Artwords 1

THE ARTIST’S VOICE:
Opening speech for exhibition 3 March 2007, 2pm.

Welcome everyone to this excellent exhibition of works by the group known collectively as The Artist’s Voice.

On Friday when I was travelling on the bus back to Adelaide after previewing this exhibition, I went past a stand of pines, I think between Aldgate and Stirling, behind which was a mid-afternoon sun.

It was a deja vu for me, and I tried to establish the deep memory with which I was connecting.

As a child I am travelling in a car with other members of my family, returning to the city from an exhibition opening, and see this or a very similar forest. I experience an artistic epiphany while gazing out of the window in the back seat. I keep hold of the image and the sensation and when I can or am ready I paint a picture, not an objective recording but a subjective account of that visual and emotional sensation in the car.

It was rendered with small palette knives using watercolours from the tube in colours of veridian green, prussian blue, burnt sienna and cadmium yellow. It was probably the best painting I made as a child, and I vaguely recall that I sold this picture for £5.

If my memory is correct, it means I must have been less than 10 years old.

I wanted to remember what the exhibition could have been. I dug deeper into my memory and deduced it must have been an exhibition of my father’s art at Jibilla Gallery, located just out of Aldgate, near the bus terminal. I found out that it was held in October 1966, so it must have been $5 that I had received for the picture.

So, through coming here on Friday and keeping my mind open I was able to trace the origin of my own artistic voice back to a specific point in time.

And what a mystery it is, the powerful sense of compulsion and the integration of identity that comes from creative activity. What a mystery it is that a human being does not just observe and translate that observation into a tangible form, but injects into it a synthesis, mediated through the senses, emotions, memory and intellect, that results through hard work in something we call Art.

Human beings are complex creatures, and in Art we see a manifestation of complexity and the capacity of the human mind to construct meaning and identity. It is, however, a process for which many pragmatic and inhibited people have little time or empathy.

In Australia, historically and until recent years, we have tended to resent our artists and, perhaps more generally, difference or intelligence of any kind. It took a lot of hard-fought battles and personal effort, if not crusading, to create the respect, benefits and pleasures that younger generations now enjoy. We see tremendous opportunities for young artists. These opportunities tend to rise quickly and present themselves for a few years before a new batch of Bright-Young-Things come to the fore and take that space. This cycle seems to be quickening each year, and there are many more stars in the firmament.

Before I digress into dyspepsia about overlooked talent I need to recognise a good segue to take me back to speak to the exhibition, and that comes with a work of Kon Heyer, titled Firmament, a glass bead game wall assemblage that gleams like a night sky.

Kon is a really talented and imaginative artist – one who has a gift for spotting artistic possibilities of unlikely media, who has the gift of epiphany. He is not yet officially recognised but has proved his abilities over a number of years, and has worked in a variety of media imaginatively and successfully – as we see here with his art povera Gateway, made of old timber and found object steel, and his micro-cosmological painting titled Homage to Chihuly, named, no doubt, because of its translucent, vivid colours, and their glass-like qualities….

We see around us here a number of mature contributions and offerings, and it is noteworthy how many of them emerge from that art povera aesthetic of recycling found materials.

We look at the simplicity of Don Richardson’ Split; Floortje Costain’s satirical elegance in Today’s woman with meathook; Donna Brink Reid’s combinations of raw and painted timbers in her sculptures; Susan Sherrah’s two framed collages and her wonderful miniature dresses made of embellished rusted metals; Pamela Kouwenhoven’s bizarre reconfigurations of decaying car battery cases; and Alison Brown’s topographical mixed media triptych titled High over Mungo.

Then there’s Kym Afford’s conceptual constructions that require inter-activities such as nose polishing and stepping through time and space into a present better informed of grim realities and possibilities.

And what of the painters? The dignified and classically inspired drawings of Penny Choate; the solid and well-resolved plein air and studio landscapes of John Wiggins and Clair Hamdorf; and the formal and textural extravagance of Monica Mortgensen’s massive Freudian paint blot; Vitas Jurevicius’ nod to Ian Fairweather, John Olsen or Mark Tobey and their use of calligraphic detail in abstracted landscape painting; and Kathleen Munn’s impressive meditation titled Drift II.

We see a diversity in the overall selection as well as the individual’s approaches to their work. It’s almost incomprehensible that Colin Rogers, in one guise, paints a conventional self-portrait, attesting to his skills sufficient to catch the eye of the Doug Moran Prize, and in another guise, carves a totemic pole in a manner Stephen Skillitzi would aspire to in glass.

It’s infinitely mysterious, this compulsion to make art, mysterious as the dreams of the dreamer in Tess Magor’s monoprint, and as mysterious as the sensitivities expressed in Anni Luur-Fox’s collaboration with poetic dreamers among the prisoners from Mobilong.

I’ve known Don Richardson for over twenty years. I first met him when he worked for the Education Department at Wattle Park Teachers’ College, and through his commitment and understanding he was a huge help in maintaining the successful momentum of my arts magazine Words And Visions. I thank him for his invitation to speak today. I admire his steadfastness and his refusal to let things lie or slide. He is an activist, and I once described him affectionately as an agent provocateur. His voice is perhaps loudest of any of us in a world largely apathetic to the tribulations experienced and the treasures offered to the world by artists.

But for those of us who care to listen and look, we know that the artist’s voice can be heard and seen – and also experienced. I hope the group known collectively and specifically as The Artist’s Voice gathers strength and recognition. I congratulate them for their splendid artwork, which clearly demonstrates their dedication to plumbing depths and raising standards. I am impressed, and may even be inspired, and am more than pleased to declare the exhibition open.

MA GREENSTEIN:
LA Art in the late 1990s

MA Greenstein, art critic for the prestigious journals Artforum and World Art and lecturer at three art schools in Los Angeles, presented two seminars for the University of South Australia yesterday in the Iris Cinema.

The first dealt with the Los Angeles art scene and showed work by 15 contemporary artists, including Larry Pittman, Mike Kelly, Paul McCarthy, Carol Caroompas, Jeffrey Vallance and Patty Wickman. The work covered a wide range, from land art to outrageous and absurdist installation work and text-based “paintings.”

Greenstein asserted that art from Los Angeles was regionally specific in its use of devices, especially in terms of popular culture, but the themes and tendencies were internationalist in inclination. A perceptible influence was the pattern and decoration abstraction of Miriam Schapiro.

Greenstein described the work as “the sunshine of the noir,” and said the revival of painting was one of the most exciting developments. She said appropriation was now a dead issue in Los Angeles, and most emerging artists were celebrating their freedom to not be political in their work.

In the second session Greenstein discussed the work of artists in Los Angeles influenced by Indian culture and her experience of contemporary art on the Subcontinent. She highlighted the work of occidental artists living in India as well as artists who are breaking out of the constraints of traditional conceptions of art.

On Thursday evening she will deliver a lecture on LA Pop Culture and the impact of science-fiction novelist Philip K Dick. It will feature work by numerous artists at undergraduate level. The lecture will be held at Nexus Cabaret in the Lion Arts Centre from 4-30pm.

Adam Dutkiewicz (c.1998)

JOHN BRACK
National Gallery of Victoria and touring.

John Brack argued against abstraction having a place in Australian art in a provocative lecture dating from October 1953, a response to the massively influential touring exhibition French Painting Today, crammed as it was with abstractions from artists then based in France. The argument was advanced by subsequent contributions from the founder of the Blake Prize, the professor of theology, JP Kenny, S.J., and the artists Lloyd Rees and Maximilian Feuerring in Meanjin and Quadrant respectively.

Brack’s lecture was predicated on a scepticism that arose from “the developing maturity of Australian artists, not because of their naivete or conservatism.” Brack suggested that in an international sense abstract art was no longer radical but “commonplace” and by then was in a mannerist phase. The evidence presented to Brack in the exhibition, and his natural questioning, led to his refusal “to accept as inevitable the rise of Abstraction projected in modernist narratives” in Australia.

From the perspective of history both a case for and against his argument can be mounted in terms of its reception in Australia. By the end of the 1950s, especially after a significant input from post-war migrant artists with European experience, it had become a mainstream style in Australian art; and in recent times has been seen as the crucible of experimental art that emerged in the post-object era.

On the evidence of this survey exhibition, Brack seems to have been well informed about abstraction, especially by the 1960s, and used it to his own ends. But he was forever the Social Realist, even though in later life he did tackle big themes of civilization and human folly and vulnerability.

In the post-war 1940s his painting began, as usual, in a straight ahead fashion, the usual fare of portraits and landscapes, before veering towards cartooning in work such as Little boy lost (1947). By the early 1950s his art seemed a particular fusion of bleak parody derived from sources such as the Die Brucke expressionists and George Grosz’ satire. In work such as The Barber’s shop and The tram, both from 1952, one of the two or three figures respectively depicted is left rendered in a fuzzier style, even quite abstract in the latter, as a woman seated in the background remains out of the sharp focus of the artist’s gaze.

But in the foreground we see his mature style fully emerged. It is clearest to see what is happening in a small painting titled Man in pub (1953), in which the face of the character is constructed out of a series of intersecting, flat geometrical planes, while he uses a repetition of similarly bending lines to depict the fingers of the man’s hand holding the glass, which in turn is broken down to a parallelogram as it overlaps the nose and lips. The man has bronzed skin and wears darker brown clothes and hat, and is backlit by a stained glass window, a significant clue in the inspiration for his stripped back, flattened style of representation.

By 1955 this style was fully deployed in his first major work, Collins Street, 5pm – here revealed with all its background studies of individual faces and the peak hour, winter crowd filing past lamp posts.

In 1956 he spent much of the year chronicling the racing industry. His exhibition of November that year of 21 watercolours and accompanying etchings referred to the lack of gaiety in the industry, in contrast to the approach of French impressionists from an earlier time who tackled the subject, intent on festivity. This imagery reflected an expanding interest in industrial still life and perhaps an influence by artists such as Edwin Tanner and Yves Tanguy.

In the late 1950s Brack’s art focused on the trials of his family life, suburban dreams and the schooling of his children. The etchings of his four daughters are a highlight of his earlier work, while the portrait of his wife, Helen, shows her in a severe, drained condition. Mother and Son (1958) could have inspired the casting of Ruth Cracknell in the television series.

The last of the series of paintings of suburban settings, and his wedding paintings from the early 1960s, indicate a radical stylistic departure from his by then established method, into an investigation of more painterly methods. Indeed, in Summer in the suburbs (1960) he constructs the images as a duotone of bleached yellow light and sepia foliage, rendering his geometry of rows of houses, on a flattened vertical plane, to contrast with the organic texture of the vegetation. In The Golden Embrace (1960) he presents a surreal and abstract image of sex and physical entanglement, in which the figures fuse with the earth and rocks.

But this experiment with abstraction and texture was short-lived, as he was soon immersed in portraiture and depicting dancing scenes and more celebratory female nudes than his first foray into that territory two decades earlier.

Through his portraiture, from the early painting of Fred Williams to his 1969 portrait of Barry Humphries as Edna Everage, we see cunning visual tricks that allude to the character portrayed: Humphries’ forearms are enormously exaggerated in length, perhaps to signify the “reach” of the character, and he makes Kym Bonython’s shoulders much broader to carry the burden of promoting modern art. There are always areas in his portraits which capture his eye for detail and perfectionism, and they add to the visual drama and interest of the surface. John Percival is made out to resemble a Dalíesque figure, using a shrunken chair as a ridiculously tiny support to prevent his preposterously large head from toppling him over, while around the edge of the room his ceramic dolls are littered like carnage on a battlefield, and they tilt the horizontal perspective of the room under their weight.

In the 1970s’ nudes there are unusual perspectives at play, and Persian rugs and other props that are rendered with the kind of precision and the overall scale of his well-known work from the 1980s onwards.

In the later paintings Brack refers to the aforementioned big themes: often using postcards or the tools of his art as props for architectural constructions that allude to lost or ancient civilizations and even in his most monumental work, The Battle of Waterloo.

In these oils we see rigour and technical polish, and at this point, if not before, the viewer cannot fail to recognize that the artist deserves his place in the pantheon of great Australian artists.

DALI: Liquid Desire
National Gallery of Victoria, 2009

The exhibition begins with a somewhat abstract painting of a town, in pastel palette, and with obvious affinities with Cézanne’s taches. The precocious teenager had an enormous appetite to learn techniques, demonstrated also in his perfect pencil drawing of a back viewed nude, rendered into an alabaster finish. His early experiments with cubism show remarkable maturity in terms of composition, formal and tonal control, maintaining the sombre constraints while somehow getting down into the character of the place he depicted.

The first uniquely surrealsitic imagery emerged suddenly – melting clocks and other forms drooping over other surfaces and propped up on crutches of varying kinds, translating the illusion of the permanence of things in life by transforming objects into others and punning with visual associations.

His first surrealism was subversive of conservative painting, but Dalí aimed to dazzle with technique more than any of his contemporaries. The so-called “paranoic critical” method, in which he played with ambiguities and tricks of perception, could only be achieved through close observation, mercurial imagination and skills of the highest order.

So his project became less concerned with subversion of older forms than with a subversion of modernism itself, particularly the abstractionists, whom he regarded as a dreary, lazy and unskilled lot whose art was puffery and even a cul-de-sac.

That did not stop him from borrowing heavily on those forms and incorporating them into his broader programme – a very postmodern one in the sense that he cannibalised all the styles of art that preceeded him, especially in terms of the Western tradition from the era of the Renaissance.

His art conveyed his personality, complex as it was, but it was also an interrogation and upskilling of earlier and contemporary forms into an ever-expanding repertoire of techniques and devices that he could employ in his art.

It began with fascination with the paintings, sculptures and designs of Leonardo, Michelangelo, Titian and Raphael; moved through the sculpture of Cellini and the paintings of the Dutch masters, especially Vermeer, Rembrandt and Holbein, through Neo-classical and epic history painting to Millet, incorporated some of the flair of Monet and Turner, and then cannibalised modern art from the Dadist’s objets trouvées, optical art from Seurat to Riley and Vasarely, and the mass-production techniques of Warhol.

There are also continuous references to architecture and twists on the paintings of contemporaries and predecessors like Delvaux, de Chirico, Arp and Miro, as well as an obvious connection to Picasso and even Moore.

His reworking of Millet’s painting of two peasants, as monumental sculptual or architectural forms, and its repetition through numerous illustrations and drawings, was massively influenctial on the direction of modern sculpture. One can see an interest in classical and modern architecture too, from Visari to Gaudi.

Two themes emerge in terms of Dalí’s personal exploration: his interest in the fourth-dimension, in capturing moments of action and natural or physical forces frozen in time (his “atomic” Dalí) and an attraction to the metaphysical; and his sense of absurd humour, which allowed for the kinds of juxtapositions and transmogrifications for which his art became renowned.

A rare component of the exhibition is Destino, an unfinished animation in collaboration with Walt Disney, which has myriad connections with paintings and drawings on display.

Perhaps surprisingly, the exhibition ends with a piece of quirky, on one level Constructivist abstraction. On another, it is a self-portrait in which all the detail and personality or ego has evaporated into a white plane, highlighted by the odd shadow and sign that could refer to his trademark moustache.

PART OF A CONVERSATION ABOUT ART
October 2010

A few years ago I took up photography as a hobby and have since gone on regular photo excursions with Ben Loveday, Aldo Trissi, Michal Dutkiewicz, and from time to time others. Most of our trips have been into the countryside or as street shoots around the city and suburbs. Along the way we have talked a fair bit about the nature of photography and how it fits into the spectrum of art media. Ben’s the most experienced and progressive thinker in our group: although I feel there are many ways to approach photography, and feel I am still learning. Ben talks about the need for a conceptual base and the need to get beyond the hegemony of materialism, about needing to get beyond the ascendancy of the object in creative photography.

When I reviewed I battled the perception that because I personally liked abstract art my ideas were nonsense. That flowed from art school thinking of the era that were linked to left-wing, anti-individualist philosophies. In the end, the newspaper tried to get me to write previews of exhibitions rather than reviews – so I would present the ideas or motivations of the artist and, possibly, not my own. For those of you who know a little postmodern theory, this sits very well with Derrida’s ideas that there is no absolute authority, and as a corollary that all opinions were equally legitimate. On that basis a journalist may as well be the art critic, and I told them so. I fought with the notion that taste is subjective, and realized a lot of that is to do with peer group involvements and cultural backgrounds – and ignorance. My beef with that attitude is that it allows for lazy and inferior expression to sit side by side with considered, well crafted work.

I actually gave a lecture on the end of postmodernism at Adelaide Central School where I called for the return of ambition and personal challenge in art, and the pursuit of the idea of the masterpiece, which had been discredited by the prevailing theoretical orthodoxies about power etc that infiltrated cultural studies from the 1960s onwards. I sympathized with a lot of that stuff, as it redressed imbalances, but when it comes to art the notion of constant upheavals and rejection of the past, I believed, was anti-instructive: I felt a better way to look at it was to see all the isms as potential in an an artist’s repertoire, not to be constantly iconoclastic. That approach was more about fashion and marketing.

At the heart of it I did believe that art needed to be “creative” or “experimental”, in some form; but that was often just a matter of definition (eg = play, and the individual artist’s own history is relevant in that line of argument). That did mean that I did not favour “genre” pieces in my reviewing, even though I saw them as inevitable. Usually the argument came back at me that art that did not communicate was no good (ie, all abstract art is empty).

If there is no such ambition, art deteriorates into mediocrity, like a scum that floats on the surface of the art world. A number of artists I know live elsewhere these days, not as part of the orthodox hemisphere; they tend to see “Fine Art” as compromised by lazy attitudes and poor (democratized and therefore usually quite conformist, if not ignorant) taste. There’s no doubt that in the corporate art world the committed, driven artists have little to do with marketability and that particular universe, unless by a quirk of fate or the grace of discerning yet powerful dealer-activist. They tend to show their work in museums rather than commercial galleries; but an elite commercial gallery these days shows work of high calibre and diversity.

It takes me right back to my father’s position and his career, when in the 1960s he decided to exhibit in his own studio/gallery because he knew that pressure would be exerted (and it was) for him to change what he wanted to do, the directions he wanted to explore were not confluent with the needs of the gallery system, which often pandered to poor taste and other financial strategies that have no real connection to proper art (or his idea of it). In my experience the art museum circuit is more likely to present better art; but the major state and national galleries judge art by its value in the market, despite all their pretenses, they actively seek excuses to exclude work that has not suited the inherited judgements of their peers and predecessors – so the system is corrupt. Robert Hughes wrote and broadcasted about this in his late years, he became more cutting and confronting after his near-fatal car accident.

Let the truth be known that the art market now is just another version of the stock exchange, a game played by an excessively wealthy elite. Art itself lies elsewhere, in the cracks and hollows of asphalt streets and vast spanning walls of our cities, in people’s homes and sheds, in antique stores, auction houses and the artists’ homes and studios. There’s so much of it, it’s almost impossible. And there’s so little of it that will endure, even if it really deserves to live on in the hearts and minds of the public.