Land of the Long Dark Cloud - Edward Hanfling

Anthony Davies’ Land of the Long Dark Cloud—The Good the Bad and the Ugly is an immense body of work, produced during 2024–25, spanning several print techniques and various recent political flashpoints.  They function in Aotearoa New Zealand somewhat like the paintings of Pieter Bruegel did in the Netherlands in the sixteenth-century.  Both artists pile masses of figures—the “lumpenproletariat,” perhaps—into one big allegory, either about the grotesqueness or the furious determination of humanity, depending on how you want to slice it.  The “long dark cloud” of Davies’ title is the overarching sense of unease and unrest, even violence, that disturbs any idealised view of the New Zealand social landscape.  Davies, like Bruegel, neither veils nor explicitly judges the spectrum of curious concerns and exertions that he observes.  What seems to intrigue him is the extent to which human beings congregate around social divisions.  

Over the last decade, the divisions in New Zealand society have become more visible, erupting with greater frequency, like a chain of volcanic events, such that the “long dark cloud” seems ever-present.  There have been moments before when protest movements have drawn attention to an insidious perpetuation of oppression and racism by New Zealand governments and institutions—and drawn attention to large conservative and complacent factions in New Zealand culture who are prepared to turn a blind eye to injustice.  Think of Bastion Point (1977–78) or the Springbok tour (1981).  These events, however, seem like positive steps along a road to a better New Zealand culture.  

In comparison, the more recent “eruptions” captured in Davies’ prints are confusing.  In all these cases—such disparate groups and phenomena as anti-vax demonstrations, boyracers, Cyclone Gabrielle, Destiny Church, Gangs, the Rainbow community and ram-raiders—the specific events seem to lead nowhere, to yield nothing, except to the fact of division itself.  The oppressed are forced into desperate actions that reinforce the judgements of the wider community; or end up rallying behind people in power who could not care less about their welfare; or the relatively privileged consider themselves oppressed by the slightest beneficence shown to those who have for generations endured oppression; or, in the case of more-than-human catastrophes, human beings simply have no answers to the “dark cloud” of climate change that they have manufactured.

What does all this mean to Davies, the artist?  Perhaps “meaning” is the wrong thing to be after.  What is important is the act of representation and the craft of making, which is the business of the artist.  And it is the particular business of the printmaker to represent representations—to put them through a series of transformations that extend their life and imprint them on the eye and mind.  Davies starts with media images.  He draws them in his own way, such that figures and their environments are strung together in long networks of lines.  The lines are etched—incised—and ultimately collect ink, and sometimes additionally given the grainy texture produced through an aquatint process; or, in the case of lithography, the greasy medium of the drawing resists the solutions applied to the stone and then grip the ink that is applied … The process takes time.  The artist becomes absorbed in and acts upon the image and the materials, such that the “original” representation becomes increasingly removed from its referent—from the realities it purports to represent.  The artist too is at a remove from those realities, but, paradoxically, through the act of reiteratively representing them—through the time spent making lines and immersed in the medium—the artist also become absorbed in those realities, grappling with them on the paper or the block or in the press.  

This simultaneous detachment and involvement has been the purview of artists for centuries.  Insofar as they get to grips with whatever they are representing, they have insight.  And insofar are they detach themselves from the scene, through working on the act of representing it, their viewpoint is valuable and (to use a difficult but in this case apt word) unique—not shaped by the forces acting on the people they are representing, but comparatively clear-sighted, incisive.  Non-artists, caught in the swiftly-flowing cascade of images that constitutes contemporary culture, rarely gain this time-filled grasp of the world around them—except in the process of looking at an artwork and tracing the actions and perceptions of its maker.  Artists as disparate as Bruegel, Watteau, Hogarth, Goya, Daumier and Basquiat exemplify this “inside” and “outside” perspective of artists who seek to represent, and imprint on the senses, the patterns and follies of human behaviour of the times in which they lived.  Davies, likewise, observes, captures and translates the flaring moments of life in New Zealand, drawing them out, giving them time.

A conspicuous feature of the Land of the Long Dark Cloud series is the frequent shift in method and materiality within any given “topic.”  The first series within the series, “Anti Vax Demonstrations Beehive,” begins as black-on-white linework—people piling up on top of people and the Beehive government building teetering above like the Tower of Babel—and ends up in brittle white on sullen red and blue colour-fields.  A complementary set of lithographs zooms in on the demonstrators—no longer mere outlines of the crowd but fully-formed, frame-filling protagonists contributing to the charged atmosphere.

In the most recent works, “Ram Raiders—Dairy Assaults,” Davies has recourse to a type of image he has used in the past (notable in 2014’s Surveillance)—date-stamped security camera stills.  The texture afforded by the stone lithography medium perfectly evokes such grainy, fitful footage.  Again, however, what is significant is not so much the extent to which Davies’ images are consistent with their source, but their transformation of the source material and the achievement of a more balanced and time-filled perspective—one that is to do with a kind of “processing” of the troubles of human existence, rather than identifying and prosecuting perpetrators.

The “Cyclone Gabrielle” images, in tandem with the “Dark Cloud” referred to in the title of the overall series, puts me in mind of the nineteenth-century English writer John Ruskin, who in his later years lamented the “dark cloud” (or “storm cloud” or “plague cloud”) that registered both his mental health and, prophetically, the health of the environment under the impact of capitalist industrialisation.  Perhaps part of Davies is, like Ruskin, emotionally wrapped up in the real ramifications of the events he documents.  His contribution to our time, however, is (again, like Ruskin’s writings, or Bruegel’s paintings) to make of the world something other than what it really is—to rupture the rapid passing of time with a grand allegory about the (self)destructiveness of human beings, and with a craft- and material-based and non-instrumental form of “doing” that asks us to slow down and our take our time rather than jumping to conclusions.