Lies I Have Told My Children

No. 2 in an occasional series.

"Mum, what's this button for?"
"That's the ejector seat."

Perpetual Xmas: No Abstractions

In my experience, holidays can be divided into two predominant types: cultural, where the object is travelling vast distances to look intently at rare and special things; and actual, where the object is to keep one's eyes closed for as long as possible while lying on the beach in the sun and pretending not to hear the children asking for drinks.

Many holidays taken during my English childhood were of the former 'cultural' category, and involved my family packed into a pop-top VW Combi van (known ominously as The Dormobile), sitting in a campsite somewhere in the home counties waiting for the rain to lift so that we could visit a historic house and garden. The vehicle was stuffy, and had a roaring engine, and I suffered reliably from travel sickness in any particularly winding bits. At night, my parents slept on the bench seats pushed together to make a double mattress (a brown tartan pattern): my brother and I were hoisted on to the swing-out canvas bunks above. We ate corned beef. The Dormobile smelled of kerosine from the tiny camp stove. There were always naked Germans in the toilet block. There were moments when everyone was quite cross with everyone else. It was not altogether jolly.

Even now when I see a Combi I come out in a sweat. Visiting Michael Parekowhai's The Big OE (2006) on Te Papa's roof required considerable personal courage.

We've recently returned from a few days' holiday in Queensland, which was definitely of the latter variety. Not much culture, but plenty of sandy shut-eye. And importantly: no earthquakes. (Or Combis.)


Although we didn't travel in search of culture, culture found us in the most unexpected places. Here is Queensland's favourite Crocodile Hunting family and their pets immortalised in several tonnes of bronze at Australia Zoo.



I like how everyone's smiling in this photo.



A painting of the Crocodile Hunter sent to the Zoo by a fan. The eyes in particular capture a certain something.


There's definitely something of Ronnie van Hout's robot teeth about this squeaky pufferfish.


We have those ridiculous new "No Cruising" signs in the central city in Christchurch now. But in Queensland, they don't beat about the bush: there they call it by its proper Antipodean name. I find Australians on the whole very congenial: they're like New Zealanders with assertiveness training. "Anti-Hooning Initiative" would be an excellent name for something or other, perhaps a novel or an exhibition or a band.


At Australia Zoo's very impressive Crocoseum, I was intrigued by the presenter's description of crocodiles as the 'Apex Predator'. Inevitably my mind turned to wondering which member of the New Zealand artworld might be described accordingly, and thus another pleasant five minutes passed.


Some people might consider this ad for a Queensland realtor to be in poor taste.


A receipt for some cultural merch.


The second artwork we found commemorating the Crocodile Hunter, this time in Queensland marble. (There are no doubt many more, which would make an interesting photoessay sometime, although then the holiday would be in grave danger of segueing into the 'cultural' category given the research and inconvenient travel involved.) Again, the eyes have it.



The grass is worn away around the base by visitors' feet.


And at the end of the trip, half a day in Brisbane at GOMA. The work above is Scott Redford's 10-metre-high The High / Perpetual Xmas, No Abstractions, which refers to the pop culture icons of the Gold Coast's glorious past (though is influenced in its design by a sign he saw in Yukon, Oklahoma). Apparently it has confused many tourists, who have enquired of GOMA staff where the motel is.

Back home now in Shaky Town, where, I read, the aftershocks might conceivably go on for up to a year. A Combi might well start to look like a good option.

Sixty year view

Doris Lusk, Canterbury Plains from Cashmere Hills, 1952, oil on board, Collection of Christchurch Art Gallery

Last Sunday we drove up to the Port Hills in search of the landscape Doris Lusk painted in 1952. From the city below, the hills were shrouded in low cloud. It seemed doubtful we'd see anything at all, yet alone a sixty-year-old view. I was sure I'd seen it before; I distantly remembered driving along the winding hill road many years ago and catching sight of it suddenly from the car window and thinking oh, there's that painting; but I couldn't remember if the bend in the road where I'd seen it had been before or after Victoria Park or even beyond the Sign of the Kiwi, the second of Harry Ell's travellers' way stations which marks the high point of the road before the long descent to Lyttelton. The eroded valley Lusk painted might be anywhere really; and we prepared for a long drive.

I'd been thinking of the task like detective work, assuming that while the view might be quite changed, there would be certain features -- the bones of the landscape, if you like -- which would remain the same. Ignoring trees, we were looking for the silhouette of the hills, and perhaps the little volcanic knob in the foreground, much in the way you might discount the effect of the hair and focus instead on the shape of the head of a missing person you were trying to identify. (Our ostensible purpose was to add Lusk's location to the Christchurch Art Gallery's new geotagging project, which records the geographical coordinates of landscapes depicted in works from their collection.) In the event, we were a little disappointed to find Lusk's landscape so quickly, at one of the first entrances to Victoria Park, a walking track named for Harry Ell. While the trees had grown up thickly over the upper slopes, the fissured walls of the valley were unmistakeable.


In search of Lusk's painting viewpoint, we took the steep track up through the trees into the park. There was a crossing of paths, and a knot of runners pounded past, shaking drops of sweat on to the ground. Further in, the pine needles were thick and soft underfoot, and our footsteps made no sound. Shadows fell sideways through the pines. I thought of Heavenly Creatures, and a brick in a stocking. The canopy blotted out the sky. It was impossible to see the valley below through the trees.


Frustrated, we climbed back down to the carpark, past the painted fire danger sign which from behind looked like an easel. Squinting through the trees, the viewpoint from the bluff above the carpark was almost the one in the painting, though a little to the right.



As we drove on, we wondered how Doris Lusk had got up here; we thought it unlikely she'd owned a car in 1952. Perhaps by bus? Or bicycle, though carrying the painting materials might have been tricky. But then artists at mid-century thought nothing of biking enormous distances in search of landscape subjects or to organise exhibitions: for his exhibition in Dunedin in the early 1930s -- the show which a young McCahon wandered into -- Woollaston sent his paintings down from Mapua by carrier, following later by bike. It's possible that McCahon's own epic journeys by bike were immortalised in his Six Days in Nelson and Canterbury, of 1950; there's a fancy that the streak of red down the centre of the panels refers to a graze he took in a tumble from his bike, but that's probably pressing the autobiographical factor too far.


Lusk's bare hills were thatched with grass and tussock: grazing land. The early 1950s were arguably the highest point of agricultural optimism in New Zealand, a point at which national prosperity seemed inextricably allied to sheep farming -- much, perhaps, as it does to dairy farming today. As soil scientist Andrew Carran notes, since the wool boom and bust in the mid-1950s the same valley has hosted two crops of pinus radiata, a land use unthinkable at the time of Lusk's painting. Today there are clumps of pines and expanses of grass, some small buildings and an orderly market garden (perhaps a vineyard?) on the lower slopes.


In search of a place to turn round on the narrow winding road, we drove on towards the Sign of the Kiwi. And as we drove back to the city, we finally saw it: Lusk's viewpoint on the distant valley. But there was nowhere to stop, and no way to climb up on to the thickly wooded bluff above the road. I took some photographs out of the car window, but it was gone in a flash.

The blurb about Canterbury Plains from Cashmere Hills on the Christchurch Art Gallery's website has Lusk 'influenced' by McCahon, in her painting of the bare, unpopulated land. Certainly, they were great friends; they had known each other as young people in Dunedin, where they had both attended Russell Clark's Saturday morning art classes at John McIndoe's studio. Lusk later spent time in Nelson with McCahon and Woollaston and others, and when McCahon moved to Christchurch in 1948, he initially stayed with Lusk and her husband Dermot Holland, painting several of his major religious works in his small bedroom there.


McCahon famously received a copy of Charles Cotton's Geomorphology of New Zealand for a wedding present at the time of his marriage to the painter Anne Hamblett in 1942, and his subsequent works demonstrate his study of the linear landforms pictured by Cotton. So, I would argue, do Doris Lusk's paintings of a similar (or perhaps slightly earlier) vintage: her Towards Omakau (c.1942) -- a comparatively little-known painting which I'd argue should be considered one of the key works of early modernism in New Zealand -- reveals a similar treatment of the folded hills in the distance. Perhaps, as is frequently the case, what art historians misleadingly describe as influence (a power relationship which almost always proceeds in one direction, from the more well-known artist to the lesser-known) is rather more accurately described by artists themselves as common interests.

Doris Lusk, Towards Omakau, c.1942, oil on board, Collection of Christchurch Art Gallery

Revisionist western: 'I am sick of killing bandits'

As I have been known to remind him from time to time, the big guy is a very lucky man indeed: and one of the ways his good luck is manifest is to be married to someone as keen on westerns as he is. Blame it if you will on all those winter afternoons in our respective childhoods stuck in front of Bonanza, The Virginian and High Chapparal, and in my case the endless John Wayne seasons on the BBC during school holidays. 'Get on your horse pilgrim...'.

I think of my personal graduation from spaghetti to revisionist westerns in the 1980s (though actually we're not fussy these days: either will do) as marked by a shift from dust to mud, from the tumbleweed shoot-em ups of John Ford and Sergio Leone to the mud-splattered 'realism' of Sam Peckinpah on TV and Jim Jarmusch at the movies. Moving quickly past such lightweight excursions into the territory as Young Guns and Unforgiven, we arrived, some years ago, at what the big guy and I both regard as the final unbeatable high noon of the revisionist western genre; the single best show ever made for TV, the mighty Deadwood: vast tranches of mud and grit, buckets of gore, volleys of swearing of an almost operatic nature, corpse-eating pigs, corrupt big business and politics pitted against reluctant law enforcement, and a mother-lode of anti-heroes.

Now it seems the small guy has inherited his parents' fondness for epics of dust, blood, gold and tumbleweed: his latest book is titled Super Sheriff and the Stupid Sombrero Gang. In it I think he's been able to quite neatly incorporate many of the significant tropes of the revisionist western.

Driven

A couple more images from yesterday, taken at dawn as I watched Michael Parekowhai's Yes We Are go up for the second time in Wellington. The work was driven down from Auckland the previous day on the truck that became its mobile plinth as it moved around the city. In the photograph of the sign on its back pointing up to the sky, there's just the possibility of a kind of Garry Winogrand-ish moment that makes me wish I'd had a better camera with me.

Open all hours

Yesterday I was in Wellington, following Michael Parekowhai's truck around town from dawn to dusk. His work Yes We Are was suspended from a crane on the flat bed of the truck, and was driven to strategic spots around the city, where it parked for an hour or so before moving on again. It took about 20 minutes at each site to hoist the work and secure it at the base, and about the same to unfasten and lower it again and strap it to the deck when it was time to go. Yes We Are was the closing work in New Zealand's One Day Sculpture series.

Here's some photographs I took over the course of a very long day.

5am. Taken from the motorway layby overlooking the Inter Island Ferry's marshalling yard.

Dawn in Buckle Street.

Mid-morning, Manners Mall.

Lunchtime in Cuba Street, near the Peter McLeavey Gallery.

Mid-afternoon, ouside Parliament on Molesworth Street. Budget being read indoors.

(Here I should have a photo of Yes We Are in its position at late afternoon on Oriental Parade near the Freyberg Pool, but I forgot to photograph it as I was having a cup of coffee at a friend's at the time, and saw it from an upstairs window. It looked great, though.)

Early evening, Point Jerningham, Shelly Bay, in a howling gale.

Last post: from the lookout at the top of Mt. Victoria, 9pm. (Clearly visible as far away as Vogeltown.)

Tail pipe

A couple more photos of Thomas Hirschhorn's Poor-racer, the One Day Sculpture in Sumner which I blogged about yesterday.

The first shows the twin exhausts customised with tin foil.


We presumed the foil-covered box in the boot in the second image was the obligatory ginormous subwoofer for the car stereo, but were corrected by curator Danae Mossman. It's actually the petrol tank: seems when cars are lowered, the petrol tank needs to be raised and welded into the boot cavity so it doesn't scrape along the ground and burst into flames. "Oh, OK," we said, and nodded. It was one of those strange art moments, standing in the cold wind of the Esplanade looking at a tin foil box and being instructed by an art history MA in the finer points of street racer customisation.