The Bank of New Zealand Art Collection (Auckland: Webb’s, 2022).
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In the 1980s, when Peter McLeavey was assembling the BNZ Art Collection, the New Zealand art discussion was dominated by one question: nationalism or internationalism? McLeavey said he wanted the Collection to ‘reflect a national identity’.¹ I assume this was partly because it fitted the brand of the Bank. But, by then, what did ‘national identity’ even mean?

In earlier times, New Zealand art and literature were seen as spearheading a search for national identity. Gordon Brown and Hamish Keith’s classic nationalist account An Introduction to New Zealand Painting 1839–1967 (1969) argued that New Zealand painting was, at its heart, about capturing the truth of New Zealand’s distinctive light and landscape. But, as New Zealand art developed and expanded in the late 1960s, 1970s, and 1980s, this settler perspective became less relevant, less tenable. Old tropes of New Zealandness were challenged—even satirised—as wobbly fictions. By the time the Introduction was republished in a revised form in 1982, the national-identity thesis had become passé. The book didn’t need a new update chapter but an overhaul, argued critic Francis Pound.²

Of course, no matter how internationalist we wanted to be, distance and smallness still made New Zealand’s art scene provincial. Even in the 1980s, New Zealand art remained an intimate, enclosed discourse. New Zealand art was made in New Zealand, shown in New Zealand, written about in New Zealand, and collected in New Zealand, with little visibility or cachet beyond these shores. Artists looked over the horizon for reference points and aspired to be part of a larger discussion, but their art found its reception here. New Zealand art was a bubble. We wouldn’t get to the Venice Biennale until the next century.

When McLeavey said he wanted the collection to ‘reflect a national identity’, he didn’t simply mean a nationalist one. As part of its national story, his BNZ Art Collection embraced old-school nationalists, modernist abstractionists, ironic postmodernists, and more. Works in the collection, especially from the 1980s, took liberties with now-familiar tropes of nationalist landscape painting. Colin McCahon was famous for abstracting the New Zealand landscape, but, in Fly Away Girl (1969­–70), Ian Scott took this to an absurd pop extreme. In Bill Hammond’s It’s the Lay of the Land My Son (1985), classic New Zealand mountains were reiterated and arranged like clip art. In Russian Cruise Ship, Princes Wharf (1987), Julian Dashper overwrote Michael Smither pebbles with geometric abstraction. In On the Forest Road to the Headwaters of the Tarawera River (also 1987), Dick Frizzell revisited the dead-tree school with his tongue in his cheek. 

These works are jokey takes on the nationalist tradition, but, for me, the work that distinguishes itself now is Brent Wong’s hyperrealist New Zealand landscape painting Town Boundary (1969). It pictures a confrontation between a heritage house with its finial in the foreground and a menacing sci-fi monolith in the distance. Back in the day, the Wellington painter was seen as adding a pinch of surrealist spice to that vein of hard-edged regionalist-realist landscape painting exemplified by Don Binney, Michael Smither, and Robin White. But, against the nationalist vision that they advanced, his works were more disorienting, more corrosive, because they weren’t obvious parodies.

In 1969, the year Brown and Keith’s Introduction came out, Wong had his first solo show at Wellington’s Rothmans Cultural Centre. He was just twenty-four. His iconic monolith paintings³ seemed to come from nowhere—a big idea already fully formed. They all involved three pictorial elements: bone-dry New Zealand landscapes, deserted Pākehā buildings (some wooden, some concrete; sometimes intact, sometimes dilapidated or ruined), and, of course, the monoliths. These complex, Escheresque geometries floated enigmatically in the sky or appeared in the distance. They looked like cast concrete, like ‘convoluted masonry’. Titles like Misconception, Dissolving Speculation, Recapitulation, and Matrix just added to the mystery.

The relationships between natural landscape, human building, alien monolith, and title played out in different ways in different paintings, but the paintings had a cumulative logic. There was a sense that the local landscape was being visited by miraculous alien ships with a purpose—perhaps ominous, perhaps generous. Ufology was big at the time. Erich von Däniken’s book Chariots of the Gods?—which speculated that ancient human cultures had been exposed to visiting-alien technologies—was published in 1968. That year, New Zealand pilot Bruce Cathie’s Harmonic 33—which hypothesised the existence of a world grid system, an electromagnetic field exploited by UFOs as an energy source for levitation—was also published. 

I do like Gregory O’Brien’s reading of Town Boundary as an allegory of New Zealand art, representing a tipping-point confrontation between the old colonial-period settler aesthetic and a newly minted modernism—as something alien, coming over the horizon.⁴ But it’s more complex. The monoliths aren’t a known quantity, but necessarily a mystery, an enigma. And, while the buildings and the monoliths seem at odds at first glance, there is also a suggestion that they could be related. Their structures echo one another. In Town Boundary, for instance, the house’s ceramic chimney cap points towards the monolith, as if wanting to align with it, target it, communicate with it. The chimney cap also rhymes with pipe-like forms in the monolith. Is there a link between the building’s architects and the monolith’s engineers? Perhaps that old building is not what it seems. Was it designed to blend in, while awaiting this arrival? 

The monolith paintings find parallels in surrealist art and science fiction. In surrealism, they nod to the impossible floating stone forms in René Magritte’s paintings, like The Glass Key (1959). In sciencefiction, they recall all those moments when something unaccountable enters the frame, revealing a previously accepted reality to be an illusion, paper thin: the monolith in 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968), the falling theatre light in The Truman Show (1998), and Morpheus’s phone call to Neo in The Matrix (1999). Similarly, Wong implies that New Zealand’s supposedly truthful realist art could be a cover up, a veil of appearances masking the true reality.

The monolith paintings exemplify British theorist Mark Fisher’s aesthetic categories of the weird and the eerie.⁵ For Fisher, the weird is when things appear where they shouldn’t, upsetting our epistemological categories, our basic understanding of reality. The eerie is more to do with absences, and is typified by depopulated landscapes. The monoliths are out of place; they are weird. But his depopulated landscapes are also eerie. Why are there no people? What happened? Where have they gone? (Later, when Wong made deserted New Zealand landscapes without monoliths, apparently dropping surrealism for plain realism, his scenes still felt haunted. Expecting to see the monoliths, we were left wondering where they had gone and if they might return.)

Another question hanging over the monolith paintings is not ‘where are we?’—it seems to be New Zealand (or some parallel New Zealand)—so much as ‘when?’ Are we in the present or in the future, and, if so, how far in the future? Is this a time ‘after people’, with buildings left as remnants and ruins—like pyramids at Giza or stone heads at Rapanui? Has the nationalist project—which was about reconciling settlers with this place—failed, leaving these vacant buildings for future alien archaeologists to visit and speculate over? Or has the settler population been ‘beamed up’?

Wong’s iconic works may be well known, but he has always been an outlier. The monolith paintings were strangely absent from the debate on nationalism and internationalism through the 1980s, and remain something of a blindspot in New Zealand art history generally. Wong isn’t indexed in Pound’s magnum opus The Invention of New Zealand: Art and National Identity 1930–1970.⁶ However, the monolith paintings did play a key role in David Sims’s largely forgotten documentary Painting in an Empty Land, made in 1981, the year before Brown and Keith’s revised edition was published.

The film ‘explores the responses of four New Zealand painters to a landscape illuminated by a distinctive light, but yet to feel the full impact of human settlement’.⁷ It is a ripe, occasionally hysterical distillation of old-school nationalist thinking. It’s nationalist-art rhetoric on steroids, albeit belated. The film’s central chapters on key New Zealand–identity artists—Toss Woollaston, Smither, and McCahon—are bookended with sequences focusing on Wong’s monolith paintings.

The film opens with a pan across an ‘empty land’ as a male narrator quotes Katherine Mansfield’s 1912 short story, ‘The Woman at the Store’: ‘There is no twilight in our New Zealand days, but a curious half-hour when everything appears grotesque—it frightens—as though the savage spirit of the country walked abroad and sneered at what it saw.’ The pan ends on a Wong monolith—constructed by the props department—standing incongruously in this ‘empty’ landscape. We match cut to a Wong painting in which the same form floats miraculously over its landscape. Then the camera pulls back to show that the painting is leaning against a wall in a dilapidated building, a ruin, itself in a rural landscape. It’s a mise-en-abyme, with Wong’s imagery framing Wong’s imagery, and so on and so on. We see other paintings in the building, some hung casually, off kilter. They are a mixed bag—including works by Rita Angus, Ralph Hotere, Milan Mrkusich, Alvin Pankhurst, and Michael Smither—not all representative of a nationalist viewpoint. The voiceover continues anyway: ‘Painting. Alien images in an ivory tower or expression of the soul unearthed in an empty land?’

We work through segments on Woollaston, where he celebrates his ‘Mapua mud’ backyard, and Smither, where he celebrates his kitchen table; then onto McCahon, whose Christian heroism is writ large. Of McCahon, we are told: ‘That painter, contracted to pity, who first laid bare in its offended harshness the act of life in this land, expressed the perpetual crucifixion of man by man that each must answer. Rendered in naked light, the land’s nakedness that no one before had seen or seeing dared to publish, and outraged all whose comfort trembles, hollow, against such vision of light upon darkness.’ Then, we segue back to Wong, to seal the deal. 

Paraphrasing Patrick Hutchings, Wong’s critic-champion, the narrator describes the monoliths: ‘An enigmatic impossible folly floating above a beautifully recorded landscape. These uneconomic pieces of architecture look like concrete, as they float over the windswept New Zealand countryside. Brent Wong has painted with meticulous attention his concrete cloud castles. With regret for what is not there, their presence is a visualisation of absences.’⁸ Sims then cuts to a Milan Mrkusich museum show, where men in suits and women in frocks sit in modernist chairs and sip wine. He pans across the works, perhaps implying that their ‘empty’ fields are akin to those aforementioned ‘visualisations of absences’. Then, the narrator is replaced by an annoying ingénue, who recites an inane poem. ‘I can see a picture. Tell me what you see. Bluebells in a beechwood and green leaves on a tree …’ As we cut from the gallery back to the dilapidated building, and come to rest on an empty picture frame lying on the floor, she concludes: ‘I can see a picture. Tell me what you see.’ If the male voiceover communicated one kind of authority, hers suggests another—the innocent, uncluttered gaze; the inner child.

Painting in an Empty Land is riddled with contradictions and clutter, but, through its rhetorical momentum, it seeks to flatten these out, to make the diversity of New Zealand art answer to a governing idea or sensibility—the ‘empty land’. It attempts to assimilate works with antagonistic viewpoints, perversely conscripting Mrkusich’s modernist abstraction to its nationalist cause. But, now, when I watch the film, it’s Brent Wong who sticks out like a sore thumb. The very work Sims used to frame his account is its undoing. Wong’s explicit fantasies rupture the implicit fantasy that once passed for realism in this place. 

[IMAGE: Brent Wong Town Boundary 1969]

1. Peter McLeavey to J.C. Hiddleston, Bank of New Zealand, 17 June 1982, Peter McLeavey papers, Alexander Turnbull Library, Wellington.
2. Francis Pound, ‘The Real and the Unreal In New Zealand Painting: A Discussion Prompted by a New Edition of An Introduction to New Zealand Painting’, Art New Zealand, no. 25, Summer 1982–3: 42–7. 
3. People call them monoliths, but Wong calls them ‘constructions’. ‘A Conversation’, Brent Wong at the Dowse Art Gallery (Lower Hutt: Dowse Art Gallery, 1977).
4. Gregory O’Brien, We Set Out One Morning: Works from the BNZ Art Collection (Auckland: Bank of New Zealand, 2006), 59.
5. Mark Fisher, The Weird and the Eerie (London: Repeater Books, 2016).
6. Francis Pound, The Invention of New Zealand: Art and National Identity 1930–1970 (Auckland: Auckland University Press, 2009).
7. www.nzonscreen.com/title/painting-in-an-empty-land-1981.
8. See P.A.E. Hutchings, ‘Young Contemporary New Zealand Realists’, Art International, vol. 17, no. 3, March 1973: 20.