Engaging emotions and intellect

By T.J. McNAMARA

The head or the heart: is an exhibition going to engage your brains or your emotions? At best, of course, both. Two exhibitions in Auckland involve a bit of both, but one is instantly appealing while the other is all head without being exactly heady - no one is going to be swept away.

There is captivating magic in David Barker's Openings and Enclosures at the Studio of Contemporary Art in Newmarket until April 11.

The magic comes from his wonderful control over colour and the play of light. Barker is concerned with portals, archways, doors and reflections. Over his long career the intellectual element of his work has deepened. He still seeks out the kind of picturesque building or scene that appeals to those who love weathered timber, the sense of time passing and the imprint of personality that remains on buildings.

A very beautiful house at Mangonui features largely, but the subjects range from Northland to Cornwall, France, Italy and the European Alps. They are always interesting in themselves but the paintings are much more than simply illustrative.

They are not obviously symbolic but something much more oblique. The viewer feels their metaphorical depth about place, time, transition and perception as well as their pictorial qualities.

The metaphorical sense is reinforced by the immaculate, strong perspective structure of each work. Unconsciously, we follow away from the open middle of the painting to the vanishing point. What is placed at the vanishing point, whether an old hut or weather equipment as in Weather Station, has its special significance.



The technical virtuosity is the servant of Barker's suggestions of the light or darkness beyond an opening, and how a glimpse can be romantic or elegiac and unforgettable. The works brilliantly capture surfaces, but also evoke a melancholy mystery about what is beyond the standpoint of the present.

The hard-headed exhibition at Artspace until April 12 is the first project of the new director, Tobias Berger, who has come to us after working on the famous avant garde exhibitions at Kassel in Germany. It makes philosophical and intellectual points about the relationship of art and money.

It does not exclude the heart, but the emotions involved are not warm but range from appalled fascination to a wry irony laced with wit. It is called Money for Nothing, which is the title of a Dire Straits song about playing the guitar. It is also the message of a graffiti poster in the show by Rirkrit Tiravanija - though in keeping with the international flavour, the sentiment is in French.

Nowhere in the show are there any conventional paintings unless it is Billy Apple's big work NFS. Not For Sale usually implies the work is being lent to an exhibition; this piece is all about the mechanics of such a loan. Such a painting must be valuable so what is presented here is not only the painting, which is simply black and white lettering, but also the elaborate wooden case lined with insulation necessary for its transport. The case is an excellent piece of cabinetmaking, but its function is to indicate the value of the work within it which, ironically, has little visual value beyond its presence as a gesture.

Most of Apple's work is philosophical comment about the nature of art transactions, and also recycled here is his piece about the value of gold reinforced by constant updates on the value per ounce in New York.

The truly startling work in this exhibition is in video. In a work by Nomeda and Gediminas Urbonas, the women clerks of a bank in Lithuania sing the Abba song, Money, Money while their jobs are in peril.

One of two videos by Santiago Sierra shows indigent Cuban men having a line tattooed across their back in return for $30. The other shows poor street vendors in Venice, mostly black, for a slightly larger sum having their hair dyed blond in numbers large enough to suggest an industrial process. It is horrible but the tattooing is even more unnerving. It is like an execution. What people will submit to for money, and others will record as art for money, is graphically conveyed.

This is a show where the artists bite the hand that feeds them, and some of it is really offensive.

There is another video by Christian Jankowski where a very pompous type of the sort who lectures to MBA students interrogates, in an academic way, two traders, perhaps of art. One is a beautifully dressed young woman, the other a benign old man. Both are stereotypically Jewish and the work, though both funny and pertinent, basically reinforces some ugly ideas.

More harmless is a string of models of KFC outlets by Eimi Tamua, a case with a heroic tree by Kate Newby and some aggressive signs by Andrew McLeod.

The exhibition, hastily put together so soon after his arrival, shows the knowledge and range of interests Berger brings to his position.