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lf his face pressed against the glass of the small thick windows of the old turbo prop planes scanning the horizon for significant forms in his notebook perhaps a sketch for a drift of cloud a curve of hill the remains of a vapour trail against an impossibly blue sky a grid of lines describing the bleak hard fastnesses of the canterbury landscape seeing the world as a work yet to be painted w a sutton threshold iv 1973 oil on canvas collection christchurch art gallery when sutton flew over the plains and incorporated their characteristic forms into his work he drew perhaps on his experiences during world war ii as a member of the camouflage unit between 1941 and 1944 he had moved around the south island digging post holes and designing and painting camouflage to hide gun emplacements and ammunition stores the job was to make things look like other things these utilitarian paintings designed to be seen from the sky to hide things in plain sight were often gigantic in scale i remember we disguised an airfield at taieri dunedin by extending the appearance of paddocks and hedgerows into the airfield itself with bleaches for grass and manure to intensify the colour it was so good our chaps couldn t find it sutton commented forty years later 2 sutton s familiar view of the canterbury landscape will change with the introduction of water consents for intensive dairying across the plains his burned off dry grasses shaded by the long dark shadows of the macrocarpa shelter belts will be replaced by patches of bright jade green sutton s aerial landscapes the structures of ochre and umber and indigo which hover between abstraction and representation and which for so many people are synonymous with the experience of flying in to the city over the plains will be relegated to a historical report on experience like the paintings which depict it the landscape is itself a cultural artefact vulnerable to the forces of market productivity although it s part of our cultural identity the look of our home landscape is as little owned by us as the architectural heritage of our cities 1 bill sutton personal perspectives in pat unger w a sutton painter christchurch hazard press 1994 p 46 2 bill sutton interview with deborah shepard 1982 quoted in pat unger bill s story a portrait of w a sutton canterbury university press 2008 p 52 posted by cheryl bernstein at 1 30 pm no comments email this blogthis share to x share to facebook share to pinterest labels art and economics artists studios bill sutton tuesday september 18 2012 lies i have told my children no 2 in an occasional series mum what s this button for that s the ejector seat posted by cheryl bernstein at 11 15 am no comments email this blogthis share to x share to facebook share to pinterest labels road trips small guy monday september 17 2012 the proper photographer a photographer asked to take our picture yesterday i m a proper photographer he said works in the public art gallery collection he was taking photos of christchurch people in the ruined city have you lived here forever he asked looking down through the view finder no we said he made a portrait of us in front of the ruin of shands emporium a small wooden shop built in 1850 tyres were piled on its roof holding it down loose stones shifted underfoot the shop looked like an ark battered after a long journey at sea the carpark was bordered with hurricane fencing and white dashes like a mayday signal the children held our hands looked at the camera just one more he said i ll shift my camera and one more closer together last one coming done posted by cheryl bernstein at 10 33 am no comments email this blogthis share to x share to facebook share to pinterest labels earthquakes tuesday august 21 2012 this is educational every day the small guy has to fill out his homework exercise book with a description of the book he s currently reading and do his spelling words he s quite a good speller so is allowed to choose his own words from the dictionary recent choices have included critique corrupt pessary muscovado and freudian here s a recent homework page featuring a description of a reading book he s really enjoying the possibly slightly unsuitable s c u m by danny katz i like this book because it has funny bits like a guy sticking a red hot poker up someone s bum this is educational because it was by shakespear there you go posted by cheryl bernstein at 2 19 pm no comments email this blogthis share to x share to facebook share to pinterest labels small guy wednesday july 11 2012 the small guy on socrates socrates annoying mum you know socrates i think he would have been really annoying because when the other philosophers said anything he d just go why saying why to everything was what his philosophy was about he died because they made him drink poison and people were probably quite glad and people say that watching tv isn t educational posted by cheryl bernstein at 2 27 pm 1 comment email this blogthis share to x share to facebook share to pinterest labels philosophers small guy thursday july 5 2012 blocked last night i watched tv3 s premiere of the block nz it s a diy home renovation reality show based on an australian model in which four couples compete to do up dilapidated houses or as tv3 s website had it depilated homes which makes it sound more like the gc the first episode appeared to consist of a half hour commercial for bunnings these are the four houses the contestants will live in and renovate over three months clearly the art department has been hard at work with their crowbars with tarps on the roofs holes in the walls iron boarding up windows and piles of bricks and rubbish in the yards the block s derelict doer uppers look like half of christchurch nearly eighteen months after the earthquake where fixing houses is rather more critical than entertaining not wanting to be too mealy mouthed about it but at the very least it seems like a wasted opportunity doesn t it disappointingly i see they ve now fixed the typo posted by cheryl bernstein at 12 57 pm 2 comments email this blogthis share to x share to facebook share to pinterest labels earthquakes nz tv reality tv wednesday july 4 2012 the box of lost names central london 1961 photographer charles w cushman charles w cushman photograph collection via the retronaut my brother and i are second generation london migrants we were born in the west country and never lived in the capital visiting only as tourists but the cultures of the east end and the streets of north london informed our home life it has only been recently that i have come to understand how much my parents competitive critical fiercely intelligent were beneficiaries of the post war british education reforms which enabled academically inclined children from a wide range of social backgrounds to go to grammar school education propelled them away from london up and out it took my father nearly forty years to go back to the streets behind the arsenal f c where he d grown up only to find it changed almost beyond recognition he returned as a distinguished academic a writer a member of the royal society and as a new zealander but as my parents accelerated away from the city of their youth london was always there in the rear view mirror a vast and creaking hulk a place of bomb damaged row housing and ghostly pea soupers of rationed coal and coronation flags of dog races and tin baths and bread and dripping when asked where i m from even now i find myself saying that i was born in devon but my parents are from london there are few photographs of my parents youth in london i imagine that few were taken when i get out the box of family photographs and look at the pictures of london they seem primarily historical and foreign rather than familiar they are not part of our experience they depict a way of life that we never knew though it coloured our own 12 000 miles away there is a small box brownie shot of my father as a baby outside on the street in a gigantic ancient pram taken in 1941 at around the time the german air raids on london began to gather momentum my mother blonde beautiful aloof sitting on a brick wall in her grammar school blazer in the mid 1950s an ektachrome picture taken a couple of years later outside the front door at ferntower road in which my father black haired and bohemian stands with my mother s family everyone holds melting icecreams and looks either melancholy or mildly irritated those photographs contain clues to the culture of the family in recent years i have understood many things by looking at them when you look at photographs of your parents youth you re not looking at people you know but at people whom you never knew you respond less to their familiarity than to their strangeness recently i ve re read roland barthes s camera lucida the book which inspired sebald s austerlitz and have been struck once again by the passage in which following the death of his mother he spends an afternoon looking through the family photograph album in the photographs which were taken during his lifetime during the span of his memory he finds only a likeness of his mother it s not until he discovers a photograph of her as a girl of five in a winter garden that he is struck by her identity which comes on him like a sudden rush of air like proust s madeleine the winter garden photograph raises an overwhelming tide of narrative barthes chose not to reproduce the image in his book it exists only for me he wrote for you it would be nothing but an indifferent picture the photograph that i have reproduced above was taken by charles w cushman in 1961 at the time my father was studying at university college and my mother was training to become a teacher it is from a series documenting street life in london the photograph was featured recently on the retronaut site when i saw it i held my breath i ve looked at it dozens of times in the past few weeks the young couple sitting on the low wall by the fountain could be my parents they re not of course my mother s hair was fairer my father s features swarthier when i blew up the image in search of proof its generalities disappeared but there s something about the couple s mutual abstraction amidst the life of the city that i immediately recognise their heads are bent forward as if reading the city around them forgotten left behind they are in the city but the city is not in them they are to use barthes s term the punctum of the image the point of its emotional resonance but as the fountain plays behind them and the pigeons strut and the men in grey suits go about their business the woman in the pink dress and the man without a jacket are somewhere else entirely the people in the photograph are not my parents but they might as well be but they are perhaps someone else s parents and by now someone s grandparents though their images are on the internet their names are lost to history their identities have become detached from their images their digital image is the contemporary equivalent of those old photographs you used to see in boxes outside junkshops other people s ancestors unnamed abandoned caught in indifferent pictures lost to memory and consigned instead to history a few years ago i went to a talk by cushla parekowhai about ans westra s photographs of the communities up the whanganui river cushla s parents had been the teachers at the school westra photographed they were out of sight in her photographs cushla named the children in westra s images restoring the identities to the portraits at the end of her talk she handed everyone in the audience a 2b pencil and told them to go home and write the names of people on the back of their family photographs she was concerned that otherwise their identities would be lost i did what she asked i was glad that i did i ve got some more photographs still to name great uncles and aunts and people further back that possibly only i know the names of now and only that because my mother told me perhaps while you are thinking of it you could get a pencil and write names on the backs of the old family photos in your box too and you might also think of doing the same for the digital images you upload but if the couple in cushman s photograph had been named and who is charles w cushman his name suggests he is american a visitor to london in the early 1960s i would have never have recognised my parents in them cushman s photograph gives me an image of my parents as londoners rather than as my parents it sets them against the backdrop of the generic cityscape recognisable to a tourist such as myself rather than the familiar city intimated by the detail of a front door or the brick wall of a back yard from the mistaken identity of cushman s photograph i ve understood something about the essential mutability and fictionality of the city itself the mid century london i have invented for my parents is not the city in which they lived although it has many similarities it s a cultural fiction composed as much from novels and films and documentary photographs as from the reported experiences of my parents and there are remnants still of that london culture both real and imagined in our family life here in christchurch odd patterns of thought and jokes and turns of speech which i ve passed on to our children without even thinking about it the experience of any migrant is that the life of the culture endures beyond the lives of the people and is not confined to the specificity of a place it changes it adapts it is passed on it goes with you wherever you are posted by cheryl bernstein at 9 42 am 1 comment email this blogthis share to x share to facebook share to pinterest labels earthquakes photography wednesday june 20 2012 waters above waters below on sunday we visited waters above waters below an installation by artists hannah and aaron beehre at the christchurch art gallery s temporary premises in madras street the gallery is closed like half the city for earthquake repairs it will reopen sometime in 2013 to find the art you skirt the edge of the shrinking central city red zone and park next to hurricane fencing surrounding a wasteland there are few landmarks to give you your bearings the location is familiar but the place is not a small sandwich board indicates a doorway and then you climb an old wooden flight of stairs to the top floor and pass through a hallway into a large darkened room a camera obscura in which the world outside is projected on the far wall the projection takes place in real time what you see in the gallery is what s happening outside a camera is connected to a projector by means of an infinity cable the city is inverted the camera is stationary the clouds move across the sky backwards upside down when there s a nor wester aeroplanes pass over the screen flying from right to left sometimes there s a helicopter or a seagull as night falls the camera lens opens slightly to draw in the available light and the picture expan...