Something in the air in the arts world

By T.J. McNAMARA

Once in a while there is a show that catches exactly themes and ideas that are in the air. Humid at the New Gallery comes from Britain by way of the Melbourne Festival and the artists have international reputations. It is a show by women, about women and its timing is appropriate with The Vagina Monologues playing.

Context is all. The poster used to advertise The Vagina Monologues is an image of lips that was respectable when it was used horizontally to advertise the opera The Pearl Fishers. In some eyes now it is indecent because the lips are set vertical for the poster.

Humid, too, relates to the controversy about "Conceptual Art" that is agitating the London art scene and has caused the resignation of its denouncer Ivan Massow, chairman of the Institute of Contemporary Arts.

Only one artist does anything like conventional painting. The show, which runs until May 26, is full of text, video, installation, found objects and conceptual art. They have all come from under Tracey Emin's bed. Yet it would be impossible to condemn the concepts behind the works. They are full of thought and sensitivity and take time to read and respond to. Everyone will read them differently. That is the nature of art and context.

The show is so much concerned with the female principle that the male gaze, at times, is like an intrusion. Yet it begins, at the top of the stairs, with an image that goes back to such male artists as Sandro Botticelli and beyond him to antiquity. It is Venus Rising from the Foam by the Norwegian A. K. Dolven, only she calls it Warmth.

On a huge screen, a dim, womanly shape emerges through a mass of foam. What comes to the surface is only nipples and a hint of breast but it is enough to evoke eternal womanliness.

The same artist is also responsible for one of the most fascinating videos, which deserves to be watched intently throughout its short running time. It is based on a simple reversal.

A warm egg has been placed on ice scattered with snow. It melts through the ice and leaves a perfect egg-shaped hole. But the loop is run backwards so we see the hole first then the egg gradually and triumphantly emerge from it. It is a complete and perfect image of birth.

The same process of reversal gives tension, power and metaphor to a video of a tulip in virginal white which is continually penetrated by a brush and ends up full of colour and bloom.

The male gaze is carried into a context where only women have been before in a video made in a Turkish bath in Budapest by Tacita Dean.

Nude, except for a little apron, young, middle-aged and elderly women slide into the water or shower or chat together. The bathhouse recalls those harem paintings beloved of male artists.

This bathhouse's green tiles are identical to the lip-licking painting of a bathhouse by Bouguereau that was exhibited here a couple of years ago.

In this video we have truth, not male fantasy. The forms of the women are real, monumental and handsome, familiar to women in every changing room in the world but hidden from the eyes of men. It offers a sense of wonder and shows how, at times, the female gaze must be profoundly different from the male.

The other works are sometimes as simple as framed texts from women writers, sometimes as witty as Tete-a-Tete, chairs assembled by Nina Saunders which take on female characteristics and chatter together.

One work by Christine Borland is elegiac and evokes weeping. One part is a circle of leaves under a spotlight. The leaves have been blanched and are as thin as discarded tissues. Leaves change, people weep. Both are sad but natural processes. The effect is intensified in the second part, where the leaves float in the liquid in a tear-shaped, glass womb.

The single most magical work is Mariele Neudecker's Things Can Change in a Day. This work is just as wonderful as the glass cases by the same artist in Bright Paradise last year.

Within the glass case and underwater like a sunken cathedral is a forest full of mystery, shafts of light shine through and make it a place at once dangerous, appealing and dramatic.

There is only one work in this show that descends into rubbish. The overwritten introduction to the catalogue by Juliana Engberg, who put the show together, suggests that Pipilotti Rist's Ever Is Over All recalls a game of "unbridled pleasure". The catalogue says, "Here the glistening, free-spirited female body finds its moment of jouissance."

This moment of joy is a young woman dancing down a street, smashing car windows with a protea. That joy and independence are expressed by breaking windows, even stagey, sugar-glass windows, becomes a hideous irony

It is a bad metaphor. You can get shot in Taranaki for breaking windows. Context alters the gaze.