The galleries: Junk is just too banal for words
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5:00AM
Thursday June 05, 2008
By T.J. McNamara
Notable American artist Robert Rauschenberg, who died last month, said his aim was to fill the gap between art and life. His method for achieving this was to take the discarded rubbish of modern life and change its context - shift it into an art gallery - to make it art. He spoke of "the secret life of junk".
Karangahape Rd continues to be the forum for the most avant-garde art in Auckland, with two galleries hosting artists addressing that gap between everyday life and art. At Starkwhite until June 21, John Reynolds has one big piece that is an assemblage of road-signs. His work has always been about mark-making and the relationship between signs and words.
WORKS END is the iconography of life on the road and of life in art. The combinations of white and yellow, green and blue, the stylised direction arrows and the shields with numbers are replicated in the reflective paint used by road signwriters.
The writing on the signs is taken from the titles of outstanding work by New Zealand artists. More specifically, they are the titles of 10 paintings that have reached the highest price at auction. Half are by Colin McCahon.
The work is a big, bold thing. Its blatant, poster-like, quality makes it, in the context of a gallery, immediately impressive but essentially the work is misguided. Most of Reynolds' art gains vigour from the personal nature of his mark-making, which is entirely absent here. The wording has connotations that need explaining to all but the very slim minority of those interested in the history of New Zealand art at auction. They do not have the colloquial resonance of the expressions used in his outstanding work Cloud which graced the entrance to the 15th Sydney Biennale.
Using everyday banality creates the problem that it might lead to banal art and the problem of transforming the commonplace into the visually exciting is not solved here.
The problem is even more deeply compounded in the installation Fractal Tears by Dan Arps at Michael Lett until July 5. Most of this exhibition is truly junk, the detritus discarded by modern life. In the small room at the front, there is a smashed wooden rostrum. In the main gallery the walls are adorned with pseudo-mystical posters collaged with distinctly non-mystical elements or cancelled out with over-painting. On the floor lie cardboard tubes, vinyl, plastic bags, newspaper and unidentifiable burnt objects. The only clearly identifiable object is an inflatable bag with a skeleton on it and a skull adorned with a fake beard. Overhead is a line of plastic twine with a single coat hanger.
There is no apparent order or relationship between the objects. When Rauschenberg made his assemblages or collages there was often a unifying colour or a hint of a theme or history. In this show, the junk remains junk. What the viewer takes from this exhibition is a fractured sense of melancholy meaninglessness. It is a truly nihilistic exhibition with little perceptible purpose and little sense of being art but rather the junk of a secret life.
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