Laurence Simmons on Allen Maddox

Laurence Simmons on Allen Maddox

Featured in The Lois Going Collection Glorious Vision: Art at the Centre of a Life Lived

Allen Maddox — along with his peers, friends (and sometime frenemies) Philip Clairmont and Tony Fomison — has long been regarded as one of the ‘bad boys’ of New Zealand painting. They all produced rhetorically inflated work with a sense of macho entitlement and called themselves the Militant Artists Union whenever they got together. The cheeky travesties of their art suggest the gall of an adolescent ripping the family home apart. ‘Last week I smashed the place up. Destroyed some irreplaceable works,’ Maddox once confessed in a letter to Tony Green. On another occasion he commented that he ‘would like to be able to visually reproduce the little electric thought patterns that go on in your head when one is paranoiac.’

It would appear that mental instability (including paranoid schizophrenia) was the engine of his art. Maddox started producing his ‘X paintings’ around 1975 when in a rage he ‘crossed out’ the image he was working on. He immediately saw the power of the gesture, and of the motif, which he then multiplied like gridded semaphore flags. Alluding to the Scottish saltire, he mordantly described his crosses as ‘a symbol of simple human activity. It’s what St Alban, St David and St Andrew were crucified on.’ So behind the cross there was something more than a simple borrowing, there was an action, ‘simple human activity’. The cross was an effect not a fulfilment. To some extent what he was engaged in was ‘action painting’. Maddox had discovered the perverse pleasure we find in crossing something out. We’ve used it, done with it, assimilated it, or just simply don’t want it any more. In this sense, Maddox’s images might be read as ‘self-portraits’, a vision of the futility of destiny, revelling in life’s impotence. Having nothing to say, he says it ever and ever more marvellously. The visual poetry is almost too persuasive. The execution is phlegmatically deliberate, he tended to use oils as if they were poster paints, flatly on unprimed, unstretched canvas — he even used old bedsheets for a while. The result was a surreptitious richness. The jostle of mismatched marks and textures that bounce off each other enable an exhilarating sense of participation, as if we view stroke by stroke.

These five works illustrate the rich itinerary of Maddox’s career. The most iconic is the gridded Liar from 1980, the most riotous, and therefore interesting, with its resonances of Jackson Pollock, is the Untitled work originally from his former dealer’s collection, and somewhere in between sits For Amy (1998), a more refined chaos. There’s an intensity to Maddox’s method that’s hard to explain. I sense a mental process in his work as a whole: there is something personal he is trying to deal with or at least excommunicate: obsessive memories of some sort, neurosis, a repetition compulsion... The need to expel the ‘monsters produced by the sleep of reason’, as Goya caustically defined it. He made a cottage industry of his own vulnerability. The drama of the work inheres in self-doubt which torments Maddox, in the face of a drive that sustains him nonetheless. Each frantic cross is a victory against odds. Who is the Liar we want to ask? One of Maddox’s painterly peers, the artist himself? Or is the title, added in pencil, addressed sarcastically in prospect to the future owner of the work? The particular psychological intensity, almost histrionic, involves a hint of playing for the stakes of what is beyond the immediately visible. The surprise is that such a negative doubting can generate real artistic force. It does so in Maddox’s art by recovering some of the traditional aesthetic capacities of painting, those which in 1975 he first crossed out.

This is the case for the 1984 Untitled work on canvas paper. There is no ‘cross’ as such but the ‘crossing out’ is there in the repeated jabs and twists — almost creating circles — of the artist’s brush. There must be, you feel, an aesthetic logic to the vibrant interactions of colour. When something doesn’t quite cohere you see what it is made of. Everything, including the snatches of abstract expressionism, feels random-looking at first glance but on sustained attention profoundly disciplined, somehow imported from somewhere and put in place. There exists a strangely lucid control in the awkwardness. In the Untitled watercolour there is a similar sublimity of rich colour that nudges through the grid of crosses. A combination of fury and poignance. The marks lie on the surface but dig into pictorial space and he deliberately joins the incomplete crosses with a shaky black drawn line.

Maddox’s art is not abstract, just relentlessly abstracting. It might look simple but actually it is not. The artist has to select and arrange things. They have to deliberately make no sense, form no style, evidence no care, no intention. If Maddox’s painting is obsessive and nightmarish, as some critics have asserted, the effect pertains not to its subject matter, the cross, but to its mockery of understanding. Liar again! The paintings, of course, cross out what we might think about them. They convey that we might know a lot but that our knowledge is useless. Everything in these paintings is hard to take and impossible to think about because they makes no concessions to the viewer’s intelligence. There exists an unalterable core of incomprehension. Somehow this seems very contemporary as we seem to career from one foreseeable disaster to another. If there is ever a hitch to enjoying Maddox it is satiety, too much all at once. But that is also what keeps us coming back to him.

Laurence Simmons