Back Story Journal of New Zealand Art, Media & Design History最新文献

{"title":"Self Help, Sunlight and a Modern Chair: Considering Auckland’s historic signage as a heritage object","authors":"C. Powley","doi":"10.24135/backstory.vi8.58","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.24135/backstory.vi8.58","url":null,"abstract":"Cities are an ever-changing space, filled with commerce and community. Signage plays a strong role in the visual narrative of the urban environment. It creates a constant visual hum, a street level monologue of promotion, identification and direction. Commercial signs are designed to serve and improve business. So, what role could an old, fading or non-functioning piece of signage possibly play in our neoliberal capitalist society? From a designer’s perspective, there’s a lot to like—the craftsmanship, the idiosyncrasies of a hand-generated pieceof typography, the sense of nostalgia for a time before globalisation and brand guidelines took over. Looking at historic signs from a broader context they also represent an “intricate urban history.”1 They speak of the changing face of commercial enterprise, social values and cultural expression. Even when they no longer serve their original semantic role of commercial promotion, they “accumulate rich layers of meaning. They no longer merely advertise, they are valued in and of themselves. They become icons.”2 The semiotic function of an historic sign shifts to a new role—signifying notions of survival, continuity and loss. They also feed into our complex personal narratives of place, identity and community.3 These multiple and interwoven values can form the cultural significance of historic signs. Despite this recognisable value, historic signage tends to fall through the gaps of heritage practice and legislation in New Zealand. This paper offers a set of case studies that represent a range of possible outcomes for historic signs, when they exist outside a system of heritage management. I propose six categories for framing the case studies: remain, repair, regenerate, relocate, replace and remove. These examples are combined with a broader reflection on the value of historic signage and an overview of relevant heritage practice in New Zealand. The intention is to encourage reflection on the possible heritage significance of historic signage and our current approach to assessment, scheduling and conservation.","PeriodicalId":223199,"journal":{"name":"Back Story Journal of New Zealand Art, Media & Design History","volume":"1 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2020-12-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"129211788","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"The Influence of the Infomercial in New Zealand","authors":"Rosser Johnson","doi":"10.24135/backstory.vi1.13","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.24135/backstory.vi1.13","url":null,"abstract":"New Zealand television networks introduced infomercials (30 minute advertisements designed to appear as if they are programmes) in late 1993. Although infomercials date from the 1950s in the USA, they were unknown in this country and quickly came to be seen as a peculiarly “intense” form of hyper-commercial broadcasting. This article aims to sketch out the cultural importance of the infomercial by analysing historical published primary sources (from the specialist and general press) as they reflect the views and opinions that resulted from the introduction of the infomercial. Specifically, it outlines the three main areas where that cultural importance was located. It concludes by analysing the significance of the cultural impact of the infomercial, both within broadcasting and within wider society.","PeriodicalId":223199,"journal":{"name":"Back Story Journal of New Zealand Art, Media & Design History","volume":"29 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2019-12-05","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"115113531","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"“Messages of Love from Maoriland”: A. D. Willis’s New Zealand Christmas Cards and Booklets 1883-1893","authors":"P. Gilderdale","doi":"10.24135/backstory.vi7.49","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.24135/backstory.vi7.49","url":null,"abstract":"I have previously explored the beginnings of the New Zealand Christmas card prior to 1883, and the ways that the designers of these cards negotiated the colonial experience of a summer Christmas.1 This paper examines the development, over the decade following 1883, of the chromolithographic work of A. D. Willis, whose production not only continued the work of creating a niche for New Zealand Christmas cards, but also tried to compete with the large overseas ‘art publishers’ who were flooding the New Zealand market with northern hemisphere iconography. Willis’s Christmas cards are frequently used to illustrate books looking at the 1880s, but there has been no detailed study done of them. The paper therefore documents the cards, their production and reception, explores how they record Willis’s understanding of the art publishing business and the market he was working into, and situates them in relation to broader print culture. Understanding this overlooked chapter in ‘commercial art’ provides useful evidence of the murky interplay between the local, national and transnational identities that marked New Zealand cultural production when artists and designers sought to capture the public’s Yuletide sentiments. Willis’s work also displays two very distinct conceptions of how to represent what was increasingly known as ‘Maoriland’ to an overseas market – one focused on the land, and the other on Māori. As such, these cards act as a weathervane for what the New Zealand public accepted as New Zealand, artistic and appropriate as a Christmas gift.","PeriodicalId":223199,"journal":{"name":"Back Story Journal of New Zealand Art, Media & Design History","volume":"23 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2019-12-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"124445916","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"The “perpetual hazard”: Middle New Zealand attitudes to marital infidelity in the agony aunt columns of the New Zealand Woman’s Weekly, 1950 editions","authors":"Rosemary Brewer","doi":"10.24135/backstory.vi7.51","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.24135/backstory.vi7.51","url":null,"abstract":"Social norms about the conduct of married life change over time. This paper examines New Zealand norms about marital infidelity as represented in the agony aunt columns of the New Zealand Woman’s Weekly in 1950. It concludes that sexual adventures outside of marriage constituted a significant challenge to contemporary beliefs about trust and romantic love within it, and that women facing this dilemma were given the task of saving the marriage. However, advice on how to do this was contradictory, from withholding sex while enduring the situation with dignity, to Freudian psychologists’ instruction to provide the straying husband with more and better sex.","PeriodicalId":223199,"journal":{"name":"Back Story Journal of New Zealand Art, Media & Design History","volume":"1 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2019-12-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"115908822","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Remembering Les Cleveland","authors":"Michael Jackson","doi":"10.24135/backstory.vi7.48","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.24135/backstory.vi7.48","url":null,"abstract":"As Michael Jackson notes in this profile, Les (Francis Leslie) Cleveland (1921-2014) was a man of many parts. As a New Zealand journalist, political scientist specializing in the media and a photographer, Cleveland is clearly a person of interest for a journal looking at New Zealand’s media and art history. An account of Cleveland’s life could alight on any one of a number of aspects but in this profile the author focuses on his early experiences in the Great Depression and the Second World War as the backstories central to understanding Les Cleveland.","PeriodicalId":223199,"journal":{"name":"Back Story Journal of New Zealand Art, Media & Design History","volume":"40 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2019-12-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"122926201","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Everybody’s Artist Photographer: Collaborators and creative influences in the work of Charles Peet Dawes","authors":"Keith Giles","doi":"10.24135/backstory.vi7.50","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.24135/backstory.vi7.50","url":null,"abstract":"When 1670 glass plate negatives taken by Kohukohu photographer Charles Peet Dawes were gifted to Auckland Libraries in 2018, it was immediately obvious from annotations on the negative envelopes that established ideas of how and when Charlie took up photography needed to be re-examined. Charlie’s notes also revealed the names of some previously unsuspected Hokianga visitors and residents who influenced and assisted him in his artistic endeavours. In addition, buried in the collection was a unique record of the 1898 Dog Tax Rebellion together with invaluable and historically important photographs of the people and communities of the Hokianga at the end of the nineteenth century and the beginning of the twentieth.","PeriodicalId":223199,"journal":{"name":"Back Story Journal of New Zealand Art, Media & Design History","volume":"19 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2019-12-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"123537503","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Don’t Reinvent the Wheel: Magazine idea-sharing in the 1960s","authors":"Gavin Ellis","doi":"10.24135/backstory.vi7.52","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.24135/backstory.vi7.52","url":null,"abstract":"Jean Wishart was the editor of the highly successful New Zealand Woman’s Weekly (NZWW) from 1952 to 1985. As part of her strategy to develop the magazine she undertook extensive international study tours looking at other popular titles for women. Gavin Ellis has gained access to reports she wrote in the 1960s for the owners of the NZWW and they provide some insight into what she adapted from overseas models as well those elements which did not impress her as suitable for her New Zealand audience.","PeriodicalId":223199,"journal":{"name":"Back Story Journal of New Zealand Art, Media & Design History","volume":"3 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2019-12-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"131867299","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Russell Duncan: Re-tracing history","authors":"Emma Jameson","doi":"10.24135/backstory.vi6.45","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.24135/backstory.vi6.45","url":null,"abstract":"This article considers the construction and meaning of time in Russell Duncan’s photographs. A hobbyist photographer and passionate historian, Duncan extensively photographedsites associated with early European explorers and colonial history in New Zealand, focussing primarily on those associated with Captain Cook. This article analyses, for the first time, Duncan’s use of the sequential format of photographic albums to manipulate timelines in order to visually reconstruct historical narratives. By analysing Duncan’s photographs of sites associated with Captain Cook in detail, this article investigates how Duncan’s photographs, read both individually and in a sequence, fuse past and present in their re-tracing of history.","PeriodicalId":223199,"journal":{"name":"Back Story Journal of New Zealand Art, Media & Design History","volume":"35 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2019-07-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"123950501","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"The cover of Herbs’ first Pacific reggae album: Perusing the paratext","authors":"E. Turner","doi":"10.24135/backstory.vi6.42","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.24135/backstory.vi6.42","url":null,"abstract":"The cover of Herbs’ award-winning EP What’s Be Happen? is dominated by an image of the final day of the Bastion Point occupation in Ōrākei, Auckland on 25 May, 1978. Released in 1981, the album has been recognised in a number of music industry awards for its important contribution to cultural life in Aotearoa New Zealand, and for the musician’s brave political stance in a period of activism that achieved significant social change. This article presents an analysis of the ways in which the record cover acts as a visual and textual introduction to the songs it encloses. Drawing on theorisations of features of paratext such as the title and images on a record sleeve as thresholding devices and as textual extensions of the records they enclose, the paper explores Herbs’ album title, the typographic forms of the title and the band’s name, and the use of colour, as well as the textual organisation of the songs on the two sides of the record. With reference to the social and political context at the time of the album’s release, the article offers an interpretation of the identifications and values signified by these elements of the cover, as carriers of meaning.","PeriodicalId":223199,"journal":{"name":"Back Story Journal of New Zealand Art, Media & Design History","volume":"42 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2019-07-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"116039134","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Rita Angus: A New Madonna 1942–1951","authors":"S. Whaley","doi":"10.24135/backstory.vi6.43","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.24135/backstory.vi6.43","url":null,"abstract":"This article explores the ‘New Madonna’ in Rita Angus’s artwork in the 1940s and early 1950s. The New Madonna combines female independence and celibacy with sexualityand motherhood. She develops from Angus’s position as a woman painter who lived and worked alone, and is expressed in three nudes and a number of goddess portraits which are discussed. The origins of the term ‘New Madonna’ and the interpretative possibilities it affords to Angus’s art are examined. These works allow Angus to inscribe herself with a value derived from being female. In order to offer insight into these portraits, Angus’s letters to the composer Douglas Gordon Lilburn are considered.","PeriodicalId":223199,"journal":{"name":"Back Story Journal of New Zealand Art, Media & Design History","volume":"21 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2019-07-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"114600487","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}