The Big Picture by Hamish Keith. Published by Godwit $50.00.
KEY POINTS:
In my youth, the best shortcut to understanding New Zealand cultural background was via E. H. McCormick's 1940 Letters and Art in New Zealand. It was an important book, the first attempt to put New Zealand's writing and art in perspective, which he did very well. But what he did not adequately do was put it in context. He was a man of his time and the context was only partly here. Its reference points were mostly in England.
The important achievement of Hamish Keith, nearly 70 years on, is he has not only given us a new, refreshed perspective, he has embedded the story of New Zealand art and culture in the broader national history; given it context. And that is where The Big Picture differs from attempts since McCormick's to tell the story of our art. They were written as though art stands apart from national life with its complexity and continuity.
Keith has been an influential commentator on cultural life in this country for a long time. I know him well as a droll polemicist, so it comes as no surprise to me that this text is opinionated and assertive. But there is not much point in being tentative if you are trying to reframe the future of cultural debate by challenging conventional assumptions about everything since the cave drawings at Opihi and what inferences we can take from the drawings of Isaac Gilseman's in Murderer's Bay in 1642.
He rejects the claimed effects of early isolation on our art; releases Maori art from its freeze-frame in museums; resurrects an understanding of our gifts from the Victorians; and writes with pride and feeling about the accomplishments of artists in the modern era since the first of them, William Hodges for example, came, saw, recorded and departed.
It is an informed view but a personal one, with revelatory moments. "Arriving in Auckland fresh from the Canterbury School of Art and completely ignorant about New Zealand art, I had never heard of [clergyman, artist and photographer] John Kinder or any other 19th century New Zealand artist. Still intending to be a painter I believed, along with most of my contemporaries, that New Zealand art would begin more or less with my next one-man show. Yet here was a painter who had arrived in Auckland a hundred years ago and made marvellous, clear and bright watercolours of the place."
He records the artists and their work - the great and the just less than great - but what makes this book most extraordinary is its narrative raciness, its accessibility. This is a story, not a cold collation of facts and theories.
The Big Picture begins and ends with the metaphor of Canterbury's Rakaia, the braided river, and with it he sets the tone of the book which is fundamentally that the culture will look after itself, as it always has, if encouraged but not tampered with. He says in his preface: "The river had largely made itself, and so has our culture. No reasonable person would want to pick out one channel, current, pool or backwater and assert that that was more authentically the river than any other; yet for almost all of the 20th century cultural bureaucrats toiling at their desks and sharpening their various agendas have tried to do just that to our culture. Some still do and I wish they would stop."
He gets off more shots at bureaucrats and curators who try to make decisions about which art should be honoured and preserved. Which prompts me to paraphrase George Bernard Shaw: "He who can, plays. He who cannot, referees."
Keith comes back to the braided river at the end of the book, where he concludes proud, confident and optimistic about this country and its culture, upbeat about the past, the present and the future: There is no escaping the one simple fact that runs through all of this story. The art made here or influenced by this place is the only art that speaks to us directly about our experience. That does not make it better, or worse, than the art of some other place, it just makes it different.
And what will happen next? Something marvellous. Whatever it is, it will certainly be coming to a gallery near you some time soon.
The book is a co-product of a television series of the same name which begins on TV One on Sunday night, but unlike most of the book-of-the-series genre, it has power and relevance in its own right and my guess is it will still be read when the television series, however it turns out, is forgotten.
This is a seminal work which will leave close readers with a more complete understanding of this culture and its art than they will get from any other single volume.
