Books by Laurence Simmons
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Perhaps at the origin of all thinking about culture lies the question of the afterlife. The artist makes their work hoping that it will live on after their death. The critic reads or looks at the work wondering whether a future audience will engage with it. Victory over Death: Th...e Art of Colin McCahon takes up this question of the afterlife of the work of art by looking at the work of the New Zealand painter Colin McCahon, who is often described as one of the most important Australasian artists of the twentieth century. Imagine for a moment being a great artist in faraway and culturally marginal New Zealand in the 1950s. The audience for your work does not yet exist. You are destined to die unknown. So, what does McCahon do? He makes work as do all the artists we remember for a future audience. It is they who will grant him eternal life. It is they who will allow him to live on. In this, as McCahon well knew, he was like Jesus, who similarly lives on through his Apostles. And this act of religious transmission increasingly becomes the real subject of McCahons work. Just as he becomes an Apostle of Christ, so we become Apostles of McCahon. And in so doing, McCahon tells us something profound about art, whose truth would lie not so much in what it tells us as in its act of telling. McCahons Victory over death 2 (1970), a huge black and white painting featuring the words I AM and evocative of the cloudy mountains of New Zealand, is now in the National Gallery of Australia, where it and Jackson Pollocks Blue Poles (1952) are regarded as the two most significant works in the collection. It is a painting about the resurrection of Christ, but every time someone stands before the painting and looks at it is also McCahon who is granted a certain victory over death. Victory over Death: The Art of Colin McCahon seeks to speak of this small miracle of art and the particular life or even afterlife it grants both the artist and their audience.
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Tuhituhi follows the geographical and chronological progress of Cook's voyage on the Resolution, for which William Hodges was hired as official artist, a landscape painter. In the Pacific, painters like Hodges found themselves staring again and again in disbelief at landscapes an...d seascapes that stretched 18th-century conventions of painting (such as the picturesque, the sublime, and the beautiful). Each chapter of this book focuses on the close reading of a significant painting by Hodges of a South Pacific location and opens fresh theoretical perspectives on the representational problems raised by these early Pacific works. The final chapter considers the important influence of Hodges work on a series of paintings by the major twentieth-century New Zealand painter Colin McCahon.--Cover.
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The most comprehensive and authoritative academic examination of David Lynch's work and career.
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Looking at the intellectual life in today's New Zealand, this work is organised around interviews with leading intellectuals. It shows that in their commitment to understanding and improving the social world they have faced hostility, incomprehension and rejection but their lives... are rich, complex and dramatic.
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Synopsis coming soon.......
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A critical reflection on the ideas and intellectual itinerary of Slavoj Zizek - regarded as one of the pre-eminent European cultural theorists of the last decade. As well as bringing a Zizekian analysis to a discussion of the cultural and social aspects of nationhood in New Zeala...nd ad the Souther hemisphere, it provides new perspectives on his thinking on psychoanalysis, multiculturalism, televison and the new media, ethics and politics.
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Examines in detail the work of seven major twentieth century New Zealand painters and photographers: Rita Angus, Colin McCahon, Gordon Walers, Milan Mrkusich, Richard Killeen, Les Cleveland and Megan Jenkinson. The aim of the book is to "apply a broad range of critical theories a...nd methodologies to sustained close reading of paintings and photographic images, in an attempt to explore a cluster of related concepts".
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In this book, adopting Zizek's own tactic of counterintuitive observation, we shall read the corpus of Alfred Hitchcock's films ('one of the great achievements of Western civilization') and Zizek's idiosyncratic citation of them in order to arrive at a position where we can ident...ify the core commitments that inform Zizek's own work.
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In this book, adopting Zizek's own tactic of counterintuitive observation, we shall read the corpus of Alfred Hitchcock's films ('one of the great achievements of Western civilization') and Zizek's idiosyncratic citation of them in order to arrive at a position where we can ident...ify the core commitments that inform Zizek's own work.
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