Art threat

"The greatest threat to art is posed by Occupational Health and Safety regulations."

-- Adam Jasper, reviewing the 4th Auckland Triennial in Frieze.

Better than collecting dust

Lately our house has been gripped by collection-mania. The small guy has been furiously eating his way through groaning bowls of cereal, even to the point of regularly asking for Ricies and ice-cream, a dish of his own invention, for dessert. The object of his desire is Weetbix rugby cards, for which he has conceived a rare and burning passion. His conversational starters these days include such gems as "Would you like me to take you through all my cards in the order in which I got them?" and "Mum, I know you said I wasn't to talk about them again today, but I've been thinking, if I swapped Sitiveni Sivivatu..." and the plaintive "I really wish I hadn't swapped Richie McCaw with Edward... Do you think I could get him back?"*

When the big guy was sick the other week it fell to me to take the small one to soccer, which is the nearest I've got to a sportsfield since a regrettable foot-tripping incident on the netball court at high school. I am not generally considered a sporting type, nor I am one of nature's sports'-lovers, though I am married to one. The big guy has an uncanny ability to discover a test match just about to kick off, while seemingly innocently channel hopping: "Oh, look," he says, "Might just watch a few minutes." I open a book, although it's hard to concentrate over the yelling and drumming of feet. (I will admit to a slight relaxing of my usual anti-sports 'tude when Frank Bunce appeared on Dancing with the Stars.)

Buncey: The Samoan Robert de Niro


While the small guy had a terrific time running round after the ball in a mad puffing scrum of muddy little boys, and the other parents roared up and down the sideline barking instructions to their oblivious offspring ("Tackle him! TACKLE HIM! Oh, what's that! They're playing A STRATEGIC GAME! Get off, you showpony! etc), I stood under my brolly listening to art podcasts, giving the small guy an encouraging shout now and then when he hove into view and feeling, not for the first time, like a bit of a tosser. While the big guy is able to balance his enthusiasms for art and sport most effectively, I suspect I may have been born without the requisite gene. The artworld is a comfortable enough habitat, but on the sideline of the soccer field on a wet Saturday lunchtime I am a fish out of water.

The small guy's mania for rugby cards, however, is something I'm quite familar with. It's a look that I've seen in the eye of many art collectors over the years. The collecting bug is one that all public galleries depend on; the expansion of the New Zealand art market in recent years means that galleries are increasingly dependent on loans from private collectors to supplement monographic exhibitions. Many 'museum quality' works, as they used to be called, are now in private hands, and it's the job of public galleries to persuade the collectors to part with their works, temporarily, for public exhibitions.

Art collectors are usually interesting people to speak with, as -- like the small guy, who needs no encouragement whatsoever -- they'll often communicate wild and intemperate enthusiasm for the works they've acquired. They might have started with an anonymous painting bought from the school art auction, and end by waiting in the rain outside a top dealer gallery for an advance preview of an exhibition opening that night: the kind of exhibition which opens with the red dots already appended to the works. Arranging, distributing, and refreshing their collection, as well as acquiring new works, can take up a considerable portion of a serious art collector's time and energy.


The small guy, who is no fool, realised early in the piece that a competitive advantage was inherent in the fact that his little friends were keenest on Crusaders cards. He understood that if he were to collect another team, one less valued by his rabidly red-and-black mates, any Crusader cards he got would be more valuable as swaps. This proved correct: on several occasions, before rugby card trading was banned at school, he was able to negotiate two-for-one deals. He started to put together a collection based around the Highlanders ("Because they're a bit useless, and no one wants them") and the Chiefs, for ancestral reasons. Sentimentality got in the way, a bit: for ages he wouldn't part with George Whitelock ("He's hopeless, hasn't got any points, and I feel sorry for him.") Although not intrinsically different, or even rarer, some cards had a higher value purely because they were more sought after by those in the know. It was just like the art market.

The small guy got serious. He press-ganged his extended family into changing their breakfast-eating habits; found a couple of lost cards on the pavement; ate dozens and dozens of Weetbix; spent hours rearranging the cards and thinking of different taxonomies (positions, teams, cereal types, favourite-to-least-favourite, and so on); and was continually encouraged by his long-suffering mother to please introduce another topic of conversation. The collection steadily grew.

Poor old George Whitelock: we feel a bit sorry for him.

And then one day Charles came round for a playdate, with a bulging bag of swaps. Charles is a big maths brain; while the small guy, more language-orientated, is confident pronouncing tricky names like Mils Muliaina, Charles refers to all his cards by their number. Listening to their conversation was like watching a debate at the UN through the medium of simultaneous translation. A brisk session of horse trading ensued after afternoon tea. "Do you need Corey Flynn, Charles? Because I might be prepared to trade him for someone good." "Flynn, Flynn. Number 21. Yes. OK. What are you thinking?"

But something was amiss. It slowly dawned on the small guy that the enormous pile in front of Charles only represented his trading cards: his real collection was at home. It was essentially very dispriting. The cards are due to stop being issued in early June; it would be impossible for the small guy ever to catch up. (In vain we told him that Charles's parents teach at a boys' boarding school, where they must go through three hundred packets of Weetbix a week: no wonder he can hardly lift his bag of cards. It would be like comparing the collection of a public gallery to the works pinned up on one's fridge. No consolation, though, for the serious collector.)

The small guy put his collection away for a few days until an envelope arrived from his uncle with a few more cards (new ones! no double ups!), and his enthusiasm was rekindled. But it's been an interesting thing, watching the collecting bug develop in the small guy, and his knowledge of rugby consequently grow exponentially, in the way that an art collector's does, when they start getting serious about their subject. (As well as his intuitive feel for the 'market' in the cards. Terrible. Capitalism 101, for six-year-olds.) What's been most interesting for me, with no wish to further my own very limited knowledge of sporting heroes, is to discover that the kinds of behaviour that I'd previously put down to the specific enthusiasms of art collectors are in fact those of collectors in general. Whether it's the holy grail of a McCahon or of Richie McCaw's face on a Weetbix rugby card, it's the thrill of the chase that's the point.

*["No."]

Great spaces

I was listening the other day to a podcast of architect Guy Marriage in conversation with Lucy Orbell on Radio New Zealand's 'Arts on Sunday' programme. (Available here for a short time.) They were speaking about the architecture of the Adam Gallery, an institution which last year celebrated its tenth birthday. As they walked through the gallery, Marriage spoke about why he thinks the Adam -- designed eleven years ago by Athfield Architects -- is such a successful building.

It was an extraordinarily challenging site; a thin wedge of space between existing buildings, which incorporated an existing three storey staircase. The architects covered the staircase with black rubber, giving the Adam that tyre-shop smell I always love, and created a building with a variety of flexible gallery spaces. Very little of the building is seen from the outside, apart from the monumental blank north wall, pictured above, covered in zinc. When you enter the building, you have no idea what to expect. As Marriage walked through the gallery, describing what he saw, I recalled that sense of jaw-dropping surprise I had the first time I visited the building, at its opening party, coming through the squeeze of the front foyer gallery and turning the corner to peer over a three storey void. The grandeur of that enormous wall dropping away below the visitor is one of the great architectural experiences of New Zealand.

Here's how Guy Marriage concluded his walk-through:

"I guess people think that architects just design buildings. But my philosophy is that architects design spaces. And once we've designed the spaces then we figure out how to build the buildings that enclose the spaces. So it's very important to think about the space first. It's something as New Zealanders that we often forget. We don't have many grand spaces in New Zealand: we tend to have lots of little slices. So I really love it when we have a grand space like this that someone's taken the trouble to think about."

Julia Morison, wall drawing for 'Wall Works', Adam Art Gallery (showing lower level), 2009.

While I don't think I've ever seen an Athfield building that I didn't warm to from the outside, it seems to me that it's Athfield's use of internal space which is one of his great skills. There's a humanness to his designs, as well as frequently a sense of daring and functional grandeur. He creates spaces that people are comfortable to be in, to congregate with others and move through. I always think of the Wellington Public Library, as well as the City to Sea bridge, as a couple of his most successful spatial designs. Not only do they look beautiful, and reference the history of the place in which they stand, but they're used, happily and creatively, by many hundreds of people every day. The scale and grandeur of their designs are balanced with a concern for the way people use them and exist within them.

Guy Marriage's remarks on the paucity of grand internal spaces in New Zealand architecture got me thinking. He's absolutely right, I suspect, but there are a few. In addition to the Adam Art Gallery and Wellington Public Library, I thought the following might constitute the beginning of a list of great New Zealand architectural spaces, albeit a list rather biased towards art-related buildings and Christchurch. Each of the spaces below reveals that sense of functional grandeur which the Adam so epitomises; astounding on first encounter, yet ultimately accommodating of the human presence. I'd be interested in further suggestions.

1. The central dome gallery of the Sarjeant Art Gallery, Wanganui. 1932. Architect Donald Hosie of Edmund Anscombe and Associates.

2. The A1 Arts Lecture Theatre building at the University of Canterbury. (I don't know who the architect was.)

3. The Great Hall at Christchurch Arts Centre, 1882, architect Benjamin Mountfort.

4. Level 5 at Waikato Museum in Hamilton, 1987, architect Ivan Mercep.

5. The Britomart Project, 2008, architect Mario Madayag with Jasmax.

6. The Christchurch Town Hall auditorium, 1972, architects Miles Warren and Maurice Mahoney.

Cotton's windows

Some of the most memorable art experiences I've had have been off the clock and off the wall, outside art galleries. Taking a special trip to see a work of art in a distinctive setting somehow compresses and distills your experience of the work. Maybe the effort required to see it makes you pay single-minded attention to what's in front of you, unlike the way that works in art galleries have to compete for your time and gaze.

These moments for me have included climbing the steep hill to see the Henry Moore in the Wellington Botanic Gardens; making the trek to the Matisse Chapel in Vence; coming across Michael Parekowhai's metal trees at Britomart and being completely astounded by the scale and conception of the work; my childhood memories of my brother and I poking our heads through the Barbara Hepworth bronze on the Exeter University campus; driving past Bill Culbert's Sky Blues and Blue for the first time at night (the latter work should be on everyone's must-see list for Christchurch -- it's quite simply one of the best public works in the country).

In Auckland recently, we took a trip to the Cathedral of the Holy Trinity in Parnell, something I've wanted to do for several years. The Cathedral is increasingly staking a claim for itself as one of the more significant commissioners of contemporary art in this country. It has an extraordinary cast glass font by Ann Robinson which has just been dedicated (I'll post images of that shortly), and major window works by Robert Ellis, John Baker, and Shane Cotton.

The 'Pacific neo-Gothic' building by architects John Sinclair and Dick Toy is terrific -- a kind of friendly brutalism that acknowledges the forms of the old wooden church nearby while creating an elevating and soaringly grand space -- and the integration of the works with the architecture is exemplary. But we were really there to see Shane Cotton's suite of windows, which I've photographed below, commissioned in 2002 and completed a year or so later. If a cathedral building can be called a public place -- and I suspect the very friendly and welcoming people at Holy Trinity would see their building in that light -- there is strong argument for Cotton's windows to be considered one of New Zealand's most ambitious and successful public works of art. Memorable, resonant, achingly beautiful, effortlessly synthesising different cultures and histories and worldviews, they really are one of the best things I've ever seen. My photographs do little justice to the experience of being in that cavernous space with Cotton's works. Everyone should go and visit them immediately.
























The windows were fabricated by Suzanne Johnson and Ben Hanly of The Glassworks. To see more of their work, go here.

Sitting on committees

I've sat on a few committees in my time, and I've always been fascinated by the way they work. The first 'proper' committee I was appointed to, something or other to do with Women's Suffrage in the early 1990s, included a sole male member (so to speak) who had been put there -- or so he announced proudly -- as a punishment for repeatedly making sexist remarks in the council chamber.

On the committee, he referred to himself as 'a thorn amongst the roses', beaming genially round the table at the various representatives of women's groups. I recall that he spoke about the suffragettes' bloomers a lot, and consumed most of the sausage rolls. Meanwhile a couple of ladies in sensible shoes steamrollered through the agenda items they had [evidently] mutually agreed upon prior to the meetings. I sat there drinking endless cups of stewed Cona coffee and squeaking ineffectively from time to time. I was thanked for my contribution. Horrible outcomes were vigorously pursued. From this experience I learned pretty much all I have subsequently needed to know about the usual functioning of committees.

I was interested, then, to recently come across the great art historian Herbert Read's thoughts on selection committees in the arts. Here he is in 1948* speaking about the State's patronage of artists, in the 'selection of artists to work for the State and of works of art to be bought by the State':

"I have served on many such committees and in my experience only one of three things can happen:

1. something is chosen which offends nobody, beause its virtues are negative;

2. a little bit of everything is chosen to please everybody;

3. the committee agrees to be realistic and to allow one member to make the choice for all of them: the committee, that is to say, resign its functions in despair.

The first two possibilities merely lead to compromises: they do not imply intelligent patronage and can hardly be said to encourage the best in art. The third possibility is equivalent to the administrator's own choice, and the State is really paying for the indulgence of one man's taste, to which it then proceeds to give the sanction of its anonymous authority."

Knew what he was talking about, old Herbert. (Of course, a fourth possibility may be considered: that the composition of the selection committee and the significance of the opportunity might be such that after sparkling and impassioned debate and argument, a project of great merit and substance is selected to everyone's satisfaction. I have heard of such things happening, and occasionally -- very occasionally -- have even witnessed it.)


*Herbert Read, 'The Fate of Modern Painting', Hudson Review, vol.1, no.1, Spring 1948.

Don Peebles, 1922-2010

Don Peebles, Work in Progress, 1980

A friend who worked as a cameraman in New York in the early 1990s had a polaroid of a vaguely familiar older man stuck to his fridge door. Yes, he said, it was Clement Greenberg; he'd just shot a documentary about modern art in which he'd been interviewed. During the shoot, when Greenberg discovered that his cameraman was a New Zealander, he asked if he knew an artist friend of his from New Zealand. "Don, his name is. Don Peebles."

I think this story illustrates a couple of things beyond the one- or two degrees of social separation that New Zealand is famous for. At a certain level, the international artworld is a club, or more accurately a series of clubs, in which the members recognise one another by their achievements and mutual interests. One of New Zealand's pioneering abstract artists, and an influential teacher of several generations of artists, Don Peebles -- not one, I think, to blow his own trumpet -- was a significant figure in the history of abstraction, connected at the highest level of his field.

At one of the public galleries where I worked, Peebles was a legend among the staff for his no-nonsense treatment of one of his 'fin' paintings on loose canvas, like that pictured above: in order to remove creases which had resulted from transporting the work, he took the painting outside, threw it on the ground, turned the firehose on it, and proceeded to shake and wrestle it into submission. I always loved the idea of this rough-housing by the artist, in stark comparison to the careful white-gloved museum-standard treatment of the work by gallery staff. Peebles's physical tussle with his painting revealed an entirely different kind of relationship with an artwork, one which I've always found instructive when thinking about his practice.

I was deeply moved to hear that a week or so before Don Peebles passed away, he visited the Christchurch Art Gallery in order to see, for the last time behind the scenes, his many works in the city's collection.

Sixty year view

Doris Lusk, Canterbury Plains from Cashmere Hills, 1952, oil on board, Collection of Christchurch Art Gallery

Last Sunday we drove up to the Port Hills in search of the landscape Doris Lusk painted in 1952. From the city below, the hills were shrouded in low cloud. It seemed doubtful we'd see anything at all, yet alone a sixty-year-old view. I was sure I'd seen it before; I distantly remembered driving along the winding hill road many years ago and catching sight of it suddenly from the car window and thinking oh, there's that painting; but I couldn't remember if the bend in the road where I'd seen it had been before or after Victoria Park or even beyond the Sign of the Kiwi, the second of Harry Ell's travellers' way stations which marks the high point of the road before the long descent to Lyttelton. The eroded valley Lusk painted might be anywhere really; and we prepared for a long drive.

I'd been thinking of the task like detective work, assuming that while the view might be quite changed, there would be certain features -- the bones of the landscape, if you like -- which would remain the same. Ignoring trees, we were looking for the silhouette of the hills, and perhaps the little volcanic knob in the foreground, much in the way you might discount the effect of the hair and focus instead on the shape of the head of a missing person you were trying to identify. (Our ostensible purpose was to add Lusk's location to the Christchurch Art Gallery's new geotagging project, which records the geographical coordinates of landscapes depicted in works from their collection.) In the event, we were a little disappointed to find Lusk's landscape so quickly, at one of the first entrances to Victoria Park, a walking track named for Harry Ell. While the trees had grown up thickly over the upper slopes, the fissured walls of the valley were unmistakeable.


In search of Lusk's painting viewpoint, we took the steep track up through the trees into the park. There was a crossing of paths, and a knot of runners pounded past, shaking drops of sweat on to the ground. Further in, the pine needles were thick and soft underfoot, and our footsteps made no sound. Shadows fell sideways through the pines. I thought of Heavenly Creatures, and a brick in a stocking. The canopy blotted out the sky. It was impossible to see the valley below through the trees.


Frustrated, we climbed back down to the carpark, past the painted fire danger sign which from behind looked like an easel. Squinting through the trees, the viewpoint from the bluff above the carpark was almost the one in the painting, though a little to the right.



As we drove on, we wondered how Doris Lusk had got up here; we thought it unlikely she'd owned a car in 1952. Perhaps by bus? Or bicycle, though carrying the painting materials might have been tricky. But then artists at mid-century thought nothing of biking enormous distances in search of landscape subjects or to organise exhibitions: for his exhibition in Dunedin in the early 1930s -- the show which a young McCahon wandered into -- Woollaston sent his paintings down from Mapua by carrier, following later by bike. It's possible that McCahon's own epic journeys by bike were immortalised in his Six Days in Nelson and Canterbury, of 1950; there's a fancy that the streak of red down the centre of the panels refers to a graze he took in a tumble from his bike, but that's probably pressing the autobiographical factor too far.


Lusk's bare hills were thatched with grass and tussock: grazing land. The early 1950s were arguably the highest point of agricultural optimism in New Zealand, a point at which national prosperity seemed inextricably allied to sheep farming -- much, perhaps, as it does to dairy farming today. As soil scientist Andrew Carran notes, since the wool boom and bust in the mid-1950s the same valley has hosted two crops of pinus radiata, a land use unthinkable at the time of Lusk's painting. Today there are clumps of pines and expanses of grass, some small buildings and an orderly market garden (perhaps a vineyard?) on the lower slopes.


In search of a place to turn round on the narrow winding road, we drove on towards the Sign of the Kiwi. And as we drove back to the city, we finally saw it: Lusk's viewpoint on the distant valley. But there was nowhere to stop, and no way to climb up on to the thickly wooded bluff above the road. I took some photographs out of the car window, but it was gone in a flash.

The blurb about Canterbury Plains from Cashmere Hills on the Christchurch Art Gallery's website has Lusk 'influenced' by McCahon, in her painting of the bare, unpopulated land. Certainly, they were great friends; they had known each other as young people in Dunedin, where they had both attended Russell Clark's Saturday morning art classes at John McIndoe's studio. Lusk later spent time in Nelson with McCahon and Woollaston and others, and when McCahon moved to Christchurch in 1948, he initially stayed with Lusk and her husband Dermot Holland, painting several of his major religious works in his small bedroom there.


McCahon famously received a copy of Charles Cotton's Geomorphology of New Zealand for a wedding present at the time of his marriage to the painter Anne Hamblett in 1942, and his subsequent works demonstrate his study of the linear landforms pictured by Cotton. So, I would argue, do Doris Lusk's paintings of a similar (or perhaps slightly earlier) vintage: her Towards Omakau (c.1942) -- a comparatively little-known painting which I'd argue should be considered one of the key works of early modernism in New Zealand -- reveals a similar treatment of the folded hills in the distance. Perhaps, as is frequently the case, what art historians misleadingly describe as influence (a power relationship which almost always proceeds in one direction, from the more well-known artist to the lesser-known) is rather more accurately described by artists themselves as common interests.

Doris Lusk, Towards Omakau, c.1942, oil on board, Collection of Christchurch Art Gallery

It's a small world after all

The small guy and I collaborated recently on a review of the new children's exhibition at the Christchurch Art Gallery. You can read it here.

It was a lot of fun working with him, and I think we might do it again.

Early Sunday Morning

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

Merry Christmas me arse

The small guy gets into the Christmas spirit with a homemade card.

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.

"The New Museum is my Bitch"

Oh dear. As soon as I saw this brilliant cartoon by artist William Powhida regarding recent developments at New York's New Museum [click on text link for a big detailed version], I couldn't help but imagine what the equivalent in the New Zealand art world might look like. If anyone draws it, it had nothing to do with me, OK?

Via JamesWagner.com. William Powhida's drawing appeared on the front cover of the Brooklyn Rail.

Sea of night

A gratuitous night-time self-portrait, Lartigue-style.


Yesterday evening a friend and I drove into town to photograph Fiona Pardington's new illuminated billboard, installed a couple of days ago on the Worcester Street facade of the Christchurch Art Gallery. The image is Pardington's photograph of a small hand-blown glass ship, enlarged to monumental public scale. It looks strong in the daytime, but enters another dimension by night.

Fiona Pardington (Ngai Tahu) came across the glass ship among the collections of Canterbury Museum: it's a model of the Charlotte Jane, the first to arrive of the First Four Ships which brought out the British colonists to the Canterbury Settlement in 1850. The model was made by one of the descendants of the original settlers. When I was growing up in Christchurch in the 1980s, there was still considerable concern -- in a certain quarter of town at least -- over whether your ancestors had come out on one of the First Four Ships. Like going to Christ's College or casually mentioning that you were planning to take the Range up to the snow in the weekend, having a family connection to the First Four Ships was a decisive shorthand for being posh in Christchurch: more than anything it denoted old money, political power and the distinct probability of driving down major arterial roads bearing one's family name.

Living here again in 2009, I sense that the First Four Ships fetish seems to have receded a bit as history sails inexorably on; but it lurks there still, hoving into view like a Lovecraftian ghost ship every now and again.

I took the photograph below looking up at Fiona Pardington's backlit billboard from the pavement.


The first person to push past the steerage passengers and stagger down the gangplank of the Charlotte Jane at 10am on 16 December 1850 after 99 days at sea was the man who became the first Superintendent of Canterbury province, James Edward Fitzgerald.* Fitzgerald was later involved in national politics, and advocated equal civil and political rights for all New Zealanders regardless of race, including the right for Māori to be involved in government and to retain their own lands. Oddly enough, he had previously been Assistant Secretary of the British Museum; an appropriate enough profession, one might argue, for one of the founding fathers of a deeply conservative and dusty city often described by the credulous or untravelled as more English than the English; a city which since Fitzgerald's time has increasingly been developed as a themepark of itself, its willow trees flanking the shallow river, its punts, straw boaters, striped blazers, Devonshire teas and Gothic Revival architecture creating not only a visual identity but a steady income from tourists.

The founder of the Christchurch Press, Fitzgerald was later able to use his newspaper as a vehicle to attack the plans of fellow colonist William Moorhouse to bore a rail tunnel through the Port Hills to link the city and the port, largely because of the enormous costs involved. The Press is still commonly used by its citizenry to scupper significant civic projects today.

Here's a photograph of Fiona Pardington's image The Prow of the Charlotte Jane with the night closing in around it. There is a strange effect whereby the image, spectral white on black, looks at first glance to be a negative. On the monumental scale of the street, the delicate glass rigging of the model appears like real ropes encrusted with ice, like one of the early Antarctic explorers' ships which left from nearby Sumner. The ghosts and shadows of the early years of the colony, the precarious voyages and provisional structures and scale models of elsewhere still present in the fabric of the city, are summoned by Pardington's work.

This shot above is taken from across the Boulevard. Yesterday evening the lights in the newly revamped, not-yet-open collection galleries were on, and the oriel window was illuminated. A stack of gallery furniture waited in the window, upturned chair legs silhouetted like a four-masted black schooner. A pirate hulk on one side, and the pearly white ship of the British colonists on the other. For a moment as darkness fell, the illuminated window and the backlit billboard appeared like positive and negative versions of one another.


Neil Pardington kindly allowed me to use his photographs (numbers 3 and 4 above) of Fiona Pardington's billboard for this post. His exhibition 'The Vault', a series of large-scale photographs taken behind the scenes in New Zealand museums and art galleries, is currently on display at Christchurch Art Gallery before it tours nationally.

*Characteristically enough, Fitzgerald's sharp elbows were in play again for the opening of the winding hill road connecting Lyttelton with Sumner, when he was the first to drive over it, in his dog cart.

"Actually it was just me"

Image via Worth1000


How was your day at school? I asked the small guy.

Today, said the small guy, I had to break up the Fang Gang. J. stopped being our enemy, and it's only fun being in a gang when you've got an enemy and then you can have a war. When you haven't got an enemy there's not much to do. After J. stopped being our enemy we played Star Wars for a bit, and then the gang broke up at the end of lunch.

This afternoon W. and I tried to put a spell on J. We tried the farting spell, where you have to make a farting noise with your mouth or under your arm and point at the person and say the magic words which cause the person to fart. W. thought the spell had worked, but actually it was just me.

Cass and the colour of New Zealand history

Rita Angus, Cass, 1936, oil on board, Collection of Christchurch Art Gallery Te Puna o Waiwhetu

On the way back from the West Coast, we took the turn-off to Cass. In the Craigieburn Ranges between Arthur's Pass and Castle Hill, Cass is about 120 kilometres from Christchurch and feels utterly remote. You take a turn-off from State Highway 73 and drive along a shingle road for nearly a kilometre until you reach the tiny settlement which has grown up around the railway stop Rita Angus made famous. You can't hear the main road: the place is quiet and still. The sun is hot on your back, and the air is cold. You feel like you're walking into the pages of a Frank Sargeson story.

More than seventy years on, the young macrocarpa trees Angus painted are now enormous and venerable, casting long shadows over the tussock. The station platform is long gone, as are the stacks of timber and the open shed pictured to the left of Angus's work. The small house in the background is still there.


The view along the tracks towards Arthur's Pass and the Coast.


Looking towards Christchurch.

The station building is much the same as Angus pictured it. The door to the right is still locked: the waiting room to the left is still open. The lettering on the sign has slightly altered from that Angus depicted: the contemporary version of standard railway signage is fatter and more squat than the more airy and elegant 1930s style.

The station building is in good repair, painted a glossy brownish red, as are several of the sheds and houses in the settlement. It is much the same colour that Maori carvings and architectural members were painted by museum staff in the first half of the 20th century: a colour known in the sector as 'museum red'. It's the reddish-brown colour of dried blood and freshly-turned fertile soil and of rust in the rain. Museum red: the colour of history in New Zealand.


The waiting room at Cass Station.

'Kiss the ground you walk on', exhorts the graffitti scratched into the wooden walls inside the waiting room.

The view out to the railway line from the waiting room: looking at the place Angus stood to make her painting in 1936.