Ian Wedde
Out of the Blue: Essays on artists from Aotearoa New Zealand 1985–2021 by Christina Barton (Te Herenga Waka University Press, 2025), 400pp, $50
This marvellously substantial, articulate and elegant book closes on page 399, after its final alphabetical index of 16 pages—it’s a very big book, with a lot of index entries that together generate a gregarious, generous hum. Turning pages back from there, we find a seven-page bibliography with entries from 1985 to 2025, listing informed and sympathetic essays on 37 artists. This has been a lot of work, and it makes for a big read but what I want to celebrate, before going on to attempt an unpacking of this substance, is the energy and enjoyment articulated in and by the writing, which made reading this book a sustained, engrossing pleasure. It has been a can’t-put-down experience from start to finish.
An aspect of that has been the quantity of subject notes generated by reading—my copy of the book sprouts a forest of orange place-markers. So, of necessity, I’ve had to generalise about the richness and diversity of the experience, choosing a limited range of samples to speak for the whole.
I’ve been in very good company throughout, given the hospitable and gregarious quality of Tina’s engagements with her ‘subjects’. One of them, the artist Maddie Leach (b. 1970, Auckland), is given the last word in this book, in the form of a tribute and a ‘thank you’ on behalf of the other artists. Maddie writes of Tina’s sympathetic review of her first large-scale solo exhibition (2004) that, ‘By locating the project’s aesthetic and contextual touchstones with seriousness, she assigned currency and relevance to its wishful intentions. As an artist, one couldn’t ask for more.’ A better sign-off to the book would be hard to find, and it’s characteristic of Tina’s generosity that she’s given that last word to one of the artists included here.
Maddie’s was 34 at the time of her 2004 exhibition, which is a good mid-range measure of the generation Tina’s essays mostly scan—a decision she makes clear at the outset. An exception is the first essay, from 1985, on the senior artist Claudia Pond Eyley (born 1946). This introduces a firm and historically timely feminist focus, marking a shift from ‘the manipulation of colour and form for their own sake … to a more politically and socially engaged position where her experiences as a woman, wife and mother play an important role in defining the meaning of her work’.
What is marked here, in general art-historical terms, is a move away from the ‘social disengagement’ (Tina’s term) of modernist ‘manipulation of colour and form for their own sake’, towards what comes to be defined in these essays as postmodern and, in due course, conceptual (deploying ideas in and through materials), post-object (Tina Barton’s 1987 MA thesis was ‘Post-Object Art in New Zealand 1969–1979: Experiments in art and life’) and performance (time-based events). These are not exclusive categories, and it is art history’s (and therefore Tina’s) job—and even responsibility—to extrapolate how art continues to perform because of, and not in spite of, these shifts in emphasis and practice.
A very good example of Tina’s engagement with a dynamic, rather than category-stifled, art history is the 2019 text she contributed on Kate Newby in the publication Kate Newby: I can’t nail down the days (Kunsthalle Wien and Sternberg Press, 2019). This substantial 10-page essay begins by describing a 2008 work (unnamed) made specifically for a group show in New Plymouth, under the overarching exhibition title Break: Towards a public realm. The project clearly announced its commitment to breaking out, so to speak, from the confines of the gallery or museum. Tina describes Kate’s work with an intriguing and intelligently focused early choice of words, typical of her flair for arresting as well as appropriate language:
It was a pathetic thing: a low, sloping oblong of poured concrete that sat on the pavement opposite the Govett-Brewster Art Gallery, with a few found stones and crystals pressed into wet cement along its upper edge. Too short and low to serve as a wall, too politely oriented to block pedestrian traffic, too far from the gallery to be read as a pedestal, too ordinary to be looked at as sculpture, it seemed to mock the institution’s ambition to ‘showcase the latest developments in contemporary art from Aotearoa New Zealand’.
Having taken in this ‘pathetic thing’, Tina goes on to offer a sharp endorsement of it by deliberately returning to Maddie Leach’s analysis. In doing so, she opens up a space for art history to engage ‘the project’s aesthetic and contextual touchstones with seriousness’, thereby—recalling Maddie’s words—assigning ‘currency and relevance to its wishful intentions’. Those intentions were clearly ironic and indeed playful, but they also, as Tina observes, ‘worked as an awkward but knowing marriage of amateur construction, urban landscaping and creative assemblage. As such, the work gently sidestepped the institution’s (and my own) historicising agenda.’
The ‘historicising agenda’, neatly coded by Tina, moves on into realms that cover performance art in a variety of guises—ephemeral except where retained through video and photographic recordings. In the case of Newby’s Let the other thing in, this includes ‘pretty things’ such as tokens to be given away, shared, recycled, redistributed (somewhat in the manner of Bruce Chatwin). In the case of her ‘skim stones’, it takes the form of flattish porcelain pebbles made by the artist and offered to be thrown into the nearest body of water.
Such procedures mark a move away from the still object-based and deliberately feminist-themed work of Claudia Pond Eyley into a realm of interaction and exchange. One example is the skim stone photographed at the moment the recipient is throwing it away. One recipient, Jenifer Kabat, describes what this feels like: ‘She’ll slip you the stone, and I can tell you the moment is difficult, exhilarating and an honour. You’re being given something she’s made and asked to chuck it away.’ Such events are obviously not hung to be viewed, although photographs of the stones may be included. As Tina writes, with sympathy and enjoyment, ‘Neither the object thrown nor the performance is, in the end, the artwork. It is the photograph that serves this role, because it carries that action beyond the intimacy of its occasion.’
There are, in this book, a large number of subject options that sideline object-based works for more conceptual ones. However, Tina’s chapter on the painter Bill Hammond (first published in Art New Zealand, issue 97) deals enthusiastically with art where ‘looking becomes a process of slippage and elision as resting places for the eye are relentlessly denied’. Hammond, suggests Tina, confronts us ‘with a stark reminder of the crisis of representation’. Only he does it with paintings.
Further on, in a section titled ‘The Morality of Things’—the title of a Bruce Chatwin talk given in 1973—Tina recalls his different ‘morality’, in which the need or desire for possession is replaced by ‘mobile tokens’, objects of exchange with the capacity to ‘bind people together’. This, she suggests, is very much Newby’s ‘rebuttal of consumption’. She writes:
Newby’s images are radical not because they replace chiselled marble [for example, Bernini’s David, 1623–24, in the Galleria Borghese in Rome] with printed paper (there’s a long lineage of such transmutations), but because they instantiate and make public a rebuttal of consumption that is collectively demonstrated over and over by the people she enlists.
Given the contemporary trajectory of these essays—from 1985 (Claudia Pond Eyley) to 2021 (Paul Cullen)—it comes as a surprise to encounter Tina’s 2019 essay on Louise Henderson (b. 1902, Paris; d. 1994, Auckland) as the third-to-last in the book. Tina writes: ‘It was only recently that I stumbled upon Dame Louise Henderson’s grave … I was struck by the fact that we had been neighbours of sorts for years and I had not realised until that moment.’
The phrase ‘neighbours of sorts’ chimes with Tina’s extensive bibliography of sources and quotations, which put Henderson in very good company—her admirers included Colin McCahon, and the art historians and writers Francis Pound, Gordon H. Brown, Michael Dunn, Elizabeth Grierson, Gil Docking, Roger Blackley, Merimeri Penfold and others. Tina also confesses to being a late convert. When she was assistant curator at the Auckland Art Gallery in 1990, she was asked by Alexa Johnston, curator of contemporary New Zealand art, to prepare a Louise Henderson exhibition for the following year. ‘Other than her being a woman artist,’ she writes, ‘the thought of doing a Henderson show seemed counter to my skill set and inclinations.’ But, she continues, ‘I bit the bullet and started researching my subject. What I found was revelatory.’
Henderson’s work had joined a vanguard in two ground-breaking group shows, Object and Image (1954) and Unit Two (1955), and Tina recalls that ‘Henderson was a brilliant stick with which to beat the old guard.’
Finally, Tina concludes her homage to Henderson with an exhortation:
to continue the broader effort to chart the shifts in taste that bring artists in and out of focus, to interrogate the structural causes and their discursive effects, to gain insights not merely into the achievements of one artist or an art movement, but into the social and cultural drivers that determine what we value, how we look and what we see.
A better concluding paragraph for this book would be hard to find, given Tina’s scrupulously self-critical commitment to exploring the ‘what’s new’ impulses of contemporary artists. The final two artist chapters, on Zac Langdon-Pole and Paul Cullen, back this up.
I’ve no doubts about the scholarly importance of Tina’s book, and would add, finally, that it has been a pleasure to read its diverse, close attentions.
IAN WEDDE is the author of sixteen collections of poetry, seven novels, two collections of essays, a collection of short stories, a monograph on the artist Bill Culbert, several art catalogues and a memoir. He has been co-editor of two poetry anthologies. His most recent book is The Social Space of the Essay 2003–2023 (Te Herenga Waka University Press, 2024).
An excellently readable and informative review. But is the headline appropriate?