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By Mark Amery
 
I really wanted to like Roundabout. I’ve tried over several weeks, I really have. After all, what isn’t there to like? An epic exhibition spread out across the entire City Gallery, featuring over a 100 contemporary artists from every far-flung corner of the globe, yet with a bevy of outstanding New Zealand artists centre stage. A show that speaks strongly of the need for global peace, love and understanding no matter our cultural differences. Amen to all of that.
 
The trouble is it’s all a bit much. A grandiose example, with the noblest of intentions, of the power of a curator to dramatically affect your view of great art.
 
Setting an unusual precedent, the exhibition has been curated by the private collector of the work, David Teplitzky. On paper this sounded like a fascinating concept. Why should public galleries continue to hide behind a thin veil of objectivity in selecting work they deem to be the best? Surely it’s far more honest to let a personal viewpoint reign free of such institutional know-it-all filtering?
 
Sadly, Roundabout suggests it’s not. My experience of the show felt akin to that of wandering around somebody’s art collection after a dinner party. You pick out some gems, notice how the art reads like an autobiography of their travels and faith, and forgive the occasional works you find twee or rather minor on the basis they probably have some great sentimental attachment to your generous host.
 
Rather beautifully Teplitzky’s metaphor for the exhibition is a set of rosary beads creating a kind of global mantra. Yet this suggests that the work is being treated as a series of slogans. Robert AF Thurman writes in his foreword to the accompanying book of Buddha’s enlightenment in discovering an “intensely satisfying orgasmic bliss that shares itself beyond all boundaries of self and others in a vast communion.” I’d like to say I felt bliss here, but I didn’t. Rather I felt the dizziness of signs moving repetitively around me at speed that I do going around a roundabout.
 
While the exhibition is full of exceptions to the following, the art does have a tendency towards excess, glossy rich surfaces and a barrage of symbols and loud statements. Rather than rosary beads I was reminded of a denim jacket covered in bright button badges. Pop art appropriation and collaging, with the repeating of popular and religious icons abounds, from Washington crossing the Delaware to Gandhi. Artists re-appropriate back into their own culture symbols of peace and faith that have been emptied of their local significance through their use in a globalised consumer market.
 
Exploring what is familiar to us in New Zealand from the 1990s as ‘identity politics’, with a conglomerate of faces and icons staring back at you, many of the artists comment on this commodification by reproducing and fracturing them even further, creating on mass a bewildering buzz of iconography.
 
The most unfortunate thing about this, given the curator’s clear wish to promote better understanding of cultures and artists concerns beyond the usual limited international art perspective and globalisation’s reduction of the world to a monocultural view, is that in such quantity it creates, like some giant United Colours of Benetton advertisement, a similar globalised emptying of independent cultural perspectives. It raises the volume of the work’s collected common messages at the expense of appreciating individual work’s deeper complexities.
 
The Roundabout project began as an attempt to bring New Zealand, Australian and Pacific work into conversation. Yet it has grown into a global behemoth, where the conversations become too limited. The exhibition ends up highlighting the conversations that aren’t happening as much as those that are.  It’s the equivalent of the great cuisines of the world mixing together at some great buffet table.
 
You can see the strength of the original concept in the use of figurative work by Maori sculptors to provide kaitiaki or guardians in each of the five main
galleries. However the exhibition would be far richer for taking any smaller number of artists represented and giving them more space to allow their work to talk more intently between each another.  
 
Given more space and more cultural context, for example, the wonderful colourful invention of the embroidery of the Bhutanese Textile Project - bringing contemporary imagery and text into a giddy psychedelic whirl – would be an eyepopping treat. Yet by the time I get to it my eyes are already glazing over from the saturation of so much visual busyness elsewhere.
 
Roundabout may be best viewed in small doses on repeat visits. While there are times where I find myself like a guest at that dinner party asking “what was he thinking”, there’s also a treasure trove of great work by artists I’ve never heard of, from countries I know too little about. Yemen’s Zadok Ben-David’s capture of nature and the human figure in motion in a circular steel plate. Northern Ireland’s Kevin Francis Gray’s pieta, cast like a giant plastic trinket and coated in black auto body paint. The bequiling shattered photographic trompe l’oeil of Korean Osang Gwon’s protesting figure, with her boots punching into the air.  I will keep on returning to pick out the many gems, before scurrying home to read more about these artists’ work in their own context.  
 
Roundabout: Conversations in Art From Around the Globe, City Gallery Wellington, until 16 January.