Jan Senberg S
g eelong re-imagined and o b S erved work S from the w e S t Coa S t
by Jan Senberg S
Deakin University Art Gallery
‘the imagination has its own geography which alters with the centuries.’
Graham Greene 1952I recently read this quotation when visiting the National Museum of Australia and thought immediately of the paintings of Jan Senbergs. Now an elder statesman of Australian painting, Senbergs’ artistry has undertaken a colossal voyage, laden with imagery and themes of colonisation, settlement, cartography, transportation, migration, industry, humanity and nature. This artistic course has been charted by Senbergs’ internal compass as much as a surveyor’s sextant; the imprints and hierarchy of memory are given equal footing with the discrimination of sight and first contact. In short, when we reflect on the experience of looking, Senbergs’ paintings remind us that the eye is a useful receptor but the brain is doing the real work.
Jan Senbergs arrived as a young boy in Australia from Latvia in 1950 taking his first steps ashore at Port Melbourne. Though one might have expected a long process of adjustment to a new home, Senbergs took to the country within just a few years. In 2006 a major monograph, Voyage and Landfall: The Art of Jan Senbergs (Miegunyah Press), written by former Director of the National Gallery of Victoria, Patrick McCaughey, retraced the artistic journey of the Latvian migrant in Australia. I will not attempt to repeat that great task here but it is worth signalling some important signposts for those discovering Senbergs’ artwork for the first time, and to help understand his connection to the west coast.
Senbergs’ landscape paintings are characterised by a strong sense of location as well as bold and robust formal features. However, his rigour should not be mistaken for a lack of finesse. Senbergs describes his subjects in pastel – an uncompromising medium – with great virtuosity. In a single line he might capture an outline, a contour and shading all at the same time, the result of a scrutinising eye that is particularly attuned to shape, weight and volume. His observations, however, are often just the first act for a larger vision. Never timid in outlook or application, Senbergs contorts the world, the act of observation grappling with the inclinations of perception and memory. There is uncertainty as to which plays the respective roles of master and servant in this perceptual relationship.
Senbergs’ preoccupation with the Victorian west coast developed after purchasing a holiday stay near Angahook at Airey’s Inlet with wife Helen in 1987. Along with the appeal of a brooding, rugged coastline and wind pummelled scrub and trees, he became interested in its human history, in particular William Buckley, the infamous convict escapee – a survivor and interloper from Australia’s
colonial past. Though enamoured with this region his paintings are tinged with awe. The landscape is presented as formidable as Buckley might have encountered. The reverence for nature and the desire to subdue it, human will against wild land, is a recurring tension in Senbergs’ work. Though not limited to Victoria’s west coast, this tension finds frequent expression there, beginning in repeated drawings of the same inland vistas and natural coastal features and ending in imaginative visions on canvas.
The impetus for this exhibition came after the purchase of Geelong Capriccio (If Geelong were settled instead of Melbourne) 2010, a significant acquisition for the Deakin University Art Collection. To contextualise this work the exhibition draws heavily on other recent works displayed in two solo exhibitions, Angahook – Otway 2007 and Capriccios 2009 held at Niagara Galleries, that together spanned ten years of artistic output. These works are supplemented with sketches, drawings and visual diaries, many of which have never been exhibited, showing the embryonic beginnings of monumental opus paintings. It is a delight and privilege to share these works at Deakin University, which has its own strong connections with the west coast. Geelong Re-imagined and Observed Works from the West Coast will tour to the Dennys Lascelles exhibition space, Geelong Waterfront Campus after showing at the Deakin University Art Gallery, Melbourne Burwood Campus.
Deakin University Art Gallery is proud to present this exhibition by Jan Senbergs and we thank the artist for his willingness and enthusiasm throughout its development and presentation. We extend our gratitude to Simon Grennan, Lecturer in Visual Arts, Faculty of Arts and Education, for his compelling catalogue essay, and to Patrick McCaughey for generously allowing Deakin to reproduce his fine appraisal of the painting Geelong Capriccio
We also thank the private collectors who have loaned works to this exhibition, William Nuttall and Gina Lee from Niagara Galleries for their assistance and Jasmin Tulk for her catalogue design.
We hope that you enjoy the paintings, drawings and journals presented in this exhibition, a unique opportunity to share the observations and re-imaginings of an artistic journey along the west coast of Victoria.
victor griss Exhibition Curator
Otway and Old
World Memory 2009
acrylic on linen
196 x 233 cm
From the Collection of Atticus and Milo
eSSay: landSCaPe on the brink
While today’s art world is outwardly pluralistic, it can still be quick to chastise established artists for taking a wrong turn. Looking back at Jan Senbergs’ prodigious body of work I am struck firstly by the unselfconscious audacity of it, its adventurousness both thematically and formally. He seems disinclined to ever fully submit either to his audience’s, or his own, expectations. This makes easy generalisations and theorising about his art highly fraught.
It is safe to say however that Senbergs is not a programmatic kind of artist. While he has a ‘visual signature’ (as he puts it) that is unmistakably his, it is combined with an open-ended receptiveness to the world around him. His itinerant artistic nature is in part cultivated out of familiar modernist sensibilities: the urge to mine creative impulses and visual motifs operating outside of the academy. His early training, not at art college, but as a screenprinting apprentice, also instilled an appreciation of the creative potential of peripheral and outsider practices, as well as a genuine identification with
them. This, together with a cool-eyed indifference to artistic trends and art historical hierarchies, has produced an oeuvre that treks across divergent thematic and aesthetic terrain. Hence a series of works may be triggered by the purple passages of a naïve and otherwise clumsy colonial painter, or by scientific diagrams and other visual material culled from obscure technical magazines, by indigenous carvings, or more recently by pre-renaissance cartography. He turns his gaze to lofty narrative and historical subjects – to war and current affairs – as impartially as he does to the quotidian world of his studio, or a decomposing animal carcass discovered in the coastal scrub.
There is the same intrepidness in the artist’s formal handling. The pictorial language shifts restlessly between careful observation and imaginative representation. The paintings in particular confront us with a more ‘difficult’ aesthetic than the drawings which always possess an immediate graphic toughness and observational power. Senbergs’ work avoids an easy visual elegance at all cost.
He will habitually combine seemingly irreconcilable elements and stylistic conventions within unstable, almost compositionally suicidal arrangements. Rather than avoid formal difficulties, the artist appears to actively solicit them; a deceptively rigorous design, usually developed through thumbnail sketches, keeps the parts tautly, but only barely, in place. This gives the work much of its kinetic force but also allows Senbergs to fuse form with content, so often imbuing his depicted environments, particularly those in which humans have intervened, with this sense of imminent systemic malfunction.
There is then in Senbergs’ construction of space a relentless pushing and shoving between elements which becomes especially vigorous in this conversation between the natural and the man-made. In Coastal Settlement 2009, for example, it is the natural environment that has the upper hand. Laid out below us, human attempts to colonise the land manifest as an act of hubris, wholly at the mercy of the crushing geological
and elemental forces that surround it. The primal ruggedness of the west coast landscape, battered by the elements for millennia, is palpable. There is a raw energy in the work that arises largely through the torsion and warping of forms. Everything is agitated, on the move. A relatively placid strip of sky glimpsed through the ranges provides a counterpoint which only serves to intensify the action. The horseshoe (or saddle-like) composition – like a kind of pictorial spring – adds to this feeling of immense compressive stresses at once acting upon and indifferent to the nominal human habitation it supports. It is the antithesis of the idea of landscape as manifest destiny. So it is with all of the wild west coast works; Senbergs gives us a kind of visual truth founded less in faithful topographical description than in its power to express the salient environmental processes at work.
landSCaPe and the aerial view
The physical landscape, in its broadest terms, remains the central stage upon which Senbergs’ creative experiments and thematic forays play out. The stage or theatre is more than a convenient (not to mention overused) metaphor here. If we take our meaning from the original Greek ‘theatron’ –literally an ‘open air place for viewing’ – we are able to reconnect concepts that seem particularly apt in discussing Senbergs’ art. We have, essentially, a construction of a specific view, both privileged and distancing; it is the view from above, looking down into the pit. We also have, however, a reemphasis of what is being viewed as both object and (historical) event, that is, the fusing of site and performance as the singular subject of our gaze. Hence the landscape is revealed as both form and process.
This comes across in Senbergs’ ongoing Capriccios series. The artist has been mapping major Australian and international cities as well as townships along the Victorian west coast for over a decade now (sometimes, as in Otway and Old World Memory 2009, he seems to be doing all three at once). The series ranges between expansive aerial maps and closer, often composited, oblique views. Certainly, the elevated view has been an important visual device for Senbergs from the beginning. As has his interest in earlier map-making traditions when landscape painting and the project of objectively recording and measuring space were richly, sometimes bizarrely, intertwined.
The mappae mundi of the Middle Ages, early Renaissance maps, and 18th century capriccio landscapes clearly opened up a rich vein of aesthetic tactics and odd visual conventions for Senbergs. We get the same promiscuous blending of outwardly objective aerial surveys with re-arranged and re-imagined space, of familiar places and pure fantasy. There is the same mixture of pleasure, adventure and anxiety too. We are afforded visual mastery over the terrain and the ability to travel with our eyes alone. But we are also unsure of what is fact and what is fiction. Today we assume, quite reasonably, that our maps will be accurate to a hair’s breadth and (at least in the topographical sense) objective and impartial. Yet I suspect that the aerial depiction of space has always projected an inherent psychological and perceptual veracity that is hard to dislodge, even when we know the picture harbours quite different intentions. The capriccio aerial view then is openly both authoritative and untrustworthy. This creates a perceptual tension in the capriccio work that artists have long exploited. Equally important however for Senbergs, apart from the great beauty and inventiveness of these early landscape-maps, is that they could represent other dimensions of space and place. They could convey hierarchical and symbolic relationships between places, denote systems of exchange, or instruct in religious doctrine. Perhaps most importantly for Senbergs; these traditions could express the affective experience of being in those places. These were in short, image practices
that would allow for different kinds of ‘truth’ to be told beyond mere depiction.
As uncertain or vertiginous as many of Senbergs’ elevated views are, they nevertheless locate the spectator in this omniscient position, showing us not only, or not so much, how a landscape looks but how it functions when we are permitted a little ‘perspective’. We are given a kind of provisional grasp of the relationships or causality between things. This is not an understanding, it seems, that is bestowed upon the unseen inhabitants of Senbergs’ pictures. From these privileged vantage points, we see the manifest results of human activity and industry, and it does not appear to unfold with anything that could be mistaken for prescience or thoughtful planning. All seems shaped through an endless stream of short–sighted and arbitrary decisions, driven by the insatiable urges of commerce and progress, and more fundamentally still, by our species relentless compulsion to build. In Senbergs’ mapped cities, faceted architectural forms crowd and clamour for available space forming ever-expanding circuitry, the urban progress often constrained only by the most acute topographical limitations: by coastlines, rivers, and mountain ranges.
Again, we are not merely implicated by the objects and material products of our habitation but embodied in the artist’s construction of space, in his painterly process and abstract language.
While our buildings, industrial complexes, motorways etc. are literally synthetic, inanimate, rationally constructed, the process through which these artefacts proliferate in Senbergs’ work appears raw, frenetic, and (all too) human. This renders literal human depiction largely redundant. Even when we are close enough to apprehend human scale the artist rarely does so overtly. The stratagem, as Senbergs points out, maintains the malleability and ambiguities of scale operating in the work. The mondrian-esque red, yellow and blue cars that tear up and down the highway arterials in the Melbourne Capriccios for example, stand in for the human. It is a device that represents us as standardised units, reduced to the small machinery of the city. The artist is perhaps more interested in our collective rather than individual behaviour here, and especially in how this collective behaviour seems to so easily trump and override our intentions and values as individuals. One imagines anonymous but obsessively industrious human-units carrying out apparently harmless sub-routines which nevertheless drive the urban machine toward unplanned and unintended outcomes. Senbergs’ city paintings confront us with an aspect of our collective nature that is compulsive and paradoxically destructive (we can not create without also destroying), yet at the same time he makes use of these deep urges as a prodigiously generative creative process.
(continued page 12)
Geelong Capriccio (If Geelong were settled instead of Melbourne)
“One of the rarest qualities in contemporary painting is wit. When we do encounter it, we are surprised, almost ambushed by its presence, and then find ourselves immediately engaged. Jan Senbergs’ Geelong Capriccio is in every way a painting of wit with its single absurd proposition as to what the world would look like if Geelong had become the capital and the site of Melbourne remained open paddocks. What makes the painting so wonderfully and weirdly convincing is the documentary quality of the work. How plausible it is that the fashionable suburbs of this Geelong should be on the other side of the Heads, still at Portsea but linked to downtown Geelong by super-bridges and highways. Senbergs annexes to his own purpose the very earliest ways of depicting cities: a bird’s eye view where the image lies somewhere between a map – a truthful document of the place – and an overall vision of the urbs and its surrounding country.
T.S. Eliot once shrewdly remarked that wit was the ‘alliance of levity and seriousness’. What makes Senbergs’ Geelong Capriccio a work of real substance along with a certain sweeping grandeur to it, is that it points to one of the most serious and enduring qualities of the Australian experience. Australians and the cities they inhabit are caught between two extreme conditions; a vast and thinly populated inland and an equally vast, uninhabited space, the oceans of the world. There is something precarious about this clinging to the littoral – a condition shared by no other country in the world. By moving the centre from Hobson’s Bay to Corio Bay, Senbergs takes us one large step closer to ‘the deserts of ocean’. It seems to me to be a very Antipodean painting: the upside down world, which Europe imagined Australia to be, a place where anything might happen. The painting is genuinely witty and uneasy making for Eliot went on to say that by the ‘alliance of levity and seriousness … the seriousness is intensified’ and so it is in Jan Senbergs’ masterpiece, Geelong Capriccio.”
Patrick McCaughey 2010
Geelong Capriccio (If Geelong were settled instead of Melbourne)
2010
acrylic on canvas
200 x 260 cm
Deakin University Art Collection
(continued from page 9)
More recently the capriccio idea has enabled Senbergs to run his own creative experiments: how, given the same essential ingredients (human nature, environment, historical contingencies) would our cities look if we rewound the clock and began things over? In Geelong Capriccio 2010, the artist asks this quite explicitly: ‘If Geelong were settled instead of Melbourne, how would the area look today?’ Senbergs clearly wants us to ponder just that. The work in many respects is not as capricious as one might expect. He is careful to preserve key topographical features: the distinctive profile of Port Philip Bay, the Barwon River and Lake Connewarre, along with many of the existing infrastructures and arterial networks. Variables are maintained in order to convey the larger narrative. Senbergs’ powers of invention thus work in concert with an intimate knowledge of, and connection to the area, the culmination of many decades travelling and working in the region. The result is not merely the fantastical or the whimsical, but a fully realised and plausible alternative scenario of the Melbourne-Geelong region.
The effects of this are unexpectedly subtle. The brute power driving many of Senbergs’ pictures is tempered here. There is a certain wry pleasure for the viewer in looking at these alternate histories told through alternative patterns of settlement. We feel like insiders in the deception, but we are also shaken from our own distorted
sense of history as natural and inevitable rather than contingent. The urban matrix turned out this way but if we re-ran the experiment perhaps rather insignificant, vexingly unheroic, transactions would result in very different realities. On the other hand, Senbergs conveys something about the human project that does look both inevitable and ‘predictably irrational’1. It is in the way it expands and consumes; in the way, for example, the vine-like road networks spread and branch parasitically over their landscape host. The particulars have changed but the underlying patterns of settlement and expansion have not. For me, it is this conversation between contrasting time scales – between the geological instant of human history on the one hand and the land’s own vast (geo)history on the other – that emerges most persistently in Geelong Capriccio, and which adds a melancholy note to the work’s humour.
The Yarra Ranges that run along the visible limits of the landmass like a prehistoric spine re-enforce this palpable sense of time, casting the landscape not as inanimate rock but as an ancient and evolving organism. Abetted by the luminous and limitless sky beyond, the dome of the horizon stills the urban white-noise as the machinations of the human project are set against unfathomable time and space.
Other works in the exhibition plunge us back toward terra firma, sometimes functioning as close-ups in Senbergs’ thought experiment.
Otway and Old World Memory as the title suggests, is a curious amalgamation of modernist,
renaissance-ish, and retro-futuristic architectural forms wedged somewhere into the harsh but picturesque Otway coast: the old historical-cultural centre at the arse-end of the world. We question not only where but who has done the settling here. One senses, with its grand continental piazzas, monuments and canals, that it is a fabrication that particularly appeals to Senbergs’ cosmopolitan tastes. Old world buildings jostle and vie for position within the rugged terrain while modern beachfront high-rises lean precipitously into Bass Strait. Senbergs’ familiar chewed-up compression is still present but this time the whole scene looks like it’s been flayed open. The natural topography is literally unable to restrain the urban activity as the city peels itself away from the ground plane altogether, transforming itself into a colossal, freestanding machine-monstrosity. Roads convert into a series of giant sci-fi-esque struts and in the process our perception wavers – between the relative safety of a distant aerial view and a side-elevation of this landscape-cyborg hybrid that encroaches into our own physical space.
Threatening as many of these works are, they cannot be neatly categorised as dystopias. As other commentators have been careful to point out, Senbergs is never pointedly judgemental or didactic. He does not offer us conspicuous moral sermons, and rightly so. A figurative artist, no matter how sensitive his gut is to the sufferings of others, will nevertheless rejoice at the visual
possibilities and aesthetic riches of a burnt, bombed, flooded, or environmentally decimated site. Indeed, an artist never wipes away his tears because he is too busy rubbing his hands together. Senbergs is no exception. It is after all the more extreme, dysfunctional, and downright apocalyptic environments that suit his aesthetic instincts best and this inevitably creates a more complex and ambiguous moral relationship to the subject. Even so, Albert Schweitzer’s oft-quoted warning comes readily to mind when looking at many of these works: ‘Man has lost the capacity to foresee and to forestall. He will end by destroying the Earth.’
In the meantime, Senbergs’ practice continues along its open-ended and experiential way, led not by an undeviating artistic mission but by the opportunities of a chance encounter, a current event, or the invitation of a new assignment or expedition. This is perhaps as close to a fixed creative maxim as the artist gets, and one gleaned from a lifetime of practice. The endurance and constant inventiveness of his art is fuelled, in part, by an unwillingness to maintain a set course.
Simon Grennan Lecturer in Visual Arts School of Communication and Creative Arts Faculty of Arts and Education, Deakin University
Jan Senbergs AM was born in Riga, Latvia in 1939 and arrived in Australian in 1950. He began his career as an apprentice silkscreen printer while attending the Melbourne School of Printing and Arts (1956–1960) and began exhibiting in the 1960s. Since then he has held nearly 50 solo exhibitions in Sydney and Melbourne. Over the years many presentations of his work, including touring exhibitions, have been mounted in Australian public galleries. In 1994 a major survey of paintings Imagined Sites – Imagined Realities was held at Heide Museum of Modern Art in the same year he was awarded the William Dobell Prize for drawing at the Art Gallery of New South Wales. Since representing Australia in the Sao Paolo Biennale, Brazil in 1973 his work has also been included in numerous major national and international survey exhibitions of Australian Art. Senbergs is renowned for his mural commission States Wall and Constitution Wall (1977–1980) displayed in the atrium of the High Court of Australia, Canberra. He was a lecturer in Fine Arts at RMIT (1966 –1980) where he was awarded an honorary doctorate in 1986. He was the Visiting Professor and Chair of Australian Studies at Harvard University, Boston, USA (1989–1990) and appointed as a trustee of the National Gallery of Victoria (1984–1989). In 2003 Senbergs received the Order of Australia for service to the Australian visual arts. His work is extensively represented in public collections, including the Museum of Modern Art New York, National Gallery Washington DC, the National Gallery of Australia, National Gallery of Victoria, Geelong Gallery, Warrnambool Art Gallery and the Deakin University Art Collection. The book Voyage and Landfall: The Art of Jan Senbergs by Patrick McCaughey was published by Miegunyah Press in 2006. Jan Senbergs lives and works in Melbourne and is represented by Niagara Galleries.
geelong re-imagined and observed works from the west Coast
by Jan Senbergs Deakin University ArtGallery
exhibition dateS
Deakin University Art Gallery, Melbourne Burwood Campus
14 September to 22 October 2011
Dennys Lascelles Exhibition Gallery, Geelong Waterfront Campus
28 October to 25 November 2011
© 2011 the artist, the authors and publisher. Copyright to the works is retained by the artist and his/ her descendants. No part of this publication may be copied, stored in a retrieval system, transmitted or reproduced in any form or by any means without the prior written permission of the publisher and the individual copyright holder(s).
The views expressed within are those of the author(s) and artist and do not necessarily represent the views held by Deakin University. Unless otherwise indicated all images are reproduced courtesy of the artist and Niagara Galleries. Unless otherwise indicated the photographer of the images is Mark Ashkanasy.
Jan Senbergs is represented by Niagara Galleries, Melbourne.
Published by Deakin University
ISBN 978-0-9806214-7-1
Edition 1000 copies
Catalogue design: Jasmin Tulk
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Cover:
Coastal Settlement 2009 (detail)
acrylic on canvas 169 x 216 cm
Private collection
Inside cover: Still we stand –Point Roadknight ii 2006 pastel/acrylic on paper 100 x 195 cm
Collection of the artist