Art New Zealand Autumn #161

There’s a memorable exchange in a conversation with Marti Friedlander, published in this magazine 21 years ago. Interviewer Ron Brownson reminded Marti that she was one of our finest portrait photographers. She countered his comment, offering the typically self-effacing explanation that this was work that simply needed to be done. She went on to protest that some people may have felt they knew who she was, but it was only she who knew who she was and why she was doing what she did. In the meantime, thousands of Friedlander images have charted over 60 years of New Zealand culture, in the widest sense of that term. The illustrations in Len Bell’s 2009 biography reveal this range, from a young girl pictured with a recorder, playing Pied Piper to a…

Auckland Potentially Yours, The Coming Community Artspace, 10 November–22 December EDWARD HANFLING The first impression is purple: the colour of two walls and of the background on four video screens, each showing the same person’s head making odd sounds and movements. Then steel frameworks, frustratingly useless and opaque. Three multicoloured fabrics hang like coats against one of the white walls. The whole amounts to an almost alien, or alienating, aesthetic, at once striking, severe and strange. At length, the philosophical and the political materialise, most unambiguously in a room with dark green walls where there is a short video, Time and a Half (2003), by New York-based Argentinian artist Mika Rottenberg. We watch a person serving in a food hall, although she does not actually serve anyone during the course…

I met John Pule for the first time at the end of last year, a hurried introduction at the opening of his solo show at Gow Langsford where, with toddler in tow, I barely had time to quaff a beer let alone digest the paintings. It was immediately clear that the paintings were new―somehow more joyous and freer than much of Pule’s previous work. A more leisurely return visit to the gallery gave me a fuller appreciation for the sense of continuity with earlier paintings too, in the artist’s characteristic combination of raw materiality and fine, elegant drawing. Our subsequent interview also allowed me to enjoy more of Pule’s distinctive humour and humanity, and yielded a glimpse of his new life on Niue where he has built himself a writer’s…

Something fundamentally unsettling happens when history begins to write its own history. Pierre Nora, ‘Between Memory and History: Les Lieux de Mémoire’, trans. Marc Roudebush, Representations 26 (1989) An admission: I needed multiple viewings to ease my way through Dark Matter. A buffer, a breather, a respite from the accumulated histories contained in the show. Clementine orange gallery walls greet the viewer on entry, but the joy the colour conjures is largely momentary. The title is an indicator of the challenging subject matter to come. Fortitude is needed in navigating Ann Shelton’s labyrinth of history at the Auckland Art Gallery. The photographer’s commitment to research-based practice and the historical use of photography also means that there is a considerable amount to unpack in Dark Matter. And, like in a labyrinth,…

Drawing -making language communication from which most art forms derive. It is the foundation that one is introduced to in one’s formative years at art school. For artist James Ormsby, of Ngati Maniapoto, Ngati Pikiao and Scottish descent, drawing and mark-making represent a lifelong interest and passion that have shaped his career. This was recently reiterated last October with a survey of his drawings presented at Pataka Art + Museum in Porirua. Whakapapa, curated by Mark Hutchins-Pond, presented 13 of Ormsby’s most significant works from 2005 to 2016. The term whakapapa is most commonly associated with genealogy and descent but can also be interpreted as the process of layering and the building of continuity. It is a fitting metaphor that not only tracks the growth of the artist, but also…

Self-portraitists know that the longer you look at yourself, the more estranged you become. Self-scrutiny isolates the intensity of looking and, whereas taking a selfie with a smartphone flattens and homogenises that experience, the self-scrutiny embodied in a painting deepens and enriches the engagement with the thing in the mirror. Jo Robertson, an autodidactic artist who characteristically uses herself―her body―as her subject, draws and paints self-depictions that are sculptural, angular, blocky, monumental, and often fragmentary. Her graphomania teases states of being out of a flux of swirls, squiggles, twists and streaks of pencil, pastel, charcoal, paint. Francis Bacon compared paint to a bodily secretion―like a snail leaving its trail of slime―and Robertson’s sequences of life-studies―her test-piece formulations of eye, lip, hand, torso―imply the same. A body part is generated―as if…