Innholdsfortegnelse for Winter 2018 i Art New Zealand

Auckland Hugo Koha Lindsay But will it float Gow Langsford Gallery 21 March–14 April LUCINDA BENNETT I visited Hugo Koha Lindsay’s exhibition just after the storm that swept through Tamaki Makaurau in early April. There had been strange pink flashes in the sky that weren’t lightning, but were caused by fallen power lines sparking. A huge tree on the street next to mine was blown over; I walked past it the next morning to see its sprawling roots unearthed, pointing up to the sky. The road was criss-crossed with dead palm fronds. Lindsay’s paintings are about the city. They combine the slickness of corporate architecture and gentrified districts with those parts that serve utilitarian functions such as road markings, temporary barriers and scaffolding. But they also include grubby,…

MICHAEL WILSON The death of painting . . . . As a beginning art student, I was fond of taunting anyone who still insisted on wielding a brush and pigment with the possibility—nay, the inevitability—of their chosen medium’s imminent and deserved demise. At the time—the cusp of the 1990s—standing at an easel felt to me like the last thing any forward-thinking artist should be doing, though of course I had little to propose in the way of viable alternatives (at least any I yet knew how to carry out). In short, I was young and in love with extreme ideas, so the potential end of an entire way of working tickled me no end. It’s always with some residual amusement, then, that I notice this particular notion now crop up…

ANN POULSEN Tacita Dean writes of travelling to Delphi, the navel of the ancient world, where she crouches in fear, transfixed by the landscape because she believes in it, believes it is the place where the umbilicus between Mount Olympus and the human realm has been severed. Are we born in myth and echoes continue to rustle the foliage like minor gods sneaking by on their way to meddle with the natural order? The stories Dean believes in affect how she sees, how she experiences the landscape. Her landscape is a cultural construction of the sublime, and she responds accordingly―but how is it that a contemporary artist can be so deeply affected by a supernatural story from another culture, another millennium? Could it be something about the place itself which…

JON BYWATER When Mami Kataoka—chief curator at the Mori Art Museum Tokyo since 2003—awarded Kate Newby the 2012 Walters Prize, her judge’s statement concluded: ‘This decision is derived from my attempt to evoke a state of equilibrium in our ever competitive and hierarchical society.’ So saying, she weighted her decision towards valuing the ‘reserved’ means with which Newby’s piece drew attention to ‘both void and silence’, embracing ‘personal gestures and subtle actionsʼ.1 As Artistic Director of this year’s 21st Biennale of Sydney, the same, key term appears in her title: Superposition: Equilibrium & Engagement. Simultaneous distinct states of ‘equilibrium’ and ‘engagement’ might be implied if they exist in ‘superposition’—a concept she adopts from quantum theory (the analogy: quantic entities as waves and particles)—yet equilibrium dominates in Kataoka’s distinctly polite, restrained…

In a world ordered by sexual imbalance, pleasure in looking has been split between active/male and passive/female. The determining male gaze projects its fantasy onto the female figure, which is styled accordingly. In their traditional exhibitionist role women are simultaneously looked at and displayed, with their appearance coded for strong visual and erotic impact so that they can be said to connote to-belooked-at-ness.1 Laura Mulvey In 1968 and 1969 Jan Nigro made two series of seemingly unremarkable drawings. Entitled Summer Encounter and The Haast River Series, these works document in pencil various anonymous women.2 However, if we consider these drawings in relation to Laura Mulvey’s concept of the male gaze, formulated in 1975, they take on an aspect that is quite remarkable. In one of the drawings, entitled Summer Encounter,…

PRISCILLA PITTS Twenty years ago Te Papa Tongarewa redefined what a national museum could be. Not everyone liked it. Most vocal among its critics were members of the visual arts community—and with good reason. Opening day, and who can forget Parade with a Richard Killeen cut-out arranged around the uppermost cupboard of Christine Hellyar’s Clutch, Brood and Echo (1990) or Colin McCahon’s Northland Panels (1958) squished into a too-small space alongside a refrigerator. The labels written for a hypothetical someone of very limited intelligence, a word or two highlighted just in case the reader missed the point. The huge blue and red ‘thumbs up’ and ‘thumbs down’ objects that invited, not reflection, enquiry or thought, but, rather, mindless reaction. Upstairs the more conventional exhibition Dream Collectors did little to showcase…

In her essay ‘The Image-World’ Susan Sontag suggests that, unlike a painting, a photograph is ‘not only like its subject, a homage to the subject. It is part of, an extension of that subject; and a potent means of acquiring it, of gaining control over it.’1 The photograph becomes a surrogate for the photographed, but also the means by which we experience or re-experience the moment captured. The viewer is the consumer, and our knowledge is increasingly acquired through photographs, through the vast catalogue of images constantly available to refer to, and which, in turn, influences the way we will experience the next. It is not that images are so faithfully representational of reality, but that reality seems to confirm what we have seen in pictures. Landscapes, in their geographical…

Wanted: The Search for the Modernist Murals of E. Mervyn Taylor edited by Bronwyn Holloway-Smith Massey University Press, Auckland 2018 MICHAEL DUNN Art-historical writing is not always noted for the thrill of the chase or sleuth-like detective work. But, as TV shows like Fake or Fortune have shown, tracing the location of masterworks hidden behind overpainting, or overlooked because of false attribution, damage, or years of neglect can be exciting and informative. We learn about more than the works themselves; we discover how changes of taste and social circumstances affect how the works are treated and valued. Wanted: The Search for the Modernist Murals of E. Mervyn Taylor brings much of this excitement and drama to the study of this somewhat neglected artist. Taylor (1906–1964), when discussed, is noted…