Beauty, they say is in the eye of the beholder. When Ralph Hotere died I Googled his website to be beholden by the images of his art. I’m sorry to say I was sorely disappointed.
Obviously my eye has a different focus to those who revered him. Don’t misunderstand me here; I’m not suggesting for one minute that Hotere and his admirers are wrong and that I am right. Quite the opposite. I am lamenting my inadequacy to recognise and appreciate art in all its forms.
And I am a long way behind the eight ball. Writing in the Listener Gregory O’Brien said of Hotere: “As a painter he is capable of great fury. His art can smoulder and brood; it points accusingly at those who abuse power, yet often in the space of a single work can simultaneously strike an introspective or elegiac note. At other times he can be euphorically romantic and decidedly amorous. His reds can be as sensuous as they are cataclysmic.”
Who can argue against prose such as that? Reds that are sensuous and cataclysmic? I now have a whole new respect for the dye we dipped our saveloys in.
In the same publication actor-person Sam Neill told of how he and his brother went round to Hotere’s one day and were given a job sanding some charred planks from a devastating fire at a boatbuilders shed. Hotere asked them to sand a section on each piece of the blackened wood. Hotere then told the two young men that he had to slip away, something pressing had come up. He returned four hours later admitting that he had been caught up at the pub. They went back the next day to complete the task and again Hotere slipped out and went to the pub, probably “giggling all the way,” Neill thought.
The work went on to become the “masterpiece” Black Phoenix. Neill says he wants to cry every time he sees it.
So would I, but probably for a different reason.
Artistic prose is a bit like those who pontificate about wine. I heard John Hawkesby on the radio recently waxing lyrically about a wine that was “reasonably priced” at $95 a bottle! The wine he said was “tight and not flabby” – for a moment there I thought I had stumbled upon an R18 airwave – and had a hint of asparagus in the taste. Tight, not flabby with a hint of asparagus. And all this from a tart-tasting liquid made from rotting grapes!
My cousin was once the CEO of a large state owned enterprise. On one wall in his expansive penthouse office in one of Wellington’s most imposing high-rise buildings hung a Colin McCahon. Much to the disappointment of my cousin I viewed it from all angles but could perceive no beauty. He did his best to expose the mystical artistic intricacies of this taxpayer funded artwork, but to no avail.
We grew up together in Masterton and I was surprised just how much his tastes had matured and developed compared to my own, I should have sensed this when some years earlier he admitted to me that he loved going to the ballet!
I once visited the Sistine Chapel not long after the ceiling art had been restored and I thought to myself, now Michelangelo, there’s a real artist, but we are told realism has been superseded by the coloured photography. We have to move on. And yet last week I went to the opening of an art exhibition in the foyer of the Carterton Events Centre where local painters - I dare not call them artists - had done their impressions of sunflowers to highlight the upcoming production of Calendar Girls, and thoroughly enjoyed the realism of the almost photographic quality of the exhibits.
Meanwhile Ralph Hotere, whose real name was Hone Papita Raukura, has been laid to rest on Mount Zion in the Hokianga amidst great ceremony and a huge band of followers. His body was transported there from Dunedin by the Air Force’s new NH90 helicopter which reportedly costs more than $30,000 an hour to operate. In the New Year’s honours list Mr Hotere was appointed to the Order of New Zealand, our highest award.
You don’t get all that unless you deserve it.
Best-selling author John Gray says men are from Mars and women are from Venus.
I reckon I must be from Pluto.
