Allen Maddox in Auckland

TONY GREEN

Of momentary interest only are the irritations of newspaper reviewers and the expostulations of gallery goers: who are capable of being upset, one is glad to know, by Allen Maddox. He seems bent on teasing them to the limit with scrawl and splodge and torn canvas, bits of scrim cut off someone's wall, casual titles, and apparently berserk execution of endless simpleminded motifs, notably boxes and xes. So far he's winning hands down, drawing confessions of incomprehension from Neil Rowe and parental admonition from T.J. McNamara, refusals to buy from Auckland City Art Gallery and no sales yet from the show to anyone. He has his admirers, one of. whom stole a drawing by 4 year old Matthew Buis 'torn by Allen Maddox'. But no one yet has taken one of his splendid paintings home from the comfortable flat with the white-walled sitting room in which Peter Webb shows pictures.

There is something about his work that brings people out in rashes. They talk about aggression, violence, adolescent attitudes. And Allen helps them along by adroitly acting the wildman, knocking doors down after midnight, punching jaws, talking loony in thick Liverpool. And he's a big man and strong and grandly uninhibited. Sometimes I suspect he's so busy projecting this romantic wild image that he gets a bit carried away himself. There were deliberate provocations of bourgeois sensibility, enough, in this show. But that gives him plenty of room to get on with the serious business of the painting. It's big work with very real ambitions, and colossal energy and skill to bring it forward.

ALLEN MADDOX
Simply Sad Stars
mixed media on paper

But you'd think he'd said something dreadful the way his audience is scuttering about, tut-tutting. As if he's the first painter to go for untidynesses vis-a-vis the grid, the hard-edge, the format. Or the first to assert the primacy of spontaneous gesture, to upset the existing bounds of decorous behaviour. Even the obvious impermanence of some of his paintings is nothing new. Eva Hesse's informal work of the late '60s is already, some of it, disintegrating. There is a sense in which what Maddox does is gesture, bodily act, performance, of which painting is left as the only trace. The appropriate record of it, and what is perhaps marketable as a commodity after the event is the colour transparency. Much of the interest is in the performance and the installation in the gallery. It might satisfy the investors who want guaranteed permanent objects to sell them slides for their Kodak deepfreezes.

Painters are people who renew our imagery. If Allen Maddox is any use then what's new in his painting needs a good looking at. His present tactics distract many people from doing that. First thing to do is to take him seriously. What does he in fact do, not in the street or at the cocktail party opening, but in the one place that it matters, in the room with the canvas and paint. He swings his brush so fast he cannot have time to consider alternatives at each stroke, must get on with it, the action not the brooding over it, not stuck like Durer's Melancholy. That is evident from the rough strokes.

But this man roughens things up systematically. 1976, the grid, the support, canvas, scrim off someone's wall, duck, cotton, the lines the ground the texture the edges and boundaries. At present he is the master of systems of disorder. And that comes from taking a particular stance: the belief that order in painting can only be attained by faithfully following impulse with impulse, that the field is constituted of an accretion of acts/marks, not predictable in advance, not plannable for.

Unfortunately this does not work out. Because the decision has been made to work against certain style-features. So Maddox has planned to do the unplanned? Obviously a nonsensical stance then. That is, if he whirls his arm around as in the Diptych I don't even enjoy doing it, Phil, with a blue brush load, and makes three rapid stabs, his hand will produce the unfathomable, the unthought. By outwitting his wits, so to speak. This would otherwise seem to be the advantage of the schizophrenic, so lost he finds it all easy.

Elsewhere, say in the long Violet Painting slung rather than hung across the corner at P. Webb's, red spiderings at one end and broomstrokes of xes at the other, there is a contrast between the casual, or stupid drunk act at one end and the heavyweight thumper at the other, as uncareful as possible and so avoiding the desiccations of timid artistic types mindful of what is polite in a classy drawing room. The principle you could call Spoiling. 100 ways a naughty boy can mess up a nice bit of canvas. But all that negative stuff can only take you as far as what it opposes. It's a sado-masochistic vicious circle, sheer pleasure to stay inside of, and not have to face the fact that all roles all acts are limited, or 'conditioned'. There is no pure, natural act, and certainly approaching it by a deliberate aggression on some imaginary target is hardly pure or disinterested.

The only way to come to terms with Maddox's painting is not to be conned by the act he puts on into thinking it's Real. It's an act of magic. What you might think you are seeing is a sheet of canvas roughly pinned up, maybe ripped, slashed and sloshed over by a drooling idiot who's likely to come back any minute and rip you into shreds too. This creature has invaded the sitting room and he's out of control and probably uncontrollable. But the only place such an illusion of an ogreish presence can come from is the flurry of brushstrokes. Must have been done in a fury? Not so. Film of Jackson Pollock at work shows his calm attentive movement, dance. And broad strokes like Maddox's can be done at leisure, even coldly. It's the speed of each stroke and the latitude you notice. The result is the appearance of a canvas on which the paint is still in movement, hence the presence of a hand not long passed through here. The appearance of a manic presence is pure convention, the wildman artist's acts attested by the roughness of his work, the 'violence' of his actions, the violent impulses he's subject to. It's been done to death by 'expressionist' painters in the wake of the legend of Van Gogh.

In other words Auckland has largely conned itself into imagining a Rebel Hero on the basis of the most superficial look at the actual paintings. This familiar and outworn Romantic role can turn into pure ego-trip, if the artist is conned by his own public role, thinking that it's guaranteed him access to his Real Self, this apparent flouting of conventions (albeit the conventions are no longer such).

Truth is, access to the unknown, the new, entails abandonment of ego, as Allen has perhaps thought: but that involves much more than playing baddie roles. Now let's get something straight. I'm not putting Maddox down. In fact what he has got is positive and more in evidence in the recent show than in the one I saw at P. Webb's in 1976, but it's been obscured for: gallerygoers and perhaps even for Allen by the public image he's projecting. The positive force of this 'badboy' is his serene adventuring into possibilities of physical acts done at very high speed and with unhesitating decision, acts of daring. The excitement of his painting, 1976, was that the coloured strokes made a structure in front of the ground, did not imply an illusionary space removed from actuality, but every stroke stood up, for itself and for nothing else, no symbol, no metaphor, a physical piece of action, not mistakable for anything else. Each stroke is a piece in the development of a field. You could retrace the actual movement of the stroke. That's how it moved you, bodily. The strokes did not stand for nor could they be added up as the categories of emotion, conventionally abstracted, such as terror, pity, anger, devotion. He showed he had a wide variety of means for varying the simple box and x motif so that no two could ever be alike.

Now, in 1978, what comes out is, first, that the speed of his drawing is in the paintings. With practice, he can now trace a route round the blocks of his grid, that turns at unexpected angles, like a car-chase on two wheels, or sprinting through a maze. Or going out from an intersection point, as in D'Artagnan, coloured strokes rocketing outwards, or brushstrokes like flashing sword-blades.

The speed is unmatchable, dizzying, speaks of athletic brilliance of hand, a trained intelligence. He does amazing zig-zags inside triangles. Or multidirectional machine-gun fire in the triangles of the banners, like design for a ring (that's what the inscription says on the picture, though he titles it Flag for a Punk Rock Group).

Second, he's not bound by the completion of grids anymore. Butch Painting shows it. The shapes of the blocks are squashed up and stretched at will, and there are gaps too. Violet Diptych is all crosses in rows, no boxes.

What must be counted as a loss though is the softening of the contrast between painted structures and clear unpainted ground. Wet paint effects, dry brush comet-tails, filling in of triangles, all lead back to illusions of depth, of a fictional 'space' full of 'fictional' or 'metaphorical' events.

The picture that comes off best is Simply Sad Stars. Sheets of paper pinned to the white wall of the gallery, boxes placed irregularly, such that their boundaries often straddle two pieces of paper, masking the gap, and such that they are not complete within the rectangle of the whole set of paper sheets. There are several layers, beginning with a comb-like trickled grey distemper and going up to great clear coloured strokes. The white paper is little different from the white gallery walls. It's a shock when the rough paintwork stops clean, sharply interrupted at the edge of the work. You get the clear idea that you're seeing a fragment only of a continuing life-event. Maddox, for all the role-playing, is as smart a painter as any we've got.