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Gallery Watch—June 2006
DAVID LEVINSON canvases Auckland’s contemporary art scene. This month: Sara Hughes, Crash @ Gow Langsford; Jim Allen, Poetry for Chainsaws @ Michael Lett; Nick Austin, In a room @ Starkwhite.
Sara Hughes
Crash | May 9-June 3 @ Gow Langsford
On first glance, Giblett flagship gallery Gow Langsford seems to have flung the turgid oilskin gait of its führer with Hughes’ digi-cosmological outbursts, yet four years out of elam and she’s already clipped with a pedigree, having picked up a Wallace Art Award just last year. Of course, in this choking climate all that means is greater freedom to parlay hardly-concepts into moveable units. Hughes’ paintings are twee optical scrimmages founded on a language of “squares and circles. . .stretched and squeezed out of their formal constrains.” Like gazing through water, there’s a strange feeling of suspended dynamism to the works; each two-steps repeatedly between patterned clarity and cool oblivion. But in a world that dangles from the fingers of the post-object bullies, obviously mere formal kabuki ain’t gonna cut it; it’s under this supposition, lumpen with half-purpose, that Hughes attempts to chart the chaos of “data transmission.” Her vision, however, is too florid and meandering to hold down any weight in the face of something so visually limitless – meaning that we’re back where we started, hurling praise at the novelty of artist’s hand trumping machine’s. Anyway, as mangled as her blueprint may be, she essentially nails whatever electricity it harbours in the largest of the canvases, leaving the conceptual repetition of the others looking like empty exposition. Only the wall mural, a giant interstellar ray-gun, ejaculating multicoloured space dust, provides real bang for your buck.
Jim Allen
Poetry for Chainsaws | May 15; originally performed in Adelaide, 1976 @ Michael Lett
“It’s a cliché to recite Ginsberg today,” one patron quipped. Okay, but for those of us not raised in a barn, Jim Allen’s restaging of his 1976 performance attained a vaudeville sad-grandeur as Allen – clad in full military get-up – hung around like a dying marshal, hawking soundless transmissions shredded by the wind. As if present only by holographic projection, Allen curtailed audience acknowledgement, speaking solely to a band of brothers who buzzed incantatory and bled oil all across the floor. Despite the stubborn, premature death of a third chainsaw, two were still enough to transform the gallery space into a DIY warzone; thwarting Allen’s howl, their mechanical fixity also grossly mirrored his stark and solitary drive. As things unwound, audience numbers fell harder than free love and the 80’s, driven out by the choking fuel emissions – proving once and for all that the only palatable agitprop is the kind that grabs you by the throat.
Nick Austin
In a room | May 3-27 @ Starkwhite
Says Allan Smith of Nick’s delicately inscrutable new show: “[It] has objects and it has things which are more like conditions.” To which I add: And it has things which are things, but which simultaneously evoke the conditions of their existence. The latter is a case of perfectly twinned consciousness: Rather than imposing objectness as an absolute – to which individual components must subsist –, Nick smears it like ruddy placenta over his newly hatched genus. Beneath this languorous film, elegant tensions build like steepled fingers, each coy blend of materials making for another smudge on the looking glass (a single red button anoints three bands of cardboard as a cake, yet at the same time, marooned atop such a stark geometric plateau, it never seems to stop being a button). To similar ends, the titular ‘room’ is more feeling than place, not in the least thanks to the embedded irony that has it spanning two showrooms. Culled from a kind of picture-book logic, it unfolds through lateral assemblage, apexing in a lazy mid-afternoon frozen in uncertainty. With harmonious ease, Nick manages to turn the blankly familiar into an indefinite article.
» David Levinson is a regular fly-on-the-wall at openings around Auckland.
Sara HughesCrash | May 9-June 3 @ Gow Langsford
On first glance, Giblett flagship gallery Gow Langsford seems to have flung the turgid oilskin gait of its führer with Hughes’ digi-cosmological outbursts, yet four years out of elam and she’s already clipped with a pedigree, having picked up a Wallace Art Award just last year. Of course, in this choking climate all that means is greater freedom to parlay hardly-concepts into moveable units. Hughes’ paintings are twee optical scrimmages founded on a language of “squares and circles. . .stretched and squeezed out of their formal constrains.” Like gazing through water, there’s a strange feeling of suspended dynamism to the works; each two-steps repeatedly between patterned clarity and cool oblivion. But in a world that dangles from the fingers of the post-object bullies, obviously mere formal kabuki ain’t gonna cut it; it’s under this supposition, lumpen with half-purpose, that Hughes attempts to chart the chaos of “data transmission.” Her vision, however, is too florid and meandering to hold down any weight in the face of something so visually limitless – meaning that we’re back where we started, hurling praise at the novelty of artist’s hand trumping machine’s. Anyway, as mangled as her blueprint may be, she essentially nails whatever electricity it harbours in the largest of the canvases, leaving the conceptual repetition of the others looking like empty exposition. Only the wall mural, a giant interstellar ray-gun, ejaculating multicoloured space dust, provides real bang for your buck.
Jim AllenPoetry for Chainsaws | May 15; originally performed in Adelaide, 1976 @ Michael Lett
“It’s a cliché to recite Ginsberg today,” one patron quipped. Okay, but for those of us not raised in a barn, Jim Allen’s restaging of his 1976 performance attained a vaudeville sad-grandeur as Allen – clad in full military get-up – hung around like a dying marshal, hawking soundless transmissions shredded by the wind. As if present only by holographic projection, Allen curtailed audience acknowledgement, speaking solely to a band of brothers who buzzed incantatory and bled oil all across the floor. Despite the stubborn, premature death of a third chainsaw, two were still enough to transform the gallery space into a DIY warzone; thwarting Allen’s howl, their mechanical fixity also grossly mirrored his stark and solitary drive. As things unwound, audience numbers fell harder than free love and the 80’s, driven out by the choking fuel emissions – proving once and for all that the only palatable agitprop is the kind that grabs you by the throat.
Nick AustinIn a room | May 3-27 @ Starkwhite
Says Allan Smith of Nick’s delicately inscrutable new show: “[It] has objects and it has things which are more like conditions.” To which I add: And it has things which are things, but which simultaneously evoke the conditions of their existence. The latter is a case of perfectly twinned consciousness: Rather than imposing objectness as an absolute – to which individual components must subsist –, Nick smears it like ruddy placenta over his newly hatched genus. Beneath this languorous film, elegant tensions build like steepled fingers, each coy blend of materials making for another smudge on the looking glass (a single red button anoints three bands of cardboard as a cake, yet at the same time, marooned atop such a stark geometric plateau, it never seems to stop being a button). To similar ends, the titular ‘room’ is more feeling than place, not in the least thanks to the embedded irony that has it spanning two showrooms. Culled from a kind of picture-book logic, it unfolds through lateral assemblage, apexing in a lazy mid-afternoon frozen in uncertainty. With harmonious ease, Nick manages to turn the blankly familiar into an indefinite article.
» David Levinson is a regular fly-on-the-wall at openings around Auckland.
