John Hurrell – 6 January, 2012

Upstairs in the new Auckland Art Gallery building, on the top floor (the Chartwell Gallery) the three brilliant installations from the collection by et al., Peter Robinson and Dane Mitchell have been replaced by the touring John Pule show Hauaga organised by City Gallery that is now finally arriving at his hometown. His paintings, lithographs and drawings here span about a decade, for this sampler shows his growth since when, as a Niuean Kiwi writer and artist, he began experimenting with the grid structure of hiapo, the traditional Niuean tapa barkcloth. In the early 90s he began inserting into that compositional format references to Pacific myths, personal narratives and social observations that he was also exploring in his poetry and novels.

Because the AAG top floor space is not that big, we see only 15 of the original 28 works presented in Wellington. But a new inclusion is a spectacular addition from the AAG Collection, a 15 metre long (18 panel) work on paper, The Death of A God. The overall hang is sensitive and comfortable, the result more of pragmatics than of original design because Gregory O’Brien the main curator has a tendency to overpack shows (remember the Aberhart survey in Wellington?). So by chance the result is a useful, very focussed, survey that highlights Pule’s strengths and downplays his weaknesses.

One of the problems with Pule‘s paintings (as most of his work is drawing in method, I call the works on canvas ‘paintings’ as opposed to works on paper) is that he is an inconsistent draughtsman. He mixes virtuosity with sloppy indifference and lacks an instinctive integrating procedure within his markmaking. By this I mean that he oscillates between two extremes of line, very thick and very thin, with no gradient that links the two: no continuum that lets the two function as components within a scale. His method lacks variations that collectively create a visual language, thereby making his linear juxtapositions abrupt and jarring. 

This means that his use of thin spidery ink lines, drawn with a pen, has unfortunate consequences in the big canvases, while it works most successfully in the works on paper where viewers are up close anyway. These drawings  are strange annotations to his cursive writing. As three separate series of spontaneously tilted marks and nuggetty graphic illustrations, the long sets of fragmented illustrated text (under glass) have a wild exuberance. They use subtle earth colours, mixed with smeared dramatic blacks, and lots of white paper. Although regularly in debt to other artists like Hotere or Cotton, Pule’s images are sometimes better because of their compositional compression. And he is good at telling stories with text. Delivering the information carefully. Controlling the pace.

Of these textual presentations the most successful are the PaperGraphica lithographs made with Marian McGuire that focus on 11 self-contained sections within the 16th chapter (Restless Spirit) of The Shark that Ate the Sun. Some of these handwritten paragraphs have circled words and arrows that allude to translation into Niuean and to other similar forms. The drawn lines after printing are softer and a little thicker than the nearby harsher pen and ink illustrations.

The necessary editing means that overall the most recent, freer, paintings here work best - despite the fore-mentioned ‘weedy line’ problem. The earlier sepia and umber coloured works from the mid-90s are too hiapo influenced in that the stacking of rectangles containing imagery is dense and rigid, like scaffolding. While they reveal a crucial role in Pule’s development, now their compact skeletal structure looks tedious.

In contrast the airier red, green and blue cloud paintings of around 2006 are extraordinarily fresh and unpredictable. AAG’s own massive To All New Arrivals (Kehe Tau Hauaga Foou) in particular, with its five blue and white panels, amazes with its inventive treatment of the middle east conflict (American fighter planes and bombers over Bagdad) as perceived by somebody very aware of the effects of imperialism in the South Pacific. The imagery (such as vines suspended from clouds, toppled statues of Batman) though abundant, has no sense of cramming - and you can spend a lot of time pouring over the five surfaces discovering interesting details. While some of the drawing is weak you still get swept away by the different macro and micro worlds, and comparing related images between panels.

The best space for substantial contemporary art exhibitions at AAG is the downstairs floor, but that is being taken up with overloaded NZ collection shows of absurdly long duration. With the New Gallery gone, inner city Auckland has a problem with touring displays from which Pule has benefited - for this trimmed survey looks excellent. Fewer loose canvases improve his PR.

John Hurrell

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