Panel discussion at Te Uru Waitākere Contemporary Gallery, 18 August 2024
23 August 2024
MILKSTARS: Sound constellations in the Chartwell Collection, installation view, Te Uru, 2024, The Chartwell Collection, courtesy of the artists and Te Uru. Photo by Samuel Hartnett.
The following are excerpts from Sue Gardiner’s notes in response to questions posed by curator James Gatt for a Panel Discussion at Te Uru Contemporary Art Gallery, Titirangi, Tamaki, 18 August, 2024. The event was in association with MILKSTARS/ Sound Constellations in the Chartwell Collection, 17 August to 20 October 2024, marking Chartwell’s 50th Anniversary. On the panel were Marie Shannon, Sue Cramer and Sue Gardiner who gathered to discuss the work of Julian Dashper and John Nixon. These notes were prepared by Sue to reflect some of Chartwell’s history of support for the visual arts.
James Gatt: Sue G, congratulations on 50 years of Chartwell. Could you start by telling us about the formation of the Chartwell Collection and how you became involved?
The Chartwell history began in Kirikiriroa Hamilton where my sister Karen and I and our parents had lived from 1962. Things were changing in Hamilton at that time - 1964 was the foundation of Waikato University, followed two years later by the Waikato Institute of Technology. There was a group of artist educators who were to become core leaders in national Māori visual art education, studying at the Hamilton Teachers College. And the Waikato Society of Arts, the mainstay of the visual art world there at that time, was made up of a very active group of artists and supporters with Rob Gardiner as WSA president. This WSA group was working hard to see the development of a new purpose built, professionally run, public art gallery in the Waikato. Important in this history was the opening of The Govett-Brewster Gallery in New Plymouth in 1970 whose Director was invited to visit Hamilton to present a report about the value of public art galleries to the Hamilton Mayor.
With the goal in mind to create a new public art collection, to assist in the development of the proposed new public art gallery, Chartwell founder Rob Gardiner conceived of a new model for its time, the establishment of an independent charitable trust that set out to generate funds for the development of a new public loan collection to be held within and created for a future public gallery in the city. The Chartwell Collection was named and established in 1974. Rob began to acquire works from 1974 which were lodged with and cared for at the existing small Waikato Art Museum. Then from 1982 – 1992, the collection moved for another ten years to be stored and exhibited in an independent arts centre in Hamilton that Chartwell developed, called the Centre for Contemporary Art (CFCA), and this is where Rob first worked with artists Julian Dashper and John Nixon. Rob and a very small team put on over 130 exhibitions at the CFCA from 1982 until 1994.
Much later, the Collection moved to the care of the Auckland Art Gallery Toi o Tāmaki in 1997 which is its home today on long term loan. The Gallery is also Chartwell’s major lending partner for a series of 50th Anniversary exhibitions in 2024.
JG: Sue G, looking back, were there any key points for the Collection that helped to shape it?
One of the key points was that the project from day one was a charitable one, the collection had a charitable purpose, it wasn’t a private art collection. Rob has described our roles as charitable trustees as being to preserve and promote contemporary cultural artefacts which reveal human sentient life and thought as well as changes in human knowledge and the nature of the creative human being, with the focus on the ideation processes involved in both making and viewing art.
So from the start, Chartwell asked how do we build an audience for art that would champion the importance of visual artists’ ideas in contemporary society. At the heart of the Project has been the belief that the sense-activated imagination needed to be more widely valued. So by deeply exploring the visual arts, through the collection seen in public art galleries, we would be able to ultimately encourage everyone to access and use both their sensing, imagining bodies and conscious, reasoning minds and understand that the deep impulse to make and create defines us all as human beings.
There has always been the sense that there had not been enough general communal understandings about contemporary art, its nature and its role in building a culture with its potential for fulfilment, for a nation and its citizens. So Chartwell’s investigation has always been incredibly wide spread across human evolution, the imagination, aesthetics and perception and the nature of human vision, philosophy, spiritual histories, education and neuroscience for example.
To quote Rob, he has noted that “we are aesthetic, socially and environmentally constructed organisms, and nothing is more important than our culture and related values and beliefs – these point to the importance and special nature of art.”
JG: Sue G, the Chartwell Collection has works dating back to the 1940s but focuses its collecting efforts on contemporary art? Why?
There are some works that have been acquired back, if you like, as a way to trace an important idea through time, but principally, our focus has been on the contemporary nature of creative thought. In the first year of acquisitions, Chartwell acquired the first work by Gretchen Albrecht, for example, in 1974, a year before the National Art Gallery in Wellington acquired their first work by the artist. With regards to first nation Australian artists, Chartwell acquired many works in the same year they were made, often ahead of the development of a dealer gallery network that focussed on their work.
Art making is in a process of change as it works to reveal the continuously adapting creative process, and the ever-expanding and evolving notions of imaginative enquiry. So the collection can be seen in an active way to focus on the way the visual arts have a role in building a culture, that in itself is a generative project- and so the collection becomes an accumulation of creative acts, taking us deeper into new avenues of expanding imaginative enquiry, tracking time as it goes along.
It is a way to look back at the history of human thinking, seen through the eyes, hands, minds of artists, but always addressing the ways ideas weave in and out of the present and the future too. There has been a clear focus on abstraction, the non-objective, and approaches to making that test the boundaries of the past, that address materiality and reveal the energy of future contemplative thinking. There has always been a need to apply conceptual thought to the provocation of ideas represented in the works made by artists in the collection. For us it is always the opportunity to actively LEARN and in this instance of an exhibition of sonic characteristics, to actively LISTEN.
In the end, the collection wants to ask- How do we think about creative visual thinking from the universal perspective of art making?
JG: What does the term ‘artist orbits’ mean to each of you?
(These notes pertain to Chartwell’s perspective of ‘orbits’ of significance.)
“The Chartwell philosophy is that everything in our lives is related in some way,” Rob once explained.
I think this notion of orbits has been amplified for me in the process of writing the Chartwell history for the upcoming 50 th anniversary book. For the early days of Chartwell, the notion of an art orbit might be thought of through the main centres of art in New Zealand, Auckland and Wellington, Christchurch and Dunedin, so in Hamilton, a regional centre, there was always a sense of reaching out and drawing in these orbits to a regional context. It resulted in rewarding interactions between artists, the growing dealer gallery system and public gallery curators and directors who came to the Centre for Contemporary Art between 1982 and 1994. Sue Crockford Gallery, Trish Clark Gallery and others, all made things happen in Hamilton for Chartwell in those years. I think of the Australian artists coming to NZ in the 1980s often for the first time and heading to Hamilton, rather than staying only at the main art centre orbits in Auckland…John Nixon for example came to Hamilton in 1987, made work and exhibited there, with Chartwell acquiring Self Portrait (Non-Objective Composition( Night) in same year. In the mid to late 1990’s, RMIT art academic and artist, David Thomas, regularly travelled to Hamilton as they had a reciprocal education programme with Wintec.
JG: Sue G, when did you first become aware of these artists (Julian Dashper and John Nixon) and why this particular interest in their work?
Across both Julian and John’s works, there is a strong thread from Chartwell’s perspective , to their focus on non-objective abstraction as an intense artistic and theoretical investigation in the nature of art. This pursuit of knowledge across two art practices was of huge interest. There are 113 works by Julian and 97 by John Nixon (together that’s nearly 10 percent of the collection) and Chartwell has been honoured to be a recipient of gifts of works, from Julian’s sound recordings and drawings, to John’s gift of 48 works to Chartwell in 2014.
Rob and I both found Julian was a friendly communicator and generous teacher and he started at Elam in 1978, the same year I started art history just up the road from Elam. Later in 1979, I lived in Whitaker Place opposite the Mansion Studios in 1979. Later when I worked at New Vision Gallery in the early to mid 80s, I met a lot of artists and Julian always encouraged me to visit artist run spaces, recommending shows for me to see, and made sure I knew the young artists he was so often mentoring such as Alicia Frankovich for example.
Rob first saw Julian’s works at New Vision Gallery in 1986. Acquisitions in the late 80s showed an increased interest for the Collection to explore large scale abstract expressionist paintings. That’s when he acquired the large triptych, Cass Altarpiece, 1986, for the collection.
Rob said recently “Wow I remember walking in on Cass and was bowled over immediately! A big painting using lots of paint! I really only came to fully understand the work later as is often the case. It was as if Julian had decided to use all the paint he had in a work out of ab-ex from New York and at a totally different scale to the famous Rita Angus Cass! So the work is really important for me in remembering those times.”
Julian had two exhibitions at the CFCA in 1987 and 1990 and came to install and spend time there. His exhibition in 1987, when Julian was 27, and which included Cass Altarpiece and around 35 other works, was a large show and was titled Julian Dashper – A survey.
As Julian’s practice changed in the 1990s, acquisitions reflected this.
Rob wrote recently:
"I could see Julians progress from Ab Ex to conceptual, to process, to new- materialism and via mediums, drawing, painting, found objects, photography, sound recordings, local art history then world art history - I think the Chartwell Collection has the lot .”
His focus on the structures of painting was of particular interest to Chartwell, the frame, the hanging chain, the preparatory drawing, who makes the work, his focus on particular subjects and motifs and the limitless possibilities within them has always been of interest.
This interest in art histories, links between music and visual art, and a rigorous enquiry into the material character of art and making is the key link between Julian and John for Chartwell.
John came to the CFCA in 1987, made work there and exhibited. The orbit of artists around Sue Crockford, Hamish McKay, Two Rooms Gallery, Sarah Cottier and Anna Schwartz was important to Chartwell.
The memorable exhibition Julian Daspher/John Nixon: The world is your studio, 20 November 2004 – 12 February 2005 at the Gus Fisher Gallery was important for the focus on the collaboration between the two artists. And also in 2004, Rob and I went to ACCA in Melbourne to see John Nixon EPW in 2004, an extraordinarily epic exhibition that explored his Experimental Painting Workshop, that had works intensely hung around the room and along an almost 30 metre wall.
Rob wrote in the Auckland Art Gallery Toi o Tāmaki catalogue to the 2018 exhibition John Nixon Abstraction, that “meeting Australian artist John Nixon was a revelation to me as a New Zealander from McCahon country. When we met, I was learning about the process of acquiring artworks from Chartwell and the ways in which the collection would be used by public rt gallery curators.”
Rob was also developing an advocacy for the significance of contemporary art and the need for its wide understanding.
JG: can you talk about the Auckland’s artist run spaces such as Teststrip which ran from 1992 to 1997. Do you have any memories of that space?
I had two little kids and went back to do my art history Masters around that time and I do remember visiting artist run spaces such as Fiat Lux which opened in 1996, and involved many of the same artists as Teststrip. I think the connection to the Teststrip artists for Chartwell was triggered by Sue Crockford who started to exhibit Denise Kum and Daniel Malone, and then later in 2009 took a window space in the doorway of the Fiat Lux location on Karangahape Rd, which also was where artist run space Gambia Castle was based and had been where Daniel Malone was living too. The contents of Daniel’s flat in the old Teststrip gallery rooms became the artwork Black Market to my Name which was acquired in its entirety in 2007. So I feel the spirit of Teststrip and the artist orbits around it is now embodied in this work.
JG: Sue G, looking around this exhibition, it’s clear that many artists in the Chartwell Collection have a preoccupation with sound in one way or another. Has the relationship between music and art been important to the collection?
Yes we are interested in the conversation between the aural and the visual. The connections with both music, and visual art as notions of abstraction has always been important to Chartwell. The phenomenon of synaesthesia has always been central to Chartwell involving the music of painting and the significance of visual music. Phil Dadson’s work here has been important too.
Aspects of time are important across both music and visual arts- and there is a particular interest in improvisation, rhythm, variations and systems, codes and structures and dynamic visceral interactions triggering memories and associated feelings. From Scratch also has their 50th anniversary this year.
JG: Sue, what do the practices of these great artists continue to teach us?
For Rob and I, it is their ability to bridge across an important time in New Zealand art history- the transitioning from modernism to postmodernism and using their work to voice the experimental and relentless nature of their thinking, that the practice of object making might focus on the reductive but the thinking is expansive. It’s like a sense of truth- to ideas and art making.
Thanks to Marie Shannon and Sue Cramer, for their contributions to the panel and their investment of time in the archiving and in depth commitment to see the works of Julian Dashper and John Nixon activated for future audiences. Thanks to Te Uru Contemporary Art Gallery and to curator James Gatt.
