Lynda Tyler on Ralph Hotere 'Towards Aramoana'

Using his Queen Elizabeth II Arts Council Grant to travel to Europe with wife (poet and French teacher Cilla McQueen) and her daughter Andrea in 1978, Ralph Hotere spent several midsummer months based in a cottage in the Quartier du Mouton on the Île de Barthelasse on the River Rhône in Avignon, in the southwest of France. A lapsed Catholic – he had been named Hone Papita Raukura after the French Bishop Jean- Baptiste Pompallier who had Christianised the far North in the nineteenth century – Hotere was fascinated by the architectural legacy of the seven popes who had resided in Avignon rather than in Rome during the early papacy period from 1309 to 1376.

The family’s stay in “Ma Villa”, a white roughcast house with an orange terracotta roof, coincided with the death of Pope Paul XI in August of 1978, followed 33 days later by the death of his successor, John Paul I. Popes were much in the news that summer. The outpouring of mourning in the predominantly Catholic countries of France and Italy occasioned a concomitant series of Hotere works, the first emblazoned with the words borrowed from the headline in the French newspaper, Le Monde, “Le Pape est Mort” and the second using the words from the Italian paper La Repubblica, “E Morto Il Papa“.

At the bottom of this canvas, in the bare unprimed area that extends beyond that which was pinned to the backing board, are painted three gold keys denoting papal authority. With trefoil-shaped tops providing a three-leaved reminder of the Holy Trinity (Father, Son and the Holy Ghost), these are the keys of St Peter or the keys of heaven, their repetition symbolising binding, loosening and knowledge. Above and to the right of the keys is an area of V-shaped gestural splattered paint carefully shaped like an inverted Bishop’s mitre. Stencilled authoritatively above this is the stark lettering of the placename, AVIGNON, layered onto a horizontal rectangle of cleared brown ground set between two vertical rectangles which glow like backlit doorways. Hotere’s ability to use imagery, text and colour sparingly creates worlds of association.

Many of the marks on the canvas which seem like deliberate painterly decisions are the result of the artist’s process at the time. The garden at “Ma Ville” had a large apricot tree which afforded some shade while Hotere worked out of doors in the sunshine, occasionally battling the Mistral, a strong cold northwesterly wind characteristic of the Rhône Valley that blew through in the afternoons, upturning paint pots and lifting canvases. Around the edges of this work you can see the holes where pins anchored it in place while a mixture of thinned black and burnt sienna acrylic paint was scrubbed into the surface to create layers of mysterious depth. Four bricks provided extra ballast to weight the support down so it wouldn’t move, and the artist has later highlighted the resultant blank areas of canvas with yellowy-orange paint.

Just as he made a virtue of the circumstances of his outdoor studio, so he delighted in the information conveyed by found materials such as the Victorian sash window frames he scavenged from a Dunedin recycling depot. For him these were readymade picture frames that offered him the opportunity to pursue the idea of painting as a window onto the world. Typically reticent when it came to discussing his work, Hotere liked to hark back to the medieval role of the artist to create images that would communicate truths in pre-literate times. Always engaged politically, the artist was opposed to the 1981 Springbok Rugby Tour from South Africa which still had an apartheid regime. He was also part of the “Save Aramoana/No Smelter” campaign that same year.

Living at Port Chalmers, 12 kilometres from Dunedin, his home and studio were close to where an overseas consortium proposed to build a processing plant on the spit at Aramoana (the Māori name means “pathway to the sea”) to begin refining bauxite using cheap electricity to make aluminium for export. One of the “Think Big” projects favoured by Minister of Energy, Bill Birch, in the National Government at the time, this development was promised to bring employment and prosperity to the area. But Aramoana was a breeding locality for a range of threatened species of seabirds and waders. Without closing down other non-political meanings, Hotere’s Towards Aramoana -Black Window series uses a number of painterly devices to defend this local area against predation.

This work is made from board inserted into a recycled sash window frame with its brass lock mechanism still attached at the top. Like a window at night, no view is offered, and instead a white cross is marked at the centre of the black field. This demarcates where the vertical transom and horizontal mullion would once have divided the window into four sections. As well as reminding viewers of the Christian symbol for Christ’s sacrifice and thereby sanctity or holiness, these markings appear like the fine hairlines of the reticle in a telescopic sight of a rifle which are used to line up a target. In this case, it is a conservation area which is in the firing line.

In the upper left quadrant is the original Māori name for Observation Point where Hotere built his studio, and where he could look out towards Aramoana. The letters for that word, Koputai, are reversed like a reflection in the mirror, as are the sequential stencilled numbers below, making them read like a countdown to an explosion. The squares of brushy green paint application enliven the dark background reinforcing the idea that energy radiates from Papatuanuku, the earth mother, and that protesters will defend the land against encroachment. Although not intended to be didactic, this work acts like a blackboard in a classroom, inscribed with messages for those who choose to heed them.

For economic reasons, the Government called off the smelter development at the end of 1982, by which time Ralph Hotere had completed over a dozen of these important Towards Aramoana - Black Window compositions which stand as a lasting memorial to the campaign.

Linda Tyler