Julian Dashper

Journalstar.com

Lincoln, Nebraska, USA.

Review by L. Kent Wolgamott

09.02.06

L. Kent Wolgamott: Julian Dashper’ retrospective is about ideas more than objects

Every day, sometime between 1 p.m. and 2 p.m., the public phone in the booth in Sheldon Memorial Art Gallery’s basement rings over and over. Coming from New Zealand, 17 hours ahead of Nebraska in time, the telephone call is a work of art. It’s titled “Future Call” and it’s part of “Midwestern Unlike You and Me: New Zealand’s Julian Dashper,” a thought-provoking mid-career retrospective of 25 years of Dashper’s work on view through March 26 at Sheldon.

Filling the museum’s two first-floor galleries and spilling out into the great hall and onto the landing above, “Midwestern Unlike You and Me” is a multimedia exhibition that includes everything from a tiny drum kit to vinyl records, video loops and a recorded buzz to fabricated paintings, drum heads, art magazine advertisements and even the artist’s Curriculum Vitae.

A concept-based artist, Dashper works more with ideas than he does with the objects he exhibits. In fact, all the objects in “Midwestern Unlike You and Me” are mechanically created, and many of them are common things given new meaning in the art world.

That technique is an obvious connection between Dashper and Marcel Duchamp, who introduced “ready mades” nearly 100 years ago and started the movement that made art about ideas rather than simply being painting, drawing, sculpture, photography and other traditional media.

Some of those objects are literally presented as they are, such as “Untitled (Sherrie Levine Napkins),” a pair of napkins used by the artist and shown in plastic bags under a vitrine or a canvas stretcher hung on the wall. Others, such as the piece of striped cloth Dashper found in a shop and had stretched into a “painting” are more manipulated, but still raise questions about what is art and why does it appeal to us.

Similarly questioning is an untitled piece from 2000 in which a photograph of a black square surrounded by a white border is reproduced twice in paintings of a similar size, raising issues of originality that reach back past Duchamp to copyists throughout the ages.

That Duchampian openness is what allows “Buzz,” a 2001 sound recording of a Dan Flavin light piece, to function as art, capturing an experience in front of another piece of work while serving a commentary on the “buzz” that Flavin has generated of late in the art world.

That piece also illustrates two more themes in Dashper’s work: a deep connection with minimalism and continuing observation of the behavior and ephemera of the art world.

The fabrication of work is a direct homage to Donald Judd, as are the explorations of form, such as a look at three variations on the placement of a black triangle on a white canvas and the clear vinyl records with varying lengths of grooves that are on the wall of one of the galleries.

Those records, titled “Blue Circles (1-8)” are recordings Dashper made in front of Jackson Pollock’s “Blue Poles,” his 1952 masterpiece that is now in the National Gallery of Australia in Canberra, again transforming an experience into an object, and if you buy one, returning it to an aural experience.

“Blue Circles (1-8)” is hung opposite a series of drumhead adorned with concentric colored circles, perhaps a salute to the “targets” of Jasper John or even the work of Kenneth Noland. But the drumheads are industrially produced and uniform beyond the color, another nod to mimimalism.

The records and drumheads share the gallery with two of Dashper’s witty commentaries on the art world. On one wall is “Untitled (Slides 46-65)” (1980-1990), a series of slides that document a decade of his world. A vivid reminder that most art is seen in reproduction, be it slides, CD, computer or in books, the slides are also arranged into squares, providing a pattern that invites viewing.

On the opposite wall is Dashper’s CV (resume), a piece which changes each time he has a show. To me, the series of typewritten pages is a pointed commentary on the rampant careerism in the art world, in which the number of shows, articles and gallery placements is used to rank artists and serve as their goals.

The Sheldon’s print study room serves as the location for one of Dashper’s true masterworks, a series of advertisements he has placed in Artforum magazine over the years.

By publishing “Cover Version,” a 1991 exhibition made for the magazine, “Artfrom,” a January 1992 piece that plays on the magazine’s title and makes its focus New Zealand, and a fake “review” the next month, Dashper is tweaking the intellectual art world journal while making art that is likely seen by more viewers in more places than any other piece of work at that time.

Can an artist-developed magazine ad be art? Or does it get that designation only when it is shown in a museum or gallery? Does art have to be “made” by the artist, or can it be mechanically reproduced thousands of times?

Those are just a few of the questions raised by Dashper’s Artforum pieces. The rest of the exhibition raises similar issues, taking the viewer deep inside the important dialogues that have been at the center of the art world since the mid ’60s without trying to supply any kind of “right answer.”

There’s a final piece in “Midwestern Unlike You and Me” that says plenty of Dashper and the intent of his work.

“Untitled (English White Chain),” a 1992 piece, uses plastic white chain that can be purchased in any store. A meter long, the chain is attached to Edward Hopper’s “Room in New York,” Sheldon’s signature painting hanging in the museum’s permanent collection gallery.

That chain literally attaches Dashper to art history, a modernist connecting himself to one of the great artists who has come before him. But it is also about boundaries and distance, linkages and attachments, art and society.

It is not too great a stretch to see the chain as linking Dashper and New Zealand to Western art and to see the connection the chain makes as part of a blurring of boundaries, both in the art world, which has become globalized, and in economics.

That admittedly is reading a lot into a plastic chain hooked up to a painting. But that’s the point of Dashper’s art. It’s about ideas far more than objects and it’s designed to make you think. And it does it over and over and over.

For images and CV:

http://www.minusspace.com/Dashper/dashper.html

Julian Dashper is represented in Auckland, New Zealand by Sue Crockford Gallery.