The Dance of the Hooligans: Dick Frizzell

It’s been a big twelve months.

We moved back to Auckland after nine years of bucolic splendour in Hawkes Bay.

And I turned seventy.

One of these events prompted an enormous upheaval of several storage systems and the other a reflective rummage through the subsequently exposed archive.

A lot of highly excitable ‘unpacking’…everything new again…unexpected juxtapositions in the reshuffle!

I was struck by how much great material I had accumulated over the years…and how much stuff had never been ‘dealt to’…the notebooks and lists of orphaned ideas… and I decided that now might be an appropriate time to somehow gather it all together. It seemed to me that there must be some reason that I’d dragged this stuff around with me for so long and if I DID deal to it I might find out what that reason was!

As the vast piles of hitherto unexploited resource material got glued or painted onto the ‘narratively camouflaged’ and alarmingly disparate Hooligan canvases (‘Part 1’,a dispensing of indispensable bumph) the ‘lost paintings’ emerging into the sunlight from the rear of the storage racks also seemed to be calling out for some sort of attention.

So I talked Gary and John into letting me take over the Kitchener Street gallery as well and we put ‘Part 2’ together. A mini retrospective of a sort I suppose.

It’s been fun…a major unbundling… and something has definitely emerged from it all…I obviously like buckets!

This monstrous production (the exhibition’s signature work The Dance of the Hooligans, which hangs at Lorne St) is a sort of scrapbook painting. A vast repository of all the ideas and images that I’ve accumulated over the last 50 years or so that never found a conceptual or aesthetic home in any previous context.

The plan…such as it was…was to build the largest canvas my painting wall could contain and then glue or paint all this alarmingly diverse material on it at random…and see what happened.

What happened was that all sorts of interesting and insistent organising principles kept intruding into the process which made me aware…more than ever…that we have to be constantly alert to the often inhibiting guidelines we erect around ourselves for moral and intellectual support.

There was a lot of liberating going on with this dance.

- Dick Frizzell, Artist Statement, 2013