As a schoolboy in 1970 I was unaware of the opening of the Govett-Brewster Art Gallery with the landmark immersive installation Real Time by Leon Narbey. Encompassing the entire gallery, the kinetic light-and-sound environment invited audience interaction and ran defiantly against the grain of the offerings of other galleries in Aotearoa and, not least, expectations for the launch of a new regional gallery. In the ensuing years, that moment, and in particular the policies and programmes implemented by the gallery’s maverick inaugural director John Maynard in Taranaki and Tāmaki Makaurau, would come to be decisively influential for my later work as an artist, curator and director.

It wasn’t until the mid-1970s, after Maynard had left the Govett-Brewster, that I became aware of him, primarily through visiting exhibitions he organised as Exhibitions Officer at Auckland Art Gallery. There he continued the direction he had set at the Govett-Brewster by launching in 1975 the Auckland City Art Gallery’s famed ‘Project Programmes’, focused on post-object art. Projects he presented included one by Jim Allen, who was championing radical new art practices at the Elam School of Fine Arts, and whose ground-breaking work New Zealand Environment No. 5 (1969) Maynard had acquired for the Govett-Brewster in 1970. 

With the opening of the Govett-Brewster, Maynard also set in place an engagement with the Pacific Rim, a policy that eschewed the dominant regionalist and nationalist focus of galleries in Aotearoa and one that was remarkably prescient given much later initiatives such as the Asia Pacific Triennial. His pursuit of a Pacific dialogue continued at the Auckland City Art Gallery, where he organised the Pan Pacific Biennale in 1976, focused on experimental camera-based work and featuring artists from New Zealand, Australia, the USA and Japan. 

By 1990, I was working as a curator and making my first research trips to the US and Europe. While many aspects of these trips were inspiring, the most curatorially instrumental experiences for me were the visits I made to spaces renowned internationally for breaking and shaping new directions in contemporary art. It struck me that the size and resources of many of these spaces and, not least, the trajectories of their histories, had parallels in Aotearoa. Kunsthalle Düsseldorf was a case in point. No bigger than the Govett-Brewster, the gallery has claimed an outsized position in the history of twentieth-century art, particularly for the ‘Prospect’ exhibition series, presented between 1968 and 1976. Distinct from the prevailing national focus of German museums, these exhibitions embraced developing international positions in conceptual art, minimalism, performance and land art, and paved the way for their wider exposure in Europe and beyond.

The temporal span of those exhibitions coincided almost exactly with the period in which Maynard was championing the same positions in Aotearoa. When, in 1998, I took up the position of Director of the Govett-Brewster, that insight fuelled my determination to honour the gallery as an international exemplar of what is possible. In A Film of Real Time (1971), Leon Narbey preceded mesmerising footage of Real Time with jump cuts of guests assembled outdoors at the gallery opening, in their floral frocks and shorts, glasses of beer in hand. The jarring contrast symbolises the seismic impact of the gallery opening in the turn away from the prevailing settler mentality in art in Aotearoa and toward ushering in the contemporary.