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.

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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.

Hammond Eggs

Andy Warhol had soup for lunch every day for 20 years. His favourite home-cooked dinner was turkey and potatoes, "because it looked so simple and clean". Picasso liked ancient eggs, stilton and preserved ginger. Edward Hopper was partial to "cans of the friendly bean". Jeff Koons served his favourite food, tuna burgers, at his 50th birthday party. And while Louise Bourgeois had a lifelong fondness for the humble oxtail, at one point in the 1990s Tracey Emin was on 70-100 oysters a week.

What these artists' snack preferences have in common (with the possible exception of Louise Bourgeois's, as oxtail takes a bit of stewing; but then again she was extremely well-organised) is a lack of fuss and no need for lengthy preparation. As Jo Hopper, Edward's wife, told the compiler of a Greenwich Village cookbook who'd approached them for a recipe: "We feel that where there's too much fussy cooking there isn't so much painting."

In a similar vein, here are two tasty no-fuss snacks enjoyed by Lyttelton's favourite son, the artist Bill Hammond, and Jane McBride. I do like to think of Buller's Table Cloth being painted with the help of a fortifying beetroot buttie.

From Harbour Kitchens: Celebrating Lyttelton, Its Food and Its People, Lyttelton Main and Lyttelton West Schools, 2009. Introduction by Roy Montgomery.

In an octopus's garden

Some artists -- Bill Hammond, et al, Henry Darger, and so on -- are famously reticent about their work, and there's nothing wrong with that. But equally, I always admire an artist who's happy to front. Here's the latest in the small guy's epics of crime and punishment.

"The grumpy jellyfish is stinging the shark up the bum. Pretty much everyone’s grumpy, except the octopus, who’s happy. He’s trying to get the electric eel with his tentacles, and here he’s grabbing the shark, whose eyeball has popped out of its socket. Down the bottom a turtle is asleep, and some eyeballs are following the shark. This diver is happy because he’s found a dead crab. There’s an undersea restaurant called Soy Boogers. Two pirates on a pirate ship are making a turtle walk the plank. And up the top a happy jellyfish is stinging the electric eel up the bum."

Stilled life

When the world's greatest taxidermy establishment, Deyrolle's of Paris, went up in flames earlier in the year, first on the scene after the fire brigade had left were the artists.

"The animals had undergone a second death, in a sense, and the visitors were both captivated and deeply touched," wrote Olga of Greece, entomologist, in her account of the conflagration. (The first three images are from Deyrolle's website, taken before the fire.)

"First to arrive was the artist Anselm Kiefer, newly resident in Paris, followed by photographer Nan Goldin, a longtime Parisian. Goldin arrived in a pair of tight jeans and very high heels, which she was politely asked to change; Françoise was afraid that she would sink into the mud and ash. Goldin came back better equipped, to take photographs. Sophie Calle also came to photograph the burned interior. The Chinese artist Huang Yong Ping arrived and proposed taking all the damaged animals for an installation. There were others: the painter Miguel Barcelo, photographers Karen Knorr and Jean Baptiste Huynh, and the artist Marina Karella."

Somewhat oddly for a vegetarian, perhaps, I have a distinct weakness for taxidermy myself; my small collection includes various sets of bull's horns, a dried sea horse, antlers, and a pair of matching pine martens with bared teeth mounted on branches, which my brother-in-law purchased for me at the Hawera auction rooms in Taranaki. He recently rang up about a stuffed snake he'd seen coming up for sale; we were keen, but in the event it went for hundreds of dollars. However, the big guy has officially banned any further additions to the home menagerie. (We'll see...)


Many artists of my acquaintance are also interested in taxidermy, though not many use it directly in their works. I think their interest has something to do with the imaginary worlds immediately conjured up by stuffed animals. However, there have been a few notable New Zealand artworks employing taxidermy: you might well count Bill Hammond's images of Buller's birds, especially Buller's Table Cloth, in the collection of the Auckland Art Gallery, pictured below; there's Peter Robinson's legendary possum log, from the early 1990s, made of skins he'd cured himself (I think); the myriad sparrows and rabbits of Michael Parekowhai's Beverley Hills Gun Club series, and his Driving Mr. Albert, from 2005; and perhaps most notoriously, Francis Upritchard's family cat.

Here's what Upritchard had to say about another taxidermied work she made for a show in 2003:

"There's a snake, Ourobouros, eating its own tail. A white albino python, which I taxidermied, so it's a real python. I've got a friend who is a taxidermist who got me the body, so I did it in his workshop. I filled it with foam filler. The snake itself is a bit confused. I've done a lot of drawings of snakes in the past, but I've never seen a snake. In New Zealand you have no snakes. So I've drawn the eye down where a whale's eye is, down the side, where the mouth is. And then when I got the snake it was like 'Oh God, its eye is at the top', so it doesn't look like my snake drawings. So I sewed up the eyehole and made a new one. It's very over-stuffed and bulky, it looks like a funny old turnip, you don't look at it and think 'Hey, what a sexy snake'. It's like a stupid lumpy old thing."

Bill Hammond, Buller's Table Cloth, 1994, acrylic on canvas, Collection of Auckland Art Gallery

The purpose of taxidermy is, of course, to make a dead thing look as life-like as possible. (Upritchard, however, has something else in mind: "Look, I'm making these to look as bad as possible, as badly made as possible - I'm not glamorising them... I'm interested in a critique of taxidermy, making things look as dead and pathetic as possible.") Beyond all the slightly alarming techniques of the profession, taxidermists have traditionally achieved life-likeness in one of two ways; either by arranging the animal to look as if it is still alive in its natural habitat -- as if a bird has momentarily alighted on a branch, perhaps -- or by creating an anthropomorphic tableau in which the animal plays out a second life -- a rabbit displayed in a hunting jacket with a miniature rifle tucked under its arm, for instance.

Anthropomorphic taxidermy reached the height of its popularity in the late Victorian and Edwardian eras; among its foremost practitioners was the extraordinary Walter Potter, of Bramber in Sussex, who specialised in large scale, complex human dramas "acted out" by vast numbers of small dead animals. His sentimental Kitten Wedding featured twenty farm kittens, while 34 guinea pigs were stuffed for his Guinea Pigs Cricket Match. His most famous work, The Original Death and Burial of Cock Robin, is pictured below. (The picture is borrowed from A Case of Curiosities, an excellent fine art taxidermy site.)


I could go on about this stuff all day. But I probably shouldn't. Can't wait to see what Nan Goldin and Sophie Calle will do with their shots of Deyrolle's, though.

Slow local

Edward Hopper, Highland Light, 1930, watercolour over graphite on rough white wove paper, Collection of Harvard College


I've written before about the way in which certain artists come to "own" the views which inspire their work, to a point where it's almost impossible to see a particular landscape except through their eyes. Think of Edward Hopper's Cape Cod landscapes; Ed Ruscha's LA; Arthur Boyd's Wimmera. There are dozens of New Zealand examples: Toss Woollaston's high vantage point across Wellington Harbour, which he experienced in a sort of muddy atmospheric cubist frenzy, and accordingly now so do I; McCahon's tablet-like clifs at Muriwai; the slight edge of craziness in the swirling skies of Bill Sutton's rural Canterbury churchyards; the surprising delicacy of Bill Hammond's Boulder Bay in Lyttelton Harbour, with its whispy birds and plumes of spray; the doughty resoluteness of Michael Smither's stony Taranaki beaches banking up his glimpse of the mountain.

Years ago I was driving through Provence when I saw a familiar landscape appear like a mirage in the distance. "It's Mont Sainte-Victoire!" I said excitedly. "You know, that mountain Cezanne painted a lot." Until I saw it I'd had no idea where it was, or even, stupidly, that it was a real place: I'd never thought about it. I felt ridiculously pleased: seeing the view framed in the windscreen was like owning my own personal version of the paintings, until the road turned a corner and it was out of sight.

The extraordinary thing was that what I saw from the car looked just like the paintings, an arrangement of angles and planes and edges softened by a golden haze. I wasn't long out of university and had "done" Post-Impressionism twice, once as part of a stage one French culture course and again as part of Art History (bet it doesn't feature much in either today). Of course everything was taught by slides: there were no real works of art to look at. Driving through the French countryside I realised that my understanding was completely at fault, and that Cezanne, at least, was much more of a realist than I'd hitherto assumed. (Ditto Hammond, when I took a walk down to Boulder Bay.)

On a visit to Christchurch once, I had a similar experience of encountering a landscape I was already familar with from a painting. I was driving through the old streets of the eastern central suburbs, trying to find an acquaintance's studio, hopelessly lost. Going through an intersection, I looked to the right towards the hills, and suddenly saw Doris Lusk's Pumping Station. It looked exactly like the painting. Just as suddenly, it was gone, and I've never seen it again.

Doris Lusk, The Pumping Station, 1958, oil on board, Collection of Auckland Art Gallery

Built in 1882, the Christchurch Pumping Station (it pumps the city's sewage along the pipes out to Bromley) is now a protected building. The city council with the poorest record in the country of granting non-notifiable resource consents (effectively letting developers knock stately old buildings down before anyone else finds out about it) couldn't knock it down, even if it wanted to: Lusk's view is safe. (Now, if only I could find it again!)

But not so Edward Hopper's view of Highland Light and the keeper's house at Truro, Cape Cod, which inspired so many of his works. The NY Times has a piece about the zoning consent which has just been granted to owners of the section next door to the house once owned (and designed) by Hopper and his wife Josephine, to allow them to build a 6,500-square-foot trophy house, which will effectively block the barren view made into one of the iconic images of American art by Hopper. It's being done in the teeth of opposition from local residents, who say there are two types of people that traditionally live in Truro: fishing people and artists, and landmarks are important to both.

It's a vain hope, I guess, to suggest that landscapes which artists have made famous should be protected from development. But in this instance, it does seem a bit of a pity.


Hopper used to drive around the Cape a lot to find locations to paint; he often painted from his car, a two-tone Buick sedan, in which he had had the green-tinted windshield and windows replaced with clear glass. An article in Time magazine in December 1956 in which he was interviewed at his Truro home commented that his paintings look as if the viewer is travelling, somehow:

"By suppressing all details that would not be noticed in a passing glance, and arranging his compositions to suggest that the scene extends far beyond the frame, he puts his picture window in motion. Seeing a Hopper exhibition is like floating through people's backyards on a slow local, in a state of awed awareness."

Unlike the new neighbours, one of the current owners of a house painted by Hopper says she feels an obligation to keep the house as it was, given the numbers of people who come to photograph and paint it themselves, following Hopper's trail around Truro. You can compare the paintings with the locations as they are today in this New York Times feature: or click here for an interactive 360 degree video view from the Hopper house. Might not look like this for much longer.

"Hovering above the others"

Bill Hammond's Jingle Jangle Morning is officially the best-designed book in New Zealand over the past year, winning the 'Best Cover' and 'Best Illustrated' categories, and finally the prize for the Best Book at the book design awards in Wellington yesterday evening. In a fit of the poetics, the convenor of judges Guy Somerset commented that Aaron Beehre's design “hovered above the other books like one of Hammond’s birds”. (And shat all over them, presumably.)

Unlike Bookman Beattie who predicts otherwise, my money's still on Aberhart to take out the Illustrated category at the Montana Book Awards tonight...