Art
High culture
by Andrew Paul Wood
For all intents and purposes, North and South Island art are different empires. In the late 19th century when northern artists were imitating a “greenery yellary” version of Claude Lorrain’s repoussoir Arcadias, the south was embracing the bravura and Barbizon-influenced outdoor light and tonal impressionism of James Nairn, Petrus van der Velden and Girolamo Nerli.
When McCahon moved north at the exact mid-point of his life, it coincided with a shift in authority away from the Landfall-championed Canterbury/Otago southern canon to an Auckland/Wellington-centred culture fostered by Auckland Art Gallery and the Department of Internal Affairs. The legacy of that division was a cultural rivalry not unlike that which existed between the city states of ancient Greece or Renaissance Italy – two distinct artistic cultures. Apotropaic subtropical Auckland, with its extensive dealer network and bouncier economy, tends to produce a lighter, slicker model, often with more obvious Polynesian influences.
The cooler, darker, continental south has a Euro-Anglo-Scottish sensibility with tendencies to gothic navel-gazing. A lack of institutional enthusiasm has always forced Southern artists to be largely self-reliant. The contemporary scene is intimately dependent on up-by-the-bootstraps, smell-of-an-oily-rag artist-run spaces. The art is often grungier, perhaps even slightly edgier despite a widely held perception of the Garden City as an urban Miss Haversham – and a far cry from the historical yellow ochre and plein air.
Christchurch’s High Street Project is one of those artist-run spaces, and is in its 13th year – an aeon in the ephemeral mayfly existence of such phenomena. It has helped launch the careers of many of Aotearoa’s younger artists. This month sees them open at the latest in a long succession of venues in and around the High St heritage precinct.
Their first exhibition at level one, Lichfield Lane (off Poplar Lane, behind C1 café) is Brand New Second Hand, a collaborative installation by local artists Amelia Bywater and Anton Mogridge. The new space is huge – a great white windowless loft, and the artists have put the high ceiling spaces to good use. Mogridge toys with formalist minimalism and stereo culture. There are lines of mocked-up veneer-clad speaker boxes. A green fluorescent light illuminates a wall work that quotes the iconic graphic equaliser readout in homage to Donald Judd. One wall is dominated by an enormous “Doof Doof” spelt out in floor to ceiling letters. The reading must be considered ironic in a city notorious for its boy racers.
This is counterpointed by Bywater’s more intimate and feminine evocations of the domestic fragments of yesteryear – either through Rachel Whiteread-esque wax moulds of thrift shop late-colonial bric-a-brac, or recycled furnishings more-or-less uniformly whited out and negated, perhaps in reference to Robert Rauschenberg’s “combine paintings” and the aesthetics of gallery spaces and academic sculpture. Both threads of the show seem to be a knowing homage to what anthropologist James Clifford calls “the salvage paradigm” – a desire to somehow rescue cultural authenticity from the jaws of destructive historical change. In its most benign form, it kickstarted the Maori Renaissance of the 70s and 80s. At its most destructive, it views other cultures as Kipling’s “lesser breeds without the law” having lost out to the white man’s progress and preserved under glass in a museum.
This installation turns the mirror back on Pakeha – perhaps the southern variety specifically – and asks if we are rapidly going the way of the huia. Brilliant.
BRAND NEW SECOND HAND, the High Street Project, Christchurch.
