2009 AAANZ Conference Abstracts - The Art Association of Australia ...

Forms, are expressions of ambivalence, a necessary corollary
to memorialisation. The eating of the biscuits “re-enacts” the
Eucharist, metaphorically reminding us of our responsibility
for the lives of those charged to defend our interests. As New
Zealand’s SAS troops are redeployed in Afghanistan to join
coalition allies – including our ANZAC “brothers-in-arms” -
questions of sacrifice should be foremost in the New Zealand
public’s minds.
Today, sacrifice seems both an old-fashioned word and concept;
one associated (negatively) with World War One and poets - such
as Rupert Brooke - who idealised sacrifice and extolled the virtues
of dying for one’s country. Sacrifice is a central part of Judeo-
Christian beliefs and the memory artist’s sculptures are intended to
relate military sacrifice to Christianity’s ultimate act of selflessness,
the death of Christ on the Cross.
This paper will explore how Baird’s new memorial forms interrogate
the conflation of Christian and military notions of sacrifice,
the “consumption” of sacrifice for national ideals, and, its
“celebration/commemoration” in the formation of national identity.
Kingsley Baird is a visual artist and academic whose primary
research field is a longstanding and continuous investigation
of memory, cross-cultural memorialisation, and public art
through making artefacts and writing. Major international and
national examples of his research in this field – particularly in
relation to remembrance, and loss and reconciliation - are: Diary
Dagboek (an artwork exhibited at In Flanders Fields Museum
in Ieper, Belgium, while artist in residence in 2007), Diary
Dagboek (authored book, 2007), The Cloak of Peace Te Korowai
Rangimarie (a sculpture commissioned for Nagasaki Peace
Park, Japan, 2006), The Tomb of the Unknown Warrior Te Toma
o Te Toa Matangaro (Wellington, New Zealand, 2004), and The
New Zealand Memorial (Canberra, Australia, 2001, with Studio
of Pacific Architecture). Kingsley Baird is a Senior Lecturer in
the School of Visual and Material Culture at Massey University’s
College of Creative Arts, Wellington, New Zealand.
4. Frances Hodgkins’s War Art: ‘tragic comments on
dereliction and wreckage’
Associate Professor Joanne Drayton
While England endured the devastation of the Second World
War, Frances Hodgkins battled illness, old age and deprivation
to produce some of her most provocative work. Her paintings
from Purbeck, Dorset, of the early to mid-1940s are regional
elegies to conflict. They are English neo-romantic visions – that
integrate the cold metallic machinery of Paul Nash’s war images
with the haunting mood of John Piper’s architectural structures
and the faceless struggle of Graham Sutherland’s Welsh miners
to create something unique.
Piper was so impressed with their originality that he wrote in
his 1941 review of Hodgkins’s show at the Leicester Galleries,
London: “This is Frances Hodgkins’s war art . . . tragic
comments on dereliction and wreckage. They are not of war
subjects, but humanity at war is the emotional background for
these rubbish heaps among the outhouses of a south Dorset
farm.” (John Piper, “Art: Frances Hodgkins”, Spectator, 17
October 1941, MS Papers-5599-13, Alexander Turnbull Library,
Wellington) Hodgkins takes mundane structures and familiar
environments – farmyards and farm machinery – and imbues
them with a psychological sense of chaos and war. In paintings
such as Houses and Outhouses, Purbeck (1940-1), she found
her equivalent of Paul Nash’s Totes Meer. Here a seemingly
banal, domesticated landscape is strewn with mechanical
rubbish. Across a rich red-brown ground are scattered jarring
forms and seemingly incongruous colours that communicate
both pattern and place. Always in these war works hover
ambiguously between representation and abstraction.
This paper will focus on Hodgkins’s war art investigating the
language of signs and symbols she uses to communicate the
carnage of war. It will reflect on her ambivalent attitude towards
abstraction and consider her war art in the context of her
contemporaries.
Joanne Drayton is the author of Edith Collier Her Life and
Work, 1885-1964 (CUP, 1999); Rhona Haszard: An Experimental
Expatriate New Zealand Artist (CUP, 2002); and Frances Hodgkins:
A Private Viewing (Random House, 2005) and contributed a
chapter to Between the Lives: Partners in Art (AUP, 2005). She
has curated exhibitions of Collier, Haszard, Hodgkins, and D.
K. Richmond, and publishes in art and design history, theory
and biography. In 2007, she was awarded a National Library
Fellowship to write a biography Ngaio Marsh: Her Life in Crime
(HarperCollins NZ, 2008 and HarperCollins UK, 2009).
5. Histories of Violence: Cinematic Reflections on War
and Atrocity in the Work of Alain Resnais
Dr Morgan Thomas
This paper looks at three key films by French director Alain
Resnais in the early post-war period which deal, directly or
indirectly, with the trauma and horror of twentieth-century
modes of violence and warfare: Guernica (1950), Night and Fog
(1955) and Hiroshima Mon Amour (1959). The paper focuses
on the disparate approaches to the representation of violence
and atrocity that Renais adopts in these films: in Guernica, the
event of the bombardment of the Spanish town of Guernica
in 1937 is relayed, in visual terms, primarily through images of
Picasso’s paintings and sculptures; in Night and Fog, sequences
in which the camera revisits the abandoned sites and camps
of the Holocaust are followed by deeply shocking sequences
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