Always His Own Man: Bill Hammond

Webb’s has a special relationship with Billy Apple. Not only has his work passed through the auction house over many years (a process the artist followed with keen attention), but it was in the rooms of the original Peter Webb Galleries in April 1981 that Billy Apple presented the first canvases and prints to mark his return to object making after more than a decade of time-based and ephemeral practice. As I outline in Billy Apple® Life/Work (Auckland University Press, 2020), this exhibition was a watershed not just for the artist but for New Zealand art in general. And the large canvas that was the centrepiece of the exhibition, Sold, 1981, was also the very first one painted by Terry Maitland. The story of this exhibition bears retelling as it paints a picture of the Auckland art scene in the 1980s that is very different from today. Contemporary New Zealand art was by 1980 well and truly being made and shown in Auckland by a growing number of serious artists, who were supported by a small number of dealer galleries – particularly Barry Lett Galleries (by then RKS Art), Denis Cohn, and New Vision – and by the Auckland City Art Gallery, which was running a cutting edge programme, especially utilising the new large galleries of the Edmiston wing for contemporary projects. But there wasn’t a secondary market for contemporary work and Peter Webb Galleries was set up in part to address that lack. Much more needs to be written on the crucial role Peter Webb played in the Auckland art scene at this time, but suffice to say, in late 1979 he refurbished a space on the first floor of the T & G Building on the corner of Elliott and Wellesley Streets to function as a combined auction house and contemporary gallery, launching this as Peter Webb Galleries (it is here that the first contemporary New Zealand art auction took place). Webb was helped in preparing the space by Billy Apple, then known as a New York-based conceptual artist who had flustered the public by staging radical installations across New Zealand in his two visits to his country of birth in 1975 and 1979–80. These largely entailed removing items from spaces and requiring owners to correct architectural, decorative or functional features he felt detracted from their performance as spaces fit for art, and presenting the empty or adjusted galleries as ‘his’ work. Indeed, between 27 November and 7 December 1979, Apple documented the changes he was responsible for in Webb’s new space as one of his The Given as an Art-Political Statement series titled New Premises in the rooms Webb now occupied. Then, on the invitation of Peter Webb, who had provoked the artist by asking him to make something he could sell, Billy Apple staged the exhibition Art for Sale (27 April – 8 May 1981). This consisted of one large canvas and ten smaller screenprints each functioning as a blownup bill of sale. Using the distinctive typography Apple had developed for the installations he executed nationally for his second tour of the country, these works were the first to move centre stage from ancillary documents to physical art works. The really radical dimension of the exhibition, however, was the challenge Apple set Webb, which was to ensure that all the works were sold prior to the opening. This was the only way their contents would make sense. I can still sense the drama of this undertaking: the pressure to sell every work in the show by a particular date (which was documented the night before the opening when each work was signed by the artist, the gallery and the buyer), the shock for guests at the opening to discover that everything had already sold, and the consternation that a painting that merely documented the transaction and even – shockingly – announced its price, could be a work of art! This was the moment that Apple’s conceptual practice found its visual form and the Art Transactions series Sold inaugurated, it has been the most enduring of the artist’s career. It was also the moment when the New Zealand art market came of age, at the very brink of the 1980s, that heyday for materialism that changed the system forever. From that moment, the cliché of the impoverished artist shivering in their garret was struck a terminal blow, as viewers were forced to realise that art is a material thing that can be traded like any other, and that it gains its value not because of its intrinsic qualities but because of a social contract based on relations between makers, sellers, and buyers, who must mutually believe in the value of the product. Billy Apple articulated this arrangement and continued to do so for the rest of his career. He was fascinated by the system that gave his very existence meaning, and in every deal he struck he required a re-statement of that deepest belief in the concept of ‘art’. This was as important to him as any price paid for an art work. Though of course he understood that our society equates high prices with increased value, and was happiest when his works were sold for their true worth. In this sense Billy Apple was the contemporary art world’s conscience. It was not always an easy role to play, and there are myriad instances of him being cold-shouldered. I know it will take time for his contribution to art history to be fully understood, but in the outpouring of tributes and memories that followed news of his death, I think a tide is turning.

Christina Barton is director of Te Pātaka Toi Adam Art Gallery at Te Herenga Waka Victoria University of Wellington. She is a respected curator, writer and art historian. She has known and worked with Billy Apple over many years, including curating his retrospective exhibition Billy Apple®: The Artist Has to Live like Everybody Else at Auckland Art Gallery Toi o Tāmaki in 2015. Her monograph on the artist, Billy Apple® Life/Work was published by Auckland University Press in 2020.

Billy Apple, New Premises: The Given as an Art-Political Statement, 1979, exhibition poster (courtesy of Billy Apple® Archive)

Entrance view, Bill Hammond, Jingle Jangle Morning, Christchurch City Art Gallery Te Puna o Waiwhetū 20 July – 22 October 2007.

Tribute by Jenny Harper

Bill Hammond (1947-2021)

I like Bill Hammond’s paintings a lot. Like others, I’m fascinated and intrigued by their detail, with the singular style he developed over the years. More than this, I admire Bill Hammond’s work. He could certainly paint and, even if you weren’t fully tuned into the issues he dealt with, his works were not something you could pass by without wondering.

His death in January this year sadly marks an end to his output, but it enables the task of assessing the full range of this artist’s phenomenal contribution to the heritage of Aotearoa New Zealand. Just as Hammond’s artistic landscapes are humorous and subversive, imaginary and ethereal, they are decidedly from here and of this place. Their impact will endure as they are admired by gallery visitors and in more private situations; they’ll fascinate and preoccupy curators and scholars well into the future. Hammond declined all interviews and opportunities to talk about his work. As far as he was concerned, he’d made it – and others could talk about it. Bill Hammond was born in Christchurch in 1947 and attended Burnside High School before the University of Canterbury School of Fine Arts. During the 1970s, he worked in a sign factory, made jewellery and designed and manufactured wooden toys, but he turned to painting full-time in 1981. He also had a keen interest in music, playing the drums in the Band of Hope Jug Band. Canterbury has a rich history of nurturing artistic talent and Bill Hammond loved Banks Peninsula and lived most of his life in Lyttelton. He had two sons, and together with his second wife, Jane McBride, he became part of the Lyttelton community. It was a struggle at first and Bill Hammond paid for food and drinks at the Volcano Café and Lava Bar with paintings. Volcano Flag, 1994, now in the collection of Christchurch Art Gallery Te Puna Waiwhetū, has a visible red wine stain in the lower right corner which remains as part of its history. Always his own man, Hammond was notoriously reticent when it came to talking about his work; ‘I just paint them’, is about as much as he would say. We’re free to interpret without any expectation. On a personal level, once the ice was broken, he was nicely forthcoming about life, peppered with heaps of his wry sense of humour. Like many in this area, however, he was badly affected by the Canterbury earthquakes of 2010-11, losing and having to relocate both his studio and living spaces. His 1980s work is infected with the energy of punk, rock ‘n’ roll, graffiti, cartoons and other unexpected sources. Perhaps it functions as something of a gothic rebellion against the suburban conservatism of Christchurch. But it also shows the impact of other visual cultures, that of Japan and various European artists whom he admired when he travelled there. Titles are often painted on a work.

[They] are like New Zealand before people got here. It’s bird land. You feel like a time traveller… [it’s] a beautiful place, but also full of ghosts, shipwrecks and death…1 – Bill Hammond

1 Gregory O’Brien, Lands and Deeds, Auckland, Godwit, 1996, p 58. Birds first began to populate Hammond’s paintings after he visited the Auckland Islands in 1989, as part of the Art in the Subantarctic project. It was a three-week trip to the remote, windswept islands, where the severity of the climate has allowed little human impact on the natural environment. Clearly a revelation, an epiphany, this visit had a profound impact on him. For here Hammond experienced what he termed Birdland – and it led to his claiming of the bird motif like few others. In a 1996 interview with Gregory O’Brien, Hammond spoke of the Auckland Islands as a kind of lost world, ruled over by beak and claw: ‘[They] are like New Zealand before people got here. It’s bird land. You feel like a time traveller… [it’s] a beautiful place, but also full of ghosts, shipwrecks and death…’¹ In earlier 1990s canvases, the anthropomorphic creatures on Hammond’s canvases may have been the great flocks killed and stuffed by Victorian ornithologist Sir Walter Buller. Over the years they grew into something different – a beautiful, but occasionally sinister, race of creatures distinct from both avian and human beings. These beings are layered and active. They connect with the volcanic and hilly landscapes Hammond looked out at from his studio and, in pictorial and metaphorical ways, to Europe. These creatures inhabit caves and sink holes as well as mountain tops. They grow wings, ride horses, play musical instruments, go freedom camping, hang from trees or ropes. Their heads may be above or below the clouds; one even became a ‘strap buddy’ when the artist broke his ankle and had to go to the orthopaedic section of Christchurch Hospital. Hammond’s local public art gallery, Christchurch Art Gallery Te Puna o Waiwhetū, has done him the honour of two exhibitions, both resulting in strong major publications. The first, Jingle Jangle Morning (a line taken from Bob Dylan’s song Mr Tambourine Man, and the title of a 2006 painting), was an impressive exhibition of more than two decades of Hammond’s work staged in 2007. The second publication, Across the Evening Sky, has only just become available. Developed after another Hammond exhibition at the Gallery in 2019, Playing the Drums, it also celebrates the successful fundraising and purchase in 2021 of the sensational Bone Yard Open Home, Cave Painting 4, Convocation of Eagles, 2009, to enhance the Gallery’s already strong collection of his work. Another formidable book production, designed as a companion to the first, it combines several essays and an informal recorded conversation (remember, no interviews) between Tony de Lautour and Bill Hammond, as well as other essays, and incorporates excellent new photography of his work. There’s no doubt in our minds that Bill Hammond is an artist admired by artists as we read the heartfelt commentary of a dozen of them on him and his work. Looked up to by others, he remained generally dismissive of the broader art world and its expectations. There was little doubt, however, of the ultimate respect many, many people from all walks of life had for him as a string of farewells followed his burial on Banks Peninsula earlier this year.

Jenny Harper Director of Christchurch Art Gallery Te Puna o Waiwhetū November 2006 to March 2018. Prior to that, Jenny worked at Victoria University of Wellington, developing the Art History programme and establishing the Adam Art Gallery. She was Director of the former National Art Gallery in Wellington, becoming Director of Art & History at the then Museum of New Zealand after legislative change in 1992. In 2011 she received an MNZM for services to the arts.