The Treachery of Images

5/20/2018 The Treachery of Images

1/8

130

THETREACHERY

OF IMAGESRobert Leonard


2/8

131

In 2003, Shane Cottons big exhibition at Wellingtons City Gallery was in two minds. The gallery

wanted a curated show with all the key works, summarising Cottons development, explicatinghis imagery, themes, politics and achievement. But Cotton didnt want the museum-retrospective

treatment. He wanted to do a project show of new work. Museum and artist both got their way.

Downstairs, curator Lara Strongman assembled a tight, greatest-hits selection of Cottons works

from the previous decade. Upstairs, Cotton presented a cycle of seven large diptychs that were

wildly new in imagery and treatment. The show felt like two shows in counterpoint, as if two artists

were being presented: downstairs, the Cotton the gallery and the culture expected, even demanded;

and upstairs, the Cotton Cotton wanted. You could take your pick, or compare and contrast.

In retrospect, the shows polarised quality seems symptomatic of a dilemma Cotton faced. In

the ten years since his 1993 breakthrough show at Wellingtons Hamish McKay Gallery, Cotton had

tapped the biculturalism zeitgeist, becoming a key figure in the paradigm-shifting new generation

of Maori artists that Jonathan Mane-Wheoki would call the young guns.1Feted by curators and

collectors alike, Cotton seemed to tick all the boxes: as much as his work was rooted in local

history, it also offered a new spin on the most current of international art concerns (appropriation).

However, being typecast as an ambassador for Maori causes proved to be something of a trap for

this artist, still in his thirties. Prevailing cultural politics were overdetermining readings of his work,

casting it as illustration and instruction, and bypassing the exploratory, speculative nature of his

practice as a painter. By 2003, Cotton was no longer riding the waves of biculturalism, they were

riding him.

While the downstairs part of the City Gallery show locked Cotton into a pious and by now

familiar discourse about history, place and identity, the diptychs upstairs, with their pop-art quality,

were unexpected. Style and imagery felt utterly experimental. Riffing on their place in Maori lore,

birds suggested harbingers of death, emissaries from the beyond, intercessors between earth and

the heavenstranslators, Cotton called them. Meanwhile, bulls-eyes recalled archery targets and

Royal Air Force insignia although Cotton said he saw them more abstractly, as vortexes. Their

juxtaposition seemed visually vital, yet fatalistic. But, given the cultural anxiety surrounding them,

Cottons images of Toi moko (Maori preserved heads) were far more morbid and provocative.

Preserving heads dates back to pre-contact times. Maori kept the heads of important men

who had died, from their own tribe (to venerate) and from vanquished enemy tribes (to lord over).

However, following contact, Toi moko became curios, trophies, ornaments for the Pakeha tourist

art. During the inter-tribal Musket Wars, slaves were tattooed and killed so their heads could be

traded with Pakeha for guns and ammunitionthese heads are known as Mokomokai. Havingnever previously been tattooed, slaves were now inscribed carelessly with a jumble of meaningless

motifs, contributing to the desacralisation of the moko and its decline as a status symbol and art

form.2Fast-forward to the 1990s and Toi moko have become a sore point. On the one hand, Maori

condemn museums for their insensitivity in continuing to display their tapu heads, and petition them

to repatriate these ancestral remains to relevant iwi. On the other hand, the same heads are also


3/8

132

evidence of indigenous brutality, Maori insensitivity to their own cultural values, and shamefully

at odds with popular feel-good representations of the tangata whenua as children of nature andnoble victims.

Presented repeatedly, frontally and in profile, Cottons Toi moko took on a cut-and-paste,

decal-like quality. His heads were not exactly tattooed: some were camouflage-patterned or rainbow-

striped. The camo-heads seemed to nod at once to military fashion and to Andy Warhols camp

1986 pop-goth self-portraits, in which Warhol superimposed camo-patterns over an image of his

own disembodied, white-wigged, toothless, pasty face. (Interestingly, he died the following year.)

But, what was at stake in Cotton subjecting Toi moko to Yellow Submarineor Warholian graphic

treatment? Was this some somewhere-over-the-rainbow redemption of the heads, or blithe disregard

to their sensitive nature insult added to injury? Was Cotton pointing to a problem or a solution?

Whose side was he on?

Although Maori references permeated the new work, Cotton seemed to have largely dispensed

with customary Maori stylisations; his birds could have been lifted from an encyclopedia. His images

were not organised on trees, feast scaffolds or shelves, or integrated into bold emblems, as they

had been previously. Now, they were more like tokens, provisionally placed on flat black void-

fields and spray-painted skies, less organised than disorganised lost in space. Cottons diptychs

were inscrutable, cryptic. Sure, his earlier works had dispatched critics and curators to the library

to double-check the citations and to brush up on their history and their Maori language, but the

diptychs were beyond obscure, they were positively deranging. They begged for interpretation, but

defied it. They made you wonder not only if you understood what Cotton was doing now but

whether you had even understood what he had been doing before. As much as the diptychs could be

seen as continuing Cottons previous concerns, they could also be read as a dummy-spit, with Cotton

shrugging off the worthy expectations weighing down on him and cutting himself some slack.

With the diptychs, a surrealism previously implicit in Cottons work had suddenly become

explicit and urgent. Now Cotton was clearly not being prescriptive or normative making signs and

symbols for people to live by, as Colin McCahon had put it3but was free-associating with images,

crashing together Maori and Pakeha image fragments in the manner of Lautramonts notorious

chance encounter on a dissecting table of a sewing machine and an umbrella.4If the surrealists had

clashed codes to explore the repressed, unfinished business of the psychosexual unconscious, Cotton

was doing the same with the post-colonial historical and cultural unconscious. The surrealists

had been disinclined to analyse the latent content of unconscious imagery, preferring to bask in

its manifest poetry its non-sense. Where psychoanalysis sought to heal the patient in order toreintegrate them into society, surrealism declared society itself sick and their unconscious, automatic

imagery a revolt against it. So, perhaps at this point, the idea that Cotton was advocating some

sane bicultural reconciliation should have gone by the wayside.

In the years that followed the City Gallery show, Cotton would continue to explore the

directions opened up by his 2003 diptychs, refining and expanding his speculative cultural-surrealist


4/8

133

approach. With his increasingly acrobatic, reckless, even suicidal birds, he took to the skies, largely

leaving the land (and any safe hermeneutic footing) behind.

wwwww'''''

In 2011, Cotton acknowledged the influence of the surrealists in titling his Hamish McKay Gallery

show The Treachery of Images; Cotton borrowed this title from Magrittes famous 19289 painting

of a pipe that is not a pipe.5Cottons work owes much to the Belgian surrealist. The links to Magritte

are obvious in Cottons endless plays of substitution and displacement, in his disorienting and illogical

scale shifts, in his puzzling mismarriages of images and idioms, in his penchant for frames and frames-

within-frames, and in his witty title play. Both artists exploit chains of association and analogy within

works and between works, making interpretation interminable, postponing closure. Their puzzlepictures foreground the machinery of representation while transporting us into poetic other worlds.

Magritte keeps it simple; in each work, he tends to isolate a single trope, to tease out a particular

ambiguity. Cotton, by contrast, prefers complexity, hybridity and excess. Consider Back Words(2011,

see page 127), from Cottons Treacheryshow. The painting is divided into eleven horizontal sections:

flat black bands inscribed with scribbly Maori spirals alternate with deep spray-painted skyscapes that

provide backgrounds for exhibits. These exhibits include stuffed birds on stands, dead, yet frozen in

different stages of flight (recalling Eadweard Muybridges animal locomotion studies); tall ships, the

same size as the birds and also on stands; a billboard (or is it a drive-in movie screen?); that famous

Maori carving from the 1840s of a mokoed Madonna and Child (now in the Auckland Museum),

toppled;6 a Western-style Madonna sculpture; two red Arnold Wilsonesque Maori-modernist

sculptures; and a couple of blue pitted rocks, also on museum stands (are they pebbles or asteroids?).

There are also some freestanding letters, which recall both Colin McCahons text paintings and the

Hollywood sign; they spell out the title of a Christian hymn Beneath Thy Protection. (If this derelict

signage acknowledges a caring God, it seems to be one who has left the building.) 7

Not only does Cotton mix imagery here, he also scrambles styles and idioms. References to

printing, painting, Maori carving, Western sculpture, model ships, moko, kowhaiwhai, hymns and

taxidermy collide. The silhouetted ships look like shadow puppets while the birds and stones are

painted to look like they were printed old-school style, with black-and-white line work filled in

with solid spot colour. The way the skyscapes are stacked recalls McCahons serial landscapes.

They could represent sections of a continuous scene or different places and/or times (a history, a

narrative)or not. One can only ponder the relationship between the skyscapes and the inscribedblack bands that insulate and link them. Are we to understand those bands as labels or shelves,

supporting and distinguishing the exhibits above them? In relation to the skyscapes, are we to read

the inscriptions on the black bands as source, translation, crib or critique?

In Cottons works, images seem sometimes to belong to obscure or obsolete frameworks,

sometimes to exist in-between various frameworks, and sometimes to have come adrift from any


5/8

134

framework whatsoever. Adding a twist to Magritte, Cotton exploits the ways that images can move

in and out of plural, even antagonistic, cultural value systems, connecting and disconnecting with

alternative signifieds. This idea informed a suite of painted baseball bats that Cotton also included inhis Treacheryshow (perhaps intending to recall the way Magritte had painted on phallic objects

rendering nudes and clouds on bottles).8While the bats suggest partisan politics, the need to take

sides in conflicts, be they sporting or violent, these sides are not explicit. On the bats, Cotton

painted his characteristic mlange of historical and contemporary, Maori and Pakeha imagery. One

bat features an image of the Maori Madonna and Child carving. Is Cotton suggesting that such

images and the ideologies they refer to are symbolic weapons, which might do violence upon

us (or for us) without touching us? Or is he suggesting that those images are actually frail and

endangered, for one would surely not swing the bats for fear of damaging their exquisite surfaces?9

Similarly, as much as Cottons line of bats suggests an arsenal, implying we might take our turn to

pick one up in defence of the realm, they also suggest a colonial-history museum display of pathetic,

retired spoils of war. Perhaps these conflicted bats are at war with themselves.

To an audience anxious for answers, Cotton offers allegorical impasses and frustrating

interpretive feedback loops. His works radiate an enigmatic quality, like yet-to-be-deciphered Rosetta

Stones. Cotton piles language upon language, reference upon reference, trope upon trope, scrambling

different modes of representation, offering too many clues (and perhaps a few red herrings), generating

cross-cultural moir patterns. There are simply too many, contradictory ways to read his works, so

that any clear interpretation seems wishful. Theres no advocacy hereconfusion reigns. Cottons

pictorial imbroglios recall the awesome snowballing wreckage famously contemplated by Walter

Benjamins angel of history: His face is turned toward the past. Where we perceive a chain of

events, he sees one single catastrophe which keeps piling wreckage and hurls it in front of his feet.

The angel would like to stay, awaken the dead, and make whole what has been smashed. But astorm is blowing in from Paradise; it has got caught in his wings with such a violence that the angel

can no longer close them. The storm irresistibly propels him into the future to which his back is

turned, while the pile of debris before him grows skyward. This storm is what we call progress. 10

For Magritte and Cotton, images (signifiers) are slippery. They are slippery because they dont

behave in the way their signifieds do, and because they dont stay attached to their signifieds. You

can do things with an image of a pipe or a bird that you cant do with an actual pipe or an actual

bird. Images rhyme and relate in ways their referents dont, and you can picture things that have no

parallel in reality. Its as if, in Cottons paintings, real-life conflicts that may have long ago ended

continue to play out in a parallel world of images, perhaps with different results. For instance, in

Cottons 2010 painting Son(s) of Gods, a musket discharges a disembodied moko pattern in place

of gunsmoke a visual non-sequitur. Even if we could draw some conclusion from this image,

what would we do with it (now)? How might we apply it to the real world?

The title of Cottons showThe Treachery of Imageswas more than just a nod to Magritte.

It was a manifesto of sorts, one that distanced Cotton from the prescriptive identity rhetoric that


6/8

135

was settling around his work a decade or so ago. In the Maori meeting house, we are told, images

are not ambiguous, only familiar and reassuring. They situate the locals within the family, within

the community, within history, within the land, within the universe. They tell the faithful who theyare. However, in arguing that images are traitors, Cotton turns his back on this idea. Saying that

images are treacherous implies that they have agency, lives and projects of their own, and that they

are duplicitous not to be trusted. As much as his art is about meetings (collisions more like), it is

the antithesis of meeting-house art.11

wwwww'''''

Cottons work broaches an old dilemma: (how) can you be Maori and modern? This has long been a

vexed matter, not just because what is commonly considered authentically Maori predates exposure

to Western modernity, but because Maori culture is inherently traditionalist, being based in ancestor

worship and whakapapa (understanding people and things in terms of their origins). Maori and

modern may be chalk and cheese. Responses to the Maori-modern dilemma polarise. Some argue that

contact was catastrophic for Maori culture, others that the culture is dynamic and that foreign ideas

and values have been absorbed and adapted into its framework. Both ways of thinking are wishful.

Cottons breakthrough works, like those shown at Hamish McKay Gallery in 1993, were explicitly

keyed to the dilemma. They drew on the creole iconography of Rongopai, the novel meeting house Te

Kooti built in 1888 in the wake of the Land Wars, when the people were dispossessed, disillusioned

and disoriented. It remains hard to know if Rongopais carefree appropriation of European materials,

motifs and manners was a canny, empowered response to encroaching modernity or a symptom of

cultural breakdownclutching at straws. This ambiguity intrigued and transfixed Cotton.

In the early twentieth century, the Ngata Revival would sidestep this chapter of Maori art

(sometimes called Maori folk art), asserting classical art styles in its programme for cultural survival

in modern times.12However, in the 1960s and 1970s, the pendulum swung back, when the Maori

modernists promoted the idea that Maori and modern could be blended: Arnold Wilson conflating

Henry Moore with pou and Paratene Matchitt scrambling Victor Vasarelys op art with tukutuku.13In

the 1990s, it seemed that Cotton might be pursuing precisely this kind of merger. But, since his City

Gallery show, it has become ever clearer that he is grappling with the Maori-modern conundrum in a

very different way. Neither a conservative revivalist nor a utopian blender, Cotton has created a new

idiom, which he has called Maori Gothic.14

I was once told that Cottons favourite film is F.W. Murnaus Nosferatu(1922), and its telling

to compare his recent paintings with that films source, the classic Gothic vampire novel Dracula. BramStokers talepublished about ten years after Rongopai was builtalso had a conflicted relationship

with modernity. Stokers Victorian characters were modern, they were neophiles: they rode trains,

practiced stenography, used typewriters, sent telegrams, dictated their scientific observations onto

wax cylinders and transfused blood. But, for all their scientific and industrial nous, they were both


7/8

136

plagued and excited by a dark occult figure from an earlier, aristocratic, pre-enlightenment time. This

vampire was a remnantthe last of his kind. Dracula was not the past as appropriated by the present

to explain and legitimise itself, but a past that couldnt be assimilated, couldnt be reada past thatexercised its own excessive claims on the present. Stoker was explicit about this. At Castle Dracula, a

twitchy Jonathan Harker famously observed: unless my senses deceive me, the old centuries had, and

have, powers of their own which mere modernity cannot kill.15

Vampires are a sign that modernity is a house built on sand. As Jeff Wall explains: The vampire

is neither alive, nor dead, but exists in an accursed state of irremediable tension and anxiety he

embodies a certain sense of cosmic grief the vampire signifies not simply the unwillingness of the

old regime to die, but the fear that the new order has unwittingly inherited something corrupted and

evil from the old, and is in the process of unconsciously engineering itself around an evil centre. The

presence of the phantasm of the vampire in the consciousness of modern, liberal men signifies the

presence of an unresolved crisis in the creation of the modern era itself.16

In coining the term Maori Gothic, Cotton acknowledges the haunted, vampiric quality of

his paintings. With their glaring severed heads, suicide cliffs, tormented skies, graffiti written on

the wind and plummeting birds, they seem spooky and ominous. Its as though, in the course of his

iconographic enquiries, the artist, like some latter-day Lord Carnarvon, had unwittingly prized open

a Pandoras box, releasing ancient, dark, disavowed forces into the world. Under their corrupting

influence, familiar items now behave in unfamiliar ways. Passages from the good book, lava lamps

and baseball bats begin to mean something else entirely. Everything is haunted; nothing can be trusted.

But how exactly is Cotton positioning himself in relation to Maori-as-vampiric? Does he see

the Maori vampire as pathetic or powerful, as provoking sympathy or dread? To what extent is he

on the vampires side and to what extent is he invested in the new world that the vampire threatens?

Many interpreters presume Cotton sides with his historical Maori imagery, but the reality may bemore complex. After all, Cotton came to that imagery late, largely as a result of the research he

conducted in order to teach Maori art in the early 1990s.17His historical Maori imagery may be

less familiar, less natural and more mysterious to him than his modern images of digital clocks and

PlayStations. Perhaps his position is not simply that of a Maori insider, but simultaneously that of

insider andoutsider. When interpreters align Cotton with his Maori imagery, as if he were simply a

booster in matters Maori, they neglect and override his works experimental, surrealist imperative.

Cotton thrusts images together to explore the outcome, not to illustrate a point or argue a case.

They say that the meeting house locates and grounds its community, providing some

turangawaewae, some place to stand. If so, Cottons work does the opposite. Its all about uprootedness,

uncertainty, nowhere to stand, being up in the air. For Cotton, being Maori is not conservative; its

not about a sense of cultural certainty, the succour of tradition. Its more about identifying with and

embracing the epistemological crisis that came with contact, a crisis that split open signs, tearing

signifier from signified, turning images into traitors. Its about being fundamentally conflicted. And

perhaps Cotton finds a certain pleasure and freedom in this, where all meanings and frameworks,


8/8

137

Maori and modern, might come unstuck, or, equally, repossess and plague each other. Rather than

reconcile the indigenous and the modern, Cotton revels in their terrific, caustic, game-changing

antagonism, reaping its dark abundance as that pile of debris before him grows skyward.For Cotton, it seems, biculturalism is not about finding a bureaucratic solution, not about

policy and partnership, not about reconciliation, but rather, as Ian Wedde once put it, about keeping

a certain problem alive,18and, if not alive, at least undead.19

____

1 Jonathan Mane-Wheoki, Toi Hiko: Maori art in the electronic age, in Hiko: New Energies in Maori Art, Robert McDougall ArtGallery, Christchurch, 1999, n.p.

2 Christian Palmer and Mervyn L. Tano, Mokomokai: Commercialization and Desacralization, International Institute forIndigenous Resource Management, Denver, 2004 (nzetc.victoria.ac.nz/tm/scholarly/tei-PalMoko-t1-body-d1-d3-d1.html).

3 Colin McCahon, Colin McCahon: A Survey Exhibition(exhibition catalogue), Auckland City Art Gallery, Auckland, 1972, p. 26.

4 Comte de Lautramont (Isidore Ducasse), Les Chants de Maldoror, 18689.

5 The French title La Trahison des Imagesis sometimes also translated as The Treason of Images.

6 This carving is thought to have been made in the 1840s by Patoromu Tamatea of Ngati Pikiao for a new Catholic chapel in theBay of Plenty. The carver indicated the Virgins spiritual status in Maori terms by giving her a full moko. The piece was rejectedby the local priest.

7 Back Wordsis permeated with references to the Virgin. The hymn Beneath Thy Protection addresses her. And, according toCotton, the image on the billboard is based on Jean Fouquets Virgin and Child(circa 1450).

8 Incidentally, Magrittes The Future of Statues (1937)with sky and clouds painted on a commercial plaster reproductionof Napoleons death maskoffers another precedent for Cottons camo-heads. Magrittes work suggests transcending deaththrough dreaming.

9 Cottons painted bats also recall Marcel Duchamps notes on the idea of the reciprocal readymade: use a Rembrandt as anironing board in The Green Box(1934).

10 Walter Benjamin, Theses on the Philosophy of History, VII, 1940.

11 Although, I note, Cotton did paint kowhaiwhai panels for the wharekai at Motatau Marae, which opened in 2009.

12 For more on Ngata, see Jeffrey Sissons, The post-assimilationist thought of Sir Apirana Ngata, New Zealand Journal of History,

Vol. 34, No. 1, 2000, pp. 4759.13 Thinking here of Matchitts 1965 mural Niho Taniwha.

14 Cotton titled his 2005 Hamish McKay Gallery show Maori Gothic.

15 Bram Stoker, Dracula(1897), Penguin, London, 2003, p. 43.

16 Jeff Wall, Dan Grahams Kammerspiel (1985), in Gilda Williams (ed.), The Gothic, Whitechapel Gallery, London, 2007, pp. 21112.

17 From 1993 to 1996, Cotton taught Maori art at Te Putahi-a-Toi, School of Maori Studies, Massey University, Palmerston North.As Cotton explains: I shifted to Palmerston North and took up a lectureship in the Maori Studies department, and all of a sudden Iwas exposed to a different kind of history, a Maori colonial history it was something that I didnt know about in any great depthbut I had to try to teach the stuff. I was learning, teaching, learning, teaching, all at speed, and it started feeding into my painting.So a lot of the work through the nineties was dense; it was dense with biblical scripture and dense with Maori history, which wasnew to me. I wasnt so much trying to teach people about this stuff as trying to understand it for myself. Shane Cotton: stamina,surprise and suspense (interview with Justin Paton), B.170 Bulletin of Christchurch Art Gallery, Summer 2012/13, p. 14.

18 See Weddes The Delft effect, Midwest, no. 3, 1993, p. 16.

19 For all its supposed darkness and disruption, the Gothic is fundamentally romantic and reassuring: its a mode of enjoyment, away of taking pleasure. And thats why it will never be part of a utopianbicultural solution. Because inpreferringthe Gothic, weprefer the problem. Robert Leonard, Hello darkness: New Zealand gothic, Art & Australia,Vol. 46, No. 1, Spring 2008, p. 95.

The Treachery of Images

Documents

Transcript of The Treachery of Images