Art
Money changes everything
by David Eggleton
The sex doctor’s gift to Gore.
A personal art collection is always idiosyncratic, its composition determined by the tastes and interests – the personality – of the collector, who usually has a tale to tell about the acquisition of every piece. In the case of the John Money Collection, housed since December 2003 in a large, purpose-built extension at the back of the Eastern Southland Gallery’s converted library building in Gore, the acquisition of the collection constitutes a colourful saga, and it’s a story laid out by gallery director Jim Geddes and historian Michael King in a just-published slim volume entitled Splendours of Civilisation. The Money Collection joins a Ralph Hotere Collection and the Hokonui Moonshine series by Trevor Moffitt, turning the ESG into the little gallery that could: if you’re going to the deep South at all, be sure to go by way of Gore.
Money, who died in Baltimore on July 8 aged 85, was, to use a tabloid epithet, a celebrity sexologist. In 1975, the New York Times dubbed him “an agent provocateur of the sexual revolution”; in 1990, Rolling Stone magazine anointed him the “Hot Love Doctor”; and in 1994, renegade feminist Camille Paglia proclaimed him “the leading sexologist in the world today”. In fact, Money, a psychologist, was something of a period piece: like Alfred Kinsey, he was the academic expression of a cultural desire that sprang out of early 20th-century provincial puritanism and flowered most vividly internationally in the 60s and 70s. Advances in neurobiology, as well as a cultural shift, diminished the authority of Freudian-based behaviourist ideas about the psychosexual on which Money’s reputation was built.
The narrative of Money’s life – or at least the latter part of it – is reflected in his art collection. The nucleus of the collection is a body of work by Theo Schoon. Money met Schoon and Rita Angus through Douglas Lilburn in the mid-1940s in Christchurch, which was then the bohemian art capital of the country. A lecturer in psychology at Otago University, where his students included Janet Frame, Money, who had only recently thrown off the shackles of a strict Christian fundamentalist upbringing, went bush with Schoon over the university summer holidays in early 1947. He helped Schoon make a visual record of ancient Maori rock drawings in backblocks Canterbury for the Department of Internal Affairs.
Money’s first acquired work was his own 1947 portrait painted by Schoon in a naturalistic style that Schoon later repudiated. Schoon – New Zealand’s most significant outsider artist of the mid-20th century, and an artist schooled in Bauhaus principles – confirmed for Money the importance of primitivist art and the importance of the polymorphous in nature generally. In a way, the pair were soul brothers, although they were to go in very different directions.
Money left New Zealand in August 1947 for Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, to undertake doctoral research in transsexual behaviour and gender identity, and based himself in the US thereafter, living in Baltimore and returning periodically to New Zealand, where he acted as patron for both Schoon and Angus, buying art works from them.
Splendours of Civilisation – Money’s own phrase – aptly sums up the display of items selected from more than 400 pieces: they seem like totems and fragments of lost worlds. Besides Schoon’s kowhaiwhai patterns and moko patterns, there are Aboriginal paintings from Arnhem Land and 50s abstract expressionist paintings by Baltimore artist Lowell Nesbitt, and a 1964 portrait of Ruth Money – John Money’s mother – by Rita Angus. This last is a work of extraordinary psychological penetration. The head of the subject resembles a chunk of landscape surmounted by white clouds of hair. Her glance – sharp, like that of a mother to a son – is piercing and in a way anguished.
The exhibition space, though, is dominated by a group of “provider figures” – two-metre-plus-tall wooden statues from Mali. Indeed these works out of Africa, stark, simplified, sculpturally bold, combine with the initiation helmets and dance masks from Zaire to evoke an atmosphere of mystery, beauty and fecundity. Stripped of context, they yet seem like living, spirit-infused objects, and imply an elective affinity: the psychologist as modern witchdoctor confronting age-old taboos.
THE JOHN MONEY COLLECTION, Eastern Southland Gallery, Gore, on permanent display
SPLENDOURS OF CIVILISATION, catalogue with introduction by Jim Geddes and essay by Michael King (Eastern Southland Gallery/Longacre Press, $39.99)
