arts and culture

Renaissance Man

April 1, 2011 Leave a Comment

Andrew Paul Wood
Fantastica: The World of Leo Bensemann, Peter Simpson (Auckland University Press, 2011), 232 pp., $75.00

If you could physically sense an author’s passion and thoroughness, Peter Simpson’s books would glow like fresh bread. His timely and lavishly illustrated Fantastica: The World of Leo Bensemann positively radiates, and yet again shows Auckland University Press to be New Zealand’s pre-eminent art book publisher.
Artist and illustrator Bensemann was the descendent of North German immigrants from Bruchhausen-Vilsen south of Bremen, settling at Moutere, and was born in Takaka in 1912. His family moved to Nelson in the early 1920s, and that dramatic karst landscape was to become a reoccurring feature in his rich oeuvre. The German influence was also strong, manifesting in a rich vein of Romanticism in his work, embracing Holbein and Dürer, and various Medieval, folk, and expressionist sources, to complement the vivid orientalism of his drawings and landscapes.

Outside of Canterbury Bensemann has not been well known beyond the influential Ilam mafia and the occasional reproduction in magazines in the 1940s and 1950s, though his portraits were reproduced annually in the New Zealand Arts Year Books from 1946 until 1949, and during his lifetime one article in Landfall in 1953, and a memorial in Art New Zealand shortly after his death in 1986. Since then, there have been two publications by Bensemann’s daughter Caroline Otto and at least two significant exhibitions curated by Simpson.
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The Shape of Things to Come

March 1, 2011 Leave a Comment

Roger Horrocks
The books to come, Alan Loney (Cuneiform Press, 2010), 136 pp., $39.95

Our media landscape is changing at a greater speed than ever before. It is likely that children born 20 years from now who discover a copy of a printed newspaper will need to ask a grandparent to explain the function of this curious object.

Those children will never have seen ‘film’, a strip of celluloid with sprocket holes. (That analogue medium will be as obsolete as the megaphones through which film directors once shouted their commands.) Today’s television set will have become a quaint relic. Tomorrow’s children will also be baffled to encounter a DVD (not to mention a VHS tape), or a letter sent by ‘snail mail’, or a wristwatch, or a telephone attached by a cord to a base.

The key question for bibliophiles like ourselves is whether the printed book will similarly become obsolete. I can’t help thinking of the second-hand shop I visited in a country town the other day where old books were piled up in a corner gathering dust. So far, the traditional book has survived more vigorously than other non-digital forms of communication, but it too is visibly losing ground. Amazon now sells almost twice as many ‘e-books’ as hardcover books, and it expects e-book sales to overtake paperback sales by the end of 2011.

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Wax-spotted, Burnt and Scorched

March 1, 2011 Leave a Comment

Helen Watson-White
Reading on the Farm: Victorian Fiction and the Colonial World, Lydia Wevers (Victoria University Press, 2010), 344 pp., $40.00

‘I suffer from an illness, an illness which has no cure, no limit and no end. It’s compulsive, expensive, consuming and addictive, it fills my house and my life and my time…’

In her 2004 essay ‘On Reading’, Lydia Wevers identifies what was described in Fraser’s Magazine in 1847 as ‘book-love’: the passion that drives (it seems) everyone’s purpose as well as her own in this study of a colonial library. Reading on the Farm presents a richly detailed record of nineteenth-century life at the Beetham family’s Brancepeth Station in the Wairarapa — and by implication, in colonial New Zealand generally. Wevers’s story-telling style mixes the personal and the academic in a way that should appeal to a wide readership of bibliophiles.

This is not, however, a straightforward read, an invitation to nostalgia; it is an appreciation but also a critique. The illustrations, for instance, are as important as in any social history — fixing impressions, establishing place and time — but some of their ramifications are realised only when you’ve taken in the text. In its need to interpret puzzling visual signs, what sets out to be an academic monograph (with excellent notes, index, bibliography) assumes the intriguing character of a murder mystery.

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Light-sensitive

March 1, 2011 1 Comment

David Eggleton
Artists @ Work: New Zealand Painters and Sculptors in the Studio, Richard Wolfe and Stephen Robinson (Penguin, 2010), 224 pp., $72.00

Developed from a concept initiated by photographer Stephen Robinson, this book documents the creative processes of twenty-four artists within their native habitats. The selected assortment ranges far and wide nationally, though only one Maori artist is included and there are no Polynesian artists, or indeed other non-Pakeha artists, while the media synchronicities which characterise the twenty-first century are signalled with the listing at the back of the book of relevant dealer gallery websites.

Each artist is allocated a self-contained chapter within which writer Richard Wolfe asks sensible questions and elicits illuminating answers. This well-designed book shows us what goes on behind the white cube as it were, with artists for the most part offering succinct summaries of what they do as they wield the tools of their trade and knock out artworks in idiosyncratic spaces.
John Reynolds suggests that the artist’s studio is ‘just the roof over the head of the bigger picture’, and gesturing around his newish studio located adjacent to his home states that ‘the studio is in the head and this is just a workspace.’ But if he argues for ‘a studio that functions as a machine’, other artists declare a more organic allegiance.

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