I'm killing off Cook & Co," says jeweller Octavia Cook. That's not definite, hence the title of the show. Cook added the "& Co" tag at her first show at Anna Miles in 2005, part of the process of staking out territory in the world of art.
"It was born of a need to make more than just jewellery. It brings my family into it. It started off as my version of Tiffany & Co, a humble, no-frills version, but it has grown and expanded with every show," she says.
Two photographs made to accompany specific works show Cook picking up on the performance aspect of wearing an eye-catching piece of jewellery and turning it into performance art.
In one, she is seated in a chair in the corner of her parents' Pakuranga living room, which has been augmented by items like royal portraits added to things Cook grew up with.
A photo within the photo shows the interior of a maharajah's palace with an octagonal table with a mirror top, the model for the table Cook's pieces are displayed on.
"Mine is more a customised barbecue table," she says, picking up the theme of the shady cousin with aspirations to grandeur.
Read more...
Labels: contemporary jewellery, Octavia Cook
¶ 9:05 PM 0 comments links to this post
The figure lounges on a couch, arms thrown back, chest thrust out, feet entwined in front of its crotch.
It's not overtly threatening, but it's not to be trusted either.
The painting is loosely based on a pare, a door lintel, an idea artist John Walsh been playing with for several years.
"Every time I take it on it seems to be looking less and less like a formal pare and taking on other forms."
Pare to My Place was done while Walsh was in Xiamen, China earlier this year as part of a sister city exchange with Wellington.
"We had to produce some work over there and we didn't have a lot of time. I knew the format of these pare, so I flew into that, and the idea was of having to go through this pare and this guy, who is not quite menacing, but he certainly gets your attention, to get to the landscape and the little house on the hill.
"I didn't want to spook (the viewer) but I wanted them to feel you had to puzzle your way through this guy to get beyond him."
Walsh operates in a territory which combines a painterly take on New Zealand light and landscape with Maori signifiers.
It's territory which has to be navigated with care. Slapping a tiki on the canvas won't save a bad painting, and loaded ideas can go off in unexpected and unwelcome ways, or fail to fire completely.
Read more... ¶ 9:02 PM 0 comments links to this post
Marti Friedlander calls the new book by art historian Leonard Bell on her life's work a love story.
"Leonard Bell decided he wanted to write about my photography and I feel it's a gift to me to have someone write about my work with such understanding. In a way it's a kind of love story. One feels very touched by that. It's beautifully written."
There's another love story, too, the one that got a free-spirited Londoner to New Zealand half a century ago.
Gerrard Friedlander is sitting at a nearby table in the Parnell cafe where I meet the photographer, perhaps in case she wants to abort the interview - he leaves only after she's gone. She quizzed me about why I want to write about her, and then agreed to answer questions.
"Why does one need to expose oneself?" asks the woman whose images strip away psychological layers from her subjects.
I suggest that she's an interesting photographer because of the way she has put herself in all sorts of extraordinary situations.
Read more... ¶ 8:56 PM 0 comments links to this post
Unfortunately our politicians are poor students and their advisers not much better, failing to notice when the test tubes boil over or the promised elixir fails to materialise.
The launch of mobile phone company 2degrees is a great chance to observe economic phenomena and test some of hypotheses about competition and the state of the economy.
Telecommunications is an example of where the central planners and politicians and regulators have got things so wrong, bizarre behaviours have spring up.
People don’t talk on their phones, they write with them. They go to the hassle of getting another landline connection when they move, instead of switching to cellphone. They tell their mobile phone provider whom they are going to call most often, and then call no one else. They won’t call or text subscribers to another mobile network, even though the arithmetic of networks is 1+1=1.
If the country stuffs up the introduction of a third mobile phone company, forget any meaningful foreign investment – the only money coming in will be to pick up any remaining New Zealand-owned businesses with assets still to strip, or state monopolies the Key-English government flogs off in its second term.
Australian telecommunications analyst Paul Budde has already sounded a warning that because the Commerce Commission has still not made the changes which make competition possible, “there is very little opportunity for 2degrees to become a successful competitor in the New Zealand mobile market”.
“What nonsense,” you say. “There has been competition between Vodafone and Telecom, and 2degrees makes one more.”
What we’ve had until now is two huge trains steaming down separate tracks, hot cinders flying, swathed in steam so passengers can’t see where they’re going or how their pockets are being picked.
Vodafone is a mobile phone company which bought the network built by BellSouth and has since brilliantly worked the referee to maximise its return with minimal extra investment.
I don’t know where the millions Vodafone claims to be spending on network upgrades is going – my calls still drop out at the same spots on the ride between the airport and the city.
Telecom’s business model since the departure of its cash-guzzling initial shareholders has been to squeeze every last dollar from its copper landline network. Its management has extracted huge salaries while driving down shareholder value through this lack of vision.
Its mobile phones are there to prop up the landline business. They didn’t work anywhere else, so no global roaming.
High fixed to mobile rates suppressed traffic and provide a subsidy for mobile operators. Extrapolating from Commerce Commission estimates that fixed to mobile traffic rose from 900 million minutes in 2004 to a billion minutes last year, landline customers have handed more than $2.4 billion dollars to mobile operators over the past decade.
Factor that into Don Brash’s productivity review.
Telecom only built a proper mobile network when 2degrees emerged as a real prospect, because a new entrant can win market share either by winning another mobile network’s customers, or by encouraging customers to ditch their landline.
It’s all about the bundles. Get substandard broadband, mobile and landline services in one convenient package and you’re less likely to shop around for a better service in any individual area.
Throw in “free” SMS text and the customer is locked in. Since SMS and any cheap call offers take advantage of on-network pricing – made possible by poorly conceived regulation and high termination rates – shifting provider means cutting yourself off from friends and family.
The Commerce Commission says in 2008 on-net traffic accounted for more than 80 percent of all mobile to mobile voice traffic and a higher proportion of SMS traffic.
Young people in Auckland may pick up a 2degrees SIM card, but it remains to be seen how long they keep using them when their friends on Vodafone stop texting them (because it costs them money to do so).
The same applies in Dunedin, where the network of choice for scarfies and high schoolers is Telecom.
If New Zealand had an indigenous mobile phone manufacturing industry, it would be producing phones which took two SIMs. As it is, kids will just have to keep carrying one in each pocket.
There’s no sound economic reason for this, apart from anti-competitive behaviour by the incumbents. The arguments about the cost of an SMS message is what fraction of a cent it is – nothing like the 9.5 cents Vodafone and Telecom have been charging each other.
It’s a bit like the Auckland Harbour Bridge (one of whose supports was last week plastered with a huge 2degrees logo for the launch). By the time tolls were scrapped in 1984, they were costing more to collect than they were contributing to bridge repayments.
Most of the cost of SMS is in wrapping a billing system around it.
The Commerce Commission wants to regulate because it says current rates for provision mobile termination access services are well above cost and a barrier to efficient market entry and expansion.
That mean at least another two or three years of policymaking, politics and litigation, plus the ongoing bureaucratic effort of arguing with large multinationals about their real costs.
Better to do what they did on the Auckland harbour bridge – take away the toll booths, and let the companies compete on signal quality and innovative services. ¶ 12:32 PM 0 comments links to this post
NZ Herald Saturday Aug 08, 2009
Julian Dashper had a work called Curriculum Vitae. His biography and list of exhibitions would be pinned to a gallery wall, taking more space each time.
That vitae part ended on July 30, but the curriculum bit will continue being added to, as people assess the achievement of one of New Zealand's most consistent and challenging artists.
Entering Elam art school in 1978, Dashper cut a large figure with his khaki shirt, umber corduroy trousers and shaggy mop of golden hair.
He came with a dog, a van, every Bob Dylan record and a back story that was obviously improvising with the truth, but so amusing it did not need questioning. The joker's mask protected him from the pressures of the institution and allowed him to get on with his serious purpose of becoming an artist.
In finding a voice Dashper was not shy about working through the slim canon of New Zealand modernism, painting landscapes that referenced giants like Colin McCahon and Toss Woollaston as he assimilated their influence and moved on.
Through the 1980s, in tandem with John Reynolds, he made an art of markings, painterly effects and colour, often squeezing pigment straight from the tube.
Underneath the abstraction was an exploration of the city he traversed as a taxi driver. His father Dick, a former Ministry of Works architect, and mother Madeline, a potter, had developed his appreciation of architectural form and he knew every public artwork or sculptural relief in Auckland. The Tip Top factory, the Sheraton Hotel and other landmarks made their way into his paintings.
Dashper's abandoning of a painterly vocabulary in the early 1990s caught many by surprise, but the clues were there early. His first show while still at Elam, at Frank Stark's 100m2 Gallery, was Motorway Schools, two pairs of Polaroid photographs of Westlake Boys and Westlake Girls high schools, with a tape loop of motorway sounds running in the background.
Reassessing the hot abstract work in light of the cool conceptualism, it's clear the same concerns continued. This was an art about art, aware of its history, modes of production and distribution.
The readymade drum kit emblazoned with a name from the previous generation was an assertion by Dashper that those New Zealand artists were part of the wider stream of modernism, even if for New Zealand modernism was "a car we only get to drive secondhand".
Dashper set out to change that turning himself into an international artist based in New Zealand. That meant travel and residencies building up relationships with artists, galleries and collectors. He also took on limited teaching work, treating students as future colleagues and opening them up to the power of ideas. It meant ideas that could travel and not burn up the budget in freight costs.
Rather than wait for Artforum to notice him, Dashper mocked up a cover featuring himself and inserted it in the magazine as a paid advertisement, after negotiation.
His growing international recognition culminated in a retrospective which toured three state galleries in the American Midwest. There has been no similar attempt by any public gallery here to survey his achievement.
Julian Dashper is survived by his life partner and fellow artist Marie Shannon and their son Leo. ¶ 12:32 PM 0 comments links to this post
There's only a couple of days left to make submissions on proposed legislation governing how copyright affects your internet use.
It follows last year's debacle, in which former culture and heritage minister Judith Tizard and departmental officials used a supplementary order paper to jam a new section into the Copyright Act stuffed with provisions a select committee had already rejected. According to technology law specialist Rick Shera, the regime would have been even worse than that in the United States, where record industry enforcers are winning millions of dollars in damages against hapless downloaders.
Shera says the US Digital Millennium Copyright Act requires actual knowledge of infringement rather than the "reason to believe" in the New Zealand Act, and penalties for people making false or misleading takedown notices.
That's important, because as Judge David Harvey pointed out in a submission to the Telecommunications Carriers Forum, 30 per cent of New Zealand copyright litigation fails because of a failure to prove ownership of copyright, or due to the copyright in question not being governed by New Zealand law.
The new section 92A was not implemented because of public uproar, and officials were instructed to try again. At issue was wording which would have required internet service providers to cut off the accounts of customers suspected of downloading copyrighted material.
On one side are the rights holders, the music and film industries. On the other the ISPs. The two sides have been unable to come up with a voluntary code of practice on how section 92A would operate.
There are also other parties whose interests aren't being properly considered by the proposals - artists, who want to reach an audience and get fair recompense for their efforts, and the audience, which wants a constant diet of new sensation at a reasonable price in a convenient format.
The Ministry of Economic Development says its aim is "to provide a fair and efficient process for rights-holders to deal with repeat copyright infringement in the digital environment". Its current proposal is for an escalating process.
When a rights holder considers its copyright has been breached, it would send an infringement notice to the ISP to be forwarded to the subscriber. If the infringement continues, they will be sent a cease and desist notice, again via their ISP.
If they still won't stop, the rights holder can go to the Copyright Tribunal to demand their identity, and then force them into mediation.
The problem with all this is there is a huge amount of effort going in to fix a broken business model.
The recording and film industries are structured around distribution of physical items - getting bits of shellac or vinyl or plastic into shops, celluloid into cinemas.
More ¶ 12:30 PM 0 comments links to this post
Ever wondered what happens to all that information the Government collects? Think you can make better use of it than the bureaucrats? Need some facts to give your mash-up some muscle?
A new initiative by a group of digital activists aims to identify sources of public information, classify who "owns" it, what licence it is distributed under and if it is free or not. Open government ninja Glen Barnes says the Open Data Catalogue is from open.org.nz's practical manifesto.
"We have paid for that information, and I believe we have a right to it," says Barnes, whose day job involves turning property information into useful applications.
Some information must be kept behind departmental walls to protect individuals' privacy but there is a lot more which can quite safely be let loose.
To make it easier for local bodies and central agencies to let their data out, Barnes is working on an API (application programming interface) for data which is not available in easily digestible formats like Excel or CSV (comma separated values), such as information from websites written in HTML.
Alternate Ad Image Text Goes Here!
He'll take it along for discussion next month at the first open government data bar camp, a user-generated conference to be held at the National Library in Wellington on the weekend of August 29.
"I'm also taking down some work I'm doing on real-time transport information - some of the councils are interested in the concept of how things can happen from that.
"Local bodies often do not have the resources to build websites, but they might make data available for private enterprise to do it."
A typical example is mashing up Google Maps and crime statistics, giving people a visual impression of risk in their town.
Open data scares some agencies and politicians, as evidenced by Education Minister Anne Tolley's contortions when questioned about the league tables her national testing programme will inevitably generate.
It also raises questions about the way government agencies have treated data in the past.
Think of the Companies Office site, which is an excellent and free source of information, but was first designed with the aim of charging fees to offset its development and running costs. It's burdened with some clunky APIs - so for example it's not possible to search which files have been recently updated.
Laurence Millar spent the past five years as government chief information officer trying to streamline the Government's information systems and get better outcomes from its $1.9 billion IT spend.
In his last blog posting as a public servant, Millar wrote of a need to recognise the network effects of opening up government data in a form that means others can access it. ¶ 12:23 PM 0 comments links to this post
Published NZ Herald May 30
What happens when an anthropologist and an artist go in search of a long-dead carver? Some of the results can be seen at Two Rooms in Mark Adams' large-format photos of the work of Ngati Tarawhai carver Tene Waitere (1854-1931).
There is also the accompanying book, published by the University of Otago Press, which is credited not only to Adams and Cambridge University fellow Nicholas Thomas but to Waitere's great-great-grandson James Schuster and carver Lyonel Grant.
The first Waitere work Thomas saw was the Ta Moko panel in the post-Te Maori show, Taonga Maori, which travelled to Australia in 1989. It features three heads, two male with eyes open and one female with eyes closed, rendered in a realistic fashion from a single slab of wood.
It was not in Te Maori - its early 20th century creation, the fact it was not made for a house or traditional use, and even the fact Waitere incised his name on the back made it marginal to the canon of great works that show was arguing for - "but when I saw it I thought it was impressive and interesting", says Thomas.
More ¶ 9:49 PM 0 comments links to this post
In the 18th century a book cost as much as a shirt. Most people only had a couple of shirts - they were an expensive hand-made item. The invention of the papermaking machine at the end of that century and other advances in mechanical binding brought down the price of books, so they are still about the price of the shirt.
But there are a few souls out there keeping older methods of production alive, printing lead type on handmade papers and sewing them up into books. "Marshall McLuhan said when technology becomes obsolete for industry it becomes available for art," says Peter Simpson, publisher of the Holloway Press, which is celebrating its 15th anniversary with a burst of activity.
Fine press printing has been an important undercurrent in New Zealand cultural history, as pioneering printers like Bob Lowry, Pat Dobbie, Robin Lush and Ron Holloway in Auckland, and Dennis Glover and Leo Bensemann in Christchurch, ran off small editions of poetry, prose, criticism and typographical fantasies that recorded and fuelled the literary underground.
The coming together at Auckland University 15 years ago of Simpson, a specialist in New Zealand art and literary history, with poet and printer Alan Loney, led to the creation of the Holloway Press, named after Holloway, who donated some of his equipment and archives.
Loney moved to Melbourne in 1998, but after a short hiatus Simpson carried on as publisher, and his retirement from teaching at the university's English department at the end of last year has given him more time to devote to the press.
Two books have come out over the past month: Fishwork, a collaboration between Loney and New York-based expatriate artist Max Gimblett; and The Fruits Of, a retelling by writer Murray Edmond and photographer Joanna Forsberg of Apuleius' Eros and Psyche story from the 2nd century AD.
"I invited Alan to contribute because he had never done a book for the press of his own writing, and it made sense he print it," Simpson says.
The collaboration with Gimblett was established early on when the press published his illustrations to Robert Creely's 1995 poem Mad Dogs of Auckland. In 2006 it published Searchings, a selection by Loney from the artist's private journals and sketchbooks.
"For Fishwork, Max had done a series of figurative paintings, which is unusual for him. Alan saw them in his studio and was so struck by them he wrote poems about each of the nine paintings. Then Max responded to the poems by doing drawings for books."
The deluxe edition of 30, which includes an original artwork by Gimblett, has a gold cover and comes in a slipcase, and costs $2000 compared with $700 for the standard edition of 50 copies.
That price reflects the high production costs of the materials and the effort to co-ordinate the project across three countries, as well as the unusual layout - because Gimblett wanted his drawings to run across two pages with the text placed over or around them, each page is treated as a single signature and sewed in separately to the spine.
"This book was signed up a year ago, and the change in the economy means it's a nerve-racking situation producing luxury books but the libraries are still buying," Simpson says.
"If you think of the books in relation to the art economy, they are not all that expensive. I'm also giving work to a lot of people - the typesetters, platemakers, binders, the printer."
The Fruits Of was printed by the press' usual printer, Tara McLeod, as boxed unbound leaves in an edition of 35, selling for $650.
Simpson says the press has come to reflect his interest in the crossover between art and literature, as well as flying the flag for colleagues like Edmond and others associated with the university.
"It is a university press and I see it partly as a vehicle for university artists and writers. If you look at who we have published, it's pretty much the A list - Colin McCahon, Alan Curnow, Kendrick Smithyman.
"A lot of hand press books are beautiful to look at but boring to read. I won't print anything where the material is not worthy of publication in its own right," Simpson says.
"I believe our New Zealand traditions are richer and more interesting than we are given credit for. There are certain narratives that have taken over New Zealand art history and literature history. I am interested in going behind those master narratives and renovating them. I'm interested in someone like Leo Bensemann, because he has been dropped out of the narrative.
"When you put him in, it becomes so much more interesting - here was someone not doing realistic landscapes of Canterbury but weird drawings based on the Brothers Grimm and Dr Faustus.
"That is part of the role of the Holloway Press, bringing stuff out of the archive that complicates the texture of the history. It's a small and new enough culture, we don't need to make it smaller and more linear than it actually is." Alan Loney says his own printing history was influenced by the example of Keith Maslin at the Bibliography Room of the University of Otago and the late Don McLeod at Victoria University's Wai-te-ata Press.
"They published books of contemporary poetry, they hand set the type, hand fed the printer and folded the covers.
"I modelled my work on theirs and found them of continuing interest and value. When I started I was publishing poetry, which I also happened to print, so I eventually became a printer."
He was driven to self-publishing by the typographical demands of his own poems, which use a lot of internal spacing.
"I think the basis of typographical accuracy to poems as they were written is difficult for some poets in New Zealand," Loney says, citing Smithyman's occasional practice of not putting a space between a full stop and the first word of the next sentence.
"If I am printing a text I presume the poet is taking care of what they are doing, and my job is to be accurate to that, not to play the editor."
Loney says starting the Holloway Press "is one of the best things I have done in my printing life.
"It enabled me to make books I couldn't possibly have made on my own and I think a university press like Holloway Press permits the continued production of books that are special, that are different, that the commercial world does not tend to pick up on so it creates extra opportunities for writers which simply do not exist in the commercial realm."
On Simpson's list of books to do is a second book drawn from material in the Len Lye archives by Roger Horrocks, an unpublished James K. Baxter poem and a celebration of the work of Bob Lowry.
The umbrella of the press could also be used to hold events such as symposia.
There is online production - Simpson has put up an annotated archive of the complete poems of Kendrick Smithyman on his Mudflat Webworks site.
"It's just too big to be published as a book in this country," he says.
There is also an anniversary sale now on, with steep discounts on the back list. ¶ 12:03 PM 0 comments links to this post
Roger Ballen's photographs journey from the disturbing documentary images of his early series in rural South Africa to the disturbed interiors of his recent compositions, taken around Johannesburg.
It started with a journey, with the young American hitting the hippie highway in 1973 and travelling overland from Cairo to Cape Town.
"I stayed awhile, then went on another journey from Istanbul to New Guinea before going back to America in 1977," says Ballen.
His first book, Boyhood, was drawn from pictures taken during those travels, but his name was made by the work he did after returning to his wife's country of South Africa in the early 1980s, which is included in the retrospective at AUT University's St Paul St Gallery.
Ballen has been seeing the world through a lens since he was a small boy. "My mother started one of the first photography galleries in New York in the 1960s, and I got seriously interested. I knew the leading photographers of the time."
That interest gave him a comprehensive understanding of the craft, but it didn't extend to wanting to become a commercial photographer or a photojournalist - the options for a photographer in the era before photography was considered a proper art.
Instead he secured a PhD in geology and mineral exploration, and continued to take pictures as a hobby. Prospecting in the back blocks of South Africa, Ballen would shelter from the heat of the day by knocking on people's doors.
From those encounters came the images in his first important collection, Dorps, Small Towns of South Africa. The following book, Platteland, extended the ideas and created sufficient impact for Ballen to seek interest outside the country.
"My early pictures were more documentary in terms of the questions I was asking, and the images were more about the culture I was in. For the Dorps project the question was, 'What is the unique aesthetic sensibility of these small towns?'.
"In Platteland, the pictures of poor white South Africans on the margins were a metaphor for emotional states."
By the mid-90s, when he settled in Johannesburg and pursued photography fulltime, the work was becoming increasingly complex and metaphorical. The next collection, Outland, took a more theatrical approach, with its subjects performing in mysterious tableaux.
"They would add something, I would add something. I was asking questions like how would people deal with their ultimate fear, how would they deal with shadows."
That exploration of metaphor continued in later collections like Fact of Fiction, Shadow Chamber, and the most recent, Boarding House, in which fragmentary human or animal subjects compete with drawn and stained walls, worn out furniture, grime and mysterious sculptures.
¶ 10:29 AM 0 comments links to this post
Pic Kenny Rodger: Barry Linton (front) with Kelly (left) and Darren Sheehan and Dylan Horrocks.
IN 1961 Roy Lichenstein painted Look Mickey in response to a dare from one of his sons to match the quality of a Disney comic. The challenge turned him from a lately arrived Abstract Expressionist to a pioneer of Pop, but half a century later the relationship between comics and art is still fertile ground for debate.
Lichenstein himself had largely moved on from sourcing images from popular comics by 1965 - looking at his paintings in the flesh you realise the popular image is a misinterpretation, and his concerns were surface and space and colour and how the eye responds. Comics gave him something to paint, but the painting was the bit that interested him.
The debate continues at Bath St, with some of our more maverick comic artists and some artists who use comics for image-making.
Dylan Horrocks, who is represented by panels from his great Hicksville series, two pages from the 2000 story called Western Wind and some colour originals from the Milo's Week comic strip drawn for the NZ Listener in the mid-1990s, gets prickly about the difference between comics and "gallery art".
"Ultimately I guess I'm just not that interested in the distinction. I sometimes get a lot out of looking at paintings as 'comics' - Art Spiegelman once said Picasso is a great cartoonist - but I also have spent much of the last several years exploring the pictures in comics as individual drawings, rather than merely storytelling tools," says Horrocks, adding that the differences "are probably about milieu and markets and subcultures, rather than the work itself".
Rob McLeod, who is showing his 2007 painting Bridesmaid, is unwilling to give up any ground, despite his plunder of cartoon forms.
"I am very protective of painting's territory. I want to establish boundaries by pushing at them, not breaking down barriers. It's important that my work is always recognised as painting," says McLeod.
Denys Watkins is more conciliatory, saying the "art crowd" doesn't get the crossover with comics. As well as Lichenstein, he points to Philip Guston's reversion from pure abstraction to imagery, guided in his exploration of the human condition by George Herriman's Krazy Kat and Robert Crumb.
"For me, Hogarth was the first in this genre. The Rake's Progress was a big influence in subject and drawing."
It was also a work interpreted by David Hockney as a student at the Royal College in London a few years ahead of Watkins. "Being a line and tone man, my early influences were Ginger Meggs and Dagwood in the newspapers. I then expanded to Beano and Disney, graduated to Crumb in the 60s, and have a great respect for the influence of Mad and the iconic skills of Marvel and Eagle."
Many of the American artists he likes, such as Peter Saul, John Wesley, Jim Nutt, and Sue Williams, display some of the drawing skills associated with cartooning.
"Back home, I have to say that only Dick Frizzell, Tom Kreisler and myself had a take on this from my generation, and this came from a love of drawing and the emotive information you can get from such simple apparatus," Watkins says.
McLeod dates his use of comics to 1973, soon after he arrived in New Zealand from Glasgow. "It wasn't so much comics as the newspaper strips, The Wizard of Id in particular and the characters' noses to be specific."
Much of the work from that period was never shown, and McLeod then went "on the road to abstraction". The cartoons returned in the 1990s, even though the paintings looked abstract.
"I finally acknowledged the figurative element in Meet Mutant Mickey, an important work from 2000. Full-blown figuration took over. I started looking at comics again and referring to certain characters: Mickey, Goofy, Daffy Duck, Tweety Bird. But not post-modernly appropriating them. They get twisted to my ends."
Horrocks says comics ignore borders. "Comics tend to be equally engaged with art and literature, and are really both." He says comic artists in the show are some way outside the mainstream, have zero interest in superheroes, and are producing distinctly "local" work.
"Barry Linton and Tim Bollinger, especially, have a very deeply Pacific feel. One of Tim's stories in this show is about the so-called 'terror raids' against Tuhoe and his other story transplants Noah and the flood to contemporary Wellington. Tim's work often has a very strong sense of place to it, especially his Wellington stories.
"Barry's been off on his own unique path for years, creating work that's unlike anything else. He's totally his own man - and he's had very little to do with wider comics cultures, especially the commercial industry, which he probably views with contempt."
Linton sees himself as carrying on an ancient tradition of blending words and pictures for instant and direct communication, saying, "It's as complex as stage or screen art. Its potential is depraved by commerce, but it thrives in secret globally."
Exhibition
What: The Comics Show: Comic book pages by Tim Bollinger, Dylan Horrocks, Barry Linton, Darren and Kelly Sheehan; paintings by Mark Braunias, Dick Frizzell, Rob McLeod and Denys Watkins
Where and when: Bath St Gallery, 43 Bath St, Parnell, to April 25
More... ¶ 7:28 AM 0 comments links to this post
