In
a collection spanning her career, highly regarded art historian and
curator Christina Barton reminds readers of the art writer’s essential
quandary: how to put the visual, material, sensory and temporal into
words. ‘The project of art writing is at once argumentative and
invested,’ she writes, ‘self-doubting and ambitious, flawed yet with its
own beauty (at its best).’
Published in partnership with Te Pataka Toi Adam Art Gallery, Out of the Blue
gathers 37 essays devoted to artists from Aotearoa New Zealand. These
are artists whom Barton – entering the art-writing fray in the 1980s, a
time of widespread intellectual upheaval – has thought about, worked
with and written for, from her first piece on artist and filmmaker
Claudia Pond Eyley, published in 1985, to a foreword written in 2021
about sculptor Paul Cullen. They form a small but telling subset of her
work, and provide readings that not only anatomise the nature of each
artist’s work but also demonstrate the ideas that have been in play as
art has unfolded here in Aotearoa.
Artists
discussed include Jim Allen, Edith Amituanai, Billy Apple, Bruce
Barber, Shane Cotton, Bill Culbert, Pip Culbert, Julian Dashper, Bill
Hammond, Louise Henderson, Frances Hodgkins, Zac Langdon-Pole, Maddie
Leach, Vivian Lynn, Julia Morison, Kate Newby, Pauline Rhodes, Marie
Shannon, Shannon Te Ao and Ans Westra.
Introduction by Elizabeth Eastmond and afterword by Maddie Leach.
Format: Paperback
Pages: 400
Imprint: Te Herenga Waka University Press
Publication date: 06/11/2025
