AM I LOOKING, OR AM I SEEING?
Wall-sized paintings with a dark background, overlaid with religious texts in white. Landscapes, stark, often with religious symbolism that, as one critic put it, “reconceived Aotearoa as the land of the long black shadow”.
If Colin McCahon’s body of work is frequently described as “difficult”, Auckland Art Gallery curators Ron Brownson and Julia Waite see it through different eyes.
Their relationship with McCahon and his work is professional, personal and public. The artist spent long days and nights – and years – in the place where they work every day. Indeed, the gallery holds 228 of the prolific painter’s completed works. As Ron explains, “All of our team feel very close to McCahon because he spent a great deal of his time here, and he ensured we have the pre-eminent public collection. This place belongs to everyone in Auckland – this place where quite a number of the works were created.
“We don’t want a centennial celebration of McCahon. We want an intimate conversation with the works.”
The exhibition will take up the entire second floor of the gallery, and will be divided into three decades: the ’50s, ’60s and ’70s – corresponding to different eras in McCahon’s artistic life.
Julia traces the path. “Each area will give a very strong impression of the character of the work through the different decades. As people come into the gallery they’ll be immersed in the 1950s – we want to take people out to Titirangi and French Bay,” she says.
Imported from Dunedin is ‘The Wake’, made in 1958 when McCahon returned from a trip to America and found himself energised by the artistic movements he witnessed there. It was created to be exhibited in a small, round gallery. “It’s one of McCahon’s largest paintings – 16 panels – and it was a collaboration with the poet John Caselberg,” says Julia.
“He was trying to create a fusion between poetry, painting, music, and theatre. It’s an environment for people to go into and experience different aspects of the arts. We’re hoping that we can put together a really interesting performance programme.”
The exhibition area dedicated to the ’60s spotlights McCahon’s practice while he was working at the gallery and as an art lecturer at Elam, and the final space honours his years as a full-time artist, mostly living and working at Muriwai on Auckland’s West Coast.
Julia says, “What I hope people gain when they move into this room is what happened when he didn’t have professional commitments anymore. It’s not as though the painting goes from first gear to third gear, it’s going from first gear to fifth gear.
“The work becomes more deeply enigmatic, more abstract, but we want to tie the paintings back to important local stories, intimate friendships and the beach at Muriwai, which becomes a theatre to him.”
THE SLOW REVEAL
For those who feel slightly challenged when viewing McCahon’s art, Ron has some words of encouragement. “In the 50-plus years since these works have been produced, there’s been a change in the perception of McCahon. People can now see McCahon easier than they did half a century ago. Somehow we’ve learned to see through his eyes.
“Sometimes when we’re looking at a work of art, we don’t know what we’re encountering. It’s a conjunction between these two statements: what am I seeing, and how am I looking?”
“It’s not as though the painting goes from first gear to third gear, it’s going from first gear to fifth gear.”
JULIA WAITE
He references ‘Takaka: Night and Day’. “When you look at this painting it’s what you might call a slow reveal. It’s not like a Nike brand – swoosh! – you get it instantly. This art is really to do with space. Space that’s receding away from you and space that’s coming towards you. So it’s really to do with, where is the painting? How am I looking, what am I seeing?
“[New Zealand poet and McCahon patron] Charles Brasch said, ‘There’s a difference between the time in which you see a McCahon painting and when you understand it.’ Other people have said the same thing – ‘Oh, what’s Colin on about this time?’ And 10 years later, you go, ‘Snap – I get it.’”
CHANGING PERSPECTIVES
Ron’s top tip is that “Often, you have to realise that Colin is taking the bird’seye view. He’s flying above the land, so he’s seeing it in a way that we only ever see if we’re aerial. The notion of changing the perspective is a key motif all through McCahon’s work.
“[With ‘Takaka: Night and Day’], you have to imagine he’s seeing himself as a high bird, and he’s flying through the valley, and he’s seeing it over a 24hour period. So he is changing the perspective of how you see a place in not only topography, but also in time.”
But what do the words mean? Ron explains, “McCahon said at one time, ‘I will need words’. The words are there to share more messages with us, they’re opening windows and doors.”
Don’t be put off: all of his works will have extended labels that will be carefully written to act like beacons to ways of approaching the painting. “They’re not going to say, ‘This is what it means’. They’re going to say, ‘This is where you can start from’,” Ron says.
Both Julia and Ron believe that McCahon still has much to say to New Zealanders. Julia points out that the last major Auckland exhibition of his work was in 1988, only a year after his death. “People of my generation and younger haven’t had a big experience of McCahon,” she says. “We want to make sense of him for ourselves.”
They cite a powerful recent experience. Julia explains, “Ron and I had this moment in the wake of what happened in Christchurch. We were looking at a painting he made in the ’50s called ‘Let Us Possess One World’, and we thought about the power and the ambiguity and the openness of a lot of his questions and how he made those public.
“He was sharing the big questions with us – and he wasn’t giving any answers, necessarily. The work’s there and I think, let’s get him out in 2019, 100 years on, and see what he has to say, and what his questions mean in this context.”
And, just in case you think you’ve never seen McCahon’s work before, Julia points out that it’s on the supermarket shelves every day. “People love his typography, and it is now a typeface [called McCahon]. It’s used by Charlie’s orange juice on their bottles.”