Robert Hughes the art critic and writer died
earlier this month and it set us thinking about our own memorable encounter
with him. He was giving a lecture in Wellington in the 1980s and we were asked
to keep him occupied for an afternoon.
What the hell do you show Robert Hughes
when he comes to Wellington? Not being complete masochists we stayed away from
art and started with the Maori and Pacific collections in the Dominion Museum
on Buckle Street.
Captain Cook's Hawai'ian feather cloak completely captivated him and his
knowledge of it was formidable. Across the way from this cultural marvel was
the Museum's attempt to display something of its fish collections. This was
done by sticking stuffed fish on rods so they looked as though they were in
schools swimming through a fake grotto. They got Hughes going prompting astonishing stories from the history of displaying things on sticks (as we
found out that day Hughes could speak with expertise on any subject at all and
we kept throwing up arcane and silly topics to see what eloquent miracles came
out of his mouth). Next we moved onto a small glass fish tank mounted
into a wall that had a single sea horse
floating in it. The abject poignancy of it all was too much for Hughes who
was convulsed with laughter, his face (already pretty florid) going a sort of
purple colour.
Back home, Bob (we were nervously calling
him Bob by this time) saw his book The shock of the new on the
shelves. He strode over, pulled it out and wrote with a flourish ‘For Jim and
Mary Barr with best from Bob Hughes’. We were too stunned to tell him it was a borrowed copy.
We stumped up with another copy for our
friend and decided that to commemorate the afternoon anyone called Bob or Robert
should sign alongside Hughes. Curator Robert Leonard and artist Robert Jesson did just
that, but then it turned out we didn't know very many Roberts and no Bobs and everything went all to hell.
From then on artists who stayed or
visited were invited to do something with book and its illustrations, you can
see a couple of them above. Now Bob's book is going to spend the rest of its
life in the Christchurch Art Gallery library.
Images: Top left, Marie Shannon deals up
The rat in the Rietveld chair and right, Michael Smither transforms Cezanne’s
mountain into Taranaki. Bottom Neil Pardington converts one of Albert Speer’s buildings for Germania into the Sarjeant Gallery.
