Angela Brennan Forms of Life
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Angela Brennan: Forms of Life Curated by Jacqueline Doughty, Curatorial Manager, Samantha Comte Curator/Exhibitions Coordinator and Alyce Neal, Assistant Curator Conceived by Joanna Bosse Published by the Ian Potter Museum of Art, the University of Melbourne, on the occasion of the exhibition Angela Brennan: Forms of Life, 5 September 2017 – 25 February 2018. Text: 2017, the authors and The Ian Potter Museum of Art, the University of Melbourne
Cover Polythymnia 2016 stoneware
Photograph: Christian Capurro
pp 1 Calliope 2017 earthenware
Photograph: Christian Capurro
> Vase drawing 1 2017 pigment print on cotton rag
Images: the artist, unless otherwise stated All installation views, unless otherwise stated, are of the exhibition Angela Brennan: Forms of Life at the Ian Potter Museum of Art. Photography courtesy of Christian Capurro. Acknowledgements The artist would like to sincerely thank Will Barrett, Craig Barker, Jan Bryant, Rosy Green, Michael Graf, Michael Sainsbury, Diana Conway-Wood and Robert Fagles for his translation of The Iliad. Michael Graf would like to thank Russell Walsh. This catalogue is copyright. Apart from fair dealing for the purposes of research, criticism or review as permitted under the Copyright Act 1968, no part may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted by any means without the prior permission of the publisher. The views expressed in this publication are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect those of the Ian Potter Museum of Art or the publisher. ISBN 978 0 7340 5392 3 Design by 5678 Design Printed by Bambra Press, Melbourne The Ian Potter Museum of Art The University of Melbourne Victoria 3010 Australia Email potter-info@unimelb.edu.au www.art-museum.unimelb.edu.au Patron Lady Potter AC
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Angela Brennan Forms of Life
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Foreword Kelly Gellatly, Director
Forms of Life is a response by celebrated Melbourne-based artist Angela Brennan to the University of Melbourne’s collection of Greek and Cypriot artefacts, and investigates, via Brennan’s own ceramics, drawings, paintings and textile works, how pre-modern objects contribute to thinking and making in contemporary art practices. The exhibition is the first in an initiative to encourage the increasing engagement of artists, via the Museum, with the University of Melbourne’s much-loved Classics & Archaelogy Collection; ably captured by Brennan in the bringing together of antiquity and her own work and her desire to ‘allow the viewer to encounter the temporal instability of the artefact and to recognise how the artefact resists periodisation.’ The newly-commissioned body of work showcased in Forms of Life developed from the artist’s residency in October 2016 with Dr Craig Barker, Manager, Education and Public Programs, Sydney University Museums as part of the University of Sydney’s Paphos Theatre Archaeological Project in Nea Paphos, Cyprus. For Brennan, this residency heightened her understanding that ‘artistic form and its complexities never settles in one instance but instead draws its vitality by virtue of being in constant circulation.’
This publication includes new writing by artist Michael Graf and I thank and congratulate him on his contribution. Thanks and acknowledgement are also due to the entire Potter team for their work in ensuring the exhibition’s success; in particular, the Potter’s curators Jacqueline Doughty, Samantha Comte and Alyce Neal; Collections Officers Svetlana Matovski and Roxanna Richens and Museum Preparators James (Ned) Needham and Adam Pyett. Warm thanks is also due to Will Barrett; to the artist’s gallerists Niagara Galleries, Melbourne and Roslyn Oxley9 Gallery, Sydney, and to Dr Craig Barker for kindly agreeing to open the exhibition. Finally, we congratulate Angela Brennan and thank her for so generously sharing her work, and for the exhibition.
Kelly Gellatly Director
Primarily known as a painter, Brennan began creating ceramic works alongside her painting practice after taking a ceramics course in 2013. Informed by their historic context and use, and by stylistic properties such as shape, decorative marks and material textures embedded in the artefacts, Brennan employs the same exuberant approach to colour and form evident in her paintings in her own ceramics, and in her new foray into textiles, which are shown for the first time in this exhibition.
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installation view
Photograph: Christo Crocker
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Naiads 2017 earthenware
Photograph: Christian Capurro
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...fun to funky: Angela Brennan, her ceramics, and the ancient world
With the exhibition Angela Brennan: Forms of Life at the Ian Potter Museum of Art, Angela Brennan engages with the University of Melbourne’s Classics and Archaeology Collection in a singular fashion. Alongside antiquities selected by the artist from the Museum, the exhibition includes ceramics made by Brennan, drawings scaled up as digital prints and a series of outfits made from specially designed fabrics. The exhibition’s diverse material is mirrored in the many fields it covers, which range across archaeology, art history, philosophy, and literature, as well as travel and fashion. Brennan is unafraid to shape this material with humour, wit, and modesty, characteristics not always encountered in a museum. Framed as a dialogue with the Classics and Archaeology Collection, the outcome of the Museum’s invitation to Brennan is actually much more like a dialogue with herself. The new bodies of work, conceived as experiments, are only obliquely related to the artist’s established painting practice though they draw on ideas and interests that have obsessed her for some time. In particular, Brennan asks herself, why is it that objects from the distant past continue to have such a strong resonance, and how does an artist respond creatively to the concept of a continuity of forms? It’s very clear, however, that the specialised nature of archaeological taxonomy fundamental to the Classics and Archaeology Collection (which is publically manifested in the ongoing series of superb exhibitions at The Ian Potter Museum of Art) is subject to a degree of pressure and disruption by Brennan’s responses. While her deep engagement with the ancient world is prominent throughout this project, it’s also appropriate to ask what the academic world can potentially learn from Brennan, a question I will return to. Ceramics have featured in many of Brennan’s recent exhibitions, usually clustered in attractive groupings adjacent to her painted canvases. They occasionally riff on brushwork and colours seen in the paintings, but the artist is clear that they form a distinct body of work informed by different modes of making and thinking. Initially made in emulation of objects she was studying in collections of ancient art, her ceramics have never been conceived as direct copies. They are sometimes unsettling: their offbeat forms and strident coloured glazes rarely matching the qualities we associate with ancient ceramics. Equally unsettling is that frustrating mismatch with the paintings. Their offbeat forms are often modelled after the bulbous shapes of Bronze Age and Geometric ceramics from Cyprus, represented in depth in the Classics and Archaeology Collection,
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and the discordant relationship with the paintings is ultimately an issue of typology rather than aesthetics. It’s important to note that Brennan doesn’t align her ceramic production with contemporary artisan practitioners, and has never exhibited her work in this medium alongside ceramicists. Technically, Brennan has attained a level of expertise with her ceramics that has allowed her to undertake pretty much whatever she likes. This was consolidated in the preparation for this exhibition by a productive residency at the Strathnairn Arts Centre, Canberra, in November – December 2016. Of equal importance was a quite different residency in October 2016 at the University of Sydney Archaeological Excavation at the Paphos Theatre Site, Cyprus. This experience allowed Brennan to observe at first hand the meticulous fieldwork of professional archaeologists, something very few artists, even those with specific archaeological interests, are able to access. We have then, an artist making ceramics as a distinct activity from her painting, and with only a quasi-functional relationship to use, and a close affinity with ancient objects without closely resembling them. What then are we looking at, and more importantly, what has the artist herself wanted to make? In the ancient world, when glass was both difficult and expensive to make, ceramics were mass-produced to cater for almost all storage needs. Objects for tableware were a mix of metals for wealthy households, mostly silver or bronze, and ceramics for everyone else. The forms of ceramic tableware were often copied directly from metallic models. Because of their base value, ancient metal objects have survived in small numbers, whereas ceramics are evident in such profusion that it is a standard archaeological practice to determine ancient population densities by the rate of potshards found in each square metre at excavation sites. Brennan’s ceramic vessels are designed as if for use as tableware, though I don’t know of anyone actually using them for this purpose. And although acquired by collectors, Brennan doesn’t conceive them as artworks in the same way as she does her paintings. Their function is more symbolic. To understand this shift in function from the utilitarian to the symbolic, it helps to track the life cycle of ancient Greek tableware from its use in the aristocratic drinking parties, or symposia, to its emergence as funerary objects. Information about symposia, where the consumption of food was completed early on before the drinking began, has been recorded in ancient Greek literature, and is also known thanks to ample archaeological evidence. Beautiful sets of silver and bronze symposiumware, with a complete range of different sized drinking cups, plus vessels and utensils for straining, mixing, and ladling the wine, have been discovered in a number of spectacular ancient tombs, particularly royal ones. But the overwhelming number of surviving symposium-ware objects are the painted ceramic Greek ‘vases’ that are such a feature of museum collections of ancient art. These are the inexpensive ‘knockoff’ copies of the original metallic pieces, often of great aesthetic beauty in themselves.
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The drinking party, as depicted in Plato’s Symposium, was a ritualised set of practices designed to steer the consumption of alcohol away from solitary inebriation and its potential for anti-social behaviour towards moderating the consumption of wine socially by pacing the evening with philosophical conversation. Or so the literature would have us believe. Objects of symposium-ware vary in shape and function according to location and period, but its standard components are the krater, a large vessel used for mixing wine with water, and a series of different shaped drinking cups, shallow for convivial parties and deeper for drunken ones. All this crockery, whether metallic or ceramic, is of little consequence without consideration of the wine it was made to contain, and in particular the effects it produced on its drinkers. Wine, of course, was sacred to the god Dionysus, and its effects were considered a manifestation of the sacred bond between the god and his devotees. Drinking then made every imbiber, by necessity, a follower of Dionysus. It was effectively a quasi-religious practice. Unsurprisingly, a number of Greek words are used to describe both the effects of drinking and religious ecstasy: ekstasis, enthousiasmos, and athymia (radically altered consciousness). In this double identification of wine consumption and the dissolution of self in exalted spiritual states, exemplified by the mania of Dionysus’s female followers the maenads, the shift in function of the symposium-ware to funerary goods is signalled. Additionally, Dionysus’s marriage to the mortal Ariadne and her ascent with him to Olympus betokens a hope for a happy afterlife. Images of this union feature on both symposium-ware and in eschatological contexts, most spectacularly on the famous Derveni Krater. Ancient Greek funerary practices varied. Even within singular periods and locations, inhumation existed alongside cremation, and there were manifold ways of storing the deceased’s remains. Large items of symposium-ware were regularly re-purposed as receptacles for bones and ashes, and for burying infants and children intact. Kraters also served as standard grave markers in classical Athens. Symposium-ware was also buried with the dead for ongoing use in the afterlife. In the current exhibition, Brennan’s ceramic vessels reference symposium-ware in their generic shape and function. Brennan has also painted lines from Plato’s Symposium onto ceramic plates, and she has crafted a set of ceramic figurines representing each of the participants. Although they appear ready for imminent use at a banquet, Brennan’s vessels maintain a religious and funerary character. This is affirmed by a number of tall vases also on display that are modelled on the lekythos, the elegant vessels that were used to pour libations of fragrant oil to honour the dead at gravesides. The bright glazes of these objects may allude to modern Mediterranean tourist tat, but the shape of these vessels denotes an exclusive funerary function.
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The sense of continuity Brennan has identified in relation to the ancient objects from the University of Melbourne’s Classics and Archaeology Collection, as well as other museums and historical sites, is amply manifested in the making of new objects. By allowing her interest to range over many different fields of knowledge and creative endeavour, Brennan also achieves something the specialist can only rarely offer: breadth and synthesis. Her results may appear odd, even child-like at times, but like the speech of the drunken Symposium gatecrasher, Alcibiades, they need to be taken seriously. …fun to funky? I guess I planted this line from the 1980 David Bowie song as both a descriptor of Brennan’s pots, and the ancient drinking parties they evoke, but also to prompt the preceding line, which is also the song’s title, ‘Ashes to Ashes’. Along with these words from the Book of Common Prayer, do we have a neat diagram, thanks to Bowie’s classic song, of the shift from the pleasures of this life, to death, and on to the afterlife? Please discuss – in company – with drinks.
Michael Graf Michael Graf is a Melbourne-based artist
pp 14–15 What do you want a poet for? To save the city of course! 2017 synthetic polymer paint on wall Photograph: Christian Capurro
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installation view
Photograph: Christo Crocker
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Urania 2016 stoneware
Photograph: Christian Capurro
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Vase drawing 3 2017 pigment print on cotton rag
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Plato’s plates 2017 earthenware and marble
Photograph: Christian Capurro
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installation view
Photograph: Christo Crocker
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List of works
Angela Brennan Forms of Life
Angela Brennan born Ballarat, Victoria, 1960; lives and works in Melbourne. All works collection of the artist unless otherwise stated. Courtesy of the artist, Niagara Galleries, Melbourne and Roslyn Oxley9 Gallery, Sydney. The Gods sat ruminating 2014–16 earthenware, stoneware 4 parts; dimensions variable XIV 2016 stoneware 50.5 x 34.5 x 35.5 cm Between 2016–17 earthenware, stoneware 2 parts; dimensions variable Above 2017 earthenware 37 x 31 x 31 cm Among 2017 earthenware, stoneware 2 parts; dimensions variable Aphrodite 2017 twilled cotton dimensions variable Apollo 2017 twilled cotton dimensions variable
Clio 2017 earthenware 39.5 x 30.5 x 32 cm
This 2017 oil on linen 70 cm (diameter)
Erato 2017 earthenware 36.5 x 30.5 x 31.5 cm
Urania 2017 stoneware 34.5 x 32.5 x 33 cm
Eros 2017 twilled cotton dimensions variable
Vase drawing 1 2017 pigment print on cotton rag, edition of 10, AP 101 x 73.5 cm
Euterpe 2017 earthenware 35 x 32.5 x 33 cm Form of life – One 2017 earthenware 17 parts; dimensions variable Melopmene 2017 earthenware 39 x 31.5 x 31.5 cm Naiads 2017 earthenware 39.5 x 30.5 x 32.5 cm
Vase drawing 2 2017 pigment print on cotton rag, edition of 10, AP 101 x 73.5 cm Vase drawing 3 2017 pigment print on cotton rag, edition of 10, AP 36 x 50 cm Vase drawing 4 2017 pigment print on cotton rag, edition of 10, AP 36 x 50 cm
Pan 2017 twilled cotton dimensions variable
Vase drawing 5 2017 pigment print on cotton rag, edition of 10, AP 34 x 40 cm
Plato’s plates 2017 earthenware and marble 26 parts; dimensions variable
Vase drawing 6 2017 pigment print on cotton rag, edition of 10, AP 34 x 40 cm
Pnoae 2017 earthenware 36.5 x 29.5 x 30 cm
Vase drawing 7 2017 pigment print on cotton rag, edition of 10, AP 34 x 40 cm
Pollux 2017 twilled cotton dimensions variable
Around 2017 terracotta, earthenware 5 parts; dimensions variable
Polythymnia 2017 stoneware 41 x 29.5 x 29.5 cm
Athena 2017 twilled cotton dimensions variable
Terpsichore 2017 earthenware 33.5 x 30.5 x 32 cm
Calliope 2017 earthenware 31 x 31 x 31 cm
Thalia 2017 earthenware 35 x 31 x 31.5 cm
Vase drawing 8 2017 pigment print on cotton rag, edition of 10, AP 34 x 40 cm What do you want a poet for? To save the city of course! 2017 synthetic polymer paint on wall 300 x 470 cm
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The University of Melbourne Art Collection Classics and Archaeology Collection
Amphora 2300–2150 BCE ceramic 19.5 x 20.8 x 15.6 cm Purchased from Australian Institute of Archaeology, 1987 (1987.0088)
Jug 2200–2000 BCE ceramic 40.5 cm (H), 22.7 cm (diameter) Melbourne Cyprus Expedition (1972.0169)
Juglet 2100–1650 BCE ceramic 14.4 cm (H), 8.35 cm (diameter) Purchased from Australian Institute of Archaeology, 1987 (1987.0084)
Bowl 1950–1650 BCE ceramic 7.3 x 15.4 x 10.6 cm Melbourne Cyprus Expedition (1972.0201)
Stirrup jar Mycenaean, c. 13th century BCE ceramic 12 x 15.9 x 16.1 cm Gift of Oscar Whitbread and Corinne Kerby. Donated through the Australian Government’s Cultural Gifts Program, 2013 (2013.0021)
Animal figurine 1000–586 BCE ceramic 4.8 x 7.1 cm (1970.0340)
Buff ware chalice with red bands and bird decoration 8th–7th century BCE ceramic 25 x 24 x 24 cm Gift of David and Marion Adams, 2009 (2009.0249)
Human figurine 750–325 BCE terracotta 10.8 x 5.5 x 4.85 cm Purchased from Australian Institute of Archaeology, 1987 (1987.0183)
Aryballos Corinthian, c. 550 BCE ceramic 7 cm (H), 6.8 cm (diameter) Purchased 1972 (1972.0034)
Neck amphora Attic Black-Figure, Light-make Class, c. 520 BCE ceramic 25.3 cm (H), 15.6 cm (diameter) Purchased 1971 (1971.0122)
Aryballos Corinthian, c. 660 BCE ceramic 7.17 x 4.1 cm Purchased 1977
Footless lekythos Lucanian, 510–490 BCE ceramic 10.1 cm (H), 6.2 cm (diameter) Purchased 1985
(1977.0152)
(1985.0113)
Unguentarium 600 BCE–100 CE ceramic 21.5 x 5.1 cm Gift of Peter Chaldjian, 1995
Lekythos Attic White-Ground, Workshop of the Beldam Painter, 470–450 BCE earthenware 19.6 cm (H), 6 cm (diameter) Gift of Dr Geoffrey Kaye 1986
(1995.0092)
Lamp Byzantine, 5th–7th century CE ceramic 5 x 6 x 8.7 cm (0000.0292)
Alabastron Etrusco-Corinthian, c. 575–550 BCE ceramic 20.35 cm (H), 10.3 cm (diameter) John Hugh Sutton Memorial Bequest, 1929 (1931.0002)
Lagynos 325–50 BCE ceramic 21.6 cm (H), 19.7 cm (diameter) Purchased from Australian Institute of Archaeology, 1987 (1987.0213)
Unguentarium 325–50 BCE ceramic 10.8 x 4.8 cm Purchased from Australian Institute of Archaeology, 1987 (1987.0102)
Bell krater Campanian Red-Figure, The Boston Ready Painter, c. 330–310 BCE ceramic 33.5 cm (H), 30.2 cm (diameter) Purchased 1957 (1957.0006)
Female figurine fragment n.d ceramic 8.2 x 4.9 x 3.2 cm (0000.0367)
(1986.0090)
Lekythos Attic White-Ground, Reed Painter, 430–420 BCE ceramic 25.7 cm (H), 7.4 cm (diameter) John Hugh Sutton Memorial Bequest, 1929 (1929.0081)
Bell krater c. 400–380 BCE ceramic 12.4 cm (H), 14.2 cm (diameter) Estate of W. Culican, presented by Mrs E. B. Culican, 1984 (1984.0256) 27
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Pan 2017 twilled cotton
Photograph: Christian Capurro
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