Lookout 1

This essay originally appeared in New Zealand Art at Te Papa (Te Papa Press, 2018).

Tony de Lautour’s deftly repainted found paintings depend on a subtle fusion of respect and desecration. On one level they are kin to the posters or waiting-room magazines that we feel compelled to deface with spectacles, beards or buck teeth. They are also part of a modernist tradition of sophisticated art vandalism initiated by Marcel Duchamp’s moustachioed Mona Lisa. Today, complex defacement of past art seems widespread — the Pride and Prejudice and Zombies novel by Seth Grahame-Smith, and Jake and Dinos Chapman’s modified Goya etchings, come to mind.
De Lautour’s group of modified, revisionist history paintings were produced in the late 1990s and early 2000s. He bought most of the original paintings from garage sales and junk shops. These were usually generic late nineteenth-century amateur landscapes or seascapes that assume painting as a genteel pastime for the educated.

What most fascinated de Lautour about the material he collected was how they looked like empty stage sets where nothing happens. Having his head full of histories of the New Zealand Wars and settler society, de Lautour was well aware that purist visions of an innocent nature waiting to be tamed through culture now looked dangerous and more than a little ludicrous. De Lautour wanted to show a more anarchic local history, to model an allegorical fantasy which alluded to the nasty and brutal side of empire building. He therefore painstakingly insinuated a comedic heart of darkness into his found paintings through the addition of strange beasties, evil kiwi, armed heraldic lions, piles of bones, gunboats and drunken wastrels, which spread through these otherwise serene settings like invasive species.

In some works in this series, a white snake suggests trouble and deceit in paradise. The armed lions watching from their promontory in Lookout 1 are emblems of fortified British interests, and the thin, darkly maniacal kiwi figures on the far shore betoken the ‘savages’, an indigenous population threatening the would-be ‘civilising’ forces. The coloniser’s painted vision is colonised itself and deviated ever so elegantly into showing more than it might have been comfortable with. The painting’s title turns on a double meaning: a lookout is the best place for viewing scenery but also a person who keeps watch for the enemy.

Allan Smith