Vivian Lynn

"I question the structure of patriarchal societies' representations. [The work] attempts to destruct old orders of representation and re-inscribe them with codes which embody reversal and posit spiritual freedom"

—Vivian Lynn, 1992

Beyond the Either/Or is an exhibition dedicated to a series of the same name initiated by Vivian Lynn in 1983, never before shown outside of Lynn's native Aotearoa New Zealand. The work comprises six diptychs: vertically paired framed graphite and acrylic drawings positioned beneath sculptural reliefs, cast on the forms of metal cyclone gates (also the central motif in Lynn's major 1982 installation G(u)arden Gates, collection of Te Papa Tongarewa, Museum of New Zealand). It was first exhibited as a set in 1989, and again in 1992.

Presented dialogically, the works that make up Beyond the Either/Or: Ice Burns, Poison Cures serve as a critique of the binary system of Western patriarchal culture, both acknowledging and disrupting its language. The drawings that form the baseline of each diptych signify ‘culture’, contained within their frames and replete with coded symbolism. Each page bears private ciphers in various combinations – mirrored symbols of hourglasses, double-ended tree trunks, crosses and figure eights – threaded at each corner onto sheets of leathery processed paper. These discrete drawings are characterised by Lynn’s typically innovative and expressive material handling, with precisely delineated symbols set against graphite, thickly applied to form a near-metallic surface.

The assemblages that float above each drawing are comparatively ‘open systems’, stained, smeared, organic in appearance, resistant to confinement in the irregular frills around each edge. Made by layering wet processed paper and paint over a cyclone gate, hardened into a firm relief, the gridded forms are near-skeletal structures overlaid with a skin-like surface, both bodily and industrial.Both sections of the diptych are at once in contrast and in proximity, inciting the potential for exchange. The closeness of both elements speaks to the permeability of the boundaries between them, thus casting the differing pieces as ‘inextricably one surface.'

Accompanying the Beyond the Either/Or works is Iris (1970), a rare painting by Lynn. Classically trained as a painter, this was the medium that provided Lynn's foundation and leaping-off point for formal and material experimentation as political gesture. In acrylic on canvas, Iris was made two years after Lynn took the decision to stop painting in oils, having reasoned that the medium was too steeped in patriarchal histories to any longer be useful – an early indication of her tireless development of new narratives, formal decisions and signs to jolt audiences into alternative ways of reading [her] art. Formally, the geometric motifs and symbolic use of colour that make up Iris, and have an echo in the aesthetics of the Beyond the Either/Or works, are strikingly reminiscent of mystical abstraction in the vein of Hilma af Klint, an artist who, like Lynn, departed from painting landscapes and portraits in the mode she had been taught in favour of pursuing a language in which to describe both spiritual and scientific realms of discovery.

"The subject of this work is a concept. It is a text in itself.

It is a critique of the master narrative embodied in the western inversion symbol system. It questions the structure of patriarchal societies’ representations. It attempts to destruct the old order of representation and reinscribe it. The older order embodied in the inversion symbol system explained the world in binaries and posited difference. This work demonstrates that what is represented by these symbols, for example, masculine and feminine are not stable identities but subject to ex-change."

—Vivian Lynn