Wanker

This essay originally appeared in New Zealand Art at Te Papa (Te Papa Press, 2018).

Does this artwork deserve to be called a ‘wanker’? Well, it is nothing if not colourful. Four rows of crosses shake and shudder within their lattice boxes. The oil paint has a slapdash appeal, each stroke thick and lustrous as though it has been applied in a rush. The composition is as spontaneous as a game of noughts and crosses. Even though it was completed in 1979, it’s easy to imagine the slicks of paint are still wet.

Perhaps the profane title is a nod to the finale of a tumultuous decade in world politics and the death of the hippie dream. Or is it personal? Is the viewer who stares at this canvas searching for meaning a wanker? Perhaps Allen Maddox is making a stab at the pretentiousness of the art world, notorious for being up itself. It’s tempting to interpret these crosses as a negation. A cross is the annotation given
to a wrong answer.

But Wanker also epitomises the joys of expressionism. Every swish of Maddox’s brush is alive with the pleasure of paint. And the title itself could easily be self-deprecating. Maddox’s career is an example of the dislocation of New Zealand art. The Liverpool-born artist worked in Napier three decades after the original abstract expressionists whom he much admired, such as Jackson Pollock and Mark Rothko, had come to prominence in the post-war New York of the 1940s and 1950s.

But who really cares about the locations of artists or who was first on the scene? Maddox doesn’t. X marks the spot, he insists, again and again.

Maddox’s first cross canvas began as an accident. In the mid-1970s he cancelled out a failed painting and thereby discovered his signature ‘crosses in boxes’. The compositions that he wrought from this simple structural framework are endless: random and in sync, nihilistic and joyful, repetitive and variable. Even the X on the end of Maddox’s surname is satisfying; it’s as if it was purpose-built for him to paint.

Megan Dunn

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For some 25 years, starting in the late 1970s, Allen Maddox painted almost nothing but crosses. The cross was a crossing out, a filler, a symbol. ‘And of course it’s a hex,’ he once said, in his Liverpool accent. ‘That means you can’t get off it.’

Like all Maddox paintings, this one is full of energy. His hand would have streaked across the canvas, layering on the colours, leaving no time to think. The title, Wanker, may be a wry swipe at himself, or a yell of protest at people who dismissed his work.

There’s a framework here: the grid. But there is freedom too. Maddox was a master of control and chaos – a balance achieved through decades of obsessive practice.