Sunday Evening

Today has been an intriguing sort of a Sunday with enough drama to keep me going for the entire next week. Post morning coffee I decided to go to Te Papa and see the new Toi te Papa exhibit (this is a sort of semi permanent exhibition where Te Papa's national collection is exhibited with suitably nationalistic curatorship and accompanying rhetoric to really reinforce Te Papa's concept of what makes New Zealand culture and identity... mmm, subtle). Holy Mother of God some of the placement of the paintings was bizarre and almost offensive - issues of appropriation totally subsumed by neutralising language - art history lite. Honestly, who thinks to put a Gordon Walters and a Sandy Adsett side by side and basically suggest that each artist had a similar aim in their production of work?? Gordon Walter's program is expressed with barely any address to the issues of appropriation that his work brings about. And (this, I found, was the piece de resistance) who found it appropriate to put the work of Theo Schoon and the Tovey school artists side by side where the work can only affirm the sort of (ridiculous) concepts of bicultural utopianist ideas that continue to conceal the need for further discussion of race relations in this country?!!!? Feeling suitably smug I proceed to the City Gallery to see the work of Martin Thompson in the Hirschfeld Gallery. I read a review earlier this week about this exhibition and I have to say that I agree with the reviewer in his assessment of the large scale digital prints of Thompson's work - that part of the magic of Thompson's work is the fact that despite it's kind of spooky mathematical precision if you examine the work closely you can see where mistakes have been patched with tape. In this exhibition though I kind of think that the curators probably had a different kind of relationship with the work selected - and (of course) a totally different agenda in showing Thompson's work, as the Hirschfeld Gallery shows the work of strictly Wellington artists and there is no doubt that Thompson is a Wellingtonian (he's a sort of civic icon). After all this I decided to go home and feel sorry for myself re: breakup with Andy. After a long series of (rather hurtful) text messages about A's intrinsic selfishness, a good bawl on the phone to Mum, coffee with Bryna and one of those dreadful crying too much/post coffee drinking headaches I feel exhausted but stronger and I'm determined to do an awesome job of being myself, alone, and being strong and independent and wilful.