Poussin's Humour

Jim Allen's 'NEWS'

This is a live performance piece that is not particular to the performer's aesthetic sensibility [as with traditional author role], but may be performed by anyone prepared to stick to the minimum of script-requirements.  Notes made watching the video version performed by Jim Allen. 

Material & not-expressionist gesture, repeated towards destruction of the material as bearer of news – but maintaining its entirety – refusal of reading-text value. http://vimeo.com/108515118 10mins58sec first tear. Doodle. Sculpture as bodily act in relation to materials spaces & those present with artist - “audience” – not aiming at transforming material into product for the aesthetic /moral appraisal – which maintains social-institutional power over labour & thought. 

 [Sunday] That's a direction away from 'language'-'discourse' to 'material'-'body' as discursive method, show without tell, 'enactment' not 'mimesis' -- however well or badly those were theorised in the hope that the arts were of value if they could work across cultures/languages - important in a multi-cultural educational set-up like NZ's. Problem is then theorising in 'language-discourse' in assessing effectiveness of art-work done -- the phenomenology of Merleau-Ponty in 1943 [the likely model for this] had not fully enountered the problem of language. It's not indifferent to the News, but indifference to discourse that is most at issue.  

Terry Smith however presented a project work in Auckland that directly attacked the news content/politics of the sacking of Australian Premier Gough Whitlam  & made the Auckland City Art Gallery uncomfortable - referring to the NZ Prime Minister as Piggy. 

 

 

academies ruined

Corporate 'principles' ruin learning & teaching - substituting obedience training & low-grade versions of sophistry that never question principles - that's why it seemed to me absolutelky necessary to support Le Collège International de Philosophie [q.v.] which is as near independent of the system as is likely to be achieved now -- & a possible model for democratic education outisde corporate control -- the earliest model, the Republic of Letters mutual support & communication [letters by courier, a bit slower than email, but effective because slower for scholars & artits outside church & state control --[[ slow = time to consider responses] ]-- in the 17th century.

Martin Brumsby's Good Idea

today on Facebook the photo below & comment led to the conversation [typos edite out]   below that - 

[Caption]    ‪Tony Green In the beautiful new welcoming hotel-style lobby -- bookshop in the background -- & note the company logo on the shirt in the foreground, checking in coats before the tour with guides, processed by management to take you round the new corporate sponsorship culture-temple - & if you speak English. there are wall-labels with easy-read instructions on what to think about each work of art
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                   Martin Rumsby Every non practicing artist who works as an arts administrator, academic etc should be tithed 15% of the salary they make off the back of artists (even those artists they ignore) to go into an artist administered fund to be paid amongst artists by artists according to artistic principles.
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           Tony Green I really like your idea ---- you mean an artist's council- actually funded by the public administrators paying15%tax into a fund for every dollar they pay administrators - a council like the best of the Queen's initiative for the New Zealand govt to form an arts council --- currently in ruins ---  that wd encourage all administrative bodies in the arts to pay the administrators less & divert their money to where it would benefit the arts - so they need to be prevented from hiring at a cheaper rate so they don't get more mediocracy there than they've got already -- there is a need for the best educated intellectual support you can find [as distinct from trained managers] - not corporate processed graduates with cheapened degrees· Reply · 40 mins








 

           

 

           Martin Rumsby We all know about the benefits of chance. Arts funding could be greatly expanded by throwing arts applications into a draw, like a lottery. There could be some culling at the beginning, to kick out bogus applications, criminals etc. No need to pay flights, catering, hotels, per diems etc; plus no actual arts officers - just someone to sort out the honest from the dishonest applications. Sure some turkeys will get funded. That happens now. I bet the odds would be much the same as under the present system, but more money would go to artists. That's where it needs to go.           

 

                       

 

           

‪Tony Green & valuable arts enterprises cdn't get de-funded [un-friended?] so callously - Downstage? Sport? & unfunded like Kilmog Press etc
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           Tony Green may I post this conversation on my art blog, please, Martin?
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          Martin Rumsby The other thing that would be saved would be research, meetings, studies etc on 'policy.' Imagine the artwork that would be created if a group of artists sat around talking about, developing and instituting arts policy. Policy that probably ultimately reflects the bias of the current government. The solution is so simple and yet impossible to achieve. Prioritize artists. Put artists first. Support & serve artists and chuck everything else out. It's irrelevant.
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Write a comment...    ‪Martin Rumsby The other thing that would be saved would be research, meetings, studies etc on 'policy.' Imagine the artwork that would be created if a group of artists sat around talking about, developing and instituting arts policy. Policy that probably ultimately reflects the bias of the current government. The solution is so simple an yet impossible to achieve. Prioritize artists. Put artists firsts. Support & serve artists and chuck everything else out. It's irrelevant.
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post-election with the blues

conversations online today -- ending with response to Peter Hoar's link 

http://iso.org.nz/2014/09/22/lessons-to-learn-from-bitter-defeat/

 

 imho, teachers, health workers, contract workers in IT & services, artists [needless to say] are being pushed towards manual/factory working class in their roles/status in relation to new-liberal capitalist managers, ruling class & its control of public information spaces [including universities, libraries, museums] -- in NZ the class conflict is also exacerbated by colonial exploitation: the economics of usable land/sea/river/lake resources [for short term profit to pay off international debt] -- & human 'resources' [especially Maori & Pacifica] as low-paid workers -- it's going to take a serrious revitalising of the whole of the left to turn this around before it turns ugly -- for a moment it looked as if Mana might be able to do something in parliament….clearly I'm reading the situation as a liberal intellectual - but from where I sit it looks as bad for the working class as ever -- resulting in a politics of gangs & prisons child poverty & living in garages -- the South Americanization of NZ

notes: critique & crticism, & declarations of interest

1. Critique in the arts too easily comes down to squabbling over political motivation of artists, over their representation of racial and gender identity and their stance in relation to a particular political ideology.

 

2. That is where theory isolated from material practices, like visual studies and museum studies headed, a localized anthropology and a sociology, that easily degenerated into censorious political correctness.

 

3. Even in the career/political analysis of sociological behavior of artists and critics, it has to be noted that critics must be self-critical [Bourdieu, for example, insisted on it]. Critics and historians of the arts need therefore, like financial journalists, declare their attachment by financial interest or career interests. Academics usually declare what institution they are writing from, but few, if any critics, openly declare their financial interests in an art-dealership.

 

poor Gordon

has his work has been used as prop for conservative - reactionary? - art-politics

        In    our    time    it    smacks

       Of    impiety    to     opine

       Gordon     Walter's    art    no

       Pinnacle    to    honour    artists

       With    a     prize     aberration

       Of    private    patronage    that

       Detests      radical     criticism

       In    art    by    artists    who

       Despise    the    market    &

       Hypocrisies    of    church   

       &    state   a    sanitized

       Bland     apolitical    version

       Of    his    art    is    lauded

 

       Key-stone    of    our    culture's

       Arch   that    no    gumment    in-

       Quiry    can    dislodge    even

       As    it    crumbles  

      

 

big shows of old master art?

correspondents on Facebook raised the issue today, of big big art shows, my immediate response was as follows: "viewing/reading becomes a fly-past -- best to stop a while with one or two or three things - jostled in blockbuster shows by the fly-past-ers with & without their cameras - like don't you want to read the whole poem or novel or hear the whole sonata?-- painting though not time-based, takes time to 'grasp' & for scholars & artists takes time to 'digest' which is like 'memorising' - question is who are big shows mounted for?" 

If Sir Joshua Reynolds wittily remarks that seeing so many together emphasises the artist's faults, one cd reply & the artist's virtues likewise. Reynolds remark needs to be contextualised within the attemopt to determine a rational basis for an over-arching Style that cd be qpplied to all kinds of subjects/genres - a meta-style, so to speak -- as a basis for teaching in the Academy.  

Since there has been a big shift in art thinking towards process rather than market-product, the advantage of big shows of artists who think that way is that every work can be seen as part of a larger life-work not detachable master-pieces.

But the valuation of art works and artists that makes possible the economics of a big show is in fact that of the market-place. Which is not often that of active artists, unless they are re-working previously established validated marketable styles. Fashions in marketabilityy also determine which Old Masters attract large numbers of culture-tourist visitors & that is partly determined by collusion between museums and travel-tourism merhants.  

 

 

 

 

 

JIM ALLEN's ARENAS

https://www.flickr.com/photos/fflap/5329889444/in/photostream/ 

In order to avoid confusions in future I am drawing attention once more to In the photo of my notebook entry of 1969 [notebook now in Auckland Art Gallery archive[. It shows the 'Barb Wire' piece at Barry Lett Galleries had barb[ed] wire  surrounding all three areas of the 'arena'. But like a maze, it has a clear entrance to each space. There was a blanket thrown over the outer surrounding barbed wire. 

There was a later version, called 'Arena'. Differences: There were no maze-like entrances; & the inner surround was a soft rope, made from discsarded clothing of friends. I contributed clothing to this rope. I saw this version in the garden at the Govett-Brewster Art Gallery, New Plymouth -- early 1970s. There are photos in Jim's archve of a trial assembly of it in the yard outside the sculpture department at Elam School of Art.

[The garden area of the Govett-brewster has since that time been taken over by the cafe]. 

Art, politics, language.

No disrespect to Murray Ball intended by me. I note the political language on NZ's TV3 in an ad for a programme in which a gruff middle-aged man of rural appearance praises Murray Ball,cartoonist, as an artist who is "Unpretentious" with a "Natural Talent". It goes without saying, he is not like the people without talent & too much theory learned from books, who pretend they are artists to justify their incomprehensible modern art

Philip Dadson at Trish Clark's

my first visit to 1 Bowen ave the annex to the former old synagogue with big spaces & white walls

a small retrospective of Dadson from From Scratch to Antarctica and other exploration videos earth & rock & water by boat & bike & a recent wall full of big paper rectangles edge to edge of colours blown in the wind as once c 1972 a windsock on the grass bank at Elam next to motorway with red [?] paint that dribbled out produced one or two complaints by motorists of distraction in days when - as now too - someone will always complain about any public display of arts

reading George Orwell last night 'down & out 
in Paris & London' police censorship of Bozo pavement artist cop scuffing work with big feet & a nude on pavement outside St Martin-in-the-Fields outraged clergy Bozo was a 'screever' ancestor of Bsnksie

Dadson work with stones & water sounds was there too but none of his music instruments and performances

& big arm-rhythm drawing on black paper Toby Curnow said there's one in the Auck uni Music School & I recall hanging one in an art history seminar room in Symonds st but after I left that was removed & disappeared from sight for a while

 new electronic video display is lovely to see Toby recalled the old heavy monitors from the old days when video-art in big gallery shows was new 

good to have such varied work assembled - it's time a major gallery took on the job of presenting a retrospective

 

 

1. GLOMM HERE to ETERNITY

1   Glomm Here to Eternity - The Musical! 

 

Prologue.

 

[Voice-over, montage of picturesque concrete buldings, sun-bathed campus with cheerful students, brilliantly lit laboratory scenes, small but comfortable student cell-accommodation. 1950s band arrangement of Gaudeamus Igitur faintly heard between paragraphs].

 

In a distant galactic depression in the near future, new education Provider Wigg that has been taken over by Dauern, becomes in a short time a market-leader in online training seminars, with a broad global corporate shareholding, now named EwigDauern. The flagship product-line is the full-time Doctorhood, the famous crimson satin, with bright blue trim, for seven years of fees.

 

Every year students fill in their questionnaires for computer-examined grading, with a small panel for personal comments on teaching quality & pledge of commitment to the Provider.

 

The terms for obtaining grades are stated in the contract, notably giving up all rights to copyright in anything they have said, whatever, which is routinely recorded by their supervisors. Anything whatever that they have published through Ewigbook is of course the Provider’s copyright. All research results whatsoever belong to the corporation for use in whatsoever projects in the real world they can sell them to.

 

By the second year, deals between students & supervisors (who are only paid a small retainer) yield good earnings in payments to their charitable trusts. Governments of all stripes are guarantors of quality & keen buyers of the appropriate research when it has a symbiotic fit with their programmes. Corporations are also notable patrons, buying the research they need when they apply to government for contracts.

 

[to be continued]

 

 

ex- post - ulations 1

[I thought it might be useful to save some recent ephemera, Facebook posts]

1.  There are only 2 notable 1930s shop buildings in Highbury - 2 photos to come, the rest is nothing special at all & all covered in the signs of commercial 'culture'- no use talking it up as another Napier. There is some more way down towards Birkenhead Point among the old villas built for workers at Chelsea Sugar Refinery. I'll post photos of the 2 so-called "Art Deco" buildings. 

 

2.    Frances Hodgkins 'fauve' water-colour to go with Matisse's musical moments - I've just tried posting a link to a photo of it, but Auckland Art Gallery's PRIVACY settings deprive me of opportunity to post it on fb - AAG call it, wrongly, The Piano Lesson & when I tell them so they do not respond at all. [Tony Green, Emeritus Professor, Art History, University of Auckland] It is easily findable on google [Frances Hodgkins, Piano Lesson.] On the left people playing a 4-hands piano piece. [Who ever heard of piano lessons on a leisurely summer afternoon, with 'family' & 'friends' talking &/or reading around them?  Even my comment online to the gallery has been removed. Try this inserted today in this typepad file http://www.aucklandartgallery.com/the-collection/browse-artwork/15520/the-piano-lesson

Gordon Walters with 'Te Whiti'

3.     "Te Whiti", Gordon Walters - in next show at Gow Langsford ---how cd anyone seriously miss the coded commentary on black/white relations in many of his paintings - in this one, dominant assortment of whites in the centre, blacks pushed to the edges - "FUSION of 2 cultures", what a joke! [Yelling about appropriation missed the point because the work was taken to be just Europe-based international abstraction]

That's why Herbin was important for GW - painting's 'plastic alphabet' [see I Buchanan's useful essay in "GW: Order & Intuition" (Walters Publication, Auckland, 1989]

 I know abt the titles: this is about critical blindness of formalist/idealist thinking to 'representational/symbol/coded' readings of the paintings [irrespective of titles]. Likewise, blindness to what for Herbin was important - a kind of coding by colours & forms as if there were sometimes implicit intellectual categories - see my essay in same book for an earlier version of what I'm saying. [Some titles, I believe were Maori words used as street names. Where Robert got 'arbitrary as street signs', I don't know. Or is that you paraphrasing him. & Street signs are not arbitrary, often silhouette-pictorial, or well-established conventional signs used as a 'language' ]. There was behind the blindness an attempt to promote Walters [abstract] & demote local, 'nationalist' 'subjective' 'expressionist' ''preacher-prophetic' McCahon.

4.    

Old Choral Hall once had columns under the portico, but when the building was restored by the Uni works dept .- no surprise: the columns were too hard [or too expensive] to do so they left them out -- hence a classical pediment apparently unsupported. That's what happens if you ignore art history.

 

Ingenio non est genio & Hic labor hoc opus est

.... I cannot remember where I came across that Latin tag.

Translates as what: ad hoc pragmatic approach to everything ----

doing artwork responding to changes of conditions obedient to authority of PARADIGM arrived at theoretically  ----  the pattern  ---   garment-trade fashion-world method --- before beginning series of productions. Work done so that there is no glitch while putting tools to work. Results immaculately clean tidy & machine-like. [McCahon was 'untidy', Walters perfect]. 

As against leaving all possibilities -- foreseen and unforeseeable open during process of working each piece --- ready for all eventualities --- variability of bounce as the ball comes off the court with a mind prepared for masximum stretch & coordination of mind with the time --- cutting a stone glyph, stone is not uniform in its internal composition -- take consequences of each glyph or sentence as it goes forward -- by the time I got to Phoenix it had gone up in smoke & down in ash --- path to knowing something is no more specifiable than what is to be known & what knowledge comes in -- & from  --  working.

Answers to questions like 'why is Poussin still in the syllabus for this year's art history exam' can only be determined in a retrospective accounting, of where inquiry began & what route it took, after course has ended --- knowledge about teacher-student relation among other things --- about the felt effect of changes of feeling towards paarticular artworks during study --- prejudices dissolving --- something in analysis of an artwork that raises questions of interpretation & therefore slways of subject positions in dialogue --- all of which are 'subjective', not only those with the most incisive speculations as starting points for investigations, such as problem of generalities raised by particulars. 

=======  maximium stretch   Genio ========

Hic labor, hoc opus est  cries out to be justaposed with University of Auckland's motto  Ingenio et Labore  --- labouring up field in 30 phases of pick-&-go or coordination of a team able to invent on the run end with a team-try --- in retrospect I note the distinct lack of collegiality even in 1970s, instead a gaggle of competing male-egos & bullying of newcomers --- wars of the nobles with not a few robber-barons among them no Robin Hoods

I've just got the Alumni magazine -- Spring 2013 -- don't remember asking for it no mention of uni's savage attack on Fine Arts -- recognise at once it's corporate format & journalism styled like progress reports from Infratil. No hint of what a former colleague of mine tells me in the street recently that staff are intimidated, that they are afraid of 'punishment' if they 'speak out'.

So "Are the arts, and humanities really having a crisis of confidence? No mathematicians or scientists I know regard these subjects as irrelevant or valueless". Prof Bill Barton. Sure, those guys are in the same boat. Publish or perish, show immediate cash values for courses. Cost-benefit analysis, working hours controlled, leave and promotion dependent on production of word-lengths assessed by envious peers. 

The fear comes from an administration made up of ex-academics turned apparatchiks, who are answerable only to political bosses. Irrespective of academic priorities. It is they who define what is 'today's economic climate' & having defined it make use of their definition to 'redirect' funding. Primarily from inquiry subjects, critical subjects, subjects that require understanding of philosophical issues, towards technical school training of more managers wih no inquiry into philosophical issues. [Tourism? what is that?]

Who needs more managers in Tourism so badly [local tourist industry -- clean green hobbitland] leisure entertainnment travel-spectacle & adventure for fairly rich retirees -- a good earner --  that politicians have to redirect yet again more funds from Fine Arts, where they've lost 19 part-timers in very recent times, I'm told, 2 retiring senior teachers will not be replaced & now 50% of their course to be cancelled. 

"Isn't adversity the breeding-ground of revolutions, be they political, artistic, or intellectual". So artistic and intellectual revolutions are not political revolutions? Does this mean only revolt of workers would be real & to be feared? Guess so, because administration thinks that intellectuals are compromised by their class background & their inability to do anything other than talk for ever in their ivory towers at the public's expense. Forgetting the giant glass & steel thing that houses tomorrow's entrepreneurs who are never faced with ethical questions, with questions about the social value of the systems,or their effects on the lives of people, only costs-benefits.   

However, let us ask who are the critics of social injustices, are they rent-a-crowd protesters [so they say in politics]  Who makes inquiries into the systems that politicians put in place, who is informed enough to tell the public at large when some inequity appears? who informs the press? when information is lacking or suppressed for political ends? Who makes the reports tht are chucked inn the bin by ministers? Who makes social conditions & issues visible & readable & seeable as movie & TV & hearable as radio, if not those who have studied the arts&sciences?

The advantage of having arts&sciences prominent in a university is that they are best placed to advise government, to offer significant debate on issues, as independent of political pressure & commercial pressure as possible -- public is entitled to a free intellectual press in order for democracy to exist. Any attack on the arts&sciences is implicitly or explicitly an attack on democratic process. 

There are famous examples of political interference in academc process & repression of arts in 1930s Europe & USSR in 1950s USA in much of South America.

Nov 5th yesterday: -- remember Parihaka, remember Ghandhi, remember Mandela, cherish Ai We Wei, remember thousands who have disappeared & imprisoned.    

 

contribution to museum studies

Poussin's Humour - the book

'Poussin's Humour', the book, is out of print & an expensive rarity - quoted on one internet site at 300 pounds sterling -

but for only $8US it's online & ready to download here are the links 

http://www.amazon.co.uk/Poussins-Humour-ebook/dp/B00D6JPBRE/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1370378475&sr=8-1&keywords=green+poussin%27s+humour

http://www.amazon.com/Poussins-Humour-ebook/dp/B00D6JPBRE/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1370378573&sr=8-1&keywords=green+poussin%27s+humour

http://www.smashwords.com/books/view/322398

re Simon Ingram's computerised painting

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 

 

politicians against intellectuals

This note is for scholars & artists in New Zealand, where they come under frequent attacks of name-calling mud-slinging & occasional stone-throwing.  

Jacques Rancière [Eng trans] remarks in 'Chronicles of Consensual Times' p70 

"...the classic trick of presenting the dominant vision of

things as a minority viewpoint, a victim of persecution in a

horrible plot by intellectuals".

 

hard yards in arts - are you happy?

hard yards in arts & in sciences & mathematics -- airy fairy intellectual [related to philosophy] stuff no use in the 'real' world -- the real world is the world of cash without flesh blood the flux of weather or organic life or earthquakes -- a mechanical Newtonian universe, seriously lacking in relativity, -- tho there is still, surprisingly, plenty of profit in insurance, so I've been told. 

I wonder what is the difference between a Management doctorate and an arts or sciences doctorate -- I believe it is at base, or thereabouts, this, that everything in the Management style of teaching & learning is training in obedience to the given [dictated, by ruling authority]  rules and systems -- even the language is reduced to jargon in the process -- 

in the arts & sciences neither the system nor the rules nor the discourse methods nor the significations in any method of semiosis -- nor the researcher's own positions -- are to be so much taken for granted as in training and obedience: all are always necessarily open to questioning -- criticism. Including the institutions in which they take place. Because it is always open-ended as to its results [who knows what they will find before they find what they didn't expect] & open-ended as self-discovery as is always the subject of discourse or other method of making knowledge known, artists & scholars. 

Under the amended Universities act in an earlier draft shown to professors just before the summer vacation and timed so that no debate could take place -- made the universities accumulators of knowledge [the knowledge economy] but criticism was omitted.

Professors were asked to write their comments -- separately and without a proper meeting to discuss their responses -- & succeeded in getting the word 'criticism' included amnong their objectives. But, I note, self-criticism, was not included. The institution is, yeah, beyond the criticism of mere academics. The only criticism from then on was that of the Minister of Education through the Unversity Council, because of the newly created majority of Ministry appointees & lay appointess over academics on Council. 

Stefano della Bella - Auckland Art Gallery

Rarely exhibited [& never more than a handful at a time], etchings of master Italian 17th century print-maker, Stefano della Bella. There are some 120 of them, given to the Auckland Art Gallery in 1982 by Walter Auburn.

30 years later a few turn up on the walls -- as part of a show which has 16th & 17th century images of warfare. Ok, neat little 'theme' show. Nice to see the other works.

One problem: double-hanging of work that needs to be seen close means that neither the one hung high [too high for average height humans] & one hung low [too low to be seen except in a prolonged knees-bend] can be seen properly.

Of course, prints were not made for hanging on walls, but to be kept in portfolios and seen close to.

But the hang is I guess of little consequence when they are hung as illustrations of 'warfare through the ages', to be seen as no more than amusing exotic pictorial historical subject-matter.

Is that really the only use the art gallery has for them -- dusty old museum objects? Isn't it a gallery whose purpose is to contribute to public knowledge and awareness of the discourse of art?  Or is that no longer its primary purpose?

The present hang does very little to show to gallery visitors the art of this considerable artist, extraordinary draughtsman, who uses etching rather than pen & ink as his medium.