New Zealand Listener, 1 October 2005.
•
Robert Leonard has curated contemporary art in New Zealand for twenty years. In 1985, he was hired as a curatorial intern at the National Art Gallery in Wellington (since subsumed into Te Papa). He arrived into a scene heady with the influence of postmodernism; it was an exciting time. He also curated for the Dunedin Public Art Gallery, the Govett-Brewster, and spent five years as director of Artspace in Auckland. The list of shows he has worked on include some of the most notable of the past two decades: Headlands, Shadow of Style, Hangover, Action Replay: Post-Object Art, Michael Stevenson’s This Is the Trekka, and Mixed-Up Childhood. He has just left the Auckland Art Gallery, where he spent two years as curator of contemporary art, to take up the job of Director of the Institute of Modern Art (IMA) in Brisbane.
.
Robert Leonard interviewed by Philip Matthews.
.
Philip Matthews: Describe the IMA in Brisbane.
.
Robert Leonard: It’s an art centre that runs an international contemporary exhibition programme, with lots of artists’ projects and artists’ residencies. It also does lots of publishing. There’s no collection. The IMA is part of a network of Australian spaces that includes Artspace, Sydney, and ACCA, in Melbourne. You could compare it to Artspace here, but it’s larger physically and better staffed and funded. Why am I going? Well, working as a curator at Auckland Art Gallery, I get to make individual shows, but directing Artspace I got a taste for being able to shape a whole programme. That’s really what I’m interested in, and I’ll get to do that at the IMA.
.
The Australian jump might seem like a shock to some: you’ve been so bound up in contemporary New Zealand art.
.
I’ve got a big investment in New Zealand art. And although I don’t have an agenda to increase the amount of New Zealand art shown at the IMA, I want to continue working with New Zealand in other ways. Plus I need to finish my book, which is a history of New Zealand art from 1956 to now. Really, Brisbane isn’t so far away. It doesn’t seem much further from Auckland than Dunedin. And of course there’s heaps of New Zealand art being shown in Australia and vice versa. There’s a lot of interplay.
.
In an interview with the Brisbane Courier-Mail in July, you said, ‘I don’t see the IMA as a ghetto for fringe and alternative work, but as a broker of new ideas into the wider scene.’ Which is the kind of thing you were saying about Artspace in 1997.
.
Yeah, I guess when I said that I was really talking about my time at Artspace. There’s always a risk that organisations like the IMA and Artspace lapse into a self-marginalising rhetoric about being ‘alternative’, when they could be pushing themselves centre stage, shaping the wider discussion, setting the agenda, brokering the new ideas.
.
When does your programme start at the IMA?
.
Around the middle of next year. Until then, it’s an inherited programme. There’s a New Zealand show just after I arrive, with Reuben Paterson and Lonnie Hutchinson.
.
Will your programme feel like a break from the current one?
.
Well, my approach isn’t to stick to one flavour anyway. I like to make a programme that constantly breaks with itself. You need to have a focus and an agenda, but if things get too consistent it’s dull and dogmatic. The funny thing is that in order to surprise, you first have to cultivate erroneous expectations. When I arrived at Artspace, I wanted to take control, so I pushed everyone back and put the programme together the way I wanted it. But after a couple of years, I saw the advantage of bringing people back in, having more curatorial voices in the programme. I ended up with some very strong personalities on the board, with very divergent tastes and allegiances in art. And that was great. We argued the toss all the time, but there was room in the programme for antagonistic perspectives. I began to work like a managing editor.
.
In an interview with the Listener in June, Greg Burke identified himself, Tina Barton, and yourself as the bold new generation of curators in the 1980s.
.
Greg and I came online around the same time, working in Wellington in the late 1980s, me at the National Art Gallery and him at Wellington City Art Gallery. It was a very buzzy time, and especially with Shed 11. There was a mix of competition and collaboration.
.
One collaboration between you and Burke was Shadow of Style, a show of eight new artists that seems pretty influential in retrospect.
.
We were rather lucky, I think. A lot of the artists went on to became key figures: Robinson, Cotton, Fong, Intra, van Hout. It’s nice to look back and see we were right on the money.
.
Why was there that fertile intellectual culture then and there?
.
The late 1980s saw a big paradigm shift, a change of guard; postmodernism basically. In Wellington, people could be very antagonistic, and criticism was passionate and bitter by turns. There seemed to be a lot at stake. It’s different now, because today everyone is pretty much operating within the new paradigm, and it’s no surprise to see Et Al. on the cover of Art New Zealand. In the 1960s and 1970s, generally speaking, New Zealand art was made by New Zealand artists in New Zealand. It was shown in New Zealand, collected by New Zealand collectors, and written about in New Zealand magazines. It was influenced by things happening offshore, but it was a largely enclosed conversation. And because of that, it was quite intense and intimate. It’s different now. Everyone is more outward looking, and so many New Zealand artists are working internationally.
.
But are we seeing enough international art here?
.
There’s never enough. In New Zealand, it’s easy to bemoan the fact that we are too far out of the loop. But then you’ll read a press release from overseas about some really famous artist that says it’s their first show in New York, or Europe, or whatever. Wherever you are in the world, if you are serious about art, you need to travel. It won’t always come to you.
.
When did you first become interested in being a curator?
.
I got the bug when my dad took me to the Auckland City Art Gallery to see the MOMA Surrealism show sometime in the mid 1970s. I was, like, nine. A lot of kids come to art through surrealism, it seems. I decided I wanted to be a curator when I was in the seventh form. But, looking back, I wonder if I even knew what being a curator meant.
.
You didn’t think: I want to be an artist?
.
No. I prefer the intellectual freedom of being a curator. Curators and artists have a lot in common, but there’s a lot that’s different, too. To succeed, artists need to develop a very particular set of concerns, a focused body of work, whereas curators can chop and change. They can be fickle. A lot of people complain about the fickleness of the scene, but I think it’s very generative. It’s the life of contemporary art.
.
Mixed-Up Childhood seems to me to have been the art show of the year so far. You must have been proud of it.
.
Yes. And I was extremely heartened by the generous reception it received, especially from the media. It included work that had proved controversial in the past: Sally Mann, the Chapmans, and Henry Darger. It would have been quite easy for the media to have sensationalised it. We were anticipating a negative response, but it never came. We got a lot of coverage, but it was engaged coverage. That was a joy.
.
How does that compare with the way that, say, Tania Kovats’s Virgin in a Condom was received?
.
It’s a quite different matter presenting Mixed-Up Childhood at the New Gallery, which is already associated with pushy contemporary art and draws an audience interested in that stuff. Virgin was in Pictura Britannica, one of the first shows at Te Papa, aka ‘Our Place’. Te Papa was controversial for being so expensive and they justified the price tag by saying it would appeal to mainstream New Zealand, so there were huge expectations on that opening programme. But maybe if the piece was shown at Te Papa now, there wouldn’t be much fuss.
.
What stage is your book at?
.
It’s on hold. But I’m anxious to get it finished and get it out, because I don’t want it to miss its moment. It’s called Rock On, after the Ronnie van Hout photograph.
.
What’s the general shape of it?
.
In New Zealand, we see lots of coffee-table books with titles like 100 New Zealand Artists and Another 100 New Zealand Artists. They create a false impression of a big pluralistic scene, when in fact at any one time there are only a few things of genuine consequence occurring. My book is about identifying those things and showing why and how they were important. It’s about mapping developments. I try to explain why something that was a good idea in 1984 suddenly becomes a stink idea in 1987. The book will traverse a big period, from 1956 to now. It starts with Peter Tomory arriving to run the Auckland Art Gallery and the branding of a New Zealand art and the concurrent invention of an art scene. The last chapter is ‘The End of New Zealand Art’, because today the discourse isn’t nationally enclosed, as it was back then. As New Zealand artists operate more internationally and find the stake of their work in other places, the idea of New Zealand art is losing traction.
.
We can’t talk about New Zealand art without talking about Et Al. and the Venice Biennale.
.
Et Al. was a great choice for Venice. It was often presented as a daring and contentious choice, but really it wasn’t. In art terms, Et Al. was a safe bet. Here’s an incredibly established, respected, and pedigreed artist, with over twenty years in the business, and at the top of her game. And you could be confident the show would be good.
.
Why did all that not get communicated last year?
.
Venice got exploited by the press. A controversy was conjured out of thin air, seemingly on behalf of the public. Reporters asked questions but didn’t seem remotely interested in the answers, they just wanted to keep the story rolling. And, if some in the press seemed outraged that Et Al. wouldn’t talk to them, well, they certainly provided ample evidence of why not to. That debate was bizarre. People complained about the obscurity of Et Al.’s work and the fact that Et Al. wouldn’t do interviews, and then suggested we send Hotere instead. But Hotere’s work is ten times more obscure than Et Al.’s—he works with an incredibly personal artistic language—and he’s a legend for never talking to the media. Go figure.
.
With three trips to Venice undertaken, Creative New Zealand is set to review our Biennale participation. Is it important for New Zealand artists to be there?
.
Absolutely. And it’s worked extremely well for all the New Zealand artists that have been there and for the scene as a whole. We have learnt so much from it. And some of the lessons have been painful. The point of going there is not ‘to win’, that’s naïve. We go to be part of the wider art discussion and to lift the level of our game. All three times we have made ambitious shows and on rather tight budgets.
.
Is there a ‘New Zealandness’ about Et Al.?
.
In many ways Et Al. could be seen as a very New Zealand artist. It’s very ‘after McCahon’. I remember a great Et Al. piece in Headlands in 1992 called Art to Express New Zealand. It made fun of the idea of presenting clichés of national identity in your art, but at the same time it expressed a particularly local anxiety. Art to Express New Zealand could only have been made here.
.
In 1998, you said, ‘I fear the 1990s will be remembered as the time when all the components of the art world as we know it actually withered and disintegrated’. What did you mean?
.
Did I say that? It sounds so apocalyptic. I guess we were very pessimistic at that time. Te Papa had just opened and there was a fear that art was on a slippery slope and everything was about to become Te Papa-ised. And I think it could have gone like that. One of the things that saved it was Creative New Zealand’s response to the New Vision report; doing Venice and bringing in all those international residencies.
.
But weren’t you part of a culture that said it’s good to put a McCahon next to a refrigerator?
.
Yeah. But also one of the people that was quite horrified when Te Papa did it. It was one thing when that stuff was done by artists and curators as part of an art game, another when it was done to us from outside as part of Te Papa’s social-history game. Te Papa took a lot of ideas perfected in the artworld but repurposed them to disempower art. We became the victims of our own devil’s advocacy. That said, I think that Te Papa has improved out of sight, but undoubtedly as a result of sustained criticism. And it has a long way to go to recover the ground we lost when the National Art Gallery was axed.
.
Robert Leonard interviewed by Philip Matthews.
.
Philip Matthews: Describe the IMA in Brisbane.
.
Robert Leonard: It’s an art centre that runs an international contemporary exhibition programme, with lots of artists’ projects and artists’ residencies. It also does lots of publishing. There’s no collection. The IMA is part of a network of Australian spaces that includes Artspace, Sydney, and ACCA, in Melbourne. You could compare it to Artspace here, but it’s larger physically and better staffed and funded. Why am I going? Well, working as a curator at Auckland Art Gallery, I get to make individual shows, but directing Artspace I got a taste for being able to shape a whole programme. That’s really what I’m interested in, and I’ll get to do that at the IMA.
.
The Australian jump might seem like a shock to some: you’ve been so bound up in contemporary New Zealand art.
.
I’ve got a big investment in New Zealand art. And although I don’t have an agenda to increase the amount of New Zealand art shown at the IMA, I want to continue working with New Zealand in other ways. Plus I need to finish my book, which is a history of New Zealand art from 1956 to now. Really, Brisbane isn’t so far away. It doesn’t seem much further from Auckland than Dunedin. And of course there’s heaps of New Zealand art being shown in Australia and vice versa. There’s a lot of interplay.
.
In an interview with the Brisbane Courier-Mail in July, you said, ‘I don’t see the IMA as a ghetto for fringe and alternative work, but as a broker of new ideas into the wider scene.’ Which is the kind of thing you were saying about Artspace in 1997.
.
Yeah, I guess when I said that I was really talking about my time at Artspace. There’s always a risk that organisations like the IMA and Artspace lapse into a self-marginalising rhetoric about being ‘alternative’, when they could be pushing themselves centre stage, shaping the wider discussion, setting the agenda, brokering the new ideas.
.
When does your programme start at the IMA?
.
Around the middle of next year. Until then, it’s an inherited programme. There’s a New Zealand show just after I arrive, with Reuben Paterson and Lonnie Hutchinson.
.
Will your programme feel like a break from the current one?
.
Well, my approach isn’t to stick to one flavour anyway. I like to make a programme that constantly breaks with itself. You need to have a focus and an agenda, but if things get too consistent it’s dull and dogmatic. The funny thing is that in order to surprise, you first have to cultivate erroneous expectations. When I arrived at Artspace, I wanted to take control, so I pushed everyone back and put the programme together the way I wanted it. But after a couple of years, I saw the advantage of bringing people back in, having more curatorial voices in the programme. I ended up with some very strong personalities on the board, with very divergent tastes and allegiances in art. And that was great. We argued the toss all the time, but there was room in the programme for antagonistic perspectives. I began to work like a managing editor.
.
In an interview with the Listener in June, Greg Burke identified himself, Tina Barton, and yourself as the bold new generation of curators in the 1980s.
.
Greg and I came online around the same time, working in Wellington in the late 1980s, me at the National Art Gallery and him at Wellington City Art Gallery. It was a very buzzy time, and especially with Shed 11. There was a mix of competition and collaboration.
.
One collaboration between you and Burke was Shadow of Style, a show of eight new artists that seems pretty influential in retrospect.
.
We were rather lucky, I think. A lot of the artists went on to became key figures: Robinson, Cotton, Fong, Intra, van Hout. It’s nice to look back and see we were right on the money.
.
Why was there that fertile intellectual culture then and there?
.
The late 1980s saw a big paradigm shift, a change of guard; postmodernism basically. In Wellington, people could be very antagonistic, and criticism was passionate and bitter by turns. There seemed to be a lot at stake. It’s different now, because today everyone is pretty much operating within the new paradigm, and it’s no surprise to see Et Al. on the cover of Art New Zealand. In the 1960s and 1970s, generally speaking, New Zealand art was made by New Zealand artists in New Zealand. It was shown in New Zealand, collected by New Zealand collectors, and written about in New Zealand magazines. It was influenced by things happening offshore, but it was a largely enclosed conversation. And because of that, it was quite intense and intimate. It’s different now. Everyone is more outward looking, and so many New Zealand artists are working internationally.
.
But are we seeing enough international art here?
.
There’s never enough. In New Zealand, it’s easy to bemoan the fact that we are too far out of the loop. But then you’ll read a press release from overseas about some really famous artist that says it’s their first show in New York, or Europe, or whatever. Wherever you are in the world, if you are serious about art, you need to travel. It won’t always come to you.
.
When did you first become interested in being a curator?
.
I got the bug when my dad took me to the Auckland City Art Gallery to see the MOMA Surrealism show sometime in the mid 1970s. I was, like, nine. A lot of kids come to art through surrealism, it seems. I decided I wanted to be a curator when I was in the seventh form. But, looking back, I wonder if I even knew what being a curator meant.
.
You didn’t think: I want to be an artist?
.
No. I prefer the intellectual freedom of being a curator. Curators and artists have a lot in common, but there’s a lot that’s different, too. To succeed, artists need to develop a very particular set of concerns, a focused body of work, whereas curators can chop and change. They can be fickle. A lot of people complain about the fickleness of the scene, but I think it’s very generative. It’s the life of contemporary art.
.
Mixed-Up Childhood seems to me to have been the art show of the year so far. You must have been proud of it.
.
Yes. And I was extremely heartened by the generous reception it received, especially from the media. It included work that had proved controversial in the past: Sally Mann, the Chapmans, and Henry Darger. It would have been quite easy for the media to have sensationalised it. We were anticipating a negative response, but it never came. We got a lot of coverage, but it was engaged coverage. That was a joy.
.
How does that compare with the way that, say, Tania Kovats’s Virgin in a Condom was received?
.
It’s a quite different matter presenting Mixed-Up Childhood at the New Gallery, which is already associated with pushy contemporary art and draws an audience interested in that stuff. Virgin was in Pictura Britannica, one of the first shows at Te Papa, aka ‘Our Place’. Te Papa was controversial for being so expensive and they justified the price tag by saying it would appeal to mainstream New Zealand, so there were huge expectations on that opening programme. But maybe if the piece was shown at Te Papa now, there wouldn’t be much fuss.
.
What stage is your book at?
.
It’s on hold. But I’m anxious to get it finished and get it out, because I don’t want it to miss its moment. It’s called Rock On, after the Ronnie van Hout photograph.
.
What’s the general shape of it?
.
In New Zealand, we see lots of coffee-table books with titles like 100 New Zealand Artists and Another 100 New Zealand Artists. They create a false impression of a big pluralistic scene, when in fact at any one time there are only a few things of genuine consequence occurring. My book is about identifying those things and showing why and how they were important. It’s about mapping developments. I try to explain why something that was a good idea in 1984 suddenly becomes a stink idea in 1987. The book will traverse a big period, from 1956 to now. It starts with Peter Tomory arriving to run the Auckland Art Gallery and the branding of a New Zealand art and the concurrent invention of an art scene. The last chapter is ‘The End of New Zealand Art’, because today the discourse isn’t nationally enclosed, as it was back then. As New Zealand artists operate more internationally and find the stake of their work in other places, the idea of New Zealand art is losing traction.
.
We can’t talk about New Zealand art without talking about Et Al. and the Venice Biennale.
.
Et Al. was a great choice for Venice. It was often presented as a daring and contentious choice, but really it wasn’t. In art terms, Et Al. was a safe bet. Here’s an incredibly established, respected, and pedigreed artist, with over twenty years in the business, and at the top of her game. And you could be confident the show would be good.
.
Why did all that not get communicated last year?
.
Venice got exploited by the press. A controversy was conjured out of thin air, seemingly on behalf of the public. Reporters asked questions but didn’t seem remotely interested in the answers, they just wanted to keep the story rolling. And, if some in the press seemed outraged that Et Al. wouldn’t talk to them, well, they certainly provided ample evidence of why not to. That debate was bizarre. People complained about the obscurity of Et Al.’s work and the fact that Et Al. wouldn’t do interviews, and then suggested we send Hotere instead. But Hotere’s work is ten times more obscure than Et Al.’s—he works with an incredibly personal artistic language—and he’s a legend for never talking to the media. Go figure.
.
With three trips to Venice undertaken, Creative New Zealand is set to review our Biennale participation. Is it important for New Zealand artists to be there?
.
Absolutely. And it’s worked extremely well for all the New Zealand artists that have been there and for the scene as a whole. We have learnt so much from it. And some of the lessons have been painful. The point of going there is not ‘to win’, that’s naïve. We go to be part of the wider art discussion and to lift the level of our game. All three times we have made ambitious shows and on rather tight budgets.
.
Is there a ‘New Zealandness’ about Et Al.?
.
In many ways Et Al. could be seen as a very New Zealand artist. It’s very ‘after McCahon’. I remember a great Et Al. piece in Headlands in 1992 called Art to Express New Zealand. It made fun of the idea of presenting clichés of national identity in your art, but at the same time it expressed a particularly local anxiety. Art to Express New Zealand could only have been made here.
.
In 1998, you said, ‘I fear the 1990s will be remembered as the time when all the components of the art world as we know it actually withered and disintegrated’. What did you mean?
.
Did I say that? It sounds so apocalyptic. I guess we were very pessimistic at that time. Te Papa had just opened and there was a fear that art was on a slippery slope and everything was about to become Te Papa-ised. And I think it could have gone like that. One of the things that saved it was Creative New Zealand’s response to the New Vision report; doing Venice and bringing in all those international residencies.
.
But weren’t you part of a culture that said it’s good to put a McCahon next to a refrigerator?
.
Yeah. But also one of the people that was quite horrified when Te Papa did it. It was one thing when that stuff was done by artists and curators as part of an art game, another when it was done to us from outside as part of Te Papa’s social-history game. Te Papa took a lot of ideas perfected in the artworld but repurposed them to disempower art. We became the victims of our own devil’s advocacy. That said, I think that Te Papa has improved out of sight, but undoubtedly as a result of sustained criticism. And it has a long way to go to recover the ground we lost when the National Art Gallery was axed.