Art is not dead. Go beyond the sexy blockbuster to find the truth
Contemporary art needs more work like this: eloquent but not reducible to convenient and approved formulas.
In Lewis Carroll’s Through the Looking-Glass, and What Alice Found There (1871), Humpty Dumpty famously says, “in a rather scornful tone”, “When I use a word, it means just what I choose it to mean — neither more nor less.” This famous example of a logical fallacy, so often quoted by linguists and philosophers, seems to sum up the disingenuous conception of veracity shared by many across the whole political spectrum in what is sometimes called a post-truth age.
Such attitudes are most harmful in politics and breed in the swamps of social media, but they are also particularly conspicuous in contemporary art, as we have seen on several occasions recently. I mentioned in discussing the Biennale of Sydney several labels that made unfounded claims about the meaning of the works in question, and a couple of weeks ago I cited another ludicrous example accompanying an ill-judged new acquisition by the Art Gallery of NSW.
We could dismiss the countless wordy and meaningless labels we have all seen in contemporary exhibitions as merely the promotional blather of publicists seeking to demonstrate that the work conforms to the approved political orthodoxies. But the use of language to make flatly and visibly untrue assertions raises more than questions of mendacity; it calls into question fundamental principles of semantics and semiotics: how is meaning made, and is it simply whatever the White House or Gagosian Gallery or any other self-interested party claims it to be?
Art is particularly vulnerable to this kind of corruption of truth because it is made partly of coded or symbolic languages and partly of mimesis and imaginative reworking of experience: unlike forms of rational discourse, art conveys meaning by reshaping the world and presenting it to us in a new form. We apprehend this reshaped world with the same combination of senses, imagination and intellection that we use to perceive the real world. This is ultimately what is meant by the word aesthetic, which etymologically refers to perception through the senses.
arcel Duchamp played with the mismatch between intrinsic or aesthetic meaning and spurious commentary a century ago, in the elaborate claims he made for the sense of The Bride Stripped Bare (1915-23), but the art establishment was too obtuse to realise just how subversive he was being and took him at face value. Since then armies of teachers, students and arts administrators have followed in a conga line of the obtuse, repeating that art can be whatever the artist says it is. Duchamp had the last laugh by leaving behind Etant donnees when he died, an ambivalent but disturbing work for his admirers and critics alike to worry about unaided.
The consequence of all this is that the curators of contemporary art seem more interested in what they are told a work means than in what it intrinsically and manifestly means. In the case I mentioned a couple of weeks ago, the work plainly has no specific meaning — apart from the rhumb line or windrose patterns which generically recall early maps — but the curators apparently were willing to believe that it magically alluded to a comically long and incoherent list of socio-political issues.
And this reflects the assumption that art should be concerned with and make statements about such issues. But as many artists have repeated across the course of the past century, they make art because they are trying to articulate intuitions and insights that cannot be expressed in any other way, much less be reduced to moralistic and political slogans. Art is concerned with what is, not what should be; with truth, not with preaching.
Three prominent contemporary painters whose work is of an entirely different order have exhibitions in leading dealers’ galleries in Sydney and Melbourne, all of which, in this COVID age, can be viewed online. Euan Macleod’s was not open at the time of writing but will be by the time this column goes to print. Macleod combines the human figure and landscape in symbolic compositions that originated in a formative personal experience but have since evolved to embrace broader and more impersonal themes such as the ordeals of war or, in this case, the frozen rocky landscape of the Tasman Glacier in New Zealand.
The exhibition is titled Figure in a Dissolving Landscape and was based on time spent with the artist’s photographer friend Greg Weight on a camping trip at the glacier. Some of the figures in these paintings are imagined and metaphysical, such as one who walks on a tightrope over a chasm, but most are rapidly sketched memories of the actions and movements experienced during the journey through this harsh environment.
Figures also are the subject of a new artist’s book by Nicholas Harding, to be launched in a couple of weeks but already on view in his exhibition at Olsen Gallery. For years Harding, thanks to personal connections to the theatre world, has been allowed to sketch actors such as his friend Hugo Weaving in rehearsal, and now he has brought together a collection of them in a large and lavishly produced volume. As I observed a couple of years ago in reviewing Harding’s exhibition of portraits at the National Portrait Gallery, it is his ability to define the characteristic forms and inner life of sitters in drawing from life that underpins his painted portraits. In this book, we can admire his still more surprising gift for capturing the postures, actions and fleeting gestures of figures in movement in rapid, almost calligraphic sketches.
Although this exhibition is entirely devoted to landscape, animated only by birds, we can feel the same sense of significant gestural form in Harding’s drawing and painting of trees; it is in fact this quality that allows him to maintain some sort of order and design in the dense and tangled scenes that he is drawn to paint, which could collapse into shapelessness in the hands of a painter with less control of form and colour.
This is all the more so because Harding does not look at nature from the distance that would permit a classical composition, and rarely stands back far enough to distinguish between ground and sky. Most often he adopts a very close viewpoint, the motif entirely filling the frame. The smaller pictures, in square formats of two different sizes, are close views of branches, trees, birds and flowers, although the ambitious composition that dominates the main room of the exhibition has space, ground and a watercourse.
Of course none of these formal qualities is accidental, and in Harding’s case they express his sense of profound absorption in the landscape that he paints, and a joyous, almost ecstatic delight in the beauty and vitality of the natural world.
Rick Amor’s world is, of course, very different and though always grounded in sites and motifs closely observed, as was made clear in the outstanding exhibition at the Castlemaine Gallery in 2013, is in the end an imaginary creation; indeed Amor is, with Bill Henson, one of the very few Australian artists to have created a powerful imaginary world that has been developed and elaborated across many years in the course of his distinguished career.
Because of the current conditions, it has not been possible for me to visit Melbourne or to see this exhibition at Niagara Galleries in person, but the work can be viewed online and for many years Amor has published all of his exhibited works in small but well-produced exhibition catalogues.
Amor draws on the traditions of both classical and romantic painting as well as dystopian modernist themes to evoke a contemporary condition poised between alienation, loneliness and longing. Like Jeffrey Smart, he is drawn to modernist architecture, but unlike Smart he tends to paint ruined and abandoned structures, as we see here in The Terminal, lit on one side with bright sunlight while clouds and the shadow they cast on the left side of the composition introduce a note of menace.
He loves to represent urban spaces as uncomfortable, at once overbearing and disorienting, but these places also become allegories of our inner life, in a picture such as Trespass, where a single figure walks from a light courtyard into a dark industrial interior that is perhaps the storehouse of a museum, for a huge Egyptian statue stands in a shadowed niche on the left of the composition. Here, as in One-Way Street in Shadow, we can appreciate the nuance of meaning that deliberately can be added by the choice of a painting’s title.
Night in the Remote Suburbs epitomises the inhumane environment of the modern city, dominated by a vast concrete structure of uncertain purpose, the foreground occupied by a road, empty and dark at night, and the single detail of a semi-trailer that has its lights on but is apparently stationary.
Other pictures evoke the sense of nature: Pines by the Sea, with its classical composition but romantic rueckenfigur gazing at the bay, and Evening on the Ti-Tree Shore, a conscious variation on a theme by Caspar David Friedrich. In a couple of more enigmatic pictures, Performance and The Magus, the artist represents himself on the stage of an old theatre, conjuring up illusions before our eyes.
The exhibition also allows us to see something of Amor’s method, which involves the careful study of real sites and then their metamorphosis, through a process of drawing and studies, into something artificial and imaginative. Here we see a pencil study for Night in the Remote Suburbs, although it is a full compositional study rather than the original sketch of the motif that must have caught his eye.
Closer to the original view of the subject are two watercolours: the beautiful Boat Wreck Bass Strait, in which we can appreciate the mastery and delicacy, as well as the exacting accuracy, of the artist’s watercolour studies — which has been turned into a finished composition by the simple addition of a solitary walking figure. Sunshine, too, is the study of a real site, although the wooden cable drum in the foreground has undoubtedly been added — almost a homage to Smart — to complete the composition.
The exhibition also includes the annual self-portrait — Self-Portrait at 72 — that for some time Amor has included in each of his exhibitions, like a signature as well as a stage in a continuing process of self-reflection.
Contrary then to the impression that one may get from so many official contemporary art exhibitions, and from the morgues of public collections, painting is not quite dead after all. But for some reason the curators of the contemporary art business prefer ambitious promises, even when vacuous, to actual delivery. They seldom select artists such as this, whose work is eloquent but not reducible to convenient and approved formulas; in their world of empty verbiage, everything is plausible even if nothing is real.
Rick Amor, Niagara Gallery, Melbourne, until September 26; Nicholas Harding, Olsen Gallery, Sydney, until September 12; Euan Macleod King Street on Burton, Sydney, until September 26.
