Messages surge through gallery air

By TJ McNAMARA

Something happens when you go into a gallery knowing nothing. I should have known about William Kentridge but until I visited the Gus Fisher gallery at the top of Shortland St, I knew nothing. So his projected drawing called Stereoscope was a new experience.

Here was animated drawing projected on a screen in black and white with flashes of blue. Time and movement had been added to the usual processes of drawing but not a clear narrative.

At first the impression was that these bold and striking drawings must have been done in the 1930s. It was politically committed anti-capitalism. The situation and the sensibility were like Barcelona in the Spanish Civil War: trams and guns, mobs and atrocities.

But the visual techniques, the animations, the cutting, the transitions were startlingly new and modern. And then it went back in time and perhaps it was the Russian Revolution where everybody caught the tram to the Bolshevist meetings where Lenin made speeches.

But the trams were not benign. They were mechanical things that drove mindlessly through the crowd. They were not just realistic; they were symbolic. And then there was the cat, the black cat that stalked through frame after frame and could roll itself into a ball and become a bomb or convert itself into an electric spirit that leaped about like the bolts of blue lightning that represent communications in the film.

Communications are everything in this eight-minute film. It is a continuous loop - you can come in anywhere. If there is a beginning it is in an old-fashioned telephone exchange where people are plugged in and if there is an ending it is when the wires of the plugs shrivel like withering grass.

These dominating communications leap between people and run through wires and power-stations and the messages surge through the air and through the earth and make violent abstract patterns.

Always at the centre of these communications is a balding, ageing man in pin-stripe suit. The attitude toward him is ambivalent. He looks and acts like the heavy capitalist villain of innumerable political cartoons but he is a split personality in keeping with the title Stereoscope. He can communicate only in figures. He is attacked by the slings and arrows of savage problems but he barricades himself off from the world and lets his subordinate alter ego, who exactly resembles him, absorb the punishment. Balance-sheet figures are all-important. His relationship with a naked female figure, his chance of joy, dissolves into columns of figures.

The drawing in this film is almost anachronistic, harking back almost to Goya's Disasters of War, but in some frames it is nothing short of magnificent. At one stage the principal protagonist lies prone on the ground, his head and shoulders as weighty and monumental as any drawing by Kathe Kollwitz.

But the villain proves to be ambiguous. Astonishingly, there are times when he engages our sympathy. At the end of the film his heart overflows and then his pockets overflow and he is engulfed in tears while the words GIVE and FORGIVE appear on the screen.

Then our ignorance is dispersed. We read the catalogue and learn that the artist was born in 1955, not in the 30s of last century. We learn that he was born and lives in Johannesburg and immediately we see references to apartheid and our understanding is deepened. Yet all those things we felt before are valid because these bold drawings have a universal meaning.

Go up Shortland St and spend eight minutes with this loop of film. It is a remarkable, moving, visual, political and humanist experience.

The public galleries carry it off this week. It is also worth going to Pakuranga to te tahi/the mark, formerly the Fisher Gallery, where there is an exhibition that bubbles like champagne, serious champagne. Sara Hughes, a bright young talent, has created, with immense labour, Dot.Land.

This is a world of circles. It begins with an intricate pattern of little red circles on the glass doors leading to the gallery. Through the doors are walls adorned with circles in outline and others made up of innumerable smaller circles. Every circle, small or large, has an individual character. Each has its own pattern and these range from 18th-century scenes through images of art deco cars to lots and lots of patterns in all colours. The visitor is overwhelmed by this intricate dance.

Within this installation there is one room where all the circles are green and sometimes subtly shaded to suggest spheres. Here the feeling of micro organisms is more apparent than elsewhere in the show even though the patterns on the dots are artificial, not natural.

There is a great deal that can be made of this show. You can say, "Oh! Look, that looks like something biological" and "Look, that looks like a molecular model" and "Oh! Look, aren't the colours lovely" and "Oh! Look, see how the doorway interrupts that circle but you complete it in your mind" and "Oh! Look, isn't it a bubbly, intricate wonder?" and finally think, "Oh! The work involved" and "How did she do it?"

Then you move on to the larger exhibition in the main gallery, called, enigmatically, The Contingency of Vision. It is full of variety from turbulent photographs by Joyce Campbell, a huge, bright banner by Caroline Rothwell and a projection of a curious, buttoned couch by Nuala Gregory, discordant and slightly disturbing minimal abstraction on glass by Bill Riley, a beautiful series of still-lives by Jude Rae and one of Fiona Pardington's ironic found images inexplicably displayed on the floor.

Coupled with the work of Hughes and with a little coda of a tutors' exhibition in an adjoining gallery it makes the trip to Pakuranga compensate for the heat and motorway traffic.