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I’m so sorry to hear that filmmaker and author Peter Wells has died. Last year—despite his illness—Peter kindly spoke with Gareth Watkins at City Gallery in conjunction with a screening of his 1983 film Little Queen. He had much to say. Here’s a transcript.
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I’ve just been in Brisbane, checking out the latest Asia-Pacific Triennial—APT9. Since it began in 1993, the APT has presented art from across the region, from developing and developed nations alike. In the early years, it drew curatorial advice from far and wide, but, since APT4 (2002), it’s been largely internally curated. Strengthening in-house expertise, Queensland Art Gallery dispatches its curators to diverse jurisdictions, to uncover new art and artists. 

The curatorial-team approach gives the APT a distinctive flavour. Although it is never a particular curator’s view, the APT has developed a particular voice that transcends its iterations. It may promise a patchwork of difference, but it is always a patchwork, never so different. Every three years, we return to enjoy a new lineup of artists but largely the same set of concerns, the same frame. The APT finds it hard to ‘move on’.

The APT seeks to create a level playing field for diverse artistic and cultural practices, ranging from the contemporary to the crafty and customary. But, in the process, it can decontextualise things, fudging and flattening distinctions. You see this in the way it clusters craft objects to accord them a contemporary-art ‘installation’ look and in the trouble it occasionally has distinguishing the ‘primitive’ and the ‘primitivist’—pardon my French. Interestingly, Jonathan Jones brilliantly exploits this in his APT9 project.

A question that the APT continually poses but never answers: What is the difference between art and culture, art and artefact? We can certainly appreciate the amazing formal qualities of Tolai shell-money wheels from Papua New Guinea—one of the hits this time. But would the APT consider exhibiting Australian paper money in this fashion, so we can appreciate its iconography and print quality?

Walking through the show, we are prompted to make correlations between works and whereabouts, pigeonholing works as signs of the cultures from which they come. This time, the folly of this was revealed when I saw Kushana Bush’s work. The New Zealand artist’s paintings look like Indo-Persian miniatures. Her aesthetic is not symptomatic of New Zealandness, but, in the context of the show, if you knew no better, it would be easy to imagine it was. (This certainly made me revisit my snap judgements about other works I’d seen.)

The APT is ambitious. The size of the Gallery’s spaces prompts artists to upscale—it can feel like art on steroids. However, it’s the intellectual, cultural, and artistic territory the project covers that is truly daunting. The APT addresses an imagined viewer sufficiently versed in and concerned about the region’s many local histories and conflicts, religions and philosophies, and art traditions to get it. In this, it is forever exposing shortfalls in its actual viewers’ knowledge of their neighbours.

That, in itself, may be a good thing, but a paradox underpins the enterprise. As much as it celebrates art and artists embedded in specific local conditions, the APT constructs a viewer who is just the opposite: a privileged cosmopolitan who—like APT curators—presumes to encompass, bridge, and transcend specificity. Of course, in the end, the APT is no neutral frame, but itself a highly specific product of its own local conditions and histories—a unique cultural artefact. Polished.
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Last year, I participated in a small seminar asking whether the notion of ‘New Zealand art’ is still of use in this post-nationalist day and age. On the one hand, things have definitely shifted—gone global. But, on the other, so much of what we call ‘New Zealand art’ remains effectively of interest here and only here, and that won’t change in a hurry.

The seminar got me thinking. What has ‘New Zealand art’ meant, what does it mean, what will it mean? How has its meaning and purchase changed? What has the term revealed and concealed, enabled and enacted? Who has, does, and will it serve and undermine? What is the history, legacy, and future of ‘New Zealand art’ as idea? Political questions.

The idea of ‘New Zealand art’ is vague. It’s boundaries have never been clear. What counts? Is it art made by New Zealanders (where ever), art made in New Zealand (by whom ever), or art recognised in New Zealand? What art practices does it encompass? Forty years ago, many thought of ‘New Zealand art’ simply as mainstream New Zealand painting, with other local developments out of court.

Of course, in-out definitional boundaries aren’t the only thing. It’s also about what is emphasised and privileged. Is ‘New Zealand art’ the good New Zealand art—canonical New Zealand art? Are Peter McIntyre and Colin McCahon both New Zealand art? Are they equally and similarly so? What about Rangimarie Hetet and Michael Smither? Evelyn Page and Simon Denny? We also can’t look to the experts to resolve these questions, because their business is to disagree. If, say, Wystan Curnow and the late Francis Pound were both talking about ‘New Zealand art’, they would probably not have same thing in mind. ‘New Zealand art’ is a necessarily contested term.

Even if we can’t define ‘New Zealand art’ precisely, life goes on. There’s a New Zealand art industry. There are books on New Zealand art that sit in the New Zealand art section in the library. We have magazines called Art New Zealand, Art News New Zealand, and the Journal of New Zealand Art History. We have shows of New Zealand art. New Zealand art museums appoint specialist curators to address it. Creative New Zealand funds it. The Walters Prize celebrates those who contribute to it. The Arts Foundation declares some practitioners New Zealand arts laureates and icons. Artists represent New Zealand at Venice. 

It may be unclear as to exactly what counts as New Zealand art, but, in arguing the toss, we construct it. And it’s the vague, unspecified nature of the term that allows us to construct it this way and that, giving it a discursive life. A clear, unambiguous definition would kill the conversation. Perhaps it’s best to think of ‘New Zealand art’ not as something that can be defined, but in terms of all that has been, is, and will be done and undone in its name. The history of New Zealand art, then, is the history of an idea.

The German philosopher Martin Heidegger developed a novel approach to working with compromised and contested terms. In texts, he put them ‘under erasure’, crossing them out but allowing them to remain legible and in place. His thought was that a word may be inadequate and flawed, yet it must be used, as language provides nothing better. (Later, French philosopher Jacques Derrida took up the idea. But, for him, it was not just particular words but the entire language system that needed to be placed under erasure.) Perhaps it’s time to put ‘New Zealand art’ under erasure, so we can excise and exercise it knowingly. Have our cake.
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