Ken Unsworth catalogue essay Boutwell Draper gallery. : Anthony Bond

Ken Unsworth holds the unlikely honour of being a contemporary artist whose work Suspended Stone Circle 1985 at the Art Gallery of NSW pipped Streeton's Fire's On to the post as the most popular work of art in a public place in Sydney according to a poll held by the Sydney Morning Herald. Unsworth's enormously diverse body of works has the capacity to touch a cord in most people. He seems to move from apparently Minimalist constructions to disturbingly expressive symbolist paintings to elaborate sets or should I say installations. Our first contact may induce awe, anxiety, a belly laugh and sometimes an uneasy mixture of all three!

At first sight the works of Ken Unsworth seem to be impossibly schizophrenic. His signature works from the 1970s have a formal order and physical inevitability to them, the stones and rods are the way they are because this is how they can be. Why balance a rock on a stick? Because it works! Then by contrast there is a range of works including performance, installation, set design, movement and objects where things or bodies enact the impossible or at least the unlikely; however animate or inanimate they are always performers.

If we look at both aspects of this work through the history of performance rather than take a formalist art historical perspective it is possible to see how both strands of Unsworth�s art reflect a very particular sensibility that cares nothing for the ideology of art theory or the opposing camps of artistic taste.

It is clear from references in many of his drawings and installations and from his occasional direct involvement in theatre that he is drawn to dark drawing room situations of symbolist literature and theatre. I can almost see Unsworth in the heady ambience of Lugn�-Po�s Th��tre de l�Oeuvre where symbolist productions of plays by writers like Maeterlink were performed in surprisingly radical sets designed by artists including Vuillard and Bonnard. Unsworth once built a set for Maurice Maeterlink's The Intruder in a Euan Upston production at Performance Space that perfectly created the claustrophobic and intense psychological atmosphere of the play.

Maeterlink himself described his productions as having "the appearance of slightly deaf sleepwalkers who are constantly being woken up from a painful dream," and who together with the scenery form "a certain horrifying, sombre harmony", he could almost have been describing the mood of Unsworth's installations and performances. In 1896 Jarray�s Ubu Roi was performed at Theatre de l'Oeuvre and in the audience was the young Marinetti who was inspired by this experience to develop his Futurist productions that in turn influenced the avant-garde in Russia and informed the performative activities of the Bauhaus.

This performative history intertwines the formality of Cubo-Futurism with disturbing dada fantasies of modern man set against the horrors of successive wars that still seem to plague us today. These sculptural maquettes and drawings for objects at Boutwell Draper Gallery clearly show us how the formal even minimalist works of Unsworth feed directly into fantastic, improbable and emotionally charged expression. We can come to see how the rock wedged between slabs of iron is an actor even possibly the artist himself trapped by the conditions circumscribing his life.

In 1977/8 Unsworth performed a sculpture of Richard Serra�s. The original work consisted of a square sheet of lead held against the wall by a leaning steel pole. In Unsworth's piece it was his spreadeagled body that was pinned to the wall. The Five secular settings for sculpture as ritual and burial piece performed in 1975 all made reference to these minimalist props and suspensions but brought them alive through the interpolation of the artist's body. I do not subscribe to the idea that minimalism is without affect, Richard Serra may in some ways seem to be the quintessential Minimalist but if we think of such work as without expressive intent we clearly have not been in a room with one of his awesome steel plate props or monumental leaning walls. It seems as if Unsworth capitalises on this significant presence of form and then injects a poetic human element that theatrically exploits this presence while also exploding its portentousness.

While it would be reductive to suggest that each of these small works is in some way an image of the artist's body trapped or suspended in the web of circumstance, I believe it makes our enjoyment of them all the greater when we think of them as actions or animations rather than as static forms in equilibrium.
One of the most popular works of art at the Art Gallery of NSW is undoubtedly Unsworth's suspended stone circle first installed in Paris in 1985. While this is in some ways a very calm and still work it is also a structure based on enormous forces and dynamic tension.

It attracts the public to engage with it. The wire closest to the entrance has to be replaced regularly as people are drawn to feel for themselves the actuality of the tension. Young children have to be dragged out from under when they crawl to inspect this phenomenon from below! The 300 river stones each weighing about 15 kilograms seem to be levitating effortlessly suggesting a mountain pool disturbed by a single pebble tossed precisely into its centre. The dramatic form of the three cones of wire represent a literal diagram of the forces that hold these stones in place contradicting the appearance of timeless floating. Each of the series of suspended stones typically represents a diagram of possibilities. He never repeats the same physical solution.

In some ways these works only exist as the idea of their possibility. Indeed this is one of the works that the Trustees bought that had no physical existence at the time! Only after the work as "idea" was acquired did Ken go out to find the rocks and bring them back to the Gallery. Each time it is installed new wires have to be strung. It is a work that could in theory exist as an instruction only: First find 300 river stones approximately this size and this shape etc. In this case each stone hangs independently in space requiring three wires for each stone, the necessary and sufficient physical solution. In another work the stones touch each other and in this case only one wire is required, hence one cone. In this way he has devised a set of variables each determined by an inexorable logic.

The maquettes and drawings in this exhibition start from this logic and expand out into more expressive and playful even absurdist configurations. These mind games resonate within the body of his work because of the underlying architecture of his logic. Without this grounding in reality, fantasy quickly becomes boring. Once we lose our kinaesthetic grip on the fact that the world is held in place by gigantic forces obeying fundamental laws, demonstrations of levitation may come to seem banal.

Anthony Bond 18/3/03