Angst-laden videos present a confrontational view of modern life
The Pacific Rim is reflected in the Auckland Arts Festival with art from Japan, New Zealand and Samoa. Six artists from Japan at the St Paul Street Gallery make considerable demands on the viewer. Three long videos are full of angst, examining Japanese society and personal relationships.
Gallery one houses fragile sculpture by Nobuko Tsuchiya contrasting hard materials and moss-coloured fabric, but the major work is a video by Hiroharu Mori investigating the life and attitudes of women in modern Japan. The artist recorded women in a chat show speaking about their financial circumstances, their marriages and the problems of bringing up successful children. These recorded conversations are spoken by an actress who changes clothing and accessories to suit the character of each woman. Their appearance may change but their preoccupations do not.
They speak of the combined income of themselves and their husbands, of saving, about denying themselves "luxuries" until late in life, their hopes to travel and stay in fine hotels. They speak very little about their enjoyment of life. They seem beset by problems and their lives are a grind. Their problems are the worry of couples the world over but the repetition here is compelling.
Another video, by Meiro Koizumi, is a monologue about personal stress evoked by a spoken script. The visuals are the opposite of personal. They show the endless rush and movement of people and traffic in a big city. These rapidly changing scenes are accompanied by a soundtrack of concrete music as abstracted from joy as the visuals. The effect is relentless.
In gallery two the work by Masahiro Wada has much more emphasis on effects which are very striking although they are improvised. The work is about crowding and relationships. It begins in a claustrophobic apartment full of all manner of things.
A woman complains about the difficulties of bringing up a baby. She was a singer but now her husband is the only artist in the family. His situation is dire. Like Gregor in Kafka's novella Metamorphosis he has turned into an insect.
He sits on a chair in a room where a small television is constantly playing banal movies. He has a monstrous head, hairy with bulging eyes. It resembles a fly. Suddenly, he walks up the wall and across the ceiling and down the other wall. He continues to do this intermittently. He leaves a trail of filth. On the floor is a bird shape he pulls to bits. The bird creature is left naked. The figure covers it with clay and remakes it as a weird undefinable thing. Sometimes the action is slow, sometimes extremely fast.
The end comes when the room is suddenly transformed with colour that drips down the wall. The man disappears and the weird creature flies to pieces. It is a visually gripping work full of scope for metaphorical interpretation.
Another kind of metamorphosis can be seen in a thoughtful work called Ebbing Tagaloa in the Fresh Gallery in Otara The show is about the changes brought about by global warming and rising sea levels in the Pacific. The artist, Paula Schaafhausen, has fashioned a series of tableaux of oval and circular shapes on the floor that represent islands in Samoa.
Each area contains small statues based on the god Tangaroa, chosen because there are variants of his name in many Polynesian languages. The statues have the vitality of traditional carving and a large penis. They were made from white solidified coconut oil, black Koko Samoa and a brown mixture of both.
Paula Schaafhausen's Ebbing Tagaloa.
The figures on the floor are gradually melting. The runs from the melting figures mingle and make complex patterns that evoke ever-changing foreshores or riverbeds. The work is by nature transient but at whatever stage you see it is full interest and its message is abundantly clear.
At Te Uru in Titirangi Judy Millar has a coda to her new show in the Auckland Arts Festival. It is an extension of the swooping and folding work she did for the Venice Biennale but plainer and more sculptural involving the use of ropes and slings and a projection. On one floor a large piece of laminated board undulates through space and folds in on itself.
The top has painted shapes in black on white and the whole is suspended clear of the floor on a system of pulleys, ropes and slings that are impressive in themselves as they are held taut by being fastened on cleats.
Two of the ropes extend down to the next floor where smaller works are supported by stepladders or held together with clamps. Some can be manipulated by the viewer. All the shapes are inventive in an abstract way but, apart from the energy controlled by the taut ropes, lack the colour and the emotional drive in the artist's work where the viewer can sense the hand as well as the mind at work.
At the galleries
What:
Invisible Energy
Where and when:
St Paul St Galleries, 40 St Paul St, AUT, to March 27
Six Japanese artists delve deeply into modern life. Five are at the AUT gallery, while performance artist Yoshinari Mishio may be encountered ritually changing clothes with onlookers in the CBD.
What:Ebbing Tagaloa by Paula Schaafhausen Where and when: Fresh Gallery, Fairmall, Otara Town Centre, to March 14 TJ says: Metaphors for climate and sea level changes are tellingly presented as statues of gods made of Pacific food materials gradually melting into changing landscapes.
What:The Model of the World by Judy Millar Where and when: Te Uru, 420 Titirangi Rd, Titirangi, to April 5 TJ says: Judy Millar, whose paintings have sometimes romped through several rooms, creates inventive sculptural forms that occupy space in a different, quieter way.
