Artist, writer, sculptor and conservationist Sam Mahon has a reputation for controversy. He is a self-described contrarian, and so it’s no surprise to see that his newly released book, ‘How to Paint a Nude’ has aroused curiosity in the arts world with a press release that reads: “Mahon is sure to cause controversy with this wonderfully written, yet dangerously close to reality fiction.”
The book is set in the real world of art in Canterbury in the year of the earthquakes. A work of fiction, it centers around two characters – Gregor, a refugee from Belarus, and Sambo, a local artist. They meet every week at Le Cafe in the Arts Centre to discuss everything from public art to art schools to art criticism. Sam Mahon himself is so stranger to criticism having raised eyebrows with his controversial sculpture of then-minister Nick Smith squatting over a glass of water.
The book will be officially launched at Lumière Cinema on Tuesday 25th November from 5.30pm.
We spoke to Sam ahead of his book release and covered a wide range of subjects…
‘How to Paint a Nude’ is very much a conversation between two artists – how did you come up with this idea? Is it something that’s been in your head for a long time?
I think there are a lot of questions about art that have never been answered and during my career as an artist I’ve always enjoyed robust debate – I think it’s really important. But at some point things changed and galleries began to employ people to write reviews and so every show was ‘fantastic’ and ‘amazing’ and the more I saw that happening the more I missed – what a friend of mine called – ‘the polishing force of abrasive society’. It’s necessary to put opposing forces together in order to get something out of it.
And the book came out of that?
Yes, I created a character who was in my head for about three years and every time I walked around and saw something, didn’t matter what it was, any kind of political dialogue, I would think to myself, “What would Gregor say?”. I love writing dialogue, and I especially love the dialogue of two-handers and so Gregor became a character that I would visit in my mind every Tuesday to talk about art. Now the difference being that he comes from a country that is so heavily repressed that art is now seen as a political tool. As John Pilger said, ‘The visual arts are not doing their job’ and when I go to any exhibition now I’m looking around for some comment on the broken nature of our world at the moment and all I see is decoration.
And you’ve felt like this for a while?
There was one moment during SCAPE, when I created a sculpture which I put right outside the Art Gallery, about 5 meters outside the front door, as a antithesis to what they were doing – they were taking public space and plonking stuff in it and so I thought ‘Well, I’ll create something and plonk it in the art gallery space, that’ll be quite funny.’ And without permission we did that, and it was absolutely hilarious. The interaction with that one kinetic piece was huge.
I have to ask, does the character’s name Gregor have anything to do with Kafka’s Metamorphosis?
You’re quite right. When I was thinking about writing a two-hander play, I had a friend who died – who’s actually in the book, Jesse – and I wanted to write a play where she and Kafka meet. So, in order to do that I read absolutely everything he’d written. So yes, the name Gregor came out of that.
I think people have this idea of Kafka as being a bit of a miserabilist but actually he’s very funny.
I think he’s hilarious. Someone said once, and it’s apparent in his writing, that everything he wrote was his way of trying to apologise to his father. I think we all do that, we carry our parents on our shoulders our whole lives even when they’re gone.
His father was his ultimate audience.
It’s like any artwork, the trick is to do it, it doesn’t matter so much about the audience. I don’t mean that in the Banksy sense where he said that ‘Art, of all culture, does not require an audience.’ but I think just the making of an artwork is its own catharsis – you get that stuff out of you. The completion of an artwork to my mind is when the public react to it. When I did the Nick Smith sculpture a lot of people were very furious with me, but that was the completion of the artwork, that was what made it ok.
If you have no opinion about an artwork, then has it actually done its job?
When I was looking at definitions of art, I found a wonderful story by Tolstoy and he talked about a little kid from a village who goes into the forest to look for berries, and he comes to a clearing and spies a wolf. The kid locks eyes on the wolf, the wolf on him, and the kid is terrified, then the wolf turns and goes back into the forest, and the kid runs back to the village. The first person he sees he grabs and tells them the story of the wolf and Tolstoy says “If in the telling of the story the person who’s listening feels the same fear, then that’s art.” He says, if you see a painting and you’re infused or infected by the passion that the painter felt when he was painting then that’s art. Everything else is decoration.
The book deals with themes of criticism, so how do you see the state of reviewing and criticism in New Zealand at the moment?
I think it’s terrible. I’m disconnected from the art world to a large extent; it was never really my métier. I tend to hang out with engineers. This is based on Thoreau’s idea of it is man’s nature to build castles in the air, but then it’s our duty to put scaffolding (foundations) under them. Especially with kinetic art, I’ve always used engineers to put my art into place and artists sort of piss me off a bit, because as Jesse says in the book, ‘we live in this post-post-modern world anything is possible. I read poems on Facebook every day and I think, ‘Christ, if they had just read Dylan Thomas or T.S Eliot first, maybe they wouldn’t have written that bloody poem.” A friend of mine, Chris Wittington – he’s a wonderful artist, a polymath really – he said to me, “We are lurching in great strides into the field of mediocrity, we accept anything and we make no criticism.” Actually, it’s very hard these days to make any sort of criticism.
There’s so much ‘content’ coming at us every day now, and yet there seems to be a reticence to embrace the idea of criticism – which has always been a part of the arts, with reviewing and such – do you think we need to be a little more open to criticism at this point?
I think we’re going backwards in a way. I read De Bono’s definition of the adversary position years ago, where he said, ‘the adversary position has no creative element to it whatsoever,’ and I took that to my father who was a lawyer and asked him what he thought of this and he just got up and walked out of the room! De Bono went on to talk about Hegel’s idea of presenting a thesis and then an antithesis and then you get a synthesis. That comes from discussion. Well, children, to my mind, are not being taught to discuss or debate ideas with respect to the other person. I liked Christopher Hitchens’ take that there should be no censorship, and no matter how absurd the other idea appears to us, it then stimulates us to examine why it is that we believe something. I find nothing more refreshing than having my mind changed.
You mentioned polymaths before and you’re a bit of a polymath, so how did you get to be so good at so many different disciplines?
Well, I’m not. If I walk into a room and there’s a banquet on, I want to taste everything and when I don’t know something, I find an expert on it and draw them into my life. I love going into different areas.
That would suggest to me that yes, maybe you are a contrarian, but possibly you’re just an intensely curious person?
Curious, definitely. I was walking through a forest in Switzerland with a friend and he is a polymath, and he was teaching teachers in Basel, and we were walking through this forest early in the morning and our breath was frozen, and I said to him, ‘What do you ask of your students?” and he replied, “What I ask of my students is that they ask questions. The answers aren’t important.”
How was it for you to grow up in Christchurch – I wonder how the city shaped your own creativity?
Well, it did. I loved it. The wonderful thing about getting out of art school in the 1970s was that in those days you could find a job in the street like a fallen apple. The price of living was a sixth of my income. But people can’t do that now. Everywhere I look, people are constrained and there’s no money left. It’s a huge worry. I found Christchurch lively and there was something there that was very vibrant. I think though after the earthquakes, we lost some key characters, and that did take something away from the city I think. I think people are pulling into themselves a bit more these days. I think the other thing that has happened is that there are people who aren’t artists controlling the art world and they can only give you what is already known.
So you feel there aren’t so many chances or ‘risks’ taken when it comes to seeing something altogether new?
Yes. I was driving my motorbike down the road one day and I saw in the rear vision mirror this beautiful landscape and I stopped the bike and got off because I couldn’t believe it. I turned around and I couldn’t see the landscape. I looked back into the rear vision mirror and there it was. What the mirror had done was frame it. I think one of the jobs we have as artists is to frame things, to capture an essence, and it can happen almost without thinking. I remember the first exhibition I saw that moved me was Graham Sydney’s and I just fell into the paintings.
You touched on the economy at the moment and how hard it is for artists. How do you feel about the price of art these days, especially when we see these enormous sums commanded at auction. I believe the late art critic Robert Hughes was very critical about the idea of art as investment as the extraordinary prices for these works means art galleries and museums can’t afford to buy them nor afford the insurance costs to tour them.
I think they should travel the exhibitions and just not care. If something gets broken, then that’s just part of the deal. People shouldn’t be so touchy about it. But the corporate thing scares the shit out of me to be honest. I think that if you depend on corporates and you want to write a piece of music or create an artwork that has something that might offend them, then you’re going to be in trouble. If you keep your integrity, then you’re going to be poor. We need to look after artists but I don’t think we should feed them fat because if you do they’re going to get lazy and I think it was stupid of Helen Clark to think if you pour lots of money into arts, you’ll get more art – all you get is more trash really, I think. One of the criticisms Gregor makes in the book – not me of course – is that there are some sculptors who believe that if something ordinary is made fifty times bigger than normal life then it’s art.
Who were your influences when you were a young artist starting out?
Well I never really had anyone up close and personal, I was watching from a distance, which is what I’ve always done. But some of the people who really struck me were Doris Lusk, her honesty and integrity, she was incredible. The CSA – it was a jewel, it tied the community together. Barry Cleavin, Bill Sutton. Bill, in life drawing classes, would sit next to me and look at my drawing and say, ‘Why have you created that line heavier than the others?’ and I’d say, ‘I think it’s where the weight lies,’ and he would say, ‘Well, that’s an interesting point of view. Here’s another..’ and that was so generous. These were exceptionally clever working artists who were also teachers. Back in those days I had heroes around me. Graham Sydney was generous; he’d let me sit in his studio and let me watch him work. Artists can be quite egotistical, but it’s that egotism that allows them to work, and I’ve tried to capture that quality in the book – this character is almost unbearable but he’s so beautiful at the same time.
I think that’s an interesting perspective. You can forgive unbearable people if they have the talent. It’s the unbearable no talented people that are really hard to deal with!
One of my favourite writers is Graham Greene but you wouldn’t want to have a cup of tea with him as he’s just such a nasty bugger. The point is though; to write about humanity, you have to go to the dark side. Same as Cormac McCarthy, he would have been so difficult to be with, but what an interesting man. I think any great art is made from broken people. Solzhenitsyn said ‘Human nature is not fully formed until [they’ve] suffered.”
It’s a little like the metaphor of a stone – it doesn’t fully reveal itself until it’s been through a polishing tumbler. Don’t they say, ‘happiness writes white’, meaning words are invisible when you’re happy.
We have a band that comes here to play sometimes, and the last time they came, they said ‘Look we haven’t written anything good lately, because we’re all happy.’
There is something to that. Expression often comes out of needing some form of resolution or release.
Going back to the stone metaphor – I had a friend whose work I criticised and she asked me why I was always critical. I thought about it and I think it goes like this: If I’ve got a piece of stone in front of me and I start hammering it with the hammer and chisel, then that’s the criticism. If I criticise that stone well enough, then I’ll get a Rodin out of it. If I’m scared to criticise it, I’ll just have a heap of stone.
Which contemporary artists are inspiring to you at the moment?
I think the most inspiring is Bing Dawe. We had an exhibition here about a year ago, and his self-effacing nature and generosity is really inspiring. I love him very much.
Back to the book – you are working on a sequel now?
Yes, when I’m up there in the writing room and there’s a piece of dialogue that really works, I can feel myself smiling. It doesn’t matter if it gets published, it’s almost like a marker for me that I’m alive in the world.
One final question, when you’re working whether it be writing or painting or sculpting, do you work in silence or do you have music playing?
No, I do it in silence. When I was painting I would have the radio on, but now I work in silence.
‘How to Paint a Nude’ is published by Ugly Hill Press and will be launched at Lumière Cinema on Tuesday 25th November from 5.30pm. The book is available at Scorpio Books.