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CRITICS & CRITICISM: This month Mark Amery & guests address the vexed issue of Criticism in New Zealand and Australia. Has the proliferation of new art forms made it difficult to critique art? How do we develop bold young critical voices? Should we fight for space in the shrinking profit margins of the newspaper? Should we simply pitch our tent in a friendly corner of the internet? 

The Aachen Faxes is a simple striking video of white text on a black background. The text is taken from a series of faxes Julian Dashper sent to his partner Marie Shannon during his Aachen residency in 1995. The soundtrack is fittingly maudlin, a lone cello played by Dashper’s brother. The video is pitch perfect; the text exquisitely weighted across the screen as though set by a typographer onto a page.

The passing of time is a slippery experience, difficult to pin down and usually different in retrospect. Thinking back, there are usually milestones, key markers that help you plot a path from one fixed point to another with lesser events positioned before or after with reference to cause-effect relationships. This is Auckland gallerist Michael Lett’s 10th year in business, an occasion he has chosen to observe with a survey of works by Steve Carr, the artist whose exhibition Dive inaugurated the gallery in 2003.

Back in the early 1990s, friend, artist and then ELAM School of Fine Arts intermedia student Tessa Laird enlisted my participation in making a video. Quite simply it involved one afternoon purchasing chicken dinners from the Kentucky Fried Chicken in Ponsonby Road, Auckland and then returning to my flat around the corner to get stoned and eat. We chewed the fat, as it were, for an hour or more, before the camera as witness.