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    • Divine symmetry
      • In her new exhibition, contemporary artist Julia Morison channels a new source of influence through her otherworldly art practice: the Swedish artist and mystic Hilma af Klint.By Theo Macdonald published by North & South Magazine In the mid-70s, freshly delivered from the art-school womb, multi-media artist Julia Morison (now 72) found herself swaddled in the spiky […] The post Divine symmetry appeared first on .

    • The sound of one hand waving 
      • By City Gallery Wellington Te Whare Toi Experience Wellington Curator Megan Dunn From his perch on the rooftop of City Gallery Wellington Quasi looks forward to the rebuild of Te Ngākau Civic Square. One wind-frightened day, a little boy in a yellow rain jacket turned back and looked across Te Ngākau Civic Square, his face […] The post The sound of one hand waving appeared first on .

    • On the Lure of the Sea
      • By Experience Wellington Curator Megan Dunn. Originally published on ArtNow.NZ. Alexis Hunter, mermaids and me THE LURE OF THE SEA is an oil painting by Alexis Hunter, but I first fell for it as a jpeg. I dragged and dropped it into a PowerPoint called ‘The Muse of War: Mermaids, Hybridity and Feminism in the art […]

    • Through a glass, glittery
      • By City Gallery Wellington Te Whare Toi Senior Curator Aaron Lister One of my favourite views of the exhibition Reuben Paterson: The Only Dream Left is from outside City Gallery Wellington Te Whare Toi at night. Looking through the glass doors you see that a four-and-a-half metre glittered tree has mysteriously taken root. The Golden […]

    • Ask Me Anything: Reuben Paterson
      • Exhibiting artist Reuben Paterson sits down to answer questions submitted by our audience. What is your advice to young artists? What is the inspiration behind your work Koro? What is your view on secondary art markets and equity for artists? Best and worst things about working with Glitter? Reuben answers these questions and more. The […]

    • Artists in Conversation: Martin Basher and Ben Buchanan
      • Artists Martin Basher and Ben Buchanan sit down for a candid conversation about their work, practice and the ideas that have brought them together for the exhibition SOUR GRAPES. Both artists push painting beyond the frame, into other media, onto walls, floors and into the world in order to explore some of the possibilities and […]

    • Simon Morris on Room of Time
      • Te Whanganui-a-Tara artist Simon Morris has made site-based paintings in most of Aotearoa’s public galleries. In this video series, we sit down with Simon to unpack his most recent work Walking Drawing as part of the exhibition Room of Time. Abstract in form and impermanent in nature, this painting exists only for the duration of […]

    • Art, Authorship & Reuse
      • Hosted by Caitlin Lynch · December 2, 2022 Sampling, reuse and copying have long been strategies and approaches in artistic practice and is a thread you can follow through art history. But who owns art? Should culture be under copyright? What are the limits of fair use? These questions are explored in the recent artworks exhibited at City […]

    • Debra Bustin: Illustrated Talk
      • City Gallery Wellington is excited to share an illustrated talk by artist Debra Bustin presenting her history of art making and exhibition. With exhibitions described in the press as ‘opulent phantasmagoria’ and ‘unexpected and undecipherable’, Debra Bustin has led an ambitious and challenging art practice spanning several decades. In this illustrated talk using documentation rarely […]

    • The Maker
      • Words by Maggie Tweedie. Originally published on Island.com. It’s both effortless and impractical to follow the work of Joanna Margaret Paul. Much like the words which emerge throughout her paintings, she is ever evolving. Imagined in the Context of a Room, gathers a breadth of works, spanning decades of her life from the early 70s to the […]

    • Notes on: Fruiting bodies
      • ‘Notes On’ is an online weekly exhibition column by Connie Brown. Originally published in The Art Paper, Issue 04. Online, mycology forums mimic their object of study. Threads accumulate, spreading deep and wide, bifurcate, and loop back upon themselves as users post images, seek help in identifying an unknown species, discuss medicinal uses, or simply […]

    • Thinking Out Loud: Moya Lawson
      • Moya Lawson on the development of At Thresholds at City Gallery Wellington Te Whare Toi. Originally published on Art Now, read the essay here. Making art about other species seems less restrained than writing about them. The artists in At Thresholds are experimental with their practices, harnessing colour, shape, and material—the organic and the machine. […]

    • Glen Hayward: Wish You Were Here
      • Artist Glen Hayward take us deeper with anecdotes and insights into the works that make up Wish You Were Here. Glen Hayward’s work blends carving, painting and conceptualism to snare the viewer in a standoff around what is real or illusionary, art or not art, profound or absurd. Wish You Were Here focuses on his […]

    • MATARAU – New group exhibition at City Gallery big on scale and ambition
      • City Gallery Wellington Te Whare Toi’s exhibition Matarau responds to our turbulent times and exploresthe role that art can play in navigating new found complexities of everyday life. Matarau is a group exhibition of contemporary Māori art, guest curated by Walters Prize-winning Pōnekeartist, writer and curator, Shannon Te Ao. It features all new work made […]

    • Access to Hilma af Klint: The Secret Paintings on Saturday 12 March 
      • Due to a gathering at Te Ngākau Civic Square this Saturday, entry to Hilma af Klint: The Secret Paintings will be via our Harris Street entrance. We are closing our main entrance to ensure visitor safety following notification of a gathering by Freedoms & Rights Coalition in this space on Saturday. This is likely to […]

    • Ummu: Hilma af Klint Here and Now
      • Hilma af Klint: The Secret Paintings, curated by Sue Cramer, Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney, 11 June–19 September 2021, and City Gallery Wellington, 4 December 2021–17 March 2022.

    • Box Set 2020 Liner Notes
      • .As a fundraiser, we asked thirteen artists we’ve worked with to produce prints for a boxed portfolio. The portfolios were for sale to members of our Foundation at a special event on 22 October 2020. They all sold—a big success. Thanks to everyone. Here are the Box Set 2020 liner notes. This portfolio emerges from and celebrates City Gallery Wellington’s programme. On the occasion of the Gallery’s fortieth anniversary, we invited thirteen New Zealand artists who we’ve worked with in recent years to contribute a Giclee print. We included artists from different generations—established names and newer figures—whose work we knew would suit the medium. The project’s purpose is to raise funds for City Gallery Wellington Foundation, to support the work of the Gallery. We produced fifty-five sets, forty for sale, thirteen for the artists, and two for City Gallery’s archives. In developing this miscellany, our curators had two earlier boxed sets in mind aesthetically. One was David Bailey’s Box of Pin-Ups (1965). Containing thirty-six loose reproductions of celebrity studio portraits by the London photographer, it epitomised the swinging 1960s. The other was Multiples (1969), published by Auckland’s Barry Lett Galleries. These twelve screenprints by canonical New Zealand painters—including Don Binney, Ralph Hotere, Colin McCahon, and Gordon Walters—helped popularise New Zealand contemporary art. Our thanks go to the Box Set 2020 artists, for generously supporting this project. If you have acquired Box Set 2020, we thank you too. Thanks to the artists and collectors both, for supporting our ongoing work—to present the best of contemporary art. Elizabeth Caldwell, Director | Kaitohu Matua, City Gallery Wellington Te Whare Toi / Jan Kelly, Chair | Heamana, City Gallery Wellington Foundation Martin Basher (b.1979) Untitled 2017/2020 Martin Basher addresses the aesthetics and politics of display, the points where art and commercial display meet and blur. In 2014, City Gallery presented his show Blackberry Schnapps, featuring work he had just made as artist in residence at McCahon House in Titirangi. Untitled digitally restages a painting from Basher’s 2017 show Hawaiian Tropic at Starkwhite, Auckland. Its hard-edged geometry speaks to modernist abstraction; its strobe-like light effects and surface gleam suggest retail-display fittings; its blinding light and hot colour palette are drawn from found photos of exotic landscapes. The original work translated these elements into painting. Untitled translates them back into digital form, closing the loop. Basher is represented by Starkwhite, Auckland; and Anat Ebgi, Los Angeles. Andrew Beck (b.1987) Dissipative Structure 2020 Today, photography is digital and odourless. But, in the past, photographers worked their magic with light and smelly chemicals, processing film and prints in tanks and baths—‘wet photography’. Wellingtonian Andrew Beck’s pristine abstract photos look futuristic, even ‘digital’, yet are produced using old-school, analogue, wet techniques. Typically hybrids of photogram (cameraless photography) and painting (painted coloured-glass mattes), their clean geometries recall both early-modernist painting (particularly suprematism) and digital effects (like ‘flocking simulation’). Looking both to the future and the past, his works evade easy pigeonholing. Since 2015, Beck has also been making photograms of agitated water, by exposing sheets of photographic paper submerged in baths. These unique images register, in negative, the shadows cast by the liquid’s ripples and swirls— fleeting forms Beck can barely control. Originally made as ‘drawings’ to prompt ideas for new work, he has begun showing them as works in their own right. While they seem diametrically opposed to his trademark geometries, his Dissipative Structures reveal the basis and depth of his interest in light refraction and energy fields, while referring back to the chemical baths found in the darkroom of old—photography’s primal scene. Beck is represented by Visions, Auckland. Steve Carr (b.1976) Smoke Bubble 10 2016 Soap bubbles and wisps of smoke are stock motifs in vanitas still-life painting. Their fugitive qualities remind us of the brevity of life. In his 2016 series Smoke Bubbles, Steve Carr doubles down on death by combining them, photographing soap bubbles filled with cigarette smoke. He captures these evanescent entities against darkness, depriving them of any sense of scale. Carr’s spheres seem at once cloudy and iridescent, like unique and mysterious planets shrouded by their atmospheres. Time is one of Carr’s big themes. He is famous for making video works that explore duration, making us wait for a watermelon to explode or owers to change colour. But here, he grants permanence to an ephemeral beauty. Carr’s work featured in our 2016 show Bullet Time, and we presented his video installation Chasing the Light in 2019. Carr lives in Christchurch, where he is Senior Lecturer in Film at Ilam School of Fine Arts at the University of Canterbury. He is represented by Michael Lett, Auckland; and Station, Melbourne. Bronwyn Holloway-Smith (b.1982, Pākehā) Stoned_01 2020 Bronwyn Holloway-Smith explores national identity, public art, new technologies, and the power dynamics shaping knowledge and information. Based in Te Whanganui-a-Tara Wellington, she pursues these interests in her work and in other forums. Her work has featured in several City Gallery shows. For The Obstinate Object: Contemporary New Zealand Sculpture in 2012, she made models of other artists’ works in the show that could be downloaded and 3D printed. Her PhD project, The Southern Cross Cable: A Tour, starred in 2018’s This Is New Zealand. Here, her drawing (the first in a forthcoming series) refers to one of the first PC viruses, the ‘Stoned’ virus. Created by a young Wellington programmer in 1987, it spread quickly throughout Australasia, with variants springing up around the globe. Infected computers displayed the message ‘Your PC is now Stoned!’, along with the phrase ‘Legalise Marijuana’. Holloway-Smith’s highlighting of this story takes on a strange new relevance in a year marked by another sort of virus and a referendum on whether to legalise cannabis. Yona Lee (b.1986) In Transit (3D Pipes) 2020 Yona Lee’s snaking, maze-like installations of cut-and-welded stainless-steel pipes have been seen around the world, including presentations at Sydney’s Art Gallery of New South Wales (2018), Lyon Biennale (2019), and Busan Biennale (2020). In 2018, she made the fifth iteration of her In Transit project for City Gallery. It spread across two downstairs galleries and the auditorium corridor, tracing the movement of utility pipes.Her 3D computer-generated drawings initially served a preparatory function for her installations but have started to take on a life of their own. Following rather than preceding her sculptures, they now play out and rewrite the relationships her sculptures have to the body and spaces unrestricted by gravity or framing architecture. Continuing to push the possibilities of these digital drawings, she is currently investigating animating them. Lee lives in Auckland and is represented by Fine Arts, Sydney. Judy Millar (b.1957) Ears of a Donkey 2018 There was a time when painterly gestures seemed full of passionate intensity, yet today we tend to see them as conventional—signs of ‘expression’, tropes. Judy Millar wants to keep the baby and the bath water. Her paintings feel intensely physical and highly mediated. She famously ‘paints backwards’, using her hands to wipe paint off her canvases, creating springy exaggerated ‘brushstrokes’ that seem to float in illusionistic space. Here, she presents not a painting but a photo of her hand dripping gold paint. She originally made it as a ‘supplementary promo image’. Is it a quip about ‘the hand of the artist’ or her Midas touch? Millar was last seen at City Gallery back in 2007, in Prospect: New Art>New Zealand. Two years later, she represented New Zealand at the Venice Biennale. These days Millar splits her time between Auckland and Berlin. She is represented by Gow Langsford Gallery, Auckland; Robert Heald, Wellington; Nadene Milne Gallery, Christchurch; Sullivan and Strumpf, Sydney and Singapore; and Galerie Mark Müller, Zurich. Seung Yul Oh (b.1981) Pou Sto 2020 Seung Yul Oh’s improvisational approach to forms, materials, and spaces has made his work a fixture in galleries and museums in New Zealand and South Korea. He works across painting, drawing, sculpture, installation, performance, and video, animated by a sense of chaotic energy and play that often seeks audience participation. In 2014, City Gallery Wellington collaborated with Dunedin Public Art Gallery to stage Moamoa, a Decade, his first survey show. It included wall paintings, an inflatable labyrinth, and fake-noodle sculptures. Pou Sto belongs to Oh’s menagerie of creatures real and imagined, and specifically to a family of cute, cartoony mice. Oh often plays up the relationship between his mice and the viewer, knowing that even the most adoring viewer would likely recoil in horror if a real rodent darted across the floor. Here, he presents his mouse through a kind of photographic portrait. In ancient Greek, Pou Sto refers to the search for ‘a place to stand’—which is exactly what Oh’s creatures, art works, and audiences constantly negotiate with each other. Oh lives in Auckland and is represented by Starkwhite, Auckland. Fiona Pardington (b.1961, Ngāi Tahu, Kati Mamoe, Ngāti Kahungunu, and Clan Cameron of Erracht) Covid-19 Hand-Dug Bottle and a Piha Man O’ War: Nightwalking Level 4 2020 Fiona Pardington’s photography hinges on her mastery of her medium and her own mediumistic abilities. Her ongoing still-life project is alive to the range of forces present in images and objects she encounters in the world. Her ritualistic process is a form of sympathetic magic that starts with a daily salvaging of objects—many of which she nds washed up onto the beach and accepts as ‘gifts of Tangaroa’. This photograph emerges from one of Pardington’s night walks on Piha Beach during lockdown. Against a velvety black background, an ihumoana (stinging jellyfish) washed ashore sits in front of a glass bottle dug from the sand. Relating organic and inorganic, opacity and transparency, soft and hard, surreal and everyday, it offers a classic Pardington twist on the still life. This hypnagogic ‘message in a bottle’ is made at and for a time when the relationship between humans, the natural world, and the one we have built for ourselves has been thrown off its axis. In 2015, City Gallery staged Pardington’s survey exhibition A Beautiful Hesitation, which toured to Auckland Art Gallery and Christchurch Art Gallery. The hero image was a lush still life, featuring salvaged bottles, roses, persimmons, and a colander teaming with ihumoana. Pardington lives in Piha and is represented by Starkwhite, Auckland. Elisabeth Pointon (b.1992) WOULD YOU LOOK AT THAT AGAIN. 2020 In 2012, the art fair Art Basel Miami Beach commissioned ‘fifteen of the most seminal figures in text art’ to create text works to be flown behind aeroplanes. The line-up included just three women, and no one of colour. Jack Pierson’s banner reeked one-percenter privilege, declaring ‘WE’RE RICH WE CAN DO WHAT WE WANT’. Questioning who gets to speak, where, and how, Wellington-based Pākehā-Indian artist Elisabeth Pointon responded by flying her own banners bearing generic tongue-in-cheek taglines, including ‘SPECTACULAR.’ and ‘OUTSTANDING.’. (Her slogans always include a full stop—a ‘bindi’.) Pointon’s print shows her banner ‘BIG DEAL.’ flying over Auckland Art Fair on 4 May 2019. Pointon’s ‘SPECTACULAR.’, ‘OUTSTANDING.’, and ‘BIG DEAL.’ banners featured in her 2019 City Gallery show What Goes Up. They are part of her ongoing project, détourning the generic language of capitalist boosterism. Patrick Pound (b.1962) Reflectors 2020 Patrick Pound turns collecting into art, creating idiosyncratic ‘museums’— including Photography and Air, People Who Look Dead but (Probably) Aren’t, and The Museum of There, Not There. The two photos reproduced here featured in his 2018 City Gallery show On Reflection, a follow-up to his humbly titled 2017 show The Great Exhibition at the National Gallery of Victoria in Melbourne—the city he has called home for more than twenty years. On Reflection located doubles, doppelgängers, and mirrors in scores of found images and objects drawn both from Pound’s own collections and from Te Papa’s. The show was installed to mirror itself, like a giant Rorschach test. These photos—of a woman diving into water and a man poking his head out a window—were stand-ins for viewers reflecting on Pound’s algorithmic assemblage. Pound is represented by Hamish McKay, Wellington; Melanie Roger Gallery, Auckland; Station, Melbourne; and Darren Knight Gallery, Sydney. Jono Rotman (b.1974) Notorious Son Dog Reads King Notorious Roy RIP, Waipawa, MMXVIII 2018 There are few topics more polarising than gangs. Famously violent, New Zealand’s Mongrel Mob has always operated on the fringes of mainstream society. Most of its members are Māori, and many have been victims of state and family abuse. Gang life provides them with community and whanau. Part of New Zealand’s colonial legacy, the Mob has its own lore and iconography. Perversely, its totems include both the British bulldog and the Nazi swastika. Over many years, photographer Jono Rotman has documented Mob members and their own photos and talismans, culminating in his 2015 show Mongrel Mob Portraits at City Gallery and his 2018 book Mongrelism, with its suggestively redacted text. In this image, Notorious Son Dog, worldwide captain of Mongrel Mob Notorious, reads from the thirteenth bark of King Notorious Roy (RIP 2014) from Mongrelism. Son Dog wears the rings of other Mob hapu and one to represent MMMighty Henry battle wagons (Ford V8s). Originally from the Wellington region, Rotman now lives in San Francisco. He is represented by Gow Langsford Gallery, Auckland. Yvonne Todd (b.1973) Alice Bayke (Outtake) 2002/2020 Auckland photographer Yvonne Todd is known for her studio portraits of imaginary female characters with invented names—wigged, costumed, made up. Often tainted with tragedy, her portraits prompt us to imagine her sitters’ back stories. The glamorous woman in Alice Bayke (Outtake) looks like she’s stepped out of Valley of the Dolls. The shot came from the sessions for Todd’s series Sea of Tranquility, made in 2002—the year she won the Walters Prize. Todd said she styled her models for this series like ‘the daughters of Mormon pastors, circa 1969’—the year of the moon landing. Bayke’s frosted wedding gown reminded one critic of the lunar surface—remote and airless. Sea of Tranquility featured in Todd’s City Gallery retrospective Creamy Psychology in 2014. She is represented by McLeavey Gallery, Wellington; Ivan Anthony, Auckland; and Fine Arts, Sydney. Jasmine Togo-Brisby (b.1982) Adrift Amidst the Middle Passage II 2019 Jasmine Togo-Brisby addresses the shameful history of the Pacific slavetrade (known as ‘blackbirding’). The Wellington artist is a fourth-generation Australian South Sea Islander. As children, her great-great-grandparents were taken from Vanuatu and forced into domestic servitude in Sydney. She says: ‘I’m interested in examining the effects of trauma transmitted through ongoing oppression across generations, particularly in contrast to the inheritance of wealth that has come to those who benefit from slavery and colonisation.’ Here, her family photo shows three generations of women: the artist, her mother, and her daughter. Her mother wears a model sailing ship as a headdress, recalling the ships that carried her ancestors to Australia. Made using the antique collodion photographic process, the image has a nineteenth-century look. In 2017, City Gallery presented the show Colonial Sugar, placing Togo-Brisby’s work in conversation with Tracey Moffatt’s photo series Plantation. Togo-Brisby is represented by Page Galleries, Wellington. Co-ordinator Nicki ManthelCurators Robert Leonard and Aaron Lister

    • HILMA AF KLINT – Pioneer of abstract art an exhibition coup for New Zealand.
      • HILMA AF KLINT – Pioneer of abstract art anexhibition coup for New Zealand Startling paintings by Swedish artist rewrite modern art history City Gallery Wellington Te Whare Toi is thrilled to bring to New Zealand for the first time, Hilma af Klint: The Secret Paintings. The exhibition showcases an artist whose mysterious works —until recently little known—have captivated audiences and broken records for attendance worldwide, including major galleries such as the Guggenheim Museum in New York, where in 2019 it attracted the largest audience in the museum’s 60-year history. ‘City Gallery is honoured to host this extraordinary exhibition, introducing af Klint’s remarkable body of abstract and mystical paintings to New Zealand audiences,’ City Gallery Director Elizabeth Caldwell says. Af Klint began creating her most ambitious paintings in 1906. Some are huge in scale – unprecedented in her time – with radiant colour combinations, enigmatic symbols and other-worldly shapes. Influenced by spiritualist practices and scientific discoveries, af Klint saw herself as a receiver of messages from higher powers, which guided the creation of her work. She instructed her paintings be kept secret until 20 years after her death – convinced that the world was not yet ready to see her art. The eventual discovery of af Klint’s work has turned art history on its head. Remarkably, her first abstract paintings were made several years prior to those of her more famous male contemporaries Kasimir Malevich, Vassily Kandinsky and Piet Mondrian—artists commonly considered ‘the fathers of abstract art’. In an era of limited creative freedom for women artists, af Klint found a way to create an astonishing body of artwork unlike anything that had been seen before, which still has the capacity to surprise and astound us today. The exhibition features more than 100 paintings, including The Ten Largest – exuberantly colourful paintings that are a towering three-plus metres tall, through which the artist explores thefour stages of human development. Other major series from the artist’s Paintings for the Temple cycle will also be on show including The Swan and The Dove, which are filled with drama and symbolism. Caldwell says af Klint’s themes are highly relevant in today’s turbulent times. ‘The secret paintings were created not for fame or fortune, but to speak across time, to audiences of the future. Her exploration of humanity’s place in the cosmos resonates particularly during a global pandemic and the challenging issues we are experiencing today. An underlying theme of af Klint’s beautiful paintings is a drive toward harmony and interconnection, ideas that are pertinent for our time. Hilma af Klint: The Secret Paintings is supported by the Wellington City Council, Wellington NZ, and the City Gallery Wellington Foundation and is presented with the cooperation of The Hilma af Klint Foundation, Stockholm, in association with the Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney and Heide Museum of Modern Art, Melbourne. The exhibition has been curated by Sue Cramer, formerly Curator Heide Museum of Modern Art. It will also feature as part of the 2022 New Zealand Festival of the Arts. Wellington Mayor Andy Foster said the exhibition was coming at a time when globally af Klint is being recognised as a vital originator of abstract art and it will be a major drawcard for Wellington. Residents and visitors will enjoy a unique and stunning insight into the world of af Klint. ‘Her vision and message is represented with a scale and a perspective of colour and design that will inspire, for many, a new interpretation of modern art and the world around us.’ Other exhibition highlights are af Klint’s rarely seen early botanical watercolours; her experiments with the spiritualist group The Five; more than 30 abstract watercolours from the last decades of the artist’s life, several of which have never been exhibited in public before; and a selection of notebooks, which give fascinating insights into her influences and processes. Hilma af Klint: The Secret Paintings can be seen at City Gallery Wellington from 4 December 2021 to 27 March 2022 with tickets on sale soon. Visit hilma.citygallery.org.nz for more information. Note to editors; Images and captions can be found here: dropbox.com/sh/8d0t975zbmtgzzg/AAAMJBob5jM-uK_k0yBWtTKSa?dl=0 Tracking link to be used on digital channels: bit.ly/31oIkEm About the artistBorn in Stockholm in 1862, af Klint was one of the first women to study painting at the city’s Royal Academy of Fine Arts, graduating with honours in 1887. She established herself as a respected painter in Stockholm and, like many of her contemporaries, became deeply engaged with spiritualism, rosicrucianism and theosophy, which had a profound influence on her practice. In 1896, af Klint and four other like-minded women founded a spiritual group named The Five and studied esoteric texts, conducted séances, exercised automatic writing and mediumistic drawing. Following a traffic accident, af Klint died in the autumn of 1944, aged almost 82, leaving behind more than 1,300 rarely seen works and 124 notebooks. Her works have since been displayed in major museums in New York, London, Stockholm and São Paulo. The illustrated book Hilma af Klint: The Secret Paintings includes new writing by Sue Cramer (editor and exhibition curator), Nicholas Chambers, Jennifer Higgie, Julia Voss and City Gallery Wellington curator Aaron Lister. About City Gallery Wellington Te Whare ToiCity Gallery Wellington is a contemporary art gallery with a dynamic programme of exhibitions and events, and an international reputation. Located in Te Ngākau Civic Square, the Gallery is the hub for art-life in New Zealand’s capital. Media contact Anna Chalmers, Communications Manager, City Gallery WellingtonE: annac@experiencewellington.org.nz   

    • Extend and Snap
      • .For the latest instalment in our essay series ‘Art History Is a Mother’—developed in partnership with Verb Wellington—Lana Lopesi discusses her writing career.  ‘Art history is a mother fucker.’ That’s how the sentence should end.  Art plus history is art history. Not a sexy combination. More a reminder of the downfall of the humanities within the neoliberal university. A reminder of something loved, once vibrant, perhaps frivolous, now under threat, lifeless, near extinction—a hobby for those with too much time on their hands. A lesser sibling to art proper.  I write about art for a living, but I’m not yet sure if I write art history. Whether today’s writing has historical significance will only be known with time, by whether it gets cited, by whether it has value for thinking yet to happen, by whether it enters the canon. My work as an art writer—now nearing the ten-year mark—has been significantly influenced by thinking around the canon, but how I feel about the canon has changed. Let’s look at why.   When I started writing about art, I naively thought I could change the world. I thought the addition of my perspective, as representative of many missing perspectives, could stop racist art being made. Louisa Afoa and I started the #500words website in 2012, because of a gap in the writing on Pacific art and a lack of young voices like ours, and to expand and diversify the canon. After #500words, I moved into editorial roles at The Pantograph Punch. There, I wrote about allyship in curation, art’s obsession with diversity, and racism in Francis Upritchard’s work because I thought this would have real impact. Now, all those pieces just feel like iterations of the same idea.  Francis Upritchard: Jealous Saboteurs, City Gallery Wellington, 2016.. Recently, I came across literary scholar Alice Te Punga Somerville writing on canons. It helped me articulate thoughts I had been struggling with.  The point of challenging a canon isn’t to take the logic of the canon (that certain texts and writers are superior to any others) and put it in reverse. Flipping things on their head never undoes power structures—it just reinforces them! As a Māori women writing within and about the English literary canon, Te Punga Somerville said,  we challenge canons by drawing attention to how they work. Canons steal the limelight from everyone else, implying they are not as deserving of attention and/or they simply do not exist, so we undermine canons by seeking out the other writers, trying to understand why other texts have been forgotten or ignored (whose purposes has it served to forget them?). She’s right. When we do this, our work becomes an additive, spicing up the colonial art histories we’ve inherited, hoping things will eventually balance out. But, in the words of American writer Ijeoma Oluo, the un-inclusive canon ‘works according to design’. In Mediocre: The Dangerous Legacy of White Male America, she details how systems and structures built on a racial and gendered hierarchy always require the disempowerment of some to empower others. It’s how they are designed to work. To decolonise them or make them inclusive isn’t possible—it’s to work against that design. In May 2016, I wrote for the Pantograph Punch about being an artist mum making art. I had one two-year-old, a lot of internalised misogyny, a chip on my shoulder, and an allegiance to neoliberal productivity. I was on an artist residency in Taipei and finished my article saying: Operating within this arts ecology with a baby on my hip is a radical place to be. Artist mothers and young ones shouldn’t need to compartmentalise their lives for the comfort of the Emins, and I’m glad I haven’t. I was referring to British artist Tracey Emin, who said being an artist and a mother were mutually exclusive positions. At the time, I felt I had the power to choose my own representation, and that was a loud-mouth brown girl from deep west Auckland cum baby mama who could also turn up intellectually. I read the piece now and feel sad for the young me, who thought she had to prove Tracey Emin wrong and knew being a mediocre brown woman mother wouldn’t cut it in a sector of mostly white men. I feel sad because I’d spent so much time examining the mechanisms of whiteness that I hadn’t critically examined the mechanisms of masculinity at work. Most of all, I feel sad because I remember how tired I was trying to prove myself in a sector that was and still is working as designed. In trying to prove myself, I was reproducing the system I was endeavouring to critique. By shining the spotlight on myself as an exception, I was reinforcing it.  It took time to confront my lack of power over how I was positioned. In the early stages of my career, I crafted a sense of self from a position of response and retaliation that only stunted my imagination. And I was burdened by responsibility to communities. When not many people who write art criticism look like you, you’re assumed to be identitarian, limiting your range. You are never sure if your opinions are valued, or if you’re just a diversity commission. I snapped.   In Living a Feminist Life, Sara Ahmed writes about the ‘feminist snap’—putting a positive spin on what we commonly call ‘breaking point’. She writes, ‘Sometimes you snap when an effort to do what you’ve been doing is too much to sustain’. Instead of staying committed to a life not working, you snap. A snap is not a starting point, because something has already happened that led to it, but it is the start of something. A snap can give you the freedom to get on with the life you want to live. Ahmed continues:  A case for a feminist life can be made in a moment of suspension: we suspend our assumptions about what a life is or should be. Just opening up room for different ways of living a life can be experienced by others as snap. These words helped me understand my own snap, which happened a few years ago. I was working as a full-time project manager, a full-time PhD student, a freelance writer, and parenting two children. I couldn’t keep producing at this level, trying to serve everyone. It wasn’t for me anymore.  I snapped, in part, because I realised the level of repetition that the art world required of me. I had become a one-trick pony. Repetition is important—it’s the core of activism—but you wonder how much longer you can keep saying the same things. It’s not that I stopped thinking about the problems, but I was tired of feeling angry, tired of trying to prove myself, and tired of writing about the things that devalued my humanity. Maybe I’m just ageing. I also snapped because I realised that the ‘Pacific art community’ that I had burdened myself to serve was just a bunch of individuals with different ideas and experiences linked by affirmative-action initiatives and ancestral connection. Serving this community was impossible, because it’s an impossible community. This compounded with the death of my Papa. I saw life differently. My  snap brought about an ontological shift. I saw that Western art structures had no room for my full humanity, and that the people who I had told myself I was working for never asked me to do that work.  I realised I had always written in response to something—to oppressions perpetrated in exhibitions and art works or to a community or racialised experiences I had made myself a spokesperson for. But who was I as writer, art critic, art historian? I had no idea. I had never let myself dream about the work I would want to do if I didn’t burden myself with all the things that were wrong. What would I want to say then?  In Living a Feminist Life, Ahmed says,  Citation is how we acknowledge our debt to those who came before; those who helped us find our way when the way was obscured because we deviated from the paths we were told to follow. In her book, citations are ‘feminist bricks’—‘materials through which, from which, we create our dwellings’. In citing some people not others, Ahmed ‘extends a line’ to particular literatures, and snaps the lines to others.  My time as a racialised and gendered art writer can be understood through an Ahmed-like practice of citation as a way of writing into the canon. Citation has been driven by a desire to connect myself and my peers to our own intellectual ancestries, building a dwelling combining a variety of feminist, Pacific, and BIPOC bricks to extend new lines.  This year, I listened to a podcast by Artspace Aotearoa and Ruangrupa on refusal. It included Ema Tavola, Nigel Borrell, Tanu Gago, Leilani Kake, and Iokapeta Magele-Suamasi—a relational web. These staunch southside arts professionals discussed comfort on the margins. Borrell talked about how refusals offer opportunities for intervention, where one can realign opportunities to benefit what they think is important, where they are centred and not on the peripheries, something groups that face discrimination are naturally great at. Gago discussed the importance for Fafswag asserting their own chronology as a way of countering how institutions use them to reductively leverage a singular moment. This group of creatives were committed to moving their intellectual weight from institutions with glass ceilings to parallel art worlds. As Tavola said, she’s still a foot soldier of Western art, but is learning to work with institutional tools to decolonise Western art frameworks rather than be oppressed by them. Listening to them, I think of how their work will be—and in many cases already has been—canonised, impacting art history and discourse. But, in all of it, they maintain their power; they’ve extended lines, but they’ve also snapped others.  Before I snapped, I overloaded my plate. I felt every opportunity might lead to another and cared too much about ego-driven metrics like importance or impact. Now my work is centred on what bring me joy, ensuring that I can be a whole human in my relationships and not give my power away. So, now, when I write about art for Metro, I think not about the latest art controversy that will satiate art folk. I stay away from things I would have previous dived into—like Mercy Pictures, OIAs, and high-profile resignations—and focus  on the art I care about enough to spend my days thinking through. This includes a decade of specialist writing for specialist publications about Pacific art and artists in ways that contextualise them amongst similarly different experiences of the contemporary world, using expansive trans-Indigenous thought.  It includes normalising Pacific arts and artists in mainstream publications, and giving them their rightful place front and centre in the art section. It includes my work on the Pacific Arts Legacy Project, a Creative New Zealand–funded anti-history capturing the multi-layered art genealogies of Pacific artists in and of Aotearoa. Extending lines, an Indigenous ethic of acknowledgement, simultaneously snaps others. It snaps a reliance on the Western art-history canon. Pacific Arts Legacy Project. I want to platform voices around me. The work of my peers is worth recording, deserves critical engagement, and should be documented for the future. I’ve learnt about so many seminal shows, works, and artists. I wish I knew more about Archill Gallery, which I’ve heard about many times while working on the Legacy Project. It was an important space for Pacific art, but the curators are no longer here to tell us about it. I wish I could have felt the radicalism of the Tu Fa’atasi Festival in Wellington or seen the bloodclot sculpture made by Lonnie Hutchinson at one of the early male-dominated Tautai sculpture symposiums. Writing for me is an act of remembering, not just for you in the now but remembering for the future. I write about art as a mother, extending lines of thought and citation, so it will all be laid bare for my kids. I wonder what they’ll think of the work I do, if they’ll care, if they’ll be proud or embarrassed. It could go either way. I can’t change the Western art canon for shit, plus it sounds like a hard job. Art history is a mother fucker, but only if you give it too much power. If art is a kind of Hunger Games, where we’re all after the same prize, then all but one of us will die, because the winner keeps winning and everyone else remains hungry, because the game is working according to … SNAP. Extend the line.  —Lana Lopesi _ Lana Lopesi’s writing has featured in the Pantograph Punch, Metro, Art New Zealand, and Afterall. She is Editor-in-Chief for the Creative New Zealand Pacific Art Legacy Project, a digital-first Pacific art history told from the perspective of artists. Bridget Williams Books published her book False Divides in 2018, and will soon publish her book Bloody Woman.

    • Bodily Exchanges: Blondes, Beasts, and Body Swaps: Part Two
      • [Continued from Part One last fortnight.] The Star A theory—one that I am sure others share—is that all Hitchcock’s blondes are one blonde, just as all fantasies are one fantasy. The faces and the clothes are swapped, bodies exchanged, but the same libidinous impulse is still there, erupting from the frame, unable to be repressed.  This is something at the core of David Lynch’s playful account of the Hitchcock blonde—one that acknowledges her role as a mythic Hollywood trope and the Möbius strip that runs between desire and violence, always hovering in an interstitial space where fear, yearning, and black comedy collapse into insanity and body horror. These exchanges persist throughout Lynch’s account of America’s dreamland, where the interplay between the blonde and her brunette sister, cousin, alter ego, or whatever, does more to address, rather than naturalise, cinema’s role as dream machine and the uncanny nature of its erotic currency. These women are literally duplicitous.  Sheryl Lee in dir. David Lynch Twin Peaks 1991. We see this in Twin Peaks (1991–2017), a sprawling television-series/film/transmedia hybrid that grabs the wholesome myth of small-town America by the throat and shakes it until it’s insensible. Poor dead, perfect blonde Laura Palmer, a troubled American sweetheart, and Maddy, her brunette cousin, are played by Sheryl Lee in a marvellously funny act of doubling. We see it too in Lost Highway (1997), a meandering dissociative fugue of a film, that features Patricia Arquette in the role of a brunette wife and a gangster’s blonde mistress—good girl, bad girl, round and round. This film is filled with explicit references to Hitchcock’s Vertigo, such that it feels like a spectral manifestation of the film summoned in some odd cinematic séance.  dir. David Lynch Mulholland Drive 2001. But Lynch grapples with this most perfectly in Mulholland Drive (2001), an extraordinary film that so disturbed me when I first saw it in the cinema that I wanted to throw up. Wholesome, wide-eyed blonde Betty (played by Naomi Watts) arrives in Hollywood as an aspiring actress and befriends a sensual brunette with car-crash-induced amnesia (played by Laura Harring, a former Miss USA). Betty dubs her ‘Rita’ for 1940s screen idol Rita Hayworth—one of many problems with the film has with identity and forgetfulness. As they investigate Rita’s origins, one woman gets confused with the other. It’s intense and unsettling, the brunette becomes blonde, they have sex, we don’t know who is who. The world begins to collapse on itself and the film is like an assault on the viewer. Suddenly, Watts is now Diane, a bitter, failed actress, and Harring is Camilla, a successful Hollywood star, whose rejection of Diane sparks jealousy and violence. Woven through this split narrative are multiple oddball storylines, taking place in spaces of LA where even everyday animals are conspicuous by their absence, bar a smear of dog shit in the courtyard of Betty’s flat. Where have all the animals gone? It’s unsettling, unreal. Perhaps people are the only animals. Notably, the blondes in these knowing films recall every blonde in the pantheon of American celebrity—from Veronica Lake to Marilyn Monroe to Madonna—because Lynch is often playing with the figure of the star, the commodified dream woman, as part of his interrogation of the nature of cinema, dreaming, and reality. A running gag in Mulholland Drive is the patronising phrase ‘this is the girl’, which identifies a new starlet, a new film commodity, as much as it does a victim. In Stars, his 1979 account of stardom, Richard Dyer notes that the ‘celebrity’ is a commodity manufactured by capitalist institutions and constructed through media, such as films and advertising. Stars are created to make money (actors and musicians sign with particular producers or studios); many become brands themselves. Dyer noted that, paradoxically, stars must be ordinary enough to be relatable, somehow ‘just like us’, but extraordinary enough to be idolised. They must be present within our everyday lives, their faces and voices all around us, yet absent, in that they are out of reach—on a pedestal or not really there. Stars need an audience. We complete their images by consuming their products or engaging with their story. Jean Harlow. Recall, then, that the contemporary mythic blonde comes directly from this figure—Hollywood movie star Jean Harlow, the original ‘platinum blonde’ bombshell. Harlow’s natural colour was ash blonde, closer to mine. Her hairdresser said that the bright colour was achieved through the use of soap flakes, ammonia, and Clorox bleach. Don’t try this at home: it can create hydrochloric acid. Fans tried to dye their hair to match hers. There were even competitions. Poor Harlow died at twenty-six from kidney failure. Her life had been peppered with significant bouts of illness. But who knows what the effects of all those ghastly chemicals were. By that stage, her hair had been falling out for years.  The Void Actress Scarlett Johansson, a Scandi blonde, is a bona fide star. In 2018 and 2019, she was the world’s highest-paid actress; Marvel films pay well. She’s very talented, immediately recognisable, and aware of her role as and alongside commodity. She is a brand ambassador for Dolce and Gabbana, and, in an ad for their fragrance The One, she both is and plays the part of the classy bombshell star. She’s flirtatious and distanced, flashbulbs going off in her face, lush orchestration in the background, her droll bon mots evoking Marilyn Monroe. Luxury, darling, nostalgia—but for what? It’s a layered account of the hyperreality and performativity of celebrity, because who can tell where Johanssen ends and the layers of monetised persona begin? I highlight this to emphasise the importance of her casting in Jonathan Glazer’s eerie horror-drama Under the Skin (2015). Johanssen, who was attached to the project for so long that you know she really cared about doing it, plays a nameless creature—‘the female’—that takes the form of a human woman. Not the first and not the last of her sort, she wears scruffy slappery clothes, wears a shaggy black wig, and cruises around Glasgow, enticing unsuspecting, horny men to follow her—enchanted—into a dark, viscous void. Why wouldn’t you? She’s soft, coquettish. Even her probing questions, asking men whether they are alone or expected anywhere, read as engaged, not menacing. Protective colouration. The film is deliberately opaque and terrific in its aesthetics, music, and stylisation. Johanssen is an anglerfish’s pretty lamp, a shimmering artificial fly, and human men are meat, being harvested for alien consumers.  A key aspect of the film’s impact relies on our intertextual recognition of Johanssen as blonde-star figure. It offers a sophisticated rejoinder to Hitchcock’s appreciative, voyeuristic camera, its punishments of blonde women who are desired and hated. Honestly, it’s genius. We are conditioned as spectators to appreciate her beauty—she is meant to connote ‘to-be-looked-at-ness’—but the stilted, impersonal framing and cinematography refuses such objectification and identification, and it’s a source of tension. The female is blank, initially an automaton, all carefully programmed flirtatious predation, but with little actual agency. Johanssen gets naked—I think it’s her first film that features nudity—but, despite near-hysterical fan interest in her body and sexuality, here it’s flat, not sexy, and that’s a real act of subversion. She’s not an object for our visual consumption. She moves, through the film, from object to subjecthood. The longer she is in her constructed, disposable body, the more she experiences and learns, and with this embodiment comes a sort of awakening. It’s not a ‘becoming-human’, but it’s a type of individuation. This film, then, provokes uncomfortable questions about what it means to exist in a body, about the nature of sex and identity, and about the naturalisation of objectification. It’s also about animals, meat, and consumption. I recall feminist activist-scholar Carol J. Adams’s 1990 book The Sexual Politics of Meat, which charts the intersections of institutionalised misogyny and a culture obsessed with meat and masculinity. You will see this at play a little in Simnett’s The Udder, all girlhood, milk, and mastitis.  As such, Under the Skin asks us, ‘Why do you find this image enchanting?’ And then, like Simnett’s work, it turns us against it. We should know better, but become conditioned to Johanssen’s image and the memory of her blonde stardom, so, when we see the creature’s true, monstrous form at the film’s climax, it’s shocking. She is desired and hated for being desired. As she stumbles confused through the woods, a predatory logger tries to rape her and tugs her human skin away from her black-void body. He is so appalled at her inhumanity—despite already seeing her as less than human—that he sets her on fire. In a film that genuinely invites multiple and layered readings, it’s easy to recognise this as an account of the cult of celebrity, the pathological veneration and destruction of beauty, and the unknowability of the hidden self within.  So, the film is a tragedy, but powerfully moving. Hitchcock’s Marnie shifts our viewing position from Marnie to that of the sexually domineering bully, Mark; this film brings us closer to the creature, who was initially alienated and alienating. For while we are accustomed to the objectifying, voyeuristic male gaze, Under the Skin finishes with us looking out of the female’s eyes for the first time, as she stares up into falling snow for in a long, still take, before the screen goes black. Even though we know that, from the outside, she is disposable, beastly, and will be exchanged with another sexpot and another, in these final vulnerable moments we are truly with her. In spite of everything, she is a person, important and whole.  • A sense of blurring or exchange occurs in so many stories about blondes, beasts, and bodies, where horror and delight walk hand in hand. Our role, as we encounter the challenging works here in the Gallery, isn’t just to take them in and move on—go get a beer, whatever—but to see where we fit within these layers of instability. In these abject fairy tales of femininity and metamorphosis, we are confronted with complex histories of representation and identity, and—we must remember—our own complicity with them. —Erin Harrington_ Erin Harrington is a senior lecturer at University of Canterbury Te Whare Wānanga o Waitaha. She is the author of Women, Monstrosity and Horror Film: Gynaehorror.

    • Bodily Exchanges: Blondes, Beasts, and Body Swaps: Part One
      • Marianna Simnett The Needle and the Larynx 2014. Marianna Simnett uses her body, and the bodies of others, as the raw material of her art practice. And the images are striking. She is young, conventionally attractive, blue eyed, and blonde—all things that she weaponises. In The Needle and the Larynx (2014), in which a doctor injects Botox into her throat in slow motion, she invokes an image of the ingénue—a vulnerable but desirous innocent, looking wide-eyed up at her lover. In Worst Gift (2017), she recalls Alice, peering through the looking glass at medical equipment and prepubescent men who are to receive the same treatment, which, in this alternative narrative, is denied to her. Later, she stares at the camera, a worm flicking between her lips; it’s both obscene and mannered. In The Udder (2014), a young blonde girl, Isabel, is perversely doubled, her other sexualised with lipstick. In one sequence, she holds a scalpel—like the disturbed blonde boy Oskar does in Tomas Alfredson’s film Let the Right One In (2008)—which she later turns on her nose. In Blood (2015), the blonde Isabel has a procedure on her nose, and, in her delirium, enters into an existential dialogue about biology and sexuality with a ‘burrnesha’, an Albanian sworn virgin. In social-media and performance images, Simnett is the witch, the vamp, the high-fashion model, in some cases cradling or wearing a crow, the key protagonist (or antagonist) in The Bird Game (2019). In others still, she is animal. In Tito’s Dog (2020), she makes herself over as a German shepherd, her dark roots showing, playing interspecies make-believe within an aesthetic built on girlish make-believe. Alongside the bright clear blonde sits sexuality, corporeality, animality, contamination. There’s both opportunity and threat.  And she is drawing from a clear tradition. I am taken with the sense of blurring or exchange that happens in so many stories about blondes, beasts, and bodies. This happens at the level of narrative, of course, but also representation and form. In these fairy tales of femininity, be they traditional or contemporary, identity is malleable, contingent. Bodies double or swap, and uncanny doppelgangers insinuate themselves into familiar situations. Embodiment is not fixed. Instead, metamorphosis and rupture are the norm. Often these women don’t have given fixed names or use pseudonyms as protective colouration. Human and non-human animals encounter one another, coming into literal or abstract alliances, into odd combinations. Throughout, there is no stable original, only layers of representation. As such, these lines of identity are as crazed and interconnected as cracks in a broken mirror. Horror and delight walk hand in hand. This is because of what we can make of the figure of the blonde. In From the Beast to the Blonde: Fairy Tales and Their Tellers (1994), Marina Warner notes that, from the seventeenth century, in English, the term ‘blonde’ suggested sweetness, charm, youthfulness, and lacked vampish overtones until the 1930s. It implies both beauty and light; note the resonance of the word ‘fair’. She writes, ‘Blondeness and beauty have provided a conceptual rhyme in visual and literary imagery ever since the goddess of Love’s tresses were described as xanthe, golden, by Homer.’ This ‘colour fulfils a symbolic function’—it is ‘a blazon in code’ that wraps up ordinary and popular materials of the everyday into ‘moral and social terms’. No wonder, she suggests, the ‘Nazi’s Aryan fantasies were partly rooted in this ancient, enduring colour code which cast gods as golden boys and girls and outsiders as swarthy’. Elsewhere, she observes that ‘Golden hair tumbles through the[se fairy] stories in impossible quantities’—note Cinderella, Rapunzel, Goldilocks—such that ‘Among the heroines of fairy tales only Snow White is dark’, and that is because her story requires it. It is her mother’s wish. We have then, in the mythic figure of the blonde, an archetype that speaks youth and beauty, often purity, drawing from fantasy. But, like Alice, she hovers at the edge of Wonderland, always-already topsy turvy. Here, I want to address four of the many faces of this blonde archetype— the dream, the muse, the star, and the void. Some of them are referenced directly in Simnett’s works—she is nothing if not a skilled magpie, lining her artistic nest with shiny things, images plucked strategically from film and art, stories kept alive in their retelling. Others are clearly sisters to her characters and images. But all are part of the great pantheon of mythic, yet uncertain, blondes.  Sleeping Beauty 1959. The Dream In Disney’s 1959 take on the French fairy tale Sleeping Beauty, princess Aurora is blessed at birth with beauty and song. She is also cursed to die at the spindle of a charmed spinning wheel by bad fairy Maleficent, rightly angry that she was denied an invitation to the christening. Baby Aurora is whisked away for protection by mildly incompetent good fairies. She will live incognito, in the woods, as Briar Rose, until she’s married at the age of sixteen. Note the double names, the double identity, things are immediately uncertain. The film is animated, beautifully, to recall the flat planes of a stylised storybook come to life. We are in the realm of fantasy. We hear, again and again, that her hair is as gold as sunshine, her lips as red as roses. She is a natural phenomenon, as benign as the dawn for which she is named. What’s important is that this blonde isn’t really a person: she is currency. She has exchange value—that in marrying the prince, to whom she was betrothed at birth, two kingdoms might unite. Her safety isn’t for her own benefit, but for the security of the realm. Good thing she doesn’t seem to have any ambitions of her own. You may know the famous scene in which woodland creatures, our beasts,are drawn to her song, her charm, her poise, before acting as matchmaker. They steal the cloak from the nearby prince, who’s out for a forest ride, forming an absent man-thing, a spectre, with whom she dances. Her song ‘Once Upon a Dream’ uses a melodic line from Tchaikovsky’s ballet and has gone on to be the de facto Disney theme. She dreams of a man, or a something. Who knows what those three good fairies have been telling her as she grows up, alone, out in the woods. Enter Prince Phillip, cutting in on the dance. He’s a creeper; he pounces. The man replaces the beasts who make up a man, because he, too, is entranced by the dream—the voice, the face, the lips like roses, and the blonde, blonde hair. Why have a person when you can have—and be—a dream? What is love at first sight if not a form of enchantment. After, she demurely retreats, promising to meet him again later; neither of them knows the other’s true identity. The part that always unsettles me is when the woodland creatures make way for the Prince and the girl, frightened, looks at them for help. Who is this? Is she safe? The owl who makes up the ghostly beast-man’s head lifts its wings in a cocky shrug—whatcha gonna do? Princes gonna prince! It’s a tiny betrayal, but why not pass her on to the strange man in the woods? Isn’t that what’s supposed to happen, just a bit early? From here, things go downhill, magic goes awry, she’s been rumbled. Maleficent, ever the bad bitch, the only woman with any grit in her personality, finds a way to entice the girl, in a dreamlike state, towards a dreaded spindle. All she must do—it’s only a small thing—is touch a little prick. She faints, she sleeps—as do people in many of Simnett’s works. Sleeping Beauty is now a ‘sick girl’. To protect the realm, the good fairies cast ‘extreme narcolepsy’ on the kingdom. The prince—off sulking, thus untouched by the enchantment—must fight his way to the newly revealed princess, waking her with love’s true kiss, setting the world to right.  Of course, as in so many of these stories, she is even more lovely inert than awake—why have a real woman when you can live once upon a dream? There’s a whole history to this: think of Coppelia the dancing doll, Pygmalion falling in love with his statue, Olimpia the alluring automaton in E.T.A. Hoffman’s short story ‘The Sandman’, the gynoid Ava in the film Ex Machina, or even the beautiful anatomical Venuses that were shipped from town to town in eighteenth-century Italy. But she plays her passive part. He kisses her, the kingdom wakes up, they marry, the kingdoms unite, the economy is saved, and they twirl, round and round, doomed to live happily ever after.  We know that fairy tales aren’t nice—that Disney has done a pretty good patch-up job on stories that are about sex, death, and dismemberment. Sleeping Beauty doesn’t have a fixed name; her identity is unstable. She doesn’t have a personality; her identity is a blank slate. And, with blonde, we have light, luminosity, the ideal heroine. There is the implication of pale skin, thus youth, and a lack of outdoor work, thus nobility. But also, historically, blonde was the colour of virgins’ hair. The perfect woman is a dream, nameless fiction, waiting to be had. Most importantly, the thorns, Briar Rose, make way for the dawn light, Aurora. If you are au fait with some of this imagery there are some pretty big red flags. The hero must hack his way with his big strong sword through the thorns, removing or subduing them, to get to the soft prize within, those lips red as roses! The story of Sleeping Beauty is one of the best metaphorical representations of the toothed vagina, the vagina dentata, a widespread mythic trope that frames female sexuality as dangerous, voracious, and monstrous. It can be misogynistic, when aligned with patriarchal disgust for women’s sexual autonomy. It can also be subversive, when used to destabilise those power dynamics. Sleeping Beauty contains a gleeful undercurrent of threat that cannot be excised; maybe one day, in the retelling, the prince won’t be so lucky. dir. Alfred Hitchcock Vertigo 1958. The Muse Alfred Hitchcock had a thing for blondes: warm blondes, soft blondes, icy blondes; blondes who were distant, aloof, sophisticated, and poised; women whose simmering sex appeal was only matched by their sense of mystery. Beneath her perfectly styled hair and her crisp clothes, the ‘Hitchcock blonde’ is complex, cunning, and duplicitous—seductive and threatening. She is often paired with, contrasted against, some kind of brunette. In Vertigo (1958), the icy blonde, played by Kim Novak, is a really brunette in disguise. But plain Judy is forced back into the role of fictional blonde stunner Madeleine by obsessed cop Scottie (James Stewart), one facet of a woman exchanged into another, a dream dragged into reality or manipulated into submission because of a man’s sadistic obsession. In Hitchcock’s films, we can’t trust the blonde—there is always more to her that meets the eye. So why not punish her? And the eye is important here. Hitchcock’s films play with the language of cinema as the language of voyeurism. For what is film, but peering into a world, without that world knowing we are doing so? We might look at something because we are fascinated by it, and it gives us a deep, almost erotic pleasure—something called scopophilia, where you demystify something threatening by gazing at it like a fetish object. We may also engage in voyeurism—a secret look in which the power balance is all off, when the viewer takes pleasure in subjecting the unaware object of the look to a penetrating, punishing, and controlling gaze. If you’ve done Film 101, you’ll know I’m talking about the work of seminal film theorist Laura Mulvey. Her famous 1975 article ‘Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema’ broke down the inherently patriarchal language of classical Hollywood narrative film’s objectification of women, the way women connote ‘to-be-looked-at-ness’—a dynamic that is exemplified and knowingly leveraged in Hitchcock’s films. In the history of classical Hollywood narrative cinema, men actively drive the narrative; we follow them and we look with them. Women are such a spectacle that they arrest the action of the film; we stop, stricken, and luxuriate in their soft-focus image.  Voyeurism is central to the plots of many Hitchcock’s films. And later, of course, these women are brought back into line, either through their gentle, coy domestication or their violent death—ends on a spectrum. People desire these women, and often hate them for it. In Simnett’s The Needle and the Larynx, for instance, we must ask ourselves—what pleasure are we gaining from the image of a needle being inserted into a woman’s throat? And what happens, when that woman, looks straight back out through the camera, challenging us instead of supplicating?  dir. Alfred Hitchcock The Birds 1963. One of the most famous Hitchcock blondes is the terrific Tippi Hedren, a successful model who was ‘discovered’ by Hitchcock. He moulded her as an actress, but became obsessed with his muse, becoming abusive and controlling. When I look at the birds in Simnett’s The Bird Game, Wrong Gift, and related media, I think of Hedren in The Birds (1963), a raw, enigmatic film based on a Daphne du Maurier story. Wealthy socialite Melanie Daniels comes to Bodega Bay, north of San Francisco, to deliver a pair of lovebirds. She’s a practical joker who initially hides her identity. She’s there to flirt with a lawyer, Mitch, she’s just met in town. Desire is everywhere. When Melanie meets schoolteacher Annie, Mitch’s ex, the sexual chemistry is so raw it looks like they want to rip each other’s clothes off and bang against the letterbox. But, along with Melanie, comes a series of inexplicable bird attacks. They are horrific, visceral. The film remains terrifying.  It’s too simple to say that the birds represent sex, punishment, or repression. It’s more complex than that. The violence and the unknowable, non-human nature of bird intelligence is beyond our understanding. But an uneasy dynamic fuelled by desire is flagged immediately. In the opening sequence, Melanie walks down the street, and a young boy wolf whistles at her. He might as well be a Tex Avery cartoon, with his eyes popping out of his head and his tongue rolling out. She smiles at him, appreciative, for why shouldn’t he whistle?—she’s a babe!—but then she turns to look up and out, as a flock of birds circle above a statue, their presence a portent. She enters a pet shop where birds—not domesticated but captured—crowd cages. Their noise is like nails on a blackboard. As both Simnett and singer-songwriter Aldous Harding have asked, in different ways: what if birds aren’t singing, but instead screaming things at us that we can’t understand? Later, when she arrives in Bodega Bay, townsfolk stare at her as she gets out of the car, her platinum hair, furs, and heels all out of place. It’s clear that they want her, and they hate her for it. And, boy, does she get punished, ending the film tattered, her blonde hair messed up, face covered in blood, all that confidence knocked out of her, as Mitch drives her slowly away from the bay, birds as far as the eye can see.  dir. Alfred Hitchcock Marnie 1964 This is not Hitchcock’s only film in which blondes, and beasts, and bodies all come crashing together. In Marnie (1964), a film I find repulsive, Hedren plays a charming serial thief. Again, her blondeness is key to her character, her desirability. We see her first from behind as she completes a con, her hair dyed dark. But when we see her face the first time, she arrests the action, flipping her newly-washed blonde hair back, staring out at us. Like the other blondes, her identity is in question, for she has multiple pseudonyms. She also has serious childhood trauma, and she is increasingly framed as a wild, unstable animal who needs to be brutally domesticated so that she doesn’t have to be put down, so to speak. The man for the job is Sean Connery, as the domineering, rapey Mark Rutland, a creeper whose interest in zoology helps him identify and dismantle her animal impulses. It makes me queasy the way the film shifts our viewing position, and thus our sense of identification, from her to him. dir. Alfred Hitchcock Psycho 1960. And those birds, and all that peeping, are explicit in Psycho (1960). Norman Bates, a psychotic motelier with a split personality, secretly watches as blonde Marion Crane, played by Janet Leigh, undresses. Treacherous Marion is travelling under a pseudonym; she has stolen a lot of money and is on the lam. Norman, too, is a creeper—a running theme, it seems. The motel is his own little voyeur’s nest. We, the spectator, peek with him through a secret hole in the wall, and are invited to take note of her pale skin, her pointed bra. We are aligned with his eye, invited to feel what he feels: desire, cruelty, disgust.  Note the pictures of birds that sit on the wall of Marion’s room, because there are birds everywhere in this film, in people’s names and in lines of dialogue. Norman surrounds himself with taxidermied songbirds, game birds, and birds of prey mounted mid-swoop, as if they are attacking him in the frame. He talks of feeling trapped, as a stuffed owl (a stand-in for his dead mother’s malign influence) hovers over him. That is, repressed psychotic Norman likes to stuff birds—a double entendre if ever I heard one. Later, in one of cinema’s truly iconic scenes, Marion is stabbed to death in the shower, the screeching strings shrieking like Norman’s birds as her blood pools and slips down the drain. She stares back at the camera, eyes blank. Goodbye body, goodbye blonde.  Hitchcock said, in a TV interview on CBS in 1977, that ‘Blondes make the best victims. They’re like virgin snow that shows up the bloody footprints.’ But did he though? I’ve been looking for the source of this quote, digging around on the University’s database and in our library, and I can’t find it. It’s specific enough in its seeming provenance to seem true, but only appears on spammy quote websites and in popular-press articles. In one case, I found it an academic book that cites, of all things, an unverified entry on Wikiquote. Oops.  I like the idea that it’s apocryphal—that it contains the ring of truth, even if it was never stated. Being shared so many times, uncritically, brings it into the world, reinforcing Hitchcock’s myth, the myth of the blonde. But I also like that, in The Birds, it’s as if blonde Melanie, witch-like, can summon the creatures, that she’s somehow elemental; that the birds covering the town as her broken body is driven away aren’t an enactment of violent displaced desire, but are traces that she’s left that can’t be scrubbed away.  [Continued next week.] —Erin Harrington_ Erin Harrington is a senior lecturer at University of Canterbury Te Whare Wānanga o Waitaha. She is the author of Women, Monstrosity and Horror Film: Gynaehorror. Tippi Hedren, 1963. Marianna Simnett, 2020. [Next week: Part 2.]

    • Simon Ingram and John-Paul Pochin Talk to Su Ballard
      • .The Algorithmic Impulse surveys Simon Ingram’s work over decades. The earliest work—a yellow monochrome incorporating a yellow spirit level from 1996—sets the scene, referring inwards, to itself, and outwards, to the world. The show includes Ingram’s Automata Paintings (whose gridded compositions were determined by algorithms, but executed by hand) and his Radio Paintings (created by programmed painting machines, responding to input from radio waves). The show tracks these lines of inquiry into new works: Earth Models (evolving computer models based on contrasting agricultural systems) and Monadic Device (a painting machine where human brainwaves now provide the input). Art historian Su Ballard talks to Ingram and his collaborator John-Paul Pochin. Simon Ingram Spirit-Level Painting 1996 Simon Ingram Monadic Device 2018, Sydney Contemporary, 2018. .Susan Ballard: Simon, you and I have been talking since about 2011. We started off by talking about your Radio Paintings. Here, at City Gallery, these paintings are shown separated from the painting machines that produced them. They are removed from the process of their making—which is, of course, how we are used to seeing works in a gallery. Back in 2011, I remember I had questions: What’s the works’ relationship with very-low-frequency radio (VLF)? And is there science here? Actually, my first question was: Are you just faking it all? Are you just pretending that you used a machine? Simon Ingram: It was probably less a matter of faking, than of being an amateur crossing over into disciplines I wasn’t trained in. I got interested in VLF as a way to engage my painting with the world. VLF is around 10 to 25kHz with wavelengths several kilometres long. It’s part of the electromagnetic spectrum that’s used in underwater communication between naval bases and submarines. I developed a coil-type antenna and a custom radio receiver to tune into VLF communications. I was interested in how variations in the Sun’s energy, particularly with solar flares, affect VLF communications on Earth. Later, for shows at the Adam Art Gallery, in Wellington, in 2012, and at ZKM, in Karlsruhe, Germany, in 2017, I adapted the machine to make paintings in response to spectral emissions from atomic hydrogen in the giant dust clouds in interstellar regions. These spectra—known as the 21cm wavelength because of the distance between peaks in the waveform—are observable here on Earth and are a subject of interest for amateur radio astronomers. These waves may have travelled millions of years through space, so, to observe them, is to look back in time. Su Ballard: What does all this mean for the paintings?  Simon Ingram: They express fluctuations of energy across a spectrum and they do this in different ways. We can see where this happens by looking for where the lines break out of nice neat rows and bounce around, as in the top half of Matotchkinchar (2011). With the ZKM works, lines run concentrically out from the centre of the canvas. There are gaps in the lines where energy has dropped below a certain threshold. Simon Ingram Matotchkinchar 2011 Simon Ingram: Paintings of the Sun, Gow Langsford Gallery, Auckland, 2015. .Su Ballard: Although your Radio Paintings appear to be discrete, finished artworks, they index the electromagnetic spectrum out there, a world we can’t see. You focus on very low frequencies, which are beyond what we can hear, but the planet hears them.  Simon Ingram: Electromagnetic energy is a theme that runs through the exhibition. Monadic Device (2018) uses an extremely low-frequency radio receiver called an electroencephalogram (EEG), an off-the-shelf headset that allows us to observe electrical energy from a subject’s brain. Hyperspectral Camera (2020) observes electromagnetic energy as both visible light and as invisible infrared. Su Ballard: I remember visiting your studio in 2011. Your machine started painting, but you said the result was ugly and stopped it. When did you feel that you and the machine were in sync, working with the radio spectrum, collaborating? Simon Ingram: Probably around that time. Through a mix of painting knowledge and the constraints of the device, a language began to develop. By ‘painting knowledge’, I mean, for instance, that the width of the brush is given by the need for it to hold enough paint to travel a certain distance across the canvas before the next dip in the paint pot. That the strokes are full and hold themselves, rather than dripping down the canvas, relates to the viscosity of the paint as well as to programming the brush to wipe off excess paint on the edge of the pot. Su Ballard: The exhibition blurb says you’re seeking to ‘displace’ the artist.  Simon Ingram: That’s a provocation. It’s more a case of extending and complicating the space between the painter and the canvas, and allowing a range of different forces, methods, contents, and cultural practices to author the paintings with me. I’m stepping back to let other things come in. I’m expanding the orchestra, rather than replacing the artist. Su Ballard: Monadic Device is a centrepiece in the show. You and I have different reference points for that word, ‘monadic’. I assumed you were engaging with the monad as defined by the seventeenth-century English philosopher Lady Anne Conway, and later popularised by the German humanist philosopher Gottfried Liebnitz. Instead of mind and body being separate as Descartes proposed, she thought we are mind, body, and soul together, a single entity that relates to the world out there. Simon Ingram: Mind-body. Su Ballard: So, when I heard of this idea of the monad in your work, I thought: I’m looking at a single entity: a mind and a body modelled together. But, then you introduced me to a totally different idea of the monad. Simon Ingram: My use of the word monad comes from the German philosopher Theodor Adorno. He argued that authentic art is a social monad, where art works’ internal formal relationships echo operations in the broader cultural-political sphere in which they’re produced, and particularly technological ones. Here, I’m also influenced by writers like Thierry De Duve and Caroline Jones. I like the idea that theblank stare and flesh tones of Manet’s Olympia are informed by the magnesium-flash of early photography, and that the telephone enabled a remote factory to produce paintings for Laszlo Moholy-Nagy. Jackson Pollock’s gestures have been compared to those of a production-line worker and Frank Stella said he wanted to get the paint looking as good on the canvas as it did in the can. In such moments, painting enacts, demonstrates, or works through industrial methods. In my Monadic Device, an EEG headset—an off-the-shelf device used in meditation—allows electromagnetic energy in a human subject’s brain to be streamed to the painting machine. Reflecting aspects of technology in the culture is the monad here. Su Ballard: Tell us more about Monadic Device and what might happen with it during the show.  Simon Ingram: This was the first project John-Paul Pochin and I collaborated on. It was first shown in Sydney Contemporary in 2018. I was given an area in the middle of a large open space, so I situated the Device in a scaffolding-cube enclosure. That’s important because it feels like a zone which people enter, sit, and interact with the machine. Over the course of the show people have been invited to engage in an activity of their own choosing while wearing an EEG headset. Electrical impulses from their brain will be streamed as an input for a system that actuates the brush to wander around a support. For The Algorithmic Impulse, I’ve invited other people to participate by putting on the headset. They will engage activities: one might crochet, one might read, one might program a computer, one might paint while the machine paints, etcetera. The resulting paintings will be displayed and the people who’ve made them can claim them at the end. Also, Moniker—a subset of the Wellington band The Phoenix Foundation—will perform as a painting is being made, with me wearing the headset, listening to them. My brainwaves will be streamed not just to the painting machine but through a midi application that allows the data to be sonified, becoming a layer in the music. It’s some kind of duet. Su Ballard: We’ve been talking about the electromagnetic spectrum—waves travelling around the planet and through the universe. With Monadic Device, we’re still talking about electromagnetic frequencies and waves, but inside our bodies. Are you correlating external and internal worlds? Simon Ingram: Monadic Device uses two different frequencies, alpha and beta waves (though we could use theta and gamma ones too). Alpha and beta waves are interesting because they measure contrasting kinds of cognitive activity. The frequency of the Earth—also known as the Schumann Resonance (7.83Hz)—is just below the alpha frequency. So, yes, there is that sense of internal and external mapping here. Su Ballard: There are different levels of collaboration in your works. In making Monadic Device, you collaborated with John-Paul. Now, there are also going to be collaborators inside the work, as part of it—other bodies will occupy the cube. Are they substitute Simon Ingrams or just cogs in your machine—because, I suspect, they will all produce Simon Ingram paintings? Simon Ingram: Interesting question. Clearly, a degree of alienation in painting is important to me, so we are all cogs in the machine. I’d like to think that, like me, my collaborators will become tormented painting subjects, at least for the durations of their performances (laughs). Regardless of who wears the headset, my choice of materials and the software parameters always generate a certain kind of painting. On this occasion, it’s a wandering-line composition. That look was influenced by works by the French surrealist painter André Masson from the 1920s. Simon Ingram Monadic Device 2020 .Su Ballard: Cybernetics is a reference point for your work too. After World War II, Norbert Wiener resisted the military application of his work, but his ideas were picked up by systems theorists, who used it in their development of a contemporary concept of ecology. That’s where we get the idea that dandelions and soil are connected. For me, because of that history, the Earth Models (2020) are the logical next step in your practice. They engage with a long history of cybernetic thought, systems thought, ecological thought. They connect to our world at a moment when we are trying to engage with and understand the health of the planet. With these works, you are no longer the sole artist. They are credited to a group, Terrestrial Assemblages. Terrestrial Assemblages Earth Models 2020 .Simon Ingram: Earth Models consists of three open-box computers in plexiglass cases. They run computer models of plants interacting with soil and atmosphere. John-Paul and I came at the idea of creating model worlds based in rule-based systems via John Conway, a computer scientist. In 1970, he developed The Game of Life, which models a dynamic set of relationships between big creatures and a virtual computational space.  John-Paul Pochin: Two of the models show agriculture methods where fertilisers are used, and one shows where they aren’t, where it’s regenerative agriculture. You can compare the results. With the regenerative example, there isn’t as much organic matter in the ground; there are less bacteria and fungi. Here, the interaction, the symbiosis, is key. It shows that, if we just leave nature alone, things will go brilliantly. But we don’t, we end up hooked into adding fertiliser endlessly. Simon Ingram: Regenerative agriculture is a worldwide movement. It’s being taken up in Aotearoa, where it resonates with Maori farming methods. You don’t use supplements—nitrogen, pesticides, or herbicides. You ensure the soil is not bare and has a diversity of crops. What regenerative agriculture shows is that, if nature is left to take its own course, symbiosis between root and fungi systems flourishes, allowing plants to be more efficient at carbon sequestration and for soil health to increase. It means less run-off, so farmers don’t require soil to be trucked in, and sediment and supplements don’t end up in our rivers. In Aotearoa now, many farmers want to make a transition from chemical to regenerative farming, but, as our soil has been so degraded, there’s a belief that the only way we can continue to work is by using supplements. To stop that cycle and develop regenerative approaches is scary, but the sector has to break out of dependent relationships with big agrochemical companies and banks. John-Paul Pochin: Earth Models represent interactions in soil. Soil is so complex. To get these models doing something that is remotely similar to behaviour in real soil has been hard. In the model, there is one bacterium, but, in real soil, there are hundreds. In the Models, every cube only knows about the cubes adjacent to it, but they’re constantly interacting. The result is mesmerising.  Simon Ingram: The Algorithmic Impulse, City Gallery Wellington, 2020. Simon Ingram Automata Painting 13 2006 Terrestrial Assemblages Earth Models 2020 .Su Ballard: Simon, you hung some of your earlier Automata Paintings facing Earth Models.  Simon Ingram: Like Earth Models, the Automata Paintings are based on game-like rules, in a framework similar to Conway’s, operating in a stepwise manner: if this square is coloured do that, if not do this. The Paintings were composed using an algorithmic system but produced manually. The Earth Models are computer generated and evolve in real time, and are much more complex in terms of their rules because they’re attempting to integrate this rule-based way of working with biological principles. Su Ballard: John-Paul, how did you work with Simon?  John-Paul Pochin: Simon and I have similar backgrounds. Our interests in science, technology, and art mesh. We’ve both read a lot about regenerative agriculture. Simon comes at the project from painting and wanting to connect painting to technology. I come at it from physics and computer science. Simon initiated the project. He developed the overall idea and the look of the work, and I wrote the code. Of course, along the way, ideas emerged from writing the code, from understanding what’s possible and what’s not. We also talked with others, including Shane Ward, who works in regenerative agriculture.  Su Ballard: Why produce these works as art? John-Paul Pochin: I don’t think there’s much point in doing anything unless it’s got a message. Earlier this week, I was protesting at Ravensdown, the synthetic-fertiliser factory in Nelson. We’ve been trying to shut the place down. It’s the kind of protest where you stand under a banner or chain yourself to a fence. The flip side is this work, where we’re explaining why. That’s what the Earth Models do. _ Su Ballard is an Associate Professor in Art History at Victoria University of Wellington. She has written for October, Artlink, Art and Australia, Art New Zealand, Eyeline, The Anthropocene Review, and Environmental Humanities. Her books include Alliances in the Anthropocene: Fire, Plants, and People (with geographer Christine Eriksen), 100 Atmospheres: Studies in Scale and Wonder (with the MECO Network), and A Transitional Imaginary: Space, Network, and Memory in Christchurch. Art and Nature in the Anthropocene: Planetary Aesthetics will be published in March 2021.

    • More than Human
      • .On 4 February 2021, we staged a panel discussion addressing post-humanist thinking in science, art, and culture. This is what people said. Robert Leonard: I’m Robert Leonard, Chief Curator at City Gallery and curator of the current shows, Zac Langdon-Pole: Containing Multitudes (which we are sitting in) and Simon Ingram: The Algorithmic Impulse. We’ve organised this panel discussion More than Human in response to those shows. However, the connection to these shows—and to art generally—may not be immediately apparent. So, I thought I would provide some context, before the panel digs in. Human thinking has generally been human-centric, drawing a line between consciousness and the world, humans and everything else. That’s why animals are so perplexing for us, because we don’t know which side of the line to put them on, whether to relate to them as other sentient beings like us or as objects for us. Art has emphasised this human-centric approach, locating artists (and, by analogy, their viewers) at the sovereign centre of the world, with things arrayed for their (and our) benefit, addressed to them (and us). We have learnt to take this approach for granted. So, for me, it was profoundly disorienting to see Pierre Huyghe’s project Untilled in Documenta 13 in Kassel, Germany, back in 2012. A game changing moment. Untilled occupied an out-of-the way location—a dowdy area where one was not expected to go—at the edge of the otherwise scenic Karlsaue Park. I entered via a beaten track, passing piles of compost and algae-covered puddles. The site was overgrown with plants, including psychotropic, medical, and aphrodisiac ones (cannabis, deadly nightshade, and angel’s trumpets). Concrete paving slabs were stacked up matter of factly, as if waiting to be deployed elsewhere. The apparent centrepiece was a conventional sculpture of a female nude on a plinth—a replica of a 1930s work by Max Weber. But, by the time I arrived, the head had been replaced—or colonised—by a hive of bees. A greyhound called Human, with one leg painted pink, wandered around freely. Many obscure reference points—including nods to Huysmans’s novel À Rebours and Raymond Roussel’s novel Locus Solus—were apparent only by reference to a drawing in the exhibition guidebook. Untilled didn’t look like any artwork I had ever seen—it didn’t look like art full stop. Stuff was rotting; stuff was growing; stuff was interacting; stuff was waiting to be turned into something else somewhere else. Potential was everywhere. There was no clear frame to show where the work started and stopped. It was hard to know what was in or out, what was significant and what was incidental, what had been found and what had been added by the artist. Not only was the work not addressed to me, it incorporated flora and fauna with lives and purposes of their own, engaging with this scenario alongside me on their own terms. The work seemed free to evolve or devolve, beyond any artistic intention. There was no clear drama, no spectacle, yet the effect was uncanny, even menacing. I was reminded of The Zone in Tarkovsky’s 1979 film Stalker. Only later did I come to appreciate the full significance of Untilled, as breaking from a human-centred perspective. It heralded a new approach to art making, with more art operating in this vein appearing in its wake. Today, knowing we have brought the planet to the brink ecologically, there’s an appetite for less-chauvinistic attitudes—orientations that deprioritise human perceptions and demands. This imperative informs new philosophical approaches, such as Graham Harman’s object-oriented ontology. In different ways, Zac Langdon-Pole’s and Simon Ingram’s shows participate in this Zeitgeist. They favour decentred approaches: Langdon-Pole colliding disparate, often inhuman frames of reference (an octopus shell and a meteorite); Ingram by understanding the artist as but one node in the assemblage that produces the work. I’m incredibly grateful to Tim Corballis for agreeing to chair this panel discussion. Please, a warm welcome for Tim. Tim Corballis: I’m Tim Corballis, a Senior Lecturer at the Centre for Science in Society at Victoria University of Wellington and a writer, a novelist. Today, we’re going to talk about what it is to be ‘more than human’, taking some of the art on these walls as a jumping-off point. But first, I’d like to give my fellow panelists a chance to introduce themselves. Janine Randerson: I’m Janine Randerson, a lecturer at AUT University, and chair of the Leonardo Art and Science Evening Rendezvous talks programme in Auckland. I wrote the book, Weather as Medium: Toward a Meteorological Art. I’m interested in what an art for the weather—or what an art that extends beyond our human concerns—could look like. It’s delightful to be here under Zac Langdon-Pole’s photogram of sand of the Ngāti Hei, from Cooks Beach, near Hahei, which I’ve frequented for the last forty years. That’s my grounding here. Emalani Case: I’m Emalani Case, from Hawai‘i. I’m a lecturer in Pacific Studies at Victoria University. I study and work in areas of protective action for whenua, for ‘āina. I hope to bring that into the conversation.  Oliver Gasser: I’m Oliver Gasser, a human immunologist. I lead a research group at the Malaghan Institute of Medical Research working on subjects like HIV transmutation. In the last few years, my research has been about how we need to be colonised by bacteria—especially the gut microbiome. You cannot be healthy without being colonised by trillions of bacteria. Tim Corballis: Zac Langdon-Pole’s wall text kicks off with a well travelled Walt Whitman quote—that we ‘contain multitudes’. When Whitman wrote that, he was saying not just that we contain different perspectives and contradictory beliefs, but that we contain the cosmos within us. But, as Olivier just indicated, back then Whitman didn’t know the half of it. Today, scientists talk about the human body as an ecosystem, containing communities within it. Our cells can be understand as collaborations between bacteria. We’re all collaborative projects, not the singular, bounded individuals we like to think we are. And we extend beyond ourselves, linking with things outside us. There’s a bunch of ways in which you can see these ideas referenced in the works here. I think of Langdon-Pole’s Sleight of Hand, the jigsaw-puzzle work of a bird containing the stars perched on a human hand. Emalani, you said the sand photograms grabbed you, initially. [SAND PHOTOGRAM] Emalani Case: At first, I didn’t realise they were of sand. I thought they were shots of stars—the universe. If we talk about containing multitudes, as an indigenous person I know myself as genealogically connected to the universe. In Hawaii, we have chants about how we were birthed from pō, from darkness, from heat. So, I thought, ‘Wow, this work is like whakapapa on a page.’  When I read the label and realised it was sand, my engagement changed. In one photogram, the sand comes from Kealakekua, where I come from in Hawaii. I know it well. I know what the sand there is like. Sand is important to Hawaiians. We introduce ourselves through the ‘sands of our birth’. Because we believe ourselves to be genealogically connected to place, we have protocols around everything from sand and soil to plants and animals, where you seek permission before taking. So I thought: The artist took some sand; I wonder what processes he went through?  Then I did some reading and realised that the sand in a couple of the photograms comes from places Captain Cook landed. So, I was conflicted and I still am, but I guess that’s the point—that in a tiny grain of sand, you can see the entire universe and complex tensions in human relations.  We’re supposed to be talking about the ‘more than human’, but here I’m centralising myself. As much as we’re trying to decentre the human, there’s something about taking and decontextualising that sand that makes me ask: Who is being erased in the process? Cook went to these places and interacted with people, who are now marginalised. When we decentre the human, do we risk doubly decentring the colonised people who are already not part of the conversation? Are we again centralising Cook, by tracking his journey and not other, older migration patterns? Tim Corballis: We’re left to think about that, aren’t we? Art works are ambiguous. We can read one as an act of violence or as a criticism of that violence. Olivier, you mentioned that Langdon-Pole’s jigsaw works recall images you show your students. Oliver Gasser: Yes. If you Google ‘human microbiome’, you get lots of images of human-body outlines filled in with representations of bacteria. I use a slide like that with my students. Other images take human contours and mark the percentages of human cells to bacterial cells, and human genes to other genes. Obviously, it varies from individual to individual, but, in theory, we’re ten-percent human, because bacteria cells are so much smaller than human ones. The bacteria in your gut outnumber your human cells ten fold. And, if you’re looking at genes, it’s 100 fold, because humans don’t have a lot of genes. Tim Corballis: There’s not just the gut microbiome, there’s an armpit microbiome, a hand microbiome, and a belly-button microbiome? Oliver Gasser: Some microbiome researchers just focus on the skin. Even then, your armpit will be a different ecosystem to the top of your head—different pH, different temperature, different everything. It’s like a different continent, so you have different animals living there. The gut has the most bacteria—up to two kilos worth. And that makes sense, because we feed them all the time. We eat fibre, but can’t utilise it. It would pass straight through the gastrointestinal tract, except it’s what our bacteria use.  Your gut microbiome control your cravings. If they learn to thrive on fast food, that has a detrimental effect on your health. If you’ve ever been on a diet, you know you feel awful for a couple of weeks at the start. If you don’t hang in there—and most don’t—you go back to your old ways. The bacteria are like your kids at home. If you change what you feed them, they’re not going to be happy, right? So that feeds into the gut-brain axis. You may want to diet, but you’re not in charge of what your gut is saying: No, no, I don’t like salad; I want the burger. You contradict yourself because you contain multitudes. Tim Corballis: Why doesn’t the brain have bacteria swimming around in there? Oliver Gasser: It would be bad to have bacteria in the brain. You would have an encephalitis or meningitis, which are life-threatening conditions. That’s why we have a blood-brain barrier. Nothing should cross into the brain. Tim Corballis: In talking ‘more than human’, we’re not just talking about slimy stuff and animals. We’re also talking about the weather and the atmosphere. Janine Randerson: The more we step back and think ‘it’s not all about me’, the better we will do in this ecologically critical moment. Robert described Pierre Huyghe’s Untilled work, where he saw other stakeholders at play. There are Langdon-Pole works that suggest other points of view, like Untitled (Library), the floor of native timber, where the borer tracks have been painstakingly traced in with gold leaf. Fujiko Nakaya’s Fog Sculpture #94925: Foggy Wake in a Desert: An Ecosphere is another work that exists for non-human others. It was shown at the Biennale of Sydney in 1976 and at Melbourne’s National Gallery of Victoria in 1982. It’s now permanently installed in the sculpture garden at the National Gallery of Australia in Canberra—a dry, desert landscape. The fog only plays from noon to 2pm because of water restrictions, but it feeds a lake and indigenous trees and shrubs. While I was there, I saw crimson rosellas and other birds coming to take advantage of the moisture the work created. Air currents carry the fog over stones the artist placed in the water. Walking through it, you have a sense that nothing has edges: the trees don’t have edges, your body doesn’t have edges. Perhaps we’re always in this fog of being, interacting with other beings. In that work, I could sense the liveliness of the atmosphere.  Tim Corballis: Does the wider cosmos give the things within it meaning or do we give the wider cosmos meaning? Emalani Case: In Hawai‘i, we have stories of Wākea, our sky father, and Papahānaumoku, our earth mother. They gave birth to Hoʻohōkūkalani, the stars. Then Wākea and Hoʻohōkuūalani gave birth to the first people. Whakapapa is such a powerful tool for recognising our interconnectedness. Coming back to the world we live in today, a world in rapid decline, we have to recognise genealogical connections—not just recognise them, but act on them. It’s not a question of how far the interconnectedness goes, but how far are we willing to go to recognise that. We have to see our being stewards of the Earth as responsibility to family. Tim Corballis: Interconnection is not always good. Cook’s voyages were a problematic form of interconnectiveness. You’ve told the story of Kamilo Beach, which also offers a strange case of interconnection. Emalani Case: It’s on the island of Hawaii that I come from. Kamilo means to curve and to swirl. The beach was given that name because of its strong ocean currents. There are stories about people on other parts of the island throwing things into the ocean and their washing up on Kamilo Beach. There’s a story of a man who threw something into the ocean, knowing that his wife, who left him, would find it there and know he loved her. Unfortunately, Kamilo is now called ‘plastic beach’. It’s one of the most polluted beaches on Earth, because of the currents. With Hawaii’s proximity to the North Pacific Gyre and the Great Pacific Garbage Patch, Kamilo is one of the dirtiest places on the planet. I went there a few years ago and found it challenging. The currents once brought treasures and beautiful stories to the shore, but if you walk the shoreline now, you can see toothbrushes, bottles, everything, coming from places all around the world. I remember thinking: If someone else’s trash is here, where’s mine? When people think of Hawai‘i, they think of clean beaches, white sand, palm trees—the ideal tourist paradise. So Kamilo is hidden. It doesn’t bring tourists in, so it’s been erased in a particularly colonial way. Tim Corballis: How does Kamilo Beach compare with the human body? What’s washing up in us?  Oliver Gasser: We accumulate a lot of crap. One of our biggest problems is plasticisers—hydrophobic substances. If you take vitamin supplements, like water-soluble vitamin B, there’s no problem with over-supplementing, because they segregate with water and you excrete them in your urine. However, many substances are hydrophobic, which means they steadily build up in your adipose tissue, your fat. Technologically, we innovate fast, putting new substances in the environment and food chain, but we are very bad at predicting the effects. So, if you go on a weight-loss diet, you might feel bad. That’s because you’re releasing all those accumulated toxins into your bloodstream. Janine Randerson: We could compare the introduction of untested toxins to our bodies with human experimentation on the environment. We assume we’re past the phase when we introduced stoats into Aotearoa to catch the rabbits, despite the warnings of nineteenth-century biologists. But, in the last seven days, there’s been the issue of the red-eared slider turtles breeding at Cooks Beach. Someone thought: They’re not going to hatch; it’s too cold here. Yet they one of the world’s most successful invasive species, aside from humans.  Oliver Gasser: We do things without knowing the consequences. And it’s more or less the same with microbiome. We did not predict that a very large number of individuals born using cesarean section would develop allergies because they haven’t been colonised properly. Tim Corballis: What percentage plastic we are? Oliver Gasser: We could take a biopsy right now, run it through a mass spectrometer, and see what’s there. We’d see a lot of things, but what worries me most is that we don’t yet know what it may mean in terms of health or disease.  Tim Corballis: Langdon-Pole is interested in the work of the evolutionary theorist Lynn Margulis. We think of the cell as being this bounded lovely thing, but it’s not. Margulis saw about the cell—the animal cell—as originating through the combination of bacteria. Our cells contain mitochondria, which at one point would have been separate bacteria. Which leads me to think: Is there politics of the cell? Does this allow us to think about borders and boundaries more generally? Janine Randerson: Lynn Margulis pioneered this model of symbiosis, of co-operation. It’s quite different from the competitive Darwinian model, where bacteria are seen as attacking us. When Darwin’s notion of ‘the survival of the fittest’ shifted into politics, it justified colonisation. Now we are beginning to recognise that in Aotearoa we are part of the sea of islands, Te-Moana-nui-a-Kiwa, surrounded by Moana cultural practices that resist the legacy of Euro-American anthropocentrism. I suggest in my book that contemporary-art practices also play a part in collective re-engagement our atmosphere and living biota, and with communities through communication and exchange rather than competitive models.   Oliver Gasser: Cells communicate to each other and exchange things. There are little vesicles that bud off a cell and fuse with other ones. A cell can tell a neighbouring cell, ‘Hang on, I don’t have enough energy. Can you pass me on some of your mitochondria?’ There’s fusion and information exchange all the time. Politically, that’s how the human body works. It’s not one cell saying: This is me, this is you, that’s it, there are boundaries. No. Cells fuse, they merge, they do all sorts of things. Fusion, separation, it’s happening right now, in your body. It is part of life. And it’s all based on interaction—communication. I think politics can learn something from cell biology. Janine Randerson: A criticism of ‘more than human’ approaches—and of Bruno Latour’s actor-network-theory as a precursor—is that they flatten social and cultural difference and can obscure unequal power relations. There are still inadequacies between ‘more-than-human’ version of ecological relationality and non-Western cultural paradigms, as well as useful parallels. If all things are equal, then Covid-19 has as much of a right to survive as anything else, yet we are doing our best to halt its progress. Tim Corballis: By ending life, Covid-19 is a bit of a failure as a virus. Oliver Gasser: Some biologists say that a virus by itself is not alive, because it needs a host to survive. We haven’t figured out where Covid-19 comes from. From the genetic sequence, it might be from a bat. It’s a novel virus, meaning humans haven’t encountered it before. That’s why it’s so virulent and deadly. But a virus never seeks to kill its host. And, ideally, the host should get something from the virus, or at least not being harmed. If it doesn’t, it’s just a parasite, right? With the microbiome, it’s a symbiosis: the bacteria cannot live without the host, but the host gets something from it. When viruses come from the animal kingdom—HIV came from monkeys—they spread like wildfire in humans. Across time, we can potentially adapt. An evolutionary balance eventually arrives. In the meantime, if we look at it from a purely ‘more than human’ perspective, it might mean that ninety-nine percent of the population dies, and only a few individuals with particular genetic traits survive. But, that’s the evolutionary game, where two things meet up and try to see if they can live together. We are quite arrogant in thinking that, by sheer intelligence, we might survive anything. Tim Corballis: Reaching out to the cosmos can also have a melancholy aspect, because, actually, the meteorite doesn’t pay us much attention. We think ‘let’s be friends with the animals’ and all that, but it’s not always friends, is it? [TALKING HAMBURGER] Janine Randerson: We can be confronted by nature’s crushing indifference. Yet we—particularly those of us raised in a Eurocentric paradigm—are now beginning to see ourselves as part of the ecosphere, not hovering outside it. Art can amplify our sensitivity to the stuff of the world, for its intrinsic value, rather than its value for us. I was just reading David Mitchell’s Utopia Avenue. There’s a passage in it with a talking hamburger bun. Let me read it: The bun is a real, soft, puffy bread bun that breathes in and out and in and out. ‘Your big mistake,’ the bun tells Dean, ‘is to assume your brain generates a bubble of consciousness you call “Me”.’ ‘Why is that a mistake?’ Dean asks the talking bun. ‘The truth is that you’re not your own private “I”. You are to consciousness what the flame of a match is to the Milky Way.’  … Dean puffs a puff of air and a cloud is pushed along.  Separateness is an illusion, Dean realises. What we do to another we do to ourselves.1 Dean was having an acid trip at the time, but his insight is appropriate to our conversation.  Tim Corballis: Thinking about decentring the human, I have to keep asking if we should be decentring ourselves or recognising our interconnectedness? Interconnectedness is not always peaceful. It’s sometimes painful, even traumatic. But the survival of the planet relies upon us recognising it, and recognising our impact.  1. Kim Tallbear, ‘Why Interspecies Thinking Needs Indigenous Standpoints’, https://culanth.org/fieldsights/why-interspecies-thinking-needs-indigenous-standpoints. 2. David Mitchell, Utopia Avenue (London: Hodder and Stoughton, 2020), 539–40.

    • Requiem for an Airport
      • To coincide with our current exhibition Terminal, we invited five writers to deliver requiems for an airport. Of course, the event was postponed due to Covid-19, but finally happened at our Tuatara Open Late in December. Better late than never. Today on the blog we share Melissa Laing’s requiem for the ill-fated TWA terminal.—Megan Dunn   TWA Hotel, New York. .It’s 1956 and Finish-American architect Eero Saarinen has just been commissioned to design the TWA Flight Centre at Idlewild Airport in New York. Twin-propeller planes are still ferrying passengers across the continent and the Atlantic. They’ve only just invented coach class. It’s an untapped market as opposed to the economic base of an airline. Idlewild is in the middle of being built. Its vision: a terminal city. The airport complex itself is only eight-years old, its runways laid where a golf course and summer hotel used to be in Queens. TWA is one of America’s leading carriers and has been invited to be one of Idlewild’s cornerstone tenants. Seizing the opportunity TWA wants to create an era-defining terminal that captures the spirit and imagination of flight. A monument to their success and a beacon for their aspirations for the future. Saarinen is an architect whose been establishing his reputation with striking and sometimes difficult-to-construct buildings that reify their purpose in their form. But he’s also a trained sculptor, interested in form and volume, so its plausible that, while describing the shape he wants to achieve, he would turn his breakfast grapefruit over and press on its empty skin. The form that distorts around the pressure of his fingers is considered an early prototype for the building. The completed TWA terminal is immediately iconic. The poured concrete roof is caught in mid swoop. Its white penny-tiled interior scribes a series of spatial curves that are accented by pools of red carpet covered with custom furniture. At the back wall, an angled bank of windows looks out onto the planes as they take off centring the spectacle of flight. This, it says, is the future. It’s tempting to be nostalgic for the era of aviation the Saarinen terminal was designed for. A time when people dressed up to fly and the fiction of frictionless flight seemed almost a reality. But from a distance we forget that it was an era when the cost of flight acted to filter out those who weren’t well off, and a culture of segregation coupled with immigration prejudices kept the terminal and the plane pretty damn white. Shifting politics and the dropping cost of flights changed part of this, democratising economic access. But, at the same time, a security culture emerged in response to a rash of plane hijackings. Passenger profiling became a thing in the 1960s, and mandatory security screening came with the 1970s. As the hijackings became political rather than economic, the profiling and screening became more and more targeted to the perceived ethnicity and religious affiliation of the passengers. Saarinen never gets to see any of this. He never experiences its success. It’s one of ten major commissions that are completed after his death in 1961. But then, he also doesn’t have to face its failure. Between 1959, when the design is signed off, and 1962, when it opens, the damn thing has become too small. They asked him to design a terminal projecting a steady, slow growth of passengers that would reach 2,000 people per hour by 1970. However, the airline is already hitting those numbers in 1962. By 1967, the TWA terminal, at the now renamed John F Kennedy Airport, has become notorious for its delays with planes sitting on the tarmac unable to disgorge the passengers for up to ninety minutes. The aspiration of the architecture is lost behind the reality of the experience. Then TWA starts to struggle. The American airline industry changed its regulations in 1978, and, in the ensuing free-for-all of mergers and route-grabbing, TWA ended up with debt it could never quite shake. For the next twenty-two years, the Saarinen terminal grinds on, over capacity, with tacked-on modules to handle the changing technological demands, and TWA slowly crumbles, going bankrupt for the last time in January 2001. This isn’t the end of the building though. While Saarinen is on record saying it would make a beautiful ruin, the New York architectural societies were not on board with that and secured its protection in 1994, leaving the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey with a small problem. They couldn’t knock it down but it wasn’t fit for purpose. So they loaned it out instead. Receiving hundreds of requests a year. The Catch Me If You Can film crew took it over for a week in 2002, ripping out everything that was not original, to shoot two pivotal scenes for the movie. And, in 2003, the airport accepted a proposal from a twenty-six-year-old independent curator Rachel K. Ward. She put forward the idea of an exhibition in the terminal taking its name from the site, Terminal 5. As the Terminal show we are standing in at City Gallery demonstrates, there’s something about the conflict between an airport’s aspiration and its reality. It borrows wonder from the technological achievement of heavier-than-air flight and appropriates the romance of travel from its destinations, yet is somehow grindingly boring. It speaks to freedom of movement, yet surveils and controls its passengers, and it calls into physical being an ‘outside’ in the centre of the country that is entirely conceptual yet utterly solid. As an artist there’s so much to work with. The curator, Ward, has leveraged the architectural cachet of the building and the complex socio-political realities and imaginings that played out in its concourses to secure the participation of some significant artists. She’s got major works by Dan Graham and Jenny Holzer. Ryoji Ikeda illuminates the flight-wing tubes with light and sound. She almost gets late-1990s art darling Vanessa Beecroft across the line. She wanted to present one of her infinitely problematic live tableaus of nearly naked black women in chains, but the Port Authority said no. Other artists occupy the gift shop to sell ironic takes on duty free. Baggage is made for the carousel, posters are designed to riff off the 1960s fantasy of flight. But the show doesn’t quite hold itself against the weight of the building, and opening night turns into one of those parties where people get drunk, write what they think on the walls, and, in what they think is adventure, open doors onto the runway. And it turns out that, post 9/ 11, aviation authorities just don’t have a sense of humour. They simply cancel the show. The building continues to sit empty, as a newer, larger terminal for America’s leading budget airline Jet Blue is constructed behind it, cutting off its line of sight to the runway. But the Port Authority is still seeking a solution, not satisfied with a building-sized monument simply taking up space. And, in 2018, they secure a partnership with a developer to build a hotel, with the restored TWA Flight Centre as its foyer, bar area, and rationale for a mid-century-modern décor complete with period snacks in the minibar and the letters TWA tiled into the base of its infinity pool. Where the Terminal 5 exhibition flirted with nostalgia, the hotel is all in, selling a fantasy of what flying was supposed to have been—sexy, glamorous, elegant, exciting—coupled with the comfort of staying in one place and having a full-sized bed. I remember when I read about its opening in May 2019, wondering where has the imagining of the future gone? As this thought crosses my mind, it’s only seven months before everything changes. And so we come full circle, to a new building that is the wrong size for the changing industry it is in. Only this time too big. And we come full circle to an international aviation industry that’s flying at the frequency it did in the 1960s. We don’t quite know yet what this snapback to a mid-century mobility will mean. We can only see the beginnings of how our security and profiling patterns might adjust, which inequities will emerge, and what administrative borders will be called into being, to be made concrete, and where and what buildings will be needed. All I can say is we need to step carefully as we go into the future. If we wallow in nostalgia, we’ll let the romanticism of an idea take us to an ill-fitting solution. —Melissa Laing Melissa Laing is an artist, curator, and theorist. Her PhD, from the University of Sydney, addressed the legal, social, and architectural frameworks of international aviation through the lens of contemporary art. 

    • Zac Langdon-Pole’s Recommended Reading
      • .Zac Langdon-Pole is an avid reader. Here’s a list of books that have been important to him, and that offer some nice ways into, through, and beyond his current City Gallery show, Containing Multitudes.—Robert Leonard Farīd Attar The Conference of the Birds c.1177 In this epic Persian poem, the world’s birds gather to decide who will be their sovereign. Their inquiry takes them on a great journey across seven valleys: Valleys of Quest, Love, Knowledge, Detachment, Unity, Wonderment, and Poverty and Annihilation. Some survive. In this Sufi allegory, the birds refer to diverse human psychologies—each person having their own ideas and ideals, fears and anxieties, and holding on to their own version of the truth. Like the birds, we take flight together, but, for each of us, the journey will be different. Lynn Margulis and Dorion Sagan Microcosmos 1986 For Charles Darwin, new species emerged as a result of random mutations within species being favoured or excluded by natural selection. Lynn Margulis (1938–2011) disagreed. She saw symbiosis—relationships between species—as the central force in evolution, with the big leaps forward coming from mergers between different kinds of micro-organisms, starting with bacteria. She also developed the Gaia hypothesis with British chemist James Lovelock, proposing that the Earth functions as a single self-regulating system. Addressed to the general reader, Microcosmos provides a view of evolution based not on competition (survival of the fittest) but on interdependency and interconnectedness (co-operation). Édouard Glissant Poetics of Relation 1990 Édouard Glissant (1928–2011) was a Martinican poet, novelist, and philosopher. His model for decolonisation is premised on the colonised’s right to ‘opacity’, to exist as different, not untranslatable into the coloniser’s perspective. His notion of identity—constructed ‘in relation’, not in isolation—is relevant not only to Caribbean creolisation but to decolonisation generally. Geoff Park Ngā Uruora 1995 Aotearoa has been a land of opportunity for Māori and Europeans alike, yet today its natural character seems remote. Geoff Park takes us across the country’s river flatlands, where European settlers transformed the forests and swamps with ruthless efficiency. He addresses specific locations—what they mean to Māori and their current ecological vulnerability—through his own appreciation of their magic, beauty, and immediacy. (Also available as a podcast.)  David Abram The Spell of the Sensuous 1996 David Abrams draws on phenomenology, Balinese shamanism, Apache storytelling, and sleight-of-hand magic to explore our connection to the natural environment. He endorses animism as a nuanced and viable worldview; where human cognition, rooted in the sensitive and sentient human body, is entangled with the other animals, plants, and bioregions that surround and sustain it. Maggie Nelson Bluets 2009 Part philosophical tract, part autobiography, Bluets takes the colour blue as an alibi to explore the limits of vision and of love. Chopping and changing between the poetic, the scholarly, and the obscene, Maggie Nelson intercuts intimate personal confessions with bookish references to Goethe, Isaac Newton, Ludwig Wittgenstein, Stéphane Mallarmé, Gertrude Stein, Marguerite Duras, Derek Jarman, and Horace-Bénédict de Saussure, the creator of the cyanometer, a device for measuring blueness. Nell Irvin Painter The History of White People 2010 Black historian Nell Irvin Painter traces the evolution of the idea of whiteness in America. In 1790, US citizens were defined as ‘free white men’, excluding white indentured servants. By the mid-nineteenth century, all whites were free, but immigrants from Ireland, Italy, and Iberia were not considered fully ‘white’. Painter tracks consecutive ‘enlargements of American whiteness’ whereby Irish, Italians, Jews, Hispanics, and other ethnicities were incorporated into white society. Race, she shows, has not disappeared. A fundamental black/white binary endures, but whiteness (non-blackness) has expanded. Plus, a bonus article!Kwame Anthony Appiah ‘There Is No Such Thing as Western Civilisation’ 2016The values of liberty, tolerance, and rational inquiry are not the birth right of a single culture. In fact, the very notion of something called ‘western culture’ is a modern invention.

    • Myths about Introverts
      • .In November, we finally got to hear Michael Davis’s NZIA City Talk on introverts, which had been postponed for months due to Covid-19. Sitting in the Gallery’s packed auditorium, I realised I was more introverted than I’d thought—and I wasn’t alone. The introverts among us are numerous, but—Davis asks—is the world we live and work in designed for us? —Megan Dunn Caspar David Friedrich Wanderer above the Sea of Fog 1818 I had always thought that being an introvert was about being shy and quiet, but a few years ago I read Susan Cain’s book, Quiet: The Power of Introverts in a World that Can’t Stop Talking and discovered that I had a few misconceptions. I’d like to look at three of the myths that apply to the between a third and a half of us who are to some degree introverted. Personality is, of course, complex, but what follows is of a very general nature. Myth 1: Shyness and Introversion are the Same No, they’re not. Shyness comes about because of a fear of social disapproval, so shy people simply don’t say much or put themselves forward in case they are humiliated in some way. On the other hand, introversion is fundamentally a sensitivity to stimulation, so introverts tend to avoid situations with lots of noise, people, visual disturbance, and the like, and would rather seek out quietude. This means that you might meet someone—say in a work situation—who comes across as confident and a good communicator who may in fact be an introvert. If so, they will probably ‘re-energise’ by going home at night for a quiet evening. Similarly, you can have someone who doesn’t say much at work but is quite happy to socialise often and party hard. An example of this difference is shown in the respective preferences for background noise levels while performing a task, with introverts preferring and performing better in quieter environments, while extroverts are the opposite. Good design of offices, schools, cafés, etcetera, should therefore provide a range of spatial treatments that recognise this neurodiversity. Myth 2: Extroverted types make better managers and leaders It is a common misconception that charismatic and extroverted personalities make better leaders and managers. The opposite is often the case. Management guru Peter Drucker said that the one common trait he observed among effective business leaders was what they didn’t have— charisma. Management studies also show that introverted leaders are more effective, particularly with proactive employees. ‘Because of their inclination to listen to others and a lack of interest in dominating social situations, introverts are more likely to hear and implement suggestions.’ Another truth: just because someone presents and speaks confidently does not mean they have the best ideas. For this reason, it’s really important, for example in a meeting or seminar, to ensure that quiet people get the opportunity to have a say. Myth 3: ‘Innovation—the Heart of the Knowledge Economy—Is Fundamentally Social.’ This is a quote from all-round clever guy Malcolm Gladwell. These days, it is common to think that we have to work in groups to be innovative, yet there is a lot of evidence that working alone can be more creative. For example, ‘brainstorming’ is a process that many of you will be familiar with, yet numerous studies show that more and better ideas are produced when people work alone. There are several reasons for this, but the main one is called ‘evaluation apprehension’, which means that, despite an invitation to throw ideas forward in the supposedly judgement-free arena of the brainstorming session, we are all somewhat conscious of what our peers, or bosses, or collaborators will think of our ideas. This impacts on the outcome of these sessions, so it’s important to manage this kind of collaboration to get the best out of everyone—introverts and extroverts alike. On the subject of working alone rather than in groups, I like the advice of Steve Wozniak, Apple co-founder and introvert: ‘Work alone. You’re going to be best able to design revolutionary products and features if you’re working on your own. Not on a committee. Not on a team.’ But we have to acknowledge that innovation also comes about through collaboration, something that author Matt Ridley poetically describes as ‘ideas having sex’. The challenge is to do this in a way that harnesses together the individual efforts of all personality types in a constructive and positive manner. More than dispelling a few myths though, Cain’s book is essentially a plea for a greater acceptance of quiet, thoughtful people. This is particularly poignant in our current cultural paradigm, which is increasingly stimulating, distracted, and seemingly more preoccupied with our image rather than our true selves. Our culture made a virtue of living only as extroverts. We discouraged the inner journey, the quest for centre. So we lost our centre and have to find it again. —Anaïs Nin —Michael Davis Michael Davis is a registered architect and Senior Principal at Wellington’s Studio of Pacific Architecture. He has over thirty years experience in a range of projects, from interiors to urban design. He has a particular interest in ensuring that office workplaces and educational settings are designed to provide a range of spatial and acoustic qualities to accommodate and support our personality preferences. Davis’s blog is based on his 2020 NZIA City Talk. The City Talks series begins again on Monday 22 March 2021.

    • Rajorshi Chakraborti: Requiem for an Airport
      • To coincide with our current exhibition Terminal, we invited five writers to deliver requiems for an airport. Of course, the event was postponed due to Covid-19, but it finally happened at our Tuatara Open Late in December. Better late than never. Today on the blog we share Rajorshi Charkraborti’s requiem.—Megan Dunn The Parallax View 1974 The Parallax View is a 1974 political thriller starring Warren Beatty. When I first saw it, I hadn’t yet been to New Zealand. I didn’t know that at Christchurch and Nelson airports, just to name two examples, you could arrive minutes before certain domestic flights, run through the terminal and onto the tarmac, and board, if you don’t have anything to check in. Which is why, when Beatty’s character does precisely this in the movie, I had to pause, go back, and replay the sequence. I had never seen anything like it! The movie, and that era, go even further. The character runs on board exactly as you would on a bus, finds himself a seat, and the flight takes off. Only when they are at cruising altitude, if I remember rightly, does one of the flight attendants assume a second role as a ticket conductor, and all the passengers buy tickets off her! From their seats! In mid-air! Now you see why, in 2002 or 2003, as a twenty-five-year old, I had to watch that sequence a second time to believe it! There’s a layer of irony in the fact that the movie is all about political paranoia and yet this sort of flying was still possible even in the early 1970s, when airplane hijackings were very much a thing. And the reason it was especially striking to me, as an Indian, is that for most of my life, at airports back home, we’ve had the diametrically opposite experience. In India, because of security worries, if you’re not actually boarding a flight, you’re not allowed into the terminal building! Not to see people off or to receive them—all that happens outside! Which is why my parents felt vaguely like people getting away with something criminal as they boarded a flight to Wellington from Christchurch some years back on their first visit to New Zealand, out of sheer disbelief that they were being allowed onto a plane without a security check. Or the ho-hum fact that, if you feel like a good bagel and you’re in Kilbirnie or Miramar, you can just pop along to the airport and treat its lounge like a food court. Your parking will cost as much as your bagel, but that’s your call. Of course, in most airports around the world, most people don’t whizz through the building on fairy dust and trust alone. You know how—for any new technology that appears—porn and the military will be the first to try out if it’s going to be of any use to them. Well, airports occupy a similar cutting edge when it comes to any kind of invasive technology, anything that promises the lowdown on what we are carrying, on our persons, in our bags, and inside our bodies in this year of the pandemic—from thermal imaging to temperature scans to body X-rays to sniffer dogs that, at Heathrow, are even trained to detect suspiciously large amounts of currency notes in people’s bags (because London is one of the world’s money-laundering capitals). You can be sure that, if mind-reading technology or reliable emotion scanning ever become a thing, you’ll encounter them first at an airport! And, as well, being from India but having also had the opportunity to carry another passport, I’ve experienced both ends of the promise of an airport— as a portal to free movement and limitless discovery, but only for some. As an Indian citizen, I’ve had to supply salary statements, a letter from my employer, hotel reservations, everything short of a chest X–ray, in order to establish that I wouldn’t overstay a long weekend in France while visiting from the UK, or, still more absurdly, slip out of an Australian transit lounge on the way to somewhere else! While, just a few years later, travelling in Europe on a New Zealand passport, I was waved through with a three- month leave to remain with barely a glance at my photo, despite being the same brown face with the same back story. In Australia, I didn’t even encounter a human being on my way to entering the country. So, airports are all that as well, as this exhibition powerfully evokes—sites that emphasise, often in humiliating public view, that, when it comes to opportunity, dignity, and trust, we are far from equal. And yet, there are other sides, besides the invasions of dignity, the exposed inequalities, that explain why so many of us endure them. My father and I had this thing in common—we both had the opportunity to study in faraway schools in our teens. In my father’s case, the journey was even longer, over seventy-two hours if everything ran on time, involving four rail journeys on two different gauges of track, as well as ferry crossings across two rivers over which rail bridges hadn’t yet been built. He was travelling, in 1961 as a fourteen-year old, from his small hometown in Assam to a school on the outskirts of Calcutta in the neighbouring state of Bengal. I, at sixteen, left India, to complete my schooling on Vancouver Island, off the west coast of Canada—a thirty-six-hour journey when everything ran to schedule. It has always blown my mind, that, de facto, my father was twice as far away from home in his time as I was, even though I was literally halfway around the world. The difference, of course, is airports and flying. One Sunday morning, at the waterfront market here in Wellington, my daughter and I counted stalls serving foods from seventeen distinct cultures. It moves me to think how all that too is enabled by airports and flying. Of course, people had the courage to begin new lives in unknown places long before the aeroplane age, but it’s a possibility open to many more of us now, with wonderful, enriching consequences all around the world. Migration, for most of us, isn’t the unimaginable, lifelong pain that people would have felt, for example, during the ‘American wakes’ that used to be organised in Ireland in the nineteenth century to farewell emigrating relatives you didn’t expect to see again. For someone like me, to have made a second home without having to permanently give up the first, was only made possible by planes. Everything has many meanings, many ripples. On the one hand, I completely get the urgency of the concerns around flying as a sustainable activity, especially in the era of $2 to $10 flights in certain parts of the world, which are really nothing more than a collective bird we’re flipping to every other species on the planet. On the other, flying when I need to and occasionally as a luxury, hopefully one day with more sustainable fuels, is perhaps the single staple of modern life I would find hardest to give up. I’d like to think it isn’t just because I’m unremittingly uncaring in my self- and anthropo-centredness. A world that isn’t connected by flying would certainly be cleaner and many ecosystems would start to heal. But, simultaneously, one of my fears is that, in such a world, we would be living in diminished human ecosystems, amid far less varied and colourful human reefs, that, as an unintended consequence, are perhaps more likely to be dominated by those nativist predators in each society who seek to persuade us that we’re only like people who look like us. And so, I confess that I long to be in an airport once again whenever it is safely possible. Aware of my privileges and their consequences, but flying, with guilt in my heart towards all other species, for experiences that Zoom, Google Maps, and YouTube cannot provide. —Rajorshi Chakraborti  Rajorshi Chakraborti is an Indian-born, Wellington-based writer. He is the author of six novels and a collection of short fiction. His latest novel, Shakti, was published by Penguin Random House in February. 

    • Requiem for an Airport
      • .To coincide with our current exhibition Terminal, we invited five writers to deliver requiems for an airport. Of course, the event was postponed due to Covid-19, but it finally happened at our Tuatara Open Late in December. Better late than never. Today on the blog we share Rajorshi Charkraborti’s requiem.—Megan Dunn The Parallax View 1974 The Parallax View is a 1974 political thriller starring Warren Beatty. When I first saw it, I hadn’t yet been to New Zealand. I didn’t know that at Christchurch and Nelson airports, just to name two examples, you could arrive minutes before certain domestic flights, run through the terminal and onto the tarmac, and board, if you don’t have anything to check in. Which is why, when Beatty’s character does precisely this in the movie, I had to pause, go back, and replay the sequence. I had never seen anything like it! The movie, and that era, go even further. The character runs on board exactly as you would on a bus, finds himself a seat, and the flight takes off. Only when they are at cruising altitude, if I remember rightly, does one of the flight attendants assume a second role as a ticket conductor, and all the passengers buy tickets off her! From their seats! In mid-air! Now you see why, in 2002 or 2003, as a twenty-five-year old, I had to watch that sequence a second time to believe it! There’s a layer of irony in the fact that the movie is all about political paranoia and yet this sort of flying was still possible even in the early 1970s, when airplane hijackings were very much a thing. And the reason it was especially striking to me, as an Indian, is that for most of my life, at airports back home, we’ve had the diametrically opposite experience. In India, because of security worries, if you’re not actually boarding a flight, you’re not allowed into the terminal building! Not to see people off or to receive them—all that happens outside! Which is why my parents felt vaguely like people getting away with something criminal as they boarded a flight to Wellington from Christchurch some years back on their first visit to New Zealand, out of sheer disbelief that they were being allowed onto a plane without a security check. Or the ho-hum fact that, if you feel like a good bagel and you’re in Kilbirnie or Miramar, you can just pop along to the airport and treat its lounge like a food court. Your parking will cost as much as your bagel, but that’s your call. Of course, in most airports around the world, most people don’t whizz through the building on fairy dust and trust alone. You know how—for any new technology that appears—porn and the military will be the first to try out if it’s going to be of any use to them. Well, airports occupy a similar cutting edge when it comes to any kind of invasive technology, anything that promises the lowdown on what we are carrying, on our persons, in our bags, and inside our bodies in this year of the pandemic—from thermal imaging to temperature scans to body X-rays to sniffer dogs that, at Heathrow, are even trained to detect suspiciously large amounts of currency notes in people’s bags (because London is one of the world’s money-laundering capitals). You can be sure that, if mind-reading technology or reliable emotion scanning ever become a thing, you’ll encounter them first at an airport! And, as well, being from India but having also had the opportunity to carry another passport, I’ve experienced both ends of the promise of an airport— as a portal to free movement and limitless discovery, but only for some. As an Indian citizen, I’ve had to supply salary statements, a letter from my employer, hotel reservations, everything short of a chest X–ray, in order to establish that I wouldn’t overstay a long weekend in France while visiting from the UK, or, still more absurdly, slip out of an Australian transit lounge on the way to somewhere else! While, just a few years later, travelling in Europe on a New Zealand passport, I was waved through with a three- month leave to remain with barely a glance at my photo, despite being the same brown face with the same back story. In Australia, I didn’t even encounter a human being on my way to entering the country. So, airports are all that as well, as this exhibition powerfully evokes—sites that emphasise, often in humiliating public view, that, when it comes to opportunity, dignity, and trust, we are far from equal. And yet, there are other sides, besides the invasions of dignity, the exposed inequalities, that explain why so many of us endure them. My father and I had this thing in common—we both had the opportunity to study in faraway schools in our teens. In my father’s case, the journey was even longer, over seventy-two hours if everything ran on time, involving four rail journeys on two different gauges of track, as well as ferry crossings across two rivers over which rail bridges hadn’t yet been built. He was travelling, in 1961 as a fourteen-year old, from his small hometown in Assam to a school on the outskirts of Calcutta in the neighbouring state of Bengal. I, at sixteen, left India, to complete my schooling on Vancouver Island, off the west coast of Canada—a thirty-six-hour journey when everything ran to schedule. It has always blown my mind, that, de facto, my father was twice as far away from home in his time as I was, even though I was literally halfway around the world. The difference, of course, is airports and flying. One Sunday morning, at the waterfront market here in Wellington, my daughter and I counted stalls serving foods from seventeen distinct cultures. It moves me to think how all that too is enabled by airports and flying. Of course, people had the courage to begin new lives in unknown places long before the aeroplane age, but it’s a possibility open to many more of us now, with wonderful, enriching consequences all around the world. Migration, for most of us, isn’t the unimaginable, lifelong pain that people would have felt, for example, during the ‘American wakes’ that used to be organised in Ireland in the nineteenth century to farewell emigrating relatives you didn’t expect to see again. For someone like me, to have made a second home without having to permanently give up the first, was only made possible by planes. Everything has many meanings, many ripples. On the one hand, I completely get the urgency of the concerns around flying as a sustainable activity, especially in the era of $2 to $10 flights in certain parts of the world, which are really nothing more than a collective bird we’re flipping to every other species on the planet. On the other, flying when I need to and occasionally as a luxury, hopefully one day with more sustainable fuels, is perhaps the single staple of modern life I would find hardest to give up. I’d like to think it isn’t just because I’m unremittingly uncaring in my self- and anthropo-centredness. A world that isn’t connected by flying would certainly be cleaner and many ecosystems would start to heal. But, simultaneously, one of my fears is that, in such a world, we would be living in diminished human ecosystems, amid far less varied and colourful human reefs, that, as an unintended consequence, are perhaps more likely to be dominated by those nativist predators in each society who seek to persuade us that we’re only like people who look like us. And so, I confess that I long to be in an airport once again whenever it is safely possible. Aware of my privileges and their consequences, but flying, with guilt in my heart towards all other species, for experiences that Zoom, Google Maps, and YouTube cannot provide. —Rajorshi Chakraborti  Rajorshi Chakraborti is an Indian-born, Wellington-based writer. He is the author of six novels and a collection of short fiction. His latest novel, Shakti, was published by Penguin Random House in February. 

    • My Lucky, Unlucky Book
      • .For the latest instalment in our essay series ‘Art History Is a Mother’—developed in partnership with Verb Wellington—Talia Marshall discusses photographer Ans Westra’s 1967 book Maori. Ans Westra and James Ritchie Maori (Wellington: A.H. and A.W. Reed, 1967). Dorothy Beatty, New Zealand Cake Decorating Guide (Wellington: Sevenseas, 1974). I guess that technically my copy of Ans Westra’s Maori is stolen. I was on the run then from a life that wouldn’t stop imploding, and, while I shed people, places, and things, the substitutes were whipped into my human tornado. Sucked into a chaos that took me months to register, and in the aftermath’s grey, stinking wreckage, I was ungrateful to still be alive. But I loved my new book.  My possession of Maori was part of a larger argument between me and a man who had helped to raise me in the absence of my Māori whānau. He was only seventeen when I met him at two as Mum’s wary pāua, but he quickly won me over. They were at polytech studying early childhood and we ended up living together with Sue off the top of Cuba Street in a rickety cottage. I can remember him putting food colouring in my bath to make it go red, blue, and purple. When I turned five, he made me a gingerbread-house cake with chocolate fingers for the roof and immaculate green coconut grass out the front.  Maybe it’s ironic that we fell out as adults in Riwaka, a place I whakapapa to and he had offered as a refuge to me, his ‘favourite niece’. Maybe it’s ironic that, in the wall-to-wall kitsch of his cavernous whare, this Pākehā had so much Māori stuff—the kind you get from a secondhand shop or sieve through the ‘funky’ ‘kiwiana’ listings of TradeMe for, to call treasure rather than taonga.  The book was in the back of my silver Audi as I drove over touchy Takaka Hill and away from Riwaka in a hurt rage. The new car was my other decent consolation prize in the tornado, but the kurī was already destroying the black leather upholstery with his anxious terrier antics.  Three years later, I found myself almost homeless and living with the kurī in the furry miasma of the car, but instead of the Audi I now had a beat-up red Nissan I’d christened Bobby Jo. I drove her to Roman’s place in Gisborne with the oil light on and my mental-health companion-in-chief panting his ageing, rancid, Jack Russell breath over my shoulder. I was running out of options and this was a sound offer from Roman, my son’s father, to come and stay with him. On the way to the coast, Māori were everywhere I looked. Except for Tirau, which had a Trelise Cooper outlet store in lieu of tangata whenua, and I thought: why is Tirau? The glib answer is horses, dairy farming, and shit taste in clothes. I saw Māori in Rotorua, Tokoroa, Whakatāne, and Ōpōtiki, and then in smaller, more mysterious places like Nukuhou, with its roadside marae and the kehua I felt at my nape driving through Tāneatua where a puppy trotted loose in the rain. I drank in the mythic promise of the road signs indicating the turn off to Galatea and Murupura before I cut through the brooding valleys of the Waioeka gorge. Roman had warned me about Waioeka, telling me I wouldn’t want to break down there after midnight. I felt my eye snapping shut like a shutter behind a lens on all the Māori I witnessed animating the cakey North Island whenua. And, in my madness, all these Māori everywhere were such a comfort to me. I did not need to open a book to find my own people, even though I still had Maori with me in Bobby Jo, my lucky, unlucky book. In Gisborne, I kept trying to show Roman the images in Maori but he gave me Nāti side eye and said: no one cares about Ans Westra, Talia, write something positive. It was as dismissive as the comment I found searching her name on Twitter, which remembered Ans as that hippie lady who turned up on the coast scrounging for a feed. My worry was how much that label also fit me. And then, a few weeks later, because he likes to toy with me, Roman mentioned some aunties on a rohe Facebook group who were sorting out who was who in one of Westra’s unnamed images. It had already occurred to me that this was one of the chief flaws of the book James Ritchie wrote the text for, this lack of names and identifying hapū and marae. And it was the lacuna I wanted to write about. I felt that Ans Westra had gapped it on us and that her career was built on a simplistic, homogenous view of Māori. A view that battled with my initial response to the photos, which was to feel seduced by their vibrating dream. I physically love some of Westra’s images. I feel a pull towards them, and this is a rare feeling for me when it comes to art.  And I was as anonymous as her photographs in Gisborne, lying on the couch in my freshly dead father’s black puffa jacket, which was the bulk of my inheritance. My bulk on the couch sunk one of the squabs lower than the others with the shape of my sorrow. I mean, I rarely moved. Sometimes I would heave myself outside to smoke on the porch and look at the panelbeaters over the road through the straggly winter hibiscus.  Eventually I did leave the house and bought cheap and cheerful leopard-print tights and garish muumuus from a trash emporium called Art! Fun! Wear! on Gladstone Road, so my lying down had a more tropical, festive feel after that. I was exhausted and wounded but I was safe in this dingy haven. I hadn’t felt safe for a long time.  Gisborne is so far from another main centre. The op shopping is excellent, with plenty of whenua-rich farmers and wealthy Pākehā in the greater area who have nowhere else to drop off their dead or unwanted loot. In the Salvation Army, this mixed with cheaper plastic plates ringed with kowhaiwhai patterns and the sign on the women’s clothes rack read ‘Wahine’. At the local auction house, there was a golliwog in the rafters, and I squinted up at it wondering if anyone from Ngāti Kāren, desperate to decolonise her thinking, had demanded that it be removed. I was not that bothered by the crass doll. It seemed like a toy for creepy old ladies rather than kids.  Yes, golliwogs are historically gross and racist, but it was easily remedied, compared to the fact there were almost no rentals available in Gisborne and homeless or precarious Māori were the least likely to be picked as tenants. On their own whenua.  I saw men walking or cycling the streets with everything they owned in a backpack, who slept under bridges or trees by the poisoned river. One day, a Pākehā man turned up at the front door with a raw steak in a plastic bag and asked if I would cook it for him, because he was living in his car. But Roman had said he didn’t want any homeless cunts turning up at his door, apart from me, and I was ashamed and relieved that his voice was in the back of my head when I said ‘no’.  Besides, if anyone dared to jump the corrugated-iron fence out the back, Roman’s pit bulls would have ripped them apart like lions, and I kept a watchful eye on my kuri, only letting him piss and shit out the front. Roman was lavish with love towards him. He’d given him as a puppy— with the name Tonka—to our son, when he turned eight. Now, he called him Party Boy in a singsong voice, while he fed him chicken necks and comically large bones on the rug. Stanley, the guard pittie Roman had named after mass murderer Stanley Graham, would watch me through the kitchen window from on top of his kennel under the phoenix palm. If I met his empty gaze, it was like what Nietzsche said about staring into the abyss, except, after a while, the abyss got used to me and thumped his tail. Slightly. Turns out the abyss enjoys a steak. Sometimes Roman would get us hangi in covered foil trays from the shop around the corner. I doused my steaming tray in mint sauce, a childhood habit I’d picked up from Sunday hogget roasts after church with my grandparents. The vinegar cut through the gassy cabbage, sheep fat, and starched smoky sweetness of the kumara and pumpkin. And who doesn’t love stuffing? Our son was just relieved that his father had given his nearly crazy mother somewhere to live.  Outside the best secondhand shop in Gisborne. Near Art! Fun! Wear! was my favourite secondhand shop for its superlative Maori collection, a wakahuia obscured by the travel cots displayed outside. Inside, there were whiskey bottles shaped like Te Rauparaha and other rangatira, a genuine find. There was a pickaninny ashtray and a weird print homage to Rachel Hunter, Dame Kiri Te Kanawa, and KZ7, beside jigsaw puzzles that once assembled revealed a stern Captain Cook being greeted by happy natives. I guess these finds were pretty offensive, but I coveted them all. I love Māori tat. And Te Rauparaha whiskey was less problematic to me than a golliwog, because his heke murdered so many of our iwi in the unfair game that war became for Māori with the introduction of the musket.  Art in a secondhand shop in Gisborne. Meanwhile, the local statue of Captain Cook on the port’s waterfront had been branded with the words ‘Pakeha Thief’, in a protest at Tuia 250. It was a dig at those in Tairāwhiti trying to celebrate (under the guise of commemoration) the two-hundred-and-fiftieth anniversary of Captain James Cook turning up in 1769 and murdering some locals with his crew, with the same poverty of imagination he used to rename their gorgeous bay. It is telling that most people in this country will have heard of Captain Cook and that there is a global scholarship industry obsessed with his voyages, when Te Maro of Ngāti Oneone, who was the first Māori to be killed by Pākehā on his own whenua, is barely known or talked about outside his own people. There were no macrons used over the two ‘a’ in the ‘Kupu Pakeha’ defacing the statue, possibly because the graffiti artist was in a hurry.  Although I fully supported the righteous vandalism, the statue is rude af. My own Kurahaupō iwi had a different story to tell about their encounter with Cook. Ngāti Kuia and Rangitāne o Wairau are far less visible within our own rohe than these mighty Ngāti Porou and Rongowhakaata iwi. Kurahaupō iwi chose to meet the Endeavour-replica flotilla in waka last year, if only to remind people who the whenua and the wai truly belongs to in Te Tau Ihu, and that, despite Te Rauparaha’s tactical decimation of us between the arrival of Cook and the signing of Te Tiriti, we are still very much alive. Cook was more understanding than a picky, plant-based eater when my ancestors, led by Kahura, ate ten of Furneaux’s men over a grievance at Wharepunga Bay in 1777. He reminded the outraged crew they had probably insulted them. But that insight was only possible because we were equally curious about them and what was onboard their big, buxom ships. We could have killed all those honky devils, but chose not to. Since our arrival in Aotearoa from Hawaiki centuries before, fuck all other people had turned up to visit and these clumsy manuhiri had nails. The best secondhand shop in Gisborne. I muttered to myself and to Roman from the couch that the real raruraru with Pākehā didn’t start until we signed Te Tiriti and the settlers descended on us as a troubling mass. Cook was just the first to wedge open the gate using his silly naval flag. His impact on the whenua, apart from the immediate human tragedy, was negligible, but the legacy of his voyages to Aotearoa is immense and shattering. Roman replied to my horizontal muttering by reminding me that all my sentences began with the letter ‘I’ and that no one likes a big head, pointedly watching YouTube videos about Emmett Till, as he repeated the words ‘big head’ at me, because he didn’t want any of my trouble in Gisborne. Still, I felt haunted by those men sleeping beside a poisonous-looking river, by the difference between the haves and have nots I tallied at the two supermarkets. I studied a woman in a silver bob, the official senior helmet of the middle class, cramming a basket with all the bougie favourites. I saw a kōtiro, about seven, counting each grocery item too carefully as it moved along the conveyor belt at Pak’nSave. From behind, a man, who I assumed was her father, watched over her with the same stern regard. I caught myself staring and looked away. It’s rude to stare anywhere, but it felt extra rude here on the coast. One of the reasons Maori is so precious to me is because Ans Westra caught Māori men in the act of being good. And this is doubly poignant because the book was published in 1967. Over the next decade, the state accelerated its uplifts of our tamariki, almost collapsing the structures of Māori whānau by ripping tamariki from the heart of their harakeke and putting rangatahi in punitive homes. Now, gang members on television and half-broken people in print media describe being ‘interfered’ or ‘fiddled’ with as historical wards of the state. These are subtle words, when a tane uses them like this in hindsight. They manage to say so much with so little. But then Māori have this knack for subtext, maybe especially when it elides a horror. Me, mum, and nana, Glendhu Bay, Christmas 1979. When my Mum was studying early childhood in 1980, Betty Armstrong, her Pākehā tutor, showed her class the Ans Westra image from Maori of a man pushing a wheelbarrow surrounded by kids, including the one riding his shoulders and the other laughing from the wheelbarrow. He is smoking as he pushes the wheelbarrow, but everyone smoked then. There is another image of an older man bending down to the same level of a little girl as they both corkscrew into the twist. And, my own favourite, because it reminds me of Roman, where a younger man in a mesh singlet lets one toddler happily eat beside him, while the other has a tutu with his singlet. It reminds me of those moments when Roman played much easier than me with our son and freed up my fingers to do something useful. This is reversed in my other sentimental favourite from Maori which shows a man under a tree fiddling with what might be a blade of grass as a woman walks past him in gumboots, slinging a toddler out her front.  They are such intimate, natural images, but how did Ans Westra get so close to us? The New Zealand she arrived to in 1957 was socially segregated by geographical and political factors, into white and brown. But this was on the cusp of change, as Māori were moving from papakainga and smaller towns into the city. Ans became enamoured with a Māori family over the fence in Auckland, who were part of the new urban migration to the cities. Her Eurocentric gaze noted how free, natural, and spontaneous they seemed, compared to her own reconstituted family, and her camera started seeking us out. She moved to Wellington and found us at Ngāti Pōneke kapa-haka club meetings and became their official photographer. She would also catch the train out to Waiwhetu, the marae being built in Lower Hutt.  She saved enough money working at Rembrandt Photographic Studio on Cuba Street to buy a secondhand Volkswagen and began driving out of town on weekends to remote Māori areas. The car had just enough room to hunch her long Dutch frame into for a terrible night’s sleep. Later, she would sometimes have her children in tow, tamariki with hair like wheat, heading off with their mother for the browner parts of the map. Tall and stooped, with her camera at waist level, she would have seemed strange to Māori at first. This wasn’t the usual Pākehā behaviour for a woman. And they would invite her in, because anything could happen to her out there. And children are often curious about a camera and would have been her first point of access, I suppose, it’s canny of her really to shoot from the hip.  The colour dust jacket of Maori shows tamariki looking down into her lens. They are from Ruatoria, a specificity she had previously disguised in Washday at the Pa, three years before, giving them another surname, Wereta, and pretending they were from Taihape, to protect their identity, and, in doing so, added her milk to their strong, dark tea.  The Māori Women’s Welfare League met in Dunedin the year Washday was published then withheld because of their outcry against it. They scalded Ans Westra with their tea. But it wasn’t the anonymity of the whānau which disturbed them. They were more concerned that the publication of these images by the Department of Education would make Pākehā look down on us. Some more. One image showed children lighting each other’s cigarettes, but they were only copying the adults around them. The League’s agenda was aspirational. They were going to show Pākehā how to be better ladies; they were going to beat them at their own domestic game. Most of the 38,000 copies of the booklet were guillotined in the furore. This is a pretty ghastly fate for images of happy children, to chop off their heads. Ans Westra revisited Washday in a later series of images. One of the main subjects, called Mutu in the original text, told Ans she didn’t need wallpaper or carpet in her adult whare because it reminded her of the safe, happy home she grew up in back on the coast. Her mother’s consent for them all to be photographed by Westra also seems a bit lost in the historical fuss. To me, as a contemporary observer, it is more anthropologically frustrating that Westra changed their names and location than to present smoking children or Mutu breaking tapu by warming her feet on a stove. Tikanga tends to be a bit more flexible in private, but that image incensed the League. Yet the mother in these images is so freely intimate with her children, and this Pākehā woman was allowed to record it. The story of Westra’s perseverance with us hits me as a mother. Her pluckiness is admirable, I think, especially when she describes herself as a bit shy. I am shy too. And, like her, I am far more interested in what is happening in the neglected corners than on the main stage. It is also why I am suspicious of her career built on images of Māori, because we have proven to be such a cheap date and Westra used her vulnerability—whether she was conscious of it or not—to engage with us, as much as any mandate for mahi from the Department of Education. And her gaze is not the same as ours, with its secret toughness underwriting the consent. Māori transcend her gaze. We are bigger than her, so it is a painful irony that Ans Westra’s images are a collective taonga we rarely possess. We animate Maori unnamed by place, person, marae, hapū, or iwi, the social circuits which form the motherboard of our being. Although I have managed to recognise some of the marae in Maori by the women doing kopikopi in the Waikato or the mana wahine energy of the ancestral pou at Hiruharama near Ruatoria. The nunnish habits at Rātana competing with the honking of the brass bands took less detective work because it was a large well-known event. Our real stories should be this noisy, they should be spilling out the sides of her frame. Ans Westra was poor and aspirational when she ventured off in her Volkswagen in search of our arcadia. When Māori became more radicalised in the 1970s, some were critical of her shy presence in our world. She argued she earned about the same then as a cleaner for her art. It is too humble a claim, when Ans Westra is a living legend and reciprocity quietly demands she polish more than her own lens. The man in the mesh singlet appears again in Maori. He stands at the sink so you can only recognise him from the back. Two women and some kids sit at the stuffed table in the close kitchen. The children are working happy bones. They appear in other images of Maori and I recognise one by matching the cuffs of his pyjama sleeves. He is why Ans Westra got so close to us. But it is his turned back at the sink which suggests something to me too. I wonder if they are a whānau from the coast from the angle of the sun hitting the door and the open face of the boy, but this answer is held mostly in the archives. I can’t reproduce Ans Westra’s images here without asking for her permission and I am reluctant to ask because of this history of her ‘taking’ our photos. It has left me in something of a bind, but maybe I prefer an unsolved puzzle? Roman wouldn’t let me near the closed Coastie Facebook groups, where they were clucking over who was who in some of her images. He is guarded because my nosiness is embarrassing to him. There is also the danger I would discover that he was making up this story of invested online aunties to distract me from my sorrow, which was stinking up his house.  Our son holding a picture of his father. What I remember most about being in labour with our son is this sudden involuntary turn into a wild animal, and having to surrender to being subject to my body’s will. There is no getting out of it now, I thought, as Roman fussed at me to hang up my towel and I marvelled at the hospital’s endless supply of gushing hot water filling the bath. The water was my only relief from the pain because the gas made me throw up the Big Mac and McChicken I’d had for lunch before my induction, and there was no way I was staying still for a needle going into my spine.  When my son was a baby, I used to sing him ‘Summertime’, ‘The Girl from Ipanema’, and this song from primary school in Foxton Beach, ‘When the Red, Red Robin Comes Bob, Bob, Bobbin’ Along’. The lyrics of the latter advise the listener to ‘Wake up! Wake up! You sleepyhead!’ It was a contradictory song to sing as a lullaby, but he seemed to like it. Its forced cheeriness was reassuring to me as a young, new mother feeling the walls of the house close in on my isolation.  Funny, I guess, that two of my son’s favourite songs have the phrase ‘wake up, wake up’ in them. Aradhana’s song ‘Wake Up’ reminds me of when we used to live in Aramoana. He thrashed it from the sleepout beside my annuals in the sweet courtyard garden. If I didn’t water my flowers, they would sizzle off in the sandy soil like the mist that hung as a white woolly beard over the cliff in the mornings. At last, a memory with a bearable echo. The other song is Mad Season’s slower, droning ‘Wake Up’. Roman played this grunge dirge when my son was fifteen and he brought it to my house with its view of the harbour and the monkey-puzzle trees. ‘Wake Up’ was the song on repeat in the weeks before the tornado and my new silver car, but I have fewer regrets now about not setting the house I left on fire. Still, I can’t hear it without feeling for a warning which pulls much deeper than a siren.  But this sound is the thing I want to write into the images in Maori, as much as solving the mystery of who the man in the mesh singlet is. Roman is not the right name for him; he would hate it. If I go further, and follow the music around the path down the side of the house there is a Māori girl on the back steps by the door. She is sitting there with a guitar, wearing jandals under the polite skirt tucked over her knees. She is playing the be-positive chord of D, and the kurī are gentler lions. They are ghosts the camera does not see.  Page 63, Maori (Wellington: A.H. and A.W. Reed, 1967). —Talia Marshall Talia Marshall (Ngāti Kuia/Rangitāne ō Wairau/Ngāti Rārua/Ngāti Takihiku) is a Dunedin-based writer. Her first collection of poetry is forthcoming from Kilmog Press. In 2020, she was the inaugural emerging Māori writer in residence at the International Institute of Modern Letters. Her project was to write about Maori by Ans Westra and James Ritchie, to try to locate some of the people in the book, and to develop her own book-length photo essay as a response. During her first week at the Institute, Covid infections started popping up all over Aotearoa, so she returned to Dunedin without the book, because she could see she was going to get stuck in Wellington with no stable accommodation. By the next week, she was in lockdown, and it was impossible to start taking photos of contemporary Māori or to begin locating subjects of the book without permission from Ans Westra to reproduce the images on social media. These are things she would still like to do, and this essay is a response to having such bad luck—although the book is with her again. Born in 1936 in the Netherlands, Ans Westra emigrated to New Zealand in 1957. In the early 1960s, she began extensively photographing Māori people. Much of her work was published by the Department of Māori Affairs in its magazine Te Ao Hou/The New World and by the School Publications Branch of the Department of Education. In 1964, her photo-book Washday at the Pa was distributed to primary schools, then withdrawn by the Minister of Education at the request of the Maori Women’s Welfare League. In 1967, Westra’s Maori was published, with a text by James Ritchie. The monograph Handboek: Ans Westra Photographs was published in 2004 and the documentary Ans Westra: Private Journeys/Public Thoughts was released in 2006. Westra became a Companion of the New Zealand Order of Merit in 1998 and an Arts Foundation of New Zealand Icon in 2007. She lives in Wellington, where she is represented by Suite Gallery.

    • Q&A: Zac Langdon-Pole
      • Zac Langdon-Pole gives us the lowdown on his journey as an artist, and the stories behind his City Gallery Wellington show. Be sure to follow City Gallery Wellington on Facebook, Instagram, and YouTube for more stories to come. Learn more about Containing Multitudes now.

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