back issue

The Gothic is at risk of becoming a reigning truism in New Zealand art. But is it a telling term or a convenient marketing device, Zeitgeist or constricting cliche?

New Zealand art's Gothic turn was partly a response to biculturalism, the dominant discourse in New Zealand art in the early 1990s. A new generation of contemporary Maori artists were getting all the airtime and biculturalism overwhelmed every discussion. Against this backdrop, a new group of Pakeha artists emerged who were interested in exploring their cultural background while reacting against the pieties of biculturalism and earnest 1980s theory art. While contemporary Maori art typically asserted cultural identity as noble, much of this work had a bogan edge. Some of it - but not all - was overtly postcolonial, concerned with the skeletons in the historical closet, a supposedly shameful past haunting the present.

The key figure in the Gothic turn is undoubtedly painter Bill Hammond, today New Zealand's most commercially successful living Pakeha artist...

Hammond's bird-people paintings lurch from sadistic to whimsical, heavy metal to heavenly. The bird-people gaze out across the ocean as if anticipating invasion and slaughter. They wile away hours in the pub drinking, smoking and playing pool in print shirts. They play cello in the trees in primordial forests. It is as if they are fatalistic, looking forward to what will overwhelm them. They are floating signifiers, referring at once to the birds that were there before Maori, to the Maori who decimated the bird population, and to the Pakeha who later dealt to the Maori...

Hammond hails from Christchurch, the South Island city that is seen - indeed, promotes itself - as the heartland of New Zealand Gothic. He has been embraced as a precursor to a younger generation of Christchurch artists. They include, of course, Ronnie van Hout (now based in Melbourne, who has long milked debased Gothic tropes and channelled impulses from the other side), Jason Greig (an old-school printmaker who makes fantasy images in exquisite chiaroscuro of brooding Heathcliff types on the moors, flayed men and The Reaper), Seraphine Pick (now in Wellington, making goth-girl/princess fantasy art), Saskia Leek (now in Auckland, with her naive folksy paintings) and Tony De Lautour...

While New Zealand Gothic is tied up with the postcolonial, not all the work is postcolonial Gothic. Take Auckland photographer Yvonne Todd, sculptor Peter Madden and installation artists et al. Todd's work has been labelled 'suburban Gothic', and, more precisely, 'North Shore Gothic'. She's been particularly inspired by Virginia Andrews's Flowers In The Attic novels. Todd flaunts the idealising expectations of commercial studio photography, producing portraits of female characters that seem to exemplify some physical or psychological malaise...

The Gothic is principally a Pakeha thing, but some Maori artists have made use of it. Michael Parekowhai referenced the 1993 Gothic melodrama The Piano in creating a piano-coffin littered with carved wooden lilies, imagining the passing of the colonial order (The story of a New Zealand river, 2001)...

But the question remains: why is New Zealand home to the Gothic when it is supposed to be such a nice place?... It is also an escapist fantasy, developed in response to the fear that New Zealand - particularly Christchurch - is benign. New Zealand Gothic flourishes as an expression of who we are but also of who we don't want to be...

This article appears in excerpted form. You can read the entire article in Art & Australia's Spring 2008 issue.