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.'

Talking about art in a hotel lavatory

Peter McIntyre, Study of a Dancer, undated, oil on canvas, collection of Auckland Art Gallery, purchased 1950.

"The New Zealander suspects anyone who is sure with words, he thinks it is either glibness or showing off. (Could we take kindly to a Christopher Fry?) Once in a hotel lavatory an art student and I were talking of Peter McIntyre's drawings when a little man piped up that he was a returned man from the first war and he knew that we knew what we were talking about but there was no need to let the whole lavatory know it. We explained that the place had been empty when we entered, we hadn't seen him come in, as we left with his blessing. I can't speak for others: I know I hate talking anything but gossip in a bus or train or in the pictures: otherwise you sense the rest of the bus listening united in one unspoken sneer at half-cock. The New Zealander fears ideas that don't result in increased crop-yield or money or home comforts. The wise man never mentions his learning, after the same pattern as the popular ideal of the returned soldier who never mentions his battles."

Bill Pearson, from Fretful Sleepers, 1954

I am pretty sure that all this is still true. Quite astute, Bill Pearson.

Being serious for a moment

Bertrand Russell, a well-known serious person.

Erwin Panofsky: more the earnest type.

"All serious people seem to have a good sense of nonsense, as opposed to earnest people, who don't know what to make of nonsense. Today, there are too many earnest people in the arts and not enough serious people."

--George Rose, via 98Bowery

Very rarely have I read anything that I agree with more. In fact, having taken a few moments to review my acquaintance of the New Zealand visual artworld, I can confidently state that there is no one who does not fall neatly into one or other of these categories. (I'm wondering if I should run a little 'match up' poll, but then again it might be considered bad form. By the earnest people, at least.)

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.)

Rising from the ashes

A small spate of arsons in Christchurch schools over the weekend was reported in this morning's Press. A photograph [see left] showed the principal of Manning Intermediate, the most badly damaged school, squatting awkwardly in front of a sculptural relief which had been severely charred. For once, the artist of the background artwork was identified in the caption: the work was by Ria Bancroft.

I met Ria Bancroft in the early 1990s, a year or so before her death, when I went to interview her at her home in New Brighton. She was born in the same year as Rita Angus, and had moved to New Zealand in the early 1960s. She was a slight, demure, softly-spoken elderly lady with a British accent; she wore a small crucifix and plain, neat clothes; she was a little like a very kindly nun. I didn't know a great deal about her, and was astounded by both the scale and the ambition of some of her sculptural work. Over a cup of tea she showed me a scrapbook, as I remember, with small pictures of some of her earlier works sellotaped in. She spoke about the difference between modelling and carving, and some of the problems of working in metal. I went away feeling that I should have known her: that the identity of the person, as well as her work, should be better known in the cultural life of the city.

A few days after meeting Ria, I went to the Catholic Basilica near the end of Barbadoes Street and looked at her designs for the Tabernacle Doors: vaguely Symbolist, slightly Rodin-esque, with a kind of swirling Art Nouveau energy translated into a no-nonsense modernist idiom. They were quiet, and small, and modest, and had a grace to them which seemed entirely appropriate for the subject and the setting. I liked them a lot.

I was familar with Ria Bancroft's abstract sculptural relief, Energetic Forms (1965-6), from the concourse outside the Science lecture theatres at the University of Canterbury. It's one of those works that you always notice (it's enormous, about 6 or 7 metres long), wonder briefly who made it, and walk past. You do the same thing next time you see it, and the next, until it becomes part of the scenery, but somehow I never stopped noticing it. I didn't realise it was by Ria Bancroft, until she told me. It had been commissioned by the Ministry of Works for the building, and was, I think, the largest work she made.

Ria Bancroft, with Pat Mulcahy, Energetic Forms, 1965-6, Carved wood, plastic resin and applied colour, University of Canterbury

In the mid-1980s, when I was first at varsity, Energetic Forms looked incredibly old-fashioned: dated modernist wall jewellery for the equally dated concrete neo-brutalist building it adorned. I saw it again recently, and realise that twenty or so years later I have achieved a newfound respect for both aesthetics. It involves admiration, perhaps, for their mutual conviction that a humanist ideology might be effectively communicated through stripped-back form. (As a student of the ironic-critical-relativist late 80s I can't really bring myself to believe in this kind of modernist essentialism, but I do respect the sensibility.)

Seeing Ria's work -- albeit damaged -- in the newspaper this morning has brought a few things to mind. Firstly, I hope the school seeks professional conservation advice about restoring the work: the public art gallery would be a good place to start. And should it be possible to restore, I trust that some appropriate public fund be made available for the restoration: it's not something that should come out of the school's own coffers.

It also struck me that it would be useful -- for purposes of both scholarship and preservation -- if the newly-updated public art register were expanded to include works such as these scattered across the whole city which are effectively in public ownership, but which aren't owned or administered by the City Council. Putting all these works on the public record is an important way to make them accessible as well as to keep them in mind: the public sculptures currently being taken out of Aotea Square and quietly put away shows how quickly works no longer in fashion can be lost from public view.

And finally, the photograph has reminded me again that Ria Bancroft's work deserves to be better known. Sure, the art gallery put together an exhibition of her work [PDF] in the late 1990s [interesting fact from the catalogue: as a child, Bancroft was friendly with the inventor of plasticine, William Harbutt, who encouraged her to model animals which he displayed in his shop], and her daughter the writer Peb Simmons produced a biography of her mother, but I wish, somehow, that a sense of Bancroft's graceful modernist aesthetic, as well as knowledge of her work and life, were broader. At the very least, as a public sculptor working in the 1960s and 1970s, Ria Bancroft should hold the equivalent art-historical position in the formation of Christchurch's visual identity as Guy Ngan does in Wellington. Not sure how I can help make that happen, except by continuing to talk about her.

Driven

A couple more images from yesterday, taken at dawn as I watched Michael Parekowhai's Yes We Are go up for the second time in Wellington. The work was driven down from Auckland the previous day on the truck that became its mobile plinth as it moved around the city. In the photograph of the sign on its back pointing up to the sky, there's just the possibility of a kind of Garry Winogrand-ish moment that makes me wish I'd had a better camera with me.

Open all hours

Yesterday I was in Wellington, following Michael Parekowhai's truck around town from dawn to dusk. His work Yes We Are was suspended from a crane on the flat bed of the truck, and was driven to strategic spots around the city, where it parked for an hour or so before moving on again. It took about 20 minutes at each site to hoist the work and secure it at the base, and about the same to unfasten and lower it again and strap it to the deck when it was time to go. Yes We Are was the closing work in New Zealand's One Day Sculpture series.

Here's some photographs I took over the course of a very long day.

5am. Taken from the motorway layby overlooking the Inter Island Ferry's marshalling yard.

Dawn in Buckle Street.

Mid-morning, Manners Mall.

Lunchtime in Cuba Street, near the Peter McLeavey Gallery.

Mid-afternoon, ouside Parliament on Molesworth Street. Budget being read indoors.

(Here I should have a photo of Yes We Are in its position at late afternoon on Oriental Parade near the Freyberg Pool, but I forgot to photograph it as I was having a cup of coffee at a friend's at the time, and saw it from an upstairs window. It looked great, though.)

Early evening, Point Jerningham, Shelly Bay, in a howling gale.

Last post: from the lookout at the top of Mt. Victoria, 9pm. (Clearly visible as far away as Vogeltown.)

A chapter of accidents

As I write, the entire family -- absent me -- have been stricken with gastric flu and the house resembles the sun lounge of the Inter Island ferry after a particularly rough crossing. But right now all's quiet; time to sit down in front of Coro Street and blog about some things that have caught my eye over the past few days.

1. Accident Book
Accident-prone British artist Simon Faithfull has produced a book cataloguing the various mishaps which have seen him admitted to 8 Accident and Emergency departments. He's printing 500 copies, which will be tucked among the ratty old magazines at various A&E departments in London and Cambridge, waiting to be discovered 'by accident by people who've had accidents'. Those who fancy it can take Faithfull's book home, and if they're so inclined, they can then use a special code provided to log on to a website, record the location and date of the discovery of the book and detail their reason for their visit to A&E.

I like the sound of this work, very much: I've spent a lot of time waiting at A&Es myself over the years for one reason and another, and the work plays into the essential curiosity you always have about the exact nature of the events that have brought other people to the hospital. I'll keep watching to see what responses Faithfull gets. (I'd imagine the temptation to make some up, though, would be tremendous.)


Simon Faithfull, proposal for a work, 'Teach My Dog to Type (using a specially extended typewriter)'.

Reading about this project reminded me about a very accident-prone museum technician I once worked with. In particular I recall a terrible incident where we were installing a huge steel work. (I say 'we': of course, I was standing well back pretending to direct the traffic while everyone else did the heavy lifting.) The work was finally grunted into place and everyone relaxed. Suddenly there was an loud DDONNNGGGG sound, like a massive gong ringing. One of the steel motifs had become detached from the work and fallen squarely onto the accident-prone technician's head. There was no reason why it should have been him, out of the half dozen people in the room, but somehow it was not unexpected. He was utterly poleaxed. After being assured that he was OK, everyone collapsed in shameful laughter: it had looked like something out of a Looney Tunes cartoon, like the one-ton weight felling the coyote. When he came to, he said brightly, 'Not to worry! I've been concussed 16 times. This will make it 17.'

(Not much chance that I'll be in one of the A&E departments in which Simon Faithfull's accident register will be secreted: but I guess this comprises my response anyway.)


2. My body is my tool
I'm not a fan of street-level performance art. (And actually when I think about it, of much performance art at all, wherever it takes place.) The current push to preserve Marcel Marceau's legacy is not something I would happily contribute to. In fact, the list of public 'creative acts' I would personally be delighted to see a city ordinance against includes:

* stiltwalkers
* fire poi twirlers
* fire eaters
* human statues
* jugglers
* unicyclists
* mime exponents
* anyone wearing a Dutch girl wig with yellow wool plaits, etc.

(Any combination of the above only exponentially increases the offence.)

Possibly unwisely, I mentioned some of these shameful prejudices on Twitter the other night. I had several people tweet back in complete agreement (clowns, Christmas music, 'random acts of biblical reading on street corners and anyone playing a small electric piano', as well as face painting, were also suggested as prime offenders. It was also helpfully pointed out to me that as a resident of Christchurch, home of the circus arts school, I could witness public acts of creative heinousness committed daily all over town). But the next morning I was taken aback to read quite a plaintive tweet from someone I didn't know asking why on earth I would wish to ban fire performances and circus arts from public places? This was not something I could readily answer in 140 characters or under.

Which in turn reminded me of something an ex-visual arts manager at NZ's Arts Council (now Creative New Zealand) once admitted to me; he had been badgered by the craft sector* for months, and in the end said with great dignity 'Knitting may well be an art form. But it is not an artform we choose to fund.'

Can't get away with that stuff so much anymore.


3. And finally...
Elder statesman, contrarian and cultural curmudgeon Hamish Keith is now on Twitter. He also has a new blog about the formation of Auckland as a supercity. Which is all very well, and quite interesting, but I've wished for sometime that he would start blogging about art and culture as I haven't been able to bring myself to buy the Listener (the once-great NZ TV & culture weekly in which his column appears) for months now. Bound to be worth following what he's got to say via Twitter.

*It could be argued that the craft community back then wasn't nearly as interesting back then as it is now, with people like @Styler on the job.

Things to do with an art history degree, #56

Kim Hill: "Did you know anything about art when you took the job on?"

Paul Brewer: "I have a Masters in Art History. I studied it at university, before I got into communications."

KH: "Oh well, never mind. You got over that, didn't you."

PB: "Yeah, I got over it."


Paul Brewer, previously Marketing and Communications Director at Te Papa, interviewed by Kim Hill on Radio New Zealand recently.

Working in the gap between art and life

Apart from the truly stupendous news that Martin Scorsese is to direct a biopic of Frank Sinatra's life (all it would need is art direction by Richard Prince and script consultancy by Nick Tosches & Dave Hickey for my cup to entirely runneth over), there hasn't been much of great inspiration shooting down the digital pipe and popping up in my feedreader lately.

At such moments, however, there is always the small guy. Always a fan of collages, more recently he's been experimenting with combines, a la Rauschenberg.

Here's one I rather liked from the weekend.

Department of creative self expression: This way

I trust I'm not alone in finding the juxtaposition of destinations on this sign at Canterbury Museum unfortunate.

Just asking for trouble, really.



*While the puerile double entendre made me smile, that's more than can be said for the clunky new signage design. Hopefully it's only a temporary measure during their refurbishment.

How to get away from girls

The big guy and I are fans of both artists' books and handprinted books. We don't have many of the former, though we'd like to; but we do have a few of the latter which are among our prize possessions. Almost all of the handmade books on our shelves have been printed by Brendan O'Brien on an old-fashioned letterpress, in various suburban garages in Wellington and at the Rita Angus Cottage, during the term of his residency there. I love the gentle but distinct embossing of letterpress typography; the slight unevenness of the kerning, inevitable even in the hands of a printer as expert as Brendan; the sheer sense of significance of the printed word, composed painstakingly letter by letter.

The small guy, who started school at the end of last year, has been making handmade books of his own lately, again composed painstakingly letter by wobbly letter. Here's his latest, written in the form of a self-help manual for his readers. It relates to difficulties he's been having with a girl at school, who chases him at morning tea and covers him with kisses when she catches him. (I've changed the names on the cover.) It has a fairly tough and uncompromising message.

Last night, after commenting favourably on the unusual right-handed and round-the-corner binding (which has made photography quite tricky), a friend staying with us, who happens to be a prominent Wellington-based graphic designer, described How to Get Away From Girls as 'one of the great New Zealand books'.

Colour notes

Rita Angus, Colour notes, 1950s, watercolour, 324 x 290mm, Museum of New Zealand Te Papa Tongarewa, on loan from the Rita Angus Estate.

I had coffee this morning with an old and very dear friend, in town to install an exhibition of his new sculptural work. We met at my suggestion at the art gallery cafe (he pulled me up on saying this: which gallery? he asked. There's only one with its own cafe, I answered) as the dealer space he shows at has a flight of stairs like Mt Everest which are completely impassable by baby buggy (and down which over the years I have seen many artworld luminaries take a nasty tumble after sampling a little too much of the hospitality up above). I won't be going to the opening tomorrow: at 5.30pm, exactly coinciding with dinner- and bath-time for tired small children, art openings are scheduled as if on purpose at the worst conceivable moment of the day for families. The Wellington-based trend towards Saturday morning dealer gallery openings (OK then, just the uniformly excellent Hamish McKay) is something to be warmly encouraged.

I got to the gallery a little early so I could spend some time looking at the Rita Angus show, which has toured to Christchurch from Te Papa. It's had an avalanche of well-deserved positive reviews, primarily for the excellent curation by William McAloon and Jill Trevelyan who have thoroughly researched the history, delineated clear chapters in the work in order to make its progression intelligible for the viewer, and included a few surprises as well as greatest hits. It's textbook curatorial practice, which should form a model for such things for New Zealand museum studies and curatorial courses.

Te Papa billed the show as a 'gift to the nation', as they decided not to charge an exhibition fee to the municipal venues who are hosting the show on its national tour. The costs of putting the show on the road (crating, loan negotiations, etc) were thus absorbed by Te Papa rather than being paid for by the touring venues, which enabled them in turn to put it on free of charge to the public. Of course, that's a good thing; but at the same time one might argue that:

a. the cultural heritage of New Zealanders, exhibited in public institutions, should as a matter of course be free of charge to the New Zealand public; and

b. Unlike the Auckland Art Gallery, whose NewGallery attracts an entrance charge, most of the other municipal public art galleries (Christchurch Art Gallery, Dunedin Public Art Gallery, City Gallery Wellington) habitually never charge for nationally-generated exhibitions of New Zealand art; and

c. Putting a major survey exhibition of one of the country's most significant 20th century artists on the road should be business as usual for New Zealand's national art gallery, rather than an extraordinary event worthy of 'gift' status.

But far be it from me to be churlish, etc. (I decided against titling this post 'A Gifthorse to the Nation', as (a) the show has excellent bite; and anyway (b) I have foresworn mean-spiritedness as a blogging platform.) Rita Angus is a great show, and a big one; I'm delighted to see it in Christchurch; it's of such substance that it would take an hour or more to get round, if one had the luxury of doing it properly and didn't have a fifteen-month-old in tow with an attention span even shorter than mine. Because I know many of the works so well, on this occasion I was able to spend more time with the strangers-to-me, like this:

Rita Angus, The artist’s studio, c. 1962, watercolour, 390 x 284 mm, Museum of New Zealand Te Papa Tongarewa, on loan from the Rita Angus Estate

and this:
Rita Angus, Timmy, 1952, watercolour, 449 x 350mm, Private collection

as well as my all-time favourite painting by Angus, AD 1968 (I have personal reasons for this -- an excellent year, 1968 -- as well as thinking it one of New Zealand's finest modernist works).

Rita Angus, AD 1968, 1968, oil on hardboard, 587 x 595 mm Auckland Art Gallery Toi o Tamaki, gift of the Friends of the Auckland Art Gallery, 2004

The inclusion of Angus's sketchbook material was a fantastic surprise, as was the inclusion of the preliminary study Colour Notes above from the 1950s, framed as a work and hung with other nature studies. The little washes of watercolour looked like Gretchen Albrecht's largescale abstractions on canvas from the early 1970s, and gave me an insight not only into Angus's technical prowess but also a quick vision of her as an abstractionist, in another time or place.

I've written before about the way in which access to the artist's preparatory material greatly informs a view of their work. There was something intimate, and private, and I suspect entirely memorable about being able to see the way in which Angus logged and developed her ideas, sketchy images surrounded by hasty pencilled notes, some of which later became paintings. I'll go back and spend more time with Colour Notes and the sketchbooks another day, if I can.

I was intrigued by a label on the case of ephemera which said something like 'Please respect the artworks'. While I think it was meant as a nice way of saying don't touch, it was kind of odd, as the sketchbooks were entombed in a perspex case, and you couldn't touch them even if you wanted to. (I did want to, of course; there's something so terribly frustrating about being only able to view a single page of a book.) The odd notice immediately made me think of Angus's much-storied sensitivity to criticism of her work. I trust visitors to the show have been duly respectful, and have only made positive comments in front of the work.

Although it really is a terrific show, I thought, not for the first time, that Angus's work is as good in reproduction as it is in real life. It's not something you can say of all artists: my experience of Angus's contemporary Gordon Walters, for example, whose strongly graphic works look great in reproduction, is that a real-life encounter can be breathtaking and quite different from looking at the work in a book. I don't mean this as a criticism of Angus's practice; maybe it's just that so many of the works are quite small, and quiet, and intimate in tone; and the book format, where you can sit down comfortably and look at the images in good light over time does as well for them as viewing in the gloomy spaces of the gallery, when you're on your feet and best behaviour.

(Just on this, I really wish Christchurch Art Gallery would turn the jolly lights up a bit. I know, I know, conservation values and all that: but I would just like it to be a little brighter in there so I could see the art better. I'm hoping that Nicholas Serota's conservation taskforce might change the rules of the game for the better for us all.)

Access to art's an important thing; whether or not like me one's in charge of a small anti-art protester and can only poke one's head briefly into an exhibition, barriers to full engagement with our visual culture are presented not only by dull lighting and steep stairs, but perhaps also more seriously by the absence of an actual National Art Gallery in New Zealand -- though the curators of Rita Angus: Life and Work sensibly haven't let that hold them back. I've said it before, but I will again: more like this, please.

Public sculpture desserted

An advertisement for the Millennium Hotel which appears in the Christchurch Arts Festival programme, launched last night. (I've been wondering whether Neil Dawson doesn't deserve a special royalty payment from the business community for the sheer number of times his various public works around the country have 'inspired' art directors at ad agencies.)


Never let it be said that Christchurch doesn't take its public art seriously.

The face of Jesus in my soup

This image appeared on the inside of the glass door of our logburner this evening, written in smoke.



Not wanting to make too big a deal about it or anything, but it did remind me quite a lot of this:

Jason Greig, Homer 2006, monoprint. Darren Knight Gallery, Sydney.

I think I may have been back in Christchurch too long.

The history of modernism's reception in New Zealand

Lurking on Twitter, I came across this great image the other day to fuel my found note obsession, directed to Twitpic by @MOCAlosangeles. It's a third-grader's response to viewing Dan Graham's "Public Space/Two Audiences" at LAMoca. (Click to enlarge.)



It reminded me a lot of this, a photocopy I've kept from a public art gallery I worked in -- a seven year old's description of New Zealand artist Julian Dashper's project.


You can tell the student was listening very hard.

Cover art

Paul Anka, The Painter (1975). Cover art by Andy Warhol. Image from Music Artwork.

Most of the time I really like living in New Zealand. Though sometimes I worry that New Zealand's relationship to the world is a larger mirror-image of Te Awamutu's to New Zealand (a trading post for farmers occupied by salt-of-the-earth inhabitants in walk shorts; a few famous people were born there and left as soon as they could), actually I'm happy to stay put in this bolthole at the end of the world. While it can be a little dull, on the other hand the living is fairly easy and the place has much to recommend it. Although I am more an indoors sort of a person (as I heard myself describing myself the other day to a new friend I was having coffee with, who asked me hopefully if the big guy and I went tramping much [#lightlarf]), if you like that sort of thing there is plenty of extraordinarily beautiful scenery to look at here. The food's good. The water, in Christchurch at least, is great. The healthcare's OK. The climate's all right. The government's stable. The only problem, really, is the culture.

It's not the local culture that's problematic; every time I've returned after travelling internationally I've remembered, all over again, just how lucky I've been (and still am, now and again) to work with contemporary New Zealand artists. It probably goes without saying that the top echelon of New Zealand artists is working at the equivalent level of their peers anywhere in the world. Contemporary New Zealand art isn't a crap option globally, it's no one's second-best; nor, to use Tony Fomison's immortal phrase, does it require a haka-and-handstands act in support when it goes overseas [are you listening NZ at Venice organisers?]; artists of New Zealand descent hold their own anywhere, by merit of their own work.

But what is problematic, living in New Zealand, is access to international culture. While the changing economy of contemporary music has revalidated international tours for major recording artists, the huge costs in bringing international visual art to New Zealand means that we only really get to see international work which falls into one of the following categories:

• has low overheads (tends to be video or digital work; you can send the disk through the mail and get sponsorship for the digital gear involved to show it);


• involves relational aesthetics (a series of gestures or transactions carried out by other people at the artist's behest, which might not even require the artist to be present);


• is made on the spot by the artist as part of a short-term residency;


• is either (a) already so famous or (b) can be cranked up into such a media-friendly spectacle that bus-loads of general punters will troop along to see it and pay decent money to do so, thus mitigating the huge costs of insurance, freight, and the usually exorbitant loan fee charged by the initiating museum to show it.

As a result what we don't see in New Zealand are the small or offbeat shows of work by notable international contemporary artists who aren't household names (in NZ at least) -- Cy Twombly, say, or Brice Marden, or Julian Schnabel, or Richard Prince, or Larry Clark, or Louise Bourgeois. The kinds of shows that are important culturally, but in a market sense are neither income-generating blockbusters nor cheap enough to be able to be absorbed by general public art gallery budgets. Although there are a couple of Auckland-based gallerists with international stables (notably Gow Langsford, Andrew Jensen, and Jenny Todd at Two Rooms) who do a good job of showing significant works, it's really access to the modern or contemporary art history I'm after, in curated exhibitions that look at a particular facet of an artist's practice or which in themselves might illuminate the better-known work.

'Warhol Live', now on show at the deYoung Museum in San Francisco is exactly the sort of exhibition project I'm talking about, which I would love to see but which is equally the epitome of the kind of show that never comes to New Zealand: a fastidiously-curated exhibition looking at the role of music in Andy Warhol's work, including the fifty album covers the curators tracked down (Canadian teen-idol Paul Anka's The Painter, pictured above, is one of the better-known.)

Warhol's career as a commercial artist began with album covers, notes Fred Kaplan in the New York Times.

When Warhol came to New York in 1949, fresh out of art school, the long-playing record had just recently hit the marketplace. Warhol called the big labels, offering to illustrate their covers. He won an assignment right away, from Columbia Records, for an LP called “A Program of Mexican Music.” His drawings, of ancient drummers and dancers, were crude, but already they anticipated signature aspects of his later works.

He copied the figures from 16th-century Aztec sketches that he found in a Museum of Modern Art catalog, a forerunner of his tendency to make art from existing images, like the Marilyn Monroe photos and Campbell’s Soup cans. And he used a technique known as “blotted-line” drawing, a basic form of printmaking that foretold his fascination with silk-screens.

These early covers “have pizazz and elegance and a sneaky linearity, like Cocteau with a movement disorder,” said Wayne Koestenbaum, the author of a Warhol biography. “The blotted line gives a jumpy and nervous and emotionally unstable rhythm to the otherwise coherent line, like a dry drunk."

Gee, I'd like to see that. Well, I'm not travelling anywhere in the next little while: guess I'll just have to buy the book.


(Just as a quick sidebar: in thinking about this post I came across Music Artwork, a terrific blog devoted to the connections between art and album covers. New Order's homage to Fortunato Depero's Futurismo; Sonic Youth warming their hands on the flame of Gerhard Richter; The Stone Roses' 'improvement' on Jackson Pollock's No.8. Well worth a visit.)

Dragnet

'Sometimes there's a good feed of whitebait coming through, sometimes nothing comes through for a couple of months -- it doesn't prevent you from going down with your whitebait net and trying to catch a few whitebait.'

Venerable Wellington art dealer Peter McLeavey -- who's seen a few seasons come and go from his Cuba Street stand -- on the vagaries of the art market. Quoted in The Press, 25-6 April 2009.

Behind the ropes at the Museum

Seth White, Canterbury Museum, 2002

I had a slightly odd experience at Canterbury Museum the day before yesterday. We'd done our usual things, in the usual order:

1. Enter moa-hunter glowworm cave and pop out of the crawl hole;

2. Stop to admire the full-sized fibreglass model horse in the historic Christchurch colonial street;

3. Give Amundsen's enormous and very shiny bronze nose in the Antarctic gallery a quick rub (am hoping the same selective high polish will occur to the notable noses in the Arts Centre's new bronze sculpture park);

4. Admire the stuffed husky dog on its hind legs licking the explorer's Parka; bash forehead on glass looking at the seal mother and pup and the Emperor penguins; consider loudly whether or not (a.) the icy scenes in the dioramas contain real snow; (b.) the stuffed animals were shot by hunters or died of natural causes; (c.) the husky actually died with his tongue poking out; (d.) how you would stuff a tongue;

5. Press the sound buttons outside the early 1970s listening booth and offer a personal interpretation of whale song to other visitors;

6. Shout "Look! A skeleton! A dead person!" as we pass the Egyptian Mummy's tomb;

7. Admire Michael Parekowhai's suite of kowhaiwhai lightboxes through the glass walls of the museum library [actually that's just me, but I insist on it];

8. Disappear under the safety rail surrounding the conversation pit under the spinning globe of the world, and pop up the other side giggling like a lunatic;

9. Gaze in rapt and silent adoration at the dinosaur skeletons for 30 seconds;

10. Enter the Discovery Centre at a furious clip and dive on to the cushioned divans.

After a thoroughly satisfying hour in the Discovery Centre (live tarantulas, pickled snake skeletons, stuffed tropical birds behind black velvet curtains), we left via the bird gallery past the giant Chinese lions, wending our way through the labyrinthine third floor galleries to take the lift back down to the historic street and the foyer. Outside the Victorian room, our path was suddenly blocked by a fat navy blue velvet stanchion which had appeared out of nowhere.

No respecter of barriers in public places, I attempted to steer the buggy around the knot of people bunched uncomfortably behind the stanchion six feet short of the foyer. Immediately a very tense-looking young guy in a black museum T shirt popped up, palm raised in the international 'Stop!' position, and said "Ah, excuse me ma'am, but I can't let you exit the Museum right now."

Ahead a group of well-dressed middle-aged people in suits was filing slowly out of the museum's ridiculously cumbersome exit, which requires the visitor to make two 45 degree turns within the space of a couple of metres. This is in order to accommodate egress of nearly a million people a year through the narrow doorway of architect Benjamin Mountfort's now untouchable Gothic Revival design, just one of the many problematic issues for Canterbury Museum which would have been addressed by architect Ian Athfield's visionary (and to my mind, entirely sympathetic) redevelopment plan, shot dead by the Environment Court a year or so ago. The museum attendant dropped his voice impressively and said, "An important function is going on."

Alarmed, irritated and slightly amused all at once at the notion of being expected to wait for a corporate hirer to leave the museum, I asked what the function (such a great New Zealand term, that; full of self-important bureaucracy and redolent of dusty boredom) was.

"It's the iwi. Rangitane. They've come to collect the bones of their ancestors, and take them home," he said. I realised he was very nervous, and that this was a moment of great significance for the museum. We were waiting for a funeral party to pass. Understanding the solemnity of what was occurring a few feet away, it felt just fine to be behind the velvet ropes.

When we got outside, dozens of people in suits and black clothes were milling about near the brightly planted municipal flowerbeds, snatching a quick chat before boarding two huge coaches. A couple of pairs of big guys carrying large square wooden boxes between them were walking slowly across the pavement. The museum director stood under the Gothic portico, watching the departure. A bare-chested haka party wearing piupius were bracing themselves in the chill autumn air. "Are they warriors?" asked the small guy.

It felt like a historic moment.

The next day I read in the paper that the bones of more than 60 tipuna were being returned for reburial at the Wairau Bar in Marlborough, where they'd been dug up by museum archeologists about seventy years ago. Possibly New Zealand's oldest human remains, the bones had been dated to the 14th century by a research team from Otago University, including archeologists, anthropologists and biologists who worked in a partnership with the museum and Ngai Tahu. Other archeologists have been working with iwi on the preparation of a new site on the boulder bank of the Wairau Bar for reinterrment of the ancestral remains.

Human remains of one sort or another rest quietly in the collection storage areas of many of New Zealand's museums. Some can already be, or are in the process of being, identified, and are being returned to descendants for burial. Others have lost their identity and are likely to stay behind the scenes at the museum. Apart from the bandaged corpses of ancient Egyptians, it seems, it's no longer seen as appropriate to display dead bodies to the public, which can only be a good thing: although I'm aware of some of the historical and moral complexities around the issue, I can never look at this photograph of the colonial soldier-artist H.G. Robley with his collection of moko mokai, or tattooed heads, without shuddering.

Robley offered his collection of 35 moko mokai to the New Zealand Government for £1,000 in 1908; his offer, however, was refused. Later the bulk of Robley's collection [PDF] was purchased by the American Museum of Natural History in New York, for £1,250. Along with the descendants of Robley, the late Dalvanius Prime began negotiations in 1998 with the Museum of Natural History to repatriate these to New Zealand. Many other human remains have since been returned to New Zealand from public museums, private collections and teaching collections overseas.

I'm pleased that the children and I saw the bones of Rangitane leaving Canterbury Museum on their final journey home to the Wairau Bar. It was something of significance, something to remember. The moment revealed the museum not only in its traditional role as a repository of culturally-significant historical objects, but as an active player in the contemporary culture, responding to the shifting imperatives of the contemporary world. After all, it's not about simply keeping the collection, it's what museums do with their collections that determines their value to society. Even if sometimes that means giving the objects back.

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.

The incongruity of peacocks

Carlo Crivelli, The Annunciation, with Saint Emidius (1486), egg tempera and oil on canvas transferred from wood, 2070 x 1467mm, Collection of the National Gallery, London


While over the years in my professional life I have written many hundreds -- quite possibly thousands -- of extended labels for art exhibitions, the number of exhibition labels I have wanted to read in a personal capacity can probably be counted on the fingers of two hands. When I look at a work of art in a gallery, or an object in a museum, I am quite happy to do so without knowledge, or at least only the prior knowledge I might bring to my encounter with the work: if what I see interests me enough, then I might find out what it is, or who made it and when it was produced, but it's most unlikely that I'll seek interpretation and contextual information while standing there actually looking at the thing.

When I'm visiting a gallery or a museum, I'm there less for education and more for experience, for the opportunity to become immersed in another way of seeing the world -- to see something I couldn't have imagined by myself. If I simply can't get what I've seen out of my head and have to know more -- specifically to understand the context of its production -- then I'll buy the catalogue on my way out, and think about it later. I don't think I'm alone in this way of dealing with cultural objects.

(One can, of course, simply ignore extended labels when visiting a public art gallery, but it takes a strong will not to read a sign on the wall: we're all conditioned to do so.)

Here's novelist J.G. Ballard's view of the matter, which I came across recently in his terrific autobiography Miracles of Life: Shanghai to Shepperton, published last year after his diagnosis of prostate cancer in 2006. (He's working on what is quite possibly going to be his last book, whose working title is Conversations with My Physician: The Meaning, if Any, of Life, at the moment.) Since adolescence, Ballard's intellectual touchstones have been Freud and the Surrealists, whose ideas landed like 'a stick of bombs' for him in the middle-class drawing room of his grandparents after his experiences in war-torn Shanghai as a child. (“I felt, and still do, that psychoanalysis and surrealism were a key to the truth about existence and the human personality, and also a key to myself.”)

"I am sure that a large part of the enduring mystery of the Renaissance masterpieces, in the National Gallery was due to the absence of the explanatory matter that now drains away much of the strangeness and poetry of the Old Masters. I would stare at Crivelli's Annunciation, charmed by the peacocks, loaves of bread and other incongruous items, the passer-by reading a book on the bridge and the Virgin in her jewel box of a house. I was forced to use my own imagination to stitch these elements into a master narrative that made some kind of sense, rather than read an extended wall caption and be solemnly told that the peacock was a symbol of eternal life. Perish the thought, and let the exquisite bird be itself, and nothing more or less than itself. What could be more natural, and more mysterious, than a peacock and a loaf of bread appearing on the scene to celebrate the forthcoming birth of the Saviour?"

J.G. Ballard, Miracles of Life: Shanghai to Shepperton, An Autobiography, London: Fourth Estate, 2008, p. 155.

Who turned the lights out?

A typical public art gallery in New Zealand


If you've ever stumbled -- perhaps literally -- into a public art gallery and wondered who turned out the lights, it was probably the conservator. It's the conservator's job to preserve the works of art for the future, and they often effect this by demanding on lighting so dim it's hard to see the exhibition. Gallery and museum conservators apply stringent rules for the display of artworks and cultural objects, including low lighting to avoid fading through UV exposure, and a relatively stable humidity and temperature to ensure that works don't warp, crack, or succumb to fungal spores.

There is an inevitable tension between the museum's twin roles of preserving and exhibiting. (The conservator's narrowed eyes, occasional sharp intake of breath and sometimes -- awfully -- a long slow shake of the head when reading a curator's wishlist for an exhibition is an art gallery comedy staple, much like someone mislaying their trousers in a French farce or fat jokes in a Farrelly Bros flick.) The trouble is that it's much better for the longevity of the objects or artworks to keep them in an airconditioned box than display them to the public. The changes in temperature and humidity around works of art caused by, say, a hot crush of people crowding round at an opening, or a class of kids wearing wet raincoats, is marked, and distinctly detrimental to the physical condition of the work, which is literally being slowly destroyed by every pair of greedy eyes clapped upon it.

Or is it? Anyone who's ever worked in an art gallery has wondered how conservators know this stuff. Is it really true? Will the work really fall apart, or completely disappear, 200 years hence, if the light on it is a bit brighter than usual for six weeks or so? Argue against it, and you're a potential destroyer of the nation's cultural heritage. Go with it, and you're stumbling around in the dark with the public visitors. The trouble is, much like an assessment of the safe amount of alcohol to drink during pregnancy, verifiable experimental conditions are both difficult to record and unpalatable to establish. Much the best to be on the safe side and leave well alone.

But interestingly, the director of the Tate, Nicholas Serota, has wondered long enough and is now taking action, seeing if there is room to operate with 'more subtlety' under the exisiting museum conservation guidelines --which I'm quite amazed to discover from this article were actually established only in 1978, by Garry Thomson, a London-based conservator who had researched the effects of fluctuating humidity on antique panel paintings, and whose recommendations quickly became the global museum industry standard. (A current panel painting specialist at the Met, George Bisacca, wonders if this should still be the case: “If you can keep that relative humidity constant, then you stop that constant process of expansion and contraction. But people who don’t understand the mechanisms involved have taken that [idea] and applied it everywhere on earth.”) Along with the director of the Victoria and Albert Museum, Mark Jones, Serota is convening a group of directors of some of the world’s most prominent museums to address the issue of how specific materials are actually affected by physical changes in the museum environment, and is now working with British conservators to figure out where to begin.

Perhaps they could consider using New Zealand museums as a case study.

A little something for the weekend

Vic Reeves and Bob Mortimer, photo from Flickr by Dullhunk

Ten years ago, I had a date with Reeves and Mortimer most Thursday nights. Billing themselves as the 'alternative to alternative comedy', they were less a circuit-breaker than the latest incarnation of a long tradition of two-man visual and verbal comedy; the direct descendants of Eric and Ernie on the one hand, and Rik Mayall and Adrian Edmondson in their early Young Ones days on the other. R&M's brand of humour was quintessentially British, surreal and slapstick in equal parts. A typical episode would see them bashing one another over the head with giant frying pans while spouting ridiculous Dadaist non sequiturs -- "Like a badger with an afro, throwing sparklers at the pope!" "Like Bono in a boob-tube on the choir master's lap!" -- or stopping to argue in great detail over some pointless matter of terminology, vis:

After recently revealed aliens have stopped police in their tracks:
Bob: "What's going on?"
Vic: "He's just frozen them with his special eyeballs so now we've got to get them into that booth."
Bob: "That's not a booth, that's a kiosk."
Vic: "No it's not, there's no shelving in it."
Bob: "No, a kiosk has a counter. Shelving, you're thinking of a pantry."
Vic: "So what's a kiosk without shelving or a counter?"
Bob: "That's a booth."
Vic: "Exactly."
Alien: "Howay yous two! Them's only frozen for thirty seconds!"

Now of course Reeves and Mortimer are a couple of big sellouts, hosting mainstream panel games on TV and radio and appearing on I'm a Celebrity, Get me out of here. But remembering how good they were back in the day, I'm really quite intrigued by the recent re-rentry into the artworld of the once self-styled Darlington Dadaist, who became a comedian after leaving art school: a couple of years ago Reeves's works were shown at Whitechapel, while Jake and Dinos Chapman describe Reeves's art as “able to command our laughter as a purgative, to encourage the viewer to leak at both ends”. I think the works are OK, actually, although maybe a bit less Dadaist than you'd expect. But maybe it's just that I'm imagining them as the backdrop to a serious bit of tomfoolery. You can decide for yourself with eleven of his paintings reproduced here, including Luftwaffe Love School.

Stately piles

One of my favourite British TV characters of recent years is the Hon Francis Fulford of Great Fulford, Devon, the foul-mouthed patriarch of one of the oldest aristocratic families in Britain, and possibly the first member of the British upper classes to go for a warts-and-all reality TV documentary on his family in order to raise some much-needed cash: if you missed The F*cking Fulfords when it screened on TV a couple of years ago, and are a fan of stately homes, swearing, bigoted rants and British history, you may enjoy a quick perusal of the few clips available on YouTube. Stalking his estate with a metal detector hoping to find coins dropped by an ancestor in order to pay off his overdraft, cursing Germans as if the war were still raging, Fulford's like an unfeasibly posh version of Alf Garnet. (“Crisis point? I wouldn’t call this a crisis point. One of my ancestors was hung, drawn and quartered in 1463. That’s what I call a fucking crisis point.”) Here's a typical blast of Fulfordian invective, in which he reminisces about his schooldays at the minor public school Milton Abbey in an interview with Hugo Rikind:

“Fantastic place,” he rumbles. “Still going. Has a ferret block bigger than the science block. Think it’s the only school where you can still take your dog.” He had one German friend there, whose nickname was 'Nazi'. These days, he feels, people are too sensitive about nicknames. “Judges are ridiculous. Tell somebody they’ve got nice tits, and they’ll make you give them a million pounds. Ridiculous.”

(Possibly an acquired taste, I'll grant you.)



Devon's answer to The Osbournes was popular enough for the unreconstructed Francis Fulford (also known as F*cker Fulford) to be allowed to make two more TV shows, both documentaries written and presented by himself: Why England's F*cked and Why America Sucks. According to Fulford, England's problem stem from the 'fact' it's lost its cultural identity as a nation because the rest of the world were jealous and copied it. With over a thousand years of Fulfords residing at Fulford Manor behind him, his brief to chronicle the iniquities of the present day is wide-ranging: at one point Fulford visits a decrepit inner-city concrete tower block estate and strikes up a conversation with the kids hanging about in a grafittied concrete wasteland ('Ah, yes, the upper classes and the working class have always got on famously. Say what we like. Don't give a fuck what anyone else thinks.') in order to expound his theory that modernist architecture is essentially inhuman. He's joined by an intense young architectural historian in horn-rimmed specs, who is anxious to point out the aesthetic history of the buildings, while the kids on the estate agree forcefully with Fulford that it's a truly horrible place to live. It was thought-provoking television.

Francis F*cker Fulford's visit to the council housing estate came to mind in relation to a couple of recent architectural stories: firstly, the gradual rehabilitation of brutalist architecture in Britain which has been signalled by the popularity of a Le Corbusier exhibition at the Barbican, a modular brutalist complex inspired by the architect which only a matter of a few years ago was voted Britain's ugliest building. For decades, Le Corbusier's name has been synonymous with the failed modernist concrete housing complexes which have fallen into disrepair and in some cases, been torn down, in inner cities across Britain; now, it seems, there is a revival of interest in the aesthetic and its possibilities for regeneration.

I can't imagine the rehabiliation of concrete brutalism is something that Prince Charles, on the other hand, would much go for: he is an outspoken critic on the evils of modern architecture, that 'monstrous carbuncle' on the face of cities which he regards as both cavalier and inhuman.

"We must come to regard the characteristics of traditional architecture as not merely unfashionable political statements, to be thrown out with yesterday's rubbish along with the baby and the bathwater, but rather as organically adapting creation over the passage of time, helping us to generate and regenerate places that relate to our essential humanity. I know you all know what I mean in your heart of hearts - its just that so many of us are terrified of being thought of as old-fashioned, out of touch and 'not modern'. Don't worry. I've already volunteered for this particular task," he said in 2005.

Exasperated by the failure of contemporary architects to work to his anachronistic brief, the Prince recently rolled up his sleeves and got on with the job himself, designing a firestation at the Dorset village of Poundbury. The result hasn't met with universal acclaim: the architecture critic of the Guardian has described it as 'Brookside meets the Parthenon -- a dumpy neoclassical Georgian palace with three garage doors attached to it.' Others have called it a 'scale model of Buck Palace'.

Prince Charles's firestation, photograph by Phil Yeomans/BNPS, via The Guardian

While most of the model village of Poundbury (which is due to be completed in 2025 and will house about 5000 people) is designed like the firestation in the 'humanistic' Georgian style, it seems the aesthetic's not immune from the social problems which plague the inner cities' brutalist concrete jungles. Here's what I presume is Poundbury's bus stop in the neo-classical mode, pictured recently in the Mail.

Wonder what Francis Fulford would make of that.