Robert Leonard is one of New Zealand’s most experienced contemporary-art curators. In January, he left Brisbane, where he was Director of the Institute of Modern Art (IMA), to become Chief Curator at City Gallery Wellington. He was also appointed curator for Simon Denny’s New Zealand 2015 Venice Biennale show, which will refer to the ‘Five Eyes’ agreement. This agreement links the United States, the United Kingdom, Australia, Canada, and New Zealand in a clandestine alliance, sharing ‘signals intelligence’. Virginia Were asked Leonard to share intelligence regarding his future plans.
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Art News New Zealand: After nearly a decade in Australia, why did you return to New Zealand?
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Robert Leonard: I started directing the IMA late in 2005. Eight years was probably one too many in the job. It was time for a change. As a curator, it’s good to move around. It means you can repeat yourself. In a new place with a new audience, you can work with the same artists and ideas again. You can revisit, refine, and amplify.
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Why move to a curatorial post back in New Zealand?
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Running the IMA was a great experience, but consuming. I learnt that I could direct an organisation, but I also learnt that it’s not what I want to do. I’m a curator. That’s what gives me pleasure, and, ultimately, it’s where I will make my mark. I loved my time in Australia, but my expertise is in New Zealand art, and I couldn’t make much use of it there. I wanted to put myself back into a situation where I could capitalise on my knowledge.
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City Gallery has a bigger audience.
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The IMA is hugely influential, but it has a tiny immediate audience. By the end, I was yearning for a larger audience, a public-gallery-size one.
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How are you reconnecting with New Zealand?
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I never disconnected. In Australia, I worked with New Zealand artists and galleries. There was lots of back and forth. But, I do need to catch up with what younger New Zealand artists—artists in their twenties—have been up to. I need to spend some time in artists’ studios and artist-run spaces.
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And reconnecting with Wellington?
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I’m an Aucklander by birth and breeding, but I’ve lived in Wellington twice before. I love the scene. Wellington is affluent, educated, but bohemian. It has become such a lifestyle city. I live in cafes.
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City Gallery doesn’t have a collection. What are the advantages and disadvantages of this for a curator?
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I’ve worked in collecting institutions and non-collecting ones. I’m proud of having acquired important works and I get a kick out of seeing them included in shows by other curators. ‘I bought that,’ I say. It’s fun acquiring art. Dealers are so nice when you have a budget; they roll out the red carpet. That said, I think collection-based institutions rely on their own collections way too much. They get resistant to borrowing in works from elsewhere. That’s limiting for curators (and audiences). For me, the benefit of working in a non-collecting institution is that you simply have to borrow works, so you get to work with many collections.
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You’ve admitted to being a ‘promiscuous collaborator’.
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At the IMA, budget and audience were small, with limited scope for growing philanthropy. I developed a business model in response to that. I did shows as joint projects, both to fund them and to get bigger audiences (increasing reach and impact). City Gallery doesn’t have the same issues, but I hope to keep working with my friends in other galleries, here and there. I like working with other curators. I don’t want to be limited by my own thoughts.
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Can you tell me what you’re working on at the moment and what we can look forward to seeing at City Gallery in the short to medium term?
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I was working on City Gallery’s programme before I arrived. The IMA and I had a hand in the Gregory Crewdson and Shane Cotton shows last year. Currently, City Gallery is showing three shows I’ve done: Simon Starling (which I wrote the essay for), and McLeavey Sat Here and Viviane Sassen: Lexicon (which I put together). I’m working on a raft of new shows, including an Yvonne Todd survey for the end of the year. And I have some bigger art-history projects in the pipeline, but I don’t want to jinx them by going public just yet.
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How did you come to be doing Sassen?
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She’s a Dutch fashion photographer. I saw her work in Venice last year and fell in love with it. She shot Lexicon in Africa, where she had spent some of her early childhood years. The images sit in some no-man’s-land between the documentary and the directorial, fact and fiction. You don’t quite know how to read them. Sassen is fascinated by black skin and how it appears in photographs, with black people disappearing into shadows and into one another. The images are haunted by political implications, but it’s hard to know whether the politics are in the images or are baggage we bring to them. Sassen frames her viewers as much as her subjects.
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It’s like you made a solo show but included other artists.
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It was an experiment. Sassen’s work is subtle. I wanted to prompt people to look at it closely. So I framed it with two films that address the way Europeans view the African ‘other’. There’s Statues Also Die, a 1953 essay film by the French filmmakers Chris Marker and Alain Resnais. It starts out by considering how we see ‘primitive art’, then spins off into a Marxist critique of racism and colonialism. It’s a product of its time and its politics are very black-and-white: whites think this, blacks think the opposite. The other film goes a different way. It’s Pieter Hugo’s recent music clip for black South African rapper Spoek Mathambo’s cover of Joy Division’s She’s Lost Control. With scenes of cemeteries, burning slums, minstrels, voodoo, possessions, and cathartic violence, it relishes problematic, stereotypical images of Africa. It re-appropriates them, camps them up, has fun with them. In the show, you see Sassen’s photos first, then the films. After you see each film, you pass back through the photos again, and hopefully see them again, differently.
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You’ve called yourself an ‘Australasia-based curator’. At the IMA, you introduced Australian audiences to New Zealand artists. Can we look forward to seeing Australian artists here?
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At the moment, I’m working on a show with Brisbane artist Grant Stevens, which opens in late June. I’ve also co-curated a survey of Melbourne artist Stuart Ringholt, currently on at Monash University Museum of Art, Melbourne, which we plan to show next year. It includes a giant, out-of-kilter mantle clock.
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You’ve mentioned your desire to balance your love of detailed exhibition making with coalface responsiveness, high turnover, and direct collaboration with artists. Has your curatorial practice changed over the years?
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I started as a curatorial intern at the National Art Gallery in 1985. I learnt exhibition making by working with the collection. Back then, solo shows weren’t a big part of it for me. I was a group-show curator. I saw my job as generating new meanings through novel, even perverse, juxtapositions. I didn’t consult artists. I took liberties. That’s why I got into hot water with Headlands in 1992, but it also made for a good show. Later, I would increasingly collaborate with artists on their projects and solo shows—a completely different thing. I like working with artists, but I also like having the freedom to curate independently of them. I don’t believe curators should just be enablers for artists. We need to be free, on occasion, to make shows that exceed, even challenge, what artists think and want. At different moments, curators have to be able to work for artists, with them, and against them.
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How do you find a balance?
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I like to work across a whole programme, rather than just making individual shows. I want to make a programme that explores art by taking different approaches.
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Which curators do you admire?
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My reconnaissance trips are usually based on alignments of biennales. Biennale crawls are great for research, because I get to see acres of new work. But biennales tend to be bad shows, sloppily crafted and philosophically thin. I’m not a fan of curatorial novelty and curatorial naval-gazing. I prefer thoughtful, deeply researched, impeccably constructed, old-school museum shows. I’m quite conservative in that way. I see exhibition making as a craft.
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You’re the curator for Simon Denny’s Venice show next year. What do you like about his work?
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I was a late convert to Denny’s art. It only clicked for me when I saw his work at Venice last year. Before that, I knew that what he was addressing was interesting, but it was only then that I began to appreciate how he was addressing it.
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Denny’s engagement with post-internet aesthetics, surveillance, and loss of privacy seems timely.
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Denny addresses styles, subjects, and issues that are so new, so contemporary, and so vulgar that it is hard to assimilate his work into prevailing notions of art or prevailing canons of good taste. That’s why it sticks out. In art, he has laid claim to a huge area of new style and new content. I suspect that, in the future, anyone who deals with this material will be understood as operating in Denny’s wake.
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What do you do to relax?
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If I take time off, it’s usually to visit galleries. Being a curator is a great job. Not only am I paid to do my hobby, I’m given money and resources to do it with, big buildings to do it in, teams of people to help, and audiences to test out my ideas on. I’m spoilt. I don’t need spare time.
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[IMAGE: Franz Erhard Walther and Santiago Sierra Demonstrating Work No. 46 from Walther’s First Workset Sehkanal 1968 2011]