UPDATE March 20: Auckland Museum, Auckland Art Gallery and Te Papa in Wellington today announced they are closing their doors from tonight for at least two weeks. Many other galleries and museums remain open for now, but people should check the website before visiting, as the situation is changing fast.

Right now, all public galleries and museums remain open in New Zealand, with the exception of the Bowen House Exhibition space within parliament which closed Monday. But things are changing quickly. In many cases, public programmes have been suspended, including openings. As of this morning, Auckland Museum has suspended school visits, guided tours and other events.

This is all ahead of a government statement today that is expected to announce a further tightening on the size of allowable public gatherings. Already at least two private galleries are closed except by appointment, Mossman in Wellington and Fox Jensen in Auckland. Others like Auckland’s Trish Clark Gallery – a just opened space in Great North Road – are still open, for now. 

That’s not necessarily the case with the galleries and museums overseas. On Wednesday the National Gallery in London closed its doors. It followed the Tate Modern and a range of high profile private commercial dealers in London taking precautionary measures by closing on Monday. So have other major galleries across the world. The Museum of Modern Art in New York closed last Friday, for example. In Melbourne, the National Gallery of Victoria and other public and private galleries and museums closed earlier this week.

In Hobart, millionaire David Walsh’s remarkable Museum of Old and New Art was one of the first to close. 

“What do you do when you’re trying to predict something that can’t be predicted?” wrote Walsh in a statement online. “Panic may be a legitimate option, but as someone who holds a level of responsibility to the staff and the community, that option isn’t open to me. A good remaining option is the Precautionary Principle.”

However, closing is certainly not the case everywhere across the Tasman. In Sydney, the region’s biggest art biennale is in full flight, featuring a range of New Zealand artists across six sites. Major galleries remain open, including the National Gallery of Australia in Canberra which is taking similar precautionary measures to institutions here.

Before we panic, there’s another side to this. In the UK there have been community transmissions cases for some time; there are none here in New Zealand, yet. Galleries and museums are far less busy than supermarkets or retail outlets. As any gallery worker will tell you, it’s only at openings that you’re likely to bump into more than one or two people in a single gallery space. The contemporary white gallery cube is known for the wide open spaces it provides around artworks. In galleries like these, practising social distancing when viewing artwork is already commonplace. 

Public institutions are stressing their vigilance in providing hand sanitiser and other measures, while also being guided by official public health advice. Yesterday, Zoe Black of Auckland public gallery Objectspace said the gallery had no current plans to close, but that extra hygiene procedures have been put in place. Staff are using antibacterial wipes to clean the VR headset of Kereama Taepa’s new work in between uses. The exhibition has a rather apt title: Transmission. 

The great thing about an art gallery, Black points out, is you’re not allowed to touch anything. Spaces like Objectspace are large. Outside of events, there’s rarely any more than 10 people in the gallery at one time. Social distancing is no problem. 

Courtney Johnston, new tumu whakarae/chief executive of Te Papa, confirmed that our largest cultural institution remains open but a range of precautionary measures are now in place. From today, tours, school visits, public programmes and events are cancelled until further notice. Te Papa has also closed its children’s discovery centres and StoryPlace. But the museum, exhibitions and cafes and shops remain open. All have increased cleaning, with hand sanitiser available throughout the building and staff following “all the hygiene guidance,” says Johnston.

“We made these decisions based on proximity – how close people are to each other and for how long – and on whether we could trace people.

“We know Te Papa is an important public space, somewhere to take time out, to socialise, to renew yourself. That’s a role that galleries and museums play around the country and around the world, and we want to play that role as long as it’s sensible for us to do that.”

If New Zealand galleries do close, there’s hope that they will step up to increase the online resources and experiences made available to the public.

The National Gallery of Victoria closed on Monday but as it did it released a virtual tour of its latest temporary exhibition Collecting Comme, a survey of the work of Rei Kawakubo, the designer behind fashion label Comme des Garçons. Virtual doesn’t just mean a video. In the Collecting Comme online tour you get to move about the 3D space as you wish, much like a real-time visit. 

Meanwhile if you’re already in self-isolation are practising social distancing you might like to take a lunchtime wander around the over 500 museums and galleries collections online, from institutions that have partnered with Google to increase access to the arts. Te Papa, Auckland Art Gallery and Auckland Museum are among them. The platform also uses Google’s Street View to allow you to wander around various large gallery spaces around the world.

If anyone is going to initiate some smart digital initiatives, Courtney Johnston is a good contender. Her reputation in this area saw her recently invited to write the foreword for the Routledge book The Digital Future of Museums: Conversations and Provocations, published last month

“Our message to would-be visitors is if you’re feeling well, come on in, we’d love to see you,” says Johnston. “If you’re feeling unwell then stay home – and check out some of our incredible online content.

“The culture sector has so much to offer people, whether you’re in the building or stuck on your couch, and we’ve been inspired by some of the amazing offerings from our colleagues internationally.”

Sumptuous exhibition Sapphic Fragments at the Hocken Gallery, Dunedin is the result of painter Imogen Taylor’s year as Frances Hodgkins Fellow at the University of Otago, bringing her work on canvas and walls into conversation with Hodgkins, Sappho and other women artists to explore pleasure in abstraction. It reminds us, writes Bridie Lonie, that today’s comfort with queer pleasure has been hard-won  

Colourful and placed on colour, Sapphic Fragments comprises a large wall-work on a green wall, acrylic abstracts on skewed rectangles of hessian, and formalist watercolours. From the inner side of the wings that mask the entries to the side galleries, Frances Hodgkins’s ‘Double Portrait’ (1922-3) and works by Dorothy Kate Richmond and Lois White are brought into play with Taylor’s contemporary understandings of queer pleasure, and in particular, women’s love for women.

The central room is dominated by long wall-work ‘Double Portrait, Screw Thread’, a collaboration between Taylor and her partner the architect Susan Hillery. Hodgkins’s ‘Double Portrait’ shows two women seated slightly apart, introspective but intense, the space between them as alive as their thoughtfulness. In contrast, Taylor and Hillery’s interlocking twin spirals are tilted in pink, green and a hyacinth-purple on a grass-green wall, always in motion and always together. 

In Taylor’s nine paintings, minor representational effects reinforce deliberate references to pleasure.  These bright hessian paintings are thick and shiny, broadly brushed and layered. They reject precision. Their plastic, dimpled surfaces and asymmetrical compositions press against the paintings’ edges, or crowd toward corners challenging the rectilinear purities of artists working with similar material in the past. 

In the accompanying catalogue and in the wall text the twisting and destabilizing of rectilinear forms here is suggested as a queering of abstraction. Yet the exhibition’s colours are as significant as the forms, as is the focus of the exhibition on pleasure. Hodgkin’s portrayal of caution and introspection reminds us that today’s comfort with a portrayal of pleasure was hard-won.  

Taylor has drawn on Greek poet Sappho for the curation, the paintings’ colours, and the exhibition’s sensibility. Sappho uses “grass green” in her poetry for the dizzying sense of looking at a loved one; hyacinths occur in both fearful and pleasurable contexts; and bodies turn and tremble. The spaces of the lesbian poet’s images of desire are never still and always at odds with the status quo.  

The right hand gallery’s witnesses are Hannah Richie and Jane Saunders, the subjects of Frances Hodgkins’s  ‘Double Portrait’. Their eyes consider Taylor’s almost monotonal ‘Another word for abyss’ (2019) with its tessellated niches of saturated crimson, orange, purple and turquoise. 

The left-hand gallery, also red, is introduced to us by Dorothy Kate Richmond’s warm still-life, ‘Roses with Rainbow Scarf’ (1930). This faces twenty formal meditations, from a year of daily drawings by Taylor as Hodgkins fellow. Calm alternations and sprung rhythms of triangle, semi-circle, arc and bioforms have resonances with 20th century French geometric abstract painter Sonia Terk’s brushed arcs, Russian abstractionist Wassily Kandinsky’s symbolic geometries and the more decorative French abstraction of the 1950s. 

Tucked into the darkest corner, safe from the light, Auckland mid-century symbolist A. Lois White’s ‘Trio’ (c.1930) performs tight rhythms of dance, their formal structures echoed in Taylor’s sequence. 

Sapphic Fragments is the result of Taylor’s year-long exploration of queer theory and queer pleasure considered in the light of the works and intentions of women modernist painters.  Its catalogue makes the exhibition’s intentions very clear. Writer Joanne Drayton describes Hodgkins’s experiences of both the “push-pull” between heterosexuality and homosexuality and between representation and abstraction,  while Milly Mitchell-Anyon argues that a parallelogram “might be considered an inherently queer structure, formed by these paths of desire”. Cellphone images of fragments of domestic and studio life reinforce the exhibition’s argument that art, daily life and desire cannot be separated. 

Abstraction has generally required the rejection of anything remotely resembling or drawing on the world outside the picture frame. This rejection of representation is often positioned as an indicator of intellectual purity, ethical superiority and political exclusivity. For feminist painters in the 1980s, abstraction meant playing what was on the whole a male game. In the 1990s and early 2000s, concerns with art’s complicity in the ideological structures of neoliberalism had a similarly dampening impact on art’s licence to deliver sensual pleasure, both in its making and in its reception. Taylor’s work by contrast is successful in being able to absorb representational readings that subvert abstraction’s iconoclasm while also embracing the sensual freedom of abstraction.

In an exhibition floor talk, Taylor stated that her original impulse was to gather the histories of earlier women artists into today’s queer histories, until she realised that today’s identity politics don’t quite work retrospectively.  For instance, contemporary British novelist Nicola Upson, in her recreations of lesbian relationships of the 1920s, describes the anxiety experienced by women whose initial liberation from the necessity to marry – in the face of the deaths of their prospective partners in the trenches – was followed by an uncomfortable focus on what had previously been a largely unquestioned opportunity for and habit of closeness. A. Lois White’s own feelings are undocumented as far as we know but, as in ‘Trio’, she often used rhythmic and metaphorical means to show women engaging with women. 

D.K Richmond and Frances Hodgkins wrote to one another in terms of endearment that suggest more explicit but perhaps anachronistic readings today, yet the women were, undeniably, very close. But Hodgkins’s solitary intellectual pleasure was generations away from the comfort that, for the moment, and only for some is afforded in a space today for queer sexuality. 

It’s a comfort that is still not secure and that warrants the saturated colours and delicate linear explorations of this celebration. 

Sapphic Fragments,  Imogen Taylor Hocken Collections, Dunedin until 28 March