Modernist showing at C.S.A. Gallery

Press, Volume CXV, Issue 33974, 15 October 1975, Page 12

Modernist showing at C.S.A. Gallery

This year’s annual Group Show has opened at the C.S.A. Gallery. It closes on October 24.

With their golden anniversary a year or two away, it seems not inappropriate for the members of the Group to engage in a little introspection. What is the Group, what does it stand for, where has it come? Each year its impact is weakened, and only positive, and immediate answers to questions of this nature would seem to justify its continuation. It has been an assemblage of artists whose collective contribution has shared in shaping the passage of New Zealand painting; it has been of historical significiance. If it was once the cake, it is now hardly the icing.

I understand that the Group came into being as a reaction against the rejection of modernism by the C.S.A. selection panels. A negative beginning you might say, but a negative attitude which soon became a positive promotion of uncompromising modernism flying in the face of C.S.A. conservatism.

The fifties were balmy years. McCahon, Woollaston, and Sutton, were some of the hard core of our young professionals whose singleminded conviction was largely responsible for setting the Group, and modem art, in its various forms, upon the New Zealand map. Initially it was a dynamic collective front, protecting its individual members from the erosive influences of conservatism.

It is still something of a protectionist movement, but the tide has turned, the conservatism is now internal and the threat younger talent poses to the establishment is best met by absorbing it into the establishment, and its modem academicist hierarchy. There is a reluctance amongst many of our painters to conduct themselves in a manner consistent with that of a thoughtful professional artist. Their commitment to their art is frequently less than total, their behaviour dilettantist. The Group unfortunately has come to provide such a painter with the protection necessary to continue in this fashion —protection against exposure to a criticial public — and, because of a consistency of attitude, protection from others.

It offers the aspiring artist all the semblances of success, acceptance by colleagues, and apparent attainment. But it is not an incestuous mutual acceptance for which the young artist should be aspiring. It is pub-

lie acceptance most especially by the nation’s galleries and patrons, and the Groups’s influence on these is now’ negligible. If exhibition in a group context is desirable then presumably there will be a motivation consistent with the aims of all the contributors. If expedience and mutual protection is the aim, then it says little in favour of each contributor’s integrity. *

Presumably the kind of purpose we are looking for transcends this. The challenge that the Group must face is to find a shared philosophy, and common ground for its continuance. Its members must search their own professional attitudes and find them not wanting.

New members should be elected on grounds of real attainment and consistency of aim with that of the group at large, not as the result of a threat, real or implied, which their work might be considered to offer to the status quo. In short, the Group must be seen to be a cohesive union of artists sharing common, defensible beliefs, and these should be evident from their attitudes and work both within and without the context of the Group. As usual, this year’s exhibition is a discordant medley of painters, printmakers, potters, weavers and sculptors, some local, some not. Their only common ground is that their work is by and large not topographic or romantic landscape, although Olivia Spencer-Bower and Doris Lusk are represented by work of this genre. There is everything from the tourist shop kitsch jewellery of Ross McFarlane

and the. gross sculpture of Llew Summers to tse rics managnificence of Hotere’s four large loose “Song Cycle” canvases. The local contingent comes off rather badly, their contribution to the exhibition being substantially propped by such outside guests as Hotere, and Haniy (represented by a suite of seven fluidly painted nonfigurative panels in which paint stands for the “Seven Ages of Man” from “As You Like It”). Nevertheless, Sheehan’s and Hardy’s gutsy dynamism, Bruce Edgar’s mechanistic intricity, Jenny Hunt’s excellent sculptural weaving (135,137,138), and Vivienne Bishop’s delicate sensitivity attest to strength, and potential, among the younger artists.

Gavin Bishop’s works, consistent with the last Octagon Group show, are im-

maculately executed, wellconsidered decorative pieces, but a good deal better suited to the illustrated pages of a fine book than to canvas. McCahon’s contribution is slight, Cleavin does not come up to his recent Brooke Gifford show, although the futile dance sequence, reminiscent of a correspondence fox-trot course of the fifties, is a compelling example of his particular brand of satirical humour. The Frances Hodgkins’ fellow, John Parker, is showing a series of fine three-part drawing sequences of “The countryside from a car window,” although we might be justified in wishing to see something more substantial than this from him. All in all it is an amazing fruit salad of 162 works which doesn’t add up to very much at all. — T.L.R.W.