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For the 1991 Carnegie International in Pittsburgh, Christian Boltanski created a vertiginous corridor—an alley of floor-to-ceiling industrial metal shelving stuffed with archive boxes bearing obscure names. Who were all these nobodies? The penny dropped when visitors finally encountered a familiar name. These were the 5,000-plus artists included in all previous fifty-one Internationals. Stars in their day, they were now largely forgotten—or likely soon would be. It was an artist cemetery. They come, they go.

After writing my post on the curious apotheosis of Guy Ngan, I’ve been thinking more about art-world recognition and what it means. We say artists are ‘recognised’ as if they’ve passed some test and been accredited, but art-world recognition is a more complex, amorphous thing. It’s not determined dispassionately by experts ranking everyone across the board in relation to clear, agreed criteria. (Agreed criteria went out the window with Duchamp.) Recognition is unregulated. It’s the cumulative effect of miscellaneous, intersecting individual and corporate vested interests and endorsements, engagements and opportunities. It results from artists being shown, bought, argued about, responded to, profiled, and resourced. It’s about being in play, in the right place at the right time, the stars in alignment, resonating. It’s political: what you know and who you know. And it waxes and wanes with the volatile art-world weather.

At any time, most art is overlooked. As the art world is made up of people, prejudices are always in play—racism, sexism, nepotism, chauvinism, and tribalism. But the main reason most art is overlooked is that the spotlight is tiny and competition is fierce. The art world is agonistic and opinionated, not impartial. A small number of artists and ideas necessarily dominate the discussion at any time and that’s not likely to change. When we hear of neglected artists only now getting their due, it presumes that the scene generally makes fair calls, but occasionally fails. But things were never so sorted. Despite any pretence to be above it, institutions are players in the game—not referees. And, besides, all ‘neglect’ arguments are partisan, because no one argues on behalf of everything that’s overlooked, only the specific things they want to champion.

But don’t be glum. The art world may be volatile and erratic, but it is also insanely generative. Churn—resulting from ambition, curiosity, short attention spans, and the dictates of commerce—keeps the game interesting and stops the canon from setting in stone. Today’s big thing will be knocked from its perch tomorrow, when something new appears, as if from nowhere. And artists can be buoyed along by the fact that their own overlooked practice could become utterly central some day soon—stranger things have happened. Tomorrow will be the same, but not as this is.
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Guy Ngan died two years ago and his work is now having a moment. Last week, I saw curator Sian van Dyk’s exhibition, Guy Ngan: Habitation, at the Dowse Art Museum in Lower Hutt, and there’s another Ngan show, Either Possible or Necessary, on concurrently at Artspace, Auckland. Emma Ng just published a long piece in The Spinoff , ‘Guy Ngan, An Artist Ignored but not Forgotten’, and Anna Knox followed up days later with an interview with Van Dyk, again in The Spinoff, ‘His Work Hangs in the Beehive, but Galleries Ignored Guy Ngan, Until Now’. Both pieces were funded by the Dowse. Plus, I hear, a new monograph is in the wings.

Ngan lived in Lower Hutt. For the Dowse, he’s a local artist and his work fits neatly within their applied-arts mandate. Doing Habitation makes perfect sense for them. I enjoyed the show. Indeed, I think it should have been bigger, with more works and certainly more space around them. Nevertheless, I find the emerging argument—of Ngan as a neglected figure only now getting his just due—spurious and amnesiac. In the art scene, it is routinely claimed that artists have been marginalised or neglected, but without ever benchmarking or justifying what appropriate recognition would look like.

Ngan did not operate in what we would now think of as the New Zealand art mainstream—showing in galleries and museums and being reviewed in Art New Zealand. He was principally a public artist, in his heyday perhaps New Zealand’s most successful one, with steady patronage. When many now-canonical New Zealand artists were doing it tough, struggling to professionalise their practice, Ngan was on a salary working for the Ministry of Works or in private architectural practice. An establishment figure, an insider, he went on to direct the conservative New Zealand Academy of Fine Arts for a decade (1976–86) and was awarded an OBE in 1983. It’s illogical to consider him a neglected artist in his time. He was entirely successful, in the area he elected to work in.

It’s true, he wasn’t a big fish for the mainstream art scene. But that scene celebrates innovation, and Ngan wasn’t particularly innovative. He was a style artist, not an inquiry artist. He had chops and versatility, but ultimately he aspired to produce attractive, unchallenging works. In 1983, he wrote, tellingly: The office ‘is where we come into contact with other people on an average of eight hours a day on at least five days of the week. To have an appropriate work in your office is more important than to have a great work of art.’ Ngan’s appropriate ‘brooches on buildings’ kept clients happy rather than pressing their buttons. Which is why—despite his professional success and ubiquity—he failed to make a dent in the discussion.

Destined for facades and foyers, Ngan’s works were modern looking, but not avantgarde. As Stella Brennan wrote: ‘In a period of expansionist “think big” government spending, his work was caught up in a bureaucratisation of modernist precepts and forms.’ Habitation has the feel of a tasteful mid-century-modern design store. Ngan’s buffed-metal and varnished-wood sculptures, his almost-abstract paintings, and his big wall rugs are likeable, exemplifying a familiar, now-groovy, retro-modern style. But his period-piece modernism was always belated, diluted, and provincial, which is why Julian Dashper part-affectionately, part-mockingly namechecked him in his tongue-in-cheek 1987 painting Guy Ngan Mural, Bledisloe State Building, Auckland City in the Auckland Art Gallery collection.

Given all this, and perhaps against the odds, I think Ngan’s work has enjoyed surprising, perhaps undue recognition in recent years—and not just with Habitation. In the 1990s, Dashper’s perverse interest kept Ngan’s name in play. Then, in 1999, Ngan’s 1973 Newton Post Office Mural became the unlikely star of Stella Brennan’s Artspace show Nostalgia for the Future, where it shared the stage with current figures, including Dashper, Jim Speers, and Mikala Dwyer. In 2004, Auckland Art Gallery acquired the Mural (on my recommendation) and, in 2005, put it on display. In 2006, City Gallery Wellington presented a major Ngan survey show, and, in 2010, Ron Sang published a big book. None of this really screams neglect.

Actually, where Ngan is neglected is in the Habitation show itself, which makes little case for his art as art. Instead, making much of the Chinese and Māori references in some of his works, it pivots on current identity politics. As a Chinese New Zealander who used Māori imagery, Ngan is recast as an ancestor figure for our newly multicultural biculturalism; in the process, his Māori appropriations go unquestioned. Right now, there’s a pressing desire to entwine Asia-Pacific–tauiwi and Māori identities, so Ngan is coopted as a precedent. Thus, at the Dowse, the artist who once typified generic corporate-foyer internationalism—‘the bureaucratisation of modernist precepts and forms’—now dances to a brand new tune: uniqueness, place, diversity. This wilful reinvention of Ngan to meet our current needs is masked as making amends for his past neglect. All this must raise flags about how we are rewriting or ignoring art history to service current political fashion—albeit worthy.
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In his 1978 parody ‘If the Impressionists Had Been Dentists’, Woody Allen captures just what makes art so different, so appealing, so exceptional:
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Dear Theo, Will life never treat me decently? I am wracked by despair! My head is pounding. Mrs Sol Schwimmer is suing me because I made her bridge as I felt it and not to fit her ridiculous mouth. That’s right! I can’t work to order like a common tradesman. I decided her bridge should be enormous and billowing and wild, explosive teeth flaring up in every direction like fire! Now she is upset because it won’t fit in her mouth! She is so bourgeois and stupid, I want to smash her. I tried forcing the false plate in but it sticks out like a starburst chandelier. Still, I find it beautiful. She claims she can’t chew! What do I care whether she can chew or not! Theo, I can’t go on like this much longer! I asked Cezanne if he would share an office with me but he is old and infirm and unable to hold the instruments and they must be tied to his wrists but then he lacks accuracy, and, once inside a mouth, he knocks out more teeth than he saves. What to do? Vincent.
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Vanessa Crofskey just published an op-ed on The Pantograph Punch site, ‘There’s Something Wrong with Art Writing’. It’s been enthusiastically shared and has been promoted by Radio New Zealand. Crofskey rails against art writing for its pretension and exclusive jargon—that old chestnut. Many will agree, including plenty who haven’t read much art writing and don’t much care.

Surprisingly, Crofskey is an insider. Her opening line sets the scene in a ‘master’s critique’ she’s attending (she assumes her reader knows what this is). She’s chosen to spend five or six years in an art school, where art is recognised as a specialised area of inquiry taught by experts, where disciples leave with degrees and doctorates, and yet she suggests that the litmus test of successful art writing is whether it makes sense to her mother (who I assume is not Rosalind Krauss). Isn’t it perverse to devote years to a specialist area of inquiry if you believe it can all be effortlessly explained to those who come to it cold, without doing the hard yards? In what other area would this make sense?

Crofskey’s examples of bad writing are limited to online sites EyeContact and Panto, which are hardly representative of art writing’s bandwidth, and to relatively obscure writers, Robyn Maree Pickens and (my pal) Terrence Handscomb. If I was making a list of the most visible New Zealand art writers, neither would figure. Crofskey’s not talking about Anthony Byrt or Sally Blundell; about Megan Dunn, Andrew Paul Wood, Damian Skinner, or Justin Paton; about Lana Lopesi or Francis McWhannell—all committed, lucid, patient explainers. Indeed, Byrt writes for both the elite international art mag Artforum and the mainstream local rag Metro.

The idea that art writing is generally highfalutin has to be questioned. Most serious art writers I know come through journalism, teaching, and museum work—boot camps for accessibility. We are trained to boil things down for broad audiences. As for jargon, it’s not the end of the world. Explanatory shorthand emerges in any specialist field; it helps us to communicate. Imagine trying to teach someone to drive without using technical terms like ‘accelerator’ or ‘clutch’. Sure, wording needs to be appropriate to the readership, but readers also need to meet art and art writers half way.

Turgid writing is a drag, but it’s too easy to disparage the whole endeavour of art writing by pointing to bad examples—throwing out the baby with the bathwater. Given that art is a complex and specialised discussion, isn’t it instead laudable that so many New Zealand art writers work so hard to make it accessible to broad readerships?
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On Sunday, City Gallery is screening one of my favourite films, 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968). I picked it because it resonates with the art-science dialectic and mystic minimalism in our current shows, Semiconductor: The Technological Sublime and Eva Rothschild: Kosmos. In googling the film, I came across a toxic review from the day by the brilliant film critic Pauline Kael. It has such brio, I need to share …

‘The ponderous blurry appeal of the picture may be that it takes its stoned audience out of this world to a consoling vision of a graceful world of space, controlled by superior godlike minds, where the hero is reborn as an angelic baby. It has the dreamy somewhere-over-the-rainbow appeal of a new vision of heaven. 2001 is a celebration of cop-out. It says man is just a tiny nothing on the stairway to paradise, something better is coming, and it’s all out of your hands anyway. There’s an intelligence out there in space controlling your destiny from ape to angel, so just follow the slab.’

Ouch. As Quentin Tarantino describes Kael (enthusiastically): ‘The greatest shit ever and she’s just being so fucking mean.’ Can we love Kubrick and Kael? I find it hard not to.

Catch 2001 at City Gallery Wellington, Sunday 9 June, at 2pm. (And check out my blog.)
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Right now, I’m housebound, convalescing from a leg injury, while my artist friends and curator-critic colleagues swan around Venice, downing spritzes and checking out the latest art at the Biennale. I’m observing them all and it all on social media, trying to suppress my jealousy, wishing I could be there.

Although it began in the late-late nineteenth century, for New Zealand the Biennale is a twenty-first–century thing. We’ve only been going since 2001. Getting on board signalled our entry into the international art world at a moment when the international art world was itself going global. Venice is the oldest and biggest of the world’s regular contemporary-art mega-shows. It has three components: a ‘state of the art’ show (curated by the Biennale’s director, who is different each time), national pavilions, and collateral projects (official and unofficial). 

The national pavilions set Venice apart from similar projects. As participating countries choose, develop, and present their own shows, they have agency—they get deeply involved and competitive. Consequently, the Biennale’s three-day professional preview, or ‘vernissage’, has become a massive networking event, greased by parties and receptions.

The Biennale has two main locations. The Giardini is home to the Central Pavilion—a museum-standard space that houses half the curated show—and purpose-built, dedicated national pavilions maintained by their countries. The Arsenale, more rough and ready, houses the other half of the curated show, and, increasingly, space there is also rented for national pavilions. The Biennale overflows into the city, with offsite national pavilions and collateral projects. If you’re in the Giardini or Arsenale, you’re guaranteed foot traffic; elsewhere, cross your fingers. Seeing the whole thing takes time: the Giardini and Arsenale each take a day, offsites a couple more. Plus, there are other art distractions on hand, contemporary and historical. No one sees it all.

For their pavilions, most countries do solo shows. New Zealand favours new commissioned artist projects—typically sculpture, in some form or other. We usually send one artist, but twice we’ve spread our bets (or dissipated our message) sending two. Of the eleven artists we’ve sent, five were women, four were Māori. Apart from 2017, with Lisa Reihana in the Arsenale, New Zealand has always had offsite pavilions. CNZ funds the pavilion to the tune of $700,000 a pop, plus there’s support from patrons and from the artist and their dealers. For artists and dealers, there can be a big pay day at the end, if work is purchased. In the past, Te Papa has often acquired New Zealand’s Venice works. Parts of Simon Denny’s 2015 project were acquired by Te Papa and New York’s Museum of Modern Art.

This year, Dane Mitchell is our artist. His project, Post Hoc, lists things that have become extinct, that have disappeared. It’s a brave theme in the context of a Biennale that has seen so many artists come and go, that feels at once permanent and evanescent.

New Zealand artists have barely featured in the curated component of the Biennale, and then it’s usually been those already operating offshore—the Berlin-based Denny in 2013 and London-based Francis Upritchard in 2017. No Biennale director has ever visited New Zealand to scout for artists for the curated show.

Presenting a national pavilion is costly and complicated, requiring endless site visits, negotiations, consents. Supplies have to be moved around on canals and carts and it’s hard to get and do basic stuff that elsewhere you’d take for granted. Work is shown in protected historic buildings that you can’t bang a nail into and that often overwhelm the art. Some spaces flood during the acqua alta. Even the Giardini’s purpose-built national pavilions have issues. Some are architect follies quite unsuitable for art—Canada’s has trees growing through it. Once the biennale is up, pavilions need to be invigilated and maintained for months. The Biennale keeps the city afloat: venues rented, hotel rooms and restaurants occupied, a local workforce engaged. It goes for about seven months, but there are also Venice biennales for architecture, music, theatre, and dance, and the Venice Film Festival—Venice is a perpetual biennale. National representation is crucial to its business model, even if not to the artists.

The Biennale is a welter of contradictions. There’s aggressively contemporary art in a picturesque, kitschy, historical city that’s crawling with tourists buying glass baubles and carnival masks, eating gelato, and riding gondolas. Bridges are impassible because of selfie sticks. The vernissage is attended by artworld insiders, but also by the rich and famous and by know-nothing journos on junkets. You see serious, politically righteous, save-the-world art (the centrepiece of the 2015 Biennale was a marathon live reading of Das Kapital) with obscene wealth (super yachts, oligarchs, Elton, Cate). But, if you’re in the business, the Biennale is compulsory viewing. It creates common reference points. Art baggers synchronise their watches in Venice.

In our globalism era, when artists don’t necessarily live in the countries they were born in and show all over the place, the Biennale’s national-pavilion structure feels anachronistic. However, it also exposes the real competitiveness of the art world, as countries bankroll their artists to make absurdly ambitious projects. There’s a lot on the line. It can be make or break for an artist. You see amazing stuff, but also terrible, bloated, bridge-too-far stuff. Schadenfreude reigns. Doing Venice can be uplifting, traumatising, or both—a moment of truth. And truth is a great teacher.

With national pavilions, there are different approaches. Some countries treat them as lifetime-achievement awards for doddery national-treasure artists, others as springboards to propel younger talent into the big leagues internationally—that’s New Zealand’s approach, generally speaking. Timing is crucial. We don’t simply pick a good project, we pick one that we anticipate will work in Venice this time based on the artist’s professional trajectory and our reading of art-world weather patterns. The tea leaves!

The Venice Biennale has transformed New Zealand art. It’s a matter of scale. The US is a big country with lots of artists, New Zealand a tiny one with far fewer. Both countries send a representative artist each time. So, New Zealand artists have a far greater chance of being a national representative than US ones. Consequently, as an opportunity, Venice looms large for our artists—for us. And, it’s not just about the few artists who get to go, it’s also about the many artists who contemplate it. In New Zealand, there’s a selection process, with a number of artist-curator teams pitching each time. They all imagine grand, blue-sky projects that could hold up in the Biennale context. Even if their pitches are unsuccessful, this ambitious thinking feeds into other projects they go on to do. Going to Venice also activates the wider scene, engaging not only our artists and curators, but also our arts administrators, dealers, critics, patrons, and media. Venice has become our window on the world and integral to our domestic art ecology—a talking point.
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So sad to hear of the death of Carolee Schneemann, the pioneering American performance artist famous for works like Meat Joy and Interior Scroll. I have a story. As a living legend, Schneemann spent a lot of time on the lecture circuit. When she spoke at Auckland Art Gallery in 2000, I was her gopher. She outlined my key task: ‘Robert, five minutes into my lecture I will snap, “Robert, where’s my water?” Then, you will bring to the lectern a large tumbler of neat vodka and apologise. You will say, “Sorry Carolee, here’s your water.”’ Which I did. It was my pleasure, but it was hard to keep a straight face.
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Acquiring a salad at my local Pita Pit, I was shocked to discover how they see me. The beard comes off tomorrow.
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Yes, you may. In April, City Gallery Wellington serves up a double helping of international art, with big shows by Eva Rothschild downstairs and Semiconductor up—stars in alignment!

Rothschild’s show Kosmos features a giant punching bag, a decorated concrete-block barricade, an upholstered play space, a disco-decor fly-screen curtain, and a surveillance video of frisky lads demolishing and rudely repurposing her art. The London-based sculptor is known for her formal wit, her novel materials, and for putting her own spin on the modern-sculpture tradition. The show is timely: while it’s on in Wellington, she’ll be representing Ireland at the 2019 Venice Biennale.

Semiconductor’s awesome video installations make the invisible visible. Collaborating with prestigious science agencies, including NASA, CERN, the Smithsonian, and the Charles Darwin Research Station in the Galapagos Islands, the UK duo—Ruth Jarman and Joe Gerhardt—extend our experience and understanding of the macrocosmic and the microcosmic. Their churning Earthworks installation uses data from real-world volcanoes, glaciers, and earthquakes—including the 2016 Kaikoura quake.

Eva Rothschild: Kosmos, 6 April–28 July 2019; Semiconductor: The Technological Sublime, 23 March–14 July 2019. (And here’s a link to my interview with Rothschild last year.)
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I’m so sorry to hear that filmmaker and author Peter Wells has died. Last year—despite his illness—Peter kindly spoke with Gareth Watkins at City Gallery in conjunction with a screening of his 1983 film Little Queen. He had much to say. Here’s a transcript.
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