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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.