We didn’t change our own attitude to religion but were glad to have an opportunity to be proud of the courage of those men. Catholism was seen to support the oppressed. Priests were machine-gunned at the altar by the henchmen of the rich. Proper modern-day martyrs for the cause. While young priests in New Zealand were leaving the church in droves, those guys, in quiet despair, burned with conviction. Through the publications from South America, imaginative possibilities opened up for us too, some sort of Jungian signal from our ancestors. Something had been recognised, embedded in all that religious crap, as a nut of genuine insight. Recognised and held now, in South America, as a shining truth. Of course, as Voltaire predicted, you could not hold on to such truth for very long. Now you see it and then sadly you can’t. What this can do, however, is energise you for a while, give you the belief to carry something through.
I have written that Pope John’s hopeful philosophy put a spotlight on the clusters of Catholics all over the world, who joined up with the oppressed in resistance to their oppressors. Fraser was inspired with certainty, a sense that there was no valid argument against defending the weak against the strong. The new developing politics implied the opposite, that it was a natural process, that the weak must go to the wall. As the ’70s played out, that self-serving mentality gained in popularity and was eventually to end in Rogernomics in New Zealand; however, at Kingseat and for some time at Carrington our creativity was powered by the new energy that Pope John released into the world.
For myself, for some time, I believed that painting was worthwhile, that painting really meant something. I did not have to ask, as I did later in my Williamson Avenue paintings, can painting change anything? I knew then that it could.
So while Fraser, with serious intent, raced from meeting to meeting, I felt compelled to get my vision of the world down as fast as possible. I was drawing much closer to Eric McCormick and my perception of him was undergoing a change. From a sort of spectre haunting my lack of purpose, he metamorphosed into a curiously benign figure, beckoning me towards entertainment that would feed my work rather than distract me from it.
One evening, some time around the late ’70s, Eric and I met at the pub in Victoria Street before going to an opening at RKS Gallery. That night, for some reason, the inhabitants of this world were wild and raucous. Eric just loved it. With a fine gallantry, he bought and served our drinks. The next table was all Maori in gumboots and singlets.
Someone yelled out to me, ‘Who’s your mate? What’s he do?’
I yelled back, ‘He is very interested in history.’
The wit of the group said, ‘But he’s history!’
I started talking about Omai, the book Eric had just published about the first Pacific Islander who went to London and met the Queen. Because I knew Eric would feel it was conceited of him to start such a conversation, I had to get things going. But soon Eric was into it, the born teacher teaching without anyone even knowing he was doing it, least of all himself: asking questions, questioning the answers. All the men were laughing, offering him the true respect of listening to what he was saying. Somehow, at last, we extricated ourselves, and out on the street we knew that we had had our party.
The more cynical would say that we were slumming it but I don’t think so. We were in search of the innocent, the spontaneous. Our forays were more like a shared wish to get away, like going to another country where nobody knew us. It was illuminating that both Eric and I hated Christmas. I found it an irritating distraction: all my efforts to establish a workable routine invaded by trivia, awful music, bogus joviality and mindlessness … That I had no faith in goody-goods dispensing a just Christian God along with presents made it seem rather tedious. I kept telling myself it was all for the children but did not feel good about perpetuating such time-absorbing foolishness. Eric’s reasons were similar but also included a sense of rejection. Though lots of people did ask him to dinner, he was too proud to accept.
As I see it, Eric’s thinking was informed by his belief that there is no such thing as the common man. Saint Augustine’s The Damned and Condemned Masses was anathema to his thinking. His sympathy sprang from an understanding that only fortunate circumstances stop us acting out the worst of crimes, that the possibility for both understanding and ignorance is in all of us. Eric separated himself from those modernists who knowingly addressed only a small elite group. He was a great communicator who strove to be understood. He had the unnerving ability to spot that dubious hinterland of self-importance that often lurks behind the thinking of clever academics. His very human heart was not easily deceived.
I had in my youth, despite my pretensions towards humanist thinking, an urge to condemn, an urge to indulge in what the novelist John Updike describes as ‘devil theories’, a wish to purify myself in certainties. In Eric’s company, those atavistic urges declined in frequency and the old adage of the Dominican nuns of Teschemakers, ‘There but for the grace of God, go I’, took on more power.
I remember another hot summer’s evening, another adventure with Eric; a recollection like a haunting lament from the past. Eric had intended that we should go to the Gluepot to a reading to music, a poetry reading – something, I think, along the lines of a happening. Happenings were still happening in Auckland in the late ’70s.
Eric had, I soon realised, got the time wrong. The stage was empty. However, he bought us a drink and seated himself expectantly, waiting for a poet or at least a musician. What we got was poetry in action. A beautiful, tall Maori woman, rather drunk and with a witty idea of stage entrance, sat down next to Eric as if she had been keeping him waiting. Eric responded by buying her a drink. She accepted this as her due and downed her drink in silence, gazing about her like the Queen of Carthage, surprised to find herself in such a lugubrious place. She was shortly joined by a companion who had plenty to say. All of it about fucking Pakeha men. She said, ‘What I do is a fucking sin. I deserve to spend a night in gaol. So what are those fuckers doing? Saying the rosary? Shitty little hypocrites, don’t know what the other hand is doing. Who makes the money out of this shit, that’s what I would like to know? No, I do know. I will tell you who makes the money. Pakeha men.’
She was plump, small and perfect. ‘The whole problem is that they don’t really like it. That’s their fucking problem. They think that they should because they think they are supposed to be cocksmen, but they really think it’s a dirty, disgusting thing to do. Stupid shits.’ She started to cry. The Queen of Carthage spoke. ‘Stupid shits.’ And placed her long arm gracefully around her companion’s back.
Well, that’s what happened, but it’s not the guts of it. What made everything important that night was the women’s poignant style. Like Blondie in the Chelsea Hotel, or Kate Moss in her prime. These were so-called fallen woman fighting back with an indefinable stylish aplomb. They were hugely sad and beautiful, to be remembered as you would a meaningful death or a tragic love affair. The evening was like a play from Yeats’s Abbey Theatre, where the mysticism and power of ordinary people’s lives was out on display.
Remembering those two women at the Gluepot reminds me of the origins of the best contemporary styles. That jolt of surprise you get when you see an original. This look comes from the bottom up, it comes from exclusion, from transforming anything to hand. The survivors learn a new way of seeing, they create a new way of looking. This is certainly not the same process as a schooled clothes designer’s, who looks back to historical sources for inspiration. This is like an artist instinctively making something out of random sightings.
The first time I recognised a style like this was at the Oak Hotel in Wellington back in the ’50s. The Oak catered for all sorts. It was down by the waterfront, just out of range of respectability’s radar. There was a bar frequented by old-age pensioners, who would suck away at their booze all day and were, I suppose, alcoholics. For the six o’clock swill there was a bar for anyone and everyone, but the other bar, the one the creative girls hung around, catered to s
eamen, guys from up north and the odd lawyer or businessman on the prowl. The fifteen-, sixteen- and seventeen-year-old Maori girls who frequented the hotel had developed a uniform. A knee-length very fitting black skirt, a thin black sweater hacked low in the front: Chanel’s little black dress done practical. Plain black pumps and stockings. That was the base. Then there were earrings, hooped, large and either gold or silver. But the jackets were where the money was. They were simply gorgeous and I rather suspect stolen from Kirkcaldies and then embellished out of recognition. I remember a jewel-like purple jacket with cranky fluffy baby-blue cuffs and collar. Some were scarlet, some emerald green with tiny sequins sewn all over in meaningful patterns. Fabulous.
Plagiarism of the visual kind took hold of me: to put it plainly, I copied them. I lifted their insight and put it on my own back, and it caught on. I was on display myself at this time, within the radar of middle-class perception, serving customers at Harry’s espresso bar on Lambton Quay. My new style was a practical, glamorous way to dress and best of all it was new. The skirt, tight, knee-length, was the guts of it. As Chanel said, anything higher is not going to flatter your whole figure. The much longer skirts that we were still wearing at that time were beginning to look depressing. There were no tight and knee-length skirts in the shops, you had to shape them yourself, ditto the sweater.
This was 1957 and I didn’t see those skirts again until 1960 at the Melbourne Cup. The Melbourne debs were doing a money version of the Maori girls’ style from the Oak Hotel, the little black dress with patent leather shoes, handbag and hat. They caused a media sensation but my girls were around long before those Melbourne Cup debs – and they were raunchier.
Looking at life from other angles, like Eric and I did that night at the Gluepot, moved my painting in new directions. Did the complaints of those young women about male assumptions influence my thinking? Possibly. They were not transvestites, just stylish good-looking women who thought they had a right to dress how they liked, drink where they liked and bonk any guy they fancied. They had never heard of the women’s movement. What struck me was their talk about the abuse they suffered from men, who were punishing them for giving them what the men said they wanted. That got me going on my new paintings, where I found my subject matter out of the house and on the streets.
Myra McCormick was another person who got me going. Eric’s sister had vast experience with the effect of unemployment on women. At the end of the First World War, Myra had helped desperate families in the settlements around Kaitaia during the flu epidemic. One evening I was having a drink with Myra and Eric at their home. With a fine sense of nostalgia, Eric produced his silver drinks tray. On the tray were crystal glasses and a bottle of wine. This ceremonial approach to such occasions recalled Eric’s happy days as a postgrad student at Clare College, Cambridge. With Eric’s guidance our conversations took on the structure of a seminar. Eric would, in his discourse, make reference to his mentor at Cambridge, Professor Leavis of the English Department. Leavis was famous for his reassessments of reading lists in English universities and this would often become one of the topics of our conversation.
But that night Eric, Myra and I were discussing unemployment in Auckland. Myra was complaining that the government was constantly saying the jobs were there. She said there was only one place where there was plenty of work advertised in the newspapers and that was in the massage parlours.
Myra, it was your feelings for those young women trying out that underworld, that path to perdition, that started me on my K Road paintings. This was 1982–83, when I worked on paintings like The Pink Pussy Cat, Funny Thing Happened on K Rd and Demeter Saves her Daughters. I am very grateful to the women at the Gluepot and Myra who made me understand the hidden economy of prostitution, prostitution aligned with the drug trade.
My paintings were an illustration of the ancient structure of that transaction. The seller and the buyer were mostly men but the crimes were committed by women. Women were shoved into the paddy wagons and were arbitrarily judged, the men ran home to dinner with their wives. Eve had lured Adam into sin once again. She was still being denounced from the pulpit in 1982. But who set the trap these fallen women fell into? That was never mentioned. In the ’80s, K Road was more crass and innocent and had preserved the structure of a frontier town. Like a false front on a store in the goldrush days, K Road resembled a dark tragic stage set with ageing alcoholics clutching bottles and vanishing down alleyways, figures bursting out of the windows and struggling on balconies, women fighting women, police coming, men running. The events on this stage set became the paintings that evolved in the next few years.
And here again I have the goddesses who, on a whim, do or don’t interfere as is the way of the Gods. Venus is too busy making love to care while Demeter saves her daughters from the Pink Pussy Cat.
My much later K Road paintings are still about the limits on employment for women. Not even a university degree can save you from gross, poorly paid serving jobs. In one of them, my youngest daughter addresses two sex workers on K Road, one Maori, one Asian. She is saying something like ‘Waitressing sucks, at least you make more money then I do.’ (In a later work she says similarly, ‘Sure beats waitressing, eh?’) She is wearing her waitress’s apron, and the sex workers are all resplendent: flashy earrings, glowing lipstick. But Emily has an out and they all know it. At the end of the year she will have finished her degree and she can also sing. She knows that they know theirs is the hazardous occupation.
Words and how they melded into paintings also concerned me at the time. I had stumbled on a book about the French Revolution that included some of the earliest cartoons of the western world. The drawings of the king, the peasants and the bishops are rage-filled and quite obscene. First the king sits on a donkey led by a strutting peasant, next the peasant sits on the donkey led by a cringing king, then the peasant carries the donkey led by a confused king. There are lots of words, very small, worked into any available space, and which balance the composition. I wanted the words on my own paintings to emerge quite haphazardly.
So I had done it. I had made my escape out of the house and on to the streets, running away from that put-down label ‘domestic painter’. I was opening my eyes to the outside world. This would lead me to K Road, to Grey Lynn Park, to Williamson Avenue and then, opening my inner eye into the past, back to Porirua. But it would lead me first of all, and next, to America.
CHAPTER EIGHT
Jack in the Box
It was a sense of confinement that drove me in 1980 to apply for a grant from the QEII Arts Council to go to New York for three months. My ’70s paintings had put me in a trap – I was being arbitrarily defined and locked into a particular art historian’s box. Watch out what box you are consigned to, it could be nailed down fast and put on a top shelf. I was put in the ’70s women’s movement box. This led to a rather immature reaction that I still experience any time attention is paid to my ’70s paintings: I feel they were done by some other person, who I am now competing with and don’t like much.
In applying for the grant to go to New York, my agenda was dictated by the realities of my own life as a woman and as a painter. I was eager to discover how women who painted survived in the New York marketplace. I had in no way abandoned the struggle for equality for women. The curious twists and turns that that struggle had imposed on Fraser’s and my own life never for a moment damaged my faith in the rightness of fighting for equality for women. The truth is that we were not prepared for the pressures our involvement in that struggle would put on us as a couple. If Fraser was championing the liberation of women, then in the eyes of many he was attacking marriage itself. That was the common perception and it is easy for me now to see what was going on. Women naturally enough viewed the movement from where they were looking, they had no other place to view it from. When Germaine Greer addressed the students of Auckland University in 1972 she was on the cusp of her belief in free love and abortion as a form of contraception. She spoke v
ery well, indeed, saying that there was no hope for the women’s movement without a change in society’s structure. Down at the bottom of the heap were Maori women in terms of work options and in terms of control over their own bodies; they had no power.
It was, however, the photograph that did it for me: Germaine surrounded by the current television gurus and the intelligent attractive young women spearheading the women’s movement. The current gurus were Fraser for psychiatry, the current art guru Hamish Keith and two swinging politician gurus. There were some other guys in the photograph, I can’t remember now who they were, but I do know that all the wives stood around wondering why they felt usurped, desexed even. Hamish Keith most perceptively remarked to me in a jokey sort of way: ‘And who are you supposed to be, fall guy?’
I could see even at that time that the problems were not with those young women, the problem was with Fraser and me. They were young and full of the best intentions; almost all of them have gone on to prove themselves as having true grit and real worth. No, the problem was definitely between Fraser and me. I should have realised that the pressures he was under from both the hospital and the publicity over the women’s movement made him very vulnerable. I should have protected him but that would have involved playing the role of guard dog and I didn’t fancy that as a good look either. What the situation did do was spark a genuine creative urge in me, a sort of back-to-the-drawing-board mentality. I found an urgency in myself to see to my own personal survival, to take charge of my own life and it manifested itself in a splurge of creativity.
Before I Forget Page 7