Max cleans up

By WILL THOMPSON

Paint splatters four of the six caps hanging on pegs at artist Max Gimblett's third-floor studio in New York. There are drops also on the chairs that have been set out for our interview, and on the hammers which sit in each corner of the room, their handles camouflaged with red, yellow and blue spray. The floor, of course, has no chance, covered with thousands and thousands of splashes, some of which - to give Gimblett his due - were deposited by the studio's last tenant, pop artist James Rosenquist.

Carelessness and abandon fit the romantic cliche of the artist (frenzied, heedless of petty norms) but they are not applicable to Gimblett. The man is devoted to order. Discard a cushion, as I did, from one of the chairs and he quietly picks it from the floor, and stows it neatly. His CDs, which he plays while painting, and which run from ambient dance techno to Japanese flute playing, are numbered. He has a pin-on button from one of his trips to New Zealand that bears the legend "Clean and Tidy Kiwis". He likes that. His documents are in drawers, with the largest number of these being devoted to G - presumably for Gimblett; his drawings are filed according to theme. "I can't work in clutter," he says.

At present the Queensland Art Gallery is holding an exhibition of his drawings. A New York publisher has produced a collaboration with poet Alan Loney, and in October, Craig Potton Publishing in association with Gow Langsford will produce a monograph that includes essays by Wystan Curnow and the poet John Yau. In September, the Haines Gallery in San Francisco will hold its 15th-anniversary group show and Gimblett is included. Gimblett may be correct when he asserts, "I'm at the best part of my life right now."

It's a cliche to say, "What a long way from Grafton, for a boy whose parents owned a corner dairy", but we'll say it anyway, because the distance and origins are indicative. Gimblett, who was born in 1935, never had any intention to pursue art. He was sporty at school, playing rugby, boxing a little until he saw one fight in which an uppercut lifted a fighter off the canvas. He banged a tennis ball against a brick wall in Seafield View Rd in Grafton, a wall he says still exists.

At 16 he left school and went to work as a textile salesman for Classic Manufacturing in Elliott St. He had a nice suit, he played rugby (front row prop, loosehead) on the weekends, he was fond of beer, a model of conventionality. What he didn't tell his friends was that he was reading Hemingway and Balzac.

At 20, he went to London to attend a management trainee course for 18 months. Returning to New Zealand, he found himself incapable of selling. He had nightmares, and became neurotic.

"I wasn't repelled from New Zealand," he says, "my main reason for leaving was because I felt very anxious and unhappy. I could have felt that way anywhere."

So he left his job, and went back to London where he dropped out. He worked at coffee shops and as a short-order grill chef. He met the Australian painter Brett Whiteley. He found bohemia, but he didn't find peace. Gimblett continued to travel. He went to Paris in search (unsuccessfully) of French existentialist Jean Paul Sartre, then to Spain, ending up finally in Toronto as an apprentice studio potter.

The turmoil began to abate, he says, when he threw his first pot at centre. Within months he had met his wife, Barbara Kirshenblatt-Gimblett. The artist is a most uxorious man. Images of him and Barbara sit around the studio. About once every half hour he makes reference to her, and by inference to their life together, the living quarters at the rear of the studio, the 18,000 books they share, and the baby grand piano. Kirshenblatt-Gimblett has a post equivalent to that of a distinguished professor at New York University.

At 29, Gimblett enrolled at the San Francisco Art Institute, and though he dropped out after the first semester, he had found what he wanted to do. That same year, he sold his first painting for $25 Canadian; these days a Gimblett fetches around NZ$70,000. "I'm an autodidact," says Gimblett, "and a late developer."

On the table, which has no paint splatters, lies a review by Peter Schjeldahl, art critic for the New Yorker. Dramatically, Gimblett says, "This is what I'm against," then reads, "Art has lost its prophetic mandate, abstract painting has lost its starring role, and the competition among artists is mute."

Gimblett appends his criticism, "I'm for sacred, healing art. I do not believe that art has lost its prophetic mandate."

He reads another section from Schjeldahl, "Current abstract painting must tout small values - freshness, finesse - merely to stay interesting."

Gimblett puts down the review. "I piss on this," he announces.

Clearly he takes his work seriously. What does he want people to see when they look at his works? "The truth", which is not the sort of word artists allow themselves to use in public these days.

"Justice", he adds, is important, "in that I'm trying to make a space where the viewer knows that what they're feeling is correct."

Throughout the interview Gimblett refers to Flaubert, a writer who did his living essentially in his 20s, then spent the rest of his life writing. Flaubert was a notorious perfectionist, taking all morning to add an adjective, and all afternoon to remove it. Gimblett would admire thoroughness, the competition with himself. There's something of that too in the squash games he plays three times a week at 7.30 ("when the courts open") each morning. Squash is one of the most cut-throat games going; there's only you, your opponent, and four walls. "It's very hard," he says, "to lose regularly."

Gimblett tells me that in personality tests, his most likely professions are priest, social worker and law enforcement. He's a copper on the beat of art, sniffing out parodists, mannerists, signs of decadence. He's a Zen Buddhist but one, like ice in a drink, with shards of the Presbyterianism he was raised with.

Don't imagine, though, for all this stridency and seriousness, that Gimblett doesn't have a playful side. He's excellent company, and enjoys clowning about. One moment he is shadow-boxing you, the next resting his chin puckishly on the shoulder of his assistant, artist Matt Jones.

Outside is a long street on New York's Lower East Side called the Bowery. Once considered the penultimate stop before the drunk tank, or the drug wards of the state mental hospitals, the Bowery is now a place of comparative urban serenity. Air rights on the tops of surrounding buildings may go for US$1 million ($2.04 million).

At the beginning of the interview I said, a little teasingly, "Some people believe that art requires turmoil." "I'm not one of those people," Gimblett replied, sitting in his chair - and a contradiction: his composure and the riotousness of paint.