Hamish McKay is currently showing Julian Dashper's masterful Regent (on resale) alongside a little group of smaller velvet paintings selected from private collections.
It is an utterly fantastic painting. Energetic, almost greedy, it latches on to your eyes and propels them around it surface, over clownishly thick lines and sublime golden dribbles and scaley white patches and turquoise lakes.
Dashper famously observed of these works that
they were all made by holding the tube and squeezing it. So I never touched or embraced the painting. I could have made them wearing three piece suits. They were like lies in terms of artistic expression or angst.
As such, they're often taken as conceptual paintings. Dashper disowned the word 'conceptual' as it was applied to him - all art, he argued, was conceptual. And you can't help but feel, as your eye travels over Regent, that there's a joy in colour and texture and gesture, and that while Dashper might have been faking it, he was feeling it too.
I've always loved Dashper's words as much as his works. The show at Hamish McKay's coincides with the publication of Julian Dashper: This is not writing, a collection of essays, interviews, artists statements and other texts. I can't wait to get my hands on a copy.
NB: For those of you who tune in, I'll be talking about Dashper's work, with a focus on Regent, on Radio New Zealand national at about 11.45am today.
We spent last night talking about Julian - him, his work, and the imitable way he narrated it. As well as doing great work, Julian did great artist. His floortalks were priceless, and when he was in the zone you could sit back and let the well-honed commentary wash over you for hours.
In a post on the Te Papa blog yesterday William scooped a number of my favourite Dashperisms, including the terrific "People say my paintings are deep in the way they say that fat people are heavy". But he missed this one, which I think sums up beautifully the delight Julian took in setting up then subverting easy assumptions about painting:
Someone asked me once at a party 'What sort of artist are you?', and I said, 'I’m a super realist painter' and they said, 'Well that sounds good, what do you paint?' and I said, 'Abstract art'.
-- Interview with Mark Kirby, Luxus, The Hague, 1997, reprinted in The Twist, Waikato Museum of Art and History, 1998.
Julian Dashper, Untitled (1991), 1991. Printed industrial canvas over stretcher, 860 x 860 mm. Collection of the Museum of New Zealand Te Papa Tongarewa.
Jim and Mary Barr have just posted that artist Julian Dashper died this morning.
I only got to know Julian over the last few years - he was one of those people who, after studying their work in art history class after art history class, it was a little terrifying to meet in the flesh. I quickly found out that the person behind the work was generous, funny, worldly, curious, and engaged with life, art and people with a level of energy that was almost ferocious.
Someone observed to me once that Julian had been a venerable elder of the New Zealand art world since he was about 23. It's too soon to eulogise, but I - like hundreds, thousands of others - will miss him.
On Saturday night I tweeted that I would give one finger (after consideration, I selected my left-hand little finger, because I don't use it to type) or up to two toes (I figured if you lost one, it would be easiest to balance if you took one off the other foot too) if it meant I could live with this painting.
You have today and tomorrow (Wednesday and Thursday ) to catch it and other works on paper by Julian Dashper at Hamish McKay's; the exhibition is online too.
I missed Dashper's early career; in 1989 I was wearing Adidas three-stripes trackpants with the cuffs rolled up to primary school. It was lovely to see early works in the flesh, especially this very elegant Phillishave drawing. If only I'd had a trust fund when I was ten and parents who encouraged me to spend it on art.
A bunch of stuff came in via my feedreader last week which has all added up to this - rather lengthy - post about blogging. If you just want to read about art, I'd recommend scrolling to the end of the post.
- Blogs and 'other websites' are blurring: "Larger blogs are taking on more characteristics of mainstream sites and mainstream sites are incorporating styles and formats from the Blogosphere. In fact, 95% of the top 100 US newspapers have reporter blogs".
- Your brand (read: gallery) is probably all over the blogosphere: "Four in five bloggers post brand or product reviews, with 37% posting them frequently. 90% of bloggers say they post about the brands, music, movies and books that they love (or hate). Company information or gossip and everyday retail experiences are fodder for the majority of bloggers."- Not blogging? Dummy. "The word blog is irrelevant, what's important is that it is now common, and will soon be expected, that every intelligent person (and quite a few unintelligent ones) will have a media platform where they share what they care about with the world." Seth Godin.
1. You get the 'First Mover Advantage'. Not everyone believes in this, but the guts of the idea is that people who know stuff first have a competitive advantage.
2. You know what other people are talking about. This lets you spot gaps in the market (and fix stupid stuff you've done).
Search engine optimisation (SEO) is one of my areas of interest, so I follow the eminently useful SEOmoz blog.
This week's Whiteboard Friday video was about tips for corporate blogging. If your gallery/museum is still thinking about taking blogging on, don't be put off by the "corporate" in the title: it's packed with repurposable advice.
The best piece of advice: don't just write about yourself. Join - or create - the wider conversation. Ed Winkleman does an amazing job of this; sure, he posts regularly about what's going on at his gallery and with his artists. But it's his "off-topic" posts that make him such a fresh and enjoyable regular read.
For those that want to read about art: a new blog
Check out The Paint and Bake, written by AUT undergrad painting students. The origin story is too cute:
One day Agnes and Elliot were sitting in front of the macs in studio with Julian Dashper, looking at various art sites and blogs and Julian Dashper said, "hey why don't you guys start up a painting blog?" and we said, "hmm dunno might be a bit of work..." and he said, "come on it'll be fun", and we said, "oh alright then" and he said, "so you'll have it up by the next time i come in?" (as Julian Dashper only comes in every two weeks on a friday) and then Agnes said, "ok", so here it is.
Speaking of Julian Dashper - check out the recent(ish?) collection rehang on the 4th floor at Te Papa. Three pieces by Dashper have been hung along with works by Mrkusich and Driver* in the penultimate room of Toi Te Papa, and a set of drumskins share the final room with new works by Chiara Corbelleto.
*There is a frigging spectacular Driver in the hang - the appropriately named Big Relief (1980). While I think the room would have been enhanced by including one of the relief works, or maybe even a small assemblage, it's still totally worth checking out.
If your institution's web presence currently consists of a website and an e-newsletter and you're wondering how to step outside the boundaries of your URL, look no further - do I have the conference for you.
The Transforming Cultural and Scientific Communication conference is being held in Melbourne, 5-6 March 2009. The conference is chaired by Angelina Russo, who works closely with Seb Chan (who's a bit of a rockstar, really, from where I sit).
Digital Change Promotion organisational change and new business models Branding the Cultural Experience interactive strategies for brand building Implementing a Networked Communication Strategy increasing participation through social networks Social Media and Public Programming communicating discipline knowledge online.
If you want to get a feeling for the kind of things that are likely to be discussed at the conference, I'd take a look at the following:
Second, a exhibition of Driver's banner works from the 1970s to the present at the Govett-Brewster, opening 31 May.
I wasn't around for the big Driver retrospective in 1999. Over the last few years though, as I've seen bits and pieces of work here and there, I've become more and more interested. With Spirit was a standout work for me in Reboot, and I really enjoyed the Driver/Dashper pairing at Hamish McKay's last year. The pieces that really ring my abstractophile bells are the painted relief works, which I've been lucky enough to see at people's houses - where the banners squawk and the assemblages growl, for me, the reliefs sing.
Images Don Driver, La Guardia, 1966, mixed media Don Driver, Another Belt Pocket, 1981, mixed media From the Hamish McKay website (now in a nice chocolatey tone).
Don Driver, Horizontal Relief, 1973, acrylic on canvas and stainless steel. Chartwell Collection, Auckland Art Gallery (and nice to see that the AAG's collection database is now regularly returning results on Google Image searchs, alleviating the poverty of images of New Zealand art on the web).
Once again, Rose Nolan walked away with the exhibition, with her huge wall painting SELFDOUBT filling the longest wall of the West gallery. This part of the exhibition takes its tone from Colin McCahon's I am Scared / I Stand Up; Nolan's statement might seem a little abject in this context, if you didn't know that in the Dunedin installation the work was SELFLESS, and in Christchurch the cheeky SELFISH snuck round the wall to invade Michael Stevenson's hanging space.
[Side-bar: Nolan is having a solo show at Sydney's Artspace later this year - I can't find the dates online (anyone?) but it must be quite soon, as the show travels to the IMA in Brisbane at the end of June.]
Another highlight for me were three works by Julian Dashper that have been added for the Wellington installation (absent from the Christchurch installation as they were needed for Dashper's CAG show 'To the Unknown New Zealander'). I'd round out my top three with the un-monumental room in the South gallery.
However, I think I preferred the Christchurch installation: the gallery proportions seemed better suited to the scale of the work, or to function better to create small groupings of works. The piece that suffers the most, I think, in Wellington is Don Driver's With Spirit - which was my revelatory experience in Christchurch (more Don Driver, I say). City Gallery's foyer also doesn't appear to have been able to accommodate Michael Parekowhai's Jim McMurty, who's recently been vacationing at the Māori Hall in Auckland, courtesy of Michael Lett.
Don't let any of my quibbling put you off though - get along and see the show.
Final thoughts
City Gallery: any chance you could talk to Robert Leonard and bring Nolan's show out here, as you did with Hany Armanious?
And: apologies for their not being any images here, but I can't find any installation shots online. Anyone else find it weird on Friday night that while we the audience can't take shots of the galleries, the Gallery was photographing us?
Image Most of Rose Nolan's Selfdoubt. Also in the picture: Michael Parekowhai's I Am He.
And - possibly a rank outsider, because I don't think the Foundation awards to artists based mostly outside of New Zealand, but deserving nonetheless - Michael Stevenson.
UPDATE Over the net have pointed out that the male to female ratio of awards to visual artists so far is 4:1 (and that's before you count Warwick Freeman. But if you count him, do you count Ann Robinson? Hmmmm).
My own factoid: no artist has represented NZ at the Venice Biennale and become a Laureate.
Totally unrelated, an interesting article in the Guardian about readers' reports, the invisible arbiters of the publishing industry.
In preparing for his current joint show with Don Driver at Hamish McKay Gallery, Julian Dashper selected and responded to Driver's works - this set of three red white and blue circular digital prints, for example, are carefully matched to a flag in one of Driver's assemblages.
What I like about the show is that it makes you look a bit harder at both of them. A tarp in one of the Driver's play up the plasticky finish on one of Dashper's paintings. You think more about the way Driver uses colour. A block of wood nailed to the wall might belong to either of them.
Dashper currently seems to be NewZealand'sbusiestartist. It's great to see more of Driver's work, but 'With Spirit' was eight years ago .... is it getting close to time to have another prolonged look at his work?
I think Julian Dashper probably wins the 2007 most active artist award - the man is every where this year.
His new show, 'Julian Dashper: To the Unknown New Zealander' opens at the Christchurch Art Gallery on 10 August. The exhibition is a response to Rita Angus' iconic Canterbury landscape, Cass, a work that has interested Dashper since the mid 1980s. The show features some of iconic-ness of Dashper's own, with a suite of his drumkit works. Mention of which allows me to segue into this moment of artist-dealer historicity...
Not to be missed: Julian Dashper talking about his work in 'Four Times Painting' at the Adam Art Gallery, Wednesday 18 July 2007 at 12.30 pm.
The work shown here is Untitled (Van Gogh in Auckland), which is part of 'Four Times Painting'. Read a story that may lie behind the title on the Sue Crockford website.
Image: Julian Dashper, Untitled (Van Gogh in Auckland), 2006. Digitalprint on rag paper. Image from the Sue Crockford Gallery website.
After several years in the doldrums, the Adam Art Gallery at Victoria University is re-emerging, with the appointment of a new director, Tina Barton, earlier this year and the opening of her first show Four Times Painting on Saturday morning.
Bucking the Friday night trend and opting for a morning opening had two advantages. First - people weren't all end-of-the-week bitchy and trying to get drunk quick. Second - the Gallery looks its best in daylight, a fact you tend to forget.
Four Times Painting brings together the work of Simon Ingram, Shane Cotton, Julian Dashper and Isabel Thom. According to the website:
Four Times Painting focuses on the work of four contemporary New Zealand artists, who each critically engage with the history and practice of painting.
Acknowledging painting as a medium that has come back into critical focus, the exhibition enlarges on this medium’s current situation and considers how painters today engage with its history, purpose, and material practices. Curated by Christina Barton, Director of the Adam Art Gallery, it features the work of Simon Ingram, Julian Dashper, Isobel Thom and Shane Cotton, four artists whose works can be approached as complex and multilayered meditations on painting’s relation to time.
Each of the artists got their own space within the Gallery: Ingram in the Chartwell gallery on the first floor, Cotton in the cave-like Kirk gallery on the mid-floor, Thom in the bottom of the stairwell, and Dashper in the ground floor Chartwell (his paint-splattered drum kit from the Auckland Art Fair is also displayed in the top floor window).
Cotton's and Dashper's installations were particularly strong. The Kirk gallery was painted black, and Cotton's three statuesque recent paintings hovered spotlit on the walls. It could have been too spooky for its own good, but I think it worked.
Cotton gave a quick talk as part of the opening events, and it was interesting to hear him focus on mark making and painting as an activity, rather than about what the paintings 'mean' (though there were several bird-related queries at the end of the talk).
Dashper's installation on the ground floor gallery was both immaculate and kick ass, and beautifully set off by the natural light. The installation brings together a number of untitled works from 2006 including the work shown above, which at the Adam is hung vertically, giving it a looming, giant-like effect. Dashper will give a floor talk in July.
