Oddities abound in impressive displays

By T.J. McNAMARA

The second Auckland Triennial is a great event. It is an extremely ambitious thing to organise an exhibition every three years that will have an independent identity on the world circuit even if the intent is not to rival the biennales of Sydney or Venice.

Such a collection of international artists alongside our own should excite a good deal of public debate as part of its purpose.

Art is an uncomfortable business. In the triennial called PUBLIC/PRIVATE at the New Gallery there are things that would have brought howls of outrage and derision even a decade ago but now we surrender to art on almost any terms.

The exhibition spreads up Shortland St to the Gus Fisher Gallery and the University and to Artspace in Karangahape Rd without much information about what is where.

In this art festival there is not a single conventional painting or sculpture. What we have is found objects, video, photographs, computer prints and models.

All of them are designed to add new dimensions to our perception of the world rather than exist as precious objects. Art now can attach itself freely to almost any substance.

A striking instance is the red plasma screen used by Fiona Pardington, from Auckland. On the screen is a woman whose back has been fully tattooed with lettering in Maori.

The screen adds a sense of life and movement that is not part of the otherwise excellent still black and white photographs that fill out Pardington's contribution.

As we watch throbbing movement of this back, which bears such a painfully acquired branding, we are aware that it carries its message in every thrusting, walking, bending moment of the subject's life.

What is being made public is a message so private that even the owner of the back will never see it clearly herself.

A feature of this work is that the illustration in the catalogue is accompanied by a remarkable piece of writing by Peter Shand.

This is typical of the way, exemplified often in the catalogue, of the interdependency of artists and writers. Another example is the art of Julia Morison and the text by Anna Smith.

Explication of work by close collaborators rather than detached criticism can be extremely valuable. It works well in the writing that accompanies the most astonishing work in the show, which is Chris Cunningham's DVD projection piece based on the music of Icelandic singer Bjork.

In this film, two female robots are assembled by probing, programmed, mechanical hands. The plastic faces are bland. Then suddenly the eyes come shockingly alive and the robots become aware of each other intimately even as they are penetrated by the devices that assemble them.

Every viewer will have a different interpretation of this film but to see it happening is an intensely moving experience.

The theme of public and private is caught with astonishing directness in an assemblage of mirrors by Australian Robert Pulie.

The mirrors are at right angles to each other and are mostly tall and narrow. They make an Alice in Wonderland woodland and they show only the person immediately near them but in six different versions. You are in a public gallery but isolated by the mirrors as an intensely private person.

The ultimate in privacy extends to the work of Emiko Kasahara, whose bright pink photographs show the cervix from inside the womb, the passage by which we enter from total privacy into the world.

The public part of the theme is emphasised by an installation by et al, a name that conceals the identity of a New Zealand artist who assumes many names.

This is a room bleakly empty of people but full of industrial trolleys that once, no doubt, held valuable commodities. Now they are grey and dusty. On them lie faded orchestral programmes and each supports an outmoded computer whose screens show simple graphs.

It is all a relic of some important process but it is suggested that all it ultimately produced was excrement. This is emphasised by two big, grey portaloos standing in the corners.

The impersonal industrial atmosphere is intensified by the unnatural humming of power coming from the machinery. It is a grim vision but an undoubtable effective comment on some aspects of public work.

When an intensely private obsession is made public it can be funny and repellent at the same time.

The desire of many men to revert to dependent babyhood is explored by Australian Polly Borland in a series of photographs where riding in pushchairs is funny but big pink bums are appalling.

No modern exhibition is complete without irony and appropriation. There is irony in Mark Adams' photos of people with full body tattoos in Maori and Polynesian patterns living in apartments in Amsterdam.

Appropriations of pose and lighting from well-known images by famous photographers are an essential part of the work of Margaret Dawson, who transposes them on to elderly New Zealanders.

More telling is the work of Hulleah J. Tsinhnahjinnie who confers enormous dignity on old photographs of the Indians of her tribe, and sets them in an emotional context.

Everywhere in the show the concept is dominant and sometimes the ideas run thin.

Australian artist John Barbour uses stains on linen and supports them by epigrams in irregular embroidery. He embroiders I Am War on material that suggests a shroud.

He is saying that shrouds are the only outcome of war. But the material does not convey enough sense of a body bag. Here, as elsewhere, the style cannot carry the weight of the concept.

The Triennial is filled with oddity but overall is an impressive gathering of sensations at least comparable to disruptive and capricious exhibitions such as Sensation and Apocalypse at the Royal Academy in London and losing little by the comparison. It is stimulating Easter viewing.