The galleries: In the scrum or dance of death

Sometimes the artist sees one thing but the viewer sees quite another. In the work of Scott Eady - in a week when sculpture rules - the artist sees a curious hybrid creature with which he grimly explores the concepts of masculinity within contemporary culture. We see a scrum.

The show, at the Roger Williams Gallery in Randolph St until September 30, is called Dickkopf , which is German for "thickhead".

Eady uses a group of six masculine forms combined to suggest one entity of extraordinary deformity, like a freakish birth of Siamese sextuplets, yet a being of great strength and power.

To many New Zealanders the group will suggest a rugby scrum - or rather a league scrum, since there are no flankers. As anyone who has played either game knows, the three-two-one combination focuses enormous colliding power. As such it could be a fitting symbol of massed masculinity.

But Eady is not representing a sport, he is playing a variety of artistic games.

In one version a small boy, clad in military camouflage material, plays with articulated dolls grouped as this strange creature. At an early age he is being educated in aggression. The piece makes a neatly satirical point.

A larger and much more macabre version is a grotesque scrum made up of skeletons grinning, with all their teeth intact. This surely is a reminder of the mortality common to all men but far from their minds in the present exercise of their strength.

It is a modern dance of death, the subject of many artists, notably Holbein, and he would have delighted in it had there been rugby in Basle in the 16th century.

The feeling of a memento mori is emphasised by the carefully designed pedestal on which the big work stands. It is at once a coffin equipped with handles and a museum display piece.

The same care is given to the pedestals that give an official sanction to the three small statuettes in bronze that are the third variant.

These groups are fighting, raping and dying and in their own violent way they are dramatic. But overall the exhibition is surprisingly anti-male.

There has always been the opportunity for an artist to take our national sport and convert its pace, skill and physicality into memorable images. But while the artist thinks of a many-headed monster, the rest of us think of props, locks and hookers.

The undeniable power and invention of the work is dissipated by the confusion of ideas. The artist intended to extend the viewer's thinking but ended by reinforcing stereotypes.

In the work of Margriet Windhausen at the SOCA Gallery, in France St until September 22, most viewers will see quaintly charming ceramic heads, shrewdly characterised and delicately coloured. What the artist has in mind is a modern version of the exquisite portrait busts of noblewomen by Renaissance sculptor Francesco Laurana. The Isabella of Aragon in the Kunsthistorishes Museum in Vienna is a lovely example. In these sensitive works, face, headdress and hair all contribute to the smoothly monumental effect while keeping a likeness. What the modern sculptor adds is a variety of generalised characters to replace the solemn dignity of the Renaissance portrait work but she acknowledges the debt by calling several of the works Renaissance Woman.

This is a unfashionable but skilled and thoughtful exhibition.

It is accompanied by a considerable showing of paintings by Paul van den Berg. His painterly skills produce charming decorations in the manner of the School of Paris with a big debt to Picasso, especially in the use of the female profile. This is Old School stuff but it is done with the flourish of authority.

There is nothing Old School about the extraordinary installation by Mary Teague at Michael Lett in Karangahape Rd until September 30.

The artist calls it Wisdom Tooth and sees it as a reconstruction of the ritual of tying a string to a doorknob. This is no baby tooth but a grand piano. It is a big, white, wonderful grand piano. It is the tooth.

The piano is attached by a looping hank of hemp to a doorknob on a door drawn on the wall. The dental references end there because this piece is really about childhood. The grand piano is covered with stickers of the kind children collect in scrapbooks and with glass crystals which promise much more than they could ever deliver.

The string is propped up with crutches which suggest the way harsh reality is modulated through stories.

There are some formal little paintings where the structure is made ambiguous by loose handling and two works with more stickers that are titled Friendly Reminder. It all makes lively and witty sculpture.

A fourth show of sculpture is Peter Robinson's monstrous ACK, which fills Artspace and deserves a review to itself.