Out of the Blue: Essays on Artists from Aotearoa New Zealand 1985–2021
by Christina Barton

Out of the Blue isn’t really. It’s been forty years in the making and the fruit of over fifty curated exhibitions, dozens of essays and articles and hundreds of lectures and plenty in between, including the creation of one of the great artist monographs, Billy Apple Life/Work, (AUP 2020). Since graduating with a MA in Art History from the University of Auckland in 1987, Christina Barton MNZM has devoted her formidable energy and talent to the task of exploring the visual arts in Aotearoa for half a century.

Barton is a self-confessed post-modernist. What that means for the writer, reader and artists is an enquiry that begins with a healthy skepticism towards the dominant canon-building and power structures that ruled art thinking for a century before the 1980s – one that privileged western, masculine and capitalist programmes. The engine that drives Out of the Blue, notwithstanding the question of whether the term ‘post-modernism’ still carries a critical payload, is what fellow author and art historian Kirsty Baker describes as Barton’s ‘enduring commitment to thinking and writing about art’. Apparent to Baker ‘across the arc of time we travel in these essays’ is ‘Barton’s sheer love of art.’

Maria Olsen, Cauldron in a Landscape, acrylic on canvas circa 1987. Courtesy Maria Olsen estate.

Right now, the formative training of critical thinking – of which Out of the Blue is such a fulsome example – is under siege. In September, Minister for Education Erica Stanford announced the axing of the teaching of art history as a standalone discipline in schools, shunted to make way for a ‘future facing’ curriculum and a greater focus on STEM (science, technology, engineering and mathematics) subjects to prepare the next generation to be good little worker bees.

In addition, as I was reading Out of the Blue and admiring Barton’s finely chiselled prose, I became aware of yet another example of the ‘enshittification’ of the brave new world of digital dementia. Apparently 40% and counting of the music uploaded to Spotify is now AI Slop. The platform reports it has ‘removed over 75 million spammy tracks from Spotify’ in the past year and introduced stronger ‘impersonation rules’, and that most humans can tell alt-country band ‘Velvet Sundown’ is bogus, but the bots just love it: fake ears for fake music. Music streaming has become ‘a hotbed of fraud and fakery.’ Similar drolleries are also infesting the art and literature spaces as our helpful friends at ChatGPT have just introduced free image-generation algorithms. A recent report in the Guardian argued this will herald ‘the next step in the death of art and artists, joining the impending death – or zombification – of the writer, as AI-generated novels are slated to flood the market.’

We are not immune to these synthetic intrusions in Aotearoa. Last month the Ockham New Zealand Book Awards (temporarily) disqualified two fiction entries because their covers were AI-produced, examples of the awful visual gruel flooding bookshop shelves.

Gordon Walters, The Poet, pencil and oil on canvas, 1947. Collection of Te Papa Tongarewa.

So – to use that all-important art critical term – this is the ‘context’ for Out of the Blue. Fortunately, Barton’s text provides a life raft of reason, an oasis of calm structured thought and the balm of fact-based observation. The author may not have intended such a scholarly body of writing to posit as a polemic, but ‘life, the universe and everything’ have rendered it such. It’s a book that eloquently makes a case for the entire discipline of critical cultural thinking. In a 2012 lecture on Gordon Walters presented in Germany and published here for the first time, Barton addresses the appropriation debate in terms that remain strikingly relevant today: ‘[By the 1980s and 90s] Māori were no longer willing to tolerate Pākehā using their cultural property, however respectfully undertaken. This was the time when postcolonial and postmodern theory was used to unpack the universalising assumptions of Modernism and question formalist autonomy.’ She notes that ‘Art can and needs to be rethought constantly if it is to have more than antiquarian significance.’

Walters is one of the big guns of our art history canon and in that capacity is something of an outlier in Out of the Blue. Across the 37 essays Barton mostly eschews familiar names and canonical painters, although some – including Bill Hammond and Frances Hodgkins – are the subject of some powerful analysis. In a 2006 essay on Shane Cotton, Barton considers the role and relevance of painting in the contemporary art space: ‘To be a painter today is an act of faith, for neither painting’s representational nor its expressive claims have withstood the onslaught of contemporary doubt.’

Shane Cotton, Vee, acrylic on canvas, 2006. Collection of Te Papa Tongarewa

Barton selects her essays from both established sources such as Art New Zealand but also more ephemeral, hard to access documents including exhibition room-sheets, lecture notes at international symposia or limited-run, regional-museum exhibition guides. Out of the Blue really shines when she turns to lesser-known female artists such as Claudia Pond-Eyley, the subject of her first published essay in Art New Zealand in 1985, or Maria Olsen and Caroline Williams in the 80s and 90s, or esoteric artists including Pauline Rhodes and Fiona Amundsen in the 2000s.

There are some riveting passages of analysis of performative artworks and makers that are described as post-object and conceptual. Barton gives Jim Allen (1922–2023) a central role in the post-object narrative. He is both an ‘innovative educator’ and ‘the prime mover behind the emergence of new – multi-media, time-based, site-specific, performative and installational – modes of sculptural practice that galvanised artists in the 1970s’. To create works like New Zealand Environment No 5, Allen ‘overturns a whole history of Western representation that removed the viewer from the scene to turn it into a purely aesthetic experience, which we understand now to be inextricably implicated in the colonising process.’

Vivian Lynn, Self-Portrait 1981/2008, synthetic hair, polyethlene industrial pipes. Courtesy of the Vivian Lynn estate.

Another favourite is the little-known-in-Aotearoa Vivian Lynn (1931–2018), the subject of a 2010 survey show at Te Pātaka Toi Adam Art Gallery, Wellington during Barton’s sixteen-year tenure as director. The description of Lynn’s intent encapsulates Barton’s perspicacious enquiry into a sharp, even recalcitrant artist:

Vivian Lynn is no easy artist to accommodate in art history’s narratives. Even a cursory glance at her work proves it is tough on many counts; there is a point at which the practice simply will not comply with the discipline’s neat categories and tidy periodisations. Try packaging within available terminologies an artist who is committed to abstraction and figuration… who calls herself a feminist but would not align herself with the Women’s Art Movement… Rejecting the idea of the artist as expressive genius and the signature style that goes with it; working for years outside the dealer system; seeing art-making as a social and collaborative activity but fiercely guarding her privacy … [and s]lipping the straitjacket of art history’s criteria, she has gone her own way for nearly 60 years.

Barton champions these bucking broncos, denizens of roads less travelled – rebel figures such as Lynn and Billy Apple, who, with a mixture of puckish humour and a dazzling insistence on redefining the art dancefloor, continue to inspire contemporary artists who, over the last two decades, have represented Aotearoa New Zealand at the Venice Biennale and been awarded the Walters Prize.

Edith Amituanai, Hendo from the series End of my Driveway, colour photograph, 2011. Courtesy of the artist.

It is the local that makes Out of the Blue fresh and relevant. A 2019 essay describes photographer Edith Amituanai standing outside her West Auckland house, photographing people passing for the series End of My Driveway. Amitauanui, Barton writes, ‘positions herself at the junction between private property and public space, the threshold where family meets friends and strangers.’ Barton is ‘fascinated by this series for the ways it inflects a history of representations that have been made in Aotearoa that treat home and its limits as a frame for thinking, seeing and being’. Other examples she cites here include John Kinder’s 1856 watercolour view from an Auckland veranda; Robin White’s Florence at Home, Te Puke (1976); and tagged garage doors from a 2012 installation in South Auckland by Luke Willis Thompson.

In the words of a 1967 neon text spiral by American artist Bruce Nauman, ‘the True Artist Helps the World by Revealing Mystic Truths’. Out of the Blue demonstrates that Barton has been pondering what these truths might be for five decades. Here, using the post-modern scalpel as her tool of choice, she goes about the task with surgical precision.

Barton could not have foreseen the sheer meddlesomeness of social media or its intractable, almost blinding filter of algorithmic grime. But the clarity of a ‘before computers’ and ‘pre-internet’ mind at work suggests a template for future generations of art writers. This is important, given that the foundational educational pathways that inspire curious local students to begin a journey in art are about to be severed. Barton’s mahi will stand as a testament to the vital role critical thinking must play in our national cultural discourse.