As part of the Ockham NZ book awards held earlier this month, the finalists were invited to read for two minutes from their books. My novel How to Paint a Nude was shortlisted for the fiction prize. I chose in my reading to deviate from the expected (always an interesting thing to attempt at highly orchestrated events like these) by giving 30 seconds of my time to Arundhati Roy’s view that “art and politics must be indivisible.”
My off-piste remarks with regard to our government’s tacit support of the current Israeli/American war so enraged Ockham’s representative, Mark Todd, that he threw away his prepared closing speech to attack my discourse as “tribalistic”. I am still not sure what he meant, but I assume he saw me as an emissary from the left. I am not. I haven’t voted in a general election since 2017. I can’t quite see the point.
No matter how obscurely put, I think what we all took from Todd’s improvised rebuff was that I should not have used this event, a festival of words, as a forum for… well, let’s face it, free speech. Nor should I have singled out arts minister Paul Goldsmith, the government’s representative in the front row.
Is he right? Should Art behave itself, tip-toe around the dead, whisper admonitions before mirrors, be deferential? Banksy would disagree. So would Chomsky, Hitchens, Le Guin, Atwood, Ani di Franco, Pilger, Orson Welles, Voltaire, Thoreau, and most emphatically Bertolt Brecht. These are my favourites, but the list is endless. And I do enjoy Brian Patten’s injunction: “When in public Poetry should take off its clothes and wave to the nearest person in sight.” In this case Paul Goldsmith.
Everyone has been to a zoo at some time and seen a dangerous animal behind bars. There he is pacing up and down, no threat to anyone, everybody taking selfies beside the celebrated man-eater. But then imagine you meet this same tiger in the street some minutes later, uncaged. The sphincter clamps like a fist, your mouth goes dry and you suddenly wish you were living in America. This, the street, is where Brecht and Banksy say Art should reside, Fourth Walls all a-crumble.
To speak ‘truth to power’ in a book is one thing, but to say it out loud is apparently another, at least on stage at the AWF. And yet every sentiment expressed in my 30-second speech is also expressed in my book How to Paint a Nude. What I said and what I have written are to a large extent the same thing. Were my comments deemed offensive because they were made freely, unanchored to the page? Or because in the delivery I indicated to the audience that a representative of a government, which seems to think that 75,000 dead Palestinians had it coming, was among them?
The section of my book that I did read from was a castigation of the Key-led government’s predation on post-earthquake Christchurch. Every accusation in those few paragraphs can equally be levelled at the Luxon coalition. Indeed the justice minister’s recent proposed changes to climate legislation are described by the EDS as an attack on the rule of law, eerily bringing to mind my old adversary, Nick Smith and the 2010 ECan Act. Governmental disregard for the rule of law is also closely examined in my book.
In Tolstoy’s essay, What is art, he argues that the reaction of an audience to any work of art is its completion. To be castigated by the sponsor of a word festival for expressing a critical view kind of makes my point for me while at the same time completing Tolstoy’s requirement.
The entire premise of my novel is based on Art’s eternal struggle to free itself from the constraints of corporate and political influence. If the majority of art funding is derived from the business sector then, as Chomsky and my protagonist aver, the proper course for any self-respecting artist is to bite the hand that feeds it.
If Mark Todd feels in anyway nipped, then he should take succour in the fact that I bought my own sandwiches.
How to Paint a Nude by Sam Mahon (Ugly Hill Press, $40) is available in bookstores nationwide. It was a popular choice in the recent ReadingRoom contest asking readers to name their favourite book published in 2025. Comments included this short assessment from Alison, who wrote, “It is unlike any NZ book I have ever read.” And there was this, from Graham: “I related to what feels like swift changes in NZ, with the Chch earthquakes as an example of abrupt, unplanned, uninvited and forced change.” And there was this fabulous close reading from Marcus, who wrote about a scene in chapter 2: “It describes the Parisian apartment of Eloise, draped with bright fabrics, silk scarves and Chinese fans ‘like entering the nest of a bowerbird.’ It is nine pages long and the description, the atmosphere and a deep sense of unfulfilled longing is perfection. He also describes a statue in the Rodin Museum, a statue which you have to stand behind and peer down over the right shoulder to catch the faint smile of the model. I know that exact smile and place.”
