References to beauty from art's past and present

By T.J. McNAMARA

The in-word at the moment is "referencing"; no art pundit can do without it. We can no longer speak of alluding, hinting at, quoting, acknowledging, borrowing, or appropriation, it is all "referencing". In modish speak, Michelangelo was "referencing" the Bible when he painted prophets on the Sistine ceiling and "referencing" antiquity when he painted sibyls. Michelangelo is "referenced" in the work of the Dutch artist Harald Vlugt at the Muka Gallery until Saturday.

One of the best prints in the show, a screen-print called The Message, has the Lybian Sibyl from the Sistine ceiling spreading open her book of prophecy while overhead aeroplanes fly and drop great swathes of letterpress into it.

This is one of the more straightforward prints in the show. Vlugt is primarily a sculptor and printmaking is an enclave in his work but one in which he creates with skill and authority.

His prints are dense, with references as well as visual invention. In the foyer of the gallery are three prints, Spring, Summer, Autumn, made to celebrate the 200th anniversary of lithography as an artistic medium. They also show Rembrandt as a young man, in middle age and in old age by quotation from his self-portraits. Added to this are references to the season, the Bible, printing in the 17th century, modern exhibition techniques and the development of photogravure. They are handsome, thought-provoking prints.

Upstairs are more riches but nothing is simple. A fascinating etching called For Critics Only ranges through anatomical diagrams and ecorche figures to references to Crete and Picasso.

This splendid print is, inexplicably, displayed near the floor but this may be because the sexually explicit prints in the show are displayed high above children's reach and each given a coy little curtain.

These, and many others, have that rare thing in art, a fine sense of wit. They are often funny, like Brainwave, where sex is all in the mind and also Healthy Dutch Boy, with his inevitable windmill. The work is witty but not superficial. The big print Blue Room has a lot to say about framing devices and how we make an image from some aspect of the world. The technical invention continues in a fine, big, airy print on artificial silk. It is called Eye Am.

By a happy coincidence, there will undoubtedly be I AM paintings in the huge show of work by Colin McCahon which opens in Amsterdam this month.

The wit and the effort in Vlugt's work are also contained in a big work of interactive art which occupies the floor of the back of the gallery. It is a huge map of Europe made of letters. These enigmatic messages addressed only to "Hotel Europe" were sent to more than 1000 European post offices. Whether they "Returned to Sender" depended on national character, post office regulations and chance.

A fair percentage came back and they represent an imaginative journey around the continent and, assembled on the floor, have considerable visual impact.

Cherie Knott's exhibition called Whispers at the Grantham Gallery (until August 24) contains references which are more oblique and less dense. The artist "references" women and spring, summer and silence, blossom and dreaming and even alchemy.

This is barefoot in the grass stuff. It echoes exactly the mood of early poetry by W. B. Yeats:

Down by the salley gardens my love and I did meet;

She passed the salley gardens with little snow-white feet. ...

She bid me take life easy, as the grass grows on the weirs;

But I was young and foolish, and now am full of tears.

Grassy green is predominant in the best of these paintings. Elsewhere the colour sense is too hot and chemical for the subject. The paintings where the green of grass and forest is linked to the white of a long, floating dress are really captivating, although a curious note of anonymity and sadness creeps into their lyric charm.

Sometimes the figure in the dress lies sprawled on the grass almost dead, the face of the figure is often blank and even scratched across at the level of the eyes.

These are attractive paintings, done with great flourish and skill. They present, as in a dream, a view of the world that "references" basic natural processes, as in the lovely big dream of pregnancy in Quickening, and surrender to these processes in the several works called Listening to the Grass.

It is possible to make a work of art that simply is without reference to much outside its own autonomous being. Such works can be seen in the exhibition by Emily Siddell at G2, the FHE gallery on Kitchener St, until August 20.

These sculptures are long strings of ceramic cones interspersed with fused glass. They hang from the ceiling, sometimes they stop just short of the floor and at other times curl in a spiral on it. They are pure and white. Perhaps they "reference" sea creatures or cascades but they exist entirely within themselves as delicate but strong falls of shape and light.