Everything Black Can Be
In Marti Friedlander’s 1979 black-and-white photograph, Ralph Hotere stands in front of a wooden fence outside his Port Chalmers studio holding a lit cigarette from which the ash has yet to fall, as if he’s been standing there a long time. With his beard and long hair, his black wool jersey, the punctuation point of his roll-your-own held close to his face, he has the aura of a jazz musician, a beatnik, an existentialist confronting the void, or else the air of an alert raptor eyeing far-off prey from his eyrie atop Observation Point. In the photographer’s presentation, the heroic, victorious advance of the modernist artist in the twentieth century is being acknowledged. Hotere’s measured pose might testify to his ability as an artist to astonish, seduce, convince, even as his sideways glance takes in things as yet unseen by the rest of us.
Ralph Hotere: Ātete (to resist) Dunedin Public Art Gallery, 14 November–28 February 2021 Christchurch Art Gallery Te Puna o Waiwhetū, 27 March–25 July curated by Lucy Hammonds, Lauren Gutsell, Peter Vangioni & Nathan Pohio
Friedlander’s poster-boy image figures prominently in publicity and promotion for Ralph Hotere’s major survey exhibition at the Dunedin Public Art Gallery, his first for over 20 years. Arranged more or less chronologically—though also in thematic clumps, like mini-curations—by four different curators, led by Lucy Hammonds and Lauren Gutsell (in a partnership project between DPAG and Christchurch Art Gallery (1977), originally commissioned as a mural for the international arrivals lounge at Auckland Airport, and (1984–88), constructed out of the charred remains of the fishing boat that burnt to the waterline at Port Chalmers in 1984. But inevitably, too, much is left out, in what is in effect a sampling that broadly conforms to the notion of ‘resistance’.
