2017.Q3 | Artonview 91 Spring 2017

ARTONVIEW

SPRING 2017 | 91

National Gallery of Australia

EXCLUSIVE MEMBERS VIEWING Experience ‘Humanity Amplified’ up close with a curator introduction, a glass of wine and an intimate after-hours viewing of Hyper Real.

Wednesday 25 October 5.30 to 8.00 pm $40 members $50 guests Limited availability Bookings Visit nga.gov.au/members or call (02) 6240 6528

Patricia Piccinini The welcome guest 2011, silicone, fibreglass, human hair, clothing, taxidermied peacocks. Courtesy of the artist, Roslyn Oxley9 Gallery, Tolarno Galleries, Melbourne and Hosfelt Gallery, San Francisco

ISSUE 91 SPRING 2017 Contributors Jaklyn Babington, Senior Curator, Contemporary Arts Practice—Global Franchesca Cubillo, Senior Curator, Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Art Sally Foster, Curator, International Prints, Drawings and Illustrated Books Anne Gray, Emeritus Curator Bianca Hill, Assistant Curator, Australian Art Jane Kinsman, Head of International Art Shaune Lakin, Senior Curator, Photography Lara Nicholls, Curator, Australian Painting and Sculpture Anne O’Hehir, Curator, Photography Lucina Ward, Senior Curator, International Painting and Sculpture Guest contributors Wally Caruana, independent curator, consultant on Indigenous Australian art Advertising enquiries artonview.advertising@nga.gov.au Enquiries artonview.editor@nga.gov.au nga.gov.au/artonview © National Galley of Australia 2017 PO Box 1150, Canberra ACT 2601, Australia +61 (0)2 6240 6411 | nga.gov.au

Published quarterly. Copyright of works of art is held by the artists or their estates. Every effort has been made to identify copyright holders but omissions may occur.

Views expressed by writers are not necessarily those of the NGA. Artonview may contain names and images of deceased Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people.

ISSN 1323-4552 Designed by Kirsty Morrison Printed by CanPrint, Canberra, on FSC and PEFC certified paper using vegetable-based inks FSC-C017269 | PEFC/21-31-41

Cover: Patricia Piccinini The long awaited 2008 (detail), silicone, fibreglass, human hair, plywood, leather, clothing. Collection of Detached Cultural Organisation, Hobart.

Courtesy of the artist, Roslyn Oxley9 Gallery, Tolarno Galleries, Melbourne and Hosfelt Gallery, San Francisco Left: Emily Kam Kngwarray Yam awely 1995 (detail), synthetic polymer paint on canvas.

National Gallery of Australia, Canberra, gift of the Delmore Collection, Donald and Janet Holt, 1995

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CONTENTS 4

DIRECTOR’S WORD Gerard Vaughan

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COMING SOON Arthur Streeton, Cartier, The National Picture, American Masters 1940–1980, Light Moves, The Vollard Suite

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EXHIBITION LISTING

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COLLECTION DISPLAYS ANGELICA MESITI Shaun Lakin interviews video, performance and installation artist Angelica Mesiti, whose work is currently on show at the NGA

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RUSSIAN CENTENARY Sally Foster discusses the NGA’s Russian avant-garde collection, highlights from which are now on display

20 MAJOR LOAN BARNETT NEWMAN Lucina Ward highlights the sculptures of American artist Barnett Newman to celebrate the loan of his Broken Obelisk, now installed at the NGA’s entrance

24 COMING MAJOR EXHIBITION HYPER REAL Jaklyn Babington introduces the work of artists in Hyper Real who are exploring new trajectories in hyperrealism, Lara Nicholls interviews Australian artist Sam Jinks and Bianca Hill explores the ideas behind Paul McCarthy’s That Girl (TG Awake)

40 COMING EXHIBITIONS ARTHUR STREETON Anne Gray illuminates preeminent Australian Impressionist Arthur Streeton’s war art of 1918, the subject of an exhibition opening at the NGA in December

46 DAVID HOCKNEY Jane Kinsman provides a preview from the NGA’s soon-to-be-published book accompanying its exhibition David Hockney Prints in November

52 DONOR KEN TYLER Jane Kinsman profiles printmaker and philanthropist Kenneth E Tyler AO to celebrate the strong bonds formed with the NGA over the past fifteen years

54 INTERNATIONAL TOURING EXHIBITION INDIGENOUS AUSTRALIA Wally Caruana and Franchesca Cubillo remind us of the unique relationship Indigenous Australians have with this country

58 ARTIST’S GIFT CHRISTINE GODDEN Anne O’Hehir highlights the photography of Christine Godden in a recent gift to the NGA by the artist

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DIRECTOR’S WORD Gerard Vaughan

‘Arthur Streeton’s Golden summer, Eaglemont 1889 now back from London’s National Gallery and looking stunning in its new setting!’

Our third National Indigenous Art Triennial, Defying Empire, is about

movements, but the reversion to hyperreality, or superreality, has always

to come to an end. It has received rave reviews, making a strong,

been there, beginning with the Surrealists and moving in the 1960s and

unforgettable impact on everyone who has seen it. It has made a major

1970s into the first generation of photorealist painters and hyperrealism

contribution to the nation’s commemoration of the 50th anniversary of

in sculpture.

the historic 1967 Referendum on Indigenous recognition. But I should

extraordinarily realistic sculptural representations of the human form,

Australian art at the NGA will continue with our beautiful installation

especially the nude. At the NGA, however, we’ve developed the concept

of the work of Albert Namatjira, guaranteed to lift your spirits, and his

not only to highlight the importance of Australian artists in the

successors in the Hermannsburg School (a wonderful gift to the nation

development of this global genre but also to explore how hyperreality

from Gordon and Marilyn Darling), plus a display of paintings, posters

is now being employed in new ways and in new media.

and photographs that document campaigns for Indigenous recognition

We’ve gone beyond the generally well-understood concepts

since the 1960s, drawing together works about dissent and protest from

of hyperreality in sculpture to encompass the humanity of hybrid

the national collection.

forms which, with new scientific discoveries and advances in genetic

Children, too, will still be able to enjoy Reko Rennie’s NGA Play

research, may soon become reality. This element of the exhibition is

until the end of November. Don’t forget that the NGA has fourteen

being explored not only by Australia’s Patricia Piccinini but also by

galleries devoted to the permanent display of its Indigenous art

Russian collective AES+F in 3D moving-image form. Kinetic elements

collection, the largest in the world, including the installation of the

have also been introduced in the form of motorised sculptures

potent and elegiac The Aboriginal Memorial 1987–88, which is the

by the Chinese duo Sun Yuan and Yu Peng. And bio-art makes an

first work every visitor sees on entering our building. Masterworks

appearance in Marc Quinn’s Self 2011. The inclusion of virtual reality,

from our Indigenous collection will also be heading to Germany for

online 3D worlds and multi-channel video works also lets us consider

a three‑month showing at the me Collectors Room in Berlin from

other media that, like sculpture, take hyperrealism beyond the two-

16 November as part of the Australian Government’s project Australia

dimensional—through the addition of time, sound or immersion,

Now. See pages 54–7. If by chance you’re going to be in Berlin at that

for instance. This means that Hyper Real at the NGA will very firmly

time, let us know.

chart the continuing course of hyperrealism as we move through the

Our next major exhibition, Hyper Real, opens on 20 October and traces the trajectory of hyperrealism from its beginnings in the 1960s.

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This exhibition has great audience appeal through its focus on

also point out that our special anniversary program of Indigenous

twenty‑first century.

On 25 October, we will host an intimate after-hours viewing

Since the early twentieth century, the role of realism in art has been

of Hyper Real, which will introduce this globally significant genre

questioned and challenged largely through the rise of the various abstract

exclusively to NGA members and their guests. The catalogue includes

DIRECTOR'S WORD

an essay by German curator Otto Letze as well as new scholarship from

The combination of a series of new exhibitions, most of which

the NGA’s own Jaklyn Babington. Plus, our shop will have many other

are free, and the continuing changeovers of the permanent collection,

cool and uncanny products that will make fine mementos or gifts—

including what will be a brilliant New Year display of the national

remembering that Christmas is not far away! A preview of Jaklyn’s

collection of Art Deco in all its forms, are sure to make the NGA a

catalogue essay features in this issue of Artonview (see pages 24–33).

must‑visit destination for the coming holiday season.

We also highlight the provocative work of American Paul McCarthy and

At the end of March 2018, we will open one of the most beautiful

interview Australian Sam Jinks about the making of his The deposition,

and glamorous design shows ever to be presented in Australia: Cartier:

a hyperreal sculpture the NGA specially commissioned for the exhibition

The Exhibition. The exhibition will include many of the most beautiful

and the national collection.

jewels in the world, with the glittering Cartier settings containing

On show now, we have five incredible video works by Paris-based

many individually famous diamonds (such as the largest pink diamond

Australian artist Angelica Mesiti, each exploring an aspect of non-

known), emeralds and sapphires. We have been truly astonished by the

language-based communication. See pages 10–13 for a fascinating

generosity of the many lenders, ranging from Her Majesty The Queen,

interview with Mesiti. Our new, greatly enlarged display of nearly all

who is contributing major items from her personal collection, to Prince

the finest Australian Impressionist works in the national collection

Albert of Monaco, who is lending items from Princess Grace’s collection

will continue into the New Year and includes Arthur Streeton’s Golden

(including her engagement ring), to private collectors throughout the

summer, Eaglemont 1889 now back from London’s National Gallery and

world, many of whom have acquired items once belonging to celebrities

looking stunning in its new setting! We’ve produced a documentary

such as the Duchess of Windsor and Elizabeth Taylor. A special focus

related to the display for our website, where you will also discover what

will be our own Dame Nellie Melba, who turns out to have been a major

else is happening around the gallery over the coming months.

client of Cartier. It’s an exhibition about design, style, taste and celebrity

From 11 November, an exhibition of a selection of the NGA’s collection of David Hockney prints (one of the largest in the world)

that will enthral everyone.

We hope we’ll see you here often during the coming months.

will demonstrate the range of his practice over his entire career, including some incredible recent acquisitions in new media. An exhibition of Streeton’s war art of 1918, opening on 15 December, will surprise many who think they already know the work of this giant of Australian art history. Both exhibitions will be accompanied by richly illustrated catalogues presenting in-depth research by Jane Kinsman and Anne Gray respectively.

Above: Arthur Streeton Golden summer, Eaglemont 1889, oil on canvas National Gallery of Australia, Canberra, purchased 1995. Back from London and looking stunning

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COMING SOON At the NGA

ARTHUR STREETON: THE ART OF WAR

CARTIER: THE EXHIBITION

15 December 2017 to 29 April 2018

30 March to 22 July 2018

Bringing together key works from collections around Australia and

Lovers of beauty and fine jewellery rejoice! Make sure that your 2018

overseas, an important survey exhibition of Arthur Streeton’s war art will

calendar includes a visit to Canberra for this breathtaking collection

open at the NGA in December. Streeton’s contribution to the Australian

of many of the world’s most exquisite jewels. The NGA has curated

war effort was significant. He served with the Royal Army Medical

this unique exhibition only for Australia. It will be a once-in-a-lifetime

Corps at the Third London General Hospital in Wandsworth from 1915

opportunity to see many of the largest and most important stones in the

to 1917 before leaving for the Western Front as an official war artist

world in their exquisite Cartier settings, evoking the tastes and styles of

in May 1918. His wartime output includes images of war machinery

the twentieth century, from royalty and aristocracy to celebrities. This is

stranded in the landscape and scenes of operations headquarters, dressing

glamour at its most beautiful and sensational.

stations and field hospitals. Streeton visited regions in France where

This remarkable exhibition will only be on show between 30 March

the Australian army had been successful against the enemy, including

and 22 July 2018. With more than three hundred spectacular items,

Poulainville, Péronne and Mont St Quentin, overlooking the Somme.

Cartier: The Exhibition explores themes such as ‘icons of style’, ‘the age

The NGA has recently acquired a deftly painted watercolour of this

of glamour’ and ‘royal style’, with loans from royal families, celebrities

strategically significant area, presented as a gift to Sir John Monash, one

and the astonishing Cartier collection itself. Portraits, costumes and

of the war’s outstanding commanders.

film will also be part of the incredible program, evoking the glamorous world of the Maison Cartier and its clients. Never before will so many diamonds, emeralds and other precious stones in extraordinary settings, including royal tiaras, have been seen in this country.

Arthur Streeton Mont St Quentin, October 1918 (detail), watercolour and pencil on paper laid down on cardboard. Art Gallery of South Australia, Adelaide, gift of Miss E Waite, 1954

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COMING SOON

Diamond and emerald necklace worn by the Countess of Granard. Cartier London, special order, 1932. Photo: Vincent Wulveryck, Cartier Collection © Cartier

THE NATIONAL PICTURE

AMERICAN MASTERS 1940–1980

12 May to 29 July 2018

24 August to 11 November 2018

Next year, The National Picture will shine a light on two enthralling yet

The NGA invites you to experience an extraordinary survey of American

under-examined figures in Australian history: colonial artist Benjamin

art from the 1940s to the late 1970s, displaying together in the one

Duterrau and the ‘Conciliator’ George Augustus Robinson. Drawing

place for the first time the greatest American works of art that make

key loans from national and international collections, including for

the NGA’s collection globally renowned. American Masters 1940–1980

the first time ever all seven known ‘proclamation boards’, The National

will examine how European émigrés such as Marcel Duchamp, Henri

Picture will examine the work of colonial artists from the declaration of

Matisse and Josef Albers influenced a generation of young Americans to

martial law in Van Diemen’s Land in 1828 and the beginnings of George

challenge local traditions and reinvent modern art. It will also highlight

Augustus Robinson’s ill-fated ‘Friendly Mission’ through to Duterrau’s

the sensational international impact of the era’s major artists, including

death in 1851. The exhibition will also include a group of works dating

Jackson Pollock, Andy Warhol, Claes Oldenburg, Chuck Close, Donald

from the 1920s to the present day that reference and respond to the

Judd, Eva Hesse and Louise Bourgeois.

many confronting issues that continue to arise from Tasmania’s complex

This exhibition has been designed to show the wealth of the

past. Curated by Professor Tim Bonyhady, working in partnership with

NGA’s collection of American art, including its world-class holdings of

Dr Greg Lehman, The National Picture embodies the NGA’s ongoing

paintings and works on paper by the New York School, most famously

commitment to using its impressive resources to contribute insightfully

Pollock’s Blue poles, Sol Lewitt’s huge wall drawing (specially remade for

to Australia’s evolving national narrative.

the show) and a selection of spectacular light works by Dan Flavin, Bruce Nauman, Keith Sonnier and James Turrell. Don’t miss your chance to discover or rediscover our own hidden treasures by America’s masters, many of which have not been displayed, and certainly not together, for a very long time.

Benjamin Duterrau Mr Robinson’s first interview with Timmy 1840 (detail), oil on canvas. National Gallery of Australia, Canberra, purchased 1979

Jackson Pollock Blue poles 1952 (detail), oil, enamel, aluminium paint, glass on canvas. National Gallery of Australia, Canberra, purchased 1973

ARTONVIEW 91 SPRING 2017

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COMING SOON Around Australia

LIGHT MOVES: CONTEMPORARY AUSTRALIAN

PICASSO: THE VOLLARD SUITE

VIDEO ART

2 December 2017 to 15 April 2018 @ Queensland Art Gallery & Gallery of Modern Art

25 November 2017 to 4 February 2018 @ Wangaratta Art Gallery After two years of touring Australia, the NGA’s Light Moves: Contemporary Australian Video Art will soon reach its eleventh and final venue, the Wangaratta Art Gallery, on 25 November. This popular exhibition of video from the national collection features works made between 2009 and 2014 by some of Australia’s most internationally significant video artists. The works, although speaking of the artists’ personal interests and histories, are all examples of contemporary storytelling, inviting viewers to think about the place and significance of real bodies in a contemporary world, a world in which our interactions increasingly occur in virtual spaces. The exhibition is accompanied by an extensive online education package, including information and links on all participating artists and a do-it-yourself e-zine, aimed at making it more accessible to younger viewers.

Pablo Picasso’s trip to the great cultural and artistic centres of Rome, Naples and Florence had a profound effect on the course of his work during the 1920s and 1930s, a period that saw him embrace classical and mythological themes and imagery, culminating in the one hundred etchings in the Vollard suite 1930–37. Although three hundred sets of the suite were made, most were broken up and scattered across the globe.

Only a few cultural institutions worldwide hold the the Vollard suite in its entirety today. The NGA is proud to be one of these few institutions and to share it with the nation in the travelling exhibition Picasso: The Vollard Suite. This is an incredibly rare opportunity to see one of the twentieth century’s greatest suites of prints in Australia. The tour will begin at the Queensland Art Gallery & Gallery of Modern Art on 2 December, followed by two other venues before the suite returns to be shown in Canberra.

Shaun Gladwell Centred pataphysical suite 2009, six-channel high-definition video.

National Gallery of Australia, Canberra, purchased 2012

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COMING SOON

Pablo Picasso Masked figures, bird-woman, from The Vollard suite 1930, etching.

National Gallery of Australia, Canberra, purchased 1984. © Pablo Picasso/Succession Picasso. Represented by Viscopy

EXHIBITION LISTING AT THE NGA

TOURING EXHIBITIONS

DEFYING EMPIRE: 3RD NATIONAL INDIGENOUS ART TRIENNIAL

SILVER AND GOLD: UNIQUE AUSTRALIAN OBJECTS 1850–1910

A major survey of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander art through the work of thirty of today’s leading, mid-career and emerging artists.

26 May to 10 September 2017 Free

Works from the NGA’s significant collection of colonial Australian decorative arts and design.

7 October to 26 November 2017 @ Hamilton Gallery 10 December 2017 to 25 February 2018 @ Castlemaine Art Museum Free

FRANK STELLA: SAVING ABSTRACTION Visually powerful works by Frank Stella and master printer Kenneth Tyler, taking printmaking to new levels.

19 November 2016 to 22 October 2017 Free

ANGELICA MESITI A multi-channel video work exploring the whistled languages of communities in Turkey, Greece and the Canary Islands.

9 September 2017 to 2 April 2018 Free

HYPER REAL From the work of the earliest hyperrealists to their contemporary successors, this exhibition brings the human body into sharp focus.

20 October 2017 to 18 February 2018 Adult $25.00 | Children 16 and under free Concession $22.50 | Member $20.00 Audio guide hire $7.00 Book now at ticketek.com or 1300 795 012

DAVID HOCKNEY PRINTS: THE NATIONAL GALLERY OF AUSTRALIA COLLECTION Explore the history of David Hockney’s printmaking practice through key works from the NGA’s representative collection.

11 November 2017 to 27 May 2018 Free

ARTHUR STREETON: THE ART OF WAR An important survey exhibition of Arthur Streeton’s war art, bringing together key works from collections around Australia and overseas.

15 December 2017 to 29 April 2018 Free

ABSTRACTION: CELEBRATING AUSTRALIAN WOMEN ABSTRACT ARTISTS A visually exhilarating exhibition revealing the contribution Australian women have made to abstract art.

15 September to 24 November 2017 @ Cairns Regional Gallery Free

RESOLUTION: NEW INDIGENOUS PHOTOMEDIA Contemporary photomedia by some of today’s leading and emerging Indigenous Australian artists.

26 August to 29 October 2017 @ Shepparton Art Museum Free

INDIGENOUS AUSTRALIA: MASTERWORKS FROM THE NATIONAL GALLERY OF AUSTRALIA Organised by the NGA and drawn exclusively from Australia’s national collection.

16 November 2017 to 2 April 2018 @ me Collectors Room, Berlin Free

LIGHT MOVES: CONTEMPORARY AUSTRALIAN VIDEO ART A selection of video art since its early days in the 1960s to now.

25 November 2017 to 4 February 2018 @ Wangaratta Art Gallery Free

PICASSO: THE VOLLARD SUITE An incredibly rare opportunity to see one of the twentieth century’s greatest suites of prints, a highlight of the NGA’s collection of prints.

2 December 2017 to 15 April 2018 @ Queensland Art Gallery & Gallery of Modern Art Free

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N E W AC Q U I S I T I O N A N D C O L L E C T I O N D I S P L AY

THE CALLING Shaune Lakin interviews Paris-based Australian artist Angelica Mesiti, whose The calling 2014 was recently acquired for the national collection and is currently on show at the NGA with four of her other multi‑channel video works exploring non‑language-based communication.

Shaune Lakin: Your three-channel installation The calling 2014 takes the appearance of a documentary to explore the use of whistled languages in communities in Turkey, Greece and the Canary Islands.

How did this project come about?

Angelica Mesiti: I’d just worked with Asim Gorashi, the whistler in Citizens band 2012, when I came across a clip online of the whistling communities in Greece. I’ve always loved whistling as an embodied instrument, so I curiously followed this thread. The more I read about whistled languages, their history and communities, the more intrigued I became, so there was a strong pull towards the material.

I very quickly realised that the scale of the project that was emerging was more ambitious than my previous work. Around this time, I was invited to apply for the Ian Potter Moving Image Commission, and winning that made it possible to produce the work. The project was developed over fifteen months and involved extensive research into the languages and their communities, exchanges with linguists who helped me to establish contact with communities, field trips to each of the communities and then return visits with a small crew for the shoots.

Shaune: What motivated the work?

Angelica: I think part of an artist’s training is to learn how to look and listen beyond the conventions of those faculties. Learning to perceive and then re-communicate those perceptions through another form is how I understand art’s role within culture. I trained as a dancer before going to art school, so the impetus to express through a means other than speech or text is embedded within my approach to making work.

So many of us feel things we cannot articulate verbally and this tension can generate creative responses through need and necessity. Whether it’s being in a foreign country and connecting through a common language like music or a whistled language to communicate across vast distances or sign language for the hearing impaired or early long-distance messaging systems such as morse code, impediments to communication always seem to give rise to new ways of connecting to one another.

Whistling is an ingenuous and really practical response to the problem of how to communicate in a particular environment.

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THE CALLING

For me, this language and its use represent a complex picture of so many fundamentals of our drive to communicate. It was developed in mountains and valleys in an age when humans lived more closely with animals and the natural world, so it was influenced by the native sounds of that environment, like bird song. It’s a more complex version of whistled signals used by shepherds to herd their flock, so it also embodies an interspecies form of communication.

In The calling, I was interested in exploring how the language has developed over centuries, including the effects lifestyle and technology have had on its use. The work looks at how a cultural activity that is no longer a necessary part of daily life can be held onto as a cultural artefact, and how that activity then enters into another state. It becomes a tradition that can be performed as a representation of a culture’s identity, shifting from something useful to something symbolic.

Shaune: You have a background in performance, both as a trained classical and modern dancer and as a performance artist. Can you talk about the role performance still plays in your practice, and how this role has shifted in your more ‘cinematic’ works of the past decade?

Angelica: Performance is part of my artistic DNA. It’s something I have had a connection to since childhood, through dance. From early days at art school, then collaborating with The Kingpins to my solo work, it always felt natural for me to work within the realm of performance. Initially, I was the performer. But that then shifted to where I became the choreographer or director of movement, and I became more interested in dissecting what performance could be, the unlikely places it is found and its function in our lives.

Shaune: You also have an interest in what it means to translate something. How does translation operate in your performance and video work?

Angelica: This interest surfaced in my work when I moved away from Australia and settled in a foreign country where I didn’t speak the language. Being a ‘foreigner’ puts you on the outside with so much to learn quickly, not only language but also the more complex codes of a ARTONVIEW 91 SPRING 2017

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limited understanding. The act of translating—language, behaviour,

Shaune: While The calling is interested in communication in its most transactional state, you have considered in other works the transcendental capacities of communication. If communication provides opportunities for people to come together, how do you see your work engaging with notions of community?

cultural codes—becomes a feature of daily life. There are slippages of

Angelica: Communal exchange or experience has long been one of

society: cultural sensitivities, etiquette, manners and the like. There’s a long period where you’re constantly feeling like you’re doing it wrong, and there is a really intensive period where you’re watching and trying to figure stuff out by decoding the signs as best you can with your

understanding that can occur, certainly, but other sensitivities become heightened, and you decipher and understand through signals other than verbal language, like body language, hand gestures and facial expressions.

Even when making literal translations between languages, there’s always contention about meaning. Subjective interpretation comes into play as well, as do cultural specificities that don’t translate well between one culture and the next.

I’m interested in informal, instinctive, haphazard methods of translation. Desperate attempts to understand ‘well enough’. The space between literal translation and interpretation can be disarming. It can open us up to feeling what is meant, drawing on empathetic responses rather than literal ones. This is why I don’t always use subtitles and have left some songs in my work untranslated. To me, it’s more interesting for the viewer to come to a slower understanding by themselves—they have to sense or figure out rather than be given the answers.

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THE CALLING

my interests. My formative experiences as part of the Imperial Slacks collective and collaborating with The Kingpins shifted me away from the singular artist working in isolation towards a communal and collaborative approach to making art. I am also interested in reflecting on how our present behaviours are connected to or have shifted away from human behaviour in the past. What are the origins of dance?

How and why do ecstatic trance states, historically linked to religious activity, still exist in our culture today? How do they occur? What role do they play in our collective experience? Is there something fundamental about these communal experiences that continues to find a form in contemporary secular societies? These are questions that interest me.

When I’m developing an installation, the viewer’s experience as a participant within the work is something I always consider. Sometimes the installation is constructed to place people around a particular area in the room, on a certain path or on seats together. Creating a community

within the installation, between the performers on screen and the

research for The calling, I watched a lot of ethnographic films made

audience, is something I am always thinking about.

in the 1960s by French linguists about whistled languages. Some of

Shaune: Your work has become increasingly tightly focused around, and recognised for, its highly refined and quite poetic, formal and aesthetic sensibility. What does style mean to you, and does it emerge from the particular subject of a given work?

Angelica: That’s a hard one. I don’t deliberately think about the style.

I try to approach each work from a fresh place and let the content inform the shape and my approach. I guess there is a way of looking that I try to bring to the viewer, a slowing down of time. I also try to create

it was problematic and dated, but it’s always interesting to consider this material in relation to when it was made, as it says a lot about the concerns of a particular time. Perhaps, in the future, The calling will be read in this way.

I think the work is reflective of our present age of communication.

Although now, three years on, one can also think about our present state of miscommunication and ‘fake news’. Certainly, it was not accidental that I made a work about an ancient ‘bird language’ in the age of Twitter!

connections between the viewer and performer on screen, bringing them into intimate contact. I work with rhythm and musicality, so those concerns can sometimes influence the work’s style. As I’ve made more work and gotten more experienced, I’ve developed techniques that achieve certain aims. However, I do get concerned about becoming mannerist, so I’m always trying to resist a familiar, easy approach, which can be lazy.

Shaune: The calling is not strictly documentary in its structure or intention, but it has a strong interest in history. What do you think of the prospect of the work becoming historical record?

Angelica: I’ve never considered that prospect! While undertaking

Angelica Mesiti The calling 2014, three-channel video, audio track. National Gallery of Australia, Canberra, purchased 2017. Courtesy of the artist and Anna Schwartz Gallery. © Angelica Mesiti

ARTONVIEW 91 SPRING 2017

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THE RUSSIAN AVANT-GARDE IN REVOLUTION

C O L L E C T I O N D I S P L AY

One hundred years after the 1917 October Revolution in Petrograd, Sally Foster discusses the NGA’s Russian avant-garde collection, highlights from which are now on display, including over forty-five books and a selection of prints, drawings, paintings, photographs and decorative art pieces.

The Russian avant-garde in Revolution

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After three centuries of autocratic Tsarist rule, popular uprisings in February of 1917 and then the Bolshevik seizure of power under Vladimir Lenin in October saw the collapse of the Russian Empire and, following a bloody civil war, led to the formation of the Soviet Union in 1922. Now, a century after the October Revolution, the NGA has drawn on its significant collection of Russian avant-garde art to mount a display that acknowledges the importance of one of the twentieth century’s most politically contentious and artistically ambitious historic periods.

Dating from the first three decades of the twentieth century, this remarkable collection is the only one of its type in an Australian cultural institution. Largely acquired in the 1970s, it forms part of the founding core of the NGA’s international art collection and includes works made in the years immediately preceding and during the Revolution

by Russia’s leading artistic figures such as Natalia Goncharova, Mikhail Larionov, Olga Rozanova, Kasimir Malevich, Vladimir Tatlin, El Lissitzky, Gustav Klucis and Alexandr Rodchenko. Representing works made in all media, it illustrates the Russian avant-garde’s evolution from the Western European influenced Futurist movement to Malevich’s unique declarations of Suprematism in 1915 and the ascendancy of non-objective abstraction through to the Constructivist forays into industry and Socialism in the 1920s. Despite the collection’s specificity to a century-old political event, the works created by the Russian avant-garde remain enormously important to the canon of twentiethcentury international and Australian art history. Like the Revolution itself, its shockwaves and influence reached far beyond the borders of Eastern Europe.

Books, both handmade and mass produced, were fundamental to the practice and development of the avant-garde art in Russia between 1910 and 1930, and they comprise a large part of the NGA’s Russian art collection. Numbering in excess of one hundred and fifty items, the first of these books was acquired in 1974, when the then Australian National Gallery purchased two rare works by painter and teacher Kasimir Malevich, the oil painting House under construction c 1915–16 and Suprematism: 34 drawings 1920. The latter was a lithographed book designed to instruct students through a developmental sequence of Suprematist compositions that begins with a black square. Number 22 in the sequence is a drawing of House under construction. Along with other highly publicised works that were critical to forming a worldclass collection for Australia, books were part of an unprecedented and Page 14: Aleksandr Rodchenko (cover) & Sergei Tret’iakov (author) Rechevik: stikhi (Orator: verse) 1929, relief halftone.

Purchased 1976 Page 15, left to right: left to right: Kasimir Malevich (back cover), Aleksei Kruchenykh (author) & Velimir Khlebnikov (author) Igra v adu (A game in hell) 1914, 2nd edn, lithograph. Purchased 1976; Kasimir Malevich Suprematizm: 34 riskunka (Suprematism: 34 drawings) 1920, lithograph.

Purchased 1974 Above: Kasimir Malevich Stroyuschiysya dom (House under construction) 1915–16, oil on canvas. Purchased 1974.

All works in this feature from the National Gallery of Australia, Canberra

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THE RUSSIAN AVANT-GARDE IN REVOLUTION

ambitious collecting program, instigated between 1973 and 1974, that targeted artists and art movements recognised as central to the history of twentieth-century modern art.

Staff in Canberra, working in concert with international advisors, actively sought artist-made books, paintings, sculptures, drawings, decorative arts, photographs and films that illustrated the Russian and early Soviet-era avant-garde’s depth and breadth of creativity.

Notable among the early acquisitions was a group of seventy Futurist, Suprematist and Constructivist books, portfolios, pamphlets and manifestos dating from 1911 to 1935, which were purchased in 1976 and 1977 from London antiquarian bookseller HA Landry. The group was

Clockwise, from top left: Aleksei Kruchenykh (collage and author) Zaumniki (Transrationalists) 1921, collage of coloured paper and fabric. Purchased 1976; Aleksandr Rodchenko Cover for Pro eto (About this) 1923, printed 1930, gelatin silver photograph. Purchased 1984; Aleksandr Rodchenko Man balancing on tower for Pro eto (About this) 1923, printed 1930, gelatin silver photograph. Purchased 1984

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described at the time as comprising both ‘excellent exhibition material’ and ‘essential tools for research into the art movements around our Malevich’. It included many of the most important pre-Revolution and Revolutionary artist-made books, which contained original collages, woodcuts and lithographs, graphic design and typography, poetry, literature and art theory.

The group included the burlap covered Futurist manifesto Poshchechina obshchestvennomu vkusu. V zashchitu svobodnogo iskusstva.

Stikhi, proza, stat’i (A slap in the face of public taste. In defence of free art.

Verse, prose, essays) 1912 and the first and second editions of the lubokinspired Igra v adu (A game in hell) 1912 and 1914, with lithographed manuscript text by poets Alexsei Kruchenykh and Velimir Khlebnikov and drawings by Goncharova, Malevich and Rozanova. The theoretical tracts, rare experimental cover designs and collages, masterpieces of typography and iconic photomontages evident in the works in this group demonstrate the radical thinking and approaches adopted by Russian artists at the time. When acquired, the Landry purchase constituted one of the most comprehensive collections of Russian avant-garde printed matter outside of the Soviet Union.

With their genesis in the Futurists’ low-cost hand-drawn and lithographed artist books, journals and manifestos made prior to the Revolution in 1917, the mass-produced publications designed by Constructivists during the first decade of the Soviet Union saw artists skilfully employ bold geometric design, photomontage and inventive typography to engage in a complex intellectual exchange with each other and between their proletariat audiences and political authority.

Given that 1921 marked the end of the Russian Civil War (1918–21) 18

THE RUSSIAN AVANT-GARDE IN REVOLUTION

and the beginning of Lenin’s New Economic Policy (1921–28), the

work inspired an immediate international response. Attracted to its

Constructivists viewed the role of art in the formation and success

foreign aesthetic, formal experimentation and revolutionary idealism,

of the fledgling communist state as being of the utmost importance.

artists appropriated elements from Suprematism and Constructivism,

Elucidating communist ideals in keeping with the People’s Commissariat

adapting them to their own conceptual and Pop Art practices. In the

of Enlightenment (Narkompros) and documenting a period of

United States of America, Dan Flavin, Carl Andre and Sol LeWitt

outstanding graphic invention, books in Soviet Russia were uniquely

credited Tatlin and Constructivism with informing the development

situated at the intersection of literary and artistic creativity and the

of minimalism and radically altering the course of art from the 1960s.

dissemination of political propaganda. In their form, content and look,

In Australia, abstract motifs referring to Malevich and Suprematism and

these books offer an unprecedented insight into a period that left an

the designs and typography of Constructivism more generally became

indelible impact on the world of art and ideas.

a characteristic feature in the 1980s in the work of John Nixon and

When publications documenting the full extent of the Russian

Rose Nolan. A century after the Revolution, Russian avant-garde art

avant-gardes activities between 1910 and 1930 began to appear for

continues to exert a direct and indirect influence on our contemporary

the first time outside of the Soviet Union in the early 1960s, their

global culture.

Opposite, from top: Kasimir Malevich Shel avstriets v Radzivily ... (When the Austrians came to Radzivilov ...)

1915, colour lithograph. Gift of Orde Poynton Esq CMG, 1993; Vladimir Tatlin & Nikolai Punin (author) Pamyatnik III Internatsionala (Monument to the Third International) 1920, relief halftone. Purchased 1977 Above: El Lissitzky & Vladimir Mayakovsky (author) Dlya golosa (For the voice) 1923, relief halftone, letterpress.

Purchased 1976

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20

BARNETT NEWMAN

M A J O R LOA N

Barnett Newman Lucina Ward highlights the sculptures of American artist Barnett Newman, one of the most prominent figures in Abstract Expressionism, to celebrate the loan of his sculptural masterpiece Broken Obelisk to the National Gallery of Australia.

Barnett Newman is one of the best known painters of the postwar period. His largely monochrome, richly saturated and exquisitely paredback canvases influenced the next generation of Colour Field painters and minimal art more broadly. His work emphasises the essentials of painting, with surfaces punctuated and modulated by carefully crafted ‘zips’, produced by exploiting the effects of paint bleeding under masking tape. Newman’s work is held in museum collections internationally but, unfortunately, not at the National Gallery of Australia, despite its otherwise extraordinary holdings of American art. Fortunately, the Barnett Newman Foundation has generously lent its exhibition copy of Broken Obelisk 1963/67, which is now installed prominently near the main entrance. Although less known than his paintings, Newman’s sculptural output is equally impressive.

In 1951, for his second solo exhibition at Betty Parsons Gallery in New York, Newman showed several remarkable works that, considered collectively, hint at his future directions. Having worked as a teacher, curator and essayist, he had only recently begun to paint full-time.

He was known as an anarchist and polemicist with a reputation as an affable and exceptional talker, a citizen-painter who provoked consideration of new ideas about art and existence. Dominating the gallery space was his largest canvas to date, Vir Heroicus Sublimis 1950–51, a vast expanse (two and a half by five and half metres) of cadmium red with thin stripes of orange, white, brown and beige. Another painting in the exhibition, The wild 1950 is the same height but only four centimetres wide and deep, so it appears object-like on the wall. His first sculpture Here I 1950 was also on show. A rather rough and ready work, ARTONVIEW 91 SPRING 2017

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central section of the preceding work. These sculptures are, however, deceptive. Because the bases are elevated slightly, Here II and Here III both seem to hover. The emphasis on the relationship between upright form and its base is an idea that finds full articulation in Broken Obelisk, as Armin Zweite astutely observed in his 1999 book Barnett Newman: paintings, sculptures, works on paper, ‘An inverted obelisk, its shaft broken, is mounted on a pyramid in such a way that their tips touch and slightly penetrate each other—an upward-moving force meets a downwardsweeping movement, or, to put it another way, a vertical load is supported by an opposing thrust’.

Broken Obelisk seems to have been influenced by several practical concerns. Initially, as Newman’s sketches show, the pyramid was flatter and more squat and the obelisk much thinner, so it appeared more precariously balanced. To develop its dimensions while retaining the teasing connection between the massive forms, he relied on Lippincott, a Connecticut fabricator specialising in working with artists to build large-scale sculpture. The monumentally of the final sculpture is, of course, key, and engineering drawings demonstrate how the pyramid became taller and the relationship between the obelisk and pyramid more elegant, with the two elements meeting in diagonal cross formation serving to highlight the upper broken end of the obelisk.

A full-scale model, produced to test the spatial effects, confirmed the final configuration, and a second Broken Obelisk was fabricated. The works were installed in front of the Seagram Building in New York and adjacent to the Corcoran Gallery of Art in Washington in October 1966.

Newman’s following sculptures are very different but relate to Broken Obelisk in several distinct ways. Lace curtain for Mayor Daley 1968 was it comprises two slender wooden uprights, juxtaposed at right angle and set into a mounded square base structured from a crate covered with plaster. The shaped plaster surface and the edges of the upright elements in particular prompt a parallel often drawn between this sculpture and the painted ‘zips’. Newman, however, considered the elements of his practice quite separately, as he stated in an interview with Washington Post critic Andrew Hudson in 1966: ‘I do not consider my sculpture to be a three-dimensional equivalent of my paintings. I think the problems are altogether different. Painting is a planar art. Sculpture involves for me the problem of volume. But I hope that both the sculpture and the painting give the onlooker a sense of place, a sense of being there’.

After his 1950 and 1951 exhibitions, Newman did not have another solo show until 1958. There were several hiatuses—some prompted by lack of recognition, others due to ill health—and, when he returned to Here I in 1962, casting two bronze versions, he made several adaptions to the base, which was initially left out, then reproduced in metal. The ideas for his next sculptures developed quickly. Here II 1965–66 was made in weathering steel, and Here III 1966 combined stainless and weathering steel, both produced with Treitel-Gratz, a foundry on Long Island.

22

prompted, as the title suggests, by a specific event: the violent reaction to demonstrations against the Vietnam War in Chicago and inflammatory comments made by mayor Richard J Daley to justify the police cordon of the grounds of the Democratic National Convention with barbed wire in August 1968. Artists protested and an exhibition at the Feigen Gallery in Chicago was organised, which included Newman’s grid-like work, complete with red paint. His final sculpture, Zim Zum I 1969, was produced for an exhibition in Japan. Its title refers to the writings of a sixteenth-century mystic, and its two zigzagged walls form a corridor into which the viewer enters. Zim Zum II, produced posthumously in 1985, enlarged the dimensions to those initially intended by the artist, resulting in a sculpture that expands beyond human scale to enfold space architecturally.

Newman’s sculptures are powerfully symbolic and acutely political. Through means as elegant and as carefully considered as his paintings, they combine universalist qualities of ancient forms with the geometry of modern architecture and materials. Broken Obelisk also developed a memorial quality, aas demonstrated by the third exemplar installed within the reflecting pool near the Rothko chapel for the Menil Collection in Houston and dedicated to the memory of Martin

In Here II, three uprights of equal height, one thick and two thin, set

Luther King. As Newman commented, writing in the year of King’s

on truncated pyramids are grouped on a base. Here III likewise suggests

death, ‘I hope I have transformed its tragic content into a glimpse of

a logical progression, as if Newman decided to isolate and enlarge the

the sublime’.

BARNETT NEWMAN

Page 20: Broken Obelisk 1963/67, fabricated 2005, weathering steel. The Barnett Newman Foundation.

On display at Storm King Art Center, Mountainville Opposite: Here II 1965, hot-rolled and weathering steel, National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa purchased 1978 Above: Zim Zum I 1969, weathering steel, San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, purchase through a gift of Phyllis C Wattis, 1998 All works © The Barnett Newman Foundation, New York / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York

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24

HYPER REAL

COMING MA JOR EXHIBITION

In a special preview of her essay ‘The hyperreal figure: from the uncanny to the cyborg’ in the catalogue for the upcoming major exhibition Hyper Real, at the NGA from 20 October 2017 to 18 February 2018, Jaklyn Babington introduces the work of the artists on display who are exploring various trajectories in hyperrealism, through a myriad of ideas and new media.

Opposite: Marc Quinn Self 2011, artist’s blood, liquid silicone, stainless steel, glass, perspex, refrigeration equipment. Collection of the artist

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HYPER REAL

Opposite: Duane Hanson Woman with a laundry basket 1974, oil paint, cardboard, resin, talc, fibreglass, fabric, plastic, cardboard packaging. Art Gallery of South Australia, Adelaide, South Australian Government Grant, 1975. © Estate of Duane Hanson Right: Paul McCarthy That Girl (TG Awake) 2012–13, silicone, paint, hair, wood, glass, melamine board.

D.Daskalopoulos Collection. Installation view of The Human Factor: The Figure in Contemporary Sculpture, Hayward Gallery, London, 17 June – 7 September 2014.

Photo: © Stephen White

Every five years since 1991, the British artist Marc Quinn takes six litres

that ‘art, in wise moderation, avoids the absolute and complete imitation

of his blood and freezes it into a sculpture of his head. Like scientific

of nature and living beings, well knowing that such an imitation can

specimens, these heads are presented in sealed, steel and glass chambers

easily produce uneasiness’. Although people vary in their sensitivity to

plugged into electrically powered refrigeration units. Known as the Self

uncanny stimuli, Freud concluded that these types of encounters may

series, Quinn’s heads are a biochemical experiment akin to cryogenics,

cause the surfacing of an instinctive impulse—a surmounting of the

specifically neuropreservation in which the head is removed and

conscious by our latent and primal fears—that momentarily displaces

frozen without the body, halting the natural process of decay. In this

the intellect.

way, Quinn’s sculptures represent a faith in medical technology, where,

…

in time, they might provide the DNA required for a future cloning of

This momentary psychological instability is precisely the powerful

the artist—a human life preserved and remade anew, a human entity

effect that hyperrealistic works of art have on us, and is a defining aspect

beyond our current definitions of what constitutes the natural. But, for

of the genre. By presenting us with a work ‘marked not by an unreality

now, these eerie biosculptures sit in frozen potential, simultaneously

but instead by its excess of reality and truth’, hyperreal artists deliberately

alive and dead, real and artificial, familiar and strange, evoking in us an

destabilise our ability to distinguish the real from the imaginary. In

uneasy feeling. This is an experience of the uncanny.

our uncertainty, there is potential for our manipulation. By creating

The uncanny was a psychological concept explored at the beginning

human replicas and alternate experiences that transgress the boundaries

of the twentieth century by Ernst Jentsch and Sigmund Freud, who

between inanimate and animate, human and nonhuman, natural

likened it to a unique kind of fright arousing a sense of dread, horror,

and synthetic and real and virtual, hyperreal works seek to affect the

repulsion or distress. Both determined its provocation to reside in

contemporary viewer by way of a deep emotional, psychological, spiritual

the familiar appearing inexplicably strange and in situations where

or moral register.

one struggles to clearly distinguish between what is real and what

Historically, hyperrealistic sculptural forms include death masks,

is imagined, ‘when something that we have hitherto regarded as

lifelike dolls and mannequins, sculpted archetypes and body casts. Since

imaginary appears before us in reality, when a symbol takes over the

the 1960s, the more recent lineage of hyperrealist sculpture has been

full functions of the thing it symbolizes’, as Freud wrote in his essay

populated with examples of static figures that employ adroit techniques,

‘The uncanny’. An encounter with an inanimate object that arouses

largely adopted from the special effects industry, to achieve ultrarealistic

doubts as to whether it is actually alive—as in a mannequin, wax figure

skin, bodies, faces and eyes. This extreme realism has been a major

or automaton—was determined to be a pronounced trigger of the

technical and aesthetic concern for those involved in the genre, with

uncanny. In ‘On the psychology of the uncanny’, Jentsch observed in 1906

the surface of the sculpture—both in monochrome and polychrome—

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HYPER REAL

playing a central role in the positive public reception and critical

figuration from sculpture to digital works in an assessment of the

discussion of such works.

hyperreal figure, from the uncanny to the cyborg.

A comparative consideration of the earliest work in this exhibition,

…

Duane Hanson’s Woman with a laundry basket 1974, with a more recent

Chinese duo Sun Yuan and Peng Yu’s Old people’s home 2007

work by Paul McCarthy That Girl (TG Awake) 2012–13, shows how

critiques the stereotypical male figures occupying powerful positions

the materials, techniques and image-making technologies available to

on the political world stage. Thirteen decrepit old men sit slumped in

artists have changed over the intervening four decades, dramatically

battery-powered wheelchairs, minds wandering as they gaze off into

enhancing capabilities to create the ultimate illusion. In the work of

space, drooling from open mouths and seemingly hanging on to their

McCarthy, we are confronted by a triplicate simulation of a naked

positions of power by a single breath. Created from silicone and human

woman: three sculptures that are near perfect replicas, right down

hair, each figure is dressed in religious robes, nationalistic costume or

to the freckles and fine downy hair on their forearms. This advanced

military uniform and adorned with silver crosses or wartime medals.

mode of representation as deliberate deception is used by McCarthy

One is missing a leg and clutching a can of beer. We can perhaps identify

to connect with ‘a fear of the virtual, the fear of being unable to

Yasser Arafat, a Josef Stalin, Mikhail Gorbachev, Hu Jintao or even the

discern a real human from a mannequin’. Here, McCarthy hints at

lesser-known figure of Ahmed Yassin (a Palestinian politician who used a

the underlying motivation in the recent resurgence of hyperrealist

wheelchair during his lifetime).

practice as a questioning of our complex times and its effects on human subjectivity.

The contemporary hyperreal is a rich genre that resides at the nexus

By turning their hyperrealistic sculptures into mechanised automatons that effectively simulate human movement, Sun and Peng advance the lineage of static hyperrealistic sculpture. The effect of this

of art, psychology, science and science fiction, technology and philosophy.

satirical, mechanical theatre on the audience is divisive: some laugh while

It is fascinating to think beyond the technical perfection of the surface

others recoil. The way in which these sculptures move—a biomimicking

to an extended understanding of hyperrealist practice. A plurality of

of bodies controlled by outside forces—creates an effective play with the

practice has taken place alongside the scientific developments and

unpredictable and the macabre, triggering in us the uneasy effects of the

technological advancements of the past decade. Artists have adopted

uncanny. On the edge of life and death, sanity and madness and, in some

new concepts and tools to create works that explore contemporary

cases, consciousness, these mechanised figures evoke the quintessential

subjectivity and new and imagined forms of life. The artists in

liminal trope of the postmodern era, the cyborg.

this exhibition employ a myriad of approaches: imbuing sculpted

…

doppelgangers with lifelike emotional and psychological qualities, animating otherwise static sculptures, sculpting with biological matter,

The American Tony Oursler’s Incubator 2003 affects the audience by playing on a confrontation with an incessantly talking and moaning

creating digital imagery that appears more real than real, inventing avatars and alternative lives online and placing us in a virtual world.

By expanding the Institute for Cultural Exchange’s original survey of hyperreal sculpture, this new iteration of the exhibition at the National Gallery of Australia identifies artists that have advanced hyperreal

Opposite and above: Sun Yuan and Peng Yu Old people’s home 2007, fiberglass, silica gel, clothing and various accessories, electric wheelchairs. Collection of Shi Lai Liu. Courtesy of the artists

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projection of a human head. This work moves the hyperreal genre

rely on simulations to produce their effect and, in this way, exemplify

beyond the skin, beyond the human figure, and further into the realm of

Baudrillard’s notion of ‘pure simulacra’.

the cyborg, which Haraway describes in ‘A cyborg manifesto’ as, ‘a kind of

The digital works of the Russian collective AES+F are a beautiful,

disassembled and reassembled, postmodern collective and personal self’.

hypnotic and often dangerously compelling response to the hyperreality

It is the ghost in the machine, questioning what it means to be human in

of the contemporary media. The luscious visuals and slow-motion effects

a media-saturated world and making an impassioned and erratic plea for

present life in high definition, life as timeless, colour-saturated and far

validation: ‘I see you; you see me’, it says to us, ‘Your eyes keep me alive;

more alluring than it really is. Through composite photography, video

don’t stop, I’ll die; someone is looking at me. I feel it; keep me alive with

and digital technologies, AES+F’s films appear as seamless hybrids of

your eyes; don’t look away; don’t look away; I love you; I can’t; I love

advertising, music videos and fashion shoots that present fiction as fact.

you; don’t look away; please look at me. Attention! Attention!’

The collective’s immersive video presentation Inverso mundus 2015 is

We are caught in this simulation of a horrible existence, accosted

set within a realistic frame of reference, yet its fantastic narrative of the

by an inescapable one-sided effusion. This is a work that both looks at

unexpected and strange gives the audience a feeling of a trip through a

us and speaks to us, delving into the dark corners of communication

brave new world.

technologies. Our watching is taken as an act of engaging in a simulated

Four main storylines run through the overarching narrative: the

conversation with a personality that can’t, and won’t, be ignored. Akin

poor overthrow the rich, women torture men, youth punish their

to a terrible Facetime breakup with an unhinged lover, the pitiful script

elders and animals usurp humans. Comprised of idealised human

explores the shifting forms of power and pleasure to be found in our

bodies and stereotypical identities, each a digitally perfected moving

contemporary plugged-in existence. In this way, Oursler edges his artistic

sculpture of a basic cultural archetype, the film shares the addictive

illusion ever closer to a new kind of ‘technocultural’ cyborg encounter,

aesthetics of daytime soap operas—another form of hyperreality in

albeit an unpleasant one.

which the viewer becomes so immersed, so mesmerised that they begin

In surveying contemporary hyperreal figuration, it is fascinating to move our attention beyond static sculptural forms and into the digital realm. Here, Jean Baudrillard’s postmodern definition of our technologically advanced world as a hyperreality in itself, a world of simulacra and simulation, is of interest. Approaching the hyperreal sculptures in this exhibition as simulacra we can see how the distinction between reality and its representation vanishes in the face of excessive realism. A hyperreal sculpture ‘interferes with the very principle of reality’, to use Baudrillard’s terminology, unlike representation, which simply reflects, masks or perverts it. Moving beyond sculpture, the digital, online and virtual forms of hyperrealism in this exhibition 30

HYPER REAL

Above: Tony Oursler Incubator 2003, single-channel video, colour, sound, fibreglass sphere. National Gallery of Australia, Canberra, purchased 2003 Opposite: AES+F Inverso mundus 2015, seven-channel high-definition video installation, colour, sound. AES+F | ARS New York. Courtesy the artists MAMM, Anna Schwartz Gallery and Triumph Gallery. © AES+F | ARS New York. Courtesy of the artists, MAMM, Anna Schwarz Gallery and Triumph Gallery

to imagine the fictional characters as real, obsessing over the details of

home and, perhaps most significantly, a new life. As a user-generated

their lives and projecting onto them. The concept for Inverso mundus,

simulated world SL promotes opportunities to ‘Become a Creator’,

which translates as ‘The world turned upside down’, comes from a

‘Have an Adventure’ and even ‘Earn Money’. Akin to Baudrillard’s analysis

series of sixteenth-century engravings that invert what we believe to be

of Disneyland in ‘Simulacra and simulation’, it is ‘a perfect model of all

the natural order of things. The work is an allegory for today’s media

the entangled orders of simulation’. Users, both consumers and creators,

saturation. As AES+F’s Lev Evzovich explains in the YouTube video

are lured by the social microcosm that is provided and the opportunity

Making of: AES+F’s ‘Inverso mundus’, ‘the media is also to some extent a

to simulate life before living it—a modelling of our own reality. This,

world turned upside down, and it is unclear which world and which

of course, obscures the fact that contemporary life is already, in part,

consciousness we exist in: in the media’s virtual world or the real world?’

a simulation. As China Tracy explains to China Sun in Live in RMB

In contemporary life, we are now more contactable than ever

just means that our programming has in some way or form left the

unknowingly, through CCTV, fingerprinting, bioscans and the mass

hardware that sustains it. Whereas in Second Life, humans can create

data collection of our online habits. The rise of social networks such

eternal avatars that act as substitutes and attain eternal life. Birth is

as Facebook, Twitter and Instagram has dramatically blurred the

just registering an “account”, and “death” is just a form of “cancellation”

boundary of the private and public. As contemporary thinker Boris

like in the world of The Matrix … climbing in and out of the real and

Groys surmised in Google: words beyond grammar, ‘Today, we practice our

virtual worlds’.

dialogue with the world primarily via the Internet. If we want to ask the

With SL, we are the creators of our own digital rebirth, free to

world questions, we act as Internet users. And if we want to answer the

reimage and reshape our physical form as well as fashion ourselves

questions that the world asks us, we act as content providers’. Life is now

a new subjectivity. In this way, Cao’s avatar China Tracy is another

composed of both the real and the online spaces that we occupy, and

kind of hyperreal figure, a self-portrait of the artist digitally sculpted

our contemporary subjectivity is split across the real and virtual spheres

and animated via the medium of digital code. In discussing digitally

within which we exist.

generated figuration, contemporary media theorist Lev Manovich

In 2007, the Chinese artist Cao Fei co-opted the online virtual

points out in his The language of new media that ‘we should not consider

world Second Life for her project RMB City, constructing not only

clean, skinless, too flexible, and at the same time too jerky, human

an alternative identity, her online avatar China Tracy, but also a new

figures in 3-D computer animation as unrealistic, as imperfect

online city in which to live and have relationships. Two of the artist’s

approximations to the real thing—our bodies. They are perfectly realistic

video works, RMB City: A Second Life City Planning 2007–11 and Live in

representations of a cyborg body yet to come, of a world reduced to

RMB City 2009, provide insight into what life can be inside RMB City.

geometry, where efficient representation via geometric model becomes

The latter video serves as an educative virtual tour with philosophical

the basis of reality’.

discussions by the avatars China Tracy and China Sun, her baby son.

Since it was launched in 2003, Second Life has offered its residents a copy-world, a second reality replete with a new identity, a new 32

City 2009: ‘If god is a mighty programmer, then death in the real world

before, but also more recorded and monitored, both knowingly and

HYPER REAL

The very way in which we look at the world, and thus our perception of what is real, has changed with the rapid development of digital imaging. Manovich speaks of digital technologies in particular as

presenting us with a new type of technical image, a ‘synthetic image’

result of this mind-body split, it is equally fascinating to observe those

Examples of the synthetic image include digitally composed images,

who are ‘doing’ a virtual-reality piece—their faces covered by black

animation and virtual reality. It is an image, as Manovich says, ‘free of

goggles, performing the strange motions of one having an out-of-body

the limitations of both human and camera vision. It can have unlimited

experience. In a way, virtual reality not only bestows a hyperreal vision on

resolution and an unlimited level of detail. It is free of the depth-of-field

the gallery-going spectator but also transforms their body into another

effect, this inevitable consequence of the lens, so everything is in focus …

type of hyperreal figure, one to be observed and interpreted as keenly

From the point of view of human vision, it is hyperreal’.

as the other figurative sculptures on display. This new ‘technobody’ is a

Via wearable technology in the form of a headset with headmovement tracking capabilities, 3D stereoscopic images and headphones with surround sound, we can experience total immersion within a work

cyborg, a composite figure in which the human and technological are intertwined—a hyperreal figure in and of our contemporary era.

Since its inception in the 1960s, the narrowly defined genre of

of art, and a perceived shift from the real world to the virtual world.

hyperrealist sculpture, concerned itself primarily with the surface quality

A sense of digital disembodiment is experienced in the virtual-reality

of the corporeal form as a means of undertaking investigations into the

work Orbital vanitas 2017 by the Australian artist Shaun Gladwell,

nature of human existence. This existence, however, has grown more

who repositions us alone, floating, untethered in deep space. We see

complex over the intervening decades—perhaps most evidently in the

a distant Earth and, looking left or right, find only the vast expanse

proliferation of online social platforms, digital technologies and virtual

of the universe studded with thousands of shimmering stars. As the

experiences. Our uncertainty about what is real and what is natural has

simulation unfolds, an enormous floating human skull appears, and

increased apace. The myriad of media simulations we now experience

we enter. Its bony interior presents as a barren landscape of caves, cliffs

has led artists to construct and, at the same time, interrogate new forms

and crevices. Turning our head to look down, we feel a sense of sudden

of hyperreal figures, hyperreal experiences and hyperreal visions that

uneasiness. Expecting to see our lower torso and legs, we instead see only

deliberately blur our sense of what is inanimate and animate, natural

a strange circular platform, akin to a glitch in the simulation. The result

and artificial, human and posthuman, real and virtual. These works

of this physical disembodiment can be a dizziness due to a technological

fundamentally alter our understanding of ourselves as contemporary

upset of our body memory. In this way, we experience a new out-of-body

beings and promote an acceptance of Haraway’s proposition that ‘we are

sensation—an intellect without physical form.

all chimeras, theorized and fabricated hybrids of machine and organism’.

Synthetic imagery offers a technologically enhanced vision, a vision beyond the capabilities of the naked eye, yet a vision that is ‘too real’— a hyperreal vision. Manovich poses and answers the question, ‘Whose vision is it? It is the vision of a computer, a cyborg, an automatic missile.

It is a realistic representation of human vision in the future when it will be augmented by computer graphics and cleansed of [visual] noise’.

While the synthetic vision of virtual reality shifts our conscious attention to another world, our bodies, however, remain in the real world. As a

Opposite: Cao Fei Live in RMB City 2009, single-channel video. M+ Sigg Collection, Hong Kong.

By donation Above: Shaun Gladwell Orbital vanitas 2017, virtual reality, high-definition video, colour, sound.

Courtesy of the artist, Anna Schwartz Gallery and Badfaith

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Paul McCarthy Bianca Hill explores the ideas behind Paul McCarthy’s That Girl (TG Awake) in the NGA’s upcoming major exhibition Hyper Real.

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HYPER REAL

The female body has been a central subject (and object) of western art

their gaze. They are pretty, nubile and naked. McCarthy is not ignorant

from the remotest antiquity through to the Renaissance, persisting into

of the tradition in which his bodies will be read. He told the magazine

the modern and contemporary periods. Whether drawn, sculpted or

Art in America in 2013, ‘I’m not making a sex doll. I think the pieces

photographed, it has functioned as the most consistent, and constructed,

are capable of putting somebody in a different place’. In every aspect

trope of aesthetic beauty. A deliberate articulation of this narrative is

of McCarthy’s image making, there is an acute awareness of existing

British art historian Kenneth Clark’s 1956 treatise The nude: a study

structures. This is what makes his subversion so powerful.

of ideal art. Starting from the premise that the naked female body is

Although, at first, it may not seem to share the same aesthetic as

obscene, Clark then grapples with establishing a set of parameters for

his more visceral bodily art, That Girl (TG Awake) is just as much an

non-objectionable nakedness—that is when the female form is fully

exploration of the grotesque body as a site of social transgression, a place

transformed into art.

to question social and cultural standards. Ideal beauty, according to the

Feminist art historian Lynda Nead articulates in her 1992 book

hugely influential eighteenth-century art historian and archaeologist

The female nude: art, obscenity and sexuality that the ‘boundaries of the

Johann Joachim Winckelmann, should be devoid of human bodily

female form control that mass of flesh that is “woman” … [allowing]

functions. Orifices, excrescences, fluids and everything else that interrupts

the image of the female body to offer the possibility of an undisturbing

the continuous contour of the human form, or potentially reveals the

aesthetic experience’. Containment is then an integral element of the way

body’s interior, should be minimised. In this concept, the ideal body

in which women have been represented in visual culture. Boundaries

is radically separated from its surrounds, self-contained and complete.

are not, however, conclusive or determinative. They can be breached and

The grotesque body contradicts this, exaggerating those body parts that

transgressed. Often this is not a comfortable experience but, rather, one

can be entered or those that protrude. It is on this premise that McCarthy

that confronts and unsettles. This is the forte of Los Angeles-based artist

constructs his bodies. In a 2011 interview with The Guardian’s Jonathan

Paul McCarthy.

Jones, he mused, ‘I had this thing about exposing the interior of the body,

It is difficult to define McCarthy’s disparate art practice. In the 1970s, he donned a woman’s wig and filmed himself cavorting in a bathtub while slathering his genitals in condiments and eating raw sausage

the orifices leading into the body, and what the interior was, and the taboos of the interior’.

Although Elyse Poppers is presented with her legs splayed and her

meat until becoming violently ill. More recently, he has produced

vagina clearly exposed in the NGA’s upcoming exhibition Hyper Real,

monumental, immersive experiences that reimagine the Disney classic

she is not sexualised or pornographic. Her bodies are opened. While they

Snow White and the seven dwarfs as a conglomeration of the most perverse

conform to the standards of ideal beauty, they simultaneously transgress

sexual fetishes. If there is a central theme, beyond provocation, it is the

its boundaries and interrogate the symbolic significance of the female

body—his own or others, fantastical and banal, both male and female.

body today.

McCarthy’s ‘bodily art’ does not discriminate, but it does disrupt.

Paradoxically, it may be the most ‘normal’ and ‘beautiful’ of his bodily forms that are in fact the most challenging. That Girl (TG Awake) 2012–13 is a stunning triplicate, an installation of three life-size, nude female figures of uncanny verisimilitude. Each is a body cast of McCarthy’s muse the actress Elyse Poppers and was produced by leading special effects artist Kazuhiro Tsuji and his team. Their silicone skin reveals every fine crease, tanline and tiny blemish, but each sculpture remains an empty form, a representational vessel of the modelled avatar.

The figures are similarly posed, seated with legs out stretched, but with slight variations in the placement of their limbs and the direction of

Opposite: Paul McCarthy That Girl (TG Awake) 2012–13, silicone, paint, hair, wood, glass, melamine board.

D.Daskalopoulos Collection. Installation view of The Human Factor: The Figure in Contemporary Sculpture, Hayward Gallery, London, 17 June – 7 September 2014.

Photo: © Stephen White

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Hyperrealism in the making Lara Nicholls spoke to Australian artist Sam Jinks in July about the process of developing his work The deposition, commissioned by the NGA for the national collection and its upcoming exhibition Hyper Real, on show from 20 October 2017 to 18 February 2018.

Lara Nicholls: The subject of the Deposition of Christ is a historically

to make this piece actually work, it needs to be an old woman who’s

laden theme. What brought you to making a modern iteration?

very frail, with that strange translucency that comes when someone

Sam Jinks: Well, there are a few things. The first was to make a work

reaches that level of frailty. It’s a bit like a newborn baby. There’s a

that fitted in with a group of sculptures I made years ago: Pietà, Woman and child and The hanging man. When I made Pietà, I was trying to navigate the emotions felt at the death of a relative. It was a cathartic act.

When the proposal came to make a work that fitted in with that genre, I thought it needed to be something that I can relate to personally.

At this time in my life, I have very old relatives and young relatives.

I’m mixed into the middle, but our place in that order isn’t clear. When I was younger, it seemed like life was very linear. The older I get, it seems far less like that. You have older people that are very robust, who take

weird otherworldliness like it hasn’t quite arrived yet. The same sort of thing starts to happen when people grow very old. As I grow older myself, I feel like my connection to the world is changing. I become less connected. And perhaps, over time, one becomes very disconnected.

My ninety-one-year-old grandmother agreed to let me cast her hands for this piece, which we did a couple of days ago. She’s actually super robust. It was such a beautiful moment to cast her hand and then reveal the hand. Just having that kind of intimate moment with her in that context, seeing how beautiful the hand is, a hand generated by a lifetime

on the role of being the givers of strength and support. Then you have

of work and activity—quite different to a young person’s hand.

young people who you would hope would be robust but wind up being

Lara: Hand gestures in art have always been powerful devices to

very fragile. It was almost comforting, in a way, to realise that was the case. But it’s also a little bit scary. This work is me trying to navigate that.

Lara: So life doesn’t just fall into an order. Things can change and

manipulate our gaze and direct where our energy is going. I was struck by the positioning of the hands in this work, particularly the left hand of the mother figure. She holds the hand to the forehead, a movement

evolve in ways that don’t go to script.

pretty much reserved for mothers.

Sam: Exactly. And loading this work up with the title of ‘The deposition’

Sam: Yeah. Well, I actually had my mother pose with my son for the

works nicely because you have a very frail old woman and a middle-aged man. But there is a mystery as to which one is the deposed figure. The old woman is giving support to the man, who appears more robust but is in a submissive position. So you get this sort of strange shift in traditional roles going on. …

Lara: You often play around with preconceived notions of relationship structures, and you already mentioned the shift in traditional

initial rough up. I thought, ‘I can piece it together like this. Let’s take some photos to see what happens’. Immediately, she placed her hand on his forehead. There was the same intimacy when we did the hand casting of my grandmother. I brought my daughter, who can be challenging.

She was loud and carrying on, but you could see that very powerful sort of connection between the two of them. It’s a very unconditional kind of love. …

roles going on for this work. How conscious are you of subverting

Lara: Turning to materials and technique, can you tell me about

those stereotypes?

your working processes?

Sam: It was important with this work. Originally, when I roughed it

Sam: My process is actually changing. I used to just kind of battle it

up in clay, I had this vision of just an old woman. But then I thought,

out. It was like a war in the studio, where I’d just launch into a piece.

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Often I would get very stuck and disorientated. Whereas, now, I go

accurate in a maquette that just doesn’t work when you blow it up to a

through the process. I’ll do drawings, then a maquette, which I scan.

larger scale. It’s hard to know why that actually happens. They shouldn’t

Then I blow it up to a larger scale and can make a waste mould of that.

feel different. They should feel the same.

It’s still a very convoluted process, but it feels sort of safer. I tend not to get as lost as I used to. My enthusiasm was often so much so that I was desperate to get to the finish of the work. I would be moving as quickly as I can, then get stuck because something wouldn’t work and I have to make a great big structural change. Now, the process is both simpler and more complicated. Simple in that I spend more time on the maquette resolving the work and trying to figure out the bugs that may be in it.

With any work in the round, you’ll have one angle that doesn’t work, and you’ve got to kind of balance that out. Is the leading edge so good that you’re willing to accept a couple of flat spots? As time goes on, I’m a bit more forgiving to myself, because you can’t have everything—as much as I try. And, in this case, there was one strong leading edge on the sculpture that I loved and it was good enough to go, ‘Okay, I’m going to push that through’.

Lara: What is the maquette usually made out of?

Sam: Just clay. Actually, I’ve been using this very hard clay, which is difficult because it’s so cold. It’s madness using it. But it doesn’t dry, as it’s oil-based, a bit like plasticine. I needed a lot more detail in this work than I would normally introduce, so it was a very good medium to use. The hands, for instance. And the old woman needed to be something that you could move further and further into and see the shimmering intricacy of her wrinkles. And to achieve a contrast between the two figures and capture that frailty, too.

Once I have the maquette, I have it scanned using a 3D-scanning process, then printed up in polystyrene to the correct size. In that state, I can look at it and go, ‘Is this going to work?’ From there, I’ll either skin it with plasticine or clay and use that as the armature, or I’ll make a waste

Sam: You refine it, and that can take a while. Because it’s polystyrene, it’s a very rough, crappy surface, so I’ll refine it and refine it and then try and push together all the subtleties that need to go into it. It’s one thing to have it all roughed up, but then there’s a lot of things that happen in between that and getting it to work.

Often I’ll make life casts as a reference of hands and things like that.

I can use those as a detail point to add to the roughed-in piece. I’ll usually break the sculpture apart then and start moulding it. Once the pieces are moulded, I start using the silicone. And you just paint it in like you would a reverse painting. I tint and brush in the skin tone to achieve the skin’s sense of translucency. From there, I remove it from the mould in silicone and start piecing it together.

Then the detailed work really begins. I start putting hair on it, which is actually one of the more relaxing parts of the process because it’s relatively straightforward. I paint further and eventually put the clothing on. And that’s it. There is no difference to the process than any other sort of sculptural form, like a bronze—except that, with metal, you’re not painting silicone into the mould, you’re pouring bronze into it.

It’s one of those things that I’ve being doing for quite a while, so there is probably not a lot of mystery to it anymore. When I first started, there was a real mystery to it. Not many people were doing it, and the people that were often weren’t forthcoming about how. …

Lara: Your family seems to be part of your work. You mentioned you cast your grandmother’s hands for The deposition, and I understand the

mould of the actual cast form pieces and do a thin skin of plasticine.

dress the woman wears in Mother and child is made by your mother.

Then I’ve got a lightweight version of the original maquette that’s the

Sam: Yes. She’ll be working on this piece, too. She’s like me, extremely

right size.

focused on doing the best she can with that chance. She’s so good at

When you blow up the scale of the maquette it feels different.

A larger scale changes everything. You can have something that’s really 38

Lara: After the maquette is scaled up, what happens?

HYPER REAL

it, and it’s perfect. We sometimes clash on what might be the most appropriate material, but she seems to have a really good sense of the

subtleties. I don’t think I could go to a conventional dressmaker to do it because they’d probably find me very frustrating to deal with.

Lara: Mothers are much more tolerant.

Sam: Yeah. And I think she just has a really good sense of detail and the way things need to fall.

It was a real turning point when I realised that you can introduce elements that tell an enormous amount and add an extra dimension to the work. The dress for Mother and child really made the work because it actually put it in a context. It was the third element that the work needed to function. And it does seem, once you get three elements working together, that’s the magic number.

Lara: Tell me about briefing your mother to make a garment for The deposition.

Sam: We’re actually meeting next Thursday, and we’ll spend the whole day together just shopping for fabric. In the maquette, I roughed in the clothing on the woman to try and figure out what’s going to work best with the idea. But there is so much that can go wrong. I could choose the wrong fabric, and it might become distracting. You can do something as simple as having fabric that looks too shiny or folds the wrong way or doesn’t scale correctly—that’s a huge one. With Woman and child, it was silk because it just fell correctly. With this one, we’ve got to figure it out. First, the colour, because the colour is critical. You can make skin look bad with certain colours. It can look light or dark or all sorts of things. But get it right, and you get something special happening.

In this work, it is probably more important than usual because it’s a big portion of it.

In some ways, it needs to be kind of deconstructed, and something new needs to come out of it. The medium needs to be used in more interesting ways, and I think I’d like to try mixing things up a little bit more. I’ve been exploring a very subtle and precarious aspect of realism such as intricate little moments that have real subtleties to them. It’s not like a giant figure that just looks real. There has to be something else going on with it. You can’t rely on that trickery anymore.

Lara: I think you’re using this medium as a handmaiden into the more psychologically interesting elements of human experience and relationships. There is a technical mastery, but it’s actually the relationship between your figures and that sense of mystery that takes the works to another level.

Sam: That’s the potential for the delicacy in the medium. And they’re the things I find interesting, too. It’s like in life, you have these moments when something simple will happen and will suggest something deeper.

Often I’ll be trying to describe it with something subtle, in the way a person is positioned or a contact point or something like that. It is there that the art resides.

My concern is that people have seen enough of this sort of work now that they can no longer pick up on the subtlety. That might be in my head, but I’ve seen a lot of people—and this is not a criticism—use the medium conceptually like a one-line joke. I like it when someone treats it with the delicacy that it needs. The silicone is like ice cream: too much of it is nauseating.

Lara: Where do you think the medium is heading?

Sam: I think we are at a similar point to the period when photography

…

emerged. It evolved and got better and better, and painting had to be

Lara: The hyperreal genre has come so far since the beginning. It’s as though there is nothing that we cannot replicate.

make a 3D print of one of these sculptures. So it is critical that something

Sam: There is also that element in films. Historically, people made rubber

destroyed and reconstructed. There will be a time when you can just else is going on. It can’t just be a technical exercise.

creatures and monsters and things like that. Now, it’s computer graphics.

I think there is a bit of joy in knowing that someone has created this lifelike thing with their own hands. There is something special about it,

Page 36: Sam Jinks in his studio, July 2017.

almost like a magician. But it’s trickery.

Opposite and above: The deposition at various stages of production, 2017.

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Arthur Streeton Anne Gray illuminates preeminent Australian Impressionist Arthur Streeton’s war art of 1918, which is the subject of a poignant new exhibition opening at the NGA on 15 December.

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ARTHUR STREETON

COMING EXHIBITION

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If you think you know the work of Arthur Streeton, you might need

circles and horizontals made by the wheels of the ammunition limbers,

to think again if you do not know his war art. These are generally very

and to this purpose he refined his subject into natural simplified

different from those ‘gold and blue paintings’ for which he is best

forms. He visited Glisy when preparations were well under way for

known, and which helped define an image of Australia.

the major Allied offensive launched on 8 August. Artillery, carefully

While resident in London in 1915, Streeton voluntarily joined the

breaking through the German front and, for the first time, maintaining

General Hospital, where he came to understand the impact of war.

the momentum of the offensive. Streeton recorded evidence of these

He was then appointed an Official War Artist in 1918, working in

preparations in this row of ammunition limbers. Shellfire caused

France from 14 May to 20 November. When he arrived at the front,

approximately two of every three casualties in the war.

it had become much more mobile warfare than at any time since 1914, as the front never settled for more than a few weeks.

As an artist best known for his lyrical landscapes, his depictions of

As a person receptive to the harmony of nature in peacetime, he inevitably noticed the deserted carcasses of war machines haunting the wartime landscape. Rather than portraying its ability to annihilate, he

technology—guns, lorries, planes—are unexpected, and yet they make

showed a howitzer lying broken and abandoned, no longer having any

sense. To a large extent, technology was what made the First World War

destructive power. Such images of the debris of war provided echoes

so devastating, and Streeton was there in the last months to observe

of so much that had occurred and of the men who had also been

its impact on the troops, towns and landscape. He was remarkably

maimed by war. In particular, Streeton was at the forefront in depicting

comfortable depicting the essence of modern machines of war and had

aircraft. By working from life during the war, he produced images that

an uncanny ability to capture intricate details convincingly. Moreover,

have integrity both as works of art and as convincing representations of

by recognising the significance of technology in the war, he showed

the technology.

that he appreciated what made it so different from, and so much more catastrophic than, previous wars.

Design was always a critical element in his work. In Guns, Glisy 1918, for instance, he appears to have been fascinated by the repeated

42

coordinated with all other arms of the forces, played a crucial role in

Royal Army Medical Corps, working as an orderly at the 3rd London

ARTHUR STREETON

Large tented hangars were rapidly erected to protect aircraft from the elements. Streeton depicted the way in which camouflage paint was applied to the canvas structures to reduce their visibility to enemy observation. Temporary hangars protected the aircraft from the

‘If you think you know the art of Arthur Streeton, you might need to think again if you do not know his war art. These are generally very different from those ‘gold and blue paintings’ for which he is best known, and which helped define an image of Australia.’

weather and also allowed mechanics to work on the machines relatively unaffected by external conditions. However, on 17 September 1918, the limitations of these tent structures were dramatically demonstrated when a violent thunderstorm tore the hangars to shreds and damaged every one of the Australian Squadron’s aircraft.

When Streeton was sent to Péronne, he was fascinated by the weird appearance of the town, writing to his wife Nora on 31 October 1918: ‘[two] thirds of the houses [were] smashed down, [and the] remainder yawning with all their interiors exposed’. At this time, he painted some of his most powerful watercolours, in both beauty and drama, creating a striking record of wartime devastation. In his Péronne paintings, more than in any of his other war works, he demonstrated a heightened sense of response, creating images that are bolder and more abstract than his earlier ones. He was justifiably confident of their quality and wrote in his letter to Nora: ‘I’m getting some watercolours of ruins, in some

Pages 40–1: Nocturne, Amiens 1918 (detail), oil on canvas. Art Gallery of South Australia, Adelaide, gift of the artist, 1943 Opposite: Guns, Glisy 1918, watercolour and pencil.

Private collection Above, from top: The bomber at rest 1918, watercolour and pencil; Barracks, Péronne 1918, watercolour over pencil. Both National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne, gift of the artist, 1926

ways much more striking than the ones I did before—they are bolder & I think more decorative. Heavens how one realises things here in these fresh ruins … I’m getting good things’.

While in France, Streeton chose to work in pencil and watercolour, as both the shellfire and weather made it necessary for him to work rapidly. His war watercolours reveal that he was in full technical mastery of this medium. They have a freshness and spontaneity and capture his immediate observations. Indeed, there is an honesty in these ARTONVIEW 91 SPRING 2017

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ARTHUR STREETON

watercolours, a truth to the particularity of his scenes. In The stairway,

the right, a sign that a shell has landed in the lake. In the sky, it looks as

Péronne, for instance, he showed a staircase hanging loosely, tentatively.

if more shells are exploding. This apparently bucolic image tells of one

He captured exactly the look of a shelled building, yet the scene also

of the horrors of the war, of how a shell could come apparently out of

echoes with the life that was once part of the town, of the people who

nowhere at any time, day or night. Indeed, two thirds of the casualties

once would have climbed these steps. By portraying the rubble below,

in this war were caused by such shellfire. This image blends Streeton’s

he also hinted at those who might have been buried or maimed under

knowledge of wartime machinery and their deadly power with his

the debris.

peacetime love of nature.

Streeton probably worked on the spot in pencil or pencil and

The First World War was unlike all earlier wars in that technology—

wash in his sketchbooks and then worked up some of the images into

especially guns, tanks, aircraft and long-distance intensive shelling—

finished watercolours after returning to base. Composite works such as

dramatically changed the essential character of what occurred, including

Headquarters, 2nd Division, Glisy were clearly images that he removed

the damage done to people and places. Streeton was at the forefront,

from a sketchbook. He also reworked a number of images made at

being one of the few war artists who actively chose to depict this aspect

the front into oil paintings. Nocturne, Amiens, for instance, is a refined

of the war. He also conveyed with dramatic simplicity the stark reality of

and simplified version of his on-the-spot watercolour Ruin, Amiens.

the yawning buildings and dislocated remnants of the battlefield. While

The watercolour captures some of the devastation in the town, but the

he did not often depict soldiers or portray scenes of action, his images

oil is more dramatic—and abstract. Streeton divided the image into

of the world left behind, the stilled machines and silent ruins, are amply

dark and light, contrasting the shattered building on the left with the

suggestive of all that had taken place.

silhouetted ruins on the right, and setting both against a deep blue sky, giving drama and poignancy to the scene.

In Troops bathing, Glisy, Streeton depicted what at first appears to be an idyllic scene, a calm tree-lined lake, like paintings he produced before and after the war—The lake, Coombe Banks 1913 or The pool of Venus 1920. Reflections glimmer on the water, and a group of men can be seen bathing near the shores. The scene is broken by a large splash on

Opposite: Damaged buildings, Péronne 1918, watercolour and pencil. Private collection Above: Troops bathing, Glisy 1918, oil on canvas.

Private collection

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46

DAVID HOCKNEY

C O M I N G E X H I B I T I O N

David HOCKNEY Jane Kinsman provides a preview from her chapter ‘How to be an artist’ in the NGA’s soonto-be-published David Hockney Prints, accompanying an exhibition of Hockney’s works from the NGA’s collection opening on 11 November. After his early years at Bradford Grammar, two years of national service and time at Royal College of Art, Hockney pursued his interest in exploring his own iconography in both painting and printmaking.

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Though Hockney was a generation younger than many of the activists seeking a change in the law, in Britain being openly gay was still illegal.

In his art of the early 1960s, Hockney created a series of ‘Doll boy’ images with codes, symbols and humour. This enabled a particularly intimate and personal iconography, allowing the artist to produce, on occasions, autobiographical works relating to his own homosexuality.

In 1960 Hockney began making etchings in the college’s Print Department. Such an interchange between schools was encouraged at the Royal College of Art, as Carel Weight recalled in correspondence with me years later in 1991: ‘Students had freedom to develop their own personal ways. They could move freely and work in other parts of the College such as Printmaking, Sculpture, Photography and Film Making.

Life Drawing and Painting was always available …’ The cash-strapped Hockney, who had no money for paint, was advised that the Print Department provided students with free materials and so he went along.

Here he was fortunate to meet a student of Art and Theatre Design, Ron Fuller, who taught him how to etch. Writing to me in 2003, Fuller said, ‘I was a technical assistant in printmaking at the RCA when David came along and wanted to do some etching … I set him up to do this but a lot of the students helped him as well—it was a good, free and easy place’.

Hockney’s work as a printmaker flourished under these circumstances. …

Many of Hockney’s subsequent prints of the early 1960s related to his sexual preferences; a bold move for the young artist, given that homosexual acts remained illegal. To introduce gay themes, albeit in a relatively subtle coded way, was a cheeky but defiant personal statement by the young man. Homosexual topics were sometimes accompanied by a certain proselytising enthusiasm. He found that it was both exciting and liberating to develop homoerotic imagery—a subject with a complex pictorial tradition, where style, subject matter and composition alluded covertly to the topic. Contemporary art required a new exploration and Hockney was keen for one to evolve in his own art. To this end he developed subjects such as his Doll boy and Queen series in both painting and print.

A key figure in the Art Brut movement, Jean Dubuffet, was an important influence with his ‘naive childlike’ figures, graffiti lines and rough surface qualities. Dubuffet had been introduced to the British public with an exhibition at the Institute of Contemporary Art, London, in 1955, and Hockney saw three exhibitions of his art in London while a student—one in 1958 and two in 1960. Nowhere is Dubuffet’s powerful influence more evident in Hockney’s art than in his 1961 series Doll boy, where he adopts the humorous, barrel-shaped figures with oversized heads and stick limbs rendered in a richly textured manner. A box of Alka-Seltzer, a brand of digestive salts for overindulgence, completes the picture Fires of furious desire—the most beautiful boy in the world.

The numbers on each work are a code where numerals stand for letters, an idea Hockney had adopted from Walt Whitman, as he outlines in his book David Hockney by David Hockney: the early years:

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DAVID HOCKNEY

‘If the poetry of Cavafy or Whitman inspired Hockney in his search for themes for printmaking, so too did fairytales and fables.’

I … used Whitman’s rather childish little thing about playing with each letter of the alphabet: A as one. B two. C three and so on; so the painting has these code numbers on it. I liked the idea of putting numbers on it in just the same way the cubists put numbers on their work. The numbers really say ‘DH’ and ‘WW’. I remember the summer of 1960 I read everything by Walt Whitman. I’d known his poetry before but I’d never realized he was that good. There are quite a few paintings based on his work.

In doing so he was inventing a new vocabulary for the world of changing sexual mores in the 1960s.

It was Hockney’s markedly individual and idiosyncratic response to Pop Art, one of the key influences among students of the RCA, that set him apart from the others. Alka Seltzer 1961 is a variant etching of a large painting, The most beautiful boy in the world of the same year. Like the painting it contains a male figure in three-quarter view, nude except for a sheer dress, an image Hockney derived from a story about a cross-dresser in a gay magazine. He is watched admiringly by a young man, seen as a head in profile with a heart hovering above. The label for Alka-Seltzer is included in the composition, as is the inscription ‘The most beautiful boy in the world’ and the coded initials ‘DB’ (Doll boy) with their homoerotic suggestion, which refers to Hockney’s fascination with the pop idol Cliff Richard:

Doll boy was a reference to the pop singer, who was very attractive, very sexy. I’m not a great pop music fan … but I am a lover of music and lover of songs and I like singing. Cliff Richard was a very popular singer and I used to cut out photographs of him from newspapers and magazines and stick them up around my little cubicle in the Royal College of Art, partly because other people used to stick up girl pin-ups … He had a song in which the words were, ‘She’s a real live walking talking living doll’, and he sang it rather sexily. The title of this painting is based on that line. He is referring to some girl, so I changed it to a boy.

The artist’s early liberation and open homosexuality allowed him to introduce homoerotic themes relatively early in his artistic development.

While Francis Bacon had been a forerunner in exploring gay iconography, this was the exception rather than the rule.

Hockney’s early ventures were rich in imagination as well as adopting multiple techniques and various surface and tonal values, as exemplified in Kaisarion with all his beauty 1961. This is an homage to the poet Cavafy, which mixes techniques and styles and includes stamps of Britannia, hands and a coat of arms from metal blocks found at the print studio, revealing the experimental nature of Hockney’s intaglio techniques at the time. The central figure of Kaisarion, the son of Julius Caesar and Cleopatra, is combined with a military procession and the words ‘ALEXANDRA, CLEOPATRA’ and (a deflating) ‘MUM’

Pages 46–7: A diver, from a series Paper pools 1978 (detail), twelve sheets of handcoloured pressed paper pulp. Purchased 1979 Opposite: The diploma 1962, etching and aquatint. The Poynton Bequest, 2008 Right: Alka Seltzer 1961, etching and aquatint. Poynton Bequest, 2017; Kaisarion and all his beauty 1961, colour etching, hardground etching, aquatint. Purchased 1997 All works in this feature from the National Gallery of Australia, Canberra

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beside the portrait of the exotic Egyptian queen with her signature long straight hair and fringe. Lilliputian figures in a procession frame the composition at the base and side, adding an element of whimsy, as well as the politics of the untrustworthy crowd. The Alexandrians march out of their city, while the armed Romans with helmets and shields and a banner emblazoned with Cleopatra’s name line up for the proclamation of the kings. The work was inspired by Cavafy’s Alexandrian kings (1912), where a fabulously bejewelled young man is decked out in coloured silk, flowers and ribbons to meet the kings at the Alexandria Gymnasium.

The theme of a procession of figures intrigued Hockney in terms of the complex pictorial problem of how to create a crowd using the simplicity of composition required for his etchings. …

If the poetry of Cavafy or Whitman inspired Hockney in his search for themes for printmaking, so too did fairytales and fables. One of his friends, American student Mark Berger, who was openly gay, wrote a fairytale for his Italian boyfriend. To accompany the fable Hockney produced Gretchen and the Snurl 1961, a humorous and inventive visual narrative of five images telling of the two lovers Gretchen and Snurl, escaping the toothed vagina dentata, evoking a sense of impotence and forming the shape of the ‘nasty’ Snatch, who devoured a city, while the lovers live happily ever after.

Hockney was also a great admirer of the Brothers Grimm. In Study for Rumpelstiltskin 1961 he produced a visual narrative of four images recounting the tale of the goblin-like figure, shown in the etching with the letter ‘R’. The fable tells of a miller who had promised a greedy king that his beautiful daughter could spin gold from straw. Threatened

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with death if this proved false, Rumpelstiltskin tells the terrified young woman that he will carry out this feat and creates rich tangles of gold, indicated by curling etched lines. The woman marries the king (shown in profile with a crown) and is seen in one image surrounded by all the gold. In the final image we see the evil manikin threatening the princess, indicated by an etched legend and ‘prince’ written on her pregnant figure. Hockney pursued the subject with a second more elaborate, more technically proficient intaglio print with a single image, Rumpelstiltskin 1962. The very rotund (in the manner of a Dubuffet) and evil Rumpelstiltskin threatens the princess who is wearing a medieval gown and elaborate headdress. A silhouette of a male figure and a castle in the background complete the composition. Hockney’s creativity as a figurative artist is clearly evident in these inventive, highly personalised, whimsical images.

Above: Gretchen and the snurl 1961, etching.

The Poynton Bequest, 2008 Opposite: Afternoon swimming 1980, colour lithograph.

Gift of Kenneth Tyler, 2002 Right: Gregory in the pool, from a series Paper pools 1978, handcoloured and pressed coloured paper pulp.

Purchased 1979

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DONOR

Kenneth E Tyler Jane Kinsman profiles Australian-born American master printmaker and philanthropist Kenneth E Tyler AO to celebrate the strong bonds formed with the NGA over many years

In 1973, the Australian-born, American-based critic and writer Robert

support a curatorial role that tackles the large task of documenting and

Hughes alerted the Australian National Gallery’s then acting director

researching the Tyler collections. Along with his wife, Marabeth Cohen-

James Mollison that master printer Kenneth E Tyler AO was selling over

Tyler, he gave Frank Stella’s sculpture Mersin XVI to the NGA in 2006 in

six hundred prints, drawings and multiples by key artists working from

memory of Australian modernist architect Harry Seidler AC.

his Los Angeles workshop. Tyler’s desire was to move his workshop to

In 2009, Tyler and the NGA established a ten-year program of

be close to many of the talented artists who lived in the eastern states

funding, providing US$200 000 annually for curatorial staffing,

of America, artists with whom he had worked or wished to do so. These

publishing, website development and filmmaking to support the

circumstances allowed the NGA to acquire an outstanding collection of

exhibition program in the NGA’s Orde Poynton Gallery (named after

artists working in the United States from the 1960s to the early 1970s,

our generous benefactor the late Dr Orde Poynton AO, CMG). This

including Josef and Anni Albers, Jasper Johns, Robert Rauschenberg,

program has included exhibitions and publications devoted to the NGA’s

Roy Lichtenstein, Frank Stella and Andy Warhol.

collections of prints and multiples by Rauschenberg, Lichtenstein, Stella

Since that time, this master printer and publisher has continued

and Robert Motherwell. For his services to Australian culture, Tyler was

to work in partnership with many key artists of the day, as well as

awarded an Order of Australia in 2012 at the Australian Embassy in

mentoring young, emerging artists. At his four workshops over the years,

Washington DC. He was just one of two Americans to receive the award

Tyler has provided gifted artists with places for innovation, where they

at that time.

could hone their skills, contributing to the postwar print renaissance.

Tyler’s generosity continued when further funds were made through

Stella, David Hockney, Helen Frankenthaler, Joan Mitchell and James

the American Friends to develop a program of films based on the Tyler

Rosenquist were just some of the artists whose work thrived in such

collection. In 2014, the American-based film production company

settings. Tyler’s studios were not just bricks and mortar but places for

Cantomedia, headed by Frank Cantor, began work on nine short

artists to embrace risk in a playful hard-working environment. Supported

films—Anthony Caro: sculpture inside out, David Hockney: moving focus,

by Tyler’s technical wizardry, there was no project too ambitious.

Roy Lichtenstein: pop remix, Joan Mitchell: blueness of blue, John Newman:

In 2002, a further purchase and major gift from Tyler of editioned

Afterimage, Terence La Noue: Beyond the shore, James Rosenquist: Welcome

prints and proofs, along with matrices, film, candid photography and

to the water planet, Steven Sorman: balance of form, Frank Stella: The

print documentation, fully augmented what has now become an

fountain—and the longer production Ken Tyler: the art of collaboration.

extraordinary storehouse of American art from all of the Tyler print

These films have been shown or will be shown in NGA exhibitions.

workshops, from the early days to the turn of the century. Tyler has

And the last of these, the legacy film, will be launched abroad at Tyler’s

made a lifetime commitment to printmaking, elevating the notion

alma mater, The Herron School of Art and Design in the United States,

of the original print in the postwar period and playing a key role in

in 2018.

establishing the modern print as a major art form. To date, acquisitions

As well as donating their time, energy and extraordinary knowledge

from Tyler have grown to almost seven-and-a-half thousand works, and

over many years, Ken Tyler and Marabeth Cohen-Tyler have provided

he has generously given us an archive of sixty thousand photographs

a remarkable legacy for the National Gallery of Australia. They have

and hundreds of hours of film that provide an account of the working

significantly contributed to and enhanced visual culture in Australia.

methods of artists and printers at his studios.

And, in recognition of their dedication, the NGA will continue to

The NGA now owns a rich, complex and important collection

preserve, research, exhibit, publish and provide online access to the

documenting this exciting era of printmaking, through the auspices of

outstanding resources that comprise the Tyler collection in all its richness

the American Friends of the National Gallery of Australia. Continuing

and diversity—and to make this collection well known worldwide.

his generosity to NGA, Tyler also contributed to some start-up funding to

Kenneth E Tyler at the NGA’s exhibition Roy Lichtenstein: pop remix, July 2013.

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KENNETH E TYLER

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INDIGENOUS AUSTRALIA

I N T E R N AT I O N A L TO U R I N G E X H I B I T I O N

The second half of the twentieth century witnessed a revolution in Australian art, when the paintings and sculptures of Aboriginal Australians were finally recognised as art and not artefact. Towards the end of the Age of Enlightenment, the Aboriginal societies of the recently discovered continent of Australia were regarded as people with no art: where were the rectangular paintings in frames and sculptures on pedestals? Just as its Aboriginal culture had been misread, so too had the landscape of Australia. The land was considered a wilderness, empty or barely occupied, and of no economic benefit to its Aboriginal

Indigenous Australia Wally Caruana and Franchesca Cubillo remind us of the unique relationship Indigenous Australians have with this country they’ve called ‘home’ for tens of thousands of years.

Celebrating the NGA’s extraordinary collection of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander art, the exhibition Indigenous Australia, curated by Cubillo, opens at the me Collectors Room in Berlin on 16 November.

inhabitants: where were the ploughed fields and fences? Yet, as Bill Gammage points out in his book The biggest estate on Earth, the early explorers and settlers often described the coastal areas of the country as having the appearance of an English gentleman’s park, with swards of grass surrounded by forests, and the first colonial artists painted it that way.

What the explorers and the early settlers failed to see were the ingenious ways in which Aboriginal Australians managed the land.

Nor could they appreciate the intrinsic relationship between Indigenous people and the land that was and continues to be at the core of Aboriginal being, and at the core of Aboriginal art. As Galarrwuy Yunupingu wrote in the NGA’s 1989 book Windows on the Dreaming: ‘English is incapable of describing our relationship to the land of our ancestors. We decided then to … [describe] it in a way we hoped nonAboriginal people would understand; through pictures. If they wouldn’t listen to our words, they might try and understand our paintings’.

Aboriginal art is about the land, made of materials gathered from the land, etched into its surfaces as rock engravings or ceremonial ground designs, and painted onto the bodies of the people who inhabit the country (figures in the landscape who carry the landscape on their bodies). The continent is the Aboriginal artist’s canvas, fertile in natural and spiritual resources that are imperceptible to those with foreign eyes.

The land as we experience it today was shaped by the original creator-beings who transformed themselves into features of the landscape and imbued the earth with their sacred forces. It is a spiritual entity, packed with symbolic meaning and totemic associations that are the subjects of an art that is fundamentally religious in character. Paintings about country are not mundane landscapes in the conventional sense of pictures of natural scenery, nor do they represent ‘physical form[s] of human emotion’, as Robert Hughes wrote in his 1970 book The art of Australia. They are made with reference to the Ancestral Realm or, as it is commonly described today, the Dreaming—although this English term fails to capture the all-encompassing nature of the concept.

The Dreaming is Aboriginal cosmology and relates to the genesis of the universe, the creation period when the ancestors established the

Opposite: Poly Ngal (Alyawarr & Anmatyerre peoples) Bush Plum Country 2002, synthetic polymer paint on canvas. Gift of Lauraine Diggins, 2013. Donated through the Australian Government’s Cultural Gifts Program. © the artist, Represented by Viscopy All works in this feature from the National Gallery of Australia, Canberra

laws of nature, science, religion and society. But the Dreaming is not restricted to the past; rather, it is a constant reality that governs, informs and sanctifies people’s lives. It underpins people’s identity and their relationship to the spiritual and physical worlds, and to their traditional lands. Thus, the idea of ‘place’ in Aboriginal Australia—where ‘land’,

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‘country’, ‘camp’ and ‘home’ are synonymous—is a locus where the Dreaming is made manifest with specific relevance to the individual or the group.

Traditionally, most art is made for ceremony, in which young initiates gain ancestral knowledge through song cycles that bear comparison to the Mahabharata, Homer’s Odyssey or Beowulf in their epic, episodic nature and complexity. Knowledge is also passed on through works of art, which are not mere illustrations of episodes of the Dreaming but, rather, manifestations of ancestral agency and an affirmation of the artist’s relationship to the ancestors and the land.

The lexica of graphic symbols, icons and designs of Aboriginal art differ greatly from place to place. Each group or clan owns sets of specific designs, which are painted onto people’s bodies in ceremony, onto sacred objects and, today, onto portable sheets of bark or canvas.

Pictorial elements are composed along conventional templates that identify specific Dreamings. Knowledge of these designs, the right to reproduce them and the act of making them are of greater significance than the surfaces to which designs are applied. In Aboriginal art, the emphasis is on iconography and compositional structures to reflect the esoteric nature of its themes, rather than on figurative accuracy. Authority over the levels of interpretation of designs allows for the protection From top: Clifford Possum Tjapaltjarri (Anmatyerr people) Warlugulong 1977, synthetic polymer paint, oil and natural earth pigments on canvas.

Purchased with the generous assistance of Roslynne Bracher and the Paspaley Family, David Coe and Michelle Coe, Charles Curran and Eva Curran, 2007. © the estate of the artist, licensed by Aboriginal Artists Agency Ltd; Rover Thomas Joolama (Kukatja & Wangkajunga peoples) Cyclone Tracy 1991, natural earth pigments and binder on canvas.

Purchased 1991. © the artist’s estate, courtesy Warmun Art Centre

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of the cultural integrity of paintings and sculptural objects in the public domain, as artists distinguish between the open interpretations of their work, the ‘outside’ stories, and those that prevail within the restricted circumstances of ceremony and the normal course of religious instruction, the ‘inside’ stories.

In 1788, about two hundred and fifty distinct languages were spoken across the continent, each language group with its own set of traditions, kinship rules, laws, belief systems and styles of art. Despite their individual identities, each Aboriginal clan or group is not an isolated unit. Neighbouring groups share several socio-cultural elements, allowing us to distinguish a number of cultural or regional blocs. People are also connected by an ancient web of trade routes that crisscross the continent, allowing for the exchange of ceremonies, songs, words, objects and designs over vast distances.

The Indigenous artists represented in the exhibition Indigenous Australia come from specific regional blocs: Arnhem Land and its environs, the western deserts and the Kimberley. In addition, a number of artists hail from the eastern, western and southern seaboards where their ancestors experienced the initial force of colonisation at the cost of many lives and of many cultural traits. But culture persists.

In the late nineteenth century, Mickey of Ulladulla, William Barak and Tommy McRae provided us with their impressions of a changing world. In modern times, their artist-descendants comment on their contemporary worlds, making us aware of Indigenous realities that slipped through the cracks left by the official histories written by the dominant society.

From top: Christopher Pease (Minang, Wardandi, Balardong & Nyoongar peoples) Hunting party 2003, oil on canvas. Purchased 2004; Mick Namarari Tjapaltjarri (Pintupi people) Untitled (Rain Dreaming at Nyunmanu) 1994, synthetic polymer paint on linen. Australia Exhibition Patrons Club Fund, 2013. © the estate of the artist, licensed by Aboriginal Artists Agency Ltd

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58

CHRISTINE GODDEN

A R T I S T ’ S G I F T

Christine Godden Anne O’Hehir highlights the photography of Christine Godden in a recent gift to the NGA by the artist. The works show the formative period Godden spent in America in the 1970s, an important decade in the development of photography globally as an art form.

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CHRISTINE GODDEN

The work that Christine Godden made while living in the United States

outlet for photographers working in the 1960s to their work being

of America in the 1970s is remarkable for the way it is able to combine

seen on gallery walls. Studying photography in America during this

formal rigour with tenderness and sensuality. The forty-five photographs

extraordinarily dynamic decade was an exciting prospect, as both

in a generous gift to the NGA from the artist this year show in particular

California and Rochester were major centres, alongside Chicago and

her formative experiences in San Francisco and then New York in the

New Mexico. As Godden later reflected in the 1984 book Anything goes,

mid 1970s. The influence of early twentieth-century West Coast greats

‘photography in America currently enjoys a serious academic and artistic

such as Imogen Cunningham and Edward Weston is clearly discernible.

status … Through colleges, workshops, museums, journals and books

Like them, she combines an interest in the formal aesthetics of the

there is now an extensive dialogue and a well-informed, critical audience’.

medium with a desire to reveal the essential nature of an object, stripped

One of the great stories of the 1970s, and one that continues to play

of extraneous content, and brings an astounding intensity and seductive

out today, is the dialogue between Australian and American photomedia.

heat to how she views the world.

Influential American photographers such as Harry Callahan, Bill

Godden has said that she essentially photographs ‘how light falls

Clift, Lee Friedlander and Ralph Gibson visited Australia, while some,

on things’, a disciplined and reductive way of facing the world with the

including Bill Heimerman and David Stephenson, came and stayed.

camera that gives her work a level of toughness and abstraction. Yet her

Curators and others working in the field also visited, most notably John

work here also reflects her social engagement in America, as she was an

Szarkowski, then head of the photography department at the Museum of

active part of northern California’s countercultural scene. Many of the

Modern Art, New York, and arguably one of the figures most responsible

works interrogate domestic environments and the experience of young

for defining new developments in photography. At the same time,

people living in the American West. At the time, she regarded the people

Australians were travelling to America to study and work—among them

she lived with communally as ‘family’ and sought to capture the ‘quality

Grant Mudford, who stayed, as well as Ian Lobb, Les Walkling and Fiona

of optimism and the closeness of friendship’ she felt, later reflecting

Hall (who turned up to study at the Visual Studies Workshop a couple of

that both ‘living, and the picturing of it, was unselfconscious and

years after Godden).

uncomplicated’. Many of her works, especially those examining women’s

After returning to Australia in 1978, Godden took up the

experience of giving birth, were intended to show ‘how women see [and]

directorship of the Australian Centre for Photography in Sydney,

how women think’. Perhaps, for this reason, her nudes in particular do

a post she held until 1982. She soon established herself as a key figure

not seem voyeuristic, but rather intimate or even matter-of-fact. Godden

in the development of contemporary Australian photomedia, as a

was searching for a new, and distinctly female, way of working based on

photographer, a curator, an administrator and a writer. While at the

collaboration and equality.

ACP, she oversaw an expansion of its programs and the move from

Her imagery is also distinctive for its use of the fragment, which

Paddington Street to Oxford Street in 1981. She wanted to make the

reflects a marked heightened response to her environment. Such a way

centre a place that people could walk into without feeling intimidated.

of looking at the world, rigorous yet light, lifts the commonplace, so her

When interviewed by journalist Geraldine Brooks at the time, she

work, despite the absence of voyeurism, still comes with an erotic charge

made a passionate plea for the status of photography and its relevance

that is palpable yet mysterious, allusive. She gets in close to the bodies

in people’s understanding of art. She noted, ‘It’s the art form that most

she photographs and, through attention to the interactions between

people in the community are interested in’, adding, ‘it’s not photography

different textures, comes close to bringing a sense of touch into play.

as a commodity that we’re promoting. What we are promoting is

Some photographer’s images let you forgot that someone was there

awareness of a particular photographer’s creative work—sad, serious

taking the shot, whereas Godden is always present in her work, sharing,

insights into the sensibilities of a particular artist’.

rather than showing, intimate moments with her audience.

After travelling through Europe, via India, from 1970, Godden

Part of what Godden learnt at the Visual Studies Workshop in the 1970s—something she also intuitively grasped—was an understanding of

arrived in America in 1972, where she studied at the San Francisco

the cumulative power that images acquire in dialogue with one another.

Art Institute under Linda Connor and Judy Dater, taking courses in

This generous gift of photographs, enhances a fine holding of her

filmmaking, printmaking, drawing and women’s studies. She then

photographs acquired by the NGA throughout the 1980s and allows us

completed a Master of Fine Arts at the Visual Studies Workshop of the

to present nuanced displays of her work in the future.

State University of New York in Rochester in 1978, which was founded and run by Nathan Lyons—though Godden says that his wife, Joan, was a greater influence on her. The workshop offered graduate classes in the theory, history and practice of photography and was one of the most exciting and dynamic places to study the medium at the time. Students were encouraged to be adventurous, pursue cross-disciplinary interests, think critically and learn to be visually literate.

The 1970s also saw a huge shift in attitudes to photography, as it began to be collected institutionally and to be seen as an important player in the art world. There was a notable move away from Europe, particularly England, and from picture magazines being the major

All works untitled c 1973–76, gelatin silver prints.

National Gallery of Australia, Canberra, gift of Christine Godden, 2017. Donated through the Australian Government’s Cultural Gifts Program

ARTONVIEW 91 SPRING 2017

61

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