LOOKING BACK AT THE FIELD
Exhibition Catalogue The Paddock: Looking Back At The Field 24 June – 24 July 2015 Library Stairwell Gallery National Art School Sydney, Australia
Tania Alexander Bianca Burns Natalia Dzwigala Annelies Jahn Michelle Le Dain Caroline McGregor Anya Pesce Lisa Sharp Samantha Stephenson Laura Sutton Lisa Tolcher Oliver Wagner Suzi Zglinicki
This exhibition brings together 13 artists from the BFA (Honours) at the National Art School in 2015. Our practices share an interest in the non-objective and/or in abstraction. As contemporary inheritors of an Australian art legacy, the works in this show were conceived in relation to a prior contemporary - Australia’s then “new” abstraction as showcased in the seminal The Field exhibition of 1968. The Field was the first temporary show held at the newly opened NGV before it toured to the AGNSW. The Field included 40 painters and sculptors1, selected with a confessedly curatorial bias. The aspects of abstraction it promoted have been variously labelled as “post-painterly”, “hard edge”, “colour field”, “conceptual”, “minimal”, “unit pattern, “geometric” and “deductive structure”. Clement Greenberg was in town and art historically the works are receptive to formalist description. Overall, subject matter and expression were downplayed in favour of direct visual experience and a questioning of the object-status of the work of art. The Field was later criticised for being a pale imitation of American abstract painting, even of being un-Australian. Within the
Australian art world however it was significant, not because it was the first time abstraction was shown but because it brought abstraction into the institution. Also significant for us was the sense of a collective endeavour by the artists involved. As Patrick McCaughey noted in his catalogue essay, the abstractionists “have generated among themselves the debate and the dialogue, not necessarily in speech but in painting” (and sculpture) “out of which creative stimuli arise.”2 The Paddock is a reference to the bumpy terrain of the contemporary art world into which we are emerging. It is also a vantage point from which we can look back to The Field. As early career artists in this catalogue we consider the works or an aspect of The Field in relation to our own work and practice as contemporary abstractionists. It is an opportunity to consider the trajectory of abstraction in Australia since 1968, and the continuing influence (or not) of the moment in time captured in and on The Field of abstraction. Lisa Sharp
1
They were 37 men and 3 women; we are
12 women and 1 man. 2
Patrick McCaughey, The Field, National Gallery
of Victoria, 1968. Exhibition Catalogue, 90.
Bianca Burns Michael Johnson, who exhibited in The Field, 1968 has been a major artist influence on my practice. His works exist between the realm of painting and sculpture, hovering between surface and object. His use of shaped canvasses and multi-panel works, such as Frontal 2 (1968) provide stimulus by questioning the illusory potential embedded within perceived objects. As this painting is held by the Art Gallery of NSW and has been on display recently, I have been able to spend time looking closely at it. Like Johnson, I am also interested in achieving a flat quality of light-absorbing matte paint on surfaces.
Anya Pesce Robert Jacks was a Melbourne-born artist (1943-2014). Jacks lived and worked in New York for many years, mixing with artists Sol Le Witt and Donald Judd. He produced paintings as well as three-dimensional work and his serial approach was aligned with Minimalism and conceptual practices. Jacks was the subject of a major retrospective held earlier this year at the National Gallery of Victoria. I have responded to Jacks’ Red Painting, 1967, which was included in The Field exhibition of 1968, and which he later gave to the NGV. Jacks “understood that colour can make a powerful impression on the viewer, stimulating a range of instinctive, emotional responses.”3 An emphasis on the more than visual experience of colour is also a feature of my work and I have recently made an installation based on different versions of the colour red. My work addresses formal aspects of non-representational abstraction such as colour, material and form. In the two pieces shown, I have isolated these elements. Gesture is used as a counter point acting against hard edge in a movement towards equilibrium.
1 Red Gesture 2015 moulded acrylic 60 x 17 x 21 cm 2 Grey with Red Panel 2015 acrylic and glass on board 40 x 55cm
3
John McDonald, Robert Jacks, Sydney Morning
Herald, November 8, 2014, johnmcdonald.net.au
My two untitled works in The Paddock exhibition speak to the relationship between the wall and the artwork. These paintings on shaped panels can be read frontally, in terms of a dialogue arising from the positive / negative weight and spatial tension created by the surrounding wall space. Seen from the side however, they present ideas about the work as object and question its function. Placed opposite each other in the narrow corridor of this gallery space, they enable the viewer to enact a shift between seeing a painted composition and solid components. These works are of a different scale to Johnson’s large canvasses and as such they function quietly to engage perception through requiring focussed observation rather than immersion.
3 Untitled 2015 acrylic on panel 25 x 30cm 4 Untitled 2015 acrylic on panel 25 x 30cm
Lisa Sharp There is something compelling and utopic about looking back at The Field, 1968. They seemed so sure of themselves, in abstraction and in thanking the tobacco sponsor. The curators identified The Field not as a movement but as a moment.4 And while I am drawn to the works, I am troubled by the rules. So, my work is a small, provisional, of the moment reply to the catalogue words of Lawrence Alloway, who attempted to define the moment as a movement:5 LA: In hard edge the forms are few and the surface is immaculate. LS: I took 3 forms: the corners of 2 hessian sacks and a leftover piece of Belgian linen and stretched and sewed them together on a stretcher they didn’t quite fit. LA: The surface must be immaculate because all the parts composing it must be equivalent. LS: The surface is rough, puckered and sags in the middle. The parts have different textures. LA: There is no established relation between the figures and the field. LS: The stitches are visibly holding the parts together. LA: The colours are limited to two or three tones. LS: The colour is that derived from a single pigment, named Italian Green Earth. LA: What one sees is exactly what there is… LS: Yes.
Caroline McGregor Clement Meadmore once said, “I am interested in geometry as a grammar which, if understood, can be used with great flexibility and expressiveness.” Inspired by what he termed as “the expressive possibilities of geometry” of Mondrian, he was successful in employing geometry to dictate the form of his work, without it becoming the subject. Meadmore showed 3 sculptures, all made from weathering steel in The Field, 1968.
5
4
Italian Green Earth 2015, whiting, rabbit-skin glue, linseed oil, pigment, wax, damar resin and turpentine on linen, hessian, string and pine 60 x 34 x 4.5cm
Brian Finemore & John Stringer,
The Field exhibition catalogue, 3. 5
Lawrence Alloway, Ibid., 84.
Like Meadmore, the insistent materiality and decisive forms of the works of the Minimalist sculptors initially informed my work. In terms of Modernist principles, these sculptors were earnestly looking for a formal ideal; a certain truth that they felt was intrinsic to the world as they knew it. I am also attracted to the cool rationality of geometry as a formal language for my large-scale and hard-edged plywood forms. Interestingly, Meadmore reacted to Minimalism’s obdurate reductiveness by evolving a method that transformed that geometry into something more pliable and animated. Without reverting to the trademark twisted elements of his work, I am inspired by his ability to animate the stasis of the geometric form. In You and I the stained plywood form arcs subtly in a singular tensioned curve, heavily weighted on the floor yet just resting lightly on the wall behind.
6 You and I 2015 plywood 240 x 45 x 30cm
Natalia Dzwigala
Michelle Le Dain
Many of the paintings in The Field use a simple repetition or inversion of a form, colour or abstract pattern as the basis for a reductive composition in which positive and negative elements interact on the flat picture plane. Sydney Ball, Gunter Christmann and Joseph Szabo are examples of artists from The Field who worked in this spare, concise and spatially aware manner.
The Field, 1968 was an exhibition dedicated to a particular stream of international abstraction – in painting one that emphasized surface flatness, geometric forms and fields of saturated colour. This is exemplified by Dick Watkins’ colourful work October (1967), which has been described as combining “elements of hard-edge, Pop and cubist spatial relations to create a vigorous composition whose competing geometric shapes jostle for attention.”6
In my practice I am interested in revealing the beauty and harmony of the ordinary and the imperfect in a conjunction of unlikely forms. The forms originate from a drawing and collage process. The vertical form used, divided and repeated in my works Green 1 and Green 2 is a device that enables an exploration of spatial relationships between the elements. As a result, the gap between illusion and abstraction, flatness and depth, art and the everyday are brought together. This blending of painting and wall installation, canvas and polystyrene, suggests a depth of meaning in the simplicity that surrounds us in our everyday lives.
7 Green 1 & Green 2 2015 acrylic on canvas and polystyrene 50 x 50 cm and 12 x 28 cm
Within my own practice, I find geometric abstraction by combining everyday materials and ready-made forms from the world around me. Using these materials and in a departure from flatness, I like to work in the space between painting, sculpture, assemblage and drawing – layering and placing colour, line and forms as objects directly on to the wall in an intuitive process fuelled by a sense of play. Gift No.1 and Gift No.2 are wall assemblages, referencing Froebel’s theories about the primacy of play through the gift of geometric forms.
8
Gift No.1 2015 glass, acrylic, timber, string, ping pong ball and polypropylene, 85 x 85 cm
9 Gift No.2 2015 pipe cleaners and fishing line 150 x 75 x 22 cm 6
Natalie Wilson, Tackling THE FIELD. Art Gallery
of NSW, 2009. Exhibition catalogue, 10.
Laura Sutton
Samantha Stephenson
In responding to The Field, I was struck by the simple hard edge composition of Rolla-Scape (1968) contributed by Janet Dawson. The reduced language of this work speaks of tension and movement, two elements I have endeavoured to imbue my own work with. In my sculpture One-Seven (2015) I have attempted to respond to her shaped painting in three-dimensional form, utilising the same key elements Dawson implemented with great success.
Afternoon is the result of a sustained focus on rectilinear forms, contrasting colour and the qualities of its materials. The prosaic rectangular monolith of the mdf plinth, traditionally the neutral white base for a sculpture to sit on is drawn up, via the medium of paint, to interact and engage with the steel forms set above it. This apparent harmony of the paired forms coming together is set against an opposition of colour and movement.
Dawson creates the sensation of movement through the repetition of forms that appear to be building rhythmically upon one another, compressing and expanding across the composition. My sculpture consists of similar elements coupled with compositional repetition, which may be more reminiscent of Dawson’s other painting, Wall (1968). The crisp edges of the timber elements, where two hard surfaces meet at sharp angles create a dramatic and defining aspect of the work. However this definition is partly negated by the use of colour, as it is in Dawson’s original. The painted surface of Rolla-Scape appears to cast its own shadows. This subtle shifting of colour defines and in turn defies the hard edge quality of the forms. Colour appears to function with a duality of purpose that I have applied to my own work. At times the colour serves to heighten the viewer’s perception of the form however it also makes the relationship of elements in space ambiguous.
Like many of the works of The Field 1968, colour is a significant component of my work, signifying both meaning and expression. The overlapping and interacting areas of blue and orange lie and curl in tension and opposition. Not only are they chromatic opposites on the colour wheel, but also in the emotions and feelings that they represent. Cool to warm. Cautious to reckless. Calm to drama. This opposition is echoed in the weight of the forms that the blue and orange occupy, some heavy and some apparently weightless. Yet each component form is a subtle variation on the simple rectangular plane – whether expressed as a gentle curve, a pitted surface or a painted band.
11 Afternoon 2015 painted steel and MDF 18.5 x 63 x 31cm
10 One-Seven 2015 timber, acrylic paint and varnish 40 x 25 x 30cmm
Tania Alexander This work references Vesta II, by Paul Partos, a Czechoslovakian born Australian abstract painter, which is now in the collection of the AGNSW. It responds to the formal geometrical composition of his canvas, which is divided into four equal square quadrants, with a central cut-out of a white rectangle, or negative space. The title may refer to the predecessor of 4 Vesta, one of the largest asteroids, with minor-planet designation, in the Solar System. Vesta was also the Roman virgin goddess of hearth and home. By using low-art materials, such as found cardboard, and bright orange fluorescent spray paint, which is traditionally associated with graffiti, or construction site set-outs, the artist offers a playful feminised alternative to the serious, male dominated field of hard-edged abstraction, which she terms “soft-edge abstraction”. By re-using packaging materials such as cardboard, she is making a comment on the disposable nature of our current consumer based society, and by using the non-archival
and highly fugitive, non-fixed pigments in fluorescent spray paint, she has created the anti-art object, worthless and ephemeral. The work is also about colour perception, and the central image of the square, seems to both advance and recede. The void is the same colour as the perimeter cardboard, and yet our vision does not perceive it as such. The result is a throbbing, expanding and contracting, ambiguous inter-space, of neither inner, nor outer space…
Suzi Zglinicki
13 OVA AVO 2015 (diptych) ink on paper and canvas 40.5 x 50.5cm
12 Vesta III 2015 (after Paul Partos) acrylic spray paint on cardboard 72 x 96cm
OVA AVO is a personal response to The Field, and particularly Normana Wight’s Untitled (1968) painting. Wight was one of only three women artists included in The Field exhibition and her work, a large-scale shaped canvas depicts, in hard edge, nuanced tones of a grey scale, almost-mirrored, in a refined modular progression. The artist subsequently destroyed this painting. My work attempts to capture the tension between the sensitivity of creation and its subsequent destruction. I have also used tones of grey, derived from black ink. The composition is a serial repetition of soft edged circular forms, presented as a mirrored diptych. The title uses text to repeat that mirrored image as OVA AVO. It is an allusion to the duality of women’s roles as child bearers and nurturers (OVA), opposed to the violence inflicted upon them in abusive relationships (AVO), and is related to the huge upsurge in women‘s rights in that era.
Annelies Jahn The trigger for my work in The Paddock exhibition, comes not so much from following or responding to an artist and their work, but rather from an anomaly within The Field catalogue of 1968. In this metal press print production, with its course screening and half toning of images, we come across page 2829, which is given over to the work of Robert Hunter. On page 28 there is a photograph of Robert and a short biography. On page 29, the most intriguing page in the catalogue (for me at least), are the following words:
piece. So I looked to create a reductive work, to make something “appear to disappear”. To work two whites against each other. Looking at the site of the NAS Stairwell Gallery, for me the most intriguing aspect is the upstairs wall niche. My work attempts to not entirely eliminate the presence of the recess in the wall, but to give it a more discrete presence. In concealing the three-dimensional space, an assumed geometric architecture is revealed as irregular and organic.
By virtue of a technical glitch Robert Hunter’s abstract work, minimal in its monochrome, became a conceptual
My sculpture, Equanimity responds to the temporary character of the 1968 The Field exhibition. The materials I have chosen to work with, sand and timber, reflect temporality and transience. The rectangle of sand on the floor of the gallery utilises a form that traditionally hosts a hard edge, but the grains of sand will undoubtedly shift and blur that edge as air currents and visitors move through the space for the duration of the exhibition. 15 Equanimity I 2015 sand and timber 65 x 70 x 53cm
Due to the close tonal relationships between white and off-white in this painting, the camera has been unable to produce an image and reproduction is therefore impossible.
27 UNTITLED 1968 83¾ x 83¾ Acrylic on canvas Collection: The Artist Courtesy: Tolarno Gallery, Melbourne
Lisa Tolcher
14 27 Untitled 2015 acrylic on cardboard 83 cm x 41.5cm x 22.5cm
The rectangle of sand can also be seen as the ground out of which the roughly cylindrical figures of cut timber forms emerge. The forms are held still, finely balanced in a poised structure that explores ephemerality. The contrasting textures are magnified as applied colour is absent. While geometric, the forms placed against each other reference nature and impermanence. Exhibitions at the NGV prior to The Field were based on historical considerations of acquiring or exhibiting permanent collections. The Field however was a temporary showing of a specific contemporary genre in art.
Oliver Wagner The work Five Fields is an important aspect of my practice’s ongoing dialogue about the issues and paradigms of painting. I see the work as painting rather than video. Five Fields is digitally manipulated light that simulates the illusion – and transformation – of colour. The projection on the wall is a flat depiction of the familiar forms of five mobile phones. The screen of each phone is a monochromatic colour field. The five fields cycle in subtle gradients through the colour spectrum, providing a current context to The Field’s focus on flatness, formal reduction and colour as features of post painterly abstraction. This work examines the collapse of a contemporary iconic object into its reduced and abstract components of colour and form. It does so through a flat picture plane. This questions how we perceive paintings today. The ubiquitous mobile device we all have displays a paradox in which the flat screen becomes a window to deep space. The projection onto the flat wall defines the difference between the real and the simulated world. Yet at the same time the projection flattens and reduces the forms to an abstraction, mere light running on a loop, in the absence of gravity, materiality and taste. The projector, sitting on a small wooden plinth in front of the work then takes up an important role, reminding the viewer of their role, here, in the real world.
16 Five Fields 2015 single channel video
Editor: Lisa Sharp Photography: Annelies Jahn Design: Oliver Wagner