The galleries: Galleries get into the spirit

By T.J. McNAMARA

The Triennial, the big international art fest held in Auckland every three years, is centred on the New Gallery of the Auckland Art Gallery. It creates a big buzz there and in the galleries associated with it in the central city.

Coincidentally, a series of fringe exhibitions offer a taster of the labyrinthine multinational show at the New.

At Lopdell House in Titirangi until April 25 there is a show by Mark Braunias that is not part of the Triennial but fits into its spirit because it is edgy, uncomfortable, aggressive, unconventional and requires the viewer to read a lot and focus on a large number of small, visual incidents. The show is accompanied by a similar exhibition by Julia Morison, who also has work in the Triennial.

Braunias' work cocks a snook at everything, including his own talent. In its own way it is an exuberant display, with paintings, a huge number of drawings, lots of little cut-out wooden sculptures and even a painted table-top.

Everywhere there is evidence of his considerable ability as a draughtsman, but this is continually subverted by a deliberate crudity in the cause of effect and self-conscious naivety in the cause of spontaneity.

The impression is reinforced by an assemblage in the middle of the floor that represents the artist's studio. "Look," it says, "I don't need an easel. I just stick the stuff I want to paint on a chair among the cigarette butts. I've got a book on Picasso but it's covered in paint and, besides, my book on boxing is more important.

"I am too spirited to keep things tidy. If I heat something in a pot, I just leave the pot lying around with a brush going hard in it."

The interest in boxing has at least one witty outcome. There is a series of magazine pages that count from one to 10, then proclaim a winner. The subjects are not boxers but New Zealand artists and their boxing stance reflects their attitude to their work and is accompanied by an amusing fact sheet.

Braunias has peopled the gallery with characters accompanied by some irascible, satirical comment or reduced to comic caricatured oddity. His collection of characters extends to crowds painted on the gallery wall.

The sheer perversity that is apparent everywhere is exemplified on one of the walls, where all the figures are upside down.

There is much that is fascinating and colourful in this highly individual show, but also a great deal that is wilfully careless and even contemptuous of those who might visit it.

Also at Lopdell House are six show-cases by Morison, who has much larger works at the New Gallery. They feature the same medium - a bubbling, extruded, squashy plastic.

Here, the show-cases are suitable since each contains specimens, as in a museum of zoology, or have the plastic poured on the glass in the way that recalls the ant-houses of the classroom.

The most striking work is one of these. Against the glass is a honeycomb of foam which has four openings which allow the viewer to see a store of tiny spheres - eggs, food or whatever the imagination suggests.

At the top of the work pearls are laced around a stalk as if some sort of sea-change had created them. There is more magic and less museum in this case.

Elsewhere the specimen quality is emphasised. The foam is adorned with feathers or hair or eyes. Sometimes it is looped in complex arrangements, sometimes the invented creatures are in a line. The effect has the wit and strangeness of oddity.

When in the past Morison was obsessed by alchemy the transformations were somehow more profound.

Another artist who is represented in the Triennial is Australian Kathy Temin but her work at the Sue Crockford Gallery until April 3 is unrecognisably different from that in the New Gallery.

There, her work is an absurdist video. At the dealer gallery the work is publicity shots from the media caught in fused glass and called, appropriately, Iconic Moments. The subjects of these glorified tiles are celebrities or celebrated photographs of celebrated things.

The artist has an ongoing preoccupation with Kylie Minogue so she appears several times, along with Allen Jones' crouching stripper who supports a table.

The works catch a moment and there is a fine balance between just the right amount of information and not enough. Pin-up Iceskating with Heart Balloon is the essence of movement and pseudo glamour, and Pin-up with Telephone conveys a special milieu and an attitude, but Pin-up's Legs in Fishnets does not give enough for the mind to work on. Kylie with Pearls around her Waist is an exact capture, simplified and caught.

The Triennial itself is so extensive that it takes a while to absorb and will be the subject of a full review later.