Art: Bright neon lights and rooms of dark intent

By T. J. McNAMARA art critic

The Italian term "chiaroscuro" means light and dark, and it applies to this week's exhibitions.

The light is provided by the work of three artists at the Gow Langsford Gallery. The show is fittingly called Let there be Light, but it is far from the epic of Genesis.

In the two works by the famous American artist Dan Flavin, who died in 1996, the light is from coloured fluorescent tubes. They give no real hint of the way he could use fluorescent light to alter space and perception, but are minimal demonstrations made less austere by the glow of the tubes and the light of his reputation.

Less pretentious but rather more witty are the works in neon by Paul Hartigan, who has used neon tubes at various stages of his career.

In the past his neon works have often been abstract, but this is the post-modern world where everything has a spin, so these four works incorporate a play upon words as well as a reference to the art of last century when Mondrian articulated his areas of plain colour by rigid systems of black line.

In Hartigan's work the tubes are supported on clear glass, but connected by black areas that are always curved, never rigid.

The results, especially post-modern incorporating a corporate logo, are very entertaining.

There is a certain wit, too, in the work of Michael Parekowhai, which allies traditional rafter patterns with modern materials and lighting. The ironies and the way they comment on art just save these works from being simply display, but only just.

The obscure or dark can be seen at Artspace in Karangahape Rd, where an installation called Simultaneous Invalidations is by a well-known woman artist who, as usual, hides behind a pseudonym. In this case she calls herself Et Al.

The three galleries that constitute the show are as dark as the purpose and meaning of the work.

In the main gallery is a Last Supper comprising 13 tables. The table in the centre is level and has four legs. The others all rock about the room, tilted on three legs, except for one small table that has four legs, but legs that are uneven, so it is as unstable as the rest.

On each table is a loudspeaker fixed on the lid of a paint-tin as a resonator. The tables are also adorned with cloth decorated with a grid pattern and have their edges bound with copper wire. Some of the tables have ammeters and obscure diagrams.

The ammeters are not connected to the computerised system that sets the speakers going in an apparently random patter. What they emit is a rhythmic noise, like a muffled drum or a plucked string. The noise is disconcerting at first but gradually becomes an insistent, busy but not entirely unpleasant background. Like many an annoyance, one becomes used to it.

The lower part of the gallery walls are painted a battleship grey, which combines with dim lighting to emphasise drabness.

The mechanism to work all this is in the next gallery and feeds through the wall. This gallery, also dark, contains a canvas stretcher on which a viewer might lie to look at a small security screen placed almost at floor level. The walls of this gallery are also grey and marked with scribbled slogans and diagrams.

There is a larger screen in the third gallery that shows a black and white video of feet in socks, one black and one white. The legs belonging to the feet, which may be real or artificial, are pock-marked and scabby.

The three rooms together make up a comment on modern life with its rickety rhythms and banalities. Of the three rooms, the smaller two hold little interest. They show that life is dull by being themselves exceptionally dull, which surely is some sort of artistic fallacy.

The main gallery with the tables is a special invention that has a horrid fascination, and can be read as a metaphor for the rituals and business of urban activity and is, in many ways, the best thing this reclusive artist of oddity has created.