Hight’s ‘Paintings’

Press, 16 August 1988, Page 17

Hight’s ‘Paintings’

“Paintings,” by Michael Hight, at the Jonathan Jensen Gallery, until August 20. Reviewed by Pat Unger. Today, artists to be worthy of the name must be seen to be in the mainstream, to be identifiably contemporary. As pictorial image has progressed through classicism, realism, romanticism and abstraction it now is in the epoc of the code and the copy. Paintings have become composites of fragmented fictions, both past and present, those from the past appearing to have more validity than those of the present.

Contrary to modernist practices, the key to painting here is not its central subject, but is to be found in its margins. From edge to edge the works are pastiches — medleys from a variety of sources. Their ordering shows a conscious rejection of reason or logic. Subjective associations and the need for surface experiences are deemed more important. Michael’s Hight’s four large canvases at the Jonathan Jensen Gallery waver about in this psychological and historical no-man’s-land. So significantly “coded,” “deconstructed” and “decentered” are they that there is no doubting their contemporariness. “Exit to Main Menu,” in computer programming style is a delineation of Westminster Abbey’s floor plan. Its tarry dullness is brightly edged with aluminium foil and beneath it is the textured corpse of an old digger mouldering away. This stark but not unattractive work suggests post-colonial input into its postmodern “mode.” The “down-under” reading predicates international-Gothic reference above.

In the recently popular wild-expres-sionist style, “Top Shelf,” also projects ideas of universality coupled with New Zealand imagery. The ground of this landscape looks

pretty ravaged. Sculls of dead sheep and several cheap female dolls, are attached to the surface. At its right, on a separate canvas, are the heads of clowns from a carnival shy. Draped in fish netting, they no doubt await the throes of some unknown misfortune.

Do these sculls represent the freezing works, the rightness of natural substance, rape of the land or the real world of men? And are the dolls mere extruded clones, of which there are no originals, and does their false “cuteness” imply worthlessness or just the social order? The viewer might well ask. “Codename Icarus” and “Fabric of Unknowing” are morality plays. Friezes of heavily painted humans, either from the holocaust or performing some ritual dance of death, are defined by their margins. A catalogue of graphic illustrations alluding to human achievement, a woman locked into her Walkman’s universal music and wreathed with everlasting plastic flowers (superimposed upon the stockmarket quotes) and the shadow of an upside down Icarus all tell of the fall of man. Ambition and vanity meet their fate in life after modernism. Hight’s style of fractured psychohistorical drama, with its reliance on image taken from image in such a way as to divorce meaning from appearance, curiously numbs emotion. Presumably this is the artist’s intention. These works call for lengthy viewing to “read” their significance and their surface.

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