tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-24648748803008583032024-03-10T21:25:11.054+13:00Hitori hoahoa o AotearoaNew Zealand design historyChristopher Thompsonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01264481177071819483noreply@blogger.comBlogger36125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2464874880300858303.post-62545228127473486902016-09-12T07:11:00.000+12:002018-06-25T13:25:37.265+12:00The most complete set of illuminated windows in the colonies: Clayton & Bell at Ellerslie<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgxUMAIhHsF1NJXqAcV2w-RKPLYrn3ZlA_2UdckYJHlPUDAOqHv_3g2-JhMdau32w-vYW9PWx65XqceNttiT4mWxW0_T_prn38mEg93yj-C7PmtXb1mN1_YkiJJRgJqxztIW_GxUkvCb8gu/s1600/Window_6+Bottom_Panel_2.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="334" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgxUMAIhHsF1NJXqAcV2w-RKPLYrn3ZlA_2UdckYJHlPUDAOqHv_3g2-JhMdau32w-vYW9PWx65XqceNttiT4mWxW0_T_prn38mEg93yj-C7PmtXb1mN1_YkiJJRgJqxztIW_GxUkvCb8gu/s640/Window_6+Bottom_Panel_2.jpg" width="640" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Alfred Bell (1832-1895) for Clayton and Bell, Predella detail of [<i>The ascendant Christ</i>]<i> </i>(1884). The central red escutcheon is emblazoned<br />
with a paschal lamb and banner proclaiming victory over death.<br />
Christ Church, Ellerslie, gift of Alfred Bell, 1885<br />
Courtesy of the Parish of Ellerslie and Mount Wellington. Photograph: <a href="http://lacphotography.com/">Luke Carpenter</a></td></tr>
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<span style="font-size: large;">In</span> a memoir of his time in New Zealand, <a href="http://www.teara.govt.nz/en/biographies/2c36/cowie-william-garden">William Garden Cowie</a> (1831-1902), the first Anglican bishop of Auckland (1869-1902), recorded a ride 'to <i>Christ Church</i>, Ellerslie, another of our beautiful suburbs'. Describing the church as 'a very small building of wood, like most of our Auckland churches', he noted it was 'adorned with a series of painted windows, the gift of Mr Alfred Bell, of the well-known firm of Clayton and Bell, through his old friend Mr Albin Martin, a resident in the district.' <span style="font-size: x-small;"><W Cowie, <i>Our last year in New Zealand 1887</i> (London: Kegan, Paul, Trench , 1888), pp. 5-6>. </span>Cowie was far from being the only contemporaneous visitor to the church to note the windows, but he was probably the most impressed; certainly no other church in his diocese was so spectacularly illuminated.<br />
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Installed in Christ Church in January 1885, the gift by the stained glass artist Alfred Bell (1832-1895) of thirteen stained and painted glass windows (comprising thirty lights) is now the most significant surviving set of English gothic revival stained glass windows to be found in New Zealand. Not only were they designed by Bell specifically for the newly erected church – it was dedicated on 22 December 1883 – but they were also a personal acknowledgement of the role the artist <a href="http://www.teara.govt.nz/en/biographies/2m34/martin-albin">Albin Martin</a> (1813-1888) played in catalysing Bell's career as both one of the nineteenth-century's more pre-eminent designers of stained and painted glass and co-owner of <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clayton_and_Bell">Clayton and Bell</a>, at the time probably the most prominent stained glass workshop in England. The circumstances of how the windows arrived in New Zealand are intriguing not only for the personal connections they reveal but also in the way they demonstrate how art and design was deployed to integrate the frontier settlement of New Zealand into the cultural hegemony of empire.<br />
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj3qlrhzRragCK4CzVjqM8qGT7xPiLNK5IRpjmX7r_eE0Ihf4jOAEwuY5eoONEafTSqEU6e2zJpundek_44I__cfFVLP3MLBfD_6rGro4NlsKxXGmqZrsf3QFKDcsYxIU4HBwNqiR3oYB0R/s1600/Screenshot+2016-05-08+15.20.12.png" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="466" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj3qlrhzRragCK4CzVjqM8qGT7xPiLNK5IRpjmX7r_eE0Ihf4jOAEwuY5eoONEafTSqEU6e2zJpundek_44I__cfFVLP3MLBfD_6rGro4NlsKxXGmqZrsf3QFKDcsYxIU4HBwNqiR3oYB0R/s640/Screenshot+2016-05-08+15.20.12.png" width="640" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">James D Richardson, <i>Exterior of Christ Church, Ellerslie</i> (1928)<br />
<a href="http://www.aucklandcity.govt.nz/dbtw-wpd/exec/dbtwpub.dll?BU=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.aucklandcity.govt.nz%2Fdbtw-wpd%2FHeritageImages%2Findex.htm&AC=QBE_QUERY&TN=heritageimages&QF0=ID&NP=2&MR=5&RF=HIORecordSearch&QI0=%3D%224-4121%22">George Grey Special Collections, Auckland Libraries (4-4121)</a></td></tr>
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The decision to construct a church in the recently developed, semi-rural, suburb of Ellerslie was made in 1881 when the Anglican diocese of Auckland acquired land – partially by gift – on Bella Street (now Ladies Mile) <span style="font-size: x-small;"><Pamela Stone, <i>With memories filled: a history of the parish of Ellerslie </i>([Auckland: the church, 1983]), p. 4></span>. It was the second church to manifest in the suburb and was financed and built by local parishioners at a cost of £600 (the equivalent of $108,500 today), a decade after the opening of the Auckland to Mercer railway line that had encouraged the formation of what was one of Auckland's first railway suburbs.<br />
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The church was <a href="https://paperspast.natlib.govt.nz/newspapers/NZH18831229.2.4">designed</a> by the Irish-born civil engineer, surveyor and erstwhile architect Robert McFarland (1832-1901) in what was described as the 'Early English' style; a more contemporary classification would be Antipodean gothic revival. It was not McFarland's first church. In 1868 he had designed the first, neo-classical, iteration of St James Presbyterian church in Thames (it survives as the church hall) and in 1876 he devised his first gothic revival structure, the Thames Congregational Church, which also survives – albeit in mutilated form – as the <a href="http://www.thamesbaptist.org.nz/">Thames Baptist Church</a>. Neither church now acknowledges McFarland's role as architect.<br />
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhSwoVovmZo1ypDDvMZYWZv4Vn7yC6HfaauGwdnywFEuSjTCX7NM0AtjJJR-EUzvFlv58VOLjEOT3g35byXxL0z-6_J9KXmrIClLY1PnaefcLlWfLJbu-YZtG9q35xeAaeU9kYLvZqBUf3x/s1600/Screenshot+2016-08-31+07.16.20.png" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="508" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhSwoVovmZo1ypDDvMZYWZv4Vn7yC6HfaauGwdnywFEuSjTCX7NM0AtjJJR-EUzvFlv58VOLjEOT3g35byXxL0z-6_J9KXmrIClLY1PnaefcLlWfLJbu-YZtG9q35xeAaeU9kYLvZqBUf3x/s640/Screenshot+2016-08-31+07.16.20.png" width="640" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Unidentified photographer,<i> Congregational Church, Thames </i>(1902)<br />
<i><a href="http://nzetc.victoria.ac.nz/tm/scholarly/Cyc02Cycl-fig-Cyc02Cycl0873a.html">Cyclopedia of New Zealand </a></i></td></tr>
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In all probability the designs of both of McFarland's gothic revival churches, with their pointed arches, lancet windows, false buttresses and steeply pitched roofs, were taken from, as yet, unidentified pattern books. As Jonathan Mane-Wheoki points out, the Anglican diocese of Auckland had an extensive library of architectural books, most of them collected by <a href="http://www.teara.govt.nz/en/biographies/1s5/selwyn-george-augustus">George Augustus Selwyn</a> (1809-1878), first – and only – Anglican bishop of New Zealand – and most, if not all, reflected his distinct preference for 'the original, true style' of the gothic revival. <span style="font-size: x-small;"><J Mane-Wheoki, 'Selwyn the ecclesiologist – in theory and practice', in A K Davidson, ed, <i>A controversial churchman</i> (Wellington: Brigid Williams Books, 2011, 128-145, p. 137></span>. Selwyn's espousal of the gothic revival not only influenced colonial ecclesiastical architecture but was also ubiquitous and lingering. As Bill McKay notes in his recent history of New Zealand church design, 'Perhaps because of the number and familiarity of Gothic Revival churches in New Zealand, large and small, we think this is the natural style of church architecture' <span style="font-size: x-small;"><W McKay, <i>Worship: a history of New Zealand church design</i> (Auckland: Godwit, 2015), p. 187></span>.<br />
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As G A Bremner <a href="https://abe.revues.org/357?lang=it">observes</a>, colonial bishops deployed architecture not only to exert discipline on their sometimes wayward communities but also <span style="font-family: inherit;">'<span style="background-color: white; text-align: justify;"><span style="color: #333333;">to enhance the physical presence of the Church, thus asserting both its dignity and identity' in an increasingly pluralist religious world. </span></span></span>Christ Church was one of a number of substantial – if spatially and decoratively modest – timber built Antipodean gothic revival churches erected during Cowie's time as bishop. These included <a href="http://www.heritage.org.nz/the-list/details/0721">St George's</a>, Thames (Edward Mahoney, 1872), <a href="http://www.aucklandcouncil.govt.nz/EN/newseventsculture/heritage/Documents/mtalbertheritagewalks.pdf">St Luke's</a>, Mount Albert (Pierre Burrows, 1872-1883), the <a href="http://www.heritage.org.nz/the-list/details/98">Church of the Holy Sepulchre</a>, Khyber Pass (Edward Mahoney, 1880-1881), <a href="http://www.heritage.org.nz/the-list/details/744">Christ Church</a>, Kihikihi (Philip Walsh, 1881), <a href="http://www.aucklandcity.govt.nz/dbtw-wpd/exec/dbtwpub.dll?BU=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.aucklandcity.govt.nz%2Fdbtw-wpd%2FHeritageImages%2Findex.htm&AC=QBE_QUERY&TN=heritageimages&QF0=ID&NP=2&MR=5&RF=HIORecordSearch&QI0=%3D%224-8433%22">St Jude's</a>, Avondale (Edward Bartley, 1884) and <a href="http://www.heritage.org.nz/the-list/details/21">St Mary's Pro-Cathedral</a>, Parnell (Benjamin Mountfort, 1884-1898).</div>
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgcgcpmWbxBrCPdZTnQtabmJRQ97FsC5y2_DadHABSgAu7Tohe2_FqPvXqpPPdNeOR-yZbkuVepg0trB6vKlLLbvXQAmBWx63wqsgENvwRtWMVR9doac7wte1Iyg3-Wv562_NUKhplgtK4v/s1600/Screenshot+2016-05-08+15.12.39.png" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="466" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgcgcpmWbxBrCPdZTnQtabmJRQ97FsC5y2_DadHABSgAu7Tohe2_FqPvXqpPPdNeOR-yZbkuVepg0trB6vKlLLbvXQAmBWx63wqsgENvwRtWMVR9doac7wte1Iyg3-Wv562_NUKhplgtK4v/s640/Screenshot+2016-05-08+15.12.39.png" width="640" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">James D Richardson, <i>Interior of Christ Church, Ellerslie</i> (1928). The church's original internal configuration, with the congregation facing east and the altar raised to ensure visibility, conformed to ecclesiological principles.<br />
<a href="http://wpd/exec/dbtwpub.dll?BU=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.aucklandcity.govt.nz%2Fdbtw-wpd%2FHeritageImages%2Findex.htm&AC=QBE_QUERY&TN=heritageimages&QF0=ID&NP=2&MR=5&RF=HIORecordSearch&QI0=%3D%224-4125%22">George Grey Special Collections, Auckland Libraries (4-4125)</a></td></tr>
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Christ Church was distinguished from the other churches by what a nineteenth century reporter <a href="http://paperspast.natlib.govt.nz/cgi-bin/paperspast?a=d&d=NZH18831224.2.39&cl=CL2.1883.12.24&e=-------10--1----0--">described</a> as 'a share of luck that rarely falls to a colonial church'. Newly resident in Ellerslie, Albin Martin was a member of building committee formed to oversee the construction of the church. He was not only an artist but also a sometime farmer and politician. Martin, who migrated to New Zealand in order to farm in 1851, was the son and brother of Anglican clergymen who, from the age of 16, lived in the Dorset village of Silton where his father, Harry (1772-1832), was rector of the parish. In March 1833 he followed his elder brother – another Harry (1812-1864) – to Cambridge where he matriculated at Jesus College. Unlike his brother he abandoned his studies and in 1834 became a pupil of the landscape painter John Linnell (1792-1882) in London <span style="font-size: x-small;"><Una Platts 'Albin Martin 1813-1888', in <i>Albin Martin</i> (Auckland: Auckland City Art Gallery, 1988), p. 9></span>. Una Platts speculates that Martin's decision to forswear Cambridge was prompted by his coming into money, an assertion supported by entries in the British censuses for 1841 and 1851 where he is described as being of independent means and as a landed proprietor, residing in Silton.<br />
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgO9nKfCNuOBCgfn4IKQQZrZESe_C1BjuTrzQWrsmDQG-WjWaQWWUkWdt0z1NxYQo5clwYqTJ4lqqVoVv4l8Qh3Ka-FE4Y4DFbSLH3eCo723Y7HqAzXjL5Hm2ha5e9-Dqwtwv7UGg-sQkj2/s1600/Screenshot+2016-05-08+22.40.36.png" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="400" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgO9nKfCNuOBCgfn4IKQQZrZESe_C1BjuTrzQWrsmDQG-WjWaQWWUkWdt0z1NxYQo5clwYqTJ4lqqVoVv4l8Qh3Ka-FE4Y4DFbSLH3eCo723Y7HqAzXjL5Hm2ha5e9-Dqwtwv7UGg-sQkj2/s400/Screenshot+2016-05-08+22.40.36.png" width="320" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">John Linnell (1792-1882), <i>Portrait of Albin Martin</i> (1835).<br />
<a href="http://www.aucklandartgallery.com/explore-art-and-ideas/artwork/8682/portrait-of-albin-martin">Auckland Art Gallery Toi o Tāmaki on loan from a private collection (L1940/1/2)</a></td></tr>
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Between 1834 and 1851 Martin spent much of his time in London and Italy but his family retained their connections with Silton. In the 1841 census, the Rev Harry Martin is recorded as being in residence there with his wife Anne, two female and one male servants, along with a guest and her son; as there is no other clerical listing for the parish this suggests that Harry Martin was acting as its curate and thus responsible for the care of the aged, infirm and poor. In the same census an eight year old boy, Alfred Bell, is recorded, along with his father, Jeremiah – an agricultural labourer, his mother, Leah, and two brothers. Bell's great grandson, Peter Larkworthy, suggests it was Harry Martin 'a man of discernment and an accomplished amateur artist' who was responsible for promoting Bell's talents, but this account ignores the substantial reality of Bell's gift of the glass to Christ Church and Albin's two accounts of the connection, of which Larkworthy was, apparently, unaware <span style="font-size: x-small;"><Peter Larkworthy, <i>Clayton and Bell, stained glass artists and decorators</i> (London: Ecclesiological Society, 1984), p. 6></span>. It is evident though that sometime between 1841 and 1851, despite long absences in Italy and London, Albin Martin, probably through his brother, encountered and instructed the young Bell. Forty years later Martin <a href="http://paperspast.natlib.govt.nz/cgi-bin/paperspast?a=d&d=NZH18841210.2.25&cl=CL2.1884.12.10&e=-------10--1----0--">recalled</a> that<br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
[He] had recently returned to England from Italy [possibly in July 1844], many years before he came to Auckland, [when] he met, on visiting a friend's house, a little boy whose aptitude for drawing attracted his attention. The boy was poor, but [he], thinking there was something in the lad, gave him lessons in the art of drawing and painting. The boy, whose name was Alfred Bell, progressed with such rapidity that Mr Martin was fairly astonished and [...] resolved to do what he could to give the young lad a push.</blockquote>
In another account published in the Auckland-based <i>Church Gazette</i> in March 1885 Martin was more specific in his description of how he and his brother promoted Bell's talent, he allowed it was Harry who effected Bell's critical encounter in 1847 with the architect <a href="http://www.victorianweb.org/art/architecture/scott/dnb.html">George Gilbert Scott</a> (1811-1878) then completing a church near Silton, <a href="https://www.achurchnearyou.com/zeals-st-martin/">St Martins</a> (1842-44) at Zeals <span style="font-size: x-small;"><A Martin, 'The donor of the Ellerslie windows', <i>Church Gazette</i> (2 March 1885), pp. 27-28></span>. Martin recalled how he later visited Scott's studio 'to see how young Bell was getting on and to thank Sir Gilbert for taking him into his office; but Sir Gilbert said that so far from any thanks being due to him, he had to thank me for sending him a youth possessed of such power of drawing.'<br />
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Scott, like the Martins, had a clerical background, was a convinced mediaevalist and, arguably, the pre-eminent English architect of the age with over eight hundred projects credited to his practice including the Foreign and Colonial Office in Whitehall (1861), St Pancras Station and its associated Midland Hotel (1865), the Albert Memorial in Hyde Park (1872) and, not least, a series of schemes for Christ Church cathedral in Christchurch, New Zealand (1858-1873), later adapted by the New Zealand-resident architect <a href="http://www.teara.govt.nz/en/biographies/1m57/mountfort-benjamin-woolfield">Benjamin Mountfort</a> (1825-1898). Scott was evidently impressed by Bell, recalling that 'His productions at that early age were most remarkable, and, during the whole time he was with me, nothing he had to do seemed to present any difficulty whatever to him.'<span style="font-size: x-small;"><G G Scott, </span><span style="font-size: x-small;"><i>Personal and professional recollections</i>, e</span><span style="font-size: x-small;">d by G G Scott jnr ([London]: Sampson, Low, 1879), pp. 217-224></span>. Bell's work as a designer of mosaics, murals and stained and painted glass featured prominently in Scott's projects, both during and after his time in his studio.<br />
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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Unidentified photographer, <i>Alfred Bell</i> [about 1880?].<br />
From Peter Larkworthy, <i>Clayton and Bell, stained glass artists and decorators</i> (London: Ecclesiological Society, 1984)</td></tr>
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It was in Scott's studio that Alfred Bell met John Richard Clayton (1827-1913) who joined it around 1850. Clayton, who had trained at the Royal Academy Schools as a sculptor, had been a pupil of <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anthony_Salvin">Anthony Salvin</a> (1799-1881), reputed for his work as a repairer of medieval buildings rather than a builder of new. Bell and Clayton began designing stained and painted glass for Scott's projects in accordance with his preference for the English geometrical decorated gothic style as promoted by the Cambridge Camden Society in its journal <i>The Ecclesiologist</i>. In keeping with their status as architects, their early designs were produced by other London glassmakers: Heaton & Butler, James Powell & Sons and Lavers and Barraud but, in 1855, with Scott's encouragement, they established their own workshop at 311 Regent Street in London's West End.<br />
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Clayton and Bell succeeded in their enterprise both for the quality of their workmanship and the popularity of their designs. Reviewing a now destroyed window in Westminster Abbey, the Tractarians at <i>The</i> <i>Ecclesiologist</i> declared its lights to be 'an epoch in glass painting, from their size, their merit and their locality.' <span style="font-size: x-small;"><<i>Ecclesiologist</i>, vol. 9 (1858), p. 41></span>. By the end of the 1860s they allegedly had some three hundred employees; they also expanded their repertoire. In collaboration with the Anglo-Italian glass factory Salviati & Co (established in 1866) they produced glass mosaics, the best known of which are those on Scott's <a href="http://www.british-history.ac.uk/survey-london/vol38/pp159-176">Albert Memorial</a>. They also exported widely: Clayton and Bell supplied the extraordinary set of fourteen stained and painted glass windows (124 lights) commemorating great scholars for the <a href="http://dictionaryofsydney.org/entry/stained_glass">Great Hall of the University of Sydney</a> (Edmund Blackett, 1858); it seems likely that this set of windows was the first secular cycle produced during during the nineteenth century revival of the technique.<br />
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New Zealand – particularly the Anglican-driven settlement of Christchurch – was the destination of a number of Clayton and Bell windows. In her catalogue raisonné of the stained glass windows of Canterbury, Fiona Ciaran identifies thirty from Clayton and Bell. <span style="font-size: x-small;"><Fiona Ciaran, <i>Stained glass windows of Canterbury, New Zealand</i> (Dunedin: University of Otago Press, 1998), p. 218></span>. In numerical terms the firm wasn't the most popular; other London makers, Powells and Lavers and Barraud, held that distinction. Explaining this relatively low ranking for Clayton and Bell works, Ciaran cites the animus of the chapter of Christ Church cathedral who, in 1881, dismissed the firm notwithstanding its association with the building's original architect. It's unclear what caused this rupture but the chapter accused the firm of 'negligence' in carrying out the commission. However it seems that Clayton and Bell's apparent tardiness was due more to the imprecise nature of Mountfort's instructions rather than a disinterest in the commission <span style="font-size: x-small;"><Ciaran, p. 113></span>. Nonetheless, Clayton and Bell produced three of the cathedral's 17 windows including – for the reduced sum of £200 – its <a href="http://www.nzherald.co.nz/nz/news/article.cfm?c_id=1&objectid=10732276">now destroyed</a> decafoil rose window, <i>The lamb of God and the hierarchy of angels</i> (after a design by Mountfort, c. 1881-82) <span style="font-size: x-small;"><Ciaran, pp.111-112></span>. Added to this, a sense that Clayton and Bell windows were perceived as unfashionable may also have been a consideration. Martin Harrison observes that by the 1860s the design of Clayton and Bell windows were becoming formulaic; their tones were increasingly harder and metallic and the purist Gothic Revival was being supplanted by the less rigorously mediaevalist arts and crafts style espoused by the like of, the increasingly fashionable, William Morris.<br />
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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Clayton and Bell after Benjamin Mountfort (1825-1898), <i>The lamb of God and the hierarchy of angels </i>(about 1881). The now destroyed decafoil rose window in Christ Church cathedral, Christchurch. Mountfort's design of the window was based on that of Christ Church, Oxford.<br />
<span style="background-color: white; color: #333333;"><a href="http://www.flickriver.com/"><span style="font-family: inherit; font-size: x-small;">www.flickriver.com</span></a></span></td></tr>
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Again, through Scott, Clayton and Bell had other New Zealand connections. From the firm's point of view, probably the most important were the stained and painted glass windows installed by George Selwyn in the 'unsightly' chapel he had built for his bishop's palace following his translation from New Zealand to Lichfield in 1869 <span style="font-size: x-small;"><A B Clifton, <i>The cathedral church of Lichfield</i> (London: George Bell, 1900), p. 34></span>. One of the windows alludes both to the alleged life-saving actions of <span style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">Hēnare Wiremu Taratoa at Gate Pā and, with its three gold stars on a blue ground, to the heraldic achievement</span></span> of the Anglican diocese of New Zealand, arms later assumed by the Auckland diocese. Clayton and Bell were also responsible for the west window (1869) and the mural decoration surrounding Selwyn's tomb in the lady chapel of <a href="http://www.britishlistedbuildings.co.uk/en-382780-cathedral-church-of-the-blessed-virgin-m#.V05fBFdPfdk">Lichfield Cathedral</a>.<br />
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It's possible that Bell's gift to the Ellerslie church was an attempt at rehabilitating Clayton and Bell's reputation amongst the Anglican community in New Zealand following the fiasco in Christchurch, however the reported circumstances surrounding the gift suggest otherwise. In an interview Martin gave around the time of the donation, he asserted he had written 'to his old pupil to learn whether any pieces of painted glass could be obtained cheap'. Bell's response was to request the patterns of the windows and it seems that he was sent the architectural drawings for the church, enabling him to not only ensure appropriate dimensions for his glass but also to conceive of an appropriate narrative programme. In October 1884 Clayton and Bell despatched the set of windows to Auckland on the SS Coptic; unfortunately the ship was diverted to Wellington from whence they were forwarded arriving in the third week of December; they were installed in early January under the supervision of John Lorraine Holland (1839-1917) late of the local decorating firm Holland and Butler.They were first exposed to public scrutiny on 17 January 1885.<br />
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In September 1884 Bell wrote to Martin advising him of the imminent despatch of the windows, enclosing a diagram indicating the placement of the windows and explaining he had 'taken upon me to treat the whole series of windows thus securing a certain rhythm and unity throughout not otherwise easy to obtain'. As a new built church, Bell, as designer of its most prominent decorative feature, could conceive of it as a tabula rasa. He described the programmatic cycle as 'illustrating the attributes of Christ and the general character of His mission on Earth', noting however that 'As I have avoided for the most part the an historical aspect of Our Lord's life there remains abundant material [for others] to work on' <span style="font-size: x-small;"><Christ Church Archives, Letter from Alfred Bell to Albin Martin, 24 September 1884></span>. Bell's concern that others would object to the completeness of his contribution to the decoration of the church were groundless.<br />
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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Alfred Bell (1832-1895) for Clayton and Bell, <i>S Matthew; S Mark: S Luke: S John</i> (1884). Christ Church, Ellerslie, gift of Alfred Bell, 1885<br />
Courtesy of the Parish of Ellerslie and Mount Wellington. Photograph: <a href="http://lacphotography.com/">Luke Carpenter</a></td></tr>
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The narrative Bell developed reflected the beliefs promulgated by the Oxford Reform Movement of the Church of England and adopted by followers of the Cambridge Camden Society (later the Ecclesiological Society) as to how the Christian faith should be manifest to its adherents. The set of thirteen windows is comprised of thirty lights and organised in three sections: the west end or baptistery; the nave; and the chancel or sanctuary. The cycle is initiated in the eighteen light western window that depicts the teachings of Christ made known by the evangelists, Saints Matthew, Mark, Luke and John who are shown in four geometrically traceried lancet windows, the two central panels surmounted by a pentagram-traceried roundel within an arched timber moulding, the points of the pentagram symbolising the five wounds of Christ. </div>
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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Alfred Bell (1832-1895) for Clayton and Bell, <i>I am the light of the world </i>(1884). The text is from John 8.12, which recounts Christ's sermon on the Mount of Olives.<br />
<span style="font-family: inherit;">Christ Church, Ellerslie, gift of Alfred Bell, 1885.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: inherit;">Courtesy of the Parish of Ellerslie and Mount Wellington. Photograph <a href="http://lacphotography.com/">Luke Carpenter</a>.</span><br />
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<span style="font-size: small;">The nine lancet windows flanking the nave – in ecclesiological terms, ‘the Church Militant’ – depict events in the life of Christ as recounted by the evangelists: ‘Emanuel God with us’ (Matthew 2.1, the nativity); ‘This is my beloved son’ (Matthew 3.17, the baptism); ‘Ye must be born again’ (John 3.7, encounter with Nicodemus); ‘I am the resurrection and the life’ (John 11.25, meeting with Martha); ‘I am the good shepherd’ (John 10.11); ‘I am the light of the world’ (John 8.12, sermon on the mount of Olives); ‘I ascend unto my father and your father’ (John 20.17, Mary Magdalene at the tomb); ‘I that speak unto thee am he’ (John 4.26, meeting with the woman of Samaria); and ‘Of such is the kingdom of heaven’ (Matthew 19.14, blessing the little children). </span></div>
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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Alfred Bell (1832-1895) for Clayton and Bell, <i>Christ is risen from the dead and become the first fruits of them that slept </i>(1884). The running text is from the epistle of Paul the apostle 1 Corinthians 15.20 (1884). The figures depict (from left to right, Saints Peter and John, Christ ascendant and the two Marys. Christ Church, Ellerslie, gift of Alfred Bell, 1885<br />
Courtesy of the Parish of Ellerslie and Mount Wellington. Photograph: <a href="http://lacphotography.com/">Luke Carpenter</a></td></tr>
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The principal window in the former chancel – the part of the church representative of ‘the Church Triumphant’ in the symbolism of the ecclesiologists – is comprised of three elaborately decorated lancet lights, with elaborately painted canopies and a running text quote from I Corinthians 15.20 – ‘Christ is risen from the dead’ (Saints Peter and John); ‘And become the first fruits’ (Christ ascendant); and ‘Of them that slept’ (The two Marys). The chancel lights were originally flanked by two smaller lancet windows – ‘I am the bread of life’ (John 6.35) and ‘I am the true vine’ (John 15.1). This sub-set celebrates the ritual of holy communion. Appropriately for the most sacred space in the church and the focal point of worship, these windows are most richly decorated and the three central lights are the only windows in the set with elaborately painted predellas of escutcheons depicting: a pelican and her piety, symbolic of Christ’s sacrifice; an apostolic lamb, symbolic of Christ’s victory over death; and a lion guardant and haloed, symbolic of the majesty of Christ’s victory. To emphasis their liturgical significance and to reiterate the unifying concept of the Trinity, the three lights are set within a tripartite moulded architrave supported by four roseate corbels.<br />
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Given his involvement in devising their theme, his personal connection with Martin – the mediator of the gift – and the assuredness of the painting, it is highly likely that Bell was responsible for more than just supervising a sketch of the designs, a procedure that appears to have been the convention at Clayton and Bell at this stage of its history <span style="font-size: x-small;"><Ciaran, p. 196></span>. Unlike much of the stained glass of the period, the imagery does not appear to have been based on the work of other artists, although the figures exhibit the stillness and flat colouring associated with the <a href="https://www.princeton.edu/~lgossman/nazarene_essay.pdf">Nazarene</a> movement. Harrison notes that 'Bell's forte was always said to be architectural canopy-work <span style="font-size: x-small;"><Harrison, p. 31></span> and such canopies feature in those windows intended for the chancel – the three traceried lights forming the east window and the two windows 'The true vine' and 'The bread of life' intended to flank the east window – as well as on the four major lights of the eighteen depicting the Evangelists of the west window. Both the chancel and west windows resonate with the heavy blues and reds that characterise the firms later work.<br />
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By contrast, the lights of the nave windows have been designed to provide sufficient daylight for a darkened space with the narrative image confined to a central rectangular panel delicately painted in the flat planes. Each window is framed by a band of undulating vines around diamond patterned leading. These are painted with an alternating pattern of stylised flowering campions and laurel-like leaves. The windows have their identifying texts painted along their bases.<br />
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<span style="font-size: x-small;"><span style="text-align: center;">Alfred Bell (1832-1895) for Clayton and Bell,</span><span style="text-align: center;"> <i>I am the bread of life</i> and <i>I am the true vine </i></span><span style="text-align: center;">(1884). Bell intended the windows to flank the altarpiece, </span></span></div>
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<span style="font-size: x-small;"><span style="text-align: center;">emphasising the dignity of the sanctuary and the significance of the ritual of holy communion. The texts are from John 6.35 and </span></span><span style="font-size: x-small;">John 15.1.</span><span style="font-size: x-small;"> </span><br />
<span style="font-family: inherit; font-size: x-small;">Christ Church, Ellerslie, gift of Alfred Bell, 1885 </span></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit; font-size: x-small;">Courtesy of the Parish of Ellerslie and Mount Wellington. Photograph: <a href="http://lacphotography.com/">Luke Carpenter</a></span></div>
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Reporting on the installation of the windows, the <i>New Zealand Herald</i> <a href="http://paperspast.natlib.govt.nz/cgi-bin/paperspast?a=d&d=NZH18850105.2.64&cl=CL2.1885.01.05&e=-------10--1----0--">speculated</a> that they were 'worth considerably over £1000' (in today's terms $182,500), that is more than the cost of erecting the building. While the <i>Herald's</i> conjecture was probably hyperbolic, it reflects the impact the windows had on viewers. Another report <a href="http://paperspast.natlib.govt.nz/cgi-bin/paperspast?a=d&d=NZH18850115.2.17&cl=CL2.1885.01.15&e=-------10--1----0--">effused</a> that 'The light of the day as it shines through the painted glass becomes so rich and mellowed that we may fancy it to be an earthly resemblance to that heavenly light which shall cast its rays on faster, emerald, and ruby of greatest lustre'. All reports agreed with the <i>Auckland Star</i>'s <a href="http://paperspast.natlib.govt.nz/cgi-bin/paperspast?a=d&cl=search&d=AS18850103.2.52.4&srpos=117&e=--1880---1888--10-AS-111-byDA---2christ+church+--">assertion</a> the gift would 'render [Christ Church] the most attractive little tabernacle in the colony.' At a service to commemorate the installation of the windows, The Cambridge-educated Cowie <a href="http://paperspast.natlib.govt.nz/cgi-bin/paperspast?a=d&d=NZH18850119.2.26&cl=CL2.1885.01.19&e=-------10--1----0--">observed</a> 'in the matter of adorning her houses of prayer, the Church of England has been returning during the last thirty years to the point which our forefathers had reached four hundred years ago'. This architectural hiatus, he opined, was due to the malign influence of 'the Bishop of Rome' on the English peoples and the emergence of a society that asserted 'Architecture and painting and sculpture were supposed to be of the earth, earthy; and not to be cultivated as handmaids of religion.'<br />
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But for all the enthusiasm displayed by the clergy, congregants and reporters in 1885, the miracle of surviving a <a href="http://paperspast.natlib.govt.nz/cgi-bin/paperspast?a=d&cl=search&d=AS19281205.2.171&srpos=4&e=-------10--1----0christ+church+ellerslie+fire--">fire in 1928</a>, and the best efforts of generations of churchwardens to preserve its features, the church and its windows have fallen into obscurity. This is not just the result of an increasingly secularised society that has prompted a falling off in religious adherence and a concomitant loss of income to the parish but also changing patterns of observance. By the 1980s Anglican services had become less ritualised and worshipers – both clergy and congregations – were finding the older liturgy and its associated furnishings too formal. In 1990, in order to facilitate a connection with a newly constructed adjacent 'parish lounge' and to enable a more relaxed style of worship, a new entrance was inserted into what had been the chancel, the floor plan of the church was reversed, with the altar and its associated furnishings relocated under the western window, and the original, now darkened, shellac finish of the interior woodwork stripped to provide a more contemporary feel. The reconfiguration diminished the visual impact of Bell's windows, disassociated their symbolic narrative from the functional roles of the spaces, effectively rendering it meaningless. The left flanking window of the now redundant chancel – designated 'I am the bread of life' – was clumsily inserted into the right terminal wall of the nave.<br />
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<span style="font-family: inherit;">B</span>ell's generosity to the parish did not go unacknowledged: a brass plaque was mounted in the church recording his gift and in September 1885 parishioners determined to present him with a casket of New Zealand woods made by the distinguished Auckland cabinetmaker, the Bohemian-born <a href="http://www.teara.govt.nz/en/biographies/1s7/seuffert-anton">Anton Seuffert </a>(c. 1814-1887). It was an elaborate affair; the <i>New Zealand Herald</i> <a href="https://paperspast.natlib.govt.nz/newspapers/NZH18850926.2.18?query=martin%20seuffert%20ellerslie">reported</a> that 'the designs in inlaid work of the different [New Zealand] woods are illustrative of Maori life and New Zealand ferns and shrubs.' An inscription was 'engraved on a silver shield:– "Presented to Alfred Bell, Esq., by the Vestrymen of Ellerslie, in grateful recognition of his magnificent gift of eighteen painted windows to Christ Church, Ellerslie, New Zealand. Auckland, January 17, 1885."' Shortly after, the casket was forwarded to Bell on the SS Arawa along with an exhortation from Martin that he should consider exhibiting it at the forthcoming Colonial and Indian Exhibition in London. Bell response was delivered through Martin who <a href="https://paperspast.natlib.govt.nz/newspapers/NZH18860216.2.5.4?query=martin%20seuffert%20ellerslie">published</a> an excerpt from his letter in the <i>New Zealand Herald</i>:<br />
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The beautiful present came safe and sound in all respects. What a magnificent thing it is! Everybody is interested and full of admiration. I will certainly do as you suggest, and endeavour to get it prominently exhibited at the May Exhibition of Indian and colonial products. It deserves to be seen–not only for the design, but the workmanship is so admirable–and the variety and beauty of the materials so remarkable.</blockquote>
Alfred Bell <a href="http://nzetc.victoria.ac.nz/tm/scholarly/tei-Stout66-t8-body-d3.html">exhibited</a> an unattributed 'memorial casket of New Zealand design and workmanship' at the Colonial and Indian Exhibition in May 1886; amongst a range of other furniture, Anton Seuffert also exhibited a number of caskets in the New Zealand court at the exhibition, some borrowed from English-domiciled owners. It is possible Bell was unaware of the name of the maker of his 'beautiful present' but it seems most probable that what he displayed at the exhibition was his Ellerslie casket. In November 2009 the <i>New Zealand Herald </i> reported the casket had been sold that month at <a href="http://www.nzherald.co.nz/entertainment/news/article.cfm?c_id=1501119&objectid=10609574">Christies </a>in London, allegedly to a New Zealand buyer.<br />
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Bell's glass transmogrified a modest timber structure into a jewel box of a church, endowing a newly-built colonial building with a simulacra of metropolitan verve and, with its mediaevalist imagery and colouring, adding a deeper historical and aesthetic dimensions to its thinly rendered Antipodean gothic revival form.<br />
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<i>Thanks to the Rev Harvey Smith, priest in charge, Pamela Stone, people's warden, and Murray John of the Parish of Ellerslie and Mount Wellington, for their care of the windows and assistance in researching this post. </i><br />
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<i>The Christ Church Clayton and Bell windows feature in a forthcoming Auckland Heritage Festival event 'Ellerslie heritage walk and the stained glass windows of Christ Church' to be held at 2pm on Sunday 9 October 2016. Bookings required: (09) 579 5033 / eba@ellerslie.net / ellerslie.net</i>Christopher Thompsonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01264481177071819483noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2464874880300858303.post-75691561468767356802016-04-21T14:08:00.000+12:002018-06-23T21:11:03.712+12:00The floating world of Captain Humphreys-Davies<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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Utagawa Kuniyoshi <span style="font-family: inherit;">歌川国芳 </span>(1797-1861), <span style="text-align: start;"><span style="font-family: inherit; font-size: x-small;"><i>Nagato no kuni Akama no ura ni oite Genpei ôg assen Heike ichimon kotogotoku horobiru zu (In the great </i></span></span><br />
<span style="text-align: start;"><span style="font-family: inherit; font-size: x-small;"><i>battle </i></span></span><i style="font-family: inherit;">between the Minamoto and the Taira in Akama Bay in Nagato Province, the Taira clan is utterly destroyed)</i><span style="font-family: inherit; font-size: x-small;">. Woodcut, about 1845. </span></div>
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<span style="text-align: start;"><span style="font-family: inherit; font-size: x-small;">Formerly in the collection of G A W Humphreys-Davies.</span></span></div>
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<span style="text-align: start;"><span style="font-family: inherit; font-size: x-small;"><a href="http://www.aucklandartgallery.com/explore-art-and-ideas/artwork/8911/nagato-no-kuni-akama-no-ura-ni-oite-genpei-og-assen-heike-ichimon-kotogotoku-horobiru-zu-in-the-gre">Auckland Art Gallery/Toi o Tāmaki, Mackelvie Trust Collection (M134-136)</a></span></span></div>
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<span style="font-size: large;">Connoisseurship</span> – the visual analysis of objects based on formal considerations, or 'expertise in the matter of taste' as the <i>Oxford English Dictionary </i>currently and narrowly defines it – has a pejorative status nowadays. In academic circles this combination of historically-informed visual and theoretical scholarship is derided as elitist, conservative, qualitative and uncritically empirical. In the museological world it is now relegated to obscure corners of the institutional basement as a quirky sort of pedantry. Public disinterest is palpable; for those directing popular taste through the media, connoisseurship is rarely acknowledged and, when it is, it's usually projected in a populist format such as the BBC's long-running series 'Antiques roadshow' where arcane knowledge is greedily equated with hidden fortunes. Awareness of of the arts in this neoliberal climate is increasingly determined by the whims of celebrity, the buzz of a bargain, the ubiquity of easy information and the <span style="background-color: white;">thrill of</span> chimerical spectacle. Leading auction houses now promote sales glossily '<a href="http://www.sothebys.com/en/news-video/blogs/all-blogs/sotheby-s-at-large/2015/11/reed-delphine-krakoff-transforming-interiors.html?cmp=email_n09445_exh_important_design_121215-121215">curated</a>' by minor celebrities whose acquaintance with the objects being sold is more often than not limited to expressing a sort of aesthetic preference.<br />
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The diminution of connoisseurship in the academic and museological worlds has prompted a reaction of sorts, which usually reflects the ideological leanings of the perpetrator. A <a href="http://www.theguardian.com/education/2015/nov/15/art-historians-fail-spot-differences-paintings-canaletto-bellotto">recent article </a>in the <i>Observer</i> quoted Brian Allen, former director of the Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art and a trustee of the British National Portrait Gallery, bemoaning the fact that universities are 'no longer training historians to tell their William Hogarth from their Francis Hayman'. Allen attributes this failing to the fact that students are 'more likely to focus on some aspect of the sociology of view painting in 18th-century Europe.' He opines 'the best scholars coming through in the field of British art are from Italy, where [...] they're better equipped to deal with the rigours of older art where you have to know languages, classical mythology, Greek and Roman history.' This deficiency is also applicable to Britain's national art museums, which he claims have few real experts left. Noting that Tate Britain has recently made three of its specialist curators redundant, Allen declares 'There's hardly anybody left.' While there's a smack of the reactionary in these observations, their substance isn't in doubt and it's <a href="http://www.apollo-magazine.com/educated-eye-connoisseurship-now-paul-mellon-centre/">not the first time</a> that the problematic has been raised: historical visual knowledge – specifically the reading of an object from the viewpoint of a trained individual, if you will – is significantly less regarded both academically and museologically.<br />
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Similar trends have been observed in New Zealand although, given the systemic poverty of resources committed to both the academic study of art and design history and public collections of the same material, this degradation is difficult to measure. It is telling, though, that art history no longer has departmental status at the University of Auckland and will shortly lose its only professorial chair, a situation already prevailing at the University of Canterbury. The University of Otago intends <a href="http://www.odt.co.nz/campus/university-otago/349081/design-school-move-opposed">closing</a> its Department of Applied Science, which includes its design school. Institutionally the Auckland Museum gives every appearance of further downgrading the status of its remaining curatorial staff in favour of a management-heavy cohort of Taylorised technocrats; it doesn't even bother listing its acquisitions in its latest <a href="https://www.aucklandmuseum.com/getmedia/34ba95cd-ce97-41b3-80d6-770d2ed7c010/auckland-museum-annual-report-2014-2015-interactive">annual report</a>. Te Papa has also endured a renewed bout of managementitis with the appointment of a chief executive with no museological experience let alone a scholastic background, but 'an exceptional track record in senior executive roles'. Te Papa's most recent <a href="https://www.tepapa.govt.nz/SiteCollectionDocuments/AboutTePapa/LegislationAccountability/TePapa%20Annual%20Report_2014-15.pdf">annual report</a> lists no acquisitions of any note in the fields of art and design and, with a couple of notable exceptions, exhibits an absence of publications of any significance by its staff in the same fields.<br />
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Perhaps the most visible local manifestation of this national dearth of institutional learning came in 2013 when, acting against the advice of external expertise, the Alexander Turnbull Library acquired at <a href="https://issuu.com/bravemedia/docs/dsw_part1/26">auction</a> a portrait of Hamiora Maioha allegedly painted by Gottfried Lindauer (1839-1926). Subsequent forensic examination has proven it to be a forgery. While the library <a href="http://www.stuff.co.nz/entertainment/arts/73140913/alexander-turnbull-library-caught-out-with-forged-lindauer-portrait.html">admitted</a> its failure, it justified its stance by suggesting that the disputed attribution had merely been a disagreement of experts. It failed to acknowledge that its own, anonymous, 'experts' evidently had no claim to the designation, certainly in respect of the work of a well-known, well-documented, locally-based, painter.<br />
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While they may now be institutionally disregarded, connoisseurs have been critical in <a href="http://www.victoria.ac.nz/sacr/research/art-history/gordon-h.-brown-lecture-series/Mary-Kisler-lecture.pdf">developing</a> many of New Zealand's public collections, usually at their own expense. In the field of books and manuscripts <a href="http://www.teara.govt.nz/en/biographies/1g21/grey-george">George Grey</a> (1812-1898), <a href="http://www.teara.govt.nz/en/biographies/2h39/hocken-thomas-morland">Thomas Hocken </a>(1836-1910) and <a href="http://www.teara.govt.nz/en/biographies/2t53/turnbull-alexander-horsburgh">Alexander Turnbull</a> (1868-1918) are pre-eminent. All three also collected ethnographical material, art and decorative arts although their activities in the latter fields are usually unrecognised. Other significant New Zealand connoisseurs might include the members of the extended de Beer family who made a series of extraordinary gifts to the Dunedin Public Art Gallery and the expatriate <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/James_Mackelvie">James Tannock Mackelvie</a> (1824-1885) whose accumulations bequeathed to Auckland in 1885 are now held between the Auckland Art Gallery Toi o Tāmaki and the Auckland Museum.<br />
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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><i>Press</i> (27 May 1935), p. 20</td></tr>
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Less well known is George Arthur Wenham Humphreys-Davies (1880-1948) one of New Zealand's earliest art curators. That his was an honorary appointment and made thirteen years after the first professional art curator had been employed at the Dunedin Public Art Gallery was a reflection of the lowly status enjoyed by art and design collections in Auckland.<br />
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Between 1936 and 1943 Humphreys-Davies developed what was probably the most significant collection of Asian art formed in New Zealand at the Auckland Museum. The collection was based around a series of donations made by Humphreys-Davies and his first wife Ethel. Yet, so completely has he been airbrushed from the museum's institutional history that the little biographical <a href="https://www.aucklandmuseum.com/collection/object/am_humanhistory-object-2721">information</a> it provides about him not only ignores his scholarship and the exhibitions he organised during the 1920s and 30s, but mistakes the date and place of his birth, exiles him from his adopted country for significant periods of time, diminishes his war record and eliminates his wife from the credit lines of the pieces that she gave jointly with her husband.<br />
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Only two critical evaluations of Humphreys-Davies' cultural activities have been published: a passing <a href="http://www.nzasia.org.nz/downloads/NZJAS-June08/4_Bell_4.pdf">notice</a> of his role as one of a number of New Zealand collectors of <i>ukiyo-e</i> in an article by David Bell in 2008; and an informed <a href="http://www.eastasianhistory.org/37/beattie-murray#note-49">analysis</a> of his 1937 'Exhibition of Chinese art' by James Beattie and Lauren Murray in 2011. Both papers suffer from knowing little about the man, his background and the material he collected. This post provides a preliminary biographical overview and focuses on Humphreys-Davies as a collector of <i>ukiyo-e</i>.<br />
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Humphreys-Davies was born in Newport, Monmouthshire, Wales, the second son and second of four children of the Guernsey-born Mary Rosalie Dutch Satterley (1847-1920) and George Humphreys Davies (1848-1915), a surveyor, valuer and co-author (with Edward Boyle) of <i>The principles of ra</i><i>ting practically considered</i> (London: Estates Office Gazette, 1890), a text deemed recently to be an '<a href="http://www.forgottenbooks.com/readbook_text/Political_Science_Quarterly_v6_1000063031/757">admirable account</a>' and 'invaluable mine of information' concerning English local taxation. Davies was a fellow of the Institution of Surveyors and a successful businessman who ultimately established an architectural and planning office in the City. By 1891 the Davies family had moved to the Old House, Brooke Green, Hammersmith in London.<br />
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Humphrey-Davies matriculated at Pembroke College in Oxford but while taking terms from 1899-1901 did not graduate. Coming down from Oxford, he was commissioned in December 1901 into the 30th (Pembrokeshire) Company, 9th Battalion of the Imperial Yeomanry, a volunteer cavalry regiment, raised in 1900, that was despatched to South Africa to fight in the latter stages of the Anglo-Boer War. He appears to have had an active time there and was awarded clasps to the Queen's South Africa medal for service in Cape Colony, Orange Free State and Transvaal. He also appears to have contracted pneumonia, typhoid and bacillary dysentry, afflictions that had a lasting impact on his sporadic military career.<br />
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In September 1902 Humphreys-Davies <a href="https://www.thegazette.co.uk/London/issue/27480/page/6344">relinquished</a> his commission and for the next six years nothing is known of his activities although there are suggestions he may have worked in Malaya; he wrote a 157 page illustrated, unpublished <a href="http://www.aucklandmuseum.com/collections-research/collections/record/am_library-manuscriptsandarchives-1359?c=ecrm%3AE84_Information_Carrier&k=humphreys-davies&ordinal=3">account</a> of his travels in the region in 1930, delivered a lecture on the development of the Malay peninsular to the Auckland Museum in 1932 and subsequent press interviews are sprinkled with <a href="http://paperspast.natlib.govt.nz/cgi-bin/paperspast?a=d&d=AS19350925.2.17&e=-------10--1----0--">references</a> to '35 years of fossicking in out of the way places – Malaya, Bali, Sumatra [and] Celebes'. However in 1908 he caught black water fever and was repatriated to England. It was most likely a medical response to this debilitating disease that prompted him into emigrating to New Zealand in 1909. He took up sheep farming: in the supplementary roll of the Taumarunui electorate for 1911 he is listed as a farmer, living on the Meringa Station, some 22 kilometres north east of Taumarunui. Shortly after he seems to have acquired a property 'Glenalvon' at Rangataua near Ohakune that, in April 1912, he allegedly on-sold to a Jane Solloway, the Taumarunui-domiciled wife of a builder who converted an existing building on the property into a boarding house. By January 1914 he had taken up the lease of a farm 'Arawata', on newly opened land near Ohura; at that year's Ohura Agricultural and Pastoral Association show at Niho Niho he won the first of many prizes for champion sheep.<br />
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With the declaration of war in August 1914 Humphreys-Davies, rather than enlisting in New Zealand, rejoined his regiment in England. It is possible that this decision was precipitated by a court action against him lodged in April by Mrs Solloway who sued him for damages amounting to £1044/1/9 in the Hamilton Supreme Court <span style="font-size: x-small;"><Archives New Zealand (Auckland) BCDG A1492 14616 Box 9 A196>.</span> She alleged he had failed to provide proof of ownership of the Rangataua property, which had led to her eviction by the former landowner. The action appears to have lapsed. Departing Wellington on 21 August 1914, Humphreys-Davies arrived in San Francisco on 17 September where, four days later, he <a href="https://familysearch.org/ark:/61903/1:1:XL64-8ZQ">married</a> Ethel Dorothy Patton (1879-1938), a trained nurse and the daughter of a mining engineer who had spent <a href="http://paperspast.natlib.govt.nz/cgi-bin/paperspast?a=d&d=NZH19381230.2.160&e=-------10--1----0--">part of her childhood in New Zealand</a>. The newly married couple proceeded to London – probably the last time they travelled 2nd class – where Ethel worked as a nursing sister first in Dieppe with the French Red Cross and later at the Life Guards Military Hospital in Regent's Park, London.<br />
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Ethel Patton was independently wealthy and this may explain Humphreys-Davies' decision in 1915 to dispose of his leased farm in remote Ohura. Humphreys-Davies' father who died in 1915 left an estate valued for probate purposes of £40,000 (the equivalent of £1.4 million today); he was bequeathed a £5000 trust fund, suggesting that his earlier New Zealand farming venture may have had a paternal subsidy. Following his mother's death in 1920 he seems to have had little contact with his family.<br />
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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Army Medal Office, World War One medal index card for G A Humphreys Davies. Humphreys-Davies was issued with a 1914-15 star by the War Office for service in the 2nd Life Guards in Flanders and with a British War Medal and Victory Medal by the Air Ministry for Service in the Royal Flying Corps/Royal Air Force. These would have been worn after his Queen's South Africa Medal issued by the War Office in 1902 for service in the Imperial Yeomanry during the Anglo-Boer War.</td></tr>
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While Humphreys-Davies held a commission in the Imperial Yeomanry (disbanded in 1908), he served with the 2nd Life Guards in France from August 1915 (Battle of Loos) to November 1916 before being placed on sick leave having been diagnosed with Myocarditis. After an extended period of leave he was placed on light duties at the London District Command Depot in Seaford. In 1917 he was made temporary captain and attached to the Royal Flying Corps as acting adjutant with no 189 (N) Training Squadron, a night-flying training unit based in Ripon. Ignoring pleas from his flight commander that he remain with the squadron, Humphreys-Davies was then posted on health grounds as acting adjutant of no 36 (India) Squadron in Risalpur on the North West Frontier of British India. It was not an ideal location for a semi-invalid and he returned to Britain shortly after the declaration of Armistice. Following a further medical board inquiry he was deemed unfit for further service, discharged and promoted to the substantive rank of captain, a title he employed for the rest of his life. Effectively a retired territorial officer, Humphreys-Davies' experience of the war was typical of that experienced by many Anglo-Boer war veterans and, despite his enthusiasm and notwithstanding initial front line duties in France, he spent much of it invalided by a pre-existing medical condition in administrative positions.<br />
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The Humphreys-Davies' returned to New Zealand in July 1919. Ethel purchased a large, well-worked in farm, '<a href="https://www.bayleys.co.nz/381757">Freshwater</a>' at Kawakawa Bay, near Clevedon. Aside from a tragic accident in 1923 that saw Ethel's visiting sister <a href="https://law.resource.org/pub/us/case/ca9/briefs/govuscourtsca9briefs1428/gov.uscourts.ca9.04449.b.01.pdf">killed</a> when a bus she was travelling in collapsed into a river, the couple led a comfortable life for much of the 1920s. Humphreys-Davies bred championship Corriedale sheep, showing his livestock at the Clevedon Agricultural and Pastoral Association Fair. He was also involved with a number of 'patriotic', ex-officers' organisations such as the British Legion and the Household Brigade Old Comrades' Association. The local press reported the activities of the dapper Captain Humphreys-Davies and his wife: he had <a href="http://paperspast.natlib.govt.nz/cgi-bin/paperspast?a=d&cl=search&d=AS19240401.2.38&srpos=2&e=--1920---1927--10-AS-1----2HumphreysZz-Davies-ARTICLE-">received a message of thanks</a> from the Queen for a donation he had collected on the occasion of her birthday from the first class passengers on RMS Tahiti; he was a member of the Northern Club; he was <a href="http://paperspast.natlib.govt.nz/cgi-bin/paperspast?a=d&d=NZH19330710.2.5.4&e=-------10--1----0--">entertained </a>by fellow members of Auckland's Oxford Society on his return from one of his overseas excursions; they were the <a href="http://paperspast.natlib.govt.nz/cgi-bin/paperspast?a=d&d=NZH19370415.2.97&e=-------10--1----0--">generous donors</a> of 135 acres (54.6 hectares) of 'uncut bush' on the Kawakawa-Orere road to the nation; and in regular attendance at Auckland social gatherings throughout the 1930s. To all appearances, the Humphreys-Davies' led the sort of life enjoyed by affluent sheep farmers around the country, except for the fact that Auckland was a short distance away – they usually travelled to Auckland by motor launch – making their rural retreat somewhat less isolated than that enjoyed by most of their peers. Seemingly affectionate, the marriage was nonetheless childless.<br />
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From 1927 the Humphreys-Davies' public profile underwent a major shift. From being regarded as a well-travelled bon vivant George emerged as a connoisseur, a collector of antiquities and an expert on South East Asia; Ethel effectively disappeared from public gaze. On 17 May, the <i>Auckland Star</i> <a href="http://paperspast.natlib.govt.nz/cgi-bin/paperspast?a=d&cl=search&d=AS19270517.2.148&srpos=1&e=--1920---1927--10-AS-1----2HumphreysZz-Davies-ARTICLE-">reported</a> Captain C (<i>sic</i>) Humphreys-Davies had given two academic studies by David Wilkie (1785-1841) plus £1 for framing to the School of Architecture at Auckland University [College] and on 25 October an exhibition of 120 'Japanese colour-prints' from the collections of Mr H S Dadley and Captain G Humphreys-Davies <a href="http://paperspast.natlib.govt.nz/cgi-bin/paperspast?a=d&cl=search&d=NZH19271022.2.13&srpos=53&e=01-06-1927-07-12-1927--10-NZH-51----2Japanese--">opened</a> at the Auckland Art Gallery in a recently <a href="http://paperspast.natlib.govt.nz/cgi-bin/paperspast?a=d&cl=search&d=NZH19270908.2.99&srpos=91&e=01-06-1927-07-12-1927--10-NZH-91----2Japanese--">renovated space</a> that had previously contained the Russell donation of plaster casts (now partly held at the Auckland Museum). The exhibition was accompanied by a 30 page part-illustrated catalogue and extensively reported in the Auckland press, employing information provided by Humphreys-Davies who also delivered two public lectures. The exhibition was intended to run for four weeks, but having attracted an unexpected 4,000 visitors, it was extended for a further ten days and Humphreys-Davies delivered a further lecture.<br />
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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Title page and frontispiece of <i>Catalogue of a loan collection of Japanese colour prints: owned by Mr H S Dadley and Capt G Humphreys-Davies</i> ([Auckland]: Auckland City Council, Library Committee, 1927).<br />
Auckland Art Gallery Toi o Tāmaki</td></tr>
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Humphreys-Davies involvement in the exhibition was incidental. In April 1927 the printmaker Thomas Gulliver (1891-1933) suggested to John Barr (1887-1971), city librarian and part-time director of the Auckland Art Gallery, that 'one or two exhibitions of prints and drawings' could be held over the forthcoming winter. Barr favoured the proposal and, given the deficiency of the gallery's collection, <a href="http://paperspast.natlib.govt.nz/cgi-bin/paperspast?a=d&cl=search&d=NZH19270427.2.94&srpos=2&e=-01-1927--08-1927--50-NZH-1-byDA---0art+gallery+etchings--">suggested</a> through the local press that he would be 'glad if persons having suitable original etchings would communicate with him, giving him particulars of the etchings they possess'. Barr received a number of responses including one from G Humphreys-Davies (Capt) stating he would 'be only too glad to assist by lending some of my things' <span style="font-size: x-small;"><Auckland Art Gallery Archives, Exhibitions 1927, letter from G Humphreys-Davies to J Barr, 1 May 1927></span>. Attached to the letter was a list of sixteen pre-1800 European prints including five Piranesi etchings along with a number of French and Flemish works. As well, he noted, his wife had a Nicolas Poussin, 'which I expect she would lend' and he also had 'a few Persian and other rugs which lend themselves to being exhibited, also some silver and Sheffield plate and a little china of various kinds'. Almost as an aside he mentioned he owned<br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
a number of Japanese colour prints, enough almost to make a show in themselves, and if you would like them I have a ms of a pamphlet about them which could be printed, also about 20 films which I had done through a colour screen, and possibly an illustrated catalogue could be made and sold. I myself would contribute and buy £5 worth. There are other collectors of Japanese colour prints, Mr Dadley is one, who I am sure will assist.</blockquote>
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It was evident that Humphreys-Davies was no ordinary collector. Moreover, the collection of <i>ukiyo-e </i>formed by Harry Sproston Dadley (1862-1933), an Auckland shoe merchant, was part of an extensive collection of South Asian art formed over forty years that included Chinese and Japanese ceramics, Chinese snuff bottles in glass, porcelain and jade, and <i>tsuba</i>, along with 'a very large and representative collection of old English china, metalwork and furniture'. Part of Dadley's Asian collection had been deposited on loan with the Auckland Institute and Museum prior to World War One, and a part was bequeathed to the museum although, as with Humphreys-Davies, institutional recognition is now non-existent. Significantly, and unlike many contemporary collectors of Asian objects, Dadley had travelled extensively throughout the region; his <a href="http://paperspast.natlib.govt.nz/cgi-bin/paperspast?a=d&d=NZH19330304.2.143&e=-------10--1----0--">obituary</a> in the <i>New Zealand Herald</i> noted he visited Japan eight times.<br />
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Barr responded to Humphreys-Davies' offer with some alacrity; five prints were borrowed from him for the etchings exhibition and, following an inspection of the two <i>ukiyo-e </i>collections, it was decided to defer the proposed exhibition of drawings in favour of one devoted to Japanese prints <span style="font-size: x-small;"><Auckland Art Gallery Archives, Exhibitions 1927, letter from J Barr to G </span><span style="font-size: x-small;">Humphreys-Davies</span><span style="font-size: x-small;">, 2 June 1927>. </span>In accepting Humphreys-Davies' proposal, Barr noted that Gulliver would undertake the hang and would supplement the prints with 'some other wood block prints to round off the exhibition'. In the event the other prints were restricted to a display case of wood blocks and impressions, demonstrating the technical aspects of the wood block printing process. Barr was also keen to publish Humphreys-Davies' manuscript, declaring that the gallery intended 'doing the best possible within the financial limitations which unfortunately exist'. This was a bit of an exaggeration given that both Humphries-Davies provided the text and images gratis, along with £5; Dadley made a donation of £7 which more than covered the cost of printing.<br />
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By contemporary New Zealand standards, the catalogue was sophisticated in both appearance and content. It is evident that Dadley and Humphreys-Davies not only owned significant collections of <i>ukiyo-e</i> but also the latter had an authoritative, if Eurocentric, knowledge of the subject. The tenor of Humphreys-Davies' introductory essay is surprisingly radical, emphasising the point that <i>ukiyo-e</i> should be seen as an art, 'essentially popular in their origin and purpose', emphasising the fact that 'The pictures dealt with the subjects of everyday interest and were sold in the streets of old Tokio in large numbers at a very low price'. It demonstrates an interest in the technical aspects of production. It anticipates the patronising reaction of a local audience in attempting to explain the absence of perspective. And it contextualises the images into recent western cultural history, explaining that the prints 'have exercised a great influence over modern Western art, and men like Monet, Degas and Whistler came under it to a marked degree'. Few visitors to the exhibition would have little knowledge of, let alone sight of works of art by Monet, Degas and Whistler.<br />
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In the Auckland Art Gallery's archived copy of the catalogue there are a number of pencilled annotations to the catalogue entries. These are, according to a note initialled by Barr on the inside cover, 'the work of a visiting Japanese who had studied Japanese colour prints'. On the outside back cover of this catalogue there is a further, semi-erased, pencil, inscription: 'Mr I Kitakoji / Glad to see / [Knows it ... has been interesting] / Representative / Nothing like it outside of London / Arrangement good'. The 'visiting Japanese' was the aristocratic poet<span style="font-family: "helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;"> <a href="https://ja.wikipedia.org/wiki/%E5%8C%97%E5%B0%8F%E8%B7%AF%E5%8A%9F%E5%85%89">Isamitsu Kitakōji</a> <span class="vernacular" lang="ja" style="font-family: inherit;">北小路功光著</span><span style="background-color: white; font-family: inherit;"> </span></span><span class="vernacular" lang="ja"><span style="font-family: "helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">北小路, 功光, </span></span><span style="font-family: inherit;">(1901-1989) who was appointed <a href="http://trove.nla.gov.au/ndp/del/article/28058873?searchTerm=Kitak%C5%8Dji&searchLimits=">lecturer in Japanese</a> at the University of Sydney in 1926. Notwithstanding his literary distinctions and his relationship with the Showa emperor – he was a cousin – he resided in Sydney briefly; his 1927 visit to New Zealand was made on his return to Japan. </span></span><br />
<span style="font-family: "helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;"><span class="vernacular" lang="ja"><span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif;"><span style="font-family: "helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;"><br /></span></span></span>
<span class="vernacular" lang="ja"><span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif;"><span style="font-family: "helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">As well as praising the exhibition's content and presentation, Kitakōji, who claimed a degree in aesthetics, attributed a number of works that were either unidentified or misidentified and corrected some of the translated texts. Kitakōji was not alone in his flattery of the exhibition. Barr was obviously won over by the exhibition's success, mediating retrospective notices in <i>Art in Australia</i> and the British magazine, <i>Connoisseur </i>that noted the generosity of the lenders, comparing the largesse of 'these two New Zealand connoisseurs' to 'the generosity of American collectors to their museums'.</span></span></span></span><br />
<table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: center;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiudBFEL2ODMEYfcEnBy2YPTRv2Wm71HsqeqT7dno3CTMdo-3_pxQyc3nnUSntvNhktq7N5vhtYIkoKjm8ECKoJ-I3KX1Dwxg0PY6H_pVzagIVFFYA1Ihvr7Crk4pnJfdhM3HtEr4FT_o9T/s1600/LoanAAG34.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="404" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiudBFEL2ODMEYfcEnBy2YPTRv2Wm71HsqeqT7dno3CTMdo-3_pxQyc3nnUSntvNhktq7N5vhtYIkoKjm8ECKoJ-I3KX1Dwxg0PY6H_pVzagIVFFYA1Ihvr7Crk4pnJfdhM3HtEr4FT_o9T/s640/LoanAAG34.jpg" width="640" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Title page and frontispiece of <i>Catalogue of a loan collection of Japanese colour prints: from the collection of Capt G Humphreys-Davies</i> ([Auckland]: Auckland City Council, Library Committee, 1934).<br />
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<span style="font-family: inherit;">Between September and October 1934, the Auckland Art Gallery held a further loan exhibition of 103 of Humphreys-Davies <i>ukiyo-e. </i>In the seven years since the earlier exhibition Humphreys-Davies' collection had expanded both in terms of its size and chronological scope; the catalogue was a little more revealing as to provenance; he noted he had acquired pieces from other collectors including Basil Stewart, whose <i><a href="http://www.hiroshige.org.uk/hiroshige/stewart/stewart.htm">Guide to Japanese prints and the subjects they illustrate </a></i>(London: Kegan, Paul, Trench & Turner, 1920) remains, even today, an useful reference work. Kitakōji's unexpected approbation may have been a factor in his decision to expand his collecting of <i>ukiyo-e.</i> The connection – it would have been uncharacteristically curmudgeonly for Barr not to have put the two men in contact – may also have been a factor in prompting him into visiting Japan: between April and June 1933 he, along with his wife, visited Japan and China for the first time, returning to New Zealand with a number of Japanese catalogues to express his astonishment 'at the very large sums paid to-day by Japanese collectors for prints' <span style="font-size: x-small;"><G Humphreys-Davies, <i>Catalogue of a loan collection of Japanese colour prints</i> ([Auckland]: Auckland City Council, Library Committee, 1934), p. 8></span>. </span><br />
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Harry Dadley died two months prior to the Humphreys-Davies' departure for east Asia leaving an estate valued at some £80,000 (the equivalent of $9.5 million today). There were two bequests: his collection of Asian art was left to the Auckland War Memorial Museum, which would receive 'such of the curios as the curator may select as suitable' and the remainder was 'set aside on the determination of certain life interests as an endowment fund for the establishment and maintenance of a home for crippled children'. By default, Humphreys-Davies became involved in the selection of Dadley's 'curios' for the museum's collection, a process that in December 1935 saw him <a href="http://paperspast.natlib.govt.nz/cgi-bin/paperspast?a=d&d=NZH19351219.2.134&cl=CL2.1935.12.19&e=-------10--1----0--">appointed</a> honorary curator of Chinese art – a position shortly retitled honorary curator of the oriental collections.<br />
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Curiously Bell's 2008 paper fails to acknowledge the existence of Dadley's collection while in 2013 Mathew Norman observed only that 'Dadley died in 1933 and his collection did not feature in the 1934 exhibition where, again, the catalogue enables us to identify works from Humphreys-Davies's collection which are now in the Gallery's collection (<i>sic</i>).' <span style="font-size: x-small;"><M Norman, 'From the collections: historic Japanese woodblock prints', in <i><a href="http://www.aucklandartgallery.com/page/fragile-beauty-historic-japanese-graphic-art">Fragile beauty: historic Japanese graphic art</a> </i>(Auckland: Auckland Art Gallery, 2013), 13-23, p. 23></span>. A close reading of the two Auckland Art Gallery exhibition catalogues suggests he may have acquired up to five of Dadley's prints – including works by Chōbunsai Eishi <span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="background-color: white; color: #545454;">鳥文斎 栄之</span><span style="background-color: white; color: #545454; font-size: x-small;"> </span></span>(1756-1829) Utagawa Kuniyoshi <span style="background-color: white; color: #252525;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">歌川 国芳 </span></span>(1797-1861) and Toyokuni V Kunisada III <span style="background-color: white; color: #252525;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">歌川国貞</span></span><span style="background-color: white; color: #252525; font-family: sans-serif; font-size: 14px;"> </span>(1848-1920) – although this, obviously, cannot be confirmed without supporting documentation. Moreover, the Auckland Art Gallery's collection of <i>ukiyo-e,</i> with the exception of twenty-nine prints given by the estate of Thomas Gulliver – who also died in 1933 – is comprised almost entirely of the collection Humphreys-Davies sold to Mackelvie Trust in December 1946 <span style="font-size: x-small;"><Auckland Libraries NZMS895 Series 9 Folder 2></span>.<br />
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Humphreys-Davies' exposure to the reality of imperial Japan evidently shocked him, probably more than his discovery that <i>ukiyo-e</i> were no longer sold cheaply on 'the streets of old Tokio'. Interviewed on the day of his return he <a href="http://paperspast.natlib.govt.nz/cgi-bin/paperspast?a=d&d=AS19330626.2.84&e=-01-1933--08-1933--10--1----2%22HumphreysZz-Davies%22--">declared</a> it 'the most highly-organised, efficient and industrious nation that has ever existed' that it was – as an <i>Auckland Star</i> headline writer put it – a 'danger to the [British] empire and that the Japanese 'envisaged the possibility and probability of war'. Even as he was travelling through east Asia Japanese military forces were surrounding Beijing following Japan's annexation of Manchuria in 1932 and its subsequent withdrawal from the League of Nations. The extended press coverage given to Humphreys-Davies' opinions on his return, while in keeping with the tenor of contemporary New Zealand reporting of Japanese issues, was extraordinary given that hitherto it had restricted itself to reporting his quotidian activities. His comments on the growth of Japanese militarism and the concomitant expansion of its trade were not only published at length in the Auckland newspapers but also reported in Wellington and Christchurch press, although not without criticism. An anonymous <a href="http://paperspast.natlib.govt.nz/cgi-bin/paperspast?a=d&cl=search&d=EP19330627.2.34.9&srpos=31&e=26-06-1933-01-07-1933--10--31-byDA---2Japan--">letter to the editor</a> in the Wellington <i>Evening Post</i> ridiculed Humphreys-Davies' apprehensions, suggesting that Captain Humphry Davis (<i>sic</i>) had got it all wrong, ingenuously quoting Emily Lorimer's benign observation that the Japanese 'savours poetry, as everyone sincerely loves Nature, and friends invite each other not to bridge but to a cherry viewing [...] not to talk golf but to make verse.'<br />
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Direct experience of Japanese culture, or perhaps, more accurately, an awareness of the recent availability of significant numbers of Chinese artefacts, augured a change in the focus of Humphreys-Davies' collecting; he now turned to collecting Chinese decorative arts in earnest. The Japanese invasion of north China had released a flood of looted objects onto the market. In a 1935 interview, Humphreys-Davies addressed what was described as 'the moral aspect of collecting', <a href="http://paperspast.natlib.govt.nz/cgi-bin/paperspast?a=d&d=AS19350925.2.17&e=-------10--1----0--">observing</a> that 'the history of nearly all the most valuable objects d'art in the world has been one of robbery, cheating and violence. If the collector went to deeply into the history of any object of the kind he would never start his collection.' Humphreys-Davies' collecting of <i>ukiyo-e </i>was a part of the final stage of the diaspora of Japanese art and design that had begun with the arrival of Europeans in the 1540s and effectively finished in the interwar period as Japanese reasserted their right to control their cultural heritage. Seen in this light, the 1934 exhibition seems more of a sales promotion than a celebration of Humphreys-Davies' connoisseurship in the uncomfortable context of what culturally was still a European settler outpost.<br />
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgXjbosVPYhZZEbEAWVe7k2Qo1GiC7gfxWPUf0jkqju8rwxEHPsTIII9TVUqjz5zo9GGAkm5pJzK4NgEhRZPqxBTeiN0EdjxNrtvbUEwNnUqZgs5IP3rkBrbupUlK10S-nmzQgjKg0wE40C/s1600/Screenshot+2016-01-13+09.56.21.png" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="470" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgXjbosVPYhZZEbEAWVe7k2Qo1GiC7gfxWPUf0jkqju8rwxEHPsTIII9TVUqjz5zo9GGAkm5pJzK4NgEhRZPqxBTeiN0EdjxNrtvbUEwNnUqZgs5IP3rkBrbupUlK10S-nmzQgjKg0wE40C/s640/Screenshot+2016-01-13+09.56.21.png" width="640" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">A selection of Humphreys-Davies' <i>ukiyo-e</i> can be seen framed on the rear wall.<br />
<i>Press</i> (29 May 1935), p. 18</td></tr>
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Humphreys-Davies was certainly selling <i>ukiyo-e</i> in the aftermath of the Auckland Art Gallery exhibition. A selection from his 'collection' formed a component of the Oriental Art exhibition that opened in Christchurch on 28 May 1935. His involvement in the exhibition <a href="http://paperspast.natlib.govt.nz/cgi-bin/paperspast?a=d&d=CHP19350529.2.8&e=-------10--1----0Exhibition+of+oriental+art--">occurred</a> when the organising committee 'came across a catlogue (<i>sic</i>) of Captain G Humphreys-Davies's collection, and when we wrote to him we found that he was not only willing to help with his experience, but to place his collection at our disposal and be present at the exhibition. This was our crowning stroke of luck.' In September that same year he lent a 'small collection of Japanese colour prints, showing examples of the work of the most famous artists from about 1630 to 1830' – that included works now in the Mackelvie Trust collection – to the <a href="http://nzdesignhistory.blogspot.co.nz/2015/10/fortunes-in-odd-places.html">Loan Exhibition of Antiques</a>, held in High Street, Auckland; once again, Humphreys-Davies was prominently involved in organising the event.<br />
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But from 1933 Humphreys-Davies’ collecting focus was on Chinese objects; he asserted he had been collecting this material since his youth and <a href="http://paperspast.natlib.govt.nz/cgi-bin/paperspast?a=d&cl=search&d=AS19350925.2.17&srpos=1&e=-------10--1----2Art+treasures%3a+history+in+jars+--">regaled</a> journalists with stories that ‘He
found his first collection piece in an old shop in Bayswater, London. It was a
valuable sacrificial wine jar, on which the markings were emblematic of eternal
life.’ During his travels in east Asia in 1933 he acquired some
seventy-five pieces from China and ‘Chinese merchants living in Japan’, a
number of which he subsequently <a href="http://www.aucklandmuseum.com/collections-research/collections/record/am_library-ephemera-8949?c=ecrm%3AE84_Information_Carrier&k=humphreys-davies&ordinal=4">placed on display</a> at the Auckland War Memorial
Museum. The combination of an institutionally-endorsed exhibition along with a
slew of press interviews in which Humphreys-Davies emphasised his
connoisseurship and eye for a good bargain proved an effective marketing tool
not only for the exhibitions but also for sales, which were conducted with a
degree of discretion. Aside from Dadley who evidently had his own sources of supply, there were other collectors of <i>ukiyo-e</i> in Auckland – not least Gulliver – including Gordon Minhinnick, the staff cartoonist of the <i>New Zealand
Herald </i>who, through Humphreys-Davies, lent a print to the 1935 Christchurch <a href="http://paperspast.natlib.govt.nz/cgi-bin/paperspast?a=d&cl=search&d=CHP19350529.2.8&srpos=1&e=-------10--1----2Oriental+art%3a+an+impressive+display--">exhibition</a>. It is known that Humphreys-Davies sold at least
one print, Hishikawa Moronobu <span style="background-color: white; color: #252525;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">菱川 師宣</span></span><span style="background-color: white; color: #545454; font-family: "arial" , sans-serif; font-size: x-small;"> </span>(1618-1694) <i>Picnic under the
cherry trees</i> (c. 1680) to the Christchurch collector Gordon McArthur; there were, undoubtedly, other sales.</div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit;">Notwithstanding his newly-awakened enthusiasm for Chinese
ceramics, which would culminate in his extraordinary 1937 'Exhibition of Chinese
Art,' Humphreys-Davies retained and probably enhanced his <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">ukiyo-e</i> collection. However his circumstances changed markedly the
following year. <o:p></o:p></span>On 29 December 1938 Ethel Humphreys-Davies died, 'unexpectedly'. While she left her 'beloved husband' a life interest in her trust, her real estate – notably the farm in Kawakawa Bay – was left to her Californian nieces <span style="font-size: x-small;"><Archives New Zealand (Auckland) R9393673/BBAE/1570/A645/42/P34/1939></span>. The property was put up for sale, Humphreys-Davies resumed his role as honorary curator of the oriental collections at the Auckland Museum and, rehearsing the patriotic fever of his comfortable days, <a href="http://paperspast.natlib.govt.nz/cgi-bin/paperspast?a=d&d=NZH19390420.2.132.1&cl=CL2.1939.04.20&e=-------10--1----2%22Oriental+art%3a+an+impressive+display%22--">opened an office</a> under the aegis of the British Legion to recruit former officers back into military service in anticipation of the 'inevitable' war. <span style="font-family: inherit;">It was a short-lived venture: two months later he left New Zealand for
Europe, arriving some five weeks before the declaration of war. Notwithstanding
his official connections – his nephew was private secretary to the British prime minister Neville Chamberlain – Humphreys-Davies' services were not required and he returned to New Zealand in November having <a href="http://paperspast.natlib.govt.nz/cgi-bin/paperspast?a=d&d=NZH19391201.2.33&e=-------10--1----0--">visited Paris</a> where he 'renewed his acquaintance with M René Grousset, director of the Cernuschi Museum'.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: inherit;"><br /></span>
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On his return and on behalf of the British malacologist <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Read_le_Brockton_Tomlin">J R le B Tomlin</a> and his wife he presented the Auckland Museum with part of an intended <a href="http://paperspast.natlib.govt.nz/cgi-bin/paperspast?a=d&d=NZH19391201.2.33&cl=CL2.1939.12.01&e=-------10--1----2Gift+to+museum%3a+pieces+of+porcelain--">gift</a> of English porcelain. But soon after, apparently frustrated at being excluded from the war, he once again sought to be involved in the conflict. The <i>New Zealand Herald</i> <a href="http://paperspast.natlib.govt.nz/cgi-bin/paperspast?a=d&cl=search&d=EP19400214.2.139&srpos=18&e=--1939---1948--10--11----0HumphreysZz-Davies--">announced</a> he was leaving in March to take up permanent residence abroad with the intention of offering his services to the War Office but 'If his application is not successful, he will proceed to France, where he has plans for opening a rest home for pilots of the Royal New Zealand, and French Air Forces'. He arrived in London, appropriately enough, on ANZAC day 1940, France surrendered in June leaving Humphreys-Davies' plans for a French rest home in tatters. It is unclear how he was occupied between April 1940 and 17 October 1943 when, describing himself as a sheep farmer, he departed Liverpool for New Zealand on the MV Port Alma.<br />
<br />
Back in Auckland he lodged at the Northern Club and resumed his work at the Auckland Museum with a directed sense of vigour. In December 1943 he began the process of donating his remaining collection of Chinese art to the museum, including examples acquired recently in Britain, notably pieces from the Charles Rutherston collection, <a href="http://paperspast.natlib.govt.nz/cgi-bin/paperspast?a=d&cl=search&d=AS19440122.2.70&srpos=5&e=--1939---1948--10--1----0HumphreysZz-Davies--">a Gandhara stone head</a> and a large wooden <a href="http://paperspast.natlib.govt.nz/cgi-bin/paperspast?a=d&cl=search&d=AS19440108.2.41&srpos=23&e=--1939---1948--10--21----0HumphreysZz-Davies--"><i>Lohan</i></a> that he stated had recently been exhibited in Nottingham. In early 1944 he purchased a six-roomed bungalow on half an acre of ground in Manukau Road, Epsom but soon after disposed of it and purchased a house divided into two flats in Gillies Avenue, a tonier part of the same suburb. Later that year he remarried a Frances Sophia Leslie née Maclean (1909-?), apparently a demonstrator at an Auckland appliances store.The marriage was not a success and by 1946 the erstwhile wife was living at Castor Bay and Humphreys-Davies was, once again, moving abroad. The Gillies Avenue flats were sold, along with their contents, the collections gifted or sold for what appears to have been token amounts and on 15 January 1947 he left New Zealand for the last time.<br />
<br />
Humphreys-Davies retained the bulk of his collection of <i>ukiyo-e</i> until December 1946 when, through Barr, he sold 184 prints and nine 'illustrated books' to the Mackelvie Trust for £250 (the equivalent of NZD20,000 today) <span style="font-size: x-small;"><Auckland Libraries NZMS895 Series 9 Folder 2></span>. The disposal seems to have marked the end of his collecting activities.<br />
<br />
George Arthur Wenham Humphreys-Davies died aged 68 on 10 December 1948 at the Anglo-American Hospital at Petit Juas in Cannes. In his will – his estate was valued for probate purposes at £6000 in New Zealand and £3370 5s 2d in England – he left £50 to his former housekeeper, £500 to the Auckland Museum 'for the publication of his catalogue of Chinese art, or any other purpose' with the remainder divided between three Auckland and one Christchurch-based women. His catalogue of the Auckland Museum's collection of Chinese art remains unpublished.<br />
<br />
<i>Grateful thanks to Jo Upton, Sylvia White and Richard Meager for archival assistance in England and Caroline McBride and Ron Brownson of Auckland Art Gallery/Toi o Tāmaki for assistance and advice.</i></div>
Christopher Thompsonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01264481177071819483noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2464874880300858303.post-92145556444562337302016-03-21T10:00:00.001+13:002017-11-01T12:14:39.087+13:00Design: the wallflower of Australian galleries<table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: center;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhxvPmihWo438-dsna7hPxhvdo4M1lHAvdbPOL4tXrHJ1StAgkm0psJ9uCrH7gx8f_Ni5BwrKpyAsq77c1i9Xp_n9pin9Vlw-iJ7VevrLbPeP691kkI9naznRKO97BaSezinMpZwIuRKhX0/s1600/IMG_20140226_0001.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="640" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhxvPmihWo438-dsna7hPxhvdo4M1lHAvdbPOL4tXrHJ1StAgkm0psJ9uCrH7gx8f_Ni5BwrKpyAsq77c1i9Xp_n9pin9Vlw-iJ7VevrLbPeP691kkI9naznRKO97BaSezinMpZwIuRKhX0/s640/IMG_20140226_0001.jpg" width="492" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">[Unidentified painter 3] for Maioliche Artistiche Cantagalli Firenze. 'Piatto Urbino' (c. 1895). Reproducing a dish probably from the Fontana Workshop in Urbino, the image depicts Scipio Africanus receiving the keys of conquered Carthage. The dish forms part of a large group of reproduction <i>maiolica</i> selected from an 1895 catalogue by the British artist and designer Walter Crane for the Art Gallery of NSW.<br />
Art Gallery of New South Wales (2133)</td></tr>
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<span style="font-size: large;">The</span> collecting of designed objects – the things commonly
designated as decorative and applied arts – has long been part of the
activities of Australian art galleries. The National Gallery of Victoria (NGV)
in Melbourne began developing its <a href="http://www.ngv.vic.gov.au/essay/the-development-of-the-collections-of-decorative-arts-in-the-national-gallery-of-victoria/">collection of decorative arts in 1859</a> with the purchase of a collection of plaster casts of ‘the choicest statues,
busts, and alto-relievos […]; of coins, medals and gems’. In Sydney, the Art
Gallery of New South Wales (AGNSW) also collected reproductions of well-known
European decorative arts during the 1890s, including plaster casts of the architectural features of Europe and an extraordinary collection of copies of European Renaissance
<i>maiolica</i> (tin-glazed earthenware)
dishes made in Florence under the direction of Ulisse Cantagalli and selected for the gallery around 1890 by <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Walter_Crane">Walter Crane</a>. These acquisitions, based on best contemporaneous practice, were solid bases for future collecting activities.</div>
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<o:p></o:p></div>
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When the National Gallery of Australia (NGA) in Canberra –
then known as the Australian National Gallery – opened in 1982 it also
displayed a significant collection of decorative arts and design, both local
and international.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Indeed decorative arts
were essential to the vision outlined for the NGA by its first director, <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/James_Mollison">James Mollison</a>, and he was largely responsible for the acquisition of its
extraordinary holdings of Russian revolutionary ceramics and nineteen works by
the so-called ‘pioneer of modernist design’, Christopher Dresser. At a time
when most major international museums adhered to the modernist idiom of
displaying works of art – understood to be primarily painting and sculpture –
on bare, white walls and had relegated decorative arts and design objects to
storage, this was a bold and far-sighted decision.<o:p></o:p></div>
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The fortunes of these three collections have varied over the
years. As Terence Lane explained in 1980, during the nineteenth century the
NGV’s collection was ‘essentially a didactic one’ and the focus was on
reproductions: copies of <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">maiolica</i>,
electrotypes of hoards, fictile ivories and plaster casts; but there were also
unexpected acquisitions of collections of historical Italian glass, as well as
glass, ceramics and metalwork from contemporary makers, some purchased at the
international exhibitions during the 1870s and 80s.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The advent of the Felton Bequest in 1904
meant the gallery had access to significant funds for acquisitions outside the
purview of politicians and was also able to draw on a crop of, generally able, European-based
advisers, starting with <a href="https://dictionaryofarthistorians.org/marquetdevasselotj.htm">Jean-Jacques Marquet de Vasselot</a> of the Musée du Louvre and including <a href="https://dictionaryofarthistorians.org/cockerells.htm">Sydney Cockerell</a> of the Fitzwilliam Museum in Cambridge and <a href="https://dictionaryofarthistorians.org/clarkk.htm">Kenneth Clark</a> of the National Gallery in London. As Ann Galbally <a href="http://www.emelbourne.net.au/biogs/EM00558b.htm">observes</a>, 'Felton's bequest transformed the NGV from a small regional picture gallery into one of international standing.'<o:p></o:p></div>
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<table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: center;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjlUwIxfi-TNhQ4IEvh9Aqfe2zwue9m98oWIUrQY4oFGBQWsUEcBAlDq698rFsd8MJQtZjUdd-vqZPmg1-6LXIsVLyi3C3UxIuBh01Cl5e7ZAde8FEDiKJWMcetjvCLYsvhpE5EoErMlig9/s1600/Screenshot+2016-03-11+12.46.52.png" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="480" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjlUwIxfi-TNhQ4IEvh9Aqfe2zwue9m98oWIUrQY4oFGBQWsUEcBAlDq698rFsd8MJQtZjUdd-vqZPmg1-6LXIsVLyi3C3UxIuBh01Cl5e7ZAde8FEDiKJWMcetjvCLYsvhpE5EoErMlig9/s640/Screenshot+2016-03-11+12.46.52.png" width="640" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Adolf Loos (1870-1933) (designer). Long case clock and panelling from the Langer apartment, Vienna (c. 1903).<br />
<a href="http://www.ngv.vic.gov.au/explore/collection/work/55268/">National Gallery of Victoria, Presented through the Art Foundation of Victoria by Mr Alfred Muller, Governor, 1994</a></td></tr>
</tbody></table>
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Quality attracts quality and, since the advent of the Felton
Bequest, the NGV has attracted not only other notable funding sources such as the Art Foundation of Victoria but also significant and important donations of
decorative arts to complement those purchased including the Connell Collection
(1914), the Andrews Collection (1925), the Howard Spensley Bequest (1939), the
Templeton Bequest (1942), the Biddlecombe Bequest (1954), the Collier Bequest
(1955), the G Gordon Russsell collection acquired by the W & M Morgan
Endowment (1968), the Everard Studley Miller Bequest (1975) and, during the
1990s, the Keith and Norma Deutscher Gifts. These bequests have been supplemented by a series of
judicious acquisitions by the museum’s curatorial staff including but not least
the remarkable suites of furniture and fittings designed in Vienna by Josef
Hoffmann about 1912 for the Gallia family (1976) and Adolf Loos about 1903 for
the Langer family (1994).</div>
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<o:p></o:p></div>
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<br /></div>
<table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: center;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjat6-sr1bAtZWCfRkFNWIBB3O3j64wIMcbbQdUuG_iDYQ6_Mvq43eJAol9SQns32YrcfQHkyfgnkQSMGtV4g-b7YwPP-JqRoSq9Z46A2eAUZc3daeJXO2FxVrEfKTVUr0zf8o8ahYJvx3T/s1600/Screenshot+2016-03-06+09.34.27.png" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="448" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjat6-sr1bAtZWCfRkFNWIBB3O3j64wIMcbbQdUuG_iDYQ6_Mvq43eJAol9SQns32YrcfQHkyfgnkQSMGtV4g-b7YwPP-JqRoSq9Z46A2eAUZc3daeJXO2FxVrEfKTVUr0zf8o8ahYJvx3T/s640/Screenshot+2016-03-06+09.34.27.png" width="640" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Unidentified Delft pottery. Garniture of tin-glazed earthenware (c. 1700).<br />
<a href="http://www.ngv.vic.gov.au/explore/collection/work/114368/">National Gallery of Victoria, Felton Bequest, 2015</a></td></tr>
</tbody></table>
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The evidence of its current displays and exhibitions
suggests the NGV’s commitment to collecting and displaying international decorative arts and
design remains strong. The gallery continues to acquire important pieces in the collecting area and there are significant exhibits drawn from the gallery's collection of European and Asian decorative
arts and design in its St Kilda Road venue. Currently the NGV International is the venue for two decorative arts and design focussed exhibitions, both also based around objects from its collection: <a href="http://www.ngv.vic.gov.au/exhibition/eighteenth-century-porcelain-sculpture/">'Eighteenth century porcelain sculpture'</a> and <a href="http://www.ngv.vic.gov.au/exhibition/blue/">'Blue: alchemy of a colour'</a>. While these exhibitions are relatively esoteric in their subject matter, they are a refreshing sign of the NGV's attention to not only scholarly research but also its willingness to promote its own collection.<br />
<br />
Sadly, the same commitment cannot be seen for the gallery's collection of Australian decorative arts and design. Nominally these should be displayed with Australian art at the gallery's Ian Potter Centre on Federation Square, but they're not. A search of the NGV's collection database of Australian decorative arts reveals the endless message 'Not on display'. Instead four galleries in the Ian Potter Centre have been appropriated for <a href="http://www.ngv.vic.gov.au/exhibition/200-years-of-australian-fashion/">'Two hundred years of Australian fashion'</a>, celebrating '<span style="font-family: inherit;">Australia’s unique voice and impact on the fashion industry internationally, showcasing the work of contemporary designers such as Dion Lee, Ellery, Romance Was Born and Toni Maticevski alongside key designs from the past 200 years, including exquisite examples of historic design.' While this promotional spin suggests a strong commercial imperative, the exhibition is likely to be popular.</span><br />
<span style="color: #333333;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><br /></span></span></div>
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The situation at the AGNSW couldn’t be more different. Until
recently – with, since 1978, the exception of Asian decorative arts – the AGNSW
held the dubious reputation of being the only state gallery in Australia that
didn’t collect or display decorative arts and design. In terms of allocating
state resources, responsibility for collecting the field seems to have passed to the
Museum of Applied Arts and Sciences (MAAS) in the late 1920s when the AGNSW
Board of Trustees rejected a gift of ‘contemporary applied arts’ that had been
assembled by its president, the architect and planner <a href="http://adb.anu.edu.au/biography/sulman-sir-john-8714">John Sulman </a>during a European tour he made in 1924. The
gift was eventually made to MAAS who, failing to appreciate its significance, deaccessioned
a number of items as being unfashionable some twenty years later. In fact, notwithstanding a brief flush under the remarkable <a href="http://adb.anu.edu.au/biography/laseron-charles-francis-carl-7038">Charles Francis Laseron</a>, officer in charge of applied arts between 1926 and 1929, MAAS
had neither the expertise nor the resources to actively collect decorative
arts until the 1970s. Its curator/director from 1927 to 1955, <a href="http://adb.anu.edu.au/biography/penfold-arthur-de-ramon-8013">Arthur Penfold</a>,
was not only ignorant of the field (he was an industrial chemist) but maintained an animus against collectors
of decorative arts. As a consequence, the AGNSW was in 1952 the recipient of a
generous bequest of eighteenth century English porcelain from the estate of Dr
and Mrs Sinclair Gillies, but it languished in the basement, where it may still
remain although it is not listed in the gallery’s collection database. The
gallery deaccessioned further items – including the plaster casts – as late as
the 1980s.<o:p></o:p></div>
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<table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: center;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgZbtDsViXWERNgGQYYaeG5Dg9DulQokTZzdCk5QzIRTED31A9qMCd9q8ugbUUSu-Ph60Ti-tfpB3AHe7yenL_XmCJvz8xyHVdXn0XwHfJntn7VHx8BzhLQZjK-gMDo8Fw4cXgl7dHG24-R/s1600/2016-01-21+11.52.07.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="480" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgZbtDsViXWERNgGQYYaeG5Dg9DulQokTZzdCk5QzIRTED31A9qMCd9q8ugbUUSu-Ph60Ti-tfpB3AHe7yenL_XmCJvz8xyHVdXn0XwHfJntn7VHx8BzhLQZjK-gMDo8Fw4cXgl7dHG24-R/s640/2016-01-21+11.52.07.jpg" width="640" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">The James Fairfax Galleries at the Art Gallery of New South Wales.<br />
A part of the promised Kenneth Reed bequest underwhelms showcases along the centre of the space </td></tr>
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Times have changed. In 2010 a retired Sydney lawyer, Kenneth
Reed, announced he intended <a href="http://www.artgallery.nsw.gov.au/media-office/kenneth-reed-bequest/">bequeathing</a> the AGNSW ‘<span style="color: #262626; mso-bidi-font-family: HelveticaNeueW02-55Roman;">a substantial collection of old master
paintings, Italian Maiolica and European 18th-century porcelain’, valued for
insurance purposes at $7 million. The gallery’s interest was driven primarily by the twenty-five old master
paintings forming a part of the gift but it also seems to have recognised that the
<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">maiolica</i> and eighteenth century European
porcelain could be used to decoratively enhance the gallery’s existing,
somewhat paltry, holding of old master paintings. Until such time as the bequest is executed, its ceramic component was conveyed to the gallery on loan and subsequently catalogued. Table-top show cases were
acquired for the gallery exhibits while the rest of the collection is displayed
in a dark foyer near the gallery’s research library in the basement. Two impressive neo-classical painted and gilded porcelain vases – one
of Sèvres origin, the other from the Royal Porcelain Manufactory (KPM) in Berlin, acquired for
the gallery from the 1879 Sydney International Exhibition, flank the library entrance, but there seems to be a certain reluctance on the part of the
gallery to acknowledge its other decorative arts holdings; the two vases also don't appear on the gallery's collection database.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="color: #262626;">The objects comprising the Reed loan, while domestically scaled, are of a notably high
quality, particularly for an Australian private collection, but, as currently displayed, neither enhance the paintings they are set against nor convey any sense of why the decorative arts were an integral part of
pre-modern European art and design. There’s a sense of desperate oddity in that
the gallery shows only </span><span style="color: #262626;">pre-nineteenth century European ceramics with the
implication that later productions somehow or another, are deficient in their
sense of artistic integrity. The AGNSW’s highly conventional display of this
loan material lacks any critical rigour and, ultimately, seems employed as a decorative fore drop for the more serious things hanging on the walls. Moreover, the absence of any examples of Australian decorative arts
and design in those galleries devoted to Australian art reinforces the sense of a stunning
national cultural deficit.</span></div>
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<span style="color: #262626; mso-bidi-font-family: HelveticaNeueW02-55Roman;">Meanwhile the New South Wales state collection of decorative arts and
design held by MAAS languishes in that under-threat museum’s Ultimo basement, for the most part, unseen, unappreciated and, for the best part, forgotten by the public for whom
it was collected, although a number of objects from its extensive collection of costume are currently on display, but in Melbourne. It’s unclear what the future holds for this collection. The
current state government proposes reconfiguring the museum into more of a child
and entertainment-focussed science and technology centre and and moving it to
Parramatta, a transformation that would, inevitably, lead to the institution's demise
as Australia’s last remaining museum of manufactures and the diminishment of
its decorative arts and design collections.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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But if decorative arts and design are underappreciated in
New South Wales, the situation prevailing at the NGA in Canberra is, perhaps,
even more disheartening. The NGA recently rehung its permanent collections; in
doing so it moved its international and Australian displays with the former relocated from the monumental galleries of the ground floor to the more intimate
spaces of the first floor. While there may be a compelling nationalist rationale for this shift, it’s not all that effective as, until the 1980s,
most Australian works of art were invariably modestly proportioned whereas many
of the overseas paintings acquired by the gallery during its
formation were, quite deliberately, grandly scaled.</div>
<table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: center;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEitzVqigStQwYsd2NpL0eRpIja8890Apl3Uh7OnEwXmmB9Qsgyb0ShyphenhyphenCGZ7xDw3HWZP9IQAHD9ffmw3UuDigfar-DcEqzpHmjkg9a8zEU-Yu4bLQw_EhDpwKpaseP1Pk30bsCoJPWhIzTRY/s1600/2016-02-09+11.14.35.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="640" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEitzVqigStQwYsd2NpL0eRpIja8890Apl3Uh7OnEwXmmB9Qsgyb0ShyphenhyphenCGZ7xDw3HWZP9IQAHD9ffmw3UuDigfar-DcEqzpHmjkg9a8zEU-Yu4bLQw_EhDpwKpaseP1Pk30bsCoJPWhIzTRY/s640/2016-02-09+11.14.35.jpg" width="438" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Illuminated signage at the NGA for its Wedgwood Tea Room.<br />
The background display would appear to be a detail of the decoration on a ceramic object produced by the eponymous British-based pottery</td></tr>
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This reconfiguration would seem the ideal opportunity to
show the NGA’s long-concealed collection of international decorative
arts and design. But, aside from a token <a href="http://nga.gov.au/CollectionSearch/Default.cfm">display</a> of the constructivist elements
of the gallery’s important collection of Russian revolutionary ceramics and an <a href="http://artsearch.nga.gov.au/Detail.cfm?IRN=10554">Henri Matisse-designed costume</a> for the Ballets Russes de Serge
Diaghilev<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>the opportunity has been ignored. In fact the
only reference to international decorative arts and design in the NGA comes
with a poster for the gallery’s Wedgwood-sponsored tea room, which apparently
has ‘stunning views across the lake’; there is certainly no example of any of
the work of the eponymous pottery on display.<o:p></o:p></div>
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<table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: center;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgoIN69CiaepohGAa2pKXCM-jyIGhbmFkeSf_MEDCg751bIwSMuzsqW7LTfbUtIhCVD_skq6xkyFBHsiqDOBbGR8Ud-_3oPpZvW_umIajqnJJbCRjFnhv3EqPNubqg2seXgXiFXovU3umci/s1600/Screenshot+2016-03-21+09.42.18.png" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="640" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgoIN69CiaepohGAa2pKXCM-jyIGhbmFkeSf_MEDCg751bIwSMuzsqW7LTfbUtIhCVD_skq6xkyFBHsiqDOBbGR8Ud-_3oPpZvW_umIajqnJJbCRjFnhv3EqPNubqg2seXgXiFXovU3umci/s640/Screenshot+2016-03-21+09.42.18.png" width="466" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Paul Arden (1940-2008) and Jeff Stark for Saatchi & Saatchi. Poster for the V&A (1988).<br />
<a href="http://collections.vam.ac.uk/item/O92603/where-else-do-they-give-poster-arden-paul/">V&A E.515-1988</a></td></tr>
</tbody></table>
</div>
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With the exception of a small case of craft
produced from the 1970s through to recent days located on the outer perimeter of the entrance foyer, a similar
situation prevails in terms of Australian decorative arts and design,
notwithstanding the fact that the NGA has, over the past forty odd years, assembled what, in terms of its scope and quality, is probably the single most important collection of this
material anywhere. The NGA may well, in the words of the 1980s V&A advertising campaign, have an 'ace caff' but there's not much design in the 'quite a nice museum' attached to it.<br />
<br />
These are not the only Australian institutions collecting and displaying designed objects in Australia: the state art galleries of Tasmania, South Australia, Queensland and Western Australia collect – or have collected in the recent past – designed objects, as have many of regional galleries and organisations such as the various state branches of the National Trust of Australia and the awkwardly titled Sydney Living Museums, formerly the Historic Houses Trust of NSW. Recently a number of publicly accessible private collections of decorative arts have emerged including the <a href="https://www.johnstoncollection.org/">Johnston Collection</a> in Melbourne, the <a href="http://www.rochefoundation.com.au/">David Roche Foundation House</a> Museum in Adelaide and the short-lived <a href="http://www.smh.com.au/news/Arts/The-past-kept-for-the-future/2005/03/22/1111254024036.html">Clyde Bank</a> museum in Sydney. These private institutions have emerged largely because there is a perceived deficit on the part the state and federal institutions when it comes to collecting and exhibiting design and the decorative arts. The reactionary drive behind the private galleries is revealed in the way the historical commodities forming their collection bases are displayed: there's an emphasis on form and fashionability rather than a critical analysis of the material cultures that enabled their production, mediation and consumption.<br />
<br />
With the notable exception of the NGV there is an ideological constant emerging in the way design and decorative arts are approached institutionally in Australia. It represents a shift from a progressive, pedagogical and, at times, scholarly view of material cultures to one that places greater emphasis on form and appearance, on decoration and fashionability. The AGNSW's decision to selectively employ designed objects to decorate its galleries and the NGA's excision of designed objects from its displays while using a designed commodity brand to market a catering service seem to be apposite distillations of this partial and uncomfortably exclusive reading of design history.<br />
<br />
<i>Thanks to Andrew McNally for facilitating this overview.</i></div>
Christopher Thompsonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01264481177071819483noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2464874880300858303.post-31736723016869019692015-11-25T09:27:00.001+13:002022-04-10T11:34:11.927+12:00The familiar unknown<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhvmUNNEytbMhC7G9ayJ8Mvz3ZIN2x8ngZwP5XX56DNWnDxWX3-c3WAe36Xn0_YUpP4CXO6PLfXkstkYpka0o0i4NvqtFQJRngqHP9LuTqSQ2lIIQbuoiLqca_y1xYszysNgYz9hVEpLsm4/s1600/Screenshot+2015-10-07+10.45.09.png" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="640" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhvmUNNEytbMhC7G9ayJ8Mvz3ZIN2x8ngZwP5XX56DNWnDxWX3-c3WAe36Xn0_YUpP4CXO6PLfXkstkYpka0o0i4NvqtFQJRngqHP9LuTqSQ2lIIQbuoiLqca_y1xYszysNgYz9hVEpLsm4/s640/Screenshot+2015-10-07+10.45.09.png" width="512" /></a></div>
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<div style="text-align: center;">
<b>MARK CLEVERLEY: DESIGNER</b></div>
<div style="text-align: center;">
<b>by Jonty Valentine</b></div>
<div style="text-align: center;">
<b>David Bateman, 143 pp., August 2014, $60.00, 978 1 869 53869 9</b></div>
<br />
<span style="font-size: large;">Writing</span> to a would-be British migrant to New Zealand in January 1961, Henry Holden, an economist at the Department of Industries and Commerce, observed that while 'New Zealand manufacturers are becoming increasingly aware of the merits of industrial design [...] it would seem that this interest has not yet developed to the point where full-time consultants have been established [...] Normal design services are rendered by Advertising Agencies and in some instances architects and publishers.' <span style="font-size: x-small;"><Archives New Zealand, IC W1926 57/1/6 vol 1, letter from H C Holden to G King, 25 January 1961></span>. Holden was in a position to know about how design functioned and was perceived in New Zealand; he was a member of the industrial design study team established in May 1959 by Dr W B Sutch, permanent secretary of the Department of Industries and Commerce, to investigate the role of industrial design in New Zealand manufacturing with a view to establishing a design promotion body modelled on the British Council of Industrial Design (CoID).<br />
<br />
In January 1961 Mark Cleverley was working as a draughtsman in the architectural department of the New Zealand Dairy Company Ltd in Hamilton; it was, as he recalls in the series of interviews with Jonty Valentine that form the core of this book, 'all a great buzz'. Like Sutch, Cleverley had ambitions for design in New Zealand and shortly after, as Sherry Blankenship recounts in her introductory biographical essay, moved with his wife and family to Christchurch where, as a recipient of one of the first Queen Elizabeth II Arts Council Scholarships, he enrolled as a student at the Ilam School of Fine Arts at the University of Canterbury. Cleverley was precisely the sort of person Sutch saw as a lynchpin of his vision of an intelligence-led economy, one characterised by 'brains and skills' not the production of raw material for conversion elsewhere.<br />
<br />
In many respects, Cleverley's choice of Ilam, rather than, say Elam or the Wellington School of Design – soon to be incorporated into Wellington Polytechnic – was serendipitous notwithstanding the fact that the competing institutions were in the process of establishing industrial design courses. When Cleverly started his studies, the design component of the Ilam diploma course was taught by <a href="http://christchurchartgallery.org.nz/blog/bunker-notes/2012/10/25/flo-akins-tribute/">Florence Akins</a> (1906-2012), who, as he observes 'was quite old-fashioned [...] virtually just craft'; Akins, the first Ilam student to be awarded a Diploma in Fine Art had been appointed to the staff in 1936. Things changed the following year when the new head of school, the English silversmith John Simpson, recruited his fellow countryman the designer Maurice Askew (1921 - ) to teach graphic design. Askew's approach to the subject was rooted in interwar European modernism and marked an abrupt shift in the school's teaching of not only two dimensional design but also three dimensional form.<br />
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjIC1YQgjyXDTkV8IcMTuulGn_MQQds_RofFmRagJ2tK1F4l1FSoykgngW_SMCKTQH9ASyegVqk2PxL-MnleatfVkCJjTv2u6DEj_kvZ_yiQlogPNnLG4gVYWKrGcjABokk4L9NNv3ALcSd/s1600/Screenshot+2015-11-02+12.25.19.png" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjIC1YQgjyXDTkV8IcMTuulGn_MQQds_RofFmRagJ2tK1F4l1FSoykgngW_SMCKTQH9ASyegVqk2PxL-MnleatfVkCJjTv2u6DEj_kvZ_yiQlogPNnLG4gVYWKrGcjABokk4L9NNv3ALcSd/s1600/Screenshot+2015-11-02+12.25.19.png" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Unidentified photographer, <i>Queen Street 18 June 1964</i>. The design of Robert Kerridge's 246 Queen Street development (<a href="http://www.lostproperty.org.nz/architects/rigby-mullan/">Rigby-Mullan, 1959</a>) embodied an alternative, commercial American-inspired, modernism, to that practiced by Cleverley<br />
<a href="http://www.aucklandcity.govt.nz/dbtw-wpd/exec/dbtwpub.dll?BU=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.aucklandcity.govt.nz%2Fdbtw-wpd%2FHeritageImages%2Findex.htm&AC=QBE_QUERY&TN=heritageimages&QF0=ID&NP=2&MR=5&RF=HIORecordSearch&QI0=%3D%227-A918%22">Sir George Grey Special Collections, Auckland Libraries (7-A918)</a></td></tr>
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As Cleverley studied, so New Zealand attitudes toward design and its role in manufacturing underwent significant shifts. In Christchurch the recently founded Design Association of New Zealand (DANZ) attempted to establish a 'design centre', based on the CoID's eponymous London shopfront. There was a difference though, proposed Christchurch design centre was to be more shop and less front, more a sales outlet than an impartial design promotion agency, even if DANZ anticipated that it would be publicly funded. The Auckland cinema chain entrepreneur Robert Kerridge was more brazen, but equally unsuccessful, in seeking government support for the formation of a similar retail front as part of his 246 Queen Street retail development.<br />
<br />
It's evident that the idea of a government-sponsored design promotion body was as misunderstood in New Zealand as it was elsewhere: designer practitioners argued these bodies should be all about their practice; retailers, importers and advertisers saw them as a profit-making opportunities; manufacturers and primary producer organisations identified them as a source of funding that could enable niche market penetration. At various times all three sectors expressed opposition to their formation and all three contributed to the demise of the New Zealand Industrial Design Council (NZIDC), the institutional outcome of Sutch's investigation, which was finally realised in November 1967 when an Order in Council brought into force the provisions of the Industrial Design Act 1966.<br />
<br />
Confusion as to what design councils were conceived to do carries over in this book with Valentine thanking a practitioner body, the Designers Institute of New Zealand (DINZ) for permission to reproduce articles from <i>Designscape</i>, the influential magazine produced by the NZIDC from 1969 until 1984. In fact DINZ, which was formed in 1991, has no claim to ownership of the magazine. The NZIDC was a government agency created by an Act of Parliament and the Act <a href="http://www.legislation.govt.nz/act/public/1972/0036/latest/versions.aspx">abolishing the council in 1988 </a>transferred the Crown's residual ownership of the assets of the NZIDC, including copyright, to Telarc, a Crown Entity involved with quality control that had been established in 1972 by the dairy industry.<br />
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This sense of uncertainty about the ownership of design prompts a discussion of Cleverley's 1972 application to join the British design practitioner body, the Society of Industrial Artists and Designers. Now called the Chartered Society of Designers it formally coalesced in 1930 as the Society of Industrial Artists; a number of New Zealanders were early members including Len Lye, Eric Lee-Johnston and James Boswell. It had no formal connection with either the Council for Art and Industry, the first British design promotion body that operated from 1934 until 1939, or its successor body the CoID, established in 1944 and now called the Design Council. To the contrary, those responsible for appointing the first CoID deliberately sought industrialists and avoided practising designers. As the design writer John Gloag observed approvingly, it consisted 'almost entirely of specialists, moreover who know what they are talking about. There is not likely to be any "uplift" or "art blah" emitted from the deliberations of this body.' <span style="font-size: x-small;"><National Archives BT/64/5173, letter from J Gloat to F Meynell, 21 December 1944></span>. By 'specialists' Gloag meant manufacturers; the 'art blah' came later.<br />
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjJKgzkYz3X-ki-lGupxdcEoM56QTick8VGveotKMC-4H8PxjDNZSc6UBE1_1dHbjOTXkOPIXqVyGlxZYD_4rKt6n5u4X9TzzYW8Vo01WGxCAGkJE73F-qk5qIvHyLoO_Bv6tWBZ3EHlhLp/s1600/milnercoidarms.jpg" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="328" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjJKgzkYz3X-ki-lGupxdcEoM56QTick8VGveotKMC-4H8PxjDNZSc6UBE1_1dHbjOTXkOPIXqVyGlxZYD_4rKt6n5u4X9TzzYW8Vo01WGxCAGkJE73F-qk5qIvHyLoO_Bv6tWBZ3EHlhLp/s400/milnercoidarms.jpg" width="400" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Milner Gray (1899-1997) for the British Council of Industrial Design, <i>Royal arms of England </i>(c 1946). Gray redesigned the arms for use as the council's logo. This version emphasised the council's role as a state body while conveying a somewhat whimsical sense of modernity</td></tr>
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It's worth remembering that the CoID was established as a grant-aided body primarily 'to promote by all practicable means the improvement of design in the products of British industry'. Michael Farr, quoting from the Council's first annual report, defined the CoID's understanding of industrial design as 'not simply the plan of a particular product. It is a unity in the industrial process, a governing idea that owes something to creative design, something to the machine, something to the consumer, and links them all together.' <span style="font-size: x-small;"><M Farr, <i>Design in British industry: a mid-century survey</i> (Cambridge: University Press, 1955), p. 209></span>. Design promotion bodies were primarily intended as policy tools for changing industrial mindsets, not for promoting the practice of design or protecting its practitioners.<br />
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The changing perception of design by New Zealand businesses is encapsulated in a letter sent by T E Clark, managing director of Crown Lynn Potteries Ltd, to Sutch in July 1960 inviting him to 'favour us with your presence, and with a short address, at the presentation of prizes in Our Crown Lynn Design Contest for 1960.' Asserting that the design competition was 'second only to the Kelliher Prize' for painting, Clark noted that 'In this way [...] we are taking the first steps towards making the New Zealand pottery industry a 100% New Zealand industry, and opening a new field or the creative abilities of New Zealand designers' <span style="font-size: x-small;"><Alexander Turnbull Library, Sutch Papers, 2002-012-22/7, letter from T E Clark to W B Sutch, 19 July 1960></span>. That the Crown Lynn design competition was viewed as second only to the Kelliher says more about the poverty of artistic patronage in New Zealand than it does about Crown Lynn's competition, which had earlier been criticised as unethical by the Association of New Zealand Art Societies. The competition however, raised the company's public profile and partly expunged its reputation for producing shoddy, ill-designed and dubiously labelled wares.<br />
<br />
Cleverley won the first of his Crown Lynn design awards in 1961, but being a prizewinner in such a competition didn't seem to auger a career in New Zealand's under-capitalised and erratically managed ceramics industry. After having subsidised his university study by working at for the architectural practice Warren & Mahoney, Cleverley found employment as a graphic designer in Christchurch, with an advertising agency in Auckland and then, between 1966 and 1968, with the entrepreneurial packaging firm UEB Packaging Ltd.<br />
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjjwy31teDrcyxWsoW1Gs1cFlkbqLfB7TKwKMdUWOH9MatxweIapl-knYodZmOI2-TcoF7fdeUtCLa1F3U2u3Eh2gvRWL_JHO_Tpmx51FB5KJPKCMUgKozMVgVGmkDyma2pO_WHYM9UZ2dN/s1600/DSCF3167.jpg" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="640" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjjwy31teDrcyxWsoW1Gs1cFlkbqLfB7TKwKMdUWOH9MatxweIapl-knYodZmOI2-TcoF7fdeUtCLa1F3U2u3Eh2gvRWL_JHO_Tpmx51FB5KJPKCMUgKozMVgVGmkDyma2pO_WHYM9UZ2dN/s640/DSCF3167.jpg" width="480" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Unidentified designer/UEB Packaging Ltd, Detail of packaging for British Wax candles (c 1974) showing the UEB logo.</td></tr>
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UEB was a New Zealand firm that embraced the concept of good design with an almost evangelical fervour. during the late 1960s and 70s UEB's squared scroll logo was ubiquitous on an extraordinary range of consumer products. UEB had been established in 1947 by James Doig (1913-1984), a former Glaswegian merchant marine officer to manufacture cartons and boxes by the mid 1960s, the company had become one of the largest companies in the country and had expanded into fields such as carpet manufacturing. Aside from his entrepreneurial drive, Doig had a strong interest in design, recognised by his appointment as deputy chairman of the inaugural governing body of the NZIDC in 1966; he retired in 1973.<br />
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgC8ov3x69l00STUGrPsKRvD5SRAy9f_V3zhH1oUSOkkUP6LE1uBUmSvB2qou0XVR3ZDz4aNhRfZkZy-rZMbd7XZ7K42vtzr57WUkvEcoh4M6oaDdiVcfvJ6jbjgcovTnGYt7MuyWpZaAE1/s1600/Screenshot+2015-11-02+15.35.05.png" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="634" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgC8ov3x69l00STUGrPsKRvD5SRAy9f_V3zhH1oUSOkkUP6LE1uBUmSvB2qou0XVR3ZDz4aNhRfZkZy-rZMbd7XZ7K42vtzr57WUkvEcoh4M6oaDdiVcfvJ6jbjgcovTnGYt7MuyWpZaAE1/s640/Screenshot+2015-11-02+15.35.05.png" width="640" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Mark Cleverley (1934?-)/Crown Lynn Potteries Limited, <i>Palm Springs styled by Dorothy L Thorpe</i> earthenware plate (1967-1972). One of Cleverley's early challenges at Crown Lynn was to develop the American decorator Dorothy Thorpe's sketches into feasible production designs.<br />
<a href="http://portageceramicstrust.org.nz/object-search/?os=maker:cleverley">Portage Ceramics Trust (2008.1.626)</a></td></tr>
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Cleverley though is best-known as a designer of Crown Lynn ceramics and he was finally recruited by the company as a development designer in 1967. This is where the informal interview format that forms the heart of the book shines. Valentine introduces a text Cleverley wrote for the NZIDC's magazine that prompts the latter into an extended and informative account of his work for the company <span style="font-size: x-small;"><M Cleverley, 'Stacks of crockery', <i>Designscape</i>, no 58 (May 1974), pp. 5-7></span>. This liberty of expression enables a sense of how design functions; its interactive process as the designer both as a form maker intimately involved in the mechanics of production and as a mediator between the institutional power formations of the enterprise.<br />
<br />
Notwithstanding the fact that much of his output for Crown Lynn has hitherto been either ignored or misattributed in the literature, Cleverley's work at Crown Lynn was technically innovative, visually exploratory, intellectually informed and of a quality and sophistication rarely seen in New Zealand manufactured goods. Unfortunately he was sidelined when the company's board initiated a series of what might best be euphemistically described as corporate blunders: it changed its name, acquired unrelated manufacturing interests, restructured its ceramics production while failing to support these changes with associated investment, dropped the design competition and employed a Royal College of the Arts graduate and former technical college lecturer, Tom Arnold, as design director. Arnold stayed less than three years before lasting less than a year running down the NZIDC as its penultimate director. The 1980s were not good years either for design or its promotion.<br />
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj8c8UY6WOl_5qvWadtruUEWg-KOmbRH36GW0x0nd3P1OkAYtSeFlyZm3r_VGqI1BkP7_QHF0ZshKd22aHgayH_nAVG5jGrvili6F2NjiNE5TukCiwvh3EngfuxBoXv5q7tOLsD-eKq_2Jn/s1600/fdcrv70+%25281%2529.jpg" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="380" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj8c8UY6WOl_5qvWadtruUEWg-KOmbRH36GW0x0nd3P1OkAYtSeFlyZm3r_VGqI1BkP7_QHF0ZshKd22aHgayH_nAVG5jGrvili6F2NjiNE5TukCiwvh3EngfuxBoXv5q7tOLsD-eKq_2Jn/s640/fdcrv70+%25281%2529.jpg" width="640" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Mark Cleverley (1934?-) for New Zealand Post Office / Harrison & Sons, 10 cent definitive stamp (1969) with unidentified designer for New Zealand Post Office, commemorative envelope (1970)</td></tr>
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But notwithstanding his impressive – if largely unrecognised – career as a designer of ceramics, it was in the esoteric field of stamp design that Cleverly made his most distinctive mark, as one of a small group of designers commissioned by the Post Office to invent a new image for New Zealand stamps between 1969 and 1974. This decision produced some of the best-designed stamps to be found anywhere in the world. Presumably in order to mollify conservative critics, the Post Office continued its tradition of simultaneously producing some of the <a href="https://stamps.nzpost.co.nz/new-zealand/1971/health">more conservatively designed </a>stamps to be issued anywhere.<br />
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiGY2zEYyb6IBMtW2viEOmdm4r45OM9YQoGh3eRbCKSCL8SUiXgNGR7rvKH7KEMSlQVrI-hgH7yKBWEwS7QDhxiHh4teyOh7_YQEE5sIW55B07kAEcOzyNSg_xydvwYl4wDCfmbYXtd4F-F/s1600/fdc080470+1+%25281%2529.jpg" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="356" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiGY2zEYyb6IBMtW2viEOmdm4r45OM9YQoGh3eRbCKSCL8SUiXgNGR7rvKH7KEMSlQVrI-hgH7yKBWEwS7QDhxiHh4teyOh7_YQEE5sIW55B07kAEcOzyNSg_xydvwYl4wDCfmbYXtd4F-F/s640/fdc080470+1+%25281%2529.jpg" width="640" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Mark Cleverley (1934?) for New Zealand Post Office/Japanese Government Printing Bureau, Expo'70 stamps (1969) with [Mark Cleverley (1934?-) for New Zealand Post Office] commemorative envelope (1970)</td></tr>
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The Post Office's decision to respond to criticism of its low design standards by improving the quality of its definitive stamps prompted the establishment of a design advisory committee in 1968, which included John Simpson of Ilam and Gil Docking of the Auckland City Art Gallery (as it was), along with 'all the old guard from the Post Office'. The committee ultimately invited a number of designers to submit proposals that resulted in a series of commissions for a new definitive range; Cleverley designed the 10c, 15c, 25c, 30c $1 and $2 issues; Maurice Askew, one of his lecturers at Ilam, designed the 28c and 50c stamps.<br />
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The resulting designs were the subject of a short, critical, assessment in the NZIDC's <i>Designscape </i>(no. 8 (October 1969), probably written by its director, Geoff Nees, which is reproduced – in all its glorious Letraset layout – in the book. While noting that 'the general standard is far superior to most previously produced [...] the new stamps represent a landmark in the history of the New Zealand Post Office', Nees cautioned that all was not good and compromises had been made. The English-born artist and designer <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eileen_Mayo">Eileen Mayo</a>'s six stamps were derided as 'stodgy and ill-considered', a view that considering her long career as a stamp designer, was both damning and provocative. Cleverley's modernist designs were, however, the 'best of the lot'.<br />
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgN_Ob82VswZeJu8KoRdV91IPePA5-rgxw2cVd8BRG5rwGdhhxOlTpKtwIrRxZkuZmB7dDADZH_y6U5sORMpRwqaIBJr5qrCw0mpsaGisP1ouYvBljyNb4dNxNJwfAAJ_hs7SKmqK8eFCnM/s1600/commgames74.jpg" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="352" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgN_Ob82VswZeJu8KoRdV91IPePA5-rgxw2cVd8BRG5rwGdhhxOlTpKtwIrRxZkuZmB7dDADZH_y6U5sORMpRwqaIBJr5qrCw0mpsaGisP1ouYvBljyNb4dNxNJwfAAJ_hs7SKmqK8eFCnM/s640/commgames74.jpg" width="640" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">New Zealand Post Office after Mark Cleverley (1934?-)/Harrison & Sons, 1974 Commonwealth Games commemorative issue with PD/Colin Simon (logo) commemorative envelope (1974). Cleverley disclaimed responsibility for the final stamp designs</td></tr>
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These reductive, asymmetric designs challenged the Post Office's traditional approach to more than just the design of its stamps. For the 10 cent definitive he attempted to render the New Zealand armorial bearings in a more contemporary idiom, in much the way Milner Gray had updated the British arms for the CoID some two decades earlier. As Cleverley recounts, the proposal was rejected, as was his hopes of embossing the armorial. These designs perturbed the deeply conservative culture at the Post Office and Cleverley's last designs for it were for the 1974 Commonwealth Games. However, as Blankenship recounts, his design requirements were too much for the then Postmaster General, the Labour party's Roger Douglas – who would later gain notoriety for his neoliberal reforms of the state apparatus, including the abolition of the NZIDC – and subsequent changes imposed by the Post Office prompted Cleverley to disavow his role as designer of the issue.<br />
<br />
Blankenship fails to either identify Douglas as the obstructor or recognise that the Postmaster General was a political position – it was a Cabinet post – and thus that his intervention had a political dimension over and beyond the bureaucratic. This avoidance of social and political contexts denies an understanding of the impact Cleverley's designs for both Crown Lynn and the Post Office had on New Zealand in the 1970s. In an economically modest, conservative and homogenous society, suspicious of both the arts and innovation, modernist design – with the notable exception of motor vehicles – seems to have been regarded as a pathway to a sort of material perdition. In his modest way, Cleverley's designs of the nation's crockery and stamps made a significant if subtle contribution to the country's changing perception of the modern during the 1970s.<br />
<br />
After leaving Crown Lynn in 1980, Cleverly took to teaching, initially at Ilam then at Wellington Polytechnic, retiring in 1996. Crown Lynn, by then a small part of the Ceramco Corporation Ltd, was shut down in 1989 by the asset-stripping, entrepreneurial businessmen who now controlled the company. The Post Office was split up and privatised and the NZIDC abolished. The society that over the 1970s had against its own inclinations developed a nascent manufacturing sector and a concurrent sense of design was now focussed on unbridled consumerism of products manufactured elsewhere and devoid of local design input.<br />
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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Detail of the stamped mark on Crown Lynn Potteries Limited's <i>Palm Springs</i> wares. Mark Cleverley is acknowledged as the designer although his name is misspelt as 'Cleverly'</td></tr>
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Valentine provides a reflective conclusion that acts as a terminal bookend to his interviews with Cleverley. In it he contextualises and critiques the forgoing conversation, locating it within the surprising normality of the designed product in 1970s New Zealand: the stamps, the Colin Simon logo, the Crown Lynn 'Apollo' dinner service along with the Lego building blocks and other international manifestations of the designed product that were available here. As he notes:<br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
A lot of Mark's work will be familiar to many New Zealanders and will likely provoke similar personal memories and associations. But unlike literature or artworks that are viewed in galleries, hung on walls with labels to name the artist and explain what they are, most of these artefacts have not been attributed to an individual designer and certainly have not been explained, historicised or contextualised as such. The paradox of most designed objects is that while they are familiar and most likely encountered every day in our homes they cease to be consciously 'attended to' soon after purchase. And the result of this is that the makers of the objects, the designers, are completely forgotten. Actually, were most often never known by name.</blockquote>
This perceived need for identity is a problematic that teeters on the brink of a now discredited form of design history that has been identified by Tony Fry as a sort of canonisation: the 'great white men of modernist history' narrative. The suspicion that this text falls into the 'great white men' category of historical exegesis is somewhat reinforced by the series title 'Objectspace Masters of Craft', a designation that ultimately sits uncomfortably with the book's subject and content. A canonic history is one that 'is generative of design heroes and movements as the primary agents of the evolution of design; and a history which takes the canon as given knowledge and the foundation upon which to elaborate or criticise.' <span style="font-size: x-small;"><T Fry, <i>Design history Australia</i> (Sydney: Hale & Iremonger, 1988), p. 27></span>. Fry dismisses the validity of this premise, posing the fundamental query: 'what of all the other designed objects, the vast majority, which evolve and are used but are excluded from such a history?'.<br />
<br />
Anonymous history – the phrase was coined by the architectural historian Sigfried Giedion in his historical account of the industrialisation of commodities, <i><a href="http://biopolitics.kom.uni.st/Siegfried%20Giedion/Mechanization%20Takes%20Command_%20A%20Contribution%20to%20Anonymous%20History%20(143)/Mechanization%20Takes%20Command_%20A%20Contributio%20-%20Siegfried%20Giedion.pdf">Mechanization takes command: a contribution to anonymous history</a></i> (1948) – raises another set of problematics. As Fry observes, much that Giedion discussed wasn't anonymous, 'all the objects which populate this history have the stamp of commodities; all have been named in the market-place.' Moreover, he effectively ignored the social relations of production by separating them into discrete economic and cultural spheres rather than seeing mechanisation as 'a function which acts on a specific society'. Fry asserts that 'while there were changes at the industrial point of production, which recast the social relations of production, these changes equally reconfigured the domestic, as re-ordered use and space.' <span style="font-size: x-small;"><Fry, pp. 32-33.></span>. A similar prognosis might well be applied to Valentine's text, but in this case it would be redundant. His specificity is quite deliberate. Recognising the formal modernist demarcations, the 'need to differentiate between spheres of design', Valentine proffers the rationale<br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
that when I play the role of a graphic-design writer I am conscious that my job is always to try to present an authentically design-based narrative, and part of doing that is to constantly question my own discipline's use of language and mythologies.</blockquote>
Imposing parameters on this history of design in New Zealand has not detracted from the power of the text nor the importance of its content. Unlike much of what passes for the written history of design in New Zealand, this is an intelligent, rigorous and perceptive recounting of a practice; a significant and important contribution to the archive. Rather than a 'revised New Zealand history from the perspective of a graphic designer', the entertaining anecdotes of a critic, or the well-rehearsed opinions of a practitioner, this is a key text in the nascent history of design in New Zealand.Christopher Thompsonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01264481177071819483noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2464874880300858303.post-15837416803959854262015-10-26T12:45:00.000+13:002016-04-18T09:31:49.446+12:00Fortunes in odd places<table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: center;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhu3lysDy4t2D9rIFPCTSiEVcnc_k7i1Zhzs0_pUDvw69vihc25lBcqI0FVyd-y8e5Bp2J1jpD6T4FkTh-QdgWS06hUPESZpJAQEnJrbG0WLIOTcc3zRCVlvUeoMJz93luw7VFI6RBhb1n0/s1600/Ak+35+antiques+exhibition.jpeg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="640" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhu3lysDy4t2D9rIFPCTSiEVcnc_k7i1Zhzs0_pUDvw69vihc25lBcqI0FVyd-y8e5Bp2J1jpD6T4FkTh-QdgWS06hUPESZpJAQEnJrbG0WLIOTcc3zRCVlvUeoMJz93luw7VFI6RBhb1n0/s640/Ak+35+antiques+exhibition.jpeg" width="432" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Gordon Minhinnick (1902-1992), Cover drawing for <i>Loan exhibition of antiques</i> (1935)</td></tr>
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<span style="font-size: large;">Between</span> 26 September and 10 October 1935, Auckland 'art lovers' were able to view what was described as 'a loan exhibition of antiques' on display in the – now demolished – L D Nathan buildings in High Street. There were over 1026 objects on show, drawn primarily from local private collections and embracing paintings, furniture, clocks, metalwork, ceramics, dress, books, prints and manuscripts, coins and medals, arms and 'Miscellaneous & exhibits received too late for classification'. Ostensibly <a href="http://paperspast.natlib.govt.nz/cgi-bin/paperspast?a=d&cl=search&d=NZH19350824.2.43&srpos=8&e=-06-1935--10-1935--10--1----0Exhibition+antique--">modelled</a> on the 1934 <a href="http://www.grosvenor-antiquesfair.co.uk/history.html">Antique Dealers' Fair</a> held at the Grosvenor House Hotel in London, the exhibition had been developed by a selection committee and was accompanied by a printed catalogue, with a cover designed by the <i>New Zealand Herald</i> staff cartoonist, G E Minhinnick. Selected objects were made available for sale, an entrance fee was charged and profits were directed towards the Plunket Society and the Girl Guides Association. The <i>Auckland Star</i> <a href="http://paperspast.natlib.govt.nz/cgi-bin/paperspast?a=d&cl=search&d=AS19350803.2.98&srpos=18&e=-------10--11----2display+of+antiques--">reported</a> the only difficulty encountered by the organising committee concerned the lack of suitable glass showcases for the smaller exhibits.<br />
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjnklLk0xwVtvFLefZNtqbCGDl6D2vjqRkR8KkJ-EoyVQx3LvZU0EM_WIbS2zoVQmhVeGMX-KnBo37a539mXBJhQ8qXfmCzDSZNT1_nFC3m6qE809QhbxdY1HCT2NwY1LLHVa9jhiZFPYyC/s1600/Screenshot+2015-10-28+09.36.36.png" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="528" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjnklLk0xwVtvFLefZNtqbCGDl6D2vjqRkR8KkJ-EoyVQx3LvZU0EM_WIbS2zoVQmhVeGMX-KnBo37a539mXBJhQ8qXfmCzDSZNT1_nFC3m6qE809QhbxdY1HCT2NwY1LLHVa9jhiZFPYyC/s640/Screenshot+2015-10-28+09.36.36.png" width="640" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">The <i>Auckland Star</i> report of the opening of the exhibition was juxtaposed against an account of a protest meeting in the Auckland Town Hall against poverty and distress by a group of clergy, including the future dean of St Paul's cathedral in London (1967-77), the Rev Martin Sullivan.<br />
<a href="http://paperspast.natlib.govt.nz/cgi-bin/paperspast?a=d&d=AS19350925.1.5&e=-------10--1----0--"><i>Auckland Star</i> (25 September 1935), p. 5</a></td></tr>
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Parading an ostentatious display of wealth during the Great Depression, even under the fig leaf of charitable works, could be perceived as a provocative act, but the loan exhibition provoked no rioting, seems to have elicited no negative comment in the media of the time although it opened the day after a major meeting at the Auckland Town Hall protesting against poverty and has been ignored in historical accounts of the slump. Nonetheless the exhibition represents a significant threshold moment in New Zealand's material history culture for a number of reasons. While not the first assemblage of 'antiques' to be held in the country – Christchurch had an <a href="http://paperspast.natlib.govt.nz/cgi-bin/paperspast?a=d&cl=search&d=CHP19320818.2.59.9&srpos=20&e=--1900---1935--10--11----2exhibition+of+antiques-ARTICLE-">exhibition</a> in 1932, Wellington <a href="http://paperspast.natlib.govt.nz/cgi-bin/paperspast?a=d&cl=search&d=EP19331024.2.121.6&srpos=12&e=--1900---1935--10--11----2exhibition+of+antiques-ARTICLE-">another</a> in 1933 – it seems to have been the largest and, as the <i>New Zealand Herald</i> <a href="http://paperspast.natlib.govt.nz/cgi-bin/paperspast?a=d&d=NZH19350924.1.6&e=-06-1935--10-1935--10--1----0Exhibition+antique--">bragged</a>, 'probably the finest collection of antiques ever assembled in New Zealand.'<br />
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhKhRBuBuMcRaMtFniay3_WNTNayGigPVD6_N5KR4tuYIooeyyTFGgxIwrJOKwJjINIfhAjJwcqTvY7gsshBPFkQCbz0iLDoMGEJZbilqHnw5WXltti_X49AX3cRgOf54w-RQWC_HLKVbKX/s1600/Screenshot+2015-10-31+14.48.14.png" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="472" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhKhRBuBuMcRaMtFniay3_WNTNayGigPVD6_N5KR4tuYIooeyyTFGgxIwrJOKwJjINIfhAjJwcqTvY7gsshBPFkQCbz0iLDoMGEJZbilqHnw5WXltti_X49AX3cRgOf54w-RQWC_HLKVbKX/s640/Screenshot+2015-10-31+14.48.14.png" width="640" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">John Cecil Hill (1889-1974), Comment cartoon in the <a href="http://paperspast.natlib.govt.nz/cgi-bin/paperspast?a=d&d=AS19350926.1.8&e=-------10--91----2%22HumphreysZz-Davies%22--">Auckland Star (26 September 1935), p. 8</a>. Hill notes the indifference of neglectful national and local governments to the loan exhibition of antiques while his clerical observer draws attention to the more pressing concerns of the Town Hall protest meeting</td></tr>
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Reporting on preparations, the <i>New Zealand Herald</i> <a href="http://paperspast.natlib.govt.nz/cgi-bin/paperspast?a=d&cl=search&d=NZH19350715.2.136&srpos=13&e=-------10--11----2display+of+antiques--">observed</a> such exhibitions 'had met with marked success from the artistic, educational and financial points of view.' Aside from its avowed charitable aim – and the making of a profit – the purpose of the exhibition seems to have been an attempt to address the city's cultural deficiencies by demonstrating the breadth and depth of its private collections. And, in the face of economic instability, it provided a tangible level of reassurance and historical continuity to a nervous bourgeois class. Its failure to acquire cultural or political visibility may have been deliberatively protective but it also reflects a prevalent sense of public ignorance and disinterest in portable material culture.<br />
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgtCqAllLZ5TqvhdQo_rhrJUZMKQ46uejBfxh-ZCZJ8lYeiL_4ZkZio_3ouSejoodjqKILlYKl1I6-qqW9VEg7GYqU-Dz8Tke9pW3GWBJGHU1euAewWdukAJ3yTKCSxtwhAB7VEHijzhMso/s1600/Screenshot+2015-10-19+10.23.28.png" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="460" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgtCqAllLZ5TqvhdQo_rhrJUZMKQ46uejBfxh-ZCZJ8lYeiL_4ZkZio_3ouSejoodjqKILlYKl1I6-qqW9VEg7GYqU-Dz8Tke9pW3GWBJGHU1euAewWdukAJ3yTKCSxtwhAB7VEHijzhMso/s640/Screenshot+2015-10-19+10.23.28.png" width="640" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Unidentified maker, inkstand of painted and gilded earthenware, [England, (c. 1850)]. From the collection of the Rt Rev E A Anderson, bishop of the Riverina, NSW. Anderson sold this piece at auction in Sydney where it was described in the catalogue as 'an exquisitely pretty soft-paste Sèvres [porcelain]<br />
inkstand [...] one of the gems of the collection'.<br />
<a href="http://www.powerhousemuseum.com/collection/database/?irn=182425&img=126431">Museum of Applied Arts & Sciences, Sydney (A509)</a></td></tr>
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Lenders to the exhibition encompassed what passed for Auckland society in 1935. Not only did Lady Galway, the wife of the governor general, George Vere Arundel Monckton-Arundell, viscount Galway, open the exhibition but the gubernatorial couple also lent material including a trove of silver (236), a collection of miniatures (726) and a 'Pewter communion cup, once the property of Captain James Cook, whom it accompanied on his voyages of discovery. About 1760.' (403). The Rt Rev <a href="http://adb.anu.edu.au/biography/anderson-ernest-augustus-5014">Ernest Augustus Anderson</a>, former Anglican bishop of the Riverina in New South Wales, lent a collection of Worcester porcelain (518-519), seventeen pieces of 'miscellaneous' English eighteenth century porcelain (530), 'two coloured Bartolozzi prints and one needlework picture. 1780' (687) and three enamel patch boxes (868). Unfortunately for the art lovers of Auckland, peculation of the funds of the diocese of Riverina by its solicitor led to the greater part of Anderson's collection of ceramics being sold by the Sydney auction house Lawson's in 1906. A number of pieces were acquired by the Sydney Technological Museum although, sadly for the museum, most of the pieces it purchased were not what they were claimed to be. In the absence of comparative examples, attributions tended to be aspirational rather than actual.<br />
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEivNeFrBcQeU6iyb-btSlfgBce0cMzK-0urWqQHAr2C6-eATay915HocmchHR9P6n_ZJujghZrbahvlynqm0pJmnU6p_VX0MuXJE0_Mwel6THMxQjf3Fw9P9lNBeOFQDchlBDZY8p1Fv3mw/s1600/Screenshot+2015-10-19+09.18.50.png" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="366" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEivNeFrBcQeU6iyb-btSlfgBce0cMzK-0urWqQHAr2C6-eATay915HocmchHR9P6n_ZJujghZrbahvlynqm0pJmnU6p_VX0MuXJE0_Mwel6THMxQjf3Fw9P9lNBeOFQDchlBDZY8p1Fv3mw/s640/Screenshot+2015-10-19+09.18.50.png" width="640" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Day & Son after Frederick Rice Stack (1822-1873), <i>View of Auckland Harbour, New Zealand, taken during the regatta of January 1862 (the race of the Maori war canoes)</i>, from F R Stack, <i>Views in the province of Auckland, New Zealand</i> (London: Day & Son, 1863), plate 1. <br />
Six prints from the series were lent to the exhibition by the Northern Club.<br />
<a href="http://www.georgegrey.org.nz/TheCollection/CollectionItem/id/54/title/views-in-the-province-of-auckland-new-zealand.aspx">Grey Collection, Auckland Libraries (GNZ 993.2 S78)</a></td></tr>
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The president and members of the Northern Club lent 'six lithographs of early Auckland, from the drawing of Major F R Slack (<i>sic</i>)'. Club members or their wives were equally generous: Sir George Wilson, first president of the New Zealand National party, lent a collection of English watercolours. His fellow <a href="http://www.nzjh.auckland.ac.nz/docs/1994/NZJH_28_1_07.pdf">Kelly Gang</a> member, Edward Russell, éminence grise of his father's law firm Russell McVeagh, loaned 'a Korean cabinet bound and ornamented in brass' (199) while his sisters lent a variety of things: Ada (Mrs R Anthony Carr) a 'Chinese work box in gold and black lacquer (913); Agnes (Miss Agnes Russell) a 'Engraved Egyptian copper tray. Probably 14th century.' (392) and a 'Spode fruit dish 1805' (486); and Grace (Dr de Courcy) a 'Pair of tall brass candlesticks, used in Palestine' (371), 'An oviform copper urn of Adam design. 1780' (377) and an 'Oak spinning wheel from Donegal. Early 18th century' (991). Russell's nieces were equally generous: Mrs Austin Carr (née Barbara Greig) lent a 'Child's high chair in two pieces 1800' (100) and a 'Copper tray engraved in Arabic "To the Glory of Allah: made by Solomon the gardener". About 1700' (374); and Mrs Paul Cropper (née Airini Carr) made available a 'Prie Dieu chair in walnut, upholstered in cross stitch. 1700' (74) and a 'Tea caddy in walnut, with claw feet. 1800' (901). The Islamic copper pieces had probably been collected by Grace de Courcy while working for the International Quarantine Commission in the Suez and the Egyptian Public Health Service during the second decade of the century.<br />
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh00HCEqXDztPA1LpaHnnpydhnIPW-Rka10pNZtfkVVzYGxMgI0Jfk1pqtHAQ6qLyVV4QLHP2oSE1H6qxGE7iWG1sH74r8401JcLa1V0Gl-03yqqCq63gVjQYEzKqHd1eVZc6iV2r3YMy26/s1600/nathanpic.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="640" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh00HCEqXDztPA1LpaHnnpydhnIPW-Rka10pNZtfkVVzYGxMgI0Jfk1pqtHAQ6qLyVV4QLHP2oSE1H6qxGE7iWG1sH74r8401JcLa1V0Gl-03yqqCq63gVjQYEzKqHd1eVZc6iV2r3YMy26/s640/nathanpic.jpg" width="486" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><span style="text-align: start;">Unidentified photographer, </span><i style="text-align: start;">Includes no. 59 ['Five panelled screen, Chippendale, Chinese style with glass panels'] and part of no. 111 (</i><span style="text-align: start;">sic</span><i style="text-align: start;">) ['suite of Louis XVI furniture'] </i><span style="text-align: start;">(1935). The photograph appears to have been taken at the Charles Nathan residence, 'St Ann's' in Arney Road, Remuera, prior to the exhibition.<br /><i>Loan exhibition of antiques</i> (Auckland: [s.n.], 1935), p. 17</span></td></tr>
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Pre-exhibition publicity emphasised the exhibition was drawing on the collections of the city's wealthier residents, notably that of Mrs Charles Nathan (née <a href="http://trove.nla.gov.au/ndp/del/article/120606942">Gladys Cohen</a> of Sydney); her husband's cousin's firm, L D Nathan & Co, provided the exhibition venue and she seems to have been an active member of the committee, evidently cajoling members of Auckland's Jewish community into supporting the exhibition, including Kenneth Myers and Dr <a href="http://www.aucklandcity.govt.nz/dbtw-wpd/exec/dbtwpub.dll?AC=SEE_ALSO&QF0=Descriptors&QI0==%22Klippel,+Augusta,+(nee+Manoy),+1898-1989%22&XC=/dbtw-wpd/exec/dbtwpub.dll&BU=&TN=LocHAM&SN=AUTO18703&SE=91&RN=0&MR=0&TR=0&TX=1000&ES=0&CS=1&XP=&RF=Displayweb&EF=&DF=&RL=0&EL=0&DL=0&NP=2&ID=&MF=WPEngMsg.ini&MQ=&TI=0&DT=&ST=0&IR=7583&NR=0&NB=0&SV=0&SS=0&BG=&FG=&QS=&OEX=ISO-8859-1&OEH=ISO-8859-1">[Augusta] Klippel </a>(née Manoy) who lent a plethora of smaller objects ranging from a 'Medallion in bronze of Charles XII of Sweden. 1705' (399) to a 'Beleek (<i>sic</i>) bowl. Early 19th century' (439). Mrs Nathan's loans included a 'Five-panelled screen, Chippendale, Chinese style, with glass panels. 1753' (59), a 'Three-panelled folding screen, Louis XVI. 1780' (61), a 'Suite of Louis XVI furniture with Aubusson tapestry, six upright chairs, two stools, one settee. 1780' (114), 'Eleven Dutch silver birds and bear. 1800' (303), a 'Complete Rockingham teaset. 1825' (481) and a 'Waterford glass goblet. 1800' (614). Other members of the extended Nathan family were equally generous with loans: Mrs Sidney Nolan (incidentally a Wellington resident) showed a 'Monk's chair in oak with straight legs and wooden seat. 17th century' (69). Mr David L Nathan, chairman of L D Nathan & Co, exhibited a pair of Louis XIII chairs. 1601-1643 (112), 'Two Louis XV chairs with original tapestry. 1710-1774' (113), a 'Pair of hand-tooled leather Portuguese chairs. 16th century' (108) and a 'Pair of hand-painted Cordova leather chairs. 17th century (109). The Nathans seemed keen to demonstrate that, authentic or not, the Rothschild taste for French furniture had spread as far as Auckland.<br />
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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Unidentified photographer, <i>Viscountess Galway opens antique exhibition: Her Excellency with Captain G Humphreys-Davies, of Clevedon, a noted collector of antiques, after performing the opening ceremony yesterday</i>.<br />
<a href="http://paperspast.natlib.govt.nz/cgi-bin/paperspast?a=d&cl=search&d=NZH19350927.2.26.4&srpos=2&e=-06-1935--10-1935--10--1----0Exhibition+antique--"><i>New Zealand Herald</i> (27 September 1935)</a></td></tr>
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The most significant material both in terms of scope and quality was that lent by Captain George Arthur Wenham Humphreys-Davies (1880-1948), a sheep farmer from Kawakawa Bay, near Clevedon. Now largely forgotten, despite his generosity to his adopted land, he was without doubt the most sophisticated collector lending to the exhibition. Humphrey-Davies was a Welsh-born, Oxford-educated, former officer in the Household Guards – hence the military title – who had fought in the Boer War and World War I. More importantly he was a discerning and knowledgeable collector of Asian arts, notably Chinese ceramics and Japanese <i>ukiyo-e</i>. He also lectured regularly on the subject and had been involved in a number of exhibitions, notably in July 1933, when he exhibited 75 early Chinese ceramics from his collection at the <a href="http://paperspast.natlib.govt.nz/cgi-bin/paperspast?a=d&cl=search&d=NZH19330627.2.20.4&srpos=1&e=-06-1933--10-1933--10--1----2%22HumphreysZz-Davies%22--">Auckland War Memorial Museum </a>and in September 1934 when he exhibited a selection of his <i>ukiyo-e </i>at the <a href="http://paperspast.natlib.govt.nz/cgi-bin/paperspast?a=d&d=AS19340918.2.49&e=-06-1934--10-1936--10--1----2%22HumphreysZz-Davies%22--">Auckland Art Gallery</a>; the museum later appointed him honorary curator of its oriental collections.<br />
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgAuHEQrC3H5M4qVIjkdllLI50dsslz-E-WmLLOpo50qwkNGeIIa40UufnydD6BI7GRvTj8fI4wJ4yQQej3h91fjlWUC_hQRwJBTUuGzRelyAosNYUwlxQJNDn6vZElK3hSBVzvKel1uA7d/s1600/Screenshot+2015-10-14+10.29.38.png" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="400" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgAuHEQrC3H5M4qVIjkdllLI50dsslz-E-WmLLOpo50qwkNGeIIa40UufnydD6BI7GRvTj8fI4wJ4yQQej3h91fjlWUC_hQRwJBTUuGzRelyAosNYUwlxQJNDn6vZElK3hSBVzvKel1uA7d/s400/Screenshot+2015-10-14+10.29.38.png" width="273" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Andō Hiroshige (1797-1858), <i>Kameido Tenjin keidai (Inside Kameido Tenjin Shrine</i>) (1856). One of a number of <i>ukiyo-e</i> from Humphreys-Davies' collection shown at the loan exhibition (722). The print was acquired by the Mackelvie Trust in 1946.<br />
<a href="http://www.aucklandartgallery.com/the-collection/browse-artwork/11176/kameido-tenjin-keidai-inside-kameido-tenjin-shrine">Mackelvie Trust Collection, Auckland Art Gallery Toi o Tāmaki (M77)</a></td></tr>
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Humphreys-Davies's loans to the exhibition were not only extensive in scope but also numerous. The most prominent was his 'Collection of Chinese ceramics, illustrating the development in porcelain from 20BC to the early nineteenth century.' (421) but he also lent a 'Small collection of European earthenware' (591), a 'Small collection of Japanese colour prints, showing examples of the work of the most famous artists from about 1630 to 1830.' (722), a 'Prayer carpet of silk pile on linen warp, made in Asia Minor. Early 18th century' (750), a 'Prayer carpet of silk pile on cotton warp, made in North Eastern Persia. Early 18th century' (751), a 'Khira Bokhara rug of wool pile on woollen warp. Early 19th century' (753), a 'Prayer carpet of silk pile on cotton warp, woven in North East Persia in early 19th century' (754) a small group of eighteenth and early nineteenth century European porcelain (1017-1022), a 'Pair of Japanese dower chests. About 1650' and, finally, but not least, a 'Tiara said to have belonged to the Empress Josephine' (1024). Humpheys-Davies' collecting anecdotes, with his chatty accounts of treasures won against the odds, were a highlight of the exhibition's publicity push: as he blithely <a href="http://paperspast.natlib.govt.nz/cgi-bin/paperspast?a=d&d=AS19350925.2.17&e=-06-1934--10-1936--10--11----2%22HumphreysZz-Davies%22--">informed</a> the <i>Auckland Star, '</i>the history of nearly all the most valuable objects d'art in the world has been one of robbery, cheating and violence.' It was all good copy.<br />
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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Unidentified photographer, <i>Nos 155 and 634</i> (1935). Mrs Bruce Mackenzie's Sheraton (<i>sic</i>) writing table and her 'Bristol decanters'.<br />
<i>Loan exhibition of antiques</i> (Auckland: [s.n.], 1935), p. 21</td></tr>
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On the basis of pieces with a Humphreys-Davies provenance in contemporary public and private collections it's reasonable to conclude that, with the possible exception of the tiara – which has disappeared – most of his attributions were fairly accurate. The few pieces photographed for the catalogue suggest this was not the case with many of the other loans. Mrs Charles Nathan's 'Five-panelled screen, Chippendale, Chinese style, with glass panels' (59) with the absolute date of 1753 was neither designed by Thomas Chippendale, nor was it made in a 'Chinese style' in 1753; it was probably French and made in a Louis XV revival style around 1900. Dr Klippel's 'Early 19th century' Beleek (<i>sic</i>) bowl also defied chronology, the Belleek factory being established in 1857. Similarly Mrs Bruce Mackenzie's 'Sheraton writing table. About 1760' (155) had no connection with either Thomas Sheraton or his influential publication <a href="https://archive.org/details/cabinetmakerupho00sher" style="font-style: italic;">Cabinet maker's and upholsterer's drawing book</a>, published in parts in London between 1791 and 1793. Writing tables do not feature in the pattern book and the photograph suggests this piece was most likely made about 140 years after the date attributed to it in the catalogue. Moreover, it would have been a remarkable juvenile survival if Sheraton, born in 1751, had anything to do with its manufacture. Likewise, Mrs Mackenzie's 'Bristol decanters. About 1800' (634) were, on the basis of the photograph, neither of Bristol origin nor were they decanters. In part these ambitious attributions, with their extraordinarily precise dating, reflect the absence of public collections of decorative arts collections and, with the notable exception of Humphreys-Davies, any accurate and informed knowledge of the material under scrutiny. The <i>New Zealand Herald</i>'s <a href="http://paperspast.natlib.govt.nz/cgi-bin/paperspast?a=d&d=NZH19350924.1.6&e=-06-1935--10-1935--10--1----0Exhibition+antique--">assertion</a> that 'Not one of the exhibits is less than a century old' was a delusion.<br />
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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><i>Loan exhibition of antiques</i> (Auckland: [s.n.], 1935), p. 64</td></tr>
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The presence of a number of objects marked for sale suggests not only that there were a number of antique dealers trading in Auckland but also, more poignantly, that a number of exhibitors were hoping the sale of their pieces might relieve pressing financial burdens. Only one dealer advertised in the catalogue: Mrs J [Winifred Lilian?] Cowley who had premises on two levels at numbers 17 and 116 Queen's Arcade. Mrs Cowley seeded the exhibition with a number of items including a 'Boulle cabinet. 1780' (187), a 'Corner washstand in mahogany with jug and basin. Late Georgian' (201) (inexplicably not marked for sale), a 'Silver pomander. 17th century' (241), along with a number of ceramic pieces including Derby figures (453), other Derby wares (460), and a 'Wedgewood (<i>sic</i>) cup. Late 18th century' (468), also not for sale.<br />
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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Classified advertising by Karoly Antiques in the <i>Auckland Star</i> (1933-1940)</td></tr>
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The only other dealer who can be identified as associated with the exhibition is the laconically described and studiously ignored Karoly. During the 1930s a series of wanted and for sale notices were placed in Auckland newspapers by Karoly Antiques located, initially, in Wellesley Street, 'opposite the Public Library' and later at 418 Queen Street. The shop survived until November 1940 when a <a href="http://paperspast.natlib.govt.nz/cgi-bin/paperspast?a=d&cl=search&d=NZH19401111.2.99.1&srpos=11&e=-------10--11----0Karoly+Antiques--">public notice</a> in the <i>New Zealand Herald</i> announced its imminent closure, advising clients to collect their goods. It is possible Karoly was, or may have been associated with, the Hungarian-born musician Charles Moor-Károly (18?-1948) who arrived in New Zealand in 1922. Karoly placed a number of items for sale in the exhibition, including an 'Oval table in mahogany. 1740' (4), which may have been acquired through a wanted advertisement for 'Old mahogany and walnut furniture condition immaterial' placed in the <i>Auckland Star</i> on 22 May 1933. Other pieces offered for sale through the exhibition included a 'Sheffield plate tankard. 1800' (327) and a 'Pair of plaques painted on porcelain. About 1830 (framed)' (596).<br />
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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">William James Harding (1826-1899), <i>H F Turner Major 65th Regt Severely wounded Mahoetahi Nov 1860</i> ([c. 1860]). <a href="http://paperspast.natlib.govt.nz/cgi-bin/paperspast?a=d&cl=search&d=PATM19020516.2.10&srpos=3&e=-------10--1----2The+Late+Major+Turner--">Henry Ferdinand Turner </a>(1823-1902) sold his commission in 1862 and returned to New Zealand in 1867. After serving as resident magistrate in Patea he farmed at Whenuakura.<br />
His son exhibited a silver racing cup he had won in 1854.<br />
<a href="http://collections.tepapa.govt.nz/object/406990">Te Papa Tongarewa (O.013569/01)</a></td></tr>
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The reasons that prompted Alfred Turner and his sisters Helen and Margaret to identify their loans as for sale are unclear, but given that the pieces appear to have been family heirlooms suggests an air of genteel desperation. Turner, a retired farmer, and his sisters, all now living in Remuera, exhibited a number of pieces, notably, from Alfred, a 'Silver cup won by "Nainai", owned by Major [Henry Ferdinand] Turner of the 65th Regiment, at what is believed to be the first race meeting held in Wellington. 1854' (297). The Misses Turner lent six groups of material, five of which were for sale: a 'Pair of Wedgewood (<i>sic</i>) plates. Early 19th century' (514), a 'Set of five Royal (<i>sic</i>)<span style="font-size: x-small;">*</span> Worcester vases. 1800' (520), a 'Blue Royal (<i>sic</i>) Worcester bowl. About 1820' (524), a French 'Spill vase. 18th century' (558), a 'Lace veil and two lace scarves (limerick), also three pieces of black lace. Early 19th century' (800) and an 'Indian scarf. 18th century' (830). It is impossible to tell if there were any buyers but it does not appear that the silver racing cup survived. Its probable fate was to be consigned to pawnbrokers, such as the Meltzer Brothers who had premises in Auckland, Wellington and Christchurch, where it was likely melted for its metal value.<br />
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Aside from the governor general's putative Cook relic, the Northern Club's prints and the Turner racing cup, few of the exhibits had local connections, real or imagined. Mrs R N Moody exhibited a 'New Zealand inlaid wood table, by <a href="http://www.teara.govt.nz/en/biographies/1s7/seuffert-anton">[Anton] Seuffert</a>. About 1845' (46), Mrs W J Coutts a 'Hall chair used in Government House, Auckland, in Captain Hobson's time. About 1841' (107) and Mrs Ball a 'Soup tureen and two plates. Part of a Coalport dinner service once the property of Bishop <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Selwyn_(bishop)">John Selwyn</a>' (449). Artefacts with a colonial provenance seem to have had little currency with a selection committee more concerned to exhibit its worldliness; colonial relics, unless they could be invested with an aura of social superiority – a governor, the monarch (Queen Victoria allegedly patronised Seuffert), a bishop – were of no significance. But what passed for cosmopolitan taste in Auckland was realised in the exhibition as a sort of dreary provincialism; as Keith Sinclair archly observed some thirty years later, <span style="font-family: inherit;">‘a pleasant dream of taking tea at Lyons Corner House—or
Buckingham Palace—has shaped society in Remuera and St Heliers.’<span style="font-size: x-small;"><Keith Sinclair, ‘The historian as prophet: equality, inequality and civilization’, in <span style="font-style: italic;">The future of New Zealand:
the University of Auckland winter lectures 1963</span>, ed. by M F Pritchard, (Auckland: Whitcombe & Tombs for
the University of Auckland, 1964), 124-142, p. 126></span>. No matter its displays of exotica – Humphreys-Davies carefully curated Asian material and the Russell familys' dubiously identified Islamic metalwork – the prevailing appearance of the exhibition would have been its provincial Britishness; conformity, no matter how banal, was all.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: inherit;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: inherit;">Despite its avowed aim, the </span><i><span style="font-family: inherit;">Loan ex</span></i><i>hibition of antiques </i>was more than just an exercise in charitable philanthropy, the avoidance of economic reality and a foray into social frivolity. Its primary – if unspoken – purpose was to reassert the economic and social values of Auckland's urban elite. Using a language of untutored connoisseurship, the exhibition drew on an often false lexicon of objects in an attempt to sidestep the city's provincial condition. But by investing the city with a concocted veneer of metropolitan sophistication, the organisers of the exhibition unwittingly highlighted the disastrous impact unfettered capitalism had recently made on New Zealand's colonial economy and on its society.<br />
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<span style="font-size: x-small;">* The Worcester Royal Porcelain Co Ltd was established in 1862.</span></div>
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Christopher Thompsonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01264481177071819483noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2464874880300858303.post-24719273502916774702015-09-30T10:30:00.000+13:002016-01-14T20:18:57.438+13:00Real and fake<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjFyNPgevgXVSfEBmsbaJTU2LjFjApgmaFvl-xpyx8oCTeJ9PVj2aCSNiFCc82wemfLlTCc4M1eMditxD8PPhrhFA2XEGhUKdNfYTxYqRvm08pmABFSRYrHWSNQYPNoRbsGdhZ8xbxsUFLN/s1600/2015-07-05+19.28.50.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="640" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjFyNPgevgXVSfEBmsbaJTU2LjFjApgmaFvl-xpyx8oCTeJ9PVj2aCSNiFCc82wemfLlTCc4M1eMditxD8PPhrhFA2XEGhUKdNfYTxYqRvm08pmABFSRYrHWSNQYPNoRbsGdhZ8xbxsUFLN/s640/2015-07-05+19.28.50.jpg" width="632" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Unidentified painter after Mikhail M Adamovich <span style="font-size: x-small;"><span style="text-align: start;">(1884-1947) </span>/ </span>M S Kuznetsov Partnership Factory, '<span style="font-size: x-small;"><span style="text-align: start;">борьбд родинг</span><span style="text-align: start;"> героев</span></span><span style="text-align: start;"> РСФСР V 1918-1923</span><br />
<span style="text-align: start;">Heroes of the battle of the Motherland RSFSR V 1918-1923'</span><span style="text-align: start;">, porcelain and enamel painting [c 1910 - c. 1995?].<br />The design commemorates the fifth anniversary of the founding of the Red Army</span></td></tr>
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<span style="font-size: large;">Located</span> on the outer fringes of the western civilisation it predominantly identifies with, New Zealand's non-indigenous material culture is characterised more by what is absent than what is present. This state of absence is one of the many tangible manifestations of colonial economies. While the colony supplies unprocessed material to the colonial power and acts as a market for manufactured commodities, it has few of the skills and resources necessary to undertake domestic conversion of the unprocessed produce.<br />
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When it comes to manufactured commodities such as ceramics, this skills deficit is accompanied by by the unavailability of what might be best described as the presence of comparative material. This deficiency ensures consumer choice is limited to what consumers are aware of, with the consequence being that market is defined not so much by competitive forces but rather by what manufacturers and their agents choose to supply. In New Zealand, for example, for much of the second half of the nineteenth century, this curtailed supply chain had little cultural significance as many European settlers brought not only their material culture with them to the colony but also memories of what they had seen in the metropolis; emporia of the mind.<br />
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But this situation changed dramatically as the population became more settled. By the early twentieth century, the ceramics market in New Zealand was dominated, exclusively, by English manufacturers. On the basis of information relayed to them by their New Zealand-based agents, the potteries of Stoke-on-Trent teamed up with import/export houses, based primarily in London, to determine what ceramics would be selected and distributed in New Zealand. It was a small, unsophisticated but lucrative market. The wares sent out were generally conservative in their design, repeating the shapes and patterns of familiar wares. When New Zealand manufacturers began producing tablewares during the import substitute phases that followed the institution of import licensing in 1938, they simply reproduced the familiar products of Stoke-on-Trent. External influences on the design of ceramics produced industrially in New Zealand were limited: the studio wares of the Anglo Japanese potting tradition (Temuka's stoneware lines); mid-20th century simple hand painted wares from the Netherlands, Sweden and Italy (Crown Lynn's brief foray into art ware in the mid 1950s); and American industrial ceramics (notably the rimless plates and the Dorothy Thorpe inspired wares produced at Crown Lynn). There was no reference to the larger European ceramic tradition or to those of Islam and China; to all intent and purpose they had no bearing on local practice.<br />
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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Unidentified painter/Royal Saxon Porcelain Manufactory, Meissen, Tea bowl and saucer, porcelain, enamel painting and gilt, [c. 1730]. The extensive gilding and its baroque design suggests an early date of production.<br />
<a href="http://www.aucklandmuseum.com/collections-research/collections/record/am_humanhistory-object-10493?p=2&k=meissen&dept=Applied%20Arts%20and%20Design&ordinal=34">Mackelvie Trust Board collection, Auckland Museum (1932.233</a>)</td></tr>
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These empirical limitations were recognised by some of the more pre-eminent early settlers including, in Auckland, <a href="http://www.georgegrey.org.nz/SirGeorgeGrey.aspx">George Grey</a> and <a href="http://www.aucklandcity.govt.nz/dbtw-wpd/msonline/%5Cimages%5Cmanuscripts%5Cinventories%5Cnzms895inventory.pdf">James Tannock Mackelvie</a>. While Grey's primary focus as a collector of things was on books and manuscripts he also made significant acquisitions of Chinese decorative arts, apparently with the view of gifting them to a public institution. The non-resident Mackelvie – he lived in Auckland for only six years – acquired a significant collection of paintings but, as Mary Kisler observes, his 'real preference was for a range of decorative arts'<span style="font-size: x-small;"><M Kisler, </span><i>Angels & aristocrats: early European art in New Zealand public collections</i><span style="font-size: x-small;"> (Auckland: Godwit, 2010), p. 20></span>. A watercolour <a href="http://www.aucklandartgallery.com/the-collection/browse-artwork/keyword(james%20tannock%20mackelvie)">portrait of Mackelvie</a> by George Halkett depicts him with a blue and white tin-glazed Delftware double gourd-shaped tin-glazed vase that is missing its lip. Unlike Grey, and no matter his proximity to the British Museum's extraordinary <a href="http://nzdesignhistory.blogspot.co.nz/2015/07/george-greys-drawing-room.html">Augustus Wollaston Franks</a> – they were neighbours in Victoria Street, Westminster – Mackelvie seems to have collected without the advice of experts; many of the pieces he acquired have been subsequently identified as being not what they were originally thought to be, a not uncommon problem in antipodean collections prior to the age of near instantaneous, high-quality visual digital communication.<br />
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi0PMOFmq9OFglNkICRd9X-2br3UhKP1yL8IophGUFtwd9z4Ik6ytOGXZPBq7A86hgq39DHkOySNCYZRFGU7YLRuKqhLMpjbpryNTlTKEaE7HD4UnM6UYl_8BIzU_vUUfBi7mbNngvzM0HU/s1600/IMG_0673.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="480" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi0PMOFmq9OFglNkICRd9X-2br3UhKP1yL8IophGUFtwd9z4Ik6ytOGXZPBq7A86hgq39DHkOySNCYZRFGU7YLRuKqhLMpjbpryNTlTKEaE7HD4UnM6UYl_8BIzU_vUUfBi7mbNngvzM0HU/s640/IMG_0673.jpg" width="640" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Ceramics Study Gallery at the Victoria & Albert Museum, London. This publicly accessible display storage gallery, which stretches for over half a kilometre, displays a representative portion of the museums collection of ceramics</td></tr>
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While the collections of New Zealand museums are, compared to those of Europe, minuscule in size and restricted in scope, the situation is exacerbated by the reality that, even when correctly identified, most of the material forming those collections remains in storage, disregarded by its curators and inaccessible to the public. Museum managements have long advocated using digital resources to compensate for the absence of display space but such a solution has considerable limitations and is, ultimately, reliant on the quality and knowledge of the cataloguer.<br />
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi3PQCdFp063DlLn2rhrbod024yDQJAcggWY5Mqz98y8LQCdtoMsy9E8MJPwbHtzRviz9IXRjoaaON7cM8FgF4HH_aRII8rEzHJHuKbJg7l7GO4TXpfpZNkXa8-Ek6z0EEImPL72DVnwP3O/s1600/Screenshot+2015-10-01+12.57.16.png" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="640" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi3PQCdFp063DlLn2rhrbod024yDQJAcggWY5Mqz98y8LQCdtoMsy9E8MJPwbHtzRviz9IXRjoaaON7cM8FgF4HH_aRII8rEzHJHuKbJg7l7GO4TXpfpZNkXa8-Ek6z0EEImPL72DVnwP3O/s640/Screenshot+2015-10-01+12.57.16.png" width="638" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Screenshot of the <a href="http://www.aucklandmuseum.com/collections-research/collections/record/am_humanhistory-object-10493?p=2&k=meissen&dept=Applied%20Arts%20and%20Design&ordinal=34">Auckland Museum's entry for a tea bowl and saucer</a> in the Mackelvie Trust Board collection (September 2015)</td></tr>
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The Auckland Museum's collection database is a case in point. Take the tea bowl and saucer from the Mackelvie collection, which is housed by the museum. The entry correctly identifies the form and the ceramic body and also suggests, without any supporting evidence, a date of manufacture within an imprecise twenty year span. However, the data is deficient in a number of respects. The organisation producing the piece is referred to as the Meissen porcelain factory, rather than, as Anglicised, the Royal Saxon Porcelain Manufactory, a title that not only provides a clue as to the country of origin, Saxony but also resonates with the autocratic nature of the factory's formation by Augustus II, the Saxon elector. Any connection to the Prussian monarch Frederick II is spurious. The entry does not indicate how the crossed swords mark is applied, it was painted; it states the gilded mark '35c' is a manufacturers (<i>sic</i>) mark although there is a possibility that the gilding may have been undertaken outside the factory. There is no description of the ground colour or the painted vignettes. No reference material is cited. The entry appears to comply with an internal museum cataloguing standard (record richness) of ⅔ yet it is evident that the object has been catalogued by a person both without any specific knowledge of the work of the manufactory and a minimal understanding of ceramics. There is no dialogue between the object and its cataloguer, leading to an absence of dialogue with the viewer of the entry.<br />
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgzliHMM9A8m7mZIKMgcC_OY7zgF7WPeCcDLaDAw4zkzsO-48E9oY3TgTdcUUdZ0rL4EC-NhAaNPdp86-C4xtjhoW29eQGTSGTIDu4l1Mq4rgNOtmueGpTl6ReMyxnC0zOP_F850BlQrYN4/s1600/Screenshot+2015-10-01+13.28.44.png" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="526" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgzliHMM9A8m7mZIKMgcC_OY7zgF7WPeCcDLaDAw4zkzsO-48E9oY3TgTdcUUdZ0rL4EC-NhAaNPdp86-C4xtjhoW29eQGTSGTIDu4l1Mq4rgNOtmueGpTl6ReMyxnC0zOP_F850BlQrYN4/s640/Screenshot+2015-10-01+13.28.44.png" width="640" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Screenshot of a part of the <a href="http://www.britishmuseum.org/research/collection_online/collection_object_details.aspx?objectId=84448&partId=1&searchText=state+porcelain&images=true&page=1">British Museum's entry for a plate</a> produced at the Imperial Porcelain Factory, Lomonosov, Russia (September 2015)</td></tr>
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By way of contrast the British Museum's on-line collection data-base provides information based on the expert assessment of curatorial staff. There are hiatuses in the information which appear to relate to the limitations of the software. For example, while the porcelain blank was produced at the factory when it was designated the Imperial Porcelain Factory, St Petersburg, by 1922, when the blank was decorated, it was the State Porcelain Factory, Petrograd, and by 1925 the Lomonosov Porcelain Factory, Leningrad.<br />
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh5vhTZ6snscCeT_VktbJbrd8Vm_j5u2810IDHWQW-9qds4PNRdo40UvNyf-Kl4rSjjNjCqhsMTmZxaxyNjCZbbTnX0bh1F0Zd4V8ea6oKfIbe_8x9v6K-PvssARmGMbxEjX6EB1MdV-gDL/s1600/2015-07-05+19.37.39.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="400" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh5vhTZ6snscCeT_VktbJbrd8Vm_j5u2810IDHWQW-9qds4PNRdo40UvNyf-Kl4rSjjNjCqhsMTmZxaxyNjCZbbTnX0bh1F0Zd4V8ea6oKfIbe_8x9v6K-PvssARmGMbxEjX6EB1MdV-gDL/s400/2015-07-05+19.37.39.jpg" width="285" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Detail of the obverse of Unidentified painter after Mikhail M Adamovich/M S Kuznetsov Partnership Factory, '<span style="font-size: x-small;"><span style="text-align: start;">борьбд родинг</span><span style="text-align: start;"> героев</span></span><span style="text-align: start;"> РСФСР V 1918-1923</span><span style="text-align: start;"> </span><span style="text-align: start;">Heroes of the battle of the Motherland RSFSR V 1918-1923'</span><span style="text-align: start;">, porcelain and enamel painting [c 1910 - c. 1995?]</span></td></tr>
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The 'Heroes of the Battle for the Motherland' plate heading this post encapsulates some of the problems encountered in using digital technologies to verify an object's origins and dates. The plate's appearance and size suggests it is an example of the revolutionary porcelains decorated at the Lomonosov factory between 1917 and 1927. The painting is crisp and confident, albeit a little pallid and the gilding somewhat scant; the painted marks on the obverse of the plate are not too dissimilar to those found on the British Museum's examples. The lower inscription correctly attributes the design of the Red Army soldier to Mikhail Mikhailovich Adamovich (1884-1947) and the painter's 'АГц' cypher is similar to those on other examples, although, like many of them, it remains unidentified <span style="font-size: x-small;"><N Lobanov-Rostovsky, <i>Revolutionary ceramics: Soviet porcelain 1917-1927</i> (London: John Calman and King, 1990), pp. 154-155></span>. The design appears, rather more confidently executed, on a plate formerly in the Nicholas Lynn collection dated 1925, published in 1990 by Nina Lobanov-Rostovsky (Fig. 3).<br />
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhqz-u0rPn93NVOlQinRK-9sORtZr-oOfmvHJtejgsS8nrl6Cvb0-xbQOHERjsZ1_4CeAGuhTfc7iM8OCNtwQTyTYSiWtj5Bc4fXyXSsGMbKVfsRt5vs-eFCrc8ZQvjsJsS0GsQjGRZqMHD/s1600/2015-07-05+19.38.21.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="640" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhqz-u0rPn93NVOlQinRK-9sORtZr-oOfmvHJtejgsS8nrl6Cvb0-xbQOHERjsZ1_4CeAGuhTfc7iM8OCNtwQTyTYSiWtj5Bc4fXyXSsGMbKVfsRt5vs-eFCrc8ZQvjsJsS0GsQjGRZqMHD/s640/2015-07-05+19.38.21.jpg" width="630" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Mikhail M Adamovich/Imperial Porcelain Factory. 'V <span style="text-align: start;">РСФСР V 1918-1923/V RSFSR V 1918-1923', porcelain, enamel painted and gilded plate (1925).<br /><span style="font-size: xx-small; text-align: start;">N Lobanov-Rostovsky, </span><i style="text-align: start;">Revolutionary ceramics: Soviet porcelain 1917-1927</i><span style="font-size: xx-small; text-align: start;"> (London: John Calman and King, 1990, fig. 3</span></span></td></tr>
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There is an obvious problem though with 'Heroes of the Battle for the Motherland' plate. Rather than bearing the underglaze stamp of the Imperial Porcelain Factory at Lomonosov – an imperial cypher – it bears a blue transfer-printed underglaze factory mark with the post-1900 version of the <a href="http://lastochka-fromrussiawithlove.blogspot.co.nz/2010/01/kuznetsovs-porcelain-empire.html">M S Kuznetsov Partnership Factory</a> – '[a double-headed imperial eagle] / т <u>в2</u> / мс кузнецова / дф' – at Dulevo, outside Moscow. This might not be so much of a problematic given that it's known that Adamovich worked at the Dulevo factory between 1927 and 1933 and it is not without the realms of possibility he may have provided a painter at the Kuznetsov factory with the design; the painted date on the obverse might relate to the date of the original design, rather than the decoration of the blank.<br />
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiFqn3TvhnG3DRAccBJ5WrCSAW3cY2jPEAjOZ8CKxTOo6bjIjzhgW6zF9uYkY9kMz192XYTiQyQFqsjgqg5w2W53uDPYRiRPg4wz2vLLxo_XC8wdAOa_bpnJHpO-UCMdkztE74kaMGuY0na/s1600/Screenshot+2015-10-02+10.17.09.png" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="632" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiFqn3TvhnG3DRAccBJ5WrCSAW3cY2jPEAjOZ8CKxTOo6bjIjzhgW6zF9uYkY9kMz192XYTiQyQFqsjgqg5w2W53uDPYRiRPg4wz2vLLxo_XC8wdAOa_bpnJHpO-UCMdkztE74kaMGuY0na/s640/Screenshot+2015-10-02+10.17.09.png" width="640" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Rudolf Vilde (1868-1941) / State Porcelain Factory, 'Sieg der Werktätigen 25 Oktober/Victory to the workers 25 October', enamelled porcelain plate (1921). The plate commemorates, in German, Labour Day celebrations<br />
<a href="http://artsearch.nga.gov.au/Detail.cfm?IRN=116323">National Gallery of Australia, Canberra (78.1288)</a></td></tr>
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This is where digital information would leave a researcher; the information available suggests a possibility that the 'Heroes of the Battle for the Motherland' plate is what it claims to be. It's not. Examination reveals the decoration has been painted on a used, clear-glazed, plate which has been re-fired subsequently at a temperature somewhat lower than the original: abrasions consistent with quotidian use are visible under the painted decoration. While it may well have been decorated by a competent painter in Russia, possibly based on an unidentified prototype, it seems to have been produced within the last two decades of the twentieth century in order to satisfy a growing demand for Soviet revolutionary ceramics, which nowadays <a href="http://www.christies.com/lotfinder/lot/a-soviet-porcelain-plate-by-the-imperial-5322089-details.aspx">sell at auction</a> for tens of thousands of pounds. Ironically, one of the first 'western' cultural institutions to acquire these graphic ceramics was an Antipodean museum, the Australian National Gallery in Canberra (now the National Gallery of Australia), which purchased a significant group of this material in 1978. The appearance of 'alien' ceramics in the gallery's collection represented a cultural shift from a provincial mindset to a sophisticated and knowledgeable one, comfortable with its place in the world.<br />
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Recognised for what it is rather than what it was intended to be seen as, the 'Heroes of the Battle for the Motherland' plate was acquired for a modest sum at Portobello Market in London in 1995.<br />
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<br />Christopher Thompsonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01264481177071819483noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2464874880300858303.post-48557943902570329602015-08-31T14:43:00.000+12:002015-10-26T21:15:48.898+13:00Vogel furniture<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhikXwCMApNclhQP6ica6daAqG8pOnPkIxS9bfQuC6dSq_-J4v5UZdkYGVi10JsmWdbxcEUG4TatdLiYHcQpw4sBuRWbpht7lFrERqgtvqnZnuKKvPq1UQOVzANBEF4PjPdcG1TWIZWwSyH/s1600/IMG_1505.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="355" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhikXwCMApNclhQP6ica6daAqG8pOnPkIxS9bfQuC6dSq_-J4v5UZdkYGVi10JsmWdbxcEUG4TatdLiYHcQpw4sBuRWbpht7lFrERqgtvqnZnuKKvPq1UQOVzANBEF4PjPdcG1TWIZWwSyH/s400/IMG_1505.jpg" width="400" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">William Henry Mudge (1831-1920), Kauri chest of drawers, 1891.</td></tr>
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<span style="font-size: large;">Even</span> today, chests-of-drawers make regular appearances at Auckland auctions. Among the earliest pieces of furniture imported into New Zealand by Pākehā settlers, chests-of-drawers were also the earliest furniture types produced in the colony, after chairs and tables. A key feature of the domestic landscape, particularly in the bedroom, chests-of-drawers feature regularly in the auction columns of the local press in the first years of settlement. In January 1841, Frank Losack <a href="http://paperspast.natlib.govt.nz/cgi-bin/paperspast?a=d&cl=search&d=NZGWS18410206.2.9.1&srpos=1&e=-------10--1-byDA---2chest+of+drawers--">advertised</a> in the <i>New Zealand Gazette and Wellington Spectator </i>the sale – from a tent – of a mahogany chest-of-drawers amongst a variety of other furnishings and impedimenta. Second-hand chests-of-drawers were a regular feature of the auction columns in the press well into the latter part of the century when expanded domestic production and the growing weight of fashionability displaced second hand furnishings, quite literally, to the back of the shop.<br />
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A recent auction in Auckland listed a plain Kauri chest-of-drawers of nineteenth century date. Unlike much of the furniture that turns up in auctions, this piece retained its original shellac finish. It was exceptionally well made and its design exhibited a sophisticated understanding of geometric proportion, from the square ratio of the whole to the reductive proportions of the five drawers. There were other subtle refinements, including the stepped vertical corners, the raised plinth and the cock-beading of the drawers. It was a handsome example of functional furniture and its timber and location attested a New Zealand origin.<br />
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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Detail of inscription on the fielded dust slip of the upper left hand drawer. </td></tr>
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Dating such a piece seemed problematic. Its chaste lines, squared proportions, turned drawer pulls and an absence of ornament suggested both a maker with a provincial background and a date close to the middle of the century. Such speculation became moot when the drawers were removed from the chest revealing a pencilled inscription on the fielded dust slip of the upper left hand section. Written in an expansive long hand it read: 'Made at Christmas / <b>1891</b> W Mudge'. It's not common to find a signed and dated example of furniture from the nineteenth century anywhere, which suggests that this simple piece may have had a particular significance for its maker.<br />
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New Zealand electoral rolls for 1890 list three W Mudges in the country: one, a tailor, in Port Chalmers; another Otago resident, a carter, in Mount Ida; and the last and most likely identity, a carpenter residing at Marjoribanks Street, Wellington. William Mudge appears as a freeholder on the Wellington electoral rolls from 1878-79, initially at number 27, and remains on them until 1919, when he is still listed as a carpenter living at 41a Marjoribanks Street in Wellington East.<br />
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjjJcjUE_xzr3xES3oLPJtJJnjSc54HQYVBEmGi8gBtzY3_jv8VeCP3LMB2VIQpd20I67yBNcPr_H8wHun9_iT3Osks7C0n9benRODBSn3W-15yWtsVWtJDG7MSP4pLsoX4k8eiFJKBjwr1/s1600/Screenshot+2015-09-01+11.05.23.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="338" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjjJcjUE_xzr3xES3oLPJtJJnjSc54HQYVBEmGi8gBtzY3_jv8VeCP3LMB2VIQpd20I67yBNcPr_H8wHun9_iT3Osks7C0n9benRODBSn3W-15yWtsVWtJDG7MSP4pLsoX4k8eiFJKBjwr1/s640/Screenshot+2015-09-01+11.05.23.jpg" width="640" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Excerpt from <i>City of Wellington electoral roll 1890</i></td></tr>
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William Mudge is not mentioned in New Zealand furniture histories; his identity as a carpenter, rather than a cabinetmaker or even a joiner would seem to suggest that he was more involved in the construction of buildings than the making of furniture. Newspaper reports provide a little more information as about his career and death, notably the fact that in 1890 he was president of the Wellington branch of the Amalgamated Society of Carpenters and Joiners, <a href="http://www.teara.govt.nz/en/unions-and-employee-organisations/page-1">constituted in 1860</a> which, as part of the Building Trades Union, is now the oldest surviving union in the country. In 1878 the Wellington branch of this British-based union is recorded as comprising 32 members. Bert Roth in his history of the trade union movement in New Zealand notes that 'the carpenters too were the first union to combine on a countrywide basis: a New Zealand Council of their union still subordinate to headquarters in Britain was formed in 1876.' <span style="font-size: x-small;"><H Roth, <i>Trade unions in New Zealand: past and present</i> (Wellington: Reed, 1973), p. 5></span>. The <i>Evening Post </i>of 16 July 1890 <a href="http://paperspast.natlib.govt.nz/cgi-bin/paperspast?a=d&cl=search&d=EP18900716.2.27&srpos=1&e=--1890---1920--10-EP-1----2william+mudge-ARTICLE-">reported</a> a meeting chaired by Mudge – for which he received a vote of thanks – where members received a 'short but pithy' explanation of the benefits of unionism. An item from 20 August <a href="http://paperspast.natlib.govt.nz/cgi-bin/paperspast?a=d&cl=search&d=EP18900820.2.34&srpos=3&e=--1890---1920--10-EP-1----2william+mudge-ARTICLE-">reported</a> the union 'arranging matters relative to Demonstration Day', now known as Labour Day, suggesting that, notwithstanding his status as freeholder of the property in Marjoribanks Street, Mudge was a key player in the first celebrations – held on 28 October 1890 – of the eight-hour day, an achievement won in Wellington in 1840 by the carpenter Samuel Parnell.<br />
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgk1wOo7dratz25HagmP2n-VEsq7vCQ7KWftQWy4UNVxSZoUs0G_Nv3EV-cblkGlosck3r66BPKtZ5L0aDO0b-5zRMwGDUTh78yUAYfvM3cHv9tpBmBmUvdEzJVdanrlxuaDtHleMYDhiEf/s1600/Screenshot+2015-09-02+14.15.50.png" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgk1wOo7dratz25HagmP2n-VEsq7vCQ7KWftQWy4UNVxSZoUs0G_Nv3EV-cblkGlosck3r66BPKtZ5L0aDO0b-5zRMwGDUTh78yUAYfvM3cHv9tpBmBmUvdEzJVdanrlxuaDtHleMYDhiEf/s1600/Screenshot+2015-09-02+14.15.50.png" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">[Unidentified photographer, The eight-hour day committee, Wellington, (1890), re-photographed by Winifred Gladys Rainbow (1890-1960). Samuel Parnell is seated in the centre of the front row. It is possible that William Mudge, as president of the Wellington branch of the Amalgamated Society of Carpenters and Joiners was a member of the committee.<br />
<a href="http://natlib.govt.nz/records/23171863">Alexander Turnbull Library, Wellington (PAColl-2324)</a></td></tr>
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Further information on Mudge's life is provided by a brief report noting the death of his wife, Sarah, published in the <i>Evening Post</i> in November 1919. It records that they arrived in New Zealand on the <a href="http://nzetc.victoria.ac.nz/tm/scholarly/tei-Bre01Whit-t1-body-d79.html">SS <i>Avalanche</i></a> in 1875 and, somewhat inaccurately, observes they 'had resided ever since at 41a Marjoribanks Street.' William Mudge died in September 1920 'at the residence of his daughter, Mrs Gilchrist, in Island Bay'. A<i> </i>brief<i> </i><a href="http://paperspast.natlib.govt.nz/cgi-bin/paperspast?a=d&cl=search&d=DOM19200913.2.11&srpos=1&e=--1890---1920--10-DOM-1----2william+mudge-ARTICLE-">obituary</a> in the <i>Dominion</i> noted he was born in Devonshire in 1831 and, most significantly, 'was a very old member of the Amalgamated Society of Carpenters and Joiners.'<br />
<br />
The Mudge's move to New Zealand was made possible by the provisions of Julius Vogel's Immigration and Public Works Act, a piece of legislation designed not only the bolster settler presence in New Zealand but also to diversify its political economy. In reporting the arrival of the <i>Avalanche</i> in Wellington, the <i>Evening Post</i> noted that it carried 225 immigrants comprising 180 adults and 45 children. Beyond increasing settler numbers, Vogel's immigration programme sought to expand and diversify the colony's skills base. Mudge's skills as a carpenter and joiner were highly sought after by New Zealand immigration agents in Europe: migrants required housing and houses in New Zealand were, more often than not, constructed of timber.<br />
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEig_r8LntY97rrEpowKD-H2WWAAg1RTMA4uaT-knW4l8_mgp3Z8jPNsP_fE-CbSEhCB4RyrhP1zcAR2khd5bWKSya80uHk14gSMvRzk7bhD8vRqW-zbhoUMtyhLK5_VDjqeFr7pLkXa4fPf/s1600/Screenshot+2015-09-02+13.38.45.png" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="180" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEig_r8LntY97rrEpowKD-H2WWAAg1RTMA4uaT-knW4l8_mgp3Z8jPNsP_fE-CbSEhCB4RyrhP1zcAR2khd5bWKSya80uHk14gSMvRzk7bhD8vRqW-zbhoUMtyhLK5_VDjqeFr7pLkXa4fPf/s640/Screenshot+2015-09-02+13.38.45.png" width="640" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Excerpt from the 1841 census return for the Borough of Devonport</td></tr>
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William Henry Mudge was born in Christow, a small village in the western part of Devon, in 1831. By the time of the 1841 Census, the Mudge family was recorded as living at Newport Street, East Stonehouse, Plymouth, where William's father John was employed as a screw cutter, possibly in the Royal Navy's Devonport Dockyard which was massively expanded during the 1840s. By 1851 William had moved across the Tamar to Gunnislake in Cornwall, approximately 16 kilometres north of Plymouth, where he was apprenticed to a James Mudge, a carpenter employing five men. Like William, the 32 year old James Mudge had been born in Christow, so most likely was closely related.<br />
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgnA0B_xhLwHJdws1NL3cJDDjz8Vgjh0nKN3I7E5rRJyXKKJGTdgcqatPf67tTetHUb3X3bKfO7HGpHQmNJxmv1HhdTcjAjV0Oh_OTpM19pYQzTNKNEzfc4owGOWDSyWnjQHA0gd9_jHWlP/s1600/Screenshot+2015-09-02+13.51.44.png" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="148" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgnA0B_xhLwHJdws1NL3cJDDjz8Vgjh0nKN3I7E5rRJyXKKJGTdgcqatPf67tTetHUb3X3bKfO7HGpHQmNJxmv1HhdTcjAjV0Oh_OTpM19pYQzTNKNEzfc4owGOWDSyWnjQHA0gd9_jHWlP/s640/Screenshot+2015-09-02+13.51.44.png" width="640" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Except for the 1851 census return for the village of Gunnislake</td></tr>
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Between 1851 and 1856, when he married Sarah House Jackson (1830-1919), at St Mary's church, Bryanston Square in Marylebone, William Mudge, like many of his fellow countrymen, made his first significant migration from Cornwall to London. The 1861 census shows Mudge – now described as William H Mudge – listed as a joiner and, with his wife and three children, sharing a house on Southampton Street in Camden Town, an overcrowded London district best known for its sooty proximity to the mainline stations of Euston, St Pancras and King's Cross. By 1871 the Mudge family which now comprised six children had moved to 42 Mornington Crescent, still in Camden Town, which they shared with a lodger, another family and their lodger.<br />
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEitKvKL6keMrmQiAg-V1NfO3766XodeMzjnx0a-a0-xfh50LcmNeQbsX1Ab5Plz7QAlIB0rJtJ9KonsQaeBrTQIMAawCXyKNeZ_a6YefiKhJHgHvt1nfuBiXW5zKUlqqJMpmhNiT6Q4F2hU/s1600/Screenshot+2015-09-02+17.55.20.png" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="312" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEitKvKL6keMrmQiAg-V1NfO3766XodeMzjnx0a-a0-xfh50LcmNeQbsX1Ab5Plz7QAlIB0rJtJ9KonsQaeBrTQIMAawCXyKNeZ_a6YefiKhJHgHvt1nfuBiXW5zKUlqqJMpmhNiT6Q4F2hU/s640/Screenshot+2015-09-02+17.55.20.png" width="640" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Excerpt of the 1871 census return for the Civil Parish of Pancras</td></tr>
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgPLWP0xoGKzR_uv2NWlH8vPpNcy0mqX7a7hEFYvusMPlujZJVSiAlAcwRhHNVgTLX8IIcRgHq4uVR-T-RIT-3SbFWiHtORBxDN3Usa83HN9gdKPFcIt2ilRxTiyQgKcT8wnAGlhAoUwLeO/s1600/Screenshot+2015-09-02+18.57.25.png" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="400" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgPLWP0xoGKzR_uv2NWlH8vPpNcy0mqX7a7hEFYvusMPlujZJVSiAlAcwRhHNVgTLX8IIcRgHq4uVR-T-RIT-3SbFWiHtORBxDN3Usa83HN9gdKPFcIt2ilRxTiyQgKcT8wnAGlhAoUwLeO/s400/Screenshot+2015-09-02+18.57.25.png" width="280" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">42 Mornington Crescent, Camden Town, London in 2012.<br />
<a href="https://www.google.co.nz/maps/@51.5343863,-0.1396536,3a,75y,314.45h,103t/data=!3m6!1e1!3m4!1sdR3HRZLw7p8-fW5EuvXllw!2e0!7i13312!8i6656!6m1!1e1">Google Maps</a></td></tr>
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It is difficult to discern from the scant official records what persuaded William Mudge to apply for assisted passage to New Zealand. While unemployment doubled in Britain between 1870 and 1880, a skilled and experienced manual worker such as Mudge should not have had difficulty finding employment, particularly in London. Skilled joiners were in constant demand as the city expanded at an unprecedented rate and Mudge's New Zealand chest-of-drawers attests to the quality of his work. It's possible that Mudge's activities as a unionist – and the <i>Evening Post</i> comment suggests that he was probably an active member prior to his removal to New Zealand – may have led him to believe that his life and that of his family would be better spent working in what James Belich describes as 'the progress industries' of 'Better Britain' than the smutty purlieus of the metropolis.<br />
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjf61flFi7Xy4tV96pDFRx-PUmkYwVdpE7JimgjxOuKN6PPvl_xOEKDd-HqhWjkH10WjvgyBxM_a2B1erstVEhSlFCLIA0brhdpzOrO559KbTzZOzFMndqOiSqrD27Scw4oiUXhlJWlLooY/s1600/Screenshot+2015-09-02+19.37.52.png" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="237" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjf61flFi7Xy4tV96pDFRx-PUmkYwVdpE7JimgjxOuKN6PPvl_xOEKDd-HqhWjkH10WjvgyBxM_a2B1erstVEhSlFCLIA0brhdpzOrO559KbTzZOzFMndqOiSqrD27Scw4oiUXhlJWlLooY/s320/Screenshot+2015-09-02+19.37.52.png" width="320" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">41a Marjoribanks Street, Wellington in 2015.<br />
<a href="https://www.google.co.nz/maps/place/41+marjoribanks+street+wellington/@-41.2946839,174.7860768,3a,75y,30.39h,90t/data=!3m7!1e1!3m4!1s0j34mMCfEMgILkuMO06DTA!2e0!7i13312!8i6656!4b1!4m2!3m1!1s0x0:0xb920422e167dd54d!6m1!1e1">Google Maps</a></td></tr>
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Official records don't indicate how or by whom William Mudge was employed from the time he arrived in Wellington up to the time he died, but, as an active unionist, it's unlikely that he was self-employed. Notwithstanding the <a href="http://paperspast.natlib.govt.nz/cgi-bin/paperspast?a=d&cl=search&d=EP19200909.2.2.2&srpos=3&e=--1920---1921--10--1----0william+mudge--">admonition</a> in his death notice that there be 'no mourning (by request)' his eldest daughter Priscilla inserted an in memoriam notice on the anniversary of his death. The Mudge name survives in Wellington in a small cul-de-sac, Mudges Terrace in Newtown, developed in the early 20th century by William's youngest son Alfred John (1869-1947), also a carpenter by trade.<br />
<br />
William Mudge made his chest-of-drawers in his sixtieth year, at the end of what appears to have been a highly successful presidency of his union. While it's a design he could have made as an apprentice in Cornwall forty years earlier, its construction demonstrates that he was a craftsman of considerable talent and skill. But more than anything, the chest-of-drawers is a physical manifestation of Julius Vogel's attempts to bolster settler society by providing opportunities for 'decent working people' to enhance and improve their life in the Britain of the South.Christopher Thompsonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01264481177071819483noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2464874880300858303.post-51317813320686252252015-07-27T16:09:00.001+12:002022-04-16T20:24:09.849+12:00George Grey's drawing room<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhlxnr_jE-sY9WX8WNfV0KyB_lw_iqswE2CN0o5gTEXCRN4b0eiq-bR6KyyF6S5kNz2j4qMGpjS9lFo1uVuhJv0pzzbl81fdbsJCS9NIWP_IXjXVGUQcouNTUPKLjx4cJd_Nkgwvn6Dob5f/s1600/sir-george-grey-and-annie-thorne-george-mansion-photograph-album-collection-no-88-sir-george-grey+%25281%2529.jpg" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="498" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhlxnr_jE-sY9WX8WNfV0KyB_lw_iqswE2CN0o5gTEXCRN4b0eiq-bR6KyyF6S5kNz2j4qMGpjS9lFo1uVuhJv0pzzbl81fdbsJCS9NIWP_IXjXVGUQcouNTUPKLjx4cJd_Nkgwvn6Dob5f/s640/sir-george-grey-and-annie-thorne-george-mansion-photograph-album-collection-no-88-sir-george-grey+%25281%2529.jpg" width="640" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Daniel Louis Mundy (1826-1881), [Sir George Grey and his niece and adopted daughter<br />
Annie Matthews in the drawing room, Mansion House, Kawau Island, about 1871].<br />
<a href="http://www.aucklandcity.govt.nz/dbtw-wpd/exec/dbtwpub.dll?BU=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.aucklandcity.govt.nz%2Fdbtw-wpd%2FHeritageImages%2Findex.htm&AC=QBE_QUERY&TN=heritageimages&QF0=ID&NP=2&MR=5&RF=HIORecordSearch&QI0=%3D%227-A3034%22">Sir George Grey Special Collections, Auckland Libraries (7-A3034)</a></td></tr>
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<span style="font-size: large;">Due</span> to the long exposure time required to achieve a successful image, few photographs of inhabited nineteenth century New Zealand interiors survive. Probably the best-known is that taken by the Port Chalmers-based photographer <a href="http://www.teara.govt.nz/en/biographies/2m62/mundy-daniel-louis">Daniel Louis Mundy</a> (1826-1881) depicting the erstwhile governor of New Zealand Sir<a href="http://www.georgegrey.org.nz/SirGeorgeGrey.aspx"> George Grey</a> (1812-1898) with his niece Annie Matthews (later Thorne George) in the drawing room of Mansion House, Kawau. The photograph is remarkable for a number of reasons not least for its documentation of some of the objects Grey collected for his temporary retreat from the disputatious world of colonial politics. It appears to be summer: the French doors are open onto the adjacent verandah; the timber-slatted Venetian blinds are drawn up; and the sun shines on the floor of this north facing room; the chairs are concealed by seasonal slip covers. With its stained and polished Kauri panelling and restrained decoration, it's a functional space, seemingly untroubled by the concerns of fashion but housing objects of a quality rarely seen in New Zealand.<br />
<br />
The photograph depicts a small part of what was described by one visitor to Kawau as 'a peculiarly-shaped room, something like a carpenter's square, and the ceiling is supported by six pillars' <span style="font-size: x-small;"><'The governor's tour', <i>Supplement to the New Zealand Public Opinion </i>(22 January 1881), p. 1, cited in D Kerr, </span><i><span style="font-size: x-small;">Amassing treasures for all times: Sir George Grey, colonial bookman and collector</span></i><span style="font-size: x-small;"> (New Castle, Del; Dunedin: Oak Knoll; Otago University Press, 2006), p. 201></span>. Possibly for aesthetic reasons, Mundy has excised some details of the room, including its board and batten ceiling, but the configuration of the room seems uncontrived. Following Grey's departure, the house was materially altered to accommodate a range of functions – in its penultimate iteration the drawing room was converted into a bar – before it came under public control in 1977, when it was renovated in an attempt to reinstate its notional appearance under Grey's ownership. The room's current appearance, while superficially mimicking how it might have been seen by visitors during Grey's residence, intimates little of the significance of what it originally contained.<br />
<br />
Grey's collections of books and manuscripts, notably those he gave to the South African Library in Capetown and the Auckland Free Public Library, have been exhaustively researched and documented and the paintings he collected and subsequently <a href="http://aucklandartgallery.blogspot.co.nz/2013/02/auckland-art-gallery-celebrates-125.html">donated</a> to what is now the Auckland Art Gallery/Toi o Tāmaki are well documented but very little attention has been paid to the other objects he surrounded himself with. His furniture, ceramics, carpets, clocks, silver and the like have been both dispersed and, if identified, poorly documented. Some of this material was given to the Auckland City Council and later transferred to the Auckland Institute and Museum (now the Auckland War Memorial Museum), much of the rest was inherited by his niece, part of which was subsequently either given or loaned to the Department of Conservation for display in the house following the 1977 renovation.<br />
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEguRURJRhCLZjfp83TMdvYiDWD0iVlgd56GbIEpxfYEzQHWMGTEJPutoYPRSzjf9yRDbcEDtHQ49k8-dcPL7P_pUIGsDgp-W4BH3ewWCFTg3Bha3Uuj2V7HOwELLOgV3EwolnJG7lt2QuuZ/s1600/mansion-house-photograph-album-collection-no-88-sir-george-grey-special-collections-auckland-city+%25281%2529.jpg" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="502" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEguRURJRhCLZjfp83TMdvYiDWD0iVlgd56GbIEpxfYEzQHWMGTEJPutoYPRSzjf9yRDbcEDtHQ49k8-dcPL7P_pUIGsDgp-W4BH3ewWCFTg3Bha3Uuj2V7HOwELLOgV3EwolnJG7lt2QuuZ/s640/mansion-house-photograph-album-collection-no-88-sir-george-grey-special-collections-auckland-city+%25281%2529.jpg" width="640" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Daniel Louis Mundy (1826-1881), [Mansion House, Kawau Island, about 1871]. The drawing room<br />
occupies the bow window-fronted ground floor of the rear wing of the building.<br />
<a href="http://www.aucklandcity.govt.nz/dbtw-wpd/exec/dbtwpub.dll?BU=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.aucklandcity.govt.nz%2Fdbtw-wpd%2FHeritageImages%2Findex.htm&AC=QBE_QUERY&TN=heritageimages&QF0=ID&NP=2&MR=5&RF=HIORecordSearch&QI0=%3D%227-A3034%22">Sir George Grey Special Collections, Auckland Libraries (7-A3085)</a></td></tr>
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Grey purchased the 2000 hectare Kawau island in 1862 and between 1865 and 1868 employed the architect <a href="http://www.teara.govt.nz/en/biographies/1t92/thatcher-frederick">Frederick Thatcher</a> (1814-1890) to renovate and extend the original mine manager's two-storey brick house (1845) into what became Mansion House. Having been somewhat peremptorily removed from his vice-regal post by a Conservative administration, Grey returned to England in September 1868. He evidently intended being away for some time as he leased the newly extended house for five years, but he returned to Kawau in October 1870, broke the lease and lived there until 1885 when he moved with his niece and her husband to St Stephen's Avenue in Parnell. The books and the 53 paintings he gave to the Auckland Free Public Library were removed from the house from November 1886 and it was sold in 1888.<br />
<br />
Mundy's conversation piece of the Mansion House drawing room offers a tantalising glimpse of Grey's taste soon after his return from England in October 1870. As Mundy was advertising an Auckland exhibition of his landscape photographs in the <i><a href="http://paperspast.natlib.govt.nz/cgi-bin/paperspast?a=d&cl=search&d=DSC18710202.2.44.7&srpos=2&e=01-02-1871-28-02-1871--10--1----0mundy--">Southern Cross</a></i> in February 1871, it is probable that he visited Kawau around the same time. While there appear to be no other images of Grey's drawing room it was described by many of his visitors, both personal and members of the public. The Auckland correspondent of the <i>Otago Witness</i> <a href="http://paperspast.natlib.govt.nz/cgi-bin/paperspast?a=d&cl=search&d=OW18750116.2.11&srpos=205&e=--1870---1883--10--201----0grey+kawau-ARTICLE-">asserted</a> in 1875 that Grey was 'in the habit of throwing open [...] his fine library and drawing room, and in fact the greater part of the entire house' to passing visitors, where there were 'choice books, and curiosities of all kind lying about, rare and valuable pictures by Sir Joshua Reynolds (<i>sic</i>) and other great painters, with many of less value, but still worth studying, adorn the walls.'<br />
<br />
The British historian James Anthony Froude who visited Kawau for a week in 1884 described it as 'a spacious and fine drawing-room, panelled and vaulted with Kauri pine [...] Some good oil pictures hung on the walls, excellent old engravings, with Maori axes, Caffre shields and assegais, all prettily arranged.' After comparing its atmosphere to that of a reading room at the Athenaeum Club in London (Gray, like Froude, was a member), Froude further observes that 'The furniture was plain and solid, most of it home-made by Sir George's own workmen, Kauri pine chiefly providing the material.' <span style="font-size: x-small;"><J Froude, <i>Oceana: or England and her colonies</i> (London: Longmans, Green, 1886), p. 264></span>. Other, less discerning, visitors were equally entranced, commenting that the rooms were 'large, lofty and cheerful, admirably furnished, and the walls hung with paintings of great antiquity.' <span style="font-size: x-small;"><J Grey, <i>His island home</i> (Wellington: Lyon & Blair, 1879), p. 4.></span>. The observation that most of the furniture was mostly new reflected not only the peripatetic nature of Grey's career but also unfortunate incidents such as the disastrous fire at Government House in Auckland in 1848 which consumed his collections of specimens, manuscripts, wine, 'all [his] plate, linen, furniture of bedrooms, numerous books, [and] valuables of all kind.' <<span style="font-size: x-small;">Grey to G Gairdner, 14 July 1848, cited in</span> <span style="font-size: x-small;">Kerr, </span><i><span style="font-size: x-small;">Amassing treasures</span></i><span style="font-size: x-small;">, pp. 61-62></span>.<br />
<br />
The 'good oil pictures' shown in Mundy's photograph can be provisionally identified from those gifted to the Art Gallery. The oval painting on the left of the photograph is one of two <a href="http://www.aucklandartgallery.com/the-collection/browse-artwork/61/bacchanals-i">Bacchanals</a> by Jacopo Amigoni (1682-1752); the painting over the door is William Ewart's 1862 portrait of <a href="http://www.nzmuseums.co.nz/account/3236/object/1365">Hami Hone Ropiha</a> (also known as John Hobbs), Grey's orderly during the Northern War of 1845-46. Over the fireplace is an Aelbert Cuyp (1620-1691) <a href="http://www.aucklandartgallery.com/the-collection/browse-artwork/121/river-scene-with-a-ferry-boat">river scene with a ferry boat</a>; hung next to the French door is one of the two paintings of saints, probably that of <a href="http://www.aucklandartgallery.com/the-collection/browse-artwork/71/saint-protase">St Protase</a>, from the altarpiece painted for the Congregation of St Ambrose in the church of St Francesco in Vercelli between 1527 and 1535, by Gerolamo Giovenone (c. 1490-1553), then attributed to Giorgiacomo Fara known as Macrino d'Alba and latter misattributed to Bernadino Lanino. Other than the portrait of Ropiha, these paintings were among those acquired by Grey in London at Christie's on 13 February 1869 where he purchased thirty-five paintings for a total sum of £259 19s – an income value of £226,500 or NZD526,100 in today's terms – including the Amigonis (lot 21), the Cuyp (lot 45) and the Giovenones (lot 36) <span style="font-size: x-small;"><M Kisler, <i>Angels & aristocrats: early European art in New Zealand public collections</i> (Auckland: Godwit, 2010), p. 19f></span>.<br />
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh1XEsOtHT8ZWJggjHP24cT6n0nI1roAgtDh6MrwHO8rurzzoQOCjdYHMKrqYy9QGpB1bXG23s-dhW25QkT6RYo7Rm2aA6HuyVXtarxkXyjcxqXtPRBBy9gfPHrz2BcCmBjgBEkbEGrFeW4/s1600/maori-artifacts-in-greys-museum-on-kawau-photograph-album-collection-no-88-sir-george-grey-special+%25281%2529.jpg" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="640" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh1XEsOtHT8ZWJggjHP24cT6n0nI1roAgtDh6MrwHO8rurzzoQOCjdYHMKrqYy9QGpB1bXG23s-dhW25QkT6RYo7Rm2aA6HuyVXtarxkXyjcxqXtPRBBy9gfPHrz2BcCmBjgBEkbEGrFeW4/s640/maori-artifacts-in-greys-museum-on-kawau-photograph-album-collection-no-88-sir-george-grey-special+%25281%2529.jpg" width="520" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Daniel Louis Mundy (1826-1881), [Māori artifacts (<i>sic</i>) in Grey's museum on Kawau, about 1871].<br />
<a href="http://www.aucklandcity.govt.nz/dbtw-wpd/exec/dbtwpub.dll?BU=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.aucklandcity.govt.nz%2Fdbtw-wpd%2FHeritageImages%2Findex.htm&AC=QBE_QUERY&TN=heritageimages&QF0=ID&NP=2&MR=5&RF=HIORecordSearch&QI0=%3D%227-A3034%22">Sir George Grey Special Collections, Auckland Libraries (7-A14074)</a></td></tr>
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Other than the two Korowai cloaks employed as seat covers, the Māori and African artefacts mentioned by Froude are excluded from Mundy's photograph although they do feature in another of Mundy's photographs of the interiors of Mansion House. Gray's most recent biographer, Donald Kerr, suggests that the greater part of Grey's collection of Māori artefacts was exhibited in the entrance hall and in his library <span style="font-size: x-small;"><Kerr, <i>Amassing treasures</i>, p. 195></span>. Ethnographical displays were par for the course amongst more intellectual colonists during the nineteenth century: Anna Petersen reproduces an 1881 photograph of the Rev Dr John Kinder's study at St John's College in Auckland that shows a large collection of Melanesian artefacts mixed up with Indian brass work, stone adzes, specimen of coral and religious prints <span style="font-size: x-small;"><A Petersen, </span><span style="font-size: x-small;"><i>New Zealanders at home: a cultural history of domestic interiors, 1814-1914</i> </span><span style="font-size: x-small;">(Dunedin: University of Otago Press, 2001), pp. 78-79></span>. A posthumous photograph of the library of Donald McLean, chief land commissioner during the 1850s and 60s, depicts a similar, if less discriminating, assemblage of <span style="text-align: center;">Māori artefacts.</span> Petersen suggests that while this interest in indigenous arts represented an interest and involvement in the cultures of its makers it was also an assertion of economic and social power.<br />
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjem1zU_oqwotHi0UbQMjHF5CXCLpH0pRLTJpq0b4QP79Y25PG5uxmr2QPsq9o8zXAjGaR0HnWoMUiQ0zjPQcQsg2cwRGFlTTpqbZfzLp8g_e6XvMtudXlK1X3M_DWIOWxfB1GRCZsiO54r/s1600/Screenshot+2015-07-26+10.51.16.png" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="432" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjem1zU_oqwotHi0UbQMjHF5CXCLpH0pRLTJpq0b4QP79Y25PG5uxmr2QPsq9o8zXAjGaR0HnWoMUiQ0zjPQcQsg2cwRGFlTTpqbZfzLp8g_e6XvMtudXlK1X3M_DWIOWxfB1GRCZsiO54r/s640/Screenshot+2015-07-26+10.51.16.png" width="640" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Unidentified photographer, [An interior photograph of the library at Sir Donald McLean's home on Napier Terrace, in Napier, Hawkes Bay, about 1890].<br />
<a href="http://collection.mtghawkesbay.com/search.do?db=object&page=1&view=detail&id=37389">MTG Hawkes Bay (m2004/19, 7512 b, Album 39, 78722)</a></td></tr>
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The furniture seen in Mundy's photograph of Grey's drawing room comprises a double half-height open bookcase, an upholstered footstool, two spoon-backed armchairs (covered by the Korowai cloaks), a pair of balloon-backed chairs that appear to be upholstered under the slip cover. Matthews and Grey appear to be seated on spoon-backed easy or parlour chairs that are also concealed by slip covers. A circular library table is covered with a bordered baize cloth and there are three occasional tables of different styles. In the bay window is a piece of furniture with what appears to be a carved gallery. This half-concealed object would appear to be a neo-jacobean davenport, which Froude observed 'had a large Bible on it, from which he read daily prayers to his household.' The davenport – a type of desk first made in the late 1810s – appears to have been fabricated from older components and is currently displayed in the renovated drawing room, presumably on loan from the descendants of Grey's niece. It is a rare example in New Zealand of furniture found in its original nineteenth century location.<br />
<br />
It's difficult to accurately attribute a date or place of origin for furniture on the basis of a photograph but in the absence of the originals some tentative attributions may still be made in respect of the more visible pieces. The open bookcase, for example, appears to be of mahogany veneer and is unlikely to be of colonial manufacture. The same might be said for the occasional table positioned against the fireplace; its carved and turned tripod feet suggest a metropolitan, rather than provincial, origin. By contrast, the other two occasional tables and the upholstered footstool seem to fit with Froude's description of 'plain and solid' 'home-made' Kauri furniture: the vertical elements are turned and the supports sawn and chamfered. It seems likely that the furniture is a combination of pieces acquired by Grey subsequent to the incineration of his furniture in 1848 and utilitarian pieces either recently brought from England or made locally; there's little about it that suggests either Grey's gentry background or his former gubernatorial status.<br />
<br />
There are four carpets visible in the photographs. Given Grey's social circumstances, they are, in all likelihood, Axminster or Brussels carpets – machine woven carpets from Kidderminster – rather than more exotic pieces. Seventy three Brussels carpets were listed as being installed at Government House in Auckland in an 1841 inventory of furnishings conducted by Felton Mathew. A notice for the <a href="http://paperspast.natlib.govt.nz/cgi-bin/paperspast?a=d&cl=search&d=AS18710131.2.19.6&srpos=2&e=--1865---1872--10--1----2Brussels+carpet--">sale of the recently assembled contents</a> of the Coromandel gold prospector George Clarkson's Charleville House in Remuera in January 1871 lists eight Brussels carpets. At the time of Grey's return from England, new and carefully selected Brussels carpets were advertised for sale in Auckland by importers such as LD Nathan.<br />
<br />
There are a significant number of ceramics adorning the room that include two porcelain <i>garnitures de cheminée</i> – on the bookcase and on the mantelpiece – that appear to be of Chinese manufacture. On the bookshelf the three quadriform inverted baluster-shaped vases are interspersed with what appear to be four brush pots, presumably also of Chinese origin. On the mantelpiece, the five vases are backed by two octagonal plates flanking two obscured objects that might be circular dishes; the mouths of the four flanking vases appear to be stopped by small bulbous bottles, presumably also of porcelain. Any decoration is indistinct. There are five more, large, vases, also apparently of Chinese origin scattered around the room on tables and brackets. Petersen quotes an 1881 visitor observing that all around the room 'was a sort of shelf or ledge, covered with curios of every description, peculiar chinaware, little deities of different metals, Maori curios, etc.' <span style="font-size: x-small;"><Petersen, <i>New Zealanders at home</i>, p. 77></span>. Grey's drawing room was evidently a dynamic space, with pieces being added and, presumably, removed as his collection of things developed. What is evident is that the ceramics are not displayed primarily for the purpose of decoration. Like the paintings and the books, they're there to make a point: this is serious collecting.<br />
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi1tTVHJjsgPF2oYZfu9ylqB4Xy01vTH27Yz9YYIqVPAdop_GynUt7BF7kijEeQVoY-3LwrOdKlGWmC9O3Lxw5J_c8J-9-nxuX4LuvzB80ooMQXdJGWhN0jxVMllaKTX7qTFgLY7PfvPPMj/s1600/Screenshot+2015-07-25+17.03.35.png" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="442" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi1tTVHJjsgPF2oYZfu9ylqB4Xy01vTH27Yz9YYIqVPAdop_GynUt7BF7kijEeQVoY-3LwrOdKlGWmC9O3Lxw5J_c8J-9-nxuX4LuvzB80ooMQXdJGWhN0jxVMllaKTX7qTFgLY7PfvPPMj/s640/Screenshot+2015-07-25+17.03.35.png" width="640" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Unidentified photographer, <i>Captain [Roderick] Dew and the officers of HMS Encounter</i> ([1862])<i>.</i><br />
<a href="http://www.gettyimages.co.nz/detail/news-photo/captain-roderick-dew-and-officers-of-the-hms-encounter-news-photo/3321151">Otto Herschan Getty</a></td></tr>
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It's unclear what prompted Grey's interest in Chinese porcelain but Kerr records that 'while still in New Zealand [in 1865] Grey somehow learnt that a large Chinese enamel vase was being sold for £60 at a private sale organised by some navy agents in Westminster. Described as booty taken by a Captain Dew of the Royal Navy, 'it was a specimen of very curious art' that he was 'very anxious to get' because it would then be the only one in Australasia.'<span style="font-size: x-small;"><Kerr, <i>Amassing treasures</i>, p.196></span>. That Grey was prepared to spend the equivalent income value today of £53,000 (NZD110,000) on an object he had not seen seems remarkable, but as with his books, collecting unseen was a condition of colonial life. In fact, Grey would have been well aware of Roderick Dew's actions as captain of HMS Encounter. Even though subject to criticism, Dew's actions at Ningbo during the millenarian Taiping rebellion against Qing rule in May 1862 were <a href="http://paperspast.natlib.govt.nz/cgi-bin/paperspast?a=d&cl=search&d=NENZC18630530.2.22&srpos=2&e=--1860---1863--10--1----0Ningpo+captain+dew--">widely reported</a> in the New Zealand press; it was an eerie foretaste of Grey's own position as commander in chief in and over the British colony of New Zealand during the settler-initiated land wars of 1863. From the brief description, it's possible that the vase positioned on the hearth of the unused fireplace may be that acquired from Dew's prize agent.<br />
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgaJpGSMyJ9XQe5YrVWr5R88DN1ihjLWOC8a0ERRtWA8BLk7Ipb3K_yr-_f5dO66W3Gg4ucE_myFjDL5G5BPjxUL0OMcjpLNJZ8cd6Z1AFeceK_C3GmFAZGQng-8tXpFdlglOr4zlpyeEEW/s1600/Screenshot+2015-07-27+15.30.41.png" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="400" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgaJpGSMyJ9XQe5YrVWr5R88DN1ihjLWOC8a0ERRtWA8BLk7Ipb3K_yr-_f5dO66W3Gg4ucE_myFjDL5G5BPjxUL0OMcjpLNJZ8cd6Z1AFeceK_C3GmFAZGQng-8tXpFdlglOr4zlpyeEEW/s400/Screenshot+2015-07-27+15.30.41.png" width="205" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Detail of the vase located on the hearth in Daniel Louis Mundy (1826-1881), [Sir George Grey and his niece and adopted daughter<br />
Annie Thorne George in the drawing room, Mansion House, Kawau Island, about 1871].<br />
<a href="http://www.aucklandcity.govt.nz/dbtw-wpd/exec/dbtwpub.dll?BU=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.aucklandcity.govt.nz%2Fdbtw-wpd%2FHeritageImages%2Findex.htm&AC=QBE_QUERY&TN=heritageimages&QF0=ID&NP=2&MR=5&RF=HIORecordSearch&QI0=%3D%227-A3034%22">Sir George Grey Special Collections, Auckland Libraries (7-A3034)</a></td></tr>
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Grey's collection of Chinese porcelain as depicted in Mundy's photograph seems to have been unique in the colony both for its origin as well as its size – at least twenty-three pieces are visible. While Chinese ceramics were imported privately into the colony, surviving records suggest such material was not abundant; Between 1865 and 1875 there are a mere four auctions listing Chinese vases in Auckland newspapers including<a href="http://paperspast.natlib.govt.nz/cgi-bin/paperspast?a=d&cl=search&d=DSC18720905.2.22.1&srpos=6&e=-10-1865---1875--10--1-byDA---2Chinese+vase--"> the sale</a> in September 1872 of the stock of Japanese and Chinese goods of Mrs Johnstone of Shortland Street. It's unlikely that any of the pieces would have sold for £60.The September 1858 auction of the household furniture and effects of Colonel Robert Wynyard of the 58th Regiment, acting governor after Grey's first term, lists an extensive range of useful and ornamental ceramics, all of which appear to have been of European origin. Moreover, commercial imports of non-British ceramics attracted punitive duties and tariffs which would have deterred all but the most determined – or privileged – collector.<br />
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh3WmDH19vFzkUjFm137UJzuHDnhMhMcKSpl1aWflcaDaGPhk_36xrVWqYkezztLgDg-tAEHqQeZwXNiEXPE6bZvG5ItzHuKI82XEu6o94QtR-FclIVYW-l8ZBjwOvy4qPC9L29lJ_icyIm/s1600/Screenshot+2015-07-27+15.08.32.png" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="268" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh3WmDH19vFzkUjFm137UJzuHDnhMhMcKSpl1aWflcaDaGPhk_36xrVWqYkezztLgDg-tAEHqQeZwXNiEXPE6bZvG5ItzHuKI82XEu6o94QtR-FclIVYW-l8ZBjwOvy4qPC9L29lJ_icyIm/s640/Screenshot+2015-07-27+15.08.32.png" width="640" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Detail of the <i>garniture de cheminée </i>on the mantlepiece<i> </i>in Daniel Louis Mundy (1826-1881), [Sir George Grey and his niece and adopted daughter<br />
Annie Thorne George in the drawing room, Mansion House, Kawau Island, about 1871].<br />
<a href="http://www.aucklandcity.govt.nz/dbtw-wpd/exec/dbtwpub.dll?BU=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.aucklandcity.govt.nz%2Fdbtw-wpd%2FHeritageImages%2Findex.htm&AC=QBE_QUERY&TN=heritageimages&QF0=ID&NP=2&MR=5&RF=HIORecordSearch&QI0=%3D%227-A3034%22">Sir George Grey Special Collections, Auckland Libraries (7-A3034)</a></td></tr>
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Grey's friendships in London encompassed notable collectors such as the art critic John Ruskin (1819-1900) and, more pertinently in respect of his ceramics, <a href="http://www.britishmuseum.org/research/search_the_collection_database/term_details.aspx?bioId=148562">Augustus Wollaston Franks</a> (1826-1897). Franks was keeper of British and medieval antiquities and ethnography at the British Museum and a voracious, knowledgeable and well-connected collector in his own right. He was also a fellow member of the Athenaeum club. Grey seems to have met up with Franks in November 1869 – he probably knew him from earlier visits to London – and during the remainder of his stay encountered him socially at regular intervals. Franks not only introduced Grey to other collectors but would have been well-positioned to advise him both on the paintings he acquired at Christie's and on the purchase of Chinese ceramics; he gave over three thousand examples of Chinese porcelain to the <a href="http://www.britishmuseum.org/research/collection_online/search.aspx?people=148562&place=42791&material=17994">British Museum</a> and his <i><a href="https://ia700408.us.archive.org/26/items/cu31924023326055/cu31924023326055.pdf">Catalogue of a collection of oriental porcelain and pottery</a></i>, a documentation of his private collection that formed the basis of the gift (1876), is still highly regarded as an example of meticulous scholarship and exacting research.<br />
<br />
Jessica Harrison-Hall opines the timing of Franks' interest in Chinese ceramics 'is significant and coincides with the commencement of long British involvement in East China during the Taiping Rebellion (1851-64) and the Second Opium War (1856-60)', and notes that these military actions 'brought a flood of high quality Ming (1348-1644) and Qing (1644-1911) ceramics onto the European art market.' <span style="font-size: x-small;"><J Harrison-Hall, 'Oriental pottery and porcelain' in <i>A W Franks: nineteenth century collecting and the British Museum</i>, ed by M Caygill and J Cherry (London: British Museum Press, 1997), 220-229, p. 222></span>. Like Grey with his 'large vase', Franks is known to have acquired Chinese ceramics directly from military sources but, as Harrison-Hall observes, 'his main mode of collecting was very pedestrian. Literally. He walked along the Strand and shopped for most of his pieces at his London dealers'<span style="font-size: x-small;"><Harrison-Hall, p. 225></span>, which may have been how Grey acquired many of his pieces.<br />
<br />
As keeper of ethnography at the British Museum Franks was implicated in Grey's 1854 gift of over a hundred Māori objects and he evidently sought Grey's ethnographic advice during his time in London <span style="font-size: x-small;"><D Starzecka, R Neich and M Prendegast, <i>Taonga Māori in the British Museum</i> (Wellington: Te Papa Press, 2010), p. 15>.</span> In a note dated 17 May 1870 Franks informs Grey that he 'would be glad of an opportunity of looking at your pear-shaped implement from the Cape if not giving you too much trouble.'<span style="font-size: x-small;"><<a href="http://www.aucklandcity.govt.nz/dbtw-wpd/exec/dbtwpub.dll?AC=NEXT_RECORD&XC=/dbtw-wpd/exec/dbtwpub.dll&BU=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.aucklandcity.govt.nz%2Fdbtw-wpd%2Fmsonline%2F&TN=Manuscriptsonline&SN=AUTO19493&SE=316&RN=0&MR=10&TR=0&TX=1000&ES=0&CS=1&XP=&RF=WebReport&EF=&DF=WebRecord&RL=0&EL=0&DL=0&NP=2&ID=&MF=WPEngMsg.ini&MQ=&TI=0&DT=&ST=0&IR=0&NR=0&NB=0&SV=0&SS=1&BG=&FG=&QS=index&OEX=ISO-8859-1&OEH=ISO-8859-1">A Franks to Grey, 17 May 1870, Auckland Libraries, GL F30.2</a>></span>. Grey, in turn, was certainly not averse to taking expert advice and although the surviving correspondence between the two men in the Grey Collection at Auckland Libraries does not reveal if advice was sought from and given by Franks, it does encourage the possibility that it was.<br />
<br />
As a collector, Grey's principal focus was on his books and manuscripts. His remarkable collection of paintings came, largely, from a single source. His carpets and furniture and other household goods seem to have been acquired by him primarily for functional purposes. His collection of Chinese ceramics, now dispersed and apparently unrecognised, has hitherto been ignored in assessments of Grey's connoisseurship. However it not only seems to have been acquired in the same pedagogical spirit as his paintings but also, like them, it's entirely possible that it was a collection of a particularly outstanding quality.<br />
<br />Christopher Thompsonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01264481177071819483noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2464874880300858303.post-64353915587403554392015-06-19T07:22:00.002+12:002017-03-26T19:23:40.609+13:00An overriding enthusiasm for good design in all things<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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<b>VERTICAL LIVING: THE ARCHITECTURAL CENTRE AND THE REMAKING OF WELLINGTON</b></div>
<div style="text-align: center;">
<b>by Julia Gatley and Paul Walker</b></div>
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<b>Auckland University Press, $60.00, July 2014, 9781869408152</b></div>
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<span style="font-size: large;">The</span> Architectural Centre Inc, a Wellington-based association organised in 1946 by a diverse group of individuals who believed 'in the transformative potential of modern architecture' is an exemplary instance of the collaborative way people around the world sought to understand the modern movement in architecture and design. As Julia Gatley and Paul Walker note in the introduction to their book, the Architectural Centre wasn't the only such body formed at that time in New Zealand but it is the only one to survive. However, while citing the contemporaneous formation of the Auckland-based Architectural Group (1946-1957), they ignore the Auckland-based Design Guild (1948), the Dunedin-based Visual Arts Association (1951-1968) and the Christchurch-based Design Association of New Zealand (1960-1966?), presumably on the basis that their foci were not solely architectural. It's an odd distinction to make particularly since the Architectural Centre was one of the principal proponents in New Zealand of not only architecture but also the many other fields of modern design. Unlike the other local design promotion organisations that emerged during the 1940s and 50s, the Architectural Centre proselytised its aims to the public through a journal, the <i>New Zealand Design Review</i>. Indeed the editorial of the first issue of the <i>Design Review</i> asserted that their members' 'greatest claim to affiliation was an overriding enthusiasm for good design in all things.' <span style="font-size: x-small;"><<i>New Zealand Design Review</i>, 1:1 (April 1948), p. 1></span>. Despite being either ignored or dismissed as a student initiative in many of the standard New Zealand architectural histories, the Centre had a more significant role in activating modern design in New Zealand than its name might suggest.<br />
<br />
Separately Gatley and Walker have produced earlier histories that have reshaped our understanding of twentieth century architecture and design in New Zealand. In <i>Looking for the local: architecture and the New Zealand modern </i>(2000)<i>, </i>Walker, with Justine Clark, was responsible for the first substantial analysis of mid-twentieth century New Zealand architecture and design to be framed within an international context. <i>Looking for the local</i> explored one of the Architectural Centre's failed initiatives, a book on local architecture intended to make New Zealand architecture available to a local and international audience, along the lines of those produced by the American architect G E Kidder Smith in association with the Museum of Modern Art. Likewise, Gatley's <i>Long live the modern: New Zealand's new architecture, 1904-1984</i> (2008) was equally internationalist in its perspective on how modernism was manifest in New Zealand. <i>Vertical living, </i>by contrast, with its focus on the architecture and planning of Wellington, is distinctly parochial in its coverage.<br />
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It's difficult to convey the cultural radicalism implied in the formation of the Centre and the other design promotion bodies and it's something that Gatley and Walker and their co-authors largely avoid addressing. New Zealand in 1946 was a deeply conventional, provincial society; consumer taste was, on the whole, conservative and mediated by British interests. The country's socially orthodox Labour administration's continued commitment to a command economy was not only increasingly resented by the electorate but also exploited by the opposition National party who claimed to represent a future untrammelled by the bogey of 'socialism' while espousing equally conservative social values. While it's a truism, the mantra 'rugby, racing and beer', leavened by a little Hollywood and a bit of bone china for the ladies, perfectly exemplified the gendered anti-intellectualism of mainstream New Zealand culture of the post-war period. Organisations promoting modernism such as the Centre, tiny as they were, represented a challenge to the prevailing cultural hegemony.<br />
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What differentiated the Architectural Centre from the design promotion bodies that failed to survive? Gatley and Walker, comparing the Centre to the Architectural Group, suggest the answer lies in focus; that while the former was concerned with 'the bigger but vaguer issue of the urban realm', the latter 'focused on the design and construction of the small, refined, architecturally designed house, the holy grail of New Zealand architecture'. In drawing this delineation Gatley and Walker clearly articulate the tensions between metropolitan and provincial views of design and architecture and the Centre's long championing of urbanity in the face of suburban hegemony. This is too narrow a reading of the Centre's rationale and it underplays the sense of collaborative governance that allowed it to flourish, while the other bodies devoted to the promotion of modernism – organised along more conventional lines – withered. Another significant point of demarcation was the Centre's periodic championing of progressive political views – notwithstanding its 1958 president standing as a Ratepayers' and Citizens' Association candidate in the 1959 local body elections – and its embrace of theory, notably through its summer schools held between 1946 and 1953. By a bizarre quirk of local politics, modernism as manifest in New Zealand was often associated with a reactionary right and the other New Zealand design organisations actively rejected any theoretical debate, presumably on ideological grounds.<br />
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhe_t_Xgd30Ib7yN7vdvNjDK4wKkfFRiOCNMkGrrrJCbUcbtnMXs2lXtbON2IyC4Ij1ehZu9VAbDIfL-JrwHjfSG-OYgguj5ZsJzph93APycdANuDKc7_S7v8OdIa-MMglgg73KrpoHKOba/s1600/Werkbund+ad.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="640" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhe_t_Xgd30Ib7yN7vdvNjDK4wKkfFRiOCNMkGrrrJCbUcbtnMXs2lXtbON2IyC4Ij1ehZu9VAbDIfL-JrwHjfSG-OYgguj5ZsJzph93APycdANuDKc7_S7v8OdIa-MMglgg73KrpoHKOba/s640/Werkbund+ad.jpg" width="476" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">A 1916 <i>Deutschen Werkbundes</i> advertisement of its current publications. Even under wartime conditions, the range and scope of <i>Werkbund</i> publications were impressive. The advertisement appears on the back cover of <i>Englands Kunstindutrie und der deutsche Werkbund</i> (1916),<br />
a translation of the founding documents of the British Design & Industries Association</td></tr>
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One of the most significant associations established to promulgate modern design was the <i><a href="http://www.deutscher-werkbund.de/">Deutscher Werkbund</a></i>, 'an alliance of laymen, dilettantes, scholars of art, art critics, and a very particular kind of younger architect'<span style="font-size: x-small;"><Quoted in F Schwartz, <i>The Werkbund: design theory and mass culture before the First World War</i> (New Haven/London: Yale, 1996), p. 13></span>. Established in 1907, the <i>Werkbund</i> looked to the bigger picture and saw architecture and design as a reified object as they sought, as Schwarz observes, 'to discover the way form acts in, and reacts to, a market economy; and to redeploy form under these conditions as a utopian force, as a carrier of Culture'<span style="font-size: x-small;"><Schwarz, p 17></span>. Gatley and Walker claim the Centre's origin is located amongst the body of modernist architectural organisations such as <a href="http://www.ciam4.com/">CIAM</a> (1928) and its British wing, the <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MARS_Group">MARS group</a> (1933) but this assertion ignores the fact that the Centre was not exclusively architectural in either its membership or activities and minimises the experience of a number of key figures involved in its establishment. While identifying a group of European refugees as a vector for the 'radical ideas' of the inter-war period, they fail to acknowledge that this 'educated and cultured' group, a number of whom – most notably Ernst Plischke – had been involved with the <i>Werkbund </i>and brought with them a sense of intellectual engagement that was entirely alien to provincial New Zealand. The experience of the <i>Werkbund</i> with its wide-ranging debates and its embrace of a disparate range of intellectual disciplines and social classes was not something New Zealanders were familiar with, notwithstanding their ostensible egalitarian aspirations.<br />
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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Design and Industries Association original notification of interest form (1915). Like the Architectural Centre in 1946, <br />
its establishment was driven by architects and its membership was equally diverse</td></tr>
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A British attempt to replicate the <i>Werkbund</i>, the Design and Industries Association (DIA), effectively foundered soon after its establishment not only on its failure to comprehend the German organisation's horizontally-structured governance but also on its inability to effectively reconcile the mediaevalist romanticism of the still prominent arts and crafts movement with modern industry. Where the <i>Werkbund's</i> influence grew after the war, the DIA, established in 1915, divided into traditionalist and progressive strains, with the former tendency prevailing. Unlike many other British institutional initiatives of the period that were manifest locally – such as the Royal Overseas League (1910) or Arts and Crafts Exhibition Society (1887), which prompted a number of arts and crafts societies in Whanganui, Christchurch and Auckland between 1901 and 1912 – the DIA found no adherents in New Zealand. A search of DIA membership rolls fails to reveal any member with an overt connection to the dominion. In part this reflects the absence of any substantial manufacturing industry but it also reflects a gendered attitude to design prevalent in New Zealand during the first half of the twentieth century that posited design – although not architecture, which was perceived as 'mathematical' and hence suitably masculine – as a domestic and manual concern. The formation of the Architectural Centre would, in part, redress that imbalance; Gatley and Walker note the 'tardiness with which the New Zealand architectural profession has welcomed women to its ranks', while noting blandly that its early women members – only one of whom, <a href="http://www.architecturewomen.org.nz/archives/marilyn-reynolds-conversation">Marilyn Hart</a>, worked as an architect – 'had an important impact on the organisation's activities'.<br />
<br />
Despite this architectural bias, the authors allow that the Centre had a wider stakeholding. Like the <i>Werkbund,</i> and unlike the other New Zealand design promotion bodies, publishing was at the core of the Centre's activities. A chapter by Walker and Justine Clark – his co-author on <i>Looking for the local –</i> critically assesses the Centre's publishing of the <i>Design Review</i> from 1948 until 1954 comparing its high design and production values – notably those produced under the aegis of the 'illustrator' Melvyn Taylor – to those prevailing in the country's 'professional' architectural journals of the time: the <i>Journal of the NZIA</i> and <i>Home and Building</i> (which had a formal connection to the NZIA). The question as to why the NZIA associated journals were so dire graphically when compared with the <i>Design Review </i>is not addressed. Damian Skinner contributes a chapter on the Architectural Centre Gallery, which operated in leased spaces between 1953 and 1968 and, in effect, carried on the work of the pioneering Helen Hitchings dealer gallery, which operated between 1949 and 1951 (currently the subject of a disappointing <a href="http://arts.tepapa.govt.nz/on-the-wall/the-gallery-of-helen-hitchings">exhibition at Te Papa</a>). Like the Centre itself, the volunteer gallery's programme was distinctive in its internationalism. Skinner opines that it was 'remarkable that it organised and displayed so many international exhibitions' but then diminishes the observation by suggesting this was because 'it was '"in effect a civic gallery", presenting modernism to the Wellington public', rather than a vibrant arm of international modernism.<br />
<br />
In its essence <i>Vertical living</i> comprises a series of stand-alone essays anchored around the Centre and organised chronologically. Through this unchallenging structure a number of key themes emerge about the organisation, its members, its challenges and the changing institutional nature of Wellington. It's a very personal narrative that emerges: the activities of the newly established centre are documented by informal snapshots of parties and architectural students <i>en charette</i>, interspersed by more formal photographs delineating the morphing urban profile of the city. Later chapters are not so personal; it's almost as if as Wellington 'modernised', the Centre became less personal and its agenda more institutional. The tone of writing about the Centre seems to shift from a compelling account of its early days to a description of contemporary Wellington that seems to spring from a Positively Wellington Tourism press release: 'the coolest little capital in the world' sort of thing. Its a transformation that's similar to that which occurred in the city's architecture: from the austere beauty of Plischke's Kahn House in Ngaio (1941) to the sprawling, horizontal, vulgarities of Jasmax's Te Papa Tongarewa building 'circuited by a car race track' (1992).<br />
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh6ncDLWpa95jVPXheZeJmEQnMDwytirhcmJoomEP7-YdCkxToWVfs6msWUSD_KqCj85uH7T14gYutLxqJ4yyMb33R9aSn8oIhz88syDlzevH_vVdgY5fmy7aH7TQC2jo96GKgSpL346zMw/s1600/Sutchplanning.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh6ncDLWpa95jVPXheZeJmEQnMDwytirhcmJoomEP7-YdCkxToWVfs6msWUSD_KqCj85uH7T14gYutLxqJ4yyMb33R9aSn8oIhz88syDlzevH_vVdgY5fmy7aH7TQC2jo96GKgSpL346zMw/s320/Sutchplanning.jpg" width="259" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Cover of W B Sutch, <i>New Zealand planning</i> (1965)</td></tr>
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Indeed, facilities for cars were – and continue to be – the real catalysts of Wellington's redevelopment, impinging on all aspects of the Centre's activities, from town planning to heritage and environmental protection. Indeed the development of Wellington's motorway network was a threshold moment in the Centre's history and marked its transformation from an organisation devoted to the promotion of design into an activist lobby group. It's odd then that there is little mention of the activities of one of the more articulate protagonists of the Centre as a lobbyist organisation, W B (Bill) Sutch. Permanent secretary of the Department of Industries and Commerce from 1958 until his enforced retirement in 1964, Sutch was involved with the Centre from when he returned to Wellington in 1951. In his chapter on the Centre's gallery, which opened in 1954, Damian Skinner acknowledges Sutch – 'by all accounts a charismatic man' – as 'spearheading' the gallery committee, noting that he also 'would coordinate the exhibitions, assigning individuals the responsibility of undertaking the necessary research and organisation.'<br />
<span style="font-size: small;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-size: small;">Although unacknowledged by Gatley and Walker, as well as effectively controlling the gallery, Sutch was involved in all aspects of the Centre's activities. He and his wife, the lawyer Shirley Smith, commissioned Plischke to design their house in Brooklyn (1953-56) and he was notably interested in planning issues. In a speech delivered in April 1965 to the Wellington branch of the New Zealand Geographical Society, Sutch summarised succinctly and in some detail the state of planning internationally and in New Zealand, noting that 'the extent and complexity of planning undertaken in New Zealand are much greater than most people realise.' </span><span style="font-size: x-small;"><W Sutch, <i>New Zealand planning</i> (Wellington: Victoria University of Wellington Geography Department, 1965), p. 47>.</span><span style="font-size: small;"> His assessment not only articulated the Centre's stance in respect of Wellington's urban planning but also located it in a wider context: planning was not just about the making of urban space; it was also, fundamentally, about the economic life of a country. </span><br />
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi9knk0KD5brSPnPyiVL28mP6hBOEgHGvn4WK9WqzZTjkTZxleUymGChNVobztKw2SzmOFtc0yYJo0fueph9dOgx90qwZWNGVNgT7ThyphenhyphenKlBC0BXXg97YV32RTT595TvNUAMc-KQb4KoJw9_/s1600/SutchWell.png" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="306" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi9knk0KD5brSPnPyiVL28mP6hBOEgHGvn4WK9WqzZTjkTZxleUymGChNVobztKw2SzmOFtc0yYJo0fueph9dOgx90qwZWNGVNgT7ThyphenhyphenKlBC0BXXg97YV32RTT595TvNUAMc-KQb4KoJw9_/s400/SutchWell.png" width="400" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">[Geoff Nees (1923-1999)?], cover of W B Sutch, <i>Wellington: a sick city</i> ([1965])</td></tr>
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<span style="font-size: small;">That same year, Sutch published <i>Wellington: a sick city</i> in which he savaged the National Roads Boards proposal – partially based on plans developed by the Californian engineering firm de Leuw Cather – to insert a motorway to the west of the Wellington CBD. This </span>heartfelt philippic, inspired by a close reading of Jane Jacob's <i>Death and life of great American cities</i> (1961), again mirrored the equally passionate opposition of the Centre to the scheme. While the Centre did not campaign as a group against the Roads Board proposal, two of its senior members, the architects Al Gabites and James Beard submitted an alternative proposal that reduced the impact of the motorway on the fabric of the city by relocating it to the CBD periphery, pedestrianised large sections of the central city and inserted an extended underground railway along the length of a pedestrianised Lambton Quay. Sutch proposed something more radical: the motorway should be postponed indefinitely, at least until Wellington had a town plan (which it did not get until 1968) and a 'high-speed electric train (probably underground)' should be installed from the existing railway station, which 'should eliminate the peak hour traffic jams, reduce the need for all day parking buildings, save space from motorway swathes and eliminate the necessity for a motorway planned for heavy peak loading' <span style="font-size: x-small;"><Sutch, <i>Wellington</i>, p. 23></span>. Dr Sutch's diagnosis of Wellington's ills and his prescription for their cure have an uncanny resonance with the Centre's current campaign to <a href="http://savethebasin.org.nz/">save the Basin Reserve</a> from the depredations of the New Zealand Transport Agency, the institutional successor of the National Roads Board. Unfortunately for Wellington, the issues he raised and the solutions he proffered were and continue to be ignored by those charged with the development of New Zealand's transport infrastructure.<br />
<br />
In terms of the Centre's original remit to promote 'good design in all things', its most impressive but generally disregarded non-architectural achievement came in 1966 when a conservative National party government introduced a Bill into Parliament establishing the New Zealand Industrial Design Council (NZIDC), a state-funded, independent agency charged with promoting 'the appreciation, development, improvement, and use of industrial design in New Zealand with the object of improving the quality, efficiency, packaging, presentation and appearance of goods produced in New Zealand'<span style="font-size: x-small;"><Industrial Design Act, 1966></span>. The Council was Sutch's invention and its first director, Geoffrey Nees, a student foundation member of the Centre, was recruited by Sutch in 1960 to fill the specially created position of Industrial Design Officer at the Department of Industries and Commerce. The Centre was pivotal to the creation of the NZIDC; not only had Sutch drawn inspiration from the Centres publications and debates but he also recruited its members to boost his arguments for its existence. Where other design-related organisations, notably the Design Institute of New Zealand and the New Zealand Society of Industrial Designers (established in 1960) <a href="http://nzdesignhistory.blogspot.co.nz/2015/01/social-design.html">fought against the formation of the NZIDC</a> on the specious grounds of state interference in the private sector, the Centre worked to support the initiative. For the 1963 Export Development Conference, in part organised by Sutch to obtain institutional endorsement of his design initiative, two key background papers were submitted by members of the Centre: an official one; and one submitted by Allan Wild, a former president of the Centre (1956-58), under the false flag of the Public Relations Committee of the Wellington branch of the New Zealand Institute of Architects. It's Wild's 1968 project, Jellicoe Towers – illustrated on the book's dust jacket – that is one of the buildings giving the book its title.<br />
<br />
By concentrating on the modernist remaking of the urban fabric of Wellington, <i>Vertical living</i> avoids dealing with what was probably the central problematic of modernism in New Zealand: the nature and function of the metropolitan phenomenon of modernist design as it was manifest in a provincial society. Equally, by asserting the Centre as a predominantly practitioner agency, Gatley and Walker in a way narrow the significance not only of the non-architects who were involved in its activities but also the importance of architecture as a signifier in the wider urban context. It's strange too that the political dimension of the Centre's activities, while hinted at, is largely ignored. The internal tension between the left and right, between those Centre members – such as Sutch – who espoused progressive views seem to have begun in the 1960s. The marginalisation of the left seems to have prompted an increasingly conventional, less diverse, membership. <a href="http://www.converge.org.nz/georgeporter-tribute.html">George Porter</a>, the Centre president elected in 1959 to the Wellington City Council on a right-leaning ticket was noted in 1960 as becoming 'concerned that the Centre's activities were antagonising council and hindering progress. He encouraged restraint from members'. This reactionary stance, articulated by a key member of the Centre at the start of another decade of conservative hegemony, remains unexplored in the narrative. It may be the key to understanding why, despite its seven decades of advocacy and activism, the Centre has ultimately had a limited impact on the urban form of Wellington.Christopher Thompsonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01264481177071819483noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2464874880300858303.post-20317609283819409752015-05-26T10:30:00.000+12:002015-10-08T08:21:51.453+13:00Pirates of the South Pacific: a Crown Lynn story<table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: center;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhsF3Azd1XndKjd3L2MHCkIkvSV1PLloqv0jo6_QZIdvblHXiP2bv9BSd5YdJoNb2SM3NzhSE8o_3kZOQgRhHbpZ0zGM-6Cxa-wDkNs3qpHrNaom7woJ826ByYNjnDShS24S1rWK8VAyEaD/s1600/2015-05-06+11.41.14.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="578" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhsF3Azd1XndKjd3L2MHCkIkvSV1PLloqv0jo6_QZIdvblHXiP2bv9BSd5YdJoNb2SM3NzhSE8o_3kZOQgRhHbpZ0zGM-6Cxa-wDkNs3qpHrNaom7woJ826ByYNjnDShS24S1rWK8VAyEaD/s640/2015-05-06+11.41.14.jpg" width="640" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">[David Jenkin (1919-2002?), modeller?] for Ambrico Ltd, 'Paris' earthenware bowl, [about 1948]. Based on a British wartime Utility design,<br />
the bowl was produced using a second-hand press moulding machine imported from England in 1947.</td></tr>
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<span style="font-size: large;">Crown Lynn</span>, the brand name adopted in 1948 by the industrial porcelain (<i>sic</i>) department of the Auckland brick and tile manufacturer Ambrico Ltd has, in recent years, become synonymous with an idea that New Zealanders, when pushed, can turn themselves to producing anything. In this meme Crown Lynn is envisaged as a '<a href="http://www.penguin.co.nz/products/9780143020639/crown-lynn-celebration-icon">New Zealand icon</a>'; it's a manifestation of a '<a href="http://www.teara.govt.nz/en/photograph/18585/no-8-wire-sculpture">number eight wire' mentality</a>; an example of how a <a href="http://www.nzherald.co.nz/entrepreneurship/news/article.cfm?c_id=190&objectid=10112108">plucky New Zealand entrepreneur</a> can build a 'world class' business from scratch, notwithstanding the interference of – usually socialist – governments; and it was compelled to close due to a combination the abolition of the protective tariff and action of bloody-minded unions, unwilling to accept change. More than anything though, it's products are perceived as embodying 'Kiwiana', a term defined by the sociologist Claudia Bell for 'New Zealand locally-produced objects from the post-war period: everyday objects, once prosaic, [which] are now the stuff of wilful nostalgia.' <span style="font-size: x-small;"><C Bell, 'Not really beautiful but iconic: New Zealand's Crown Lynn ceramics', <a href="http://jdh.oxfordjournals.org/content/25/4/414.full"><i>Journal of Design History</i>, 25:4 (2012), 414-426</a>, p. 414></span> It's a compelling myth, all the more so for being a significant distortion of the history of the pottery. It is a carefully confected narrative fostered by the company and, since its demise, by collectors of the factory's wares.<br />
<br />
At the beginning of May 2015 Te Toi Uku, the Portage Ceramics Trust, launched a small, entrance-by-appointment 'museum', Te Toi Uku Clayworks, in premises located on land that had previously formed a part of the Ambrico Ltd site. More a display storage facility with a limited <a href="http://portageceramicstrust.org.nz/collections/">on-line access</a> handle than a museum, it's based around a collection formed by the late Richard Quinn (1946-2009) who, following the closure of the pottery in 1989, retrieved a vast array of material from the abandoned works. Although untrained and lacking in any institutional support, Quinn's collecting was of critical significance in terms of a future understanding of when, how and what the factory produced. His work in preserving not only the shards, moulds and other relics of the factory but also its associated documentation was remarkably similar in intent to the actions of the <a href="http://www.dhub.org/the-wunderlich-puzzle/">Museum of Applied Arts & Sciences</a> in Sydney in the early 1980s to collect and preserve what was left of the productions of the architectural fittings manufacturer, Wunderlich Ltd, at its Redfern factory.<br />
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgdikbv9jxYHWU1Fde5p0GYH5GxvtNiO4gIUdlbJZ9caa7HEURQ2qq9aYR0e5Zc4rgS0qJVxpHzcFRysy53aTOyowWx1A0JLO8vW7eq04Hwn8AElgML4ec_iN44ynYjpH5np02pHKAym5Iv/s1600/Screenshot+2015-05-03+10.40.42.png" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="480" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgdikbv9jxYHWU1Fde5p0GYH5GxvtNiO4gIUdlbJZ9caa7HEURQ2qq9aYR0e5Zc4rgS0qJVxpHzcFRysy53aTOyowWx1A0JLO8vW7eq04Hwn8AElgML4ec_iN44ynYjpH5np02pHKAym5Iv/s1600/Screenshot+2015-05-03+10.40.42.png" width="640" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Opening of Te Toi Uku Clayworks display storage facility in New Lynn, 2 May 2015.<br />
<a href="https://www.facebook.com/david.cunliffe.labour/photos/pcb.937236722988169/937236709654837/?type=1&theater">David Cunliffe MP, Facebook</a></td></tr>
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The difference between the two recovery operations is that the Wunderlich rescue was undertaken by trained professionals, received financial assistance from the factory's owner, CSR Building Products, and was, ultimately, stored under climate-controlled conditions. By contrast Quinn's activities, although condoned by the company owning the closed works, were unfunded, unsystematic and initially at least stored in what was a tin shed. In 1993, the Waitakere City Council employed heavy-handed techniques to exclude Quinn from the site and effectively confiscated his collection on dubious legal grounds. After seven years of legal tussling the council <a href="http://www.nzherald.co.nz/nz/news/article.cfm?c_id=1&objectid=197865">grudgingly</a> paid Quinn $130,000 for the collection that forms the basis of Te Toi Uku.<br />
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhNRgiuJ2hpiIIuLJjXlcY8f9jQQXRzISOlqpXgI57hwTXBm0Kjj3MUV_vSKKP-tnbB0AI4i9J958nPIH2f2mO8_bXd3BOlbs92x8eckgxyO4LSnEJk-BMjfUJeJgl_I5INV7HrWFyxzxZV/s1600/2015-05-18+14.42.57.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="480" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhNRgiuJ2hpiIIuLJjXlcY8f9jQQXRzISOlqpXgI57hwTXBm0Kjj3MUV_vSKKP-tnbB0AI4i9J958nPIH2f2mO8_bXd3BOlbs92x8eckgxyO4LSnEJk-BMjfUJeJgl_I5INV7HrWFyxzxZV/s640/2015-05-18+14.42.57.jpg" width="640" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">A selection of Crown Lynn ceramics on display in the New Lynn Library building, May 2015. Lighting is not optimal</td></tr>
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Having no dedicated premises in which to either store or display the material, the city council installed a small selection of wares in the newly constructed New Lynn library - in a corridor leading to the public toilets. Following the demise of the Waitakere City Council with the advent of the Auckland unitary council, ownership of the collection was transferred to the Portage Ceramics Trust.<br />
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiq1Jq5_EIsKfb8I-cwOIe8C2kvyC1OEna_DLUb0Twx0CLWmb0039HHx5yVfM0xro0EqVSx6cOywesWw-ufG2ykszQxizXvoJJMQ9_iF1WshaOE-R9Iq9JnyazvPS6xUG0Vyzv2EqSX4OyK/s1600/MA_I113341.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="640" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiq1Jq5_EIsKfb8I-cwOIe8C2kvyC1OEna_DLUb0Twx0CLWmb0039HHx5yVfM0xro0EqVSx6cOywesWw-ufG2ykszQxizXvoJJMQ9_iF1WshaOE-R9Iq9JnyazvPS6xUG0Vyzv2EqSX4OyK/s1600/MA_I113341.jpg" width="466" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Milton Pottery, Press-moulded earthenware ewer decorated with 'Sailing Boats' transfer prints, [about 1880].<br />
The pottery also made tableware decorated with the English-designed transfer prints.<br />
<a href="http://collections.tepapa.govt.nz/Object/71102">Museum of New Zealand Te Papa Tongarewa (CG001651)</a></td></tr>
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Despite the ready availability of the raw materials, the production of ceramics in New Zealand has always been a risk. Historically, the local market was small and, being far removed from the flow of new patterns and fashions, was deeply conservative in its buying habits. As in most colonial economies, consumers were satisfied by a steady stream of English-made wares entering the country under preferential tariffs. There were attempts to establish a ceramics industry, following a traditional provincial British pattern, which saw brick and tile works expand their production to include 'fancies' such as crudely modelled vases and figures before moving into the production of more sophisticated ornamental and useful wares and, in a few instances, tablewares. The Milton Pottery, which operated in South Otago between 1873 and 1915 seems to have produced transfer-printed tableware from 1877 <span style="font-size: x-small;"><G Henry, <i>New Zealand pottery.</i> 2nd ed. (Auckland: Reed, 1999), p. 35></span>. While the quality of the wares produced at Milton may have been comparable with the low-end productions of Staffordshire, they were unable to compete in a market that not only favoured British productions but was also rigged by British manufacturers to ensure their continued dominance.<br />
<br />
Given that it was not subject to competition from overseas manufacturers, brick making was in most instances a profitable industry: both raw materials and labour were relatively cheap and available and while the majority of the country's domestic building stock was of timber construction there was a growing demand for bricks for commercial buildings. During the 1920s a number of Auckland potteries were consolidated by the Clark family into a single concern the Amalgamated Brick and Pipe Company Ltd (Ambrico) giving them what amounted to a monopoly over brick and pipe production in the Auckland region. The company suffered during the Great Depression with the collapse of the building industry but the election of a Labour party government in 1935 prompted a turnaround in its fortunes. Labour's state housing programme not only launched a massive building spree but it also specified that the 3500 new homes intended to be built annually should be constructed of New Zealand materials. For Ambrico this meant an increase in the production of bricks and pipes and the cash-flow generated by expanded business enabled the company to diversify its output in 1938 into the production of dry-pressed tiles and electrical fittings. Responsibility for the concern was given to Thomas Edwin Clark (1917-2005), the 21 year old son of the managing director.<br />
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Ambrico's decision to expand its manufacturing base reflected the intent of legislation introduced into Parliament in 1936 by the new Labour administration. <a href="http://www3.stats.govt.nz/New_Zealand_Official_Yearbooks/1938/NZOYB_1938.html#idsect1_1_168144">The Industrial Efficiency Act</a> was intended 'to promote the economic welfare of New Zealand by providing for the promotion of new industries in the most economic form and by so regulating the general organisation, development and operation of industries that a greater measure of industrial efficiency will be secured.' Significantly, the Act also enabled government to provide monetary incentives to manufacturers. A further incentive for local manufacture came in 1938 when, due in part to capital flight and a consequent run on New Zealand overseas funds, the government introduced an import licensing scheme that sought to limit excessive imports of commodities whilst encouraging local industry. This remarkable shift in government policy attracted the ire not only of the British manufacturers and government but also local importers and the conservative opposition but it formed a solid foundation for Ambrico's later success.<br />
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj5mHmZOHPXolhVxQyfrro7Bage6N2V0PD-vYu3XZF-a4aT_zvyApdme-y686qUf8e_FbDZJID3e0Dw4_Uib0QZeGAU-4ymnsfkkHdIwk-rVeAxay3CoAyfMGN4l0OhvoQ-Kzl0WkWOxMuL/s1600/MA_I050583.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="410" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj5mHmZOHPXolhVxQyfrro7Bage6N2V0PD-vYu3XZF-a4aT_zvyApdme-y686qUf8e_FbDZJID3e0Dw4_Uib0QZeGAU-4ymnsfkkHdIwk-rVeAxay3CoAyfMGN4l0OhvoQ-Kzl0WkWOxMuL/s640/MA_I050583.jpg" width="640" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Amalgamated Brick and Pipe Company, partially vitrified earthenware bowl produced for the United States Joint Purchasing Board<br />
for use by United States service personnel in New Zealand, [about 1942-44].<br />
<a href="http://collections.tepapa.govt.nz/object/157269">Museum of New Zealand Te Papa Tongarewa (CG002430)</a></td></tr>
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World War I had closed the rarely profitable Milton Pottery; World War II was the making of what became Crown Lynn. New Zealand's reliance on British ceramic manufacturers had significant repercussions when the supply was interrupted not only by the destruction of British plants and the enemy's control of shipping lanes but also by the repurposing of industry. Ornamental 'china' imports dropped from a value of £80,000 in 1938 to a mere £9,000 in 1941. Worse hit were the institutional users of 'hotel ware', the utilitarian tableware used in hotels, schools, the railways and the military. The situation was exacerbated in 1942 with the arrival in New Zealand of elements of the United States armed forces. In order to deal with this unanticipated demand the National Supply Council, which had been established in 1936, realised that it would have to kick start local production and instructed the Department of Industries and Commerce to locate a suitable concern. In conjunction with the Department of Scientific and Industrial Research, Clark investigated the availability of suitable clay bodies and began production of crude but serviceable substitutes for the imported wares. Further state assistance came when the concern was declared an Essential Industrial Undertaking, enabling it to obtain labour and essential imported raw materials and to construct a new, semi automated factory.<br />
<br />
With a captive, almost competition-free, market and a new, government-subsidised, plant, Ambrico expanded its production to include domestic tablewares, imitating the form, if not the quality of British Utility wares, with their 'reduction of form to a bare ascetic minimum with the total elimination of any colouration', to employ Graham McLaren's evocative description of the type <span style="font-size: x-small;"><G McLaren, 'Utility forgot: shaping the future of the British pottery industry 1941-45', in J Attfield, ed. <i>Utility reassessed: the role of ethics in the practice of design </i>(Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1999), 157-170, p. 157></span>. They were not popular with local consumers more comfortable with the gaudier effusions of the British pre-war pottery industry. Moreover there were quality issues with the New Zealand version. Wholesalers complained that Ambrico wares 'had proved so unsatisfactory to handle, that by common consent of all the firm, the Directors and the travellers, we all preferred to do without it.'<span style="font-size: x-small;"><G Jackson, in New Zealand Board of Trade, <i>Public tariff inquiry. Tariff items 214 & 215, china ware, etc. Transcript of proceedings</i> (1952). Archives New Zealand, IC/10/ACC W2537></span>.<br />
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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Crown Lynn Potteries Ltd, 'Crown Lynn' earthenware plate, [about 1950]. The central transfer print was sourced in England and the delicate painting of the rim was undertaken by staff recruited in Staffordshire.<br />
<a href="http://collections.tepapa.govt.nz/Object/214727">Museum of New Zealand Te Papa Tongarewa (CG002482)</a></td></tr>
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The end of the war saw the gradual dismantling of the restrictions and opportunities of the command economy and the resumption of ceramic imports from Britain. Nonetheless Ambrico was in a strong competitive position. British manufacturers were directing their output primarily to non Sterling bloc economies and import licensing combined with high tariffs on non-British production meant that other overseas manufacturers such as those in Europe and the United States were actively discriminated against by government fiat. Moreover a decision to devalue the New Zealand pound meant Ambrico was in a position to contemplate exporting its wares into the Australian market. In 1947 Clark accompanied by an Ambrico board member Len Stevens (1890-1973) travelled to the United Kingdom where, with the agreement of government, they acquired a number of second-hand machines, observed new patterns and shapes and recruited specialist workers amongst those dissatisfied with the grim conditions prevailing in post-war Britain. The inclusion of Stevens, an Auckland lawyer, chairman of the Dominion Breweries and a key confidant of the construction magnate James Fletcher, suggests Ambrico had been embraced by the Auckland business community. In what would be recognised today as a blatant instance of intellectual piracy, Ambrico began producing imitations of British lines, more often than not ambiguously branded as being of 'British' origin and with names – such as 'Fancy Fayre', 'Regal Potteries' and 'Crown Lynn' – more redolent of the pot banks of Staffordshire than the industrial periphery of Auckland.<br />
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEglFT33aPsWy_uhcvRfeAvxY9QaYJX7QkRMV0ImQvYiyGFTlQBIPECgbLJcszxs4UXrL2cs-Fre6VeSvAPusi_fdK7cBzYyOvraCh3Nuatdm3r6wemp0yOqr9sIQTMnir68JY4ebbSoIQa1/s1600/Screenshot+2015-05-21+10.45.23.png" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="400" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEglFT33aPsWy_uhcvRfeAvxY9QaYJX7QkRMV0ImQvYiyGFTlQBIPECgbLJcszxs4UXrL2cs-Fre6VeSvAPusi_fdK7cBzYyOvraCh3Nuatdm3r6wemp0yOqr9sIQTMnir68JY4ebbSoIQa1/s400/Screenshot+2015-05-21+10.45.23.png" width="301" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Keith Murray (1892-1981), designer, for Josiah Wedgwood & Sons Ltd, earthenware vase shape no. 3765 (about 1930).<br />
<a href="http://shapiro.com.au/lots/keith-murray-1892-1981-24863/">Shapiro Auctioneers, Sydney</a></td></tr>
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgDT0C0VjpEngH1FcvTlOY-zFkoKlB-Nda7ASHJ09QgpNeWnVxBytLG8dDjdoZ0iSg__Wwft-BmcdxBdhnDBrA2ZNspN9CPYyupeC-lxuw0sqGBc3WwxuTQBMg4GNPhrEaoVh5m0JZyrY7z/s1600/MA_I091018.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="312" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgDT0C0VjpEngH1FcvTlOY-zFkoKlB-Nda7ASHJ09QgpNeWnVxBytLG8dDjdoZ0iSg__Wwft-BmcdxBdhnDBrA2ZNspN9CPYyupeC-lxuw0sqGBc3WwxuTQBMg4GNPhrEaoVh5m0JZyrY7z/s320/MA_I091018.jpg" width="320" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Ernest Shufflebotham (1908-1994) for Crown Lynn Potteries Ltd, earthenware vase (about 1950).<br />
<a href="http://collections.tepapa.govt.nz/object/72687">Museum of New Zealand Te Papa Tongarewa, The Walter C Cook Decorative Art Collection, gift of Walter Cook, 1992 (CG001939)</a></td></tr>
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Probably the most blatant example of piracy by the newly-formed Crown Lynn Potteries Ltd was its imitation of a series of vases produced by Josiah Wedgwood & Sons Ltd after designs by the architect of its Barlaston premises, Keith Murray. Murray's designs – he was not a potter – were popular amongst New Zealand consumers not least for Murray's tenuous connection with the country (he was born and spent his first fourteen years here) but they were expensive and scarce. Among the fifteen English staff recruited by Clark in 1947 was a former employee of the Wedgwood concern, Ernest Shufflebotham who, on his arrival at New Lynn in 1948 was set to producing imitations of the wares he had thrown and turned in England. Rather than exhibiting the finely-honed quality of the originals, Shufflebotham's reproductions while competently produced were crudely mechanical and dipped in thick white matt glazes that obscured the turned bands. In 1953, in an effort to further expand the company's consumer base, Clark employed a Dutch ceramic designer Frank Carpay to produce a range of modernistic hand painted wares under the self-consciously exotic 'Handwerk' label that captured the spirit if not the quality of some of the Scandinavian and Italian ceramics being imported in small quantities to satisfy a niche market for well-designed products. Clark declared that he was using Carpay's 'fine china' in a 'campaign to educate the public away from imported china of the "pretty rosebud" variety' <span style="font-size: x-small;"><'No "museum pieces": new venture in the manufacture of china', <i>New Zealand Manufacturer</i> (15 December 1953), p. 35></span>.<br />
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEishnOA7mgXFRItNIX1sjnE-xBIHZ0S_2tJePY3yVlCAFehdvdXYwU4_vBAeWn6h5ZbC1gUUrODdHkX2wf_sji8MyCJiGdwJs6UieGFI3mq2HKhSnrE8MiGEzwgykyzFSOnNMUQMJFdttt3/s1600/Screenshot+2015-05-25+10.13.30.png" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="436" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEishnOA7mgXFRItNIX1sjnE-xBIHZ0S_2tJePY3yVlCAFehdvdXYwU4_vBAeWn6h5ZbC1gUUrODdHkX2wf_sji8MyCJiGdwJs6UieGFI3mq2HKhSnrE8MiGEzwgykyzFSOnNMUQMJFdttt3/s640/Screenshot+2015-05-25+10.13.30.png" width="640" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Paul Champion, <i>Queen Elizabeth II visiting Crown Lynn, 1963</i>.<br />
<a href="http://www.aucklandcity.govt.nz/dbtw-wpd/exec/dbtwpub.dll?BU=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.aucklandcity.govt.nz%2Fdbtw-wpd%2FHeritageImages%2Findex.htm&AC=QBE_QUERY&TN=heritageimages&QF0=ID&NP=2&MR=5&RF=HIORecordSearch&QI0=%3D%221055-1%22">Sir George Grey Special Collections, Auckland Libraries (1055-1)</a></td></tr>
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Crown Lynn's dependence on pirated designs suggests design was a problematic for the company and its management; an unresolved hiatus in the process of making, mediating and consuming the wares it produced. Clark's recruitment of English pottery workers along with the acquisition of relatively new machinery indicates an awareness of the problem. Moreover, Clark was an enthusiastic publicist and, from the start, Crown Lynn was prominently featured in the local press as well as being involved in trade fairs, retail displays and tours by the monarch, politicians and other celebrities. Clark seems to have gauged the local mass market well. By producing wares that imitated those of Staffordshire Crown Lynn responded to a consumer demand that, over decades, had been carefully groomed by import agents and retailers to appreciate the more traditional productions of English manufacturers.<br />
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These strategies were reactive and failed to address fundamental problems such as production quality which, compared with imported wares, remained crude. The English-recruited staff were all of relatively low status; craftsmen, not educated professionals. The machinery acquired in 1947 was technologically redundant even before it was installed: a British manufacturer observed that he was:<br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
Staggered by some of the most basic principles employed [at Crown Lynn], which I cannot for the life of me imagine were put-in in 1947. If they had been put-in in 1897, I should have thought it would have been more reasonable [...] I mean some of this things there – take the casting: tub and bucket. Well it is going back to the days of bows and arrows <span style="font-size: x-small;"><R Bloore, in New Zealand Board of Trade, <i>Public tariff inquiry. Tariff items 214 & 215, china ware, etc. Transcript of proceedings</i> (1952). Archives New Zealand, IC/10/ACC W2537></span>.</blockquote>
Worse still, the Labour administration's revaluation of the New Zealand pound in 1948 eliminated what had been a 25 per cent subsidy of the company's exports and the election of a National party administration in 1949 on a promise of ending import licensing seemed set to usher in a collapse of the hard-won domestic market but the company continued to expand. Notwithstanding Clark's claim that labour costs were high 'due to New Zealand's higher standard of living' it transpired that they were half those prevailing in England – largely due to a predominantly female workforce – and could have been lower had production been more efficient. For its first twenty years Crown Lynn seems to have epitomised that quintessentially colonial mentality of 'cobbling things together on the cheap'.<br />
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjZR-OQ_s_hOV58OhGdJ3JMM0QjYiofWpRISDhyp8tQ54voNH9IoW8R0kOJ7NZwew7Z-D1qRB1efBvkaS9_Wcp06VmLRY3SzAD5IyvTwIDJCRDMDXMhF9XVPKpJhdRl2X6UcENdAsIy_ETy/s1600/Screenshot+2015-05-23+14.15.09.png" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="484" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjZR-OQ_s_hOV58OhGdJ3JMM0QjYiofWpRISDhyp8tQ54voNH9IoW8R0kOJ7NZwew7Z-D1qRB1efBvkaS9_Wcp06VmLRY3SzAD5IyvTwIDJCRDMDXMhF9XVPKpJhdRl2X6UcENdAsIy_ETy/s640/Screenshot+2015-05-23+14.15.09.png" width="640" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Sparrow Industrial Pictures Ltd, [Women moulding handles for cups at Crown Lynn Potteries Ltd, (about 1955)].<br />
<a href="http://muse.aucklandmuseum.com/databases/librarycatalogue/P5205.detail?keywords=Sparrow%20Industrial%20Pictures%20Ltd%20%20Crown%20Lynn%20Potteries">Auckland War Memorial Museum Tāmaki Paenga Hira</a></td></tr>
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By 1956 it was apparent that Crown Lynn was struggling to survive. Following a disastrous fire the company's banker, the British-owned National Bank of New Zealand Ltd instructed Clark to lay off staff: along with tens of production staff, Carpay was 'let go' and Shufflebotham returned to Wedgwood. Production was scaled back to those basic lines that were guaranteed to sell. This gloomy state of affairs seemed set to continue (Clark took to motor racing) when, at the general election of November 1957, a Labour government was returned with a slim majority. The new administration not only advocated an expansion of manufacturing but was also compelled to re-impose import licensing in an attempt to stabilise New Zealand's volatile currency. Moreover, in July 1960, it introduced tariff protection on a number of commodities produced by what were described as 'one-unit' industries; these included Crown Lynn.<br />
<br />
Labour's industrial policy ensured Crown Lynn's survival, most notably its strategy of encouraging good design not only in the production of commodities but also in terms of educating retailers and consumers. In its annual report for 1959 the Department of Industries and Commerce asserted that 'In an age when technical skill is of such importance, the function of good design in unifying the qualities of utility, durability, harmony and balance is an important factor in [industrial] development.'<span style="font-size: x-small;"><'Report of the Department of Industries and Commerce for the year ending 31 March 1959', <i>AJHR</i>, 4 (1959), H44, p. 19></span>. This officially-promoted focus on design did more than anything to change not only the appearance of Crown Lynn's products and how they were marketed but also the way the company's management understood that design was more than a concern for appearance but had an impact on every aspect of its activities.<br />
<table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: center;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiCxb2Fzi9cFPJCLLxnd25_Mi_TGr4-kyodS3Ges9tLdPzDCSX_l4e2C0JN4Vnn6oNo6Q_KPMXkWRk-aLv982wpSTHOT2_D0_NlI6CKVaGw3VUrrL5540TmnHJiuqpHwI9Kqi5WNxlqIkMB/s1600/Screenshot+2015-05-21+14.48.52.png" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="324" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiCxb2Fzi9cFPJCLLxnd25_Mi_TGr4-kyodS3Ges9tLdPzDCSX_l4e2C0JN4Vnn6oNo6Q_KPMXkWRk-aLv982wpSTHOT2_D0_NlI6CKVaGw3VUrrL5540TmnHJiuqpHwI9Kqi5WNxlqIkMB/s640/Screenshot+2015-05-21+14.48.52.png" width="640" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Barry Woods, [<i>Window display by Allan Smith at the Milne & Choyce department store, Palmerston North,</i> about 1963]. Crown Lynn's changed attitude to design during the 1960s extended to controlling its retail image even in provincial New Zealand<br />
<a href="http://digitallibrary.palmerstonnorth.com/awweb/main.jsp?flag=browse&smd=1&awdid=1">Palmerston North City Library</a></td></tr>
</tbody></table>
Ambrico/Crown Lynn resorted to design piracy during the late 1940s and 50s because not only was it expedient but also, located at the end of the colonial supply chain, it could get away with it. What might have appeared to be a good business move – getting something for nothing and making a profit on it – in practice turned out to be a disaster. For all its publicity-driven bluster, Crown Lynn management's failure to recognise design as a process concealed a range of critical issues that it consistently failed to address. Its products were derivative, not 'iconic'; it's reliance on 'number eight wire' technology resulted in low production standards; its export 'success' was dependent on a cheap, largely female, labour force, tariff protection and an undervalued currency; its existence and continued survival was brokered on the initiatives of and the support provided by two Labour party administrations. Its heyday during the 1960s and 70s resulted from its adoption of a design led strategy of growth that was predicated on the financial and logistical support of the state. Crown Lynn Potteries Ltd – renamed Ceramco Ltd in 1974 and the Ceramco Corporation in 1987 – collapsed when the fourth Labour government's attempts to remedy the macroeconomic ills bequeathed by its National party predecessors unleashed the demons of neoliberalism. The production of ceramics was by now a minor part of the Ceramco Corporation's activities and the board, disinterested in the product, unfettered by regulation, devoid of social responsibility and obsessed with the chimera of profit, curtailed investment, asset-stripped the company, laid off staff and in May 1989 finally closed it down.Christopher Thompsonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01264481177071819483noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2464874880300858303.post-63363317251875928922015-04-30T12:30:00.000+12:002018-06-14T13:28:28.141+12:00Dislocating the Powerhouse<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
</div>
<table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: center;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEibft3UeIwrUf0uRXx_sNl0nB1hL9UWWRYx0AwBXw6GObWD-1auFmspJ9GmZt4qPV4N9yIbXR7Ix1iBSnfGXe2qGs_VMsaKTTa519u5pVwuc8tT_TjaNefz2l-wdXNAlbaAq1nbPaKBhITy/s1600/thompson+2.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="510" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEibft3UeIwrUf0uRXx_sNl0nB1hL9UWWRYx0AwBXw6GObWD-1auFmspJ9GmZt4qPV4N9yIbXR7Ix1iBSnfGXe2qGs_VMsaKTTa519u5pVwuc8tT_TjaNefz2l-wdXNAlbaAq1nbPaKBhITy/s1600/thompson+2.jpg" width="640" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-family: inherit; font-size: x-small;"><i>Powerhouse Museum, April 1988</i>. The Museum of Applied Arts and Sciences' Powerhouse Museum venue shortly after its opening.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: inherit; font-size: x-small;">Museum of Applied Arts and Sciences (00219141)</span></td></tr>
</tbody></table>
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<span style="font-family: inherit; font-size: large;">On</span><span style="font-family: inherit;"> 26 November 2014, following months of rumour
and speculation, the premier of New South Wales, Mike Baird, </span><span style="color: windowtext; text-decoration: none; text-underline: none;"><a href="http://www.dailytelegraph.com.au/newslocal/parramatta/powerhouse-museum-to-move-to-parramatta/story-fngr8huy-1227135382717">announced</a></span><span style="font-family: inherit;"> that
Sydney's Museum of Applied Arts and Sciences (MAAS) was to be relocated from its
current Ultimo venue, the Powerhouse Museum, to Parramatta, a suburban centre some 23 kilometres
west of Sydney's CBD, where it would become part of an 'arts precinct' based around the
somewhat grim, architecturally undistinguished, former premises of the King's
School, dating from 1834. Baird was quoted as stating that moving the state's museum of design and technology from an inner city locale to a suburban hinterland was ‘an
amazing opportunity and I think it shows we need to, think well beyond the CBD
of Sydney; we need to spread these opportunities across the city.' The current site of the museum, the listed former Ultimo Power Station will
be sold to developers and the proceeds used to part-fund an </span>un-costed move of the museum's collection and a new building<span style="font-family: inherit;">.</span></div>
<table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: center;"><tbody>
<tr><td><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg9yVoPepJXTnzjb49zZTuXm5C89UxNtcRlV2RnR23PBzjgboHjWxcZFrMI6o4BlQAD0eYNuduVIZ9je_RPi4Hyvvsn-ZMRVIPq823_BDpq3NNnxaprMttan3VqppASmEwVjrdkJ8nReNhC/s1600/7822297546_98fb481a89_z.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="480" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg9yVoPepJXTnzjb49zZTuXm5C89UxNtcRlV2RnR23PBzjgboHjWxcZFrMI6o4BlQAD0eYNuduVIZ9je_RPi4Hyvvsn-ZMRVIPq823_BDpq3NNnxaprMttan3VqppASmEwVjrdkJ8nReNhC/s1600/7822297546_98fb481a89_z.jpg" width="640" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption"><i>Old King's School – Parramatta, NSW </i>(2012). Ambrose Hallen's original two-storeyed building of 1834 was significantly modified over the 130 years<br />
it served as a private Anglican boys' school. Following its acquisition in 1968 by the the Askin coalition administration it was<br />
repurposed as the Marsden Rehabilitation Centre for intellectually handicapped children.<br />
<a href="https://www.flickr.com/photos/50415738@N04/7822297546/">Flickr</a></td></tr>
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<!--StartFragment--><!--EndFragment--><span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">In the lead-up to the March state election the
Baird administration revealed further details of the planned shift and stated
that <a href="http://www.smh.com.au/nsw/powerhouse-museum-site-in-ultimo-to-be-sold-to-developers-20150226-13pn5o.html">all the funds gained from the sale of the museum site</a>, envisaged in the
region of $150-200 million, would be returned to the museum and that it would </span><a href="http://www.businessinsider.com.au/the-nsw-government-wants-to-spend-10-million-moving-the-powerhouse-museum-to-parramatta-2015-2">allocate</a> $10 million 'to develop a business case for the Museum's
relocation to ensure it remains the interactive and vibrant place enjoyed by
children and families.' The announcement was greeted with enthusiasm by News Corp Australia newspapers with its populist Sydney tabloid the <i>Daily Telegraph</i> enthusing that it was
'Fair go for the West'. A grateful lord mayor of Parramatta declared the move
'visionary' and opined it would 'be a huge boost to local tourism
and further cement the City's growing reputation as a major arts and cultural
centre'. </span><br />
<span style="font-family: inherit;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: inherit;">There are a number of reasons behind
this proposal, not least the fact that the current conservative coalition state
government's majority in the NSW Legislative Assembly was dependent on it winning
a number of key western Sydney electorates. But the proposal is more than a
cynical 'bread and circuses' move; it's also about the perceived
failure of the Powerhouse Museum, a project sponsored by an Australian Labor
Party administration that opened in the former </span><a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ultimo_Power_Station" style="font-family: inherit;">Ultimo Power Station</a><span style="font-family: inherit;"> in March 1988. In the 27 years since the museum </span>– recently re-branded with its official title –<span style="font-family: inherit;"> re-opened it has
been presided over by five directors (Dr Lindsay Sharp, Terence Measham, Dr Kevin Fewster, Dawn Casey and Rose Hiscock), funding has diminished and visitor
numbers have collapsed significantly. In the financial year 1988-1989, the year after it opened, the Powerhouse received state government funding of $24 million ($98 million in 2014 terms) and in the 2013-2013 financial year $28 million, a decrease of around 252%. In 1989-90, its first full year of operation, the Powerhouse attracted 2,112,001 visitors; in the 2013-2014 financial year only 381,582 visitors were recorded. On an annualised basis this represents a drop of some 82% since the museum opened. </span><br />
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi7doXJWL4X9jTWCuRN4-ZBzdBs5s1X4A_UGk18Vo6t_NosRVWKKlaZ5KGPOcchzRESZy6xRJ5t1kMTV7_wbqw7R5uYpQBcZVoQc2otmfd82in1d2Q-596AGOViiri-3cNxEDFfS1UF4Nj_/s1600/Screenshot+2015-04-06+10.01.07.png" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><img border="0" height="494" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi7doXJWL4X9jTWCuRN4-ZBzdBs5s1X4A_UGk18Vo6t_NosRVWKKlaZ5KGPOcchzRESZy6xRJ5t1kMTV7_wbqw7R5uYpQBcZVoQc2otmfd82in1d2Q-596AGOViiri-3cNxEDFfS1UF4Nj_/s1600/Screenshot+2015-04-06+10.01.07.png" width="640" /></span></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-family: inherit; font-size: x-small;">Charles Bayliss (1850-1897), <i>The International Exhibition, from Lady</i><i> Macquarie's Chair</i>, [1879-1880].</span><br />
<span style="font-family: inherit; font-size: x-small;"><a href="http://acms.sl.nsw.gov.au/item/itemDetailPaged.aspx?itemID=412581#">State Library of NSW (SPF/265)</a></span><br />
<br />
<div style="text-align: left;">
<span style="font-family: inherit; font-size: small;">MAAS is one of the two institutional legacies of the Sydney International
Exhibition of 1879-1880; the other was the Art Gallery of NSW (AGNSW). Conceived by the
progressive administration of Henry Parkes in late 1878 and opening in
September 1879 in the colonial architect <a href="http://adb.anu.edu.au/biography/barnet-james-johnstone-2939">James Barnet</a>'s
gargantuan wooden Garden Palace located in
Sydney's Royal Botanic Garden, the exhibition was undoubtedly the city's single most
spectacular event during the nineteenth century.
Following its closure seven months later, the trustees of the <a href="http://australianmuseum.net.au/a-short-history-of-the-australian-museum">Australian Museum</a>
– which had been established in 1827 'with the
aim of 'collecting many rare and curious specimens of natural history' – agreed
to establish a branch museum within the Garden Palace based around a
collection formed initially from a selection of the manufactured commodities shown at
the exhibition. The institution was known as the Technological, Industrial and
Sanitary Museum and its formation mirrored the establishment of similar museums around the world from
the London-based Museum of Manufactures, which evolved into the <a href="http://www.vam.ac.uk/">Victoria and Albert </a>and <a href="http://www.sciencemuseum.org.uk/">Science</a> Museums (<a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Great_Exhibition">Great Exhibition of the Works of Industry of All Nations,1851</a>) to <i>Kunstindustrimuseet</i>, now <i><a href="http://designmuseum.dk/">Designmuseum Danmark</a></i> (<a href="http://da.wikipedia.org/wiki/Den_Nordiske_Industri-,_Landbrugs-_og_Kunstudstilling_i_Kj%C3%B8benhavn_1888"><i>Den Nordiske Industri-, Landsbrugs- og Kunstudstilling</i>, 1888</a>). In the first of many setbacks that would befall
the museum it was destroyed before it opened to the public when the Garden
Palace was consumed in a spectacular conflagration in September 1882.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: inherit; font-size: small;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: inherit; font-size: small;">The Sydney museum finally opened to the public –
in the former Agricultural Hall in the Domain</span><span style="font-family: inherit; font-size: small;"> – in 1889 before moving in 1893 to a modest
purpose-built venue in Ultimo, designed by the architect William
Kemp, where it was associated with the Sydney Technical College. The museum's title was
contracted to the Technological Museum and its governance transferred from the trustees of the Australian Museum to the Minister of Public Instruction.
The museum’s links with the college endowed it with a distinctly
pedagogical role not only in respect of technology but also the applied arts.
Together with the National Art Gallery of NSW, the museum was a repository for
the objects used by graduates of the British National Art Training Scheme (the
South Kensington Scheme) in teaching the college’s art and design education programmes.</span></div>
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEheT_oTdX8UVpeZV8-AJUQsjgrdGuFyqFUQJ7nGxqY-PFeGZiqQ2-5Z2FGrITg0oPeLuSCAFnCI6dQ1GYO6iNCCGCvznBUJa0P3Ffwxc3kiB-3I5EA89K3YueiYnn6yMqlMFnIzaLxWlpcq/s1600/Screenshot+2015-04-28+21.55.24.png" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="452" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEheT_oTdX8UVpeZV8-AJUQsjgrdGuFyqFUQJ7nGxqY-PFeGZiqQ2-5Z2FGrITg0oPeLuSCAFnCI6dQ1GYO6iNCCGCvznBUJa0P3Ffwxc3kiB-3I5EA89K3YueiYnn6yMqlMFnIzaLxWlpcq/s1600/Screenshot+2015-04-28+21.55.24.png" width="640" /></a></div>
<div style="text-align: center;">
<span style="font-family: inherit; font-size: x-small;">Star Photo Co, <i>Technological College, Sydney</i> [about 1900]. The Technological Museum occupied the building to the left from 1893 to 1993.</span></div>
<div style="text-align: center;">
<span style="font-family: inherit; font-size: x-small;"><a href="http://acms.sl.nsw.gov.au/item/itemPopLarger.aspx?itemid=413496">State Library of NSW (PXE 711/252)</a></span></div>
<div style="text-align: center;">
<span style="font-family: inherit; font-size: x-small;"><br /></span></div>
</div>
<div style="text-align: left;">
<span style="font-family: inherit; font-size: small;">Ultimo was not an ideal location for the museum: it was
separated from the city centre by the Darling Harbour railway goods yards;
the site was physically constrained meaning that the institution was unable to
accommodate its growing collections on site; and, unlike its original site in the Botanic Gardens, it was a heavily polluted environment, plagued not only by the smuts and smells
of local industry and the goods yard but also those emanating from the Ultimo Power House, which
was erected some 500 metres away in 1899 to provide electricity for Sydney's
tram network. Despite the dogged efforts of a succession of curators, the
museum sank into underfunded obscurity, collecting what it could with scant
resources and attempting not only to entertain generations of Sydney school
children but also undertake research in those areas in which the museum
collected, most notably in the fields of economic botany and chemistry.</span></div>
</td></tr>
</tbody></table>
<table cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: center;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><span style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><a href="https://www.blogger.com/goog_1311012057"><img border="0" height="506" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj0dRM52bBxHKDr4XC2cMiRbbBt1STiB6jGZvljN07hPhH0V6trU2VZ6ZRQE4CBDRyr5d0eTyLrhu9QxD9KEc93cSIbVlRcB2lakjOGCL8X95J1v9PGxZUmfvFmNg1rvLOrIZNyz_m2c2iG/s1600/Screenshot+2015-04-08+14.22.47.png" width="640" /></a></span></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">NSW Government Printing Office, [<i>Fictile ivory, ceramic and glass displays in the Technological Museum</i>], 1906.<br />
<a href="http://www.powerhousemuseum.com/imageservices/page/109/?s">Museum of Applied Arts and Sciences (MRS 295/4/2</a>)<br />
<br />
<div style="text-align: left;">
<span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">There were stymied attempts to upgrade the museum in the
aftermath of the Great Depression: in 1939 the curator, Arthur Penfold, went on a fact-finding
tour of Europe (he was reputedly impressed by recent political developments in Germany);
plans were drawn up for a new venue; and the museum's governance
was restructured and formalised through </span><a href="http://www.legislation.nsw.gov.au/inforcepdf/1945-31.pdf?id=1bdab3bd-05b1-c820-e7df-bd7a42c03381" style="font-family: inherit;">The Museum of Technology and Applied Sciences Act 1945</a><span style="font-family: inherit;">, which established a board of trustees to oversee its
activities. Collecting became increasingly professionalised in the early 1970s
with the appointment of specialist curators in fields such as applied arts,
technology and transport and professional educators were recruited to
articulate the museum's exhibitions to visiting schoolchildren. </span></span></div>
</td></tr>
</tbody></table>
<table cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: center;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj_6DQFKOpj85h7qtKPMgN2dJt62fBq-A_gsRl-HqoLXYrj_zF-rx6CZ1SandoNg4zt5oVyeMeYep7-KR4ndfhdcSx6Xx6z8ZLtG05VnmK0jQOGRawrfdGab1S6pZxor6lnP4L9YWqiR1oL/s1600/Screenshot+2015-04-06+21.50.57.png" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="640" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj_6DQFKOpj85h7qtKPMgN2dJt62fBq-A_gsRl-HqoLXYrj_zF-rx6CZ1SandoNg4zt5oVyeMeYep7-KR4ndfhdcSx6Xx6z8ZLtG05VnmK0jQOGRawrfdGab1S6pZxor6lnP4L9YWqiR1oL/s1600/Screenshot+2015-04-06+21.50.57.png" width="540" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Deutsches Gesundheits-Museum, Köln, Anatomical model (1950-53). The Museum of Applied Arts and Sciences obtained the model from Germany in 1954 ostensibly to further its mission 'to shape model citizens'; the scandal caused by its importation marked one of the few moments of newsworthiness in the museum's pre-Powerhouse history.<br />
<a href="http://www.powerhousemuseum.com/collection/database/?irn=244414">Museum of Applied Arts and Sciences (H5789)</a></td></tr>
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<!--StartFragment--><!--EndFragment--><span style="font-family: inherit;">It was not until April 1978, when Joseph
Glascott, an environmental reporter at the <i>Sydney Morning Herald</i>, published <a href="https://news.google.com/newspapers?nid=1301&dat=19780413&id=dtYjAAAAIBAJ&sjid=e-YDAAAAIBAJ&pg=5102,4248951&hl=en">a series of in-depth articles</a>
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<!--StartFragment-->about the museum Sydney had forgotten, that
things began to stir. While elected officials on both the political left and right during the 1970s and 80s viewed cultural <i><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grands_Projets_of_Fran%C3%A7ois_Mitterrand">grands projets</a> </i>as the ultimate
political accolade, it was Glascott's revelatory articles that catalysed a remarkable
shift in the attitude of the newly-elected Wran ALP administration toward the
museum. In <!--EndFragment-->the <a href="https://www.parliament.nsw.gov.au/prod/parlment/hanstrans.nsf/V3ByKey/LA19771011/$File/452LA083.PDF">1977 state budget</a> the museum's annual grant was a mere $770,000 whereas
its sister institutions the Australian Museum and the AGNSW received $2.33 million and $1.3 million, respectively. By 1979 the situation
was reversed when Neville Wran announced that, in anticipation of the
bicentennial of European settlement in Australia, MAAS would move into new premises, a refurbished Ultimo Power
House; the project was estimated to cost $35 million, an economic cost value of
approximately $450 million in 2015 terms.</span><br />
<br />
Notwithstanding a general perception, museums are more than
exhibition venues. They're institutions with very specific remits based around
collections, which they form, document, study, conserve, interpret and
communicate to the wider public who, in most instances, ‘own’ them. Exhibitions are a vital part of
a museum’s communication brief but – particularly in this increasingly virtual
world – they’re not a core function. In the case of MAAS its collection
was immense, of enormous scope and, in 1978, housed in appalling conditions and
significantly under-researched. Quoted in Glascott's articles, the then
director, Jack Willis, estimated that the museum's collection might comprise
some 650,000 objects. But as many of these had not been seen for generations –
much of the collection was stored in <span style="font-family: inherit;">a filthy former wool store in Alexandria – and
documentation was significantly deficient, this reckoning was more guesswork
than established fact.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: inherit;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: inherit;">Museum staff do not spring fully-formed from the
ether and, from 1980, the museum was required not only to recruit new staff and
establish new professional disciplines, such as registration and
conservation, but also to establish a new managerial framework that wou</span><span style="font-family: inherit;">ld react
efficiently and effectively to the pressures exerted on the institution by a
project of this immense scale. The result was a highly centralised, hierarchical
management system, one that rewarded conformity, minimised challenges and
sought to mimic the power differentials of the private sector while diluting the influence of those trained in museum disciplines; enthusiasm was stifled under a regime of micro-management and over-zealous bureaucracy.</span><br />
<table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: center;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhag-kzyDV1CmvnJAxiixMEGj7MnorBMatQGNT8mNL46UibU8zMSB6ClY29ZzP4C2BY9FbZuWHH-SpWIdmdAWASkWJ5KRvHHVJCaOZIeV_dDg3JlzPVLbKzAv-U_o42u8Q02iWkNMY9BJdu/s1600/Screenshot+2015-04-09+13.58.54.png" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="474" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhag-kzyDV1CmvnJAxiixMEGj7MnorBMatQGNT8mNL46UibU8zMSB6ClY29ZzP4C2BY9FbZuWHH-SpWIdmdAWASkWJ5KRvHHVJCaOZIeV_dDg3JlzPVLbKzAv-U_o42u8Q02iWkNMY9BJdu/s1600/Screenshot+2015-04-09+13.58.54.png" width="640" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">The south wing of the first iteration of Sydney Hospital (1815) was redeveloped by the Museum of Applied Arts and Sciences in 1983 to show a small collection of Australian-themed decorative arts and in 1990 as a commercially-driven display of gold and mining. It was transferred to the Historic Houses Trust in 1997.<br />
<a href="http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/"> J Bar at the English language Wikipedia</a> </td></tr>
</tbody></table>
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<!--StartFragment--><!--EndFragment--><span style="font-family: inherit;">The museum's building, collection and exhibition
development programmes during the 1980s were, by any reckoning, extraordinary.
The newly-appointed staff not only had to deal with developing and preparing a
collection suitable for exhibition in the new facility but they were also
tasked with redeveloping a new temporary exhibition space in Ultimo, Stage I
(1981), a museum train (1984), which toured the state with a display of 'objects, pictures and ideas', and three historical venues including, in 1982,
the former Sydney branch of the <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sydney_Mint">Royal Mint</a>
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<!--StartFragment-->in the south wing of the so-called Rum Hospital
(John O'Hearen,1815), in 1984 the <!--EndFragment--> <a href="http://dictionaryofsydney.org/entry/hyde_park_barracks">Hyde Park Barracks </a>(Francis Greenway, 1818) and in 1987 the <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sydney_Observatory">Sydney Observatory</a> (Mortimer Lewis, 1858). These projects all involved significant capital works to
their buildings, both to conserve their fabric and to convert them into working
museums.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: inherit;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: inherit;">Conversion of the shell of the Ultimo Power
House was entrusted to the Government Architect's Branch of the Department of
Public Works. Working with museum management, the Government Architect's project
architect, Lionel Glendenning, developed a design that, in the fashionable
post-modernist language of the time, made passing reference through
a barrel-vaulted semi-glazed core to Joseph Paxton's 1851 Crystal Palace.
It was an in-joke that had the unfortunate effect of highlighting the design's major problematic: that of responding to
the exigencies of the site, flanked as it was by a major arterial road to
the west and, on the city-side, a double-track freight railway, as well as
being topped and tailed by semi-derelict depots and warehouses. </span><br />
<span style="font-family: inherit;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: inherit;">Internally, the
design struggled to meet the functional requirements of the museum, not only
in terms of visitor circulation – a key consideration in the design of such
public venues – but also in its provision of spaces for the semi-permanent
exhibitions envisaged by the museum’s curatorial staff. In an attempt to
overcome these limitations, management employed a number of external
design consultants to complement a large team of in-house designers and a
project director was brought
in to ensure the museum's redevelopment adhered to its politically-driven timetable. Dame Margaret Weston, director of the London Science Museum, was conscripted to review the overall
design. As a consequence of this ‘imperial’ intervention the architect Richard Johnson was recruited from the private sector in an attempt to
provide visitors with a more seamless experience of the venue but the
basic configuration was already established and little could be
changed. </span> <br />
<table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: center;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhpd9M785RcgdBKhO48xKSKhukuwIywcu7OHDNoTNeNI9tNa9eP8cpIWypjAi-1nh_6At5hO3B3cWTGPl-VBT1gYBQPdyZhPWjvZWm_ppVDUzNNt48N0qjKlF3S_-kE6iTNewDqZ9v6UzDx/s1600/IMG_20140226_0002.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="464" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhpd9M785RcgdBKhO48xKSKhukuwIywcu7OHDNoTNeNI9tNa9eP8cpIWypjAi-1nh_6At5hO3B3cWTGPl-VBT1gYBQPdyZhPWjvZWm_ppVDUzNNt48N0qjKlF3S_-kE6iTNewDqZ9v6UzDx/s1600/IMG_20140226_0002.jpg" width="640" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Powerhouse Museum 'Style' exhibition, 1988. External design consultancies were deployed in an attempt to resolve<br />
the venue's spatial deficiencies and to obscure 'gaps' in the museum's collection.<br />
Museum of Applied Arts and Sciences<br />
<br />
<div style="text-align: left;">
<span style="font-family: inherit; font-size: small;">By the time the Powerhouse opened, Neville Wran was no
longer premier and the ceremony was performed by an ALP premier, Barrie Unsworth, on the brink of
losing a state election. Notwithstanding the political shenanigans
associated with the project, the museum attracted enormous crowds. On
the first Saturday some 36,000 visitors squeezed through the
doors to inspect 25 semi-permanent thematic exhibitions that spanned the range
of the museum's collection, showing objects that ranged from a steam-driven
1784 Boulton & Watt horizontal beam engine and a Consolidated PBY Catalina
flying boat to Sèvres vases shown at the 1879 Sydney International Exhibition
and Ettore Sottsass’ 1981 post-modern ‘Carlton’ room divider produced under the
Italian Memphis brand. </span></div>
<div style="text-align: left;">
<br /></div>
<div style="text-align: left;">
<span style="font-size: small;">The exhibitions were broadly integrated around an
overall theme of creativity and design. Moreover, in an effort to address
the venue's chaotic internal plan and to deal with the hiatuses that had
emerged once the museum's collection had been re-housed and more accurately
documented and assessed (there had been many misattributions), project management
decided to use exhibition design as the primary way of organising the space.
Prioritising the design of exhibitions over their content saw the curatorial
voice diminished, form dominate substance and interpretation subsumed to
entertainment.</span></div>
<div style="text-align: left;">
<span style="font-family: inherit;"><br /></span></div>
<div style="text-align: left;">
<span style="font-family: inherit; font-size: small;">To some observers, the new displays evinced a
lack of both a critical dimension and a coherent intellectual framework. As the
Deakin University academics, Wade Chambers and Rachel Faggetter observed 'The
rhetoric that accompanied the museum's opening led the serious visitor to
expect a full delineation of the nature and role of creativity, design,
invention and innovation in the Australian context.' but, they commented,
'success in this undertaking has so far proved elusive'. </span><span style="font-family: inherit; font-size: x-small;"><<a href="http://www.jstor.org/discover/10.2307/3106636?sid=21106371543183&uid=3&uid=16337080&uid=17585184&uid=2134&uid=2&uid=76&uid=3738776&uid=17556408&uid=70&uid=60">W Chambers and R Faggetter, 'Australia's museum powerhouse', <i>Technology and Culture</i>, 33:3 (1992), 548-559, p. 552</a>></span><span style="font-family: inherit; font-size: small;">. </span><span style="font-family: inherit; font-size: small;">Assessing the design-focussed exhibitions, Tony
Fry argued that the museum aimed merely at being a provincial simulacrum of the
London-based Science and Design Museums and New York's Cooper-Hewitt Museum.
Discussing the museum's exhibitions he noted that: 'These conventionalist
approaches create and induct Australian design history into the great men,
great object, great stories syndrome, which not only obscures a more accurate
history but also lays foundations for study in fictions and a cultural cringe
fall-out.' </span><span style="font-family: inherit; font-size: x-small;"><T Fry, <i>Design history
Australia</i> (Sydney: Hale & Iremonger, 1988), p. 42></span><span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="font-size: small;">.</span></span><span style="font-family: inherit; font-size: small;"> In a very real
sense it was these intellectual deficiencies, this subscription to a fictional
sense of Australia's material cultural history, which defined the renewed
museum. Nonetheless, the visiting public evidently enjoyed the museum; it attracted over a million visitors in its first six months and garnered an impressive range of tourist awards. Scholarly recognition remained elusive.</span></div>
</td></tr>
</tbody></table>
<table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: center;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjNeGHFrAfvFl6iGUL8zjJDLyotfiBFnt-ohCYi5Ko9kEuxGnxAmgMAK1buWuEfdTy1IBa2hpnMy_bMhbzBvmDIgCiZTCBoa5yw7lP7V97PyUXae8gva-49X5-26EBhysm0eosvNRDhFBmp/s1600/thompson+1.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="466" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjNeGHFrAfvFl6iGUL8zjJDLyotfiBFnt-ohCYi5Ko9kEuxGnxAmgMAK1buWuEfdTy1IBa2hpnMy_bMhbzBvmDIgCiZTCBoa5yw7lP7V97PyUXae8gva-49X5-26EBhysm0eosvNRDhFBmp/s1600/thompson+1.jpg" width="640" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">'Kings, queens and soup tureens', a loan exhibition of 18th century objects from the Campbell Museum collection installed at the Hyde Park Barracks in 1990. Prioritising exhibition design over content resulted in an out of scale, assertively kitsch display that<br />
distorted the historical narrative of the space and overwhelmed the objects</td></tr>
</tbody></table>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: inherit;">In the aftermath of the museum's re-opening, it became
increasingly evident that the political energy channelled to develop the museum's new venues was a double-edged
sword. A newly-elected Coalition administration, perceiving the museum as a creature
of the former administration, sought to rein in what it judged to be political
folly and extravagance. Rather than addressing the institutional deficiencies
revealed by the project, consolidating the museum's achievements and developing
strategic links with adjacent tertiary education institutions, management
reacted to these political and ideological critiques by focussing on the museum
as a brand and by developing strategies and implementing policies that, in the fashionable management jargon of the period, were responsive rather than pro-active. Rather than being collection-focussed in its activities the museum began to be seen by the public as a venue for highly-priced, externally-generated commercial exhibitions such as 'Audrey Hepburn, the woman, the style' and 'Star Wars: the magic of myth'. These interactive, often child-focussed, revenue generators had the unfortunate side effect of detracting from other, less well-promoted, exhibitions.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: inherit;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: inherit;">Design – in a travesty of its meaning as a process of production, mediation and consumption – became the museum's defining quality. In a somewhat simplistic reading of the process by the institution's management, design came increasingly to be understood as branding, as a sort of aestheticising; in truth it was, more ominously, a strategically-placed fig leaf for the gradual corporatisation of the museum’s culture. Under its guise the museum was radically de-intellectualised, allowing it to be perceived by dominant power formations as a site of mass culture, a distraction, and a counterbalance to the elitist preoccupations of, for example, the AGNSW or the National Trust of Australia (NSW branch).</span><br />
<span style="font-family: inherit;"><br /></span>
<br />
<table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: center;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjiWvPNdI3vL2XIh_DOrHJT4z9WDBDMTw53JdOeEDIFDkS1uGXidw9kaNB6ZWF5O50wbhYT9PwBSkqTPIYZGItE-FC1XGU94nTDWdHEGbmzaxmSPUnWytuYyfP2CqrTJsLaypUCE4qTJ6Wm/s1600/Screenshot+2015-04-30+10.31.52.png" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="92" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjiWvPNdI3vL2XIh_DOrHJT4z9WDBDMTw53JdOeEDIFDkS1uGXidw9kaNB6ZWF5O50wbhYT9PwBSkqTPIYZGItE-FC1XGU94nTDWdHEGbmzaxmSPUnWytuYyfP2CqrTJsLaypUCE4qTJ6Wm/s1600/Screenshot+2015-04-30+10.31.52.png" width="640" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Left: Emery Vincent (designers), Powerhouse Museum logo (1988). Centre: Unidentified designers, Powerhouse Museum logo (2000). Right Boccalatte (designers), Museum of Applied Arts & Sciences logo (2014)</td></tr>
</tbody></table>
As with many of the museums created on the cusp of the
neo-liberal political ascendancy, the museum had argued that its success lay in the politically dangerous metric of visitor numbers. The new conservative Coalition state government, seeing
visitor numbers as a potential income stream, immediately imposed an entrance
charge of $5.00 (now $15.00); perhaps not enough to deter tourists and enthusiasts but more
than enough to alienate casual visitors. The state government then began
stripping the museum of its off-campus venues. The Hyde Park Barracks, which had
ill-advisedly been used as a prestigiously-located temporary
exhibition venue, was transferred to the more appropriate custodianship of the
Historic Houses Trust of NSW, which had been formed in 1980 specifically to manage government-owned historic properties. Then, following an abortive attempt to transform it from
under-visited museum of Australian decorative arts into a fully commercial gold
and coining enterprise, the Mint followed suit. In an attempt to broaden its appeal, the museum re-purposed its Castle Hill store as a display storage facility known as the Powerhouse Discovery Centre in 2007. While its allure seems limited – it attracted 18,367 visitors in 2103-2014 – the museum has, in collaboration with the Australian Museum and Sydney Living Museums (the former HHT), decided to expand the facility. It's unclear what the impact of the move west will have on this development. </div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br />
Factors other than political and managerial were involved in the museum's perceived decline. From well before the start of the Powerhouse project to the present
there have been calls for the museum's collection to be split. In an April 1978
letter to the <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Sydney Morning Herald</i>, Leo
Schofield, then a Sydney ‘tribal elder and gad about town’, argued that 'the time has
clearly come to house and display the museum's science and decorative arts
collections separately. Members of the public interested in steam engines,
models of sailing ships and transparent plastic women are unlikely to be galvanised
by a display of eighteenth century porcelain'<span style="font-size: x-small;"><'Our dowdy technological
museum', <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Sydney Morning Herald </i>(24
April 1978), p.4></span>. Proponents of the split resurfaced in 2010 when the then
director, Dawn Casey, dismantled ‘<a href="http://www.powerhousemuseum.com/video/inspired/flythrough.mov">Inspired!</a>’ a four year-old, semi-permanent
decorative arts display. Responding to this perceived attack, Schofield again emerged on the letters page of the <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Herald</i> <a href="http://newsstore.fairfax.com.au/apps/viewDocument.ac;jsessionid=DBBB0A3899F6BB7262C449A48BD5532C?sy=afr&pb=all_ffx&dt=selectRange&dr=1month&so=relevance&sf=text&sf=headline&rc=10&rm=200&sp=brs&cls=611&clsPage=1&docID=SMH1010231IJ5S4P75VE">arguing</a> that ‘bit by bit, the applied and decorative arts
are being de-emphasised and the program of exhibitions dumbed down’. Similar
statements have been made <a href="http://www.theaustralian.com.au/arts/leo-schofield-slams-powerhouse-museum-move-to-parramatta/story-e6frg8n6-1227245311962">more recently</a>, albeit in not quite so condescending a
manner.<br />
<br />
It's an appealing conceit. Unlike many of its transport, technology and scientific exhibitions in the Powerhouse, the semi-permanent decorative arts and design exhibitions have proven more fugitive. Moving the decorative arts and design
collections into a discrete space – preferably in the ‘cultural circuit’
around the Sydney Domain – while leaving the interactive geewhizzery, the machines and engines, the ‘popular
stuff’, for the youthful masses would certainly make things far simpler for those
proposing glamorous touring or collection-based exhibitions in keeping with the idea of a museum replicating, in a minor, provincial, way, the sophistry of the far better endowed V&A and
Cooper Hewitt museums. This line of reasoning is both perniciously classist and
fundamentally ahistorical, undermining MAAS’s abiding rationale as one of the world’s
few museums of industrialisation – a veritable museum of manufactures – and leaving it open to the sort of
disintegrative solution implied in the proposal to relocate the institution far from its roots.</div>
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The Baird administration has, for the wrong reasons,
recognised that MAAS – one of the concealed glories of Sydney – is a problematic. It's located
in a place that seems to operate against its foundation. Nor does it
tie in comfortably to the nearby Darling Harbour public space with the Sydney
Aquarium and the National Maritime Museum despite the pragmatic efforts of various directors to reorientate the museum's entrance so that it opens directly onto Darling Harbour. Outside the cultural circuit formed by the AGNSW, the Australian Museum and the various urban venues of Sydney Living Museums, it struggles to attract visitors, particularly tourists, anecdotally many of whom are unaware of its existence; in 2013-2014 only 11% of its surveyed visitors identified as being from overseas. The statistics are even more grim for the Museum's western outreach, the Powerhouse Discovery Centre where zero overseas visitors are recorded and only a statistically insignificant 2% are from outside Sydney.<br />
<br />
For some twenty-five years the museum has struggled to demonstrate a sense of institutional coherence in terms of what it does, what its
collection is about, what its audience is and how it communicates its mission and purpose. It is not unique in having to address the meta-question of what museums mean in an increasingly digitised age. Are they about education or entertainment; what are their audiences; do physical collections really matter; and are they a public resource available to all or a source of revenue and profit? In announcing the move Baird argued that the museum's relocation would ensure that it remained 'the interactive and vibrant place enjoyed by children and
families'. It seems that the NSW government has formed a view that MAAS is pre-eminently a
place of entertainment with a primary audience that is both domestic and young, rather than a place of education, knowledge and learning.
This stance stands in marked contrast to the state government’s approach to the AGNSW,
which not only remains in its Domain location but is currently <a href="http://architectureau.com/articles/jury-decided-agnsws-sydney-modern-awaits-government-approval/?utm_source=ArchitectureAU&utm_campaign=33bf43f694-AAU_2015_04_15&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_e3604e2a4a-33bf43f694-40561717&mc_cid=33bf43f694&mc_eid=5d721a6483">contemplating</a> yet
another $450 million extension. Despite <a href="http://www.smh.com.au/nsw/call-for-art-gallery-of-nsw-to-move-to-western-sydney-20141126-11tsmz.html">calls</a> by western Sydney lobbyists for the AGNSW and the Australian Museum to follow MAAS west to the demographic centre of Sydney these have been rejected by the state government.<br />
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgn834_cox4cliKon2aATQBuHeJ4pJW8W8HI8YWPgBzFcoEVAa92wN89Z0Sa06_jEYu1944uBWQDYMfmdeevdpyeJY0eDpaTSInbOJ-XBgoYveXXFvfVBmp_kH_ps-llXu9SRXEhrPKhfDn/s1600/Screenshot+2015-04-30+09.09.24.png" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="332" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgn834_cox4cliKon2aATQBuHeJ4pJW8W8HI8YWPgBzFcoEVAa92wN89Z0Sa06_jEYu1944uBWQDYMfmdeevdpyeJY0eDpaTSInbOJ-XBgoYveXXFvfVBmp_kH_ps-llXu9SRXEhrPKhfDn/s1600/Screenshot+2015-04-30+09.09.24.png" width="640" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Screenshot of MAAS's webpage in April 2015 with a photograph of the repainted and rebranded Powerhouse Museum building. </td></tr>
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In July 2013 the MAAS trustees moved to address the museum's seemingly intractable systemic difficulties by appointing a new director and management team. The director, Rose Hiscock, has a <a href="http://www.powerhousemuseum.com/media/files/2013/05/MAAS-Director-appointment.pdf">background</a> in strategic marketing and this seems to have informed many of her decisions including the somewhat prescient one of rebranding the museum by reverting to its official title and downgrading the Powerhouse Museum brand to venue status. Somewhat ingenuously <a href="http://www.powerhousemuseum.com/about/">declaring</a> her overarching vision for the institution 'to be the world's leading museum of science and design' she asserted this could be realised through themes such as '"curiosity" for science and "creativity" for applied art', a – perhaps unwitting – reiteration of the generic themes of design and creativity that had informed the Powerhouse Museum's first exhibitions. As Hiscock recognises, the Powerhouse Museum is now located in 'a dynamic and rapidly changing educational and cultural precinct', making it possible for the museum to 'more effectively engage with the business, entertainment and residential life of these new communities.' Evidently this recognition of the museum's changing locale has not been sufficient to sway the NSW government from its purpose. Moreover, despite Hiscock's enthusiastic spin, fundamental problems remain: the collection is far from 'world class' and its acquisition budget is risible; a radically reduced expert staff has impacted on its ability to deliver the sort of exhibition and research programmes commonly associated with world-class museums; and the museum's political environment is, once again, distinctly uncertain.<br />
<br />
Museums – certainly museums of art, design and technology –
are urban phenomena. To function effectively they require the synergies only
found in urban environments: a ready flow of visitors to attend exhibitions and
freely access the collections and their attendant resources; good transport
links; informed, committed and focussed staff; effective direction; and a commitment from all
stakeholders involved in their governance. Setting aside the logistical
nightmare involved in relocating a collection of some half a million objects, this
proposed move will not resolve the dilemmas the museum currently faces, to the
contrary. Relocating a museum developed in an urban context over 136 years to
the cultural periphery of the Sydney metropolis, where transport links are limited and visitors are few, and unlikely to increase even with a relocated MAAS, would seem to be
antithetical to ensuring its successful future. While Parramatta may be closer
to the demographical centre of Sydney, it has neither the infrastructure nor
the mass of population and potential connectivity required to support a cultural institution of the
museum’s national and international significance. Neo-liberal governments,
espousing the language of the corporate sector, are fond of identifying
opportunities and this proposal would seem to embrace another corporate stratagem:
risk. This proposed move may well turn out to be an, inadequately assessed, risk too far.<br />
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Thanks to John Wade for his comments and suggestions on a draft of this post. All opinions and errors are mine.</div>
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Christopher Thompsonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01264481177071819483noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2464874880300858303.post-69975335068650292212015-03-25T13:53:00.000+13:002015-05-05T22:14:17.558+12:00Forty-two packages for the monster exhibition<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiEmbtxKtyIC8QvVw2t9MPeLwA9aIJA_aPcs3DK6VDsu8aB7KXKPChsiihFNf5O21fcsJAkfuyT5OxN23kESI-Ji_QLpuK8F_ku7CpLAstx1B4PHQKwsQidLpPWia_T4Yg-3vPQjbFS3TKb/s1600/Screenshot+2015-03-17+10.51.13.png" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="422" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiEmbtxKtyIC8QvVw2t9MPeLwA9aIJA_aPcs3DK6VDsu8aB7KXKPChsiihFNf5O21fcsJAkfuyT5OxN23kESI-Ji_QLpuK8F_ku7CpLAstx1B4PHQKwsQidLpPWia_T4Yg-3vPQjbFS3TKb/s1600/Screenshot+2015-03-17+10.51.13.png" width="640" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">William Mulready (1786-1863) designer, John Thompson (1785-1866) engraver, <i>Postage one penny</i> letter sheet (1840). Relief engraving.<br />
<a href="http://www.kcphilatelics.co.uk/page%20mulreadies.htm">K & C Philatelics</a></td></tr>
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<span style="font-size: large;">In </span>what was probably the first time the word design – in the sense that it is understand today as a tripartite process of production, mediation and consumption of manufactured commodities – was mentioned in the New Zealand press occurred in a Wellington newspaper, the <i>New Zealand Gazette and Wellington Spectator </i>on <a href="http://paperspast.natlib.govt.nz/cgi-bin/paperspast?a=d&cl=search&d=NZGWS18401010.2.14&srpos=6&e=--1839---1886--10--1-byDA---0design-ARTICLE-">10 October 1840</a>. Under the heading 'English news', the paper republished a short item 'Design of the postage cover' taken from the January 1840 issue of the progressive quarterly, the <i>London and Westminster Review. </i>The article concerned William Mulready's design for the British General Post Office of a pre-paid letter sheet, one of a series of reforms introduced in 1840, which included the invention of the adhesive pre-paid postage stamp, intended to revolutionise communication not only in the British Isles but also around the world, including the newly-established British settlements in New Zealand.<br />
<br />
The short extract from the<i> Review</i> article was restricted to a description of the symbolism of Mulready's image, which observed the figures 'were emblematical of British commerce, and communication with all parts of the world'. It's hard to imagine what this twenty-four line text would have meant to colonial readers of the <i>Gazette </i>as, few would have received or even seen a postage stamp let alone a Mulready letter sheet as both had only been introduced some five months earlier; for example, <a href="http://www.teara.govt.nz/en/biographies/1r5/revans-samuel">Samuel Revans</a>, the editor of the <i>Gazette</i>, had left London in September 1839. In fact, the discussion was in part redundant as, in the face of furious lobbying by private stationery manufacturers, the letter sheet was withdrawn from sale by the General Post Office, less than eight weeks after its release. It was a decision in keeping with the British state's long-standing deference to private interests. British commerce had trumped efficient communication; consumer utility was abandoned in favour of profit, no matter how inefficiently it was acquired.<br />
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhrpPbxtt5GNCaJn5ZKfzFdyFTqvZUEA-gWE7Mh8rfkmxD55fP9pesYFTCcEjlqxKzrfn9EMA2pdWhJC5qaEK_WXhdBMQP3CbxVOwarBdwdPEdtxE1vGxh1nwr7PO3dmKtJTdVZTRJPd0S1/s1600/263027-1333110628.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="640" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhrpPbxtt5GNCaJn5ZKfzFdyFTqvZUEA-gWE7Mh8rfkmxD55fP9pesYFTCcEjlqxKzrfn9EMA2pdWhJC5qaEK_WXhdBMQP3CbxVOwarBdwdPEdtxE1vGxh1nwr7PO3dmKtJTdVZTRJPd0S1/s1600/263027-1333110628.jpg" width="448" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Unidentified maker, Swinging cradle (1840). <a href="http://www.bridgemanimages.com/en-GB/asset/618987/english-school-19th-century/the-princess-royal-her-majesty-the-queen-and-hrh-prince-albert-with-the-royal-cot-c-1840-engraving?context=%7B%22sourceUrl%22%3A%22http%3A%5C%2F%5C%2Fwww.bridgemanimages.com%5C%2Fen-GB%5C%2Fsearch%5C%2Fassets%5C%2F%25start%25%5C%2F%25limit%25%5C%2F%257B%2522filter%2522%3A%257B%2522filter_bw%2522%3Anull%2C%2522filter_colour%2522%3Anull%2C%2522filter_creator_id%2522%3Anull%2C%2522filter_footage%2522%3Anull%2C%2522filter_group%2522%3A%2522all%2522%2C%2522filter_horizontal%2522%3Anull%2C%2522filter_image%2522%3Anull%2C%2522filter_illustration%2522%3Anull%2C%2522filter_location_id%2522%3Anull%2C%2522filter_object%2522%3Anull%2C%2522filter_orientation%2522%3Anull%2C%2522filter_photograph%2522%3Anull%2C%2522filter_square%2522%3Anull%2C%2522filter_supplier_prefix%2522%3Anull%2C%2522filter_text%2522%3A%2522The%2520princess%2520royal%2520her%2520majesty%2520the%2520queen%2522%2C%2522filter_text_within_new%2522%3Anull%2C%2522filter_text_within_queue%2522%3Anull%2C%2522filter_vertical%2522%3Anull%2C%2522filter_web_category_id%2522%3Anull%2C%2522filter_asset_title%2522%3Anull%2C%2522filter_asset_med%2522%3Anull%2C%2522filter_creator_name%2522%3Anull%2C%2522filter_asset_location%2522%3Anull%2C%2522filter_year%2522%3Anull%2C%2522filter_year_to%2522%3Anull%2C%2522filter_century%2522%3Anull%2C%2522filter_century_to%2522%3Anull%2C%2522filter_year_adbc%2522%3Anull%2C%2522filter_year_to_adbc%2522%3Anull%2C%2522filter_century_adbc%2522%3Anull%2C%2522filter_century_to_adbc%2522%3Anull%2C%2522filter_lightbox_id%2522%3Anull%2C%2522original_filter_text%2522%3A%2522The%2520princess%2520royal%2520her%2520majesty%2520the%2520queen%2522%2C%2522filter_searchoption_id%2522%3A%25222%2522%2C%2522sort_order%2522%3A%2522best_relevance%2522%257D%2C%2522include_withdrawn%2522%3Afalse%2C%2522on_web_only%2522%3Afalse%2C%2522query_clause%2522%3A%2522%2522%2C%2522sort_order%2522%3A%2522best_relevance%2522%257D%5C%2Flist%22%2C%22number%22%3A91%2C%22max%22%3A113%2C%22min%22%3A1%2C%22hash%22%3A%2297f61e2902dab0fedfe61d164993088e%22%7D">A contemporary image </a>indicates a number of features<br />
noted in news reports of 1840 were removed when the cradle was modified in 1894.<br />
<a href="https://www.blogger.com/"><span id="goog_1961621719"></span>Royal Collection Trust (RCIN 42508)</a></td></tr>
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Unless referring to the layout of the settler towns, discussions about design appeared rarely in the colonial press. When the subject was raised it was inevitably identified under the heading 'Latest English News' and comprised reprints of the strange and exotic. For example, in April 1841, some five months after the event, the <i>New Zealand Gazette </i>published an account of a '<a href="http://paperspast.natlib.govt.nz/cgi-bin/paperspast?a=d&cl=search&d=NZGWS18410410.2.11&srpos=8&e=--1839---1886--10--1-byDA---0design-ARTICLE-">nautilus-shaped cot'</a> manufactured for the monarch's daughter, 'the Child of the Ocean Queen'. While the apparent absence in the press of any discussion about design in a local context doesn't necessarily indicate an actual absence, it does suggest that the matter was considered either unimportant or invested with only a metropolitan relevance. For it to make any sense, the description of the royal cot relied upon the memory and imagination of the reader, although – with the possible exception of a Wellington cabinetmaker, Johann Levien – it's unlikely that any residents of the colony of New Zealand would have been familiar with such a luxurious object. The technology of the time and the location of the colony both circumscribed and limited perceptions of the visual, at least in terms of manufactured commodities.<br />
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiV6LbNBT63XU_gy-Su_Ocb8qbScSNYjGoVPB4vaX_Udim4yaZr5SYv4UjncYG7GbJ1Q4o3Fr9krbXJ26D62Yc36bO0QsoCzbLH0DF60SIPqDmLz02WcvgJGTseMzgoJeZr_MHNzhGtpNMn/s1600/Screenshot+2015-03-22+16.16.38.png" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="488" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiV6LbNBT63XU_gy-Su_Ocb8qbScSNYjGoVPB4vaX_Udim4yaZr5SYv4UjncYG7GbJ1Q4o3Fr9krbXJ26D62Yc36bO0QsoCzbLH0DF60SIPqDmLz02WcvgJGTseMzgoJeZr_MHNzhGtpNMn/s1600/Screenshot+2015-03-22+16.16.38.png" width="640" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">'Front of the Great Exhibition building exterior of the south' <i>Illustrated London News</i> (1851) <br />
<a href="http://www.bl.uk/learning/images/victorian/crystalpalace/large102732.html">British Library</a></td></tr>
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However this changed in 1842, when a key source for images of things, people and events, the <i><a href="http://gale.cengage.co.uk/product-highlights/history/illustrated-london-news.aspx">Illustrated London News</a> –</i> the world's first illustrated weekly magazine – began publishing. The emergence of the medium with its regular selection of woodcut images meant that colonists had more proximate access to the visuality of the metropolis, albeit 75 to 120 days (the length of a voyage from London to Auckland) after publication. So, by 1851, colonists not only knew about the Great Exhibition but they also knew what it looked like and what it contained. Knowledge about the exhibition arrived in Auckland on 28 February 1850 via the <i>Isabella, </i>which carried English news from 31 October 1849. The following day, the<i> Southern Cross</i> briefly <a href="http://paperspast.natlib.govt.nz/cgi-bin/paperspast?a=d&d=DSC18500301.2.7&cl=CL2.1850.03.01&e=-------10--1----0--">reported</a>:<br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
An exhibition of the industry of all nations is intended to take place upon a most superb scale in London in the course of the year 1851. The prizes are to be princely ones, upwards of £20,000 being to be awarded (<i>sic</i>); the largest amount, it is stated, will be a prize of £5,000.</blockquote>
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiBpaByxHSfsT1JGfgwI6PBJgirPCDRJJyjBEasKU1RE5Tp4BSbgijwGn0Q_PbWq1hkaI41hZwnZPW1ugTIG3BOuTzqgfEHyNpv68suzoAKNB_dRrbObFgIYzkoyuSS8MfzHP-e1tg7OnFZ/s1600/Screenshot+2015-03-23+13.01.23.png" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="464" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiBpaByxHSfsT1JGfgwI6PBJgirPCDRJJyjBEasKU1RE5Tp4BSbgijwGn0Q_PbWq1hkaI41hZwnZPW1ugTIG3BOuTzqgfEHyNpv68suzoAKNB_dRrbObFgIYzkoyuSS8MfzHP-e1tg7OnFZ/s1600/Screenshot+2015-03-23+13.01.23.png" width="640" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">John Nicol Crombie (1827-1878), [<i>Looking east from Constitution Hill towards Parnell</i>] (1861). In March 1850 Robertson's Ropewalk,<br />
Mechanics Bay, (rear centre) was the site of the second annual show of the Auckland and New Ulster Agricultural and Horticultural Society.<br />
<a href="http://www.aucklandcity.govt.nz/dbtw-wpd/exec/dbtwpub.dll?BU=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.aucklandcity.govt.nz%2Fdbtw-wpd%2FHeritageImages%2Findex.htm&AC=QBE_QUERY&TN=heritageimages&QF0=ID&NP=2&MR=5&RF=HIORecordSearch&QI0=%3D%224-1117%22">Sir George Grey Special Collections, Auckland Libraries (4-1117)</a></td></tr>
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It is perhaps telling that the <i>Southern Cross</i> saw fit to focus on the scale of the prizes; there was no conception of the magnitude intended for the exhibition or its contents; to colonial eyes the proposed London exhibition seems to have been perceived merely an expansion, albeit a well-remunerated one, of the <a href="http://paperspast.natlib.govt.nz/cgi-bin/paperspast?a=d&cl=search&d=NZ18500316.2.5&srpos=4&e=--1848---1852--10--1-byDA---0Exhibition+industry+arts-ARTICLE-">annual show</a> of the Auckland and New Ulster Agricultural and Horticultural Society, the second of which, with its 'first-rate pigs' and prize pumpkins, was due to be held at Mechanics Bay, later that month. By late March the <i>Southern Cross </i>had access to further information concerning the proposed Great Exhibition and<i> </i>intimated it thought it proper that New Zealand should contribute to the exhibition, a stance it reinforced in May when it <a href="http://paperspast.natlib.govt.nz/cgi-bin/paperspast?a=d&d=DSC18500514.1.4&e=-------10--1----0--">opined</a> that<br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
The advantage to be derived by such a contribution must be obvious to every one, since, however comparatively obscured by the more gorgeous displays of the arts and industrial skill of wealthy and populous Europe, the very fact of the productions of the Colony being admitted into such gay and goodly fellowship must prove to be an instrument far more effective than the most elaborate Standing Advertisement, the most powerful Leading Article, or the most painstaking Book. It will be a standing reference at the command of the friends of the colony to point to, and say, –'Look here! Behold the fruits of the soil –the produce of the sea–and the arts and industrial capacities of New Zealand during the first year of her second decade!" </blockquote>
By June 1850, the size and scope of the exhibition was becoming increasingly comprehended; newspapers in <a href="http://paperspast.natlib.govt.nz/cgi-bin/paperspast?a=d&cl=search&d=DSC18500604.2.7&srpos=9&e=--1848---1852--10--1-byDA---0Exhibition+industry+arts-ARTICLE-">Auckland</a>, Wellington and Nelson reported (under 'Latest English News') that:<br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
A circular has been sent to the Mayors and official Authorities throughout the country, with the urgent recommendation to appoint local committees to carry out the object of the great Arts Exhibition. The appointment of local commissioners was also insisted upon, so that each branch of the industry of the town may receive representatives. The French government are expected to allow the export of their own articles, and the transit of articles of other countries through territory without official payment.</blockquote>
By July the minuscule New Zealand press was in a positive frenzy about the exhibition, with the <i>New Zealander</i> publishing <a href="http://paperspast.natlib.govt.nz/cgi-bin/paperspast?a=d&cl=search&d=NZ18500731.2.7&srpos=16&e=--1848---1852--10--11-byDA---0Exhibition+industry+arts-ARTICLE-">columns</a> of lists of objects eligible for display; in August the <i>Nelson Examiner</i> reprinted extensive <a href="http://paperspast.natlib.govt.nz/cgi-bin/paperspast?a=d&cl=search&d=NENZC18500831.2.10&srpos=19&e=--1848---1852--10--11-byDA---0Exhibition+industry+arts-ARTICLE-">discussions</a> concerning the aims and purpose of the exhibition and its governance. The <i>New Zealander</i> weighed in, <a href="http://paperspast.natlib.govt.nz/cgi-bin/paperspast?a=d&cl=search&d=NZ18500907.2.7&srpos=20&e=--1848---1852--10--11-byDA---0Exhibition+industry+arts-ARTICLE-">observing</a> that:<br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
The extent to which this subject has engaged the public mind at home [...] would warrant our devoting considerable space to it [...] The movement, however, is in itself so important – so fraught with prospects of universal benefit, in which, if it not be our own fault, we in New Zealand may fully participate – that we deem it a duty to keep it before the view, and so far as we can, to press it upon the practical consideration of our fellow colonists.</blockquote>
But it wasn't just the press; as Charlotte Godley, wife of the leader of the Canterbury settlement, commented in a May 1851 letter to her mother:<br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
I suppose London is now nearly mad with the Great Exhibition just opened [...] I think we are rather well out of it; it makes me feel quite tired only to think about going to see such a monster exhibition. But, perhaps, after all, the grapes are sour. <span style="font-size: x-small;"><C Godley, <i>Letter from early New Zealand, 1850-1853 </i>(Christchurch: Whitcomb & Tombs, 1951), p. 202></span></blockquote>
But despite popular agitation little could be done by local authorities to ensure that the exhibition commissioners were cognisant of colonial desires. Nonetheless, the exhibition commissioners hadn't forgotten the colonies – their existence was, ultimately, a compelling rationale for the event – but, as Jeffery Auerbach observes, 'One of the most monumental tasks facing the commissioners was to organise the British colonies, dominions and dependencies and make them part of the exhibition, and fittingly, the imperial displays at the Great Exhibition were located at the very centre of the Crystal Palace.' <span style="font-size: x-small;"><J Auerbach, <i>The Great Exhibition of 1851; a nation on display</i> (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1999), p. 100></span>. Finally, on 6 September 1850, colonial authorities issued a <i>Government Gazette </i> primarily comprising information received from the exhibition commissioners and <a href="http://paperspast.natlib.govt.nz/cgi-bin/paperspast?a=d&d=NZ18500907.2.7&cl=CL2.1850.09.07&e=--1848---1852--10--11-byDA---0Exhibition+industry+arts-ARTICLE-">stating</a> that those items that were to be selected to represent the colony must be received at the Customs Warehouse in Shortland Street, Auckland by 1 October, 'and then transmitted to London at the expense of the Colony.'<br />
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiNJQR8kb_Btjmom8dbzyagfaRen1SBTnqZFsTA8JqWlQeP7IVvg73MnLF-1Y5RHE-mGWjVVfeoygwhV4smALvqYcEZ4knZ_hK2tGOPU2uibfqDlEXa8yjB-cynzaC3UtNPWRxzd9C49F3F/s1600/Screenshot+2015-03-24+10.24.59.png" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="502" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiNJQR8kb_Btjmom8dbzyagfaRen1SBTnqZFsTA8JqWlQeP7IVvg73MnLF-1Y5RHE-mGWjVVfeoygwhV4smALvqYcEZ4knZ_hK2tGOPU2uibfqDlEXa8yjB-cynzaC3UtNPWRxzd9C49F3F/s1600/Screenshot+2015-03-24+10.24.59.png" width="640" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">John Alexander Gilfillan (1793-1864) artist, Edmund Walker (1826-1892) lithographer, <i>Interior of a native village or 'pa' in New Zealand, </i><br />
<i>situated near the town of Petre, at Wanganui</i>.<br />
<a href="http://mp.natlib.govt.nz/detail/?id=4421&l=en">Alexander Turnbull Library, National Library of New Zealand (C-029-001)</a></td></tr>
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Notwithstanding the short period allowed for collection, settlers had already taken to heart the <a href="http://paperspast.natlib.govt.nz/cgi-bin/paperspast?a=d&d=DSC18500514.1.4&e=-------10--1----0--">admonitions</a> of the <i>Southern Cross</i> that an exhibition committee be formed 'to receive and determine upon specimens, and to purchase articles of native workmanship'. It's unclear as to the identity of the members of the committee but it appears from the <i><a href="https://archive.org/stream/officialcatalog06unkngoog#page/n184/mode/2up">Official catalogue of the Great Exhibition of the Works of Industry of All Nations</a> </i>that some thirty-six exhibits were displayed from the <a href="http://paperspast.natlib.govt.nz/cgi-bin/paperspast?a=d&d=NZ18510823.2.6&cl=CL2.1851.08.23&e=-08-1851--12-1851--10--31----0Great+Exhibition--">forty-two packages</a> despatched from Auckland. The greater part of those goods comprised specimens of flax, wool, leather, timber, Kauri gum, fish, a grub and minerals, along with examples of locally-manufactured soap, scale models of White Island and of Ruapekapeka Pā, the latter made by <a href="http://www.teara.govt.nz/en/biographies/1b2/balneavis-henry-colin">Henry Balneavis</a> of the 58th Regiment, as well as a selection of woven goods produced by both Māori and pākehā. A later edition of the <i><a href="http://www.teara.govt.nz/en/zoomify/45418/new-zealand-exhibits-at-the-1851-great-exhibition">Official catalogue</a></i> seems to indicate that this small contribution was supplemented by a selection of New Zealand-related material assembled in London by <a href="http://natlib.govt.nz/items?i%5Bprimary_collection%5D=TAPUHI&il%5Bcollection%5D=Moore%2C+Frederick+George+1815-1892%3A+Manuscript+autobiography+of+life+in+Wellington+%26+Nelson+in+1841-1842">Frederick Moore</a>, a sometime settler involved unofficially with the organisation of the New Zealand display at the exhibition. Moore owned John Gilfillan's – now lost – painting <i style="text-align: center;">Interior of a native village or 'pa' in New Zealand, situated near the town of Petre, at Wanganui </i>and probably arranged for it to be lithographed. The lithographed image seems to have been used to provide a context for a display of Māori artefacts. The provenance of the waka shown in the Nash lithograph <i>Colonial produce</i> is unclear but it may well have been included in a further attempt to enliven the display.<br />
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjzpkTjrdp8sroSZQW1f5YeR-G3SKTYaQzHp54VIqrydvq6TdfoNmxhSGgVHY4DW4IEDR4q-LIGKaDeXjhheuqkXq5tTDoRLUpDSGyBBC8kM8Cu7bTxXW_EQkLNOz6FbjIEAtG1pEvfuHtq/s1600/Screenshot+2015-03-23+12.41.02.png" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="488" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjzpkTjrdp8sroSZQW1f5YeR-G3SKTYaQzHp54VIqrydvq6TdfoNmxhSGgVHY4DW4IEDR4q-LIGKaDeXjhheuqkXq5tTDoRLUpDSGyBBC8kM8Cu7bTxXW_EQkLNOz6FbjIEAtG1pEvfuHtq/s1600/Screenshot+2015-03-23+12.41.02.png" width="640" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Joseph Nash (1808-1878), 'Colonial produce' (1852), from <i>Dickinson's comprehensive pictures of the Great Exhibition</i> (London: Dickinson Bros., 1854).<br />
The location of the New Zealand display in the colonial court is suggested by a suspended waka at the left rear.<br />
<a href="http://collections.vam.ac.uk/item/O81694/colonial-produce-print-nash-joseph/">Victoria & Albert Museum</a></td></tr>
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The entry of greatest interest in the revised list of the New Zealand section, at least from a design perspective, also emanated from London. Item 40 in the <i>Official catalogue</i> comprised a group of furniture made using decorative New Zealand timber veneers entered by the exclusive Mayfair furniture retailers Messrs R Lucas & Co.<br />
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgQ4W6sWYTRilwgGXn-35ChxdyCDWMskuLgmE6E83aLtfCK6_bbzZBjFquNjnXh-PsBkXS7lXorMgus416NbQhn25uqVgQvpsNobZBdnuK6KWnwHfw2t48giPWoOyjrE6z612xbeE0deHRy/s1600/Screenshot+2015-03-24+11.29.51.png" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="82" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgQ4W6sWYTRilwgGXn-35ChxdyCDWMskuLgmE6E83aLtfCK6_bbzZBjFquNjnXh-PsBkXS7lXorMgus416NbQhn25uqVgQvpsNobZBdnuK6KWnwHfw2t48giPWoOyjrE6z612xbeE0deHRy/s1600/Screenshot+2015-03-24+11.29.51.png" width="320" /></a></div>
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It is unclear who was responsible for the production of this luxurious furniture – ' sliding secret panels, fluted with green silk', but it is probable it was the cabinetmaker Johann Martin Levien (1811-1871), <a href="http://paperspast.natlib.govt.nz/cgi-bin/paperspast?a=d&d=NZGWS18431209.2.23&e=-08-1851--12-1851--10--31----0Great+Exhibition--">described</a> in the <i>New Zealand Gazette</i> as 'a highly respectable German, and an excellent cabinet-maker', worked in Wellington from 1840 before moving to London in 1843 where he not only established what appears to have been a bespoke furniture business based in Davies Street – about 500 metres from the premises of the Messrs Lucas – but also 'a warehouse for the manufacture and sale of New Zealand wood.' Levien developed a considerable reputation in Europe for his use of New Zealand timbers and he showed at the Great Exhibition under his own name, but located in the United Kingdom section; he was accorded an Honourable Mention. But he was more than a cabinetmaker, albeit one with a royal warrant granted in 1846. As an importer into Britain of exotic New Zealand timbers, it was in his interest to expose them to the widest possible audience: displaying furniture made from New Zealand timbers under the imprimatur of their colony of origin enabled him to do just that.</div>
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjfGTwSSjwL3rV2YBHXUNyqFI6ug6yQ88Tk68RQxxl7QRRNWb1nAda4laXiEGaxgyFQ9e1L-fN-uwBTH1tB5veCQpOck7ekKCoWDryEyJnTTmcnVATNQFWbuSYHePhdbKucjfTFRLLYWc9Y/s1600/Screenshot+2015-03-24+14.40.47.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="58" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjfGTwSSjwL3rV2YBHXUNyqFI6ug6yQ88Tk68RQxxl7QRRNWb1nAda4laXiEGaxgyFQ9e1L-fN-uwBTH1tB5veCQpOck7ekKCoWDryEyJnTTmcnVATNQFWbuSYHePhdbKucjfTFRLLYWc9Y/s1600/Screenshot+2015-03-24+14.40.47.jpg" width="320" /></a></div>
News of the opening of the exhibition by the monarch on 1 May seeped slowly into the colony; on 26 August, the <i>Southern Cross</i> resorted to <a href="http://paperspast.natlib.govt.nz/cgi-bin/paperspast?a=d&d=DSC18510826.2.13&cl=CL2.1851.08.26&e=-08-1851--12-1851--10--31----0Great+Exhibition--">printing</a> guest lists and the opening programme from April editions of English newspapers. Finally, on 29 August the <i>Thames</i>, which had left London on 5 May, berthed at Auckland. On 2 September the <i>Southern Cross </i> <a href="http://paperspast.natlib.govt.nz/cgi-bin/paperspast?a=d&d=DSC18510902.2.13&cl=CL2.1851.09.02&e=-08-1851--12-1851--10--31----0Great+Exhibition--">devoted</a> almost an entire page to an account of the opening of the exhibition taken from the 3 May edition of <i>Bell's Life in London</i>. While on the following day the <i>New Zealander</i> <a href="http://paperspast.natlib.govt.nz/cgi-bin/paperspast?a=d&d=NZ18510903.2.10&cl=CL2.1851.09.03&e=-08-1851--12-1851--10--31----0Great+Exhibition--">reprinted</a> a report of the opening from the 3 May edition of the <i>Illustrated London News. </i>Further news of the exhibition was slow arriving; the <i>Southern Cross</i> <a href="http://paperspast.natlib.govt.nz/cgi-bin/paperspast?a=d&d=DSC18510902.2.8&cl=CL2.1851.09.02&e=-------10--1----0--">rehearsed</a> its periodic complaint as to the tardiness of the mails. On 24 October it published an extended article complaining of the effect of the exhibition on the London retail trade. There seem to have been no reports concerning the New Zealand exhibits published in the colonial press. As Jock Phillips <a href="http://www.teara.govt.nz/en/exhibitions-and-worlds-fairs/page-1">observes</a> in his entry on 'Exhibitions and world's fairs' in <i>Te Ara; the encyclopedia of New Zealand</i>, 'amid the scale of the Great Exhibition, the display was small and little noticed.' New Zealand responses to the exhibition were of little concern to its commissioners. Auerbach notes that while the exhibition documented the vastness of British possessions, it 'also domesticated the empire. Through maps and charts, [domestic] visitors learned what 'belonged' to them. But Auerbach also asserts that 'a number of colonial exhibits suggested, iconographically, a high level of integration between the metropole and the periphery.'<span style="font-size: x-small;"><Auerbach, p. 101></span><br />
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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">[Johann Martin Levien (1811-1871)], Cradle ([1846]).<br />
<a href="http://www.mossgreen.com.au/view-auctions/catalog/id/48/lot/34051/?url=%2Fview-auctions%2Fcatalog%2Fid%2F48%2F%3Furl%3D%252Fview-auctions%252F%253Fstatus%253Dbidding_upcoming%26page%3D1%26key%3Dcradle%26cat%3D%26xclosed%3Dno">Mossgreen, Melbourne</a><br />
<br />
<div style="text-align: left;">
<span style="font-size: small;">The sort of integration Auerbach seems to envisage is encapsulated in another cradle with an alleged royal provenance attributed to Levien and produced around the time he received his royal warrant. The cradle, which was listed for <a href="http://www.mossgreen.com.au/view-auctions/catalog/id/48/lot/34051/?url=%2Fview-auctions%2Fcatalog%2Fid%2F48%2F%3Furl%3D%252Fview-auctions%252F%253Fstatus%253Dbidding_upcoming%26page%3D1%26key%3Dcradle%26cat%3D%26xclosed%3Dno">sale</a> by the Australian auction house Mossgreen earlier this year, was executed in a Renaissance revival style and made extensive use of veneered New Zealand timbers. While lacking a documented provenance (the possible royal connection could be easily confirmed or dismissed through the Royal Archives at Windsor), it is not entirely fanciful to suggest that the boat-shaped cot not only evokes Māori waka but also echoes the account published in 1841 in a Wellington newspaper concerning an earlier 'royal' cradle, one made for the 'Child of the Ocean Queen'.</span></div>
<div style="text-align: left;">
<span style="font-size: small;"><br /></span></div>
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<span style="font-size: small;">But Levien's furniture also represents the disconnection of empire; the tension inherent between ruler and ruled. While Levien made good use of his time in New Zealand, his continued location in the colony would have never enabled him to obtain the level of recognition and wealth – his estate was sworn for probate purposes at less than £5,000 (the equivalent economic status today of £3 million) – that he achieved in London. In part, this design hiatus between metropolis and frontier resulted from inefficient communication. If the first mention of design in the New Zealand press had been prompted by British postal reforms of 1840, so too the status of design in the colony was compromised by a continued failure in the way Britain connected its economic, cultural and social networks. As the <i>Southern Cross </i><a href="http://paperspast.natlib.govt.nz/cgi-bin/paperspast?a=d&cl=search&d=DSC18510902.2.8&srpos=1&e=-------10--1----2let+the+advocates+of+expedition+in+this+era--">fumed</a> in a frustrated editorial in September 1851 'let the advocates of expedition in this era of rapid communication, fancy upwards of eight months elapsing between the posting of a letter in London and its receipt in Auckland.' Such reforms would only occur with the reform of the corrupted British civil service following the gradual implementation of the Northcote -Trevelyan reforms from 1854. But, more significantly, in design terms at least, the disconnection of empire ensured that while the periphery provided raw materials and a small consumer base, the design, production and mediation of commodities remained primarily a metropolitan concern.</span></div>
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Christopher Thompsonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01264481177071819483noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2464874880300858303.post-22577248438565990472015-02-28T17:17:00.000+13:002016-10-04T21:06:51.871+13:00Cultural colonising<!--[if gte mso 9]><xml>
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgcFtzbjKD6OfxLgpgbCfCcEMG92VuI5XBgoNENGyC2aViKl02WcRfZEZR7KnblgdOlHt0CMMD27jTVfL1ptvt1zFqIZX723teEXwsj63YzjuP5MKuVOAcuSlg98WG_1AkPUNWkjj7bg-rW/s1600/IMG_1930.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="640" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgcFtzbjKD6OfxLgpgbCfCcEMG92VuI5XBgoNENGyC2aViKl02WcRfZEZR7KnblgdOlHt0CMMD27jTVfL1ptvt1zFqIZX723teEXwsj63YzjuP5MKuVOAcuSlg98WG_1AkPUNWkjj7bg-rW/s1600/IMG_1930.jpg" width="446" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Andrea Carlo Lucchesi (1859-1925), <i>Love breaking the sword of hate</i> (1900). Albert Park, Auckland,<br />
purchased with funds provided by the estate of Helen Boyd.<br />
The missing sword of hate was replaced in April 2015</td></tr>
</tbody></table>
<span style="font-size: large;">From</span> 25 February until 25 May, Tate Britain is the venue for a major exhibition of nineteenth century British sculpture entitled <a href="http://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2015/feb/23/tate-hopes-new-show-will-encourage-a-fresh-look-at-victorian-sculpture">Sculpture Victorious</a>. Although reviews to date have been <a href="http://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2015/feb/23/sculpture-victorious-review-tate-britain">less than kind</a>, it's an opportunity to assess what has long been a neglected field of art. Sadly, notwithstanding the efforts of public benefactors such as the speculator <a href="http://www.georgegrey.org.nz/History/EvolutionoftheGreyCollection.aspx">James Tannock Mackelvie</a> (1824-1885) and the the brewer <a href="http://nzetc.victoria.ac.nz/tm/scholarly/tei-Cyc02Cycl-t1-body1-d1-d37-d4.html">Moss Davis</a> (1847-1933), there are few extant examples of nineteenth century sculpture to be found in Auckland, at least in the city's public spaces. Those meagre pieces garnishing the local landscape tend to depict nineteenth century worthies such as Queen Victoria (<a href="http://www.nzhistory.net.nz/media/photo/queen-victoria-statue-empire-day">F J Williamson, 1899</a>), George Eden, first (and last) earl of Auckland (<a href="http://www.vanderkrogt.net/statues/object.php?record=nz001&webpage=ST">Henry Weeks, 1848</a>), and George Grey (<a href="http://www.teara.govt.nz/en/photograph/32552/sir-george-grey-statue-auckland">F J Williamson, 1904</a>), and they're about as inspiring as a brick wall. However, amongst the respectable dross there are a few instances of the genre that rise above the banal. All are in less than optimum condition, suggesting that institutionally at least, Auckland is a casually neglectful steward of its public art. Three of the pieces have significant, if somewhat tangential, connections with the design - the production, mediation and consumption – of ceramics in New Zealand. All three are exemplars of the way in which British visual tropes became a part of New Zealand's cultural economy.<br />
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjXQnNFV2T8S75s09IQ3ctQ538wTKw8eTDPb7IUxFD8fq__aP0F31Vc2ekkmA3yv1WLQYOxWNix6s58SZBakUMjp3jEDAETiTq7Mog08ZhDLyz9QqX36PU18I9VyYOl7sAWcpIEep92MtYy/s1600/IMG_1798.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="640" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjXQnNFV2T8S75s09IQ3ctQ538wTKw8eTDPb7IUxFD8fq__aP0F31Vc2ekkmA3yv1WLQYOxWNix6s58SZBakUMjp3jEDAETiTq7Mog08ZhDLyz9QqX36PU18I9VyYOl7sAWcpIEep92MtYy/s1600/IMG_1798.jpg" width="394" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Gilbert Bayes (1872-1953) <i>Fountain of the valkyries</i> (c. 1912). Auckland Domain, gift of Richard Hellaby, 1929</td></tr>
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Gilbert Bayes' <i>Fountain of the valkyries </i>is one of these more remarkable examples of public sculpture to be found in the city. Prior to its acquisition by Richard Sydney Hellaby (1887-1971) – the self-exiled, artistic scion of an Auckland butchery chain – it had been exhibited at the Royal Academy in London in 1912 and, in 1917, reproduced – in colour – in the pre-eminent art journal of the time, the <i>Studio</i>. Hellaby studied at the Lambeth School of Art prior to World War I and may have been acquainted with Bayes, but the gift – of what to a metropolitan audience would have been by then a somewhat anachronistic work – appears to have been made to enhance the surroundings of the newly-opened Auckland War Memorial Museum, possibly more as a private war memorial – Hellaby had served with British forces during the war – than as an act of personal patronage.<br />
<br />
Bayes was probably best known in New Zealand for his work as a designer of polychromatic architectural ceramics which, from the early 1920s, he designed for the Doulton Lambeth works. A selection of his architectural sculpture was exhibited by Doulton & Co at the Dunedin New Zealand and South Seas International Exhibition in 1925-26. Other sculptural work also gave him a local profile: a bronze bas relief <i>Jason ploughing the acres of Mars</i> (1898) was exhibited at the Christchurch New Zealand International Exhibition in 1906-07 and purchased by the Canterbury Society of Arts; and a bronze and enamel figure <i>St George and the dragon </i>(1920) was also shown at the Dunedin exhibition and subsequently acquired for the Dunedin Public Art Gallery. Bayes' work embodied early twentieth century British official taste: it was figurative but sufficiently stylised in its form to suggest a sense of progress; in its attention to detail and in its evident craftsmanship it made reference to the apogee of British cultural developments of the previous century, the arts and crafts movement. Moreover, Bayes' subjects were unquestionably patriotic - knights in armour were a common feature – deeming them appropriate for export to the provinces, for the delectation of middle-class colonial audiences.<br />
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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Gilbert Bayes (1872-1953) <i>Fountain of the Valkyries</i> (1912) as illustrated in the <i>Studio</i>, 72 (1917), p. 105</td></tr>
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While Bayes' sculptural fountain can be adduced as representative of official British art, the same cannot be said for one of the
few examples of academy sculpture to be found in New Zealand, ‘Love breaking the sword of hate’ (1900), by the Anglo-Italian sculptor <a href="http://sculpture.gla.ac.uk/view/person.php?id=msib2_1203103929">Andrea Carlo Lucchesi</a> (1859-1925), located in Auckland's central Albert Park. Moreover, notwithstanding the inscription on its plinth, few are likely to associate it with George Boyd (1825-1886), an Irish-born Scottish brick maker and potter who worked in New Zealand from 1851 to 1885.<br />
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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Inscription on the plinth of Lucchesi's <i>Love breaking the sword of hate. </i>This blandly municipal text fails to identify either the sculptor or the title of the statue</td></tr>
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While Boyd's connection with the sculpture is restricted solely to the fact that it was acquired using funds bequeathed by his widow, Helen, it can be seen as metaphor for the way the cultural forms and technologies of Europe were transferred, appropriated and deployed by settler society at the colonial frontier. Indeed, Boyd was involved in the same process of cultural transfer, introducing not only technological and mechanical innovations but also new forms and shapes.<br />
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiK5WqA57oHGLlArmTMs1A25DdH992L84ma-Krx0Toyf-OjPpRN_OiSWiTO9ssug5E4CcSGPKjP6leB0w5Q2ZHzDlF5OZ_Rt_FdTE0o6ybV8w4tzNJBSoW_i7GcBa4G0iOLW2hb7Jxlr7pn/s1600/Screenshot+2015-02-28+16.19.53.png" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="472" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiK5WqA57oHGLlArmTMs1A25DdH992L84ma-Krx0Toyf-OjPpRN_OiSWiTO9ssug5E4CcSGPKjP6leB0w5Q2ZHzDlF5OZ_Rt_FdTE0o6ybV8w4tzNJBSoW_i7GcBa4G0iOLW2hb7Jxlr7pn/s1600/Screenshot+2015-02-28+16.19.53.png" width="640" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Frederick George Radcliffe, <i>Albert Park Auckland</i> (about 1903).The photograph shows Lucchesi's <i>Love breaking the sword of hate</i> shortly after it was installed. Other elements of the Boyd bequest, the 'outside vases', are also in evidence.<br />
<span style="background-color: white; text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: inherit; font-size: x-small;">Sir George Grey Special Collections, Auckland Libraries (35-R137)</span></span></td></tr>
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Boyd's early years in New Zealand are obscure but he appears on the Auckland Provincial electoral rolls from 1854 where he is recorded as a brickmaker although the identity of his employer is unknown. Around 1860 he set up his own brick and tile manufactory, the Newton Brick and Tile Works, on the eastern flank of the ridge forming Great North Road in Newton; the site is now partially occupied by Newton Central School.<br />
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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">James D Richardson [<i>Looking towards Boyd's Pottery from Rendall Place</i>] (about 1880).<br />
Sir George Grey Special Collections, Auckland Libraries (4-254)</td></tr>
</tbody></table>
Boyd initially made bricks using clay sourced from the 10 acre (4.05 hectare) site 'for his own use, on account of the inferior quality then being sold in Auckland at the enormously high price of £7 to £8 per thousand.' <span style="font-size: x-small;"><<i>Auckland Star</i> (11 November 1878), p. 3></span> Two years after setting up the works, he began producing field drain pipes and by 1864 was advertising sophisticated sanitary wares such as glazed drainpipes, garden tiles, chimney pipes and a variety of drain fittings that were able to compete with imported wares, notably those produced by Doulton & Co in Lambeth. This advance was presumably the consequence of his acquisition of a Clayton & Howlett extruding machine. Boyd was also experimenting with his ceramic bodies, including procuring clay from 'the Bay of Islands' for fire bricks <span style="font-size: x-small;"><<i>Daily Southern Cross</i> (21 February 1873), p. 3></span> and in 1864 he sought letters patent for the 'exclusive right to prepare Powdered Scoria Stone, and Powdered Scoria Ash for the purpose of being used to compound Mortar, Cement, and Plaster, and in the manufacture of Bricks, Tiles, Drain-pipes, Sanitary-ware, and other ceramic productions.'<span style="font-size: x-small;"><<i>New Zealand Herald</i> (31 August 1864), p. 2></span> By the mid 1870s Boyd's pottery, by the known as The Newton Sanitary Pipe Works <span style="font-size: x-small;"><<i>Daily Southern Cross</i> (9 November 1875), p. 3>, </span>comprised 700 feet (over 200 metres) of sheds, two brick making machines, three pipe machines and three crushing machines all driven by a 12 horse power Robey & Co steam engine <span style="font-size: x-small;"><<i>Southern Cross</i>. (9 November 1875), p. 3>, </span>along with five large circular down draught kilns. The works employed some twelve workers and consumed about £500 worth of coal a year.<br />
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjZ1dNjghT6hWN1bQ0YXXHr0e_1zKtaLKrZnBuN2xTgygZQHDuT1R-qe9bz02uQcVHJE663VNEXdfyI6FOpKLlEjFpCED_e72xFsvQ767pWr8pfAcK-R-bm09JeUo2AMXVpPa84HdhBnzNG/s1600/Screenshot+2015-02-28+12.36.16.png" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="375" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjZ1dNjghT6hWN1bQ0YXXHr0e_1zKtaLKrZnBuN2xTgygZQHDuT1R-qe9bz02uQcVHJE663VNEXdfyI6FOpKLlEjFpCED_e72xFsvQ767pWr8pfAcK-R-bm09JeUo2AMXVpPa84HdhBnzNG/s1600/Screenshot+2015-02-28+12.36.16.png" width="400" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Title block of an advertisement for the Newton Pottery published in the <i>New Zealand Herald </i>(27 June 1883), p. 2</td></tr>
</tbody></table>
The utilitarian nature of his early productions were, in part, supplanted by the production of 'fancy work' including ornamental stands and flower pots. Around 1878 Boyd appears to have imported a number of moulds for vases and, when he issued a <i>Reference price list</i> in 1882, he listed forty two shapes of vases, pots, brackets and pedestals, including a 28cm high 'Grecian vase for pottery decoration' and a 40.6 cm high bust of Shakespeare (priced at ten shillings). Boyd's most prestigious production, known as the 'Garnkirk Wedding Vase', was illustrated as the centrepiece of the title block for his 1883 advertisement in the <i>New Zealand Herald</i>. Designed by the Glasgow architect Alexander 'Greek' Thomson (1817-1875) for display by the Glasgow pottery Ferguson, Miller &Co at the Great Exhibition of 1851, the mould was acquired by another Scottish concern, the <a href="http://glasgowwestaddress.co.uk/1891_Book/Garnkirk_Fire_Clay_Co.htm">Garnkirk Fireclay Co</a> and, sometime in the early 1880s a copy made its way to Auckland; it was one of two models from Garnkirk that are known to have been used by Boyd.<br />
<table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: center;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhRNjl07grvKUlRxqQgoC3YXZcV9LKjUF8BcltphAS3Wqaoja5ACf7qrYYNJ2qiez5Lz0FDdY-EBd4aOmXoA7ef2moAmBdQArpQf09zPrWod2-Sne3K3tnBVx1KRAFtNmGHUNp_T6bNpwyN/s1600/MA_I017401.2000x2000.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="400" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhRNjl07grvKUlRxqQgoC3YXZcV9LKjUF8BcltphAS3Wqaoja5ACf7qrYYNJ2qiez5Lz0FDdY-EBd4aOmXoA7ef2moAmBdQArpQf09zPrWod2-Sne3K3tnBVx1KRAFtNmGHUNp_T6bNpwyN/s1600/MA_I017401.2000x2000.jpg" width="342" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">[Unidentified designer], majolica-glazed earthenware stand made at the Newton Pottery, Auckland (about 1885).<br />
Museum of New Zealand Te Papa Tongarewa, gift of George Boyd (CG00639)</td></tr>
</tbody></table>
Boyd's industry and enterprise was recognised from the start. At the 1865 Dunedin New Zealand exhibition he was awarded an honorary certificate 'for drain pipes and tiles of good manufacture'; and by the time of the 1885 Wellington New Zealand Industrial Exhibition the Newton Pottery was so highly regarded that it was awarded First Prize for ornamental and household pottery. The jurors' observed that:<br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
His fancy table-ware is especially handsome, some of the pitchers and vases on the stand being really beautiful, noticeably so one richly-relieved blue jug. Some copies of Wedgwood, in white on blue ground, are well made; and there is an exquisitely designed fruit stand representing storks supporting a dish [...] a really beautiful exhibit, and one of great value, as proving the existence of a real art-feeling in the manufacture of cheap and common goods.<span style="font-size: x-small;"><New Zealand Industrial Exhibition, 1885, <i>The official record</i> (Wellington: Government Printer, 1886), p. 46></span></blockquote>
Boyd was evidently so gratified by the reception of his wares that he gave four examples to the Colonial Museum. He did not enjoy his success for long; at the end of 1885 he appears to have been diagnosed with a fatal illness and in January 1887 advertised the factory 'to let for a term of years' noting that<br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
The whole of the works are in first-class order, there are immense drying sheds; also steam-engine pipe machinery of every description, brick and tile presses, 2 brick machines and edge runners; also, six kilns of various construction suitable for every class of good. The town water and telephone are laid on to the works. Office, Show-Room, Carpenter's Shop, Stables, and an endless variety of plaster moulds; also common pottery clay in any quantity.<span style="font-size: x-small;"><<i>New Zealand Herald</i> (4 January 1886), p. 1></span></blockquote>
There do not appear to have been any takers for what Boyd described as 'an opportunity seldom to be met with'. He died at his house on Nixon Street on 10 March 1886 aged 61, allegedly instructing his widow, Helen, to destroy 'the endless variety of plaster moulds'<span style="font-size: x-small;"><G Henry, <i>New Zealand pottery: commercial and collectable</i> (Auckland: Reed, 1999), p. 140></span>. Local newspapers lauded him as 'an industrious, persevering man', 'most energetic in prosecuting the local industry with which his name was so long and honourably associated', noting that 'Deceased was a native of Scotland, and much respected for his integrity of character.'<span style="font-size: x-small;"><'Obituary', <i>New Zealand Herald</i> (29 March 1886), p. 13></span><br />
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgHOwhAcoyU_YpI1ONkxflQml15ZY17HMttDpYxyD20snnPQXg0y-q2vdyZbSgdfavdvGDIZDHTgG6DKVzu3jwPmkAzPEHOhVvcjTe-O214rjG1Jgbg3shYqBKJvKU6cioSE19W2U_xBy-j/s1600/IMG_1928.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="640" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgHOwhAcoyU_YpI1ONkxflQml15ZY17HMttDpYxyD20snnPQXg0y-q2vdyZbSgdfavdvGDIZDHTgG6DKVzu3jwPmkAzPEHOhVvcjTe-O214rjG1Jgbg3shYqBKJvKU6cioSE19W2U_xBy-j/s1600/IMG_1928.jpg" width="413" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">[Unidentified designer], cold-painted earthenware urn made at the Newton Pottery (about 1885) <br />
in Albert Park, Auckland. Bequeathed by Helen Boyd. One of the few remaining elements of her bequest of 'outside vases'</td></tr>
</tbody></table>
Helen Boyd died on 30 September 1898 leaving a number of surprisingly generous legacies to the Auckland Institute and Museum and the <a href="http://www.aucklandartgallery.com/the-collection/browse-artwork/166/the-arrival-of-the-maoris-in-new-zealand">Auckland Art Gallery</a>. She also bequeathed 'a large number of outside vases for the Albert Park, and has desired her trustees to expend £1000 in the purchase in Italy, or elsewhere, of statuary, to be placed in the said park' <span style="font-size: x-small;"><'Death of Mrs Helen Boyd: handsome bequests to the city', <i>New Zealand Herald</i>, 1 October 1898, p. 5></span>. This unexpected bequest – today's equivalent in terms of purchasing power would be about $1million – prompted consternation at the Auckland City Council, however, by the end of the year, a sub-committee of the council was formed comprising Boyd's trustees and a handful of the local great and good.<br />
<br />
The committee's initial decision was to split the bequest into four and send to Sydney, London, France and Italy for photographs of appropriate statues. In August 1899, evidently frustrated by a tardy response, the mayor decided to approach the newly formed Auckland Scenery Conservation Society seeking advice; the earlier decision was rescinded and it was resolved to seek expert advice as to the choice of subject from London.<span style="font-size: x-small;"><'Auckland Scenery Conservation Society: meeting of the committee', <i>New Zealand Herald</i> (5 August 1899), p. 5></span> Letters from both the mayor and the Boyd trustees were sent to William Pember Reeves, the New Zealand Agent General in London, requesting him to 'place the matter before some sculptor of note in England (such as E Onslow Ford, RA, 62 Acacia Road, St John's Wood).'<span style="font-size: x-small;"><<i>New Zealand Herald</i> (1 November 1899), p. 6></span> <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edward_Onslow_Ford">Edward Onslow Ford</a> (1852-1901) – his massive <i>St George and the dragon </i>salt cellar is included in the Tate Britain exhibition – seems to have suggested that fewer rather than more statues be acquired and recommended not only that a work by Lucchesi be acquired but also one by the better known sculptor <a href="http://sculpture.gla.ac.uk/view/person.php?id=msib2_1203718199">Alfred Drury</a> (1856-1944). Drury's efforts seem to have gained him a reputation in the colony; in late 1902 – again through Pember Reeves – he was commissioned by the New Zealand premier Richard Seddon, on behalf of the citizens of Wellington, to produce a bronze statue of <a href="http://www.heritage.org.nz/the-list/details/3663">Queen Victoria</a> along with three bronze relief panels to decorate the pedestal. Drury's formalised depiction of the signing of the Treaty of Waitangi, the subject of one of the pedestal panels, was reproduced, unacknowledged, on the <a href="http://www.teara.govt.nz/en/object/36393/second-series-of-banknotes-10-shillings">New Zealand ten shilling note </a>from 1940 to 1967.<span style="font-size: x-small;"><A Lys Baldry, 'A notable sculptor: Alfred Drury ARA', <i>Studio</i>, 37 (1906), pp. 3-18></span><br />
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgBc_gLcbC113skLuSAcEKO_Ph7Jmdbedof96vMZDBRmv9X8lE53D-ajYXbzgdEcA6O4LR749sJWzbc_fgjAh1R7Be-0nr6GNiekasHyA2aYwfwkijbmQvw37o4RdC6LVC7fjI8zd8U_EOz/s1600/IMG_1948.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="640" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgBc_gLcbC113skLuSAcEKO_Ph7Jmdbedof96vMZDBRmv9X8lE53D-ajYXbzgdEcA6O4LR749sJWzbc_fgjAh1R7Be-0nr6GNiekasHyA2aYwfwkijbmQvw37o4RdC6LVC7fjI8zd8U_EOz/s1600/IMG_1948.jpg" width="326" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Alfred Drury (1856-1944), <i>Spring</i> (1902), Auckland Domain, Auckland,<br />
purchased with funds provided by the estate of Helen Boyd. Unidentified, relocated, demounted and unacknowledged.</td></tr>
</tbody></table>
The statues were commissioned with the <i>New Zealand Herald </i> commenting enthusiastically – even if it consistently misspelt Lucchesi as 'Luchessi' – that 'These works of art will be a great adornment to Albert Park'<span style="font-size: x-small;"><'Statuary for Albert Park', <i>New Zealand Herald </i>(29 August 1900), p. 4></span> <i>Love breaking the sword of hate</i> was installed in the park in January 1903 in its present position. Drury's <i>Spring</i> had suffered delays in its making 'owing to an accident to the clay model' but in March 1903 it was reported in the <i>Auckland Star </i>that it was to be' erected in the Albert Park at the end of this week near the entrance at Wellesley-street East<span style="font-size: x-small;"><<i>Auckland Star</i> (25 March 1903), p. 4></span>. No images of the statue in its original location appear to have survived although, curiously, it is still extant, installed anonymously under a pergola at the Wintergarden in the Auckland Domain.<br />
<br />
Both George Boyd and the trustees of Helen Boyd's estate chose to import their forms and models from Britain. Richard Hellaby had the means that enabled him to practice his art overseas, but all made significant contributions to the country's cultural inheritance. It's to our shame that these legacies have been so abused: neglected, damaged, uncared for and ignored. </div>
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Christopher Thompsonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01264481177071819483noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2464874880300858303.post-91410750634232784972015-01-10T13:49:00.000+13:002016-09-30T21:56:24.848+13:00Social design<!--[if gte mso 9]><xml>
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<table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: center;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjhC_gwF87QcmgcmmFSmDk4r5pSYaak-naUaSupNxpB-pTFWIxGpblxvJxNZpGZr0P5qiz5igqbeevLDnML7ANhZZZndgFXC3eqWepz_tpZwVoQj-bkn1wR-IX-x5wQUsPfMxh4TXnom9Kc/s1600/DSCF3083.JPG" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="400" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjhC_gwF87QcmgcmmFSmDk4r5pSYaak-naUaSupNxpB-pTFWIxGpblxvJxNZpGZr0P5qiz5igqbeevLDnML7ANhZZZndgFXC3eqWepz_tpZwVoQj-bkn1wR-IX-x5wQUsPfMxh4TXnom9Kc/s1600/DSCF3083.JPG" width="330" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Post-war British design propaganda: Richard Guyatt (1914-2007), cover for<br />
Alan Jarvis, <i>The things we see: indoors and out</i> (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1947)</td></tr>
</tbody></table>
<span style="font-size: large;">Forming</span> an organisation dedicated to the promotion of an idea,
a cause or an interest, is one of the hallmarks of modern society. In
one sense, these modern social bodies have, in our most recent history, shaped the way we perceive and
understand how we order the world by creating a concept of human,
educational, cultural and intellectual capital in lieu of one based
almost entirely upon the control of land. Ranging from learned bodies such as
the <a href="https://royalsociety.org/">Royal Society of London</a> (1660) to ‘professional’ bodies such as the <a href="http://www.icaew.com/en">Institute of Chartered Accountants in England and Wales</a> (1880) and, closer to home, the <a href="http://dinz.org.nz/">Designers’ Institute of New Zealand </a>(1991) they are, in effect, one of
the more tenuous manifestations of service capitalism.</div>
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<o:p></o:p></div>
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In a 2012 lecture to the Friends of the Hocken Collections – another sort of social body – the photographer Gary Blackman referred to the Dunedin-based Visual Arts
Association, an organisation established in 1951 ‘to encourage the appreciation
of good design’, that he had chaired for a time (<span style="font-size: x-small;">G Blackman, <i>Aspiring to art; the William Mathew Hodgkins
memorial lecture</i> (Dunedin: Friends of the Hocken Collections, 2014), p. 26</span>). The association's formation is telling evidence of the collective way many New Zealanders came to appreciate and understand design, a process that had been either marginalised or ignored in New Zealand's short history of Pākehā culture. Like much else in post-war New Zealand, the design debate was predominantly a British cultural import and it arrived in New Zealand through a variety of media including journals, books, lectures, newsreels and, not least, designed commodities.<br />
<br />
The Visual Arts Association was not the the first locally organised body established in the face of
national indifference to design matters. The earliest – and the sole survivor
of the phenomenon – was the Wellington-domiciled <a href="http://architecture.org.nz/archive/">Architectural Centre</a>.
Formed in 1946 with the utilitarian purpose of providing a support framework
for Wellington-based students of the Auckland School of Architecture, the
centre, almost incidentally, expanded its remit to promote and encourage a debate about how larger
issues of design could be encouraged to flourish in a local context. Between 1948 and 1952 it sponsored the publication of <i><a href="http://nzdesignhistory.blogspot.co.nz/2013/09/29-steps-to-modernity-new-zealand.html">Design Review</a></i>, the first journal in the country to explore the concept of design in a critical fashion. With its
focus on regional modernism and embrace of theory, the centre espoused a
progressive ideology; a number of its key figures – Ernst Plischke springs to
mind – were refugees from Nazism and they understood that design was political.<o:p></o:p></div>
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhE4QhkWKt8BLaZV8n7y-BilCEhMR7Ut97MkjkQkhyMuLUsMRAV61EMce2y8nxsjiWjB18kUjo5SKEHszBMf0gdnTFNuoEMeptHi9j1VI2Yl1qi33za18BpiGlUEvXunVb_EJfeQ7Vyrk9B/s1600/Screenshot+2015-01-08+09.27.08.png" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="640" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhE4QhkWKt8BLaZV8n7y-BilCEhMR7Ut97MkjkQkhyMuLUsMRAV61EMce2y8nxsjiWjB18kUjo5SKEHszBMf0gdnTFNuoEMeptHi9j1VI2Yl1qi33za18BpiGlUEvXunVb_EJfeQ7Vyrk9B/s1600/Screenshot+2015-01-08+09.27.08.png" width="457" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><i>New Zealand Design Review</i>, vol 1, no 1 (April 1948)., p 1<br />
<a href="http://nzetc.victoria.ac.nz/tm/scholarly/Arc01_01DesR-fig-Arc01_01DesRFCo2.html">New Zealand Electronic Text Collection/Te Puhikōtuhi o Aotearoa</a></td></tr>
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In Auckland, such concerns were regarded with a degree of
distrust. In 1949, in the wake of a <a href="http://nzdesignhistory.blogspot.co.uk/2014/09/an-incidental-impetus.html">visit</a> by the British industrial designer
Milner Gray, a group of interested individuals with an interest in design issues associated
with <a href="http://www.creative.auckland.ac.nz/en/about/our-faculty/schools-programmes-and-centres/architecture-and-planning/about-the-school-of-architecture-and-planning.html">Cyril Knight </a>(1891-1972), professor of architecture at the Auckland University
College School of Architecture, formed the Auckland Design Guild, ‘an association providing for the exchange
of ideas on the arts and sciences connected with design’ <span style="font-size: 10.0pt;">(</span><span style="font-size: x-small;">‘Pledge to combat shoddiness’, <i>New Zealand Free Lance</i> (27 July 1949</span>), p. 9). Knight, an
Australian who had been appointed to the school in 1924, had conservative
rather than modernist inclinations, a tendency reflected in the archaic
designation of the body as a ‘guild’. The guild’s existence was fleeting; it
failed to survive the year. One former, architectural, member later recalled it
as ‘too theoretical’, explaining that ‘considerable time was devoted to ruling
out any commercial exhibition of members’ work’ (<span style="font-size: x-small;">P
Parsons, ‘The postwar development of industrial design in New Zealand’, <i>New Zealand Manufacturer</i>, 18:1 (October
1965), p. 68</span>). In fact, a surfeit of theory was probably the least cause of the guild's failure. It was more probable that, like many of his academic contemporaries in Britain, that Knight - no theoretician – objected to the guild being used to provide commercial enterprise with a veneer of objective respectability; it was too difficult to reconcile arts and crafts romanticism with the pragmatics of growing a business.<o:p></o:p></div>
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhb-aha6ZldZoT9bwL4X6NKj2Uwn5f6WyX9e96EDn-UM8coVkb1TCo9DVL7VZHK0mv4AAMy8b2HgEu-QLEf1uuCx7gdg6M58DHSpr8Vp7rzTvJ61Vmd09KPEVmhOnZawP1BAfpyoIKa7TzQ/s1600/DSCF3077.JPG" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="300" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhb-aha6ZldZoT9bwL4X6NKj2Uwn5f6WyX9e96EDn-UM8coVkb1TCo9DVL7VZHK0mv4AAMy8b2HgEu-QLEf1uuCx7gdg6M58DHSpr8Vp7rzTvJ61Vmd09KPEVmhOnZawP1BAfpyoIKa7TzQ/s1600/DSCF3077.JPG" width="400" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Unidentified photographer, 'Modern room setting at Dunedin Public Library, 1953'.<br />
From G Blackman, <i>Aspiring to art: the William Mathew Hodgkins memorial lecture 2012</i><br />
(Dunedin: Friends of the Hocken Collections, 2012)</td></tr>
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The Visual Arts Association was formed as a consequence of two meetings convened by the Adult Education Department of
the University of Otago and its first chair was Dr Edward Murphy, lecturer in
design at the School of Home Science. Its first pamphlet declared aspirationally
that ‘the terms of reference of the Visual Arts Association are very similar to
those of the Council of Industrial Design (CoID) of Great Britain, even though the
association is a voluntary body’. However, where the CoID was <a href="http://hansard.millbanksystems.com/commons/1944/dec/19/industrial-design-appointment-of-council">charged by Parliament</a> ‘to promote by all practical means the improvement of design in the
products of British industry’, the Dunedin association was restricted to embellishing the
Lecture Hall of the Dunedin Public Library with, as Newman recalls, ‘a room
setting furnished with a range of [imported] objects selected from local shops’. The furniture, though, was New Zealand made although, looking at the photographic evidence, much of it it was based on designs pirated from Australian and United Kingdom prototypes (<span style="font-size: x-small;">T Esplin, ‘Visual Arts Society’, <i>The Press</i> (15 May 1962), Supplement on design in industry, p. 4</span>). As Blackman relates, the association's ambitions were not matched by the reality of it being a small, university-based, organisation and it 'soon broadened its concerns to include current visual arts and crafts and undertook a wide-ranging programme of lectures, panel discussions exhibitions and films. The association was wound up in 1968. <o:p></o:p></div>
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhrAWwEfkg_FJKCw8UJjue9Tu82rl8cVWvpyK4isCD2nka0tFpCopkB0gans3IL8FnAyNR9Tsloe5xGg8mtPpMZWuH9HXvfV4DLVgPjJrhGRYKhjLTFD82QBbPvCMvdXq1mN1LgyJEcR9uK/s1600/Screenshot+2015-01-05+19.00.56.png" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="465" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhrAWwEfkg_FJKCw8UJjue9Tu82rl8cVWvpyK4isCD2nka0tFpCopkB0gans3IL8FnAyNR9Tsloe5xGg8mtPpMZWuH9HXvfV4DLVgPjJrhGRYKhjLTFD82QBbPvCMvdXq1mN1LgyJEcR9uK/s1600/Screenshot+2015-01-05+19.00.56.png" width="640" /></a></td></tr>
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Unidentified photographer, 'Exterior of the Design Centre, Haymarket, [London], 1958'.<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: center;">
<a href="http://www.gordonrussellmuseum.org/">Gordon Russell Design Museum</a></div>
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Probably the most ambitious of the mid-twentieth century New Zealand design promotion bodies was the Christchurch-based Design Association
of New Zealand (DANZ). In July 1957 Roger Lascelles (1928-), a self-described Christchurch
‘foreign and intercolonial buying agent’ – recently returned
from Britain and impressed by the CoID's recently opened London 'shop front', the Design Centre – had a letter published in <i>Design</i>,
the house magazine of the CoID:<br />
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgFlHouv403eogETDuCx7c0ygWVOAIyoIXORsFJJhI_XB6z3Qb1nI5DXLqFKZELRMLlopE9orN38ZbbJ-XJguSLLmbTetVZck5NwMcOeribapWwv6BYeHjTiK1O_R6_y9DiiOlesQw3MhzV/s1600/Screenshot+2015-01-07+11.06.31.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgFlHouv403eogETDuCx7c0ygWVOAIyoIXORsFJJhI_XB6z3Qb1nI5DXLqFKZELRMLlopE9orN38ZbbJ-XJguSLLmbTetVZck5NwMcOeribapWwv6BYeHjTiK1O_R6_y9DiiOlesQw3MhzV/s1600/Screenshot+2015-01-07+11.06.31.jpg" width="300" /></a></div>
By December 1959, Lascelles – who was well-connected in
<a href="http://www.ccoba.com/membership/search/recordview.php?id=2-1148">Christchurch social circles</a> – had begun organising for the creation of a similar facility in New Zealand, albeit on a smaller scale. Alerted to these moves and
responding to enquiries received from the CoID concerning Lascelles’ status,
the Department of Industries and Commerce (DoIC) interviewed him, reporting that:</div>
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
Mr Lascelles is very keen about the subject of industrial
design and appears to be well informed. He is full of enthusiasm and could, I
think, do some useful work in making the subject more generally known in New
Zealand, provided his group consists of responsible and more mature people who
could guide him; perhaps they might even have to restrain him (<span style="font-size: x-small;">Archives New Zealand IC W1926 57/1/6 vol 1 box 1797,
Memorandum from H Larsen to W Sutch, 25 January 1960</span>). </blockquote>
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Seemingly unaware that the DoIC had
been investigating the idea of a local design council since the
election of the second Labour administration in 1957, Lascelles, as ‘honorary
secretary pro tem’ of the association began soliciting national interest in the setting up ‘a Design Organisation similar to, but on a more
modest scale than the Council of Industrial Design in London’. The association claimed twenty 'founders': seven architects (including <a href="http://www.architecture-archive.auckland.ac.nz/docs/block-digital/2009-07-Block-Digital-Beaven%20Guide.pdf">Peter Beaven</a>, <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Miles_Warren">Miles Warren</a> and <a href="http://www.teara.govt.nz/en/biographies/5p14/pascoe-arnold-paul">Paul Pascoe</a>); four 'designers' (including John Simpson, a British craft silversmith); three solicitors; two engineers and one printer (<a href="http://www.teara.govt.nz/en/biographies/4b23/bensemann-leo-vernon">Leo Bensemann</a>), an importer (Lascelles) and a journalist. By June 1960,
although Lascelles had subsequently returned to London, a small committee under
the guidance of Simpson, who was professor of fine art at the University
of Canterbury, had developed the text for a
pamphlet explaining the aspirational aims and ambitions of the society.</div>
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<o:p></o:p></div>
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj7ER9AJFsbvAcQSTOY02uGoBleRjEC7oSdIDeDQdV_d5_Xs4vEID4MkIZgXSXEIZzrLCrpYiqcNaYF9wup_N1z52eMG95rJSbeNBzJPoukwAXocJb7rg40Cmh613WYGYUkyW9SsG52IrfA/s1600/DANZ.jpeg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="400" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj7ER9AJFsbvAcQSTOY02uGoBleRjEC7oSdIDeDQdV_d5_Xs4vEID4MkIZgXSXEIZzrLCrpYiqcNaYF9wup_N1z52eMG95rJSbeNBzJPoukwAXocJb7rg40Cmh613WYGYUkyW9SsG52IrfA/s1600/DANZ.jpeg" width="258" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Title page of the prospectus for the Design Association of New Zealand (1960)<br />
National Library of New Zealand/Te Puna Mātauranga o Aotearoa</td></tr>
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The association’s main object, it asserted, was ‘the encouragement of Good
Design in every sphere of life’, positing that ‘Good Design is a matter of
national importance and that it is imperative for New Zealand to have, now, its
own properly constituted Design Association supported by public funds though
independent of government direction’ (<span style="font-size: x-small;">Archives
New Zealand IC W1926 57/1/6 vol 1 box 1797, Letter from A Hearn to W Sutch, 24
June 1960</span>). There was an undoubted spirit of enterprise driving the
members of the association and by the end of 1961 they had contacted a number of
like-minded individuals and organisations throughout the country and were in
the throes of organising one of the earlier design exhibitions to be held in
the country. Opening on 15 May 1962 and displayed in the less than salubrious Canterbury Society of Arts premises in Durham Street,
Christchurch, the exhibition was launched with a speech from the associate
minister of trade and industry and accompanied by a gracious address from the
governor general who was not present (both texts were drafted by the DoIC). While no catalogue was produced, the <i>Press</i> printed a six page supplement,
paid for by advertisers: the <a href="http://nzdesignhistory.blogspot.co.uk/search/label/PDL%20Industries%20Ltd">PDL Industries Ltd</a> advertisement occupied the entirety
of page one <span style="font-size: 10.0pt;">(</span><span style="font-size: x-small;">‘The <i>Press</i> supplement on design in
industry’, <i>Press</i> (15 May 1962</span>). The exhibition attracted 8,700 visitors, a number that exceeded even the Association's best hopes, but it was a unique event and by 1965 it seems to have effectively dissolved, albeit after some of its office holders had led rancorous attacks on the DoIC in respect of its proposals to establish a design promotion body in New Zealand.<o:p></o:p></div>
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi3EytfE0SMf3mHCKLZTXu1QbBuwlaQLbOzhDiAlrxhf7eoi9G93wn4MPPSWdbiABFT4cnrGDDiMcvxdspxeLvrTvE3FvSS7CV2bFU3eSPIVOyfcPZ57eSTZQOw72PU4QV31hi7Ex-Z3Qo2/s1600/Screenshot+2015-01-06+10.02.06.png" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="400" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi3EytfE0SMf3mHCKLZTXu1QbBuwlaQLbOzhDiAlrxhf7eoi9G93wn4MPPSWdbiABFT4cnrGDDiMcvxdspxeLvrTvE3FvSS7CV2bFU3eSPIVOyfcPZ57eSTZQOw72PU4QV31hi7Ex-Z3Qo2/s1600/Screenshot+2015-01-06+10.02.06.png" width="310" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">How to press the buttons of the electorate: 'A greater range and variety in consumer goods' and 'Board of Trade to advise on imports and industrial matters'.<br />
Consumerism at the heart of National party 'non-design' advertising for the 1949 general election in the <i>Otago Daily Times</i>.<br />
<a href="http://www.electionads.org.nz/national-party-1949-general-election-25/">New Zealand Election Ads</a></td></tr>
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The DANZ's vision of a private organisation
undertaking similar design promotional activities as the CoID, funded by the taxpayer but ‘independent of government direction’, was a somewhat ingenuous reading of the situation, one that misunderstood not only the nature and function of the ostensible prototype and
its relationship with government but also the changing economic order as
Britain shifted its trade from its former empire to Europe. It’s
tempting to think that the primarily aesthetic understanding of design espoused
by the DANZ was more a consequence of residual Anglophilia in establishment Christchurch – a concern with the awfulness of popular taste
was one of the hallmarks of the British modernist debate – but there seems to
have been something more to the argument. Since its introduction in 1938, the <a href="http://www.rbnz.govt.nz/research_and_publications/reserve_bank_bulletin/1981/1981mar44_2importlicensinginnz.pdf">import licensing regime </a>adopted by the 1935-49 Labour administration had been subjected to prolonged attack from not only
the opposition National party but also from retailers and architects who
argued that it denied consumers access to well-designed British commodities. In fact the problem of restrictions on choice lay more with the cosy arrangements entered into between British manufacturers and those responsible for selecting what was imported into New Zealand under the licensing regime as well as with New Zealand's membership of the Sterling Area. Lascelles’ occupation as an indent agent - albeit one working primarily with sports equipment - and the argumentative 'government interference' tone adopted by the DANZ, which would become increasingly evident, suggests that one of the association's more tacit purposes was ideological. Moreover, its understanding of design seems to have been inclined toward the superficial with a focus on aesthetics and 'taste', rather than seeing it as a process encompassing production, mediation and consumption.<o:p></o:p></div>
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<table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: center;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgnaFr0yyYOqRaVuisW9CKjoRccNNq7PwZ4ohOltJfobU70o4sxaV_hvX-cx4yxhlGhyATbrr8YWCgHzcvqZvcV-3fL16Uk6MQ_RgrbJaQHUUDMVYbmApTx8ebnFNxVjMUavOV8ERxlKrh5/s1600/DSCF0125+Croppe_bright.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="640" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgnaFr0yyYOqRaVuisW9CKjoRccNNq7PwZ4ohOltJfobU70o4sxaV_hvX-cx4yxhlGhyATbrr8YWCgHzcvqZvcV-3fL16Uk6MQ_RgrbJaQHUUDMVYbmApTx8ebnFNxVjMUavOV8ERxlKrh5/s1600/DSCF0125+Croppe_bright.jpg" width="368" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Unidentified designer, poster for a series of lectures by Colin Barrie, director of the Industrial Design Council of Australia (1962).<br />
Archives New Zealand/Te Rua Mahara o te K<span style="font-family: "helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif; font-size: x-small;">āwanatanga, Wellington (IC W1926 Box 67 57/1/6 pt 2)</span></td></tr>
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Lascelles wasn't the only individual to contact the CoID 'expressing enthusiasm for its aims and interest in establishing something similar in New Zealand.' (<span style="font-size: x-small;">Archives New Zealand IC W1926 57/1/6 vol 1 box 1797, Letter from M Browne to W Sutch, 11 January 1960</span>). Jolyon Saunders, a newly appointed lecturer in design at the <a href="http://www.reynoldmacpherson.ac.nz/publications/Elam%20IJEM99a.pdf">Elam School of Fine Arts</a> – which had come under the control of the Auckland University College in 1950 – had also been in touch with the CoID in his capacity as secretary of a new design group, the New Zealand Society of Industrial Designers (NZSID), being set up in Auckland. A colleague of Saunders at Elam, <a href="http://www.aucklandartgallery.com/the-collection/browse-artists/1933/robert-ellis">Robert Ellis</a>, in his capacity as chair of the new society, had also contacted the DoIC indicating that the new body was in the process of obtaining legal status (<span style="font-size: x-small;">Archives New Zealand IC W1926 57/1/6 vol 1 box 1797, Letter from R Ellis to W Sutch, 23 </span><span style="font-size: x-small;">November 1959</span>). The NZSID differed from the other design societies in being intended as a 'professional institute safeguarding design, designers and the public and compiling registers, etc.' Notwithstanding these ambitions, the new society foundered, only to be revived two years later when the British arts educator <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paul_Beadle">Paul Beadle</a> (1917-1992) was appointed head of Elam in 1961 and, on his arrival in 1962, elected as the re-titled president of the hitherto quiescent NZSID. Prior to taking up his appointment in Auckland, Beadle had been head of art schools in Newcastle (NSW) and Adelaide (SA) in Australia and appears to have had dealings with the Industrial Design Council of Australia. In Auckland, Beadle - who had been admitted to membership of the British Society of Industrial Artists in 1947 – placed the revived NZSID – which had around twenty members – onto a war footing with a programme of lectures, an exhibition, 'Designed in New Zealand' (May 1963), talks with manufacturers including the New Zealand Manufacturers' Federation, and consumer organisations such as the Auckland District Consumer Committee. He also approached DANZ seeking not only financial support for his agenda of professionalising the practice of design but also backing for a forthcoming battle: Beadle had identified the DoIC generally and its permanent secretary Dr W B Sutch specifically as the enemy.<br />
<table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: center;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgYa-iHnfaELTA_wxN6CvQztkBodQaZdymnynJKrK06SIC1NF4JK0gCzsRL3JlSv6TQS-9XS0uAzJh7j84XcfPBX9scHtlaTyxaANLhfPnbotKYwnPLfI4_GOPkCKDq7Kn3kzZQvlIjAryW/s1600/Home&Bldg.1.6.1963p53(i).jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="400" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgYa-iHnfaELTA_wxN6CvQztkBodQaZdymnynJKrK06SIC1NF4JK0gCzsRL3JlSv6TQS-9XS0uAzJh7j84XcfPBX9scHtlaTyxaANLhfPnbotKYwnPLfI4_GOPkCKDq7Kn3kzZQvlIjAryW/s1600/Home&Bldg.1.6.1963p53(i).jpg" width="391" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Rod Harvey, Setting designed by John Crichton for the NZSID's May 1963 exhibition 'Designed in New Zealand'.<br />
From <i>Home and Building</i> (June 1963)</td></tr>
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It's unclear what activated Beadle's animus, but it was uncharacteristic; Reynold Macpherson <a href="http://www.reynoldmacpherson.ac.nz/publications/Elam%20IJEM99a.pdf">describes</a> him as a 'gentle liberal humanist'. As has been <a href="http://nzdesignhistory.blogspot.co.nz/2014/02/sutchs-dream-background-to-new-zealand.html">observed previously</a> on this blog, as early as 1958 the DoIC had formed a study team to investigate the workings of design councils around the world, with a focus on those that had been established in Britain, Australia, Canada and Denmark. Although the National party won the 1960 election and its ministers of trade and industry despised Sutch and sought his removal, they also sanctioned the DoIC's design council proposals to the point that subsequently they claimed credit for its invention. All this notwithstanding, in September 1963, in an effort to avoid departmental scrutiny of the exchange, the executive committee of the NZSID instructed Saunders, still its honorary secretary, to write privately to the parliamentary undersecretary for industries and commerce on behalf of 'the the only professional organisation of practicing designers in this country'. Saunders reiterated the society's vehement objections to 'a proposal to establish a Council of Industrial Design under direct departmental control'. Although there had been in fact no such proposal from the DoIC, Saunders asserted that while the society, along with the DANZ, supported the establishment of a design council, it must be 'autonomous', alleging, without supporting proof, that 'An autonomous Industrial Design Council was established in Australia recently on a very small budget, and has had a tremendous impact on Australian industry'. He then asserted a series of mistruths that 'no informed design organisation in the country supports the existing proposals for a Council of Industrial Design and the manufacturers themselves want nothing to do with them in their present form' (<span style="font-size: x-small;">Archives New Zealand IC W1926 57/1/6 vol 3, Letter from J Saunders to L Adams-Schneider, 13 Sept</span><span style="font-size: x-small;">ember 1963</span>). Notwithstanding the heated rhetoric, support for the NZSID's position was far from the unanimity it claimed, even within the DANZ; its then president, Paul Pascoe, for example, seems to have considerable misgivings about the association's backing of the NZSID and contacted Sutch expressing his support for the DoIC proposals.<br />
<br />
In fact both the NZSID and elements of the DANZ appear to have been confused as to the function of a design promotion body - such as the CoID or the IDCA, both of which had been developed within the appropriate ministries of trade: they were not formed to impose state regulation on design or designers or to determine an approved standard or type of design. In a briefing note to the minister, Sutch opined:<br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
The successful operation of a design council would lead to a developing understanding of good design, but basically the objectives of establishing a design council are to ensure ways by which the best design practices may be encouraged in industry, and educational facilities improved as necessary, to provide industry with adequate numbers of suitably trained designers. In other words, the main justification for the work of a design council is economic, leading to a better use of the country's resources, a decreasing pressure for imported manufactured goods, and greater opportunities for export trade in such products </blockquote>
As Sutch observed to the minister, design councils were not just about aesthetics. (<span style="font-size: x-small;">Archives New Zealand IC W1926 57/1/6 vol 3, Memorandum from W Sutch to Minister of Industries and Commerce, 20 Sept</span><span style="font-size: x-small;">ember 1963</span>). As it was, Saunder's letter was the last shot in Beadle's war. In March 1964 Sutch briefed the parliamentary undersecretary for trade and industry noting that the DoIC had been in contact with 'Professor Beadle of Auckland who on various occasions expressed publicly his strong disagreement with the [proposed council]. He has since privately told the department that he will not obstruct the establishment of the Institute (<i>sic</i>). Both Beadle and Saunders resigned from the executive of the NZSID, being replaced by Keith Mosheim and D J Haynes respectively, both practitioners working in the private sector. Mosheim wrote to the minister requesting that it should be represented on the proposed council but when the council was, finally, brought into being in 1968 no members of either the NZSID or the DANZ were appointed. The NZSID survived as a practitioner body until 1988 when its members voted on a change of constitution and name. In 1991 the re-jigged organisation merged with the New Zealand Association of Interior Designers, emerging as the <a href="http://dinz.org.nz/about">Designers Institute of New Zealand</a>.<br />
<br />
New Zealand first became a part of the world economic system at some point near the end of the eighteenth century. Like most colonial constructs, it exported products that would be transformed elsewhere, usually in Britain and, employing Keith Sinclair's memorable expression, 'imported its standards of living'. Peter Gibbons, noting the endurance of this long-standing colonial relationship, has elaborated that 'Even when local production of goods has been promoted and encouraged, at times subsidized, such goods, based upon designs and technologies developed elsewhere in the world system, are seen as substitutes for the 'real thing'. [...] People want goods from elsewhere, preferably with designer labels, not what is homegrown' (<span style="font-size: x-small;">P Gibbons, 'The far side of the search for identity: reconsidering New Zealand history', <i>New Zealand Journal of History</i>, 37:1 (2003), 38-47, p. 42</span>). The post war design societies were a collective response in an attempt to deal with what can, in retrospect, be identified as a cultural concept imported from Britain. The way that the societies processed this newly translated notion of design varied: by adapting it to the local condition, as the Architectural Centre was to do; by ignoring it, as the short-lived Auckland Design Guild did; by using it to define a newly 'professionalised' occupation as the NZSID sought to do; or as the DANZ aspired to do, by using it in an attempt to reinforce a colonial status quo.<br />
<br />
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<!--EndFragment--><br />Christopher Thompsonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01264481177071819483noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2464874880300858303.post-31147919244184569542014-12-25T22:25:00.002+13:002017-03-30T22:10:05.351+13:00Designs on flags<table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: center;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhPcSKn8F_lO_dfBiB0khe35wWKbuFaFoxTtbmE7tsB3RzreeqAG0kAI0ktps9OkZAVgEyB1OtIlWIMzx3hOqMrwzNyWxru27C9OF0mEHF_yiuBEgnIg0v8jE8hLqFi2mOAr1J2qpI6ERzL/s1600/Screenshot+2014-12-03+13.40.48.png" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="314" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhPcSKn8F_lO_dfBiB0khe35wWKbuFaFoxTtbmE7tsB3RzreeqAG0kAI0ktps9OkZAVgEyB1OtIlWIMzx3hOqMrwzNyWxru27C9OF0mEHF_yiuBEgnIg0v8jE8hLqFi2mOAr1J2qpI6ERzL/s1600/Screenshot+2014-12-03+13.40.48.png" width="640" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-family: "helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">The New Zealand ensign. Although this image is what is currently provided by the responsible ministry, the flag colours are, more correctly, red (Pantone 186C, websafe RGB 204-0-0), blue (Pantone 280C, websafe RGB 0-0-102) and white.</span><br />
<a href="http://www.mch.govt.nz/files/NZ%20Flag%20-%20Large.jpg"><span style="font-family: "helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">Manat<span style="font-size: x-small;">ū</span></span><span style="font-family: "helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;"> Taonga/Ministry for Culture and Heritage</span></a></td></tr>
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<span style="font-family: "helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: large;">In</span> March 2014, in a move presumably designed to divert public attention from more pressing issues of politics such as the state of the economy or the ethical performance of his administration, John Key, the New Zealand prime minister, announced that should his conservative National party win the forthcoming general election, a referendum would be held on changing the country's flag. In a set piece speech Key <a href="http://www.beehive.govt.nz/speech/speech-victoria-university-0">declared</a>: '<span style="background-color: white; color: #282828; line-height: 20.719999313354492px;">It's my belief, and I think one increasingly shared by many New Zealanders, that the design of the New Zealand flag symbolises a colonial and post-colonial era whose time has passed'. Key's move found some editorial support amongst the media, with the conservative <i>New Zealand Herald </i><a href="http://www.nzherald.co.nz/nz/news/article.cfm?c_id=1&objectid=11193861">opining</a> that it didn't go far enough, but there seems to be little popular support for a change, particularly among the elderly and those adhering to the traditional right. </span></span><span style="background-color: white;"><span style="color: #282828; font-family: "helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;"><span style="line-height: 20.719999313354492px;">The National party went on to win the election and two legally binding referendums are to be held. The first, which will select a new design, at the end of 2015; and the second, which will pit the endorsed new design against the </span></span></span><span style="color: #282828; font-family: "helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;"><span style="line-height: 20.719999313354492px;">existing flag, early in 2016.</span></span><br />
<span style="background-color: white;"><span style="color: #282828; font-family: "helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;"><span style="line-height: 20.719999313354492px;"><br /></span></span></span>
<span style="background-color: white;"><span style="color: #282828; font-family: "helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;"><span style="line-height: 20.719999313354492px;">Changing brands is a conventional corporate strategy. The thinking goes that if a corporate image – as conveyed by a company logo, house style or a name – is somehow or another tainted by scandal, or even if it's just perceived as old fashioned, then a complete makeover is a certain way of ensuring that the smear of dodgy business or the blemish of decrepitude won't endanger profits and that shareholders and managers can carry on reaping the benefits of the business. Banks, for example, regularly seek to detoxify their image by transmogrifying their logos, house styles and </span></span></span><span style="background-color: white; color: #282828; font-family: "helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif; line-height: 20.719999313354492px;">names,</span><span style="background-color: white; color: #282828; font-family: "helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif; line-height: 20.719999313354492px;"> so it should come as no surprise that as a former bank employee, Mr Key – probably the first prime minister of New Zealand to conceive of his position in primarily corporate terms – should seek to 'update' the country's corporate image. For Key, as the CEO of New Zealand Ltd, changing the flag is merely a branding exercise, a bit of flag waving, which he'll pass by the chairman (the governor general), the board (cabinet) and submit to a general meeting of the shareholders (the electorate) for confirmation.</span><br />
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<tr><td><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjAMpfUoZX818E_SqqwDN9A-ajR2PbNwq9HxtaXaSSN4sWIKhqlbPXJl-s6zkbzkVnWziWfntvIJT9dINUXdWWKvIX-ug6QcFhU3mmUXLAuy-EaAC_z_geMEb-bGH8HYjrZ_rP2JBTYxq26/s1600/Screenshot+2014-12-04+10.35.30.png" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="424" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjAMpfUoZX818E_SqqwDN9A-ajR2PbNwq9HxtaXaSSN4sWIKhqlbPXJl-s6zkbzkVnWziWfntvIJT9dINUXdWWKvIX-ug6QcFhU3mmUXLAuy-EaAC_z_geMEb-bGH8HYjrZ_rP2JBTYxq26/s1600/Screenshot+2014-12-04+10.35.30.png" width="640" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption"><span style="font-family: "helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">Flag of the<span style="background-color: white; color: #252525; font-family: sans-serif; line-height: 21px;"> <i>Vereenigde Oost-Indische Compagnie</i> (Dutch East India Company).<br />Himasaram, <a href="http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Flag_of_the_Dutch_East_India_Company.svg">Wikimedia</a></span></span></td></tr>
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<span style="background-color: white;"><span style="font-family: "helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;"><span style="line-height: 20.719999313354492px;"><span style="color: #282828;">Despite the fact that the first flag most probably seen in New Zealand waters was that of a corporate e</span>ntity – the </span></span></span><i style="font-family: 'Helvetica Neue', Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; text-align: center;">Vereenigde Oost-Indische Compagnie</i><span style="font-family: "helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif; text-align: center;"> (</span><span style="background-color: white; font-family: "helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;"><span style="line-height: 20.719999313354492px;">Dutch East India Company), history is no friend of corporations because, aside from recording events, it also q<span style="color: #282828;">uestions and interrogates those same moments from a perspective that, in some instances, corporate entities might regard as being 'off-message'. Key's casual attitude to history is perhaps best exemplified by his recent, apparently somewhat ingenuous, <a href="http://www.stuff.co.nz/national/politics/63377474/New-Zealand-settled-peacefully-PM">observation</a> </span></span></span><span style="background-color: white; color: #282828; font-family: "helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;"><span style="line-height: 20.719999313354492px;">that 'New Zealand was settled peacefully by the British'. Key's pronouncement, one that he has refused to resile from, is patently untrue, even if one ignores the corporate-driven land wars of the 1860s and 70s. As Ann Else has remarked, there's a long-standing local tradition of vested interests indulging in 'a widespread and deliberate political attempt to reshape [...] "the presence of the past" in this country, in order to serve political ends' <span style="font-size: x-small;"><A Else, 'History lessons: the public history you get when you're not getting any public history' in <i>Going public: the changing face of New Zealand history</i>, ed. by B Dalley and J Phillips (Auckland: Auckland University Press, 2001), 123-140, p. 135></span>.</span></span><br />
<span style="background-color: white; color: #282828; font-family: "helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;"><span style="line-height: 20.719999313354492px;"><br /></span></span>
<span style="background-color: white;"><span style="color: #282828; font-family: "helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;"><span style="line-height: 20.719999313354492px;">Flags should not be understood simply as ephemeral brands or tokens of national identity, but rather as visual symbols that people use to communicate with themselves and others. They are portable, material, objects that allow identified groups to recognise, embrace and defy others; they mark out particular individuals; they define and assert </span></span></span><span style="color: #282828; font-family: "helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;"><span style="line-height: 20.719999313354492px;">allegiances and commitments. They're used for religious, political, military and peaceable purposes. Some flags convey a sort of visual whakapapa, a genealogy if you like, a sort of history, emblazoned with emblems and signs vested with specific significance or meaning. They have become emotional rallying points in the way that they have come to define nations, cultural and religious adherences and patriotic allegiances. Indeed, these pieces of coloured cloth, marked out with signs and symbols, even when faded and tattered, are more than just brands requiring an update, every now and then, in order to conduct business as usual.</span></span><br />
<span style="color: #282828; font-family: "helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;"><span style="line-height: 20.719999313354492px;"><br /></span></span>
<br />
<h3>
<span style="color: #282828; font-family: "helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif; line-height: 20.719999313354492px;">A short genealogy of flags in New Zealand</span></h3>
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhTu_neF5n2KfXewU62mFStaizKducXxBCb1ldIFlrfmWKu_xxqAtH70C1gM9UMoeP3clOucKpwNhNWScRcuQ_V09Td0X0xN-4PqRZzZ8f2GOTIHemDWHrjTxUuu6pUv_l2uBcr86rUqzRi/s1600/Tasman.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="427" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhTu_neF5n2KfXewU62mFStaizKducXxBCb1ldIFlrfmWKu_xxqAtH70C1gM9UMoeP3clOucKpwNhNWScRcuQ_V09Td0X0xN-4PqRZzZ8f2GOTIHemDWHrjTxUuu6pUv_l2uBcr86rUqzRi/s1600/Tasman.jpg" width="640" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-family: "helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;"> [Isaac Gilsemans], <i>De Moordenaars Baay vertoont zich aldus, als gy daer in op 15 vadem ten anker legt.</i> (A view of the Murderers' Bay when you are anchored there at fifteen fathoms), [1642].<br /><a href="http://natlib.govt.nz/records/23220299?search%5Bi%5D%5Bcentury%5D=1600&search%5Bi%5D%5Bdecade%5D=1640&search%5Bi%5D%5Bsubject%5D=Waka&search%5Bil%5D%5Bcategory%5D=Images&search%5Bpath%5D=items">Alexander Turnbull Library (PUBL-0086-021)</a></span></td></tr>
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<span style="color: #282828; font-family: "helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;"><span style="line-height: 20.719999313354492px;">Flags have a relatively short history in New Zealand. Pre-European </span></span><span style="font-family: "helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">Māori had no use for flags although manu tukutuku (kites) were used for <a href="http://www.teara.govt.nz/en/kites-and-manu-tukutuku/page-1">communication purposes</a> in much the same way that other cultures employed flags. Abel Janszoon Tasman's ships, the <i>Heemskerck</i> and <i>Zeehaen</i> sighted New Zealand on 13 December 1642 and while Tasman does not appear to have held a flag raising ceremony, as he had earlier in Australia, there is little doubt that the first flag flown in the country was <span style="text-align: center;">the sixteenth century Netherlands red white and blue tricolour, possibly defaced by the Dutch East India Company's 'VOC' initials, even though Gilsemans' presumably contemporaneous drawing doesn't show the modification. It is not known how </span></span><span style="font-family: "helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">Māori reacted to the Dutch flag but it's entirely possible they conceived of it merely as decoration. Margaret Orwell however <a href="http://teaohou.natlib.govt.nz/journals/teaohou/issue/Mao50TeA/c21.html">suggests</a> that Māori '</span><span style="font-family: inherit;">were at once attracted to [flags], for they had a keen interest in signs and symbols, and quickly learnt how much importance their Pakeha visitors attached to these bright cloths</span><span style="font-family: "tahoma" , "verdana" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif; font-size: 15px;">.'</span><span style="font-family: "helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;"> </span><br />
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjKZadCEWIYM1y_gCNhNSFVAtO10GDRHAyrHbz4rRVKQq-Xzr8lN5tsRfU8ZNv29Ta4zA_BNnTCqc_XeDU42zuH8KIe9341T_YwwP6_BZzWQnJYy2h4LMic3R_ojNuJGVyo4X3G_WH9CuJ6/s1600/Screenshot+2014-12-04+10.31.02.png" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="356" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjKZadCEWIYM1y_gCNhNSFVAtO10GDRHAyrHbz4rRVKQq-Xzr8lN5tsRfU8ZNv29Ta4zA_BNnTCqc_XeDU42zuH8KIe9341T_YwwP6_BZzWQnJYy2h4LMic3R_ojNuJGVyo4X3G_WH9CuJ6/s1600/Screenshot+2014-12-04+10.31.02.png" width="640" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-family: "helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">British red ensign (1707-1801).<br />Wangi, <a href="http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:British-Red-Ensign-1707.svg">Wikimedia</a></span></td></tr>
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<span style="font-family: "helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif; text-align: center;">The next </span><span style="font-family: "helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">Pākehā</span><span style="font-family: "helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;"> intrusion into New Zealand, </span><span style="font-family: "helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif; text-align: center;">James Cook's ship HMB Endeavour, flew a 1707-1801 version of the British red ensign, a flag that, in a modified form (the jack in the canton was augmented in 1801 with a red saltire), remains one of the New Zealand's current official flags as long as it is defaced in accordance with the provisions of the <a href="http://www.legislation.govt.nz/act/public/1981/0047/latest/whole.html#DLM52246">Flags, Emblems and Names Protection Act, 1981</a>. It also, not coincidentally, forms the basis of the modern flags of <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flag_of_Tonga">Tonga</a> (1879) and <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flag_of_Samoa">Samoa</a> (1949). Cook circumnavigated the country <a href="http://www.teara.govt.nz/en/flags/page-1">raising the British union jack</a> in various parts of the country, claiming it for the British crown. It was essentially a meaningless action being ignored both by </span><span style="font-family: "helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">Māori</span><span style="font-family: "helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;"> and, ultimately, the British government. But if any flag had an impact on </span><span style="font-family: "helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">Māori</span><span style="font-family: "helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;"> culture it was most probably Cook's red ensign: the abundance of red – kōkōwai in Te Reo – indicated high status in Polynesian cultures.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif; text-align: center;">A number of flag designs emerged during the 1830s, as it became increasingly evident that the islands forming what Europeans described as New Zealand required a flag to identify the increasing number of ships owned by their inhabitants. Kerryn Pollock in her essay on flags in Te Ara <a href="http://www.teara.govt.nz/en/flags/page-1">suggests</a> that the first was devised in 1831 by <a href="http://www.teara.govt.nz/en/1966/mcdonnell-thomas">Thomas McDonnell</a>, a retired Royal Navy officer and captain of the <i>Sir George Murray</i> barque, in response to a requirement by British colonial authorities that all ships </span><span style="font-family: "helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">entering Port Jackson display a recognised national flag.</span><br />
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgvydwbZEnAHJZnRGxLhvFezRU9Jplf8jxM90yXMyD_aZ6f4ah9ofp3ceDBNV92qEiPnBfdBOY4y1EoBiOxO3bhd0pN1wm30Vs2o0m45mq0gtzDW4leQlLcp4QYxrE8quLgHdhlmXcBaiCI/s1600/Screenshot+2014-12-06+12.34.27.png" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="108" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgvydwbZEnAHJZnRGxLhvFezRU9Jplf8jxM90yXMyD_aZ6f4ah9ofp3ceDBNV92qEiPnBfdBOY4y1EoBiOxO3bhd0pN1wm30Vs2o0m45mq0gtzDW4leQlLcp4QYxrE8quLgHdhlmXcBaiCI/s1600/Screenshot+2014-12-06+12.34.27.png" width="320" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-family: "helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">'Domestic intelligence', <i>Sydney Herald</i> (22 August 1831), p. 4</span></td></tr>
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<span style="font-family: "helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">McDonnell's flag – a symmetric red cross on a white field with a blue canton on the upper hoist charged with a white crescent – seems neither to have been recognised by the authorities (Pollock suggests his ship was seized) nor, more significantly, adopted by other ships from Aotearoa. In 1833 The <i>Sydney Gazette</i> noted that the brigantine <i><a href="http://www.hokianga.net.nz/hokianga/horeke/horeke_shipyard.htm">New Zealander</a></i> was sailing under a 'black flag bearing three red daggers' having earlier been <a href="http://trove.nla.gov.au/ndp/del/article/2210390?searchTerm=1833%20zealand%20flag&searchLimits=">seized</a> by port authorities as it was regarded as sailing under a false British flag and lacking documentation.</span><br />
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><span style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi0_GVVgoXF1QIzCXjDvFj3_PZmNOg3ZIJnRTp-bM1XJgmIZ7eJZNLU20x4RkVGnrDlVGM2XHQt9SR-QnqiFNHAsZ8-z2jLPm308WAj1sKpI3aMI7XY5H-teruv6ZANVlmpcmFQcGMUXLP8/s1600/Screenshot+2014-12-08+09.51.55.png" /></span></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-family: "helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;"><i>Sydney Gazette and New South Wales Advertiser</i> (07 May 1833), p. 2</span></td></tr>
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<span style="font-family: "helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">In an attempt to resolve this and other issues relating to British interests in New Zealand and acting on the instructions of the Colonial Office in London, Richard Bourke, governor of New South Wales, appointed a British representative, <a href="http://www.teara.govt.nz/en/biographies/1b54/busby-james">James Busby</a>, whom he despatched to Waitangi in May 1833. Among Busby's tasks was a resolution of the flag issue. The British proposed three possible designs developed by the Admiralty (the agency of state controlling flags) in collaboration with the College of Arms (the branch of the royal household responsible for heraldic matters) in London. They included a striking flag reminiscent of not only the <a href="https://www.blogger.com/"><span id="goog_1045459440"></span>British East India Company<span id="goog_1045459441"></span></a> and the revolutionary American <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grand_Union_Flag#mediaviewer/File:Grand_Union_Flag.svg">Grand Union</a> flags but also, more romantically, that of the <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flag_of_Hawaii">Kingdom of Hawai'i</a> and of newly independent <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flag_of_Greece">Greece</a> (adopted in 1822); it comprised four horizontal white bars on a blue field with a union jack in the canton.</span><br />
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjGS5HIXbzB6MuBQw8jVOIb83wuL4Kg_C20pJq-fnu5kjgtppvTU20sLD0rNMrg5AxIfDDYVUqYq-BQIqYMqR4MMBrMjegUqX6Qj6P3acv1a7U86ksIEGssiNOI2bkskZGmcLJr3W3VnQWd/s1600/Screenshot+2014-12-08+11.49.43.png" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="315" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjGS5HIXbzB6MuBQw8jVOIb83wuL4Kg_C20pJq-fnu5kjgtppvTU20sLD0rNMrg5AxIfDDYVUqYq-BQIqYMqR4MMBrMjegUqX6Qj6P3acv1a7U86ksIEGssiNOI2bkskZGmcLJr3W3VnQWd/s1600/Screenshot+2014-12-08+11.49.43.png" width="640" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-family: "helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">One of three British proposals for a New Zealand ensign (1835).<br /> António Martins, <a href="http://www.crwflags.com/fotw/images/n/nz!1834.gif">Flags of the World</a></span></td></tr>
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<span style="font-family: "helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">In 1835 Busby submitted the three proposals to a selection of North Island</span><span style="font-family: "helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;"> rangatira who following a brief consultation selected the flag promoted by members of the Church Missionary Society (CMS), since 1814 the dominant </span><span style="font-family: "helvetica"; font-size: small;">Pākehā presence in the country </span><span style="font-size: x-small;"><span style="font-family: "helvetica";"><W Yate, </span><i style="font-family: 'Helvetica Neue', Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; text-align: center;">An account of New Zealand and the formation and progress of the Church Missionary Society's mission in the northern island</i><span style="font-family: "helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif; text-align: center;"> (London: Seeley and Burnside, 1835), p. 29></span></span><span style="font-family: "helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif; font-size: 13px; text-align: center;">. </span><span style="font-family: "helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif; text-align: center;">The rapid process of choosing the flag was recorded by the CMS carpenter and catechist Henry Miles Pilley:</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif; text-align: center;">We had a grand day on Thursday, March 13. A man-of-war ship came in, bringing three flags with her, for the chiefs to decide by vote which should be the standard of the nation, as New Zealand was about to be placed on the scale of nations. Mr Bushy (<i>sic</i>), the British resident, provided a splendid dinner for the Europeans, which were from fifty to sixty in number, chiefly consisting of the captains and other officers of the man-of-war, captains of merchant ships, the missionaries and respectable settlers; the natives were also provided with plenty of boiled flour, which they esteem the greatest luxury. When the flag was hoisted, twenty-one guns from the man-of-war were fired, the natives joining in one continual shout of acclamations. The day was an important one.<span style="font-size: x-small;"><H Pilley, <i>The New Zealand missionary </i>(Cheltenham: William Wight, 1838), p. 27></span>.</span></blockquote>
<span style="font-family: "helvetica"; font-size: small;">The selected flag comprised the St George's cross of England with the arms of the soon-to-be-established Anglican diocese of Australia in the canton. The ensign is known today as He Whataputanga or the <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_Tribes_of_New_Zealand">flag of the United Tribes of New Zealand</a>. While the missionaries were undoubtedly delighted by the choice of a flag invested with Anglican symbolism, the rangatira were more probably persuaded by the CMS-promoted flag having a higher proportion of red than the other two options. Moreover it wasn't so </span><span style="font-family: "helvetica";">brazenly</span><span style="font-family: "helvetica"; font-size: small;"> deferential to Britain. The decision on the flag foreshadowed the <a href="http://www.nzhistory.net.nz/culture/declaration-of-independence-taming-the-frontier">declaration of the independence of New Zealand </a>made by a loose confederation of the same rangatira some months later.</span><br />
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><img border="0" height="640" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg6bV4zUOfldHc4gt3EbBPz3ErC57bWKk1mAsysLlDyw2xSraBgm_dUwhCS8G9xQjJoEUyFt_OH7O7k0Ffp2L4uqFfLWc1gGAO1Xt9seRavID2dGhzyH4MkntETPEGSDn8MthX2Sxb8kClP/s1600/Screenshot+2014-12-08+10.43.18.png" width="417" /></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-family: "helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;"><i>The standard of New Zealand</i> from William Yate, <i>An account of New Zealand and the formation and progress of the Church Missionary Society's mission in the northern island</i> (London: Seeley and Burnside, 1835), p. 22. </span><span style="font-family: "helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif; font-size: x-small;">The flag of the United Tribes of New Zealand was perceived by the society's local representatives as a clear expression of</span><span style="font-family: "helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: x-small;"> </span></span><span style="text-align: start;"><span style="font-size: x-small;"><span style="font-family: "helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">Māori embrace of Christian symbolism. </span></span></span><br />
<a href="https://archive.org/stream/anaccountnewzea01yategoog#page/n0/mode/2up" style="font-family: 'Helvetica Neue', Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">University of California</a></td></tr>
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<span style="font-family: "helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif; text-align: center;">Busby's effort in resolving the flag issue was conveyed to the Colonial Office and in August 1835, having passed the final imprimatur of the Admiralty, the agreed ensign was officially <a href="http://trove.nla.gov.au/ndp/del/article/42008890?searchTerm=flag%20governor%20zealand%20183&searchLimits=l-decade=183">gazetted</a> making it possible for New Zealand ships to trade with British possessions, including not only Australia but also India. By flagging its own ships New Zealand made the first move into being a trading country, rather than one that just loaded its raw materials onto foreign vessels for others to process and sell. Adopting a flag asserted a level of economic as well as political independence but the process of 'selection' also confirmed New Zealand's entanglement in the amorphous web of the expanding British empire.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif; text-align: center;">In February 1840, following the signing of the Treaty of Waitangi between </span><span style="font-family: "helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">Māori and a representative of the British crown, the flag of the United Tribes of New Zealand was supplanted by the various flags of the United Kingdom, primarily the British civil ensign, the union jack. </span><span style="font-family: "helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif; text-align: center;">Throughout the British empire flags were not only important symbols of power but also had significant functional purposes. The harbours in both Sydney and Auckland, amongst other colonial outposts, were marked by a series of manned flagstaffs which not only identified British hegemony but in the absence of alternative and reliable lines of communication also provided their administrators with a primitive form of radar. News of an arriving vessel up to around 50kms away could be signalled to colonial authorities in a matter of minutes, allowing them to not only determine the intent of the arriving vessel but also to enable their response. Until 1876, when New Zealand was <a href="http://www.theprow.org.nz/enterprise/telegraph-made-world-of-difference/#.VIZU_YvEPdk">connected</a> by telegraph cable to the rest of the world, flags not only announced the arrival of orders, information and migrants but also, in the form of the union jack, reinforced a sense of British hegemony over the country and its sea lanes. </span><br />
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhhyjr350IC-94VcHvFbe9bWfg_hAegPBklLanGgm9r6Fyuokk_p-NiyOMlasQA8Ot1aeKiGMKgcxl3t7TBNNqnbNegadWsRtQxXgjtQsf7XIBAa59yUmAJmxZtE9QlGNTbzxeClH7N7JCd/s1600/Screenshot+2014-12-10+10.10.01.png" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="640" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhhyjr350IC-94VcHvFbe9bWfg_hAegPBklLanGgm9r6Fyuokk_p-NiyOMlasQA8Ot1aeKiGMKgcxl3t7TBNNqnbNegadWsRtQxXgjtQsf7XIBAa59yUmAJmxZtE9QlGNTbzxeClH7N7JCd/s1600/Screenshot+2014-12-10+10.10.01.png" width="476" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><span style="background-color: white; font-family: "helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">After P Walsh<i> The old Colours of the 58th Regiment, at present hanging in the Supreme Court, Auckland</i>. The 58th (Rutlandshire) Regiment of Foot was sent to New Zealand in 1845 and remained there until 1858. The regimental colours were <a href="http://www.aucklandmuseum.com/collections-and-library/collections/about-our-collections/conservation-projects/58th-regimental-flag">presented</a> to the people of New Zealand in 1860. Reproduced in </span><i style="background-color: white; font-family: 'Helvetica Neue', Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Auckland Weekly News</i><span style="background-color: white; font-family: "helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;"> (28 December 1900).</span><br />
<span style="background-color: white; font-family: "helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif; text-align: left;"><a href="http://www.aucklandcity.govt.nz/dbtw-wpd/exec/dbtwpub.dll?BU=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.aucklandcity.govt.nz%2Fdbtw-wpd%2FHeritageImages%2Findex.htm&AC=QBE_QUERY&TN=heritageimages&QF0=ID&NP=4&RF=HIORecord&QI0=AWNS-19001228-6-4">Sir George Grey Special Collections, Auckland Libraries (AWNS-19001228-6-4)</a></span></td></tr>
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<span style="font-family: "helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;"><span style="text-align: center;">In a subtly different way, flags – ng</span></span><span style="font-family: "helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif; text-align: center;">ā</span><span style="font-family: "helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;"><span style="text-align: center;"> haki or </span></span><span style="font-family: "helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;"><span style="text-align: center;">ng</span></span><span style="font-family: "helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif; text-align: center;">ā kara </span><span style="font-family: "helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;"><span style="text-align: center;">– became rallying points for Māori as they were progressively stripped of their lands by an expanding inflow of </span></span><span style="font-family: "helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">Pākehā</span><span style="font-family: "helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;"> settlers. B</span><span style="font-family: "helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif; text-align: center;">etween 1844 and 1845, Hōne Heke, a Ngāpuhi rangatira, ordered the cutting down of the British flagpole at Kororāreka four times; the final felling saw British troops involved in fighting with and against various northern iwi. Flags were key elements on both sides of the Great New Zealand War as North Island </span><span style="font-family: "helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif; text-align: center;">Māori sought to protect their land from the predatory grasp of </span><span style="font-family: "helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">Pākehā capitalism</span><span style="font-family: "helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif; text-align: center;"> </span><span style="font-family: "helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif; text-align: center;">between 1860 and 1872.</span><br />
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjIcV2YnKaNbhD8mxLkOl2v-I18fitt5mRq-XUS0dQ9u1lNAKCU_OsmxzRAIsM_1QGrWCNMDeLVLjgxOK7m4Zis39oB9Cn0lEtYIfrSjqhUkXPYKb3xDyqNVG-1lUEfTPkpMCwWDNNO7V0h/s1600/MA_I080827.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="262" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjIcV2YnKaNbhD8mxLkOl2v-I18fitt5mRq-XUS0dQ9u1lNAKCU_OsmxzRAIsM_1QGrWCNMDeLVLjgxOK7m4Zis39oB9Cn0lEtYIfrSjqhUkXPYKb3xDyqNVG-1lUEfTPkpMCwWDNNO7V0h/s1600/MA_I080827.jpg" width="640" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><span style="background-color: white; font-family: "helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif; font-size: x-small;">P Reveirs, <i>[</i><span style="text-align: start;"><i>Māori rebel flag] No. 5</i>, [c. 1865]. A watercolour rendering </span></span><span style="color: #333333; font-family: "verdana" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif; font-size: 10px; line-height: 10px;"> </span><span style="color: #333333; line-height: 10px;"><span style="font-family: "helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif; font-size: x-small;">of <a href="http://artsonline2.tki.org.nz/resources/units/visual_culture/representations_of_aotearoa/te_porere.php">the flag</a> of Te Kooti Arikirangi Te Turuki (c 1832-93), a Māori rebel leader and prophet from Ngati Maru, a hapu (subtribe) of the Rongowhakaata (tribal group). Judith Binney <a href="http://www.teara.govt.nz/en/zoomify/33977/te-kootis-flag">asserts</a> the crescent symbolised a new beginning; the cross stood for the fighting Archangel Gabriel; and 'Wi' was a recurring holy day.</span></span><span style="background-color: white; font-family: "helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif; font-size: x-small;"><span style="text-align: start;"><br /><a href="http://collections.tepapa.govt.nz/object/400096">Museum of New Zealand Te Papa Tongarewa (1992-0035-1631-12A)</a></span></span></td></tr>
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<span style="font-family: "helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">Whereas Pākehā flags deployed in the conflict were coded by tradition to conform with military and civil regulations, </span><span style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-family: "helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">Māori approached the design of flags in a way that was both innovative and creative, drawing upon an appropriated lexicon of re-interpreted symbols and words to develop a new vexillogical vocabulary. But it was the rigid rules of the British Admiralty that devised the flag that for the twentieth century was used by New Zealanders to mark their land and identify themselves. </span></span></div>
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgQ3jOY35zKwhnYjM8WWg48y49RMLTaydowvZqfw_7nwgcTcsQFc6aDFHiWbv2inD-WAkmDiul9fNEN_AIRl9SPUh3RGtS_EBjvgFae9pHy-CGKWlkmNxfP22a-F28BuVa6WwS0SexL9pt6/s1600/Screenshot+2014-12-17+10.00.32.png" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="322" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgQ3jOY35zKwhnYjM8WWg48y49RMLTaydowvZqfw_7nwgcTcsQFc6aDFHiWbv2inD-WAkmDiul9fNEN_AIRl9SPUh3RGtS_EBjvgFae9pHy-CGKWlkmNxfP22a-F28BuVa6WwS0SexL9pt6/s1600/Screenshot+2014-12-17+10.00.32.png" width="640" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-family: "helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif; font-size: x-small;">Modern rendering of the flag deployed by Tauranga Māori fighting British troops at <a href="http://blog.tepapa.govt.nz/2014/04/28/the-new-zealand-wars-150th-anniversary-of-pukehinahina-the-battle-of-gate-pa/">Pukehinahina (Gate Pā)</a> in 1864. The flag was deployed strategically in the battle to mislead attacking British troops.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: "helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif; font-size: x-small;"><a href="http://tauranga.kete.net.nz/en/battle_of_gate_pa_1864">Tauranga City Libraries </a></span></td></tr>
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<span style="font-family: "helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif; text-align: center;">New Zealand's modest blue ensign devolved from the British blue ensign. Until 1864, when the Royal Navy was reorganised, the blue ensign was the flag of its <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Admiral_(Royal_Navy)">Blue Squadron</a>. Following reform, it was allocated to those ships either in government service or commanded by a reservist officer. In 1865 a regulation was promulgated requiring ships under the control of colonial governments to fly a blue ensign defaced by the badge or coat of arms of the appropriate colony. As the colony had no badge, let alone a coat of arms, the governor, George Gray, ordered that the flag be defaced with the letters NZ in red fimbriated in white. Merchant vessels registered in New Zealand were to fly a red ensign, defaced with the letters NZ in white. Lettering on flags was a relatively recent phenomenon that in the mid-nineteenth century was still associated in British official thinking with the <a href="http://www.loeser.us/flags/revolution.html">American revolution</a>. The lettered badge defacing the blue ensign was replaced in 1869 by four red five-pointed stars – representing the Southern Cross constellation – on either a white ground, or with the stars fimbriated in white, on a blue ground. While the union jack remained the national flag, the locally inflected blue ensign became used increasingly to identify New Zealand as a distinct political identity. Notwithstanding Admiralty objections, this situation became regularised in 1902 when the monarch approved the New Zealand Ensign Act, 1901 which established the defaced blue ensign as a distinctive flag for New Zealand. While not an inspired example of design, it's now the <a href="http://nzflag.wordpress.com/">fifteenth oldest</a> national ensign currently flying in the world.</span></div>
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><span style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="460" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiSSsd9ACS-V0xlnn0tFAefytO1X8BSkSaLRHbXA9uzsXnKID9hS6tIb8cCcqWmdDhnVdU_264D_Fkkj1zcrj0CP0I9AkBN78Bd_vkH1R5Vvx6v8UpEVdpdGBjf5R0aQSbVWR2J_qWEOWmf/s1600/Screenshot+2014-12-22+15.39.10.png" width="640" /></span></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-size: x-small;"><span style="font-family: "helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">F J Grant, <i>Māori reception during the tour of the Prince of Wales, Arawa Park, Rotorua</i> (1920).</span></span><br />
<span style="font-size: x-small;"><span style="font-family: "helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">Alexander Turnbull Library (PA Coll-7081-03)</span></span></td></tr>
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<span style="font-family: "helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif; text-align: center;">The blue ensign, the symbol of the settlers, did not find much popularity amongst </span><span style="font-family: "helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif; text-align: center;">Māori who, if accepting of </span><span style="font-family: "helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">Pākehā hegemony, flew a red ensign defaced with their iwi name. Others, over the course of the twentieth century, either continued to fly the flag of the United Tribes of New Zealand or developed their own flags, drawing upon a variety of symbols and meanings. The </span><span style="font-family: "helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">Kīngitanga, for example, used a variety of flags and very early on regularised their use, effectively developing a tradition of <a href="http://www.teara.govt.nz/en/artwork/37842/kingitanga-flags-potatau-te-wherowheros-flag">reign flags</a>. The current king Tuheitia's flag, which bears <a href="http://nzdesignhistory.blogspot.co.nz/2014/07/te-paki-o-matariki-heralding-design.html">Te Paki o Matariki</a>, the coat of arms of the Kīngitanga, was first <a href="http://www.radionz.co.nz/news/national/13462/maori-king's-new-flag-unveiled">raised</a> in 2009. </span><span style="font-family: "helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">Other </span><span style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-family: "helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">Māori independence movements, such as Kotahitanga, also deployed flags as '<a href="http://www.teara.govt.nz/en/nga-haki-maori-and-flags">symbols of mana and to show allegiances</a>'. It was not until 1990 that a single flag representing </span></span><span style="font-family: "helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif; text-align: center;">Māori was proposed. It</span><span style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-family: "helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;"> followed from two decades of activism as</span></span><span style="font-family: "helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif; text-align: center;"> </span><span style="font-family: "helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif; text-align: center;">Māori </span><span style="font-family: "helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif; text-align: center;">sought to reclaim that which they had been denuded of by</span><span style="font-family: "helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif; text-align: center;"> </span><span style="font-family: "helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">Pākehā.</span></div>
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<tr><td><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiNi3wG-wymnMj0fDh7nxnQwMxMi-PxeBCxlK66FLaYPlq-06xzpJHxSTuZsSwzHH3FlRxTG-mkVBdKO_T_UOp2exGKbFzeHjADcB59HePVcy_U9vrg2d4gN5jDPW0g8CPABXVcJndMcD6K/s1600/Screenshot+2014-12-22+16.12.24.png" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="370" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiNi3wG-wymnMj0fDh7nxnQwMxMi-PxeBCxlK66FLaYPlq-06xzpJHxSTuZsSwzHH3FlRxTG-mkVBdKO_T_UOp2exGKbFzeHjADcB59HePVcy_U9vrg2d4gN5jDPW0g8CPABXVcJndMcD6K/s1600/Screenshot+2014-12-22+16.12.24.png" width="640" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption"><span style="font-family: "helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">Hiraina Marsden, Jan Smith and Linda Munn, Tino Rangatiratanga flag (1990).<br /><a href="https://flagspot.net/flags/nz_mao.html#tino">James Dignan and António Martins, Flags of the World</a></span></td></tr>
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<span style="font-family: "helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif; text-align: center;">Designed by Hiraina Marsden, Jan Smith and Linda Munn, the Tino Rangatiratanga </span><span style="font-family: "helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif; text-align: center;">flag </span><span style="font-family: "helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif; text-align: center;">– the name translates loosely as 'absolute sovereignty' – was the winner of a nationwide competition to find a flag that represents all </span><span style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-family: "helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">Māori. Although it employs traditional colours and references traditional symbolism, the flag's design – based on a magnification of traditional kowhaiwhai (rafter decoration) – is very much of its time. As a consequence of coalition negotiations between the National party and the </span></span><span style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-family: "helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">Māori party, the flag was accorded <a href="http://www.mch.govt.nz/nz-identity-heritage/flags/national-m%C4%81ori-flag">official status </a> as the national </span></span><span style="font-family: "helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif; text-align: center;">Māori flag </span><span style="font-family: "helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif; text-align: center;">in December 2009.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif; text-align: center;">Changing the flag</span></h3>
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<span style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-family: "helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">Key's proposed referendum on changing the New Zealand flag is a step toward realising an ambition long held by a number of New Zealanders to replace the current blue ensign with a flag that symbolises how they feel about their country. There have been </span></span><span style="font-family: "helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;"><a href="http://www.nzflag.com/default.cfm">numerous proposals</a> over the years. Most of these have tended to be vexillogical nightmares: <a href="http://anzac-a1.deviantart.com/art/New-Zealand-Flag-2012-Anzac-A1-Design-335269422">bizarre conflations of colours</a>, <a href="http://www.newsfixboard.com/t3139-new-zealand-to-hold-referendum-on-new-and-more-original-looking-national-flag">overly literal symbols</a>, <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Koru_Flag">visionary chimeras</a> and, somewhat embarrassingly, a new phase of </span><span style="font-family: "helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;"><a href="http://idealog.co.nz/design/2014/02/michael-smythe-floats-abstract-koru-flag-design">Pākehā appropriation</a> of </span><span style="font-family: "helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif; text-align: center;">Māori iconography, albeit at a remove</span><span style="font-family: "helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">. Announcing his decision to hold a referendum, Key indicated that his flag of preference was a white 'silver fern' leaf on a black field, not coincidentally, an image most commonly associated with the All Blacks, the New Zealand national rugby football union team.</span></div>
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgJ6edps2RJReleryj7tXJwcEWTIkZpnF09k22_eVvIC7j0n7OYXg7EsrWF9-LvmFRJG3HhiW7Nv3br8UwjMAQebnnmSaPmSs9nj5LQEAsQvA39dL8S8usz_7uQBUl4ddfrc_1KQKXdYHsS/s1600/Screenshot+2014-12-18+10.22.27.png" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="428" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgJ6edps2RJReleryj7tXJwcEWTIkZpnF09k22_eVvIC7j0n7OYXg7EsrWF9-LvmFRJG3HhiW7Nv3br8UwjMAQebnnmSaPmSs9nj5LQEAsQvA39dL8S8usz_7uQBUl4ddfrc_1KQKXdYHsS/s1600/Screenshot+2014-12-18+10.22.27.png" width="640" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-family: "helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;"><a href="http://tvnz.co.nz/national-news/silver-fern-not-right-flag-designer-5819850">Dave Clark</a>, Silver fern design for the New Zealand Rugby Football Union (1991). One of many proposal for a black flag defaced with silver fern frond. Some versions place the words 'New Zealand' underneath the frond.<br /><a href="https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Silver_fern_flag.svg">Wikimedia</a></span></td></tr>
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<span style="font-family: "helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">The first official use of the fern as a symbol of New Zealand seems to have occurred in 1869 when the British War Office issued a campaign medal to British and colonial servicemen and Kūpapa involved in</span><span style="font-family: "helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;"> fighting those Māori resisting settler incursion in Taranaki and Waikato during the New Zealand Land Wars of 1860-1866. The fern pattern did not appear on the medal itself – the reserve was designed with a conventional victory laurel wreath – but on the arms of the ribbon suspender. Under the circumstances it might be considered somewhat ironic that a fern – the first symbol used to identify the country by its colonising power – has been appropriated by those ostensibly seeking to remove the symbols of the country's 'colonial and post-colonial era'.</span></div>
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiv1fmbn2AIIDl6862LqNquge9Mjs72dO_u3Qp-WWhfUWZgh2tQDnugLpXq5LsFzx3H0JW8jurJ1oAeZzme0UuZJvehQYyXk0ixbaEzTdjUk67ke8wEdpysHhpAzSFtK8Up5Rsfmiq2EELg/s1600/Screenshot+2016-06-06+16.06.05.png" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="400" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiv1fmbn2AIIDl6862LqNquge9Mjs72dO_u3Qp-WWhfUWZgh2tQDnugLpXq5LsFzx3H0JW8jurJ1oAeZzme0UuZJvehQYyXk0ixbaEzTdjUk67ke8wEdpysHhpAzSFtK8Up5Rsfmiq2EELg/s400/Screenshot+2016-06-06+16.06.05.png" width="201" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Unidentified designer for the British War Office, New Zealand medal (1869).<br />
<a href="http://medals.nzdf.mil.nz/category/h/h1.html">New Zealand Defence Force Te Ope Kātua o Aotearoa</a></td></tr>
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<span style="font-family: "helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">The silver fern first entered the New Zealand state's iconography when it was paired with an oak branch to form a wreath on the obverse of the New Zealand Long and Efficient Service Medal which was first issued in 1887 to veterans with sixteen years service in the New Zealand Militia. The medal was probably designed by its first manufacturer, the Prussian-born Wellington-based goldsmith and jeweller Siegfried Kohn. Kohn had earlier designed the medal awarded at the New Zealand Industrial Exhibition (Wellington, 1885) which also depicted fern fronds, albeit those of the button fern, rather than the silver fern (</span><i style="font-family: 'helvetica neue', arial, helvetica, sans-serif;">Pellaea rotundifolia</i><span style="font-family: "helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;"> in preference to </span><i style="font-family: 'helvetica neue', arial, helvetica, sans-serif;">Cyathea dealbata).</i><span style="font-family: "helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;"> </span></div>
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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Siegfried Kohn (1854-19?), New Zealand Industrial Exhibition silver medal (1885).<br />
National Museum of New Zealand/Te Papa Tongarewa, bequest of Mrs Mary H Quin, 1956 (PC000254)</td></tr>
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<span style="font-family: "helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">A later military medal, the </span><a href="http://www.birkenheadrsa.com/medals-details.php?MedalNumber=690" style="font-family: 'Helvetica Neue', Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">New Zealand Volunteer Service Medal</a><span style="font-family: "helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;"> of 1902 depicted a full wreath of silver fern fronds on its reverse. The military application of these depictions suggest not only that the fern wreath was seen as a local inflection of the laurel wreath given to the victorious in </span><span style="font-family: "helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">antiquity, but it also ties in with the nascent nationalism evident in the colony from the 1880s.</span></div>
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgfNMHOjD8OFJDLFmXzKsKKx47SHoQk8boa5WrGyyAw3EavYX_5TXOJCmxLYKwf0t8PJ2T15ILUR6GwFKIq0LXv_n1wcf4XjNASE3emacUhmzsnR-bqmNtDnS3uFLkIsoEIlVXte_c1FF2o/s1600/MA_I171347.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="400" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgfNMHOjD8OFJDLFmXzKsKKx47SHoQk8boa5WrGyyAw3EavYX_5TXOJCmxLYKwf0t8PJ2T15ILUR6GwFKIq0LXv_n1wcf4XjNASE3emacUhmzsnR-bqmNtDnS3uFLkIsoEIlVXte_c1FF2o/s1600/MA_I171347.jpg" width="225" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Siegfried Kohn (1854-19?), New Zealand Long and Efficient Service Medal (1887).<br />
<span style="background-color: white;"><span style="font-size: x-small;"><span style="font-family: "helvetica neue" , "helvetica" , "arial" , sans-serif; line-height: 20px;">National Museum of New Zealand Te Papa Tongarewa, gift of Mr Dollimore, 1956</span><span style="font-family: "helvetica neue" , "helvetica" , "arial" , sans-serif; line-height: 20px;"> (NU006152)</span></span></span></td></tr>
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<span style="font-family: "helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif; text-align: center;">By the time of the Second World War the silver fern had acquired significant military associations, being used in the design of military <a href="http://www.nzmuseums.co.nz/account/3021/object/73120/Badge_military">cap badges</a>, <a href="http://www.nzhistory.net.nz/media/photo/badge-hmnzs-philomel">ship's badges</a> of the newly formed Royal New Zealand Navy and a range of other naval, military and <a href="http://www.teara.govt.nz/en/1966/24242/police-badge">police</a> applications. Its medallic apotheosis came with the New Zealand War Service Medal, designed by the academic John Cawte Beaglehole and the artist Mervyn Taylor in 1947. Beaglehole recounted that the Labour 'Cabinet says it doesn't like the Army's idea, what Cabinet wants is a fern-leaf like on the All Black's jersey, & Peter [Fraser, the prime minister] asks me to arrange it accordingly.' <span style="font-size: x-small;"><Letter from J C Beaglehole to Janet Paul, 10 July 1947, cited in T Beaglehole, <i>A life of J C Beaglehole</i> (Wellington: VUP, 2006), p. 300></span>.</span><br />
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiZfShLUM-Jnk2AmSGpiIa2aon1XuHfNhdOQaEXaxgEd5jxuCa-Gq7ViwZYFI5FxJD5b2xYS_z1x4f-5ncWZry7i957_Tn3_VSt71sTHO8YmKOz3IGJF6vadrwZThqhUZYOkONWOTJf7Vpq/s1600/Screenshot+2014-12-18+13.43.00.png" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="400" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiZfShLUM-Jnk2AmSGpiIa2aon1XuHfNhdOQaEXaxgEd5jxuCa-Gq7ViwZYFI5FxJD5b2xYS_z1x4f-5ncWZry7i957_Tn3_VSt71sTHO8YmKOz3IGJF6vadrwZThqhUZYOkONWOTJf7Vpq/s1600/Screenshot+2014-12-18+13.43.00.png" width="226" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-family: "helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">John Cawte Beaglehole (1901-1971) and Mervyn Taylor (1906-1964), Reverse of the New Zealand War Service Medal, [1947].</span><br />
<span style="font-family: "helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif; font-size: x-small;"><a href="http://medals.nzdf.mil.nz/category/c/c1.html">New Zealand Defence Force Te Ope Kātua o Aotearoa</a></span></td></tr>
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<span style="font-family: "helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif; text-align: center;">The national rugby football union team, the All Blacks, adopted the silver fern frond on a black ground logo in 1893, six years after its appearance on the Long and Efficient Service Medal. While rugby union football might well be regarded as 'the national game' by its supporters, it is, like the military, an activity that's largely the preserve of young males, with an emphasis on disciplined physicality. Unsurprisingly, the military's symbols leached, probably quite subliminally, into those of sporting teams, and vice versa. </span></div>
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg5NmRwKuFg1uxAtI2Yy-m0TFUxs9kd53qpItMpLXeJYItRlrGgd1g15BdKNPzr-LcVlZ0-zn5vu_fPBn3BYVx1Qs-wVPsIJo09k2EZjkKE3O8W5ZhngUz0xXTP_yFVIMrfTB6dgPkMxd9u/s1600/Screenshot+2014-12-20+15.12.30.png" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="444" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg5NmRwKuFg1uxAtI2Yy-m0TFUxs9kd53qpItMpLXeJYItRlrGgd1g15BdKNPzr-LcVlZ0-zn5vu_fPBn3BYVx1Qs-wVPsIJo09k2EZjkKE3O8W5ZhngUz0xXTP_yFVIMrfTB6dgPkMxd9u/s1600/Screenshot+2014-12-20+15.12.30.png" width="640" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-family: "helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">E Kelley, <i>All Black rugby team that toured the United Kingdom in 1905-6</i>. </span><br />
<span style="font-family: "helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">Making New Zealand: negatives and prints from the Making New Zealand Centennial collection.<br /><a href="http://natlib.govt.nz/records/23186793">Alexander Turnbull Library (MNZ-1035-1/4F)</a></span></td></tr>
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<span style="font-family: "helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif; text-align: center;">Both the New Zealand military and the New Zealand Rugby Football Union (NZRFU) are fundamentally conservative organisations and the innocuous, if somewhat laudatory, quality of the fern leaf emblem, one untarnished by history and devoid of any significant pre-</span><span style="font-family: "helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">association, would have appealed to the mindset of those responsible for choosing its differentiating emblems. In recent years, as the game of rugby has lost its amateur status, the All Black livery has been turned by the NZRFU </span><span style="font-family: "helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">(now known as Rugby New Zealand) </span><span style="font-family: "helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">into a legally-protected </span><a href="http://dna.co.nz/our-work/case-studies/nz-rugby-all-blacks-ip-creation-brand-strategy-engagement-management-systems/" style="font-family: 'Helvetica Neue', Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">corporate logo</a><span style="font-family: "helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">. However, although a version of the silver fern was trademarked in 1991, the increasingly corporatised NZRFU's attempts to control the image have foundered in litigation with the assistant commissioner of trademarks </span><a href="http://www.nzherald.co.nz/nz/news/article.cfm?c_id=1&objectid=10359885" style="font-family: 'Helvetica Neue', Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">ruling</a><span style="font-family: "helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;"> in 2008 that the silver fern was 'very broad in scope and had a low level of inherent distinctiveness'.</span></div>
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEisC_6XWEe23fjZNGeSDpwonR4QDSD3tCYkA4nvwbKzhs0jYRiCVvz-_1H-7kmLksPUACL8Hd5PjYfxhIHmITTPRIesnMCJ5SoDNnn8pjVOTghuIhEm9XymRcwwdOBESMcE83W83yYAASGy/s1600/IMG_1902.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="255" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEisC_6XWEe23fjZNGeSDpwonR4QDSD3tCYkA4nvwbKzhs0jYRiCVvz-_1H-7kmLksPUACL8Hd5PjYfxhIHmITTPRIesnMCJ5SoDNnn8pjVOTghuIhEm9XymRcwwdOBESMcE83W83yYAASGy/s1600/IMG_1902.jpg" width="400" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-family: "helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">Crispin Schuberth, New Zealand Labour party logo (2011)</span></td></tr>
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<span style="font-family: "helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">Although its most prominent incorporation into the regalia of state came about through the wishes of a Labour party cabinet and that it has intermittently formed a part of the <a href="http://idealog.co.nz/design/2011/03/labour-same-politics-new-logo">New Zealand Labour party logo</a>, the silver fern has, since the 1970s, been favoured by National party and corporate interests as a suitable symbol for replacing the current New Zealand flag. In 1998 the National party minister of cultural affairs, Marie Hasler, supported by the then prime minister Jenny Shipley, argued that the current blue ensign should be replaced by the silver fern on a black ground, claiming that 'our most constant and enduring symbol is the Silver Fern. It is the most commonly used and instantly recognisable New Zealand symbol'. This assertion has been promoted by a number of </span><span style="font-family: "helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">corporate interests, most notably the late <a href="http://www.nzflag.com/about.cfm">Lloyd Morrison</a>, CEO of the investment group Infratil, who established a charitable trust <a href="http://nzflag.com/">NZflag.com</a> to promote both a change in the New Zealand flag and the adoption of a silver fern flag design. While the silver fern on a black ground flag might seem distinctive from the point of view of those more familiar with rugby, the army and corporate logos it is far from distinctive, as the recent tragic events in Sydney and the rise of the Islamic State in the Middle East attest. </span><br />
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhQyRItqRUZQQstoaol7NtYDonf3jeaq8dDSgPXcEJoUzgH_AqdaziDPRqs5yB2ltK-L92B_9U9lFdKn-MGK7-ZqJInbfhqgZxWBD068wfTf9i6t2pjO47A14_t8n5Oafrva_SBYFJEx1eH/s1600/Screenshot+2014-12-22+11.48.37.png" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="314" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhQyRItqRUZQQstoaol7NtYDonf3jeaq8dDSgPXcEJoUzgH_AqdaziDPRqs5yB2ltK-L92B_9U9lFdKn-MGK7-ZqJInbfhqgZxWBD068wfTf9i6t2pjO47A14_t8n5Oafrva_SBYFJEx1eH/s1600/Screenshot+2014-12-22+11.48.37.png" width="640" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-family: "helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">Islamic black standard defaced with the Shahada.<br /><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_Standard#mediaviewer/File:Flag_of_Jihad.svg">Wikimedia</a></span></td></tr>
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<span style="font-family: "helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">Embracing a somewhat pedestrian corporate logo as 'the symbol of the Realm, Government and people of New Zealand' not only denies the history of the flags that have been flown in this country but also condones a narrow understanding of how flags best represent a nation. Sovereign nations shouldn't be represented by symbols and colours that reflect particular interests, no matter how popular they might seem. </span><br />
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjyTu2IrYQctytzNkEID0X4__2rwdHCLgJWCyk6w3VAceM_0O6S0Qb-Y7M983IAxoTq0cjO2FHk1NQ5HRHROHv8IcZK8yjNd3AW5okcTdkqXvuk7G3fp44wIaJ0gzsi9r-XKQKqAaCOP62k/s1600/Screenshot+2015-01-15+11.59.10.png" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="178" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjyTu2IrYQctytzNkEID0X4__2rwdHCLgJWCyk6w3VAceM_0O6S0Qb-Y7M983IAxoTq0cjO2FHk1NQ5HRHROHv8IcZK8yjNd3AW5okcTdkqXvuk7G3fp44wIaJ0gzsi9r-XKQKqAaCOP62k/s1600/Screenshot+2015-01-15+11.59.10.png" width="320" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Unidentified designer for the New Zealand Transport Agency, silver fern roads logo for a New Zealand government road safety campaign (2014)<br />
<a href="http://saferjourneys.govt.nz/">saferjourneys.govt.nz</a></td></tr>
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<span style="font-family: "helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">Flags are emotional things. In a recent <a href="http://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2014/nov/26/patriot-games-battle-for-flag-of-st-george-english-identity">essay</a> on the way the English St George's cross flag has come to be seen as projecting a racist and bigoted perception of the world, often associated with football hooligans and white van-driving, working class males (the two are not exclusive), the <i>Guardian</i> columnist, Stuart Jeffries noted that 'Flag waving is a veil, hiding precisely nationalism's desire for power and the flag waver's desire to exclude and subjugate the other.' It's a sentiment New Zealanders might consider as they contemplate how they're next going to wave their flag not only amongst themselves but also to the world. Rebranding sometimes goes horribly wrong.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">Postscript</span></h3>
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<span style="font-family: "helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">Key has <a href="http://www.stuff.co.nz/national/politics/65856095/No-black-in-new-flag-John-Key">changed</a> his view on the design of a possible flag, sort of.</span></div>
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Christopher Thompsonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01264481177071819483noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2464874880300858303.post-7687279341025916172014-11-25T12:28:00.000+13:002014-12-28T22:20:26.889+13:00Enjoying William Morris <div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj1zcEW_er2xZ_QqWJQxtCyzuEh3JxGOWtlnR35TFdHnU8fYPgo4k9wbJSrR6_Mp5491WpXQJP2pEMhe984urqXhv73pYB4zZthRhnJWssRygp3_SOaOG2XYshS4n1Q35soqe8uAdvfh6oj/s1600/IMG_1835.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj1zcEW_er2xZ_QqWJQxtCyzuEh3JxGOWtlnR35TFdHnU8fYPgo4k9wbJSrR6_Mp5491WpXQJP2pEMhe984urqXhv73pYB4zZthRhnJWssRygp3_SOaOG2XYshS4n1Q35soqe8uAdvfh6oj/s1600/IMG_1835.jpg" height="400" width="352" /></a></div>
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<i>
Anarchy and beauty; William Morris and his legacy, 1860-1960</i><br />National Portrait Gallery, London<br />16 October 2014 – 11 January 2015</h3>
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<span style="font-size: large;">On</span> the face of things, William Morris (1834-1896) doesn’t
seem to have much of a profile in New Zealand. As a promoter of the arts and
crafts movement, which, together with John Ruskin, he founded, he’s a reference, a distant source of an idea. His work as a poet,
printer and a political activist, is pretty much ignored probably for the same vicarious reasons. His productions of textiles and
furniture, as retailed through Morris, Marshall, Faulkner & Co (later
Morris & Co), were with the odd exception (the book collector Alexander
Turnbull being the notably odd exception) too expensive for the thrifty burghers of the
colony and, with its socialist resonances, too devoid of imperial glory for the grandees of the dominion. While
his romantic mediaeval-revival poetry and sagas found some passing New Zealand adherents
in the early years of the twentieth century, they were known through cheap
posthumous editions, not through the beautifully crafted editions from his Kelmscott Press; only Turnbull was financially enabled to collect those. Strangely
enough, it was Morris' theorising about art that had impact in the colony, largely by its
promulgation through an inadvertent process of colonialism: art education.<o:p></o:p></div>
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjE4swZq7dD6LF5jb5SEs_frwD1M7DU3xdXQb3tYc-_0DeRW6Z9fmgHHwz1UgJ929DdgnFBnMsF_wAlQfUgMjkHUhyphenhyphen3k4l0sPHn4cfwGQdUDkli4s0xpt3f_Y4vbAX4ALyYBslJUCK0SG3W/s1600/MA_I212750.3383x6704.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjE4swZq7dD6LF5jb5SEs_frwD1M7DU3xdXQb3tYc-_0DeRW6Z9fmgHHwz1UgJ929DdgnFBnMsF_wAlQfUgMjkHUhyphenhyphen3k4l0sPHn4cfwGQdUDkli4s0xpt3f_Y4vbAX4ALyYBslJUCK0SG3W/s1600/MA_I212750.3383x6704.jpg" height="640" width="322" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">John Dearle for Morris & Co. Stained and painted glass window, 1910-1935.<br />
Te Papa Tongarewa, purchased with the assistance of the Charles Disney Art Trust Fund, 2010 (GH020700)</td></tr>
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A man who has prompted multiple biographies, Morris and his
productions appear in most major collections of art and design although there aren't many of those in New Zealand. The tokenist holdings of Morris-related material in the Auckland
Museum include a printed curtain, posthumously produced by Morris & Co and a <a href="http://muse.aucklandmuseum.com/collections/general/DecArtsGallery/14609.detail?Ordinal=1&c_keyword_search=morris">'Rossetti' chair</a>, marketed by Morris & Co (both acquired in the 1980s). Te Papa's holdings include a stained glass window produced by Morris & Co and a sketch design by Dante Gabriel Rossetti for another Morris & Co window. Morris' designs have been the subject of numerous exhibitions around the world. In 2008
the Christchurch Art Gallery was the venue for <i>Morris & Co: the world of William Morris</i> assembled by the Art Gallery
of South Australia, the one Antipodean institute with a significant holding of his work. The focus of these exhibitions has been on Morris’s
work as a designer of textiles, furniture and private-press books and on his firm's retailing of carefully co-ordinated, expensively-produced, commodities for the well-upholstered interiors of the privileged classes.<o:p></o:p></div>
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The National Portrait Gallery in London is the – perhaps
surprising – venue for the exhibition <i><a href="http://www.npg.org.uk/whatson/anarchy-beauty-william-morris-and-his-legacy-1860-1960/home.php">Anarchy and beauty; William Morris and his legacy, 1860-1960</a></i>, curated by the independent
historian Fiona MacCarthy, author of one of the more definitive recent biographies of
Morris, <span lang="EN-US" style="mso-ansi-language: EN-US;"><i>William Morris: a life
for our time</i> (London : Faber, 1995). </span><span lang="EN-US"><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> Unlike </span></span>its predecessor exhibitions <i>Anarchy and beauty</i> investigates the political dimension of Morris' design activities and the impact they had not only on his contemporaries but also on the subsequent generations of theorists, agitators, designers, planners, makers and retailers. Even with its British focus, the exhibition promotes an impressive genealogy, even if some of the more connective elements of the table are missing.<br />
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Where, for example, is that great implementer of Morris' ideology, Hubert Llewellyn Smith? Smith underwent a Damascene conversion to Morris' vision after attending a lecture 'Art and democracy' given by Morris, under the aegis of Ruskin, in the hall of University College, Oxford, in November 1883. He was so inspired that he became a Toynbee Hall pedagogue, a protégé of the Webbs, the effective founder of the Central School of Arts and Crafts (by way of his 1893 report on technical education for the London County Council), the founding secretary of the Labour Department of the Board of Trade and the patron of William Beveridge, the originator – in 1908 – of the Exhibitions Branch of the Board of Trade and hence a whole line of state-sponsored design promotional organisations up to today's neutered Design Council.</div>
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgXLxq7mDQodsiBKMOUdLOf1FFgJkuLH94Z3vxVnpaMEk5GlBLhr8WB1P4rJWU7VKdlJ38B0y4SULQcbQgKo49FE_F2nP_uBpXrmVGHlJlFM0pAUmpsi5PgJRyIXEgRy8gMAWAcJNpxOcra/s1600/Screenshot+2014-11-18+17.29.04.png" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgXLxq7mDQodsiBKMOUdLOf1FFgJkuLH94Z3vxVnpaMEk5GlBLhr8WB1P4rJWU7VKdlJ38B0y4SULQcbQgKo49FE_F2nP_uBpXrmVGHlJlFM0pAUmpsi5PgJRyIXEgRy8gMAWAcJNpxOcra/s1600/Screenshot+2014-11-18+17.29.04.png" height="320" width="273" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Walter Crane. Bookplate design for Alexander Turnbull, 1891.<br />
Alexander Turnbull Library, National Library of New Zealand (A-136-001) </td></tr>
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So in this glorious rag bag of those influenced by Morris' ideology we get the designer Walter Crane (represented in the exhibition among other things by his design of the membership card of the Hammersmith Socialist Society) and the socialist poet, philosopher, anthologist and early LGBT activist Edward Carpenter (represented by his Indian-made sandals) ; the anarchist geographer and philosopher Prince Pyotr Kropotkin; the Suffragette painter Sylvia Pankhurst and the stained glass artist Mary Lowndes; the painter and potter William de Morgan and the silver designer, architect and pedagogue C R Ashbee (a magnificent silver peacock brooch he designed for his long-suffering wife); the priapic calligrapher and designer Eric Gill and Ebenezer Howard, the architect and planner who developed the idea of the garden city. Leaping well into the twentieth century we encounter the furniture and textile designers Robin and Lucien Day, the industrial designer Misha Black and, lastly and certainly not in his view leastly, the retailer Terence Conran. But, as the <i>Guardian's</i> Rachel Cooke <a href="http://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2014/oct/19/anarchy-beauty-william-morris-legacy-review-virtue-of-simplicity">observes</a>, despite all this plenitude of names and associated objects, it's fundamentally all about 'Morris, the fat spider, who sits at the heart of the web constructed by the exhibition's curator, Fiona MacCarthy'. It's Morris' insistence on the availability to all of objects that are both utilitarian and beautiful and that the acquisition of manual skills is not only essential to a well-rounded life but also a life-enhancing political act. In Morris case, beauty was to be found in the relics of Mediaeval Europe, later adherents to his thinking found it elsewhere.</div>
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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">David Kindersley after a design by Eric Gill, 'Adam and Eve' garden roller, Portland stone and iron.<br />
Leeds Museums and Galleries (Leeds Art Gallery)</td></tr>
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It's in Ann Calhoun's impressively researched book <i>The arts and crafts movement in New Zealand 1870-1940: women make their mark</i> (Auckland: Auckland University Press, 2000) that we are able to understand both the impact that Morris had in New Zealand and, in part, why this legacy has been so ignored by local historians of art and design.<br />
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Design and its relation with manufacturing was an issue that had been a concern of the British state long before Morris began delving into its roots. From the late 1830s, the British government began establishing Schools of Design around the country aimed primarily at improving the quality of design and thus of industrial production. By the 1850s responsibility for overseeing the curricula for these schools was controlled via the Department of Science and Art's South Kensington Museum. As Calhoun notes, Morris became an adviser to the South Kensington Museum in 1876 and was appointed an examiner, a position he retained until his death. In the absence of any local initiative, this British art training system was imported directly into New Zealand through the establishment of local art schools – with minimal government involvement – who employed not only graduates of the South Kensington National Art Training School but also its teaching methodologies and examinations. Given the non-existence of any significant manufacturing industry in the colony and thus an associated class of 'skilled artisans' the majority of those attending these schools tended to be women and the focus of their education tended to be domestic and/or appropriate for the teaching of primary school children; drawing was an required to be taught in New Zealand schools under the terms of the 1877 Education Act.<br />
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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">'British art section - arts and crafts', from Isidore Spielmann, <i>The British government exhibit at the New Zealand International Exhibition 1906-1907</i> (London: HMSO, 1908), p. 243. The frieze circumventing the rooms was designed by Walter Crane</td></tr>
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Arts and crafts productions did however receive considerable popular exposure and even some acclaim in 1906-07, at the New Zealand International Exhibition held in Christchurch, but these were British made, selected by Walter Crane in his capacity as president of the Arts and Crafts Exhibition Society. Crane's role didn't require him to visit visit New Zealand – he was represented at the exhibition by <a href="http://nzdesignhistory.blogspot.co.nz/2013/07/glitches-in-modernist-narrative.html">Alfred Appleby Longden</a> – but he also designed the frieze used on the walls of the exhibit, although he'd executed it for the 1904 Louisiana Purchase Exposition, held in St Louis in the United States. The inclusion of these arts and crafts pieces in the exhibition seems to have been the result of significant lobbying by Hubert Llewellyn Smith in his then capacity as acting permanent secretary of the British Board of Trade. They were an highly popular component of the exhibition: many pieces sold, 321 articles by 72 exhibitors. However, as Calhoun observes, the exhibit was 'very English' and a colonial hankering for reasonably-priced relics from 'home' may have accounted for the popularity of the pieces, few of which have been identified subsequently.<br />
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Effectively, by being stripped of its political dimension, gendered as a feminine concern and its promulgation confined to the genteel middle classes, Morris' noisy, rumbustious, socialist, all people and all classes, hands-on arts and crafts movement failed to flourish in colonial New Zealand. As Calhoun's text demonstrates, there were some enormously talented designers and makers, but the marginality of art and the absence of any viable market for their productions effectively put an end to any dream of living by their work.<br />
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiOgcIIMDETwaY2fahzcOAd-2JgXTrfq3QrAMRZJbOXtujlJZLfxaynDztJ-gKFJk-UVLxZxnqb5g7eEAlmzCEA62SrYzXtoxXEhMIGkgsN3W1j8bt7lzlYwJkZDly-JGEbVxBUqDkloiqG/s1600/IMG_1836.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiOgcIIMDETwaY2fahzcOAd-2JgXTrfq3QrAMRZJbOXtujlJZLfxaynDztJ-gKFJk-UVLxZxnqb5g7eEAlmzCEA62SrYzXtoxXEhMIGkgsN3W1j8bt7lzlYwJkZDly-JGEbVxBUqDkloiqG/s1600/IMG_1836.jpg" height="400" width="340" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Charles James Fox after a design by May Morris. Memorial case of gold-plated wood containing a locket of William Morris' hair, 1896-97<br />
Victoria & Albert Museum</td></tr>
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As <i>Anarchy and beauty</i> clearly demonstrates such was not to be Morris' British legacy. His socialism may have been overtaken by larger political events, but its core values remain a part of British political discourse. His furniture, textile and wallpaper productions may have been dismissed for much of the twentieth century as old-fashioned (Morris & Co finally closed in 1940) but the objects he designed and made, as indeed are those of his followers and adherents are highly sought after and many of the textiles and wallpapers remain in production. MacCarthy's intelligently structured, slyly witty (not the usual experience one imparts from a serious exhibition), brilliantly contextualised and beautifully selected exhibition shows the vitality of Morris' thinking and, indeed, its relevance to today. Appropriately, it's also well-designed and is accompanied by an equally rewarding <a href="http://www.npg.org.uk/whatson/anarchy-beauty-william-morris-and-his-legacy-1860-1960/shop1.php">catalogue</a>. A must see, if you can get there.</div>
Christopher Thompsonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01264481177071819483noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2464874880300858303.post-85975755074893172612014-10-22T21:30:00.000+13:002015-07-15T21:17:34.699+12:00The joy of Danish design<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjvXQxSoXfV-v063QbhWUxuhow5IM_7f7yWziMnuZNTfSvisrlhi2gsi4k-IoV955YLETt-xO_8mjJ6bVWJkDlGJVdBcGvgKeyIeHaNA5HhuuFRwJKj1Dblkfn-_r7HvwawC7vf63QnvnqT/s1600/IMG_2089.JPG" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="442" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjvXQxSoXfV-v063QbhWUxuhow5IM_7f7yWziMnuZNTfSvisrlhi2gsi4k-IoV955YLETt-xO_8mjJ6bVWJkDlGJVdBcGvgKeyIeHaNA5HhuuFRwJKj1Dblkfn-_r7HvwawC7vf63QnvnqT/s1600/IMG_2089.JPG" width="640" /></a></div>
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: large;">Notwithstanding</span> the fact that Danish design appears to be a current favourite of at least one New Zealand auction house (it forms a significant component of Art + Object's <a href="http://www.artandobject.co.nz/auction/84/nordic-design">Nordic design sale</a> on 22 October 2014), in the unlikely event that New Zealanders give much thought
to the history of the subject, it’s most probable they’ll opine it emerged, fully formed, with the architect Arne Jacobsen’s well-known <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Myren stol</i> (Ant chair) in 1951. There
may be some slight awareness of earlier design endeavours including, possibly,
a conflation of Scandinavian design (Denmark, Norway and Sweden) with Finnish
design and a vague recollection of the work of the influential modernist Finnish architect Alvar Aalto (1898-1976). In terms of accuracy,
this is probably on a par with believing that New Zealand comprises the
pristine, clean, green paradise of the Saatchi and Saatchi ‘100% Pure’
advertising campaign for Tourism New Zealand, rather than the deeply
compromised colonial landscape of pest plants and animals, factory farming, industrial
forestry and motorways that it has become. It's always difficult to correct ill-informed myths.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Outsider views of the development of Danish design have
tended to reflect its marketing as a thoroughly modern, contemporary,
phenomenon. This stance is not entirely uncommon; most people tend not to think
of the historical antecedents of the objects they commonly surround themselves
with. In Denmark things are a little different thanks, in part to a
long-standing educational programme about design that dates from the
establishment of the Royal Danish Academy, <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Det Kongelige Danske Skildre-, Billedhugger- og Bygnings-Academie i Kiøbenhavn</i>
(now known generally as <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Kunstakademiet</i>), in
1754. This programme of design pedagogy gained significant momentum following
the striking success of <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Den Nordiske
Industri-, Landbrugs- og Kunstudstilling</i>, the Nordic industrial,
agricultural and art exhibition, which was held in Copenhagen in 1888. In the aftermath of the exhibition and inspired
by the activities of the Paris-based <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Union
des Arts Décoratifs</i>, a collaboration between Danish industrialists, artists
and historians sponsored the establishment in 1890 of a museum of Danish design, <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Det Danske Kunstindustrimuseum</i> (known, more colloquially, as <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Kunstindustrimuseet</i>). Since
2011, the museum has been known by the gimmicky neologism <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><a href="http://designmuseum.dk/en">Designmuseum Danmark</a></i>. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Originally located near the Tivoli pleasure gardens, the
museum moved in 1926 into the restrained rococo premises of the former <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">kongelige Frederiks hospital</i> (Nicolai
Eigtved/Laurids de Thurah, 1752-57) on Bredgade (the hospital is best known to history as the place where Søren Kierkegaard died in 1855), near Eigtved’s equally
delightful and better-known <a href="http://dkks.dk/the-history-of-amalienborg/">Amalienborg palace</a> (1750). The conversion of an
eighteenth century hospital into a twentieth century museum of design was
undertaken by the furniture designer Kaare Klint (1888-1954) and the architect Ivar
Bentsen(1876-1943). The integrity of their redesign of the hospital space remained intact until
recently suggesting not only the simplicity of their re-arrangement of the
space and its flexibility but also the enduring quality of their design.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjDPFb_rDMO0Zbb1TE0t6xsfYF7q0WY_51Bkoc-xcL8UmT9SlZXDi1yzDJ6ArtoC3DGFjW4aJawvojnJ6sJuoDaDRHN7cYaWR_CI17R42Q9AMqRWpvbTcXnjJJ6Up6R-yaihPMc-SYV3Gn6/s1600/2014-10-08+12.46.01.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="640" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjDPFb_rDMO0Zbb1TE0t6xsfYF7q0WY_51Bkoc-xcL8UmT9SlZXDi1yzDJ6ArtoC3DGFjW4aJawvojnJ6sJuoDaDRHN7cYaWR_CI17R42Q9AMqRWpvbTcXnjJJ6Up6R-yaihPMc-SYV3Gn6/s640/2014-10-08+12.46.01.jpg" width="480" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">A remnant display of late nineteenth century Danish design in the galleries developed by Kaare Klint and Ivar Bentsen in Kunstindustrimuseet. The glass cases along the right wall were also designed by Klint</span></td></tr>
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<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">The museum’s collection reflects both the extraordinary
creativity of Danish designers and makers over the past two and a half
centuries as well as the scholarship and research interests of not only its
curatorial staff but also that of major donors to the collection over the past
125 years such as Hugo Halberstadt whose collection of Japanese arms and armour – given to the museum in 1941 – was, in the estimation of Nobuo Ogasawara of the National Museum of Japan, ‘one
of the finest collections of its kind anywhere in the world’. The museum’s
collection of Asian and European ceramics, while relatively small when compared
with those of, say the Victoria and Albert Museum in London, is encyclopedic and of a notably high quality. Moreover, the museum has one of the most comprehensive (and delightful) libraries of decorative arts and design to be found anywhere in the
world.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh_w6qjjABRBx4vfApHuTi8i0GTRqmFyypkp6_6RR6LZiboYknyu0CiCPZv3MVNaehTcq85SJfMBBCJuRCeIAxFBPyiVuwGXfrZvIxOLR2Rb1kdebVNVS4SWgiePe1RgGYhID2l9KhDnaTb/s1600/IMG_2117.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="640" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh_w6qjjABRBx4vfApHuTi8i0GTRqmFyypkp6_6RR6LZiboYknyu0CiCPZv3MVNaehTcq85SJfMBBCJuRCeIAxFBPyiVuwGXfrZvIxOLR2Rb1kdebVNVS4SWgiePe1RgGYhID2l9KhDnaTb/s640/IMG_2117.jpg" width="640" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Twentieth century furniture displays dating from the early 2000s located within the intact Klint and Bentsen galleries</td></tr>
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<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">However, along with its change of name, the museum seems to
have decided that Danish design is best represented by exhibitions of modern
Danish furniture and its current displays reflect this partial belief. Alongside a long-installed gallery of twentieth century Danish furniture, the museum is currently showing three temporary furniture exhibitions: <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Øvelse gør
mester: Kaare Klints møbelskole (Practice makes perfect: Kaare Klint’s furniture
school)</i>, which focuses on Klint's pedagogical activities; <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Møbler til folket! Børge
Mogensen 100 år (Furniture for the people! Børge Mogensen’s centenary)</i>; and
<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Wegner: bare een god stol/just one good
chair</i>, a comprehensive exhibition devoted to the work of Hans Wegner
(1914-2007) </span><span style="font-family: 'Helvetica Neue', Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">curated by Christian Holmsted Olesen</span><span style="font-family: 'Helvetica Neue', Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: 'Helvetica Neue', Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">The Wegner exhibition, which runs until December 2014 and comprises some 132 objects, is
the most scholarly and the best displayed of the three temporary exhibitions. The exhibition is complemented by a meticulously researched and
illustrated <a href="http://www.amazon.co.uk/Hans-J-Wegner-Just-Chair/dp/3775738096">catalogue</a> that, conveniently, is available in an English language version. The Klint exhibition (on display until February 2015) is undermined by an obscure take on the subject, intrusive exhibition design and a touching belief in the effectiveness of electronic gadgetry. The Møgensen exhibition is comprehensively overwhelmed by the others.</span></div>
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgUfNYfqKgZNYYPMKCq4qCq1oLGuUGJPLGT3n_AkjQtHU1bX46rPpNJzqixmhjpEynEPXlK10-07K0ARcOFqFpi3TTwLt65RuxW2T8bLIZpLefbYGEyzLk1ihK-zyO4B_EHL_cQ0o8PUaK0/s1600/5.JFK_TheChair_1060.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="400" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgUfNYfqKgZNYYPMKCq4qCq1oLGuUGJPLGT3n_AkjQtHU1bX46rPpNJzqixmhjpEynEPXlK10-07K0ARcOFqFpi3TTwLt65RuxW2T8bLIZpLefbYGEyzLk1ihK-zyO4B_EHL_cQ0o8PUaK0/s1600/5.JFK_TheChair_1060.jpg" width="261" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Unidentified photographer, John Fitzgerald Kennedy, president of the United States of America, seated in Hans Wegner's 1949 designed 'Den runde stol (The round chair)' in 1960. The chair was manufactured in oak by Johannes Hansen Møbelsnedkeri.<br />Designmuseum Danmark</span></td></tr>
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<span style="font-family: 'Helvetica Neue', Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">From a marketing perspective Wegner was the archetypal post-war Danish designer. Aside from his sheer productivity, the popularity of his designs in the United States, particularly during the 1950s and 60s, prompted a massive expansion in the export of Danish furniture around the world. The notable exception to this trend was in New Zealand and Australia where protectionist tariffs and import licensing regimes made its acquisition financially unfeasible for most consumers. Would-be Antipodean consumers of modernist furniture in the 1950s and 60s had to put up with what, more often than not, were shabbily-produced, pirated travesties of the Danish originals. Contemporary Antipodean consumers of modernist Danish furniture might be well-advised to visit the exhibition before indulging their tastes. If that proves impossible, then the acquisition of Olesen's impressive book would be an adequate, if less tangible, substitute. </span></div>
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<span style="font-family: 'Helvetica Neue', Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">It's unfortunate that in pursuit of it's recently announced strategy 'of pursuing alternative exhibition and communication approaches' and re-jigging itself as a 'central exhibition venue', Designmuseum Danmark has decided to move its public focus from a collection that provided it with a unique identity and fostered a remarkable, scholarly, research culture. The museum's pursuit of the chimera of public relevance is hardly unique – witness the sad spectacle of the V&A's social media-driven 'rapid response collecting strategy' – but it's depressing to see it being embraced with such unreflective abandon. </span></div>
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Christopher Thompsonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01264481177071819483noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2464874880300858303.post-76449623429551202042014-09-07T12:29:00.000+12:002014-12-10T15:44:09.577+13:00An incidental impetus? <div class="MsoNormal">
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj8j43xyv_H3mGLKW-YMsv-7s8oso_xu5e7tsxjFTt8_weT5sCuYZUFBSEM_H4kE-I7yQk3N5vRB6i2wySfKMymtP1IML8aHaHtJ8y4r56jbLuEiT1aaokL_h2_qVkEd9mEnKGRW6eSZFfo/s1600/SIAlogo.png" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj8j43xyv_H3mGLKW-YMsv-7s8oso_xu5e7tsxjFTt8_weT5sCuYZUFBSEM_H4kE-I7yQk3N5vRB6i2wySfKMymtP1IML8aHaHtJ8y4r56jbLuEiT1aaokL_h2_qVkEd9mEnKGRW6eSZFfo/s1600/SIAlogo.png" height="304" width="320" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Milner Gray (1899-1997), logo for the Society of Industrial Artists, about 1933</span></td></tr>
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<span style="font-family: 'Helvetica Neue', Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: large;">In </span>April 1949 the </span><i style="font-family: 'Helvetica Neue', Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">New
Zealand Listener</i><span style="font-family: 'Helvetica Neue', Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"> published a short article by the poet, lecturer, textile
printer, music critic and general gadfly <a href="http://www.teara.govt.nz/en/biographies/4f2/fairburn-arthur-rex-dugard">A R D Fairburn</a> entitled ‘Art and
industry’. Seen from the perspective of the early twenty-first century, the article has good claim to represent a bit of a threshold moment in the history of
design in New Zealand as it was probably the first time the
subject of industrial design was raised in a popular forum, rather than in specialist
publications such as </span><i style="font-family: 'Helvetica Neue', Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Home & Building, The Year Book of the Arts in New Zealand</i><span style="font-family: 'Helvetica Neue', Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"> or the recently launched </span><i style="font-family: 'Helvetica Neue', Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">New Zealand
Design Review</i><span style="font-family: 'Helvetica Neue', Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">.</span><br />
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhhEahb7jl-umySfsqcsOPChXty9bSpNVByBYCuFw_H-brgyiLB-_EwDgePumIEs2dLL6d1mNL4BxihTwICRfp0J8Egf5hIo6ZhZIYYE0_CBFHQatJoInrG7NEX5jBoPZQdH9BfOE2rfTp_/s1600/IMG_1455.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhhEahb7jl-umySfsqcsOPChXty9bSpNVByBYCuFw_H-brgyiLB-_EwDgePumIEs2dLL6d1mNL4BxihTwICRfp0J8Egf5hIo6ZhZIYYE0_CBFHQatJoInrG7NEX5jBoPZQdH9BfOE2rfTp_/s1600/IMG_1455.jpg" height="400" width="308" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Probably the first popular discussion of industrial design in New Zealand. A R D Fairburn, 'Art and industry',<br /><i>New Zealand Listener</i>, 20: 513 (22 April 1949), p. 8</span></td></tr>
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<span style="font-family: 'Helvetica Neue', Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Fairburn’s article discussed a visit to New Zealand by the British industrial designer Milner Gray, then president of the Society of
Industrial Artists, a design practitioner body formed in 1930 'to advance and protect the interests of [designers] and to raise the standard of [design] in [Britain]'. Between 28 March and 10 April 1949, under the aegis of </span><span style="font-family: 'Helvetica Neue', Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">the British Council – the propaganda arm of the British government, </span><span style="font-family: 'Helvetica Neue', Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Gray delivered a series of lectures on aspects of industrial design to audiences in Auckland and Wellington. Fairburn’s article, while the only critical commentary, wasn’t the only published record of Gray’s New Zealand expedition. His itinerary was tracked
in the newspapers – in the women’s columns (‘Housewives helped by good design’, </span><i style="font-family: 'Helvetica Neue', Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Auckland </i><span style="font-family: 'Helvetica Neue', Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><i>Star</i> (29 March 1949), p. 3.) – and abridged versions of his lectures were subsequently published in the Wellington-based </span><i style="font-family: 'Helvetica Neue', Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Design Review</i><span style="font-family: 'Helvetica Neue', Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"> and some months later
in <i>Modern Manufacturing</i> and the </span><i style="font-family: 'Helvetica Neue', Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">New Zealand Manufacturer</i><span style="font-family: 'Helvetica Neue', Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"> as well as in </span><i style="font-family: 'Helvetica Neue', Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">The Australian Artist</i><span style="font-family: 'Helvetica Neue', Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">;</span><span style="font-family: 'Helvetica Neue', Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"> Gray's tour also encompassed Melbourne, Canberra and Sydney.</span></div>
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhU2F61jY3oGGVWfiDjn1haanAmuV4AjF1eWG5mdksKl65ytzfgZ4QFLghV9GJgpCmCoZprVm4c7h4xlF4QVmyoqcqqtdKbSklMmhMBhS-HiQZNxgVruN00gFOaIpJZqM0KxFF-Pi3fnFwy/s1600/DR22.png" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhU2F61jY3oGGVWfiDjn1haanAmuV4AjF1eWG5mdksKl65ytzfgZ4QFLghV9GJgpCmCoZprVm4c7h4xlF4QVmyoqcqqtdKbSklMmhMBhS-HiQZNxgVruN00gFOaIpJZqM0KxFF-Pi3fnFwy/s1600/DR22.png" height="400" width="308" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-family: 'Helvetica Neue', Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">E Mervyn Taylor (1906-1964), cover of </span><i style="font-family: 'Helvetica Neue', Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Design Review</i><span style="font-family: 'Helvetica Neue', Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">, 2:2 (August-September 1949). </span><span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Gray's visit coincided with the Architectural Centre's commissioning Taylor to re-package the <i>New Zealand Design Review</i>. Taylor's cover design incorporates one of Gray's pre-war designs; the issue contained an abridged transcript of Gray's lecture 'Package design in Great Britain' </span></td></tr>
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<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">These </span><span style="font-family: 'Helvetica Neue', Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">reports and </span><span style="font-family: 'Helvetica Neue', Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">transcripts were for some time the only
published records of Gray’s fortnight-long visit. Notwithstanding the singularity of the event, Gray's foray into the Antipodes has been excised from his biographies as being of no relevance to his role in creating design as an identifiable practice. From a
New Zealand perspective, the visit subsequently became something of an
embarrassment and the presence of one of the key figures in British design
circles, was, until recently, air-brushed from the history of design in New Zealand, possibly
because it was considered a diversion from the emerging national
design discourse. In part, this reflected political reality. Some seven
months after Gray left for Sydney, a conservative National party government was elected. The
new administration had no interest in design matters and withdrew the scant funds that had been previously made available in the fields both of research and promotion on the grounds that subsidising such activities was inappropriate in a country whose primary function was to
export the barely processed products of grass and to import the manufactured
commodities of the ‘mother’ country.</span></div>
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg3k2x6Yd4hXX7Tl4MNCmNMc8ldwOpgd3aGclJfXHeqhRJGxmuOCSjdvTl-tNoN6x7HS12ctUrK4hJML5SeePWkCe2WGh9-bFIzQ831nyyHG0yL2blyodyalOyOnKncyHJtwfn4_oo2Svsv/s1600/Untitled+4.png" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg3k2x6Yd4hXX7Tl4MNCmNMc8ldwOpgd3aGclJfXHeqhRJGxmuOCSjdvTl-tNoN6x7HS12ctUrK4hJML5SeePWkCe2WGh9-bFIzQ831nyyHG0yL2blyodyalOyOnKncyHJtwfn4_oo2Svsv/s1600/Untitled+4.png" height="400" width="293" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Gray's lecture 'The industrial design profession in Great Britain'was published in the</span><span style="font-family: 'Helvetica Neue', Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"> </span><span style="font-family: 'Helvetica Neue', Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">winter 1949 edition of</span><span style="font-family: 'Helvetica Neue', Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"> </span><i style="font-family: 'Helvetica Neue', Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">The Australian Artist</i><span style="font-family: 'Helvetica Neue', Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">, edited by <a href="http://adb.anu.edu.au/biography/james-richard-haughton-jimmy-12692">Richard Haughton James</a>, the first president of the Melbourne-based practitioner body, the Society of Designers for Industry. Reference to Gray's text is made on the upper left of the cover</span></td></tr>
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<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">The idea of sending someone to the Antipodes to talk about
design generally and British design specifically seems to have occurred to
British Council in early 1948. </span><span style="font-family: 'Helvetica Neue', Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Design was not an unknown field to the council. The
influential secretary of its Fine Arts Committee until late 1947, </span><a href="http://nzdesignhistory.blogspot.co.nz/2013/07/glitches-in-modernist-narrative.html" style="font-family: 'Helvetica Neue', Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Alfred Appleby Longden</a>, <span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">had been involved in a number of the British government’s design promotion initiatives since 1906;
the committee's long-standing chairman was Eric McLagan, director of the Victoria & Albert
Museum and, prior to the Second World War, a member of the Council for Art and
Industry. However, the most notable exponent of design in the committee was the
ubiquitous Kenneth Clark, formerly director of the National Gallery and an
active member of the Board of Trade sub-committee that, in 1943, had
recommended the formation of the Council of Industrial Design (CoID); the Council came into being in December 1944. Clark was,
incidentally, from 1945-47, adviser to the Melbourne National Gallery of
Victoria’s Felton Bequest and </span><span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">was a close </span><a href="https://www.academia.edu/4637546/Kenneth_Clark_Deus_ex_Machina_of_Australian_Art" style="font-family: 'Helvetica Neue', Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">friend</a><span style="font-family: 'Helvetica Neue', Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"> of the recently appointed Herald Professor of Fine Art at the University of Melbourne, <a href="https://arthistoriography.files.wordpress.com/2011/05/anderson-on-burke.pdf">Joseph Burke</a> – formerly private secretary to the British prime minister Clement Attlee – who had not only been involved in the formation of the CoID but </span><span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">was also acquainted with key members of a recently-established, design practitioner body, the </span><span style="font-family: 'Helvetica Neue', Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Melbourne-based</span><span style="font-family: 'Helvetica Neue', Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"> </span><span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><a href="http://www.dia.org.au/index.cfm?id=204">Society of Designers for Industry</a> (SDI). </span></div>
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<span style="font-family: 'Helvetica Neue', Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">In March 1948 Violet Merriman of the Lectures Department at the British Council, approached Cycill Tomrley, design advice officer at the CoID seeking advice as to who might be recruited as ‘a practical speaker with a knowledge of the distributive and selling
side of consumer goods as well as the design side, so that he (<i>sic</i>) is equipped to </span><u style="font-family: 'Helvetica Neue', Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">inform</u><span style="font-family: 'Helvetica Neue', Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">
and enlighten any sort of audience even the specialist trade audiences and
students of design, rather than discuss the social and theoretical aspect of
industrial design’ (University of Brighton Design Archives, 85/12, Memo from C
Tomrley to M Hartland Thomas, 06 April 1948). </span><span style="font-family: 'Helvetica Neue', Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">After extended discussions with the CoID and having rejected a number of the proffered candidates – such as Bill Newman, editor of the retail trade journal </span><i style="font-family: 'Helvetica Neue', Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Store</i><span style="font-family: 'Helvetica Neue', Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"> – the British Council finally selected Gray.</span></div>
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjsabUfaJB46meCVfmYUREgK-WwhpppixghEp_20n4S20lCtfFN-ME-LVN-kkLvbIDt_oCeH_Ro6aFcVI8pXjMzqfHL5Zxbnkym2mJa5nksseebgmA-I-RdwOf9TijCHtxU7t4KGwf91Jge/s1600/MA_I091435.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjsabUfaJB46meCVfmYUREgK-WwhpppixghEp_20n4S20lCtfFN-ME-LVN-kkLvbIDt_oCeH_Ro6aFcVI8pXjMzqfHL5Zxbnkym2mJa5nksseebgmA-I-RdwOf9TijCHtxU7t4KGwf91Jge/s1600/MA_I091435.jpg" height="326" width="400" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Milner Gray (1899-1997) for A J Wilkinson Ltd, 'Bizarre for Clarice Cliff' earthenware plate, 1935.<br />Te Papa Tongarewa/National Museum of New Zealand. Gift of Walter Cook, 1992 (CG001946)<br /><span style="font-size: xx-small;">CC BY-NC-ND license</span></span></td></tr>
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<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">As a practicing designer, Gray was perhaps not the obvious
candidate for a tour of the frontiers of what was still referred to as 'the Empire'. His urbanity and wit were qualities not usually held in high regarded in provincial circles, but he was an articulate speaker and an effective motivator. He had been the key figure not only in the establishment in the late 1920s of the Society of Industrial Artists (SIA),
the most enduring design practitioner body in Britain but also in its post-war reconstruction. During the Second World
War, Gray had been appointed head of the Exhibitions Branch and principal design
adviser at the Ministry of Information. He also played a part
in the formation of the CoID where he both acted as an
advocate for design practitioners as well as contributing to the understanding of what design entailed amongst those directly responsible for its formation. In 1942, together with Misha Black, Marcus Brumwell and
Herbert Read, he founded one of the most successful twentieth century British design consultancies,
Design Research Unit. <o:p></o:p></span><br />
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj6GUmFxBEG9K0iFRHcQzZRTIGu9UgeGOoW8vbmHfr8Jk3ZL41Mze1plAHaKraI_XKlV0Ef_CdyUJCdF0mFKHaoHB_B_mCPQzN8L1jQq2w_vI6qUZTmcsO0N6FqKhRXjdyWUPWm-mqSQ3_G/s1600/Screenshot+2014-09-06+10.57.23.png" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj6GUmFxBEG9K0iFRHcQzZRTIGu9UgeGOoW8vbmHfr8Jk3ZL41Mze1plAHaKraI_XKlV0Ef_CdyUJCdF0mFKHaoHB_B_mCPQzN8L1jQq2w_vI6qUZTmcsO0N6FqKhRXjdyWUPWm-mqSQ3_G/s1600/Screenshot+2014-09-06+10.57.23.png" height="417" width="640" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-family: 'Helvetica Neue', Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: x-small;">Unidentified photographer, Meeting of the Design Research Unit's board of associated designers, March 1948. In what seems to be a parody of the iconography of the Christian 'last supper', Gray is seated third from the left</span><br />
<span style="font-family: 'Helvetica Neue', Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: xx-small;">From M Cotton, <i>Design Research Unit 1942-72</i> ([London]: Koenig Books, [2010]</span></td></tr>
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<span style="font-family: 'Helvetica Neue', Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">British Council tours of the Antipodes – which began in 1946 following a change in government foreign policy – had hitherto focussed on exporting British cultural values: music, art, the theatre and literature. In 1947 the Old Vic Theatre Company, led by Lawrence Oliver and Vivien Leigh, and the Boyd Neel Orchestra toured Australia and New Zealand to considerable acclaim and profit. In 1948, the Council exhibited Henry Moore drawings and sculpture in the Australian state capitals – although not in New Zealand – again and surprisingly, to popular acclaim. This new proposal for a design-focussed tour with ‘a practical speaker’ was, as Merriman acknowledged ‘rather the opposite of what one would expect of the British Council’.</span><span style="font-family: 'Helvetica Neue', Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"> </span><br />
<o:p style="font-family: 'Helvetica Neue', Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"></o:p><span style="font-family: 'Helvetica Neue', Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: 'Helvetica Neue', Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"></span><span style="font-family: 'Helvetica Neue', Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">The rationale behind the British Council's design tour is obscure but it is evident
that it was not prompted by any specific recognition of an interest in design emanating
from either Australia or New Zealand, notwithstanding the emergence of a modernist design discourse in both countries. While the
British Council’s representative in Wellington, John Bostock, was undoubtedly aware of the activities of the Architectural Centre and its publication the <i>New Zealand Design Review</i>, this was not a factor in the Council’s decision. Moreover, the decision to add a New Zealand leg onto Gray's touring schedule seems to have resulted from concerns in the newly-established Wellington office of the British
Council that New Zealand businesses and consumers were increasingly swayed by United States influences. In 1946 New Zealand negotiated a settlement of its <a href="http://atojs.natlib.govt.nz/cgi-bin/atojs?a=d&d=AJHR1946-I.2.1.2.10&e=-------10--1------0--">Lend-Lease Agreement </a>debts with the United States in a manner that ensured the acceded funds – some USD4million – remained in the country, being used </span><span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">to acquire property
locally and to foster cultural initiatives such as the United States Foreign Information Service
(later the United States Information Agency) and the Fulbright Programme. As in Europe and
Japan, assimilation of United States technologies and management methods largely stemmed from
local manufacturers, businessmen and, to a lesser extent, officials from government agencies.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">While design had next to no profile in New Zealand at government level, the British post-war Labour government saw design as a critical component of the country's export-led economic recovery programme. As Stafford Cripps, president of the Board of Trade, declared </span><span style="font-family: 'Helvetica Neue', Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">in a speech to the SIA </span><span style="font-family: 'Helvetica Neue', Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">in December 1945 'The efficiency of our industries depends to a very great extent upon our combining the latest results of scientific and industrial research on the part of large and small firms alike with an attractive and suitable appearance and shape.' (S Cripps, 'The industrial designer', </span><i style="font-family: 'Helvetica Neue', Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Democracy alive</i><span style="font-family: 'Helvetica Neue', Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"> (London: Sedgwick & Jackson, 1946), p. 87). Cripps' vision did not sit well with British manufacturers who, rather than subscribing to this brave, new world, reverted to manufacturing the sort of thing they had produced prior to the war, employing the same outmoded processes in the expectation that their overseas markets were as conservative as their taste. In an effort to overcome this opposition to innovation, Cripps inaugurated a series of working parties formed of representatives from both employer and employee organisations. A part of their brief was to address the issue of design and its applicability to industry. In the case of the Pottery Working Party, this move failed to gain the support of both manufacturers and the unionised workforce; it was rejected out of hand. Designers, the Pottery Working Party argued, should, primarily, be industry-trained and, in any case, 'Creative designers are born, not made'. The government's industry-based Design Centre proposals were summarily dismissed as something that might be contemplated in the future. (Great Britain, Board of Trade, <i>Working party reports: pottery</i> (London: HMSO, 1946), p.23; p. 32.)</span></div>
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgJfD6D5quVgNX8vP27UucuC28-ViVBGfuAgqufDy5FnF-A4rnrGn5rZlFQ5eg51oKJNpdmv0124TY_6ffZDXu0Y7S8hBdxzV7wEz8_WkIaTaMefIVerO4M9GzKZeZUzyhK67sHnZW9bNt1/s1600/Pottery46.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgJfD6D5quVgNX8vP27UucuC28-ViVBGfuAgqufDy5FnF-A4rnrGn5rZlFQ5eg51oKJNpdmv0124TY_6ffZDXu0Y7S8hBdxzV7wEz8_WkIaTaMefIVerO4M9GzKZeZUzyhK67sHnZW9bNt1/s1600/Pottery46.jpg" height="400" width="250" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Reforming British industry or vindicating existing practices. Unidentified designer, cover of </span><span style="font-size: x-small;"><span style="font-family: 'Helvetica Neue', Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; text-align: start;">Great Britain, Board of Trade, </span><i style="font-family: 'Helvetica Neue', Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; text-align: start;">Working party reports: pottery</i><span style="font-family: 'Helvetica Neue', Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; text-align: start;"> </span></span><br />
<span style="font-size: x-small;"><span style="font-family: 'Helvetica Neue', Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; text-align: start;">(London: HMSO, 1946)</span><span style="font-family: 'Helvetica Neue', Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"> </span></span></td></tr>
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<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Charged with articulating the government line, the CoID responded to the snub. Writing in the trade journal <i>British Industries</i>, its newly appointed director Gordon Russell asserted 'The Council is most anxious to be of service to industry and there is little doubt that there are many firms whose design standards are not good enough to maintain sales in the face of real competition. I was told the other day of a case in New Zealand where a consignment of a certain British commodity was being jobbed off at about 50 per cent of the ceiling price because the standard of design was low.' (G Russell, 'Britain a pioneer in design', <i>British Industries,</i> 35:5 (May 1948), p. 135.) Just as the success of the British fine arts pavilion at the Christchurch New Zealand International Exhibition of 1906-07 had sparked a British government design initiative - the formation of the Exhibitions Branch of the Board of Trade, so reports of trading failures in New Zealand seem to have prompted the British Council into entering into the field of design promotion.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">In the eyes of the British Council Gray's fortnight in New Zealand passed off satisfactorily, almost successfully. In the afterglow, Fairburn declared that Gray had 'done more, perhaps, than any other man to raise the profession of industrial designing to its present high status', an observation that suggests he had been speaking to someone with direct experience of Gray's activities in the SIA - possibly his friend <a href="http://nzdesignhistory.blogspot.co.nz/2013/11/eric-johnson-and-his-dog-london-about.html">Eric Lee-Johnson</a>. In both Auckland and Wellington Gray delivered four carefully scripted lectures to audiences of between 150 and 200 persons in Auckland and around 100 in Wellington, as well as undertaking radio interviews in both cities. Throughout his lectures Gray sought to counteract the perception that British design was deficient although he allowed that 'The design of cheap mass-produced articles is still, with few exceptions, as unsatisfactory in Great Britain as in most countries.' The problem, Gray asserted, lay both with manufacturers and designers and he argued that 'the approach to industrial design must be a synthesis of the three ideals of form and function, sales appeal and economic production–fitness for purpose, design for selling, and design for making.' (M Gray, 'Design in everyday life', <i>New Zealand Design Review</i>, 2:1 (June-July 1949), p. 10).</span></div>
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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-family: 'Helvetica Neue', Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">E Mervyn Taylor (1906-1964), cover of <i>New Zealand </i></span><i style="font-family: 'Helvetica Neue', Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Design Review</i><span style="font-family: 'Helvetica Neue', Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">, 2:1 (June-July 1949). The most tangible record of Gray's visit was the 'Industrial Design Number' dedicated issue of the <i>Design Review</i>,<i> </i>which reproduced abridged transcripts of two of Gray's lectures.<br /><span style="font-size: xx-small;"><a href="http://nzetc.victoria.ac.nz/tm/scholarly/tei-Arc02_01DesR.html">New Zealand Electronic Text Collection</a></span> </span></td></tr>
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<span style="font-family: 'Helvetica Neue', Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">But if the British Council was hoping that Gray's tour might prompt a resurgence of faith in British manufactured commodities they were sadly mistaken. Reporting on Gray's visit Bostock observed that 'owing to the pressure of other business, it was impossible for the Minister of Education and for the Minister of Industries and Commerce to meet Mr Gray'. Instead he was lunched by the governor general, Bernard Freyberg, attended 'a small cocktail party given by Mr Vernon Brown, architect and lecturer at the [Auckland] University [College], and attended by representatives of the University [...] and the Auckland Manufacturers' Association.' A meeting with members of the Manufacturers' Research Committee of the Department of Scientific and Industrial Research led to a request for 'a small travelling Exhibition to illustrate good design'. Bostock speculated that Gray's tour might prompt the formation of a local 'Society of Industrial Artists, whose members would initially be drawn from the fields of Architecture and Art, there being no recognised Industrial Design Specialists as yet in this country.' Such a society, he opined, would probably 'reduce the "piracy" of designs which is at present widespread here.' (National Archives of the United Kingdom, BW83/9, Letter from J Bostock to Lectures Department, 12 April 1949).</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Bostock's prognostication as to the incidental impetus Gray's visit might have on New Zealand design proved wrong. By the end of 1949 the Auckland Design Guild, 'an association providing for the exchange of ideas on the arts and sciences connected with design', </span><span style="font-family: 'Helvetica Neue', Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">which had been established in the July following Gray's visit had folded on unrecognised ideological grounds; the incoming government had withdrawn the small subsidy provided to the Architectural Centre for publication of the </span><i style="font-family: 'Helvetica Neue', Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Design Review</i><span style="font-family: 'Helvetica Neue', Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">; and New Zealand manufacturing companies, notably the newly established Crown Lynn brand, continued to pirate imperfect imitations of British commodities. Moreover, the production standards of British manufactures continued to be criticised: in July 1952 a National party backbencher, T P Shand, was moved to comment in the House of Representatives about the quality of imported British goods, declaring that 'I say to the English manufacturer and his agent in New Zealand that they are doing a very bad turn when they put rubbish on the market [...] we have had some shocking rubbish by way of English crockery in the last three or four years [...] I think it fair to say the the New Zealand manufacturers of crockery got blamed for some of it' (</span><i style="font-family: 'Helvetica Neue', Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">NZPD</i><span style="font-family: 'Helvetica Neue', Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">, vol. 297, (June- August 1952), pp. 86-87).</span><span style="font-family: 'Helvetica Neue', Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"> By identifying the connection between manufacturer and importer, Shand got it right. The problem with British manufactures wasn't the deficiency of British design, but rather a deficiency in what was despatched to this, the least critical of consumer markets; Gray's '</span><span style="font-family: 'Helvetica Neue', Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">cheap mass-produced articles', invariably retailed in New Zealand at highly inflated prices</span><span style="font-family: 'Helvetica Neue', Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">. </span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">In his post-visit report to the British Council, Gray was somewhat less sanguine than Bostock in his opinions, observing that 'No Australasian style of design in mass-produced goods has yet evolved, and in most cases it is evident that little or no thought has been given to the subject. There are few competent designers practicing in either Australia or New Zealand, and the present tendency is for those of outstanding ability to emigrate to the UK or USA, where greater opportunities are offered.' (</span><span style="font-family: 'Helvetica Neue', Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">National Archives of the United Kingdom, BW83/9,</span><span style="font-family: 'Helvetica Neue', Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"> Memorandum from M Gray to the British Council, 21 April 1949). The British Council heeded Gray's advice; industrial design was subsequently deemed a subject best ignored when considering tours of New Zealand. It would take the best part of a decade before steps were taken to invest design with an independent institutional profile in New Zealand. </span></div>
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Christopher Thompsonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01264481177071819483noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2464874880300858303.post-90174791736863607682014-08-01T06:30:00.000+12:002015-05-25T14:23:33.131+12:00Teenage dream: rapid response collecting <div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiEEYxuze3NFTBG7yYUysPNU_FLnUIgg0sDog4jqI7KsDEPAv5MEv8q5sD5I0q_nLRzk3ZI6n5qqvKJ4VWsgcsGAdObKoT8xt-Cy9RzxYmS4xnKVTrB0D4Dftd02HY2v8FCvx5Ghac7ARL_/s1600/Perry.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="400" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiEEYxuze3NFTBG7yYUysPNU_FLnUIgg0sDog4jqI7KsDEPAv5MEv8q5sD5I0q_nLRzk3ZI6n5qqvKJ4VWsgcsGAdObKoT8xt-Cy9RzxYmS4xnKVTrB0D4Dftd02HY2v8FCvx5Ghac7ARL_/s1600/Perry.jpg" width="361" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="background-color: white; color: #555555; font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: 11px; line-height: 16px; text-align: start;">Unidentified designers for Eylure,</span><span style="background-color: white; color: #555555; font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: 11px; line-height: 16px; text-align: start;"> 'Katy Perry lashes' false eyelash set, </span><span style="background-color: white; color: #555555; font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: 11px; line-height: 16px; text-align: start;">manufactured by PT Korindah, Indonesia, 2013, </span><span style="background-color: white; color: #555555; font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: 11px; line-height: 16px; text-align: start;"><br />Victoria & Albert Museum,</span><span style="background-color: white; color: #555555; font-size: 11px; line-height: 16px; text-align: start;"> </span><span style="background-color: white; color: #555555; font-size: 11px; font-style: inherit; line-height: 16px; text-align: start;">given by Gethin Chamberlain (CD.24:1 to 5-2014)</span></span></td></tr>
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<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: large;">At </span>the end of 2013 the Victoria & Albert Museum in
London – Britain’s national museum of art and design – announced a <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2014/07/07/arts/design/victoria-and-albert-museum-pushes-boundaries-of-collecting.html?_r=0">new collection strategy</a> aimed at ‘collecting objects as soon as they become newsworthy,
to reflect the changing way fast moving global events influence society.’ The
strategy is manifest in the museum’s recently formed ‘Contemporary
Architecture, Design and Digital team’ headed up by the architectural
journalist Kieran Long. The objects collected are exhibited in a new Rapid
Response section of the museum’s recently refurbished Twentieth
Century Gallery. </span><span style="font-family: 'Helvetica Neue', Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">The sort of things being assembled include </span><span style="font-family: 'Helvetica Neue', Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">a <a href="https://defdist.org/">Liberator handgun </a>–</span><span style="font-family: 'Helvetica Neue', Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"> </span><span style="font-family: 'Helvetica Neue', Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">‘the first
3D-printed “wiki-weapon”, <a href="http://www.theguardian.com/world/2013/dec/28/false-eyelash-industry-indonesia-low-pay">Katy Perry false eyelashes</a> made for an American-owned British company in Indonesia (£5.95) and a panel of <a href="http://www.theguardian.com/society/2014/jun/12/tesco-spikes-remove-regent-street-homeless-protests">spike studs</a> used in London to deter the homeless from
sleeping on the exteriors of the premises of the better off. Recognising the inherent banality
of many of these objects, Long argues that these usually fugitive things are
precisely what a future generation will want to see in its museums ‘because
lots of valuable things are kept by people’ (Rose Etherington ['Interview with Kieran Long'], </span><i style="font-family: 'Helvetica Neue', Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><a href="http://www.dezeen.com/2013/12/18/rapid-response-collecting-victoria-and-albert-museum-kieran-long/">Deezen</a></i><span style="font-family: 'Helvetica Neue', Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"> 18 Dec 2013).</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">New Zealand doesn't have a 'national museum of art and design', but as in New Zealand, the British media tend to avoid
mentioning museums – unless there’s a scandal in the making – but commentary in quality
newspapers such as the <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><a href="http://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2014/jul/02/victoria-and-albert-rapid-response-gallery-unveiled">Guardian</a></i>,
in magazines like <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Dezeen</i> and on sites
such as <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><a href="http://designobserver.com/feature/exhibition-as-inquiry-an-interview-with-kieran-long/38454/">Design Observer</a></i><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"> </i>has been generally positive. Oliver
Wainwright, writing in the <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Guardian</i>,
emphasises how important it is to regard the material collected under this strategy against the narrative of
the museum’s collection of ‘the embroidered thrones and lacquered vases of
despots and dictators’, arguing that ‘Rapid Response brings these stories to
the fore, as a powerful reminder that, beyond the craft of their making, every
object is political.’ Nonetheless, Wainwright cautions that ‘It is a
curatorial approach that at times feels a little too journalistic, a bit like
walking through a “most read” list of articles-as-objects’.<o:p></o:p></span><br />
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgfLN9M663uA_pgLPdT9eNeix8l6p9Q0LOeItmS0TYGZE9LxMTq1YMSjFx3XdDCZGqPPVncVPuIadRxnd4rHAkieXcbzN1IfWB5yDRQp5zpy3apV_oR6pTkrOaGQovMwoKMeZ9m0IKdgF0n/s1600/Screenshot+2014-07-24+07.42.34.png" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="400" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgfLN9M663uA_pgLPdT9eNeix8l6p9Q0LOeItmS0TYGZE9LxMTq1YMSjFx3XdDCZGqPPVncVPuIadRxnd4rHAkieXcbzN1IfWB5yDRQp5zpy3apV_oR6pTkrOaGQovMwoKMeZ9m0IKdgF0n/s1600/Screenshot+2014-07-24+07.42.34.png" width="352" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Twitter profile summary of Fiona Hughes, assistant editor, arts, <i>Evening Standard</i> newspaper, July 2014</span></td></tr>
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<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">It’s perhaps natural that journalists would mandate the
initiative of another journalist, particularly one that highlights the
contemporary and the newsworthy. Equally telling is the decision by the museum's management to resource a team comprising four curators dedicated to collecting
the contemporary, particularly in an institution that for much of its existence
has been significantly under-resourced, at least from a curatorial perspective.
There’s no indication that this situation has changed but even the most
traditional observer will recognise there’s little media purchase to be found
in a scholarly study of sixteenth century German stoneware vessels. One of the few negative responses in the British press to the V&A’s new strategy has been
the almost predictable publication of an excerpt from the museum’s press
release in the </span><span style="font-family: 'Helvetica Neue', Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">‘Pseuds corner’ column of the </span><span style="font-family: 'Helvetica Neue', Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">satirical magazine </span><i style="font-family: 'Helvetica Neue', Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Private
Eye</i><span style="font-family: 'Helvetica Neue', Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"> (</span><span style="font-family: 'Helvetica Neue', Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">no. 1369 (27 June-10 July 2014), p. 33).</span><br />
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh0KlOCjK9eFH501SDDc7MoiUtPDf8jaaw2BcKoYwh4o4P_BECPaqHOTRwtV6H_dP3Il62xtqFGRP0swTBUoKCkFpgAKBDQJPqeD_VdsStmRA88FRmGL_roP-wQs59D8H1S2sL7IkECidx8/s1600/Screenshot+2014-07-22+10.33.35.png" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh0KlOCjK9eFH501SDDc7MoiUtPDf8jaaw2BcKoYwh4o4P_BECPaqHOTRwtV6H_dP3Il62xtqFGRP0swTBUoKCkFpgAKBDQJPqeD_VdsStmRA88FRmGL_roP-wQs59D8H1S2sL7IkECidx8/s1600/Screenshot+2014-07-22+10.33.35.png" width="640" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Kieren Long's Twitter page, July 2014</span></td></tr>
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<span style="font-family: 'Helvetica Neue', Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Media savviness would appear to be the rationale both behind the </span><span style="font-family: 'Helvetica Neue', Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">the appointment of this high-profile curatorial team and the </span><span style="font-family: 'Helvetica Neue', Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">adoption of this strategy. Long has shifted from reporting news to collecting the ‘realia’
of news and being a part of the reportage. In many ways, it’s not too far
removed from the role he played in the BBC series ‘Restoration Home’ where
Long, employed as an architectural history pundit, would represent an anonymous
research assistant’s archival work about a building to its current owners who would then use it to inform their amateur efforts to obscure Britain’s built heritage. Complementing his profile as a talking head and a widely published journalist, Long has a quantifiable social media presence: he’s on Twitter (</span><span style="color: windowtext; font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; text-decoration: none; text-underline: none;"><a href="https://twitter.com/kieranlong">@kieranlong</a></span><span style="font-family: 'Helvetica Neue', Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">) although his </span><a href="https://www.facebook.com/victoriaandalbertmuseum?fref=ts" style="font-family: 'Helvetica Neue', Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Facebook</a><span style="font-family: 'Helvetica Neue', Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">
presence is mediated through the museum, as indeed are </span><a href="http://www.vam.ac.uk/blog/network/wearable-tech-who-wears-it" style="font-family: 'Helvetica Neue', Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">blog entries</a><span style="font-family: 'Helvetica Neue', Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"> from members of the Contemporary Architecture,
Design and Digital team. The Twitter feed for the new strategy has its own hashtag: #RapidResponseCollecting.</span><br />
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhls-kCuFpqdoWXK0NFif18XpruCW3kY2RKa5pAN5FKPzuwu6KWPK3EPs2WAlXpF_KEoosQHXNfR4gOoPYYRsTg8gEDQe5K_pGqfiZ4bRtqzRxdsEQ97dn4pfHI3fIoCh1owo3fFfjAtZsV/s1600/Screenshot+2014-07-29+06.31.12.png" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="380" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhls-kCuFpqdoWXK0NFif18XpruCW3kY2RKa5pAN5FKPzuwu6KWPK3EPs2WAlXpF_KEoosQHXNfR4gOoPYYRsTg8gEDQe5K_pGqfiZ4bRtqzRxdsEQ97dn4pfHI3fIoCh1owo3fFfjAtZsV/s1600/Screenshot+2014-07-29+06.31.12.png" width="400" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Twitter profile summary of Tom Dyckhoff, presenter of the 'Great Interior Design Challenge' show on BBC1, July 2014</span></td></tr>
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<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">All is not well though. The architectural journalist and BBC pundit Tom Dyckhoff recently tweeted his displeasure at the scale and location of the Rapid Response section of the Twentieth Century Gallery, suggesting it was 'wee' and 'tucked away' and that it should be relocated to 'the main reception'. Tellingly, Dyckhoff's tweet was retweeted by Long, which might suggest a degree of concurrence with the views expressed. Such a repositioning might engender a new range of problems, not least the fact that instead of highlighting the material acquired under the rapid response collecting mantra against the museum's historical collection, it would be competing with the museum's shop, located </span><span style="font-family: 'Helvetica Neue', Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">prominently </span><span style="font-family: 'Helvetica Neue', Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">near the 'main reception'.</span></div>
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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">David Iliff, Foyer of the Victoria and Albert Museum, London, 2012. <br />The museum's shop, surmounted on the mezzanine level by George Gilbert Scott's <a href="http://www.vam.ac.uk/content/articles/t/the-hereford-screen/">Hereford Screen</a> (1862), is to the right of the photograph, directly in a processional line from its principal public entrance to the left.<br /><a href="http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:V%26A_Museum_Foyer,_London_-_Oct_2012.jpg">Wikimedia Commons</a> <span style="background-color: white;">l</span></span><span style="background-color: white; color: #252525; font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; line-height: 21px; text-align: start;">icense </span><span style="background-color: white; color: #252525; font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; line-height: 21px; text-align: start;">CC-BY-SA 3.0</span></td></tr>
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<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">The idea of collecting quotidian and popular objects is no
innovation; social history museums, for example, do it all the time. In interviews with the press, Long has cited
an earlier precedent at the V&A in the activities of the <a href="http://www.vam.ac.uk/vastatic/microsites/1159_grand_design/essay-collecting-the_new.html">CirculationDepartment</a>, which, from the early twentieth century until 1977, collected contemporary
work as part of its circulating (hence the departmental title) exhibitions
programme.
Although the primary curatorial departments in the V&A did reluctantly – and occasionally controversially – collect
the odd contemporaneously made object from the start, the first systemic collection of the
contemporary to be shown in its walls was undertaken privately under the aegis
of the <a href="http://www.oxfordreference.com/view/10.1093/oi/authority.20110803095528242">British Institute of Industrial Art</a> (1920-1933). Following the closure in 1921 of
the Institute’s short-lived Knightsbridge gallery – dubbed by a journalist wag on
the <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Daily Chronicle</i> ‘the state art
shop’ – it convinced the V&A to allow it to exhibit a selection of contemporary designed objects in the museum's – rather inappropriately scaled and peripherally located – North Court. The majority of these pieces were collected by the art writer and proselytiser <a href="http://books.google.co.nz/books?id=CtSYC7PWFJgC&pg=PA12&lpg=PA12&dq=Margaret+Bulley&source=bl&ots=uRKilDsVa0&sig=jUy_JkZFTI7weKzBA_1_0oarums&hl=en&sa=X&ei=7Q_aU5_YK4O6oQSVr4G4Dw&ved=0CDAQ6AEwBzgK#v=onepage&q=Margaret%20Bulley&f=false">Margaret Hattersley Bulley</a> (1882-1959) who, on the demise of the institute following the formation of the better-funded and organised Council for Art and Industry, endowed the collection to the V&A.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">[Hannah Ritchie (1915-1940)], Cover of Margaret H Bulley, <i>Have you good taste? A guide to the appreciation of the lesser arts</i> (London: Methuen, 1933). </span><br />
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Ritchie appears to have been a pupil at a London County Council school influenced by the theories of its inspector of art, the art pedagogue Marion Richardson</span></td></tr>
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<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">More recently the V&A has initiated other programmes addressing contemporary consumption including the 2000 exhibition 'Brand new' which took 'a challenging look at consumer culture and the proliferation of brand identities.' Unlike the rapid response collecting strategy, the exhibition critically examined the nature of contemporary consumption in particular the relationship between brands and consumer behaviour. While the exhibition was neither the result of a deliberate collecting strategy nor focussed exclusively on the contemporary, it was an interesting indicator of the way the institution had changed its approach to the contemporary. </span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">A collecting strategy aimed at acquiring the banal rather than the precious follows much of the thinking espoused by what might be described as the first generation of design historians – as opposed to, say, art or architectural historians with an interest in design – such as Adrian Forty and Jonathan Woodham. Forty's 1986 text <i><a href="http://www.thamesandhudson.com/Objects_of_Desire/9780500274125">Objects of desire: design and society since 1750</a></i> (London: Thames & Hudson) made what was then a radical assertion that design was shaped by economic, social and ideological decisions and that it was best expressed in everyday objects. Woodham in <i><a href="http://ukcatalogue.oup.com/product/9780192842046.do">Twentieth-century design</a></i> (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997) elaborated on this view declaring that the best known and by implication the most successful designs of the twentieth century were found in the marketplace, not the museum. This emphasis on the consumer</span><span style="font-family: 'Helvetica Neue', Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"> experience – on the the exchange value of the commodity rather than the singularity of the design, the significance of the designer or the sagacity of the manufacturer – marks an important shift in institutional approach to collecting. It's a blurring of the distinction between the shop and the museum, locating the museum as a site of entertainment, a distraction, an asylum; no less, a contemporary Benjaminian <i>Passegen</i>.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">It would require no great stretch of the imagination to think that the V&A's media-driven rapid response collecting strategy might appeal to the management of the handful of museums in New Zealand that acquire designed objects for their collections. It's a relatively cheap move and would require no great outlay other than staff costs and a small acquisitions budget. For all that, it probably wouldn't work for any number of reasons, not least the facts that New Zealand </span><span style="font-family: 'Helvetica Neue', Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">has </span><span style="font-family: 'Helvetica Neue', Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">neither that many design-minded media celebrities nor museums with collections of ‘the embroidered
thrones and lacquered vases of despots and dictators’ to act as a contextual backdrop for the new material. </span></div>
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi8y_77ZGLhic_FhRwXd-syGl2vnKbL34YLQsdIo9BX-5_Y_1XtX0LZgQqaQQvWbdeKu89UkAHsSwFyzguWP61Qq1BM2If4tr7f3XAfVvVI5iB1sNpdLnZ7EOc3f6dSt1VZDVACl2f_UZhl/s1600/MA_I084844.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="640" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi8y_77ZGLhic_FhRwXd-syGl2vnKbL34YLQsdIo9BX-5_Y_1XtX0LZgQqaQQvWbdeKu89UkAHsSwFyzguWP61Qq1BM2If4tr7f3XAfVvVI5iB1sNpdLnZ7EOc3f6dSt1VZDVACl2f_UZhl/s1600/MA_I084844.jpg" width="412" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-family: 'Helvetica Neue', Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">David Jenkin (1919-c. 2002), presentation vase commemorating the production of the '100 millionth article' at Crown Lynn Potteries Ltd, New Zealand. </span><br />
<span style="font-family: 'Helvetica Neue', Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Presented to Walter Nash, prime minister of New Zealand, in July 1959.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: 'Helvetica Neue', Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Te Papa Tongarewa/National Museum of New Zealand, gift of the Nash family 1996 (CG00271)</span></td></tr>
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<span style="font-family: 'Helvetica Neue', Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"></span><span style="font-family: 'Helvetica Neue', Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">As a museum whose collection, among other things, encompasses art, design and social history, Te Papa has, over the years, collected both the local versions of 'embroidered thrones and lacquered vases' as well as 'newsworthy' objects. The former might best be represented by the covered vase produced in 1959 by the Crown
Lynn factory and presented to the prime minister, the crockery-minded Walter
Nash.* It must be pointed out that no matter the slurs of his opponents, Nash hardly fitted the mould of a despot or dictator. Despite the fact that it wasn't collected contemporaneously, this crudely conceived if technically perfect vase – it has the appearance of being carved from a lump of lard – is the ideal exemplar of the New Zealand market place as it was in 1959. Its form is derivative and anachronistic and it was manufactured using outdated and imported, second-hand technology. There's a certain irony in that, arguably, Nash and his second Labour party administration (1957-1960) did more than any government, before or after, both to encourage the growth of manufacturing industry in New Zealand and to address the abysmal standard of design embodied by the vase. </span><span style="font-family: 'Helvetica Neue', Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Except as a product of Crown Lynn's marketing department, Nash's vase had no consumer profile; despite its political resonances, no one bought or sold it and, strangely enough, while the event of its presentation was considered newsworthy, the piece itself was not illustrated but referred to, glancingly and inaccurately, in newspaper reports of the occasion as a 'loving cup'.</span><br />
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgIw9_h4gkLXYp55bAp2CwGqPcAWouKfipULbWavNj77puH1Y8VwmeGGgnTPvHBGUJbkvI_B0ff4D5yiRkHhHjFJOrOPMiFRHgcIRDBpaA4cf-ViExgCxYSaHXC-sxLDYm8f64xHKvbdNzH/s1600/MA_I270583.2493x1694.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="217" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgIw9_h4gkLXYp55bAp2CwGqPcAWouKfipULbWavNj77puH1Y8VwmeGGgnTPvHBGUJbkvI_B0ff4D5yiRkHhHjFJOrOPMiFRHgcIRDBpaA4cf-ViExgCxYSaHXC-sxLDYm8f64xHKvbdNzH/s1600/MA_I270583.2493x1694.jpg" width="320" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-size: x-small;"><span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Unidentified designers, 'Carlton Ware' </span><span style="background-color: white;"><a href="http://collections.tepapa.govt.nz/Object/68681" style="border: 0px; font-family: 'Helvetica Neue', Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif; line-height: 20px; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; text-align: start; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">cup and saucer</a><span style="font-family: 'Helvetica Neue', Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif; line-height: 20px; text-align: start;">, commemorating the New Zealand Centennial Exhibition 1940, </span></span></span><br />
<span style="font-size: x-small;"><span style="background-color: white;"><span style="font-family: 'Helvetica Neue', Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif; line-height: 20px; text-align: start;">manufactured by Wiltshaw and Robinson Ltd, England, 1939. </span></span></span><br />
<span style="background-color: white;"><span style="font-family: 'Helvetica Neue', Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Te Papa Tongarewa/National Museum of New Zealand, p</span><span style="font-family: 'Helvetica Neue', Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif; font-size: xx-small; line-height: 20px; text-align: start;">urchased 1980 with the Minister's discretionary funds</span><span style="font-family: 'Helvetica Neue', Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif; font-size: xx-small; line-height: 20px; text-align: start;"> (CG001344)</span></span></td></tr>
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<span style="font-family: 'Helvetica Neue', Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Equally un-newsworthy but distinctly quotidian is the collection of ceramic souvenirs from the 1940 New Zealand Centennial Exhibition acquired by the museum in 1980. These knickknacks – souvenir ashtrays, cups and saucers, egg cups and the like, standard low-end productions decorated with a clobbered transfer print of Edward Anscombe's temporary Centennial Tower – were produced in England to satisfy not so much local consumer demand for material memories of a national event but more the balance sheets of the British manufacturers, export agents, confirmers and shippers charged with supplying the New Zealand manufactured commodities market, who effectively defined consumer choice. Acquired institutionally as part of a social history collecting strategy some forty years after their production, these tawdry memorabilia of a newsworthy event were, individually, as un-newsworthy as Nash's vase. But in terms of what they represented in the way they were produced, mediated and consumed were accurate reflections of the country's material culture as it was embodied at a particular moment. </span><br />
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<span style="font-family: 'Helvetica Neue', Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">The V&A's new rapid response collecting strategy is neither new nor is it about collecting. Its Liberator handgun doesn't even need to be collected as an object but merely recorded as a line of computing code that with the appropriate software can be produced by a 3D printer anywhere, anytime. It is, in effect, a dematerialised commodity; it doesn't need to exist physically in a collection to convey the reason why the V&A decided to mediate its existence. It's telling that a recent article on Michael Brand, director of the Art Gallery of New South Wales, quotes him asserting that '"the age of collecting is over", and that the future for museums and galleries worldwide is collaboration and loan.' (Peter Robb, 'Brand management', </span><a href="http://www.themonthly.com.au/issue/2014/august/1406815200/peter-robb/art-gallery-nsw%E2%80%99s-michael-brand" style="font-family: 'Helvetica Neue', Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><i>The Monthly</i></a><span style="font-family: 'Helvetica Neue', Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"> (August 2014), p. 36). Brand's comment is perhaps best understood from his background as a former director of the Getty Museum where his major role seems to have been remediating and unpicking the rapacious collecting activities of the museum's former curator of antiquities <a href="http://traffickingculture.org/encyclopedia/case-studies/marion-true/">Marion True</a> rather than expending its vast acquisitions budget on extending the museum's collection. Brand's comment shouldn't be seen as merely the frustrated comments of the director of an art gallery with a notably modest collection – </span><span style="font-family: 'Helvetica Neue', Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">at least by international metrics – </span><span style="font-family: 'Helvetica Neue', Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">and little chance of improving it. Brand is, apparently, 'formidably well connected with the world's leading institutions - the Hermitage in Russia, the Harvard Museum, the Courtauld Institute in London, the American Association of Museum Directors, and so on.', so what he says has a universal currency. What he appears to be advocating is something similar to what the V&A has done with its de-objectified collecting strategy. By advocating a focus on loan-based exhibitions Brand, like Martin Roth at the V&A, is not only condoning but also encouraging a </span><a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Medium_Is_the_Massage" style="font-family: 'Helvetica Neue', Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">McLuhanesque</a><span style="font-family: 'Helvetica Neue', Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"> shift in the public gaze, from the collection to the shop. At least Brand hasn't yet promulgated a collecting strategy that gives all the appearance of being driven by the fickle chimera of popularity.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: 'Helvetica Neue', Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><b>Postscript</b></span><br />
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<span style="font-family: 'Helvetica Neue', Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">The underwhelming experience of what Katy Perry eye lashes created by Eylure look like when they're put on display in the V&A's Rapid Response Collecting 'gallery':</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">* <span style="font-size: x-small;">Keith Sinclair, <i>Walter Nash</i> (Auckland: Auckland University Press, 1976), p. 182, observed that in July 1939, during the humiliating negotiations around the 1938-39 exchange crisis, Nash 'had done a certain amount of travelling about Britain, mainly talking to disgruntled crockery and other manufacturers.' Is there a connection between Nash's visits to the 'disgruntled crockery manufacturers' and the tawdry Centennial Exhibition souvenirs they despatched to New Zealand soon after?</span></span><span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><br /></span>
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Christopher Thompsonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01264481177071819483noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2464874880300858303.post-72903207754317290512014-07-01T05:51:00.000+12:002017-08-27T21:48:07.069+12:00Te Paki-o-Matariki: heralding design<div class="MsoNormal">
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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-family: "helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">The royal arms of England from the title page of </span><i style="font-family: 'Helvetica Neue', Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Journals of the House of Representatives of New Zealand </i><span style="font-family: "helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">(1941-42)</span></td></tr>
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<span style="font-family: "helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif; font-size: large;">One</span><span style="font-family: "helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;"> of the omnipresent symbols of British colonialism during New Zealand’s initial</span><span style="font-family: "helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;"> </span><span style="font-family: "helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">European settlement </span><span style="font-family: "helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">period </span><span style="font-family: "helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">(1840-1906) was the coat of arms of the British monarch. A visual depiction of a couple of fantasy beasts, propping up an assemblage of even more obscure bits and pieces, it was an odd, if effective, visual metaphor for something that had no actual physical presence in the country, the monarch. Given that its current configuration had been created only in June 1837, following the death of William IV, it was a novel manifestation of royal absence. It was reproduced ubiquitously: on the uniforms of British soldiers; on </span><a href="http://sarahguppy.co.nz/website/wp-content/uploads/2013/09/Detail-of-Ponsonby-Post-Office-800x600.jpg" style="font-family: 'Helvetica Neue', Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">post offices</a><span style="font-family: "helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">, </span><a href="http://i365.photobucket.com/albums/oo92/RasputinDude/News%20Story%20Pix%202010/3403063s-04Mar10.jpg" style="font-family: 'Helvetica Neue', Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">courthouses</a><span style="font-family: "helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;"> and in the </span><a href="http://www.nzhistory.net.nz/media/interactive/legislative-council-chamber" style="font-family: 'Helvetica Neue', Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Parliament</a><span style="font-family: "helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">; and on official correspondence and other constitutional documents. Representing absent 'power and majesty' of British sovereignty, it is <a href="http://uniforminsignia.org/?option=com_insigniasearch&Itemid=53&result=96">still used officially</a> by the New Zealand government in lieu of its own coat of arms notwithstanding the 1947 adoption of <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Statute_of_Westminster_Adoption_Act_1947">the Statute of Westminster</a>, the act of British Parliament that established New Zealand as an autonomous</span><span style="font-family: "helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;"> realm. </span></div>
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<!--StartFragment--><span style="font-family: "helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">Heraldry, the system by which coats of arms and other armorial bearings are devised, is a visual code that developed
- in Europe at least - around the eleventh century. Deploying a finite set of
tinctures (colours, metals and furs), ordinaries (geometrical charges including bars, barrys, </span><span style="font-family: "helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">bends,</span><span style="font-family: "helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;"> chevrons, </span><span style="font-family: "helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">chiefs, </span><span style="font-family: "helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">crosses, </span><span style="font-family: "helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">fesses, </span><span style="font-family: "helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">pales </span><span style="font-family: "helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">and saltires) </span><span style="font-family: "helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">and an incredible variety of devices, beasts and plants - both real and unreal, tools, weapons and fabricated objects </span><span style="font-family: "helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">on a variety of media (badges, </span><span style="font-family: "helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">crests, </span><span style="font-family: "helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">compartments,</span><span style="font-family: "helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;"> </span><span style="font-family: "helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">escutcheons, </span><span style="font-family: "helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">helmets, mantles,</span><span style="font-family: "helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;"> supporters and torses),
heraldry enables a highly regulated, simple tool that provides an immediate visual
identity for states, cities, universities, schools, corporations, families and individuals whilst
simultaneously establishing a social narrative of allegiances and connections that,
in many respects, has never been bettered. It is signally unfortunate, both for
it and for us, that this sophisticated visual code has, over the years, become
associated with reactionary snobbery, recondite elitism, pomposity and
overweening self-entitlement. Because of the way it’s administered - in both England and Scotland, as part of the royal household - it tends to be regarded as a bit of a
mediaeval hangover, an embarrassing reminder of unearned privilege and class
distinction, a discomfiting relic rather akin to the recent ignominious reintroduction
of chivalric titles by hubristic conservative governments in <a href="http://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-26730216">Australia</a> and <a href="http://www.radionz.co.nz/news/national/14958/new-zealanders-reclaim-titles-of-knight-and-dame">New Zealand</a>.</span></div>
<table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: center;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg_ME7mYTYgQggLwxNff_XbDAe6qriDqHiVzng39Fch1mwzvMKNGSF5eBL7Hn1i00aI9VCjM5EUcLHfGaHBJg1R6ddQ0kRPRu6Osym3loYRdlV6KqWU7WOfmmdcJKy2c5zzRwGAGvqJWzua/s1600/heraldryineng.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="400" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg_ME7mYTYgQggLwxNff_XbDAe6qriDqHiVzng39Fch1mwzvMKNGSF5eBL7Hn1i00aI9VCjM5EUcLHfGaHBJg1R6ddQ0kRPRu6Osym3loYRdlV6KqWU7WOfmmdcJKy2c5zzRwGAGvqJWzua/s1600/heraldryineng.jpg" width="267" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-family: "helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">William Grimmond (1884-1952), Cover of Anthony Wagner, <i>Heraldry in England</i> (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1946). </span><br />
<span style="font-family: "helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">Commissioned by Nikolaus Pevsner as part of the post-war King Penguin series, this 1953 </span><span style="font-family: "helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">printing </span><br />
<span style="font-family: "helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">came from the library of the modernist London design consultancy Design Research Unit</span></td></tr>
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<span style="font-family: "helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">During the mid-twentieth century a number of designers, particularly those imbricated in the power formations of the state, interrogated the way that heraldry presented itself in the modern era. <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reynolds_Stone">Reynolds Stone</a> and <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Milner_Gray_(designer)">Milner Gray</a> (of Design Research Unit), for example, developed a number of versions of the royal arms of England that, while adhering to heraldic rules, communicated a pared, contemporary version of an old symbol. This was heraldry for a new, dynamic, post-war Britain, part of a deliberate political strategy to establish an image of Britain that while acknowledging and respecting aspects of the past projected an efficient, productive and modern state, a manifestation of what Michael Saler describes as mediaeval modernism which sought to 'spiritualise capitalism, infuse mass commodities with soul, and reshape an increasingly fragmented and secular culture into an organically integrated community of the faithful.' (M Saler, <i>The avant-garde in interwar England: medieval modernism and the London Underground</i> (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999), viii). Moreover, these redesigned emblems reinforced a sense of British difference from the post-war economic and political hegemony of both the United States and the Soviet Union. They were also in marked contrast with the logo-like symbols of the former Nazi Reich.</span></div>
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh8ONoaY5dmSpt2cyg5zHZFIVgMZFNfH9O5fe2cOBRnDeWf-K7CExBbL3IoQ4iQFRQPjYcI3wJ09xNAzTAwNZpHZuzIA9UdpQRSy3PI8VI2L9I1faRQ_xceLoouMUo9BOxXB8lYF_NUAi3O/s1600/Design+at+work.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="400" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh8ONoaY5dmSpt2cyg5zHZFIVgMZFNfH9O5fe2cOBRnDeWf-K7CExBbL3IoQ4iQFRQPjYcI3wJ09xNAzTAwNZpHZuzIA9UdpQRSy3PI8VI2L9I1faRQ_xceLoouMUo9BOxXB8lYF_NUAi3O/s1600/Design+at+work.jpg" width="301" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-family: "helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">Milner Gray (1899-1996), Cover of <i>Design at work</i> (London: HMSO, 1948) </span><br />
<span style="font-family: "helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">showing a modernised version of the English royal arms</span></td></tr>
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<span style="font-family: "helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">There were a few, half-hearted, attempts in New Zealand to modernise the images of state during the mid-twentieth century. Aside from the near total absence of designers in the country, there was little perceptible design sensibility evident in any branch of government other than in the Public Works Department. </span></div>
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiE-7vSurfaDd2nwvlrAzZKa2V0l_GNJYpyw_q7CJIWWwk7mj84rAgjDjXI2lK1-Llray4XHuxvFBb3IFuMSOyd3u2_3X-jNxkckIXhqUxIrVF5PBMo_TXJqNAYGqddOffWi0nvXZFCUEO2/s1600/Screenshot+2014-06-27+22.18.28.png" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="640" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiE-7vSurfaDd2nwvlrAzZKa2V0l_GNJYpyw_q7CJIWWwk7mj84rAgjDjXI2lK1-Llray4XHuxvFBb3IFuMSOyd3u2_3X-jNxkckIXhqUxIrVF5PBMo_TXJqNAYGqddOffWi0nvXZFCUEO2/s1600/Screenshot+2014-06-27+22.18.28.png" width="459" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-family: "helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">Sparrow Industrial Pictures Ltd, [Government Building, Shortland Street, Auckland, c. 1945]. <br />A stylised version of the royal arms of England can just be seen attached to the second floor balcony.<br /><a href="http://muse.aucklandmuseum.com/databases/librarycatalogue/P8577.detail">Auckland Museum</a></span></td></tr>
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<span style="font-family: "helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">Following the election of the first Labour administration in 1935, Modernist architects in the Public Works Department did manage to change the way the English royal arms were represented on a number of buildings, particularly those associated with the Post Office. The <a href="http://www.heritage.org.nz/the-list/details/7631">Government Building</a> on Shortland Street (popularly known as the Jean Batten Place Post Office) in Auckland (<a href="http://www.teara.govt.nz/en/biographies/4m31/mair-john-thomas">John Mair</a> architect, constructed 1937-42) had balconies garnished with rectangularly stylised versions of the royal arms, cast in bronze and in keeping with the modernist form of the building. In the recent refurbishment of the building's residual façades, these coats of arms - removed around 2000 - were ineptly substituted by painted cast metal versions of an earlier, nineteenth century, configuration of the symbol. </span></div>
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjTuf6goJiCRPSMJvR96x8i_YFFo1r4rUHapEkeOG3W_TGUMExxz1DsHcT0fiSQSGCNFYPBSx04e_ql5lMgfs42yXIwxqrpC3JHyytB7n1oab_GBP9ECklf_TICdR03qQR9QE_6yu4JCNYi/s1600/Screenshot+2014-06-11+09.56.31.png" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="318" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjTuf6goJiCRPSMJvR96x8i_YFFo1r4rUHapEkeOG3W_TGUMExxz1DsHcT0fiSQSGCNFYPBSx04e_ql5lMgfs42yXIwxqrpC3JHyytB7n1oab_GBP9ECklf_TICdR03qQR9QE_6yu4JCNYi/s1600/Screenshot+2014-06-11+09.56.31.png" width="320" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-family: "helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">Armorial bearings of the Dominion of New Zealand as granted in 1911</span></td></tr>
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<span style="font-family: "helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">Notwithstanding this long, uncritical, adherence to British official symbolism, at the urging of the prime minister Joseph Ward, <a href="http://www.teara.govt.nz/en/coat-of-arms/page-1">New Zealand was granted armorial bearings by royal warrant in 1911</a>. </span><span style="font-family: "helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">In the mid 1940s the historian </span><a href="http://www.teara.govt.nz/en/biographies/5b16/beaglehole-john-cawte" style="font-family: 'Helvetica Neue', Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">John Cawte Beaglehole</a><span style="font-family: "helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">, employed part-time in the Department of Internal Affairs, tinkered with the 1911 grant, ostensibly to ensure that it 'fitted more naturally' with the new typefaces he had persuaded the Government Printer to acquire; it was not an inspired interpretation (F Corner, in <i>An eye an ear and a voice</i>, ed by M Templeton (Wellington: Ministry of Foreign Affairs and Trade, 1993), 64-126, p. 77). More successfully he also collaborated with the artist</span><span style="font-family: "helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;"> </span><a href="http://www.teara.govt.nz/en/biographies/5t3/taylor-ernest-mervyn" style="font-family: 'Helvetica Neue', Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Mervyn Taylor</a><span style="font-family: "helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;"> to design the mount and reverse of the elegant</span><span style="font-family: "helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;"> </span><a href="http://medals.nzdf.mil.nz/category/c/c1larger.html" style="font-family: 'Helvetica Neue', Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">New Zealand War Service Medal</a><span style="font-family: "helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">. Both elements of the medal depicted, at the insistence of the Labour party cabinet, a silver fern leaf 'like on the All Blacks' jersey'; it was the first appearance in the assemblage of state icons of this now ubiquitous national symbol. (T Beaglehole, <i>A life of J C Beaglehole</i> (Wellington: Victoria University Press, 2006), p. 300) Beaglehole was evidently more concerned about the quality of the state's typography than he was with its iconography. Beaglehole's design of the letterhead for Victoria University College (about 1950) that included a simplified version of the college's heraldic shield was a notably better design. </span><br />
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgCHvy5HFwTJzgugjAr4OT5V_ZlsbcUVeloN7lXDQXMtCuLLvCymR2DO6kt_J9vVVRobaxdGm-j-1wD9njxtS2HM5h1_Gqh4bGTctpwlc5PAXniU52UL4PW3I9QkD1zbW0qOadasW98R5qZ/s1600/Screenshot+2014-08-11+10.01.21.png" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="260" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgCHvy5HFwTJzgugjAr4OT5V_ZlsbcUVeloN7lXDQXMtCuLLvCymR2DO6kt_J9vVVRobaxdGm-j-1wD9njxtS2HM5h1_Gqh4bGTctpwlc5PAXniU52UL4PW3I9QkD1zbW0qOadasW98R5qZ/s1600/Screenshot+2014-08-11+10.01.21.png" width="320" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-family: "helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">John Cawte Beaglehole's 1944 version of the New Zealand armorial bearings. Rather than being designed to match new typefaces ordered by the Government Printer it was commissioned by the newly established Department of External Affairs to provide a less anachronistic symbol of the country.<br /><a href="http://www.teara.govt.nz/en/document/35064/varying-coats-of-arms">Te Ara/The Encyclopedia of New Zealand</a></span></td></tr>
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<span style="font-family: "helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">The awkwardly configured 1911 New Zealand armorial bearings were</span><span style="font-family: "helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;"> eventually modified by the National party government in 1956. In both their original and amended form they are an unappealing, if colourful, late nineteenth century
confection celebrating Pākehā hegemony, trade, agriculture
and mineral exploitation, suggesting the country’s location under a stylised
arrangement of the ubiquitous stellar constellation of the Southern Cross and extolling a colonial economy of mining and primary production. </span><br />
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<tr><td><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgedYtcxxPt-cp9NUTVqG8Rq24Ao25EpfTkSQJTslFHA-c-aBhlpmQ6BOb2g7Owet7whckVEGWdFgJG79-tcORqa4l-XAqL-5XgtcwpuY9zcSt2l3cJ49-NSRKuxIuCzR9wG-rbbWeJo6G9/s1600/Screenshot+2014-06-11+10.29.57.png" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgedYtcxxPt-cp9NUTVqG8Rq24Ao25EpfTkSQJTslFHA-c-aBhlpmQ6BOb2g7Owet7whckVEGWdFgJG79-tcORqa4l-XAqL-5XgtcwpuY9zcSt2l3cJ49-NSRKuxIuCzR9wG-rbbWeJo6G9/s1600/Screenshot+2014-06-11+10.29.57.png" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption"><span style="font-family: "helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif; font-size: x-small;">Modified armorial bearings of the realm of New Zealand as granted in 1956</span></td></tr>
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<span style="font-family: "helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">In the original design the escutcheon was surmounted by a gold coloured half lion bearing the British union jack or, in the arcane language of heralds, 'a demi-lion rampant guardant or supporting a flag staff erect proper thereon flying to the sinister the Union Flag.' In the 1956 version the lion was replaced by a fractionally more subtle symbol of hegemony, the British crown of St Edward. As well, the female </span><span style="font-family: "helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">P</span><span style="font-family: "helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">ā</span><span style="font-family: "helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">keh</span><span style="font-family: "helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">ā</span><span style="font-family: "helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;"> supporter was redrawn at the behest of the responsible minister, allegedly in the image of the American actress Grace Kelly.</span><br />
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhWdKkxK8Qg43awtFrMtRN82zo2BaQvkLMifwkYGyCEXueBvKe2tg4CHLKENV1ukOos0-Ia7Gwj95X-DMBNaEuSaIfVQB-G2RjKSJdQioZjDLFt4_SOpRiTHoJq3r9Ef60zWaUbhveVQHg6/s1600/Screenshot+2014-06-23+21.48.36.png" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="282" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhWdKkxK8Qg43awtFrMtRN82zo2BaQvkLMifwkYGyCEXueBvKe2tg4CHLKENV1ukOos0-Ia7Gwj95X-DMBNaEuSaIfVQB-G2RjKSJdQioZjDLFt4_SOpRiTHoJq3r9Ef60zWaUbhveVQHg6/s1600/Screenshot+2014-06-23+21.48.36.png" width="320" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-family: "helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">Milner Gray (1899-1996), Design for a proposed one dollar coin, 1964.<br />Victoria & Albert Museum, Archive of Art & Design, 1999/8</span></td></tr>
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<span style="font-family: "helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">Milner Gray essayed a revised version of what might be described as the lesser New Zealand coat of arms – that is without supporters, compartment and motto – in 1964 when he was involved in an invited competition to design new decimal coinage. Gray's more vigorously modelled, uncluttered, designs, in part based around elements of the coat of arms, were ultimately rejected by the New Zealand Treasury's Coinage Design Advisory Committee, who spurning the advice of the Royal Mint Advisory Committee in London, selected <a href="http://www.teara.govt.nz/en/biographies/4b26/berry-reginald-george-james">James Berry</a>'s more <a href="http://www.rbnz.govt.nz/research_and_publications/fact_sheets_and_guides/3063374.pdf">pedestrian proposals</a> in which heraldry played no part.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">Even if the former prime minister Geoffrey Palmer <a href="http://www.nzhistory.net.nz/files/documents/geoffrey-palmer-symbols-of-nationhood.pdf">considers</a> these revised armorial bearings 'somewhat dated [...] not central to New Zealand identity today', they constitute an image familiar
to most New Zealanders, appearing in courtrooms as a symbol of the power of the
state, on <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_Zealand_passport">passports</a> (since 1963), <a href="http://medals.nzdf.mil.nz/category/b/b1.html">orders</a> and <a href="http://medals.nzdf.mil.nz/category/c/c2.html">medals</a>, <a href="http://coinquest.com/cgi-bin/cq/coins?main_coin=2602">coins</a> and <a href="http://stampsnz.com/1970_definitives_pictorials.html">stamps</a>. Its original designer wasn’t someone versed in the heraldic
arts but a draughtsman in the Department of Tourist and Health Resorts, James
McDonald, a photographer and filmmaker. The design resulted from two
competitions held in 1906 and 1908 and three winning entries, as selected by
<a href="http://www.teara.govt.nz/en/biographies/2h8/hamilton-augustus">Augustus Hamilton</a> - a biologist, ethnologist and director of the Dominion
Museum, were despatched to the </span><a href="http://www.college-of-arms.gov.uk/" style="font-family: 'Helvetica Neue', Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">College of Arms</a><span style="font-family: "helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;"> in London for
heraldic processing. McDonald’s design was the least awful; the others
reflected not only the untutored state of design in New Zealand but also the widely held delusion that the country was merely a satellite of Britain. Perhaps the most telling aspect of the exercise was early evidence of the 'number eight wire' syndrome at work in the service of design, a local belief that make-do substitutes are not only cheaper but just as effective.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">*</span></div>
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjI3OQyUj8ZqmvPZNMwfknNaIpzFHvUs8i8DxRXXP3O1UmKyI-VZsBh-VSsZrhskZ6wGLzL0N4w6-XKNwTYGy-hcvZCCWmqWTJqAAisVWsEGLw1NY_Hr6lWKS98sSpLBHwGsfPpZq5mgYJv/s1600/Screenshot+2014-06-11+10.18.50.png" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="249" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjI3OQyUj8ZqmvPZNMwfknNaIpzFHvUs8i8DxRXXP3O1UmKyI-VZsBh-VSsZrhskZ6wGLzL0N4w6-XKNwTYGy-hcvZCCWmqWTJqAAisVWsEGLw1NY_Hr6lWKS98sSpLBHwGsfPpZq5mgYJv/s1600/Screenshot+2014-06-11+10.18.50.png" width="320" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-family: "helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">Unofficial arms of the Selwyn District Council (1989).<br /><a href="http://www.ngw.nl/heraldrywiki/index.php?title=Selwyn_District">Heraldry of the World</a></span></td></tr>
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<span style="font-family: "helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">A similar situation applies to the coats of arms adopted by a majority of the towns and cities of New Zealand. In most instances these representations of civic virtues have been drawn up by persons
unversed in either design or the codes of heraldry. More often than not, the results abound
with images of plenty, agriculture, the odd animal, an impressive local feature, such as a mountain, and, occasionally, a badly drawn M<span style="mso-ascii-font-family: Cambria; mso-hansi-font-family: Cambria;">ā</span>ori-derived pattern. The difference between the New Zealand armorial bearings and the municipal
inventions is that the former was submitted and approved by the country’s
official heraldic authority, whereas the arms developed for, say, the Selwyn
District Council </span><span style="font-family: "helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">in 1989</span><span style="font-family: "helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;"> </span><span style="font-family: "helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">were not, they were just assumed.</span><br />
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<tr><td><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEix95cR0eefJ4B34YRTPwH62AiE47yKzF_1lxFRACrSbO1nWzy_dAlKKUAUkZ1BO9cZDNuB1uY8wJacBBo99WNRX6AeIFI31zOqJ6QXv-rLRddoKEDlRzRJslYI2wm3C0K_vdtss0shslvd/s1600/Screenshot+2014-06-21+14.17.10.png" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEix95cR0eefJ4B34YRTPwH62AiE47yKzF_1lxFRACrSbO1nWzy_dAlKKUAUkZ1BO9cZDNuB1uY8wJacBBo99WNRX6AeIFI31zOqJ6QXv-rLRddoKEDlRzRJslYI2wm3C0K_vdtss0shslvd/s1600/Screenshot+2014-06-21+14.17.10.png" width="293" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption"><span style="font-family: "helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif; font-size: x-small;">Armorial bearings of the Auckland City Council as granted in 1911</span></td></tr>
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<span style="font-family: "helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">In 2010 the seven former city and district councils of the Auckland region, along with its regional council, were merged to form a single governing entity, Auckland Council. The change was overseen by a managerial body known as the Auckland Transition Agency and one of the strategies it implemented to symbolise the unity of the new Council was to hold a design competition for a new logo. The Auckland region has, over the years, been represented by a wide variety of graphic symbols. These have ranged from those devised by the College of Arms in London to various corporate-style logos. Armorial bearings were granted to the Auckland City Council in 1911. Like the arms of New Zealand, granted that same year, they were a rather awkward confection of local attributes: a cornucopia, a pick and shovel and a sailing ship with Kiwi supporters and a crest comprising a mural crown acting as a sort of crenellated flower pot for a Harakeke (New Zealand flax) plant. Other former councils such as <a href="http://www.ngw.nl/heraldrywiki/index.php?title=Manukau">Manukau City</a> and <a href="http://timespanner.blogspot.co.nz/2011/02/west-auckland-coat-of-arms.html">Waitakere City</a> also had armorial bearings, granted in 1968 and 1955 respectively although, technically, they were being used illegally as they had been granted to predecessor bodies.</span><br />
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhMuqJYEpYYcXd7WHQOPUNbHe0O4q-QZQ7Zn-UwIcqGbtQOtjArtRQj0YfDb4UIN6Y47B0UG8puThkPAIKJB170tg5xmDF2S1dH4ecDKEoULGB9EWTY1uPkTd6VuVHSUeTT-NC5eOQFq2od/s1600/2014-06-22+14.55.24.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="75" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhMuqJYEpYYcXd7WHQOPUNbHe0O4q-QZQ7Zn-UwIcqGbtQOtjArtRQj0YfDb4UIN6Y47B0UG8puThkPAIKJB170tg5xmDF2S1dH4ecDKEoULGB9EWTY1uPkTd6VuVHSUeTT-NC5eOQFq2od/s1600/2014-06-22+14.55.24.jpg" width="320" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-family: "helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif; font-size: x-small;">A 1990s rendering of the 1980s Auckland City Council logo</span></td></tr>
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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-family: "helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">A 2000s rendering of the 1980s Auckland City Council logo. <br />It was originally accompanied by the catchphrase 'city of sails'</span></td></tr>
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<span style="font-family: "helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">Auckland City Council may have had a properly authorised armorial bearing and, up to the 1970s, was sufficiently proud of this civic device to employ it widely, including, scaled up, on an external wall of its modernist <a href="http://metromag.co.nz/city-life/urban-design/the-civic-building-auckland-architectural-treasure/">Administration Building</a> (Tibor Donner architect, 1966). However, by the mid-1980s, as New Zealand lurched into an orgy of neo-liberal deregulation, this was a 'brand' seemingly anathema to the council and its officers who commissioned the first in a series of corporate logos that supposedly more closely represented the city's self-image. The final iteration of an Auckland City Council logo, designed in collaboration with an advertising agency Ogilvy Metro, was launched in 2007 at <a href="http://www.underconsideration.com/brandnew/archives/auckland_sets_sail_into_the_ab.php#.U6UADBYVrwI">a reputed cost of $1 million</a>. The expenditure was <a href="http://www.stuff.co.nz/auckland/local-news/central-leader/7496/City-sets-sail-with-new-25-000-logo">justified</a> on the grounds that the previous logo was 'tired', that market research had shown that '</span><span style="background-color: white; font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif; line-height: 18px;">people didn't know what the old brand referred to' and they </span><span style="background-color: white; line-height: 18px;"><span style="font-family: "helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">'didn't recognise that it represented the council'.</span></span><br />
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjxbeu11AT1TXWdBX-xpfhlIMx8ES1JoIR1ki1VNZNb_Kg2jply8Aq0AWZMs4K-BZpUgOjeUKmCwVRed3E6fLNtbBGapLkC-_mWC2Bxt7tMWREhVwk7cLMYI-z7lmZuY6vxXN50F5ReGj5b/s1600/Screenshot+2014-06-21+15.35.34.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="163" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjxbeu11AT1TXWdBX-xpfhlIMx8ES1JoIR1ki1VNZNb_Kg2jply8Aq0AWZMs4K-BZpUgOjeUKmCwVRed3E6fLNtbBGapLkC-_mWC2Bxt7tMWREhVwk7cLMYI-z7lmZuY6vxXN50F5ReGj5b/s1600/Screenshot+2014-06-21+15.35.34.jpg" width="200" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-family: "helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">The 2007 Auckland City Council logo</span></td></tr>
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<span style="background-color: white; line-height: 18px;"><span style="font-family: "helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">The Transition Agency's design competition seems to have been undertaken in the spirit of the earlier logo-making essays with the added benefit that, by making it an open competition, the council would not be liable for the sort of fees charged by commercial brand identity makers. In an eerie mirroring of the 1906 and 1908 competitions for a national coat of arms, the competition attracted over one thousand entries. This time the submissions were judged by a group of local celebrities chaired by a former advertising executive. The winning entry, by a retired commercial artist Jim Dean was <a href="http://www.nzherald.co.nz/nz/news/article.cfm?c_id=1&objectid=10640382">described</a> by one of the judging panel, presumably without any sense of irony, as '</span></span><span style="font-family: "helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;"><span style="background-color: white; line-height: 21px;">concise, elegant, compelling - not threatening or aggressively corporate.</span><span style="background-color: white; line-height: 21px;">'</span></span><span style="background-color: white;"><span style="font-family: "helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;"><span style="line-height: 18px;"> In fact, its circular badge form and clean, stylised rendering has a distinctly heraldic quality, although the reference appears to be to Japanese <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mon_(emblem)"><i>mon</i></a> </span></span></span><span style="background-color: white; font-family: sans-serif; line-height: 22px;">(</span><span class="t_nihongo_kanji" lang="ja" style="background-color: white; font-family: sans-serif; line-height: 22px;" xml:lang="ja">紋</span><span style="background-color: white; font-family: sans-serif; line-height: 22px;">)</span><span style="background-color: white; font-family: "helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif; line-height: 18px;">, rather than the <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heraldic_badge">badges</a> of European heraldry.</span><br />
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<tr><td><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhRfn_wZOV4lwtTV5EDWpf2b7mszSiYVx0an7qzBfJJ64zMF1koUDicJyBdkC5S1GB3Oc428-H3N3FvGT2LokJtxGTqznr8dlobrVUmho4K3r_G7H-395MHi5gPITjJ8pLsJlfDbqJN-Klt/s1600/Screenshot+2014-06-21+14.46.23.png" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="154" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhRfn_wZOV4lwtTV5EDWpf2b7mszSiYVx0an7qzBfJJ64zMF1koUDicJyBdkC5S1GB3Oc428-H3N3FvGT2LokJtxGTqznr8dlobrVUmho4K3r_G7H-395MHi5gPITjJ8pLsJlfDbqJN-Klt/s1600/Screenshot+2014-06-21+14.46.23.png" width="200" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption"><span style="font-family: "helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif; font-size: x-small;">Jim Dean (1941-), Initial design for an Auckland Council logo, 2010</span></td></tr>
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<span style="font-family: "helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">While Dean's design may have earned the approbation of the judging panel, it does not seem to have found much support either from the Transition Agency's contracted designers or with a significant sector of <a href="http://www.tourismindustryblog.co.nz/2010/04/new-auckland-super-city-logo/">the branding industry</a>. The Agency's unidentified designers rejected Dean's mon-like roundel, opting instead for one of his alternative designs which placed the stylised pohutukawa flower over three stylised blue waves - or blazoned in heraldic terms, three</span><span style="font-family: "helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;"> engrailed</span><span style="font-family: "helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;"> barrys azure - and enclosed it within an escutcheon-like tri-lobed border as well as adding the words Auckland Council/Te Kaunihera o T</span><span style="font-family: "helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">ā</span><span style="font-family: "helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">maki Makaurau, a move that detracted from the visual potential of the image while simultaneously trivialising Dean's design.</span><br />
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjEReZFgHLRgYpW84oFDyNYnO_GpvHY-p73JJOv1Hlk6TNNZqybHpiULI3kRrGoGMRuKwKreOUtyZkhPXBAIjF0NhRWYqI8P8KrGzeEiTmA76Nl-LcTZceODEt6w0jlUO-qPpPdr0u2PKZh/s1600/Screenshot+2014-06-22+14.28.00.png" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="128" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjEReZFgHLRgYpW84oFDyNYnO_GpvHY-p73JJOv1Hlk6TNNZqybHpiULI3kRrGoGMRuKwKreOUtyZkhPXBAIjF0NhRWYqI8P8KrGzeEiTmA76Nl-LcTZceODEt6w0jlUO-qPpPdr0u2PKZh/s1600/Screenshot+2014-06-22+14.28.00.png" width="320" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-family: "helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">Jim Dean (1941-) and unidentified designers, Final design for the Auckland Council logo, 2010</span></td></tr>
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<span style="font-family: "helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">The pohutukawa design has <a href="http://www.btob.co.nz/article/brand-or-not-brand-question">not found favour</a> among the various agencies of the reformed council, possibly because its current elaborated form doesn't lend itself to ready identity. </span><span style="font-family: "helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">Moreover,</span><span style="font-family: "helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;"> a number of Auckland Council agencies have sought to commission brands that differentiate their identities from that of their sole shareholder. </span><span style="font-family: "helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">Auckland Transport, the Council-controlled body responsible for, among other things, public transport in Auckland decided, </span><a href="http://transportblog.co.nz/2012/06/16/does-auckland-transport-now-have-a-logo/" style="font-family: 'Helvetica Neue', Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">controversially</a><span style="font-family: "helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">, to adopt a new, more corporate, 'working' logo on the grounds that the pohutukawa design did not '</span><span style="font-family: "helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;"><span style="background-color: white; line-height: 21px;"><a href="http://www.nzherald.co.nz/transport/news/article.cfm?c_id=97&objectid=10818227">say anything about movement or transport in Auckland</a>'</span>.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">While the design finally adopted by the Transition Agency reinforces the heraldic resonances of Dean's initial design the subsequent augmentations suggest that those responsible for generating the image of the city haven't learned much from their earlier forays in commissioning unmemorable corporate identities. While the 1911 grant of arms to the Auckland City Council was produced at a time when heraldic design was at a low aesthetic ebb there was no reason why when it was first replaced by a logo it could not have been simply redesigned for a new audience or why it could not have been augmented by the grant of badges and banners with a stronger visual presence. Dean's design has sufficient visual coherence to be the basis of a new grant of arms but it's unlikely that the reconfigured Council knows any better than to continue a dependence on the heraldically illiterate designers of corporate identities when it comes to expressing civic identity.</span><br />
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgUIzvcE8kbxDW4LfMYzHFT5Wo0dGskqbcZaTq3Xn1POoy2zpL-Z5uSHt_bIB1uacFJpLZgs2RwlfCRocD4PpMphATurUsm0Xh_o_t213qlWNIYrRd_2OKr9xD6Q4iukbm8wPFFotwhqpK_/s1600/IMG_1932.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgUIzvcE8kbxDW4LfMYzHFT5Wo0dGskqbcZaTq3Xn1POoy2zpL-Z5uSHt_bIB1uacFJpLZgs2RwlfCRocD4PpMphATurUsm0Xh_o_t213qlWNIYrRd_2OKr9xD6Q4iukbm8wPFFotwhqpK_/s1600/IMG_1932.jpg" width="222" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-family: "helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">Kel Marsh, Semi-heraldic logo of the Auckland Institute of Technology (1989) and, following its change of status in 2000, </span><br />
<span style="font-family: "helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">the Auckland University of Technology until 2008</span></td></tr>
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<span style="font-family: "helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">It isn’t just New Zealand municipalities that have indulged in this sort
of heraldic illiteracy. AUT University, formerly the Auckland University
of Technology - which prides itself on having a large school of art and design - had, until recently, <a href="http://www.reocities.com/noelcoxfiles/AUT.pdf">a semi-heraldic logo</a> that it ‘inherited’ from
its former manifestation as the Auckland Institute of Technology. This travesty of a logo broke most
heraldic - and for that matter aesthetic - rules in terms of its design and
application. Uniquely among the eight New Zealand universities, AUT University
has no official armorial bearing and, most recently, in what appears to be a
fit of self-conceit, replaced its semi-armorial logo with a rebarbative corporate logo evocative
of <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Letterman_(sports)">letterman</a> sports apparel found in the high schools and colleges of the
United States. It seems that the authorities at this redundantly titled university are of
the opinion that the derivative sports jock logo they have adopted makes a
cutting edge statement about what the modern, business-savvy university is all
about: no unfortunate baggage from the past and, definitely, no regressive acknowledgement
of history, cultural or otherwise.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgh9c3heC6cEl_35Be-UVjMZcJ00tb80rBgPYSHA9pTPRA2dJInNHt0u5o3YJT6C7ot0Izh5Ipd_YeCEh83m3xEklaA6JIJU6BRNBvwRr7EReUoH8rCYxPuXYGHor2CNdxKEJDLsZJL9D6n/s1600/Screenshot+2014-06-11+10.24.28.png" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgh9c3heC6cEl_35Be-UVjMZcJ00tb80rBgPYSHA9pTPRA2dJInNHt0u5o3YJT6C7ot0Izh5Ipd_YeCEh83m3xEklaA6JIJU6BRNBvwRr7EReUoH8rCYxPuXYGHor2CNdxKEJDLsZJL9D6n/s1600/Screenshot+2014-06-11+10.24.28.png" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-family: "helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">Unidentified designer, Corporate logo of AUT University (2008 to date)</span></td></tr>
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<span style="font-family: "helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">The right to bear a coat of arms is derived from the monarch
in her role as fount of honour, a medieval concept that, surprisingly, remains a part of the New Zealand constitution. In respect of the crown in right of New
Zealand, this authority is administered by the College of Arms in London. In this respect alone coats of arms differ from corporate logos in that they have legal status over and above
copyright on a design. Few New Zealanders are aware of the way coats of arms and other heraldic appurtenances are granted and fewer would be aware that there is a specific heraldic
authority for New Zealand located within the Cabinet Office of the Department
of the Prime Minister and Cabinet. The post of <a href="http://www.honours.govt.nz/honours/overview/herald-of-arms">New Zealand Herald of Arms Extraordinary</a> was created by royal warrant in 1978.
The occupant of this post is responsible, among other things, for providing advice to
‘the crown in right of New Zealand, the government, government departments and
New Zealand Defence Force on heraldic and certain allied matters; to liaise
with the College of Arms in respect of the granting and confirmation of coats
of arms, both personal and corporate, and to advise on technical aspects of
distinctive New Zealand motifs which it is desired be incorporated in any
grant.' While the position exists, it's widely ignored, even by government departments, who, aspiring to corporate status, have commissioned corporate brand identities from commercial graphic design consultancies. Unlike heraldic arms, badges and crests, these emblems tend to be determined by fashion, fleetingly controversial, expensive and, invariably, short-lived.<o:p></o:p></span><br />
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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-family: "helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">Unidentified designer, Corporate logo of the Ministry for the Environment</span></td></tr>
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<span style="font-family: "helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">M</span><span style="font-family: "helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">āori response to heraldry and its associated system of <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vexillology">vexillology</a> - the study of flags - was immediate and positive, recognising the utility provided by clearly delineated, codified, images that articulated the mana and authority of its bearers. While He Whakaputanga or <a href="http://www.teara.govt.nz/en/zoomify/33966/united-tribes-flag-original-flag">the flag of the United Tribes of New Zealand</a> is widely recognised, little attention has been paid to </span><span style="font-family: "helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">M</span><span style="font-family: "helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">āori heraldry, the most notable example being <a href="http://www.teara.govt.nz/en/photograph/1736/te-paki-o-matariki">Te Paki-o-Matariki</a> (the fine weather of Matariki, [the winter solstice and/or the</span><span style="font-family: "helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;"> Pleiades </span><span style="font-family: "helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">constellation]), the armorial bearings devised about 1890 for the </span><span style="font-family: "helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">Kīngitanga movement by T</span><span style="font-family: "helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">īwai Par</span><span style="font-family: "helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">āone of Hauraki and Te Aokatoa of Waikato and Ng</span><span style="font-family: "helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">āti Raukawa. It was a very specific visual response to the iconography of the English royal arms and all the more powerful for its recognition of the mana invested by </span><span lang="EN-US"><span style="font-family: "helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">P</span></span><span style="font-family: "helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">ākeh</span><span style="font-family: "helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">ā</span><span style="font-family: "helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;"> in this symbol of ultimate absence. In formal heraldic terms, these indigenous armorial bearings adhere to the codes of European heraldry: they encompass what appear to be an escutcheon (or shield); a helmet; a crest - an eight pointed star and the six five-pointed stars of the eponymous constellation; two supporters; and the whole rests on a compartment embellished by native flora.</span><br />
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjSToKPglUcjUd_3siKDawkLiMTuLRac0bQYm5dKcUDHY4jk0G5G3SuB73thAMqUAWS2KJIsNhBGo1cdP3RG0VnKi6mQyplr8MHmde5DL9fJpgvq5RJDsCxWca5ZNm0ihmsmhRQXJWEjlAC/s1600/Screenshot+2014-06-11+13.27.02.png" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="432" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjSToKPglUcjUd_3siKDawkLiMTuLRac0bQYm5dKcUDHY4jk0G5G3SuB73thAMqUAWS2KJIsNhBGo1cdP3RG0VnKi6mQyplr8MHmde5DL9fJpgvq5RJDsCxWca5ZNm0ihmsmhRQXJWEjlAC/s1600/Screenshot+2014-06-11+13.27.02.png" width="640" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-size: x-small;"><span style="font-family: "helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif; text-align: start;">T</span><span style="font-family: "helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif; text-align: start;">īwai Par</span><span style="font-family: "helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif; text-align: start;">āone of Hauraki and Te Aokatoa of Waikato and Ng</span><span style="font-family: "helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif; text-align: start;">āti Raukawa</span><span style="font-family: "helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">, Te Paki-o-Matariki, about 1890,</span></span><br />
<span style="font-size: x-small;"><span style="font-family: "helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">taken from the first masthead of <i>Te Paki-o-Matariki </i>(1892-1935)</span></span></td></tr>
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<span lang="EN-US" style="mso-ansi-language: EN-US;"><span style="font-family: "helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">According to Te Ahukaram</span><span style="background-color: #f9f7f4; font-family: "helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif; line-height: 14px;">ū</span><span style="font-family: "helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;"> Charles Royal in his Te Ara entry 'Waikato tribes - the King movement', the 'central double helix represents the creation of the world. On the left is the figure of Aitua (misfortune) and on the right Te Atuatanga (spirituality). The stars above are the Pleiades, and a Christian cross can also be seen.' The compartment suggests Te Whenua (the land). The narrative encapsulated in the image is precise, resonating with the aims and intentions of the </span></span><span style="font-family: "helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">Kīngitanga movement and </span><span lang="EN-US"><span style="font-family: "helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">conveying both its whakapapa and mana. From a European heraldic perspective this achievement is both nuanced and exemplary and contrasts favourably with the near contemporaneous 1911 armorial bearings of New Zealand in terms of the clarity of its message and visual sophistication. Te Paki-o-Matariki was conceived of as a strategic visual response to P</span></span><span style="font-family: "helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">ākeh</span><span style="font-family: "helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">ā deployment of the royal arms of England and used by</span><span style="font-family: "helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;"> </span><span style="font-family: "helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">the </span><span style="font-family: "helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">Kīngitanga movement in much the same way, notably in the masthead of its eponymous <a href="https://blogs.otago.ac.nz/thehockenblog/2014/07/21/huia-tangata-kotahi-niupepa-maori-at-hocken/">newspaper</a> published between 1892 and 1935.</span><br />
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjVWgiVe-v9BEcId6Ij644V4SdAkAwmwc1Zmg6IlW2DHdjwd6KS7R-J72bmeGV4lDLYN9Vucs_ZhTfvyjhQI_a0tcvS2SpSxa621Nt08OQ0SZ9j8IiOSLnO1giEuD1mCStwRC_LlkYfrsyk/s1600/Screenshot+2014-06-20+10.59.54.png" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="640" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjVWgiVe-v9BEcId6Ij644V4SdAkAwmwc1Zmg6IlW2DHdjwd6KS7R-J72bmeGV4lDLYN9Vucs_ZhTfvyjhQI_a0tcvS2SpSxa621Nt08OQ0SZ9j8IiOSLnO1giEuD1mCStwRC_LlkYfrsyk/s1600/Screenshot+2014-06-20+10.59.54.png" width="507" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><span style="background-color: white;"><span style="color: #222222; font-family: "proximanova" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif; font-size: xx-small; line-height: 15px;">Te Rata Mahuta Potatau Te Wherowhero (18?-1933), Te Paki o Matariki, Ngaruawahia, Waikato, Pepuere 1929. He Niu ka torona ki ngaiwi o Aotearoa, o Te Waipounamu, ki ona topito e wha. ... Nga kaupapa. 1. He kawanga whare whakairo, ko to koutou tupuna ko Mahinarangi; ka tomokia i te ata o te mane, te 18 o nga ra o Maehe,1929. ... Heoi, </span><span style="color: #222222; font-family: "proximanova" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif; font-size: xx-small; line-height: 15px;">Na Te Rata Mahuta Tamaki makaurau, Mokau Kohunui, Pare Hauraki, Te Hauauru [1929]. </span></span><br />
<span style="background-color: white; font-size: x-small;"><span style="color: #222222; font-family: "proximanova" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif; line-height: 15px;">Alexander Turnbull Library, Wellington,</span><span style="color: #222222; font-family: "proximanova" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif; line-height: 15px;"> Eph-D-MAORI-1929-01</span></span></td></tr>
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<span lang="EN-US" style="mso-ansi-language: EN-US;"><span style="font-family: "helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">That </span><span style="font-family: "helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">M</span><span style="font-family: "helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">āori</span><span style="font-family: "helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;"> had grasped the essentials of heraldry so immediately is hardly surprising. Nineteenth century </span></span><span style="font-family: "helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">M</span><span style="font-family: "helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">āori placed high value on appropriating those aspects of </span><span lang="EN-US"><span style="font-family: "helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">P</span></span><span style="font-family: "helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">ākeh</span><span style="font-family: "helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">ā culture they deemed to be of utility in their dealings with the incomers. Wharehuia Hemara, noting the rapid and widespread acquisition of literacy by </span><span style="font-family: "helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">M</span><span style="font-family: "helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">āori, observes that 'Either </span><span style="font-family: "helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">M</span><span style="font-family: "helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">āori or a blend of native and exotic teaching and learning styles enabled a pre-literate society to capture literacy within one generation and then reconfigure it to suit themselves.' (W Hemara, </span><span style="font-family: "helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif; font-style: italic;">M</span><span style="font-family: "helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;"><i>āori pedagogies </i>(Wellington: New Zealand Council for Educational Research, 2000), p. 9.) The same capacity for absorbing and adapting seems to have been prevalent when it came to visual literacy. Roger Neich observes a similar phenomenon occurring in the decoration of meeting houses, particularly in respect of 'the remarkable development of figurative painting' from the 1870s up until the 1920s when this innovation was 'downgraded in a revival of the "traditional" arts'. (R Neich, <i>Painted histories</i> (Auckland: Auckland University Press, 1994), p. 1). Te Paki-o-Matariki was another innovation that while expressing </span><span style="font-family: "helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">M</span><span style="font-family: "helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">āori</span><span style="font-family: "helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;"> cosmology</span><span style="font-family: "helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;"> employed the codes of European heraldry</span><span style="font-family: "helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;"> to create a new emblem at a critical moment in history.</span><br />
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj1gQKxReqmOAp6fnIWLpuGaDJqCRDbeFs03y2fiYe67ToYSmp8JLZfCQESMg1lOYdFzrL4ncbfdQ60jX9iJiqsaRfC9HQeP3EVRnGImSst2nLQhW-2Y_whNr4IEfU5a1zyDnxIpE1ivnIj/s1600/Screenshot+2014-06-30+10.00.52.png" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="400" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj1gQKxReqmOAp6fnIWLpuGaDJqCRDbeFs03y2fiYe67ToYSmp8JLZfCQESMg1lOYdFzrL4ncbfdQ60jX9iJiqsaRfC9HQeP3EVRnGImSst2nLQhW-2Y_whNr4IEfU5a1zyDnxIpE1ivnIj/s1600/Screenshot+2014-06-30+10.00.52.png" width="347" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-family: "helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">Canadian Heraldic Authority and Andrew Qappik (1964-), Coat of arms of the territory of Nunavut, 1999. Like Te-Paki-o-Matariki, the escutcheon depicts the Pleiades, albeit from a northern hemisphere perspective </span></td></tr>
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<span style="font-family: "helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;"><span lang="EN-US">A number of former British colonies around the world have, following independence, established their own heraldic bodies. The first was Ireland, which as part of its de-Anglicising process established the office of <a href="http://www.nli.ie/en/heraldry-introduction.aspx">Chief Herald</a> in 1943 in place of the authority previously exercised by the British Ulster King of Arms, an officer of the College of Arms</span><span lang="EN-US">. Canada established an <a href="http://www.gg.ca/document.aspx?id=2">Heraldic Authority</a> by royal letters patent in 1988 </span></span><span lang="EN-US"><span style="font-family: "helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;"> and South Africa a <a href="http://www.national.archives.gov.za/HERALDRY%20ACT.pdf">Bureau of Heraldry</a> by Act of Parliament in 1962. Both Canada and South Africa have instituted remarkable changes in the the presentation of their official, civic and personal heraldry and are increasingly drawing upon <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coat_of_arms_of_Nunavut">indigenous iconography</a> in their designs rather than the redundant medievalism that permeates much of the heraldry of the British isles.</span> <span style="font-family: "helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">Perhaps it is time that New Zealand too established its own heraldic authority, one drawing on the country's rich cultural and visual diversity rather than being dependent for its official symbolism either on the rulings of a mediaeval relic in London or, less impressively, the heraldically illiterate and culturally banal whims of corporate fashion.</span></span><span style="font-family: "helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;"><br /></span><br />
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Christopher Thompsonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01264481177071819483noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2464874880300858303.post-43714554564624417102014-06-10T13:32:00.000+12:002014-07-25T17:14:35.043+12:00Man alone: advertising in a colonial culture<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi_C4G04zK7Iux7dnD0YfOaCdyj_Snv-S1zgOSrYK0bGyfZZsMaQCWagsLuVdvEAejckBiqz66NVTquhaKlQ7fC9-Ba2ajM1wGtSAdboDq12x1dSrC89AsQ9aepYU9g8RFSy1-BZOze9Q1R/s1600/IMG_1912.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi_C4G04zK7Iux7dnD0YfOaCdyj_Snv-S1zgOSrYK0bGyfZZsMaQCWagsLuVdvEAejckBiqz66NVTquhaKlQ7fC9-Ba2ajM1wGtSAdboDq12x1dSrC89AsQ9aepYU9g8RFSy1-BZOze9Q1R/s1600/IMG_1912.jpg" height="400" width="326" /></a></div>
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<span style="text-transform: uppercase;"><span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Promoting prosperity:
the art of early New Zealand advertising</span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">by Peter Alsop and Gary Stewart<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Craig Potton, $79.99, October 2013, 978 1 877517 96 9<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: large;">P<span style="mso-ascii-font-family: Cambria; mso-hansi-font-family: Cambria;">ā</span>keh<span style="mso-ascii-font-family: Cambria; mso-hansi-font-family: Cambria;">ā</span></span> New Zealanders like to regard themselves as being a reticent society,
awkward with words and uncomfortable with art. This hesitancy, a trait <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bloke_(word)">shared</a> with
other white Anglophone frontier populations, is part of the settlement myth. It conjures
up the archetypal lone, grizzled, <a href="http://brianedwardsmedia.co.nz/2010/08/unaccustomed-as-i-am-why-most-kiwi-blokes-cant-string-two-words-together/">laconic</a>, male, one suspicious of urban luxury; a bloke who calls a spade a grunt. It’s reflected in the utilitarian P<span style="mso-ascii-font-family: Cambria; mso-hansi-font-family: Cambria;">ā</span>keh<span style="mso-ascii-font-family: Cambria; mso-hansi-font-family: Cambria;">ā</span> place names of New Zealand: North Island, Bridge Road, New
North Road, Cloudy Bay, Black Range and in the settlement names with which the
newcomers invested the country, either replicated from Britain or appropriated
from M<span style="mso-ascii-font-family: Cambria; mso-hansi-font-family: Cambria;">ā</span>ori:
Auckland and Cambridge; W[h]anganui and Hokitika. It’s a mentality that privileges
faux commodity by engaging with the concepts of make-do and ready-made; the
‘number eight wire’ solution to perceived problems. It’s the favouring of physical
sports over the arts. It’s the simple suspicion of the provinces when confronted
by the sophistries of the metropolis. James Belich, notably in <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Replenishing the earth</i> (2009), is one of
a number of historians who has observed the settler myth as complicit in an un-nuanced strategy
aimed at concealing the twin processes of colonisation and industrialisation.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Simplified myth permeates <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><a href="http://www.promotingprosperity.co.nz/">Promoting prosperity: the art of early New Zealand advertising</a></i>. <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>As Susan Buck-Morss observes ‘Myths give
answers to why the world is when an empirical cause and effect cannot be seen,
or when it cannot be remembered.’ (S Buck-Morss, <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">The dialectics of seeing: Walter Benjamin and the Arcades Project</i>
(Cambridge, Mass: MIT Press, 1989, p. 78). Memory or, more precisely, invented memory, frames the book's stated purpose of, as the introduction avers,
‘circumnavigating the nexus of art and early advertising’. Rediscovered 'memory' comprises the core of this visually-driven account of the history of advertising in New Zealand; an
exercise in a nationalistic visual mythology, Kiwiana, you could say.</span></div>
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhqFJaQGdB7Dxc6dHFpz7lr0kY4zoQTDWPTb1VbGLa8EEMj_z7E2VZwjbO0dVhvVO5kf7wNgI7AqzBr26c3unvQQaroG3z0R6njPUuOmpHkOcmN2_Up8QDVU4tCFG7Z03-IjvzUWZtTxKXn/s1600/Screenshot+2014-06-07+11.53.42.png" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhqFJaQGdB7Dxc6dHFpz7lr0kY4zoQTDWPTb1VbGLa8EEMj_z7E2VZwjbO0dVhvVO5kf7wNgI7AqzBr26c3unvQQaroG3z0R6njPUuOmpHkOcmN2_Up8QDVU4tCFG7Z03-IjvzUWZtTxKXn/s1600/Screenshot+2014-06-07+11.53.42.png" height="400" width="293" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">[Stanley Davis (1882?-1938)] for Railways Studios.'New life; Lanes emulsion restores and maintains health', [1927].<br />Alexander Turnbull Library Eph-E-PHARMACY-1927-01</span></td></tr>
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<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">One of the key aims of the book is about mainstreaming what
is conventionally recognised as ‘commercial art’ into ‘legitimate fine art’; a reconfiguring of what Peter Alsop describes as ‘the tainted trade’ (p. 20). He asks
us to recognise a new canon by demonstrating how ‘commercial art’ obtains a
level of criticality that enables it to transcend the stigma of advertising,
revising a myth by altering its older narrative. Alsop’s revisionism is a
fraught ideological process requiring us, among other things, to understand visual culture</span><span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"> through, as Tony Fry observes, 'a "high/low culture" framework, which excludes "low" objects as cultureless' (T Fry, </span><i style="font-family: 'Helvetica Neue', Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Design history Australia</i><span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"> (Sydney: Hale & Iremonger, 1988), p. 27). Attractive as it might seem to some, Alsop’s revisionism is at odds with his
subject. When seen from the wider perspective, it is not so much about elevating a disregarded set of cultural objects, but more about the growing
visuality of New Zealand culture.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Walter Benjamin observes in his essay ‘The work of art in the age of
mechanical reproduction’ - a key discussion about the impact of technology on
the arts and design that is inexplicably
ignored by the authors of the text - that ‘The manner in which human sense perception is organized, the
medium in which it is accomplished, is determined not only by nature but by
historical circumstances as well.’ (W Benjamin, ‘The work of art in the age of
mechanical reproduction’ in <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Illuminations</i>,
ed. by Hannah Arendt (New York: Schocken, 2007, 217-251, p. 222). </span><span style="font-family: 'Helvetica Neue', Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">While ‘nature’ is essential to an understanding of the
technologies involved, the condition of ‘historical circumstances’ is
critically absent in this instance. If the intention of the book’s editors, is
to ‘rehabilitate’ commercial art, they seem unaware that they are merely
revisiting a nineteenth century dispute about the artistic value of painting
versus photography. This was a debate that Benjamin adjudged ‘devious and
confused’, observing that it ‘was in fact the symptom of a historical
transformation the universal impact of which was not realized … When the age of
mechanical reproduction separated art from its basis in cult, the semblance of
its autonomy disappeared forever.’ (p. 226). This revalidation of the
achievements of ‘commercial artists’ is more about the creation of a false cult
rather than investing their work with a status it has hitherto lacked. The
subject of this book isn’t art but it is design and its texts
and images document the processes embraced by that understanding.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Promoting prosperity</i>
comprises over 750 high quality images, of mostly New Zealand produced
advertising, along with an introductory essay, a brief account of the history
of advertising and nine case studies investigating, in a broad sense, aspects
of the history of advertising in or about New Zealand. Despite the textual
contributions, it’s the images that provide </span><span style="font-family: 'Helvetica Neue', Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">not only</span><span style="font-family: 'Helvetica Neue', Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"> </span><span style="font-family: 'Helvetica Neue', Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">the main achievement of
this hefty volume but also its primary raison d’</span><span style="font-family: 'Helvetica Neue', Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">ê</span><span style="font-family: 'Helvetica Neue', Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">tre. They include photographs,
posters, banners, playing cards, book and magazine covers, organised under
general thematic headings and reproduced in full colour with endnotes as to
dates and ownership. It’s an invaluable visual resource, even if the information accompanying the images borders on the sparse; an indication of dimensions and the methods of reproduction would have been useful. With all this visual splendour in a book
that makes claims to redefine a narrative, you would imagine the editors would have realised the importance of getting the text right, by locating the images in a tightly defined theoretical and historical discourse, but it seems they are convinced that the impact of the images alone is sufficiently compelling an argument.</span></div>
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<table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: center;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjTKgAHF4396pYTgA1WHcuqbD24ieACyfP-S5JfNSM30BkYEKLAsgyzI3F4815vwCMX7fgLNrJVuBL7NKEdi2v2fJ049X66mTCkegGzQGhQ7qx6EaSBmNHPFtqUdlOKeeqqoeg3tHRTnBcA/s1600/ilotts2.jpeg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjTKgAHF4396pYTgA1WHcuqbD24ieACyfP-S5JfNSM30BkYEKLAsgyzI3F4815vwCMX7fgLNrJVuBL7NKEdi2v2fJ049X66mTCkegGzQGhQ7qx6EaSBmNHPFtqUdlOKeeqqoeg3tHRTnBcA/s1600/ilotts2.jpeg" height="400" width="313" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Cover of the first number of <i>Cuts</i>, a black and white block proof catalogue published by J Ilott Ltd from 1916.<br />From <i>Creating customers: the story of Ilott Advertising New Zealand: 1892-1982 </i>(Auckland: Richards, 1984)</span></td></tr>
</tbody></table>
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<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Ian F Grant’s ambitious chapter describes an outline history of advertising
in New Zealand up to the 1960s that seems intended to provide the chronological narrative on which to locate the subsequent eight essays. Grant specifies the origins of the </span><span style="font-family: 'Helvetica Neue', Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">New Zealand </span><span style="font-family: 'Helvetica Neue', Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">practice in two ‘advertising
agencies’ operating in Dunedin and Christchurch prior to 1891. If the British
model of the mid-nineteenth century advertising agency was that adopted by
these South Island agents then their primary
function was to act as a conduit between retailers, manufacturers and importers
and selected papers while undertaking responsibility for payments. They also
passed information between local newspapers, and supplied copies of other
provincial and overseas newspapers to the newspapers they represented. They
were more a cross between a subscription agent and a jobbing journalist than an advertising agency as the role is understood today. While these agents may
have had input into the language used, they had very little to do
with the composition and layout of advertisements, a function usually
handled by outside studios or independent commercial artists.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">An overwhelming expansion in </span><span style="font-family: 'Helvetica Neue', Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">commodity</span><span style="font-family: 'Helvetica Neue', Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"> production combined with an explosion in literacy and advances in printing
technologies gave advertising critical mass during the latter part of the nineteenth century. The connection between the development of advertising and the availability of technically superior printed media has long been
recognised and is demonstrated, quite graphically, from the returns of
advertisement duty connected with newspaper taxes collected between 1800 and 1853
when it was abolished (see T R Nevett, </span><i style="font-family: 'Helvetica Neue', Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Advertising
in Britain: a history</i><span style="font-family: 'Helvetica Neue', Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"> (London: Heinemann, 1982), pp. 26-27). Grant undervalues the colonial dimension, opining ‘the United States [was] the birthplace of modern advertising techniques’
(</span><i style="font-family: 'Helvetica Neue', Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Promoting prosperity</i><span style="font-family: 'Helvetica Neue', Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">, p. 26).
Advertising agencies in the United States at the end of the nineteenth and beginning of the twentieth centuries may well have been the hotbed of
‘modern advertising techniques’, but in New Zealand, well until the 1950s, these practices were mediated through Britain.</span></div>
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj4AZKUV9lTrh2KtUaZlchyphenhyphenJCPoxBL8jOfpagEVfhP-wPumaKmfH0aOMhlblBfZuLfEr8pnd7CqDhj1RTeWWJjg8m3QddG1JnvH-sF8wdqhCgR6Tk97QyOQH2CmBRBrOsZxqmpnbx_Q5Mvc/s1600/ilotts.png" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj4AZKUV9lTrh2KtUaZlchyphenhyphenJCPoxBL8jOfpagEVfhP-wPumaKmfH0aOMhlblBfZuLfEr8pnd7CqDhj1RTeWWJjg8m3QddG1JnvH-sF8wdqhCgR6Tk97QyOQH2CmBRBrOsZxqmpnbx_Q5Mvc/s1600/ilotts.png" height="400" width="295" /></a></div>
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<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: x-small;">Advertisement from the British trade publication <i>Advertisers Weekly</i> (27 May 1927). </span></div>
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: x-small;">From <i>Creating customers: the story of Ilott Advertising New Zealand: 1892-1982 </i>(Auckland: Richards, 1984) </span></div>
<br /></div>
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<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">By making his chronology so tightly focussed on New Zealand and because histories of advertising in New Zealand are so thin on the ground Grant depends on the canonical trope of the heroic pioneer, the dynamic leader setting the ground for lesser men - and they are all men - to follow. From the South Island pioneers he progresses through a ‘late 19<span style="font-size: x-small;">th</span> century revolution in printing techniques’ interpretation of the rise of
advertising – although there’s no mention of the extraordinary New Zealand
printer, typographer and journalist <a href="http://www.teara.govt.nz/en/biographies/2h13/harding-robert-coupland">Robert Coupland Harding</a> – and into the twentieth century, a period that saw the formation of what might
be described as modern advertising agencies: J Inglis Wright, Charles Haines
Advertising and J Ilott Ltd being the three local agencies deemed worthy of
mention. Then, in the afterglow of the agencies, advertising clubs emerge; like
the agencies, they appear to have developed fully formed out of nowhere. </span><br />
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><br /></span><span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">In the 1920s we see the establishment of new competitors to this recently
formulated establishment, organisations such as Carlton Studios, the Government
Publicity Studios and, about 1928, the Goldberg Advertising Agency.
This singularity is remarkable: in this ‘man alone’ version of the history of
advertising in New Zealand there’s no evident political, cultural, social or
economic context; New Zealand is no longer enthralled by a colonial
relationship with Britain; the First World War hardly impinges on things while
the Second World War merely enables agencies to ‘[gain] a new level of
respectability […] with campaigns that filled war loans and boosted morale’ (p.
32). In Grant’s assessment it would seem that New Zealand advertising agencies functioned
largely uncontaminated by overseas connections, despite having offices overseas, recruiting from overseas, modelling
their organisations on overseas templates, reading overseas publications such as <i>Modern publicity</i> and <i>Advertiser's weekly</i>, losing their personnel to overseas wars
and, not least, relying on technologies and strategies first developed overseas.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span></span><br />
<table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: center;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi-mRBbBhT_P-35o9Sm7au-8MZTOF82HTDCbLENjAUN7mE1CU2l8P9qDcnjS9t8iagHceyq4fwTRnFsqcu6RwZfwuzIQcjQ7ozFdXPHVx3I7oSv3AnYJ9fwz2jE-JdxSIoz7EcO33do5bF7/s1600/Modernpub.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi-mRBbBhT_P-35o9Sm7au-8MZTOF82HTDCbLENjAUN7mE1CU2l8P9qDcnjS9t8iagHceyq4fwTRnFsqcu6RwZfwuzIQcjQ7ozFdXPHVx3I7oSv3AnYJ9fwz2jE-JdxSIoz7EcO33do5bF7/s1600/Modernpub.jpg" height="400" width="286" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Edward Bawden (1903-1989), dust jacket for <i>Modern Publicity: 1939-40</i>. <br />Ed by F A Mercer and W Gaunt (London: Studio, 1939).<br />This much-repaired example was retailed by the Dunedin bookseller Hyndman's </span></td></tr>
</tbody></table>
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<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">The remaining essayists adopt two modes of approach: the opinionated anecdote and the
populist academic.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span></span><span style="font-family: 'Helvetica Neue', Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Dick Frizzell's contribution incarnates the anecdotal</span><span style="font-family: 'Helvetica Neue', Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"> with a racy autobiographical reminiscence of his experiences in the advertising industry. Brian Sweeney's chapter on myth-making 'Kiwi chutzpah: the art of the sale' also relies on an anecdotal, loose-with-the-facts approach to the subject. While the inclusion of such views might broaden the book's popular appeal, f</span><span style="font-family: 'Helvetica Neue', Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">rom a design historical perspective it’s the second, more rigorous, approach that's of interest. This counterpoints the archive against a set of
identifiable historical benchmarks and processes, enabling a more informed and nuanced analysis. </span><br />
<span style="font-family: 'Helvetica Neue', Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: 'Helvetica Neue', Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Gail Ross’s account of the Auckland Quoin Club, a graphic
arts ‘club’ established by <a href="http://www.aucklandartgallery.com/the-collection/browse-artists/13/thomas-gulliver">Thomas Gulliver</a> and <a href="http://www.aucklandartgallery.com/the-collection/browse-artists/2078/arnold-goodwin">Arnold Goodwin</a> in September
1916 seems intended to support the revisionist editorial aim. Modelled on London prototypes, the club functioned as an Auckland hybrid of the independent studios - such as
the Carlton Studios - who supplied many of the London advertising agencies with
commercial art combined with the clubs – such as the Column Club, which
provided art workers with training and social facilities. Ross’s essay seeks to
locate the club and its activities within the Auckland art establishment by de-emphasising its commercial character. In fact, the Quoin Club with
its practitioner base and emphasis not only on commercial art but also design –
the applied arts and crafts – was, rather than being ‘an independent art
society’, a predecessor organisation of the Auckland Design Guild (1949) and the
New Zealand Society of Industrial Artists (1959) later incorporated as the New
Zealand Society of Industrial Designers (1962).</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Noel Waite’s contribution on New Zealand industrial exhibitions provides a useful overview of this significant aspect of national self-regard.
New Zealanders were fascinated by the idea of these 'secular cathedrals' from the first. <span lang="EN-US" style="mso-ansi-language: EN-US;">As early as May 1850 the <i><a href="http://paperspast.natlib.govt.nz/cgi-bin/paperspast?a=d&cl=search&d=DSC18500514.2.6&srpos=1&e=-------10--1---0+Article%2e+%09THE+SOUTHERN+CROSS+TUESDAY%2c+MAY+14%2c+1850%2e--">Southern Cross</a></i> </span><span lang="EN-US" style="mso-ansi-language: EN-US; mso-bidi-font-style: italic;"> </span><span lang="EN-US" style="mso-ansi-language: EN-US;">was suggesting that there should be
a New Zealand contribution to the <a href="http://www.bl.uk/learning/histcitizen/victorians/exhibition/greatexhibition.html">1851 </a></span><a href="http://www.bl.uk/learning/histcitizen/victorians/exhibition/greatexhibition.html">Great Exhibition of the Works of Industry of all Nations</a>, the London spectacle that determined the <span lang="EN-US" style="mso-ansi-language: EN-US;">template of them all, declaring
that: </span></span></div>
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<span lang="EN-US" style="mso-ansi-language: EN-US;"><span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">The advantage to be derived by such a contribution must be obvious to
every one, since, however comparatively obscured by the more gorgeous displays
of the arts and industrial skills of wealthy and populous Europe, the very fact
of the productions of the Colony being admitted into such gay and goodly
fellowship, must prove to be an instrument far more effective than the most
elaborate Standing Advertisement, the most powerful Leading Article, or the
most painstaking Book. <o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span lang="EN-US" style="mso-ansi-language: EN-US;"><span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Waite’s
account is equally upbeat. He argues that ‘from the beginning [New Zealand
exhibitions] sought not ephemeral vistas but remarkably tangible and productive
vistas that would sustain the industrial and social infrastructure of cities,
regions and the nation well into the 20<span style="font-size: x-small;">th</span> century.’ It’s a moot
argument and, with the essay’s focus restricted to the so-called
‘international’ exhibitions held in New Zealand, one based on a partial
account of the phenomenon. <o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span lang="EN-US" style="mso-ansi-language: EN-US;"><span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">With the
exception of the State of California exhibit at the New Zealand Centennial
Exhibition of 1940 (located, appropriately, in the Motors and Transportation
Court and a trade off for New Zealand participation in the 1939 San Francisco
Golden Gate Exposition), ‘international’ in the New Zealand exhibitions context
meant British empire. Rather than the prestige of state-sponsored foreign exhibits any non-imperial involvement was generally undertaken by
manufacturers’ local agents. For example, Belgian representation at the 1925 Dunedin
New Zealand and South Seas Exhibition seems to have been restricted to commercial displays on behalf of a safety match manufacturer, <a href="http://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Union_Match">Union Allumettière SA</a> of Brussels and a wallpaper manufacturer <a href="http://www.reflexcity.net/bruxelles/communes/ville-de-bruxelles/haren/rue-du-pre-aux-oies/usine-peters-lacroix">Usines Peters-Lacroix SA</a>, also of Brussels. The United States was represented by a display of canned
vegetables and soups manufactured by <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Libby's">Libby, McNeill & Libby</a> of Chicago and by a small selection of heating devices sourced from various manufacturers including the <a href="http://www.oac.cdlib.org/findaid/ark:/13030/c8qc027s/">Edison Electric Appliances Co Inc</a> also of Chicago.
Nonetheless, these displays demonstrated the allure of the visual in terms of
the packaging of their products. Their appearance alone would have led them to
stand out in contrast to the more familiar and conventional packaging design of
local and imperial products.</span></span></div>
<table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: center;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgzQa-6s7oJDzQGzfhoL8dSFYgvrEnkZEwMxRXAgnD-9pkOWiHjicW6WqmJI3KZP2Ij-3lPlwvIthtcgnO5p9Tx6W5D38w0_Q5A6WC3kGkcN9_MgzWMPfgvRuvaxXa6pY5qt3okbk1cNXji/s1600/MA_I021781.645x493.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgzQa-6s7oJDzQGzfhoL8dSFYgvrEnkZEwMxRXAgnD-9pkOWiHjicW6WqmJI3KZP2Ij-3lPlwvIthtcgnO5p9Tx6W5D38w0_Q5A6WC3kGkcN9_MgzWMPfgvRuvaxXa6pY5qt3okbk1cNXji/s1600/MA_I021781.645x493.jpg" height="305" width="400" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Burton Brothers (fl 1866-1914), [Industrial Exhibition Building (1885)].<br />Museum of New Zealand/Te Papa Tongarewa C.11315</span></td></tr>
</tbody></table>
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<span lang="EN-US" style="mso-ansi-language: EN-US;"><span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Probably
the most ‘tangible and productive’ exhibitions held in New Zealand are ignored in this account,
possibly on the grounds that they lacked an international
component other than those exhibits sourced from Britain. Prime among the roll
call of the absent is the <a href="http://collections.tepapa.govt.nz/topic/864">1885 New Zealand Industrial Exhibition</a> held in
Wellington, which, like the 1865 New Zealand Exhibition, was an initiative of
the premier, the exhibition-minded Julius Vogel. The exhibition had the general purpose of gathering 'material evidence of all that the colonists could accomplish in the way of useful productions and manufactures' but its primary purpose was to attract both capital and trained artisans to the country, something that explains why such a relatively modest exhibition had so immodest a published record; it was produced for external consumption. It was also the catalyst for an essay-writing competition on
the subject of ‘New Zealand Industries, the Past and the Present’ and the winning essays were published in the <i>Official record</i> as a further lure for investors. But while
this move toward a degree of industrialisation garnered support from the urban
population, it was anathema to those members of the agricultural industry
dominating the legislature.</span></span></div>
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<table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: center;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjWXBxDkx9mZQr18zyN6G_2aXyB8z17J0sSsX4EPQDjZL1gjoQ0fppfuoljfS7yriB6lIJPYZ3z2ZyIpPPOOmaMADrSdb4I9V2dKQ80S_FaYLBm6wm1TvwoT4JHaSJZpJIY-ZkSe7gEgByS/s1600/IMG_1922.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjWXBxDkx9mZQr18zyN6G_2aXyB8z17J0sSsX4EPQDjZL1gjoQ0fppfuoljfS7yriB6lIJPYZ3z2ZyIpPPOOmaMADrSdb4I9V2dKQ80S_FaYLBm6wm1TvwoT4JHaSJZpJIY-ZkSe7gEgByS/s1600/IMG_1922.jpg" height="400" width="247" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Cover of <i>New Zealand Industrial Exhibition, 1885, Wellington: the official record </i>(Wellington: Government Printer, 1886)</span></td></tr>
</tbody></table>
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</div>
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<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span lang="EN-US" style="mso-ansi-language: EN-US;">Other
hiatuses in the list include the 1898-99 Auckland Industrial and Mining
Exhibition and the 1913-14 </span>Auckland Industrial, Agricultural and Mining
Exhibition. While the former, held on the site now occupied by the city campus
of the University of Auckland was adjudged a success, the latter, held in the
Auckland Domain, was the subject of a slew of criticisms for its empty halls
and reliance on visitors attending the associated fun fair, Wonderland. It’s pertinent
to this text to question whether or not these exhibitions had anything to do
with the emergence of advertising art in New Zealand. Surviving photographs of
the displays suggest not; to the contrary, most publicity seems to have been
organised by importers, producers and retailers. The dominant visuality of
these commodity spectacles seems to have been the objects on display rather
than the promotional art.</span></div>
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<table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: center;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEicbIwmFyMC4aZytZOHhOIMVscS8IsG9WmXYGldZinpkl7UM-1Mzd77vxBE9Fh85TlIbjCBP3_Y3FsdaFBYJYg4oG2tUUw0UfMKtQOcT1rsBrBza912vV5M-uPkJN9GylD5HcjnEaYWueeW/s1600/23115137.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEicbIwmFyMC4aZytZOHhOIMVscS8IsG9WmXYGldZinpkl7UM-1Mzd77vxBE9Fh85TlIbjCBP3_Y3FsdaFBYJYg4oG2tUUw0UfMKtQOcT1rsBrBza912vV5M-uPkJN9GylD5HcjnEaYWueeW/s1600/23115137.jpg" height="292" width="400" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-size: x-small;"><span style="background-color: white; color: #222222; font-family: ProximaNova, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; line-height: 15px; text-align: start;">View of the Palace of Industries and Exhibition Towers, Auckland Exhibition, Auckland Domain. </span></span><br />
<span style="background-color: white; font-size: x-small;"><span style="color: #222222; font-family: ProximaNova, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; line-height: 15px; text-align: start;">William Archer </span><span style="color: #222222; font-family: ProximaNova, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; line-height: 15px; text-align: start;">Price</span><span style="color: #222222; font-family: ProximaNova, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; line-height: 15px; text-align: start;"> (1866-1948) collection of post card negatives. </span></span><br />
<span style="background-color: white;"><span style="font-size: x-small;"><span style="color: #222222; font-family: ProximaNova, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; line-height: 15px; text-align: start;">Alexander Turnbull Library </span></span><span style="color: #222222; font-family: ProximaNova, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: x-small; line-height: 15px; text-align: start;">1/2-001152-G</span></span></td></tr>
</tbody></table>
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<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">There’s another aspect of the New Zealand exhibition
phenomenon that’s also omitted, one that possibly had a more significant impact
on the way the country both perceived and promoted itself. The first
independent New Zealand representation at an international exhibition occurred
at the 1873 Vienna <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><a href="http://atojs.natlib.govt.nz/cgi-bin/atojs?a=d&d=AJHR1873-I.2.3.3.6">Welt-Außtellung</a></i>; participation in this non-British
spectacle was another Vogel initiative and its primary purpose was to attract
settlers, both urban and rural. This foray into overseas exhibitions was
followed by New Zealand displays at Philadelphia (<a href="http://atojs.natlib.govt.nz/cgi-bin/atojs?a=d&cl=search&d=AJHR1875-I.2.2.4.10&srpos=1&e=-------10--1------0philadelphia+exhibition--">1876</a>) and Sydney (<a href="http://atojs.natlib.govt.nz/cgi-bin/atojs?a=d&d=AJHR1879-I.2.2.2.15">1879</a>), Melbourne (<a href="http://atojs.natlib.govt.nz/cgi-bin/atojs?a=d&d=AJHR1882-I.2.2.4.7">1880</a> and <a href="http://atojs.natlib.govt.nz/cgi-bin/atojs?a=d&d=AJHR1889-I.2.3.2.25">1888</a>), London (<a href="http://paperspast.natlib.govt.nz/cgi-bin/paperspast?a=d&d=NZH18860427.2.42">1886</a>, <a href="http://paperspast.natlib.govt.nz/cgi-bin/paperspast?a=d&d=NZH19090524.2.81">1909</a> <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>and <a href="http://nzdesignhistory.blogspot.co.nz/2014/03/progress-empire-art-whatever.html">1924-25</a>), Paris (<a href="http://atojs.natlib.govt.nz/cgi-bin/atojs?a=d&cl=search&d=AJHR1889-I.2.3.2.54&srpos=3&e=-------10--1------0zealand+exhibition+paris+1889--">1889</a>), Louisiana (<a href="http://archive.org/stream/catalogueofexhi00loui/catalogueofexhi00loui_djvu.txt">1904</a>), San Francisco (<a href="http://paperspast.natlib.govt.nz/cgi-bin/paperspast?a=d&d=TC19150409.2.41">1915</a> and <a href="http://paperspast.natlib.govt.nz/cgi-bin/imageserver/imageserver.pl?oid=EP19381018.1.9&ext=png">1939</a>), Johannesburg (<a href="http://paperspast.natlib.govt.nz/cgi-bin/paperspast?a=d&d=AMBPA19361231.2.16">1936</a>) and Glasgow (<a href="http://nzetc.victoria.ac.nz/tm/scholarly/Gov13_01Rail-fig-Gov13_01Rail013a.html">1938</a>). A display at the 1878 Paris <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Exposition
Universelle</i> was aborted at the last minute owing to government
incompetence. In fact, none of New Zealand’s overseas promotions seem to have
been effective, even by the hardly challenging standards of the day. They were
under-resourced and poorly designed: a visitor to the Philadelphia exhibition<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><a href="http://atojs.natlib.govt.nz/cgi-bin/atojs?a=d&cl=search&d=AJHR1875-I.2.2.4.9&srpos=2&e=-------10--1------0the+philadelphia+exhibition+of+1876--">expressed</a> his astonishment that ‘nothing
appeared in the [New Zealand] court but a case like a large packing-case made
of rough timber, something like a cucumber frame, […] covered over with wire
netting [and] all the wool and grain exhibits.’ It’s this amateurism, the
absence of a coherent visual narrative, that seems to be a
more authentic reflection on the condition of the New Zealand promotional
industry during the period under interrogation. Not so much of a ‘tangible and
productive vista’ but more a myopic and uncritical sense of national hubris.</span></div>
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgqu3Cov9Kmp2EEetLs64m7TOQ9ggCKPwV6akhGc_AOAPgp5ZccDSv6rdgbkKDv6HIuJ-xAQGRlfKiXeYzllkzmCGvNdvPqR7j0prJw0Lf1MEm-CxIFCpluuvl2Y4mkHE29I35kK43DRUIJ/s1600/9:2.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgqu3Cov9Kmp2EEetLs64m7TOQ9ggCKPwV6akhGc_AOAPgp5ZccDSv6rdgbkKDv6HIuJ-xAQGRlfKiXeYzllkzmCGvNdvPqR7j0prJw0Lf1MEm-CxIFCpluuvl2Y4mkHE29I35kK43DRUIJ/s1600/9:2.jpg" height="273" width="400" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Gregory Brown (1887-1941) for the Empire Marketing Board, 'Sheep raising - New Zealand' [about 1926].</span>
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<span style="font-size: x-small;"><span style="font-family: HelveticaNeue;">National Archives of the United Kingdom CO 956/528</span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">It’s an essay discussing an overseas political initiative that provides
the vital key to understanding both the political economy of advertising in New Zealand and the mechanism through which its practitioners embraced new visual forms and concepts. Felicity
Barnes’s essay ‘Britain’s farm: empire marketing at home’, an exploration of
the activities of the British Empire Marketing Board (EMB) in relation to New
Zealand, not only articulates the prepotent political, social and economic
links between the two countries but also raises the possibility that the local circulation
of these arresting images, which represented the way New Zealand
was perceived by the former colonial power, had a marked effect on the practice
of design in the country. <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Not only was a
selection of the 800 EMB posters toured around New Zealand in 1929 but also their
display in Britain was reported in local newspapers.</span></div>
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiwFCUhU7ZfHD-HuQ6v6L0-FJpqHTXaoeNQjFfDJeNJaA56bxui_ZSKe4hyjdRwfp5cyX0TwXDiL-Qz2TWNj5B47P8wuXcqJDNpV62yyLSbmBfCRU8wCsQCftY6QMWF2W8WHGqNLXcCQcyE/s1600/Screenshot+2014-05-18+12.06.08.png" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiwFCUhU7ZfHD-HuQ6v6L0-FJpqHTXaoeNQjFfDJeNJaA56bxui_ZSKe4hyjdRwfp5cyX0TwXDiL-Qz2TWNj5B47P8wuXcqJDNpV62yyLSbmBfCRU8wCsQCftY6QMWF2W8WHGqNLXcCQcyE/s1600/Screenshot+2014-05-18+12.06.08.png" height="292" width="400" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-family: 'Helvetica Neue', Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; text-align: start;"><span style="font-size: x-small;">Empire Marketing Board British promotions publicised in the <i>Auckland Star</i> (26 July 1933)</span></span></td></tr>
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<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">One of the great debates of the early twentieth century, in
Britain at least, was the Liberal ideal of free trade. Unlike their neo-liberal
descendants, free traders argued that a global
competitive market would not only reduce prices but also empower labour and make the world a better place for all. Conservative interests rejected this stance
arguing that the imperial interests would be best served by a tariff preference
that favoured imperial goods. Britain would sell its manufactured commodities
to the empire while the dominions and colonies would sell their unconverted raw
materials and foodstuffs to Britain. It was a view that found acceptance amongst
the agriculturally-minded, conservative New Zealand government, keen to ensure
continued access of its primary produce to what, in effect, was a captive
market.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">In an effort to win over a sceptical public, a British Conservative
government, on the advice of Leo Amery, Secretary of State for the Dominions,
formed a partnership between the state and private sectors to
facilitate and promote imperial trade. Endowed with an sizeable budget, the EMB’s activities were not only aimed at promoting imperial produce
to British consumers but also improving the quality and efficiency of colonial
and dominion production. In pursuit of the former objective the EMB established
a Publicity Committee, whose vice-chairman (not, as Barnes avers, its ‘head’) was
William Crawford of the eponymous advertising agency W S Crawford Ltd, a progressive British agency and one of the first to
identify design as a discrete practice.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>He
was also principal advisor to its Poster Sub-Committee, chaired by Frank Pick
of the London Passenger Transport Board responsible for one of the
largest <a href="http://www.ltmcollection.org/posters/index.html">poster campaigns</a> ever undertaken anywhere in the
world. <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgpImv0fTCYfec3DmZANY-cCBXINCqAiZmIEZ02Nsh8qS6Ebvl029wHx_lBXuidBUQnfcAm9foG8o5LW_BgaXeTVbWOyDxPuKHb-FJW036k52KZsJOyj9UF9E_vDhdv2xHqaoenQEM8JJ9d/s1600/Screenshot+2014-06-06+12.50.36.png" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: center;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgpImv0fTCYfec3DmZANY-cCBXINCqAiZmIEZ02Nsh8qS6Ebvl029wHx_lBXuidBUQnfcAm9foG8o5LW_BgaXeTVbWOyDxPuKHb-FJW036k52KZsJOyj9UF9E_vDhdv2xHqaoenQEM8JJ9d/s1600/Screenshot+2014-06-06+12.50.36.png" height="400" width="302" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Léon Gischia (1903-1991), cover of <i>Gebrauchsgraphik</i>, 8:5 (May 1931), a Berlin-based monthly magazine for promoting art in advertising </span><br />
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">and the official organ of the </span><i style="font-family: 'Helvetica Neue', Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; text-align: start;">Bundes Deutscher Gebrauchsgraphiker</i></td></tr>
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<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Crawford, who had been educated in Germany, was a promoter of modernism: the advertising he promoted was pared of ornament,
rich with colour and entranced by the mechanical; his London office was housed
in modernist, sub-Corbusierian, construction; and he was an equal opportunities
employer <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">avant la lettre</i>. In 1925 he
arranged a visit to London by members of the modernist <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Bundes Deutscher Gebrauchsgraphiker</i> (the
Association of German Commercial Graphic Designers), which <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">inter alia</i> prompted the formation of the British Society of
Industrial Artists in 1931. This formal connection between the design
practiced by the members of the <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Gebrauchsgraphiker</i>
and that promoted by Crawford in his role at the EMB is of particular interest
because it also descries a link connecting the graphic arts
of Weimar Germany with those of 1930s New Zealand. <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span></span><br />
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">In 1927 the Wellington-based advertising agency J Ilott Ltd
opened an office in London to both service the company’s Glaxo account and
capture those of British manufacturers selling in New Zealand. While
Ilotts was proud to claim that it ‘was the first New Zealand advertising agency
to bring copy and art specialists from overseas’, this almost accidental
internationalisation of New Zealand advertising prompted the company into
recruiting British art directors such as Eric Lee-Johnson (a New Zealander
working in London) and Howard Wadman to ensure that its advertising remained on
a par with that of the metropolitan centre (J Ilott, <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Creating customers: the story of Ilott Advertising New Zealand
1892-1982</i> (Auckland: Richards, 1985) p. 142). <a href="http://nzetc.victoria.ac.nz/tm/scholarly/tei-Arc01_04DesR-t1-body-d7.html">Wadman</a> and Lee-Johnson were
both members of the Society of Industrial Artists and, following their stints
at Ilotts, separately edited Harry Tombs’ <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Year
book of the Arts in New Zealand</i>. While </span><span style="font-family: 'Helvetica Neue', Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Lee-Johnson was </span><span style="font-family: 'Helvetica Neue', Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">the subject of the first monograph devoted to a New Zealand artist - </span><a href="http://www.worldcat.org/title/eric-lee-johnson-with-a-biographical-introduction-by-eh-mccormick-edited-by-janet-paul-reproductions/oclc/561401983" style="font-family: 'Helvetica Neue', Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Eric McCormick's 1956 publication</a><span style="font-family: 'Helvetica Neue', Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">, his move from ‘commercial
artist’ to ‘professional artist’ came at considerable personal cost and saw him
actively suppress his earlier achievements as both a graphic and an industrial
designer.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Barnes has previously explored the impact of the EMB on New Zealand in <i><a href="http://www.press.auckland.ac.nz/en/browse-books/all-books/books-2012/New-Zealands-London-A-Colony-and-its-Metropolis.html">New Zealand's London: a colony and its metropolis</a> </i>(Auckland: Auckland University Press, 2012) although she curiously ignores the fact that the board's secondary aim of improving production
standards forced a reluctant New Zealand government into establishing the
Department of Scientific and Industrial Research in 1926. As she asserts,
the EMB had a significant cultural impact, in ‘epitomising the idea of New
Zealand, and the other dominions, as rural hinterlands of Britain’ through its
films and posters. She notes too that this fantasy of New Zealand cows and
farmers being displaced Britons ‘managed to overlook the innovations of
Taranaki-based, Chinese dairy farmer Chew Chong, Danish and American
contributions to the industry; and of course M<span style="mso-ascii-font-family: Cambria; mso-hansi-font-family: Cambria;">ā</span>ori dairy farming.’ This was
myth making in the service of the state: one of the EMB posters used to
illustrate the essay, by <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frank_Newbould">Frank Newbould</a>, depicts a ‘New Zealand’
mustering scene; the central figure is a lone, mounted shepherd. Newbould’s
poster not only conveyed the EMB’s emphatic message to British consumers that
empire was theirs but it also provided P<span style="mso-ascii-font-family: Cambria; mso-hansi-font-family: Cambria;">ā</span>keh<span style="mso-ascii-font-family: Cambria; mso-hansi-font-family: Cambria;">ā</span> New Zealanders with a visual
fiction that eradicated not only the distance between metropolis and the
frontier but also the compromises and the economic, environmental and social
damage inherent in colonialism.<o:p></o:p></span><br />
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<i style="font-family: 'Helvetica Neue', Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Promoting prosperity</i><span style="font-family: 'Helvetica Neue', Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">, l</span><span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">ike its companion volume <i>Selling the dream: the art of early New Zealand tourism </i>published in 2012, represents a significant commitment on the part of the editors and their publisher Craig Potton Publishing to making available to a wider public one of the more extraordinary visual archives to be found in New Zealand. It's an impressive achievement. Future publications though would benefit from being more than vehicles for personal rediscoveries of this long disregarded body of work. A preponderance of the texts accompanying the images suggest that the contributors to these volumes see their subject matter in purely formal terms, disconnected from wider, social, economic and political narratives. This position is exacerbated by both a disregard of theory and an undeveloped sense of where </span><span style="font-family: 'Helvetica Neue', Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">'commercial art' - or, deploying a more contemporary term, graphic design -</span><span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"> fits into the wider visual culture of New Zealand. </span><span style="font-family: 'Helvetica Neue', Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">If graphic design in the service of advertising and
promotion was all about creating an alternative visual narrative to the humdrum
existence of provincial life, then </span><i style="font-family: 'Helvetica Neue', Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Promoting prosperity</i><span style="font-family: 'Helvetica Neue', Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"> succeeds in conveying the richness and
diversity of the archive it produced. The book is less successful in its aim
of transmogrifying ‘commercial art’ into the canon of 'legitimate fine art' because,
ultimately, such a model has neither historical validity nor practical
justification. A more nuanced and appropriate approach, as both the archive and
historical circumstance suggests, would be to see this body of work as a part
of a yet unwritten history of design in New Zealand.</span></div>
Christopher Thompsonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01264481177071819483noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2464874880300858303.post-44604332823239642062014-05-06T15:31:00.000+12:002014-09-08T20:16:28.301+12:00Politicking and design<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg2OqYl_6Iwl19Oth2vC2YCYKWWEyOgaXO7_mGkaWD8BBaG3YUuuV5_49_Hu0goXhbPTClcOmshFI8QeGDSZc4x7gMlKBMsb5kmch61StS44z9jdyz8hywrJ7orvEbmVc9xAggsZmy68NJ-/s1600/Screenshot+2014-05-06+11.23.51.png" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg2OqYl_6Iwl19Oth2vC2YCYKWWEyOgaXO7_mGkaWD8BBaG3YUuuV5_49_Hu0goXhbPTClcOmshFI8QeGDSZc4x7gMlKBMsb5kmch61StS44z9jdyz8hywrJ7orvEbmVc9xAggsZmy68NJ-/s1600/Screenshot+2014-05-06+11.23.51.png" height="245" width="400" /></a></div>
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<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: large;">Over</span> the past few months the New Zealand Labour party has been
releasing a slew of policies, something that might be expected given that it's an election year. At first glance, these
announcements appear somewhat fragmentary and devoid of holistic
application but, in the absence of any clearly articulated policies from the
current National party government - other than a general commitment to drilling, mining, irrigating, </span><span style="font-family: 'Helvetica Neue', Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">building motorways</span><span style="font-family: 'Helvetica Neue', Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"> and </span><span style="font-family: 'Helvetica Neue', Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">selling state-owned assets for the benefit of a wealthy few - they’re a
welcome indication of what the opposition would do should it succeed to the
Treasury benches following the general election in September. This past month (17 April) saw the launch of Labour's </span><a href="https://www.labour.org.nz/economic-upgrade/manufacturing" style="font-family: 'Helvetica Neue', Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">manufacturing policy</a><span style="font-family: 'Helvetica Neue', Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">, which addresses the recent hollowing out of the country’s manufacturing sector, once its
largest source of employment and a generator of research and skills. Underpinning these policy announcements have been a number of speeches by key
members of the Labour caucus identifying the country’s growing inequality and suggesting ways this condition might be addressed.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Taken together, these policies suggest a significant change
in ideological direction by the Labour party, hitherto - at least since 1984 - in thrall to the siren song of the
free market. In some respects these recent announcements appear to mirror the
radicalism of those that saw Labour elected for the first time in New Zealand
in 1935, but they’re not. What they represent are well-informed, more nuanced,
better-targeted responses to a sustained crisis of capitalism, in a country
that, in population terms alone, is not only many times larger than it was eighty years ago but also increasingly
complex in terms of the economic and social challenges it faces. Moreover,
despite the current government’s increasingly colonial relationship with the
People’s Republic of China, New Zealand no longer depends on a single market as
an outlet for its primary products. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg6q3okBdjJ-qupKZK2cf45uMDzfWY8EgUdoZ-T5nU8v6GN5AWuEcQO-8vmDc3jgPdEEuCEBKy4KRz9zZmGR0hyphenhyphenOnaJoqkA7BXyFxz0LCta6W-24y_fXpXF8YZJyW-QswuEqjSmbcP5CQSt/s1600/Screenshot+2014-05-06+12.20.55.png" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg6q3okBdjJ-qupKZK2cf45uMDzfWY8EgUdoZ-T5nU8v6GN5AWuEcQO-8vmDc3jgPdEEuCEBKy4KRz9zZmGR0hyphenhyphenOnaJoqkA7BXyFxz0LCta6W-24y_fXpXF8YZJyW-QswuEqjSmbcP5CQSt/s1600/Screenshot+2014-05-06+12.20.55.png" height="400" width="283" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Unidentified designer, cover of <i>Manufacturing: the new consensus </i></span><br />
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">(Wellington: New Zealand Parliamentary Services, 2013)</span></td></tr>
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<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Labour's manufacturing policy is a considered response to the
issues raised in the parliamentary opposition’s timely and comprehensive 2013 inquiry
into manufacturing, <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><a href="http://manufacturinginquiry.files.wordpress.com/2013/06/manufacturing-inquiry-report-june13-final-no-pm.pdf">Manufacturing: the new consensus</a></i><span class="MsoHyperlink">. </span>The parliamentary inquiry recommended three central
proposals (out of a total of eleven) that suggested ways in which New Zealand’s
manufacturing sector might be revitalised. The first recommendation that: ‘The
government adopt macroeconomic settings that are supportive of manufacturing
and exporting’ is hardly radical but entirely pragmatic given the desired
outcome of greater industrial activity. The second recommendation ‘that New
Zealand businesses are encouraged to innovate’ is consistent with progressive
attitudes to manufacturing that reject the supposedly laissez-faire doctrine of
neo-liberalism and articulate a role for the state in encouraging an economic accruals
that benefit the entire country, not just a particular, investor elite.
Recommendation 3, which argues that ‘The Government [should] adopt a national
procurement policy that favours Kiwi-made and ensures that New Zealand
manufacturers enjoy the same advantages as their international competitors’,
is, again unexceptionable, at least when viewed from the perspective of the
left.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">It’s the second recommendation that warrants some unpacking
because its promotion of innovative, research-based research carries the
inquiry’s few and fleeting references to design. The first mention refers to an
OECD report that identifies design as being one of the agglomerate benefits of
manufacturing (p. 15). The second observes that in respect of research and
development in manufacturing industry that many submitters to the inquiry had
cited the ‘Better by Design’ model ‘to meet business needs in a timely,
cost-effective and competent manner’. (p. 23). '<a href="http://www.betterbydesign.org.nz/">Better by Design</a>' is a
management-focussed programme operated by New Zealand Trade and Enterprise, an
SOE working under the aegis of the Ministry of Business, Innovation and
Employment. It emerged from the recommendations of a ‘Design Taskforce’,
established in May 2002 by Jim Anderton, the Alliance party minister of
Economic Development in the first Clark Labour-led administration.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgOOdookWKcLj6Fyx2DjWV2itjefG3IrAUWIR-sZ5FRsO0-vIT9NGBnUIwp4I1Q5smPd98rcn8xj1pskDR-wQuPZHyUb410-LBPtSRd3wt7jllCifD_M-W5rTLWn3L8ngOdggSC043flCuG/s1600/Screenshot+2014-05-06+12.22.34.png" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgOOdookWKcLj6Fyx2DjWV2itjefG3IrAUWIR-sZ5FRsO0-vIT9NGBnUIwp4I1Q5smPd98rcn8xj1pskDR-wQuPZHyUb410-LBPtSRd3wt7jllCifD_M-W5rTLWn3L8ngOdggSC043flCuG/s1600/Screenshot+2014-05-06+12.22.34.png" height="400" width="292" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Charlie Ward, cover of New Zealand Design Taskforce, <i>Success by design: design makes first world economies</i> </span><br />
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">(Wellington: Industry New Zealand, 2003)</span></td></tr>
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<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Parliamentary inquiries into manufacturing by progressive
political parties are hardly a new thing: the British Liberal party undertook a
similar exercise in 1928, only beaten by the British Labour party which set up
a parliamentary inquiry ‘into the conditions and prospects of British industry
and commerce with special reference to the export trade’ during its brief term
in office in 1924, although its final report wasn’t published until 1929 when
Labour regained office. The aims of the 1924 British inquiry don’t seem too
different from those of the 2013 New Zealand version, which aimed to ‘ascertain the problems confronting manufacturing and policies that political parties can adopt to best deal with those problems'. Indeed, both inquiries had the overriding aim of dealing with the problems and implications of free trade regimes. </span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">An innovation of the 1924 inquiry was that it addressed the impact
of research and development on manufacturing and trade at some length. More
significantly, it also argued for a greater recognition of the role of design
and designers in the manufacturing process and even alluded to the need not
only of educating designers and consumers but also taking into account their
needs and requirements through recognition of the ‘<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">distributive trades</i>’:<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">There is no doubt that the
tendency of modern industrial and commercial organisations to widen the gap
between the original producer and the ultimate consumer has thrown into the
hands of intermediate buyers and salesmen, both wholesale and retail, an
increasing power of influencing for good or ill, the standard and trend of current
industrial art’ (Great Britain. Committee on Industry and Art, <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Factors in industrial and commercial
efficiency</i> (London: HMSO, p. 351).<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">It was a lesson that the New Zealand ‘Design Taskforce’
resolutely ignored throughout its recommendations that design was not only a
producer-led process but also, in what it described as an increasingly global
manufacturing environment, something that transcended international
borders.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>For the Taskforce, and for the
‘Better by Design’ programme, local manufacturing is something of no great
importance other than an opportunity for designer engagement. In the
neo-liberal doctrines espoused under the ‘Better by Design’ regime production
is best undertaken where production costs are the most competitive.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Design, at least as we understand it today, is a product of industrialisation; modern capitalism.
It developed from the need to plan and shape the form of industrially-produced
commodities in order to meet the demands of a newly invented, democratised, class of consumers. It expanded its scope in order to sell those same productions, by mediating, shaping and educating the desires of consumers; and
it matured as its role was accepted as part of the way we construct our
material world. But according to many practitioners, the current primacy of a
global market-driven economy hasn’t had a negative impact on either the quality
or the availability of design production. The received idea many, mostly
corporate, designers promote is that even though things might be physically
produced elsewhere, they can always be designed by practitioners based anywhere in
response to local market requirements; it all depends on the brief. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">This glib reasoning, posits design as operating in a
producer/distributor/designer bubble. A good exemplar of this way of
thinking can be found in a recent addition to the Auckland bus fleet. In
January 2011 New Zealand Bus Ltd, formerly Stagecoach New Zealand Ltd, a
subsidiary of the British Stagecoach Group (sold November 2005), and operator of most of the Auckland isthmus bus network, announced that it was to invest in
a new bus fleet. Its chosen supplier was the Scottish bus and coach manufacturer,
Alexander Dennis Ltd. <o:p></o:p></span><br />
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><br /></span></div>
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj5VIrh3dFgavMpNYPydnWYVmyryTYTw5Ic71lN8doFzXvVVVGB0Jam-Vzz3q4SRwpCqAXNAAFNhEKuOzL7Agyzo9sGgTtssf8JQX7E8R4fBNguGlyaQrUTp6dVV7v5Y0-a1Ru6hq3vZoYy/s1600/2014-05-06+13.56.27.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj5VIrh3dFgavMpNYPydnWYVmyryTYTw5Ic71lN8doFzXvVVVGB0Jam-Vzz3q4SRwpCqAXNAAFNhEKuOzL7Agyzo9sGgTtssf8JQX7E8R4fBNguGlyaQrUTp6dVV7v5Y0-a1Ru6hq3vZoYy/s1600/2014-05-06+13.56.27.jpg" height="300" width="400" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Unidentified designers, </span><span style="font-family: 'Helvetica Neue', Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">New Zealand Bus branded ADL Enviro 200 midi bus (2012)</span></td></tr>
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<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">It is perhaps no coincidence that the majority shareholders
in both the Stagecoach Group and Alexander Dennis Ltd are the Scottish transport
operators <i>Sir</i> Brian Souter and his sister Ann Gloag. New Zealand Bus has
subsequently acquired three hundred and fifty ADL Enviro 200 midi buses at a cost of around
NZD150 million. Designed in 2006 and looking very much the product of <a href="http://www.coventry.ac.uk/course-structure/2014/school-of-art-and-design/undergraduate-degree/automotive-and-transport-design-mdesba-hons/">the automotive and transport design course at Coventry University</a>, the bus has proven inappropriate for New Zealand conditions: among other things, <a href="http://transportblog.co.nz/tag/nz-bus/">critics have pointed out </a>that it is too small to cope with current passenger numbers; the rear of the bus is
too low for many passengers; and the doors, seats and aisles too narrow for the
New Zealand commuter environment. At <a href="http://www.nzherald.co.nz/lifestyle/news/article.cfm?c_id=6&objectid=11173055">a rate of thirty per cent of the adult population</a>, New Zealand does, after all, have the second highest levels of obesity in the Anglophone world. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhWnFxl8Q4ad1idmuTO3k4yolkFqN7QpQA6T60r1JpoO9BC75LhdZ7qSkpQI9KBYmDFJV9hSWdCLG4-7etk6xvDulAO0FseFzgsp5Zj_piuOzaPVmWKgo50iYG5qRCR3536Bc0KPQcmP12N/s1600/Screenshot+2014-05-06+10.07.51.png" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhWnFxl8Q4ad1idmuTO3k4yolkFqN7QpQA6T60r1JpoO9BC75LhdZ7qSkpQI9KBYmDFJV9hSWdCLG4-7etk6xvDulAO0FseFzgsp5Zj_piuOzaPVmWKgo50iYG5qRCR3536Bc0KPQcmP12N/s1600/Screenshot+2014-05-06+10.07.51.png" height="288" width="400" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Douglas Scott designer, AEC Routemaster bus (1947)</span></td></tr>
</tbody></table>
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<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Probably the most successful urban bus design of all time was
the London <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Routemaster">Routemaster</a>, a bus design developed between 1947 and 1956. Notwithstanding its universal popularity, the design of the Routemaster responded to a very London-centric brief: it was economical, lightweight,
agile, highly practical, and equipped - by Douglas Scott (1913-1990) - with comforts, such as heating and moquette-upholstered seats, that were as
good as, if not better, than those available in cars of the time. It’s no
coincidence that the Routemaster was designed within the context of the
post-war command economy and at a time when the state had effectively made
design its own through bodies such as an enviably well-funded design
promotion body, the Council of Industrial Design (1944), programmes such as the
Utility rationing scheme (1941-1951) and design-driven mass-visitor exhibitions such as <i>Britain Can Make It</i> (1946) and <i>The Festival of Britain</i> (1951). The
success of the Routemaster design, still in (limited) service some sixty years
after its introduction, stands in marked contrast to the contrived gimmickry of
the <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_Routemaster">latest London bus design</a> (Heatherwick Studio, 2013), an ungainly, expensive, late
post-modern ‘tribute’ to the erstwhile prototype.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Auckland’s inappropriately accommodated, dysfunctional, midi
bus and London’s self-indulgent parody bus both represent different aspects of
the way neo-liberal entities in both the public and private sectors employ design as a mechanism for maximising profit while
minimising the role of users and consumers. The design of these buses
illustrates the problematic confronted by manufacturers, exporters, progressive politicians and
administrators as they attempt to grapple with New Zealand’s growing manufacturing
hiatus. Like many political announcements made by under-resourced opposition parties, Labour’s
policy statement on manufacturing is big on vision but short on detail; nonetheless it's, at least, a step in the right direction. If design is to be a part of that
vision of a reinvigorated manufacturing sector, it has to be a model of design that allows for a more nuanced understanding of
the process than is found in the approach encapsulated by the 'Better by Design' programme: a corporate fantasy of producer-driven mediated gloss on commodities fabricated elsewhere. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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Christopher Thompsonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01264481177071819483noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2464874880300858303.post-18240906970297883172014-04-08T14:02:00.002+12:002016-09-25T12:31:31.736+13:00Undesigning history<!--[if gte mso 9]><xml>
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhBKgTkuzrmE9aMXA7Cgwzx2xcwS703gqwJuJxSz_Tytal6IO25eLBKu8k_m9scgf4n8SNU9Mm3q4eEP4_CaE_3dhDoFPzvN9q7n1KZBGloXZ56zMo_V9GDtTvY34LyLQojkPPYjsmH7HYz/s1600/DHS1.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="288" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhBKgTkuzrmE9aMXA7Cgwzx2xcwS703gqwJuJxSz_Tytal6IO25eLBKu8k_m9scgf4n8SNU9Mm3q4eEP4_CaE_3dhDoFPzvN9q7n1KZBGloXZ56zMo_V9GDtTvY34LyLQojkPPYjsmH7HYz/s1600/DHS1.jpg" width="400" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-family: "helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">Unidentified designer, cover of <i>Design 1900-1960</i>, a collection of papers delivered at the inaugural conference of the Design History Society held at Newcastle upon Tyne Polytechnic in September 1975</span></td></tr>
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<span style="font-family: "helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: large;">As</span> with many scholarly disciplines, new and old, design
history is constantly undergoing what might be described as tectonic shifts in
the way it’s structured, interpreted, critiqued, focussed, written, promulgated
and understood. Design history, as a ‘solid field of academic study’ emerged
in Britain during the early 1970s and in the United States in the early 1980s.
According to <a href="http://www.aut.ac.nz/__data/assets/pdf_file/0003/15816/jonathan_woodham.pdf">Jonathan Woodham</a>, its origins lie as a branch of art history that
developed to accommodate the curriculum requirements of polytechnical
institutions. However, the relative novelty of its subject matter and its
capacity to embrace a range of disciplines has seen its adherents reject the
traditional methodologies of art history employed in universities and museums,
even when they condescended to deal with the same subject matter. More recently, some exponents of the discipline have embraced new theoretical concerns with a fervour that at times seems to dehistoricise the history under analysis.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">Design history in New Zealand as an identifiable field of
scholarship has no discernible profile either in or outside the country. The <i><a href="http://www.oxfordjournals.org/our_journals/design/about.html%20">Journal of Design History</a></i>, established in 1988 and internationally recognised as the leading journal in
the field has published – under the aegis of the Oxford University Press on behalf of the <a href="http://www.designhistorysociety.org/index.html">Design History Society</a> – four scholarly articles with New Zealand subjects (very roughly,
about 0.04 per cent of the total number of published articles), two book
reviews of New Zealand publications and a note relating to the formation of the
short-lived and now defunct New Zealand Design Archive. New Zealand-resident
sociologists are responsible for two of the articles and one is by a London-domiciled
American graphic design historian. This scant number not only reflects the marginality of the discipline in New Zealand but also the Eurocentric framework of much of the design historiography undertaken to date.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjBWfRH8F8BUtiZQASSVs9mqdHlF8nFohFKsNLHMdcJsAN_WNPY2x93BSbyncEFMt6FOC5g0NP5EFFp2qV5gQktFnJGLeTuwcpqmGzMrR4ldJLULRLw5XhP12d9HVUdtqUe6PBMhiENJLUx/s1600/natgrid.png" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="400" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjBWfRH8F8BUtiZQASSVs9mqdHlF8nFohFKsNLHMdcJsAN_WNPY2x93BSbyncEFMt6FOC5g0NP5EFFp2qV5gQktFnJGLeTuwcpqmGzMrR4ldJLULRLw5XhP12d9HVUdtqUe6PBMhiENJLUx/s1600/natgrid.png" width="286" /></a></div>
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<span style="font-family: "helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">The only locally published journal to address design history
issues with any claim to critical integrity is the delightfully quirky but
nonetheless immensely rewarding <i><a href="http://www.thenationalgrid.co.nz%20/">The National Grid</a></i>, published annually between 2006 and 2012, It was, not so incidentally, the
subject of <a href="http://jdh.oxfordjournals.org/content/22/4/325.full?sid=41e6f997-56d3-4d6b-bbed-aa761922d6bf">one</a> of the four scholarly articles relating to New Zealand that has appeared in the <i>Journal of Design History</i>.
Sadly for the discipline, future appearances of this publication seem uncertain.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">Three monographs published over the last decade can be classified
as 'general' design histories: Douglas Lloyd Jenkins’ 2004 <i><a href="http://www.fishpond.co.nz/Books/At-Home-Douglas-Lloyd-Jenkins/9781869621100">At home: a century of New Zealand design</a></i> and his 2006 <i><a href="http://www.randomhouse.co.nz/books/douglas-lloyd-jenkins/40-legends-of-new-zealand-design-9781869621209.aspx">40 legends of New Zealand design</a></i>;
and Michael Smythe’s anecdotal 2011 <i><a href="http://www.randomhouse.co.nz/books/michael-smythe/new-zealand-by-design-a-history-of-new-zealand-product-design-9781869795740.aspx">New Zealand by design: a history of New Zealand product design</a></i>.
All three publications proffer a nationalist and canonical ‘great men of
design’ take on the history of design in New Zealand. All three publications are production-driven interpretations of a small aspect of New Zealand material culture, ignoring not only the mediation of design but also its consumption. As the Australian design
theorist Tony Fry observes ‘Design in these formations of knowledge progresses
by the assumed asserted power of exemplary objects.’ <span style="font-size: x-small;"><A Fry, <i>Design history Australia </i>(Sydney: Hale
& Iremonger, 1988), p. 27></span>. </span><span style="font-family: "helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">In addition to these there have been a number of related survey
texts published over the same period including: Peter Alsop, Gary Stewart 2013 </span><i style="font-family: 'Helvetica Neue', Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><a href="http://www.promotingprosperity.co.nz/">Promoting prosperity: the art of early New Zealand advertising</a>; </i><span style="font-family: "helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">Dave Bamford, Peter Alsop and Gary Stewart’s 2012 </span><i style="font-family: 'Helvetica Neue', Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><a href="http://www.sellingthedream.co.nz/">Selling the dream: the art of early New Zealand tourism</a></i><span style="font-family: "helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">; and Hamish Thompson’s 2007 </span><i style="font-family: 'Helvetica Neue', Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><a href="http://www.fishpond.co.nz/Books/Cover-Up-Hamish-Thompson/9781869621230">Cover up: the art of the book cover in New Zealand</a></i><span style="font-family: "helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">Notwithstanding these generalist histories, the sad corpus of New Zealand design historiography is characterised by various empirical,
object-driven, histories, such as Valerie Ringer Monk’s 2006 <i>Crown Lynn; a New Zealand icon</i> and her
2013 <i>Crown Lynn collector’s handbook</i>;
Damian Skinner’s 2011 <i>Lalique vases: the
New Zealand collection of Dr Jack C Richards</i>; Angela Lassig’s 2010 <i>New Zealand fashion design</i>; Lucy
Hammonds, Douglas Lloyd Jenkins and Claire Regnault’s <i>The dress circle: New Zealand fashion design since 1940</i>, also
appearing in 2010; and William Cottrell’s 2006 <i>Furniture of the New Zealand colonial era</i>. These have supplemented
earlier publications such as: Stanley Northcote-Bade’s 1971 <i>Colonial furniture
in New Zealand</i>; Gail Henry’s 1999 <i>New Zealand
pottery: commercial and collectable</i>, a revised edition of her (as Gail
Lambert) 1985 <i>Pottery in New Zealand:
commercial and collectable</i>; Jennifer Quérée’s 1993 <i>Royal Doulton: illustrated with treasures from New Zealand and
Australia</i>; and Winsome Shepherd’s 1995 <i>Gold
and silversmithing in nineteenth and twentieth century New Zealand</i>. Contemporary
craft production has also contributed to the historiography of design in New
Zealand with a number of survey publications, biographies of leading makers and
handbooks of marks and other aids.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">A populist strand of the material culture history of New
Zealand and a great generator of unsubstantiated myths concerning the origin,
production, design and ownership of things is found in ‘Kiwiana’, a localised
version of ‘Australiana’. Kiwiana
publications, such as Richard Wolfe and Stephen Barnett’s 2001 (republished in 2007)
<i>Classic Kiwiana: an essential guide to
New Zealand popular culture</i><span style="font-size: 13pt;"> </span>uninhibitedly indulge in an uncritical celebration of flag-waving, drum-thumping, number-eight-wire nationalism, one untroubled by an interest in wider, critical contexts.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">Additionally, a number of public and private museums and art
galleries have exhibited aspects of design, some with a New Zealand connection, and have accompanied these with appropriate publications. Over the past decade or so the
most notable of these have been initiatives of the regional Hawkes Bay Museum
and Art Gallery (now <a href="http://www.mtghawkesbay.com/">MTG Hawke’s Bay</a>) – <i>Keith
Murray in context</i> (1996), <i>Avis Higgs:
joie de vivre</i> (2000) and <i>Frank Carpay</i>
(2003) - and <a href="http://www.objectspace.org.nz/">Objectspace</a>, a private trust-operated venue in Auckland – <i>Clay economies</i> (2008); and <i>Printing types: New Zealand type design since 1870</i> (2009). More often than not disinterested in
theoretical or historiographic concerns, these exhibitions and their
associated publications reinforce the visuality of what passes for design
historical discourse in New Zealand. Institutional art has however provided one of the
more interesting critical design historical statements when the artist Michael
Stevenson published a number of design historical papers as a part of his
Biennale di Venezia installation ‘This is the Trekka’ in 2003.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">Adding to this body of literature, but generally ignored in
such surveys, is the material generated by historical archaeologists, operating all too
rarely on the all too common sites of demolished structures, notably in
Auckland. Reports such as those by: Simon Best and Rod Clough, </span><i style="font-family: 'Helvetica Neue', Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Pollen brickyard and Wright potteries: early
colonial ceramic industries on the Whau peninsula, site R11/</i><span style="font-family: "helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">1509
(Wellington: DoC, 1986); and Robert Brassy and Sarah Macready, </span><i style="font-family: 'Helvetica Neue', Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">The history and archaeology of the Victoria
Hotel, Fort Street, Auckland (site R11/1530)</i><span style="font-family: "helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;"> (Auckland: DoC, 1994), which
have researched and analysed the material history remnants of early European
settlement sites, provide a solid basis for a greater understanding of the
economic social and cultural contexts of the design process. Such resources
have, in the past been difficult to locate however, one of the benefits of
digitisation has meant that they are now easily </span><a href="http://www.historic.org.nz/protecting-heritage/archaeology/digital-library" style="font-family: 'Helvetica Neue', Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">accessible</a><span style="font-family: "helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">, even if neither
recognised nor appreciated by those outside the historical archaeology
sector. </span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">But despite all this published material relating to the
history of design in New Zealand, and an apparent appetite for more amongst the reading public –
Lloyd Jenkins’ <i>At home</i> has gone
through at least three printings - design history isn’t taken seriously by those determining the curricula in New
Zealand’s tertiary art and design sector. Regarded as theory’s dowdy
sibling, it’s sometimes included as an optional component in first year degree
courses, usually taught by someone with absolutely no interest in, let alone
knowledge of the field. A few years ago at the redundantly-titled AUT University, the token design
history course available to design undergraduates (it involved, from
recollection, about two or three lectures) was delivered by a member of staff
who thought it a wheeze to dress up in what he guessed was appropriate costume of the periods under discussion.
Despite this pervasive institutional indifference, some post-graduate research has been
undertaken, notably in the <a href="http://www.otago.ac.nz/appliedsciences/research/theses/index.html">University of Otago’s Department of Applied Science</a>.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">Ironically, AUT University was, briefly, host to the rather ambitiously
described <a href="http://jdh.oxfordjournals.org/content/14/3/227.full.pdf+html?sid=920e530f-590e-40d5-b9a4-7a0adebb5a3d">New Zealand Design Archive</a>. Established in 1998, primarily as a research grant earning mechanism, the
archive was closed in 2004 when both the server on which its digital content
was stored failed and its physical collection was deemed by university
management to be occupying space that would be better allocated to other activities. The collection, which never achieved
formal status within the university, appears to have been dispersed
subsequently.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">This anti-intellectual condition,
increasingly a characteristic of the contemporary university, accords with the
view expressed in 2003 by a New Zealand government-sponsored ‘Design
Taskforce’, a committee comprised of a roll call of the current New Zealand
corporate design establishment. It effectively asserted a positive take on <a href="http://www.thenationalgrid.co.nz/issue6.html">the absence of an historical dimension to local design practice</a>.
Nothing has changed over the subsequent decade. If anything, the perception of
design history as a valid critical tool for understanding design in its context has receded even further in that
variable, ascholastic environment that passes for contemporary design pedagogy
in New Zealand. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">Recently the <i>Journal
of Design History</i> launched a virtual special issue <a href="http://oxfordjournals.org/our_journals/design/resource/reframing_australian_design_history.html">‘Reframing Australian design history’</a>, introduced by Daniel Huppatz a senior lecturer at the Swinburne University of
Technology in Melbourne. The issue pulls together a selection of the Australian
content of the journal (nine papers) and Huppatz’s introduction identifies a set of common concerns and contextualises them within the wider frameworks of Australian historical research and global design histories. Three themes emerge from the
Huppatz’ essay: design history’s acceptance as a valid discourse
within a wider Australian historiographical context; the existence of a strong
theoretical formation based, notwithstanding Huppatz’s evident disagreement, on
Tony Fry’s 1988 text <i>Design History
Australia</i>; and the enormous potential to be found in advancing design history
scholarship in both in Australia and other ‘settler colonial contexts, such as
[…] New Zealand’.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">Is this a path that the study of the history of design in
New Zealand should take; a shared design history with Australia? Huppatz
attributes his tentative suggestion to informal discussions with Noel Waite at
the University of Otago who commented that ‘despite efforts to identify
distinctive design cultures in Australia and New Zealand, the framework and
narratives of design history on both sides of the Tasman are remarkably similar’.
If this is a possible future, then the position of design history in New
Zealand will require considerable investment, no less than a complete reworking, because,
institutionally and critically at least, it isn’t there at the moment.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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Christopher Thompsonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01264481177071819483noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2464874880300858303.post-3898355855436894542014-03-26T17:09:00.000+13:002015-02-03T21:37:37.445+13:00A veneer of gentility<!--[if gte mso 9]><xml>
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhxRcoNNOEjfFZFi6z9_8WYIYu7-dgDG45kPqkPW9NQ2SAW5Ij9-hR7ASV3CWlH-buUEHKWu4ufgZKJ-aJ_bZDkYuAeqY7QAIH3cZyyVY2dFDnbp_Wi8lyWzyWsmgKafnlRIIxorjmSmIcs/s1600/DSCF3036.JPG" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhxRcoNNOEjfFZFi6z9_8WYIYu7-dgDG45kPqkPW9NQ2SAW5Ij9-hR7ASV3CWlH-buUEHKWu4ufgZKJ-aJ_bZDkYuAeqY7QAIH3cZyyVY2dFDnbp_Wi8lyWzyWsmgKafnlRIIxorjmSmIcs/s1600/DSCF3036.JPG" height="400" width="300" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Unidentified maker, occasional table of red cedar with mahogany and rosewood veneers, [Sydney, NSW, about 1845]</span></td></tr>
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<span style="font-family: 'Helvetica Neue', Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: large;">If </span>we regard design as a tripartite process of production,
mediation and consumption and view it pre-eminently as one of the
manifestations of industrialisation, then we have to allow that for much of the
nineteenth century the production of furniture fell into what might be described
as a design history problematic: it was global yet persistently local; it was modern in its conception and production, yet pre-modern in the methodology of its making. The raw materials used by furniture makers were
sourced globally: from exotic timbers such as Brazilian and Indian rosewood and
mahogany – used largely for veneers, to more humble woods, such as Baltic
pine and deal, which were employed structurally. Over the course of the nineteenth century, furniture production was neither industrialised nor
entirely craft-based; and while many of the processes it made use of were increasingly
mechanised, those making it were still, largely, organised on the
pre-industrial model of master, journeyman and apprentice, although this also changed as the century wore on.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">In terms of its mediation though, nineteenth century
furniture production, at least that directed for consumption by the middle and upper classes,
was entirely modern, relying predominantly for its types and forms on pattern
books, catalogues and other printed references. The use of such mediated sources
was no new thing and had characterised elements of European furniture production – particularly those directed at luxury markets – since the
rapid expansion of printed visual media in the mid-eighteenth century. The
difference was that printed material was no longer exclusive to producers but
was used, increasingly, to shape market preferences. As society commercialised,
middle-class consumers – no matter their location – were increasingly exposed
to notions of fashionability. Equally, the availability of printed sources
meant that fashionable furniture could be produced outside the metropolitan
centres, provided it adhered to the centre’s standards of quality of design and
production.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">One of the best instances of this derogation of production
was the market for furniture that emerged in Australia during the late
eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Thanks to the circumstances under which
the continent was colonised by the British, we know quite a bit about the
people who moved there, what they did and what they surrounded themselves with:
convict colonies were the ideal surveillance society and, free or not, rich or
poor, their inhabitants were well observed and the results documented. The
trouble for design historians, amongst others, has been the difficulty of
matching this archived data with the objects, the things of the period. In some
instances, it’s relatively easy; in others it’s quite impossible as the vital
connection between thing and documentary context or thing and the observed
person has been lost. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: center;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj_nBjMibGZW2jsOqUrAJ6aVZsouT_cqEFwhQFurvmMhcaWlfzmo5R80iB-5M3paGWlibBPYoqUWoewbeWAP1kgoPskHQ0DN_W1q_QlbNVNEz2rwYd6OCLtnBvkZKTvunrvLixYDcCrM6cM/s1600/Screenshot+2014-03-25+14.34.19.png" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj_nBjMibGZW2jsOqUrAJ6aVZsouT_cqEFwhQFurvmMhcaWlfzmo5R80iB-5M3paGWlibBPYoqUWoewbeWAP1kgoPskHQ0DN_W1q_QlbNVNEz2rwYd6OCLtnBvkZKTvunrvLixYDcCrM6cM/s1600/Screenshot+2014-03-25+14.34.19.png" height="265" width="400" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: x-small;">John Verge architect, western façade of Camden Park House, Menangle, NSW, about 1835</span></td></tr>
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<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">The contents of <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Camden_Park_Estate,_New_South_Wales">Camden Park House</a>, the speculating termagant John Macarthur’s </span><span style="font-family: 'Helvetica Neue', Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">‘Grecian’ style </span><span style="font-family: 'Helvetica Neue', Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">patrician villa at
Menangle, south of Sydney (John Verge, 1835) are uniquely, for a private Australian house of that date,
largely intact and well-documented. The <a href="http://acms.sl.nsw.gov.au/item/itemDetailPaged.aspx?itemID=404867">Macarthur papers</a>, now held at the
Mitchell Library in Sydney, retain many of the invoices and receipts for the
objects used to furnish the house from the mid 1830s. Over the past sixty or so
years, furniture and architectural historians have sought to match the invoices
with what remains in and what is known to have been in the house – there have
been a number of family settlements over the years that have led to some
dispersals. The research has led to some items of furniture, once proudly identified
as ‘made of Australian cedar </span><span style="font-family: 'Helvetica Neue', Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">by convicts on the estate’, being recognised as made of exotic timbers and
acquired from fashionable London retailers. It’s easy to make mistakes when it
comes to cataloguing furniture, particularly if you don’t have access to
sources or are unfamiliar with the timbers used. In the case of Camden Park
House such errors of classification really shouldn’t have happened given that it
accommodates an extraordinary collection of wood samples, apparently duplicates
of those collected by William Macarthur and exhibited by him at the 1855 Paris </span><i style="font-family: 'Helvetica Neue', Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Exposition universelle</i><span style="font-family: 'Helvetica Neue', Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">The study of nineteenth century Australian furniture production
has been helped by publications such as Kevin Fahy, Christine Simpson and
Andrew Simpson’s <i>Nineteenth century
Australian furniture</i> (Sydney: David Ell, 1985) and by the development of
that invaluable resource, the <a href="http://sydneylivingmuseums.com.au/research-collections/library">Caroline Simpson Library and Research Centre</a>, a vital component of Sydney Living Museums, formerly the Historic Houses
Trust of NSW. With their emphasis on economic, social, political and geographic
contexts, these empirical resources have contributed to a significant change in
the way Australian material culture history is researched and written. It’s an
approach emphasising the critical position that design is more than just a production
process.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">While there have been furniture histories written in and
about New Zealand they tend to be decontextualized in the sense that they focus
predominantly on objects rather than ideas; narrating the thing rather than its
context. Probably the earliest New Zealand furniture history, Stanley
Northcote-Bade’s, <i>Colonial furniture in
New Zealand</i> (Wellington: AH & AW Reed, 1971) was remarkable in its
attempt to both identify a genealogy of furniture types and place them within a
specific, colonial, context. William Cottrell’s more recent <i>Furniture of the New Zealand colonial era:
an illustrated history 1830-1900</i> (Auckland: Reed Publishing, 2006) deploys Fahy
and Simpson’s methodology along with the facilities made available by
modern digital technology to document and analyse a much broader range of types
and possible makers. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">The problematic of nineteenth century colonial furniture is
evident in a piece that turned up at a recent <a href="http://www.artandobject.co.nz/AuctionResources/321/Cat_75_Asian_MD_Pottery_DecArt_Taonga.pdf">Art+Object auction</a> in Auckland. It was catalogued as ‘lot 715. William IV period mahogany and rosewood work
table, single frieze drawer raised on an octagonal tapering column on a
quatrefoil base on four scroll legs. W. 510 x H. 730mm’. Rather than being a
work or sewing table, it might be better described as an occasional table as,
conventionally, work tables have a cloth bag - or the fittings for one -
suspended under the top. In addition, while the table is clad with a thickly
cut <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mahogany">mahogany</a> (<i>Swietenia sp.</i>) veneer with a cross-banded <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rosewood">Indian rosewood</a> (<i>Dalbergia
sp.</i>) trim to the top, the bulk of its carcase is made of <a href="http://www.timbercraftsman.com.au/timber-species-selection">red cedar</a> (<i>Toona ciliata</i>). With the exception of the drawer, which is dovetailed, the component parts of
the table are glued and screwed together and the resting surfaces of the
scrolled pads or feet protected with pressed metal ‘buttons’. There are no
labels, stamped marks or inscriptions. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Both the thick veneer and the cedar carcase suggest that the
table was most probably of colonial manufacture. Cottrell notes that New
Zealand furniture makers used Australian red cedar, possibly as early as the
1830s and into the 1840s (pp. 312-313) but certainly not in the quantities found in this piece. A more likely place of manufacture would be Australia and more
specifically either New South Wales or Tasmania. In the 1840s and 50s, Sydney
cabinetmakers such as Andrew Lenehan and Joseph Sly were certainly making
tables with quadriform bases, scrolled pads and octagonal sectioned pedestals
with Lenehan also setting the pedestals within a turned shallow concave collar
(Fahy and Simpson, plate 455). Lenehan is also known to have used rosewood
veneers on cedar carcases in the mid 1840s (Fahy and Simpson, plate 496). The turned finials under each corner are made of a different timber from the the other external parts, have a different finish and would appear to be later additions; similar finials are found on Australian furniture dating from the 1870s and 80s. They may have been added to the table to enhance its appearance in the second-hand furniture market.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhWFZDlB_sOI21BC5prbtPD8dmZbklPwZkiOuJYrxrg9cA_EC9PQSQTrSK4or0vxCX47M4wAtyl3wKR3qQs7b5eFndHMK5Qzto8J5qEViPAkr-2HUkJcZGGdRLxex5tgjyPIPpTY-vClxfM/s1600/Screenshot+2014-03-26+15.25.10.png" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhWFZDlB_sOI21BC5prbtPD8dmZbklPwZkiOuJYrxrg9cA_EC9PQSQTrSK4or0vxCX47M4wAtyl3wKR3qQs7b5eFndHMK5Qzto8J5qEViPAkr-2HUkJcZGGdRLxex5tgjyPIPpTY-vClxfM/s1600/Screenshot+2014-03-26+15.25.10.png" height="400" width="257" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: x-small;">Title page of </span><span style="font-size: x-small;"><span style="font-family: 'Helvetica Neue', Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; text-align: start;">John Claudius Loudon’s </span><i style="font-family: 'Helvetica Neue', Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; text-align: start;"><a href="https://archive.org/details/encyclopdiaofc00loud">Encyclopaedia of cottage, farm and villa architecture and furniture</a></i></span><br />
<span style="font-size: x-small;"><span style="font-family: 'Helvetica Neue', Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; text-align: start;">(London: Longman, 1846)<br />University of Pittsburgh Library System</span></span></td></tr>
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<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">The design of the table, described by the auctioneer as ‘William
IV’ - that is it is based on a design produced between 1830 and 1837 - could
have been sourced from the maker’s own drawings, an imported example or, more
likely, on an illustrated publication. John Claudius Loudon’s <i><a href="https://archive.org/details/encyclopdiaofc00loud">Encyclopaedia of cottage, farm and villa architecture and furniture</a></i> (London: Longman, 1833) illustrates an écarté
table (fig 1956) with a similar base configuration and an overall similar form
to the piece under discussion. </span></div>
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj9XKz_5MA05GKSbJbXgJxtlvtx0wkG9bAPxiTcJGOEdSZvTmpPE0fpsP2la5lliz0vKdAEtodwVRjzyMsrB9plQgqn-vTikkOINfWQam4wcI_052k7D96i9AlNrcOefsqUzIai7aIJfjnZ/s1600/Screenshot+2014-03-23+11.19.45.png" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj9XKz_5MA05GKSbJbXgJxtlvtx0wkG9bAPxiTcJGOEdSZvTmpPE0fpsP2la5lliz0vKdAEtodwVRjzyMsrB9plQgqn-vTikkOINfWQam4wcI_052k7D96i9AlNrcOefsqUzIai7aIJfjnZ/s1600/Screenshot+2014-03-23+11.19.45.png" height="400" width="255" /></a></div>
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<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">As Fahy and Simpson assert, Loudon’s <i>Encyclopaedia</i> was ‘Probably the most
popular and significant publication of the period in terms of its effect and
influence on Australian furniture forms’ (Fahy and Simpson, p. 215). Although
regarding Loudon’s prescriptions as reflecting a ‘decline in taste’, they
observe that the book was ‘Enthusiastically received in Australia’ and that
copies were in wide circulation by the 1840s and were available in popular venues such as the library of the Sydney Mechanics Institute soon after 1842. The availability of
this pattern, combined with the use of veneers, suggests that the table was
probably made about 1845.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Empirical histories are vital tools in decoding the
information embedded in objects but they tend not to be all that illuminating
when it comes to contextualising or understanding the dynamics of commodity
production, mediation and consumption. To achieve this, another approach that
is needed, one that provides a critical understanding of context,
artefacts, space and connections, across timeframes and cultures. In her
2007 paper ‘Furniture design and colonialism: negotiating relationships between
Britain and Australia 1880-1901’ (in G Lees-Maffei and R House, eds <i>The design history reader</i> (Oxford: Berg,
2010), pp. 478-484), Tracey Avery comments on the connection between the desire on the part of both makers and consumers for
a British appearance to furniture designs and ‘the tenuous place of Australian
timber in the hierarchy of domestic suitability.’ While Avery's focus is on a later period than
that in which the occasional table was made, her view is equally pertinent. Her conclusion is that ‘the
achievement of the appropriate furnished ‘British’ domestic interior in
Australia involved certain reassignments of meaning around style, labor (<i>sic</i>), and materials.’ <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Designed elsewhere, but veneered to express both gentility
and sameness to the culture that provided its design, the occasional table
expresses the moment in a colonial culture where the local market’s capacity
for production surpasses the social, economic and aesthetic urge to sustain haptic links with the
colonising culture. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><i>Camden Park House continues to be a residence for the descendants of John Macarthur. It is open to the public once a year, during the second last full weekend of September. For further information see: <span style="background-color: white; border: 0px; line-height: 20px; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;"><a href="http://camdenparkhouse.com.au/">camdenparkhouse.com.au</a></span></i></span></div>
<!--EndFragment--><br />Christopher Thompsonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01264481177071819483noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2464874880300858303.post-75466872321301067992014-03-02T11:26:00.002+13:002015-02-25T21:37:25.944+13:00Progress; empire; art; whatever?<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiP-L8-4E881M0rrQSJuZpj4p8sWVpnqIGAsC-mHoAdK4_5Lh7KaMp1d8ksahEfcJTxDCVqhl0Sk1Qbu_9ODRyogT29Tz6fy2Tw7zUeEakb-ygzwI1lpd8LhdDirU_9QnKkTw6UOss-ZQRD/s1600/Stehenempire.png" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiP-L8-4E881M0rrQSJuZpj4p8sWVpnqIGAsC-mHoAdK4_5Lh7KaMp1d8ksahEfcJTxDCVqhl0Sk1Qbu_9ODRyogT29Tz6fy2Tw7zUeEakb-ygzwI1lpd8LhdDirU_9QnKkTw6UOss-ZQRD/s1600/Stehenempire.png" height="400" width="257" /></a></div>
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<span style="font-family: 'Helvetica Neue', Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">THE EMPIRE OF PROGRESS: WEST AFRICANS, INDIANS, AND BRITONS
AT THE BRITISH EMPIRE EXHIBITION, 1924-25</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">by Daniel Stephen<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Palgrave Macmillan, £65.00, September 2013, 978 1 137 32511
2<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: large;">From</span> the 1851 Great Exhibition of the Works of Industry of
All Nations, held at the Crystal Palace in London, to the 1900 Paris <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Exposition Universelle</i>, international
exhibitions were the show-stopping marvels of the time. In a subfusc age,
they were the blingy, multi-coloured rainbows of enterprise, the seductive handmaidens of trade and commerce. They were </span><span style="font-family: 'Helvetica Neue', Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">the panoramic glory of the second half of the nineteenth century, </span><span style="font-family: 'Helvetica Neue', Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">packed with steam gadgetry, chemical
fantasies and human exotica. Not
only did these showcases of industrial enterprise attract displays and tourists of all classes from all corners of the globe, they also projected the economic, social and
political aspirations of the exhibiting nations, or at least their rulers. </span><span style="font-family: 'Helvetica Neue', Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Daniel Stevens quotes Umberto Eco’s apt description of these overwhelming commodity spectacles as ‘the Missa solemnis of traditional capitalist society’ and he isn’t far wrong. Exhibitions were pure ideology, deployed under the guise of an enhanced familiar space; they were, ostensibly, all about trade, commerce and profit.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">They were also one of the principal mechanisms for
the visual and technological education of their visitors. Until the Education
Acts of the 1870s and 80s, education remained a privilege, rather than a right;
the exhibition phenomenon became a significant, progressive, driver in changing attitudes to technical education. Quite deliberately, the 1851 exhibition spawned what
became the Victoria & Albert and Science Museums whilst, in Sydney, the
1879 Sydney International Exhibition delivered the New South Wales Technological,
Industrial and Sanitary Museum, an ungainly title for a radical production, one
that soon after was truncated to the Technological Museum, notwithstanding
the fact that, as the original title suggested, it collected almost everything. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">However, by 1900, the allure of exhibitions was diminishing,
even if attendance rates remained significant. Increasing numbers of manufacturers
were becoming reluctant to be involved in these spectacles on the grounds that
the format had lost its novelty, other kinds of advertising had improved and
the ‘surroundings’ of the exhibitions were more suited to entertainment than
trade. Other disincentives for attendance included: a decrease in the value of
awards; the trouble and expense of participation, particularly if the
exhibitions were located outside Europe; the danger of goods being copied by
competitors; and, not least, the assertion that many manufacturers were
apparently ‘too busy to attend’. (Great Britain. International Exhibitions
Committee, <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Report […] with reference to
the participation of Great Britain in great international exhibitions</i>. Cd
3772 (London: HMSO, 1907), pp. 3-4.).<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">The official British response to this conundrum was to reconfigure
the nature of the country’s participation in international exhibitions by
establishing a central organisation within the Board of Trade, the Exhibitions
Branch, which would regulate and organise British involvement in international
exhibitions, by being more selective about where it showed and by focussing on
specific themes and emphasising particular aspects of British life. World War
One put a stop to these activities and, in 1919, responsibility for the
Exhibitions Branch was transferred to the recently formed Department of
Overseas Trade, a miscegnated administrative confection, invented to satisfy the
influence of business interests in the post war coalition government. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiMBWC_3uBZyr4r6506ccBr8gll_dPEOhvgu_bPgNehQdtXgNYplWUsOjZRrqR_hZa99QVNnXAf3hewvFRF9MN6g13aOIRTEQmGLttxbmAK9qjgsldxJpbDYQeVuw4FmfxhbiB9pVgQlYvl/s1600/wembleyguide.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiMBWC_3uBZyr4r6506ccBr8gll_dPEOhvgu_bPgNehQdtXgNYplWUsOjZRrqR_hZa99QVNnXAf3hewvFRF9MN6g13aOIRTEQmGLttxbmAK9qjgsldxJpbDYQeVuw4FmfxhbiB9pVgQlYvl/s1600/wembleyguide.jpg" height="400" width="245" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">The design of the cover for the official guide reflects initial attempts <br />to invest the appearance of the exhibition with a sense of modernity</span></td></tr>
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<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">The 1924-25 British Empire Exhibition held at Wembley was one
of the more tangible results of this administrative rethinking although Stephen
fails to identify this specific institutional context in his account, notwithstanding the fact that the first general manager of the exhibition,
Ulick Wintour, was the foundation director of the Exhibitions Branch until the start of the First World War. Instead he focuses on the political and
economic contexts of a loss-making exhibition that, rather than acting as the
celebration of empire its organisers sought, revealed its economic inadequacies,
political rifts and fundamental racism. While the - mostly British - visitors
to the exhibition were ‘suggestively shown ways in which the British Empire
seemed strong, secure, productive, even glamorous, and a force for “good” in an
uncertain world’, the non-white subjects of empire found its approach
humiliating, demeaning and exploitative while the overseas ‘Britons’ of the
book’s title, the inhabitants of the ‘white dominions’, were, on the whole,
unimpressed.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjYvSiF5fy5fEAxj2_ThTZZRZF-kRi4rAmp8dI0w21_-i4NndpeU5I_LhWUGKaKfz2XzKcfYW551seH6uMuXNfTv67P6rNdnTxbfEQ6Vf5wzpxozNDbqrBDDMqxM1V7uMGwONQQ65JIFIJQ/s1600/Screenshot+2014-02-28+14.24.08.png" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjYvSiF5fy5fEAxj2_ThTZZRZF-kRi4rAmp8dI0w21_-i4NndpeU5I_LhWUGKaKfz2XzKcfYW551seH6uMuXNfTv67P6rNdnTxbfEQ6Vf5wzpxozNDbqrBDDMqxM1V7uMGwONQQ65JIFIJQ/s1600/Screenshot+2014-02-28+14.24.08.png" height="270" width="400" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Unidentified designer, <i>British Empire Exhibition, 1924</i>. Dobson, Molle & Co. Ltd, London. The official map to the exhibition reverts to an ersatz sense of traditionalism in keeping with political changes made to the exhibition's governance in 1922.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="background-color: #f8f8f8; color: #222222; font-family: ProximaNova, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: xx-small; line-height: 15px; text-align: start;">Alexander Turnbull Library, Wellington, New Zealand. </span><span style="background-color: #f8f8f8; color: #222222; font-family: Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: xx-small; line-height: 15px; text-align: start;">Eph-D-EXHIBITION-1924-01-map</span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Stephen lists an impressive bibliography of material relating to the exhibition and those involved with it, while simultaneously ignoring official publications. Most of these references are, by necessity and, speculatively, geography, somewhat tangential because very little of a critical nature has been written about the Wembley exhibition itself and the surviving archival material remains largely unexplored. Probably the most incisive text to date is Ann Clendenning's recent on-line essay for the Branch Collective '<a href="http://www.branchcollective.org/?ps_articles=anne-clendinning-on-the-british-empire-exhibition-1924-25">On the British Empire Exhibition 1924-25</a>', which would seem both to post-date Stephen's publication and to flag the future publication of her own book on the subject. However, like Stephen, Clendenning disregards the key role played by the arts at the exhibition not only in the way they were used to define its overall image but also how they were deployed as material manifestations of Britishness in the overall perception of the exhibition. </span><br />
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiek3vw_JbpHM8MWrFH5wkflGJBdJ695yw_36yzHaar2Rldot5AWZ8GmKaMchx25GOGfqexcYyRIZ2PzpaWULr-UY2gdmqLRnlUi3EqV2_986P0pw6OyuG593HHLg0kvmyWu_xowGXjix6p/s1600/Screenshot+2014-03-09+17.11.57.png" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiek3vw_JbpHM8MWrFH5wkflGJBdJ695yw_36yzHaar2Rldot5AWZ8GmKaMchx25GOGfqexcYyRIZ2PzpaWULr-UY2gdmqLRnlUi3EqV2_986P0pw6OyuG593HHLg0kvmyWu_xowGXjix6p/s1600/Screenshot+2014-03-09+17.11.57.png" height="251" width="400" /></a></td></tr>
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<span style="background-color: white; color: #222222; font-family: ProximaNova, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; text-align: start;"><span style="font-size: x-small;"><i style="line-height: 20px;">Palace of Arts [British Empire Exhibition, Wembley, 1924]</i><span style="line-height: 20px;">, Fleetway Press.</span></span></span></div>
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<span style="color: #222222; font-family: ProximaNova, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: x-small;"><span style="line-height: 15px;">Brent Archives, London</span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">The relatively modest,
but nonetheless <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>monolithic, Palace of
Arts was probably one of the Wembley exhibition's more successful venues, notwithstanding an entry
surcharge of 6d (about $2.50 in today’s terms). While its popularity was probably due
to a pastiche eighteenth century neo-classical doll’s house - the <a href="http://46.236.36.161/queenmarysdollshouse/home.html">Queen’s Doll’s House</a> designed by Edwin Lutyens – rather than a </span><span style="font-family: 'Helvetica Neue', Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">pastiche </span><span style="font-family: 'Helvetica Neue', Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">renaissance-revival painting ‘Service and sacrifice’ by the now almost forgotten society artist Alfred Kingsley
Lawrence (1893-1978), the arts – fine and applied - had formed a core element
of the British exhibition strategy since the surprising profitability of the
British Art Exhibit at the 1906-07 Christchurch New Zealand International
Exhibition. Sadly for the overall appearance of the exhibition, the sacking of
Wintour by Conservative party interests in 1922 led to the dilution of his
concept of a visually coherent, almost modernist, space of ‘concrete buildings
of Egyptian dimensions’ and its replacement by an overwhelming atmosphere of twee traditionalism, interspersed by moments of colonial exotica.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">James Cowan opined in 1910 that ‘New Zealand has had a
weakness for Exhibitions from the first’, but its capacity to either host them
locally or attend them internationally has always been circumscribed by
distance, inadequate organisation, insufficient funding and a certain degree of naivety. Between 1865 and 1930, there were four
so-called ‘international’ exhibitions held in New Zealand. The first, the New
Zealand Exhibition, held in Dunedin in 1865, was organised by the Otago
Provincial Council; the second, the first New Zealand and South Seas Exhibition
of 1889, again organised by local interests, was held in the same city; the 1906-07 New Zealand International
exhibition moved north to Christchurch and, for the first time, saw the involvement of the state; and the second New Zealand and South
Seas Exhibition of 1925-26 was again held in Dunedin and locally organised. Notwithstanding their
titles, they weren’t<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>particularly
‘international’. While they all sought to emulate the grandeur and excitement
of the European and American spectacles, these simulacra ended up being more akin to a few muttered prayers in
non-conformist chapels than grandiose masses in increasingly over-ornamented
cathedrals of the Eco metaphor. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">James Weaver Allen, <i>Dunedin Exhibition building 1865.</i></span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Other than the New Zealand government and a few, token,
local manufacturers and primary product convertors, the exhibitors at the New
Zealand exhibitions tended to be from either Britain or its colonies and their
principal concern seems to have been with seeing off any competition for their
products rather than in entrancing New Zealand visitors with the fruits of
their enterprise or engendering further trading opportunities. The country was, after all, a captive market for British
goods. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">New Zealanders in the late nineteenth century wishing to see
something a little more spectacular than the local efforts without having to
travel to the other ends of the earth were able to assuage their desires by
simply crossing the Tasman. International Exhibitions were held in Sydney in
1879 and in Melbourne in 1880 and 1888. Most of the New Zealand exhibitions
were held in temporary structures; only the 1865 exhibition was displayed in a building
with any claim to architectural merit or permanency. Although intended by its
architect, William Mason, to be converted into a market building following the
exhibition, the edifice was ultimately transformed into the Dunedin Public
Hospital, which, tragically unregarded, was demolished in 1930; that's what usually happens to New Zealand's built heritage. By contrast, the Australian venues, in Sydney
and Melbourne, were architecturally sophisticated, grandiose, permanent
structures and they attracted significant numbers of overseas exhibitors
including those from France, Belgium, Switzerland, Germany, Italy, the
Netherlands, the United States and Japan. To the despair of its inhabitants,
the Sydney venue, the timber-built Garden Palace in the Botanic Gardens, combusted three years after the
exhibition’s close. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><span style="background-color: white; color: #222222; font-family: ProximaNova, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; text-align: start;"><span style="font-size: x-small;"><span style="line-height: 20px;">Campbell-Gray Ltd, </span><i style="line-height: 20px;">New Zealand pavilion [British Empire Exhibition, Wembley, 1924]</i><span style="line-height: 20px;">, Fleetway Press.</span></span></span><br />
<span style="background-color: white; color: #222222; font-family: ProximaNova, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; text-align: start;"><span style="font-size: x-small;"><span style="line-height: 20px;"><span style="background-color: #f8f8f8; color: #222222; font-family: ProximaNova, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: xx-small; line-height: 15px; text-align: start;">Alexander Turnbull Library, Wellington, New Zealand. </span><span style="background-color: #f8f8f8; color: #222222; font-family: ProximaNova, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: xx-small; line-height: 15px; text-align: start;">Eph-POSTCARD-Ellis-11</span></span></span></span></td></tr>
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<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">New Zealand was an eager recruit to the Wembley Exhibition.
Stephen highlights the country’s somewhat ingenuous enthusiasm for this project of imperial consolidation when he notes that the ‘New
Zealand premier (<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">sic</i>) W F Massey
expressed hope on Wembley’s opening day that the exhibition would help in
“peopling the empty spaces overseas with energetic and enterprising British
citizens”’. It was not to be. Perhaps unmoved by serried displays of
refrigerated butter and cheese, ‘the largest item of the Dominion’s trade’ - a refrigerated life-size butter cow was, unfortunately, trumped by the <a href="http://imgur.com/r/HistoryPorn/WtoCd8X">Canadian refrigerated life-size butter statue of the Prince of Wales</a> in First Nation drag, the ‘refrigerated cabinet containing specimens of sporting fish caught in New
Zealand rivers and bays’ and ‘the finest collection of red deer heads presented
to the British public’, the New Zealand pavilion failed in its attempts to
attract immigrants to ‘better Britain’, or, more accurately, an
agriculturally-inflected, reproduction Britain, located in a slightly alien and
definitely distant environment. Nor for that matter, despite the existence of
state-subsidised travel, were many New Zealanders inspired to visit the
exhibition and those that did seem to have been <a href="http://paperspast.natlib.govt.nz/cgi-bin/paperspast?a=d&d=NA19241112.2.18">underwhelmed</a> by the way they
were represented. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">The British Empire Exhibition at Wembley wasn't much of a success generally, notwithstanding a decision to extend it for a further season in 1925 in a vain attempt to break even financially. But, as the 1924 Board of Trade Committee on Industry and Trade reported in 1929, 'exhibitions have not in recent years yielded practical advantages to British participants commensurate with the expense occurred'. (Great Britain. Board of Trade, <i>Final report of the committee on industry and trade. </i>Cmd 3282 (London: HMSO, 1929), p. 169).</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">However, in keeping with his reticence in identifying the part played by the arts at Wembley, Stephen makes no mention of a contemporaneous international exhibition, one that was not only <a href="http://paperspast.natlib.govt.nz/cgi-bin/paperspast?a=d&cl=search&d=EP19260115.2.72&srpos=12&e=-------10--11----0paris+exhibition+1925--">profitable</a> but also adjudged to have been a roaring success: the Paris <i><a href="http://www.architecture.com/LibraryDrawingsAndPhotographs/Exhibitionsandloans/ArtDecoTriumphant/ArtDecoTriumphant.aspx#.U0dKLcfvOu4">Exposition internationale des arts décoratifs et industriels modernes</a></i>. Where the exhibition at Wembley sought to project an untenable fantasy of empire, the Paris one was a fantasy of imperial proportions, one that popularised not only commercial modernity - hence the term 'art deco' - but also </span><span style="font-family: 'Helvetica Neue', Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">architectural modernism</span><span style="font-family: 'Helvetica Neue', Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">, thanks to the effrontery of Le Corbusier's </span><i style="font-family: 'Helvetica Neue', Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><a href="http://www.fondationlecorbusier.fr/corbuweb/morpheus.aspx?sysId=13&IrisObjectId=5061&sysLanguage=fr-fr&itemPos=44&itemSort=fr-fr_sort_string1%20&itemCount=78&sysParentName=&sysParentId=64">Pavillon de l'Esprit Nouveau</a></i><span style="font-family: 'Helvetica Neue', Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"> and the revolutionary constructivist </span><a href="http://www.greatbuildings.com/buildings/USSR_Pavilion_at_Paris.html" style="font-family: 'Helvetica Neue', Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Soviet pavilion</a><span style="font-family: 'Helvetica Neue', Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"> of Konstantin Melnikov. The British exhibited in Paris, albeit to no great acclaim; the New Zealanders seem to have been barely aware of the exhibition's existence until long after the event.</span></div>
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Christopher Thompsonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01264481177071819483noreply@blogger.com0