Landfall Review Online

New Zealand books in review

Dear Antarctica

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Science on Ice: Discovering the Secrets of Antarctica, by Veronika MedunaAlice Miller
Science on Ice: Discovering the Secrets of Antarctica, by Veronika Meduna (Auckland University Press, 2012), 225 pp., $59.99; These Rough Notes, by Bill Manhire, Anne Noble, Norman Meehan, and Hannah Griffin (Victoria University Press, 2012), 64 pp., $40.<

A Canadian band I once loved sang an unlikely song about an Antarctic explorer meeting Foucault in Paris. The explorer, having noted Foucault’s resemblance to Shackleton, concludes the meeting with the lines:

thank you for the flowers and the book by Derrida
but I must be getting back to dear Antarctica. 

This was my unlikely refrain as I kept returning to these two books, which approach dear Antarctica in very different ways – both trying to haul forth its expansive, freezing mass, its strange inhabitants, searing winds, and wild force of questions. [Read more…]

False Light

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Hanna Scott

The Evening Hours: Ben Cauchi, edited by Aaron Lister (Victoria University Press, with City Gallery Wellington, 2013), 125 pp., $60.

Ben Cauchi’s images are like a series of unanswered questions. That means that this monograph The Evening Hours: Ben Cauchi is perfectly timed. The exhibition at City Gallery, and the publication that coincides with it, come in the wake of an intensive period of artistic activity for Cauchi. It follows on from the Frances Hodgkins Fellowship at the University of Otago, the Rita Angus Fellowship in Wellington and the McCahon Residency in Auckland, as well as the 2012 residency at the Künstlerhaus Bethanian in Berlin. There is precious little catalogued work, and even less written about his practice. The biography points out, ‘this is his first monograph.’

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The Transparent Eyeball

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Max Oettli
Laurence Aberhart: Recent Taranaki Photographs, by Laurence Aberhart, with essays by Paul Brobbel, Peter Ireland and others, (Govett-Brewster Art Gallery, 2012), 69 pp., $33.
 
Flying up to Auckland from the South you can often see Mount Taranaki, and if it’s clear you see the amazing radial land-use pattern around it especially to the east where Hawera and Stratford lie. And down there, somewhere, plods Laurence Aberhart, setting up his gigantic camera, his images essentially explorations of the idea that photography is inevitably the past, the passé composé after the shutter has clicked.
            In one introductory photo in the catalogue, we see an anonymous gallery with  pristinely framed prints on immaculate walls, and a polished white floor. Three people are looking intently at the eye-level pictures.  In the foreground a shaggy-maned man is contemplating a war memorial photo.  Another figure, a statuesque blonde woman, is leaning slightly into a picture in the back corner; a third figure in a contraposto attitude is closely studying the mysterious tryptich of the distant mountain. Intent, motionless silent. Their viewing distance is identical: a kind of ritual worship.

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Subjective, Not Comprehensive

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Aindriu MacFehin
Artspace 25 : Every Cloud Has a Silver Lining, edited by Caterina Riva, with texts by Tobias Berger, Chris Kraus and others, (Artspace Auckland, 2012), 160 pp., $ 40.
           
Art books are a mystery. Art itself is mysterious, not just because it is often better understood in retrospect but more because in order to be art, art must fail. Boris Groys pointed out that if the surrealists’ automatic writing had resulted in a psychological improvement for the artist, it would have been an interesting byproduct of the work. But if it was intended to heal the psyche of the artist and succeeded, it wouldn’t have been art, it would have been psychoanalysis. It is not so much that art fails, but that the criteria for success are absent.[1] Artspace 25: Every Cloud Has A Silver Lining, is an art book.  As a rule, art books don’t have a text that you read from cover to cover and they often have images that seem unrelated to the text. They obey design principles, but their readers have often not studied design. It can be seen that art books have an aesthetic that they adhere to, but what that is that aesthetic and how is it arrived at? What are the rules? What are the criteria for success in a book like this? How do we understand them, or find a way into them? I spoke to the three people who had had most to do with the construction of Artspace 25: Every Cloud Has A Silver Lining.
            Caterina Riva is the director and curator of Artspace, a non-collecting, non-commercial organization for contemporary art in New Zealand Aotearoa. Caterina was the main decision maker for the content of the book, and also author of the text on the cover. For Caterina, an important aspect for this publication was that it was not an endpoint: ‘Artspace 25 is not an encapsulation of 25 years in a handy package and that is the end of that. It is a subjective take on the research that I carried out with the then Artspace intern Arron Santry in the archives. It is not just what we decided to show or make available, but also an attempt to let the Artspace organization speak for itself, rather than privileging mine or Arron’s, or anyone else’s voice.’

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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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