The art world is alight with feel-good rhetoric about ‘creativity’. We celebrate it as intrinsically beneficial. But creativity looks less benign outside the white cube in the real world, where its consequences can be dire. Take the American mechanical and chemical engineer Thomas J. Midgely. Granted more than a hundred patents, he was clearly rather creative. He will be particularly remembered for two creations: leaded petrol and chlorofluorocarbons. Both were later banned due to their disastrous impact on people and the planet. Midgely has been described as a ‘one-man environmental disaster’ with ‘more impact on the atmosphere than any other single organism in Earth’s history’. Interestingly, he would be a victim of his own creativity. In 1940, aged 51, he contracted polio and devised an elaborate system of ropes and pulleys to lift himself out of bed. Four years later, he became entangled in the device and died of strangulation. Thought experiment: If you had a TARDIS, would you go back and eliminate Midgely before he created his bad things and thus save the world? If so, would that make you a creativity killer?
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John Lethbridge Rides Again
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Come and see my latest show—John Lethbridge: Divination: Performance Photographs 1978–82 at Webb’s new space in Marion Street, Wellington (until 23 April 2022). Lethbridge featured in Action Replay: Post-Object Art—a series of shows I curated with Tina Barton, Wystan Curnow, and John Hurrell back in 1998—and has been on my mind ever since. It’s great to finally do this show.
Born in Wellington, Lethbridge started out as a printmaker, but went on to study under Jim Allen at Elam in Auckland in the early 1970s, joining the post-object-art set. (His show Formal Enema Enigma was part of Auckland City Art Gallery’s 1975 Project Programme.) He moved to Australia at the beginning of 1976 and bought a Hasselblad camera. The iconic staged photographs he made in the late 1970s and early 1980s have one foot in the literalism of performance documentation and another in the glitz of fashion photography. Equal parts Joseph Beuys and Helmut Newton, they scrambled genuine psycho-spiritual enquiry with camp theatrics, and epitomised the postmodern turn.
Many of Lethbridge’s photos feature performer–assistant Jane Campion. His 1978 series Farm Life: An Exercise in Survival was shot at her family farm at Peka Peka. It includes The Ride, showing a gender-bending Campion riding a saddle mounted on a stepladder, carrot in one hand, riding crop in the other. Tally ho! Essay here.
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[IMAGE: John Lethbridge Farm Life: An Exercise in Survival: The Ride 1978]
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Thoughts that Count
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Thank you to Carey Young for dedicating this day of the Hilma Af Klint show at City Gallery to me. Brought tears to my eyes.
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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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