... MEMORY AND THE MUSEUM ...
Teresa Peters
I walk this small loop walk every day around the lawn, like a tribute to Richard Long. As the pandemic hit it really seemed all anyone could talk of, mowing the lawn, grasping for the everyday. Mum, Maree Horner’s work, The Chair 1973, also harnesses high voltage. She said it was a response to the suburbia and her father electrifying the car to ward off cats at night, in Auckland’s `Eastern suburbs…. My granfdfather was a German P.O.W for 4 years, he commited suicide drowning himself in the estuary at 85 when the war memories started bubbling to the surface by night. Reading through the Art forum archives, somewhere in my gut these lockdown days I carry the death of Robert Smithson. It is all too poetic that he died entropically over an earthwork. ‘The terrain is flat and loaded with "middle-income" housing developments with names like royal garden estates, rolling knolls farm, valley view acres, split-level manor, babbling brook ranch-estates, colonial vista homes-on and on they go, forming tiny boxlike arrangements. Most of the houses are painted white, but many are painted petal pink, frosted mint, buttercup, fudge, rose beige, antique green, cape cod brown, lilac, and so on. The highways crisscross through the towns and become man-made geological networks of concrete. In fact, the entire landscape has a mineral presence. From the shinychrome diners to glass windows of shopping centers, a sense of the crystalline prevails.’