Theatre of memory

Imants

Sophie Knezic

Credo by Imants Tillers Giramondo $26.95 pb, 185 pp

In the early sixteenth century, the Italian Renaissance poet and philosopher Giulio Camillo conceived an imaginary structure for universal knowledge named The Theatre of Memory; essentially a classical amphitheatre that inverted the position of spectator and stage, turning the auditorium into a tiered structure that fanned into rows of encyclopedic knowledge. Imants Tillers makes no mention of Camillo’s theatre in his anthology of essays, Credo, but the structure could be a parallel schema for his own expansive project The Book of Power – an ongoing inventory of all the canvas board panels Tillers has painted since 1981, which totalled 102,663 by 2018.

Born of immigrant Latvian parentage, Tillers is a renowned Australian artist who garnered national attention in the late

1970s and, through his customary strategy of appropriation, came to typify Australian postmodernism. He is best known for his modular paintings comprising multiple panels of canvas boards which are assembled into grids, fracturing the surface into a matrix of semi-unified parts. Fragments of images from disparate artists and writers interlock into collaged compositions, making his works compendia of literary and artistic quotation.

While paintings have been his primary output over the past fifty years, Tillers has also written essays. Credo is a collection of fourteen of them dating from 1982 to 2019, all previously published, apart from ‘The Sources’ (2019). It is this last essay that elaborates The Book of Power and takes the format of a dictionary of Tillers’ key artistic and literary influences, including Giorgio de Chirico, Marcel Duchamp, Georg Baselitz, Jackson Pollock, Sigmar Polke, and Colin McCahon, Novalis, and Stéphane Mallarmé. Committed to continuing his over-arching project, Tillers nonetheless notes, ‘Something [is] always missing – that is, the next work, the next reference, the next source, the next allocated number as it heads in the impossible direction of infinity, never to reach finality or terminus.’ There is a voracity here yet the linking of each of these artists back to his own oeuvre has a touch of self-aggrandisement.

It is a tendency that Tillers mostly skirts, although the latter essays do become more self-referential. The earlier essays written in the 1980s and 1990s, however, show Tillers to be a sharp cultural critic. ‘Fear of Texture’ (1983) wittily punctures the pretensions of paint manufacturer Chromacryl in promoting a product overloaded with signifiers of rugged authenticity.

Chromacryl’s new line of Atelier Impasto Acrylic proclaims its ‘tactile meaty impasto’, its retention of ‘vitality of gesture’. For Tillers, ‘It is as though the precariously flat and provisional surface of Australian art up to now is about to be given some “depth” and integrity by the extrusion of tonnes of paint.’ He mentions the Australian National Gallery’s purchase of Jackson Pollock’s Blue Poles in 1973, but what interests Tillers is less the public outcry at its price tag of $1.3 million than the fact that, despite the popular press’s sensationalising of its surface – purportedly studded with cigarette butts and glass fragments – the painting, up close, reveals the shock of its flatness. For Tillers, a consequence of the photographic reproduction of art is that it suppresses the true tactile qualities of surface and leads not only to a distorted view of an artwork but a uniquely Australian fear of texture.

The consumption of artworks via photographic reproduction, preceding their direct encounter, is for Tillers emblematic of the Australian cultural condition or what he calls our ‘second-hand reality’. This is further discussed in ‘Perpetual Mourning’ (1984), where Tillers argues that the lack of direct access to international artworks renders us immune to the complexity of their aura and authority (and surfaces); the process of photographic reproduction levelling out difference and rendering all manner of images equivalent and interchangeable. Such an assessment seems more relevant than ever as digital interfaces dominate our world, amplifying this logic of decontextualised immediacy and equivalence.

The issue of mediated access leads back to the topic of provincialism, and Terry Smith’s definitive essay on the subject, ‘The Provincialism Problem’ (1974), looms large in the background. Smith’s iconic diagnosis of the cultural condition of artists in geographic peripheries (principally the global south) as caught in a bind of inevitable subservience to a hierarchy of cultural value determined elsewhere (with New York as the epicentre) is contested by Tillers, who argues by 1984 things have changed. Suddenly, ‘mimicry’ rather than derivation has become a virtue, a way of turning the charge of provincialism into a badge of honour. The terms ‘regionalism’, ‘quotation’, and ‘appropriation’ ripple through these early essays, and while strategies of image appropriation and deconstruction are now seen as orthodox and somewhat dusty tactics of postmodernism, it is nostalgic to read Tillers’ lyrical endorsements of them during the era’s height.

In many of the essays Tillers champions the rise of Indigenous art and celebrates the fact that, by the 1980s, Indigenous paintings are no longer viewed as ethnographic objects but as contemporary art, often eclipsing those by white Australian artists. Tillers fully acknowledges the history of genocide, yet his advocacy of Indigenous culture belies his own problematic relation to it. In ‘Locality Fails’ (1982), Tillers discusses the attempts at ‘cultural convergence’ by white artists in the mid-twentieth century such as the Jindyworobak poets and the painter Margaret Preston, who invoked the notion of ‘Aboriginality’. Tillers resuscitates the term to claim that the difference is that now contemporary art can approximate the ‘look’ of traditional Indigenous artefacts and, more egregiously, that ‘“Aboriginality” is a ubiquitous quality which is no longer the exclusive domain of “black” Aboriginals’. Such claims highlight the way in which strategies of appropriation can remain wildly insensitive to the autonomy and sovereignty of Indigenous knowledge and culture.

A case in point that Tillers breezily narrates in ‘Poetic Justice – A Case Study’ (1994) concerns his painting The Nine Shots (1985), which appropriated an image from the German artist Georg Baselitz alongside one by the Indigenous artist Michael Nelson Jagamara. He acknowledges that this is the painting that implicated him in the debate of the postmodern appropriation of indigenous imagery but remains defensive. He dismisses the contemporary Chilean Australian artist Juan Davila’s critique of his appropriative act, which subsequently inspired the Indigenous artist Gordon Bennett’s painting The Nine Ricochets (fall down black fella, jump up white fella) (1990) as a riposte.

When the curators of an exhibition at the Institute of Modern Art in Brisbane in 1993 propose that Tillers collaborate with Bennett, Tillers contends, by detecting fragments of his own paintings in Bennett’s The Nine Ricochets, they were already enmeshed. One day, staring at a reproduction of Giorgio de Chirico’s painting Greetings of a Distant Friend (1916), Tillers determines that the collaboration will be a reworking of de Chirico’s image – a decision allegedly conveyed telepathically by Bennett. Tillers reprints Bennett’s wary response to this proposition with the latter’s reasonable definition of a collaborative work as ‘one that is produced on an equal basis’. Bennett, justifiably, goes on to write, ‘Your idea just seems a little too convenient and I must say a little patronising as well.’ Bennett refuses the role that Tillers assigns him but Tillers, stubbornly he admits, goes on to make the painting, which he titles Painting for Closed Eyes – An Experiment in Thought Transference From an Image Received Telepathically From Gordon Bennett at 1.30pm on July 27, 1993 (1993). This wilful deployment of Indigenous artists recurs through Tillers’ essays and betrays his insouciant attitude to appropriation, despite his promotion of Indigenous culture.

When he sidesteps such troublesome politics, Tillers is inquisitive and exploratory, and his discussions of the immigrant experience are particularly astute. Underscoring many of his essays is an encyclopedic impulse and the belief in a world in which ‘locality fails’ – where we are not limited to our immediate circumstances but open to a world brimming with possibility. Mallarmé’s elliptical dictum, ‘a throw of the dice will never abolish chance’, crops up intermittently as shorthand for Tillers’ intrigue with the contingency of life events and his thrill at their unexpected and mysterious connections. g