arts and culture

The Politics of (In)Visibilities

December 1, 2020 Leave a Comment

Robyn Maree Pickens

Sapphic Fragments: Imogen Taylor with essays by Milly Mitchell-Anyon and Joanne Drayton (Hocken Collections, 2020), 50pp, $35; Llew Summers: Body and soul by John Newton (Canterbury University Press, 2020), 200pp, $65

Sapphic Fragments is an intimate, provocative and critical publication that is in conversation with artist Imogen Taylor’s exhibition at the Hocken Collections gallery in Ōtepoti Dunedin in early 2020, and her eleven-month residency as the 2019 Frances Hodgkins Fellow. The Fellow’s publication is ever increasingly becoming an integral component of the residency ‘outcomes’, and Taylor’s is no exception. Slightly smaller than A4, with a soft card cover and a geometric-patterned, light gsm dust jacket, Sapphic Fragments, as an aesthetic object, sits partway between high-end artist’s workbook and Moleskine stationery. The considered intimacy of the book’s exterior is continued between the pages with the inclusion of iPhone photos taken either by Taylor or partner and architect Sue Hillery. This naming of Sue Hillery as Taylor’s partner is significant for several reasons that encompass Taylor, Hillery and contemporary lesbian/queer visibility while also reaching back into the past of Hodgkins (1869–1947) and her ‘friend’ (lover), Dorothy K. Richmond. Sapphic Fragments can be interpreted as an act of reframing, repositioning and reclaiming elided intimate histories (personal and artistic), while agentially self-positioning Taylor (and Hillery) in an attempt to prevent present or future homophobic omissions. From design to photographs and text, the publication materialises the politics of queer intimacy, collaboration and reclamation. [Read more…]

‘All art comes from the depths of one’s feelings’

July 1, 2020 Leave a Comment

Michael Dunn

Louise Henderson: From life, edited by Felicity Milburn, Lara Strongman and Julia Waite (Auckland City Art Gallery/Christchurch City Art Gallery, 2019), 256pp., $65

At one time, in the mid-1950s, Louise Henderson was a prominent figure among painters based in Auckland. In fact, she was seen as a modernist; she had associated with John Weeks in Auckland and later studied in Paris with Jean Metzinger (1883–1956), a Cubist painter, teacher and writer. Henderson had changed her earlier style, learnt in Christchurch, for a more abstract and Cubist-influenced approach. She exhibited at the Auckland Art Gallery alongside Colin McCahon and Milan Mrkusich, both of whom were some twenty years her junior. She was highly regarded by collectors and critics, such as Charles Brasch and Eric McCormick. But by the 1970s her star had waned, and although she continued to paint and exhibit into the 1980s she was no longer seen as a leading contemporary painter. Auckland Art Gallery staged an important show of her work called Louise Henderson: The Cubist years, curated by Christina Barton in 1992, and in 1993 Henderson was made a Dame. Henderson has, however, still not been accorded her full due as a painter and teacher. Louise Henderson: From life and the accompanying exhibition aim to redress the situation. [Read more…]

Copy That

May 1, 2020 Leave a Comment

Tasha Haines

Make It the Same: Poetry in the age of global media by Jacob Edmond (Columbia University Press, 2019), 346pp., US$64.99

Ezra Pound’s famous maxim ‘Make it new!’ was not new at all; Pound acquired the idea, whether advertently or inadvertently, from a Chinese Confucian scholar, who passed it on to an Emperor … The questions: What is original? What is a copy? What is new? are core to modernity and yet, as Frederick Jameson wrote and Jacob Edmond discusses in Make It the Same: Poetry in the age of global media, there is nothing new that does not have antecedents. So the compound question arises: when is ‘the new’ also a copy or, more specifically here, an ‘iteration’ of what has gone before, and how does this inform creative practice and statements of identity? [Read more…]

Solitary Grandeur

November 6, 2019 Leave a Comment

Martin Edmond

McCahon Country by Justin Paton (Penguin Random House NZ, in association with Auckland Art Gallery Toi o Tāmaki), 304 pp., $75

This year is the centenary of the birth of Colin McCahon, and among the publications celebrating that event is Justin Paton’s McCahon Country. It is not the only one. The first of Peter Simpson’s two-volume chronicle of McCahon’s life and work will be published in October 2019, with the second to follow in June next year; and Wystan Curnow’s long-delayed opus is also rumoured to be coming out in 2020. None of these books is, or will be, properly speaking, a biography. Indeed, three decades after his death, we still lack a comprehensive life of the artist. Gordon Brown’s Colin McCahon: Artist, first published in 1984, is more an elucidation of the work than of the man; as is Simpson’s work; as Curnow’s presumably will be. As Justin Paton’s book, with qualifications, also is. [Read more…]

Reeling Them In

November 1, 2019 Leave a Comment

Helen Watson White

Whatever It Takes: Pacific Films and John O’Shea 1948–2000 by John Reid (Victoria University Press, 2018), 462pp, $60

Whatever It Takes is an apt title for John Reid’s story of the formation of Pacific Films, an enterprise that dared to dream in an age when dreaming was expensive. The No. 8 wire mentality, necessitated by insufficient funding for almost any part of independent film-making, is exemplified in countless ways in this account, from the building of a camera dolly with bicycle wheels, to the capture of the 1953 Royal Tour on three cameras simultaneously, by mounting them on the same frame, the results of the shoot destined for three different agencies, each paying for a share of news footage of the glamorous royal couple ‘abroad’. [Read more…]