object relations in exhibition titles.^11 The future tense,
obviously, is speculative or at least anticipatory—
something may or will occur (she will paint a
painting). The past perfect (or pluperfect) organises
more than one event sequentially (she had painted
and exhibited a painting) or expresses a condition
and a result (if she had painted it, she would have
exhibited the painting). The past perfect is the ‘if’
part and implies that something follows in a way
the past tense does not (she painted it—end of); the
considerable difference between the participles had
and has. Why this matters is attitudinal. The past
perfect suggests that none of the actions named
is conceived by the speaker as either isolated or
essentially done with. Further, ‘if’ imputes the radical
contingency at the heart of the enterprise.
If: if ‘a’ then maybe ‘b’; if ‘p’ then maybe ‘j’ then
maybe ‘m’; if ‘this’ then maybe ‘this’ and if so then
what of ‘this’ and ‘this’ or perhaps ‘this’...?
Where each ‘this’ is an action undertaken by Millar
it is responsive to what has occurred before but
unpredictably within the context of echoing call
and response in painting. For these are not integers
(discrete, whole, regularly spaced, predictable)
so much as occurrences in duration. Occurrences
informed by her and our accumulated prior
experiences real and imagined, thinking, feeling, being
and doing but not, in essence, able to be anticipated as
to thought, form or effect. Occurrences in-between.
Wherein harbours painting’s capacity to surprise
and excite, effected but undiminished by its pressured
histories. It takes courage to continue with gesture but
something of genius to continue to take it away. She
will give-take back; she had given-taken back.^12
- It builds implicitly on the dual English- and German-language
publication Judy Millar: You You, Me Me published by Kerber
Verlag on the occasion of her exhibition Giraffe-Bottle-Gun at the
53rd Venice Biennale, 2009, in that the book shares the focus on the
masking-tape works and post-millennium paintings. - I contributed an essay ‘Walls & Mist: Patrick Lundberg’s
Paintings’ to the previous issue of Art New Zealand (170, Winter
2019, pp. 74–78) that raised this point and drew on Jullien’s analysis
of pre-modern Chinese painters’ treatises. I noted there my wish to
consider Lundberg and Millar’s practices as partners to this matter
of the in-between, which I think is shared between their practices
much as they differ in modality and method and much as the
painters differ in age, gender, ethnicity and experience. - François Jullien, The Great Image Has No Form or On the Nonobject
through Painting, University of Chicago Press, Chicago 2009, pp.
45–46. - Ibid. p. 99. Further to my previous essay on Lundberg’s practice, I
concluded it with the notion of a painter ‘not quitting, not sticking,’
which Jullien offers as an alternative translation of bu ji bu li. - Untitled (2005) is the subject of a stand-alone essay accompanying
its exhibition at Robert Heald Gallery, Wellington, in September of
this year. Also to be shown then in the office space are a selection
of masking tape works from the 1980s and ‘90s (although not those
exhibited in St Gallen). - There’s a connection here to László Moholy-Nagy’s moves from
and to painting in response to technology. Famously, in 1923 he
dictated instructions for enamelled abstract paintings over the
telephone, utilising then novel technologies of communication and
mass-production. Rather than a rejection of painting, however, this
was part of a consideration of painting’s task. See Joyce Tsai, László
Moholy-Nagy: Painting After Photography, University of California
Press, Oakland 2018.- I have in mind here Giambattista Tiepolo’s masterpiece,
the ceiling for the Treppenhaus in the Residenz at Würzburg,
Germany. One of the persistent fascinations of this extraordinary
allegorical fresco is its recursive interrelation of its different phases
of production. As an example, from small, vigorous oil on paper
sketches to the finished scheme more than 30 metres in length,
tiny brushstrokes barely a brush-hair’s width are transformed into
undulating drapery clearly visible from the stair below. See Svetlana
Alpers & Michael Baxandall, Tiepolo and the Pictorial Intelligence, Yale
University Press, New Haven 1994. - Whimsically, earlier this year Millar brought my attention to the
film Kung Fu Panda, 2008. When the hero, Po Ping, first enters the
Hall of Warriors at the commencement of his training he encounters
several peerless artefacts including a painting. In awe at his
proximity to the famed artwork he gasps: ‘I’ve only seen paintings
of that painting.’ - See Peter Shand, ‘If I were Penelope... ’, Art New Zealand 91,
Winter 1999, pp. 60–63, 87. - Jullien, op. cit., p. 97.
- For example, a 1994 exhibition at Gow Langsford Gallery was
called The Past and Future Perfect, which finds an echo and inversion
in St Gallen, or I Will, Should, Can, Must, May, Would Like to Express,
Auckland Art Gallery in 2005. - Travel to Judy Millar: The Future and the Past Perfect at
Kunstmuseum St Gallen and Frozen Gesture: Gesture in Painting from
Roy Lichtenstein to Katharina Grosse at Kunstmuseum Winterthur was
supported by the University of Auckland. I am also very grateful to
Patrick Lundberg for his insightful critical feedback on the draft of
this essay and, as always, to Judy Millar.
16.InHome&Taanila,op.cit.,p.27.- Playboy, September 1970, pp. 179–81.
- See Harri Kalha, ‘A House of Ill Repute: Figuring out the
Futuro’, in Home and Taanila, op. cit., pp. 160–63. In the story a
group of women who have arrived from outer space in a Futuro-
styled sky-ship clad in leather and stiletto boots cavort together for
the sake of the male gaze. - The address at the head of the letter is given as STAR-TECH
HOMES, PO Box 10734 Wellington. The earlier brochure (with
expression-of-interest coupon on the back) was accompanied by
an explanatory letter from Bill Wilkinson and bore the address 57
Lakewood Ave, Churton Park. Both in the collection of Grant Major
and Judy Darragh. - Grant Major, in an email to the author, 16 December 2018.
- Ibid.
- http://www.thefuturohouse.com.
- See ‘Farewell to the Futuro: an interview with Marko Home
and Mika Taanila’, Disegno, http://www.disegnodaily.com/article/
farewell-to-the-futuro-an-interview-with-marko-home-and-mika-
taanila, accessed 22 March 2018.
AccumulatingSubtractions
(continuedfrompage79)
FormFollowsFantasy
(continuedfrompage109)In memoriam
Art New Zealand would like to record the death in May of
Roger Blackley. Roger’s career began in Auckland, where he
was curator of historical New Zealand art at Auckland City
Art Gallery, and moved to Wellington where, in 1998, he
joined the Art History department at Victoria University. He
was the author of numerous books on New Zealand art and
had been a regular contributor to Art New Zealand, for the
first time in 1977, writing on Alfred Sharpe for issue 7.
Our thoughts and condolences go out to Roger’s family.