In 1972, at the age of 23, Jeffrey Harris had already won the attention of a small group of influential artists and collectors in Dunedin, and had been included in New Zealand Young Contemporaries at Auckland Art Gallery. His energy and confidence were matched in paintings and drawings shown at the CSA Gallery in Christchurch and in the Otago Museum foyer, Dunedin, and he was taken up by the leading North Island dealers Barry Lett in Auckland and Peter McLeavey in Wellington.
At first sight, the paintings that caused this excitement appeared naive and anachronistic. Hectic, crowded and with highly charged symbols and paradoxical tableaux, their content defied narrative interpretation. Recognisable art-historical subjects such as crucifixions, genres of landscape and portrait painting, and composition strategies including perspectives and grids, were violently mashed up. This outburst of imaginative energy did not fit within the then-emerging rumours of a Neo-Expressionism centred on German Neue Wilden painters who dominated the international art market from the late 1970s through the mid-1980s either. Harris arrived at a style and purpose for his art independently of any movement or training. He flaunted his self-taught approaches and omnivorous, chaotic uptake of art history. A highly sophisticated, intuitive intelligence was combined with intense emotional force.
These qualities are dramatically at work in the painting, War (1972). At first sight, this might be interpreted as an anti-war painting. Fires rage across a landscape above which military aircraft fly. But the coherence of this narrative soon breaks down. A dark road has anomalously lit up beyond the place where twin gallows stand. In a landscape of lurid greens, a lone tree appears bleached as if by a blast of heat or light; three crucifixes or grave markers cast harsh shadows as if they, too, are in the path of a violent light. On a small stage, an abject tableau is being enacted. Behind this, a man pursues a naked figure; another points in the direction of these events but without a hand at the end of his sleeve. Another man holds up a frame which seems to extend the stage in some way but without any apparent purpose. In the foreground, a naked man and woman embrace, but with expressions of anguish or even agony; the man stares in the direction of a crudely painted, armless figure. Another, perhaps a Veronica figure, seems to be wiping the armless man with a pleated napkin. Meanings collapse, the abjection of the work seems neither exclusively subjective nor a protest of some sort. A grotesque chaos engulfs narrative sense.
Justin Paton, who curated the Harris retrospective at Dunedin Public Art Gallery in 2004, used a quote by the American curator, Robert Storr, who located the grotesque where “logical and emotional certainties waver, taste loses its bearings, and familiar realities warp into disorienting paradoxes”. Harris has said that he uses highly charged symbols such as crucifixions simply to increase the emotional intensity of paintings. Both comments are key to responding to War, one of the most complex and highly charged works in the artist’s unflaggingly intense oeuvre. The effect of War is in its total impact, not in the narratives that fragment within it. IAN WEDDE