The Art of Sam Mahon

This week's artist is Sam Mahon of New Zealand and this is the piece that caught my attention. The piece is titled, "Tern for the Worse"

Sam Mahon: "Tern for the Worse"

mixed media: cowpat & resin, NFS

Jenny’s at her window,

the city at her feet,

a coffee cupped in both her hands,

staring at the street.

She wonders if the crowds below,

consider Michelangelo,

or Epstein, or Eliza Frink:

What do the people really think,

she wonders.

In their suburban heart of hearts

is there still room for the visual arts?

She lays her finger tips against

the crenellated scar,

that one unlovely part,

the slow embalming of her heart.

She takes a sip

and feels the bitter taste upon her lip

of crushed black beans and cinnamon,

with a little froth to hide it in.

After viewing the piece, I couldn't quite make out what the white objects inside the head were, so I did some research. I googled "tern, New Zealand" and this is what I discovered:

With a population of around 36 individuals that includes only ten breeding pairs, the New Zealand fairy tern is probably New Zealand's rarest breeding bird.

It is ranked as an endangered species, and carries a "Category A" priority for conservation action. A department of Conservation Recovery Plan is currently in action.

I love the piece, and the combination of the poem and the sculpture. It is a beautifully sculpted human head with white bone/skeletons of small New Zealand terns where the human skull should be. It is as if we don't have brains.

The shapes in the cranium have their beauty too. They remind me of dolphins playfully breaching the oceans surface. What it says to me is that humans, even if we don't know it, are being changed by our actions, our actions that wound or kill other forms of life. This total disregard for other forms of life will take us over, consume us, and eventually be our downfall.

After reading a short quote from the artist, I see the Jenny in his poem as his daughter living in America. She wrote him that "I look around me and everything seems broken." So I envision her living in a large American city, looking out her window at us. Although I realize this could be any large city in many countries. And "the slow embalming of her heart" to me represents what is happening to us all as we watch injustices, war, extinctions occur with no action on our part to stop it. And the "little froth to hide it in" is the froth, perks, little luxuries of our modern life that help us forget what we are doing to our planet and its inhabitants, human and otherwise. Notice that we still drink the bitter drink.

Sam Mahon thinks that art as social activism in main stream society no longer exists. I like his metaphor of art as wallpaper. Below is a short quote from the artist.

"Ever since secondary school I’ve been making political art, although mostly I painted and sculpted just for myself in order to document the beautiful world in which I moved. It was only occasionally that I used images to try and change points of view. But the egalitarian world I grew up in where we would unhesitatingly step into the street to protest Vietnam, Apartheid and American hegemony are long past. We have since somehow slipped into a culture of acquiescence where our sense of social responsibility has been subsumed by individualism. My daughter wrote from America recently; ‘I look around me and everything seems broken.’

Art is no longer seen as a medium for change. Along with all other revolutionaries it has been captured, branded and turned into wallpaper. The dealers and city art galleries and the public art advisory groups do not ask any more what art has to say; they inform art just as a captain of industry informs the shop floor. It seems that the safest place for art these days is the street." -Sam Mahon