Robert Leonard

Contemporary Art Writer And Curator

Barbara Kruger, We Presume …

November 3, 2016

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Barbara Kruger just designed the cover of New York magazine—her portrait of Donald Trump. I was reminded that, in 1988, Priscilla Pitts, Merylyn Tweedie, and I interviewed the American artist for Antic. Kruger was here for her show at Wellington’s Shed 11. She was a superstar, at the height of her fame, and intellectually intimidating. That’s probably why it took all three of us to interview her. Re-reading the interview, the funniest bit is when Tweedie asks Kruger if she would consider making a film ‘outside the Hollywood system’. Kruger replies: ‘What other system is there? … I don’t want to make a black-and-white film with words over it.’ Presumably, she was unaware that this described Tweedie’s own alternative films to a T. Here’s that interview.

Todd Showing

September 4, 2016

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I just attended the opening of Barnacles, photographer Yvonne Todd’s new-work show at Tauranga Art Gallery. It was well worth the trek.

Todd is known for her ‘portraits’ of quirky, imagined female characters, who typically suffer from some or other illness, curse, or blight. Her works draw on the normative language of commercial studio photography, and yet seem persistently askew, perverse, wrong. She uses costumes to help create her characters. In the past, these included vintage gowns she purchased on the Internet (one was a glittering Bob Mackie number, formally owned by a real-life tragedy, Whitney Houston). However, for most of the portraits in Barnacles, Todd designed the outfits herself and had her crafty mum knock them up.

Todd’s new costumes are bizarre. Pale Blue’s robust outfit looks like a straitjacket, with absurd big-mitten hands and bondage-rope detailing. Moone’s oversized quilted bib is like a couture medical collar. Is it to prevent her from hurting herself, to absorb her drool, or both? Infanta wears a repressive Victorian puff-sleeve dress in an incongruously psychedelic paisley pattern. It totally conceals her body: the skirt goes to the floor, the sleeves cover her arms and the collar her neck, and she wears a face mask with the same pattern. It’s hard to know if there’s a real person underneath—the sitter is spectacularly erased. It’s part encasement fetishism, part Kusama-style self-obliteration, with nods to Leigh Bowery and Anatoly Moskvin. Todd’s other portraits are Ernestina (whose appliqué floral dress seems happier than she is) and Amateur Theatre (a glowering, self-styled drama queen).

Todd’s heroines are contradictions in terms. They are glamorous hysterics, ready for their closeups or their ECT.

The new works—we are told—draw on the artist’s recent experience of pregnancy. And one image—smaller than the others, and set off in an egg-shaped frame—presses the point. In Self Portrait (39 Weeks), Todd riffs on those ever-popular pregnancy portraits, where expectant mothers commission professional photographers to celebrate and preserve their most fecund, special moment. But Todd’s version is wacky. She wears a body-hugging, but badly dyed, blue unitard, from which her ripe belly pokes out in contrasting pink, as if visually distinguishing the shape of her own body from that the baby bump. (Perhaps the baby is a ‘barnacle’.) It’s a very flattering image of Todd’s late-pregnancy body, and yet, for such a studio-shot scenario, Todd seems surprisingly un-made-up, and, compared with her five model hysterics, rather plain. For no apparent reason, she holds a pair of glasses.

Todd plays on our desire to interpret, offering us a few hooks, but nothing definitive. On the one hand, Barnacles seems a bit random—a miscellany. On the other hand, it’s tempting to join the dots, to try to find a diagnosis that fits all the symptoms. Can we link the themes of body restraint and body anxiety in Todd’s character portraits to Todd’s own pregnancy?

In addition to the portraits, the show includes two still-life studies: one of a withered old raincoat that looks like a jellyfish, or, perhaps, in this company—we might imagine—a placenta (Augusta); another of a distressed old sack. Perversely, this work is called Sack-Like. But, surely, a sack is not sack like; it is a sack. Is this sack ‘sack-like’ because that’s all there is to it (literally) or to imply that there is more to be said (metaphorically)? By adding this apparently innocuous work with its apparently redundant title, Todd makes me think: sacks are sacks, clothes are sacks, bodies are sacks in sacks, pregnant women are incubation sacks, and images are sack-like—art is pregnant. Todd may be ‘showing’, but she won’t let the cat out of the bag.

(Tauranga Art Gallery, until 6 November 2016; also Fictitious Bodies: Costume in Yvonne Todd’s Photography, Tauranga Art Gallery​, until 4 December.)

Highly Recommended

August 15, 2016

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In recent years, Wellington’s Adam Art Gallery has distinguished itself by presenting related shows in counterpoint, in compelling constellations. This has proved a brilliant solution to the constraints of their tiny budget and idiosyncratic spaces. The current mix of shows is smart. Director Tina Barton must be pleased.

The anchor show, Walker Evans: The Magazine Work, has been touring for several years and was clearly a labour of love for British photography curator David Campany. Evans is a canonical figure in American photography, whose career ran from the 1920s to the 1970s. His key images have become icons of art photography and American social history. However, here Campany has approached Evans obliquely, showcasing not these iconic images but the less-known photo-essays he produced for magazines, which often offered a quirky commentary on American life. In assembling his show, Campany rejected the idea of including original prints, preferring to display the actual magazines, which he personally acquired—thanks eBay. Alongside them, he stuck blow-ups of the magazine pages to the gallery walls. Campany’s presentation links and contrasts the logics of the magazine and the exhibition, while cross-referencing his collecting, sorting, and arranging (as curator) with Evans’s (as photographer and artist).

Alongside this main dish, the Adam added three tasting plates: American artist Sherrie Levine’s recent series, African Masks after Walker Evans; New Zealand-born, Melbourne-based Patrick Pound’s project, Documentary Intersect; and local artist Sonya Lacey’s film, Newspaper for Vignelli. Their proximity to the Evans show opens it up in numerous ways.

Levine is synonymous with the idea of appropriation. In 1979, she famously re-produced classic Evans photos of the American South made during the Depression, as if asking: What does it mean for me—as a woman, now—to reiterate these iconic masterpieces? With such gestures, Levine became the art-theory pizza with everything: ‘a feminist hijacking of patriarchal authority, a critique of the commodification of art, and an elegy on the death of modernism’. In 2014, she returned to Evans, reproducing twenty-four photos of African masks from the hundreds he had made in 1935 to document the Museum of Modern Art show African Negro Art. Unlike those images of the South (made around the same time), the Masks are not popularly associated with Evans and seem out of place in his oeuvre. Evans did not make them as (his) art, but as a pay job—of course, one might claim this of his magazine works too. In 2000, his Masks were unearthed in Perfect Documents: Walker Evans and African Art 1935 at the Metropolitan Museum, New York. In 2012, they reappeared in Intense Proximity, the Paris Triennale, curated by Okwui Enwezor, where they kept company with other ethnographic-documents-turned-art, including Claude Lévi-Strauss drawings and a Jean Rouch film. With its Primitivism show in 1984, MOMA was roundly condemned for its bad habit of appropriating primitive art to provide a legitimising context for modernism. By including Evans’s photos in his show, Enwezor located the unwitting photographer within that dodgy history, granting him an authorial role he may well have shrugged. In appropriating the same images in 2014, Levine added a twist, putting all that history into conversation with her earlier appropriations of ‘signature’ Evans images.

Who knows what Evans would have thought of this (or, indeed, of Campany’s treatment of his magazine works)? Of course, it’s irrelevant. Evans’s images have entered the culture and curators and other artists will make of them what they will, reinventing Evans.

Campany is a curator and an artist. His projects often fudge the distinction. So do Patrick Pound’s. Pound makes exhibitions from collections, particularly his own collections. Documentary Intersect links his personal holdings of photos of ‘tears’, ‘floral clocks’, ‘crime scenes’, ‘sleepers’, and San Francisco’s Cliff House. Blu-tacked to the wall in horizontal and vertical lines by category, intersecting on common images, they are like a pictorial crossword. Pound plays on the way images are framed off from one another, yet in dialogue. His mind map intersects with Evans, one of whose photo-essays reproduced a postcard of Cliff House from his own collection (Pound tracked down and included a copy of the very same card). While Pound speaks to this arcane detail within Campany’s Evans project, it also speaks to Evans’s and Campany’s enterprises in general—to Evans’s postcard collecting and to Campany, following him, tracking down all those magazines, joining dots, putting twos and twos together. Foregrounding the collectors-curators’ mindset (or pathology), Pound suggests that they are akin to photographers, as taking photos is essentially a form of collecting—of curating—the world. Of course, this is also a conceit, drawing attention to the Adam’s own curatorial gambit, in forming this precise cluster of shows. Curating about curating.

In her retro-looking black-and-white 16mm film Newspaper for Vignelli, Sonya Lacey chases newspaper pages as they are blown across the ground by the wind, like mass-media tumbleweeds. (It reminds me of that poignant scene in American Beauty, where, in a courtship ritual, a boy and girl watch a video of a plastic bag magically dancing, buffeted by air currents.) But the film is not as casual as it looks and it is not just any newspaper—it is way more contrived. Lacey created the newspaper in question, basing it on Massimo Vignelli’s proposed but unimplemented modernist design for the European Journal of 1978. I’m prompted to read her melancholy film as a key to the Adam’s current ensemble of shows, in which various originals and reiterations find themselves caught up in winds of change, propelled by history, with the Gallery and we viewers, like Lacey, in hot pursuit. The answer, my friend, is blowing in the wind. (Adam Art Gallery, until 18 September).

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Who Am I?

I am a contemporary-art curator and writer, and Director of the Institute of Modern Art, Brisbane. I have held curatorial posts at Wellington’s National Art Gallery, New Plymouth’s Govett-Brewster Art Gallery, Dunedin Public Art Gallery, Auckland Art Gallery, and, most recently, City Gallery Wellington, and directed Auckland’s Artspace. My shows include Headlands: Thinking through New Zealand Art for Sydney’s Museum of Contemporary Art (1992); Action Replay: Post-Object Art for Artspace, Govett-Brewster Art Gallery, and Auckland Art Gallery (1998); and Mixed-Up Childhood for Auckland Art Gallery (2005). My City Gallery shows include Yvonne Todd: Creamy Psychology (2014), Julian Dashper & Friends (2015), Francis Upritchard: Jealous Saboteurs (2016), Colin McCahon: On Going Out with the Tide (2017), John Stezaker: Lost World (2017), This Is New Zealand (2018), Iconography of Revolt (2018), Semiconductor: The Technological Sublime (2019), Oracles (2020), Zac Langdon-Pole: Containing Multitudes (2020), and Judy Millar: Action Movie (2021). I curated New Zealand representation for Brisbane’s Asia-Pacific Triennial in 1999, the Sao Paulo Biennale in 2002, and the Venice Biennale in 2003 and 2015. I am co-publisher of the imprint Bouncy Castle.

Contact

BouncyCastleLeonard@gmail.com
+61 452252414

This Website

I made this website to offer easy access to my writings. Texts have been edited and tweaked. Where I’ve found mistakes, I’ve corrected them.

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Selected Writings

2025

  • Susan King

2024

  • Miguel Aquilizan: Mutagenesis
  • Sarah Poulgrain: Take Me to the River
  • Ralph Hotere: Taranaki Gate Stations

2023

  • Brent Harris: Hidden Figures
  • Michael Zavros: The Devil’s in the Detail
  • The Last Word
  • Kathy Barry: Within You Without You
  • Anselm Kiefer Has Left the Building
  • Tia Ranginui: My Other’s Other

2022

  • Giovanni Intra: The Light that Burns Twice as Brightly
  • Brett Graham: Art of Forbearance
  • Divergent
  • Brent Wong: Twilight Zone
  • Brett Graham: Ark of Forbearance
  • Julian Dashper: Are You Talking to Me?
  • Yvonne Todd and Geoffrey Heath: Mould in the Lens
  • John and Jane
  • Simon Ingram with Terrestrial Assemblages: Machine in the Garden
  • Venice for Beginners
  • Zac Langdon-Pole: Hurry Slowly
  • John Currin: Part of the Problem
  • John Lethbridge: Escape the Flames

2021

  • Robin White: The Tide Turns
  • Telly Tuita: Telly Vision
  • Brett Graham: Written on the Wind
  • Florian Habicht: Everything Is Kapai
  • Andrew Beck: Photography Backwards
  • Judy Millar: Paint, Canvas, Action
  • Julian Dashper: Autumn 1989
  • Yona Lee: Fix and Fit
  • Tia Ranginui: Gonville Gothic
  • In Memory of Bill Hammond 1947–2021
  • Wellness versus Art
  • Susan King: Address Unknown
  • Michael Zavros: Zeus/Zavros

2020

  • Zac Langdon-Pole: Containing Multitudes
  • Isabella Loudon: Concrete Mixer
  • Zac Langdon-Pole: Rabbit Hole
  • Kirsty Lillico: Let Me Tell You About My Mother
  • Steve Carr: Taking the Fun out of Fireworks
  • Explaining Peter Peryer to a Dead Hare
  • Stuart Ringholt: Committing Time
  • John Stezaker: A Ship’s Steering Wheel and a Hangman’s Noose
  • Gavin Hipkins: No Place (Like Home)

2019

  • Brent Harris: Sincere Disconnect
  • Colin McCahon: Numerals
  • City Chief
  • Stanley Kubrick: 2001
  • Patrick Pound: Slender Threads

2018

  • Questioning Revolt
  • The People vs. Kelley Walker
  • Eva Rothschild: The Difference a K Makes
  • Patrick Pound: The Collector’s Shadow
  • Jono Rotman: Our Enduring Image of Strength
  • This Is New Zealand
  • Ian Scott: Enzed Dead Zone

2017

  • Gavin Hipkins: The Revenant
  • John Stezaker: Twice Removed
  • Michael Parekowhai: The Empire of Light
  • Colin McCahon: On Going Out with the Tide

2016

  • Gavin Hipkins: Wives Are Scarce
  • Mikala Dwyer: Psychoplastic
  • Corita Kent: Sister Act
  • Laith McGregor: Ramblin’ Man
  • Francis Upritchard: Adrift in Otherness
  • Fifteen Minutes, Twenty Years Later: Ann Shelton’s Redeye
  • Cindy Sherman: Everything and Its Opposite
  • Julian Dashper: Nothing Personal
  • When Artists Die
  • Bullet Time
  • Michael Zavros: Daddy’s Girl
  • Jacky Redgate: What Ever Happened to Baby Jacky?

2015

  • Julian Dashper & Friends
  • Love Not Given Lightly 
  • City Mission
  • Feel the Love in Venice
  • Simon Denny: Too Much Information
  • Steve Carr: Annabel

2014

  • Yvonne Todd: Cult Appeal
  • Viviane Sassen: Detail in the Shadows
  • Mikala Dwyer: Drawing Down the Moon
  • Promiscuous Collaborator
  • Stuart Ringholt: The Artist Will Be Naked
  • Curnow’s Leverage
  • Simon Starling: Please Explain
  • Ocula Conversation
  • Michael Zavros: What Now?

2013

  • Shane Cotton: The Treachery of Images
  • Geek Moment
  • On Curating
  • Craig Walsh: Elephant in the Room

2012

  • Re-Reading Julian Dashper’s The Big Bang Theory
  • Nostalgia for Intimacy
  • Don Driver 1930–2011

2011

  • Peter Madden: Orgasm and Trauma
  • Damiano Bertoli
  • Judy Millar
  • Unnerved: The New Zealand Project
  • Michael Zavros: Charm Offensive

2010

  • Peter Robinson: Gravitas Lite
  • APT6: Nice Show
  • Scott Redford: It’s Complicated
  • Feminism Never Happened
  • Michael Stevenson: Gift Horse
  • Scott Redford vs. Michael Zavros
  • Taryn Simon’s Known Unknowns

2009

  • Vernon Ah Kee: Your Call
  • Biennale Makers
  • Hamish Keith: The Big Picture
  • Julian Dashper 1960–2009
  • Tomorrow Will Be the Same but Not as This Is
  • Jemima Wyman: The Declaration of Resemblance and Fluid Insurgents

2008

  • Hello Darkness: New Zealand Gothic
  • Vivian Lynn’s Playground Series
  • Archives Become Him: The Giovanni Intra Archive
  • The Dating Show
  • Diena Georgetti: Parallel Existence

2007

  • Katharina Grosse: Mist and Mud
  • Julian Dashper: Mural for a Contemporary House 4
  • Scott Redford: Pop Haiku
  • Grey Water
  • Yvonne Todd: Why Beige?

2006

  • Jim Speers: Outdoor Cinema
  • Curator/Surfer
  • Gordon Walters: Form Becomes Sign
  • Et Al.’s Neo-Brutalist Playground
  • Hany Armanious: Catalogue of Errors

2005

  • Mixed-Up Childhood
  • Yvonne Todd
  • Michael Smither: Print Friendly
  • AES+F: We Are the World, We Are the Children
  • Stella Brennan: History Curator
  • Michael Parekowhai: Kapa Haka Pakaka
  • At the End of New Zealand Art
  • Judy Millar: I … Would Like to Express
  • Ian Scott: Jump Over Girl

2004

  • Mike Parr: Portrait of M and F
  • Shane Cotton: Cultural Surrealist
  • Peter Robinson: The End of the Twentieth Century
  • Et Al., Jacqueline Fraser, Ronnie van Hout, and Daniel Von Sturmer: 2004 Walters Prize
  • Et Al.: Simultaneous Invalidations, Second Attempt
  • Judy Millar: Things Get Worse

2003

  • Terry Urbahn
  • Michael Stevenson: Call Me Immendorff
  • Bill Hammond
  • Michael Parekowhai
  • John Reynolds
  • Michael Stevenson
  • Michael Stevenson: This Is the Trekka
  • Peter Peryer

2002

  • Jim Speers: Everything Is in Two Minds
  • John Reynolds: A City Street. A Sign. Dusk.
  • Gavin Hipkins: The Colony

2001

  • John M. Armleder: Lovers Lane on Full Moon

2000

  • Ava Seymour: I’m So Green
  • Jim Allen: Contact
  • Stephen Bambury: Interview
  • Gavin Hipkins: The Crib
  • Michael Parekowhai: Patriotism
  • Michael Stevenson and Steven Brower: Genealogy

1999

  • Adrian Hall: Bricks in Aspic
  • Gavin Hipkins: The Guide
  • Stephen Bambury: Chakra
  • Patrick Pound: Landscape of Mirrors
  • William Kentridge
  • The End of Improvement: In Defence of Ava Seymour
  • Colin McCahon

1998

  • Te Papa: Papa’s Bag
  • Rudi Fuchs: Some Sun, Some Mist, Some Shadow
  • Gavin Hipkins, Ani O’Neill, Peter Robinson, and Jim Speers: Biennale of Sydney
  • Shane Cotton
  • Action Replay: Curators’ Introduction

1997

  • Ronnie Van Hout: Overimpressed
  • Pacific Sisters: Doing It for Themselves
  • Peter Robinson’s Strategic Plan
  • Dick Frizzell: Self Portrait as a Serious Artiste
  • Richard Killeen: Secret Handshake
  • John Nixon

1996

  • Edgar Roy Brewster: Where the Bee Sucks There Suck I
  • Peter Peryer: Second Nature
  • For Armchair Tourists

1995

  • 3.125% Pure: Peter Robinson Plays the Numbers Game

1994

  • Peter Tyndall
  • Dashper as Photographer
  • Julian Dashper and Michael Parekowhai: Perverse Homages
  • Michael Stevenson: Smokers Please
  • Michael Parekowhai: Kiss the Baby Goodbye

1993

  • Dick Frizzell: Beyond the Pale
  • Michael Smither: To My Father the Printer

1992

  • Sleeve Notes: Julian Dashper’s Greatest Hits
  • Derrick Cherrie: Two Interviews
  • James Ross: Damned Fine Paintings
  • How Far Can Curators Go?
  • Mod Cons
  • Cliff Whiting: Te Po, Te Whaiao, Te Ao Marama (From out of the Darkness, the World of Being, to the World of Light)
  • Making a Scene

1991

  • Merylyn Tweedie: Mixed Emotions
  • Michael Parekowhai: Against Purity
  • Marie Shannon: Something from Nothingness Comes

1990

  • Julian Dashper: Surf
  • Derrick Cherrie: First Impressions

1989

  • Nobodies: Adventures of the Generic Figure

1988

  • You Must Be Barbara Kruger!

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