Eve Armstrong/Gretchen Albrecht at Michael Lett’s.
Agreed this was a smart idea for an assemblage, putting them together.
The discussion with the two artists, led by Te Papa Curator, Heather Galbraith pushed in the direction of recognising the similarities between them. These amounted to formal preferences and behaviours that would happily cluster together most post- 1950s artists.
Albrecht stressed her interest in ‘process’, which she glossed as the changing that goes on between general conception and the actuality of making, the room left for adjustment. And this is also a common proposition that many artists would agree with, evne though it is strikingly incomplete, when it does not address the materials of production and the means and effect of distribution.
Albrecht went along with Galbraith’s notion that form and colour were metaphoric for feelings or for responses to nature. Critics like that proposition, because it allows the discourse to supposed representations of the sensitive feelings through their superior genius [of the ‘lyrical’ artist] towards nature and/or to the human condition. Romantic position for interpretation. That hasn’t work properly since Pop, Minimalism, Earth Art. Or for that matter with Russian formalism, Dada, ‘geometrical’ abstraction., in spite of efforts to maintain it, e.g. in newspaper reviewing in NZ.
Galbraith pressed Armstrong to join the party and tell us about her metaphors. Which, happily, she refused to do, saying her work was material and there were no metaphors of the sort she was being asked for.
The whole discussion was conducted by Galbraith in terms of lovely [significant] form and colour, as if that was what art was about. And as if the purpose of sculptural material in the space was to be ‘aesthetically pleasing’, as if it were a nice painting.
At no point was it apparent that there were any differences between them, that there was any kind of contestation, not to do with status, age, generations, but with different ways of working to different ends. If the sculptures are like paintings, they are disruptive of aesthetic norms, with their material build up of rubble and discarded things, strewn about without much evident control. They appear to simulate wrecked cities, seriouly damaged interior decors, or a Kia store falling apart, an unlikely piece of interior décor, a comic lighting store arrangement, with light shades, one of which echoes [mocks] the signature shape of Albrecht’s nearby painting, a semi-circle. [They may represent three-dimensional forms of hemispheres, but they are in fact, semi-circles]. Of course, the aim of the paintings, according to Albrecht, is to produce an effect of light --- which is exactly what the electric bulbs in the sculpture do, but literally.
And then there is the crux of the matter, the sculptures edge towards suggestions of cityscapes or interior design, but the hints of representation dissolve into a mess of materials. Vocabulary of building without a syntax. The paintings are landscape oriented, nature substitutes, imitative , illusions, not tangible stuff. [Please do not touch].
The paintings are meant to last, are manufactured for sale in a particular market, which it seems has not been completely saturated, since the biggest newest painting produced for the show is another ‘Hemisphere’, a big and gesturally strenuous affair in red and gold. The ‘process’ is purely that of the artist’s internal adjustments, self-criticisms and bright solutions, during working – the end in view is a satisfaction for the known dealer/buyer nexus.
It was more than a little interesting to see less familiar, non-signature style and format, paintings, selected for the show by Armstrong. Darker, broodier colours, unexpected asymmetries of the colour blocks. Though they have been exhibited, they are untypical and perhaps represent a kind of image somewhat repressed in favour of the more typical.
When it comes down to process, of course that term is not just one of artist in midst of working in the studio, it is also the term for an opposition with product. The floor sculptures from detritus rubble and junk-shop discards, do not result in any product beyond the temporary exhibition – they cannot be replicated anywhere else. They are exclusive to occasion and site. They are not supported by the buyer/dealer nexus, rather by residencies and teaching, possibly the sale of drawings or collages. They enter therefore into dialogue, including oppositional dialogue, with the prevailing market-dominated styles -- at least initially, though they too can become routinised to get continued attention from critics and institutional patrons -- until thy are finally recuperated by the ‘culture’ in 40 years time as museum materials.
The paintings began as something unusual was back in the 60s and 70s, but they rapidly became status symbols of the leaders of the consumer culture, whose mode of existence is currently in doubt in the ‘West’.
It is the oldest trick in the book, for the middle of the road [mainstream] established culture, in its late phase of ripeness and complacency, to pretend that the new and oppositional is 'the same’ as what they do, only masking the differences with dismissla as a new gimmick and/or vulgarity and/or poor technique. This way of ‘thinking’ is deeply rooted in NZ culture. It’s to be heard or seen at work nearly everywhere in the arts. Is it the case that Eve Armstrong, who has long been aware of the social repercussions of our built and our commercial consumerist social milieu, can be allowed in to institutions like Te Papa, if she 'aestheticises' her practise?
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