Landfall Review Online

Modus Operandi

October 1, 2011 Leave a Comment

Lydia Wevers

The Frame Function: An Inside-Out Guide to the Novels of Janet Frame, by Jan Cronin, (Auckland University Press, 2011), 222 pp., $49.99.

Janet Frame’s 1979 Living in the Maniototo is her penultimate novel and one generally regarded, as Jan Cronin says in her book, as some kind of creative manifesto. The headings of the different parts of the novel are a set of instructions to the reader, predominantly about ‘paying attention’. If these instructions reflect Frame’s sense of her reader, or rather, to adapt Cronin’s title, the ‘reader function’, then paying attention might be something she thinks the reader already does (but not well) or does too much, or does not do enough, and there won’t, of course, be anything simple about what Frame might or might not be saying, but if it is possible to have a reader who pays enough of the right kind of attention, then that person is Jan Cronin.

The Frame Function picks up from a phrase coined by Patrick Evans in an obituary in 2004, the ‘Frame effect’, which described the way he thought that ‘as readers, each of us is … under her control whenever we read her and required to perform – to solve’. Frame referred to her fictions as ‘explorations’ rather than novels and the questions that have absorbed, intrigued and teased scholars over the duration of her work relate to the ways in which they do not conform to habitual reader expectations. The narrative will never arrive a point where all becomes clear and you are offered ‘closure’. And the reason her novels never reach a reassuring destination is because the author (or rather her many stand-ins because you are never allowed to rest in the comfortable arms of a reliable narrator) is always at your elbow troubling the waters of comprehension.

Cronin, adapting the ‘Frame function’ from Foucault’s famous term for the author, bases her ‘guide’ to Frame on the ‘authorial presence’ in Frame’s novels and how that presence impacts on the reader. Cronin opens with a wonderful example of Frame playing with her reader’s attention in The Adaptable Man. Over breakfast Russell Maude, the village dentist, his wife Greta and their son Alwyn are being treated to a reading of Anglo-Saxon poetry from Russell’s brother, Aisley, a clergyman who is convalescing with them. Misquotations and mistranslations are exchanged across the table cloth, Frame setting traps for an unwary reader who has done Medieval English 1 and thinks they know some Anglo-Saxon verse. Cronin notes that there is no question of Frame simply having made a mistake about which translation matches which Anglo-Saxon poem. Later in the text translated lines from ‘The Wanderer’ are repeated and matched with the correct Anglo-Saxon original. There are other ‘mistakes’ too, which are harder to classify, and like the good scholar she is, Cronin checked Frame’s ms and various editions of the novel and concluded, to her relief, that the reader ‘could not rely on the empirical author to clarify the text’. But at the same time the ‘wilful authorial presence in the text was such that it wouldn’t allow the reader to disregard it’.

Of course this is not a new insight in Frame studies. No one can read Frame and not become aware of the author playing cat and mouse with the reader, but what Cronin offers in The Frame Function is a detailed, erudite, clear and illuminating account of Frame’s novels and what she calls Frame’s ‘MO’ — how they work. Cronin acknowledges that her own MO, the ‘inside-out guide’, might be seen as ‘making an implicit claim to know the text better than Frame, to have access to a textual endgame of authorial interests and choices’, but she is always at pains to disavow the potential hierarchies of this position. Instead, she asserts that the ‘Frame function’ and the inside-out guide are two sides of the same interpretative coin. So does it help?

The answer is unequivocally that yes it does. Cronin delivers a very lucid and highly informed guided journey through corpus of Frame’s fiction, discussing the novels in roughly chronological order, and using each chapter to open out a more complex examination of the ‘prescriptive authorial presence’ and how the novels work. As she repeatedly notes, her interpretive labours are more focused on the how and not the what of Frame’s fiction, reflecting Frame’s own focus, as expressed in an interview with Elizabeth Alley, on the ‘pattern of things’. Towards the end of this comprehensive and learned book, the person she refers to as the ‘empirical author’ appears in her ‘own voice’ (the trouble with reading Frame is one’s heightened apprehensions of the chasms buried in that taken-for-granted, everyday kind of phrase) in quoted interviews and letters. These notes from the deep don’t really say anything that authors through the ages haven’t always said. For example she commented to Susan Chenery that ‘when you are writing you think you know what you are going to do but it gets organised for you’. This is not really any different from the old chestnut of characters taking over the narrative, but where Frame is unlike other people, the source of her great difficulty and treasure is how she changes her reader’s alertness to, and awareness of, the otherworld of the text. Where does the text stop and the world begin? Cronin shows, with expertly heightened attention, how shifty and cunning Frame and her texts are, and how complex and unfinished the reader’s experience will always be.

This is not a book for a casual reader. Cronin declares at the outset it is for those who have ‘acquired a taste’ for the novels of Janet Frame, and the book is primarily geared to a scholarly audience. Undergraduates looking for an easy fix to an essay won’t find their answers here. It is a guide more in the sense that Virgil is Dante’s guide through the Inferno — there are still complex mysteries. Cronin deploys the metaphor of the guide in her own syntax, which is the only thing about her book that I found irritating — the reader is always part of an armlocked ‘we’. But Cronin’s image for Frame’s novels suggests, I think, the expansions offered by her own text. Cronin says the image that sticks with her is the blue police box — yes the TARDIS, in which Doctor Who travels to new worlds — bigger on the inside than on the outside. This is true of both authors and their texts. The Frame Function won’t be the last word on its subject, but it will be a must-read for anyone trying to write about or get to grips with the work of our most extraordinary, gifted and elusive author.

LYDIA WEVERS is the director of the Stout Research Centre at Victoria University. Her most recent book is Reading on the Farm: Victorian Fiction and the Colonial World (VUP).

Metamorphosis

September 1, 2011 Leave a Comment

Roger Blackley

Fiona Pardington: The Pressure of Sunlight Falling, edited by Kriselle Baker and Elizabeth Rankin, (Otago University Press, 2011) 160 pp., $120.

A ‘museological’ orientation distinguishes a range of photography that engages in fresh ways with historical spaces and artefacts. Thomas Struth’s long-term project ‘Museum Photographs’ observed the observers — the audiences that are such an essential component of displays in museums — while the uncanniness of Candida Höfer’s 2006 photographs of the Louvre’s galleries depended in part on the absence of any human users. In New Zealand, museums sit alongside other memorial sites in Laurence Aberhart’s oeuvre, while Neil Pardington’s recent series explored the aesthetics of museum storage. Occasionally, such projects succeed in completely redefining a historical topic. One example is Rauru: Tene Waitere, Maori Carving, Colonial History, edited by Nicholas Thomas and published by Otago University Press in 2009, which showcased Mark Adams’ photographs of Waitere’s innovative carvings and the international contexts they inhabit. Rauru also featured historical images, an essay by Thomas and insightful perspectives from James Schuster, a great-grandson of Waitere’s, and Lyonel Grant, a leading contemporary carver.

Otago University Press now gives us Fiona Pardington: The Pressure of Sunlight Falling, an even more spectacular exploration of this fascinating interface of art and ethnography. Full-page plates reproduce Pardington’s sombre, almost monochrome photographs of casts made from living models by Pierre-Marie Dumoutier, the phrenologist serving on the last great scientific voyage by the French into the Pacific. The photographs are accompanied by an impressive array of images and essays that explore the significance of Dumoutier’s work and its relationship to nineteenth-century anthropology. The elegant design is the responsibility of Neil Pardington, the photographer’s brother.
Usually termed a ‘pseudo-science’, phrenology was a popular pastime of the early nineteenth century that purported to reveal inner truths — much like psychoanalysis in our time. Naval commander Dumont d’Urville was flattered by a favourable reading of his cranial bumps received from a London phrenologist; when this was repeated in Paris he became a convert and secured Dumoutier’s services for the expedition to the South Seas. Charged with forming a collection of skulls and head-casts to support d’Urville’s racial mapping of the Pacific, the phrenologist produced the moulds for some fifty life-cast busts that — back in Paris — were photographed using the novel technique of daguerreotypy and published as lithographs in an atlas documenting the expedition’s anthropological discoveries.

Pardington’s connection with the casts, which are now held by the Musée de l’Homme in Paris, originated with Ngāi Tahu’s knowledge of the portraits made at Otago in 1840. Takatahara (known to Dumoutier as Taha Tahala) was a Banks Peninsula chief who played a leading role in the wars of the 1820s and 1830s between Ngāi Tahu and Ngāti Toa and is related to the photographer. The other Ngāi Tahu male portrait depicts Piuraki or John Love Tikao (Poukalem), who was taken prisoner by Ngāti Toa in 1831 and later travelled the world, living in Bordeaux and London. Fluent in French and English, Piuraki was also at Otago at the time of the French expedition’s visit in March 1840. Together with the portrait of a female subject, Heroua, these South Island casts represent the ancestral connection and catalyst for the project.

The subject of a life cast is effectively a co-author of the resulting artefact and, given the deployment of a negative mould to produce a positive image, Pardington recognises an affinity between life casts and photographs. While this series represents her first foray into digital photography, which transcends the negative-positive dialectic, the works are nevertheless imbued with an antiquarian aura. Apart from the impressive scale and immaculate surface of the exhibition prints, and the wilful manipulation of colour, it is noteworthy that Pardington consistently rejects the three-quarter orientation of European portraiture (which is how the busts were documented in the photographically derived lithographs of d’Urville’s atlas) in favour of a more severe pairing of frontal and profile views, and even some views of the backs of the busts. These formats are intriguingly reminiscent both of the racial profiling of nineteenth-century ethnography, and of the criminal profiling system developed for the Parisian police by Alphonse Bertillon.

Scholarly essays are interspersed with the plates, some of which fold out. The artist’s gradual discovery of and interaction with the life casts is discussed by the book’s editors, Kriselle Baker and Elizabeth Rankin, while David Elliott — artistic director of the 2010 Sydney Biennale where the photographs debuted — profiles the trajectory of Pardington’s career. Kriselle Baker’s essay, ‘The Truth of Lineage: Time and Tā Moko’, focuses on the significance of Māori tattoo and its representations, while anthropologist and Pacific historian Nicholas Thomas sketches the broader story of the voyage and the ‘archival turn’ exemplified by contemporary artists who engage with the legacy of colonialism. French curator Yves Le Fur, in ‘Dumoutier’s Artifacts’, and Elizabeth Rankin, in ‘Facing Difference: Casts as Documents and Display’, furnish interesting contextual information regarding the history and status of Dumoutier’s work. Further essays come from Stacy L. Kamehiro, whose ‘Documents, Specimens, Portraits: Dumoutier’s Pacific Casts’ offers a nuanced reading of the quest for races and types, and Ross Calman, who gives a Ngāi Tahu perspective. The final contribution is by anthropologist and Pacific historian Anne Salmond, who muses on the mechanics of casting a head in plaster and finds it difficult to believe that Māori chiefs would allow such a treatment of their heads.

Fiona Pardington has formerly engaged with museums and their collections, photographing birds’ nests and feathers at the Otago Museum, huia specimens from the Canterbury Museum, and hei-tiki from the Okains Bay Māori and Colonial Museum. I was reminded of the hei-tiki photographs recently, when reading David Eggleton’s critique of Damian Skinner’s interpretation of the artefact photography of Brian Brake. Skinner argued that, by suppressing ethnographic clarity in his dramatically decontextualised images, Brake had ‘aestheticised’ the taonga of Te Maori. A similar play of dark and light — together with an equivalent decontextualisation — characterises Pardington’s approach to artefact-imaging. Far from the dispassionate objectivity of Mark Adams’ Rauru photographs, Pardington’s images of the plaster artefacts partake of a moody neoclassicism.

Elizabeth Rankin concludes her essay by discussing the renunciation of colour in Pardington’s photographs and claims that they will ‘write another chapter in the history of Dumoutier’s heads’. Since this book will now be the essential reference for Dumoutier’s Pacific work, Pardington’s draining of colour from her prints does present a slight problem. Dumont d’Urville claimed credit for mapping the racial divisions of the Pacific and named the darker-skinned islanders Melanesians, in distinction to the copper-coloured Polynesians. Yet this crucial distinction — signalled in part by Dumoutier’s careful painted calibration of skin tone — is precisely what Pardington has collapsed by filtering the colour and thereby blurring the full story of the busts’ contribution to an important episode of racial profiling. One remedy might have seen the book’s historical images supplemented with standard (‘non-aestheticised’) photographic documentation of selected busts.

Dumoutier’s life casts proved insufficient for their intended anthropometric purpose: the characterisation of separate Pacific races as determined by head formations. But with the passage of time they have become precious, almost magical documents that collapse time and distance: indexical imprints made through the collaboration of a French phrenologist and the Pacific peoples themselves. That is why the casts have had a busy exhibition itinerary in recent times, in which the Māori ‘specimens’ have played a prominent role. All four Māori busts returned to New Zealand in 1991 for a National Library exhibition of early French artists’ work in the country. A selection of the Pacific busts travelled to Sydney in 2002 for a Dumont d’Urville exhibition, at the same time as the elaborately tattooed Matoua Tawai (a portrait cast in the Bay of Islands in the month following the Otago portraits) was starring in exhibitions of life-casting staged in Paris and Leeds. The Musée du quai Branly, marking its 2006 opening with a vast exhibition of European depictions of the ‘other’, placed one of Dumoutier’s Māori busts into a compelling line-up of casts. Now, in the form of Pardington’s sumptuous digital photographs, these ethnographic artefacts have completed their metamorphosis into spell-binding works of art.

ROGER BLACKLEY teaches art history at Victoria University of Wellington. He was formerly curator of historical New Zealand art at Auckland Art Gallery Toi o Tāmaki.

Dominion of Signs: Three Photo-books

September 1, 2011 Leave a Comment

David Eggleton

Bold Centuries: A Photographic History Album, by Haruhiko Sameshima (Rim Books, Auckland, 2009, $60.00); Alan Miller — New Zealand Photographs, by Alan Miller (Anglesea house, 2009, $70.00); A Man Walks Out of a Bar: New Zealand Photographs 1979—1982, by Lucien Rizos (Rim Books, Auckland, 2011).

‘The camera sits alongside the axe, the gun, the Bible and the specimen jar as colonial tools of preservation’ suggests Aaron Lister in his essay included in Haruhiko Sameshima’s kaleidoscopic Bold Centuries: A Photographic History Album. Sameshima’s Album is an ambitious project, almost a history of New Zealand photography, but presented in a non-chronological and thematic way. Enlisting a number of commentators to provide short texts, he’s gathered together a number of his photographic preoccupations from the past two decades or so, mingling his own photographs (colour, and black and white) with historical photographs, and assembled it all into meticulous arrangements according to subject matter.

The result is an idiosyncratic enquiry into ‘New Zealandness’, with the unit of the photograph as an identifier, a form of measurement, a way of mapping — and perhaps claiming. Sameshima tells us he emigrated from Japan with his family in 1973 when he was fourteen: ‘Why exactly my father made the decision to leave Japan and settle his family in New Zealand remains a mystery to me, but the project seemed like an exciting adventure . . .’. In a way, Bold Centuries reflects that sense of excitement and wide-eyed wonder: he lays out his images as a seductive mosaic of pictorial souvenirs — as a scrapbook, reminiscent of the kind that many of us, as Kyla McFarlane points out in her essay, may have assembled as children.

Except that Sameshima is also, by his juxtapositions, implicitly subjecting what he shows us to quizzical examination, rather than merely positioning them as objects of reminiscence. Making historical comparisons — placing found postcards and found cigarette cards alongside photographs by mid-twentieth century National Publicity Studio photographers, and late nineteenth-century scenic photography firms such as Muir and Moodie, and the Burton Brothers, as well as beside topographic photographs by expeditionary colonial photographers — Sameshima highlights the utopian quest behind New Zealand’s settlement.

Sameshima’s ‘album’, with its consideration of the epic, with its taxonomies that group various photographs by subject, from ‘beautiful’ waterfalls to beautiful photographs of the ‘visual pollution’ of twenty-first-century wind farms, Sameshima challenges us to look again at how we arrive at our visual conventions — how we ‘see’.

Bold Centuries — journeying from close-ups of the antique wallpaper in the Kerikeri Mission House, to dioramas in the Auckland war Memorial Museum, to the Cook Strait Ferry Terminal to ‘picturesque Lake Manapouri’ — is imbued with a doubting sceptical quality about touristic ‘image factories’ of all kinds. Is the photographer essentially an unreliable witness? Do cameras make good liars? On the cover of the book, a wide river swirls and foams and then cascades as a cataract into a cauldron of froth. This might stand for today’s image torrent, at once powerful, threatening, evanescent and disorientating, which we must navigate.

Active in many areas of New Zealand photography, Sameshima reveals himself here as a broad-spectrum searcher of our accumulated nationalist photographic depictions — from the clichéd iconic tropes of the lone kowhai flower or crowded sheep run, to the repackaged eco-friendly landscape-as-theme-park experience — for what they might reveal, playing different photographic traditions off against one another.

Sameshima shows how that the mysterious and rarefied Sublime of landscape art rhetoric has become the ‘sublime’ of galloping consumption, to be ordered from a catalogue. But if capitalist advertising now ‘owns’ much of this imagery, making it contentious, even untrustworthy, adept use of photographic technologies also allows that ownership to be contested, critiqued and even subverted.

Sameshima’s witty archives of imagery relish the paradoxes and complexities of the photograph. A photograph can be at once realistic and illusionistic, superficial and profound — a veneer, or surface, invested with emotional depth. The photographer as collector, he employs repetition and monotony to tease us with the scrapbook as scrapheap — photographs of obsolescent industrial objects gathering dust — and destroys the notion of uniqueness by producing, in his ‘typologies’, images interchangeable with those of Wayne Barrar, David Cook and Mark Adams by way of ‘quotation’. Yet, examined carefully, Sameshima retains his own signature touches, and perhaps most characteristically a certain complex mood: gentle longing undercut by wry self-awareness; a delicate, even sweet, hovering melancholy.

If Sameshima’s methodology resembles that of scientific enquiry, Allan Miller’s photographic stance in Allan Miller — New Zealand Photographs is that of a nature mystic. As Martin Edmond puts it in a short accompanying essay, Miller’s photographs of the landscape ‘seem to raise the quotidian to another power’ . . . his photographs ‘marvel’ at the world and its numinous mysteries, its ‘true face’.

Technically, Miller is old school: for these images he’s used a classic Leica camera and Kodak black-and-white film. So, in a way, he is a magician of the darkroom, emphasising the alchemical, his camera’s black vault a progenitor of dreamy musings. The prints have a granular quality, at times a sticky-as-tar quality. They are, design-wise, painterly; in an interview in the book with Kriselle Baker Miller invokes Colin McCahon as a force for revelation of what landscape might be — an exemplary visionary.

Miller works then with the primal, with shadows and radiance. His is the rhapsody of things as they are, but his wish is to push on past that recognition, seeking the mystery at the heart of rhapsody. Put simply, his subjects are the seasons, as in the shrouded, autumnal aura of ‘Full moon, Bay of Islands, April 2002’, and the organic, as in the close-up of a seed-pod in ‘Nikau, Punakaiki, 2004’.

We think of photography as a fast medium. Miller’s self-appointed task is to slow it down, and then examine the edges of perception thereby made visible. His weighty images offer a sense of estrangement from the everyday; his skewed shadowplay seeks evocations of spookiness and spirit-beings, traces of the Gothic sublime, the consideration of a Romantic poet’s eye-view, where everything is a metaphor for time and decay, collapse and entropy, transcendence and eternity.

Light, here, is a material substance: smearing and streaking, glistening on the sea, muffled by mist, veiled by condensation, twinkling through rain from a sunshower that steams off a corrugated iron roof in the backcountry. A charred-looking tree set starkly against the winter snows of Mount Ngauruhoe and slithery surfaces of a Rotorua mudpool forming ominous whorls suggest a world of portents and messages.

Broody and moody, but also exhilarating, Miller is the photographer as believer. Showing us ragged plumes of toe-toe blending harmoniously with travelling clouds, or taking us deeper into the mottled chiaroscuro of a chrysalis, or tree bole, and promising resurrection of a kind, or at least regeneration, he makes you a believer too.

In French critic Roland Barthes’ book Camera Lucida: Reflections on Photography, Barthes describes early cameras with their wooden cabinets as ‘clocks for seeing’. You could apply the same metaphor to the retro-vision offered by Lucien Rizos’s photo-book A Man Walks Out of a Bar: New Zealand Photographs, 1979—1982. Its sixty-six black-and-white photographs, selected from an accumulation of thousands made while Rizos was a violinist on tour with the New Zealand Symphony Orchestra, offer the sensation of time travel, and also something of the sensation of their instantaneous making. Essays by Damian Skinner and Ian Wedde ruminate on lost time recovered in these photographs. What once was urgent has been locked into the permanent Now of yesterday.

This book, a homage of sorts, as Ian Wedde points out, to Robert Frank’s famous 1959 road trip selection of photographs The Americans, and steeped philosophically in the climate of post-World War Two existentialism, has transferred its analogue images into the digital age by smoothing them seamlessly into grey-on-grey. Thus Rizos’s New Zealand is rendered in an atmospheric Parisian grisaille. But in this artful rendering of time lost, arranged loosely into a narrative of riffs and sequences and ‘movements’ that imply the flicker of moving film, of a road movie, what we miss, or what our attention is drawn to, is the absent soundtrack, and how it is signified visually.

The title offers the first droll signpost. It implies, perhaps, the beginning of a shaggy dog story, to be followed by appreciative chuckles, as well as being a literal description of the cover photograph, but a second look at that photograph suggests that the missing noise is not bar chatter, but some interior music, to the beat of which the man in question is skipping along, with a sway in his step, his pace quickening, his tempo accelerando, in keeping with the images inside the book. The photograph also implies the snatched glimpse of the passer-by, a consequence of the good hand-eye coordination and reflex actions of the alert snapper.

It signals, too, the scope of the project. Rizos is photographing the rhythms of daily existence in the form of chance encounters. He photographs people caught unaware, or barely aware, or else surprised and curious. Moments of exposure made on the fly taken together constitute a sustained momentum, a series of punctuation points, the sensation of movement confirmed, for example, by the way the man walking out of a bar meets the photographer’s sideways glance, his gaze, as if to mirror his curiosity.

Rizos, meanwhile, hurries on in search of more arrested moments, in search of the spirit of New Zealand, hoping to make something of consequence from the inconsequential. If Haruhiko Sameshima is interested in examining what varnished photography might consist of, Rizos aims to be the unvarnished photographer, reacting to strangers.

A study of the lull before the watershed, the last of the Muldoon Years, AMWOOAB forms an interesting counterpoint to Ans Westra’s photo-book of a decade earlier, Notes on the Country I Live In (1972), which presents us as New Zealanders as static, hieratic, often heroic figures. By comparison, Rizos has photographed people who look boxed-in, squeezed into their small British cars, or peering out of a tea-room window disconsolately; they are the grey ghosts and pale doubles of Westra’s people — the same people, perhaps, at the fag-end of a decade of euphoria. In these studies of small-town settings, even the outdoors seems claustrophobic; the skies are permanently overcast — this is Fortress New Zealand.

Editorial choices are made so that Rizos avoids flashpoints such as political protest rallies, instead his wanderings and his body language diagnoses imply a country locked in space and time, whose scruffy and scrubby surroundings convey a sense of imprisonment, with the Great Escape taking the form of mass exodus to Australia.

Improvising like a jazz musician, Rizos plays an air upon the theme of emotional repression. It’s as if he’s gone looking for crowds, for camaraderie, and found mostly solitaries wrapped in gloom, like a nation of professional mourners. He’s trying to make a sense of isolation palpable, trying to make anxiety palpable, scenting it in petrol fumes and scorched rubber, in beery but mostly deserted lounge bars, and in smoky tea-rooms, where over the formica table-tops, with their freight of metal ashtrays, individuals are engaged in sour tea-swilling and irritable newspaper-rustling interludes. This is period-era comedy or drama which could have found its inspiration in the writings of Samuel Beckett.

Pedestrians trot or shuffle, pushchairs squeak. All is locomotion. The mutton-chopped long-hair in his white woolly cardigan drives by, glowering, his elbow plonked on the sill of the open car window. Everyone is preoccupied, solipsistic, oblivious. This is a corpus of imagery with a single-minded conviction.

Then Rizos, too, moves on — down a state highway, photographing through the car window a house almost by accident. He snatches the moment and renders it as sensation. The subject is the sandblasted leaping gazelles on the glass front doors. Clouds lour and the hills are bare and stark. The doors are caught centre-frame, but they are emphatically shut.

DAVID EGGLETON is the editor of Landfall and The Landfall Review Online.

The Unsuspecting Huia

September 1, 2011 Leave a Comment

Tim Jones

Mr Allbones’ Ferrets: An historical pastoral satirical scientifical romance, with mustelids, by Fiona Farrell (Vintage, 2007), 217 pp., $27.99.

Growing up in rural Southland, I was aware of a powerful and supposedly benevolent body called the Acclimatisation Society, which – so I gathered – had the job of ensuring that river, stream and field were stocked with the fish and game best suited to delight the nation’s anglers and hunters. As I grew older, I learned that these benevolent overlords of the natural world were not, in fact, so benevolent after all, and that the story of ‘acclimatisation’ was a story of disaster after disaster, as wave after wave of English fauna was imported and let loose on native ecosystems ill suited to receive the aggressive intruders.

First the accidental releases of rats, mice, cats — then the deliberate; surely the rabbit, so charming on an English sward, would prove no less charming hopping about on a New Zealand meadow? When the rabbit proved to be an all too successful immigrant, threatening the pasture on which the colonists depended, then an even more fateful decision was made: to import their natural predators, the weasels, stoats and ferrets, to control them.

The Acclimatisation Societies are all Fish and Game Councils now, and wiser with it, but the consequences of their past diligence are all around us, in silent forests and empty nests. Therefore, it was a bit of a stretch for me to take on the task of reviewing a novel, set in the 1880s, in which the protagonist is a man whose job it is to catch ferrets and transport them safely to New Zealand to control the rabbit problem. But I have read and enjoyed books about unpleasant professions before — Gene Wolfe’s Shadow of the Torturer, for one — and I enjoyed Mr Allbones’ Ferrets too.

The novel does pretty much what it says on the tin: it’s historical, it’s pastoral (at least initially), there is science afoot, there is a romance, and, by George, there are mustelids aplenty. I didn’t really notice the satire, but there are strong doses of dramatic irony. To fit all that in 217 pages is a challenging assignment for any author, but Fiona Farrell’s assured command of literary technique means that Mr Allbones’ Ferrets rises to the challenge, though not always without strain.

It’s not a criticism of this novel to say that the most memorable characters are the ferrets. The novel opens with a marvellous set-piece in which we see Walter Allbones going about his business, and his favourite ferret going about hers, in a happy if risky concord. For Walter Allbones is a poacher; he poaches rabbits, and Pinky the ferret is his chosen implement. In a scene so vivid it will stay with me long after the plot of the novel has grown hazy in my memory, we learn how poacher and ferret work together to lay pink, juicy rabbit on the table. By the end of this scene, I was on the side — for the duration of the novel — of Allbones and his ferrets, and also confident that I was in very good authorial hands.

Then, on his way home with his spoils, Allbones runs into trouble, and that trouble leads him, all spit and polish, to the door of the big house at two o’clock on a sunny afternoon. Mr Pitford, a gentleman, has need of a man who knows his way around a mustelid, for Mr Pitford is in the business of acclimatisation, and the colonists in distant New Zealand are crying out for help with their rabbit problem.

And Mr Pitford has a granddaughter called Eugenia — a young, beautiful, granddaughter, with whom Allbones is smitten, and who in turn does not seem entirely immune to his rustic charms.

And this is where I went ‘uh-oh’, for in a thousand novels and films Ken Shabby, the tramp/poacher/gamekeeper, has lusted after Rosemary, the virginal daughter of the manor; and in a good proportion of those, Rosemary has raised his station or lowered hers. How could Fiona Farrell bring anything new to this well-worn trope? To make life even tougher for Eugenia, she is also Exposition Girl, tasked with bringing Allbones up to speed on the Theory of Evolution and the inevitable extinction of weaker species, and in general to show Allbones and we, the readers, how the Victorians rebranded Darwin’s work as a moral justification for their own rapacious colonialism.

So, after the vividness of the opening scenes, I found this section of a novel something of a let-down. Of all the major characters — Allbones the poacher, his rival/tormentor/reluctant ally Metcalf, Pitford the paterfamilias — it was Eugenia I found the least convincing. Nevertheless, developments late in the novel do provide a retrospective explanation for much of her behaviour and her character. Her given name is surely no accident.

But then the chief dramatis personae and their horde of ferrets take ship for New Zealand, and we get the second of the great set pieces — set pieces which, though it is high praise indeed, reminded me in their intensity and vividness of the great mowing scene in Anna Karenina. Fiona Farrell gives us a panorama of the colonists boarding the Adam and Eve, 999 tons and bound for Wellington direct, with the rich well-housed, the poor crammed into narrow berths, and the ferrets, securely caged, standing between them.

The terrors and pleasures of the journey to New Zealand are well described, but what stuck with me most vividly was the sense that, on such a voyage, the social order was being overturned as well as the seasons. In a new land, the poor may rise, but so too the rich may fall. Chance, circumstance, and old sins brought to light can lead to new dispositions.

In all the human drama of the voyage and its aftermath, I feared that the ferrets would be forgotten, but the novel ends as it should. Walter Allbones and his new bride are riding upcountry from Wellington in the gig that will take them to their new home carved out from the bush. Caged in the wagon behind them rides Pinky the ferret, pregnant with her next litter, and eager for release:

Her pink nose whiffles as she smells the sweet deep soil of her new home. She smells feathers and flesh and warm blood. She hears thousands upon thousands of birds singing songs new to her: korimako and tui. Piopio, miromiro, matata, hihi, kakariki, kaka and unsuspecting huia. (213)

Walter Allbones and his kin have faded into archival records, old photos, and genealogy, while Pinky’s descendants are very much with us. Well done, that man!

In Australia, I once stayed in a house run by ferret breeders. A ferret tried to get into my sleeping bag. I had to leap in the air and shriek before it saw reason. I don’t like ferrets very much. I did like this novel.

TIM JONES is a Wellington-based poet, writer and editor. His second collection of short stories, Transported (Random House, Auckland, 2008), was longlisted for the 2008 Frank O’Connor International Short Story Award. He blogs at: http://timjonesbooks.blogspot.com/

5 (Or More) Things About ‘This is Not writing’ by Julian Dashper

September 1, 2011 Leave a Comment

David Herkt

This is not writing, by Julian Dashper, (Clouds & Michael Lett, 2011), $39.95.

‘Why should one understand anything? Should we not just experience it?’ – Julian Dashper (p. 75)

1. Memento Mori
In September 2010, the first anniversary of the death of New Zealand artist Julian Daspher was marked in New York by exhibition of a single artwork by him.
   Entitled ‘Future Call’, a telephone was installed in MINUS SPACE, a Brooklyn art gallery, and then periodically phoned from New Zealand, nominally ‘ahead’, time-wise, from much of the world — but the call was left ringing and unanswered.
   ‘Future Call’ was usually undertaken by the artist himself, but in the Brooklyn show the call was now placed by the artist’s wife, Marie Shannon.

   What had been a trenchant commentary on the nature of time, presence and distance, New Zealand art in a global environment, and technology and mediation, ‘Future Call’ now became a poignant reminder of the absence of the artist from his artwork.1
   And this was Dashper’s great skill: he made artworks that often had an existence apart from their embodiment. They were frequently works that could be carried anywhere, a nomad’s art gallery, curated in the mind, and changing with circumstance.

   This is not writing is a near-definitive collection of Dashper’s public writings, compiled from gallery catalogues, interviews, magazine articles, and the artist’s archives, and selected by the artist himself prior to his death. Not only are these texts descriptive and revelatory of intent and circumstance, they are often works of art in themselves, performative utterances by an artist whose material range frequently seemed subsidiary to a state of being.
   With Dashper’s death, these texts take on new resonances, just like Curriculum Vitae (various dates), the title of a piece consisting of Dashper’s written biography and list of exhibitions that was simply pinned to a gallery wall, taking more space each time. Now, while the exhibitions are still added to the exhibition-listing, the biography pages of Curriculum Vitae are considered to have been completed.

1. The exhibition can be seen in ‘Julian Dashper (1960–2009) It Is Life at MINUS SPACE’. The clip includes the telephone in ‘Future Call’ ringing through to answerphone:

2. Physics (Fetish)
This is not writing is a book published by Clouds and Michael Lett in June 2011.
   Hefted in the hand, it weighs in at 670 gm, feeling pleasant to lift and to hold, one of those exact weights of both delight and use. It is not problematic to read in bed or on a desk, though the binding is of such quality that the book itself prefers closure — perhaps oddly, in view of its content.
   The volume measures 166 x 236 x 23 mm, and is thus not pocketable, though easy carried, and possibly with some social cachet (eye-catching design and colour) in the carrying.
   Hardcover and cloth-bound, This is not writing is a pleasing light pink (JHT #0008), more old-fashioned prosthetic than primrose. The cloth has a slight nap that furs under the fingers nicely. It was bound, as it was printed, by Everbest, in China.
   The cover is titled on the upper left front, in black 18-point font, discreetly. The spine contains the title and the names of author and publishers in 10 point, even more discreetly. The font is Helvetica Neue (Linotype), which is used throughout the volume.
   The paper is 140 gsm SUN woodfree, with no sense of flimsiness, but rather an appropriate gravitas. It does not take fingermarks.
   Importantly, the acknowledgements page of This is not writing contains an editor’s note by Gwyneth Porter, the writer, curator, and former editor of the NZ periodical Log Illustrated, which states that the book was based on a list and materials provided by Dashper to gallerist Michael Lett in 2008.
   The tone and formal qualities of Dashper’s writings (particularly his use of the dash and ellipsis) have been retained by the editor, as was Dashper’s titling (unitalicised, initial uppercase only). The versions of the texts are those chosen by Dashper.
   At 188 pages it is an ideal length for a book that aims for a ‘complete’ status. It is without any size-of-a-doorstop portentousness. It is approachable and companionable.
   This is not writing has been produced in an edition of 1000, giving the book some of the quality of an artist’s limited edition for the purchaser.
   The book was designed by Luke Wood, of Christchurch, co-editor of online-design journal The National Grid. Wood’s work ‘seeks to centralize the role of the physical artefact — the publication — in the development of an engaged network of participants in such a project.’ It’s readily apparent that in This is not writing Wood has succeeded in this aim.
   The unique International Standard Book Number identifier of This is not writing is ISBN 978-0-9582981-9-3.
   Each copy is individually shrink-wrapped.

3: Contentious Content
A key moment in the reception of Dashper’s art occurred at the Institute of Contemporary Art, Newtown, Sydney, in 2008, when Dashper’s video installation The Last Second of the Last Venice Biennale 2007 (DVD, Edition 1 of 5) containing a repeating loop of the last second of that biennale for 90 minutes, was turned-off. 1
   A member of the public had apparently assumed the display unit was simply malfunctioning.
It wasn’t the first time that Dashper’s brand of reductive art — ‘They thought there was nothing there’ — had been subject to change by viewers or exhibitors. As Dashper relates, even his own technicians on occasion could not find or see the art-work they were being called upon to witness.
   An expert at maximalisation; a constructor of enigmas; an adaptor of conceptualism, of abstract expressionism, and of minimalism to his own ends; a former Fulbright Fellow and holder of a Marfa Artist’s Residency; and also famous as an exhibitor of drum kits in art galleries: it is possible to claim that Julian Dashper was one of great showmen of recent New Zealand art practice.
   But Dashper’s work was never appearance without content, and it was never without contention.
The texts collected in This is not writing, written or produced between 1986 and 2008, record Dashper’s development and form a bracketing of — a commentary on — modes and means of creating art in a contemporary context.
   Dashper’s texts also straddle the line between artwork and documentation — enough in his case as to put the distinction profoundly in question.
   And in an age of brevity, blogs, Youtube clips, inevitable links, and cut-and-paste, the relevance of Dashper’s own complexly reductive works (often with a self-enclosed commentary) is immediately apparent.
   Emblematic of this contemporaneousness is Dashper’s intensive utilisation of lists as an art-form, as for instance in: ‘Sydney 2000’, ‘Favourite Things’, and ‘100 thoughts as an artist in residence at the Chinati Foundation, Marfa, Texas’.
   Dashper’s listings become autobiography, speculation, philosophy, autobiography — and riddling statement: ‘57: I imagine it would be hard for a critic to resist making a critical comment about this’; ‘59: Colin McCahon was born in Australia. Not many people know this.’
   Dashper also reveals himself to be an acute observer of the contemporary world as in the 1993 interview with an airline pilot (‘Pilot Essay’) which offers trenchant remarks on the nature of speed, time, global spaces, and our experience of them: ‘The cockpit is just the same as the simulator, but when you get out the destination is different’ (p. 43)
   Dashper’s texts also forefront the role of an artist in contemporary culture, not only with regard to Dashper’s own practice, but also in terms of of an entire contemporary art movement. He proves himself to be a sharp observer of the strategies and styles of both himself and his peers.
   ‘Things I remember Philip Clairmont saying today’ (a typical Dashperian title) offers cumulatively revealing glimpses of that artist: ‘Don’t let the landlord see past the front door’; ‘I’m an inside person’; ‘If you turn it up past here, the neighbours ring up’; ‘Try painting outside, if your studio is too small. Outside is big’.
   Curiously, the weakest texts in This is not writing are the interviews — perhaps the archetypal twentieth-century literary style — where Dashper explains, contextualises, and situates his work for the benefit of various interlocutors. These interviews might have historic and personal interest for students, art historians, and those interested in contemporary art — and they are nothing if not engaging — but when they are flatly juxtaposed with the elan and intensely wrought succinctness of Dashper’s practice as documented by the volume’s more performative texts, they suffer by the comparison.

1. See particularly the Simone Horrocks and Richard Flynn film Julian Dashper My Space, a document/documentary supported by The Screen Innovation Production Fund, filmed in 2008 and released in 2010, as per the artist’s wishes, on Youtube. It is also fascinating to discover in Dashper’s video and on-line documentation that he speaks as much as he writes.

4: Assured Wit
The real history of wit remains to be written, but Dashper can be seen, in some ways, to be the heir of both John Donne and Oscar Wilde. Donne’s use of an extended metaphor, where two very different ideas are combined in a single conceit, and Wilde’s epigrams are perhaps the true precursors to much of Dashper’s written art.
   Dashper’s works and his writings are invariably tight, taut, condensed — and audacious. More often than not they open up a field, rather than close it down. They contain worlds.
But while the texts of This is not writing dissolve distinctions — between high and low, work and commentary, object and practice — many of Dashper’s works, such as ‘Untitled (Portrait of Ben Curnow)’/‘The work consists of Ben Curnow sitting at a desk in the gallery’, contain a profound finality at their core.1 In each exhibition of the work, Curnow ages and changes. In each exhibition, he inhabits a different environment. It is a portrait in practice. It is abbreviated, sure, changing and terribly finite.
   Like the portrait of Curnow, the texts of This is not writing almost inevitably encourage metaphysical flights of thought. They are surprisingly brief. The best of them are a sentence long. They are conceits, intent on capturing fragility and transience — the profound and frequently joyous ephemerality of our deadly passage through time.
   Julian Dashper died in April 2009, at the age of 49.

1. Images of the artwork can be found here

5. Experience (Last Glimpse), 2009

The creation of ‘Untitled (I’m afraid of red, yellow and blue)’ Acrylic paint on wall, 2009, dimensions variable.

DAVID HERKT is an Auckland-based television producer, writer and poet.