Being asked to speak at events like this is like being asked
to be the designated driver. It is nice to enjoy the confidence
of your colleagues, so that they get to party, and you get to
have all the nice orange juice.
My great thanks on behalf of you all as guests to this wonderful
gallery and to Greg Burke, Hanna Scot, Gillian Irving, and the
installation. We are here because of you.
As a special matter I also want to say a public thank you to
John McCormack. John ran his leg of the Govett-Brewster gallery
relay race some time ago, and shifted the tradition of this place
to a new level when he did. He has often stood in the place I
am standing in tonight.
There are several great pleasures with occasions like this,
which always somewhat overwhelm me. I am certainly a person for
whom these occasions generate pointing behaviour. You know it
when you see it and you will see it in these remarks; I engender
the lolling tongue, the energetic goodwill, and the lack of knowledge,
of a red setter dog in the midst of general excitation.
That means that your designated driver is well-meaning but clueless.
Oh dear.
Here is one of the pleasures of this occasion: one has a certain
warm confusion as to what the occasion is. We are here as a gathering,
in a beautiful, historic, New Zealand, city, in good spring time,
with the artist’s family and friends, the gallery’s family and
friends, wannabes, supporters, charlatans, and poorly guided
enthusiasts, like me. There are speeches and there is a little
feeling in the air. And we are at something that it is hard to
know what it is.
This occasion has many of the more normal ceremonies we take
part in, and know how to make complete sense of.
It has some of the aspects of a funeral, with its solemnising
and scope for outbreaks of high emotion and sonorousness, only
of course it is much much happier.
Neither is this occasion a wedding, although it has some the
features of one.
And so you could say to yourself, what is this warm occasion
and gathering all about? And in my case, My God, how did I get
here? People have come from big distances.
Another great pleasure is that this wonderful occasion is that
it is happening to someone else. Clearly this pleasure is part
of the melancholy charge at a funeral. It is also a happy feature
of going to another’s wedding not your own. Although with weddings
there is also the pang and the tingle of being part of one of
the great set pieces of foreplay in public. But there is a secret
relief and gaiety being part of an act where someone else has
had to bear responsibility for the setting and the carriage of
the emotional tenor.
But we are unsettled, in this vague way, nonetheless. It is
because one of the huge and particular feelings of this occasion
is that it is not about someone, even someone called
John Reynolds. This wonderful show, K Rd to Kingdom
Come, is about something. And it is a very different
occasion than we are generally used to seeing.
This something is in part a thorough and beautiful takeover
of the whole gallery. Large visual artworks activate the walls
here and cannot be seen all at once by the viewer. They strongly
solicit attention. We glimpse here and there the strong abstract
pull of the work while we are having our conversations and various
distractions. This show is a wonderland, and we are unsettled,
because we feel ourselves to be as Alices.
So what is this particular work as something to look at and
think about, and what difference does it make?
Of many things possible to say, or which could be said better
by others who are here this evening, I will comment on four things
about the work; its largeness of scale, the way movement appears
as an idea, the use of text, and the nature of minimal strategy.
The largeness of scale is a common and distinguishing feature
of Reynolds’ painting. It is a feature only successful if it
is driven by naturally large and concrete frameworks of meaning: K
Rd is a streetscape; the Office of the Dead is derived
from a distribution of yachts in a race upon the sea; Kingdom
Come is about a change to the world; Western Springs/Bloody
Angle is about a theatre of war, and a park; Nietzsche
on White’s Beach invokes a beach scene, sort of, and so on.
The point is, each large work here is both a painting, or is
a developed visual idea, and also retains strong linkages with
objects in the world. There is a literalness to these paintings,
together with the abstraction. This gives them their particular
Reynolds beauty, which is a vernacular quality.
They also surface a particular aesthetic emotion, which is their
principal value: they are large enough to get lost in as a viewer,
which is idiom for, you cant see them all at once. They sustain
endless viewings, particularly if see them in close-up, from
an ideal viewing distance of approximately 8 inches.
The idea of movement is central to the works success. Nietzsche
on White’s Beach, for example, is the sort of poem I would
like to write. It presents itself as something to be read,
as a serially unfolding group of lines. It is hugely suggestive
with movement, across the face, and downward. The modulation
of colour in the wall drawing does this too. The Office
of the Dead overwhelms as a sea of vectors of speed and
direction taken from roadsigns. Kingdom Come is a radiation
pattern, and so on.
Reynolds placement of painting on a boundary in common with
the world of text is also a regular device. In many works here
painting becomes drawing becomes writing. What is this all about?
It is an abstract pleasure, like everything else. Words and texts
are defamiliarised - by bad writing, or defeating length, or
by being hard to decipher because they are written in pudgy oilstick
- so that they blur and appear as images; as a teasing luxury
of repeated texture and thought, and register of thought.
There is an increasing minimalism to Reynolds painting, which
is not yet acknowleged, and which this show makes obvious. The
strategy works the way minimalism always does: by reducing its
narrative content art sharpens the search instincts of the viewer,
and drives basic aesthetic states – of speed, texture, dispersal,
thought - more solidly home.
But there are other things, apart from the paintings, that I
wish to name. This occasion is about two other large themes:
art values, and the tradition of the Govett-Brewster Art Gallery.
When an art show comes to achieve a particular authority, power
and quality, which this one does, it sends out huge wafts, to
touch the broadest of states of feeling. We sense in such a show
as this the invisible presence of all of the things we care about
most. K Rd to Kingdom Come takes its place with the truly
significant shows of the past in these rooms, and with them makes
plain, yet again -
- What labour means
- the value and nature of innovation, made as always, in boldness
and independence of thinking
- how courage or its objects always capture our affection
- the civic nature of strong artworks, which bring a glory
to the region in which they are made; and lastly,
- how joy gets into the world
This is the bridge that leads directly to the meaning of the
Govett –Brewster Gallery. It is an institution famous for its
championship of the above list of qualities. It has a commitment
to high culture in contemporary visual art and an independence
of thinking, together with a professionalism of approach, that
allows New Plymouth to recruit artists like John for shows like
this.
So this is not a wedding or a funeral although it has some of
these features. It is painting enveloping its viewers. And it
is a city performing an act of leadership.
The familiar things are the traditional values we love about
such art: the fact that they are paintings, and in your face,
that they are dynamic, rich in materials, and dense with things
to look at and think about. There is another familiar too: they
need viewers to wander around them, with limited attention spans
and busy heads, that is, in various kinds of difficulty and proximity
with the paintings, over a lifetime.
The strangeness comes in the disguise of directness, angularity
of vision, and a certain extremity in the use of scale, visual
elements, lines, and materials. I call this the rudeness.
