Tomorrow will be the same, but not as this is

Colin McCahon, Tomorrow will be the same but not as this is, 1958,  solpah and sand on board, Collection Christchurch Art Gallery Te Puna o Waiwhetu; presented by A Group of Subscribers, December, 1962

If Christchurch Art Gallery were open, at 12.51pm today I would stand in front of this painting by Colin McCahon and think about what we've lost, and what we carry forward with us.

A packet of cigs at Exeter Railway Station

Exeter Central Railway station, Devon, England. 31/07/1969. Wikimedia Commons, via Rosser1954.

As the story goes, the publisher Allen Lane, returning to London from the West Country following a visit to crime writer Agatha Christie in the early 1930s, was trapped at Exeter railway station waiting for a train with nothing to read. He could buy cigarettes from a vending machine and flick through a newspaper; but otherwise he was on his own. Pacing about the platform and smoking, he conceived of a new range of cheap paperback books which would combine the mass market appeal of American pulp fiction with the modernist design of contemporary German imprints. (After his death, his family described him as part way between missionary and mercenary.) Lane's Penguin paperbacks would make literary fiction available to a wide reading public and would be sold initially from vending machines: the first 'Penguincubator' opened in Charing Cross Road the following year. The paperbacks cost no more than the price of a packet of cigarettes.

Andre Maurois's Ariel, the first Penguin book ever published, and something I have spent most of my life unsuccessfully keeping an eye out for in second-hand bookshops in the hope of making my fortune. (The image above, from Penguin.com, isn't a first edition: the first edition has no accent on the final 'e' of Andre.)

I've always liked this story, not only because I've been a voracious reader and purchaser of Penguin and Puffin paperbacks over the years, but because in my early childhood I too spent quite a lot of time on the platform at Exeter Railway Station, waiting for the train to London and worrying about reading matter. When packing for holidays at my grandparents' house, I would carefully calculate exactly how many books I would need to last both the journey and the visit. Joan Aiken's complete Midnight chronicles. Almost certainly a Molesworth. A couple of Jennings and Darbishires. Second hand copies of Malcolm Saville and Rumer Godden and Alan Garner, picked up from the market. And then I'd pop a couple more in my bag, just in case. Running out of books while away from home would be a disaster. One of the lowest depths of misery, I've always thought, is not having something to read.

On a recent trip away I realised that I hadn't packed a book. Knowing that without something to read I would be pacing around my hotel room like Allen Lane on the station platform, I bought Martin Edmond's extraordinary work of psychogeography, Dark Night, an account of Colin McCahon's lost hours in Sydney in 1984, and The Hill of Wool, Jenny Bornholdt's latest collection of poetry. Both are paperbacks; both include paintings by New Zealand artists on the cover; both writers, seemingly effortlessly, conjure up imaginative worlds with which I am familiar but which are at the same time beautifully, sometimes almost unbearably, strange. (I imagine that I'll carry round forever lines like Edmond's "the way the places we belong to do not belong to us", and Bornholdt's blood-streaked poem "Tower of London".) Both are books I'm pleased to own, and that I know I'll read again and again, but I did notice that each cost considerably more than a packet of cigarettes.

I'm not familiar with the current mechanics of paperback book pricing in New Zealand, but I do think there's something a bit strange when you can order obscure titles to be sent from England at a cheaper cost than you can buy paperbacks in New Zealand. Books are increasingly becoming a luxury item. (My recent purchases cost me respectively three times, and twice, the price of a packet of cigarettes.) I suppose if Allen Lane were still around, he'd be embracing digital formats as literature's new international mass-market vending machine. And the digital future of books, as VUP publisher Fergus Barrowman mentioned recently on Twitter, is likely to lie not with e-books but with "fluid text on multipurpose devices". The death of the novel, of course, has been darkly (and inaccurately) prophesied for decades now, but it may well be that the ubiquity and comparative cheapness of digital technologies will spell the gradual demise as the book-as-object.

I suspect that the distinction between mass publishing and literary publishing may well become increasingly sharp, returning to a time before Lane effectively brought the two together by starting the Penguin imprint. On the one hand, foil-jacketed bodice rippers and thrillers are being sold in mass outlets like supermarkets and big box variety stores, and on the other, literary books are being sold from arm chairs in small quiet rooms or by mail order. It might be wishful thinking, but I hope there will always be room for the cheaply-produced, stylishly-designed paperback book that Lane conceived in my home town: high-end literature in a mass-market format that's perfect for reading in the bath or at the beach or in frustrated moments at train stations when your battery has run down.

"This is about earthquakes"

Our three-year-old has recently become interested in titling her paintings and drawings. It's interesting watching her process of decision-making; sometimes her titles are informed by visual associations (a drawing with lots of circles might become "The rocks on Gran and Grandad's hill") and sometimes by images from stories that are currently on her mind. I like the simultaneous association/disassociation of her titles; they are narratives in their own right, which, like the painter Cy Twombly's titles, bear only a tangential reference to her mark-making but are spurred into life by the images.

She has also become interested in making little books, with a drawing on each page accompanied by words which she dictates to me. It's hard to keep up with the flow of ideas, and I have to write very quickly.

Here's a page from a recent book.

"This is about earthquakes. Eggs fall down. Houses fall down. A crane tries to rescue people. Churches fall down. You have to get under the table or mummy gets you in the doorway. We have to go through a dirty river and that's liquefaction."

Early Sunday Morning

The after-lives of famous artists, in Clarence Street, Riccarton, Christchurch.

The Art Instinct

Lately my life has been locked in a dialectical struggle between, on the one hand, the extremely brainy books I'm attempting to digest for my university work, and on the other, the minor domestic incidents which pepper my existence like pellet holes on a West Coast road sign.

Recently these have included (but are not limited to) the following:

1. The hair clippers blowing up in the middle of two simultaneous haircuts, leaving the big guy with a No. 1 and a bushy beard, like one of those blokes out of ZZ Top; while the small guy was left high and dry sporting a long front, short back, and a two inch fringe across the nape of his neck. Throw in a couple of Team Holden jackets and it would have been a splendid father and son look for a night out at the stock cars;

2. Running over a fresh dog poo with the deep 'mountain' tread tyres of the baby buggy, something the Super Nanny and Gina Ford's otherwise comprehensive parenting manuals completely fail to mention;

3. Breathlessly retweeting Alain de Botton's remark like a giddy schoolgirl with a Twitter crush:

"Useful new verb, 'to moast' - that is to moan about one's condition while at the same time also secretly boasting about it."

and being rightly told off for so doing (even though it accurately describes the conversational style of several people I know).

4. Dealing severely with the return of a large pantry rat with a taste for chocolate buttons;

5. Being banned from leaving helpful comments on John Hurrell's otherwise excellent EyeCONTACT art review site until I use my 'proper first name last name'. Oh well. A simple pleasure denied.


So all in all, there's been little visiting of art exhibitions lately, and not a great deal of TV watching either now we're through the second series of The Wire and awaiting the arrival of the third from Wellington. As ever, though, the small guy can be counted upon. He is just about to finish his first year at school ("Mum, I really hope Santa brings me an archery set for Christmas! Binoculars for spying on people! And a huge nerf gun!") and recently completed a new book which deals with evolution and comparative mythologies -- traversing much the same territory as Denis Dutton's The Art Instinct, though I believe the small guy's approach to the material is less dogmatic. Including the Loch Ness Monster, leprechauns, and God, the small guy is clearly a cultural relativist: put them in a room together and I think he and Dutton would have words.


Chapter One: What is a Dimorphodon?
A Dimorphodon is like a pterodactyl. A Dimorphodon is a herbivore.


Chapter Two: Cavemen
Cavemen killed animals for their skins and meat. Cavemen make a fire by rubbing two sticks together.


Chapter Three: Woolly Mammoths
Woolly Mammoths lived in the Ice Age. Woolly Mammoths ate plants.


Chapter Four: Early Rodents
They ate dinosaur eggs. Early rodents were like mice.


Chapter Five: The Dragon
A long time ago people in China believed in dragons. Dragons breathed fire.


Chapter Six: The Loch Ness Monster
A long time ago in Scotland people believed in Nessie. Nessie was big and strong.


Chapter Seven: Leprechauns
Some people in Ireland believed in leprechauns. Leprechauns guarded a pot of gold.


Chapter Eight: God
Some people believed in God. God was a good man. [The picture shows God on his cloud sending a bolt of lightning to Earth to kill a witch who is threatening two children.]


Chapter Nine: Hercules and Apollo
Hercules was strong and Apollo was fast. They are Greek myths.

The book's title? The Discovering Fun Saloon. The cover has a picture of a cowboy holding a gun in one hand and a bunch of balloons in the other. Its original title was simply the very bold History, but the small guy crossed that out and retitled it when he moved on from the facts and got on to the 'beliefs' section. That's the sort of thing that makes him such enormously good company.

'I will be Captain Underpants. OK?'

The recent school holidays have given me a new appreciation of the sheer anthropology that is involved in being the mother of a son. This was clearly illustrated to me by a couple of playdates which the small guy had over the past fortnight. The first was with his best friend, and I overheard a conversation between them which went much like this.

'Boogers? What are boogers?'
'They're bogies. Bogies. YOU know.'
'Bogies?'
'Yeah.'
'Heh heh heh.' Etc.

Then a little girl from down the road came to play. They know each other well, and are great friends, but the socialisation of nearly a year at school is making its mark. It was almost impossible for them to find a computer game they both wanted to play. The small guy's friend said that she didn't like Ben 10 Alien Force at all. 'Yuck! All that fighting!' She suggested the Power Puff Girls, to which the small guy said 'What? The Power Puff Girls? Do you want to make me vomit? Or have a heart attack?'

After canvassing whether his friend was familiar with 'the sort of magic where the magician cuts someone in half' ('We'd need a very big box,' he said thoughtfully), they sat down happily to watch the mercifully gender-issues-free Tom and Jerry Show. At one point the small guy broke wind and giggled, looking to his friend for appreciation. But she just folded her arms, pursed her lips and shook her head sorrowfully. And thus gender roles are set for life.

Today: a transcription of the most ambitious Captain Underpants adventure yet in the ongoing series by the small guy. No babies here, and no girls either.



Captain Underpants and the Treasure of the Pea Brain Pirates Poo
PS. No babies in this book.

Chapter One: 'Oh no!'

George saw a ship. 'Let's go on it,' he said.
'Oh no!' said George. 'We are far from home.'
'Har har! We got you!' said the pea-brain pirates.
'Aha! I know you two,' said one of the pirates. It was Mr Krapp.
'I will take you to the island,' he said. 'Yes, an island with treasure.'
'OK. We will go,' said Harold.
'Good. Let's go.'
'This is good,' said George.
'I've got the map,' said George.
'We are at the island,' said Harold. 'JUMP!'
'OK.'
'This is the place,' said George. 'The map says to dig here.'
'OK, dig.'
'Aha! The chest! Good.'
'OK, look inside... it is a poo!'
'That is dumb,' said George.
'No it is not,' said the chest.


Chapter Two: Click!

Click! It snapped its lock. Uh-oh ... Captain Underpants!
'I will save you,' he said.
'OK.'
Bam bam bam.


Chapter Three: Let's Go!

'OK, let's go home,' said George. 'Aha, today was fun for me.'
They were home at last.
'Do you want to play a game?' said Harold.
'OK.'
'We will play Captain Underpants, OK?' said Harold. 'I will be Captain Underpants.'
Bam bam bam bam bam bam bam bam bam bam bam bam bam bam bam bam.


Chapter Four: Yes!

Ring ring!
'Yes?' said George.
'It is here.'
'What,' he said, 'not the newspaper?'
'We are in the newspaper! Oh no!' Harold said. 'RUN!'
'What?'
'Just run, OK?'
So they did.

The End.

The politics of aesthetics

In 1960, American social critic Dwight MacDonald wrote 'Masscult and Midcult', an influential and excoriating essay in which he expressed his utter loathing of the middlebrow culture first derisively described by Virginia Woolf three decades earlier. As MacDonald saw it, the loathsome midcult fell well short of both the high culture with its specialisation and drive for excellence, and the low culture of the working people with its 'raw', 'honest', 'folk' qualities of genuine expression. The middlebrow involved a nasty pastiche of both the low and the high. It was fundamentally inauthentic, primarily expressed by mass-produced products which aped the cultural refinement of the upper classes; experiences designed by shameless money-grubbing commissars to be flogged to half-educated idiots who were trying to appear cultured.

Of course, MacDonald's critique involved a particularly distinguished kind of snobbery: the targetted disdain of the upper classes, or of the highbrow culture -- largely interchangeable terms -- for the tastes of the middle classes. What Woolf and MacDonald identified is still very much with us: if anything, as the middle class has expanded, it's become the official culture. Among recent midcult products one might consider including Oprah's Book Club; the NZSO's concerts with Crowded House; Kiri te Kanawa's release of Christmas with Kiri; anything at all by Merchant Ivory; Te Papa; the vile Dan Brown; the very fact of Hugh Grant; blockbuster art exhibitions; Brancusi's endless column knock-off lamps at Freedom Furniture; Vivaldi ringtones, etc.

I read MacDonald's essay some time ago, and was reminded of it again yesterday evening when I got into the bath and settled down for a quiet read, only to discover that I had picked up the wrong book by mistake.


The inside back cover mentions that writer Jeremy Strong sat on a heater when he was five and burned his bottom, and used to look after a dog that kept eating his underpants.

This is the book I'd meant to have taken with me into the bathroom, an account of contemporary life amid the rebel combat zones of Uganda by Jane Bussmann, a journalist who used to write comedy sketches for So Graham Norton and celebrity features for The Sunday Times.


And this is what I actually should have been reading, but couldn't bring myself to, an important book by a theorist ominously described on the back jacket as one of the most compelling thinkers and writers in France since Michel Foucault and Gilles Deleuze.



And there, in a nutshell and neatly illustrated, you have Dwight MacDonald's theory of high-, middle-, and low-brow culture, alive and well and in operation at our house.

'Oh no!' they said

The small guy has been at it again: his own version of the Captain Underpants franchise continues its theme of crime and just retribution with a recent excursion into the very topical UFOlogical genre, with the completion of Captain Underpants and the Turbo Toilet 2000 and Professor Poopy Pants and the Zombie Lunch Ladies and the Bionic Booger Boy.

Once at Jerome Horwitz Elementary School George and Harold saw a UFO.
'Oh no!' they said.
It landed in the playground. Out popped Professor Poopy Pants and the Turbo Toilet 2000.
Then another UFO came, and landed on the school. Out popped the Zombie Lunch Ladies and the Bionic Booger Boy.
Then George and Harold got some kids to help.
They got the Turbo Plunger 3000 out.
The villains were scared.
They ran.
To the UFO.
But the door was stuck.
They were sent to jail. The police said 'Thank you.'
The End.

The accidental curator

When you work with artists and collections for a while, you inevitably get to thinking about them in a certain way. This artist belongs with that one, you think to yourself; these works are part of this school; these ideas are the particularly interesting ones; and you go about your business accordingly. It's not really a bad thing: not so much a prescribed way of thinking but more like an intuitive shorthand based on experience.

However, I really enjoy the kind of accidental curation that arises from looking at works of art in informal situations. Some of the best ideas come from just prowling about looking at works and constructing unlikely relationships between them. The painting racks in the art stores of public galleries, where the only principles of selection and juxtaposition are the relative sizes of works -- accommodating the largest number of works into the smallest safe space possible. These ordered but essentially haphazard spaces are a great source of random curation, in which a Woollaston might be hung cheek-by-jowl with a Rohan Weallans, or a Frances Hodgkins next to a Julian Dashper.

Recently I noticed a particularly pleasing example of random curation on our dining room mantelpiece, where we tend to put things that we want to look at for a week or so. On the left is a reproduction of Tony Fomison's Detail for a Dancing Skeleton (1970), from Art + Object's auction calendar for 2009. On the right is a postcard from rival auction house Webb's, featuring Don Binney's Kotare over Hikurangi (1965). Beyond very broad historical principles, I would never generally think to relate the two artists' work, and hadn't noticed the anthropomorphic face shape in the landform of Don Binney's painting until I put it next to the Fomison.


On the other side of the mantelpiece, Tony de Lautour's hand-screened catalogue cover from his recent show at the Physics Room accidentally on display next to the Dali invitation card has -- beyond the enjoyably silly formal relationship of the lightning bolt and the moustache -- has opened up a new avenue for me to think slightly differently about de Lautour's work in terms of pranksterish surrealism.


One of the best sources for random acts of curation are auction catalogues. Some of the strangest juxtapositions of works are thrown up on their pages; so wonderful, sometimes, that it's hard to know if they are genuinely random or are an inventive curatorial outlet for the auctioneer. (I must ask one!) I enjoyed this page of works incorporating disrupted grids from Art + Object's 'Second Important Paintings 2009' catalogue. Again, two artists whose works I wouldn't usually think to put together. (Allen Maddox's Grid (1982) and Lozenge (Blue) (1997) with Richard Killeen's Frontal Lobe (1998).)


And, from the Webbs' catalogue, another couple of unlikely bedmates (though I would have been horribly tempted to put the Ted Bullmore on a page with the Ava Seymour photograph below. Thankfully, the auctioneers' good sense and taste prevailed.) (These are Edward Bullmore's Astroform no.13 (Bliss) (c.1967) and Callum Innes's Exposed Painting Red Violet Yellow Oxide Charcoal Black (2003), from Art + Object.) Makes me think, once again, what an incredibly interesting painter Bullmore was.


However, looking at the spread below, I find it impossible to believe that the auctioneer, or perhaps the catalogue designer, placed these two photographic works together randomly. (Ava Seymour's Yellow Oval Room (1994), and John B. Turner's La Patisserie (1972/8), at Webbs.)

But I think perhaps the most enjoyable of all these random acts of curation I've seen lately is the page layout below from the Webbs' 'Important Works 2009' catalogue, juxtaposing Tony de Lautour's Display (2004) against Milan Mrkusich's Painting Indigo 1969. It's hard to know whether this odd comparison best positions de Lautour's work as colourfield abstraction with some doodley bits added, or Mrkusich's as a ground ready to receive the projection of personal content. Actually, it's probably both. And that's why I love these random acts of chance curation: they add immeasurably to one's perception of the almost boundless ability of good art to take on different resonances in different contexts.

Revisionist western: 'I am sick of killing bandits'

As I have been known to remind him from time to time, the big guy is a very lucky man indeed: and one of the ways his good luck is manifest is to be married to someone as keen on westerns as he is. Blame it if you will on all those winter afternoons in our respective childhoods stuck in front of Bonanza, The Virginian and High Chapparal, and in my case the endless John Wayne seasons on the BBC during school holidays. 'Get on your horse pilgrim...'.

I think of my personal graduation from spaghetti to revisionist westerns in the 1980s (though actually we're not fussy these days: either will do) as marked by a shift from dust to mud, from the tumbleweed shoot-em ups of John Ford and Sergio Leone to the mud-splattered 'realism' of Sam Peckinpah on TV and Jim Jarmusch at the movies. Moving quickly past such lightweight excursions into the territory as Young Guns and Unforgiven, we arrived, some years ago, at what the big guy and I both regard as the final unbeatable high noon of the revisionist western genre; the single best show ever made for TV, the mighty Deadwood: vast tranches of mud and grit, buckets of gore, volleys of swearing of an almost operatic nature, corpse-eating pigs, corrupt big business and politics pitted against reluctant law enforcement, and a mother-lode of anti-heroes.

Now it seems the small guy has inherited his parents' fondness for epics of dust, blood, gold and tumbleweed: his latest book is titled Super Sheriff and the Stupid Sombrero Gang. In it I think he's been able to quite neatly incorporate many of the significant tropes of the revisionist western.

The wee pool of terror: It was not fun

In recent weeks, the small guy has become a great fan of Captain Underpants. Anyone with small boys at home may now jump two paragraphs, but for the rest of you: Captain Underpants is a seemingly endless series of novels for junior readers in which two nine-year-olds, George and Harold (who spend their days drawing comics and sneaking into the school office to make hundreds of photocopies to sell to their schoolmates), accidentally turn their school principal Mr Krupp into a superhero. When Mr Krupp hears anyone snapping their fingers, he becomes Captain Underpants and gets into a great mess of trouble, pursued by George and Harold: he only turns back into Mr Krupp again when water is poured on his head.

Featuring superheroes, idiotic behaviour, fart jokes, baddies getting their come-uppance in the end, and enormous Y-fronts used as significant plot devices, I presume the target readership for Captain Underpants is predominantly male. (But there may well be girls who like that sort of thing too, you never know.)

In a neat example of art following life, the small guy has recently produced his own comic book version of the Captain Underpants legend, to accompany such existing titles as Captain Underpants and the Attack of the Talking Toilets, Captain Underpants and the Wrath of the Wicked Wedgie Woman, and so on. He's working on it during rainy lunchtimes with a friend and its pictures haven't all been completed yet, so I reproduce just the narrative below.

Captain Underpants and the Wee Pool of Terror

Harold and George are bad.
It was at the pool. Wee was in it.
'Aha!' said Mr Krupp. 'I got you two.'
Click! He snapped his fingers.
'Oh no!' said George.
It was Captain Underpants. Their wee was in the pool.
'OK, got him,' said Harold.
Oh no! Captain Underpants went in the pool.
'Ah! I am in the pool! Help!' he said.
Mr Krupp was mad. They had to do extra homework. It was not fun.
'I hate school,' they said.
The End.

As chance would have it, I have been reading psychiatrist Frederick Wertham's Seduction of the Innocent (1954), a vastly influential tirade connecting comic books with juvenile delinquency which became the central platform for the moral panic against comics which swept the US, Canada, the UK, Australia and New Zealand during the mid-1950s (the precursor to later moral panics about milk-bars, TV, horror films, heavy metal music, computer games etc etc). Wertham described comics as a 'bacillus' and noted an insidious 'comic book syndrome' which adversely affected the psychology of many children under his care. While he really went to town on the adverse effects of the true life crime and romance comics which were popular in the 1950s, in his opinion even the good-guy superheroes destroyed the fabric of society: 'Psychologically Superman undermines the authority and the dignity of the ordinary man and woman in the minds of children.'

Hate to think what Frederick Wertham would have made of 'the wee pool of terror'.

Funnies peculiar and ha ha

A baby. Not related to me.

One of the things I miss about being in the workplace – possibly the only thing I really miss – is the laughs. I used to spend a lot of time at work laughing. (If you didn’t, you’d dissolve into tears. Or go batshit postal. Over the years I have experienced both entirely understandable reactions among the ranks of my colleagues. The euphemism I used to use is that public art galleries present an unusually robust work environment, quite to the surprise of most people who think it's all posh girls with expensive clothes wafting about admiring pictures and pretending to be intellectual. Chance would be a fine thing, I used to think, as I'd roll up my sleeves, spit on my knuckles and venture into the fray, swinging wildly.)

Working in public art galleries, you come into contact with a wide range of eccentric personalities with inordinately large and combative egos – many of them working inside the institution; the artists by comparison are easy to deal with – which creates surreal situations of unparalleled absurdity. On a daily basis, there seemed to be a lot to laugh at. Where I last worked, as a rookie you’d start with open-mouthed incredulity at the sheer ridiculousness you’d encounter; you’d work your way up to unstoppable guffaws out in the gallery where you’d have to escape to, by way of quiet collegial sniggers in the tearoom; until finally, as a dear friend of mine once did in the face of unspeakable provocation, you might laugh so hard in a meeting that you’d go scarlet in the face and choke, tears shooting out of your eyes as you’d race out of the door. (The 'coughing fit' that you’d afterwards apologise for fooled no one, of course.) I can remember coming home at the end of the day feeling like I’d done 500 sit ups, my stomach muscles would be so sore from holding the mirth in. My poker face was a source of considerable personal pride.

(Can't say what it was all about of course. I'm sworn to secrecy. You sign something or other to that effect when you start.)

At home with a baby, things aren’t so funny. Occasionally amusing things might happen, but there’s no one to share them with. Hearing yourself laugh out loud when (effectively) alone feels like the thin end of the wedge, too: next you’ll be keeping 56 feral cats and creating a fire hazard in the hall with old newspapers. Saving up the funnies till the end of the day when the significant other returns to the nest usually falls a bit flat. 'You had to be there,' I'd find myself saying weakly, when attempting to recount some amusing moment with an exploding nappy or somesuch.

The same is true of swearing. For at-home mothers, the opportunities for swearing are severely curtailed, which again is something the baby books and antenatal classes never think to mention. And if I say so myself, I am a champion swearer. I'm proud of it: I come from countless generations of champion swearers. In my book, swearing is both funny and clever. It represents not only an opportunity to let off necessary steam -- to avoid the emotional problems that Freud suggested would inevitably be caused by repression of the traumatic, cough cough -- but provides a significant opportunity to express one's creative inner self. Working in public galleries afforded a vehicle for my talent for the construction of creative volleys of foul language to be exercised on an almost daily basis. And yes, I do miss it. Who wouldn't?

Again, I expect this would surprise many people who might assume that public art galleries are polite and refined places. I have been in many different workplace environments over the years, but I suspect the only industry to rival public art galleries for use of various descriptive Anglo Saxon phrases would be the night shift at the printers. Foul language is not, as you might think, part of the gallery technicians' job descriptions: the art gallery director and management team are frequently the worst offenders. A new marketing manager at a gallery where I once worked gradually grew more and more tight-lipped over the course of his first week. Finally he could bear it no more. 'I'm not a prude!' he hissed, 'But Cheryl, I think it sets a very bad example for senior managers to swear in front of the junior staff.' I will admit that for a hopeful minute I thought he was exerting quite a sophisticated and entirely appropriate poker-faced public-gallery leg pull. I was disappointed.

The small guy, however, has recently turned five, and with the rush of testosterone that is meant to accompany the school birthday, has developed a sense of humour so entirely puerile, scatological and wildly inventive that I am -- although also his doting mother -- in complete awe at its daily magnificence. Home life has become like living in the prequel to Wayne's World.

For example, he had a little friend round for a playdate (as they're now called) the other day. After running round and round the dining table yelling for what seemed like half an hour, they sat down to watch Sponge Bob, each wearing a pirate eyepatch and poking each other in a friendly way from time to time with toy swords. Sample dialogue:

'Who farted?'
'Wasn't me.'
'Must have been.'
'Wasn't. It was you.'
'Wasn't. It was you.'
'Wasn't.'
Ha ha.
'Who farted?' etc.

On and on and blinking on.

Despite his parents' best attempt to turn him away from the arts into a satisfying suit-wearing career involving numbers and large sums of money, the small guy has taken to writing stories at a furious rate lately: I've blogged previously about his excellent self-help book for dealing with unwanted attentions from yucky girls. (Hilariously, How to Get Away From Girls by Sam has gone minor-ly viral: I've had copious hits on it from all over the show, the page favourited via the Facebook pages of countless people I don't know. I'm just glad it's been useful.)

For your reading pleasure, here's the text of his latest, entitled The Adventures of Rabbit, Hamster and Guinea Pig: The Flying Underpants.

'Look!' said Rabbit. 'Some flying underpants up in the sky!'
'Oh!' said Hamster. 'Is it a joke?'
'No,' said Rabbit. 'It is not a joke. They are mean.'
'That is not true.'
'Yes it is.'
'No. No! NO!'
'It is true you poo,' said Rabbit.
'I hate you Rabbit,' said Hamster.
'Shut up,' said Rabbit. 'I hate you too. Me and Guinea Pig.'
'No,' said Hamster. 'Me and him.'
'Let's be friends,' said Guinea Pig.
'Yes,' said Hamster. 'Let's all fight bad rats.'
'OK. But be friends.'
'Right.'
Bam bam bam.
'This is fun,' said Rabbit.
The End.

(I increasingly think the home life may have humorous possibilities I never imagined.)

Art + language

Robert The, The Art Crisis, 2003


"They seem to be locked into an over large, confusing, inward-looking organisation that thinks and speaks an entirely different language from artists."

-- Guardian art blogger Charlotte Higginson on the British Arts Council, following a damning report on the fallout from its "investment strategy".

Maybe they're using this site to write their copy? Looks like Elam School of Art at the University of Auckland could be, too.

"Hovering above the others"

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

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

"He doesn't always talk a lot"

Laurence Aberhart, Vicksburg, Mississippi 1988, collection of Auckland Art Gallery

As he doesn't always talk a lot, in public anyway, don't miss this opportunity to hear New Zealand photographer Laurence Aberhart speaking about his work. Catch Kathryn Ryan's interview with Aberhart, which includes his thoughts on taking pictures of Maori meeting houses, the problem of disappearing photographic paper, and the parallel histories of photography and New Zealand, here for a limited time.

And although I'm not really much of a gambler (wonder when the NZ TAB will start offering odds on the Montanas like the British bookmaker William Hill does on the Man Booker?), I'll plonk my money down on Victoria University Press's Aberhart to take out the Illustrative category of this year's Montana Book Awards. The content's just too good.