Gordon H. Brown lecture series
The Art History Programme established the Gordon H. Brown lecture series to further art historical scholarship in New Zealand.
The series is named in honour of the achievements of the distinguished New Zealand art historian. In December 2002, on being awarded an Honorary Doctorate by Victoria University of Wellington for his contributions to art history, Gordon H. Brown himself delivered the first lecture in the then-unnamed series. Brown's lecture was subsequently published as an illustrated book: Elements of Modernism in Colin McCahon's Early Work.
Publications
If you would like to order any of the Gordon H. Brown publications please email: adamartgallery@vuw.ac.nz
Prices:
- Individual books (1 - 6, 8 - 11) $5 each
- Set of 10 (Nos 1 – 6, 8 –11) $45 (No 7 not published)
- No 12: Does Māori Art History Matter? $15 per copy
- No 13: A Critique of the Natural Artefact: Anthropology, Art & Museology $15 per copy
- No 14: Unsettling: Art and the New Zealand Wars, $15 per copy
- No 15: London Calling $15 per copy
- No 16: Towards a History of the Contemporary $15 per copy
Postage and packing: 1-2 books $2.00, more than 2 books $4.00
2021 Gordon H. Brown Lecture #19:Artefacts of Relation: Mana and Shimmering Houses of the Pacific
Delivered by Leali‘ifano Dr. Albert L. Refiti, on 27th November
Ancestral buildings in the Pacific have an inherent brilliance in ‘their shining’ that draws people to them because they are embodied and blessed with mana. The lecture looked at how mana is materialised in Pacific buildings and why their shimmering qualities can be credited to the relationship between magic and technology, producing enchanted artefacts. The lecture explained why the word for building in Polynesia - fale, hale, whare - means something that is drawn around rituals thereby creating a covering apparatus that preserves the 'thing' being housed.
Leali‘ifano Dr. Albert L. Refiti, Associate Professor of Art and Design, Auckland University of Technology.
2020 Gordon H. Brown Lecture #18:Simon Denny's Surveilism: An Accelerationist Art for Accelerated Times
Delivered by Anthony Byrt on 19th November
The lecture looked at Simon Denny's most significant recent projects, including Secret Power (2015), The Founder's Paradox (2017) and Mine (2019). Art critic Anthony Byrt focused particularly on the way Denny's work examines the growing and pervasive impact of "surveillance capitalism" on our lives. He discussed how Denny and a handful of his contemporaries internationally are deploying monsters and the grotesque to create new visions of how digital technologies are reshaping the world around us.
Anthony Byrt, Journalist and art critic
2019 Gordon H. Brown Lecture #17:How to look at art in Aotearoa, Lessons from Māori experiments in cultural heritage 1920-40
Delivered by Prof. Conal McCarthy
What are the lessons from Māori experiments in the visual and performing arts in the early 20th century? This lecture analysed a series of remarkable episodes when a wide range of cultural practices were mobilised by the Young Māori Party to advance claims for social and political development. It considered how, after the ‘ontological turn’, non-Western ways of being, knowing and doing may enrich the study, not just of global art history, but of visual and material culture more generally.
Prof. Conal McCarthy works in Museum and Heritage Studies, Victoria University of Wellington.
2018 Gordon H. Brown Lecture #16:The Promise of Art History: Towards a History of the Contemporary
Delivered by Christina Barton
This lecture traversed a history of New Zealand art from 1969 to the present, focusing on specific works by a range of artists to argue a case for the discipline of art history as a valuable tool not only to read works of art but to understand the nature of our contemporary era. Drawing on her double life as an academic art historian and a working curator, Christina Barton touched on her many encounters with art and artists to map a different route through her times. Part polemic, part love song, her lecture modelled a critical and a personal way of thinking with and against the grain of established approaches to her topic.
Christina Barton is director of the Adam Art Gallery Te Pātaka Toi at Victoria University of Wellington, where she has been integral to the teaching of Art History since her appointment to the programme in 1995.
Gordon H. Brown Lecture Series 16: Towards a History of the Contemporary
2017 Gordon H. Brown Lecture #15:London Calling: Settler and Indigenous Artists, Artistic De-colonisation, and the British Art World
Delivered by Damian Skinner
In the years following WWII, a generation of artists moved from England’s colonies to London to pursue their artistic practices as modernists. Indian, African and Caribbean artists challenged the hierarchies of colonialism and modernism by becoming practitioners rather than the subjects of modernism. This moment, named New Commonwealth Internationalism, also involved artists from the ‘white dominions’ and settler-colonial societies of Aotearoa New Zealand, Australia and Canada. Their legacy complicates the way both British and New Zealand art history of this period can be written, and the ways in which artistic modernism was caught up in the wave of decolonisation in the middle of the twentieth century.
Damian Skinner, Art historian and curator of Applied Art and Design, Auckland War Memorial Museum Tāmaki Paenga Hira.
2016 Gordon H. Brown Lecture #14:Unsettling: Art and the New Zealand Wars
Delivered by Dr. Rebecca Rice on Thursday, 12 November 2015.
This lecture revisited institutional practices of collecting and exhibiting, past and present, to reflect upon the histories of remembering and forgetting embodied by art from the time of the New Zealand Wars.
Dr. Rebecca Rice is the Curator of New Zealand Historical Art at Te Papa Tongarewa.
Gordon H. Brown Lecture Series 14: Unsettling: Art and the New Zealand Wars
2015 Gordon H. Brown Lecture #13:A Critique of the Natural Artefact: Anthropology, Art and Museology
Delivered by Nicholas Thomas on Thursday, 10 December 2014 at the City Gallery in Wellington.
The lecture reflected on the constitution of collections, and in particular on collections of indigenous artefacts, proposing that the museum has the capacity to constitute a 'method' that can empower the interpretation of this kind of art.
Nicholas Thomas is Director of the Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology, Cambridge, U.K.
2014 Gordon H. Brown Lecture #12:Does Māori Art History Matter?
Delivered by Prof. Deidre Brown, AProf. Ngarino Ellis, and Prof. Jonathan Mane-Wheoki in November 2013.
Although Māori art has long been acknowledged as one of the world’s great art traditions, no comprehensive history of this tradition has yet been written. In this context, we propose a radical shift towards a new Māori art ‘historiography’ that extends the ‘scope, method and vision’ of standard art history practice. This address discussed how earlier assumptions about time and periodisation have shaped perceptions and misconceptions about the cultural relevance, collection and presentation of Māori art.
Professor Deidre Sharon Brown of Ngāpuhi, Ngāti Kahu is a New Zealand art historian and architectural lecturer at the University of Auckland. Ngarino Ellis of Ngāpuhi, Ngāti Porou is an Associate Professor in Art History at the University of Auckland. Professor Jonathan Mane-Wheoki of Ngāpuhi, Te Aupōuri, Ngāti Kuri was a New Zealand art historian, academic, and curator.
Gordon H. Brown Lecture Series 12: Does Māori Art History Matter?
2013 Gordon H. Brown Lecture #11:Oceans in Mind, Art Histories in Flux
Delivered by Prof. Ross Gibson on Thursday, 15 November 2012 at the University of Sydney.
Beginning with an examination of the encounters of European voyagers with the South Pacific in the eighteenth century, this lecture asked how histories of Oceanic intelligence might now be legitimately used by artists and others to better understand our contemporary world.
Ross Gibson is a Professor of Contemporary Arts at The University of Sydney.
Gordon H. Brown Lecture Series 11: Aqueous Aesthetics: An Art History of Change
2012 Gordon H. Brown Lecture #10:Nostalgia for Intimacy
Delivered by Robert Leonard on Saturday, 26 November 2011 at the City Gallery, Wellington.
Leonard poses that New Zealand art was once a small, enclosed scene—an intimate discourse. As the scene grows and becomes more international, it becomes less intimate. He asks, considering the impact of social scale: What are the implications for 'New Zealand art'?
Robert Leonard is Director of the Institute of Modern Art, Brisbane.
Gordon H. Brown Lecture Series 10: Nostalgia for Intimacy
2011 Gordon H. Brown Lecture #9:The Art of Taonga
Delivered by Paul Tapsell
In the Maori World, taonga and stories are intimately connected. Be it a song or a weapon, a painting or a cloak, taonga open doorways to ancestral imaginings of time and place. But what happens when the resources that define taonga are appropriated by another value system, and recast in terms of ownership rather than belonging? What stories are then attached to taonga, so many of which are commoditised along with the landscapes to which they relate?
In The Art of Taonga, Paul Tapsell takes us on a journey from the time of Tupaea, a traveller on Cook's Endeavour in 1769, to today. He surveys the changing meanings of taonga, including the re-engagement by source communities with their ancestral treasures, arguing that rather than being fixed in the past, the dynamic concept of taonga always responds to changing contexts and conditions. Acknowledging the crisis facing marae communities, and the concurrent dislocation of urban Maori, Tapsell interrogates the precarious future of a guiding tradition that reaches back to ancestral Hawaiki.
Paul Tapsell is Professor of Māori Studies and Dean of Te Tumu, the School of Māori, Pacific and Indigenous Studies at the University of Otago. He is the author of the prize-winning Pukaki: A Comet Returns (2000), Ko Tawa: Māori Treasures of New Zealand (2006) and many scholarly essays on taonga and their place in the Māori world.
Gordon H. Brown Lecture Series 9: The Art of Taonga
2010 Gordon H. Brown Lecture #8:Colin McCahon in Australia
Delivered by Rex Butler
Colin McCahon in Australia is an intriguing new response to Colin McCahon, New Zealand’s most important modernist artist, by acclaimed Australian art historian, Rex Butler. Butler’s argument, builds on the idea that the ultimate meaning of McCahon’s work lies not in what he intended for it, but rather how his ideas are taken up by later generations. Referring to the work of visual artists such as Scott Redford and Geoff Newton and the novelist Peter Carey, Butler offers a powerful new way of thinking about the prophetic character of McCahon’s painting. By exploring what he calls the ‘afterlife’ of McCahon’s work, Butler shows us how not just McCahon’s , but all great art, functions as a kind of material and spiritual ‘leap of faith’. His text will make us think differently about the achievements of New Zealand’s greatest artist, but it also invites us to re-envisage the nature of great art in general.
Rex Butler is Associate Professor in Art History at the University of Queensland. He is well known as a contemporary art critic and writer and has published a number of books on critical theory (Jean Baudrillard: The Defence of the Real, 1999; Slavoj Žižek: Live Theory, 2005; Borges’ Short Stories, 2010) and written and edited various books on Australian art (A Secret History of Australian Art, 2002 and Radical Revisionism, 2005).
Gordon H. Brown Lecture Series 8: Colin McCahon in Australia
2008 Gordon H. Brown Lecture #6:Rangiatea Revisited
Delivered by Sarah Treadwell
Revisiting Rangiatea is a fascinating reconsideration by leading architectural historian and theorist Sarah Treadwell of the historic Maori church built at Otaki between 1848 and 1851 by local iwi, Ngati Toa, Ngati Raukawa, Te Ati Awa. Through a careful re-reading of the evolving history of the structure (including its reconstruction after it was destroyed by fire in 1995) and its various visual and textual representations, Treadwell explores how the building has gained its meaning within a history of colonial and postcolonial cultural production.
Her argument models a new way of thinking about architectural heritage, in which the physical preservation of an actual building matters no more than its survival and reinvention across the entire field of representation, to convey a refreshing new vision of architecture as multiple, sequential and renewable. For Treadwell, Rangiatea exists in built form, but also in prints, drawings, photographs, and written accounts, as a space where the principles of western architecture are both invoked and undone. In this her text serves as an exemplary postcolonial re-reading that aptly fits the format of the annual Gordon H. Brown Lecture.
Sarah Treadwell is Senior Lecturer in Architecture at the University of Auckland’s School of Architecture and Planning, whose work entails the examination of visual representations as the basis for her study of colonial architecture in New Zealand and the Pacific.
Gordon H. Brown Lecture Series 6: Rangiatea Revisited
2007 Gordon H. Brown Lecture #5:Questions of Home & Belonging in New Zealand Art
Delivered by Leonard Bell
What does it mean when an artist has exchanged one home for another? This question is central to In Transit: Questions of Home and Belonging in New Zealand Art, in which Leonard Bell explores the work of two artists, expatriate painter Douglas MacDiarmid, who left New Zealand for France, and photographer Marti Frielander, an immigrant to New Zealand. Bells’ nuanced readings place these artists within a wider frame, one where displacement can be recognised as a prime driver of creativity. Bell argues, furthermore, that this type of work is ambiguous by nature and apt to be ignored or misinterpreted by the nationalist lens through which New Zealand’s canon of art has been filtered.
Leonard Bell is an acclaimed specialist in the field of cross-cultural interactions and representations in New Zealand. He has investigated nineteenth-century colonial traditions as well as the work of twentieth-century European refugees. Currently Associate Professor of Art History at the University of Auckland, Bell is fascinated by the ways in which considerations of displacement and migration can shed fresh insights into the trajectories of New Zealand art history.
Gordon H. Brown Lecture Series 5: In Transit: Questions of Home & Belonging in New Zealand Art
2006 Gordon H. Brown Lecture #4:Memory, Landscape, Dad & Me
Delivered by Annie Goldson
Memory, Landscape, Dad & Me is Annie Goldson’s thoughtful account of her 1994 experimental documentary film Wake, which explores her family’s experience of immigrating to New Zealand in the 1960s. This film offers a personal encounter with a new home, but it also serves as an instance of our common history. By weaving together her father’s home movies with nineteenth-century watercolour depictions and her own documentary footage, Goldson produces a powerfully evocative film that raises issues about New Zealand’s history, its landscapes and its people. Her considered account of this project is an exemplary instance of postcolonial theory and practice that will be of interest to all who share a desire to understand the complex links between history, memory and representation. Readers are also able to view Wake, as a limited-edition DVD version of the film has been specially produced to accompany this publication.
Annie Goldson is an acclaimed documentary filmmaker. Since Wake, Goldson has produced and/or directed six films: Seeing Red; Punitive Damage; Georgie Girl; Sheilas: 28 Years On; Pacific Solution: From Afghanistan to Aotearoa; and the newly completed Elgar’s Enigma: Biography of a Concerto. Goldson is also a writer and teacher. She is Associate Professor in Film, Television and Media Studies at the University of Auckland.
Gordon H. Brown Lecture Series 4: Memory, Landscape, Dad & Me
2005 Gordon H. Brown Lecture #3:A Nation's Portraits
Delivered by Roger Blackley
A Nation’s Portraits, by Roger Blackley, offers fascinating insights into a history of portraiture in New Zealand. Rather than restricting himself to an examination of elite portraits in national repositories, he explores a range of historical and contemporary venues, from the window displays of nineteenth-century photography studios to Henry Partridge’s Lindauer Art Gallery of Maori portraits on Auckland’s Queen Street, to the hallowed halls of Parliament and the busy corridors of his own university. His purpose here is to ask probing questions about the place of New Zealand’s rich heritage of official and unofficial portraits. As a result, Blackley has made a timely and relevant contribution to the historical task of examining art’s vital role in shaping the nation.
Roger Blackley is a leading historian of colonial art. He is the author of Goldie, published in 1997 on the occasion of Auckland Art Gallery’s major exhibition of Charles F. Goldie’s paintings. Currently Senior Lecturer in Art history at Victoria University of Wellington, he continues to research, teach, write on and curate aspects of colonial New Zealand art.
Gordon H. Brown Lecture Series 3: A Nation’s Portraits
2004 Gordon H. Brown Lecture #2:Toss Woollaston: Origins & Influence
Delivered by Tony Green
Toss Woollaston: Origins and Influence, by Tony Green, is a timely re-evaluation of an artist widely considered to be a key figure in modern New Zealand art history. Green offers a probing critique of existing literature on Woollaston and fresh interpretations that will do much to provide a more accurate and deeper picture of a figure ripe for more critical attention. The book is a vital new contribution to scholarship on the artist that sets out to both answer questions and to pose fresh ones.
Tony Green was the founding Professor of Art History at the University of Auckland (1969-1998). He is an art historian, writer, curator and critic, who has published widely on the history of modern art in New Zealand. Amongst other things he has recently published a book on the paintings and writings of French 17th-century artist Nicholas Poussin.
Gordon H. Brown Lecture Series 2: Toss Woollaston: Origins & Influence
2003 Gordon H. Brown Lecture #1:Elements of Modernism in Colin McCahon's Early Work
Delivered by Gordon H. Brown
Elements of Modernism in Colin McCohn’s Early Work, by the eminent art historian Gordon H. Brown, explores the art of Colin McCahon prior to 1947, to explain the exact nature of his engagement with modernist principles and practices. Through the careful analysis of selected works and drawing on his extensive knowledge of McCahon’s life and letters, Brown offers rare insights into the artist’s sources, working processes and attitudes. This book is a vital addition to the critical appraisal of Colin McCahon, New Zealand’s most important twentieth-century artist.
Gordon H. Brown is an artist, writer, curator and critic. His publications include An Introduction to New Zealand Painting 1969, 1982 (with Hamish Keith); Colin McCahon: Artist 1984; and Visions of New Zealand: Artists in a New Land 1988. In 1989 he was awarded an OBE for his contribution to art history in New Zealand.
Gordon H. Brown Lecture Series 1: Elements of Modernism in Colin McCahon’s Early Work