KEY POINTS:
Notable American artist Robert Rauschenberg, who died last month, said his aim was to fill the gap between art and life. His method for achieving this was to take the discarded rubbish of modern life and change its context - shift it into an art gallery - to make it art. He spoke of "the secret life of junk".
Karangahape Rd continues to be the forum for the most avant-garde art in Auckland, with two galleries hosting artists addressing that gap between everyday life and art. At Starkwhite until June 21, John Reynolds has one big piece that is an assemblage of road-signs. His work has always been about mark-making and the relationship between signs and words.
WORKS END is the iconography of life on the road and of life in art. The combinations of white and yellow, green and blue, the stylised direction arrows and the shields with numbers are replicated in the reflective paint used by road signwriters.
The writing on the signs is taken from the titles of outstanding work by New Zealand artists. More specifically, they are the titles of 10 paintings that have reached the highest price at auction. Half are by Colin McCahon.
The work is a big, bold thing. Its blatant, poster-like, quality makes it, in the context of a gallery, immediately impressive but essentially the work is misguided. Most of Reynolds' art gains vigour from the personal nature of his mark-making, which is entirely absent here. The wording has connotations that need explaining to all but the very slim minority of those interested in the history of New Zealand art at auction. They do not have the colloquial resonance of the expressions used in his outstanding work Cloud which graced the entrance to the 15th Sydney Biennale.
Using everyday banality creates the problem that it might lead to banal art and the problem of transforming the commonplace into the visually exciting is not solved here.
The problem is even more deeply compounded in the installation Fractal Tears by Dan Arps at Michael Lett until July 5. Most of this exhibition is truly junk, the detritus discarded by modern life. In the small room at the front, there is a smashed wooden rostrum. In the main gallery the walls are adorned with pseudo-mystical posters collaged with distinctly non-mystical elements or cancelled out with over-painting. On the floor lie cardboard tubes, vinyl, plastic bags, newspaper and unidentifiable burnt objects. The only clearly identifiable object is an inflatable bag with a skeleton on it and a skull adorned with a fake beard. Overhead is a line of plastic twine with a single coat hanger.
There is no apparent order or relationship between the objects. When Rauschenberg made his assemblages or collages there was often a unifying colour or a hint of a theme or history. In this show, the junk remains junk. What the viewer takes from this exhibition is a fractured sense of melancholy meaninglessness. It is a truly nihilistic exhibition with little perceptible purpose and little sense of being art but rather the junk of a secret life.
James Joyce once made a pun that many adolescents were "Jung and easily Freudened". This might well apply to the characters in the exhibition called Hush by Sam Mitchell at the Anna Bibby Gallery until June 14. These piquant paintings are done in acrylic on the back of sheets of Perspex. Mostly they are heads full of Freudian symbols, the pre-occupations of their burgeoning lives. There are some paintings that include a body but adding a torso spreads the images rather thinly and they lack the concentration of the heads.
The imagery is often drawn in a manner that resembles the style of the fashion for tattoo. Among the pierced hearts and crosses and the heads of Christ are lists of boyfriends, tigers and rubrics like True Lust or Tell Me Lies. This lettering adorns the work called Something Blue which includes a busty girl tied to a stake and wrapped in a snake. The bridal theme continues in other female heads such as Chewed where prominent teeth are allied to a veil which may be bridal or related to first communion.
What is going on inside the female heads is generally more convincing than the male heads. In a series of drawings on paper that accompanies the show, there are tightly-drawn images of people, cats and film stars.
The wit of this show and its link to the underbelly of fashion gives it a lively character all its own.
Another artist who has created a highly individual style is Daniel Blanshard whose wall sculpture is at the Lane Gallery until June 14. This artist has developed a highly decorative technique where a surface is covered with tar and lacquer, then etched and scribed lines of circles and geometric petal forms are created with a compass-like device. Sometimes the surface is polished within the forms to show the steel underneath.
In the past, Blanshard's work was strictly symmetrical. Now his rhythmic patterns sometimes make a dance across the surface in ways that are not exactly symmetrical across the central axis but still retain a strong rhythm. The geometrical accuracy of his marks and his unusual style of working suits circular works best. This show has lively, lyrical examples of this and makes it well worth a visit.
