Andrew Paul Wood
Art Toi: New Zealand Art at Auckland Art Gallery Toi o Tamaki, edited by Ron Brownson (Auckland Art Gallery Toi o Tamaki, 2011) 388 pp., $59.95; CSA: The Radical, the Reactionary and the Canterbury Society of Arts 1880–1996, by Warren Feeney (Canterbury University Press, 2011) 223 pp., $49.95
The history of New Zealand art is, like that of Renaissance Italy, one of regional rivalry. From the nineteenth century up until the Second World War, the South Island asserted a cultural dominance that ranged from Girolamo Nerli, James Nairn, and Petrus van der Velden in the nineteenth century, through to the small and bohemian ‘Bloomsbury south’ surrounding Rita Angus and Leo Bensemann, the Caxton Press, and Canterbury College in 1930s and ’40s Christchurch.
A major transition took place around (for the sake of mythology and convenience) 1953, when coincidentally that great unignorable cultural edifice Colin McCahon — à la Dante’s Inferno, ‘Nel mezzo del cammin di nostra vita’, at the midpoint of his life — moved to the North Island. Similarly, political and material authority in fine art shifted to Auckland and Wellington. Eventually North Island institutions reorganised the canon. The subtropical eudemonic euphoria and bright palette of Auckland and the earnest social concern of Wellington supplanted the subdued Romanticism and Gothic tendencies and emphasis on landscape (now seeming rather quaint) of Christchurch and Dunedin.
It is with this in mind that I peruse Auckland Art Gallery’s Art Toi, which sets itself up as a kind of overview of art by and about New Zealand: from Isaac Gilsemans, who sailed with Tasman, right up to the present day, as seen through the lens of AAG’s collections. One feels that this might be a slightly piqued riposte to Te Papa’s 2009 Art at Te Papa, part of those two institutions’ long-running rivalry, but it is also a clarion announcement of AAG’s concluded refurbishment and reopening. Despite a certain inevitable geographical bias, Art Toi manages remarkably well at being representative (Canterbury regionalist Bill Sutton finally ascends to deserved national relevance), largely due to the excellence of Auckland’s collections and to being edited by the knowledgeable Ron Brownson of AAG’s curatorium.
Art Toi is full to pussy’s bow with excellent images and revelatory works previously unknown to me (Albin Martin’s c.1855 Stour Homestead, Artist’s Farm, East Tamiki is a painting forty years ahead of its time, anticipating advances in the European avant-garde — wow). The accompanying short essays are useful cultural touchstones for the general reader, but, inevitably with a project of this scope, perhaps a tad superficial. For example, for Ngahiraka Mason, indigenous curator of Māori art at AAG, to say John Steele’s orientalist-cum-Maoriland-cheesecake Spoils to the Victor (1908) ‘shows a fondness for the exotic, and follows a nineteenth-century European realist approach to the depiction of captive female slaves’, is not only reductive, but also a very peculiar interpretation of the word ‘realist’. Should not Ingres be mentioned?
Similarly, associate curator Jane Davidson-Ladd’s assertion in relation to Louise Henderson that by 1954 ‘Cubism was an accepted painting style in Europe’ is an understatement, given that by that stage cubism in Europe was unfashionable old hat (supplanted by Tachisme) — even Picasso wasn’t doing it anymore — and abstract expressionist New York was busily pushing Paris to the curb. Often I find biographical details for the artists, birthplaces for example, lacking; and disappointingly too, where is Trevor Lloyd’s Death of a Moa (c.1925)? It’s a rare and much beloved New Zealand echo of that peculiarly tenacious Victorian genre, fairy painting.
The richness and authority of the earlier sections seems to evaporate in a puff of relativism, banality, generalisation and redundancy once we get to the contemporary section ‘Indefinite Article: New Zealand Art 1990–2011’. Here the accompanying texts are often far too short to offer much meaningful context, and are frequently timid (the artists being alive is no excuse) where decisive boldness is required. I would discuss the content of these texts, but with some exceptions, like Brownson on Bill Hammond, and Mason on the artists of the second and third waves of the Māori Renaissance, there is very little actual content to respond to. It feels rushed, and is symptomatic of the serious lack of good writing (or is that good writers) about contemporary art in this country: it’s either boring, laden with theory jargon, or as in this case, professionally invested. There is nothing ‘indefinite’ about contemporary New Zealand art at all – it sits within a very specific set of confluences and semantic nets, and conforms to what sociologists like Roland Robertson term “glocalisation” – thinking globally and acting locally.
Some contexts are striking by their absence: for example no attempt has been made to connect Hammond, Shane Cotton, Peter Robinson, and maybe Saskia Leek, even though in the 1990s they formed a recognisably coherent wave of Canterbury postmodernists, sometimes known as ‘the pencil case painters’ for their graffiti-like style. And it seems to me that to give et al and l. budd separate entries is just bloody-minded; we know who Merilyn Tweedie is — how about saying something useful about her use of personae and heteronyms instead, like a brave little institution? Wouldn’t this have been an opportune moment to educate the public on what the 2005 Venice Biennale furor was all about? These cavils aside, however, this is a beautifully produced book, chocker with excellent reproductions, a useful primer to New Zealand art, and a testament to AAG as an institution. They are to be commended, and here’s hoping they don’t stop coming out with goodies like this.
***
Lest you thought the North had used up all of the oxygen in the room, the South chuntered redoubtably on, doing its own thing as only a confident and self-sufficient provincial art scene can. A significant institution in that regard — one little heard of outside Christchurch, and overshadowed these days by Christchurch Art Gallery — was the Canterbury Society of Arts (CSA), which later became the Centre of Contemporary Art (CoCA). CSA: The Radical, the Reactionary and the Canterbury Society of Arts 1880–1996 is a history of the association and institution written by its former director Dr Warren Feeney. Just as AAG reopens, the Canterbury earthquakes have, at least for now, closed CoCA as it has so many of Christchurch’s venerable cultural institutions.
You may think you understand New Zealand art history, but this book will change your mind. Up close, the real picture is quite different to what received wisdom would have you believe. Clunky title ignored (and it is very clunky), Feeney is a capable, erudite and engaging storyteller, weaving a history of great significance in understanding the cultural development of modern New Zealand. The CSA was founded in 1880 by paying member artists wishing to have a place to exhibit. Their first exhibition took place in 1881, a year before the establishment of the Canterbury College of Art. The year after that, they began their own permanent art collection, somewhat muddying their role. The CSA not only nurtured a great many artists, it also provided something for other artists to react against, spawning ‘the Palette Club’ in 1889, and the influential early modernists of ‘The Group’ in 1927. Margaret Stoddart, Frances Hodgkins, Bill Sutton, Petrus van der Velden and Colin McCahon all benefited from the CSA’s support, as did much later and more avant-garde figures like Neil Dawson and Pauline Rhodes.
Up until the 1950s, membership of an Arts Society was often essential to any artist in New Zealand with ambitions of a professional career. From then on the societies frequently came to be seen as stuffy, old fashioned, and stifling of younger artists with more radical ideas. Feeney reveals that the CSA and CoCA were quite the opposite, supporting and advocating for the arts in a very relevant way for more than a century, later in particular hosting happenings, installations, art rock bands and other things that most civic galleries wouldn’t have touched with a ten-foot electrified barge pole at the time, including, in 1978, Andrew Drummond’s notoriously controversial nude self-crucifixion performance as part of Platform, the CSA’s contribution to the Christchurch Arts Festival that year.
However, for all that, in 1948 the CSA was infamously at the centre of controversy. The society had decided to purchase some works by the celebrated ex-New Zealand painter Frances Hodgkins and asked the British Council to send them examples from various stages in her career. Six paintings were sent but the CSA rejected all of them, resulting in public outcry and the deposing of three Hodgkins supporters from the CSA’s council. One of the excommunicated, Barbara Frankel, organised a public subscription to purchase one Hodgkins watercolour, The Pleasure Garden (1932), to donate to the City Council for hanging in the city’s Robert McDougal Art Gallery, only to have it rejected for its precocious expressive abstraction. There was more public outcry, petitions and letters to the editor. The Council only relented when Auckland Art Gallery offered to buy the painting in 1951. Feeney’s handsome book is also a treasure-trove of archive photographs and reproductions of art, and not incidentally helps to fill out the broader history of Canterbury art. It is also a refreshing change for Canterbury University Press, for whom recent efforts in art publishing can only be described, charitably, as coffee table fare. Obviously they’ve pulled their socks up as the present volume should serve as a model for all future New Zealand art historians. One suspects, however, given the frequent culturally imperialistic and dismissive tendencies of a certain large and solipsistic city straddling the narrow bit of the upper North Island, this exquisite tome may be overlooked for most of the awards it very much deserves. But perhaps I’m just a bit cranky because I’m a One-Eyed Cantabrian and all Cantabrians have endured one MoFo of an Annus Horribilis — so sue me.
ANDREW PAUL WOOD is Christchurch-based writer and art critic who reviews for a range of publications. He is a Ph.D. candidate at the University of Canterbury, and a sometime tutor there in art history and academic style.
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