Smells like mean spirit

Images via BitRebels

Like many New Zealanders, I am a habitual champion of the underdog. I can't help myself. I'm all for the gingery Shane Cameron over the sleek racehorse Tuaminator, Dame Malvina over Dame Kiri, Ronald Hugh Morrieson over Frank Sargeson: Colin McCahon over every other international modernist master. I'm always looking for the transcendent moment of brilliance in the face of impossible odds. Add to this national proclivity a personal cultural heritage emanating from London's East End, whence a couple of branches of my family pulled themselves out of the Thames's primeval sludge several generations ago, and in any fight I'm naturally attuned to look for the balance of power. Who's the force to be reckoned with, I'll wonder? Who's got the stuff? Who's slipped lead weights into their gloves? Where's the smart money going? And then I'll cheer for the weedy one putting up his dukes, for the slightly porky one on his make-or-break comeback special, for the one who seems almost impossibly behind the run of play but might be able to pull it off, for the one just getting out there and bravely having a go, despite the odds. (I'll have my money safely down on the other one, of course. The actual winner.)

This penchant for under-doggery may well not be peculiar to New Zealanders; I expect it's a cultural trait to be found in most small, slightly crap countries. It's a strange form of humbuggery and moral superiority rolled into one. While collectively we might be losers, there's something about the culture that breeds individual champions, innovative rough-hewn geniuses armed only with a piece of No.8 wire or a pair of sturdy legs. Or so we wish to believe. Given the impossible odds in such unequal competitions as we specialise, a loss is unremarkable and to be expected; but a win from behind is something truly to savour, something distinctive and memorable which helps to form personal and national identity. Edmund Hillary was perhaps the ultimate underdog, a beekeeper from New Zealand who bestrode the roof of the world. Given our tiny population, any time our sports teams win at pretty much anything at all it's a triumph of the underdog. Katherine Mansfield, Frances Hodgkins, D'Arcy Cresswell*: plucky colonial underdogs, one and all. And we all walked a bit taller when Colin McCahon and Laurence Aberhart showed at the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam. That was good. That was earnt.

But something I've been thinking a bit about recently is the critical importance of correctly identifying the underdog. Sometimes I've got it wrong, and have cheered for a weedy villain, or an arrogant fool. The underdog category can be quite mutable, and depend utterly on one's personal perspective. For example, having known several art critics personally, and watched them having to cross the road sharpish in order to avoid a smack to the chops by an irate subject of their criticism, I tend to think of them as underdogs, but that's not how an artist may think of them. The artist may well have quite a different view of the critic as a wannabe jackbooted overlord which is quite at variance to the way he or she (actually, it's almost always he) might see himself: a humble worker in the art mines, sweating over copy at 10 cents a word, fighting the good fight for quality and saying what needs to be said. Underpaid, brave, plucky, and only very occasionally funded by Creative New Zealand.



Being an underdog is not the same as being the probable loser or just not very good at whatever you're doing. It takes a certain kind of indominitable spirit as well, a kind of dogged goodwill towards one's opponents, even -- perhaps especially -- when one is being trampled in the mud. Discussing this post with the big guy last night, he put it thus: NZ's cricket team, The Black Caps, are not plucky underdogs, even though they almost always lose, because they are an arrogant bunch of swines and as such, are not worth cheering for. To be an underdog worthy of the name, one needs humility, a sense of humour, and a show of public respect towards one's opponents. Arrogance, or mean-spiritedness, is an instant disqualifier from glorious underdog status.

I've often thought that the artworld, pound for pound, has more than its fair share of mean-spirited people. (I hasten to add that I'm not talking about artists here, very few of whom could be described in this way.) I've put this characteristically snappy arts personality down to the fact that a) there are a lot of very intelligent people attracted to working in the arts; and b) there is not a lot of financial recompense for their work. The result: dogs fighting over scraps. As a status-based industry, gossip and slander inevitably become its everyday currency: the artworld, perhaps surprisingly, is no place for the faint-hearted and not really a very comfortable home for the underdog. But I think this is probably true of various other worlds too, including -- possibly particularly including -- academia.

One of the rules I adopted when I started blogging -- apart from the classic never drinking and blogging -- is no mean-spiritedness. (It's similar to the one I assumed when I stopped working in the public sector: only do business with someone you like.) Many's the blog post I've started writing and had to delete, thinking, no, actually that's just mean. Funny, perhaps, but unkind. I've commented a few times lately on art review site EyeCONTACT when I think John Hurrell is being a bit unfair or hasn't given the subject proper credit for something they've attempted: but actually I only bother doing this because I know Hurrell to be a fundamentally good-hearted person, if a tiger for an argument. If I thought he was just being mean-spirited I wouldn't go near it. (But as the big guy said to me, if the underdog gets too yappy, sometimes a quick kick to the flank will sort things out nicely.)

I'm far too soft-hearted to be an art critic; even as a book reviewer critiquing truly terrible books I've tried to scrape up something nice to say for the sake of balance, knowing how hard it is simply to get a project up. And how comparatively easy it is for someone else to score unkind points off it. Of course, I will take considerable pleasure in being rude about it privately later; and I am occasionally horribly (and rather hypocritically) partial to the meanness of others. Vis: my recent obsession (via the excellent Artandmylife) with the entirely mean-spirited blog Regretsy, which takes the very worst and most ill-advised hand-made items from the crafting site Etsy and reposts them with appropriate comments. Here you can window shop for pendants in the shape of your own vulva; gigantic reusable sanitary pads with pictures of sexy vampires; ponchos for chickens (can also be a wrist cuff); hand-knitted tampon covers made from recycled wool for your key chain; or mispelled lines from Proust written in gold pen on an old pair of jeans made into a hideous skirt. And the art: the art on Regretsy is a thing of great wonder and aching ribs.

A painting by Heather Buchanan via Regretsy. Actually, I really like this painting.

By laughing at Regretsy I am of course, swimming against the tide of my own cultural heritage: the hapless crafters who are the subject of the blog's derision are most definitely underdogs. But it is extremely funny.

Of course, one might legitimately argue that reducing social relations to a knockdown contest between the underdog and the favourite is ridiculously simplistic. And in the case of Dargaville Museum vs. Reading the Maps, you'd be right. On a recent visit to the Museum, blogger Scott Hamilton was appalled at the incorrect attribution and inappropriate display of a carved pou. In particular, he took exception to the label which suggested that the pou belonged to an ancient pre-Maori 'Waitaha' civilisation, commenting that he was dismayed that 'pseudo-history has gained a foothold in one of New Zealand's larger provincial museums'. He wrote a series of sternly-worded emails to the museum critiquing their treatment and attribution of the pou, which he also posted on the Reading the Maps blog. Many prominent and scholarly people left comments on the blog in support of Hamilton's actions, and wrote their own complaints to the museum. Dargaville Museum then replied to Hamilton, explaining the circumstances which led to the carving being attributed in this manner, and saying that they had subsequently removed the label and were planning to seek help regarding the attribution from National Services Te Paerangi Te Papa.

Scott Hamilton's point of view, of course, is entirely correct. Reputable scholars concur there was no technologically advanced pre-Maori civilisation: there's no evidence for it whatsoever, and it's a notion which only exists in the mind of conspiracy theorists, and, as Hamilton suggests, pseudo-historians. Hamilton was right to point out this egregious error of judgment to the museum: what's out there for perusal in the public sector should conform with the accepted historical facts of the contemporary world. But somehow in the midst of all this I couldn't help feeling a little sorry for Dargaville Museum, which is a place run by volunteers and whose collections are largely based on the donations of generous private individuals. In such circumstances, a little bit of the whacky factor is inevitable (and indeed, is sometimes to be encouraged, or those museums wouldn't exist in the first place). In taking on Dargaville Museum, it wasn't Denis Dutton or Theodore Dalrymple giving the massive monolith of Te Papa a serve after its opening: the power in this fight seemed to be largely with Scott Hamilton, though I utterly respect him for standing up for an important principle. But after reading his emails (Whack! Whack! More information has come to my attention! Whack!) it felt a little bit like fish in a barrel to me. Dargaville Museum, though clearly in the wrong in its promotion of dubious pseudo-history in relation to this exhibit, seemed for a weak moment or two like the underdog, a bantam-weight fighter bloodied and out for the count under the sheer force of heavyweight blows landed by Hamilton.

While they may have had the unexpected effect of engendering a momentary sympathy (in me, at least) for the beleaguered museum, Scott Hamilton's emails represent a quite brilliant expose of a not-uncommon situation for small provincial museums. He makes some significant points about scholarship and the display of artefacts from a living culture which deserve to be widely heard. In the face of such a barrage, Dargaville Museum has done a sensible thing by turning to Te Papa's National Services for help. And here National Services could be a great deal of use to small museums by showing them how to distinguish between reputable scholarship and pseudo-history: strikes me that Scott Hamilton would be a great guest lecturer for such a workshop. I'd like to see this one resolved not by a smackdown but in a sit-down.


*Actually, D'Arcy Cresswell might be disqualified from true underdoggery on grounds of terminal arrogance. But he was very funny.

I AM ... disappointed

Colin McCahon, I Am, 1954, image via Art New Zealand.


A little while ago -- following a remarkably irritating encounter with the Christchurch City Council's booking system for children's swimming lessons which still has me gritting my teeth when I think about it; a system based, I assume, on close observation of railway ticket offices in the Indian subcontinent -- I canvassed opinion about starting a new blog solely for complaining purposes, entitled I Am Disappointed.

The more I thought about it, the more the idea seemed to have legs. And as is my way, grand visions rose like coloured smoke before my eyes. After a while when it gained momentum it wouldn't just be me complaining; I could secure complaints for 'I Am Disappointed' from all over New Zealand, maybe from throughout the Anglophone world. Anyone who wanted to complain about anything could have a forum to do so. Ex-boyfriends, bad architecture, swimming lessons, the frequency of school holidays, the selection process for New Zealand's participation in the Venice Biennale: all disappointments would be grist to the blog's mill. It could be funny. It might be useful. It would be enormous.

Via Twitter, at least, there was general approval of the idea, albeit with suggestions for alternative names. 'You are a disappointment to me', suggested one correspondent; 'What, is that it?' proposed another. The inimitable @styler mentioned that she was herself thinking of "starting a blog called 'I fucked up' but I'd be so busy I'd never have time to fail big in future". And @Hamish_Keith chipped in with 'Fresh Disappointments Delivered Daily', which had me fantasising about a masthead designed by Dick Frizzell.

There would be legal issues, undoubtedly, as some of the complaints might be a bit near the knuckle, but the problems could probably be got around. And I'd have to make sure the complaints were interesting, rather than just whinges or insane rants. And the blog would need a brand: it would need to narrow its focus. It couldn't deal with everyone's complaints about everything, that would break the internet. Perhaps it could specialise in art-related complaints? Thus enabling me to shoot for the big McCahon I AM (disappointed) masthead. Although that would mean I couldn't include my feelings about:

1. Christchurch City Council's antiquated booking system for children's swimming lessons which requires you to turn up in person at 8am on a single school day each term and queue for about 45 minutes (have I mentioned that?)

2. The fact that the gigantic house being built down the road has just had a two-storey barrel arch craned into place as an architectural feature, thus making a frigging mockery of the Christchurch City Council's supposed architectural guidelines for its Special Amenity Areas;

3. The fact that toys in Kinder Surprise eggs almost always come readymade these days rather than being the sort you have to put together (actually, this is one of the small guy's peeves, rather than mine, but it's heartfelt).

Then I realised it would actually be quite a lot of work to read through and vet the submissions, and that it would probably be a bit of a downer being a clearing house for other people's complaints (not unlike being a curator at a public gallery again, in fact). Also, aiming to operate in a territory marked out by the intersection of talkback radio, Hamish Keith's 'Cultural Curmudgeon' column, and the admirable New York-based keep-em-honest blog, How's My Dealing, might not necessarily be the recipe for a quiet life. So I've decided not to do it, after all.

But if I had, this week I'd be considering the forthcoming closure of Te Papa's brilliant research library to the general public. I've used it often over the years, and I've always liked how it's literally open to the public; you can walk right into it, sit down and start reading. You run into Te Papa's curators there, when they're working on something: and if you need help with a reference, in my experience the staff are quick and knowledgable. It's been reported that from November you'll still be able to use the research library on certain afternoons, but only if you make a previous appointment. I'm sure it's a necessary matter of cost-cutting, an internal management choice between this and that and so on, and I do note that they're planning to digitise more of their research collection, but I wish they hadn't chosen to cut the open library access: I liked and admired how the set-up of Te Papa's library announced 'We're open for scholarship. Ours, and yours.' It was a good look.

So, I wish the public swimming pools would digitise their booking systems, it's ridiculous to have to turn up in person as if the internet had never been invented: but I loved the fact you could turn up in person as a member of the public to Te Papa's research library. No doubt the swimming bookings will be online at some point, but I'll bet that it will prove considerably more difficult to reopen Te Papa's library to general public access in the future. It's the sort of thing that, once done, is surprisingly hard to undo.

"Gallery evicts nude dwarfs"

Not that I think for a minute that this piece of breathless reportage was really how the story went down (I say curator, you say censor... let's call the whole thing off), but I do take my hat off to the writer of that headline in the ODT. Good work, though they might also have considered some tasteful variation on "dwarf tossing". Nice opening sentence too: "A Dunedin artist is grumpy because she says her nude dwarfs have been banned from the Dunedin Public Art Gallery."

The Herald, on the other hand, has a pretty dopey account of the deep South's art-dwarf controversy with the artist suggesting that it's all down to self-censorship on the Dunedin Public Art Gallery's part because -- ahem -- they're "afraid" of Te Papa, whose touring Rita Angus survey show has just opened there.

"They told me the Rita Angus curator didn't like the dwarfs ... He thought too many little old ladies going to the Rita Angus exhibition would be offended."

All news to Te Papa, of course, and wearily denied by the DPAG who decided to "celebrate the strongest aspects" of the artist's work by leaving the dwarfs out. TVNZ has vision here, if you're up for it.

Overlooked objects

Rachel Whiteread, Place (Village), 2006-2008. Image from Boston Museum of Fine Arts, via Time-Blog

Like many other British artists of her generation included in the big touring show 'Pictura Britannica', which came to Wellington in 1998, the impact of Rachel Whiteread's work in New Zealand was diminished by the howling public furore which blew up over the inclusion of Tania Kovats's tiny conceptual sculpture, Virgin in a Condom. Originally scheduled to be shown at City Gallery Wellington, a leaky roof sent the exhibition across the road to the big house: a gift-horse whose mouth, in retrospect, Te Papa's decision-makers may have wished to have examined more closely, given the extent of the protests which ensued.

From memory (I don't have the catalogue of the show, and may well be making this up), Rachel Whiteread's work in 'Pictura Britannica' was a concrete cast of the negative spaces under bench seating. The work was related to her extraordinary cast of the interior of an entire house at the end of a 19th century tenement row in East London, House, which she made in the summer of 1993; a gargantuan project which left her both physically and mentally exhausted, as well as dealing with the challenges of having suddenly become a public figure.

Although I never saw the work (the old house had originally been scheduled for demolition; the same fate met Whiteread's House in 1994), I've always been fascinated by photographs of it; its strange looming bulk, the mismatched fireplaces projecting from the inside-out skin of the house, the blankness of its aspect. It was the kind of house in which both sets of my grandparents lived, in north and east London: ubiquitous in Britain, yet impossibly exotic in New Zealand, in a slightly jokey old-fashioned working-class British sort of a way, like jellied eels and pearly Kings and knotted hankies on the head. Giving solid form to an empty space which was once lived in, Whiteread's sculptural memory of a house is now only a memory itself, and has become conflated in mine with the small dark rooms of those London houses I visited in my childhood.


A "small, somewhat fitful show" of Whiteread's work has just opened at the Boston Museum of Fine Arts. The centrepiece of the exhibition is a new work, a nocturnal townscape of dolls-houses, which the artist has collected for more than twenty years (pictured at top above):

"I think the thread that connects it with all the earlier work is that if you look inside these houses none of them have people in them, there's no furniture. They just have electricity - I was interested in the interiors of these houses and also the fact that they had been through many generations of family. They may have been made by the father. There was a lot of love involved with them and then eventually the love was lost. They were transferred through generations. That transaction is always something that's been in my work. The things that I've used have been second hand."

Time magazine's Richard Lacayo has a terrific short interview with Whiteread here, following the opening of her show in Boston, in which, among other things, she discusses her first meeting with Louise Bourgeois:

"Many years after college, just after I had made House, Louise was at home ironing the New York Times, which it was her habit to do every morning. And there was a picture in the paper that day of House. She saw it and said to somebody: "I want this woman in my house. I want her to come to my house." So I was summoned to see her."

Not for the first time, I've been wishing this morning that a New Zealand art museum would give Rachel Whiteread a call. Get her over to do a show in one of our houses. Or preferably, a survey show AND a new project.

Friday Miscellany

A few bits and pieces that have caught my eye this week.


1. Before Madonna and Posh Spice, there was ... Rita Angus?

Rita Angus, Self Portrait, 1936-37, oil on canvas. Image from The Angus Clan

Hamish Coney reviews Te Papa's 'Life and Vision' show in Idealog magazine, and decides that Rita Angus, "Christchurch's answer to Greta Garbo", produced the blueprint for post-feminist girl-power in New Zealand.


2. The poetry of the street

Exasperated by his sons' wrestling antics, essayist and blogger Martin Edmond sent them for a run around the block. On their return he asked them to write down what they saw. A great fan both of peculiar lists and the detritus of the street, the results made me laugh like a drain.


3. Vegetable man


Growing up in Christchurch in the 1980s and listening to Flying Nun bands, for my friends and I a supergroup like Pink Floyd represented the enemy; on a par for all-round crapness with REO Speedwagon, Foreigner and Emerson Lake & Palmer. Yet Syd Barrett, their early lead singer, was somehow exempt from our scorn, and after I heard that he wrote Vegetable Man, covered by the Jesus and Mary Chain, I bought the single and played it non-stop for a while. Various commentators have suggested that the song documents the beginnings of Barrett's monumental breakdown, in which he left the band, shaved off all his body hair, grew very stout and lived as a recluse for the rest of his life.

I was interested to read about an exhibition of Barrett's paintings due to open in his home town, Cambridge, next week. A report in The Independent notes that few of the paintings he produced during the last twenty five years of his life survive, due to his tendency to spend weeks on a project and then photograph the piece before burning it.


4. Table stakes

The 2008 version of the artworld's Power 100 list is out, published by ArtReview. There are four criteria, as judged by a panel which includes John Maeda from the Rhode Island School of Design, and art critic and TV presenter Matthew Collings: "genuine influence over the production of art, international weighting, art-market relevance and their contribution to the art world over the past 12 months". Unsurprisingly, Damien Hirst comes in at no.1: perhaps equally unsurprisingly, no Australasian dealer, collector or artist appears on the list.

This is what I think about when I think about museums

Canterbury Museum's Victorian Room: the best "dusty old museum display" in the country and one of my favourite places in the world. (The famous vegetable sheep is behind the moose skeleton and to the left of the stuffed pigmy rhino -- or whatever it is; just behind the facsimile of the Rosetta Stone.)


Years ago, when Te Papa was still a glittering neon twinkle in the eye of its spruikers, I went to a talk by poet Ian Wedde, who had recently signed on to the project team, about its conceptual development. It was a terrific dissertation, full of typically image-laden metaphors and incidental histories. Ian's method, as I recall, was to speak from personal experience, finding in the events of his own life practical demonstrations of the philosophies of museums he was discussing. I found it compelling, yet also somehow slightly outrageous. At this remove, I remember him talking about sitting with a girl on a bench in the Black Forest in the late 1960s as fighter jets flew overhead, though I don't recall how that fitted in to the argument. And I also remember him talking about the "dusty old museum displays" of his childhood.

I don't think I do Ian a disservice here by attributing this quote to him, though it's a phrase which I heard many times on the lips of other people in subsequent years to describe what Te Papa was not. I remember being profoundly puzzled: my experiences in "dusty old museums" were among the happiest and most vivid of my childhood.

Hours, for example, spent in front of the huge Victorian dolls house which used to be on display at Canterbury Museum, and the one in the English cathedral town where I lived as a child, in which I was lost in a perfect miniature world peopled by stiff-limbed dolls who ate shiny plaster hams stuck to china plates. The long strange walk through the cavernous bird halls at the Natural History Museum in London with the feeling of being watched by thousands of eyes, the image of which, in my memory, has become a kind of British Bill Hammond painting. The miasma of creeping horror which rose from the iron torture implements at the Tower of London, still present in the air four hundred years after they were used. Mad museums of Roman masonry in Italy, the pieces all jumbled together with no regard for their age or origins. Measuring one's own child-height against the stuffed Emperor Penguin at Auckland Museum. The strange loneliness of the little Egyptian Mummy in Christchurch, thousands of miles and thousands of years away from its home. The crazy ornithological case at the old National Museum in Wellington in which all the birds appeared to be conversing with one another, which I've written about before.

I can't remember ever feeling bored by all this, or patronised, or excluded, as the new museology promoted by the developers of Te Papa assured me I had. Frequently of course I had no idea what I was looking at (the 'vegetable sheep' in my photo of Canterbury Museum's Victorian room above is a prime example). But neither did I care. With no sense of the 'stories' the museum object might tell (a prime goal of the new museology), I was free to make up my own.

When critics bemoaned the museum's descent from education to entertainment, I felt that they missed the point; museums, for me, were (and are) places of personal discovery, aids to the imagination much like art galleries. They provided a way to see the world through the eyes of someone else, a direct conduit, through the strange objects one encountered only there, to lives lived in another time or another place.

What I did find patronising and very, very boring, however, was the amount of interpretation the new museology required. Endless labels, didactic panels, and even, in the unspeakable Museum of Sydney which was developed at around the same time as Te Papa, talking holograms triggered by the movement of visitors, in which stock characters from Australian history (the convict, the servant girl, the officer, the Aboriginal) loomed out of the darkness and started chatting to you about their daily lives.

I don't know about you, but for me the only thing worse than a hologram in a mob cap telling stories in a dodgy Irish accent is a real person prancing around a museum in costume pretending to be an early settler, or a figure in a painting, or whatever. I feel much the same about people dressed in Easter Bunny suits who approach you in the supermarket, or mime artists in Cuba Mall, or people peddling religion or cheap pizza deals at the front door: a muttered bugger off! seems the only reasonable response.

Which brings me as if by magic to the latest column [full version not yet online] by New Zealand's own cultural curmudgeon, Hamish Keith, in which he remarks on the irony of the title of the first exhibition to be presented under the new administration of Auckland Museum: 'Secrets [Revealed]'. An energetic and rather bristly new broom in the form of new director Vanda Vitali has swept through the staffing structure of the museum. Dozens of jobs have been disestablished; new jobs have been created; and I would imagine that, as in all restructurings I've been through, many of the good people have left because they can, while many of the bad people (and the really difficult ones) have left because they've been made to. The new number two at the Museum is Tim Walker, the erstwhile director of the Dowse in Lower Hutt, who was previously a senior curator at Te Papa.

Keith is concerned that there has been very little public information about the new direction that Auckland Museum is clearly being primed to take. He is particularly concerned to ensure that the hints it has dropped thus far about being more "accessible", "innovative" and "attractive to younger visitors" do not precede a "whizz-bang dumbing down" and development into "an interactive mall" (no prizes for guessing which other museum he's alluding to). He advises the museum to allow its future to be driven by the enlargement and development of its collections, suggesting that it has the potential to become of one the great museums in the world.

I've always thought of Auckland Museum as the anti-Te Papa, a place where you could go to see interesting and rare things rather than displays of computer-cut vinyl lettering contextualising everyday objects. I love both the Museum's original neo-Classical architecture and its neo-brutalist alterations, by architect Noel Lane; somehow the splendid austerity and grandeur of the building upholds the significance of its contents, unlike the jaunty pastel cheeriness of Te Papa, which at some angles looks like a particularly fancy municipal leisure centre. I particularly like the sheer amount of stuff you can see at Auckland Museum. I suspect it's no coincidence that its previous director, Rodney Wilson, was an art historian and art gallery director for most of his career: art people tend to value the physical presence of objects rather more than the social histories which may be prompted by the object. (Keith, also an art person, argues that it's simply a historical accident that the great Maori and Pacific artworks held by Auckland Museum are in its care rather than that of the art gallery.)

I'm with Hamish Keith on this one. Whatever else the regime change at Auckland Museum does, it should concentrate on what is an outstanding collection. Get the objects out on display, and let visitors continue to build personal relationships with them. Bring the magic of the "dusty old museum" forward into the new century, and leave the MDF and talking holograms behind in the last one. The 'Secrets Revealed' exhibition, which includes a kiwi with an albino foot, a completely bald kiwi, a frozen baby orang-utan, a full bottle of brandy from the earliest years of European settlement in Auckland, and -- you guessed it -- a fine vegetable sheep -- actually seems like quite a promising start.

Fox in socks

Grant Wood's American Gothic necktie: a step too far.

Call me tasteless if you will -- I assure you that you wouldn't be the first -- but when I saw the Frida Kahlo socks posted by Best of 3 the other day, I immediately thought it might be fun to own a pair. (Why don't New Zealand's gallery shops bring this sort of thing in? Or get New Zealand versions made -- koru stripes or Grocer with Moko anyone? Asked and answered, perhaps.) As chance would have it, I happened at the time to be wearing my much-loved but now ageing Mona Lisa picture socks, likewise bought at the MoMA store, which some people might also think were in dubious taste.

Since I tend to wear boots in these chilly southern climes, until now my private predeliction for kitsch socks has gone largely unremarked and unchallenged. (Attendance at preschool gym or music classes, with the requirement to remove shoes, has presented some minor aesthetic difficulties, but quite frankly looking around the room at the other harrassed mothers one's lucky even to find another pair that matches -- and I doubt that anyone's consciously channelling Edmund Capon.)

Of course, I have some standards -- controversial SMH art critic and erstwhile National Gallery of Australia curator John McDonald's range of art ties was a very, very long step too far -- but now and again, I'm partial to a bit of art merch. The odd Mondrian tea towel, say. A Louise Bourgeois T shirt, or perhaps one featuring a work by Ronnie van Hout. A Rokeby Venus washbag (actually probably not). A Tony de Lautour mousepad. There's an interesting taste hierarchy of this stuff -- Pierre Bourdieu would have a field day -- whereby T shirts by contemporary artists are highly desirable, and tea towels or tote bags emblazoned with historical or contemporary works might be amusingly kitsch, but silk scarves, umbrellas, earrings and placemats are completely beyond the pale.

Still on the subject of gallery gift-shops, a prominent sidebar under the masthead of yesterday's Press directs readers to "Rita Angus: Salute from Te Papa", a lengthy article in a later section. But when you get there, what's delivered is more in the line of a Bronx cheer.

In a peevish review, Warren Feeney (director of COCA -- the Centre for Contemporary Art, the old CSA -- in Christchurch) was particularly off-put by the Rita-related merch available for purchase from Te Papa's shop, on the occasion of its current "Rita Angus: Life and Vision" exhibition. Feeney wrote:

"In addition to her paintings, the accompanying merchandise also introduces her as a maker of images that have helped create and define our national identity. Visitors can buy art cards, postcards, bookmarks, T-shirts, badges, posters, a DVD, a biography and prints of selected works. Curated on the premise that her paintings were a breakthrough in their depiction of New Zealand's landscape [Feeney argues the opposite: the Lovell-Smiths did it first, he says], the commercial packaging perfectly complements the veneration accorded to her in the exhibition catalogue."

How dreadful, etc. Shocking, and what not. Bookmarks? It's an outrage.

Back in the day, whatever carping or criticisms went on behind the scenes there was an unspoken agreement that people from one art institution didn't publicly review exhibitions put together by people in another. This was variously known as professional courtesy, or otherwise collegiality. The idea was that you were all in it together. Hah! Tell that to the Marines.

Getting all hot under the collar about Angus's illustrations for the Press Junior not being included in the show (the reality was Angus herself hated them and wrote to friends that she was compelled to produce commercial art to support herself after her marriage broke up), and endlessly critiquing the marketing of the exhibition as a landmark event featuring new insights into Angus's practice, Feeney (rhymes with "meanie") has missed the real point: this is the kind of useful show which Te Papa should be pumping out every year, and touring round the provinces. "Rita Angus: Life and Vision" shouldn't be in any way remarkable: rather than a tenth birthday present to the nation it should be business as usual, Te Papa's bread and butter, something which to his great credit Director of Art at Te Papa Jonathan Mane-Wheoki stated firmly at the opening function. Let's have more like this, please.

Rita Angus, A Goddess of Mercy, 1946-7, Collection of the Christchurch Art Gallery

But meanwhile, what about a nice pair of Goddess of Mercy socks...

Free wheeling

In the country recently for an exhibition, the presentation of a substantial gift of his work to the Auckland Art Gallery, and a visiting professorship at Elam Art School, NY-based expatriate artist Max Gimblett's been all over the New Zealand media recently. Foremost among the stories was his radio interview with Kim Hill (available here for a limited time), in which some of the truly great NZ art quotes of all time were uttered: "Yes, I take a photograph of [an object] with my third eye, and I hear it speak." "I get occupied by a whole series of commands, and I execute them." "Caffeine makes me cry."

Extraordinarily generous with his personal information, occasionally hilarious with his asides, disarmingly good-natured, full of Jungian rhubarb and self-deprecating anecdotes, this was the most compelling radio I've heard in ages, and has prompted me to look at Gimblett's work in a new light. Here's his A Love Like Fire, from 2005.


In her review of his show at the Page-Blackie Gallery (previously the Tinakori Gallery) in Wellington, Abby Cunnane repeats what's been a fairly constant refrain in the media around Gimblett's visit:

"Next year, he will be the first New Zealander to show at New York’s Guggenheim Museum, in a group exhibition, American Art and the East, alongside giants such as Jasper Johns and Robert Rauschenberg."

Kim Hill noted, however, that Gimblett wasn't actually prepared to commit himself on this one; and he was probably right not to do so. Great achievement though Gimblett's is to be the first New Zealand-born painter to be hung on Frank Lloyd Wright's ramps, I think the first New Zealander to show at the Guggenheim was in fact Christchurch designer John Britten, whose innovative carbon-fibre motorbike, the Britten V-1000, was one of the stars of Thomas Krens's much-vilified (and vastly popular) 'The Art of the Motorcycle' exhibition at the Guggenheim in 1998. The artworld hated the show: the punters flocked in droves. Here's a picture of Te Papa's Britten, which you might be familar with from a visit to their upstairs coffee-shop.

In all this thinking today about New Zealanders and the Guggenheim, apart from my own alarming pedantry what I'm most surprised about is that Gimblett's friend and mentor Len Lye, himself an expat-New Zealander resident for many years in New York, doesn't appear to have ever shown there.