In 1998, I was among the team of curators who put together a suite of shows called Action Replay: Post-Object Art, at Auckland Art Gallery, Auckland’s Artspace, and New Plymouth’s Govett-Brewster Art Gallery. We wanted to revisit 1970s post-object art as a luminous ‘missing chapter’ in New Zealand art history. The show included Wellington-born artist John Lethbridge, who had been in the heart of the post-object scene in Auckland, as one of the precocious students in Jim Allen’s Sculpture department at Elam. Lethbridge presented a solo show, Formal Enema Enigma, as part of Auckland City Art Gallery’s famous 1975 Project Programme. However, in 1976, he headed to Australia. The following year, he bought a Hasselblad medium-format camera and devoted himself to photography. The photos he made from the late 1970s into the early 1980s had one foot in the literalism of performance-art documentation (they are performances for camera) and another in the glitz of fashion photography. What interested me was not just that Lethbridge had been part of a neglected moment in New Zealand art, but that this subsequent photography represented a bridge between it and the postmodernism that followed, and between New Zealand art of the 1970s and Australian art of the 1980s.

Many of Lethbridge’s photos from then feature his then partner, another Wellingtonian, Jane Campion, who had yet to become the famous filmmaker we know now. (Today Lethbridge wonders whether to call them collaborations, but Campion is happy to be credited as ‘performer-assistant’.) The series Farm Life: An Exercise in Survival (1978) was made while they were back in New Zealand, holidaying at Campion’s family farm in Peka Peka. In most of these images, Campion wears a disguise—a white pillowcase over her head, with sunglasses on top. (Perhaps it’s a reference to Lethbridge’s Auckland City Art Gallery show, which included photos of him with a paper bag over his head.) The rest of Campion’s outfit is a queer mélange of masculine (tie and waistcoat) and feminine (shiny leggings, gloves, and heels). In one image, she strikes a campy, limp-wristed pose, while sporting a white fur boa—pretending to be a rabbit; her ‘bent’ burlesque stance contrasting with the rectitude of a power pole standing beside her. Campion is an alien presence, looking like she’s stepped out of a nightclub rather than a milking shed. This image jabs at New Zealand’s rural ‘man alone’ ethos.

Birds figure in two shots in Farm Life. In one, Campion sidles up against a barn, as if avoiding the attention of a chicken in the foreground—despite her outstanding attire. In the other, she crouches, mimicking the pose of a turkey, as if trying to relate. In The Ride, she swaps her heels for cowboy boots and sits astride a saddle mounted on a step ladder in a mock-heroic ‘tally ho’ pose. She’s like a deity, embracing duality, with a carrot in one hand, a riding crop in the other—carrot and stick. Is she chasing her own carrot? 

A colour image, Water Well, is more fashiony. The shroud is gone, replaced by a peaked hat. Campion wears gold pants that seem inappropriate for farm chores. She strikes an overtly sexual, dominatrix pose, mastering a ribbed plastic hose with white gloved hands. It’s a look straight out of the Helmut Newton playbook, sexy but camp.

The Farm Life works were timely—Cindy Sherman started making her Untitled Film Stills around the same time. They were also suggestive. But it’s not clear exactly what Campion’s character represents, if anything. On the one hand, she’s shrouded, concealing her identity; on the other hand, she’s an explosion of contradictory identity signifiers. Lethbridge describes her in psychological and shamanistic terms, as a fusion of masculine and feminine principles. She’s a flaming creature, an impish presence, a disrupter.

Post-object art is often characterised as overtly literal—anti-illusionistic, anti-representational—presenting real materials, real processes, in real space, in real time. Indeed, that’s how we largely understood it as the curators of Action Replay back in 1998. But there were veins of post-object practice that were mythic, mystic, and magical—the Beuysian dimension. As early as 1978, Lethbridge’s work was being described as ‘post-conceptual romanticism’.

Returning to Sydney, Lethbridge and Campion continued to make theatrical photographs—performances for camera. Divination: Lost at Sea (1979) was shot on Sydney Harbour Bridge. Campion sits in an inflated inner tube (perhaps a nod to the inner tubes used in Lethbridge’s Auckland City Art Gallery show). She’s not at sea, but elevated, in a sea of concrete. Her inner tube is tethered by a rope, but it’s not dragging her; it’s slack. She wears a man’s suit, a bathing cap and sunglasses, gloves and heels. She extends a striped divining rod, as if seeking subterranean streams. Dried sardines—literally fish out of water—dangle from it. There’s a broken boomerang at her side—no return. Over the wall, we see a city—a world she’s perhaps oblivious to. Divination: Lost at Sea is a dream image. Variants on it were given similarly surrealistic titles, Mystery of Migration and Kangaroo Dream. On the one hand, Lethbridge was developing a personal mythology—the work was about his feelings on leaving New Zealand for Australia. On the other hand, he left the allegory open ended, for his viewers to meet half way. 

Joseph Beuys was one of Lethbridge’s heroes. His Searching for Beuys images (1979) were shot in Sydney’s Hyde Park, at night, with a flash. In the Park, the plane trees are pruned back, making them look like they’ve been planted upside down, roots up. Campion appears from behind one, in her signature suit and tie, bathing cap and heels—but, this time, she wears a Kato mask. She carries a souvenir-store boomerang and a suitcase trailing a string of sausages—a nod to Beuys. These works may be a homage to the German artist, but they have a more comedic, slapstick feel. In the catalogue for his 1990 Biennale of Sydney, The Readymade Boomerang, curator Rene Block describes them as a ‘metaphor for the artist as compulsive traveller’. But, as much as the image suggests an Australian artist venturing offshore looking for Beuys, the boomerang implies travelling inland, to outback Australia. 

As fate would have it, the boomerang would return. In 1980, the European performance artists Marina Abramović and Ulay spent five months in the Australian outback as part of their own Beuysian grail quest. They returned to Sydney to present a performance, Gold Found by the Artists, at the Art Gallery of New South Wales, the following year. For its sixteen-day duration, they sat, still, silently, at either end of a long table, on which were placed gold nuggets they had found in the outback, a boomerang covered in gold leaf, and a live python. On the gallery wall between them hung a large, slick, studio-style photo of them dancing, taken by Lethbridge, who would also photograph the performance. These photos include one of the snake wrapped around the boomerang, recalling the Rod of Asclepius.

Around 1980, Lethbridge and Campion would go their own ways. He headed to New York for a few months, as the recipient of the Australia Council’s Greene Street studio, while she started film school in Sydney. For Lethbridge, New York opened a ‘Pandora’s box’ of eastern mysticism. He studied Kashmiri Shaivism and accessed alternative bookstores. He continued to make images featuring various performers, often himself, expanding on his interests in psychology, spirituality, and eastern philosophy. A sequence of three images, Intention, Retention, Rocket (1980), shot in his New York loft, find the artist naked on a ragged, womblike couch, his head covered with a black plastic bag. It looks like an S/M scenario, involving asphyxiation, a mirror, a Perrier bottle, some rubber hose, a cut-up doll, and a writhing male body worthy of Francis Bacon. In fact, it represents a Kashmiri Shaivist exercise, to channel energies through the chakras. Similarly, Dark Transmission for Pisces (1982)—made back in Sydney—is an astrological self portrait. Lethbridge—a Pisces—is blindfolded, floating. In one hand, he holds a steam iron; in the other, a fish, split open, flattened out. Iron and fish create a visual rhyme. Lethbridge says the work was his response to feeling psychically ‘flattened’.

Lethbridge typified the boundary-blurring ‘anything goes’ mentality of the day. His work was equally visible in art galleries and in fashion magazines, perhaps sitting oddly in both. He was friends with legendary Australian fashion designers Katie Pye and Peter Tully, and his images regularly featured in Pol, the too-cool moment-defining Australian magazine. In 1981, critic Paul Taylor championed his work as part of a new-wave Zeitgeist. In his seminal essay, ‘Australian New Wave and the “Second Degree”’—in the inaugural issue of Art and Text, the organ of Australian postmodernism—he wrote: ‘… punk was supposed to have had a social conscience (aggressively, working class, adolescent, and politically powerless) while disco, continually misunderstood since its emergence from the bars of black and gay America, represented glitz, gloss, and glamour; it was the epitome of superficiality and apt vehicle for vacuity. Stated simply, the accidental collision or crossover of punk and disco styles is now called new wave music and it is such a collision to which Lethbridge aspires, admiring both punk’s rebelliousness and disco’s formalism.’

While there’s truth in Taylor’s reading, it bypasses Lethbridge’s own interests. For the artist, these works were less new-wave glitz, more psycho-spiritual enquiry. Taylor didn’t mention Lethbridge’s interest in Jung and Gurdieff—in dream analysis, Gestalt therapy, Zen, shamanism, and astrology. Despite their fashionable sheen, his photos were about serious stuff: archetypes, animas and animuses, multiple and shadow selves. They represented spiritual philosophies and practices. And yet, what gave them their unique kick was how they conflated the superficial and the consequential, surface and depth. 

Around 1983, Lethbridge moved into drawing and painting, presenting his grand painting-installation project Hunt the Moon at Queensland Art Gallery in 1985. Throughout the 1980s, he would remain a key figure in Australian art, a staple of biennales and export shows. However, in the late 1990s, Lethbridge largely quit the scene, feeling out of step with the direction in which it was moving. He stopped teaching at Sydney’s College of Fine Arts, stopped showing, and ‘went bush’. But he continued making art for himself, making the unconscious conscious, exploring deeper layers of the psyche.

In recent years, Lethbridge has returned, quietly. He completed a PhD at UNSW Art and Design in 2016, presenting a show of new photographs, Imaging the Void, at UNSW Galleries. But then, in 2020, he lost everything in the Cobargo bushfire. In four hours, his home and decades of art were gone. He was, however, left with a hard drive, with high-res scans he had made of key early photographs. Printed from these scans, our show, Divination, recovers classic works from a key art moment—as the post-object pivoted into the postmodern. These images miraculously escaped the flames, literal and metaphoric.
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[IMAGE: John Lethbridge Farm Life: An Exercise in Survival 2 1978]