Title: Somebody Say Something

Author: Gregory O'Brien

In: Sport 23: Spring 1999

Publication details: Fergus Barrowman, November 1999

Part of: Sport

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Sport 23: Spring 1999

Nostalgia

Nostalgia

In July 1998 I was talking with a successful young local painter at the New Gallery in Auckland, not far from a huge wall-mounted work, Untitled (1980) by the Greek artist Jannis Kounellis. The artwork comprised three industrial steel panels with beams bolted to them and pieces of clothing affixed between the beams and panels. When I remarked on what a powerful work it was, the artist replied that he couldn't bear the ‘nostalgia’ of it.

I queried this remark. The three panels obviously referred to the rather un-nostalgic business of the tripartite crucifixion on Golgotha. The aged articles of clothing evoked the forced emigrants and civilian prisoners of World War Two and, more particularly, the persecution of Jews. ‘Nostalgia’ didn't feel like the right word.

Months later, amidst media images of the Kosovo crisis, Kounellis's artwork seemed to me to contain the essence of that catastrophe as well, the breaking of humanity on the the wheel of wanton power. page 20 (HOMO HOMINI LUPUS, Rouault might well have captioned the work.) I tried to think of who among the contemporary New Zealand artists might plausibly create a work capable of articulating the enormity and gravity of such public, social calamity. Which isn't to suggest this is the only area worth painting about (and, lord knows, public calamity has led to miles of rotten Expressionist canvas), but who was there capable of painting with the necessary seriousness and self-excoriating honesty?

‘Nostalgia’, of course, is to do with events being lost in the past or being infused with a sentimental attitude to the past. Perhaps, on the terms of the young artist, McCahon's Storm Warning would also be a nostalgic work, especially if you packaged up its religious and, I guess, High Modernist references and consigned them to their historical niches. On the other hand, I would assert that a work that can reference and inhabit the past at the same time as it remains alive and relevant in the present cannot be exactly nostalgic. The work might appear unfashionable and untimely but surely that is something a sophisticated critical environment should explore rather than side-step or deride. Maybe the young artist's approach is akin to ‘post-humanism’—a term that has crept into art parlance but which I've never found an explanation of, or justification for. Maybe ‘post-humanism’ suggests we have transcended art's ability to get inside the human situation? Such a state of affairs would have been anathema to McCahon.

The point at which humanist or moral aspects of an artwork are deemed ‘nostalgic’ is, it could be argued, a point at which the work becomes imminently saleable. The artwork becomes a quotation rather than a statement, a semiotic hiccup rather than an outpouring—in the case of Storm Warning, a ‘gift’ in the material sense only. (And this would accord neatly with the parallel point in the history of Art History when the master-narrative of Western Art becomes a socio-economic narrative of the buying, commissioning and selling of chattels.) One can only assume that at the point the Storm Warning sale was decided upon, the status of the item to be sold had been distorted and reduced accordingly. However, while the purpose and spirit of the work had obviously been decommissioned as far as those directly involved in selling the work were concerned, this was far from the case for the page 21 Black and white image of a painting Black and white image of a painting page 22 university community at large. The University Council's right to sell Storm Warning will always be contested, if not necessarily on legal grounds then certainly on moral and ethical ones. At the time of writing, with the Adam Art Gallery recently opened, the Storm Warning debacle lingers like a black cloud or busted Zeppelin over the Hunter Building where the painting was once installed. The brilliantly conceived, Athfield-designed Adam Art Gallery deserved a better opening fanfare than the fallout from this piece of bureaucratic and art-historical misadventure.