By Mark Amery Courtesy of The Dominion Post

Great art often stays with me like great music - it demands another spin. It keeps turning in the head, making me want to return. It's catchy but complex - a catchiness born of an artist taking the familiar and shifting it into vital new ground.

It's thus that I find myself wanting to return to the Adam Art Gallery up at Victoria University and cursing that hill. All nine works in current group exhibition The Subject Now have got their hooks into me. By Mark Amery Courtesy of The Dominion Post

Great art often stays with me like great music - it demands another spin. It keeps turning in the head, making me want to return. It's catchy but complex - a catchiness born of an artist taking the familiar and shifting it into vital new ground.

It's thus that I find myself wanting to return to the Adam Art Gallery up at Victoria University and cursing that hill. All nine works in current group exhibition The Subject Now have got their hooks into me.Curator Christina Barton's interest is in how contemporary artists are unsettling given perspectives on the human subject, exploring the complexity of assumptions behind a viewer's perspective of others in a world so heavily controlled by the media's frames. It's the way these artists take familiar voyeuristic viewpoints on terrorism, violence, culture and sex and question their construction that makes this exhibition so magnetic.

Often the subjects in these works are free in their movement but controlled by external forces, making them uncertain in position to us, displaced and in an array of different relationships with others.

Completely captivating is Dutch artist Aernout Mik's Training Ground, a two screen video positioned at knee height on a constructed white wall (as if urging you to leap it). The camera slowly sweeps around like a wayward searchlight over bodies on the ground or in the process of patrolling with guns (made of wood), or frisking and arresting suspects. This seems at first a training exercise, but the characters don't behave as you expect, constantly disturbing by taking on different roles or movement, like dancers abstracting a charged real situation. On the outside of the exercise truckies have pulled up and are cooking curry, contributing to a field of action full of cultural confusions. Like some extraordinary complex psychodrama the boundaries between spectatorship and participation keep collapsing, echoing the way terrorism has completely unnerved our concept of how good and bad dress and behave.

Marketa Othová's Talk to Her takes the perspective of hidden Paparazzi, a camera in Venice shooting off from a cafe table at another group socialising, a celebrity coming into view among them, who is made no more interesting than any other person (Bjork, or is it?!). Over 31 images narrative and subject shift and are confused, and your own perspective as viewer becomes increasingly troubled and considered as a result.

For Willie Doherty's film Passage you walk into a space so dark you are uncertain what you might bump into. On two screens, the camera uses familiar tension building techniques as two figures in a badly lit urban thoroughfare approach each other and then - disappointing the expectation of violence each time - pass. It's beautifully rhythmically structured. This is nicely aligned with a work by Daniel Du Bern, where you're invited to take a poster of the artist's battered face from a pile on a pallet. Du Bern has found a strong contemporary take on the performance art tradition of artist as mutilated product. The prospect of hanging one of these of these posters on my wall raised all sorts of uncomfortable questions about the self portrait.

All the artists in The Subject Now interrogate the framing in film, print and photography that subjects are presented to us within. Like et al.'s creepy barely decipherable soundtrack of authoritarian mumblings, they mess with the mechanics of control over the individual.

This exhibition is marked by both its breadth of approaches and its locations. Barton has emphasised her theme by also bewildering traditional expectations of the source of work for a group exhibition. Of the nine artists, four would be identified as New Zealanders, but two were resident overseas when they created their work (Daniel Du Bern and Terrence Handscomb). Another, Hye Rim Lee, is originally from Korea and then there is et al. The others from Ireland, Czechoslovakia, Turkey, Holland and China also suggest a new shifting art map of outsider perspectives.

Barton's show has the umbrella breadth of a biennale. If you haven't made this year's Sydney Biennale be consoled by the fact that all of this work would have sat well with other form-turning work currently sited on Sydney's Cockatoo Island. We are unlikely to get a better contemplation of where contemporary art is at internationally this year.

The Subject Now , until 5 October
Adam Art Gallery
Victoria University of Wellington
Gate 3, Kelburn Parade

Image
Daniel du Bern
Youth work 2007/8
digital colour print
Courtesy of the artist
Photo: Robert Cross

08/09/08