Innholdsfortegnelse for Winter 2019 i Art New Zealand

A little-known Parsi legend relates that an ancient textile fragment torn from a girl’s dress, and found centuries later embedded in the crevice of a mountainside in the Iranian province of Yazd, belonged to Banu Pars, daughter of the last Sassanian King of Persia, who was separated from her family during the Islamic invasion of 651 AD. Banu Pars fled, alone and on foot, disguised in the clothes of a commoner. Without food or water, and certain that she would perish, the Princess prayed for help, and her prayers were answered, not by Dadar Ahura Mazda, the supreme God of Zoroastrianism, but by Anahita, the goddess of fertility, who conjured a stream from the young girl’s tears to quench her thirst and parted the barren mountainside to reveal a verdant…

Something to Remember, an exhibition of work by Alexis Neal and Elke Finkenauer at Gus Fisher Gallery in 2018, took as its starting point the late Louise Bourgeois’ artist book Nothing to Remember. Published shortly before her passing, the book contemplates how memory contributes to a sense of identity, and the attempt to hold on to it. For Alexis Neal, there is much to remember, and indeed, recover, within Māori art. Her subject matter draws on feminine cultural memory that still resonates in Māori adornment, weaponry and domestic artefacts. While research into historical contextual information underpins her inquiry, it is primarily through process that the artist seeks access to the mentalities that drove the development and evolution of their objects. The sensible epistemologies—the concerns, values, tastes and habits that unified…

Alan Pearson first settled in New Zealand in 1956. He was an older student at the Ilam School of Fine Arts in Christchurch; then a graduate at London’s Royal Academy of Art. His roots were in northern England, where he had been born into a working-class family in Liverpool in 1929. As a child he had drawn, prodigiously, but had to wait for formal education as an adult, in Wellington, after suffering an injury while working on the inter-island ferries. The injury gave him time and compensation money to begin focused study. A dynamic student, he was painting and exhibiting in his adoptive country from the mid-1960s. He would be working at his art through some of the most fraught moments of its history. Constant transitions in critical theory have…

Frances Hodgkins: European Journeys by Catherine Hammond & Mary Kisler Auckland University Press, Auckland 2019 MICHAEL DUNN  Frances Hodgkins is one of New Zealand’s most admired and best-known painters, even though she spent most of her career in France and Britain and it was in England that she found fame late in her life. Many of her works are now in New Zealand galleries and collections where they can be readily seen. She has been thought of as an expatriate painter, indeed the expatriate painter since Eric McCormick published his influential book of that title on her in 1954. The Expatriate was a fundamental and founding work of art history in this country that established Hodgkins as a woman who sacrificed domestic life and security for the existence of a…

It has been commonplace for some time to see making art as a form of research. Artists work in tertiary institutions and collect PBRF (Performance Based Research Funding) points. But Aucklander Louise Menzies really is the most conscientious of artist-researchers. Her research is deep and detailed, and she brings to light what would otherwise remain obscure or invisible. She has signed off from her residency in Dunedin as the Frances Hodgkins Fellow in admirably geekish style, with an exhibition at the Hocken Library that reveals the extent to which she has made use of that institution’s seemingly bottomless collections. This is not to say that the exhibition is an encyclopaedic record of Menzies’ research, or that we wade through masses of information. Rather, it is a sparse, distilled summary: at…

And suspended above the earth, I look across to unstable forms. It was on a trip to the sacred Emei Mountain in Sichuan Province that I thought I came to a personal understanding of traditional Chinese landscape painting. Ascending in a gondola, looking across to the rugged, wooded range shrouded in late-December mist opposite, the scene appeared a precise analogue for the art. The steep terrain seemed to flatten out in the manner of a Hitchcock dolly zoom, a vertiginous experience of spatial contraction of the world simultaneous with the apprehension of a correlative relationship to a mode of painting. Suspended and moving, the landscape seemed to scroll around me, a painterly experience of and in the world. As a literal experience, it captures attention. Nor is that experience completely…

Pain―the final frontier. I imagine a Venn diagram: of the mind, of the body, and an intersecting zone where the, at times, unspeakable lives. For anyone who has experienced pain, and particularly chronic pain, what is produced can be likened to a new subjective experience. This zone is also a rich field for philosophy. Writers such as Elaine Scarry (The Body in Pain) and Susan Sontag (Regarding the Pain of Others) have investigated the conditions and outcomes of pain in terms of how it shapes our identity. Scarry acknowledges the way in which pain ‘unmakes’ the world and the self, situating the individual in question beyond their identity, beyond language. Image-making has been known to produce new ways of depicting the world (telescopes; microscopes). Could it be then, that photography…

GALLERY I was in Auckland on a warm weekend in March to see Philippa Blair’s exhibition Counter-flow at Orexart, and to interview the artist. For more than a decade, Philippa Blair was a familiar name in the New Zealand art world, from the break-out Mellow Yellow show at New Vision Gallery in 1975, to the paint-splattered loose canvases of the 1980s, inventively turned into mats, cloaks and tents inspired by Native American art. Then she moved to California. The paintings changed, the career flourished, but back here we saw less. The Orexart exhibition, however, covers work of the last four years, since she returned to Auckland to live. I met Philippa at the gallery, in Arch Hill, on the Saturday afternoon; the paintings beamed with light and colour (especially the…

From The Attributes of a Marijuana Smoker (1975) to Commemoration (It was 70 Years Ago Today) (2017) featuring the drum from the famous cover of The Beatles’ Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band, Michael Shepherd’s engrossing exhibition Reinventing History Painting covers more than four decades of his distinctive and distinguished practice. Ably curated by Elizabeth Rankin, who also wrote the text for the indispensable catalogue,1 the exhibition includes 112 works (if series such as five Fiscal Envelopes and eight Dead Letter Mails are counted separately). It is a show that takes time to absorb, given the invariably subtle and layered character of Shepherd’s method. A single visit left me with strong impressions but also the frustration of not having been able to give each work the attention it deserves. Despite…

Arriving in Hawai‘i is a confrontation with reality. As with Aotearoa New Zealand, Hawai‘i has to deal with an image of an exotic, far away holiday location, where cocktails are sipped against endless sunsets. Truth be told, there is an element of this to the capital Honolulu, one that soon vanishes on visiting the sites of the second Honolulu Biennial. Curated by Te Papa’s Nina Tonga with a team that includes Devon Bella, a curatorial consultant from San Francisco, and Josh Tengan, a curator living and working in Honolulu, the Biennial is titled To Make Wrong / Right / Now. It questions the image of Honolulu as an American city, transforming it into one of the most engaging, truthful and supportive exhibition platforms to be witnessed in the wider Pacific.…

On 19 August 1768 Lieutenant James Cook addressed the assembled company of HMS Endeavour at Plymouth, reading them the obligatory Articles of War and Act of Parliament. The men had received two months’ wages in advance, and were advised they could expect additional pay depending on performance. They were, Cook recorded, ‘well satisfied’ and ready to ‘prosecute the voyage’.1 But unfavourable weather delayed the departure, and it was not until 2pm on 26 August that the ship finally put to sea. On board were 94 persons and sufficient provisions for nearly 18 months.2 The aim of the voyage was to observe the transit of Venus across the face of the sun, which was duly carried out at Tahiti on 3 June 1769. Then, following secret instructions from the Admiralty, Cook…