UTS collection book

The artists discussed in this essay are about as heterogeneous as you could get.  They span the range from Surrealist tinted traditional subject painting through secular and metaphysical abstraction to postmodern rhetorical painting and even Australian Arte Povera.   It is interesting to try and discover what the strands are that might link them, after all any taxonomy of artistic attitudes in Australia must deal with eclecticism viewed through the distorting lens of distance.

Lets start with Brian Blanchflower because he is first and foremost an Australian landscape painter although his work has dallied with performance and installation and today looks at face value to be closest to minimal abstract painting.  When we examine the various phases of his work the landscape is always present.   As a young artist in England in the 1960s he walked the country visiting ancient sites and megaliths.   This is a clue to his consistent concern with man�s place in the cosmos.   The other major theme in his work is the materiality of the ground and the accretion of the paint almost as if it were the trace of a natural process.  Blanchflower helps us imagine the infinite by giving us a sensation of the night sky or undifferentiated space through the substance of his paintings.  He does not just create an illusion of space he grounds it in material that acts as the earth itself.

War in the Air was made in 1986 after Blanchflower returned from a residency at London�s Air Space studio.  During this time he had loosened up the painted surface, which had previously been crusted, and often �bitumen black� relieved with strong bone-white motifs.   These new atmospheric paintings led to the Canopy series that was to dominate his late 80s and early 90s output.  They attempted to capture a sense of the energy latent in the universe.  Blanchflower once talked of the paintings as if they were filters held up to cosmic bombardment as if to capture a trace of the flux of being.   War in the air is more graphic than the canopies to come he is not yet content to capture the energy he is still trying to represent it through his gesture.  It is in fact a transitional work that still carries figurative components that have emerged out of the activity of mark making.   His more recent transcendent works clearly bring his painting into a direct lineage from Samuel Palmer to Monet and Rothko, a unique position within Australian art.

Blanchflower often worked from his memories of being in the desert combining the texture of the ground with the nocturnal vision of infinity above.  Night in the Desert is also a common theme with Tim Storrier.  He has always enjoyed the campfire and the outback.   In his most recent paintings fiery strands illuminate strange repasts abandoned as if after some Olympian debauch in the middle of nowhere.   Storrier may not be trying to manifest a direct metaphysical experience through his work settling instead for a vivid image of some illusive narrative but he is clearly deeply moved by his nocturnal adventures in the bush. 

In Evening Asia we have a very pared back nocturnal landscape.   Somewhere near the golden mean he has placed the horizon, nearly black below and glowing with the aftermath of fire above.   The intense glow at the horizon itself could be read as urban illumination through haze or forest fires burning out of control.  A few stars sparkle dimly above and seem to be reflected below suggesting that this is a seascape or else the quartz fragments that glow in the starlight in the red centre.  In this work Storrier comes his closest to the vision of Rothko and by common association to Blanchflower whose painting has become more and more reminiscent of the visionary spaces of that great modern master.

The surreal aspect of Storrier�s work touches upon the simplified realism of Jeffrey Smart.  Smart lives and works in the kinder climate of the Italian countryside but many of his paintings reflect the severity of the contemporary Italian built environment against the relics of a more classical past.  Streetscapes and urban street furniture stand out in stark relief.  They suggest an evacuated and lonely environment in which humans are nearly always singular, something like the early paintings of deChirico.  The compositions verge on the abstract and yet they also share a pop sensibility. 

Children playing 2 1965 is unusual in that it includes a number of diminutive figures of children running along a wall in the background.  A political poster showing the head and shoulders of a rather sinister bald man replaces the singular figure.  The Children�s play in the background and the bunting that frames the upper part of the composition cast this morose figure into even greater isolation.  This could also be a seascape.  The pebble-strewn ground that occupies the mid field has the look of a beach car park while the wall where the children play could easily be a sea wall but a glimpse of the open space of the sea is not allowed to free us from the closed and desolate isolation Smart so effectively conveys.

Richard Dunn has interrogated the limits of abstraction as well as tracing its source in, and influence on, the built environment.   Some of his works track curious historical journeys from his own family tartan to the designs of modernist buildings in the German textile city Chemnitz.   Dunn is in a sense a conceptual painter which today sounds like a contradiction but in his formative years it was the reverse.  London in the mid 1960s was a vibrant centre for visual and philosophical research.   Another Australian, Ian Burn was pushing the phenomenological boundaries of abstraction until he arrived at the definition of the object in text.  Text for Burn did not absolve the viewer from visual contemplation on the contrary it invited the viewer to work harder at looking and understanding what it is to see.  This was the stimulating intellectual environment in which Dunn developed his investigations into highly specific visual effects of colour line and surface.  In the 1980s Dunn developed the conceptual and critical aspect of his work by juxtaposing historically charged images to construct politically engaged paintings.

Untitled (the object of art � indices 1,2 &3) 1997 is one of a series of paintings that return to his phenomenological investigation of visuality in the 60s however he has continued his historical and conceptual project by interposing a found form into the equation.  These are part of a series of works that explore the complex structure of tartan.  Tartan is a form of complex abstract grid but it also has encoded into it records of moiety not dissimilar to the use of cross hatching in the traditional painting of Arnhemland.  Dunn uses this structure as a kind of resistance or frame from the real although he is clear that he can also offer resistance to the structure making it a reciprocal process.   In these three paintings (that are part of a set of four) he has taken a magnifying lens to the tartan, cutting it almost randomly so that the edge cuts through the middle of a stripe or band.   This chance element is however tightly controlled because in each case the bars of colour form a part of a framing composition that constantly affirms the edge of the canvas from which the elements are depended symmetrically.

Dunn�s engagement with a history of design and the built environment contradicts the image of the bushman we started with.  In fact most Australian artists are more concerned to discover or reveal the codes that are embedded in the cities where they live.  Richard Goodwin is a sculptor who trained as an architect.  His artworks still reference this training and have often branched out into major engineering works in conjunction with architects and structural engineers.  His artworks range from fairly conventional exhibitions of works on paper or sculpture to performances and public art works.  There is an in-between quality about this that is not simply the space between gallery and the public domain or between Art and architecture but a more uncomfortable negotiation of interpersonal space and between art and life.

The theme of exoskeleton that has been present in his work from the beginning in one form or another may be seen as a metaphor for this interpersonal space and perhaps for a more difficult intrapersonal space.  None of us would want to exist without the infrastructure modern society provides for us.   It is a kind of exoskeleton with which we are so familiar that we probably find it difficult to realise that it is as much part of our bodies and minds as our most intimate bodily or psychological secrets.

Sculptural Installation 1997 has been built into the wall of the Law building of the University.   There is an engraved text that is drawn from the Bill of Rights and a handrail that might be taken to play with the idea of the bar to which barristers are called.  Most interesting of all Goodwin has created time capsules hermetically sealed behind glass within the walls themselves.   Inside these containers he has gathered gowns and wigs from across the years.  The heads are separated from the bodies i.e. wigs in one capsule the gowns in the other.  Could this be a metaphor for the sharp line drawn between fact and affect in the law?  In any case the bodies of past and present lawyers are forever opened to our gaze in this installation.   The fabric of the university impregnated by traces of its sons and daughters.

Janet Laurence also likes to work with traces of the body and often incorporates images and materials from the science laboratory.   Her practice has moved from installation to painting and back to painting.  Today her work finds paths between media but invariably she uses materials to suggest the underlying bio-chemical processes of life.   Laurence calls her materials �substances�, a word that somehow has rather stickier more mysterious connotations than the blander term �materials�.   The recently opened Melbourne Museum includes an installation in vitrines by the artist.  Laurence has selected large numbers of objects from the museum store including dozens of stuffed birds.  She has arranged these aesthetically without reference to any scientific taxonomy. The resulting wunderkammer has proven very popular with the public who revel in the profusion of things, with all their colours and textures. 

Laurence is not just designing delightful compositions or titillating our desire for profusion she is invoking a sense of wonder for the variety and continuity of life in all its forms.  In the Transpiration series 2000 in UTS collection she has poured �substances� suspended in medium over aluminium and stainless steel sheets.   The effect of these layers of stains and transparencies is suggestive of clouds and of the watermarks on rocks as well as having disturbing associations with bodily secretions.  Water is the basis of all life and it is the force that erodes mountains into flat deserts in geological time.   Ebb and flow is not just a metaphor for the effects of time it is a literal description of our lives inextricably bound as infinitesimal parts in the greater flux of the universe.  The presentation of her works in grids on plates of glass and stainless steel suggests the structure of a scientific lab and gives the work a sense of abiding order that offsets the processes of organisms in constant flux.

John Firth-Smith has always had a strong feeling for materials and textures and in spite of a brief period of apparent abstraction in the early 70s he has never moved far away from the watery sensations of Sydney Harbour.   Whereas Laurence has abandoned deliberate gesture to allow materials to find their own way within her carefully controlled experiments, Firth-Smith keeps inscribing his own body into the work.  Even in the most abstract paintings that came close to the severity of Barnet Newmann it was the broad sweep of the painter�s arm; he is a big man, which determined the scale of the composition.

Since the mid seventies he has returned to a celebration of the textures and effects experienced on the harbour where he loves to sail.  Brett Whitely painted the harbour from the heights of his Lavender Bay studio from where it is often reduced to a pool of blue dotted with colourful sails and streaked with brilliant white wakes.  Firth-Smith on the other hand is down among the wharves finding his way past vast rusty hulls of merchant ships, struggling with all weathers, avoiding grey and green rocks and encrusted hulks. 

These are the qualities he manages to capture in his canvasses.  The combed surfaces of paint have something of the ripples and waves of the water but they also suggest the crusted surfaces of ship�s hulls.  The calligraphy he invariably superimposes on his canvasses always demonstrates the sweep of the artist�s hand as if he were bringing the vessel around finding just the right tension between wind and canvas.  At times he draws perfect ellipses that demonstrate this idea of dynamic tension, in From the deep 1985 the gesture seems to suggest a whale�s skull.  Firth-Smith tells a tale about diving in the harbour when he saw ahead of him a remarkable sight in the submarine gloom.  Suspended from a Buoy was an elephant�s decomposing head.  It seems that the Zoo had donated it to the Museum but it was too big to go in the caustic tanks so it was entrusted to fish swimming in and out of its sockets to cleanse the flesh from the skull.   It is an image that must have stayed with him and its memory seems to have infused this strange drawing with some of its mystery.

Imants Tillers is more conceptual than most of the artists in this chapter but it was a brush with the rocky foreshore that attracted him away from his studies in architecture to become an artist.   His University lecturer Marr Grounds encouraged him to participate in Christo�s Little Bay project in 1969.  It was an experience that was to change his life.  Tillers� early work was affiliated with conceptual art in Australia regularly making homage to Marcel Duchamp in the late seventies.  During the 1980s he became the principle exponent of appropriation as a strategy for the antipodes.  The Transavantgarde sponsored by Bonito Oliva in Italy began an international movement that reversed the modernist paradigm of originality and declared open season on the history of visual culture. 

Tillers argued that Australia had always relied on imperfect reproductions for its experience of great masterpieces and was thus poised to adopt the Transavantgarde as a local movement.  At this time he also evolved the strategy of painting large scale works in modular form on small numbered canvas boards.   These works were therefore eminently transportable to take advantage of the increasing internationalisation of the exhibition circuit.   The numbering process that continued over from painting to painting also became a conceptual art work in itself in the manner of On-Kawara whose date paintings document every day of his life.  At this time Tillers shifted his attention from Duchamp towards the master of bad faith Giorgio de Chirico.  DeChirico had reneged on modernism by copying old masters such as Rubens, Courbet and even his own earlier Surrealist work.  Tillers in turn copied deChirico and layered his appropriated images with elements from aboriginal art and more personal selections from Latvian children�s stories. 

In the late 1980s Tillers began appropriating the metaphysical art of Colin McCahon.  This has marked a change for Tillers whose homages to McCahon seem to be made without irony.  De Chirico could be seen as an anarchist or loose cannon. McCahon might have been a bit crazed but it was the madness of an itinerant preacher and not a bad boy of modern art.  This mature phase of Tillers� art is structurally informed by the history of his engagement with conceptual art and post modernism but has a poetic honesty that belies the image of prankster that he had projected in his conceptual art.   In this he has something in common with some of the greats of the century including Duchamp, Klein and Beuys. The commissioned portrait of Professor Peter Johnson belongs to this mature body of work.  The Professor is the father of another Appropriation artist Tim Johnson but his borrowings from Aboriginal and Asian sacred imagery is more in the spirit of collaboration and veneration and has no trace of postmodern irony

Ian Howard has also collaged found images together but of all these artists he is perhaps the most overtly political.  Howard has a fascination with technology and in particular with the instruments of war.  Land property power no 2 (garden setting and tank) 1995 juxtaposes a suburban back garden complete with barbeque and plastic benches with a landscape that would in the past have been considered sublime but today more vividly conjures the sites of tragic conflict in Kosovo, Kashmir and Chechnya.  Beyond the brick barbeque a tank rolls into view giving the recreational object the atmosphere of a military bunker.  The side panel shows an idyllic scene of dappled spring light falling through gentle woodland.  The images are laser printed onto vinyl conveying the abject version of the sublime found in a picture window or domestic mural. It is a stark reminder that war does not only touch the exotic other but is always in someone�s front yard.