Down the Rabbit Hole

Colin McCahon needed words. He said so and put them up on the canvas for all to read. Mostly biblical. Some te reo.

He wasn’t the first to do so. Others had used words before him, some that go back as far as the Renaissance, while more recently there was, of course, Picasso, Magritte, and the Dadaists with their cut and paste jobs. And there are many that have come after McCahon here in New Zealand, like Peter Robinson, John Reynolds, Rosalie Gascoigne (albeit chopped up and rearranged), and another expat, Richard Lewer.

Words. They have almost become a New Zealand tradition for a nation of so-called inarticulates. The reading of the image was not sufficient. The message must get through without impediment or confusion. Text makes definitive what the image might fail to communicate.

But even words themselves can bring with them elements of ambivalence, and this is one area that James Ford, dealer in words, focuses on.

First, there is often no image in the painting to play off. The words/phrases are it; plain and simple. And the configuration of the words on the canvas are also plain. No personalised cursive writing here. Just your bog-standard lettering, hard edged, looking like it might have been printed with a machine, and often monotone.

But that is where the plain and simple ends. Ford trades in seeming paradoxes, gnomic sayings, philosophical conundrums, contradictions, comic assertions, truisms, troubling aphorisms, banalities made strange and bits of quotations.

Take, Having. Doing. Being. (2023). These three bold words are composed like a shopping list on canvas, each with a full stop (square) and presented in capital letters. This simple trinity of words, banal at first blush, do in fact, when you think about it, sum up the essence of life itself, in order of significance from least to utmost. “Having” and “doing” refer to acquisitiveness and action, while the last on the list, “being”, refers to the fundamental fact of existence. Philosophically, these words, especially the latter, has taken on particular significance via the writings of German philosopher, Heidegger, who made the point that modern man had forgotten “being” and thus lost touch with primal reality as a consequence; and as a consequence, became consumed with having and doing to the detriment of the species and the environment.

Ford has encapsulated in three words the core elements of Heidegger’s text, Being and Time. And the order on the list reflects the argument. If our awareness of “being” (existence-ness) were elevated, the veil would fall from our eyes, and we would see the wonder and mystery of it all and become more authentic human beings, unafraid to confront our finitude.

These are big subjects and Ford’s simple graphics – black bold lettering on muted-colour canvas, a minimalist aesthetic, carries the message directly.

The same philosophical musings are reflected in another text-based work – It’s All a Bit Confusing Then It’s Over (2021). This time a sentence with similar bold black lettering set across the middle of the canvas, taking up about a third of the space.

This type of statement sounds at first like the sayings employed by American feminist artist, Jenny Holzer, another neo-conceptualist, using illuminated electronic displays with LED signs. Her cryptic texts are often political, as in Raise Boys and Girls the Same Way, played up like street signage or ads on the side of buildings in city precincts, or more intimately on postcards and t-shirts.

Ford, however, by contrast, confines himself to more meditative texts. He has no political axe to grind or polemical designs on us, thus his choice of text is more reflective and philosophical in nature.

Ford engages with an existential issue that bedevils modern individuals – the brevity of life, one that often seems lacking in any meaning. Such a pithy text, sounding like a proverb, has impact. It doesn’t preach or attempt an answer. It doesn’t pretend to know the answer. It merely acts as a prompt to contemplation and therefore avoids that polemical strain that comes with a kind of art that skirts the edges of propaganda.

The absence of imagery provides a singularity and starkness to the works that aids in its impact and delivery. There is nothing else to look at. It’s short, sharp and snappy for today’s audience with short attention spans, a generation brought up on txt and tweets. And because of its brevity, it is memorable.

These are often troubling pronouncements, but the aesthetic provides a nice counterpoint that presents crisp lettering, like something on a product or package of goodies. The medium is thus non-threatening and conventional which acts as a foil to the message. Thus, what looks harmless, tidy, conventional, comes with a bite.

Another text in the same vein is – It’s Hard When Things Have No Meaning (2021). This time the text is presented with a pale peach background and sums up the quintessential modern dilemma, the cry heard issuing from Samuel Beckett’s Waiting for Godot, or the line from Bob Dylan’s All Along the Watchtower – “There are many here among us who feel that life is but a joke”.

In Ford’s seven words is encapsulated the legacy inherited from things that reach back as far as Darwin’s Origin of Species (“Nature, red in tooth and claw” as Tennyson described it) to Edwin Hubble’s discovery of the galaxies, both of which destroyed our comfortable user-friendly image of the cosmos, leaving us on a “darkling plain” as poet Matthew Arnold pictured it.

Ford has captured the essence of the fallout from such shifts in metaphysical perspectives and done it sympathetically in a single work.

In 2023 Ford collaborated with designer Alistair McCready to create the custom typeface Blundell Protest for use in his textworks. It draws inspiration from early nineteenth century newspaper headlines, advertising billboards and protest placards, tapping into elements pertinent to the delivery of the works.

First, there is a touch of nostalgia evoked, which sets up a sense of poignancy that compliments the text, given the themes are often about a sense of loss.

Second, there is an element of irony operating, given that a headline is constructed to grab attention and is often sensationalised. There thus exists here an antithetical dynamic operating between an overdramatised commercial medium and the more serious introspective nature of the text in the work. Two worlds face off here in a little playful joust.

Because the statements are couched in aphoristic form and come sharp and precise, they possess a punch. They tap us on the shoulder, remind us to step back from the everydayness of things that overtake us, and ask us to look at the bigger picture, the deeper conundrums.

Some of them feel like Edvard Munch’s The Scream, without the image.

But not all the works are text alone. Ford has introduced images in a few of his canvases, but with a new factor recently emerging from the landscape of fast-moving technological development – that of generative AI.

The implications of its imitative powers, a force for both benefit and detriment, are well known, and Ford has playfully availed himself of the technology in certain critical ways.

One work, This Is Not An Oak Tree (2023), includes an AI-generated “painting” of an oak tree, with text directly across it declaring, “THIS IS NOT AN OAK TREE”, riffing on Magritte’s 1929 work, The Treachery of Images (most commonly referred to as This Is Not a Pipe). Magritte was technically correct – it was only a painting of a pipe. Ask Plato and he would have pushed it even further by declaring that it was only an image of an image – two degrees removed from reality, according to the philosopher, a man impatient with illusions and shadows.

Ford’s work conjures with the artificiality of thing. It looks to all intent and purpose like a tree of the designation, but what have we got via machinery here? A generic picture? Something ‘thought up’ inside the ‘mind’ of the machine from input coming from where? A bundle of algorithms? And do we thus end up with some cheesy, kitsch creation? This is a mock-up, an object spawned from thousands (if not millions) of alphanumeric inputs and, thus, an amalgam of the object.

It’s a whole can of worms where real and fake, authentic and synthetic, battle it out and has ramifications for the age, present and future.

And why an oak tree and not, say, a fry pan? The artist has in mind a fellow traveller – conceptual artist Michael Craig-Martin and his 1973 piece called An Oak Tree, where he exhibits a glass of water and argues that, by some transubstantiation process, the artist has magically transformed it into something else – an oak tree. Ford is tipping his hat to someone who also deals in the conundrums associated with the notions of reality and simulation. We are deep inside the world of conceptual game playing here that interrogates the nature of the real. Or alternatively, the realisation of the arbitrariness of words as applied to objects and, thus, our perception of things.

Words, words, words. And he’s not done. Next, the artist ups the ante in this dance of the seven veils by factoring in “tips for artists who want to sell”, advice purloined from a certain John Baldesseri, noted for his conceptual text paintings. Here, the hand of commercialism is brought into play to conflate the procedure, generating some bog-standard image to attract the likes of Mr and Mrs plastic bucket. Ford instructs the AI software to create an “average landscape oil painting”. What might that be and where is the machine sourcing this material from? And who has decided what “average” might be?

What we end up with is a sentimentalised product, which is paradoxically and ironically redeemed because of the philosophical exploration involved.

Perceptual Best Guess (2023), is one of those basic saleable landscape digital creations, which presents idyllic cottages placed adjacent to a pretty inlet of calm sea, complete with blue sky and rolling hills, where the superimposed title sardonically sums up the picture.

In another twist, the artist plays off man against machine, artistry against apparatus, real versus replication, by carefully and precisely painting the text himself with such exactitude as to simulate the work of a machine. We are well down inside the rabbit hole, along with Alice who sees the artist having fun with art, reality and all its alternatives, together with its amusing contradictions.

Newer works include a range of phrases and quotations, introducing more vivid colours,
some of which have a postmodern feel and look about them. For example, Belief in Believing (2024), which reminds me of the line, “Have beliefs, but don’t believe”, found in Life’s Little Deconstruction Book: Self-Help for the Post-Hip, by Andrew Boyd, a mine of phrases and sayings that explore the world of PoMo and its theoretical posturings.

Others include enigmas and oxymorons like The Remedy is in the Poison (2024) and Biting Your Own Teeth (2024) – a gloss on anxiety from Alan Watts, which might reflect on the Eastern guru’s philosophy and his take on the oneness of all things. This, in turn, might look apposite hung next to another work of Ford’s that includes the line, “Stressed spelled backwards is desserts”.

McCahon wanted us to think deeply about things – Christrian faith, the New Zealand landscape, death and life’s meaning, using words. Ford does something of the same with text, but his range is more eclectic, his style cooler and more minimalist, and his tone often ironic, which reflects the times we live in.

It is good to see that the tradition of word use still has the power to do the job, the job art was elected and born to do.