Heart of Darkness

It is the calendar industry that has, by meeting market demands, discovered a Pleistocene taste in outdoor scenes. – Dennis Dutton[1]

People have always explored their affinity with the landscape through cultivating an appreciation of art. Contemporary postcolonial New Zealand is no different. Our country faces very real issues involving the deforestation, erosion, waterway pollution and numerous native animal extinctions in our 600 million year old archipelago, which prior to the arrival of humans had developed quietly over the course of 62 million years. This situation means any awareness of the place in which we live is valuable.

The circumstances we are facing are illustrated best by the late historian Michael King who, in his seminal text The Penguin History of New Zealand, wrote: “So drastic was the impact of European settlement that one geographer was moved to note that human-sponsored modification of landscapes which had taken place over twenty centuries in Europe and four in North America had occurred in New Zealand in only one century.”[2]

Twentieth century modernist painting witnessed the birth and evolution of abstraction. New Zealand was a late-comer to this ‘party’ and when modern abstraction did arrive, the content of much art remained centred around our emerging national identity through exploring our ties to the land. Visual artists such as Colin McCahon and Ralph Hotere, for example, metaphorically and abstractly ‘peopled’ the landscape with references to and critiques of our emerging national character.

McCahon is at once an exceptional and a typical figure in Nationalist response to the ‘ultra-modern’, in simultaneously spurning and accepting it as he does, and twisting it to the national purpose. Located in the very heart of his art is the strain between a Nationalist localism and the imported forms of the ultra-modern: much of his power derives from the clash of this contradiction.[3]

The year 2012 is an interesting time for a contemporary art exhibition themed around the landscape. In twentieth century New Zealand we may have witnessed the changing terrain of international art through reproduced images, but our responses to it were played out through our unique social and physical landscape, located as we are in the South Pacific region between the tropics and the Antarctic. The development of electronic media in the late twentieth century coincided with the advancing of contemporary art, gradually erasing these borders and leading to the present time where we have caught up with international art and occupy a crossroads between traditional art practices and popular media. The fact remains, however, that despite the constantly evolving tropes of conceptual art, the landscape retains a core place in our psyche when thinking about art.

Photographer and noted environmentalist Craig Potton said “it is the nature of art and the way of nature to push us beyond the narrow realities we often become trapped in, to new or forgotten realms of pleasure.”[4] In the field of Evolutionary Psychology, as Dennis Dutton noted, the landscape seen through calendar imagery has a universal appeal to humans. Our essentially ‘Pleistocene’ taste that Dutton referred to is our evolutionary compulsion to seek the greener side of the fence. In these terms, when we look at a landscape what we are really seeing is potential, or its opposite.

Matt Blomeley, November 2012

LAND / SCAPE was an exhibition curated by Tracey Williams at Papakura Art Gallery (25 Aug – 6 Oct 2012). The exhibition featured a wide range of established, well known and emerging New Zealand artists.