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Sport 23: Spring 1999
Impeded and Unimpeded View
Impeded and Unimpeded View
Colin McCahon's belief in art as a means of ‘conquering spiritual death’ must sound like mumbo-jumbo to the post-humanists and those sainted individuals bold enough to describe themselves as ‘skilled in reading the visual’. How also would they cope with McCahon's stated objective ‘to make a painting beat like, and with, a human heart’? Not that McCahon would have been particularly impressed by the theorists who, if forced to confront the ferocious religiosity of his work, would probably consign it to the same basket as, say, the folk art of Howard Finster—filed under Quaint, Eccentric Religious Visionary—or William Blake, a writer-painter whose anti-monetarist imperative was often cited by Toss Woollaston: ‘Where any view of
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money exists, Art cannot be carried on.’ A thought worth noting in the present circumstance.6
How do we—as viewers and commentators—cope with the confrontational aspect of Storm Warning? By retreating into formalism and seeing it as entirely self-referential and contained within a Modernist tradition of art speaking only to itself? But wouldn't that mean fixing McCahon at the point he reached relatively early in his career with the infamous Painting (1958), in which he had dispelled not only imagery but words. That painting was both a nadir and a watershed for the artist, a wall he hit hard, rebounding back into ‘content’ with the even more stridently voiced messages which would dominate his work for the next two decades.
Most likely, the answer is to bear in mind Octavio Paz's assertion that ‘theory is grey, green the tree of life’ and abandon all our discussions and speculations, and simply stand before a painting like Storm Warning in all its expressive, explosive vigour. As Julian Bell usefully points out: ‘Who needs a theory of firework displays?’