Installations off the wall

By T.J. McNAMARA

Hardly a painting in sight - installations everywhere. The grimmest is at the Ivan Anthony Gallery in Karangahape Rd, where The House of the Rising Sun by Ronnie van Hout runs until August 3. There is a tradition of making installations that show the sordid side of life. American Ed Kienholz did it with drunks and bus stations and even the back seat of a Chevy.

Decades later, it is not enough just to recreate the scene with props such as wire netting and clothes. Now, an installation such as this must be layered. It must have allusions as well as depiction.

When van Hout creates a powerfully expressive figure sprawled drunk on the floor and wearing a shabby suit which suggests debased gentility, the face of the figure has to be a chimpanzee's and the piece entitled Drunk Chimp, because this evokes Planet of the Apes, a film famous enough to inspire a recent remake.

In Swiftian fashion the installation turns the idea of intelligent apes on its head. The prone figure has in its hand an electronic device, the epitome of modern technology, but is past making use of it.

The piece also evokes ideas of evolution and human surrender to animal instincts and the degradation of natural things. It is also, in an awful way, funny.

In the adjoining room Sick Chimp is much worse. The humour has evaporated except, perhaps, for the way the figure is so precarious that it looks on the point of falling. The pool of vomit on the floor is nasty. In all of this there is a polarity between human and bestial, civilised and instinctive.

These opposites are intensified by a third work which is two talking heads. One is black-haired and alien, one is blond and earthy and this opposition is increased by the cut-out words YES and NO on opposite sides of the entrance foyer.

The installation is arresting. Although its effect is uncomfortable, it provides food for thought about society in general and the drunken chimps are visually unforgettable. Funk art still has a bizarre spark of life in it.

It is impossible to remember the detail of Ani O'Neill's installation at the Sue Crockford Gallery until August 17, because of the huge number of the component pieces of each part of the work.

The materials are seeds and tiny shells and crocheted medallions. O'Neill's work is based on her own and New Zealand's link with Pacific culture.

Her reputation was built on accumulations of the brightly coloured crocheted mats Pacific women make. There is a large work in this manner on show at the Auckland City Art Gallery.

For this show she has returned to the traditional Pacific Island ei (usually known as lei). Seventy-seven examples of these ceremonial necklaces she has collected are arranged high around the gallery wall as a celebratory frieze.

Her original work is on a table. They are what she calls ei scumbles: shells and seeds crocheted on to nylon line and woven into a ball. The variety of shell used gives each scumble a character of its own. Some are brown and spiky. Some are made up of flat, white scallop shells. Some are made of heavier cowries.

These pieces have the character of nifty craft ideas and not a great deal more but if you care to, you might create a commentary on the South Pacific out of them. They certainly merit that catch-all word "interesting" and are charming to handle.

Verbal commentary is the modern art game: to take a visual sensation and build a big edifice of verbalisation on it. Material for this game is available in abundance at Artspace in the show called Honestly, which runs until August 3. It is the fifth of an annual series of exhibitions of the work of emerging artists. All the work is a starting point for the viewer to elaborate a commentary in the imagination.

The extreme case is Ella Bella Moonshine Reed's installation, which comprises pots of African violets on a wooden tea-trolley. Of course, it is not African violets on a tea-trolley but, according to the literature that comes with the show, a commentary on the light that pours through the gallery windows.

It may also be a commentary on suburban life, on tidy gardening or afternoon teas. The literature challenges us to "catch the flowers at growing".

Certainly there is the feeling that these harmless violets are "anti" something, and this feeling of being "anti" is epitomised in Kate Newby's big installation of tatty dresses with crude slogans lettered on their print, and lace and bad photographs and ill-designed posters lettered with, "destroy, destroy, destroy".

This work is described as, "deliciously ironic" but it is more than that, it is savagely anti-fashion, a fashion show that derides every aspect of the industry.

Derision and irony extend to Lauren Winstone's take on the trucking business. The game-playing and "playfulness" are also part of Joyoti Wylie's tangle of wires in a corner.

These are linked to three old telephones. If you pick one up and listen you get whispering voices and old tunes. The past is nothing to be proud of. It is whispering and fading.

Visitors to the show may be saved from utter despair at the mocking directions young artists are taking by John Lake's mesmerising video, Longer Whiter Cloud.

Endlessly a shaving-cream can spews out a white cloud that constantly changes shape to the accompaniment of volcanic rumbling.

It suggests all kinds of images of clouds and volcanoes while remaining resolutely realistic. It works the magic trick of art that makes us look at commonplace objects with new eyes.