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‘Droll thing life is–that mysterious arrangement of merciless logic for a futile purpose. The most you can hope for it is some knowledge of yourself–that comes too late–a crop of inextinguishable regret.’ Joseph Conrad–Heart of Darkness

For several years now, Adrian Jackman’s paintings have been subtly persuading viewers into consideration of various troubled tokens closely aligned with modern[ist] prestige; from golfing fairways and fast cars to computer gaming and more recently, industrial architecture. Reflecting an ongoing investigation into substratum of the aforementioned touchstones, it is a Conradian approach to representation which for Jackman marks a point of differance between his work and the [dominant] landscape oriented typology of most New Zealand art. If it is correct that the best art is by necessity incapable of conclusive opinion, then painting nowadays is firmly seated in Conrad’s boat. Indeed, H.L. Mencken noted of Heart of Darkness that central to Conrad’s argument was the non-determinant dimension of his protagonist.

Jackman’s most recent work draws upon a polyvalent approach to personal recollection through the use of stock photographic footage. With his deconstructive yet imaginative approach to visual narrative, Jackman has carefully developed a reductive drawing procedure appropriate for one who has come of age and spent his journeyman years, like many, involved with and observant of the gradual developments in digital imaging. In a process utilizing the technical facility of digitally sourcing and photocopying to degrade any superfluous aspects of an image, Jackman intends painting to enter into the structural remains of photographic space, much like the era of computer gaming technologies he grew up with.

‘The revolt of represented things–will this be a world without mirror, without theater and without painting? No and Yes. What is in question is the surface of separation, the limit formed by the screen of painting or surrounded by the scene’s frame.’ – Lyotard. In discussing the monochromatic 60’s and 70’s work of Jacques Monory, Lyotard elucidated not only the position of his charge in relation to modernism but also Monory’s position within a much older trajectory; the history of painting and it’s primary agent, symbolic realism. Symbolism and libidinal tension are the constituents which can be perceived in Monory’s [and Jackman’s] work; in Jackman’s instance offering an updated approach to dealing with representational content suggestive of capitalism, current affairs and the personal.

Freed of baroque ornamentation, the development of recent drawing based practices utilizing the reductive properties of pixel surgery and photocopying, provides an interesting contrast and parallel position to the early deconstructive approaches employed prior to many modern advances in imaging [photography, video and digital media]. For Jackman the historical models of other painterly ‘surgeons’, for instance Cezanne and Matisse, are never out of range. Given the rapid changes of temperature that art has been subject to during the last two decades, it is interesting to observe here that the old role of painter is one which continues to offer new potential in the continual revision of discourse.

For Jackman, painting offers a journalistic yet personal negotiation of the liminal territory his muse [the limit/s of modernism] occupies. Locally, although much could be made of the possibility of a local reading into the subject of Jackman’s work, especially given New Zealand’s position as emerging middle class emeritus of the British Commonwealth, ultimately it is as part of a more global socialist-type aesthetic critique prevalent in contemporary art that Jackman’s work is engaged.

M.J. Kjarr

Image: ‘The English Patient (detail), Adrian Jackman, 2006.

Out In The Sticks

“At 6am we weigh’d and stood out of the Bay which I have named Poverty Bay because it afforded us no one thing we wanted.” (1)

We were mostly deposited in New Zealand by varied forebears. Some of us have been here longer than others. Significant others among us even have a claim of residence dating back possibly millennia. A lot has happened since European arrival in New Zealand, largely technological. A rough shod explanation would be that our early modern colonization and global isolation lasted for a while and then rapidly grew less within a few short years of explosive Calvinist (i.e. Protestant) inspired economic growth. And so it goes.

Amongst the advances (for better or worse) the modern period has given us, possibly the most solely remedial of these is the phenomenon commonly known as The Grand Tour. We have after all possessed a desire to travel somewhere new as a primary form of education since the days of Aristotle. Most obviously to us now however, it was the Enlightenment period of the 18th century which disseminated this by now well pegged out Eurocentrism.

To paraphrase Thoreau, the aesthetic intention of the enlightenment was to open channels of thought more so than of trade. More recently the late Hugh Kenner coined this literate desire for discovery; The Elsewhere Community. In his essay, originally delivered as a Massey Lecture in 1998, Kenner outlined the history of the Grand Tour. The resulting truncated history lesson summarized the (ultimately) invisible nature of such endeavors:

“The elsewhere community we’ve been talking about is not so much an ideal we can define, as it is a set of instances we can point to. They are instances of human collaboration, which can sometimes even be unconscious, or else as simple and sustaining as the knowledge that we’re not alone.” (2)

Like the post-apocalyptic effect upon a city just after Christmas when the masses have bailed out, nowadays most of us occasionally (if not often) wish for an antithesis to our fast moving evolution into material idealism. In a similar vein (as illustrated by Kenner et al) one of the issues facing recent generations of cultural content providers in New Zealand, as elsewhere, is one of transparency, provenance and as always, signification. Perhaps a reason in part for our trepidation lies in how the relatively recent founding of New Zealand as “immigrant nation” has necessitated some possibly divisive anthropology? For example, to Maori colonization has meant a jump from ancient spiritual practices to “couch based” meta narratives, such as Freud probing the prohibitive nature of Maori superstitions (3). All this and much more in just one hundred or so years.

The recent series of shows constituting Narrations of Displacement can be viewed as a form of discourse closely meshed to Kenner’s concept of the elsewhere community; i.e. individual perspectives addressing past, present and future from various viewpoints and hypotheses. The series has in this way functioned succinctly through collectively addressing several of the histories which have led us to how we presently view New Zealand.

M.J. Kjarr (catalogue text)

1. Shirley Maddock, Far as a man may go, Collins, Auckland, 1969, pp47 (Captain James Cook & quot).
2. Hugh Kenner, The Elsewhere Community, Allen and Unwin, New South Wales, 1998, pp87.
3. Sigmund Freud, Totem and Taboo, Routledge, London, 2001 (orig 1913; English trans. James Strachey 1950), pp32,33.

Free Parking: Unitec bDes Painting Graduates Show:
It can be fairly said for current art production in general that artistic autonomy is often one of the immediate demands put upon the viewer. Very loosely put, as part of a conceptual stance autonomy often reflects the desire of content providers such as painters to avoid the cultural censorship that can result (for instance) from the modernist rhetoric of occasionally miscalculated formalist analysis.

Similarly and in addition to this observation, Charles Esche notes the aforementioned tendency of artists as “a state of being or action, rather than something vested in the objects of production. To act autonomously, while committing the results of those acts to specific contexts and conditions, is the move that might preserve the idea of the autonomy of art from its total commodification.”

To a certain extent this approach risks obviating the unknowing art viewer to drawing such negative collusions as befits the villager confronted by a barely comprehensible Zarathrusta type figure, newly arrived in town from his alpine cave and proclaiming the death of something important. What then to make of a selection of graduate art students? Each of this years emerging artists from Unitec’s Bachelor of Design Painting programme have undertaken a period of concentrated study and reflection and have graduated with a variety of autonomous aesthetic practices. It is however as a collective artists show that the viewer in this instance occupies a privileged position, namely through an opportunity of experiencing the varied outcomes of the semi-communal collective which constitutes Unitec’s School of Design.

An investigation of the range of views, beliefs and hypotheses in this show is beyond the scope of this introduction. Nevertheless you are hereby invited to investigate, form and enjoy your own opinions; hopefully emerging with further insight into the study and practice of contemporary art.

MJ Kjarr (catalogue text)

Like many, I too had a stint in the hospitality industry. On and off, from making literally tons of sausages in my dads butchery as a teenager on summer holidays, to later on cutting croissant triangles in a mangy hotel kitchen, until my first quarter century elapsed the flirtation with food preparation held. For a year or two I collected recipes, noting down well worn formulas and read books by Michelin Star cooks like Marco Pierre White whose recipes were inevitably too difficult and expensive for me. In the end the trade off for all the odd hours was seemingly little more than a dead social life. And so hospitality quickly loosened it’s grasp, much like a doomed relationship. It was decided after all that consuming, even on a meager budget, was more enjoyable than slaving in a commercial kitchen. The relationship died.

The hospitality workforce is comprised from a variety of societal backgrounds. From the near infinite range of individual circumstances there are several traits which usually determine the path of the chef. I will not divulge these hackneyed contingencies, suffice to say there is one road in particular, lesser traveled, usually more esteemed and even for what it is worth, widely celebrated. It is the notorious path of egotism in want of genius. It is shared in particular with the modernist era artist. Thankfully for the art world at least, the baton of ‘troubled genius’ has now largely passed into the hands of the celebrity chef, leaving artists to labour away more intelligently than some previous generations under the guise Laurie Anderson succinctly termed; ‘content providers’. Time will tell whether this recent displacement in the narrative of art history will be remembered; preserved.

Nevertheless, due to this somewhat shared history, it is of interest whenever the convergence of two cultural bulwarks such as art and food meet. It is just as T.S. Eliot said in his retrospectively well “preserved” 1948 essay, Notes towards the Definition of Culture: ‘it is only by an overlapping and sharing of interests, by participation and mutual appreciation, that the cohesion necessary for culture can obtain. A religion requires not only a body of priests who know what they are doing, but a body of worshipers who know what is being done’.

Each of the artists involved in the group show ‘Preserve’ has, through a course of action involving the home territory of the heretofore vaunted chef, licentiously picked up another vaunted baton, the victual notion of repast, (namely) the discerning act of providing food for a meal. Subsequently, each of the artists involved in this project have undertaken a conceptual navigation of the idea of repast, incorporating ideas and positions from their varied practices. It is a sharing of interests between food and art which brings about Preserve. The show represents a collaboration between Exhibition Practice students from Unitec’s Bachelor of Design programme. A one night only event, visitors will be invited to warm their senses and taste buds whilst experiencing the variety of conceptual positions on offer.

MJ Kjarr (catalogue text)

‘Preserve’ was a happening at Alberton Restuarant, Mt Albert, Auckland, November 3, 2005