Jim Allen, The Skin of Years

Comprising recent interviews with New Zealand post-object artist and educator Jim Allen by art historian Tony Green and artist Phil Dadson, this book traces Allen’s full biography including his participation in WW2, and explores his activities as artist, teacher – and sailor – from the 1950s until the present day. This book attests to Allen’s great influence and diverse productivity, and to his dogged persistence to engage what he has called “the art of the possible.”

“…a new generation of artists has been discovering Allen, locating in his work a new genealogy for their for own endeavours. And so, as Allen’s installation, video, and performance work of the 1960s and 1970s has become more (and more widely) valued for its ground-breaking significance, it is also being recognised as the local precedent for present day art practices. Jim Allen is, we should now be saying, our first contemporary artist.”
–Wystan Curnow

“Biography is so often looked to by its readers – perhaps also its authors and subjects – as a means to identify some essential truth or kernel of experience that might distill, account for or even reconcile the fundamental contradictions and complexities that underpin any individual life. This is most pronounced when encountering the first-person voice of the subject. In this instance, however, the complexities and even contradictions inherent in a figure so influential in multiple guises across two countries are allowed to emerge and linger.”
–Blair French

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