KEY POINTS:
VISUAL ARTS
What: Mystical Truths
Where and when: New Gallery, to Oct 14
Love is a complicated business. You don't "become" in love - you fall - and the journey you take on the way down is dotted with all sorts of rituals we happily buy into as
we get caught up in the moment.
If you have never been in love, the desire to experience the unknown is irresistible, even though you know your most passionate feelings should be tempered with a healthy dose of scepticism.
This tension between desire and scepticism forms the basis for the exhibition Mystical Truths , at Auckland Art Gallery's New Gallery.
Mysticism in contemporary art is not new - the show takes its title from American artist Bruce Nauman's 1967 neon work The true artist helps the world by revealing mystic truths. The original work has been secured for the exhibition, lighting up the gallery's street front window.
Dutch artist Jennifer Tee plays to the rituals of love with her sculpture Covert Entwined Heart, a collection of plastic pipes and ribbon. "It's an entwined heart, like a DNA coil," Tee says, "but the two parts don't touch. I wanted to make an abstract form of the heart."
The idea was to create an object symbolising a passionate moment. "In that moment there is absolute joy but also the idea of loss. You know the moment is fleeting."
Equally fleeting was Tee's father's experience of post-World War II New Zealand. "My father lived here for a short time after the war because he was from Indonesia. In the end they settled back in the Netherlands, but I have always wanted to visit New Zealand for that reason."
Tee has included a little piece of New Zealand for the Auckland installation. "I chose a cabbage tree but it is metaphoric really because it's fresh at the start but it dies in the heart and begins to dry." Her magical machine is not an inanimate object - she uses it in a performance when the large wheels on the side activate the heart.
"The wheels reference Marcel Duchamp. In the 1920s he was intrigued by the idea of machines and how they could take over human life."
Her performance also ritualises her sculpture. Tee's response to the exhibition title was to regard her object as something that can transcend and take you to another place - the mystical world of love, spirit and truth.
Finding the concepts expressed in her work difficult to pin down? That will bring a smile to curator Natasha Conland's face.
Deliberately ambiguous, she describes Tee's work as "a form and series of actions to call back the soul and this moment of passion".
Conland says the word "mysticism" is tricky. "It's like writing in disappearing ink. When you put it down on the page, or in a sequence of words intending meaning, you call up the illogic."
Seventeen international and three New Zealand artists took up the challenge to draw on mystic realities, spiritualism, and superstition for the show.
Artists include Annette Messager, the first woman to represent France at the 2005 Venice Biennale.
She picked up the country's award that year for her work which explored childhood, and for this exhibition she has dripped the word "secret", gothically, across the gallery wall. New Zealand artist Dane Mitchell uses the physical space of the gallery - the walls, floors, even the storage - to warn us against the spiritual aspects of the space. Microphones, lights and a "good witch" spook the audience.
A.P. Komen (Netherlands) and Karen Murphy (Ireland) have recreated a beach hut which four friends tested for a night to find out if it is haunted.
Along with the detritus of their stay - beer cans, soft-porn magazines and insect repellent - a creepy silence inhabits the hut.
Is it haunted? In the spirit of the best reality TV, you decide.
Each exhibit sits uneasily against the other, but they could equally be viewed on their own merits.
Either way they occupy the uncomfortable space between belief and cynicism.
So the question Tee's sculpture might pose, "Does he love me?" could be answered with a "Yes," tempered with an inner dialogue, "But does he really? And why?"
