Visual art: Top 10 plus a few more

By T.J. McNAMARA

"Pick 10," the arts editor said. "Don't write your usual generalisations. Write about the 10 most memorable shows."

Obviously the Auckland Art Gallery will loom large, not least for the splendid posters whose bold images on the tower and the gallery have dominated the scene around Kitchener St. Stanley Spencer's haunting self-portraits and the colourful Flaunt poster that displays the "Gauguin" by Jo Torr dress are two of the most memorable.

Flaunt, which draws on the gallery's collections, is a wonderful show to have on during the holidays and makes the 10. Usually the mixture of fashion with art does little good for either, but this has so much art that is interesting and varied that the related fashion makes a cheerful break from concentrating on the captivating paintings. There are also some clever curatorial juxtapositions, such as Anna Miles' fabric alongside Rita Angus' Portrait of Betty Curnow. It gives a new spark to a New Zealand icon.

Such mixed and thematic shows have become the staple of the public galleries. The pattern was set by Arrivals and Departures at the New Gallery, which began the year with a mixture of things as varied as Bill Hammond paintings supplemented by specimen bird skins from the museum collections and a group of splendid cloaks by the celebrated weaver Diggeress Te Kanawa.

In the dealer galleries, shows exhibited the virtues of good drawing and beautiful painting. The third show was early in the year at the Anna Bibby Gallery. The paintings of Emily Wolfe were exquisite, delicately painted lace curtains that evoked a strange atmosphere at the same time as they fascinated by the exact rendition of texture.

It is cheating a bit to add the October show by Jude Rae at the Jensen Gallery, but she worked the same artistic, painterly magic with still-life of gas bottles, of all things.

The fourth show must be the most defining, important retrospective show of the year when work by Greer Twiss occupied most of the New Gallery. His evocative statue by Grafton Bridge has become so much part of the furniture of the city that it was important to be reminded of the immense output and variety of his work. It ranged from figures filled with energy to inspired balancing acts, and comment on colonialism and nuclear threat. Twiss was always astonishingly inventive.

An inspired touch was the recreation of the sculptor's workshop with its clutter, models and material that inspired the work. It filled a room and you could almost hear the rasp of tools and the hammer of creation.

Another exhibition filled with sound was the great McCahon exhibition first shown at the Stedelijk Gallery in Amsterdam. The writing on works by McCahon is not the fullness of their meaning, but certainly the viewer must sound out what is written in the same way as the painter spoke to the canvas.

Such close attention was needed to reach the full grandeur of this exhibition.

The nature of paint is debated obsessively by Rohan Weallans, winner of the Waikato Art Prize, who had a show at the Ivan Anthony Gallery in which the images were not just painted, they were made of paint.

He had laid thick layers of paint in glass, peeled it off and then painted again on sheets of dried paint to make noticeboards that expressed individual personalities. It was a development of his earlier layered and dissected paint and was certainly the most remarkable tour de force of the year.

An aspect that has become prominent here as overseas is video clips as works of art. Artspace in K Rd is at the cutting edge of art and shows works that would not or could not be shown in a dealer gallery.

It has had a number of thematic exhibitions and almost all have included videos.

The best was Wonderland; and the single most notable piece was the mesmerising exercise in fluid mechanics by Dutch artist Saskia Olde Wolbers, who took the simple idea of paint dripping through grids, filmed it, turned it on its side and linked it with a narrative about love and accident in a surreal and wonderful way.

Technology also includes photography, but the outstanding photographic exhibition this year used old-fashioned black and white. The international class of the work by Laurence Aberhart is indicated by its sharing the Stedlijk with McCahon, but its importance lies not in any international ranking but in the way it evokes something special about the New Zealand landscape and the artefacts of the European and Maori people who have lived here. The show, at the Sue Crockford Gallery, was as important in its own way as the trilogy of The Lord of the Rings.

A man who found epic stature in ordinary things was Stanley Spencer and the exhibition of his work at the Auckland Art Gallery, although comparatively small, gave insight into almost all aspects of his work except the big industrial paintings he did during World War II. The Resurrections in his home village of Cookham were there as well as his detailed landscapes, but the memorable things were the great self-portraits which included the spellbinding image of the artist contemplating the nudity of his second wife. The combination of sexual attraction, neurotic obsession and splendid flesh painting was incomparable.

At 10 is Nine Lives at the New Gallery, with some splendid things and some damnably awful things. It should have caused savage controversy, but it did not do so because anything goes and, in some quarters, obscurity and deliberately denying skill is a virtue.

Difficult to leave out were the talking heads by Tony Oursler and the ambitious accomplishment of Caroline Rothwell's plants at the Gus Fisher Gallery.

And, beyond the 10, the most under-rated exhibition - the extraordinarily inventive paintings by Robert McLeod, damned because he was a Scotsman and from Wellington.

And the single greatest work of the year - the intensely moving screen painted by Bill Hammond, memorable not just for its astonishing asking price (the market established that) but because the artist has moved into his own world which is at once his creation and our wonder.