On the face of things

By T J McNAMARA

Countenances are everywhere in galleries this week, not portraits, but faces with a spin on them.

One famous countenance dominates the exhibition at Artspace for the next month. The face of Joseph Beuys looks out, crowned with his famous hat and looking infinitely sad.

Beuys, a fighter pilot who crashed during World War II, was saved by people who wrapped his burned body in fat and felt, which became important media in his work. After the war he was the great philosopher of German art who helped to find a way out of the dilemma of postwar artistic helplessness.

His eyes are haunted by the past and in this show, curated by Udo Kittelmann, Director of the Museum for Modern Art in Frankfurt, he stares for 11 minutes almost unblinkingly from the wall. If you watch you come to know not only the man but also his thought. The film was made in 1969 by Lutz Mommartz.

The exhibition is based on time, and it includes Fred Zinnemann's film, High Noon, where the events in the film are in real time. There is also a hypnotically fascinating work by Rosemarie Trockel which shows the unravelling of a woollen jumper. As the jumper unravels, a fine body is gradually revealed. It is a metaphor for knowledge, eroticism and the homely craft of knitting, and is unforgettable.

The rest of the show is equally unusual and should convince even diehard traditionalists that video clips can make it to the level of art.

There is a countenance which is the outstanding work next door at the Ivan Anthony Gallery where there is a group show until November 1. The work is by Ronnie van Hout.

The face lies on a chair, almost like a severed head, and it confronts a TV screen. The face is learning Dutch - there is a language programme on the screen. It is a matter of the artist confronting his heritage. It is called, Not Learning Dutch.

Further along Karangahape Rd at the Michael Lett gallery is an exhibition by Seraphine Pick until November 8.

There are many small paintings in this show and a couple of large ones. The images are no longer lost in a mist, as in her early work, nor combined in large compositions, as in her more recent painting. Each one is an odd, isolated image.

She paints the faces of children, but they are marked by measles or chickenpox, or are desperately sad. She paints circus freaks covered with hair, autopsies, and a bearded woman.

This is the straightforward reworking of a photograph and does not have the pathos of the famous image by Ribera who, centuries ago, painted the same subject complete with nursing baby.

Yet nursing or cuddling or cradling is part of the best painting in this show and it recalls Joseph Beuys. One of Beuys' acts of performance art was called How to Explain Pictures to a Dead Hare. In Pick's painting a rabbit or hare is being held like a baby. The wild intensity of its eye gives this painting a powerful tension lacking elsewhere.

There are real problems with this show, such as the right hand of one of the babies in the big paintings which is either skimped as painting or meant to look crippled. If it is the latter, it is unconvincing.

The exhibition has an impact, but there is a wide variation of quality in individual paintings. It seems like a stage in the artist's development and an accumulation of material for some future synthesis.

It is not often you see a countenance from an exhibition staring at you from the back of a bus, but the exhibition of paintings about Lady Godiva by Piera McArthur is advertised on the buses and this is perhaps appropriate since the heroine's behind is shown to be just about as big as the proverbial back.

The Lady Godiva of legend is really only the starting point for the exuberant exhibition at the Studio of Contemporary Art until October 31. Amid a mass of anachronisms of bass drums and violins, what emerges is McArthur's customary symphonic romps in red with feminist overtones.

There is a big cast in these paintings. The snotty Leofric, Lord of Coventry, who wants to tax the people, Lady Godiva, his wife, who is prepared to ride naked through the town, the horse, who has a speaking part, the townsfolk, Peeping Tom and a variety of triumphant women.

All these are splashed on a canvas in an exuberant manner, full of movement and humour and mostly reliant on the combination of red and black. It looks absolutely spontaneous, but in fact the artist is well aware of 20th-century artistic energies, and these paintings are really Dufy painted large.

There are too many of them, but the best are persuasively funny and full of spirit, and all this is reflected in the painter's countenance in a self-portrait that is part of the show.

The final countenance is a cool, polished, serious face that sits on the top of a smooth body in little statues by Kiki Smith, an American artist who is part of the exhibition Bodylogue at the Gow Langsford Gallery until November 15.

Part doll and part fetish object, these three little statues are curiously set in some space between the cute and the confrontational. The countenances are the most edgy of all the faces on show.