Art: Take a bow before the game

By T.J. McNamara

Seekers after art have to bow down these days. Even at the august Royal Academy in London, visitors to the Apocalypse exhibition must creep through a dirty tunnel to reach the show.

It is something that radical artists inflict on the middle classes who might buy their work and who pay the taxes for their government subsidies. We have an example this week at Artspace, which is displaying the work of three German artists, with the support of the Institute for Foreign Cultural Relationships, Germany.

The most readily understandable work is by Bjorn Dahlem. To get into the installation you have to duck through a low opening in a ramshackle wall.

Once having made this obeisance you are confronted by a big construction in wood that vaguely resembles an animal. Alongside it is a lamp and an enigmatic black box, which look very domestic. It is obviously the animal's home. At first you might take the animal for Fafner, the dragon, because it guards a treasure. This hoard can be seen though a narrow dark window which also reflects the gallery.

That the treasure is made up of junk makes it read as a post-modern joke, an ironic comment on how the treasure of legend is modern muck.

So far so good; but this is much too simple. The ironies run deeper. The title of the work is Club Schroedinger's Cat 2000. Schroedinger, the publicity tells us, had a "fabulous idea." He imagined a cat in a box with some poison that the cat might or might not eat. Since it was impossible to know if the cat was dead or alive it was a "philosophical metaphor" for the indecisive state of things.

The Schroedinger's Cat proposition still does not explain the pile of junk/treasure behind the wall unless, perhaps, that was where the artist piled his leftover rubbish.

In an exhibition like this it is hard to tell. The walls and the animal structure are so clumsily put together that it is hard to say what is rubbish and what is not. Artists are usually good with their hands but this one would have trouble making a decent letterbox.

Here this is seen as a virtue. We are told that all three artists regard perfection as deceptive and that they "do not care for a smooth finish."

Certainly there is nothing smooth about the work in the adjacent Dark Gallery by John Bock. This is the clutter in the shack of the artist's mind. There are bits of gangster movies in black and white and panels with enigmatic scrawls in English and German, a red light, a curved mirror, a lame jacket, an odd construction and some photos of Auckland.

One of the scrawls says, "Sorry, drop dead" and another, "Will SOLD give schnapps" which are very contradictory messages to even sympathetic viewers.

The main gallery is host to a work by Rene Zeh. A poster for the film Westworld establishes this as a metaphor, too. There is a Transporter with laptop and bed, some maps as a guide, a display of invitations to art openings around the world and the letters S, M, L, XL on the walls to show that the ideas come in all sizes. All the connections are left to the imagination of the viewer. It is a thin diet. All three works set up a masquerade of irony as a cover for contempt of the society that sustains them. Or perhaps it is all a game. Go up to Artspace and be outraged. Play the game.

Our own artist-philosopher, Billy Apple, was playing these games as long ago as the 1960s. His desperately dry show at the Sue Crockford Gallery is an autobiography done in terms of diagrams of spaces in which he has exhibited.

These works at least have the merit of precision and, with the associated charity show of signs for the 49 Women's Refuges in New Zealand, display Apple's extraordinary ability as a designer.

There is precision too, in the geometric abstractions of Jonathan Organ at the Vavasour Godkin Gallery. The artist's background in photography is reflected in the subtle combinations of black, silver and a range of greys.

These elegant works are at their best when a horizontal bar of silver keys up the oscillations of space within the geometric simplicity of the work.