Life, Sometime After the Horse was Harnessed
Chapters one & two by Stephanie Beth 1
A Curator slipped a book cover referencing my first film into a published books cabinet in 2018 that I saw at Auckland Art Gallery. I had offered Wellington curators a graphic image twenty-five years before for an art exhibition cover - the one in black and white on the right. It was for City Gallery, Wellington in 1993. The event there was Alter Image. Feminism and Representation in New Zealand Art 1973-1993. So, here it is ambiguously in a basement room in a book cabinet for a while. Also, In a vitrine was a set of interviews with artists from 1980 by Lita Barry. There there was an interview with me about what I was doing. I had produced two documentary films. I was filming video weddings at the time. I pick up on this gallery visit further into this chapter.
CHAPTER ONE. PART ONE: mingling in the eco sphere

Ethics are the Aesthetics of the Future. 1 Alfonso Cuaron. 2008 *

 While strolling Constitution Square before heading off to dinner in Athens in the Plaka district I was approached directly by a worried man. He asked, "Would you say that our current progress is satisfactory?" It was 1973. I recognized this as the men’s anxiety. Greece was in bad financial shape. With no work there can be no life to give. Livelihood is essential for both love and life. As to the management of pathways to protect the vulnerable, this is the gesture we are taught. To work and to give.
*Also attributed to the character Godard wrote, for Le Petit Soldat, (1960) script - released 1963. Bruno.Godard was, at the time, engaged in reading works by Husserl, Mann, and Koestler. (Richard Brody, p. 95, 2008)
Hydra Harbour foreshore. Daily fisherman ritual in front of our Hotel. 1973. Photograph by Stephanie Beth.
It wasn’t necessarily those warm nights in Athens that had prompted me. However, after three weeks in the Aegean, in 1973, the Yom Kippur war in Israel broke out and time and history somehow seeped into my sinews. Within weeks David and I headed home. After four years on the road, we were each ready to get onto the next phase. For me it was back to school to train to become a practitioner. Taking steps to ask questions had become a necessary drive.
PERFORMANCE.
This book cover was displayed on an exhibition table. This work is authored by Rosa Lee Goldberg, who is an art historian, critic, and curator. The 1979 edition. Adam Art Gallery. Wellington. April. 2023. 2 *
*Goldberg is Clinical Associate Professor of Arts Administration at New York University.
Copy of a photo of the agora on the island of Hydra. It is in a book by Lawrence Durrell. The Greek Islands. 1978
David (on the left). with traveller friends. The swimming rock. Hydra. 1973
See more stills from Hydra. 1973 by Stephanie. On David Story
David gave me books. One on Brecht, one by de Beauvoir and one by Nin. David adorned his bookshelf. He fondly retains one or two well-travelled novels and short stories by Henry Miller, Hemingway and Durrell’s quartet as his language palette and style. David had already graduated University and experienced life abroad. Home had left him when his father died. In 1968 I was launching into a decade of wandering. After marrying in 1969 and committing to lifelong partnership, my explorations shifted to expanding my mind through creative pursuits not unlike crochet or applique, in finding mental grounding. I incorporated visual elements, dynamic motion, and audio components into my amalgamation. The practice of filmmaking turned out to be, for me, an anchoring. 1970
 I knew that when I travelled, I would begin to catch up on a perspective of the current active, political and economic world. Long travel does this. It is not a holiday. It tends to foster epiphanies. I know that events in these times were the outcome of thoughts, actions and learnings in real situations. These first two chapters are fragments of my life tale where I reference experiences that were part of the kindling for the filmmaking fire. The fire came from the gift of my childhood, the lack of impediments along the way and the energy that I contained with which to forge some ideas. In 1980 I produced and directed a documentary exploring Improvisation performance in Auckland with a group of women with a performance facilitator. The film was IN JOY (1980). I spotted the facilitator, Maggie Eyre, the person who I asked to work with me, as a firebrand of love and life. A compact planning and structure made with Maggie affirmed my confidence that we would put together an opportunity for several individual women to experience a group amateur workshop over four days that aimed to give suggestions for funny insights. It would be a great show. The film was a riveting success, standing out for its close attention to detail and processes. We screened the doco to a thrilled audience. 2025 In 2025 I was invited to Auckland University’s Gus Fisher Art Gallery: in partnership with CIRCUIT.org.nz forty five years later, to show the IN JOY film again. The piece was chosen to conclude a two-week exhibition showcasing videos produced by international women utilizing video cameras. The exhibition was titled ‘Having it all, all.’ 3 The videos were videos from the 1980s except for two in film, mine and Yoko Ono’s in 16mm. The videos originated from Canada, the United States, Turkey, France/USA, Japan, Switzerland, USA and Cuba. The collection’s ‘banner’ showcased examples of activism and identity politics from Second Wave Feminism. Historical awareness that generate umbrage, continue to challenge the gap, any gap too extreme in power politics, regardless of nature. It is the investigations of the malpractice of power that feeds most of our concerns in any society. Theatre had a role, an ancient role in my film, to have worked with implications of communication detail. I sensed I had had it all. My life was about the loving and protected world of my family. A great granddaughter of three women who signed the petition for Women’s Suffrage in 1893 in New Zealand, I was a politically well cushioned female in the mainstream. When I was first approached and then was commissioned to make a film about women in society, it gave me student wings to address issues that could run amok. My first film, when a student, I titled, I Want to be Joan (1977). I had been commissioned work to be political about misogyny within the patriarchy and to claim attention for the sex of self. The technique for doing so was to be forthwith. Three years after that film at age thirty-two, I created IN JOY effortlessly. The student documentary project in 1977 emerged out of interviews I conducted at the 1977 Women’s Convention in Christchurch. IN JOY was made in a medium that's expensive - 16mm film negative. I directed my attention to getting the film offshore to three Festivals and four times in New Zealand. The audiences were enthralled, firstly on Queen Street at the Civic Wintergarden. When we SOLD OUT the repeat screening, queues strung down the road past Wellesley Street to Derby Street. Maggie took the film to America. It was also taken to Cannes. Short films were not getting much leverage then. The Film Commission took a trip to NFT London, and the film was shown in a packaged set in 1992. Maggie told her second New Zealand audience, in September 2025, that she received great ovations at Harvard and at Waikato University. The compliments felt wonderful.
 I needed to borrow a large lump of money to make IN JOY. My confidence had been triggered by the aftermath of Film No 1, by what I learned and felt while I travelled the country as a distributor. The 29 minutes long doco, titled I Want to be Joan (1977) was aided by a couple of grants an numerous volunteer crew member. The launch was in the Christchurch Town Hall James Hay Theatre.4 The evening was dressed in a Steinway pianoforte performance first, then for the second half of the evening, the film. My tour, Thundering Through New Zealand 1978/79.
By the mid 1980s I had more pressing personal needs. After IN JOY, I took a break from working inf for more than twenty years. I began filming again when I saw that our son was moving into the digital artist generation. I waited and waited for the accelerating networked world and then went abroad to America in 2009 to see how that family of creatives was faring.ated out male from female for this film to concentrate upon a culture of the female ‘voice’. I wasn’t yet into debt from Real Estate or parenthood, so it was a great time to go full on with Art. Societal change was walking along beside me. I could briefly explore tropes. I was determined to make a second film quickly that harnessed imagery of women in collective engagement. This was my instinct; to make and share ideas about mental health. I knew about images of the visual world in traditions and in performance with gestures in mime specifically. Correctives of gesture would easily make an impression if I secured enough real money to produce an idea. 1980 was a different culturally defining year. Aspiring local film directors were going to work offshore or else go into the advertising industry. Only a few were creating original fiction. I knew I was on a ‘focused path ‘. My subject, a mime and performance facilitator guiding a classroom of women, Maggie Eyre, went on to have a stellar career in the commercial sector, supporting people to find their ‘voice’.5 Commercial cinema had just started to boom. By the early 1990s American blockbuster films would be a next generation’s mainstream cultural fare.
By the mid 1980s I had more pressing personal needs. After IN JOY, I took a break from working in film for more than twenty years. I began filming again when I saw that our son was moving into the digital artist generation. I waited and waited for the accelerating networked world and then went abroad to America in 2009 to see how that family of creatives was faring.
*Sleigh, a producer for CIRCUIT.org.nz ( Listen on Soundcloud from correctives.co.nz/reviews)
Film No 3 US AND THE GAME INDUSTRY(2014)
In process during 2008- 2012. Released first in Los Angeles in 2013, my third film touched upon the activities of artists, designers, musical composers, arrangers, engineers, and directors publishing and being dynamically published on computers. These participants enjoyed videogames. Some were working within serious budgets of millions of dollars. These people were a new ‘few’. This mass would swell. It would go down in history that later there was an independent game developer bubble. Deciding to get in and look around early, I wished to encounter small teams at work, or, first breakaways of staff from very large teams, some of whom had worked for years on one game. There were suddenly opportunities to meet with ‘alt view ‘ due to the lesser overheads of smaller teams, even for ideas by single individuals. Years of work go into this Artform. If we equate my approach to my piece of research and say I approached my new topic like Third Cinema; my view was to ascertain degrees of artistry at scale for developers keen to explore games with more adult curiosity. I had a tiny budget but huge interest. I felt that I could produce some of my impressions. Attitude towards production indicated a world newly coerced by the blooming of mathematics; a world of humans intrigued by the pull of computer technology at a time when engineering was compounding an ever-expanding range of design tools. There was applied physics in play (Newton’s Law of Motion) and studies of forces and dynamics with objects. As to literature, what is a test of prowess for fiction and illusions? There was also the genre factor. What about sadness or humour? I went to California to have a look, as a judicious new kid on the block. When I attended the first GDC (Game Developers Convention) in San Francisco, in 2009, the popular presentation of a few Swedes and Finns that I met was that they loved to ‘throw down the gauntlet ‘for speed challenges in programming. There had been Lovelace and Turing.6, 7 How could coding language be a thrill? Where in the swirl of new satellite communications was the category of artificial intelligence going to take us all? How was the ‘human’ per say, finding new human relations in the networked universe and what, otherwise, were the benefits of skilled play?
A small body of young developers at a production house thatgamecompany, were working with’ Flow ‘as theory. Welcome to ‘Flow’ in games (Mihály Csíkszentmihályi (2009). 8 Jenova Chen completed a Master of Fine Arts Degree at USC with an investigatory thesis. The key, as Chen knew, with English as a second language, was to work with ideas about ‘solace’ or ‘seeker’ with a new game in development: JOURNEY. 9 I investigated and then telephoned Jenova to arrange a meeting with him before I left New Zealand. Here I had a hunch of a masterpiece of work with the non-verbal. I selected the team working for him as my focus for US AND THE GAME INDUSTRY (2013) ( correctives.co.nz/Documentary Reviews) I met and then spent a few days with designer Richard Lemarchand who was really excited to be considering advances in game narrative in design. Jason Rohrer was already an attraction to me. He had executed one short game of repute. This was Passage (2007). Musical composition was, in my awareness, another key drive. By 2010, once I became aware of steps in production processes, I made a booking to meet with Austin Wintory at his studio in Burbank for when he was recording Tina Goa playing cello. He had called her in to record the opening chords of JOURNEY, the game in production for thatgamecompany. It was a beautiful moment to film this. It was achieved in a ‘first take'.
Austin Wintory drops in for a cup of tea to Richard Lemarchand, game designer, educator and author Richard has just had a chat with Jason Rohrer. Los Angeles. Photograph by Stephanie Beth. 2010
Austin Wintory is enamored with composing music for videogames. He was in a wonderful position salary for three years composing the videogame JOURNEY as it evolved with the programmers and artists for SONY Entertainment America. Wintory, busy and enthralled, composed a special decade later celebration with the London Symphony Orchestra for the success of the thatgamecompany videogame, as this game became an enormous hit.10 Careers for all of the participants in this Documentary continued in salutary careers. Lemarchand, for example, put out a best practice game design book in 2021 that is touted as a treasure for all. 11 It was enjoyable for me to look on as a participant observer of play over those years. Getting underway in America, I saw to viit and peak with key writiers and players in the game field- to name a few; Simon Carless, Tracey Fullerton and Ian Bogost.
Photographs Composer Austin Wintory's Studio. Burbank. Tina Guao gets ready to play the opening theme of Journey for recording. WRAP PARTY. in Santa Monica . US AND THE GAME INDUSTRY (2013) c 2012. Location. People view a player play JOURNEY for the first time. At the home of assistant Professor Tracy Fullerton, University of Southern California. 12
AMTRAK. Holiday to Davis. California. Photograph by Stephanie Beth. 2016
To TRAVEL
With travelling I had vivid and pulsing experiences in the international scene. I got into a productive space ingesting variety and wanted to ask many penetrating questions. I was born 1948. David was born in 1944. I lived on a sheep farm Estate. I grew up in a basin of primary produce export to Britain. David's father was employed by an American company. We both grew up in the post-war golden era. We were the first generation post the Atomic Bomb. As we travelled, the war in Vietnam was raging. Furthermore, we travelled during the political scandal of Watergate. I had no conversations about Bretton Woods as a child. I knew, though, by my twenties, that Nixon had unpegged the dollar from gold.
I had just enough savings in 1970 to go travelling. I topped up costs with waitressing and some Infant teaching in London, Australia and Canada. I was living out what the author Simon de Beauvoir had written about autonomy for the individual. What I am putting to purpose now is some writing that elucidates my sense of how culture has flares of expression and how some traditions as well as experimentations affect thinking and actions in life. Also, a person needs to know what the State is thinking; that any set of precepts for the individual, is ‘work in action’ and that citizens are affected by relations of commerce.
To use the motif of ‘migrant story’ fits well with my curiosity about life as a livelihood subject, for it is ideas themselves that move with transportations. It is through this modelling i.e. reading, discussing and sharing that we humans ascertain the function of human roles, activities and relationships of self in relation to others. We find ways to ‘become’ from either long histories or even shorter time spans.
My past work has been associated with Second Wave Feminism. The label attached itself easily. To invite the further balancing of what we in society have become, is to see how crucial it always is to research, monitor, test and debate ideas. What is a contemporary view of humans within the spectrum of ‘pain and pleasure’ in life here, there and over there? * Consequently, what are relationships for: people and relationships on our life spectrum? In the process of writing, I recognize that I have lived a chosen lifestyle, not a professional career. I have worked some moments with film as Artform. What are some of the takeaways and memories and what for a ‘generalist,’ is a life overview? Is the crux of all questions due to being in a continuum?

*An old Bentham clause. One that Goethe rather mostly dealt with as ‘Light and Dark', whilst Christopher Marlow, for example, took another tack. (Note. Goethe took until he was well past his 80’s to attempt a completion of” Faustus”. (Appendix iv)

In the late 1970’s in the Arts scene several artists left the ‘Art Wall’ and moved to interactivity, installations and mixed media. By instinct there was always line drawing, painting, etching, moulding and sound. Times were tough, though, since the machine of ‘progress’ had harnessed itself to the fossil energy industry and we were all made to Kow Tow. Headiness had gone ‘Pop’. The question though had to be by what forces? One commercial think tank summarized, ‘The 1980s was a decade of neon colours, big hair and cultural shifts—but behind the pop culture glamour, women still faced many social, economic, and legal barriers. Progress had been made, however. Since the feminist movements of the 1960s and ’70s, several outdated rules and expectations have continued to hold women back. From work and motherhood to fashion and financial freedom, certain unspoken “rules” defined what it meant to be a woman—and not often in empowering ways. 13 ( google a range of summaries)
I trained in primary education. In the late 1960’s my educational route had been when ninteen, to consider styles by which to teach children in the subject called Art. Such was my specialty that I had worked with theorists, Itten, Piaget, Illich, Erikson and more. My film IN JOY (1980)slipped into the repertoire by being about a young facilitator tumbling happily with her ‘freedom’ undampened - young enough and in carte blanche style. I had a conversation with a woman two decades younger than me the other day who saw this 1980 film in 2025. Her sense of the times for women in the 1970s was that women did support each other, did gain from Feminist focus, that that film was magical and reminds us that there is a world lost in harder, isolating realities for many people now. What to do? One of the traditions of newer modifications of Performance has been not to participate in bombast. Clarity. Honesty. Those traits have been a goal.
PERFORMANCE
Rosa Lee Goldberg wrote about exploration. This curator, based in New York, assembled biennales called PERFORMER that got people past a very curious introversion that had “led people to cut themselves, drop blood” (in the 1970’s.) to extremes. Goldberg’s research looked at the start of the 20th Century. The Futurists, 14 Picabia,15 dance at the Bauhaus.16 By the 1990s she was keen to create sit down audience spaces for people who used several skills with which to design live performance. She started with the thought of Cindy Sherman appearing at parties in dress up. She began commissioning artists, e.g. an Iranian woman who sang, but had never been allowed to sing to an audience. Lee said of her book, by then in several translations, at the launch of a fresh translation, this time translation of Performer into Russian, in 2014, the performer in art is the , "avant-garde's avant-garde" ( Appendix Chapter 1.A).

Art and Theory. Notes.Yvonne Rainer.17 (80 in 2013) Different audiences. Different edges. - Isaac Julian.18 (African diaspora)- Strong content. Marvel.- What makes any work radical? - Go back to the Russian constructivists.19
Marina Abromovitch would carry on with the power of articulations of the ‘body’ later in history via her knowledge of predecessors.20 I picked up on Kembra Pfahler, for example, self-made, just lately, who still performs on a shoestring. As well as being a figure in New York, she appeared in The Gentlewoman, a London magazine in 2024.21 Our lives bear out as performances. From within families, awareness of the psychology of these stir. I knew that I had to move past ‘Art Grant systems’, so I borrowed 10K to make my second film; a personal investment, so that, free of national obligation, I would make a film that I felt like making. I produced my third in 2013. I moderately covered the financial equation with the viability and the reality of pre-sales for that one. Performance?! Had I watched players of videogames? Yes. More later.
Hydra foreshore directly in from of our hotel for three weeks. At this room we heard of the Yom Kipper war launched October 6. Photograph by Stephanie Beth. 1973
THE VALUE OF TRAVEL
Until I read Geronimo and Dalziel’s book, ‘Half the Perfect World ‘in 2019, I didn’t know it had been a thing to jump into the sea at Hydra fully clothed.22 The delirium struck. After the ferry from Athens edged us into the small harbour we waited until dark, squealing with the thrill of being on an island famous for not having motorcars. Three of us took to the night sea nude. The fourth was carrying our clothing. We came out at the other end of the agora near a booming “ritzy'' nightclub. I found out from David about his important six weeks on his own in Hydra five years earlier. Canadians had had something of an edge there, especially due to minstrels and writing bohemians.
The Australian writer/journalist George Johnstone, his journalist wife Charmian Clift, painter Sidney Nolan and Canadian poet/singer Leonard Cohen, romantically owned some Greek earth on Hydra. were notables. We lived in Austria in the summer of 1973 with an artist Hilde Goldschmidt, with whom we had lived for ten weeks in the winter of 1970/71. David and I then lived on Hydra for a month at the end of summer 1973. Suddenly, one morning, we dramatically heard two Israeli female soldiers at 5.00am, rush and leave for war (our hotel rooms were just above these donkeys) Events of conflicts in societies were sending David and I home. We needed to find our own ways to settle into our expression in work and good will. Two weeks later we were in London and then packing to go home to New Zealand. As closing, we had time though, to attend a wonderful art exhibition in the Lake District. Then we headed home.


‘At 50 a lot of you is what you have read between say 16 and 35’. Jacqueline Fahey*
*There are two Fahey paintings as stills in my documentary I WANT TO BE jOAN.(1977) . One was Christine in the Panty. 1971 23 The images were photographed on an early English 16mm Neilson Hordell Animation stand.
It had come to me with clarity when I haunted Art Galleries in my youth on visits to Auckland, specifically to the Barry Lett Gallery in 1966/67, that Art shown internationally or locally basically told either individualized or ‘ collective’ ideas.23 I could see that this source of thinking about interblending and interconnecting would be an interest for me to enjoy all of my life. The importance for me was to develop my own angle and thinking about art and philosophy. Fiction, novels and films were the top drawcards in the first half of my life. I capitalized on taking steps with observation and reflection upon ‘voice’ and ‘brain’ for the latter haul. Having chosen to study film when I was young enough, meant skipping over the treads of painting, sculpture, installations and photography. The demand of that work allowed me to turn the tap on and off, not be a committed film director. After making two films I didn’t want to make any more until I was a mother. I wanted to be a mother, stay in my country of birth and start living in the symbolic and sensual garden as well.
This tome is one of love and respect for family and equally a chance to preview some intellectual precedents. The 1990s Along with family joy and recall, this memoir celebrates what artists do. I have met or had acquaintanceships with a few. Their endeavors set me on a path that has prompted some writing. David fitted himself to the fermentations of the road to Damascus story, a parable I did not know. Mid 1970s Our long, amazing trip to several regions of the world in 1969 - 73 remains unreplaceable, a treasuretrove. Firstly, back in New Zealand, we lived for three years in Rangiora with great friends as a ‘peer group family’, in a property we purchased together. It was a time that encapsulated the best of our young desires to reach for a way to live, balancing the yearnings of the psyche with a lifestyle of substance. Four individuals: David, I, Maureen and Bob lived our late 20’s immersed in our tapestries in reading, work, music, politics, social engagement and vitality - everything our age demographic offered. I, as the youngest of the four, still had to step up to start tertiary school. At the end of those years, Maureen ‘cameoed’ our times then as the vapors of our ‘being young and life as ephemeral’. David found his direction. He framed a first decade for himself working within the probation service of the Justice Department. Then he moved to being an independent practitioner. Maureen felt a strong urge to return to her home and family in Kingston Ontario. She was intent on being a writer. Bob qualified with an MA in Resource Management. His mind played upon the taut strings of our looming ecosphere collapse having learned from history resource excavation and plunder. His father had been an engineer in mineral excavation. He knew how the dice rolled.

In New Zealand, Australia, Austria, England and New York art as events had given me stimulus. Austria, because of Hilde Goldschmidt, was the gift I now strive to honour.
AUSTRIA. 1970, 1973
Meeting and getting to know Hilde Goldschmidt for both David and I was a wonderful experience in our twenties.
THE LAKE DISTRICT


Art critic and author. Dr. J. P. Hodin (1901 - 1995) smiling at Stephanie. 24 Abbot Hall, Kendal. UK. Photographs by Stephanie Beth. 1973
"Look Peppi! That's Steffi"!

 Hilde Goldschmidt Exhibition at an exhibition of her work. 25
J. P. Hodin was writing a monograph about Hilde Goldschmidt. Through 1971 -3 *
I received Paul Hodin’s smile of acknowledgement on an early afternoon of an exhibition that celebrated Hilde’s life and work from the ten years (1940 - 50)at Abbots Hall, Kendal. I knew about other artists whom Hodin had written. Meeting an individual who was at the top of his field as an Art professional felt like a page turner. Hilde Goldschmidt, curated in the UK, gave me a lot of inspiration to become more appreciative of human exchanges. That evening at the Kendal hotel cocktail party, a colleague of the Director of the gallery, raised her glass for a toast to Barbara Hepworth, absent friend. 26 We all clinked glasses and I signed the group postcard. I have received smiles from my parents, my teachers and friends in my life. To be received in this other world, to become more knowledgeable in the arts, became a new cue for my ambitions.

P. J. Hodin's book on the artist Hilde Goldschmidt arrived on our doorstep in 1976. The Robinsons image there is in black and white. I made a colour photograph of this before returning to the UK, and then we were invited to Hilde's Survey exhibition in Kendal later that month.
* Hodin: Biographies on Kokoschka Munch, Moore, Nicholson, Hepworth and Goldschmidt, potter Bernard Leach and a book on Modern art and the modern mind (1972) as well as several essays
Exhibition opening. Hilde Goldschmidt. Abbots Hall. Photograph by Stephanie Beth. 1973.
Article on Goldschmidt. Ben Uri 27. Article on Goldschmidt. Museum Kitzbühel 28
New realism became the story of the post-World War era. American abstract art became a cultural thing. Hilde jinxed me by making the portrait The Robinsons. (1973) She made an interpretation of David and I after we had lived with her in 1970 and 1973. This was never a sitting. It was a perception. The painting appeared in the book that Hodin wrote about Hilde. It is published in black and white there . I took a photograph of the painting still on her easel in her studio before we left Austria for the UK in 1973.
The writer J. P. Hodin’s text on Hilde increased my awareness of an individual finding a way to work and live.
We, Hilde's household, all drove out for lunch one day. Summer of 1973. A friend of Hilde’s, Paul von Ringleheim, after lunch, drawing Hilde. 29 Photograph by Stephanie Beth. Pastern. Austria.
Get away from the figurative’. Seek ‘the tension between objective planes and negative space’. said her younger colleague, Von Ringleheim. *

I did not know from any conversation that Paul had with Hilde that he had had lessons with Picasso in 1959. I caught up with his facts in 2024. His credentials took shape in such exploratory times. He also designed jewelry.(correctives.co.nz/Appendix 1A i)
Austrian born artist Paul von Ringleheim, homed in contemporary New York, wanted to suggest the importance to Hilde of her getting to more abstraction.* He and his family escaped Nazi persecution in Austria in 1941 by emigrating to America, settling in Newark New Jersey before moving to Brooklyn. He studied at the Brooklyn Museum Art School and at Fairleigh Dickinson University, Teaneck NJ. In 1959, he met and was befriended by Picasso and studied with him before spending 1960-61 in Munich on a Fulbright scholarship. For the New York World Fair of 1964 and 1965 he was commissioned to create a massive minimalist cast bronze 'Screen of Peace', 29 foot wide and 10 foot high, for the Federal Pavilion, which now stands in the campus of his alma mater. For me, a fascinating viewpoint concerning Europe and America as terrains of culture were differences in assertions in structures and forms. Paul came to stay with Hilde the summer we were there. We would go on drawing outings, and he would talk with and shout at Hilde! (Appendix 1A i)
*An influence on Paul von Ringleheim. Skylla rock. (look up the myth) Spatiality became a motif for him. (Appendix 1A ii)
In my adulthood I became more aware of topics such as post- war reconstitution.

COLLAPSE AND NEW BEGINNINGS 1945 The West. 1948. Germany: Twelve million refugees or displaced persons came flooding in from the eastern territories, exacerbating the housing shortage. 30 No ban on night flying during the Berlin blockade of 1948-1949 and American and British ‘candy bombers' ensured the survival of the city. rabble of Soviet soldiery”. 31
Oskar Kokoschka autobiobraphy. 1974
Without hesitation, I could take in Turner’s sky glory. On a much more emotional level, I was presented with a floor to ceiling crimson and black painting on one of my first Saturdays in London. (ROTHKO) The world had become deeper by Mark Rothko's design options - deeper for feeling. This exhibit that surrounded me was presented at TATE Britain after ROTHKO had committed suicide. I could feel more than melancholy. I was a responsive candidate for his work. I had within me tears about death, since my mother had died just a few years before. I was still carrying that loss. It took several decades for me to process what an artist suicide does for the world. In 2024, I read about the stages of Marlborough Gallery's vendor ship of ROTHKO’s art. I read how Rothko’s son wrote about his father in the twenty-first century. I read about the Latvian Art Museum that now houses much of ROTHKO’s work. (Appendix 1A ii)
Non-representational work in Western tradition became a strong challenge for artists post WWII in New York. My visit there was a mere four days in 1972. The place held an energy enough to to note this inkling. Already, books had been telling us so.I sensed my perception of the Jewish cultural drive with the contemporary in New York and London. I thought about breakthroughs by the artist Gustav Klimt. I saw several Klimt paintings when hitchhiking through Belgium in 1973. Our driver was a Belgian who knew where this artist’s magic was housed. We hitchhiked with him in the smallest of Citroen 2CV 1954 models.
I could think about artists as prescient, and I could think about the Art business and the wonder of curatorial practices in culture. (Appendix 1A ii)

 P.J. Hodin spotted very early on how and why Art moved into the modern. He described artist’s motivation. To him the writer's task was to articulate this new style process to the viewer. He conducted critical writings, wrote lectures, wrote notes and corresponded with this perception.
Hodin developed the idea of giving voice to consciousness. I went looking for someone who had thought about him. There is Alexandra Lazar, when writing at the TATE. She noted that he wrote perceptive essays. About him she wrote:
‘Hodin’s writing primarily reflects a methodology that sought to illuminate the artistic presence within its times. What he called the enigma, or the dilemma, of modern art was, to paraphrase the critic Jerry Saltz, ‘a link to a new vision and the vision itself’, a method of seeing and knowing humanity that he felt was constantly changing.34
Herbert Read and J.P. Hodin at the Venice Biennale 1956.Tate Archive.35
Kurt Schwitters attends his shubbery. Hilde Goldschmidt is visiting. She was good friends Schwitter's wife Edith Thomas. Schwitters is standing outside his world famous shed in which he made the art construction Merzbau. Online image. c 1946
The Lake District, UK.
Artist. Kurt Schwitters. 1887 - 1948. c 1943. Artist Kurt Schwitters in the Lake District in Ambleside.
Famous Schwitters. As an epileptic, when living in Hannover, Schwitters was exempt from WWI military service. He is most famous for his post-impressionist work and was a champion for performance. He designed Merz, a 'Psychological collage' made with objects he found around himself in six of his family rooms. He fled to Norway in 1937. He was interned as an enemy alien in Scotland. Freed in 1941, he moved to Paddington, London to work. He then moved with Edith to Ambleside in the Lake District. Hilde Goldschmidt lived in Ambleside as artist, a friend and a neighbour from 1942 - 1949.
Merz barn shed wall. Construction by Kurt Schwitters. 1947. Ambleside. The Lake District. UK. (Online image) Heritage.
As mentioned, TATE Gallery, London, holds significant documents that discuss Hodin's insights about the Modern world and artists perceiving what this was doing to the minds.36 The foreboding was present in his writing as was his awareness of loneliness and timelessness of creativity “remembering and reproducing itself. “Lazar has written. 37 Merz barn as an influence and Kurt Schwitters is discussed by Hodin.38 As well as writing prolifically about Oskar Kokoschka, Hodin was the major biographer of Edvard Munch. In later years he would frequently return to Munch’s work, not least in his lectures at the Institute of Contemporary Arts in London during the 1950s.’39My privilege was to be so conscious of P J. Hodin's critical method. He spent time with artists that he wrote about. We lived with Hilde Goldschmidt for more than two months. It was especially the writers who framed her and the manner in which her mental attitude survived that became my forward trajectory. I saw David and her engrossed every day and every evening in the 1973 days as they together broke into building a first English translation of the book by Hodin about her.
David broadcasts in his writing, his incredulity in being placed into center European history. I heard Kokoshka laughing on the telephone with Hilde in 1970 on evening, snow falling outside. “A marvellous phone call” Hilde said in a thrilled mood in her stube where we lived the first time with her in the winter of 1970. The call lasted an hour - London to Kitzbühel on a landline. By this time, I too was deeply with the European story. Audibly. Incredible.
(Der irrende Ritter) Knight Errant. 1915. Oskar Kokoschka. Guggenheim Museum Collection 40
Oskar Kokoschka as a subject
Oskar Kokoschka, artist, poet, playwright and teacher.(1886 - 1980)
Oscar Kokoschka painted Knight Errant after he felt completely unarmed by the agony of losing the child he desired. Alma Mahler arranged an abortion of their foetus without consulting him. He was recovering from a serious wound from war in 1916. I quote from the Guggenheim. I read Cornelia Lauf's label for the painting when exhibited : ‘‘In the Vienna of 1914, a woman having an abortion was cause for scandal, even within the confines of the relatively open-minded art world. When such a woman was the widow of a famous composer, unwed, and carrying on two love affairs simultaneously, her decision would alarm even the most sympathetic souls.” 41 I began to develop a text for a documentary script. 2021
Title. Bearer of Dreams


Vo Audio
In 1906 Oskar Kokoschka was a prominent painter in Europe. Known as expressionistic, something he would write in 1971, to say, “as in, doing art as young people do, as they set out to find themselves” . Kokoschka took a very personal route. He had lived in total poverty prior to and during the First World War. He travelled extensively, painting many scenes of viewpoints in world famous cities, bent upon capturing these before advancing industrialization eviscerated visual experiences. Image with audio effects.
Muddy sunlight. Colours Serpentine, white and grey textures from within an oil painted canvas fragment fill the frame. This is the Thames and Tower Bridge, London. 1926.Text label.
Tower Bridge, London.1926.performance.(Brush strokes in a painting in the style of Kokoschka, German expressionist) (reference https://www.artsy.net/artwork/oskar-kokoschka-london-waterloo-bridge)Text. London. 1926.
After I visited London, I quickly bought a print of Kokoschka’s Tower Bridge to give to my aunt Priscilla , the one relative who had travelled to Europe in the mid-20th Century from my home territory. It was the first print I ever bought. That’s the bridge, the bascule bridge, built in 1894, that stands today - one down from the one bought by the American who took it brick by brick, (The London Bridge), to the desert.
Kokoschka was seriously concerned about the damages of the “age of rationalism”. p 119.It seemed that he most wanted to appreciate Art for its humanism. He was loath to embrace abstraction.
Image with audio effects.
Historical images of European Wars and History Image with audio effects.
War archive footage. World War I. Maps of Europe animated with conquests and changes.
Vo. Audio Oscar Kokoschka was Born, 1886, “in a small town Pöchlarn on the Danube. Kokoschka took up a pathway to painting. His strategy was to pay little attention to political movements to turn his energies and attention fully to exploration of consciousnesses. We must consider his life during the first World War. We may know that he started drawing young. Image with audio effects.
Costume museum clothing
Having to enroll when aged 28, he trained rudimentarily for World War I as an Austrian cavalryman. Resplendent in a blue jacket with white stripes, yellow trousers and a helmet, upon a horse, his nearest foe was the Russians.
Vo. Audio. Stephanie cont Kokoschka left Hungary, his regiment part of the liberation of the Austrian part of Poland. (p 87) “We left like liberators”, on the endless trek to the Eastern Front”. Kokoschka wrote, “Girls in colourful costumes brought us wine and cheered us up”. “Our cavalry was protecting the flank of the infantry and artillery of the Austro-German army corps” (p88)
9. Voice. Reader
 “The first dead that I encountered were young comrades - in arms of my own with whom, a few nights earlier, I had been sitting around a campfire on the Ukrainian forests, playing cards and joking”
 ”. Next, he saw the results of an attack done ahead of him - “a cap dangles, and in the next tree a dragoon's fur-lined blue cloak”” The horses lay in the forest with their hooves in the air, swollen-bellied, swarming with flies”A day or more later,” The Russians had lured us into a trap. “I felt a dull blow on my temple” Image with audio effects.
 Performance.Close up images of paint being applied to a canvas in Expressionistic style
Image with audio effects.DrawingGirls in colourful costumes bring soldiers’ wine Photograph. O.K. as a Dragoon on the Isonzo front. 1916.
Image with audio effects.Performance.Close up images of paint being applied to a canvas in Expressionistic style cont.Vo. Reader
“I had a tiny round hole in my head” “My horse, lying on top of me had lashed out one last time before dying and that had brought me to my senses” (p 93)
“Suddenly, a man was standing over me. He was in a Russian uniform and hence my enemy”. (p 94)” I thought I wouldn’t be able to stand the pain, telling myself that it was only fear, while the bayonet came sliding through the stuff of the jacket”; “Now the point was beginning to pierce my skin, searing into the flesh. My ribs were resisting, expanding, I couldn’t breathe. My capacity was failing. It was unbearable.” ” I went on telling myself, as I grew weaker: ‘Just a second more! This ordinary Russian is only obeying orders!
Image with audio effects.Performance.Close up images of paint being applied to a canvas in Expressionistic style cont.
"Then suddenly I felt quite light and a wave of happiness- never since then in all my life have, I felt it so physically - a sense of well-being positively flung me upward. I was buoyed up on the hot stream of blood from my lungs that was coming out of my mouth and nostrils and eyes and ears. I was floating in mid-air. So, this was all there was to dying?" Voice. Reader. "I couldn’t help laughing in the man’s face before I breathed my last. And the ordeal was over. All I took with me to the other side was the sight of his astonished eyes. The enemy ran away leaving his weapon sticking in my body. It fell out under its own weight”
 Image with audio effects. Performance.Close up images of paint being applied to a canvas in Expressionistic style.
Vo.Kokoschka survived a head wound. After he was demobbed, he did not marry, nor have children. He became a committed painter. Image with audio effects.Imagery of Kokoschka paintings


Kokoschka cut all his hair off when he first left Vienna to live in Germany around 1910 so that he looked different from all the other males. I looked like a “convict”, he wrote. Otherwise, he was expected to use a hair net, pompadour, a brush and comb. It was in Berlin that his work received a commercial value. He had a dealer.
What enormously fascinates me is that during youthful war experience, his psychology created his fearlessness. He left intact with no vulnerable Achilles heel. In that tract just read, he described his rationale as he lay on the ground all the time with his one prescription gun cocked to kill that man, but holding off so that direct killing might not be his action. He said to himself, “After all, it’s our mothers who bring us into the world and not our fatherland”, hence, his thought about the Russian only obeying orders. He escaped death. 42 It has been remarkably interesting to think about Kokoschka. He was insistent upon the importance of Expressionism for German pupils such as Hilde and her generation. Most particularly, he was restless. He gained the label of being a ‘Cook’s Tour’ painter after he painted so many cities before they were obliterated. He wrote, the commissions he did, the number of portraits he did and his having to give up on Vienna, also, his complete disinterest in Cubism, all make the reading of his personal thoughts very considered. He went to England for years in 1939. He borrowed a house in London during the blitz. He and his wife settled in Switzerland. Kokoschka wrote engrossing tracts. Example:
Extract 1. North Africa.
 North Africa. After the old city of Tuni (1927 or 1928)
‘On a hair-raising journey from Tougourt south to Chadames, we were forced to take refuge from a sandstorm in the lee of one of those strange, tall, canonical rock formations which are often capped by a mass of precariously balanced stone. Washed out by cloudbursts, blasted smooth by sandstorms, they look like the fossil coral crags on the bed of the sea, wrought into fantastic shapes by the currents. It is hard to believe that North Africa was once the granary of Imperial Rome, and the Sahara a hunting -ground where lions and elephants were trapped for the gladiatorial combats. While we waited for the storm to abate, I began to pick at the crumbled stone lying about us. I found trilobites and parts of oystershells which must have once been as big as cartwheels: but what astonished me most was a fragment of a bone fishhook, delicately worked, reminiscent of the La Tène period” 43
Extract 2. ‘I have been to Greece five times, too. For all of us, Hellas is an ideal, like the Garden of Eden. Why? Perhaps because there, man came closest to realising his true nature. Rome, and the whole of Europe until the eighteenth century, lived on the heritage of ancient Greece, building their civilizations on its foundation, while they themselves progressively became less truly human.
An abyss has opened between the ancient Greeks and the modern world. Modern governments - in Germany, and sadly, in England and France as well - are gradually abolishing the study of classical languages, as irrelevant to society’s needs but also because such study stands in contradiction to the spirit of the age, which is entirely dominated by their exact sciences, and would burden the young with useless ballast. No one fears that one day, without ballast, the young might drift weightless and defenceless, at the mercy of the nihilistic current. Even the Catholic Church has now given up, in its sacrament of divine love, the ancient language which once united all nations.’ (Kokoschka) 44


Kokoschka at work. Villeneuve, Lake Geneva. 1963
*OK ‘s 1909 Photographs are from Kokoschka’s book. My Life. 1974 ( correctives.co.nz/bibliography )

‘Eros, as the child of Wealth and Poverty, is always accompanied by Want; and he always pursues the beautiful, like the inspired, clear-sighted creative artist. And so, he stands as a seeker after truth, between the divine - gods who have no need of wisdom, because they are all-wise - and the human, which is eternally unknowing. Diotima, the wise woman of Mantineia, answered her pupil Socrates, when he asked what the value of Eros for mankind was: ‘Eros enters the human soul together with the longing for beauty’. ( Kokoschka ) 45 ( correctives.co.nz/Kokoschka )