My exhibition Julian Dashper & Friends—at City Gallery Wellington (5 December 2015–15 May 2016)—pays tribute to an artist who was more-or-less my contemporary. Dashper was an important figure for many and was hugely important for me as a curator. When he died young in 2009, aged 49, I wondered what kind of show I could do to recognise him and support his legacy. My exhibition, which places his work into conversation with works by other artists, is a response to that question.

The show includes a video by Dashper’s partner Marie Shannon, What I Am Looking At (2011). In it, she describes the experience of surveying the contents of Dashper’s studio after he died. To me, this work symbolises the whole show. It parallels what I have done as its curator, and what the audience is doing, as survivors, picking up the pieces, making sense of things in the absence of the artist, as the work also lives on.

At City Gallery on 10 March 2016, I used the occasion of the show—and  Shannon’s work in it—to convene a panel on the question: what happens when artists die, when the work of the dead becomes the responsibility of the living? The panelists were curator-collector-blogger Jim Barr, gallerist Gary Langsford, artist Marie Shannon, Len Lye Foundation Director Evan Webb, and Heide Museum of Modern Art curator Kendrah Morgan, with myself as chair. Together, we scratched the surface of this epic topic. What follows are the edited highlights.
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Robert Leonard: Let’s start with Julian.
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Marie Shannon: Julian was in the middle of his life when he died. Even though he was diagnosed with a serious illness, he didn’t want to reflect on dying. Before he was diagnosed, he’d planned to tidy up the studio, to throw lots of stuff out. But, now, this felt too final for him. So, he concentrated on making new work, on keeping going. This helped him to deal with his illness.

Julian was always positive. He was well enough to continue working until the last few months. Even then, he was still working as much as he could, often with the help of friends. He planned his 2009 Sue Crockford Gallery show, leaving a detailed list of works, in his words ‘just in case I’m not feeling very well’. That was as close as he came to admitting that he might not be there.

In his will, Julian left his works to our son Leo and I together, which meant our solicitor needed a list of every work in the studio, in the house, on consignment to dealer galleries, and on loan to museums around the world. It took me two years to complete. Everything else—the legal term is ‘the residue’—was left to me alone.
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Jim Barr: Julian was a conceptual artist, which makes it more difficult to determine what was art and what wasn’t—the trousers, for instance.
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Shannon: With conceptual work, provenance is crucial. And yes, Julian did exhibit a pair of jeans as an artwork, so I keep them as such. But he also used to buy jeans and black tee shirts as a kind of uniform. He had a supply of them, which I have also kept. But I don’t treat them as artworks. Julian was clear about what was what.
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Barr: But there are always lots of decisions to make. Maybe not all of them will be right, but somebody has to make them. I know, when Don Driver died, for instance, his wife Joyce chose to discard a number of works on paper that she didn’t consider finished.
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Leonard: Marie, what did you do with all the other stuff, ‘the residue’?
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Shannon: Julian was fairly orderly. But still, he had boxes of photographs, reviews, articles, and correspondence piling up around the studio. When I began cataloguing the works, I also started cataloguing this material. People offered to help, which was kind, but personal stuff was mixed in with gallery stuff, and I needed to be the first person to look at it, and maybe help could come later. After I finished the photographic archive, I started on Julian’s papers, sorting them into categories. There’s still a lot of material in Julian’s own filing system that I haven’t looked at.

The archive includes fascinating material. Julian kept all his diaries. You can go back and find the day he painted a particular painting or met a particular person, and what they ate for dinner. Julian would note down the appointment, and later write comments. Looking through his papers brought nice surprises. I found a report from Te Papa detailing the discovery of a lipstick kiss tucked under the frame of one of his works. He had been excited to receive it. We still don’t know who left the kiss, so I won’t say anything about the colour of the lipstick.
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Barr: What’s your ongoing responsibility to Julian?
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Shannon: Work is still available. The estate has several dealers. My responsibility is to keep the work busy and relevant, and to give people access to it.
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Leonard: You preserved Julian’s studio.
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Shannon: Julian loved his studio and the idea of the studio. The way he arranged things on tables was part of his creative process. Personally, I wanted to keep his studio as close as possible to how he left it. Maybe, for me, it’s part of a gradual process of letting go. It was a challenge to maintain the atmosphere of the studio as he left it, while adding storage, so works could be kept clean and safe after I’d documented them. I took photographs at the beginning, knowing things would change a bit.
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Barr: You’ve created a museum, but what happens to it?
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Shannon: Fortunately, we owned the building. I would have made different decisions if we hadn’t. I don’t know what happens next. And how long am I going to last? The responsibility for maintaining the place is not something I want to hand on to Leo, who’s 19 now. He’s interested, but he’s not going to devote the care to it that I have.
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Kendrah Morgan: When they’re alive, artists can tend their reputations and advance their interests, but, when they die, other people have to champion them or they can be lost to history. I’d be surprised if anyone here has heard of Ross Crothall. He couldn’t be more different to Dashper. When he disappeared in 1968, no one knew whether he had died or not, and the family received no work from his estate. His work is hard to track down.

Crothall started working as an artist in the Auckland in the 1950s—his mentors were Colin McCahon, Gordon Walters, and Theo Schoon. He moved to Sydney in 1958 and became involved with two now-famous Australian artists, Mike Brown and Colin Lanceley. Together the trio developed a short lived, experimental, collaborative enterprise, called imitation realism, and had two exhibitions, both in 1962. The work combined elements of expressionism, primitivism, and pop, and took the forms of painting, collage, assemblage, and installation. Australia had never seen anything like it. After the imitation-realist shows, Crothall gave up art for a while. In 1965, his parents were killed in a car accident on the Bombay Hills and he returned to New Zealand.

In Auckland, Crothall started working again, and,  in 1966, he put together a remarkable show for New Vision Gallery, including works referring to Schoon, McCahon, and Michael Illingworth. New Zealand wasn’t ready for it, and the work was dismissed as anti-art in the press. But now, with that show, he looks like a proto-postmodernist. Crothall returned to Australia soon after, where he developed mental-health issues. William McCahon helped him get admitted to a psychiatric hospital for a couple of months, but then he discharged himself, disappeared, and was never seen again.

Although Crothall made it into the history of Australian art, he’s not part of the history of New Zealand art, but he should be. He’s a fascinating figure, a mystery man, and you can see how New Zealand art could be rewritten around him.
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Leonard: Len Lye was lucky enough to have champions to carry the torch after he died in 1980. Evan, how did the Len Lye Foundation come into being?
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Evan Webb: For most of his life, Lye was unknown in New Zealand. But, in the 1970s, a number of enthusiastic New Zealanders got to know him in New York, and fell in love with his work. They were Wystan Curnow, Roger Horrocks, Hamish Keith, Ray Thorburn, and the engineer John Matthews. In 1977, an exhibition was staged at the Govett-Brewster Art Gallery in New Plymouth. It featured new versions of Lye’s kinetic sculptures Fountain and Trilogy, which Lye had created with Matthews. When Lye was diagnosed with leukemia, he and his New Zealand supporters decided to bring his art works to New Zealand. (Actually, the plan was to bring everything, even items of clothing—jackets and hats—because you never know what people may find significant later.) Lye gifted his work, the contents of his studio, and all copyright in his work to a new charitable trust, the Len Lye Foundation. It was charged with taking care of the work, exhibiting it, and maintaining access to it. Lye also granted it the rights to reproduce the sculptures. The New Plymouth District Council made space available at the Govett-Brewster to house the collections. And, as everyone here knows, last year a new Len Lye Centre opened in New Plymouth.
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Leonard: Gary, Gow Langsford Gallery has also worked with artists who have died.
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Gary Langsford: We’ve had related experiences with Tony Fomison and Allen Maddox. When they died, in 1990 and 2000 respectively, we were invited in, did all the cataloguing, and decided what to keep, what to scrap. And then, it was left to us to conserve, store, and manage those bodies of work to generate ongoing income for the estates and heirs.
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Barr: So, did you keep the trousers?
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Langsford: We didn’t keep the trousers.
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Leonard: Gary, for a dealer, what happens when an artist dies and their affairs aren’t in order?
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Langsford: When Fomison died, we had a visit from Inland Revenue, who now noticed that he had never paid tax or GST. It was a nightmare for the family. The first thing we had to do was organise an exhibition, where most of the proceeds from sales went to pay Fomison’s enormous back-dated tax bill, which included penalties. These days, artists run their practices more professionally, but Fomison and Maddox were from another era.
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Leonard: I want to bring up a thorny question—posthumous production. Evan, the Len Lye Foundation makes new old sculptures. It upgrades and reproduces sculptures that Lye actually made, but it also makes sculptures that Lye never made, based on his drawings, plans, and desires. How do you ascertain what you can and can’t make in Lye’s name—what’s a success and what’s a failure?
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Webb: I can tell you about a failure. Lye’s Wind Wands are slender poles with weighted balls on top. They are so balanced that, when a breeze catches them, they bend. Lye constructed several in his lifetime, the largest for an exhibition in Hyde Park, Toronto, in 1967. At that time, he knew you couldn’t build really tall poles out of aluminium and steel—they wouldn’t support themselves—so he tried fibreglass. Lye commissioned a company to fabricate one, but they botched it—it wasn’t flexible. In any event, he mounted it in a gimbal, hung children’s swing seats underneath it, and called it Swing Wand. But it was never going to work for him, so he had the council take it down, and it languished somewhere and presumably rotted away. There were articles in the paper about it. He was annoyed about the whole experience.

So, we took up the project in 1996. There were considerable plans and drawings about how to make Wind Wands. Lye wanted one 25-metres high, another 45. Being prudent, we attempted the 25-metre one first. We had a design engineer and various fabricators, but we had to make some guesses. When the helicopter lifted the prototype onto the site, the press were there and the champagne was uncorked. The work was placed in the hole—where it was supposed to stand, catch the breeze, and bend—but it bent straight over so the nose hit the ground. It looked like half a McDonald’s arch. It was a failure. But, later, we did get it right.
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Barr: Lye’s proposing such monumental works may have been megalomania at the time, but the Foundation trying to make them now strikes me as hubris.
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Leonard: Evan, are there grey areas, where you’re unsure what Lye’s original intention was or what it would even mean for a work to succeed or fail?
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Barr: It might be helpful to talk about a specific work that most Wellingtonians know, Water Whirler. Seriously, Evan, how could the Foundation make this sculpture on the basis of a few drawings then claim that it’s the artist’s work?
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Webb: With Water Whirler, Lye left notes and drawings, which give us a good indication. We know Lye wanted water to come out like a pencil drawing moving in space. He didn’t want a mist, he wanted lines. We know the water has to be moving at a certain speed to get that—that’s defined by physics. But, still, if the artist saw the work now, we can’t know that he wouldn’t say, ‘Hey, how about we do this or that instead.’
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Barr: But Wellington’s Water Whirler looks nothing like the sketches for it that I’ve seen, where it comes straight out of the water and has churning water beneath it. The Wellington work is on a high plinth.
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Webb: Your point is an ethical one.
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Barr: It’s more basic than that. If an artist hadn’t made a work, and then someone else makes it, it’s not that artist’s work.
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Leonard: But, Evan, are you saying that Lye ‘intended’ to keep producing work beyond the grave and that the Foundation is simply fulfilling this, that Lye entrusted the Foundation with the on-going interpretation of his intentions?
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Webb: Yes. But we’re always careful to acknowledge that the works we make are reconstructions of existing works or are made on the basis of notes and drawings left by the artist.
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Leonard: Disclosure, then. But, can you draw a line between ‘interpretation’ and ‘invention’?
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Webb: There are two points I’d like to make. First, we know Lye himself reconstructed and reproduced sculptures in his lifetime. He made Roundheads, Fountains, and Universes that are in other collections. We are working from this precedent. Second, in the 1968 TV documentary, Art of the Sixties: The Walls Come Tumbling Down, Lye says his work is for the twenty-first century. He means there wasn’t yet the means to make his work, the technology or the coin. But there is now.
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Barr: But still, you are effectively inventing works that the artist never made.
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Langsford: But may have intended. With these works, Lye did a sketch in a notebook, he made a plan, whatever. And the reality is that collectors and museums have knowingly purchased these works. In the end, they decide, the market decides.
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Leonard: You’ve sold posthumous Len Lye sculptures.
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Langsford: We have indeed. We got involved with the Foundation because we believed in the work. Of course, Lye is not the only artist to have made works posthumously. There’s quite a history to it, particularly with sculpture, like those bronzes cast from Rodin’s plasters after he died.
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Leonard: Works get repaired, reconstructed, remade, and replicated all the time. Today, there’s an industry for interpreting—or imagining—what artists intended. And, with some kinds of art, the intellectual property is more important than the hand of the artist. Also, when artists become important, generating a greater market for their work, odd things are elevated to artwork status. Colin McCahon’s letterbox came up at auction. It may not have been intended as an artwork, but it was, technically speaking, ‘a painting’, and you could say it was ‘signed’—he wrote his name on it. Something similar is happening with Andy Warhol’s time capsules, which are now being provenanced through inclusion in exhibitions.
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Langsford: Blame the dealers! But it is not simply about something being an artwork or not—there are levels. With sculpture, casts made during an artist’s lifetime will sell for more than casts made posthumously. If you can’t afford the $10m vintage Rodin casting, you can buy a $2m editioned posthumous casting. And, why shouldn’t you? There’s a clear distinction between these things, and that registers in the market.
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Morgan: There are particular issues with photography. Albert Tucker took many photos in the 1930s and 1940s. Back then, he never considered them artworks. But, before he died in 1999, a curator convinced him that they were, and Tucker consequently agreed to oversee the printing of a selection of them for an exhibition. After he died, Barbara Tucker presented his photography collection to Heide and the State Library of Victoria jointly under the Cultural Gifts Program, which gives donors tax concessions. Heide holds the exhibition prints as well as digital files. But owning jointly owning a photography collection is slightly complicated. Members of the public can purchase digital files of the images that are out of copyright through the State Library website and print them up or reproduce them, though they are required to declare the intended usage. Heide therefore doesn’t always have control over how, where, and when these artworks in its collection are reproduced.
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Leonard: There are such different practices with photography. A lot of liberties get taken. Lee Friedlander effectively invented the historical photographer E.J. Bellocq by printing up his old glass plates, many of which Bellocq had defaced, presumably so they wouldn’t be printed. The new heroine of outsider photography, Vivian Maier, didn’t exhibit work. After she died, people made prints from her negatives, inventing her oeuvre. The curator of San Francisco Museum of Modern Art’s 2013 Garry Winogrand retrospective made prints from films Winogrand hadn’t bothered developing in his lifetime.
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Barr: At least he took the photographs.
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Leonard: As always, it seems, the question is not just about what artists want, or wanted, but what their survivors want. When artists die, the power balance shifts—artists ‘enter the culture’.
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[IMAGE: Peter Hujar Paul Thek Working on the Tomb Figure 1967/2010]