Toi Te Papa (and Wisdom)

How busy have I been? I have been so busy that I have had a comic in my bag for ten days and still haven’t read it. I’m even blogging instead. But I’ll read it before I finish this post, then write about it, how about that?
Today Cal and I spent ninety minutes wandering through Toi Te Papa, the NZ art exhibition at the national museum. It was time well-spent. There was a cornucopia of material on show, and it was good to see so much incredible work by names that are legendary here – Ralph Hotere, Rita Angus, Colin McCahon being three whose works made predictably big impressions on this viewing. There was a degree of incoherence in the exhibition, cramming photography and pottery and sculpture and historic carving and painting and more all together; the point is obviously to gather all our artistic output together into one narrative, but in practice I felt that it didn’t do justice to any of the disciplines but the dominant one, painting. But this is a small point – it’s an accessible and fun exhibition with some real heavyweight stuff.
However, the thing that slowly sunk in as I wandered was how much the artworks resonated with me because, on a deep cultural level, I understood them. I didn’t need the references explained. The landscapes, the colours, the motifs, most of the politics, almost all of it was familiar or transparent to me. I actually felt at home in this exhibition as I never have in an art exhibition before, which was a surprise, because I came to love trawling art galleries while in Europe and I never appreciated the extent to which I was an outsider there. Here I was suddenly an insider.
It was a surprisingly rich experience. It reminded me of how when I first arrived in the U.K. I noticed countless tiny things that I had internalised as a child, reading British comics and watching British TV shows. These were things that I had never even registered as culturally specific until I was there and seeing them repeated in front of me. All of that pop-art I had inhaled as a kid suddenly became richer and more powerful in hindsight, because I saw that it wasn’t pulling its references out of thin air, but was instead part of a thick cultural context. Things were that way for a reason.
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And with that deft segue into comics…
Wisdom issue 2, written by Paul Cornell, drawn by Trevor Hairsine. Amusing Warren Ellis pastiche with spotty storytelling but high on mad ideas. English town comes to life and stomps about while everyone has wacky dreams. Points for including in the team a shapechanging alien who was also a Beatle, and as a comics geek I appreciated the nod to the 1961 story in which the alien species first appeared. Points against for just being a bit too twee, a little bit too earnest, and a little bit too character-thin for me to care. I’m done with this one.