art and photography

In Counterpoint to the Music of Time

October 2, 2018 Leave a Comment

Max Oettli

Aberhart Starts Here by Lara Strongman with Laurence Aberhart (Christchurch Art Gallery, 2018), 136 pp., $39.99

This catalogue is based on the Christchurch Art Gallery show of Aberhart’s early work (1975 to 1983 with one picture from 1986), from when he was living in Lyttelton and later working as an instructor at the University of Canterbury School of Fine Art at Ilam.

My initial thought was to wonder: have we got to a point when everything that can be written about Laurence Aberhart has been written? Can we squeeze one more review out of this gigantic stack of beautiful work that he has shored up against the crumbling ruins of our civilisation? [Read more…]

A Dynamic Optimism

September 1, 2018 Leave a Comment

Peter Shand

Gordon Walters: New vision edited by Lucy Hammonds, Laurence Simmons and Julia Waite (Auckland Art Gallery Toi o Tāmaki & Dunedin Public Art Gallery, 2017), 244 pp., $79

The title of Gordon Walters: New vision presents its own wero. Building from Walters’ innovating position within New Zealand art, the title points to the writers’ collective aim of presenting new ways of engaging with and thinking about his work. Hence their challenge to realise novel propositions for geometric abstraction, for ambitious local art practices, for cross-cultural appropriation and/or for histories of modernism. This is in the context of an artist who enjoys a sound if moderate bibliography, with notable contributions from Michael Dunn and, in particular, the late Francis Pound. This handsome addition to that record accompanies a touring retrospective exhibition curated by three of the book’s essayists: Lucy Hammonds, Laurence Simmons and Julia Waite. [Read more…]

Yielding Up Riches

December 1, 2017 Leave a Comment

Andrew Paul Wood

Undreamed Of … 50 years of the Frances Hodgkins Fellowship by Priscilla Pitts and Andrea Hotere (Otago University Press, 2017), 224 pp., $59.95

It’s tough being an artist in Aotearoa – it doesn’t exactly come with the flotilla of perks and acknowledgements one might find in countries less suspicious of culture. Even so, there is a lot more in the way of laurels available now than there was back when the Frances Hodgkins Fellowship was the only one. Established at the University of Otago in 1966 through the efforts of Charles Brasch (1909–1973), and named after the nation’s most famous expatriate artist, it has long been one of the most prestigious awards for a New Zealand artist, with the financial freedom of a lecturer’s salary, a studio to work in, and some of the most extraordinary cultural resources in the country. Unlike its sister fellowships, the Burns (writing) and the Mozart (music), the Hodgkins is something of an outlier in that the university has no art school; that’s the province of Otago Polytechnic – ‘Olam’ to Elam and Ilam – and a very fine producer of talent. [Read more…]

Hammer and Sickle, Yeah!

August 1, 2017 Leave a Comment

Max Oettli

Seen in China 1956 by Tom Hutchins, edited by John B. Turner (Turner Photo Books in collaboration with Photo Forum as Photoforum issue 86, 2016), 124 pp., $25; The Shops by Steve Braunias and Peter Black (Luncheon Sausage Press Books/Photo Forum, 2016), 62 pp., $40

What did I know about China in 1956? I was nine at the time, a smart-arsed Swiss-German kid, the runt in a family of four. We had a German Jugend book I’d devoured, as I devoured everything readable in our house, a kind of companion volume to Harrer’s Seven Years in Tibet I suppose, of a German’s experience of living in China for 30 years. The book was probably from a time when Germany was a somewhat tarnished currency (as was Harrer’s Tibet book, incidentally), but this did not stop me reading it avidly. There were countless millions of Chinese, apparently; they drank tea, did gruesome things to women’s feet and had rather fixed dietary habits and somewhat rudimentary plumbing, which gave them and their whole country a distinctive smell, to put it mildly. Their governance was based on a very hierarchic Confucian order and their punishment of criminals was gruesome. [Read more…]

Have I Got Time to Look at This?

October 1, 2016 Leave a Comment

Max Oettli

A Beautiful Hesitation by Fiona Pardington, with Kriselle Baker and Aaron Lister and others (Victoria University Press, 2016), 264 pp., $70

Have I got time to look at this? Books of pictures always seem to have a time signature built into them, and from that point of view Fiona Pardington’s A Beautiful Hesitation is a very long book. The ‘score’ is clearly Adagio. You have to give it the time to unfold, to enable you to engage with at least some of the layers of meaning and beauty it contains. A Beautiful Hesitation has, for me, a whole weave of significations; it must be approached slowly and with respect. There is no quick spasm of ecstasy here; we’re in for the long haul.

Peter Ireland remarks in a slightly bitchy review of the accompanying exhibition on the EyeContact website that it is unusual and possibly dangerous to do mid-career survey exhibitions, feeling that they can ‘suddenly clarify nagging doubts about an artist’s general approach, and begin to settle questions about the depth of the philosophic and conceptual claims made for their work’. Seems a good idea to me here, actually, as it does mark a kind of mid-career milestone in this artist’s chequered and varied output. As for the book, sumptuous and well made it certainly is, with immaculate reproductions, good editorial calls, and an important typographic contribution by the artist’s brother (and also a photographer) Neil Pardington. [Read more…]