Go to it

After going to the opening on Friday night and Marcus Moore's floortalk on Saturday, I'm still wrapping my head around Peripheral Relations: Marcel Duchamp and New Zealand Art 1960-2011 at the Adam Art Gallery.

My first impression is that it is a sophisticated, incredibly considered, and surprisingly (I don't know why 'surprisingly', but it was apparently not what I was expecting) elegant exhibition. My second impression is of nostalgia - not on Moore's part, but my own. I suddenly feel old enough to have history.

Standing between Julian Dashper's Untitled 6-25 on one side of the upper Chartwell Gallery and Giovanni Intra's 365 Days over the void, I felt enveloped in old friends. Both the works themselves (I'm old enough to play 'Remember when we saw that at ...') and the artists. It struck me later in the weekend that although I never met Intra, I have soaked up so many people's strong and fond and sad feelings for him, that I respond to seeing his work in the same way that I do Julian's - appreciation and attention for the art, but also this heart-clench moment for the person. It is a little like seeing Len Lye's Roundhead in the stairwell - slim and delicate and a fist through the heart. That work has always simply said 'Love' to me.
All this makes me wonder how people who don't have these histories and connections perceive a show like this. It is nearly impossible to put myself in their headspace (although increasingly I try).

However. This is beside the point. What I really wanted to do was flag the three-part lecture series by Wystan Curnow that is being staged across Wellington this week. I only found out about it by accident, so just in case you haven't heard:

We’ll Take Manhattan, New Zealand Artists in New York, 1957-1972 

For at least three decades following the end of World War Two, global developments in visual arts were dominated by one city: New York. But not all those developments were the work of native New Yorkers, or Americans. In three lectures, over three nights, in three different venues, Wystan Curnow will examine the New York experience of three artists to ask whether their work belongs to the history of New Zealand art or America’s or to some combination of the two.

Colin McCahon
6.10 – 7.30 pm, Tuesday 31 July
Victoria University of Wellington - Murphy Lecture Theatre MYLT 101

Len Lye
6.10 – 7.30 pm, Wednesday 1 August
City Gallery Wellington - Adam Lecture Theatre

Billy Apple
6.10 – 7.30 pm, Thursday 2 August
Massey University - Te Ara Hihiko, New College of Creative Arts Building

Poking around looking for these event listings, I stumbled over three pieces Curnow wrote in 1977

The New York Scene 1977 
The New York Scene 2
Thinking about Colin McCahon and Barnett Newman

They are so surprising and so fresh. Abstract painting is no stick to beat McCahon with, nor is McCahon a stick with which to beat abstraction. I still have so much history in front of me to dive into.

Pretend you never went to school

It might not be the "challenge [to] expectations of what music can be ... and where it should be performed" the Adam Art Gallery has planned, but someone's been making music with the Common People already (Weird in Wellington, via the Wellingtonista).

Fame!

Last week I wrote about visiting the Anthony McCall show at the Adam.

While I was there, two art students (well - that was what I thought, anyway) were rather self-consciously playing with the light-streams. It reminded me of this post on the Walker Art Centre's site, announcing a forthcoming event focused on David Lamelas' 1967 work Limit of a Projection 1.


On one of the museum's Target Free Thursday Nights, visitors were invited to have their photos taken under the spotlight. The images were then posted to a Flickr set.



It makes me wonder how many 'guerilla' portraits are already out there ....

Formalism two ways

To find Robert Heald's new gallery, you turn off Cuba Street into the Left Bank Arcade, and then head towards the light.

It's exciting to see a new dealer space open, especially when it's with a show of a new (or not-well-known-in-the-market) artist. Patrick Lundberg's altered found pieces make for a subtle but interesting inaugural exhibition - they're works that grow on you, that reward taking some time to observe. I'm looking forward to seeing more work by artists who so far I've only really had the chance to follow online.

A visit to the Adam Art Gallery to see the Anthony McCall show that closed over the weekend was less fun. If Lundberg's formalism is somehow warm and personal - a record of action, a kind of archaeology - then McCall's felt more coldly cerebral, a well-produced technical spectacle that somehow manages not to be at all affecting.

In his review, John Hurrell observes that on visiting the show "you realise that the online documentation of McCall’s sculptural work often looks slick, as if digitally tidied up and possibly a little bland." He goes on to say that "accidental components" bring an "unanticipated richness" to the experience.

I don't think these components - such as the fog machines - were in the least accidental, and I'd actually apply Hurrell's first sentence to the way I felt about the whole show. In an age where so much is technically possible, I sometimes feel it's getting harder for artists to distinguish what they do from other visual productions.



I don't think I'm arguing about hand-made versus digitally or mass-produced here, but more pondering how artists can continue to make objects or create experiences that stand out to you in a way that other things (or 'not-artworks') don't.

Images

Patrick Lundberg, installation view, Robert Heald Gallery, 2010. From the Robert Heald Gallery website.

Anthony McCall, Installation view of Breath (The Vertical Works) at Hangar Bicocca, Milan, 2009 (Photograph: Giulio Buono). From the Adam Art Gallery website.

Meditating

Although the last 10 days have been pretty much full immersion in the web world, I did surface twice to take an art breath.




Between the end of the Webstock conference and the beginnings of the Onya's dinner, I slipped over to City Gallery Wellington for the opening of the Festival shows, mostly to get a glimpse of Janet Cardiff's The Forty-Part Motet. The small amount of time I spent in the room was enough to convince me that I'll be returning often - perhaps when there isn't a woman in there using it as a quiet place to have a conversation on her mobile away from the noise of the opening.




Then on Saturday night I headed out to the New Dowse for the opening of their suite of Festival shows, and in particular Bill Viola's The Messenger. The Dowse is clearly moving at a great rate of knots right now - all three new shows have been quickly assembled, but the move I've noticed recently towards more cleanly, thoughtfully installed shows continues nonetheless. The collection show was an unexpected and lovely treat, and a purposeful reminder from the Dowse of the great works they hold on behalf of and for the benefit of their community.

Tonight Anthony McCall opens at the Adam Art Gallery and on Thursday Te Papa opens the installation of Judy Millar and Francis Upritchard's Venice Biennale projects. I don't know if it's chance or not, but the three international shows that have been brought in at Festival time - McCall, Cardiff and Viola - all fall into the meditative kind of art experience rather than the spectacular, a la Kusama and Mueck. In a rather rare public display of interoperability, a Festival Art Bus is running on 6 March, which will take you round all three shows for $15.

Un-named, 2009

Yesterday I went to check out Wall Works at the Adam Art Gallery - site-specific works by 8 artists, commissioned to mark the 10th anniversary of the gallery's opening.

Earlier in the day I'd had a really surprising visit to the Dowse (more on that later) and while I enjoyed some of the works - Jeena Shin's in particular - I think my capacity for art wonder had been used up for the day. You can read John Hurrell's review for more about the show, and David Cauchi's rather entertaining accounts of the development of bathroom work to get a feel for the "art camp" experience.

Instead, I got rather hung up on one detail of the exhibition installation. For the second time in the row (Laura Preston's previous show was the same, I think), there was no signage to tell you who each work was by. I can understand the desire not to put labels up next to wall works - it would have been quite incongruous, and even ugly. But surely there are some inventive ways to get around this, like vinyl signage on the floor?

If you picked up the understated little flyer from the desk, you did get details about each artist and their work, with the name of the space they were working in. However, this relies on you checking whether you're in the Congreve foyer or the lower Chartwell gallery to make sure you correctly match artist to work - or doing this retrospectively, if you pick up the flyer on the way out.

It's fine if you're pretty familiar with contemporary New Zealand art, and can make a good stab at it for yourself. But I do wonder how this makes less regular gallery visitors feel.

Crash

It's not often that an art project outrages me.

My visit to the Adam Art Gallery's current show, The Future is Unwritten, was flat. The only work that really grabbed me was Peter Trevelyan's pencil lead sculpture - such a formally perfect work felt out of place amongst the provisional bits and pieces dotted throughout the other spaces. If I'm brutally honest though, the work grabbed me because by the time I got to the Chartwell room I'd become pretty desultory, and almost missed it: I stopped in the doorway, saw a dim empty room, and was about to move on when I saw a strange haze at the end of the space - the laugh was on me in this case, the lazy visitor. I might as well have been running through the show viewing it through my iPhone (if I had an iPhone, that is).

It was when I was clicking around on the exhibition website that I came across the work that got me going. The first time I clicked on the link to Amit Charon's page on the site, and my browser slowed and then crashed, I thought maybe something was up with the Adam's recently redeveloped site. The second time it happened, I began to wonder if this was intentional. I visited the link again and again, trying to read the text on the page before the tab disappeared, to see if it would confirm this. Each time, my browser crashed, although at least I'd learnt my lesson by this point and closed all my other tabs and applications. Eventually, I made it out in time: Slowly add pressure to the site. Wait until breaking point.

I decided to err on the safe side and emailed curator Laura Preston, asking her if the crashing was intentional and, if so, would she cast some light on the project for me. Laura replied and said yes, the crashing is on purpose, and gave me an explanation of the piece. A sentence of her explanation inflamed the part of me that gets all righteous about the web and the communities of people who live on it, and had me ranting all weekend to friends and colleagues.

When I asked if I could publish what she sent me here, Laura demurred, and came back with other explanation that she had checked off with Charon. This piece had the sentence that got me all worked up removed and a more common-sense explanation appended, as follows:

For the exhibition project The Future is Unwritten, Amit Charan has made a subtle site responsive work. He has built a transparent 'skyscraper' which in digital speak is a vertical advertising banner 160 x 600 pixels. The invisible skyscraper is placed on the right hand side of his project's webpage. By dropping this very large file on top of the Adam Art Gallery website, Charan is simulating weight as a sculptural quality in digital space. Consequently, the added strain causes the browser window to slow down, stall or even crash as the skyscraper is downloaded and shifts from the gallery website to the user's temporary files folder stored on the desktop. To view this work is to give up one's own space/time.

Charan's work also connects back to the actual exhibition as it quietly relates to Daniel Malone's project - Bricks break dialectics 2009 a performance Malone proposed five years ago and realised at the opening of the exhibition, which involved throwing a brick through the gallery's front window.

For his supplementary material Charan has selected to highlight Santiago Sierra's 300 tons (brief information here: http://www.kunsthaus-bregenz.at/ehtml/aus_sierra.htm) which also places viewing restrictions due to the overwhelming weight of the work.

Reviewing the show, Mark Amery found the online projects "dull, undeveloped and too disconnected from the exhibition in situ". I too found the other projects pretty dry. I'm also not keen on Preston and Charon's site/site pun, which I think is kinda slim.

However, Charon's complete violation of web standards, his theft of my time, and his disregard for my activities and property is to my mind far more confrontational than Daniel Malone's exhaustively discussed and documented brick throwing. Bricks might break dialectics, but getting permission to bust a window hardly breaks open the conventions of the gallery. Downloading huge files onto my computer without telling me breaks the conventions of the web, and for many millions of people that's far more outrageous (if you don't believe me, listen in the next time a free service like tr.im goes tits up, or the Failwhale shows up on Twitter).

I do query though the seeming decision not to explain the project for unsuspecting victims seeking reassurance that their computer hasn't now been filled up with malware. The catalogue notes and the website have only the vaguest descriptions of Charon's work. From the catalogue "For this project Amit Charon has constructed a skyscraper, an intangible form that make its effects known": this doesn't help at all. If you're going to play jokes on me, I'd appreciate it if you shared the punchline afterwards.

Switch on

Two quite different art experiences over the weekend.

1. Thrill Me Every Day, a selection of works from Celia Dunlop's private collection, at the Dowse in Lower Hutt.

Celia died of cancer last year, and expressed the wish that her collection be shown and documented (a book is forthcoming). Thrill Me Every Day presents roughly half of the art, contemporary jewellery and ceramics that Celia collected over the past 40 years.

I was lucky enough to visit Celia a few years ago and get a tour of her house. It's really hard to replicate that feeling of a family of works that has grown organically through a house in a gallery setting, although there's an attempt with the display of a set of photos commissioned from Andrew Ross that recorded Celia's home in 2007. Reproducing rooms risks tweeness, like last year's reconstruction of Helen Hitching's gallery at the Museum of City and Sea, and often it's the stories that collectors weave around their collections while they conduct you around that form stronger ties than where things happen to be placed.

To me, the galleries (the three rather awkward small rooms on the left of the ground floor of the Dowse) felt overstuffed. Picking stronger themes and leaving more white space would have made for a more curatorial show, and shown some of the larger works in particular to better advantage. On the other hand, Celia personified abundance for me, and I thought she would have been really happy to see and hear the way people were drawing their own connections, recognising some things, oohing and aahing at others, and just not really getting the big Peter Robinson at all.

2. Billy Apple New York 1969-1973 at the Adam Art Gallery, Victoria University

You know, I never realised Apple made beautiful work (will he hate me for saying that?).

It might just have been that the documentary photographs brought out the formal quality of Apple's interventions with glass on footpaths and in his West 23rd Street space, but the works shown upstairs at the Adam were a bit of a revelation for me. The neon work in the long skinny downstairs gallery also skirts between grit and beauty, and made the most of that space, which I think works best when you view it from above.

The sparse hang was welcome after the busyness at the Dowse, but unfortunately it emphasised some epic technical fails: with two monitors down, and the projection in the Kirk Gallery not working, I felt like I only saw half an exhibition. The Adam needs to either provide more training to its gallery staff, or get more tech support.

Henry & Hank

Many moons ago, I did a stint on the front desk at the Adam Art Gallery. I always felt the Gallery was in a bit of a quandary - it sat smack dab in the middle of the student audience, but struggled to get the students through the doors (except for openings, and then they flooded in).

As a result, I'm a real admirer of the Henry Art Gallery at the University of Washington, Seattle. I met two Henry staffers a few months ago, when they presented a demo called "Reaching the Internet Generation using Interactive Web Technologies and NO MONEY". Realising that students are (in-phrase alert) digital natives, Henry staff understood that the web offered a number of ways for them to communicate with their primary audience.

Today, the Henry has a Facebook group and a MySpace page, and share podcasts via Henry Artcasts and iTunes. All these things take time, but only a small amount of financial input.

The Henry also has the very active HankBlog, which includes students who are doing internships at the Henry as writers. I really like the informal tone of writers like Jamey and Kira who report on events and exhibitions inside and outside and unrelated to the Henry. And although the effect is a little lost on a NZ reader, I also love the localness of the blog - I imagine if you were a kinda-interested-in-art-or-film-or-stuff-like-that student, you'd read the blog as a great way of finding out what's going on.

So, my learning from this? Make use of those students on your front desk. Start up a blog, make a digital camera available, lay down some super-simple guidelines, make sure YouTube isn't blocked by the institution's IT department, and set them free.

John Johns (and others) at the Adam Art Gallery

Several years ago at the McNamara Gallery in Wanganui I saw an exhibition of photographs by John Johns, the New Zealand Forest Service’s official photographer for more than three decades.



Johns' photos are just astounding. They reminded me very strongly of Peter Peryer's work, when he sinks you so far into the texture and pattern of what he's showing you that you lose track of what you're looking at and are simply absorbed in the looking.



A selection of Johns' photos feature in Tina Barton's second show at the Adam Art Gallery at Victoria University. 'Primary products' opens on August 11, and "teases out new connections between the facts of New Zealand’s emergence as a modern industrial nation and the history of art that accompanies this, to try to determine the nature of the relationship between modernisation and modernism in this country."

Images: these photographs and more by Johns can be seen on the McNamara Gallery website .

Attention Wellington readers II

Not to be missed: Julian Dashper talking about his work in 'Four Times Painting' at the Adam Art Gallery, Wednesday 18 July 2007 at 12.30 pm.

The work shown here is Untitled (Van Gogh in Auckland), which is part of 'Four Times Painting'. Read a story that may lie behind the title on the Sue Crockford website.

Image: Julian Dashper, Untitled (Van Gogh in Auckland), 2006. Digitalprint on rag paper. Image from the Sue Crockford Gallery website.

Kick ass, yet immaculate

After several years in the doldrums, the Adam Art Gallery at Victoria University is re-emerging, with the appointment of a new director, Tina Barton, earlier this year and the opening of her first show Four Times Painting on Saturday morning.

Bucking the Friday night trend and opting for a morning opening had two advantages. First - people weren't all end-of-the-week bitchy and trying to get drunk quick. Second - the Gallery looks its best in daylight, a fact you tend to forget.

Four Times Painting brings together the work of Simon Ingram, Shane Cotton, Julian Dashper and Isabel Thom. According to the website:

Four Times Painting focuses on the work of four contemporary New Zealand artists, who each critically engage with the history and practice of painting.

Acknowledging painting as a medium that has come back into critical focus, the exhibition enlarges on this medium’s current situation and considers how painters today engage with its history, purpose, and material practices. Curated by Christina Barton, Director of the Adam Art Gallery, it features the work of Simon Ingram, Julian Dashper, Isobel Thom and Shane Cotton, four artists whose works can be approached as complex and multilayered meditations on painting’s relation to time.

Each of the artists got their own space within the Gallery: Ingram in the Chartwell gallery on the first floor, Cotton in the cave-like Kirk gallery on the mid-floor, Thom in the bottom of the stairwell, and Dashper in the ground floor Chartwell (his paint-splattered drum kit from the Auckland Art Fair is also displayed in the top floor window).

Cotton's and Dashper's installations were particularly strong. The Kirk gallery was painted black, and Cotton's three statuesque recent paintings hovered spotlit on the walls. It could have been too spooky for its own good, but I think it worked.

Cotton gave a quick talk as part of the opening events, and it was interesting to hear him focus on mark making and painting as an activity, rather than about what the paintings 'mean' (though there were several bird-related queries at the end of the talk).

Dashper's installation on the ground floor gallery was both immaculate and kick ass, and beautifully set off by the natural light. The installation brings together a number of untitled works from 2006 including the work shown above, which at the Adam is hung vertically, giving it a looming, giant-like effect. Dashper will give a floor talk in July.