Ritual

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

For over three decades Don Driver’s Ritual has unsettled audiences with its rural gang of marauding armed dolls. About his immediately preceding assemblage, Girl with skull, 1981 (Museum of New Zealand Te Papa Tongarewa), Driver stated: ‘I wanted to use the doll … to produce an awesome feeling’ and to create ‘the shock of seeing a goat’s skull upon a human body’.1

The next year Driver upped the ante with Ritual, deploying nine such beastly creatures wielding pitchforks and deadly scythes, each one standing on a forty-four-gallon drum and the entirety placed in a large dray. With a thunderous, pulsating soundtrack accompanying the assemblage, this was art that you could see (enhanced by a flashing red light, in case you missed it), hear and smell (hay was added to later installations of the work). A strong whiff of the occult and voodoo would have been pervasive when the artwork was first exhibited at the National Art Gallery, unsettling conservative visitors while thrilling others. Driver’s treatment of each doll took no prisoners: their dresses revealed protruding, enlarged, triumphant genitalia. When it was reported that a very proper security guard had tugged down their hemlines for the first few nights following their installation, ‘the power of art’ and ‘the shock of the new’ became palpable.

The timorous New Plymouth City Council sat on the fence when invited to purchase the work for the Govett-Brewster Art Gallery in 1984; ‘“Ritual” sexual overtones concern’ was a Hutt News headline when it visited the Dowse Art Museum in 1987, evidently causing visitor numbers to almost double.2 Two years later, Ritual finally found a permanent home when it was purchased by Te Papa’s predecessor, the National Art Gallery.

But an important question remains: Just what do these sinister dolls get up to overnight, back of house?

Sarah Farrar

Ritual is a large-scale sculpture by Don Driver consisting of ten 44-gallon drums surmounted by doll figures with goat-skull heads all set on a dray. Hay on the ground completes the work, which has an enigmatic relationship to art and the gallery. As Jim and Mary Barr wrote in 1999: 'Ritual seems to have a more sinister purpose, trekking endlessly through the order and mock neutrality of twentieth century, white cube, art galleries. Somewhere, at some time, these gods took the wrong turn . . .'

Two traditions of art
Two traditions of art meet in Ritual. One tradition is the custom of ritual parades of powerful religious or fetish figures before a crowd of believers - common to many cultures with which Driver is familiar. The other is the modern western art practice of bricolage - the use of diverse objects in art gallery assemblages. Driver's installations often suggest that the functions of the fetish and the artwork are not significantly different from each other.

A controversial work
Driver's Ritual has been a controversial and confrontational work since it was commissioned by the National Art Gallery in 1982. When it was first installed, the gallery's education officer assured visitors that 'The artist insists that the work has no black magic or sinister overtones.' It was also noted that a security guard working in the gallery was in the habit of modestly adjusting the genital-revealing skirts of the doll figures.

Te Papa owns twenty works by Driver, including other installation works and large wall hangings.