'Instead of a dearth of relevance, suddenly there's a ghastly surplus of it. Like a boor at a party, the quake insists on pushing in and monopolising every conversation. For anyone familiar with contemporary art, post-quake Christchurch threw up dozens of unsettling echoes: I was reminded often of Doug Aitken's extraordinary installation House, in which the artists' parents sit silently facing each other as their own family home is brought to the ground around them; and more than one person joked about the whole city becoming an et al. installation. The prize for Best Imitation of an Artwork by an Earthquake had to go to the twenty-five tonne Port Hills boulder that rolled through the roof and into the hallway of a Heathcote home, thereby mimicking, with chilling accuracy, Callum Morton's rock-in-a-shop sculpture [above] for the 2008 SCAPE exhibition. If you've been trained in art history's method of compare and contrast, then you can't help looking for meaning in these echoes. But natural disasters don't mean in that way. They just are, and before long I grew bored with the way this disaster was appropriating perfectly good artworks for its own tedious purposes. Call it poetic injustice—the gazumping of art by life.'

From a piece I've written about post-quake collisions of art and life and the fate of De-Building, in our soon-to-be-released 'quake' issue of Bulletin. We'll be posting more taster paragraphs from the issue over the next couple of weeks.