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On Line Writers Series
On this On-Line Writers page, we aim to include links and writing about contemporary art by well known curators and writers, art historians, media commentators etc.
John Hurrell reviews Alicia Francovitch's exhibition at Starkwhite, Auckland, on his blog site. Visit the site to read more reviews and discussion. http://eyecontactartforum.blogspot.com/
Alicia Frankovitch: Counter/action
Starkwhite, Auckland
1 February - 1 March 2008
Frankovitch’s show is a suite of (mostly) framed photographs and an inverted screened map of the world, positioned around another photo - on its side - leaning against some metal trestles. The show seems a sort of rebus: a combination of Simon Denny meets John Baldessari. It could be a spoof on those artists.
The ‘floor sculpture’ features a photo - in a damaged folder - of a thin metalic Armani purse with a cord handle. Close to it, draped over the trestles on one corner, is what seems to be a section of basketball-hoop netting. One of the photos is a bunch of ripening tomatoes and a rope ladder into which has been jammed a piece of woven plastic, and around the corner is an image of a foot sticking out of a top floor window of an old brick barn.
What does this all add up to as a statement? It seems to examine suspension, the effects of gravity on certain substances, and how weight behaves when spread out through soft versus inflexible materials. Formally, the angle of projection for the foot relates to the trestles and the highlight of the room, the pink map.
The screened map shows - using zigzaggy lines reminiscent of eye movement diagrams - the routes between Christchurch and Auckland and the UK, Central Europe and Japan. As discrete items the map and the ‘rope ladder’ photograph make a fine pair - linked by diagonal trajectories.
The inverted map in particular, is an intriguing image that works well with the accompanying twitchy, fine, black line. It implies the trips to Europe and Asia are a process involving natural laws, as inevitable as a tomato falling off a stalk and landing on the ground.
Installation view, Starkwhite, Auckland.
Julian Dashper interviewed during his 2007 exhibition at Christchurch Art Gallery: October 2007
Julian Dashper is fascinated by the relationship between art and popular identity. The artist talks to ROSA SHIELS.
What are five drumkits doing in the Christchurch Art Gallery?
The answer is that they are Julian Dashper's Big Bang Theory, his 1992 homage to major New Zealand art and artists. The skin of each bass drum is enamelled with the title of the "group": The Anguses, The Colin McCahons, The Hoteres, The Drivers, The Woollastons - loud statements about the artists who have made a big splash in New Zealand art.
The five shiny kits in question are currently placed in front of works by the artists they venerate. While there are several more Julian Dashper works on show in the collection galleries, a major survey of the artist's work from 1980 to the present, To the Unknown New Zealander, is also showing in the Burdon Family Gallery on the other side of the stairwell.
Dashper, a 1982 Elam (Auckland) graduate who majored in painting under tutors who included Don Binney, Bob Ellis, Billy Apple and Philip Clairmont, is a prominent figure in international galleries. He exhibits regularly throughout Europe, Australia and New Zealand, and more recently in the United States, and his works are held in public collections in New Zealand, Australia, Germany and the Netherlands.
Sculpture, with its lack of limitations, had been Dashper's original selection for major study at art school.
"It seemed to me that sculpture at that time was the most radical and advanced subject to study," he says, "and that's primarily my interest in art - advanced radicalism."
But he faced unexpected opposition.
"What materials do you want to work in?" Dashper was asked.
"Paint and canvas," he told them.
"No, no, that's the only thing you can't work in, in sculpture. That's painting," they told him.
"To my amusement Don Binney overheard the entire conversation and one of his big burly fingers beckoned me, like Santa Claus on the corner of the Queen Street (Auckland) Whitcoulls, and he said come and study in painting and you can do whatever you want - you can make sculpture, you can make photography, etc. It was as if he was saying painting commands the higher ground; painting doesn't have to prove itself. You can do whatever you want," Dashper says.
So he signed up for a painting major and fell in love with the medium, "the smells and all the techniques", while at the same time taking a lead from the hard-line abstract expressionists of the New York School whom he admired.
Instead of painting, Dashper began to make work about painting.
"Painting became the subject as opposed to the medium. At the same time, it's very important to stress that there was a guy down the road called Colin McCahon, and I greatly respected his work. I saw it on a regular basis, and I saw him walking the streets, so I was very much aware of McCahon, Milan Mrkusich, Gordon Walters, and the post-object artists that had sprung from Elam, like Jim Allen and Bruce Barber.
"In 1979 I'd also gone to the Sydney Biennale for the first time and I'd had a big brush with my first dose of European conceptualism."
Nowadays he is comfortable in the role of conceptualist.
"If you think of a triangle: European conceptualism is one point of the triangle, another point is American abstraction, colour-field painting, and the other side of the triangle is this little kid in New Zealand seeing everything from a distance, picking up the wrong end of the stick and running like hell."
As seen in To the Unknown New Zealander, Dashper's abstract concepts and constructs wander a long way from the stretcher and canvas, while never entirely forsaking the allusion.
This exhibition covers many aspects of his practice, from sound recordings of gallery and studio doors to deconstructed canvases and stacked stretchers; from acrylic colour-field paintings on jute to round vinyl target "paintings" on drum skins, links of plastic white chain, silver gelatine prints, stacked glass and plastic slides, and perspex-boxed sheets of A4 paper on which his CV is printed.
Curiously, the painting that bears the same title as the exhibition is described as being seven plywood panels with morphine. Its origins lie in the cancer treatment Dashper has been recently undergoing. The meaning of the work is still making itself apparent.
"I had a melanoma spread through my body, so I had to have chemo and radio etc. I've now come out at the end of it, but when I was having the radiotherapy I had ulcers in my mouth the size of marbles - pretty painful. I'm not a druggie or anything, but they said you'll have to get on the morphine. I was in pretty bad shape."
After his treatment, he had some morphine left over.
"I couldn't help but notice the label on the side of the bottle, `Julian Dashper - for pain', and of course `pain' is the first four letters of painting. I took it down to my studio for safekeeping. There's always a sense of you don't know what's going to happen next in a studio. I was going to tip it down the toilet but I ended up one afternoon starting to coat one of my paintings with morphine." It's now one of the seven panels on show.
"My work during the last 25 years has focused very particularly on making work that was able to be exported. Now, suddenly, for the first time I'm making work that is not able to leave the country. I'm also making work for the first time which is about me, which is something I've never really done; it's been more abstract," he says.
"This painting, To the Unknown New Zealander, even though it was painted last year, is brand new, and we're just finding out what it means: which has morphine on it, and which is the odd man out? And I think that metaphor, that analogy, is what the painting is about." Which takes us back to the unknown New Zealander.
Something in one of New Zealand's most revered paintings caught Dashper's eye and gave him the focus and title of this work and the show. Rita Angus's 1936 oil painting Cass features a country railway station against snowy southern mountains, and an anonymous seated man having a smoke on the siding.
"I know we have a fascination with `new' in New Zealand art, and I know we have the word New in the name of our country, but this exhibition was a chance to group together a collection of works based around the motif of that little figure in the Cass painting," he says.
"It seemed astounding to me that this painting, which most people agree is New Zealand's greatest, most popular painting, has got this little person whom nobody knows. Nothing's been written about it. So I just dreamt up that this person was you or me or anyone who had left the country or who had just arrived.
"He is sitting in the middle of nowhere in a country in the middle of nowhere. This is the unknown New Zealander. This is the humble and ordinary bloke that Sir Edmund Hillary always describes himself as. It's you or I - anyone who's ever gone to an airport or waited. It seems to be symptomatic of our situation in New Zealand. We're used to being able to go somewhere."
Julian Dashper constantly seems to be travelling to somewhere else to exhibit, but he had other priorities after this interview - a weekend trip to Sydney to watch the Warriors play rugby league.
" Philip Clairmont (who collected war comics) said that `every artist should have a hobby.' My hobby is rugby league, and totally different to the art world. You can step out of yourself and just follow it."
Perhaps when a future New Zealand artist conjures up a new Big Bang Theory, Julian Dashper might be represented by a V-striped rugby league jersey, mouthguard and sprigged boots.
* Julian Dashper: To the Unknown New Zealander, Christchurch Art Gallery Te Puna o Waiwhetu, October 2007.
Image and Text: An independent, non commercial, by-invitation, online gallery dedicated to the internet as an
art medium and platform for critical discourse.
Artbash: art criticism, art writing, art resources
The Creative Act by Marcel Duchamp
http://members.aol.com/mindwebart3/marcel.htm
Aesthetical Values of Photography and
Arnheim's Psychology of Art, Chong Ho Yu, Ph.D. http://seamonkey.ed.asu.edu/~alex/photography/photo_essay/dynamic.html
Talks to Teachers, By William James
http://www.emory.edu/EDUCATION/mfp/tt2.html
The Work of Art in the Age of Electronic (Re) Production, by Douglass H. Thomson.
http://users.ox.ac.uk/%7Escat0385/work.html#1
Snake Oil:Chartwell Acquisitions 2002 - 2005
New Gallery, Auckland Art Gallery, Toi o Tamaki, 12 June to 8 September 2005.
The Chartwell Collection reviewed: 2001.
http://www.amyberk.com/reviews_chartwell.htm
Originally published in stretcher.org, January 2002
Multistylus Programme: Recent Chartwell Acquisitions
Auckland Art Gallery / Toi o Tamaki, New Zealand / Aotearoa
16 June - 16 August 2001
reviewed by Amy Berk
A way in down under...When you enter a new country, everything--place, people, and their history-- comes under your personal microscope. Trying to make sense of all this new information, I considered how I could integrate my new experiences in meaningful ways. As an artist, writer and educator, I naturally sought out art to aid in my quest...more
