Blocked

Last night I watched TV3's premiere of The Block NZ. It's a DIY home renovation reality show based on an Australian model in which four couples compete to do up dilapidated houses (or as TV3's website had it, "depilated homes"*, which makes it sound more like The GC). The first episode appeared to consist of a half-hour commercial for Bunnings. 


 These are the four houses the contestants will live in, and renovate, over three months. Clearly the art department has been hard at work with their crowbars.

With tarps on the roofs, holes in the walls, iron boarding up windows and piles of bricks and rubbish in the yards, The Block's derelict doer-uppers look like half of Christchurch, nearly eighteen months after the  earthquake, where fixing houses is rather more critical than entertaining. 


Not wanting to be too mealy-mouthed about it: but at the very least, it seems like a wasted opportunity, doesn't it.




*Disappointingly, I see they've now fixed the typo.

"This art is a terrible business."*

It's been a dry spell in the blogging life: while twittering like a maniac, and scribbling away offline, I've been on the blogging wagon for the past month. Last night, however, the clouds burst and the rains came, and here we are again this morning. Kia ora and hello.

With season two of Mad Men now a distant memory, there is now officially nothing to watch on New Zealand TV if you're not keen on:
a. sexy vampires;
b. forensic pathology;
c. other people's home renovation disasters;
d. Hamish McKay (not the art dealer, the other one) being subjected to yet another personal indignity on Pulp Sport.

There is, however, always Coronation Street, a guilty pleasure for a couple of decades now. I represent the third generation of women in my family to be obsessed with it. The baby hasn't shown any interest yet, but give her time, give her time.

Yesterday evening in a disgraceful example of life imitating art the big guy and I were eating dinner in front of the TV. We had just settled down in front of Coro with a plate of kedgeree (a dinner choice prompted by various nostalgic and plaintive tweets about one of the things I miss most about living in Wellington, along with the Northland Panels and Moore Wilsons: Kelda's kedgeree at Nikau), when I happened to mention to the big guy that I was sick of looking at the horrible 'art' in Gail Platt's house -- a framed poster of a flower-bedecked doorway in the Algarve by an anonymous watercolourist, which has hung in the Platts' lounge behind various scenes of mayhem over the past decade including attempted murders, divorces, teenage pregnancies, juvenile deliquencies and the greatest horror of all, Gail simply being herself -- and I expressed a fervent wish that the set dressers would change it.

No sooner had I said this than a major new storyline began to unfold, involving, for perhaps the first time in recorded history, art on Coronation Street. (Thus neatly combining two of my greatest interest areas and strongest specialty subjects, and prompting this post.) Here's the set up. Having recently swapped houses, a source of teeth-gnashing female interpersonal tension and consequent escapades of one-upmanship that lasted several months, Claire Peacock finds a painting rolled up in the attic of what until very recently was for many years the appalling Kevin and Surly Webster's dreary residence.


In a frenzy of excitement she takes it to her drippy husband, the butcher Ashley, and unrolls the canvas.


'Ha ha!' he says. 'Did the kids do that?' Thus confirming his suitability for his chosen vocation of chopping up bits of offal rather than a career as an art critic, interesting plot device though it could be.


But hang on, those matchstalk men look familiar...


Could it be ... could it be ... a real Lowry? One of these? A previously undiscovered work of art by that other great cultural chronicler of fictional working class life oop there in the bleak North? But that would be worth a fortune! And involve endless dramas over its authenticity, provenance, and ownership that would keep a troop of actors in work for months sorting it all out, wouldn't it? Eeeee, but that were a champion idea for a story, Deidre.

Can't wait for next Tuesday.


*One of the more memorable quotations of the rather peculiar L.S. Lowry, who would himself have made a good guest appearance on Coro Street, given his habits of being economical with the truth, painting secret erotic works, and keeping a suitcase by the front door so that if someone he didn't fancy talking to called round, he would be able to make a quick exit by pretending he was just off to the station.

Playing on

One of the most recognisable fonts designed in New Zealand in recent years is 'Parihaka', the typeface drawn by Neil Pardington (Kai Tahu), Aaron McKirdy and George Clarke for the exhibition and book Parihaka: The Art of Passive Resistance at City Gallery Wellington in 2001. The typeface was used for the title of the book, as well as for indvidual chapter headings.


Gifted by the designers to the trustees of Parihaka Pa for their use following the exhibition, the font is now used as a logotype for the annual Parihaka Peace Festival in Taranaki.

Via Outdoor Styles.

The font's ancestry is complex. It's based on the lettering hand-painted on the walls of some nineteenth-century Maori meeting houses, which in itself was influenced by printed letterforms remembered from the early missionaries' Bibles. (The painted word has thus been a part of New Zealand art history from very early days.) While Maori communities lived with their treasures daily, it was not until 1993, with the publication of Roger Neich's seminal Painted Histories, that these early works of art were brought to wide public attention. Re-imagined and hand-drawn in a Wellington design studio in 2000, and finally digitised, the ongoing history of what's now known as the Parihaka font describes the way in which design is fundamentally a circular and cyclic process, the passing of a baton back and forth between artists of different generations and places.

Fiona Pardington, Puhi Wahine/Rere Torohai/Ae: I–V, 2004,(Noble Woman/Rising from underneath/Yes, 2004) video installation, 5 LCD screens, dimensions variable. Via Auckland Art Gallery.

I think it's one of the most important examples of New Zealand graphic design produced in recent years: utterly distinctive, at once elegant and engagingly awkward, informal yet painstaking, it speaks of the shared history of Aotearoa New Zealand while resisting categorisation as an antique aesthetic. Neither historical nor modern but something else again, the Parihaka font is essentially a hybrid, a coming together of diverse cultures and technologies.

I've thought a lot about this font over the years, and hence perhaps I'm unnaturally attuned to sightings of it. I was, however, completely astounded to see a version of it appear on Rhys Darby's pop culture TV programme Rocked the Nation the other night, in a sign held up at a rugby game in about 1990, following Wayne 'Buck' Shelford's dropping from the All Blacks' captaincy.

Here's rather a blurry photo I took off the TV, which I think should henceforth enter the ranks of the Parihaka font's various ancestral iterations.

My problem with video art

Transmission has been patchy over the past ten days or so, while I have battled against such major handicaps to blogging as the due date of a large essay and the children and I falling sick one after the other in an endless domino loop of coughing and nose-blowing. (Possibly not unrelated.) The result has been a kind of intellectual rain-fade; a radical attention-span deficit not at all conducive to sustained blogging: indeed, though somewhat luxurious, watching the back-to-back episodes of Coronation Street saved up during my period of enforced TV abstinence has proved quite intellectually demanding. Between bouts of surreptitious sniffing at the sad demise of Vera (even the big guy was suspiciously red-eyed), I've been hard-placed in recent days to string more than one coherent sentence together, and even that's been pushing it at times, much like the baby, who is at the stage of pointing wildly at things she would like to be handed and shouting 'That! That! That!' with an ever-more indignant tone in her voice. Twitter, a form of micro-blogging which allows you to write in only a 140 character maximum, has proved the perfect distraction.

I'm predicting the usual massive take-up by New Zealanders of this new form of communication technology: perhaps our geographical position at the end of the world makes us increasingly conscious of keeping in touch. Many New Zealand art bloggers are already tweeting away, as are several public New Zealand art galleries and museums (including Christchurch Art Gallery, who've announced they're about to start twittering on 6 April), and a couple of prominent local artists. I'm enjoying it. Twitter's like a collective stream of consciousness to which you can add and dip into when you have time and inclination. Far from being a way of holding the world at arm's length, it's a new way to become intimately involved with it.

Some of the ideas tweeted by others, and the links posted, have been useful for my studies (@Pareidoliac is a particularly effective and generous connector of ideas, people, and writings). Others have made me laugh, a lot: I suspect it will be hard this week to trump @BadTom's comment that with an outing in the weekend he has managed to bring the cost-per-wear ratio of his top hat down to double figures. Other tweets involve quite abstract and gnomic utterances, scraps from a plotless narrative thrown out and picked up like a discarded note found on the footpath.

There's a vaguely voyeuristic element to the window Twitter provides into people's private lives, or at least, the private selves they perform in the public space of the internet. (Twistori , a spin-off site which reveals in real time what people are loving and hating, feeling and believing, thinking and wishing, is particularly interesting. It's like a model of human consciousness, developing in real time. 'I wish I could make up an ingenious conspiracy.' 'I wish it would stop snowing.' 'I wish it was summer and I could lay in the sun and drink whisky and listen to Metallica in Helsinki'.) Luckily for my present purposes Twitter requires a very short attention span indeed, yet presents a worthy enough challenge to compose vaguely interesting utterances in under 140 characters.

A friend who now manages young people's programmes at the National Portrait Gallery in London once said to me that she always structured her lessons around a commercial TV hour. She would break the learning into roughly ten minute chunks followed by a brief change of pace, as she believed that adolescents were unable to sustain concentration for any longer than the TV programming time between advertising segments. In New Zealand, at fifteen minutes in any hour the advertising load is one of the highest in the western world, and I've sometimes wondered if this is the explanation for my own rather poor concentration span; which is never more evident than when it comes to video art.

When I read descriptions of video installations like this, even though the artist is Gary Hill and therefore the work is likely to be quite interesting, I quake in my boots: 'So seven works spread out on different week days are quite difficult to get to. You have to be keen – especially if you don’t work in town – but so you should, they are worth it.' Gulp. Even if I lived in Auckland, I know I would be hard-pressed.

It's not just that it's on a screen, and therefore that I'm conditioned to regard video works as entertainment, which I initially suspected might be the exceptionally shallow root of my longterm problem with video art. No, it's that video art seems to demand such a lot from its audience. Time, stamina, multiple visits: I suspect it's only something that someone without small children in tow could possibly countenance. I have a readymade excuse now, of course, but I'll admit to never having been too keen. If a video work is rubbish, or dull, or generally not worthy of your attention, you have to have watched the whole jolly thing to know that. A dull painting or a sculpture, however, you can move on from immediately.

Nam June Paik, TV Garden, 1974. via Artnet

There are many, many video works I think are terrific: for example, anything I've ever seen by Bruce Nauman. Stella Brennan's exploration of the Mt Erebus tragedy. Sean Gladwell's skateboarding Storm Sequence. And I've had some really great video art experiences: hovering about in the darkened flickering light of Nam June Paik's TV Garden upstairs at City Gallery. Being revolted by Paul McCarthy downstairs. Up against Thomas Demand in Sydney. The Daniel Crooks installation at the Christchurch Art Gallery last year was one of the most extraordinarily immersive art experiences I've ever had. Among New Zealand artists, video works by et al, Lisa Reihana, Sean Kerr and Steve Carr never seem to feel demanding of my time as a viewer: instead, I've been delighted to give it, and have always felt hugely rewarded for doing so.

I came across these remarks on video art by Christian Boltanski the other day. I suspect that by his definition I most enjoy the video works that are like paintings, that describe space rather than take up time.

The big difference between painter and artist is that some art is to do with space and other art is to do with time. Music, literature or theatre, these things do something with time. Painting does something with space. When we see a movie, there is a beginning and an end, most of the time. When you see a painting, you can look at it for ten minutes or six hours, and you can move around. The big "cut", in terms of media, I think, is time or space. There are some artist videos, like Bruce Nauman's, which are more like painting, really, because they are a space product, like sculpture. But there are also artist videos that are more like cinema, because they have a beginning, an end, and we sit down to watch them.

My problem with video art is that I always feel a bit anxious in approaching it. I'm apprehensive that it won't repay the time I spend with it, that somehow I will go away feeling that I have wasted my time on something I don't much care for. Which is a pretty ridiculous anxiety, when I stop to think about it, given the amount of time in my life I've spent watching TV. Or reading submarine novels. Or writing nonsense on Twitter. (Interestingly, John Hurrell, the critic who recommends Gary Hill's show so warmly, doesn't have a TV. I think this may be significant.)

A short guide to flatting in 1968

Another installment from the Playdate archives.


In 1968 you could get a one-bedder "personalized pad" in Herne Bay for under $10 a week, or an ultra-modern furnished three bedroom flat in Mount Eden, complete with low coffee tables, divan beds, shiny copper light shades and "ceilings of sprayed-on asbestos" -- evidently a desirable feature forty years ago -- for only $26.

Like many of the articles in Playdate, this guide to four typical Auckland flats is an amazing time-capsule; but what caught my attention here is this fabulous photograph of the lounge in a converted Herne Bay villa with its Toss Woollaston painting hanging over the fireplace, and a brushy gestural abstract work next to the "gas caliphont" over the bath. (Ahem. Art gallery registrars all over the country would be having a fit.)


The article reads:

"The whiteness of the room itself accentuates objects. Colours seem brighter, form clearer. The few paintings (McCahon, Angus, Woollaston etc.) read as clearly as type on a page. There are books everywhere--on a desk, on a writing bureau, on bookshelves, mantlepiece and floor. Bessie Smith is singing."

While the various advantages of the flat included briar roses and nasturtiums in the garden and a "first-rate fireplace", the downside was that it was a bit dark and damp: "The light isn't good enough for painting."

Anyone recognise the tenant? (The clue may well be hanging in the bathroom.)

On another matter, Season 5 of Dancing with the Stars has started. (I promised myself that this time I wouldn't watch it, but regrettably as ever found myself glued to every cheesy spangled moment.) This one's harder than most to pick, but I suspect reality-TV veteran (oh, and ex-All Black) Josh Kronfeld will be in the final hunt. Wonder how many series to go before they have a visual artist among the line-up of celebs, and gulp -- who would it be?

Cinema with ease

New Zealand's cultural heritage has just got a whole lot more accessible with the launch of NZ On Screen, a non-profit, free-to-view, "living archive of New Zealand television and film" funded by New Zealand on Air. It's an extraordinary resource: over 250 films and TV programmes have been uploaded, and there are plenty more to follow. I spent yesterday evening working my way through some of the visual art material; it's an absolute treasure trove of great stuff, which is as you'd expect, given the calibre of the people who've put it together, including film industry stalwart Robin Scholes (living proof that there is life after an art history degree), uber-blogger and new media commentator Russell Brown, and Len Lye biographer and film academic Roger Horrocks.

There's the 1977 documentary made by Sam Neill, Architect Athfield, which, when I first saw it some years ago, made me realise that Ath was not only an extraordinarily skilled architect in his ability to create buildings that people enjoyed using, but was also a philosopher of architecture; there's Merata Mita's impressionistic documentary about Ralph Hotere made in 2001, in which the man himself says very little (a quote from Hotere flashes up at the start: "There are very few things I can say about my work, that are better than saying nothing"), but in which the work says a great deal.

There's Leanne Pooley's Being Billy Apple, and Gaylene Preston's Lovely Rita, both from 2007. There's Greg Stitt's Peter Peryer: Portrait of a Photographer shot by Leon Narbey in 1994, a film which the site blurb suggests definitively answers the question of why Peryer photographed himself holding a chicken. (A moody, magnificent image, this one.)

Peter Peryer, Self Portrait 1977, Collection of Auckland Art Gallery

There's a lot more, and they're adding new material weekly. I haven't even got started yet on all the 70s children's programmes (first episode of Spot On anyone? Olly Ohlson singing Fangface?), and I'm saving the first episode of the late lamented cult classic 80s bitch-fest glitter-soap, Gloss (starring art collector Miranda Harcourt), as a special treat. "Monuments and mirrorglass / The city's on the make... " Oh yes. Shoulder pads at dawn, girls, and the devil take the hindmost! Just click through and watch. Great stuff.

White world

I fell asleep for a couple of hours on Saturday afternoon. When I woke up at dusk, a fall of snow had transformed the garden into a wonderland. Snow is a rare event here, and so we took some photographs; but as ever, none of the magic of that moment (the silence, the stillness, the strange feeling of connection to history through the natural world) was conveyed in the images.

Why is it that photographs of weather are always either banal or cheesy, yet the experience of snow, or a sunset, or storm clouds approaching, can be so intensely felt? It's not solely due to technical ineptitude on the part of the photographer: in fact, the more professionally produced a cheesy weather image is, the greater the cliche. I think the problem is something akin to hearing descriptions of other people's dreams, or their drug-induced visions, always recounted with a kind of starry-eyed, far away intensity. ("... and then the Beatles danced right off the page, and Paul caught my hand, and we all ran laughing into the ocean...") The sense of the radical transformation of the everyday world peculiar to dreams, or visions, or to extreme weather, is lost in translation. It is essentially uninteresting, unless you were there.

So it is an extraordinarily clever artist who makes something interesting out of atmospheric conditions as a subject. Among New Zealand artists, Bill Culbert's photographs of the view at sunset from his house in the South of France spring to mind. They reveal the world in a process of daily transformation.

This is Dawn at Bill's house.

New Zealand artists have been going to Antarctica to look at the snow for a decade or so now, and when I hear there's someone else ready to board the Hercules, palette knife or Leica in hand, my heart sinks. I have to confess to being inherently disinterested in the Antarctic. (I wavered a little when I watched Marcus Lush's terrific Ice TV show, but that was probably more due to his gratuitous horseplay with the terrible static electricity that builds up on the nylon carpets at Scott Base.) Likewise I find it hard to care about under-the-sea volcanoes, Mt. Everest, or outer space, and if I heard that an artist was ready to set off to one of these places, I wouldn't be anticipating the result with much excitement.

Yet there has been some interesting work made in response to the ice, and every time I've seen it, I've been pleasantly surprised. There's Anne Noble's seminal Wilhelmina Bay, Antarctica (2005), which reveals the icy landscape as a photographic opportunity in the making.

And Stella Brennan's extraordinarily moving White Wall/ Black Hole, which uses footage from the 1979 Erebus disaster.

One of my favourite Antarctic images was made in Sydney. This is Gavin Hipkins's The Homely: Sydney (Hood) (2001). It speaks of the mystery and menace and blankness of the Antarctic, as well as the talismanic nature of objects which have returned from the ice.

Ronnie van Hout's one of the 2007-8 Arts Fellows in Antarctica. And actually, I can't wait to see what he'll make of the experience. Maybe, as with all good art, what it really comes down to is the calibre of the artist rather than the specific nature of the environment they're in. There's no such thing as a good or a bad subject...