Art
Two galleries with plastic in them
by Jon Bywater
ONE GOOD THING ABOUT MUSIC: MARTINA DEL RAY, Jim Speers, Andrew Jensen Gallery, Auckland (to August 5); Bill Culbert, Auckland Art Gallery’s new foyer (to August 31).
WHO IS THE MARTINA DEL RAY OF Jim Speers’s new show? No one, in fact. If she were anyone, though, it’s easy to imagine who she might be. Not quite Norah Jones, not quite Mariah Carey, but someone glamorous and easy, with major label backing. The imaginary CD pitch also carries an echo of Bob Marley: "One good thing about music, when it hits you, you feel no pain."
Speers is a master of the evocative title. To one kind of art fan approaching his latest show, to the kind of person who wants to line up and disentangle the component associations in that evocativeness, his title could flash up a disclaimer or an acknowledgement: that some things are pitched to a general audience, that they aren’t about preaching to the converted, but about taking it to the mall. The painless joy of things such as great pop, it could remind us, can be done a disservice by trying to work it all out. Separating the strands reveals a message telling you to just put them back together.
At my own risk, I’ll continue to unpick, to explain the joke, just a little further: that any unknown talent could be "the one good thing about music" is a denial of history so preposterous that it’s almost funny, funny sad – if you have any investment in history, that is. Of course, it suits marketers who’d use such a line just fine that some people can’t be bothered with old stuff. They’d much rather that you followed fashion and bought the latest. Here’s the thorny thing: who’s to say that there’s anything wrong with that? It’s the kind of question Speers’s new show of lightboxes provokes, because their own relationship to history, to art history, may be beside the point.
On the one hand, now more than ever (these are larger, more solid variations on things that he’s been making since the mid-90s) Speers’s radiant Perspex confections hang squarely on the wall next to a bookshelf full of big 20th-century art. Like Bill Culbert’s work on show concurrently, they inhabit the gallery in the wake of 1960s minimalism in general and the fluorescent light pieces of Dan Flavin in particular. The similarity between the iconic works of depressive abstract expressionist Mark Rothko and Speers’s fuzzy-edged, 3D, plug-in versions has been pointed out more than once, too.
Rothko saw his paintings as about "the timelessness and tragedy of the human condition", though. Flavin wanted to "define space". Speers offers us our visual thrills with neither such grand transcendent nor scientific ambitions. In this, Culbert and Speers share more than componentry. Following the 90s revival of the look of modernist architecture and abstract art, they represent a "playful" or "allusive" reworking of the pleasure to be generated from colour and form. Culbert’s medley of Tupperware pastels in "Spacific Plastic", for example, shares a similar possibility for nostalgic gazing to the glowing tones of Speers’s "English Electric". Both are concerned to allow us to see what we will in the material beauty of illuminated plastic.
Speers and Culbert part company, however, where Culbert lets his materials be themselves, transparently a collection of old containers and some ceiling bulbs, with only the title acknowledging our human interest in the possibility of something more. Speers hides his circuitry inside hermetic, welded acrylic, and so creates something like a Romantic mystery of technique. Is this "old-fashioned" of him? Culbert’s calling a bulb a bulb could seem as blunt as his relatively clunky wordplay. He soberly locates us, while Speers’s daydream glow – like neon through misted glass – takes us somewhere less specific, away from the real world, somewhere where "you feel no pain".
