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| Catalogue essay: Pippa anderson @ Idiom Studio, October 2001 |
| What has made it impossible for us to live in time like fish live in water, like birds in air, like children? J. M. Coetzee; Waiting for the Barbarians The little guys are back. Those little active figures that inhabited the looming, elemental landscapes of Pippa Sanderson’s 2000 exhibition Numino have come in to land, come out of the shadows, come to the fore in this latest exhibition. Whereas previously the landscape was asyndetic (big thanks to the OED for that word; it just means not cross-referenced), decontextualised, it is now recognisably local. That it’s New Zealand, or Aotearoa, is evidenced by the cabbage trees, the eroding farmland with the powerlines looping through, and the lesser beaked Numino perched on the cross-tree like an unconvincing magpie. More specific (both geographically and historically) than that even. Although often occluded by the Numinos filling up the foreground, the coastal formations Napier, Cape Kidnappers, Waimarama stand out, occupied by markers of the contemporary such as the monument that marks Bruno Lawrence’s grave, a monument created by, among others, Pippa’s mother. This last point indicates a further level of localisation. The region depicted is Pippa’s ‘home’ territory. It’s the place she grew up in. So, a homecoming of sorts. Pippa describes returning once again to the Hawke Bay area recently – home until she left at 17 – as a profoundly ambivalent experience. An experience that is fairly common, I suspect, for those of us who call provincial New Zealand towns home despite being settled in the urban centres, she found herself in a familiar, instantly recognisable landscape, but was acutely aware that personally both she, and the social ecosystems of the towns of her childhood had moved on, evolved. And evolved in different directions. Her first response, she says, was to start making sketches of the landscape, processing the visual familiarity into the familiar/unfamiliar of the representational process. The tension that happens here, in the reconstitutive process, is perhaps no more or less than the ongoing tension of the self negotiating its sense of self to itself (so you noticed the inelegant circularity? It’s an inelegant process, I think). The individual confirming identity through two necessarily combined processes that are only superficially distinct: a process of kinship, or association; and rejection or unfamiliarity – disassociation. The disguise, then, of the Numinos in this current exhibition becomes particularly interesting. In another time and place the (more definitively colonial) reading would have been more straightforward, the colonial subject struggling to develop a sense of cultural and personal belonging in a landscape that was at once awe inspiring (with all the attendant psychological baggage of the Romantic sublime) and menacing. Any figure within the landscape not ‘at one’ with it would be instantly identifiable as the non-indigenous, the unsettled newcomer in ‘a land of settlers/ With never a soul at home’. The phosphate factory chimneys with angled lines of smoke – a hint of multinational branding across the landscape – suggesting a place corrupted through the economic systems of the colonising force. Landscape, in short, would stand as a powerful marker of guilt and alienation to the non-autochthonous resident. And the disguise, of course, would read as the failing attempt of the alienated self to pass itself off as belonging, masking a peculiar lack of self and agency. You know the drill, take the verb of existential presence (‘be’ – to have place in the realm of fact) from belonging, and what are you left with? Allen Curnow (famous dead white guy) famously conceded: ‘Not I, some child, born in a marvelous year,/ Will learn the trick of standing upright here’, neatly yoking the notion of evolution with learned response, even trickery. I like this sense that evolution might be an active rather than a passive process, might be art rather than the workings of the natural. In the same way, I find these paintings challenging to the Romantic notions of art versus nature, of authentic versus inauthentic. I like the fact that these figures, have such a sense of presence, of vibrant life within the landscape yet conform to no simple positivist metaphysics. It disrupts easy binaries of physical and spiritual, of objective and subjective. The guise of these figures is a crudely attached bird beak, yet in many cases they seem oblivious to these prostheses. And in the cases that they do try, or succeed in, removing them, their faces seem oddly truncated. Pinning down the ‘point’ of disguise becomes fruitless. The multiple levels of pun, word and image-play prevent the viewer settling into familiar patterns of interpretative alignment. Even the landscape refuses the role of stable backdrop. In Bluff the landform of the Napier bluff mocks the profile of the foreground figure: who’s kidding who? The truncated spurs of Cape Kidnappers appear apt behind the awkwardly unmasked face before them. The title of Waiting for Guthrie-Smith recalls Bill Hammond (for obvious reasons) who is recalling Beckett (for less obvious reasons). The circularities that these references set up reflect the mercurial, circular paths of the figures, who seem to reverse the condition of the kiwi, arbitrarily chosen as ‘our national bird’: they are wingless but able to fly. One answer to Coetzee’s question (the one about living in time like fish in water) is that the question is suggestive of a particular ideal that is revealed to be mythical. It points to a desire for an idealised unity that is ironically predicated on a notion of human attributes irremediably disjunct from ‘nature’. We can’t live naturally because we have art. But, conversely, if we accept art and nature as not necessarily opposites but rather more of the same (‘Botany is panic of another description’: Curnow again) then that unhelpful polarity collapses. I like figurative art. I’m a literalist, and it gives me a way in, helps me find things to do with pictures that wouldn’t otherwise present themselves. Yet what I like here in particular is the deft and subtle way these paintings avoid the trap of didacticism, of telling you what to think. They can appear self-enclosed, yet are interpretatively open-ended. They present recognisable landscapes ‘peopled’ with identifiable figures. . . that don’t exist. What’s it all about? Go figure. James Meffan (James is a Wellington writer) |
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