KEY POINTS:
What do you read, my lord?" "Words, words, words." "But what is the matter, my lord?" Polonius might well have asked Hamlet about art in Auckland this week where, among a multitude of exhibitions, he would have found at least three that were all words.
At the Gus Fisher Gallery until March 9, Peter Gibson Smith's exhibition Speaking of Tongues includes a structure of words called Dwelling. It is three sides of a burnt-out building. The outside shows a huge number of spines of books lettered with titles. The books are about the nature of language and were generated by a key-word search for "language" and "art". The structure is much more complex than Gibson Smith's work last year, a face made of books on portrait painting.
Usually words are a commentary on art. Here the art is a commentary on words. The emphasis is on language as the intermediary between the artist and the world. It makes a curious work pierced by big, empty windows, laden with history and full of ambiguity.
The 192 separate pieces that form the book spines have been painted in the ancient medium of tempera, where pigment is mixed with egg yolk. This difficult medium unifies the tone of the colours. It is not like a huge still life because the spines are not curved and, contrary to convention, the titles run parallel to the length of the spine rather than across the top. It is, fashionably, "a construct".
What are we to make of the blackened and burned back of the work? Does it indicate that language is almost burnt out? That books are almost gone? That the future is a digital world? It is probably part of the interest of this piece that it opens so many questions.
Other works in the show have no words but depend on digital codes. If they are the future they are much less interesting than the books.
Also at Gus Fisher are works by Gretchen Albrecht in connection with the launch of a book of poems she has illustrated. In the small gallery, a tight exhibition by James Ross called The Red Studio plays deft variants on shape, space and the colour red.
There is no colour in Richard Lewer's show Skill, Discipline, Training in the back room at Orex Gallery until March 9. It covers the walls from floor to ceiling. Panels with line drawings alternate with panels with words as sayings, comments, rubrics and encouragements, done with an ironic twist. The drawings are of middle-aged men playing sport or imagining themselves playing sport. They are all aspects of the sporting hero that men hope they might be.
So we have men playing cricket with improvised stumps on uncut grass or a paunchy man posed as a boxer with eyes narrowed over his clenched knuckles, alongside such mantras as "I am one with my Body" - "body" with a capital B, taking a hint from McCahon about how the nature of the writing should symbolise the message, although here replacing the sublime with the ever-so-slightly ridiculous.
The drawings have an appropriate hint of naivety although they are skilfully done, notably in such illustrations as an ageing surfer standing with his board in front of a plant that bursts like a sunrise behind him.
Other writings urge these men to "Put more sweat on the floor" and the finishing touch is "Fading Light", appropriate to the drawing of a balding man in long shorts with beard and spectacles crouching to gather a rugby ball in a game of touch.
It is not entirely mockery, though it is rather cynical. There is truth, honesty and a certain delight in these shrewd comments on male activity. Good drawing, good words, pity about the spelling.
There is a room full of words at the Lane Gallery in Victoria St East where father and son Johnny and Lyle Penisula have an exhibition called Tusi Folau (Passport) until March 3. Johnny (the father) makes attractive sculpture redolent of the sea from the splendid stones of Southland.
Lyle has more lofty aims and is directly influenced by McCahon, though his version of "I AM" refers to himself and is not used as the Biblical name of God.
The paintings dramatise his role as preacher. Using Samoan motifs he has stylised himself into a prophet figure. The head of this figure is four petals in a square.
The top two are eyes, one has a pupil, the other is blank. The lower petals are a mouth from which emerges the tongue of prophecy and a flying spirit that is both a bird and the leaves of a book. The origins of these stylisations can be traced to an idealised, haloed self-portrait which shows the artist with a blind eye lost in a rugby accident.
The single best work is small and comments on rugby as "religion". It shows a visionary field with goal posts against the sky and the turf enveloped in Samoan motifs. There is just one word but the matter is more intense than the multiplicity of words in the big paintings.
