The knowing eye

By T.J. McNAMARA

What price innocence? Can the innocent eye enjoy a work of art or do you have to be in the know? The truth is complicated. Who are the monumental men and women ranked along Michelangelo's Sistine Ceiling? The viewer is astonished by them but few realise they are the sibyls and Old Testament prophets who foresaw the coming of Christ. Knowing this helps.

In the work of Julian Dashper at the Sue Crockford Gallery, if you do not know you are lost. Most viewers are lost anyway but knowing may help.

The exhibition is called Selected Masterpieces and the principal "masterpiece" is Big Bang Theory, a collection of five drum kits first shown a decade ago. On each bass drum is the name of an artist pluralised into a group. The black and white drum kit is The McCahons. The one with the cars on it is The Hoteres. The one with the old-fashioned lettering is The Woollastons.

It is easy to talk about the relative size of the drums and the corresponding size of the artist's reputation and how the fancy lettering reflects the nature of the artist's work but, truth to tell, if you do not know they remain just drum kits.

You have to know things, too, at the exhibition called Naked Adolescence, by Brendon Wilkinson, at the Ivan Anthony Gallery. A typical work is a table with a miniature aerodrome on top of it. It is a bleak, bare aerodrome with three plastic fighter planes, a little sign, some lights and some fuel tanks.

Some details are funny, like the little dog at one end and the man stepping off the table at the other. The whole is called South Sea Tropic Zone, a title full of irony. What you have to know is that the aircraft are models of the F-16, the aeroplane that New Zealand nearly bought to replace the Skyhawks, although if you had peered closely you might have got a hint from the kiwi decals on the wings. What you might make of it is an open question.

You do not need to know so much about a second table work called An Arm and a Leg. It looks like any railway station in a toy trainset except for the marvellously accurate graffiti that adorn the platform and station. It makes a fascinating, accurate slice of life, although you may need to be acquainted with Mt Eden station.

Everyone is acquainted with the cross. It is the inescapable symbol of sacrifice so that when a painting incorporates a cross it gains in impact because we know all the implications. Most of the paintings by Jeffrey Harris at Oedipus Rex Gallery incorporate a cross alongside another vertical black element, such as the upright of one of the crosses of the generally forgotten Good or Bad Thief crucified with Christ.

Given these known elements, what does Jeffrey Harris add? To the symbol he adds, purely by colour and simple shapes, an atmosphere that moves us emotionally whether it is the red, hectic blaze of Cross Number 1 or the blue serenity of conscious sacrifice in Cross Number 2.

The second part of this exhibition is made up of Dunedin landscapes notable for the energetic attack of their thick paint and they are as atmospheric and moody as the cross paintings but without the depth of emotion that the well-known symbol confers.

For all its simplicity or perhaps because of it, this is a powerful show.

Finally, at the Anna Bibby Gallery, Heather Straka insists that we do not have to know anything because her exhibition is entitled no subject specified.

As in her previous exhibitions, she makes great play with glazed surfaces that are cracked and crazed, surfaces she paints with extraordinary accuracy. In the past, these surfaces were linked with bathroom fittings, cloakrooms and seat backs. In this show they are just surfaces, grey solemn surfaces, on which she poses decorative patterns like tattoos.

But no one tattoos porcelain or painted and varnished wood, so the patterns that say Melody or Mutt or Love Mother Forever take on a peculiar strangeness, which, with the addition of stains, marks and graffiti, end up as a solemn image like a tombstone, a memorial to something or other, we know not what.

To know too many explicit things would wreck the feeling of this remarkable show, where the paintings have a more independent existence than anything Straka has achieved before.