Little monkey, tono ano

Regular readers may remember that I started my employment in the wonderful world of bridging education (or, as it is known more kindly and more gently in Australia, enabling education) teaching a compulsory paper called New Zealand Studies, designed for international students.  Alas, this carefully-crafted paper was largely reviled by those who took it, its spectres perhaps too much like the less savoury aspects of their socio-cultural education back home.  These reservations were shared not only by some of my colleagues but also by powers that be, and eventually the paper, like the way of all flesh, was restructured out of existence.

I don’t miss the daily grind of trying to facilitate the western-style critical thinking of students whose learning priorities were largely elsewhere, but I do miss the field trips.  The visit to a mid-Canterbury dairy farm in which half my class and I had suddenly to leap out of the way of flying excrement (flying at speed, too, as the cows stepped on to the rotary milking machine) remains in memory, as does another day on which we alighted, two busloads of us, at Nga Hau e Wha marae only to discover we were a day early for our booking.  That short trip ended with me running up to the entry to the marae, crying cease-and-desist to students who were running ahead of me taking photographs of the pou and wharenui, sans powhiri, and thus formed part of my history of absurdist problem-solving, if not pedagogy’s finest hour.

What I miss most, however, are the visits to the Art Gallery, on which students would typically abandon their worksheets to find new objects for their contemplation, often stalked with varying degrees of discretion by gallery staff who doubted the students’ ability or willingness to look but not touch.  In the case of Michel Tuffery’s Povi Christkeke, they were right to be worried.  Inevitably, a small cohort of lads would pat and embrace the bull as if it were a beloved toy or perhaps a large dog.  While they generally balked at mid-century modernism or pop cultural abstraction, the Povi was always a hit.

I would typically use the latter free-range part of these field trips to view the touring exhibitions, once the students for whom I was responsible had been schooled in the negative with regard to handling the art works.  By these means did I keep calm and carry on my own practice as a viewer, a dualism that I practised on most field excursions (fleeing flying cow dung excepted).  Now those times are gone, and my erstwhile companion in gallery visiting, Governor’s Bay Jay, is currently otherwise engaged.  I realised this weekend that if I didn’t take what viewing opportunities remain available, my identity as a two-bit lover of the visual arts might well atrophy altogether.

I immediately noticed how differently I felt physically there from how I feel at work: comfortable, in the gallery, walking pregnant: the weight thrown back, the slight waddle, the hands resting atop the quiet looming of my daughter.  In my place of employment, I feel awkward about such biological idiosyncrasies: I suspect they conflict rather too much in my mind with my image of myself as a large but swift-moving educational ninja.  I also get a certain amount of teasing in some work environments for coming across pregnant at all, and although I would like to say it doesn’t affect me, it does.  However, the failure of invisibility is as inevitable as my continuing expansion, and here I can only gesture at the peace-of-mind I felt to be doing something — looking at art — in which pregnant behaviour was no affront to anyone.  I was also put in mind of a recent piece of news-lite — was it in Germany?  was it in Scandinavia? — in which pregnant women toddled about an art museum, infusing their bumps with the serenity of looking at academic landscapes.  While I was happy to look at Van der Velden’s Otira Gorge on the passenger’s behalf, I had other aims too.

I am permanently enthused by the work of Fiona Pardington to the extent that I hope we never meet, since I would inevitably greet her with too much effusiveness.  With this in mind, and in my condition, you can imagine the joy with which I experienced Mauria mai, tono ano, currently displayed just inside the entrance to the recurated collection.  While I struggle with pregnancy raising in me this intensity of emotion, I have no such qualms when it comes to art, so this work presented a fortuitous coming together of two sentiments in my life whhich I read, as signalled in earlier posts, as a sign that I should probably let myself just go with some of these baby-emotions a little more:

Traditionally worn close to the heart, heitiki are fertility symbols and so are strongly connected with life and death.

Pardington has used an average of ten flashes for each exposure. This process recalls a Mäori idea that light is held within greenstone, suggesting that what Pardington was doing was not illuminating the heitiki, but releasing a light that was already there.

The images of these heitiki set the tone for much of the rest of my experience, which was as much about reconnecting with loved works in a new environment as it was encountering the new.  I think I am correct, for example, in saying this is the first time I have seen Lonnie Henderson’s sista7 in Christchurch, although I’m sure I’ve encountered it in Wellington and Dunedin in other exhibitions.  It is as ever beautifully hung and illuminated and was one of many moments in which I wished Governor’s Bay Jay was here, since the view that inspired it is the view that she also can see from her home.

In other regards I am I suppose predictable in my tastes.  Killeen was a pleasure; Hammond of course (and I remembered the happy days of 2005 when Mariella would take-and-send covert pictures on her mobile phone of Hammonds displayed in Wellington and Auckland) and Walters too.  Indeed, the modernism of the collection was I thought particularly well accounted for in the wall notes that accompanied the successive galleries, which managed, in clear prose, to explain the history both of the intentions and the critique of a whole variety of works, Walters and McCahon (and, to my surprise, Frances Hodgkins) included.  The abandonment of rigid chronology in favour of thematic incursions to the loosest of narratives allows for all kinds of serendipitous resemblances which, for one who wrote a PhD that was itself just shy of an influence study, were definitions of a fun afternoon out.  The last and most delightful of these was Ann Shelton’s Wintering, a photographic re-envisioning of what Van der Velden painted that put me in mind, in a different fashion, of Cheryl Bernstein’s recent adventures in geo-tagging.

After nearly two hours of such contemplative strolling and the accompanying belly patting, the singing ligaments below the passenger reminded me that cheerful transcendence is possible only for so long.  I bought a copy of Art New Zealand and consumed a chocolate fairy cake and a pot of feijoa green tea in the cafe next door.  I need to think while I still have income about subscribing to some of the periodicals I always say I can read for free at the university, then don’t.  With the coming housebound-ness and immobility of a baby, I will need reading materials for those moments of lucidity and curiosity that won’t require my leaving the couch or the bed.

Something in this visit brought me back to myself in a manner that the last six weeks of work have taken away.  The industrial life is fulfilling but requires a kind of carapace that tends in me to isolate away the more creative territories of my imagination.  I don’t think I’ve ever in my working life achieved this balance between hard-edged analytical and contemplative reflection, and when the former has immediate, real-world consequences for one’s colleagues, the latter can seem (falsely, I might add) like unacceptable self-indulgence.  But if I’m not to go mad, and if I’m to give this baby a fair go at a tranquil mind of her own, I can’t eliminate the latter in service of the former.  I have some thoughts about how better to manage all this in the lead-up to parental leave, but I will let them brew a while longer.  For now I’m going to try and think a little more about the tenderness I find in this image — animals and children! — and think further about how, and from whom, that might also apply to me too.