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Baker Douglas has reproduced Rodney Charters’s photo Woman on a Horse (1966) as a limited-edition poster to support the launch of our Unseen City app book. Not so city, but definitely unseen.


The New Auckland Phonebook
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I’m a middle-aged art curator, so I’m a hard-copy publishing guy. In the art world, hard-copy publishing is a status thing. Ink on paper in the morning smells like victory. But I’ve just been involved in making an app book and I love it. Baker Douglas has published an expanded app-book version of the catalogue for my 2015 show Unseen City: Gary Baigent, Rodney Charters, and Robert Ellis in Sixties Auckland. The digital format enables the inclusion of different kinds of content and way more content. The show comes to life in a rich new way. The app book includes Rodney Charters’s Film Exercise (1966) as a movie, rather than representing it through stills, and users are guided through Gary Baigent’s photobook The Unseen City (1967) as a movie. There are all kinds of added extras. Everything makes more sense. It leaves the original hard-copy publication for dead. We launch it at Art+Object in Auckland on 30 November, 6–8pm. Join us for the party.

Barbara Kruger, We Presume …
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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.
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.
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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