Editorial

The founding of a new national art magazine may call for a few words of explanation. It is a fact that with the exception of Ascent, published for a few years in Christchurch from the late 'sixties, there has been no regular New Zealand journal devoted entirely to the visual arts since the end of the 'forties. Certainly, painting and sculpture have been given some space in the literary journals. Charles Brasch, poet and founding editor of the quarterly Landfall, always tried to publish a few plates and an occasional article. He had a sincere personal interest in painting and was one of the earliest collectors of Colin McCahon and M.T. Woollaston (Charles Brasch's collection is now held by the Hocken library). This policy has been continued but Landfall remains overwhelmingly a literary journal.

Under its editor Robin Dudding, Islands, now issued from Auckland, continues to print articles - sometimes lengthy ones - on New Zealand artists. However the format, designed primarily for textual presentation, necessarily imposes limitations. The Bulletin of New Zealand Art History (started in 1972) edited by Anthony S.G. Green from the Art History Department of the University of Auckland, though it continues to make available invaluable research material, could hardly be described as a popular journal.

Two private galleries, the Barry Lett Galleries and New Vision, brought out over a brief period two newsletters: the Barry Lett Galleries Newsletter and Artis; and these provided useful information from galleries that have done a great deal for New Zealand painting over a decade or more. Art New Zealand has in fact grown out of involvement in a more recent newsletter from a private gallery, the Peter Webb Galleries Newsletter.

There has been an increasing dearth of intelligent writing for the general public on the visual arts here. Apart from a few thoughtful articles in the publications mentioned above there is no adequate consideration given to the growing number of exhibitions of contemporary painting and sculpture. The daily papers seem to share a delusion that just about anyone is qualified to turn in a few lines on an art exhibition. The 'notices' that even the larger newspapers print as a sort of casual concession to the visual arts often permit their writers to express ill-informed and dogmatic opinions that certainly anyone with a serious interest in art finds little short of ludicrous. Often, important exhibitions are not reviewed at all - seemingly at the whim of the reviewer - while patently amateur showings are treated with the same respect as those of established artists.

The following distinction between 'criticism' and 'reviewing' put by Harold Rosenberg in a recent interview is surely the correct one: 'As I see it, the critic is valuable insofar as he enriches the environment of ideas in which artists work. Ultimately, this intellectual environment is also that of people who look at artworks and appreciate them. . . This is quite different from the function of reviewers, which is to get around to as many shows as they can and to make judgement as to how good or bad the work is. To me, this is a highly specialised task, one that I regard, in fact, as fundamentally impossible. I do not know how anyone can go from one gallery to another, look at an artist's work, and say "Give him a B-plus, or a C, or this guy has flunked. "How does the reviewer know what the work is worth?'*

As to the general content of Art New Zealand: we can say here briefly that it will cover the past and the present. Much of this first number is given over to expatriate and immigrant artists of the 'twenties and 'thirties - in fact one of the richest and least-examined periods in the history of New Zealand art.

A journal like Art New Zealand could not have come into existence without the help of the galleries. We have not launched on the project without the promise of their support. It is in the dealer galleries especially that the latest developments in New Zealand art are to be seen. And it is mainly from these exhibitions that the public art galleries select such contemporary work as they buy. We will therefore begin each issue with a brief survey of current exhibitions.

* Conversation in Craft Horizons, August 1975