Dougal McNeill Essay

Gate III, Colin McCahon, 1970
Adam Art Gallery, Victoria University of Wellington

Winner 2003 Chartwell Trust Student Art Writing Prize

It is, I think, the sheer, unapologetic pomposity of McCahon that delights me: I AM in gigantic, tortured and torturous white and stern black is something quite hard to miss, and most of us would feel a little self-conscious demanding recognition of something so obvious. It's hard to avoid that agonized, high modernist sense of precariousness and uncertainty written into the very letter of the canvas. I AM: the achieve of, the mastery of the thing unsettles ironically, too: a long time between drinks here. More permanent than speech and yet at the same time fighting against the anonymity of print: I AM in its singular, determined sense of individuality is what strikes. It is, if we want to quibble, an incomplete sentence - a subject and verb free-floating at once assertively and anxiously - at the same time strangely final while offering the moment of something else.

Lacking a Protestant scriptural familiarity, a good deal of the spiritual is lost on me but one thing is obvious: all the other lettering is fluff, filler, a heart in a heartless world, the sigh of the oppressed creature: an attempt to inscribe meaning onto an empty landscape. "The gate of wisdom", for us as viewers, is in the immediacy of I AM.

This tight-lipped seriousness of spiritual angst and subjectivity wracked over untold pains is, of course, the easiest thing in the world to parody: "I AM….getting a sore head standing here?….suffering the agonies of constipation?…in the gallery to avoid the rain?" - the very intensity of vision, to use a slightly old-fashioned way of talking, invites this kind of common-sense, briskly skeptical deflation. Fame and easy recognition are dangers as well. I recognize the work from before ever having seen it here, in the flesh, and a certain resentment, a certain floozy familiarity is inevitable. We arrive at the work with ways of seeing always already calculated, and the pomposity of it invites ridicule: like so much of the shopworn spiritual excess the modernists tore their hearts out over we feel a certain embarrassment, a certain sense that such labouring over verb and subject is just a little self-indulgent. The whole thing seems dated.

But, in my opinion, that last sentence can't be true. The forms have changed but the historical moment itself, the argument in the canvas, is far from exhausted. It is in this that one senses there is something to the very silliness of it, the certainty that I AM is important enough to record in such ridiculously large lettering is as reassuring as it is unsettling. He is (or, more accurately, was) but am I? Is this a general statement or something more personal, a personal assertion of existence?      

What our assumption of seeing and the emphasis on the individual and the spiritual miss, I think, is that there is a politics to the statement: refusing the status of commodity. The work and its author assert a connection, the huge, uncompromising solidity of the letters refuse to melt into air, they demand to be seen as the connection of life and work, individual, human status and laboured creation. The aesthetics are in the labour: the artwork as statement against the relentlessly leveling, ceaselessly interchangeable flow of objects and commodities circulating in capitalism. It is in this rebelliousness, this grave sense of self-importance against the anonymity of the market that is, for me, the great appeal of this work. I AM: it is in this, a basic claim to irreducibly different, unique, human status, that the work has a great political sense.

But, as with all individual, artistic records of protests, Gate III ironically undermines its own position at the very moment of articulation. Gate III is a commodity: it is owned by a gallery, bought and sold on a market as ruthless as any other, reproduced endlessly in designer calendars, diaries, posters and textbooks. The very assertion of individuality is a sham, the distinctive pomposity no more than a recognizable mark to market the very commodity status it protests against. I AM is written against an empty landscape: the cry of minority culture as much against mass civilization as the cultural logic determining its fate as commodity. We're back in man alone territory but, as should be obvious, the emptiness of Gate III is a myth, a piece of ideological landscape and background necessary to assure the status of its own disabling politics of individuality. The scripture serves only to reinforce this point: it is free-floating, shorn of any social context or significance, hovering - in naturalizing fashion - above and amongst the very fabric of the land. This political weakness goes a long way towards explaining the strange ambivalence of the piece itself. The letters are at once solemn and serious with their total black and large, Oamaru-stone white standing like pillars. At the same time there is something preening and coy about them. I AM (as if you needed reminding) - the very fact that so much energy and agonized theatricality needs to be invested in this sentence in a landscape reveals the very anxiety and knowledge of failure written into its very politics. I AM is a start but alone it cannot be, as here, a solution or an argument.

I am, in this world, only with the benefit of others. We are not, as James K Baxter's silly poem puts it, "born alone" and every mother's son should recognize this most obvious of biological facts. But, more importantly, alone we do not have a hope of solving the real crises of commodity production with spiritual solutions. McCahon, in this sense, is of diagnostic value: this piece states a condition and, in the process, asserts and at once negates an argument. He recognizes one side of the constant revolutionizing of production that the market engenders: commodities. But, and here there is a necessary blindness to the ideological assumptions of the work, he cannot recognize the Other to commodities: labour power. Where, in the real, lived existence of the market commodities and the increased socialization of labour go together all McCahon can do is, like the angel of history, cast his eyes back, dreaming of an (always imaginary) time when individual status and free work had status and existence. The emptiness of the work writes out a crucial force in the world of commodities: class. There is no sense of the social nature of production "in this dark night of western civilization", of the very force who are thrown into conflict with those commodities they produce and who can, and have, worked against them. In the very labour of his effort to achieve individual status - and here I mean of course ontological status, not "social prestige" - McCahon is blind to the one force who can give this labour reality.

The self-contained, irreducible artifact as rebellion against the whitewashed world of the commodity, as potent force against the power of the market: this is a utopian and dangerous dream. There is a seductive force to MacCahon's letters, an undeniable integrity of purpose. But it retains this validity only if placed within a fuller, profane illumination. The task is, in Brecht's phrase, to see above the work a well as within it, recognizing at once the condition that gives birth the argument, the argument itself and the problems contained within it.

Those destructive forces Gate III sets its face against are still at work in our world. We need to learn to practice complex seeing, go beyond the always doomed assertion of one individuality and see the battle over the commodity where it really is: amongst the spectators, the collective and the producers. They alone are responsible for how the future history of Gate III turns out. This is the "gate of wisdom" through which, at any second, the real Messiah might enter and one which these tall, tortured words help us to turn our faces towards.