{"id":325725,"date":"2026-02-07T21:10:08","date_gmt":"2026-02-07T21:10:08","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/325725\/"},"modified":"2026-02-07T21:10:08","modified_gmt":"2026-02-07T21:10:08","slug":"some-16-years-after-his-death-nz-artists-acclaimed-exhibition-rides-again","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/325725\/","title":{"rendered":"Some 16 years after his death, NZ artist\u2019s acclaimed exhibition rides again"},"content":{"rendered":"

\n Twenty years ago, a touring exhibition carved a path through the American Midwest, from Sioux City, Iowa to Lincoln, Nebraska and Wichita, Kansas. Titled Midwestern Unlike You and Me: New Zealand\u2019s Julian Dashper, it\u2019s thought to be the first and only time a survey of a New Zealand artist has
\n toured US museums. Its subject was a figure who used his country\u2019s perceived remoteness not only as a focus, but also as a catalyst for a witty, profound and global career.\n <\/p>\n

On its 20th anniversary, and 16 years after Dashper\u2019s death, aged 49, the exhibition is being restaged at Auckland\u2019s Michael Lett Gallery. The work \u2013 with its bright colours, clean lines, and sharp symmetries \u2013 strikes the eye with a freshness that feels less like a historical document and more like the maturation of a contemporary talent.<\/p>\n

\u201cA really nice thing about Julian\u2019s work is that it hasn\u2019t become familiar,\u201d says Marie Shannon, Dashper\u2019s partner and a cele\u00adbrated artist herself. \u201cIt\u2019s still very much something that only he was doing, and it still surprises.\u201d<\/p>\n

Dashper\u2019s own beginnings were framed by creative tension. Born on a leap day, February 29, 1960, he grew up in a modernist home in Auckland designed and built by his father, filled with art and music. Yet his path wasn\u2019t predestined. Given that Dashper was as likely to be at a rugby game as a gallery, his decision to enrol at Elam School of Fine Arts in 1978 surprised his parents. There, he was taught by two giants of late-20th-century New Zealand art who represented opposing poles: the tormented expressionist Philip Clairmont and the cool conceptual provocateur Billy Apple.<\/p>\n

This early lesson in contradiction became a cornerstone of his practice. \u201cJulian is making work about art,\u201d says curator and art historian Christina Barton. \u201cBut at the same time, he\u2019s making art. He\u2019s doing both things at once.\u201d<\/p>\n

He was deeply serious about art\u2019s discourse, yet approached its tropes and institutions with a wry humour.<\/p>\n

\"TheThe Sioux City Arts Centre in Iowa was the first venue for Julian Dashper\u2019s 2005-06 touring exhibition, Midwestern Unlike You and Me. and (right) an installation at the Michael Lett Gallery, which is restaging Dashper’s 2005-06 retrospective. Photos \/ Sioux City Art Center, Sioux City, Iowa USA<\/p>\n

Conceptual Wit<\/p>\n

For a New Zealand artist, the \u201ctyranny of distance\u201d has always been both an economic and psychological reality. But Dashper didn\u2019t just meekly navigate it; he weaponised it with conceptual wit. He made records, books, slides and paintings designed to fit in carry-on luggage \u2013 practical solutions that became the art itself. <\/p>\n

A series of his drum paintings \u2013 acrylic or adhesive on stretched drum skins \u2013 epitomised this. They were bold, graphic objects that resonated with the language of American pop art and 60s minimalism, but their very form was inherently portable and inexpensive.<\/p>\n

The DIY ethos was fundamental. \u201cJulian\u2019s whole big thing was: make your own opportunities,\u201d says Shannon. \u201cDon\u2019t wait for someone to come and ask you. Don\u2019t wait to be invited, just go and do it. He got a little bit sick of gatekeeping. He didn\u2019t want to wait around until he was 40 when he was 23 or whatever; he wanted to just go and do things.\u201d<\/p>\n

Perhaps his most notorious act of long-distance engagement came in 1992 with a pair of sly interventions in Artforum magazine. A paid advertisement featured a mock cover where the masthead read \u201cArtfrom\u201d; \u201cNew Zealand\u201d replaced \u201cInternational\u201d; and his name stood in for the date. The image was of his Untitled (slide works). The following month, another ad \u201creviewed\u201d the fake cover as an artwork. \u201cI got 30,000 people to see my work without having to leave the studio,\u201d he told Christopher Cook, co-curator for the American exhibition, sending a signal \u201cback into the wild blue yonder from whence it came\u201d.<\/p>\n

Midwestern Unlike You and Me in 2005-06 was the ultimate recognition of this strategy. The show was the culmination of years of global networking, including a pivotal 2001 residency at Donald Judd\u2019s Chinati Foundation in Marfa, Texas, where he met the exhibition\u2019s other co-curator, David Raskin. <\/p>\n

Yet Dashper was determined to maintain his base in New Zealand. \u201cHaving an international practice was really important for Julian,\u201d explains Shannon, \u201cbut what he wanted was to be able to live here and have an international practice, not to have to relocate.\u201d<\/p>\n

The exhibition\u2019s title perfectly captured Dashper\u2019s paradoxical position. As Barton explains, \u201cThere\u2019s a subtlety to the title. Julian both understands the \u2018Midwestern condition\u2019, of being in the provinces, of not having access to the highest and best, and imagines escaping it: the \u2018unlike you and me\u2019 might be Julian in Auckland and a curator in New York \u2013 that is being in two distinct \u2018centres\u2019.\u201d He was both the provincial and the cosmopolitan, a duality he embodied and exploited.<\/p>\n

Poetic sound work<\/p>\n

Dashper\u2019s work with sound, particularly his vinyl records, is some of his most poetic. Works such as Blue Circles (1-8) were pressed from ambient recordings made in front of Jackson Pollock\u2019s Blue Poles in Australia\u2019s National Gallery. The listener expects a revelation, but the grooves hold only the muffled shuffle of gallery visitors. \u201cThe records were about latency,\u201d says Shannon. \u201cYou don\u2019t need to listen to the record \u2026 It\u2019s simply that this was recorded on the site and this is the artefact of that site. And that\u2019s what you then think about.\u201d<\/p>\n

This cerebral play could confound local audiences. His 1993 installation Big Bang Theory, featuring five drum kits branded with spoof names of New Zealand art legends, prompted The New Zealand Herald critic TJ McNamara to write, \u201cIf it is irony, it is witty. If it is serious, it is nonsense.\u201d For Dashper, it was likely both \u2013 a celebratory monument and a cheeky deconstruction of local art mythology.<\/p>\n

\"AnAn installation view of Dashper’s original exhibition. Photo \/ Sioux City Art Center, Sioux City, Iowa USA\/<\/p>\n

The friction was persistent. In 2002, he published Reviews \u2026 he loves me not, a deadpan booklet compiling 29 negative reviews from McNamara spanning 1981-2002. Shannon recalls: \u201cFor Julian, it was like, \u2018He\u2019s not trying to understand the work. He doesn\u2019t want to engage with it, but he has to tell everyone how much he hates it every single time.\u2019\u201d<\/p>\n

Barton observes a deeper cultural schism: \u201cThere\u2019s a natural antipathy in New Zealand towards conceptual practice. People expect content, meaning, heartfelt expression. They still subscribe to romantic notions of the solitary artist working in their garret. Julian just was not that kind of painter. Being a conceptual artist, however, positioned him importantly within a venerable history of critical contemporary practice.\u201d<\/p>\n

Yet those who knew him emphasise that this serious practice was infused with levity. \u201cHe took his work very seriously and he took other people\u2019s work very seriously,\u201d says Shannon, \u201cbut he also thought it was important to have fun.\u201d<\/p>\n

This spirit made him a pivotal figure for emerging artists. He was an engaged mentor to many. \u201cHe was really important to a generation of artists that followed him,\u201d says Barton. \u201cHe would always say to them, \u2018Go out and do it for yourselves.\u2019\u201d<\/p>\n

His legacy is evident in the international practices of the following generation of New Zealand artists such as Kate Newby, Fiona Connor and Simon Denny, who inherited his DIY globalism, but have found it expedient to stay overseas and regularly return, rather than the other way around.<\/p>\n

For Denny, whose father helped Dashper make books and record covers, encountering Dashper\u2019s work as a teenager was formative. \u201cHis work was, for me, a strange mix of accessible and obscure,\u201d he says from Germany, where he has lived and worked since 2007. A visit to Dashper\u2019s studio was a revelation. \u201cI remember asking him what he did in there, and he just said he spent time looking at things and sorting things, making connections, selecting and arranging things. I was blown away that this could be considered productive artistic labour \u2013 I thought you had to produce something.\u201d<\/p>\n

Life of dedication<\/p>\n

In his final years, diagnosed with melanoma, a new and profound layer surfaced. Dashper began a series using his prescribed liquid morphine as a medium, applying it to raw linen to create stark, quiet works. \u201cHe is deadly serious,\u201d says Barton. \u201cBut he\u2019s not a theorist or philosopher. He\u2019s an observer of the mechanisms of the art system and its keenest commentator. <\/p>\n

\u201cFor me, though, something shifts towards the end of his life \u2026 without sentiment, because the works were still utterly minimal, he injected a sense of mortality, using liquid morphine he was prescribed for his terminal illness and applying this to the surface of his canvases.\u201d<\/p>\n

This turn reframed his lifelong preoccupations. The emptiness at the centre of what he called his \u201cbagel\u201d paintings, the ambient silence on his records, the geographic distance \u2013 all took on a new, human resonance. \u201cWith those late works in mind, I think you can see a certain poignancy in his work more generally, a knowledge of working in the wake of something that has past, an absence or loss that he\u2019s giving shape to. In the wake of the modernist ideal, all that is left is the paraphernalia.\u201d<\/p>\n

Dashper\u2019s death in 2009 coincided with the rise of Instagram, a platform that would democratise the global image flow he had spent his career manually engineering. Two decades on from Midwestern, Dashper\u2019s questions about distance, identity, and art-world systems feel both historically specific and urgently contemporary.<\/p>\n

\u201cI think the work does still look very current,\u201d says Andrew Thomas, co-director of Michael Lett Gallery. \u201cThe things Julian was dealing with around distance \u2026 it is still something that New Zealand artists grapple with.\u201d<\/p>\n

In the years since his death, a mythology has grown around Dashper \u2013 the artist\u2019s artist, the shrewd networker who left us too soon. \u201cYou could say to a certain extent Julian\u2019s been mythologised,\u201d acknowledges Thomas. \u201cPerhaps partly because he passed away so young.\u201d<\/p>\n

For those closest to his work, his importance is grounded not in myth, but in the rigour of the work itself. \u201cHe lived a life of complete dedication,\u201d says Barton. \u201cI think he was absolutely the real deal \u2026 he reminds me that art is an extremely powerful and serious thing, and the longer you live with it, the deeper it becomes.\u201d<\/p>\n

Perhaps Shannon offers the simplest summary of his enduring appeal, paraphrasing pioneering art dealer Peter McLeavey: \u201cFashion is something that looks great when you first see it and then it just starts to look weirder and weirder. And good art is something that looks weird when you first see it and then it just starts to look better and better.\u201d<\/p>\n

Two decades after his American survey, Julian Dashper\u2019s work continues to look better, sharper and more necessary than ever. It invites us to look past the bright surface, and to recognise in his lifelong negotiation with distance a profound meditation on how we connect, how we communicate, and what we leave behind. <\/p>\n

Midwestern Unlike You and Me<\/b> is at Auckland\u2019s Michael Lett Gallery until March 7.<\/b><\/p>\n

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