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Spreading the word: Colin McCahon: Thomas Crow talks with Maria Bloem - curator Maria Bloem discusses the Colin McCahon paintings exhibited in A Question of Faith - Interview
ArtForum, Sept, 2003 by Thomas Crow
GLOBALIZATION, OUR MANTRA OF THE MOMENT, only carries so far where art is concerned. A case in point: A major contemporary of Rothko, Newman, Pollock, Twombly, and Johns--an artist fully at their level of achievement--is in the midst of his first major touring retrospective. Most of you reading this will be in no position to see it.
The artist is Colin McCahon, and, yes, he is that good. The exhibition, titled "A Question of Faith" and curated by Maria Bloem, originated at the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam, a venue of no small historical prestige. Despite the best efforts of its organizers, however, no partners in Europe or North America could be secured, and so the show has traveled directly to a series of key sites in the Southern Hemisphere, where it still has one stop to go the Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney, November 15--January 18, 2004--after its current outing at the National Gallery of Victoria in Melbourne.
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"A Question of Faith" assumes a place at the end of a series of retrospectives devoted to the above list of modernist grandees, one that began with the Museum of Modern Art's Twombly show in 1994 and has rolled out in steady progression to conclude with the Newman exhibition that opened at the Philadelphia Museum of Art last year. With the exception of McCahon's, all of these exhibition projects were operating within a relatively narrow margin of possible discoveries and potentially fresh interpretations. Bloem, by contrast, had the equivalent of a new world to offer, and hers might well become the most lasting--if least heralded--of these curatorial interventions. But the museum-class guardians of order in the history of modern art have denied most audiences any chance to test that proposition for themselves, along with a precious opportunity to rethink the foreclosed possibility of high-modernist painting as narrative of place and state of mind.
That McCahon's career has long eluded the regard of the international art world comes as no real surprise. Apart from a bare few months spent in trips to Australia and the United States, he lived out his entire life and career in New Zealand. Born in 1919, he both endured and exploited his country's geographical isolation, which persisted over much of his life (he died in 1987). Not that McCahon did a great deal to aid his own cause--though one doubts that he would have recognized international self-promotion as a cause worthy of his commitment. When he traveled to the United States in 1958, an ideal moment to assess the great decade of New York School abstraction, he did so in his capacity as deputy director of the Auckland City Art Gallery, rarely revealing, in scores of visits to museums, galleries, and studios across the continent, that he was himself an artist. Indeed, despite a fierce sense of vocation and prodigious productivity as a painter, printmaker, and set designer, he had difficulty imagining his art as a professional proposition until late in his life. On resigning his last paid, full-time employment--at age fifty-one--in order to devote himself only to painting, he wrote, "I am only now, and slowly, becoming able to paint in the mornings. After a lifetime of working--farming, factories, gardening, teaching, the years at the Auckland City Art Gallery--I find it hard to paint in the world's usual work-time. It can be difficult to accept that painting too is work."
The life story encapsulated in that remark sums up a saga of genuine hardship and punishing resistance to his ideas. It's a time-honored avant-garde script, but McCahon lived it: When he painted Six days in Nelson and Canterbury, 1950, he had just journeyed several hundred miles on a bicycle looking for seasonal work in the fields; his first job at the Auckland City Art Gallery was as a janitor. The irony of his experience lay in his resolute pursuit of an unprivate painter's idiom that could communicate in society as widely and immediately as possible. Any aesthetic nicety that stood in the way of this goal he sacrificed as an impediment and distraction. He cherished Cubism, Suprematism, and de Stijl, absorbed painstakingly from reproductions, then confirmed by the Gris and Mondrian shows he saw in America. But he wanted none of their private and esoteric character, regarding their vaunted difficulty as no more than an accidental effect. Looking at the historical record of modernist abstraction through McCahon's eyes, one sees how narrowly it has been construed in terms of a spatial phenomenology. For him, no painter's mark could be contained in any one register of experience; each reverberated unstoppably through the human storehouse of signs, devices, alphabets, and rhetorical figures. Where Rothko felt driven to "pulverize" all "finite associations" as the price of his abstraction, McCahon assumed that no association could possibly be finite. In their unbidden correspondences lay his "way through" the obdurate surface of the canvas to deeper and larger meanings that few abstract painters have been able to articulate with his precision.
