B.
What did you just call me?
Behind the scenes
Let's talk titles. Or, if the title's a bad one, let's not.
Bill Hammond The look of love plus the sound of music. Acrylic on board. Collection of Christchurch Art Gallery Te Puna o Waiwhetū, purchased 1986. Reproduced with permission
Contemporary art contains plenty of perfectly tolerable paintings that have been ruined or at the very least hobbled by dodgy or straining titles.
The artist Marcel Duchamp called the titles of paintings their 'invisible colours' and that's a beautiful way to think about them. A great title can flood a work with just the shade of meaning it needs. The worst titles talk over the paintings they accompany, like anxious parents prompting their children. You see (or hear) a lot of this when 'research' starts driving art, as it does in today's PBRF-crazed tertiary art departments.
Over-explanation of this kind is what drives abstract painters toward the tight-lipped 'Untitled', which as much as says: shut up and look. As New Zealand painter John Reynolds has said, a title can also be used to 'unhinge' a painting – send it into poetic overdrive. His own Acacacacademy of anthropopopometry shows how that's done.
Best title in the Christchurch Art Gallery collection? For me the honours go straight to Bill Hammond for The look of love plus the sound of music, the flayed-looking landscape seen at the top of this post. Best title ever in New Zealand art? I'd hand the prize here to Allen Maddox for Finer and finer and more gutless – the perfectly pissy title he gave to this brilliantly sarcastic variation on the abstract grid, from Auckland Art Gallery's collection.
Related reading: Bill Hammond
Notes
RIP Bill
All of us at Christchurch Art Gallery Te Puna o Waiwhetū were very saddened to hear of the death of Bill Hammond over the weekend. Bill’s contribution to the art of Aotearoa New Zealand was original and unforgettable and he occupied a special, beloved place within the arts communities of Christchurch and Lyttelton.
Notes
A Bird in the Hand
The Christchurch Art Gallery Foundation is honoured to assist the Gallery in acquiring Bill Hammond's Bone Yard Open Home for its permanent collection. But, we need your help!
Notes
De Lautour / Greig / Hammond
An exhibition of recent work by Tony de Lautour, Jason Greig and Bill Hammond opens at our NG space on Madras street tomorrow. These artists have had limited opportunities to show their work since the quakes so this exhibition is well worth a visit if you have the time.
Here's a taster of some of their work.
Commentary
The Edge of the Sea
A vision of New Zealand’s past from 1995:
Europeans first imagined New Zealand as “a garden and a pasture in which the best elements of British society might grow into an ideal nation”... When the smoke of the colonists’ fires cleared at the end of the 19th century, New Zealand had become a different country. Māori had lost their most precious life-support system. Only in the hilliest places did the forest still come down to the sea. Huge slices of the ancient ecosystem were missing, evicted and extinguished. Our histories, however, have had neither the sense of place nor ecological consciousness to explain what has happened.
Commentary
Doctor Jazz Stomp and the Webb Lane Sound
“Bill Hammond is long, lithe and tired, and was born several years ago. Is currently pursuing a Fine Arts course and trying hard to catch up. He is deeply interested in the aesthetic implications of sleep, sports the Rat-Chewed Look in coiffures for ’68, and dreams about blind mice in bikinis. He has never been known to sing outside the confines of his bedroom. Shows a marked but languid preference for the subtle textural nuances and dynamic shadings of washboard, cowbell, woodblocks, claves, cymbal, spoons, thimbles, tambourine, and the palms of the hands in percussive contact.”
Article
A miscellany of observable illustrations
Romantic notions of gothic leanings, the legacy of Tony Fomison, devotion to rock sub-genres and an eye to the past are familiar and sound reasons to group Tony de Lautour, Jason Greig and Bill Hammond together in one exhibition, but De Lautour / Greig / Hammond is to feature new and recent work. Could all this change? What nuances will be developed or abandoned? Will rich veins be further mined? We can only speculate and accept that even the artists concerned can't answer these questions. For the artist, every work is a new endeavour, a new beginning. What may appear to the public, the critic or the art historian as a smooth, seamless flow of images is for them an unpredictable process where the only boundaries are those that they choose to invent.
