Shiny, unhappy people.

The Subject Now

Adam Art Gallery

Victoria University of Wellington

Wellington, New Zealand

July 26-October 5, 2008

"The Subject Now," a group exhibition featuring nine international artists, displayed works that evince the glimmer, sheen, and unity of much contemporary video and photographic practice. This acted in distinct contrast to the numerous registers of turbulence and uncase barely concealed beneath these ever-so-polished surfaces.

It is a testament to the estimable curatorial skill of Christina Barton, a well-known scholar of "post-object art" (i.e., conceptual tendencies in New Zealand art), that the tenuous argument upon which the exhibition rested did not yield under the pressure of this formally and thematically diverse selection of works. Barton cites art historian Pamela M. Lee, who recently commented, "the subject has returned full force," and continued, "One's political subjectivity no longer seems a function of agency (or performativity) so much as an act of conscription. Another way of putting it: we are being forced to choose sides." Proceeding from this point of departure, Barton in her accompanying essay writes of the political and social climate of the current period, from the so-called "war on terror" to the perils of everyday existence, ultimately advocating for more experiential practices that purportedly "destabilise any too-fixed playing out of subject positions." Fortunately much of the work on view generally escaped one-dimensional portrayals of "identity" and "issues," and instead concentrated upon individual responses to contemporary triggers of anxiety, including such phenomena as media hype, political conflicts, the ongoing war, and threats of terrorism and urban violence.

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Czech artist Marketa Othova's sequence of thirty-one black-and-white photographs records a cafe scene in Venice in which the pop superstar Bjork is seated at an outdoor table along with other customers. The images recall skillful tourist snapshots or perhaps a private detective's evidence, given their offhand, surreptitious feel, rather than the work of paparazzi. One is also reminded of another subtext, that the singer is also known for her own violent outbursts when she feels her privacy has been invaded, the most recent having occurred, coincidentally, in a New Zealand airport.

Willie Doherty's Passage (2006) depicts two figures walking toward on another at night. Doherty's work, beyond its evident allusion to the troubles in Northern Ireland, was one of the strongest pieces on view, largely due to its ambiguity. Two figures cross paths a few times, only to meet in a gaze, but not otherwise. The darkness in which Doherty's video unfolds is markedly different in appearance to the dual-screen video Training Ground (2006) by Aernout Mik. Here a crew of police enacts a terrorist drill, detaining "suspects," and cordoning off an ostensibly dangerous criminal scene. This is all the more disturbing as it is an event occurring in broad daylight.

In moving between floors within the Adam Gallery, itself an elegant example of contemporary New Zealand architecture, one was confionted in its small elevator by an appropriately brief (82 seconds) and captivating video by Kan Xuan (Kan Xuan--Ail, 1999) in which a young woman dashes through a subway passage yelling the title phrase. The sequence actually depicts the artist herself, it turns out and just after stepping into this mysterious vignette, one is deposited out from the elevator again.

Daniel du Bern's Youth Work (2007-08) features a photograph of the artist's battered and bruised visage as a poster-scale offset print. His choice to present a repetition of the same image in a large stack set atop a pallet is uncomfortably reminiscent of the approach of Felix Gonzalez-Torres. It might be asserted, however, that this emerging New Zealand artist is offering up his own allegorical struggle with a recent artistic heritage, both in terms of relational aesthetics and the all-too-dated notion of the "bad boy."

Most of the artistic projects included in "The Subject Now" address manipulation by and of the media, including Terrence Handscomb's video The Revelation/The Gospel According to Andrei (2005). which conflates references to both the horrific events of Abu Ghraib and the filmic artistry of Andrei Tarkovsky. Hye Rim Lee creates a kind of amalgamation of soft-core pornography, computer graphics, and neo-minimalist polish in her Candyland (2006). On view from et al. was "Disputed: Denied by the Estate of L. Budd National Park (Sorry)" (2008), a sometimes cryptic, yet somehow engaging, installation comprising sculptural elements, sound, and a broadsheet newspaper as neo-conceptualist document. More directly arresting and rich in its implications was Dengbejs (2007), a video shot in a documentary mode by Halil Altindere, in which the artist records a number of Kurdish men singing significant narratives of history and remembrance in a "traditional" setting that is actually in the midst of a large, modern Turkish city.

"The Subject Now" was an involved yet concise attempt to make a selective accounting of recent art practice, and more specifically to note how it has been both impinged upon and influenced indelibly by current events. Perhaps surprisingly, the assembled works were far more concerned with aesthetic impact than political ideology, although their political subtexts were not far from view.

MARTIN PATRICK is senior lecturer and coordinator of critical studies at the School of Fine Arts of Massey University in Wellington, New Zealand

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Above

Youth Work (2007-08) Daniel du Bern