Gavin Hipkins is a photo-tourist. Literally, pilgrimages play a major role in his work, and, metaphorically, he is a tourist of photography itself, of the spaces defined by its histories, its modes, manners, and mechanics.¹ Hipkins is on a grail quest, hankering after some truth, some sublime, but always arriving late on the scene, discovering evidence, clues, engaging in cultural and art-historical forensics rather than basking in affect. While he tracks down the ideal, something unpleasant dogs his search.

Tourists prefer sites of preordained or readymade significance, places known by reputation. Hipkins’s 1997 show The Blue Light—named after the 1932 proto-fascist movie starring Leni Riefenstahl—developed out of a research trip to Germany. This package odyssey took him to the Pergamon Altar in Berlin, to Zeppelin Field in Nuremberg, to Munich’s 1972 Olympic Stadium, to Dresden’s German Hygiene Museum, and finally home, to Napier, New Zealand, the city that arose from earthquake rubble in art-deco style. While Riefenstahl’s film was romantic and moving, Hipkins’s show was not: it was bitsy. It included images gathered along the way, shot and presented in diverse styles—odd fragments divorced in time, space, and content. There was a still from Fantasia (1940), some architectural details, closeups of light fittings, and a blurry shot of a tooth resembling a hermit’s cavern in the mountains. We were left to join the dots, as though these images were less works than findings, clues that might shed some light on something. Detective work was required to piece together the story Hipkins was seeking, or perhaps the story of his seeking.

A sense of belatedness nags Hipkins’s work, which is routinely obscure, affectless. In 1997, Hipkins visited Chandigarh in Northern India. Le Corbusier’s ‘radiant city’, built in the 1950s, contains many of the architect’s celebrated buildings, but also his kitschy Monument of the Open Hand. Located alongside a sunken amphitheater, the giant, idealised hand slowly rotates to suggest ‘the direction of the wind (that is, the state of affairs)’. The judges and lawyers of Chandigarh once identified the monstrous disembodied hand as a representation of the Law, but, at the time of Hipkins’s visit, the Hand’s ‘Trench of Contemplation’ had been co-opted by kids as a makeshift cricket pitch, reflecting instead the fate of modernism’s lofty ideals. Hipkins’s The Trench (1997–8) is a slide show containing eighty images of the ominous Hand double-exposed with roses from Chandigarh’s rose garden. The hand rotates as the roses pass from yellow to orange to red … The scale of projection is intimate, bringing the Hand down to hand-size, just as that rosy overlay undermines its pomp and authority, its faith in the State.

Hipkins says the use of double exposure in The Trench echoes not only cheesy effects found in Indian commercial photography but also special-effects sequences from the old children’s TV series The Tomorrow People. Hipkins courts this kind of ambiguity. He homes in on suggestive retro styles or motifs we can’t locate in just one place, things that belong at once to different value systems, moments, discourses—or between them. Many of his works—The Track (1995–7), for instance—recall brands of early modernism, when an efficient, dynamic aesthetic was linked both with utopian social movements and with totalitarianism. This imposing work, some three metres high, is made from a tiny image, an unassuming closeup of some brown plasticine. Strips of machine prints of this snap are stacked horizontally. The work catches us in a web of slight references. It resembles an aerial view of an athletics cinder track, as one might find in a sports stadium. (Those who know Hipkins’s The Blue Light may be reminded of Riefenstahl’s 1938 film Olympia; the Fantasia still it incorporated recalled Albert Speer’s dome of light from Olympia’s finale.) It also looks like lengths of slot car track. The mechanics of the photographic process is likewise suggested: the softness of the plasticine is like photographic film waiting to receive the imprint of reality, a negative image. And the strips of prints, pinned through their tiny sprocket holes, make an analogy to the strips of film that run through the track of a still or movie camera. The strips also recall the backgrounds Eadweard Muybridge used for his protocinematic studies of animal locomotion.

In her essay ‘The Im/Pulse to See’, Rosalind Krauss observes that a pulsing, an agitation, a dissolving of the visual, marks certain early modernist art.² She links it to the popular fascination with the flickering of protocinematic toys. The pleasure we take in the zoetrope, she argues, is dependent on recognising both the vitality of its effect and the artifice of its generation—the mechanism. Hipkins is no stranger to artificial life. For The Tunnel (1995–7), he alternated at random hundreds of brown snaps and yellow snaps of a ball in two meandering lines at head height and crotch height. Talking to eyes and testicles, The Tunnel was intended as an agitating erotic trench to channel our gaze, but to nowhere. It was a self-conscious instance of ‘round’ phallocentrism.

Pulsing has a long history in Hipkins’s work. It’s there in the Falls (1992–), a series Hipkins started at art school. Shown individually or in groups, each Fall is a vertical strip of machine prints that presents the content of a single roll of film—suggesting a session of almost identical shots of a subject from more or less the same angle, like a ‘shot’ of film footage. In Hipkins’s most recent collection of Falls, Zerfall (1997–8), shown at last year’s Sydney Biennale, the subjects are circular and hail from the kitchen and the bathroom, sites of eating and excreting, the ends of another tunnel. The effect is once enticing, static, hallucinatory, banal, vibratory, and inhumane.

Marxists have criticised dynamic product photography as the ultimate expression of commodity fetishism. Bringing the inanimate to life, it imbues commodities with a mystic vitality apparently independent of and superior to the lives that brought them into being. Hipkins’s images work somewhat similarly. But, while Krauss characterises early modern pulsing as a virile throb, Hipkins’s retro-pulsing is more a sterile jiggle, an already spent eroticism. Pointedly, ‘Zerfall’ is a German word meaning cultural dissipation, decay. Hipkins relishes exhaustion, the residue of vitality. Another photographic work, Zerfall: Wellington, 1 March 1996 (1996), freezes exploding fireworks, arresting their spectacle at the moment of fulfillment and expenditure.

In discussing Hipkins’s work, one can’t avoid mentioning the sublime, a worn-out idea that has done its dash. In The Field (1994–5), a thousand or so photograms of balls are massed and marshaled, papering the wall to create a starry cosmos or a cosmic computer screen. This work suggests a hollow, weary, denatured sublime—the sublime as a trope that can be routinely summoned, restaged, wheeled out, to satisfy the masses. When he showed The Field at Dunedin Public Art Gallery in 1996, Hipkins hung his small diptych, The Field Rats (1996), on the opposing wall, presenting a nasty tangle of plastic rats, their glowing eyes mimicking the lights of The Field. While the big work on its own might suggest shadows cast by a galaxy of ideal forms, read in association with the rats The Field became monstrous—glowing feral eyes lurking deep in the gloom of Plato’s cave. The sublime staring back. The romantic dream transformed into vermin.

Using grand, gravid, portentous titles like The Dam, The Well, The Drop, and The Movement, Hipkins offers his works as authoritative and thuggish. He says his titles may be heroic (suggesting mammoth engineering projects and mighty public works) but they are also pulp, recalling the corny language of horror-movie tides (The Howling, The Thing, The Hidden, The Omen, The Shining), where the definite article enhances the sense of some generic menace—something original, archetypal. An underlying uneasiness is always there in Hipkins’s work. It is the unease we feel when we get too close to the absolutism of utopias, when we realise the modernist project of creating the ideal city may not be far removed from the fascist’s project of creating the ideal extermination camp. Both lose the individual within the mass, the social machine, the big picture. In this way, Hipkins’s beautiful, bleak abstractions belong to the neo-gothic, with Le Corbusier’s severed but animated Hand serving as their fleurs du mal.
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[IMAGE: Gavin Hipkins The Trench 1997–8]

Stephen Bambury’s paintings have been called elegiac, even belated. They operate in the wake of the discredited utopian programme of the historical avantgarde. Certainly, Bambury’s crosses can be read as death—the crucifixion of modernism. But they can also be understood as hopeful—a resurrection of sorts.

These days, modernism is routinely cast as univocal, dogmatic, and exclusive, and yet Bambury’s paintings touch on a diversity of art philosophies, histories, and technologies. They connect with Malevich and Mondrian, obviously; but also with icon painting, Navajo sand painting, alchemy, yoga … They also nod to other contemporary artists—Colin McCahon, Helmut Federle, Imi Knoebel, John Nixon—but without aligning themselves with any camp. Bambury’s paintings aren’t simply formalist, there is too strong a suggestion of symbolism in the motifs (crosses, I-forms, ladders, the word Hi-Fi) and too much investment in idiosyncratic materials and processes. On the other hand, they’re not exactly discursive either—what is their issue? They seem to imply a range of possibilities, but also keep them at arm’s length.

Bambury is dogmatic when it comes to not being dogmatic. He frequently resorts to a contradiction-in-terms to explain himself, describing his approach as ‘porous hermeticism’. I take this to mean that, though his abstract paintings may appear formal, self-referential, exclusively visual (in that arch-modernist vein), they also absorb the world, asking to be read in relation to the diverse things, histories, philosophies, and opportunities around them. They flicker open and closed. Does that make the artist a fence sitter? Not at all. It would be truer to say that Bambury prefers—even constructs—a space between.

Not surprisingly, writers have made much of the porous aspect of Bambury’s work—it enables their displays of art-historical and philosophical proficiency. However, Bambury’s work is equally compelling for its stand-alone qualities: its hermeticism, its lack of complicity with what it absorbs—its elusiveness. Exceeding, even countering, the work of the writer, Bambury’s painting also evacuates meaning—exquisitely. In emptying themselves, and our heads, his works belong to a meditative practice, meditation being precisely that blissful and contemplative state of mind where ideas may float in and out of consciousness without judgment, opposition, or approval—without touching the sides.

Bambury’s practice is a careful balancing act. He is constantly deterritorialising his work, deranging any position or dogma he might appear to be setting up, subtly disrupting the emerging coherency of his project in a series of ‘necessary corrections’. Take Chakra (1994). This work follows a series of ‘ladder’ works in which seven Maievich crosses are stacked vertically. In Tantric thought, the seven chakras are energy centres along the human spine arranged in an implicit hierarchy from low to high, from base to crown. Tantric practice involves aligning the chakras to enhance the circulation of energy. In arranging the crosses here horizontally, Bambury dehierachises the chakras, offering them as interchangeable, near identical. Similarly, in representing the chakras with Malevich crosses, he promotes the near identity of Malevich’s metaphysics and those Eastern philosophies thought to have inspired him.

Moreover, he does this beautifully.

Patrick Pound is irresistibly drawn to the quaint. He is attracted to cultural products that the passage of time has liberated from moral or aesthetic pertinence—things piquant by virtue of being old-fashioned in appearance, ornamentation, and manner. Scouring secondhand bookshops, he locates raw material that is already obscure, outmoded, out of print: for instance, cancelled library books, discarded family photographs, used postcards. Not only does Pound work with quaint materials, his work emphasises quaintness. Take his recent collage of old book pages, A Guide: Towards a Theory of Everything (1998). Though the scale and title promise something major, this work is an accumulation of trivia, ironic juxtapositions, and arcane conceits. You have to go up close to discern the subtle liberties the artist has taken in arranging, grafting, and working the given. Pound thus declares his complex relation to the big picture, whether it comes in the form of a theory of everything, an encyclopedia, a library, or museum, or some other brand of empire—all of which are implicated in the raw materials chosen for A Guide.

In Landscape of Mirrors (1991), Pound treats the work of Colin McCahon, New Zealand’s acclaimed big-picture artist, painting McCahonesque minimalist landscapes across a number of disposable black and silver plastic serving platters. McCahon certainly had a major project. His late landscapes were the culmination of a search for national identity that had dominated not only his own work but also post-war New Zealand art and letters. McCahon practised an ‘expressive realism’ by which it was thought the self would be perfected in its search for the essence of the land, while the truth of the place could be simultaneously distilled via deep introspection.

Pound revisits McCahon’s heroic project, reworking it as something quaint. The platters he paints on are the cheap, ‘fancy’ kind some people use to serve dainty finger food. Pound creates a cheesy—a wine-and-cheesy—version of McCahon. Satirising the idea of the land as a mirror to the self, the platters are arranged as a gathering of portrait mirrors in which we might celebrate our good persons. As frames, the platters seem extravagant and prissy in the face of McCahon’s preference for the robust, unframed, and plain-spoken. Pointedly inappropriate, the supports are unsupportive: they pull McCahon’s punches. And so, Pound creates a McCahon for the powder room, conflating McCahon’s metaphysical presumption, his virile hankering for reconciliation with the land, with vanity and preening.

Pound’s project epitomises a camp sensibility: he is not revolutionary; he offers no alternative big picture; his work is necessarily parodic in that he is reliant on conventions to inflect, presumptions to deflect. As Susan Sontag explains: ‘The whole point of Camp is to dethrone the serious. Camp is playful, anti-serious. More precisely, Camp involves a new, more complex relation to “the serious”. One can be serious about the frivolous, frivolous about the serious.’¹
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[IMAGE: Patrick Pound Landscape of Mirrors 1991]

 

Animated-film maker William Kentridge has enjoyed a meteoric rise to fame. Aside from Marlene Dumas, he is the only contemporary South African artist to have gained international ubiquity (his work has appeared at Documenta 10, and recent biennales in Sydney, Havana, Istanbul, Johannesburg). Yet, by his own admission, the work is provincial and illustrative, the subject matter specific, close to home: the legacy of apartheid and the laying to rest of skeletons in closets.

Although troubling, Kentridge’s films are overwhelmingly nostalgic. Predominantly black-and-white, they recall silent movies with their intertitles and old music soundtracks. The imagery is also explicitly antique: old photos or newsreels of smokestack-era industrialism. The smudginess of the drawings suggests the blurring of memory. There’s a sense here that we are somehow stuck in the past, ensnared in unfinished business.

Most of the films rotate around two characters, both white (as is Kentridge). Soho Eckstein is the fat-cat tycoon, creator and ruler of Johannesburg. In his pin-striped suit, puffing on a cigar, he could have been lifted from George Grosz’s caricatures of Weimar bourgeoise. Felix Teitlebaum, whose features are those of the artist, is the artist, the sensual observer ‘whose anxiety flooded half the house’. Lost in romantic possibilities, he hankers after, and makes love to, Mrs. Eckstein. Felix’s struggle against Soho’s evil is played out against the backdrop of the exploitation of the miners and the land.

Soho and Felix are both ‘captives of the city’, but redemption is always a possibility, even for Soho. In Sobriety, Obesity, and Growing Old (1991), Soho outlives his greed to be reunited with his wife, leaving Felix in the wilderness. In The History of the Main Complaint (1996), Soho becomes the object of our sympathy: comatose, hospitalised, and attended by doctor versions of himself, he searches his soul, while his body is probed by a CAT scan. In Ubu Tells the Truth (1997), Kentridge even hints at the possible redemption of Alfred Jarry’s sadistic puppet leader, King Ubu, while, in real life, the Truth and Reconciliation Commission offers amnesty to those willing to come clean and so ‘heal’ the nation.

Kentridge’s animations are created by successively adjusting and re-photographing charcoal drawings. The process has its limitations: the effect is rude, primitive; the charcoal is hard to erase fully and smudges; the drawing betrays the ghosts of its previous stares. But, in the context of Kentridge’s concerns, it is somehow appropriate: his dubious romantic tropes must he employed, as Jacques Derrida put it, ‘under erasure’. There is no storyboard; Kentridge makes the narrative up as he goes along, out of the free associations drawing engenders. Objects are constantly transforming as if to reveal their true colors: a coffee plunger turns into a mine elevator, a cat turns into a telephone. The metaphors are urgent. They move faster than we can read, creating the sense of a world in which the imagination runs amok as compensation for social stasis, for the inability to transform the recalcitrant real world that is the bleak landscape of Johannesburg.

Kentridge writes of his inability to be lyrical, but in his poignant, deeply moving films, lyricism persists alongside, or as a response to, that which would pollute it. The volatile mix of escapism and realism reminds me of Terry Gilliam’s 1985 film Brazil. At the end of that film, the tortured hero finally cracks, escaping, as a sort of compensation, into a blissful utopia in his head. Kentridge’s films aren’t like that, and that’s why he remains a political artist. Lyricism and realism are both present as alternating currents: Kentridge refuses to quash utopian desires while attending to sad realities, and so impels us to seek some resolution in reality. While Adorno wrote that there could be no lyric poetry written after Auschwitz, the ongoing relevance of poetry is the heart of Kentridge’s project.

For her latest series of photomontages, Health, Happiness, and Housing (1997), Ava Seymour travelled the length of New Zealand, photographing state houses in such suburbs as Otara, Glen Innes, Porirua, the Hutt Valley, and Brockville. Aided by a generous arts-council grant, but armed only with a plastic Olympus fixed-focus camera, she sought out the most plain, generic examples of these basic dwellings, preferring to record them on overcast days. Seymour avoided dilapidated and customised houses, with their distinguishing marks—the stuck-on butterfly or graffito, the hobby garden, the added-on games room, or the rusty Holden up on chocks. Into the dull, generic images that resulted, Seymour inserted black-and-white images of retards, cripples, amputees and other social rejects, clipped and adapted from old medical text-books and the like. The works derive their humour from the strange interplay between the scrupulously clean images of the built environment and the botched but playful inhabitants that cavort within it. Although the series title Health, Happiness, and Housing prompts the thought of some utopian possibility, the works fail to deliver on it. With individual work titles like Welfare Mom, Minnie Dean, Valley of the Fruitcakes, and Enema Nurse, the images suggest the degeneration of the democratic dream represented by state housing. Seymour writes: ‘Health, Happiness, and Housing not only addresses the issue of mental health but also places it in a humorous context—the place where Shirley from Avondale finds Dali’s decomposing finger in her soup.’¹

State housing was part of a grand utopian plan devised in the 1930s in the wake of the Great Depression, when the new Labour government was looking towards the time when every family might enjoy its own quarter-acre castle. Building as many as 5,000 houses a year, they created new suburbs for the great unwashed—worker-housing developments where rents were determined not by market forces but by tenant income. However, by the 1960s, state housing developments had attained a stigma, being seen as a breeding ground for juvenile delinquency and signifying the squalor they were to provide an escape from. By the 1970s, state housing had become an emblem of repressive state paternalism, promoting a kind of bland conformism. State housing was no longer liberation, but house arrest.

Today, New Zealand is different. The New Right is the ruling paradigm and the welfare state is being dismantled. Double-think prevails: the lunatics are being turfed out of the asylums and into the street—they call it ‘community care’. Last year, the government decided to leave social security to the individual—they call it The Code of Social and Family Responsibility. In these dark days, state housing holds an ambiguous position in the New Zealand psyche, being at once nostalgically tied to modernist ideals of egalitarianism—the New Zealand Dream—yet also to a stigma of depressing sameness, a vicious cycle of poverty and paternalism. State housing is at once something to defend and something to be defensive about. In some quarters, the state house has even become ‘cool’, as belated yuppies run out of colonial villas to gentrify and happily embrace the state house as the embodiment of a rich, conflicted social history.

Seymour’s show predictably hit a nerve and drew a sharp response when shown at Artspace, Auckland, in 1997. Her work was read as an attack on the actual occupants of state houses and as an affront to the dignity of the poor, with visitors going into the Artspace offices to complain about the work, to defend egalitarianism as the New Zealand way, and to generally regale staff with their accounts of wonderful people who happened to be tenants of state houses.

Reviewing the show in the local paper, T.J. McNamara was similarly dismissive: ‘Lunacy and aberration rule. The faces are grotesque, haunted, set on bodies too small for the features. The result is an exhibition that is quite singularly offensive, patronising, and snotty. The state houses, for all their plainness, have from the beginning provided shelter and a stable place to live for hundreds and thousands of ordinary New Zealanders. Such houses helped them to achieve a sense of place. The inhabitants of state housing were not the grotesques shown here. Health and happiness were given to many of them by state housing. This exhibition … has no concern for social dignity but rather purveys a smart untruth that cares little for the reality of ordinary people.’²

Conducting tours of the show at the time, I can testify to the hostility of the general response. People are still talking about it. Last week, almost two years later, one of my friends said that Seymour’s collages should be used in the pamphlet to illustrate the government’s heartless Code of Responsibility: ‘It’s what they [the government] really think’, she said, ‘that poor people are all retards and degenerates’. However, all this criticism takes the works at face value, as if the works said simply: people in state houses are sub-human—mentally, physically, and morally defective. But to think this way is to assert a crushingly banal politics of representation, to read the images as if they were offered as simple photographic documents rather than as patent fabrications—photomontages. I would contend that these works can be read in a very different way, as commenting less on reality—the real life of the real people who live in actual state houses—than on other representations.

Health, Happiness, and Housing draws on a variety of registers and vernaculars of photography. Seymour’s research trip—largely unnecessary as these houses are everywhere the same—recalls those large-scale systematic documentary projects that promise to reveal one subject in depth through committed and comprehensive treatment, be it Robert Franks’s The Americans (1958)—enabled by a Guggenheim fellowship—or Ed Ruscha’s already parodic Every Building on Sunset Strip (1966). Seymour’s pallid background shots resemble the kinds of amateurish photos seen in New Zealand real estate agents’ windows; shots that never show a house at its best—bad angle, bad lighting, power pole in the centre. They also echo American art photography’s preference for deadpan documentation of the suburbs. The figures belong to the tradition of photomontage, the work of John Heartfeld and Hannah Hoch, and to Diane Arbus–style freak photography (several collaged figures were actually lifted from Arbus shots). Seymour’s works as a whole recall common snapshots of people standing proudly outside their houses as families or newlyweds (two images in the Housing series are wedding photos: Gas Mask Wedding and White Wedding, Invercargill). They also echo Walker Evans’s images of poor white Americans during the Great Depression, posed before their weatherboard houses. Crucially, Seymour’s images recall—and distance themselves from—the work of the New Zealand coffee-table book photographer, the late Robin Morrison.

Morrison scoured the country, habitually documenting old codgers standing proudly before their common homes, popularising his vision through books like The South Island for New Zealand from the Road (1981) and Sense of Place (1984). Morrison idealised his modest sitters, offering them as characters, while really telling us little about them as individuals. His images belong to the Family of Man brand of photo-humanism, which promotes diverse subjects as sharing in a common humanity at the expense of what distinguishes them from one another, and particularly what distinguishes them from us as viewers. Photo-humanism depoliticises its subjects, making them available for our empathetic response. Morrison’s positive images have become part of the reassuring grab-bag of signs known as kiwiana, which nostalgically evoke New Zealanders as das volk, suggesting simpler good-old-days and basic values. Morrison’s images have become emblems of collective, nationalistic, anti-urban matehood: a romanticised kiwi psyche. In the 1990s, Morrison’s work is constantly reprised by local advertising agencies to sell Mainland Cheese and McDonald’s Kiwi Burgers, while the population becomes increasingly fragmented, urbanised, and diverse, and the myth less and less tenable. Call it compensation.

Seymour’s Housing series could be understood as a punk parody of Morrison’s work, an alternative reduction, exaggerating what his photo-humanism would conceal. In Welfare Mom, a woman grips a baby, ignoring another lying naked on the pavement; Minnie Dean takes its name from the famed caregiver kid-killer. Seymour provides a low blow to a comforting image of the past, an ideal of the social. This was brought out by her inclusion in the group show Folklore: The New Zealanders, which presented works by fourteen photographers related to the subject categories of coffee-table-book photography. However, curator Gavin Hipkins chose images that were negative, bleak, dowdy; rejects from the great New Zealand photograph album. Folklore was a kind of shadow history of New Zealanders, the abject version of an ideal.³

Not only is Seymour’s series related to other modes of photography, it has many precedents in a strain of New Zealand art and literature, evident since the late 1950s, that interrogates the party line of the New Zealand suburbs as a utopia. This theme is extremely visible in the work of painters in the late 1960s and 1970s, for instance, in Michael Illingworth’s boxed-in suburbscapes, with their rows of generic detached houses and pathetic hydrocephalic-headed everymen; in Jeffery Harris’s pathologically distorted family groups, posed as if for a photograph; and in Richard Killeen’s milling suburban crowds, oblivious of the odd corpse. These works mess with egalitarian assumptions hard-wired into the kiwi brain. Seymour’s work is readily located within this context, as another, somewhat nastier, reply to the legacy of centrally driven programs of human perfectibility: New Zealand, the social experiment gone wrong. In fact this would seem to be the explicit message of Seymour’s Valley of the Fruitcakes, which prominently includes a Ministry of Works sign reading: ‘End of improvement, thank you for your patience’.

Seymour’s work exemplifies the dada tradition of photomontage as a device for rupturing the mythological completeness of normative images. In her previous series Rubber Love (1994–5), Seymour relocated figures from rubber-fetish magazines in sumptuous domestic interiors, collapsing the distinction between the conformist and the deviant. These house-proud gimps have spent all day cleaning their houses, fluffing their doggies, and greasing their rubber suits in expectation of the Conde Nasty photo-crew: they are ready to parade their drapes and butt plugs. Betraying evident pride in their defectiveness, they wear their deformities and perversities as badges of honour.

In both Health, Happiness, and Housing and Rubber Love, the figures appear deliberately posed—complicit in their presentation. And yet Seymour is not trying to humanise freaks in the manner of, say, the Australian photo-journalist duo Sandy Nicholson and Chris Johnston, whose recent Suburban Fetish series, a sympathetic portrayal of S&M and bondage practitioners, superficially resembles Seymour’s Rubber series. As photo-humanists, Nicholson and Johnston want to reabsorb deviants into the canon of normality, into an idea of das volk, promoting understanding, extending a shared humanity. In the end, their celebration of perversity is in the service of assimilation. Seymour’s images don’t attempt this kind of redemption. There is always a sense of non-empathy—no pretence of identification—with the subjects.

Health, Happiness, and Housing belongs to the Gothic, with its preference for the grotesque, the fragmented, the destructive, the uncanny, the diseased, the pathological, the blissfully freakish. Seymour messes with our need for reassuring ideological images of social life, getting us where we live, where we need that comfort. Her work is less about a violence done to the subjects of the images—here, the actual or imagined occupants of state houses—and more about the violence the photographs do to the viewer. Getting back to my friend’s comment that Seymour’s collages should be used to illustrate the Code of Responsibility pamphlet, of course Prime Minister Jenny Shipley would never put such images on the cover. Instead you get happy families—a spoonful of sugar to help the medicine go down, a clown mask on the executioner. But, no one would be surprised if they put a Robin Morrison on the cover.
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[IMAGE: Ava Seymour Valley of the Fruitcakes 1997]

 

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In thinking about how Colin McCahon could be introduced to a German audience, a comparison with Joseph Beuys is irresistible. Roughly contemporaries, Beuys and McCahon were artists of the post-war period: McCahon was born in 1919 and Beuys in 1921; Beuys died 1986, McCahon 1987. Both engaged with the project of post-war reconstruction, with its imperatives of healing and redemption. Both posed as teachers with an urgent desire to communicate: big themes, burning messages. Blackboards loomed large for both. Both combined a search for simplicity and directness—public address—with density, difficulty, and self-reference. Both were cast as romantic visionaries, grail questers, even prophets: legends surrounded them, they spawned disciples. Both seemed simultaneously ahead of their time and romantic, almost nineteenth-century figures: McCahon speaking to an increasingly secular audience in the language of the bible, Beuys posing as a shaman. Both enjoyed a complex relation to modernism and internationalism, being modern but ‘provincial’ in relation to the dominant art discourse emerging from the US. Both had strong veins of nationalism running through their work. As well as posing as teachers in their work, both were influential teachers in art schools. The artists who followed them literally made works in their wakes. Both remain essential to the art of their countries, little of which makes sense without reference to them. Of course, McCahon is not Beuys; the differences are just as compelling.

In the 1940s, New Zealand was still a young nation, an isolated place, a cultural backwater. Conditions for producing and receiving contemporary art barely existed. McCahon’s early works came from landscape. Confirmed by his appreciation of Professor Cotton’s technical line drawings of the distinctive faulting and folding of our land, McCahon imagined it stripped of vegetation and signs of habitation, denuded botanically and culturally; a place waiting to be claimed, named, settled; a place waiting for a culture—‘a landscape with too few lovers’. His pictures emphasised the land’s hard, buxom corrugations; its underlying structure; its rhythmic, monotonous geomorphology. This was not a pretty-picture landscape for the tourists, but something assertively, unspectacularly, blatantly here. Massive, rude, and empty, McCahon’s landscapes evoked the biblical ‘wilderness’, calling forth the possibility of a promised land, a utopian reconciliation of the people and the place.

Wystan Curnow has characterised McCahon’s early work through a contradiction-in-terms: ‘expressive realism’. Expressionists deform external reality to express the truth of their inner experience while realists eschew subjective distortions in the hope of capturing the external world. The expressive realist however conflates inner and outer realities, discovering and inventing his true self only in striving for the deep essence of the Other. This quest finds clear expression in McCahon’s Six Days in Nelson and Canterbury (1950), which contains six views of a landscape as though glimpses sampled from a journey. The work refers to the six days of Creation, but, less grandly, it was based on McCahon’s epic bicycle rides in search of seasonal work. God created the world in six days, each day a lurch forward providing a new level of complexity and detail, a new order of existence. And yet, McCahon’s six landscapes vary only in their profile, so it is hard to argue such a sequence. Here, McCahon implies, what is changing, what is being created, is not the World, the landscape, but rather the subject. The subject is refined in spending time with the land, tuning in to it. Geomorphology begets psychomorphology.

In the late 1940s, McCahon populated his bleak, majestic landscapes with figures and tales from the Christian story: Christ and the Virgin, annunciations, crucifixions, depositions, entombments. These works drew on a range of sources. Early Renaissance painters had already staged the Christian story as if it were happening on their own doorstep. The crude black outlines came from Georges Rouault and comics—notoriously, the speech bubbles came from a Rinso soap-powder packet. The artfully clumsy rendering and the mix of high and low sources suggested, to some, something urgent, pious, direct; to others, blasphemy. Poet Charles Brash reported: ‘Colin McCahon is saying that here in New Zealand men who are the sons of God … are betraying and crucifying one another daily, that daily the three Maries are being turned back from the tomb (or that we are looking for truth in the wrong place, and according to the letter and not the spirit) …’¹

While they became notorious—critic A.R.D. Fairburn said they might pass as graffiti on some celestial lavatory—the ‘early religious paintings’ were not entirely satisfactory: they made literal, too literal, what was already implicit in McCahon’s unpeopled landscapes. McCahon would turn his back on this approach, rejecting illustration, edging towards a different approach, which we see in his mature works of the 1960s and 1970s. But, what would come next, in the early and mid 1950s, in retrospect, seems like a re-apprenticeship, with McCahon going back to the drawing board, schooling himself in modern ways of composing pictures, retooling himself in cubism and its offshoots. On Building Bridges (1952) says a lot about McCahon’s issues at this point. It offers three views of a distant local terrain framed by the struts of an unfinished or decomposing heavy-metal bridge. Bridges are artificial contrivances that take us places, that offer access to destinations we couldn’t reach otherwise; but McCahon’s bridge does not take us into the land exactly, in fact it could be seen as a barrier, running parallel to the landscape, bypassing it. However, the unraveling of the bridge also echoes the cubist facetingof the landscape, as though each might be melding into the other, or emerging from one another, as though at some deep level there might be some intrinsic sympathy between the bridge (the subject) and the land (the Other). Ambiguous, the work is an imbroglio.

When McCahon returned from his visit to the US in 1958, he made a breakthrough, informed by his exposure to abstract expressionism. McCahon geared up, bringing a new authority, scale, and complexity to the work. 1958 was the year of  the Northland Panels, a serial landscape, a landscape narrative, painted on big drops of unstretched canvas. Moving out of the easel painting mode, this was an installation painting, a painting to walk by. The Wake, same year, was like a sequence of giant illuminated pages which filled the room. Text drops featuringpoet  John Caselberg’s elegy for his dog were punctuated by thin abstracts representing kauri trees. The space of reading had become a forest of signs, the work an immersive environment. The following year, McCahon produced Let Be, Let Be, taking Christ forsaken as a metaphor for the lot of modern man. In the late 1940s, McCahon would have pictured Christ on the Cross, but, in this painting, the figure is replaced with a sign: a T shape, a Tau cross, the Jewish cross associated with the Passover. This cipher is both image and writing—a letter; is both Christian and pre-Christian. In the context of McCahon’s work, the cross here pointedly recalls the broken bridge in On Building Bridges, as though it were attempting to span the painting. And so Christ takes on the ambiguity of the bridge: he is both a barrier and a way through.

After 1958, McCahon moves onwards and outwards like never before, mixing orders of language, images, signs, and symbols; mixing different registers of significance; multiplying and cross-fertilising ways of making paintings. McCahon synthesises all manner of influences and content: abstract expressionism, minimalism, Maori nationalism, environmental concerns, Japanese scroll painting, Moby Dick … The Christianity complicates everything it comes into contact with, making religious nationalism, apocalyptic environmentalism, holy minimalism, divine conceptualism! With few artists in New Zealand practicing radical styles for McCahon to position himself against and no one else laying down the law, McCahon was free to make it up as he went along, making wilful use of his sources, grounding his explorations not in a broader context but back in his own work. As Wystan Curnow put it, ‘having invented painting in New Zealand, he could now work in a tradition of his own making’.²

Through the 1960s and 1970s, much of McCahan’s work turns on the idea of the fourteen Stations of the Cross. For Catholics, the Stations are a meditational conceit, a ritual by which they might accompany Christ through his last journey and reflect on his suffering. McCahon created many versions of the Stations. In a 1966 work, rudimentary landscape forms stand in for each stop. But McCahon’s most radical innovation was to resist representing the Stations, simply replacing each stop with a number—a mnemonic. His three Teaching Aids (1975) recall blackboards. Each is an array of ten sheets, two-up five-across; each sheet a performance of the Stations, thirty performances in all. McCahon counts up through the Stations this way and that, using Arabic numbers, Roman numerals, and words, sometimes making it to fourteen, sometimes not; with white lines subdividing panels, suggesting compartments, crosses, letters, landscapes. While we might impute specific readings to each panel, with this many variations McCahon is surely suggesting that we might read sense even into a random organisation of numbers if we approach them via the interpretative prompt and spiritual imperative of the Stations. And so the Aids invite and confound our hermeneutic zeal. Marrying the absolute and the provisional, they meet us halfway, affirming faith as a hankering, a coming to terms.

McCahon exploited the deep structural possibilities of Christian myth to create a labyrinthine oeuvre, a body of work we can ‘get into’. But was McCahon Christian? Anxious to promote him as a passionate agnostic who used Christianity as an armature for an art with other objectives, Wystan Curnow cites McCahon’s difficulty with organised religion, his persistent doubt, and his obsession with Christ’s death on the cross, as though this were the literal death of Christianity. Stuart McKenzie, however, characterises McCahon’s project in terms of contemporary theology, in which the death of god, the profane, and doubt are motors for religious feeling. There is, in fact, considerable common ground between these views. It is this: McCahon is aligned with existentialism, investing meaning into a meaningless world, a post-war world that God had forsaken. But more remarkable is how the work implicates us in this. The viewer is set up to relate to the works in the manner that McCahon himself once confronted the land, approaching it as an Other that is not easy, that is recalcitrant and shy to knowledge. And yet, we find ourselves, our own meanings, in it, as if we and they were one and the same. Deciphering implicates us in an invention, the invention of ourselves. McCahon’s work reaches out to embroil us in an epistemological contract.

Paradoxically, the artist who wanted to find a way through became an obstacle for a subsequent generation. In the 1970s and early 1980s, there was a feeling that wherever New Zealand artists wanted to go, McCahon had been there, done that, already. He had pegged out the territory, made his mark, everywhere. McCahon’s work was so heavily essayed, so closely read, and in itself so expansive and complex, so influential, that it seemed to belong to all moments: premodern, modern, post modern; regionalist, nationalist, internationalist; believer, doubter. Gravid, his work seemed to draw everything into itself. However, since his death in 1987, contemporary artists have found a way through McCahon by reading and rewriting the work perversely. Take some of the younger generation of artists in Toi Toi Toi. Ronnie Van Hout mimics McCahon’s ominous early landscapes in his 1992 photographic series, Return of the Living Dead. McCahon’s holy personages are replaced by a model Afrika Korps radio operator, as though conflating McCahon’s presumptive colonisation of the wilderness with Hitler’s dream of world domination and the legacy of German romanticism. Mike Stevenson’s hokey naive paintings of small towns and their churches and church halls from the late 1980s nodded towards McCahon’s early religious paintings. But his more recent works are less an illustration of Pentecostal life than a parallel instance of irrational fundamentalism—righteous and cranky. L. Budd draws on McCahon’s late text paintings, even painting on canvas blinds as McCahon did and often imitating his blackboard look. But rather than achieving a public voice, her works are solipsistic and arcane. It’s as if the search for the truth seriously fell off the rails, but just kept going, echoing McCahon’s voice in the wilderness, the man alone, the unbelievable believer. Peter Robinson draws on McCahon’s preference for plain-speaking vernacular sources—grocers’ signs and cricket scoreboards—as shortcuts to the truth, except in Robinson’s case the truth is the sad state of our race relations. Aping McCahon’s pedagogical aspirations, Robinson casts himself as the bad preacher, the evil McCahon. All these artists show great affection for McCahon in their own way, but as disbelievers they are all concerned to undermine his—perhaps anyone’s—purchase on Truth with a capital T. Perversely perhaps, McCahon’s legacy may have been to have generated a space for folly, disbelief, and cynicism in New Zealand art—a way through.
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[IMAGE: Colin McCahon Six Days in Nelson and Canterbury 1950]