Innholdsfortegnelse for Spring 2018 i Art New Zealand

Wait! Let us pause for a moment, right here, at the start. It is a kind of threshold. Drawing attention to the beginning of this text seems fitting because Sriwhana Spong creates artworks that constantly yet subtly signal threshold spaces. She has manifested door jambs, flimsy curtains, provisional screens, scenic backdrops, empty theatres, small sets of steps, shorelines and beaches. Such inside-outside, in-between spaces confuse orientation, they complicate oppositions and make location less straightforward. Indeed, for the past five years Spong has been particularly itinerant, yet for me, personally, her practice has always seemed to operate within a nomadic, dreamy and indeterminate space, one that confuses time zones as well as art-historical periods, past events, prior actions and near-forgotten stories. More concretely, it is following a period of two months…

When Campbell Patterson was asked to address the audience attending the opening of his Hocken Library exhibition toot floor, he ambled up and said pretty much nothing—which spoke volumes. In the excruciatingly long course of his ‘speech’, he seemed to be trying to think of something to say, but could muster only a few ‘um’s and a ‘thank you’. It was either an inadvertently profound attack of stage fright, or one of the best performances of his career. For the significance of Patterson’s 2017 Frances Hodgkins Fellowship in Dunedin lies not so much in the objects that ended up on the walls and floor of the Hockenin things made or found—nor even in the process of making or finding them. Patterson’s work is really about various states of anxiety, boredom,…

Canterbury, as the largest region by area in New Zealand, is geographically and biologically diverse, containing 59 per cent of the country’s braided rivers, a type that is a rarity worldwide.1 The braided rivers themselves contributed to the formation of the Canterbury Plains, carrying millions of tonnes of alluvial outwash sloughed off the Southern Alps and down the valleys to the east of the mountains 25,000 to 10,000 years ago.2 This displaced moraine fanned out to form the plains, which at their widest point meet the eroded forms of the two extinct shield volcanoes comprising Banks Peninsula. Before human settlement the plains were largely forested, although small amounts of native bush can still be found in the present day—notably the intra-urban copse known as Riccarton Bush in the eponymous Christchurch…

In December 2015, two months after American Apparel filed for bankruptcy, the clothing retailer announced the closure of its flagship store on Sunset Boulevard in Los Angeles. The store, which had then been in operation for 12 years, was one of the earliest casualties of a last-ditch attempt to resuscitate the struggling company. By early 2017, American Apparel would close all of its remaining physical locations across the United States. Just over two years after its closure, a segment of the Sunset Boulevard building re-emerged in Wellington. For four weeks in April this year, a replica of the shop’s doors stood, bolted to the floor, in Hopkinson Mossman’s new Wellington gallery, as part of Fiona Connor’s show Closed Down Clubs & Monochromes. The doors are fairly unassuming. Nothing about them,…

Colours of a Life: The Life and Times of Douglas MacDiarmid by Anna Cahill Mary Egan in association with MacDiarmid Arts Trust, Auckland 2018 RICHARD WOLFE With the recent passing of Milan Mrkusich, Douglas MacDiarmid (born 1922) surely qualifies as both the longest-lived and longest-active New Zealand-born artist. But as Leonard Bell points out in his foreword to this book, MacDiarmid has rated ‘barely a mention’ in this country’s standard art histories written since the 1960s. Bell offers several reasons for this relegation to the ‘extreme margins’ of our art narratives; the fact that MacDiarmid has worked in several different styles simultaneously, and the perception that much of his art did not comfortably fit the standard New Zealand categories. In addition, he left the country in 1946, a decision described…

Auckland Aide Harvey -M é Benge moire and Other Stories Northart, 3 June–20 July NINA SEJA I encountered Harvey Benge’s photographs in my pre-Y2K youth. Four Parts Religion, Six Parts Sin—a photobook, a form extensively used by Benge—appealed to my worldview of the unexpected, the quirky, the witty. His images showed the grungy side of street life. There are some photographers who have such a decided style that even without a wall label you know it is unmistakably them. A tone, a colour palette, stock or setting—their imprint is distinct. However, it is unusual to have the landscape seem to remake itself as if conforming to the photographer’s vision. Since that early encounter with Benge’s work, I have found myself meandering through…

In 1942, for the vernissage of First Papers of Surrealism in New York, Marcel Duchamp installed his Sixteen Miles of String. Stretching between ceiling, floor and walls, Duchamp’s intricate web complicated attendees’ ability to view the other works in the exhibition; they were further hindered by groups of children throwing balls and playing hopscotch and skipping games. In 1998 Maureen Lander’s String Games, commissioned for the launch of the Museum of New Zealand Te Papa Tongarewa, referenced both traditional Maori string games or whai and Duchamp’s provocative opening gambit. Suspended at the centre of her twine, light and video installation was a glow-green replica of an item from Te Papa’s collection: Duchamp’s Boîte-en-valise. Twenty years later Michael Parekowhai picks up the baton. Duchamp has been a key figure in Parekowhai’s…

I was reading Pip Adam’s The New Animals when I flew to Auckland to see The Long View at Pah Homestead—Mary Macpherson’s latest photographic series. Auckland is the setting for Adam’s novel and to research it, she walked around the city, visiting places her characters would go. She recorded details, views and conversations that she later used to tell the story. The novel turned out to be the perfect companion for looking at The Long View. At some point, it seemed to Macpherson that no one in the photography world was making images of Auckland’s CBD. Some preliminary trials and the possibility of exploring a big urban theme became a stimulating prospect. She travelled to Auckland from Wellington as often as possible over a three-year period to photograph the CBD.…

A very abbreviated survey exhibition that sampled from the ministry of works by Marilynn Webb in the Dunedin Public Art Gallery’s keep, this offering in a small side gallery overflowed its wall area awkwardly and somewhat incoherently, the chronology shuffled, the contextualisation scanty—as if these were ancient artefacts about which little was known. But individual artworks sang out strongly, and the centrepiece, Taste Before Eating, a limited edition portfolio of hand-coloured monotypes featuring polemical puddings and their recipes, first displayed at The Dowse Art Museum in 1982, tantalised from a low-slung, glass-topped, shiny white display case. If you suspended disbelief as you peered down into it, it could almost have passed for a banqueting table, albeit one of comic disquiet and droll foreboding. Marilynn Webb is an artist for whom…

The world is, indeed, a very strange place, made stranger still by the photographs of Jeremy Blincoe. His large, composite, digitally manipulated images are sharp and clear, throwing a hyperreal volley back at painters who might emulate the photograph. They are also murky, encouraging, almost mandating close scrutiny to ascertain what exactly is going on. They seem to be photographed in an atmosphere of permanent dusk, a time that equates to that surreal crunch moment that belongs to all of us on a daily basis, when that blurring occurs between the states of being asleep and being awake, and the clarity of dreams is usurped by the clarity of a new day. Blincoe, New Zealand-born and resident in Melbourne, has won prizes for his photographs on both sides of the…

The painter sits to one side of the image. At the other side, two paintings are stacked against and facing the wall—just one stretcher bar of the foremost painting is visible where the canvas is stapled to the back, and part of the cross-brace; the same section of the other painting protrudes from behind it, but wrapped. Milan Mrkusich was, as obituaries have emphasised, a private person. Adrienne Martyn’s portrait photograph, commissioned in 1987 by the then National Gallery along with portraits of other New Zealand artists, does not breach but rather projects privacy. Mrkusich’s arms are folded in a way that at first seems typical but then seems more arranged; they are not folded sternly in front of his torso, but languidly across the thighs. His face bears no…

Concepts of service and whakapapa characterise Wi Taepa’s ceramic practice. This comes through strongly in his current exhibition Wi Taepa: Retrospective at Auckland Art Gallery Toi o Tamaki, created in partnership with Pataka Art + Museum. Personally and artistically his works speak of giving back—particularly to those in difficult circumstances, such as in prison (he worked as a prison officer from 1973 to 1984) and in borstal (he was senior social worker at a boys’ home). They also connect with practices from the past and the artists who worked within them, as well as to other uku/clay artists working today. For Taepa (Ngati Whakaue, Te Arawa, Te Ati Awa), exploring uku has provided a space in which he can think through not only his personal history, but also look outwards…

Parbhu Makan’s studio is in the basement of his parents’ old house in Papakura. There, he has his darkroom—a tiny converted hallway—his enlarger, his washing station and countless Tupperware boxes of photographic prints, dating back to his student days in the early 1970s. Makan is a contemporary of photographers such as Fiona Clark and Ian Macdonald, but his work has rarely been seen publicly, save for a few shows at Real Pictures Gallery, in the mid-1970s. Makan’s work has remained largely unseen by the public because he has not actively pursued an art career—rather, he supported himself as a house painter, and raised his daughter. However, over the last 40 years, he has continued to take and print black-and-white photographs, compiling an archive of prints: family portraits, figure studies, documentary…

On 13 July 1771 James Cook’s Endeavour anchored off the Kent coast, back from its 34-month voyage around the globe. Objects and records accumulated on its Pacific voyage would shortly enter the collection of the British Museum and, around 1780, go on display in its South Sea Room. Cook was the man of the moment; an 1803 guidebook noted that ‘perhaps no age or country were ever more happy in the choice of a navigator and his companions in science and perseverance’.1 Later that century Cook was ‘enshrined in the pantheon of inspirational imperial heroes killed in the line of duty’,2 but there was little, if anything, in the way of events to mark the centennial of his voyages. However, his historical role was recognised during celebrations marking the 150th…