farewell

Well this is my last day at the Auckland Art Gallery and it has been a fabulous 5 or so years. Things in the online space have changed a lot in that time, indeed this blog wasn't even a twinkle in my eye when i started. I truly believe that working online is one of the most challenging but exciting places to work. You never get bored, there is always something new coming out to push the boundaries a little further. I love it and will continue to work online in my new role.

Good luck to the Gallery in all their future project, i know great things will come out of those offices.


Anyway, I'm handing over the blog and look forward to seeing some fabulous posts up here.


Onwards and upwards, I shall miss all the wonderful staff both here and also at the many other institutions around the country that I have met. Thanks for all the wonderful support.



Take Care
Over and out


Sarah xx


p.s i bumped into Gok on my leaving lunch hence the odd leaving photo below! x

The Photography Curator and Collector known as Sam Wagstaff Jr (1921-1987)

Part one:

I watched Black White + Gray, James Crump’s documentary on Sam Wagstaff and felt dissatisfied with its perspective on one of the most influential curators of photography. The feature length portrait did not create a convincing portrait for me of Sam as an outstanding and incisive collector of photographs. It concentrated much more on the man’s personal life and his relationship with the artist Robert Mapplethorpe.

Sam started forming his collection during 1973, purchasing widely and boldly across all periods but in particular pre-World War I material. A decade later he sold almost all of the collection to the Getty Museum and set that institution onto a strategic plan that quickly established one of the world’s key photography collections. The Getty’s photography curator Gordon Baldwin knew Sam personally and commented, “It was pretty clear that he came from a starchy background.”

In 1978, Gray Press issued A Book of Photographs from the collection of Sam Wagstaff in conjunction with an exhibition of the works at Washington’s Corcoran Gallery, that later travelled throughout America. This show alerted many museum curators that they just were not giving enough attention to the achievement of photography.

It is impossible to not be moved by this outstanding collection. It is totally heterogeneous and idiosyncratic. The images that Sam collected were not constrained by silly ideas about hierarchies of value. He mixed up categories in a way that no museum was then doing: travel and industrial, ethnographic and amateur, scientific and pictorialist photography. Sam refused to be constrained by notions that certain photographs were more important than others.

You can access Sam Wagstaff's archive at the Archives of American Art:
http://www.aaa.si.edu/collectionsonline/wagssamu/

In my next blog I will show three favourites from his collection.

Double Take/Time Frame

John De Stefano and Ann Shelton have opened their photographic exhibition Double Take/Time Frame at RMIT’s PROJECT SPACE / SPARE ROOM. It includes an engaging essay by Martin Patrick and images of the artwork that they have included in the show that is also web accessible:
http://schoolofartgalleries.dsc.rmit.edu.au/PSSR/exhibitions/2010/double_take.html


I enjoyed reading Martin’s essay. It reminded me of the title of Nabokov's incisive memoir about his early life in Russia: Speak Memory. The essay demarcated an interesting contemporary take on the creative power of memory. Not nostalgia, or even retro-sense, but the welling effect of perception influenced by current stimuli as a means to reach straight into the past. The creative locus that drives all of Marcel Proust's work.

John Di Stefano, Ashes [Amsterdam] 2008
Single channel video projection, 5 minute loop

Somehow, putting distance between the representation of their photographs, their locality so to speak, and where they are exhibited actually affects how they are read and perceived. Perhaps this is the notion that Peter Tomory identified in reverse: Distance Looks our Way.

Ann Shelton, Cell, (after An Angel at My Table) Seacliff Asylum, North Otago, New Zealand 2003
Diptych, C Type prints

John and Ann’s exhibition raises the question: if we separate a place filled up with history from the culture which it was born in, what changes happen to the image’s meaning? This is an interesting conundrum.

Thinking of Diane Arbus

I have been a committed fan of Diane Arbus’ photographs ever since I was a teenager. My mother purchased me a subscription to Creative Camera and it was in that lovely magazine that I saw my first Arbus photograph in April 1970. This was the totally bizarre portrait of Viva Superstar at home, New York City 1968. Viva looked as if she was in the process of some astonishing vision.

Arbus was an utterly fearless artist. She always wanted to terrify herself with the people that she photographed. Imagine someone who says: "I have never taken a picture I've intended. They're always better or worse." Those are the words of one tough and resolute artist!

Diane was something like a Hassidic mystic in the manner in which she wrote and spoke about what mattered to her as a photographer. Her comments are like riddles and they are essential to understanding her work as an American Jewish artist:

“A photograph is a secret about a secret.”
“I really believe there are things nobody would see if I didn’t photograph them.”

"One thing that struck me very early is that you don't put into a photograph what's going to come out. Or, vice versa, what comes out is not what you put in."
“The more specific you are, the more general it will be.”

Auckland Art Gallery presented the fantastic Museum of Modern Art survey exhibition of Diane Arbus’ photographs from December 1978 until January 1979. I think that this was the first monographic show by an international contemporary photographer to have been presented in New Zealand. It was an eye-opener for everyone who saw it. We advertised the exhibition in local cinemas with the an image of the Lady at a masked ball with two roses on her dress, New York City 1967.

The Summer 2010 issue of Aperture magazine (number 199) reproduces nine “Unknown or almost-known photographs” by Diane Arbus selected by the American artist Robert Gober that were first shown at the wonderful Fraenkel Gallery based in San Francisco. See: http://www.fraenkelgallery.com/

The Estate of Diane Arbus is firm about where the artist’s images are reproduced and even the Fraenkel Gallery does not reproduce her work on their website. Yet, let me give you some of her photograph’s memorable titles:

Christ in a lobby, New York City
Two girls in curlers, New York City
Teenager with a baseball bat
Barefoot child jumping rope, New York City
Couple dancing in front of a curtain, New York City
Five members of the Monster Fan Club, New York City
Jack Dracula at a bar, New York City

If you could only possess one book on an American photographer I recommend:
Diane Arbus – Revelations, San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, 2003
(ISBN 08129 7220 1). This book is a remarkable introduction to a profound camera artist. See also the important 1972 mongraph Diane Arbus (Penguin Books, ISBN 0713907274) which is arguably one of the most important photographic books ever produced. It is now rare and valuable.

For more quotes by Diane Arbus please see http://www.photoquotes.com/showquotes.aspx?id=90&name=Arbus,Diane

Josie Robertson

Late this afternoon we learned that Josephine "Josie" Robertson, wife of Julian, died in New York on Tuesday. Josie was only 67 but she had been battling breast cancer for a number of years and it finally took its toll. She was a truly energetic and passionate woman who provided much of the drive and inspiration behind the couple's global philanthropic and business interests. At the beginning of their life's partnership art was very much her interest but one that Julian quickly came to share. He often tells the story that he was virtually dragged into his first major art museum experience, while on their honeymoon in Paris 38 years ago. Josie insisted they make a visit to the Jeu de Paume and a lifelong love of the post-impressionists was born.

Josie had taken art as her major when she studied at the University of Texas, from where she graduated in 1965. Although art history was not taught at the time she became a regular visitor to art museums. Once she and Julian began to form their collection, she told Gallery curator Mary Kisler in 2008, "it really started to work for itself, leading the way". She and Julian would talk about it a lot, and it became a wonderful common interest for them. She said at the time that her favourite work was Picasso's Femme à la résille, a striking study of his mistress Dora Maar, painted in 1938 and included in the Robertsons promised gift to Auckland.

The Auckland Art Gallery is greatly indebted to the Robertsons for the stunning generosity of their gift of 15 European masterworks, including some truly exceptional works by Picasso, Cezanne and Matisse, which they announced in May 2009. It remains a signal gift on any standard, unprecedented in this part of the world, and Josie was very much its co-author. She and Julian shared an abiding love of the arts and particularly of late 19th and early 20th century painting, and she had a discerning eye honed through their long experience as collectors. Josie loved their collection - their children, as she and Julian would both refer to their paintings - as she loved life. Her loss will be very deeply felt by her husband Julian and by their family and friends.

The Gallery has lost one of its most remarkable, generous and far-sighted benefactors. Her name and Julian's are to be honoured in perpetuity when the Auckland Art Gallery dedicates the level one Kitchener Wing the "Julian and Josie Robertson Galleries" when our developed building opens in mid 2011.

Chris Saines
Director
Wednesday 9 June 2010

WITH OFFENSIVE CANDOUR - Bulletin Artists in the Collection of the Auckland Art Gallery

The Auckland Art Gallery has a small, but very comprehensive, collection of original cartoons from The Bulletin, or by artists who found fame in its pages. The Bulletin was started in Sydney in 1880 by JF Archibald, who, during his 16 year tenure as editor was responsible for hiring some of the worlds best cartoonists. In the late 1880s The Bulletin was known as the Bushman’s Bible. It was read avidly by miners and saw millers throughout Australia and New Zealand, and was to become the authentic voice of the new colonial population, establishing the careers of writers and poets of the calibre of Banjo Patterson, Henry Lawson and Steele Rudd. From the beginning The Bulletin was as famous for its black and white art as it was for its political and social commentary.

In the era before photographic reproduction magazine illustration was left up to a dedicated group of black and white artists and cartoonists. Initially illustrated by art editor William Macleod and other home-grown talent, publisher WH Traill determined to get new blood into the publication and travelled to the United States where he hired Livingstone Hopkins in 1883, a Civil War veteran then working for New York humour magazines Puck and Judge. In England in 1886 he discovered the great cartoonist Phil May, who was at that time an unappreciated artist working for the St. Stevens Review. May agreed to travel halfway around the world for a three year contract at 20 pounds a week. These two artists revolutionized The Bulletin and inspired a whole new generation of home-grown cartoonists, such as Norman Lindsay, Will Dyson, David Low and Percy Leason. May is credited with bringing a more simplified style of drawing to cartooning, influencing black and white artists everywhere.

Norman Lindsay started his 50 year association with The Bulletin in 1901, on the recommendation of Julian Ashton, while David Low was hired as a teenager on the strength of work sent from New Zealand. Many of these artists went on to become world famous, with Phil May inheriting the mantle of Charles Keene at Punch and Will Dyson and David Low becoming the top political cartoonists on British newspapers from the 1920s through to the 1950s.

This article features some of the rare surviving original artwork from the collection of the Auckland Art Gallery, which includes work by New Zealand born artists David Low, Unk White and George Finey.

Rod MacLeod


Norman Lindsay 1879 – 1969
“The joke-block, to have permanence as art, must not only demonstrate technical excellence, but must reflect the life of its generation”

Once Bitten 1915
Grinder (with offensive candour): ‘Now that there mower only chaws the grass. It wants sharpenin’.Why, yesterday, for two bob I sharpened the one they got next door.’
Old Poi: ‘Yes, I just borrowed it’.

Near Relations – A Study in Fowls 1916

Lindsay delighted in showing the similarities between people and their animals. He also enjoyed endowing animals with human qualities as in his classic children's story The Magic Pudding with its koala bear character Bunyip Bluegum.

The Lost Fare
Lindsay had a great understanding of kids. He was unique in depicting children as entities with concerns of their own in his cartoons. He had a parallel career as a successful comic novelist, and one of his most popular books was Saturdee which dealt with the various adventures of young Australians at the beginning of the 20th century.

Livingstone Hopkins 1846 – 1917
This cartoon refers to Sir George Reid, the Scottish-born Australian politician who was Prime Minister in 1904 -5. He was also the Premier and Treasurer of NSW in the 1880s and helped with the draughting of the Commonwealth Constitution, even though his lack of enthusiasm for Federation confused voters and earned him the nick-name ‘Yes No Reid’. A large man with a walrus moustache, he was a popular subject for cartoonists of the day.

Frank P Mahony 1862 – 1917

Mahony’s work was regularly published in The Bulletins early years. As well as fine pen and ink drawing his speciality was a moody dark wash that reproduced well using the printing methods of the day.

Our demoralized black brother

Police Trooper: ‘Well Jacky! What have you been up to this time?’
Jacky: ‘Not much, boss. Only swearing like a plurry trooper.’

Rider: ‘How far is that township?’
Pat: ‘No distance. You could throw a stone to it.’
Mick: ‘Shure – yer couldn’t – nor two stones nather.’

When the work was published Mahony’s original words were changed editorially:

Stranger (on horseback on country road): ‘Is it far from the top of that hill to the township?’

Hennessy: ‘No sir, yer could throw a stone from there into the main street.’

Murphy (contradicting): ‘Indade yer couldn’t, Hinnessy, nor two stones.

Look how far we have come

Since the webcam went live in 2008 it has been capturing the Gallery Development project everyday, rain or shine. To celebrate how far we have come with the building I have put together a little time-lapse video to illustrate how much has happened. We still have a long way to go but I hope you enjoy this glimpse at the current progress to the building.

You can keep an eye on daily activities through the webcam at www.aagwebcam.com

Horologist returns

A few months ago I did this post on Michael Cryns who looks after our Gallery clock. At the time, when I looked through his collection of photos, showing the inside of the clock from the past to present, there was only one photo of him and the clock together. Michael took this photo (below) himself and as you can see, it doesn't quite do him justice, as it only shows the top of his head.

He recently came in to do an interview with TVNZ for One News (which you can still see here) and I took the opportunity to take some more recent and fitting photos of Michael with the clock he has cared for over the years.

Michael with the beautiful bells in the clock-tower.

Michael with the TVNZ crew and Lee from Hawkins who showed us round.

Here Michael answered my request to show me how the bells chimed.

Climbing down the new ladder from the bell tower past the back of the clock face.

Les Cleveland and New Zealand photography (1)

It is always easy to identify nationalist intentions within New Zealand's photography if you are looking back at an historical image.With some camera artists such a revisionist approach is not only needed, it is actually appropriate. With the subtle photographs of Les Cleveland, I have always recognised a nationalist perspective.

Some years ago, I acquired for Auckland Art Gallery’s collection, Les Cleveland’s intriguing photograph John O’Shea and Colin Broadley at the Franz Josef Glacier during the production of “Runaway”, May 1964. (pictured above)

One of my colleagues asked me what the photograph ‘was’. It seemed an odd but pertinent question because it appears at first to be a double portrait of Runaway’s director and the film's lead character. This image is certainly a production document and while not intended to be a film still, it cannot be separated from the film’s making.

Colin Broadley is standing 'in costume' and is obviously still in character. I could have replied, “This 10 by 8-inch gelatin silver print is a behind-the-scenes image of the production of one of O’Shea’s finest movies Runaway.” Such a stuffy, yet correct, response would have really missed the point.

When looking at this photograph it is useful to know that it was taken immediately prior to the movie’s shooting of the scene when Colin’s character - David Manning - was about to ascend the Franz Josef Glacier. The local metaphor is clear – this character finds himself by going off and becoming lost himself in the mountains. This is an intentional loss, not a act of misadventure.

O’Shea positions the character as a New Zealand city bloke who has become a Man Alone figure inhabiting the wilderness. Is is interesting to recall that Bill Pearson’s brilliant book Man Alone was issued in 1960.

What is compelling about this photograph is that it shows a private moment of creative collaboration when issues of how to achieve the scene are being discussed on location. It is obvious how much John O’Shea has created an outsider character from a city guy. While dressed in a Swan-Dri woollen shirt, Colin Broadley remains totally in character – a sophisticated city swinger who has gone bush.

Local reviewers in 1965 did not realise how much Runaway was a radical film for New Zealand. One review said, “The picture has a brooding, dream like quality, but it lacks any real sense of urgency in the young man’s flight from himself, too many motives are started but never fulfilled, and the direction is deliberate. Unusual camera shots occasionally succeed in creating atmosphere and the photography of the New Zealand countryside is fine. Colin Broadley displays quite a personality as David, but Deidre McCarron is wishy- washy as Diana, and Nadja Regin is an utterly conventional vamp.” ("Runaway Killer” in Kinematograph Weekly, 1965)

If you look at the trailer that John O’Shea prepared for his film you will see how international in cinematic style Runaway appears. In its visual look, it is not dissimilar to Michelangelo Antonioni’s astonishing L’Aventura.
See http://data.filmarchive.org.nz/search/view_video.php?ref_no=F14194&no=1

Outside of New Zealand, the film was seen more clearly, “This is an absolutely brilliant film, all but unavailable on video, which is well worth seeking out. I viewed a print at the New Zealand Film Archive, and felt as if I was watching an undiscovered Losey or Antonioni film from the apex of the 1960s, with superb black and white cinematography, excellent acting, and a script which is suitably brutal and yet ultimately intangible, as in the best of both Losey and Antonioni. Do what you need to, but see this film; it is a remarkable testament to one person's determination to make a film without any studio to back him up. Shot for less than $50,000, without sync sound (but so skilfully "looped" that you'll never know it), and with a great "cool" jazz track, this is one of the undiscovered treasures of the cinema.”

Review written by W Dixon at http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0217776/usercomments.

See http://www.imdb.com/user/ur0103121/comments

For further background about the film’s significance refer to John Stuart Reynolds’ superb thesis Going far? - John O’Shea’s Runaway in the context of his attempt to establish a feature film industry in New Zealand
See http://hdl.handle.net/2292/334

I invited Les Cleveland to comment on his photograph John O’Shea and Colin Broadley at the Franz Josef Glacier during the production of “Runaway”, May 1964.

Les kindly sent me this fascinating response:
“I was touring South Westland in May 1964 and photographing a few buildings and landscapes when I encountered the cast and film crew of “Runaway” at the Franz Joseph Glacier terminal moraine. It was about 5 pm and they were all waiting in the last of the sunlight as they looked anxiously toward the jumbled mass of ice and rock at the terminal face. Two of their number was missing. I made several exposures of this group of people. There was good cause for concern as it would soon be dark, the temperature would drop and the ice was no place to be blundering about on in darkness. I had climbed most of the peaks at the head of the glacier and I was aware of the dangers that could be encountered on the terminal moraines so I stayed with the group in case a search had to be organised in the gathering darkness. However, the missing persons finally turned up and we all drove back to the hotel in Harihari where Pacific Films had set up their headquarters for shooting the final sequences of the film.”

Credit:
I am very grateful to Les Cleveland for his comments. I thank the New Zealand Film Archive for permission to provide a link to the Runaway trailer held in their collection of Pacific Films material.

Caption:
Les Cleveland
John O’Shea and Colin Broadley at the Franz Josef Glacier during the production of “Runaway”, May 1964 1964
gelatin silver print
Auckland Art Gallery Toi o Tamaki, purchased 2003
2003/42

Don Peebles, ONZM (1922-2010)

Canvas relief, brown 1979
acrylic on canvas
Auckland Art Gallery Toi o Tamaki, purchased 1980

We learned the sad news of Don’s passing on the weekend, and tributes have already begun to flow. We wanted to offer our sympathies to his wife Prue and his children and extended family on behalf of the Auckland Art Gallery. He will be missed.

There is a quote that I have always admired by Don, when talking about his students who “come here experienced, and they leave (I hope) as beginners.” The quote says a lot about Don, his passion for teaching, indeed for learning, but underscoring it all, is that spirit of risk taking and testing that are essential for a life of artistic enquiry and that we appreciate so much in him.

The recognition that Don achieved during his lifetime was remarkable and a testament to his personality and his skill. His status as an Arts Foundation Icon testifies to his life-long achievements. We know that the spirit of experimentation so implicit in his work will live on.

The legacy of his prodigious artistic activity over more than 50 years will be sketched for many years to come of course. The first work acquired by the Gallery in 1960 was Wellington XII and since then we have acquired 15 works that demonstrates some of the extraordinary breadth of his creative output. The latest acquisition in 1997 came to us via the Chartwell Collection, who have also been enthusiastic supporters. His work was shown in the influential exhibition of  Aspects of New Zealand Art 1983, and more recently, his work has been on display at the Gallery in the collection exhibition, A Feeling for Form in 2005. Both exhibitions echo that character of testing and teasing the limits of his work, which is one of the ways in which we will remember him.
The lyrical exploration of form that sees his work erupt from the static picture plane of two dimensions and into the physical space of sculpture or painted relief is just one aspect of his impact on artistic production in New Zealand.

Our thoughts are with his family at this time.

Hanna Scott
Acting Contemporary Curator