The Policy Implications of a Failure to Create.

That's Obvious! That's Right! That's True! et al at the Christchurch Art
Gallery, 23 July – 22 November.

This is possibly the best show you can see in the province of Canterbury at the moment. It makes the Seraphine Pick next door look like talented Seventh Form work. It's harsh and serious. It takes the viewer quite literally out of the cool white cube and into a space defined by engagement, away from the pale introspective psychologising of Pick and the eerie reminisces of van Hout. It is not fun. The world is not fun either.

There's a temptation to just list all the parts of That's Obvious! That's
Right! That's True!, to repeat all the claims and statistics et al range throughout the grey room, scrawled on black boards, projected on screens, typed up on neat sheets of paper, and announced from loudspeakers. But that is not really what et al are getting at. We all know, vaguely, that Israel's actions in the Occupied Territories are abominations amongst the nations, that the modern industrial economy was fuelled by women and children digging coal from the earth in mines miles deep and a metre high, and that fundamentalist Christians and Islamists are not very nice people. We do not particularly need to be told at this late date that there are some flaws in free markets, or that there may also have been some issues with civil liberties in the former Soviet Republics.

Rather, et al want to look at the structures that cause those actions. How is a reality constructed where the economic development of the world is determined by the performance of the US housing market? How is a reality constructed whereby it seems eminently reasonable to accuse the figurehead President of Ireland of complicity in the crimes of the PLO? There isn't a simple answer. But et al explore these issues, through the creation of an environment defined by the industrial treatment of information. It is printed in a newspaper, New Zealand
Altruism Review, and bound up in plastic, reams of meaning wrapped unreadable up in a milky sheen. It is softly spoken over loudspeakers, a female voice carefully reciting passages on the conditions of the working class in England from Marx's Capital. It is prostituted by the government of the Uzbek Soviet Socialist Republic, in communiques from the Society for Friendship and Cultural Relations with Foreign Nations and statistics on the number of lectures on atheist subjects.

Et al subject this material residue of the superstructure to an intense gaze; they work back in to it, bring charcoal (the forests of Europe were destroyed that the industries of Europe might have charcoal) over and around the claims of power. This contestation of the forms of control is messy. It is not the sort of art that ends up being beautiful and elegant. It is a rough passionate art, an art that exposes ugliness and must, therefore, bear the birthmarks of the world that bore it. Et al can in fact draw (or rather, write) with a piece of burnt stick on a surface of mashed fibre in such a way as to make you very angry with that which is the case.