See our Summer- Autumn 2013-2014 - Govett-Brewster Art Gallery

FROM THE DIRECTOR
Tena - - koutou,
Dear friends and patrons of the Govett-Brewster Art
Gallery/Len Lye Centre. It gives me great pleasure
to address you, personally, for the first time as the
incoming director of New Zealand’s most beloved
contemporary art institution, situated in the gem of a
city that is New Plymouth.
As you are reading this you are undoubtedly enjoying
the pohutukawa - blooming as a signal of the start of
summer and wind-down for Christmas, New Year,
and holiday season. Meanwhile, here in Vienna,
Austria, the leaves have already turned their brown,
gold, and red autumnal hues and have started
drifting to ground and collecting on berms and
gutters all over the city. It’s already dark well before
I leave the museum in the evening. We are waiting
for the first flakes of snow and dreaming of a white
Christmas (in the age of global warming, grey and
slushy is more likely). My own dreaming is especially
poignant as it will be my eleventh and last such
Christmas here for some years to come.
Despite the relative longevity of my stay in Europe,
and adjustment to the seasonal cycles, sometime
about now I start to look forward to the weight of a
cricket bat in my hands. I play many an air-shot while
walking corridors and gallery spaces where I work
(in all likelihood looking, to European eyes, like the
wackiest-and-worst-ever sports enthusiast to walk a
museum’s halls!).
While all this doesn’t seem to have much to do with
contemporary art, I have accompanied my greeting
with a photographic work by Vienna-based
New Zealand artist Mladen Bizumic, Global Truths
#77, depicting a renowned carousel in this city’s
Prater—Vienna’s famous civic park that appears in
numerous international films. The work’s title is
suggestive of contemporary art’s centripetal power:
it spins inasmuch as the carousel spins to draw us
together; despite antinomies of global distance.
The weather might be on a different – even antipodal
– cycle, but our experience of it is common and can
be intuited as a collective truth. Working with
contemporary art, and the art, films, and ideas of
Len Lye, which connect to the collective unconscious
illuminating the problems and wonders embodied in
daily life, is what we set out to do at the Govett-
Brewster/Len Lye Centre. As relevant as that
sounds, we also, like the carousel, and the loopiest
of Len Lye’s works and ideas, want to make your
heads spin!
Season’s greetings.
Nga - mihi o te Kirihimete ki a koutou.
Simon Rees
Director, Govett-Brewster Art Gallery/Len Lye Centre
Image: Simon Rees joins the Gallery as Director, 10 February 2014
Image far left: Mladen Bizumic Global Truths #77 2009 (detail).
Unique C-type photograph. Courtesy the artist and Georg Kargl Fine
Arts, Vienna. The James Wallace Arts Trust Collection, Auckland