Artbash: Reviews

review of re:location : dunk

Fri, 7 May 2010 15:49:13 +1200

In a side street, in sleepy Whanganui, upstairs at The Green Bench is an installation by Akiko Diegel and Asumi Mizuo.

There is a sea of slippers, made from old blankets, arranged in waves of colours with the dark hollows of the slippers welcoming visitors to the exhibition. Moving to the opposite side of the room, the toes of the slippers are more confronting. Each slipper is unique but one of a pair. The subtle differences in the slippers create the feeling that something is a little off, like looking down at child's feet and noticing that the shoes are on the wrong feet. The slippers are the work of Akiko Diegel.

Incorporated in the sea of footwear, are tiny tables with spikey legs, bearing teacups, side plates and a teapot. On closer inspection the crockery is cracked and chipped. The cracks and chips are sealed with gold. The delicate spidery traceries turn the reason for discarding these objects into a way of increasing their value and beautifying their history. Asumi Mizuo is responsible for this work.

The combination of these works set up a gentle conversation, stimulating the mind and the imagination.

Its worth popping in to see this show if you find yourself in Whanganui.

Renown (Salad Days) : -

Wed, 5 May 2010 00:44:42 +1200

The artist’s indulgence in sculptural form indicates an obsessive desire for tactility in objects. The audience, as experiencing subject, is related to the objects of the mise en scene through the artist’s gestural manipulation of the camera. Painterly strokes, tracks, and zooms come to mimic the artist’s particular and considered approach to the material world. Yet the mediatedness of screens confers the touristic enterprise of incessant deferral of contact and engagement, both within the artist and her audience. Materiality is acutely intense/visceral and thus unexperienceable, and is also essentially untrustworthy. Here an epistemological narrative is covertly deployed which denounces experience anyway and instead elevates a series of internal mythical narratives which are admittedly informed by external sources, yet are also expositional, and excretal, for the artist.

My own understanding of these two works is difficult to differentiate from my understanding of the artist and as such it is problematic for me to pursue separate readings of the two. In Glottis 2 I am confronted by my own ambivalence, for the work represents a purity of expression, an acute catharsis, or in the artist’s own words “hooliganism”, yet this ideal is never reached within the work, I am confronted by a disjointed and uncomfortable pulling away, the emotive equivalent of coitus interruptus; deferral. Family Tree: The Flummox of Equilibria 3 is clearly a more satisfying work. The narrative structure is circular, cyclical, and self-contained. There is an almost palpable satisfaction in this, the beginning is the end; what is more enticing than a hermitically closed ritual/theatre? This closedness signifies a space of safety and control for the artist, who positions herself literally within the diegesis, and is importantly, as she writes, “creator of paradigm and -to the fore- (much coveted) participant”. However, within the work itself the artist is not renowned, she is not known to the interlocutors she has scripted, she is an invisible force. Instead, she is viewed voyeuristically by the spectator who fetishises her manipulation of the internal space of the work.

What the : Enoch

Sun, 28 Feb 2010 20:53:26 +1200

My first 'Fringe Festival' experience since moving to Wellington, in a little gallery off Dixon Street. I got there quite late,I think, as the action was just wrapping up.

A video art piece playing... looped street scenes accompanied by a semi-naked semi-alive Anton Newcombe type singing in a strange baratone voice and who had evidently mainlined a vodka-P cocktail as some point during the evening... Someone told me that they had found him on the street one night. Said blues wailer/Weil character was accompanied by a pretty good drummer and some discordant guitar.

Don't know if music shows are a regular feature or not but I certainly hope so. No one I talked to the next day had heard of the place as a music venue... But I will defintely be back given the pretty fresh and sophisticated look of the gallery itself and the generally bacchanalian feel of the show, or at least the bit I caught, which I felt was a welcome change to the staid rather boring art shows/galleries I've been to in recent months.

I'm in love, I 'm in love with teh Bells of St Marks. : Flake

Mon, 13 Jul 2009 01:36:36 +1200

Who would buy these tired losers? : Quinton Baker

Sat, 4 Jul 2009 18:15:07 +1200

Ah yes I zipped in browsed around, saw those same old names and fell asleep, but I guess that's what you want, relaxation and recreation, I'm sure tha grannies loved it though.

Trips the Light Fantastic : bunrush

Thu, 25 Jun 2009 18:10:23 +1200

Matthew Ward is both trippy and cute in a sort of pre-verbal way.

I can't say I saw his show. I was in town for one day and when I went to take a peek the door was locked.

"It is quite generally agreed that the child understands gestures before he understands words and, in fact, that he uses gestures himself long before he uses language proper ... It has been claimed that words constitute substitutes for actual gross motor activity."
-the first edition of Carmichael's Manual of Child Psychology

That sums up what I might have had to say had I been able to gain access to MW's exhibition.

Would some one please review this for me? : Susan Hawkins

Thu, 11 Jun 2009 19:25:52 +1200

I would appreciate it

Before Dust Review- By Ross Brighton : S.Kelly

Tue, 9 Jun 2009 09:41:22 +1200

Before Dust...

This show is defined by the diversity of the practices represented, but can be seen as dealing primarily with questions of grotesquery, liberation/constraint, and artistic production itself. At a glance this emphasis is apparent, be it through the unveiling of the excesses of western consumption in the work of Zhong Hao Chen in its own excessive luxuriance and scatology, or the very real treatment of the visceral in its most literal sense in Shannon Williamson’s “specimens” and “case studies”. Here sexuality and its relationship to questions of power is also examined, as in the work of Oscar Enberg, working through the ruins of the western tradition, reanimating the corpses of Shakespeare and the performance theorists Stanislavski and Laban through a deformative action of rebirth.

Gaby Montejo’s work demonstrates Adorno’s conception of art’s inherent (conventional) non-functionality as basis for political statement. The conventional means of engagement with flour and the photo-reactive are subverted in favour of the unintentional and spontaneous. The capturing of the real temporal ephemerality of the flame’s image reopens questions of power and control, moving beyond the drive toward closure in favour of ongoing discussion. Experiment as performance here joins with the disavowal or problematization of the ego through unintentionality pioneered by Fluxus practitioners such as John Cage and Jackson Mac Low.

Zhong Hao Chen's work is characterised by excess and overflow. Grotesque luxuriance permeates his treatment of the canvasses, implicating the viewer in an economy of gluttony. The earthy, brutal palette contributes to this treatment of unease, as staple foodstuffs are destroyed in a rage of gestural, antagonistic brushstrokes, and conflated with scatological textures and tones in an unnerving conflation of sustenance and excrement.

Shannon Williamson’s work operates as an unveiling, a tearing open of the skin to unveil the libidinal impulses lurking below the surface, those of muscle, tissue and organ. The folds of flesh operate as points of contact and problematized sites of difference, where the differentiation between bodies and their constitutive parts are complicated by contact and penetration, rupture and permutation, and the conventional notion of body as site for autonomous subjectivity is erased.

Oscar Enberg’s practice involves a proto-modernist network of complex over-coding and associations, resulting in dense, hermetic works that resist entry. These drawings pertain to a mechanical or (a-) functional allegory of sexuality, production and conceptual relationships through the construction and deconstruction of thought experiments. Enberg weaves a trail of wreckage, using the iambic foot as a chassis for his war machine, exploiting and pillaging the resources of history. This is a performance of irresponsibility as social work, a deconstruction and subversion of the discourses of history, visual art and theatre, leaving a trail of destruction through the narratives of western artistic canons.

--Ross Brighton

What do people see in this guy? : bestfriendbanger

Sat, 25 Apr 2009 21:02:12 +1200

Why would anyone buy such dull contrived pictures?
I just don't get it.
Amongst all the talent on this site this stuff just seems so infantile and insincere.

of course I want to talk about what's his face : Flake

Fri, 3 Apr 2009 16:50:44 +1200

Billy, i came to your show eating an apple, Crunch.

Thanks Tina but don't ever do taht for me. Ha, of course billy is a great artist, you should see his arrchive. BUt he was inventive, he really did take teh inside generic lableling popular with the English publishing huses of the 50's, everymuch the establishment and put the on the cover, he did a madonna, underwear on the out side, but the rest of his claim to fame, is liek the rest of us surely , i mean I've met some great minds, ok no Warhole, shit maybe they did share a joint and invent the piss painting. i wasn't there, but if meaning means that I have to back it up with a photograph a slip of paper a rent recipt or a used condom circa "the age" i'd think something was up.

ilke my idea of teh Leegal secretary followin gme around for the day, sure she is a woman generic in real male power fantasy, but if it' slike hey what you record and display that is going to be the story of what happened, you know history, HERSTORY. Possibly, is the chance taken.. is Tina a woman. power suit asside. The Barrs are feeled bad by the small list of who showed up to Aplles one day a sculpture will come. Good one ya billy that 's takign the corprates to lunch, you got out of your own bed for less than $10, 000 a day. You and me we the man of the people. Lets's go save a tree while we're at it. Glowing growing rainforest in a suburb near you. Ever really wondered while enviromentalism never took off, i mean here we are every single on of us with a huge shared thing in common, tha's onnly as vital as teh life itself, and yet you couldn't make a person over 20 notice let alone participate in earth what ever.... 60 second Earth hour is why. HUMANS WHO THINK THEIR EGO CAN SAVE TEH EARTH> Which brings me to Santiago, Riveria, St Sabastian, Sir Sorry, St of teh working classes, diseased in the mind Fellow brother, Santiago Sierra.

Well his picture isn't up on teh web site, Not even mentioned in the list of what has happened April, Billy iApple s there but he happened after Sierra. First who can argue who is named after a great national park. One of the Best. i think he's jesus throwing over the money tables, but have you seen teh size of the Vatican these daays.
Ok so I didn't go. Didn't need to any on ewith half a brain wouildn't be seen caught dead playing the sick and crippled by hobbling up to attend his midnight vigil on the late capitialist garunteed trickle down, bad behaviour. So the guy refelcts to this so called uneducated that there is expolitation greed relentless egotism in the sytsm. Aprt for jaded the idea of it alone to me suggests a facination with humility played out as humiliation. Peopel cued to see teh elephant man. And be fore you think that i am suggesting Hurrels argument to me, that it simply is not enough to point at the problem if you are not willing and abble to address (and I think mistaken ly he feels solve!) the issue yourself. For I do think he has made a significant point. BUT ONLY AS FAR AS he discloses where the argument isn't. He is a poor mans grotsque trap, a fox news of teh Gn'R reality.

Man did i fell sorry for all those day walkers who lined up to tell me, how they saw the old guys penius, and how he looked sad, and it was scarey all alon ein there, you could tell each one of tehm felt thay had communed with god. Good one Santigo, you really nailed their flailing balls on this one. Shit I wishe dtehy asked me, I feel Santiago you were me, a safer me, how is that! Cause the fist thing id' done is do somethign for a week.