Don Driver: An Ounce of Ambiguity
Don Driver, Dimension No 1, 1970
When I think of New Plymouth I think of Peter Peryer, Len Lye and Don Driver. Of the three, Driver was the only one to make New Plymouth his lifelong home after moving there from Hawke’s Bay as a boy. Peryer lived there for many years later in life, but had a far more peripatetic early life. And though Len Lye never lived in New Plymouth, he chose this city, of all he could have chosen, to house his work after his death. What is it that drew these artists to New Plymouth? And what did New Plymouth give them?
When I think about Peter Peryer, Len Lye and Don Driver a slight smile forms at the corner of my mouth. I see Peryer’s Dead Steer, an image at once sombre and inexplicably funny; the beast is as dead as anything, but with its legs splayed in the air it becomes farcical. I hear the music from Len Lye’s Kaleidoscope, see the whirling, swirling patterns and imagine the comic gyrations and secretions of his Water Whirler on Wellington’s waterfront. And most of all, because he always managed to see the heart of the matter and put things together in just the right way, I see works like Driver’s Rollaway.
Don Driver, Rollaway, 2000
A small skull sits upon an upturned clay flowerpot, which sits upon a giant plastic sneaker with wheels at the back—all of which is seemingly held together by a length of blue rope. Absurd, morbid and hilarious at once: Rollaway is a memento mori for our postmodern souls. Put it on your mantelpiece, reflect on it daily. It’ll make reading the news a little easier, a little funnier. It’ll put things in perspective.
Movement and stasis, life and death, sincerity and irony—Rollaway, like so many of Driver’s works, is work is brought to life through the artist’s genius assemblage of these ideas. As he said in a 1997 interview, just three years before he made Rollaway: “I want to place in an exaggerated context things normally in an everyday range of vision.”
The skull, first of all: millennia-old artistic symbol of death, used by most great painters from Rembrandt to Picasso to continually remind viewers of the ephemerality of existence. But with postmodern eyes it is difficult for us to look back at an old master memento mori without a hint of irony, without Warhol’s car crashes and his Marilyns repeated over and over at the back of the mind. Driver saw Warhol too; he knew a skull could never again be used sincerely. And so enter the absurd: a giant shoe that could only have been worn by the likes of a clown, or Ronald McDonald (but what is the orifice-like hole on its top for?) Most skulls aren’t going anywhere, but this one appears to be skating off to the horizon, horns bent back for aerodynamics like a Tour de France time triallist. It gives the impression of motion, but without moving; a little like our modern lives, with all our tweeting and flying that gets us nowhere.
Don Driver, Chromatic II, 2000
Or consider Chromatic II, a work from the same year as Rollaway, in which Driver takes a different approach to movement and stasis. Made from aluminium airplane wing struts, the work’s materials reference travel and great distances. But hung flat and still against a wall, these small parts of one of the great industrial inventions are rendered ineffective; they are reconstituted for an aesthetic function, never to move again. The work raises questions about the life of industrial inventions; the opposite, in many ways, to Jeff Koons’ Hoovers, prevented from fulfilling their functions. Add to this ideas of sonority and silence (the horizontal aluminium struts appear as keys on a keyboard—might the work’s title refer to the musical scale?—and yet hang mutely, silently, forever) and a small work becomes a site of complex ideas and dualities.
If death is Rollaway’s central idea, its message is to not take it too seriously. Don’t let life roll away from you, but don’t get too caught up in it either. Remember death, but rather than letting it weigh you down, have some fun with the prospect; laugh at it; read Milan Kundera rather than Nietzsche. It is this irreverent spirit that defines the New Plymouth artists. Peryer, Lye and Driver share an ability to deal with weighty ideas without ever losing the smile in the corner of the mouth.
Rollaway is quintessential Driver at the height of his powers. The work is a totem like the many that Driver owned and displayed in his own home. Yet Rollaway is a totem for our own times: humorous, cynical and wry, caught between sincerity and irony, speeding off somewhere but making questionable progress.
Driver seems sometimes to occupy a corner of New Zealand’s art history that we haven’t yet come to terms with. Looking at his works, whether it be Dimension No 1 or major installations like Ritual (held by Te Papa, and presaging assemblages like Rollaway) it can be easy to forget that he was contemporaneous with McCahon, Angus and Woollaston. So separate were Driver’s artistic concerns that he may as well have been living in a different country to that great trio. And ironically, far from making him provincial, it may be that New Plymouth shielded him from the dominant frame of art in New Zealand at the time, with its continuing references to regionalism and landscape, and its ongoing struggles with even tepid abstraction. When looking at Don Driver’s art, New Plymouth seems in many ways far closer to New York than to Auckland or Wellington.
Dimension No 1 is a major early work that emphasises the international world of ideas Driver was engaged with. If Rollaway is Driver towards the end of his career, most free in his associative powers of assemblage, Dimension No 1 is Driver in earlier years, finally finding a way to reconcile the young man’s disdain for tradition with the then-prevalent mode of international hard-edged abstraction. Driver’s is abstraction with a twinkle in the eye—Donald Judd if he could have taken himself a little less seriously.
And the comparison to Donald Judd is more apt than it might at first seem, at least for the first half of Driver’s career. A 1979 exhibition catalogue describes Dimension No 1 as a “Wall relief on a constructed wooden base with two diagonal corners and five horizontal ribs over which canvas is stretched taut so they show through…” In other words, it comes very close to one of Judd’s “specific objects.” These were artworks that blurred simple categories between painting and sculpture—tied up with what we now think of as Minimalism, specific objects didn’t fit artistic categories of the time. Nor did Driver’s works. In breaking through the picture plane with the horizontal struts that force parts of the canvas forward and off the wall, Judd both declared his own future directions (never to be held back by the limits of a canvas) and opened up new possibilities for art in New Zealand.
Dimension No 1 is one of Driver’s more subdued abstractions, granted—part of a series from the years around 1970—and yet in its arrangement of colours seems to maintain an ironic mode that separates it from both the abstraction of the likes of Milan Mrkusich, and the sincere Minimalism of New York at the time. Driver’s colours are almost-neon hues; comic tonal gradations (blue on purple on orange-red, in this case); and never once conceding to living room decorum that said a painting should at least try to not clash with the curtains. Subtly introducing humour to hard-edged abstraction is no easy task, but Driver managed it—and always with an ounce of ambiguity, so that gallery-goers are still not quite sure whether to smile or scratch the chin sincerely.
Much early writing on Don Driver tried to place him in the New Zealand box in which most people thought any artist working in New Zealand inevitably belonged. The logic, which now seems so naive, was that because he lived in New Zealand, his work somehow dealt with New Zealand. We find, for instance, attempts to link his art to his immediate environment, such as: Driver’s “acid yellows, hot pinks and sharp greens… derive from what he sees and finds around him in New Plymouth”; or that in his assemblages Driver sought to represent rural New Zealand through his use of materials like sackcloth and industrial waste. Try as I might, last time I visited New Plymouth I could not manage to make out any acid yellows or hot pinks.
On the contrary, far from seeking to represent his own city or country, Driver’s art is cosmopolitan. Not the Gordon Walters kind of cosmopolitan, slick and sleek and sexy and at home in any European capital. Instead the traveller cosmopolitan: the kind of person who travels and finds themselves wide-eyed, interested in everything. At his home Driver collected an eclectic range of objects, from fetish dolls to Buddhist statues and an enormous range of materials that many would categorise as junk. Out of all this Driver created his own vision, a view of the world far more expansive and daring than that of many of his New Zealand contemporaries. His was an “internationalist and universalist ethos mixed in with values from regionalist and non-Western art sources”, as writer John Hurrell has put it so well: “The resulting sensibility allows his work to oscillate between aesthetic delectation and black humour, serene contemplation and overt manipulation of primal fears.”
Driver’s gift to us is a kind of vision that is unique not just here, in McCahon land and Man Alone land, but which is in many cases unique anywhere. His relationship to New York was one of fruitful looking, but he does not seem to have been concerned with borrowing from or contributing to the New York art world. His 1965 trip to America (undertaken only because his funds did not stretch to Europe) no doubt influenced his work—yet it is not a part of the Hero’s Journey in the same way that McCahon’s 1958 America trip is now seen. Driver might just be difficult for us to place because of the uniqueness of his vision. He appears now to a new generation of New Zealanders as a genial man with an astoundingly generous sense of humour.
I’m reminded of the way Peter Peryer described his own artistic development. “I think there’s been an emotional maturing in my image-making,” he said in a 1994 documentary on his life and work. “In many ways I was moving from West to East in my attitudes. I think I mean that they have moved from the crucified Christ to the laughing Buddha. That is what I mean by a maturing.” And the same seems true of Don Driver. The hint of the inner laughing Buddha was always there in his work, even in his most sincere abstractions, but it took time for it to develop. In Rollaway the thoughtful good humour is clear, where the wheels at the back now appear to represent some kind of Buddhist cycle of life; and it’s clear too in Chromatic II, which seems to say we should live by music and colour.
Essay commissioned for Webb’s Works of Art catalogue, November 2019.