Kate Beynon's "Mystic Dragon", 2005.
Art
Sublime technology
by Andrew Paul Wood
Shortly before he died, Marcel Duchamp said, “Since Courbet, it’s been believed that painting is addressed to the retina. That was everyone’s error. The retinal shudder! Before, painting had other functions: it could be religious, philosophical, moral.” And sometimes pretty, too. That is why painting remains apart in art, and why I am inordinately fond of it.
A recent trend in painting is to introduce elements of graphic design and the influence of video and Photoshop. It is less puritanically elitist than abstraction, and less distant than photorealism, but retains the desire for the naked act of mark-making. In New Zealand, this can readily be seen in the work of Andre Hemer, Hannah and Aaron Beehre, Craig Easton and Scott Flanagan, to name a few. In the case of James Cousins (showing with Dan Arps in Projected Stories and Plastic Nudity at 64zero3), the picturesque and sublime ideals of Romantic painting are an excuse to, in his words, “get paint onto canvas” without any sense of retrograde irony or naive anachronism. What many younger artists have abandoned as an obsolete genre crushed to pulp beneath the weight of art historical baggage, Cousins has made the spine of his practice.
Cousins is engaged in tweaking out the vicissitudes of filtering atmospheric soft-focus landscapes through dot matrix grids, VDU scan lines and other technological and graphic feedback constantly bombarding us in the modern world. The absence of human life recalls Ruskin’s “Pathetic Fallacy” in art – the Victorian need to project human emotions onto Nature with a capital “N”. My only major criticism is that it is essentially a mash-up of various phases of earlier work and depends heavily on Gerhard Richter’s blurred chocolate-box landscapes.
Arps’s drawings are a whole other empire to his Mark Dion-influenced mind-map accumulations and non-site installations circa 2000. Instead, we are presented with some exquisitely deft drawings reminiscent of Stephen Hillenburg TV cartoons.
“The hand of a great master at real work,” sayeth Ruskin in 1857, “is never free; its swiftest dash is under perfect government.” Arps here unleashes that co-ordination on a Dr Seussian mélange of random limbs, turds, and a toy duck on a stick. The drawings are accom-panied by a deliberately odious little plastic statuette that reminds me of Scandinavian kitsch: moomins, trolls, gnomes, etc – but rendered almost abstract and amorphous. Arps’s talent is that no matter how bizarre, it always seems to work.
The Physics Room dished up the goods by exhibiting Melbourne artist Kate Beynon’s Mixed Blood and Migratory Paths. Beynon’s paintings are flat and street, stylistically derived from bombing and Chinese pop culture graphics. An oriental female face (perhaps a stylised self-portrait) is endlessly repeated with variations on hair, eye-colour and skin – an allusion to Beynon’s exploration of her hybrid Chinese-Welsh Australian identity. This figure is Li Ji, a Qin dynasty folk heroine celebrated as the slayer of a demon python to whom the girls of her village were regularly sacrificed. This tale is told in an animated video where Beynon intersperses it with contemporary Melbourne. The snake becomes the personification of racism (and perhaps sexism) in predominantly white Australia – but is also relevant in our context. Chinese have lived here since the gold rush of the 1860s, and yet are kept on the outside of the binary monolith of New Zealand identity.
But to reassure that I am not the exclusive slave of painting, Joanna Langford, recently awarded the Olivia Spencer Bower fellowship for 2006, had an excellent exhibition at the Jonathan Smart Gallery. I have long admired this young artist’s outrageous, whimsical and delicate fairy-tale installations. Jitterbug includes the usual surreal popsicle-stick trees and landscapes, but in an Alice in Wonderland touch included plastic rosebushes that can be driven around a white picket fenced course by remote control.
PROJECTED STORIES AND PLASTIC NUDITY, 64zero3, Christchurch (until December 3). MIXED BLOOD AND MIGRATORY PATHS, Kate Beynon, Physics Room, Christchurch (until December 3). JITTERBUG, Joanna Langford, Jonathan Smart Gallery, Christchurch.
