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COLIN Mccahon, HIGH ART, and the COMMON CULTURE 1947-2000

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COLIN Mccahon, HIGH ART, and the COMMON CULTURE 1947-2000 1 ‘THE AWFUL STUFF’: COLIN McCAHON, HIGH ART, AND THE COMMON CULTURE 1947-2000 Lara Strongman A thesis submitted to the Victoria University of Wellington In fulfilment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy Victoria University of Wellington 2013 2 Why this sudden uneasiness and confusion? (How serious the faces have become.) Why are the streets and squares emptying so quickly, As everyone turns homeward, deep in thought? Because it is night, and the barbarians have not arrived. And some people have come from the borders saying that there are no longer any barbarians. And now what will become of us, without any barbarians? After all, those people were a solution. — Constantin Cavafy, from ‘Waiting for the Barbarians’, 1904 3 CONTENTS ABSTRACT ............................................................................................................................... 5 ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS ....................................................................................................... 7 LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS ................................................................................................... 11 INTRODUCTION: HIGH ART AND THE COMMON CULTURE ..................................... 14 A note on terms .................................................................................................................... 27 PART ONE: COLIN MCCAHON 1947-1950: ‘SEEKING CULTURE IN THE WRONG PLACES’ ................................................................................................................................. 34 I. Introduction: ‘A Vast New Potential’ ............................................................................... 34 II. Critical Reception: ‘The Lavatory Wall’ ........................................................................ 48 III. Cultural Context: ‘The Shape of Things in New Zealand’ ............................................ 60 IV: ‘The Awful Stuff’: Commercial Art and its Discontents .............................................. 87 V: ‘Deliberately Primitive’: Primitivism, Authenticity and the Everyday ........................ 102 PART TWO: AFTER McCAHON: THE DIALECTIC OF CULTURE IN A SMALL PROVINCE............................................................................................................................ 117 VI: Introduction: The Remedial Project ............................................................................ 117 VII: The American Invasion and the ‘Comics Menace’ .................................................... 123 VIII: Dwelling on Failure: ‘The Provincial and the Vulgar’ ............................................. 147 IX: After McCahon ............................................................................................................ 163 PART THREE: AFTER AFTER McCAHON: ART AND IDENTITY POLITICS IN THE 1990s ...................................................................................................................................... 172 X: Introduction: The New Crisis of National Identity ....................................................... 172 XI: ‘Choice!’ and The Indefinite Article ........................................................................... 179 XII: Afterwards: After After McCahon and Zombie Nationalism .................................... 199 XIII: McCahon and the Fridge: Te Papa, 1998.................................................................. 218 CONCLUSION: THE WORLD AT PLAY .......................................................................... 230 BIBLIOGRAPHY .................................................................................................................. 234 4 ABSTRACT This thesis analyses the conditions of artistic production at two pivotal moments in the reception of modernism in New Zealand: the emergence of a tradition of modernist painting in the work of Colin McCahon in the late 1940s, and the dispersal of that tradition under the impact of postmodernism and postcolonialism circa 1990 in the work of Michael Parekowhai and Ronnie van Hout, among others. Artists’ distinctive engagement with a broad compass of visual culture is considered alongside a critique of local high culture in relation to the culture of everyday life. The reception of this work is figured as emblematic of the historical contestation over the representation of the everyday; a struggle for visibility which reveals the social antagonisms of New Zealand culture. The first part of the thesis considers the vituperative critical response to McCahon’s use of formal devices drawn from comic books and commercial design in the late 1940s, against the background of the establishment of the national high culture. It accounts for the response by exploring the social factors inherent in critical disdain for commercial art and mass culture, which drew on the trenchant opposition of British intellectuals, and suggests that in McCahon’s work popular culture is employed as a form of aesthetic primitivism with which to represent the barbarities of World War II, as well as to express the experience of everyday life in New Zealand to a broad public audience. It concludes that fundamental to the antagonism over his work was disagreement over what constituted local cultural authenticity. The second part of the thesis considers problems of New Zealand high culture figured in antagonistic relation to the culture of everyday life that were advanced by New Zealand critics in the years after McCahon produced his popular-culture inflected paintings. The anti- Americanism of New Zealand culture is considered in relation to the rise of the ‘comics menace’ as a source of moral panic in the early 1950s. However, the interest of a new generation of New Zealand scholars in popular culture is observed in changing attitudes towards comic strips (and to American culture) in the 1980s. The same scholars also seek new terms for local critical address. A final chapter of this section explores the afterlife of McCahon’s work following his death in 1987, tracking the movement of the work out into the common culture and the high culture’s contestation of his modernist legacy. 5 The third part of the thesis opens with an account of aspects of art practice under emerging cultural conditions of postmodernism and postcolonialism in New Zealand in the 1990s, and explores the continued role of McCahon’s work in expressing and revising issues of national identity. Central here is ‘Choice!’ (1990), an exhibition of contemporary Māori art, which introduced Michael Parekowhai’s work and precipitated an ongoing discussion on the politics of identity in contemporary art. While Parekowhai located aspects of Māori identity in the traditions of high art and globalised mass culture, other artists interrogated national identity by similar means. The result was an expansion of the terms both of national identity and of the critical territories of the high culture. The thesis concludes by examining the critical furore that arose when Te Papa Tongarewa, New Zealand’s new national museum, opened with the exhibition of a painting by Colin McCahon beside a refrigerator of the same vintage. The debate, which ensued, was largely concerned with the desire of critics to separate the domain of art from the domain of everyday life. This analysis demonstrates how contestation between the high culture and the common culture represents a recurring and generative dynamic in the history of New Zealand art—in which McCahon is a pivotal figure—during the second half of the twentieth century. 6 ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS I would like sincerely to thank my supervisors, Dr. Peter Brunt, and Dr. Raymond Spiteri, for their help, for their support, and for their exceptional mentorship. My study was marked by the death of my mother, the birth of my daughter and the great strangeness of life during and after the Christchurch earthquakes. There were many days when I wrote through continued aftershocks, the windows rattling and the house vibrating around me, an experience shared with the population of the entire city. I am profoundly grateful to Dr. Brunt and Dr. Spiteri for their encouragement and generosity over this period, as well as for the intellectual benchmark set by their own work and their expectations of mine. Writing a PhD thesis, especially by distance, can be a lonely business. I am grateful to the many people who have alleviated that loneliness and who have helped me, whether by means of personal encouragement, productive argument, the provision of information or the circulation of ideas. Among them are Jim Barr, Mary Barr, Tina Barton, Dr. Megan Clayton, James Dann, Dr. George Darragh, Pauline Dawson, Tony de Lautour, Dr. Matthew Dentith, Dr. Mike Dickison, Dr. Warren Feeney, Dr. Blair French, Dr. Jolisa Gracewood, Jenny Harper, Tom Irwin, Tim Jones, Dr. Hamish Keith, Dr. Ian Leggat, Philip Matthews, Caroline McBride, Stuart McKenzie, Annie Mercer, Gregory O’Brien, Professor Michael Parekowhai, Adrienne Rewi, Caterina Riva, Dr. Simon Sellars, Marie Shannon, Dr. Leon Tan, Dr. Giovanni Tiso, Philip Tremewan, and Ronnie van Hout. Thank you. I’d also like to acknowledge the impact of the many conversations I’ve had over the years prior to writing this thesis with both Robert Leonard and Professor Jonathan Mané-Wheoki that have been instrumental in my subsequent thinking about this work. (In a thesis which deals with misunderstandings and misreadings, any misunderstandings are of course entirely my own.) I have been profoundly grateful for Jonathan’s
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