Goods and Services (Auckland: Webb’s, 2022).
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It’s a well-known story. In 1989, Ōtautahi Christchurch painter Bill Hammond was among a group of artists who visited the remote Auckland Islands. The trip changed his art, resetting its course for the rest of his life. The Auckland Islands are in the Subantarctic, some 450 kilometres south of Aotearoa New Zealand. There’s no human inhabitants and birds still rule the roost. There, Hammond felt distant, not only in space but also in time. He saw the Islands as primeval, as if they were old-old New Zealand, before people arrived. Inspired, he started to populate his paintings with inscrutable hybrid bird-people. The earliest of these works namechecked Sir Walter Buller, the nineteenth-century New Zealand ornithologist and colonist. Buller slaughtered vast numbers of native birds in order to ‘preserve’ them, while arguing, of Māori, ‘Our plain duty as good compassionate colonists is to smooth down their dying pillow.’ In the 1990s, Hammond’s bird-people paintings quickly became part of an emerging postcolonial imaginary—a much loved one.
Hammond’s bird-people are ambiguous. They gaze out across the ocean as though anticipating colonial invasion (‘watching for Buller’), but they also while away hours in the pub, drinking, smoking, and playing pool in print shirts (perhaps unconcerned). Even in the forest, they play cello and violins and are inscribed with musical notation and copperplate script (the hand of bureaucracy), as if looking forward to what will overwhelm them. Sometimes they seem to be pathetic victims; other times a criminal gang. People and horses occasionally join the party, without explanation. It’s all rhyme, no reason. The bird-people are floating signifiers that could refer to the birds there before the Māori, to the Māori who decimated the bird population, and to the Pākehā who decimated the bird population and the Māori one. They could be us or them, victims and villains rolled into one—or radically other.
Hammond’s bird-people are haunted by problems. On the one hand, there’s anthropomorphism: our desire to project our own human desires and emotions onto them, assuming we can know them, that they are like us. On the other, there’s the opposite: assuming they are totally unrelatable and unfathomable in their alienness, and we need not care. Of course, this dilemma also attends our intercourse with other people.
The bird-people paintings are interpretative conundrums. Meanings are impossible to pin down. Not that people won’t try. Perversely, the authors of the artist’s Wikipedia entry argue that his paintings are motivated by environmental and social-justice concerns, which seems rather wishful. Hammond was no woke snowflake. Rather, his works remain refreshingly amoral, prompting us to think, but offering no real guidance as to what to think. He didn’t create a coherent world, but a baffling one, and he never explained it. It may have been a mystery to him too.
I don’t know who was first to call Hammond’s bird-people paintings ‘history paintings’, but it was one of those intuitive insights that seems obvious, yet demands endless unpacking. History painting—those grand representations of edifying biblical, historical, mythological, and allegorical narratives—was once a staple of Western art. It served the propaganda needs of the elites—church, state, aristocracy—bolstering the status quo. It stood as painting’s highest genre for centuries, because of the skill it required and because it had a (supposedly) edifying purpose. However, history painting collapsed in the nineteenth century, with the decline of the academy and the emergence of the avant-garde. Now, it seems antiquated, an artefact itself. Today, when we see history paintings in museums and great houses, they can seem like lumbering pictorial machines, requiring armies of guides to decode them for us. So, if Hammond’s bird-people paintings recall history paintings for us, I suggest it’s not about how history paintings operated for their original audiences, but about how they don’t operate for us now. Hammond’s paintings are history painting as bewildering and opaque—illustrating no familiar tale and with no obvious moral.
Painted in 2013, Goods and Services Triptych is late Hammond, when his imagery had become courtly and magical. It’s set in a liminal space, part cave, part architecture; part nature, part culture; neither inside nor out. It’s framed by tree-columns aligned with the sides of the canvas panels. At their bases, they spread their roots; at their capitals, they sprout branches. Is it a single scene or a comic strip to be read from left to right? Most of the bird-people are in profile, suggesting heraldry. They come across as courtiers or angels, involved in cultish rituals. What are the three large figures in the centre panel up to? Are two of them getting married or forging an oath, with the third witnessing or presiding? They all wear dresses, but are they male or female? There’s the suggestion of a colour-coded and scalar pecking order, but the upshot isn’t clear. When a large bird bears a small bird in its hand, does that mean the small one has less status or more? Perspective is ambiguous—no help—nothing lines up. And what’s in those urns? Are they canopic jars or treasure pots? Are they full or empty? Why is there a horse in one corner and a pterodactyl flying overhead? And why is it the painting drenched in dribbles, like it began raining before the paint dried?
The work suggests a mythological mishmashy elsewhere and elsewhen, an escapist fantasy—but there’s a twist. It’s the title. Goods and Services can only refer to New Zealand’s Goods and Services Tax, created in 1986 as part of the raft of neoliberal economic reforms known as Rogernomics. To kiwis at the time, then attuned only to income taxes, it seemed a curious and cryptic imposition, but it’s become second nature.
Hammond is no stranger to GST. Back in 1994, he made a work called GST (a.k.a. GST on Tea Towels). It consisted of three ragged pieces of raw unstretched canvas, each featuring one of the letters from the title rendered in black paint. There was a blocky comic 3D letter G, and two figured initials that could have come from either an old illuminated manuscript or a tattooist’s catalogue. The S was a snake form with bird heads at either end, bisected by a leaf (suggesting a dollar sign perhaps); the T took the form of a bird-person hanging from a tree (recalling the crucified Christ). What was Hammond getting at? Was he putting a bogan-medieval spin on this touchy subject? Was he implying that GST was not part of a modern or civilised future, perhaps even ushering in a new dark age? As usual, his point wasn’t so clear.
And the upshot of Goods and Services isn’t clear either. The title is radically at odds with the picture. It reframes it, turning it on its head. Hammond shows us a magical other world, yet his title redirects us rudely back to our own, as if wanting to awaken us from a dream. How are the obscure actions of the bird-people in fanciful Hammondland linked to real life in GSTland? Is Hammond offering this apparently idyllic scene as exemplary misdirection, delightfully masking the grim reality of perpetual taxation? Is he reminding us that, even in other realms, interrelations always come down to trade and tax—that we must always render unto Caesar? Who knows the answers? But these are the questions.
[IMAGE: Bill Hammond Goods and Services Triptych 2013]