Clippings

Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio, Narcissus, 1594-6, oil

A few things that have been on my mind over the Easter break.

1. A taste for Suede

Having grown up in a household where plants were regarded as either 'tasteful' (usually those used by Gertrude Jekyll for her Edwardian gardens such as astrantia, hostas, and oak leafed hydrangeas) or utterly 'tasteless' (cheerful 1950s cultivars in shouty bright colours including freesias, begonias, dahlias, and hybrid tea roses), I was interested to read about artist Carol Bove's use of vintage plant catalogues in her exhibitions at the NY Horticultural Society and the Tate St Ives. In particular, I'm drawn to her description of a brown daffodil named Suede hybridised in 1973 as possible evidence of a botanical 'period eye' in the history of taste. 'Daffodils are all clones of each other,' she notes, 'and each cultivar (or variety) is genetically identical, so you can’t renew a variety once it’s faltered. Flowers need to be continually in circulation and nurtured to persist, which always strikes me as such a clear metaphor for the history of ideas.'


2. On the comfort of Twitter

Film maker Karina Longworth on the role of Twitter in her life, via Tomorrow Museum:

'(Twitter) allows me — a freelance writer who works at home alone when she’s not spending two weeks out of every month on the road –– to communicate a cumulative narrative of my idle thoughts and actions to an audience that responds in real time. It’s a simple thing, but there’s something incredibly comforting about having an ongoing reminder that if I have something to say, there are people who want to recieve it. Some days, the trail I leave on Twitter is the best proof I have that I actually exist.'

3. Giving it back

Bernd Neumann, the German minister of culture, has firmly rejected the call that Sir Norman Rosenthal made late last year to end the ongoing restitution of works looted by the Nazis to Holocaust victims and their heirs.

Rosenthal:

'History has always looked after works of art in strange ways. Ever since the beginning of recorded history, because of its value, art has been looted and as a result arbitrarily distributed and disseminated throughout the world. Of course, what happened in the Nazi period was unspeakable in its awfulness. I lost many relatives, whom I never knew personally, and who died in concentration camps in the most horrible of circumstances. I believe, however, that grandchildren or distant relations of people who had works of art or property taken away by the Nazis do not now have an inalienable right to ownership, at the beginning of the 21st century. If valuable objects have ended up in the public sphere, even on account of the terrible facts of history, then that is the way it is.'

Neumann:

'The German government stands by its historical and moral responsibility. It would be unacceptable if, despite improved knowledge, we were to perpetuate the injustices already suffered by deciding against restitution.'

While there's a different history involved, the restitution and return of inappropriately acquired cultural property, both from national holdings and from international organisations, continues to be a critical issue both for New Zealand museums and for iwi. It's something that our museums quite understandably stay very quiet about.

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...