Thursday Lunchtime

Get Ready

The Warren Hellman celebration at ocean beach last Sunday was superb, you can read my review here at the Daily Cal.

Tomorrow I’m reviewing Scorched which has been running in San Francisco for a few days now but is only just getting around to press screenings.

http://www.dailycal.org/2012/02/21/hardly-strictly-stars-come-out-for-festival-founder/

And here’s a Venice Biennalle espresso cup I saw today. I thought it was cool so I’ll post it!

The Wanderer: Diary of a Summer

Permanent Collection of New Zealand Art – Auckland Art Gallery Te Toi Tamaki, Kitchener Street, Auckalnd.

Off the Wall – Canterbury Museum, Rolleston Avenue, Christchurch.

I have been meaning to write for quite some time. Since I finished up at Salient a little over a month ago, I have seen some amazing shows with some truly wonderful art. But, as is the way with this time of the year, my efforts to commit my thoughts and opinions to writing have been circumvented by what can only be described as the unavoidable pressures of the season. Now, forced into an unplanned state of calm by the unpredictable machinations of nature, I can finally commit some words on the cultural treasures that have been on show throughout the country this last month.

Earlier his month, I found myself at my grandmother’s home in Christchurch, shortly before flying to Auckland to visit the Auckland Art Gallery – Te Toi Tamaki. I was restacking her bookshelf when I discovered my Great Grandfather’s Oxford Travel Atlas of Britain – a sort of Lonely Planet of the 1950s. It is a plain, cloth bound book with plain, concise and unremarkable descriptions of Britain’s tourist spots of interest. For example, of the National Gallery and National Portrait Gallery it says, ‘Collections commenced in 1824 and 1856 respectively. Statue of George Washington on lawn a copy of Houdon’s statue at Richmond, Virginia.” This sort of understated sentiment has all but vanished from today’s guides. Contemporary Lonely Planet readers are treated to a somewhat different description that runs on for an entire paragraph. We are lavished with alacritous superlatives , ‘fantastic’ and ‘beautiful’. The guide even gives a brief outline of the best works to see (Turner’s The Fighting Temeraire, Botticelli’s Venus and Mars, Van Gough’s Sunflowers). To imagine my Great Grandfather on his grand tour standing outside the National Gallery with the Oxford Atlas, needing no more than this basic description to pique his interest in the treasures it might hold. But that was then, and this is now. What of the Auckland Art Gallery which seems to be touting itself as a sort of National Gallery of New Zealand? What is its purpose? Does it achieve it?

At first glance, it would seem that the galleries of London have not quite relinquished their allure on those of their former colonies. The Gallery’s zen like balance of colonial and new international style architecture has a distinctly Tate Modern feel. This carries into the gallery itself, from its large atrium space for installation art (reminiscent of the famous Turbine Hall) and its eclectic, thematic arrangement of artwork. Of course, this isn’t a bad thing, the Tate and it’s predecessor of sorts, the Pompidou Centre in Paris are two of the most popular and influential art museums in the world and Auckland’s mimicry is so complete that it succeeds on all the levels of the Tate and Pompidou. Through this hanging these museums communicate a feeling of emotion as well as a sort of intellectual stimulation so lacking from many of the world’s great art museums. This is perhaps best evinced in the gallery’s hanging of New Zealand artworks on the ground floor.

Like at Tate Modern, Auckland’s eclectic hanging encourages the viewer to seek out inconsistencies and clashes as well as themes and harmonies between artworks. In this, Auckland is very successful. In one corner are works by Don Binney and Peter Siddell that together try to evoke a relationship that lies at the heart of the New Zealand mindset; the tenuous relationship between land, nature and humanity. Binney’s image of a Tui flying over a compressed, shallow seaside landscape has been rightfully elevated to the sort of icon status it aspires to. It is a sensational image for New Zealanders who perhaps struggle to culturally reconcile the fact that the greatest asset of our national identity – the land – is something that exists completely independently of us and is - in most cases - better off without us! Yet, unlike the National Gallery collection so brusquely described in the Oxford Atlas that crafts a national out of Holbourn’s portraits of Henry Tudor and debates Van Dyk’s remarkable portraits of a decidedly unremarkable king and which portrait of Shakespeare, if any, was painted from life. New Zealand’s pictorial ‘identity’ is only as strong as the  earth upon which it  is built. Binney’s flat surface, it’s depth perception adumbrated with hills in broad brushstrokes. This creates a literal ‘icon’, a visual conduit between the viewer and a higher sense of meaning and purpose. It might be hung in a church, like a flat medieval Madonna. The tui that presides over this landscape, replaces the eagle that sits atop so many standards. It is a peaceful reworking to create our own national insignia.

Artfully arranged alongside Binney’s work, Homecoming, Peter Siddell’s landscape of an urban scene in Auckland adds the human touch to Binney’s picture. Siddell’s gift is his ability to force us to question the familiar sights in his images by driving a wedge between the subject and its formal  representation. This familiar sight of Victorian and Edwardian Villa housing is rendered unfamiliar by the the ghostly pallor in which he casts them, and the unnatural juxtaposition of their vertiginous construction lines with the mellifluous motion of the hills tumbling to the sea. Can we really call this street familiar? Siddell understands the beauty in Auckland’s homes, the importance of land and property and the importance of the relationship of ‘home’ to the land. In rendering these things unfamiliar, Siddell draws us into the work with a visual verfremdungseffekt. He asks us to take a second look at what we take for granted. Are those familiar homes really ours? Can the unnatural vertiginous lines of the houses really contain the wild line of the hills? Recent experience would suggest not. Siddell’s art asks us to think about the repercussions.

Turn around to face Gretchen Albrecht’s take on Rothko’s colour bands, Golden Cloud, evoking the Coromandel sky. In Albrecht’s care, this subject matter that, in the hands of any other artist would threaten the most gross sentimentality, becomes a subtle and endearing meditation on feeling and emotion. The stark bands of colour bleed out to penumbraed edges, lost in the unprimed canvas. The colour nearly completely drains into the canvas fibre, it could almost be said to bleed off the gallery wall altogether, wrapping itself around the viewer in bands of warm, visceral embrace. It is the final word in a three painting arrangement that represents the wonderful detail, emotional and intellectual consideration that has gone into the Auckland Art Gallery.

Further south entirely and under quite a different sky is Off the Wall, a collection of wearable art from the WOW shows in Nelson and Wellington on display at the Canterbury Museum in Christchurch. In spite of the overwhelming credentials of its curators (including one Sir Richard Taylor), I feel an opportunity has been missed in the exhibition’s layout which falls back on the old cliché of a black nondescript cloth backing. This does nothing to endear these challenging works to the viewer who is already entrusted with the task of contextualising works in a static gallery that were originally intended for life on a dynamic runway. There is little in the way of visual aids and the exhibition is too sparsely arranged to give any sense of what the works are like on the runway. Many of the most interesting pieces like, Persephone in Cuba Street and Lady of Wood, intelligently play on the fact that they are mobile, living works of art. (Wooden one) does this strikingly by taking wood a material that symbolises strength and staying power and turning it into a languid, mellifluous meditation on the poetics of nature and mankind. It is difficult not to be moved by the fine craftsmanship of this most ancient of materials – though it might have been aided by its curator in evoking off its motion.

However, one of the most enduring things about WOW and its patron, Sir Richard Taylor is the way in which it supports and fosters traditional arts and crafts. Over the years, Taylor’s Weta workshop has employed traditional metalworkers, armorers, medieval cloth workers and other artisans, keeping  their crafts alive in service of the film industry. WOW works in much the same way, with wool spinners, wood workers and others pushing their ancient crafts to the limit for the grand prize. This trope led me to thinking of William Morris, the 19^th century champion of English arts and crafts movement in England

Under Burford, a small town in the Cotswolds, the Oxford Guide is perhaps suitably understated, Burford, ‘medieval church (with fine chapels) and stone build houses. Early closing Wednesday. It does not mention that stone churches connection with the preeminant pre-Raphaelite, William Morris, nor its connection with New Zealand. Morris loved the Burford parish. Lovingly cut from Cotswold stone, itself only quarried a few miles away, Burford is a mediaval evocation of Morris’ guiding principals. He stood to protect them, once telling the local Vicar to stop removing the medieval wall paintings he was told that, “This Chruch, Sir, is mine, and if I choose to, I shall stand on my head in it.” It might have been this trite response that inspired Morris to found the Society for the Protection of Ancient Buildings. Morris’ appreciation for the enduring quality of the Church might have seemed appropriate in England, a land of history, but in New Zealand it came under assault by artists William Sutton.

In the Auckland Art Gallery hangs a powerful image of a Canterbury churchyard. Like the WOW pieces, it works on the contrast of movement and stillness. Sniddel’s conceit of vertiginous human control seems absent from this work. William A. Suttons, Nor’wester in a Cemetery depicts that moment when the work of  man is put to nature’s grindstone in a depiction of our own mortality. Leading our eye from the foreground is a dramatic line of headstones – we notice them first, jagged, pulled from the earth at all different angles. Yet, with the settlement of Canterbury only kicking off in the 1850s, we know that these headstones can only be 150 years old at most, hardly matching the medieval age of the orderly rows in  Burford’s church.

They are beholden to the powerful wind that blows through the cemetery out at the viewer. Look at the tussocks that grow unchecked through the cemetery, billowing in every direction, and the boughs of the trees that seem to will to tear themselves from the trunk like things possessed. It is an emotive painting, a pathetic fallacy like Lear’s storm, crackling with kinetic energy. It’s the energy that is rather the point, as it is nature, not man that powers and drives this image. From the line of trees in the background the invisible wind extends her lascivious grasp round every vestige of human arrogance in a remarkable gesture of hubris. She bends and breaks down the tombstones, the very last vain attempt of a man at immortality. All this in a Canterbury churchyard, so familiar to us all.

William Morris’ was able to keep traditions and skills of the past alive by imbuing it with new meaning and relevance. The validity of strict preservation is negligible if old art cannot be made to feel relevant and meaningful to new audiences. This is where the Auckland Art Gallery succeeds and where Off the Wall falls short. Objects like the Oxford guide are relics that offer us windows into the voices and attitudes of the past, but the museum has the unique ability and, I would say responsibility to ensure that dialogue is two-way.

 

Top 5 Political Art Works

This is we hat we have in this weeks Salient. Hope you enjoy!

The Temple of Bacchus at Ephesus (I’m sorry ex-NCEA Level 3 Classics students, but we had to bring it up) is a characteristically Roman take on political art. The Romans needed a symbol of their dominance in the unruly Eastern Mediterranean. The temple is a harmonious fusion of eastern religious symbols put to the service of a western deity that simultaneously incorporates the culture of the occupied while projecting the Romans’ powerfully eternal imperial message. What better way to celebrate imperialism than with the God of wine and revelry.

Eugene Delacroix, Liberty Leading the People. For those who have any grounding in the French Revolution (or have a copy of Coldplay’s Viva la Vida), you will be all-too familiar with this Delacroix classic. The graphic violence of the blood-drenched soldiers in contrast with the celestial, flag-bearing Liberty leaves the viewer with an overwhelming sense of the brutality of the revolution. The painting not only creates a brilliantly visceral visual personification of the uprising, but also demonstrates the tremendous political resonance an image can possess.

Francisco Goya’s The Third of May—1808 is a potent political image remembered as much for its assertion of Spanish nationalism as for its subversion of artistic norms. As the French troops round up and execute Spanish rebels, Goya uses their single lantern to subvert the place of light as the sacrosanct symbol of good in art. Here, light is used to sniff out the heroes in the shadows, to cement their martyrdom in earthy skin tones resilient to the candle’s sickly pallor. It is simultaneously a memorial and a powerful artistic precedent echoes in Pablo Picasso’s Guernica.

Unknown to many as Guerrillero Heroico (“Heroic Guerilla”), the beret-wearing Che Guevara has become an icon of rebellion in the 20th century, as well as a staple fixture on the wall of any student flat. Although the image holds highly political connotations, it is perhaps more reminiscent of Warhol’s Pop Art screens of the 60s than the Cuban Revolution which took place in that same decade. Rather than representing a time and a place, Che has become an emblem of whatever the viewer decides him to be, demonstrating the power of an image through mass circulation, in contrast to what it is supposed to symbolise.

Banksy’s Gaza Strip Graffiti is a potent contemporary example of the power of the political image. Banksy appropriates popular media imagery to make a political statement. Unlike images in the gallery space, Banksy’s media appropriated imagery relies heavily on its geographical context to form a political one. The work, showing two children digging to paradise is a prime example of this—on the gallery wall it would be meaningless, on the wall dividing Israelis from Palestinians it is a powerful political statement.