The distilled essence of chair

By T.J. McNAMARA

There was a lecturer at Elam who went on to become a legend. When he moved to California, he caused riots at UCLA, when he gave a lecture on furniture design.

He sat silently on a chair as the class filed in. When everyone was seated, pens at the ready, he stood up and with a kick broke the rails of the chair. A few more kicks and the legs were gone; a couple more and the back was demolished. He walked off without a word. End of lecture. The chair was weak; it was bad design.

A similar demonstration, equally devoid of emotion, can be seen in the exhibition of furniture attributed to Donald Judd at the Gow Langsford Gallery until June 15.

Judd, one of the most celebrated of modern American sculptors, died in 1994 but a foundation lives on that makes sculpture to his designs; the sculpture in this show is a modular series of chairs and one table.

These are the distilled essence of chair: a back and a seat. Variations come in the way the seat is supported - horizontal support, diagonal support and vertical support between the legs. These demonstrations of the basic possibilities for a chair take on the finish of sculpture. Other sculptors might make their work from observation of fruit, buttocks, faces or even landscape but Judd designed his work around the concept of "chair".

Yet this is not Conceptual Art. These are specific objects. "A chair is a chair is a chair," as Gertrude Stein might have said if she'd been confronted with this show.

It is all immaculate. The demonstration chairs are made from beautifully machined plywood without a hint of a nail or screw. They are shown between white walls on a white platform hovering above the bleached wooden floor. The scattering of autumn leaves blown in from Albert Park provides welcome grace notes.

This chaste presentation lifts the exhibition far from the sweat and juices of ordinary life. The works are expensive, elitist and exist in an atmosphere as rarefied as that at the top of Everest. As on that summit, you wouldn't want to linger and sit.

There is a bit more emotion to beguile one to sit among the work of Jim Speers at the Jensen Gallery until June 7.

Speers follows the minimalist tradition pioneered by Judd and others in the 1960s. He is holding a dialogue with the minimalist painters of last century. They painted plain fields of colour, using intense layers of paint trying to fill them with luminosity. But paint can never be as luminous as light itself and what Speers has done is take plain surfaces of opalescent plastic and put light behind them to make them glow with colour. He has been working in this vein for some time now and in the present exhibition the results are magical.

One of the works, Coming in to Changi, consists only of two intersecting surfaces of gold/yellow. The work should be seen from directly in front so the two surfaces appear to hover clear of the wall. They glow with colour but where they intersect there is a lovely play of tone and the exchange of sharp edges for soft. Light surrounds the work like a halo and is subtly modified by a rosy glow that comes from the top of the light box that supports the work clear of the wall.

The effect is simple, soft but strong, and enhanced by the way all cables are hidden where in the past Speers felt obliged to leave the mechanism exposed.

Simplicity reigns in these two exhibitions but detail is all the go in the extraordinary exhibition by Liz Maw at the Ivan Anthony Gallery until June 15. She does isolated figures on plain board and it is impossible not to admire the extraordinary Flemish detail of her painting: an elaborate jewelled halo, jewelled borders to a robe, intricate tassels, the elaborate structure of crystals of ice and ice particles floating in the air. It is also equally impossible to follow the intellectual and emotional concepts in the paintings.

The figure of Jesus, blessed by the Catholic bishop of Auckland, is amazing in detail but oddly kitsch in the white line that surrounds the work, the blue, bearded film-star face and the elegant, unwounded hands - is it for real or post-modern ironic? Is the young, blue centre-fold woman an ideal or an absurd stylisation hovering somewhere, nail polish and all, between pop-art and soft porn?

Impressive but awful, religious but in bad taste, ancient but modern, ironic or sincere - this exhibition takes the cake for spectacular ambiguity.