KEY POINTS:
So the Olympics kicked off last night and athletes from around the world will be sweating it out in the Beijing fug in desperate attempts to extend their speed to the limits. It will all be taken terribly seriously. Meanwhile, back on this side of the world, a gallery in Newton, Auckland, is making a bit of mischief by playing host to its own mini-Olympics, the inaugural Man-O-Lympics.
The opening night party, next Tuesday from 6pm, will feature dart-throwing, Pictionary games and surrealist "exquisite corpse drawing" exercises to commemorate the gallery's "elite team of visual athletes".
None of the works has actually anything directly to do with the Olympics but the title serves as a handy banner for a disparate range of works by eight male artists who have something to say about masculinity, sport, family, health and history.
Wellington artist Michel Tuffery, who finds endless inspiration in the narratives of our colonial history, has delved back into the past for his contribution to Man-O-Lympics, two 30cm curved sheep knives, with carved kauri handles concealing USB sticks. First created for a series commissioned by Te Papa, the knives are a homage to a Tahitian named Jem who travelled via ship to Sydney, then Northland in the early 1800s. Jem, who knew the missionary Samuel Marsden in Parramatta, was later reunited with him in New Zealand in 1814 and became his translator and provision buyer.
The notorious "Boyd incident" in Whangaroa in 1809, when a group of Maori killed the crew and passengers as utu for the mistreatment of the chief Te Ara, sparking a series of further brutal retaliations and waka raids, is central to Tuffery's research into the life of Jem.
"Jem and Marsden knew each other before Jem left Sydney," says Tuffery. "Jem absconded and was living in the Bay of Islands. When Marsden turned up, Jem was in one of the war wakas. One of the quotes from the story was that Marsden remembered seeing the knife so that got me started.
"The Boyd incident was full of injustices, a horrible story which has its ups and downs. We started looking at all the other Islanders who might have absconded on to the boats and we found these interesting stories about Pacific Islanders, even Maori, who got on the boats and had adventures around the world.
"It was really hard for me to know where to start because the stories kept opening up with every angle we looked at. There were a lot of historical heroes, real people, not made-up people."
The inclusion of the UBS stick, says Tuffery, brings Jem's adventures into the modern day, acting as his memory stick, recording "all the people and places he inter-acted with ... like a visual diary".
Violence of another kind - boxing - is the subject of Wellington artist Andrew Topp's three Fight Club paintings in Man-O-Lympics. Seven years ago, Topp and his friend, artist Jason Grieg, created a book called United We Stand Divided We Rule, with Grieg contributing a couple of paintings of boxers as part of his presentation.
"Midway last year, I was revisiting old works and saw the boxers and thought there could be something in this," explains Topp. "I knew about Ted Morgan, who was the first New Zealander to win a gold medal [at the 1928 Olympics] so I started doing a search of the old school boxing poses. I liked the dynamic of them. It started out as a bit of research interest and one thing led to another and I started applying the images to my work." Topp is also fascinated by the story of one of our greatest boxers, Bob Fitzsimmons, who won the world heavyweight title against James Corbett at Carson City in 1897.
"When he was fighting, it would go on until someone got knocked out," says Topp. "It was the 16th round and Corbett was a tactical boxer. Fitzsimmons' wife supposedly yelled out, 'Hit him in the guts, Bob!' and he did and won the world title."
Conflict has also been the subject of work over recent years by NZ Army Artist Captain Matt Gauldie, who has painted the army deployed in countries such as Afghanistan and the Solomon Islands. This time, he is in civvy land, painting workers at the bus depot in Kilbirnie, Wellington, where he lives in the six months each year he's not with the army.
His portrait of Stagecoach mechanic Calvin is a study of a man at ease in his vocational element and is part of Gauldie's new series of studies of Wellington workers. "I'm interested in socialist art of working people, playing their part in keeping society going, pride in the workplace, like the art produced in the former Soviet Union."
Auckland artist Marty Welch has two male nudes in the show, The Creation of Adam and a male nude holding a long staff. Both are a comment on male neglect of health, he says. "It's in regard to a really good push from the Government towards female health. Smear tests are widely publicised and have a lot of momentum which is fantastic but when it comes to prostate cancer, it fizzes out."
Kiwi blokes are too preoccupied with being "manly" to acknowledge health issues, Welch observes. "When we get something like the flu, we want our mums to look after us. When we are genuinely ill, we don't acknowledge it. By the time there are symptoms of prostate cancer, it's almost too late. We put our blinds on - it's all to do with our manly Kiwi upbringing."
Brendan McGorry, also of Auckland, looks at male genealogy in the family in his four paintings in the show. Waiting For the Call Up, a charcoal and oil work, shows McGorry sitting on a chair in a room with his teenage son. His elderly father looks through the window, clutching a bunch of flowers.
"It's like a waiting for death sort of thing," says McGorry. "I am now looking after my father as opposed to the other way around. The father in the back with the flowers - it's almost like he is passing that on to the next generation and it is a continual line."
Auckland sculptor Dave McCracken's contribution to Man-O-Lympics is a 2m steel sculpture of a giant paper dart (no image was available when we went to press), a painting by Nathan Mac Ryde (ditto), who is based in Italy, and a wall-mounted sculpture of a rugby goal post made of police batons by Wellington-based Emil McAvoy. Given that McAvoy's previous works - three penis-tipped riot batons - caused a stir when they were exhibited last year, it doesn't take much to guess what materials were used to make The Game of Love. It's a man thing.
GALLERY
What: Man-O-Lympics group show
Where and when: Soca Gallery, Aug 12-26; preview viewings on now, 74 France St, Newton
