ASEBL Journal – Volume 11 Issue 2, Spring 2015
the best artists, “the ones who are truly influential, like Kafka, are so not because
they pass on some set of identifiable characteristics but because they do not. In a
paradoxical way, it is rather a certain nothing or emptiness that they represent, a
space in which subsequent readers and interpreters can see themselves reflected”
(Butler 2012, emphasis original).
McCahon’s work is the same. The perspective of an evolved interrelationship between artist and viewer deepens Butler’s and Kafka’s argument by explaining a
history and psychology behind it: when experiencing artification that has evolved
over millennia, preparing people to see the products of artists, leading people to
ruminate on “what the artist meant” and how the work impresses others, art like
Kafka’s or McCahon’s allows the viewer to formulate an image of the artist behind
the work upon, as Butler calls it, “a certain nothing”. This formulation is all the
more powerful if the work is important to someone for whatever personal reasons
the image she creates of the artist behind the work and the perspective imparted.
Just as remembering characters from art can help people in life by providing a scene they can think of, the ability to picture the artist in the way Butler describes allows for an understanding of how to view and use the artwork. Butler’s idea for
why McCahon is lauded is thus the ability to create an artist behind an art largely
as we see it, to metarepresent an artist behind the picture (although she does not
use the term for painting, for more on Zunshine talking specifically about paintings, see Zunshine (2012)). And whatever New Zealandism McCahon typifies, this
“certain nothing” allows the person, “more than anything else, a New Zealander”
to be metarepresented in his work by viewers; Walters as an originally misunderstood “abstract pioneer”; Hodgkins as “Turner in New Zealand” and Angus as expressing “joy in living here”.
Conclusion
What I have argued here is but an iceberg-tip to the range that art theory could
gather from increased connection with other disciplines. The arguments here allow
the ideas of Brown, Keith, Leonard, Pound and Butler to all be understood in a far
wider scope, from what happens in the neural circuits of artists’ and viewers’
brains, to the social settings that demand the socially active to feel, take positions
and conclude, to times past when a group first sang together in the crepuscular
light, individuals began to take care to craft a particular shape that induced pleasant
feelings, and babies and their mothers began a conversation that enriches just as
much today. I have tried to take a step that shows the potential of such dialogue for
art criticism. Rather than subsuming or stripping away that special, ethereal feeling
art provides, felt everywhere from the Newfoundland forest to Aotearoa’s Tail of
the Fish, the sciences provide additional premises for art critics’ conclusions. I feel
it is hard to put it better than as Zunshine writes, if “we are all in the business of
figuring out how the mind works, then arriving at complementary conclusions
while starting off from very different disciplinary perspectives is a good indication
that we are really onto something” (2012, 147). Arts are not subsumed by information from sciences; they are the experience, while the science is part of the story. Just like artist and viewer, both are involved in a deep, linked interrelationship.
If McCahon had painted them, maybe not “I AM”, but “WE ARE”.
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