Peter Robinson

In ancient Greek medical theory, ‘the humours’ were the four fluids thought to course through the human body and determine a person’s temper – blood was associated with optimism, phlegm with calmness, choler with anger, and bile with melancholy. Imbalance among the humours created ill health and an imbalanced state of mind. In Peter Robinson’s new exhibition, ‘the humours’ are three very bodily sculptures that strive to attain their own states of balance – and fail in oddly sympathetic ways.

A key player in New Zealand art of the last decade, Robinson has a reputation as a toppler of pieties – someone who upends cosy cultural assumptions and breaks open contradictions. Jam-packed with written taunts and come-ons, his paintings, drawings, and sculptures of the 1990s took swipes at art-world careerism, racism, globalism, multiculturalism, and his own flight to fame as a commentator on biculturalism. Filled with sharp intelligence and desperate humour, they had something to offend almost everyone – especially those who believe that art should be high-minded and pure.

Words have all but disappeared in Robinson’s new work, but the impurity, physical gusto and black comedy remain. The product of a four-week residency in Dunedin earlier this year, the sculptures in this show are the latest additions to the population of comic-monstrous objects that Robinson began to hatch in 2004 – flies, grubs and one-eyed heads, lathered with expander foam in the colours of ash and fat.

In The Humours, Robinson pushes his objects even more energetically into the territory of the grotesque. There are echoes of earlier works – in particular the felt-wrapped totem sculptures he made in the early 1990s and the molecular models he made for the Venice Biennale in 2001. But here those familiar shapes have been stripped of all details that might secure their identities. The title of the largest sculpture sums up well the bluntness and oddness of these somethings: das Es, which means, roughly, The It.

Sculpture in the traditional sense tends towards hardness and uprightness – think of monuments and statues carved from stone, or abstract sculptures milled from steel. But Robinson’s Humours are caught in less dignified positions. Lowly, sticky-looking, gleefully grotesque, they exist in states of meltdown, metamorphosis, tragi-comic collapse, and blunt physical union.

In an art-world where critics and commentators (and the writers of wall labels) often rush work towards a single interpretation, Robinson’s new works have a physical presence that spills beyond easy ‘readings’. Is Sweet Thing an accident in an ice-cream parlour, or a splurge of entrails? Is Choler just a waste-heap of spare parts, or a monster struggling to reassemble itself? Do the three objects describe a kind of life cycle, rising from the primal soup of Sweet Thing to the in-your-face sex-monument that Robinson calls das Es? Or does the narrative run in the other direction – from monument down to mere matter?

As always in Robinson’s work, finding answers to these questions matters less than confronting the objects in all their strangeness and contradictory presence. Reinventing the tradition of the grotesque for the 21^st century, Robinson has fleshed out a world in which comedy and anger chase each other, our baser instincts are given monumental form, and art falls from its pedestal and spills into our space with (darkly) humourous results.