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I’ve been enjoying David Salle’s essay collection, How to See, which was published back in 2016. It’s self-consciously old fashioned, down to its anachronistic design and coarse black-and-white reproductions. Its pieces juggle Salle’s artist’s insights into art works with in-the-know, behind-the-scenes asides about the artists. It’s art criticism as dinner-party repartee. Salle name drops and sound bites like there’s no tomorrow, but it’s all rather readable, balancing a dash of erudition with a lot of writerly flair. As a painter, Salle can be repellant (in a good way); as a writer, he’s easy to like—good company. What I like most is the way he gives voice to my own prejudices. Who doesn’t like that? I particularly adore his swipes at contemporary art’s current fetish—content. ‘Aboutism’ we call it. Here, he scores some killer blows.

Take this: ‘The focus on the what in art has been going on forever, or at least since 1865, the year Édouard Manet provoked the audience with Olympia—a painting of a reclining, dark haired courtesan, skin pale as chalk, adorned only with a pair of “come hither” mules and a black choker. You can imagine the dialogue in the cafes, over a glass of absinthe: “He painted what?” Subject matter—the what—can of course be a big deal. It’s also easy to talk about. But more to the heart of the work, the thing that reveals its nature and quality, is the how, the specific inflection and touch that go into its making. To take a work’s temperature, look at its surface energy. Like syntax and rhythm in poetry, it’s the mechanics that reveal an artist’s character. They determine the way art will get under our skin, or fail to.’

And this: ‘Sometimes what we call an idea is really more of an enthusiasm, the passing intellectual weather. Artists are curious, they pursue all kinds of obscure knowledge. Some like to do research, and art seems like as good a place as any to show off one’s interests. The ideas with staying power are those that intersect with an artist’s inclination for form, causing it to deepen and expand, like a paper flower that blooms when you put it in water.’
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Above: Wellington’s proposed film museum and conference centre. Below: The Broad, LA, designed by Diller Scofidio + Renfro.
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When the abstract painter Milan Mrkusich died last month, at the ripe old age of ninety-three, it felt like the end of an era. The ‘big three’ of the New Zealand national-art canon—Rita Angus, Colin McCahon, and Toss Woollaston—were long gone, passing in 1970, 1987, and 1998 respectively; and Gordon Walters, Mrkusich’s fellow traveller in modernist abstraction, departed in 1995. So Mrkusich outlived them all—by almost twenty years.

In New Zealand, Mrkusich has always been the textbook exemplar of modernist abstraction—modernist abstraction and nothing but. He started working in an abstract idiom in the mid-1940s. From the outset, his work was rooted in design principles—the Bauhaus. He did modernist interior and furniture design as a day job. Then, in 1952, he built himself an award-winning modernist home, where he would live and work for the remainder of his days in splendid isolation. (Marti Friedlander’s photos of him there—in his clean, orderly studio—implied that his art and life were of a piece.)

In the 1950s and 1960s, Mrkusich worked his way through a range of art idioms and ideas. In different works, we hear echoes of Piet Mondrian, John Tunnard, Ben Nicholson, Mark Rothko, etcetera. At this time, McCahon was also considering his options, trying stuff out. While Mrkusich and McCahon would later seem to be poles apart, their works in these years sometimes seem to be caught in a dialogue, a dance. At Auckland Art Gallery, I always loved seeing Mrkusich’s cubisty City Lights (1955) hanging alongside McCahon’s cubisty Flounder Fishing, Night, French Bay (1957) in a game of visual Snap.

In the 1960s, Mrkusich’s paintings sometimes emphasised designy graphic and geometric elements, sometimes expressive painterly ones, and sometimes combined them, as if seeking some resolution between thought and feeling, calculation and intuition. My favourite example: Painting 62–19 (Little Radiance) (1962). His Emblems (1963) and Elements (1965) fused formal inquiry with metaphysical symbolism, lifted from Rudolf Koch’s The Book of Signs.

Mrkusich’s breakthrough came in 1968, when he began his radically simple Corner paintings. They were more-or-less monochrome fields—some flat as, some inflected and ‘atmospheric’. They had contrastingly hued and toned triangular ‘corners’. Resembling photo corners or blotter corners, they seemed to hold the colour fields in place and more-and-less impeded our gazes from escaping the field. In some examples, the corners were the same hue and tone; in others, the corners optically advanced and receded to different extents, torquing the fields. The best are about sixty-eight inches square—neither big nor small, dominant nor submissive. The Corner paintings were the ultimate resolution of material literalness and immaterial beyondness, the architectural and the atmospheric, without resorting to symbolism or allegory.

With the Corner paintings, Mrkusich nailed it. It was hard to see how or where the idea could be taken further. And, in a larger scene, perhaps he could have gone on making them forever. In subsequent decades, Mrkusich continued to make important, handsome works, but nothing to top the brilliance and consequence of the Corner paintings—or build on them.

It’s often said that in New Zealand abstraction was neglected—marginalised. There’s truth to this. But Mrkusich was also hugely successful. He had his Auckland City Art Gallery retrospective at in 1972, the same year as McCahon. In the 1970s, Mrkusich first, then Walters, were the big-name abstract painters. They were cornerstones in the argument of Auckland’s legendary separatist Petar/James Gallery, which championed formal abstraction and also represented young-turk painters, including Stephen Bambury, Richard Killeen, and Ian Scott.

Nothing holds. In the late 1980s, the battle lines would shift again, with postmodernism. Abstraction would be read in a new way, a ‘post-formalist’ way—less as form, more as sign. As if in response, Mrkusich softened his formalist hard line, allowing allusions to landscape and metaphysics to return in his Journeys (1986–9), Chinese Elements (1989), and Alchemical Spectrum (1990). Later, he would duet with younger post-formalist abstract artists, like John Nixon (at Sue Crockford Gallery, Auckland, in 2007) and Julian Dashper (at Hamish McKay Gallery, Wellington, in 2008)—despite their being fully cheese to his chalk.

In the 1990s, Mrkusich would find himself eclipsed by Walters, whose standing was paradoxically enhanced by the cultural-appropriation debate, even though he claimed his works were purely formal—as champions ran to Walters’s defence. He remains a live issue in the culture—there’s a Walters industry. Dunedin Public Art Gallery and Auckland Art Gallery have just done a major Walters show, and it’s touring to Te Papa. By contrast, Mrkusich’s last public outing was rather glorious, but four years ago and in Masterton!

Mrkusich was a resourceful, intelligent painter. His works were brainy and good looking. But, while he’s a key figure in our national art history, he aspired to an entirely different context—a different conversation, which never came. The dilemma remains: what to do with an internationalist whose work is only known on these islands; what to do with him in this postmodernist, post-formalist, post-medium, post-national moment; what to make of him, now?
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A few months back, sojourning in New York, I was reading rave reviews of The Rhonda Lieberman Reader. I scoured the bookshops for a copy—to no avail. Amazon didn’t list it either. Frustrated, on my return to Wellington I contacted its boutique publisher, Pep Talks, directly. My copy has just arrived. Joy.

In the 1990s, I had the biggest reader crush on Lieberman. When Artforum arrived each month, her Glamour Wounds column was the first thing I’d read. Perhaps annoyingly, I’d read it aloud to my co-workers—some of whom appreciated my guilty pleasure.

Lieberman wrote sharp art pieces—her essay, ‘The Loser Thing’, brilliantly mapped the emerging abject Zeitgeist in American art. But, her Glamour Wounds columns were mostly about other stuff: Barbie and Barbra Streisand, Sandra Bernhard and Thomas Bernhard, Roseanne Barr and Coco Chanel, being a model for a day and teaching in Sweden, Miami’s Fontainebleu Hotel and grunge. Each revealed a new vector of personal interest, pleasure, and pain, triangulating her. Reading her, I thought I knew her. 

Lieberman was Ivy-League educated, bookish but bratty, chatty, catty, and altogether ‘too Jewish’. She missed no opportunity to drop Yiddish slang. Her self-deprecating anecdotes invited sympathy, but her off-the-cuff observations had cruel cut through. She was a breath of fresh air. I wanted to write like that, even if it wasn’t me.

Here’s my favourite bit from ‘The Coldest Profession’: ‘Since I daylight as a pedagogue, getting into heavy textual discussions with any schmendrick who can get into a seminar, my ethical high road has more than a slight odor of the world’s oldest profession. I greet often clumsy advances responsively, indulge freakish trains of thought with the poker face of a hardened pro, shamelessly encourage the boring, and treat half-baked gibberish as if it were a cogent point, saving the client’s face by making him seem sentient and desirable before the group … The distinction between prostitute and professor is finer than we suspect.’

Glamour Wounds felt purposefully out of place in Artforum. But, while the column was unique, it was also timely. Published between 1992 and 1995—years that bracketed the 1993 Whitney Biennale—it resonated against the rise of identity politics. That moment favoured the worthy, personal testimony of marginalised Others. But how could you get a look in if you’re privileged—not invited to the pity party? Lieberman’s solution: join them anyway. Recast your privilege as pain, your subcultural passion as cultural oppression, and your singularity as marginality. ‘Glamour Wounds’ said it all.

Happily, I got to meet Lieberman. On a trip to New York—in late 1994, I think—I looked her up. She suggested a drink at the Algonquin Hotel, so we could sit in the room where Dorothy Parker and the Vicious Circle once held court. There, I felt at home, a million miles from home. 

Later, after I returned to wet, dismal Dunedin, the highlight of my year would be the interruption of a Gallery staff meeting: ‘Robert, telephone. It’s Rhonda Lieberman.’ I felt like Cinderella, surrounded by ugly sisters, being handed my glass slipper. The reason for her call? She was concocting an identity-politics-mocking assignment for her Swedish art-school students, prompting them to address a cliched export property perennially used to characterise their country—Ingmar Bergman. ‘Is there a New Zealand equivalent?’, she asked. Is there what.

The Rhonda Lieberman Reader, ed. Sarah Lehrer-Graiwer (Los Angeles: Pep Talk, 2018). Order here.
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Once upon a time, we imagined the Internet connecting us, one and all, as a big happy family. But now, we see how it separates us, creating enclaves, breeding trolls. In Kill All Normies  (Alresford: Zero Books, 2017), Angela Nagle charts the evolution of online subcultures of both the left and right, and shows how they paved the way for the emergence of the alt-right and Trump. It’s a fascinating, scary little book.

Nagle shows how sanctimonious, intolerant, and prescriptive the online left has become. Its clicktivists, snowflakes, and social-justice warriors are obsessed with safe spaces and parking their privilege. But this has a sinister side. In insisting on the scarcity of virtue, the left polices ever more arcane forms of political correctness. The left eats itself.

Nagle understands the emergence of the anti-establishment alt-right—rude and crude, misogynist and racist—as a reaction to this. It’s impressive how far she, as a left-winger, will go to understand their toxic mindset and how it has evolved in the online petri dish. Paradoxically, she also reveals how much this new brand of right-wing thinking has taken from the left, from Gramsci’s cultural Marxism and from postmodern art strategies of irony and transgression. It makes it hard to beat.

Clearly, we’re in a new phase of the culture wars. Nagle offers a roadmap to the rabbit hole. Required reading.
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Last week, I had the pleasure of introducing my old friend Megan Dunn, before she did a public reading from her new book Tinderbox. This is what I said:
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I’m introducing Megan Dunn … because she asked me to. I’ve known her for over twenty years. I first met her in 1997, when she was in her early twenties, at Elam, and running Fiat Lux gallery out of the front room of her Hobson Street flat. I had just returned to Auckland to direct Artspace. I was only in my mid-thirties, but to the Fiat Lux people I must have seemed ancient. I liked them because they were ‘the kids’. There was a new energy there. Fiat Lux represented a break in attitude not only from Artspace but also from the older kids’ gallery, Teststrip, with its half-ironic, half-pompous ‘international advisory board’. While I made Artspace into a white cube, Megan painted her tongue-and-groove gallery walls dark blue. While I wrote artspeak press releases, Fiat Lux issued smart-arse, in-joke, parish-pump newsletters, with insightful observations, such as ‘Charity—like madness—begins in the home.’

Back then, Megan made collage videos, frothy little pop-art epiphanies. They would have tormented Julainne Sumich, her high-minded no-fun Intermedia lecturer, who really was from another generation. Megan’s videos superimposed, recut, and intercut mainstream movies, TV ads, and art. They cross-referenced Fantasia, Nine-and-a-Half Weeks, Wild Orchid, Watership Down, and Labyrinth; the Kate Moss Obsession ad; Dali and Magritte; adding soundtracks by the Doors, the Cure, and Ultravox. There was always an uncanny fit, like these disparate things were meant to go together, were calling out to one another through space and time, and Megan had been the only one to spot it. The subtext was often the intersection of innocent childhood fantasy with knowing adult sex-and-violence. These works could only have been made by a woman in her twenties. Art people could see that Megan’s superimpositions related to the metaphorical overlays of Francis Picabia, Sigmar Polke, and David Salle, but also that this didn’t much matter. Her trick was making the work look intuitive, effortless, even lazy, yet unexpectedly affective. Her videos became a staple in the Artspace programme. (She also introduced me to her best friend, Yvonne Todd, whose work shared her generational reference field.)

Off the back of reading the Fiat Lux newsletters and a few of her exhibition pitches, I asked Megan to write art pieces for Pavement, where I was art editor. She turned out to be a natural and became a regular contributor. These days, she may be embarrassed by her Pavement juvenilia, but so much of what she has become, as a writer, was already there, in embryo, in those pieces. I loved the way she wrote. She didn’t come on like an art critic or historian, but despite this—or because of it—her writing was studded with unexpected insights. She had her own voice, her own map; she had cut-through.

Megan decamped to England in 2001 and we lost contact. There, she abandoned art in favour of creative writing; reinventing herself. Courses, courses, courses. Writing, writing, writing. When she returned to New Zealand in 2010, her ambitions were tied up with becoming a novelist. But she also relapsed into art criticism—doubtless because it was writing that people would pay her to do. When I came back to Wellington in 2014, Megan was working for Booksellers New Zealand, writing art criticism, and working on a novella—a female-perspective reheat of Ray Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451. Unfortunately, her attempts to get it published would be thwarted by the Bradbury estate. The bastards. To get around the lawyers, she reconceptualised it as Tinderbox. And here it is, her first book. And I love it.

But I’m not sure what it is. It’s not a novel—it’s non-fiction; non-fiction about writing fiction. It’s not exactly a memoir—that would be too pompous. It is more like a big personal essay. It shows how Megan has been able to expand her short-form writing—pieces like Submerging Artist and The Recipe for a Frosty Pussy—into book form. Tinderbox is a meta-book, a book about books. It switches back and forth between accounts of Megan struggling at writing her Fahrenheit 451 cover version and accounts of her day job as a manager at Borders Islington, flogging other people’s books—always at the coal face. It makes some kind of analogy between Fahrenheit 451, as a book about book burning, and Borders, as a book-selling empire in freefall—but I’m still not clear on the upshot.

Tinderbox is a book about a writer reading and about a reader writing. It foregrounds Megan’s techniques and toolbox—her NaNoWriMo course, her timer, and her dependency on SparkNotes, YouTube, and Wikipedia. It’s a time-capsule account of the way writers write these days, not in a bubble, but with their browsers open and someone playing video games in the same room, contrasting that with another time—Bradbury using a coin-operated typewriter in the basement of the UCLA Library.

I like Tinderbox because it’s so Megan. It’s multitasking Megan, hectic Megan, procrastinator Megan, neurotic Megan, masterful Megan. Somehow, she has transmuted her endearing admissions of failure and frustration into a racy page turner.​​ Having known Megan since the early days, I find her book has a lot in common with the sense and sensibility of her old videos and Pavement reviews, both being about her discovering ways to express herself through other people’s art. I like to think I was there at the beginning. I’m grateful for this book and proud to know its author.​ [Megan Dunn, Tinderbox (Norwich: Galley Beggar, 2017).]
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In David Cronenberg’s film The Fly (1986), Seth Brundle’s DNA gets spliced with a fly’s, in a teleportation experiment gone wrong, producing a monstrous, drooling hybrid—Brundlefly. I recalled this today when I googled myself and found an autobot-generated sidebar entry mistakenly attributing a dozen of my publications to another Robert Leonard: ‘A Dublin native, Robert Leonard writes about the history of twentieth-century economics and the social sciences in scientific and cultural context. His work has appeared in a range of journals in economics and the history of science, including the Economic Journal, History of Political Economy, and Isis. His 1995 article in the Journal of Economic Literature, from which the present book grew, won the Best Article Award of the History of Economics Society. Leonard is Professor of Economics at L’Université du Québec à Montréal.’ It may be a bigger problem for him. I suspect I’m the fly.
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