Private collection, Auckland. Acquired from Peter McLeavey Gallery, Wellington.
Julian Dashper – Visual Esparanto
Essay by VICTORIA MUNN
Having described it as ‘visual Esperanto’, Dashper’s artistic output embraces abstraction from his standpoint as a New Zealand artist.1 Dashper plays an important role in New Zealand’s art history, brokering a move from the mid-century regionalist artists keen to establish a distinctive artistic identity for New Zealand, to an outward perspective, and a new generation of artists engaging with global discourses and embracing a variety of media. Rather than feeling suppressed or limited by New Zealand’s remote place in the south Pacific, Dashper embraced this isolation in his practice, in which the topic of internationalism consistently appears, and the international language of abstraction is spoken fluently.
In his c1985 oil painting (Lot 32) and 1986 watercolour (Lot 34), both entitled Anglican Church at Matauri Bay, Dashper’s painterly, gestural strokes are reminiscent of the Abstract Expressionists’ action paintings. Yet in providing a place name in his title, Dashper simultaneously undermines the movement’s rejection of conventional descriptive titles. Dashper often used his artwork titles to state his subject, and respond to his specific environment, whether locations, buildings or landscapes. In both the watercolour and oil painting, the composition’s relation to the Matauri Bay church is not clear or direct. But the title gives the viewer space for imagination and response, to reconcile the visual with the lexical. Dashper’s outlook is not exclusively international, either. His title also engages with New Zealand art history, potentially commenting on New Zealand artists’ predilection for the landscape as subject matter and the doctrine of New Zealand regionalism, and his responses to New Zealand sites certainly diverge from the landscape traditions of our art history. With this approach, early in his artistic career, Dashper introduced a new generation of New Zealand art that was experimental, consequential, and embraced quotation of other artists.
Both paintings of Anglican Church at Matauri Bay (Lot 32 and Lot 34) read as riotous networks of lines and colours. Dashper’s strong green and purple lines do not neatly divide the painting into clean blocks of colour, but traverse the canvas, and seem to continue beyond it. The translucency of forms in the screenprint enable Dashper to overlap them, creating a greater sense of depth or distance. Rather than the varying blocks of colours employed in the oil painting, Dashper’s watercolour relies heavily on forms of primary colours. While some lines travel across the picture plane, from top to bottom, white lines connect to form misshapen crosses, a more figurative nod to his subject matter. Dashper’s acrylic painting on paper, It’s All So Beautiful (Lot 36), also includes bold sections of bright colours, though they are consciously contained and without the severe overlapping. These three works all retain evidence of the painterly process, whether the obvious brushstrokes of thin paint, the uneven cuts of paper, or the block letters spelling PURPLE in an unpainted strip across the picture plane.
But where Anglican Church at Matauri Bay generously bestows the viewer with Dashper’s subject, untitled (Lot 33) of c1996 challenges the viewer to distinguish Dashper’s concept or meaning from the work’s form. His concentric circles of coloured vinyl constitute a recognisable facet of his abstract lexicon, and resist any discussion of their formal qualities. In 1997, Dashper asserted that his art was ‘about abstraction and painting, rather than being actual painting,’ signalling a development from his earlier gestural work.² Indeed, untitled lacks any trace of the artist’s hand. And the various colours of contact adhesive circles were chosen not with serious consideration of colour theory, artistic expression or symbolism, but by Dashper’s two-year-old son who crawled amongst them on the floor, making his selections.
Rather than shying away from dialogue, many of Dashper’s works emphasise their connections to other international artists. For example, in his graphite on paper work A Philip Guston (Lot 35) (c1991), with his clearly outlined individual forms differentiated by patterns, Dashper playfully draws upon the simplified, quasi-cartoonesque forms of Canadian American artist Philip Guston’s later work. In the clearly delineated sections of colour, and the slick, flat, vinyl circles of untitled, Dashper clearly speaks the language of ‘visual Esperanto’. Employing the vocabulary of American abstract artists, the work brings to mind the geometric shapes of Frank Stella and, to many, Dashper’s use of concentric circles cites Kenneth Noland’s and Jasper John’s targets.
Applying the circles onto the drumhead, untitled is also representative of the consistent references Dashper’s art makes to pop culture. Readers will likely be familiar with one of Dashper’s witty, most iconic works, The Big Bang Theory of 1992-1993 – five drum kits, each bass branded with the names of a canonical New Zealand artist. Dashper embraced – even advertised – connections between his work and pop culture, and likened the language of abstraction to that of pop music, similar in their generic nature. Instead of separating abstraction from the everyday world, then, Dashper amalgamates the two, simultaneously fusing popular and high cultures.
The conceptual, playful and witty works of Dashper have earned the artist a distinct position in New Zealand art history. Tellingly, Dashper resisted being labelled a painter or sculptor, simply preferring the term ‘artist’. His oeuvre demonstrates constant enquiry and reflection on parochial traditions. Impressively, Dashper manages to simultaneously look inward, at New Zealand’s society, art history and art market, and outward, at the global forces of abstract art. Consistently, Dashper traversed different artistic positions, avoiding categorisation, and embracing ‘slippages’, rather than marching to the beat of the same drum.
1 Julian Dashper, quoted in ‘Will the circle be unbroken: A conversation between Julian Dashper and Trevor Smith’, in The Twist (Hamilton: Waikato Museum of Art and History, 1998), 22.
2 Julian Dashper, The Twist (Hamilton: Waikato Museum of Art and History, 1998), 33.
