The West Coast: Not as bad as it used to be

It is no secret that the West Coast and I are not friends. Our dislike of one another is entirely mutual and goes back almost thirty years. It was born out of various family holidays from which I was delighted to return; the sort of depressing minibreak on which one family member is coming down with something nasty, someone else has forgotten to pack something essential, two people are ignoring one another and everyone has the hump with someone else. Although this kind of break usually only lasts a couple of days, at the time it seems interminable. A vague air of anxiety closes in with the weather. The days cannot end quickly enough. The night sounds include the rumbling of the coal trains, an unidentified drip, and distant howls. At the half-way point it appears likely that the toilet paper will run out before the end of the stay; dinner consists of corned beef and mashed spuds with grey lumps; there is no TV; and the only thing to read in the mis-named 'holiday house' is a dog-eared copy of Papillon with the final page ripped out.

I know that there are some people who enjoy the long slog across the plains and over the mountains, whose idea of a pleasant getaway is a weekend in an uninsulated wooden cottage with a longdrop toilet 50 yards away up a hill; people who are unconcerned by relentless rain and sandflies as big as small dogs; people who positively thrive on the challenge of a day-long muddy hike up a scrub-clad mountainside in order to have a vile cup of tea with Germans in a small hut. I know there are people like this, and to them I say: you are most welcome to the West Coast.

I am not one of those people, and so for many years now I have been more than happy to stay firmly put on the eastern side of the main divide. In the weekend, however, I took a drive over the mountains to the Coast for the first time in more than 15 years. It was a family occasion, and it may be that my expectations were not high, but in the end I was quite pleasantly surprised: the West Coast is not as bad as it used to be. It still doesn't meet my definition of civilisation, vis: a place offering (a) the ability to buy a good cup of coffee, in conjunction with (b) the chance of being able to speak to someone who has read the same books as oneself, but on this trip at least there were no sandflies, the rain let up every now and again and there was a copy of Lawrence Durrell's Complete Antrobus in the bach.

At Moana, in the playground of a school by the edge of Lake Brunner, I photographed this concrete wall. The wall, if not my photograph, reminded me of images by Peter Peryer, as well as Julian Dashper's drumskin target paintings.


There isn't a lot of art to be found on the Coast, of course: that's not the point of it, I suppose. There's an art gallery at Otira (which has 'Contemporary' written sideways on it in a sans-serif font, Shed-11-in-the mid-80s-style). It seems so unlikely that it commands attention, and if it hadn't been shut, we might well have stopped. But it would be hard to compete art-wise with the experience of driving through the Otira Gorge these days: the new roadway engineering (a gigantic viaduct over a scree slope hundreds of feet high, a waterfall channelled across and over the road, a concrete rock shelter) is genuinely impressive and reduces not only the duration of the journey but also both the spew factor and the chance of death, which always used to feel quite considerable. If they ever set a James Bond film in New Zealand, the Otira Gorge would be the perfect backdrop for some very foolish stunt driving and perhaps a parachute chase.

On our way back across the plains heading towards Springfield, there were roadworks. At one point we were led through the works by a 'pilot car'. I've never come across this before. It seemed so utterly ridiculous that we couldn't stop laughing at it; we felt as if we had been co-opted into some peculiar work of relational aesthetics dreamed up by the road crew, cars following close in an Austin Powers-esque conga line on the Canterbury plains. 'Poot poot! Follow me.'


Or maybe I was just happy to be on the home road.

At Springfield we slowed to see the remains of the giant doughnut, erected a couple of years ago to celebrate the release of The Simpsons Movie. The fibreglass doughnut has been, like any work of public art, quite controversial: it has divided the small town between those people who think it amusing and a positive drawcard for tourists, and those who consider it an eyesore. It now resides on private land beside the main road, after its temporary resource consent ran out and the council gave it its marching orders. A little while ago, someone -- presumably someone in the 'eyesore' camp -- set fire to it. The locals have threatened to rebuild it in concrete to foil future vandals, but for now the doughnut stands as it is, battered but triumphant.

As we passed, I applied my usual test as regards the worth of a public artwork: Is it better than nothing at all would be in the same spot? And in the case of the Springfield doughnut, after a great deal of consideration, I think yes, it is.

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.

Groundwater

There's a stream at the end of our garden. The city is scored with them, built over water like an Antipodean New Orleans. Water rises from the underground aquifers, drips from the copper downpipes of the wealthy nor-west suburbs, leaks from the dusty goodsyards of the industrial south-east, picking up rubbish and effluent and diesel slicks on its way to the sea. After the big rains a few weeks ago, signs appeared in the park, nailed to the ancient oak trees: "Danger! Polluted water. Do not fish." Two days ago a man out for an early morning run discovered a body floating in the river in the heart of the tourist area of the central city, where the old willows the settlers planted are slowly being replaced with native trees.

The raupo swamps were drained generations ago, while the last surviving area has recently been made into a museum of itself. When I was growing up, the bus to New Brighton took you through a scrubby waterlogged wasteland known as the Travis swamp. Now it's an eco-system called the Travis Wetlands: prisoners on day release have built boardwalks and bird hides for families pushing baby strollers on a Sunday outing. Across the road is a massive wall which encloses a new cookie-cutter subdivision.

When it rains, our stream rises quickly. It is a tributary of the Wairarapa Stream, which in turn feeds the Avon: the stormwater drains of our neighbourhood empty into it. You can go out for half an hour in heavy rain and when you come home, the water might be several feet up the lawn. When it recedes, it leaves behind a wild tangle of sticks and leaves and plastic rubbish which collects in great drifts around tree trunks. The sticks are left all pointing in the same direction, marooned by the current. I read recently that if the Waimakariri River were to breach its banks in a catastrophic storm, the resulting flood would reach the Cathedral.

I've been most struck this week not by art images, but by reportage of the aftermath of Hurricane Ike in the US. This image of a house in Texas's Crystal Beach reminds me of the kind of uneasy scale that often exists in Peter Peryer's photographs, where you're not sure whether you're looking at a full-scale object or a miniature version. The photograph shows debris from storm surges, which look like a giant version of what collects on our lawn. If you look closely, you can see kitchen cupboards and entire decks among the debris.

This is a photo of the foreshore in Gilchrist, Texas, where only one house was left standing after three-metre-high floodwaters receded. (More images of the aftermath of Hurricane Ike are at thebigpicture)


There were many casualties of the storm. Among them was Mies van der Rohe's famous glass Farnsworth House on the Fox River in Illinois, which, though standing 14 feet above the river on 5 foot poles, was flooded to the depth of more than a foot.


When it was built, the architect researched the Fox's history of flooding, and raised the house to a height sufficient to withstand a one-in-one-hundred year flood: subsequent development, though, has decreased the stormwater capacity of the surrounding area and made it increasngly vulnerable to rising waters. Its original owner, neurologist Edith Farnsworth, with whom Mies van der Rohe was romantically linked, sued him after it was built, claiming that the house was completely "unliveable".

First move: get the rubbish bin

What was it about the teaching style of the Ilam art school faculty in the 60s and 70s? Something transmitted by osmosis from the neo-brutalist architecture of the new university campus, perhaps? They certainly believed in breeding 'em tough back then: if you were a painting student, you had lecturer Rudi Gopas famously advising you to make your works smaller (so they would fit in the bin) or to add more turps (so they would burn better). If you were doing sculpture, you developed a second sense for ducking the large lumps of clay thrown by lecturer Tom Taylor which came cannoning across the studios towards you.

Now it seems the photography students weren't exempt from the school-of-hard knocks style of art education, either: in an outstanding biographical essay included in his new monograph, Peter Peryer recounts his experience with Larence Shustak, a New Yorker who'd worked for Time and Life magazines, whom Peryer encountered as a lecturer on a summer workshop:

"After glancing at [my prints] briefly his first move was to walk over to the other side of the room and pick up a rubbish bin.

Methodically, he examined each photo in turn. 'This is boring, let's get rid of it,' he would say as he tore a print in half and placed it in the bin. Or, 'this has been done before', as he gave it the same treatment. In the end there were just a couple of prints left, still there because in each one he had pointed out small portions in which he thought something interesting was happening. 'Go back and have another look, but this time move in closer,' he instructed.

It was teaching of the highest order and exactly what I needed, although not of a style that would be permitted today."

Five on Friday: Whiskers on kittens

A quick (late: apologies; it's been a big day) Friday Five this week: five favourite things of the past seven days.

5. The ridiculously profound pleasure of a brand new pair of socks.



4. Thursday: a typical encounter with new technologies in our house:

Him: Crikey, the baby's just ... Sorry, no, as you were: it was just my Blackberry going off.

3. Seeing this new photo posted yesterday by Peter Peryer, which he says reminds him of photographs he's taken of flowers:

2. The description of lo-fi merchant Sean Kerr in the Physics Room's enterprising press release for his current exhibition 'klunk, clomp, aaugh!' as "New Zealand’s own troublemaking new media pundit". And then citing Martin Kippenberger. In a press release. More like this, please.

1. Watching the first season of Deadwood (yet again). Best show on TV -- ever.

Sample dialogue:
[Jack has just been found not guilty of killing Wild Bill Hickock]
Al Swearengen: "What's your name, it's Jack, ain't it?
Jack McCall: Yes, sir! You buy me a drink, I'll make my mark.
Al Swearengen: Stick around camp, Jack -- I'll make mine for you. Jack McCall: What in the hell is that supposed to mean?
Al Swearengen: Means there's a horse waiting for you outside you'll want to get on before somebody murders you who gives a fuck about right and wrong -- or I do. [Jack stares, dumbfounded]
Al Swearengen: It's the paint, Jack. Right outside my joint. [whispering]
Al Swearengen: Run for your fucking life."

and:
Hotel proprietor E.B. Farnum: "Hickok's half-woman friend's off somewheres on a tear. The orphan square head's in the widow's care. The widow feels put upon. She's asked me to find her some help. I suggested the gimp."

and:
Al Swearengen: "In life you have to do a lot of things you don't fucking want to do. Many times, that's what the fuck life is... one vile fucking task after another."

and:
E.B. Farnum: "Be brief.
Calamity Jane: Be fucked!"

Road trip

In my in-box this morning was a cheery (and rather optimistic) invitation from Phaidon Press to purchase an extremely expensive limited edition facsimile of the journal that photographer Stephen Shore kept of his road trip of the States in 1972-3. Shore meticulously -- some would say obsessively -- documented the trivia of the road, including "where he stayed, what he ate, what he watched on TV, alongside pasted-in ephemera such as receipts, postcards and parking tickets." As a teenager, Shore used to hang out at Andy Warhol's factory, and the work's got that same kind of cumulative banality that I always find so compelling.

Here's a statement Stephen Shore made in 1982 about his process of taking photographs:

The trout streams where I flyfish are cold and clear and rich in the minerals that promote the growth of stream life. As I wade a stream I think wordlessly of where to cast the fly. Sometimes a difference of inches is the difference between catching a fish and not. When the fly I've cast is on the water my attention is riveted to it. I've found through experience that whenever -- or so it seems -- my attention wanders or I look away then surely a fish will rise to the fly and I will be too late setting the hook. I watch the fly calmly and attentively so that when the fish strikes -- I strike. Then the line tightens, the playing of the fish begins, and time stands still. Fishing, like photography, is an art that calls forth intelligence, concentration, and delicacy.

That statement immediately made me think of this image, by Peter Peryer, a New Zealand photographer likewise of great intelligence and concentration (not sure if he is also a fly fisherman):


Shore's book has also prompted me to think about interesting on-the-road images in New Zealand photography. There's Laurence Aberhart's Seedless Heads Blow Me Away, from 1981, or -- possibly my favourite photograph ever -- Dimboola, Victoria, 13 August 1997 (in fact just about Aberhart's whole oeuvre involves a road trip); there's Peryer's wonderfully blank and blocky Barn from 2004, and much of Robin Morrison's work; there's Peter Black's Moving Pictures and Streetworks series. Black shot his Moving Pictures images through the car window, while passing through various nondescript locales.

I presume Peter was driving at the time -- I haven't ever asked him -- but it was interesting to note that Stephen Shore couldn't drive, and experienced his on-the-road epiphanies through the passenger's window. I'm uncertain as to how that might change your perspective. Maybe it's why Shore concentrated on things he could photograph in his hotel room.

Travelling in the States and Europe in the early 90s, I had the idea of photographing the chairs in each of the low-budget hotel rooms I stayed in, and the carpet in each airport. (I took this trip before I learned to drive.) I thought the pictures might be interesting to look back on. But I think I only documented two or three examples before it all became too much of an effort. It takes a great degree of self-discipline to be obsessive, or indeed even to be meticulous. Let alone to be an artist.