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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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