Art should take a leaf from the Victorians' book

By T.J. McNAMARA

What is this thing called art? The Victorians were sure that they knew and a show The Visual Style of the Victorians in the Special Collections Exhibition Room on the Heritage Floor of the Auckland Central City Library shows exactly what they thought.

Prominent on one wall is a chromolithograph copy of Holman Hunt's The Light of the World, Christ with a lantern knocking on an overgrown door.

One version of the original painting was in St Paul's Cathedral, another in Oxford. There is even a version in coloured glass at the west end of St Andrew's Anglican church in Epsom, Auckland. The religiosity, the careful drawing and the glowing light and the moral purpose all make it a work of art.

Hunt's themes of sacrifice and redemption can still be given modern expression, as seen in the impressive work of John Badcock at the Chiaroscuro Gallery. These works feature The Cross, a Christ-like figure, Maori boundary markers and orators' sticks and an ever-present sense of rising from dark to light, from gloom to exaltation.

The paintings are shot through with flashes of red, which suggest the blood of sacrifice. The fascinating technique sees layers of bright colour laid on, with darkness overlaying the colour. Here and there the colour emerges through the darkness.

The most striking work is Conversation, in which an idol against a cross emerges from the light with a bird of ill-omen on his shoulder, and Redemption in which a Christ-like figure rises from the red of Hell towards the light.

The sense of rising towards a luminous spiritual state through the fire of experience unifies this accomplished and powerful show and its mood is complemented by the vigorous, passionately pessimistic drawings by Saso Sinadinovski in the adjacent room.

In the 20th century, art and the public parted company. Now, nobody agrees what art is except that if you show it in a gallery it must be art. An instance is New Artists 2001, at Artspace in Karangahape Rd.

One sizeable work by Megan Blake is made up of the fan-shaped turnings you get when you sharpen a pencil.

The work is about a metre square and the little cedar fans, all with a bright edge of paint, cover the entire surface. This unique surface took six months to make. It is a clever work and there is a kind of damnable logic about it.

Everybody is intrigued by how nice pencil sharpenings can look and if, in the past, art has been made by recording the sheen on apples or grapes or flowers in a vase, why should it not be made with equal patience from pencil sharpenings?

The truth is that, despite the immense amount of work, this is not art but a clever gesture, a one-off that could never be part of a developed body of work that had any depth of thought. Alongside is a little dark "painting" made from the lead of the pencils "deconstructed" to make the bigger work.

Elsewhere are three flat, dull paintings by Bridgid McLaughlan covered with filler with not even delicacy of surface to recommend them.

The curious viewer could also watch closeups of a face and ear magnified many times by Jae-Hoon Lee, or two militant statements about the stereotyped place of woman in society, by Jodi Stuart.

One is a video of a pretty, life-sized doll that opens and shuts its eyes and sings flat. Or you can play a video game and watch an enraged Barbie doll with amputated feet smash things to the accompaniment of orgasmic groans.

Art perhaps, but with nothing left to say after the first viewing. Hunt's sweet Christ was a consoling image. Art now has little for your comfort but much to disturb.