Marco Fusinato (Australian, b. 1964) Double Infinitive 3 2009
Double Infinitives by Marco Fusinato at Anna Schwartz Gallery, Melbourne is an excellent exhibition of large UV ink on aluminium images sourced by Fusinato from the print media.
The images are made up of a dot pattern familiar to those who have examined photographs in the print media closely. Larger and smaller clusters of dots form the light and shade of the image. As you move closer to the works they dissolve into blocks of dots and become and optical illusion like Op Art from the 1960s. Fusinato contrasts this dot structure with the inclusion of flat panels of black ink to the left and right hand side of the images. The section lines that run through the images (for they are not one single image but made up of panels) also adds to the optical nature of the work as the lines cut the conflagrations, literally stitching the seams/scenes together.
Each image contains an individual holding a rock enclosed in the milieu and detritus of a riot; the figures are grounded in the earth and surrounded by fire but in their obscurity, in the veiling of their eyes, the figures seem present but absent at one and the same time. They become ghosts of the fire.
Fire consumes the bodies. The almost cut out presence of the figures, their hands clutching, throwing, saluting become mute. Here the experience of the sound, colour and movement of an actual riot is silenced in the flatness and smoothness of the images. The images possess the intensity of a newspaper reality ‘blown up’ to a huge scale by Fusinato (see the installation photograph below to get an idea of the effect). The punctum of the riot, that prick of consciousness that Barthes so liked, is translated into a silenced studium of the aluminium surface; an aural history (the sound) / oral history (the telling of the story) trapped in the structure of silence.
There is a double jeopardy – the dissolution of the image into dots and the disintegration of the body into fire. In one of the images the upraised arm and hand of one of the rioters holds a rock with what appears to be a figure on it, surrounded by fire. To me the arm turned into one of the burning Twin Towers with smoke and fire pouring from it (see the first photograph in the installation photograph below).
My only concern about the images were the black panels, perhaps too obvious a tool for the purpose the artist intended. Maybe the needed some small texture, like a moire pattern to reference the contours of a map and continue the topographical and optical theme. Perhaps they just needed to be smaller or occasionally placed as thin strips down the actual image itself but these are small quibbles. Overall this is an fantastic exhibition that I enjoyed immensely. The images are literally ripped from the matrix of time and space and become the dot dot dot of the addendum. What Fusinato does so excellently is to make us pause and stare, to recognise the flatness of these figures and the quietness of violence that surrounds us.
Music – Noise – Silence Flatness – Advertising – Earth – Fire Rock – Space – Memory
Dr Marcus Bunyan
Many thankx to Anna Schwartz Gallery for allowing me to publish the photographs in the posting. Please click on the photographs for a larger version of the image.
Marco Fusinato (Australian, b. 1964) Double infinitive 1 2009
Marco Fusinato (Australian, b. 1964) Double Infinitive 4 2009
A selection of images from the print media of the decisive moment in a riot in which a protagonist brandishes a rock against a backdrop of fire. Each image is from a different part of the world, from the early twenty-first century, and is blown up to history-painting scale using the latest commercial print technologies.
Text by Marco Fusinato on his website
Installation of Marco Fusinato Double Infinitives exhibition at Anna Schwartz Gallery, Melbourne
Double Infinitives
“Unheard music is better than heard.”
Greek proverb of late antiquity
“That music be heard is not essential – what it sounds like may not be what it is.”
Charles Ives, Essays Before a Sonata
“The proposition of Jacques Attali’s Noise is different. He says that while noise is a deadly weapon, silence is death.”
David Rattray, “How I Became One of the Invisible,” Semiotext(e), 1992.
The explosive communal act of rioting is most commonly delivered to an audience suspended in the stillness and silence of a photographic image. Noise is not removed in this process, it is almost amplified: the sound and action that deliver this singularly captured moment into existence are infinite, as all things remain while they are imagined, before they are anchored down by express articulation.
Photographic representation can easily be accused of subverting the truth of events, not because what is seen in the image has not transpired, but because static images leave so much space around them for multiple narratives to be constructed. The still image is totally contingent on the consciousness that confronts it. By contrast, the near-totality of videos can give too much away …
Sourced by Fusinato from print media published in the last few years, these images of rioting all contain an individual clutching a rock, bathed in the refractory glow of a nearby fire. The image has become prototypical, so much so that it lacks the sensation of spontaneity requisite to produce a riot. (Apropos to this predictability, Fusinato would check global newspapers after every forum or conference of global financial authorities, often finding the image he was looking for).
Double Infinitives is a succinct allegory for the reluctance to compromise comfort overpowering radical impulses. Conversations suggest this is a conflict frequently experienced by artists. Deprived of a volatile political reality, we experience radicalism through images that act as small ruptures, reminders that the world we live in might be more severely charged than our individual experiences allow. Fusinato’s works flatten these images of volatility onto a smooth slate: they are similar and radiate with the vexed beauty of sameness. A riot is a mad and brutal spectacle, a theatre that is often documented as if it were a play. Hugely expanded in scale and rendered in the suffused gloss of advertising, the real possibility of violence that these works infer deepens the layers of the fiction rather than comprising an indicator of human concern. Those things with which we come into such gentle contact that their thorns barely prick …
Liv Barrett June 2009
Text from the Anna Schwartz Gallery website [Online] Cited 10/07/2009. No longer available online
Marco Fusinato (Australian, b. 1964) Double Iinfinitive 2 2009
Marco Fusinato (Australian, b. 1964) Double Iinfinitive 2 (detail) 2009
Marco Fusinato (Australian, b. 1964) Double Iinfinitive 5 2009
Anna Schwartz Gallery 185 Flinders Lane Melbourne, Victoria 3000
Emma Davies (Australian, b. 1968) Sekai (meaning ‘be humorous’) 2009
A stimulating exhibition by Emma Davies at Craft Victoria of polypropylene industrial netting and packaging that has been heated, moulded, sculpted and literally morphed into these fantastical sculptures, inspired by the artist’s experiences when visiting Johannesburg in South Africa as part of the South Project. Davies evokes the mysterious and the bizarre in her figures, making the commonplace into something uncommon, taking her themes from the relics of bush medicine present in the street markets: the medicine market of Johannesburg full of dried animal bones, skulls, skins and bottles of alchemistic objects.
Despite their comforting South African names (translated into English as ‘hope’, ‘faith’, ‘quiet, tranquil’, ‘lady’, ‘chief’, ‘prince’ for example) these extremely individual figurative ‘presences’ have a powerful melancholic affect on the viewer. Their elongated long legged and armed, no necked forms create dark eyeless creatures that crouch in rusted boxes or sit on wooden posts with their legs and arms hanging, folded. They seem lonely and sad despite their titles, perhaps reflecting the harsh realities of a life of poverty on the streets of Soweto.
Two figures on wooden blocks seem to walk aimlessly, placed on large rough industrial tables with huge wheels while another figure sits up a rusted ladder propped against the wall. A group of figures are clustered together on top of large wooden posts of different heights, some with arms round each other for comfort, others with black or red feathers sprouting from shoulders, legs or wearing a red feathered skirt. These creatures create a marvellous group of contemplative wandering minstrels while behind them their eerie shadows fall on the gallery wall.
As Goya began to sympathise with the suffering of the peasants so Davies seems to have been transformed by what she saw around her during her visit, trying to make sense of a foreign culture, dreaming the sleep of reason but surrounded and invaded by a world in which the natural and unnatural has fused and morphed.
I really liked this exhibition and the presence of these figures. I am obviously not alone as the show is almost sold out. A visit to these disturbing, enfolding creatures is recommended.
Dr Marcus Bunyan
All photographs courtesy of Craft Victoria (thankyou Amy Brand!) and taken by their photographer Alexia Skok. Please click on the photographs for a larger version of the image.
Emma Davies (Australian, b. 1968) Tariro (meaning ‘hope’) 2009
Emma Davies (Australian, b. 1968) Rutendo (detail – meaning ‘faith’) 2009
Francisco de Goya (Spanish, 1746-1828) Los Caprichos plate 43 from the series El sueño de la razón produce monstros 1799 Etching and aquatint Height: 21.3cm (8.3″) Width: 15.1cm (5.9″) Museo del Prado, Madrid
Emma Davies (Australian, b. 1968) Zola (detail – meaning ‘quiet, tranquil’) 2009
Emma Davies (Australian, b. 1968) Group with from left to right: Enitan (person of story), Ntombi (lady), Kgosi (chief), Nkosana (prince), Lucky and Alaba (second child after twins) 2009
Emma Davies (Australian, b. 1968) Nkosana (detail – meaning ‘prince’) 2009
Craft Victoria Watson Place, off Flinders Lane, Melbourne 3000 Phone: 03 9650 7775
Josephine Kuperholz presents a beautifully engineered set of photographs in her exhibition Blight at Gallery 101, Melbourne. Featuring hand coloured silver gelatin photographs of endangered Australian insects sourced from the Entomology collection of the Victoria Museum, Kuperholz literally weaves multiple narratives into the photographs. The execution (an apt word for the circumstances of extinction facing these insects) of these images is fastidious, the weaving superlative, almost clinical.
The layering of the photographs disrupts their surface tension. There is a disjunction between the dead specimen and the singular photograph of it, a disruption of the smooth surface of the photograph by the hand colouring and a further fragmentation of the original photograph by cutting and weaving. Through these processes the photographs become intertextual in their construction, assemblages, creating new tissues of past citations: animal, colour, silver, artist, text, photograph, environment. At their best the work subverts the concept of the text as self-sufficient and hermetically sealed, blurring the outlines of the fixed image, “dispersing its image of totality into an unbounded, illimitable tissue of connections and associations, paraphrases and fragments, texts and con-texts.”1
Kuperholz’s mutations, ‘differance’ in Derrida’s terminology, produce spaces that are both fluid and fixed at one and the same time; neither her nor there.Though the original specimens and photographs are already narrativised, already textualised, Kuperholz disrupts this marking, the continual reiteration of norms, by weaving a lack of fixity into her objects; in her reconceptualisations of space and matter Kuperholz redefines the significations of the body of the animal in the fold of inscription, through a process of materialisation. Kuperholz attempts to ground these re-inscriptions through the naming of these disrupted surfaces, equating the images back to the scientific labels for the original specimen, Trapezites eliena for example (see below), and through the box frames surrounding the work that are much like museum cases. Unfortunately I found the constant reference to the habitat of the insect, it’s Latin name inscribed in pencil under the images and the use of plain brown box frames somewhat irritating. These tropes are not necessary for the work is strong enough to stand on it’s own without having to tell the viewer what to think.
The singular beetles (as seen above) are beautiful images and the multiple images where the weaving intermingles, the self decentred and multiple, fluttering and vibrating like the strobing of a time lapse photograph caught in three-dimensional space, are fantastic. Other photographs are less successful: the reflected beetles are a little passe, while the grid photographs of insects lack presence and intensity (see bottom installation photograph below). Where the concept works it is pushed hard, the fragmentation and interweaving causes an anxiety of identity and a meditation on the problematic nature of existence, revealing the changing sizes, shapes and rhythms of space and structure.
Perhaps a loosening of the rigid structure surrounding the works (the text, the frame, the incantations) would have let the photographs ascend into the ether, further releasing the work from the constraints of author, text and earth. It will be interesting to see future developments of this work. Perhaps the incorporation of gentle, subtle physical elements into the photographs (through the sowing of patterns, through the sowing of objects directly onto the photograph?), will elevate these already beautiful photographs to an-other plane of existence.
Dr Marcus Bunyan
Many thankx to Gallery 101 for allowing me to publish the photographs in the posting. Please click on the photographs for a larger version of the image.
Josephine Kuperholz (Australian) Trapezites eliena 2008 Common name – Eliena Skipper Woven hand coloured silver gelatin photographic image
Josephine Kuperholz (Australian) Dryococelus australis 2008 Common name – Lord Howe Island Phasmid Woven hand coloured silver gelatin photographic image
Josephine Kuperholz Blight exhibition, Gallery 101 website text
Josephine Kuperholz Blight exhibition installation views at Gallery 101, Melbourne Photos: Marcus Bunyan
Roy de Maistre (Australian, 1894-1968) Colour Composition derived from three bars of music in the Key of Green 1935 Oil and pencil on composition board Private Collection
Despite some interesting highlight pieces this is a patchy, thin, incoherent exhibition assembled by the Powerhouse Museum, Sydney now showing at Heide Museum of Modern Art, Melbourne. Featuring a hotchpotch of work ranging across fields such as drawing, architecture, photography, painting, film, graphic design, craft, advertising, Australiana and aboriginal works the exhibition attempts to tell the untold story of Modernism in Australia to little effect. Within the exhibition there is no attempt to define exactly what ‘Modernism’ is and therefore an investigation into Modernism in Australia is all the more confusing for the visitor as there seems to be no stable basis on which to build that investigation. Perhaps reading the catalogue would give a greater overview of the development of Modernism in Australia but for the average visitor to the exhibition there seems to be no holistic rationale for the inclusion of elements within the exhibition which, much like Modernism itself, seems eclectically gathered from all walks of life with little regard for narrative structure.
With work spanning five decades from 1917-1967 we are presented with, variously, Robert Klippel’s kitsch Boomerang table from 1955, Robin Boyd’s ‘House of Tomorrow’ from 1949, Wolfgang Sievers ‘new objective’ photographs, Berlei’s scientific system for calculating beauty in woman in use till the 1960s, swimsuits from the 1920s-1940s, Featherston chairs from the Australian pavilion at the 1967 Expo, a recreation of Australian architect Harry Seidler’s office (the most interesting part of this being the books he had in his office library: Frank Lloyd Wright, Mies van de Rohe and Concerning Town Planning by Le Corbusier) and the wind tunnel test model of the Sydney Opera House in wood from 1960. Etcetera, etcetera, etcetera …
Highlight pieces include the above mentioned test model of the Sydney Opera House which is stunning in its scale and woodenness, in it’s simplicity of shape and form. Other highlight pieces are the colour music compositions of Roy de Maistre which were the tour de force of the show for me, true revelations in their rhythmic synchronic Moebius-like construction with layered planes of colour swirling in purples, greens and yellows. The large vintage photographic print of Sunbaker (1934) by Max Dupain was also a revelation with it’s earthy brown tones, the blending of the atmospheric out of focus foreground with the clouds behind, the architectural nature of the outline of the body almost like the outline of Uluru, the darkness of the head with the sensuality of the head and shoulders framed against the largeness of the hand resting on the sand. Lastly the two paintings and one rug by French artist Sonia Delaunay are a knockout. It says something about an exhibition when the best work in the show are two paintings by a French artist seemingly plucked at random to show external influences on Australian artists and designers.
While the exhibition does attempt to portray the breadth of the development of Modernism in Australia ultimately it falls well short in this endeavour. The most striking example of this shortcoming is the true star of the exhibition – the building that is Heide II itself. Commissioned by John and Sunday Reed and designed by the Victorian architect David McGlashan of the architectural firm McGlashan and Eversit in 1963 the building epitomises everything that is good about architectural Modernism and it’s form overshadows the exhibition itself. In this building we have beautiful spaces and volumes, an amazing staircase down into the lower area, suspended decking overlooking gardens, the blending of inside and outside areas, large expanses of glass to view the landscape, nooks and studies for privacy and the simplicity and eloquence of form that is Modernist design. With money one can indulge in the best of elitist Modernism. With position, position, position one can side steep the alienation of the city and the spread of surburbia where the dream of Australians owning a home of their own still continues in the vast, tasteless expanses of McMansion estates.
Robert Nelson in his review of this exhibition sees the car as creating the suburbs and Modernism as the emptying of the city after 6pm, the lessening of community and the devaluing of space he insists that there is little difference between a Californian bungalow in the suburbs and a utopian geometric neo-Corbusian box by Harry Seidler because they were equally shackled to motor transport.1 This is to miss the point.
Although Modernism in its basic form influenced most walks of life in Australia from swimsuit design to milk bars, from cinema to naturism, from bodies to advertising the most effective expressions of Modernism are architectural (as evidenced by Heide II) and were only open to those with money, power and position. Although Le Corbusier’s concept of public housing was a space ‘for the people’ the most interesting of his houses were the private commissions for wealthy clients. And so it proves here. One can imagine the parties on the deck at Heide II in the 1960s with men in their tuxedo and bow ties and woman in their gowns, or the relaxation of the Reed’s sitting in front of their fire in the submerged lounge. For the ordinary working class person Modernism brought a sense of alienation from the aspirational things one cannot buy in the world, an alienation that continues to this day; for the privileged few Modernism offered the exclusivity of elitism (or is it the elitism of exclusivity!) and an aspirational alienation of a different kind – that of the separation from the masses.
Go to Heide for the glorious gardens, the wonders of Heide II but don’t go to this exhibition expecting grand insights into the basis of Australian Modernism for that story, as Robert Nelson rightly notes, remains as yet untold.
Dr Marcus Bunyan
Many thankx to Heide Museum of Modern Art for allowing me to publish the art work in the posting. Please click on the photographs for a larger version of the image.
An excellent review of the exhibition by Jill Julius Matthews, “Modern times: The untold story of modernism in Australia,” (reCollections Volume 4 number 1) can be found on the Journal of the National Museum of Australia website [Online] Cited 20/02/2019
1/ “Emanating from Sydney’s Powerhouse Museum, Modern Times“explores how modernism transformed Australian culture from 1917 to 1967.” But something is missing. The overwhelming modern development in these 50 years was the proliferation of automotive transport, which redefined the layout and function of Australian cities.The cars created the suburbs; and as the individual bungalow drew out the vast dormitories of Sydney and Melbourne, the city centre was spiritually drained, dedicated to bureaucratic and commercial premises.The story at Heide emphasises the gradual triumph of the tall buildings of the CBD. It doesn’t really reflect how these abstract monuments didn’t contain a soul after 6pm.Although the project makes such a big deal of being interdisciplinary, the social history doesn’t have a robust geographical basis. And because of this, the exhibition and book fail to handle the new alienation that modernism brings: the evacuation of the city and the insularity of suburban people in bungalows with little street life and roads increasingly deemed unsafe for children.
What does it really matter if a house looks like a Californian bungalow or a utopian geometric neo-Corbusian box by Harry Seidler? In social terms, they’re structurally the same, equally retracting from a sense of community and equally shackled to motor transport. In this sense, the styles are immaterial, except that one of them gives you a feeling of intimacy while the other has a bit more light and is easily wiped with a sponge.
At the end of the chosen period, the folly of the dominant suburban pattern came to be understood in its dire ecological consequences. Alas, it was too late. The modernist devaluation of space had already occurred, and our whole society had been reorganised around petrol.”
Robert Nelson. The Age. Wednesday 6th May, 2009
Roy de Maistre (Australian, 1894-1968) Arrested Movement from a Trio 1934 Oil and pencil on composition board 72.3 × 98.8cm National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne
In late 1918, Roy de Maistre collaborated with fellow artist Roland Wakelin in exploring the relationship between art and music. Their experiments produced Australia’s first abstract paintings, characterised by high-key colour, large areas of flat paint and simplified forms. The works received critical acclaim, but modernist developments were largely derided by the conservative establishment.
This painting exemplifies de Maistre’s theory of colour harmonisation based on analogies between colours of the spectrum and notes of the musical scale. It is also aligned with de Maistre’s search for spiritual meaning through abstraction, akin to other artists such as Kandinsky who were interested in the ideas of the theosophy and anthroposophy movements, spiritualism and the occult.
Text from the Art Gallery of New South Wales website
Sonia Delaunay (Ukraine, b. 1885 moved Paris 1905-1979) Rhythm 1938 Oil on canvas
Wolfgang Sievers (Australian born Germany, 1913-2007) “House of Tomorrow” exhibition at Exhibition Building, Melbourne 1949 Gelatin silver print National Library of Australia
Stanislaus Ostoja-Kotkowski (Australian born Poland, 1922-1994) Nymphex 1966 Gelatin silver photograph from electronic image 50.6 x 60.8cm Gift of Dr George Berger 1978 Art Gallery of New South Wales @ Estate of Stanislaus Ostoja-Kotkowski
Rayner Hoff (Australian born United Kingdom, 1894-1937) Decorative portrait – Len Lye 1925 Marble 30.5 x 22.5 x 16.5cm Purchased 1938 Art Gallery of New South Wales
Cossington Smith captures the drama of a crowd in Rushing, which depicts commuters clamouring down to the ferries of Circular Quay to get home after work. The flying scarf and fallen hat emphasise the speed at which the travellers are moving and the peril and claustrophobia of a, mostly faceless, city crowd. The steep gangplank and diagonal composition accentuates the dynamism of the painting.
A brilliant colourist, Cossington Smith’s work of the early 1920s adopts a darker palette than the vivid colours she is usually associated with. Inspired by a visit to Sydney in 1920 by the tonalist painter and teacher Max Meldrum, her paintings became studies in tone, rather than colour, a practice she had abandoned by 1925.
Text from the Art Gallery of New South Wales website
Robert Klippel (Australian, 1920-2001) Boomerang coffee table 1955
The Powerhouse Museum travelling exhibition Modern times: the untold story of modernism in Australia explores how modernism transformed Australian culture from 1917 to 1967, a period of great social, economic, political and technological change. From the ideals of abstraction and functionalism to the romance of high-rise cities, new leisure activities and the healthy body, modernism encapsulated the possibilities of the twentieth century. This exhibition is the first interdisciplinary survey of the impact of modernism in Australia, spanning art, design, architecture, advertising, photography, film and fashion.
Modern times is presented at Heide across all four of the Museum’s gallery spaces. It unfolds in thematic sections highlighting key stories about international exchange, the modern body, modernist ‘primitivism’, the city, modern pools, and the Space Age. Comprising over 300 objects and artworks, it showcases works by major artists including Sidney Nolan, Margaret Preston, Albert Tucker, Grace Cossington Smith, Max Dupain, Wolfgang Sievers, and Clement Meadmore, key architects Robin Boyd, Roy Grounds and Harry Seidler, and designers Fred Ward and Grant and Mary Featherston. An installation, Cannibal Tours, by Madrid-based Australian artist Narelle Jubelin is a contemporary adjunct to the exhibition.
While modernism was international in character, an ‘Australian modernism’ was first championed in the 1920s by artist Margaret Preston, whose promotion of Aboriginal forms and motifs was important to the understanding of their artistic value. Preston’s designs, Len Lye’s stunning animation Tusalava (1929), Robert Klippel’s boomerang table (c. 1955) and other works show the development of a vernacular modernism.
Other highlights of Modern times include works from the visionary experiment in colour theory by Roy de Maistre and Roland Wakelin in 1919, a model of Robin Boyd’s innovative House of Tomorrow (1949), the iconic Featherston wing sound chairs from the Australian pavilion at the 1967 Montreal Expo, and a large wooden model for Jørn Utzon’s Sydney Opera House.
Text from the Heide Museum of Art website [Online] Cited 06/06/2009. No longer available online
Athlete and movie-star Annette Kellerman’s Modern Kellerman Bathing Suit for Women which became commercially available by the mid-1920s. The one-piece bathing suit became Kellermans trademark Gift of Dennis Wolanski Library, Sydney Opera House, 2000 Photo: Powerhouse Museum
On hot summer days cool off with Tooth’s KB Lager About 1940 Advertising poster Colour and process lithograph, artist name “Parker” in image lower right 100.4 x 75.4cm Sydney Living Museums
Grant Featherston (Australian, 1922-1995) and Mary Featherston (Australian, b. London 1943, migrated to Australia 1952) Expo mark II sound chair 1967 Aristoc Industries Polystyrene, polyurethane foam, Dunlopillo foam rubber, Pirelli webbing, fibreglass, hardwood, sound equipment, upholstery fabric Powerhouse Collection
The Expo Mark II sound chair, adapted for the Australian domestic market after Expo 67 in Montreal.
A cloth-covered high back winged chair with a circular base. The chair has a circular orange cloth covered cushion in the base and an integral full-width headrest. Two 125mm diameter inserts are pressed into the top of the back of the chair where speakers are fitted inside it. There is a cylindrical knob on the side of the chair.
National Archives of Australia A modernist vision of Australia: Grant and Mary Featherston’s wing sound chairs were a feature of the Australian Pavilion, designed by architect James Maccormick with exhibits selected by Robin Boyd, at Expo 67 in Montreal, 1967 1967
In 1967 Australia participated in the International and Universal Exposition held in Montreal, Canada. Australia’s Expo ’67 theme was the ‘Spirit of Adventure’. In the 30,000 square feet glass-walled Australian Pavilion, developed by the Australian Government and designed by Robin Boyd, exhibits explored Australian science, arts, people and development. The pavilion was designed as a ‘haven’ of ‘space and tranquillity’ floating above an Australian bushland setting. Inside, 240 innovative sound chairs offered ‘foot-weary Expo visitors’ the chance to hear the voices of famous Australians describing the exhibits, in French as well as English. The Great Barrier Reef was re-created in a lagoon beneath the pavilion while wallabies and kangaroos could be viewed in a sunken enclosure.
Text from the National Museum of Australia website [Online] Cited 20/02/2019
James Birrell (Australian, 1928-2019) View of the elevated restaurant, Centenary Pool, Brisbane Nd Powerhouse Museum
“A major exhibition opening for Sydney Design 08 in August, Modern times looks closely at the transformation of modern city life. The advent of cars, freeways, skyscrapers and new entertainment such as cinemas, milk bars, swimming pools, cafes and pubs are all legacies of modernism as revealed through the exhibition. The exhibition spans five decades from 1917 to 1967 – a tumultuous period marked by global wars, economic depression, a technological revolution and major social changes – out of which a modern cosmopolitan culture was shaped.
Several great modern public pools were designed in Australia initially as part of an international swimming boom in the 1930s and boosted by the 1956 Melbourne Olympics. These will be shown on a large, immersive, panoramic audio visual screen celebrating the most Australian of past-times, being poolside. The earliest 1920s swimming costumes by silent film star Annette Kellerman, several decades of Australian icon ‘Speedo’ cossies and an early bikini will also be on display.
The much-loved corner milk bar from the 1930s will also be recreated in the exhibition for visitors to enter, complete with lolly jars, milkshakes and a juke box.
Other story highlights in the exhibition include Robin Boyd’s ‘House of Tomorrow’ that featured at the 1949 Modern Home Exhibition in Melbourne; and Boyd’s memorable Australian pavilion at the 1967 Montreal Expo that showcased Australian design including the iconic Featherston wing sound chairs and hostess uniforms designed by Zara Holt, wife of then prime minister Harold Holt.
Modernism also inspired new forms of public art and design like the abstract fountains by Tom Bass on Sydney’s former P&O building and Robert Woodward’s El Alamein Memorial Fountain, a popular tourist site in Sydney’s Kings Cross. Modernism shaped an exultant explosion of experiment as part of the Space Age informing such spectacular architectural feats as Roy Grounds’ dome for the Australian Academy of Science in Canberra and Jørn Utzon’s internationally-acclaimed Sydney Opera House, both featured in the exhibition.”
Ruzan Haruriunyan, “Modern Times: Untold Story Of Modernism In Australia,” on the Huliq News website [Online] Cited 20/02/2019
Hedie II photographs by Rory Hyde. More photos of Heide are on his Flickr photoset
Heide II – commissioned by John and Sunday Reed 1963, designed 1964, constructed 1964-1967
Designed by Melbourne architect David McGlashan of McGlashan Everist, it was intended as “a gallery to be lived in” and served as the Reeds’ residence between 1967 and 1980. The building is considered one of the best examples of modernist architecture in Victoria and awarded the Royal Institute of Architects (Victorian Chapter) Bronze Medal – the highest award for residential architecture in the State – in 1968. It is currently used to display works from the Heide Collection and on occasion projects by contemporary artists.
Max Dupain (Australian, 1911-1992) Australia Square: a keyhole to the future [Australia Square Tower] 1968 Gelatin silver print 49.9 × 39.2cm Courtesy of Max Dupain and Associates
Jeff Carter (Australian, 1928-2010) At the Pasha Nightclub, Cooma c. 1957-1959 Gelatin silver print
Modern Times: The Untold Story of Modernism in Australia, edited by Ann Stephen, Philip Goad and Andrew McNamara, Powerhouse Publishing, 2008 (paperback).
Heide Museum of Modern Art 7 Templestowe Road, Bulleen, Victoria 3105
Opening hours: Tuesday – Sunday Public holidays 10am – 5pm
John Beard (Australian born Wales, b. 1943) Darwin 2009
The final exhibition of the afternoon were the ephemeral images of John Beard at John Buckley Gallery, Melbourne. This was an enthralling show that I enjoyed tremendously. Beard draws in a multitude of cultural sources for his paintings often referencing painters, scientists, animals and evolution. His work has an intimate sense of knowing, a meditative mediation on the essence of the object being painted, the very presence of the thing itself. The marks on the canvas may be intuitive but it is an informed intuition that results in works that hover at the edge of consciousness. As much as the works are after images, or ghost images, they are also about the persistence of vision, the persistence of the artists vision in addressing issues of collective memory and cultural history that draw emotive responses from the viewer.
These images may be ‘on the verge of disappearance’ as an after-image but they are also pre-images as well, conjured from the mind of the artist and layered with complexity, presence and holistic wholeness. Their seduction, if I may use that word, is that they draw from the viewer peripheral memories and emotions that flit at the edges of consciousness. As Portugese curator Isabel Carlos has noted, “… Beard recreates a ‘figural’ space where the essence of the thing represented lies beyond its singular physical evidence.”1
Beard’s fragmented surfaces form a rhizomic web of dissolved pixellation, their structure almost fractal like in their linked hyper-real intimacies. These in between spaces open up the possibility of subversive commentaries that, on one level, bring a sense of disquiet to the holistic presence of the work. As Mark Poster has noted of the work of Deleuze and Guittari and which can be aptly applied to the work of John Beard,
“Deleuze and Guittari configure the social as a complex of bodily intensities in a state of continuous nonlinear movement. The logic they present is multidimensional, shifting, discontinuous. They speak of strata, assemblages, territorializations, lines of flight, abstract machines, a congerie of terms that disrupts the function of concepts to control a field through discursive articulations. Their categories cut through the normal lines of comprehension, the binary logic that governs modern social theory to present a picture of reality from the perspective of a sort of primitive life force. It is as if the earth itself were to describe the changes on its surface in the course of human history, a vantage point quite remote from the ego of the individual or from the disciplined consciousness of the social scientist.”2
Nonlinear, logical, shifting territorializations in multidimensional environments that hover below the edge of consciousness, investigations into the binary of presence / absence in the dreams of the imaginary. Powerful and poetic these works irradiate the viewer with their visceral presence.
Dr Marcus Bunyan
1/ Isabel Carlos quoted in Wright, William. HEADLANDS: John Beard works 1993-2008. Catalogue essay
2/ Poster, Mark. The Mode of Information: Poststructuralism and Social Context. Cambridge: Polity Press, 1990, pp. 135-137
Many thankx to John Buckley Gallery for allowing me to publish the art work in the posting. Please click on the photographs for a larger version of the image.
John Beard (Australian born Wales, b. 1943) Gorilla 2007
Installation view of John Beard’s exhibition After image at John Buckley Gallery, Melbourne
John Beard (Australian born Wales, b. 1943) Hand 6 2009
John Beard (Australian born Wales, b. 1943) Head SP3 2004
“Beard’s paintings often convey an overpowering sense of brooding stillness, but equally this volatile effervescence of light-reverberant phenomena, where head, headland, the Adraga rock, are no longer object so much as apparition, a painted parallel existence, a material presence invoking nature’s own organic processes …
There is a distinctive sense when encountering a body of John Beard’s works of entering into a site of composure, withheld, of images silently bespeaking truths both personal and historical; hovering presences each conveying some species quality of time-less recognition.”
William Wright 
from the catalogue essay HEADLANDS: John Beard works 1993-2008 [Online] Cited 29/05/2009. No longer available online
John Beard (Australian born Wales, b. 1943) Rose 2007
John Beard (Australian born Wales, b. 1943) Einstein 2 2009
John Beard (Australian born Wales, b. 1943) Rembrandt 2009
Anne Marie Graham (Australian born Austria, b. 1925) Jungle with Cassowary 2008 Oil on Linen 106 x 150cm National Museum for Women in Arts, Washington
I was walking around Anne Marie Graham’s new exhibition of painting at Gallery 101, Melbourne having read a review of her work on the gallery wall where the reviewer compared the structure of the work to the essentialness of the paintings of Giotto. A lady approached me and said, “You don’t want to believe everything that you read.”
And I said, “I don’t. I make up my own mind.”
This was the artist Anne Marie Graham.
We had a wonderful conversation about her work talking about space, colour and form. This is what Graham’s work is about. No conceptual arguments are needed. The work addresses the landscape in a magical way, drawing the viewer into the compositions like a piece of music. The viewer finds entrances and passageways, spaces through the images which open up a dialogue with the landscape.
Using repeated patterns and layered construction, from bottom to top, from front to back, the images subtly push and pull the viewer: space quietly recedes and comes towards the viewer. Complimentary bands of colours are muted except for stunning highlight colours – the red of flowers, the blue of leaves or the unexpected pink or yellow of a background. The forms and textures delight. Dr Sheridan Palmer is correct, these paintings have an almost hypnotic effect, meditative and peaceful. They make you feel good!
Their presence is undeniable. For such complex paintings, which on the surface seem very simple (a difficult task to accomplish); for such essential representations that address the heart of the matter… their affect is powerful.
Graham’s refined aesthetic allows the viewer to engage with the poetic spaces she creates, allowing them to appreciate the colour fields, plants and landscapes she orchestrates and to be subsumed into their fold. Here we come to understand the diverse empathy of an artist who lays it all ‘on the line’ and knows how to do so in a brilliant way.
A talented artist and a nice lady as well – what more can you ask for!
Dr Marcus Bunyan
Exotic Queensland: Recent Painting installation views at Gallery 101, Melbourne
These landscapes are inspired by the areas around Noosa, the Glasshouse Mountains and the Botanic Gardens in Cairns. Look at the bromeliads, those cousins of the pineapple that store pools of water in their depths. And the helliconias – they’re also called lobster-claw plants and you can see why! Look at the massive scarlet tassels set against tropical green – and not just the one green but the subtlest of shades and tones in combination.
How much further in both place and mood could Anne possibly have travelled from the order and long humanist traditions of her childhood home in Austria? In these Queensland paintings you’ll discover cockatoos, a water dragon, a fat goanna, ibises in the lotus pond, and the shy endangered cassowary almost hidden in the jungle. And look at the sky in that painting – the rosiest pink of a twilight had tells us tomorrow will be a perfect day.
Jane Clark Senior Research Curator, Museum of Old and New Art, Hobart
Extract from speech given at the opening of the exhibition Exotic Queensland, Gallery 101 Melbourne May 2009
Anne Marie Graham (Australian born Austria, b. 1925) Water Dragon with Banksias 2008
Anne Marie Graham (Australian born Austria, b. 1925) Heliconia No. 1 2008 Oil on Linen 106 x 150cm
Anne Marie Graham (Australian born Austria, b. 1925) Variations in Green and Mauve 2008 Oil on linen 106 x 150cm
“Anne Marie Graham’s painting career now spans more than six decades. Observed with a penetrating and affectionate gaze, her images are beautiful records of Australia’s vast landscape. Each work is an engagingly optimistic view, evoking the mystery and fragility of Australia’s rich environment. This survey of recent paintings concentrates on the tropical Queensland landscapes around Noosa and the Cairns Botanic Gardens.
As she casts he vision over mountains, rain forests and panoramic vistas or as she leads us into an intimate world of gardens, winding pathways and potted plants, we find ourselves amongst large succulents, variegated foliage, ferns and brilliant flowers, visually engaging at a Lilliputian level in her richly orchestrated fields and forests. In these locations she constructs marvellous labyrinthine worlds that reveal layers of muted colours, folding forms and textures that induce a most extraordinary hypnotic spell.”
Dr Sheridan Palmer, Art Curator, from the catalogue essay
Anne Marie Graham (Australian born Austria, b. 1925) Heliconia No. 2 2008
Rowan McNamara, Marissa Gibson, Mitjili Napanangka Gibson and Scott Thornton
Rowan McNamara as Samson and Marissa Gibson as Delilah
This is a tough nugget of a film, an absolute gem. It is a love story.
The deceptively simple narrative takes you into the dark side of Aboriginal life in the remote desert communities of central Australia. It pulls no punches taking the viewer on a empathetic ride into the lives of two young people struggling to find their reason for being on this earth. Here is violence, abuse, rape and addiction with the subtle hope of redemption.
Samson is addicted to petrol sniffing. Delilah tries to ignore him. She looks after her grandmother who is an artist, pushing her around in an wheelchair, feeding her medicine and taking her to the health clinic. Samson forces himself on Delilah, sleeping next to her but never with her. Then her grandmother dies and Delilah is blamed by the women elders of the community. Samson’s addiction escalates. He steals a car and with Delilah in tow they flee to Alice Springs to live under a flyover and sniff petrol, to be looked down upon by tourists in trendy cafes. Things get worse before they get (slightly) better.
That is the bare bones of the story. But I want to talk about other things.
The film is the traditional three acts but the narrative reads like an oral history only shown in images: themes are repeated over and again with subtle variations, like the arc of great music reiterating the flow of energy. There is little dialogue which intensifies the sounds of the desert, the band that plays on the verandah and the ringing of telephones. Every human seems to be alienated from the landscape. The Aborigines seem to be just floating on the surface of the land like everyone else, just struggling to survive. The landscape towers above the participants. Unlike our usual perception of Aboriginal people being in touch with the earth through the Dreamtime, here the director Warwick Thornton seems to suggest otherwise, until right at the end of the film.
Delilah is the strength in the film. It is her stoicism, her strength that helps Samson see it through. She ends up pushing Samson in the same wheelchair that she pushed her grandmother around in. His loss of strength is palpable, his addiction ongoing. You believe this story, the non-professional actors grounding you in the red dust of the desert.
There are several remarkable elements that lift this film to sublime places. Some of them are the most moving moments I have seen in a film in many a year:
The soundtrack, like a disjointed heartbeat, that accompanies their life under the flyover. The soundtrack of Samson’s rock and roll competing with Delilah’s music in her 4 wheel drive as one fades into the other.
Samson and Delilah sitting outside the health centre in white plastic chairs picking their feet off the ground so they won’t get bitten by ants.
Samson sitting in the wheelchair in the middle of the road at night, rocking back and forward on the wheels of the chair, so off his face that he is oblivious of the approaching 4 wheel drive until it is right upon him. Exceptional.
Delilah, towards the end of the film, washing the body of Samson with soap while he sits in a trough of water. More sensuality, more sexuality packed into 30 seconds than you will ever see in a full blown love scene. Amazing.
Samson, his head under a blanket under the flyover. The scene fades not to black as it does regularly in this film but to 80% of black and hovers there, just under the level of consciousness, before the sun rises again. This is masterful, poetic film making.
Samson, taking his ghetto blaster outside at night, dancing under the light of the verandah to rock and roll music watched by Delilah from her refuge in a 4 wheel drive. This scene is so beautiful, so genuine. The natural grace of Samson’s dancing opens Delilah’s eyes towards him. For the audience it is a revelatory, transcendent moment that crosses space and time as great cinema does. It grips you in an esoteric awareness: we are all human, we all live on the same earth. We all dance.
. Go and see this film. It is one of the finest ever made in Australia. Besides a beautiful love story it will take you to places and connect with your heart like no other. It’s not perfect by any means (in terms of some improbabilities in the narrative) but this can be forgiven in the arc of the story telling. It is harrowing there is no doubt, but in the almost timeless ebb and flow of the film, in the communion with the infinite, something that defines human existence, this film stands above all else.
Domenico de Clario (Australian born Italy, b. 1947) u (renoir’s garden) 2008/09 Oil on canvas
Based on the music of melancholy that inhabits the shadows of the paintings of Montmarte by the French artist Maurice Utrillo, Domenico de Clario’s exhibition of paintings at John Buckley Gallery in Melbourne is a major achievement. This is a superlative exhibition of focused, resonant work beautifully and serenely installed in the gallery space.
The exhibition features seven small and seven large oil and acrylic on canvas paintings that envelop the viewer in a velvety quietness, an intense stillness accompanied by ambient music composed by de Clario himself. All fourteen paintings are reinterpretations of works by Utrillo picked at random by de Clario that strip away surface matter to reveal the shadow substance that lays at the anxious heart of Utrillo’s meta/physical body of work (Utrillo was an alcoholic at fourteen and spent numerous periods in sanatoriums). When de Clario was fifteen he was fascinated by a small book on Utrillo and found that his paintings reminded him of his childhood, growing up in the town of Trieste. Recently he noticed that the word ‘triestement’ was used to mean, essentially, an investigation of sadness, of melancholy and started an investigation into the life and work of Utrillo. From this dialogue the paintings for the exhibition have emerged as de Clario found the ‘more is’ of Utrillo, the anima of his presence within the work.
The small abstract paintings (such as renoir’s garden, above) are dark and miasmic, vaporous emanations of atmosphere that contain traces of Utrillo’s lifelong battle with the black dog but it is the seven large paintings facing each other in the main gallery space that are at the heart of de Clario’s project. They are magnificent.
Painted in a limited colour palette of ochres, greys and blacks the works vibrate with energy. Cezanne-like spatial representations are abstracted and the paint bleeds across the canvas forming a maze of buildings. Walls and hedges loom darkly over roadways, emanations of heads and figures float in the picture plane and the highlight white of snow hovers like a spectral figure above buildings. These are elemental paintings where the shadow has become light and the light is shadow, meanderings of the soul in space. In the painting i (the house of hector berlioz – night)Â below, the single dark line of the house rises from the plain; the shadowy haze of recognition sits in the subconscious like the trace of our own mortality. My mind made an association with the modernist photograph by Paul Strand of the church at Taos (see photo at bottom of posting) with the looming bulk of the ramparts: it’s funny how things just click into place.
“The watergaw, the faint rainbow glimmering in chittering light, provides a sort of epiphany, and MacDiarmid connects the shimmer and weakness and possible revelation in the light behind the drizzle with the indecipherable look he received from his father on his deathbed … Each expression, each cadence, each rhyme is as surely and reliably in place as a stone on a hillside.” ~ Seamus Heaney1
To paint these works de Clario was open and receptive to the idea of the letting go. In the wonderfully erudite catalogue essay he says he felt like he was standing under a waterfall experiencing the joyful bliss of substance, material, surface, shadow, blandness, light, plenitude and triestement while acknowledging that he could never capture them and that their value could only be fully understood once he abandoned any thought of possessing them. Like Seamus Heaney in the quotation above, de Clario experienced the glimmering in chittering light, the possible revelation in the light behind the drizzle (of the shadow) and he then paints the trace of Utrillo’s subconscious anima, the indecipherable look of his triestement. de Clario feels the fluid relationship between substance and appearance; he understands that Utrillo is embedded in the position of each building and stone, in the cadences and rhymes of the paintings of Montmarte. de Clario interprets this knowledge in a Zen like rendition of shadow substance in his paintings. Everything has it’s place without possession of here and there, dark and light.
For my part it was my soul responding to the canvases. I was absorbed into their fabric. As in the dark night of the soul my outer shell gave way to an inner spirituality stripped of the distance between viewer and painting. I felt communion with this man, Utrillo, with this art, de Clario, that brought a sense of revelation in the immersion, like a baptism in the waters of dark light. For art this is a fantastic achievement. Highly recommended.
Dr Marcus Bunyan
1/ Heaney, Seamus. The Redress of Poetry. London: Faber and Faber, 1995, pp. 107-108.
Please click on the artwork for a larger version of the image.
Domenico de Clario (Australian born Italy, b. 1947) l (le lapin agile – snow coming) 2008/09 Oil on canvas
Maurice Utrillo (French, 1883-1955) Renoir’s Garden 1909-1910 Oil on canvas
Installation views of triestement (more-is u thrill-o) by Domenico De Clario at John Buckley Gallery
Maurice Utrillo (French, 1883-1955) Paris Street 1914 Oil on canvas
Domenico de Clario (Australian born Italy, b. 1947) r (rue ravignan – le bateau lavoir) 2008/09 Oil on canvas
Domenico de Clario (Australian born Italy, b. 1947) l (le lapin agile and rue du mont cenis – snow receding) 2008/09 Oil on canvas
Domenico de Clario (Australian born Italy, b. 1947) o (la grande maison blanche – snow clouds massing) 2008/09 Oil on canvas
Is there any limit, I thought, to the kinds of shadows that might be transmuted into light? And is this because the key component of the nature of shadow is its deep longing for a transmutation to light?
As a consequence of these thoughts I arrived at the question that animates the core of this current project; what, I asked myself, might the original shadow-substance Utrillo experienced and subsequently transmutes into the paintings we known, have looked like? What shadow images did Utrillo first see, or even imagine, before he transmuted them into colour? …
Utrillo must have believed that the outer world of coloured light belonged exclusively to others, for he never succeeded in releasing himself from the dark inner shadows that engulfed him. Though he struggled much to reach the light he accepted shadow as constituting his world and worked ceaselessly to offer us images that reflected this side’s plenitude.
Perhaps the luminous surfaces of his paintings functioned as the thin membrane that separates the outer world of cacophonously coloured light from the velvety grey inner world of the monotic anxiety he inhabited. Upon that thought the momentousness of his gift became apparent to me …
For the purposes of this present project I believe that the shadow substance laying beneath the architecture of Utrillo’s streetscapes existed within the artist long before his paintings came into being. This non-substance generated the appearance of matter on the paintings’ surfaces and more significantly it gradually came to contain the spirit of his Montmarte-body.
The process of removing matter results in an obvious absence of substance but paradoxically this leads me to feel that here, under all this discarded visible matter, an invisible substance that has always contained more than matter awaits to be revealed. This leads to the provisional conclusion that the primal trace of normally unseen shadow is far richer than any material constituting appearance, containing as it does infinitely more substance than appearance.
Astonishing paradox; infinite substance can only be discovered once all matter is removed.
Text from the catalogue essay by Domenico de Clario [Online] Cited 26/04/2009. No longer available online
Maurice Utrillo (French, 1883-1955) Berlioz House 1910 Oil on canvas
Anonymous Postcard of Hector Berlioz House Nd
Domenico de Clario (Australian born Italy, b. 1947) i (the house of hector berlioz – night) 2008/09 Oil on canvas
Paul Strand (American, 1890-1976) Inverted colour burn of his photograph Church, Ranchos de Taos New Mexico 1932
ACCA’s annual commissions exhibition – this year curated by Charlotte Day with new works from eight contemporary Australian artists including Justine Khamara, Brodie Ellis, Marco Fusinato, Simon Yates, Matthew Griffin, Benjamin Armstrong and Pat Foster and Jen Berean.
Simon Yates (Australian, b. 1973) Rhabdomancy Tissue paper, wood, fishing rods, tape, string, electrical components, helium balloons dimensions variable 2009 Photo: Marcus Bunyan
“That’s what art is, he said, the story of a life in all its particularity. It’s the only thing that really is particular and personal. It’s the expression and, at the same time, the fabric of the particular. And what do you mean by the fabric of the particular? I asked, supposing he would answer: Art. I was also thinking, indulgently, that we were pretty drunk already and that it was time to go home. But my friend said: What I mean is the secret story … The secret story is the one we’ll never know, although we’re living it from day to day, thinking we’re alive, thinking we’ve got it all under control and the stuff we overlook doesn’t matter. But every damn thing matters! It’s just that we don’t realise. We tell ourselves that art runs on one track and life, our lives, on another, we don’t even realise that’s a lie.”
From the story “Dentist” from the book ‘Last Evenings on Earth’ by Roberto Bolaño1
“A work of art reminds you of who you are now”
Kepesh from the film ‘Elegy’
The curator Charlotte Day has assembled an interesting selection of artists for New 09 at ACCA, Melbourne. It is an exhibition whose ‘presences’ challenge through dark and light, sound and light, contemplation and silence. The journey is one of here and now moments that transport the viewer to states of being that address the fabric of the particular: doubt, anxiety and enlightenment crowd every corner. The particularities of the experience (material, social, psychological and imaginative) impinge on the viewers interior states of being transcending the very physicality and symbolic realism of the works.2
On entering the gallery you are greeted by Simon Yates self-propelled figures that make up the work Rhabdomancy (2009, above). Suspended, tethered, floating just above the floor the figures move eerily about the entrance to the gallery, startling people who have not seen them move before. They stand silent witness, a simulation of self in tissue paper searching for meaning by using a dowsing rod. The word rhabdomancy has as one of it’s meanings ‘the art or gift of prophecy (or the pretence of prophecy) by supernatural means’. Here the figures are divining and divination rolled into one: grounded they seek release through the balloons but through augury they become an omen or portent from which the future is foretold.
“… cutting and slicing in order to see them better, willing them into three dimensions; an attempt to cheat death, or rather, to ward off forgetting of them as they are/were and as I was when the work was made.”
~Â Justine Khamara
In the first gallery, a very minimal installation by Justine Khamara of two fractured faces stare out at you from the wall, my favourite work of the show. These are unsettling faces, protruding towards you like some topographical map, one eyes screwed shut the other beadily following you as you walk around the gallery space. Here the images of brother and sister presence anterior, already formed subjects not through memory (as photographs normally do) but through the insistence of the their multiple here and now planes of existence. Rather than ‘forgetting’ the images authenticate their identity through their ongoing presence in an ever renewing present.3 Their dissection of reality, the affirmation of their presence (not the photographic absence of a lost subject) embodies their secret story on the viewer told through psychological and imaginative processes: how do they make me feel – about my life, my death and being, here, now.
The pathos of the show is continued with the next work Noosphere (2008) by Brodie Ellis (the noosphere is best described as a sort of collective consciousness of human-beings).4 In this work a video above the clouds is projected onto a circular shape on the ceiling in a darkened room. The emotional and the imaginative impact of the message on the audience is again disorientating and immediate. The images look across the clouds to vistas of setting suns, look down on the clouds and the sea and land below. The images first move one way and then another, disorientating the viewer and changing their perspective of the earth; these are alien views of the earth accompanied by heart beat like ambient music. The perspective of the circle also changes depending on where the viewer stands like some anamorphic distortion of reality. On a stand a beaded yoke for a horse adds to the metaphorical allegory of the installation.
In the next gallery is the literal climax to the exhibition, Marco Fusinato’s Aetheric Plexus (2009). (Aether: medium through which light propagates; Plexus: in vertebrates, a plexus is an area where nerves branch and rejoin and is also a network of blood vessels).
Consisting of scaffolding that forms a cross and supports large numbers of silver spotlights with visible wiring and sound system the installation seems innocuous enough at first. Walking in front of the work produces no effect except to acknowledge the dull glow of red from the banks of dormant lights trained on the viewer. The interaction comes not in random fashion but when the viewer walks to the peripheries of the gallery corners triggering the work – suddenly you are are blasted with white light and the furious sound of white noise for about 15 seconds: I jumped half out of my skin! Totally disorientated as though one has been placed in a blast furnace or a heavenly irradiated crematorium one wonders what has just happened to you and it takes some time to reorientate oneself back in the afterlife of the here and now. Again the immediacy of the work, the particularities of the experience affect your interior states of being.
After a video installation by Matt Griffin you wander into the next gallery where two works by Benjamin Armstrong inhabit the floor of the gallery. And I do mean inhabit. Made of blown glass forms and wax coated tree branches the works have a strange affect on the psyche, to me seemingly emanations from the deep subconscious. Twin glass hemispheres of what look like a brain are surrounded by clasping synaptic nerve endings that support an egg like glass protrusion – a thought bubble? a spirit emanation? These are wonderful contemplative but slightly disturbing objects that have coalesced into shape only in another form to melt and disappear: molten glass and melted wax dissipating the very form of our existence.
Finally we come to the three part installation by Pat Foster and Jen Berean (below). On the right of the photograph you can see three aluminium and glass doors, closed, sealed leading to another gallery. What you can’t see in the photograph is the three pieces of gaffer tape stretched across the glass doors, like they do on the building sites of new homes. No entry here. Above your head is a suspended matrix of aluminium and glass with some of the glass planes smashed. Clean, clinical, safe but smashed, secure but threatening the matrix presses down on the viewer. It reminded me of the vertical standing shards of the World Trade Centre set horizontal suspended overhead. Only the steel cable seemed to ruin the illusion and seemed out of place with the work. It would have been more successful if the matrix was somehow suspended with fewer tethers to increase the sense of downward pressure. Finally you sit on the aluminium benches and contemplate in silence all that has come before and wonder what just hit you in a tidal wave of feelings, immediacies and emotions. The Doing and Undoing of Things.
An interesting journey then, one to provoke thought and emotion. The fabric of the particular. The pathos of the art-iculate.
My only reservations are about the presence, the immediacy, the surface of it all. How persistent will these stories be? Will the work sustain pertinent inquiry above and beyond the here and now, the shock and awe. Or will it be like a meal one eats and then finds one is full but empty at the same time. A journey of smoke and mirrors.
Dr Marcus Bunyan
1/ Bolano, Robert. Last Evenings on Earth. New Directions, 2007. Available on Amazon.
2/ Blair, French. The Artist, The Body. [Online] Cited on 12/04/2009. No longer available online
3/ Ibid.,
4/ “For Teilhard, the noosphere is best described as a sort of ‘collective consciousness’ of human-beings. It emerges from the interaction of human minds. The noosphere has grown in step with the organisation of the human mass in relation to itself as it populates the earth. As mankind organizes itself in more complex social networks, the higher the noosphere will grow in awareness.” From the concept of Nooshpere on Wikipedia.
Justine Khamara (Australian, b. 1971) Dilated Concentrations 2009 UV print on laser cut stainless steel Photos: Marcus Bunyan
Benjamin Armstrong (Australian, b. 1975) Hold Everything Dear I 2008 Photo: Marcus Bunyan
Pat Foster (Australian, b. 1981) and Jen Berean (Canadian, b. 1981) Untitled from the series The Doing and Undoing of Things 2009 Aluminium, safety glass, steel cable Photo: Marcus Bunyan
Pat Foster (Australian, b. 1981) and Jen Berean (Canadian, b. 1981) Untitled from the series The Doing and Undoing of Things (detail) 2009 Aluminium, safety glass, steel cable Photo: Marcus Bunyan
Australian Centre for Contemporary Art (ACCA) 111 Sturt Street Southbank Victoria 3006 Australia
Siri Hayes (Australian, b. 1977) Gunnai man land 2008
A handsome group of large photographs in crisp white frames is displayed in the large space of Gallerysmith, Melbourne. Undoubtably they are well taken and printed photographs but conceptually their thematic development is confused. The photographs purport to investigate how industrialisation has changed the Gippsland landscape since colonisation whilst referencing human interactions that ‘are sometimes’ associated with Western art.
Gunnai land man (above) is very effective in this quest juxtaposing as it does an Indigenous Australian and fallen tree on a bare track with a smoke billowing power station (symbolic of the industrialisation of the area) looming in the background. Other photographs are less successful. What a man flying a kite has to do with the pre-colonial Gippsland landscape is beyond me and the juxtapositional incongruity sought by the artist simply does not work, despite the presence of the power station on the plains in the distance. The symbology has more to do with Japanese art than it has to do with Western art.
The conceptual narrative of the photograph Moe Madonna (below) works only partially as well. The destruction of the landscape has been caused by pastoralisation not industrialisation. In the image that Hayes is referencing the Madonna is front and centre set in an idyllic landscape. In the work by Hayes the incongruity has to be explained, has to be verbalised in text for the association to be didactically made. The interpretation leaves no room for personal reflection and when I looked at this image, the mother and child were so small in the landscape, the placement so obviously constructed that there incongruity turned to disbelief: namely that I simply did not believe the mise en scène being created.
Other narratives are equally confusing. In Paper bag lovers (below) I had to ask the gallery director what was going on in the photograph because the bodies where so small in the landscape (in fact it looks like one body) and you can’t really see the paper bags on their heads because the bodies are just an amorphous mass containing no detail at all (you can just see the body in the photograph below in the mid distance just below the large central tree). Why paper bags anyway? If something intentionally odd and incongruous is sought to be portrayed in the landscape perhaps Hayes should look at the work of Eugene Meatyard (see below) to see a real subversion of the body/landscape dichotomy.
The one standout photograph of the exhibition is Plein air explorers (below). This is confirmed in the sales of the show as all six prints of this photograph have been sold. One can see why!
The title is perfect, the construction of the image faultless. The naked white man stands proudly surveying his conquered domain, the land, whilst around him artists (reminding me of the dilettantes of the Victorian age going on day trips), hunker down into the ground with their easels oblivious to the desiccated trees around them. Here the photographer just observes, doesn’t construct, the incongruity of it all. The artists draw the white man based on direct observation of him and not on their conceptions or conventional images or memories of him while ignoring their surroundings. Here is the paradox, the ironic perfect storm that the artist was conceptually seeking: the representation of landscape based upon direct observation “in the open air” ignored for a perfect white arse while on the horizon smoke stacks of a power station stand in silent witness to the present and imminent destruction of the world. What a photograph! Can I have one now please?
Dr Marcus Bunyan
Many thankx to Gallerysmith for allowing me to publish the photographs in the posting. Please click on the photographs for a larger version of the image.
Siri Hayes (Australian, b. 1977) Moe Madonna 2008
Siri Hayes (Australian, b. 1977) Kite 2008
Raphael (Italian, 1483-1520) Madonna of the Goldfinch 1505-1506 Oil on panel 107 x 77cm Galleria degli Uffizi
Siri Hayes (Australian, b. 1977) Paper Bag Lovers 2008
I have predominantly focused on the parts of the Gippsland landscape that have been impacted by white settlement. I have composed various human interactions that are sometimes associated with Western art and its construction. For example, Moe Madonna references Raphael’s Goldfinch Madonna. The narratives are intentionally odd and incongruous with the surrounding location. My son and I seem out-of-place in a barren paddock while the autumn mist shrouds distant gum trees and electricity pylons. The soil here has been compacted beyond repair by cattle hooves – an inappropriate animal in Australia’s delicate ecosystems. As we sit on this barren plain, I read to Oliver from a European pre-schooler book titled Autumn, creating an interesting juxtaposition with the antipodean equivalent season.
The work in this exhibition considers the pre-colonial Gippsland landscape and how industrial ‘progress’ has altered it. Hopefully it provides pause for thought.
Siri Hayes exhibition notes. March 2009
Siri Hayes (Australian, b. 1977) Plein air explorers 2008
Gallerysmith 170-174 Abbotsford St, North Melbourne, Victoria, 3051 Australia
Art Blart _ art and cultural memory archive 
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