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This essay originally appeared in New Zealand Art at Te Papa (Te Papa Press, 2018).
Once when asked what sort of painting he did, Julian Dashper quipped, ‘Super-realist.’ To ‘What is it that you paint pictures of?’, he replied, ‘Abstract art.’1 Circles on drumheads are exactly the kind of pictures of abstract art Dashper was referring to. The circle motif links these works to the history of abstraction, such as the target paintings of Jasper Johns or Kenneth Noland. But the drumheads are off-the-shelf commercial products; the coloured circles are made not of paint but of coloured contact adhesive. Laid out on the floor, Dashper’s two-year-old son crawled around and chose them.
Drumheads first appeared in Dashper’s work in The big bang theory, 1992–93 (Chartwell Collection, Auckland Art Gallery Toi o Tāmaki), a set of five drum kits emblazoned with the names of five famous New Zealand artists, including ‘The Hoteres’ and ‘The Colin McCahons’. These works signalled Dashper’s growing interest in comparing the worlds of pop music and painting; in a number of interviews he drew connections between popular music and abstract art, in particular their similarly generic nature.
In a 1997 interview Dashper noted that his work was ‘about abstraction and painting, rather than being actual painting’.2 A painted circle is so generic that there is little point in talking about its formal qualities — instead, these works demonstrate how abstract art has been internationally adopted (Dashper once described abstraction as ‘visual Esperanto’).3
Internationalism was an enduring subject for Dashper, especially the way art spreads, either physically (in 1994 he exhibited the packing crate used to transport Jackson Pollock’s Blue poles: Number 11, 1952, 1952, when it was acquired by the National Gallery of Australia) or in reproduction (by exhibiting slides of his works, rather than the actual objects). Refusing to accept New Zealand’s remoteness as a barrier to being an international artist, Dashper absorbed this obstacle into his practice. Like much of his work after the early 1990s, the drumheads were developed with travel in mind: they fit inside a large suitcase.
Charlotte Huddleston
1 Julian Dashper, quoted in Christopher Cook, ‘Dinner with Julian’, in Midwestern unlike you and me: New Zealand’s Julian Dashper, Sioux City Art Center, Iowa, 2005, p. 35.
2 Julian Dashper, interviewed by Mark Kirby, Luxus, The Hague, 1997; reprinted in The Twist, Waikato Museum of Art and History, 1998, p. 33.
3 Julian Dashper, interviewed by Trevor Smith, in ‘Will the circle be unbroken: A conversation between Julian Dashper and Trevor Smith’, Sarah Cottier Gallery, Sydney, 1996; reprinted in The Twist, Waikato Museum of Art and History, 1998, p. 22.