Resilience

"Resilience" is a word we're hearing a lot these days in Christchurch. In fact, the visionary new Central City Plan includes the words 'resilient' or 'resilience' 36 times in 154 pages. Our ruined city will be rebuilt with a foundation of resilience. The new buildings which populate it will be resilient to the violent seismic activity which we have now come to expect. Social resilience and the strength of communities will be considered in the construction of urban public space and in zoning decisions. (Technology, in the new Christchurch, will be at the service of society: like the bionic man, the city will be stronger and better than before. A resilient utopia on the plains. Eventually.)

And significantly, the people of Canterbury, who have experienced more than 2500 earthquakes of M3 and above in the last year, are often said by national and local commentators to be extremely resilient.

Tough, even.

That was how National Radio introduced their piece on the devastating news that 20% of Kaiapoi's homes would be forcibly demolished due to severe land damage. "They're tough, in Kaiapoi..."

Visitors' Centre at Kaiapoi, tilted by the earthquake. Cables restrain the building from sliding into the river. Image via WozaWanderer.

Except that they're not. And the people of nearby Christchurch are not. They're the same as people anywhere, in Ponsonby or Temuka or Karori or Murupara. The people of New Zealand's second-biggest city are not a sturdy-legged race of dour peasants with a high pain threshold. They're you, and your Mum, and your neighbours, and the guy in the dairy, and the people you went to school with. Just New Zealand people. No tougher, no weaker than anyone else. And a year's worth of earthquakes, the loss of houses and possessions and in some cases friends and family members has taken its toll on us all.

Like their counterparts in town, the people of the Kaiapoi red zone are likely to be devastated that they will be forced to leave their homes and that in many cases the payout they receive will be insufficient to buy another house. Many older people, or people on low fixed incomes, of which there are plenty in the residential red zones (I think perhaps that fact is a story in itself), will be unable to raise a mortgage. They will be forced to rent, seeing the equity they once had in their homes drain into the pockets of others. They will see the modest savings that they had hoped to pass on to their children disappear into the profit statements of banks and property developers. They will be forced to leave their homes and their communities, where the personal relationships built up over years have ensured a means of social support for the vulnerable. The question of people's toughness in the face of these repeated blows to their financial and social security is glib, irrelevant and insulting.

The story, clearly, is in what's happening to the people, not in the presumption of their stoic emotional response.

To their great credit, National Radio instantly changed their tack on the interview with Kaiapoi's mayor, after being tweeted about the inherent wrongness of the "they're tough down there" line of approach. The interviewer read out the tweet and asked if it were true that people were devastated. And immediately, they got a response in which he described the great financial, social and emotional cost that local people, including he and his family, were faced with. The earthquakes were the first disaster; their financial consequences for individuals are the second. The mayor's voice cracked as he spoke. He sounded like a courageous man dealing with great uncertainty. This was proper radio journalism. The right questions were asked to get an accurate account of a person's experience. It told a very different story than the ridiculous pre-packaged Tough Southerners routine.

The frame that's put round a view of the world has a great deal to do with the way we understand what we're looking at. A tiny shift to one side or the other makes all the difference in telling a story. If you're standing in any street in Christchurch, things may look much as they always have: but turn 45 degrees and there will be piles of rubble and gaps in the streetscape like broken teeth. The sheer magnitude of it all -- three major destructive earthquakes, the closing and levelling of the CBD, the sleepless nights, the deaths, the injuries, the financial cost, the loss of certainty and peace of mind and personal security -- is only just starting to be realised. The people are as damaged as the city.

I've never been more aware of the importance of the humanities to people and society than in the last year. The humanities help people make sense of the great events of their own lives and times. There are stories that can only be told through mediums such as painting, or literary non-fiction, or poetry, or music. Stories that in their magnitude can only be approached sideways, through the details of a single life. The eyewitness reportage that journalism adds to the historical account is the basis for many of the stories that can be told later. The particular frame that the artist or the writer puts on their account of life in the city after the earthquake -- what they leave out, what they put in -- determines how these events, and their politics, will be remembered. It's critical that journalism gets it right as the medium of first response.

The first post-earthquake art is starting to be produced in the city. And it's good. Writers started early, endeavouring to make sense of the experience. The Arts Festival featured a work of contemporary dance entitled Tilt, where the dancers performed on a moving, tilting floor surface. And Christchurch musician Ed Muzik has been working on an EP concerned with post-quake life and politics. Entitled Ed Muzik Hates It, a reworking of an ad campaign which features pillars of the local community 'loving' the city, the EP features songs such as EQC Are Looking At My House, The Merivale Working Men's Club, and Double Brownlee (the latter of which includes the immortal lines "I don't know why the peasants moan/ Forget red or green, you're in the brown zone).  You can order Hates It here, if you like that sort of thing.

Artist Tony de Lautour was interviewed recently for the Canterbury Arts and Heritage Trust's wonderful Articulate series, in which prominent local artists speak about their experiences of the earthquake. After the quake, he exhibited some of his damaged work in Wellington, following its rescue from his eighth-floor studio in Cathedral Square, behind the red zone cordon.

He talks about the earthquakes manifesting themselves in his work, perhaps subconsciously, as cut-ups, as well as the experience of the earthquake affecting the way artists might work.

"It was a terrible experience and I wouldn't wish it on anyone, but since you're here you might as well make the best of it. It's a totally unique experience that as an artist you should be able to draw something from it. I don't mean doing paintings of the Cathedral broken down or anything like that. But it can affect the way you're working. It can be character-building in terms of toughening up your attitude to getting work done."

This is the kind of genuine resilience that I find inspirational. The strength which comes from the traditions of art and culture; from the people who continue to make new works amid piles of rubble. And in the work of artists like Ed, and Tony, and others, we'll increasingly start to see parallels and analogues for our own experiences which might help people to think through the violent destruction of the old way of life and imagine a different future: here, in the same place, where everything has changed.

The Way We Lived Then

The golden kakapo from Canterbury Museum, detail from an installation by Ronnie Van Hout at the Robert McDougall Gallery, 2009, from the Snare/Mahanga exhibition


When we moved back here nearly four years ago, I found Christchurch like a ghost town. It wasn't so much that the city was dead, but more that it was UnDead, to me at least: after fifteen years away I encountered the ghosts of my former life around every corner.

I'd drop the small guy off at gymnastics out at QEII, and bump into my teenage self staggering out of the turnstiles after Sweetwaters South in 1984. I'd go for a checkup and recall that the Greek-pedimented medical rooms were built on the site where the Victorian Coffee Lounge—one of the only two establishments in Christchurch in the early 1980s that was (a) open at night and (b) not a pub, complete with greasy red gingham table-cloths and candles in Chianti bottles—once stood. I'd see the green substation box on Wairarapa Terrace and remember the 'Fendalton Graffiti Club' sign that was once written on the front of it. I'd drive past the casino on Durham Street and suddenly be spilling out of the Gladstone at closing time after seeing The Bats or The Verlaines, checking my watch for the time of the last bus home.

Bill Hammond, Watching for Buller, 1994

Smells would do it, too. I don't notice it at all now, but for some months the university library's characteristic smell—equal parts dust and sweat and sweet floor polish—took me back instantly to Orientation Week 1985: black basketball boots, black sunglasses, black tights, black Cleopatra hair. Christchurch Gothic. The ghost of my former self.

Tony de Lautour, Operation Overload, 2006, Ray Hughes Gallery

For some time after I came back to Christchurch I went about reeling with the Freudian uncanny of it all. Every experience, every view, was overlaid with the memory of another time in the same place. It was like old fashioned offset printing, the picture slightly out of register, or perhaps a badly-tuned TV leaving ghostly trails behind the actors. I seemed to have forgotten everything, but my life was being replayed in jerky fits and starts. Any walk or trip in the car would trigger the back story. It was exhausting. It was relentless. I think when I left town in the early 1990s I pulled the door closed behind me. I never expected to be back.

Detail of serpents on a park bench in the Botanic Gardens

We live a few hundred metres away from the site of my old family home, long since demolished. The suburb is so changed that it's hard to remember what it was like, back then; but sometimes when I catch the light a certain way the Tuscan McMansions with clipped box gardens like Legoland Hidcotes disappear and the old white-painted weatherboard villas my school friends lived in rise again, shaded by hundred-year-old rhododendrons and dense shrubberies of camellias.

Even now, of course, the Freudian unheimlich, or unhomely, is never far away here in the England of the South Seas.

Reconstruction of predation by Haast’s Eagle (Harpagornis moorei) on South Island giant moa (Dinornis robustus). Image by Ray Jacobs, Canterbury Museum.

On our way to school we pass the house where Allen Curnow lived in the 1940s. I told the children about this one day when we were standing outside, waiting to cross the road. "A very famous poet used to live here. There should be a plaque, really. He wrote a great poem about the giant moa skeleton in the museum." Then a little white terrier ran through the garden and jumped up on his hind legs against the low brick wall behind a laurel hedge. "We could call him Allen," said the small guy.

Having been here for four years we are beginning to put down some roots. A while ago the small guy and I wrote down all the dogs whose names we know and whom we see on their morning rounds while we're walking through the park to school. There's Bebe the gigantic Newfoundland; Duke the poodle; Teddy, and Charlie, low-slung plumy tailers of uncertain parentage and cheerful disposition; Bertie and Bunty the spaniels; Milo the chocolate labrador. There's one big white one we call the Polar Bear, and the Barker Brothers. You start to feel at home in a neighbourhood when you know the names of its dogs.

__

I wrote this post, on the difficulties of being at home again in Christchurch, before the earthquake. Since then many things have changed, along with the streetscape of the inner city and the skyline of our street: one of the oddest after-effects of the quake, for me at least, has been to finally make Christchurch feel like home.

The accidental curator

When you work with artists and collections for a while, you inevitably get to thinking about them in a certain way. This artist belongs with that one, you think to yourself; these works are part of this school; these ideas are the particularly interesting ones; and you go about your business accordingly. It's not really a bad thing: not so much a prescribed way of thinking but more like an intuitive shorthand based on experience.

However, I really enjoy the kind of accidental curation that arises from looking at works of art in informal situations. Some of the best ideas come from just prowling about looking at works and constructing unlikely relationships between them. The painting racks in the art stores of public galleries, where the only principles of selection and juxtaposition are the relative sizes of works -- accommodating the largest number of works into the smallest safe space possible. These ordered but essentially haphazard spaces are a great source of random curation, in which a Woollaston might be hung cheek-by-jowl with a Rohan Weallans, or a Frances Hodgkins next to a Julian Dashper.

Recently I noticed a particularly pleasing example of random curation on our dining room mantelpiece, where we tend to put things that we want to look at for a week or so. On the left is a reproduction of Tony Fomison's Detail for a Dancing Skeleton (1970), from Art + Object's auction calendar for 2009. On the right is a postcard from rival auction house Webb's, featuring Don Binney's Kotare over Hikurangi (1965). Beyond very broad historical principles, I would never generally think to relate the two artists' work, and hadn't noticed the anthropomorphic face shape in the landform of Don Binney's painting until I put it next to the Fomison.


On the other side of the mantelpiece, Tony de Lautour's hand-screened catalogue cover from his recent show at the Physics Room accidentally on display next to the Dali invitation card has -- beyond the enjoyably silly formal relationship of the lightning bolt and the moustache -- has opened up a new avenue for me to think slightly differently about de Lautour's work in terms of pranksterish surrealism.


One of the best sources for random acts of curation are auction catalogues. Some of the strangest juxtapositions of works are thrown up on their pages; so wonderful, sometimes, that it's hard to know if they are genuinely random or are an inventive curatorial outlet for the auctioneer. (I must ask one!) I enjoyed this page of works incorporating disrupted grids from Art + Object's 'Second Important Paintings 2009' catalogue. Again, two artists whose works I wouldn't usually think to put together. (Allen Maddox's Grid (1982) and Lozenge (Blue) (1997) with Richard Killeen's Frontal Lobe (1998).)


And, from the Webbs' catalogue, another couple of unlikely bedmates (though I would have been horribly tempted to put the Ted Bullmore on a page with the Ava Seymour photograph below. Thankfully, the auctioneers' good sense and taste prevailed.) (These are Edward Bullmore's Astroform no.13 (Bliss) (c.1967) and Callum Innes's Exposed Painting Red Violet Yellow Oxide Charcoal Black (2003), from Art + Object.) Makes me think, once again, what an incredibly interesting painter Bullmore was.


However, looking at the spread below, I find it impossible to believe that the auctioneer, or perhaps the catalogue designer, placed these two photographic works together randomly. (Ava Seymour's Yellow Oval Room (1994), and John B. Turner's La Patisserie (1972/8), at Webbs.)

But I think perhaps the most enjoyable of all these random acts of curation I've seen lately is the page layout below from the Webbs' 'Important Works 2009' catalogue, juxtaposing Tony de Lautour's Display (2004) against Milan Mrkusich's Painting Indigo 1969. It's hard to know whether this odd comparison best positions de Lautour's work as colourfield abstraction with some doodley bits added, or Mrkusich's as a ground ready to receive the projection of personal content. Actually, it's probably both. And that's why I love these random acts of chance curation: they add immeasurably to one's perception of the almost boundless ability of good art to take on different resonances in different contexts.

Museum merch

It's not very widely known, but Canterbury Museum has quite a good art collection. (The bulk of Christchurch's art collection is housed at its public gallery.) Most of the Museum's art holdings are historical, of course, and relate to the early days of the Canterbury settlement; but there are also some great contemporary New Zealand works tucked away, including a silver epergne by Tony de Lautour and a series of Michael Parekowhai's kowhaiwhai lightboxes permanently hung in the research library.

When Canterbury Museum's rebuilding project was put on hold in 2006 after being declined resource consent (the plans involved architectural changes made to the A-listed historic building designed by Benjamin Mountfort), its proposal to take over the old Robert McDougall Art Gallery building next door, which had recently fallen vacant due to the building of the new gallery, also foundered. The plan, as I understand it, was to use the beautiful old neo-classical gallery building for temporary and touring exhibitions, and also to exhibit what the museum until quite recently quaintly referred to as its "Picture Collection". (Can't find any reference to that on its website -- but then there's hardly reference to anything much at all. Time for an upgrade, chaps.)

Anyway, in conjunction with the Ellerslie Flower Show in Hagley Park later in the year, the Museum is using the old gallery building to exhibit the complete set of Banks' Florilegium, the engravings made from the botanical specimens collected by botanists Joseph Banks and Daniel Solander on James Cook's voyages of exploration, including from the Endeavour's landfalls in New Zealand. Painter Bill Sutton donated funds to the Macmillan Brown Library at the University of Canterbury to purchase the set of prints, one of only 100 in the world: the university has a short article about the collection here. (The festival publicity about the show suggests that it's the first time they've been publicly exhibited in Christchurch, but that's rot: I saw them in the 80s. Won't stop me going along to see them again, though.)

I very rarely make impulse buys from the supermarket, but when I saw these vegetable chips the other day, I had to have them. In a triumph of the copywriter's art, the manufacturers note: "We have drawn inspiration from Sir Joe and his insatiable appetite for adventure to develop our range of incredible taste experiences." Excellent stuff. Perhaps the Museum could snap up a caseload for the gallery shop.

Fancy an ear punch?

I see it most days. Usually I'm driving past, on my way back from the university or the library or the supermarket; and I'm hurrying, trying to get home to cook dinner or take the washing in before the rain comes; and maybe the small guy's chatting in the back, and the baby's grumbling, and The House at Pooh Corner's on the CD player yet again, and school kids are biking three abreast up the road, and my mobile's ringing -- in short I am distracted -- and I see it, and I'm momentarily astounded, and I think that one day I really must stop and have a proper look, but I never do.

It's a shop window, the middle one of an unremarkable block of three shops, deep in suburbia. The shop on the corner is a dairy, one of those dark, maze-like ones with an uneven floor and a blue fly-killer hanging up and only one of each product on the shelves at a time (this is a city where everyone drives; dairies do their best business elsewhere, where people walk to and from work); the shop on the other side is the headquarters of an upmarket personal trainer. There's an irony to this, of course.

I think what first attracted me to the shop window in between was the arch of its main lettering -- an old-fashioned commercial art device like that used in the 'Hairdresser and Tobacconist' lettering which famously inspired the young Colin McCahon to become an artist -- followed by its sheer volume of information which is nonetheless utterly unintelligible to a passer-by. The font is a wrong-un: crazed-looking, slightly volcanic, wonky, like a home-made tattoo which has bled into the skin. It looks like something from Tony de Lautour's blue period. Each time I pass it, it snags at the edge of my consciousness. Until I walked there in the weekend to photograph it, I had no idea what the business actually was. An accountant? A lawnmower repair shop? Ethnic foods?

Now I've photographed the window -- an exercise which has tamed something of its visual craziness -- I realise that it advertises the premises of a hairdresser and beauticians, albeit of an unusual variety which offers "Wolfcuts" along with "Eyebrowsperm" (very tempting to re-punctuate that one) and "Eyebrowstattoo". (Don't fancy an "Earpunch" much though.)

There's something wonderful about walking where you usually drive. I am slowly becoming a flaneur of suburbia, measuring small journeys round our neighbourhood by effort and distance rather than duration. I'm seeing things I've never noticed: strange graffiti, mysterious signs, a letterbox shaped like the head of a robot.


Yet there's a mystery to car journeys absent from the footpath. On the one hand, there is the microscopic detail of the street level view, with its possibilities of human interaction; on the other, there's the passing glance from the car window, at a scene intuited but not properly apprehended. As a walker, you are a participant; you can stop, and look around, and take it in. You're immersed in your surroundings. In a car, you are a spectator, afforded only a single frame of the passing world; you have to imagine the rest.

Having stood outside with my camera I now know what I'm looking at when I pass the three shops: I can see (disappointingly) that the central word is in fact "HAIR" rather than "HATE"; I can see that the font is constructed from angular multiples of a heart, upside down on the ascent and right side up on the descent; I can see that "Diploma" is written in "serious" lettering in the middle of the mad word pile.

But what I'm wondering is whether all this newly-acquired knowledge of the sign's content will make me stop seeing the crazed beauty of the design when I flash past in the car. The attraction of the visually mysterious, one frame at a time.

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.

Should I stay or should I go

Tony de Lautour, Powder Land, 2004, acrylic on canvas, 800 x 1200mm

Prompted by various recent discussions about the cultural plight of the South Island, I've been recalling the time I ran into an acquaintance -- someone I've known in one way or another for twenty-five years -- who was briefly back from Europe, where she has pursued a successful career in contemporary dance for the past decade with one of the world's leading companies.

It was early morning; after a broken night's sleep, I'd been to the supermarket; the baby was howling; I was pushing the buggy up the hill, sweating, red in the face, with embarrassing groceries (toilet paper, cheap wine, chocolate biscuits) bulging from the basket underneath, when I saw my friend coming towards me, whippet thin, cheekbones like a razor, dressed in casually chic black rehearsal clothes. There was no escape. After the obligatory continental kiss on both cheeks, she said "And this is your ... [brief pause] ... baby? How ... er ... wonderful. Is it ... er ... [brief pause] ... a boy or a girl?"

And then she said, "And what do you do here?"

Like most people involved in the visual arts, I can't abide other highbrow artforms. Classical music leaves me cold; opera is obviously an unspeakable torment; to my shame (if I had any), visits to the theatre require the provision of free tickets; but the worst hell of all is reserved for dance. Ballet, contemporary dance, it doesn't matter which; it would take more than free tickets to get me along: I would need wages. So when I found myself promising to go to my friend's dance performance, I knew I was lying. So, I suspect, did she.

Call me over-sensitive, but I'm sure I'm not the first to detect the hint of a patronising tone among ex-pat New Zealanders on a visit home. "What wonderful coffee!" they say brightly. "Mmmm, smell that mountain air!" "Wow, you couldn't park outside the restaurant in Knightsbridge!" And with great enthusiasm: "The Phoenix Foundation sounds just like a Flying Nun band, doesn't it. I love how things in New Zealand just don't change."

At that sort of moment, chatting lightly with a stylish person with a Mittel-European accent who grew up down the road from oneself and is now an artistic success in a significant part of the world, while one is squinting into the sun, puffing like a grampus, carrying five extra kilos of baby weight and clutching dodgy groceries, it would be fair to say that one's personal decision to stay in New Zealand is put under the spotlight of harsh scrutiny. Even if you're leading a fairly cosmopolitan existence in Auckland or Wellington, it suddenly feels like you never left the milking shed or the Four Square store of Mosgiel or Hawera behind. The unspoken implication is: if you were any good at what you do, you wouldn't still be living in New Zealand. And I know, from conversations with many other stay-at-home friends, that this rampant insecurity is not peculiar to me.

Growing up in New Zealand, at some point you've got to make the decision about staying or going. When I was in my early twenties, the choice was between one or the other -- either you left, usually for Britain, where you spent a decade doing the kind of menial job for the upper classes that your great grandparents emigrated to escape from, before you finally came home with a much-embroidered CV and a chip on your shoulder -- or you stayed in New Zealand, got on with the job, and like me, spent the time since then justifying your decision not only to yourself but to the streams of New Zealanders living in the diaspora coming home for Christmas with family. There were some ex-pats, of course, like my friend the dancer, who got past the nannying/ temping/ furniture removals stage of OE subsistence and actually managed to score a good job or achieve professional success, but among my group of friends, these people tended to end up living in Sydney. Successes in Europe were few and far between.

Things have changed. These days it's entirely possible for a New Zealand artist to live and work in the States or Europe while also sustaining an exhibition practice back home. Recently we've seen visual artists running increasingly decent international careers from a New Zealand base. New Zealand writers are published internationally, get shortlisted for huge worldwide literary prizes, and sometimes manage to write about New Zealand (Christchurch even) in bestsellers published overseas, all the while continuing to live here. There are ongoing international residencies for New Zealand artists and writers; even art curators get sent away now and again to see how the rest of the world does it. And last month CNZ posted South Island art critic Andrew Paul Wood off to Germany to enlarge his horizons and presumably ours too: he's been filing dispatches for the readers back home about his encounters with bratwursts, monster German ants ("semicolons in 16 point on legs"), and villainous James Bond-esque art collectors, while noting historical German sculpture's propensity to depict "violent shagging", something my art history lecturers were remarkably tight-lipped about.

New Zealand is all very well, but you need to be able to get away every so often before the walls close in. Every time I've travelled, I've returned with a renewed sense of optimism about the quality of the art being produced here, as well as an enhanced sense of regret that we just don't get to see enough international contemporary art prctice in New Zealand.

If present circumstances didn't prevent me, I would be off like a rat up a drainpipe to see the Richard Prince survey exhibition currently on at the Serpentine. Because 'Continuation' is the sort of show that would never come to New Zealand, as the costs of shipping the enormous paintings and photographs would be prohibitive when set against the revenues you could possibly expect to make from a doorcharge. (This despite a possibly increased public recognition factor since Prince's recent foray into designing Louis Vuitton bags with Marc Jacobs... which surprised me a bit...)

Here's a guided tour of the Prince show by Julia Peyton-Jones and Hans Ulrich Obrist. ("We're going to do this as a ping pong," explains a rather cross-looking Obrist helpfully at the start. Or maybe that's just his usual expression.)


[Note to NZ galleries: hire some lapel mikes if you're wanting to do this sort of business ...]

But I digress; back to life in New Zealand. I've written before about Christchurch Press journalist Philip Matthews's recent exposure of the anti-South bias in Creative New Zealand's provision of arts project funding and appointments to assessment panels. Interviewed by Matthews, Chris Finlayson, National's Arts spokeman and ex-Chair of CNZ, invoked the deterministic power of the market when he suggested gnomically that people choose where they want to live. In thinking that one through, it seemed that Finlayson was implying that more project funding went to Wellington and Auckland because that's where the decent New Zealand artists tend to want to live, wherever they come from initially. And as a very general rule of thumb, with several honourable exceptions, that's probably right.

In his follow-up Letter to the Editor in last weekend's Press, the CEO of CNZ, Stephen Wainwright, wisely steered well clear of that area, suggesting instead that South Islanders should nominate themselves to be on the artform assessment panels. (Perhaps because no one in the North Island knows who you are...?) But the whole slightly ridiculous issue seems like a microcosm of the wider New Zealand problem. If you're any good at what you do, at some point you have to wonder whether you wouldn't be better off doing it elsewhere. And if you do decide to stay, you'll quite probably find yourself like me defending your position not only to visiting ex-pats but to yourself.

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 ...