KEY POINTS:
As Turbulence, the third Auckland Triennial, merges with the Auckland Festival - and the city's usual vigorous art activity - time, patience and conviction are needed to cope with it.
Time is needed to get around the venues. The triennial uses four official venues spread around the city
as well as a cinema and various fringe activities. Patience is needed because much of the work is on video and DVD and the viewer is expected to watch displays that run up to half an hour.
And conviction is needed because the viewer must accept that electronic means of expression are as valid as traditional painting and sculpture.
Some parts of this impressive triennial make a very convincing case.
At the New Gallery are the grand paintings of Shane Cotton and John Pule. Cotton has birds as falling spirits in a craggy landscape as well as his Maori motifs, and Pule's large work is crowded with incidents that symbolise life in the South Pacific.
Also impressive is the exquisite depiction of leaves painted in gouache by Fiona Hall, from Australia. Each is done on used banknotes. Although it is not very turbulent and the connection between leaf and setting is not clear, the technique is staggering.
But moving images are at the heart of this triennial. The most gripping work is by Regina Jose Galindo, from Guatemala. The major piece is Who Can Erase the Traces, where the artist carried a basin of blood through Guatemala City. After each dozen paces she dipped one naked foot, or both, into the blood and left footprints on the pavement and crossings. She presented herself as a priestess figure.
Her progress was watched by police and she was continually photographed. But the busy life of the city swirled around with preoccupied citizens hardly noticing her ritual act.
The performance had a clear political purpose. Here it movingly suggests how spiritual journeys are made by individuals amid the indifference of the city.
Galindo also has two shorter works that are unendurably intense. In one, blood drips on her head in the open street. In the other she is naked and beaten to the ground by a high-pressure hose.
Australian Lynette Wallworth's face-to-face and palm-to-palm encounters with women of character are also memorable experiences.
At the St Paul Street Gallery at AUT there are just two works. Body Double by Julie Rrap, from Australia, is magical.
Between two three-dimensional figures - one face down, the other face up - projected naked figures slowly roll. They alternate between male and female and the projected figures morph exactly into the sculptured figures. It is delicately beautiful.
The second piece, ambitiously projected on three large screens, is by Isaac Julien, from Britain. The triptych, called True North, involves sharp jumps from screen to screen.
The screens show a snow-covered landscape and are a response to the story of Matthew Henson, an African-American who accompanied Robert Peary to the North Pole in 1909.
The protagonist is an attractive black woman seen first in a white dress by the side of the sea where the shore is notable for blocks of clear ice, bright as diamonds.
The woman changes into fashionable hat, coat and boots and is seen plodding through the snow toward limitless horizons.
The voice-over is portentous with lots of discussion of the soul, but the photography captures the cold and the ice well, although talk of danger seems ironical with a camera crew present.
Our own Philip Dadson did it better with his image of a single flag flapping in a relentless Antarctic gale.
Some local fare does not come off so well. The Gus Fisher Gallery in Shortland St is linked to Artspace in Karangahape Rd by a composite of installations called No Chinatown. The project is headed by Daniel Malone.
At the Fisher there is notice of a competition to design a Chinatown. It has a few cranky entries staged with lots of little radios made in China and heaps of rubbish and dozens of paper bags filled with nothing of any consequence. It is fashionably ironical but looks more like mockery.
There's arty smartness in the smaller room at Artspace, with a jumble of banners purported to be carried in a procession about "No Chinatown". A typical banner reads: "Are you John, a Lee?" playing on stereotypical names. A lot of effort and expensive printing add up to nothing.
In the main gallery at Artspace is a big installation by Sriwhana Spong which is disfigured by indecipherable projections on to plywood.
It plays its part in a fascinating triennial which gives graphic evidence of how modern art has expanded its aims after centuries of specialisation.
