Art: The two Ronnies

By bringing together artists with wildly diverging styles, Bright Paradise promises to be the contemporary art event for the year, writes GILBERT WONG.

So what about those two Ronnies? Not Barker and Corbett, but Horn and van Hout. Bright Paradise curator Allan Smith plays the game. "Oh yes," he says, "I'm glad you mentioned them. They do represent two poles of what we're trying to do."

He is a sport. Journalistic japes aside, Smith knows it's one way into this story, perhaps even a legitimate one.

Smith, the curator of contemporary art at the Auckland Art Gallery, is behind the city's major contemporary art event for the year. Bright Paradise will be the city's first triennial, joining the circuit of contemporary art fixtures that have become a way to proclaim that Auckland has a place in the global culture and a contribution to make.

From March 3 to April 29, the New Gallery, along with Artspace, the newly opened Kenneth Myers Centre Gallery and many of the city's dealer galleries, will be exhibiting a vast range of international and local contemporary art, under the triennial umbrella.

To the cognoscenti, we are talking big names: Canadian artist Stan Douglas, Americans Ashley Bickerton and Sabrina Ott, along with New Zealand heavyweights such as the two Bills (Hammond and Culbert) and hot artist du jour Michael Parekowhai.

"The idea with each triennial project is to have a big set of driving ideas that become the rationale to put New Zealand work into the context of international art and international art into a local context," says Smith.

Every country has its idea of paradise, but to Smith our antipodean notion is necessarily preceded by the adjective bright. Bright in the sense of the light that northern hemisphere artists commonly speak of when they visit, shielding their eyes from the glare.

"It's the glare off the water, the dazzle of the light from fresh paint. It suggests an upbeat buoyancy and also something artificial and extreme, a brilliant covering."

Bright in the sense of brittle, he means, as in a lurid disguise for the darker side of the duality that necessarily forces any paradise to spawn an evil twin. To paraphrase John Lennon, you can't imagine heaven without a hell.

The title, Smith is quick to state, is not his. It lodged in his brain after he read Peter Raby's 1997 book of the same name about Victorian scientific travellers. Once he had the title, the rest followed, but organising the triennial has taken the best part of a year - in exhibition terms, a hasty experience.

But back to that conversation between the international and local artist. What can be overheard when these two Ronnies converse?

Some history first. The closest Roni Horn has had to a tag is "meta-minimalist sculptor." She is a big name in New York and - because when you make it in New York you make it everywhere - in Paris, Cologne, Munich, London, Tokyo. The regard in which the 48-year-old artist is held has come with an intriguing and dense body of work.

Since earning her MFA from Yale in 1978, Horn has been served up to the public as a big deal. She has been lauded in major European museums, the Leo Castelli Gallery, the Chinati Foundation in Marfa, Texas, the Venice Biennale.

Her work could be called as elusive as it is expensive. A work entitled You Are The Weather consisted of 100 portraits of the same woman, differing only in the degree to which she furrowed her brow. Prices ranged from $US50,000 to $US100,000 ($114,000 to $228,000) - for a photograph.

Her installations show the same minimalist aesthetic. The work Gold Mats featured two rectangles of wafer-thin, finely scored gold, one resting on the other. Another work covered the floor of a room with black rubber mats, embedded with words from dry to fair and torrid.

An example of Horn's photography, but not the artist herself, is coming to the New Gallery. The work Pooling -You is a set of seven photolithographs, each depicting different aspects of a fictional maelstrom off the coast of Iceland, a country Horn visits frequently to live in solitude after the cacophony of New York.

The pictures range from an image of stormy, churning white water to a close-up view of gigantic eddies and whorls and, through what appears to be super-high magnification, an unfocused array of soft, muddy colour.

Horn has said of her artwork, "The more theatrical a work is, the more it tends to pacify the viewer. I want the viewer to take an active role."

By implication viewers must find their own way through her cool, intellectual conundrums. Her photography shares with her installations the ability to impart a minimalist but sensual aesthetic pleasure.

Another Horn quote? "So I have a certain way of working that is concerned not with the invisible, but with the nonvisible; meaning it's there and you can sense it. The nonvisible is confluent with the visible, it's the bigger part of the sensible."

If Roni Horn is about cool intellect and emotion recollected in tranquillity, then Ronnie van Hout sits opposite. Ronnie is a New Zealander of Dutch descent now living in Melbourne. Smith describes van Hout as being "all about the fun park, the wonky paradise."

A heavy metal fan, former punk band singer, turned artworld prankster, van Hout is coming to Auckland along with his mutated adult-size versions of a Disneyesque duck and mouse. The two figures are modelled on actual playground figures van Hout spotted in a Picton playground.

Filtered through van Hout's sensibilities, the playground figures assume a menace that would have their progenitor, Walt Disney, whirling in his grave, just like the duck's head, which spins a macabre 360 degrees. The three-dimensional cartoons are no longer funny - they might well scare the children.

"They're spooky," says Smith. "You wouldn't want to be left alone in the gallery in the night. Ronnie is about the uncanny, the return of the repressed. His work expresses how content and information can be unmanageable and images of beauty and fun become distorted and troubled."

So let's imagine that conversation.

Ronnie van Hout in an interview in the art journal Midwest in 1994: "I want to get more and more away from meaning if I can."

Roni Horn in an interview with the Journal of Contemporary Art, 1997: "It's much easier to see things when you come from the outside. It's much more of an objective relationship, but it's also like a mirror. It reminds me of the experience of the desert, any desert: ash and ice or heat and sand.

"When you go into the desert you are who you are. The desert gives you nothing. If you don't have it inside yourself you aren't going to get it from the desert."

And so it's good night from me and good night from them.

* Bright Paradise, March 3 to April 29, at the New Gallery, Artspace, Kenneth Myers Centre Gallery, Anna Bibby Gallery, Artis Gallery, Artstation, Ferner Galleries, FHE Galleries, Fingers Contemporary Jewellery, George Fraser Gallery, Gow Langsford Gallery, Ivan Anthony Gallery, Jensen Gallery, Judith Anderson Gallery, Lopdell House Gallery, Moving Image Centre, Sue Crockford Gallery, The Lane Gallery, Warwick Henderson Gallery.