C91 Reviews
Auckland
Three recent exhibitions in Auckland attested to the continuing ability of art to generate and sustain political dialogue and critique in this country. An exhibition of the work of Richard Killeen, entitled Stories We Tell Ourselves and curated by Francis Pound, combined anthropological and historical narratives with political and social critique.
Nuala Gregory: Julia I,1998, acrylic and gouache on canvas, 40 X 80 cm; photo and courtesy the artist
Nuala Gregory: Julia II, 1998, acrylic and gouache on canvas, 40 X 80 cm; photo and courtesy the artist
Nuala Gregory; World; 1999; acrylic and gouache on canvas; 20 X 20 cm; photo and courtesy the artist.
The title of the show was derived from one work, which consists of 129 individual 'cut-out' pieces hung in a cluster. Refusing traditional framing devices, these pieces can be hung in many different ways and they tower over the viewer, while the intricacy of each individual motif invites close inspection. The disparate images seem to defy the possibility of coherent stories alluded to in the title, but Killeen is concerned with how narratives may be constructed from an array of images, and sifted into complex historical stories. He lifts images from many sources, including old encyclopaedias, manuals and zoological sketches. These images range from the intimate to the expansive and historical; as an image of the artist's son is juxtaposed with images of war, ancient voyages, insects and fish. These meticulous collections of archaeological fragments form a collage of identity, located in a culturally diverse, politicized space. Another artist who is concerned with narratives of the self, as an indeterminate yet politicized site, is Nuala Gregory. Her exhibition, Portrait of Julia , explored the premise that the identity of woman and the identity of art are open to question. According to the artist, this project began in 1997 with the discovery of a poem and a child's drawing. The resulting small square paintings each feature a single image which appears to float on the pastel, flatly mute gesso surfaces. Gregory's Julia refers to the character of Julia in the Shakespeare play Two Gentlemen of Verona which became the subject of a 1964 sound poem by Louis Zukofsky. Zukofsky's ear poem consists of 20 reworkings of a single line from Shakespeare, "come shadow come and take this shadow up," in which Julia questions and plays on her own identity. The poem picks up on this play of text, undermining its ability to represent coherent meaning in any determinate way. Gregory has drawn on the poem to continue her exploration into the shadowy notion of female identity, and its relation to art and the process of making art.
In the Shakespeare play, Julia, assuming the guise of a male messenger, is contrasted with the traditional courtly lady, Sylvia. When Julia muses on the painted portrait of Sylvia as a shadow to be 'taken up' she may be expressing a wish to be more like the lady portrayed, Sylvia, or she may be comparing her own disguise with that of the painted image as a representation. The notion of the shadow embodies both painting as mediated act and Julia's identity as mutable, thus linking art and representationality with female identity. Like the poem's repeated text, Gregory's paintings focus on an image and rework it, such as in Julia I and Julia II , which represents a skirt, childishly drawn. The artist's interest in the drawing of a child is as an image of emerging suggestibility, barely formed and unfixed. The canvas, which awaits the workings of the artist, may be a reference to the way in which a child perceives the world and her/his subsequent entry into the symbolic order and ability to comprehend the image as representation. Another concern is the politicised world view, which in World III may refer to medieval images of the world and the cosmos. Historically, these medieval cosmologies were the way in which the male structured his notion of the world, as fixed, mapped and conquerable. But this image may also operate on a more intimate, domestic scale, as may be seen in crochet, lace-making or quilting. Here is the idea of a world, which may reside within the traditional realm of female craft-making, which allows space for women and children. Gregory examines the aesthetic sensibility of the domestic realm and its relation to painting. This reveals her interest in discourses on art's aesthetic role and invites contemplation of the relative value of fine art, craft and furnishings. Ultimately, this conceptually coherent work resists fixed meanings, as Nuala Gregory engages in a discourse which questions and refuses representation, through the mediated act of transfer of found image fragments, asserting painting's ability to create new conditions for visibility. Creating and negotiating new visibilities was a feature of taonga mauri: objects of our affection 1 , at Artstation, in which Nuala Gregory also featured. For this exhibition curator Cushla Parekowhai took as her guiding premise the Maori concept of taonga, a 'priceless thing', where the precious may be located in the mundane. Taonga is a gift, whose worth is symbolic and reflective of the relationship between the giver and the receiver of the gift. Here, both art and exhibition are an expression of taonga. One contentious aspect of this show was the curator's deliberate choice not to prescribe the eligibility of participants on the basis of their ethnicity, and instead the dominant culture was subversively recolonised.
A work from the show, by Marcus Williams, was a quirky installation of air-conditioning ducting blowing hot air, which draws on the perceptual concerns of phenomenology to comment on the recent savage deconstruction of New Zealand's social infrastructure. Another, by Michael Parekowhai, consisted of two stuffed rabbits wearing the costumes of Peter Rabbit and Benjamin Bunny from the children's story by Beatrix Potter. This draws attention to the destruction wrought on the New Zealand native forest by this introduced species which has become a feral scourge. It is a cheeky metaphor for the process of colonisation, with the artist working consistently in the cultural interface between pakeha (New Zealand European) and Maori. Each exhibition offered a valuable contribution to current social and cultural debate within Auckland's arts sector.
Robin Stoney is an art historian and gallery coordinator at the University of Auckland.
Review
reproduced from CIRCA 91, Spring 2000,
pp. 62-63
