Innholdsfortegnelse for Summer 2017 i Art New Zealand

You have to have stories or some kind of whakapapa relationship to make it [i.e. Māori art] work effectively and properly. Cliff Whiting1 He hawhi Māori, he hawhi Pākehā kei au [ka katakata ia], engari he Māori katoa ōku mahi. Cliff Whiting, TVNZ Waka Huia, kōrero 2015 (22:49) Te Whanakao te maunga Oraka te punawai Kereu te awa Ko Kaiaio te hapū Ko Te Whānau-ā-Apanui te iwi I first came across Cliff Whiting via a single page of elegantly penned calligraphy. It was 1986, the sender’s address was the family home that he, his wife Heather and their boys―Gary, Paul and Dean― shared, in Kororāreka. I’d asked for help on an art history thesis on Te Whānau-a-Apanui kinsman Paratene Matchitt. While not extending a tautoko he expressed concern I capture the…

Not nostalgia: this is the title of a recent exhibition by Joanna Margaret Paul at Bowerbank Ninow in Auckland. It comes from Paul’s essay, ‘A passionate pilgrimage in time’, in which she reflected on memory, history and architectural heritage.1 Rejecting an uncritical attitude towards the past, she urged a strategy of active engagement: ‘continuity . . . use . . . passion . . . dialogue . . . respect . . .’ She praised a work by Rosalie Gascoigne, which referred to the past in its salvaged materials: ‘It appealed to piecemeal memory by offering shards that swam together to form another whole.’ That phrase could just as readily apply to Paul’s practice. As a poet, painter, filmmaker and photographer, she focused attention on the fragment, the habitually overlooked.…

 Christchurch-based photographer Maurice Lye is wide-ranging and systematic in his considerations of natural and manufactured structures throughout Aotearoa New Zealand.1 Whether in colour or black-and-white, his modus operandi is understated, quietly deliberate, employing alterations of neither light nor angle. The subjects are neither strange nor esoteric. On the contrary, they are familiar― utterly Kiwi. Or are they? The images reproduced here, some from Lye’s 2009 exhibition Still Lives at CoCA, Christchurch, index specific introduced trees and recognisable sites. They have demonstrable histories and public presence and are so ordinary that they are often seen but overlooked, or ignored. And while Lye’s sighting of these conjoined elements is totally unstaged, there is an inherent accent on human actions and impact, reinforced by pithy titles. Lye’s index,…

With an engineer father and an armament-manufacturing uncle, Michael Nicholson might well have been earmarked for a life spent down at the pragmatic end of human affairs. But then again he was a Nicholson, nephew of the painter William and a younger cousin of one of the most feted British artists of the twentieth century, Ben Nicholson. His early years in a typically English boarding school, and then on active military service, left Michael feeling, as he told Pat Baskett, ‘looking a bit straighter up and down’ than he felt.1 However, he emerged sufficiently unscathed to enrol, post-war, in the Camberwell School of Arts and Crafts, then teach at the Central School of Arts and Crafts, London. Transplanting to New Zealand in 1953, Michael made an immediate impression on the…

The idea of the house as a home is at the very centre of Marie Shannon’s retrospective Rooms found only in the home, at the Dunedin Public Art Gallery: all paths lead to ‘home’ as to a treasure chest waiting to be unpacked. The photographic and video works in her exhibition, methodically pared down from her back catalogue, form a complete narrative—a familial one and an elegiac one, tracing out how her life and her career as an artist intertwine, like climbing plants round a house. Always stubborn in pursuit of a particular manner of presentation, her preoccupation with the preservation of memories—moving between enchantment and disenchantment, between japes and meditative reflection—here, rather finely and profoundly, achieves a kind of apotheosis as her thematic progressions complete a narrational cycle. The…

All Lines Converge takes its title from a 1973 poem by Joanna Margaret Paul, which refers to all lines meeting at a centre outside the frame. Curated by Sophie O’Brien and Chloe Cull, this extensive show is primarily about that: connections and crossings between disparate ideas, media and artists―outside the frame of the monologue. The centre in Paul’s poem, is, in this exhibition, each of us: a centre that moves, creates and re-creates connections. All Lines Converge is a show on being present, not somewhere else, not some utopian must, not some nostalgic collection, and not some message to mould us. In Paul’s poem, ‘all lines converge’ implies a centre but, by being outside the frame, this phrase becomes a reference to the subjectivity of perception. In the exhibition this…

In 2016–17 a series of exhibitions in Britain examining that country’s early twentieth-century art included retrospectives of Paul Nash and Vanessa Bell and a survey of Sussex’s contribution to modernism. There was also The Mythic Method: Classicism in British Art 1920–1950,1 which featured well-known artists Henry Moore, Wyndham Lewis and Ben Nicholson as well as several ‘overlooked figures’.2 Among the latter was sculptor John F. Kavanagh (1903–1984), who left Britain in early 1951 to become Senior Lecturer in Sculpture at Auckland’s Elam School of Fine Arts. Kavanagh’s inclusion came about when curator Simon Martin spotted his plaster relief Classical Male Athletes (c.1930) at an art fair and recognised its suitability for the planned exhibition.3 It was displayed just inside the entrance to The Mythic Method, alongside Henry Moore’s 1921 linocut…

Auckland Roberta Thornley A Serious Girl Tim Melville Gallery 28 August–30 September EDWARD HANFLING Over the years, I have found that one of the good things about looking at art, especially with reviewing exhibitions, is being forced to contend with stuff I would normally edit out of my life, not even let anywhere near me. Art encompasses many tastes. A good deal of what I digest does not agree with me. But because I love art, I love its surprising guises, the unexpected ways it weasels its way into my senses. Artists get excited about things that are weird, distasteful, sickly sweet, trite, grotesque, inane, dreary, uncomfortable, nice, complicated―it does not matter, art can wrap itself round anything. Some critics use these things to make judgements, and decide…

When I was at art school in France I had a friend whose parents were responsible for a very small provincial museum―the Musée du Parchemin et de l’Enluminure in the Rouillon-Sarthe region.1 I remember going there with a group of friends and we were all catapulted back 500 years deep into the European Middle Ages. This museum was also a workshop which housed several hundred types of mineral pigments and plant extracts that were used to reproduce medieval scripts. In this extremely labour-intensive process everything was made from scratch― from the sheepskin leather used for the pages of the books to the illuminated gilded script―and visitors could see and touch the anatomy of this bygone artform. It all created the impression of being stuck in a time machine, not unlike…

‘None of the greatest painters were eccentric in their work’, the (great) English landscape painter John Constable once proclaimed. ‘They were too consistent with themselves to merit such an epithet; too sensible of what they were about.’1 Helen Brown (1917–1986) was an eccentric New Zealand painter. She painted landscapes, but did not follow the most progressive stylistic approaches of her era, and her focus was primarily on the unfashionable beauty (in terms of art, anyway) of Auckland’s harbours and the Hauraki Gulf. In keeping with her palette, she was a kind of ‘grey character’ of New Zealand art, neither overtly celebrated nor denigrated. In a 1967 review under the telling heading ‘Uncertain feeling apparent in Helen Brown’s paintings’, Gordon H. Brown suggested that she was of ‘historical interest’ in the…