Ideas take shape

By T.J. McNAMARA

Art is made from visual ideas and, in sculpture, the ideas are made solid. This is sculpture week, with three shows by artists with extremely substantial reputations.

The two shows at the New Gallery by Brett Graham and Peter Robinson until November 10 are full of political ideas. Graham sees his ideas in terms of black and white, Maori and Pakeha, two races yoked together by violence.

Violence is perhaps the wrong word since his sculpture consists of a vast double bed. Yet a bed can be an arena for violence just as much as a place for tenderness.

The bed is made of two equal sides of black and white and innumerable tablets that have the appearance of old-fashioned cakes of soap. "Cleanliness is next to godliness" runs the old rubric. There is only one pillow and it is white, but it is pushed over on to the black side.

The bed is lit from inside and light leaks from the joins, particularly on the black side, and detracts from the eerie glow of the work. Nevertheless, the eeriness sustains the second part of the work, which is hung on the wall like bed-linen made up of 1224 of the tablets.

Each is labelled with a European place name which has replaced a Maori name. It is hard to see the ones at the top. No one will read them all but, as evidence of research, they are impressive.

Despite this, the piece is less than the sum of its parts. It is uncomplicated and simplistic and expends most of its emotional voltage quickly. Surely the whole situation is more complicated and less brittle than this.

The installation by Robinson is based on the motto inscribed over the entrance to Hell, as imagined by Dante, the great Italian poet who travelled down the circles of the Inferno to describe an allegory of human life.

Over the gate was written, "You who enter here leave behind all hope". It is tempting to abandon all hope for New Zealand art because this installation is dull stuff even though it represented New Zealand at the Venice Biennale last year.

The motto, in the original Italian, is perched in one corner of the room. In another corner is a stylised rose which is the central image of Dante's Heaven. This rose is apparently cast away as worthless. What is exalted on the walls is the binomial code, one and zero, being and nothingness, arranged in patterns.

The most interesting thing in the show is the letter O from all the fonts in the artist's computer made in plastic and arranged in a chain hung from the ceiling. On the floor is a large, oval sculpture made from the centre of the O in one font. There is a curious contradiction here because in computer language zero and the letter O are very different.

Hung from the ceiling are two curious structures, one in plastic and one in glass, that are a cross between a science diagram and something a clown makes with balloons. Is science a joke? Do we live in a computer hell? The whole piece puts no real pressure on our thinking in these matters.

Go and see these works - but go on Monday when there is no charge.

The dealer galleries are free, so we can look even if we cannot buy, and there is a great deal of pleasure to be gained from looking at Paul Dibble's sculpture at the Gow Langsford Gallery until November 2. The exhibition is full of splendid visual ideas but that does not mean it lacks intellectual concepts, though they are not specifically political.

Dibble pays tribute to Maori by using the weight and monumentality of carved pounders and anchor stones in a way that has not been seen since Russell Clark did the big anchor stones for Wellesley St in 1959. They were done in stone, but this show, called Where the Owl Sits on the Water, is made up entirely of cast bronze.

By the door is the massive weight of Anchor Stone with a sea-green patina and the solid form counterpointed by the attached rope which does the trick of standing in the air unsupported. It is monumental but the detail is intriguing, particularly the binding of the rope to the stone.

Dibble is a master of figure sculpture, not only in the profile and balance of The Circumference of the World on its circular base but also in the wit and style of Between Two Islands, where a figure is upside down between two powerful shapes, one a Maori stone pestle and the other a Crown Lynn vase, both stylised in bronze.

The figure's feet support a boat. We all got here by voyaging but also by navigating, and the figure holds dividers in a piquant gesture that suggests measurement and mapping. A particularly elegant feature of this work is the transition from front through to the back using head and arms.

The finish on these works is impressive, from the green patina on Anchor Stone to the lovely, copper-coloured polish on The Voyager.

Many of the ideas in the big works are repeated on a smaller scale in a row of 30 pieces called The Tableaux. These range from the evocatively traditional Boy and Fish, which for its small size has a mythical dimension, through to a fascinating shape of a Maori kite and beautiful birds, shells, fish and aeroplanes.

Here and there, as in Classical Urn or Three Oars, the idea is just too plain and lacking tension, but Two Flounder and works like Shorter Owl are solid pieces of invention. It is a grand show.