Enzed dead zone

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

Ian Scott first made his name in the late 1960s, with his pop-ironic scenes of glamour girls floating over geometricised New Zealand landscapes. In the 1970s he jumped ship for modernist abstraction, becoming known for his iconic ‘Lattice’ paintings. Later in the 1980s, Scott changed codes yet again, this time to postmodern ‘appropriation art’. Enzed dead zone of 1988 is a fine example. It’s art about art, with Scott appropriating images from art history to locate himself within it or to locate it within him.

The main image comes from Colin McCahon’s painting Crucifixion, 1950–52, acquired by the National Art Gallery in 1988 — the year after his death. It is reproduced in black and white, suggesting Scott copied it from a printed source (recalling the way McCahon himself engaged with canonical Western art via reproduction). Scott faithfully enlarges McCahon’s image to be six times bigger, but jettisons its painterly warmth in the process.

Scott further updates the McCahon by inserting it into a red frame and adding a red reversed-out text block — signature elements from American postmodernist Barbara Kruger who, also in 1988, had a massive solo show at the National Art Gallery’s annex Shed 11. Back then, she was flavour of the month, lauded for combining found photographic images with politically punchy texts. But why redo her idea in a painting? Was Scott’s nod to Kruger wrongheaded or perverse? Was he missing the point or making a new one?

Further, the text block reproduces the masthead of a toxic review by Garth Cartwright of another 1988 show, NZ XI — ‘Enzed dead zone’, published in the New Zealand Listener.1 Assembled by the Auckland City Art Gallery and Sydney’s Art Gallery of New South Wales, NZ XI had asserted a new contemporary New Zealand art ‘team’. It forsook McCahon-style nationalism, but also sidelined Scott.

In Scott’s painting, the initials on the sign mocking the crucified Christ — ‘INRI’ (King of the Jews) — are echoed in the NZ XI logo that Scott smuggles in. Is Scott having a go at McCahon, at Cartwright or at the then-trendy NZ XI team? Whom is he crucifying here? Will they be resurrected? Will Scott?

Robert Leonard

1 Garth Cartwright, ‘Enzed dead zone’, New Zealand Listener, 26 March 1988, pp. 52–3.