Art
“Your art fails to take political aims seriously”
by Sally Blundell
CULTURAL DISCOURSE, by Mike Armstrong, Aigantighe Art Gallery, Timaru (to February 29).
From Chirstchurch it's a two-hour drive down the parched palm of a Canterbury summer. Everything is dry – sheep, grass, mountains. Long-armed sprinklers throw water into the wind, but still everything fades into pale heat.
It’s been a long while since I’ve seen an exhibition by Mike Armstrong. Memories of cut-out plywood shapes, hot colour, human form fleeting ahead of a shadow or ghost or memory. But always movement, always action caught mid-explosion.
In a cavernous room at Timaru’s Aigantighe Art Gallery incendiary colour flits across the wall. Flaming orange, yellow, red – paint sprayed and brushed onto strange three-dimensional forms erupting like bizarre life forms from the wall. Armstrong has brought together 30 works: eight paintings on canvas, the rest aluminium configurations – 3D paintings, constructed pigment rather than sculptures. The pieces are hung high up and unevenly, forming a single crooked line around the gallery that gives a cohesion to these works as if part of a single storyline.
The aluminium pieces are cut and riveted, spray-painted and contorted. They look as if they have recently been pulled from a furnace, an ironmonger’s fire where things melt and take on strange new shapes of their own accord. Human forms – a hand, an eye, a distorted face – emerge out of twisting, tortured ribbons of colour or freeze into the structure, hollow-eyed and fossil-like. There are alien figures and foetal organisms, commas and altered ampersands – the seemingly chance configurations of new life forms, altered identity, reinvented linguistic codes thrown up by cultural collision.
Colours, symbols and patterns of identity – including a Gordon Walters-style koru – leak out of their traditional casts into this new fluid test-tube world, a tangled convolution that seethes and splashes, melts metal and alters language.
In “Tiki Baby” the greenstone icon is splayed and stretched into a jigsaw piece straight from the conveyor belt of a plastics factory – an act of cultural barbarism? Commodification? Or simply the cheerful impossibility of things staying the same when one tradition impacts upon another? Everything looks hot, molten, transitional. And no one, least of all the artist, appears to be at the controls.
“Not so much an ampersand, more like a Times roman ‘g’” says one of the titles (the titles, some strangely abbreviated on the catalogue, are like ironic afterthoughts, distancing the artist from the works) and we, like Armstrong himself, become onlookers, witnessing the volcanic reaction of close cultural encounter rather than viewing the illustration after the event.
There are similarities with both the painted reliefs of Don Peebles and the cartoony figures of Robert MacLeod, but although the latter presents still-lifes of his strange organic life forms, these works are action stories, loud and unstill, a single material in the process of unpredictable transformation.
The works on canvas follow the same haphazard line around the gallery as that of the relief works. Without the vibrancy of the metal works, they tend to act as a timid conclusion whereas in their own space they are excellent, uncompromising works. Here the artist’s presence is more pronounced. “Your art fails to promote political aims seriously,” says the voice of artistic control in “New Nationalist Discourse”. An overworked sentiment perhaps, but this is one of the strongest paintings – the bold bodily outlines, features painted over in shades of grey with strong obvious brushstrokes, the body language, the pigheaded prescriptiveness of artistic jurisdiction. The same purposeful heavy-handedness occurs in “The Murder of Sensitivity”, the corporate fat cat leaning on the twisted bodies of the world’s workers, the sense of things falling apart, society on the brink of imminent collapse.
There is humour in this exhibition, in the “Alien Vampire” and the ampersand motif, in the whole Kodachrome shape-shifting sci-fi performance. There’s political commentary – the forces of power rendered in ominous bleak monochrome – and there’s also the capacity to disturb.
In the painting “Dirty Dolly, Mummy” and in the 3D works featuring Dr Flathead, Armstrong refers to “people with covert mercenary motives” who, he says in the catalogue, “manipulate public feeling against a scapegoat”. The horrified young face, the muddle of dark figures behind, the bizarre names – Armstrong responds to Lynley Hood’s version of the Peter Ellis case and, agree or not, these are strong works pursuing a contentious social discourse rarely seen in New Zealand galleries.
The solemn title of this exhibition sums up the general idea of the show, but it understates the extraordinary energy of these works – colour beating away at bodily and iconic form like tides gnawing away at a changing coastline. There’s a sense here of lighting a fuse, then running for cover to peer at the result. The result can be heard for miles. It sears the eye, it brings some colour back to the arid plains.
