The galleries: What's missing is what counts

Artist Jim Speers wants you to surrender your mind. Picture / Carolyn Robertson

Modern and post-modern art share one thing: what you leave out matters as much as what you put in. The post-modern installation by Jim Speers called Radar Lodge at the St Paul St Gallery until July 9 deliberately leaves out a great deal.

It completely avoids specifics. The artist has been quoted as saying that what he offers is an absence. It is not a complete absence or there would be nothing in the gallery at all. That has been done once and would be old hat.

What Speers does offer are a number of objects open to interpretation. You make what you will of them. There is an absence of direct links that forces viewers to their own interpretation.

So what do you find in the tall, spacious gallery? First, there are some circular troughs filled with water. They look extremely heavy but each sports from its centre a delicate plant of the sort you are never quite sure is real or artificial.

Then you move forward to a projection on the floor. As you look down at this, you see a horse rider endlessly circling an exercise yard with a hurdle in the centre.

Beyond this is a floor of planking raised above the gallery floor. Beyond this again there is a structure in plexiglass, tall, transparent and intricately linked, enclosing transparent flooring. Hanging from the ceiling are twisted, bright yellow neon tubes.

There is no story and it is not a model or an illustration of anything in particular. The challenge is what to make of it. Here is one take.

There is one sound effect - the constant sound of rain that establishes this is an interior. Since no rain falls, the rain must be outside. The interior as a whole is a collection of the ghosts of modern public or corporate architecture.

All the features are there. There is a water feature but it is static. There is some natural-seeming plant decoration but it is artificial. There is a space built where a presentation might be made or a temporary display staged. And, as frequently happens, there is something electronic going on: a flickering screen.

The projection on the floor is not so much about horse riding as about the kind of looped presentation we often find in the foyer of banks and businesses.

It shows all the tricks. There are crane shots. There are long shots. There are close-ups of the horse's hooves. There is mild expectation. Will the rider jump the horse this time round?

Nothing is too exciting. It is mildly interesting, continuously varied, and can be watched for 10 seconds or 10 minutes. Ultimately, it is decoration.

In such a foyer there is always a bit of fancy lighting, here exemplified in the twisted tubes that remotely hint at twisted baroque columns.

At the end there is this thing, this transparent construction. Transparent floors have become fashionable and certainly huge panes of glass surround the foyers of building after building; everything is open to sight. This transparent structure suggests not one particular building but relates to a whole mass of modern buildings.

So, if you tramp up to St Paul St and surrender your mind to this installation you are obliged, in the best post-modern manner, to bring as much to the work of art as the work of art offers. All viewers will have their own opinions and, by the same token, each person will decide whether the art was worth the effort.

Modern art was essentially puritanical. There was nothing more pure than the minimal abstraction practised by Milan Mrkusich in New Zealand since the 1950s.

His work once seemed extraordinarily radical. His exhibition of recent paintings at the Sue Crockford Gallery, until July 16, now reads as the mature work of a classical master of a mainstream idiom.

He offers rich colour and meditations on the way colours work with and against each other. A great deal is left out. There is no narrative, no representation, no suggestion of place or politics. Every painting is an object complete in itself.

Painting III Green (light) offers a field of green marbled by an underlying yellow. The painting is done on linen and has a lovely surface. At the bottom of the painting there is a bar of black establishing a foreground. The rich area of green floats behind it, then is limited by a bar of purple at the top of the painting which reads as being beyond and behind the green.

Alongside the purple is a white area that suggests infinite space beyond anything. The whole pulls together as a lovely harmony of colours suggesting space but also emphasising a surface.

Since everything else has been left out, the paintings stand or fall on the viewer's response to pure colour.