CHRISTOPHER HEATHCOTE, Kind of Blue
Gallery 101 [Ground level, 101 Collins Street, Melbourne];
November 4-28th, 2009
At Christopher Heathcote's opening the other night at 101, red in hand & generously at hand, the trio smoothly dipping in & out of Coward, Brubeck, Monk, Miles et al, not yet 'playing the paintings' as I fancied could be done when we first noticed the adjacency of jazz band to paintings --Mondrian/Malevich topographies but just as likely musical staves--, I deliberated with Stephen McLaughlin on how many local art-writers also painted & actually exhibited? Jeffrey Makin; Robert Rooney for a long time; Bernard Smith? --but not too many more (that's a statement not a plea). We did see an exhibition by Bernard Smith? I say to Retta, doubting myself --she nods in the affirmative, yet for some reason Tucker's in my mind now --portraits after photographs? --or Smith's portrait of Tucker, or vice versa? --golden opportunity with McLaughlin & Heathcote both in the room to corroborate, but we're having a conversation, folks, not writing a thesis!
I remember Christopher telling me the show had been hung according to palate, and perhaps the groupings & progressions did peg back the large white, albeit divided, space to a series of harmonic clusters, which is what the paintings are. A moot point, I suppose, whether there's greater or lesser aesthetic coherence in studio or gallery (or do I mean 'explication', implying that the environment for the art's literal making is the fuller context)? Telling, though, that Christopher's invitation is a photograph of his studio in the Nicholas Building, and one can imagine that the pipes & windows opposite his studio, through his similarly partitioned window, is the model for the canvas on the floor leaning against the sill. There too are his brushes, a painting on an easel, objet d'art, two small framed portraits, &, instructively, piles of books propped against which is a Readers Feast shopping bag bulging, probably, with recently acquired booty!
He's a scholar-writer, a reader-painter. Expect correspondences, then, between the monographs he's written --in recent years there's Roger Kemp & Yvonne Audette --& his own painting? Well, the references exist, but no should or shouldnt about it. To converse people employ the same language, simple as that?
Exhibition launching, as with book launch & reading, is sometimes like the mega-, meta- artefact often promised. For me, Christopher Heathcote's 'artist reception' was the expanded painting --jazz trio fulfilling the paintings' jazz titles (Around Midnight, Twentieth Century Blues, Kind of Blue), encouraging one to see the paintings' grids as fretted with the whimsical points & angles which have denoted City & its Sounds since ever art made virtue of the naturally traducing popular culture!
I recall looking back down the room, to the right of the gallery entrance, at a particular work which then opened up to me as red base (the painter getting down his initial energy & excitement), overlay of grey squares (reflections : thinking aloud the problem of what to say), gathering details (or story subsumed to & expressed as pattern). Generalizing, I could say Heathcote's paintings elicit ideas from emotions, ultimately presenting or, dare one say, expressing a state of mind, a mood, a kind of blue! According to the notes, the paintings have accrued over a long period of time spent in the inner city, and maybe that explains their combination of movement & tranquility --both states rely on repeated signs & lines for their effect.
Writing these words, Ben Shahn is suddenly in my head, --exemplary of a calligraphy that's also choreography. Shahn & Saul Steinberg both? 50s, early 60s motifs, decor, design... And confirmed easily as I turn up the copy of Perspectives (Autumn, 1952) which my late uncle Dennis gave me, my last family summer holiday before I came away to Australia, first as a one-voyage mariner then an assisted passage migrant,1965 & '66 --a magazine which introduced me to Shahn's pictures &, as it happens, W C Williams' poems & prose, & much else besides, Rexroth, Barzun, Jarrell, Dahlberg --resonating forever after!
There it is : Shahn's Composition for Clarinets and Tin Horn (1951), in which a figure of anguish, face hidden in bent fingers & forearms, & mocked by the clown face on the horn, might even be missed in the strong line of instruments, which almost indicate a kind of grid. And grid it is that's foremost in Paterson (1950) & World's Greatest Comics... Selman Rodman commented, "Shahn has not been unaffected by the drift toward nonrepresentational abstraction in the past decade. The emphasis on background pattern in such transitional pictures as World's Greatest Comics (1947) and Convention (1948) has assumed a dominant foreground position in the more recent May 5 and Paterson. The latter picture was inspired by a passage celebrating 'invention' in William Carlos Williams' strictly 'nonrepresentational' poem with the same title and has been criticized by some of Shahn's admirers as 'arid,' 'empty,' and 'too abstract.'"
I'm not sure if the discussion around abstraction & realism that Rodman reports of 1952 is or isnt passe in 2009. Certainly no reference to Ben Shahn in Heathcote's exhibition note, though Leger's La Ville, Wyndham Lewis's The Crowd, Mondrian's Broadway Boogie-Woogie, & architects Van der Rohe & Gio Ponti are all acclaimed. And the jazz goes without saying.
In the exhibition note, Christopher Heathcote doesnt talk about abstraction or at all abstractly --quite the opposite. And he could easily share Shahn's axiom that form is only ever an expression of content...
Resoundingly then, a cool event, a cool show; two weeks left to dig it some more!
-------------------------------
--Kris Hemensley,
November 6th-15th, 2009--
Showing posts with label MORE ART CRITICISM. Show all posts
Showing posts with label MORE ART CRITICISM. Show all posts
Sunday, November 15, 2009
Saturday, March 22, 2008
MODERN BRITAIN, 1900-1960
"MODERN BRITAIN, 1900-1960; Masterworks from the Australian & New Zealand Collections"; November 15,2007 to February 24,2008, at the National Gallery of Victoria (International), Melbourne; or "THIRTEEN WAYS OF LOOKING AT A BLACKBIRD"
1
Would you like to write it then, Wallace? Oh, you've already written it. Hmmm. "I was of three minds", yeah, yeah. To have the three combine or coalesce; or, simply, one to concentrate. But there's another blackbird -- there! "Who can pick up the weight of Britain, / Who can move the German load / Or say to the French here is France again? // It is nothing, no great thing, nor man / Of ten brilliancies of battered gold / And fortunate stone. It moves its parade / Of motions in the mind and heart, // A gorgeous fortitude. Medium man / In February hears the imagination's hymns / And sees its images, its motions / And multitude of motions // And feels the imagination's mercies, / In a season more than sun and south wind, / Something returning from a deeper quarter, / A glacier running through delirium, // Making this heavy rock a place, / Which is not of our lives composed . . . / Lightly and lightly, O my land, / Move lightly through the air again." [Imago, 1948] Hmmm. An echo in my head of F. M.Ford's thought about the historical composition of the English which, in America's case after the 2nd World War, is the tale of a similar roosting. Thus New York's supplanting of Europe, yeah, yeah,one of those consoling ideas of youth which seemed then the keenest thought and not at all without a grain of truth. But the years pass and the New World's moment also passes; all that's subsumed as the International Style, grown in America, imported by everyone else, dulls as well. And all along one's been wondering what happened to Britain, to Germany, to France, what happened to Europe, what happened to the sovereignties of the rest of the world?
2
It was much anticipated to say the least. Several months out and the enthusiasm was building among friends including a bevy of local painters. For years Alan Pose & I have consulted the house copy of Anne Kirker & Peter Tomory's British Painting, 1800-1990, in Australian & New Zealand Public Collections (Beagle Press, 1997). We've imagined the show that could be mounted upon the foundation of our own Melbourne (NGV) collection; welcomed the little tasters along the way, always hoping for the bigger splash!
In that indispensable book's introduction, Anne Kirker writes, "In addition to providing a comprehensive listing of British paintings currently held in public collections in Australia & New Zealand, it could serve as an entry into a number of research topics, such as tracing the reception of British art in Australia..." (p9)
Anne Kirker was also the curator of the National Art Gallery of New Zealand's survey show, The First Fifty Years : British Art of the Twentieth Century(Wellington, 1981), admitting "an essentially modernist approach" but hoping "at the same time to make clear the overall diversity and richness of British art during the last fifty years of this century." The catalogue for the New Zealand show reproduces several of the pictures also found in the Melbourne show, the most striking of which is Gertler's classically sculptural yet palpably modern half-nude, The Straw Hat (1924).
And where is Anne Kirker now? Writing finely honed poems in Brisbane...
3
Spencer Gore's glorious The Icknield Way (housed at the Art Gallery of New South Wales) graces the book's cover --no wonder my wondering at the familiarity of its reproduction in The Australian, illustrating Andrew Stephens review --we've been looking at it (without studying it) for a decade! And then seeing it in the flesh at the show -- not as vast as I'd imagined but big enough! Big enough as anthem for the discussion, the best of several supported by the show, concerning landscape in itself and as the subject in the pincer of the polemics featuring the pictorially identifiable, topographically verifiable on one hand and abstraction's sport with line & colour on the other.
4
The Age & The Australian, chalk & cheese as usual. Robert Nelson's article headlined, "Taking modernist out of the modern"; Andrew Stephens, "Landscape of Tumult".
Keywords & phrases in Nelson : "moderation of its modernists"; "something too suspicious in the British psyche, something too sceptical and pragmatic, to bring off the formalist convictions and conceptual confidence of radical modernism"; "soft modernism"; "decorative appeal"; "lacklustre and messy, failed modernism" (this in relation to Tunnard, Nash, Power, Cant, Piper, Hitchens, Vaughan, Epstein; lemons & pears aside, Nash & Hitchens, Tunnard & Piper, 'lacklustre & messy' ?); "fatally brown and dull" (of Spencer's "allegorical work of the '30s"); "heroic modernism" (its general absence, that is)...
Keywords & phrases in Stephens : "a complete surprise" (of Reynolds large paintings); "romantic British landscape convention"; "such a wealth of great British art...in Australasian galleries" (unaware of the Kirker-Tomory register?); "a whole rhapsody of themes that might have formed smaller, discrete shows in themselves : brilliant landscapes, voluptuous nudes, fascinating portraiture, still-lives, war-artists' work, post-war modernity"; "vibrant riot of colour"; "luxuriantly vivid works" (of M Smith, Bomberg, Sutherland, Holmes, Passmore); "the threat imposed on the classic landscape of the imagination" (re the neo-romantics); "a captivating vista that melds social, political and art history with the broader canvas upon which it all happens : the land beneath our feet"...
5
(30/31-12-07)
I'm sorry Robert Nelson, you probably read it when it was published --Robert Hughes, that is, in Time magazine, 1987 --but only read by yours truly today as Cathy O'Brien & I pick through our spoils from Bendigo's illustrious Book Now second-hander. Hughes article, English Art in the 20thCentury, is collected in his book, Nothing, If Not Critical (Harvill, 1991), bought --I must get this in --before walking through Rosalind Park in mid-summer Northern Victorian dry heat and ascending to the Bendigo Art Gallery to see The Long Weekend : Australian Artists in France, 1918-1939, the lovely book-end of a sort to Modern Britain, which is the actual destination of this note.
6
A wall-text at The Long Weekend exhibition seems to me utterly apropos a conversation Modern Britain inspires and to another aroused by Nelson's review's curiously ideological sideswipes; words to the affect that most of the Aussie Parisiennes resisted the modernist styles of that time & place, were happy to be there and to continue in their own sweet ways. And that is the point : jettison the notion of progress for the arrogance it is and in our time at least regard all modes as legitimate & contemporaneous, retaining one's discriminations for works in themselves. Stylistic or modal differences might be considered genre, something literature & film are able to accommodate (although we're aware of the time it sometimes takes for work to be recognized for those qualities appreciated beyond the genre). A moot point is whether the liveliness of a work emanates from style or subject, but it wouldnt be much of a work if these were so evidently separable. Style in art within the general sense of progress has been synonymous with historical time, but once progress as punitive paradigm dissolves, when style is particular and not the inevitable or logical generality, something else obtains.
7
The human warmth or palpability of Bessie Davidson's apartment interiors --their authenticity I'd like to say, their, as-it-were, habitable reality --in The Long Weekend exhibition were, to my eye, easily distinguishable from the exact line & application, technically perfect painting of Hilda Rex Nicholas, Stella Bowen & others. She was (they all were) modern but not modernist... In Davidson there's impressionism, Cezanne, perhaps something of Braque & co's generic encapsulation, density, congested enclosure, but most of all she's a la her own personable mode --aeons from Robert Nelson's vaunted "heroic" and none the worse, contra formalist-progressivist thinking, for it. [P.S. 10-03-08. Looking at Vuillard's Mme Bonnard With Her Dog (1907) at the NGV, reminded of the qualities I responded to in Bessie Davidson. The illusion of depth in the panelled construction; figure on chair, dog in foreground, curtained door behind, and another room behind these. The soft warmth of the colours translates into the words I've used before, human, palpable. Maybe too the post-impressionist warmth I see in Spencer Gore, Harold Gilman...]
8
For the record, Robert Hughes wrote this : "It would be hard to think of a more overdue subject for an exhibition than 'British Art in the 20thCentury' , the panorama of 310 works by some seventy artists at The Royal Academy in London. Our fin de siecle is the natural time for summing up, and the subject of modern British has never been tried in depth by an American museum. No matter what quibbles and demurrals one may have about the choice of this work or that name, no one with half an eye could spend a couple of hours in Burlington House and By leave without asking why the cumulative achievements of British painters and sculptors --as distinct from the popularity of a few individuals, such as Henry Moore, Francis Bacon and David Hockney -- have been so scanted by the official and mainly American annals of modernism. (....) So why do so many of the lesser known things in this show [Hughes mentions Sickert, M Smith, the Vorticists, Spencer, Bomberg, Epstein, P Nash, Freud, Kossoff, Auerbach, Kitaj, Hodgkin] now strike us as not just a footnote to, but an essential part of, the visual culture of the past 80 years : neither "provincial" nor "minor" but singular and grand? What muffled this recognition? Partly, the English themselves : a nation always mingy in valuing its own artists."
Hughes traces the origin of said mingyness to Roger Fry & Bloomsbury (Clive Bell et al)'s valorisation of everything French and the denigration of everything English. Thank God Provincial England & the Colonies saved me from most of that; even when New York was at its most attractive I hadnt realized that the assumed price of the new was the heads of the artists I'd grown up with!
9
Off the record, John Piper explains : "For twenty years the Paris Post-Impressionists had been making clear and definitive statements. They could not be ignored. By 1938 the looming war made the clear but closed world of abstract art untenable for me. It made the whole pattern and structure of thousands of English sites more precious as they became more likely to disappear. Anyway, what I had learned was now part of me, and an integral and prominent part at that. The abstract practice taught me a lot that I would not have learned without it, and all the time I had hold, through the collages, of a lifeline to natural appearances -- and so to early Palmer, to Turner, early and late (topographical and less purely topographical) and to our whole Romantic tradition in which it has always been possible for meaningful details to shine like beacons in the damp, misty evanescence of our beautiful island light and weather." Richard Ingrams comments, "What Piper could never shed was his nationality and upbringing, as he was half-expected to do by the extremists of the Modern art movement, whose aim was to reproduce a supposedly international style. He has therefore been dismissed in some quarters as provincial, a slur that could be, and probably has been, levelled at most great English artists --Blake, Samuel Palmer, Constable --who never went far beyond their native England.(....)Being an English or British painter meant resigning oneself to the probable lack of any international recognition." p22, Piper's Places (Chatto & Windus/The Hogarth Press, 1983).
This introduces the cultural dimension, melding political & emotional, and precisely what informs the "nativism" I often air.
Here's Peter Fuller on Piper and the other themes I'm constantly meditating : "Piper has always been a painter of English landscape (....) through a conspicuously English sensibility. But if he sought a continuity with romantic traditions in English culture, it was a replenished continuity. His painting affirms that though life in the twentieth century necessarily involves a changed vision, and changed values, it need not, or perhaps ought not, to involve some absolute, philistine rupture with the achievements of our cultural past, nor yet with art's capacity to give pleasure through decoration." (from Images of God, p96, 1985.) Rereading Peter Fuller recently I feel the enormous loss his tragically early death was for British criticism...
10
23-01-08
Could be, of course, that Robert Hughes isnt quotable, writing too far outside of the local academics' pale. And in the Australian context, Giles Auty is definitely persona non grata if one remembers his stroppy vacation here in the '90s. Ironically, some of his art criticism echoed one's own responses to the broad swathe of awfulness apparently authorised by postmodernism's this that & the other. However, in the prestigious Peter Nahum catalogue for its British survey show of 1988, there's Auty making the very same points as Hughes. He refers to the 'Tate Gallery Affair' of 1954, when John Rothenstein struck Douglas Cooper, during the Diaghileff exhibition at Forbes House, in what Peter Nahum considered a justified & symbolic defence of what Auty calls "the continuing worth of home-produced art and traditions in the face of that long line of francophiles and advocates of international modernism who saw fit to belittle the domestic product." He reasons that "the dominance of mainstream modernism endured only 20 years from the mid-Fifties to the mid-Seventies and subsequent post-modern practice has merely re-established the pluralism of the pre-war . Significantly, two of the major British painters of this century, Stanley Spencer and Lucian Freud, have not been modernists in a formal sense. Such strands and cross-currents in art are an irritant to the neat patterns of progress modern art-historians prefer to project. The influence of Picasso dominated the lifes of certain British artists while affecting others not at all. Is this evidence of insularity or individualism? The Slade School under Tonks, reputedly the least sympathetic or flexible of teachers, gave rise to a galaxy of talents unrivalled by any other school, anywhere. The paradoxes of modern art have long outlived Roger Fry's sweeping generalisations. " (Cross-Section : British Art in the Twentieth Century; Peter Nahum, 1988)
11
(25-01-08)
One man seems to know his subject, the other is winging it! One (Stephens) reports on what he elicits from the curators and what's there to be seen; the other (Nelson) seems intent on pushing along his rather squeeky old barrow, and cant have seen the same exhibition, since his optic is historically & aesthetically clouded by the unreconstructed cliche regarding the merit of both British art & the efficacy of the formalist rationale. However, I'm the first to agree with Alan Pose (who initially suggested I must have read a different piece by Nelson to the one he'd seen!) that the reviews must be praised for having stimulated a discussion we've enjoyed several times a week for the last couple of months. Indeed, this recent period could be called Modern Britain, comprising the wonderful show (visited two, three, four, five times & more by people I know --Ken Parker, for example, six times!), the reviews, and the discussion about pictures, painters, Modernism, Formalism, internationalism, the local...
12
21-03-08
In a discussion about cultural reference, which soon focussed upon "Englishness", on the Leafe Press (UK) blog recently, its editor, Alan Baker, suggested to me that distance from home might deepen one's regard for many features the native happily assumes --and I suppose I do bang on a bit about hedgerows, lanes, woods, fields, clumps, The Lark Rising, Neo-Romanticism, St Ives, Keeping Up Appearances & Old Thumper ale! But legacy is certainly a large aspect of the impact of the Modern Britain show for me. I'm home from home, returned to the swathe of British art I knew from Southampton Art Gallery through my teens and to particular artists I've followed since my commuting between Melbourne & the UK began in earnest in 1987, by which time my involvement with the international avant-garde had practically dissolved. And so might legacy be the issue for colleagues who're not all expatriates either. British painting for them, despite its public subordination to European & American art, is evidently something they continue to reckon with. One might deduce then that despite the USA, the EEC & ASEAN, the British reference continues for a formidable quotient of Australian society. It might also be that what is identified in such a large body of art work, and as successfully eclectic a show as I've seen (--and suddenly my heart's pounding at the thought of a post-1960 show which would pose the question, What happened after our blockbuster's cut-off date? that is to say, what happened to painting as the profound practice Modern Britain presented? and what happened with the bourgeoning & noticeably British abstraction and to the figure & landscape streams? The NGV's Hodgkins & Sydney's huge Hockney plein-air already offer answers but with so many chapters of the story to fill-in let's not leave it too long --2010, 2015 at the latest?!), that the Modern Britain exhibition constitutes a sufficiently strong statement of regional art to demonstrate the folly of the claim for distinctions & value judgements informed by a determinist formalism & historical progressivism's set of mutual exclusivities.
That painting, per se, neednt be a perfunctory means to a dubious end, might be this show's greatest inspiration. Painting is mightier than the video-installation, believe me! It is the newer form must establish itself; painting & drawing have nothing to justify in terms of technology. The primeval means are a strength; it is the sophisticated means whose results at this time are so primitive.
The surrender of definition & judgement before the supposed volume of contemporary work was always disingenuous, actually indicating a failure of critical & perceptual nerve. Periodic bets on the state of the art are essential, especially when the flux in which the tradition is always to be found is as frenetic as it is today.
After this show, I can imagine a curatorial enthusiasm for the Australian (even Australasian) representations & speculations along the same lines as Modern Britain... There's no time to lose!
13
Modern Britain, 1900-1960 is not so much a historical journey as a historical hop-scotch. How the British interacted with Europe and, post-WW2, with America, and European art similarly engaged, is the example of regional art anywhere & everywhere, especially today in the global society (think of contemporary art from Asia). There are no backwaters --later times are always likely to redeem the seeming relics & oddities. Backwaters mostly reflect stagnant criticism.
Modern Britain felt contemporary, that is to say feasible as practice in terms of means & visions. The point about the Dutch Master (still-life or portrait), the Velasquez, El Greco, Van Gogh, Cezanne, Picasso; the point about Constable, Turner, of pre-Raphaelitism, whatever, is that influence is dynamic. The original is also dynamised by its extension and vice-versa. Echoes & variations cant help but retrieve & replenish. Influence is life.
My favourites? The Johns, brother & sister, and the marvellous threesome of John, Lees & Innes; the Camden Road cameo; Passmore, Gore, Sutherland; Frances Hodgkins, exotic yet graceful; Paul Nash's magnificent wall of topographically coherent yet visionary landscapes, ditto Hitchens whose detail's all wash as though line; the architectonic & sumptuous Reynolds; the room of Spencers, ditto the Bratbys; the half-walls of Tunnards, Bawdens; the unforgetable war memorial; ah, all these & then gems here & there, Peploe, Piper, Ravillious,Smith, Jones, Bomberg, Moore, Nicholson, Wood, Wallis, Gertler,Buhler...
The most glaring omission was Lanyon, and to think the NGV actually owns Mullion Bay -- and John Nash by the sea instead of one of his glorious landscapes. The biggest joke : John Berger's 50s wall-text castigating John Bratby's kitchen sink for its rampant consumerism (wouldnt you love to have hit him with a ration-book?)! Almost as funny, the Jekyll & Hyde juxtaposition of hygenic Bowen & toxic Passmore portraits. The last word : assuredly the wall-text quoting a '30s Paul Nash, to the effect that the problem facing artists was how to be modern and British as well. But no doubt at all, Modern Britain, 1900-1960 provided a convergence of the instinctual & learned solutions.
--fin, 22-03-08Kris Hemensley
1
Would you like to write it then, Wallace? Oh, you've already written it. Hmmm. "I was of three minds", yeah, yeah. To have the three combine or coalesce; or, simply, one to concentrate. But there's another blackbird -- there! "Who can pick up the weight of Britain, / Who can move the German load / Or say to the French here is France again? // It is nothing, no great thing, nor man / Of ten brilliancies of battered gold / And fortunate stone. It moves its parade / Of motions in the mind and heart, // A gorgeous fortitude. Medium man / In February hears the imagination's hymns / And sees its images, its motions / And multitude of motions // And feels the imagination's mercies, / In a season more than sun and south wind, / Something returning from a deeper quarter, / A glacier running through delirium, // Making this heavy rock a place, / Which is not of our lives composed . . . / Lightly and lightly, O my land, / Move lightly through the air again." [Imago, 1948] Hmmm. An echo in my head of F. M.Ford's thought about the historical composition of the English which, in America's case after the 2nd World War, is the tale of a similar roosting. Thus New York's supplanting of Europe, yeah, yeah,one of those consoling ideas of youth which seemed then the keenest thought and not at all without a grain of truth. But the years pass and the New World's moment also passes; all that's subsumed as the International Style, grown in America, imported by everyone else, dulls as well. And all along one's been wondering what happened to Britain, to Germany, to France, what happened to Europe, what happened to the sovereignties of the rest of the world?
2
It was much anticipated to say the least. Several months out and the enthusiasm was building among friends including a bevy of local painters. For years Alan Pose & I have consulted the house copy of Anne Kirker & Peter Tomory's British Painting, 1800-1990, in Australian & New Zealand Public Collections (Beagle Press, 1997). We've imagined the show that could be mounted upon the foundation of our own Melbourne (NGV) collection; welcomed the little tasters along the way, always hoping for the bigger splash!
In that indispensable book's introduction, Anne Kirker writes, "In addition to providing a comprehensive listing of British paintings currently held in public collections in Australia & New Zealand, it could serve as an entry into a number of research topics, such as tracing the reception of British art in Australia..." (p9)
Anne Kirker was also the curator of the National Art Gallery of New Zealand's survey show, The First Fifty Years : British Art of the Twentieth Century(Wellington, 1981), admitting "an essentially modernist approach" but hoping "at the same time to make clear the overall diversity and richness of British art during the last fifty years of this century." The catalogue for the New Zealand show reproduces several of the pictures also found in the Melbourne show, the most striking of which is Gertler's classically sculptural yet palpably modern half-nude, The Straw Hat (1924).
And where is Anne Kirker now? Writing finely honed poems in Brisbane...
3
Spencer Gore's glorious The Icknield Way (housed at the Art Gallery of New South Wales) graces the book's cover --no wonder my wondering at the familiarity of its reproduction in The Australian, illustrating Andrew Stephens review --we've been looking at it (without studying it) for a decade! And then seeing it in the flesh at the show -- not as vast as I'd imagined but big enough! Big enough as anthem for the discussion, the best of several supported by the show, concerning landscape in itself and as the subject in the pincer of the polemics featuring the pictorially identifiable, topographically verifiable on one hand and abstraction's sport with line & colour on the other.
4
The Age & The Australian, chalk & cheese as usual. Robert Nelson's article headlined, "Taking modernist out of the modern"; Andrew Stephens, "Landscape of Tumult".
Keywords & phrases in Nelson : "moderation of its modernists"; "something too suspicious in the British psyche, something too sceptical and pragmatic, to bring off the formalist convictions and conceptual confidence of radical modernism"; "soft modernism"; "decorative appeal"; "lacklustre and messy, failed modernism" (this in relation to Tunnard, Nash, Power, Cant, Piper, Hitchens, Vaughan, Epstein; lemons & pears aside, Nash & Hitchens, Tunnard & Piper, 'lacklustre & messy' ?); "fatally brown and dull" (of Spencer's "allegorical work of the '30s"); "heroic modernism" (its general absence, that is)...
Keywords & phrases in Stephens : "a complete surprise" (of Reynolds large paintings); "romantic British landscape convention"; "such a wealth of great British art...in Australasian galleries" (unaware of the Kirker-Tomory register?); "a whole rhapsody of themes that might have formed smaller, discrete shows in themselves : brilliant landscapes, voluptuous nudes, fascinating portraiture, still-lives, war-artists' work, post-war modernity"; "vibrant riot of colour"; "luxuriantly vivid works" (of M Smith, Bomberg, Sutherland, Holmes, Passmore); "the threat imposed on the classic landscape of the imagination" (re the neo-romantics); "a captivating vista that melds social, political and art history with the broader canvas upon which it all happens : the land beneath our feet"...
5
(30/31-12-07)
I'm sorry Robert Nelson, you probably read it when it was published --Robert Hughes, that is, in Time magazine, 1987 --but only read by yours truly today as Cathy O'Brien & I pick through our spoils from Bendigo's illustrious Book Now second-hander. Hughes article, English Art in the 20thCentury, is collected in his book, Nothing, If Not Critical (Harvill, 1991), bought --I must get this in --before walking through Rosalind Park in mid-summer Northern Victorian dry heat and ascending to the Bendigo Art Gallery to see The Long Weekend : Australian Artists in France, 1918-1939, the lovely book-end of a sort to Modern Britain, which is the actual destination of this note.
6
A wall-text at The Long Weekend exhibition seems to me utterly apropos a conversation Modern Britain inspires and to another aroused by Nelson's review's curiously ideological sideswipes; words to the affect that most of the Aussie Parisiennes resisted the modernist styles of that time & place, were happy to be there and to continue in their own sweet ways. And that is the point : jettison the notion of progress for the arrogance it is and in our time at least regard all modes as legitimate & contemporaneous, retaining one's discriminations for works in themselves. Stylistic or modal differences might be considered genre, something literature & film are able to accommodate (although we're aware of the time it sometimes takes for work to be recognized for those qualities appreciated beyond the genre). A moot point is whether the liveliness of a work emanates from style or subject, but it wouldnt be much of a work if these were so evidently separable. Style in art within the general sense of progress has been synonymous with historical time, but once progress as punitive paradigm dissolves, when style is particular and not the inevitable or logical generality, something else obtains.
7
The human warmth or palpability of Bessie Davidson's apartment interiors --their authenticity I'd like to say, their, as-it-were, habitable reality --in The Long Weekend exhibition were, to my eye, easily distinguishable from the exact line & application, technically perfect painting of Hilda Rex Nicholas, Stella Bowen & others. She was (they all were) modern but not modernist... In Davidson there's impressionism, Cezanne, perhaps something of Braque & co's generic encapsulation, density, congested enclosure, but most of all she's a la her own personable mode --aeons from Robert Nelson's vaunted "heroic" and none the worse, contra formalist-progressivist thinking, for it. [P.S. 10-03-08. Looking at Vuillard's Mme Bonnard With Her Dog (1907) at the NGV, reminded of the qualities I responded to in Bessie Davidson. The illusion of depth in the panelled construction; figure on chair, dog in foreground, curtained door behind, and another room behind these. The soft warmth of the colours translates into the words I've used before, human, palpable. Maybe too the post-impressionist warmth I see in Spencer Gore, Harold Gilman...]
8
For the record, Robert Hughes wrote this : "It would be hard to think of a more overdue subject for an exhibition than 'British Art in the 20thCentury' , the panorama of 310 works by some seventy artists at The Royal Academy in London. Our fin de siecle is the natural time for summing up, and the subject of modern British has never been tried in depth by an American museum. No matter what quibbles and demurrals one may have about the choice of this work or that name, no one with half an eye could spend a couple of hours in Burlington House and By leave without asking why the cumulative achievements of British painters and sculptors --as distinct from the popularity of a few individuals, such as Henry Moore, Francis Bacon and David Hockney -- have been so scanted by the official and mainly American annals of modernism. (....) So why do so many of the lesser known things in this show [Hughes mentions Sickert, M Smith, the Vorticists, Spencer, Bomberg, Epstein, P Nash, Freud, Kossoff, Auerbach, Kitaj, Hodgkin] now strike us as not just a footnote to, but an essential part of, the visual culture of the past 80 years : neither "provincial" nor "minor" but singular and grand? What muffled this recognition? Partly, the English themselves : a nation always mingy in valuing its own artists."
Hughes traces the origin of said mingyness to Roger Fry & Bloomsbury (Clive Bell et al)'s valorisation of everything French and the denigration of everything English. Thank God Provincial England & the Colonies saved me from most of that; even when New York was at its most attractive I hadnt realized that the assumed price of the new was the heads of the artists I'd grown up with!
9
Off the record, John Piper explains : "For twenty years the Paris Post-Impressionists had been making clear and definitive statements. They could not be ignored. By 1938 the looming war made the clear but closed world of abstract art untenable for me. It made the whole pattern and structure of thousands of English sites more precious as they became more likely to disappear. Anyway, what I had learned was now part of me, and an integral and prominent part at that. The abstract practice taught me a lot that I would not have learned without it, and all the time I had hold, through the collages, of a lifeline to natural appearances -- and so to early Palmer, to Turner, early and late (topographical and less purely topographical) and to our whole Romantic tradition in which it has always been possible for meaningful details to shine like beacons in the damp, misty evanescence of our beautiful island light and weather." Richard Ingrams comments, "What Piper could never shed was his nationality and upbringing, as he was half-expected to do by the extremists of the Modern art movement, whose aim was to reproduce a supposedly international style. He has therefore been dismissed in some quarters as provincial, a slur that could be, and probably has been, levelled at most great English artists --Blake, Samuel Palmer, Constable --who never went far beyond their native England.(....)Being an English or British painter meant resigning oneself to the probable lack of any international recognition." p22, Piper's Places (Chatto & Windus/The Hogarth Press, 1983).
This introduces the cultural dimension, melding political & emotional, and precisely what informs the "nativism" I often air.
Here's Peter Fuller on Piper and the other themes I'm constantly meditating : "Piper has always been a painter of English landscape (....) through a conspicuously English sensibility. But if he sought a continuity with romantic traditions in English culture, it was a replenished continuity. His painting affirms that though life in the twentieth century necessarily involves a changed vision, and changed values, it need not, or perhaps ought not, to involve some absolute, philistine rupture with the achievements of our cultural past, nor yet with art's capacity to give pleasure through decoration." (from Images of God, p96, 1985.) Rereading Peter Fuller recently I feel the enormous loss his tragically early death was for British criticism...
10
23-01-08
Could be, of course, that Robert Hughes isnt quotable, writing too far outside of the local academics' pale. And in the Australian context, Giles Auty is definitely persona non grata if one remembers his stroppy vacation here in the '90s. Ironically, some of his art criticism echoed one's own responses to the broad swathe of awfulness apparently authorised by postmodernism's this that & the other. However, in the prestigious Peter Nahum catalogue for its British survey show of 1988, there's Auty making the very same points as Hughes. He refers to the 'Tate Gallery Affair' of 1954, when John Rothenstein struck Douglas Cooper, during the Diaghileff exhibition at Forbes House, in what Peter Nahum considered a justified & symbolic defence of what Auty calls "the continuing worth of home-produced art and traditions in the face of that long line of francophiles and advocates of international modernism who saw fit to belittle the domestic product." He reasons that "the dominance of mainstream modernism endured only 20 years from the mid-Fifties to the mid-Seventies and subsequent post-modern practice has merely re-established the pluralism of the pre-war . Significantly, two of the major British painters of this century, Stanley Spencer and Lucian Freud, have not been modernists in a formal sense. Such strands and cross-currents in art are an irritant to the neat patterns of progress modern art-historians prefer to project. The influence of Picasso dominated the lifes of certain British artists while affecting others not at all. Is this evidence of insularity or individualism? The Slade School under Tonks, reputedly the least sympathetic or flexible of teachers, gave rise to a galaxy of talents unrivalled by any other school, anywhere. The paradoxes of modern art have long outlived Roger Fry's sweeping generalisations. " (Cross-Section : British Art in the Twentieth Century; Peter Nahum, 1988)
11
(25-01-08)
One man seems to know his subject, the other is winging it! One (Stephens) reports on what he elicits from the curators and what's there to be seen; the other (Nelson) seems intent on pushing along his rather squeeky old barrow, and cant have seen the same exhibition, since his optic is historically & aesthetically clouded by the unreconstructed cliche regarding the merit of both British art & the efficacy of the formalist rationale. However, I'm the first to agree with Alan Pose (who initially suggested I must have read a different piece by Nelson to the one he'd seen!) that the reviews must be praised for having stimulated a discussion we've enjoyed several times a week for the last couple of months. Indeed, this recent period could be called Modern Britain, comprising the wonderful show (visited two, three, four, five times & more by people I know --Ken Parker, for example, six times!), the reviews, and the discussion about pictures, painters, Modernism, Formalism, internationalism, the local...
12
21-03-08
In a discussion about cultural reference, which soon focussed upon "Englishness", on the Leafe Press (UK) blog recently, its editor, Alan Baker, suggested to me that distance from home might deepen one's regard for many features the native happily assumes --and I suppose I do bang on a bit about hedgerows, lanes, woods, fields, clumps, The Lark Rising, Neo-Romanticism, St Ives, Keeping Up Appearances & Old Thumper ale! But legacy is certainly a large aspect of the impact of the Modern Britain show for me. I'm home from home, returned to the swathe of British art I knew from Southampton Art Gallery through my teens and to particular artists I've followed since my commuting between Melbourne & the UK began in earnest in 1987, by which time my involvement with the international avant-garde had practically dissolved. And so might legacy be the issue for colleagues who're not all expatriates either. British painting for them, despite its public subordination to European & American art, is evidently something they continue to reckon with. One might deduce then that despite the USA, the EEC & ASEAN, the British reference continues for a formidable quotient of Australian society. It might also be that what is identified in such a large body of art work, and as successfully eclectic a show as I've seen (--and suddenly my heart's pounding at the thought of a post-1960 show which would pose the question, What happened after our blockbuster's cut-off date? that is to say, what happened to painting as the profound practice Modern Britain presented? and what happened with the bourgeoning & noticeably British abstraction and to the figure & landscape streams? The NGV's Hodgkins & Sydney's huge Hockney plein-air already offer answers but with so many chapters of the story to fill-in let's not leave it too long --2010, 2015 at the latest?!), that the Modern Britain exhibition constitutes a sufficiently strong statement of regional art to demonstrate the folly of the claim for distinctions & value judgements informed by a determinist formalism & historical progressivism's set of mutual exclusivities.
That painting, per se, neednt be a perfunctory means to a dubious end, might be this show's greatest inspiration. Painting is mightier than the video-installation, believe me! It is the newer form must establish itself; painting & drawing have nothing to justify in terms of technology. The primeval means are a strength; it is the sophisticated means whose results at this time are so primitive.
The surrender of definition & judgement before the supposed volume of contemporary work was always disingenuous, actually indicating a failure of critical & perceptual nerve. Periodic bets on the state of the art are essential, especially when the flux in which the tradition is always to be found is as frenetic as it is today.
After this show, I can imagine a curatorial enthusiasm for the Australian (even Australasian) representations & speculations along the same lines as Modern Britain... There's no time to lose!
13
Modern Britain, 1900-1960 is not so much a historical journey as a historical hop-scotch. How the British interacted with Europe and, post-WW2, with America, and European art similarly engaged, is the example of regional art anywhere & everywhere, especially today in the global society (think of contemporary art from Asia). There are no backwaters --later times are always likely to redeem the seeming relics & oddities. Backwaters mostly reflect stagnant criticism.
Modern Britain felt contemporary, that is to say feasible as practice in terms of means & visions. The point about the Dutch Master (still-life or portrait), the Velasquez, El Greco, Van Gogh, Cezanne, Picasso; the point about Constable, Turner, of pre-Raphaelitism, whatever, is that influence is dynamic. The original is also dynamised by its extension and vice-versa. Echoes & variations cant help but retrieve & replenish. Influence is life.
My favourites? The Johns, brother & sister, and the marvellous threesome of John, Lees & Innes; the Camden Road cameo; Passmore, Gore, Sutherland; Frances Hodgkins, exotic yet graceful; Paul Nash's magnificent wall of topographically coherent yet visionary landscapes, ditto Hitchens whose detail's all wash as though line; the architectonic & sumptuous Reynolds; the room of Spencers, ditto the Bratbys; the half-walls of Tunnards, Bawdens; the unforgetable war memorial; ah, all these & then gems here & there, Peploe, Piper, Ravillious,Smith, Jones, Bomberg, Moore, Nicholson, Wood, Wallis, Gertler,Buhler...
The most glaring omission was Lanyon, and to think the NGV actually owns Mullion Bay -- and John Nash by the sea instead of one of his glorious landscapes. The biggest joke : John Berger's 50s wall-text castigating John Bratby's kitchen sink for its rampant consumerism (wouldnt you love to have hit him with a ration-book?)! Almost as funny, the Jekyll & Hyde juxtaposition of hygenic Bowen & toxic Passmore portraits. The last word : assuredly the wall-text quoting a '30s Paul Nash, to the effect that the problem facing artists was how to be modern and British as well. But no doubt at all, Modern Britain, 1900-1960 provided a convergence of the instinctual & learned solutions.
--fin, 22-03-08Kris Hemensley
Sunday, November 18, 2007
MORE ART CRITICISM, #4
ROGER HILTON'S SUGAR, Kelvin Corcoran (Leafe Press, Nottingham, UK), 2005.
What does the poet want of the painting? A poem; the absolute given ("world", "language") such as poetry would die for (though the good chance the painter's done just that is temporarily forgotten).
To the poet, the painting is already part of the world --a step or a word away from the impenetrability one might also call nothing (as in how & what to say anything); a speaking not merely audible but coherent.
The poet in the wake of the painting joins a conversation, answers because spoken to, enrolls the painting in the ventriloquy that's largely the art. To the poet the articulate painter is the painting(s) speaking. The oracle. To the poet , painter is often who one would like to be, doing, naturally, what one would like to do.
Kelvin Corcoran's Roger Hilton's Sugar (Leafe Press, UK, 2005) is as candle to moth for me if only because Hilton's one of the St Ives school, the most personal artist of that distinctively English modernism flowering at mid-century. He's one of mine, as it were, since in addition to assuaging my ex-pat's nativist fascination, he fields the formal contradiction of contemporary painting, dealing both abstractly & figuratively with the challenges of representation & feeling.
Hilton's line-drawing, Seated Nude 1972, is wonderful on the cover & also heads the sequence of poems. It's similar to the many female nudes in Night Letters and selected drawings (selected by Rosemary Hilton, produced by Newlyn Orion Galleries Ltd., 1980), those he confesses to becoming bored with in that remarkable tragi-comic testimony. The title of Corcoran's book refers to Hilton's great word-painting, Fuck You Wheres My Sugar (gouache, 1973), which I've only ever seen in reproduction in Adrian Lewis's The Last Days of Hilton (Sansom & Company, UK, 1996).
So what does Corcoran want of Roger Hilton? In his chapbook, the painter's words, often drawn from Night Letters, & the poet's words, evoking the painter & his works, convulse --sudden image in my head of the moment, in all its film versions, that Dr Frankenstein's creature spasms into life!-- and Roger Hilton appears to be up & about & all around one. My experience of Kelvin Corcoran's poetry is much the same --as though literary culture is the ground, received, mediated --not done to death though, since he tills this particular earth wholeheartedly, his head a pair of hands & no lump of stone --and disport he will, with & upon it (--the problem, if I may say, of intellect in the equation with song (that is, the sound of it, voice defined as subject's truest quiver that'll shake & fork poem (& painting come to that) to disorder's most perfect pitch) --likewise the problem of historian, political analyst, propounding critic --welcoming --could that be true? would that it were! --whatever contradiction, expressed as text, which love exacts. Love? Well of course, love : the body that doesnt mind, the body unbound --"My mind empties around the tower / of Kapetanios Christeas and into the sea", Ino in Against Purity, from New & Selected Poems (Shearsman, 2004) --the sensually responding, data dissolving, feeling, desiring poet come through all-knowing's blaze, relatively unscathed!
Corcoran's a dissenter whose poetics & politics snuggle up cuddly as these times' rad rap expects them to (--his "English Bores", in one poem, who've "co-opted Ashbery", probably line up with his Blair, Bush, Sharon, Milosevic in another poem, "those who are wired to the world, who cannot set ambition aside." --and not much of a charge, really --I mean, any four nobs would do, surely? -Mandela, Arafat, Mugabe, the Pope --but I suspect his foursome are code for "Fascists" or some such, with the despicable Milosevic there to anchor the calumny --Blair & Bush the patsies for the relativist political equation that makes nothing very much of the profound distinction between megalomaniac, racist dictatorship & liberal-democratic society; Sharon included not only as the legendary butcher but cypher for Israel in the Left's lunatic repudiation of her sovereignty (--as though poetry could be "reactionary" in such raw political terms --as though political terms served poetry's definition at all? --but, to be fair, Corcoran is a poet of history who, of course, uses the materials according to his own interest)... And he enrolls Roger Hilton in the same disaffection, disaffiliation... The famous incident of Hilton trying to give away his own CBE -- poignantly in Roger Hilton's Sugar : "I am lying under a bus in St Just / -who wants this fucking medal? / It's a curse on me for staleness, / I could use this gravel, textured to my face, / fairer far than palace walls." -- is more complicated in Jeremy Le Grice as quoted by Adrian Lewis, the contradictory psychology of the anarchist who keeps an eye on career... For Corcoran a feature of his quixotic conjuration, a Hilton whose "Stick it in your pipe" is an inflection of the "brand to stick in the eye of state"...
Probably Hilton's greater role for Corcoran is that of index of Englishness --of England & the English --from out of geology, topography, climate, culture, aesthetics, politics --exemplar of what I think of, from so far away in Australia, as the quirkiness of that marvelous place, not just St Ives but all of England as that magical "secret island". And that's Corcoran himself, hiltoned thus :
THE LANGUAGE OF ART CRITICS
My discontinuous line is sexual, intimate, savage.
your fantastic anatomy my vehicle;
this is what they say - beast, charming I'm sure,
show the whole world, why don't you?
As is your life, so is your line,
a fragment made abstract and broadcast;
the human sensation we die for;
my nudes and other animals dancing.
My horses, carts, boats and flowers
such earthly bodies in motion overlap,
run into one another the quick sensation
behind the big secret behind all thought.
Bow down you Greeks, you ghosts;
I am on the last run, with no feeling in my feet.
So much more one could say... Corcoran's domestication of Pound's dictum in the opening of the second stanza above (& Pound surely inferred in the coupling of the misquotation with giveaway word "broadcast"? --and Jack Spicer's moniker "radio" quite a motif in Corcoran's work generally)... Corcoran's lifting from WS Graham's poem, Lines On Roger Hilton's Watch, the image of Hilton's gaze, "Nothing can replace the long, steady gaze, / face to face with the picture." (Seeing Hilton), against the artist's teasing instruction, from Night Letters, "Never confront either a painting or your wife face to face. They are better seen out of the corner of your eye, while you are entertaining yourself with other things."
(These are observations, not quibbles, about the use a poet makes of historical material --all grist, yes, but something closer to metaphysics emerges than history supposes --or is it simply the natural waywardness of the lyric & what happens to history when it's caught in lyric's throat, tuned on poetry's tongue?)
My heart goes out to Kelvin Corcoran for his English project which is far from simplified in an artist like Hilton, however poetically configured --Hilton & that entire St Ives, & further, neo-Romantic, crew --before, during & after abstract-expressionism; before, during & after postmodernism...
--Kris Hemensley--
November 12-18, 2007
What does the poet want of the painting? A poem; the absolute given ("world", "language") such as poetry would die for (though the good chance the painter's done just that is temporarily forgotten).
To the poet, the painting is already part of the world --a step or a word away from the impenetrability one might also call nothing (as in how & what to say anything); a speaking not merely audible but coherent.
The poet in the wake of the painting joins a conversation, answers because spoken to, enrolls the painting in the ventriloquy that's largely the art. To the poet the articulate painter is the painting(s) speaking. The oracle. To the poet , painter is often who one would like to be, doing, naturally, what one would like to do.
Kelvin Corcoran's Roger Hilton's Sugar (Leafe Press, UK, 2005) is as candle to moth for me if only because Hilton's one of the St Ives school, the most personal artist of that distinctively English modernism flowering at mid-century. He's one of mine, as it were, since in addition to assuaging my ex-pat's nativist fascination, he fields the formal contradiction of contemporary painting, dealing both abstractly & figuratively with the challenges of representation & feeling.
Hilton's line-drawing, Seated Nude 1972, is wonderful on the cover & also heads the sequence of poems. It's similar to the many female nudes in Night Letters and selected drawings (selected by Rosemary Hilton, produced by Newlyn Orion Galleries Ltd., 1980), those he confesses to becoming bored with in that remarkable tragi-comic testimony. The title of Corcoran's book refers to Hilton's great word-painting, Fuck You Wheres My Sugar (gouache, 1973), which I've only ever seen in reproduction in Adrian Lewis's The Last Days of Hilton (Sansom & Company, UK, 1996).
So what does Corcoran want of Roger Hilton? In his chapbook, the painter's words, often drawn from Night Letters, & the poet's words, evoking the painter & his works, convulse --sudden image in my head of the moment, in all its film versions, that Dr Frankenstein's creature spasms into life!-- and Roger Hilton appears to be up & about & all around one. My experience of Kelvin Corcoran's poetry is much the same --as though literary culture is the ground, received, mediated --not done to death though, since he tills this particular earth wholeheartedly, his head a pair of hands & no lump of stone --and disport he will, with & upon it (--the problem, if I may say, of intellect in the equation with song (that is, the sound of it, voice defined as subject's truest quiver that'll shake & fork poem (& painting come to that) to disorder's most perfect pitch) --likewise the problem of historian, political analyst, propounding critic --welcoming --could that be true? would that it were! --whatever contradiction, expressed as text, which love exacts. Love? Well of course, love : the body that doesnt mind, the body unbound --"My mind empties around the tower / of Kapetanios Christeas and into the sea", Ino in Against Purity, from New & Selected Poems (Shearsman, 2004) --the sensually responding, data dissolving, feeling, desiring poet come through all-knowing's blaze, relatively unscathed!
Corcoran's a dissenter whose poetics & politics snuggle up cuddly as these times' rad rap expects them to (--his "English Bores", in one poem, who've "co-opted Ashbery", probably line up with his Blair, Bush, Sharon, Milosevic in another poem, "those who are wired to the world, who cannot set ambition aside." --and not much of a charge, really --I mean, any four nobs would do, surely? -Mandela, Arafat, Mugabe, the Pope --but I suspect his foursome are code for "Fascists" or some such, with the despicable Milosevic there to anchor the calumny --Blair & Bush the patsies for the relativist political equation that makes nothing very much of the profound distinction between megalomaniac, racist dictatorship & liberal-democratic society; Sharon included not only as the legendary butcher but cypher for Israel in the Left's lunatic repudiation of her sovereignty (--as though poetry could be "reactionary" in such raw political terms --as though political terms served poetry's definition at all? --but, to be fair, Corcoran is a poet of history who, of course, uses the materials according to his own interest)... And he enrolls Roger Hilton in the same disaffection, disaffiliation... The famous incident of Hilton trying to give away his own CBE -- poignantly in Roger Hilton's Sugar : "I am lying under a bus in St Just / -who wants this fucking medal? / It's a curse on me for staleness, / I could use this gravel, textured to my face, / fairer far than palace walls." -- is more complicated in Jeremy Le Grice as quoted by Adrian Lewis, the contradictory psychology of the anarchist who keeps an eye on career... For Corcoran a feature of his quixotic conjuration, a Hilton whose "Stick it in your pipe" is an inflection of the "brand to stick in the eye of state"...
Probably Hilton's greater role for Corcoran is that of index of Englishness --of England & the English --from out of geology, topography, climate, culture, aesthetics, politics --exemplar of what I think of, from so far away in Australia, as the quirkiness of that marvelous place, not just St Ives but all of England as that magical "secret island". And that's Corcoran himself, hiltoned thus :
THE LANGUAGE OF ART CRITICS
My discontinuous line is sexual, intimate, savage.
your fantastic anatomy my vehicle;
this is what they say - beast, charming I'm sure,
show the whole world, why don't you?
As is your life, so is your line,
a fragment made abstract and broadcast;
the human sensation we die for;
my nudes and other animals dancing.
My horses, carts, boats and flowers
such earthly bodies in motion overlap,
run into one another the quick sensation
behind the big secret behind all thought.
Bow down you Greeks, you ghosts;
I am on the last run, with no feeling in my feet.
So much more one could say... Corcoran's domestication of Pound's dictum in the opening of the second stanza above (& Pound surely inferred in the coupling of the misquotation with giveaway word "broadcast"? --and Jack Spicer's moniker "radio" quite a motif in Corcoran's work generally)... Corcoran's lifting from WS Graham's poem, Lines On Roger Hilton's Watch, the image of Hilton's gaze, "Nothing can replace the long, steady gaze, / face to face with the picture." (Seeing Hilton), against the artist's teasing instruction, from Night Letters, "Never confront either a painting or your wife face to face. They are better seen out of the corner of your eye, while you are entertaining yourself with other things."
(These are observations, not quibbles, about the use a poet makes of historical material --all grist, yes, but something closer to metaphysics emerges than history supposes --or is it simply the natural waywardness of the lyric & what happens to history when it's caught in lyric's throat, tuned on poetry's tongue?)
My heart goes out to Kelvin Corcoran for his English project which is far from simplified in an artist like Hilton, however poetically configured --Hilton & that entire St Ives, & further, neo-Romantic, crew --before, during & after abstract-expressionism; before, during & after postmodernism...
--Kris Hemensley--
November 12-18, 2007
Wednesday, November 7, 2007
MORE ART CRITICISM, # 3
[KRIS COAD : "WAITING..." , at Diane Tanzer Gallery, Gertrude Street, Fitzroy
October 20-November 17,2007]
WAITING FOR KRIS COAD
As one artist to another : our currency is response. Being a friend of the artist exacerbates the obligation (Robert Duncan : responsibility is the ability to respond), & propels the urgency.
I assume, now, exquisite ceramics from Kris Coad, and the chamotte clay tiles & stools & the bone-china shoes in her new exhibition, Waiting..., reward that expectation. One must constantly remind oneself of the sophistication of her work lest familiarity blunts ones appreciation of her true & tried craft nous. Her piece in the Contamination group-exhibition at the Gasworks, Albert Park (18/10 -28/10/07), is yet another example of her ability to make exquisite ceramic art of simple themes & familiar objects : viewed from the notional front, pillow-cases on a clothes-line; from the back, the garments within the translucent pillow-cases; on the near wall, a product of the entire exhibition's theatre-lighting, the clothes'-like shadows, a wonderful bonus for the particular work.
It's an irony, though, that the deliberate theatrical staging of the Gasworks show, the Gasworks' house-style I think (individually lit pieces within the large darkened area), fully expresses the innate drama of the work itself --a work (Washing Day) which probably wouldnt demand an entire show's focus as does Waiting...'s clearly connected tableaux at Tanzer's. But what the room at Tanzer's required, in my opinion, was a gradation of light appropriate to the different tableaux, especially for one I initially thought was the single piece but as the price-list clearly indicates is in fact three! And, in my mind, those three of seven tableaux do create an installation of their own, utterly different in its suggestivity to the remainder of the room. The expectedly exquisite smaller pieces --e.g., stool, tile, shoes --are disarmingly elegant, but the largest tableaux, the intended work or my fabrication, is something else again!
A week or so ago, on first visiting Kris's exhibition, I assumed that the entire room was an installation, an unfolding though mysterious narrative. And I wasnt going to be diverted by the artist's title or, paradoxically, by the beauty of her tiles, stools, & shoes. I was consumed by the riddle also appreciated, I realized, in the penultimate sentences of Sarah Bond's catalogue-note --"Is there another room to enter and should I remove my own shoes out of respect? Have they been collected here for another purpose?"
Remove my own shoes? O God, I thought, remove myself; so difficult to be there as the awful feeling grew in me & around me that Kris Coad's largest tableaux was no homage to an Asian temple but the ante-room of something like a dungeon of no return, even one of the death camps' ghastly ovens.
Waiting? Of course, objects always await their narrators. They are, if you like, referred subjects themselves --perfect in themselves but inanimate. It is human presence/absence (Buddhist living/dying?) which dynamises them. Whatever they are is not narrative. But mercy : mercy, mercy, mercy : the owners of these shoes werent ever coming back...
One of Kris Coad's signatures is the illuminated object (electric light artfully deployed upon the unique texture of her pieces). So possessed was I by the macabre stillness of the large tableaux that I saw candles within the shoes, little shoe candles, little flickerings for the departed souls, diminutive sepulchres. I wished then for muted lighting or darkness except for the few lit shoes & whatever filtered in from outside the gallery. However, I completely accept the comment made to me by Ursula Dutkiewicz, when we discussed these issues at the Gasworks last week, that there is a world of difference between a commercial gallery & something like the Gasworks, a space given over to its artists. So, of course, one understands & accepts the definitive tension in a commercial gallery between commercial & aesthetic imperatives. Tanzer's does well in this context : the grey wall at right angles to one tableaux, the large white screen contextualising the largest work, are crucial theatrical props. Priceless, as it were.
This is Kris Coad's first large room : her work deserved it! She filled it! No waiting for Kris Coad! The artist's arrived!
--Kris Hemensley
October 28-November 7,2007
October 20-November 17,2007]
WAITING FOR KRIS COAD
As one artist to another : our currency is response. Being a friend of the artist exacerbates the obligation (Robert Duncan : responsibility is the ability to respond), & propels the urgency.
I assume, now, exquisite ceramics from Kris Coad, and the chamotte clay tiles & stools & the bone-china shoes in her new exhibition, Waiting..., reward that expectation. One must constantly remind oneself of the sophistication of her work lest familiarity blunts ones appreciation of her true & tried craft nous. Her piece in the Contamination group-exhibition at the Gasworks, Albert Park (18/10 -28/10/07), is yet another example of her ability to make exquisite ceramic art of simple themes & familiar objects : viewed from the notional front, pillow-cases on a clothes-line; from the back, the garments within the translucent pillow-cases; on the near wall, a product of the entire exhibition's theatre-lighting, the clothes'-like shadows, a wonderful bonus for the particular work.
It's an irony, though, that the deliberate theatrical staging of the Gasworks show, the Gasworks' house-style I think (individually lit pieces within the large darkened area), fully expresses the innate drama of the work itself --a work (Washing Day) which probably wouldnt demand an entire show's focus as does Waiting...'s clearly connected tableaux at Tanzer's. But what the room at Tanzer's required, in my opinion, was a gradation of light appropriate to the different tableaux, especially for one I initially thought was the single piece but as the price-list clearly indicates is in fact three! And, in my mind, those three of seven tableaux do create an installation of their own, utterly different in its suggestivity to the remainder of the room. The expectedly exquisite smaller pieces --e.g., stool, tile, shoes --are disarmingly elegant, but the largest tableaux, the intended work or my fabrication, is something else again!
A week or so ago, on first visiting Kris's exhibition, I assumed that the entire room was an installation, an unfolding though mysterious narrative. And I wasnt going to be diverted by the artist's title or, paradoxically, by the beauty of her tiles, stools, & shoes. I was consumed by the riddle also appreciated, I realized, in the penultimate sentences of Sarah Bond's catalogue-note --"Is there another room to enter and should I remove my own shoes out of respect? Have they been collected here for another purpose?"
Remove my own shoes? O God, I thought, remove myself; so difficult to be there as the awful feeling grew in me & around me that Kris Coad's largest tableaux was no homage to an Asian temple but the ante-room of something like a dungeon of no return, even one of the death camps' ghastly ovens.
Waiting? Of course, objects always await their narrators. They are, if you like, referred subjects themselves --perfect in themselves but inanimate. It is human presence/absence (Buddhist living/dying?) which dynamises them. Whatever they are is not narrative. But mercy : mercy, mercy, mercy : the owners of these shoes werent ever coming back...
One of Kris Coad's signatures is the illuminated object (electric light artfully deployed upon the unique texture of her pieces). So possessed was I by the macabre stillness of the large tableaux that I saw candles within the shoes, little shoe candles, little flickerings for the departed souls, diminutive sepulchres. I wished then for muted lighting or darkness except for the few lit shoes & whatever filtered in from outside the gallery. However, I completely accept the comment made to me by Ursula Dutkiewicz, when we discussed these issues at the Gasworks last week, that there is a world of difference between a commercial gallery & something like the Gasworks, a space given over to its artists. So, of course, one understands & accepts the definitive tension in a commercial gallery between commercial & aesthetic imperatives. Tanzer's does well in this context : the grey wall at right angles to one tableaux, the large white screen contextualising the largest work, are crucial theatrical props. Priceless, as it were.
This is Kris Coad's first large room : her work deserved it! She filled it! No waiting for Kris Coad! The artist's arrived!
--Kris Hemensley
October 28-November 7,2007
Saturday, November 3, 2007
MORE ART CRITICISM
Regarding John Hubbard (in Dorset)
from the Journal[English], Journey 07
Tuesday, 9th October (...) Abed,11-05pm. Nothing much doing in Dorchester -- For a start the spitting rain of Weymouth had become heavy downpour in Dorchester --no chance, therefore, of following the stream into the countryside abutting the town but hidden from it (in the sense of this countryside surprising one when one comes upon it so close to the town centre) -- We visited the Museum wch. was showing paintings by John Hubbard but the thought of 6 Pounds entry x 2 for an exhibition of aerial views of Dorset several of which we could see through the entrance of the gallery room put Naad [Bernard Hemensley] off & therefore me too -- But cards & catalogue of earlier show were inviting --
At Library later on I researched [Googled] John Hubbard and was happy to find his story : from Connecticut, came to UK in 1961. . .He's in his late 60s [70s actually]. . .When I saw Naad again I told him JH was one of ours. . .references to Peter Lanyon, Mark Tobey, Maurice Graves, Zen & Taoism, Chinese poetry. . .Mentioned in dispatches by Peter Fuller. Say no more. The unexpected gift of this Journey. I have his e/mail and will probably follow up.
from little jottings notebook, at the Blue Raddle, Dorchester
Wednesday, 10th October. As luck wd have it (luck? --this is synchronicity, non?) I met the artist, John Hubbard, and only could have done so had we not attended the show y'day and only didnt because we thought entry was 6 Pounds and the view from the doorway was of aerial views which we thought would amount to a couple of paintings on each wall of a type that might not not detain us --
Spoke to JH
tall man, green jumper, runners, corduroys, angular face, distant american tinge to accent -- I'd been aware of him & a woman he'd greeted with hug & kiss -- That's not Dorchester, I thought : he might be the artist! -- When they came alongside (I was riveted by a charcoal of Dartmoor, intrigued by sub-title "The Inland Sea") I listened a while to their conversation then when he caught my eye (and the term "psychogeography" ascribed to Iain Sinclair tickles me again --that intersection of energies wch. can be mapped, wch. actualises what we call synchronicity --& how appealing is that?!)(and isnt that already available --the principle established by Konrad Bayer "map of his head"?) I smiled & sd I apologised for "eavesdropping his conversation" (he was telling his friend that the small oils on paper were done in Sutherland --in Scotland? or did he say that friends of his or children had become fascinated by Sutherland wch. I took to be Graham Sutherland), and sd how much I liked the charcoal -- He said it was alright to eavesdrop : he was "talking for me as well" -- It's always nice to meet new people, he said --I said I'd looked him up on the internet, loved the Rubens detail wch. I'd magnified to the maximum --loved the shape & flow of the tree in the foreground -- Also said I'd picked up on a reviewer's ref. to Peter Lanyon --he was a friend of mine, he said -- With that ref. in mind I'd wondered if I was looking at aerial views? -- He said people often sd. that but he "most strenuously rejected [he] was doing that" -- "Mine arent aerial --they're from the ground up!" -- I told him I was from Oz -- He said he had a picture in Australia -- in Ballarat? I asked [according to internet] -- He thought about it -- yes, there, he said, but s/where else, at the gallery in Melbourne -- I said I'd look out for it -- I congratulated him on his show, left him to his principal admirer and said to a woman who'd approached him same time as I did : sorry for stealing your conversation! Not at all, she laughed, I can talk to him now! -- Sense then of a local art scene --
from the Journal
Thursday, 11-10-07, in the conservatory, 5pm (...) Re- John Hubbard -- It was flicking thru catalogue of charcoal drawings in the Museum foyer that caught me -- Naad thought we'd seen his work years ago -- and knew s/thing of him, e.g. Abbotsbury Gardens, designing a garden -- And when I looked him up on the internet I had all the confirmation I needed. It's always been an imperative to connect with &/or contact the local [Dorset] scene -- [Jack] Clemo back in '87 or '90, the Powys family, the Portland gallery/Margaret Somerville, Anne Axenskold, the Canadian painter [Marie Laywine Cooper, in Abbotsbury] et al -- John Hubbard is part of that home-making for me and by extension for Naad also -- I found an e/ contact for him on his web-site wch. decided the issue : I now had to see the latest show, aerial views or not!
Couldnt believe that the show was free entry --what a faux-pas previous day -- And then deducing the older, tall, grey-haired chap in green jumper & runners was him --darting around the gallery, greeting a woman admirer & guiding her from one painting to the next -- Had to be him! --
A chap in waistcoat over white shirt, a moustachio Bootsy & Snudge character, was the first to introduce himself --a fan evidently who referred to previous [of JH's] shows -- And so when JH & woman friend came alongside I just had to say s/thing!--
I like the Dartmoor charcoal very much, I said, and also the 4 small works adjacent -- "From memory" or "from my head" he'd told his friend -- & "Sutherland" wch. cd have been the region of Scotland or the esteemed painter!
I mentioned the ref. to P. Lanyon in review on internet --wondered if I was looking at aerial views? Lanyon a great friend but no, he "strenuously" denied that his pictures are aerial -- my look up not down! he said -- For example, the large cliff & sea & sky painting I heard him describing to his friend -- I mentioned Lanyon's Mullion Bay in Melbourne --he seemed to know it and agreed people looking at Lanyon could interpret his own work in similar fashion --
I told him how taken I'd been by the Rubens (detail) on the internet --the sensuous foreground tree -- I'm sure we'll talk anon. . .
Sunday, 21-10-07 [Melbourne] (...) I've enjoyed reading & re-reading John Hubbard's catalogue note for his Spanish paintings & drawings (Peter Scott Gallery, Lancaster) earlier this year. I'm particularly touched by the reference to Dorset & Cornish locations juxtaposed with the 20thCentury painting references one accepts as the major tradition & also those refs. to the Ancient Chinese & the Tao --for example, on the subject of the artificiality of horizons, "While I have only been to Tresco [Scilly Isles] twice (and you can't see the horizon within that garden), I have known both Porthmeor & Chesil for over 40 years. I used to divide my paintings into introspective (woodlands) & extrovert (open landscapes) but for some years that has ceased to apply. There is the endless fascination of water, its movement & shifting light is the essence of life itself, as the Chinese realised long ago. it is an important part of the Tao."
-------------------------------------
November 3rd, 2007, Melbourne
from the Journal[English], Journey 07
Tuesday, 9th October (...) Abed,11-05pm. Nothing much doing in Dorchester -- For a start the spitting rain of Weymouth had become heavy downpour in Dorchester --no chance, therefore, of following the stream into the countryside abutting the town but hidden from it (in the sense of this countryside surprising one when one comes upon it so close to the town centre) -- We visited the Museum wch. was showing paintings by John Hubbard but the thought of 6 Pounds entry x 2 for an exhibition of aerial views of Dorset several of which we could see through the entrance of the gallery room put Naad [Bernard Hemensley] off & therefore me too -- But cards & catalogue of earlier show were inviting --
At Library later on I researched [Googled] John Hubbard and was happy to find his story : from Connecticut, came to UK in 1961. . .He's in his late 60s [70s actually]. . .When I saw Naad again I told him JH was one of ours. . .references to Peter Lanyon, Mark Tobey, Maurice Graves, Zen & Taoism, Chinese poetry. . .Mentioned in dispatches by Peter Fuller. Say no more. The unexpected gift of this Journey. I have his e/mail and will probably follow up.
from little jottings notebook, at the Blue Raddle, Dorchester
Wednesday, 10th October. As luck wd have it (luck? --this is synchronicity, non?) I met the artist, John Hubbard, and only could have done so had we not attended the show y'day and only didnt because we thought entry was 6 Pounds and the view from the doorway was of aerial views which we thought would amount to a couple of paintings on each wall of a type that might not not detain us --
Spoke to JH
tall man, green jumper, runners, corduroys, angular face, distant american tinge to accent -- I'd been aware of him & a woman he'd greeted with hug & kiss -- That's not Dorchester, I thought : he might be the artist! -- When they came alongside (I was riveted by a charcoal of Dartmoor, intrigued by sub-title "The Inland Sea") I listened a while to their conversation then when he caught my eye (and the term "psychogeography" ascribed to Iain Sinclair tickles me again --that intersection of energies wch. can be mapped, wch. actualises what we call synchronicity --& how appealing is that?!)(and isnt that already available --the principle established by Konrad Bayer "map of his head"?) I smiled & sd I apologised for "eavesdropping his conversation" (he was telling his friend that the small oils on paper were done in Sutherland --in Scotland? or did he say that friends of his or children had become fascinated by Sutherland wch. I took to be Graham Sutherland), and sd how much I liked the charcoal -- He said it was alright to eavesdrop : he was "talking for me as well" -- It's always nice to meet new people, he said --I said I'd looked him up on the internet, loved the Rubens detail wch. I'd magnified to the maximum --loved the shape & flow of the tree in the foreground -- Also said I'd picked up on a reviewer's ref. to Peter Lanyon --he was a friend of mine, he said -- With that ref. in mind I'd wondered if I was looking at aerial views? -- He said people often sd. that but he "most strenuously rejected [he] was doing that" -- "Mine arent aerial --they're from the ground up!" -- I told him I was from Oz -- He said he had a picture in Australia -- in Ballarat? I asked [according to internet] -- He thought about it -- yes, there, he said, but s/where else, at the gallery in Melbourne -- I said I'd look out for it -- I congratulated him on his show, left him to his principal admirer and said to a woman who'd approached him same time as I did : sorry for stealing your conversation! Not at all, she laughed, I can talk to him now! -- Sense then of a local art scene --
from the Journal
Thursday, 11-10-07, in the conservatory, 5pm (...) Re- John Hubbard -- It was flicking thru catalogue of charcoal drawings in the Museum foyer that caught me -- Naad thought we'd seen his work years ago -- and knew s/thing of him, e.g. Abbotsbury Gardens, designing a garden -- And when I looked him up on the internet I had all the confirmation I needed. It's always been an imperative to connect with &/or contact the local [Dorset] scene -- [Jack] Clemo back in '87 or '90, the Powys family, the Portland gallery/Margaret Somerville, Anne Axenskold, the Canadian painter [Marie Laywine Cooper, in Abbotsbury] et al -- John Hubbard is part of that home-making for me and by extension for Naad also -- I found an e/ contact for him on his web-site wch. decided the issue : I now had to see the latest show, aerial views or not!
Couldnt believe that the show was free entry --what a faux-pas previous day -- And then deducing the older, tall, grey-haired chap in green jumper & runners was him --darting around the gallery, greeting a woman admirer & guiding her from one painting to the next -- Had to be him! --
A chap in waistcoat over white shirt, a moustachio Bootsy & Snudge character, was the first to introduce himself --a fan evidently who referred to previous [of JH's] shows -- And so when JH & woman friend came alongside I just had to say s/thing!--
I like the Dartmoor charcoal very much, I said, and also the 4 small works adjacent -- "From memory" or "from my head" he'd told his friend -- & "Sutherland" wch. cd have been the region of Scotland or the esteemed painter!
I mentioned the ref. to P. Lanyon in review on internet --wondered if I was looking at aerial views? Lanyon a great friend but no, he "strenuously" denied that his pictures are aerial -- my look up not down! he said -- For example, the large cliff & sea & sky painting I heard him describing to his friend -- I mentioned Lanyon's Mullion Bay in Melbourne --he seemed to know it and agreed people looking at Lanyon could interpret his own work in similar fashion --
I told him how taken I'd been by the Rubens (detail) on the internet --the sensuous foreground tree -- I'm sure we'll talk anon. . .
Sunday, 21-10-07 [Melbourne] (...) I've enjoyed reading & re-reading John Hubbard's catalogue note for his Spanish paintings & drawings (Peter Scott Gallery, Lancaster) earlier this year. I'm particularly touched by the reference to Dorset & Cornish locations juxtaposed with the 20thCentury painting references one accepts as the major tradition & also those refs. to the Ancient Chinese & the Tao --for example, on the subject of the artificiality of horizons, "While I have only been to Tresco [Scilly Isles] twice (and you can't see the horizon within that garden), I have known both Porthmeor & Chesil for over 40 years. I used to divide my paintings into introspective (woodlands) & extrovert (open landscapes) but for some years that has ceased to apply. There is the endless fascination of water, its movement & shifting light is the essence of life itself, as the Chinese realised long ago. it is an important part of the Tao."
-------------------------------------
November 3rd, 2007, Melbourne
Wednesday, July 11, 2007
KRIS HEMENSLEY ARCHIVE OF MISCELLANEOUS CRITICAL WRITINGS, # 12
EXHIBITION NOTE ON & FOR STAN FARLEY's HAIRST, SCULPTURE; 1-16 February, 2006; at Gallery 101, Collins Street, Melbourne.
Mention humour in our time and you evoke Duchamp & Beckett & their legion of subordinates whose trajectories too often intersect the banal & puerile for any distinction to remain. Stan Farley's work gurgles with humour though it may well be the philosophical chuckle on the other side of political tears. Arguably he's possessed of Nietzsche's "golden laughter", described as the philosophers' peak grade. The gods also laughed, Nietzsche speculated; "they cannot refrain from laughter even in the presence of holy acts."
Moving from canvas painting to sculpture, from poetic painter (I'm thinking of Farley's show at Tolarno's, twenty-odd years ago, for which William Blake & Samuel Palmer remains my abiding sense & feel of it : golden wheatfields over looked by the angels) to painter poet, isn't an art-world strategy but a life-world imperative.
"What's the world without words worth?" one of his plaques proclaims. The sentence, recalling Ian Hamilton-Finlay's stone carvings & gnomic humour, isn't required to substantiate his poetic thought but does so anyway. The pun redeems Wordsworth as Nature Poet, spiritual seeker in times of upheaval, within a question about language & ultimate meaning. I feel Stan Farley's actually proposing that without words (poetry), life is worthless; additionally that meaning is garnered from speech & text, not from materials per se.
An exquisite paradox is that his work is hardly immaterial, for it's as much an expression of the materials as a use of them. Wood, for example, demands its outgrowth as though the sculpture were foliage of an essential idea.
Stan Farley's work abounds in personality. No self-portrait as such but a diffusion of identity & necessity as natural as his dearest Australian, European & British landscapes --those one imagines him recognizing as the contours of earthly bliss.
Somehow, the more personal & particular the practice the more redolent of the universal it seems to be.
His art is to successfully encourage a sense of familiarity; to make guests of strangers, shepherding us through the palimpsest he can't help but recover of the daily straight & narrow.
---------------------------------------------------
[This version of the Note contains the slightest corrections to that printed for Stan Farley's exhibition. On the night, John Wolseley launched the exhibition and the Note was available to be read.]
Mention humour in our time and you evoke Duchamp & Beckett & their legion of subordinates whose trajectories too often intersect the banal & puerile for any distinction to remain. Stan Farley's work gurgles with humour though it may well be the philosophical chuckle on the other side of political tears. Arguably he's possessed of Nietzsche's "golden laughter", described as the philosophers' peak grade. The gods also laughed, Nietzsche speculated; "they cannot refrain from laughter even in the presence of holy acts."
Moving from canvas painting to sculpture, from poetic painter (I'm thinking of Farley's show at Tolarno's, twenty-odd years ago, for which William Blake & Samuel Palmer remains my abiding sense & feel of it : golden wheatfields over looked by the angels) to painter poet, isn't an art-world strategy but a life-world imperative.
"What's the world without words worth?" one of his plaques proclaims. The sentence, recalling Ian Hamilton-Finlay's stone carvings & gnomic humour, isn't required to substantiate his poetic thought but does so anyway. The pun redeems Wordsworth as Nature Poet, spiritual seeker in times of upheaval, within a question about language & ultimate meaning. I feel Stan Farley's actually proposing that without words (poetry), life is worthless; additionally that meaning is garnered from speech & text, not from materials per se.
An exquisite paradox is that his work is hardly immaterial, for it's as much an expression of the materials as a use of them. Wood, for example, demands its outgrowth as though the sculpture were foliage of an essential idea.
Stan Farley's work abounds in personality. No self-portrait as such but a diffusion of identity & necessity as natural as his dearest Australian, European & British landscapes --those one imagines him recognizing as the contours of earthly bliss.
Somehow, the more personal & particular the practice the more redolent of the universal it seems to be.
His art is to successfully encourage a sense of familiarity; to make guests of strangers, shepherding us through the palimpsest he can't help but recover of the daily straight & narrow.
---------------------------------------------------
[This version of the Note contains the slightest corrections to that printed for Stan Farley's exhibition. On the night, John Wolseley launched the exhibition and the Note was available to be read.]
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