Image Always Has the Last Word : On Contemporary New Zealand Painting and Photography

This book examines in detail the work of seven major twentieth-century New Zealand painters and photographers: Rita Angus, Colin McCahon, Gordon Walters, Milan Mrkusich, Richard Killeen, Les Cleveland and Megan Jenkinson.While it contains some historical and contextual background, it is not an art history in the traditional sense. Rather, it applies a broad range of critical theories and methodologies to sustained close readings of paintings and photographic images, in an attempt to explore a cluster of related concepts: subjectivity, sociality, self-reflexive representation, feminism, time, the gaze and the frame.It is also a complex attempt to explore the complex relationship between words and images and therefore to begin the answer the question of how we might write about painting and the visual. To achieve this it deliberately employs a number of different performative strategies or 'manners' of writing in order to unseat the belief that discourse on painting simply 'relates' an image by speaking it.Simmons, Laurence is the author of 'Image Always Has the Last Word : On Contemporary New Zealand Painting and Photography', published 2002 under ISBN 9780864694126 and ISBN 0864694121.