The galleries: Playing the game by their own rules

By T.J. McNAMARA

Two aspects of art criticism are the interpretative and the judgmental. In many ways the exhibition of contemporary New Zealand artists, Nine Lives, at the New Gallery has already been judged. It is part of AK03. It has been selected carefully by Robert Leonard, Auckland Art Gallery curator of contemporary art, and it is considered important enough to occupy two floors of the gallery.

Drawn largely from the Chartwell Trust Collection, it was assembled by Rob Gardiner, an audacious collector who has always supported avant garde artists.

It is held under the aegis of the Auckland Art Gallery Toi o Tamaki, and the gallery is responsible for the stylish catalogue which contains interviews and comments from art scholars such as Anthony Green, Allan Smith and Wystan Curnow.

Much of the work is "ludic", a fashionable word that conveys the idea of playing games visually and intellectually.

In Nine Lives the game is frequently to kick against any conventional value in art. Most of these artists are determined kickers and their work is an expression of their revolt and desire to be original.

In the foyer is the artist group, "et al", a name that covers Merilynn Tweedie and her collaborators whose game is to deny that art is ever pretty or kind. It is black and dismal.

The principal piece is a battered sofa painted black. Its box-like interior is propped open and empty. It is ramshackle and shoddy. A speaker crudely jammed into the side of the sofa continually broadcasts a lecture on the theory of art. Nearby is a pulpit with another speaker. This pulpit suggests anyone who lectures from behind a lectern is talking nonsense.

Nearby is a trolley filled with heaters that do not heat. Blackboards refer to the German artist/theorist Joseph Beuys and emphasise that all this is about teaching.

The gallery is filled with noise coming from this piece and from Michael Stevenson's work, which is principally a piano. This game toys with the concept that anything is art if it is done by, or is about, an artist. Music that interests artists or is composed by artists is shown in a glass case as sheet music, as well as programmed to play on the slave piano.

Another game is to make one medium look like another, so pastel drawings look like photographs. These show a projector and have messages such as, "The nation's greatest conspiracy is conducted from behind white gallery walls", "art is a multi-cult perversion", and "it is governed by behind-the-scenes personages that the public never knows".

This way of approaching art through irony extends to Julian Dashper, who boasts in the catalogue that he cannot draw and whose game is to discuss the peripherals of art.

Part of the game is to make art without drawing and he extends the game to a set of slides of his work that might be used in an art history lesson. Here, they are in a glass case in an art gallery, so they must be art.

The work includes one of his drum kits that represents the reputation of New Zealand artists. The curator says the real kits are "not really the point" and the truth is they work better as photographs.

The exhibition of things uninteresting in themselves but evidence of reputation extends to the work of the late Giovanni Intra. A suit he once wore to a ball hangs on a peg, nowhere near as interesting as on a model on the cover of the catalogue.

There are artists who are largely clear of the philosophic game-playing. Bill Hammond is represented by work familiar from earlier exhibitions. His hectic vision of Japan and his elegiac and touching vision of things made lifeless by study and museums are stages in his way to wide public recognition and response.

From the work of photographer Peter Peryer some straightforward pictures of a fish and a dog have been chosen. His notorious dead steer by the roadside has stood the test of time. Jacqueline Fraser's sharp lines in twisted and bound wire are also familiar, and never so well used as a big work here.

Michael Parekowhai's dangerous rabbits are seen again and his games with scale, when he made large versions of childhood toys, are recalled in big plastic pieces on the floor.

That leaves John Reynolds, whose work is always a puzzle. His game is to take drawings and make them into huge paintings. His Protocol for an Odalisque is a monument to doodling, but his meditation on drawing is seen best in Sun Tree, where a tree in stylised curves is seen alongside the same tree reduced to a construction of angles. One has an intricate background of lines. The other has a background of geometric rectangles.

In speaking of the work of et al. in the catalogue, Allan Smith describes it as half magic, half crummy. Visitors to the exhibition must make their own judgment as to what is magic and what are the crumbs.