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Landfall Review Online: Aotearoa New Zealand books in review

The Eye and Hand in Action

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Jodie Dalgleish
Richard Parker: Objectspace Masters of Craft, by Richard Fahey (Objectspace, Auckland, 2010), 119 pp., $35.00.

Together with curator and author Richard Fahey and photographer Haru Sameshima, Auckland’s Objectspace gallery has produced a thoughtful and generously illustrated exhibition publication and monograph on the distinctive work of Richard Parker. As Objectspace Director Philip Clarke states in his Foreword, this publication is intended to position Parker as a Master of Craft in the first of what, it is hoped, will be a series of small books telling the stories of New Zealand’s master makers. In doing so, it is also intended to confirm the gallery’s dedication to the artful and craft-centric practice and process of object-making in this country. Richard Parker: Objectspace Masters of Craft augurs well on both counts. This reader’s only reservation is its slightly awkward structure that distributes similar information on Parker’s art across three chapters and an Afterword, in a manner that diffuses a full understanding of the richness of the artist’s craft. 


 Although craft has for centuries been a central part of human life, both its international and national history, and a theory of what it is and why it is important, has been largely neglected. It was only in 1997, for example, that American theorist Howard Risatti published an inaugural and internationally relevant theory of craft. Responding to this absence at a local level, Fahey begins his essay with an attempt to summarise a history of craft in New Zealand. In his first chapter entitled ‘The background to a practice: Positioning craft’, Fahey explains that Parker was initially swept up by a national obsession for utilitarian and faux-primitive pottery, before striking out in his search for objects that were more personal and alive.
Fahey’s outline is useful and necessary, but he does not mention his subject, Richard Parker, until he is four pages into his first chapter. Beginning with a telling quote from the artist, he goes on to discuss Parker’s fascination with craft’s physiological effect. Specifically, he introduces the artist’s notion of a natural ‘peripheral vision’– one that engages the eye and mind in an instinctive search for a variety of line and form – and links this to the historical concept of the restorative capacity of craft. Thus it can be said – with deference to Risatti’s view of the essential importance of contemporary craft – that Parker’s work is informed by a historically charged understanding of the life-supporting function of hand-made craft objects, and of how that function provides a dynamic link to the natural world today. For, as Fahey eventually explains, Parker’s lively pots seem to talk, walk, hustle and dance on the periphery of the uniform and ordinary, and in their liveliness remain open to reinvestigation and rediscovery.
The second chapter, ‘The precarious art of nonchalance: Positioning the ceramics’, goes into more detail and provides a richer discussion of Parker’s works and oeuvre. Fahey begins with a discussion of William Hogarth’s view of beauty and his notion of the serpentine line, which Parker could be said to have discovered in his own practice of drawing a wire through a block of inert clay. From there, the author more fully describes the physiological impact of Parker’s pots. Significantly, Fahey states that Parker’s vases are animated and petition us to become animated: they are optimistic, celebratory objects.
Fahey begins the next part of his second chapter with an exposition on the way in which Parker’s works acknowledge the importance of a vessel’s function, even while they flirt with  subversion of that practical use. As the author explains it, the artist’s works deny the courteous decorousness of a vase’s traditional form, and consequently deceive us about their interior volume through their studied and emphatic demonstrations of ornament and decoration. For, as the author points out in summary, it is the three-dimensional movement of Parker’s vessels that makes them what they are: the pointing of their toes, the lift of their chins, the upholding of their arms, the swing of their feral hips – their particular life, which he has explored and played around with over years with a singular intensity.
Finishing his chapter with an outline of the formal quirks – the decorative glazing and calligraphic syntax – of the artist’s oeuvre, Fahey seeks to further substantiate his central contention that the artist’s mastery is in his light touch, the deftness of his myriad and subtle variations on a theme, his ‘art of nonchalance’. Although use of the word ‘nonchalance’ grated against the idea of mastery for this reader, Fahey’s contention is persuasively illustrated by Sameshima’s photographs, which are well-spaced throughout the chapter and beyond. Most effectively, two central images lay out a double-page spread of vase alongside vase and aperture alongside aperture. Without fail, Sameshima’s carefully lit and composed photographs capture the characterful life of each work, the conversations implied between them, and the delightful intricacies of their surface.
Fahey’s third chapter, ‘Serendipity & single-mindedness: Positioning the man’, outlines the family upbringing and serendipitous series of events and decisions that led Parker to build his first kiln on a rented property in Northland in the late 1970s. Through this narrative, the author appropriately emphasises the hand-led experiments of the artist and his determination to make a particular kind of pot. At the same time, he recognises the importance of the support of Parker’s immediate family and the encouragement of other artists. Following this, Fahey makes it clear that this ceramicist has paid his dues and established his credentials. He goes on to substantiate his claim that Parker is now well known within the local and international ceramic fraternity as an artist with a distinctive point of view.
An ‘Afterword’ closes Fahey’s extended essay by offering a final exploration of Parker’s art. Entitled ‘Positioning the artist’, it’s a summary in which the author returns to Parker’s special world of perception: his mission to capture and share the dynamics of an inquisitive attention that defies predictability, his pursuit of a deep sensory appreciation of natural variety in the simplest of decorative rhythms. Drawing further on the author’s commentary, I add my own conclusion: that Parker’s pots perform the role of bringing human memory into the present for the constant pleasure of discovering the potential of the human eye and hand in action.

JODIE DALGLEISH is a curator, critic and author currently living in Wellington. She is a regular contributor to online art journal EyeContact, and she has a Masters of Creative Writing from AUT University.

The Lightness of Being Bill Culbert

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David Eggleton
Bill Culbert: Making Light Work, by Ian Wedde (Auckland University Press, hardback, illustrated, 272 pp., $99.99.


Have lightbulb, will travel. Sculptor Bill Culbert embodies the expatriate artist condition. He left New Zealand in 1957 at the age of 21 to attend the Royal College of Art in London and has lived overseas ever since. However, after he first returned to these islands from Europe in 1978 to take up a short term artist-in-residency at the University of Canterbury, he has been to-ing and fro-ing between northern and southern hemispheres on a regular basis. And, as Ian Wedde tells us in Bill Culbert: Making Light Work, Culbert ‘travels light’ — often, apart from a carry-on bag, his sole piece of luggage is a hard-shell Samsonite suitcase ‘containing fluorescent tubes . . . or hard-to-find fixtures and bulbs.’ It’s a hold-all for odds and ends that might be useful for helping set up an artwork or an installation that involves lighting.

            But there’s lighting and there’s lighting. Bill Culbert is a lighting specialist of another order. He uses light in all its manifestations — ‘light-marks in space, light-in-light, light in darkness, night light, daylight’ as a kind of substance, something to sculpt with, something to paint with. As Ian Wedde observes, light enables Culbert to ‘brush’ objects and atmospheres into a state of aesthetic clarity. The way this artist salvages ordinary light playing over ordinary things, and brings it to our attention; and his devotion to light’s radiance, its immanence, seems almost priestly, like that of some old-time Platonist philosopher who sought to show the world is really crystal, a sphere through which light shines.
            Wedde’s thorough-going treatment unpacks, as it were, Culbert’s battered suitcase of ‘barely revealed’ presentations and perceptions, and through a series of nuanced analyses gives a sense of the multitude of fine discriminations involved in creating any given Culbert piece, whether created by the artist alone or in collaboration. Profusely illustrated, handsomely presented, and including an extensive bibliography, this monograph is the first major study of Bill Culbert’s oeuvre. Prior to its publication, the full extent of Culbert’s range and diversity of projects hadn’t been obvious in this country. The narrative aligns him with the expatriate careers of Frances Hodgkins and Len Lye, and also serves to reveal just how highly regarded he is elsewhere, and just how much critical response he has generated, particularly in France, but also in the UK and Germany.
            One aspect Wedde stresses is Culbert’s methodology as a product of cultural exchange. In creating, or curating, this interplay of Culbert as the epitome of the well-travelled international Modernist, yet also quintessentially Kiwi in his understated, studiously casual approach, Wedde begins at the beginning, covering Culbert’s early years (a 1930s childhood in Port Chalmers, exposure to post-War progressive art education at Hutt Valley High School, an honours degree in painting from Canterbury University’s Art School) in order to give us a sure sense of the artist’s formative factors as the maker of a particular kind of artwork.
            At heart, Culbert is a conceptualist, and his conceptual rigour manifests itself in his ongoing economy of means with its paradoxical richness of reference — hence his admirable adaptability and exemplary energy. Raiding rubbish dumps for discarded plastic containers, bottles, and other faded, semi-invisible objects, he injects them with light, and thus illuminated they become beautiful objects for contemplation. Yet if Culbert appears dedicated to resurrecting the simple, the humble, and commemorating the once-functional, he’s also playful with it, a subscriber to the ‘industrial optimism’ of Laszlo Moholy-Nagy, along with the subversiveness of other early Modernist artists, such as Marcel Duchamp, Man Ray, Francis Picabia, and, latterly, Jean Tinguely.
            Since 1961 Bill Culbert and family have been based in the Vaucluse region of Provence in the south of France, and, enlivening the French connection with the help of the tramp-like suitcase Culbert lugs hither and yon, Wedde shows how the spirit of  Kiwi ingenuity finds a parallel in French peasant resourcefulness, so that Culbert’s perceptiveness is able to link the two. So, for example, when he came back to Christchurch in 1978, he travelled over to the West Coast and the rural vernacular architecture — the left-over frontier mentality — he discovered there provided validation for the repurposed found objects he was working with in Europe.
            Wedde chronicles, too, the metamorphosis from ‘William Culbert’, the art school student of the 1950s who painted portraits and still-lifes employing the framework of Cubism,  to the ‘Bill Culbert’ of the 1960s, eye-witness to Arte Povera, Op Art and the general mood of Sixties experimentation, who had begun to rethink the presentation of the properties of surface, colour, light. Working with a camera and making ‘photo-works’ presented a way of getting beyond painting’s ‘edge limitation’, while light, which ‘filled space and went through holes’ offered something to work with. Culbert became someone who cultivated light like a primary producer, making it sprout out of sculptural devices, and harvesting its reflections and projections.
            And beyond stark formalism, the ‘bare bones’ of fluorescent tube or lightbulb, Culbert sought to make an art that included interaction with people, either individually as they approached, circled or were enveloped by light-making devices, or collectively as they grasped the idea of a ‘convivial space’, a congenial and relaxed environment in which they ‘shared’ the vignette of the artwork or installation. To an extent this seems like wishful utopianism on the part of both the artist and his explicator, as actually art of this kind is something of a closed shop, a narrow regard, a rite of initiation.
            Wedde, though, also discourses on his own relationship with and connection to the artist, and his anecdotes of their interactions do perhaps stand in for the eloquent silences Culbert’s works in situ essentially offer. Elaborating on the lightness of being Bill Culbert, Wedde describes his experience of working as a facilitator on the Ralph Hotere–Bill Culbert collaborative piece ‘Void’ (2006) — essentially just two black flat rubber discs, one on the floor, one on the ceiling — permanently installed at the Museum of New Zealand Te Papa Tongarewa and providing an object lesson in the art of paradox from two masters of the less-is-more school: ‘through the brash busy core of the building a shaft of emptiness has been installed’, but rather than being an emblem of negative space this shaft is a site of optimism, an exhilarating centre. Amidst the business of its making Wedde drafted a publicity document suggesting that this artwork ‘reached heavenward’; Culbert demurred suggesting it did not, rather it reached ‘up’. His artworks, he was saying, are not intended to be ‘literary’ or ‘metaphorical’ or even ‘symbolic’; they simply are what they are: simple and honest perceptions of the physical properties of matter, and that clear-sighted minimalism is magic enough.
            The cover of the book shows a photo-work of what has become, in a number of variants, a classic Culbert image. Sunlight shines through a bistro glass of red wine, and the literal shadow it makes forms the outline of an electric lightbulb. It is a moment of stopped time, a heliograph, the light of the sun caught as the earth revolves.

DAVID EGGLETON is the editor of Landfall and Landfall Review Online.

Worlds Within

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Jamie Hanton
A Micronaut in the Wide World: the Imaginative Life and Times of Graham Percy, by Gregory O’Brien, (Auckland University Press, 2011), 182 pp., $59.99.

Back and Beyond: New Zealand Painting for the Young and Curious, by Gregory O’Brien, (Auckland University Press, 2008), 104 pp., $34.99

Imagination, and all its mighty power, is at the centre of both of these recent Gregory O’Brien publications. It is no coincidence that both titles have the eyes and minds of children at their core, yet in both cases O’Brien’s writing elevates imagination beyond its usual youthful collocation. Back and Beyond is written, as the title suggests, for more innocent art readers, while Micronaut is a biography of New Zealand expatriate artist and children’s illustrator Graham Percy.
            The challenges inherent in writing art books for children are manifold. It’s easy to patronise, and just as easy to aim too low and miss anything worth saying. O’Brien addresses this problem in both the structure and style of Back and Beyond. Using the first person, O’Brien adopts a considered conversational tone to describe many of the paintings. While shunned in some circles, there is something to be said for the well-timed invocation of the personal in art historical discourse. If gallery wall texts were written from the point of view of an individual and situated as but one voice in a multitude of voices there would necessarily be more room for disagreement and for the initiation of conversations so vital in any pedagogic scenario.
            Similarly, by presenting a collection of painters’ profiles and selected works under loosely thematic titles, each of which takes up two pages, Back and Beyond remains open for narrative interpretation. The focus on individual painters operating within particular social and historical contexts presents a personal, and therefore accessible, account of painting in New Zealand. This structure allows the book to be dipped into and threaded together in its varying ways rather than read through and unconsciously digested.
            The scattered format also ties in with O’Brien’s framing of New Zealand painting as being characterised by ‘poozling’ and journeying. ‘Poozling’ – according to O’Brien – is a slang word native to Aotearoa that means the salvaging and collecting of things to use in other places – seems to be a child-friendly version of appropriation. Raising this idea early in the book, O’Brien cleverly introduces painting’s often self-referential nature, as well as establishing a framework for negotiating cultural overlaps and intersections. He touches on colonial and post-colonial politics, but in the main explores the folksier side of New Zealand painting, focusing on narrative veins of Maori myth and on the arrival and consequent development of European representational and figurative painting. Back and Beyond is not a history of New Zealand painting, and it does not claim to be; but more attention to abstraction and its proponents would have been, rewarding strategy for broadening understanding.
            However, its rigour as an instructive text is confirmed by the inclusion of a comprehensive biographical section, along with a recommended reading list for many of the artists featured. An engaging activity page is also included; this challenges children to create their own version of Frances Hodgkins’ ‘Cherished Things’ — all part of O’Brien’s worthwhile attempt to coax the imaginative faculty forth in his readers with the hope of altering their aesthetic approach to the everyday, and thus cultivating a more alert way of seeing amongst the young and curious.
            The act of drawing as a method for perceiving one world and creating entire other worlds is the basis for O’Brien’s biography of Graham Percy. Percy attended Elam and after graduating was a constant and exceptional contributor to the New Zealand School Journal, as well as an accomplished graphic designer who worked on book designs with writer Bruce Mason and on exhibition catalogues for Colin McCahon and the Ikon gallery artists. In 1964, Percy moved to London to take up a Queen Elizabeth scholarship at the Royal College of Art.
            In A Micronaut in the Wide World O’Brien uses Percy’s Le Corbusier-esque townhouse in Wimbledon and its contents as a metaphor for Percy’s immersive love of building worlds within worlds, of exploring life’s minute details. O’Brien wrote the book in Percy’s home in the months immediately following his death in 2008, surrounded by the objects and art that Percy and wife Mari Mahr cherished. The loosely chronological account is heavily influenced by O’Brien’s interactions with Percy’s drawings and paraphernalia – as if O’Brien is conversing with Percy via these items. The book, divided into mini-chapters, takes the form of a modernist work of literature, which one feels Percy, a lover of the gently surreal, would have appreciated.
            Approximately half of the book is devoted to Percy’s independent work created after the millennium, a decision that allows greater exploration of his formative experiences and unique inclinations as an artist. Rather than dwelling on Percy as a commissions-based illustrator, O’Brien argues an extremely convincing case for greater attention to be paid towards later bodies of work that include: ‘Arthouse’, ‘Imagined Histories’, ‘the Kiwi’, and ‘Alchemical Allotment’. These nuanced and intelligent series form the majority of the current touring exhibition curated by O’Brien. The inclusion of most of the plates means the book can easily stand alone as a comprehensive visual record of Percy’s career.
            More than an article of pure documentation, A Micronaut in the Wide World is steeped in genuine humour. O’Brien’s light touch reflects the artist’s sanguine nature, infusing many of Percy’s life’s moments with an optimistic levity: beginning with his upbringing in the town of Stratford – complete with its surreal Shakespearean aspirations – his work within the Hungarian animated film industry and even in the recollection of Percy’s manner of dealing with the medical problems that affected him — first his colour blindness, then his series of strokes later in life. The book is an affirmation of the value of drawing, of travel, and of course of the imagination. O’Brien’s description of Percy and Mahr’s art as a type that ‘has a rare capacity to accommodate innocence and wonder without excluding knowledge, history and intelligence’ could equally be applied to both Back and Beyond and A Micronaut in the Wide World. 

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JAMIE HANTON is a visual arts writer and curator hailing from Christchurch. He is currently the Director of The Blue Oyster Art Project Space in Dunedin.

Painted Words

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David Eggleton 
Towards a Promised Land: On the life and art of Colin McCahon, by Gordon H. Brown (Auckland University Press, 2010) hardback, colour plates and illustrations, 216 pp., $79.99


Evangelism takes strange forms. Arthur Stace, a former alcoholic who became a Christian, spent thirty-seven years chalking the word ‘Eternity’ in beautiful copperplate onto the pavements of Sydney before his death in 1967. Toss Woollaston’s uncle, Frank, was another eccentric evangelist. One of the illustrations in Gordon H. Brown’s

Towards a Promised Land: On the Life and Art of Colin McCahon is of Colin McCahon’s ‘A Painting for Uncle Frank’, a late work (1980) containing (written in white paint over a black background) a quotation from the New English Bible’s Book of Ecclesiastes, which includes the words ‘Those who refuse to hear the oracle speaking on earth find no escape.’ McCahon met Uncle Frank a number of times during the late 1930s and early 1940s at Toss Woollaston’s house in Motueka, and was fascinated by Uncle Frank’s ‘teaching aids’: his naïve paintings of simple Christian symbols, part of his itinerant preaching paraphernalia which he insisted on pinning to the walls of Toss Woollaston’s home whenever he was visiting, much to his nephew’s irritation.

            Uncle Frank’s visual texts, as Brown outlines, were just one influence on McCahon’s complex build-up to the 1954 creation of his first distinctive all-word paintings. There was also the example of speech balloons in cartoons, comics and advertising (most famously the lettering encased in a bubble shape on the Rinso soap flakes packet). And Brown quotes McCahon’s childhood visual epiphany of a commercial signwriter at work on the words HAIRDRESSER & TOBACCONIST on a shop window: ‘Painted gold and black on a stippled red ground, the lettering large and bold with shadows … I watched the work being done, and fell in love with signwriting.’
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Renaissance Man

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Andrew Paul Wood
Fantastica: The World of Leo Bensemann, Peter Simpson (Auckland University Press, 2011), 232 pp., $75.00

If you could physically sense an author’s passion and thoroughness, Peter Simpson’s books would glow like fresh bread. His timely and lavishly illustrated Fantastica: The World of Leo Bensemann positively radiates, and yet again shows Auckland University Press to be New Zealand’s pre-eminent art book publisher.
            Artist and illustrator Bensemann was the descendent of North German immigrants from Bruchhausen-Vilsen south of Bremen, settling at Moutere, and was born in Takaka in 1912. His family moved to Nelson in the early 1920s, and that dramatic karst landscape was to become a reoccurring feature in his rich oeuvre. The German influence was also strong, manifesting in a rich vein of Romanticism in his work, embracing Holbein and Dürer, and various Medieval, folk, and expressionist sources, to complement the vivid orientalism of his drawings and landscapes.

            Outside of Canterbury Bensemann has not been well known beyond the influential Ilam mafia and the occasional reproduction in magazines in the 1940s and 1950s, though his portraits were reproduced annually in the New Zealand Arts Year Books from 1946 until 1949, and during his lifetime one article in Landfall in 1953, and a memorial in Art New Zealand shortly after his death in 1986. Since then, there have been two publications by Bensemann’s daughter Caroline Otto and at least two significant exhibitions curated by Simpson.
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Light-sensitive

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David Eggleton
Artists @ Work: New Zealand Painters and Sculptors in the Studio, Richard Wolfe and Stephen Robinson (Penguin, 2010), 224 pp., $72.00

Developed from a concept initiated by photographer Stephen Robinson, this book documents the creative processes of twenty-four artists within their native habitats. The selected assortment ranges far and wide nationally, though only one Maori artist is included and there are no Polynesian artists, or indeed other non-Pakeha artists, while the media synchronicities which characterise the twenty-first century are signalled with the listing at the back of the book of relevant dealer gallery websites.
         Each artist is allocated a self-contained chapter within which writer Richard Wolfe asks sensible questions and elicits illuminating answers. This well-designed book shows us what goes on behind the white cube as it were, with artists for the most part offering succinct summaries of what they do as they wield the tools of their trade and knock out artworks in idiosyncratic spaces.
         John Reynolds suggests that the artist’s studio is ‘just the roof over the head of the bigger picture’, and gesturing around his newish studio located adjacent to his home states that ‘the studio is in the head and this is just a workspace.’ But if he argues for ‘a studio that functions as a machine’, other artists declare a more organic allegiance.

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