“In a certain sense, Twombly operates like the Pictorialists: his photographs look almost like paintings in which light is captured in brushstrokes.”
Text from the press release
Many thankx to the Centre for Fine Arts, Brussels for allowing me to publish the photographs in the posting. Please click on the photographs for a larger version of the image.
Cy Twombly (American, 1928-2011) Untitled (Rome)
1966
Oil, wall paint, grease crayon on canvas
190 x 200cm
Sammlung Lambrecht-Schadeberg / Rubenspreisträger der Stadt Siegen im Museum für Gegenwartskunst
As a tribute to the recently deceased artist, the Centre for Fine Arts is turning the spotlight on a less familiar aspect of his oeuvre. The exhibition includes more than 100 dryprint Polaroid photographs (selected by Twombly himself), along with a selection of other works by Twombly and a film portrait by Tacita Dean.
Cy Twombly (who was born in Lexington in 1928 and died in Rome in 2011) was one of the most important US artists of his generation. He made his name with large-scale abstract paintings whose free form and spontaneous dynamism recall calligraphy and graffiti. In his work Twombly often referred to the myths of Classical Greek and Roman Antiquity, to literature and to art history.
The exhibition focuses on a less familiar aspect of Twombly’s oeuvre: his photographic work. The photographs are an addition to the artist’s creative world and throw new light on it. At the request of the publishers Schirmer / Mosel, Twombly selected more than 100 never previously published Polaroid photographs for a catalogue that was published just before his death on 5 July 2011. This selection is the subject of a travelling exhibition that has already been seen in Germany at the Museum Brandhorst (in Munich) and the Museum für Gegenwartskunst (in Siegen). At the Centre for Fine Arts the exhibition is being expanded, in collaboration with Dr. Hubertus von Amelunxen, who wrote an essay for the Twombly catalogue and who has made a selection for BOZAR of drawings and paintings by Twombly that reveal in greater depth the interplay of lines and light in his work. In addition, the exhibition is complemented by the screening of Tacita Dean’s intimate film portrait “Edwin Parker” (which takes its name from Twombly’s official given names).
Twombly and photography
Twombly took up photography back in his student days in the 1950s and continued to take photographs throughout his career. It was only in the 1990s, however, that he went public with his photographic work in gallery exhibitions and publications.
All the photographs in the exhibition were taken with a Polaroid camera, enlarged, printed using a special kind of dryprint, and reproduced in limited editions. This procedure, developed by Twombly himself, gives the photographs a hazy glow and a coarse grain. Twombly further reinforced this impression of blurring by playing with light and shade, by overexposure and sophisticated colour saturation, and by employing extreme close-ups. The lack of definition gives his photographs a certain indefinable quality and a poetic dimension. Our attention is no longer drawn to the subject, but to the texture of the picture. In a certain sense, Twombly operates like the Pictorialists: his photographs look almost like paintings in which light is captured in brushstrokes.
The subjects of his Polaroid photographs are extremely diverse. There are traditional still lifes with tulips, lemon leaves, and angel trumpets, alongside photographs of temples and atmospheric landscapes. Twombly surprises the viewer with intimate images of everyday objects such as his slippers, a detail from a painting, his brushes, a snapshot of his studio, etc.
The photographs are fascinating because they throw new light on Twombly’s creative spirit and visual language. These intangible, fragile images are permeated by the same themes that inspired the artist’s paintings, drawings, sculptures, and graphic art. The atmospheric colours and diffuse motifs of his photographs are an unexpected addition to his creative universe. Twombly’s oeuvre, moreover, is all about light – and is photography not the medium of light par excellence?
Tacita Dean
In the course of the exhibition circuit visitors can see an intimate film portrait of Twombly, Edwin Parker by the British artist Tacita Dean. The film takes its title from Twombly’s official given names (“Cy” is a traditional nickname in his family). The publicity-shy Twombly had become a mythical figure in the world of contemporary art. Dean’s film offers a rare insight into the artist’s life. The camera follows Twombly as he looks at his pictures in his studio, reads letters, looks through the louvres at the traffic in the city of his birth, or sits around a table with old friends and orders a meal. Tacita Dean is a British contemporary artist, known above all for her films. Her latest work to date is FILM, a 35 mm film continuously projected on a 13-metre-high monolith, which can be seen in the Turbine Hall at Tate Modern until 11 March 2012.
Press release from the Centre for Fine Arts website
Exhibition dates: 8th October – 28th November 2010
Exhibiting artists: Charles Anderson, George Armfield, Melanie Boreham, Bureau of Inverse Technology, Aleks Danko, Tacita Dean, Sue Ford, Garry Hill, Larry Jenkins, Peter Kennedy, Anastasia Klose, Arthur Lindsay, Dora Meeson, Anna Molska, TV Moore, Tony Oursler, Neil Pardington, Giulio Paolini, Mark Richards, David Rosetzky, Anri Sala, James Shaw, Louise Short, William Strutt, Darren Sylvester, Fiona Tan, Bill Viola, Annika von Hausswolff, Mark Wallinger, Lynette Wallworth, Gillian Wearing.
Fiona Tan (Indonesia, b. 1966) Tilt 2002 DVD Courtesy of the artist, Frith Street Gallery London
“… this immersive exhibition swallows us into a kind of spiritual and philosophical lifecycle. As we weave our way through a maze-like series of darkened rooms, we encounter life’s early years, a youth filled with mischief, wonderment, possibilities and choices, and a more reflective experience of mid and later life, preceding the eventual end.”
Dan Rule in The Age
I never usually review group exhibitions but this is an exception to the rule. I have seen this exhibition three times and every time it has grown on me, every time I have found new things to explore, to contemplate, to enjoy. It is a fabulous exhibition, sometimes uplifting, sometimes deeply moving but never less than engaging – challenging our perception of life. The exhibition proceeds chronologically from birth to death. I comment on a few of my favourite works below but the whole is really the sum of the parts: go, see and take your time to inhale these works – the effort is well rewarded. The space becomes like a dark, fetishistic sauna with it’s nooks and crannies of videos and artwork. Make sure you investigate them all!
There is only one photograph by Gillian Wearing from her Album series of self portraits, Self Portrait at Three Years Old (2004, see photograph below) but what a knockout it is. An oval photograph in a bright yellow frame the photograph looks like a perfectly normal studio photograph of a toddler until you examine the eyes: wearing silicon prosthetics, Wearing confronts “the viewer with her adult gaze through the eyeholes of the toddler’s mask, Wearing plays on the rift between interior and exterior and raises a multitude of provocative questions about identity, memory, and the veracity of the photographic medium.”1
Tilt (2002, see photograph above) is a mesmeric video by Fiona Tan of a toddler strapped into a harness suspended from a cluster of white helium-filled balloons in a room with wooden floorboards. The gurgling toddler floats gently into the air before descending to the ground, the little feet scrabbling for traction before gently ascending again – the whole process is wonderful, the instance of the feet touching the ground magical, the delight of the toddler at the whole process palpable. Dan Rule sees the video as “enlivening and troubling, joyous and worrisome” and he is correct in this observation, in so far as it is the viewer that worries about what is happening to the baby, not, seemingly, the baby itself. It is our anxiety on the toddlers behalf, trying to imagine being that baby floating up into the air looking down at the floor, the imagined alienness of that experience for a baby, that drives our fear; but we need not worry for babies are held above the heads of fathers and mothers every day of the year. Fear is the adult response to the joy of innocence.
There are several photographs by Melbourne photographer Darren Sylvester in the exhibition and they are delightful in their wry take on adolescent life, girls eating KFC (If All We Have Is Each Other, Thats Ok), or pondering the loss of a first love – the pathos of a young man sitting in a traditionally furnished suburban house, reading a letter (in which presumably his first girlfriend has dumped him), surrounded by the detritus of an unfinished Subway meal (see photograph below).
An interesting work by Sue and Ben Ford, Faces (1976-1996, see photograph below) is a video that shows closely cropped faces and the differences in facial features twenty years later. The self consciousness of people when put in front of a camera is most notable, their uncomfortable looks as the camera examines them, surveys them in minute detail. The embarrassed smile, the uncertainty. It is fascinating to see the changes after twenty years.
A wonderful series 70s coloured photographs of “Sharps” by Larry Jenkins that shine a spotlight on this little recognised Melbourne youth sub-culture. These are gritty, funny, in your face photographs of young men bonding together in a tribal group wearing their tight t-shirts, ‘Conte’ stripped wool jumpers (I have a red and black one in my collection) and rat tail hair:
“Larry was the leader of the notorious street gang the “BLACKBURN SOUTH SHARPS” from 1972-1977 when the Sharpie sub-culture was at its peak and the working class suburbs of Melbourne were a tough and violent place to grow up. These photographs represent a period from 1975-1976 in Australian sub-cultural history and are one of the few photographic records of that time. Larry began taking photos at the age of 16 using a pocket camera, when he started working as an apprentice motor mechanic and spent his weekly wage developing his shots… He captured fleeting moments, candid shots and directed his teenage mates through elaborate poses set against the immediate Australian suburban backdrops.”2
Immediate and raw these photographs have an intense power for the viewer.
A personal favourite of the exhibition is Alex Danko’s installation Day In, Day Out (1991, see photograph below). Such as simple idea but so effective: a group of identical silver houses sits on the floor of the gallery and through a rotating wheel placed in front of a light on a stand, the sun rises and sets over and over again. The identical nature of the houses reminds us that we all go through the same process in life: we get up, we work (or not), we go to bed. The sun rises, the sun sets, everyday, on life. Simple, beautiful, eloquent.
Another favourite is Louise Short’s series of found colour slides of family members displayed on one of those old Kodak carrousel slide projectors. This is a mesmeric, nostalgic display of the everyday lives of family caught on film. I just couldn’t stop watching, waiting for the next slide to see what image it brought (the sound of the changing slides!), studying every nuance of environment and people, colour and space: recognition of my childhood, growing up with just such images.
Anri Sala’s video Time After Time (2003, see photograph below) is one of the most poignant works in the exhibition, almost heartbreaking to watch. A horse stands on the edge of a motorway in the near darkness, raising one of it’s feet. It is only when the lights of a passing car illuminate the animal that the viewer sees the protruding rib cage and you suddenly realise how sick the horse must be, how near death.
The film Presentation Sisters (2005, see photographs below) by English artist Tacita Dean, “shows the daily routines and rituals of the last remaining members of a small ecclesiastical community as they contemplate their journey in the spiritual after-life.” Great cinematography, lush film colours, use of shadow and space – but it is the everyday duties of the sisters, a small order of nuns in Cork, Ireland that gets you in. It is the mundanity of washing, ironing, folding, cooking and the procedures of human beings, their duties if you like – to self and each other – that become valuable. Almost like a religious ritual these acts are recognised by Dean as unique and far from the everyday. We are blessed in this life that we live.
Finally two works by Bill Viola: Unspoken (Silver & Gold) 2001 and The Passing (1991, see photographs below). Both are incredibly moving works about the angst of life, the passage of time, of death and rebirth. For me the picture of Viola’s elderly mother in a hospital bed, the sound of her rasping, laboured breath, the use of water in unexpected ways and the beauty of cars travelling at night across a road on a desert plain, their headlights in the distance seeming like atomic fireflies, energised spirits of life force, was utterly beguiling and moving. What sadness with joy in life to see these two works.
Dr Marcus Bunyan
1/ Mann, Ted. “Self-Portrait at Three Years Old,” on the Guggenheim Collection website [Online] Cited 12/11/2010 no longer available online
2/ Anon. “History,” on the Blackburn South Sharps website [Online] Cited 12/11/2010 no longer available online
Many thankx to the Melbourne International Arts Festival and the Australian Centre for Contemporary Art for allowing me to publish the photographs in the posting. Please click on the photographs for a larger version of some of the images.
“To take a photograph is to participate in another person’s mortality, vulnerability, mutability. Precisely by slicing out this moment and freezing it, all photographs testify to time’s relentless melt” Susan Sontag wrote. Gillian Wearing registers this, and revisits herself at the age of 3 through the uncanny process of entering her own body. This performance of self, created by the artist putting on a full body prosthetic mask of herself as she was professionally photographed as a child, and peering out at the viewer with her 40-something eyes is a weird sarcophagi of identity. Is Gillian still 3? Is the adult inside the one she has become, or the one who was always there? Is identity pre-determined? Perhaps she would prefer to go back there, and yet this portrait is tinged with a kind of sadness. The eyes betray too much that has passed in the adult life, not yet known by the small child.
Sue Ford (Australian, 1943-2009) and Ben Ford Faces (still) 1976-1996 Detail 
of 15 min b/w 
reversal silent film 16mm, shot on b/w 
reversal film
Photographer, Sue Ford, in her iconic work Faces uses the camera as a kind of mirror to register the changes that occur as we grow older. Without the sometimes pompous commentary of the filmic anthropological voice-over which narrates an imposed, meta-story, Ford allowed her straightforward, black and white, close-up images to suggest the accumulation of experience and the evolution of identity silently. In this version of the work, a video projection which brings old and newer faces together in a rolling sequence, we are able to register the passage of time in a number of ways. The face becomes a terrain of time travelled.
Sue Ford’s experimental film “Faces” consists of portraits of the artist and her friends and acquaintances. Ford filmed each subject for roughly 25 seconds, using a wind-up Bolex camera that frames their faces in close-up. Variously self-conscious, serious, amused and distracted, the camera captures every small gesture, expression and flicker of emotion on the person’s face. The result is an examination of portraiture and the performance of identity, demonstrating the artist’s interest in using the camera to capture reality, time and change.
Sue Ford (Australian, 1943-2009) and Ben Ford Faces (still) 1976-1996 Detail 
of 15 min b/w 
reversal silent film 16mm, shot on b/w 
reversal film
Â
Continuing on from the Time series, in 1976 Ford created the experimental film Faces, in which she filmed portraits of herself, friends and acquaintances. Using a Bolex spring-wound clockwork camera where the film ran through the camera for approximately 25 seconds, Ford directed her subjects to behave as they liked for the duration of the portrait. The camera frames the subject’s face in close-up, steadfastly focusing on them; Memory Holloway described of the work, “While there is no acting, character is revealed by the comfort or uneasiness of the subject. Some laugh, others look romantically pensive, others blow clouds of smoke at the lens as a cover-up”[6]. By bringing an element of time into the creation of a portrait, the film both reveals a moment in that person’s subjective experience and experiments with the plasticity of time, extending and concentrating the 25-second span into a focused moment.
The photographs of Larry Jenkins deliver an authentic tribalism. Taken with his instamatic camera, the photos of his sharpie friends, hanging out, posing, wrestling and testing out their manhood, are genuine documents of their time. Belonging to this group is an important and almost primate activity. Surviving the suburbs in the 70s was an ‘us and them’ kind of universe. These were the kinds of boys you crossed the street to avoid. Their collective power, while internally tumultuous as they each try to discover their own identities, nevertheless conveys externally a tight ball of testosterone. They are one, and if you are not them, you are nothing.
Alex Danko (Australian, b. 1950) Day In, Day Out 1991
From the cradle to the grave… ACCA’s major exhibition Mortality takes us on life’s journey from the moment of lift off to the final send off, and all the bits in between. Curated by Juliana Engberg to reflect the Festival’s visual arts themes of spirituality, death and the afterlife, this transhistorical event includes metaphoric pictures and works by some of the world’s leading artists.
Exhibiting artists include:
Tacita Dean, an acclaimed British artist who works in film and drawing and has shown at Milan’s Fondazione Trussardi and at DIA Beacon, New York.
Anastasia Klose, one of Australia’s most exciting young video artists whose works also include performance and installation.
TV Moore, an Australian artist who completed his studies in Finland and the United States and who has shown extensively in Sydney, Melbourne and overseas.
Tony Oursler, a New York-based artist who works in a range of media and who has exhibited in the major institutions of New York, Paris, Cologne and Britain.
Giulio Paolini, an Italian born artist who has been a representative at both Documenta and the Venice Biennale.
David Rosetzky, a Melbourne-born artist who works predominantly in video and photographic formats and whose work has featured in numerous Australian exhibitions as well as New York, Milan and New Zealand galleries.
Louise Short, an emerging British artist who works predominately with found photographs and slides. Anri Sala, an Albanian-born artist who lives and works in Berlin. He has shown in the Berlin Biennale and the Hayward, London.
Fiona Tan, an Indonesian-born artist, who lives and works in Amsterdam. Tan works with photography and film and has shown in a number of major solo and group exhibitions, including representing the Netherlands at the 2009 Venice Biennale.
Bill Viola, one of the leaders in video and new media art who has shown widely internationally and in Australia.
Gillian Wearing, one of Britain’s most important contemporary artists and a Turner Prize winner who has exhibited extensively internationally.
Highlights of the exhibition include:
Albanian born artist Anri Sala’s acclaimed video work Time After Time, featuring a horse trapped on a Tirana motorway, repeatedly, heartbreakingly raising its hind-leg (see photograph below). Anri first came to acclaim in 1999 for his work in After the Wall, the Stockholm Modern Museum’s exhibition of art from post-communist Europe, and his work is characterised by an interest in seemingly unimportant details and slowness. Scenes are almost frozen into paintings.
Peter Kennedy’sSeven people who died the day I was born – April 18 1945, 1997-98 – a work from a series begun by the artist following the death of his father which connects individual lives with political and historical events. Kennedy’s birth in the last year of World War II and the seven people memorialised imply the multitude of others that died during this catastrophic event as well as the perpetual cycle of life.
A series of slides collected by British artist Louise Short, offering a beguiling insight into the everyday lives of everyday people accumulated as a life narrative.
Acclaimed British artist Tacita Dean’sPresentation Sisters, which shows the daily routines and rituals of the last remaining members of a small ecclesiastical community as they contemplate their journey in the spiritual after-life.
Three works from the Time series by influential Australian photographer Sue Ford, who passed away last year, will also be shown. The photographs capture the artist in various stages of her life.
Text from the ACCA website
Annika von Hausswolff (Swedish, b. 1967) Hey Buster! What Do You Know About Desire? 1995 Colour photograph Courtesy of the artist and Moderna Museet
Anri Sala (Albanian, b. 1974) Time After Time (still) 2003 Video, 5 minutes 22 seconds
Sometimes we stagger into dangerous territory. In life, some of us find ourselves on the wrong side of the track. Anri Sala’s Time After Time provides a metaphor for the unfortunate ones who have lost their way or who are marginalised or discarded. A horse has manoeuvred itself, or worse, been abandoned on the wrong side of the highway divider and is now trapped in an endless and shuddering encounter with heavy traffic. The horse visibly flinches and as viewers we are helpless to do anything to assist. It is past its prime and appears malnourished, injured and unwanted. Sala’s horse is symbolic of the scapegoat… the one sent away, or outcast in order for social cohesion to seem reinforced by its exclusion.
David Rosetzky (Australian, b. 1970) Nothing like this (still) DVD 2007 Courtesy of the artist and Sutton Gallery, Melbourne
David Rosetzky’s two videos Weekender and Nothing Like This, hyper-construct the languor of these rites of passage for introspective types. One video uses the faded colours of the 1970s Levi’s, Lee’s and Wrangler’s where-do-you-go-to-my-lovely era, through a smudgy David Hamilton Bilitis-like lens. In the other, with a postmodern crispness, Rosetzky establishes scenarios of inner intensity in which the participants narrate their disaffections and doubts. As compared to Ford’s messy, shabby and experimental aesthetic, everything in Rosetzky’s plot is sanitary. This is the synthetic age.
Rosetzky’s videos reference films like The Big Chill which pushes a group together to explore identity. In the instance of Rosetzky’s works however, action is limited and the conventional narrative eliminated in order to zero in on the heightened meditations. Devices such as mirrors refer to a kind of twenty-something narcissism; the beach is presented as a dynamic character of identity flux; time is compressed and delivered in mediated bites.
Things happen on beaches. In Australian culture, as elsewhere they are places of fun, but also menace. When I was a child, the news of the disappearance of children and adults at beaches inflicted a fear into the cultural psyche; children’s freedom was forever altered after the Beaumont Children case.
David Rosetzky (Australian, b. 1970) Nothing like this (still) DVD 2007 Courtesy of the artist and Sutton Gallery, Melbourne
Tacita Dean (British, b. 1965) Presentation Sisters (still) 2005 16 mm film courtesy of the artist, Frith Street Gallery London
 Some people find solace in religion. And in this exhibition Tacita Dean’s superb film The Presentation Sisters offers a quiet reflection space. Dean emphasises the aspects of quiet devotion, internal contemplation and external dedication that define the Sisters’ spiritual and earthly existence.
In the same way Vermeer suggested spiritualism through domesticity and by using the uplift of light through windows, Dean enlists the ethereal light that travels through the lives and rooms of this small order of nuns who go about their routines and mundane tasks. Dean’s film studies light as a part of metaphysical and theological transformation. However, Dean’s film is also about a kind of Newtonian light: scientific and alchemical.
Her interest in the transformations that occur when light passes through celluloid, and when light passes through glass is a study of the beautiful refractions discovered by scientific observation and written into philosophical enquiries by writers such as Goethe and Burke. As always with Dean’s work, there are layers of encounter in the seemingly simple.
Here’s my pick of the twelve best exhibitions in Melbourne for 2009 that featured on Art Blart (in no particular order) – and a few honourable mentions that very nearly made the list!
1. The Water Hole by Gerda Steiner and Jorg Lenzlinger at ACCA (Australian Centre for Contemporary Art)
Gerda Steiner (Swiss, b. 1967) and Jorg Lenzlinger (Swiss, b. 1964) The Water Hole 2009
“The most effective bed has a small meteorite suspended in a net bag above it. The viewer slides underneath the ‘rock’ placing the meteorite about a foot or so above your face. The meteorite is brown, dark and heavy, swinging slightly above your ‘third eye’. You feel its weight pressing down on your energy, on your life force and you feel how old this object is, how far it has traveled, how fragile and mortal you are. It is a sobering and enlightening experience but what an experience it is!”
This was a magical and poignant exhibition that was a joy for children and adults alike. Children love it running around exploring the environments. Adults love it for it’s magical, witty and intelligent response to the problems facing our planet and our lives. A truly enjoyable interplanetary collision.
2. Ocean Without A Shore video installation by Bill Viola at The National Gallery of Victoria
Installation photograph of Ocean Without A Shore at the National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne
The resurrected are pensive, some wringing the hands, some staring into the light. One offers their hands to the viewer in supplication before the tips of the fingers touch the wall of water – the ends turning bright white as they push through the penumbrae of the interface. As they move forward the hands take on a stricken anguish, stretched out in rigour. Slowly the resurrected turn and return to the other side. We watch them as we watch our own mortality, life slipping away one day after another. Here is not the distraction of a commodified society, here is the fact of every human life: that we all pass.
The effect on the viewer is both sad but paradoxically uplifting. I cried …
These series of encounters at the intersection of life and death are worthy of the best work of this brilliant artist. He continues to astound with his prescience, addressing what is undeniable in the human condition. Long may he continue.
Rosalie Gascoigne (Australian born New Zealand, 1917-1999) Sweet lovers 1990
This was a wonderful exhibition. Gascoigne rightly commands a place in the pantheon of Australian stars. She has left us with a legacy of music that evokes the rhythms, the air, the spaces and colours of our country. As she herself said,
“Look at what we have: Space, skies. You can never have too much of nothing.”
Dale Frank (Australian, b. 1959) Ryan Gosling 2008/2009
The artist offered the viewer the ability to generate their own resonances with the painting, to use the imagination of ‘equivalence’ to suggest what these paintings stand for – and also what else they stand for. States of being, of transformation, wonder and joy emerged in the playfulness of these works.
Ryan Gosling was a tour de force. With the poetic structure of an oil spill, the varnish forms intricate slick upon slick contours that are almost topographical in their mapping. The black oozes light, becomes ‘plastic’ black before your eyes, like the black of Rembrandt’s backgrounds, illusive, illuminative and hard to pin down – perpetually hanging there in two dripping rows, fixed but fluid at one and the same time (you can just see the suspensions in the photograph above).
This painting was one of the most overwhelming syntheses of art and nature, of universal forces that I have seen in recent contemporary art. This exhibition was an electric pulsating universe of life, landscape and transformation. Magnificent!
5. So It Goes by Laith McGregor at Helen Gory Galerie
Laith McGregor (Australian, b. 1977) The Last Bastion (detail) 2009
Simply spectacular!
I had never seen such art made using a biro before: truly inspiring. Inventive, funny, poignant and outrageous this was a must see show of 2009.
Domenico de Clario (Australian born Italy, b. 1947) o (la grande maison blanche – snow clouds massing) 2008/09
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.
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.
These heterogeneous paintings were a knockout with their wonderful, layered presence – they really command the viewer to look at them and celebrate the characters within them. Whimsical, ironic and full of humour these phantasmagorical images of creatures cast adrift with the night sky as background are fabulous assemblages of colour, form and storytelling.
My friend and I really enjoyed this exhibition. We were captivated by these songs, going back to the work again and again to tease out the details, to feel connection to the work. These are not lonely isolated figures but sublime emanations of inner states of being expertly rendered in glorious colour. And they made us laugh – what more could you ask for!
8. Tacita Dean at Australian Centre for Contemporary Art (ACCA)
Tacita Dean (English, b. 1965) Michael Hamburger [Still] 16mm colour anamorphic, optical sound 28 minutes 2007
“One can see echoes of Sebald’s work in that of Tacita Dean – the personal narratives accompanied by mythical and historical stories and pictures. The tactility of Hamburger’s voice and hands, his caressing of the apples with the summary justice of the tossing away of rotten apples to stop them ruining the rest of the crop is arresting and holds you transfixed. Old varieties and old hands mixed with the old technology of film make for a nostalgic combination … Dean implicitly understands how objects can be elegies for fleeting lives.”
Tacita Dean is a fantastic artist whose work examines the measure of things, the vibrations of spirit in the FLUX of experience. Her work has a trance-like quality that is heavy with nostalgia and memory and reflects the machine-ations of contemporary life. In her languorous and dense work Dean teases out the significance of insignificant actions/events and imparts meaning and life to them. This is no small achievement!
As an exhibition this was an intense and moving experience.
9. Ivy photographs by Jane Burton at Karen Woodbury Gallery
Jane Burton (Australian, b. 1966) Ivy #2 2009
I feel that in these photographs with their facelessness and the non-reflection of the mirror investigate notions of ‘Theoria’ – a Greek emphasis on the vision or contemplation of God where theoria is the lifting up of the individual out of time and space and created being and through contemplative prayer into the presence of God. In fact the whole series of photographs can be understood through this conceptualisation – not just remembrances of past time, not a blind contemplation on existence but a lifting up out of time and space into the an’other’ dark but enlightening presence.
The greatest wonder of this series is that the photographs magically reveal themselves again and again over time. Despite (or because of) the references to other artists, the beauty of Burton’s work is that she has made it her own. The photographs have her signature, her voice as an artist and it is an informed voice; this just makes the resonances, the vibrations of energy within the work all the more potent and absorbing. I loved them.
eX de Medici (Australia, b. 1959) Tooth and claw (detail) 2009
In other less skilled artist’s hands the subject matter could become cliched and trite but here de Medici balances the disparate elements in her compositions and brings the subject matter alive – sinuously jumping off the paper, entwining the viewer in their delicious ironies, all of us sweetly complicit in the terror war (send more meat, send more meat!), fighting tooth and nail to keep urban realities at arm’s length. The dark desires that these works contain possess an aesthetic beauty that swallows us up so that we, too, become ‘Barbarians All’.
The paintings were painted horizontally (like the painter Jackson Pollock who intuitively accessed the spiritual realm) and evidence a horizontal consciousness not a hierarchical one. Knowledge is not privileged over wisdom. There is a balance between knowledge and wisdom – the knowledge gained through a life well lived and the wisdom of ancient stories that represent the intimacy of living on this world. The patterns and diversities of life compliment each other, are in balance.
Wisdom comes from the Indo-European root verb weid, “to see,” the same root from which words like vision come. In this sense these are “Vedic” paintings in that they are ancient, sacred teachings, Veda meaning literally “I have seen.”
Patricia Piccinini (Australian, b. 1965) Doubting Thomas (detail) 2008
Patricia Piccinini (Australian, b. 1965) Doubting Thomas Silicone, fibreglass, human hair, clothing, chair 2008
The terrains the Piccinini interrogates (nature and artifice, biogenetics, cloning, stem cell research, consumer culture) are a rematerialisation of the actual world through morphological ‘mapping’ onto the genomes of the future. Morphogenetic fields seem to surround the work with an intense aura; surrounded by this aura the animals and children become more spiritual in their silence. Experiencing this new world promotes an evolution in the way in which we conceive the future possibilities of life on this earth, this brave but mutably surreal new world.
This was truly one of the best exhibitions of the year in Melbourne.
Honorable mentions
~ Climbing the Walls and Other Actions by Clare Rae at the Centre for Contemporary Photography In these photographs action is opposed with stillness, danger opposed with suspension; the boundaries of space, both of the body and the environment, the interior and the exterior, memory and dream, are changed.
~ Johannes Kuhnen: a survey of innovation at RMIT Gallery We stood transfixed before this work, peering closely at it and gasping in appreciation of the beauty, technical proficiency and pure poetry of the pieces.
~ Double Infinitives by Marco Fusinato at Anna Schwartz Gallery 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 recognize the flatness of these figures and the quietness of violence that surrounds us.
~ all about … blooming by JUNKO GO at Gallery 101 Go’s musings on the existential nature of our being are both full and empty at one and the same time and help us contemplate the link to the breath of the sublime.
~ Mood Bomb by Louise Paramor at Nellie Castan Gallery They are dream states that allow the viewer to create their own narrative with the title of the works offering gentle guides along the way. These are wonderfully evocative paintings.
~ New 09 at Australian Centre for Contemporary Art (ACCA) 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.
~ My Jesus Lets Me Rub His Belly by Martin Smith at Sophie Gannon Gallery At the end of days, when all is said and done, the funny diatribes with their ambiguous photographs are homily and heretic and together form a more inclusive body of bliss: ‘And also with you and you and you and you’.
Art Blart _ art and cultural memory archive 
You must be logged in to post a comment.