Notes
- F. Pound, The Stories we tell ourselves: The Paintings of Richard Killeen, Auckland: Auckland Art Gallery/Toi o Tamaki and David Bateman, 1999, p.9. The exhibition dates were: Auckland Art Gallery/Toi o Tamaki, 9 September-9 December 1999; City Gallery Wellington, May-August 2000; Dunedin Public Art Gallery, November 2000-January 2001.
- ibid. Killeen's statement originally accompanied a 1991 exhibition at Sue Crockford Gallery, Auckland entitled The Politics of Geometry. Pound's use of it as the epigraph of his catalogue essay in Stories we tell ourselves: The Paintings of Richard Killeen seems to me to establish its broader application to all of the work included in the exhibition.
- C. Brooke-Rose, Stories, Theories and Things, Cambridge/New York/Melbourne: Cambridge University Press, 1991, p.5 (my emphasis).
- ‘Resource drawing card’ included in the exhibition The Stories we tell ourselves: The Paintings of Richard Killeen at the Auckland Art Gallery/Toi o Tamaki, 9 September-5 December 1999.
- See for example G. Grass, The Tin Drum, (1959), R. Manheim (trans.), Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1965; G. García Márquez, One Hundred Years of Solitude, (1967), G. Rabassa (trans.), Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1972; M. Kundera, The Unbearable Lightness of Being M.H. Heim (trans.), London/Boston: Faber and Faber, 1984; and S. Rushdie, Midnight's Children, (1981), London: Picador, 1983.
- See most recently: J.L. Borges, “Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius’, Collected Fictions, (1941), A. Hurley (trans.), Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1998.
- “The art of suspense: Rushdie's 1001 (Mid)Nights’, Ariel, vol.18, no.3, 1987, p.64.
- As White suggests: ‘Confronted with a chaos of “facts”, the historian must “choose, sever and carve them up” for narrative purposes. In short, historical facts, originally constituted as data by the historian, must be constituted a second time as elements of a verbal structure which is always written for a specific (manifest or latent) purpose (Tropics of Discourse: Essays in Cultural Criticism, Baltimore/London: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1978, pp.55–56). For the most up to date summaries of this polemic see K. Jenkins, Why History? Ethics and Postmodernity, London/Mew York: Routledge, 1999; and A. Munslow, Deconstructing History, London/New York: Routledge, 1997. See Munslow for the idea that the past and past lives might actually have a narrative structure.
- The somewhat inadequate phrase ‘magic realism’ is being used here in its literary sense only. It was first employed by the art historian Frank Roh to describe works of visual art that were stylistically derived from Neue Sachlichkeit and/or related to La Scuola Metafisica as well as to the paintings of René Magritte.
- C.M. Beadnell with a foreword by R. Killeen, Objects and Images from the Cult of the Hook (Papers of the Hook Museum, vol. 38, no. 2), Auckland: Workshop Press, (1996) 1999.
- According to Borges, he and Bioy-Casares discovered an entry in volume XLVI of The Anglo-American Cyclopedia which ‘seemed to define the borders of Uqbar, but its nebulous points of reference were rivers and craters and mountain chains of the region itself. We read, for example, that the Axa delta and the lowlands of Tsai Khaldun mark the southern boundary, and that wild horses breed on the islands of the delta’ (‘Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius’, Collected Fictions, p.69).
- For this phrase refer to J. Varsava, ‘Calvino's Borgesian Odysseys’, E. Eizenberg (ed.), Borges and His Successors: The Borgesian Impact on Literature and the Arts, Columbia/London: University of Missouri Press, 1990, p.188.
- See for example Calvino's pastiche of subgenres in If on a Winter's Night a Traveller, (1979), W. Weaver (trans.), London: Picador, 1982; and Stanislaw Lem's literary reviews of non-existent books (A Perfect Vacuum, [1971], M. Kandel [trans.], Evanston, Illinois: Northwestern University Press, 1999).
- Bronwyn Fletcher has recently argued that Book of the Hook and its accompanying text draw attention to the problems of ethnological narratives—particularly in the museum. She asserts that: ‘I believe that Killeen's Book of the Hook and the catalogue are highlighting the problems associated with institutional methods of textualisation and display of culturally specific objects and artifacts’ (‘The Book of the Hook: is there a story here?’, in Roger Taberner [ed.], Stories we tell ourselves: The Paintings of Richard Killeen, Papers from a Seminar, Auckland: Auckland Art Gallery/Toi o Tamaki, 1999, p.17).
- M. Pavic, Dictionary of the Khazars, C. Pribicevic-Zoric (trans.), Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1989.
- Surgeon Rear-Admiral Charles Marsh Beadnell, C.B., K.H.P., M.R.C.S. (ENG), Late Fellow of the Chemical Society and of the Royal Anthropological Institute was born in 1872 and died in 1947. His legitimate publications include The Reality or Unreality of Spiritualistic Phenomena: being a Criticism of Dr. W.J. Crawford's Investigations into Levitations and Raps, London: Watts & Co., 1920; A Picture Book of Evolution, London: Watts & Co., 1932; Dictionary of Scientific Terms, London: Watts & Co., 1938; and The Origin of the Kiss and other Scientific Diversions, London: Watts & Co., 1942.
- The Khazars belonged to a confederation of Turcic-speaking tribes that established a commercial empire during the late sixth century AD in what is today south-eastern Russia. While little is known of the Khazars (their language has disappeared in its entirety), they are thought to have adopted Judaism in c.740 AD.
- See Homer, ‘Book Eleven: The Kingdom of the Dead’, The Odyssey, R. Fagles (trans.), Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1996, p.250.
- Killeen's titles attest to his literary interests: Italo's fish painting, 1989 (private collection, Auckland) and Still life with James Joyce, 1994 (collection of Telecom New Zealand, Wellington), to name two examples. (The former proves his familiarity with Calvino).
- Pound, Stories we tell ourselves…, p.11.
- For Borges's fictitious critical assessment of Pierre Menard's oeuvre see ‘Pierre Menard, author of the Quixote’, Collected Fictions, pp.88–95. For ‘Domecq’ see J.L. Borges and A. Bioy-Casares, Six Problems for Don Isidro Parodi, (1942), N.T. di Giovanni (trans.), London: Allen Lane, 1981.
- J. Updike, Bech: A Book, Harmondsworth: Penguin, (1970) 1980. Bech is Updike's invention.
- ibid, p.153.
- See J. Godwin, Athanasius Kircher: A Renaissance Man and the Quest for Lost Knowledge, London: Thames and Hudson, 1976 (chapter V in particular); and F. Bauen, ‘Athanasius Kircher (1602–1680)’, Journal of the History of Ideas, vol. XLIII, 1982, pp.129–34. Interestingly, Kircher appears elsewhere in Killeen's oeuvre, albeit obliquely. The work entitled David Wilson Comes to Town refers to the visit to Auckland of the Director of the Museum of Jurassic Technology, Los Angeles in 1997. The highly idiosyncratic Museum of Jurassic Technology is itself based on principles established by Kircher for the display of varied phenomena.
- The catalogue entry for object number 225 provides a good example of Beadnell/ Killeen's ‘interpretations’: ‘Amulet, hook hand, three finger barb with prominent thumb, bone, 51 mm, Basyrian, c. 320 AD. Probably related to the “hand of blessing”, and the “hand of the Goddess”. The hand has many symbolic meanings, the thumb stood for the child, the middle for the father and the index for the mother’ (Objects and Images from the Cult of the Hook, p.37).
- P. Leech, “The politics of order: Killeen and the aesthetic’, in Tabener (ed.), Stories we tell ourselves: The Paintings of Richard Killeen, Papers from a Seminar, p.3.
- H. Politzer, Franz Kafka: Parable and Paradox, Ithaca, New York: Cornell University Press, 1962, p.22.
- U. Eco, The Search for a Perfect Language, London: Fontana Press, 1997, p.177 (first published in 1993). Thomas A. Sebeok's report is ‘Communication measures to bridge ten millennia. Technical report BMI/ONWI-532’, Columbus, Ohio: Office of Nuclear Waste Isolation, Batelle Memorial Institute, 1984.