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Overview
This essay originally appeared in New Zealand Art at Te Papa (Te Papa Press, 2018).
Most consider the ‘Save Manapouri’ campaign of 1959–72 a triumph of populist environmentalism. But Michael Illingworth saw it as a compromise. He wrote of the site of this lyrically beautiful southern lake, threatened by a proposed dam: ‘Seal it entirely from the junk of our civilisation — let man only go there naked and on foot to learn to love this land as do our Maori hosts when they speak of the ancestral lands.’1 Illingworth’s art similarly swings between idealism and righteousness, sweetness and bitter satire. It sought to shake a dominant Pākehā culture from its self-induced malaise by positing a ‘return to nature’ and embrace of the Māori world instead.
Untitled is a communion with ‘the ancestral lands’. Fecund land, sea and sky forms pulsate with the presence of ancient nature deities. Illingworth heeds his own advice and seals this landscape off from civilisation’s junk. Previously he had piled symbols of middle-class existence into his paintings — the things responsible for altering humanity’s fundamental pacts with each other and the land. This landscape transcends, rather than comments on, materialist civilisation.
Illingworth believed that an ability to experience the true majesty of the natural order set him apart. His stylised treatment of the landscape is often called ‘mythic’ or ‘poetic’. It moves beyond ‘what we all can see’, revealing deeper truths that most are blind to. Both paintings are essentially about seeing. They encourage us to glimpse the wonders of nature, see through the trappings of materialist culture and conservative morality, and look to art and Māori for inspiration. Both stare back at us. They address us as lovers, or chastise us as traitors to our true selves.
Aaron Lister
This oil painting by Michael Illingworth is a landscape painting and illustrates the particular hallucinatory quality that Illingworth achieved in his paintings of the early 1970s. The colours are vivid, the forms crisply outlined, and the paint is finely worked into dense and complex surfaces built up from layers of oil.
Classic motifs
Along with the landscape, Untitled features other elements common to Illingworth's art. The terraced hill, named and prominently featured in Pah Hill, another painting by Illingworth in the Te Papa collection, is repeated twice in this painting. This sign of Māori presence in the landscape is joined by a spiral that nestles inside the pā site at the front of the image, and evokes the koru motif of Māori art. Illingworth's own version of the koru is inscribed on the red rock that flows underneath the land, and therefore acts as another sign of the relationship between Māori and the land. One of Illingworth's figures appears at the right of the painting, its face dissected by the edge of the canvas. We are given no clue as to the figure's identity, a mystery that is enhanced by the radical cropping of the face.
Paintings with no titles to obey
In 1967 Illingworth held an exhibition at the Barry Lett Galleries in Auckland called Paintings with no titles to obey. This marked a shift in how Illingworth presented his paintings, as he began to replace his earlier, more literary titles with matter of fact names. Untitled was first shown in an exhibition at the Barry Lett Galleries in 1971. This exhibition marked a kind of end-point in Illingworth's refusal to give the viewer hints about how to interpret his works. All the paintings in the exhibition were called untitled. Critic Hamish Keith commented on this 'stony literary silence' in his review in the Auckland Star newspaper, and the phrase is a good description of Untitled - a painting filled with signs that offer the viewer little interpretive guidance.