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Artists are often seen by the general public as people in conflict with society, and yet it is through their visions and insights that we finally come to recognise our surroundings and understand ourselves. [i]

– Jim and Mary Barr

Why do we paint and how do we define what is good in painting? As most people are aware, there are paintings about painting, paintings within paintings, paintings about things, paintings of things. Painting is old school, kicking against the pricks (or kissing up to them). It is design, a currency, representational, and it is non-objective or abstract. It can often be twee, merely pedestrian and worse, dull. So what defines good? Essentially good painting stands alone as work that has never been a fill-in for something else. It is not an aside, a ‘something that I do’ among other things.

While painting is obdurate in its refusal to yield to technology, it is not a game of refusals. At a ground level, the reason for painting’s continued importance as an artistic platform is that it is based around the physical application of artistic medium to a surface, but it is not limited to just one medium. It can engulf drawing inasmuch as it is able to pick up other pictorial technologies, from the camera lucida to printmaking and more recently digital media. That it has this magnet-like tendency in common with the dominant technology in our lives, digital media, could in fact be the strongest consideration for painting’s standing in contemporary culture, as writer Sarah Lehrer-Graiwer has observed.[ii]

If painting is essentially a parallel, a contravention or reprieve from orthodox media in the twenty first century, why is it that among visual art platforms, contemporary painting, particularly non-objective painting, both of which periodically diminish in the spotlight next to more physical and performative cousins, can still be perceived as desirable and challenging? Answering this is tricky to unpack, but essentially the challenge is that the intention behind the making of a painting is the embedment of conceptual gestures.

The reason for much of non-objective painting’s challenge and its enduring appeal is that there is no single formula for describing painting. Attempts to ascribe non-objective ‘abstract’ artistic paintings in writing are often fated to be portentous exercises wherever the public is concerned. This is often the case if the intention is to capture all of painting within a short statement, and especially, tying it up in knots with philosophical theory.

At its most pure level, painting is a humanist challenge that presents its makers (and its consumers) with a myriad of non-objective possibilities. These pathways to explore new perspectives keep it alive and universal. Painting’s challenge therefore is fluid, in that it embodies something that was determined by its maker in a moment of choice. Writer Jan Verwoert explains; “even if it’s obvious that everything possible can be represented or said, that does not mean that the possibility is within reach. First one has to know what there is to represent or say or whether there even is anything to say. The only real possibilities are those we project ourselves. In painting and in writing, too, projecting – to put it dramatically – means ‘to wrest’ something from the empty canvas or page.”[iii]

Painters and their paintings, eventually contribute to art historical representations of the era in which their best works were made. Non-objective painters in New Zealand arrived during the second half of the twentieth century, amongst the en mass acceptance of contemporary New Zealand artists. In Contemporary New Zealand Painters: Volume 1, A–M, a canonical book in the history of New Zealand art, Jim and Mary Barr wrote “we live in a country that has been slow to acknowledge its artists and even when such acknowledgement has been given, it has too often been grudging.”[iv]

Since the 1980s, the popularity of non-objective painting internationally has fluctuated, falling out and in favour while other visual art platforms and movements have flourished. The exhibition Porous Moonlight curated by Imogen Taylor, charts a small yet important selection of contemporary non-objective painters whose work has matured in the subsequent decades.

While the art of the 1970s and 1980s in New Zealand ostensibly demanded mainstream contemplation of the various roles that artists might play in our society, the artists represented in Porous Moonlight have matured in a different New Zealand. For better or worse, we are now participants in a global environment with political and neo-liberal agendas being hashed out for the first time amidst an often anesthetised and apathetic popular culture. This gets me thinking; perhaps ‘Porous Moonlight’ is an antidote?

Matt Blomeley, 11 September 2013

Porous Moonlight was an exhibition curated by Imogen Taylor at Auckland Council’s Papakura Art Gallery (7 Sep – 19 Oct 2012). The exhibition featured a selection of works by: Anoushka Akel; Dan Arps; Stella Corkery; Nicola Farquhar; Diena Georgetti; Frances Hodgkins; Michael Illingworth; Claudia Jowitt; Saskia Leek; Denys Watkins; Amber Wilson. Porous Moonlight was made possible with support from Anna Miles Gallery, Gow Langsford Gallery, Hopkinson Mossman Gallery, Jonathan Smart Gallery, Michael Lett Gallery, and The Wallace Arts Trust.

It is the calendar industry that has, by meeting market demands, discovered a Pleistocene taste in outdoor scenes. – Dennis Dutton[1]

People have always explored their affinity with the landscape through cultivating an appreciation of art. Contemporary postcolonial New Zealand is no different. Our country faces very real issues involving the deforestation, erosion, waterway pollution and numerous native animal extinctions in our 600 million year old archipelago, which prior to the arrival of humans had developed quietly over the course of 62 million years. This situation means any awareness of the place in which we live is valuable.

The circumstances we are facing are illustrated best by the late historian Michael King who, in his seminal text The Penguin History of New Zealand, wrote: “So drastic was the impact of European settlement that one geographer was moved to note that human-sponsored modification of landscapes which had taken place over twenty centuries in Europe and four in North America had occurred in New Zealand in only one century.”[2]

Twentieth century modernist painting witnessed the birth and evolution of abstraction. New Zealand was a late-comer to this ‘party’ and when modern abstraction did arrive, the content of much art remained centred around our emerging national identity through exploring our ties to the land. Visual artists such as Colin McCahon and Ralph Hotere, for example, metaphorically and abstractly ‘peopled’ the landscape with references to and critiques of our emerging national character.

McCahon is at once an exceptional and a typical figure in Nationalist response to the ‘ultra-modern’, in simultaneously spurning and accepting it as he does, and twisting it to the national purpose. Located in the very heart of his art is the strain between a Nationalist localism and the imported forms of the ultra-modern: much of his power derives from the clash of this contradiction.[3]

The year 2012 is an interesting time for a contemporary art exhibition themed around the landscape. In twentieth century New Zealand we may have witnessed the changing terrain of international art through reproduced images, but our responses to it were played out through our unique social and physical landscape, located as we are in the South Pacific region between the tropics and the Antarctic. The development of electronic media in the late twentieth century coincided with the advancing of contemporary art, gradually erasing these borders and leading to the present time where we have caught up with international art and occupy a crossroads between traditional art practices and popular media. The fact remains, however, that despite the constantly evolving tropes of conceptual art, the landscape retains a core place in our psyche when thinking about art.

Photographer and noted environmentalist Craig Potton said “it is the nature of art and the way of nature to push us beyond the narrow realities we often become trapped in, to new or forgotten realms of pleasure.”[4] In the field of Evolutionary Psychology, as Dennis Dutton noted, the landscape seen through calendar imagery has a universal appeal to humans. Our essentially ‘Pleistocene’ taste that Dutton referred to is our evolutionary compulsion to seek the greener side of the fence. In these terms, when we look at a landscape what we are really seeing is potential, or its opposite.

Matt Blomeley, November 2012

LAND / SCAPE was an exhibition curated by Tracey Williams at Papakura Art Gallery (25 Aug – 6 Oct 2012). The exhibition featured a wide range of established, well known and emerging New Zealand artists. 

‘Raising a child. It is not a science. It’s an art. A mysteriously delicate balance between holding tight and letting go.’ [1]

It is not until later in life that one becomes aware the toys we unconsciously connected exciting personal narratives with as children, actually held adult references of an entirely different context. Aware that the actual meaning carried in many objects goes over the heads of most kids, Chris Hargreaves’ exhibition, Super Heroes, recalls the sense of mystery in childhood, where objects and toys are connected with all manner of unexpected stories through colourful young imaginations.

There is a case to argue that children these days are often cotton-balled when compared with previous generations. Imagining oneself as being elsewhere through play and unexpectedly discovering the boundaries of your own corporeality through near misses and occasional accidents is after all a part of growing up. Hargreaves ‘Swings and Roundabouts’ (2012), which presents five glass swings at variously staggered heights, is a reminder of what adults are all too aware of when watching kids play, that up to a certain age they are full of ideas but not necessarily endowed with an understanding of cause and effect.

As with super hero characters, objects from childhood bearing war references and recreations of objects designed for violence (such as guns and military vehicle models) can through the imagination of a child, inversely inspire an interest in something more peaceful and sublime than firing bullets in malice. ‘Gold Leader’, ‘To Infinity and Beyond’, ‘Richard’s Drone’, and ‘Cumulus’ (all 2012), are works based on the Lockheed F117 Nighthawk ground attack aircraft. Infamously employed in the 1990-1991 Gulf War due to having a very small radar signature 0.025 m², Hargreaves’ works have received imaginative surface treatments, including imagery of clouds and outer space that play on the creative potential of stealth camouflage.

Some may wonder why many children are drawn to violent iconography, and may question whether an innate capacity for violence is something we are born with. The work of Japanese artist, Yoshitomo Nara, has often courted such discussion. This is understandable in part as his manga-inspired paintings of child characters have often featured nasty expressions and carried small weapons. Nara says ‘I kind of see the children among other, bigger, bad people all around them, who are holding bigger knives’.[2] In essence, what it comes down to is that children occupy our world, for better or worse. The magic of childhood is seeing things as fantastical and even out of this world, when they are actually of our world and often more base than we would admit.

Matt Blomeley, October 2012

Super Heroes is an exhibition of Chris Hargreaves works at Bath Street Gallery, Parnell, Auckland (October 17 – November 4, 2012).

Painting is the most fleetingly pure of design processes. The works in Denys Watkins’ latest exhibition, Lost in Space, are a case in point; abstractions loosely based upon the notion of objects or landscapes, woven together with a distinctive brand of ritualistic liminality that is associated to the artist’s impressions of the modern world. In each of these works the artist is searching for a meaningful composition through the accumulated gestures of applying paint to convey various strata of visual information.

The sense of exploration in this manner of working carries with it an element of risk in that the composition is a goal pursued until a moment of resolution becomes apparent. In these works there is no ‘endgame’ other than an indefinable, sanguine moment of skilled reflection where the maker instinctively knows to stop. The painter Albert Oehlen describes the challenge; ‘I don’t think you can really, seriously—or philosophically—try to find out what it is that a painting does to you. It’s contradictory. You can’t come to an end because, if it’s good, it’s beautiful—everything that’s good will be at the end called beautiful. But I like very much if you do things that seem to be forbidden and seem to be impossible, like a test of courage.’ [ii]

Lost in Space, the title of the exhibition taken from a classic early sci-fi television programme, is a clue to what Watkins was feeling in the studio. While Watkins’ series is conceived as abstraction, the actual works are not entirely non-objective; figurative motifs and written words both make appearances. One of these motifs is a Moa bone from Auckland Museum while another is an assortment of simplified one-dimensional machine diagrams. These references are open to interpretation, but their respective typologies within the context of each composition and their cartoon inspired forms suggest a humorous yet critical and understandably dystopian view on the clumsy ascendance of humanity.

There are other compositional cues and references scattered through the series that perhaps bear similar implications while also defying obvious purposes. For instance, in Earth House Hold; Machine of Loving Grace, and, Coney Island of the Mind (all 2012), spoked discs delineated by coloured sections located within diagrammatic compositions bring to mind Duchamp’s The Chocolate Grinder No. 2 (1914), an infamous work of abstruse purpose initially intended as a study for his equally slippery early masterpiece, The Bride Stripped Bare By Her Bachelors, Even (1915-1925).

In Watkins’ Meat Science (2012), a humanoid-dog figure sits within an inset in the pictorial composition. Appearing to be propping up a large oval of what is conceivably its metaphorical obsession with meat, the creature appears in the landscape as a burdened individual bearing a picket sign featuring the word ‘HELP’. Art theorist, Charles Harrison, wrote: ‘Landscape might be a refuge from the would-be-urbane professionalism of Conceptual Art and its derivatives. But insofar as it can be made aggressive it is no place to hide, not from the conflicts of modernity, nor from the fear of violence, nor from the power of language.’ [iii]

Ultimately Watkins works are about painting, pure and simple. He describes the process of these works creation with a concision that confirms his years of experience as an artist, ‘Its a sort of tapestry of information, weaving in events and histories, and all determined by the way the paint goes down, then embellished to construct formal visual activity.’ [iv]  To employ Oehlen’s supposition, above, is it good, is it courageous? It is both.

Matt Blomeley, 11 September 2012

Lost in Space is an exhibition of Denys Watkins works at Bath Street Gallery, Parnell, Auckland (September 19 – October 13, 2012).

The selection of works presented in this installation, APPS, is comprised of a vocabulary of drawings that the painter, Adrian Jackman, has steadily been compiling over several years. This ‘vocabulary’ is comprised of a multitude of mass media images derived from mailbox circulars; predatory photographic and vector drawn advertising images we all know which are designed to focus upon our desire for new products; ever-cheaper tools, electronics and household goods.

Jackman treats his methodical process of collecting and re-rendering drawings of everyday objects to a rigorous yet whimsical process. He likens this pick-and-choose approach to drawing as analogous to the modernist musical theory of ‘indeterminacy of composition’. Most famously utilized by the New York School of John Cage, Morton Feldman, et al, this experimental approach to music enabled a fluidity whereby the conceptual process employed by the artist was not below the content, but rather the process itself was brought to the forefront, with meaning and structure native to the presented layers of auditory content to float freely within a fixed plane.

This process of creating a scaffold for capturing free-ranging content in a self-reflexive manner has been employed within visual art for centuries, a prominent example being the ‘mise-en abyme’ in historical and modernist painting. (2) Referring to the modernist composer, John Cage, Deleuze and Guattari observed that ‘the same could be said of the fixed visual plane: Godard, for example, effectively carries the fixed plane of cinema to this state where forms dissolve, and all that subsists are tiny variations of speed between movements in composition.’ (3)

For a painter with interests in digital rendering, formal abstraction and representational imagery, it is easy to imagine this process-centric approach to dealing with representational content as somewhat liberating. Describing his drawing process and the treatment of representational content, Jackman writes, ‘I approach drawing diagrammatically where the computer is used to trace, re scale and manipulate imagery sourced from D.I.Y catalogues and similar circular ephemera. The spectral opposites of black and white and the quality of line found within these printed resources form a formal vocabulary.’

Heavily abstracted from the advertising material in which these works imagery is sourced, Jackman’s abstractions are reflections on contemporary life, the objects we collect and, of course, the waste we are produce. Dominated as we are presently by electronic goods and cellphone and tablet ‘apps’ – and the valuable time we are squandering in gazing at them – this series is a fitting metaphor for 2012.

Matt Blomeley, 16 June 2012

APPS is a 2012 exhibition at Showhite Gallery, Auckland. For more info check out Snowhite and http://adrianjackman.com/

1. Lyn Hejinian, Colours / Cyan, Cabinet, Issue 20, Brooklyn NY, Winter 2005-2006. (pp16)

2.  Francis Pound, Walters En Abyme, Gus Fisher Gallery, Auckland, 2004. (pp56) Writing about the en-abyme works of Gordon Walters, Pound could almost be describing Jackman’s APPS series when he writes, ‘we might also say that Walters’  paintings ‘en-abyme’ present representationality itself, and this ‘in’ a representation; and that they present too that which in representation allows representation to represent.’

3.  Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, (trans. Brian Massumi, Athlone Press, 1987), Continuum, London, 2004. (pp113)

In this sculptural installation by Auckland-based artist Chris Hargreaves, Notable Serenity (2012), participants are invited to visually and audibly contemplate an experimental composition that describes our geographic home in the South Pacific.

Similar to Halo, a work he completed in 2010 for the Manukau Festival of the Arts, for this new work a number of layers have been mapped into an overriding Midi score. Comprised of intricately crafted objects and sounds that taken together present an atonal composition, Notable Serenity is primarily built around four spoken word ‘roles’. These readings, borrowed from scientific texts, are defined in musical terms as: Soprano (Clouds), Alto (Resource Management Act), Tenor (Geology) and Bass (Tectonics).

The disjunctive rush of voices reading technical texts in Notable Serenity is a reminder that one is usually best to subjugate the desire to obtain facts in order to first listen. If there is a fault, it is perhaps merely that those of us who are not scientists have the easiest route to engage with this machine-like installation, being that we will not bring to this work the same accumulated technical knowledge of the installation’s auditory content as others may.

In addition to being a metaphor for the complexity of our environment – which we have continuously struggled to understand for centuries – Notable Serenity generates a sense of the machine-related anxiety that has pervaded humanity since the dawn of the Industrial Revolution. Prompting us to cultivate a careful and observant attitude, rather than searching for definitions, the sociologist, Richard Sennett, has a similarly open-minded stance to Hargreaves. Describing the enlightenment philosopher Diderot’s position at the dawning machine era, he writes:

‘The enlightened way to use a machine is to judge its powers, fashion its uses, in light of our own limits rather than the machine’s potential. We should not compete against the machine. A machine, like any model, ought to propose rather than command, and humankind should certainly walk away from command to imitate perfection. Against the claim of perfection we can assert our own individuality, which gives distinctive character to the work we do.’ (1)

While Notable Serenity may be intended – similar to Diderot’s machine – as a tool for considering our physical environment, it also serves as a reminder that it is beneficial to get lost occasionally in contemplation. Visual art and music are of course two absorbing ways to do just that. Hargreaves abstraction is not environmental science, politics nor philosophy, but it can be considered a reflection (2) of what they, individually and collectively, may represent.

Matt Blomeley, 4 June 2012

Notable Serenity is an exhibition at at Blue Oyster Gallery 19 june – 21 July 2012 . For more information visit Blue Oyster Gallery or chrishargreaves.co.nz

1. Sennett, Richard, The Craftsman, Penguin, London, 2009 (pp105,106)
2. Lütticken, Sven, Stop Making Sense, Meaning Liam Gillick (ed. Szewczyk, M et al.), MIT Press, Massachusetts, 2009 (pp40). I believe the same definition applies to Hargreaves work as Lütticken writes of Gillick: ‘That Gillick’s objects and installations reflect the becoming-design of abstraction does not, of course, mean that his work is design, merely that it reflects, and reflects on, the status of design as the current paradigm of Gestaltung through its use of post-painterly design elements and its coded implementations of a concept that can be reused and adapted to different situations.’