Collections

Imagine a collection of thousands of paintings and sculptures owned by a single man. Imagine that number of works crammed into a private home the size of a large Dunthorpe manse. Now imagine making that collection, and that private home, available, gratis, to community groups seeking to use the space for a fund raiser or any group of interested viewers who submit a simple online application. Welcome to Rannoch, the large Craftsman-inspired house owned by James Wallace. http://www.wallaceartstrust.org.nz/?s1=rannoch

Wallace, heir to a fortune built by meat and tanned hides, is a major art philanthropist in New Zealand. He collects the art work of NZ artists, supports NZ art initiatives, and founded the biannual Wallace Awards. These awards bestow cash, mana and a year-long NYC art residency on New Zealand artists and assure that their work will be included in the 4,500 piece Wallace Collection.

A week after I submitted the application to the Wallace Trust, notice arrived that we’d be welcome to tour the house if we could come the following day. After a flurry of phone calls and a visit to Google Maps, we agreed to meet at 10 the next day outside Rannoch, which turned out to be tucked between the roaring Auckland motorway and a tree-lined, poorly marked Epsom street. A glimpse behind the artist-designed metal security gate into the large garden crowded with sculptures and native bush convinced us we’d correctly followed the treasure map.

Rannoch entry gate

We buzzed the intercom and waited till we heard the voice of the German housekeeper instructing us to enter. Since Mel Brooks’ humor seems not to have made it to NZ, no one but me needed to stifle a giggle as images of Cloris Leachman in Young Frankenstein leapt, unbidden, to mind. I half expected to hear a horse ninny in outrage as Carla, the housekeeper, gave us entry instructions through the crackly intercom.

Carla, who turned out to be more art history graduate than Brooksian device, flicked on the lights and instructed us how to navigate the house. She asked us to not open the doors marked Private, but other than that left us on our own to wander at will. So four free range fiber artists roamed, unescorted, around this wealthy collector’s home for 3 hours, gobsmacked as much by the freedom as the artwork. We also agreed that we could happily spend a week in his library, as he seemed to own every art book ever printed.

Despite having spent a lot of time learning about NZ art and being accompanied by 3 other people who had a pretty good working knowledge of contemporary Kiwi artists, I could only identify makers of a small fraction of the art on the walls and in the storage rooms we were equally free to examine. Here’s the thing: in a private collection, there are no accompanying wall labels. Forget the fact that we have become increasingly dependant on increasingly lengthy labels to explain the conceptual work we encounter on museum and gallery walls – at Rannoch we couldn’t even identify the artist, since a stunningly small percentage of the work was signed on the front. I took home a lesson from this, since I am at best inconsistent about signing my quilts.

We finished our trip with a long wander in the garden, ‘chockers’ (as in chock full) with sculpture. Arranged around the periphery of the house and strewn down a steep ungroomed hillside we would not have been allowed to clamber down in the US (liability laws being what they are) were sculptures in various states of decay. It made me ponder, not for the first time, on the nature of collecting and the psychological triggers of the collector. These sculptures, some hidden beneath burgeoning undergrowth, some furry with moss, some simply gasping at overexposure to sun and wind and rain, were expensive works by major NZ artists. Like the paintings and indoor sculptures gathering dust in the dark in the house’s attic and basement, these pieces seemed like out of favor orphans who had been taken in by Wallace in a fit of enthusiasm and then allowed to wander off into the gloaming after his interest had waned. As I lifted a trailing branch to view a sculpture, I thought of the “in the collection of” listing on my own resume, and my friends’ excitement when a famous collector acquires their work. I couldn’t help but wonder if our art is rolled up under a collector’s bed, forgotten and camouflaged by dust bunnies.

Why do we make art, and why do others collect it? Vanity, hubris, obsession—art can be made and bought for less than laudable reasons. But I think the basic -- and most profound-- reason we make art is to tell our stories and the most altruistic reason people collect it is to preserve them. I think I’d rather have my quilts stored under a collector’s bed than my own. Especially a collector who opens his home to others interested in the worlds artists create.

Week 4.5

Feijoas, a small green fruit ripening on Auckland bushes now, are the New Zealand equivalent of cilantro. Like cilantro, the feijoa’s flavor and its perfume are inextricably linked, and like cilantro, people either love them or hate them, looking for unguarded verandahs for drive-by drop-offs if they have feijoa bushes in their yards. Although I think of them as New Zealand fruits, I’m told they are native to South America, like the kumara that became a staple of the Maori diet after one Polynesian sailor or another brought the sweet potato back from his overseas travels.

Yoke, the friend I’m staying with during this part of my visit, weekly lends her kitchen for photo shoots for the New Zealand Herald’s food and style insert. Her daughter is the staff photographer, so I have had fun looking for examples of Yoke’s collection of silverware and serving dishes in the Wednesday paper. This week I got to meet the food editor as she arrived to work up next week’s featured recipes – all involving feijoas delivered by the newly hired PR person for the Feijoa Grower’s Association, the long-lost friend of Yoke’s whom she had run into just the week before in our weekly community choir practices, but that’s a whole other Auckland small world story.

Although I can riff on recipes, I don’t have the palate or food imagination to think of combining food flavors I have haven’t yet tasted together. So when Amanda told me about the feijoa, smoked fish, and Vietnamese mint salad she was making for this week’s shoot, and confessed she’d never made it before but was confident “it would be lovely,” I knew I was out of my depth. She also made feijoa jam, stewed feijoas and cream (which reminded me of the Rosalind Russel line from “My Sister Eileen,” when she reads the recommendation on the back of a free cereal box: “Tastes delicious with peaches and cream,” and then asks, “What doesn’t?”), and feijoa fruit salad with green and red guavas.

The selection of tropical fruit that’s now in season – feijoa, guava, passion fruit—has contributed to the summery taste of my stay. It’s lovely to leave Portland in March, when I’m sick of apples and pears and bananas, and arrive in time for the last of the stone fruit and berry season, along with the harvest of passion fruit and feijoas. It’s also good to know the Hood strawberry season will be arriving soon after I return. Like the feijoa, putting down roots in South American and the South Pacific, I am happy to enjoy the best of both my worlds.

16 March 2009

The sun came out yesterday, after two weeks of dramatic cloud dances choreographed by the push/pull of incoming weather from the Tasman Sea on the west and the Pacific on the east (and having the Pacific on the east coast is a reminder, like the inversion of seasons, that I’m not in Kansas anymore). Yoke and I dropped everything and bundled arthritic Oskar, her 10 year old Dalmation, into the car and headed west, through the lovely bush-clad Waitakere ranges, to the black sand beach of Piha. We joined about a hundred surfers on the beach north of Lion Rock, some in wet suits, some clad only in bathing togs and Kiwi bravado. There were a few swimmers as well, but they were officially confined to the very narrow stretch of beach deemed safe by the Piha Lifeguard Club. The sea was calmer than I’d seen it in the past on this stretch of the west coast made famous to foreigners as the arrival site for The Piano in the eponymous film. The Tasman is often in a rage, giving the westies who live in the houses barnacled to the hills in the bush great views of wild surf but swim-at-your-own-risk beaches.

I remember being on this beach early in our first visit to New Zealand, when my sons were about 7 and 9, and happy to jump into deep rock pools, to dig in the sand and to explore the caves at the base of the promontory that bookends the opposite end of the strand from Lion’s Rock. Yoke remembers the beach and the drive to it 25 years ago, when the windy road that maneuvers the Waitakeres wasn’t sealed and the population, a bit thinner than it is now, included her mother and father who had come out to the west coast for a vacation from their native Holland and didn’t go back to The Netherlands for 7 years. That puts my two month stay into perspective.

Oskar forgot he was ten and creaky as he calmly ambled down the beach, greeting all the dogs sniffing the sand (all leashless; I’m not sure why anyone bothers to put up signs about dogs here, since no one obeys them). From the tiny yippy pseudo-dogs to the black bear Newfie look alike, Oskar regally greeted them and walked on. I think a sunny beach rejuvenates all of us with memories of other sunny beaches in different parts of the world, when we were younger and we assumed every day would be filled with blue skies and breaking waves.

In the evening, back in the city, just forty five minutes and a world away from the warm black sand, we traveled to the north of France at the cinema, where I understood not one word of the Bergue dialect spoken in the film. It hardly mattered, as Yoke drank her champagne and I my decaf flat white, both served in real glass and crockery. When we returned home, Yoke phoned her son and spoke in Dutch, then we ate dinner with her Japanese student and we attempted to communicate in Janglish. Auckland is like that – the largest, most racially mixed city in New Zealand. Awash with Pacific Islanders (whose NZ population often exceeds the entire population of their native PI states), Asians who immigrated from China and India and points between, Eastern Europeans and native Maoris, Auckland is the Ellis Island of New Zealand. Few immigrants make it as far south as the South Island. Reaction to this influx is mixed among the pakeha (European-descent Kiwis) who are learning to live in a more crowded, less familiar city. For them it means the corner dairy isn’t run by a familiar ginger-haired Kiwi, but by someone named Patel. It also means the ATMs I’ve used have a list of 10 languages to choose among – and that the food has greatly improved from that first visit when the kids frolicked on the beach but the cafes mostly served buttered white bread and canned asparagus sandwiches. Of course, if I’m really longing for home after all this international flavor, I could always turn on the TV and watch some American shows. But there’s something about watching reruns of Mr. Ed dubbed into Maori that reminds me I’m watching what happens when you put lots of disparate bits and bobs into a blender and hit “pulse”: some happy accidents, some grating annoyances, and a great many head-scratchers.

Oskar exploring the No Dog Zone

Piha, with Lion Rock in the foreground

5 March 2009

Last night I joined about a hundred other people in the little auditorium of the Mt. Eden Normal Primary School (and it was only when I asked if there were an Abnormal School down the road that my friend Ailie sort of scratched her head and realized she didn't have a good explanation for that moniker) to form a community chorus. We filed in, either found our name tags or paid our "casual fee" (no, not a surtax for those wearing jeans, but their version of "drop-in"), and then sorted ourselves into gatherings of sopranos, altos, tenors, and bass. No auditions, not even enough sheet music to go around. And yet when Max, the greying, pony-tailed leader who started this experiment in "If you sing it, they will come," got us started on Let It Be, we opened our mouths and joy came out. How could a group of people who've never sung together -- some with perfect pitch and some, like me, who can barely stay on key-- produce harmonies that made us all stand a little straighter?

There was a rustle of anticipation when Max announced we'd be trying Leonard Cohen's Hallelujah before the night was out. Cohen had bowled NZ over last month with performances in Auckland and Wellington that had people swearing it was the best concert they'd ever attended, and there were many people at the choir last night who still had that song ringing in their heads from their evening with Cohen. Like many of Cohen's songs, it is poetic and ambiguous and dark, but when we sang, "I'll stand before the lord of song/With nothing on my tongue but Hallelujah/Hallelujah, Hallelujah," the irony of the words was buried under the pure joy of having made such a gorgeous sound with people we hadn't known a half hour ago.

I wonder how many people responded to Max's ad in a community paper inviting interested neighbors to come and sing because, like me, they had seen Young at Heart and wondered when and why they had stopped singing. Are there hundreds of groups like this popping up in different countries because people want to start making music again, even if they were still smarting, decades later, from having been assigned to the "listener" group in previous music classes?

So, I'm back in New Zealand for a couple of months. This time I'm eating dessert first, visiting friends and spending time thinking, writing, and surprise! singing. Next month I haul my three bags of class supplies and one filled with enough black pants and changes of underwear to last several weeks as I crisscross the North and South Islands teaching at a Symposium, an art festival and two quilt guilds. Except for the schlepping of several 50 lb suitcases, it is going to be another happy adventure in meeting other women interested in sewing one piece of cloth to another to make something more beautiful than the sum of its parts. How serendipitous to start these two months with a group of strangers who hoped to perform that same alchemy with the joining of their voices to produce something very much like a prayer.