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

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