Innholdsfortegnelse for Summer 2016 #160 i Art New Zealand

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,…

Abstraction is one of the Sirens of contemporary painting. It is a thing that draws many painters in. Some approach with diffidence, while others embrace it. Some dabble in it, some grapple with it, others wrestle with it and some treat it as a plaything. For some it opens up new horizons, while for others it presents a blind alley, and the only valid response is to retreat. It is the logical, seductive endgame for those who seek to simplify, to pare down, to unembellishthe result of that elusive search for the essence of the thing, and for honesty. Roy Good succumbed long ago, and is wedded to abstraction. His partnership with it is an ongoing artistic act, but started out in politics-as a young painter, surrounded by a nationalist…

Similar to many public galleries in the country, the Aigantighe Art Gallery in Timaru owes its creation to philanthropic generosity. In 1955 James Grant, son of Mackenzie Country farmers Alexander and Helen Grant, donated his parents’ two-storeyed Edwardian retirement home (built in 1908) and garden to Timaru as a public gallery.1 The gallery opened the following year with local painter Clifford Brunsden as its first director.2 Just over 20 years later, in 1978, with pressures of a growing collection, limited storage and the inadequate scale of the homestead rooms to present an expanding exhibition programme, a large extension was added. This included a sizable entrance foyer, office and storage facilities and a large gallery. Significantly, this coincided with a rise in gallery professionalism nationwide, and staff began to be appointed…

It is now 27 years since I embarked on the job of investigating Tom Hutchins’ photographs of China. He had little interest in revisiting the biggest assignment of his career as a photojournalist and, as I dug in, he told me that I valued his work more than he did. Nevertheless, he acquiesced and eventually warmed to the idea that one day it would be possible to show what he saw. He and Florence were among the closest couples I have ever known, and she was always welcoming during my irregular visits, through the period of his ailing health, when he lost his left eye to cancer. I made enlarged photostats from his proof sheets to help him choose the most significant images and we slowly made progress. He had…

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…

Nothing could be more serendipitous than to return from a trip ‘up North’ visiting old haunts, urupa, marae, churches and galleries, to be delighted by Kathrin Simon’s FADE at the Pah Homestead. I had just seen Aberhart in Hokianga at Kohukohu-a photographic exhibition of Hokianga churches accompanied by three local stories filmed by Marg Morrow and Clare Ward. These black-and-white images, from the early 1980s, consisting of both interior and exterior shots, appear almost sculpted-stark and formidable; at times, grim. Kathrin Simon’s ten coloured interior images, all shot on a full-frame Nikon D800, are printed in a circular format on fibre-based paper. This allows for a sense of layers and moods in a silky rich sheen, creating an immediate sense of intimacy, depth and warmth. The artist speaks powerfully of…

Part of a university’s proper business is to act as nurse to the arts, or, more exactly, to the imagination as it expresses itself in the arts and sciences. Imagination may flourish anywhere. But it should flourish as a matter of course in the university, for it is only through imaginative thinking that society grows, materially and intellectually. Charles Brasch, Landfall, vol. 13, no. 1, March 1959, pp. 3–4. Since 1966, the Frances Hodgkins Fellowship at the University of Otago in Dunedin has provided an artist with a studio, the time to explore new territory on a lecturer’s salary and the chance to join what swiftly became an impressive group of New Zealand artists. It was the first artist-in-residence programme in the country and was one of a trio of…

This Model World: Travels to the Edge of Contemporary Art by Anthony Byrt Auckland University Press, Auckland 2016 PETER SHAND In a pivotal scene of calm in the television drama series The Missing, a police detective sits watch over a young woman as she comes down from a long-term heroin addiction. She awakes to find him reading, an occupation he has undertaken for the duration of his wait in the hotel room in which he has locked them both. He speaks to her of this, saying that reading is the most human of pleasures. In a narrative of desperation and unresolved grief (the principal story concerns a father’s search for a child lost and taken) the scene and statement resonate with that which makes us who we are. This Model…

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…

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…

In 1929 Robert Graves published Good-Bye to All That, a bitter memoir of the Great War and a marker in the 34-year-old poet’s personal life. Mired in resentment and controversy, Graves abandoned the United Kingdom for the Majorcan village of Deyà, leaving his wife and children for his sometime companion and muse, the American poet Laura Riding. Shortly after Graves and Riding had settled in Deyà they were joined by Len Lye and soon-to-be wife Jane Thompson. Lye had designed the cover jacket for Good-Bye to All That while Thompson had typed the manuscript.1 The New Zealand-born Lye had, just a few years prior, left his own homeland and was now making his first impressions in Britain with the animation Tusalava (1929), produced by the London Film Society, and an…

Among the exhibitions installed with the reopening of Christchurch Art Gallery Te Puna o Waiwhetu last summer was a selection of Canterbury landscape paintings from the gallery’s historical collection by the nineteenth-century artist John Gibb (1831–1909). This was the first time since the vignette show of 2000 that so many works by this artist had been given attention by the gallery, but such a lapse in exposure is not unusual. Gibb, like many of his colonial artist contemporaries, has had moments in the light and long periods in the shadows. Gibb arrived in Canterbury from Glasgow on 28 September 1876 with almost 20 years of practice behind him as a studio marine and landscape painter, as well as many years exhibiting at art societies in Greenock, Edinburgh, Glasgow and Manchester.…