Art critic, poet, academic and independent curator
Subject
Contemporary New Zealand art, Billy Apple and Colin McCahon
Notable awards
2018 Non-fiction Award: New Zealand Prime Minister's Awards for Literary Achievement
Wystan Tremayne Le Cren CurnowCNZM (born 1939) is a New Zealand art critic, poet, academic, arts administrator, and independent curator. He is the son of Elizabeth Curnow, a painter and printmaker, and poet Allen Curnow.[1]
The Curnow family moved to Auckland's North Shore in 1951, after Allen Curnow was offered a job lecturing in the English Department at Auckland University College. Wystan Curnow was educated at Takapuna Grammar School, and went on to complete a Masters of Arts in English with first-class honours at Auckland University College, graduating in 1961.[3][4]
In 1961, Curnow married Susan Matthews, and they have four sons together.[citation needed]
In 1963, Curnow and his family moved to Philadelphia, where Curnow studied at the University of Pennsylvania under the supervision of Morse Peckham. Curnow studied 19th-century American literature and literary theory. His PhD thesis was entitled Melville's poetry up to 1876, and was completed in 1970. Curnow lectured in the English Department at the University of Rochester between 1967 and 1969, before returning to Auckland in 1970 to take up a lecturing position in the English Department at the University of Auckland, where for a number of years he worked alongside his father.[citation needed] Notable student's of Curnow's include Terry Locke.[5]
Curnow has been based in Auckland since 1970, though has spent significant periods overseas, particularly in the United States and, most recently in 2010 undertook the Seresin Landfall Residency in Tuscany.[citation needed]
Career
Art critic
Curnow is active in both literature and the visual arts. His writing and interests have been significantly influenced by his time in the United States in the 1960s (and lengthy return trips in the late 1970s and early 1980s) and his exposure to American modernist painting and conceptual art, and the writing of the language poets.[citation needed]
Curnow is also closely associated with many of the post-object and conceptual artists who were active in New Zealand from the 1970s onwards. Curnow had met artist Jim Allen in Auckland and when Curnow returned to Auckland in 1970, Allen was Head of the Sculpture Department at Elam School of Fine Arts at Auckland University. Allen and Curnow worked together often, and Curnow became an informal critic for the burgeoning post-object art scene centred on Allen and Elam. Artists whose work Curnow wrote about during this time were Peter Roche, Linda Buis, Andrew Drummond, David Mealing, Roger Peters, and Bruce Barber.[6]
In 1973, Curnow edited the anthology Essays on New Zealand Literature (Auckland: Heinemann). This included his essay High Culture in a Small Province, which elucidates his position on art, literature, and cultural production more widely and its position within western society. This essay draws on the sociological writing of Curnow's PhD supervisor, Morse Peckham.[citation needed]
Jim Allen and Curnow also edited the most significant record of post-object art in the 1970s, New Art: Some Recent New Zealand Sculpture and Post-object Art (Auckland: Heinemann, 1976).[7]
During the 1980s in particular, Curnow was also closely involved in small print run, so-called ‘little magazines’ where he published both poetry and art criticism. These publications are characterised by an interest in the developing theory of postmodernism, gaining academic traction at this time and included Parallax (he was a contributing editor), AND, and Splash (he was co-editor).[8]
Throughout the 1980s, 1990s, and 2000s, Curnow contributed writing and criticism to a wide range of visual arts publications including international imprints Artforum, Studio International, Art Asia Pacific, Art and Text, Art and Australia, and New Zealand magazines and journals, including Art New Zealand, Midwest, New Zealand Listener, Art News New Zealand, Bulletin of New Zealand Art History, Log Illustrated, and Reading Room.
Published in 2014 was a significant anthology of Curnow's art writing, The Critic's Part: Wystan Curnow Art Writings 1971–2013, edited by Christina Barton and Robert Leonard and published by Victoria University Press.[9]
Poet
Through his life, Curnow has also written poetry and published this in various publications. His poetry is most significantly influenced by the American L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E poets, a loosely defined movement of avant-garde poetry that emerged in the United States in the late 1960s and early 1970s.[citation needed]
In many of his writings, Curnow has sought to collapse the distinction between his art criticism and poetry, and sometimes these forms are indistinguishable from each other. An example of this is his essay in New Art: Some Recent New Zealand Sculpture and Post-object Art ‘Mt Eden Crater Performance’ (1976) which describes in stream-of-consciousness a performance piece by artist Bruce Barber.[citation needed]
Independent curator and arts administrator
Since the 1970s, Curnow has been consistently involved in the visual arts sector in New Zealand and internationally as a curator and arts administrator. Curnow has worked to raise the profile of New Zealand artists overseas and also to provide infrastructure and critical consideration to expatriate New Zealand artists Billy Apple and Len Lye.[citation needed]
In 1976, Curnow wrote an extended piece on Billy Apple's 1975 exhibition tour of New Zealand, 'Billy Apple in New Zealand' for Auckland Art Gallery Quarterly. After this time, Curnow kept in contact with Apple and has collaborated regularly with the artist ever since. Curnow acted as a self-described 'public relations officer', as well as curator, administrator and collaborator, for Apple on his 1979 exhibition tour of nine galleries in New Zealand.[10]
Curnow has curated a number of exhibitions. He was the New Zealand Commissioner to Fourth Biennale of Sydney and curated I Will Need Words, a major exhibition of Colin McCahon's word and number paintings for the Fifth Biennale of Sydney in 1984. During the 1980s, he curated a series of exhibitions that employed postmodern theory to deconstruct meaning, language, and national identity. These included Sex & Sign (1987) and Putting the Land on the Map: Art and Cartography since 1840 (1989).
In 1998, he worked with Christina Barton, Robert Leonard, and John Hurrell to curate the critical overview and retrospective exhibition of post-objects art in New Zealand, Action Replay: Post-Object Art[11]
In 2005, Curnow set up the art project space JAR, with Susan Davis, which has exhibited the work of artists Stephen Bambury, Peter Robinson, Leigh Davis, and Simon Ingram.
William Manhire is a New Zealand poet, short story writer, emeritus professor, and New Zealand's inaugural Poet Laureate (1997–1998). He founded New Zealand's first creative writing course at Victoria University of Wellington in 1975, founded the International Institute of Modern Letters in 2001, and has been a strong promoter of New Zealand literature and poetry throughout his career. Many of New Zealand's leading writers graduated from his courses at Victoria. He has received many notable awards including a Prime Minister's Award for Literary Achievement in 2007 and an Arts Foundation Icon Award in 2018.
Thomas Allen Monro Curnow was a New Zealand poet and journalist.
Sir Mountford Tosswill "Toss" Woollaston was a New Zealand artist. He is regarded as one of the most important New Zealand painters of the 20th century.
Billy Apple was a New Zealand artist, whose work is associated with the London, Auckland and New York schools of pop art in the 1960s and NY's Conceptual Art movement in the 1970s. He worked alongside artists like Andy Warhol and David Hockney before opening the second of the seven New York Not-for-Profit spaces in 1969. His work is held in the permanent collections of Tate Britain, Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art, Philadelphia Museum of Art, Guggenheim Museum, Chrysler Museum of Art, Detroit Institute of Arts, National Gallery of Australia, Te Papa, Auckland Art Gallery, the Christchurch Art Gallery, the University of Auckland, and the Stedelijk Museum voor Actuele Kunst in Belgium.
William Kendrick Smithyman was a New Zealand poet and one of the most prolific of that nation's poets in the 20th century.
Leigh Robert Davis was a New Zealand writer who created long poems and large-scale, mixed-media projects in which he worked with painters, designers and composers. He was known for the highly experimental nature of his creative work.
Jacqueline Mary Fahey is a New Zealand painter and writer.
Barry Lett Galleries was a dealer gallery focused on contemporary New Zealand art that operated in Auckland in the 1960s and 1970s.
Vivian Isabella Lynn was a New Zealand artist.
Yvonne Todd is a contemporary New Zealand photographer known for her manipulation of conventional photographic techniques and genres.
Christina Joy Barton, known as Tina Barton, is a New Zealand art historian, curator, art writer and editor. She was director of the Adam Art Gallery between 2007 and 2023.
Elizabeth Jamaux Curnow, commonly known as Betty Curnow, was a New Zealand artist.
Roger John Horrocks is a New Zealand writer, film-maker, educator and cultural activist.
Bryony Dalefield is a New Zealand photographer and visual artist based in Wales. Her photographs are held in the collections of the Auckland Art Gallery Toi o Tāmaki and the Museum of New Zealand Te Papa Tongarewa.
Selwyn Peter Webb was a New Zealand art dealer and gallery director. He was a supporter and promoter of art, and particularly contemporary New Zealand art, for over sixty years. Webb's work spanned public art museums, publishing and the founding of the Peter Webb Galleries and Webb's auction house.
The Petar/James Gallery was the first New Zealand dealer gallery to focus on abstract art and the idea of Internationalism.
Robert Leonard is a New Zealand art curator, writer, and publisher.
The Sue Crockford Gallery was a contemporary art dealer gallery in Auckland, New Zealand.
Ian Andrew Hunter was a Northern Irish artist, art curator and cultural advocate who worked in New Zealand and England.
Ronald Norris O'Reilly was a librarian who promoted and exhibited contemporary New Zealand art. He served as Christchurch city librarian from 1951 to 1968, and director of the Govett-Brewster Art Gallery from 1975 to 1979.
References
↑ "Allen Curnow", New Zealand Book Council, retrieved September 2014.
↑ Thomasin Sleigh, Neither Here nor There, unpublished Masters thesis, Victoria University of Wellington, 2010, p.7.
↑ Thomasin, Sleigh (12 December 1993). "Neither Here nor There: The Writing of Wystan Curnow 1961–1984"(Masters; Thesis). Victoria University of Wellington restricted archive. Victoria University of Wellington: 10. Retrieved 22 October 2014. This thesis addresses the writing of Wystan Curnow from 1961 to 1984. Curnow has written a great deal throughout his life, and the challenge of this thesis has been to select an appropriate time frame and important texts to place within it. The period of 1961 to 1984 has been chosen because it encompasses the 1970s, an interesting decade of experimentation for Curnow and also because the early 1980s signal a shift in Curnow's work. I argue that Curnow's encounter with post-object art and the immediate, phenomenological writing he produced in response to this work gives way in the early 1980s to a style of writing directly informed by post-structural and postmodern theory. Further, this study looks not only at Curnow's criticism but also his poetry to reveal how, in their form and content, these two strands of writing together construct one of the first arguments for an 'avant-garde' in New Zealand art and literature. The thesis is divided into four chronological chapters. These follow the course of Curnow's life from his birth in 1939 up until the publication of his seminal essay on Colin McCahon 'I Will Need Words' in 1984. The first chapter begins with the biographical background of Curnow's youth and education and considers the significance of the eminence of Curnow's father, Allen Curnow, in the decisions that Wystan Curnow has made throughout his career. This chapter then goes on to look at Curnow's experience in the United States, studying for his PhD and engaging with contemporary American culture. Chapter two begins with Curnow's return to Auckland in 1970 and goes on to look at his important pieces of writing from the 1970s up until his return to New York on sabbatical in 1976. Chapter three focuses on this trip and the key texts which followed it. And finally, chapter four examines the early 1980s, the increasing influence of continental theory in New Zealand and the shift this precipitated in Curnow's writing.
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