Exhibitions Dunedin

FRANCIS POUND

The Lunar Eclipse: an environment by Jacqueline Fraser at the Bosshard Galleries

Woman is above all a general harmony.. . in the muslins, the gauzes, the vast and shimmering clouds of fabric in which she clothes herself.
BAUDELAIRE

Watch your step: as you open the gallery door your eyes are full of pink - right at your feet, a clear plastic bag full of tangled white tape. A soft trap - a warning to take care in your movements through a space of fragile things.

Torn, irregular sheets of translucent pink plastic float at eye level and above. They are suspended from the ceiling and walls, and stretched from each other by wires. Parts of the plastic are taut. Parts hang loose, bag, crinkle. Parts fold over other parts, or overlap pieces floating behind them, darkening the pink. There are sharper colours - turquoises, scarlets, viridians, purples, a black - set into the prevailing pink; and below the pink, intricate clusters of transparent things, hanging. There are delicate details; to your left (you are still at the door) pieces of white plastic tape; 1/4 inch wide and about 9 inches tong, are hanging on threads. They look like brushstrokes in space. In the skylight to your right, tenuous wisps of raffia. They are white on white walls - in the sky's light they are luminescent, or dissolve. In the left skylight corn husks twirl from frail wire circlets.

The first impression was of freedom - freedom in placing, in the choice of materials, freedom from gravity. It seemed 'a magpie gathering', as the catalogue said, of things light, bright and transparent. Things were strung out, things that as well as being entities were events, improvisations in a space not so much structured by them as traversed and interspersed. Intersperse: verb, transitive; to scatter, or place here and there in no fixed order; to interlard; to mingle, as the dictionary says. This is no reproach: after all, André Breton, Cage, Duchamp: randomness is perfectly respectable. I mean to imply a happy spontaneity.

But there were orders. Evidently, unity of colour, of lightness, of transparency, of sheen. Everything was, literally, linked. Perhaps less evidently, there was a unity of form, a repetition of similar elements, and, for those who cared to count, a unity of number. There were seven hanging 'nets', focal points of similar form, and seven 'weights', plastic bags stuffed full of flax, long leaves, or binding-tape, lying on the floor, with one end lifting off.

Let's get closer to the nets. For convenience I'll number them.

Net 1: a gauzy pink cloth is draped over a decagonal metal frame. The frame is bent a bit out of plane, and is held, not quite horizontally, by seven wires from the plastic sheets above. The bag is crammed with blue plastic binding tape, topped with a crumple of violet plastic - a delicious combination. A little net, cut from a purple stocking, hangs from the bag by three wires, its top held open by a circlet of wire. Dangling from the little net by a red cotton thread there is a strip of pale violet binding tape about 1/8 inch wide.

Net 2: is a net petticoat, dyed viridian green and hung upside down, its hem held open by seven wires. What would once have been a waistband is less transparent than the main body of the net, so green concentrates at the bottom. Hanging from the band by three wires is a little circle, which, like the wires, is bound in violet cloth. Suspended from the circle by seven wires is a pink silk mantle from a Tilly lamp. The mantle is weighted by three wires hanging from its lower end.

Net 3: an irregular circle of wire, bound in glossy pink tape, is stretched from three wires. Seven wires, bound in viridian cloth, hang from this circle to hold a lower circle about half the diameter of the first. The lower circle holds open a pale pink hair net. From the bottom of the net three glossy pink tapes descend to a tube of purple stocking. Its upper end is sown over a circle of wire, its lower end cut jagged. A six-inch length of pale violet tape about 1/16 inch wide hangs from the stocking by a single pink thread.

Net 4: A blue gauze scarf is draped over a rough circle of number-B wire. Seven finer wires hang, from the corners of the scarf and from three irregularly-spaced points on its hem, to hold a wire circle about half the diameter of the top circle. The lower circle holds open a pale pink hair net. Directly from the tangled bottom of the net hangs the filament of a light bulb.

Net 5: A black umbrella, bereft of its ribs, hangs by ten wi fs from a Datsun hubcap. The hubcap is suspended by three wires.

Net 6: Hung by seven wires from a sheet of pink plastic above is a blue scarf. Its lower edges have been cut jagged - another instance of the artist's attention to the tattered and torn, to mutable things. Seven tapes suspend a pale pink hairnet from the tatters.

Net 7: is like a chandelier of plastic bags. Sixteen bags hang from a rough circle of wire. Each bag encloses something: scarlet cellophane, a twirl of twine, a spiral of leaf, crumpled wads of tissue, the convolutions of dried, shredded flax. Below the bags, and also hanging from the circle, is a green-dyed hairnet held open by a circle of wire: from it, in an elegant twist, two lengths of tape descend.

That description of the nets, circumstantial to the point of tedium, should be sufficient to suggest the artist's care - care in detail, in selection, in placing, in number. The simplicity of the wire-tying, which one reviewer found lacking in traditional craftsmanship, need not worry us here. As Delacroix wrote, over a century ago: 'Execution only need be sufficient to convey the artist's idea'.

When Jacqueline Fraser wrote in the catalogue: 'I have abandoned traditional methods because they no longer express my ideas', she may have thought it is a necessary precaution in Dunedin: but there is a tradition behind her work. It goes back as far as Duchamp's Sculpture for Travelling (1918): a rubber bathing cap sliced, then stretched by string over his hotel room; or his 1,200 coal sacks hung from a gallery ceiling (1938); or his 1,000 miles of string impeding the spectator of the Surrealist Exhibition (1942).

I write let's get closer to the nets' because in The Lunar Eclipse, the spectator could not be sedentary. Most blatantly, because of the shape of the gallery, part of the work was always round a corner. You moved through the space, ducking here, looking up there, and your eye focused in on a detail, or out to a larger form. The forms themselves suggested this movement, actual or ocular, since there were foci, clusters of detail set among more-broadly-seen forms. It was as though the focus was inconstant - among larger forms, details were studded, intermittently. The work said: look me all over - come close enough to touch, step back so you can admire all of me, oh come to me again! As you moved you touched things - accidentally or on purpose - and moved them. Discreetly, the room responded to you as you responded to it.

The spectator had to move to see the work; but he could move with relative freedom. In an environment Jacqueline Fraser made in a corridor of Elam, in 1977, the 'givens' of walls, ceiling and floor were almost obliterated, and the spectator obstructed, made to crawl in one part, and in another to stumble over tyres heaped under cloth. In the Bosshard gallery, though, space was not so much interfered with as marked, the spectator not so much impeded as invited: 'we would like you to move throughout the environment and bring your children', as the catalogue said.

Children were brought and ran around looking and laughing, jumping on to the weights: the work survived them. This dwarfish race, existing in lower strata of space than we, was instructive in that respect: they encouraged us to relax on the floor with untried vistas. Also there was a child's painting tacked next to the catalogue on the wall. I could see why Jacqueline Fraser chose it. A gaily-coloured circus scene, it was leaping with jugglers, trapeze artists, acrobats-all defying gravity.

But why the title Lunar Eclipse? As the spectator moved there were interceptions of the light of one heavenly body by another, overlappings, temporary and partial effacements. Yet such was the transparency that nothing was eclipsed. The actual lunar eclipse coincided with the middle of the two-week exhibition, and provided, I suppose, an appropriate event to be celebrated, or an appropriate celebration to Jacqueline Fraser's event.