scholarly journals Marcel Duchamp and New Zealand Art, 1965 – 2007 By Means of Duchamp’s Peripheral Vision: Case Studies in a History of Reception

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
◽  
Marcus T. G. Moore

<p><b>This thesis examines the reception to Marcel Duchamp in New Zealand from 1965 to 2007. It takes as its subject two exceptional occasions when Duchamp’s work arrived in New Zealand and the various ways in which select New Zealand artists have responded to his work since that date. In doing so, this thesis acknowledges the shifting ideologies that underpin the reception of Duchamp which are characteristic of each decade. Thus it reads Duchamp’s reception through the conceptual and ‘linguistic turn’ in post-formalist practices in the late 1960s and 1970s; the neo-avantgarde strategies of the late 1970s and 1980s; a third-wave response to the readymade in the 1990s − which leads to an expanded notion of art as installation practice in the mid- to late 1990s. Finally, it offers a take on the readymade paradigm after post-modernism, as seen in a return to artisanal craft.</b></p> <p>This historical account of artistic practice in New Zealand is woven around two remarkable events that entailed Duchamp’s works actually coming to New Zealand, which I reconstruct for the first time. These are: Marcel Duchamp 78 Works: The Mary Sisler Collection (1904–1963), the exhibition that toured Auckland, Wellington and Christchurch in 1967; and the bequest of Judge Julius Isaacs and Betty Isaacs to the National Art Gallery in 1982 which included three works by Duchamp. The first took place in the 1960s during the first wave of exhibitions that brought Duchamp to a global audience. Here I argue that, rather than a belated response, this was contemporaneous with other events, proving that New Zealand was an active participant in the initial global reception of Duchamp. The second concerns the process by which Duchamp’s works entered a public collection. Here, I offer an account that reveals the uniqueness of Duchamp’s gifting of artworks to friends, and argues for the special importance of this gift, given the scarcity of Duchamp’s work, due to his limited output.</p> <p>This thesis also reads Duchamp through the lens provided by New Zealand’s situation on the periphery. Thus it offers an analysis of Duchamp’s life and work that, while acknowledging his centrality in twentieth-century art, takes from his example those components of his practice deemed relevant to the situation of art and artists here in New Zealand. By this means I locate those elements of Duchamp’s life story, his work and legacy that tell us something new about how to diffuse the power of the centre. Drawing on the consequences of the processes of decentralisation that have reshaped the landscape of global culture, this account reveals new relationships between margin and centre that provide new ways to connect Duchamp with subsequent generations of New Zealand artists. The aim here is to defy the assumed separation of New Zealand from international trends, rethink our subservient ties to England, to offer a new version of a local art history that knits our artists into a global mainstream without rendering them beholden to a master narrative that derives from elsewhere.</p>

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
◽  
Marcus T. G. Moore

<p><b>This thesis examines the reception to Marcel Duchamp in New Zealand from 1965 to 2007. It takes as its subject two exceptional occasions when Duchamp’s work arrived in New Zealand and the various ways in which select New Zealand artists have responded to his work since that date. In doing so, this thesis acknowledges the shifting ideologies that underpin the reception of Duchamp which are characteristic of each decade. Thus it reads Duchamp’s reception through the conceptual and ‘linguistic turn’ in post-formalist practices in the late 1960s and 1970s; the neo-avantgarde strategies of the late 1970s and 1980s; a third-wave response to the readymade in the 1990s − which leads to an expanded notion of art as installation practice in the mid- to late 1990s. Finally, it offers a take on the readymade paradigm after post-modernism, as seen in a return to artisanal craft.</b></p> <p>This historical account of artistic practice in New Zealand is woven around two remarkable events that entailed Duchamp’s works actually coming to New Zealand, which I reconstruct for the first time. These are: Marcel Duchamp 78 Works: The Mary Sisler Collection (1904–1963), the exhibition that toured Auckland, Wellington and Christchurch in 1967; and the bequest of Judge Julius Isaacs and Betty Isaacs to the National Art Gallery in 1982 which included three works by Duchamp. The first took place in the 1960s during the first wave of exhibitions that brought Duchamp to a global audience. Here I argue that, rather than a belated response, this was contemporaneous with other events, proving that New Zealand was an active participant in the initial global reception of Duchamp. The second concerns the process by which Duchamp’s works entered a public collection. Here, I offer an account that reveals the uniqueness of Duchamp’s gifting of artworks to friends, and argues for the special importance of this gift, given the scarcity of Duchamp’s work, due to his limited output.</p> <p>This thesis also reads Duchamp through the lens provided by New Zealand’s situation on the periphery. Thus it offers an analysis of Duchamp’s life and work that, while acknowledging his centrality in twentieth-century art, takes from his example those components of his practice deemed relevant to the situation of art and artists here in New Zealand. By this means I locate those elements of Duchamp’s life story, his work and legacy that tell us something new about how to diffuse the power of the centre. Drawing on the consequences of the processes of decentralisation that have reshaped the landscape of global culture, this account reveals new relationships between margin and centre that provide new ways to connect Duchamp with subsequent generations of New Zealand artists. The aim here is to defy the assumed separation of New Zealand from international trends, rethink our subservient ties to England, to offer a new version of a local art history that knits our artists into a global mainstream without rendering them beholden to a master narrative that derives from elsewhere.</p>


Author(s):  
Jill Young

The introduction of sex education into primary schools in New Zealand was a controversial and contested issue throughout the 1960s and 1970s. This article explores key documents and legislation produced during the period. It is argued that the controversy surrounding sex education for primary students resulted in the implementation in the 1980s of a largely fact-based curriculum, focusing on the biological process of pubertal change rather than social and emotional issues surrounding sexuality. The implementation of the 1999 curriculum document Health and Physical Education in the New Zealand Curriculum is also briefly discussed.


Author(s):  
Jacqueline Castledine

In recognizing the relation between gender, race, and class oppression, American women of the postwar Progressive Party made the claim that peace required not merely the absence of violence, but also the presence of social and political equality. For progressive women, peace was the essential thread that connected the various aspects of their activist agendas. This study maps the routes taken by postwar popular-front women activists into peace and freedom movements of the 1960s and 1970s. The book tells the story of their decades-long effort to keep their intertwined social and political causes from unraveling and to maintain the connections among peace, feminism, and racial equality. It explains how the master narrative of U.S. history too often reduces the scope of leftist women's Cold War-era activism by containing it within women's, workers', or civil rights movements.


Author(s):  
Harry A. Kersey

This article discusses the intellectual legacy of David P. Ausubel in Aotearoa-New Zealand. Some forty years after the American academic's provocative work The Fern and the Tiki first appeared in print it still evokes strong and mixed reactions from Pakeha and Maori alike. It certainly had a searing impact among a generation of New Zealanders who were in universities during the tumultuous civil rights dominated era of the 1960s and 1970s. Even those who have never read the book recognize the title, can name its author, and generally accord it some deference as a seminal work that should be read or reread.


2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
◽  
Lauren Peacock

<p>“National ideals or National Interest?” examines the making and implementation by successive New Zealand governments of policy toward apartheid South Africa from 1981 to 1994. Its main focus is the contradictory relationship between living up to New Zealand’s ideals against doing what was practicable in the context of the time. The dilemma the apartheid state faced, in trying to solve its internal problems while not imperilling its external security was often not appreciated by the New Zealand government. These misconceptions helped shape New Zealand policy. Ironically once the South African regime began to investigate the possibilities of some sort of political transformation, their New Zealand counterparts were less willing to empathise with the risks involved with such an undertaking than they had been in the 1960s and 1970s. “National Ideals’ also examines the role of civil society and what was often a parallel unofficial foreign policy based around these person -to - person contacts, including the problems posed for the government by the need to persuade groups such as the NZRFU to follow government policy without overstepping what were strongly entrenched principles of individual freedom. The conflicts within the two main political parties of New Zealand were also important in shaping policy, as was the adversarial relationship between the major parties. “National Ideals” concluded that more often than not interests came first and indeed that at times policy decisions often to the product of accident and intrigue.</p>


Author(s):  
Andrew Dean

This chapter examines how New Zealand author Janet Frame responded to both the demands of a national literature and biographical enquiry into her life. Frame in her early work courts the idea that madness provides special insight, an understanding that was read biographically by the masculine cultural nationalist coterie surrounding her at this time. However, in her later work she seeks to replace this public image with her own vision of authorship. Between two pairs of novels from the 1960s and 1970s, as well as her 1980s autobiographies, this chapter shows a dimension of metafiction that is less discussed, in which the form is used by an author to attempt to control her reception and to prescribe certain approaches. In particular, Frame would become preoccupied with an understanding of public attention as a form of contamination, and would in turn seek a purity of literary vision. The chapter closes by showing how representations of Frame’s life by biographers and film-makers, even after her death, have continued to participate in battles over the public reception of the author within New Zealand literary culture.


2017 ◽  
Vol 29 (2) ◽  
pp. 276-306 ◽  
Author(s):  
Justin Pyvis ◽  
Malcolm Tull

This article examines the impact of path dependency and changing institutions on the Port of Tauranga. Through an institutional lens it examines the port’s development in five stages from 1945, through periods of amalgamation and containerisation in the 1960s and 1970s, and then looks at the period of reform and privatisation in the 1980s, and the legacy this created.


2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
◽  
Lauren Peacock

<p>“National ideals or National Interest?” examines the making and implementation by successive New Zealand governments of policy toward apartheid South Africa from 1981 to 1994. Its main focus is the contradictory relationship between living up to New Zealand’s ideals against doing what was practicable in the context of the time. The dilemma the apartheid state faced, in trying to solve its internal problems while not imperilling its external security was often not appreciated by the New Zealand government. These misconceptions helped shape New Zealand policy. Ironically once the South African regime began to investigate the possibilities of some sort of political transformation, their New Zealand counterparts were less willing to empathise with the risks involved with such an undertaking than they had been in the 1960s and 1970s. “National Ideals’ also examines the role of civil society and what was often a parallel unofficial foreign policy based around these person -to - person contacts, including the problems posed for the government by the need to persuade groups such as the NZRFU to follow government policy without overstepping what were strongly entrenched principles of individual freedom. The conflicts within the two main political parties of New Zealand were also important in shaping policy, as was the adversarial relationship between the major parties. “National Ideals” concluded that more often than not interests came first and indeed that at times policy decisions often to the product of accident and intrigue.</p>


1988 ◽  
Vol 34 ◽  
pp. 511-551

James Dwyer McGee died in New Zealand in February 1987 at the age of 83. His life had been devoted to the field of photoelectronics, ranging from his crucial contribution to the development of television in the 1930s to his work on astronomical detectors in the 1960s and 1970s.


Author(s):  
Raz Yosef ◽  
Boaz Hagin

Scholarship on Zionist and Israeli cinema is in agreement as to the major periods and movements in this corpus. During the prestate period, and especially after the 1920s, the Zionist movement used cinema to propagate Zionist ideology and to gather financial and political support. Following the 1948 independence of the State of Israel, and during the 1950s and 1960s, Israeli films continued to comply with the Zionist master-narrative. A heroic-nationalist genre related to the emergence of a generation of native-born Israelis—Sabras—now made the new Israeli warriors, and not the pioneering group, its protagonists. In the 1960s and 1970s, two genres that broke away from representing heroic nationalist mythology can be discerned. One is the popular Bourekas genre—mainly comedies but also melodramas and musicals—that focuses on the interethnic tension between Mizrahi and Ashkenazi Jews in Israeli society, which is resolved through the (ideologically suspect according to many scholars) union of a mixed ethnic couple. A different, small group of films from the mid-1960s and 1970s has been labeled by critics and scholars as personal cinema, Israeli modernist cinema, the Israeli New Wave, or the New Sensibility. These are often extremely low-budget, black-and-white, and ostensibly apolitical films that are characterized by experimental cinematic techniques; fragmentary, minimal, and open-ended narratives; alienated protagonists; and existential themes. While the Bourekas films were extremely successful at the box office but loathed by many critics, the personal cinema was warmly received by critics but suffered from dismal ticket sales. From the late 1970s, with the rise of the right-wing Likud Party, through the early 1990s, Israeli cinema was dominated by explicitly political films that tried to challenge the Zionist ideology of the past and gave increased visibility to outsiders and outcasts. This is also the period in which substantial academic scholarship on Israeli cinema began to appear, with works by Judd Ne’eman, Ella Shohat, and scholars such as Nurith Gertz, Nitzan Ben-Shaul, Yosefa Loshitzky, Yael Munk, Raz Yosef, Régine-Mihal Friedman, Orly Lubin, and Anat Zanger. Since the 1990s, and especially in the new millennium, Israeli films have enjoyed critical and popular success both locally and internationally. Scholarship has noted this cinema’s complex explorations of trauma and personal and collective memories and identities.


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