Title: Somebody Say Something

Author: Gregory O'Brien

In: Sport 23: Spring 1999

Publication details: Fergus Barrowman, November 1999

Part of: Sport

Conditions of use

Share:

Connect

    mail icontwitter iconBlogspot iconrss icon

Sport 23: Spring 1999

Some Disciplined Mayhem

Some Disciplined Mayhem

In June 1999, Sir Denis Mahon, an 89-year-old art collector, arranged for his collection of Italian baroque art to be distributed among a number of British and European public art galleries. ‘There was disciplined mayhem at the National Gallery in London,’ reported The Guardian Weekly (27 June 1999). ‘Saints, virgins, popes and angels were on the move to accommodate the premature arrival of 26 paintings conservatively valued at 17 million pounds.’

Sir Denis had decided to distribute the contents of his will while he was still alive. The Guardian continued: ‘The treasures come with strings. They are loans that will become permanent after Sir Denis's death, on condition that none of the British galleries introduces page 12 admission charges, or sells anything from their collections. If they do, the National Art Collections Fund is charged with whipping the pictures off the walls immediately.’

In ailing health and painting only with great difficulty, Colin McCahon, by the early 1980s, was aware of his impending death. Like the admirable Sir Denis, he managed the preparation and execution of his will while he was still around to oversee it. No longer able to paint, he set to placing some of the important paintings still in his possession in public collections around the country, working out where they might be most effective. With neither Sir Denis's foresight nor his distrust, McCahon placed no written conditions on his gift to Victoria University (apart, that is, from writing informally that he did not want the artwork to disappear into a private collection).

McCahon believed passionately in the moral and spiritual dimensions of art. His innovations using language were principally to achieve such ends. He underlined the message-bearing capacity of art not only in the titles of his works (‘Load-bearing structures’, ‘Teaching Aids’, ‘Necessary Protection’) but in just about every published statement he made: ‘Painting can be a potent way of talking.’ His stated reason for painting on loose canvas unencumbered by a frame (as is the case with Storm Warning) was because it gave the artwork ‘more room to act’—his notion of the painting ‘acting’ went well beyond aesthetics to questioning and influencing how people went about their lives. He believed his paintings could act as ‘environments’, and written and spoken messages were an integral part of these environments.

In the early 1980s, Alexa Johnston, then Curator of Contemporary New Zealand Art at the Auckland Art Gallery, was involved in the purchase of a number of works from the artist. The gallery was also recipient of a large number of gifted works. She recalls Colin McCahon ‘clearly stating that he had specific destinations in mind for some of them—Wellington, Dunedin etc … gifts given with particular attention to what was being communicated and to whom’. So, in the last decade of his productive life, we find McCahon gifting the Parihaka Triptych to the people of Parihaka Paa, The Wake and Song of the Shining Cuckoo to the Hocken Library in Dunedin, Storm Warning to Victoria page 13 University and The Lark's Song to the Auckland Art Gallery.1

There is a purpose and there is a pattern to this gifting.

Just as McCahon grafted language and meaning onto the New Zealand landscape and night sky of his paintings, this time he was placing the paintings in the actual landscape. These markers or beacons were perhaps his last great statement as a painter, a final coming to terms with ‘the terrifying present we live in’ and a strategic placement of messages in places where they might be heeded.