’m writing this while the week is still going, and I haven’t been able to make it to all of them, so this is far from a thorough examination of them all. So think of this rather as a taster of a few, like the Cameo Cremes and pink wafer biscuits from one of those biscuit selections: A small selection of the overall tin, but a choice and pleasurable one nevertheless.

But enough of the biscuit metaphors. I had the pleasure of being involved directly in one of the performances that was organised by artist Beth O’Brien, a recent arrival to Wellington. Entitled Beeline, the work involved a group of corporate-types walking down Lambton Quay during the peak walking time, 8:00 in the morning. The artist sought out people she knew, friends of friends, friends of the gallery, and also random workers who worked down the end of the Lambton Quay. We had had a meeting a few nights before, where we were given our instructions. Some of us were to be part of the ‘the mass’ which stuck together in formation and walked the length of the course, all the way to the end of Lambton to near Parliament. Others were the ‘joiners’ who connected to this central group part way.

We met at 7:50 on the corner of Willis and Lambton, formed our group and headed off. We were supposed to look focused, and walk together with a sense of urgency and purpose. There were quite a few people recording the performance, taking photos and videoing it, but we were not supposed to look for them or look directly at them.

It was an interesting experience being involved. Being the way I normally walk to work, I am used to the sights and general vibe of Lambton Quay in the morning. Lots of serious people, dressed in black, going to work, thinking about the day ahead, or still waking up. I often think about it as I walk along; all these people with different stories and different types of days who come together in this public space. And it is the same people you see every day, doing the same thing, and treading the same streets. These were the kinds of issues that were raised in this performance; the patterns that people make without thinking about it, and the shapes that we create by ourselves and with others in our everyday lives. Also examined were the ways in which we adapt to our environment. Simply navigating through all the foot traffic on Lambton can sometimes be tricky, as well as crossing roads, getting on buses and waiting for lights. These were all mundane activities that we concentrated on in this performance, and highlighted the way in which our environment shapes our navigational routes.

Another performance I was lucky enough to catch was Untitled (Musical Performance) by Wellington based artist Murray Hewitt. I have been intrigued by Hewitt’s work since he was involved in the show Smoke Signals at the Michael Hirschfeld gallery a couple of months ago. In that exhibition, Hewitt showed an interest in the imagery of Southern America and the visual markers of this part of the world. Again, in this performance, Hewitt examined the imagery of America and the innate contradictions that appear in the cultural climate of this region. Dressed in red, with red Adidas pants, a Coke T-shirt, and red face paint, Hewitt sang a country gospel song to a small audience. This performance took place behind the Opera House in the small alleyway next to the James Smith parking lot. Visually, this was a stunning setting. I’ve never been behind there before. There is some amazing graffiti, and the orange wall behind the artist really offset his red attire. It is also a slightly American surrounding. I could imagine being in New York or some stereotypically urban American city. Lying on the ground next to Hewitt was an American Eagle and a soft toy of the Disney character Pluto, both overt symbols of America and American cultural imperialism.

The lyrics of the gospel song (sung very well by the artist I must say) were saccharine in their clichés and empty in their promises. “I still believe in nonviolence,” they went. “I will run to be with Jesus, I don’t believe what they say on TV.” The soft toy is immediately associated with the child-like and innocent, as are the words of this religious and supposedly uplifting song. This conception rails against the violent history of Southern America (for which it is obviously not alone), and the racism which often characterises this region. But the song was delivered dead pan, with no obvious hint of irony. “Take from it what you will” the artist seems to say.

Finally, straight after this performance I headed down to Enjoy to check out what G-fab and the Meat Pack were getting up to. Unfortunately, while I was there, this performance wasn’t working so well, and it could have been amazing if it did. The performers themselves weren’t there; they were at an ‘undisclosed location’. In Enjoy was a phone taped to a microphone, which was in turn connected to some speakers. The artists were playing electro/trash/pop music somewhere else and this was piped down the phone line, onto the phone at Enjoy and then supposedly amplified by the microphone. It would have been amazing if this music had been pumping around the gallery, but unfortunately it was very quiet when I was there. I don’t think that the connection between the phone and the microphone was quite good enough to amplify the sounds sufficiently.

Nevertheless, it was great idea, and I don’t know if it got working more successfully after I left. The piece played on the idea of presence and absence, and sneakily removed the artist almost entirely from the artwork. This gave the music a life of its own when distanced from its creator. The work also played with the ideas of connectivity and communication. And interestingly, by not actually working properly, the work highlighted the limits of communication in our supposedly technosavvy age.

Interesting bits and bobs from Performance Week. It was nice to see some art that wasn’t hanging on the gallery wall.

There are heaps of words in this show. Heaps. I’m just preparing you for the fact that you will need to read a lot. I would say almost too much. It would take hours to get round the whole thing and read everything. It is kind of like walking through a National Geographic article. My legs got tired. But it is quite easy also to pick and choose; select parts that seem interesting. For me, this was definitely the earlier photographs and collections of the Alexander Turnbull Library.

The exhibition showcases early pioneers of science in New Zealand, replete in their stuffy black coats and thick moustaches. These are the collectors and the classifiers; organising and naming an unknown land. I particularly enjoyed the case of stuffed birds on display. It brought very quickly to mind the current show on at the Adam Art Gallery, Archiving Fever. In this exhibition contemporary artists subvert and examine this very urge to arrange and archive, which these nineteenth century scientists saw as their vocation.

Besides the interesting creepiness of the earlier Victorian scientists, I’m not sure how easily all this scientific subject falls into exhibition format. There are just a few too many words, and not enough interesting things to look at. The curators haven’t really utilised the space and the opportunities that exhibition format has to offer, to their full extent. And the result seems a little dry and wordy. However, there are some interesting sections and it certainly highlights the richness of New Zealand’s scientific community. It struck me, after reading about some of the work of these scientists, how unfair it is that these incredibly intelligent people spend their lives unsung in their own country.

NATIONAL LIBRARY GALLERY
5 September – 26 November

It is such a carefully planned building, everything is balanced and organized to achieve perfect symmetry. It is exactly the same height as it is wide, and the height of its massive central dome is the same as the façade, which makes it so pleasing and satisfying to look at. It is made of vast quantities of cream coloured marble so thin and painstakingly constructed, that in places they almost appear translucent. The walls, floor, and gateway to the gardens are meticulously carved and decorated by millions of flourishes: excerpts from the Qu’ran and Islamic texts, all heightening the aura of devotion and solemnity which surrounds the building.

The building was ordered to be constructed by Shah Jahan (who ruled from 1628 – 1658) as a memorial to his favourite and most beloved wife, Mumtaz Mahal. Jahan himself must have liked the look of the place as well, as he was also eventually buried there. Understandable really.

Images such as this one are instantly recognizable as by Warhol, as they have so completely entered the domain of popular culture. They are on T-shirts and coffee cups around the world. And this is just what Warhol would have wanted. Art, in Warhol’s conception, was far too precious and self-absorbed. He burst onto an art scene where the American Abstract Expressionists were all making art about their feelings, and creating art for art’s sake alone. Warhol totally rejected this idea of art as distanced from the everyday world of advertising, product placement and consumerism. Instead, these were the biggest influences on his work.

His infamous studio was called ‘The Factory’ and it was here that Warhol mass produced vast numbers of printed canvases. Pieces such as this one, Marilyn Diptych, were created through the technique of silk screens. This allowed him to reproduce the images endlessly, sometimes even making several versions of the same work. In this way, Warhol was totally subverting the conventional art hierarchy and an art world which valued uniqueness so highly.

I’m not too familiar with Clem Devine’s other work, so it is hard for me to place these pieces within any sort of context. The title, The Remarkables, refers to the ski field of the same name in Queenstown. Two works, the ones I thought of as a beginning point for some reason, Elevator and Escalator, are created out of bits of battered skis. These are broken up, split apart, rearranged, and stuck onto plywood by way of presentation. Devine has dropped in clues (there are still bits of writing visible) so that we are able to recognise these objects, but they are totally removed from their original function. Instead, chopped up and broken, they are now appreciated for their aesthetics alone; for their shape and colour. Indeed, they reference the sort of geometric abstraction practiced by the likes of Kandinsky or Moholy-Nagy. Except these works are 3D and extend out of the picture plane into the space of the viewer.

These works, which use the actual skis, are referenced by those surrounding them. The works TNT and Shady Lane are ultrachrome prints that depict the broken skis, and the geometric shapes they have been arranged into. As the artist introduces each manipulation of the object, we are moving further away from the original function step-by-step. In TNT, the skis are lurid pinks and oranges, shattering the picture plane with their angular edges and sharp lines. They become akin to a graphic design, almost as if with commercial purposes, like a T-shirt design or advertising image. In the print Shady Lane, the artist is exploiting the high contrast of the black and white and using it to confuse and distort this space.

Homeward Bound, the largest work in the show, is painted enamel on aluminium. It uses another medium, but is still using the same sorts of shapes and patterns. There are large broken words and plain areas of colour. Devine seems to be exploring the aesthetic possibilities of a single set of objects, how they can be manipulated and what effect that medium has on a set of ideas. Homeward Bound also references a long history of New Zealand art which plays with words, signage and text. The size of the letters were very McCahon-esque, but any meaning is here effectively removed. We are able to know where these sets of symbols came from, but they are rendered useless in these art works. Their original purpose of advertising, branding and selling is cut up and deleted.

Round the corner, in the two little back rooms, there is a group show of sculptural work. Here I found other artists who share Devine’s interest in geometric shapes and their effect on space and form. I found Gabby O’Connor’s work, Extreme pressure: avalanche series, extremely interesting. In the corner of the room is a kind of cascading collection of paper. On closer inspection it is made up of the envelopes. These are all cut and folded into repeating forms, stuck together and arranged to fall down the wall and out onto the gallery floor. They invade the space of the viewer and creep insidiously outwards. The title of the work, Extreme pressure: avalanche series, implies a great force and an impending doom from this small creation. It is distinctly at odds with the actual delicate nature of the piece. The paper is obviously very light and fragile; its connections are not held together by extreme force, and cannot of course create any real pressure. There is a funny disjunction of what an avalanche should actually be and what it should cause, and what this paper avalanche can tentatively achieve. Just a quite rustle across the floor, not a thunderous boom as may be expected.

In her other works in the show, Extreme pressure: avalanche series: blue and Extreme pressure: avalanche series: red, both water colour on paper, O’Connor goes on to explore the same sorts of geometric relationships. Here, the carefully painted shapes float in white space; they are not so intimately related to each other as in the sculpture on the wall/floor. Their inside space is just as important as their exterior. They do not present a façade but instead reveal their inner workings to the outside world. Shameless really.

Another artist in the show, Douglas Stitchbury, also examines this idea of inside and outside space. His work Ghost Ship is a small model of a ship, standing out slightly from the wall, and is also simply outlined by connection sticks. There are no large planes to divide the interior from the exterior. Its ethereal emptiness (and total failure to perform in the way a ship should perform) makes it very much a ghost ship, devoid of functionality and stripped bare to the outside world.

Finally, Terry Urbahn has created for this show another one of his matchstick monuments. His clumsy tower, stuck together with wax, sits in the other back room. Again, there are geometrical shapes and forms, and a lack of distinction between interior and exterior space. The tower is simply a haphazard outline; it takes no solid form and makes no bold claims about itself. The artist is here poking fun at the traditional, monumental function of sculpture. This work would just as rather fall apart than stand firm. The fact that it is made of matchsticks also refers to its inherent self-destruction. If it wanted, it could burn itself down.

Suck on that.

THE REMARKABLES CLEM DEVINE
5 September to 7 October

A GROUP SHOW OF SCULPTURAL WORK
5 September to 7 October

A primary activity that intrigued the Surrealists was matching up two (or more) apparently unrelated objects and seeing what transpired. In this case the artist, Meret Oppenheim, has created an unlikely relationship between a cup and some luxurious looking fur. This creation had its genesis in a conversation Oppenheim was having with Picasso when they were drinking tea one day. Picasso admired a furbracelet that Oppenheim was wearing and casually suggested that almost everything could be covered with fur.

Out of this comment sprung Objet (Le Déjeuner en fourrure), which translated becomes Luncheon in fur. Like much Surrealist art, this creation is not only visually appealing, but it also playfully invites touch. The Surrealist also often had sex on the brain, and this work is no exception with its sensual fur and concave curves.

Across the back wall a large projection shows a man and a woman dressed in stereotypical cowboy outfits riding what must be mechanical rodeo machines. Their expressions are strangely serene. They are concentrating very diligently on their pursuit. Their lower halves are cut off however and we can only see the writhing motion of their torsos, flung around the space. Divorced from the apparatus which causes their bizarre gyrating, their movements take on new meanings. It is like a weird dance, at moments they mirror each other, then they move away. Man on one side, woman on the other, they seem to both attract and repel each other. It is a slightly sexual display of interest and courtship.

Gibbs’ exhibition examines the interplay of the sexes, the distinctions between them and the more uncertain ground where clear boundaries slip away and sexual identity becomes ambiguous and unclear. The plump, round beanbag-like object in front of the projection takes its ambiguity very seriously. Pink, dimpled, and spouting water out of its center, the object is very sexually suggestive but it is not immediately evident why. The texture of the material is like some sort of dodgy sex toy but this is subverted by its child-like shade of pink, and the gentle tinkle of the water which flows from it. The sexuality and innocence of this object sit uncomfortably with each other, and it is this juxtaposition that characterizes the other works in the show as well.

Opposite the large projection on the back wall is a smaller DVD depicting a montage of scenes taken from TV and popular culture. There are shots of a male strip show; men are surrounded by crowds of clapping women, laughing and at times looking a little uncomfortable. The dancing men are bizarrely reduced to their simple aesthetics. Bronzed and muscular, dressed in these extraordinary leafy thongs, they are only objects to behold.

When watching this ritual objectification of willing subjects, the supposedly sexy unravels and becomes devastatingly unsexy. Gibbs takes a step back from the practices which shape and define sexuality and reduces them to their bare essentials; their almost animalistic fundamentals. On the DVD other images are cut amongst the male strippers and body builders, and they serve to accentuate this unrealistic and hyped up display of sexuality. There is the recurring image of stags in the wilderness. These are noble, beautiful creatures, portrayed as symbols of strength and power. Also, with their stature and phallic horns they are overtly masculine. Shown immediately next to these shots are images of a hunter, complete with large phallic gun, patrolling the countryside, searching for prey. Gibbs juxtaposes these images carefully to suggest that even masculine power and potency are capable of being reduced and subverted.

The DVD is constantly toying with this subversion of power, undercutting images of masculine authority to reveal them for what they really are; subjective constructions which have only a tentative relationship with reality. The stag can easily fall victim to the hunter. The male bodybuilders, instead of being symbols of ubermasculinity, become fetishlike objects ready to be owned and manipulated.

There is a moment of real disquiet in this montage of scenes. A small boy comes up to a large empty swimming pool. It gapes before him. He stands on the diving board and bounces a little, like he is about to spring into the concrete mass. At the last minute his Dad comes up and stops him, takes him down and berates him for being so careless. Then he leaves and the boy is alone again, but there is the potential lying there that he will simply try it again. The moment examines the vulnerability of the small child. As he doesn’t know any better and could possibly injure himself, and the construction of self through teaching and environment, with the father coming down and dispensing his warning. But it is the last section that is the most interesting. The child is left alone with the pool. He now has the choice of whether to simply re-enact his former mistake or to take on the knowledge that he has been given. There is the disquieting contrast between his vulnerable childlike state and the small decision which he able to make, and the certain power that he is still able to exert.

Overlaying the whole show are the gentle strains of a piece of classical music by Haydn. It is as if someone is playing classical music when you go round for dinner at their house, when it is clear that they never would normally. Like other aspects of this show, it is deliberately sugar sweet and forced; a thin veneer of respectability coating these subtle displays of sex, innocence, knowledge, and implied violence.

SANDY GIBBS
Enjoy Public Art Gallery
6 – 23rd September

The classic example of a kid’s movie that is superficially childish but actually totally screwed is Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory. It’s like some sort of crazy test to wend your way through Wonka’s madhouse alive. Inevitably the children are slowly struck off one by one, and Mr. Wonka is worryingly nonchalant about their fates; he announces ever so casually that Violet Boregard is going to end up in the juicing room. The freakiest bit is when they are traveling through the tunnel on the barge and ‘the rowers show no sign of slowing’. On the tunnel wall is a psychedelic montage of people and animals; the chicken getting its head cut off was always particularly terrifying.

There is a point to all this rambling I can assure you. We are actually here to talk about art. And here is my segue, I kept thinking about that part of Willy Wonka when I was looking around Peter Lewis’ exhibition Scalpelicious at ROAR! gallery. That part of the movie always totally freaked me out when I was a kid. Now I am much older and more mature I was able to wander around this show without covering my eyes with my hands, but there was definitely something reminiscent of Willy Wonka in Lewis’ work. It is the unsettling conflation of childish imagery and adult themes of politics, science and gender that characterises these works and brings them to life.

Peter Lewis is a Dunedin based artist who creates these detailed and delicate montages. He foraged through op-shops and library cast-offs to find old books, children’s encyclopedias, and illustrated fairytales, to massacre. He then reinvigorates them, places them in alien landscapes, cuts and pastes, aligns disparate images, creates people with animal heads and vice versa. The result is a colourful psychedelia of weird and wonderful creatures, drinking tea and playing board games while giant squids and monsters squelch around them.

In his use of montage Lewis draws on a long history of this technique. Most famously, the Dadaists who were scampering around in early twentieth century Berlin were big fans of cut and paste as a means to create new and startling images. Dada was an art movement that exploited the power of chance and surprise to determine how artworks were made. In this manner, Dada artists such as Hannch Höch collected found materials like pamphlets, posters, and photographs which she then manipulated to create her detailed montages. These were not only decorative but addressed the ever present political issues of the Weimar Republic, such as the position of women within society and the growing influence of the mass print media. In the bizarrely constructed images that resulted, these issues were addressed with a certain irony, and were certainly filtered through the skepticism and wit for which Dada is well known.

This kind of depreciating humour is evident throughout Scalpelicious and very much shared by Peter Lewis. These images don’t take themselves too seriously. One of my favourites was ‘Tiananmen Duck’. This depicted the infamous Tiananmen Square, scene of clashes between the restrictive Chinese government and protestors. The most well known representation of this area is that famous photograph of the one protestor standing solitary before the oncoming bulk of a tank. Normally therefore the domain of serious journalists and documentary photographers, on this space Lewis has overlaid a gratuitous yellow duck, thereby subverting the seriousness of the image and reworking a cultural iconic image.

These pieces are constantly reworking, re-contextualising and sabotaging the imagery that Lewis has borrowed from innumerable sources. Lewis describes his technique as akin to that of a DJ who samples and rewrites pre-existing pieces of music. In this way, Lewis’ work is very much like a visual sampling; an eclectic mix of images stolen from anything the artist can get his hands on.

The works therefore, like Hannah Höch’s almost a century ago, are also an examination on our image saturated culture.
Images and representations pervade every moment of our modern existence. We are bombarded everyday with images from advertising, magazines, television and the internet which shape the way we think, act and live our lives. Lewis’ images are almost parodies of the vociferousness of the mass media. The sheer number of different images and references to popular culture make these works almost like music videos or the E! channel. But saying that I mean they convey a vast number of images simultaneously. When watching music videos or E! I almost feel tired from the rapid fire cuts from shot to shot. There is never a moment to focus your attention or slow down. Each moment is almost overlapped and overlaid by another.

Lewis revels in this technique of oversaturation and excess. In their playful references, the works in this show are a pastiche of both the E! channel and the macabre undertones of Hansel and Gretel. In Lewis’ world skipping girls with octopus legs make friends with aliens and toy ducks preside over Tiananmen Square. It is an implausible world where the fantastical becomes entirely believable, and above all highly entertaining.

WORK BY PETER LEWIS ROAR! gallery
August 31 – September 17

Landscape painting has had its ups and downs in popularity. By traditional standards it wasn’t really thought of as a worthy genre. Classical nudes, historical scenes, and portraiture was more where it was at. In the eighteenth century however, landscape painting became an accepted genre in its own right, and John Constable was one of the main proponents of this style of painting in England.

The Haywain is a very large painting and is a good example of Constable’s interest in the English countryside; the shadows and shapes of the land. This painting is almost soporific to look at. Slowly, slowly goes the river, trickling away into the distance.

Steadfast stand the trees. The clouds roll by in the blue sky etc. As the current exhibition at Te Papa shows, Constable was particularly interested in the weather; the changes in the sky and clouds and what effect these have on a landscape. The most interesting part of the show is studies of atmospheric conditions, the results of which can be seen in this work. Constable was a master of the nuances of light, rain and shadows.

David lived in a turbulent time of history. He was a fervent supporter of the French Revolution and the overthrow of the monarchy. As the politics of the time became more and more tumultuous, David began to turn away from re-working classical subjects to depicting the actual political events of his time. As seen through the eyes of an ardent revolutionary let us hasten to add. He became a pseudominister of propaganda for the Jacobins, and his paintings can be seen as conveying the same messages as his political pageants, ceremonies, and pamphlets.

This painting, The Death of Marat, is probably David’s most famous, depicting the assassination of his revolutionary friend Jean-Paul Marat. He was murdered by a woman, Charlotte Corday, from an opposing political party, and her name can be seen on the piece of paper which Marat holds in his limp hand. Here, Marat is presented as a noble martyr, murdered for his service to the people and the state. Upon presenting the painting to the convention, David said “Citizens, the people were again calling for their friend; their desolate voice was heard: David, take up your brushes.., avenge Marat… I heard the voice of the people. I obeyed.”

In this video piece the camera drifts, seemingly without purpose, around a darkened back yard. Occasionally, the camera will fall upon assemblages of objects, collected and arranged in careful patterns on the ground. These are the most prosaic and familiar of objects. Bones, flowers, coke bottles, bananas, and a cut pineapple, are all systematically sorted and laid out in symmetrical, flowering shapes. In their patterning they made me think back to the amazing installation of Yuk King Tan’s at the City Gallery a couple of months ago. In this case, the camera chances upon them, as if by accident, and they are eerily illuminated from an outside light source.

A ghostly soundtrack backs this whole scene, adding an air of foreboding and unease. There is the sense that we are watching part of an old horror movie. Indeed, Spong utilizes many of the techniques and traditions that characterize this genre. Dark, moody lighting, unsettling music, confusing boundaries, and unknown space, all work to disconcert the viewer. In this video, space is limitless as the dark stretches off into the distance. But it is at the same time also very intimate; as each collection of objects is highlighted our focus becomes very specific. Each assemblage is disconnected and dissociated from any other; it is its own little world. The work then is a continued struggle between what we know and what we don’t know, or can’t know, as we are only drip fed tiny snippets of information and given no wider context in which to place them.

The information that we are given, the small collections of objects, seem to be bestowed with far greater significance than their utilitarian nature would at first allow. They take on a spiritual nature; they are like small remembrances, selected and arranged with care. These objects reference the Balinese tradition of Banten, offering up objects to the gods in that hope of lives filled with happiness and health.

Spong’s Balinese heritage is something that the artist only began to explore later in life, and once described it as “a glimmer of something fed to me through shadows and whispers”. This work examines the two different cultures that make up the background of this artist, and their differing approaches to spirituality. For while these objects, fruit and bones, may appear to the Western eye as entirely mundane, they are extended outwards beyond their dayto- day existence, they take on a mystical quality and, when inserted into this Balinese religious practice, their significance is only heightened.

’2 x 2 Contemporary Projects’ is a series of two exhibitions, each of which displays two contemporary artists alongside each other. In this case, Sriwhana Spong is joined by Lonnie Hutchinson, an established artist of Ngai Tahu and Samoan descent. Hutchinson has exhibited extensively in New Zealand over the years. Her solo project ‘This show is what I do’ was exhibited at the IMA in Brisbane in 2005.

Hutchinson’s work over recent years has been largely characterized by her cut out designs. These involve careful manipulation of paper (in this case it is acrylic plastic), cut into detailed patterns. In the works on display at the City Gallery, Shading 1 – 4, these are exhibited in glass cases. They are held up, almost like ethnographic specimens, complete with tags containing series of numbers; catalogued and encased. They highlight the often ethnographic approach to Pacific art, as something timeless and in a form of stasis. Therefore it is easy to categorise, label and contain within glass cases.

However, the more I looked at the patterns cut out by Hutchinson in the acrylic, the more they looked something other than Pacific designs. They could just as easily be Victorian motifs, the fleur de lis of ornately patterned wall paper, or Celtic swirls. These symbols are by no means exclusive to Pacific culture, and Hutchinson is perhaps here hinting at the global nature of signs and symbols; an international language system.

The sculptural works are accompanied by large paintings on the walls of the gallery. These are of woman at work, crouching and in motion, created by large black swooping lines. They immediately made me think of Japanese art with its simplicity of line, form and fascination with the colour black. Emma Bugden writes in the catalogue essay for these works: “Sometimes configured as a void or hollow, the blackness in Hutchinson’s works in conceived as the colour of power and potential.” There is certainly a power in these women, found in the thickness and confidence of the brushstrokes and in the monumental size of their figures.

Hutchinson’s work in the past has examined the abysmal treatment of women, of their oppression and subjugation. Her work ‘Black Pearl’, which used images similar to these, looked at the practice of ‘black birding’ which involved the capturing of Polynesian workers into slave labour during the 1800s. However, the women in this work, Ladies, bite back at this history. Even the title suggested a powerful proclamation of worth and achievement, and pokes fun at the class system. These ladies beam down from the gallery wall with pride and passion, comfortable and unashamed in their space.

Both of these artists speak to issues of cultural identity and the construction of cultures. And their work is very much informed by their multicultural backgrounds. Spong however, seems hesitant about her heritage; it is like a mystery which she seeks to solve. Her work is a subtle and delicate examination of contrasting belief systems. Hutchinson works with more assertion and power; her women dominate the room and shout out their story from the gallery walls.

Lonnie Hutchinson and Sriwhana Spong
5th August – 24 August

The Château de Versailles is a monstrous piece of Baroque architecture situated outside of Paris. Versailles actually used to be a village in its own right but has since been subsumed by the ever growing city of Paris. In 1660, the young King of France, Louis XIV, with his dainty ankles and curly black wig, was searching for a spot where he could set up court and be distanced from the constant yabbering of the Parisian aristocrats. He picked the royal hunting lodge at Versailles and in the following years extended it into the largest and most extravagant Palace in all of Europe.

Most tourists visiting Versailles will go to the Hall of Mirrors, one of the main attractions. This was built between 167 and 1684, is 73 meters long and contains 357 mirrors. Louis, who was more than a little self-absorbed, saw it also a canvas on which to raise his profile, and foster his already monstrous ego. Following th signing of the Treaty of Nijemen in 1678, he ordered his favourite artist Charles Le Brun to paint the ceiling of the Hall of Mirrors with images of all the Louis’ government had achieved. Louis is depicted as a victorious Roman Emperor, administering his kingdom and vanquishing foreign powers.

I would suggest watching Drawing Restraint 9 with an open to mind to both its position as a piece of visual art, and also to its decidedly cinematic leanings. Writer and director Matthew Barney seems to be very interested in the opportunities which film has to offer his practice as a contemporary visual artist. Watching the film it is obvious that he takes great delight in the ways in which he can use the camera. There are majestic panning shots and delicate concentrations on the smallest gestures. I think he had fun exploring the ideas that have long interested him through the medium of film.

Matthew Barney is an internationally renowned artist, having won, among other prizes, the prestigious Europa 2000 award of the 45th Venice Biennale. Drawing Restraint 9 belongs within a series of works which Barney began in 1987, each a continuation and exploration of the same set of concerns. These include the power of resistance, containment, and pressure on shaping not only objects but also people and the way they are able to act and create. In Barney’s words ‘The Drawing Restraint project proposes resistance as a prerequisite for development and a vehicle for creativity.’ In Drawing Restraint 1 and 2 Barney conducted experiments within this idea of confinement, by running up an incline while strapped to an elastic band. Drawing Restraint 3 involved Barney lifted a barbell cast in petroleum wax and petroleum jelly (this interest in the qualities of petroleum becomes even more important in Drawing Restraint 9).

In Drawing Restraint 9 Barney works with his real-life partner, the Icelandic singer Björk. I have been a huge fan of Björk’s for years. Homogenic is such an amazing album; it’s up there in my top five. She was, in actual fact, the main reason that I went along to see this film, because she had written the soundtrack. And it was indeed worth going just for the music. Björk has always created majestic pieces of music that often sound cinematic in conception, inevitably suited to the medium of film. She has of course written cinematic music before, for Lars Von Trier’s Dancer in the Darkˆ, for which she also won the best actress award at Cannes. In Drawing Restraint 9 her compositions are so well suited to the images with which we are presented, that they often seem to shape and guide the scenes. Near the beginning of the movie, some Japanese women are shown diving for pearls and Björk’s music melds from strings to the singular sound of heavy, rhythmic breathing. One of Björk’s strengths is using these unusual sounds to create astounding and often moving soundscapes. This musical breathing certainly brings us directly into the world of these women, and builds an intimacy between viewer and viewed.

I am tentative about outlining the narrative of this film. Mainly because I don’t feel like it is that important. It is extremely hard to step away from the need for an understandable plot, but if it is at all possible, I think one has to when watching this film. Barney is much more interested in process than in definitive endpoints; where a conclusion is reached and everyone walks away happy. Briefly, the movie is shot in Nagasaki Bay, and is filmed for the most part on the pride of the Japanese whaling fleet, the Nisshin Maru. Björk and Barney, who are described in the credits as “Occidental guests” board the ship and take part in the elaborate process of bathing, shaving, getting decadently and bizarrely dressed and taking part in a tea ceremony. Also central to the action is ‘The Field’, a huge tank of some sort of petroleum jelly that is housed onto the boat in the beginning, and as it heads towards Antarctica, slowly freezes and solidifies.

This material becomes a symbol for Barney’s interest in process, resistance, and restrictions. The material is shifted and changed throughout the film by the real life crew of the Nisshin Maru, who cut it up, split it apart and move it around. It shows a material’s differing responses to the conditions that it is placed under, and the manifestations that could be created by carefully controlling it. The final shape that this Vaseline-like goo takes is an oval with a bar across it, and this symbol crops up in many different parts of the movie and Barney’s wider oeuvre. It is symbolic again of restriction, the oval seeking to be complete and full, is impinged upon by the bar that limits its fulfillment.

Björk and Barney are similarly manipulated and controlled by the elaborate costuming and ceremonies that they take part in. We are observers to every part of these decadent rituals, the careful washing, make-up and dressing, all take place very slowly. While some people may get bored, I found something mesmerizing in the methodical nature of these preparations. It is interesting to watch small detailed things happening close up. I think that if you let go of your need for resolution, for explanation, and simply enjoy these processes, then Drawing Restraint 9 will be very rewarding.

The climax of the movie is reached when Björk and Barney, surrounded by the petroleum substance, cut away at each other’s flesh, revealing blow-holes and whale tales. It is very sexual, with lots of vaginal symbolism and seminal streaks of blood. As the audience we feel almost voyeuristic in watching what seems to be a very intimate ritual of consumption. Barney seems to be exploring here the restrictions that the human body places on the creative act, the way in which we are all ultimately controlled by our own human bodies. But in the final shots we see two whales diving away from the Nisshin Maru and into the open ocean. So I think there is hope for creativity in Barney’s conception, and the possibility for rebirth and renewal.

I’ve been trying to write about as many different gallery spaces in Wellington as possible in this column. Vigilant readers will note that there has been hardly any repetition in galleries, which just goes to show the wide range of art spaces in Wellington that are ripe for reviewing. So I decided to go along to Photospace (it’s on Courtenay place, next to the Sahara café, up some stairs) just to mix it up a little, and continue my intrepid exploration of galleries in our fair city.

I’m feeling a bit disillusioned with photography at the moment. I can’t remember the last time I went to a photography show that floored me, or at least made me work and think hard. There were a few good photographic works in Islanded at the Adam Art Gallery earlier in the year. I think that the ones I liked the most were from overseas artists. But mostly I’ve just been a bit bored by it all, compared to some of the great installation and performance pieces that I’ve been able to write about this year.

There are two shows on at Photospace at the moment. The first, Catching Icarus by Ellie Smith is a lovely little show that brings together a delicate and nuanced collection of photographs, which speak well to each other in the small space. Smith has said that “this series of work continues to reference the family photograph and record moments that explore issues of uncertainty.” There is definitely a sense of unease in many of the works. Images of children having fun are tinged with disquiet. A small boy approaches the camera, an almost malevolent expression on his face, and behind him a girl’s leg pokes out of the water like a shark fin, approaching sneakily from behind. Smith has cleverly manipulated what should be the most innocent of photographic images, children swimming at the beach, and reveals unsettling intricacies in their relationship, and more importantly their relationship with the photographer.

The images are disparate. Some are photos of people, mostly children. Others are blurry shots of landscapes, or parts of bodies, or bubbling water. The unifying aspect is a sense of losing something, or that a section of the images are missing. These are not concrete, confident images. They are aware of their absences and the mistranslations that may occur when others are viewing them. Their meaning becomes adaptable and I think therefore much more interesting. Smith says, “When I make photos I wonder what I am really seeing…what clues are here that I am missing? Sometimes I get a glimpse at the tragic future, then the terror fades and I see what was always there – a child playing in a shallow pond.”

Ground Work by Kathryn Ivory is a different kettle of fish. Ivory is a Wellington based artist who works in photography and other media. Her show is situated just round the corner in a little alcove Ivory’s work comprises of large textual photographs of concrete sections, and holes where concrete spikes used to be. These are highly detailed, and seem almost like landscapes, or aerial photographs of wide open spaces. They are interesting in that they are pictures of very small spaces, minute and very functional areas, but yet they also made me think of vast expanses; of infinite areas of land. They show an interest in materials, in the construction of spaces, and also perhaps how people relate to these spaces. They play very heavily on absence and presence. I think that they are as much about the texture of the concrete and stone as they are about the emptiness of the dark fissures in between.

The press release says that these images are ‘symbolic’ which in itself a problematic word. I always find it frustrating and boring when artists create works which too overtly refer to other things, be that to concrete objects or to more abstract emotions. At first I did find these works hard to engage with. There are only a few and I couldn’t quite understand what the artist was trying to reveal, or explore. I felt like I needed more or some sort of variety to animate these works.

One point of interest though was the inversion, where the concrete would normally be, on the ground and under your feet, to up on the wall opposite you. Art theorist Leo Steinberg was very interested in this idea in the 1970s with famous painter Jackson Pollock being of particular interest to him. Pollock used to paint on the ground, by flicking paint onto the unstretched canvas, then would shift the painting at right angles up onto the gallery wall. In Ground Work Katherine Ivory is similarly interested in this shift of focus, from floor to wall, and what it might mean for how we perceive images. Certainly, in this case it causes the viewer to examine the space and texture of objects that we wouldn’t normally give a second thought, expanding them to become something different, and entirely divorced from their original purpose.

I liked these shows, and Photospace performs an important role in representing and exhibiting Wellington based photographers, but I wasn’t blown away. I think I’ve lost some faith in the medium of photography, and I am waiting for an artist to surprise and challenge me. I’ll let you know when this happens.

Each morning I get up at 6:30 and I have a shower. Sometimes, spitefully the shower is cold. I can’t figure out a reason for this. Then I get dressed and make myself a sandwich and get some fruit and a treat for afternoon tea. Then I eat breakfast and have a cup of green tea. I put my book in my bag, and my phone, lunch and wallet. Then I walk to work.

This is pretty much what happens every morning during the week. Small anomalies occasionally disrupt this system. Nothing too exciting, just little fluctuations in my patterns; but I manage to cope if we run out of milk. The thing is, it doesn’t matter what I do because I am alone, there’s just Morning Report on the radio. Nobody is watching me or judging me or analyzing what I do. I don’t really think about my routine, it is just there for practicalities sake, so I don’t end up at work naked, or go hungry all day.

This is the difference between routine and repetition. Routines are patterns that you develop unintentionally so that you can operate successfully in day to day life. But to intentionally repeat something, that is intentional, you are creating your own patterns that aren’t dictated by necessity.

I talked to artist John Borley on a wintry Sunday morning. He was sad because England had just been knocked out of the World Cup by Portugal. He likes football. He played some when he was recently in Dunedin. He was down there taking part in an artistic residency at the Blue Oyster gallery, an artist-run gallery space. The residency would run like this: Borley would arrive in Dunedin and have a week meeting people, networking, learning about Dunedin and its surrounds and generally getting out and about in town. Then, for the next four weeks, he would repeat this week to the best of his ability. Try and go to the same places with the same people, try to incorporate the same elements into his conversations and the same activities in his day. The project was called ‘Return’. It was kind of like Groundhog Day, except weekly, and without Bill Murray.

During his residency, Borley decided to stay at a backpackers. In return for his free accommodation, he cleaned everyday. He changed beds and cleaned bathrooms and kitchens. This system was well suited to Borley’s plan for repetition. Domestic duties require methodical behaviour. But things become more complicated. Having deliberately chosen to repeat his activities, Borley was much more self-conscious than your normal toilet-cleaner. These repetitions were performed with an everpresent self-awareness and caused intense self-examination. “I moved towards the conclusion that repetition doesn’t actually exist,” Borley said, “it’s actually impossible. But I became aware of these almost spiritual ideas when I was cleaning, I had no one to check that I was doing things right, but I felt like there was a kind of omnipresent being watching over me. The more and more I did this, the more and more I couldn’t separate it from the way people live their lives anyway.”

We are (hopefully) free to make our own choices and determine the patterns with which we move through life. But, as Borley’s project examined, we answer not only to ourselves but also to something above and beyond. By repeating these mundane activities so studiously, Borley was able to interrogate the structures that we put in place for ourselves as individuals, either knowingly, or more often than not, sub-consciously.

Beyond his own inner examination, Borley was very interested in the way in which his repetitions could involve and challenge others. “Participants were extremely important,” says Borley, “that was the justification to myself as why this project could be read in an an artistic context, because I was looking at how an art audience can be manipulated, but also what function it might have, and why it should even be there.” To do so Borley set up meetings with people that he hadn’t met before he went down to Dunedin. He sought out people who he thought would be interested by his project and challenge the ideas that he was presenting. The art school at Otago Polytechnic was an obvious to find these people. Borley attended weekly criticism sessions and got to be known about the campus. He made himself most obvious when he chose to arrive to a class late each week. At twelve minutes past three every Wednesday Borley would walk in to Room 201 at Dunedin Polytech and say, “Do you mind if I sit in?” This happened at exactly the same time and place for five weeks.

This repetition was obviously more performative and blatant than cleaning toilets in a backpackers. And this is, I think, one of the most interesting parts of this project. It cannot be easily categorised. While many of Borley’s repetitions were distinctive walking into a classroom late, or buying a single tulip everyday from a florist shop – repeated five times over, many of them were of the most mundane activities. He would go to Countdown three times a week at fifteen minutes past eleven at night and buy a loaf of vogels and a litre of milk, he would mop floors, and he would go to football practice. None of these actions are particularly exciting or spectacular. Actually watching someone do them would probably be quite boring. So, while a number of the chores that Borley set for himself could be regarded as a piece of ‘performance art’, (and I use those words with trepidation) they in no way characterized this project. In fact, they probably were in a minority compared to the more humdrum repetitions which took place. Return set up an inherent contradiction in that this was a performance that didn’t ask for an audience, and in many ways actually rejected it.

Borley wasn’t actually asking people to watch him. The position of the audience is problematic in Return. At many stages, Borley performed the function of both participant and audience; he was the sole member of his own artistic endevour. When he met someone for soup they would slip into the dual position of both participant and audience member; they could check if Borley was going through the motions in the correct way, but they themselves were also integral to those regulated activities. “I am really interested in the purpose and function of audience,” says Borley, “and trying to figure out who my audience might be and whether or not they are even important.” This project placed people in many roles, as artist, as participant, as audience member, as someone who had no idea what they were taking part in, but just knew that this guy came in every day for soup and always asked for a receipt. These people were integral to the project, and their response was just as valid as someone from a contemporary art perspective.

And Borley felt a certain accountability to these people, “I was responsible to the people, like the person who served me soup. I had to have the same process of doing things, because even though they weren’t aware of what I was doing, they could measure my activity.” So while the work often caused introspection in the artist, Return also took shape through outsiders’ responses and their interactions with Borley. This project was all about these dichotomies and disjunctions. I have only briefly outlined the premise in this article and some of the most evident issues that arose. I think John Borley is an artist who raises intriguing ideas, not only for those involved in contemporary art, but about the way we live our lives and function in society.

Even though the exceptional standard of journalism here at Salient makes it look easy to conduct an informative and inquiring interview, it is actually quite difficult to come up with questions that don’t make you look like either a Neanderthal or a pretentious fool. And Micheal Smither is a seminal figure in twentieth century New Zealand painting – a big wig, head honcho, or main man if you will. And here was little ol’ me doing an interview with him. So yeah, I was nervous.

However, it turns out that I needn’t have worried in the slightest. Michael Smither is the nicest person ever! For those in the know, Smither’s major exhibition ‘The Wonder Years’ opened at the City Gallery recently and runs until June 5. In conjunction with the opening, Smither had been doing interviews all week with a variety of media and I was the last one. So by all accounts he should have been tired, sick of answering the same predictable questions and going over the same material. But instead he was interesting, verbose, genuinely excited about the exhibition, and he also lent me his hat because the sun was shining right in my eyes. Michael Smither is tops.

Impressively, Smither has been working as a fulltime artist for the majority of his career. He went to ELAM art school in Auckland in 1959, mainly encouraged by his father to get some sort of ‘proper’ qualification, but left during his second year as he felt that he was being trained to be an art teacher, not an artist. “I was very focused on what I wanted to be. I wanted to be a painter. Then it was pretty much then inconceivable. There would have been about four maybe five fulltime artists in New Zealand in those days, but mostly you had to get a job as a school teacher, or maybe a job in an art gallery if you were lucky enough, like McCahon.’”

It certainly takes bravery to go it alone in the arts, particularly in New Zealand, and especially so in the early 1960s when the arts infrastructure was not nearly as extensive or as well facilitated as today (though there is still a long way to go). But for the majority of his life Smither has almost exclusively been a painter. During these early years, financially supported by his parents (he was an only child) and a series of part-time jobs, Smither learnt his craft and created the impressive body of luminescent paintings now on show at the City Gallery.

‘The Wonder Years’ focuses on the period of Smither’s life and work from 1962 to 1979, showing the undeniable links between one’s personal and professional spheres. It incorporates the period after he left art school and was living in his hometown of New Plymouth. Newly married to poet Elizabeth, and the father of three young children, Smither turned to his immediate domestic environment to create images of clarity, sincerity, and often a certain amount of the macabre. It is this sense of disquiet that most interests me in the family scenes that are predominant in this exhibition. While images such as Big Occity appear as depictions of funny childhood experiences and innocence, one cannot escape the sense of impending doom or even terror that pervades them. Big Occity shows Smither’s son, Thomas, reaching for the light switch which controlled the whole house’s power supply. He strains upwards; there is a tension in whether or not he will actually be able to reach the switch, and glances backwards to see if he will be caught, his large simplified face starting in its adult knowledge of his wrong doing.

I enjoy this tension that Smither sets up between innocence and knowledge. I find it animates the paintings of his children, and hotwires them into action. This is no more evident than in Interior with child where Smither’s son and his toy car are depicted creepily shrouded in cloth. Smither describes this as an extremely powerful moment for him: having seen a photo in the newspaper of a car crash, where the dead women’s car had been covered in tarpaulin, he walked into the lounge to find Thomas had covered his toy car in the same way. “When he saw me looking he must have got some sort of feeling that I was extremely affected by it. And he threw his blanket over his head in sort of embarrassment or realization. It was a really strange moment for me. So I painted it.”

This is what happens: there’s an event or an assemblage of objects, and Smither seizes the moment and draws it. One of the most interesting parts of the exhibition is the collection of drawings which have been brought out from the strongholds of Te Papa for the occasion. Interestingly enough for someone who creates such highly finished paintings, Smither puts great emphasis on the importance of his drawings. “One of the triumphs of the show is getting the drawing books out of Te Papa. I gave them to Te Papa in 1981. If I had the choice between a good drawing and a good painting I’d take the drawing any day. Drawing is about grabbing that immediate poetic moment. They are at an intimate level and I think a drawing says more with less.” The sketches capture very specific moments, which Smither would later revisit and create paintings out of. He would often set up a border around tableaus of domesticity while he hurriedly sketched them, so that they couldn’t be disturbed from their original state. Images such as Yellow rubber gloves, were pounced upon after Elizabeth finished the washing up one night, and when painted assume a detail and magnitude far beyond their day-to-day use.

This extension of the natural may have been what led Ron Brownson, the curator of the exhibition, to term Smither’s works as “magic realism”. Smither himself has trouble with the term, perhaps because of his obvious modesty, but I find it a particularly instructive way of describing the works. For all their domesticity and everydayness the objects that Smither depicts take on new meanings. Yellow rubber gloves appear as some sort of lurid dead-sea life, curiously shaped without the support of busy hands inside them. Stripped from their traditional use they lie uneasily between the functional and the aesthetic. I think the vibrant colour for which Michael Smither is well known also works to transport his depictions of family and surrounds beyond their superficial simplicity into another realm. Early on in his career when Smither worked at a car painting shop, he was intrigued by the layers of paint which could be unearthed, “cars in those days used to have five or six layers of paint, so when you were sandpapering them down you used to reveal all these different colours. That actually was very interesting for me, and I did a lot of painting which employed that idea of scraping back to other things underneath.” Layering of oils, stripping back, and layering again, creates the luminosity that is characteristic of a Michael Smither piece and contributes to his work transcending the bracket of straight up ‘realism’ to a quite surprising, almost radiant depiction of domesticity.

While doing the interview it soon became clear that each painting, like Yellow rubber gloves, is directly connected to a specific moment and a specific story in Smither’s life. When one of the paintings came up in conversation, Smither would invariably illustrate it with its background story. His work is explicitly informed by his experience, his family, and his environment. And this is perhaps what makes Smither so popular. Everyone loves to know the biographies of artists: the when, where, who and what of art. This is evident in the popularity of the biographical strain of art history, such as the coffee table books which detail Picasso’s life and relate each of his paintings to different wives/mistresses. Biography makes art more accessible because it is easier to see the work’s ‘meaning’. For example, Crows over the Wheatfields by Van Gogh can show the artist’s disturbed mental state metaphorically in the dark crows if we know about his unstable mental health (what exactly afflicted him is widely debated), depression and subsequent suicide. ‘The Wonder Years’ also works in this manner, as the wall plaques which accompany each painting often directly identify the person, the moment, or the place that gave rise to the work. The strident regionalism of Smither’s art also appears to heighten their appeal. Images in this exhibition are predominantly from New Plymouth and Central Otago, an environment that will have a direct nostalgic impact on many people. The paintings will also appeal ro those with young families, with the images of kids eating, fighting, playing, and pushing their boundaries.

There is no deliberate obtuseness. And while some might find this tedious, these are unashamedly ‘paintings for people’, extremely easy to engage with, to recognize moments from one’s own day to day life. “My whole idea of art was to make paintings for people. And it still is. I’ve done paintings I think people ought to look at because I have a certain attitude towards something– you know, like a political attitude or something. But basically I believe that art is to be seen, to be enjoyed or appreciated or moved by in a way. These are fairly universal subjects.”

These pages operate in a sort of grey area. The visual arts definitely aren’t as much a part of popular culture as film, music or books. The editors of those pages will no doubt get numerous people contributing reviews and writing throughout the year. But I shall soldier on boldly alone, guilt tripping a few friends to review a show now and then.

I was talking to a friend the other day about art, and why it is that the only people who read these pages are the occasional art history student, or someone in a lecture so deadly boring that it requires a more thorough perusal of Salient. It was, he decided, because most contemporary art was too hard. Music can be put on in the background, the films which dominate our movie screens are generally light hearted escapism, and inane authors such as Marian Keys are regularly cited in top 100 book lists. We don’t like to be confronted by obscure and abstract contemporary art on a Thursday evening, we like to watch Survivor instead.

Maybe I’m just being pessimistic. But I do think that most people have a problem with contemporary art practice because they hold some problematic and outdated preconceptions.

Number one: the majority of people think that art should be pretty. I’m always having this argument with my dad, where he claims that art’s main objective should be to make you “gasp with beauty”. But, I argue, whether or not something is aesthetically pleasing or not is entirely open to debate and what one person enjoys is obviously not going to be the same as what a different person likes to look at. And if that was all art was required to do then I would have very little to write about this year. Art should not only appeal to us visually but also raise questions about numerous other things, history, politics, religion, why we live the way we do, and where we are in the world. Artists are not the isolated, solitary figures estranged from the world that popular myth portrays them as. They are real people living and working in the same environment that we are, confronted and challenged by the same societal pressures and contemporary problems. Nowadays, art also often becomes self-reflective and critical, questioning the concept of ‘art’ itself and challenging the institutions which house our ‘national treasures’. It is at times like these that a little bit of art historical knowledge goes a long way. It’s easy for me to sit here after having done many years of art history and chortle in an irritatingly knowing way at the opening sequence of Desperate Housewives. But what can I say, art is hard. Get over it. It’s not going to roll over and let you scratch its belly. It’s not going to sound like Jack Johnson and it’s not going to be colby cheese (the most bland and tasteless of all the family of cheeses). It’s going to make you work for it, and art which does so becomes so much more interesting and rewarding. Seriously.

Number two: most people think that art should take lots of hard work to create, and this hard work should be obvious to the viewer. People who don’t normally go for contemporary art seem to like the work of Shane Cotton, for example. Cotton’s most well known pieces are detailed acrylic paintings, rich in symbolism and layered with delicate landscapes and text. Maybe it’s because much of his art is made up of numerous small elements, carefully crafted in paint, that we can see that he’s put in some effort, not covered a canvas in unmodulated colour like some abstract artists such as Stephen Bambury. This idea of ‘work’ has been picked apart and refuted by innumerable artists. Conceptual art is not so much about the end product, or the object which is exhibited, but about the idea behind it, the ‘concept’ if you will. Much contemporary art disregards the aesthetically appealing work of ‘art’, but is more about creating a framework of ideas which the viewer can engage with and respond to. All the way back in 1917, Marcel Duchamp (heaps of issues in the art world today can be traced to clever ol’ Duchamp, he was somewhat of a trend setter) placed a urinal in an art gallery, entirely removing any kind of traditional ‘work’ and suggesting that our concept of ‘art’ is reliant on context, particularly that of the art gallery.

Number three: lots of people get intimidated by galleries, think that there’s one right answer to art and get grumpy when they can’t figure it out. We don’t generally like what we don’t understand. What last year’s controversy over et al.’s piece for the Venice Biennale showed is that people expect art to lay itself bare, to reveal itself and give up its answer. And when it doesn’t they write irate letters to the Dominion Post proclaiming contemporary art practice as a snobbish and self-indulgent enterprise. The advice I would give to remedy this situation is to trust yourself and be confident in your ability to engage with and interpret art work. Everyone’s opinion is valid and most art doesn’t even have an answer. Many pieces of contemporary art are often created and defined by your interaction with them. Your role as the spectator is integral. Even a response such as “this is f****** bullshit” is legitimate. But you will say that less and less the more art that you expose yourself to, and the more you open your mind to acts of artistic expression.

My role as the critic is also important, if not a little complicated. I should write reviews which interest you, and also hopefully use my skill as an art historian to reveal things in art which at first might not be so apparent. But my writing is by no means the last word. Art which is centuries old continues to be reworked and reinterpreted by critics and intellectuals working today. That’s the great thing about art, it is so open and multifaceted, it’s just waiting for you, begging even, for you to come and have your say.

ART IN WELLY:
So, I’ve convinced you to spend you to spend your Saturday afternoon checking out some art around town. Excellent. We are spoilt for choice in Wellington so let’s get to it:

Te Papa proclaims itself as our National Museum and is supposed to be representative of the artistic activity of New Zealand. This is a sad state of affairs really, because it rarely puts on a critical or illuminating art exhibition but mostly caters for the masses with bland travelling blockbuster shows. I don’t like going there because I invariably get lost as the place is so damn confusing.

The City Gallery is the other obvious choice for an afternoon’s gallery going. Given that the City Gallery has none of its own collections its angle is to hold several temporary exhibitions from well known New Zealand and international artists each year.

We have an art gallery right on campus! This is news to some of you I know. But it’s a true story. Right next to the Union building the Adam Art Gallery is sandwiched into a funny space which used to be a staircase. I love the Adam. It is an unusual space which makes demands of both its curators and artists alike. It has a variety of different shows on throughout the year, and the best thing about it is that you can nip in between lectures.

Straying off the beaten track somewhat there are some smaller galleries which exhibit less well known artists. Enjoy Public Art Gallery can be found on Cuba Street, across the road from Krazy Lounge and up some stairs. Enjoy exhibits a variety of artists, from the newly graduated to more established figures. Enjoy, as its slogan says, is ‘freed from commercial constraints’, in that it doesn’t sell any of the art it shows, making it one of the few art spaces in Welly purely for discussion and experimentation

Massey University, given that there are innumerable artists swarming around there going to class, is also a great place to go and check out some art. Litmus is a space designed for new work, and hosts a number of ‘context dependent and temporary’ projects throughout the year. Also at Massey, The Engine Room is run by the fourth year students of the School of Fine Arts and is an art space dedicated to ‘emerging and established artists from New Zealand and overseas.’

Another option, of course, is to take a tour of the dealer galleries around town. These places are obviously open for viewers who don’t have the bling to go splashing out on art left, right, and centre, so feel free to have a look at what they have on display. Among these are Bartley Nees Gallery, which moved last year to Blair Street, the Hamish McKay Gallery which can be found at 128 Featherston St, and the Peter McLeavey Gallery is on Cuba, up the same flight of stairs to get to Enjoy and on the same landing.

I haven’t put down all the galleries in Wellington, and I’ve run out of words. But hopefully I’ll be able to introduce you to all of them by the end of the year, by which time you’ll all be super art savvy and hobnobbing it with the best of them.