Iterations: John Nixon
Tiarney Miekus
The Donkey’s Tail, ‘Melbourne Art Theatre,’ 2019. Photo: Yanni Florence.
Not far from where St Kilda beach forms a firm line against the land, inside the Palais Theatre, which is suspended in the throes of young energy and blatant desire, housing the new strutting contempt of rock’n’roll, John Nixon is watching the Rolling Stones. It’s 1965 and he’s fifteen years old, sitting in the second last row with a friend. It’s the spark of a first concert. He can just see. When The Beatles and the Rolling Stones cast their ballots, he was on the Rolling Stones side. It’s a memory weighted with gravity; he’s animated, gesturing, conveying the spectacle of what the Rolling Stones meant to a teenage boy who’d never seen anything like it before. And yet—he’s almost more interested in recalling the support acts, bands filled with young and local jazz, rhythm and blues players, criss-crossing between genres, lightly experimenting within the early spectres of rock ’n roll. That freedom to slide between styles, of not being caught following one musical line, to simply do, innately meant something to Nixon. It would be one small, anecdotal piece of the expansive perspective that would later animate his own approach to music-making, albeit with his sense of amateurism; of embracing multiple kinds of music, and ways of making music, in order to throw away the conventions of music-making altogether. This young Nixon would eventually be known as one of Australia’s greatest avant-garde painters — and he would simultaneously, with little fanfare, create hundreds upon hundreds of recordings.
Four decades after this Rolling Stones implosion, on a Sunday afternoon in early 2008, Nixon would perform under The Donkey’s Tail, one of his most cherished, and last, musical projects. ‘And it was at this Palais Theatre where I saw the Rolling Stones,’ he remarked, all soft smiles. ‘I thought, “This is amazing. I’m playing the Palais Theatre.”’ It was, he said, a kind of magic. The small pride in this reflection was akin to the pride when a person, who usually seems matter of fact in their ambitions, has achieved something beyond regular life. Nixon repeatedly told me that although he made music, he was never a musician. He reflected and self-mythologised in the way that every artist unavoidably ends up conjecturing, but when I mentioned this Rolling Stones story to his artist friends, only one person knew the anecdote. ‘Oh, I haven’t heard that one,’ came the replies. What other ones? I wondered. And for a brief few seconds the people I spoke to became thoughtful, weighing the worth of this small story.
Nixon had warned me two minutes into our first Zoom meeting that my role as an interviewer was akin to being a good therapist; I didn’t disagree. In mid-2020, I spoke with Nixon twice across Zoom about his music. He sat in his home, in a room of books haphazardly placed, looking into the computer screen when he was talking; looking away when he was thinking. Like much experimental music across Australia, his output has had astonishingly little written about it. At a certain point many arts writers have taken on ‘Nixon the painter’, like a rite of passage, but rarely any other kind of Nixon. Despite his small fame as an artist, the lack of interest in the music, he said, saddened him.
At this point Nixon had received a Leukaemia diagnosis. He found out in October 2019, and had undergone immediate treatment. He was resolutely positive, and then he was unwell again. Plans to visit his home archive were put on hold. ‘You’ve actually got more material to think of,’ Nixon told me in one of our sessions, going through his vast output of recordings, some of which reside online, others stored away, unheard for decades. There were the approximately 400 one-off cassettes of Anti-Music in the late 1970s where Nixon, either solo or with artist friends, created experimental, layered tape recordings. Next were the musical collaborations of the 1990s and 2000s, and later the CDs, performances, installations and digital releases of The Donkey’s Tail; beginning in 2007, it was an ever-changing music ensemble with Nixon at the helm, ranging from absurdist opera to atonal instrumentation. Laid end to end, it would be hundreds of hours of material—and one mustn’t forget the posters, printed manifestos and music-related artworks. Nixon started to speak of himself in the third person: ‘You’ve got just a lot more to ascertain, in a way, what it is he’s doing. It’s a bigger sort of…’ Here Nixon trailed off. ‘A bigger sort of what?’ I should have asked.
A few months later our mutual friend, the artist and musician David Chesworth, text messaged me. ‘John Nixon 1949-2020. XXDavid’.
The Donkey’s Tail, ‘Melbourne Art Theatre,’ 2019. Photo: Yanni Florence.
When Nixon died, the tributes cascaded. Every news and arts publication attempted to give vigour to Nixon’s life and art, but it was also the self-expression, the often-overlooked intimacy of social media that lent his death poignancy: countless artists, musicians, and curators gave exceedingly affectionate voice to Nixon. The man in Melbourne art who always showed up; the generous friend who’d purchase something in an op-shop because you came to mind; the attentive artist walking around with his tote bag full of plywood scraps that you might find useful; the attuned thinker saving that newspaper clipping just in case. Unlike many other canonised artists of his age and success, his attitude was never commercially or egotistically inclined: he was dedicated to his local arts community.
After Melbourne’s long lockdown lifted, toward the end of 2020, I visited Anna Schwartz Gallery where Nixon’s final exhibition Groups + Pairs 2016 – 2020 had been extended in memoriam. The collection of misshapen interviews and research that I was carting around in lieu of a profile on Nixon’s music felt visually mirrored in the paintings; lines of imagination and fact, all with a logic to ascertain. In a stylised salon hang, there sat the rows of minimalist paintings that saw Nixon adored and decried, all produced in the frugal materials he’d been using for a lifetime. Moving along in warm lines of colour and form, each change in composition passed along like a series of semicolons, an opening to a tuneful whisper.
John Nixon, Groups + Pairs 2016 – 2020, Anna Schwartz Gallery. Courtesy the Estate of John Nixon & Anna Schwartz Gallery.
I am not the first person to notice the musicality of his paintings, and at times Nixon himself created paintings to be read like a musical score with live performances to match. But when I mentioned this quality of the paintings to Chesworth I used the word ‘repetitions’ and was quickly rebuked. ‘You say iterative,’ said Chesworth. ‘That’s the word of a repetition, but it can have variation and change. You’re reiterating. You’re re-saying. And he’s [Nixon] re-saying, but the act of re-saying somehow accumulates. You have a different way of encountering the work through its accumulation.’ Across thousands of pieces of art, Nixon spent a life in iterations.
Despite an evident and enduring influence from Russian Constructivism and the monochrome, and a relentless rejection of realism over a fifty-year period, Nixon’s work almost ends up being a kind of disconnection from the linear continuity of the past. In using other styles, whether in painting or music, it was never pastiche or a winking quotation. Nixon came before Australian postmodernism, and many critics try to meet him at the level of repetition and irony — but that will get you nowhere. Instead, in some strange drift between modernism and postmodernism, the influence of history lay within the present, ready to be mined for its iconography and power.
The profundity of this lies beyond the painting and music. Nixon repeatedly positioned himself within the ‘expanded’ idea of being an artist. Although he never quite let the image drop of being a hard-line minimalist; he was also a writer, publisher, curator, gallery director, educator, photographer, and printmaker. Listening to and viewing what I have of the music and performances he was involved in, it would be untruthful to say it’s all individually brilliant, but there are moments of brilliance, and there is a brilliance in the unwavering output, and the brilliant way it was conceptualised. In this Nixon seemed to outdo everyone, and he was reflective of this small world he built: a few weeks before he died, Nixon joked to his collaborator and friend, the artist and musician Marco Fusinato, ‘Marco, I made too much.’ The abundance becomes its own artistic statement, and yet the simplicity is deceiving; I kept recalling something Nixon said about masterpieces.
In late 2020, Monash Art, Design and Architecture (MADA) organised a Zoom Artforum that served as a tribute to Nixon, with collective tears expressed across the software’s small windows. One speaker, Nixon’s studio assistant Jacqueline Stojanovic, mentioned how she once asked him what his favourite work was. ‘His answer disappointed me,’ she said, explaining how Nixon replied, ‘I don’t have a favourite, they’re all good.’ Stojanovic persisted: ‘Then will you ever have a masterpiece?’ Nixon replied, ‘No,’ but noted that ‘on the other hand, they are all masterpieces.’ How much of this is accompanied by a small smile? How do we measure seriousness? A bigger sort of what?
The Donkey’s Tail, ‘Melbourne Art Theatre,’ 2019. Photo: Yanni Florence.
Nixon’s parents — his father a civil servant, and mother a homemaker — were not that interested in music. ‘We had no art,’ he told me. ‘We didn’t have a record player. The radio was the unit in my family house. And so therefore you would listen to pop music.’ It was, he explained, how you learnt about pop music. In 1960s Melbourne, popular music for adolescents largely meant traditional jazz, with small shows at jazz clubs and the Melbourne Town Hall. ‘As a young person you’d go to these jazz dances, and then there would be mod dances, or rhythm and blues dances, where we would go out and meet girls and listen to young bands.’
As for most of us, music began in Nixon’s youth as something social as much as aesthetic. Yet in his early twenties, while studying fine art at the National Gallery of Victoria Art School, Nixon was deeply invested in the solitude of painting; he didn’t know anyone who made music. ‘If there had been other people who prompted me to say, “C”mon, we can make a band together or something,” I’m sure I would have been up for it,’ he said. At the same time, this young Nixon ‘fell in love’ with the 1960s folk boom of Bob Dylan and Greenwich Village singer-songwriters. ‘That became what I was really interested in: the solo performer where you do both things,’ he explained. ‘It also may be reflected on the fact that I was an artist and you had to do everything yourself, and you weren’t in a group. You didn’t have this socialised group where people had different opinions. You had your opinion, and you realised it, and I liked that about the singer-songwriter: they had an idea and they realised it.’ Nixon was unabashed about this: while Anti-Music and The Donkey’s Tail could be likened to rotating musical ‘coming togethers’ with different people, instruments and sounds guiding each release or performance, the structure of Nixon as the conceptual leader pervaded the projects.
For Nixon, music wasn’t a stagnant grid of genres that couldn’t be touched; these were malleable entities, ripe for picking. In his gentle cadence, he could become enthused by the rhythms of a film soundtrack; discuss the merits of Sonic Youth’s later music (which he rather charmingly called ‘folk’); entertain conversations on disco; and would arrestingly reinvent the emotion that opera corralled within him. His attentions, he said, were always with music. ‘Still principally, my interest in terms of sound, if sound was a bigger umbrella, my channel is still music … I always hated sound sculpture. I didn’t like sound art. I thought, “No no, these are not interesting.”’ He sounded almost annoyed to even be saying the words ‘sound art’ aloud. Those lineages of musique concrète and John Cage, while being musical histories that he seemed to indulge, were never something he was interested in (even though Nixon himself wrote, in the early 1980s, of a Cagean influence).1 ‘What’s interesting,’ he explained, ‘is how you can adapt music into some other forms.’
As an artist who had a strategy underpinning almost everything he created — ‘All the things I try to do, I try to work within rule,’ he said — the conceptual cues that begin with Anti-Music and later filter throughout his life-long relationship to sound are easily recognised: the Situationists, Dadaism, Bauhaus, Constructivism, and the work of Italian futurist, Luigi Russolo. The crossing of art forms and boundaries were integral to what these art movements were about, but what’s curious is how Nixon used music, adopting strategies from his influences. For Nixon, music was a form that contained categories, and each had their own tradition. There are limits and histories, he seemed to say, and choices to be made in what you align yourself with, but there is also musical freedom and originality in these choices, limits and histories.
Although his musical naivety would become a self-assured style, I asked Nixon if there was regret in not learning to play an instrument. ‘When I went to art school, I was a bit silly. I should have also learnt to play guitar,’ he replied. ‘Music and art were my two favourite things, the trouble is the art became too important to me, so the only time I had left was to enjoy the music and enjoy going to discotheques and things like that. It became an evening activity, and in the daytime, I’d be at art school. I also never learnt to drive. These are two legacies which I’ve lived with all of my life … In a way, I’ve made the most of the unsophisticated musician-driver: I take the train and I learnt to play guitar in the wrong.’
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John Nixon, Pneumatic Drill, Issue 48 (February 1983). ↩
The Donkey’s Tail, ‘Melbourne Art Theatre,’ 2019. Photo: Yanni Florence.
‘And I’ll never forget the scene,’ said Tony Clark, the artist, Anti-Music collaborator and friend of Nixon, describing the moment when Nixon opened his front door in Melbourne’s south to Clark in the 1970s, and the pair laid eyes on each other for the first time. ‘It was a classic mid-1970s scene of people cooking tomato soup with Mao posters on the wall, and that sort of thing around.’ At this time Nixon lived with his then-partner, the artist Jenny Watson. Although they’d eventually move somewhere more palatable, Clark was relaying the complete pragmatism with which a young Nixon approached art-making: ‘The frugality of the way they went about their work echoed in their lives.’
When the 1970s came and the phrase ‘do-it-yourself’ became a mantra, Nixon was already there — it was a necessary frugality he inherited from his parent’s generation. ‘You would just do things yourself because you didn’t have enough money to pay someone to do it,’ he explained. Always assigning significance to what others may overlook, in art school he scrounged leftover materials from other students to make paintings, using such limitations as a creative principle in itself; in music he would embrace quick and cheap recording methods, indulging the talents of his artist and non-musician friends. Style often comes out of circumstance, and if a defining characteristic of the late 1970s was a mixture of do-it-yourself ethics coupled with irreverence for the Institution, then the culture happened to align with Nixon’s already preconceived mentality.
Punk was the other big thing, and Nixon came face-to-face with it when he visited London in 1977. ‘It’s the birth of independent music,’ he said. ‘It’s the birth of not having to have a big record label. It’s the birth of being able to do things yourself, have the confidence in what you’re doing and how it’s released.’ He witnessed first-hand the likes of Chelsea, Talking Heads and Slaughter and the Dogs. ‘I would go to see everything. I was curious about what everyone did, what everyone sounded like, what everyone looked like. At the Roundhouse you could also sit upstairs, and I really enjoyed that as an observer. I didn’t have to be in the mosh pit, I didn’t have to be down in front. That was a big moment in time when I also thought, “Well, I can make my own music.” This is a moment of liberation where you don’t have to know how to play the guitar or play the instrument properly, you can play it in an unorthodox way. You can do something with sound.’ At this point rock music, already long full of brilliance and mediocrity, had truly vindicated the individualist creed that anyone can do anything.
What prompted the London excursion was Nixon’s unhappiness with his career in Australia. The sentiment felt common: ‘Nobody’s really interested,’ he told himself. ‘I thought, “Fuck this, I’m going to go.”’ As much as the two-year jaunt meant punk and being exposed to European art, it also heralded the formation of Art Projects — Nixon’s self-run gallery space that would be Anti-Music’s exhibiting site, making sense of the material being produced.
In London, Nixon met a man named Barry Barker. He self-ran a gallery near the British Museum, upstairs in an old accountant or dentist’s room. ‘Of course, people didn’t want these rooms,’ said Nixon, ‘and so he [Barker] had one room with one desk, and that was it!’ It was an example to live by. ‘I learnt: “You can do this, John. You can go back to Australia, you can start a gallery with your other friends and colleagues that you know are also a bit displaced at the moment.”’ At the age of 30 he took a couple of rooms on the third floor of Lonsdale St in Melbourne CBD and used his salary from teaching art at the Victorian College of the Arts to pay the rent of $20 per week, showing his own work alongside artist friends who would later become crucial figures in Australian art, including Jenny Watson, Peter Tyndall, Tony Clark, Imants Tillers, Robert Owen and Mike Parr.
The Donkey’s Tail, ‘Melbourne Art Theatre,’ 2019. Photo: Yanni Florence.
When Art Projects was established in 1979, Nixon’s life’s purpose became the seriousness of art. The moment is telling; only six years prior, conscription to the Vietnam War would have hung like a sentence over Nixon’s head; the cultural revolutions of the 1960s were still lightly pulsating, but a sense of deflation lingered, giving way to the heightened politics of the 1970s. The Australia Council for the Arts was only established in 1973, six years prior to the opening of Art Projects, and a new generation of artists, conceptually-minded, playful and rigorous, were done with painting landscapes and composing tuneful music — they were now awaiting their moment. A small moment would arrive three years later with curator Paul Taylor’s infamous POPISM exhibition at the National Gallery of Victoria (NGV), conceptualising and giving voice to artists like Nixon, Mike Parr and Howard Arkley.
Meanwhile in Melbourne’s inner-south, where Nixon lived, The Birthday Party were testing their esoteric sound, and the Crystal Ballroom in St Kilda was becoming the central venue for Melbourne post-punk; in the north came experimental bands like Use No Hooks, and then there was the Clifton Hill Community Music Centre, an experimental site for new music making including the likes of Warren Burt, David Chesworth, Maria Kozic and Philip Brophy. Performance art, post-object art, conceptual art and postmodernism were all becoming known terms, with these movements attempting to circumvent the growing ‘industry’ of art, and popular culture was driven by capitalism more than ever before.
Anti-Music moved among these things without quite touching any of them: it was its own cerebrally-loaded, aesthetic project where nothing else quite like it existed. ‘I think John was very much aware of what was happening in the different music scenes,’ said Peter Tyndall, the artist and Nixon’s friend who was director at Art Projects in the early 1980s, and a collaborator in Anti-Music. ‘I think he wanted to be part of music and so he brought his…’ He paused. ‘His more severe…’ He stopped again. ‘Well, his more particular parameters to it.’
Inside a small, padded postage bag, a cassette is making its way up and down the east coast of Australia. On this cassette could be all manner of strangeness; the crackles of unidentifiable self-made instruments; piano-driven compositions; screaming; giggling plods of single notes; looping phrases; instruments put to the task of dissonance; every shade of atonality; excursions into more traditional melody, but without the skill, or perhaps the desire, to really pull it off; and adventures across disco, punk, electronic, and film music. You might hear Tyndall’s tape of Muzak spilling from retail stores into the streets, or when Clark recorded his eleven-year-old sister singing lines of poetry to the tune of music only she could hear on a Walkman, or perhaps one of Clark’s peculiar libretti’s, sung and layered all by himself. These were Anti-Music tapes.
At the age of thirty, Nixon wanted to make music. He wasn’t going to wait for anyone. And plus, he had a name. Intuiting more like a proclamation, Anti-Music is a linguistic slope that eventually has you asking what music itself is. If anything, it tells you something about what you’re going to hear.
When, in 1979, Nixon turned to his circle of non-musician, artist friends — people like Watson, Tyndall and Clark, among others — to create around 100 mini-groups that would produce 400 one-of-a-kind cassettes, he didn’t realise he’d soon be director of the Institute of Modern Art in Brisbane. For two of Anti-Music’s five years — it lasted until 1983 — Nixon and his artist friends made the most of the postal service, sending cassettes back and forth, forming temporary musical groups and cultivating clear distinctions between each cassette. Otherwise, when Nixon was in Melbourne, from bedrooms and studios they created local, frugal, adhoc recordings. Rather than being a polemic against music, these rudimentary, fluctuating recordings could accumulatively call attention to the very means of music making: ideas, people, instruments, sounds, genre, mood. It’s about knowing how to lose a sense of musicality in order to find another kind of music.
As always, Nixon would conceptualise the recordings in his no fuss method. Yet through his natural inclination to build genuine rapports and friendships, people often adored working with him. Tyndall likened it to ‘being a subcontractor for a sub-band.’ Clark thought of Nixon like an organiser or manager; there was a fun comradeship, he said, alongside a sense of trying to undermine one another. Inevitably, some collaborators were rubbed the wrong way — they didn’t like Nixon’s direction, desiring the utopian ideal of each collaborator having equal control and judgement. If they didn’t leave, Nixon wouldn’t have them onboard.
Never writing down names on the cassette credits, but only collaborator initials in order to eschew the celebrity factor of recording (although this became a marker of exclusivity, since everyone ‘in the know’ could easily decipher what ‘JN’ might mean), what truly made Anti-Music possible was the cassette recorder. Mass-marketed, cheap and easy to use, it found its way into Australian experimental music-making during the 1970s. ‘I could do the music myself,’ realised Nixon. ‘Everything was recorded on a stand-up cassette player.’ He had three recorders, and for tracking layered cassettes he’d record individual sounds on separate recorders, pointing them towards a master recorder: lo-fi, simple, flexible, no rehearsals.
With a process like this, Anti-Music was always envisioned as a recording project, never performative. With only one master copy, each cassette is a rarity that would be exhibited at Art Projects or a similar gallery, or sometimes played on experimental radio. Anti-Music even featured in a music and sound section in the 1982 Biennale of Sydney. Very rarely, they’d be played live. The only publicly released Anti-Music recordings happened when William Furlong, a British sound art aficionado, visited Melbourne and worked with Nixon to produce this Anti-music sampler for Audio Arts magazine, which is now part of the Tate Collection.
John Nixon, Audio Arts supplement, 1981. Courtesy Tate Archive, William Furlong and contributors.
Otherwise, the cassettes would sit in the gallery as an art object, devoid of the commercial implications of the record store. ‘I would make concerts,’ said Nixon, ‘where, in art galleries, there would be just two speakers on the wall, seated, and I would play them like a disc jockey from the back of the room and you’d have a one-hour concert and that would be it.’ At other times, the cassettes were exhibited via speakers positioned in a minimal format.
This aesthetic would extend to the cassette artwork — which has no imagery at all — but rather featured ANTI-MUSIC written in commanding, capitalised letters set against monochrome backdrops. The same aesthetic would later emerge in The Donkey’s Tail posters and artworks. Such simple, yet formal qualities clearly drew on Nixon’s paintings, borrowing their matter-of-fact, yet strangely spiritual quality of pure communication.
Nixon — who at this time with his dark clothing and intense expressions, hair pushed to the side, a few stray rings at the front — had a punk-like, modernist demeanour. However, he was weary of the over-expressiveness of both mainstream and underground music. ‘I don’t have to be like, “Oh, I’m a punk guy. I spit on people. I hate everyone else except me,”’ he said in a bored tone that I rather loved. ‘It’s not like that. That was really a pose within certain aspects of the punk movement.’ At this time in Australia, only a few people in the punk scene were from art school, and ‘whilst I’m willing to call it music,’ said Nixon of Anti-Music, ‘it’s coming out of art. I have a different angle on it.’
While Nixon’s methods can find companionable company with the bottom-up movement in rock music — of people in small communities trying on instruments and making music by simply making do — this was not music as it’s normally known. It’d be the rare person who’d play an Anti-Music cassette for the typical joys of music. As Clark explained, ‘There was never any question of taking it out of the so-called high art context. One paid lip service to that, I suppose, but there was no effort made to get the stuff out there, or take it out of the gallery.’ As conceptually driven as it was amusingly amateur, Anti-Music flourished like a series of hypotheses in creating music.
While some argue it was less about music and more about the defiant proposition the label represented (which is why there were so few arguments about the actual music itself), others felt it was dedicated to what most of Nixon’s art is dedicated to: the idea of creating. Or it could simply have been an excuse to create the cassette imagery as a visual series. And then there are those who saw Anti-Music as textual, because they got the accompanying printed manifesto, Pneumatic Drill. The content was not solely where the concentration needed to be, and if the conventional constructions of music were now falling apart along with so many other constructions, then anything, finally, was permitted.
The role of the artist in the late 1970s was not just to create art, but to conceptualise it, theorise it. Nixon said as much in a 1980 interview with artist Ted Riggs, calling for an art practice ‘beyond the easel’, believing there was a necessity for an artist to own up to one’s work.1
A year later, Nixon took his own advice. The thoughts behind Anti-Music were published in Pneumatic Drill, an assertive, single-sided, one-page newsletter with sixty issues from 1981 to 1983. It called Anti-Music ‘a living factory of the human spirit,’ and established that ‘Anti-Music seemed an appropriate umbrella term to deliberately separate itself. It denotes a certain kind of musical practice outside “normal music” / “experimental music”.’2 With the Anti-Music logo, again written in urgent, no frills capital letters, Nixon made commanding announcements, explaining in a manifesto-like manner how and why the music was made. ‘That meant I didn’t have to have a well-written philosophy of what I wanted to do,’ he explained to me. ‘Whenever I thought of something else to add to the concept, I could just release another issue of Pneumatic Drill … It’s quite a good way to write, rather than writing the journey before you’ve actually taken the journey.’
John Nixon, Pneumatic Drill, Issue 14, October 1981, Newsletter.
Nixon made art almost every day. He didn’t do weekends. His days ‘off’ were his days teaching at Monash University. He said the reason he had credibility with different generations of artists was that although he’d show in rarefied spaces like Anna Schwartz Gallery, he also showed in alternative worlds across different forms, taking each thing as seriously as the next. ‘The work ethic goes through to every activity I do. If I do something, if I move into something else, I always have said, I have to do it for five years minimum. If you’re going to do something for five years, you make a contribution. If you do it for six months or a year, pfft! It’s not even a football season.’ Time is often viewed as tragic, measured by the clock—but not by Nixon. He had too much to do.
‘There was no one really like him, as far as I know, working in Melbourne at the time,’ said Clark when I asked what a young Nixon was like.‘What do you mean “like him”?’ I probed. ‘Well, there was no-one so ideological,’ answered Clark.
Ideological. Disciplined. Serious. Pragmatic. Unequivocal. Hardline. Punky. These are the words rustled up to describe the Nixon of the 1970s and 1980s, a borrower of minimalism for whom, at the level of caricature, appeared to be a formalist devoid of emotion. As such, Nixon had his critics. ‘He got sent up a lot for being, as a lot of people saw it, too ideological and too purist and too correct a line,’ said Clark. ‘He was basically, you know, you don’t fuck with him,’ said Chesworth.
Of course, the label Anti-Music invited its own critics. There was one time, as Tyndall recalls, a music writer turned up at Art Projects ‘quite riled up’ and ready to challenge Nixon on both the label and the sound — unfortunately, Nixon was in Brisbane. ‘Some people really wanted to have it out with John,’ said Tyndall, expanding on how there was something people didn’t understand, or would become defensive and therefore hostile about, in Nixon’s work. If punk was meant to be a music of cultural opposition, then Anti-Music took that title literally.
Another hostile moment came when Nixon performed at the Clifton Hill Community Music Centre. By performance, he played an Anti-Music cassette on stage and stood silently next to it, rejecting the expressivity of performance as per routine at the centre. Although it was a recording of brittle noises, containing a collage of popular music from a range of cultural sources, it caused great upset. Nixon, as Chesworth remembers it, was ‘basically accosted’ by the composer and poet Chris Mann. He went up to Nixon ‘and loudly questioned what the hell he was doing, which was surprising, since at Clifton Hill, all kinds of musical offerings were accepted.’ Because Nixon’s music didn’t operate on a purely musical level, it was seen by some as existing outside musical paradigms, even experimental ones. For some people, it caused offence.
Clifton Hill Community Music Centre poster.
During this time, Nixon became focused on releasing art from the clutches of conservative Australian painting, and music from well-worn song conventions. His ideal was the European artist single-mindedly dedicated to their work and to the pure, white cube, avant-garde gallery. Excellence existed almost like a moral. Anything less than serious might be a kind of nihilism. ‘You’ve got to really commit,’ he told me. ‘Whatever you are going to do, if you can commit to that and say, “Yes, I’m serious about this. I’m not mucking around.” And I don’t do mucking around stuff.’ While Nixon would always keep his discipline and pragmatism, something within him mellowed as he aged; he was still as rigorous as ever, but with a softer edge. The Nixon I spoke to was talkative and amusing; prone to small acts of theatre to make a funny point; someone who told me they believed in instances of fate. As Clark said, ‘that sort of serendipitous and silly side has only come out in recent times.’
If Nixon ever felt self-doubt or self-consciousness, he never let on. Such confidence is contagious when, for many, being an artist is a role married to the suffering of self-doubt. ‘He had this capacity to inspire people by the seriousness of his purpose,’ said Clark. ‘The reason why I admired him was that he brought it off. It wasn’t a pose. It was an authentic feeling that he had about what he was doing and the things that he liked.’ Nixon was generous with his seriousness, and he lent encouragement as freely as water — but this attention and kindness also had a point beyond generousness in-and-of-itself.
In methods both intuitive and conceived, Nixon was building a personality and set of ideas that centred on his consistent approach to art making, and he was further building a collective pulse for those ideas. As critic Francis Plagne remarked, in one of the few essays that goes beyond Nixon’s painting and thinks of his practice holistically, ‘for Nixon, the specific aesthetic or political values of a particular artwork are less important than the fact that art is made by communities of people who in some sense devote themselves to making art.’1
A few days after speaking to Tyndall, he sent me an email. He’d been thinking about our attempts to understand what ‘serious’ means when applied to Nixon. If the music was so serious, why could it also be so amusing at times, so absurd? ‘Other words for serious?’ wrote Tyndall, ‘dedicated, engaged, committed, ambitious, aware… laughing.’
Tyndall included this image, underlining the text at the bottom which reads ‘If you’re really serious you should be laughing:
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Francis Plagne, ‘Salon des Independents: John Nixon as Curator and Publisher in the 1980s’, Discipline, No. 1, Winter 2011, 22. ↩
Peter Tyndall, detail, A Person Looks At A Work Of Art/ someone looks at something…
LOGOS/HA HA (If you’re really serious you should be laughing), 1974.
I asked Nixon if he felt he’d been pigeonholed as a certain kind of hard-line artist. ‘No, not really.’ I waited, not quite believing it. ‘I mean, sometimes somebody might say, “Oh, that John Nixon, he just paints crosses.” [But] this is really just the naivety of the person saying it.’
John Nixon, Black and white cross, 1987. Courtesy the Estate of John Nixon & Anna Schwartz Gallery.
In 1996, Nixon began a series of orange paintings. Now married to his long-term wife, curator Sue Cramer, his daughter Emma was about to be born and he wanted a painting strategy that was less demanding but still concrete. He ended up with a run of orange monochromes, allowing only one other secondary colour. ‘Like, I’m not stupid,’ he said. ‘I don’t want to paint myself into a corner.’ At the same time, as a secretive gesture, he began a series of silver paintings that he didn’t initially tell people about. Using a spray can to paint the silver monochromes, he later used a brush, adding textures so the demarcations on the surface could be seen, while a sense of flatness was still maintained. ‘And then that’s really where The Donkey’s Tail comes from: The Donkey’s Tail comes out of the silver paintings. So, the process of making is coming from how many, if you say, “Well, how many visual textures have you got in this? How many aural textures can you have?”’
John Nixon, EPW:O, 1995, Sarah Cottier Gallery.
Courtesy Ashley Barber.
During this time, something else must have changed for Nixon. In the preceding two decades he never acknowledged a desire to perform, intent on pushing music as an art object. Yet during the mid-1990s, perhaps in his collaborations with artist and musician Marco Fusinato and their band Solver, Nixon began to perform live and release music in more typical ways, eventually leading to The Donkey’s Tail.
The Donkey’s Tail is, as its Soundcloud webpage says, ‘an experimental, abstract, free noise, improv, garage ensemble using electric guitars, drums, percussion teamed with banjo, triangle and trombone. the group was formed in early 2007 by abstract artist john nixon as a recording project.’ Releasing around 105 CDs, it eventually went beyond recording to encompass live performances at alternative art spaces, curated musical evenings, installations, and even The Donkey’s Tail Klang Theatre, an iteration that emerged in 2018 under the banner of Nixon’s Melbourne Art Theatre. Including two performances, The first in The Tale in 2018 and The Man Who Didn’t in 2019, this iteration of The Donkey’s Tail illuminated the more performative, theatrically-inclined aspects of Nixon’s output. In vivid yet controlled performances at an old theatre room at RMIT university, Nixon invited various Melbourne artists to perform selected roles. All of the costumes and sets were designed by Nixon, created in his typically ad hoc manner to suit the style of music.
Yet the seeds of this still lay within the era of those silver paintings: during the late 1990s and early 2000s Nixon began to create a variety of improvised homemade instruments for use by The Donkey’s Tail, and he further started to play conventional instruments in his own entirely unconventional way. During these decades he bought all manner of second-hand instruments and sound-making devices, scouring op-shops and flea-markets in every country he visited, purely for use by The Donkey’s Tail.
‘I can’t write music,’ said Nixon, explaining the recording process to someone who’s working on a Donkey’s Tail recording. ‘I think this is the melody. I’ll sing it to you. You sing it back to me. I’ll correct you if I think you’re doing something wrong or clipping words, or, you know, if it’s too fast, slow it down a little bit.’ Through instruction, notes and metaphor, Nixon would direct his Donkey’s Tail collaborators, who he’d continually be scouting, eventually working with scores of well-known Melbourne artists and musicians.
Largely recording from Nixon’s studio, he might hand you an instrument you’ve never played before, or something you’re already accomplished in, but alighted anew. When artist and musician David Palliser, Nixon’s main collaborator in The Donkey’s Tail, offered his services, it was at first as a saxophone player. Instead, with great amusement, Nixon made him play the saxophone with big thick leather gardening gloves, causing him to lose his finger control.
Artist Isabella Darcy was another recruit. Initially corralled for her trumpet playing, when Darcy and Nixon first sat down to play trumpet together, they were too much within the same rhythm. Nixon wasn’t happy, so he passed her an electric guitar, which she never played before. He instructed her to strum it with a cat toy; that didn’t work. He grabbed a pine cone. Voila! ‘It sounded fantastic,’ he said, beaming. With that method, Darcy became one of his lead guitarists, learning the rhythms of Nixon’s instructions. As Palliser said of the process, ‘That language, you just draw from it. If John said, “A loud saxophone”, you just go for it. If he said, “Soft, saxophone”, you go for that. Or “play guitar”, you just go crazy.’ Palliser stops to laugh. ‘It’s always great to get a license to go crazy.’ Almost everyone I spoke to, from Anti-Music to Donkey’s Tail, reiterated the sheer amusement and play Nixon gave them.
As the recordings grew, Nixon began to collect musicians; he had clarinet players, saxophonists, drummers, guitarists and singers. He often tried to use what he called ‘a second ability’ of musicians, something outside their primary instrument. ‘Like if you imagine Jimmy Hendrix playing the trombone,’ he said, ‘well, it just goes wild. And I thought this was amazing, and kind of implied to me that this is not rhythm anymore. This is going crazy. So why don’t I get a trombone and see what I can do.’ Sometimes aiming for the spirit of ‘going crazy,’ for recording albums there’d be no rehearsals: just a few recorders laid out, and Nixon’s instructions. There were no repeats, second takes, or experiments. A guitar might arrive un-tuned in someone’s hands, and that’s how it would be played.
The Donkey’s Tail was centred on Nixon realising his musical ideas. It might seem like there’s ego to this, but in a strange way it’s almost the opposite; he didn’t want the typically best version of someone’s musical self, but something hidden, awaiting to be brought out. ‘I think the music is very much trying to kick out personalities almost, but the personalities, paradoxically still all emerge,’ said Palliser. When discussing Nixon’s pragmatic approach, Palliser later added, ‘John’s straightforwardness is his real strength. I know “take it or leave it” is a pejorative term, but I don’t mean it in that way. “Take it or leave it” has a powerful energy. It’s a powerful sense of “the thing” being just “the thing” as if there’s no history of art or music, it’s just coming to being just like that. And yet, there is a sense of being connected to art history.’
The Donkey’s Tail, ‘Melbourne Art Theatre,’ 2019. Photo: Yanni Florence.
It might start to get noisy. There’s no rehearsal. The players have arrived to sit on their milk crates, like the raft of medusa, holding whatever instrument or non-instrument Nixon has given them, looking at the notes he’s written out for this evening’s performance. Now he’s waving a flag. What this means, explained Nixon, is ‘we’re going to start off with something really noisy, like we’re in the airplane, we’ve got to get this band off the ground. We’ve got to make everyone pay attention.’ How do they do this? Perhaps everyone has a whistle they’re instructed to blow into. There’s no timing. Who needs timing? Nixon might touch some people on the shoulder; stop blowing the whistle, it means. This is number one, explained Nixon. Number two generally builds on this, and number three might have a solo from all the people playing, one at a time. Nixon wants the audience’s eyes to move from sound to sound; he understands that music is as visual as it is audible. Four is the quiet one, perhaps with all the triangles. Don’t bash it like you’re doing the lunch call at school camp, just gently, gently. And the violins, just delicately pull on one string, make a beautiful sound. The drummer, meanwhile, knows they’re never to play any rock beats. ‘I want you to think of it like you’ve got a rubbish bin full of tin cans and bits of wood and bricks and everything,’ said Nixon. Now, over there, someone else is filling up their trumpet with water. Nixon didn’t tell them to do that, but he’s laughing anyway. And here comes the finale, building the cacophony, up and up. ‘Then, when I get the flag, you know, okay, we’re coming down to land,’ explained Nixon. ‘Now we’re going to finish. It’s that theatre of the performance. Like when you see a good rock band, you know they’re on and you know that’s the finish.’ Nixon mimed a swishing action. ‘Cut like a knife. That’s it. Good night.’ The Donkey’s Tail performance, around thirty minutes long, is over.
Mostly performing in experimental music spaces and galleries, a Donkey’s Tail show would happen only five or six times a year, and were planned and executed by Nixon with a rotating ensemble of people and instruments. ‘There is a bit of theatre in me,’ said Nixon, ‘a bit of art direction.’ It was the same as the exhibitions: ‘You’re guiding the audience through a passage of time.’ He wanted people’s eyes to be transfixed by the scene in front of them. He wanted to entertain, he said, talking not only about The Donkey’s Tail, but the anti-theatre performances he established in 2018 at RMIT University, ever-straightforwardly titled, Melbourne Art Theatre at RMIT. He wouldn’t bother, he said, if it wasn’t important.
Nixon loved the opera. He would attend concerts with a notepad and pen, taking down ideas while he watched. He told me that, against the prevailing wisdom of conceptual art, he looked through his eyes first and his brain second. ‘All my work has always been influenced primarily and predominantly by what I see,’ he explained. ‘I can get influenced by so many things in a day because I see two trucks, one green one and one blue, go past my eyes. And in my songwriting, the same. A lot of it is to do with observation.’ It might appear like he dreamed things up, but there was always a certain visual logic to how he gathered information.
While he’d initially been working with amateur singers for The Donkey’s Tail, he one day wanted something beyond instrumental noise. What’s the opposite of this? ‘It’s the song,’ he told himself, coming to the realisation that he wanted beauty in his music. And for this he would bring in singers. Beautiful singers. Opera singers.
Recording in Chesworth’s home studio, a Donkey’s Tail album filled with operatic-inspired songs might take around two hours of recording with the singer, coupled with light instrumentation. Anyone who’s ever recorded, even in non-professional ways, knows how amusingly condensed this is, especially considering no-one but Nixon knew what the album would be until they arrived. Reading lyrics from his notes, his poem-like odes, he’d hum his songs to an opera singer, who’d mimic in return, taking specific direction. ‘What note would you like me to sing?’ they’d ask. ‘I don’t know,’ said Nixon. ‘Try me.’
Later, when listening to The Donkey’s Tail song ‘I’m Your Flower,’ which has an opera singer beautifully relay, ‘I’m your flower, I’m flower. Just a moment, just a moment,’ I was at first amused, and then suddenly became genuinely emotional. I thought about how Nixon became the dream he sought: the great avant-garde artist, wanting to commit and dedicate oneself to the real seriousness of creating art, which doesn’t mean no small smiles, and to be able to hold, share, and live by that seriousness.
What to do with this overflowing harvest? ‘You know,’ said Nixon in his exceedingly contemplative way, ‘one of my daughter’s friends once said to me, “John, why do you do so much work?” And I said, “Because I want to see what it looks like.” That’s where I get the satisfaction. I want to see what it looks like. I want to hear what it sounds like. I don’t want it to be hidden in just a sketch or just a poem. I want it to be born, in a way. Sort of born.’
Through all of this sort of birthing, which resides on that plane between the intuitive and systematic, and through claiming the freedom of being a non-musician making music—as Nixon told me, if he really was a musician, he probably wouldn’t have the gall to release over 100 Donkey’s Tail CDs—Nixon gave that freedom to others, even if it was just on temporary loan through a cassette or a performance. As people who worked with Nixon said, you can’t overestimate such a gift. It’s often observed that rock and popular music is centred on people spending money to watch other people believe in themselves, and that something within us needs this—it’s another realm altogether to have one of those self-believing people cast that belief right back onto you.
After Melbourne returned to some semblance of normal, in late 2020, I visited the galleries West Space and Bus Projects in their new homes at the recently established Melbourne arts precinct, Collingwood Yards. Abandoned were the gallery spaces that Nixon had housed some of his most recent curated musical evenings and Donkey’s Tail performances in, and I felt melancholic for these new gallery rooms that would never get to witness a Nixon performance. Later, passing a jazz show in Collingwood, I thought of the bespoke Sunday jazz performances that Nixon would have attended; small stages filled with a maturing generation of musicians, the generation that could have supported the Rolling Stones over fifty years ago. The Rolling Stones created music to rule the world, while these players, and the rest of us, were just swimming within it.
For all their value and good, art and music worlds are also symptoms, propagators and reflections of the culture at large, susceptible to insularity and solipsism just like everything else. For over half a century, Nixon pushed through such solipsism, genuinely nurturing community and friendships that were as much a part of his practice as the work itself. Nixon told me that he simply wanted to ‘create something special and something which doesn’t exist, and fill a void with another kind of experience.’ He would find a way through, just by talking to people. He was his own green light. ‘None of this we’re waiting, we’re waiting, we’re waiting,’ he said. Nixon carried this mindset across thousands of artworks, interrogating the foundations of whatever forms he worked within, involving hundreds of people, across a lifetime, each iteration informing the next. It all amounted to the larger mission, both practical and spiritual, to just keep working. ‘John’s music,’ said Clark, ‘was always dedicated to the idea of creating.’
Tiarney Miekus is a writer, editor and musician based in Naarm/Melbourne. Her writing has appeared in The Age, Meanjin, The Lifted Brow (Online), Overland, Memo Review, un Magazine, Art Guide Australia, Swampland and RealTime. She is currently editor and podcast producer at Art Guide Australia.
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
The writer and editors would like to thank Sue Cramer, Emma Nixon, Yanni Florence, Anna Schwartz Gallery and Sarah Cottier Gallery.
Notes