Landfall

Landfall Review Online: Aotearoa New Zealand books in review

Helter-skelter

Leave a Comment

Jamie Hanton
The Aotearoa Digital Arts Reader, edited by Stella Brennan and Su Ballard, (Aotearoa Digital Arts and Clouds, 2008) 240 pp., $60.00.

The Landfall Online Review seems like an appropriate place to review The Aotearoa Digital Arts Reader; an opportunity to consider the digital lay of the land from within. It is also a chance to touch on the critical realm of art online – and the factors that affect the discussion and dialogue that surround current commentary. Now readers have a chance to disseminate this review, and respond to it if they choose, on Facebook, Twitter, email, or on their blog. Yet, Landfall still exists in its printed format. And it has valid reasons to, just as there are valid reasons for the Digital Arts Reader to exist in print form. Published nearly two years ago, the book is now inevitably showing its age, but despite this it remains an extremely valuable publication in the national discourse. It is this messy crossover between media and formats that characterises the time and place that we occupy and it is these tensions that are played out frequently in The Reader. 

            Aotearoa Digital Arts Network is New Zealand’s only digital arts network and has its origins in the website/message board of the organisation where members discuss projects, opportunities and issues. Members herald the site as a crucial point of connection between New Zealand artists practising in digital media within the country and outside of it. The Reader is representative of the diverse membership of practitioners and is comprehensive, inclusive and reflects the multifaceted, interdisciplinary nature of digital arts in Aotearoa.
              The Reader contains a variety of theoretical analyses, case studies, and broader views of practice. At times some of the articles read like timelines — listing name after name and work after work — this is especially true of some of the accounts of residencies which seem to be exercises in documentation for its own sake. Those pieces that strive to provide historical surveys do so admirably: Andrew Clifford’s ‘Interdisciplinary Moments: A History in Glimpses’, and Su Ballard’s piece on sound and noise art, both cover the necessary areas of practice, but also touch on lesser-known moments. Clifford and Ballard’s wide coverage and historical contextualisation of a number of themes that run throughout The Reader means that these pieces would serve better towards the beginning of the book where they would be able to establish a chronology.
            Instead, and arguably just as usefully, the reader begins with an exploration of questions of definition: Caroline McCaw examines how relevant the terms ‘new media’ and ‘digital media’ are currently and will be in the near future – her point, lucidly made, is that the modes of production, reception and consumption are still shifting and that flux is innately part of the media in question. While McCaw focuses on dynamism, Douglas Bagnall’s concise history of the concepts and moments that define digital in relation to analogue is satisfyingly concrete. It is an article that should be required reading for art students of all disciplines.  
            In the final article of the book, ‘Internet; Environment’, Julian Priest poetically captures the tangle — or tango — between the material world and the digital realm. By viscerally illustrating the obvious connections between our physical actions and the creation and maintenance of the World Wide Web, the standardised dualist conception is broken down to the unavoidable reality that it is all part of our physical environment — and that, crucially, they cannot be separated. It is a well-chosen article to end the book as it completes the circle established by Sally Jane Norman’s Foreword that begins by looking at the digital arts in a local, culturally specific context. Norman outlines the desire of artists in Aotearoa to express a rootedness in whenua — so that politics of place never disappear — and while increasing digitisation builds cyber-bridges so as to conquer the tyranny of distance, there is no escaping the here-ness of here. A number of authors develop this point further, exploring the connection between Maori culture and tradition, and the digital world.            
             Maree Mills’ piece ‘Contemporary Maori Women’s New Media Art Practice’ draws links between oral culture and digital media, citing their phenomenological similarities. Janine Randerson and Danny Butt also note corresponding patterns of information transmission across digital technology, Randerson drawing particular attention to the dislocated intermediary site of Rachel Rakena’s Rerehiko.
            While many of the writers bask in the fact that digital is a transient, often ephemeral medium, Lissa Mitchell grapples with the very real issues that work of this kind raises for museums and other arts institutions in terms of conservation and maintenance. Artists are now more involved than ever in the ongoing updating and archiving of their digital work. Stella Brennan and Steven Cleland further this conversation in their article ‘Onsite and Online’, which details the roles contemporary galleries have played in producing internet-based work.
            These articles highlight the role of the audience and provide a reminder that digital work, while stimulated locally, has the potential to reach an international and diasporic audience and that this audience can network and be collaborative. In ‘Open Interactions’ Karl D.D. Willis analyses the concept of interactivity and presents a quasi-manifesto for those wishing to create or display work that relies on audience interaction. He references MIT’s definition of interaction which states that it should be in the form of a conversation rather than be a lecture, and notes that quality interactions produce highly participatory creative experiences. The article is a tonic to the last two decades, where ‘interactivity’ became a buzzword for institutions that looked for an easy way to increase audience numbers. Mitchell, Brennan and Cleland and Willis all contribute to the value of The Reader as an excellent point of departure for good practice in the digital field. 
            The sheer amount of work and range of practices covered is extremely impressive: the publication certainly lives up to its ‘Reader’ tag. Su Ballard and Stella Brennan have been thorough with their selections, covering all the nuances of digital visual art, as well as theatre and performance art; we are given personal glimpses into the practices of Nathan Pohio, Julian Oliver and Helen Varley Jamieson, to name just a few. There is also a great array of colour images that illustrate the articles, as well as featuring on artists’ pageworks.
            However it does seem to me that the large amount of miscellaneous information in The Reader  — which contains 34 articles in total — could benefit from a restructuring, possibly using thematised chapters. At present its trove of knowledge resembles the helter-skelter form of the World Wide Web. It would be wonderful to see a second edition of The Aotearoa Digital Arts Reader that builds on the very high quality of the first, and provides updates of the work that members of ADA have been doing over the last three years.

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

Late and Early

Leave a Comment

Peter Entwisle                                                 
Mary Kisler, Angels & Aristocrats Early European Art in New Zealand Public Collections, (Random House, 2010), 399 pp., $74.99.

Angels & Aristocrats is a landmark, a useful reference, and one can simply enjoy its fine illustrations – though it has limitations and flaws. There has been very little published about the old European art in New Zealand public collections, so it was good to hear of Mary Kisler’s project when it was in preparation. 
            Peter Tomory and Robert Gaston’s Summary Catalogue European Paintings Before 1800 in Australian and New Zealand Public Collections, which came out in 1989, is the only other book-length study to cover the ground, or much of it, because unlike Kisler, the authors restricted themselves to paintings. Moreover, within its narrower compass, Tomory and Gaston’s review was not comprehensive. For example it didn’t include the Dunedin Public Art Gallery’s Madonna and Child by Zanobi Machiavelli (1418–79), a fairly glaring omission considering the significance of the work. And Tomory and Gaston scarcely discuss questions of attribution or identity, which are numerous in this field and often contentious. By contrast, Ms Kisler does venture into those matters, so her scope is potentially more useful.
            There are a few other sources people can use to background Ms Kisler’s efforts. There is my Treasures of the Dunedin Public Art Gallery, which came out in 1990, and Beloved: Works from the Dunedin Public Art Gallery, with thirty contributors, which was published in 2009. Each of these covers some of the DPAG’s European old master works, and from them it is possible to see that some attributions have changed, as well as the identifications of some subjects. Similarly, there is the Auckland Art Gallery’s summary catalogue of its holdings, which included a number of its European old masters.
            For the purposes of her study, Ms Kisler looked at the collections of the public galleries in Auckland, Whanganui, Christchurch and Dunedin, and at the collection held in the national museum, Te Papa in Wellington. Such a survey covers the great majority of European old master paintings in public ownership in New Zealand, as well as the many prints and other works on paper, and the rather scant holdings we have of related sculpture. Some things have escaped her net, such as the Flemish statuette and the Della Robbia Madonna in the Otago Museum. But the demands of making a study like Ms Kisler’s are considerable, and searching around institutions not wholly or overtly devoted to art may have seemed too laborious for the likely returns.
            One significant resource of publicly owned old European art she has not reviewed is this country’s holdings of illuminated medieval manuscripts, concentrated in a few public libraries — mostly in Auckland and Dunedin. This too may be forgiven because it was covered well, at least descriptively, in a catalogue published by Vera Vines, Margaret Mannion and Chris de Hamel in 1989. More regrettably, she hasn’t attempted to review the Classical holdings, mostly figured ceramics, in the Fels and Logie collections of the Otago and Canterbury museums, the latter sadly damaged in the September earthquake last year.
            We also need to keep in mind that Ms Kisler’s book is not really so widely encompassing as its subtitle suggests. Perhaps its ‘early’ is the New Zealand vernacular for ‘old’? However that may be, her horizon is actually late. European art has been around since at least the days of Mycenae and Knossos, which were flourishing in the thirteenth and fifteenth centuries BC, respectively, both represented in the Otago Museum’s Fels collection. The oldest work Ms Kisler reviews is from the twelfth century AD.
            Angels and Aristocrats is not aimed solely at an academic audience. It is intended for the general reader, and Ms Kisler means to locate New Zealand-owned works in the larger context of their time and place of making, which she does very well. What does give cause for concern is the number of mistakes, some minor, others less so. I’ve mentioned these before when I discussed the book in my column in the Otago Daily Times. It would be unkind to needlessly list them all again. A few will do as examples.
            On page 26, William Mathew Hodgkins is said to have died in 1895, while his death actually occurred in 1898. At page 27, Ms Kisler says the Dunedin Public Art Gallery moved to its building in the Octagon in 1990, whereas that happened in 1996. She has also, at page 26, misidentified the Lady McLean who successfully raised funds for a new building for the Dunedin gallery in 1907 with the wife of the Honourable John McLean, and, with a certain disregard for actual geography, has her living ‘in Lumsden near Oamaru’.
            Producing a long text requires particular attention to detail to avoid small errors, and occasional slips are to be expected, perhaps; but there seem rather too many of these little ones for an authoritative text. And there are others which suggest a more worrying cloud of confusion. On page 28, we are told about the de Beer siblings’ generosity to Dunedin, and of Esmond de Beer in particular that ‘a number of very fine purchases for Dunedin’s collection came about through his administrations on the gallery’s behalf in London.’ 
            I take it Ms Kisler is referring to services Dr de Beer performed on the gallery’s behalf. He did know London dealers and museum people, and sometimes acted as the gallery’s ears and eyes, for instance in the case of the Salvator Rosa Rocky Landscape which Ms Kisler discusses, although she doesn’t mention the role he played in its acquisition. This was in addition to buying works with his and his sisters’ money, and presenting them to the gallery in all of their names. Ms Kisler notes such acts of generosity, but appears to have overlooked Dr de Beer’s considerable connoisseurship which was of significant value to the gallery.
            Her treatment of some attributions and identifications is also a matter of concern. In Beloved I attributed the Dunedin gallery’s Birth of the Saviour to the studio of Bartholomaus Bruyn, following an overseas authority. At page 77 Ms Kisler gives it to the artist himself, a not inconsiderable change. She may have her reasons, but she doesn’t give any. Indeed she doesn’t even note there has been a change.
            Similarly, at page 356, the Dunedin painting of Saint John, which was formerly attributed to Bartolomeo Schedoni, she gives to the circle of Francesco Cozza without mentioning this is a change. Again, while Beloved changed the identification of the sitter in Dunedin’s portrait by Cornelius Johnson, which Ms Kisler followed at her page 267, neither Beloved nor Angels and Aristocrats mentions the argument, present in the gallery’s records, for supposing the sitter is King Charles I’s Queen, Henrietta Maria.
            Historians generally, and art historians more particularly, are not always very good at giving the reasons for their judgements, even when these are markedly different from earlier ones. They are sometimes careless about mentioning opposing views at all, let alone bothering to tell us why they differ. A recent case was Martin Kemp’s book making a case for a new proposed Leonardo.
            Such claims are bound to attract attention. Kemp’s one became controversial, not only because other Leonardo specialists emphatically disagreed, but because some people said the contention was proved by the presence of a fingerprint on the work matching one on a known Leonardo. But the match and its maker were soon shown to lack credibility. Kemp’s book marshalls other evidence for his attribution, and other specialists support him. But his book has been described as advocacy, rather than art history. The man who said this, Richard Dorment, complained that Kemp, and his co-author Nicholas Turner: ‘at no point … acknowledge any of the strong counter-arguments that have been voiced by the many scholars and curators specialising in fifteenth-century Italian art.’
            The trouble is this is not infrequently the case, I have found, in things written by distinguished art historians and which are taken as serious scholarly texts. I certainly wouldn’t describe Angels & Aristocrats as advocacy. There is no sign Ms Kisler has any axes to grind. But she has not been as careful as good scholarship really demands to point to changes and opposing views.
            Despite the flaws the book has much to recommend it. Ms Kisler is not trying to establish an order of merit. This permits hers to talk about works of minor, or even negligible, aesthetic distinction in order to illuminate the things their artists were trying to achieve – the conventions, artistic as well as social, which lay behind their making. She uses the works to illustrate not only European art history but, to some extent, European cultural history from the late middle ages to the nineteenth century. She is well-informed. Her prose is clear and her text has some nice, light touches.
            At page 55, she tells us of the significance of the goldfinch in images of the Virgin and Child, which represents the flight of the human soul at the moment of death. She mentions that portraits too ‘also showed children clutching goldfinches, any escape being thwarted by a fine string tethered above their claws. Pity the poor goldfinch.’
            The numerous colour plates are a very useful record, and the book puts together information and images you can’t find anywhere else in a single volume. At present it represents the broadest cover we have of its subject. It would be good to have a supplementary volume covering our older European material. Perhaps one day we will.

–

PETER ENTWISLE is a Dunedin-based writer, art historian and curator. He writes a regular column about the arts for the Otago Daily Times.

The Eye and Hand in Action

Leave a Comment

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.

Quintessentially No. 8

Leave a Comment

David Elworthy
Living Language: Exploring Kiwitalk, by Elizabeth Gordon (Canterbury University press, 2010), 256 pp., $35.00;  In the Paddock and on the Run, by Dianne Bardsley (Otago University Press, 2010) 464 pp, $50.00; Place Names of New Zealand, by A.W. Reed, revised by Peter Dowling (Raupo Books, 2010) 502 pp., $50.00.

Within a decade or two of their first arrival in New Zealand, English-speaking settlers began to note the changes wrought upon their native tongue by their experiences in a new environment – and their descendants have been gleefully analysing the development of New Zealand English ever since. Elizabeth Gordon’s Living Language: Exploring Kiwitalk and Dianne Bardsley’s In the Paddock and on the Run are recent additions to the pantheon, while A.W. Reed’s Place Names of New Zealand has recently appeared in a new enlarged edition revised by Peter Dowling.
            Many years ago I was lunching with Professor Ian Gordon of Victoria University, who at the time was helping to compile a New Zealand edition of the Collins English Dictionary. ‘The language of all the English-speaking peoples,’ he declared, ‘is moving in the direction of New Zealand English.’ I was stunned and delighted by this bold statement, as I had always been taught that the colourful local words we brought to school represented a corruption of the King’s English and should be exorcised at all costs. I recall submitting a story in which I wrote ‘cow bail’, only to have it corrected to ‘cow byre’ by my English teacher. Is there any local sharemilker (now there’s a fine Kiwi word) who has ever used the word ‘byre’?
            These recollections came to mind as I took up Elizabeth Gordon’s Living Language: Exploring Kiwitalk, for the author, a former lecturer in English and Linguistics at the University of Canterbury, is refreshingly free from the heavy load of prejudices carried by so many of us when we discuss the use and abuse of our beloved English language. The book gets off to a slightly unfortunate start for a wordsmith, with an unnecessary little verb floating freely in the fourth line of the Introduction, but after that Gordon treats us to a thoroughly enjoyable and quirky wander through the idiosyncrasies of our version of the world’s most widely-spoken tongue.
            Given that the book is a compilation of Gordon’s regular articles on New Zealand English in The Press, each chapter in Living Language stands on its own, but this makes for diverting dipping. The articles cover all aspects of our language, from a thoughtful analysis of the definite article and indefinite article to a useful outline of the te reo words that have rocketed into our everyday speech over the past decade. The author is particularly strong on what have always been regarded by the language snobs (and I am one of them) as ‘poor language habits’, but which in her view are more often than not either relics from dialects in Britain, such as our frequent pronunciation of ‘somethink’ and ‘nothink’, or ‘growen’ for ‘grown’ and ‘knowen’ for known’. She also discusses genuine changes in the vernacular, often initiated by the young, such as the new transitive verb ‘to vers’. Thus kids on a Friday will say, ‘Who are you versing tomorrow?’ or ‘We versed them last week.’
            Gordon uses personal experience to illustrate the changes that are taking place in the New Zealand vernacular, a technique that happily removes any lingering flavour of academia. She also ranges far and wide, as befits a book of newspaper columns, with some of my favourites, such as ‘Hokey-pokey hanky-panky’, having little to with Kiwitalk at all. But for all lovers of language this book makes for pleasant bedside browsing. It has certainly dented some of my fusty prejudices, even if it has failed to eliminate them altogether.
            As someone brought up on a sheep farm I found In the Paddock and On the Run particularly enjoyable. Dianne Bardsley, as befits the Director of the New Zealand Dictionary Centre at Victoria University, has written a thoroughly academic work, with every entry scrupulously annotated with historical citations. But such is the rich diversity of the bucolic words and phrases she has collected that even the most carefree dipper can find a gem on almost every page.
            The introductory section of the book appears somewhat cramped, but there are some fine illustrations, and I was immediately captivated by the chapter listings, which are delightfully rumbustious for what purports to be an academic dictionary. They range from ‘Aggies, Baggies, and Grubbing Gangs (Roles and identities), through ‘Hokonuis, Hermits and Halo Hairs’ (Sheep and their husbandry), to ‘Quintessentially No. 8 (Adaptations, Innovations, Pests and Diseases’. These immediately impart the flavour of the book, and from then on in my case it was just a matter of dipping joyfully, finding words that I had never encountered before. I discovered to my surprise that the South Canterbury downlands where I lived as a child are described as downy country, and I loved the definition ‘career girl’ – a ewe that refuses to accept and feed her lamb, — and ‘nudists’ as a description of shorn sheep.
            Some of Bardsley’s introductory comments are particularly illuminating. She notes how New Zealand farmers have from the very early days identified entirely with their land and their stock, quoting Samuel Butler in the 1860s: ‘I was rather startled at hearing one gentleman ask another whether he meant to wash this year, and received the answer “No”. I soon discovered that his sheep are himself. If his sheep are clean, he is clean.’ And a description of a Manawatu farmer in 2004: ‘Farming at 300 metres above sea level, he is a late lamber.’ She also cites examples of rural words and phrases that have entered the wider New Zealand vernacular, such as ‘crack your whip’, ‘drag the chain’, or ‘flat to the boards’.
            Like Elizabeth Gordon in a more general context, Bardsley provides interesting evidence of the influence of Maori words on our rural language.  From the earliest days of colonial settlement these were bastardised, so ‘piripiri’ became ‘bidi-bidi’, ‘tumatakuru’ ‘matagouri’, and ‘tutu’ ‘toot’. Incidentally, I found it interesting that in her introduction she used the words ‘te reo’ in her running text with no attempt at definition. She is right to do so, although less than 10 years ago this would have been puzzling to the majority of pakeha New Zealanders.
            As might be expected the language of sheepdogs in the chapter entitled ‘Huntaways, Hoolers, and Half-day Dogs’ is particularly colourful. I liked the contemptuous ‘powder puff’ – a light, noisy dog; ‘shandygaff’, a cross between a huntaway and a heading dog, or ‘shingle-scratcher’ – a dog that makes a lot of noise but achieves little.
            I have a suspicion that with the increased mechanisation of modern farming, many of the words and phrases so laboriously collected by Bardsley for this compilation have already disappeared from the farmer’s daily lexicon. Whether this is true or not, we owe the author a debt of gratitude for collecting and annotating so minutely New Zealand’s rich heritage of rural language.
            I was working as an editor at A.H. & A.W. Reed in 1975, when A.W., as he was always called in the company (his uncle, A.H. Reed, was known as The Founder) quietly dropped on my desk a voluminous manuscript that later became the first edition of Place Names of New Zealand. It was always thus: A.W. would spend most of his days dealing with the multifarious matters associated with running a large publishing house, then two or three times a year submit yet another manuscript for consideration. We assumed that he seldom paused to eat and obviously never slept. In the case of Place Names, he had spent years collating and describing the names of our towns, settlements and geographical features, exploiting the resources of his vast library in his Wellington house.
            The book, as wily old A.W. already knew, became a bestseller, and he updated it before he died in 1979. A further edition, entitled The Reed Dictionary of New Zealand Place Names, was published in 2002 before this edition was published by Penguin in 2010, radically revised and enlarged by Peter Dowling, who thoroughly deserves to be named as a co-author of the work.
            I am not clear whether people from other countries share our passionate interest in the words and names unique to our own environment. When I lived in England for a number of years, ‘the natives’ (read Elizabeth Gordon on that incendiary word) never evinced much interest in the rich history associated with the place names of their country, whereas here you can always stimulate a healthy discussion if you mention Whanganui or even Aoraki-Mt Cook. Perhaps this reflects the need for a young society to identify and root itself in its environment, but for whatever reason, this latest edition of Place Names of New Zealand can be expected to sell even more successfully than its predecessors.
            The origin and meaning of New Zealand Place Names are of course what the book is all about. Not only do we want to know the meaning of the vast array of Maori place names in the pantheon, but also their origins and those of the European names bestowed upon our landmarks over the past two centuries. Dowling has added another 1500 entries to Reed’s most recent lists, bringing the total to over 10,000, and has revised and edited them to create a more disciplined and authoritative work. What I found particularly intriguing were the original Maori names for those places renamed during the nineteenth century.
            One is told these days that the publishing industry is experiencing hard times. It is encouraging to know that books such as Living Language continue to be published, and it is to be hoped that valuable reference works such as In the Paddock and on the Run and Place Names of New Zealand will always be available for scholars and general readers like.

DAVID ELWORTHY grew up on a South Canterbury farm; he published his first poems in Landfall in 1954. In 1984 he and his wife Ros Henry founded Shoal Bay Press, which they ran successfully until they sold the company to Longacre Press in 2004. He and Ros are the authors of the recently-published Edward’s Legacy: The Elworthys of South Canterbury.

From People’s Rag to Scandal Sheet

Leave a Comment

Adam Gifford
Truth: The Rise and Fall of the People’s Paper, by Redmer Yska (Craig Potton Publishing, 2010), 200 pp., $50.00.

Every Thursday the presses would start at Garrett Street a stone’s throw from Wellington’s Cuba Mall, first hesitatingly, then faster, until a torrent of inky tabloids would roll down the rickety conveyer belt. During the frequent breaks when the roll of newsprint tore or a cog jammed, a crew of casuals would play gin or stare disinterestedly at the headlines screaming smut and scandal in 124-point type. Redmer Yska walked into Garrett St in 1977 as a proofreader, until punk rock – a shock/horror/probe-style story about the Suburban Reptiles’ abortive gig at Victoria University – won him a reporting job.

              Redmer Yska and I both worked at the NZ Truth building in Garrett Street, central Wellington, in 1977. While I was one of the casuals, hired to unload Truth from the presses each Thursday, grabbing the streams of inky tabloids as they rolled off the rickety conveyor belts, he was employed up in the proofreading room, checking copy and learning first-hand how to sniff out scoop and scandal. It gave him an educated appreciation of yellow journalism, and a respect for sources and verification – it’s a comfort to have all the paperwork done when the writs come flying. It also gave him an ear for the sort of story New Zealanders want to read, but that the ‘respectable’ media were too sniffy to run, and an eye for the larger-than-life characters whose written-up exploits could brighten (or darken) the country’s provincial grey.

            These days, though, when metropolitan broadsheets daily fill their front pages with murder and marital discord, solicit gossip, and frequently feature the latest semi-clad celeb, there is little call for a paper which filled its pages with the doings from the divorce courts. Even when Yska was pounding the capital’s pavements earning his odium money (the 10 per cent margin over award rates which Truth journos enjoyed), the paper’s glory days were behind it. Working there, Yska quickly became aware of the paper’s history as ‘the people’s paper’, which seemed at odds with its descent into titillation and tattle-tale combined with union bashing and consumer advocacy.
            In trying to find out why, he has uncovered a narrative of change and evolution out of which multiple versions of Truth emerge. The weekly was an Australian import, the creation of John Norton, whose Sydney Truth mixed sport, sex, crime, divorce and general muckraking into a sulphurous, irreverent brew that appealed to its working-class readers, eager for escapism and the sensational. The 1.5-metre tycoon (referred to by the Australian Bulletin as ‘Freak, big man, small man, philanthropist, scoundrel’) crossed the Tasman in 1904 to lecture on workers’ rights, the threat of Asian migration, and the even greater threat of ‘prating parsons’, ‘putrid politicians’ and other wowsers who would deny a working man his simple pleasures.
            He was a bona fide republican hero, having conducted his own defence to beat a sedition charge for calling Queen Victoria ‘flabby, fat and flatulent’, and her son the Prince of Wales a ‘turf-swindling, card-sharping, wife-debauching rascal’. That kind of alliterative language flowered in the New Zealand edition when the presses started rolling in 1905. Most of its reporters and subs came over from the Sydney Truth, but its legal counsel was Wellington solicitor Alexander Dunn, the start of a seven-decade association between the Dunn family and the paper.
            Yska was unable to unearth any copies from Truth’s first year – libraries may not have wanted to file papers ‘that soiled the breakfast cloth’, but from stories reprinted in the Australian editions he detected a crusading spark, with social wrongs like sweatshops and corrupt prison guards exposed. In those early years, Truth did indeed try to become the ‘people’s paper’, poaching Socialist Party branch president Robert Hogg from rival weekly The Worker – and eventually making him editor – siding with striking Waihi mine workers, and attacking the Massey government’s brutal suppression of the Great Strike of 1913.
            It made a stand against militarism at the start of World War I, which morphed into support and advocacy for the rights of ordinary soldiers and their families. One of the clippings reproduced in this generously illustrated book is the letter Archibald Baxter, father of poet James K. Baxter, sent to his family about the punishments he had endured at the front for his conscientious objection.
            In the 1920s, Truth moved towards the centre, with more sports, consumer advocacy and pages for women (these latter produced briefly by Iris Wilkinson, also known as novelist Robin Hyde, whose unpublished autobiography Yska mines for Truth lore).While the paper didn’t back the emerging Labour Party, once it won power in 1935 Truth reached out, first by serialising John A. Lee’s The Hunted (after its favourable review had alerted many New Zealanders to the existence of his earlier Children of the Poor), and then by offering Prime Minister Michael Joseph Savage a regular platform.
            Yska makes the case for Truth’s coverage being responsible for laying the foundations for the posthumous beatification of Savage. In 1950 the Norton family sold Truth to a group which included its chairman, lawyer J.H. (James Hamilton) Dunn, as well as businessman Cliff Plimmer – who became a senior figure in the National Party. Dunn took increasing charge of both newsroom and boardroom, creating a paradoxical mix of fierce anti-Communism, opposition to state control and the championing of the downtrodden.
            It’s here that Yska’s research becomes truly illuminating, uncovering a paper that on one hand was willing to take on abuses of police power and expose the true horror of capital punishment, yet on the other was used by the security services and right-wing politicians to undermine and attack perceived enemies. The hectoring and reactionary tone of the paper in subsequent decades, especially under editor Russell Gault, won the paper more enemies than friends. (LET’S HIT RATBAG STUDENTS HARD blared the headline in May 1970.)
            By the end, there were few tears as the paper slid towards becoming, as one of its later editors described it to me, ‘the trade paper for the sex industry’. Yska has mined Truth’s archives for his previous social histories, but now he has made the paper itself the story. And a fascinating read it is too.

ADAM GIFFORD also worked at Garrett Street in 1977, taking Truth off the presses, before finding his own circuitous route into journalism. He is an Auckland-based freelance journalist and writer who contributes regularly to the New Zealand Herald‘s arts pages.

The Lightness of Being Bill Culbert

Leave a Comment

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.