How nothing has changed since Robert Leonard wrote the essay Hello Darkness: New Zealand Gothic for publication in the Spring issue of Art and Australia in 2008. Though history is never meant to repeat, it seems, in actuality, it does just that. 

Spring 2008 was the last time we had the National Party as an incoming government. It marked the first year of what would be an almost decade-long leadership, a result of misplaced hope for salvation from the Global Financial Crisis, the event that swallowed the year whole. It was the year that unfollow, Bitcoin, stick and poke, Me Too and TERF all entered an official vernacular. A generally downtrodden mood prevailed. In retrospect, that year set the tone more than we could have known. This is to say that it is difficult to hold Leonard’s text at a distance, because the conditions in which it was written do not appear so dissimilar to those of our present moment. 

Leonard figured the New Zealand Gothic as a trashy re-run of our art history so far, with Ronnie van Hout’s 1992 photographic series ‘Return of The Living Dead’ as its pilot episode. Leonard wrote, “satirising the idea of the New Zealand landscape as a haunted space, a place of unfinished business, van Hout at once buried McCahon and revealed a latent Gothic dimension in his work. The show heralded a Gothic turn in New Zealand art.” This conception of the New Zealand Gothic forced an ironic undertone on the genre. Perhaps Hello Darkness was not searching for a Gothic history, but rather, a lineage for another dark beast—irony—that bubbled at the surface of the discourse. This had the effect of short-circuiting the second current that Leonard perceived in the New Zealand Gothic, that of biculturalism. Instead of viewing the Gothic as seriously grappling with the enduring consequences of colonisation, a roll call of art in Aotearoa was filtered through 90s-TV wasteland. The Gothic was outlined as an escape route from all the problems we didn’t really want to face—an ignorant avoidance of pressing bicultural questions. 

Yet also, how things have changed. The Gothic heartland, Christchurch, the punting-on-the-Avon, tightly-buttoned colonial-romancer Garden City that Leonard described was irreversibly altered by the initial 2010 earthquake and the subsequent and worse aftershock in 2011. Suddenly, ruins were no longer the domain of Walpole’s “creepy castles,” as Leonard put it, but a very real part of the population’s daily visual intake. Hello Darkness proposed that affliction and suffering become status symbols in the Gothic; it was a daydream response to the supposed banality of Aotearoa and particularly Christchurch. The seismic unravelling of the city spawned a renewed critical understanding of the New Zealand Gothic that did not needlessly glorify danger or sickness, and was not derivative of other cultures, nor sardonic, but reinscribed abandoned residential areas and derelict buildings with a fervent belief that they could be the setting for something better. After fifteen years then, the lethargic nineties cynicism of the New Zealand Gothic has dissolved—now, it might be a salve for such irony.