Feminists and Formalists

Abstract

Click to increase image sizeClick to decrease image size Notes1. Michael Brett, ‘Abstracts Come in from the Cold’, Auckland Star, 9 April 1974.2. James Vuletic, Petar's brother, had some early involvement in the business side of the gallery.3. Francis Pound, for example in his The Invention of New Zealand: Art and National Identity 1930–1970 (Auckland: Auckland University Press, 2009), argues that the ‘Nationalist’ attitude characterising the period c1930–c1970 died out to some extent during the 1970s. Vuletic's gallery reflected—indeed propelled—this shift.4. See Clement Greenberg, ‘Louis and Noland’, 1960, in Clement Greenberg: The Collected Essays and Criticism, Vol. 4, ed. John O’Brian (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1995), 94–100. Greenberg later famously—or infamously—singled out Olitski as ‘the best painter alive’. Art News 86, no. 7 (September 1987): 16.5. William McAloon, ‘When We Were Abstract’, New Zealand Listener 3314 (15 November 2003): 54.6. Ian Scott, in discussion with the author, 26 March 2003. See also Edward Hanfling and Alan Wright, Vuletic and his Circle (Auckland: Gus Fisher Gallery, 2003), 10–11, 25, 28.7. A breakaway group, again of exclusively male abstract painters—Stephen Bambury, Roy Good, Ron Left, Milan Mrkusich, Phillip O’Sullivan, and Geoff Thornley—established Gallery DATA as an artist collective in 1977, with Mrkusich's son, Lewis Mrkusich, managing the gallery. The gallery folded in 1978 after only 18 months in business. Alan Wright and Edward Hanfling, Mrkusich: The Art of Transformation (Auckland: Auckland University Press, 2009), 8, 69.8. Alison Mitchell (Allie Eagle) writes in the catalogue: ‘This is an exhibition of women artists who have met together and separately on several occasions to clarify their position in the arts and are beginning with many other women artists in this country and overseas to seek a new woman critique and expression of their art.’ Alison Mitchell, ‘Some Thoughts on Woman's Art’, Woman's Art: An Exhibition of Six Women Artists, exh. cat. (Christchurch: Robert McDougall Art Gallery, 1975), 3. Other important milestones were the founding of Spiral in 1976, a journal covering women's art and literature, and the opening of the Women's Gallery in Wellington in 1980 (see Anna Keir and Marian McKay, ‘Women's Gallery Planned for Wellington’, Broadsheet 76 (January/February 1980): 44).9. Cheryll Sotheran raised this issue in an exhibition review contrasting the Menstrual Maze installation/performance coordinated by Juliet Batten, and an exhibition of abstract paintings by Ron Left (‘Accomplished Set of Abstract Works’, Auckland Star, 4 July 1983). Priscilla Pitts highlighted the same point in her review of the Menstrual Maze (‘Women's Work’, New Zealand Listener, 1 October 1983, 34–36). Anne Kirker summarises the problems with applying modernist values to women's art in New Zealand Women Artists (Auckland: Reed Methuen, 1986), 11–12.10. Other developments included post-object art.11. See Clement Greenberg, Homemade Esthetics: Observations on Art and Taste (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999), 3–4.12. Susan Best, Visualizing Feeling: Affect and the Feminine Avant-Garde (New York and London: I.B. Tauris, 2011), and Eve Meltzer, Systems We Have Loved: Conceptual Art, Affect, and the Antihumanist Turn (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 2013).13. Dave Beech and John Roberts, The Philistine Controversy (London and New York: Verso, 2002), and Claire Bishop, ‘Introduction: Viewers as Producers’, Participation (London: Whitechapel Art Gallery and MIT Press, 2006).14. The hostility of New Zealand audiences to abstract art in the 1970s is documented in Alan Wright and Edward Hanfling, Mrkusich: The Art of Transformation (Auckland: Auckland University Press, 2009), 67.15. Symptomatic of the difficulties New Zealand critics experienced is a review by Hamish Keith of an exhibition of abstract paintings by Alan Wright, which concludes that the ‘major quality’ of the paintings is ‘silence’ (Hamish Keith, ‘Contrasts in Approaches’, Auckland Star, 26 February 1972). Conversely, in a more recent text accompanying the exhibition Towards Auckland: Colin McCahon the Gallery Years, curated by Hamish Keith for the Auckland Art Gallery in 2006, it is stated that McCahon's ‘ultimate concern is with the human condition’. ‘Towards Auckland: Colin McCahon the Gallery Years’, www.aucklandartgallery.com/whats-on/events/2006/august/towards-auckland-colin-mccahon-the-gallery-years (accessed 30 March 2014).16. Even today, Hamish Keith refers to Mrkusich as a ‘formalist painter’ in ‘Mrkusich's Multi-coloured Life’, Sunday Star Times, 26 April 2009. John Hurrell implicitly endorses this idea in suggesting that Mrkusich's insistence on the ‘alchemical content’ of his paintings is an overreaction to the tendency to see his paintings as ‘formal’ and ‘rationalist’. ‘Magnificent Mrkusich’, EyeContact, www.eyecontactartforum.blogspot.co.nz/2009/03/magnificent-mrkusich.html (accessed 30 March 2014).17. ‘[W]hat counts first and last is quality; all other things are secondary.’ Clement Greenberg, ‘Abstract, Representational and So Forth’, 1952, in Art and Culture: Critical Essays (Boston: Beacon Press, 1961), 133. ‘We need to strive for quality, for quality by international standards.’ Petar Vuletic quoted in Kate Coughlan, ‘Vuletic's Mission to Slay Sacred Cows’, New Zealand Times, 12 July 1981.18. Greenberg's statement, ‘The quality of art depends on inspired, felt relations or proportions as on nothing else’ in ‘Avant-Garde Attitudes: New Art in the Sixties’, 1969 (in Clement Greenberg, Vol. 4, 300), is echoed in Vuletic's description of Geoff Thornley's ‘Albus’ paintings as ‘strongly felt, personal statements of being’ (Petar Vuletic, ‘Introducing the Albus Series’, in Geoff Thornley: Albus Series 1974, exh. cat. (Auckland: Petar/James Gallery, 1974), n.p.). See also Greenberg, ‘Feeling Is All’, 1952, in Clement Greenberg: The Collected Essays and Criticism, Vol. 3, ed. John O’Brian (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1993), 99–106.19. Greenberg, Homemade Esthetics, 62. I have retained Greenberg's word, ‘esthetic’, though its meaning is the same as my ‘aesthetic’.20. Edward Hanfling, ‘Rectangles, Rediscoveries, Radiance: Gretchen Albrecht on Continuity and Change’, Art New Zealand 136 (Summer 2010–2011): 35.21. Scott, in discussion with the author, 30 November 2010.22. Gretchen Albrecht, in discussion with the author, 26 August 2010.23. Scott, in discussion with the author, 30 November 2010.24. Albrect, in discussion with the author, 26 August 2010. Albrecht did not align herself wholeheartedly with the women's art movement, and declined the invitation to join the Women's Gallery. However, a 1979 article in the New Zealand Women's Weekly (24 December 1979) drew attention to a group of six women artists called the Ayr Street Group, reporting that these artists had all had Albrecht as their tutor, and that ‘she had inspired them to take their work seriously’.25. Lita Barrie, ‘Toward a Deconstruction of Phallic Univocality’, Antic 1 (June 1986): 91.26. Barrie, ‘Phallic Univocality’, 91.27. Christina Barton, ‘Framing the Real: Postmodern Discourses in Recent New Zealand Art’, in Headlands: Thinking Through New Zealand Art, ed. Mary Barr (Sydney: Museum of Contemporary Art, 1992), 173.28. Greenberg, ‘Recentness of Sculpture’, 1967, in Clement Greenberg, Vol. 4, 252.29. Jenny Rankine, ‘Wanted: 100 Women’, Broadsheet 128 (April 1985): 7.30. Juliet Batten, letter to Kay Gardner, 10 June 1985, Juliet Batten Archive, RC 2009/7/8/1, E. H. McCormick Research Library, Auckland Art Gallery Toi o Tāmaki.31. Rankine, ‘Wanted: 100 Women’, 7.32. Juliet Batten, ‘Emerging from Underground: The Women's Art Movement in New Zealand’, Spiral 5 (1982): 25.33. Pitts, ‘Women's Work’, 34–36.34. Pitts, ‘Women's Work’, 35. The passage quoted from Lippard's book, From the Center: Feminist Essays on Women's Art (New York: Dutton, 1976), reads: ‘Perhaps the greatest challenge to the feminist movement in the visual arts … is the establishment of new criteria by which to evaluate not only the aesthetic effect, but the communicative effectiveness of art.’35. Batten, quoted in Pitts, ‘Women's Work’, 36.36. Pitts, ‘Women's Work’, 36 (my emphasis).37. Pitts, ‘Women's Work’, 36 (my emphasis).38. Cheryll Sotheran, ‘Feminist Artists Demonstrate Radical Changes’, Auckland Star, 18 July 1983.39. Heather McPherson, ‘Review: “Heresies: Is There a Feminine Aesthetic?”‘, Spiral 4 (1979): 38.40. Barton, ‘Claudia Pond Eyley: A Question of Representation’, Art New Zealand 36 (1985): 48.41. Christine Hellyar, quoted in Priscilla Pitts, ‘Forms of Fantasy: Sculptor’, Broadsheet 74 (November 1979): 34. Recently, Hellyar enigmatically said: ‘It has always been my aim to have that formalist quality without being a formalist.’ In discussion with the author, 4 April 2012. See also Edward Hanfling, ‘Four Decades On: A Conversation with Christine Hellyar’, Art New Zealand 142 (Winter 2012): 36.42. Batten, ‘Women, Water and Sand: Feminists for the Environment at O’Neills Beach, Near Te Henga, Auckland, Sunday December 6, 1981. A Personal Account’, Spiral 3 (1978): 52.43. See Jane Zusters, ‘Allie Eagle: Artist’, Art New Zealand, 73 (Summer 1994–95): 54.44. Beech and Roberts, The Philistine Controversy, 41.45. Beech and Roberts, The Philistine Controversy, 38.46. Bishop, Participation, 12.47. Allie Eagle, in discussion with Lyn Collie, ‘Allie Eagle and Me: A Multi-Textual Online Resource’, www.allieeagleandme.com/eduresource/AEinterview.html (accessed 31 March 2014).48. Eagle and Collie, ‘Allie Eagle and Me’.49. Zusters, ‘Allie Eagle: Artist’, 56.50. Paul worked in a wide range of media including photography and film, and was active as a poet.51. Gregory O’Brien, Lands and Deeds: Profiles of Contemporary New Zealand Painters (Auckland: Godwit, 1996), 68.52. Paul describes herself as ‘a painter of contingency’. Quoted in Lands and Deeds, 67, and Kirker, New Zealand Women Artists, 214.53. Quoted in Lands and Deeds, 73.54. Paul, quoted in Marian Evans, Bridie Lonie and Tilly Lloyd, A Women's Picture Book: 25 Women Artists of Aotearoa (New Zealand) (Wellington: GP Books, 1988), 95.55. Greenberg's lecture was in fact typically forthright, as can be gleaned from the Auckland Star (27 June 1968) headline: ‘Critic: NZ art can't exist’.56. Batten continues: ‘Men get commemorated for even insignificant things. All they have to do is make some money, and they get an erection somewhere.’ Quoted in Sandra Coney, ‘Strength in Cohesion’, New Zealand Listener, 13 December 1986, 67.57. See Stanley Fish, Is There a Text in This Class? The Authority of Interpretive Communities (Cambridge, MA and London: Harvard University Press, 1980), 331.58. T. J. McNamara, ‘Avant Garde in their Time’, New Zealand Herald, 29 May 2003. O’Sullivan is conspicuously absent from the major histories of New Zealand painting, including: Gordon H. Brown and Hamish Keith, An Introduction to New Zealand Painting 1839–1980 (Auckland: Collins, 1982); Michael Dunn, New Zealand Painting: A Concise History (Auckland: Auckland University Press, 2003); Gil Docking, Michael Dunn and Edward Hanfling, 240 Years of New Zealand Painting (Auckland: David Bateman, 2012).59. McAloon, ‘When We Were Abstract’, 54.60. McAloon, ‘When We Were Abstract’, 54.61. Greenberg, ‘Avant-Garde Attitudes’, 1969, in Clement Greenberg, Vol. 4, 301.62. Hugh Mercer Curtler, Rediscovering Values: Coming to Terms with Postmodernism (New York: M. E. Sharpe, 1997), 129.63. Barton, ‘Framing the Real’, 173.64. Pound, The Space Between: Pākehā Use of Māori Motifs in Modernist New Zealand Art (Auckland: Workshop Press, 1994), 188.65. Greenberg, ‘Feeling is All’, 1952, in Clement Greenberg, Vol. 3, 99–106.66. Walter Darby Bannard, ‘The Unconditional Aesthete’, http://www.duffin.net/greenberg/bannard.html (accessed 10 December 2002).67. Milan Mrkusich, Geoff Thornley and Petar Vuletic, ‘An Alternative View: Some Recent American Art’, Auckland Star, 26 October 1974.68. Greenberg once said: ‘There's a thing called “aesthetic distance” and it's inhuman, almost … You're cold when you look at art.’ The Edmonton Contemporary Artists’ Society Newsletter 3, no. 2 and 4, no. 1 (1991), http://www.sharecom.ca/greenberg/interview.html (accessed 5 December 2002).69. Greenberg, Artists’ Society Newsletter.70. Pound, ‘Petar Vuletic: Art Dealer, Critic, Heretic’, Auckland Metro (August 1981): 47.71. Beech and Roberts, The Philistine Controversy, 41.72. See note 16 above.73. Wright, ‘Herbert Read and the Early Work of Milan Mrkusich, 1960–65’, Bulletin of New Zealand Art History 18, (1997): 119–130, and ‘The Alchemy of the Painted Surface: The Early Work of Milan Mrkusich’, Art New Zealand 82 (Autumn 1997): 44–48, 79–80.74. Mrkusich, artist's statement, Milan Mrkusich: Paintings 1946–1972 (Auckland: Auckland City Art Gallery, 1972), 30.75. Mrkusich, letter to the author, 4 May 1998.76. Peter Bromhead, Auckland Star, 25 September 1975.77. Tony Martin, ‘Napier’, Art New Zealand 65 (Summer 1992–93): 28.78. See Edward Hanfling, ‘All in a Quiver: Ian Scott's Sexy Sprayed Stripes’, Art New Zealand 101 (Summer 2001–02): 62–65, and ‘Alan Wright and Ian Scott: The House-Painting Aesthetic in 1970s New Zealand Abstraction’, Journal of New Zealand Art History 23 (2002): 29–42.79. Best, Visualizing Feeling, and Meltzer, Systems We Have Loved.80. Hanfling and Wright, Vuletic and his Circle, 25–26.81. Phillip O’Sullivan, in discussion with the author, 10 September 2002. See also Hanfling and Wright, Vuletic and his Circle, 16.82. Phillip O’Sullivan, in discussion with the author, 10 September 2002.83. Gordon H. Brown, Auckland Star, 30 April 1978.84. Phillip O’Sullivan, Auckland Star, 30 April 1978.85. Interestingly, Francis Pound described Petar Vuletic in 1981 as ‘passionate’ and ‘political’. Pound, ‘Petar Vuletic: Art Dealer, Critic, Heretic’, 48.86. Lita Barrie clearly had the ‘essentialist’ feminism of artists like Batten in mind when she said ‘we are all fascinated by our bodies at some point in our infantile development, but I think it's a shame when that continues through adulthood’. Barrie, ‘Altared Positions: A Conversation between Stuart Morgan and Lita Barrie’, Antic 1 (June 1986): 106.87. Meltzer writes: ‘The appearance of language in the visual arts does not itself suffice as an organizing principle for rigorous inquiry. It simply doesn't tell us enough about what we need to know—about art or about language.’ Meltzer, Systems We Have Loved, 10.88. Beech and Roberts, The Philistine Controversy, 46.