ARTIST INTERVIEWS
A B S T R A C T I O N MICHAEL BUZACOTT, VIRGINIA COVENTRY, PAUL HOPMEIER, ROY JACKSON, JAN KING, ALLAN MITELMAN, JOHN PEART, JAMES ROGERS, PAUL SELWOOD & AIDA TOMESCU
Introduction Michael Buzacott
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Virginia Coventry
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Paul Hopmeier
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Roy Jackson
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Jan King
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Allan Mitelman
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John Peart
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James rogers
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Paul Selwood
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Aida Tomescu
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AN INTRODUCTION 2011 is the centenary of abstract art – or, to put it more accurately, it is the centenary of abstract art more or less. The earliest abstract paintings began to appear in studios in Paris and Munich around 1910-1911, yet, because art historians tend to question and refute the dating of abstract works to 1910 and earlier, and because there are a few paintings by Wassily Kandinsky and Franti ek Kupka that were incontrovertibly made in 1911, 2011 emerges as our best bet for a centenary year. Last year, the exhibition Paths to Abstraction 1867-1917, held at the Art Gallery of New South Wales, traced the evolution in European art that led to the almost simultaneous creation of abstract paintings by dozens of artists in towns and cities all over the continent, from England to Russia. The exhibition’s thesis was that the orientation towards abstraction had become evident in the work of certain European artists much earlier, and the appearance of completely abstract paintings in 1910-12 was, in many respects, the clarification and fulfilment of a tendency long matured and well advanced in both theory and practice. From our vantage point of 2011, when the heroic days of abstract art – along with the heyday of modernism itself – are regarded by many young people as a phenomenon of very remote antiquity, it could be argued that the legacy of abstraction is no longer confined to the practice and appreciation of abstract painting and sculpture, nor to any specialised knowledge of the modernist canon. Today abstraction might be understood as a much more general, pervasive phenomenon: as a way of seeing transmitted throughout the twentieth century via the diffusion of modern art and design and other related channels. As a distinctively modern way of seeing, it became so ingrained and familiar to the point that it is now prevalent just about everywhere. It has massive currency in photography and film, in contemporary architecture and design, and, perhaps most intensively and curiously of all, in a vast array of figurative painting. Here in Australia, for example, the popularity of a good deal of Aboriginal art is based on its implicit relationship to abstract painting. Nonetheless, when planning this exhibition, it was not our intention to honour abstraction as a sensibility or as a way of seeing – at least that wasn’t our primary aim. We wanted to show its longevity and vitality as a creative language, a creative language held in common by the ten participating artists (five painters, five sculptors). The artists belong to the same generation (more or less) and share an ethos (more or less). While their idioms, aspirations, ideas, heroes and heroines have much in common, each has continued to personalize and refine his or her individual language over the course of some thirty to forty years. Each of them has had a lifetime’s engagement with abstraction.
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We thought that this was a good time also to address a problem experienced by these artists many times over during the course of their careers: their work tends to have an unhappy fate in mixed exhibitions. Theirs is an art that needs to be approached on its own terms and met half-way by viewers. As all the artists insistently repeat, their works need time and reflection to reveal their essential qualities. Physically, they require a context that respects the seriousness and subtlety of their intent; they need circumstances that are conducive to unhurried, intelligent reflection. What is abstract art? According to these artists, it is an art of human measure and human scale, an art that is intimate, allusive and lyrical. No matter that certain of their works may first strike a neophyte viewer as too free, too crude, too devil-may-care, too simple and indeed too abstract. Further acquaintance will almost certainly show the neophyte that these first impressions are deceptive: that the works are in fact rigorously thought-out, irreducible, virtually unalterably right. Further acquaintance will also reveal that abstraction in the hands of these ten artists is a deeply learned art, sensitive and skilful; that their works are civilised, poetic, elegant, and that they are sometimes extremely beautiful – they are, in short, everything that works of art ought to be. Yet these same works can sometimes clam-up and die in unsympathetic surroundings – in an over-scaled, over-designed setting or in the clamorous, competitive atmosphere of the marketplace, for instance. This can be taken as a sign of their inherent weakness and insufficiency of course, but it could also be the artist’s way of saying “no”. Abstraction is a contemplative idiom, an idiom that tends to suspend time and lends itself to a state of absorption and reverie: “Abstraction is antithetical to the operations of both illustration and spectacle”, in the words of Virginia Coventry. A viewer’s relation to an abstract work (a good abstract work) can be likened to a feedback-loop: the more of yourself you give to it, the more you are liable to get back from it. Indeed, a viewer’s engagement with an abstract painting or sculpture involves the very opposite of entertainment, the opposite of diversion, the opposite of “shopping with one’s eyes”. It runs counter to the voyeuristic and vampirish propensity of late-capitalist consumer culture. We think it is high time to propose an alternative model for group exhibitions, and we hope to have done so with ABSTRACTION. Group exhibitions should be pleasurable, convivial experiences for artists and for viewers. Rather than works that shout each other down and shun each other, we chose these artists and these works because we knew they would mingle and intercommunicate. Terence Maloon and Paul Selwood
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1. Artist’s name:
JAN KING
Jan King, Monastery, 2006, painted steel, 198 x 110 x 70 cm. Image courtesy the artist and King Street Gallery, Sydney.
2. What was your earliest intimation that you were going to be an artist? I really can’t remember. I know that when I finally managed to save up enough to leave Australia and get to Europe, I felt that I had reached a source of life. After nearly four years in Europe I had to think about what was motivating me and what I wanted to do with my life, and I realised that the prime motivation for me was art, but at that stage more as an observer. I knew I wanted to understand more and therefore needed to study, and I really only thought I would just perhaps become an art teacher in a school, no more. Gradually, as I gained experience and realised how much I enjoyed making things, sculpture became my profession. 3. As a young person, was there a work, or more than one work, which revealed to you the power that art can have? I came down to Sydney with my sister in 1964 and she took me to see the retrospective of Godfrey Miller’s work at the New South Wales Arts Council Gallery in Crown Street just after Miller had died. I came out of that show in tears. I had seen very little art of any sort growing up in the country and going to a country boarding school, but I found that exhibition immensely powerful and moving, and it is really what formed my direction. 4. Who were the most important of your teachers? Ian McKay, Sidney Geist
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5. Where did your most significant learning experiences occur?
JAN KING
It is hard to say. Initially in Europe, just looking, probably indiscriminately, but still absorbing and reading - Kenneth Clark, Herbert Read, Germain Bazin, Peter and Linda Murray, all good Thames & Hudson paperbacks, easy to travel with, but really mostly dealing with pre-modernism. Later at East Sydney in the sculpture department in the early 1970s, there was good discussions in the crits. Also with John Kaplan, a man of extraordinary knowledge. Probably most importantly at the New York Studio School with Sidney Geist and Bill Tucker and the lectures by all sorts of interesting people. Plus the opportunity to go to those amazing museums and galleries and see the work of all the greats, both old and modern. A wonderful show of Matisse at MOMA is particularly memorable. 6. When you make a work, what are the qualities you would like it to evidence? Obviously each work is different, but as a generalisation I guess I would like it to communicate and express an essence of a feeling or an experience. 7. Is there a difference between aesthetic and moral/ethical qualities? Yes, aesthetic qualities relate to the visual experience, moral/ethical to the social. It is possible to have art which expresses social and moral concerns and which has aesthetic qualities, but I don’t think moral / ethical aspects add to the visual aesthetic. 8. Are there aphorisms, are there words of advice you were given which you sometimes bear in mind when you are making a work? 9. Who in your estimation are the greatest artists? Giotto, Donatello, Piero della Francesca, Masaccio, Brunelleschi, Michelangelo, Leonardo da Vinci, Durer, Rembrandt, Viet Stoss, Praxiteles & many unnamed early Greek sculptors 10. The greatest modern artists? Cézanne, Matisse, Rodin, Brancusi, Kandinsky, David Smith, Anthony Caro. 11. The greatest abstract artists? Rothko, Pollock, Motherwell, Gorky 12. Which Australian artists do you admire and respect the most? Ian Fairweather, Godfrey Miller, Tony Tuckson (the late work), LLoyd Rees. 13. Which of these artists have influenced you longest and deepest? Matisse, Fairweather, Kandinsky. 14. What are the qualities you prize in your chosen medium/media? Working primarily with steel it is the tensile strength and flexibility of the material that I value. I can make a light and open structure using space as an element , literally drawing in space, with steel, while still maintaining a structural strength. It also allows me to incorporate other materials in the sculpture, interweaving one with the other, whilst trying to maintain a balance and an aesthetic unity. 15. What are the advantages of specialising in a medium (as opposed to making “art” without media-specificity)? One does develop a fluency of technique, but the danger is that one can also develop clichés, familiar ways of resolving work in that medium.
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16. What are the things that attract you to abstraction? An open interpretation, to express a subject in a metaphorical manner, using non representational forms. To be able to use materials and forms in an aesthetically expressive way which reflect the qualities of the subject without being literal.
JAN KING
17. Modernism, Abstraction, Abstract Expressionist painting, Constructed steel sculpture all tend to be regarded as historical phenomena, associated with epochs that many consider to be impossibly remote and out-of-bounds. How would you argue against this assumption? Personally I think these approaches are still relevant and still have value to those people who are prepared to take time to appreciate the aesthetic. Beauty is a quality that is appreciated through contemplation, not necessarily in a five second sound bite. This art does not rely on an easily understood illustrative narrative nor does it need an adjacent text to explain it, but it does require the viewer to spend time and thought and to become visually involved and, hopefully, thereby to attain a deeper experience. 18. How do you feel about the term “formalism” being applied to your work? It doesn’t worry me. Most of my sculpture is abstract and guided by formal values with the elements of line, volume, space, rhythm, structure, plane, etc. It is my language. 19. Is there anything that makes you uncomfortable, that you think leads to misunderstandings, in the notion of “abstraction”? Too often the term is applied mistakenly to distortion. 20. Is your art-making relevant to “Australian art”? Does it have a place in it? I don’t know but somehow I think not. Perhaps when I’m dead I might get a small note in a survey of late 20th century art in Sydney. 21. Who are/were the writers who have been most important to you during your lifetime? William Tucker’s The Language of Sculpture , John Anderson’s Art & Reality, Clement Greenberg, Gaston Bachelard’s The Poetics of Space, Kenneth Clark, David Malouf, Herman Melville’s Moby Dick, Antoine de Saint-Exupery, Erick Fromm, Primo Levi, Arthur Koestler, Jane Austen. 22. What are the most inspiring books about art and artists that you have ever read? David Smith by David Smith, The Secret Power of Beauty by John Armstrong and most recently Matisse the Life by Hilary Spurling.
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