The Field Revisited, Robert Hunter: National Gallery of Victoria
There is something almost nostalgic, even endearing, about this show and its meticulous recreation of the original display.
When the new National Gallery of Victoria building opened on St Kilda Road in 1968, it was inaugurated not with an exhibition reflecting the depth of the gallery’s collections of art of many centuries and many different cultures — unique in Australia — but with a contemporary show that, on the face of it, espoused a radical amnesia about the past and an indifference to the variety of human cultural expressions. The Field represented an extreme expression of the modernist disregard for memory and the belief that everything could be made anew with materials that bore no imprint of past meanings, no vestiges or accretions of earlier associations.
The modernist narrative of withdrawal from the imitation of visual appearance was elaborated from the late 19th to the mid-20th century. It was ostensibly justified by the invention of photography, and one can still hear people say that the mechanical recording of visual appearance made the production of handmade pictures obsolete. The argument was always naive, but also oddly implied that rendering an account of the phenomenal world in paint was somehow easy or straightforward, or even that literal copying was possible; in reality it was always far easier to paint like a Fauve than like the dullest of the late academicians.
The rise of abstraction, motivated by a rejection of 19th-century positivism and the insistence that there were more important spiritual dimensions to experience to be represented, was promoted less subtly as a liberation from the need to represent anything at all and a carte blanche for subjective expression.
But the first wave of abstraction ran out of steam between the wars and ended in vapid or decorative design.
Abstract painting was reborn in post-war America, and the new “action painting” led to New York becoming, for the first time, the capital of contemporary art. Everything about American abstraction seemed to speak of the new world of American culture, even though supporters such as Clement Greenberg were at pains to insist that abstract painting was the new expression of the high art tradition, diametrically opposed to the sludge of mass-produced kitsch.
As we have known for some time, cultural bodies funded by the CIA helped to disseminate the fashion for American abstraction around the world, including to Australia, because it was felt that this kind of painting epitomised the free-market, capitalist and democratic culture of America, and it was clearly the antithesis of the socialist realist style of the Soviet Union, in which the academic tradition had been coarsened to produce mass-consumption images of happy peasants and workers.
The modernist narrative, as now taken up by American critics — memorably satirised by Tom Wolfe in The Painted Word (1975) — insisted that the new style of painting was not only the next step in the story of modernism, but effectively the culmination and the end of art history.
The gradual purging of representation and subject matter, then the ever more reductive pursuit of flat pattern and impassive surface, found its terminus, if not its reductio ad absurdum, in the hard-edged abstract style that triumphed in mid-1960s America and then made its way a couple of years later to the antipodes.
And yet, as we feel unmistakably in this recreation of the original Field exhibition, history and memory caught up with those who had sought to evade it, and now the whole exhibition, the work, the style and the sensibility all feel not just like a phase in the history of modern art, but a quintessential expression of the 60s in the same way that 60s rock music, or the early Bond films, or the fashions of Carnaby Street were of their time.
There is indeed something almost nostalgic, unexpectedly even endearing, about the show and its meticulous recreation of the original display, including the silvered walls, which rather remind us of a Doctor Who set, and no longer speak of the affectless and impersonal modernism they were intended to convey. At the same time, this approach to the display, by blotting out the architecture of the gallery and setting all the works in a quasi-futurist environment, unintentionally reveals the way that modern art had come to exist in its own self-referential bubble, cut off from any anchoring in the world of experience and phenomena.
All that was to change almost immediately after the brief apotheosis of flat abstraction: what was meant to be the end of painting — in the sense of its apogee or culmination — became, apparently at least for a short time, its literal end. The art of painting was abruptly declared dead and bankrupt, and the new artists of the 70s turned to minimalism, conceptualism, performance art and other alternatives.
Many of the artists in The Field abandoned painting for other art forms or even stopped making art altogether, such as Peter Booth (born 1940), before he returned a decade later, antithetically reborn as an expressionist with a grim apocalyptic vision. Dale Hickey (born 1937) turned to conceptual art — his most famous work being 100 White Walls (1970) — before returning to painting as a still-life artist. Robert Rooney (1937-2017) too became a conceptual artist, with works such as Garments: 3 December 1972-19 March 1973 (1973), which consisted of 107 snaps of the shorts, T-shirts and underpants that he photographed each day, neatly folded on his bed, before putting them on over the course of a summer holiday period.
The American James Doolin (1932-2002), who lived in Australia for a couple of years in the mid-60s and was an influential figure among some of the younger local artists even though he had returned to America before the exhibition, continued to paint but turned away from abstraction towards hyper-realistic landscapes and views of Los Angeles.
Michael Johnson (born 1938) continued to paint but moved from flat abstraction to a new style of lyrical painterly abstraction. And of course Ron Robertson-Swann (born 1941) went on to become one of the most important figures in modern Australian sculpture.
Perhaps the most surprising thing about the recreated Field, however, is to discover that in spite of the inherently impersonal and expressionless nature of flat painting, these artists were already very different in their sensibilities and their approaches to artistic form. Robertson-Swann, for example, is among the more austere and purely impersonal in his use of extremely reductive geometric shapes leavened with small twists of the unexpected.
Some adopt more radically shaped canvases, including biomorphic swellings and almost amoebic forms; Tony McGillick (1941-92) assembles shaped canvases to create geometric puzzles, anticipating aspects of conceptualism. Rooney’s work is already infused with the spirit of pop. In some cases, the geometry is in the shape of the canvas, in others it is in the forms painted on it. And there are complete surprises, such as Vernon Treweeke (1939-2015), whose luxuriant and kaleidoscopic compositions are based on turning the forms of glamour nudes into reversible and repeatable patterns.
The naming of works that are ostensibly non-figurative is obviously something of a conundrum and, following the example of some of their American models, there is a tendency to the portentous.
Alun Leach-Jones (1937-2017) chooses the metaphysical title Noumenon, followed by Roman numerals and a subtitle (Indian summer); Col Jordan (born 1935) has Daedalus; Paul Partos (1943-2002) also chooses the classical in Vesta and Orphea; Emanuel Raft (1938-2016) has Monolith. Words rush in, with their freight of philosophical and poetic associations, filling the vacancy of meaning.
Ian Burn’s work, finally, stands out because it is so entirely different in aesthetic: he has a mirror overlaid with four sheets of glass so that the reflection becomes dimmed, as through an artificially produced effect of aerial perspective. Burn (1939-93) was a conceptual artist and his work has nothing in common with the aims of flat abstraction; if anything it deconstructs the aesthetic of the rest of the exhibition, fortuitously charging the metallic walls with its own meaning, and hinting that, when all reference has been abandoned, art turns into the mirror of the self.
One artist who continued undeterred in much the same vein for the rest of his life was Robert Hunter (1947-2014), whose career is surveyed in a retrospective also at the NGV and directly opposite The Field. Hunter’s work survived the collapse of flat abstraction that followed so soon after The Field because of its minimalist and quasi-conceptual nature, and managed to find appreciative collectors throughout the turbulent years of the 70s and 80s and the decade or two of postmodernism that followed that.
His work is based on geometric patterns painted in hues so reduced in saturation as to be barely visible and virtually impossible to reproduce; on a careless glance, some of his canvases could appear to be simply white. On closer inspection, and with time and patience, both hue and pattern begin to emerge and the effect can be very absorbing.
The paintings have no interest in attracting the gaze of the spectator and are quite happy to let the incurious wander by untroubled. But if you stop to look they become unexpectedly engaging, even difficult to turn away from.
You can in fact find yourself gazing at these minimal works until your eyes feel quite tired. You discover that there is an unexpected richness of chroma lying hidden beneath what look like layers of white overpainting; but to perceive it you do not so much drill into the picture with your gaze as let it glide passively over the surface. It is rather the way that our night vision, being based on the black and white rod receptors around the edges of the retina, works best when we look slightly away from the object we are trying to see, such as a constellation.
Similarly, we cannot see Hunter’s colours at very close quarters, when two patches can seem indistinguishable; but when we stand back a little and let the whole of each area convey its minimal chroma as a mass, and in contrast to the neighbouring one, we begin to perceive the unmistakable difference between the different hues. We become, in fact, so used to the most minimal level of chroma that the occasional picture with brighter colours can seem almost shocking.
As all this suggests, these are works to be looked at quietly and without distraction. They are not paintings to hang in a dining room or a hallway or a bedroom, where the level of distraction and the incompatible energies would make it impossible to see them and appreciate them properly.
Their real end is as a kind of aid to meditation, like a mandala. These are works that sacrifice a great deal of the vocation of the art of painting, but not just because of a misconceived theory about the inherent necessity of art-historical progression.
The Field Revisited; Robert Hunter
Both exhibitions showing at National Gallery of Victoria until August 26.
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