The Seventh Asia Pacific Triennial of Contemporary Art

Daniel Boyd is perhaps best known for his classical oil paintings of colonial figures recast as pirates and thieves, spoofs of original portraits of Captain James Cook, King George III and Governor Arthur Phillip, whom Boyd recast as ‘Captain No Beard’, ‘King No Beard’ and ‘Governor No Beard’, respectively. In stark contrast to his overtly political reworking of realist portraiture, Boyd recently adopted a new style of representation that also actively works to subvert. Boyd’s large ‘dot’ paintings in APT7 are layered abstractions of originally legible scenes. A veil of clear dots is applied to the canvas, and the entire work is then painted over and wiped back to reveal a remnant of what once was. Boyd uses the ‘dot’ as a lens through which the world is viewed and distorted. According to Boyd: You have an image that is made up by elements of an original image, so it’s kind of like an erasure of memory or history in an image or an object. (It) relates to the processes that governments used . . . throughout Australian history, disregarding Aboriginal culture and systematically taking their culture away from them . . . The loss of information (in my paintings) empowers me because the viewer’s put in a position where they don’t have information. 1 This device reveals an interest in exploration, colonial history and their legacy. These interests are evident in his large painting portraying the act of cannibalism. Playing with Romanticism and primitivism — which fed Europeans’ ideas of the ‘other’ on their march to the New World — Boyd’s work also alludes to slavery and an important milestone, the 150th anniversary in 2013 of the beginning of the trade that brought the antecedents of Australian South Sea Islanders from Melanesia to Queensland. Boyd’s great-great- grandfather was taken from Vanuatu’s Pentecost Island to work in the north Queensland cane fields. His other large-scale painting to explore the idea of the ‘other’ is a portrait of Grace Jones, the Jamaican–American singer, model, actress, performance artist and style icon. In a 1984 Robert Mapplethorpe image, Jones was photographed with her body painted in tribal designs by Keith Haring, ‘so that she look[ed] like a voodoo doll or an aboriginal dancer’. 2 Through her performance art, Jones was interested in empowerment by challenging stereotypes, but Mapplethorpe’s photograph could seem ambiguous to those unfamiliar with Jones’s work. In his version, Boyd appropriates and abstracts this image to problematise the history of primitivism in modern art. Appropriation also figures in Boyd’s large painting of a Marshall Islands stick chart, which is based on a painting of an object he encountered at the British Museum in 2011, while working with the Natural History Museum’s ‘First Fleet collection’ as part of an artist residency. 3 These maps chart the winds and sea swells in relation to bodies of land, and were an aid to Pacific voyagers’ inter-island navigation. It was this kind of knowledge that was exploited by Europeans in their charting of the Pacific islands in order to claim them in the name of royalty. Vital to traditional Pacific life, stars and celestial events — such as the Transit of Venus — also feature heavily in Boyd’s work and particularly in his exploration of the tools of European colonisation. In 1769, Captain James Cook sailed to Tahiti to observe the Transit of Venus. 4 Cook had in his possession an envelope from King George III, with instructions to open it after observing the event. It contained a directive to sail on to claim Terra Australis Incognita , which he did with the aid of Tahitian navigators. 5 Cook’s observations helped formulate the astronomical unit, or the calculation of the distance from the earth to the sun. Boyd connects these ideas of discovery to the modern era in his four- channel film A darker shade of dark #1–4 2012. The film is a sort of animated dot painting, where hyper-saturated colours and pitch black darkness play with a painted field of dots to create a highly immersive environment of celestial objects and events, erupting quasars, orbiting satellites, devouring black holes and gridded gravitational field maps. This installation takes its name from a New Scientist article, published in 2012, investigating the mysteries of dark matter and the challenges for theoretical physics in identifying and defining this form of matter, which makes up a large proportion of the universe. 6 Daniel Boyd, using his own string theory — or theory of everything — threads together what was once known and what is unknown through ideas of science and exploration. Bruce McLean 1 ‘Artist Daniel Boyd looks beyond the images’, Natural History Museum , <http://www.nhm.ac.uk/nature-online/art-nature-imaging/collections/ first-fleet/modern-response/index.html>, viewed 10 September 2012. 2 ‘Robert Mapplethorpe: Grace Jones 1984’, Tate , <http://www.tate. org.uk/art/artworks/mapplethorpe-grace-jones-ar00206 >, viewed 10 September 2012. 3 Boyd saw the chart displayed in the exhibition ‘Grayson Perry: The Tomb of the Unknown Craftsman’ (6 Oct 2011 – 26 Feb 2012). See also ‘First Fleet collection’, Natural History Museum , <http://www. nhm.ac.uk/nature-online/art-nature-imaging/collections/first-fleet/ >, viewed 10 September 2012. 4 The Transit of Venus is the passing of Venus between the sun and the earth — an event that occurs twice, separated by 8 years, in a pattern that repeats every 243 years. The most recent was in 2012. 5 Rex Rienits and Thea Rienits, The Voyages of Captain Cook , Hamlyn, London, 1976. 6 Stuart Clark, ‘A darker shade of dark’, New Scientist , vol.213, no.2846, pp.30–3. DANIEL BOYD A voyage of discovery 95