The galleries: Monumental act of irony

By T.J. NcNAMARA

Artists these days do not so much make paintings or sculpture - they make things. They tend to curl the lip at conventional oil painting and statues in bronze.

The objects they make often have a good deal of presence. These things are extraordinary objects. Often these objects are interfused with irony and irony may be the death of us all.

Things are all part of the much-acclaimed exhibition by Gregor Kregar at Bath Street Gallery in Parnell until November 2. Kregar has received the accolade of the Wallace Award and has made work for Te Papa.

This exhibition is made up of television sets and little glass statuettes. The televisions are made of steel plate with the welded joins prominent. In one screen, lit from behind, are pictures in textured cast glass. The glass is divided by lead strips to "reference" the stained glass in church windows. That makes each screen an icon, and an icon is to worshipped.

But what does Kregar say we worship? He says we worship the banal, the kitsch and the ordinary. He says we worship fish swimming in a tank, we are obsessed with traffic jams, we like pretty pictures of cats and, of course, there are roses, roses everywhere. Roses, the symbol of all those tidy, middle-class gardens.

The feeling is that the artist puts roses on his screen not because he likes roses, but because other people like roses and that he thinks roses, like cats and cars, are feeble things to worship. Irony - you say one thing and mean another.

The artist is making solid, monumental and lasting a taste that it is evident he despises.

It is undeniable these heavy television sets with their thick glass screens are monumental things. They need to be supported on the wall by a huge bracket. They do not just sit in the ordinary way on a table. The real screen is a flimsy icon. Much more real is his steel and glass construction. The catalogue that accompanies the show notes that television is comforting and is used to soften our lives, but that Kregar's televisions are "hard and edgy" and by no means comfortable.

Edward Hanfling, who wrote the booklet, says the works are poised between "kitsch and art" and "banality and art". There is a danger that if you make your art out of banality you risk being banal. For all the inventiveness of their making, these weighty objects end up as dull. Beside which, Kregar cannot draw cars. The front wheels of every car in every image where they occur are absurd. The statuettes that fill out the show are made from cast glass. Their transparency is intriguing, even eerie, their poses conventional, and the irony is that, if they were made of bronze, every avant garde critic would dismiss them as mere ornaments. Does being made of glass and not bronze automatically redefine them?

The business of making art things out of glass extends to the work of Wendy Fairclough, who is part of a trio of artists showing recent work at the Milford Galleries until November 3. She makes buckets, apples and oil-cans out of glass.

These objects are arranged in groups. What Seekest Thou is apples and pears on a stand, in green glass and decorated with ferns in gold leaf, exotic fruit and native pattern.

This piece hovers between art and ornament but the sandblasted green glass of Still Life made into buckets, bowls and basins is so obvious and ordinary it must be art.

The piece that really works best is the group of things that make up Point of Departure. They are handblown glass engraved with landscapes, as well as painted and sand-blasted. Apples, pears, a rolling-pin, vases and an oil-can really succeed in evoking the interaction between pioneer Europeans and the land as well as being fascinating objects. This is a different, strange but coherent and resonant group. It has tension where some of the other work just sits.

In the same exhibition, John Nicol has beautifully painted work where the images are made into objects by being on curved and shaped surfaces. One triangular work has a bare tree above a gully that is at once a land and female form. Like another work which is long and oval, the shape supports the image. Night Passage has a long horizon that folds into the distance, and a cloud which is both bird and a spirit hovers over the waters in the foreground.

The third artist, Neil Frazer, makes his paintings into autonomous objects by his thick, layered pigment.

James Ormsby, whose work is at Whitespace until October 31, has it all ways. He does paintings which contain a little joke about fried chicken and amount to nothing. He does drawings with endless horizontal patterns, all similar but varied in a multitude of ways that are a wonderful evocation of genealogy, and against them he puts a couple of children roaring into the future.

He, too, makes objects, boards of modern plywood that are stained with natural dyes and smoked so they seem to have been part of a meeting house for a long time.

On these works on ply veneer the natural ochres from lily pollen and tawa berries, preserved with natural oils, are successful in being objects that speak of the past, the present and concerns about the environment.