Art New Zealand Summer 2016 #160

Auckland Judy Millar Turning the World Inside Out: 30 Years a Painter Gow Langsford Gallery 31 August–24 September EDWARD HANFLING Judy Millar’s work always reminds me of American pop artist Roy Lichtenstein’s 1965 Little Big Painting, with its comic-style rendering of splattery brushstrokes. In its time, Lichtenstein’s painting knocked the stuffing out of expressionism, draining the brush-mark of its emotive content and emphasising that it had been all along just a conventional sign for ‘expression’ rather than innately expressive. Millar’s tangled ribbons and swathes resemble Lichtenstein’s representation. Also, while Millar’s marks, unlike Lichtenstein’s, are to some extent the residue of dynamic painterly gestures, they have a detached, studied, disembodied quality. It is this dual action that gives away Millar’s art-historical position, after abstract expressionism, after pop, and after…

I first met Judy Darragh in my early months back in Auckland following two years working for The Physics Room in Christchurch and a good many more, living further south in Dunedin. Artist Louise Menzies extended an invitation to attend one of Judy’s now infamous COOKs evenings, which in this instance was held in the Old Folks Association Hall just off Karangahape Road. With lights dimmed and catering called in, three long tables had been arranged in the centre of the room and decorated with characteristic Darragh flourish. A flow of warm conversation and laughter moved through the hall as glasses were laid out, drinks were poured, and a growing entourage of women artists, writers and mothers began to fill the room. Judy’s COOKs evening began when, as a new…

Art follows philosophy. In the 1960s and for some while after, language was the game, and artists came up with conceptual art and illustrated the more comprehensible points of post-structuralist thought. By the beginning of this century the tide had turned and, as the realisation dawned that some kinds of experiences are difficult to describe or explain, the ‘linguistic turn’ gave way to the ‘affective turn’ (there has been an epidemic of ‘turns’). Now, in a further logical step, it has been suggested that things previously considered inanimate have feelings or a ‘life force’ too. Despite the nauseatingly frequent references in art-writing to the philosophy of Gilles Deleuze, and to Henri Bergson via Deleuze, ‘vital materialism’ carries the appealing promise of getting beyond the idea that what we think, feel…

Archiving and collecting photographs is now prominent in many artists’ photographic practices, and a recent show at the Adam Art Gallery in Wellington brought together two approaches to collecting-as-a-practice to remarkable effect. One is a pioneering methodology from America in the mid-twentieth century heyday of print culture, and the other, the recent practice of a New Zealand artist working in the current digitally dominated moment. The rich dialogue between Walker Evans’ Magazine Work, curated by English writer, curator and artist David Campany, and the Melbourne-based New Zealand artist Patrick Pound’s installation Documentary Intersect provokes many ideas about collecting, curating and editing as art practice and what those practices can tell us about both photography and collecting in the internet age. In the nineteenth and twentieth centuries there were two predominant,…

This long-awaited exhibition is a phenomenal tribute to two significant artists and teachers of Maori art, tohunga whakairo master carver Rangi Hetet and his late wife, tohunga whatu raranga master weaver Erenora Puketapu-Hetet. Legacy: The Art of Rangi Hetet and Erenora Puketapu-Hetet not only honours them, but also their artistic heritage and influence on Maori art, most especially through their own family. Five generations of this art dynasty is represented in the exhibition. It is apt that Legacy is showing at The Dowse Art Museum, in acknowledgement of the Hetets’ community leadership and relationship with the museum. The urban marae of Waiwhetu, where the Hetet family are based, was originally set aside as reserve lands for Te Atiawa in the 1840s. The city itself has grown to be the seventh…

Cuba Street is just the sort of place you might expect to stumble upon hidden memorials to the good and great of culture and art. An ‘icon’ in its own right, it is a street defined by its colourful characters, the late Peter McLeavey being just one of the more memorable, and their legacies. A recent addition to the neighbourhood-the Westra Museum-reinforces the area’s important place in the history of New Zealand art, and yet is somewhat unusual for the fact that it honours a ‘living treasure’-the Dutch-born photographer Ans Westra-herself an ‘icon’. After a career of more than half a century, it is no exaggeration to say that Westra, now 80, is well and truly embraced by the nation. She has earned some of the country’s highest honours, among…