Richard Killeen 'Tools and Weapons'

From the moment of removal from their boxed housing there are systems at play for Richard Killeen’s early cut-out paintings—systems of classification, arrangement and dispersal. They were shown for the first time in a crucial exhibition at Peter McLeavey Gallery in Wellington in 1978, breaking new ground with figures and abstract shapes painted on carefully shaped aluminium pieces for display on the gallery wall in curious arrangements. These clusters questioned the choice of figuration, their taxonomy and collective familial history, and finally how they were arranged on the wall after escaping from the box.

In the early works, the figurative morsels were insect replicas, or at least two-dimensional black shadows of insects, that had been prised out of Killeen’s painted gridded canvasses of the 1970s and set free to stand on their own. Essentially, the figure was set free to be placed in the ground. (I recall that he won the 1976 Benson and Hedges Art Award with a formal abstract painting Frogshooter now in the collection of the Auckland City Art Gallery. It displayed the shapes of acquatic fauna aligned within a triangulated grid.) These shadowy shapes are essentially pictograms as the two-dimensional image clearly refers to an object in the world. Their removal from the canvas and release onto gallery walls was a major act for Killeen and was a major stylistic turning point of his career.

In later works other taxonomies followed in pictogram form: combs, dogs, leaves, spiders, moths, fish, tools, studio objects… and often these collections were interspersed with abstract shapes, where the indexical meaning of the pictogram no longer applied. An elongated black shape could be a stick, a belt or an eel. In these there is no longer a one-to-one correspondence between the signs and the signified, and so magic can happen.

Tools and Weapons, 1981, is a 21-part work where the magic does happen. The shapes give us a feeling that they represent tools, but the specific indexical link is broken: which shape is the axehead, which the meat cleaver and which the knuckle-duster?

The grouping coalesces the dangers of weapons and the utility of tools, removing the menace from the weapons and the utility from the tools. All pieces are coated in gunmetal grey alkyd paint that is loosely applied in a
rare expressionist moment. The pieces float on the wall, where the spaces between are like chinks in an overall grey armour. If the pieces are near touching, the chinks become clear; greater spacing allows the eye to target
individual shapes.

Killeen’s hanging instructions changed across the years. In Francis Pound’s catalogue essay for Killen’s 1999 retrospective at the Auckland City Art Gallery, Killeen makes the notebook point re installation:

‘Each thing needs to be in real space. Can
have nails through each, like an insect
collection’.

The chronology in the same catalogue lists1978 hanging instructions for the first cut-outs as: ‘Hang cut-outs five to six inches apart in any order’. By 1985 the instructions change: ‘Hang with edges touching, in any order’. By 1989: ‘Hang in a loose group, any order’.

Clearly, each specific hang creates a new work in a situation where the artist has limited power to control once the box of pieces has left the studio. The nature of the hang is also a comment on how museums catalogue and exhibit their holdings, from drawers, to display boxes and wall mounts.

For the dramatic arrangement of Tools and Weapons there are no specific regionalist references; it seems not to be particularly about New Zealand. But curiously, as Art History rolls on by, Killeen’s cut-outs become embedded in the country’s discourse because of their very questioning of the nationalist landscape tradition. His cut-outs, with all their notebook features, break from the canvas to occupy the wall, like emojis scattered in a vast on-going text.