The ideas factory
By Hamish Coney,
Idealog November/December 2006, page 78. Photographs by Rob Tucker
In 1967 Taranaki’s Govett-Brewster gallery blew the socks off New Zealand’s art scene—and sent ratepayers into a moral rage. Since then the gallery has become a model for nurturing talent, exporting ideas and generating cultural tourism. Idealog looks for lessons on becoming world famous in New Plymouth
You know you’re getting close to Taranaki when you start to see steaming cows up to their haunches in finest Kiwi bog and that mad, windblown manuka that looks like Noel Crombie’s hair just before Split Enz went corporate.
Munching on a whitebait sandwich at Mokau gives me the chance to reflect on the reason for the trip. I’m one of the tens of thousands who make the pilgrimage every year to one of the great art destinations in the southern hemisphere: the Govett-Brewster Art Gallery in New Plymouth.
In a uniquely Kiwi way, the Govett-Brewster is a benchmark and an inadvertent model for the incubator concept which has swept the land. Right now there are 16 incubators in New Zealand. They’re all about harnessing the latent creative genius inherent in your average New Zilder and unleashing it on a global economy just gagging for a taste of Kiwi. But the guys and gals at the Govett-Brewster have been unleashing our latent creative genius for over 30 years.
The gallery has built an international reputation and is an exporter of ideas, people and New Zealand visual culture all over the world. This would be a remarkable feat for any New Zealand art gallery; that it has been achieved by a gallery in a medium-sized provincial town far from the main centres warrants some investigation. The Govett-Brewster has been attracting and encouraging talent for decades. American magazine Artforum recently called it “New Zealand’s only serious art institution”. Maybe all these funky new incubators could pick up a tip or two.
Lee Bul, Mon grand recit: because everything … (2005)
Arriving at New Plymouth, ‘The Pulse of the Energy Province’, there is no hint of the artistic centre of excellence quietly incubating in its midst. New Plymouth is a quiet town of 50,000 residents whose main street is deserted on a Saturday afternoon. It’s one of those pleasant, slightly dull places that bright young New Zealanders escape from as soon as they are able and then pine for the rest of their lives.
For the New Zealand traveller there is a palpable sense of nostalgia about the place. Nice old buildings, burgers with beetroot, utes with sheepdogs on the back trundling up the main street and much better second-hand music stores than you ever find in the big cities.
The journey to New Plymouth
New director Rhana Devenport, who took up the position in September, is well-placed to comment on just where the Govett-Brewster sits in the wider art world. Devenport (right), an Australian, brings an art world CV bristling with heavyweight curatorial achievement—ten years at the coalface developing the Asia–Pacific Triennale and most recently as manager of public programmes at this year’s Sydney Biennale, plus a string of major curated projects around the world. She leapt at the chance to take up the director’s chair at the Govett-Brewster, drawn by its international reputation and “an aura of attraction about New Zealand”. With new international talent like Devenport, Len Lye collection curator Tyler Cann (centre) and American curator Mercedes Vicente on board the direction of the Govett-Brewster can only become more cutting edge as more artists, curators and art fans make the journey to New Plymouth.
Just off the main drag is where you’ll find the Govett-Brewster. If you visited over the last couple of years you would have seen art exhibitions and work by artists at the absolute forefront of current international thinking and practice. Lee Bul, On Kawara, Vito Acconci, Naim June Paik and Per Kirkeby may sound like the Chelsea midfield to the average punter but to the serious art fan these artists are the real deal—major players at the top of their game.
At any given time you’ll be able to see the latest Japanese digital art, new Spanish photomedia, the newest, scariest and just plain amazing from Germany and Australia and the best of the local art product.
Cutting-edge shows with names like ‘What sound does a colour make?’ and ‘Bloom: mutation, toxicity and the sublime’ have been packing them into the Govett-Brewster in recent years and drawing 60,000 visitors a year—almost 70 percent of them from out of town. Nearly one in five of these visitors are international. By comparison the Auckland City Art Gallery, in a city more than 20 times the size of New Plymouth, has 200,000 visitors a year with just over a quarter from overseas.
Without wishing to cast aspersions on the city’s other attractions, it’s a fair bet that most of these visitors have come to New Plymouth for the express purpose of visiting the Govett-Brewster.
These are the kind of visitors that every tourist destination wants to attract: culture vultures. That these smart, savvy, occasionally-loaded opinion-formers have put the Govett-Brewster in their address books is a tribute to an honour roll of gallery directors who have thought big and ignored the tyranny of distance to put New Zealand squarely on the international art radar.
It all started in 1970 when a gift of the then-hefty sum of $100,000 by New Plymouth resident Monica Brewster (nee Govett) gave birth to the gallery. This far-sighted philanthropy by the granddaughter of the first Archdeacon of Taranaki resulted in an opening exhibition by experimental artist, cinematographer and film-maker Leon Narbey that had an incendiary effect on an unsuspecting local populace. “For the general public it was literally a cultural shock,” says reviewer Noeline Blackman. “A quiet provincial centre with down-to-earth Kiwi values was dragged screaming into the contemporary world.”
It must have been a delicious moment. Founding director John Maynard had set the template for the feisty, ambitious mindset that has resulted in the Govett-Brewster’s standing in 2006 as an acknowledged art world leader.
For senior New Zealand artist Paul Hartigan, then a high school student in New Plymouth, the impact of Narbey’s ‘Real Time’ exhibition is still vivid.
Darcy Lange, Study of a freezing worker gutting cattle, Waitara Freezing Works, New Zealand (1974)
He recalls it as a formative experience. “It was a mesmerising mix of flashing fluorescent tubes amongst a sea of reflective black plastic, buzzing neon tubes and sodium vapour lamps, all creating an eerie unnatural phosphorescent light and sound environment. This was my first introduction to neon, and I was sold—it got into my blood!”
Maynard, director from 1967 to 1971, set a bold new agenda that was lightyears ahead of the discourse and fashions of the time. It’s an attitude that has prevailed to this day and one that should be an object lesson to a new generation of creative industries looking to gain a toehold in the big, bad world.
The list of past curators and directors at the Govett-Brewster reads like a who’s who of the New Zealand—and increasingly the international—art world. Gallerists John McCormack of Starkwhite and Anna Bibby of Anna Bibby Gallery are among the leading private dealer gallery directors of their generation. Past directors include Cheryll Sotheran, who went on to be director (and Dame) at Te Papa, Dick Bett and Priscilla Pitts. Curators incubated at the Govett-Brewster include Robert Leonard, latterly of the New Gallery in Auckland and recently appointed to the directorship of the Institute of Modern Art in Brisbane, and Simon Rees who is now the curator at the Contemporary Art Centre in Vilnius, Lithuania.
“One of the great strengths of the Govett-Brewster is that it takes a punt on people,” says McCormack, director from 1990 to 94. “The gallery also broke down a lot of barriers by letting the artists into the space.”
The concept of inviting artists into a public gallery space is akin to letting the inmates run the asylum and is counter to most established gallery practice. At the Govett-Brewster, however, leading artists including Michael Parekowhai, Stephen Bambury, Derek Cherrie and Et Al have created breakthrough work which has gone on to establish their local and international reputations.
Len Lye’s kinetic art shakes, buzzes and clanks
Maynard set the tone but the Govett-Brewster’s role as an ideas factory with international resonance began in the early 1990s during McCormack’s time with major projects such as the ‘Under Capricorn’ series of exhibitions, the seminal publication Midwest and the conceptual gruntwork that resulted in ‘Headlands’, the blockbuster survey show which opened the Museum of Contemporary Art in Sydney in 1992.
However, McCormack is quick to note that it was under the directorship of Greg Burke that the international reputation of the gallery bloomed. Burke, director from 1998 to 2005 and currently director of Canada’s leading contemporary gallery, The Power Plant in Toronto, drew the eyes of the world to New Zealand art and curatorial practice. At the same time he brought cutting-edge new work to New Zealand and the South Pacific for the first time.
Burke reckons the Govett-Brewster punches above its weight because it has an unswerving dedication to contemporary art. The goal, he says, is simple: “To run a world-beating contemporary art museum that contextualises New Zealand work alongside the best of international practice.”
Michael Smither, Rocks with Mountain, detail
Sounds simple, containing that kernel of wisdom from Business 101—be first to market. As New Zealand businesses and organisations like New Zealand Trade and Enterprise grapple with the rise of Asian markets, the Govett-Brewster has got in first and is engaging these emerging zones of art production on a cultural level with groundbreaking curated shows such as ‘Media arena: contemporary art from Japan’ and ‘Transindonesia: scoping culture in contemporary Indonesian art’.
The same phenomenon is happening in art as in global markets and business. Asia is changing from a vast, poorly-understood ‘elsewhere’ into distinctive cultural destinations with their own ancient cultures and modern realities. From Indonesia to China to Korea and India, artists are flexing their creative muscles … and you can see it all in New Plymouth.
Put simply, if you want to find out what’s going on in the minds of the next generation of Asian consumers, artists and opinion-formers, book a trip to the Govett-Brewster.
This cultural exchange is now accelerating with a wave of international talent coming to the Govett-Brewster to take up senior curatorial roles. The current curator of the Len Lye Collection, American Tyler Cann, recently completed a PhD at Harvard University on kinetic art, a field in which Len Lye is a major figure (see sidebar below).
That the Govett-Brewster attracts talent such as Cann and new director Rhana Devenport is a tribute to the international profile of this small wonder of a gallery. Cann recognises that the Govett-Brewster is on the periphery of the art world within New Zealand and internationally, but he stresses it is a respected player in the curatorial stakes. As he puts it: “We’re a small fish in a big ocean but at least we are swimming.”
Clockwise from top left: Trilogy: a flip and two twisters (1977); Lye in 1923; Fountain (1959-1976); W H Auden, negative (1947)
A guide to Len Lye
If the Govett-Brewster contained nothing else but the Len Lye Foundation, it would still be a highly important art institution with an international rep.
In New Zealand, Colin McCahon, Frances Hodgkins, Gordon Walters and Rita Angus are quite rightly accorded icon status. In the same way that Janet Frame has told our story in fiction and Michael King in fact, these were the artists who built our visual arts tradition from the ground up. You, me and just about every New Zealander has seen heaps of these artists’ work over the years.
Born in 1901, artist, filmmaker, poet, painter and sculptor Len Lye can lay claim to being arguably the most important artistic figure New Zealand has produced. His work can be found at the Museum of Modern Art and the Whitney in New York, the Art Institute of Chicago and the British Film Institute.
He is best known for his kinetic sculptures. A kinetic sculpture in simple terms is something that moves. Unlike almost all other art, it actually does something. Kinetic sculpture shakes, buzzes and clanks. Kinetic sculpture is where art meets dance, engineering and music in an unholy mashup. Lye’s work, frequently involving great lengths of sheet metal, shakes, moans and wriggles like a dancing bear, doing all sorts of things metal just shouldn’t do.
It’s the kind of art that appeals to everyone. It’s involving, a bit magic and a bit strange all in one go. It’s the kind of art that small kids dance to and baffled university profs stroke their beards to at the same time.
It’s all housed at the Govett-Brewster. That’s where you’ll find over 20 of his Kinetic works including some being developed posthumously to plans left by the artist, 20 paintings, 800 photographs, 50 16-millimetre films and a host of drawings and archival material, including thousands of slides created by Lye to accompany his lectures.
By 2010—subject to raising the necessary $10 million in readies—this great artistic legacy will be housed in a dedicated building next door to the Govett-Brewster. The new Len Lye Centre will be yet another reason for art lovers and all New Zealanders to make the pilgrimage to New Plymouth.
Comments
John R. Smith
ThaNkZ for the intro into Taranaki.
It takes an outsider or Jaffa to see the cultural benefits of the region.
There is a steady flow of immigrants from Auckland and Wellington streaming into the area.
Picking up Kiwi icons for a song.
ThaNkZ again Hamish.
Cheers
John R. Smith
REALSMITH.co.nz
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