Venice 2015
October 19, 2011 – 5:58 pm by Andrew Paul WoodSend Neil and Fiona Pardington to represent New Zealand at the 2015 Venice Biennale. That is all.
200 Years of Heinrich von Kleist – Why He Still Matters
October 16, 2011 – 9:34 pm by Andrew Paul WoodThis year 2011 marks the 200th anniversary of the death of Heinrich von Kleist, one of the great German writers of the nineteenth century. You can read his biography here but what I really want to concentrate on is his relevance now – relevance that few Romantic writers can be said to have for the present. An obvious one is the way Kleist’s “Über das Marionettentheater” informs the entire theory of modern performance. I write this having just been performing in the play Earthquake in Chile by Christchurch’s Free Theatre based on Kleist’s novella Das Erdbeben in Chili (1807) Kleist’s story tells of a brief utopian breaking down of cruel social hierarchies following the Chilean earthquake of 1647. Sadly, eventually the bent branch of peace and friendship eventually springs back, the Angel lowers his fiery sword once more before the gate of Eden, and it’s business as usual with the ...
This delightful and unexpected outburst occurs in the Epilogue of Robert Hughes new book Rome. Te Papa take note:
August 24, 2011 – 2:19 am by Andrew Paul Wood“Painting and sculpture are silent arts, and deserve silence (not phoney reverence, just quiet) from those who look at them. Let it be inscribed on the portals of the world’s museums: What you will see in here is not meant to be a social experience. Shut up and use your eyes. Groups with guides etc., admitted Wednesdays only, 11 a.m. – 4 p.m. Otherwise, just shut the fuck up, please pretty please, if you can, if you don’t mind, if you won’t burst. We have come a long way to look at these objects too. We have not done so to listen to your golden words. Capisce?”
WHY TALL POPPY SYNDROME IS A GOOD THING SOMETIMES
August 24, 2011 – 2:18 am by Andrew Paul WoodAccording to the Roman author Livy, writing about five centuries later, King Tarquin the Arrogant and his son Sextus Tarquinius (whom Classicists and Shakespeare scholars will recall would grow up to rape Lucretia, triggering the overthrow of Etruscan rule and the foundation of the Roman Republic) were one day wandering in the royal gardens. As they passed a bed of poppies, Tarquin senior began chopping off the heads of the tallest ones as a visual aid to explain to junior how one should treat the leading citizens of a conquered town in order to prevent future rebellions. This little story has bequeathed to us the popular Antipodean expression “Tall Poppy Syndrome” – the Great Kiwi Knocking Machine. Often those of us who aspire to greatness decry the New Zealand crab bucket (any crab that tries to climb out gets dragged back in by the others and all end up in the ...
Is Tintin gay?
July 2, 2011 – 8:42 pm by Andrew Paul WoodEvery time I read a movie magazine Peter Jackson seems to be raping my childhood. Lord of the Rings was bad enough, and The Hobbit will be worse – but not Tintin, please leave me that much. It was bad enough finding out that Tintin’s Belgian creator Herge might have been a Nazi collaborator [Goddin, Philippe (2008) Hergé. Levenslijnen. Biografie. Moulinsart. pp. 330] but now Sir Peter will ruin it further with pompous overripe Hollywood bloat and obtrusive self-indulgent fanboyism. However, it may just be the gayest film this side of Brokeback Mountain. Consider the evidence. Tintin is a snappy dresser with a quiff. He lives alone in a chateau (“Marlinspike” for heaven’s sake) with a sailor. He has a little white dog (who in the original French utters particularly camp and bitchy asides compared with the translation), his best woman friend is an opera diva, and he seems to spend ...
John Reynolds, This is an intervention because we care…
July 2, 2011 – 8:26 pm by Andrew Paul WoodBeing an art critic, like smoking, is a slow form of suicide. Maybe it’s more like being a cop in Mexico – they give you a uniform and a gun, but you have to sort your wages out for yourself. Anyway, Saturday night, unable to face another morrow of Haricots cuite a la boîte (I say it in bogus menu French because it’s less depressing that way) I rifled around in my couch cushions and various jacket pockets and managed to gather together a small jingling trove of shrapnel. Sunday morning I took My Precious to Vic’s Café to invest in a coffee, muffin and Sunday Star Times with which to succour myself with amid the ruins of Carlton Corner. Unfortunately, I happened to read that John Reynolds is now designing the packaging for a brand of toilet cleaner Several latté dowsed customers and a Heimlich manoeuvre later I paused to consider ...
The latest from CoCA
June 7, 2011 – 5:44 am by Andrew Paul WoodWhen Christchurch was a very young city, a bunch of artists and like-minded folk got together to encourage and support art making and exhibition in this place. They established the CSA and held their first exhibition 130 years ago. That same organisation still wants to encourage and support the making and exhibition of art in Christchurch and Canterbury - but what's the best way to do that now and into the future? COCA has been closed since the earthquake. We now have an empty building, no staff and no programme. We do have a draft vision and we need your input to make sure that, when we do reopen, the gallery is relevant, challenging and exciting. What would you like to see happen at the Centre of Contemporary Art? How do you think the Centre of Contemporary Art could best encourage art making and exhibition in Christchurch over ...
Alphaville: Krautrock Valhalla
June 6, 2011 – 7:19 pm by Andrew Paul WoodLong before I read Goethe, Rilke, Schiller and Mann; long before I saw a Caspar David Friedrich or Anselm Kiefer painting; and with far more impact on my wee tortured soul than Bach and Beethoven combined (I draw the line at Wagner, it’s like being gang raped by an orchestra), Alphaville turned me into a rampant and committed Germanophile. OK, they did not quite have the sophistication of Kraftwerk who had studied under Stockhausen in Düsseldorf, but the keening emotion of Marian Gold’s (Hartwig Schierbaum) Mitteleuropan accent and the synth riffs caught me and held me fast. Their sequencer reached deep into my chromosomes and turned me queerer than a David Hockney swimming pool. On your knees, peasants and give thanks to Germany for Nena (“99 Luftballons” in which the colour red features nowhere), Horst Jankowski (“A Walk in the Black Forest”), and Harold Faltermeyer (“Axel F”). David Bowie didn’t even ...
TWO POEMS FROM THE FRENCH OF LECONTE DE LISLE
May 29, 2011 – 10:03 pm by Andrew Paul WoodTHE ALBATROSS In the vast span of Capricorn at the pole The wind bellows, roars, whistles, rattles and howls, And leaps across the Atlantic's furious White slime. It dashes and scrapes The wan water that it chases and dissipates into mist; It bites, rips, tears and slices the clouds Into convulsive fragments where sudden flashes bleed; It seizes, envelopes and tumbles in the air A whirling confusion of shrill cries and feathers That he shakes and that he drags with crests of foam, Hammering the breasts of the massive sperm whales, Mingled with their monstrous howling sobs. Only the king of space and shoreless seas Flies against the onslaught of wild gusts. From a powerful and safe way, without haste or delay, The eye darted across the livid fog Its wings stretched rigidly like iron It splits the whirlwind of raucous extended And quiet amidst the terrible, Comes, passes and disappears majestically. THE JAGUAR'S DREAM Under dark mahogany trees, blossoming vines, In the heavy air, motionless and saturated with flies Hang, winding down ...
WHY WEIWEI? CONTEMPORARY CHINESE ART IN THE INTERNATIONAL CONTEXT
April 30, 2011 – 10:27 pm by Andrew Paul WoodAn elegant, poised, and handsome young man, well versed in canons and histories, everyone calls him a teacher, or addresses him as a scholar, but he fails to obtain an official position, and he does not know how to farm. He wears only a shabby gown in winter, totally ruined by books. - Han Shan, Tang Dynasty, (Trns & Ed) Tony Barnstone & Chou Ping (2005), The Anchor Book of Chinese Poetry, New York: RandomHouse/Anchor, p202. - Contemporary Chinese art is a mixed proposition that ranges from safely apolitical neo-pop art, through a mélange of more intellectual attempts to marry western conceptualism with Chinese aesthetic traditions – some surreptitiously slipping in earnest, but usually heavily disguised questions about social justice and human rights – through to the downright macabre like Bodies: The Exhibition though not so bizarre given the pickled European hospital museums of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries and the stomach-churning Viennese Actionist happenings of the 1960s. It ...
