Kaimanawa horses - BEHIND THE IMAGE
BY EDWARD HANFLING
What’s behind an image? What’s beyond appearances? Behind a painting or a print? Nothing more than the wall on which it hangs. That seems reasonable - logical. How is it then, that Anthony Davies’ Kaimanawa Horses a series of 20 prints - generate such a profound emotional impact?
On the surface they are pictures of hoses - doomed, dying or dead. Using a combination of etching and aquatint, Davies obtains subtle tonal effects - greys along with black and white - and remarkable textural variety. The images derive from a television documentary; the selected frames were screened onto a zinc plate to be etched, and tonally manipulated and enhanced using the aquatint technique. |
I wish to suggest that the images ‘work’ - and can be considered ‘ expressive’ - in that they compel us to examine ourselves, as individuals and as a society. Initially we are led to contemplate the specific issue presented by the artist. Then we must consider that issue as a symptom of concerns central to New Zealand as a whole, and specifically of an aspect of New Zealand that is not customarily portrayed as part of its image or identity.
Since settling in NewZealand in 1996, Davies has sought to capture aspects of his adopted country that do not match its conventional image. It is significant that the Kaimanawa Horses prints deal with a conservation issue. New Zealand - clean and green. That is merely an image. Davies exposes it as such - or rather imperatively, induces us (as viewers, as a society) to reveal it.
Davies picks up on the uneasy relationship between two facets of New Zealand - conservation and farming. An odd couple. On the one hand you try to save the animals, and on the other you slaughter them. The Kaimanawa wild horses became a conservation problem when it was found they were rapidly devouring a distinctive form of tussock grass. Conservation encompasses flora as well as fauna - or as the Department of Conservation put it: ‘In the Moawhango Ecological District these roles must be reconciled as the horses have been shown to adversely effect [sic] nationally significant ecological values.” The upshot was that the horses were rounded up and incarcerated on farms - where they died.
Since settling in NewZealand in 1996, Davies has sought to capture aspects of his adopted country that do not match its conventional image. It is significant that the Kaimanawa Horses prints deal with a conservation issue. New Zealand - clean and green. That is merely an image. Davies exposes it as such - or rather imperatively, induces us (as viewers, as a society) to reveal it.
Davies picks up on the uneasy relationship between two facets of New Zealand - conservation and farming. An odd couple. On the one hand you try to save the animals, and on the other you slaughter them. The Kaimanawa wild horses became a conservation problem when it was found they were rapidly devouring a distinctive form of tussock grass. Conservation encompasses flora as well as fauna - or as the Department of Conservation put it: ‘In the Moawhango Ecological District these roles must be reconciled as the horses have been shown to adversely effect [sic] nationally significant ecological values.” The upshot was that the horses were rounded up and incarcerated on farms - where they died.
Fences are a potent symbol throughout Davies’ series. In two of the images (13 and 15) the fences take on the appearance of white crosses. Add that to the ghostly effect of many of the horses - the indistinct quality of the etching in numbers 16-19, the empty white eye of the horse at the top right of 1, the eerie white glow and white outlines of 7. This latter print has the horses in some form of enclosure with slimy, dripping walls - reminiscent of a slaughter-house. The overall effect of the images is gram - lack of colour, shifting between harsh contrasts and pervasive gloomy greys, rough scabrous textures. These are images about death. The death of animals at the hands of people is an every day event in New Zealand.
Those who come to New Zealand from overseas are more inclined to draw attention to it - as J.B Priestly did when he visited in the early 1970s:
Nobody must imagine…that the country’s rural community exists in a twentieth-century Arcadia. The men who swarm into the pubs near the big sheep stations men who treat one another not to pints but great jugs of beer, would have no place in a charming pastoral. When they have to be responsible for thousands of sheep, men are not likely to be so many “gentle shepherds’. They are not deliberately cruel but can easily become shockingly callous, seeing living creatures in their care as so much merchandise.
- A Visit to New Zealand, J.B Priestly
Priestly picked up on the conflict between conservation and farming, noting that the suffering of animals in New Zealand ran counter to the country’s humane stance and image. [3] While the Kaimanawa horses issue was not one of farming as such, these kinds of observations are relevant. The inhumane treatment of horses apparently arose through deep-set and irreconcilable conflicts of opinion - conservation as constructed by different groups of people. Not deliberately cruel, but thoughtless - to use Priestly’s words; there were not necessarily any insidious intent.
Davies’ works serve to puncture any lingering conceptions of New Zealand as an un-spoilt South Seas paradise; they get beneath that veneer. There is an undercurrent to New Zealand society - a kind of latent violence - best described as grim. One has a sense of it upon entering the main street of a small country town - or in one of those pubs where gather the local farmers and rugby players. There’s a hardness and violence to such places. They’re not full of sweetness and light. It’s this side of New Zealand that Davies captures.
This is apparent in a previous series of New Zealand works, exhibited under the title God’s Country’ [6] The prints in this series comprise bot separate and superimposed vignette of the back blocks of New Zealand. They can hardly be described as picturesque - car crashes and graveyards feature pronely among other images of decrepitude and decay. Sections of rolling farmland underpin these grim snapshots of - not New Zealand life, but New Zealand death. The Kaimanawa Horses can be seen as an extension of this theme.
Those who come to New Zealand from overseas are more inclined to draw attention to it - as J.B Priestly did when he visited in the early 1970s:
Nobody must imagine…that the country’s rural community exists in a twentieth-century Arcadia. The men who swarm into the pubs near the big sheep stations men who treat one another not to pints but great jugs of beer, would have no place in a charming pastoral. When they have to be responsible for thousands of sheep, men are not likely to be so many “gentle shepherds’. They are not deliberately cruel but can easily become shockingly callous, seeing living creatures in their care as so much merchandise.
- A Visit to New Zealand, J.B Priestly
Priestly picked up on the conflict between conservation and farming, noting that the suffering of animals in New Zealand ran counter to the country’s humane stance and image. [3] While the Kaimanawa horses issue was not one of farming as such, these kinds of observations are relevant. The inhumane treatment of horses apparently arose through deep-set and irreconcilable conflicts of opinion - conservation as constructed by different groups of people. Not deliberately cruel, but thoughtless - to use Priestly’s words; there were not necessarily any insidious intent.
Davies’ works serve to puncture any lingering conceptions of New Zealand as an un-spoilt South Seas paradise; they get beneath that veneer. There is an undercurrent to New Zealand society - a kind of latent violence - best described as grim. One has a sense of it upon entering the main street of a small country town - or in one of those pubs where gather the local farmers and rugby players. There’s a hardness and violence to such places. They’re not full of sweetness and light. It’s this side of New Zealand that Davies captures.
This is apparent in a previous series of New Zealand works, exhibited under the title God’s Country’ [6] The prints in this series comprise bot separate and superimposed vignette of the back blocks of New Zealand. They can hardly be described as picturesque - car crashes and graveyards feature pronely among other images of decrepitude and decay. Sections of rolling farmland underpin these grim snapshots of - not New Zealand life, but New Zealand death. The Kaimanawa Horses can be seen as an extension of this theme.
The use of colour in God’s Country prints is striking. Bright, brash primaries - they have a jarring quality - seem at odds with the subject matter, but in fact enhance it. These colours can be seen to signify the double-faced identity of New Zealand - the uncomfortable relationship between its different facets. There is a link here to the works of Ian Scott from the early 1990s. Visual and methodological similarities are apparent - the use of silkscreen print (although in Davies’ case combined with woodcut as opposed to Scott’s painted sections) and photographs or media media images, the bright colours and the juxtaposition of separate vignettes. For both artists these features carry ideas about New Zealand society and identity. One of Scott’s 1990 works is called God Zone Subjects, anticipating Davies’ God’s Country title and similarly satirising a complacent and self-satisfied nationalism. Scott reinforces this point using cliché images of ‘New Zealandness’ - rugby, sunbathing on the beach, sheep-farming, marching girls, pristine mountain scenery and native bush. Another interesting work is Scott’s The Drunk Drive Painting (1993) again anticipating Davies’ use of newspaper clippings of car cashes and bringing to the fore that darker aspect of New Zealand society.
In some of Scott’s works there is a more explicit attack on the New Zealander’s perception of their country as clean and green. In Weather Painter (1990) there’s an intrusive beer can in the native bush. It stands out in shining red - as if picked out by the beam of a flashlight from the dark undergrowth. Scott highlights something hidden, or glossed over. Here is nothing less than an accusation of hypocrisy.
Scott and Davies share a social conscience and a desire to probe behind conventional notions of ‘New Zealandness’. Also, as described in the works above, their use of colour goes beyond merely delighting the eye. The attractiveness of the colours is deceptive and slightly ironic, cannily playing on conventional perceptions of New Zealand. Like Davies, Scott came to New Zealand from Britain (although at a much earlier age). While his works are intended to evoke the intense colours of suburban New Zealand, [7] he is also aware that this sense of comfort and respectability is a veneer hiding other, less appealing, aspects.
An interview with curator Allan Smith regarding the Bright Paradise Triennial in Auckland brings out something of this double-faced quality:
‘It’s the glare off the water, the dazzle of the light from fresh paint. It suggests an upbeat buoyancy and also something artificial an extreme, a brilliant covering.’ [Allan Smith]
Bright in the sense of brittle, he means, as in a lurid disguise for the darker side of the duality that necessarily forces any paradise to spawn an evil twin.
- New Zealand Herald, 26 February 2001
Davies’ use of colour in the God’s Country series also harks back to some of his earlier, pre-New Zealand, prints. Abrasive colour effects are characteristic of the Self Portraits (1982-83) and The Great Divide (1987-88), where they exacerbate the menacing qualities of these urban scenes.
In the New Zealand context, Davies and Scott are not alone in probing beneath the superficial appearance of the country. In his landscapes of the late 1940s, Collin McCahon tried to capture the ‘true’ New Zealand beneath the visible veneer. Taking his inspiration from a book on the geomorphology of New Zealand, his painting reflect the belief that the country is formed on certain underlying and recurring geological structures. Paintings such as Takaka: Night and Day (1948) are less documentations of the appearance of a place, than the distillation of its ‘essence’:
The picture is a memory of my Nelson Days although, in fact, it does not have a great deal to do with the Takaka Valley…The actual valley as I saw it was like a geological diagram, only overlaid with trees and farms. In my painting all this has been swept aside in order to uncover the structure of the land.
- Colin McCahon, Artist
In some of Scott’s works there is a more explicit attack on the New Zealander’s perception of their country as clean and green. In Weather Painter (1990) there’s an intrusive beer can in the native bush. It stands out in shining red - as if picked out by the beam of a flashlight from the dark undergrowth. Scott highlights something hidden, or glossed over. Here is nothing less than an accusation of hypocrisy.
Scott and Davies share a social conscience and a desire to probe behind conventional notions of ‘New Zealandness’. Also, as described in the works above, their use of colour goes beyond merely delighting the eye. The attractiveness of the colours is deceptive and slightly ironic, cannily playing on conventional perceptions of New Zealand. Like Davies, Scott came to New Zealand from Britain (although at a much earlier age). While his works are intended to evoke the intense colours of suburban New Zealand, [7] he is also aware that this sense of comfort and respectability is a veneer hiding other, less appealing, aspects.
An interview with curator Allan Smith regarding the Bright Paradise Triennial in Auckland brings out something of this double-faced quality:
‘It’s the glare off the water, the dazzle of the light from fresh paint. It suggests an upbeat buoyancy and also something artificial an extreme, a brilliant covering.’ [Allan Smith]
Bright in the sense of brittle, he means, as in a lurid disguise for the darker side of the duality that necessarily forces any paradise to spawn an evil twin.
- New Zealand Herald, 26 February 2001
Davies’ use of colour in the God’s Country series also harks back to some of his earlier, pre-New Zealand, prints. Abrasive colour effects are characteristic of the Self Portraits (1982-83) and The Great Divide (1987-88), where they exacerbate the menacing qualities of these urban scenes.
In the New Zealand context, Davies and Scott are not alone in probing beneath the superficial appearance of the country. In his landscapes of the late 1940s, Collin McCahon tried to capture the ‘true’ New Zealand beneath the visible veneer. Taking his inspiration from a book on the geomorphology of New Zealand, his painting reflect the belief that the country is formed on certain underlying and recurring geological structures. Paintings such as Takaka: Night and Day (1948) are less documentations of the appearance of a place, than the distillation of its ‘essence’:
The picture is a memory of my Nelson Days although, in fact, it does not have a great deal to do with the Takaka Valley…The actual valley as I saw it was like a geological diagram, only overlaid with trees and farms. In my painting all this has been swept aside in order to uncover the structure of the land.
- Colin McCahon, Artist
McCahon sought to uncover the ‘true’ New Zealand - and he sought that the identity in the land - its physical mass, not its people. Thus his oft-quoted remark: ‘I saw something logical, orderly and beautiful belonging to the land and not yet to its people.’ Davies, on the other hand turns to the people to find aspects of New Zealand identity. There is a realisation here that ‘identity’ is not some fixed, physical property. Rather, it is contingent - subject to change. The identity of a country can be said to consist of the values, ideas and actions of its people, and the interactions between them. Accordingly, that identity is not singular, homogenous or coherent. We must allow for its complexity and its conflicts. Davies’ Kaimanawa Horses invite viewers to consider the issues behind the images; behind these tragic scenes lie the social conflicts that caused them. This indicates that while these are images of horses, they are about people.
Davies has always tackled social issues. Poor to 1996, when he settled in New Zealand, he focused almost exclusively on the lives of people living in the urban centres of England and Northern Ireland - the conflicts and challenges faced by those people under the prevailing social and political conditions. The prints were pointed and perceptive studies of a turbulent society.
Since arriving in New Zealand, Davies’ works have had a rural orientation and been largely devoid of people. Might this change of emphasis be a response to New Zealand’s sparsely populated tracts of land? That’s just a little too easy to be wholly convincing as an explanation. It seems that he had already decided to shift to a new method of engaging issues. Both the God’s Country and Kaimanawa Horses series present hard-hitting images, showing the consequences of human actions rather than the people or the actions themselves.
Those New Zealand works demonstrate an awareness of the lack of power of the image. Previously Davies had attempted to get at the reality of a social situation via the people themselves - to convey their actions and emotions. But images hav no content - they’re flat. And sociality is not something tangible, you can’t grasp it. We have no access to the full network of social forces and interactions - the communications and feelings - that occur behind observable reality. David Brett made just this point in relation to a 1991 exhibition of Davies’ work, A Tale of Two Cities:
“…social reality is never directly visible; we don’t see it in the same way as we see a bottle or a guitar, nor even how we see a homeless man standing in a doorway. This is because the social unfolds in time, as learnt behaviour; it stands ‘behind’ the appearance of things.
- Extracts from a Tale of Two Cities
McCahon sought to uncover the ‘true’ New Zealand - and he sought that the identity in the land - its physical mass, not its people. Thus his oft-quoted remark: ‘I saw something logical, orderly and beautiful belonging to the land and not yet to its people.’ Davies, on the other hand turns to the people to find aspects of New Zealand identity. There is a realisation here that ‘identity’ is not some fixed, physical property. Rather, it is contingent - subject to change. The identity of a country can be said to consist of the values, ideas and actions of its people, and the interactions between them. Accordingly, that identity is not singular, homogenous or coherent. We must allow for its complexity and its conflicts. Davies’ Kaimanawa Horses invite viewers to consider the issues behind the images; behind these tragic scenes lie the social conflicts that caused them. This indicates that while these are images of horses, they are about people.
Furthermore, artists cannot be sure that what they intend for an image will impinge upon the consciousness of the spectator. Appearances are blank and expressionless until we project emotions onto them.
The Kaimanawa Horses amount to an acknowledgement of this. They seek not to represent a social reality, but to engage it. That social reality exists in the values and beliefs of various, often opposed, interpretive communities. Some viewers may be enraged by the plight of the horses. Others may sympathies with the dilemmas faced by the Department of Conservation. The images become a forum for dialogue and debate, and reflect the spectrum of viewers and views. The horses are merely, shall we say, triggers.
However, the formal construction of the images compels viewers to examine intently, not only the artworks but also their own emotions and beliefs with regard to the represented objects and issues. Thus, with regard to Davies’ pre-New Zealand works, one writer talks of ‘a feeling of recognition on the part of the viewer, which ‘is not simply that of an ostensible reality, but of our relation to it. That is to say, it has an ethical character.’
Likewise the Kaimanawa Horses lead us to search for our social conscience and our political agenda. These works are about New Zealand society and, to a certain extent, identity. The viewers of the works are - or represent - that society and identity. While identity, in this sense, can be said to be a reality beneath superficial appearances, it is not, as McCahon envisaged, some palpable essence lurking under the topsoil.
Davies’ images metaphorically reaffirm the idea that identity is not singular or stable. The identity of the images themselves tends to shift as we view them. This means that they provoke more than just an immediate response, They make the viewer work at reading the images, which intensifies their emotional impact. Moreover, that prolonged process can itself be regarded as part of their meaning. Stanley Fish has found a similar experience in the reading of poetry:
The formal and thematic features of each poem are intimately related to its meaning, not because they reflect it but because they produce it, by moving the reader to a characteristic activity. In short, the poems mean the experience they give…
- Stanley Fish, Is there a Text in This Class?
In Davies’ Kaimanawa Horses it is not immediately apparent precisely what many of the prints depict. Number 5, for example, is virtually indecipherable. One vaguely senses a corpse; specific anatomical details are hard to identify. There is also a process of metamorphosis - the horse, in death, merging with the earth. An all-over grey tonality reinforces this impression.
However, these prints function on more than just an individual level. Throughout the series, the viewer is forced to conduct and intensive search. Active viewing is required for the images to materialise. At each stage of the search there is a further grisly find. Davies’ use of light is particularly interesting in this respect. The prints tend to be darkened around the edges , lightest in the centre. This ‘spotlit’ effect is particularly apparent in 4 where there is a glare of light above a solitary horse caught in a narrow beam of light. Number 20 is likewise considerably darkened towards the edges. This, often harsh light can be read in terms of exposing something that may have been covered up or concealed. One has the sense of stumbling through a desolate farm in the dark of night picking out in the beam of a flashlight this trail of death and deprivation.
It is characteristic of such encounters that one sees something at the last moment, as it falls suddenly into the light. Interspersed amongst Davies’ images are a number of close-up views; one moment there are horses trotting along the horizon - the next moment you are confronted with some ghastly spectre. The experience is all the more disconcerting in that one of these in-your-face encounters may turn out, innocuously, to be the backside of a living horse - but the next moment you almost trip over a ghastly tangle of severed legs. It is sufficiently shocking in 8 to see the head of a horse gradually materialise out of the rough grass, lying on its side, the teeth seemingly bared - a sinister brilliant white standing out from the gloom. But it is still more disturbing in 9 to have perhaps the same head staring sideways at you - grinning teeth, vacant eyes. This is how the artist leads us through the series, setting traps that we will stumble across, drawing us from a narrative. There is an accumulative sense of tension and nausea.
However these emotions are not fixed; they are not in the images but in the people who view them. In fact one could say that the viewers make the image, both in the terms of their meaning and, more fundamentally, in extracting forms from a surface of lines and tones. Again this is consistent with Davies’ earlier works, such as the Urban Portraits (1984) in which, it has been observed, lines configured in a certain way can be seen as more than one object or reality. [16]
Examples of this techniques in the Kaimanawa Horses series are numbers 13 and 15. In 13, largely taken up with barely recognisable rotting corpses, the harsh light effect leads one to see the fence at the top as a row of ethereal white crosses. The same kind of metamorphosis occurs in 15. Here there are two fences. A corpse is threaded through the foreground fence. The background fence becomes a series of white crosses separated by the foreground posts. We may, in turn, reconsider the image in its entirety - the reality of the graveyard overtakes that of the farm enclosure.
The identity and reality of an image is shifting rather than stable. Viewers of Davies’ Kaimanawa Horses will respond to them in disparate ways, determined by their psychological and social construction. The formal qualities of the images themselves emphasise these shifting identities and realities. And yet, in so far as he controls those formal properties, perhaps the artist - Anthony Davis - has a hand in directing, or impacting upon, our responses. As an artist engaged in such troubling social issues, surely he must hope to at least influence - if not alter - attitudes and perceptions. Is he really so detached? We may wish to consider the role of the artist in the construction of meaning. But that, as the Goons would say, is a horse of another colour.