Redefining the past

By ADAM GIFFORD

Art collector Rob Gardiner says that in his 40-year project to work out what art is and where it is going, his most challenging moments were in front of works by Julian Dashper and John Nixon.

Opening The World Is Your Studio, an exhibition of collaborations between the two artists at the Gus Fisher Gallery in central Auckland, Gardiner says his understanding of minimalism, conceptualism, readymades - and even his way of approaching art history - has been shaped by the two.

They have also made important statements about how the viewing space is a part of the whole work, and about what it means to be a professional artist working in New Zealand and Australia.

They are not novel ideas, but Nixon and Dashper have a way of forcing the viewer to address the questions.

Gardiner has followed the artists' separate careers since 1986, the first year Australian Nixon showed in Auckland. He has shown at Sue Crockford Gallery every year since.

"I am not interested in being a local artist who stays home," Nixon says. "I want to go into the world, and when I decide to move into a different city I make a commitment."

In 1986, Gardiner also bought one of Dashper's major paintings, Cass, for the Chartwell Collection. Cass was done in the expressive, painterly style which made Dashper's early reputation before he dropped painterly expression from his artistic vocabulary in favour of more minimal and conceptual language - leaving behind many of his fans.

That is not to say Dashper became a conceptual artist overnight. His first gallery show in 1980, Motorway Schools, was a multimedia installation, and even his most painterly work was about artistic or art history concepts.

Cass references the Rita Angus painting of a small Canterbury railway station.

Nixon has produced minimalist and conceptual work since the late 1960s. "I am 10 years older but we share a generation," Nixon says of his friendship with Dashper.

At art school, Nixon was interested in problem-solving exercises rather than life drawing. A survey of modern American painting, which included large minimalist pieces by Barnett Newman and Ad Reinhardt, and a major show of work by Marcel Duchamp, set his course.

Duchamp and Russian abstract painter Kasimir Malevich redefined the possibilities of art, he says.

"I see in principle that the function of a work of art is about the idea of a work of art. It is not to replicate something in the wider world, it must stand alongside things in the wider world."

Dashper and Nixon did not meet until the early 1990s, but exhibition curator Ben Curnow found some curious points of congruence in their work.

In the gallery entrance hall are Untitled (The Warriors), a Dashper drum-kit from 1998 - the skins painted in pastel roundels - and Nixon's Blue Rider from 1994, three hardboard rectangles painted red and propped up against a grand piano.

In a cabinet to the side are the artists' responses to Art Forum, the monthly Bible of the avant-garde. In 1970, Nixon painted over the covers of two Art Forums, one black, one red.

Nixon says the magazine was important for him because it featured artists writing about art. "I saw that it was the responsibility of the artist to not only make art but to discuss it.

"If art was about ideas, you had to disseminate them. Then you are off, veering down the hill in a wheelie cart."

In 1992, Dashper made it into Art Forum by buying advertising space. One issue contained a full-page ad which looked like the magazine's cover. A second had a quarter-page strip ad for a show at Peter McLeavey Gallery in Wellington, What I am reading now, which consisted of a 30-year complete run of Art Forum.

Producing work on similar themes is correlation or coincidence. Collaboration requires a more deliberate effort.

The Nixon-Dashper collaborations started with the lathe-cut records the pair started making in 1996.

"Julian had already made some records, and when he was over in Sydney he suggested we record something," Nixon says. "He knew this guy Peter King down in the South Island who had a pressing machine, so we knew it was possible to make records.

"We created the Circle label to put out not just our own records but ones by other artists we knew."

The following year, Nixon was doing a residency in Holland when the opportunity arose for a joint show at Laure Genillard Gallery in London.

He sent some of his orange paintings, which Dashper paired with painted drum-skins.

"In a collaboration you give responsibility to each other," Nixon says. "That is not to say you give over control. It is like going to someone's place for dinner - you don't try to do all the cooking. We are relaxed enough to go for dinner."

The centrepiece of the show is the large work the pair showed at Sue Crockford Gallery in 1997, seven Dashper drum-skins and seven of Nixon's orange hardboard panels, linked the way people would link hands.

Nixon says they wanted to do a big work, an important work. "It's like big architecture, the opportunity to build a hospital or apartment building."

The show also features new works. In Nixon's case, this means rough plyboard sheets painted silver, what he calls his secret paintings.

"In 1995, when I chose to use orange and only show orange paintings for five years, I started these ones as well. I have only been willing to exhibit them recently. When you do one thing you have a right to do the opposite."


Exhibition

* What: The World Is Your Studio, by Julian Dashper and John Nixon

* Where and when: Gus Fisher Gallery, 74 Shortland St, to Feb 12, (gallery closed Dec 20-Jan 17)