Lecture: Distance looks away: what does New Zealand art mean now?

06.10.2012

Lecture by Aaron Kreisler (Curator)

The starting point for this talk makes reference to a key book of essays, “Distance Looks our Way: The Effects of Remoteness on New Zealand” (1961), which traced the growing concerns of writers, artists, and academics in the Second World War and immediate post-war period who sought a new language/vision that was identifiably New Zealand. It posits this set of texts front and center because in a number of respects a discussion about the birth, development, and anxieties of a New Zealand contemporary art scene is something that has concerned a number of artists, art writers, and academics in this country over a sustained period and is still very prescient. Where New Zealand exists in an international framework or with respect to the center/s is of particular interest these days, especially when we are investing in significant art outings, but, as the New Zealand art writer and academic Wystan Curnow notes, maybe there are some important questions that we should be asking such as:

“… do these scenes, which now wait upon the centre, presage a further expansion of its borders, and a further reconsideration of postwar art history? Or do they represent the latest addition of fresh emigrant faces from these various scenes which serve to confirm its authority?”(1)

The power of being on the geo-political margins has been and continues to be a concern for New Zealanders. This paper will make reference to some of these issues while it responds to some of the artists, artworks, and ideas put forward in “Contact. Art from Aotearoa/New Zealand.”

(1: Wyston Curnow, “Writing History on the Margins: New Zealand,” conference paper in Wroclaw Poland, June 1999)