Landfall

Tikanga Today

April 1, 2012 Leave a Comment

David Eggleton

Kura Koiwi: Bone Treasures, by Brian Flintoff (Craig Potton, Nelson, 2011), 160 pp., $39.95. The Passing World: The Passage of Life: John Hovell and the Art of Kōwhaiwhai, by Damian Skinner (Rim Books/Huia Publishers, 2010), 136 pp., $49.99.

The cover of Kura Koiwi depicts the taongā kōrero (personal pendant) carved for the kaumātua Sir Tipene O’Regan out of a big whale tooth, using a design based on the traditional symbol of Murihiku — the southernmost part of the South island — which is a whale’s tail. The bottom half of the carving incorporates the head of the whale, an acknowledged tribal guardian or taniwha.

This talisman dangled from the kaumātua’s neck when he was fronting the 1980s TV series The Natural World of the Maori, and Sir Tipene O’Regan continues to wear it on ceremonial occasions. In Māoridom such kaitiaki (or talismans) worn as pendants, brooches, or perhaps just kept in a special place, serve to represent personal, family or tribal stories, symbolically offering connections to mythologies of the spirit world. They serve as tokens of identity, reciprocity, communality. But as Brian Flintoff points out in Kura Koiwi: ‘a bone carving is simply a decoration unless details of its constituent parts are explained to reveal the story it represents.’

Brian Flintoff is a self-taught Pākehā master bone carver who grew up in Southland and now lives in the Nelson region. Kura Koiwi brings together examples of his bone carvings as a follow-up to Taongā Pūoro: Singing Treasures (2003), which contained examples of traditional Māori musical instruments carved by Flintoff and played by musicians Hirini Melbourne and Richard Nunns on their classic recording Te Ku Te Whe, which came out on Rattle Records in 1994. With its whirrings, clicks, and solitary mournful flutes, this CD evoked elemental sounds of Aotearoa that derive not only from birdsong, but also from notes sounded by humpback whales, the fluttering of moths, clicking noises of insects and the rustlings of the wind.

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My History of New Zealand Art

March 1, 2012 Leave a Comment

Mark Stocker

It’s All About the Image,by Dick Frizzell (Godwit, 2011), 280 pp., $65.

Something about Dick Frizzell either irks or delights people: there is no scope for the in-between. I’ve just had my third student in as many years asking whether they might please write their Honours dissertation on him. Is there comparable demand, I wonder, at the Elam School of Art, where Frizzell taught for many years? Largely spurned by the curatorial and art historical world and simultaneously loved by the public, there are certain parallels between Frizzell (as he ruefully notes) and Peter McIntyre half a century ago. But whereas the literati — Landfall included — could pretend that McIntyre never existed, such mandarin hauteur is impossible to sustain in a noisier contemporary world. Frizzell is the favourite of the gallery shop if not of the gallery itself, and the time will surely come, one hopes before the master’s dotage, when he will be accorded an already overdue retrospective exhibition.

It’s All About the Image is not so much about the art of Frizzell but — something deeply suspect, and a word that he does not use himself — his taste. ‘Only a perverse form of prejudice emerges from taste’, claims the right-on contemporary art curator Okwui Enwezor, but it is precisely this prejudice (and indeed the perversion) that is guaranteed to pique any reader — or rather viewer — of this book. The cover, a-spoof-cum-tribute to Colin McCahon, with a background the colour of cherry yoghurt, sets the tone and invites a dip that soon becomes a gorge.

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North Versus South with Loaded Canons

March 1, 2012 Leave a Comment

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.
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Quest for the Middle Ground

March 1, 2012 Leave a Comment

Henry Feltham

The Desolation Angel, by Tim Wilson (Victoria University Press, 2011) 189 pp. $35

A piece of wisdom common to the music industry holds that your best song should never come first. Shoving the strongest track to the front of an album suggests the rest isn’t worth listening to. Dozens of internet threads debate the pros and cons of this notion; scarcely any make the argument for short stories. The arrangement of a collection is no less arcane than the ordering of a record. Some stories demand a position at the front, some at the rear. Some may not make the grade at all, once the logic of the collection becomes apparent (if it ever does). It may – in the final reckoning – prove impossible to astonish a reader picking the book up and not disappoint them a little further down the line. Not only is there no right answer, but the contest may be unwinnable.

There is a fulcrum at the centre of Tim Wilson’s new collection Desolation Angel, a story entitled ‘Suits’. It is the longest work in the book and seems to stabilise it. Yet this could be an accident: a parallel piece of publishing wisdom almost certainly states that it’s foolish to start a collection with the longest piece. Implicit is a vague sense of embarrassment about longer works — a doubt for their respect of short-story doctrine. ‘Suits’, though, is an extraordinary piece of writing following the disintegration of a freshly re-structured gaggle of business people as they pursue a trans-continental commute. Over forty pages, Wilson’s writing has the chance to spread out, gather pace. The disco cadence and projectile prose – which in the shorter pieces feels occasionally forced, or jammed-in-there – shimmers, darting between the crushing here-and-now of serial flight-catching and the more promising, elastic past.

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Looking for Helengrad

March 1, 2012 Leave a Comment

David Eggleton

Ruling Passions: Essays on just about Everything, by Nick Perry (Otago University Press, 2011) 230 pp. $45

Rudyard Kipling, the globe-trotting bard of the British Empire, famously described Auckland at the beginning of the twentieth century in his poem ‘The Song of the Cities’ as: ‘Last, loneliest, loveliest, exquisite, apart.’ This implicit glamourising, this poetic endorsement of ‘New Zealand exceptionalism’, as Nick Perry terms it, is one of the abiding cultural myths examined in Ruling Passions: Essays on just about Everything. In his miscellany of essays, variously written over the past two decades or so, Perry, Professor in Film, Television and Media Studies at the University of Auckland, ranges eclectically and exuberantly across many examples of ‘cultural work’ and ‘media spectacle’, but at heart his book is concerned with constructions of New Zealand identity — and is not so much an exploration of its ruling passions as of its ruling anxieties.

As a nation we have a craving for ‘authentic’ representations, but as a nation we are also ironically knowing about patriotism and propaganda, and aware that the ‘authentic’ experience is a valuable commodity, vulnerable to packaging and marketing. Framing Perry’s essays is the notion of commodity aesthetics, mediated, basically, by TV commercials and infotainment in which, as the sociologist W.F. Haug has pointed out: ‘the beautiful image becomes completely disembodied and drifts unencumbered like a multicoloured spirit of the commodity into every household.’ And so the media turns landscape into brandscape, providing idealised, emotionally affecting moments, moments of self-identification, with folk jogging, fishing, picnicking, using their smart phones, and so on. Leisure, in a word, on an industrial scale.

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Nature Study Man

March 1, 2012 Leave a Comment

Denis Harold

Seabird Genius: the Story of L.E. Richdale, the Royal Albatross and the Yellow-eyed Penguin, by Neville Peat (Otago University Press, 2011), 288 pp. $45

The establishment of the albatross colony at Tairoa Head on Otago Peninsula is iconic, but not so the individual largely responsible. Lance Richdale, born just days into the beginning of the twentieth century, saw his first albatross egg in November 1936 and was later devastated when he learned that vandals had stolen it. In fact, because of predators, no chick had successfully fledged in many years. He lobbied for the building of a protective fence, and the following season camped in his spare time near the nest of a single surviving chick. When after eight months it flew out to sea, local and foreign newspapers reported this exceptional event.

Prior to his contact with albatross, Richdale had begun intensive observations of yellow-eyed penguins on Otago Peninsula. After five seasons encompassing 800 visits to the colonies, he produced a two-volume manuscript, which unfortunately was not published because of the Second World War. He also began a twenty-year study of petrels on tiny Whero Island off the coast of Stewart Island.

Richdale was the first person in New Zealand to band seabirds systematically over time, and the second in the world to band penguins. His close observations of seabirds enabled him to debunk various fallacies, and to make many discoveries. He disproved the widely held notion that albatross deliberately starved their chicks in the later stages of rearing; and in regard to penguins he identified ‘14 types of behavior when pairs interacted’. Long-term studies of seabirds are still a rarity.
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