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If old debates over the question of whether painting should be pronounced alive or dead seem now, finally, to have exhausted themselves, Judy Millar's participation at this year's Venice Biennale is surely propitious. Millar has for many years practised a form of abstract painting remarkable for its seemingly effortless contemporaneity. She has simultaneously seized on painting's manifold histories and its particular capacity to stage dislocations in our perceptions of time and space. Selected alongside Francis Upritchard to represent New Zealand at Venice, Millar's installation, sited at the Venetian church La Maddalena, exemplifies both these things. The artist seems particularly adept at relocating abstract painting in the 'now'. As in a number of earlier projects, perhaps somewhere in the framework she has constructed for her Venice work, Millar's implicit suggestion might be that our contemporary condition - one structured by asynchrony and spatial and perceptual out-of-placeness - uncannily echoes that of painting itself.

The elaborate pictorial and architectural mise-en-scene of Millar's latest work points to a new departure in her career, certainly in terms of its very large scale, the jarring elements it draws in close proximity to one another, and the disorienting and, at times, squeezed spaces it sets up for its viewers. What, though, of Millar's work prior to Venice? For New Zealand audiences, Millar is known for the expansive, gestural (or quasi-gestural) qualities of her paintings, notably the big, candy-coloured 'action' paintings she was making around 2001 and 2002 - one could think of the looping mauves and lilacs of See-See, 2002, or the high-energy squiggles of Big Pink Shimmering One, also of 2002, for example. Yet she is equally known for a certain spectral, even photographic quality that inhabits the spaces of these and other paintings, and for the evident deliberateness of her mark-making, suggesting a conception of pictorialism informed as much by a Gerhard Richter-like distance as by the all-over intensity, movement and physicality that we might associate with later-period Frank Stella. Millar's distinctive way of thinking about painting - her 'picturing' of painting - has in many ways remained consistent in orientation. From this point of view, the degree to which her Venice project plays out longstanding concerns starts to become apparent.

Talking about her work, Millar often returns to three points. Firstly, there's her identification of painting with thought and flux - in her words, 'it's a way to think in a fluid medium'. Secondly, following from this, she advances an idea of painting as generative - radically different from other mediums in view of the basic alliance of thinking and fluid matter that is its signature. From this perspective, painting has the potential to bring about singular, unforeseeable ways of configuring the visible. It makes it possible to 'generate images that can't come about any other way'. Thirdly, Millar repeatedly speaks of an 'undoing', 'unravelling' or 'taking apart' of things as central to her orientation as an artist. As she suggests, this 'undoing' can be seen to characterise her treatment of certain concepts of art or its history (the notion of the self, for example). Beyond this invocation of what is a familiar scepticism - surely descriptive of how contemporary art often views the traditions, conventions and concepts it inherits - in Millar's account this undoing also bears on the very things, images, and structures that she makes; it names a productive subtraction, or auto-destructive supplement, integral to the work. When you encounter her work, the structures, images, or things that constitute it will, according to Millar, 'seem to be unravelling' ...

With the titles of recent exhibitions like 'Here Eyes Are Hell' and 'Giraffe - Bottle - Gun', is it possible that Millar's push to update abstract painting's terms of reference, most critically in relation to contemporary life, has moved into a higher gear? On more than one occasion, after all, Miller has cited Robert Fiske's writings on current political conflicts in the Middle East and elsewhere as having been of critical importance to her work; the implication being that, whether or not such connections make themselves decipherable, abstract painting is no less connected to the public sphere and the conflicts of the moment than any other form of art. At this point we might discern a shift in direction occurring in Millar's practice. It's as if the catastrophic undoing that functions like an aesthetic principle in Millar's art begins to look like the refracted image of a catastrophic contemporaneity. Millar's Zurich title - which could be taken as an oblique response to the devastation and horror of war - invites reflection on the question of how global politics, violence and warfare might 'operate' in paintings like Millar's, or how such matters might remain as ghostly absences in such paintings. Even if, in the case of 'Giraffe -Bottle - Gun', the three words of the title seem to have arisen from attempts by various people to name shapes of works in relation to their resemblance to familiar forms or objects, the inclusion of the word 'gun' does not seem fortuitous. Like 'Here Eyes Are Hell', it introduces a dangerous or unknown quantity into the work's field of reference. 'Giraffe - Bottle' does not have the same effect. As a sequence of words, the chain 'Giraffe - Bottle - Gun' perhaps does no more than play out, in a minor key, something like the shock of a gunshot, or the surprise disclosure that is said to 'drop a bomb' at the end of a sentence or speech ...

This article appears in excerpted form. You can read the entire article in Art & Australia's Spring 2009 issue.