Bill Hammond's private artistic vision

BY GILBERT WONG

This might have been an interview with Bill Hammond. But Hammond is notoriously leery of questions and the click of the shutter. The image of Hammond in his Lyttelton studio was taken by that fine, much-missed photographer Robin Morrison in 1991, and is one of the few outside private hands.

Morrison, a man whose art partly rested on his ease with his subjects, still doesn't seem to have got Hammond to relax. It's as if the artist doesn't want us to have any clues about what goes on in this paint-splattered room.

There is good natural light, partly screened by a curtain with a 50s-style print, a period of design which recurs in Hammond's paintings. A canvas sits on an easel. There is the usual artist's studio scatter of spaghetti and tinned-fruit cans reeking of turps.

What is significant to me is the absence of any object that does not impinge directly on his work - no photographs of friends or family; no sign of his reportedly extensive record collection or even evidence that he stops now and again for a cup of tea or a beer. This is a studio all about the painting, from the doodling displayed on the plain, stopped walls to the riot of colour that is the floor. The image could be called No Distractions.

The skeleton of facts we have about Hammond include that he was born in Christchurch in 1947 and has lived most of his life in Lyttelton. He went to the School of Fine Arts at Canterbury University in 1966 and before he became a painter he worked for Claude Neon making signs. He plays drums in a band and paints to the sound of rock played full-bore.

As an artist he won the James Wallace Award in 1993, and the following year the premier award at the Visa Gold Art Awards. He was one of the artists who represented New Zealand at the 1999 Asia-Pacific Triennial in Brisbane and this year's Sydney Biennale. Hammond has arrived, well and truly.

We can discern a little of Hammond from the image. He looks a little glum. His moustache droops. He is sensibly dressed in blue jeans and a woollen jumper. There is no outward sign of the chaotic, dark and witty imagery that floods his canvasses. He has said of his work, "It's not autobiography, it's something else."

That is a natural disclaimer from a person who values privacy and the personal, but perhaps a little disingenuous because he has been such a good chronicler of our recent times. He has taken apart that decade of greed, the 80s, with paintings peopled with suits on steroids, mutating furniture, roughly sketched skyscrapers and, throughout, the bleat of radio and television.

His work of the early 90s would not be out of place in that fringe bible of disaffected toon-art Raw, edited by New Yorker art director and Pulitzer Prize-wining cartoonist Art Spiegleman.

With artists like Jacque Tardi, Charles Burns and Alfred Jarry, Raw, sometimes dubbed the Journal of Abstract Depressionism, let New York and French intellectuals play with pop culture, taking the saccharine and light-as-air images, the inane lyrics and motifs to paint a mindscape of unease and horror.

Hammond's dense canvasses teem with Hokusai waves, Bee Gee song titles, fashion victims and mutant birds, adding up to an edgy world view well attuned to the neuroses of a country perched on the edge itself. With Death Row Auckland Islands (1990) his preoccupations changed, say the critics.

As someone who has walked those windswept sub-Antarctic Islands, 500 nautical miles in the middle of the nowhere and the last landfall before the icy continent, it's easy to see how his visit there could have affected his sensibilities.

As pristine as they are today, the past of the Auckland Islands is all about human failure and arrogance - the failure of the colony that tried to establish there, and the arrogance of the sealers and whalers and shipwreck victims who at times lived there, to respect the unbridled wilderness.

Hammond's painting shows the vertiginous cliffs and the dark violence of the seal slaughter of last century. The islands are beautiful, have world-heritage status, but their appeal is harsh and must have been startling to Hammond, with his urbanite preoccupations.

Certainly since then, his paintings have changed. They remain dark and chaotic but look instead at the collision of modern society with the environment, the paintings peopled with half-human avians, gulls and penguins.

What we can say about Hammond's work is informed by his absence. Here's what critics and curators have said about him.

Justin Paton: "Hammond is rightly viewed as a fringe-dwelling maverick, the Hieronymus Bosch of Lyttelton, but that reputation shouldn't obscure the urgency with which he's turned local conventions of landscape inside out."

Allan Smythe on his drawing: " ... with the myopic intensity of the untutored doodler; the introverted schoolboy drawing detailed hot rods with pipes and flames, or camouflage schemes of jetfighters."

Priscilla Pitts: "If there is a moral in Hammond's birdland, it's perhaps that any good human brought to these islands is ultimately more disquieting than the obvious evils they've imposed. And yet these images refuse any efforts we may make to corral and analyse them, or bend them to the service of polemic or logic."

Gwynneth Porter: "Surely the inexplicable, timeless worlds that Hammond now paints must be easier to see when one looks out, as Lyttelton does, from the dark side of the rim of a vast, ancient and apparently extinct volcano, upon the vast, ancient Banks Peninsula landscape."

* The Bill Hammond exhibition, 23 Big Pictures, at the New Gallery in Auckland, curated originally for the Dunedin Public Art Gallery by Gwynneth Porter, runs until November 5.