T.J. McNamara: Memorable encounters of extremes

Martin Boyce's Some Broken Morning. Photo / Greg Bowker

It is often said that poetry is the quality lost in translation. Similarly, contemporary visual art often has qualities that are lost when the work is photographed.

The triennial, showcasing the avant garde, typically has works whose essential quality does not photograph well. The extension of the triennial at the St Paul Street Galley at AUT has one work that is difficult to photograph and another work, by Tino Sehgal, that is not allowed to be photographed.

In his work you enter a room and your first impulse is to go and help the girl. She is wearing street clothes and is prone on the floor. Then you remember that what you are looking at is an artwork.

The artist calls his work "constructed situations". They are about movement in space and yet are more sculpture than dance. The young woman lying on the hard concrete floor moves slowly. She is following a set of oral instructions given by the artist.

The work is an encounter between the viewer and the figure, although the "dancer" never makes eye contact.

The encounter is unmediated and viewers carry away nothing except a memory of their response.

The artist does not allow visual documentation of his practice. It is based on the idea that art is essentially abstract thought and what we gain from the encounter should be only the memory of seeing it.

It is difficult to go along with a theory that denies hands-on design and produces no artefact. Nevertheless, the slow movement of the woman on the floor, which brought her finally into direct confrontation with the wall, was indeed memorable when experienced in the large quiet room while the traffic went busily by.

The other space is occupied by work by Martin Boyce from Scotland. The principal work is suspended from the ceiling. Fluorescent lighting is always disposed in regular geometric pattern but this is an irregular web of tubes. It deliberately breaks rules of standard design to make us more aware of the lighting and ceilings that sit above us. Below it hangs a mobile made of chair parts. It confers a little grace on broken, ordinary things.

Extremes which are difficult to photograph are not confined to the triennial. At the Jensen Gallery hang paintings by Gunter Umberg whose work can be seen in many international collections. His work is classic extreme abstraction found last century in the likes of works by Ad Reinhardt and Yves Klein which excludes everything except colour as irrelevant.

Generally Umberg excludes even colour. Most of his work is black. Any photograph taken from directly in front would be plain black. Yet it would in no way convey the quality of the work. The black is made of layer upon layer of powdered pigment and gum. Usually the result would be a polished shiny surface like black linoleum. Here the result is a work of extraordinary density that absorbs the light and becomes a deep space - a void. The intensity of the black is amazing. The black paintings are supported by several in green that achieve the same density but do not suggest a deep space in the way the black paintings do.

The exhibition is accompanied by a work by Elizabeth Vary. Her colourful abstractions work in three dimensions and could not be properly recorded on a flat surface. They face the problem of the edge of an abstract painting by making it 10-15cm thick. The work becomes a block with the edges and underside, at right angles to the wall, as an integral part of the lyric colour, often in violent contrast to the frontal surface. Some pieces are designed to be seen from above and below. The colour is wildly expressionist and raw in contrast to the classic work of her husband.

Black is also a feature of one of the shows at Two Rooms Gallery. Upstairs German artist Joachim Bandau has a series of extreme watercolours that are technically brilliant. His control over transparent washes is astonishing and he overlays layer after layer of them, never completely overlapping. As the layers build up, the centre of the painting becomes darker and darker. Each wash is bounded by fine straight lines at the edge of the paint.

There are tensions set up as the layers become more complex and less ordered. It has the melismatic quality of some modern music where a single syllable is repeated on different notes. The effect is fascinating and its full quality is unreproducible.

In the main gallery at Two Rooms, British artist Cornelia Parker's exhibition is entitled No Man's Land because the works are set between forces of reality and art. This is exemplified by her Composition with Horns which is made of two silver plated bugles, one squashed. The pristine instrument is a beautiful object and still perfectly usable.

Art has no practical use except to be expressive so the flattened bugle is the same object but converted into sculpture. It is reality made art. The effect is made even more piquant by the shadow of the work on the wall which suggests the abstract idea of a bugle.

These conceptual games are seen in a series of networks made in fine wire drawn from lead from a bullet. The ambiguities of material and form extend to three big sculptures called Transitional Objects. They look like tents but are made of black net and offer no shelter.

They are suspended from tense black cords from the ceiling, contrasted by the weight of bags of lead shot that hold the shapes' spread. Their uniform blackness has a memorial quality and evokes a pall over the dead. Their quality lies in the many things they suggest from soldiers' quarters to funeral processions but they are never comfortable.

In contrast to all this black and highly sophisticated conceptual work is the work of three realistic portrait painters at Whitespace. Peter Miller associates young women with birds, Meredith Collins does haunting veiled faces of migrants and Jeffry Feeger's exhibition called A New Bougainville offers us a collection of lively characters.

Even here there is something hard to capture on photograph. His people from a picturesque market are splashed with thin red that may be beetle-nut juice or blood that hints at darker elements in the culture.

At the galleries

What: Work by Martin Boyce and Tino Sehgal - 4th Auckland Triennial
Where and when: St Paul St Gallery, AUT, 40 St Paul St, to June 20
TJ says: The triennial breeds extremes and the two installations at St Paul St will stretch anyone's concept of what art should do.

What: Paintings by Elisabeth Vary and Gunter Umberg
Where and when: Jensen Gallery, 11 McColl St, Newmarket, to April 17
TJ says: Extreme abstraction by Umberg and rawly colourful constructed 3D paintings by Vary make a stylish exhibition.

What: Work by prominent Brit Cornelia Parker and watercolours by Joachim Bandau
Where and when: Two Rooms, 16 Putiki St, Newton, to April 10
TJ says: Ambiguous but stylish work using snake poison, wire drawn from bullets as well as funeral tents to make clever layered statements while German Joachim Bandau does miracles of technique with watercolour.

What: Paintings by Meredith Collins, Peter Miller and Jeffry Feeger
Where and when: Whitespace, 12 Crummer Rd, Ponsonby, to April 3
TJ says: Three artists, two local and one from Papua New Guinea, doing portraits historical and sad, contemporary and charming, exotic and picturesque.