Booth Installation’

Press, 25 May 1989, Page 21

Booth Installation’

“Installation” by Chris Booth, at the Robert McDougall Art Gallery until June 18. The interests of Chris Booth, an Ham graduate, are not in traditional sculpture. His works reject the pedestal, the body and the frieze for environmental and contemporary concerns. Floor-to-ceiling pillars . in the McDougall Gallery’s forecourt are but a modest undertaking compared to other projects. He is contriving a 16m-tall structure using 40 one-tonne-plus boulders in Albert Park, Auckland, and another huge work combining a bronze boat propeller and 13 tonnes of rock, will commemorate the sinking of the Rainbow Warrior. His South Island pillared stonework is site-specific. It is about process, about placement in an art institution, about positioning by classical but artificial marble columns, about primitive art and about the use of throw-away materials. Everlasting stones reflect the “... shaping power of Mother Earth.” Booth modifies them with diamond drill, rod and insight. He makes slender columns that use eternal matter and twentieth century technology to highlight the significant message (often kept hidden in

Nature’s disorder) that humanity and earthly things need each other for enhancement. ’

The most interesting aspect of this exercise is the process. Wall photographs do not do justice to the hassles, the hauling around of boulders, the drilling, selecting and assembling of columns erected to touch the glass and beam ceiling. Stones, steel rods, shadows of figures and vacuum cleaners in the roof, ladders and conceptual ideas all bounce around to give a building site fervour.

Once complete though, it is static. The eye records and knows instantly that the vertical columns are stable. Tension is negated by the formality of structure. And human intervention isn’t necessary to draw attention to the "towering nature” of the South Island’s rocky outcrops. If the viewer projects ideas of primitivism, of the death of sculpture and the life of detritus, of natural versus enclosed space and of European reference compared to our found flotsam from mountain and river then she or he will enjoy this rather visually undemanding earth process art, locked into gallery requirements. Pat Unger.