Art
Psychedelic experience
by Aaron Kreisler
It’s still the 70s in Palmerston North – apt given that one of new art shows at Te Manawa revives a notable painting series from that decade.
Driving north to Palmerston North in the name of art puts you in a strange mindset. My rental car – an overdesigned automated blimp that anxiously dispatches a series of risk-factor reports – only inflames my unease. Finally the destination is reached – the rather unassuming architectural statement that is Te Manawa Art Gallery.
From the first steps into the lobby, I am transported back in time. The whole place and its sensibility shouts 70s, from the hushed tones of the lobby with its rack of picture postcards to the cardigan-wearing front-of-house staff doing their bit of community service. I make a beeline for the exhibitions area in the hope that the art will provide a respite. But it is difficult to discern the art with the house lights turned to the dimmest of settings. Groping through the murk, I finally find the series of biomorphic paintings that announces the start of Ray Thorburn’s exhibition Line on Line.
Hung in essentially chronological order, this survey brings together a number of this artist’s most notable paintings, in particular his Modular Series from the early 70s. It’s a good opportunity to see Thorburn’s paintings on a comprehensive scale and in at least some semblance of their original output. But what is also striking about this exhibition, with its accompanying publication, is that it speaks and feels like an exercise in career resuscitation. I am not sure if it is the hangover of the 70s that pervades this site, the lack of contextual information in the show or the fruity ambient music (the bird song performed on a Hammond organ) humming at a nauseatingly low level that traps this exhibition in a time warp.
The research work that curator Alice Hutchison has put into this project is comprehensive and generous. It’s a retrospective that feels faithful to the artist’s underlying vision and the conceptual strategies of the artwork. Line on Line in large part seems to be about trying to reclaim the artist’s significance in New Zealand art history, but through that process it tends to locate this work in a particular historical moment. As a result, the exhibition exposes (maybe unwittingly) an important gap between Thorburn’s paintings and more contemporary concerns with respect to abstraction.
Sara Hughes’s installation Flower House is announced through a curtain wall made up of transparent multicoloured PVC strips that are locked into position by a metal frame that fits snugly into a gallery doorway. This screen has a distinct 70s fly-screen-door aesthetic, but more pointedly, it resembles the curtain sculptures that Anton Parsons has produced over the past 10 years.
In Hughes’s hands, this device loses the dark edges that pervade a Parsons work like Jamb (1997), which somehow references the language of minimalist sculpture, colour field painting and the everyday realm of processing plants and industrial zones. Passing through the curtain, one is confronted with a wall of incandescent paper flowers that are gently pushed back and forth by a couple of partially concealed fans, in what is an-out-and-out celebration of sensory perception.
Flower House is an instantly gratifying artwork that plays havoc with your eyes and is coercive through its creation of an immersive environment, but beyond this there is little intellectual stimulation. Of course the artist is probably not seeking that, but the problem with eye candy is that once you reach saturation point the most pleasurable of conditions can become an overbearing and sickly experience. Hughes’s flower experiment has provided a new set of motifs and patterns to add to her repertoire, but in this context it tends to look like Te Manawa has hosted the art equivalent of Changing Rooms.
Both Flower House and Line on Line have points of interest and connections that could be teased out and closely aligned, producing a thought-provoking and relevant set of discussions about the place of decoration, coloration and audience participation with respect to contemporary painting.
LINE ON LINE, Ray Thorburn, and FLOWER HOUSE, Sara Hughes, Te Manawa Art Gallery, Palmerston North (until July 15).
