To think is to fold, to double the outside with a coextensive inside.
Gilles Deleuze, Foucault (1986), p. 97.
The unspoken assumption of the contemporary art world is that the genre of landscape, particularly the practice of painting, is played out, and remains a dusty memento of nineteenth-century colonial painting. This despite the fact that were you to riff through any history of painting in Aotearoa the genre seems long-standing, dominant and alive. Here is Gil Docking: 'landscape views, with a strong topographical content, became a notable part of New Zealand's artistic heritage'. Or Francis Pound: 'in some forty years of Nationalist paintings, there is hardly a single example that does not in some way announce a specificity of place'. In looking at that long history of domination we can discern several landscape painters whose ideas cleared the way for a 'new' landscape painting as we might encounter it today. Indeed, it would be true to say that the idea of landscape has been recurrently used to grapple with transformations both in painting and in the conditions of existence from which that painting emerged. There is Rita Angus who, with her breakthrough (1936), discovered an anti-realist modernist aesthetic placed at the service of a revised idea of how a landscape could be presented; how it might be used to evoke a present, without nostalgia; how the land collaged together might be seen anew. Another is Toss Woollaston who, on the urging of his dealer Peter McLeavey, turned to large-format canvases (1958) the lessons of the existing tradition of the New Zealand landscape ('a landscape with too few lovers') with the experience of the 'action painting' he had encountered there. Then, could it be we who have an outdated notion of what a landscape painting is and is not?
