John Mateer

‘The neighbourhood, as I have started to record it, has started to fade into nostalgia.’

It is in the worlds of design and architecture that the word Bauhaus is most familiar today. Bauhaus is sometimes taken as a synonym for ‘Modern’. The contribution of the Bauhäuslers and their lesser known colleagues in Australia – Elenore Lange, Dahl Collings and David Foulkes Taylor – and in New Zealand – Ernst Plischke, Heinrich Kulka and Vladimir Čačala – stands as testament to a not yet sufficiently well-known dimension of the art and design histories of those two countries. For too long those histories have been introverted and, in aspiration, excessively nationalistic.

John Mateer, over a long career, has been a poet of distance and locale, working with a continental sense of poetics, traversing land and sea in an inquiry into the nature of an historically-framed instant.

Places are, of course, not exchangeable, but in Mateer’s roaming imaginary they become, at least to some extent, drawn into a kind of codification of broad historical tendencies and movements. This constitutes a way of rethinking traditional narrative historical accounts and their often doubtful ‘truths’. Unbelievers, or ‘The Moor’ is a book about imagined geographies as much as real ones.