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Sport 23: Spring 1999
Get Up, Stand Up
Get Up, Stand Up
A parallel could be drawn between the case of the Peter Robinson painting with the swastika and the sale of the McCahon. In both instances, the ethical implications of the artwork were deliberately downplayed or anaesthetised—in one case to justify a work remaining on public display and, in the other, to permanently remove a work. And what of the artists’ intentions?
Certainly in the case of the Storm Warning sale, you could be forgiven for thinking that the intentions of the artist don't count for much these days. A fortnight after the sale was announced I discussed the matter on National Radio's Kim Hill programme, having called up a number of people close to McCahon the previous night and asked what they thought the artist would have made of the sale. Without exception they said he would have been appalled.
The artist is ‘dead’, so they say, just like the author. But if intentions don't matter, then, stripped of its irony, Peter Robinson's swastika in the office of the head of the Art History Department has the same status as Fascist propaganda (which was how it appeared to the Maori student who felt intimidated by its placement and lodged a complaint). On the other hand, if intentions do matter, then weren't McCahon's, in relation to Storm Warning, patently clear from the start—and underlined by the letter that surfaced later in the debacle?
‘Someone has to stand up for what artists do,’ Harper stated in the 1998 Listener article. But what exactly is it that they do? If she will stick up for Peter Robinson's right to paint a swastika why would she page 23 not stand up for McCahon's right to strategically place a work called Storm Warning on the hilltop above Wellington, overlooking the Beehive.