Prompts - a reply
This text is a response to an invitation to write something about Prompts, the first show at Artspace Aotearoa for 2025, which as I write this preamble I technically haven’t seen yet. I started thinking about two works included in the show with Kaitohu Director Ruth Buchanan’s framing question for the year in mind: is language large enough? Otherwise preoccupied during a stay in London, I put off writing it as long as I could. I offer it here for your consideration.
Both Michael Parekōwhai and Lubaina Himid’s works can be considered critical reflections on and ‘enlargements’ of the language of primary texts, each of which possess a certain ideological and discursive authority to which they artistically respond. In integrating the symbolic properties of this source material, both works index a specific cultural context to which their forms explicitly refer and elaborate upon. The significance of the procedures of ‘translation’ and ‘rewriting’ embodied in each become intelligible against this incorporated textual background.
Himid’s work is a selection of 27 pieces from her Negative Positives series, and consists of paintings over pages of The Guardian newspaper, in which a Black subject has been conspicuously and ambiguously depicted. This choice of substrate directly situates the work, and the processes of racialisation it examines, within the liberal-left ideological frame which the paper is known to articulate editorially.
As Himid has remarked, the series dates from 2007, the 200th anniversary of the formal abolition of the slave trade in the United Kingdom and its colonies. Recognising this commemorative premise at the beginning of the series’ commencement clarifies the purpose of the artist’s critical scrutiny of the paper. It enjoins one to consider the historical relation between that initial, legislated transformation and enlargement of the political space of civic belonging and equality—a celebrated moment in the institutionalisation of liberal principles in Britain—and the banal documents of a more recent present, in which free Black subjects live and work within fraught post-colonial coordinates.
Under Himid’s artistic protocols this avowedly liberal newspaper’s representation of Black subjects is brought into relation with the history of slavery and empire that conditions the racial ascription of differential value to Black people—a social fact which liberalism has always had to awkwardly negotiate, given its formal commitment to civic equality at the same time as it axiomatically justifies a capitalist order historically grounded in the colonial expropriation of land and labour.
The series charts a sustained cultural analysis of The Guardian’s daily content in light of this historical and ideological background and its immanent contradictions—the outcome of a routine reading practice transformed into an artistic procedure. It’s on the basis of this analysis that Himid’s over-painting functions as both editorial intervention and critical commentary. Through it certain pictorial or textual details are isolated and brought into focus, their forms modulated, repeated and decoratively distilled into motifs with which she fashions a freshly inflected pictorial and textual structure. Each framed unit in the series is the result of a rearticulation of the newspaper page’s syntax, altered to attune the viewer to a latent racial subtext which her embellishments bring to the fore.
There is an ambiguity in Himid’s use of pattern and colour in these responses. Sometimes it’s used as if to elaborate upon and highlight an underlying racist association or dissonant relationship between text and image—its inscription gently re-surfacing this repressed content, displacing the original design on the page with a new critical armature. At other points it is deployed to more positively saturate the image with a visual signifier of African cultural belonging, as if to support the figure under pressure from the representation to which they are subjected. The form of the east-African kanga, which Himid has explicitly engaged in other bodies of work, perhaps serves here as an implicit, recombinant visual schema that guides these editorial adjustments.
Himid pursues these responses in the fluent, expressive vernacular of her characteristically folk-naïve style, in which the underlying material is over-coded in a subjective, decidedly hand-made idiom that works in counterpoint to the impersonal design of the industrially printed page. This is a formal dissonance which the look of her usually aged and patinated found object-grounds tend to soften; here though the tension between these two key aspects of the work’s structure is emphasised. It’s in this relationship between ground and pictorial response that the work generates its interest and meaning. Thus Himid is careful not to completely blot out the printed information contained in the paper’s original page layouts. Deliberately, this surface shows through—its complex but thoroughly conventional visual structure, composed of the titles, columns, quotations, and boxed images that permute in familiar combinations within the paper’s formatted grid, serve as the overarching graphic support for her quavering, painterly redactions and additions.
Analysing the specificities of the figure-ground relation in this work as well as the serial form in which it is embedded, one can discern the refracted trace of the social contradictions which liberal framings of race and its cultural redress must necessarily leave unresolved. Himid’s work gives artistic form to this irresolution.
One can read this social content in the formal fact that the ground and grammar of the newspaper page retains a structural priority over the intervention which partially overwrites it. Himid’s reconfiguration of its form reflexively encloses her gestures within the ideological context that the page’s spatial form materially delimits. In this way its ready-made structure, as the material basis for Himid’s artistic procedures, becomes significative of the social ground in which the artist and her art’s reception is situated more broadly. The material conditions that generate racialised social inequality, which liberalism endorses as a matter of course, become cyphered in the ‘material conditions’ presented by the page as substrate. Himid’s disclosure of a racialising subtext that cuts against the self-image and normative commitments of The Guardian’s liberal egalitarian ethos, directs one to consider the structural basis of this contradiction in the metonymic significance of the material texture of the paper itself. Viewed at the level of formal structure, social structure can be read as the ‘ground’ which conditions any cultural politics of representation or recognition within this ideological frame.
The sterility and closure of this situation, given the liberal predicates in which it is articulated, is further born out in the serial form of the work, which must be understood as a secondary, artistically rarefied sequence subordinated to the overarching serial form of the newspaper’s general circulation and consumption as a commodity. The disjunctive relation between these two streams of text—one an everyday, mass-produced commercial object with an established social and ideological function within the lifeworld of the artist and viewer; the other an artistically reframed secondary response, defamilarised through its re-presentation—stages the social limits of the discursive context in which the work’s political critique is inscribed.
Understanding ‘race’ as a structure of domination inextricable from the political-economy of the nation-state prevents this term’s neutralisation as a mere index of cultural difference or ethnicity to be celebrated as a part of an expansive multicultural polity, which the paper in its daily circulation ought to consistently reflect. What continually prevents the Black subject from ‘belonging’ within the civic frame of a genuinely post-imperial Britain, is this figure’s implicit racialisation in relation to a ‘deserving’ white English constituency, which liberal politics in the UK continues to implicitly assume as fundamental to the nation’s projected self-conception, its ‘natural’ electoral demography, and the settled organisation of its ‘indigenous’ labour market. Thus the hypocrisy of liberal egalitarianism is rendered visible in the indefinite iteration of this work’s serial form, in which the Black figure is marked by a representation which more or less subtly diminishes their standing, not as an exception, but as the rule which determines the series continuance.1
Like Negative Positives, Michael Parekōwhai’s The Indefinite Article (1990) is a work which displays a concern with its own ‘ground’—the precedents, principle conditions or sources upon which it stands and from which it draws its artistic significance. This ‘material substrate’, dense with historical meaning and the discursive weight of established cultural authority, is incorporated into the work as an essential textual element, its meaning altered and expanded through its rearticulation. In contrast to Himid’s work however, rather than appropriating a quotidian material like a newspaper with a definite social and ideological function in the wider world to use as its basis, The Indefinite Article is constructed out of material drawn explicitly from the art-historical context in which it is directly situated as a work.
The artwork which it cites and alters—Colin McCahon’s 1954 painting I AM— is itself formed through a practice of quotation, borrowing from both the bible and from the modernist ‘language’ of cubism, which glosses this emphatically traditional text in an ‘advanced’ form of contemporary artistic expression, at least as this was understood by the provincial standards of 1950’s New Zealand.
A further textual consideration is the fact that this work is being reshown at Artspace Aotearoa, 35 years after its initial presentation in Choice!, an important exhibition curated by George Hubbard which notably posed the question of Contemporary Māori Art—what is it?—and offered some definite answers, the most famous of which being The Indefinite Article. The context of this work’s reprise in this show prompts reflection on the specific institutional history of Artspace Aotearoa and its role in the construction of a national art-history, which is focused here through this work’s prior curatorial framing in Choice! as part of its own historical background.
On this occasion I want to pay attention to the work’s theological significance, temporarily 'closing’ the meaning of the work through a restricted focus on this particular aspect of it. My purpose is for this reading to then open out onto the practical problems which motivated the ‘paradigm shift’ which Parekōwhai’s work signalled, grounding the logic of a new model of contemporary artistic practice and reception in issues immanent to those faced by McCahon, which Parekōwhai’s work can be understood to internalise, restate and respond to from diverging artistic premises. Part of what I think makes the work genuinely successful in its explicit engagement with McCahon’s artistic legacy, is that rather than being merely an attempt to strategically position itself in a critical relation to his work and its extant cultural authority, The Indefinite Article evinces a serious engagement with McCahon’s religious, metaphysical themes. This particular stress on the work’s interpretation might then deepen one's appreciation of its meaning in light of its self-conscious, strategic positioning within the limits of the artistic field at the time, to which it so clearly responds and eventually transforms.
The Indefinite Article is constructed through two basic artistic procedures—a somewhat comical sculptural translation, in wood and white paint, of the faux-cubist form of the letters I AM, in McCahon’s 1954 painting of the same name. And secondly, the interpolation of ‘HE’ into this sentence—the indefinite article which the title of the work focuses one’s critical attention on.
In my opinion this work can be read as an instance of negative theology given sculptural form, where a certain conception of God is indirectly revealed through a precise construction of what ‘he’ is not; what he is not being precisely what the indefinite article as a grammatical form positively denotes: ‘a’ or ‘some’ thing understood as a thing amongst things, an object which one might subjectively comprehend. This is the ‘wrong’ disclosed in the equivocally translatable ‘he’ as it ambiguously shifts between its meaning in English, to its sense, audible in its inflected intonation, in te reo Māori. It is a wrong or error which points by way of the negation of its unaccented status as the indefinite article, to the ‘right’ understanding of the divine construed as the infinite and transcendent source of all Being, at least as this conception of God is understood from a classical theistic perspective.
Read in this way, the work asserts the authorial presence of its maker (but which maker are we referring to here?) and then, through a switch of linguistic registers, swiftly undercuts its own artistic ‘annunciation’ of the divine logos. As the sculptural embodiment of the Word of God, it ironises its own literal presence as a composite object made to stand in the real physical space of the viewer. In it the first person point of view of the place of the speaker—‘I’—grounded in the present tense of its utterance, is transformed in its predication by the third person pronoun ‘HE’, which shifts the temporal mode of the statement from the present to the past, indicating a difference which splits the position of the speaker themselves between subject and object. It is as an object that this articulation of the Word of God is made present, and yet its capacity for ‘revelation’ consists in the spiritualisation of this objectivity as it is concretely negated through the work’s interpretation, which transcends its physical materiality in the viewers explication of its sense.
As one of the names of God, the full phrase, ‘I Am that I am’ signifies, through its tautologous formulation, the logical and metaphysical necessity of the Absolute in its analytic self-sufficiency, in contrast to the contingent, conditioned and composite beings which comprise the mortal order of creation, the being of which God sustains through his ultimate and eternal creative act. Its recurrent refrain in McCahon’s work can be understood then to pose the problem of the gap or distance between man and God, and correlatively the question of its traversal from this side of the relation between the finite and the infinite. In other words, the path of redemption or salvation.
Parekōwhai’s appropriation and rearticulation of this iconic refrain can be understood as a restatement of this central thematic issue in McCahon’s work and a thematization in turn of its ambiguity. If God as creator is understood as the transcendent ground of being, in and through which all beings in their contingency and finite particularity depend for their existence, how does the modern individual—limited, finite, flawed, and inextricably bound to their particular social and historical context—properly relate to the Absolute? The problem is a troubling one, as the standard reception of McCahon’s recurrent inscription of ‘I AM’ attests.
As is well known McCahon’s searching Christian faith leads him to a sustained meditation on a trinitarian solution to this problem, in which the spiritual relation between the finite creature and the transcendence of the divine infinite is mediated by the figure of Christ—the Word become incarnate. But McCahon is modern to the precise extent to which his work is marked by the fact that this ‘solution’ and the problem to which it refers becomes increasingly obscure in a market society, as the discursive parameters of the public sphere which constitute the horizon for the work’s communicable intelligibility increasingly force it to fit within more secular cultural coordinates. Consequently the declaration ‘I AM’, rather than say, announcing the question of spiritual or mystical identification with God through a contemplative or activist practice of faith, becomes much more easily comprehensible as an egoistic ‘assertion of selfhood’, framed by a presumptive, even pathological imposition of a Christian God onto an unwitting public from a purely private, particular perspective—one that is marked by the embarrassing moral failures that have been increasingly noted in contemporary assessments of McCahon’s work and legacy.
This persistent unintelligibility or misrecognition of the work’s meaning in relation to this core theological predicament can of course itself be read as thematic in the work—integrated as a felt pathos and ambiguity that freights it with a painful irony—the source perhaps of its ‘existentialist’ anguish, which admits doubt, frailty and a pessimism shadowed by the problem of evil into what remains, despite everything, a sincere religious discourse. This is a genuine tension when one considers how important a properly universal address to the broader New Zealand public was to the idea of the artist’s vocation which McCahon clearly assumed. Eventually though, a more disenchanted meaning to this work, centring the autonomous will of the artist and the changing critical and commercial fortunes of his practice over time, (an almost quintessential local variant of the mythos of the Modern artist) overdetermines, and mostly obscures, our reading of his central theological concerns.
Situated at this level, The Indefinite Article, especially in the context of its initial exhibition, becomes more easily understood as a continuation of quite a narrow artistic discourse—the primary meaning to which it is attached being its witty retort and reference to an art-historical model which seemed frustrating rather than inspiring to a younger generation’s artistic ambitions. In other words the work becomes principally about word-play, art-history and cultural politics, its metaphysical meaning effectively repressed. This is interesting in its own right and I do not note this as a lament, as this surely is an important characteristic of Parekōwhai’s piece. Rather, I want to allude to the real socio-economic and historical subtext which underlies this narrowing of interpretive horizons, of a piece perhaps with the ideological framework which Himid’s work also discloses and responds to.
Parekōwhai’s oft-noted indebtedness to Duchamp, frequently referenced in both his works and in the critical writing about them, is interesting to think about in relation to this problem of audience comprehension so poignantly posed by McCahon, and reformulated again through Parekōwhai’s appropriation of his art. One of the lessons Duchamp’s work offers in response to this difficulty, and what makes it paradigmatic in a way which marks a shift from the more classically Modern author-centred artistic framework that McCahon operated within, is its conceptualism. It is this that makes the work Parekōwhai is known for contemporary—a periodisation not meant as a mere temporal index of proximity to the historical present, marked by the use of chronologically new materials, iconography or style, but rather to the more important fact that within this artistic framework, the social conditions of the works reception, commodification and interpretation all become self-consciously central to the work’s production and final form. Even the authorial will, and the psychological situation of the artist that subtends it, is displaced in this understanding as just another textual element or device within the work’s discursive construction through the audience’s interpretation, with all the conflicts, misunderstandings and even malice such a situation invites. This too can be integrated as material which the artist is enjoined to anticipate and craft—a situation which they are ultimately responsible for, come what may.
One can see that all of these concerns with reception are in a way condensed in the model of the ready-made and the implicit logics of art-making it opens up, which if one recognises its consequences as binding, transforms the possibility space of artistic practice, and sculptural practice in particular. Much work made now, on either side of the bi-cultural division which structures the question of ‘contemporary Māori art’ so central to the curatorial framing in Choice! is not ‘contemporary’ in this broad programmatic sense. This does not necessarily imply a negative judgement in relation to those practices which fall outside this framework, but I think it does clarify the logic of the artistic decisions and conception of the situation—cultural, political and economic—that artists and more importantly their artworks respond to.
Another way of putting this is simply that the question of ‘contemporaneity’ is really a question of how one understands the conditions of one's work’s reception, which are not, when all is said and done, ever conditions of one’s own choosing. It is nevertheless necessary to act on their basis. This recognition itself can be painful, and brings with it its own specific set of problems. But a model of art making which deliberately seeks to ‘embody contradictions’ is at least one way of attempting to know what one is doing and the situation one responds to, without being destroyed by it or losing one’s way in fantasy.2 Part of what the layered language of The Indefinite Article demonstrates then, at least in my eyes, is the necessity of a certain self-consciousness, which if one recognises its reasons for existence, is difficult to easily forget.
BIOGRAPHY
Shiraz Sadikeen is an artist who lives and works in Tāmaki Makaurau. He has exhibited recently in solo and group contexts at Treadler, Envy and Coastal Signs. He holds a docfa (2024) from the University of Auckland.