Writers Series

Snake Oil:Chartwell Acquisitions 2002 - 2005
New Gallery, Auckland Art Gallery, Toi o Tamaki, 12 June to 8 September 2005.

Curator Robert Leonard writes about the works in the exhibition for the gallery wall texts and kindly provides them for the Chartwell website.

Hany Armanious b.1962 Australia

Untitled Snake Oil 2003
Hot Melt, oil paint, drinking glasses, cardboard box
Chartwell Collection, Auckland Art Gallery Toi o Tamaki

Traditionally casting has been used to reproduce sculptures, but today sculptors are addressing the process in its own right. Hany Armanious has made a series of works using Hot Melt, a miraculous and versatile casting vinyl. He calls it "snake oil", suggesting an elixir, a wild-west cure-all (perhaps a fix for all his sculpting problems). This nickname also suggests a hoax, something bogus. Sometimes Armanious pours Hot Melt into space, forming inchoate blobs and folds that betray the material's qualities: its viscosity, the speed at which it sets. However, here he pours it into glasses, casting the space that a drink - a magic potion - would take. He turns out the solidified volumes like jellies or cupcakes, perching them atop the inverted glasses as dainty plinths. They become a family of curious comic characters: some blunt, some pointy; some graceful, some squat. Recalling the metallurgists, alchemists and charlatans of old, Armanious' piece invokes the - possibly miraculous, possibly bogus - power of art.

Guy Benfield b.1964 Australia

Head Painting 1999
video
Chartwell Collection, Auckland Art Gallery Toi o Tamaki

History returns as farce in the work of Guy Benfield. His campy video-performances and installations mix references to a 1970s Sydney bohemian lifestyle (witnessed first hand as a child) with references to sensational avant-garde art of similar vintage. The video Head Painting shows Benfield pouring paint on himself while dragging himself down the gallery wall, leaving paint-trails where his head and shoulder make contact. The performance recalls Paul McCarthy's famous 1970s performance, painting a line on the floor using his head as a brush. What Benfield leaves on the wall looks like Zen-inspired action-calligraphy after Max Gimblett. However, Benfield's behind-the-scenes document presents his creative act as not heroic, expressive or meditative, but routine, abject, forlorn.

Stephen Birch b.1961 Australia

Cosmos 2003
silicon and synthetic polymer resin
Chartwell Collection, Auckland Art Gallery Toi o Tamaki

Stephen Birch cast friends' heads in silicon, and installed the casts hither and thither across the wall, like stars in the night sky. The line up, all fellow artists and art workers, includes Mikala Dwyer, Matthys Gerber, Rosemary Laing and Birch himself. The work could be considered positive. The field of heads is like a constellation of like minds, a thinking community, Birch's personal art universe. Like stars, the heads could operate as kindly guides to navigation or support more metaphysical inquiry. On the other hand, they might be cast negatively, as severed heads, creepy death masks, or trophy heads for the collector's wall. The heads could be seen as ethereal spirits (as heads hovering happily in space with no need of the body) or as abject waxworks (as bald, uncanny, and grossly physical). Heavenly or base, it's your call.

Mladen Bizumic b.1977 New Zealand

Hauturu.Doc (with "Adagio Under My Thumb" by the Rolling Stones) 2003
video
Chartwell Collection, Auckland Art Gallery Toi o Tamaki

Long ago visionaries created the Pyramids in Egypt and the Colossus of Rhodes. But contemporary art also has heroic projects designed to kick ass and up the ante, from James Turrell's Roden Crater and Christo's Wrapped Reichstag to Matthew Barney's Cremaster Cycle. Such projects set the scene for Mladen Bizumic's grandiose proposal to relocate Little Barrier Island (Hauturu) - the nature reserve that protects many of our rare native bird species - from the Hauraki Gulf to the harbour of Venice. It's colonisation in reverse. The proposal plays on New Zealand's desire to make a splash at the Venice Biennale, and stakeholder expectations that our presence reinforce national identity and serve Trade and Industry interests. Bizumic's absurd proposal might keep everyone happy. The video here, a wire-frame CAD animation imagining the island on the move, makes you think for a second it might just be possible. Its languid soundtrack is an orchestral cover version of the Rolling Stones' Under My Thumb slowed down. The question hovering over Bizumic's proposal: how rock'n'roll is it?

Stella Brennan b.1974 New Zealand

Tuesday 3 July 2001, 10:38am 2001-2
embroidery
Chartwell Collection, Auckland Art Gallery Toi o Tamaki
made by Stella Brennan, Josephine Brennan, Claire Brennan, Steven Davies, Vikki Henderson, Juliet Pang, Nova Paul, David Perry, Steven Ritchie, Elaine Robertson, Hanna Scott, Nichola Trevithick, Siobhan Garrett and Tracey Wedge.

Stella Brennan's stitch-per-pixel embroidery of her iMac OS 8 desktop took over a year to do, and she needed help. A sewing circle of friends and family helped her complete it. By the time it was done, it was obsolete. Brennan had a new computer, running OS X. Translating the digital into the pre-industrial, the work yokes opposing values: the computer's currency and speed with craft's traditionalism and laboriousness. The woven computer screen can be read as daft, like an expressionist painting converted into paint-by-numbers. It becomes deft when it prompts us to consider more subtle historical connections, like the use of punch cards to control Jacquard weaving looms during the industrial revolution, and Ada Lovelace's proposal to use them to programme Charles Babbage's analytical engine, the 19th century proto-computer. While its title suggests an instant, the piece enfolds time: the time taken to make it, the time taken to view it, and the stretch of technological, economic and social history from the Bayeux Tapestry through the industrial revolution to the Macintosh.

Steve Carr b.1976 New Zealand

Tyson 2002
video
Chartwell Collection, Auckland Art Gallery Toi o Tamaki

Steve Carr's short films show him enjoying himself. They are about how he gives and takes his pleasure. He hands out ice creams as Mr Whippy. He plays cowboys and indians with little kids and lets them win; they tie him to the clothesline and squirt him with water pistols. He has a pyjama-party pillow fight with cute young girls, and demolishes an old van with skater-boys. In scuba gear, he checks out bikini babes treading water. Tyson, a motionless movie, has him on all fours in a Mexican standoff with a dog over a drool-drenched tennis ball. Tyson left his ball on the ground to tempt Carr, assuming the artist would value it as highly as he does. Carr plays along. Neither will move first, remaining frozen, locked in an endgame scenario. Carr mocks man's best friend and empathises with him, sharing in Tyson's pleasure.

Michael Harrison b.1961 New Zealand

Hot Pursuit 2002-2
acrylic on paper
Chartwell Collection, Auckland Art Gallery Toi o Tamaki

Magnetism 2002
acrylic on paper
Chartwell Collection, Auckland Art Gallery Toi o Tamaki

Rock Chick 2001-2
acrylic on paper
Chartwell Collection, Auckland Art Gallery Toi o Tamaki

Michael Harrison has always been the odd man out: a "watercolourist" in a time of digital-biennale-project-art, a mediaevalist who prefers the occult to art theory, an artist who explores tender feelings in an age of ironic distance. His understated images of faces, women, couples, nudes, landforms and heavenly bodies nod to art history, classical mythology and Hollywood. Modest in scale, light in touch, they transport us into a realm of dreams and desires, of melancholy beauty. In the early 1990s Harrison's output was low, as he laboured to distil singular images. But through the decade he sped up, increasingly worked in open series, permutating leitmotifs, arranging and rearranging them in endless variations. The cats and birds that dominate his recent works invite all manner of readings. Cats and birds are earthbound and airborne; predators and prey. They have long symbolised aspects of ourselves: playing anima to our animus (or vice versa). Harrison's bird riffs on the bird in the Ace of Cups card in the Waite Tarot deck; it also could suggest the soul, the Holy Ghost, a harbinger. The cats meanwhile suggest familiars, and nuzzling purring feline sensuality. Harrison's cast are less birds and cats, more bird-signs and cat-signs; his heraldic images hovering between operating as 3d scenes and 2d ciphers. And while they suggest allegories, they are ultimately inscrutable. Harrison likens them to dream images, whose significance is obscure even for - especially for - the dreamer.

Sara Hughes b.1971 New Zealand

RAM 2004
acrylic on canvas
Chartwell Collection, Auckland Art Gallery Toi o Tamaki

Back in the mid 1960s, Op artist Bridget Riley was gutted when her abstract paintings inspired wallpaper and dress-fabric patterns. Her finely honed experiments in perception became a fashionable look, destined to become equally unfashionable. The Zeitgeist seemed to trivialise her enquiry. Today, Sara Hughes is mining Riley territory, but the landscape has changed: Jean-Paul Gaultier's op-art inspired "Cyber" print fabric has already been reappropriated back into art by Sylvie Fleury. Hughes' Op-Pop dot paintings may engage with raw perception, but they court connections with décor, fashion and the kinds of associations Riley considered extraneous. Take RAM. It's based on a rectangular module split diagonally; each module has the same dot pattern in a different colour arrangement. There's a tension between the perspective cues in each module and the overall grid which flattens the painting. The title suggests computing (random access memory) and the image itself recalls punchcards, casino lights, illuminated disco dance floors, pixilated digital imagery and the cinema's use of flashing light arrays to represent awesome computer brains. Riley's paintings were painstakingly handmade, which was a mark of her seriousness. Hughes however makes a point of her use of the computers and vinyl cutters that make the job easier. She's interested in the phenomenology and the semiology equally.

Simon Ingram b.1971 New Zealand

Frictionless Painting (Social Colour) 2003
Space Painting #9
oil on linen
Monochrome In C
oil on linen, video on 12 inch G4 Apple powerbook
Chartwell Collection, Auckland Art Gallery Toi o Tamaki

Simon Ingram complicates the commonplace idea of painting as a direct expressive act. He uses computers and painting machines in designing and executing his paintings, distancing himself from the old romantic idea of the painter in his studio, passionate intensity, the smell of turps. Frictionless Painting, a two-part work, uses cyan, magenta and yellow, the "process colours" used in offset printing but rarely in art. We don't think of them as natural colours - colours of things in the world - even though they are used to reproduce them. Ingram calls them "social colour". Part one, Space Painting #9, looks like a massive enlargement of a moiré pattern. Ingram used a computer 3d rendering programme to make patterns of tilted squares, softening their edges using a "watercolour" effect (computers can be "sensitive"). He then had a painting machine - a computer controlled airbrush - spit out the patterns in magenta on a yellow canvas. He overlaid two variations on the pattern in successive passes, suggesting patches existing on two distinct planes. Part two, Monochrome in C, a diptych, juxtaposes a nondescript cyan monochrome against a G4 Apple powerbook screening a video of it being made by the painting machine. The painting is a small thing, yet suggests a sublime transcendent beyond. Maybe its metaphysical implication is downplayed when you see a machine generate it, maybe not.

Giovanni Intra 1968-2002 New Zealand

Untitled 1990
metal studs on found wool and polyester suit
Auckland Art Gallery Toi o Tamaki, purchased with assistance of the Chartwell Trust

Giovanni Intra's studded suit is a belated tribute to punk style. Needing an outfit for the Elam arts school ball, he took an op shop suit and decorated it with metal studs, imitating the look punks originally borrowed from bondagewear. "The outfit was a huge success - even if the fastenings did leave the bare-chested Intra lacerated and bleeding by the end of the evening", reported Kelly Carmichael. Later Intra hung his suit on the wall to recall the way Joseph Beuys displayed his felt suits. The contrast was telling. Where Beuys cut himself a dour grey felt suit to exemplify his job of artist as healer, Intra's uniform was dazzling. Part punk, part S'n'M, part Liberace, and very K Road, it sponged up all manner of associations, folding fashion into religion. As Bridget Sutherland imagined it, Intra's "suited yet absent figure presides over some debased ritual - a science-fiction priest who wallows in the glamour of a low and aggressively vulgar materialism. Like a devilish performer, he conjures for us the breakdown of reality into dream, object into fetish."

Peter Madden b.1966 New Zealand

Leave 2004
collage on shoes
Chartwell Collection, Auckland Art Gallery Toi o Tamaki

Ram Mount 2004
collage, false eyelashes, paint on plastic
Chartwell Collection, Auckland Art Gallery Toi o Tamaki

Sue Gardiner writes of Peter Madden: "In his secret and possibly idealist worlds there is a marriage between danger, romanticism, strangeness, reason and sentiment... the fear of catastrophe is always delicately balanced by beauty." Madden's sentimental surrealism recalls the work of Joseph Cornell. In Ram Mount a kitschy plastic animal head, a trophy on a heraldic wall plaque, has been feminised and gothicised with the addition of long eyelashes, blackened eyes and black tears - it's a little Marilyn Manson. No horns are visible, seemingly usurped by a crown of nesting trompe l'oeil butterflies. These images have been cut from encyclopedia plates and folded to resemble real butterflies, although alternative texts on their undersides give the game away. In Leave a pair of discarded brown brogues has also been colonised by butterfly-images, the spaces once occupied by sweaty feet providing an ideal habitat.

Liz Maw b.1966 New Zealand

Satan 2003
oil on board
Chartwell Collection, Auckland Art Gallery Toi o Tamaki

Liz Maw perfects noble archetypes: a woman in a suit of armour, a yellow Minotaur with an erection, an Arab soldier with oil miraculously spurting from his palms, and her boyfriend artist Andrew McLeod as a satyr. She paints her beautiful fantasy figures realistically, almost life size, and clear-cut from their backgrounds. She describes them as invented ancestors and icons. Maw's Satan is a blonde bombshell. Half retro pin-up, half retro deity, the dualistic Satan is a comment on Catholicism. Maw calls it a response to the divine impregnation of Mary. The work plays on the traditional duplicity of the femme fatale. Coming at the end of an incongruously elongated, snakelike arm, her left hand repeats the gesture of the disquieted Virgin in Leonardo Da Vinci's Annunciation in the Uffizi. But her right hand holds a gun, almost to her own head as if anticipating suicide (a Catholic no-no), or perhaps to fire on the voyeur-viewer. It's feminism and sexism rolled into one.

p mule [dr] et al. New Zealand

The Creative Act 2003
mixed media
Chartwell Collection, Auckland Art Gallery Toi o Tamaki

When et al.'s Marlene Cubewell was installing her 1992 solo show at Peter McLeavey's Wellington gallery, the eminent dealer left her in charge. When he returned he discovered she had blonded his beloved chaise longue using white paint. McLeavey cancelled her show, trucked Cubewell's work back to Auckland and sent the furniture in for repair. Subsequently this other dilapidated couch began appearing in et al. installations as a tribute to this instance of vandalism. On one occasion the interior was speckled with fly pupae, suggesting the artist had opened a can of worms, or something similar. More recently it has been transformed into a speaker box, playing an antique recording of Marcel Duchamp delivering his famous lecture "The Creative Act", noting the role the viewer plays in the completion of the art work. It is as if et al.'s work were still haunted by His Master's Voice, the father of conceptual art beamed to us from beyond the grave. Resonating within the couch, it is hard to know if the patriarch is being offered as the analyst or the bleating patient. Either way the work looks gothic - it's a vampire's coffin.

Seung Yul Oh b.1981 New Zealand

The Ability to Blow Themselves Up 2005
video
Chartwell Collection, Auckland Art Gallery Toi o Tamaki

Seung Yul Oh is something of a prankster. He filmed people - mostly fellow Elam students and Elam staff - blowing up balloons until they burst, capturing their inevitably startled expressions at that moment. He edited together the portraits in quick-fire succession. Most shots start right on the explosion; the balloons bursting before we have a chance to really see them. He loops the sequence, occasionally playing it sound-only against camera black, making the syncopated explosions sound more like gunfire. The Ability to Blow Themselves Up is addictive viewing. Everything happens so fast that you constantly compare what you are seeing with how you remember just seeing it. It's an endless action replay.

Martin Thompson b.1956 New Zealand

Untitled n.d.
felt pen on graph paper
Chartwell Collection, Auckland Art Gallery Toi o Tamaki

Computers reduce big picture complexity to simple yes/no decisions, albeit millions of them. Martin Thompson works similarly. He makes drawings on graph paper, filling in on or leaving blank the squares according to a mathematical plan, generating beautiful, often trippy patterns in the process. Our appreciation of his works does not simply reside in enjoying the patterns, but in recognising the manual and mental processes by which they are generated. The works are also rich in association. Stella Brennan is reminded of "stars, Pac-Men, and snowflake-patterned knitwear", Stuart Shepherd of "complex quilts, radiating mandelas or patterns of pixilated TV static".

Yvonne Todd b.1973 New Zealand

Chlora 2001
colour photograph (LED print)
Chartwell Collection, Auckland Art Gallery Toi o Tamaki

Yvonne Todd's impossibly perfect, dewy rose recalls Hallmark cards, designed to facilitate off-the-rack emotional response. Her big photo suggests amplified sentimentality: intimacy and tenderness WRIT LARGE. The classy egg-shaped vignette hints at fertility and pregnant pauses. The rose could be a marker of love or death. Either way this highly visually and culturally processed sign attests to the conventionalised forms our feelings take. Does Chlora recuperate kitsch? Is it sincere, a piss-take, or a bit of both? Perhaps it points
to something real at stake in the cliché.

Ronnie Van Hout b.1962 New Zealand

Drunk Chimp 2002
mixed media
Chartwell Collection, Auckland Art Gallery Toi o Tamaki

Ronnie van Hout's work features his animal alter-egos Sculpt D Dog and Monkey Madness. His monkey character plays on the idea that we evolved from apes, and riffs on old films and TV shows where this was a key trope: Lance Link, Monkey, Planet of the Apes and Kubrick's 2001. Van Hout parodies the idea that apes can paint. In the 1940s Paul Schiller studied the artistic activity of chimps, and later Desmond Morris featured Congo, an ape-artist, on his television show. Morris may have been deadly serious (he was an artist himself) and yet the idea of ape-painters was frequently used to ridicule modern art, particularly abstract expressionism. Monkey Madness first appeared in Van Hout's video Painting Again (1998), where the artist adopted a primate persona in order to defeat his painter's block. However later videos, Drinking Again (2001) and House of the Rising Sun (2002), played up Monkey Madness's problems with the bottle. The sculpture Drunk Chimp finds Monkey Madness prostrate, holding not the wine bottle from which he attempted to find inspiration, sustenance or escape, but a video screen documenting his downfall. The video uses the opening "Dawn of Man" sequence from 2001 where a cosmic intervention allows apes to evolve into humans. However Van Hout's version spoils the idea of a great leap forward, replacing the monolith with a wine bottle; the self awareness journey becoming a road to oblivion. De-evolution.

Rohan Wealleans b.1977 New Zealand

Quiet Rocks 2004
mixed media
Chartwell Collection, Auckland Art Gallery Toi o Tamaki

Rohan Wealleans is known for his "layer" paintings. He makes them by applying coats of paint, then cutting into them, peeling and pinning them back like a surgeon, exposing candy-coloured flesh. Wealleans' work is an exploration of the physical stuff of painting. But the work also engages adolescent gynaecological interests (it has been called "pornographic abstraction"), artworld in-jokes and psychedelic effects. Quiet Rocks is one of Wealleans' more serious - or pseudo-serious - works. He collected paint chips excavated in making layer paintings and pinned them in evidence bags to a notice board; sorted from smallest to biggest. Beneath each specimen, Wealleans made a contour line drawing of it for the record. Quiet Rocks is part of a series of Wealleans' works related to a fictional Planet Earth Geology Department (PEGD), whose members scour the galaxy collecting rocks for scientific analysis. The title riffs on Wealleans' 2001 notice board work, In Space No One Can Hear You Collect Rocks.

Writing Submission From: Joseph Gelfer, 29 September 2003. Joseph Gelfer is a Dunedin-based writer.

About: Peter Peryer, Moeraki Boulder, 1988, Silver gelatin print, Nine Lives: The 2003 Chartwell Exhibition, Auckland Art Gallery, Toi o Tamaki, Auckland, NZ.

A haiku in response...

Up from the Ever
Present Origin thoughts rise
towards the surface.

Peter Peryer, Moeraki Boulder, 1988, silver gelatin print