An incident in Kurow – Editorial

My fascination with graffiti has been with me since an early age. When I first encountered it, the words applied literally to the landscape had a brutal honesty; an honesty that spoke in fluorescent capital letters and swore like a bastard. At worst, graffiti is a futile attempt at selfishness; at best, it’s a hole torn in the thin veneer of respectability. Graffiti is a vision of the silent machinery that hums behind the wall of civilization, the wall that keeps us in our quiet little lives. There are rare moments that allow us to see behind this thin veneer. They are often caught in the corner of our eyes as we speed along a motorway, or are whispered in the silent corridors of an art gallery: a small comment that opens the heavens and, like good poetry, separates us and sets us back together. differently.

My fascination with these things is such that I went fishing in the small town of Kurow, in North Otago. It was – and still is – an unassuming kind of place that has a lot of advantages: a population of about four hundred people, two bars, a dairy, and a gas station garage that fixes just about everything. Like most communities, it wears its civility like a thin coat, tattered in places. It’s young people who carry the torch of honesty, sticking their fingers in the tattered parts and telling it like it is.

One year when I was there, I discreetly removed a graffiti-covered Pine radiata board from a public picnic bench near the town’s main street. I duly replaced it with a new, clean one. The picnic bench it was attached to had the right combination of prominence and privacy, as well as proximity to a fish and chip shop. The new board was, I hoped, a blank canvas slipped under the noses of the city’s youth, tempting them to tell me what it is like, daring them to take me apart and put me back together again.

A year later I went back to see what had happened to the board, to see what time and young men’s knives had etched into its smooth, smooth surface.

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On the way from Banks Peninsula I passed through my old university town. On an obscure lamppost not far from the pub was written “Mad mad AnDy” in faded but still garish red paint. It’s been there for as long as I can remember, a sort of indicator of my own youth going unnoticed. Andy was probably content long ago with a comfortable middle-class family and farm existence and the news on television at six. At that time, he might as well have been drunk on a Monday morning while possessing a pot of red paint and brush.

It was while attending university that I became aware of the type of graffiti that burns holes in civilization. It was more penetrating than just AnDy’s angry rants telling me I was getting old, and it came in the form of honest and open criticism. During my wanderings through the university’s extensive art collection, displayed on the walls of some of its newer buildings, I came across comments carefully printed on the labels that accompanied the works. Under a huge painting of a decapitated sheep’s head, someone had written, “This is so tacky.” Under another painting depicting a surrealist zoo, someone had written: “Paradise of the bourgeoisie.” The more I looked, the more comments I found.

Blunt criticisms of this type were a constant in the life of painter Colin McCahon. As the story goes, he made two visits to Kurow to teach summer schools for painters in 1971-72. Although local residents may not have paid much attention to him and his students, he was a great exponent of text in his paintings. Throughout his career, McCahon attracted much public scorn for his use of words; many people called them the scribbles and rants of an artistic vandal.

At its origin was a childhood epiphany when watching a letterer paint in the window of a tobacconist. It manifested itself in a fascination with the hand-painted white fonts on butcher shop windows and orchard signs. The honesty, lack of a suitable canvas, and occasionally eccentric grammar captured something in the young artist. Simply expressing words in white ink with a trembling hand is a very human expression. The mistakes and maneuvers tell us something about the creator that is lost in formal typography and, nowadays, in computer-generated orthographic printing.

McCahon cited prophetic texts and transposed the ideas contained therein to the New Zealand setting. They took the form of comic book-style speech bubbles and altered biblical quotes, giving expression to the uniqueness of this young bicultural colony. The gospel’s collision with New Zealand’s pristine landscape and cultural makeup produced some ingenious reactions that ranged from blinding brilliance to melancholic absurdity.

Students who attended McCahon’s summer schools in Kurow remember him as a thin, reticent man who gave his all to his students, regardless of their abilities. The public ridicule of his work went straight to his warm heart, and the wounds remained open and jagged even in the afterlife.

Perhaps McCahon’s most comprehensive statement in text was discovered in his locked studio after his death. His last painting, I have considered all acts of oppressionwas found lying face down on the floor by his son. The text cited was from Ecclesiastes and was full of all the hopelessness and anger that shines around the best graffiti and some of the best works of art. No one could offer open criticism of this work; the artist had beaten them.

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As I approached Kurow via its most famous rickety bridge, I was confronted with a foreboding about what I would find on my board. As with McCahon, the wounds of today’s youth are open and jagged. But I bought my obligatory fish and chips and sat on the picnic bench to read. Amidst the anger against acts of oppression, and falling squarely between “a shit hole” and “this place is trash,” there is a phrase.

It said: ‘I❤️U.’

Excerpted with kind permission from the splendid new book Innerland: a journey through New Zealand’s everyday landscape by Matt Vance (Potton & Burton, $39.99), available in bookstores nationwide. The author pokes his nose into the things around us – park benches, shopping centres, mudflats and modest suburbs – in this portrait of New Zealand life and landscape.