Innholdsfortegnelse for Winter 2016 #158 i Art New Zealand

Auckland Claudia Jowitt Liberal Application Bath Street Gallery, 3 March–2 April EDWARD HANFLING So often-so often that it is almost a cliché-one finds that an artist’s early work, in spite of minor flaws or even wild inconsistencies, is the freshest, most original work they ever do. Their mature output might be refined and sophisticated but somehow suffers for it, as if the artist is too accomplished or knows too much. The same pattern can occur within a smallish series of work, when artists set off on a path without knowing where they are going or why, and without knowing really that they have started anything. At some point, realising that they have done something good, they take it up more systematically and run with it, elaborating and playing…

Few artists would admit to being content to wait for fortune to fall in their laps, the entrepreneurial spirit being almost as much of a badge of honour in the world of art as it is in commerce. However, some individuals are clearly more proactive than others when it comes to making their own luck, especially those who count themselves among ‘Gen Y’, that age bracket known for its irrepressibility and refusal to take no for an answer. This must surely be the case with Ilam alumna Emily Hartley-Skudder, recently returned from her own 18-month personal ‘residency’ in Brooklyn, New York. 'Residency' is a word that appeals in a variety of ways due to connotations of real estate, transience, occupancy, studentship and paying your dues, all hallmarks of this artist’s…

Sailing, beach-hopping and leaving town are among the favoured summer pastimes of Aucklanders, and one could easily add sculpture trails to that list. The Harbourview Sculpture Trail, held in March at the People’s Park on Te Atatu Peninsula, has cannily occupied the vacant year left by the region’s biennial summer sculpture shows headland Sculpture on the Gulf and NZ Sculpture OnShore. Now in its third outing, it is a smaller, more intimate show than the other two, but maintains a strong community focus and boasts healthy visitor numbers-10,000 visited this year. Harbourview Sculpture Trail shares sea views with its Gulf-facing colleagues, but swaps cliff-top magnificence for a different grandeur altogether-it places its artworks in amongst the grasses, rushes, flax and scrub surrounding a small lake and the salt marshes of…

Colin McCahon’s Jet out from Muriwai, shown at Auckland’s Barry Lett Galleries in August 1973, was the only time he ever named an exhibition after a group of drawings, even though important paintings (Series A and B) were also included. Why were these particular drawings singled out in this unprecedented way? This essay is an attempt at an explanation. On 8 August 1973 McCahon wrote to the writer John Caselberg: I enclose an announcement of my August 13 exhibition. Stations of the Cross for James Baxter. I think some of my best painting. Mostly black & dirty white moving to purple, violet & yellow. Also two big panels of the edge of the world. The jets are all in the drawings. It’s all about the walk up the beach and…

Over the last four decades, Fiona Clark has embarked on a complex and wide-ranging exploration of the politics of identity through her photographic practice. Her work provides a unique insight into how we, as New Zealanders, perceive ourselves and each other, and how those relationships extend into the environments which we occupy. In early April 2016, Andrew Clark spent time with Fiona Clark and talked to her about her influences, the performative methodology which underlies her practice, and her early experiences with censorship. Andrew Clark: I’m aware that you were part of the sculpture department at Elam when you began there in 1972. How much do you feel that your time studying sculpture had an impact on your photographic practice? Fiona Clark: It actually had a huge impact. First of…

In the opening scene of the cult 1990 documentary Paris is Burning, an African-American man slings his arm over the shoulders of another black man. He tells his companion: ‘I remember my dad used to say, ”You have three strikes against you in this world. Every black man has two: that they’re just black and they’re male. But you’re black and you’re a male and you’re gay. You’re gonna have a hard fucking time”. He said, “If you’re going to do this, you’re going to have to be stronger than you ever imagined.”’ Nearly 30 years on, these words resonate with the experiences of many Pacific people who identify as lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, questioning, intersexual people and numerous other gender and sexual identities (LGBTQI+) living in New Zealand. Dominant…

Fiona Pardington’s survey exhibition is impressive. City Gallery Wellington had it first, and now A Beautiful Hesitation occupies the top floor of the Auckland Art Gallery Toi o Tamaki. I hesitate to call it beautiful myself, because the word is too slippery and beauty is not the main thing I get from the work. But it is a big, meaty show, impeccably curated by Aaron Lister and Kriselle Baker, and the diversity of the images . . . ‘diversity’ seems too feeble-perhaps scope, range or variety? There must be a better word to describe how far Pardington goes, how much she covers. Impressive-I cannot stress that enough, whatever my reservations. There are four main themed spaces: ‘still life’; ‘a language of skulls’; ‘becoming’; ‘flesh’. The first is dimly lit-light comes…

In the aftermath of World War II, European artists faced the challenge of dealing with dramatic changes to their social and political landscapes. At the same time, artists in the relative isolation of New Zealand were experimenting with a form of cubism which trailed the original European movement by several decades. But this preoccupation overshadowed another artistic development in this country, and one which occurred at the same time as similar events overseas. In the late 1940s, while prehistoric rock art was providing inspiration for progressive artists in Spain, it was also contributing to the emergence of a distinctive and local form of modernism in New Zealand. After the Spanish Civil War (1936–39) the new fascist regime of General Francisco Franco favoured an academic and naturalistic approach to art, one…

The composition of the seven panels of Gregory O’Brien’s A letter from Northland, Ahipara 1–7 (2014), featured in his recent exhibition at Bowen Galleries in Wellington, both makes the paintings’ title into a joke and contains its punchline. To be sure, each panel contains a letter. In the second panel, for example, taking up the lower right quadrant, is the letter ‘H’. H is after all a letter from ‘Northland’, but the panels’ letters in toto spell out a different name, ‘Ahipara’, a more specific locale at the southern tip of Ninety Mile Beach. They are, in these paintings, inscribed into the place, as if they are not only letters from the name but letters that can be found on the ground itself if you want to see them there.…

Jerusalem’s small, walled Old City has been the site of conflict and contestation longer than any other place in the world. Too much blood has been spilt. Over the last century it has been governed successively by the Ottoman Empire, the British in Mandate Palestine, Jordan from 1948 and Israel from 1967. Its population is diverse, ethnically and religiously. There are innumerable different faces here and in the much larger, surrounding modern city of Jerusalem. To try to list all the national and cultural groups found there would exhaust the allocated space for this short article. Ilan Wittenberg’s faces are those of people, predominantly stallholders with their merchandise, occupying the Old City’s souks (markets). ‘Faces in Jerusalem’ might be more apt, since they do not offer an overall cross-section of…

A Whakapapa of Tradition: 100 Years of Ngati Porou Carving, 1830–1930 by Ngarino Ellis, with new photography by Natalie Robertson Auckland University Press, Auckland 2016 ANNA-MARIE WHITE Ngarino Ellis concludes her much-awaited history of nineteenth-century Ngati Porou carving with the well-known phrase: ‘ahakoa, he iti, he pounamu’, which is translated as ‘though this is little, it is precious’. This may seem a disingenuous statement with which to finish such a major publication. Yet it is an apt summary of the nature of this book, which derives its authority from forensic analysis of minutiae recovered from an exhaustive range of resources. More so, the quality of this publication lies in its particular focus: a style of carving called Iwirakau that emerged from the Waiapu Valley on the Upper East Coast of…