Innholdsfortegnelse for Autumn 2020 i Art New Zealand

According to Elizabeth Rees, ‘The most mundane aspects of our lives are often majestic, if only we knew it. In New Zealand we live in such overwhelming beauty that we so often take for granted and seldom stop to take in.’1 This statement recalls remarks made by others about our assumed indifference to the beauty of our natural environment. For example, the painter Colin McCahon asked us in 1971 ‘Do you believe in the sunrise?’ However, in this age of the smartphone camera, we find a seemingly infinite number of people seeing and photographing natural beauty spots and recording sunrises and sunsets from Waikiki to Palmerston North, where Rees grew up. Landscape has been a well-explored subject in New Zealand art, in particular, and still is, as we can see…

In 1966 Len Lye and the Swiss artist Jean Tinguely were included in Directions in Kinetic Sculpture at Berkeley Art Museum, an exhibition that signalled that the medium of kinetic art was beyond its halcyon days of the early 1960s. Artforum editor Philip Leider dismissed the Eurocentric movement, noting ‘the measure of our technological age is more accurately taken in a Warhol soup can than in all the kinetic sculpture from here to Dusseldorf’.1 Leider singled out Lye as the single artist ‘who seems to transcend all the confusion . . . utterly beyond the petty limitations of the other artists in the exhibition’.2 A similar point would be stressed the following year by the critic Clement Greenberg dismissing pop art, land art, op art and kinetic art as ‘Novelty…

Is it possible to re-create a spirit from mere possessions? Hamish McLaren does not directly pose this question through his images of Auckland workshops, but it is unavoidable, the further down the rabbit hole one goes. Sanctuary is a curious project—through the medium of large-format photography, the minutest details of discrete lives are brought to life, without actually showing those lives in question. Absent subjects are obliquely captured through their accretions, in a sort of slow-motion photography on the timescale of a human lifespan. McLaren says the main idea behind the project is how these spaces can describe their owners in an intimate and personal way, without revealing them in the photographs. ‘I think the spaces represent the people that inhabit the spaces as well as these types of individuals…

Auckland Freeman White Call of the Ocean Sanderson Contemporary 22 October–10 November RICHARD WOLFE When the European easel painting tradition was transplanted to nineteenth-century New Zealand, it was hardly surprising that the surrounding ocean would prove a popular subject for artists. As well as claiming some 15,000 km of coastline, no part of this country is more than 120 km from the sea. By the late 1870s, Scottish-born Christchurch artist John Gibb had established himself as this country’s premier marine painter with his estuarine, coastal and harbour views. More recently, Napier-based Freeman White has brought the tradition into the twenty-first century. He came to national prominence in 2006 by winning the Adam Portraiture Award, and three years later began painting the New Zealand landscape. Since then, rolling hills…

Recent exhibitions by Anne Noble and Kate van der Drift engage endangered ecologies by exposing photographic film, not to light, but to chemicals in fragile environments. Film is buried underground or in wetlands for a period, and then unearthed, cleaned, processed and printed. The resulting cameraless abstractions—spooky, even cosmic in appearance—make visible the often unseen impacts of the Anthropocene and offer personal responses grounded in a form of critical poetics. Anne Noble’s Observations from the Critical Zone was created by burying a roll of film in the topsoil—the so-called ‘critical zone’—between two trees. In her exhibition text for Two Rooms the artist describes this critical zone as ‘a descriptor for that living, breathing, near surface layer of the earth that is experiencing catastrophic (and invisible) loss of biodiversity’.1 A leading…

The Seven and Five Society was a London-based group of seven painters and five sculptors established in 1919 with the initial aim of encouraging traditional approaches to art. It held annual exhibitions from 1920 until 1935, and over time became more modernist in outlook. At the twelfth exhibition, at the Leicester Galleries in February 1933, the reviewer for The Times identified Frances Hodgkins as the artist who had ‘made the most satisfactory terms between the subconscious and conscious powers involved in painting’, praising two of her entries as ‘excellent pictures’. Showing alongside Hodgkins was another New Zealander, Len Lye (1901–1980), who had arrived in London in 1926 after living for several years in Samoa and Australia. He exhibited regularly with the Society from 1927 until 1934, and on this occasion…

In 1983, echoing Joni Mitchell’s ‘you don’t know what you’ve got till it’s gone’,1 New Zealand Herald reviewer T.J. McNamara observed: ‘Sometimes one does not realise the extent of an artist’s contribution until he has gone away.’ The occasion was a retrospective exhibition by Anthony Stones (1934–2016), who had ‘departed for fresh fields and pastures new’.2 Stones had recently relocated to England, where he was born, to pursue his career as a sculptor. He subsequently undertook major commissions and received recognition both in the United Kingdom and, from the early 2000s, China. At the same time he continued to work on projects involving New Zealand subjects, which are the focus of this article. Born in Glossop, North Derbyshire, Anthony Stones showed an early aptitude for drawing,3 and attended the Manchester Regional…

Nigel Brown was born in Invercargill in 1949, grew up in the Bay of Plenty, then lived in Auckland for several decades before moving to the remote western Southland settlement of Cosy Nook in 2001. Now, he resides in Dunedin, working in a two-level, multi-room studio in the industrial harbourside area, amongst the hubbub of machinery, trucks and a horde of hard-hatted, high-vis-vest-clad labourers. In the 1970s, factory jobs were the means by which Brown supported himself and his family, while the ‘everyman’ Kiwi labourer became a recurring figure in his art (along with more illustrious characters such as the controversial and contrasting Jameses, Cook and Baxter). One might be forgiven, too, for thinking that the surfaces of some of the paintings were achieved with a concreter’s trowel rather than…

We should not be defined by the smallness of our islands, but by the greatness of our oceans. Epeli Hau’ofa Migration has been an issue on which politicians and political parties have staked their identity since 1901, when the idea of the White Australia policy came into being. Subsequently dismantled only to have asylum seekers become another part of political identity, Australian immigration policy is driven mainly by agendas of economic growth and boosting human capital, and only secondly concerned with humanitarianism, development or expanding cultural diversity.1 John Vea’s first Australian exhibition, If I pick your fruit, will you put mine back?, provokes awareness of migrant workers, often through the lens of labour conditions. Curators Micheal Do and Mikala Tai at Sydney’s 4A Centre for Contemporary Asian Art have brought…

Sympathetic Resonance The Suter Art Gallery Te Aratoi o Whakatu, Nelson 19 October 2019–9 February 2020, curated by Sarah McClintock Sympathetic Resonance a group the eighth in a series of contemporary art projects at The Suter Art Gallery in Nelson since 1999. Designed by curator Sarah McClintock to ‘deconstruct the hierarchies which tether art to people, material, place and time’, Sympathetic Resonance includes a collection of works that reject labels often applied to artistic practices like that of being a painter or sculptor and Western cultural binaries like artist and audience, male and female, individual and collective, form and function, landscape and portrait, past and future, mass culture and high culture and so on. The metaphor of two tuning forks is used to articulate how the individual artworks relate to…

Home and Hearth Crafting Aotearoa: A Cultural History of Making in New Zealand and the Wider Moana Oceania written & edited by Karl Chitham, Kolokesa U. Mahina-Tuai & Damian Skinner Te Papa Press, Wellington 2019 DAVID EGGLETON Te Papa is one of our great cultural gatekeepers, a central repository of New Zealand’s self-image as a nation, as represented through a history-bound agglomeration of crafted objects. Te Papa Press is one of the national museum’s proselytising arms: its gladhanding task as a publisher, as this hefty tome confirms, is to recycle fervently canonical symbols of nationhood by repackaging them so as to tell ‘our story’ afresh for audiences near and far. While the main text, a renovated master-narrative, has been written by a small committee of three with a sure…