Julian Dashper, Untitled, new installation of works
Julian Dashper, Untitled, new installation of works
The current exhibition of work by Julian Dashper continues with a new installation of late works viewable from Friday 2 August until the exhibition closes on Saturday 17 August.
We are also pleased to extend the current exhibition Pale Ideas by Zac Langdon-Pole until Saturday 17 August.
Continued from ‘9 Views of
Julian Dashper’s Last Works’
by David
Herkt
4. Silence
Dashper’s
late white works are profoundly silent. While they might
surround themselves by noisy reference (McCahon, Malevich,
Rauschenberg, even as Dashper himself has indicated,
Warhol), they are, in themselves, as objects, silent
fissures. Where they are contained, it is a bare
containment. The titles are simply the holding vessel. Where
they are en-framed, the framing can be paradoxical -
‘Untitled’ is frequently the title. The title is the
handle of nothingness, the chat around the edge, through
which there is an illusion of grasp. They contain the quiet
of the tomb.
5. Poetry
There is
a whole aesthetic history of white space. “The page
intervenes” Stéphane Mallarmé’s writes concerning the
spaces that aerate his long poem ‘Dice Thrown Never Will
Annul Chance’ (1897). A note for his incomplete
(uncompletable?) ‘master work’ Le Livre, reads:
“The intellectual armature of the poem, conceals itself and - takes place - holds in the space that isolates the stanzas and among the blankness of the white paper; a significant silence that it is no less lovely to compose than verse.“
In painting, there is Malevich’s White on White (1918) and Robert Rauschenberg’s White Paintings (1951) were described by John Cage as 'White on white. The blank is coloured by a supplementary white'. But Dashper’s white paintings, also white on white, are somehow whiter. They might repeat a gesture, but it is not the same. Dashper’s white, reiterated through the late works, is intently composed. It contains all previous art-whites. It is conscious, contemporary, and contemplative. It is both readily available and completely unique. Let us propose a new name for this colour: Dashper White.
6.
Resurrection
McCahon’s ‘Victory over death
2’ (1970) with its categorical ‘I AM’, backed with all
the power of quoted biblical utterance and the black/white
claritas of its light/dark message, is the obvious and
acknowledged precursor to Daspher’s ‘Untitled (Victory
over death Part 3)’. Here, Dashper’s long dialogue with
McCahon comes to its conclusion in three white canvases
stepped one upon the other. The ascendant block shapes might
seem to owe more to the McCahon’s earlier ‘Practical
religion: the resurrection of Lazarus showing Mount
Martha’ (1969), multiplying the flat weight of McCahon’s
South Otago table-mountain to heaven, but it is the title of
McCahon’s later work that is preserved as the chief
signifier. Daspher’s practice, always economic, has
stripped everything away from the McCahon reference but the
reference itself. It is this which is coded as the next
step, the next thing, the Part 3. Function replaces form.
Dashper’s late works whittle away the inessential, until
there are bare gestures left. Bare, barer, barest.
7. Time
Dashper created any
number of works with a temporal component. ‘Untitled
(Portrait of Ben Curnow)’/‘The work consists of Ben
Curnow sitting at a desk in the gallery’ with its constant
change through its various past and future exhibitions and
terrible inevitable finality, when Ben Curnow will no longer
be able to sit and be seen. There is also, at the other
extreme, Curriculum Vitae (various dates), where Dashper’s
written biography and list of exhibitions are pinned to a
gallery wall. While the exhibitions are still added to the
exhibition-listing, right up to the exhibition of its
exhibit, the biography pages of Curriculum Vitae are
considered to have been completed. Dashper’s ‘Future
Call’ a work in which a telephone is phoned from New
Zealand (nominally always ahead of the rest of the world for
each new day) but is not answered. Dashper’s last
exhibited DVD works, Untitled (the last 15 seconds of the
last Venice Biennale) and Untitled (the last second of the
last Venice Biennale) are other examples, if more are
needed. But perhaps, instead of time as a subject in
Dashper, we should consider death. Death as absence. Or did
we always, despite the vitality, the humour, and the wit?
Were all Dashper’s works always poised upon the edge of
non-being, No’s Knife?
8. This Is Not The
End.
Dashper’s white works are deceptively
artless, but their apparent guilelessness is profoundly
Dashperian; their whites are not quite whites, their
painting is not quite painting, their more is just the same,
their artlessness, art. Their frames are without substance,
but only in a physical sense. When there is nothing, the
least gesture becomes thunderous. What do we do with works
like this, so apparently minimal, so initially recalcitrant
and apparently unforthcoming to interpretation? It is, as it
always was; they are become devices to manufacture meaning.
Dashper hands us a space in things, a kink in the forces, a
twist in time, and a history and a culture are played like a
Mobius strip for the production of art. ‘Death is imposed
on creative beings, not on works of art,’ Adorno wrote,
‘and thus it has appeared in art only in a refracted mode,
as allegory.’ Dashper’s late, great works are profound
and elegiac allegories.
9.
‘Untitled’
-July, 2013
ENDS