A PREVIEW OF PRETENTIOUSNESS

I went to an art exhibition opening a couple of weeks ago. It was Vincent Ward's Inhale/Exhale - a mixed media show of his photography, paintings and videos that make up his latest work and which he is taking to China later this year. It was also the book launch of images from the exhibition.

So what were my impressions?


Disturbing. Rude. Incomprehensible. Vile. Extortive. Loopy.

D.R.I.V.E.L. for short.

Now Vincent Ward is a great film-maker and is a good photographer and artist. There is technically nothing wrong with the execution of the works. It is what's behind them that is a worry.

The images are misogynistic and dodgy. Many of the paintings, photographs and videos depict a woman asphyxiating/drowning, wrapped up in plastic underwater. They are ugly and reminiscent of shots from forensic murder films and TV series like Dexter.

This didn't stop the oohs and ahs from the who's who of the art world and Auckland society who were out in force either with their glad-rags (and furs) on or dressed down in designer ripped jeans. The Mercs, Audis, Beemers and Porsches outside gave them away if the dowdy dress didn't.

What got to me was the seemingly unthinking acceptance of this rubbish, the old 'he is a famous film-maker so it must be good' attitude or, more worryingly 'I don't really like it but better pretend I do because people are watching' syndrome.

I'm of an age now where I can do or say what I think and don't give a stuff about propriety. This doesn't mean that I am too rude but I do voice my opinions.


Looking at a monstrous image next to a woman drowning in a condom I loudly said to my friends "That looks like Hieronymus Bosch in his auto-erotic period." This got me disapproving stares and some tut-tuts from some 'mutton- dressed- as- lamb' society matrons. Akish the Philistine would have approved.


I'm not  totally anti-art. I have lots of friends who are artists. My mother was an amateur artist and a boy's best friend is his mother isn't she? (sorry that was a line from Hitchcock's Psycho that I watched on TV the other night and it stuck in my mind).