KEY POINTS:
What is truth? Pilate asked Christ the question but did not stop for an answer. The exhibition Mystic Truths, at the New Gallery, endeavours to supply some contemporary answers.
It is the first major show organised by the Auckland Art Gallery's new curator, Natasha Conland, who has taken her theme from a 1967 work by Bruce Nauman, the American artist who often works with neon.
Within a spiral of red neon, Nauman traced the rubric, "The true artist helps the world by revealing mystic truths."
The work is based on signs and is shown, appropriately, in the Wellesley St window. The exhibition, on two floors, has little painting but lots of video, photography and installations.
Mystic truths were long the subject of Western art when it was entirely religious, but what can artists say about spiritual truth when religion is no longer the centre of artistic purpose?
Most of this exhibition hints at things that are spiritualist rather than spiritual or pantheistic visions of God. A strong documentary feel emphasises that all visions begin in some sort of reality. What we mostly see is evidence of where the paranormal, occult and spiritual might have been manifest.
An exception is a large work in the foyer by Australian Mikala Dwyer. It is an elaborate construction of rods and circles with all sorts of things hanging from them, particularly lots of little trees contained in plastic bags. The trees are the patio plants often called money trees. The point may be that humans build all sorts of playful things but their hopes are tied up with nature and, ironically, their mystical hopes are for money.
The tree connection was emphasised at the opening when a psychic analysed people from their drawings of a tree.
On the ground floor you are hit smack in the eye by colourful works from two local artists. David Hatcher's work is a celebration of thought balloons, as in the comic convention, but his balloons are empty.
There are three fine visionary works by Liz Maw, one with an escalator as a stairway to the stars.
Then we can collect a little book of insults compiled by Maria Loboda from Germany, and go into an area where Danish artist Joachim Koester uses video, film and still photography to document the physical legacy of Aleister Crowley, wizard, mystic poet and worshipper of Satan. Crowley, once called the most evil man in England, liked to think of himself as The Beast 666.
In the little coastal village of Cefalu in Sicily, Crowley set up an abbey for himself and his followers that included a Nightmare Room covered with crude paintings.
Koester tracked down this building - now surrounded by apartments and with its roof fallen in - and got good mileage out of its overgrown surroundings.
He was investigating whether any of the spiritual insight Crowley claimed to have still lingered on the site. Koester has made a film full of flickering light with just a hint of 666 on a wall that suggests the whole deal has turned to shadows. This is one of those works that needs masses of explanatory text to make any impact.
This is also true of two full-scale reproductions of rooms. One, by the collaborators A.P. Komen and Karen Murphy from Holland and Ireland, is a hut in Thailand that was supposed to be haunted. They persuaded people to sleep in it and recorded their impressions, out of which they made a video.
The hut is tawdry and the people unpleasant and dull. The whole is a commentary on contemporary television's appetite for reality shows, but the heavy hand of irony deadens our response.
The other room is created by Briton Olivia Plender and plausibly recreates the kind of room where 19th-century mediums held their seances.
Far more telling is the video by Laurent Grasso from France. It shows a cloud of dust rolling down a narrow Parisian street. It is a powerful visual experience with its reminder of September 11 and its simple hypnotic power.
There are many other fascinating and lively things in this exhibition. And beware of a thermometer on the wall or an upside-down microphone - it may be a work of art.
Irony reigns in this show, but deep truth is harder to find.
There are plain home truths to be found in the exhibition by Richard McWhannell at the John Leech Gallery until July 28. The artist is a virtuoso painter with his own special palette of beautifully modulated greys and browns, frequently made piquant by contrast with black.
His portraits and self-portraits are exact likenesses. But going beyond individuals, this copious exhibition catches the spirit of life in Grey Lynn.
There are few painters as independently minded and expressively subtle with paint as McWhannell. He is our own Lucian Freud.
In vivid contrast is the work of German artist Katharina Grosse at the Gow Langsford Gallery until the end of July. The whole gallery and objects within it have been spraypainted with swoops and runs of vivid colour. It takes extraordinary skill to keep the colour so bright and yet in harmony as it flows over egg-shaped sculptures, flat discs, balloons suspended from the ceiling, and the walls and floors. This is abstract art gone exuberantly and richly crazy and the whole is a colourful delight.
Although some objects are complete in themselves they all have a part to play in the improvised ensemble.
