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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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With the Adam Art Gallery closed for the holidays, and Te Papa’s art spaces and City Gallery closed for renovations, the Dowse Art Museum’s Gavin Hipkins survey show The Domain feels like the only show in town. If you’re in Wellington, needing a contemporary-art fix, it has to be The Domain. And it’s well worth the trip out to Lower Hutt.

The show covers some twenty-five years of the photographer-filmmaker’s work and it’s accompanied by a door-stopper tome, courtesy Victoria University Press. The curatorial baby of Dowse Director Courtney Johnston, the show fills the Museum’s ground-floor galleries. That’s the most space the Dowse has ever devoted to such a show. It’s great to see it bite the bullet and make such a commitment to one artist.

With such shows, the stakes are high for museum and artist alike. Big retrospectives can go either way. In gathering work, they can reveal the breadth of an artist’s achievement or expose their weaknesses. There are many stories of artists unable to re-enter the studio after their big show. The Domain certainly shifted my sense of Hipkins’s work.

Hipkins has long been known as a ‘tourist of photography’, meaning two things: he’s a photo tourist (photographing things on his excursions) and a tourist of the medium itself (exploring its histories and styles). Or, as Peter Brunt put it, Hipkins is ‘an iconographer of desire, travel, time and … modern communities’, and ‘a great manipulator of the photographic artifact itself: its materiality, formats, systems, modes of installation and display’. In other words, the project is all about a dance of content and form, and you never quite know which is taking the lead.

Accounts of Hipkins’s work emphasise its eclecticism—its traversing diverse styles and subjects, histories and geographies—but what impresses with The Domain is the consistency of tone. You realise that every work is a piece in a larger cross-referenced puzzle—a Hipkins universe—and that that’s always been the case. But it took this show to reveal that. In the work, there’s a tension between its eye-candy lightness, its variety, and its novelty, and its persistent, inescapable melancholy—a haunting sense of déjà vu. And Hipkins cross-references it all with his big-picture themes: the legacies of modernism, colonialism, and other grand schemes. Hubris.

In our current research-art epoch, Hipkins is a novelty. His practice may be bookish—driven by thinking about history and art history—but he’s also a consummate stylist, with a deft touch. He lets the format do the heavy lifting. He makes it look easy. He turns everything into art. Catch The Domain before it closes. (Dowse Art Museum, Lower Hutt, until 25 March.)
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The Michael Zavros tome is out now, in time for Christmas. It’s so big it needs wheels. Writing from Laurence Simmons, Chris Saines, Rhana Devenport, and myself. Plead guilty … guilty pleasure.
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At City Gallery, we are currently showing Lost World, an exhibition of work by British artist John Stezaker. He makes collages using stills from long-forgotten films, conjuring a new world from their ‘lost world’. One of his heroes and big influences is the American surrealist Joseph Cornell. Cornell is famous for his assemblages and collages, but he was also a filmmaker.

Cornell loved the movies and particularly movie actresses. He was transfixed by Jennifer Jones and Hedy Lamarr. He would acquire 16mm film prints to entertain himself and his housebound younger brother, Robert. One of these was the feature East of Borneo (1931), a convoluted tale of love, loss, and adventure in the jungle, featuring crocodiles and pythons. It may have been a potboiler, but Cornell adored its star, Rose Hobart.

To make the film less tedious for repeat viewing, he re-edited it, excising boring narrative exposition, but retaining the good bits—shots of the delectable Hobart (often nocturnal scenes). In the process, he reduced the feature to a breezy twenty minutes of oneiric incoherence, slipping in footage of an eclipse for good measure. He projected his film through blue glass at languid silent-film speed, and replaced its soundtrack with jaunty numbers from Nestor Amaral’s record Holiday in Brazil, redoubling the original film’s air of frivolous exoticism.

According to legend, when Cornell’s Rose Hobart was first shown publicly, at Julien Levy’s New York gallery in 1936, a jealous Salvador Dalí knocked over the projector, complaining that Cornell had stolen his idea. ‘He stole it from my subconscious!’, Dalí declared. Through collage, Cornell had distilled the magical and memorable from the conventional and forgettable, anticipating situationist détournement, appropriation, and MTV. Today, the film is celebrated as a classic of surrealist cinema and a foundational work of American avantgarde cinema.

On Wednesday 8 November, at 6pm, Raymond Spiteri, from Victoria University, will introduce a rare screening of Rose Hobart at City Gallery.

 

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On Monday, via my Facebook feed, I heard that art critic and art historian Francis Pound had died. I knew he had been gravely ill, but finality is always a shock. Since the publication of his magnum opus—The Invention of New Zealand: Art and National Identity 1930–1970—in 2009, Pound had not been so visible as a commentator. He’d been off the hustings. Because of this, a younger generation may not appreciate that he had been such a looming, influential, and racy figure, especially in the 1980s and 1990s. He changed the shape and direction of New Zealand art.

From the outset, Pound had a perspective. His essays were never random commentary; they were windows on a big-picture view of New Zealand art that spanned from the art of colonial times to works made yesterday. An enemy of parochialism, an advocate of internationalism, Pound promoted a new canon of local art that linked the modernism of Gordon Walters to the postmodernisms of Billy Apple, Richard Killeen, and Julian Dashper.

Pound was a stylish, witty writer—a disciple of Roland Barthes. He could turn a phrase. He was a unique amalgam of tastemaker, polemicist, historian, and teacher, and a champion of artists. For years, he and Killeen were a double act; Killeen’s work serving his theoretical agendas, his writing centralising Killeen in the story.

When I started working as a curator and critic in the mid-1980s, Pound was a model for me as for others. He made the scene seem consequential and sexy—a theatre for argument and play. He wanted to shape art, in the future and the past. He would doubtless have agreed with Marx, who wrote, ‘Philosophers have hitherto only interpreted the world in various ways; the point is to change it.’

But, sadly, death is the end of change. In his 1991 essay ‘Deathdate’, Pound wrote: ‘The museum wants the artist timeless. It is waiting for the death. Only with the closure of death does the oeuvre completely and happily begin.’ The same can be said for what the culture wants from writers, happily and unhappily. Now Pound is timeless.

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Recently, I’ve been out and about, hoovering up the biennales. In Venice, video-installation artist Candice Breitz’s work Love Story, in the South African pavilion, was a standout. (You might remember her City Gallery show, back in 2015.) Breitz is known for her works exploring the performance of identity, our relation to celebrities, and the interview format. In Venice, however, her work, initially, seemed more ostensibly political, addressing a hot topic—the refugee experience.

Breitz shared the pavilion with another video artist, Mohau Modisakeng. In the first room, he presented Passage (2017), a poetic video triptych—a meditation on displacement, slavery, and violence. It showed three characters lying in small white boats, shot from above. Each performed gestures that alluded to their struggles against unseen forces as their vessels slowly filled up with water. Eventually, they submerged and sunk, along with their boats, which now resembled coffins. No escape, bar death.

It set things up beautifully for Breitz’s installation, Love Story (2016), which occupied the next two rooms. The first of these rooms featured a large single-channel projection. It showed iconic American movie stars, Alec Baldwin and Julianne Moore, in the studio. They were acting—playing refugees being interviewed. They read from scripts based on interviews with actual refugees. These two famous, privileged white people (who have everything) became stand-ins for anonymous unfortunates (who have lost everything). Breitz filmed them in front of a green screen, with studio paraphernalia visible—lights, microphone—emphasising the artifice. The video shuffled back and forth between Baldwin and Moore.

Like others, I spent a lot of time in this room, genuinely relating to tales of refugee woe—I thought. The twist came when I finally made it into the next room. There I was confronted with six domestic-scale flat screens with interviews with six actual refugees, one subject per screen—the interviews from which Moore’s and Baldwin’s scripts had been derived. The presentation was basic—no intercutting. I started with good intentions, but my commitment wavered—it was too much. In the previous room, I had enjoyed the single projection with the rest of the audience, together, as if we were in a cinema. But here, the sound was on headphones. I had to sit on a bench alone or maybe with one other person to listen to each interview—homework style. It was too personal; it was embarrassing. I looked at my watch, concerned at the time it would take to give each story its due, when I had, essentially, got it all from Baldwin and Moore already. But, with other audience members around, I didn’t want to look like I was only there for the stars. Shame.

Actually, I wanted to go back and spend more time in the Moore-Baldwin room—my comfort zone. It was amazing how much more compelling and engaging they seemed—despite the Brechtian alienation techniques—and how comparatively dull it was listening to real people’s real problems, presented straight and at length. Of course, this was Breitz’s point. Her refugees-being-themselves were exactly what refugees are—an unwanted excess. Her project exposed the bad faith of celebrity endorsements for such worthy issues, where beautiful people front for causes and parade their social concern, presumably enabling us to access a bitter reality but actually distancing us from it. Her work turned out to be as much or more about our relation to celebrities as about our relation to refugees. Pulling the rug, she exposed the limits of our compassion—our empathy. Mediation is her big subject.

Interestingly, with her piece, Breitz hobbled her running mate, Modisakeng. Looking back from her work, his aestheticisation of the refugee dilemma, with its consummate cinematography and lighting, felt like Hollywood escapism. It was a bit too The Life of Pi, a bit too Bill Viola. It spectacularised the issue, insulating us from the reality. The price of our attention.

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Yesterday, I was visiting the Peggy Guggenheim Collection, in Venice, and saw René Magritte’s great painting The Empire of Light (1953–4). I’d borrowed its title for my recent essay on Michael Parekowhai’s The Lighthouse, but wasn’t expecting to meet it in the flesh. Serendipity. The essay is here.

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Like many of my antipodean-curator colleagues, I’m away in Europe, on the biennale trail, looking for the next thing. So far, the standout work has been French artist Pierre Huyghe’s After ALife Ahead, in Sculpture Projects Munster—a show of new commissioned works that occurs throughout the city of Munster, once every ten years.

I’d heard Huyghe’s project was a ‘mind-blowing, living, breathing installation’, ‘a complex living organism’, and ‘a biosphere’, so expectations were high. It was a bit of a hike to get to there, followed by a two-hour wait in the queue, but it was worth it. When I entered, with a handful of others, I felt I’d been granted access to another world.

Huyghe had taken over the whole building—a huge, dilapidated, retired ice rink. He’d cut away areas of the concrete floor, revealing the cooling pipes that ran through it. He’d excavated the site, digging metres down—through strata, through time, into rock, then dirt—creating a landscape with clefts and mounds, an indoors outdoors.

After receiving the briefing—no climbing, no jumping—I descended into the site. Prompted to look for significance everywhere, I considered ponds spawning algae and two tall mounds, which turned out to be buzzing beehives. Grass sprouted on one bank. There was a triangular section of the concrete floor, incised with saw lines, cut adrift. But the chimera peacocks I was expecting were nowhere to be seen.

Overhead, in the ceiling, retro-futuristic pyramid-like shutters slowly opened and closed their petals, apparently responding to temperature and humidity levels in the room, letting in light, air, and, on other occasions, rain, and perhaps letting the odd bee escape. They looked more like spaceship hatches than ice-rink plant, an impression enhanced by an intermittent industrial-noise effect.

A minimalist box sat on an intact remnant of concrete floor. It was made of switchable glass. Sometimes, it was pitch black; other times clear, revealing that it was an aquarium. In it was a mini-diorama of triangular shards—echoing bits of the concrete slab—piled up like the ice in Caspar David Friedrich’s The Sea of Ice (1824). This set was home to a venomous sea snail, a conus textile. The pattern on its shell had been used as a score, to determine when the glass became clear, when the sound played, etc.

A machine on the perimeter of the site, I learnt, was an incubator, containing human cancer cells—HeLa cells. There was also an app, where visitors could see augmented-reality pyramids on the ceiling proliferate (as cancer cells split) and disappear (when the ceiling opened).

That everything was connected was clear, how everything was connected remained unclear. One writer summed it up as: ‘Heterogeneous dynamic systems—organisations, biotic and abiotic, real and symbolic, material and immaterial—are shifting configuration in real time in an uncertain symbiosis.’

Epic and disorienting, Huyghe’s work scrambled time, sci-fi style. I had a sense of being, at once, in the past (in a primordial landscape), in the present (in an excavation site), and in the future (in some imagined hereafter, when the ruined rink would be colonised by new life). Might I be in all three times at once? My temporal confusion seemed to be confirmed by the title.

I was not clear about my own place in the scenario: was I (as opposed to the sea snail) the addressee of this artwork, or just another temporary participant within it? What did it mean to approach this thing—which the artist had left to its own devices to evolve—as ‘art’?

I felt echoes of those maverick American minimalists Robert Smithson and Michael Heizer, who were less modernists than adepts of deep history. However, for me, the reference points were more cinematic. The work was like a film set; I approached it through memories of films. First, I imagined I was a member of the search party in Alien (1979), descending into an ominous landscape, wondering if I might be impregnated by something in one of those mounds. Then, regarding the inky black aquarium, I remembered Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968), when they first encounter the black monolith, excavated from where-and-when it shouldn’t be. Finally, I recalled Stalker (1979), where Tarkovsky, with his zero special effects, makes the field his protagonists walk through seem ripe with paranormal possibility—uncanny.

After ALife Ahead was a crazy mixed metaphor. It’s not the first time Huyghe has weirded me out, and I hope it won’t be the last. He gives pretension a good name.

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Who is Todd Atticus? His name came to my attention only yesterday, when I thought I’d spotted a bizarre typo on the cover of our current City Gallery Wellington season brochure. Instead of ‘Colin McCahon, Petra Cortright, Martino Gamper, Shannon Te Ao’, it read ‘Colin McCahon, Todd Atticus, Martino Gamper, Shannon Te Ao’. WTF! My jaw dropped. Was this a monumental screw-up or was I just having one of my typo nightmares? Someone pinch me. But, when I looked closer, I saw it was a fake. Mr Atticus had also replaced the Cortright image-and-blurb with his own, which explained his sleight. Where we had spruiked the LA post-internet-art it-girl as ‘the Monet of the twenty-first century’, he proposed himself as ‘the Duchamp of the twenty-first century’. Atticus had sneakily inserted himself into our brand, and he’d gone to great trouble to do so. (He has, apparently, done another version of the brochure, trading places with Gamper.) I hear there are now a thousand rogue brochures out and about, in the city’s bloodstream. We could be offended, could call the lawyers, but it’s too clever, too funny, too well done, and ultimately too flattering—sometimes it’s reassuring to be part of someone’s fantasy. I was reminded of Julian Dashper, who once took out an advertising page in Artforum to print a fake look-alike Artforum review of his work. Positive, of course.