KEY POINTS:
Exhibitions towards the end of the year are often a summary of trends.
Such a show was at Te Tuhi in Pakuranga in October and November which included groups of videos.
Art on small screens has played a large part in the Auckland art scene this year. One
show was based entirely on found objects and almost every recent sculptural or installation show has used found objects from junk to wheelbarrows.
Some conceptual art does not look like art in any accepted sense and we have had our share of that too.
A room nearby at Te Tuhi housed an exhibition of award winners in a secondary school art competition. The winners were not given a cash prize but canvas or boards and paint so they could realise their ideas on a large scale. The big paintings that resulted showed vigour and confidence within a wide variety of styles.
This confidence is the hallmark of art in Auckland, whatever form it takes. The video films at Pakuranga were the work of a major Polish artist, Artur Zmijewski. They dealt with handicap and fascism and were very introspective but visually they could not match the majestic images Clinton Williams made of ships moving in our own harbour shown at Two Rooms.
The conceptual work at Te Tuhi was by the perennially provocative Julian Dashper who drew two pencil lines on a wall to critique the idea of permanence in artwork. This idea of the mutability of all art is a theoretic concept rather than achieved art, and can be seen at Te Tuhi until February.
The same kind of philosophic demonstration has been dotted through the year by Billy Apple who continually meditates on the idea that once an artist has achieved a measure of fame he becomes a brand, and anything he applies his brand to is therefore art. So we have had him exhibit a new cultivar of apple which will be good because it is Apple's apple.
He applied the same concept when he allied himself with radio personality Marcus Lush on posters around town. This idea was taken up by the Artspace billboard project sponsored by the Langham Hotel and fixed to a K Rd carpark. Right now, this huge sign carries a collaborative work by Fiona Jack and the heritage manager of Ngati Whatua, Ngarimu Blair. It shows the waterfront with the huge rock called Kohimaramara, which originally stood below Bastion Pt. Its presence has the force of memory and brings a lump to the throat.
This giant image is a reminder that throughout the year photography has moved to a new level of confidence, with visual impact intensified by digital manipulation while retaining the force of reality. Notable examples of this were seen in an uncanny show by Yvonne Todd and the work currently at Starkwhite by Hoon Li.
In Li's work exact images of rocks or lagoons are seamlessly joined to make impressive structures or scenes that are mighty, born out of reality but surreal, strange and fascinating.
At Te Tuhi, Ruth Watson covered her found objects, a surfboard, books, a long-handled shovel and a large globe with a glittering coat of fine glass bubbles to make them rich and strange. It worked with the globe but the surfboard and shovel remained just that. As Freud is supposed to have said, "Sometimes a cigar is just a cigar."
This is the effect of working with found material. The artist has to make us see something new in the everyday object or transmute it into something magical. The man who tries to work the trick with sharks, cows, calves and skulls in a blaze of publicity is Damien Hirst and we had one example of his work at the Gow Langsford Gallery - an embalmed heart pierced by a dagger floating, like his menacing shark, in a glass case. It effectively suggested religion and murder at the same time.
Nic Moon at Whitespace did the alchemical thing with her patterned and adorned shovels and so did Simon Glaister at City Art Rooms when he enlarged the packing for a computer and fashioned it from beeswax to add scent as another dimension. Other artists showing in the avant-garde art quarter of K Rd did not get so far in their experiments on junk.
Leon van den Eijkel showed his brightly painted wheelbarrows in Parnell and perhaps the location saved him from banality.
Confidence was also apparent in the more conventional work of established artists. Sculptor Virginia King showed a memorable nautilus shell in stainless steel about the same time she completed a steel waka as a memorial to David Lange. Size was also a feature of Paul Dibble's assured bronze work exhibited mid-year. He made large sculptures that combined Maori myth with modernity and monumentality with fragility. His casting skills and his confident scale always make his work outstanding on the sculptural scene.
Conventional, approachable painters had their moment too in the Adam Portrait Award Exhibition at Lopdell House. Irene Ferguson's suburban gardener called The Blue Girl was an ode to forthright New Zealandness and our bright light.
One of the more amazing features of a truly fascinating exhibition of more than 350 drawings on A4 paper at Artspace is the number of portraits. Almost all achieved an excellent likeness; some go further and penetrate into character and drama. This is the third National Drawing Show at Artspace and the huge response and quality of the work is another aspect of confidence.
Confidence breeds size. Peter Robinson's Walters Prize-winning work pushed and thrust and crawled its way through several rooms and even a wall. It was deliberately made so it couldn't be all taken in at once. Similarly, Chris Heaphy's big paintings packed with macabre detail were one of the high points. For all their force they did not come near the grandeur of Colin McCahon's Urewera Mural, on loan to the Auckland Art Gallery.
In McCahon's time art was fighting for a place in our culture. His generation were courage-givers, the force behind the assurance and high achievement apparent in New Zealand.
That's in contrast to the elitist, overheated industry that is art and its marketing elsewhere in the world. In many ways we have the best of it.
