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Essay: Colin McCahon
The career of the Aotearoa/New Zealand artist Colin McCahon (1919-87) spanned four decades and was driven by a 'desire for public statement'.1 McCahon was an artist of unique and complex vision in the history of New Zealand, producing a singular brand of modernist painting that sought to make art, even in its most abstract forms, 'capable of philosophy'.2 The search for a sense of place, notions of faith, confessions and acceptance of doubt, as well as fundamental questions of identity and human existence, are forceful and preoccupying themes in McCahon's painting and interconnect the works in his oeuvre. Although his art developed from disparate and often intensely personal points of origin, it is now internationally acclaimed for its exceptional expressive power and capacity to engage the imagination and experience of a wide audience. This exhibition Colin McCahon: A time for messages has been organised around six works from the late phase of McCahon's career that, with one exception, incorporate text and iconography for which McCahon is perhaps most popularly known. McCahon had far-reaching ambitions for his work and drew on a vast range of visual and literary sources, interactions and circumstances, transforming his remembrances and researches into an idiosyncratic visual vocabulary. The works in this display concentrate on McCahon's overarching project to communicate messages that are at once mystical and, to those willing to take the time to see, mysteriously accessible. Because of the enduring impact of McCahon's work on the art and critical thinking of his contemporaries and a younger generation of New Zealand and Australian artists, this display integrates the works of several artists for whom McCahon's art can be seen to have been influential or with which it resonates. Textual fragments drawn from McCahon's A letter to Hebrews (Rain in Northland) (1979) were the catalyst for drawing together a group of artists whose concepts of place, identity, cultural memory and spirituality are in dialogue with McCahon's work. These fragments read: '...these persons... passing travellers on the earth... they are looking for a country of their own'. The Australian curator and writer Bernice Murphy has positioned McCahon as a 'regionalist', a situation through which McCahon's work can be understood in terms of its profound connection to the 'local' and its important contribution to international art in the second half of the twentieth century. Murphy argues 'McCahon's significance as an artist for the world must be established emphatically through a grasp of his indissoluble engagement with his own country, and his fully self-conscious and abiding connections with New Zealand's artistic traditions and critical practices'.3 McCahon's work was grounded in the landscapes of New Zealand and it was the landscape that served predominantly as a vehicle for his propositions regarding the relation of the individual to physical and metaphysical worlds. McCahon's art did, however, venture in several distinct directions throughout his career, and his painting is remarkable for its breadth of theoretical enquiry and its stylistic diversity.4 In 1999 the National Gallery of Victoria acquired One (1965), a painting by McCahon that is small in scale but monumental in impact. The painting represents the sign for capital 'i' and the Roman numeral 'I', and the dual meanings of 'one': the number one and the impersonal first person singular. These ambiguities and connections provide what McCahon refers to as a 'slowly emerging order' (in pictorial terms) but an order 'which is built on the arbitrariness of language, on the conventions of human communication.'5 One is a nexus of word and number, but it is primarily about individual identity. It is perhaps the power of the self-identifying noun-I-that suggests such an intimate space between the viewer and One. This painting provokes a profound consideration of the Self and the Cartesian concept of I AM. On another level, the ochre ground and diagonal upper left of the picture plane reinforce a landscape reading that corresponds with McCahon's investigation of 'place' and concept of 'the journey'. The earliest use of numbers in McCahon's work occurred after his return from the United States in 1958, when he produced a series of watercolours titled Numbers one to five and soon after a series of ten Chinese ink wash drawings Numerals one to ten. This latter series comprised a large, single, dominating number with its word form spelt out in small lettering. In these initial series McCahon continually experimented with the compositional aspect of the drawings and paintings to the point where he removed the necessity to 'read' the pictures first and foremost as numbers, emphasising instead their formal and conceptual integrity as abstract paintings. Numbers did not reappear in McCahon's work until 1965. By May of that year he was undertaking a major series of thirteen panels titled Numerals, and subsequently produced further works, including One. The number paintings recommence in 1973-76. Of the number paintings McCahon said: 'I've tried to give them a very definite purpose, both in their shapes and really what numbers say, and numbers do say a hell of a lot. They mark a time and a place...'.6 After his 1958 visit to the United States, and exposure to the monumental works of Jackson Pollock (among others), McCahon began to paint what he referred to as 'pictures for people to walk past'.7 Text, landscape and the journey are combined in A Letter to Hebrews (Rain in Northland). In 1979 and early 1980 McCahon concentrated on texts taken from Paul's Letter to Hebrews and Ecclesiastes in the New English Bible. McCahon wrote and rewrote biblical texts until he distilled their particular relevance to his current idea or situation. In A Letter to Hebrews a stormy sky darkens the landscape that is penetrated intermittently with shafts of light and sheets of rain. Here, light is the symbolic equivalent of spiritual illumination in a landscape of spiritual darkness. The superimposed text is Paul's definition of Faith and a catalogue of Old Testament figures who found salvation through Faith. The New Zealand historian Gordon Brown has suggested that the late works, of which A Letter to Hebrews is a major example, reflect McCahon's feeling of resignation (he was unwell physically and emotionally by 1980). The use of texts drawn from biblical sources corresponds with McCahon's affinity with Christian symbolism, yet he was not associated with any particular religious organisation.8 The texts, in their familiarity and description of corporeal and spiritual existence, act as metaphors for human beings' search for faith (in one's Self, in a god), and their search for meaning and location in an unstable world. The viewer's journey past the elongated landscape format of A Letter to Hebrews (Rain in Northland), and the identification of Northland, refer to the landscape to which McCahon returned physically and spiritually throughout his life. Northland is the subject of some of his most celebrated works. McCahon's art rewards slow looking and an open-mind. From its earliest public exhibition his painting attracted often acerbic and dismissive responses to what appeared a deliberately crude style and obscure content. Contemporary readings of his work, however, integrate the visual power and compositional balance of his paintings with the poetic and allusive qualities of words and numbers. McCahon installed his paintings to emphasise the serial investigation of particular motifs, and to support an association of his work with the concept of 'the journey'. This journey is one from the visual to the emotional and intellectual, and one that McCahon hoped would extend beyond the boundaries of the picture plane and exhibition space to personal and spiritual considerations, as well as new ways of being in the world. Just as A Letter to Hebrews chronicles the Faith of Old Testament figures from the Christian tradition, The canoe Mamari (1969) traces the Maori genealogy of the canoe's people as a passage of white, cloud-like script of varying density and translucency across a seemingly limitless black space. This work is from a major series of multi-panel paintings based on the book The Tail of the Fish by the Maori poet Matire Kereama, in which she records her personal memories and those of her people.9 McCahon had a profound empathy with indigenous cultures, though his appropriation of indigenous motifs and language has recently been the subject of debates within post-colonial discourse.10 The canoe Mamari acknowledges the written and oral histories of Maori in its reiteration of successive generations' ownership of cultural traditions. In his use of Maori language and names McCahon discouraged viewers' translation of the words in favour of an experience of 'the sound of the painting'.11 McCahon was a prolific artist, often interrupting one series to work on another. In 1969 he exhibited seventy-two from a series of about ninety word paintings on paper panels, which included two works in this display: a transcription from Psalm 70 and a poem by the New Zealand poet Peter Hooper that McCahon used in several works. A striking affinity exists between McCahon's journey as an artist and Hooper's sense of the most productive pathways for human endeavour and spiritual fulfilment: '... and if you're appalled/at the journey/stick to the/guided tours/They issue return tickets'.12 McCahon's art conveys lyrical and melancholy narratives, yet is politically astute and incisive. Gravity and social responsibility attend much of his work, as he interconnected images and text with concerns for environmental degradation, nuclear disarmament, and the complex dynamics between Maori and Pakeha (non-indigenous) peoples and their histories. He stated that his painting was 'almost entirely autobiographical-it tells you where I am at any given time, where I am living and the direction I am pointing in'.13 It is these distinctive and contextual layers that connect his vision and work to artists including Shane Cotton, Rosalie Gascoigne, Emily Kam Kngwarray, Kitty Kantilla, Yvonne Koolmatrie, Robert MacPherson, Judy Watson, David Stephenson, Imants Tillers and Brent Harris. McCahon's One and A Letter to Hebrews (Rain in Northland) are brought into dialogue here with two works by Rosalie Gascoigne, a pairing that pays homage to a larger exhibition in 1990 that examined the conceptual distinctions and inter-sections between each artist's vision of the landscape, the reconstruction of language and senses of place.1 Rosalie Gascoigne (1917-99) was born in New Zealand and moved permanently to Australia in 1943. She described her cut-up and re-ordered road signs as objects not to be read literally but as 'pleasures for the eye'. Gascoigne was an avid reader of poetry and enjoyed the manipulation of letters towards arrangements that would 'flash' with the force of the living world. The screenprint Close owly suggests 'a glimpse of some-thing you saw or something you felt'.15 Clouds III, like all of Gascoigne's works, originated in her intuitive appreciation of found objects and weathered materials, and their evocation of the light, climate and terrain of the Australian landscape - in particular that within a thirty kilometre radius of her home in Canberra. Gascoigne's intimate sense of place resulted in achingly poetic and often uncannily 'true' representations of the land. Material, idea and the thing to be represented were in constant dialogue: 'most of the things I use have been exposed to the weather and, in this sense, mine is an art of the outdoors.'16 The works of Emily Kam Kngwarray and Kitty Kantilla affirm the artists' affinity with place and their integral connection to country. Kngwarray had a singular vision of her country-Alhalker-to which she returned again and again as a source of spiritual power. The iconography of both artists' paintings derives from body designs for ceremonies, and, in the case of Kngwarray's After rain, reinforces the interconnection of tradition and belief with fertility and regeneration. Kantilla's art represents the interdependence of cultural practices. She states that 'to sing is to dance is to paint'. The recording of histories and cultural memory is central to the works of Shane Cotton, Judy Watson, Robert MacPherson and Imants Tillers. Cotton's work examines interactions between Maori and Pakeha cultures, and has its sources in the political, social and art history of New Zealand, and in his daily life. As New Zealand curator Allan Smith has noted, Cotton's work connects with the 'tradition of McCahon's scripting of the prophetic voice, which continually speaks across the land in long or short orations'.17 In Viewed Cotton combines images and texts from Maori art, folk culture, ceremonial design, and European history to suggest the layering of time and space, and the continual evolution and convergence of cultures. Judy Watson states that her work driftnet 'summons up the passage of water, the Pacific Ocean that connects our two countries: Australia and New Zealand/Aotearoa. It holds the weave, the threads of cultural knowledge, a catcher of thoughts like a spirit net'. driftnet also addresses destructive fishing practices and environmental degradation, and records Watson's journey across the Tasman to Christchurch and her method of 'collecting information, sieving and processing it in the creation of my work, my research'.18 Robert MacPherson's installation 'Tree rain: 16 frog poems (Yellow Monday) for J.C.' consists of a homemade wheelbarrow and timber panels attached to which are the Latinate names of frogs native to the area in Queensland in which the artist was raised. The naming and stratification of the fauna in combination with the wheelbarrow alludes to memory and personal history, an autobiographical tone amplified by the work's titular dedication. Like McCahon's 'sounding' of Maori, MacPherson's play on Latin evokes poetic and often satirical connections between the names and the sculptural object. McCahon did not work in creative and intellectual isolation. His important visits to Australia and the United States in the early and late 1950s exposed him to historical collections and new developments in Australian and international modernism. Parallels have been drawn between McCahon's pictorial style and interpretation of religious texts and the works of American artists Barnett Newman and Mark Rothko. Brent Harris has drawn on both McCahon and Newman in the formation of his suite of etchings The Stations. Apparent here are the iconic cruciform of McCahon and Newman's delineating 'zips' that construct limitless spatial fields in his work. In addition to exploiting the formal possibilities of monochrome, Harris, like McCahon, deploys the stark qualities of black and white as metaphors for 'the Fall' and redemption, and to configure a sublime space in which a form of spiritual enlightenment or calm might be effected. Imants Tillers is an Australian born artist of Latvian parents who met in a 'Displaced Persons' camp in Germany at the end of the Second World War and emigrated to Australia soon after. He is, therefore, a child of the European Diaspora and his work integrates personal identity and cultural heritage with the open-ended possibilities of creative process. Since the 1970s he has developed a vast body of works in which visual images appropriated from a range of artists and sources, particularly art magazines and exhibition catalogues, combine in complex examinations of contemporary culture and its unpredictable evolution through the global circulation of images and signs. The seven sheets from Diaspora included here pay homage to the gravity of McCahon's artistic and spiritual quests. Of McCahon's relevance to his practice Tillers has stated that there is 'a constant tension between the search for meaning, the desire for transcendence and a pervasive and immovable scepticism. It is this aspect of McCahon that I find ... most relevant to our condition today'.19 The enduring importance of Colin McCahon is as an artist who sought to reveal the mystical forces and truths that bind us to one another and to our environment. Considering the interaction of viewers with his work, McCahon suggested that: 'As a painter I may often be more worried about you than you are about me and if I wasn't concerned I'd not be doing my work properly as a painter. Painting can be a potent way of talking'.20
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