Julian Dashper is not a Photographer, at least not one with a capital P. Nor, for that matter, is he really a Painter, although he is widely known as one. Dashper stands outside the guild system. He is a conceptual artist who draws on whatever mode, medium, or manner is appropriate at the time. Exhibiting an installation one week, he will cut a record the next. By sidestepping medium-as-vocation, he can address media in a way media-based artists cannot. So, his work can be about Photography or Painting with a capital P without actually being it.

Photography is not a distinct part of Dashper’s work. He doesn’t have a single body of photographic work. His photographic works relate as much to his works in other media as they do to one another. They are details of a larger project. However, in bringing some of his photographic works together on this occasion, perhaps a little provocatively, Dashper gives us an opportunity to consider what they might have to say about one another and about Photography as such.

With this show, you will be struck by the variety of things that count as photography for Dashper. For instance, there are low-key landscape studies such as Simone (1987). These are in a documentary style, black-and-white, modest in scale, with little drama in the subject or the composition. Dashper calls them ‘meat-and-potatoes photographs’ and likens them both to the seminal art-photography of the American Walker Evans and to the artless aide-memoire shots tourists make of sites they visit. In marked contrast to these ordinary photographs is a later series of works which extend the notion of photography to include photosetting. Futurity (1992), for instance, offers a pair of Futura Os. Such works get in on a technicality. They involve photographic processes, even though they do not operate as photography, at least as we typically conceive of it.

Despite the inclusiveness of Dashper’s photographic practice, we must also recognise its limits. For instance, Dashper’s photography is always ‘straight’.¹ Athough he is not at all concerned with photography’s special effects, he is obsessed by its normal effects, the routine transformations it occasions. His work Untitled (Slides) (1990) presents sheets of identical slides of one of his ‘paintings’ (actually a piece of found printed canvas, carefully stretched). This work stresses photography’s power to multiply the original, rendering it scaleless, textureless, and placeless in the process. It plays on the way slide-documentation circulates in place of the real thing; the fact we will look at a slide and say ‘this is a Dashper stripe painting’ rather than ‘this is a slide of a Dashper stripe painting’. But, when we look at Untitled (Slides), it is hard to overlook the space between the original and its reproductions—that transformation is too apparent. Not only has the painting been changed by being made into slides, the grid format of the slide sheet offers a new visual logic, overwhelming the stripe-content of the painting it frames. In Dashper’s work, we discover that the unmanipulated photograph is always already a manipulation and transformation of its subject.²

Dashper’s photographs are never ‘expressive’.³ Expressionist work is compelling: it tries to sway you, to grant you some emotional experience or release. To do this, it must seem autonomous, redolent, here and now. But Dashper’s work is never compelling like this. It is always clearly dependent for its meaning on things outside itself: art history, art apocrypha, other artists’ work, other works of Dashper’s. Rather than expressive, Dashper’s works demand interpretation: meaning remains contingent, deferred.

Dashper’s ‘photographs’ often involve the juxtaposition of photography with other media. This exhibition includes a number of examples. Cass (1986) and Male Order (1989–90) each come in an edition. Each Cass presents an identical photograph of the railway station at Cass (the one immortalised by Rita Angus in her celebrated painting of 1936) accompanied by a unique drawing based on a detail from the photograph.⁴ In the Male Order series, it is the other way around—photography follows and reproduces drawing. Each work consists of a photograph of eight abstract pencil drawings and one of the original drawings. In both cases, photography and drawing are provocatively juxtaposed to offer us an opportunity to consider the distinct qualities of the mediums and the translation from one to the other.

In Untitled (Italian Zip) (1993–4) and Untitled (The Scream) (1991–3), photographs are combined with found objects: Dashper’s passport photograph peeks out from behind a lengthy zip and a series of condensed italicized Os is accompanied by a homemade wooden potty seat. Both works draw on a superficial visual similarity to expressionist paintings: Untitled (Italian Zip) refers to Barnett Newman’s zip paintings, while the aperture in the toilet and the elongated Os in Untitled (The Scream) recall the Munch painting. However neither work follows the logic or style of its precedent. Dashper’s zip is everyday rather than sublime. Instead of being backed by the awesome otherness of God, it is the artist’s diminutive self which coyly peeks out from behind. And, his Scream is not figurative, garish, and demented, but abstract, graphic, colourless, and cool. These works move in the opposite direction from those they might be thought to pay homage to, following instead the logic of conceptual art or readymades. Here, photography has been used alongside found objects to present further givens, more readymade content.

Included in this exhibition are a number of photographs taken by others. There is Peter Hannken’s notorious portrait of the artist as an art-world heavy (on the cover of Art New Zealand, no. 43, Winter 1987) and a 1990 paparazzi shot by Barbara M. Bachman showing a more svelte Dashper (reproduced in his 1992 catalogue for Slide Show).⁵ Bachman’s photograph, taken in New York on Dashper’s thirtieth birthday, shows him celebrating with Allan Schwartzman, now art critic for the New York Times. Dashper treats these images as if they were his works.⁶

The Art New Zealand cover features Dashper with a tough haircut in a macho pose—legs astride, paint-splattered trousers. Behind him, one of his muscular action paintings leans on a corrugated iron shed. Two of man’s best friends look on. The cover earned the artist a huge amount of flak. At the time expressionism was extremely unfashionable amongst right-thinking art persons and Dashper was widely regarded as ‘a Julian Schnabel clone’.⁶ But Dashper’s cover was a cover version. It deliberately aped the feel of Hans Namuth’s publicity shots of Jackson Pollock from 1950. While it was condemned as crass expressionist posturing, the image could be better understood as being ironic quotation, in the vein of Cindy Sherman; exposing the workings of the myth, rather than simply exemplifying it.

Dashper refuses to align himself with any particular notion of photography. He engages with photography in its diversity of forms, means, and applications. In doing so, he has, over the years, perhaps accidentally, produced a large quantity of photographic work. In gathering together a selection of these works for this show, he exposes not photography’s essence (a notion of photography we could deal with easily) but instead its invisibility—its penetration into so many levels and aspects of the artworld and of art practice.
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[IMAGE: Julian Dashper Untitled (The Scream) 1991–3]

 

Julian Dashper: Footnote Junkie
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This is an earlier version of my ‘Dashper as Photographer’ catalogue essay. After reading it, Dashper revised the show’s selection, including the Art New Zealand cover and the Bachman image.
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Julian Dashper persistently turns our attention to contingent, incidental, and supplementary aspects of art practice, the art world, and art history. He places art’s marginalia at the centre of his project. For instance, slides of a work are presented in lieu of the work itself and a modest watercolour becomes an alibi to explore cataloguing and labelling conventions. If Dashper’s works seem obscure, it is not because they are especially complex or intrinsically difficult, but because they proceed from what we hadn’t given a second thought.

In recent years, Dashper’s work has influenced the project of renovating New Zealand art history. Not only has his work been written into the story, it is influencing the way the story is being written. But, as Dashper becomes a central figure in New Zealand art, it is worth considering how his work also nags at the canon, as he turns the deconstructive impulse back onto his own work, asserting its contingent and incidental features. His recent show The Big Bang Theory is a great example.

Held at Auckland’s Artspace in 1993, the show revisited five installations Dashper had created the previous year. Each installation had featured a drumkit bearing the name of a canonical New Zealand artist. They were The Woollastons, The Drivers, The Hoteres, The Anguses, and The Colin McCahons. In each case, the drumkit itself was beside the point. What was significant was how the kits activated histories latent in the sites in which they were presented. The works were absolutely site-specific. The Big Bang Theory pretended to the status of a retrospective show, gathering and re-presenting those projects. In fact, it was an entirely new show marked by the absence of factors that had made those original installations so compelling. Dashper simply lined up the kits, leaving the job of recounting the their past lives to a well-appointed catalogue and its posse of eminent critics. The Big Bang Theory remained outside and ahead of the catalogue that presumed to deliver its truth.

Instead of reviewing the five projects, The Big Bang Theory became, in effect, the sixth and final site-specific installation in the series, recontextualising the kits in a space more redolent with Dashper’s own history than the histories of the five artists to whom the project seemed to be paying homage.¹ In The Big Bang Theory, Dashper emphasised the way the retrospective show makes something new of the work it reframes, so is not a retrospective at all. What could have been a deadly presentation of the relics of his previous shows breathed with new possibilities. Dashper outwitted the very readings he had sponsored in his catalogue. Dashper continues to generate interference patterns with his new show, Julian Dashper Photography 1980–1994. Here, he has marshalled a disparate group of works that all incorporate photography in some way.

Dashper is not a photographer, at least not one with a capital P. Nor, for that matter, is he really a painter. Instead, he is some kind of conceptual artist, who draws on media as they become useful and appropriate. He may create an installation this week, cut a record next week. It is, therefore, curious that he has decided to construct this show around a medium. Clearly, the different photographs presented here relate less to one another as photographs than to other works in other media, with which they share thematic and aesthetic concerns. But, by gathering these ‘photographs’ as ‘photographs’, Dashper asks us to forget that for a second. His show begs questions. What is the ‘photography’ that these works have in common? What concept of ‘photography’ can meaningly encompass the documentary photograph Simone (1987) and the photo-setting of Futura italic ‘O’s in Untitled (The Scream) (1991–3)? And, what is Dashper’s relation to ‘photography’?

Dashper’s work constantly redeems the marginal. It might be interesting, then, to ponder what Dashper himself has exiled from this show. What about all the work he’s done utilising photocopying? And, if photosetting counts in the case of Untitled (The Scream), what about Dashper’s proposed cover for the Auckland phone book? And, why is the mixed-media work, Young Nick’s Head (1987), in a concurrent Dashper show at Manawatu Art Gallery rather than in this one, when it includes a photo. What about Dashper’s installation The Colin McCahons, which was, arguably, only set up in order to be photographed, and which exists principally as a photographic document?

And what of Dashper’s complicity in and appropriation of other photographers’ photographs of him? Where is Dashper’s artist book, The Mad Dog (1986), which includes Peter Hannken’s photograph of him standing in front of the fourteen-metre-high statue of the Virgin Mary at Paraparaumu? Where is the cover of Art New Zealand (no. 43, Winter 1987), showing a tubby Dashper in a Jackson Pollock pose, also shot by Hannken? Where is Mark Adams’s photographic sequence of Dashper at work in the studio—which riffs on Adams’s earlier sequence of Philip Clairmont in his studio? It featured in Dashper’s show, The Painting Part (Centre for Contemporary Art, Hamilton, 1990). Where is Barbara M. Bachman’s photo of a svelte Dashper tucking into cake, reproduced in his Slide Show catalogue (Robert McDougall Art Gallery, Christchurch, 1992)? It could be argued that such photographs lie outside Dashper’s own oeuvre. But he has always challenged assumptions about where the work begins and ends, whether it includes the label, the catalogue, the slides, the press kit, the myth. Such marginalia is as central to Dashper’s project as anything.

Julian Dashper: Photography 1980–1994 exemplifies what has been described, disparagingly, as a ‘seagull show’: a show that draws together works because they share a trivial feature (they all have a seagull, say, in them), as if this feature were crucial. The term is usually used to tick off bad, lazy curators, and with cause.² On this occasion, however, it is Dashper’s good fortune to be his own bad curator, sending us on a wild-goose chase. Dashper has curated a show that flies in the face of the work as much as it flies with it. But, in its arbitrariness, its curious inclusions and exclusions, its odd focuses and blindspots, it reopens old works to new thoughts. It makes them less familiar and grants them a new lease of life. In doing this show, Dashper asks whether relevant and insightful curating might not kill off the art faster than ‘the seagull show’..

Sometimes we feel oppressed by what we loathe, but we can also feel oppressed by what we love, especially when we love it so much that it makes us feel wretched and unworthy, when we invest it with the power to bewitch us and make us feel small. Love of art can suffocate the artist. With so many great works of the past to revere, how can today’s artists compete? How can they do something new when every new thing seems always already prefigured in the art of the past? How can artists cut out a space for themselves in the face of the tyranny of art history?

Recently, Rhonda Lieberman, Artforum’s agony aunt, had some advice for the artist: ‘Confronted with a staggering masterpiece that taunts us with our limitations, we must bring it down to our level, consume it—do something to it or with it—or be destroyed.’¹ Michael Parekowhai and Julian Dashper are two New Zealand artists who do not need this advice. They are already making names for themselves by dealing to the names of the past.

For Michael Parekowhai, as for many other artists, Marcel Duchamp is a beacon. In 1913, the Frenchman gave birth to conceptual art by inverting a bicycle wheel and inserting its fork into a stool. Bicycle Wheel was an iconoclastic one-liner and art was never the same again. With his ‘readymades’, Duchamp trashed the idea of art-as-craft. He made finesse, technique, and tradition irrelevant. Art didn’t even have to look like art anymore. Now, the idea was paramount.

Seventy-six years later, Michael Parekowhai was an Elam student. Being an art student means immersing yourself in the great art of the past, all the while struggling to find a voice of your own. That’s a tall order. Parekowhai’s response to this challenge was to cut Duchamp down to size by building him up. Parekowhai lovingly fashioned a replica of the Bicycle Wheel in wood, rewriting it as a Maori carving. Honouring Duchamp’s critique of craft in a crafty replica, Parekowhai trumped the Frenchman. Of course, the work was conceptual too. A wild idea. He called it After Dunlop (1989).

Since then, Parekowhai has produced numerous works which continue in this manner. The Antiquity Act (1990) is a pair of boxing gloves. Upon them is inscribed ‘D champ … 1968 … Porirua’. Duchamp died in 1968, the year Parekowhai was born in Porirua. The young artist would happily inherit the champ’s gloves. Morris Minor (1990) is a floor-hugging mirror cube, a diminutive rerun of a key work by American minimalist Robert Morris. Parekowhai presents himself as a minor Morris, a Morris Junior. Parekowhai’s big sculpture The Indefinite Article (1990) is a pun on I Am, Colin McCahon’s modestly-scaled, but masterly, cafe-cubist painting of 1954. With it, Parekowhai addresses McCahon’s god-like status in the local art scene, undermining and monumentalising him at the same time.

Parekowhai is not yet done with the art of the past. His current exhibition, Kiss the Baby Goodbye, reprises works by Duchamp, Henry Moore, and Gordon Walters. The centrepiece of the show, also titled Kiss the Baby Goodbye, is based on Walters’s classic koru painting Kahukura, painted in 1968, the year of Parekowhai’s birth. Parekowhai offers the Walters as a mammoth kitset model.

This work plays into the ongoing debate over the appropriation of Maori imagery by Pakeha artists. Much of this debate has made an example of the work of Gordon Walters. Walters has been bitterly attacked and defended for his appropriation of the koru motif in his classic abstracts of the 1960s and 1970s. Rangi Panoho, for one, has expressed concern at how Walters ‘progressively simplified the form, divesting it of meaning and imperfection and distancing it from its cultural origins’. Francis Pound has replied, arguing that, as a ‘translation’, Walters’s work has actually enhanced the prestige of the Maori koru. More than that, Walters improved on the original. In Walters, the koru ‘swells with a new strength, it draws itself up to its full height, it takes to itself a maximum power’, wrote Pound.

Thus far, the appropriation debate has been bogged down in moralising, as if moralities were not themselves culturally relative and interminably contestable. Parekowhai’s work does not buy into the prosecution-defense duality, reading as neither a clear critique or a clear justification of Walters. Parekowhai prefers to generate interference patterns.

Kiss the Baby Goodbye could be read as a celebration of Walters. It’s a breathtakingly beautiful work, lovingly crafted. It maintains Walters’s clean lines, his modernist aesthetic. Then again, it also looks like an awesome institutional barricade, a corporate castle gate. Or, perhaps it is belittling to represent a Walters as a kitset, as if it were childish work. Then again, Walters did determine his complex koru compositions through the cunning manipulation of paper-collage kitsets. In offering a Walters as a kitset, Parekowhai might also be evoking the Duchampian idea, that it is the viewer’s job to complete the work. On the other hand, he may be inviting us to rip the work apart and fashion something new from it.

Is Parekowhai’s work a critique of Walters’s appropriation? How could it be when, like much of Parekowhai’s work, it is itself an instance of appropriation? Is this the pot calling the kettle black?

Julian Dashper’s works cross-reference the styles, works and legends of past art. For instance, in 1989, Dashper produced a series of paintings and drawings which picture the year he was born: 1960. In each he writes that date with the help of French curves—a drawing aid. These works surely refer to Rita Angus’s painting AD 1968 of 1968.

In Angus’s work, a stick, two seahorses, and a couple of tanks conspire to tell the time. Meanwhile, Dashper provides abstract-decorative-illumination of a time long past. Angus’s fantastic landscape is rendered in a tightly controlled, hard-edged manner. Every spot of the picture is covered. You could describe her style as colouring-in. Dashper’s works on the other hand are more loosely rendered. The compositions are drawn rather than painted, and the picture is never completely coloured in. Angus’s work records the year of its making, while Dashper’s celebrate the year of his making. Angus did just the one—a singular masterpiece. Dashper, however, produces plenty of examples.

Not only do Dashper’s 1960 works seem to have little to do with Angus, they seem have a little to do with several other canonical figures in New Zealand painting. McCahon also did paintings of numbers. But Dashper’s 1960 works are far lighter than McCahon’s portentous Teaching Aids. Gordon Walters is another possible reference point. Walters made french curves the subject of a still life in 1943, anticipating the use of Maori curves in his later koru series. But, apart from the French connection, Dashper’s 1960 works have little in common with Walters’s works.

Until recently, most of Dashper’s homages have involved canonical figures in the intimate New Zealand art scene. Now, he increasingly looks offshore. In Untitled (Italian Zip) (1993–4) and Untitled (The Scream) (1991–3), photographs are combined with found objects. Dashper’s passport photograph hides behind a lengthy zipper and a series of photos of italicised Os is accompanied by an inventive homemade collapsible wooden potty seat. Both works have a superficial visual similarity to famous expressionist paintings. Untitled (Italian Zip) refers to Barnett Newman’s zip paintings; the aperture in the toilet and the elongated Os in Untitled (The Scream) recall the recently returned Edvard Munch painting.

Neither Dashper’s Newman nor his Munch follow the logic or style of Newman or Munch. Dashper’s zip is mundane rather than sublime. Instead of being backed by the awesome otherness of God, it is the artist’s diminutive self which coyly peeks out from behind. Similarly, Dashper’s Scream is not figurative, garish, and demented, but abstract, graphic, colourless, and cool. These works move in the opposite direction from those they might be thought to pay homage to. Instead, they follow the logic of conceptual art or readymades.

Dashper’s works have been read as erudite commentaries on their sources, yet they could also be read in just the opposite way—Dashper wresting signature elements away from their originators and their grounding in art history. He decontextualises motifs, styles, and procedures and creates new thoughts for them. Notwithstanding Dashper’s own desire to be part of the canon, his work also exposes and taunts our desire to put him in one.

These works by Michael Parekowhai and Julian Dashper are homages, at least in part, because the artists acknowledge and value the space that has been cut out for them by their predecessors. They could not make their works without that history. Yet these homages are perverse, because they would capture that ground for themselves by inverting or deranging the logic of their sources. Rather than become victims to value systems that precede them, Parekowhai and Dashper appropriate art history and refigure it for their own use.
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[IMAGE: Michael Parekowhai After Dunlop 1989]

 

1. Rhonda Lieberman, ‘Fear and Loathing in Vienna: Thomas Bernhard’s Subjects’, Artforum, January 1994.

Michael Stevenson is an easel painter. His paintings record objects that belong to ways of life on the verge of disappearance. He has constructed a surprising canon of examples: small towns, church and community halls, caravans, trophies, crepe-paper wreaths, stuffed pheasants, cigarette-packet dogs, earthworks, and Marlboro Men. All are recent orphans, not yet so out of date as to inspire nostalgia or sympathy. They are unfashionable but not yet in a fashionable way. (The same has been said of Stevenson’s style of painting.) Though he might appear melancholic, engaged in an extended act of mourning, it is precisely the newfound status of Stevenson’s subjects that fascinates him. During Badlands, his recent solo exhibition at the Govett-Brewster Art Gallery, I caught up with Michael Stevenson to discuss his work and its sources.

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Robert Leonard: Much of your early work addressed small towns. You grew up in Inglewood, just out of New Plymouth. Were the 1970s good for you?
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Michael Stevenson: The 1970s were a great time for regionalism. People moved out of the main centres into the country. That happened in New Zealand, and in the US as well. It was a decentred decade. Places like Phoenix became fashionable. There was that whole Sun Belt thing. It also spawned Neil Young and Easy Rider—mystical, druggie, pastoral, folkie, heartland Americana. Hard rock and corny medievalism—a description of ‘Stairway to Heaven’—sums it up nicely. The things that were popular in Inglewood then were from American white-trash culture: Kentucky Fried Chicken, the Dukes of Hazzard, hotted-up cars, confederate rock, and truckin’. If you look around New Plymouth now, it’s still the lowest common denominator. The burger bars have names like Arizona and Texicana. People think of small towns as isolated but they are plugged into an international culture, only it’s not a high-cultural one. In Auckland, they listened to Philip Glass while everyone else was into ZZ Top.
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How did you research those early works?
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I travelled. I found this mouldering network of places up and down the country that weren’t used much anymore. Church halls initially. Once, the church hall was the focal point for small-town life—every social event would happen there. Now, they’re marginalised. They’re sealed up or only used once a week. There’s a weird sense of loss and decline. They’re tragic, with Christmas decorations left up long into the New Year. I’d break in and rifle through everything, through all the cupboards. I was interested in the tidiness. These places were always ridiculously tidy, for no good reason. One of my pictures was called Church Cleaning (1989). Another thing that fascinated me was how modern most of those places looked. Pentecostal Christianity prefers multipurpose churches. It doesn’t believe in spending money on edifices. The people who built those halls had no idea of modernist architecture, yet they produced severe, modern-looking buildings entirely by default.
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What about your other early works, those ‘cultural landscapes’ like The Jesus Rock (1987), Jesus Christ Superstar in Levin (1987), and One Holy Caravan (1988).
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A lot of those works deal with the rise of Pentecostalism in the 1970s and the Jesus Movement, which presented Jesus as a long-haired, blue-jeans-wearing figure. They were trying to find a biblical basis for the alternative lifestyle—the Christian version of all that Neil Young stuff. That’s what Jesus Christ Superstar rose out of. The Doobie Brothers’s song ‘Jesus Is Just Alright’ was a piss-take on the whole thing. It all seems so dated now.
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How did people respond to your early works?
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Francis Pound’s wonderful line was: a neo-regionalist footnote to McCahon that bears too much reference to Philip Guston and Morandi. The early work confused everybody. No one knew what to make of it. People thought I couldn’t paint, or thought I was proselytising, especially with the more eccentric works, the ones with text, like Jesus Loves Us All in Clinton (1988).
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Your paintings present things but don’t tell us what to think about them.
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Yes. I’ve always been interested in art that goes in under the radar, that first and foremost appears really dumb. I’ve often dealt with things that are quite controversial, like Pentecostal Christianity and small towns, things that get people really heated. But I’m not interested in sending those things up. I want more sophisticated readings. It’s not heavy critique, more like a slightly ironic record. I’m not interested in polarised views and that has confused people. Image-based art is mostly about being for or against things and I’m not really into that.
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 After Elam, why did you move to Palmerston North?
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One reason was that I couldn’t get a job in Auckland and couldn’t afford a studio. But I was also interested in retro culture, and retro culture is laid on thicker in the provinces. Palmerston North is like the Bible Belt. The problem is that when you embrace retro culture you embrace retro politics, and I don’t want to be identified with that. People think I’m trying to prop up dodgy politics but it’s not that at all.
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Are you a regionalist?
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I’m interested in the filter-down effect, like with all those people in Inglewood living in A-frame houses. Those houses obviously look back to the alternative lifestyle, but those people have no idea of that at all. They lack the knowledge to connect the form with its origins. That’s what happens with Pentecostalism too. There’s a huge irony deficit. The original reference gets lost. Songs are sung in a Pentecostal-church setting—some of them were originally Elvis songs! Chopping off the source—not understanding the source and just having bad versions to play with—that’s what regionalism is all about.
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Your style became much more realistic with the wreath paintings. Why?
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I’m interested in content. Realism allows you more detail, allows you to signify more. Realism is also an appropriate way to do regional subject matter because it’s an accepted style in the provinces. Ian Wedde once said that regionalism, out of necessity, always means some form of realism. Because I’ve taken on those styles, people perceive me as being a ‘bottom-up’, while seeing someone like Julian Dashper, who brought low references into high abstraction, as a ‘top-down’. That distinction doesn’t allow for a meeting in the middle.
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Why the interest in wreaths?
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A lot of my work had been about a sense of decay and I became interested in how you could represent that quite easily with a wreath form. The first wreath painting was Key (1990), which was based on an ANZAC Day wreath I saw. This was the only painting I did with the wreath on a monument. I really wanted to move it away from that war thing, so I put the wreaths back into the kinds of buildings I’d been painting before. Some of the wreaths were for clubs that actually existed and others were for fictitious one. I made a lot of wreaths to paint from. I made them of cheap ticky-tack materials: tin foil and crepe paper. I showed some with the paintings at Gregory Flint Gallery. At the opening, people accused me of being a grave robber.
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You travelled to the US soon after doing the wreaths. When was that exactly?
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Late 1991. I spent most of the time driving through the heart of the country, through rural Illinois, Missouri, Kansas, Oklahoma, Texas, Louisiana, Mississippi, Arkansas, Tennessee—all through the central region. I wanted to be immersed within that huge continent. It must be the weirdest place on the face of the planet. I wanted to be in the middle of it and take on all those myths, and believe them where possible, because for so many Americans that’s how they live and that’s how they want to live.
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What is it like in the middle of America?
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It’s far more sparsely populated than New Zealand. I think you could feel more isolated in the middle of America than you ever could in New Zealand. You can see why places like Kansas are so into the Union, because, if they weren’t, nobody would ever have heard of them. They’d just drop off the edge, since so few people live there. Some of them would be third-world countries if they weren’t part of the Union. There are fifty states and they operate like separate countries. Each state, each county in fact, can do what it wants. New Zealand is so much more homogenous. BP can have a campaign and completely renovate every gas station in the country in a matter of months. Things like that don’t happen in America. You go through parts of the South and it’s just like William Faulkner. Another thing is, they do put up new stuff but they don’t pull down the old stuff. We drove through lots of places where there would be three gas stations, but only one of them was functional. The first one’s falling down but no one goes and pulls it down. It just stays there. they don’t get rid of it. It’s very strange, that whole decay.
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Were you there looking for subject matter?
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The whole experience was overwhelming initially and it was hard to work out what I wanted to record and what I wanted to leave. So, I just started looking at what I had just left off painting in New Zealand—grave decorations—for a start. The most amazing ones I saw were at Gracelands, which is a culture all on its own. They tell me Elvis made a bit of music, but he sure knew how to decorate. Americans are big on trashy decoration. The church strips it all out, but then people put five life-size glowing Santas on the front lawn. In New Zealand, the high/low thing is clearly defined. People here are really uptight about it, probably because high culture is under siege. But it’s interesting there to have that distinction made completely redundant. There’s that wonderful Jeff Koons quote: I accept Micky Mouse, I hail Donald Duck, I love Bambi too. I think until you have achieved that you haven’t had an authentic American experience.
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Did you find anything new?
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During my time in the South I became interested in smoking as a subject. In Durham, North Carolina, where they make cigarettes—Lucky Strikes and Chesterfields—I came across this bronze plaque that read: ‘Dedicated to the millions who smoke the cigarette that satisfies. Chesterfield 1948.’ And then I was hooked. In Durham, they roast the tobacco and it smells like chocolate or cooked apples. It could almost entice you to take up smoking, which I did very briefly—one or two cigarettes. Smoking is a marginal thing now, at least here in New Zealand. But it was different in America. The Marlboro Man was everywhere. There’d even be cigarette drops where they’d send out free cigarettes in the mail. It was incredible. People smoke lots in the South. And a lot of people still chew tobacco. Chewing tobacco—have you ever seen it? It’s like having a whole wad of tea leaves around your gums. The good ole boys, all chewing their Red Man.
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So, it’s going to be hard to kill off smoking in the South.
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It’d be like trying to outlaw dairy products in New Zealand. It’s hooked in on all sorts of levels, like education. I had friends at The Duke, a well known university in Durham. It was started by Buck Duke, who made all his money from tobacco. That sort of infrastructure is through the whole of the state. You couldn’t remove it. Anyway, after Durham, I became interested in the depiction of smoking throughout art history. For instance, tobacco and pipes often appear in still lifes. One common theme in still-life painting is the vanitas, which goes back to the book of Ecclesiastes—‘Vanity, vanity, all is vanity.’ It’s to do with the brevity of human life. When Chardin, say, depicted smokers’ accoutrements in his still lifes, it was as a vanity, a luxury, and also as a symbol, the brevity of life being suggested in that puff of smoke, like the snuffed candle. But the funny thing is, back then, they didn’t realise tobacco could actually kill you.

I also got interested in smoking and modernism. Cigarettes really are a product of the mechanical age. They only started mass-producing cigarettes in 1884 and they weren’t really that popular until the first World War. Leger’s The Mechanic (1920) is the best example. Back then, smoking a cigarette, having a tattoo, wearing a black singlet and being a mechanic had something to do with utopian modernism. Now all those things still go together but they mean something completely different. If you wanted to say the same kind of thing now you’d have to have a guy with a ponytail tapping away at a keyboard and drinking Perrier.

Another thing that interested me were all those photographs of famous painters smoking, artists like Rothko, De Kooning, and Guston. And there are those famous black-and-white photographs of Pollock by Hans Namuth, and also a movie of him smoking and painting at the same time. People thought Pollock’s painting signified the unbridled sexual and creative potency of the artist. That’s interesting, considering the anti-libidinous effects of large quantities of fags and booze—the grunge factor in modern art.
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Smoking was a strong trope of existentialist experience.
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Those photos will mostly be set ups. It interests me that those painters all wanted to be seen as smokers. Guston painted lots of self portraits smoking. And, of course, much of the work is about self-destruction. But there’s a huge amount of irony and self-parody going on too. Guston’s Painting, Smoking, Eating (1973) is the height of the grunge factor. He’s smoking in bed and eating and painting. There’s a nasty array of tins with all sorts of solvents in them next to the bed. And there’s French fries on the bed, with ketchup all over them. There’s a definite death wish in there. And this masochistic artist persona was heavily adhered to in New Zealand painting in the 1970s. For instance, Clairmont, Fomison, and Maddox are all shown smoking in Marti Friedlander’s famous book. And smoking may have been just the tip of the iceberg. I’m interested in artists’ addictions.
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When did they discover smoking was bad for your health?
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The Surgeon General’s report came out in 1964,  but it wasn’t really until the 1970s that things started to change. Interestingly, more people smoked in the 1950s than at any other time. It was the high point. That’s when they started to bring out all the new brands, the cool-flavour menthols and the tall cigarettes—Long Horns. It’s interesting, smoking and modernism, that thing of perpetual newness.
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Cigarette advertising has become very artistic.
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During the 1980s they started to place restrictions on what you could put into cigarette ads. They outlawed a lot of text early on. Then they outlawed the human figure. You were allowed to have a hand and an arm. You could get away with a bit of leg. The ads ended up more and more focused on the packets themselves or on some other detail. Because the content was so restricted, the ads had to develop an incredibly complex sets of signifiers. They became so sophisticated and so obscure that anyone not initiated into the campaign wouldn’t even know what they were ads for. The ads became more oblique, more like art. And they used more and more art references. There’s a B&H campaign where the gold pack always appears as some kind of artwork. It’s excavated in an archaeological dig, it’s a bit of modern art that’s just been uncrated in a museum, or it sits on an easel. Quite often, the ads moved into a still-life format, even quoting from Dutch still-life painting to suggest that sort of sophistication. They took on the golden light, the dark backgrounds. They also took on aspects of the vanitas theme, which is highly ironic.
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So how did you incorporate these ideas into your work?
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I’ve always been interested in dragging up marginalised retro culture, and the woven space-frame cigarette-packet dog is a wonderful example. They were big in Inglewood in the 1970s. I remember them being made of Pall Mall Reds and B&H Golds. It took so long to make them, you were killing time. Some would take 600 packs to make, so it was like overkill, a monument to your own death in fact. And yet, those dogs are so kidsy, so cute—like giving cigarettes to children. I put them into a vanitas still-life context but also with that advertising look.
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Where do the dogs come from originally?
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They’ve got British origins—American cigarettes are soft packed. It’s a lower-working-class thing. Only certain brands are ever used. People who smoke Dunhills wouldn’t want to plait a dog out of them I’d imagine.
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The dog symbolises faithfulness—doggedness.
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When I was in the US, I saw a stunning Jeff Koons show at Sonnabend. He’d made these fantastic, polychromed wooden dogs, some of them straight out of Disney movies like The Lady and the Tramp. And they were sitting there, arranged in front of the paintings of him and Cicciolina, with their tongues out, panting—a wonderful play off between fidelity and infidelity. There’s a similar aspect in my dogs. Smokers are brand loyal and the cigarette-packet dogs each are generally made of one brand only. That loyalty thing is played off against smoking as a vice.
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How did you pick the other objects that go with the dogs?
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They’re mostly kitsch, ticky-tack sort of stuff, and often related to death in some way. Perhaps they are some sort of grave decoration or have an air of tragedy or datedness about them. The praying hands. The sawn-off piece of antler is incredibly brutal. The cowboy boot in Mild (1993) relates to the Marlboro Man. It could refer to Boot Hill, the last resting place of the cowboy. And JPS (1993), with its golf ball, brings up the fresh air athleticism of golf, sports sponsorship even, although cigarette smoking is no good for your health.
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Are you going to continue to explore the theme of smoking?
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At the moment, I’m fascinated by the Marlboro campaign. It’s so big, long running, and complex. I’m doing a series of works relating that campaign to earthworks from the 1970s. It comes from my interest in anomalies along that regional/international divide. Earthworks were part of international modernism yet they could also be seen as the height of regionalism, in that they’re site-specific, made from materials found on site, and they’re about the myth of the region. You have to travel huge distances to see them because they’re in one place, sometimes for a limited time only, like a McJordan Burger. Artists like Heizer, Smithson, and De Maria fled the New York dealer gallery scene for the big western deserts, where the mythical Marlboro Men of old had gone to be beyond the law. I’m reinventing those earthworks as easel paintings, so they become part of the art market, which is just what those artists were trying to escape.
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Did they see themselves as cowboys?
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They certainly saw themselves as rebels, like a lot of artists do, and the authentic American rebel was the cowboy. Heizer and Smithson traded in the horse for the Caterpillar D8 and they were out there in the desert, alone, for months, bulldozing. And they dressed like cowboys. There are shots of Heizer in the desert doing Double Negative in full cowboy gear and the Saturday Evening Post published one of Smithson in a cowboy hat sitting on top of a non-site. Even Christo did it. He went to Rifle, Colorado, to hang Valley Curtain. Suddenly, he’s dressed as a cowboy too. There was also cowboy behaviour. I think of Heizer out on that dry lake bed doing donuts on a trail bike, which he called ‘drawing’.¹
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Is there still a place for the Marlboro Man?
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The Marlboro Man no longer holds sway as a hero and model for artistic behaviour. His kind of posturing is truly dated. He’s dying out, just like the smoker—entropy personified. But Marlboro Country will always have its followers—the myth is too enduring. ‘Back out on the mesa, it’s still dirt, dust, diesel, dynamite and a cold wind blowing.’
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[IMAGE: Philip Guston Painting, Smoking, Eating 1972]

 

In Michael Parekowhai’s exhibition Kiss the Baby Goodbye, toys, games, and models loom large as metaphors for art. The nine sculptures resemble gigantic plastic kitset models in various states of completion. Three re-present sculptures based on toys and games from Parekowhai’s previous solo shows.¹ Four echo classic works by canonical artists: Marcel Duchamp, Henry Moore, and Gordon Walters. The other two are based on chess pieces and on the gas tanks and trolley from a sculptor’s heavy-metal welding kit.

Surrounded by these giant models, one might feel like the protagonist in the 1957 sci-fi classic The Incredible Shrinking Man. Diminished to micro-size, the film’s hero is forced to view himself and the world in a different light. The simplest things become problematic. Massively enlarged and cryptically titled, Parekowhai’s pick-up sticks, jackstraws, posting blocks, and chess pieces take on a new aspect. They become cumbersome, hard to handle. Instead of confirming our mastery, they make us feel physically and mentally challenged. Toys, games, and models play a key role in physical, intellectual, and cultural education. As children, they teach us to recognise shapes and patterns, to follow rules and instructions, to calculate risks, to compete. And they develop our dexterity. These teaching aids pave the way to adulthood. Parekowhai increases the degree of difficulty, presenting them on an adult scale as adult problems.

In offering toys and games as art, Parekowhai asks us to consider art as play. The kitset idea is a clear reference to Duchamp, who is attributed with originating the notion that it is the viewer who completes the work of art. For Duchamp, viewers are not passive. By deciphering and valuing an artwork’s inner qualifications, we actively construct its meaning. Parekowhai draws an analogy between the way we physically assemble a kitset and the way we conceptually make something of art.

Many of the works are reminiscent of museum-shop merchandise in which art images are recycled as toys or puzzles. Mona Lisa jigsaws, for instance, permit everyman the opportunity to identify with a great master in his moment of creation. Parekowhai puts such secondary art experiences back into the museum as primary art experiences, as both metaphors for and instances of the art experience proper. And yet perhaps this notion is also treated ironically. Making up Parekowhai’s do-it-yourself Henry Moore kit—The Fault Dear Brutus—would involve no creative decisions, just following the rules. The activity would permit no insight into Moore’s process—a kitset is assembled, whereas Moore carved or modeled.

While it touches on different kinds of toys and games, the show also refers to different types of art, particularly sculpture. The welding equipment in The Sound of Music relates to sculpture as construction, The Fault Dear Brutus engages the formalist tradition of carving and modelling, and Mimi and Von Trapp Two Trapps Three Trapps Four restage two Duchamp readymades.

Duchamp’s readymades are often considered the first works in the conceptual art tradition, out of which Parekowhai operates. Readymades recontextualised existing objects, to make them art. In 1917, Duchamp laid a urinal on its back and called it Fountain, and screwed a coat rack to the floor to create Trap. Parekowhai subjects these two works to further dislocation and retitling. In Von Trapp Two Trapps Three Trapps Four, Parekowhai frames two sets of ten replica Traps. Trap sadistically repositioned a benign object as an obstacle, something to trip the unwary. Parekowhai recasts Duchamp’s hazard as a toy, suggesting some menace lurking in the heart of childish play. In Mimi, he positions one urinal as art, but empty spaces in its frame suggest that two other urinals may already have been put to more practical use. Duchamp took the piss out of a urinal to make it a Fountain, Parekowhai puts it back in (‘mimi’ being Maori for urine). Does this work symbolically restore Duchamp’s object to its original purpose, or further dislocate it into the realm of art?²
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Parekowhai is a Maori artist. His work first came to public attention with his inclusion in the 1990 exhibition Choice!³ The exhibition’s curator, George Hubbard, was concerned that ‘contemporary Maori art’ was being defined prescriptively, with only those Maori artists who clearly capitalised on tradition being promoted as authentically Maori. Choice! showcased a group of mostly younger Maori artists working outside the prevailing notion of contemporary Maori art. Presenting Maori identity as necessarily problematic, multiple, and dynamic, Choice! asked us to approach Maori work with an open mind, to be prepared to find Maori identity in what Maori do, not to prejudge the issue by enforcing a single acid test for cultural authenticity. Hubbard’s polemic remains a useful entry point into Parekowhai’s work. This artist is certainly unusual in addressing issues of Maori identity, history, and culture without drawing on traditional Maori imagery, materials, or techniques. While it participates in the languages and strategies of international contemporary art, his work also gives voice to concerns that are pointedly local.

Parekowhai’s works appropriate existing things and reinvent them as spiritual manuals and history books. In this they recall, among other things, Rua Kenana’s use of playing-card symbols as religious mnemonics. His works can be read allegorically. Take Acts II, for instance. The book of Acts recounts how the apostles were granted the means to do good, notably to heal. The tools represented by the jack straws could be understood in this light—Parekowhai metaphorically offering the viewer tools with which to do good. On the other hand, the game of jack straws does not encourage generosity. It’s a competition. You set out to beat your opponent by acquiring more tools, more resources. The intriguing arsenal afforded by the jack straw set could be seen in the light of New Zealand history. Guns, swords, cannon ramrods and firers, oars, axes, and spades were all instruments of colonisation. The crutches and walking sticks, on the other hand, could be understood as shorthand for the raw end of the deal, the trials and tribulations visited upon the locals. Given this, Acts II might make us ponder the ‘good’ done by the apostles of a colonising Christianity.

Viewers have made other readings. For one, Acts II recalled the collections of crutches and walking sticks cast off during healing sessions at Ratana pa. Someone else was reminded of the stacks of tools traded for Maori land. Allegories always remain open to further interpretation and elaboration. Often different levels of meaning coexist in tension, even outright contradiction. How we read these works, how we use them, will be conditioned by the values, interests, and desires we bring to bear upon them. Whether we understand Parekowhai’s chess pieces Folie a Deux, for instance, as a tribute to chess (Duchamp’s favourite pastime) or as a comment on the colonial struggle of black versus white will say as much about us as about the artist. Parekowhai offers his works as tools for us to think with.
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The exhibition’s centrepiece is also titled Kiss the Baby Goodbye. This work is based on Gordon Walters’s koru painting Kahukura, which was made in 1968, the year Parekowhai was born—a baby, no less. Parekowhai offers the Walters as a mammoth kitset model.

Kiss the Baby Goodbye plays into the current debate over the appropriation of Maori imagery by Pakeha artists. This debate has made an example of Walters’s work. He has been bitterly attacked and defended for his appropriation of the koru motif in his classic abstracts of the 1960s and 1970s. Rangihiroa Panoho, for one, has expressed concern at how Walters ‘progressively simplified the form, divesting it of meaning and imperfection and distancing it from its cultural origins’.⁴ Francis Pound has come to Walters’s defence. He has argued that, as a ‘translation’, Walters’s work actually enhances the prestige of the Maori version; more than that, Walters improves on the original. In Walters, the koru ‘swells with a new strength, it draws itself up to its full height, it takes to itself a maximum power’, writes Pound. Sadly, the appropriation debate has got bogged down in moralising, as if moralities were not themselves culturally relative and interminably contestable. Parekowhai’s work does not buy into the prosecution-defence duality. It reads neither as a critique of Walters’s work nor as a justification for it. Parekowhai prefers to generate interference patterns.

Kiss the Baby Goodbye could be read as a celebration of Walters. It maintains his clean lines, his modernist aesthetic. It’s a breathtakingly beautiful work, lovingly crafted. Then again, it also looks like an awesome institutional barricade, a corporate castle gate. Perhaps it is belittling to represent a Walters as a kitset, as if it were childish work. Then again, Walters did determine his complex koru compositions through the cunning manipulation of paper-collage kitsets. In offering a do-it-yourself Walters, Parekowhai evokes the Duchampian idea that it is the viewer’s job to complete the work. But isn’t this also an invitation to rip Walters’s work apart and fashion something new from it? Is Parekowhai criticising Walters’s appropriation? How could he be when his work is itself an instance of appropriation?
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Allegory involves the doubling of languages and logics. In this show, titles—in French, Maori and English; taken from the Bible, from Shakespeare, from children’s games, and from the film The Sound of Music—are laid over the works. Artworks are rewritten as toys; toys, in turn, are reread as art. The works also ask to be read through their sources and through one another. Different aspects of the exhibition gloss one another.

Despite this density, or because of it, the show seems incomplete, inconclusive. Not only is the artist’s selection of  subjects to re-present as kitsets curious, the works themselves seem strangely partial. Where is the chess board, the posting box for the blocks, and the rest of the welding kit? Walter Benjamin observed that it is the ‘common practice’ of allegory to ‘pile up fragments ceaselessly, without any strict idea of a goal’.⁶ Allegories are explicitly open. They can not claim self-sufficiency—autonomy. Parekowhai offers his works here, as individuals and as a group, as clearly incomplete. We must bring something to them to finish them off. The onus is on us to make of them what we will.

Parekowhai’s works are puzzling, but there are no clear solutions to them. Instead, they work as paradoxes, conundrums, machines for thinking through, talking points, conversation pieces. They engage and embody contradictions, drawing the viewer into a conceptual space where a variety of possible and often inconsistent readings can co-exist. Parekowhai’s works both exemplify the difficulty of our situation and offer themselves as tools with which we might clarify it.
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[IMAGE: Michael Parekowhai Kiss the Baby Goodbye 1994]