Book review
New Art: Some Recent New Zealand Sculpture and Post-Object Art, edited by Jim Allen and Wystan Curnow
published by Heinemann Educational Books, Auckland 1976 (95 pages, $13.00)
Reviewed by ANTHONY GREEN
I've been waiting for this book to appear for a long time, hearing about the gathering of it from Wystan Curnow. It's like a map of the sculpture of the last few years. It's also a kind of obituary. Just as the book appears Jim Allen has taken a job in Australia, Bruce Barber is in Nova Scotia and Kieran Lyons has gone back to Britain. One wonders whether that scene can go on now. What is most going to be missed is Jim's energy: all the things he did, organising, getting sponsors, getting work shown, teaching, doing works of his own - amazing, when, how did he find time? And his best work O-AR came too late for the book.
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| KIERAN LYONS Spring from the Cross photograph by Bryony Dalefield |
But what about the book? It's something very unusual. And the most unusual thing about it is that it was put together from the material, photographs and writings, that the sculptors chose. The editors were there to receive it and put it in print, not to do what is usually done with books coming from a 'movement', with manifestoes, high-brow deliberate obscurities, rarely more than merchandising of art. The introduction will show how clean this book is. A statement of how the book was put together, that's all. It starts with a dedication - to Len Lye, the one New Zealand artist who was a force early in the modern movement (see elsewhere in this issue), and who goes on being a force - it's unsigned but obviously by Wystan Curnow, and the only account of Len Lye's work that I know of in New Zealand - the place and the language. The care in the book and the art do surely honour Len Lye.
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| JIM ALLEN Body Articulation / Imprint photographs by Bryony Dalefield |
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The advantage of assembling working drawings, sculptors' statements, taped conversations, photographs, portraits, working notes, is that you get direct artist's text: and you get too, in this book, commentary, not criticism in the journalistic sense, and a piece of writing by a most careful participant-spectator, a model of the kind of attention needed to enjoy the sculpture that Jim and his associates were working with. But the book is more catholic than that: Don Driver is in there and so is Greer Twiss, independents, and good ones (that is, they have not done work that is performance rather than object-making).
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MAREE HOMER Chair |
It's not that the others are somehow weak dependents of Jim Allen, but that they were all talking with one another and all engaged with opening up possibilities for sculpture that led away from objects towards performances. Or to making spaces that you walk in, which are given form by your actions as well as the sculptor's, a place where you and the sculptor can meet. The space as go-between, or medium.
That work carried over into the making of the book. It takes its shape from the material it has to present. The variety is the variety of the sculptors, their different concerns, their insistences: a marvellous record of people and what they've done. The glossiest of periodicals hardly manage to leave their spaces so clear for the character of the art to come through. It's difficult to make out at first where the editors are in this book, they lend themselves so completely to making the facts known, for the reader to come to his own terms with the works shown - or all that's now left of the works, several of which were performances, having no other public record.
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Stage in the performance of Bucket Action by Bruce Barber |
The photographs and lay-out and type have been given great care; the space and colour springs from the same concerns as the sculptors'. It must be one of the loveliest commercially-printed books that New Zealand has seen for some while. Colin Maclaren's lay-out and Bryony Dalefield's photographs are very good to look at. The texts are all good reading, particularly the taped talking about Bruce Barber's Bucket Action. One hears the voices warmed by their excitement, and one hears the intimate concern with details of performance, the ways in which those details are attended to by the speakers. Bruce Barber: '. .. and it was absurd and I disliked the wet-suit intensely because it didn't flatter me..' Jim Allen:'... the next morning it was still heavy and wet and it really was like a stinking skin. ..' Or Greer Twiss's simple sentences: 'I often cast direct from life - why model a life-size hand when you can take a direct cast: virtuosity has no place in communication.'
Anthony Green is Professor of Art History at the University of Auckland and editor of the Bulletin of New Zealand Art History.
Originally published in Art New Zealand 5 April/May 1977