Landfall Review Online

New Zealand books in review

Time-bound Status of Desire

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David Herkt
Manly Affections: The Photographs of Robert Gant 1885–1915, Chris Brickell, (Genre Books, 2012), 208 pp. $50.
 
Time is the final mystery. Although space has been repeatedly reconceived over the last millennia by physics, technology, and culture, our concept of the one-way flow of time has remained relatively consistent and undisturbed. We exist on a wave-front of the present; the past has departed, the future yet to be. 
           Photographs are images of gone light, caught and preserved.  They are our most extensive exact visual record of past moments. Chris Brickell’s Manly Affections: The Photographs of Robert Gant 1885-1915 recovers a particular slice of lost time as captured within the surviving images of a photographer based in Masterton, in the Wairarapa.
            Robert Gant was a pharmacist and photography was a hobby.  The majority of his surviving dry-plate images date from the late 1880s and very early 1890s: 465 images in two albums, now in the Alexander Turnbull Library. There is also a scattering of copies made in the 1970s of later photographs removed from a now-missing album belonging to the Haigh family.

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Wanderlust

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David Eggleton
 Selling the Dream: the Art of Early New Zealand Tourism, edited by Peter Alsop, Dave Bamford and Gary Stewart (Craig Potton Publishing, 2012) 408 pp., $79.99.
 
The days when glamour and romance were still attached to travel are well and truly over. Now economy travel by air is referred to colloquially as ‘cattle class’, and the individual passenger is treated almost as unceremoniously as a Fed-Ex parcel, slung hither and yon and fetching up after a matter of hours on any other part of the planet, which increasingly resembles every other part of the planet. New Zealand, once seen as requiring ‘a voyage’  – a long ocean journey to the periphery, to ‘an exotic frontier’ – is no longer a collection of distant isles in the expanses of the blue Pacific symbolising adventure, but an easily accessible stopover – part of a packaged semi-anonymous ‘experience’ of short duration and pre-processed activity – whether one arrives en masse by jumbo jet, or on a five-star cruise ship behemoth with its thousands of passengers and hundreds of crew.
            The quest for Shangri-la – for Wonderland – still goes via Queenstown, but the contemporary promotional material seems generic and placeless – or for somewhere else: a land branded and marketed as JRR Tolkein’s Middle Earth, the place-names of which overlay the Māori and Pākehā ones.
            Today the notion of New Zealand as a pristine locale glittering with 100 per cent pure paua shell iridescence is treated with scepticism and irony (that iridescence is likely to be car exhaust) – a far cry from the optimism of yesteryear, as a recently-published treasure trove of graphic designs produced before 1960 reveals.

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Precarious Looking

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Kathryn Mitchell
Van der Velden: Otira, by Peter Vangioni  and Dieuwertje Dekkers (Christchurch Art Gallery, 2011), 96 pp. $49.99.
 
Serendipitously, shortly after receiving the review copy of the Christchurch Art Gallery’s Van der Velden Otira catalogue (authored by Peter Vangioni  and Dieuwertje Dekkers), I made the trip from Christchurch through Otira to Greymouth on the Transalpine train. A frequent visitor to the Dunedin Public Art Gallery as a child, van der Velden’s A Waterfall in the Otira Gorge, oil on canvas, 1891, was one of my favourite memories; it drew me in to its immense expanse demonstrating painting’s ability to be experienced rather than just looked at. In front of this work, I was more than a mere visitor to a cultural institution: I was standing somewhat fearfully in the path of an uncontrollable torrent of rushing white water descending from dark, jagged rocks tossed haphazardly into its path with the passage of time. Its thick, wild brush strokes and dense layering of oil paint accentuated its dark, rugged and dangerous nature.     [Read more…]

The Anthropocene Era

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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

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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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