A matrix of meaning in new exhibition of Peter Tyndall work
Understanding the wordplay accompanying Peter Tyndall’s works in this retrospective is key to appreciating the artist’s philosophy.
The gallery label at the entrance to the Peter Tyndall show at Buxton Contemporary informs us that this is “the first major retrospective exhibition of one of Australia’s most influential artists” and goes on to speak of his “rigorous studio practice spanning 50 years”, which is perhaps the most positive way to present an oeuvre that has been consistent to the point of repetitiousness.
The claim for Tyndall’s influence, however, may come as something of a surprise to readers. He seemed to be everywhere in the 1980s and perhaps still in the early 1990s. It was almost impossible to visit any contemporary survey at the time without encountering one of his distinctively and uniformly titled works – a conceit of which neither he, nor the art establishment of the time, ever seemed to grow weary. Since then, however, he has been much less conspicuous.
Tyndall is perhaps lucky to get a retrospective these days. White middle-class males of a certain age belong to a category almost disqualified from serious consideration by a new establishment that fetishises “diversity” and “inclusion”. As we saw a couple of weeks ago, you can win a rich, if not actually respectable art prize by producing amateurish colourisations of family snaps as long as you are a woman who can claim some degree of Indigenous ancestry. The work has no aesthetic interest, but it is not the work that is being awarded, it is the woman, the ethnicity – and in this case, even her family.
In today’s world, Tyndall’s art is almost refreshing in its bland austerity. It’s narrow and in some respects smug, but at least the smugness is merely aesthetic. We are spared the plangent sentimentality and kitsch of gender and racial identification, the onanism of victimhood and the hypocritical writhings of post-colonial guilt. The postmodernists were too flippant to be interested in moral or political issues.
Tyndall’s most characteristic image, repeated in numerous variations, is of a family looking at a painting. They are dressed in the fashion of the late 1950s or early 1960s, the father in a neat suit and hat, the mother in a full dress, with a boy and two girls in corresponding children’s wear. The image looks like, and is no doubt drawn from, the sort of ideal family as represented at the time in women’s magazines, and is meant to epitomise the petit-bourgeois suburban people who are the backbone of the consumer society. They are presented as implicitly different from us: alienated, cogs in the system, not enlightened like the artist himself or his intended audience.
In the present exhibition they appear first on a small scale, in full colour, imitating the look of a commercial illustration, in a work from 1979. The most definitive form of the family is in a painting from 1989 (lent by the Geelong Art Gallery), in which the figures have been reduced to black outlines against a background composed of a reticulated grid of boxes in yellow paint. The painting they are looking at is itself a square with two lines above, ostensibly representing the cords by which it is hung (all the paintings are hung in the same way) but also evoking the lines that connect the boxes in the network behind. The image the family are gazing at consists of two connected boxes.
This work is accompanied by a label which the artist has used with only minor variations (and only in the form of additional parentheses) on every work he has produced since 1974 – almost five decades – so it needs to be read carefully as part of the meaning of the works themselves:
Title: detail
A Person Looks At A Work Of Art/
someone looks at something…
LOGOS/HA HA
Medium: A Person Looks At A Work Of Art/
someone looks at something…
CULTURAL CONSUMPTION PRODUCTION
First of all, the notation “detail” is the usual way of labelling the reproduction of part of an original work, and thus immediately tells us that we are not looking at a complete work; the motif of the connected boxes could be taken as suggesting that all pictures are part of an endlessly connected reticulation, recalling Derrida’s theories of meaning, in turn extrapolated from Saussure.
The form of the next two lines – with their shift from overcapitalisation to strict lower case – implies a reduction: the person is “someone” and the work of art is “something”. On the face of it, Tyndall seems to suggest that our relation to art – or more exactly ordinary people’s relation to art – is reified and alienated; they think they are looking at a “work of art”, without understanding the reality of their own experience.
In contrast more sophisticated people, like the artist himself and his implicit viewers, understand that the work is only an object, but at the same time enjoy the more refined second-degree pleasure of that very understanding. Other pieces develop this theme, like one image, whose Pop inspiration recalls Lichtenstein, in which a man takes off his glasses and seems to experience an explosion of insight.
The word “logos” is clearly one that becomes increasingly important to Tyndall, though what exactly he means by it is ambiguous. Literally, it is “word” in Greek, but depending on the context, it can mean argument, account, offer, or at a more abstract level, reason itself; Heraclitus’s cosmic Logos becomes the cosmic reason or intelligence of Stoic philosophy, and there is a similar usage at the beginning of St John’s Gospel where “Logos”, “the Word” is the divine spirit before it is made flesh with the incarnation of Christ. As for the “ha ha” that follows, one cannot but think of the tales of Zen priests laughing at orthodox Buddhism or even, like Huineng, tearing up the scriptures.
In later works, the word Logos is often represented elliptically by a large capital “L” occupying the left of the canvas and an “s” on the right. The quasi-abstract form of the black letters recalls the use of large letter shapes in the work of Colin McCahon, and like the New Zealand painter, Tyndall seems drawn to religious themes and imagery, including in particular Christian and also Buddhist traditions of spirituality.
One of the biggest pieces in the exhibition was made for the Venice Biennale and evokes the Instruments of the Passion – that is the iconography of the Cross, together with the other objects used either in the Crucifixion itself or the Flagellation and other trials that preceded it. This work uses plumblines and builders’ spirit levels to establish a grid of horizontals and verticals, and sets up two pairs of Latin words in opposition: “vanitas” – emptiness – with “veritas”; and “levitas” with “gravitas”.
A smaller piece is – fittingly – based on a detail from a painting of Tobias and the Angel attributed to the school of Andrea del Verrocchio, Leonardo da Vinci’s teacher. The story is from the Book of Tobit, one of the sections of the Old Testament added after its translation into Greek in the 3rd century BC and composed in Greek; it was later expunged from the Hebrew canon but retained by the Christians as part of the so-called Apocrypha, which are particularly rich as sources for artists; for Tyndall the special interest of the story is that the liver of the fish Tobias has caught with the angel Raphael’s help will heal his father’s blindness.
Tyndall is obviously deeply preoccupied with themes of looking and seeing, and although his most distinctive, if formulaic, work was probably done in the 1980s, there is a remarkable wall upstairs which consists of dozens of separate improvisations executed on particular days during the course of 2018.
Religious and spiritual themes abound, with endless play on the word “logos” but also notably an almost obsessive sequence of puns on the word “see” and as well as on “regard” used in a sense closer to its French equivalent, which means the gaze.
This eccentric and almost disturbing assemblage is more interesting and suggestive than the predictable variations on a theme of his earlier period, yet it also feels as though Tyndall is struggling to break out of a cage he has made for himself, as though he can’t bring himself to decide that he has outgrown the formulas of the 1970s. As already suggested, the “someone looks at something” tag is reductionist, and emphasises things that don’t seem to match the artist’s spiritual interests, namely the “self” of the viewer and the “objectivity” of the work.
This problem is aggravated by the “cultural consumption production” tag. This seems to reflect a sort of economistic view of art and culture that arose in the 1970s and 1980s, and which liked to think of the arts as an “industry” and of artists as “workers” or “producers”; the aim was ostensibly to induce government to take the arts more seriously as a legitimate and significant part of the economy, but – as in the application of similar economic and consumerist models to university education – this strategy could have unintended and perverse consequences.
In such an economic model, artists became “producers”, and audiences or art lovers became “consumers” – both terms that appear in Tyndall’s capitalised tag. But this is almost as fallacious as calling priests producers and their congregation consumers, or indeed thinking of a teacher as a producer and pupils as consumers. What is being consumed when we study mathematics? Or when we sit in meditation?
The model is wrong. It is true we can buy books and pictures, as well as tickets to concerts and plays, and we can do all that thoughtlessly, selfishly, in a spirit of conspicuous consumption, and so forth. But our intimate relation to art, literature and music, when we attend to them seriously, is not one of consumption. Far from “consuming” a poem when we read it, we give ourselves to it; it would be truer to say that we are consumed by the poem, that we forget or transcend our private self in inhabiting the poet’s words and bringing them to life again.
And so not only is the production and consumption paradigm fundamentally misleading, so is the idea that the relation of viewer to painting is one of ego-subject to aesthetic object. When we are truly communing with a painting, just as when we are truly reading or listening to music, the ego dissolves; it is not a case of “someone looks at something” any more. The distinction of subject and object is suspended. The work is not an object but a matrix of meaning into which our consciousness penetrates, a mould in which our experience takes shape and discovers itself anew; the subject is not a self or ego any longer. But all of these realisations seem to be impeded by a stubborn adherence to ossified formulas from half a century ago.
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