Mediating the modern in New Zealand

Come July, the Auckland Art Gallery/Toi o Tāmaki will be hosting what is probably the largest travelling design exhibition ever seen in New Zealand. Living in a modern way: California design 1930-1965 was the Los Angeles County Museum of Art’s (LACMA) response to the John Paul Getty Museum’s 2011 ‘Pacific Standard Time’ initiative, which saw over sixty venues showing over 130 exhibitions focussing on the importance of the North American Pacific Coast to twentieth century art and design.

Cover of LACMA's Living in a modern way
California design 1930-1965 catalogue

Living in a modern way, curated by the always impressive Wendy Kaplan and Bobbye Tigerman, was the focus of the five exhibitions held by LACMA. It was intended not only to assert a counter narrative to the view that saw what happened in California marginalised in the history of art and design in the United States, but also it sought to ‘expand the museum’s permanent collection significantly by making it the ‘preeminent assemblage of mid-century California furniture, ceramics, textiles, and industrial design’. From a New Zealand perspective, this curatorial stance is quite radical because it asserts the centrality of design to an understanding of a specific cultural space. The fact that the Auckland Art Gallery is hosting an exhibition outside of its current collecting parameters tantalisingly suggests that it too might be rethinking the way it approaches New Zealand’s art and design history.

Modernism had a rickety emergence in New Zealand; it made its earliest appearance amongst the professional readers of the British periodical Architectural Review. In terms of domestic architecture it was adapted to local conditions by architects such as Vernon Brown, from 1942 a studio instructor in architecture at Auckland University College. But it was most impressively manifest in the work of a small band of architectural refugees from Nazi Europe, people who were not only conversant with the theory and practice of modernism but also amongst its earliest exponents. Among them were Ernst Plischke, Ernst Gerson, Fritz Farrar, Richard Fuchs and Friedrich Neumann; none were able to practice as architects in New Zealand as their qualifications weren’t recognised. Unlike the situation prevailing in California where émigrés found ready acceptance, it took some time for the work of these extraordinary practitioners to be acceptable, both institutionally and culturally. Plischke's impressive polemic Design and living (1947) was probably New Zealand's most significant contribution to an understanding of modernism in the post-war period; as important as his design of the curtain-walled Massey House (1951-1957), Wellington's first modern high rise building.

Ernst Plischke, cover design for Design and living

As with the institutions, popular understanding of modernism was also a mediated exercise, although through film rather than publications. Hollywood’s influence on popular taste cannot be underrated: it gave the public a sort of superficial modernism; more streamlined packaging and gloss than the ‘real’ thing, which was concerned ostensibly with issues such as function and utility. The tastes of New Zealander consumers were, however, primarily subject to decisions made elsewhere, but what consumers saw in local shops had very little to do with what they might have seen at the cinema or in magazines. Until the mid 1950s, imported commodities emanated primarily from Britain and were determined by the conservative tastes of importers who, almost without exception, toed the line determined by British manufacturers.

Things changed following the Second World War: design found a small voice in public discourse through periodicals such as Home & Building and, from 1948 to 1954, the New Zealand Design Review. Manufacturing, which had arisen out of necessity during the war, also prompted an interest in design related matters with articles on design being carried in industry publications such as Modern Manufacturing and the New Zealand Manufacturer. Most significantly, design began to be taught in schools; but if students were hoping to be instructed in the wonders of the modern world – like their peers across the Pacific in California – they would be disappointed. In a 1949 article ‘Perpetuation of ugliness’ on the teaching of design published in the teachers’ journal Education, Richard Sharrell listed only one American publication, J Edgar Kaufmann’s What is modern design? Sharrell’s eleven other references were to British publications: Herbert Read’s Art and Industry (1934), Noel Carrington’s Design (1935, revised in 1947) and Anthony Bertram’s Design in daily life (1937) along with his Pelican Special Design (1938), among them; Plischke's local text was bizarrely ignored. A colonial reading list; all very worthy, but hardly contemporary stuff.

The one area where American influence was dominant in post war New Zealand was transport. Despite the fact that nearly half the country's GDP was expended on imported oil, politicians and engineers around the country were only too eager to eviscerate the landscape with an American version of the German autobahn; and the public appears to have been equally keen to collaborate in their cupidity by attempting to acquire American automobiles. But even though New Zealanders consumed American petroleum products with a rare avidity, economic reality ensured that New Zealanders ended up with two-laned motorways and Morris Minors instead of multi-lane freeways and Cadillacs. Never had California seemed so distant to New Zealanders than in the post-war environment. 

Inevitably, just as California begins to demolish its freeways and emphasise public transit initiatives, New Zealand embarks on yet another motorway madness exercise with the government’s egregious Roads of National Significance programme. It seems that not only is New Zealand keen to be the last of the first but also its appetite for colonial subservience is unabated, even in the way it approaches the design of its infrastructure.