Big Pin-Wheel by the Motorway

Andrew Paul Wood
How to Paint a Nude by Sam Mahon (Ugly Hill Press, 2025), 253pp, $40

Sam Mahon is one of those creative temperaments who seems constitutionally incapable of leaving a hornet’s nest unkicked, which likely explains the tendency of the cultural establishment to keep him at a safe distance. A sculptor and painter who writes by trade, and a professional irritant by inclination, he has spent decades producing intriguing and controversial (more in his own mind than those of his targets) protest sculptures—environmental activism with a relish for public mischief.

Mahon operates in that small but necessary category—negligible in Aotearoa—of cultural figures who believe that art should not merely adorn the world but be interrogated with a knuckleduster rather than a feather duster. He established a literary reputation with his novels The Year of the Horse (2002) and The Water Thieves (2006), and My Father’s Shadow (2008), a biographical portrait of his father, Justice Peter Mahon, who famously led the Erebus disaster inquiry and suffered for it, remains essential reading. How to Paint a Nude is his fifth book and managed, somehow, to secure a shortlist place for the 2026 Jann Medlicott Acorn Prize for Fiction at the Ockham New Zealand Book Awards.

A Sam Mahon book is like a Sam Mahon bronze: fashioned with care, delivered with a self-consciously clever wink that wants you to notice it, and a snarl. It is a self-indulgent homebrew of memoir, monomaniacal polemic, Canterbury Gothic and a frothy head of autodidactic intellectualism. In a country that generally prefers its creatives modest, seen and not heard, and its politics polite, Mahon’s contrarianism performs a legitimate civic service, reminding us that complacency is the favourite opiate of New Zealand sheep. We do not like confrontation. He, at least, is prepared to take it to the powerful. Of course, he was the son of a judge and an alumnus of Christ’s College, so, technically, he belongs to the same milieu as many of them.

I suspect I was chosen to review Mahon’s book because much of it covers the past twenty-five years, during which I was both an insider and an outsider in Christchurch’s art scene, working with or critiquing its institutions. This gives me some unique perspective, within the bounds of professional ethics. Without such specialist knowledge, much of the book would likely seem opaque—or simply dull—to most readers. Ironically, I had to skip several political and art-world retribution chapters because they were simply too tedious.

In the accompanying press information, Mahon offers the following as the impetus for writing How to Paint a Nude:

In 2010, I created a sculpture that criticised Art’s [his capital, not mine, repeated throughout] dependency on industrial sponsorship and submitted to the largest sculpture show in the South Island. Curiously, as a postscript, the curators declared that they would accept any other work I cared to offer … just not that one. I decided this would be the main theme of my book: how to navigate special interest, how to give Art its necessary free voice. To do this, I’d need a companion with whom to debate Art’s essential purpose …

Self-mythologisation—the prerogative of all creatives—aside, one is nearly certain that recollections may differ. But does that make for a good book? That is a difficult question, particularly when the book is so deliberately conceived to press buttons. The narrative revolves around Gregor, a painter and anarchist who has fled his native Belarus for the freedom of Aotearoa. Mahon (‘Sambo’), the protagonist and narrator, and Gregor meet weekly at the no longer extant Christchurch institution Le Café in the Arts Centre—a place of innumerable average coffees and relationship break-ups—to critique the influence of authoritarianism and creeping corporate capitalism on Art and life.

How to Paint a Nude is something highly unusual in the context of New Zealand letters: a philosophical two-hander, a dialogue-cum-essay masquerading as a novel, written well outside the gravity well of the International Institute of Modern Letters in Wellington. Some authors have made masterpieces of this difficult form. J.M. Coetzee, for example, in Elizabeth Costello, The Childhood of Jesus and The Pole. Another is Emmanuel Carrère in his The Adversary and Class Trip.

The form itself goes all the way back to Plato’s dialogues, and I would be lying if I said I did not detect in this book a faint, deliberate and resigned whiff of the hemlock of the persecuted Socrates, ordered to commit suicide by the Athenian state for the crime of teaching youth to think for themselves. But Mahon is not in that league; indeed, he cannot even see its fringes from his converted Waikari flour mill. He lacks the requisite self-awareness and lightness of touch, the kindness that acknowledges the humanity of those being skewered.

Nonetheless, How to Paint a Nude has its merits. Mahon can certainly turn a beautiful, evocative phrase, such as this description of Le Café:

One of the things I’ve mourned since the earthquake is that dark little café in the old university administration building where the proprietor watched over us from his neo-gothic garret, we, the human tide washing down the boulevard: students, tourists, the pin-striped deal makers.

Stylistically, the book has some issues. Mahon only rarely gets out of his own head and, whenever there is a choice to be made between score-settling and good writing, the writing loses out.

On the subject of score-settling, Mahon might change a name here or there, but he insists on stuffing in enough clues to make it obvious who he is talking about. Since the damage is done, and the victims of his ire cannot possibly experience any more embarrassment than they already have, I will dispense with the masquerade.

There is some very deft storytelling, particularly in the weaving through of Eloise, the idealised woman the fictionalised Sam meets at a party in Paris and who later becomes the subject of one of the book’s strongest chapters. Eloise is mapped in metaphors of light. Following the party, she assists the narrator in navigating the Parisian art world: ‘… the sun came out and a shaft of light cut through her eye between the lens and the iris and set it alight’. When her part of the story resumes: ‘The afternoon sun was flooding her room, setting fire to the bright fabrics pinned to her walls and the silk scarves which hung from the ceiling like the soft undersides of candied clouds.’

This emphasises Eloise’s lucid perceptivity, her floaty ephemerality, and is sufficiently charming to allow one to overlook the heavy-handed pastiche of a kind of roman à clef that was already becoming clichéd half a century ago. The pair drift between talk of art and the messiness of living. She recounts a failed love affair. He reminisces about his painting life in Paris. When their conversation ends, she escorts him to the Gare de Lyon and gives him a single, decisive kiss, very old Hollywood, and that is the last moment they share. Mercifully, this is all subverted when it is revealed to have been a lie he told Gregor, much as the whole book is a fiction purporting to be fact.

Eloise is typical of the female characters in the book: tangential, decorative, one-dimensional muses or obstacles for the two main male characters, both of whom function as authorial stand-ins. They are all described in terms of their bodies, their looks and what they can offer the men:

She had long autumn hair and very pale Irish skin. She was wearing bright lipstick on a mouth that seemed constantly on the edge of laughing. Her smile completely distracted me. I couldn’t take anything she said seriously, like there was a secret joke we shared and dared not talk about.

Another woman, Abigail, is described as ‘pretty in an obvious kind of way … she looks like a high-school rowing champion, large shoulders, blonde ponytail, flawless skin, very white teeth …’. Abigail is obviously supposed to be Deborah McCormick, then director of Christchurch’s SCAPE festival of public art. To my mind, there is something sordid and bullying about undermining a professional woman in this way.

The only real exception to this relentless male (navel) gazing is Rilke: waitress, Gregor’s squeeze and model (so already a cliché), who becomes the target of Sambo’s affections after Gregor’s departure and who shows a bit of feminist spark. Mahon even allows her to quote Virginia Woolf. Such is the ambient pretentiousness of the novel that we must assume she is named after the male German-Czech poet Rainer Maria Rilke.

Gregor speaks of the director of the ‘Community Arts Academy’, which I suspect stands in for CoCA. Time is ambiguous in the novel—it could be set at almost any point during the past thirty years, so exact identities cannot be pinned down. But I can guess at the director’s identity, and it is probably Warren Feeney. Gregor also describes the director as ‘blanched’ and ‘etiolated’, comparing him to an Edvard Munch painting, and recounts a conversation with him:

I tried to talk to him about The Free Theatre, he said. He thought I was talking about some little German at the Arts Centre putting on Brecht. No, no, I said, Khalezin and Kaliada, they’re in fucking prison, they’re not drinking lattes in Le Café. He looked at me with empty eyes. Then he asked if I’d read Pushkin. I said Alex? He said no, Alexander.

The ‘little German’ is quite clearly Peter Falkenberg. Nicolai Khalezin and Natalia Kaliada founded the underground Belarus Free Theatre in 2005. I am not quite sure how Mahon intends this parallel to work, because while Khalezin was imprisoned, that was before the Free Theatre was founded; afterwards, both he and Kaliada were frequently detained and interrogated, but both eventually fled to the UK and were granted asylum to avoid prison, so some licence is being taken here. And I think it’s unlikely that a Belarusian speaker would have used ‘Alex’ rather than ‘Sacha’ to signal familiarity.

Mahon’s light fictionalisations are not fooling anyone, particularly anyone in Christchurch. Calling it ‘Vista’ barely disguises the SCAPE festival of public art; Sir George and Lady Celia Robertson are obviously the late Sir Robertson and Adrienne, Lady (now Dame) Stewart, the latter being SCAPE’s patron. Author Mahon, the arts gadfly, notoriously dislikes SCAPE: the apotheosis of all he despises about the intersection of art and money. ‘Unfortunately for my relationship with Celia Robertson, she happens to be Vista’s patron.’ I imagine describing her as speaking in a ‘Sydney dockside argot’ would not help either. Sculptor Neil Dawson is given short shrift as ‘Wilson’:

He’s the guy that suspends things?
Not always. He also made that big pin-wheel by the motorway.
Yes, I’ve got it now; the guy who thinks Art is taking what’s ordinary and making it big. I knew Gregor disliked his work. He used to describe it as exterior design. By high art they mean something of Wilson’s suspended against the sky, he said. By low art they mean those bronze corgis on High Street.

Writer and former gallerist Grant Bambury makes a thinly disguised appearance for a chapter as Vincent Schulman, who had ‘been a particularly bitchy little man when we were at Art School’, apparently for no other reason than to be the subject of caricature and backhanded compliments.

The punchline of the novel is that Gregor, disillusioned by the ‘self-appointed oligarchy’ of Christchurch’s cultural elite, such as it is, returns to Lukashenka’s Belarus because ‘at least in Belarus I know very clearly who the enemy is’.

The idea that anyone in Christchurch’s arts bureaucracy—as grey and penny-pinching as it is—is anything like Belarus’s authoritarian president-for-life would be laughable were it not so offensive, as a glance at the list of those killed, imprisoned or disappeared during the 2020 protests in that country will attest. The only possible response from someone not entirely disconnected from the real world is to roll one’s eyes so hard that the Earth’s axis gives a little wobble.

Such a hyperbolic and oblivious denouement should suggest to the reader something about the nature of Mahon’s problem with the establishment, even if it does not suggest it to Mahon himself. Just possibly, the world is more complicated than one man’s vendetta against people negotiating the same irresistible forces and immovable objects as he is. It’s perhaps even more on the nose because in the press bumf Mahon mentions the philosopher Karl Popper, who, having fled actual Nazis, wrote his notes for The Open Society and Its Enemies while lecturing at Canterbury University and could no doubt have explained the difference to Mahon.

There is, however, one particularly moving passage that speaks immediately to those who went through the second big Canterbury earthquake, though it’s right at the end of the book. I quote it in full because, having been through the quakes myself, it moves me intensely:

I have said that when the cathedral spire fell we seemed in every way to lose our sense of direction. Ten miles from the Square Patrick Bollinger was walking his dog along the beach when in front of him Shag Rock dropped like a pile of kid’s blocks. The cliff below Kinsey Terrace was the next thing to go, throwing up a wall of red dust that slowly advanced across the road towards him. It was so dense he reached his arm into it and lost sight of his fingers. A woman was running along the sand towards him screaming. A mile away James stood beside his broken house watching a boulder chase a man down Clifton hill. Vincent braked his car in the middle of Madras Street thinking all four tires had burst. Then he sat gripping the wheel watching enthralled as lampposts whipped back and forth like fishing rods. At his drafting board in the Provincial Council Chambers, Sir Peter turned to see the granite stones beside him fall into the street and let in a disagreeable amount of light.

‘Vincent’ in real life does not drive, and the architect Peter Beaven was never knighted (although he should have been), but Mahon’s use of the essential truth of aesthetic to capture affect is transcendent.

While reading How to Paint a Nude, I kept asking myself who the intended audience was. It seems unlikely to me that one man’s quixotic and petulant feud with Christchurch’s arts administrators would be of much interest to anyone further afield than the province of Canterbury. But perhaps the truth is that the audience for whom the book was written—indeed, the only audience that matters—is the brooding author himself.

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ANDREW PAUL WOOD is a cultural historian, art critic and editor based in Timaru. His work appears across a range of publications in NZ, Australia, the UK and the US, and his most recent book is Shadow Worlds: A history of the occult and esoteric in New Zealand (Massey University Press, 2023). He is currently writing a book on New Zealand architect F.W. Petre.