A brief list of things I learned from Julian Dashper

I was lucky enough to work with Julian Dashper several times over the years, and each time was an unforgettable experience. The most precise and exacting of artists in regards to the presentation of his work, he was also one of the most straightforward and delightful people I've ever worked with.

Over the past day, I've been thinking back over those times. Each project was characterised by a cluster of funny anecdotes (things that happened over the course of the project, as well as stories recounted by Julian about other projects). Each time I worked with Julian I went away with an increased confidence in the significance of public art galleries in bringing important work and ideas to public attention, and a series of valuable new reflections on curatorial practice and the workings of on-the-hoof art history. He was genuinely inspiring. I'll always remember a talk he gave to a bunch of high school kids about how he spent his day as an artist: he was just about mobbed afterwards by them, everyone wondering where they could sign up. While he'll be remembered chiefly by the extraordinary body of work he left behind, Julian's role as a teacher and mentor -- both formal and informal, variously of younger artists, curators, writers and public gallery staff -- shouldn't be underestimated.

As I wrote yesterday, I think the importance of Julian Dashper in shaping New Zealand's contemporary culture will become increasingly clear. It's already evident that someone of great significance has been lost to our culture.

Just for now, I want to make a brief list of some of the things I learned from him.

1. That the smallest details are worthy of consideration.
2. A different way to look at the relationship between form and content, back in the late 1980s and early 1990s.
3. That distance could be a strength and a source of distinction.
4. That contemporary art and popular culture aren't positioned at opposite ends of the cultural spectrum but instead run parallel to one another.
5. The evergreen coolness of Al Hunter.
6. The importance of collaboration between artists and writers.
7. That the placement of a semicolon can be of critical importance.
8. To wear my Noconas with pride.
9. That it's always all about the details.

The accidental curator

When you work with artists and collections for a while, you inevitably get to thinking about them in a certain way. This artist belongs with that one, you think to yourself; these works are part of this school; these ideas are the particularly interesting ones; and you go about your business accordingly. It's not really a bad thing: not so much a prescribed way of thinking but more like an intuitive shorthand based on experience.

However, I really enjoy the kind of accidental curation that arises from looking at works of art in informal situations. Some of the best ideas come from just prowling about looking at works and constructing unlikely relationships between them. The painting racks in the art stores of public galleries, where the only principles of selection and juxtaposition are the relative sizes of works -- accommodating the largest number of works into the smallest safe space possible. These ordered but essentially haphazard spaces are a great source of random curation, in which a Woollaston might be hung cheek-by-jowl with a Rohan Weallans, or a Frances Hodgkins next to a Julian Dashper.

Recently I noticed a particularly pleasing example of random curation on our dining room mantelpiece, where we tend to put things that we want to look at for a week or so. On the left is a reproduction of Tony Fomison's Detail for a Dancing Skeleton (1970), from Art + Object's auction calendar for 2009. On the right is a postcard from rival auction house Webb's, featuring Don Binney's Kotare over Hikurangi (1965). Beyond very broad historical principles, I would never generally think to relate the two artists' work, and hadn't noticed the anthropomorphic face shape in the landform of Don Binney's painting until I put it next to the Fomison.


On the other side of the mantelpiece, Tony de Lautour's hand-screened catalogue cover from his recent show at the Physics Room accidentally on display next to the Dali invitation card has -- beyond the enjoyably silly formal relationship of the lightning bolt and the moustache -- has opened up a new avenue for me to think slightly differently about de Lautour's work in terms of pranksterish surrealism.


One of the best sources for random acts of curation are auction catalogues. Some of the strangest juxtapositions of works are thrown up on their pages; so wonderful, sometimes, that it's hard to know if they are genuinely random or are an inventive curatorial outlet for the auctioneer. (I must ask one!) I enjoyed this page of works incorporating disrupted grids from Art + Object's 'Second Important Paintings 2009' catalogue. Again, two artists whose works I wouldn't usually think to put together. (Allen Maddox's Grid (1982) and Lozenge (Blue) (1997) with Richard Killeen's Frontal Lobe (1998).)


And, from the Webbs' catalogue, another couple of unlikely bedmates (though I would have been horribly tempted to put the Ted Bullmore on a page with the Ava Seymour photograph below. Thankfully, the auctioneers' good sense and taste prevailed.) (These are Edward Bullmore's Astroform no.13 (Bliss) (c.1967) and Callum Innes's Exposed Painting Red Violet Yellow Oxide Charcoal Black (2003), from Art + Object.) Makes me think, once again, what an incredibly interesting painter Bullmore was.


However, looking at the spread below, I find it impossible to believe that the auctioneer, or perhaps the catalogue designer, placed these two photographic works together randomly. (Ava Seymour's Yellow Oval Room (1994), and John B. Turner's La Patisserie (1972/8), at Webbs.)

But I think perhaps the most enjoyable of all these random acts of curation I've seen lately is the page layout below from the Webbs' 'Important Works 2009' catalogue, juxtaposing Tony de Lautour's Display (2004) against Milan Mrkusich's Painting Indigo 1969. It's hard to know whether this odd comparison best positions de Lautour's work as colourfield abstraction with some doodley bits added, or Mrkusich's as a ground ready to receive the projection of personal content. Actually, it's probably both. And that's why I love these random acts of chance curation: they add immeasurably to one's perception of the almost boundless ability of good art to take on different resonances in different contexts.

When animals attack

Still from 'A.F.F.C.O.', ©Brilliant Films/Skeptics 1988, via Spleen

When curator Francesco Bonami invited animal rights groups to view the controversial video works of French-Algerian artist Adel Abdessemed (in which animals are shown fighting for sport or being bludgeoned to death by Mexican butchers) prior to the exhibition's opening at the Fondazione Sandretto Re Rebaudengo in Turin last month, it resulted in vigorous protests and the involvement of local legal authorities.

"An act of openness was seen as a sign of weakness, and when you show fear, it’s just like in the animal world, they attack you,” Mr. Bonami said. “That’s what happened with the animal-rights groups. We showed a little fear, and they attacked us.”

So far only warning signs have been erected: it's unclear whether the city will insist that the work be removed from public view. The same work was previously pulled from an exhibition at the San Francisco Art Institute; Bonami, curator of the next Whitney Biennial, is now reported as "thinking twice" about whether to include Abdessemed's work (which deals with the presence of violence and alienation in contemporary western society, and frequently features animals, as in his 2006 series of photographs of wild animals roaming the streets of Paris) at all in the Biennial. “I don’t want to terrify the institution," Bonami said, somewhat surprisingly. (Or perhaps he was issuing a challenge?)

I haven't seen the work (and probably wouldn't care to; I have a weak stomach and it's not the sort of thing I much fancy looking at), but I suspect that what, if anything, Abdessemed is guilty of -- in a public sense, at least -- is not being obvious enough in his moral standpoint to be publicly palatable. It's not entirely clear whether the artist is glorifying the suffering and death of animals, or is drawing attention to it in order to protest against it, or whether his works are in fact allegories of wider human situations. Or all of those things at once, or something else again. The audience isn't told. And of course, nor should it be. Although that's an entirely fair enough position for someone who's an artist and not a propagandist to take, in this private moral ambiguity lies a public problem. How should a work like this be understood in a public context?

Interestingly, one of the animal rights protestors in Turin suggested that if Abdessemed 's purpose was to "denounce the process of butchering animals", he should show their own "far more gruesome" slaughterhouse videos. This suggestion is founded on the notion that making images of real-life horror public encourages people to agitate against the conditions which brought it about. (I can vouch for this from my own experience: peering into the back of a butcher's van in my teens definitely encouraged me to become a vegetarian.) But one person's horror is always another person's entertainment.

While Bonami stresses that the animals would have been killed anyway, and that Abdessemed was just documenting what he saw, apparently that's not obvious from the videos themselves. His moral position is essentially ambiguous. It's a version of the eternal problem faced by war correspondents: should the photographer at some point put down the camera and try to intervene in the situation unfolding before them, or should they capture it and trust that the publication of the image of an atrocity will help to prevent more in future?

Perhaps it's a bit rich to compare the horrors of war with the slaughter of animals for food, which is, after all, only what Abdessemed is filming (as well as scorpions fighting spiders and whatnot while people bet on the outcome, which is apparently legal in Mexico). Not that I can imagine anyone bringing it here, but I wonder how the work would play in New Zealand? Probably OK, I would think: given our Calvinistic background, it's blasphemy or exotic sexuality which primarily pushes the New Zealand public's art censorship buttons. We're fine with dead animals. New Zealand's effectively been an enormous meatworks for the rest of the world since the late 19th century. (This in itself brought about a minor diplomatic contretemps when Peter Peryer's Dead Steer was exhibited in Germany in 1995, in an exhibition supported by the New Zealand embassy.)

As New Zealand band the Skeptics found back in 1987 when they shot their video 'A.F.F.C.O'. in a South Auckland freezing works, the meat-packing business is a violent and dangerous one, with six-foot chainsaws ripping beasts in half and 'men wading around up to their waists in blood'.

You need a strong stomach for that.

The end of the roll is approaching

A quick digression today into the ever-fertile territory of personal peeves. Although generally I retain my irritation for the demolition of historic buildings, bureaucratic decision-making in the visual arts, and over-use of certain punctuation marks, today I am concerned with the strange phenomena of signing oneself off in the contemporary world.

A few years ago I exchanged a 9-5 job (well actually more like an 8-7 job) for a new 24-hour-on-call position. In my former life I broke up fights, wiped noses, encouraged creative expression and tried to instill a culture of good manners behind the scenes: I do much the same in my new role, though the participants are all under four foot high.

Accordingly, the foul jargon of the contemporary business world has moved on without me over the last little while. Sometimes the big guy comes out in conversation with something like "staff engagement", and I have to ask what it means. (In my day the equivalent was FIFO.)

But something I have noticed is the increasing penchant for addressing people without any ceremony whatsoever in correspondence. Blow all the fag of putting "Dear" in front of their name, or signing off with any degree of courtesy; now it just seems to go like this:

[their name]

At vero eos et accusamus et iusto odio dignissimos ducimus qui blanditiis praesentium voluptatum deleniti atque corrupti quos dolores et quas molestias excepturi sint occaecati cupiditate non provident, similique sunt in culpa qui officia deserunt mollitia animi, id est laborum et dolorum fuga. Et harum quidem rerum facilis est et expedita distinctio. Nam libero tempore, cum soluta nobis est eligendi optio cumque nihil impedit quo minus id quod maxime placeat facere possimus, omnis voluptas assumenda est, omnis dolor repellendus. Temporibus autem quibusdam et aut officiis debitis aut rerum necessitatibus saepe eveniet ut et voluptates repudiandae sint et molestiae non recusandae. Itaque earum rerum hic tenetur a sapiente delectus, ut aut reiciendis voluptatibus maiores alias consequatur aut perferendis doloribus asperiores repellat. [or whatever's on your mind]

[Your name]

Not a "Yours" or "Regards" or a cheerful "Cheerio" in sight.

When I first came across this phenomenon, it was in an email from a person whom I would consider quite rude in real life, so I thought it was just a little special something they had devised. But it's increasingly common, and in my limited observation seems to be spreading through the artworld like glandular fever at a leavers' ball. Good friends of mine -- people I know to be completely delightful and unfailingly courteous in person -- are commonly doing it, so perhaps it's just that I'm out of step. I guess you could argue that the truncated courtesies exude a sort of modernist pared-back-ness, a ready-for-action no-nonsense sensibility in correspondence which some might find attractive, but I just don't like it. It looks like the sender thinks they're just too busy and important to bother.

(Which brings me on to a digression within a digression, a digression en abyme, as Francis Pound would have it. Public art galleries are, like all other branches of the public service, frequently inundated with impertinent correspondence commenting freely on all aspects of the gallery's operations, from the selection of works to the state of the foyer toilets. Dealing with this is either a pain in the bottom or a creative pleasure, depending on one's individual nature. An art gallery director of my acquaintance once described to me a reply he had sent with considerable satisfaction. "Dear So and So," it began. "I am seated with your letter of the 15th in front of me. Shortly it will be behind me. Yours sincerely, etc.")

And so on to the final plank in this morning's peevish rant: the ridiculous faux-courtesy of the labels which have appeared recently on tin foil and glad wrap, helpfully telling you the roll's about to run out. Without exception, these labels dispense themselves right in the middle of the piece of foil you are planning to cook with. It is impossible to remove the label without making a hole in the foil, thus rendering it useless for cooking. And the piece that's left on the end of the roll after all this stupidity plays out is always too small for what you need. As Helen Clark would say, it's not helpful at all.

Given the choice, I would prefer that rolls of kitchen paper didn't bother with a sign-off. But it's nice when human correspondents do.

Against representation

A couple of international items related -- at least tangentially -- to New Zealand art, which have popped up in my feed reader overnight.

Firstly, there's 'Code Share', an interesting-sounding show opening in a couple of days at the Contemporary Art Centre, Vilnius, Lithuania, curated by Govett-Brewster Art Gallery alumnus Simon Rees.

The title of the exhibition is taken from the partnership arrangements made by commercial airlines to share passengers on a single flight in order to maximise profits. As the press release notes, this isn't to everyone's taste:

"Often travellers book a flight upon one airline and arrive at the gate to find that the plane and its staff is wearing the livery of a different partner airline – and serving food and drink associated with another national culture when we were looking forward to a specific set of flavours or the taste of 'home’! This might come as a pleasant surprise for the adventurous traveller but disappoint that flyer wanting to relax to familiar sounds and flavours two hours ahead of touching down. "

Rees relates the airlines' practice of code-sharing -- dominated by the major carriers -- to the backroom arrangements which have grown up around biennales, whereby the movements of global art audiences and artists' circuits are sewn up by the big players and where there is a definite worldwide hierarchy of events based on "colonial and capitalist" order.

All this is pretty interesting, but what I particularly like about Rees's concept is his desire to have a bob both ways (he describes it as "double agency"). While the artists in his show have been selected following their appearances in many of the top-end global biennales (the Whitney, Istanbul, Sydney, etc.), their work is concerned with "processes of cultural and socio-political displacement and alienation". Effectively, turning one of the usual biennale platforms on its head, the works are being produced "in denial of [national] representativeness."

No idea what the show will look like (maybe they'll put photos on their website in due course?) -- but I like the nature of the thinking behind it, very much. I was also interested to see that one of the contributing artists (down as coming from Malaysia/Indonesia; kind of ironic they'd include the artists' nationalities in the list of contributors) is Nadiah Bamadhaj, who went to art school at the University of Canterbury in Christchurch, and whose work I last saw in a group sculpture show at the old CSA Gallery in the early 90s.

The second item that's caught my eye overnight is news of the death of Coosje van Bruggen, Claes Oldenburg's artistic collaborator and wife. Time's Richard Lacayo has a nice short piece about their large-scale sculptural collaborations here. A sculpture by Van Bruggen and Oldenburg at Donald Judd's Chinati Foundation in Marfa, Texas, was the inspiration for one of my favourite works by NZ photographer Marie Shannon. In this series, Shannon rephotographed drawings made by her then 4 1/2 year old son of works the family saw at Marfa, including Oldenburg and Van Bruggen's Monument to the Last Horse.

Here's Marie Shannon's version, Leo's Sketchbook: Claes Oldenberg and Coosje van Bruggen, Monument To The Last Horse (2002), a digital ink jet print on watercolour paper, from the Chartwell Collection at Auckland Art Gallery.


And here's Oldenburg and Van Bruggen's original, in Texas, marking the grave of a cavalry horse named Louie. (An essay about the work by Donald Judd can be read here.)

"Gallery evicts nude dwarfs"

Not that I think for a minute that this piece of breathless reportage was really how the story went down (I say curator, you say censor... let's call the whole thing off), but I do take my hat off to the writer of that headline in the ODT. Good work, though they might also have considered some tasteful variation on "dwarf tossing". Nice opening sentence too: "A Dunedin artist is grumpy because she says her nude dwarfs have been banned from the Dunedin Public Art Gallery."

The Herald, on the other hand, has a pretty dopey account of the deep South's art-dwarf controversy with the artist suggesting that it's all down to self-censorship on the Dunedin Public Art Gallery's part because -- ahem -- they're "afraid" of Te Papa, whose touring Rita Angus survey show has just opened there.

"They told me the Rita Angus curator didn't like the dwarfs ... He thought too many little old ladies going to the Rita Angus exhibition would be offended."

All news to Te Papa, of course, and wearily denied by the DPAG who decided to "celebrate the strongest aspects" of the artist's work by leaving the dwarfs out. TVNZ has vision here, if you're up for it.

Fame, please. And more cash.

It's official. Art historians are a disaffected bunch, much put-upon, ignored by colleagues from other disciplines, working for peanuts without the respect they deserve, battling both rampant anti-intellectualism and the high cost of international air travel. At least, that's according to the results of a survey by the College Art Association of America (CAA), which recently asked its members to list the most pressing issues they face in their profession.

While the CAA divided their responses into 10 categories, the Art History Newsletter blog suggests they can be boiled down to just two:

• “I deserve more money and/or fame” (91% of respondents)
• “We should do better work” (9%).

Disillusioned respondents could do worse than consult Charles M Rosenberg's list of career alternatives for art historians. Regrettably, however, most of his suggestions also require a "high tolerance for economic uncertainty" -- which on the strength of the CAA survey would seem to render art historians temperamentally unsuited.

Oh well. Back to the disaffection it is, then.

Random play

Carolyn Christov-Bakargiev, curator of the 2008 Biennale of Sydney, on art curatorship and feminism:

"The thing that I really find wrong as a curator is to frame and bracket communities, or groups. So as a feminist I've never done an exhibition of art by women, I think that's anti-feminist to do that."


John Hurrell, sensitive art critic at large, comparing himself to one of the architects of the Third Reich while considering Michael Harrison's current exhibition at the Ivan Anthony Gallery:

"Like Reichsmarschall Gōring who once said "Whenever I hear the word ‘Culture’ I want to reach for my revolver,” one can sometimes bristle at too much sensitivity. It can be cloying, and make you long for something raucous and deliciously vulgar. A fistful of salt chucked into the bowl of sugar."


Jonathan Jones, chief art blogger at the Guardian suggesting that easy art is for weaklings and losers:

"If an artist can translate the meaning and purpose of a work into easily understandable words, it means one of two things. Either the artist is lying, in order to ease the way with patrons and funders; or the artist is a fool."


Jonathan Griffin, assistant editor of Frieze, on "plenty" of works he saw at this year's Manifesta:

"the aesthetic equivalent of eating ten cheese crackers with a dry mouth"