By MICHELE HEWITSON
In a darkened exhibition space at the New Gallery in Auckland, strange totemic figures brandish rusting scythes and picks. Their bodies are the dimpled plastic of chubby baby dolls. Their heads are goat skulls, all grinning teeth and gnarled horn. The gallery space is full of the sound of pagan pipes and tribal drum beats.
A slight, white-haired figure is standing, transfixed by the spectacle. His name is Don Driver and he - who is looking upon this art work as though it is like nothing he has seen before - made this piece, Ritual, in 1982.
It adds a new perspective to watch an artist engaged in the viewing of a collected body of his own work with such uncommon freshness. With Spirit, at the New Gallery until May 14, is a retrospective of Driver's work from 1965 to 1998.
Such exhibitions represent an honouring of an important artist. They are a sort of salute to their contribution to the artistic landscape. Driver doesn't see it that way. He doesn't feel honoured: "No." He does feel happy "that they've got it all together." And he does feel "amazed that I've worked so hard."
He is also somewhat bewitched by his own work. It is possible, he says in his soft whisper, to look at this retrospective as a viewer, rather than as the artist who made it. The artist as viewer of Ritual is "quite aghast really. The aggressiveness ... [it's] barbarous." Not that he created a work with the intention of frightening: "No. I just made it."
You might say that he did just make it, in more ways than that stark, emphatic statement implies (and that is about as much as you're going to get out of Driver on the intent of his work).
In 1976, while working in the basement of the Govett-Brewster Art Gallery in New Plymouth where he was employed as a senior technician, Driver suffered a severe stroke which paralysed his right side.
At the age of 45 he had to learn to walk, talk and use his right hand all over again. The one thing he did not have to learn again was how to be an artist. His wife Joyce, who sits in on this interview as a loving presence and interpreter, says that as soon as Driver came home from hospital, "he was out there working. It meant so much to him and was his only way of expressing himself for a while."
It is still Driver's preferred method of communication. Even before the stroke, the legacy of which is a partial aphasia and has resulted in an occasional gap between words and meaning, he was the quiet, avid observer. He sees the world through his magpie's eye, homing in on colour and shape and imbuing his raw materials with the classicist's instinct for form.
He is perhaps best-known for his use of found objects. Driver will see beauty and potential in a stained tarpaulin, a row of lolly-coloured old dresses hanging in a row in an op shop, banged-about 44 gallon drums used in road works. And he is known for his trademark black humour: Yellow Tentacle Pram, a baby's buggy - symbol of the protective nature of mother love - sprouts a tangle of bright yellow plastic piping. This work lies somewhere between jokey and sinister, says the gallery's curator of education, Roger Taberner. "People come in and laugh, then they're not sure why they're laughing. Sometimes we hide discomfort by laughing - it might just be funny, I suppose."
It might well just be funny. Driver seems to find the world a monumentally amusing place. At the opening of his new exhibition, Symbols and Signs, at the Artis Gallery on Tuesday night, the star attraction watched the proceedings with his characteristically puckish air.
The opening coincided, serendipitously, with Driver's 70th birthday. There were family (Joyce Driver had secretly arranged for the couple's daughter, Justine, and her husband, Chris Barry, to fly from New Plymouth) and friends and colleagues (Jim Barr, Gordon H. Brown, James Wallace, Pat and Gil Hanly.) There was a cake with 70 candles, with a replica in icing of one of Driver's new works.
And there was Driver, standing in a huddle of important guests, winking wickedly at me from across the room. Is he having a good time? I ask him later.
"No," he mouths. But the wide grin and the eyes alight with mischief suggest that he is, just maybe, enjoying watching the show.
Earlier in the night he's put into my hand a tiny 17th-century miniature sculpture of Ganesha, the elephant-headed deity of Indian myth. Driver carries this tiny talisman, worshipped as the remover of obstacles and patron of learning, in his pocket, constantly caressing its worn curves in the way others might run their fingers over worry beads.
"Is it too far-fetched," Jim and Mary Barr pose in an essay in the retrospective's catalogue, "to imagine that during his convalescence Driver drew energy from ... the small bronze figures he patiently rubbed with his good hand?"
Such a proposition attributes to the figurine a sort of healing magic. It is an idea which would likely hold some appeal for Driver. He has an abiding fascination with magic (he was a keen amateur magician); with the alchemy that happens when the mundane (those old dresses) meets high art.
It is a magic that he has termed "logical, not haphazard."
At first glance, says Taberner, some of Driver's works can appear, "like haphazard, casual arrangements. But everything is determined and looked at very carefully. He's an artist with a great eye. With an acute visual awareness."
Born in Hastings in 1930, the young Driver developed that eye early. As a child he carved horses from wood; at age 12 he had a fascination with making ships in bottles. His father, the manager of an insurance company, was "not unsupportive" of his son's early ambition to become an artist but tuition was scarce. The Driver family had moved to New Plymouth at the end of 1943. Driver went to New Plymouth Boys High School but the art teacher was away at the war.
When Joyce and Don Driver met he was working, not very happily, as a dental technician. It was though, he laughs now, "really a form of sculpture." He and Joyce married in 1958. She is a teacher and musician. Their daughter, Justine, is an optometrist (another way of seeing, she agrees.)
At home in New Plymouth, Driver either goes every morning, seven days a week, to his workshop or is out and about casting his alchemist's eye for the "found" pieces which will become pieces of art. Sometimes he doesn't have to look too far: Background, a new work in the Artis show, is painted on an animal skin which had been lying on the floor of the family home for 30 years.
That story is illustrative of how Driver's eye works. He will alight on the familiar - he picks up a cardboard coffee cup holder and peers through it; he lifts a blind in the gallery to see what lurks behind it - and consider it anew.
To the art audience's eye, Driver's work post-stroke changed from the harder-edged formalist work to the looser hanging works like Produce. It was assumed that Driver's reduced motor skills had resulted in an apparent change in direction. But as Joyce Driver and Taberner note, Driver never one to repeat himself, had started to make the wall hangings 12 months before the stroke. Joyce Driver says that "people thought that his new way of seeing was a result of his stroke, actually it was on its way."
Along the way, Driver's career has had its controversies. In 1967 a sculpture, The Magician, was removed from the New Plymouth War Memorial Library Gallery by the gallery's director: "to save a serious artist the humiliating experience of having to remove his own work from a public place."
The piece, a shop mannequin with a watering can for a head and a phonograph mounted at waist level, was the topic of enraged letters to the editor of the local paper.
Ritual, the piece which so captures the artist's attention 18 years after it was made, saw gallery visitors issued with an assurance when it was first displayed at the National Art Gallery that "... the work has no black magic or sinister overtones." A gallery guard, however, decided that the piece affronted public sensibilities. Every morning the work was found to have been interfered with. The guard had been pulling down the dolls' dresses so as to hide the perceived rude bits.
"Oh, it doesn't matter," he says of any past controversy, "I have friends and foes."
Many more friends than foes, you'd hazard. It doesn't seem too far-fetched to imagine that when Driver takes your hand in greeting, you draw energy from having met a major New Zealand artist who also happens to be a very nice man.
* With Spirit is at the New Gallery until May 14; Symbols and Signs is at Artis Gallery until April 16.
Arts: Don Driver in control
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