I think it's to do with not just the experience of art, but specifically the experience of art in a gallery or museum - it can create, or maybe crystallise, feelings and emotions in ways that aren't normally accessible. It doesn't come every time, but when it does, it's at once acute and textural, complex, polyphonic. I suppose it has something to do with way in which engagement with art requires openness - openness to the 'larger than oneself' nature of the particular works while at the same time
This time, it really hit me while I was looking at a set of photographs by Gavin Hipkins, 80 in all, about 50 x 30 cm each, arranged consecutively, side-by-side, along three walls, under the collective title of "The homely". The series explicitly explores a theme that's at least strongly implicit in many of the other works in the exhibition - that of the uncanny (here, via its other common translation of 'unhomely') - through simple shots of familiar sites and objects, taken from unfamiliar angles and perspectives, in a way which makes them seem like fleeting glimpses of things we both know and are puzzled by: crosses, coastal scenes, war memorials, museums, corridors, lights (indoors and out), all given neutral 'place/subject' names ("Napier (Monument)", "Auckland (One Tree Hill)", "South Island (Trout)", etc). I started at one end and worked my way along; by about the seventh or eighth, I'd realised I had a lump in my throat and a fluttering in my chest, and I couldn't have said why.
The exhibition generally is heavily tilted towards photography, and explicitly sets itself to explore a particular stream within contemporary New Zealand art, drawing on complex senses of disquiet and disease mingled with reflections on national and cultural identity and appearance. Some which particularly struck me:
* Anne Noble - "Ruby's room". Six large, high-gloss, close-up photos of a child's mouth, distorted in various ways (edges of lips pulled down by a piece of string, tongue stained a vivid blue, a bright green piece of apple between the lips, etc).
* Bill Culbert - "Sunset III". Cibachrome photograph of a metal sculpture at sunset against a blue sky. And also his other gelatin silver b&w ones. As the plaque had it: "Light is treated as an active force in opposition to its ephemeral effects - incandescence, glare, reflection and, importantly, shadow."
* Sriwhana Spong - "Candlestick Park". Six minute video, b&w - screen divided in two, as hand-held camera circles around an outdoor installation (flags, shadows, shrubbery, garden path) clockwise on one side and anti-clockwise on the other. Weirdly compelling.
* Lisa Reihana - various large photos depicting Maori gods and goddesses; in its use of shadow and heavy, velvety darks, reminded me of Bill Henson.
* Yvonne Todd - "January" and "Limpet". Two beautiful young girls, cloaked in a doomed, seedy glamour.
(On at the NGV, but mainly sourced from the Queensland Art Gallery.)
