I AM ... disappointed

Colin McCahon, I Am, 1954, image via Art New Zealand.


A little while ago -- following a remarkably irritating encounter with the Christchurch City Council's booking system for children's swimming lessons which still has me gritting my teeth when I think about it; a system based, I assume, on close observation of railway ticket offices in the Indian subcontinent -- I canvassed opinion about starting a new blog solely for complaining purposes, entitled I Am Disappointed.

The more I thought about it, the more the idea seemed to have legs. And as is my way, grand visions rose like coloured smoke before my eyes. After a while when it gained momentum it wouldn't just be me complaining; I could secure complaints for 'I Am Disappointed' from all over New Zealand, maybe from throughout the Anglophone world. Anyone who wanted to complain about anything could have a forum to do so. Ex-boyfriends, bad architecture, swimming lessons, the frequency of school holidays, the selection process for New Zealand's participation in the Venice Biennale: all disappointments would be grist to the blog's mill. It could be funny. It might be useful. It would be enormous.

Via Twitter, at least, there was general approval of the idea, albeit with suggestions for alternative names. 'You are a disappointment to me', suggested one correspondent; 'What, is that it?' proposed another. The inimitable @styler mentioned that she was herself thinking of "starting a blog called 'I fucked up' but I'd be so busy I'd never have time to fail big in future". And @Hamish_Keith chipped in with 'Fresh Disappointments Delivered Daily', which had me fantasising about a masthead designed by Dick Frizzell.

There would be legal issues, undoubtedly, as some of the complaints might be a bit near the knuckle, but the problems could probably be got around. And I'd have to make sure the complaints were interesting, rather than just whinges or insane rants. And the blog would need a brand: it would need to narrow its focus. It couldn't deal with everyone's complaints about everything, that would break the internet. Perhaps it could specialise in art-related complaints? Thus enabling me to shoot for the big McCahon I AM (disappointed) masthead. Although that would mean I couldn't include my feelings about:

1. Christchurch City Council's antiquated booking system for children's swimming lessons which requires you to turn up in person at 8am on a single school day each term and queue for about 45 minutes (have I mentioned that?)

2. The fact that the gigantic house being built down the road has just had a two-storey barrel arch craned into place as an architectural feature, thus making a frigging mockery of the Christchurch City Council's supposed architectural guidelines for its Special Amenity Areas;

3. The fact that toys in Kinder Surprise eggs almost always come readymade these days rather than being the sort you have to put together (actually, this is one of the small guy's peeves, rather than mine, but it's heartfelt).

Then I realised it would actually be quite a lot of work to read through and vet the submissions, and that it would probably be a bit of a downer being a clearing house for other people's complaints (not unlike being a curator at a public gallery again, in fact). Also, aiming to operate in a territory marked out by the intersection of talkback radio, Hamish Keith's 'Cultural Curmudgeon' column, and the admirable New York-based keep-em-honest blog, How's My Dealing, might not necessarily be the recipe for a quiet life. So I've decided not to do it, after all.

But if I had, this week I'd be considering the forthcoming closure of Te Papa's brilliant research library to the general public. I've used it often over the years, and I've always liked how it's literally open to the public; you can walk right into it, sit down and start reading. You run into Te Papa's curators there, when they're working on something: and if you need help with a reference, in my experience the staff are quick and knowledgable. It's been reported that from November you'll still be able to use the research library on certain afternoons, but only if you make a previous appointment. I'm sure it's a necessary matter of cost-cutting, an internal management choice between this and that and so on, and I do note that they're planning to digitise more of their research collection, but I wish they hadn't chosen to cut the open library access: I liked and admired how the set-up of Te Papa's library announced 'We're open for scholarship. Ours, and yours.' It was a good look.

So, I wish the public swimming pools would digitise their booking systems, it's ridiculous to have to turn up in person as if the internet had never been invented: but I loved the fact you could turn up in person as a member of the public to Te Papa's research library. No doubt the swimming bookings will be online at some point, but I'll bet that it will prove considerably more difficult to reopen Te Papa's library to general public access in the future. It's the sort of thing that, once done, is surprisingly hard to undo.

Playdate at Ringo's

In the mid-1980s, I lived in a flat down by the river in central Christchurch. When I walked into town to catch the bus to university, I'd pass by Ringo's secondhand bookshop on Manchester Street. If I wasn't too late coming home, I'd pop in for a quick browse.

Ringo's long gone now -- he packed up shop sometime in the fifteen years I was away, and no one I'm in touch with now seems to know what became of him -- but in his time he was a legend. Friends told me he'd been in the book trade since the 1960s, when, presumably, he also got his name: if the fourth Beatle were tiny, ferrety-faced, wore a greasy cheese-cutter cap, and spent his days listening to the races on a transistor radio with an evil-smelling roll-your-own permanently stuck to his lower lip, they were dead ringers. Back then I was a Camel smoker, but the odour of Ringo's cigarettes was too much even for me. With undertones of damp and old chip fat, the musty fug of twenty years of cheap tobacco hit you in a dense greyish-brown miasma as soon as you opened the door. ("The smell of death," said a friend.) It took a decade or more for the books I bought there to lose the odour.

If you discounted the stench -- no easy task -- I loved popping in to Ringo's. You never knew what you might come across. The books were displayed on trestle tables, wedged together with their spines upwards; new items were stored in cardboard boxes on the floor, waiting for their turn on the table. The odd treasure floated up from a motley soup comprised of a dozen dog-eared copies of Papillon and Jaws, Hillman Imp repair manuals, countless light pink 1970s Mills and Boon hospital romances, and several unwanted volumes of Pam Ayres's poetry. At the time, probably as an antidote to my university studies, I was collecting paperback bodice-rippers. Over a few years I gradually accumulated everything Georgette Heyer ever wrote, as well as the lurid and increasingly improbable adventures of 18th-century French aristocrat Angelique, by Sergeanne Golon (a gallic husband and wife team), in thirteen fat volumes including Angelique: The Road to Versailles, Angelique and the Sultan, Angelique in Revolt, etc etc. (I needn't go on. You get the idea.)


One afternoon, rummaging through one of the boxes under the table, I found a couple of old issues of Playdate. As usual on the cover of Ringo's books, there was a sticker with a dual price written in magic marker: 50c/25c, which meant if you brought it back after you'd read it he'd give you 25c for it as long as you bought something else, in a kind of homegrown book pawning scheme. Initially attracted by the design of its advertising, I paid $1 for the two copies and took them home, whereupon I became completely enraptured by the content: Playdate was an entertainment and popular culture magazine aimed at 'teens to twenty-sixers', published in New Zealand between 1960 and 1972. It featured items on fashion, popular music, movies, and occasionally art. There were also horoscopes, advice columns, interviews with pop culture celebrities and the most fantastic adverts for bri-nylon negligees, pancake makeup and stretch slacks. Pure Mad Men. Maybe a touch of Austin Powers. It was New Zealand, after all.


Over the next fortnight or so, each time I called into Ringo's I picked up another few copies. Initially I found the Playdates in the boxes (maybe a job lot?), then they were up on the table with the 'current' books. On about the fourth occasion I was in, I noticed that the price had increased. They were now $2/$1. Plonking a pile down on the counter I mentioned the increase to Ringo.

"Well, the thing is," he said apologetically, fag bobbing up and down, taking a whistly indrawn breath like a mechanic just about to tell you the bad news about your car, "They've become very popular. Just flying out the door. I've had to put the price up."

But it's just me buying them, I said. If I wasn't buying them no one would be.

I paid up, with bad grace. It wasn't until a while afterwards that I realised Ringo's argument held up either way.

The other day I got the big pile of Playdates out again. They've been with me over twenty years, through seven house removals and four cities; they're such a fantastic record of popular culture in New Zealand that I've never wanted to get rid of them, and in the end I'll probably give them to a library collection as they should be in the public domain (I note that even the National Library doesn't have the whole run). Flicking through them, it was the big guy who first noticed a photo taken by Marti Friedlander (though the caption said Marty). Looking through the magazines again more carefully, I realised that the New Zealand art world of the 1960s features in them frequently in various overt and covert ways. There are painters, photographers, film-makers, art collectors and assorted art groupies... some surprising names.

To this end, I thought that I might post a few pages here over the next few weeks. (Please excuse, as ever, the shoddy re-photography.)

Here for your viewing pleasure is Dick Frizzell's serigraphed Warhol-esque illustration for a short story by Peter John Wheatley entitled 'Blue Capsule', from June 1969.


And Marti Friedlander's terrific photos of The Satirists, a university review from August 1965:



More to come. They still whiff, a bit.

Gracious living

I am a nosy beggar, as well as a bit of a cheapskate, so when the latest editions of Urbis or NZ Home or NZ House and Garden are out, I pop into our local newsagent to have a quick read. I scan the contents page to see if I vaguely know anyone featured (tragic behaviour, I'm well aware), and then I flick through the magazine to have a quick shufti at the art.

Following this highly scientific research methodology, I've identified four kinds of art collection featured in lifestyle magazines. There's the "decor collection", which features coloured rectangles chosen by interior designers from affordable art shows and the kind of galleries which, as John Hurrell says, also specialise in framing; these works look like art, but aren't at all. Then there's the "generic Auckland collection", which includes a work on paper by Gretchen Albrecht, a small Bambury and perhaps a Gimblett, with a bronze by Paul Dibble or Terry Stringer on the window sill.

There's a figurative variant found throughout the country which includes a Fomison painting, probably a Frizzell or two, maybe a Richard McWhannell; possibly also, depending on the age of the collector, either a Shane Cotton and a Tony de Lautour or a Maddox and a Clairmont. (In last month's NZ House and Garden I admired Hamish Keith and Ngila Dickson's Fomison and Frizzell paintings, as well as their extensive collection of art cushions.) Finally there's the sort of top-end collection that includes a free-standing figure by Ronnie van Hout, a bulbous excrescence of paint by Rohan Weallans, and an installation by et al featuring tape hiss and a tangle of speaker wire.


I've had several friends and acquaintances over the years who've had their homes "done" by design magazines. As a consequence, I know that houses featured in design mags are to real life as the catwalk is to gardening clobber. I have stored dodgy furniture and cardboard boxes full of crap and knicknacks for a neighbour who was going for an uncharacteristically minimal look in her spread; I also helped her move in the flash new furniture she had borrowed for the occasion. Her place was unrecogisable when the the magazine came out. Other friends have appeared to entirely lose the enormous TV that habitually dominates their lounge, or to have acquired several tasteful pieces of Scandinavian furniture immediately prior to the shoot.

It's similar, I suppose, to the kind of massive clear-out and smarten-up that you do when you put your house on the market. (We rented -- and entirely filled -- a storage unit with objects removed from our last house in order to sell it.) Oh yes, I always live with all surfaces completely bare of objects and an enormous vase of tulips in the kitchen... it's gracious living all day everyday round at our house.


For the nosy beggar, real estate listings can also provide a means of checking out other people's art collections, though you're more likely to see a faded print of The Haywain than a previously unexhibited Donald Judd. Real estate listings also supply another extremely guilty pleasure likewise provided by interior design mags: the opportunity to marvel at the extreme foulness of other people's taste.

Imagine, then, my great joy at coming across It's Lovely! I'll Take It!, a blog which deals solely with unfortunate real estate photographs. (The photos above are borrowed from it. Rather than being taken at my house, in case you were wondering.) Not much art hanging on the walls at It's Lovely!, but in a way, each image is a work of art in its own right. Great stuff.


*I got to It's Lovely! I'll Take It!, courtesy of Christchurch journalist and photographer Adrienne Rewi. It's one of her favourites, too.

A horse goes into a bar

I've had a complaint from a regular reader that for a blog called Art, Life, TV, Etc., although we've had a lot of art and some sneaky bits of life now and again, there's been precious little TV content thus far. That's very true. Regrettably there's none today either.

But here are five etceteras that have been on my mind this week.

1. Quite a lot of thinking about Richard Prince's paintings has reminded me of the only joke I've ever been told by an art dealer.

"A horse goes into a bar. The bartender says, 'Why the long face?'"

(The old ones are definitely the goodies.)

Richard Prince, Nuts, 2000, acrylic on canvas, 112 x 203.5 inches


2. Who would have thought the august British Museum was such a treasure-trove of tat? Following my recent post about Rita Angus's socks, a reader has pointed me to the cultural glories currently available in the British Museum's gift shop: Rosetta Stone tea towel anyone? Tutankhamen's Aroma of Intrigue perfume for men (more must than musk...)? Sacred Egyptian Book of the Dead coffee mug? Nice.

(Thanks B.)


3. A dream about a tidal wave sweeping down K Road. Odd. Art-related in some indefinable way.


4. As well as knock-knock jokes, whoopee cushions are big in our house this winter. Beware anyone who idly sits down on the couch without first checking: an enormous raspberry is likely to issue forth from under the cushions, followed by indignant accusations and hysterical giggling from the small person. Again, doesn't matter how often you hear 'em, the old ones are the good ones, etc., something which is reflected in the classic whoopee cushion's graphic design, which doesn't appear to have changed since it was invented in 1930. (Something for New Zealand's graphic design journal, The National Grid, to look into perhaps?)


When the whoopee cushion's inventor tried to sell his prototype to a practical joke firm, its owner, Soren Sorensen Adams, who had made his fortune in the Sneezing Powder craze which swept America in the first years of the last century, and was the marketer of such gems as the Exploding Cigarette Box, Itching Powder, the Stink Bomb, and the Bar Bug in Ice Cube, passed over the opportunity as he deemed it too vulgar to sell. The mail order company Johnson Smith picked it up instead, and successfully sold it along with their other novelties -- x-ray specs, joy buzzers, and fake vomit -- on the back covers of comics. Which explains why the style of the cartoon on the whoopee cushion (source material for Dick Frizzell if ever I saw it) reminds me so strongly of the adverts for sea monkeys I used to see in comics and lust after in vain as a child ...

5. Thinking about scale of sculptural works after this invitation from the Hamish McKay Gallery popped up in my in-box.
Wouldn't it be great if someone gave Tony de Lautour a whole heap of money to make a really massive version of this work ...

Artist slash model

Sometimes I feel as though I've been down a well for the past couple of years. I'm astounded that I've missed this; artist Dick Frizzell's appearance in a Barker's advertising campaign last year. He designed some boxer shorts (sporting a nifty prizefighter design) for the clothing company's prostate cancer campaign, and newsreader/TV personality/and by the looks of it good sport Alison Mau got her kit off to model them. I realise that I may well be the last person in New Zealand to be aware of this shopportunity -- you probably already have a pair or two of Dick's undies duking it out in your drawer -- but what I find remarkable and worthy of note here is the inclusion of an artist with other New Zealand 'celebs', including current All Black prop Neemia Tialata, league star Reuben Wiki, New Zealand's favourite jackass Marc Ellis, etc.

Dick Frizzell, of course, who once remarked that when visiting a supermarket, he felt like Van Gogh walking through a wheatfield, is hardly the kind of artist to recoil in horror from the world of commerce. He was an ad-man himself for a decade, during which time he created the iconic Eta peanut butter man and the gum-booted, black singletted Ches 'n' Dale cheese characters. His paintings and prints have been concerned with popular culture and the commercialisation of the image for many years. So it's tempting to see his recent involvement with the Barkers boxer shorts ads as another aspect of his constantly evolving (Pop) art practice.

It's a bit of a mistake (although quite fun) to read too much sociology into advertising campaigns (or what would the ubiquitous and sadly award-winning Novus windscreens "show us your crack!" radio jingle say about our society?) Ads are the product of the imagination of industry creatives, rather than official cultural policy. (The truth about our society probably lies somewhere between the two.) But equally, there's something interesting going on when an ad agency working for a major retail chain feels that there's commercial legs in a 'proper' New Zealand artist fronting a campaign. I would hate to say that it represents some sort of cultural coming of age, but actually, it probably does.