Apocrypha (from the Greek word ἀπόκρυφα, meaning “those having been hidden away”) are texts of uncertain authenticity, or writings where the authorship is questioned.
Julie Davis (Australian, b. 1959) and Alex Rizkalla (Australian, b. 1950) Apocrypha #1 (left) and Apocrypha #4 (right) 2008
“Intuitively we know the definition of the output from this process lies hidden within each object, seemingly carved into the underside of their skin, although we cannot see it. But actually it is not carved, it is the three-dimensional tracing of the original. The original becomes a throw-away. It is obsolete. The point of origin lies no longer within an object but at the heart of the creative impulse.”
Vanessa Mooney
Apocrypha is an interesting, if slight, exhibition of eleven photographs by Julie Davis and Alex Rizkalla at Place Gallery in Richmond. Conceptually the work is resolved if not pushed to any great depth, the small photographs of sarcophagi like casements and moulds addressing issues surrounding the absence / presence of the original object and the subsequent loss of identity. In their masking, the objects photographed hide an inner identity that has gone missing; the headless figures, like faceless mummies, protect something that has existed since early man – the inner spiritual machinations of belief – that are embedded within the existential nature of our being. Identity has been rubbed out and spirit is splitting apart the moulds trying to escape the confines of mortality, only held in check by the wooden pegs and ropes.
Like the sutures of the human skull, the marks on the casements (see below right image) try to align form across space and time but these objects are grounded in a contextless backgrounds, seemingly floating free of earthly constraints. Here we have a double tracing – that of the tracing of the original object that has been thrown away (see Vanessa Mooney quotation above) and the tracing of the indexicality of the object by the photograph – the re-presentation of an original that no longer exists. There is a double loss through this re-retracing that fits perfectly with the title Apocrypha – as the photographs become texts of uncertain authenticity.
Where the exhibition is less successful is in the physical presence of the photographs and their aesthetic qualities. While Vanessa Mooney asserts that the photographs are “meticulous in their detail and exact in their depth and texture” this assertion is untrue. From a technical point of view the photographs are soft in focus and lack depth of field. The ropes are fuzzy and the lack of depth of field in the focus plane from front to back adds to a lack of presence that the photographs needed to counterbalance the conceptual idea of apocrypha. I am also unsure about the scale of the photographs – there seems something in-between about the size of the images, neither here nor there. Aesthetically they needed either more presence (through being bigger), or more intensity through a jewel like nature in being smaller, again to counterbalance the conceptual themes. Finally, being surrounded by these eleven photographs in the gallery gives you the feeling of a ‘one shot’ idea that needed further investigation and refinement, an idea that needed to be pushed further. While the actual ideas themselves are interesting the work itself is too simple, too slight to hold the attention and reveal layers of meaning over time.
Dr Marcus Bunyan
Many thankx to Place Gallery for allowing me to publish the photographs in the posting.
Julie Davis (Australian, b. 1959) and Alex Rizkalla (Australian, b. 1950) Apocrypha #5 (left) and Apocrypha #7 (right) 2008
The Father, The Son And Apocrypha
We all have faith that we must lodge somewhere: you; the microscope, me; the earth, and the artist? There are two stories present. The first is Apocrypha, a series of works by Davies and Rizkalla and the second is something you cannot see but will soon know.
Davies and Rizkalla present to us Apocrypha; a series of photographs that are meticulous in their detail and exact in their depth and texture. It is an evocative title and encapsulates the resonance of the objects. What we can see is clear – plaster moulds used by someone, somewhere for casting objects. The clarity of the details of rope, wedges of wood and the depth of the seam tell us of the real working nature of them. The inversion here from background process to foreground subject matter is not for irony’s sake but to evoke the simultaneous banality and sacredness of the transformative creative process. It is documented honestly before the viewer, and yet, the mystery remains. Intuitively we know the definition of the output from this process lies hidden within each object, seemingly carved into the underside of their skin, although we cannot see it. But actually it is not carved, it is the three-dimensional tracing of the original. The original becomes a throw-away. It is obsolete. The point of origin lies no longer within an object but at the heart of the creative impulse.
Tony Scalzo, my father-in-law, was drawn to this process. While the creation of a religious icon amused his communist leanings the irresistible pull of the transformation from dust and water to artefact must have, I feel, fulfilled a greater need to live through making. Countless times he would present to us his recent army of saints or holy persons (Padre Pio was a boom time) to be sold through his community, and would scoff and laugh at how he could make an object that to others was an icon. He would point to the shed, the latex, the plaster dust as if to dispel the mystery, and yet the mystery remained.
Perhaps the final mystery is the process, the collaboration that has come about since Tony passed away and his son Stefano came into possession of the simple and unusual collection. Stefano like his father is drawn to the creative process. So innately aware of the artist, his father, he approached Julie and Alex with these as gifts that are, in a way, not his to give. As a custodian might he passed on the objects and communicated his intuitive knowledge of their meaning. One plus one equals three. The result, Apocrypha, is like a window that was obscured and now has been opened. We can see with clarity what was unseen, but known, before. Apocrypha silently demonstrates the entwining of faith and mystery in the creative life of all.”
Vanessa Mooney
Text from the Place Gallery website [Online] Cited 09/03/2019. No longer available online
Julie Davis (Australian, b 1959) and Alex Rizkalla (Australian, b. 1950) Apocrypha #8 (left) and Apocrypha #9 (right) 2008
Marcus Bunyan (Australian, b. 1958) Spire of der Dom, 1 – 52 2009 From the series The Shape of Dreams Gelatin silver print
The Shape of Dreams
I am pleased to announce a body of work, the second for 2009, is now online on my website.
The photographs are a sequence: one tone follows another (much like a piece of music) until the final coda. With this in mind please view the work sequentially. Below are a selection of photographs from the whole work.
Dr Marcus Bunyan
Please click on the photographs for a larger version of the image.
Photographs are available from this series for purchase. As a guide, a digital colour 16″ x 20″ costs $1000 plus tracked and insured shipping. For more information please see my Store web page.
Photographs from the series The Shape of Dreams 2009
“the form of formlessness the shape of dreams”
Marcus Bunyan (Australian, b. 1958) Untitled 2009 From the series The Shape of Dreams Gelatin silver print
Marcus Bunyan (Australian, b. 1958) Untitled 2009 From the series The Shape of Dreams Gelatin silver print
Marcus Bunyan (Australian, b. 1958) Untitled 2009 From the series The Shape of Dreams Gelatin silver print
Marcus Bunyan (Australian, b. 1958) 9/24/52 2009 From the series The Shape of Dreams Gelatin silver print
Marcus Bunyan (Australian, b. 1958) Untitled 2009 From the series The Shape of Dreams Gelatin silver print
Marcus Bunyan (Australian, b. 1958) Navy Base, Unidentified 2009 From the series The Shape of Dreams Gelatin silver print
Marcus Bunyan (Australian, b. 1958) Untitled 2009 From the series The Shape of Dreams Gelatin silver print
Marcus Bunyan (Australian, b. 1958) Part of the French Riviera taken while Whit held me at the door! 2009 From the series The Shape of Dreams Gelatin silver print
Marcus Bunyan (Australian, b. 1958) Untitled 2009 From the series The Shape of Dreams Gelatin silver print
Marcus Bunyan (Australian, b. 1958) Untitled 2009 From the series The Shape of Dreams Gelatin silver print
All the photographs from the series are now on my website.
Opening night crowd in front of the work In-Sight (2009) by Lisa Roet at Karen Woodbury Gallery, Melbourne
Another excellent opening this time of the work of the delightful Lisa Roet. If you visit the gallery don’t forget the upstairs exhibition space with further work by the artist including a marvellous large bronze Orangutan Foot.
Opening night crowd with the artist Gareth Sansom third from right
A very busy opening at John Buckley Gallery in Richmond for the paintings of Gareth Sansom. Nice to meet the artist and catch up with artist Gavin Brown and manager of Abbotsford Convent Brenton Geyer. A big thank you to Daniel for allowing me to take the photographs!
Josephine Kuperholz presents a beautifully engineered set of photographs in her exhibition Blight at Gallery 101, Melbourne. Featuring hand coloured silver gelatin photographs of endangered Australian insects sourced from the Entomology collection of the Victoria Museum, Kuperholz literally weaves multiple narratives into the photographs. The execution (an apt word for the circumstances of extinction facing these insects) of these images is fastidious, the weaving superlative, almost clinical.
The layering of the photographs disrupts their surface tension. There is a disjunction between the dead specimen and the singular photograph of it, a disruption of the smooth surface of the photograph by the hand colouring and a further fragmentation of the original photograph by cutting and weaving. Through these processes the photographs become intertextual in their construction, assemblages, creating new tissues of past citations: animal, colour, silver, artist, text, photograph, environment. At their best the work subverts the concept of the text as self-sufficient and hermetically sealed, blurring the outlines of the fixed image, “dispersing its image of totality into an unbounded, illimitable tissue of connections and associations, paraphrases and fragments, texts and con-texts.”1
Kuperholz’s mutations, ‘differance’ in Derrida’s terminology, produce spaces that are both fluid and fixed at one and the same time; neither her nor there.Though the original specimens and photographs are already narrativised, already textualised, Kuperholz disrupts this marking, the continual reiteration of norms, by weaving a lack of fixity into her objects; in her reconceptualisations of space and matter Kuperholz redefines the significations of the body of the animal in the fold of inscription, through a process of materialisation. Kuperholz attempts to ground these re-inscriptions through the naming of these disrupted surfaces, equating the images back to the scientific labels for the original specimen, Trapezites eliena for example (see below), and through the box frames surrounding the work that are much like museum cases. Unfortunately I found the constant reference to the habitat of the insect, it’s Latin name inscribed in pencil under the images and the use of plain brown box frames somewhat irritating. These tropes are not necessary for the work is strong enough to stand on it’s own without having to tell the viewer what to think.
The singular beetles (as seen above) are beautiful images and the multiple images where the weaving intermingles, the self decentred and multiple, fluttering and vibrating like the strobing of a time lapse photograph caught in three-dimensional space, are fantastic. Other photographs are less successful: the reflected beetles are a little passe, while the grid photographs of insects lack presence and intensity (see bottom installation photograph below). Where the concept works it is pushed hard, the fragmentation and interweaving causes an anxiety of identity and a meditation on the problematic nature of existence, revealing the changing sizes, shapes and rhythms of space and structure.
Perhaps a loosening of the rigid structure surrounding the works (the text, the frame, the incantations) would have let the photographs ascend into the ether, further releasing the work from the constraints of author, text and earth. It will be interesting to see future developments of this work. Perhaps the incorporation of gentle, subtle physical elements into the photographs (through the sowing of patterns, through the sowing of objects directly onto the photograph?), will elevate these already beautiful photographs to an-other plane of existence.
Dr Marcus Bunyan
Many thankx to Gallery 101 for allowing me to publish the photographs in the posting. Please click on the photographs for a larger version of the image.
Josephine Kuperholz (Australian) Trapezites eliena 2008 Common name – Eliena Skipper Woven hand coloured silver gelatin photographic image
Josephine Kuperholz (Australian) Dryococelus australis 2008 Common name – Lord Howe Island Phasmid Woven hand coloured silver gelatin photographic image
Josephine Kuperholz Blight exhibition, Gallery 101 website text
Josephine Kuperholz Blight exhibition installation views at Gallery 101, Melbourne Photos: Marcus Bunyan
Roy de Maistre (Australian, 1894-1968) Colour Composition derived from three bars of music in the Key of Green 1935 Oil and pencil on composition board Private Collection
Despite some interesting highlight pieces this is a patchy, thin, incoherent exhibition assembled by the Powerhouse Museum, Sydney now showing at Heide Museum of Modern Art, Melbourne. Featuring a hotchpotch of work ranging across fields such as drawing, architecture, photography, painting, film, graphic design, craft, advertising, Australiana and aboriginal works the exhibition attempts to tell the untold story of Modernism in Australia to little effect. Within the exhibition there is no attempt to define exactly what ‘Modernism’ is and therefore an investigation into Modernism in Australia is all the more confusing for the visitor as there seems to be no stable basis on which to build that investigation. Perhaps reading the catalogue would give a greater overview of the development of Modernism in Australia but for the average visitor to the exhibition there seems to be no holistic rationale for the inclusion of elements within the exhibition which, much like Modernism itself, seems eclectically gathered from all walks of life with little regard for narrative structure.
With work spanning five decades from 1917-1967 we are presented with, variously, Robert Klippel’s kitsch Boomerang table from 1955, Robin Boyd’s ‘House of Tomorrow’ from 1949, Wolfgang Sievers ‘new objective’ photographs, Berlei’s scientific system for calculating beauty in woman in use till the 1960s, swimsuits from the 1920s-1940s, Featherston chairs from the Australian pavilion at the 1967 Expo, a recreation of Australian architect Harry Seidler’s office (the most interesting part of this being the books he had in his office library: Frank Lloyd Wright, Mies van de Rohe and Concerning Town Planning by Le Corbusier) and the wind tunnel test model of the Sydney Opera House in wood from 1960. Etcetera, etcetera, etcetera …
Highlight pieces include the above mentioned test model of the Sydney Opera House which is stunning in its scale and woodenness, in it’s simplicity of shape and form. Other highlight pieces are the colour music compositions of Roy de Maistre which were the tour de force of the show for me, true revelations in their rhythmic synchronic Moebius-like construction with layered planes of colour swirling in purples, greens and yellows. The large vintage photographic print of Sunbaker (1934) by Max Dupain was also a revelation with it’s earthy brown tones, the blending of the atmospheric out of focus foreground with the clouds behind, the architectural nature of the outline of the body almost like the outline of Uluru, the darkness of the head with the sensuality of the head and shoulders framed against the largeness of the hand resting on the sand. Lastly the two paintings and one rug by French artist Sonia Delaunay are a knockout. It says something about an exhibition when the best work in the show are two paintings by a French artist seemingly plucked at random to show external influences on Australian artists and designers.
While the exhibition does attempt to portray the breadth of the development of Modernism in Australia ultimately it falls well short in this endeavour. The most striking example of this shortcoming is the true star of the exhibition – the building that is Heide II itself. Commissioned by John and Sunday Reed and designed by the Victorian architect David McGlashan of the architectural firm McGlashan and Eversit in 1963 the building epitomises everything that is good about architectural Modernism and it’s form overshadows the exhibition itself. In this building we have beautiful spaces and volumes, an amazing staircase down into the lower area, suspended decking overlooking gardens, the blending of inside and outside areas, large expanses of glass to view the landscape, nooks and studies for privacy and the simplicity and eloquence of form that is Modernist design. With money one can indulge in the best of elitist Modernism. With position, position, position one can side steep the alienation of the city and the spread of surburbia where the dream of Australians owning a home of their own still continues in the vast, tasteless expanses of McMansion estates.
Robert Nelson in his review of this exhibition sees the car as creating the suburbs and Modernism as the emptying of the city after 6pm, the lessening of community and the devaluing of space he insists that there is little difference between a Californian bungalow in the suburbs and a utopian geometric neo-Corbusian box by Harry Seidler because they were equally shackled to motor transport.1 This is to miss the point.
Although Modernism in its basic form influenced most walks of life in Australia from swimsuit design to milk bars, from cinema to naturism, from bodies to advertising the most effective expressions of Modernism are architectural (as evidenced by Heide II) and were only open to those with money, power and position. Although Le Corbusier’s concept of public housing was a space ‘for the people’ the most interesting of his houses were the private commissions for wealthy clients. And so it proves here. One can imagine the parties on the deck at Heide II in the 1960s with men in their tuxedo and bow ties and woman in their gowns, or the relaxation of the Reed’s sitting in front of their fire in the submerged lounge. For the ordinary working class person Modernism brought a sense of alienation from the aspirational things one cannot buy in the world, an alienation that continues to this day; for the privileged few Modernism offered the exclusivity of elitism (or is it the elitism of exclusivity!) and an aspirational alienation of a different kind – that of the separation from the masses.
Go to Heide for the glorious gardens, the wonders of Heide II but don’t go to this exhibition expecting grand insights into the basis of Australian Modernism for that story, as Robert Nelson rightly notes, remains as yet untold.
Dr Marcus Bunyan
Many thankx to Heide Museum of Modern Art for allowing me to publish the art work in the posting. Please click on the photographs for a larger version of the image.
An excellent review of the exhibition by Jill Julius Matthews, “Modern times: The untold story of modernism in Australia,” (reCollections Volume 4 number 1) can be found on the Journal of the National Museum of Australia website [Online] Cited 20/02/2019
1/ “Emanating from Sydney’s Powerhouse Museum, Modern Times“explores how modernism transformed Australian culture from 1917 to 1967.” But something is missing. The overwhelming modern development in these 50 years was the proliferation of automotive transport, which redefined the layout and function of Australian cities.The cars created the suburbs; and as the individual bungalow drew out the vast dormitories of Sydney and Melbourne, the city centre was spiritually drained, dedicated to bureaucratic and commercial premises.The story at Heide emphasises the gradual triumph of the tall buildings of the CBD. It doesn’t really reflect how these abstract monuments didn’t contain a soul after 6pm.Although the project makes such a big deal of being interdisciplinary, the social history doesn’t have a robust geographical basis. And because of this, the exhibition and book fail to handle the new alienation that modernism brings: the evacuation of the city and the insularity of suburban people in bungalows with little street life and roads increasingly deemed unsafe for children.
What does it really matter if a house looks like a Californian bungalow or a utopian geometric neo-Corbusian box by Harry Seidler? In social terms, they’re structurally the same, equally retracting from a sense of community and equally shackled to motor transport. In this sense, the styles are immaterial, except that one of them gives you a feeling of intimacy while the other has a bit more light and is easily wiped with a sponge.
At the end of the chosen period, the folly of the dominant suburban pattern came to be understood in its dire ecological consequences. Alas, it was too late. The modernist devaluation of space had already occurred, and our whole society had been reorganised around petrol.”
Robert Nelson. The Age. Wednesday 6th May, 2009
Roy de Maistre (Australian, 1894-1968) Arrested Movement from a Trio 1934 Oil and pencil on composition board 72.3 × 98.8cm National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne
In late 1918, Roy de Maistre collaborated with fellow artist Roland Wakelin in exploring the relationship between art and music. Their experiments produced Australia’s first abstract paintings, characterised by high-key colour, large areas of flat paint and simplified forms. The works received critical acclaim, but modernist developments were largely derided by the conservative establishment.
This painting exemplifies de Maistre’s theory of colour harmonisation based on analogies between colours of the spectrum and notes of the musical scale. It is also aligned with de Maistre’s search for spiritual meaning through abstraction, akin to other artists such as Kandinsky who were interested in the ideas of the theosophy and anthroposophy movements, spiritualism and the occult.
Text from the Art Gallery of New South Wales website
Sonia Delaunay (Ukraine, b. 1885 moved Paris 1905-1979) Rhythm 1938 Oil on canvas
Wolfgang Sievers (Australian born Germany, 1913-2007) “House of Tomorrow” exhibition at Exhibition Building, Melbourne 1949 Gelatin silver print National Library of Australia
Stanislaus Ostoja-Kotkowski (Australian born Poland, 1922-1994) Nymphex 1966 Gelatin silver photograph from electronic image 50.6 x 60.8cm Gift of Dr George Berger 1978 Art Gallery of New South Wales @ Estate of Stanislaus Ostoja-Kotkowski
Rayner Hoff (Australian born United Kingdom, 1894-1937) Decorative portrait – Len Lye 1925 Marble 30.5 x 22.5 x 16.5cm Purchased 1938 Art Gallery of New South Wales
Cossington Smith captures the drama of a crowd in Rushing, which depicts commuters clamouring down to the ferries of Circular Quay to get home after work. The flying scarf and fallen hat emphasise the speed at which the travellers are moving and the peril and claustrophobia of a, mostly faceless, city crowd. The steep gangplank and diagonal composition accentuates the dynamism of the painting.
A brilliant colourist, Cossington Smith’s work of the early 1920s adopts a darker palette than the vivid colours she is usually associated with. Inspired by a visit to Sydney in 1920 by the tonalist painter and teacher Max Meldrum, her paintings became studies in tone, rather than colour, a practice she had abandoned by 1925.
Text from the Art Gallery of New South Wales website
Robert Klippel (Australian, 1920-2001) Boomerang coffee table 1955
The Powerhouse Museum travelling exhibition Modern times: the untold story of modernism in Australia explores how modernism transformed Australian culture from 1917 to 1967, a period of great social, economic, political and technological change. From the ideals of abstraction and functionalism to the romance of high-rise cities, new leisure activities and the healthy body, modernism encapsulated the possibilities of the twentieth century. This exhibition is the first interdisciplinary survey of the impact of modernism in Australia, spanning art, design, architecture, advertising, photography, film and fashion.
Modern times is presented at Heide across all four of the Museum’s gallery spaces. It unfolds in thematic sections highlighting key stories about international exchange, the modern body, modernist ‘primitivism’, the city, modern pools, and the Space Age. Comprising over 300 objects and artworks, it showcases works by major artists including Sidney Nolan, Margaret Preston, Albert Tucker, Grace Cossington Smith, Max Dupain, Wolfgang Sievers, and Clement Meadmore, key architects Robin Boyd, Roy Grounds and Harry Seidler, and designers Fred Ward and Grant and Mary Featherston. An installation, Cannibal Tours, by Madrid-based Australian artist Narelle Jubelin is a contemporary adjunct to the exhibition.
Inspired by the futurist visions of various European avant-gardes, modernist ideas were often controversial and shaped by many competing positions. Modern times reveals how these ideas were circulated and took hold in Australia, via émigrés, expatriates, exhibitions, films and publications. Australian contact with significant international modernist sources, such as the Bauhaus school in Germany, occurred through figures such as influential artist and teacher Ludwig Hirschfeld-Mack, who taught Bauhaus principles at Geelong Grammar, and renowned architect Harry Seidler, who played a central role in shaping the modern city in Australia. Hirschfeld-Mack’s extraordinary film Colour Light Play of 1923 is shown for the first time in Australia, and Seidler’s 1948 studio, designed on his arrival from New York, has been re-created for the exhibition.
While modernism was international in character, an ‘Australian modernism’ was first championed in the 1920s by artist Margaret Preston, whose promotion of Aboriginal forms and motifs was important to the understanding of their artistic value. Preston’s designs, Len Lye’s stunning animation Tusalava (1929), Robert Klippel’s boomerang table (c. 1955) and other works show the development of a vernacular modernism.
Other highlights of Modern times include works from the visionary experiment in colour theory by Roy de Maistre and Roland Wakelin in 1919, a model of Robin Boyd’s innovative House of Tomorrow (1949), the iconic Featherston wing sound chairs from the Australian pavilion at the 1967 Montreal Expo, and a large wooden model for Jørn Utzon’s Sydney Opera House.
Text from the Heide Museum of Art website [Online] Cited 06/06/2009. No longer available online
Athlete and movie-star Annette Kellerman’s Modern Kellerman Bathing Suit for Women which became commercially available by the mid-1920s. The one-piece bathing suit became Kellermans trademark Gift of Dennis Wolanski Library, Sydney Opera House, 2000 Photo: Powerhouse Museum
On hot summer days cool off with Tooth’s KB Lager About 1940 Advertising poster Colour and process lithograph, artist name “Parker” in image lower right 100.4 x 75.4cm Sydney Living Museums
Grant Featherston (Australian, 1922-1995) and Mary Featherston (Australian, b. London 1943, migrated to Australia 1952) Expo mark II sound chair 1967 Aristoc Industries Polystyrene, polyurethane foam, Dunlopillo foam rubber, Pirelli webbing, fibreglass, hardwood, sound equipment, upholstery fabric Powerhouse Collection
The Expo Mark II sound chair, adapted for the Australian domestic market after Expo 67 in Montreal.
A cloth-covered high back winged chair with a circular base. The chair has a circular orange cloth covered cushion in the base and an integral full-width headrest. Two 125mm diameter inserts are pressed into the top of the back of the chair where speakers are fitted inside it. There is a cylindrical knob on the side of the chair.
National Archives of Australia A modernist vision of Australia: Grant and Mary Featherston’s wing sound chairs were a feature of the Australian Pavilion, designed by architect James Maccormick with exhibits selected by Robin Boyd, at Expo 67 in Montreal, 1967 1967
In 1967 Australia participated in the International and Universal Exposition held in Montreal, Canada. Australia’s Expo ’67 theme was the ‘Spirit of Adventure’. In the 30,000 square feet glass-walled Australian Pavilion, developed by the Australian Government and designed by Robin Boyd, exhibits explored Australian science, arts, people and development. The pavilion was designed as a ‘haven’ of ‘space and tranquillity’ floating above an Australian bushland setting. Inside, 240 innovative sound chairs offered ‘foot-weary Expo visitors’ the chance to hear the voices of famous Australians describing the exhibits, in French as well as English. The Great Barrier Reef was re-created in a lagoon beneath the pavilion while wallabies and kangaroos could be viewed in a sunken enclosure.
Text from the National Museum of Australia website [Online] Cited 20/02/2019
James Birrell (Australian, 1928-2019) View of the elevated restaurant, Centenary Pool, Brisbane Nd Powerhouse Museum
“A major exhibition opening for Sydney Design 08 in August, Modern times looks closely at the transformation of modern city life. The advent of cars, freeways, skyscrapers and new entertainment such as cinemas, milk bars, swimming pools, cafes and pubs are all legacies of modernism as revealed through the exhibition. The exhibition spans five decades from 1917 to 1967 – a tumultuous period marked by global wars, economic depression, a technological revolution and major social changes – out of which a modern cosmopolitan culture was shaped.
“The modernist movement was inspired by various European avant-gardes that projected visions of a better future, shaped by many competing positions. It was through émigrés, expatriates, exhibitions and publications that modernism become known in Australia,” Ann Stephen said. Encompassing art, design and architecture, Modern times focuses on seven themes: 1. the human body, image and health; 2. international influences and exchanges; 3. Indigenous art and modernism; 4. Interdisciplinary projects with retailers; 5. city landscapes and urban life; 6. public pools and milk bars; and 7. the space age.
Several great modern public pools were designed in Australia initially as part of an international swimming boom in the 1930s and boosted by the 1956 Melbourne Olympics. These will be shown on a large, immersive, panoramic audio visual screen celebrating the most Australian of past-times, being poolside. The earliest 1920s swimming costumes by silent film star Annette Kellerman, several decades of Australian icon ‘Speedo’ cossies and an early bikini will also be on display.
The much-loved corner milk bar from the 1930s will also be recreated in the exhibition for visitors to enter, complete with lolly jars, milkshakes and a juke box.
Other story highlights in the exhibition include Robin Boyd’s ‘House of Tomorrow’ that featured at the 1949 Modern Home Exhibition in Melbourne; and Boyd’s memorable Australian pavilion at the 1967 Montreal Expo that showcased Australian design including the iconic Featherston wing sound chairs and hostess uniforms designed by Zara Holt, wife of then prime minister Harold Holt.
Modernism also inspired new forms of public art and design like the abstract fountains by Tom Bass on Sydney’s former P&O building and Robert Woodward’s El Alamein Memorial Fountain, a popular tourist site in Sydney’s Kings Cross. Modernism shaped an exultant explosion of experiment as part of the Space Age informing such spectacular architectural feats as Roy Grounds’ dome for the Australian Academy of Science in Canberra and Jørn Utzon’s internationally-acclaimed Sydney Opera House, both featured in the exhibition.”
Ruzan Haruriunyan, “Modern Times: Untold Story Of Modernism In Australia,” on the Huliq News website [Online] Cited 20/02/2019
Hedie II photographs by Rory Hyde. More photos of Heide are on his Flickr photoset
Heide II – commissioned by John and Sunday Reed 1963, designed 1964, constructed 1964-1967
Designed by Melbourne architect David McGlashan of McGlashan Everist, it was intended as “a gallery to be lived in” and served as the Reeds’ residence between 1967 and 1980. The building is considered one of the best examples of modernist architecture in Victoria and awarded the Royal Institute of Architects (Victorian Chapter) Bronze Medal – the highest award for residential architecture in the State – in 1968. It is currently used to display works from the Heide Collection and on occasion projects by contemporary artists.
Max Dupain (Australian, 1911-1992) Australia Square: a keyhole to the future [Australia Square Tower] 1968 Gelatin silver print 49.9 × 39.2cm Courtesy of Max Dupain and Associates
Jeff Carter (Australian, 1928-2010) At the Pasha Nightclub, Cooma c. 1957-1959 Gelatin silver print
Modern Times: The Untold Story of Modernism in Australia, edited by Ann Stephen, Philip Goad and Andrew McNamara, Powerhouse Publishing, 2008 (paperback).
Heide Museum of Modern Art 7 Templestowe Road, Bulleen, Victoria 3105
Opening hours: Tuesday – Sunday Public holidays 10am – 5pm
Natasha Dusenjko (Australian) Towers of Babel 2009 Mixed media
Three very interesting exhibitions at Craft Victoria at the moment: Babel by Natasha Dusenjko, Gleaning Potential by Simon Lloyd and Cycle by Liz Low. I particularly liked the delicacy and textuality of Natasha Dusenjko’s sci-fi towers and bone fragments and the wonderful box of 6 red bricks (small and large) that you can buy from the Simon Lloyd show, like blocks for a child builder.
There is an excellent and erudite review of the exhibitions at Daniel Neville’s Nevolution website.
Dr Marcus Bunyan
Many thankx to Craft Victoria for allowing me to publish the photographs in the posting. Please click on the photographs for a larger version of the image.
“The two tables allow for different meanings and scales when viewed in opposition. Table 1 alludes to star charts; constellations of texts hinting at importance, especially in relation to the placement of towers. The map looking up to the stars via the towers of babel, communicating unknown messages to the stars above. The cold stark forms of the towers work well with the organic forms of the bones on Table 2. Perfectly ordered and numbered archaeological bone fragments repeat the textual ciphers and codes, meticulously ordered. The jump in scale between the architectural and the archaeological is lovely; each hinting at an underlying language and mythology. Meanwhile both contain elements of each other – the towers of rationality have been placed in a seemingly random manner, while the organic forms of the bones have been laid out in perfect order ranging down in sizes.”
Daniel Neville. Extract from “On the nature of language, order and decay,” on the Nevolution website June 03, 2009 [Online] Cited 05/06/2009
Installation views of Natasha Dusenjko’s exhibition Babel at Craft Victoria, Melbourne
Babel is a word-based collection of fine porcelain and paper works. This collection of short texts constitutes a series of incantations, codes and instructions scrolled around porcelain bones or thin spines. The porcelain bones are internal structures and vessels of ancestor memory. This memory is fluid, is evasive, is aquatic. The thin spines resemble futuristic Towers of Babel reaching into space, anticipating communication and new frontiers. These towers have either an upright or collapsed form.
In the making, both forms build toward new possibility, words become obscured, resulting in a non-defined beginning or end, now replaced by chance permutations of the accumulated text.
The sculptural works are deliberately placed onto two large scale text based charts. Each chart is placed on a raised surface, analogous to work benches in an observatory or laboratory suggesting a process of decipherment. Map 1 exhibits a similarity to ancient star charts, the placement of towers alluding to significant points of a constellation. The accompanying Chart 2 resembles an organised series of archeological artefacts, each piece methodically numbered and labelled.
Ultimately, Babel evokes a spiral passage both outward and inward. To unravel the scrolls initiates a return to the spine – the axis mundi, the source of a universal native tongue – love.
Text from the Craft Victoria website [Online] 05/06/2009. No longer available online
Natasha Dusenjko (Australian) Babelbones 2009 Mixed media
Craft Victoria Watson Place, off Flinders Lane Victoria 3000 Phone: 03 9650 7775
John Beard (Australian born Wales, b. 1943) Darwin 2009
The final exhibition of the afternoon were the ephemeral images of John Beard at John Buckley Gallery, Melbourne. This was an enthralling show that I enjoyed tremendously. Beard draws in a multitude of cultural sources for his paintings often referencing painters, scientists, animals and evolution. His work has an intimate sense of knowing, a meditative mediation on the essence of the object being painted, the very presence of the thing itself. The marks on the canvas may be intuitive but it is an informed intuition that results in works that hover at the edge of consciousness. As much as the works are after images, or ghost images, they are also about the persistence of vision, the persistence of the artists vision in addressing issues of collective memory and cultural history that draw emotive responses from the viewer.
These images may be ‘on the verge of disappearance’ as an after-image but they are also pre-images as well, conjured from the mind of the artist and layered with complexity, presence and holistic wholeness. Their seduction, if I may use that word, is that they draw from the viewer peripheral memories and emotions that flit at the edges of consciousness. As Portugese curator Isabel Carlos has noted, “… Beard recreates a ‘figural’ space where the essence of the thing represented lies beyond its singular physical evidence.”1
Beard’s fragmented surfaces form a rhizomic web of dissolved pixellation, their structure almost fractal like in their linked hyper-real intimacies. These in between spaces open up the possibility of subversive commentaries that, on one level, bring a sense of disquiet to the holistic presence of the work. As Mark Poster has noted of the work of Deleuze and Guittari and which can be aptly applied to the work of John Beard,
“Deleuze and Guittari configure the social as a complex of bodily intensities in a state of continuous nonlinear movement. The logic they present is multidimensional, shifting, discontinuous. They speak of strata, assemblages, territorializations, lines of flight, abstract machines, a congerie of terms that disrupts the function of concepts to control a field through discursive articulations. Their categories cut through the normal lines of comprehension, the binary logic that governs modern social theory to present a picture of reality from the perspective of a sort of primitive life force. It is as if the earth itself were to describe the changes on its surface in the course of human history, a vantage point quite remote from the ego of the individual or from the disciplined consciousness of the social scientist.”2
Nonlinear, logical, shifting territorializations in multidimensional environments that hover below the edge of consciousness, investigations into the binary of presence / absence in the dreams of the imaginary. Powerful and poetic these works irradiate the viewer with their visceral presence.
Dr Marcus Bunyan
1/ Isabel Carlos quoted in Wright, William. HEADLANDS: John Beard works 1993-2008. Catalogue essay
2/ Poster, Mark. The Mode of Information: Poststructuralism and Social Context. Cambridge: Polity Press, 1990, pp. 135-137
Many thankx to John Buckley Gallery for allowing me to publish the art work in the posting. Please click on the photographs for a larger version of the image.
John Beard (Australian born Wales, b. 1943) Gorilla 2007
Installation view of John Beard’s exhibition After image at John Buckley Gallery, Melbourne
John Beard (Australian born Wales, b. 1943) Hand 6 2009
John Beard (Australian born Wales, b. 1943) Head SP3 2004
“Beard’s paintings often convey an overpowering sense of brooding stillness, but equally this volatile effervescence of light-reverberant phenomena, where head, headland, the Adraga rock, are no longer object so much as apparition, a painted parallel existence, a material presence invoking nature’s own organic processes …
There is a distinctive sense when encountering a body of John Beard’s works of entering into a site of composure, withheld, of images silently bespeaking truths both personal and historical; hovering presences each conveying some species quality of time-less recognition.”
William Wright from the catalogue essay HEADLANDS: John Beard works 1993-2008 [Online] Cited 29/05/2009. No longer available online
John Beard (Australian born Wales, b. 1943) Rose 2007
John Beard (Australian born Wales, b. 1943) Einstein 2 2009
John Beard (Australian born Wales, b. 1943) Rembrandt 2009
McLean Edwards (Australian, b. 1972) Fifty-Fifty 2009
The next show on our marvellous walkabout were the eclectic paintings of McLean Edwards at Karen Wodbury Gallery, Melbourne. Continuing the carnivalesque theme from the previous review these heterogeneous paintings are a knockout with their wonderful, layered presence – they really command the viewer to look at them and celebrate the characters within them. Whimsical, ironic and full of humour these phantasmagorical images of creatures cast adrift with the night sky as background are fabulous assemblages of colour, form and storytelling.
Further to the evidences noted in the text on the website (the coils, the curling smoke, the starry night sky) one can also say other things about the paintings. There is an effervescence of colour within the blocking of clothing areas. There is the disproportionate size of the hands and bulbous noses of the characters, the shortening of the feet so that the figures almost become caricatures – but hold back from this through the mastery of the painting, through the intent of the artist. There is the symbology of other elements within the pictures: a doll with pins stuck in it’s body being clasped in a clumpy hand, a small house protruding over the protagonists shoulder (Fifty-Fifty); beetles on tree stumps with human faces (Hey, Bastard, Hey); and flowers, teapots and small humans appearing from around the edges of the larger characters in several of the works (Julia 1 and Night Nurse #2 for example). The numbers in the paintings were also puzzling but it turns out that they represent the age of the artist when he painted the works.
Finally one must acknowledge the carnivalesque in the paintings – their fun at playing dress-ups, the almost Alice in Wonderland fantasy and humour of the characterisations. There is an almost androgynous feeling to these characters as some of the female faces seem almost male. Personally I had a feeling that the artist is investigating the subconscious of Carl Jung’s ‘anima’ and ‘animus’ – the feminine inner personality of the male (anima) and the masculine inner personality of the female (animus). These states are manifested by appearing as figures in dreams and so they seem here: the anima or animus vies for attention by projecting itself onto others, here projecting itself outwards onto the painted surface.
My friend and I really enjoyed this exhibition. We were captivated by these songs, going back to the work again and again to tease out the details, to feel connection to the work. These are not lonely isolated figures but sublime emanations of inner states of being expertly rendered in glorious colour. And they made us laugh – what more could you ask for!
Dr Marcus Bunyan
Many thankx to Karen Woodbury Gallery for allowing me to publish the art work in the posting. Please click on the photographs for a larger version of the image.
Installation views of McLean Edwards: Songs from the Ghost Ship at Karen Woodbury Gallery, Melbourne
McLean Edwards (Australian, b. 1972) Venus 2009
McLean Edwards (Australian, b. 1972) Hey, Bastard, Hey 2009
McLean Edwards (Australian, b. 1972) Restoration 2009
“McLean’s works are theatrical, comical, eccentric and often political with the employment of symbolic imagery. His painting technique involves a painterly layering to create a defined and textured surface.
In this most recent series, Songs from the Ghost Ship, semi-fictional characters are set against the dark starry night sky. The exhibition includes nine oil paintings in addition to four works on paper. One of the works on paper shares its name with the exhibition, depicting a jumpered man with a white ghost looking over his shoulder.
The ink on paper work introduces a theme prominent throughout the exhibition, that of wafting smoke. Emanating either from a clasped cigarette or an iconic green curled mosquito coil, the smoke, in elegant strokes of white, grey, tan or black, draw the eye to the face of the central figures. The figures, often with the light of the moon or stars behind them only partially illuminating their faces, stare into the distance or coyly at the viewer, almost unaware of their solitary state against the night sky. The coil appears elsewhere, surreptitiously working its way into the dark pink weave of Twiggy’s jacket, or the blue and red dress of Venus, in the tyre marks of the Arctic Traveller or the grassy landscape in Hey, Bastard, Hey. The soft curl and filigree detail of both the smoke and the mosquito coil are similarly echoed by elements in other works, through the organic features of flowers, leaves and bugs.
Adrift at night, these haunting figures are about to embark on a journey, either from the wharf at the edge of an ocean, as in Venus, or across the vast ice of the Arctic, through the mist and smoke.”
Text from the Karen Woodbury website [Online] Cited 28/05/2009. No longer available online
McLean Edwards (Australian, b. 1972) For Elsa (Twiggy) 2009
McLean Edwards (Australian, b. 1972) Night Nurse #2 2009
Installation views of Judith Wright’s exhibition Desire at Sophie Gannon Gallery, Melbourne
On a beautiful sunny Autumn afternoon in Melbourne I made a visit to Space Furniture on Church Street to ogle at the wondrous designs and then to the galleries of Albert Street in Richmond for three outstanding painting exhibitions: John Beard at John Buckley Gallery, McLean Edwards at Karen Woodbury Gallery and Judith Wright at Sophie Gannon Gallery. First cab off the rank is Judith Wright but reviews of the other two shows will follow…
There is a part in Jim Jarmusch’s film Ghost Dog: The Way of the Samurai (1999) where the anti-hero stares into the eyes of a dog and Jarmusch just holds the scene for what seems like an eternity. The camera observes the infinite bond between human and animal, an almost palpable connection across time and space, with an unflinching eye. The same can be said of Judith Wright’s encaustic paintings (also known as hot wax painting, involves using heated beeswax to which coloured pigments are added) but here she pushes the relationship further – into an investigation of the animal in the human and vice versa, and their erotic charge when placed together. Here is the carnivalesque at it most daring, most paired back, revealing in quiet Zen like compositions the dissolution of boundaries between both states of being.
Nominally based on the symbology of characters presented in two videos in the exhibition (masked figures playing with each other, a comical goats head with horns being one figure) the paintings are much more interesting than the videos. Painted on Japanese paper in wax and acrylic the biomorphic forms of babies heads, torsos and sculpted free forms and designs suggestive of living organisms address the title of the exhibition: desire!
Wright plays with scale and form, using earth tones and a luminous palette of oranges, yellows and pinks. Her shape-shifting paintings work to unhinge stagnant systems of thought that surround identity and the body. The waxed Japanese paper adds to the sensuality of the skin-like work. A baby seems to feed on a double nipple but the nipple has missed the mouth and is invading the eye. Forms intersect and the sensual shapes slip over each other: as in the Zen idea of ‘satori’ or enlightenment attained when two circles intersect here we have the intersection of an erotic enlightenment.
As Russian theorist Mikhail Bakhtin notes the carnivalesque is the contravention of normal laws of behaviour, “and he proposes that the carnivalesque is also the home of the grotesque, where otherwise antithetical properties or characteristics are matched together in the same being: beast with human, youth with age, male with female.”1
“The carnival offers the chance to have a new outlook on the world, to realise the relative nature of all that exists, and to enter a completely new order of things.”2
And this is what these paintings propose: a new order of things, a chance for desires formed of new pleasures.
As Michel Foucault has observed,
“The possibility of using our bodies as a possible source of very numerous pleasures is something that is very important. For instance, if you look at the traditional construction of pleasure, you see that bodily pleasure, or pleasures of the flesh, are always drinking, eating and fucking. And that seems to be the limit of the understanding of our bodies, our pleasures … It is very interesting to note, for instance, that for centuries people generally, as well as doctors, psychiatrists, and even liberation movements, have always spoken about desire, and never about pleasure. “We have to liberate our desire,” they say. No! We have to create new pleasure. And then maybe desire will follow.”3
In their luminosity, in their skin-like textures, in their balance between the colour of the paper, the dark voids and the brown of babies heads we feel the sharp intake of the cold breathe of winter on the nostrils – we feel an evocation of new pleasure, of possible desires within us and the loosening of the grip of conformity. Like the perfect placement of rocks in a Japanese garden and the ripples of the gravel, of a reality that swirls around them these paintings open hearts and minds to inner states of being unexperienced before. And yes, I did enjoy the ride.
Dr Marcus Bunyan
Many thankx to Sophie Gannon Gallery for allowing me to publish the art work in the posting. Please click on some of the photographs for a larger version of the image.
1/ Buchbinder, David. Masculinities and Identities. Melbourne: Melbourne University Press, 1994, p. 53. For a discussion of carnivalesque see Bakhtin, Mikhail. Rabelais and his World (trans. Hélène Iswolsky). Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1984, pp. 196-277, 303-367.
2/ Bakhtin, Mikhail. Rabelais and his World (trans. Hélène Iswolsky). Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1984, p. 34.
3/ Gallagher, Bob and Wilson, Alexander. “Sex and the Politics of Identity: An Interview with Michel Foucault,” in Thompson, Mark. Gay Spirit: Myth and Meaning. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1987, p. 31.
Judith Wright (Australian, b. 1945) Desire [14] 2009 Acrylic and wax on Japanese paper 200 x 200cm
Judith Wright (Australian, b. 1945) Desire [5] 2009 Acrylic and wax on Japanese paper 100 x 100cm
Judith Wright (Australian, b. 1945) Desire [7] 2009 Acrylic and wax on Japanese paper 100 x 100cm
Judith Wright (Australian, b. 1945) Desire [16] 2009 Acrylic and wax on Japanese paper 300 x 300cm
Judith Wright (Australian, b. 1945) The Gift [2] 2008 Acrylic and wax on Japanese paper
Judith Wright (Australian, b. 1945) The Gift [7] 2008 Acrylic and wax on Japanese paper
Sophie Gannon Gallery 2, Albert Street, Richmond, Melbourne Phone: +61 3 9421 0857
![Judith Wright (Australian, b. 1945) 'Desire [14]' 2009 from the exhibition 'Desire' paintings and video by Judith Wright at Sophie Gannon Gallery, Melbourne, May - June, 2009](https://artblart.com/wp-content/uploads/2009/05/wright-desiresgg14-xlg.jpg "Judith Wright (Australian, b. 1945) 'Desire [14]' 2009 from the exhibition 'Desire' paintings and video by Judith Wright at Sophie Gannon Gallery, Melbourne, May - June, 2009")
![Judith Wright (Australian, b. 1945) 'Desire [5]' 2009 from the exhibition 'Desire' paintings and video by Judith Wright at Sophie Gannon Gallery, Melbourne, May - June, 2009](https://artblart.com/wp-content/uploads/2009/05/wright-desiresgg5-xlg.jpg "Judith Wright (Australian, b. 1945) 'Desire [5]' 2009 from the exhibition 'Desire' paintings and video by Judith Wright at Sophie Gannon Gallery, Melbourne, May - June, 2009")
![Judith Wright (Australian, b. 1945) 'Desire [7]' 2009](https://artblart.com/wp-content/uploads/2009/05/wright-desiresgg7-xlg2.jpg "Judith Wright (Australian, b. 1945) 'Desire [7]' 2009")
![Judith Wright (Australian, b. 1945) Desire [16]' 2009](https://artblart.com/wp-content/uploads/2009/05/wright-desiresgg16-xlg.jpg "Judith Wright (Australian, b. 1945) Desire [16]' 2009")
![Judith Wright (Australian, b. 1945) 'The Gift [2]' 2009](https://artblart.com/wp-content/uploads/2009/05/wright-the_gift2-xlg.jpg "Judith Wright (Australian, b. 1945) 'The Gift [2]' 2009")
![Judith Wright (Australian, b. 1945) 'The Gift [7]' 2008](https://artblart.com/wp-content/uploads/2009/05/wright-the_gift7-xlg.jpg "Judith Wright (Australian, b. 1945) 'The Gift [7]' 2008")
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