Despite his writings to the contrary, the sincerity of Julian Dashper’s work always resided less in theory and more in the objects he made.
In the mid-1960s, artists in New York became as interested in asking questions about why they made art as they had been about making it. This was the first generation of artists who talked theory and their minimalist/conceptual influence has flourished in New Zealand since the 1980s.
Which accounts for this posthumous publication of texts by Julian Dashper from exhibition catalogues and the artist’s statements, letters and interviews from 1987 to 2008, collectively titled This Is Not Writing. It’s a publication that complements a body of work by an artist who frequently said his practice was neither painting nor abstraction but about painting and abstraction.
So if Dashper’s collected essays are not writing, what are they? Think: The Philosophy of Andy Warhol (From A to B and Back Again) meets Toss Woollaston’s A Life in Letters. Dashper’s texts often read like cool, wry Warholian commentaries on the art world and as the observations of an artist who, like Woollaston, was a believer in art’s authority to reveal “truth and beauty”.
But this only tells part of Dashper’s story. This Is Not Writing is also the work of an artist who self-consciously sought to construct his own history and place in the New Zealand art world. One question looms large: can the written word of Dashper be trusted?
To its credit, interviews with Christopher Cook, Tony Green and Mark Kirby, alongside papers delivered by Dashper on minimalism and the art of Donald Judd, are highlights of this publication. More suspect, however, are Dashper’s lists of statements and observations.
“Some of the things I can remember Philip Clairmont saying today” is too knowing in a way that makes it read like an artist positioning his career. Similarly, when he claimed “If you want to look at my early influences, look at the difference between [Billy] Apple and Clairmont”, it leaves the reader with little sense they have gained any genuine insight into his practice.
Although Dashper may have believed his work was about painting, rather than being painting, his repeated claims that art aspires to “truth and beauty” suggest otherwise.
The sincerity of his work always resided less in theory and more in the objects he made. For example, his beautifully crafted minimalist target paintings worked best as art objects experienced in a gallery, divorced from the accompanying texts about Donald Judd, Jasper Johns and rock music. They confirmed Dashper’s stature as an assured modernist, a more interesting position than the one he occupied as a theorist on New Zealand art and the international distance he maintained looked its way.
Indeed, it is difficult not to reflect that Dashper often positioned his practice through references to the work of local and international artists such as Rita Angus and Judd, seeking to acquire something of their standing along the way. In this sense, This Is Not Writing is a document that reveals how New Zealand artists have increasingly contextualised their careers over the past 20 years.
Just how critical this has become is also revealed in the Michael Lett gallery’s co-publication of This Is Not Writing, complementing this dealer gallery’s earlier two-volume book on Michael Parekowhai in 2007. The quality of design and specialist nature of such publications confirm that over the past five years the curatorial and publishing edge of contemporary New Zealand art has shifted from the country’s public galleries to its best dealer galleries.
I cannot imagine any mainstream gallery making a commitment to a book like this. It is far too centred upon a niche audience to get past any marketing panel funded by local government and accordingly This Is Not Writing is as much a credit to Lett’s commitment to contemporary New Zealand art as it is to the art of Julian Dashper.
THIS IS NOT WRITING, by Julian Dashper (Clouds/Michael Lett, $39.95).
Warren Feeney is former director of the Centre of Contemporary Arts in Christchurch and author of the newly released The Radical, the Reactionary and the Canterbury Society of Arts 1880-1996.