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There’s a lot of clamour around ‘art history’ right now. On the one hand, universities are cutting art-history departments—it’s part of the neoliberal purge of the humanities, we’re told. On the other hand, art history is under attack from the left—as a bastion of crusty white privilege. Of course, when people talk about ‘art history’, they are often talking about very different things. For many people, ‘art history’ conjures up notions of the canon, and the image of Lord Kenneth Clark in his tweed jacket fronting the 1969 BBC TV show Civilisation, laying out the Western high-art tradition. (I was six.) However, we tend to forget that, just three years later, in 1972, BBC2 screened John Berger’s Ways of Seeing—a Marxist-feminist critique of Civilisation. (I was nine.) When I started studying art history at the University of Auckland in the early 1980s (still a teenager), it was still all about the Western tradition (white males), and, to proceed to post-grad, you had to study a European language (French, German, Italian, or Spanish). However, all that was rapidly coming unstuck. A Women in Art paper was introduced (which I did), followed (after I left) by papers on New Zealand art, contemporary art, and Maori and Pacific art. Today’s art-history courses bear little resemblance to the one I did. Similarly, in my later life in art museums, art history would be always under scrutiny while being furiously transformed. For as long as I have been involved in it, art history has been in a state of perpetual and profound revision, philosophical and political expansion. Indeed, for me, art history is that business of rewriting. Art history may be, at once, the field and the game that’s played upon it; poison and cure, scapegoat and straw man. Pharmakon.
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[IMAGE: Hank Willis Thomas Colonialism and Abstract Art 2019]
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I’m no longer at City Gallery Wellington, however I hope you get to see my four current shows, which opened there yesterday: Brett Graham: Tai Moana Tai Tangata, Judy Millar: Action Movie, Tia Ranginui: Gonville Gothic, and Pierre Huyghe: Human Mask (until 31 October). People have been asking me about my plans. For now, I’m focusing on writing and publishing. I’ve joined Art News New Zealand as Editor and I’ll be revving up my work on Bouncy Castle. Our second title—Giovanni Intra: Clinic of Phantasms—is almost off to the printers. It’s being co-published with Semiotext(e). Two more books are in the pipeline. I’m also looking for opportunities to curate and consult; advise and assist; write and edit. I can be contacted on my new email BouncyCastleLeonard@gmail.com. Don’t be shy.
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[IMAGE: Salad days. I enjoy a light lunch at Villa Blanca, Beverly Hills, Los Angeles, alongside its owner Lisa Vanderpump, 2016. Photo: Michael Zavros.]
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It’s not one of Rita Angus’s great paintings, but I’ve always had a soft spot for Churches, Hawke’s Bay. ‘Church’ suggests congregation, a united community. But, in the painting, multiple churches are grafted together or emerge from one another haphazardly, suggesting competing views, schisms, a fractured community. One of the churches is a wharenui. As if to echo this doctrinal discord, there’s no ruling perspective at work in the painting. The artist looks at once to medieval painting (before Albertian perspective) and to cubism (its undoing). Faceless people are peppered about, looking somewhat awkward and isolated, like they don’t know where to turn in the visual and ideological clamour. Perhaps those eye-candy colours are deceptive. Is this a happy painting or a sad one—an image of community or alienation, utopia or dystopia? I don’t know.
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[IMAGE: Rita Angus Churches, Hawke’s Bay 1962–3]
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