art and photography

The Anthropocene Era

October 1, 2012 1 Comment

David Eggleton

Kermadec, edited by Bronwyn Golder and Gregory O’Brien, (PEW Environment Group/Tauranga Art Gallery, 2011) , 176 pp., $79.99; River-Road: Journeys through Ecology, by David Cook, Wiremu Puke and Jony Valentine (Rim Books, 2011), 92 pp., $40; Old New World: Photographs by Mary Macpherson, (Lopdell House), 96 pp. $50; Ice Blink: An Antarctic Imaginary, by Anne Noble, with an essay by Ian Wedde, (Clouds, 2011), 104 pp., $69.95.

We live at the fag-end of the heroic, in fact we inhabit the ashtray of the heroic, where the notion of a sublime ‘Nature’ has been replaced by that of an anthropomorphised ‘environment’, a measureable resource increasingly degraded by human interaction: the Anthropocene Era. All four of the books under review dwell on ecology and survival, all are steeped in climate change wisdom, and all are aware of the pressures of the geopolitical and the industrial. Essentially picture travel books, they span a kind of archipelago of South pacific psychogeographies, leaping from ‘the island’ to ‘the river’ to ‘the road’, and finally to ‘the South Pole’. They traverse the contemporary eco-moment, where manufactured terms, such as ‘dream location’, ‘greenwash’ and ‘carbon sink’ set the terms of reference, and where only aesthetic detachment can triumph.

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Brandishing a Paintbrush

October 1, 2012 Leave a Comment

Raewyn Alexander

Before I Forget, by Jacqueline Fahey (Auckland University Press, 2012), 192 pp, $45 .

Venturing into often extremely private territory with honesty and insight, this memoir’s a remarkable read. Fahey’s stunning cover is a painting that suggests the older artist looking back: her younger self’s presented in a little black dress with high heels, with younger self yelling ‘Don’t, don’t, don’t’, (as if the older woman can never truly understand the past, not now). We make of memory what we may, crafting rather than recreating the actuality of lived experience, and Fahey illustrates this very well, giving the sense of a mature artist who mines the past for necessary information to unfold the stories she wants to tell and explore. Areas of darkness surround this sense of recall: in the cover image, a dog and an infant perhaps stand for traumatic events. Yet the interpretation of tumultuous life events persists, and the perplexities of returning to her past are carried out with aplomb. This is brave, admirably clear prose, written with wit and containing many surprises – a memoir with various layers and subtle meanings.

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Victoriana

June 1, 2012 Leave a Comment

David Eggleton

Early New Zealand Photography: Images and Essays, edited by Angela Wanhalla and Erika Wolf (Otago University Press, 2011), 208 pp., $50.

Susan Sontag characterised photographs as ‘invitations to deduction, speculation and fantasy’, while Roland Barthes asserted that the photograph was ‘a transparent envelope’ — that is, a paradoxical object at once visible and obvious but also sealed-off and enigmatic. Likewise, Walter Benjamin stated that the photographic image shows ‘dialects at a standstill’, meaning photographs can hold contradictory meanings in check. Benjamin also pointed out that: ‘Every image of the past that is not recognised by the present as one of its concerns threaten to disappear irretrievably’. Mindful then that this significant trio of twentieth-century photography critics regarded photographs as extremely ambiguous objects, attracting interpretations the way flypaper attracts flies, I launched into Early New Zealand Photography: Images and Essays, edited by Angela Wanhalla and Erica Wolf.

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Against Fear of the New

June 1, 2012 Leave a Comment

Nick Laird

New Zealand by Design: a History of New Zealand Product Design, by Michael Smythe (Godwit, 2011), 511 pp., $65.

‘Design’ is a mercurial, not to say deceptive, term. Used as a verb to refer to a process, and used as a noun to the product of that process, it has become amongst the most ubiquitous and the most tortured of labels. Often now lumped together with buzzfuzz feel-good notions of expressiveness, and used interchangeably with the tags ‘innovation’ and ‘creativity’, it is constantly and lazily colonised, while the shades of discrimination it originally implied have become hidden or lost. Design only really takes on meaning with the words that surround it, as in types of design — and even then the implied associations can serve to obscure a deeper understanding.

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Objects Material and Dematerial

May 1, 2012 Leave a Comment

Andrew Paul Wood

Lalique Vases, edited by Damian Skinner (David Bateman Auckland, 2011) 176 pp., $69.99;

Affirmation Dungeon, by Dan Arps (Clouds/Michael Lett, Auckland 2011) 318 pp, $69.95.

Lalique Vases, edited by freelance art historian Damian Skinner, is about a New Zealand-based private collection of glassware by the celebrated Art Nouveau and Art Deco glass designer René Lalique (1860–1945). Lalique began his experiments with glass and mass-production techniques like press moulding in the early years of the twentieth century. He is famous for the vast range of decorative glassware he produced, frequently using natural motifs of animals and flowers to create lighting fixtures, tableware, figurines, illuminated hood ornaments, architectural glass, and scent bottles.

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Rarity Value

April 1, 2012 Leave a Comment

Kathryn Mitchell

Ghosts in the Landscape, by Grant Sheehan (Phantom House, Wellington, 2011), 184 pp.,

$ 150.00.

A book collection of big photographs produced in a limited edition of 1050 copies, Ghosts in the Landscape by Grant Sheehan embodies the contradictions that define contemporary photographic practices. Capturing sweeping vistas on a 22 megapixel camera and processing them in a ‘digital darkroom’ using software plug-in Nik Silver Efex Pro 2, the photographer is able to generate carefully reworked images that accurately recreate the historic visual characteristics of black-and-white film. In the year 2012 though, a book of this nature does prompt the reader to ask why Sheehan has chosen to use film in what is a predominately digital age. Aren’t we saturated in digital images to the extent that these once precious rectangle fragments of our past inspire little more than brief moments of longing punctuated by a swift return to relative disinterest? Given this default condition, it may well be that Sheehan is attempting to infuse our collective memory with the ‘sacredness’ that it was once afforded — that is, the sacramental notion of the singular.

The production of Ghosts in the Landscape certainly echoes this sentiment in utilising pearlescent coated paper and metallic silver toned ink, which have been combined with an up-to-the-minute printing technology that the publisher asserts ‘give the images the same clarity and sharpness as an exhibition fine-art print’. The notion of the limited edition and fine art print is traditionally related to the notion of authenticity — the notion of the ‘one off’ unique artwork. It is this pictorialist strategy that the artist, seeking to capture the aura of the places/spaces he revisits, refers to when he speaks to the reader of the ‘quintessential’, the ‘classic’ and the ‘old, as in: old farmhouse, old corrugated barn, old fame shed, old abandoned house, old railway’s windmill, old launches, old pier, old Denniston Coal Mine, old sulphur mine, old gun emplacement.

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