Tony Lane at Black Asterisk

Hi Tony ---

I reckon you live in Majorca hoping to get to play a couple of sets with Rafa. But remembering your story about an evening with Colin McCahon in which mid to late '60s he wanted you to sing along with him to "I'm a Believer", a big hit then, wonder how you are getting on as a painter, coming back to show in NZ from work in your studio in Gillies Ave -- Let's not forget your eye for Siena 14/15 century masters of landscape or your eye for Spanish vernacular painting -- there's a lot more to it than being a Colin clone of some sort.

That you are not; nor could be --- things have changed. NZ no longer cheap feeding for mother of all parliaments GB, but instead being exploited as a smaller [2nd-rate 2nd-world power by IMF i.e. global capital] & that means screw the rights of minorities, screw the poor -- too bad about housing [shelter] health [hospitals] & education. Training yes, in how to be a bean-counter, & thus manage [censor] the arts, -- to carry out the programme of exploitation of labour and social agencies, but education on anything that of its nature has to challenge the fundamentals of the thinking of the culture, no way!!! That's a source of resistance to tyranny  -- currently they hate university educated "fashionable" deconstructionists -- supposedly -- that is a tiny minority figured as having, quite improbably, "hegemony" in the culture -- i.e. just another word for reds]. I'm one of them, so this review may land you in jail one day.

I didn't hear what et al had to say when Paul Holmes passed away -- & some like that still with us ---

But don't worry too much about it, it hasn't come to that yet, even tho I hear anecdotal evidence that universities can now fix research exam results by suppressing exam reports from examiners they don't like. 

Having given you some idea of my current position, feeling thoroughly disgusted with the so-called culture, I can now say somethiong about your paintings. First and foremost I see in them intense resistance to the notion of NZ founded on the value to us of cash from tourism: happy little hobbitland innocents and resist the uniting of the three rings of power forever, ready to sacrifice a symbolic digit -- a "finger" in the end. 

We who have to live here -- with no way to escape other than to employment in Australia -- are living as you show in mountainous deserts lost in universal dark space -- goodness knows what the only man-made things are in the landscapes -- green boxes on legs like something designed by Julian Dshper -- maybe they are fold up camp-beds to go with the certainty that some of those mountains aren't really mountains at all but tents in a desert, for, say, Palestinian refugees shut out of the land of milk & honeys. They are unlikely to get any of our milk powder unless a humanitarian charity steps in --- sounds awfully like milk for schools for impoverished NZ families.

Colin's landscapes are the hoped for Promised Land, yours aren't, are they?

Arte Povera runs through the whole show -- & in that you are true to Colin -- & to Toss Woollaston -- thinned scrawny low key browns greys and sometimes a dull violet -- with strange floating flat lozenges of brilliant water, emerald or white, like haloes of reconnaissance helicopters -- always above these hills looking down. Lakes.

No one would want to use these for toursit publicity, I guess. I think of the 'Northland Panels' of C McC as pitched against everything in the prevailing orthodoxy of how to paint landscapes and how that is still upsetting to say the controllers of the govt museum Te Papa. When, I wonder did a design for a fridge casing ever upset the cultural status quo, a design intended to market the ugly lumps of machine inside, by streamlining outside and trimming it with chrome like it was a big car. 

The simplest of all [cf Colin's 'Triple Takaka'] is 'Starry Night' -- "Starry, starry night..." which is no more than three strips of 'hills' in the darkness, one above another, with a row of gold stars down the middle. I don't fully comprehend why the vertical format is so effective here -- & the lateral dispersion of elements in the others dos something different, but then I've only seen the painting twice, I'm sure I'll get it sooner or later. Good things take time.

Nice to see Jo Torr's survey show at Objectspace a few doors up Ponsonby Rd from Black Asterisk -- I can't say much about that becasue I've only just seen it & need to go back again and spend more time with it -- helluva great presentation by Philip Clarke & his team -- as good as anything I've seen in the big public galleries.

Best wishes, see you soon,

Tony Green 

P.S. I've written this straight into the blog -- so excuse the typos 

 

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