Art: Icons of fearlessness

By PAT BASKETT

For a radical feminist of the 1970s to drop the epithet "woman" and say of herself that she is, simply, an artist, is a measure of her success.

Was Alexis Hunter brave, in those earlier days?

"Yes," she says ruefully, "and also stupid."

That is perhaps less a self-deprecatory comment than an admission that in retrospect her aims could have been more modest without altering the outcomes in any way. But hindsight is a shallow form of wisdom and Hunter's achievements are not to be belittled by paltry reflections on those heady days of 1970s feminism.

Hunter is a former Aucklander, an Elam graduate who has lived in London since 1972, but regular exhibitions in New Zealand - many of them in Wellington - have enabled us to track her progress. Her latest show, Sin and Redemption: London Paintings (reviewed on this page), at the McPherson Gallery until April 19, is her first solo exhibition in Auckland for 10 years.

These richly brushed oil paintings appear far removed from the photo-realism of her earliest London works which brought her attention because they depicted tattooed men - depersonalised, objectified in the manner in which women were classically portrayed.

In the 1970s she moved from painting to photography - specifically to what she calls sequential photographs, where a series of nine, 12 or 20 closely related images has a cinematic effect.

The sequences, which reflect the fact that for several years she worked in the film industry as an animator, have highly explicit, narrative titles.

One of her best-known series is Approach to Fear, with subtitles such as Violence - Destruction of Evidence and Pain - Solace. They feature a woman's manicured hand moving through the sequences of various activities in a style that apes the techniques of commercial advertising.

Hunter has written of those sequential works: "It is interesting to note the use of long narrative sequences or the leaning towards performance art by feminist artists ... as if women need to express their life as a sequence of instances rather than as moments caught in a single image."

They were the product of her most ardent campaigning as a feminist, when she hoped that by using the kind of imagery familiar from television and the commercial world she would reach a wider audience than the usual middle-class art-gallery stalwarts.

It was a fond hope, but those works reaped her recognition from one of the art world's noted critics, the American Lucy Lippard, who wrote the catalogue essay for a 1981 exhibition.

In it she said: "Alexis Hunter makes icons of fearlessness for women, metaphors for feminism."

Lippard had picked up on what was the essence of painting for Hunter - metaphor. Hunter says: "People live to quite an extent in a world of metaphor. It's what creativity is - poetry, prose, painting."

For the past 20 years she has worked mainly in oil and her concerns have broadened. A work called Kurdistan!, painted at the time of the Gulf War, features the anguished face of a dark-haired woman.

"I do believe artists live in the real world as well as a metaphysical one," Hunter says.

"My role as an artist is to give an opinion of a situation, to communicate something about certain events."

In The Devil Considering a Dying City, which Hunter painted in 1990, a female reptilian devil faces the viewer and holds several blades of grass. Behind her are the murky buildings of a city.

Hunter's feminism was always coloured by her socialist convictions and she says this painting "represents how the complex economic structure of a large city could be taken over by sinister forces, leaving the infrastructure to collapse. I had a personal feeling that the ministers in Thatcher's Conservative Government were corruptible and had decided the problems of running London were too difficult."

Underlying these temporal concerns are Hunter's interest in psychology and the idea of collective experience as expressed in mythology and metaphor.

In The Spirit of London a lusciously painted giant bird appears in its death throes before a hazy city. Despite the mythic treatment, it's not hard to decipher Hunter's meaning. The painting is about nature versus technology, she says, about pollution and the destruction of the environment.

It also has a link with New Zealand. As a 17-year-old, Hunter worked at the Auckland Museum, painting the diorama for the moa display and the bird in her 1994 painting is as much moa as vulture.

Camden is the part of London where she has lived for 20 years and where she and her husband, who played football for Scotland, once ran a pub. It's a colourful district where life is hard for a lot of people and Hunter expresses this in several small paintings which feature a rat or a horned rodent.

"Rats can live anywhere, they're adaptable, they represent survival," she says.

Her most recent work, exhibited in London but not yet on this side of the world, incorporates surrealism and the automatic drawing she has done for years, with computer coding in which she has just completed a degree.

The irrefutable, black-and-white certainty of computer codes is, she says, a comfort to an artist. "Especially to one like me who works intuitively."