Art History research

View recent research projects by Art History staff and students in the School of Art History, Classics, Religious Studies and Museum and Heritage Studies.

Still looking: Peter McLeavey and the last photograph

Curated by Geoffrey Batchen and Deidra Sullivan

6 October – 20 December, 2018

Opening 5 October, 6pm

“I think there is one more photograph I have to find. The last photograph. I’m still looking for it. It’s out there somewhere. I’m waiting for it to claim me, the last photograph. I don’t know what it is, but when I see it, I’ll know it and I’ll buy it, and it will hang with all the others. And maybe then the life, the story, the quest, will be complete.”

Read more

Victoria University of Wellington academic curates major exhibition in London

Victoria University of Wellington's Senior Lecturer in Art History, Dr Peter Brunt has co-curated the United Kingdom's first major show to explore Oceanic art, at London's Royal Academy of Arts.

Oceania celebrates the art of Melanesia, Micronesia and Polynesia, encompassing the vast Pacific region from New Guinea to Easter Island, Hawaii to New Zealand.

The exhibition brings together around 200 exceptional works from public collections in British, European and New Zealand museums and spans over 500 years of art. Some of the historic objects in the show have remained unseen in the stores of European museums for more than a century.

The art of Oceania is Dr Brunt’s area of expertise and he has been working on the exhibition with Professor Nicholas Thomas, Director of the Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology at the University of Cambridge since 2013.“The opportunity to create this exhibition is an extraordinary privilege,”

Dr Brunt says.“I have visited dozens of museums and storerooms in Europe, which hold amazing treasures from our region. What you realise is that they are not only carriers of our stories from the past, but remain meaningful for our relationships with Britain and Europe, now and in the future.”

The show, which opens in September, will be staged in the 250th anniversary year of the Royal Academy of Arts, which was founded in 1768—the same year Captain James Cook set out on his first Endeavour expedition.

Highlights of the exhibition include the 14th century wooden Kaitaia carving, excavated in 1920, one of the oldest known objects to have been found in New Zealand; an 18th century Heva Tupapau—or Chief Mourner’s costume—from Tahiti, one of only six known examples in existence; as well as one of the stars of the 2017 Venice Biennale—the vast panoramic video In Pursuit of Venus [infected], by New Zealand multi-media artist Lisa Reihana, charting the arrival of the British in the South Pacific and its consequences.

A documented but previously unseen object from the British Museum is an enormous wooden feast bowl from the Solomon Islands, which has the head of a crocodile holding a carved human head in its teeth.

Dr Brunt will attend the opening of Oceania in late September 2018. Following its run at the Royal Academy of Arts, the exhibition will travel to the Musée du Quai Branly, Paris, in February 2019.

Apparitions: the photograph and its image

Adam Art Gallery

Curated by Geoffrey Batchen and his Honours students
14 October – 17 December 2017

Apparitions examines the dissemination of photographic images during photography’s earliest decades. Curated by Geoffrey Batchen and his 2017 Honours class, the show draws on both private and public collections (including Te Papa, the Turnbull Library and the Auckland Museum). Apparitions displays rare daguerreotypes from England, France, Germany, and the United States, calotypes by photography’s English inventor William Henry Fox Talbot, and lithographs, wood engravings, steel engravings and other illustrations based on early photographs. The focus is on the reproducibility and mobility of the photographic image.

Apparitions is supported by the Ronald Woolf Memorial Endowment.

Te Kawa a Māui Winter Seminar Series What are these things called Lindauers?

The Māori portraits painted by Gottfried Lindauer
occupy an invincible place in New Zealand’s collective consciousness. We gasp when they are stolen, or when they fetch stratospheric prices in the
marketplace. But beyond their status as trophies of art, Lindauer’s works are revered as priceless images of ancestors.

Image: Lindauer, Gottfried, 1839-1926: Mrs Ngahui Rangitakaiwaho of Wairarapa. Dec 21st 1880. Ref: G-515. Alexander Turnbull Library, Wellington, New Zealand. /records/23245970

On 24 August 2017 Associate Professor Roger Blackley from the Art History programme at
Victoria University of Wellington talked about the complex bicultural patronage that brought these works into existence.

Te Kawa a Māui: www.victoria.ac.nz/maori

New lease of life for Lindauer portrait of colonial Maori rangatira

In June, Lindauer expert Roger Blackley, of Victoria University of Wellington, gave a talk at the museum about Lindauer's paintings.

EMANATIONS: The Art of the Cameraless Photograph, 29 April - 14 August 2016

The Emanations exhibition was held from April 29 to August 14, 2016 at the Len Lye Centre, Govett-Brewster Art Gallery.

Curated by Geoffrey Batchen, Professor of Art History at Victoria University of Wellington, April 29 - August 14, 2016, Len Lye Centre, Govett-Brewster Art Gallery.

The exhibition contained about 200 works, filling all the museum’s spaces (including both ramps) except for the Large Works Gallery (which displayed Len Lye’s Four Fountains).

Crucible Symposium, 19–21 February 2016

Over the weekend of February 19-21, 2016 Professor Geoffrey Batchen led a symposium devoted to the relationship between nineteenth-century photography and contemporary artistic and curatorial practice.
Called 'Crucible,’ the event brought together artists, curators and scholars from Australia and New Zealand and involved the close examination of rare early photographs from the collections of Professor Batchen, Te Papa and the National Library.

Indigenous Modernisms Symposium,
11-12 December 2014

A two-day symposium brought together an international group of scholars, curators and artists to address the question of the relationship between the histories of Indigenous modernisms in New Zealand, Australia, North America, Africa and the Pacific, and the artistic conditions of our own era.

Art in Oceania: A New History

Art in Oceania: A New History was published by Thames and Hudson in late 2012.

Co-authored by Dr Peter Brunt (Senior Lecturer in Art History), Professor Nicholas Thomas (University of Cambridge), Sean Mallon (Te Papa Tongarewa), Dr Lissant Bolton (British Museum), Dr Deidre Brown (University of Auckland), Dr Damian Skinner (Auckland Museum and postdoctoral fellow at the University of Cambridge) and Professor Susanne Kuchler (University College London), the book is the product of a remarkable five-year collaboration led by Dr Brunt and supported by a grant from the Marsden Fund of the Royal Society of New Zealand. Additional funding and contributions were provided by Victoria University of Wellington, The University of Auckland, The British Museum, the Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology at the University of Cambridge, the Museum of New Zealand Te Papa Tongarewa and the Arts and Humanities Research Council in the UK. The book is edited by Dr Brunt and Professor Thomas, with the assistance of Stella Ramage, currently a doctoral student in Art History at Victoria University of Wellington.

During its development, the book was based in the Art History Programme of Victoria University of Wellington where the project was assisted in many ways by School Manager Annie Mercer and several student Research Assistants over the years; namely Jessica Adams, Safua Akeli, Stella Ramage, Vivian Morrell and Mena Antonio.

With over 500 pages and more than 550 illustrations, the book ranges from the earliest archaeological evidence through the great historic works collected by voyagers such as Captain Cook, to the modern and contemporary arts of the last fifty years. It reveals the art of Oceania as profoundly grounded in tradition and customary society, yet also full of innovation. It does justice to the extraordinary variety of Pacific cultures, from those of the Highlands of New Guinea to the atolls of Micronesia and the furthest reaches of Polynesian settlement in Aotearoa New Zealand and remote Easter Island. It ranges across genres, from ancient rock art through ritual architecture to contemporary painting and installation art, as no previous survey has done. Its hallmark is the argument that art in Oceania is a product of history - from the changing relations among Pacific peoples in a profoundly interconnected world of voyaging and exchange, to their resilience and creativity in the face of colonial intrusions and the challenges of globalization.

Art in Oceania: A New History won the prestigious 2014 Art Book Prize awarded by the Authors' Club in the United Kingdom.

Picturing Atrocity

Professor Geoffrey Batchen (Art History), Mick Gidley (Emeritus Professor of American Literature, University of Leeds ), Nancy K. Miller (Distinguished Professor, CUNY Graduate Center), and Jay Prosser (University of Leeds) have edited a volume of essays initiated by the ‘Photography and Atrocity’ symposium held at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York in 2005. The volume was published by Reaktion Press in 2012.

Ever since the landmark publication of Susan Sontag’s On Photography, it has been impossible to look photographs, particularly those of violence and suffering, without questioning our role as photographic voyeur. Are we desensitized by the proliferation of these images, and does this make it easier to be passive and uninvolved? Or do the images immediately stir our own sense of justice and act as a call to arms? Are we consuming the suffering of others as a form of intrigue? Or can looking at pictures of atrocity become an act of empathy?

To answer these questions, Picturing Atrocity brings together essays from some of the foremost writers and critics on photography today, including Rebecca Solnit, Alfredo Jaar, Ariella Azoulay, Griselda Pollock, Shahidul Alam, Marianne Hirsch, John Lucaites, Robert Hariman, and Susan Meiselas, to offer close readings of images that reveal the realities behind the photographs, the subjects, and the photographers. From the massacre of the Sioux Indians at Wounded Knee to the torture of prisoners at Abu Ghraib, from famine in China to apartheid in South Africa, Picturing Atrocity examines a broad spectrum of photographs. Each of the essays focuses specifically on an iconic image, offering a distinct approach and context, in order to enable us to look again—and this time more closely—at the picture. In addition, four photo-essays showcase the work of photographers involved in the making of photographs of brutality as well as the artists’ own reflections on these images.

Together these essays cover the historical and geographical range of atrocity photographs and respond to current concerns about such disturbing images; they probe why we as viewers feel compelled to look even when our instinct might be to look away. Picturing Atrocity is an important read, not just for insights into photography, but for its reflections on human injustice and suffering. In keeping with that aim, all royalties from the book will be donated to Amnesty International.

CONTACT: AAANZ 2011 Annual Conference hosted by Victoria University of Wellington

Hosted by Victoria University of Wellington’s Art History programme and organized around the theme of Contact, the Art Association of Australia and New Zealand 2011 Annual Conference brought over 200 regional and international delegates to Wellington.

With 143 papers in the main conference, and 29 papers in the post-graduate workshop, the conference theme ran through many strands, evoking encounters between cultures, peoples and objects and the issues and outcomes they spark, e.g. resistance and hybridity, intersection and divergence, purity and pollution, and other related questions raised by the theme of contact.

A selection of the papers for the conference will be published in a special, upcoming issue of the Australian and New Zealand Journal of Art.

Keynote lectures

Okwui Enwezor (Haus der Kunst, Munich)

Professor Darcy Grimaldo Grigsby (University of California, Berkeley)

For more information visit the AAANZ conference website

Darcy Grimaldo Grigsby Keynote 51.36

Introduction / Bernard Smith Tribute 37.49

In conversation with Okwui Enwezor 39:16

In conversation with Darcy Grimaldo Grigsby 42:12

Reflecting on the theme of ‘Contact’ a conversation with delegates 36:04

Museums, Photographs and the Colonial Past Conference

Roger Blackley (Senior Lecturer, Art History) recently presented his paper ‘The Unpublishable Photograph’ at the Museums, Photographs and the Colonial Past conference hosted by PHRC De Montfort University and Pitt Rivers Museum, University of Oxford, 12-13 January 2012.

The paper investigates a group of photographs made in the early years of the twentieth century at the country residence of Henry Stevens, the famous ethnographic and natural history auctioneer of Covent Garden. His guests at Addlestone Lodge were the London-based collector, Major-General Horatio Gordon Robley, and an exceptional collection of preserved Maori heads, all of whom Stevens memorialised in a widely dispersed trophy image with which Robley publicised his collection. Other photographs in the series depict the young daughter of Stevens’s neighbour as a startling foil to Robley and several of the tattooed heads.

Firstly the paper places these extraordinary group portraits within the context of their production—an outing to the country by the exhibitionist collector and his formidable entourage. What do we know about Robley’s collecting, and his relationship with Stevens? What precise purposes might these photographs have been intended to serve?

Then it considers the current limbo inhabited by the photographs, which are regarded as unpublishable by many of the repositories that hold them. What are the limits and consequences of such censorship? By drawing an impenetrable veil over an unsavoury aspect of ethnographic collecting, are institutions participating in an all-too-convenient museological amnesia? As depictions of human beings as much or more than of ethnographic artefacts, can such photographs ever be reclaimed as records of the adventure and indignity faced by this Maori diaspora?

Dispersed Identities: Sexuality, Surrealism and the Global Avant－Gardes Conference

Dr Raymond Spiteri (Lecturer, Art History) recently presented his paper ‘‘We don’t EAR it that way’: Dissent and the dispersal of identity in the culture of surrealism’ at the Dispersed Identities: Sexuality, Surrealism and the Global Avant-Gardes conference hosted by the University of Melbourne, February 3-4, 2012.

This paper looks at “We don’t EAR it that way,” a 1960 tract protesting the inclusion of a recent painting by Salvador Dalí in a New York exhibition, Surrealist Intrusion in the Enchanters’ Domain. This protest delineates a fault-line between the political and cultural dimensions of the surrealist enterprise, and allows a reconsideration of the role of dissent in surrealism.

Great Exhibitions in the Margins, 1851-1938 Conference

Dr Rebecca Rice (Lecturer, Art History) will be presenting her paper ‘A ‘Ramble’ through art at the 1865 New Zealand Exhibition’ at the Great Exhibitions in the Margins, 1851-1938 conference hosted by the University of Wolverhampton (UK), April 26-27, 2012.

In response to the fine arts on show at the New Zealand Exhibition in Dunedin in 1865, a critic using the pseudonym ‘Rambler’ suggested that the watercolours exhibited by colonial artists were ‘quite equal to the works of some of the best artists at home and might be exhibited without fear of invidious comparison on the walls of old and new Water Color Societies of London’. ‘Rambler’ has since been identified as the politician and amateur artist, William Fox, himself represented in the exhibition, making his opinion somewhat biased. Nonetheless, his review is the first to group together the work of colonial New Zealand artists as a distinctive category worthy of its own evaluation. The exhibition itself was a remarkable grand-scale international exhibition, the first of its kind to take place in New Zealand, and an ambitious undertaking for a colony barely 25 years old. Fox’s review consequently highlights the ambiguities of a colonial culture on the margins: the desire to participate in and emulate metropolitan examples, while attempting to assert the colony’s uniqueness within the model of exhibition. Further, Fox’s identification of the ‘amateur’ highlights the conditions of artistic production in the colony and raises questions around the classification of ‘Art’ in nineteenth-century New Zealand: firstly in terms of what might constitute ‘New Zealand’ art and secondly in terms of the classification systems articulated through catalogues, exhibitions and reviews. This paper will explore the shifting boundaries of classification in art, as well as the embryonic processes of canonisation that occurred in the discourse around the Dunedin Exhibition, arguing that both were adapted to meet the needs of colonial culture.

Dark Sky exhibition at the Adam Art Gallery

Curated by Professor Geoffrey Batchen (Art History), and Tina Barton (Director, Adam Art Gallery), this exhibition explores how photographic artists, from 1874 until now, have turned their attention to the night skies. It originates from and will refer to the key historical event of the Transit of Venus in 1874 to draw together the histories of photography and astronomy.
It is scheduled to coincide with the occasion of the 2012 Transit of Venus on 6 June
1 May – 8 July, 2012
Adam Art Gallery
Victoria University of Wellington

‘Peripheral Relations: Marcel Duchamp and New Zealand Art 1960-2011’ exhibition at the Adam Art Gallery

Work In Progress: Following the completion of his PhD, Marcus Moore is working towards an exhibition at the Adam Art Gallery based on his research. Opening on 27 July 2012, Peripheral Relations: Marcel Duchamp and New Zealand Art 1960-2011 will explore the influence of Marcel Duchamp on New Zealand art, canvassing the history of Duchamp’s reception in New Zealand from 1960 to the present. As well as showcasing the work of 25 New Zealand artists, the exhibition will present seldom-seen works by Duchamp held at the Museum of New Zealand Te Papa Tongarewa, to document the little-known gift of his works as part of the Isaacs Bequest (1982), as well as reference the ground-breaking exhibition of the Sisler Collection of Duchamp’s works that toured New Zealand in 1967. Here we see Moore in collection storage at Te Papa with the 1961 edition of Marcel Duchamp's Boite en Valise. This work will be included in the exhibition and displayed so that its entire contents are visible, a rare outing for this important work that entered the national collection in 1982.
20 July – 30 September, 2012
Adam Art Gallery
Victoria University of Wellington

‘‘Shadowgraphs: Photographic Portraits by Len Lye’ exhibition at the Adam Art Gallery

Curated by Professor Geoffrey Batchen (Art History) and the 2011 Art History Honours students.

Drawn primarily from the Govett-Brewster Art Gallery collection, this exhibition presented 26 of the photogram portraits made by Len Lye in 1947, a body of work that until recently was neither well known nor fully understood. Here Lye’s works was contextualised in relation to the tradition of the silhouette portrait and the camera-less photograph. This was the Adam Art Gallery’s biennial student-led project which enables students to research, write about and present an exhibition on a unique body of work. ‘Shadowgraphs was on view at the Adam Art Gallery, 19 November – 18 December 2011.