Content ... Form ... Content ... Form ...

In the tradition of Mr Stratton's obsession with 'queasicam', Christopher Allen still seems focused on the form/content issue in artworks.

Whilst writing about Nicholas Harding:

... The whole scene is brilliantly evoked, but it is too literal an account of a real place at a given moment. It has not undergone that alchemical translation into the artifice of painting that makes a picture memorable as a work of the imagination... Buildings are already artificial things, finite and bounded in form, not unbound and infinitely suggestive like the things of nature... This is why buildings generally work best in paintings as part of a landscape, stable forms that anchor the indefinite and organic ones of nature.

Read the full article...

I do tend to have a love/hate relationship with Mr Allen's writing, especially his thoughts on the 'weakness' of photography.

Utopian Vision...

I was reading Alasdair McGregor's piece this morning in The Weekend Australian about the problems the Griffins faced with the design of Canberra.

I decided to have a look around to see if I could find a better copy of the rather beautiful image that's used on the cover of Grand Obsessions... and through that discovered the Ideal City website. This includes all of the shortlisted entries as interactive maps! Some of which prove equally interesting.

Also 'found' was the Griffin Society website which has great photographic material on it as well.

There is a second portrait that was shot the same day (!) by the same photographer which, when compared to the cover, is an interested study in how images can be used to manipulate experience.




Both originals can be found at NLA here and here.

Credit for both portraits: Dr Jorma Pohjanpalo, Helsinki, Finland

More Artspeak...

[Angelica Mesiti] told [The Australian] she was interested in "notions of worship and ecstasy", which is a bad start: a notion, a perennial favourite in artspeak, is a vague entity that is no longer the thing itself but has not achieved the clear and distinct nature of a concept. When an artist claims to be interested in notions, you know they haven't thought anything through properly. Ecstasy at a rock concert? Yes, that's all well, but do the object and context of the ecstatic state have no significance? Why not ecstasy at the Nuremberg rallies? - Christopher Allen, The Weekend Australian, Sept 26-27, 2009.

This relates to the winning artwork - 'The Rapture (silent anthem)'. The text is perhaps a bit harsh when you consider that most don't have the luxury of picking the ideal or appropriate word or phrase when interviewed.

When people write/speak they also tend to go to great effort to avoid repeating words so 'concept' is expanded to 'notion', 'thoughts', 'ideas' and a plethora of other words. Often these texts are genuinely discomforting to read as the words tend to get more and more obscure and the text becomes more pompous.

As others, I have a constant fight with the rather dry term 'narrative'. This is often dumbed down to 'storytelling' (which has it's own problems) and many filler words like 'inert', 'ambiguity', 'innate' and 'abstract' tend to creep in.

It is extraordinarily difficult for those not 'trained' in such things to write a text that is appealing to the disparate (that's another of these words) demographics of artspeak officianados and the 'masses'.

Consider Art Life's posts about 'based in' and 'is/and' from a while back.

Landscape Painting...

Christopher Allen writes in today's Weekend Australian...

The abstract order of composition is indeed so important in landscape that it can be considered the genre of painting that is closest to music... the real concern of the painter, however, is not any of [the elements in the painting itself] but the whole that they make up. It is composition, as in music, that brings everything together and animates it into life.

Then later...

All these pictures are based on a close study of, and familiarity with, nature. But the elements of nature are moved around, added or eliminated, to suit the needs of composition... [the impressionists disapproved of this] although even they took out unappealing or irrelevant features, added a shrub or a tree to balance the composition.

Later again... whilst speaking about glazing as a technique and how it fell out of favour.

... it is because [glazing] needs to be done after the opaque colours are more or less dry, and this is incompatible with the idea that the picture should be painted wholly or almost wholly out of doors, in front of the motif and in a continuous sitting.

... because many effects were lost with the abandonment of glazing, others had to be sought by raising the key of the opaque colours employed.

This brings me back to a post I wrote in January when Christopher was writing about Gursky. At the time he was discussing the illusion of factual truth with photography.

Photography has many limitations as an art and a few virtues. The chief of these is the guarantee of some kind of factual truth. When it is relinquished, it is astonishing how quickly the seriousness of the photographer's witness evaporates. If you are trying to tell the truth, you cannot afford any of these tricks. The work empties of authority and we are left with images as futile as the work of amateurs with Photoshop.

It also reminded me of a post I wrote on Frank Hurley.

Time-based work...

I never got around to writing this so playing catch up. Christopher Allen wrote in The Weekend Australia (June 6-7) about time-based outcomes and I thought it appropriate for recent debate.

The expression [time-based work] raises the question: What work does not involve time? Time is a factor even in paintings and prints, not only because it takes time to inspect and assimilate such works but because our experience of them includes a sense of the temporality of the artist's performance in their making...

This goes back to some earlier comments I made regarding The Perth School of Photography and Ric Spencer's thoughts on the temporal.

I get the feeling that photography does tend to inspire some Australian writers to bold statements. This from Juliana Engberg in Art & Australia (Vol. 46, No. 4):

Unlike a painting that comes into being over time, with nuances and flaws which have the effect of enlivening its subject, a photograph is a frozen moment. It is true (my emphasis) for one split second and yet entirely fictitious... the photograph becomes a cadaver of a person as if a mortician and laminator are in cahoots.

Then later whilst discussing a visit to the National Portrait Gallery in Canberra:

... even the worst paintings were more intriguing than the photographic portraits sprinkled here and there which have the effect of vacuum-sealing their subjects.

The might be true of images in that particular collection, but there is a sense that The Photograph is not the favourite nephew at the moment. In regards to the statement of nuances and flaws, this reminded me of some thoughts from a few years ago - The Referential in Artworks (July 28, 2007):

Due to the 'pace' of creation using more traditional media (painting, sculpture, etc) there is an 'inherent' selective process in regards to what is imaged. Does the painter render the imperfections in a wall or smooth it over to avoid distraction? Do they insert elements to tell their stories? Are portions of the image dealt with differently to highlight a (lack of) importance?

In photography and film (with the exception of digital and/or scene manipulation) there is always this underlying documentative aspect. Has the scene been 'cleaned' or is it 'as found'?

Obviously this relates more to art-subject rather than art-object. I would hope we are more sophisticated than saying that the painter's 'shaky' hand makes 'art' whereas a similarily flawed 'tool' (ie. a camera) only renders lesser objects.

Storytelling and the storytellers...

Yesterday we went and saw the matinee of Bangarra's 'True Stories' at HMT.

I became aware whilst watching the various dances that the communication of stories is very much dependent on people - with all their universal fallibilities - as well as art-objects that they might create.

Without these catalysts, the stories either die or are potentially twisted later by anthropological enquiry and the associated assumptions that come from those processes.

How the art-objects are 'phrased' twists emphasis either to a narrative based on factual representation or to one more focussed on emotional connection. Both extremes have failings and benefits with a 'centrist' approach producing often dull work.

We personally enjoyed (if that's the correct term here) the performance and it raised some interesting points for us creatively. The most significant for me was signs and the balance between 'information' and 'expression'.

Do you force feed the masses with easily understandable 'sound/visual bites' - by creating dull, simple work - or rather create and place the onus of knowledge on the audience?

In some regards, the lack of information at the performance hampered the works interpretation but at the same time the disconnection to 'this movement means x and this movement means y' meant that the universality of experience was communicated more effectively.

We 'understood' sorrow, love, grief and joy without needing to be told exactly - word for word - why and how the performers were experiencing them. It was easy to decode the messages through the very effective staging and the work didn't really 'need' 'subtitles' - again, for want of a better term.

As with other such visitations to narrative-based art-objects, I became aware of my personal lack of an overarching cultural narrative and - importantly - an audience for my art-objects. It comes back again to a sympathy for similar stories that are stagnant or lost... ultimately this disconnect is getting more and more disturbing to me... what/who am I making this for?

A final note from Christopher Allen (The Weekend Australian) in his lampooning of John Brack:

Brack's widow recalls the artist was frustrated that no one had any idea the image was meant to be deeply sinister, let alone that it has a more specific sense. It is implied that the viewers and even art academics who missed his point here and elsewhere were rather dense; but that will not do. If an artist's personal intentions are not embodied successfully in the work, this is his fault, not the viewer's.

Opposable thumbs...

Yet more gems in The Australian as Christopher Allen discusses the work of Rosalie Gascoigne at the NGV.

...the crux of the aesthetic experience lies in recognising the image simultaneously as the representation of something in the world and as an object made of pigments, or lines and washes of ink, or coloured pieces of stone and glass.

The aesthetic meaning ... lies in the ineffable tension and vibration between the patches and lines and strokes and the figure evoked; it consists in the way we see the material form become the subject, without ceasing to be itself.

To make something into something else is an act of understanding, as when reasoning shapes intuitions into a coherent structure of ideas and words.

These principles, fundamental to an understanding of Gascoigne's work, are epitomised in the early assemblage 'Grove' (1984) ... Could anything be, on the face of it, less like a grove of trees? ... It is from such distance and unlikeness that likeness surprisingly arises.

Then later...

It was this [Ikebana] training that sharpened her sense of the aesthetic qualities of things and power of assemblage. And Chinese and Japanese theories of painting are more familiar than our own with the idea that a brush mark can become a rock or a leaf while remaining a brush mark.

One of a Kind
Christopher Allen
The Weekend Australian
January 24-25, 2009.

I'm not sure what triggered it, although the article definitely helped, but I've fallen for the idea of exploring an approach with photography as a form of conceptual assemblage. This is not the same of the phenomena of the found but rather explores the idea of that which is imaged as brush as opposed to being an object or collection thereof.

There is an extra element when compared to the work of Gascoigne - the photographer would make the boxes, then destroy them and then reassemble them again - but nonetheless, the approach is as much about manipulating that which you have into what you want via the tools available.

The thoughts are a bit scattered at the moment - as you may have noticed! - but I will sit down and work out a better explanation of what I mean over the next week or so.

On the other hand...

Both Elisa and I really like Christopher Allen's writing for The Weekend Australia although these comments from the January 17-18 Edition left me in a bit of an 'off' mood.

Photography has many limitations as an art and a few virtues. The chief of these is the guarantee of some kind of factual truth. When it is relinquished, it is astonishing how quickly the seriousness of the photographer's witness evaporates. If you are trying to tell the truth, you cannot afford any of these tricks. The work empties of authority and we are left with images as futile as the work of amateurs with Photoshop.

I understand his broader comments on Gursky's occassional 'coldness' and the spectacle aspect of the work yet find that particular brushstroke disquietingly wide.

This especially so given the extensive theoretical discourse on objectivity, the lack of passive vision, 'truth' and context. A photograph has as little to do with truth as a painting, drawing or sculpture.

Or as Andrew Frost from Artlife put it...

Nah ... what we want is for the photographer’s work to be seen to be telling us something, and hopefully to do it with a degree of subtlety.

From a journalistic standpoint - which Gursky most certainly is not - do we then also return to the futile argument about how a story should be told... is an image of a slaughtered child a more effective and 'truthful' tool to illustrate a story or the apathy/boredom of soldiers on that same day?


Credit: Moises Saman for The New York Times.

Whose truth is then the 'right' truth? If something is bathed in beautiful light, slightly burred or skewed is that untruthful? What of context? Is it less truthful if the soldiers are in front of lush fields whilst the 'others' are bathed in dust?

Fleet Footed - Christopher Allen in The Australian

In his rather scathing review of the Yinka Shonibare show at MCA, Christopher Allen offers the following gems of wisdom...

The fundamental quality shared by all good art is the sense of something - meaning, perception, truth - emerging from a point beyond the light of everyday reason. It is this insight that is inseparable from the material form of the works, and that cannot be paraphrased or reduced to a more pedestrian form, that makes us want to remain with a piece, to commune with the understanding it embodies.

This is the trouble with art school. It turns a bright boy with a talent [for period frocks] into a self-conscious artist who is led to believe that these activities can be raised to a different level by associating them with fashionable theory.