Rush

Dear readers

Thank you for coming back. I realise Monday's post might have been a bit of an overload.

As an antidote, can I recommend Alex Monteith's show at the Govett Brewster.

Composition with RNZAF 3 squadron Exercise Blackbird for three-channel video installation from Alex Monteith on Vimeo.

I ducked in for literally 5 minutes yesterday afternoon, and I wonder if in its compressed intense way that may have been the perfect visit duration. The GBAG has given over almost its entire space* to Monteith's video works, which are spaciously laid out through the galleries (a nice change from the smushed-in shows that have been a bit of a characteristic of late). Video art is often tucked away somewhat apologetically behind buffered walls to prevent sound leakage: here, the sounds of whirring rotors and screaming motors reverberate through the dimmed-out galleries, creating an experience of pure visual and aural (over)stimulation. Occasionally a bit of that is good for you.


*The sampling of pop and pop-ish works from the collection tucked away into the corridor space between the lift and the entrance to the Len Lye gallery felt unnecessary, and also jarred you out of the full immersion experience of Monteith's work.

Also - Monteith's website is terrific.

Not with a bang

I've been mulling what I want to say about my visit to the Govett-Brewster's 40th anniversary shows for over a week now.

Luckily, David Cross has said some of it for me, in his review of John Reynolds' Nomadology: Loitering with Intent. Reynolds clearly has an important relationship with the Govett, but this show simply felt too big, too repetitive, too much like other work I've seen elsewhere.

The 40th anniversary show contained two other large-scale works from the collection. Pae White's Songbirds is lovely, but also oft-used: it feels like safe, easy curatorial choice. And Don Driver's Elephants for Sale is an odd fish; the installation (which hasn't been exhibited since its first showing in 1986) is a bit trippy and bubbly for my liking - I want my Driver either rigorous and elegant, or grunty and threatening.

On reflection, the word I come up with is 'toothless'. I don't mean it unkindly, really - I guess, with all the history the gallery has to choose from and play with, I feel somewhat let down. The Govett- physically and spiritually located on the edge - seems to have gone down the middle of the road for its big birthday show.

Mr Blobby

Over the weekend I had a small outburst when a radio host described Len Lye's work as 'just blobs moving around' during a preview of the New Zealand Film Festival programme.

I'm not sure if it was coincidence or if my rather intemperate tweets prompted it, but shortly after that Paul Reynolds blogged about the soon-to-open Lye show at ACMI in Melbourne.

It's great that the Len Lye Foundation has found another international opportunity to profile Lye's work, but I do still wish they'd address their web presence. The Govett-Brewster website has links to photos of Lye's work on Flickr, but no links to his film works which have been loaded up to YouTube. They do link to the British Film Institute site however - where the videos are locked down so only registered UK schools, colleges, universities and libraries can access them.

One small step that the GBAG could take would be to add a link to the 10 minutes' worth of 'Flip and Two Twisters' that's available on the NZonScreen site.

But one biiiiig step would be to start talking to the Indianapolis Museum of Art (IMA), the organisation behind ArtBabble, a showcase of high-quality video content from art galleries, collections & channels. Fortuitously, Daniel Incandela - Director of New Media at the IMA - is one of the keynote speakers at this year's National Digital Forum conference in Wellington in November. ArtBabble is always looking to expand its content - this could be a match made in international-access heaven.

Anything but scared

A trip to New Plymouth in the weekend, and the happy discovery that the collection hang which the website says closed on 31 May was still up.

The conceit of the show was that collection works were paired with each other, in variously happy and indifferent relationships: Francis Upritchard and Octavia Cook (crafty); Francis Upritchard and Rohan Wealleans (colourful); Billy Apple and Michael Stevenson (fluorescent lights and distance).

Once again, as with the Don Driver show, the curators have built extra walls and squeezed works in cheek by jowl. Of course, this means you get to see more of the collection - which, with the lack of a collection publication and the online collection still a WIP, is no bad thing - but the works simply don't get enough room to breathe, and the sightlines of the upper galleries are obliterated. It kind of makes you sigh for the days when the Gallery would give a whole floor over to Pae White's paper sculpture.

These quibbles aside, it was great to see some old friends. After spending quite a lot of time last week at Te Papa immersed in the two recently-acquired McCahons from the 1976 Scared series that have been put on display in the Level 5 galleries ( Mondrian's last chrysanthemum* and I am scared; I stand up) it was fantastic to compare these two with the Govett's Am I Scared, and get all connoisseurial over the brushstrokes and paint splotches & use of acid yellow. I would love to see the all six works from the series on display sometime.

It was also fantastic to see Shaun Gladwell's 2004 video work Multiple Descent [Taranaki] again. The work is very simple, and very beautiful - one after another, on a repeating loop, Gladwell accompanies two skateboarders to the top of the Centre City carpark in New Plymouth, filming their ascent in the lift and descent along the parking levels and ramps, lit by the late afternoon sun, the skateboarder going first, Gladwell following on his own board with a handicam. The only editing effects seem to be the slowing of the film, and the screening of sound so only the skateboards' wheels and the occasional indrawn breath can be heard.

One of the things I love about the video is that occasionally you catch sight of Len Lye's Wind Wand, but the work - which has become central to New Plymouth's new foreshore-focused identity - is treated without any ceremony, and is as much of a side-issue as the lone shopper caught pushing her trolley to her car. Instead, all the focus is on the two lanky teens; the slow scrolling motion of the leg that propels them forward, the way their hands hang from long thin wrists when they're not in use, the minimal lean and sway with which they navigate the concrete passages. In its own cool, self-contained way, Multiple Descent [Taranaki] is a very sexy piece of work.

Sadly, I can't find decent clips of any of Gladwell's video works online. Here's a stolen snippet of Storm Sequence (2000) though, complete with visitor commentary.



*The colour in that photo doesn't do justice to this work, it's definitely worth making an effort to see it in the flesh

Peel

Following the 'deinstallation' of a Sol LeWitt at SFMOMA, the Modern Art Museum of Fort worth shows how you take down a Kara Walker.

Dear Govett-Brewster Art Gallery; will you PLEASE set up a Flickr account & post pictures of the removal of Snow Ball Blind Time?

Breathe

There were two sheds down at the cow shed, both painted the same plasticky light blue. The Big Blue Shed was the taller and longer of the two - tall enough to have a neck-threatening mezzanine that held up six or seven decades of farming supplies; things that seemed romantically outmoded (leather horse collars, rusting hand shears) and excitingly new (coils of bright yellow plastic tubing, boxes of shiny fencing staples). The Big Blue Shed smelled of sump oil, welding sticks, grease, thick warm dust. It was a place to work on wet days, to let the kids loose in when they couldn't run round with the dogs.

The Little Blue Shed sat on a hump of earth in the middle of the tanker turn-around. It was like a barrow - low and dark, piled with abandoned stuff that had compacted over the years until it was part of the building's fabric. It smelt like diesel and dirty dirt. Once, crawling back into a corner, I found an ossified blackbird, a stiff collection of dried-out skin and feathers, lying inside a wooden crate with a chicken-wire cover.

The blue sheds came back into my mind recently, after seeing Don Driver's work at the Govett-Brewster. I don't want to go all literal on you, or use phrases like 'alchemist of everyday life', but it's impossible for me to see his banner works without the hessian and pitchforks and mysterious stains taking me back to my childhood.

I was really looking forward to seeing the show and I have to admit to being disappointed. The falling feeling began as soon as I walked into the GBAG and saw that the view up the staircase had been blocked by a temporary wall, which forced a left-hand turn into the ground-floor gallery.




Once in the gallery, the walls were crammed with works, several familiar from the joint show with Julian Dashper at Hamish McKay's last year. Maybe the curators were aiming for a joyful jostle, but the effect was more of carelessness. My gut feeling is that work as maximalist as Driver's needs a bit of space on the wall - allowing both it and you to breathe a bit between pieces.

The sense of overcrowding was emphasised by the retention of false walls at the end of each gallery, which blocked you from seeing up into the first floor landing like you usually can (you can just see one of these in this surreptitious photo - sorry, gallery attendant, you were doing a good job really and I had trouble evading you).

It was also curious that Produce - arguably the best of these works in the GBAG's collection - was not included in the show, but instead represented rather forlornly by an postcard in the shop window.

I don't like whinging, especially not on a Friday afternoon when you all deserve an uplifting post, not a downer. But my visit was several weeks ago now, yet I'm still a bit saddened . But there is always a bright side; Peter Robinson's solo project at the GBAG - Snow Ball Blind Time - opens on 13 September, and I can't wait.

Yay for Don Driver

My cup runneth over with Don Driver goodness in the coming months.

First, a show of works from 1968-2008 opening at Hamish McKay Gallery on 28 May (I'm hoping for something with the enjoyability of last year's Mrkusich show, but with a few more pieces).


Second, a exhibition of Driver's banner works from the 1970s to the present at the Govett-Brewster, opening 31 May.


I wasn't around for the big Driver retrospective in 1999. Over the last few years though, as I've seen bits and pieces of work here and there, I've become more and more interested. With Spirit was a standout work for me in Reboot, and I really enjoyed the Driver/Dashper pairing at Hamish McKay's last year. The pieces that really ring my abstractophile bells are the painted relief works, which I've been lucky enough to see at people's houses - where the banners squawk and the assemblages growl, for me, the reliefs sing.

Images
Don Driver, La Guardia, 1966, mixed media
Don Driver, Another Belt Pocket, 1981, mixed media
From the Hamish McKay website (now in a nice chocolatey tone).

Don Driver, Horizontal Relief, 1973, acrylic on canvas and stainless steel.
Chartwell Collection, Auckland Art Gallery (and nice to see that the AAG's collection database is now regularly returning results on Google Image searchs, alleviating the poverty of images of New Zealand art on the web).

Len Lye online

Here's a nice thing: among the links on the Govett-Brewster's Len Lye web resources page are a couple of links out the Flickr, and images tagged with 'wind wand' or 'water whirler'.



The GBAG page also links out to the BFI Screenonline site, which has clips from Lye's films, but you can only access these if you're connecting via registered UK schools, colleges, universities and libraries.

Maybe the GBAG should think about linking out to YouTube too, where people have been happily loading up Lye films including Colour Flight, Rainbow Dance, The Peanut Vendor, and a tribute to the Water Whirler in action. There's also Lye talking about his kinetic sculptures, from the Horrocks doco.

Image: Len Lye's Wind Wand on the New Plymouth foreshore; by Cicada, on Flickr.

Sex and nature in New Plymouth

In New Plymouth over the weekend, I saw 'New Nature' at the Govett-Brewster. Curated by new-ish director Rhana Devenport, the exhibition:

draws on the ideas of biologist Tim Low to investigate the endlessly mutating shifts between the natural world and the many and varied cultural readings of nature.

... New Nature looks at the impact of human habitation, nature as ‘tamed’, ‘interpreted’ and ‘framed’ and something deeply imbued with metaphorical content. It also investigates the reciprocal influence of the environment on community and ecology. Historical, allegorical and culturally specific readings of wilderness are reference points as notions of natural spaces and materials are questioned. The slippages between ‘natural’ and ‘constructed’ worlds become fertile, if aberrant, sites for new visual languages and perceptions to grow.

While the show didn't feel quite as gutsy as Greg Burke's 2003 'Bloom' exhibition, which tackled a similar subject, there was some nice stuff in there. Interestingly, the only New Zealand artist included was jeweller Joe Shehaan, represented by half a dozen of his intricate greenstone carvings.

My favourite things in the show were Brisbane artist Michael Zavros's paintings of fashion stallion centaurs, in which slim male models are grafted onto sleek muscular horses, and his small sculpture Black Ice.



The works stood out both in medium (the majority of the work in the show is digital) and in their unabashed sexiness - a surprise ending to the show.

Images:
Michael Zavros, Yves Saint Laurent Le Smoking/Bay, 2006. Oil on canvas, 195 x 250cm.
Michael Zavros, Black Ice, 2007. Bronze, 17 x 7 x 16cm. Both images from Zavros's website.

Where have all the men gone?

Danae Mossman finishes as director the Physics Room in Christchurch at the end of this week. Here's my speculative list of who will apply for her role:

• Vanessa Coxhead (Programmes Coordinator, Physics Room)
• Laura Preston (recently Curatorial Intern at Artspace)
• Marnie Slater (currently acting director of Enjoy)
• Melanie Hogg (assistant curator at the Govett-Brewster)
• Paula Booker (Publications Manager & Writer, Enjoy)
• Thomasin Sleigh (coordinator, High Street Project)

Prompting me to ask ... where are the men? In the dealer galleries and auction houses? Making art, not pimping it?

Skylighting

In Monday's Guardian, a lengthy article by Steve Rose about the new MIMA (Middlesbrough Institute of Modern Art), part of mayor Ray Mallon's desire to turn the city into a 'designer label town'.

Steve Rose on the new MIMA - Guardian website
MIMA entry - Wikipedia

The article features a lot of commentary by the MIMA architect, Erick van Egeraat, who by the sounds of it has created a good box for looking at art in - and inviting people in. My attention was attracted by this statement though:

"The gallery spaces are artificially lit, which might be a taboo in major international galleries, but is a practical consideration here, says van Egeraat, as artists can control the lighting conditions. Besides, most thefts from art galleries are through the skylights."

Crikey.

There's an interesting discussion on Edward Winkleman's blog at the moment about gallery lighting - the general consensus in the comments seems to be that natural lighting is best, and thus artist-run and dealer spaces often look the best, as galleries and museums are restrained by preservation policies (and use spot lights, which people seem to abhor). I was at the Govett-Brewster in the weekend, looking at the Break: Construct exhibition, and the combination of too-small lighting and expanses of grey carpet lighting absolutely killed Yvonne Todd's work, displayed on the first mezzanine floor - which was a shame, because the photos themselves are extraordinary.

Edward Winkleman's blog
Govett-Brewster Art Gallery


Image from the Middlesbrough Council site.

A reliably good read

Peter Peryer is both one of my favourite photogrpahers, and one of my favourite bloggers. I think he uses his blog as a way of mastering the tyranny of distance - he's based in New Plymouth, one of New Zealand's bigger smaller towns, and home to the Govett-Brewster Art Gallery. Peter's blog is one the links to the right also, but here it is again:

Peter Peryer's blog

I'm really interested in the way the blog operates as both a marketing tool and a biography.

Peter has a show opening this week at the McNamara Gallery in Wanganui, one of New Zealand's other bigger smaller towns, although thanks to the tender ministrations of the Wanganui City Council, the local gallery - the Sarjeant - is in not nearly as good a shape as the GBAG.

Peter's show - McNamara Gallery
Govett-Brewster Art Gallery
Sarjeant Gallery

Image: Peter Peryer, Claw, 2006. Silver gelatin print.