Art memories

Gordon Crook and I were photographing the work above in his garden recently in preparation for his exhibition Smoke. Afterwards he wrote to say he had remembered where the image 'came' from:



"Due to the enormous amount of research reading I did on previous shows, I wanted to pitch in straightaway and work spontaneously, ignoring the chore of research. I bought sketchbooks and let the images flow. So appeared the odd drawing of 'a man smoking a pipe' (above) though there was no pipe to be seen, and was that actually smoke issuing from his mouth? The drawing fascinating me, and I decided to concentrate on this compelling puzzle. It soon reminded me of an uncle I sometimes visited. He was shell-shocked during the Great War and lived with my grandfather and other uncles and Aunt Mabel. I would sit at the tea table with Mother and the others. Shell-shocked Ben (see painting below) would take a plug of navy tobacco from his pocket and pare shavings of it with a penknife into his pipe. After a few well-focused puffs a plume of foul-smelling smoke would hit the blackened ceiling. His face a picture of contentment.



I wanted to use this theme of smoke and smoking. But to bby-pass the cultural history - its film star charm and the ad fads of the thirties, the settlers introducing this terrible addiction to Maori, and so on. However I was no nearer to solving the mystery of that corkscrew emanation- what it might mean. In a sudden flash I recalled a small tapestry I had woven that was hung in the library at Victoria University. A similar head ans similar emanation. I did not know then what it was - but now I do - it is the 'breath of life'.

The form of the head - the why if it - eluded me. I made a Marquette of it for a garden sculpture thinking it could be enlarged like a stone mason's graveyard angel or to my aspiration of a Rodin bronze... Mary-Jane was taking photos of it when the sun shone straight through his nostril. Ureaka! It was Sunny Jim. Rag doll mascot of the cereal called FORCE given to me for breakfast when I was a child. I saved the packet tops and sent them away and back came Sunny Jim. He has rested unbeknown to me in my mind ever since - long ago wandering along with another Sunny Jim I acquired when I was thirty-six.

He was part of me associated with my uncle Cecil Aldin from whom, said my mother, I had inherited my artistic talent... He made toys for Liberty's with my father, and painted popular 'horse and hounds' pictures for many a country pub, the huntsmen in the red jacket like Sunny Jim.

High o'er the fence leaps Sunny Jim
Force is the food that raises him.

Whatever you say, wherever you've been
You can't beat the cereal, that raised Sunny Jim."

Photography is the new painting

A client visited the gallery recently to look at I Must Behave by Bruce Connew. She surprised me with a question about the validity of photography as an art form... "It is so reproducible." I was stunned - I didn't have a comeback. But what I should have said was "Everything is reproducible in the 21st century, but that certainly doesn't preclude the creation of great images in any media." And of course we all take photographs, but the real skill, the art, is in the production of the image as object - the texture, the quality of the image on the paper. This is the acid test - the translation from the screen to the wall.

And of course photography has its own tricks and knowledge and accidents and wonder that distinguish it from other media without detracting from its appeal. It can reference painting, it can reference its own traditions and practitioners - like any art form it does wherever it wants. I mean look at the image above by Bruce Connew. Gorgeous.

Behaving

Bruce Connew's exhibition I Must Behave includes 14 framed photographs. The I Must Behave series is made up of 90 images. Featured here are two images from the series not included in the exhibition.



I Must Behave takes a sideways look at behaviour. It examines the notion that wherever we are, we are controlled by social, cultural, and political forces.

Censored

Bruce Connew's new exhibition I Must Behave includes his work Censored, recently a finalist in the Waikato Art Awards. Censored is undoubtedly a major work by one of New Zealand's foremost photographers. It will also be published in the May issue of Granta.

Here's what Bruce says about it:
"While in Zhongshan, China, during May 2008, I bought a copy of National Geographic magazine's May 2008, pre-Olympic Games, special issue on China. The magazine was plastic sealed. I cut it open back at my hotel. I removed the plastic, and leisurely thumbed my way through the fresh magazine, reaching page 46, and couldn't help but notice two-and-a-bit lines on the left-hand page excised with heavy black ink. Ah, censored, I deduced, and just 80-odd days out from the Olympic Games. Angled against the light, I could read the excised words, " . . . the Japanese invasion to the Cultural Revolution to the massacre around Tiananmen Square in 1989." Oh dear, that was curiously provocative of National Geographic. I thumbed some more. I came to a page that felt thicker than the others, and figured it was a three-page fold-out; but no, it was a double-page spread that had been glued together. Astonishing - this magazine was turning out to be a collector's item.

I moved along. Two more double-page spreads glued together. I must have spent an hour carefully prising them apart. They had been glued around the bright, red-ink border of each double-page, as if the border had been made for the task, and then the censor had pressed his/her glue stick in a full-page, neatly-formed, marvellously symbolic, diagonal cross that, when prised apart, tore at the printer's ink, immortalising the censor's work, and a government's meaning. This is when I discovered National Geographic had been truly, and improbably, confrontational. Each glued double-page spread dealt with a sensitive, political issue, using, mostly, art works by Chinese artist, some of which had been previously banned."

Victor Berezovsky's "Portal"

In February Victor Berezovsky will begin the installation of his Portal (pictured above) on the facade of the Freyburg Pool in Wellington's Oriental Bay. Portal is designed to draw attention to one of Wellington most iconic twentieth century buildings, and to reference the activities that take place inside.

Smoking with Gordon Crook

The three prints by Gordon Crook included in May Contain Nuts give the flavour of a new series of work that will be shown at the gallery in March 09. The central motif of Gordon's new exhibition will be smoking in all its many forms.

Anna-Marie O'Brien and the Rabbits

The Meeting of the Anti-Natal Class and New Father's Support Group by Anna-Marie O'Brien, look like sweet rabbit paintings. The titles of Anna-Marie's work are always important. They provide the key to their real meaning...