Title: Somebody Say Something

Author: Gregory O'Brien

In: Sport 23: Spring 1999

Publication details: Fergus Barrowman, November 1999

Part of: Sport

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Sport 23: Spring 1999

What Has Been Communicated

What Has Been Communicated

Stroke and a stress that stars and storms deliver,
That guilt is hushed by, hearts are flushed by and melt …

So chimes Gerard Manley Hopkins's suitably stormy ‘Wreck of the Deutschland’. Hopkins was a bright light in McCahon's literary constellation. His ‘Angel and Bed’ paintings cite Hopkins's poem ‘Felix Randal’. Another of McCahon's favourite poems, Hopkins's ‘Pied Beauty’, also serves as a manifesto for the artist:

Glory be to God for dappled things—
For skies of couple-colour as a brinded cow …
Landscape plotted and pieced—fold, fallow, and plough;
And all trades, their gear and tackle and trim …2

Words, for McCahon, were never inert or neutral—they functioned as catalysts and vehicles for meaning. They were links with the past, explorations of the present and messages for the future. As in Hopkins's poetry, the metaphor of the storm was a particularly poignant one in page 14 Colin McCahon's art. Storm, fog and encroaching darkness are three central visual metaphors of his late works.

In a series of painted scrolls exhibited at the Barry Lett Gallery in 1968, McCahon quoted his friend, Peter Hooper (whom he had met at the Woollaston household in Greymouth during the 1950s). The seething cauldron of darkness and fire that is Storm Warning has an analogue in Hooper's ‘Notes from the Margin’, a poem which also locates itself in Wellington:

Here is the weather forecast
What was it for us?
I missed it
although who forecasts the
storms that do
the real damage?
strong to gale
southerlies in Cook Strait
separate more
than two islands

the roof falls
when
communication
is destroyed …

Certainly McCahon's intentions for his works are at odds with the manner in which much contemporary criticism deals with them. Postmodernism has, conveniently, made his work an easier pill to swallow, his ‘messages’ reduced to the status of quotations within quotations. The fashion may well be to treat a work like Storm Warning as primarily an example of semiotic sampling, an ambivalent re-rendering of lines from the New English Bible, headlined by the slogan: YOU MUST FACE THE FACT (which may well have been taken from a Christian religious tract). This kind of inability to ‘read’ the work in its intended manner, one can only assume, underlies the university's decision to sell it. Its religious and moral charge cast to page 15 the wind, Storm Warning becomes a signature ‘McCahon’ with all the prerequisite stylistic tics. A rare, if somewhat ungainly, bird.3

At the present time it would be a critical heresy to read Storm Warning as primarily a spiritual or social pronouncement. This, despite McCahon's strategic use of virtually every visual device in the work to underline the literal meaning and urgency of his text. We are simultaneously given hell-fire, a tempestuous Wellington evening and an all-encompassing night fog, partitioned off by McCahon's ‘load-bearing structures’, the bars and pillars that might once have supported bridges but are now frail and dissolving in the acid-bath of McCahon's oncoming storm.

‘The physical art of painting, its mechanics and its labour need not interest the viewer,’ McCahon said. ‘The work of art is done by the time the viewer views. What has been communicated is now of primary importance, indeed, this is the only importance a work of art has.’

Paradoxically, when, in September 1998, Jenny Harper, the head of the Victoria University Art History Department, was publicly criticised for hanging a painting by Peter Robinson entitled Pakeha Have Rights Too!, featuring a swastika and not much else, in her office, she said the individuals critical of the work's placement were ‘people Black and white image of a newspaper article page 16 unskilled in reading the visual’. Surely, such a dismissal could be just as aptly directed at those responsible for selling Storm Warning—one of McCahon's most clearly articulated statements.

More recently, Harper has been dragged, rather unfairly it has to be said, into public discussions of whether McCahon could paint or not. In an Assignment documentary on Television One in June 1999 she was filmed nodding in agreement as self-professed man-in-the-street Rob Harley droned on and on about McCahon's overinflated reputation. Her decision to cash in Storm Warning was upheld by Harley as that rare thing: a sane decision in the insane art world. Likewise, in the press, a number of correspondents, as well as Sunday Star Times columnist Frank Haden, endorsed the sale on the grounds she had palmed off a piece of junk for a cool million plus.