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Hamish Clayton
Hamish Clayton
Behind Hotere’s Iron Curtain
The silence of Ralph Hotere is iconic. Famously reticent, Hotere seldom gives interviews, and often only to affirm and re-affirm that “[i]t’s unfair to expect an artist to be articulate.” Or this, (also) from 1973: “No object and certainly no painting, is seen in the same way by everyone, yet most people want an unmistakable meaning which is accessible to all in a work of art.” In attending to the works themselves, these sorts of statements have come to shape our experience and engagement with them. Have your own moment with the work, Hotere seems to instruct us. If there is any ‘unmistakable meaning’ here, it must be found somewhere between the work and the viewer. Meaning, then, becomes a thing that not only exists but also occurs, and the act of seeing is as important as what is seen. Or, as Hotere says, “It’s a visual thing, not verbal.”
On the second floor of Victoria University’s Hunter Building, Hotere’s Aurora Painting of 1980 stands like a sentinel at the stairwell. The visual - the viewing - experience of good painting should always be a physical one as well, but there is something more substantially at work here. Categorise Aurora Painting somewhere beyond merely good painting, and put it somewhere towards sculpture. Imagery conspires with object and then refers to all that outside itself; the undulations of corrugated iron are made use of by enamel and lacquer, and then these in turn make use of light. The thick metal ridges catch light and formalise it, arranging it in thin white lines to counter the splattered, gestural character at the top and bottom of the sheet of treated tin. Hotere makes his painting an object for us to reflect on while we are vaguely reflected in it. We can move around it, trying to find ourselves somewhere in there, while it stays inscrutably at the centre of our gaze, offering up layers of pigment between us and itself, so it is at once before and beyond us. It’s a visual thing? Partly, yes.
What we see are two horizon lines, above the base and below the lintel. These have been described by a prominent writer and Hotere collaborator as a ‘frothy tideline’, and a ‘cloudy horizon’. It might be a landscape but it is presented in an elongated portrait format, perhaps as if through a window curtain veiling that landscape. (The words IRON CURTAIN are stencilled, straddling the so-called tideline.) Anyone with a passing interest in Hotere will know of the central importance that landscape often plays in his work, and that that importance is particularly charged here. The same writer in the same entry identified Aurora Painting as part of a series that operated as a protest against the building of an aluminium smelter at Aramoana, part of Hotere’s backyard since the 1970s. So while the ‘iron curtain’ that is Aurora Painting is veiled, enigmatic, and serenely beautiful, there is also a kind of violence at work. The stippled earth-red is here a colour that Hotere uses to subtly evoke the physicality of both the subject of the painting (landscape) and the painting as an object (corrugated iron, prone to eventual rusting). It is also the shade that insists on the combination of tenderness, passion, and anger that is aroused through the work’s wider political significance. Wherever there are political protests, there are also voices. Hotere can say that it is unfair for an artist to be expected to be able to articulate and ascribe meanings to works, and he may be right, but this is not a line that is necessary or easy to apply here: the painting may be veiled, and may shift before us as a painted, material object, both inviting and yet somehow distancing itself from formal scrutiny, but it is hardly inarticulate. Out of the materiality of the work, and the context of its production, comes a language. Visual, yes, but also political, spiritual, and personal.
With Hotere, and here in this painting, the visual can be poetic. Every line here - whether gestural or formal - is elegantly deployed and placed. Small circles repeat, and are arranged in lines. But these are actually lead-head nails - part of the piece’s functioning as a found-object - and so the aesthetic collapses the artistic with the industrial. Equally though, poetry is actually, actively visible here, or at any rate alluded to. At least as well-known as Hotere’s protest work is that produced in collaboration with some of the country’s premier poets. Here, although IRON CURTAIN is not a line of poetry but a pun, it has to be reminiscent of the incorporation of others’ poetry into his work, referring to the importance of the written word as both motifs and sites of meaning in his paintings. Importantly, the poets that he collaborates with are also friends. So when we see a line of poetry, or whole poems, within a Hotere, we see not only the results of artistic collaboration, but also the way that friendships have happened, and are happening. Friendships and collaborations, like seeing, not only exist but occur. There is pure, human relationship in Hotere. It is visual, and has meaning within the painting, but it is also real in the space outside it.
It seems disingenuous to posit that it is simply the inclusion of poetry, or text however generally, that renders Hotere the power of articulation. Rather, it is because Hotere is an artist in creation of spaces that have, inherently, the power-to-say that poetry can be integrated and absorbed, informed by, and inform the space in which he works. The space he presents is composed with lyrical care. The Aurora Painting sits in exquisitely wrought symmetry: the balance of the lintel, and the placement and application of colour support the painting’s inner machinery - the circle stencilled in the lower left denotes both form and absence, contains other circles (a pair of eyes?), and floats like a buoy for the stencilled lettering above and to the right of the tideline. And the corrugations - note that the middle one is free of nails: a pure, unbroken groove, as if referring through omission to the other paintings of the series that often contain a single, central line of colour. Everything seems placed to be made relevant. Hotere’s spaces are made out of the care and the processes - part control and part accident - poetry requires. So his spaces can be made for, not necessarily by, poetry.
And yet there is this way of writing about him that verges on the poetical. So how far does the writing with Hotere stand in for writing about him and his art? When we look around for words about Hotere we often find them in poetry, from poets. Friends who were there. Hotere, according to one poet-writer-painter writing in 1997 wished that his work be understood “without the need for critical or theoretical intervention.” But the exercise is hard to resist. And it is necessary. Having looked, we must report back. We are compelled to look; the work is physical and iconic. It is elegant, and it is something wild and contained. It is lyrical and yet enigmatic, but is also political, poetic, and passionate. Its very tangibly felt meaning sits just beyond us, behind a shifting veil of text and light. There is always a space between us and Hotere. And at the centre of Aurora Painting is, it seems, a dark core; something solid as though a planet. Things like silence become its gravity. Poetry orbits around it, never quite explaining things, never quite becoming concrete (honouring the artist’s modus operandi), but also proving that the inner space of Hotere is an articulate one. There are traces of the evidence of meaning. And so the enigma in the work is heightened - something is happening there - and with it the compulsion to further uncover, discover, and express what drives the whole thing. We intervene critically and theoretically but these interventions are human ones and are part of those private experiences that Hotere instructs us to have. There are layers of meaning and experience on both sides of Aurora Painting; over there, on the other side, behind that veil is the place we are compelled by, but this is the side we come away on, and here is where we are compelled towards our own expression, towards theories of poetry and the poetry of theory. The different alchemies of communication are paramount, on either side of the veil.
A lot is made of the silence of Ralph Hotere. But there is a lot more made within, and out of, that silence.
Bibliography
O’Brien, Gregory. Hotere - out the black window. Auckland: Godwit, 1997.
Wedde, Ian. ‘Ralph Hotere, Aurora Painting 1980’. Victoria’s art - a university collection. Ed. William McAloon. Wellington: Adam Art Gallery, 2005. 66.
Waikato Art Gallery Bulletin No. 4. Hamilton: Waikato Art Gallery, 1973.
