As himself

Giovanni Intra appears as himself in Chris Kraus’s latest novel Summer of hate. Kraus, who spent time in New Zealand when her father worked here in the seventies, became a friend of Intra’s in LA around the time he and a Steve Hansen set up China Art Objects the first dealer gallery to move into LA’s Chinatown. You can read more about the book and Kraus here at GalleristNY 
Image: Giovanni Intra 2001

One day in the publisher’s office

Editor: I think it’s about time we did another big New Zealand art book. 

Publisher: Lavish. 

E: Huh? 

P: Lavish. Art books. We call them lavish. You know, not big, Lavish. Or sometimes big and lavish. But never just big. 

E: OK then, a lavish art book. Something that picks up the threads and weaves them together to create an image of our culture. 

P: A history of painting in other words. 

E: I was thinking more than that, like, you know, sculpture, photography, performance, installation, video .... 

P: No, no, let’s stick with painting. Less complicated, more popular. It's what people expect when the see the word art.

E: But we already have a book on New Zealand painting. 

P: We do? 

E: Yes. 200 years of New Zealand Painting. We published it back in 1971. 

P: Great. Then let’s update it. 

E: We already did. 

P: Damn. How long ago? 

E: 1990 

P: But that was … I don’t know … lots of years ago. 

 E: Eleven. 

P: Brilliant! We could call it the cricket update then. Maybe get Martin Crowe to do an intro. 

E: I’m sure I can find some art person to do it ... hopefully. 

P: Oh… OK. (counting on fingers) I’ve even got a title. Ready? 

E: (on the verge of tears) What? 

P: It's obvious really. 241 Years of New Zealand Painting. 

Which is almost what they did.

Dream time

Now that the barriers between design and the visual arts are easing, this is the perfect time to take another look at what used to be called commercial art. Fortunately one of the most beautiful and comprehensive reviews of one area of such design has just been published and it's all about NZ. Selling the dream: the art of early New Zealand tourism comes from the publisher Craig Potton and has been conceptualised, assembled and designed and by Peter Alsop, Gary Stewart and Dave Bamford. That it's the result of dedicated collecting and researching over a very long time is evident on every gorgeous page. 

One thing you notice is how many of the images that feature in the book are by unknown artists. While there are the well-known visual art-crossover names like Leonard Mitchell, Marcus King Russell Clark and John Holmwood, most of the credits are for anonymous artists at work in places like the Tourist Department and the Railways Department. This makes it a real Wellington book as the government departments running NZ tourism were based in that city for so long. There's a lot of amazing new material to discover and some stunning images. One favourite is Leonard Mitchell’s classic man alone on a mountain top which we remember bowling American art historian Charles Eldredge for a six when he was curating the touring exhibition of New Zealand art Pacific Parallels.

Will there ever be a better book than this one on New Zealand’s unsung commercial designers? It’s hard to imagine looking at what a terrific job has been done here. 

Image: Left: Selling the dream. Right, an illustration titled The great Franz Joseph Glacier by Leonard Mitchell for Scenic playground of the Pacific published by the Tourist Department around 1935

A day for Knight

The latest Artforum fell out of our mailbox yesterday. Fortunately we were able to jump back in time so we weren’t injured. It’s the Fiftieth anniversary issue and by far the fattest edition (550 pages, just under two kilos) of a magazine that has grown its girth with the market over the last 30 or so years. 

This anniversary seems the right moment to remember the personal association New Zealand has had with Artforum thanks to one of its Publishers, Knight Landesman. Knight has visited several times and he has been an indefatigable host to New Zealanders in New York. Anyone who has done the Saturday gallery round with Knight comes away with two things. One, how everybody (no exceptions) in the New York art world knows Knight and how all of them (ok, maybe there is one who doesn’t) seem to love him, and two, how you need a full Sunday to recover. 

Someone once said you could analyse the art market’s health by making a bar chart of a year’s worth of Artforums and watching the piles grow and diminish. If that’s the case, recession or no recession, the international art market is in awesome good health.