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Auckland Art Gallery

I have recently been questioning what I consider to be art. This is a hard one because so many things that many people consider to be awful are considered to be priceless by a few. And vice versa. After being convinced for a long time that art critics are rarely clued in on reality I have decided that art is in the eye of the artist. In my opinion where the artist was at when they produced the work has more to do with the 'worth' of the work than the outcome. If the artist is producing work with little thought to make money then for me that is the baseline, the lowest form of art (copying is not art). If the artist has spent a lot of energy getting to a state of mind where they can produce this work of art then I think of it as a higher 'tier' of art. I did not do art history and I have not read anything on this matter so this is purely my opinion at the moment.

ARTIST
EXHIBITION

The one that sticks in my mind most was one that I talked to the curator about, the format of the piece was a triptych sculpture of roughly 8ftX5ftX0.5ft X 3 mounted on the wall. The piece was made by throwing darts at a map of New Zealand and then selecting three darts and recreating the land that three of them marked. I was particularly impressed by the quality of the representation considering it must have been based on a plaster cast or something of that sort. I liked the conceptual idea of representing new zealand this way, but I was a little sceptical that all of the pins landed in such man made environments. After all, isn't this meant to be a country of pristine nature? The other pieces in this exhibition were more or less unrelated so I decided to take two of these pieces separately.

ARTIST
EXHIBITION

This next piece was aesthetically quite challenging for me. But as I think the content was interesting and I am meant to be challenging my personal aesthetics anyway I will try and consider this piece in a different way. The piece was a google earth demo showing an area of land that I personally think of as the 'cradle of civilisation'. It includes Israel, Palestine, Jerusalem and a number of other places with the names written in hebrew. Interestingly Palestine is not represented on the map. at certain points in time certain places on the map are surrounded by a pentagon of towers and CIA data about that place is read out using a text to speech program. From my point of view it is hard to tell whether this is art or simply stating facts. It is interesting to note that the curator was quite vehement about the political situation in these places. I also think that the text to speech was an act of deliberate removal of emotion. This creates a certain frustration as you hear the data about these operations involving the death of thousands of people being blithely read out as if it was of no consequence. I suppose we are all suffering from a propaganda overload as it is but it is interesting to note that a piece with emotion deliberately removed is capable of evoking strong emotion in people with preconceived ideas.

Lisa Reihana
Digital Marae

This exhibition is by a Maori artist that combines photoshop and Maori themes to create works of art that are reminiscent of lord of the rings posters. I found this piece interesting because it took Maori culture and presented it in an almost totally modern way. I found the artists website later and I'm interested that she got to this point not by growing up in the city but by coming to computers from a cultural background. I liked the works of art from an aesthetic point of view but there are limitations, probably caused by coming to computers and modern art works over a period of time.

John Renoylds
Cloud

To me this was one of those elegant ideas with no real soul. The concept is relatively simple, but in endeavoring to write every possible word it kind of lost authenticity, at least for me. Part of the reason for this is it felt forced, like the more is better concept was taken too far. Another reason is that some of the words weren't anything I would still classify as natural to the purpose of the exhibition. Aesthetically the exhibition is brilliant, I enjoy minimalism and this was a good example of taking a minimalist approach conceptually and scaling it up into something mildy awe inspiring. Each individual work would gain from being one of many in the sense that it is part of a larger collection. One could imagine another layer, for instance different colour canvases with words unique to the country represented that colour, each colour getting its own exhibition in a different gallery.

MIC Atmos

Tom Corby and Gavin Bailey
Cyclone

This exhibition was interesting to me because it was similar to some of the exhibitions we have seen and conceptualized. Unlike our java based projects it was written in C++, after talking to one of the artists for a while I learned that the project took 6 months to complete. I was amazed at this considering that there were various problems displaying the RSS feeds (some characters were unformatted and letters disappeared etc.) It looked like a much smaller project than it apparently was. I suppose a combination of a more complex coding language and greater depth of idea development could be what caused this. Personally I was under-whelmed, I think some of us could produce something that impressive without too much effort. I would have been impressed if the whole thing had been done in 3d, although that might just be what I would have done!

Lisa Benson
Fade

This piece of work was conceptually alot more than the product, this piece of work was essentially a collection of antique pieces of photographic paper left to absorb light in her photographic studio. The idea being as far as I can tell that photographers are so intent on capturing light and shadow that they forget to see the act of illumination by light as a beautiful thing in itself. This work on the surface is quite difficult to get into because it looks a like a bunch of exposed ancient photographic negatives, the only interest arising from the different colours attributed to the decay of chemicals in the different kinds of paper. On a different level of understanding the paper has been influenced by specific light in a specific place so it can be thought of as capturing the 'nature' of the sunlight in that particular studio. As a concept it is fine, and you could even say that this has happened. But for me it fails to capture the nature of the light in such a way as I can see it in the piece and as a result it comes across as more of a thought experiment than a successful work of art. This is unfortunate as I enjoy the idea, it is one of the reasons I find pin hole cameras so interesting in comparison to the ultra complex nature of humanities current efforts on the subject.