Features

Hana Aoake chats to local artist James Robinson about life, art and the end of the world.

Dunedin-born James Robinson is one of New Zealand’s most successful artists. He completed a BFA from the Otago Polytechnic School of Art in 2000, and his work can be seen around campus. Each of his paintings is more than just paint on canvas; they’re sculptures, using objects in versatile ways.
 
The violent application of paint and the improvised nature of his work create a sense of trauma, often frightening the viewer, as though the viewer is witnessing a child’s nightmare. His works have a sense of intimacy, time, memory, consciousness, and voyeurism, and engage with an array of ideologies ranging from Stuckism and Buddhism through to Dadaism. Robinson appropriates a large range of Modernist and contemporary artists, from Leonardo Da Vinci to Van Gogh to Simon Cann and (perhaps subconsciously) John Pule and Penny Siopis.
 
Although he is a highly successful artist and a recipient of the Wallace Award, New Zealand’s most prestigious art prize, Robinson rigorously rejects the exclusionary boundaries of ‘high’ art and the exclusivity of the bourgeois capitalist driven nature of contemporary art. “I think what’s happened with art is that academia has kind of claimed avant garde space as its own. So the elite are on the edge, so there is actually no edge anymore because they control it. Art isn’t something they control. This is my head and my experience.”
 
Much of Robinson’s work blurs the distinction between ‘high’ and ‘low’ forms of art, due to the way in which he often entwines art, psyche and nature. In his short animated film XO Genesis, made collaboratively with another Dunedin-born artist, Rowan Wernham, Robinson has created a range of images. XO Genesis bought the world of James Robinson to life and in it Robinson tirelessly employed the same materials he uses for his works to build the sets and models. As its title suggests, XO Genesis examines ideas of rebirth, death and destruction. As well as that it’s just a really, really great animated film.
 
Many of the works in Robinson’s recent exhibition Heaven v Earth (golden heart- ritual womb) were in Robinson’s Christchurch studio during the February earthquake. Another work was made in response to the earthquake in Japan. “I wanted to show a record that there was a nuclear meltdown in the Pacific again.” This sense of nihilism, and of a lingering omnipresent doomsday, can be traced to Robinson’s fascination with the evolutionary nature of the universe and especially with the desecration of the earth and cyclic changes in the universe which predict the end of existence. “There is this idea that we are on the end of a civilisation. We might not be here in one hundred years. We already are a race in decline.”
 
James Robinson is currently showing Heaven v Earth (golden heart- ritual womb) at Glue Gallery.