Created in response to the 1991 Gulf War, this is a haunting multi-panel painting full of paradoxes. It operates like an antiphonal project, a choral work built on statement and response, between monochromatic chord structures and printed text and between opposing levels of textual content. Wedged into 14 panels the painting unfolds through an alternation of thick bands or blocks of sprayed black paint with glaring white-paper blanks. The tragic grandeur of the work's major tonal progression is modulated by a host of bleedings, scuffs, speckles, arcs of silver dots, and scripted annotations. The improvisational diversity of these playful surface effects appears to go against the painting's overridingly bitter and melancholy pall. A staccato string of words, cut out one might guess, from military reports and press releases covering the Gulf War, run like two through-lines in the top and bottom sequence of panels. The word strings act as fixed horizon lines amidst a plurality of graphic levels that jump and drop in syncopated order. The plain-text or courier font of the printed words holds the communications technology of earlier wars with their typewritten despatches from the front together with the plain-text of contemporary data screens and email systems. This is Cilla McQueen's text at work in the Hotere matrix. McQueen's lexical collage functions like a reality principle to Hotere's broodingly romantic graphic and painterly rhetoric. It is as if, through breaks in battlefield smoke or post-war toxic haze, and shown up by detonations and muzzle flashes on the skyline, McQueen's chains of words tear through the aesthetic dazzle of the military sublime. Photographs and videos that we followed on CNN at the time seduced us with their telemetric and optical wizadry. Tracer bullet tattoos of white across night-vision green, slow exfoliations of black and grey from destroyed buildings and bridges became familiar imagery in the living room. The asyntactical repetition of McQueen's words, following one another randomly and dumbly mimics the kind of psychic shutdown that can act as one form of defense against unmanageable trauma. Perhaps McQueen and Hotere, in a sense, have responded to Adorno's rhetorical question, Can there be poetry after Auschwitz? What sort of art and poetry can accompany our contemporary and all too extensive knowledge of war and atrocities? Perhaps only something that works through a sort of affectless enumeration, a machinic refusal to play with delectations of word choice and tonal chromatics. This is the sort of protection from trauma that Freud alluded to in his discussion of  the compulsion to repeat. The McQueen vocabulary which cites ˜main gambit box airburst shift communications schrapnel [sic] jam chamber and ˜smart blood break count bodybag holymilk operations kill strategy factory reprisal is answered in a dreamlike manner by Hotere's handwritten fragments from the Song of Songs, the ancient Hebrew text of seduction and lament for an elusive lover who approaches in the night. The lover calls, Arise my love, my fair one and come away, For lo, the winter is past and the rain is over and gone. The work therefore talks to itself, and thus becomes many works in one, but whether its borrowing of the new testament stations of the cross format or the old testament poetry of desire and lament provide the work with the confidence of redemptive purpose amid desolation has deliberately been left unresolved.