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Nau mai, haere mai, welcome to eyeCONTACT, a forum built to encourage art reviews and critical discussion about the visual culture of Aotearoa New Zealand. I'm John Hurrell its editor, a New Zealand writer, artist and curator. While Creative New Zealand and other supporters are generously paying me and other contributors to review exhibitions over the following year, all expressed opinions are entirely our own.
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This site wishes to encourage spirited debate about Aotearoa's art and visual culture. Readers are invited to respond to reviews and ongoing conversations by leaving comments or posting new critiques.
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eyeCONTACT is about you looking at this screen and art that is usually visual. It is also about direct talk, perhaps two people speaking face to face, one of them asserting an unpopular position and staring down the opposition.
Although it talks of commitment and being serious, the site is not actually about being right or wrong. Rather this forum is about the pleasures of debate and participating in dialogue. It is about the joy of articulating thought and responding to stimulating company.
Blog Archive
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2009
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April
(30)
- Ersatz forces of nature
- Downsizing
- Moffatt exhibition
- Performance in downtown Auckland
- Crockford window installation
- Here is a discussion from Daniel Munn on
- Placing trust
- McLeod matters
- Double vision, double vision
- A planetary object
- A question of Faith
- Priapic phantoms
- Comic compulsion
- Cushla Donaldson raises some curious questions
- Concert at Starkwhite
- Good at Artis
- Superb installation in K' Rd
- From Maps, here is a post-colonial critique of
- Interconnected reflections
- Light on skin and fabric
- Christmas in April
- Pitiful One Day Sculpture
- My need is such I pretend too much
- Watercolours from Cologne
- 0003 comments on
- Tumbling but static tangram grays
- If it is
- Embracing mortality
- More fishy tails from
- Confusia has some thoughts on
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April
(30)
5 comments:
Thanks for the plug. I don't see myself as critiquing so much as dialoguing with Bracey. I visited the Waikato gallery the other day, and noticed that two other Braceys are now on display, as part of a retrospective of work by Waikato Society of Arts members - both are very impressive.
Perhaps I was too quick to start a ruckus.I thought you were implying that the colonial history of the land impacts on aesthetic delectation, and the artist becomes complicit. Maybe some of the theories of Jay Appleton as well?
I haven't read Jay Appleton, but Goeff Park has written beautifully about the way that artists and Pakeha politicians have conspired to create the myth of a clean green 'Godzone', at the expense of the history and the indigenous people of the place. I discussed this tendency in relation to the contemporary tourism industry and the Lord of the Rings films in a lecture I gave last year:
http://readingthemaps.blogspot.com/2008/05/ripping-off-brands-rough-guide-to-anti.html
But the point of my rambling post about Bracey was that his response to his surroundings had real emotional authenticity, even if it was based on a certain ignorance of history, and that this authenticity perhaps gives his Waikato canvases a depth which embales them to take on board the sort of critique I offered. And, as I mention at the end of my post, I myself am hardly immune to the sort of romanticism Bracey brought to his Waikato paintings.
I don't think it is likely he was ignorant of the local history, it is just that the landscape reminded him (as he once explained)of his childhood in England. He adored it.He was a visual person - with a finely tuned aesthetic sensibility.
The debate rumbles on:
http://readingthemaps.blogspot.com/2009/04/virtues-of-ambiguity-or-why-im-still.html
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