Exhibitions Dunedin

PETER LEECH

Style and Change
Ralph Hotere

There are dismayingly few artists in New Zealand who are able to sustain a sense of style: a univocal language for the working out and through of successive artistic concerns. By contrast, there are many who substitute mere visual recognisability — a consistency of signature rather than style. Still, to be fair, the drive to consistent signature is practically enforced by the lamentable philistinism of a these who want things to remain as they were, and, worse, of some dealers who try to impose a spurious notion of quality control in the interests of recognisability and sale.

A problem which arises from this confusion of style and signature concerns the matter of artistic change: style, of course, permits change; signature does not — the work immediately becomes 'different'. It is this problem which is interestingly acute in Ralph Hotere's recent exhibition, Paintings 1983, at the Bosshard Galleries. For in now incorporating in his work a new and seductive element of highly-polished stainless steel sheets, it might be said — it is being said — that Hotere has adopted a different, more inviting style.

This is false. What has happened in this massively complex and important exhibition is that Hotere has introduced an occasion for deepening consideration of what his style is and has been.

There are sixteen works: eight use, in various ways, sheets of stainless steel; two, both titled Aurora, are extensions of the immediate past period of Hotere's work, focused on the Aramoana issue and executed on corrugated iron sheets; the remaining six are paintings in a more traditional medium which, in their conception seem to stretch back over several years (Requiem for A.W., for instance, is dated 1973-83; and the four Small Mungo Paintings seem to explore the colour potencies which from time to time fascinate Hotere, though they rarely emerge in major works).

But in what way do the stainless steel works constitute perseverations of the artist's style, rather than innovations? There are, I think, two crucial aspects of Hotere's style on which they hinge. The first is the peculiar tenseness of Hotere's formalism: the sense, in so many paintings over the years, that formal elements are employed not so much for formal ends but rather to clamp and artifically to hold down turbulent undercurrents. In this respect, the stainless steel sheets act in the new works in exactly the same way — rather like high-tensile skins. The second, and connected, aspect is the way in which for many years Hotere has cultivated subtle stresses of lighting effect — even in the most forbidding of his black paintings. The reflectivity and light-dance of the stainless steel develops further the shimmer which emerged in the drama of the Window in Spain series from 1979, and continued in the textured corruscations of the Aramoana paintings of the last three years.

Hotere, however, takes an enormous risk with these stainless steel works; and in some the risk does not pay off. In burring figures or inscriptions on to flat, polished planes an irrelevance - seductive as it may be — is introduced, The mirror effect, that is, produces an illusory depth in the paintings — an evanescence which I find troublingly at odds with Hotere's customary muscularity and robustness. And the further problem with this is that the paintings acquire too facile a glamour and tend, in that respect, to promote the belief that Hotere has moved to a different and more inviting style.

It is clear, nevertheless, that this potential evanescence is a concern which has exercised Hotere. For in each of the works which take this risk — five of the eight — a remarkable framing device has been used. The frames - made by Roger Hicken — comprise heavy, rough-cut and rescued timbers. The seductive glamour of the steel is immediately overpowered by this literally clamping convention. And it might he added that, with this same convention, Hotere manages to retain the richness of decaying texture which was so distinctive and compelling in the corrugated iron works, bearing their scars of weathering and abuse.

But there is no need for this convention in the two strongest works of the exhibition: Black Window 1983 (the work, of two with the same title, involving dense elaborations of acrylic brushwork, as well as lacquer and burring); and Baby Iron 1983.

Of the two, Black Window is the richer and more complex piece: it is, indeed, as fine an exercise in controlled inexhaustibility as one might expect from a multi-media assemblage this side of its own deconstruction. Here, though, the glossy glamour of the steel sheet has been traumatised. The sheet is hammered down into the painting with crude leadhead nails; and a strip is torn from the side and made to curl over on itself. Toughness and tenseness is restored; the seductive mirroring is dismissed.

Baby Iron, if a slighter work, is intriguing and surprising for other reasons. Here, Hotere has employed a corrugated sheet of stainless steel in more or less direct reference to his earlier works on corrugated iron. What this, properly, achieves is a reflectivity and shimmer folded in on itself: the play of light across the surface is more subtly contained and independent. The work, in other words, retains the sense of closed-upness and tautness which is so characteristic of Hotere's art.

One suspects that Baby Iron began as a transitional piece and took on the role of an exercise in formal resolution. However that may be, what is astonishing about the work is the degree to which it might be seen, in its uncharacteristic lack of embellishment, to constitute an act of pure modernism. In several respects, in fact, the work sings out an unlikely but explorable parallel to certain Mrkusich paintings of the late 'seventies.

That Baby Iron suggests connections of this kind is no less than the exhibition itself, in more deeply complicated ways, also does. More than that, the exhibition offers, I think, an authentic scaffolding for a Hotere style-delineation. Often the artist can seem just tantalisingly beyond focus: the sometimes numinous voices of his painted inscriptions frequently ensure that, as also does Hotere's notorious distaste for discussing his own work. The work of course speaks for itself; and in this exhibition it speaks very clearly in Hotere's style.