[Where it appears in somewhat bowdlerised form.]
Painter Ian Scott first made his name in the late 1960s, with his pop-ironic views of glamour girls floating over geometricised New Zealand landscapes. In the 1970s, he jumped ship for modernist abstraction, becoming known for his iconic Lattice paintings. In 1982, he was included in the abstraction show Seven Painters/The Eighties at Whanganui’s Sarjeant Gallery. It implied a way forward for New Zealand art, but got it wrong—we enjoyed the postmodern turn instead. This is why, in the late 1980s, Scott changed codes yet again, this time to postmodern ‘appropriation art’. Enzed Dead Zone is a fine example. It’s art about art, with Scott appropriating images from art history to locate himself within it (or to locate it within him).
The date—1988—is key.
The main image comes from Colin McCahon’s painting Crucifixion (1950–2), acquired by the National Art Gallery in 1988—the year after McCahon himself died, marking the end of an era. It is reproduced in black and white, suggesting Scott copied it from a printed source (recalling the way McCahon himself engaged with canonical Western art via reproduction). Scott faithfully enlarges McCahon’s image to be six times bigger, but jettisons its painterly warmth in the process.
Scott upgrades the McCahon by inserting it into a red frame and adding a red reversed-out text block—signature elements from American postmodernist Barbara Kruger who, also in 1988, had a massive solo show at the National Art Gallery’s annex Shed 11. Back then, she was flavour of the month, lauded for combining found photographic images with politically punchy texts. But why redo her idea as painting? Was Scott’s nod to Kruger wrongheaded or perverse? Was he missing the point or making a new one?
The text block reproduces the masthead of Garth Cartwright’s review of another 1988 show, NZ XI.1 Assembled by the Auckland City Art Gallery and Sydney’s Art Gallery of New South Wales, NZ XI asserted a new contemporary New Zealand art ‘team’ that eschewed McCahon-style nationalism but also sidelined Scott. In his toxic review, Cartwright trashed the show; for instance, comparing works by Maria Olsen to ‘atrophied dog turds’.
In Scott’s painting, the initials on the sign mocking the crucified Christ—‘INRI’ (King of the Jews)—are echoed in the NZ XI logo that Scott smuggles into the scene. Is Scott having a go at McCahon, at Cartwright, or at the then-trendy NZ XI team? Whom is he crucifying here? Will they be resurrected? Will Scott?
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[IMAGE Ian Scott Enzed Dead Zone 1988]
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- Garth Cartwright, ‘Enzed Dead Zone’, Listener, 26 March 1988: 52–3.