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.

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.

Abject robot

No. 1 in an occasional series of accidental public artworks: Ronnie van Hout's Failed Robot sticker grinning up from the concrete floor of the Christchurch Art Gallery's underground carpark.

In rooms

When the old guy down the road moved out, the wreckers were there within days. The rooms he'd lived in for 45 years were reduced to matchwood within a matter of hours. In the morning the house -- nothing fancy, a rendered 1930s bungalow -- was still standing: by afternoon knock-off it was a pile of splintered plasterboard and broken timber in the middle of the section. The demolition crew left their bulldozer parked snugly beside the heap, its arms raised in victory like Liberty leading the people over the barricades. The next day, along with a portaloo delivery, a couple of heavy duty trucks arrived and took away the rubbish. The house was gone.

There was something indescribably sad about all this. The house was nothing much, and though I fear a neo-Tuscan mansion with triple garaging will rise in its place (the developer's threat to build 'stylish homes' emblazoned on the gate placard fills me with dread), I won't really miss it. I was watching as the power shovel smashed down the exterior wall facing the street and exposed the rooms inside. I'd never been inside the house, but as the machine raised its arms to deliver the deathblow suddenly I was looking at the faded wallpaper and swirling bathroom vinyls the old guy had lived with every day for all those years, his private rooms exposed to merciless public view. I felt terribly prurient for looking. It felt a bit like watching a car crash, at once compelling and abhorrent. The privacy of the house -- the thing that made it a home, rather than just a building -- had been torn apart. What for years had been hidden from public view had become a violent spectacle, then a pile of rubble, then empty ground.

Immediately afterwards it was as if the house -- and the man who had occupied it for nearly five decades, who'd seen several generations come and go and grow up around him on the street -- had never existed at all. The people who move into the new house won't know that a huge dark red camellia once grew in the front garden, nor that the path to the front door curved through the lawn like a serpent, nor that an old man with one leg used to wait near the gate on warm afternoons in his electric wheelchair and raise his hand in greeting to neighbours. It's the way of things, I guess: perhaps particularly in a new-ish country like New Zealand, and perhaps most particularly in Christchurch, which seems to be continually razing itself to the ground and starting again. The old gives way to the new, and history disappears in a heap of rubble on the back of a truck. I'm writing this down so I don't forget.


(In the sort of strange sychronicity of content and affect that the internet increasingly seems to deliver, I came across this blog post the other day devoted to the architectural ghosts of old rooms. It did the job for me. I couldn't bear to take a photo of the old guy's house coming down, though at top above I've pictured one of the trucks which took it away.)

We went to see the Ronnie van Hout show at the Christchurch Art Gallery in the weekend, and I was thinking a lot about rooms while I was there. So many of Ronnie's works seem to be concerned with the memory of specific rooms, and of the psychological effects of enclosed familar spaces. There's something very strange and haunting about his room-based works, a sense of an actual inner world made visible, of the past reconstructed in the present. His father's shed, which Ronnie reportedly saw inside for the first time only after his father's death, has been the subject of a couple of major works -- the twin sheds installed on the roof terrace at Te Papa, as well as a temporary installation on the forecourt outside the Christchurch Art Gallery a couple of years ago.

Ronnie van Hout, A loss, again, 2008, at Te Papa. Image via Darren Knight Gallery.

The current survey show -- quite brilliantly put together, alternately tense and hilarious -- includes the wooden models of his old school and family house, with a tiny video screen of the artist flickering in the windows. There's a fantastically eerie new work inspired by his trip to Antarctica, in which a life-sized dummy of the artist dressed in parka and snow goggles sits alone inside a kind of white viewing chamber, a thin rivulet of blood running from his nose. Peering through a window at him, I felt as if my breathing were instantly being measured and constricted. Even the tiny banana-man model seems trapped inside his airless perspex display case, holding a minute 'help me' placard.

Somewhere about the middle of the show, a wall appears to be entirely empty: it's only on close inspection that a small peephole becomes visible. Through the peephole is a secret room, with two genderless figures, slightly desiccated, on what looks like a doctor's couch, one naked. Un-signposted and easily capable of being missed by visitors, the secret room is entirely closed in by vast temporary walls which reach to the ceiling. It comes as a complete surprise, and somehow, within the architecture of the space, seems impossible. But it's there.

The changing spaces of art galleries always interest me. I like going into a familar gallery space and being bamboozled by a new installation, finding the gallery's architecture altered beyond recognition by the repositioning of temporary walls, so that my memory of other visits to earlier shows is entirely disrupted. The reconfiguration of architecture for the display of art seems entirely as it should be.

Equally, it's interesting to think about the accumulated histories of other artworks that have hung or been installed on the same walls before. Visiting City Gallery Wellington, I've looked at works displayed in the big downstairs gallery and thought about where the paintings by Van Gogh and Cezanne were hung when the Stedelijk show came to town; at Waikato Museum, I've wondered if the ghost of Simon Morris's big monochrome wall painting ever floats up though the dozens of layers of gallery white acrylic which now sandwich it to the wallboard; at Peter McLeavey's, I've looked at the hundreds of filled nail-holes on the scarred walls and wondered which were the ones that held McCahon's 'Scared' paintings in the mid-1970s; at the old Robert McDougall Art Gallery, where it was easier to install a temporary wall complete with faux wooden dado in front of Petrus van der Velden's Dutch Funeral than it was to take the massive work down, I've enjoyed secretly knowing that the big gloomy painting was still glowering away behind the wall a couple of feet away.

I've realised that some of my favourite works deal with the ghosts of old rooms: I suspect it's a hangover from having moved around so much as a small child.

Here's Rachel Whiteread's Ghost (1990), a concrete cast of an entire room displayed at the Tate.

Edward Hopper's Western Motel, 1957, from the collection of Yale University Art Gallery (Bequest of Stephen Carlton Clark, via ArtTatler.com. )


And an evocation of a lost room by the Alexandrian poet Constantine Cavafy, who spent a lot of time alone in rooms remembering more congenial times in other rooms:

The Afternoon Sun

This room, how well I know it.
Now they’re renting it, and the one next to it,
as offices. The whole house has become
an office building for agents, merchants, companies.

This room, how familiar it is.

Here, near the door, was the couch,
a Turkish carpet in front of it.
Close by, the shelf with two yellow vases.
On the right—-no, opposite—-a wardrobe with a mirror.
In the middle the table where he wrote,
and the three big wicker chairs.
Beside the window was the bed
where we made love so many times.

They must still be around somewhere, those old things.

Beside the window was the bed;
the afternoon sun fell across half of it.

...One afternoon at four o’clock we separated
for a week only... And then—
that week became forever.

(From C.P. Cavafy, Collected Poems. Translated by Edmund Keeley and Philip Sherrard. Edited by George Savidis. Revised Edition. Princeton University Press, 1992. Via Cavafy.com)

Comedy teeth

In search of some dried green peas for dhal and Tibetan Pea Cakes over the weekend, we drove to Bin Inn (where I was struck, not for the first time, between the strange new synchronicity between (a) poverty and (b) the greenie leftie middle-class taste for sustainability involving slow cookers and ethnic cuisine. In a Venn diagram, the intersection between the two is undoubtedly Bin Inn). Perhaps unwisely, I said that the small guy could choose what he liked from the lolly bins.

This, of course, is what he chose.


As a consequence there has been much menacing of other family members by means of the comedy teeth. Which instantly took me back to my English childhood, and my grandad's tricks with his false teeth; performed, to the occasional and great delight of my brother and I, out of sight of my mother and grandmother, who had banned that particular school holiday comedy turn, along with the singing of dubious songs from World War II: 'Himmler ... was very similar' etc. Of course, the disapproval only intensified the enjoyment. Later, orange peel teeth, chip fangs, and Austin Powers-esque veneers made from masticated Minties entered the forbidden repertoire of childhood tooth modification. I think it's probably genetic and innate: there is a certain kind of person who views the world and its objects as raw material happily placed before them for their own amusement, and another kind who does not. (The former type often, in my experience, becomes an artist.)



We were driving past the Christchurch Art Gallery the other day when the small guy caught sight of the advertising for the forthcoming Ronnie van Hout show, which features his Failed Robot (2007) [pictured above]. Like his parents, the small guy is a massive fan of Ronnie van Hout's work. We took him to see a show at Hamish McKay's when he was two: the look of amazed delight on his face when he saw Ronnie's giant wonky fibreglass Donald Duck and Mickey Mouse figures was something I'll always remember, probably because it entirely matched my own feeling. Encountering Ersatz (Sick Child) at the Christchurch Art Gallery, his reaction was similar. As we drove past the big back-lit image of Failed Robot, I watched the small guy's face in the rear vision mirror: his immediate and total capture of attention by the image, the amazement spreading across his face, the slow smile of recognition becoming an exultant laugh ('Ha!'), then an urgent query:

'Mum, is there really an actual person inside that robot?'

'I'm not sure,' I said. 'Do you think there might be?' (It's hard to turn off the art educator thing, even when one has been decommissioned.)

'Yes,' he said. 'It's definitely a real person's teeth.'

Are you looking at me?

"There's a lot of paranoia in the arts."

Ronnie van Hout, interviewed by Kathryn Ryan last week on Radio New Zealand: audio available here for a limited time. (Absolutely one of the best interviews with an artist I've heard all year.)


Image: Ronnie van Hout, detail from 'I'm Not Here' installation 1999 including Taranaki 1992. Fibreglass, camera, monitor and framed colour photograph. Chartwell Collection, Auckland Art Gallery Toi o Tāmaki. Image from Auckland Art Gallery.

High-handed

I have a great partiality for photographic facsimiles of documents, something I've blogged about before. Whether it's Ronnie van Hout's school reports, Marie Shannon's love notes or the contents of Marilyn Monroe's filing cabinets, there's something entirely different about the experience of looking at a document up on the screen or the wall than reading the same thing on a page. You become aware of all a document's incidental visual properties when you view it as a picture; and somehow this additional information gives colour and context to what you read, steeping it in the style of its own history.

I also have a terrible sneaking weakness for disgraceful high-handedness, wherever it might manifest itself: a personal amusement which is probably due to an early obsession with Evelyn Waugh's novels of British aristocracy in decline. I can never quite bring myself to act like that, but I greatly appreciate a withering put-down when I hear one.

I was intrigued, then, to see the unusual collision of these two somewhat peculiar personal proclivities in this facsimile of a rejection letter from novelist Kingsley Amis to Granta magazine (a neat reversal of the usual order of things), which Granta have just posted on their site. Nice work.

Sticky fingers

News that the Victoria and Albert Museum has just purchased the original artwork for the Rolling Stones' famous "tongue and lips" logo at auction for US$92, 500 (where it will join other items of design ephemera including Eduardo Paolozzi's extensive Krazy Kat archive) has prompted me to think about the history of New Zealand's popular culture, particularly our popular music and entertainment culture. Who's collecting it?

Te Papa undoubtedly leads the way on this one, with their collection of popular New Zealand cultural ephemera such as Split Enz's stage costumes, Fred Dagg's gumboots (which he gifted to them in 2002), and their selection of LPs and EPs by NZ bands from the 1980s and 1990s. They've also got a handful of original band posters from the era. Not that I've seen any of the latter exhibited (I may have missed it?); but it's very good that they're actively seeking to collect this material, which all-too-often falls through the cracks of New Zealand's cultural collecting institutions.


However, absent Te Papa it's New Zealand libraries, rather than our museums, that predominantly collect popular ephemera, as part of their research collections. The National Library has a great collection of posters, underground comics and ephemera from public protests, searchable online. They define ephemera in an interesting way, too, stating that items are typically:

• too insubstantial to be included in the Library’s book collections
• anonymously produced
• of commercial content
• related to popular culture and everyday life
• of interesting graphic design.

I presume that libraries have historically collected this material because they view it as being part of New Zealand's print culture, and thus related to their collections of books and manuscripts. But you could equally argue that it is an important component of both social and design history. New Zealand's major metropolitan museums have been comparatively sluggish in acquiring items of popular culture from the recent past. Which seems crazy to me; leave it too long, until it becomes "history", and the items become scattered and detatched from their provenance, as well as downright expensive.

Robin Neate, poster design (undated, c.1982?)

Suprisingly, to me at least, it's Christchurch Library rather than Canterbury Museum, for example, which holds an archive of posters produced for the Flying Nun bands that played at the Gladstone and the Star and Garter in the early 80s. This was a hugely important time in New Zealand's cultural history which has all but disappeared from view; it's great to see the library having taken the lead on collecting and caring for this material. They've put a small selection online. Like the original record sleeves, many of these posters were silk-screened and over-painted by hand; some were designed by notable artists including Lesley Maclean, Chris Knox, Ronnie van Hout, and Robin Neate.

Ronnie van Hout, poster design, 1981

Not for the first time, I've wondered which national cultural organisation might take it upon itself to collect items from New Zealand's graphic design history as significant items of design rather than of social history: it's my understanding that currently no institution does, which is a woeful state of affairs. More bricks and mortar I know ... but I really think New Zealand needs a national design museum.


Back to the Victoria and Albert's most recent acquisition: the designer of the Rolling Stones logo, John Pasche, was a student at the Royal College of Art when he was approached by Mick Jagger to work with the band in 1970. The brief was to design an identity for the Rolling Stones' new record label: Jagger showed him an image of the Hindu goddess Kali as a starting point.

Pasche's logo was first used on the cover and inner sleeve of the Sticky Fingers album pictured above, and has subsequently become a worldwide brand. He was paid 50 pounds for the job, followed by another 200 pounds a few years later by the band in recognition of the great success of the design.

The photographic cover itself was Andy Warhol's concept, although the 'popness' of the lips logo has caused a common misapprehension that Warhol designed it; the model in the tight trousers was Factory regular Joe Dallesandro, the star of Warhol's Flesh (1970), of whom NY Times movie critic Vincent Canby wrote: "His physique is so magnificently shaped that men as well as women become disconnected at the sight of him."

Well yes.

What they don't want you to know

Ronnie van Hout, Abduct, 1999, pegasus print, 38 x 50 cm, from Darren Knight Gallery


Regular readers of Art, Life, TV, Etc. will know that I have somewhat of a bee in my bonnet about museums that are keener on interpretation and interactivity than in just getting on and showing the good stuff. Yet somehow I am filled with admiration for the sheer outrageousness of a museum which appears to collect no genuine stuff at all, and yet still attracts close to 150 000 visitors per year: the International UFO Museum and Research Center, in Roswell, New Mexico, for which a new building is being designed by architects Ahearn-Schopfer Associates, of Boston, featuring an extremely high-camp exterior "wormhole". The concept drawings have just been released.


“The concept is that this is a found object emerging from a file cabinet, kind of like information hidden in a drawer somewhere,” explains the architect, referring to the purported government cover-up of extraterrestrial evidence -- the "Roswell Incident" of July 1947, in which either a weather balloon fell to earth, or a group of tiny alien men crash-landed in a flying saucer, depending on your point of view. It's a story that refuses to die, and the UFO Museum is increasingly driving both tourism and progress to the one-horse desert town:

"Prior to the [opening of the] UFO Museum, there were no alien eyes on the lampposts, no space ship logos for a local car dealer, no city of Roswell logo and branding campaign including a space ship, no documentaries on the Incident and no television programs with the Roswell name. In the past eight years, six UFO related businesses have opened in downtown have opened. There have been six hotels completed and one currently under construction. Roswell now has a Home Depot Building Center, Super Wal-Mart, Hobby Lobby, Sam’s Club, PetCo, Famous Footwear and others."

The thing is, from what I can work out, the Museum doesn't have any actual stuff in its collections (I guess all the authentic alien artefacts would be stored in a top-secret government facility somewhere?), so instead it exhibits (currently on pegboard walls; that'll change when the new building goes up) copies of newspaper accounts and affadavits sworn by witnesses to the alien landing and subsequent cover-up, as well as a large model of a flying saucer and interpretive displays such as the very popular "Alien Autopsy" diorama below.

The Roswell UFO Museum's website comments that it "maintains its position as the serious side of the UFO visitors to Roswell and the surrounding areas ... people come looking for answers to specific and personal questions about UFOs or simply out of curiosity. People spend from 30 minutes to a week here."

And somehow, it all kind of works: a museum to something that probably never happened filled with inauthentic objects that people made years later. Usually I loathe museums that see their business as telling stories, but on reflection, maybe it's all about the nature of the story they have to tell.

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.

Southern sting

Doris Lusk, Canterbury Plains From Cashmere Hills, 1952, oil on board, collection of Christchurch Art Gallery.

On the 'map of New Zealand' board game from the 1960s, if you're unlucky enough to land on the 'Christchurch' square, you've got to go back six spaces. I've always thought this was rather apt.

Poor old Christchurch, poor old South Island; forever Tasmania to the North Island's Great Southern Land. Although it's New Zealand's second-largest city, Christchurch has long been the red-headed step-child of New Zealand's metropolitan centres, its residents periodically crying 'Unfair!' in response to "national" committees dominated by people from Auckland and Wellington and to "national" prizes juried by North Islanders which go to Aucklanders.

Although Christchurch is a city you're happier to come from rather than to go to, with a decent public art gallery, one of the country's two top art schools, and two artist-run spaces, if you're interested in contemporary art it's not nearly as bad a place to live as most other New Zealand cities. And at least it's not risible: people just look a bit sympathetic and understanding if you say that you come from Christchurch, but don't start up with the duelling banjos music as they do if you admit, say, that you come from Oamaru or Te Awamutu or Inglewood.

But now it's official; you're more likely to pick up Creative New Zealand funding if you live in the North Island. It seems the grumblings which periodically issue from the South Island have a basis in fact. Press journalist Philip Matthews has done the sums, and using CNZ's own figures, in an article in the weekend paper [not yet online] he calculates that the project funding given to the mainland's artists is almost exactly the same as that doled out to New Zealand artists living and working overseas, thus neatly confirming the suspicion that the South Island is indeed regarded as another country by the North's arts bureaucrats. And on a population basis, Christchurch's funding for arts projects is substantially lower than that given to Auckland or Wellington.

"People make choices about where they live," comments National's arts spokesman Chris Finlayson in Matthews's article, thus hinting at a truth universally known but not often acknowledged. In actual fact, by my calculations the South Island is disproportionately represented among the rollcall of artists who've received the cream of New Zealand's arts prizes in the past few years. Of a total of 16 finalists for the Walters Prize and 6 winners of the Venice Biennale nod, 10 artists grew up and were educated in the South Island, compared to 12 from the North Island. They just choose not to live there any more.

It's difficult to know what needs to be done about all this, if anything. Creative New Zealand CEO Stephen Wainwright expresses himself as "unalarmed" by Matthews's conclusions that the South Island misses out a bit, so presumably CNZ won't be doing much. It would seem politic to ensure that there are more Southerners represented on CNZ's peer artform assessment panels in future; yet I recall a friend who had reason to know saying some years ago that it could be quite difficult to recruit South Islanders to the panels who weren't either barkingly mad, a wee bit naive, or who didn't arrive in Wellington with a very strange axe to grind, but such an assessment may well no longer be accurate. (It may also involve something of an exaggeration in the first place.)

Still, it's the kind of pugnacious chip-on-the-shoulder, I'll-show-those-big-city-bastards attitude formed by the other island's disdain and hogging of resources that has helped to ensure that the South Island, always the underdog, has continually punched above its weight in the supply of artists to represent the nation. From Colin McCahon to Ronnie van Hout, Frances Hodgkins to Francis Upritchard, Len Lye to Peter Robinson, they breed 'em tough down there, etc. etc. It's just a pity they can't hang on to 'em.

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...

P.S. I Play Lead Guitar if Required

Thinking again about Stephen Shore's project of collecting and documenting ephemera from his road trip reminded me of the slightly more downmarket Found project. When an angry (but nonetheless hopeful) note meant for someone called Mario was left on his windscreen in Ann Arbor, Davy Rothbart (and his collaborator Jason Bitner) thought that other people might be interested to see it. On showing it to friends, they found that almost everyone had picked up a similar scrap from someone else's life at one time or another, and shared a similarly nosy fascination for found notes. So they started an annual magazine dedicated to the subject, and encouraged people to post their finds in, which they now do from all over the world: poetry on napkins, lost polaroids, bizarre shopping lists, diary entries, love notes written on homework paper.

There are a few New Zealand artists who've been interested in using this kind of material. In the early 1990s, Ronnie van Hout made embroideries on canvas, using handwritten texts taken from student noticeboards. This is his Untitled (Male Rock/Pop Singer) (1993) from the Chartwell Collection.

In 2005, Marie Shannon collected and photographed notes written by members of her family to one another. The prints are beautiful and reveal all the tiny crumples and creases of the notepaper. This is Sorry for being grumpy.


I have made a few bizarre street-level finds over the years. I found this note -- which is xeroxed, suggesting it must have been required on more than one occasion -- blowing down a residential street in central Wellington.

These vaguely threatening musings on the end of a relationship were tucked into a guest compendium of an Auckland hotel I stayed in a few years ago.




There's something about found texts that's so sad and futile and evocative, but like the note to 'Mario' above, hopeful somehow. New Zealand poet Jenny Bornholdt uses them from time to time. One of my favourites is this poem from her 2000 collection, These Days:

(Notice in our letterbox)

Have you lost a rabbit?
I have found a rabbit.
I found it on Waipapa Road.
I found it late on Monday night.
It was running all over the road.
It is white with brown spots.
Is it yours?
Phone Erik on 386 3641