The galleries: Exotic intruder in crowded market

By T.J. McNAMARA

In the past the patrons sat in the temple of art and the artists stood in the forecourt waiting to be told what to do. In these democratic days we stand in the forecourt and the artists are in the inner temple deciding what they will do. Then they pass their solitary efforts out to the forecourt to see if anyone will salute it or buy it. Hence it is that we are paying court to et al.

While we wait, artists are attracted to extremes to gain attention. The famous contemporary British artist Tracey Emin gained prominence by exhibiting her unmade bed as autobiography. Her latest effort is to make a feature film.

Around film festival time it is good to have reminders of links between art and cinema in The Dutch Film Show at Artspace until the end of the month.

In the major gallery is a film by Marijke van Warmerdam that has the effect of mural painting. The film runs through a projector mounted on a motorised turntable. The film loop takes exactly as long to run as it takes to move through 360 degrees.

The image is of a North African marketplace and the men are posing for their pictures or interested spectators. It is almost as if we stood in the centre of the crowd, an exotic intruder, and turned our gaze all around as an Orientalist painter, Delacroix or Edward Lear might have done.

The crowd does not move away as it might in a documentary. It is always there, as in a painting or like the figures on Keats' Grecian Urn.

In the smaller gallery is a film called Crystals by de Rijke/de Rooij. We appear to be watching a piece of colourful and inventive abstract art. Despite some choppy editing it slowly evolves and changes. At any moment it looks like a painting, but with the luminosity and movement of film.

Science has come to the party, too. These slowly evolving patterns are the growth of crystals observed through a microscope.

Most inventive and entertaining are the works by Martha Colburn in the Film Archive next door. These images, on video and projected on the wall, are in the tradition of the celebrated 15th-century Dutch painter, Hieronymus Bosch.

They are filled with people and things which dance in macabre and hectic spasms. There is much emphasis on death and the effects are gained not just by photography but also by painting on the filmstock and scratching and marking it.

We have become used to extremes. Our veteran artists are extreme. Starkwhite Gallery in Karangahape Rd has never been starker. In the huge white space of their gallery they are showing three small works in black and white by Billy Apple until the middle of next month. They are comments on the art market and the relationship of size to value, and have the stark simplicity typical of Apple's design.

At the Sue Crockford Gallery (until August 7) Milan Mrkusich has as usual brought forth work of extreme simplicity. His minimal, geometric art consists of vertical and horizontal bars of colour constructed within wide fields of colour.

The modulations between the colours are subtle and the surfaces loaded and intense without being shiny or brash. The best of the paintings is energised by a small triangular area in opposition to the dominant verticals and horizontals.

This classical geometric abstraction, distilled from long experience, is poised and elegantly set off from the wall. Yet its simplicity has a calculated perfection that might move those in the forecourt to admiration rather than passionate involvement.

Another extreme is when the artist within the temple decides, "Away with the bowl of flowers, I'm going to paint roses so big and overblown they will loom out of the dark like a soft explosion". Pamela Wolfe, whose work is at Artis gallery until August 15, brings off this idea more successfully than in the past.

The only quibble might be the water drops on the flowers. Such drops are a favourite trick of still-life painters, famously, Rubens painted water drops on sea nymphs in his great Marie de Medici series in the Louvre. Delacroix studied them when he needed to paint drops on the damned plunged in the river of hell.

These great precedents do not save some of these drops from looking heavy and less than sparkling. The bright green of a praying mantis that counterpoints the colour of the flowers is a better link with the hint of menace that gives depth to the show.

Sara Hughes, the Frances Hodgkins Fellow, has work at the Vavasour Godkin Gallery until August 7. This is computer generated work with many tiny dots or polygons repeated in patterns of great complexity. The most inventive patterns zip and slide as the basic forms morph in shape.

The works look mathematical but are designed intuitively. What the many commentators on this most fashionable of young artists do not mention is the sheer joy and exuberance these works convey.

Some might well be fabric designs that could be cut off by the yard but the ones with concentric squares work spectacularly, as do the luminous patterns on light boxes.