My favourite mean opening for a mean review: ‘One thing you can say for Buzz Spector is that he does his homework. The bummer is he hangs it in galleries and calls it art.’ Lane Relyea, Artforum, May 1992. Can it get any worse?
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I recently dropped in to London’s National Gallery, where a new acquisition—Abraham Bloemaert’s Lot and His Daughters (1624)—was proudly on display. The label was telling: ‘Genesis recounts how Lot and his family fled the destruction of Sodom, with Lot’s wife turning into a pillar of salt on looking back to the city, seen in the background of this painting. The main scene—a triangle of primary colours—shows Lot’s daughters, believing only they remained alive on earth, taking the desperate measure of seducing their own father in order to perpetuate the human race.’ And there they are, in the artist’s imagination, plying their tired papa with booze, oysters, themselves. Only in the movies.
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When I began reading Artforum—in the early 1980s, on deskcopy at Elam art school—the idea that New Zealand would one day figure in its pages seemed inconceivable. New York was the centre, New Zealand the periphery; New York was Broadway, New Zealand was off-off-off Broadway. In 1992, Julian Dashper would address this in a project in Artforum. Feeling excluded, he bought advertising space to make a page project, where he fantasised, first, being on the magazine’s cover, and, then, in its reviews pages. Later, Dashper would be instrumental in bringing (now-disgraced) Artforum publisher and advertising man Knight Landesman to New Zealand and things started to turn. With this contact and, crucially, with a global turn in the art world, we began to see more New Zealand content, with Anthony Byrt becoming a regular writer. Nevertheless, I was surprised to open the latest issue of the magazine to find New Zealand suddenly permeating it. There’s a double-page spread reproducing Richard Serra’s Te Tuhirangi Contour at Gibbs Farm, and another of Mataahou’s Takapau, Golden Lion winner, kicking off the Venice-response section. There’s a feature on Christoph Büchel by Simon Denny, a review of Dan Arps in Whangarei by Anthony Byrt, and an interview with Vera Mey, co-curator of the Busan Biennale. All this coverage is there as a matter of course, not as the result of any special prompting or pleading. It’s exciting, but also deflating. It’s like discovering the holy grail, only to realise the quest is over. We can no longer aspire to join a club that won’t have us as a member.
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