I’ll Have My Art Like I Have My Porridge.

 I’ve become so habituated to seeing my fellow artists mocked for saying nothing that it’s almost refreshing to hear work criticised for saying TOO MUCH. 

To summarise the reaction to Jono Rotman’s[1] latest exhibition: It features photographs in general, and one in particular, that are not proper subjects for art. The fact that such subjects even exist in modern New Zealand is a national disgrace, and we shouldn’t be advertising the fact much less celebrating it on gallery walls. Besides, gang members have plenty of people lining up to take snaps of them. Namely police photographers.

To extrapolate the argument, Rotman’s subjects are best treated like the old, mad, poor, dying, sick, and ugly  - i.e. forgotten about altogether.

As an artist, it’s common to the point of inevitability to be criticised for not capturing the full picture in your work. A piece of art that depicts the world as it is necessarily fails to depict the world as it could or should be. An idealistic depiction, on the other hand, is by definition out of sync with reality. To depict a subject at all is to declare it worthy of special attention, thus briefly depriving non- doppelgangers of the apple of affirmation.

As to the question of the subjects’ suitability. To contextualise this we could go back in time to Paris, 1865, when that dirty old bastard Édouard Manet had the temerity to paint an actual prostitute, as an actual prostitute, actually looking at the viewer. Olympia, bitch, avert your eyes!  Nor do you have to go to the Gow Langsford gallery to see alleged murderers staring back at you from the wall. Pop over to Texas and you’ll find George W Bush exhibiting a portrait of his mate Tony Blair.

Before dismissing Rotman’s work as easy, derivative, sensationalist, inappropriate or whatever else, I’d like to invite you, for a moment, to put yourself in the artist’s shoes. Imagine popping along to your neighbourhood chapter of the Mongrel Mob. Then try knocking on the door and asking if you can take a few pictures of them. Then once you’ve talked them into it, (and I’d imagine your common-or-garden gang member would expect to hear some more high-minded artistic motivations than the ones I’ve heard publicly attributed to Rotman) go and find yourself a dealer who you can convince to exhibit them on the basis that someone in their right mind might like to purchase one.

In taking these photos it seems Rotman may have unwittingly captured another portrait altogether - that of majority New Zealand, perhaps even the majority of the world - a brooding, mean-spirited, defensive, verbally violent creature that likes its art like its porridge. Not too hot, not too cold, and preferably not at all.

ADDENDUM – In Defence of Artists Past.

Up there’s my blog, I like to keep ‘em short, but here’s some more if you’re interested. It’s about my other besieged artist friend C. F. Goldie[2].

Given the amount of creating andl dying that artists do, the cumbersome job of interpreting the stuff they’ve made usually gets subcontracted to commentators. Enter, stage left (the ‘sinister’ entrance, as it used to be called), Dr. Paul Moon, a professional, professorial historian who gets paid a salary to think about this stuff, and illuminate the path that leads us from the cockpit of our ignorance to our nearest emergency exit. Or not, depending on his mood.

In describing Rotman’s work as derivative of C. F. Goldie, and others, Moon argues that if you’ve seen one tattooed Maori, you’ve seen them all. Despite the fact that these artists work more than a century apart, depict subjects at the opposite end of numerous social spectra[3], and basically couldn’t be more freaking different. He goes on to dismiss Goldie’s entire oeuvre as some kind of thirty-year meditation on Dr. Isaac Featherston’s contention that all we can do for Maori is to ‘smooth down their dying pillow.’ Finally he both chomps cake and has it remain magically uneaten by dismissing Rotman’s work as both unashamed exoticism, and a shameful generalization of all Maori, then biffs Goldie in the same boat and sets them both adrift.

You’d expect Moon to provide a little context around these extraordinary statements and in doing so, you’d be expecting too much. I’ve mounted my defence of Jono up above, and I also absolve him of Moon’s other charges, which I throw out of court primarily for their ‘obvious to those with eyes’ absurdity. How can one thing simultaneously be damned as representative and completely unrepresentative of the same people? How can a photographer of fringe social outcasts be derivative of a painter of elder statespersons?  But the dead have none to speak for them, except professional historians like Moon, and I have to say that if Goldie was a dog, and Moon its owner, then based on published comments, the SPCA would be getting involved. So, where he baldly does not go, I will.

Goldie was born in Auckland in 1870. By the time he had grown up and started painting, New Zealand had ramped up it’s accidental (illness) and intentional (war) extermination of Maori to the point where the population had fallen from an estimated 100,000 at the time of Cook’s arrival to around 42,000 in 1896. If you were concerned about the eradication of poverty, and you were able to point to a 60% decline over the course of a century, you’d think you were on the right track.  Similarly, given the stats in Victorian New Zealand, you’d probably feel as confident in your assessment of what the future held for Maori as we feel about who’s going to win the next rugby world cup. Nothing’s certain, of course, in life or in extinction, but you’ve got your well-founded suspicions. None of this is to say (which it often tacitly seems to do) that Goldie himself was welcoming of the demise of  a people[4], or actively involved in making it happen.

The next overly simplistic notion is that Goldie was a patronising colonial who hated on Maori and expressed these feelings by painting them as old, sad, sleepy and puffing away on the smokes. A more sophisticated reading ought to mention that the age of the subjects was at least partially because Goldie was trying to paint persons of a certain social standing (which it took them time to achieve) and more importantly, that the Ta Moko they sported were created through the increasingly rare practice of carving permanent trenches into the skin. The people who still had this type of tattoo were generally old. 

Also, you’d do well to remember that somber as most of Goldie’s subjects look, neither the portraiture nor photography of the time featured much in the way of grinning selfies.

My point is that if you do what Moon has done, and place certain half-cocked facts in a certain half-cocked order and view them in a particular half-cocked light, you can easily paint Goldie, or just about anyone as a real arsehole. I sincerely hope I haven’t done the same to Moon.

[1] Disclosure. I know Jono, I like him, but sometimes the coffee he brews is a bit strong.

[2] Disclosure. I don’t know Goldie, and cannot even begin to imagine what his coffee tasted like.

[3] Or spectrums?

[4] Or genocide?