Exhibition dates: 25th February – 14th March, 2009
Junko Go (Australian born Japan, b. 1955) Opium Poppy 2008
“One person’s heaven is another’s nightmare. Seeing both sides to every story can be a blessing and a curse. Good and bad, right and wrong, purity and impurity are inextricably linked.”
A delicate, refined but strong presence is felt in the work of Junko Go in the her new exhibition ‘all about … blooming’ at Gallery 101, Melbourne. Nominally landscape painting about flowers but featuring thoughts and ideas about the seed, the shoot, pollen and the breath of life the work addresses the essence of what it is to be human and live compassionately on this earth in an intelligent and profound way.
Denying the nihilism of abstract expressionism each mark is fully considered by being attentive to the connection between brush, hand and meaning. Almost childlike in their use of charcoal and acrylic her dogs, crosses and flowers, jottings and dashes, rain and rivers, seeds and people show a Zen like contemplation in the marks she makes on the canvas – just so. A releasement towards things is proffered, a letting go of the ego to create an awareness of just being. There is genuine warmth and humility to this work.
In Opium Poppy (2008, above) the darkness of the nightmare is represented by the black marks, ascending like Jacob’s ladder balanced by the mandala like poppies whose petals seem like feathers of a bird’s wing – a flight of fancy both good and bad. In Pollen (2009) bees swarm around a sunflower leaving traces of their presence, a bird flies close to a tiny blue cloud, the sun burst forth in a tiny patch of aqua colour, and people hug arm in arm. As Go says, “Bees in a flower bear pollen unawares and play a crucial roll for the plant to survive. Our love, kindness, warmth and wisdom affect one another unawares and play a crucial roll for our planet to survive.” In New Shoot (2008, below) the puzzle of our existence, the nature of our existential being is laid bare for all to see.
In Seeds (2008) Go reminds us that rather than being focused on what we hoped for, we must make the most of whatever opportunities we are blessed with. This means being aware of the gifts one possesses, not the distance between ‘I’ and want, need and desire – now! The seed of our experience – the calm before the force that propelled us into existence – is already present within us.
Go’s musings on the existential nature of our being are both full and empty at one and the same time and help us contemplate the link to the breath of the sublime. In the end Go’s paintings are about endings and beginnings, about being strong or not, about the infinity of the seed and about our responses to living in harmony on this planet. Through the seed, the shoot, the flower and the earth access may be granted to the sublime and this perfectly sums up the work of this artist, a reflection of her energy and radiance transferred to the canvas. I loved it.
Dr Marcus Bunyan
Many thankx to Gallery 101 for allowing me to publish the art work in the posting. Please click on the art work for a larger version of the image.
Junko Go (Australian born Japan, b. 1955) New Shoot 2008
“Each of us is born to fill a special place in this world. In the process, we sometimes have trouble finding our niche. Life is like a jigsaw puzzle in which we make every effort to find our own place that makes a right connection with others, with the world and even with the whole universe.”
Junko Go (Australian born Japan, b. 1955) Red Hot Poker 2009
“Push and pull our inner strength. Sometimes, we need courage to take risks in confronting pain and loss in order to gain a deep and profound experience.”
“We live in a world where high achievers are congratulated, yet true achievements are not related to what we can get done, but to how deeply we aware of how wonderful it is to be alive. In this exhibition, flowers are not only a predominant source of visual inspiration, looking at them also engenders a kind of appreciation and wonder. The fragile and ephemeral flower provokes in me an awareness of the human condition that reveals the true nature of our existence.
My goal is to create images which are strong and soft, bold and precise, beautiful and ugly, figurative and abstract, all at once. My greatest challenge is to make art about what it is to be human … What really matters in art making to me is a kind of awareness – a being able to say, ‘I am as I am’.”
Bill Viola’s video installation, Ocean Without a Shore, is presented in the atmospheric setting of the church of San Gallo, Venice. Monitors positioned on three stone altars in the church show a succession of individuals slowly approaching out of darkness and moving into the light, as if encountered at the intersection between death and life. Viola talks about his artistic intentions and the technical challenges of the piece.
Originally installed inside the intimate 15th century Venetian church of San Gallo as part of the 2007 Venice Biennale (see above) incorporating its internal architecture into the piece using the three existing stone altars as support for the video screens, the installation has been recreated in a small darkened room at The National Gallery of Victoria in Melbourne. What an installation it is.
Deprived of the ornate surroundings of the altars of the Venetian chapel – altars of which Viola has said that, “… as per the original development of the origins of Christianity these alters actually are a place where the dead kind of reside and connect with those of us, the living, who are here on earth. And they really are a connection between a cross, between a tomb and an alter – a place to pray,”1 – the viewer is forced to concentrate on the images themselves. This is no bad thing, stripping away as it does a formalised, religious response to mortality.
In the work Viola combines the use of a primitive twenty five year old security black and white analogue video surveillance camera with a high definition colour video camera through the use of a special mirror prism system. This technology allows for the seamless combination of both inputs: the dead appear far off in a dark obscure place as grey ghosts in a sea of pulsating ‘noise’ and gradually walk towards you, crossing the invisible threshold of a transparent water wall that separates the dead from the living, to appear in the space transformed into a detailed colour image. As they do so the sound that accompanies the transformation grows in intensity reminding me of a jet aircraft. You, the viewer, are transfixed watching every detail as the ghosts cross-over into the light, through a water curtain.
The performances of the actors (for that is what they are) are slow and poignant. As Viola has observed, “I spent time with each person individually talking with them and you know when you speak with people, you realise then that everybody has experienced some kind of loss in their life, great and small. So you speak with them, you work with them, you spend time and that comes to the surface while we were working on this project together, you know? I didn’t want to over-direct them because I knew that the water would have this kind of visual effect and so they were able to, I think, use this piece on their own and a lot of them had their own stories of coming back and visiting a relative perhaps, who had died.”1
The resurrected are pensive, some wringing the hands, some staring into the light. One offers their hands to the viewer in supplication before the tips of the fingers touch the wall of water – the ends turning bright white as they push through the penumbrae of the interface. As they move forward the hands take on a stricken anguish, stretched out in rigour. Slowly the resurrected turn and return to the other side. We watch them as we watch our own mortality, life slipping away one day after another. Here is not the distraction of a commodified society, here is the fact of every human life: that we all pass.
The effect on the viewer is both sad but paradoxically uplifting. I cried.
A friend who I went with said that the images reminded her not of the dead temporarily coming back to life, but the birth of a new life – the breaking of water at the birth of a child. The performers seemed to her to behave like children brought anew into the world. One of my favourite moments was when the three screens were filled with just noise and a figure then appears out of the beyond, a dim and distant outline creating a transcendental moment. Unfortunately there are no images of these grainy figures. As noted below Viola uses a variety of different ethnic groups and cultures for his performers but the one very small criticism I have is they have no real individuality as people – there are no bikers with tattoos, no cross dressers, no punks because these do not serve his purpose. There is the black woman, the old woman, the middle aged man, the younger 30s man in black t-shirt: these are generic archetypes of humanity moulded to Viola’s artistic vision.
Viola has commented, “I think I have designed a piece that’s open ended enough, where the people and the range of people, the kind of people we chose are from various ethnic groups and cultures. And I think that the feeling of more this is a piece about humanity and it’s about the fragility of life, like the borderline between life and death is actually not a hard wall, it’s not to be opened with a lock and key, its actually very fragile, very tenuous.
You can cross it like that in an instant and I think religions, you know institutions aside, I think just the nature of our awareness of death is one of the things that in any culture makes human beings have that profound feeling of what we call the human condition and that’s really something I am really interested in. I think this piece really has a lot to do with, you know, our own mortality and all that that means.”1
These series of encounters at the intersection of life and death are worthy of the best work of this brilliant artist. He continues to astound with his prescience, addressing what is undeniable in the human condition.
Long may he continue.
Dr Marcus Bunyan
1/ TateShots. Venice Biennale: Bill Viola. 30 June 2007 [Online] Cited 23/09/2009. No longer available online
“The unfolding of consciousness, the revelation of beauty, present even after death, the moment of awe, the space without words, the emptiness that builds mountains, the joy of loving, the sorrow of loss, the gift of leaving something behind for the next traveler.”
Bill Viola
Bill Viola (American, 1951-2024) Ocean Without A Shore (excerpt) 2007 Installation in the church of San Gallo, Venice
Bill Viola (American, 1951-2024) Ocean Without A Shore (excerpt) 2007
“Ocean Without a Shore is about the presence of the dead in our lives. The three stone altars in the church of San Gallo become portals for the passage of the dead to and from our world. Presented as a series of encounters at the intersection between life and death, the video sequence documents a succession of individuals slowly approaching out of darkness and moving into the light. Each person must then break through an invisible threshold of water and light in order to pass into the physical world. Once incarnate however, all beings realise that their presence is finite and so they must eventually turn away from material existence to return from where they came. The cycle repeats without end.”
The work was inspired by a poem by the twentieth century Senegalese poet and storyteller Birago Diop:
Hearing things more than beings, listening to the voice of fire, the voice of water. Hearing in wind the weeping bushes, sighs of our forefathers.
The dead are never gone: they are in the shadows. The dead are not in earth: they’re in the rustling tree, the groaning wood, water that runs, water that sleeps; they’re in the hut, in the crowd, the dead are not dead.
The dead are never gone, they’re in the breast of a woman, they’re in the crying of a child, in the flaming torch.
The dead are not in the earth: they’re in the dying fire, the weeping grasses, whimpering rocks, they’re in the forest, they’re in the house, the dead are not dead.
Text from the Ocean Without A Shore website [Online] Cited 23/09/2009. No longer available online
Installation photographs of Ocean Without A Shore at the National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne Photos: Marcus Bunyan
Bill Viola (American, 1951-2024) Ocean Without A Shore (still) 2007 Original installation at church of San Gallo
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.
Marcus Bunyan (Australian, b. 1958) Untitled from the series Momentum 2009 Digital colour photograph
Marcus Bunyan (Australian, b. 1958) Untitled from the series Momentum 2009 Digital colour photograph
Marcus Bunyan (Australian, b. 1958) Untitled from the series Momentum 2009 Digital colour photograph
Marcus Bunyan (Australian, b. 1958) Untitled from the series Momentum 2009 Digital colour photograph
Marcus Bunyan (Australian, b. 1958) Untitled from the series Momentum 2009 Digital colour photograph
Marcus Bunyan (Australian, b. 1958) Untitled from the series Momentum 2009 Digital colour photograph
Exhibition dates: 3rd February – 21st February, 2009
Mary Newsome (Australian, b. 1936) Bowerhouse Blues installation photograph with The Bowerhouse centre 2009
This is a slight bouffant of an exhibition by Mary Newsome at Gallery 101, Collins St., Melbourne.
“The exhibition consists of separate collections to do with blue, centring on the Bowerhouse with its beckoning light. The ideas came from several different directions.” And what directions they are.
Firstly, the idea of the lonely male bowerbird at the Museum of Victoria, given blue biros as solace after killing his last mate. Secondly, Oscar Wilde trying to live with his blue china toying with Yves Klein and his uber-dimensionality, the invisible blue becoming visible. Then we have finger painting as a child upgraded to paste painting “which is finger painting under a more adult name”; and more – poetry, yes! by famous poets, sandwiched with shells and cans and bits of glass and plastic and pottery and pegs all offered up to the god of the azure.
Artefacts litter the floor around the edge of the gallery, media wash across the walls. A silkscreen here and a painting of blue and white china there, watercolours of a view out of a blue curtained Cornish cottage, a blue seascape, the “royal-ness” of a blue tampons collage, three-dimensional objects, acrylics, crayon, pencil, oils and stencils. The Bowerhouse itself, like a blue ‘red light’ house with flashing blue light inside and heart on top. And so it goes.
There are some interesting small single-pigment blue acrylics that have geometric and anamorphic shapes painted upon them with stencilled names of the colour along the spine of the canvases. There are also a couple of competent oils and silkscreens of tea sets in a dresser with cups hanging from hooks.
The works date from 1980 to the present day – and “without fully realising it” the artist has looked through her work over the past 30 years and come across lots and lots of blue. Any artist worth their salt knows their oevure indelibly from front to back. It seems inconceivable to me that this epiphany has occurred without the artist not fully understanding the importance of the colour blue to their art practice before now.
Recently I have been reading a book called Distraction (Damon Young. Distraction: A Philosopher’s Guide to Being Free. Melbourne: Melbourne University Publishing, 2008). The book surmises that distraction is often a matter of what one values in the world. The book demonstrates that the opposite of a life of distraction is one of grateful appreciation, based on patient, sensitive, and thoughtful attention to the world. In this exhibition we have a perfect example of distraction: the noise of the collective work has subsumed its individual charms. The work seems forced into a conceptualisation not of it’s making. Everything seems laboured to the point where all the fun has been squeezed from it and, in the end, it just left me feeling the blues.
Dr Marcus Bunyan
Photographs by Tim Gresham Images courtesy of Gallery 101
Mary Newsome (Australian, b. 1936) Blue Colours 2008
Mary Newsome (Australian, b. 1936) Bowerhouse Blues 2009 Installation photograph
Mary Newsome (Australian, b. 1936) Bathroom Sink 1992
Mary Newsome (Australian, b. 1936) What Bliss There is in Blueness Extract from Laughter in the Dark, 1989 by Vladimir Nabokov 2009
Mary Newsome (Australian, b. 1936) Royal Tampons 2009 Collage
Marcus Bunyan (Australian, b. 1958) On Port Phillip Bay 2009
Port Phillip Bay in the morning from the 48th floor of a tower in Southbank, Melbourne
Melbourne’s hottest day ever 46.4 degrees. Firestorms to the north of the city, Port Phillip Bay completely obscured, very strange light seen from 48th floor. The day, 7th February 2009, is now known as the Black Saturday bushfires.
180 people died and 414 were injured as a result of the fires.
It was a very scary day. I cannot imagine what it would have been like to have been there, up close. My condolences to all those that lost loved ones.
Dr Marcus Bunyan
Please click on the photographs for a larger version of the image.
Marcus Bunyan (Australian, b. 1958) On Port Phillip Bay 2009
Port Phillip Bay during firestorm, in the afternoon from the 48th floor of a tower in Southbank, Melbourne
Marcus Bunyan (Australian, b. 1958) Looking towards the docks, Melbourne 2009
Looking towards the docks, Melbourne, during the firestorm
Marcus Bunyan (Australian, b. 1958) Looking across the city 2009
Looking across the city with the Melbourne Star Observation Wheel (at the time called the Southern Star) in the foreground
Black Saturday bushfires
The Black Saturday bushfires were a series of bushfires that ignited or were burning across the Australian state of Victoria on and around Saturday, 7 February 2009 and were Australia’s all-time worst bushfire disasters. The fires occurred during extreme bushfire-weather conditions and resulted in Australia’s highest ever loss of life from a bushfire; there were 180 fatalities, and 414 were injured as a result of the fires.
As many as 400 individual fires were recorded on 7 February. Following the events of 7 February 2009 and its aftermath, that day has become widely referred to in Australia as Black Saturday.
Background
A week before the fires, a significant heatwave affected southeastern Australia. From 28-30 January, Melbourne broke temperature records by experiencing three consecutive days above 43°C (109 °F), with the temperature peaking at 45.1°C (113.2°F) on 30 January, the third hottest day in the city’s history.
The wave of heat was caused by a slow moving high-pressure system that settled over the Tasman Sea, with a combination of an intense tropical low located off the North West Australian coast and a monsoon trough over northern Australia, which produced ideal conditions for hot tropical air to be directed down over southeastern Australia.
The February fires commenced on a day when several localities across the state, including Melbourne, recorded their highest temperatures since records began in 1859. On 6 February 2009 – the day before the fires started – the Premier of Victoria John Brumby issued a warning about the extreme weather conditions expected on 7 February: “It’s just as bad a day as you can imagine and on top of that the state is just tinder-dry. People need to exercise real common sense tomorrow”. The Premier went on to state that it was expected to be the “worst day [of fires conditions] in the history of the state”.
Events of 7 February 2009
A total of 358 firefighting personnel, mainly from the Country Fire Authority (CFA) and Department of Sustainability and Environment (DSE), were deployed across the state on Friday evening (6 February) in anticipation of the extreme conditions the following day. By mid-morning Saturday, hot northwesterly winds in excess of 100 kilometres per hour (62 mph) hit the state, accompanied by extremely high temperatures and extremely low humidity; a total fire ban was declared for the entire state of Victoria.
As the day progressed, all-time record temperatures were being reached. Melbourne hit 46.4°C (115.5°F), the hottest temperature ever recorded for the city and humidity levels dropped to as low as two percent. The McArthur Forest Fire Danger Index reached unprecedented levels, ranging from 160 to over 200. This was higher than the fire weather conditions experienced on Black Friday in 1939 and Ash Wednesday in 1983.
Around midday, as wind speeds were reaching their peak, an incorrectly-rigged SWER line was ripped down at Kilmore East. This sparked a bushfire that would become the deadliest and most intense firestorm ever experienced in Australia’s post-1788 history. The overwhelming majority of fire activity occurred between the afternoon of 7 February and 7:00 pm, when wind speed and temperature were at their highest, and humidity at its lowest.
Casualties
A total of 180 people were confirmed to have died as a result of the fires. The figure was originally estimated at 14 on the night of 7 February, and steadily increased over the following two weeks to 210. It was feared that it could rise as high as 240-280, but these figures were later revised down to 173 after further forensic examinations of remains, and after several people previously believed to be missing were located. This figure was later increased to 180 after several people succumbed to their injuries. …
Among the dead in the Kinglake West area were former Seven Network and Nine Network television personality Brian Naylor, and his wife Moiree. Actor Reg Evans and his partner, artist Angela Brunton, residing on a small farm in the St Andrews area, also died in the Kinglake area fire. Ornithologist Richard Zann perished in the Kinglake fire, together with his wife Eileen and daughter Eva.
Fatalities
General statistics
~ 164 people died in the fires themselves, 12 died later in hospital, and 4 died from other causes including car crashes
~ Out of the 180 deaths, 100 were male, 73 were female, and 7 were unidentified
~ There were 164 Australians, 9 foreign nationals, and 7 people of unidentified nationalities killed in the bushfires. The foreign nationals comprised citizens of:
~ Greece (2) ~ Indonesia (2) ~ Philippines (2) ~ Chile (1) ~ New Zealand (1) ~ United Kingdom (1)
~ 7 of the deaths occurred in bunkers of both fire-specific and non-fire-specific design
~ 1 firefighter, David Balfour, 47, from Gilmore, ACT, was killed near Cambarville on the night of 17 February, when a burnt-out tree fell on him as he attached a hose to a fire tanker
Location of deaths
~ Inside houses (113) ~ Outside houses (27) ~ In vehicles (11) ~ In garages (6) ~ Near vehicles (5) ~ On roadways (5) ~ Attributed to or associated with the fire but not within fire location (4) ~ On reserves (1) ~ In sheds (1) ~ Unknown locations (7)
This exhibition is a relatively small, muscular yet poetic evocation of the life and work of one of my favourite Australian artists, Rosalie Gascoigne. Perhaps I have an affinity with this artist that goes beyond words: being English I have grown to love the Australian landscape but to see the way Gascoigne visions it is a truly moving experience. I have also admired artists that can successfully combine images and sculptural elements visually in their work, language and memory impinging on consciousness (hence my infatuation with the work of Joseph Cornell).
As we enter the exhibition early constructions – wooden boxes – are presented dating from 1975-1984. These have a rough hewn, rustic charm to them, made as they are of weathered thick planks of wood. Less refined than the boxes of Joseph Cornell (see below) they nevertheless draw on the Australian vernacular in their use of objects. As with the Cornell boxes there is a strong element of childhood fun and games in these constructions. Dolly boxes (1976, below) for example contains innumerable plastic dollies of different sizes held inside wooden boxes; Black bird box (1976) is like a shooting gallery at a fun fair; other boxes feature birds and sea shells trapped in plastic bottles, printed images of moths, test tubes, candlesticks, metal teapots and children’s bicycle seats. Cloister (1977) below echoes the work of Joseph Cornell in it’s use of classical Renaissance imagery but with a rustic Australian charm. Unlike Cornell’s boxes which are enclosed dreamscapes that do not live in the world, Cascoigne’s boxes are made her own by being open and receptive to the landscape from which they merge, by being open to the world.
Forty acre block (1977, above) is a play on the great Aussie dream of owning your own 1/4 acre block. Inside the crate like tableaux we find cardboard parrots perched menacingly on rusted cylindrical metal tubes, two cardboard cut out cows with their white faces turned towards the viewer and at the rear of the box a sun-bleached picture of an orchard and three cows with human heads: a surreal vision of the Aussie landscape. Continuing the playfulness Parrot morning (1976, below) extends the theme, the bicycle wheel almost having elements of Duchamp’s readymades but given an Australian twist with the perching parrots.
Moving forward we find one of my favourite works, Feathered chairs (1978, below), a most beautiful evocation of technology and nature. Two red rusted 1950’s office chairs sit low on the floor, their seats, back and sides replaced by four rows of dark Commorant feathers held in place by wooden slats clamped together. Simple yet eloquent these surreal chairs have a poetic rhythm of place and space, speaking of the abandonment of technology and it’s re-habitation by a trapped but beautiful nature. Other work becomes simpler, more focused around this time (and especially from 1984 onwards) as though the artist was finding her singular voice, was confident of the ‘less is more’ rhythms of the music she was creating. The essence appears: of the land, artefacts and spaces. In Swell (1984) for example two convex forms of corrugated iron (one horizontal, one vertical) play off of each other, forming an opposing flow of energies like the swelling of the sea. Nothing else is needed.
In Step through (1980, below) fragments of floral linoleum floor are mounted on wooden blocks at differing heights allowing the viewer to visually wander across the space of the installation as their mind wanders to memories of the floors of Australian kitchens of the 1950’s – either seen in childhood or in photographs – their is a recognition from all ages, in all Australians. This theme is further developed in the gridded Inland sea (1986, below) patches of corrugated iron float above the ground like gently moving waves. Beautiful in it’s simplicity the colours, shapes and spaces evocatively reflect the undulating rise and fall of the landscape from which the iron has been rescued, the breath of air on the wind rippling the water.
The use of regularised block and grids start to appear in wall mounted vistas: of loopholes, of lovers, the metropolis and the fall, of beach houses and far views, of grasslands and medusas. Promised land (1986) offers a vision resplendent of a far away country – the promised land abstracted to Tarax, Dales, Cottee’s, Blue Bow home deliveries of a Sparkling Fruity Flavour! box ends, the 32 Fl. Oz weight weighing the vision of the Australian landscape in the balance.
The most effective work uses the yellow colour of Schweppes boxes. In Monaro (1989), one of my favourite works in the exhibition, the painted blocks of yellow wood with unreadable fragmented words on them become, from a distance, like the wafting waving dried grasses of the Monaro landscape around Gascoigne’s home. Liquid music of air and place.
“I like the gold of the Schweppes boxes. I think that gold is one of the classical colours. I don’t care if it has got Schweppes written all over it, people seem to think I care. I don’t care! I just like the black and yellow. When I started I had lots of off-cuts, little pieces too good to throw away. So I started joining them up in a sort of way, walking around them, adding a few more. I soon had a 6 x 4 foot panel. In the end I realised that I needed to have four panels to say what I wanted to say. As it grew so did I. I kept thinking of the Monaro grasslands, and I thought of David Campbell saying ‘the Monaro rolls on to the sea’.”
~ Graeme Sullivan, Seeing Australia – Views of artists and art writers, Piper Press, Annandale, New South Wales, 1994, p. 19.
 Summer swarm (1995) features small yellow blocks of wood an assemblage of yellow bees; Grassfest (1999, below) like a stand of yellow grass under the Australian sun; Metropolis (1999, below) collaged and patched road signs are worked together overlaying spaces and language. In Plenty (1986) yellow wood bricks mounted in panels are held in place with rusted metal nails. if you move close to the work the effect is immersive – every inflection of colour, grain of the wood, knot, nail hole, rub, scuff, daub of paint becomes evident. Every block is same but different, an almost transcendental experience.
In this work there is a refining of the essence of her vision of the world, a paring back of all extraneous elements but conversely an expansion in the energy of the work. A mature artist at the peak of their power.
In the ‘white’ work Star chart (1995) and Milky way (1995), heaven and earth reflect each other, the grids and patterns linked in a cosmic dance. But mostly air (1994-1995) the large installation that closes the exhibition confirms this dance, containing as it does white blocks of wood (invisible air) with a row of weathered wooden posts propped up against the gallery wall and animal spirits made of wooden blocks: faces with wings and ears, gasping for breath, white animals on a white background hovering between here and there, between heaven and earth.
This is a wonderful exhibition. Gascoigne rightly commands a place in the pantheon of Australian stars. She has left us with a legacy of music that evokes the rhythms, the air, the spaces and colours of our country. As she herself said,
“Look at what we have: Space, skies. You can never have too much of nothing.”
Nothing more, nothing less.
Dr Marcus Bunyan
Many thankx to the NGV for allowing me to publish the photographs in the posting. Please click on the photographs for a larger version of the image.
Joseph Cornell (American, 1903-1972) Medici Princess 1948 Mixed media
Rosalie Gascoigne is one of Australia’s most acclaimed and respected visual artists. Her distinctive style is characterised by her recognition of beauty in the most humble of objects such as soft drink crates, linoleum, retro-reflective road signs, dried grasses and feathers. Collecting and arranging these items, often rescued from rubbish dumps, and scarred and faded by the ravages of weather, is an integral part of her practice. Like a magician she transforms these discarded materials into sculptures, wall pieces and assemblages, which create evocative visual poetry, capturing the essence of things or an experience rather than conveying a literal representation.
Gascoigne like Picasso realised later in life that one is not made an artist, one is born an artist. Some of her fondest memories as a child are of collecting shells on summer holidays at the beach, and the yellow china her grandmother owned. At the age of ten she won first prize for her entry in a table decoration competition that included yellow flowers, an unusual Indian brass vase and Indian brass bowls.
Her journey to becoming a professional artist was highly unconventional. She received no formal art education, openly declared that she could neither draw nor paint and was not officially recognised as part of the Australian art scene until she held her first critically acclaimed exhibition at the age of fifty-seven.
Gascoigne was born in New Zealand in 1917. She studied for a Bachelor of Arts degree, specialising in English and Latin, at the University of Auckland. During this time she got to know her future husband Ben Gascoigne. In 1943, following a short teaching career, she moved to Australia to marry Ben. They lived as part of a small isolated scientific community around Mt Stromlo Observatory outside Canberra, where Ben had taken up a position. The transition from the gentle, green landscape of her home to the hard, unforgiving, dry slopes of Mount Stromlo, bounded by seemingly endless space, was initially a tough and lonely experience. She didn’t fit into the mould of the happy domesticated wife expected of this era. The lack of stimulating conversation with the other wives on the establishment made her feel particularly alone. She befriended nature instead and as she brought up three children in these alien conditions she remembers:
“I’d push the children’s prams around that lonely mountain until I knew the shape of every stone and tree, the texture of every patch of dirt and grass, the colour of every leaf and weed. I’d gaze down at the valley below, a vastness of dry blond grass and grubby sheep and the sky used to hang, from there to there.”
~ Janet Hawley ‘A late developer’, Sydney Morning Herald, Good Weekend, 15 November 1997, p. 40.
She acclimatised to this new terrain and began to gather unusual natural forms. She displayed these found objects in her home, much to the bemusement of the conventional local community. Gascoigne began creating distinctive flower arrangements in the 1950s and won prizes for them in horticultural shows. When the family moved from Mount Stromlo to the Canberra suburb of Deakin in 1960, she studied ikebana, the Japanese art of flower arranging, under Norman Sparnon, a master of the Sogetsu School. Gascoigne appreciated the strict discipline of this form of arranging, which imposed a sense of order on her collected found objects. The emphasis on line, form and sculptural properties was to become a key part of her later practice.
When Gascoigne’s three children had grown up, she had increasing freedom to pursue her growing interest in art. She visited art galleries more often, looked at art books and met people in the art world who were to shape her future career, including James Mollison, who became the inaugural director of the Australian National Gallery (now National Gallery of Australia). Her discussions with those in the arts community taught her much about looking and thinking about art, and confirmed her sense of identity as an artist.
In the mid-1960s she began making assemblages of rusted iron, which were followed, from 1973, by assemblages in boxes. These miniature surreal and often humorous worlds, such as The colonel’s lady, 1976, employed rich patterning and repetition through the arrangement of man-made objects, including advertising symbols used on the packaging of products.
The eclectic mix of objects and surfaces in these early works gave way to her later wall-based works that were elegant compositions limited to one or two materials, and subtly evoke culture, nature, language and the landscape, particularly the country around Canberra, which she came to love. Scrub country, 1982, and Monaro, 1989, epitomise these works. They are made from soft-drink crates – weathered by the sun, rain, wind and time – dismantled, sawn into strips and reassembled.
Gascoigne reached meteoric heights in her career which spanned over two decades until her death in 1999 at the age of eighty-two. She was given a major survey show at the National Gallery of Victoria (NGV) in 1978, only four years after her first solo exhibition at Macquarie Galleries, Canberra. In 1982 she represented Australia with artist Peter Booth at the Venice Biennale. Her work is included in major public, corporate and private collections.
Despite their unusual appearance, this set of feathered chairs is not a departure from Rosalie Gascoigne’s usual practice. This work does not record, despite the reference to furniture in the title, a move to decorative arts – this feathered pair were never intended to function as seating – they are sculptures, conceived to fascinate the eye rather than conform to anyone’s behind.
Gascoigne collected the feathers for the chairs on the shores of Lake George, located about 35 kilometres from Canberra, on the road to Sydney.
“And then I came to this place,” she recalled in 1982, “where there were all these… black birds, you know, cormorants. And a shattering of black beautiful glossy [feathers] as if the birds had just undressed. … They’re beautiful feathers. They’re like the underside of mushrooms. You know… the quill.”
The feathers were assembled in racks similar to those used in Gasgoigne’s Feathered Fence 1979 (NGA Collection, Canberra) which used swan feathers also found at Lake George. Racks of feathers were displayed on two reddish metal chairs that she had found at the dump. Gascoigne aimed to create poetic, rather than literal interpretations of her work, aiming for a succinct ‘plastic metaphor’, where a melding of disparate objects and textures might produce unexpected allusions and tangential meanings. Nonetheless, the claw foot of the chair suggests the foot of a bird and the splayed feathers conjure up the pose of a cormorant with its spread wings drying off in the sun. Or did the sun-basking bird with its arm rest wings suggest a throne? Gascoigne was not an artist to routinely create figurative works and it’s just as likely that in this work she sought a tension between the earthbound weight of the metal and the airy, windborne feathers. She had a longtime fascination with birds and the Feathered Chairs suggest an evocation of flight and freedom; a joyous ability to see and read the story of our ancient land. Elated by exploration and discovery, Gascoigne willingly shares her delight with the armchair traveller.
Extract from Michael Desmond. “Rosalie Gascoigne,” on the Menzies website [Online] Cited 19/12/2018. No longer available online
After first exhibiting her work at the age of 57, Rosalie Gascoigne rapidly established a reputation as one of Australia’s foremost contemporary artists. Following her first exhibition in 1974, Gascoigne subsequently developed an impressive exhibition history that included her being honoured, in 1982, as the first female artist to represent Australia at the Venice Biennale.
This major exhibition of Rosalie Gascoigne’s work ranges from the boxlike assemblages of her early career through to large scale installations and her creation of master works constructed from Schweppes soft drink crates and retro-reflective road signs. The exhibition investigates the artist’s ability to draw creative inspiration from the discarded; her intrinsic response to her chosen materials, and her unique ability to evocatively convey the essence of nature and the transitory and captivating effects of light, air and space.
Rosalie Gascoigne is the first major retrospective exhibition of Gascoigne’s work to be seen in Melbourne and is accompanied by a comprehensive exhibition catalogue.
Extract from A Formal Focus – Art Elements and Principles
In Inland sea, 1986 (below), sixteen large sheets of corrugated tin hover above the floor in a loose grid arrangement. The grid format unifies the separate parts of the composition, and also enhances the expressive power of different visual elements through repetition. The shapes and lines repeated across the buckling sheets of tin create a powerful sense of the gentle movement of wind or water.
The strong visual rhythms and movement evident in Gascoigne’s compositions are often achieved through the repetition of different visual elements. Step through, 1980 (above), is made from fifteen separate parts, each made from a torn piece of brightly coloured, floral patterned linoleum mounted on a block of wood. The blocks sit at different angles creating different levels within the installation. The spaces between the different parts create a meandering path for the viewer to explore, highlighting the importance of movement through and across space in Gascoigne’s work.
“I was thinking about the unkempt empty blocks in built up city areas … usually covered in rank grasses and flowering weeds … rubble, old tins and bottles. One steps through them gingerly and, with possible snakes in mind, lifts one’s knees high.”
~ Vici MacDonald, Rosalie Gascoigne, Regaro Pty Ltd, Sydney, 1998, p. 48
…
Colour assumed a vital presence in Gascoigne’s work. In an overview of her work, as in the exhibition Rosalie Gascoigne (2008), the importance of particular colours is revealed in swathes and groupings of yellow, red, orange and white artworks, culminating in the grey, brown and ochre hues of the Earth series (1999), which were the artist’s last works. Individually, each work reveals something of the beauty of colour and its ability to suggest meaning; from sun-baked, muted yellows that remind us of vistas of dry grass, to soft pale greys and whites that murmur quietly of the open air and cloud.
Gascoigne was often drawn to particular materials because of the beauty of their colour and texture, and the associations or moods these suggested. The visual qualities and associations found in the textures of humble and / or discarded materials are clearly revealed in Gascoigne’s work – from the flaky layers of faded paint on weathered tin or wood that speak of both rural life and work, and the forces and seasons of nature, to the staccato flash of retro-reflective road signs that remind us of driving through the landscape.
Rosalie Gascoigne’s work is often referred to as visual poetry. Her training in literature and fascination for words infuse her work. She had a particular love of poetry. This included the modern Australian poets such as Peter Porter and David Campbell, who also evoked in his writing the landscape around Canberra. Just as a poet distils the essence of their subject with carefully chosen evocative words and phrases, so Gascoigne captures the spirit of a place, or the core of an idea with sensitive arrangements of visual elements. Instead of literary allusions, Gascoigne creates visual metaphors with materials such as corrugated iron in Inland sea, 1986, which evokes movement of air, while slivers of discarded, weathered timber in Monaro, 1989 suggest dried grassland. Repetition, ordering, fragmenting and editing out unnecessary materials are also part of her practice which echo the creation of poetry.
Gascoigne admired the English Romantic poets of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries and often quoted William Wordsworth’s idea that: ‘Poetry is the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings: it takes its origin from emotion recollected in tranquillity.’ She believed passionately that her work was intricately woven with glimpses of her past feelings and experiences. …
Gascoigne frequently described her works as ‘stammering concrete poetry’ (Gregory O’Brien, 2004, p. 42), a reference to a style of poetry originating in the 1950s where the visual arrangement of words or letters suggests something about the subject of the poem. In All that jazz, 1989, for example, the artist has conjured up the pulsating chopped up rhythms of jazz with wooden strips of dazzling colour highlighted by splinters of black lettering. In contrast, the broken and fractured nature of the yellow and black road signs in Skylight, 1993, interspersed with ill-fitting patches of well-worn linoleum, sets up a tension that hints at both the tragedy of drought and the beauty of the Australian light in summer.
The evocative titles of Gascoigne’s works, which are selected after their completion and only after much contemplation, are chosen to be allusive and poetic rather than descriptive. They reveal an entry point but allow the viewer to experience their own intuitive response to the work.
Text from the NGV Rosalie Gascoigne Education Kit
Rosalie Gascoigne’s art comes from, is inspired by, and in turn reflects the spare countryside of the southern tablelands and the Monaro district, a unique natural environment that lies relatively close to Canberra, the artist’s home of more than fifty years. Gascoigne’s transformation and re-investment in her work of battered and weathered materials sourced in the landscape surrounding Canberra also highlights the importance of collecting to her oeuvre, as different materials appear in works from across the decades …
Gascoigne’s knowledge and love of language and of Romantic poetry is evident in many of her works as she aspired to make art that achieved ‘allusive and illusive’ qualities that she experienced in this form. Through the artist’s skill in making poetry of the commonplace and her intrinsic response to both her chosen materials and the particularities of the Australian landscape, we are able to witness her unique ability to evocatively capture and convey the essence of nature and the transitory and captivating effects of light, air and space.
Extract from Landscape – Place, Memory, Experience
The art of Rosalie Gascoigne has a unique place in the rich landscape tradition in Australian art. While painting has been the dominant artform in this tradition, Gascoigne worked in assemblage and installation, using natural and man-made materials collected from the landscape. Unlike many earlier artists, she was not interested in describing the visual reality, picturesque beauty or stories of the Australian landscape. Gascoigne’s artworks capture the essence of the landscape’s topography, space, air, vegetation; and the daily and seasonal natural rhythms of nature, in compositions that are often startling in their refined simplicity. …
In Scrub country, 1982 wooden slats from old soft-drink crates are arranged methodically in rows and columns, but their faded colours, worn surfaces and uneven edges reveal the impact of prolonged use and many hot summers. The medley of faded yellows and greens, and nearly naked wooden surfaces in Scrub country is punctuated by flashes of turquoise blues, evoking the patterns of dappled light and colour often found in the Australian bush.
“I called it Scrub country because to me it had the randomness and relaxed air and the quality of colour which I think is much more typical of the Australia I know than any of those ochres and oranges so often used. I have let air through because we see a lot of filtered light, random pattern and carelessness in the Australian landscape.”
~ Public Programs Department, Art Gallery of New South Wales Education Kit, Material as Landscape – Rosalie Gascoigne Education Kit, 1997
While a palette of ‘blue and gold’ colours was strongly associated with the paintings of the famous Australian landscape painter Arthur Streeton (1867-1943), Scrub country clearly breaks with the landscape conventions associated with Streeton and his generation. The repetition and ordering of elements in distinct rows and columns creates a strong formal structure and a flattened space that avoids literal landscape references. Sensations and moods more associated with memory and experience of the landscape are emphasised. Gascoigne’s focus on the formal qualities suggests some affinity between her landscape inspired artworks and those of her contemporary, Australian artist Fred Williams (1927-1982), who also broke with convention in representing the landscape.
Gascoigne worked intuitively with no preliminary drawings or plans. Her ideas, and the processes used to make each artwork, were inspired and determined by the look and feel of particular materials, and the visual and emotional associations they suggested. Depending on the materials used, many hundreds of hours would be spent on the labour intensive work of cutting, tearing, bending, scrubbing, sorting, grouping, arranging until the ‘right’ idea and visual effect crystallised. The process of transforming found materials into artworks was one of making the mood, experience and sensation of landscape visible.
“Your art has to come out of your daily life. I really believe that if anyone is born an artist they’ve only got to look at what’s round their feet and what’s available to them. They don’t have to be clever, they don’t have to go to art school, they don’t have to get the exotic stuff – make it with what’s there. People think art’s like you strike it lucky and you’re famous tomorrow, but it isn’t like that, it’s a search for honesty on your own terms. The journey to self-recognition took me decades.”
Vici MacDonald, Rosalie Gascoigne, Regaro Pty Ltd, Sydney, 1998, p. 9
“I look for the eternal truths in nature, the rhythms, cycles, seasons, shapes, regeneration, restorative powers, spirit. I’m showing what I believe to be interesting and beautiful.”
Janet Hawley. “A late developer”, Sydney Morning Herald, Good Weekend, 15 November 1997, p. 44
“I was hopeless at painting and drawing, and had no skills at making craftwork. At school, I envied people who could draw a perfect basket of apples. I regarded myself as totally non-artistic. My big love was, and remains, poetry; I always visualised every line of a poem as I read it.”
Janet Hawley. “A late developer”, Sydney Morning Herald, Good Weekend, 15 November 1997, p. 42
“My concerns are as much with my materials as with the work I make of it. They both have to satisfy me … I look for things that have been somewhere, done something. Second-hand materials aren’t deliberate; they have had sun and wind on them …”
Public Programs Department, Art Gallery of New South Wales, Material as Landscape, Rosalie Gascoigne Education Kit, 1997
“Once I’d started on my art journey I was in it with a vengeance. I needed it so badly. At last life was full of possibilities.”
Janet Hawley. “A late developer”, Sydney Morning Herald, Good Weekend, 15 November 1997, p. 41
“I have a real need to express elation at how interesting and beautiful things are and to see them arranged … I work with things I rather like and move them about until they recall the feeling of an actual moment in the landscape; then I’ve won.”
Rosalie Gascoigne interviewed by James Mollison and Steven Heath in Rosalie Gascoigne: Material as landscape (exh. cat), Deborah Edwards (ed.), Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney, 1997, p. 7
“My pieces can be looked at in many different ways. I try to provide a starting point from which people can let their imagination wander – what they will discover will be a product of their own experience as much as mine. My aim is to be allusive and elusive.”
Bob Weis, Judi Stack and Robert Lindsay, Survey 2 – Rosalie Gascoigne, video, colour, sound, 16 mins 50 secs, produced by the Media Resource Centre for the NGV, 1978
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 black and white 16″ x 20″ print costs $1,000 plus tracked and insured shipping. For more information please see the Store web page.
“Warning. Watch your step while gazing at distant view.”
Sign at entrance to the exhibition
Gerda Steiner (Swiss, b. 1967) and Jorg Lenzlinger (Swiss, b. 1964) Entrance to The Water Hole exhibition at ACCA, Melbourne 2009 Photo: Marcus Bunyan
A cave like entrance presents itself to the visitor as they enter the exhibition leading to a long winding tunnel that is lined with silver insulation foil and tree branches, lit by floor mounted electric light bulbs. The foil moves with the natural movement of air causing not a rustling of leaves but of artificial surfaces.
At the end of the tunnel the viewer enters a large installation space, confronted with a effusive pop art Garden of Eden, a Magic Forest.
It takes a while to work out what is going on, there are so many elements to the sculptural piece. The main elements are buckets, toilets, basins and drainage pipes, plumbing fittings that all lead to a bed with a drying dam in the centre of a satin bedspread: the ‘waterhole’ of the exhibition title. The waterhole is fed by water dripping from a medical bag suspended high in the air above the dam, a nice touch. The rest of the forest and pipes are dry. The installation comments on our water supplies and the ‘technologies of production’ (Foucault) that permit us to produce, transform or manipulate things. We might install rainwater tanks to catch water but if there is no water to catch in the first place then we are in trouble: we make our bed and have to lie in it, the empty basins like our catchment areas, dry and bleak.
Other elements of the forest have an environmental theme, the installation developed by the artists in response to the extensive drought most of Australia (and it particular Melbourne) is experiencing. Here are spiders with hairy legs and mobile phones for bodies infesting the installation, plumbing fittings with natural seeds sprouting from their ends, brightly coloured crystal forms fed each day with water by gallery staff so that they grow. An upside down umbrella with Polar bear images printed on it’s material has imaginary water draining down a bamboo pipe into a bucket; empty water bottles form a large nest with broken eggs inside; artificial plants, bones, crabs, seaweed and flying stuffed owls are form some of the other elements in the installation.
Climbing a few steps we enter a ‘bird’ watching gallery replete with binoculars to observe the humans in the forest as much as the forest itself. A water cooler sits incongruously in this watching space, silent and somehow complicit in its ironical presence.
The viewer then moves to another room. 4 video projectors display another water themed installation on the gallery walls, the videos meeting in the middle of the walls and reflecting each other. Ambient music accompanies images of rain!, spurting water, owls and plastic pipes, plastic flowers and plastic horses as the viewer relaxes on a waterbed in the middle of the space. The effect of the music and images is quite meditative when combined with the gentle rocking of the waterbed, the projections of the video forming kaleidoscopic ‘Northern lights’ on the ceiling of the gallery. This room is an extension of the themes of the large installation.
Moving forward the viewer enters another room – the meditation room. This room is most effective in encouraging contemplation of the different planes of our existence and our orientation in (environmental) space. Three beds are present, one suspended from the ceiling by four metal rods. Climbing onto this bed the movement from side to side caused by your weight makes you feel seasick and slightly disorientated. Above the second table is a wonderful mobile made of twigs, branches, dried leaves, plastic flowers, beads, plastic bags, baby dummies and jewellery moving gently in the breeze. Lying on the table with the mobile about a foot above your head things drift in and out of view as you change the focus of your eyes – close, mid, far and then onto the moving shadows on the ceiling.
The most effective bed has a small meteorite suspended in a net bag above it. The viewer slides underneath the ‘rock’ placing the meteorite about a foot or so above your face. The meteorite is brown, dark and heavy, swinging slightly above your ‘third eye’. You feel its weight pressing down on your energy, on your life force and you feel how old this object is, how far it has traveled, how fragile and mortal you are. It is a sobering and enlightening experience but what an experience it is!
Entering the final room small colour photos of people being hugged from behind and lifted into the air, laughing, line the gallery walls. These are the weakest elements of the exhibition and seem to bear no relation to all that has passed before. Running off of this gallery is an alcove that is a dead end, a full stop to the exhibition with an installation Desalination plant for tears. A cheap Formica desk sits at the end of the space. Perched above the desk is a tv showing live black and white images of the earlier bird watching gallery – the watcher now the watched. On the desk itself is a microscope (with slide of human tears), pencil, a candle for heat under a glass flask of water (looking like a spider from the large installation!) and various glass test tubes and vials. A diagram explains the working of a Desalination plant for tears, an analogous reference to the desalination plant earmarked for Wonthaggi, south-east of Melbourne. Irony is present (again) in the 2 leaves grown at Singapore Airport by desalinated water (2008), two framed, brown dead leaves, and in the Tear system diagram where glands have turned into forests and the eye into a lake (see below).
This is a magical and poignant exhibition that is a joy for children and adults alike. Children love it running around exploring the environments. Adults love it for it’s magical, witty and intelligent response to the problems facing our planet and our lives. Go and enjoy this interplanetary collision. Highly recommended!
Gerda Steiner (Swiss, b. 1967) and Jorg Lenzlinger (Swiss, b. 1964) The Water Hole (detail) 2009 Photo: Marcus Bunyan
Gerda Steiner (Swiss, b. 1967) and Jorg Lenzlinger (Swiss, b. 1964) The Water Hole (detail) 2009 Photo: Marcus Bunyan
Gerda Steiner (Swiss, b. 1967) and Jorg Lenzlinger (Swiss, b. 1964) The Water Hole (detail) 2009 Photo: Marcus Bunyan
Gerda Steiner (Swiss, b. 1967) and Jorg Lenzlinger (Swiss, b. 1964) Installation view of waterbed at The Water Hole exhibition at ACCA, Melbourne 2009 Photo: Marcus Bunyan
Gerda Steiner (Swiss, b. 1967) and Jorg Lenzlinger (Swiss, b. 1964) Installation view details of Desalination plant for tears from The Water Hole exhibition at ACCA, Melbourne 2009 Photos: Marcus Bunyan
The end of 2008 saw the launch of The Water Hole, a major installation by renowned Swiss artists Steiner and Lenzlinger. The artists created a fantasia of ecology in ACCA’s large hall. In the side galleries a flow out of projects including meteors suspended over beds, a crystal room and a desalination laboratory. The Water Hole, devised specifically for ACCA, referenced Australia’s acute climate challenges as well as the pressure of global waste. The project created a story of place, a fable if you like. And in the tradition of the fable, the artists employed animals, plants and inanimate objects to tell a story that has a moral and ethical dimensions.Â
The Water Hole was a big story – filled with pleasurable things but also with the message of peril.  The artists created environments that enabled the visitor to consider and sense our place in history, and our attention to striking a balance between our consumptive desiring and nature.
Text from the ACCA website
Gerda Steiner (Swiss, b. 1967) and Jorg Lenzlinger (Swiss, b. 1964) Diagram from Desalination plant for tears from the exhibition The Water Hole at ACCA, Melbourne 2009 Photo: Marcus Bunyan
Australian Centre for Contemporary Art (ACCA) 111 Sturt Street Southbank Victoria 3006 Australia
Opening hours: Tuesday to Friday 10am – 5pm Weekends and Public Holidays 11am – 5pm Monday by appointment Open all public holidays except Christmas Day and Good Friday
Lyndell Brown (Australian, b. 1961) and Charles Green (Australian, b. 1953) Afghan traders with soldiers, market, Tarin Kowt base, Uruzgan province, Afghanistan 2007-2008 From The approaching storm series 2007-2009 Digital colour inkjet photograph 155 × 107.5cm
Despite one brilliant photograph and some interesting small painted canvases this exhibition is a disappointment. No use beating around the figurative bush in the landscape so to speak, talking plainly will suffice. Firstly, let’s examine the photographs. Thirteen large format colour photographs are presented in the exhibition out of an archive of “thousands of photographs Brown and Green created on tour”1 from which the paintings are derived.
Most of the photographs are inconsequential and need not have been taken. Relying on the usual trope of painters who take photographs they are shot at night, dusk or dawn when the shadows are long, the colours lush supposedly adding ‘mystique’ to the scene being portrayed. In some cases they are more like paintings than the paintings themselves. Perhaps this was the artist’s plan, the reverse marriage of photography and painting where one becomes the other, but this does little to advance photography as art. There is nothing new or interesting here: sure, some of the photographs are beautiful in the formal representation of a vast and fractured landscape but the pre-visualisation is weak: bland responses to the machines, industry, people and places of the conflict. Go look at the Andreas Gursky photographs at the National Gallery of Victoria to see world-class photography taking reality to the limit, head on.
Too often in these thirteen images the same image is repeated with variants – three images of the an aircraft having it’s propeller changed show a lack of ideas or artefacts to photograph – presented out of the thousands taken seems incongruous. The fact that only one photograph is reproduced in the catalogue is also instructive.
Some images are just unsuccessful. For example the photograph Dusk, ship’s bridge with two sailors, northern Gulf is of a formulaic geometry that neither holds the viewers attention nor gives a deeper insight into their lives aboard ship and begs the question why was the photograph taken in the first place? The dark space has little physical or metaphysical illumination and seems purely to be an exercise in formalism. The photograph Dusk, ships’ bridge with sailor, northern Gulf is more successful in the use of light and shade as they play across the form of a sailor, his head resting pensively in his hand, red life vests adding a splash of colour to the bottom right of the photograph.
The brilliant photograph of the group is View from Chinook, Helmand province, Afghanistan. This really is a monstrous photograph. With the large black mass of the helicopter in the foreground of the image containing little detail, the eye is drawn upwards to the windscreen through which a mountain range rises, with spines like the back of a Stegosaurus. To the right a road, guarded by a desolate looking pillbox and yellow barrier, meanders into the distance. Dead flies on the windscreen look like small bullet holes until you realise what they are. This is the image that finally evidences a disquieting beauty present in the vast and ancient landscape.
Turning to the paintings we can say that some of the small 31cm x 31cm paintings work well. From an ‘original’ photograph the artist selects and crops a final image that they work up into a highly detailed oil painting. Distilled (as the artist’s like to put it) from the ‘original’ photographs, the paintings become a “merging of a contemporary sense of composition – borrowed from photography, film and video – with the textures and processes of traditional oil painting.”2
“These works were developed by the artists to be something akin to “Hitchcockian clues” which create the sense of looking out at a scene but being distanced from the action. To some degree the entire suite of small pictures participate in developing this intrigue, by showing an array of ambiguous scenes in which direct action is never present, or is obscured by limited perspectives … The artists noted that the war zones they witnessed were low in action but high in tension”3
To an extent this tension builds in some of the small paintings: the small size lends an intimate, intense quality and forces the viewer to engage with highly detailed renditions of textures of clothing, material, skin and hair and the distorted scale of the ships and aeroplanes portrayed. In these intense visions the painting seems less like a photograph and more like a new way of seeing. However, this occurs only occasionally within the group of small paintings.
If we think of a photograph in the traditional sense as a portrayal of reality, then a distillation of that photograph (the removal of impurities from, an increase in the concentration of) must mean that these paintings are a double truth, a concentrated essence of the ‘original’ photograph that changes that essence into something new. Unfortunately most of these small canvases show limited viewpoints of distilled landscapes that do not lead to ambiguous enigmas, but to the screen of the camera overlaid by a skein of paint, a patina of posing.
This feeling is only amplified in the three large ‘History’ paintings. The three paintings seem static, lifeless, over fussy and lacking insight into the condition of the ‘machine’ that they are attempting to portray. It’s a bit like the ‘Emperors New Clothes’, the lack of substance in the paintings overlaid with the semantics of History painting (“a traditional genre that focused on mythological, biblical, historical and military subjects”) used to confirm their existence and supposed insight into the doubled, framed reality. As Robert Nelson noted in his review of 2008 art in Melbourne in The Age newspaper it would seem that painting is sliding into terminal decline. These paintings only seem to confirm that view.
Here was a golden opportunity to try something fresh in terms of war as conflict – both in photography and painting – to frame the discourse in an eloquent, innovative manner. Most of this work is not interesting because it does not seem to be showing, or being discursive about anything beyond a personal whim. Because an artist can talk about some things, doesn’t mean that he can make comments about other things that have any value. Although the artist was looking to portray landscapes of globalisation and entropy, there are more interesting ways of doing this, rather than the nature of the transcription used here.
“It is very good to copy what one sees: it is much better to draw what you can’t see any more but in your memory. It is a transformation in which imagination and memory work together. You only reproduce what struck you, that is to say, the necessary. That way your memory and your fantasy are freed from the tyranny of nature.”4
No thinking but the putting away of intellect and the reliance on memory and imagination, memory and fantasy to ‘distil’ the essence. This is what needed to happen both in the photographs and paintings – leaving posturing aside (perhaps an ‘unofficial war artist’ would have had more success!) to uncover the transformation of landscape that the theatre of this environment richly deserves.
Dr Marcus Bunyan
Footnotes
1/ Heywood, Warwick. Framing Conflict: Iraq and Afghanistan exhibition catalogue. Canberra: Australian War Memorial, 2008, p. 6 2/ Heywood, Warwick. Framing Conflict: Iraq and Afghanistan exhibition catalogue. Canberra: Australian War Memorial, 2008, p. 6 3/ Heywood, Warwick. Framing Conflict: Iraq and Afghanistan exhibition catalogue. Canberra: Australian War Memorial, 2008, p. 11 4/ Degas, Edgar quoted in Halligan, Marion. “Between the brushstrokes,” in A2 section, The Saturday Age newspaper, January 17th 2008, p. 18
Many thankx to The Ian Potter Museum of Art for allowing me to publish the photographs in the posting. Please click on the photographs for a larger version of the image.
Lyndell Brown (Australian, b. 1961) and Charles Green (Australian, b. 1953) Afghan National Army perimeter post with chair, Tarin Kowt base, Uruzgan province, Afghanistan 2007-2008 From The approaching storm series 2007-2009 Digital colour inkjet photograph 111.5 × 151.5cm
Lyndell Brown (Australian, b. 1961) and Charles Green (Australian, b. 1953) Dusk, ship’s bridge with two sailors, northern Gulf 2007-2008 Digital colour inkjet photograph
Lyndell Brown (Australian, b. 1961) and Charles Green (Australian, b. 1953) Late afternoon, flight line, military installation, Middle East 2007 Oil on linen
Lyndell Brown (Australian, b. 1961) and Charles Green (Australian, b. 1953) Market, Camp Holland, Tarin Kowt, Uruzgan province, Afghanistan 2007 Oil on linen
Lyndell Brown (Australian, b. 1961) and Charles Green (Australian, b. 1953) View from Chinook, Helmand province, Afghanistan 2007-2008 From The approaching storm series 2007-2009 Digital colour inkjet photograph 111.5 × 151.5cm
Lyndell Brown (Australian, b. 1961) and Charles Green (Australian, b. 1953) View from Chinook, Helmand province, Afghanistan 2007 Oil on linen
Lyndell Brown (Australian, b. 1961) and Charles Green (Australian, b. 1953) Trolley, propeller change, on flightline at night, military installation, Gulf 2007-2008 From The approaching storm series 2007-2009 Digital colour inkjet photograph 87.0 × 87.4cm
Lyndell Brown (Australian, b. 1961) and Charles Green (Australian, b. 1953) History painting: market, Tarin Kowt, Uruzgan province, Afghanistan 2007 Oil on linen
Lyndell Brown and Charles Green Installation view of photographs from the exhibition Framing Conflict at The Ian Potter Museum of Art, The University of Melbourne 2009
Lyndell Brown (Australian, b. 1961) and Charles Green (Australian, b. 1953) Installation view of paintings from the exhibition Framing Conflict at The Ian Potter Museum of Art, The University of Melbourne 2009
The Ian Potter Museum of Art The University of Melbourne, Corner Swanston Street and Masson Road Parkville, Victoria 3010
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