KEY POINTS:
In some quarters there is an idea that if contemporary art is difficult to understand then it must be good - but there are difficulties and difficulties. Some art is worth the effort. Other exhibitions are difficult but thin.
John Reynolds, whose work is at the Sue Crockford
Gallery until October 13, has always been a difficult artist.
This show, Known Knowns, Known Unknowns, and Unknown Unknowns, reflects the ambiguities of his thinking. His problems are actually painted on the wall in the gallery in a work called I must paint more and write less. This gives a sense of Reynolds' conceptual struggles, which sometimes produce a mountain and sometimes a mouse.
The mice are the inconsequential paintings on rubber mats and the mountain a gigantic work on 14 big wooden panels that turn a corner and spread across the main wall of the gallery.
This work, Hope Street, must be "read" carefully, although there are no words.
Begin in the corner with the clouds painted in simple black lines - deep cuts in the wood to take the ink, suggesting inspiration and tradition from the works of Durer. Around the corner, some panels are typically Reynolds in the way they combine structures and dotted pathways. This could be read as the course of art or the course of life where we build structures, some well supported, others ramshackle.
The dotted lines represent the maze of pathways that might be taken.
What emerges at the end is another drawing taken from Durer. It is St Jerome - because he has just extracted a thorn from the paw of a lion - but in this modern representation he lacks a head and sense of direction.
Although this work is done in oil paint, it is really a huge drawing inspired by the ancient woodcut technique. Right at the centre is a touch of reality; the grain of a chunk of wood.
This is art that requires attention to its complex background and detail - but so does Picasso's Guernica, to which it is distantly related.
There are other difficulties.
A huge plastic cup labelled Font suggests a baptismal ritual at the beginning of life.
This time there are words, all phrases used to signify death. It is at once funny and sad in the way the object itself suggests a plastic urn for ashes and a great white marble monument at the same time. The oddity and ambiguity make things difficult.
In the works of Nick Austin, at Artspace until October 27, it is even more difficult to find a meaning.
They do not have much presence, with the exception of Panadol, a panel of brick masonry with a pillow on it. It might suggest banging your head against a brick wall. Is it a contrast between the hardness of the bricks and the softness of the pillow or perhaps the permanent and the transient?
Less convincing is a work that heaps spaghetti not in a bowl but on the bowl's base.
And then there is a work called Reading Sculpture which is a sinker on the end of a long nylon line which reaches from ceiling to floor.
If you go along with the concept, you could rhapsodise about pendulums, weight and rhythm, but it remains resolutely lead on a line and less interesting than the average plumb-bob.
The long gallery houses a beach where the sand smells salty. Stranded on the beach are pages torn from a book on the Italian still-life painter Morandi.
Perhaps it shows that such art is all washed up but this is contradicted by the careful placement of the reproductions. Art so difficult to follow is unconvincing.
The exhibition of Folkways Records Cover Design 1951-1981, by American designer Ronald Clyne, in the small gallery, is much more coherent as a guide to a style and an era.
Colour, energy and life suffuse the work of Fatu Feu'u, whose work is at the Warwick Henderson Gallery until October 20.
This is one of his best exhibitions and shows the fruit of long experience.
Polynesian motifs are enlivened by painterly variations on the regularity of pattern that lift them from design into art.
A painting like Pesega has a dark place where the essence of things exists. The patterns rise up in a blaze of colour, with dashes of white through the centre which emphasise the upward movement and the thought of the spirit rising.
The difficulties in some of these works lies not in the art but in the poems lettered on them.
Fa'amalie has a monumental assertion in its centre, gods in the dark on the left, the patterns of human endeavour on the right, and through it all a poem which - even if we could read Samoan - would be difficult because it is blotted and blurred.
These paintings have an immediate impact but their full implications are difficult to trace.
