John Hurrell – 3 November, 2010

In the small Film Archive gallery that is next door to the big square room of Auckland ARTSPACE in K Rd, we have an installation of nine video monitors, positioned on the floor in an n-formation of three connected lines, joined at rightangles. Three screens in each. It is like a square with one side missing so you can enter its open centre and peer down.

For this snappy, rhythmic, very elegant sound-image project, each artist (so it seems) has made three looped videos with a common theme, all nine of which play simultaneously. And each artist - for the three lines - has a screen in A, B, or C position. In other words, the first, second or third monitor of each row. There is no consistent alignment of image for each contributor, but the three sorts of video are easily identifiable.

One uses the human body, the surface of skin and the moving muscles and bones detectable underneath it. Another uses glass jars that can have volatile things placed or dropped within, or be themselves placed in extreme environments, and the third features pens that can be brutally treated, or dismantled and reassembled.

With ‘skin’ we see repeated movements of a female back as the body’s owner flexes and arches her shoulder blades. On another screen she wiggles her throat around her collar bones, and in the third she clicks objects hidden inside two hands joined by interlocking fingers.

With ‘jar’ one screen presents a glass container of water having rubber olive-shaped forms dropped into it from a great height, another has an exploding and very smokey firework placed inside it and a lid jammed on tight, and the third seems to be placed in a deep freeze or covered with liquid nitrogen.

Finally with ‘pen’, somebody pulls apart a drawing pen and quickly screws the bits together again, somebody else keeps furiously clicking a biro’s top ‘button’ until (I assume) the spring breaks, and the third plays the game of stabbing a piece of paper with a pen - between outstretched fingers - at increasing speed.

Though the images are at your feet and a little remote, the sound is staccatolike, loud and crisp - and engaging. With the three varieties of image, some cross over. For example the stabbing pen and hand has obvious links to ‘skin’, as does the biro being clicked or the ‘jar’ where the explosive is being lit with a match. You see the hands.

Another aspect is possible symbolism. For example the pens take a considerable battering - so is this piece of equipment intended as a Freudian symbol? Is the work a snort at insatiable men, or a critique of phallocentric power? Maybe it is something else: an attack on writing, the power of inscribed language, or even theory?

This is a nice little show that you can take in quickly. It so happens that most of the work in the ARTSPACE exhibition next door tends to be about narrative and prolonged duration, but before you go in, this Film Archive show as a possible aperitif, is appealingly lively. A bit of a tonic. Some added fizz.

John Hurrell

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