KEY POINTS:
One hundred years ago Karangahape Rd was the fashion centre of Auckland.
Now, among other things, it is the centre of the most extreme manifestations of contemporary art. Ideas are everything. This is true even of the tribute retrospective exhibition of work by New Plymouth artist Tom Kreisler, at Artspace until December 15.
Kreisler was a wit and, like Falstaff, "the cause that wit was in others". He was an artist with a considerable reputation in his area but he did not show much in Auckland.
This retrospective, assembled mostly from work left in his studio at his death in 2002, makes it clear he was a thinker with lots of bright ideas. His ideas were usually about the way words, sayings and verbal quirks could be converted to lively visuals.
His wit lay in the way he took commonplace sayings and made quick improvised images out of them. So, "a brush with death" produces a painting whacked on to the canvas showing a skeleton with a broom.
The show consists of brilliant ideas often recorded in notebooks and quick drawings on any available material. Only sometimes were these carried over into substantial paintings. Patience was evidently not one of his virtues but three showcases of the notes and drawings provide lively viewing.
Typically, he made a drawing - on two bits of paper stuck together - of Duchamp's famous fountain/urinal compared with a full set of dentures. The idea is visually witty and makes several art historical points about bright and shiny sculpture. Enlarged to the size of the painting on an adjacent wall, it gains nothing.
Determined always to be democratic with his materials as well as ideas, Kreisler's work is done with whatever was at hand whether it was Twink, clothes pegs, a pencil, paint or an odd piece of cardboard.
This exhibition is filled with stimulating ideas that show considerable power of invention. Others are simply art jokes like the life-ring painted with "HMS TONDO" - the art word for a round painting.
Only a couple of the large paintings fully succeed in realising the original inspiration, like the painting of an overcoat, one of a series. It has his characteristic washed-out colour and manages to seem like all the overcoats that ever were. A group of dancing bears makes some sort of political statement and a tribute to the visual flourish that mathematics sometimes produces. No doubt the exhibition is a thing of rags and patches, of ideas never developed, but for Kreisler the idea was all.
Retrospective exhibitions are usually rather solemn tributes but his comic vision keeps this fresh, different and controversial.
Further along K Rd is a tribute to protest in Dane Mitchell's show The Barricades, at Starkwhite until December 9. The gallery directors show extraordinary devotion to art by allowing their walls to be hacked into to provide shields of the same shape as those used by the police during the 1981 Springbok tour protests.
The pieces of board cut from the wall have been equipped with handles and stacked as piles of trophies. The holes left in the wall provide abstract patterns that are interesting in themselves as they sometimes block and sometimes allow vision. Rather more lively is a more consciously constructed tribute to the Left, which is a shovel thrust into the wall as a precarious mount for a red flag of revolution. Rather more nasty in its implications is a group of plaster models of Molotov cocktails, their explosive power made bland by the pale paint that covers them.
The source of this conceptual work is shown in two beautifully hand-made books containing photographs of barricades of all kinds made to support protests in places like Paris and Dublin as well as local brouhaha.
The work has a lot to say about the nature of street barricades and the practice of protest but, spread widely around the gallery, it lacks intensity except in that precarious shovel and flag - although perhaps the shovel should have been a well-used one.
Just how extreme things can be on K Rd is shown by a work at Michael Lett's gallery. The piece is by English artist Juliette Blightman and the gallery has been emptied out except for one intricate and elegant projector.
The exhibition takes its title from the pub expression memorably used by T S Eliot in his great poem The Wasteland, "Hurry Up Please It's Time". The projector shows a three-minute film once every 13 hours. The film was made of Big Ben on the night clocks are wound back to end daylight saving. The lights are dimmed; the hands are stopped. A schedule of projection times for the duration of the exhibition (until December 22) is available from the gallery. The film shows today at 1am and this afternoon at 2pm if you are quick and if you care about the conceptual nature of time.
Ivan Anthony Gallery hosts two shows of conventionally rectangular paintings and prints but the focus on abstract ideas continues. Matt Hunt's Solid Gold Heaven gives an idea of heaven, something like Hieronymus Bosch, but less crowded and without the energy. There are green islands and waterfalls where the lion lies with the lamb and mastodons, dinosaurs and a zebra occupy the same territory as Marilyn Monroe with wings.
There is also work by Tony de la Tour, mostly in black and white, which offers the idea of the mind as a circuit diagram. The paintings and prints have a repertoire of dots, crosses, flashes of lightning, mountains in a box, and emblems that suggest the jumble of memory.
In the work of both painters, a self-conscious naivety of manner is intended to make the imagery ironic but actually robs it of force.
