The Contemporary International Collection AGNSW 1984 to present
We are currently preparing a substantial book based on the contemporary collection 1960 to the present that will go some way to indicate the depth of this collection which is one of the most even in the Gallery and yet is the exposed for lack of space. In 12 chapters we hope to give some sense to the various sets of interests and strategies that have informed artistic practice over the period while presenting individual pages on some 150 key artists loosely grouped in relation to the chapters. There cannot be a single definitive story of recent art but we will make it as comprehensive as possible.
This talk anticipates some of the themes from the book but is constructed more as a personal history of the contemporary international and Australian collection that may shed some light on the ideas that have evolved with and through the collection. I shall set up a thematic framework for what I have been trying to do since 1984 by discussing some works that helped form the initial shape of the collection then run through a selection of other works to give a sense of the many tendrils that extend out from this core. Artworks always spill out of any boxes we try to make for them but it is possible to discern some relationships and associations and this is how we attempt to display the work rather than chronologically or by schools or movements as such.
Background
The Contemporary International collection of the Art Gallery of NSW was initiated in 1984 with funds from The Mervyn Horton bequest for international contemporary art and subsequent plans for the new wing with rooms dedicated to contemporary art. In the late 19th century the Gallery had a very good practice of acquiring contemporary works �from the studio� however this was based on the taste of the Academy and was not effectively sustained into Modernism for example Pissarro was not bought until 1935 and Monet 1950.
Post World War II art from overseas was virtually absent with the exception of one or two American paintings purchased in the 70s some 10-20 years after �their moment� and some British �Post-impressionists� and modern schools. Consequently with the exception of this aspect of British painting the thinnest part of our collection is European art from about 1870 to the present
As the Curator charged with initiating a policy for a contemporary international collection I decided to target major current works rather than trying to cover the existing gap from the 1950s and 60s not least because of very high market values for the older material but also because of the rapidly escalating prices of current work. I could see the present always eluding us if we did not break the cycle of neglect. I also decided that it should have a European focus probably finding precedents in Arte Povera, the influence of Minimalism and Conceptual art. Jim Mollinson in Canberra and Patrick McCaughey in Melbourne were focussing on American painting before and including some Minimalism and neo-expressionism from everywhere. This left a space for a more conceptual and poetic vision in Sydney.
Even with the narrowing of the field to a particular trajectory it would have been impossible to make an exhaustive representation of the art movements involved because of space and budget limitations. I decided instead to build conceptual and poetic clusters rather than attempt an encyclopaedic representation.
Taxonomies of the contemporary are in any case provisional neither is there the funding or the space to make an historical presentation in the manner of MOMA or MNAM Modern collections; neither of those great institutions are actually able to carry this project through into very contemporary collections either.
Some personal reflections
The British Show that I curated in with Bill Wright in 1984 played a strong role in shaping this broad strategy into something more concrete. In fact the exhibitions I have worked on since then have all meshed into the evolving thought process and helped me develop a language for the collection. These exhibitions include Boundary rider the 9th Biennale of Sydney 1992 which considered Bricolage as a core strategy, Body 1997 that explored corporeality and embodiment in art object and spectator, and Trace The inaugural Liverpool Biennial UK which again looked at objects as material evidence or as triggers for memory.
The British Show was principally focused on a new generation of sculptors and conceptual artists. I became very interested in the new British sculptors� appropriation of Post-Minimal / Post-Duchampian strategies where found objects and materials lend their presence as objects to a narrative. My research in the years since then has often been associated with this trajectory that examines the role of objects in stimulating bodily memory and sensation. Stephen Bann has shown how such works question our traditional understanding of representation by substituting Gadamer�s concept of �ontological communion� between the image/object and the subject of the work.
Gadamer proposed that the religious icon was the exemplary model of the artistic image precisely because it reveals something that cannot have a source in reality i.e. it is non-mimetic. He proposes another kind of association between art object and the imaginary subject. Hence my obsession with matter yielded a converse interest in the ineffable.
1. L. Anthony Gormley Work 1984 from The British Show
1. L. Anthony Gormley A Field for AGNSW 1989
Anthony Gormley is an especially clear example of the idea of ontological communion in recent art. Not only is the auratic quality of the figure paradoxically enhanced by its absence, after all there is no mimetic intention here, but these body cases have literally been formed about the absent body of the subject. They are traces almost like insect pupae left as evidence of a transformation.
2. R. Anthony Gormley Room for the great Australian outback 1989
2. R. Anthony Gormley A Field for AGNSW 1989 detail
I was lucky enough to spend some time with Gormley installing his work in the desert, Room for the Great Australian Outback and collecting red dirt for his many little figures Field for the Art Gallery of NSW. He introduced me to the phenomenology of Heidegger in the freezing desert nights. It was a perfect place to start thinking about the horizon that separates the material world from consciousness. I don�t know if I will ever get on top of these mysteries but I can never escape the memory of first hearing them and they certainly inform my reading of the collection.
Some key works for me in The British Show that help fill out these ideas.
3.L. Tony Cragg New stones Newtons tones 1978
3.R. Tony Cragg Spirogyra 1992
Tony Cragg was one of the most inspiring artists making beautiful and poetic work out of scraps of plastic found along the river in London. This work from the show New stones Newton�s tones consists of a rectangle constructed on the floor out of plastic fragments that had been graded according to the colours of the spectrum.
New Stones may be thought of as recycling waste, as a marketing strategy for generating value out of nothing, as a critical take on the romanticism of landscape artists like Richard Long, a spoof of /or homage to Carl Andre�s bricks at the Tate Gallery, It could be a reference to the laying down of flotsam in bands along the shoreline. But most of all it is an original object which rewards endless visual contemplation.
The work we finally acquired was Spirogyra it is equally layered and dense in possible readings while offering an immediate and poetic visual feast. Spirogyra encapsulates many of the persistent themes in Cragg�s work. The bottle rack is of course a reference to Duchamp�s famous Readymade, Egoutoire. Cragg often makes playful conceptual allusions to art history in this way. The spiral also suggests DNA and organic couplings that are ubiquitous in Cragg�s forms. The blasted glass bottles suggest seashores and scattered stories.
Spirogyra is prone to breakages. The artist provided a box of replacements and authorised us to go out and get more as needed. The difficulty is to maintain the random distribution of shape, size and colour; otherwise the character of the work could gradually change. I am not sure that Tony would mind this process of evolution in principle provided that certain considerations were maintained, for example including some very big bottles and a reasonable distribution of types and colour. The Egoutoir acts like DNA armature collecting suitable passing molecules at random.
4.L. Stephen Willats Pat Purdy and the glue sniffers camp 1980
4.R. Stephen Willats Pat Purdy and the glue sniffers camp 1980 detail
Stephen Willats used objects because of their literal association with his subjects as a kind of portraiture and for their metaphorical power to demonstrate transformation through context. Pat Purdy was the first work I proposed for acquisition in 1984 and it was vigorously rejected. I re-presented it successfully 17 years later.
While this is in a sense a social document there is a marvellous material metaphor operating around the fence and the hole in the fence. Pat Purdy and the Glue Sniffers Camp, is an exemplary case of the trace in contemporary art. Its physical context was a residential tower block originally built to re-house families displaced by slum clearance at the other end of London. The site chosen for the tower was an isolated area in the middle of a wasteland typical of urban fringes. Between the wasteland and the housing project there was a cyclone wire fence.
The work takes the form of 4 photographic triptychs, with an image from the estate on one side and the wasteland � which Pat, his subject, called the �Lurky place� � on the other. In the middle was a smaller panel with a close-up photograph of a hole in the fence. Objects associated with the Lurky place were attached to the middle panel of the triptych.
Pat Purdy described how the kids on the estate would crawl through the fence and create camps on the wasteland. In these camps they escaped the deterministic environment of the project by inhaling the fumes from heated glue cans. A can of Evo-stick applied to the image of the hole in the fence could be seen to have reversed its meaning as it passed from one world to another. In the world of the towers it would be a pragmatic object associated with binding and restoring, while once it passed through the fence into the Lurky-place it became the focus for a dysfunctional ritual albeit one of self- determination.
The fence is the boundary between determined space and the indeterminate; passage through it is the moment of transformation. In some ways this suggests an alienated contemporary version of the permeable membrane that allows for visual absorption, something that it has in common with the romantic painting tradition. This is the possibility of entering the work imaginatively by passing through the surface and entering a space of reverie i.e. from material and conscious to immaterial and unconscious.
5. L. Bob Law Blue black indigo black 1975
5. R. Kasmir Malevich Black cross and Black Square 1915
Bob Law provides an ambivalent view of transcendence and absorption. These black works followed a series from the late 1960s that started with large colourful abstracts called Who is afraid of Barnet Newman then the series Nothing to be afraid of in which large blank canvasses were framed by a delicate biro line and dated. Law explained to me at the time that behind the art world joke there was an element of terror. �There is nothing to be afraid of � is something people tend to say to someone having a nervous breakdown without realising that it is precisely nothing that is most to be feared!
Blue Black Indigo Black is in fact a transcendent work like the famous Malevich black square. It can be used as a Zen space for meditation - it contrives to create the experience of an infinite space or a void through its subtle layering of the colours blue indigo and black. The viewer who spends a few moments in front of it will begin to see into the black as if through veils of dark light.
6. L. Ute Klophaus Joseph Beuys Explaining pictures to a dead hare 1965
6. R. Ute Klophaus Joseph Beuys Manressa 1966
Perhaps I was ready to absorb these influences from a generation of British artists because of my encounter with Beuys in Edinburgh in 1970. Beuys had an uncanny knack for imbuing objects with presence and allowing them to generate loose fields of association. The most powerful of Beuys� objects were relics of performances through which he invested things with such strange resonance.
While we have been unable to acquire a major collection of material relics these performance photographs taken by Ute Klophaus convey the animism of Beuys through her own material approach to making the photographic image as an alchemical process and as a material trace. I have selected 12 images including performance moments and accompanied them by photos of the relics such as the bone �radio� and the stool from the performance of the Dead Hare.
The following slides will give some idea of the scope of the collection as it has evolved since 1984 but bear in mind that only 0.4% of the contemporary collection is ever on display so it is just a sample. We hope to be able to expand the contemporary space significantly in the next phase of the gallery�s development.
I have organised the works into affiliated groups rather than chronology or schools. The first deals with ambivalent transcendence, works typical of the late 20th century when the great passions and beliefs of early modernity, severely bruised by two World Wars meant that romance was now invariably tempered with irony.
7. L. Anselm Kiefer Glaube hoffnung liebe 1985-6
7. R. Marcel Duchamp Bride stripped bare by her bachelors even. The large glass 1915-23
The first major work I pursued was a painting by a disciple of Beuys, Anselm Kiefer. Kiefer�s work is riddled with self-contradiction and paradox. In as much as he exhorts us to transcendent thought he also brings us back to earth often with a thud!
In those days he was not prolific and his only dealers; Anthony d�Offay, Marian Goodman and Paul Maenz were unable to help with a major painting. I contacted Kiefer directly and he invited me to visit him in the studio, he made it clear that he would like a work in Sydney but wanted me to visit him at least 3 times to make sure we understood each other and that I got the right work. I did this between 1984 and 1986 and it was the most wonderful way to make an acquisition. I learned a great deal about myself let alone about the works of Kiefer.
One of the strange things that I saw was an uncanny parallel between this painting that I finally bought and Duchamp�s large Glass. I first saw it as the bottom panel of a vertical triptych, in the top panel he had painted three windows and below it was only the sea and rocks. He described the windows as a female passage but acknowledged the contradiction of the Apollonian form of the windows. I suggested a parallel with Duchamp�s lingering veils but he quickly dismissed the idea.
The next time I visited the propeller had appeared and the windows had gone � I resisted the temptation to suggest the bachelor�s chocolate grinder! None the less Duchamp�s horizon (also known as the gilled cooler and the bride�s garment) is precisely at the heart of the Hiedeggerian aspect of Kiefer�s work and the propeller is a failed attempt to transcend it. Kiefer later acknowledged that he had spent some months in Philadelphia Museum during the time he was working on the painting and Duchamp must have unconsciously found his way in.
8. L. Yves Klein Portrait relief (PR3) 1962
8. R. Yves Klein Leap into the void 1961
Klein was one of my few excursions into the history of contemporary art. I believe that along with Duchamp and Beuys he is one of the most influential artists in post war art.
Continuing the theme of ambivalence Klein soars into the void that he achingly desired while always undercutting himself by conceptual clowning and playing the part of the trickster.
9. L. Ken Unsworth five secular settingsfor sculpture as ritual 1975
9. R. Stelarc Street suspension 1984
Two Australians also �hanging about� playing with the possibility of material transcendence or at least levitation.
10. L. Ken Unsworth Rapture 1994
10. R. Ken Unsworth suspended stone circle 1985
Unsworth continues the theme into sculpture
Conceptual art / Phenomenology /Post modern problems with representation
11. L. Ian Burn Blue reflex 1966
11. R. Ian Burn No object implies the existence of any other 1967
Ian Burn is my other most important historical marker. It became important to me that we acknowledge Ian Burns legacy by creating a parallel strand to the rather metaphysical speculations of Klein and Kiefer. In order to do this I began collecting a range of works that very loosely speaking come under a conceptual framework. I have also extended this into postmodern speculations on the problems of representation.
12. L. Ian Burn 1-6 glass /mirror piece 1967
12. R. Ian Burn Looking through a piece of glass 1967
Through Art & Language Burn made a crucial contribution to the evolution of conceptual art internationally in the 1960s and later became a crucial mentor for many younger Australian artists. Burn always emphasised that visual acuity and paying close attention were the key to conceptual art and not necessarily the dematerialisation of the art object. His phrase � looking at, seeing not reading� seemingly runs counter to some younger artists attitude to conceptualism.
We have recently acquired A Secret painting by art and Language from this period to extend the representation of the international connection for Australian art.
13.L. Joseph Kosuth Three and one table 1968
13 . R. Lawrence Weiner Out of sight of Polaris 1990 & Miyajima Region 1991
Kosuth and Wiener are two of the best-known conceptual artists from the USA in the 60s and 70s while Miyajima is a contemporary Japanese inheritor. In his case we can find more poetic and metaphysical resonance as he counts down the minute events that make up the process of entropy.
14. L. Christo Wrapped coast Little Bay 1969
14. R. Christo Wrapped coast Little Bay 1969
John Kaldor introduced Land art to Australia in 1969 in the form of Christo who left an indelible impression on a generation of Australian artists not least Imants Tillers. These works were some of the few pieces acquired by the Gallery prior to 1984. The policy then was to only represent artists who made art here during residencies or projects such as this.
15. L. Denis Oppenheim Stills from gingerbread man 1970
15. R. Denis Oppenheim Seeded field cancelled crop 1970
Oppenheim makes a useful reference for Christo at the same time and was part of my attempt in a small way to fill in the history.
16. L. SMS portfolio 1968
16. L. SMS portfolio 1968
Daniel Thomas purchased this experimental assortment of small works by all the conceptualists you can think of from Duchamp to Kaprow in the 70s and I acquired an additional set so that they can be handled while keeping an exhibition copy. Never forget the availability of the print room there are always wonders in there to be viewed and handled.
17. L. Giulio Paolini L�altra figura 1984
17. R. Perejaume Marc a l�encasa 1990
Here are two European essays in the impossibility of representation. Both could be seen as related to Ian Burn. Perejaume�s burnt frame comments on the nature of landscape that evades framing and Paolini melancholically mourns the end of the modernist search for the essence.
18. L.Hamilton-Finlay talismans and signifiers 1984
18. L.Hamilton-Finlay Garden at Stonypath 1984
Findlay also combines neo classical landscape and neo platonic ideals in his works but with more ambivalence it is never quite clear if his is a critique or a lament either.
19. L. Peter Tyndall a detail, someone looks at a work of art/someone looks at something 1988
19. R. Joachim Gerz The Tasman woman 1984
Tyndall reflects on the place of the artwork in the white cube and provides the means to hang it as the support for the text work.
Gerz competes with John Balsessari to be the originator of photographic installation which both adopted in the 1960s. Here he rather enigmatically juxtaposes these images of his wife Esther taken in Tasmania with the words:
Like a strategy. Like one immaculate key for two doors. Like two women out of the same quote. Her roots and her ethnic roots. Her antecedents � �prisoners� or �liberation fighters�. One woman dubbed. Like herself. Without even trying to know she glanced at herself, turned around and said: yes.
20. L. John Nixon Self portrait /non objective composition 1984
20. L. John Nixon Self portrait /non objective composition 1984 detail
There is a continuing exploration of the strategies of painting as representation that somehow survives the cubist moment when all seemed to have finally been laid bare. Both Nixon in Australia and Richter in Germany are part of this in their different ways and both are exceptional craftsmen, Nixon with the aesthetics of junk and Richer of excess. In the collection we have this installation and a large painting Orange and Black Cross
The flawless and seemingly inevitable abstractions of twentieth-century masters such as Mondrian and Malevich provide Nixon with his point of departure. Beyond formal values, Malevich's social idealism and belief in the transformative role of art have influenced Nixon's approach to contemporary art production. The notion of the discrete and self-sufficient artwork, though not rescinded by him, has been subjected to systematic interrogation and re-conceptualisation since Nixon began his career in 1973. The ongoing sequence of non-objective self-portraits which has occupied him since the early 1980s, and for which he is internationally known, posits a view of artistic identity at odds with the expressive-romantic clich�s more usual in Australian portraiture. Nixon has been an articulate defender of this position, arguing his case in room-scaled installations and thematic exhibitions of admirable authority over many years.
21. R. Gerhard Richter Abstract composition 1984
21. R. Gerhard Richter Ema 1992
Richter's early paintings gave Pop Art a political edge. His subject matter was often based on news print photographs mimicking the blurring of surveillance images taken from a moving car. Richter�s origins in Eastern Germany gave this quality a more personal resonance. His painting�s relationship to photography has remained constant even though his subject matter has varied from landscape, to historical paintings, to apparently minimalist abstraction. It is not the accuracy of the image that interests him but on the contrary the potential for blurring, loss of focus and definition that it produces.
In his installation Atlas at DIA in New York and later at Documenta 1997 Richter displayed a vast array of small photos taken as if for a sketchbook. These included hundreds of images of textures, clouds, seas, tiles, brickwork, trees, and so on. These were sometimes painted over, sometimes re-photographed so that the layering of photograph and paint became inextricably conflated. The textures and colours of the worked photos bore a striking resemblance to the repertoire of marks and colours of Richter�s abstract paintings.
This repertoire is translated into a painterly tradition that is connected to Titian and Velasquez and so through Monet to Rothco. This tradition is partially expressed in the Baroque tendency to break the surface of the paint and blur the image to stimulate imaginative interpretation by the viewer. In spite of his relation to tradition, Richter has one strong affiliation with Minimalism. He emphasises process and paint as stuff rather than as a medium for pictorial composition. This is particularly evident in the abstractions where the paint is dragged onto the canvas with a squeegee. In Abstract Painting 812 he has used only one colour in the over painting, it has been dragged across the stretched canvas on which an earlier darker composition had been laid down. In the process he emphasises the underlying materiality of painting by revealing the horizontal stretcher bars. The rich yellow of this top coat produces a summery, buttery, glow. This glow is accentuated by glimpses of the underpainting that hint at deep space beyond the surface and as electric flashes against the yellow.
Ema was painted as a blurred copy of a photo of the artist�s wife descending the stairs in homage to Duchamp back in 1966. This photo of the painting was made in response to an invitation from me in 1992 to be part of an exhibition of painters whose work references photography phenomenologically, it included Beuys, Richter, Polke and Kiefer.
22. L. Imants Tillers Conversations with the bride 1974-75
22. R. Imants Tillers Pataphysical man 1984
Tillers early obsession with Duchamp gives way to the anti modernist games of deChirico in an endless parade of appropriation and parody until he finally succumbed to the metaphysics of the image and the text when he began to study McCahon.
Identity / gender as an element in conceptual art
23. L. Piper / Croft Conference call 1992
23. R. Carol Rudyard This is..1985
Adrian Piper and Brenda Croft explored identity as well as the reception of others in this work when it was first shown in the Biennale in 1992.
Carol Rudyard is an older woman whose exploration of the familiar rapidly opens out into a multiplicity of associations literary and art historical. Every moment of her videos are layered and poetic. Malarme and Proust peep through every frame.
24. L. Jenny Watson Wings of desire 1989
24. R. Cindy Sherman Untitled group of works 1979-82
Both Watson and Sherman create narratives in which they are actors. Self portraits that in Sherman�s case are masquerade but for Watson maybe memories of genuinely arrested childhood.
25. L. Julie Rrap Threshold of a new eve 1987
25. R. Julie Rrap Myth-a -register: cut the knot tie the cord sever the lifeline 1983
Julie Brown � Brownrrap and now Rrap also masquerades as her name changes imply but in her case to critique historical clich�s in women�s representation.
Memory - materials and objects that trigger episodic and bodily memory
Part of the legacy of Beuys and by convoluted routes Duchamp is the associative properties of objects. Remember Duchamp wanted to use materials other than paint precisely so that there would be some association between the means and the thing alluded to. This might also be thought of as congruity of means and substance or a case of ontological communion.
26. L. Alex Rizkalla remains vestiges 1992
26. R. Alex Rizkalla remains vestiges 1992
An inveterate collector Rizkalla made this series of works after a fire burnt down his home the remnants became an installation and later boxes of curiosities to be sold as a way of dispersing the relics of his past.
27. L. Christian Boltanski Bathtime 1991
27. R. Christian Boltanski Installation of 4 pieces 1991
Boltanski is an exemplary artist in the treatment of the photograph as a literal trace of history and a producer of memory - true or false.
28. L. Rachel Whitread Untitled ( elongated plinths) 1998
28. R . Bethan Huws Boat 1983-99
Whitread�s objects are another case of Ontological communion. They invariably cast real spaces and objects invoking the idea of memory through absence.
Huws invites us to remember sitting by a lake playing with a reed as we watch the wind and the light play on the water. Poetically invoking reverie.
29. L. Robert MacPherson 20 frog poems/ distant thunder (memorial to DM) 1987-89
29. R. Robert MacPherson Drawings from the series 555 frog poems 1990-92
MacPherson�s poetic �sound work� invokes through its title and its forms the imagined buzzing of the bees - the breeping of the frogs and the rain on the tin roof that are evocative for most Australians. The texts on the wall mounted on rainforest timber from McPherson�s native Queensland are the names of tree frogs. The beehives may look like Donald Judd readymades but they also evoke not only bees but the colonial buildings of Northern Queensland with their tin roofs that thunder under the regular tropical downpour.
29. L. Haim Steinbach Untitled (graters/ Victorian money banks) 1990
29. R. Haim Steinbach Untitled (graters/ Victorian money banks) 1990 detail
Steinbach�s temporal poem is subtler. The rhythm of graters grating contrasts with the rhythm of the moneybox accumulating in spite of the formal similarities between the objects. The shelf is an elegant Minimalist sculpture in its own right, like Burn�s Blue reflex however it exposes it means of production seen from the side, it is also concerned with surface and process. It acts as a stage on which the actors, money banks and cheese graters here, meet and perform to each other. Steinbach came to fame in the 1980s in association with the art of commodification however he was always more closely associated with the Arte Povera artists as the subtle poetry of his work makes clear.
30. L. Anish Kapoor Void field 1992
30. R. Alison Wilding Green rise 1984
Kapoor and Wilding were also in the British show. In this more recent work Kapoor returns us to the contemplation of the void but this time by a literal creation of the phenomenon rather than its painterly evocation. He created a portal onto the void within blocks of incredibly dense and ancient Cumbrian sandstone, possibly the oldest sedimentary rock on earth. At first glance the spots on top of these great stones seem like applied black velvet but on closer inspection they are revealed as holes in the rock. There are no apparent sides to the holes and there is no visible end to the space. He has created the experience of a black hole within matter by hollowing out the stone leaving only a thin shell at the top at the brink of the void. The hollow has been lined with a dark blue pigment to give spatial depth to the darkness.
The American critic Thomas McEvilley wrote for the catalogue in 1990 when this work was displayed in Venice. He played upon Kapoor's Indian background to characterise these black holes as the womb of Kali.
Wilding makes a gentler earthbound play with materials and shapes of appearances and shadows, nature and culture.
31. L. Robert Owen Appositions 1979-80
31. R. Svetlana Kopystiansky Trainer 1992
Owen has documented the movement of the sun as recorded by a common stool and turned its rhythms into a conceptual work to rival Kosuth�s three and one table but given it another layer of cosmic potential.
Kopystiansky�s rhythm however is that of the gym in the old Soviet union where she grew up and suggests the same mechanical rigour applied to the word invariably obscures real ownership of the content. We also hold Incidents a recent film work by her and Igor her husband.
32. L. Igor and Svetlana Kopystiansky Incidents 1999
32. R. Igor and Svetlana Kopystiansky Incidents 1999
Svetlana also reworked cultural forms; in her case it was text and books that she manipulated. She claims that the book holds a very powerful almost sacred status in the popular Russian imaginary. Writers were looked up to for their leadership and vision. The work she produced for the Art Gallery of NSW integrates a library with the furniture of a gymnasium. Bookshelves take on architectural proportions implying the idea of a public library with the rows of boxed books suggesting rows of windows or building modules. Within these structures she has created niches or apertures in which punch balls and punch bags of the gymnasium are symmetrically placed. The juxtaposition immediately makes us think of the totalitarian state's ideology of healthy minds and bodies at the service of the well-oiled machinery of a supposedly utopian society. In this way Svetlana represents control of information in the form of books with ideology, with architecture and the apparatus of repression.
The contents of the Library are displayed with their spines to the back and the pages spread out open to our gaze. They are all identical, a reflection of the uniformity of the state system however we can not even be sure that they are genuinely identical because although the open books suggest access in fact with the spines hidden we cannot even identify the book hence apparent openness masks concealment and lack of access.
Continuing the theme of objects and memory with particular reference to Body
33. L. Doris Salcedo Atrabiliarios 1992-1997
33. R. Doris Salcedo Atrabiliarios 1992-1997
The body artist par excellence Salcedo invokes both the idea of bodily memory and creates actual memorials to the disappeared of Colombia.
Doris Salcedo is able to raise our empathic engagement with others to an exquisite level of pain. In Atrabiliarios, an installation from the collection of The Art Gallery of New South Wales, she evokes absence and loss by using materials and processes that locate memory in the body. The viewer�s response is, in turn, emotional�even visceral�rather than purely intellectual. Niches cut into the plaster wall contained shoes as relics or attributes of lost people donated by the families of those who have disappeared in the political and economic violence that has racked her native Colombia. The niches are then sealed with a membrane of animal caul which is literally sutured into the plaster of the wall. Barely visible through the membrane, the shoes are a particularly haunting evocation of their absent owners. The animal skin and the shoes inevitably recall the grizzly souvenirs of Nazi death camps.
This work was created in the Gallery so that it was possible to follow the procedures very closely. Rectangular niches were cut into the plaster at irregular but carefully measured intervals. Each was slightly different from the others. The edges of these perfect niches were then filed down and built up with fresh plaster to produce slightly irregular shapes. This took several days and was very carefully monitored. The finished niches had become individual presences. They seemed to have specific histories as if maintained and weathered over centuries. They could also be said to have acquired individual personalities, conforming to a general range of proportions but exhibiting subtle differences.
The next stage involved stitching horse hair through tiny holes in the plaster around the opening. Once again this was done with extraordinary attention to detail. The hairs had to be spaced to avoid uniformity of thickness and precisely identical intervals and yet they clearly conformed to an orderly preconceived plan. I was reminded of Tony Cragg and his balancing of human thought with the incidents of nature.
The shoes were then placed into the niches. Some of them were wrapped in cow bladder and in some cases the shoe had been removed leaving only its husk in the material of the dried bladder. Once again there was a variety of presence from the shoe itself to the partially hidden shoe to the shadowy trace. The cow bladder was now applied to the opening. Each one was sutured carefully into the plaster so as not to tear the bladder or the plaster. The skins had to be absolutely taught with no sign of stretching or wrinkles. The hairs entered the plaster cleanly and the holes made good as if they were entering scar tissue. Endless layers of white paint were finally applied to the wall meticulously brushed up to the edge of the skin and the stitches without any trace of splash or overlap. The effect was to make the wall and the niches appear as if they were part of one body that had evolved slowly accruing a patina over time.
The lighting was also critical and took a whole day to perfect. The result was to create an atmosphere in which the viewer would not be aware of any light source. However there needed to be enough light entering each niche to make the different presences within visible, while avoiding the image of a spotlight. The effect of the finished room had the feeling of an ancient shrine and yet it was as clean aesthetically as a sol Lewitt. None of the preparations were apparent to the eye precisely because they were so perfectly crafted. The body of the viewer responded to the body of the wall without the intervention of the actions of the artist.
In spite of the intensive crafting of the illusion this work remains fundamentally realist in its intentions and in its grounding in actual objects and events. Salcedo travels extensively in the countryside where the worst effects of political violence can be found. She becomes familiar with the communities befriending people who have suffered under the repression. The most painful thing is that people disappear without trace. No charges are laid, no arrest is recorded, no body is found. Death can be mourned but disappearance leaves an unbearable void. These disappearances are a deliberate strategy to demoralise and terrify the people in order to ensure their silence. If they speak and their relatives are alive in some prison they could be signing their death warrant. They too could disappear at any time. Salcedo collects attributes of the disappeared with the support of their relatives. By constructing the memorials and exhibiting them around the world she has given these people a voice. In a small way our response to their agony strikes a blow against the dialectics of violence.
34. L. Janet Laurence Forensic 1991
34. R. Janet Laurence The measure of light 1994
Janet Laurence suggests the chemical and alchemical processes that bind living organisms and undo them after they have run their course. While they are testaments to mortality they also delight the senses. Maybe it is not too bad to be rendered back into the elements.
35. L. Hilarie Mais Grid doors 1987
35.R. Richard Deacon Listening to reason 1986
Neither Deacon or Mais exactly describe the body but both imply its presence within the work and engage our viewing body by the kinaesthetic engagement we are drawn into with the objects.
Mais has constructed this piece with layers of the grid fashioned so as to create a diagonal cross within it. She has also painted a blue cross on the white verso which colours the shadow of a cross produced on the wall by the variation of thickness in the grid. This blue cross behind the object seems like a caged or excluded ghost in the machine, possibly a self portrait?
Deacon has added the title listening to reason as a play on the five ear lobes that the forms of this complex work suggest. The work follows strict procedural working methods which are made very tangible in the materials he uses. We can see the laminations of the ply wood and the glue that squeezes out between the layers. This truth to material also celebrates its formal quality and makes the hand of the artist all the more apparent. The work started out as five separate lobes intended to make a star shape but then he realised that if he made connecting sections in a certain way he could construct the piece as a kind of double moebius curve. The effect is spatially challenging as it the assembling at installation time.
36. L. Jannis Kounellis performance 1973
36. R. Jannis Kounellis Untitled 1984
Untitled tells us the story of every life making an epic of the fact of birth, of getting by, of death and maybe transcending the material.
The fire makes a sound that emphasises its conversion into energy, fire is used here as a literal enactment, transforming matter into energy while also having an alchemical relation to transformative processes. Arte Povera artists often invoke cultural and scientific histories including the esoteric. The nature/ culture exchange is at the heart of these references.
Here the fire brings into being while the bed is the site of birth, of dreaming, of conception and death and is configured to the human body. The materials on the adjacent shelves are fragments from a house and blankets from a bed. The I beam is also part of the house, the black square suggests Malevich again and visions of the void or infinity. The rows of soot recall the cemeteries in the artist�s native Piraeus where lamps are lit to symbolise the transition of the souls of the departed. So this work describes a journey from pre-birth of the soul through material life to its final return to the infinite void.
37. L. Narelle Jubelin The unforseen 1989
37. R . Simone Mangos Salt lick 1986
In this early work Mangos exploits the material and chemical characteristics of materials to suggest the revenge of the virgin, the vestal block they have speared will consume these masculine iron spikes.
Jubelin�s works are layered with complex bodily associations but in this case they are quite accessible. The colonial mirror frame is exploited for its eye shape, the white of the eye painted laboriously with nail polish suggesting the female dressing up and the iris rendered in petit point embroidery, women�s work. At the heart of this ensemble is the image of colonial male explorers about to enter a cave in the Blue Mountains, the cave of course shaped like a vagina, another case of feminine revenge perhaps?
38. L. Ernesto Neto Just like drops of rain, nothing 2002
38. R. Ernesto Neto Just like drops of rain, nothing 2002
The installation of Ernesto Neto stretches the membrane that separates art and life. The body ingests the work and is simultaneously ingested by it. His use of transparent elastic fabric describes the tension of spaces he invades while anthropomorphising architecture. Vast masses of fragrant spice swell the fabric in voluptuous almost bodily forms that fill the gallery space and our olfactory organs with its aromatic intensity. Scent entails the physical invasion of the body by its particles unlike vision that always exists as a translation conveyed to the eye by light from a distance.
The bodily connotations of Neto�s forms are consistent across a number of distinct types of sculpture and installation. In part this is due to the particular physical properties of his most used material, a kind of stretchy Lycra that produces sensuous curves when it is stuffed, stretched and subjected to the effect of gravity. Three strands most commonly dominate his work; they are freestanding sculptural forms, enclosed but transparent spaces that invite entry and the weight of spice that stretches the fabric through architectural space. The freestanding forms are usually white Lycra filled with polystyrene beads like beanbags. These often take on a figurative character sometimes in crowds of small figures or in pairs and family groups.
The bodily association of these forms comes from their rounded surfaces but it is further enhanced by the insertion of openings in the shapes that suggest navels or other bodily orifices and by winding and knotting the ends of the Lycra tubes in such a way as to irresistibly suggest umbilical cords because of the pneumatic curves and folds that the material naturally takes when twisted. It is surprising that such a pristine industrial material can so strongly suggest bodies since apart from the formal associations that are inherent in the material and the process of assembling it there is absolutely no imitative quality such as flesh colouring or bodily textures, hair, pores, or veins. It is perhaps precisely because of this absence of the detailed and particular simulation that the auratic presence of body is so powerful.
39.L . Julie Rrap Hairline crack 1992
39. R . Bill Henson 1996
Julie Rrap is using hair to induce a sense of unease in the viewer who may approach thinking this an antiseptic minimalist installation only to find themselves up against discarded and definitely septic body parts.
Henson creates bodily unease by aestheticising often disturbing
Subject matter. He seduces our senses while holding out unthinkable and hopefully unobtainable objects of desire.
40. L . Rebecca Horn Pendulum and emu Egg 1987
40. R . Rebecca Horn Love thermometer 1988
These two sculptures by Rebecca Horn are amongst her more playful and erotic works. The pendulum suddenly descends - violently threatening the feminine potential of the egg then slowing down to a gentle caress. The male partner piece has the potential for engorgement when the globe is held in the hand or the room temperature rises. The silk lined case forms a yoni for the thermometers lingam.
41. L. Anthony Gormley Field for AGNSW 1989
41. R. Anthony Gormley Field for AGNSW 1989
I have spoken about the Gormley. Here the thousand little figures gaze directly up into our eyes when we reach the middle of the installation as if being judged or judging.
42. L. Anthony Gormley at Mootwingie
42. R. Anthony Gormley Room for the Great Australian Outback.1989
Here is Anthony out in the bush discovering the source of the creek which is straight out of Courbet, and the Room for the Great Australian Outback that we were there to install.
43. L. Hans Belmer Poupee 1972
43.R. Maria Kozic Pulse Mk2. 1994
The Bellmer was acquired to provide a connection for the surrealist strand that animates much contemporary work and in particular body works such as this Maria Kozic. Bellmer used to make these fragmented dolls life size and then rearrange them in architectural settings of the forest where he would photograph them �at play�
The Kozic consists of a row of incubators for premature babies but on the pillows are tools, a severed hand and a gun all made in plastic to look like heavily veined human flesh. As you look at them you become aware that they are subtly twitching and convulsing while an electronic tweeting further animates the piece.
44. L. Gilbert and George Reaming 1982
44. R. Francesco Clemente
G&G are making a kind of contemporary history painting. Their subject matter is drawn from the streets of London but the youths they feature take on the mantel of the heroic male model of European traditions. They confront the sexual issues of their world in public when these subjects are usually private acts and seldom spoken off except as scandal. They aim to speak to everyone with a view to "Un-shock" people by confronting them with these images while making the actual objects as seductive as possible. They want to be widely liked but they also surround themselves with an aura of difficulty. They are often rude to people and are said to be very prickly although I have never encountered them in that mode. This is all part of their performance art. Like Beuys and Warhol they have realized the importance of sculpting with their own lives as well as their own bodies.
Clemente explores a more intimate personal and often dreamlike imagery influenced by places where he lives including India and Italy He is concerned about humankind�s separation from nature and sees the ubiquitous sacred cow of India as a symbol of the time before the expulsion. The man is Clemente himself, he stands next to the cow he has beheaded so that he seems to reconstitute its body. The gesture of the hand which wards off the evil eye is also the horns of a cuckold enhancing his animality. This merging of man and beast changes the gender of the cow, making the woman�s actions more sexually charged. The ritual slaughter refers back to the healing power of the sacramental blood of Christ and the meaning of transubstantiation in art. Sacrifice is also the means by which humankind and God (nature) are symbolically reunited.
45. L. Francis Bacon Study for a self portrait 1976
45. R. Philip Guston East Tenth 1977
The Francis Bacon is one of the works that the gallery collected prior to 1984. We often display it in the company of Philip Guston, not because they are related art historically but perhaps because their material qualities are interestingly complementary. The lumpy inarticulacy of Guston�s painted figures make us feel the physicality of a world that we might have to grope our way through while Bacon�s fluid virtuosity conveys the impression of expressive representation of the sitter but always in the end it is Bacon�s own self obsession and self erasure that seems to come across.
Body art/performance
Bacon�s paintings emphasise the gesture of the artist and often the coup de grace takes the form of a splash of paint seemingly destructively thrown at the canvas or a swipe of the cloth that partly erases but somehow resolves the image. It is a small step from this dramatic action to acknowledging the body of the artist as performer. Although this is the bit that most put people off the exhibition BODY here is a medley of slides that give a very small sampling of the comprehensive body of work we have in this territory that includes photography, film and video.
46. L. Mike Parr Push Tacks into your leg 1973
46. R. Mike Parr Integration leg spiral 1975
47. L. Mike Parr Mike Parr performances 1972-75
47. R. Mike Parr Untitled self Portraits from the series 1981-1996
48. L. Mike Parr The Bridge 1992
48. R. Mike Parr Bronze liars 1996
49. L. Ana Mendieta Silhueta series 1976-78
49. R. Ana Mendieta Silhueta series 1976-78
50. L. Marina Abramovich and Ulay performance documentation 1975 - 78
50. R. Marina Abramovich and Ulay Gold Found By the artists 1981
51. L. Arnolf Schwartzkogler Action 1975
51. L. Arnolf Schwartzkogler Action 1975
52. R. Paul McCarthy Grand Pop 1977
52. R. Paul McCarthy Grand Pop 1977
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