THE BIBLE & CRITICAL THEORY ARTICLES Encountering the Song of Spring in Ralph Hotere and Cilla McQueen’s Song of Solomon Joanna Osborne, University of Otago New Zealand Maori artist Ralph Hotere’s (1931–2013) Song of Solomon series is a collaborative visual and poetic commentary that Hotere made with award winning New Zealand poet Cilla McQueen (b.1949) in protest at the Gulf War (Iraq, 1991). Here I present a reading of one of the paintings from this series with McQueen’s poem, Warpath. I explore the sonorous effects of repetition and visual and spatial arrangements in Hotere and McQueen’s collaboration, paying specific attention to the appropriation and re- contextualisation of 2:10 – 12 of the Song of Songs as it is embedded in the particular material qualities of the painting. New Zealand Maori artist Ralph Hotere’s (1931–2013) Song of Solomon series is a collaborative visual and poetic commentary that Hotere made with award winning New Zealand poet Cilla McQueen (b.1949) in protest at the Gulf War (Iraq, 1991). McQueen, a poet and multidisciplinary artist in her own right, gave Hotere a poem, initially entitled Warpath, compiled from news items on the Gulf War she copied and reconstructed from Time and Newsweek magazines.1 Seeking to counter the poetic war-language she had invented, she selected two verses from the spring song in chapter two of the Song of Songs, 2 slightly altering the King James Version, with: Arise my love, my fair one and come away, For lo the winter is past, the rain is over and gone The flowers appear on the earth The time of the singing birds is come This paper will explore the sonorous effects and visual and spatial arrangements of this biblical reference, through its appropriation and re-contextualisation in Hotere and McQueen’s work. Through their collaboration, McQueen’s poetic and politically integrated sensibility met Hotere’s signature painterly engagements and equally embodied convictions. Hotere made a series of collage works, drawings, and lithographs, over this time, exploring different configurations of the content of McQueen’s poem. The particular work from this series I will focus on is made up of fourteen individually signed and numbered black paint and exposed white paper panels, composed in reference to the convention of the Stations of the Cross.3 1 “Warpath" is published in Cilla McQueen, Axis (Dunedin: University of Otago Press, 2001) 131 -132. 2 I refer to Hotere and McQueen’s collaborative series as the Song of Solomon, and to the biblical text as the Song of Songs, or the Song, throughout. 3 Song of Solomon, 1991. Mixed media on fourteen sheets of paper. Overall size: 1324 x 3675mm. Private Collection, Auckland. ARTICLES VOLUME 11, NUMBER 1, 2015 55 THE BIBLE & CRITICAL THEORY Lyrical hand inscribed, or italicised typeface, from the text of the Song of Songs is juxtaposed, a single line at a time, with chunks of military terminologies in an invented jargon, visceral and clunky. In addition to McQueen’s poem, Hotere included an Arabic phrase, that can be found in lesser or greater degrees throughout most of his Song of Solomon series. The phrase translates as “Libyan connectedness” in the literal sense,4 and can be seen in faint black on black paint in one of the panels in this particular painting. Hotere was an intensely politically engaged artist, and abhorred the stupidity of war, yet he was also known for rarely divulging anything definitive about the meaning of his works. This phrase remains somewhat of a mystery, yet given Hotere’s political focus, it was no doubt inserted as a way of acknowledging the plight of the Gulf war – a device to contextualise the work with a gesture to the Middle Eastern situation. 5 Within the context of Hotere’s intention for the work, the heavy application of black paint also recalls the dispute over oil in the Gulf. The paint is translucent in parts; lines fade, speckled and splattered across the panels – it looks like petroleum. The dotted lines have also been compared to tracer fire by critics, or the flight path of birds in reference to the presence of the Song of Songs in the work.6 While I do not take Hotere’s and McQueen’s political stances for granted – both artist and poet felt very strongly about the circumstances surrounding the Gulf War and commented in particular on the role of the media – this paper will consist of a close reading of the textual and visual elements of their art work, exploring the potential for wider commentary that acknowledges a universal context of crisis, suffering, and the hope for reparation. The instrumental role of the soft sonority of the Song of Songs within the contrasting elements of their work will be demonstrated. The effects of repetition in a reading of the painting as a participatory process and material engagement will critically anchor this focal point. A reading that integrates the material quality of paint with the literary component of the work is also at the forefront of this consideration. The reference to the Stations of the Cross was a compositional addition made by Hotere, beyond what McQueen had composed. This addition reflects Hotere’s Roman Catholic sensibility which is evident across his oeuvre. It also calls for a sequential reading of the work. The reader is presented with a succession of alternating black and white painted mixed media pages that lay out the poem, in large format, to be viewed along a wall. While there is an extractable written or verbal component to Hotere’s Song of Solomon, I am interested in a way of reading that affirms the material effects of both written text and visual marks as a whole. A 4 The translation is provided by Taneli Kukkonen in an email correspondence during October, 2014: “Libyan connectedness” (or “Libyan ties” or, at a stretch, “Libyan federation”). Jack Ross, writes: “My Arabic teacher, Mr. Alan Dabaliz, tells me that it translates roughly as “Libyans Unite!” Copied, perhaps, from some news bulletin?” http://jackrossopinions.blogspot.co.nz/ 2013/01/hotere-out-black-window-1998.html. 5 The Arabic phrase was apparently understood by Hotere to carry a reference of praise to Allah. (Correspondence with Marian Maguire, May 2015). But there is no direct translation of any such reference, or any reference to Allah that I have been able to confirm. Any kind of territorial specificity makes no sense in light of the content and context of the painting. Perhaps the phrase is a nod towards Gadhafi, as the hero he was once perceived as; or as a generalised term espoused by black liberation figures, or a reference to the pan-African movement, but this is speculative. 6 Gregory O’Brien, Hotere, Out the Black Window: Ralph Hotere’s work with New Zealand poets (Auckland: Godwit, 1997) 109. ARTICLES VOLUME 11, NUMBER 1, 2015 56 THE BIBLE & CRITICAL THEORY focus on sensation over representation in this initial encounter with the work follows the immersive size of the painting, as the swathes of black painted segments that repeat irregularly across the work has an impact upon the viewer beyond a correspondence of literal meaning. One is confronted first with this visual thing. Through grounding a reading in the material and visual presence of the painting over the correspondence of meaning in sign systems that might come more easily in a literary analysis of the poem, I hope to present an integrated reading that does not separate the written from the visual – or to at least keep in mind that the text is imbedded in paint. Artist and theorist Barbara Bolt outlines a useful approach for this kind of reading. She locates an indexical quality at the level of affect at the base of a tiered interpretation of any given painting. Underneath any iconographic or narrative reading is a reception-based relation that “…involves the indexical quality of the paint and the effect that this has on the viewer … a vibration that hits us bodily.”7 Against the assumption that there is a gap between the sign and its referent, and towards the notion that an artwork might perform rather than represent, she asks if there could be a causal link or “dynamic relationship” between the image and matter – material effects that are also bound up with the contextual situations of the art work, or the mode of artistic production.8 Following art historian James Elkins, she finds promise in the contiguous relation between the indexical sign, and the “insistent force”9 of the dynamic object, first theorised by Charles Sanders Pierce, for her reconciliatory project that would see images as simultaneously signs and not signs. For Elkins there can be no semiotic parallel between visual marks and written marks. Images are not the same kinds of things as texts. Elkins praises the difficulty of art, believing semiotic analysis makes pictures too easy.10 He believes marks are avoided or simplified: put into broad categories such as “handling” “surface” or “gesture” which are then applied with meaning.11 He claims that the historical and analytic specificity of marks can confound semiotic readings.12 Yet he does not completely reject the significance of the development of a linguistic or semiotic model for visual texts. While semiotic analyses enable access to understanding structures of power and societal contexts through the reading of images as signs or sign systems, Elkins posits a counter “antisemiotic” approach, claiming that images are structurally complex: “they are partly inside and partly outside systematic, linguistic, logical, and mathematical structures of meaning.” 13 He 7 Barbara Bolt, Art Beyond Representation: The Performative Power of the Image (London, New York: I.B.