|
April 29, 2009
The caravans, like the boatsheds and the holiday batches, really stood out on the road trip on the west and east coast of the northern part of the South Island. Though the caravans were from an another era----the 1950s + 60s--- many, like this one at Rakautara on the Kaikoura Coast in the Marlborough district, were very well cared for.
They offer an insight into the funky culture of New Zealand---the sense of craft, the respect for historical objects, the capacity to live in the landscape rather than bulldoze the forest to build a house that dominates the landscape. An insight that suggests that the modernist bias against traditionalism and the avant garde's ideal of no place (utopia) did not sweep all before it.
Sure, the photo is an affirmation of New Zealand, rather than an expression of the underlying isolation, unease, alienation and anxiety that sits just below the surface. It is an image of how New Zealanders would like to see themselves--that they care for old things as well as the landscape. They were comfortable or at ease with their landscape, far more so than Australian's who are at odds with their land and desired to dominate and control it.
The postmodern turn to everyday life is also comfortable structure of feeling because New Zealanders never really left it to embrace a modernist utopia of a 'no place" based on the new industrial order that swept away the old. New Zealand , as 'their place', was already a paradise. There was no need to desire to go beyond the boundaries to the historical present, the everyday and the common language‘.
Modernism in New Zealand can be interpreted in terms of the contemporary the artist growing up in a provincial society and reacting against the culture of New Zealand as a late colonial settler society. The sense of artistic and intellectual isolation (in Wellington, Christchurch or Auckland) produced a modernist response in the 1940s and 1950s, which both exaggerated their apartness as an artist in an unsympathetic environment but also made it the basis of a artistic persona. It is a striving to sound and look sophisticated and cosmopolitan by removing all the indicators of a provincial or regional place.
This modernist narrative of becoming a modernist artist by staging a break from the smug provincial colonial culture of New Zealand (a culturally barren New Zealand) rests on a series of binaries — modernity versus tradition, province versus centre, national versus cosmopolitan, Victorian versus modernist. It is seeking an escape from the nightmares of colonial history into the autonomous realm of art.
|
Most agree that modernism came late to New Zealand-it was between 1940 and 1970, that the massive change occurred, which allowed New Zealand’s visual culture to look outwards rather than inwards. Abstract painting started being produced in the 1950s.