art and photography

Clarity, the Sky Says

May 1, 2016 Leave a Comment

Jenny Powell

Boundaries, People and Places of Central Otago, by Brian Turner (Penguin Random House NZ, 2015), 351 pp., $45

Travelling into Turner territory is invariably breath-taking and thought-provoking. This new collection of prose, poetry and Steve Calveley’s photography does not disappoint, but these qualities are merely the surface shimmer on the long reach of a Central Otago river. Boundaries is an intense focus on the essence of place. In his introduction Turner raises considerations about how and why we end up in certain places and how we ‘look after’ them. While our sense of identity and belonging is frequently connected to ‘our place’, we don’t all have the freedom to choose where we want to be. This book, as Turner advises, is about making the best of what we’re faced with. [Read more…]

Blood and Guts in Wartime

April 14, 2016 Leave a Comment

David Eggleton

The Penguin Book of New Zealand War Writing, edited by Harry Ricketts and Gavin McLean (Penguin Random House, 2015), 602 pp., $65; Calls to Arms: New Zealand society and commitment to the Great War by Steven Loveridge (Victoria University Press, 2014), 336 pp., $40; How We Remember: New Zealanders and the First World War, edited by Charles Ferrall and Harry Ricketts (Victoria University Press, 2014), 289 pp., $40; The Anzacs: An inside view of New Zealanders at Gallipoli: Photographs from the Auckland War Museum, with essays by Damien Fenton and Shaun Higgins (Penguin Random House, 2015), 244 pp., $45; The Prison Diary of A.C. Barrington: Dissent and conformity in Wartime New Zealand by John Pratt (Otago University Press, 2016), 204 pp., $39.95

Our overfamiliarity with the bromides – war is futile, war is hell, every war is like every other war, no soldier returns the same from the battlefield – means it’s difficult for the genre of war literature to make it new, or to be pertinent as literature to anyone beyond the specialist or the obsessive. The Penguin Book of New Zealand War Writing is an anthology that gets around this to a certain extent by concentrating on one particular truism and using that as a thematic thread: namely, war is the forge of national identity. The selections, chosen by literary historian Harry Ricketts and cultural historian Gavin McLean, are mostly crisply edited and tightly focused. Theirs is a hefty tome: a semi-chronological echo chamber of war stories, reportage, reminiscences, documentation and latter-day analysis covering nearly 400 years. It is a book aimed at the general reader, with brief endnotes, a basic bibliography and a serviceable index. [Read more…]

Flows of Energy

March 1, 2016 Leave a Comment

Melinda Johnston

The Dharma Punks by Ant Sang (Earth’s End Publishing, 2014) 424 pp., $39.99; Sam Zabel and the Magic Pen by Dylan Horrocks (Victoria University Press, 2014) 208 pp., $35

Collectively, the publication in late 2014 of Dylan Horrocks’ latest graphic novel Sam Zabel and the Magic Pen and the re-publication of Ant Sang’s Dharma Punks signalled a key moment for cartooning in this country. To be fair, neither publication equals the breakthrough previously achieved when Hicksville received global acclaim and put New Zealand cartooning on the map, or when Dharma Punks, a modest local comic series, originally achieved its unlikely cult best-seller status. Nonetheless, these publications are indicative of the recent mainstreaming of the New Zealand comics industry, where glossier, slicker publications are now considered viable and are even taken ‘seriously’. [Read more…]

How to Take a Picture

December 9, 2015 Leave a Comment

David Eggleton

View from the Road: Exploring New Zealand from State Highway 1, by Arno Gasteiger, with an essay by Kennedy Warne (Penguin, 2014), 208 pp., $65; Te Atatu Me: Photographs of an urban New Zealand village, by John B. Turner, with an essay by Grant Cole (PhotoForum and Turner PhotoBooks, 2015), 176 pp., $60; Meet Me in the Square: Christchurch 1983–1987, by David Cook (Christchurch Art Gallery Te Puna o Waiwhetu, 2014), 180 pp., $49.95; Frozen, by Peter Black, with an essay by Andrew Johnston (Peter Black Photos, 2015), 68 pp., $130; Creamy Psychology: Yvonne Todd, with essays by Anthony Byrt, Justin Clements, Megan Dunn, Misha Kavka, Robert Leonard, Justin Paton, Claire Regnault and Yvonne Todd (Victoria University Press, 2014), 260 pp., $60; See What I Can See: New Zealand photography for the young and curious, by Gregory O’Brien (Auckland University Press, 2015), 112 pp., $34.99

Beginning with a sunshine-gilded empty street in the township of Bluff, and finishing in front of the lit-up lighthouse at Cape Reinga/Te Rerenga Wairua as darkness falls, the sequence of photographs by Arno Gasteiger in View from the Road: Exploring New Zealand from State Highway 1 traverses the 2047 kilometres of State Highway 1 in search of prospects, vistas, panoramas, landmarks. State Highway 1 is, Kennedy Warne argues in his introductory essay, ‘a road of history’, one offering ‘sites of memory’ and ‘a repository of stories’. Warne gives us some of the chronological history and a sense of the road’s heritage, but the stories are mainly implicit in Gasteiger’s distinctive and expansive images. [Read more…]

Ice Cream Dreams

November 1, 2015 Leave a Comment

Max Oettli

F4: In the Interval by Susan Jowsey, Marcus Williams, Jesse Williams & Mercy Williams (Rim Books, 2014), 96 pp., $25; An Urban Quest for Chlorophyll by Jennifer Gilliam & Dieneke Jansen (Rim Books, 2013), 80 pp., $30

Seldom have I received a parcel with more disparate contents than that containing the two books I am reviewing here. They have one common thing: their imprint from Haru Sameshina’s Rim Press, and I suppose I could go on about this delightful do-it-yourself publishing venture, and Haru’s assured way of putting books together and making them meaningful without getting too stuck in a house style.

Both works smell of art; and a kind of defence/deference mechanism clicks in with this cynical reader, a linguistic and cultural retro-referencing which allows me to scuttle back into my comfort zone and peep out – stick out my feelers to see whether the beast bites. F4: In the Interval affirms the values of Haru’s Rim Press, assuring a consistent typographical approach, careful paper choices, and pictures imbued either with deep sadness or with a kind of weird bathos.

Then, I immediately summon up the personal reference that ‘F4’ has for me. It denotes a French state-subsidised apartment designed for a 4-person family unit: 2 bedrooms, separate kitchen and living room, minimum surface of 90 square metres. It fits, with Marcus Williams, Susan Jowsey and the two kids, now earnest adolescents, thrown together in a number of spaces and configurations – essentially acting or inter-acting out rôles. [Read more…]