Exhibition dates: 15th August – 27th September, 2009
Commissioning Curator: Juliana Engberg Coordinating Curator: Charlotte Day
Installation view of Scenes by David Noonan at ACCA Photo: Marcus Bunyan
Thoughts
Limited colour palette of ochres, whites, browns and blacks.
Rough texture of floor covered in Jute under the feet.
Layered, collaged print media figures roughly printed on canvas – elements of abstraction, elements of figuration.
The ‘paintings’ are magnificent; stripped and striped collages. Faces missing, dark eyes. There is something almost Rembrandt-esque about the constructed images, their layering, like Rembrandt’s Night Watch (1642) – but then the performance element kicks in – the makeup, the lipstick, the tragic / comedic faces.
Mannequin, doll-like cut-out figures, flat but with some volume inhabiting the tableaux vivant.
Twelve standing figures in different attitudes – a feeling of dancing figures frozen on stage, very Japanese Noh theater. Spatially the grouping and use of space within the gallery is excellent – like frozen mime.
The figures move in waves, rising and falling both in the standing figures and within the images on the wall.
Looking into the gallery is like looking through a picture window onto a stage set (see above image).
“The fracturing of identity, the distortion of the binaries of light and dark, absence/presence in spatio-temporal environments.
The performance as ritual challenging a regularized and constrained repetition of norms.” (Judith Butler).
Excellent, thought provoking exhibition.
Dr Marcus Bunyan
Many thankx to ACCA for allowing me to publish the photographs in the posting. Please click on the photographs for a larger version of the image.
Installation views of Scenes by David Noonan at ACCA Photos: Marcus Bunyan
Noonan often works with found photographic imagery taken from performance manuals, textile patterns and archive photographs to make densely layered montages. These works at once suggest specific moments in time and invoke disorientating a-temporal spaces in which myriad possible narratives emerge. The large-scale canvases framing this exhibition depict scenes of role-playing, gesturing characters, and masked figures set within stage-like spaces. Printed on coarsely woven jute, collaged fabric elements applied to the surface of the canvases further signal the cutting and splicing of images.
Noonan’s new suite of figurative sculptures, comprise life size wooden silhouettes faced with printed images of characters performing choreographed movements. While the figurative image suggests a body in space, the works’ two dimensional cut-out supports insist on an overriding flatness which lends them an architectural quality – as stand-ins for actual performers and as a means by which to physically navigate the exhibition space.
Press release from the Chisenhale Gallery website [Online] Cited 20/09/2009. No longer available online
For the Helen Macpherson Smith Commission, he will bring the characters depicted in his signature collage works off the wall and onto an imagined ‘stage’. Several life-size, wooden cut-out figures will inhabit the ACCA exhibition gallery, frozen in choreographed movements.
Noonan’s dancing figures will be framed by several large-scale canvas works, printed photographic and film imagery gleaned from performance manuals, textile patterns and interior books. Printed on coarse woven jute, he cuts, slices and montages images together constructing compositions that hover between two and three dimensionality, positive and negative space, past and present, stasis and action.
“‘Scenes’ recalls the experimental workshops and youth-focused exuberance of a more optimistic era, coinciding with the artists own childhood in the 1970s” says curator Charlotte Day. “With these new works, Noonan re-introduces the idea of ritual, of creating a temporal space beyond reason that is filled with both danger and hope.”
David Noonan (Australian, b. 1969) is the fifth recipient of the Helen Macpherson Smith Commission, one of the most significant and generous commissions in Australia. The partnership between ACCA and the Helen Macpherson Smith Trust offers Victorian artists the opportunity to create an ambitious new work of art, accompanied by an exhibition in ACCA’s exhibition hall.
Press release from the ACCA website [Online] Cited 20/09/2009. No longer available online
David Noonan returned to Melbourne with this significant project which extended his abiding interest in time and space. Using ACCA’s large room as a field of encounter, he created an ensemble of works in 2 and 3 dimensions that make purposeful use of the audience’s own navigation through the gallery. Visitors walking between David’s free-standing figures performed like time travellers in a landscape that had been paused. His enigmatic wall based works appeared to trap momentary scenes in a layered time warp.
This major commission allowed for an ambitious project by a Victorian artist who had reached a significant platform in their own practice. Elements of the commission were gifted to a Victorian regional gallery. In this case the recipient was Bendigo Art Gallery.
Text from the ACCA website [Online] Cited 24/04/2019
Installation views of Scenes by David Noonan at ACCA Photos: Marcus Bunyan
Australia Centre for Contemporary Art (ACCA) 111 Sturt Street, Southbank, Victoria 3006, Australia Phone: 03 9697 9999
Opening Hours: Tuesday to Friday 10am – 5pm Weekends & Public Holidays 11am – 5pm Open all public holidays except Christmas Day and Good Friday
Exhibition dates: 3rd September – 3rd October, 2009
Lyndal Hargrave (Australia, b. 1959) Sacred Geometry 2009 Acrylic painted timber coat hangers, screws, staples 180 x 170cm Photo: Marcus Bunyan
This is a mixed bag of an exhibition by Lyndal Hargrave at Anita Traverso Gallery in Richmond, Melbourne.
Despite one outstanding painting Breathing Space (2009, see below), the view from the back of the artist’s house onto a jetty with attendant wooden posts and sky, the other paintings are the weakest elements of the exhibition, lacking the strength and resonance of the sculptural work.
The two standing towers, Hairpin Dragons I & II and Jacob’s Ladder (both 2009, see below) are stronger work, Jacobs Ladder imitating the form of the painting Breathing Space in three-dimensional Cuisenaire-type coloured rods (see the installation photograph of the two pieces below).
The best pieces in the exhibition are the wall mounted geometric, mandala-like sculptures made of wooden coat hangers. Delicately shifting patterns take the micro cellular form and make it macro, their patterns of construction offering a pleasing visual balance that is both complex, layered and innovative at one and the same time. As explorations of the notion of the universal structure, the golden ratio, they reward repeated viewing.
As the exhibition stands there are too many little pieces to make a holistic whole. Perhaps an exhibition solely of the towers or geometric pieces would have been stronger. I look forward to seeing how the geometric pieces (d)evolve in future work. Will the structures break down and reassemble in other marvellous incantations? I hope so!
Dr Marcus Bunyan
Many thankx to Anita Traverso 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.
Lyndal Hargrave (Australia, b. 1959) Arabesque 2009 Acrylic painted timber coat hangers, screws, staples 200 x 360cm Photo: Marcus Bunyan
Lyndal Hargrave (Australia, b. 1959) Arabesque (detail) 2009 Acrylic painted timber coat hangers, screws, staples 200 x 360cm Photo: Marcus Bunyan
Lyndal Hargrave (Australia, b. 1959) Hairpin Dragons I & II 2009 Wire, formply 170 x 15cm (varying) Photo: Marcus Bunyan
“It is a constant idea of mine that behind the cotton wool (of daily reality) is hidden a pattern, that we – I mean all human beings – are connected with this: that the whole world is a work of art; that we are parts of the work of art.”
~ Virginia Woolf
For as long as I can remember, my art practice has served as a filter between the outside world and my inside world. I realise now that the act of making the artwork informs my ideas rather than the other way round. Working intuitively results in a continuous stream of surprises that in retrospect mirror the pressing issues surrounding me at that time.
In All the Little Pieces my fascination with patterns of construction from micro to macro and natural to man-made continues. My work explores the gap between order and chaos and helps me to understand the meaning of balance.
Using mundane found objects, my sculptures probe the possibility of re-invention through the way the componentry of human habitation can be re-configured to offer us a new way of seeing and experiencing our world.
It is this process of metamorphosis that is at the centre of my investigation: how life forms make the transition from one state to another – tree to timber to tower or talisman; why some systems remain strong and others crumble.
Overarching my work is the notion of universal structure and the geometry that has informed our evolution from molecule to macro-system.”
Lyndal Hargrave 2009
Text from the Anita Traverso Gallery website
Lyndal Hargrave (Australia, b. 1959) Whirlpool Galaxy and The Samarian Star 2009 Acrylic painted timber coat hangers, screws, staples Photo: Marcus Bunyan
Installation view of the Lyndal Hargrave exhibition at Anita Traverso Gallery Photo: Marcus Bunyan
Photograph showing the relationship of form and colour between the work Jacob’s Ladder (2009) and the painting Breathing Space (2009) Photo: Marcus Bunyan
Lyndal Hargrave (Australia, b. 1959) Breathing Space 2009 Oil on canvas 200 x 200cm
Anita Traverso Gallery
The physical gallery has now closed.
PO Box 7001, Hawthorn North 3122 Phone: 0408 534 034 Email: art@anitatraversogallery.com.au
Many thankx to the C/O Berlin Gallery for allowing me to publish the photographs in the posting. Please click on the photographs for a larger version of the image.
Pierre et Gilles (French, Pierre Commoy b. 1950 and Gilles Blanchard, b. 1953) Mercury 2001
“It’s hard to think of contemporary culture without the influence of Pierre et Gilles, from advertising to fashion photography, music video, and film. This is truly global art.”
Jeff Koons
The cosmos of the worldwide renowned French artist duo is a vivid, colourful world poised between baroque sumptuousness and earthly limbo. Pierre et Gilles create unique hand-painted photographic portraits of film icons, sailors and princes, saints and sinners, of mythological figures and unknowns alike. Pierre et Gilles pursue their own, stunningly unique vision of an enchanted world spanning fairytale paradises and abyssal depths, quoting from popular visual languages and history of art. Again and again, they re-envision their personal dream of reality anew in consummate aesthetic perfection.
Pierre et Gilles are among the most influential artists of our time. In their complex, multilayered images, they quote from art history, transgress traditional moral codes, and experiment adeptly with social clichés. Their painterly photographic masterpieces exert an intense visual power that leaves the viewer spellbound.
Over the last thirty years, Pierre et Gilles have created photographic portraits of numerous celebrities including Marc Almond, Mirelle Mathieu, Catherine Deneuve, Serge Gainsbourg, Iggy Pop, Jean-Paul Gaultier, Nina Hagen, Madonna, and Paloma Picasso. They work almost exclusively in an opulently furnished studio, where their subjects are costumed lavishly and placed before three-dimensional backgrounds. Pierre photographs the model, and Gilles retouches and hand-colours the print. The reproducible portrait is rendered unique through painting, which highlights each detail with carefully selected materials and accessories.
As only venue in Germany, C/O Berlin presents the exhibition as the first of Pierre et Gilles in fifteen years. The show comprised a total of 80 unique large-format works – from their early photographies of the 1970s to the brand new pictures that were never shown in public before.”
Text from the C/O Berlin website [Online] Cited 20/08/2009 no longer available online
Pierre et Gilles (French, Pierre Commoy b. 1950 and Gilles Blanchard, b. 1953) St. Sebastian 1987
Pierre et Gilles (French, Pierre Commoy b. 1950 and Gilles Blanchard, b. 1953) Neptune 1988
Pierre et Gilles (French, Pierre Commoy b. 1950 and Gilles Blanchard, b. 1953) Saint Rose De Lima 1989
Pierre et Gilles (French, Pierre Commoy b. 1950 and Gilles Blanchard, b. 1953) Le Petit Communiste Christophe (The Little Communist Christophe) 1990
Pierre et Gilles (French, Pierre Commoy b. 1950 and Gilles Blanchard, b. 1953) Legend (Madonna) 1990
Pierre et Gilles (French, Pierre Commoy b. 1950 and Gilles Blanchard, b. 1953) La Madone au coeur blessé (Madonna with a wounded heart) 1991
Pierre et Gilles (French, Pierre Commoy b. 1950 and Gilles Blanchard, b. 1953) St. Sebastian of the Sea 1994
Pierre et Gilles (French, Pierre Commoy b. 1950 and Gilles Blanchard, b. 1953) The Martyrdom of St Sebastian 1996
Pierre et Gilles (French, Pierre Commoy b. 1950 and Gilles Blanchard, b. 1953) Extase (Arielle Dombasle) 2002
Pierre et Gilles (French, Pierre Commoy b. 1950 and Gilles Blanchard, b. 1953) Le Grand Amour (Marilyn Manson and Dita von Teese) 2004
C/O Berlin Postfuhramt Oranienburger Straße 35/36 10117 Berlin
This is a solid retrospective of the work of the Australian artist John Brack (1920-1999) presented by the National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne. John Brack is, quintessentially, an Australian and more specifically a Melbourne artist. Melbournians have a love hate relationship with his work – loving the earlier paintings that view the working classes of 1950s Melbourne through a nostalgic, humorous, sardonic lens (when originally the popularity of the work in the 1950s/60s was, as Robert Nelson has observed, mistakenly identified with ridicule of the subject matter)1 while finding the later work of massed pencils, postcards, deities and wooden people mystifying, cold and elusive.
Brack saw his paintings of suburbia as honest portrayals of the new milieux. His sparse, graphic style evidenced the emotionally distanced relationships between space and people in the new cityscapes and best suited his cerebral approach to the subject matter. Men become mannequins with skeletal faces that hover menacingly behind the barmaid in The bar (1954, above), an amorphous mass of brown-suited humanity. Two women are portrayed in all their high-collared stiffness in the painting ‘Two typists’ (1955, above), their stylised faces, black hat and hair surmounted by hanging, disembodied legs at the top of the painting. These two women then reappear at bottom right in one of Brack’s most famous paintings, Collins St, 5p.m. (1955, above) subsumed into the two lines of people wearily trudging home from a day’s work at the office.
Brack’s early paintings are full of stylised metaphor – for example the clinical emptiness of space, the implied threat of hanging ‘instruments’ in ‘The block’ (1954, above) or the decapitated bird-like alienation of the fish head in The fish shop (1955, above) – offer comment on the nature of suburban life: ordered, dead, soulless surfaces, facades behind which life seethes. Brack recognises the slightly macabre beauty of these industrial spaces, their form and purpose, where no one had recognised them before. There are oversized teeth (The veil, 1952), large hands, the fleshy pink of faces (The barbers shop, 1952) and the tribal mask of a face in Man in pub (1953) where man becomes fragment. Above all there is a simplicity and eloquence in line and form grounded in a limited palette of ochres, yellows, greys, blacks, whites and browns. These are the colours of the early cave painters and it’s poignant that Brack uses them so effectively to anchor his subject matter both in history, memory and the present of contemporary life, a life we still recognise intimately over fifty years later.
Here is the ‘Human Condition’ writ large (with capitals!), the humility of professions such as butchers, seamstresses, typists and barmaids (with their limited control of the environment) portraying the body of the worker, as in Satre’s ‘Nothingness’,2 living the tedium of suburban life whilst wanting to flee the anguish of this existence into the desirable light of the future toward which man projects himself. This a theme that Brack develops in the later paintings with their stilted, cerebral investigation of existentialism. These paintings offer a more general contribution to a view of the human condition – love and hate, we, us, them, pros and cons – a view originally grounded in the suburbs of Melbourne but elevated to the ethereal, paintings that seem to lack material substance but offer a hyper-refined conceptual aesthetic.
Sticks and Stones Will Break My Bones But Pencils Will Never Hurt Me
As early as Knives and forks (1958) and The playground (1959) we can observe the beginnings of the spaces of his later pencil paintings with their uniting of form, line and plane (think the planes of Cezanne). The later work is literally much colder, the palette now blues instead of the warmer ochres and yellows and this change is very obvious when you walk around the exhibition. There is an emotional distance here – from human contact and the warmth of company. Ronald Miller observed in 1970 that Brack’s work is about the rituals of life, about states of uneasy poise and vulnerability, about realities behind facades but in the later work the paintings become the facades: gone are the ambiguities and vulnerabilities to be replaced by an altogether different ‘order’ of existence.
We see in paintings such as Souvenirs (1976), We, Us, Them (1983), The pros and cons (1985) and Watching the flowers (1990-91 – see all below) how the canvas has become a stage set replete with turned up edges, spaces of ritual performance containing generalised metaphors for the nature of human existence, metaphors with universal themes. In his investigation of the universal Brack looses sight of the personal. His towers made of playing cards, his thrusting planes, the military precision of his opposing armies of goose-steeping pencils lack empathy for the thing that he was searching to be attuned with: the nature of existence, the human condition.
As Sartre observed,
“To apprehend myself as seen is, in fact, to apprehend myself as seen in the world and from the standpoint of the world. The look does not carve me out in the universe; it comes to search for me at the heart of my situation and grasps me only in irresolvable relations with instruments. If I am seen as seated, I must be seen as “seated-on-a-chair,” … But suddenly the alienation of myself, which is the act of being-looked-at, involves the alienation of the world which I organise. I am seated on this chair with the result that I do not see it at all, that it is impossible for me to see it …”3
This is the point that John Brack reached: through his desire to paint universal themes he was unable to visualise and apprehend himself as seen in the world from the standpoint of the world. It feels (yes feeling!) that he was alienated from the very thing he sought to portray – how the personal and the universal are one and the same.
Brack’s ‘failure’ as an artist (if indeed it can be called that) is not, as Robert Nelson has suggested, “because he didn’t talk enough or wisely enough to negotiate his way out of a misunderstanding” (that his work was sardonic). On the contrary I believe his ‘success’ as an artist is that he painted exactly what he wanted to paint in the time and place that he wanted to paint it. His later work might strike some as cold and impenetrable but if one looks clearly, with a steady eye, there still beats a heart under that chill exterior, a heart grounded in the life of suburban Melbourne. In the end Brack returns to the beginning, still exploring, still searching.
As T.S. Eliot wrote in one of The Four Quartets,4
“We shall not cease from exploration And the end of all our exploring Will be to arrive where we started And know the place for the first time.”
Dr Marcus Bunyan
Many thankx to the NGV for allowing me to publish the art work in the posting. Please click on the photographs for a larger version of the image.
1/ Nelson, Robert. The Age newspaper. Melbourne, Friday 24th April, 2009
2/ “We learn that Nothingness is revealed to us most fully in anguish and that man generally tries to flee this anguish, this Nothingness which he is, by means of “bad faith.” The study of “bad faith” reveals to us that whereas Being-in-itself simply is, man is the being “who is what he is not and who is not what he is.” In other words man continually makes himself. Instead of being, he “has to be”; his present being has meaning only in the light of the future toward which he projects himself. Thus he is not what at any instant we might want to say he is, and he is that towards which he projects himself but which he is not yet.” Barnes, Hazel. Introduction to Jean-Paul Satre’s Being and Nothingness. London: Methuen, 1966, pp. xvii-xix
3/ Satre, Jean-Paul. Being and Nothingness. (trans. Hazel Barnes). London: Methuen, 1966, p. 263
4/ Eliot, T.S. “Little Gidding” from The Four Quartets (1942)
“What I paint most is what interests me most, that is, people; the Human Condition, in particular the effect on appearance of environment and behaviour… A large part of the motive is the desire to understand, and if possible, to illuminate …”
John Reed, New Painting 1952-62, Longmans, Melbourne, 1963, p. 19.
Opening 24 April, the National Gallery of Victoria will present a major retrospective of the work of John Brack, the first in more than twenty years. This exhibition will survey John Brack’s complete career, incorporating over 150 works from all of his major series. John Brack will bring together a significant body of the artist’s paintings and works on paper, including pictures that have developed ‘icon status’ and others that have rarely, if ever, been seen publicly since they were first exhibited.
Kirsty Grant, Senior Curator Australian Art, NGV said that more than any other artist of his generation, John Brack was a painter of modern Australian life.
“John Brack painted images which explored the social rituals and realities of everyday life. Long considered the quintessential Melbourne artist, Brack’s images of urban and suburban Melbourne painted during the 1950s drew attention for their novelty of subject and instantly recognisable references. His work is much broader however and in this exhibition we will see the continuity throughout his career of his fundamental interest in people, human nature and the human condition,” said Ms Grant.
Frances Lindsay, NGV Deputy Director said John Brack was widely considered one of Australia’s greatest twentieth century artists.
“The NGV has enjoyed a long association with John Brack: he worked as an assistant frame maker at the gallery in 1949, became head of the National Gallery School in 1962, and the NGV was also the first public institution to purchase one of his works. Brack’s iconic works are certainly the highlight for many visitors to the Gallery. We are thrilled to be continuing this special relationship by presenting this important and timely retrospective.”
The exhibition will be displayed chronologically, beginning with some rare early student works. Each phase of Brack’s practice will be explored, from his well-known urban scenes of the 1950s to the highly symbolic paintings from the 1970s. Many of Brack’s most familiar paintings are included in the exhibition such as Collins St, 5p.m, The bar and The Old Time.
Brack produced compelling pictures which captured the essential characteristics of his subjects involved in everyday activities and, in some of his most engaging series, he depicted the characters of the racecourse, children at school and professional ballroom dancers. Throughout his career Brack also painted the nude, still life subjects and portraits, both of family and friends – including artists Fred Williams and John Perceval – as well as commissioned subjects, such as Barry Humphries as his alter-ego Edna Everage. During the 1970s Brack replaced the human figure with an assortment of everyday implements including cutlery, pens and pencils which he used as metaphors for the complexities of human behaviour and relationships.
Press release from the NGV website [Online] Cited 26/07/2009. No longer available online
John Brack (Australian, 1920-1999) Inside and outside (The shop window) 1972 Oil on canvas
All photographs are of work in the exhibition. Many thankx to the De La Warr Pavilion for allowing me to publish the photographs and art work in the posting. Please click on the photographs for a larger version of the image.
Dr Marcus Bunyan
Joseph Beuys (German, 1921-1986) Untitled (Sun State) 1974 Chalk and felt-tip pen on blackboard with wood frame 47 1/2 x 71 1/8″ (120.7 x 180.7cm)
Joseph Beuys (German, 1921-1986) I like America and America likes me action 1974
Joseph Beuys (German, 1921-1986) Überwindet endlich die Parteiendiktatur – Poster, N070815SE_118_098 – Overcome Party Dictatorship Now 1971 Print on paper 278 x 395 mm ARTIST ROOMS Tate and National Galleries of Scotland Galleries of Scotland through The d’Offay Donation with assistance from the National Heritage Memorial Fund and the Art Fund 2008
German artist Joseph Beuys (1921-1986) is widely recognised as one of the most influential and extraordinary artists of the twentieth century. Artist, educator, political and social activist, Beuys’s philosophy proposed the healing power and social function of art, in which everyone can participate and benefit. The works in this exhibition provide an opportunity to experience this expanded concept of art as he understood it. Collectively, the exhibition presents the ‘constellation of ideas’ central to Beuys’s practice, revealing his ideas on zoology, ecology, homeopathy, economics, politics, social activism, teaching and learning. Beuys incorporated into his work various materials such as felt, fat and metal, selected because of their inherent properties such as insulation, conduction and protection which all have associations with Beuys’s ideas.
The exhibition is largely selected from the ARTIST ROOMS collection and brings together well-known sculptures, drawings, vitrines and a remarkable selection of posters recalling live actions and events. Works include Fat Chair (1964-1985) and, in Gallery 2, a single major work Scala Napoletana (1985) is shown for the first time in the UK. In addition nearly twenty notable multiples are included within the exhibition selected from National Galleries of Scotland. The multiple was a form of communication for Beuys – a means by which he could share and distribute his ideas beyond the confines of the artworld.
Text from the De La Warr Pavilion website [Online] Cited 23/07/2009. No longer available online
Joseph Beuys (German, 1921-1986) Fettstuhl (Fat Chair) 1964-1985 Wood, glass, metal, fabric, paint, fat and thermometer 1830 x 1550 x 640 mm ARTIST ROOMS Tate and National Galleries of Scotland Galleries of Scotland through The d’Offay Donation with assistance from the National Heritage Memorial Fund and the Art Fund 2008
Joseph Beuys (German, 1921-1986) Entwurf für ein Filzenvironment (Model for a Felt Environment) 1964 Wood, glass, felt, oil paint and lead 1840 x 1680 x 840 mm ARTIST ROOMS Tate and National Galleries of Scotland Galleries of Scotland through The d’Offay Donation with assistance from the National Heritage Memorial Fund and the Art Fund 2008
The neat rolls of grey felt on painted wood inside this vitrine are intended as a model for an ‘environment’. Felt insulates and absorbs, representing protection but also a sense of constriction, like being suffocated. The same type of felt rolls are seen in the ‘environment’ Plight (1958/1985), now in the Pompidou Centre, in which the walls and ceiling are covered with felt to create a stifling atmosphere. Beuys used felt in an infamous ‘action’ performed the same year this model was made. The Chief saw the artist being wrapped in a felt blanket, fighting claustrophobia to lie practically still, as if in a coffin, for a nine-hour period.
Joseph Beuys (German, 1921-1986) Fettecke (Prozess) (Fat Corner (Process)) 1968 Wood, glass, 2 cardboard boxes and fat 1835 x 1680 x 840 mm ARTIST ROOMS Tate and National Galleries of Scotland Galleries of Scotland through The d’Offay Donation with assistance from the National Heritage Memorial Fund and the Art Fund 2008
Looking inside the two boxes in this vitrine, we can see that in one, the fat has been neatly shaped into the corner to make a wedge. In the other, the shape of the fat has a disturbing biological look to it, like inner organs which have been unceremoniously dumped in a heap. Beuys used triangles of fat in both his sculptures and ‘actions’. From around 1963, he would use wedges of fat or felt to mark the boundaries of a space when performing an ‘action’.
Joseph Beuys (German, 1921-1986) Langhaus (Vitrine) 1953-1962 Wood, glass, felt, oil paint and paper 1830 x 1545 x 640 mm ARTIST ROOMS Tate and National Galleries of Scotland Galleries of Scotland through The d’Offay Donation with assistance from the National Heritage Memorial Fund and the Art Fund 2008
Langhaus can be variously translated as ‘nave’ such as one finds in a church, or ‘longhouse’, such as the dwelling house for one or several families found in early north European regions or, still today, in tribal communities in the Amazon region or the South Seas. The block of wood has a small piece of felt attached to the top, suggesting, according to Beuys’s usual iconography, the idea of protection, a connotation strengthened by the length of felt also lying in the vitrine. The walking stick lying alongside the felt is a traditional Beuysian symbol for leadership and protection, much as a shepherd looks after his flock.
Beuys is recognised as one of the most influential artists of the late twentieth century. Adopting the roles of political and social activist and educator, his philosophy proposed the healing power and social function of art for all.
From the 1950s onwards, many of his works are made from a distinctive group of materials, in particular felt, fat and copper. These were chosen for their insulating, conductive, protective, transmitting and transforming properties. Animals of all kinds appear in his work, but he was particularly drawn to stags, bees and hares. A childhood interest in the natural sciences remained with him throughout his life, fuelling a desire to explore themes and experiment with the properties of materials.
Beuys produced a vast body of work that includes performance, drawing, print-making, sculpture and installation. His complex, interlocking themes cover science, myth, history, medicine and energy. Beuys’ own image and life story is inextricably linked to his work through his persona of the Shaman, shepherd or stag-leader.
This group of works covers forty years of Beuys’s career. Included are nature-based drawings of the 1950s, images and scores recording 1960s ‘actions’ and later installations, in addition to sculptures and vitrines. The collection brings together drawings with sculpture from the 1960s like the iconic Fat Chair, and images relating to Actions and installations like Coyote and Show Your Wound. It culminates with the sculpture Scala Napoletana which was made only a few months before the artist’s death, and relates to the theme of communication with the beyond.”
Text from the National Galleries of Scotland website [Online] Cited 23/07/2009. No longer available online
Joseph Beuys with Rose for Direct Democracy 1973
Joseph Beuys (German, 1921-1986) Schwangere und Schwan (Pregnant Woman with Swan) 1959 Oil paint and watercolour on paper 276 x 214 mm ARTIST ROOMS Tate and National Galleries of Scotland Galleries of Scotland through The d’Offay Donation with assistance from the National Heritage Memorial Fund and the Art Fund 2008
The tiny swan in this painting looks as if it is swimming serenely inside the woman, replacing the foetus inside her pregnant body. The drawing combines male and female elements, with the phallic nature of the swan’s neck. Beuys had been fascinated with swans since childhood. A sculpture of a large golden swan sat on top of the tower of Schwanenburg castle (Swan Castle) in his home town of Cleves, and was visible from his bedroom window while he was growing up. With his interest in language, the artist would also have delighted in the similarity between the German words for pregnant woman (Schwangere) and swan (Schwan).
Joseph Beuys (German, 1921-1986) Felt Suit 1970 Felt and wood 1660 x 660 x 260 mm ARTIST ROOMS Tate and National Galleries of Scotland Galleries of Scotland through The d’Offay Donation with assistance from the National Heritage Memorial Fund and the Art Fund 2008
Beuys began producing works in multiples in the 1960s, partly as a way to combat the elitism of the art world. This is probably his most famous multiple. It has its origins in the performance Action the Dead Mouse/Isolation Unit of 1970, where Beuys wore a felt suit with lengthened arms and legs, like the one seen here. He described the suit as an extension of the sculptures he made with felt, where the material’s insulating properties were integral to the meaning of the work. Beuys intended this concept of warmth to extend beyond the material to encompass what he described as ‘spiritual warmth or the beginning of an evolution’.
Joseph Beuys (German, 1921-1986) Stark beleuchteter Hirschstuhl (Brightly-Lit Stag Chair) 1957-1971 2 works on paper, oil paint, graphite and masking tape 1390 x 963 mm ARTIST ROOMS Tate and National Galleries of Scotland Galleries of Scotland through The d’Offay Donation with assistance from the National Heritage Memorial Fund and the Art Fund 2008
Although Beuys began this collage in 1957, it was not finished until 1971. The chair is similar to the subject of the artist’s 1972 sculpture Backrest for a fine-limbed person (Hare-type) of the 20th Century A.D. This is a cast iron impression of a child’s plaster corset, made as a multiple. However, the striding feet of the chair in this collage give it a human aspect, making it seem almost confident and self-possessed. The curved back of the chair is echoed in the lightbulb shape at the top of the image. The stag, in Beuys’s bestiary, guided the soul in its journey to the afterlife.
Joseph Beuys (German, 1921-1986) Passage der Zukunftplanetoiden (Hearts of the Revolutionaries: Passage of the Planets of the Future) 1955 Watercolour on card 295 x 490 mm ARTIST ROOMS Tate and National Galleries of Scotland Galleries of Scotland through The d’Offay Donation with assistance from the National Heritage Memorial Fund and the Art Fund 2008
The choice of red for this painting would seem like an obvious one, reflecting both the heart and the virtues of honour and courage of the revolutionary in the title of the piece. Red also represents socialism, a belief of Beuys which became central to his later work. However, the colour red is used sparingly and symbolically in the artist’s work, and here it makes a bold statement on life, vitality and the future. The inclusion of the round shape to represent a planet brings an astronomical element into the work.
Joseph Beuys (German, 1921-1986) Scala Napoletana 1985 Overall dimensions variable: 11000 x 10000 x 6000mm (room size at Bexhill) Ladder: 4510 x 250 x 80mm, Lead spheres: 500mm diameter each ARTIST ROOMS Tate and National Galleries of Scotland Galleries of Scotland through The d’Offay Donation with assistance from the National Heritage Memorial Fund and the Art Fund 2008
Much of the work Beuys made in his last few years includes objects or themes which suggest death. This sculpture was originally inspired by a ladder the artist found while recovering from illness on the island of Capri in Autumn 1985, which he hung with two stones. When he visited Amalfi at Christmas in the same year, he purchased a ladder (Scala Libera) from a landlord which he used to make this sculpture. Held in suspension, it appears as if the pair of lead weights are preventing this heavy wooden ladder from soaring into the air. This is one of the last sculptures Beuys made. He died in January 1986.
Joseph Beuys (German, 1921-1986) Sled 1969
The materials used in the making of this work relate to Beuys’s experience of being rescued by nomadic Tartars when his plane was shot down during the Second World War. Fat was rubbed into his body and he was wrapped in felt to keep him warm. The sled looks as if it has been prepared for an expedition or in response to an emergency, with a survival kit strapped to it. The flashlight represents the sense of orientation, the felt is protective, and the fat is for food.
Joseph Beuys (German, 1921-1986) Ohne Titel (Untitled) 1970 Gelatin silver print on canvas 2330 x 2275 mm ARTIST ROOMS Tate and National Galleries of Scotland Galleries of Scotland through The d’Offay Donation with assistance from the National Heritage Memorial Fund and the Art Fund 2008
Wearing his unmistakeable felt trilby hat, with his fishing vest poking through a luxuriant fur-lined jacket, this large image (over two metres square) shows Beuys at his most iconic. The clothes he wears here were part of his artist’s ‘uniform’, chosen for comfort and practicality (the multi-pocketed vest was particularly useful) but also as a way to create his image. Fittingly, he is depicted with one of his most distinctive sculptures. In the foreground is The Pack (1969), a group of twenty-four sledges. Each one has its own survival kit including fat for sustenance, felt for warmth and a torch for navigation, making the artist’s signature materials part of this image too.
Text under images from the National Galleries of Scotland website [Online] Cited 23/07/2009. No longer available online
De La Warr Pavilion Bexhill-on-Sea, East Sussex, TN40 1DP
Guo Jian (Chinese-Australian, b. 1962) No.c 2009 Acrylic on canvas 152 x 213cm
This exhibition of eight new paintings and one older work by Chinese artist Guo Jian presented at Arc One Gallery in Melbourne is, with the exception of one outstanding painting, a disappointment. The new work addresses, variously, themes of consumerism, stardom, sex appeal, the military and Chinese culture. Using old photographs as reference and inserting the body and face of the artist into the canvases, Jian examines the paradoxes that exist between Western / American and Chinese culture to limited effect.
Using a restricted colour palette in each painting Jian’s ‘mise en scène’ places American soldiers and babes wearing bikinis of distorted American flags with the artist as lone Chinese soldier – his face pulled into focus while the other figures almost become cut-outs with the overlay of a “blur filter” softening their features. In another set piece Untitled 3 (2009) a seductive woman with flaming red hair and half open jacket holds a bottle of Chloe perfume in her hand while behind Chinese female military dancers brandish swords and red flags. In No.g (2009) two soldiers with guns propped behind them read contrasting books – one the ‘Little Red Book’ and the other ‘A Big Naughty Girly Magazine’. Marilyn and Madonna feature heavily, pastiches in a built environment – all pink and fleshy with a silver heart (perhaps it should have been a Purple Heart).
The iconography in these staged ‘tableaux vivants’ is a one shot idea repeated in all eight paintings. The themes seem hackneyed, their language a bricolage of ironic archetypes that don’t have anything new to say about the subject matter but repeat things we know already: vis a vis that Chinese society is struggling to cope with the burden of becoming a consumer culture. On reflection, the new paintings have not impinged on my consciousness – always a sign whether the work really has made a connection. However, the single work from 2003 is a different beast.
The Training from the series The Day Before I Went Away (2003) is a hypnotic, mesmerising and powerful work, lurid even, with it’s hyper-real colours and maniacal faces, eyes rolling in the back of heads, barring of teeth, the hand over the mouth, the upraised hand, the glistening white of the blade – oh the lust for blood!
This painting is so evocative it shames the new work by comparison – you think about this work, you remember it!
Here is the passion and insightfulness of the artist. Danger and terror grab you and shake you and force you to think about the human condition. This is what I want art to do in whatever way it can – subtly, quietly, psychologically, forcefully. Great art challenges us to look, feel and think. Unfortunately the new work, while clever on a superficial level, fails to deliver.
Dr Marcus Bunyan
Many thankx to the Arc One Gallery for allowing me to publish the art work in the posting.
Guo Jian (Chinese-Australian, b. 1962) No.d 2009 Acrylic on canvas 152 x 213cm
“This series is about looking at the persuasion or morale boosting efforts for soldiers from another perspective. I considered how starlets and celebrities are deployed in the West – often not dissimilarly to the way Chinese Entertainment Soldiers are used to influence and motivate in my part of the world.” ~ Guo Jian
Guo Jian (Chinese-Australian, b. 1962) No.f 2009 Acrylic on canvas 152 x 213cm
Guo Jian (Chinese-Australian, b. 1962) No.g 2009 Acrylic on canvas 152 x 213cm
Guo Jian (Chinese-Australian, b. 1962) Untitled 3 2009 Acrylic on canvas 152 x 213cm
Born in China in 1963, Jian was raised in a controlled political environment. He served over three years in the Peoples Liberation Army and bore witness to the horrific Tiananmen Square massacre in 1989, where he assisted carrying the wounded to the hospital.
Jian’s personal atlas of history continues to feed his visual commentary. His voice is both satirical and erotic, challenging and confronting. He plays with irony and foreplay to exploit and raise potent questions surrounding propaganda and manipulation.
“As I have grown older, I have realised that all of the education I have received is rarely practical in real life. Reality and education are conflicting. The way in which you inherently view the world is influenced by education which is the perspectives of others. Our surrounding environment defines our perception of ‘right’ and ‘wrong’, ‘enemy’ and ‘friend’, ‘them’ and ‘us’. But, if you dare to open your eyes and liberate your mind, you will find that the world is not exactly the way you have been told. Put your feet into someone else’s shoes to think about the world and your own life differently. For me, if the surroundings change, are combined, are old or new, it doesn’t matter. My life is defined relative to my self-experience and the things I have heard or seen. From this perspective, I have discovered the freedom to reopen my eyes to a new world and to new possibilities.”
Guo Jian
Text from the press release on the Arc One Gallery website [Online] Cited 10/07/2009. No longer available online
Guo Jian (Chinese-Australian, b. 1962) The Training from the series The Day Before I Went Away 2003
Arc One Gallery 45 Flindes Lane Melbourne, Victoria 3000
Shining brightly in the firmament the star of the show is, undoubtedly, the supremely talented Francesca Woodman. What an artist – both photographer and subject, here and there, enigmatic, sensual, psychotic, beautiful, playful, and desperate. Who is she; who are we.
Baldly put, “Francesca Woodman’s photographs explore issues of gender and self, looking at the representation of the body in relation to its surroundings… Found objects and suggestive props are carefully placed to create unsettling, surreal or claustrophobic scenarios. Her photographs are produced in thematic series’, relating to specific props, places or situations. In combining performance, play and self-exposure, Woodman’s photographs create extreme and often disturbing psychological states.”
Her photographs are so much more. They promote in the attentive viewer a ghostly insistence that you could be her – in vulnerability, in presence, in fear of suffering, for our death. Who are we that is represented, what is our place in this lonely world, how do we interact with our shadow? “In concealing or encrypting her subjects she reminds the viewer that photographs flatten and distort, never offering the whole truth about a subject.” No. This is no truth.
It is that they offer glimpses of another world, not flattened or distorted, but a lens to focus on the microcosm of the infinite spirit. The personal as universal truth.
Dr Marcus Bunyan
Many thankx to the Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art for allowing me to publish the photographs in the posting. Please click on the photographs for a larger version of the image.
Throughout 2009, 18 museums and galleries across the UK will be showing over 30 ARTIST ROOMS from the collection created by the dealer and collector, Anthony d’Offay, and acquired by Tate and the National Galleries of Scotland in February 2008. This is the first time a national collection has been shared and shown simultaneously across the UK, and has only been made possible through the exceptional generosity of independent charity The Art Fund and, in Scotland, of the Scottish Government.
The opening displays at the Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art in Edinburgh this spring will include the work of Vija Celmins, Ellen Gallagher, Damien Hirst, Alex Katz, Andy Warhol, and Francesca Woodman. Highlights will include Celmins’ beautiful, delicate images of seas, deserts and the night sky, a complete series of landscape and portrait paintings by the American painter Alex Katz and Francesca Woodman’s intimate, surrealist-influenced photographs. Damien Hirst, the most prominent British artist of today, will feature in an expanded display across several rooms. This will bring together works from ARTIST ROOMS – such as the iconic Away from the Flock (an early example of Hirst’s animals in formaldehyde) and a recent butterfly painting – with additional loans from further collections.
The ARTIST ROOMS display at the Gallery of Modern Art is dedicated to Vija Celmins’ ethereal images of seas, deserts and the night sky, a complete series of landscape and portrait paintings by Alex Katz, and Francesca Woodman’s intimate, surrealist-influenced photographs. Photographs by Warhol and paintings by Ellen Gallagher will also be included. Damien Hirst will feature in an expanded display, which will bring together works from ARTIST ROOMS – such as the iconic Away from the Flock and a recent butterfly painting – with additional loans from further collections.
American artist Vija Celmins makes paintings, drawings and prints. Using charcoal, graphite and erasers she produces delicate images based on photographs of the sea, deserts, the night sky and other natural phenomena.
The ARTIST ROOMS collection comprises 24 works on paper by Celmins, including three unique drawings. Web #1 is typical of her fragile images and is the first of nine works on the theme of the spider’s web. It is accompanied by a series of four ‘web’ prints which echo the web-like construction of the universe. Other works in the collection include an important series from the entitled Concentric Bearings which explores different images of turning space.
Celmins works focus on something small and individual in the context of vastness. The images they depict seem fragile because they record a specific human glimpse through a telescope or camera which is temporary and frozen in time. …
Damien Hirst is the most prominent artist to have emerged from the British art scene in the 1990s. Hirst’s work forces viewers to question their understanding of issues such as the fragility of life, our reluctance to confront death and decay and other dilemmas of human existence.
He is best known for his Natural History works – large-scale sculptures featuring dead animals floating in Minimalist looking vitrines – but also for his mirrored pharmacy cabinets lined with shelves full of evenly spaced drug bottles, pills, sea shells or cigarette butts, and his paintings, which he produces in series.
An example of these, included in ARTIST ROOMS, is the early Controlled Substances Key Painting (Spot 4a). Also included in ARTIST ROOMS is the key work Away from the Flock, featuring a sheep floating in formaldehyde. The large butterfly diptych Monument to the Living and the Dead, 2006 was made specifically for ARTIST ROOMS. …
American photographer Francesca Woodman has eighteen rare vintage black and white photographs in ARTIST ROOMS. They have a timeless unique quality. The artist began taking photographs at the age of thirteen and though she was only twenty two when she took her own life, she left behind a substantial body of work.
Francesca Woodman’s photographs explore issues of gender and self, looking at the representation of the body in relation to its surroundings. She puts herself in the frame most often, although these are not conventional self-portraits as she is either partially hidden, or concealed by slow exposures that blur her moving figure into a ghostly presence.
Found objects and suggestive props are carefully placed to create unsettling, surreal or claustrophobic scenarios. Her photographs are produced in thematic series’, relating to specific props, places or situations. In combining performance, play and self-exposure, Woodman’s photographs create extreme and often disturbing psychological states.
Andy Warhol is one of the most influential American artists to emerge in the post-war period. ARTIST ROOMS includes an impressive selection of 232 works which span the artist’s entire work. This display focuses on a group of stitched photographs from the collection.
After graduating and moving to New York in 1949, Warhol quickly became established as one of the city’s most sought after commercial illustrators, working for magazines such as Glamour and Harper’s Bazaar. However, it was in the early-sixties that he began to produce the work for which he is most celebrated.
As the most famous proponent of Pop Art, his earliest ‘pop’ works depict consumer goods and images from the press. This evolved to reveal his enduring fascination with celebrity and mortality, with many of his most powerful images touching on these themes.
ARTIST ROOMS comprises a superb array of important works representing all phases of Warhol’s career and a cross-section of media. Warhol explored the medium of photography extensively and began producing stitched photographs in 1986. Returning to his earlier predilection for repetition, Warhol used multiple prints of the same photographs that he then had sewn together to form a composite work of art. By repeating the same image, Warhol could extend the abstract design to the whole work and emphasise the broader significance of what might seem to be peculiarly singular and oddball.”
Text from the Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art website [Online] Cited 25/06/2009. No longer available online
Celmins’s intense monochromatic images, based on photographs, focus on small and individual marks in the context of vastness. The images seem fragile because they record a specific human glimpse through a camera which is ephemeral and frozen in time. Celmins’s serial exploration of her subjects, including spider webs, allows the artist to exploit the distinct characteristics of the variety of media she uses. This meticulous, translucent web is typical of her apparently fragile, ephemeral images. These images echo the web-like construction of the universe, a further preoccupation of the artist. Celmins has explained: “Maybe I identify with the spider. I’m the kind of person who works on something forever and then works on the same image again the next day.”
Damien Hirst (English, b. 1965) Controlled Substances Key Painting (Spot 4a) 1994 Acrylic paint on canvas Support: 1220 x 1224 x 40 mm Frame: 1307 x 1303 x 81 mm Acquired jointly with the Tate through The d’Offay Donation with assistance from the National Heritage Memorial Fund and the Art Fund 2008
This canvas is constructed using a grid of dots of different colours, accompanied by letters in alphabetical order that seem to dissect and reorganise the very matter of painting into cells. Hirst has said that he only painted five of his spot paintings himself, since he found them so boring to paint and could not do them as well as his assistants. But the key thing about these works is their conceptual clarity – the potentiality of making an infinite number and variety of paintings, based on size and colour of the dots and size and shape of the canvases. Like Andy Warhol, whom Hirst greatly admires, Hirst has set up a sort of factory with assistants to help him make his works of arts. Like Warhol, Hirst retains central control of what and how it is produced.
Woodman lies naked, in a vulnerable state, the curve of her body echoing the curved form of the eel. She has printed several similar versions of this image with her body on either side of the eel. While Woodman was studying in Rome between 1977 and 1978 she came into contact with the Symbolist work of Max Klinger, whose influence can be seen in this series. The image is sexually charged, yet in placing herself on both sides of the camera Woodman hovers between being in control and being defenceless, exploring the ways in which femininity can be portrayed. The photograph is not a self-portrait in the conventional sense, as it explores the possibilities of representation, instead of revealing the artist’s identity.
Crouched against a dilapidated interior, Woodman conceals her face with her hand. The combination between the vintage pattern of her dress and the peeling wall behind her create an antique, romantic air. Woodman’s photographs exhibit many influences, from Symbolism and Surrealism to fashion photography and Baroque painting. She explores issues of gender and self, looking at the representation of the body in relation to its surroundings. Woodman usually puts herself in the frame, although these are not conventional self-portraits, since as she is either partially hidden, or concealed by slow exposures that blur her moving figure into a ghostly presence. This underlying fragility is emphasised by the small and intimate format of the photographs.
ARTISTS ROOMS Essay
American photographer Francesca Woodman has eighteen rare vintage black and white photographs in ARTIST ROOMS, acquired from a collection once owned by the artist’s boyfriend. Woodman’s photographs exhibit many influences, from symbolism and surrealism to fashion photography and Baroque painting. They have a timeless quality that is ethereal and unique.
The artist began taking photographs at the age of thirteen, and though she was only twenty two when she took her own life, she left behind a substantial body of work. Francesca Woodman’s photographs explore issues of gender and self, looking at the representation of the body in relation to its surroundings.
She puts herself in the frame most often, although these are not conventional self-portraits as she is either partially hidden, or concealed by slow exposures that blur her moving figure into a ghostly presence. This underlying vulnerability is further emphasised by the small and intimate format of the photographs. We often see her in otherwise deserted interior spaces, where her body seems to merge with its surroundings, covered by sections of peeling wallpaper, half hidden behind the flat plane of a door, or crouching over a mirror. Found objects and suggestive props are carefully placed to create unsettling, surreal or claustrophobic scenarios.
Her photographs are produced in thematic series, relating to specific props, places or situations. Woodman was exposed to the symbolic work of Max Klinger whilst studying in Rome from 1977-78 and his influence can clearly be seen in many photographic series, such as Eel Series, Roma and Angel Series, Roma.
In combining performance, play and self-exposure, Woodman’s photographs create extreme and often disturbing psychological states. In concealing or encrypting her subjects she reminds the viewer that photographs flatten and distort, never offering the whole truth about a subject.
Text from the Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art website [Online] Cited 05/03/2019
Andy Warhol (American, 1928-1987) Trash cans 1986 4 photographs, gelatin silver print on paper and thread Support: 698 x 543 mm Acquired jointly with the Tate through The d’Offay Donation with assistance from the National Heritage Memorial Fund and the Art Fund 2008
Warhol’s stitched photographs depict a wide range of subjects including signs, objects, celebrities, nude models and buildings. Trash Cans is one of many that focus on everyday and ordinary objects and can be related to some of Warhol’s best-known pop works, in which common objects and consumer goods (for example Brillo boxes, Coca-Cola bottles, and Campbell’s soup cans) are isolated from their everyday context so as to foreground their individual aesthetic value. Many of Warhol’s pop works are also composed of repetitious images, for example his screenprints in which identical images are repeated numerous times across a canvas, such as Marilyn Diptych 1962 (Tate T03093). It is thus useful to compare Trash Cans with Warhol’s screenprints featuring multiple images of Campbell’s soup cans – especially given the similarities between the shapes of the different receptacles.
Text from the Tate website
Andy Warhol (American, 1928-1987) I am blind 1976-1986 9 photographs, gelatin silver print on paper Frame: 1315 x 1066 x 26 mm Acquired jointly with the Tate through The d’Offay Donation with assistance from the National Heritage Memorial Fund and the Art Fund 2008
Andy Warhol (American, 1928-1987) Venus in Shell 1976-1986 4 photographs, gelatin silver print on paper and thread 700 x 542 mm Acquired jointly with the Tate through The d’Offay Donation with assistance from the National Heritage Memorial Fund and the Art Fund 2008
Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art 75 Belford Road, Edinburgh, EH4 3DR
Opening hours: Open daily, 10am – 5pm Admission free
Scott McFarland (Canadian, b. 1975) Fallen Oak Tree 2008 From the series Hampstead Inkjet print 27 x 24 inches (68.6 x 61cm) Edition of 5
Variations on a theme
Whether McFarland’s photographs are “straight” or composites, there always seems to an unnerving feel to them, a formal frontality that empowers the viewer into trying to unlock the photographs secret, like an enigmatic puzzle. Everything is presented front on, square to the camera, no oblique angles, relying in the straight photographs on the scale of the accumulated blocks of information, and in the composites, in the very unlikely, even theatrical, staging of the people within the mise en scène.
These are very cinematic photographs, some, literally, with their panoramic aesthetic, others built by assembling their scudding skies and stiff, neatly placed people. Too neatly placed in my opinion but that’s McFarland’s hook, his aesthetic cough which prompts the viewer to question the veracity of the image, its link to the photographs indexical reality. His multiple exposures push the boundaries of truth or dare, hyperreal solutions to a disengaged world. Personally, I prefer his straight photographs which are built on a fabulous eye, a masterful understanding of pictorial space (monumental elements held in balance) and wonderful previsualisation. You don’t need anything more.
Dr Marcus Bunyan
Many thankx to Regen Projects for allowing me to publish the photographs in the posting. Please click on the photographs for a larger version of the image.
Scott McFarland (Canadian, b. 1975) The Admiral’s House as seen from the Upper Garden at Fenton House 2006 From the series Hampstead Inkjet print Edition of 5
“Regen Projects is pleased to announce an exhibition of new work by Canadian artist Scott McFarland. This exhibition will feature new photographs including 3 large panorama works, smaller works from the “Hampstead” series, and introduce the new “Niagara” series.
Scott McFarland’s photography reconsiders the traditional concept of a photograph as the depiction of a single captured moment in time. Through digital means he is able to manipulate composition, colour, light, space, shape, and form. McFarland’s photographs combine multiple negatives to represent simultaneous temporalities and interweave selected elements into a cohesive whole. Several different moments are packed into what appears to be one densely constructed instant. The photographs are meticulously crafted illusions created within the formal language of documentary photography.
McFarland’s consideration of photography and the built picture was brought about by the artist’s own understanding of the artificial “nature” found in built environments such as gardens and zoos. Taking the relationship of the constructed space/constructed image one step further, McFarland has photographed a modernist architectural landmark: the Berthold Lubetkin designed penguin pool at the London zoo. Through two very distinct works, McFarland investigates the elliptical structure of the famous penguin pool vis-à-vis the elliptical / arcing motion of his camera rotating on a tripod. One photograph is an objective colour rendering where the camera has been left level while rotating; the other is a larger black and white version where the camera arcs along a non-level plane distorting and altering the curve of the structure from right to left.
The new square format photographs from McFarland’s “Niagara” series have a rough unfinished quality unlike any photographs he has taken to date. These softer focus images with odd shifts in light and glare are location studies for the large panorama A Horse Drawn Hearse, Queens Royal Tours, 174 Anne, Niagara on the Lake, Ontario (2009, below). This work depicts an old carriage business and its surroundings during the dead of Canadian winter. In this visually captivating work, a black funeral carriage contrasts against the white snow. The acreage, surrounded by newer suburban homes, evokes the question of how long can this structure resist the modern urban pressures it faces. These straight photographs presented alongside his precise digitally mastered compositions illustrate how the photographic process and the history of art and photography have always informed McFarland’s work.
“Over the last decade, Scott McFarland has produced bodies of work that engage with different aspects of photography … McFarland’s approach is both descriptive and metaphoric … The images, rich in cultural significance, express the complementary workings of conceptual and aesthetic factors all the while holding various characteristics of art and photography in ambiguous relation.”
Andrea Kunard. Scott McFarland: A Cultivated View, published by the National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa, 2009, p. 12.
Text from the Regen Projects press release [Online] Cited 16/06/2009. No longer available online.
Scott McFarland (Canadian, b. 1975) A Horse Drawn Hearse, Queens Royal Tours, 174 Anne, Niagara on the Lake, Ontario 2009 From the series Niagara Inkjet print 59.5 x 124 inches (151.1 x 315cm) Edition of 5
Scott McFarland (Canadian, b. 1975) Boathouse with Moonlight 2002 From the series Boathouse Digital C-print 71 x 91 inches (180 x 231cm) Edition of 5, 2 AP
“Boathouse with Moonlight” is an exploration of the technical advancements afforded by digital photography, created by assembling multiple exposures taken over the space of two hours under the light of a full moon. Unlike traditional photography, this image does not represent one specific moment captured at a particular site; rather, it shows an accumulation of moments that have been manipulated and layered to create a revised version of the boathouse and its surroundings. McFarland’s use of multiple exposures to produce the final image emphasises not only the duration of the photographic act, but also the many facets of the boathouse’s character. This type of building on British Columbia’s “Sunshine Coast” is disappearing with the construction of new, suburban-style retirement housing.
Text from the National Gallery of Canada website [Online] Cited 02/03/2019
Scott McFarland (Canadian, b. 1975) Gorse and Broom, West Heath, Hampstead 2006 From the series Hampstead Inkjet print Edition of 5
Scott McFarland (Canadian, b. 1975) Women Drying Laundry on the Gorse, Vale of Health, Hampstead Heath 2007 From the series Hampstead Inkjet print 29 x 45 inches (73.7 x 114.3cm) Edition of 5
Scott McFarland (Canadian, b. 1975) Inspecting, Allan O’connor Searches for Botrytis cinerea 2003 From the series Gardens Digital C-print 40 x 48 inches (102 x 122cm) Edition of 7
Scott McFarland (Canadian, b. 1975) Orchard View with the Effects of Seasons (Variation #1) 2003-2006 From the series Gardens Digital C-print 42 x 122 inches (106.7 x 309.9cm) Edition of 3
Scott McFarland (Canadian, b. 1975) [Huntington Botanical Gardens in San Marino, Calif] 2005 From the series Empire Inkjet print
Scott McFarland (Canadian, b. 1975) Echinocactus grusonii [Huntington Botanical Gardens in San Marino, Calif] 2006 From the series Empire Inkjet print 24.5 x 27.5 inches (62 x 70cm) Edition of 3 Private collection/Vancouver Art Gallery
This picture comes from Empire, a series on desert vegetation shot in the Huntington Botanical Gardens in San Marino, Calif. Henry E. Huntington, an art collector who made his fortune building railroads, founded the garden in 1919.
“The plantings [of the garden] are dense, and the soil is mostly hidden beneath the thriving vegetation,” writes Grant Arnold in a catalogue essay for the exhibition, “the fullness of the planting continually reminding the visitor of Huntington’s beneficence.” To many gallery visitors, however, these images of lush desert vegetation will simply be appealing to the eye.
Scott McFarland (Canadian, b. 1975) The Granite Bowl in the Berlin Lust Garden 2006 Inkjet print 43 x 62 inches (109.2 x 157.5cm) Edition of 5
At first the photograph appeared to be a simple scene, one of no importance. The two young children, obviously related based on their similar physical features, seemed a bit awkward and posed, but otherwise, I thought it to be a snapshot, much like the one I took of the bowl while in Berlin. Upon learning how McFarland created this and many of his other photographs, I learned how complex of a scene this really is. McFarland uses multiple negatives, often taken over a matter of days, weeks, and even months, and combines them digitally into a seamless print. His interest is in breaking through the concept of a photograph being an image of a single instant in time and space.
A fuller narrative is created as well. With just one negative, there may only be one or two people depicted. We may just have the dog with his owner half shown, or even only half of the brother-sister group. But by overlapping the various negatives, Mr McFarland manipulates his work into a greater piece. We can now ask ourselves, why are the brother and sister so psychologically distant? Or, who is the small girl with the accordion and where is her mother? Is her mother the woman with the baby carriage? How long has that man been sleeping under the bowl? These are all questions that can be asked together because the negatives are combined that couldn’t be asked if we had just the single frame.
Scott McFarland (Canadian, b. 1975) View of Vale of Health, looking towards Hampstead 2007 From the series Hampstead Inkjet print 27 x 42.5 inches (68.6 x 108 cm) Edition of 5
With the stiff figures of a historical painting, Scott McFarland’s View of Vale of Health, Looking Towards Hampstead muddles ideas of what’s real and what’s not.
From the get-go, painting and photography have been inextricably bound together. The Pictorialists tried to make their photographs look like paintings. The Futurists, in their paintings, mimicked the blurred and segmented movement found in Etienne-Jules Marey’s chronophotographs. The photorealists created paintings whose subject was the photograph itself. And in his large-scale, backlit photo-transparencies, Jeff Wall has alluded to paintings by Nicolas Poussin, Edouard Manet, and Paul Cézanne, among others. The digital age has done nothing to diminish each medium’s obsession with the other.
This continued entwining of art forms is evident in Scott McFarland’s computer-montaged photographs, on view at the Vancouver Art Gallery. So is the parallel entanglement of nature and culture. Both conditions are conspicuous in his 2006 series, “Hampstead”, inspired by the landscapes of the early-19th-century English painter John Constable. McFarland’s colour photos, shot in various locations around London’s immense Hampstead Heath, pay homage to Constable’s attraction to the same place. They also play variations on that painter’s rendering of multiple versions of the same scene, and on his open-air studies of the changing effects of light and weather. …
Over the past decade, McFarland’s working methods have changed from straightforward analog photography to the creation of highly manipulated images in which he digitally splices together multiple segments of the same landscape or structure, shot over a period of days, weeks, or even months. In both variations of Orchard View With the Effects of the Seasons, for instance, the blossoms and foliage of spring, summer, and fall are contained within the same seamless panorama.
The digital assist means that there are no constraints of time, space, or documentary veracity in McFarland’s work: he can build whatever impossible pictures he wants and they will look “real”. At least until they’re closely scrutinised, revealing incongruities of light, shadow, time, and figuration. In this sense, his art challenges our understanding of the nature of the photograph and its relationship with the truth. There’s nothing really new about this project – as long as photography’s been around, it’s been manipulated by its practitioners. Photoshop, however, has added a vast digital dimension to the darkroom antics of earlier photo artists.
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!
Installation view of the interior forecourt of the National Gallery of Victoria showing banners for the exhibition Salvador Dalí: Liquid Desire Photo: Marcus Bunyan
Installation photographs from the latest Winter Masterpieces blockbuster Salvador Dalí: Liquid Desire from the media preview on the day the exhibition opened at NGV International, Melbourne. Thank you to Jemma Altmeier, Media and Public Affairs Administrator at the NGV for the invitation. Photographs were taken using a digital camera, tripod and available light.
Fantastic to see my friend and curator of the exhibition, Dr Ted Gott, at the opening. Congratulations on a wonderful show!
Photographs proceed from the beginning to the end of the exhibition in chronological order.
Many thankx to the National Gallery of Victoria for allowing me to publish the photographs in the posting. Please click on the photographs for a larger version of the image.
Entrance to the Salvador Dalí: Liquid Desire Winter Masterpieces exhibition at the National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne Photo: Marcus Bunyan
3 panel video installation of the Catalan countryside where Salvador Dali lived. 13 minutes duration from the exhibition Salvador Dalí: Liquid Desire Winter Masterpieces at the National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne Photo: Marcus Bunyan
Early work from the Salvador Dalí: Liquid Desire Winter Masterpieces exhibition at the National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne Photo: Marcus Bunyan
To the left View of the Cadaques from the Creus Tower 1923; to the right Table in front of the Sea. Homage to Eric Satie 1926 from the Salvador Dalí: Liquid Desire Winter Masterpieces exhibition at the National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne Photos: Marcus Bunyan
In the centre The First Days of Spring 1929; to the right Surrealist composition 1928 from the Salvador Dalí: Liquid Desire Winter Masterpieces exhibition at the National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne Photo: Marcus Bunyan
Installation view with The Age art critic Associate Professor Robert Nelson at centre right and The hand. The remorse of conscience 1930 at far right, from the Salvador Dalí: Liquid Desire Winter Masterpieces exhibition at the National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne Photo: Marcus Bunyan
Installation view with Memory of the child-woman 1932 at right from the Salvador Dalí: Liquid Desire Winter Masterpieces exhibition at the National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne Photo: Marcus Bunyan
Salvador Dalí (Spanish 1904-1989, worked in United States 1940-1948) Lobster Telephone (installation view) 1936 Photo: Marcus Bunyan
Jewellery gallery at the Salvador Dalí: Liquid Desire Winter Masterpieces exhibition at the National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne Photos: Marcus Bunyan
Televisions with film installation from the Salvador Dalí: Liquid Desire Winter Masterpieces exhibition at the National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne Photo: Marcus Bunyan
Installation of black and white photography from the exhibition Salvador Dalí: Liquid Desire Winter Masterpieces exhibition at the National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne with Dr Ted Gott, curator of the exhibition, with back to camera at centre Photo: Marcus Bunyan
Reproduction of Gala foot. Stereoscopic paintings 1975-1976 in an installation using mirrors that would have been originally used to obtain the stereoscopic effect Photo: Marcus Bunyan
Final exhibition space from the Salvador Dalí: Liquid Desire Winter Masterpieces exhibition at the National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne Photo: Marcus Bunyan
Final gallery space from the Salvador Dalí: Liquid Desire Winter Masterpieces exhibition at the National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne featuring The Ecumenical Council 1960 Photos: Marcus Bunyan
National Gallery of Victoria (International) 180 St Kilda Road, Melbourne
Opening hours: Salvador Dalí: Liquid Desire is open 7 days a week and until 9pm every Wednesday from 17 June
Tickets Adult: $23 Concession: $18 Child: $11 (ages 5-15) Family (2 adults + 3 children): $60 NGV Member Adult: $16 NGV Member Family: $40
![Joseph Beuys (German, 1921-1986) 'Entwurf für ein Filzenvironment [Model for a Felt Environment]' 1964](https://artblart.com/wp-content/uploads/2009/07/beuys-filzenvironment-web.jpg "Joseph Beuys (German, 1921-1986) 'Entwurf für ein Filzenvironment [Model for a Felt Environment]' 1964")
![Joseph Beuys. 'Fettecke (Prozess) [Fat Corner (Process)]' 1968](https://artblart.com/wp-content/uploads/2009/07/beuys-fettecke-web.jpg)
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