A personal approach for Pettit

I suppose one crude criterion for judging a painting’s worth is whether you’d want to take it home with you to hang on your wall. If this is true — and if we aren’t too worried about defining what we mean by worth — Michael Pettit’s Dog in a Box passes. I’d love to be able to look at it every day.

I further suppose that one criterion for judging a bad reviewer is whether he starts his review with the personal pronoun “I”. This usually portends a review that is going to be entirely subjective and more concerned with the reviewer’s ego than the merits of the work. Obviously, I’m hoping to get away with it here and in my defence, Pettit’s show at the Association for Visual Arts (AVA) demands a very personal approach.

Partly, this is to do with the heavy symbolism of some of the paintings, but you could say that about much art. Mostly, though, it’s because of the wide disparity between the different works. You could almost divide the paintings into different generic groupings and, indeed, they are hung according to this teleology. Some works are fantastical, some are quasi-realist portraits, some are whimsically kitsch and some are abstract.

Of the four large abstract works the most striking is Tent, an ominous, black circus tent shape set against an angry, silvery-gray background. It’s a kind of anti-carnivalesque, the mute, dark side of performance and all the tropes associated with that.

With such a wide range of styles, it’s inevitable that the viewer will find weak moments. Perhaps this is because you feel compelled to focus on the styles that appeal to you, so that your enjoyment isn’t diluted. Some of the attempted droll kitschiness, for example, sits uneasily alongside the force of the large, abstract works.

Of course, we are looking at more than four years of Pettit’s work hanging in the AVA. Well, half of it anyway, as the remaining works are being exhibited at the Irma Stern, in an unusual double show. The catalogue does assert that “the diversity of [Pettit’s] work is an essential part of its total meaning”. I don’t really buy it, though. Ascribing a total meaning to an oeuvre would be reducing the power of individual pieces, as well as limiting the effect of the show to the weakest of the works.

To return to my favourite, Dog in a Box, it’s possible that I like it because I feel like the dog, although perhaps not as cute. The dog, a stuffed toy sitting in a preternaturally alert pose, is in a cardboard box. It stares at the side of the box, its long ears erect. On the other side, there’s a brown paper shopping bag and a pencil balancing on its end: the promise of consumption and the potential for creation. But because he’s been placed into the box the wrong way round, the poor dog can’t see that, although he sure as hell looks as if he can sense it. As I look around at Pettit’s paintings, my ears prickling, I am that dog, wishing that someone would turn me around and point me at the right way to see. I’m undecided as to a final judgement on the quality of the show. Is that a strength of the show, or a weakness of the reviewer? Go and judge for yourself.

July 31 to August 18