Blog

Peter was a great believer in communicating about photography and got into blogging in its early days.

His blog ran, with some gaps, from 30 November 2006 to 2 September 2018.

You can visit the earliest entries via archived links on the right hand side of this page.

Japanese Weather today.

The apartment in which I’m staying in Auckland has a 42 inch plasma television set. One station the television receives is NHK, a Japanese no-ads broadcast.

Watching Japanese television here in Ponsonby is an intriguing experience even though I don’t understand a word of what is being said. I could watch it for hours.

I particularly like the weather maps, and here is a snap of one. It’s slightly soft partly because the image on the screen was not particularly sharp.

Must get back to TV now.

Just How Good Are New Zealand Curators?

From this afternoon I am in Auckland and Wellington on business and may not be able to do any blogging until I return on Sunday afternoon. It depends upon time and access to a suitable computer, however I will do my best.

On Saturday evening I will be going to the opening of Telecom Prospect 2007 at the City Gallery in Wellington.

Curated by Heather Galbraith, this show is described in their publicity as being ‘an explosion of new art by New Zealander artists….drawing on the most vital and curious work made by New Zealand artists over the last three years.’

I’m sceptical of this claim because I’ve seen the list of artists in this show and find the work of some of those included to be conservative, and far from vital.

In recent years, not only has the number of curators in this country risen exponentially, but they have accrued considerable power over artists. A question I want to see asked is ‘just how good are these curators?’ Of course in a tiny country like this not many artists are going to ask this in public as it could have serious repercussions for their careers. But apart from artists, there doesn’t seem to be any serious commentary questioning in even a mild way, the quality of curatorial connoisseurship.

In the case of Prospect, there is also a statement that has been issued summarising the curatorial basis for the selection, unfortunately written in the usual hifalutin language that streams out of art galleries, and has earned art writing here the title of ‘the sick man of New Zealand literature.’ Here is the statement. Take a deep breath:

The exhibition is structured around three intersecting thematic clusters which have been derived from observations of and queries about current trends and debates: contemporary abstraction; a reconfiguration of the everyday and augmented reality. A connective thread weaving through the exhibition is an interest in collabortive practices and experiential dynamics between art works and their audiences.


Waitangi.
May, 2005

Today is Waitangi Day, a national holiday in New Zealand, to celebrate the signing of
the Treaty of Waitangi, an agreement made between the British and the Maori.

This is a view that I took of the very place where, in 1840, the Treaty’s first signatures were collected. Subsequently it was taken to other parts of New Zealand.

I was fortunate to have spent much of my early childhood in this area.

A commemorative set of stamps from my tiny stamp collection.

Sunday Star Times


The cover of the magazine that accompanied yesterday’s edition of a national Sunday newspaper.
The original photo has had space added to the top and bottom, to make room for the typesetting.



Often editors take liberties with my images and crop them, which usually makes me rather unhappy. This is a very unusual case. The balance created by the designer seems well executed and I am pleased with it.

The photo was also printed inside the magazine.

The image immediately reminds me of musical score, which given that I am now studying the piano,
and am involved with looking at music several times every day, does not seem surprising.

The Sunday Star Times has a current print run of 202,000 and an estimated readership of 650,000, so this is good coverage. I’ve had exhibitions at dealer galleries in the past where I’ve been lucky if there have been, over a 3 week run, 200 visitors.

Most importantly, perhaps, is that having a photo put out there like this is a morale booster, an uplifting way to start the year.

Janet’s Hand.

Janet is a yoga teacher who I knew about 10 years ago. I was so impressed by her
flexiblility that I asked her to come to my Auckland studio and press her hand against a wall.

This she did with ease.


Luc Tuymans

New Plymouth has a great library. A few days ago I borrowed a new book on the work of Luc Tuymans b. 1958. Two things impressed me about it.

Firstly, how much I liked the work. Secondly, how much work I have seen in this country that is clearly influenced by him.

Of course, in a country that doesn’t even have the population of Atlanta, Georgia, it’s understandable that much of the art work made here will be cover versions of what is being acclaimed overseas. Another huge influence in New Zealand at present is the Japanese artist, Takashi Murakami b.1962.


Sunset from my balcony 9.15pm 31st Jan 2007
(click to enlarge)


Wrestlers 2003

This photo is a close-up of a marble copy of a Greek statue. I don’t know where the original is, but this copy is one of two that are in NZ. One is in the Dunedin Public Art Gallery and this one is in the Sarjeant Gallery in Wanganui.
I was pleased with this image, and printed it up an edition which I released onto the market. Some viewers were a little puzzled by the figures in the photo, being unsure whether they were real or not. One person even asked me which one was me! Unfortunately I think that he was joking.

A few weeks ago I was looking at the interior of the main Catholic Church here in New Plymouth, and was impressed by the concrete bas-relief Stations of the Cross that Michael Smither made some years ago. Again I was interested to see some sculpture based on the human figure.


The 14 Stations of the Cross are a compulsory part of every Catholic Church in this country and having had a strict Catholic upbringing (although now I’m an atheist) I was exposed to many sets of them. Coming from a family and a culture which was not strong on the visual arts to put it mildly, they made a big impression on me. Almost all the art that I saw was religious. Although I was fortunate enough to have regular exposure to Life magazine, which at that time regularly published photographic essays by top photographers such as Edward Steichen, Lee Miller, Dorothea Lange, and Margaret Bourke-White.

Generally the Stations of the Cross were, in art terms, just plain awful, even kitsch. Hence it was a relief to walk into St Joseph’s here in New Plymouth and see Stations that had some force and sincerity to them.

Christianity is, in global terms, an unusual religion in that it worships a mutilated god. I remember, in a television series made by English historian Bamber Gascoigne, and called The Christians, him saying that it is the only religion in the world to do so. I often wonder what psychological effect all the Christian art that I was exposed to had on me as a child, and ask myself if it still does affect me in some ways. I was brought up on the lives of the saints. I particularly remember one who had her hat nailed to her head. Flagellation was normal, we even drank blood and ate flesh during Mass. Keep in mind that many Roman Catholics believe that via transubstantiation, the Mass literally transforms bread and wine into the flesh and blood of Christ. The Mass is a cannibalistic ceremony.

I fervently believed and practised these ideas, even in my early 20’s I wanted to be a priest. My middle name is Chanel, hence I am Peter Chanel, named after the only Catholic saint to have ever lived in this country. He died in 1841, on Futuna, in the Fiji group of islands, clubbed to death by some of the indigenous people who did not like his ideas. I used to adhere to the orthodox Catholic belief that matyrdom such as this was a shortcut to ‘heaven’.

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