Radio New Zealand

February 21, 2010 – 6:23 pm by Andrew Paul Wood

To continue with my theme of bashing National for bashing art, let us now turn to the cuts demanded of that most innofensive of cultural roosters, Radio New Zealand. Broadcasting Minister Jonathan Coleman is a medical doctor by profession (presumably of the hacking bits off school rather than the treat the body holistically and keep it healthy kind), so one really does have to wonder what the hell he would know about broadcasting that he should be getting aggressive with a little island of civilisation in a sea of commercial crap. I include a cross-section of the debate below, but it looks to me like the shop keepers-cum-brown shirts have arrived. http://www.stuff.co.nz/marlborough-express/news/opinion/3358578/Editorial-Hackles-raised-over-Radio-NZ http://www.nzherald.co.nz/politics/news/article.cfm?c_id=280&objectid=10627121 http://www.nzherald.co.nz/technology/news/article.cfm?c_id=5&objectid=10627764 http://www.guide2.co.nz/politics/news/english-criticises-doc-and-rnz/11/14373 http://pacific.scoop.co.nz/2010/02/joining-the-dots-on-nationals-public-broadcasting-policies/ http://www.stuff.co.nz/sunday-star-times/opinion/3354408/Broadcaster-tunes-in-to-welfare-state

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Art in schools

February 14, 2010 – 8:04 pm by Andrew Paul Wood

I have a problem with the way Right-ish governments treat the arts. Actually, I have a problem with the Right in general. Not that I’m particularly pro-Labour, you understand (any ideologies I subscribe to are strictly ad hoc), but rather I am profoundly anti-National and Act. This is because I have a humanities background and am thus able to think critically on occasion. National doesn’t like most intellectuals. Recall, if you will, one of their main attack points on Labour was the number of academics in the cabinet. Apparently, according to the National way of thinking (which, of course, is not to think at all because thinking is hard) academics know nothing about what families need, presumably because academics reproduce by asexual budding and fart hundred dollar bills. Paging Pol Pot. I find this interesting, because National chooses social policy ministers who have absolutely no technical expertise of academic training in ...

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From icanhascheeburger.com – an excellent definition of art

January 12, 2010 – 8:01 pm by Andrew Paul Wood

see more Lolcats and funny pictures

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Air New Zealand’s New Uniforms

January 10, 2010 – 6:06 pm by Andrew Paul Wood

Oh my Gawd! WTF? They have gone from drab Thunderbirds in mourning by Zambesi, to a dress by Trelise "explosion in granny's closet" Cooper that I swear I last saw on Dame Edna circa 1988. Perhaps the American historian Robin Winks was correct. When he came here in 1953 on a Fulbright Scholarship, he came to the conclusion that the ubiquitous nature of school uniforms in NZ meant that we never learned how to dress ourselves. Air NZ CEO Rob Fyfe (the best looking CEO of any major NZ enterprise, it must be said) should really ask himself "would I wear this?" No dear, you don't have the legs. Does this Boeing 747 400 make my arse look big?

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IF YOU LIKED AVATAR, YOU WILL LOVE…

January 5, 2010 – 5:11 pm by Andrew Paul Wood

Given that everything that Hollywood has produced since ET is derivative, it strikes me that if you enjoyed the movie Avatar, you will probably enjoy the following novels exploring similar themes – I know I do: The Sparrow, Maria Doria Russell, 1996. The Left hand of Darkness, 1969, and The Word for World is Forest, 1972, Ursula K. Le Guin. A Stranger in a Strange Land, Robert A. Heinlein, 1961. Cycle of Fire, Hal Clement, 1957. The Winds of Altair, Ben Bova, 1983. King of Argent, John Phillifent, 1963. The Dune series by Frank Herbert, 1965-1983, but not the inferior cynical cash-in prequels by his son. Transfigurations, Michael Bishop, 1979. Alien Influences, Kristine Kathryn Rusch, 1995. Brightness Falls from the Air, James Tiptree Jr, 1985. Night of Light, Philip José Farmer, 1966. Leviathan’s Deep, Jayge Carr, 1979. The Right hand of Dextra and The Wildings of Westron, David J. Lake, 1977. Any of the Polesotechnic League novels by Poul Anderson. Dragon’s Egg, Robert L. ...

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W(H)ANGANUI

December 29, 2009 – 1:36 am by Andrew Paul Wood

I read an editorial recently disingeniously comparing the recent tizzy over the usage of Wanganui/Whanganui to the usage of Mt Cook/Aoraki. For one thing, Aoraki is the South Island dialect pronunciation and spelling (with a non-aspiratded plosive velar 'k'), just as Wanganui (with the unvoiced labio-velar phoneme 'w'' as in 'whom' and 'where' and 'whales', but not 'womb', 'ware' or 'Wales') is the correct local pronunciation for that region's dialect of te reo (it is not pronounced "Fanganui" with a bilabial voiceless fricative 'f''). The 'Wanganui' spelling more accurately represents the pronunciation, where as 'Whanganui', while true to standard modern written te reo is just going to confuse people, and I expect people will be mutilating the town's name to 'Fanganui' within a couple of generations in a bid to out-sensitive the Hone-Joneses. I consider most people who go on about "PC gone mad" to merely be bigots without the manners to keep it to themselves, but ...

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TAKING BERLIN

December 29, 2009 – 1:09 am by Andrew Paul Wood

It should be perfectly obvious to anyone with half a brain, or even an Australian, that Berlin is the world centre of contemporary art. In about 1600 it was Rome. By the 1880s it was Paris – which then passed the baton to New York so that it could concentrate on designing frocks. But Berlin has the juice now. It’s important for New Zealand artists to maintain a presence in Berlin. While the Kunstlerhaus Bethanian residency was good for individual NZ artists, it did very little for broader German perceptions about NZ art. We can dangle the line as much as we want – sometimes they’ll bite, but for them to bite regularly you need the right bait. Our problem is we keep trying to project a quasi-mythical group identity by highlighting art with stereotypical ‘obvious’ content. This falls flat for two reasons: (1) we end up looking like dorky rubes in ...

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A Tradition of Immediacy: Group Drawing Exhibition

December 13, 2009 – 7:54 pm by Andrew Paul Wood

A Tradition of Immediacy: Group Drawing Exhibition Observatory Art Room, Christchurch Arts Centre 10 – 13 December 2009 Conversely, the graphic line can only exist against this background, so that a drawing that completely covered its background would cease to be a drawing. This confers on the background a specific role that is indispensable for the meaning of the drawing, so that in a drawing of two lines they can be related to each other only through the background – a feature, incidentally, that clearly distinguishes the graphic line from the geometric line. – The graphic line confers an identity on its background. The identity of the background of a drawing is quite different from that of the white surface inscribed. We might even deny it that identity by thinking of it as a surge of white waves (though these might not even be distinguishable to the naked eye). The pure drawing will ...

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THE FUTURE OF ART: Some Speculative notes

November 29, 2009 – 7:46 pm by Andrew Paul Wood

I looked into the future as far as I could see – Tennyson. You know exactly what I think of photography. I would like to see it make people despise painting until something else will make photography unbearable – Marcel Duchamp to Alfred Stieglitz In all likelihood there will be no art galleries in the future. Of course there will probably storage and research institutes – glorified warehouses – as long as we invest importance, mana and Benjaminian aura in the material object, but when the image can be stored most efficiently digitally at the highest possible pixel resolution, the internet offers the most democratic exhibition space for art. One day nano-technology may be able to reproduce and painting, photograph or sculpture down to the exact detail, and virtual reality (perhaps directly interfaced to the brain at a staggering refresh rate of polygons – holography seems to me more of an impractical ...

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MALEVICH’S TARDIS: RUSSIAN SUPREMATISM

November 18, 2009 – 7:46 pm by Andrew Paul Wood

Of my youthful enthusiasms, I am still rather fond of the Russian avant-garde art movement known as Suprematism (Супрематизм), a movement based on pure geometry – specifically circles and squares (in particular the square and circle) which formed in 1915-1916. Despite various Russian artists being involved at one time or another, all things considered it was a party of one: Kazimir Severinovich Malevich (Казимир Северинович Малевич). Malevich was already an established painter of the avant-garde, having exhibited in the Donkey's Tail and the Der Blaue Reiter (The Blue Rider) exhibitions of 1912 with cubo-futurist works. Malevich was born near Kiev to ethnic Poles Seweryn (a manager of a large sugarworks) and Ludwika Malewicz. He was baptised Roman Catholic. His father was the manager of a sugar factory. Kazimir was the first of fourteen children, of which only nine survived into adulthood. The family moved often for Seweryn’s work, and Malevich’s childhood ...

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