Four artists vie for New Zealand's 'Turner'

By T.J. McNAMARA

"Yer pays yer money and yer makes yer choice" with the $50,000 Walters Prize exhibition at the New Gallery. Sadly, the $4 entry fee still applies (except on Mondays), though surely one of the major aims of the prize is to increase public awareness of artistic achievement.

An invited expert from Switzerland, Harald Szeemann, will judge the work in July. Meanwhile, four artists have been chosen by home-grown experts and given space to display their work.

The four were chosen by leading commentators in the small world of avant-garde art. There are two photographers, a painter/draughtsman and an installation artist.

The organisers want the prize to have the status of the Turner Prize, administered by the Tate Gallery in Britain, and perhaps they hope it will be as controversial.

There is one obvious link with the Turner Prize which, a couple of years ago, included a work by the installation artist Tracey Enim who exhibited her unmade bed, complete with stains on the sheets.

Michael Stevenson's installation called Call Me Immendorff has a bed, too. There are two sides to the work; one is domestic and the other public. The bed and a chest of drawers are on the domestic side. It is 1987, the time of the big economic crash and, coincidentally, the time of the visit of prominent German artist Jorg Immendorff.

Using newspaper headlines and the posters that advertise newspapers outside dairies, Stevenson documents the impact this fierce personality had on Auckland.

The show documents the way Auckland, which had seemed so "hot", was upset by someone who did not confirm to a stereotype. They knew nothing of Immendorff or his master, Joseph Beuys, who made his name by giving public lectures to a dead rabbit. Yet someone knew about rabbits and German art when they dumped a dead rabbit at Immendorff's door and scared him into flight.

No one had been scared by Immendorff's paintings when they were shown in Wellington a couple of years earlier but the roaring man himself, when not safely corralled in an exhibition, was something different.

The installation is not really about Immendorff but about New Zealand, particularly Auckland society at a crucial time.

And the bed? It is furnishings of the flat the artist occupied in the 80s as he was making his reputation with conventional paintings that evoked the past of small-town New Zealand. Now he lives in Berlin, a logical step up.

Another artist who lives much of the time abroad is Gavin Hipkins. His 80 photographs are a tribute to his fascination with the strangeness of things as commonplace as a burn on a venetian blind.

What you search for in vain in this long line of photos of identical size is a theme or a preoccupation. At the beginning is a seaman's fancy knot in the form of a cross. From there we go to a photograph of square-rigged sail and an odd Maori gateway. Are we recapitulating the history of New Zealand? But many of the scenes and images do not connect with New Zealand.

Some images, such as a shot of a bird and a distant river valley, are good enough to make most photographers stick to such themes throughout a long career but Hipkins never does the expected.

The largest room is dominated by two huge paintings by John Reynolds. First seen at Artspace accompanied by some 80 drawings, the drawings are now edited down to 16 and chart Reynolds' intellectual development as a series of signposts.

To follow you need to know Auckland's street names along with the work of a variety of European poets and philosophers. The big paintings are a journey, too. He takes a simple gesture, an intersection, and works it over a large expanse, hoping something will happen. And it does, darkly in one painting, visionary bright in the other.

What emerges are indefinite shapes in the way social movements appear in a mass of population or any other change that is born out of a multiplicity of similarities undergoing slight change. You do not focus on one part of these paintings as much as feel your way across them.

Tucked away in the smallest gallery is the fourth competitor, photographer Yvonne Todd. She takes softly beautiful photographs and frames some in old-fashioned ovals. Yet these images are far from old-fashioned. They are the latest in postmodern irony.

When we see one of her photographs of a rose and note the string of pearls across one corner, is it really charming or a comment on a cliche?

Ambiguity reigns. More resonant is a series of photos of a tall woman with her back to us, photographed against the light, looking out at a landscape.

The hair differs slightly from one image to another. She is wearing a long dress that makes her like a pioneer woman, like a doll, like a bride?

Everyone will have a choice but few will make it with passion. The effect of the exhibition is clever but dry. Does our art show us to be still the passionless people?