Laurence Simmons on Bill Hammond 'Hokey Pokey 3'

Laurence Simmons on Bill Hammond 'Hokey Pokey'

Featured in Important Paintings & Contemporary Art | Tuesday 15 August 2023

Wikipedia tells me a lot about ‘hokey pokey’. Apart from being the New Zealand term for honeycomb toffee which we add to vanilla ice cream and export, the name may have originated from the term hocus pocus, the stereotypical words for magic. Or it may derive from Italian ice cream street vendors in New York in the early twentieth century called ‘hokey pokey men’ who yelled out ‘ecco un poco’ (‘here’s a little something’). The multiple sources and corruptions of ‘hokey pokey’ match the magic and sweeping range of Bill Hammond’s mise-en-scène here in his 1997 work Hokey Pokey 3. Just look at the bird people grouped in some kind of natural stocks, or bird people with human faces (some sprouting from wing feathers — the three heads of Cerberus?), two large great Danes, a hula hoop, a wooden cross which grows out of a bird’s nest in an urn, a reclining horse, a winged creature with a taxidermied and mounted deer head with antlers for a face, a bird figure in a cricket jersey pointing a gun. Their iconography and behaviour stymies interpretation. In terms of narrative content Hokey Pokey 3 is maddeningly coy. Hammond’s hermeticism is daunting because it is naturalistic, or rather anthropomorphic. If this was surrealism you wouldn’t worry, but it’s not. Epic and ridiculous at the same time, he employs a deadpan satirical tone of majestic confidence with little conceivable basis in fact. Do bird people really exist apart from in mythology? Whatever feelings or thoughts you have about his content are only your own. Hammond leaves you alone with them, and with the innate sensuousness and sensitivity — the physical appeal to the imagination — of paint on canvas. His masterly areas of painting captivate us. Hammond uses acrylics, metallic paint, glazing and blending to modulate tones and colours. The result is a richness that grows upon you surreptitiously. Hammond’s surfaces glow, variously like darkened stained glass, or even flesh. You keep trying to decide what you’re looking at. Something sacred can seem entangled with something demoniacal. Something cautionary with something bleak. Critics have argued for his place in the long tradition of New Zealand landscape painting but I think they are mistaken and still life seems to be Hammond’s lurking fundamental genre. His bird people are objects. (Bits of hokey pokey in the vanilla ice cream). He arranges them. Everything seems imported from elsewhere and put in place, where it stays. There is no disappearing point of perspective and Hammond’s signature drips tell you that. Everything is displayed up and down. The more observant you are of erudite allusions (there are many allusions to music), the more acute will be your frustration in trying to make sense of the ensemble. A Hammond painting both demands and rejects answers. We may know plenty but our knowledge is useless. Of course, there is a highly contemporary sting to this. Today we are flooded with an overload of information as we career from one readily foreseeable disaster to another. Is Hammond telling us that the eighteenth century in settler New Zealand was like that anyway? And that we are now caught up in the same historical quicksand? Or is he suggesting, with his grim anthropomorphic satisfaction in demonstrations of human folly, that we had just better get used to it? In these pictures body parts routinely transmogrify, as if in involuntary response to a figure’s discomfiture. Hammond’s bird people come across as tender souls, half awake, who are burdened by inchoate longings and no conceivable right to be. But is Hammond simply repeating himself and the same message in a nagging fashion you may want to ask? I don’t think so. When you get past the overwhelming family resemblance of his works, you see that he does not repeat himself. Each painting has the authority of a continuing quandary, freshly recast, a new pitch of acuity. It is as if each work were still in the act of coming to its point.

Laurence Simmons