KEY POINTS:
Free beer is a slogan with two magic words but can they be turned into the magic of art? The Danish art collective Superflex uses the slogan in its exhibition at Artspace. One exhibit is a recipe and apparatus for making and bottling beer. In truth the beer is not free - although a batch brewed on the opening night is for sale very cheaply. The point is that everyone has the ability to make beer. The slogan is an imperative, not an announcement: we should be free from slavery to advertised brands.
Another part of the exhibition concerns liberation from the supposed tyranny of copyright. There are designer lamps you can't reproduce because of copyright. Subverting this idea, art students in the gallery make lampshades of photographs of the lamps so they are not copying the design but nevertheless freeing the designs into the public space.
These concepts can be part of a philosophic dialogue but visually they do not offer any special excitement. What is shown is a completely new concept of art. What the artist chooses to be art, is art. Art is all encompassing, all inclusive, all persuasive and completely democratic. Every home brewer is an artist provided he brews his beer in an art gallery.
Democracy in choice of expression is demonstrated by a variety of shows in town this week, notably in the paintings of Rob McLeod at the Bath Street Gallery. His paintings are a crowd, a mass of chattering, feeling, posing people, spread like a vivid frieze around the walls of the gallery. The works are all cut-out shapes and stand on the floor, at once heroic in size and scope, at other times shudderingly grotesque.
The comic grotesquerie arises not only from Mickey Mouse figures but also from the variety of slurps, slops and slips that spout from the mouths of the figures. The painterly invention is endless. The turned-up sole of a clownish slapstick shoe can be a painterly event. A pair of tartan trousers or a tartan slipper can be a tribute to the artist's delight in and control of paint.
It is a long way from the audacious, often exquisite, minimalism so admired at the beginning of the artist's career in New Zealand. These paintings are audacious but it is audacity of irony, or satire, or self-mockery which we find in the two paintings called Imperialist Impostor, in the outlined figures of Mickey Fillers and in the cool figure in the midst of agitations in Great Moments in the History of Painting.
Few things could be more different from the thick paint spilling across the floor in McLeod's exhibition than the elegant, delicately focused detail in the work of Peter Madden at Michael Lett. Madden has always used precisely cut-out found photographs to make his colourful works massing huge amounts of intricate detail. In this show the material from the found photographs - butterflies, birds, people, fish, furniture, skulls and an immensity of other imagery - is organised as never before.
It is a wonderful exhibition. It speaks of mortality in a work Sleep With Moths, which has a skeleton from which intricate stems grow, each crowned with moths. Shed skins of locusts as well as gold and silver and even snails emphasise the feeling.
In contrast to the elegiac nature of this is the copiousness of We Must Meet. A library and a desk suggests study, and a number of images of natural things burst out rich in colour and vitality, with a spider mounting guard over all.
Even this intricate work is surpassed by The Leaving, a huge circle from which an almost incredible number of tiny images expand as if from a supernova. Schools of fish, flocks of birds, people, furniture - a vast variety of objects is present. Because this work mounts the photographs on and behind Perspex, the open centre is reflective. Stand in front of it and you are reflected in the centre of a world of images. This exhibition confirms the enormous promise of earlier work by Madden.
A hundred yards along the road at Starkwhite is an exhibition of painting by Andrew Barber called Lean. This extends the democratic notion of what art is because these paintings are raw but highly sophisticated, abstract yet realistic, extreme yet traditional. The paintings, all called Study, show soft and misty landscapes. They are of no particular place but very beautifully suggest such things as lakes, hills and long avenues of trees. They fall in bands of colour as plain as an abstract expression. Paradoxically, sometimes they have sharp little geometric corners that deliberately refer to the work of the abstractionist Milan Mrkusich.
The romantic atmosphere is contradicted by one big painting that is totally black with only the merest hint of image. For all its contrasts, which sometimes push to logical absurdities, it is a beguiling show that emphasises the choice available to any artist.
The artist can choose to show nature red in tooth and claw. Wholesale Killers at Satellite Gallery by Miss Mica Still has paintings and small relief sculptures that show predators, both animal and human.
The screaming colour supports all the rip and tear and bleeding hearts allied to titles like I Asked You Nicely Before I Ripped Your Head Off. Seldom has there been an exhibition so rawly grisly and hysterical.
This week at the galleries
What: If value, then copy, by Superflex.
Where and when: Artspace, 300 K Rd, to Nov 22.
TJ says: Work by a Danish art co-operative in favour not of giving away beer but of giving away brand names.
What: Paintings, by Robert McLeod.
Where and when: Bath Street Gallery, 43 Bath St, Parnell, to Nov 29.
TJ says: Marvellously comic and inventive paintings that fill the gallery with people and energy.
What: Slices in a disappearance, incisions across a paper sky, by Peter Madden.
Where and when: Michael Lett, 478 K Rd, to Dec 6.
TJ says: Most impressive show yet by the master of found detail massed to make meaning and wonder.
