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Spinoff reviews road art

SocietyJune 1, 2018

The Spinoff reviews New Zealand #62: The giant yellow penises of Rodney

Spinoff reviews road art

We review the entire country and culture of New Zealand, one thing at a time. Today: the giant penises painted on potholes in Rodney District by Geoff Upson. Reviewed by Toby Morris 

The greatest art is anger. At least, that’s what’s Auckland artist Geoff Upson suggests in his bold new work “Giant Penises highlight potholes on Kahikatea Flat Rd, near Waitoki in Rodney District” (2018, spray paint on asphalt). Frustrated at a lack of council action over potholes near his house, Upson has responded with a masterwork that not only highlights, quite literally, the pothole issue, but also serves as a brutal axe attack to the nation’s feverish fixation with asserting our dominance over the natural landscape with the hollow and endless pursuit building of new roads.

Upson has created giant yellow phalluses of national significance. We’re all giant cocks on a road to nowhere. Art is action, art is anger.

Indeed, this is not art as beauty. The form and execution are distorted, aggressive and mutated. Upson eschews bourgeois concerns of pleasant realism in favour of a brash and confrontational nouveau-naive scrawl. The phalluses are grotesquely long, 20 metres each, in a confrontational shade of industrial flouro yellow that suggests and inverts working class industrial class structures.

Clockwise from bottom: The giant yellow penis; a truck driving alongside the giant yellow penis; Geoff Upson, who painted the giant yellow penis. Image: Upsons’s Facebook

To the viewer driving by they’re are placed upside, testicles above the shaft – a bold inversion of the traditional conceptions of masculine status quo. The testicles themselves are naive, simplistic, evoking crude cartoon eyes drawn drunk, guilty and ashamed. They’re hairless and innocent but, echoing the shafts themselves, they’re concurrently bloated and virile, engorged and horrific; exaggerated, vain and overblown; a searing indictment of the nation’s roading fever dream.

The masterstroke forever, is the pink. Each individual pothole is highlighted in chemical burn pink, like pustulent weeping sores, each broken blight both celebrated and shamed. The potholes, Upson seems to suggest, are swollen infected sores on New Zealand’s fragile and distorted ego.

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Not since Picasso’s Guernica (1937) have we seen such a pure expression of rage and fear and vulnerability. A crude howl at a cruel world. Bravo, Geoff Upson. Bravo.

VERDICT: A searing incision into the heart of the nation’s ego.

GOOD OR BAD: Incredible.

Keep going!
Phil Twyford (Getty Images) / Construction starts on the Kiwibuild project Photo: RNZ/ Sophia Duckor-Jone
Phil Twyford (Getty Images) / Construction starts on the Kiwibuild project Photo: RNZ/ Sophia Duckor-Jone

SocietyJune 1, 2018

Labour’s Kiwibuild project: talking big, thinking small

Guest writer
Phil Twyford (Getty Images) / Construction starts on the Kiwibuild project Photo: RNZ/ Sophia Duckor-Jone
Phil Twyford (Getty Images) / Construction starts on the Kiwibuild project Photo: RNZ/ Sophia Duckor-Jone

Labour’s inexplicable timidity risks turning the much-vaunted KiwiBuild policy into a damp squib, argues Guyon Espiner for RNZ.

The most ambitious interventionist economic plan pursued by a New Zealand government was named after a race.

Think Big won the Melbourne Cup twice in the mid-1970s, making quite an impression on Allan Highet, a long forgotten minister of racing in Rob Muldoon’s government.

When Highet addressed the 1977 National Party conference he used the name Think Big to describe the large scale industrial projects to be bankrolled by the government.

Now that might seem relevant only to your next pub quiz outing or Trivial Pursuit game but of course history casts a long shadow.

Many of the Think Big power and energy assets, like the Clyde Dam, are still with us today. But so are the cautionary tales of a government borrowing too heavily and running up huge external deficits, bringing us to the brink of ruin.

So now we Think Small. Even Labour governments do this, despite claiming to be interventionist and hands on. They have to. Well, they have decided they have to. This government has set itself a rule of having debt at no more than 20 percent of GDP.

That’s their call. The problem comes when you Talk Big but Think Small. Which leads us to KiwiBuild.

This week the Salvation Army joined a growing and diverse list of groups with strong concerns about the policy, which promised 100,000 affordable homes over a decade.

Speaking on Morning Report yesterday, the Salvation Army’s Alan Johnson said the price cap of $650,000 for a three bedroom KiwiBuild home in Auckland could not be described as affordable.

“If this is as good as it gets then what is the point of doing the programme?”

I put a similar question to Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern a few weeks back.

If the home costs $650,000 and requires a 20 percent deposit of $130,000 then does it count as affordable? She conceded that for “too many people” it would not be.

“People are saying we may fail. I would rather try than do nothing at all,” she said.

But why isn’t the alternative actually to do more rather than to do nothing? The government can borrow at under 3 percent and, unlike in Muldoon’s Think Big days, its books are the envy of the world.

National refused to call it a housing crisis. That didn’t make it go away. Labour is happy to call it a housing crisis but it doesn’t seem to want to act like it is a crisis.

What was sold as a massive, state-driven housing programme has morphed into one where houses that were being built by developers will be underwritten or purchased as KiwiBuild houses.

Of course there will be new KiwiBuild houses as well but one of the four main channels for delivering the policy is now the ‘Buying off the Plans’ initiative.

Now, I know Housing Minister Phil Twyford is trying. Just a month ago he issued a press release saying he was “incredibly proud” that the first KiwiBuild homes were under construction. He said the 18 houses in a South Auckland development would be ready by August.

But look at the scale of the problem. According to the Ministry of Building, Innovation and Employment, New Zealand is about 71,000 homes short. If, on top of that, you are bringing in 70,000 new people into the country every year then how does 10,000 KiwiBuild houses a year cut it?

I wonder what Highet, the forgotten minister of racing – or indeed Muldoon himself – would think of a Labour government that is too worried about its debt profile to borrow for housing.

Ironically, the last call for big intervention on housing came from the political right too. John Palino’s second unsuccessful tilt at the Auckland mayoralty included an idea for a satellite city in South Auckland.

It was laughed off as Palinoville and buried with his mayoral aspirations. Or was it? The idea surfaced again late last year with Infrastructure New Zealand talking about a satellite city just north of Pukekohe.

Media reported interest from Auckland Mayor Phil Goff and from Mr Twyford, although nothing seemed to come of that.

I haven’t seen serious analysis on whether this is a viable plan. But it’s an example of the scale of the thinking required to solve the problem.

The welcome sign is obvious: Welcome to Philville: We Think Big.

Society