After said web searching, here’s De Cirkel, a work similar to Circle Dish Relief, and with a confidence and crispness about it that I recognised in De Cirkel and which made the latter work powerful and engaging despite its apparent simplicity.

Jan Schoonhoven (1914-94)
De Cirkel 1967
White-painted papier mâché on board, 120 cm. diameter.

From Sotheby’s catalogue for the sale of De Cirkel in 2001:

The year 1961 saw the formation of the Dutch NUL, or Zero, group by artists Jan Schoonhoven, Armando, Kees van Bohemen, Jan Henderikse and Henk Peeters, choosing their name in imitation of the German Zero Gruppe, created in 1957. These five artists had close links with Lucio Fontana and Yves Klein, proponents of Modern monochrome painting, who had similar goals to the NUL artists: a rejection of the extreme individualism of post-war Abstract Expressionism and a longing for impersonal, “objective” art. Like others in the group Jan Schoonhoven embraced a form of art that expressed no personal feeling; which he achieved by placing simple forms in rows under and across each other, and painting them white.

There’s a selection of Schoonhoven’s works in the MoMA collection, and more work on-line at Galerie m Bochum.

Rhythmical Grid Relief was a grided work of cardboard and papier mâché, in white acrylic. In each cell of this grid were two alternating planes, like little pitched roofs, and the overall effect was energised and beautifully – as the name suggests – rhythmical. And as I said, no photo allowed. I don’t get this policy!

Here are some photos I took when last there for the Unsworth exhibition (the first showing the huge doors to the Turbine hall, behind which were Unsworth’s installations). I look forward to visiting the Kentridge multimedia work I Am Not Me, The Horse Is Not Mine, which has recently opened there.

Addendum:

• BLDBLOG on Urban Islands.
• Urban Islands in July at the Island.
• More images at Flickr.

Often a work looked at first in reproduction doesn’t stand up when finally seen in the “flesh”, but this one certainly does for me.

Peter Booth
Painting 2008 (Man in Cardboard)
oil on canvas, 101 x 91cm

(Evidently there’s a homeless gentleman in Melbourne who gets around in cardboard, and the painting references this brave man.)

Here’s another work from the show which for me is a stand-out:

Peter Booth
Painting 2008 (Crouching Man)
oil on canvas, 51 x 71cm

Booth’s work touches on the existential condition of men (read both ways, as in “humanity” and in “men-the-gender”). We are confronted by figures stripped back to the essential. They are revealed to us in such a robust way that the very act of depiction counters the knowledge of the pointlessness of their (and our own) existence. Revealed in this way, their situation is elevated; reminding us of the inevitably, the majesty of our own existence, and in that we are not alone.

The poem (from 2003), that “fits” with this painting, is called vision:

a cambered green
fringed by dark trees

field of luminous shoots
delicate, massed

bright spring growth
lit from the soil

signal low and mute

a swathe of soft light radiating

Last year during a trip to Italy I visited the Santuario di San Francesco at Monteluco (on the hill-top near Spoleto) and had a strong experience once more of the primacy of the noumenal field, in the form of the courtyard of the Sanctuary. Here is that courtyard:

In this case the field was the extent of the courtyard – and the perception was, as Berger states it (see Part 2):

The field that you are standing before appears to have the same proportions as your own life.

This life had a simplicity about it – I had the strong impression of how unseen hands cherished this courtyard (no one was around); that it had been cared for for many years (the Sanctuary was established in the 13th century, although monks have inhabited the caves in this area since the 5th century) and that the greatest respect that could be, and was, paid it was regular sweeping with a simple broom.

On the Field, Part 3 of 4: Richard Long
On the Field, Part 2 of 4: John Berger
On the Field, Part 1 of 4: Robert Duncan

The three metre skeleton in the work Razed by Glass (”light, sound, movement”) is a macabre creature that’s repeatedly hoisted by a mechanism, whereupon it wacks the ground alarmingly with its cane and is then lowered – the cycle instigated by the ringing of a crystal flute in a little motorised contraption.

The setting of In the Shadow of Stars is a darkened room, in which we see Elizabeth’s bed, a black and white television and video footage of her. (Unsworth nursed her for a long period before she died.)

In the next room, Toyland Fever is a beautiful reflection on and memorial to Elizabeth’s prodigious abilities as a pianist (for which she’d been recognised as a child). The tiny, child-sized pianos seem to float and sing in the air in a light and fragile way.

And in the final installation room we encounter The last song from the four last songs for Elizabeth, a work using the suspended parts of a grand piano, similar to the one that Elizabeth had for much of her life.

The SMH has articles on this labour of love here and here. I found visiting these works, on a cold Sydney winter Sunday (having taken the ferry from Circular Quay) a moving experience. Unsworth is operating from the heart, and there are few artistic strategies involved.

John Berger reminds us in About looking of Marcuse’s statement that art is the “great refusal” (the protest against that which is), and this show had me pondering on this idea, and on Unsworth’s statement as a refusal to let his wife’s passing go unnoticed.

Seeing all this work online reminded me of how, when I was studying sculpture, I was influenced by this artist, particularly by his early works such as A Line Made By Walking. As Robert Macfarlane says in one of the above Guardian articles:

His best-known early piece is A Line Made by Walking. On a sunlit day in 1967, he caught a train south-west out of Waterloo. When the suburbs gave way to countryside, Long got off the train, and found a field whose grass was starred with daisies. He walked back and forth, until the flattened grass caught the light such that it was “visible as a line”. Then he photographed the line in black and white, and went home.

And here is that photograph:

Richard Long
A Line Made by Walking, 1967

I don’t imagine that Richard Long had in mind the noumenal field when he walked this work – it’s my overlay onto the work that it stands for me as a kind of “ur-work”, a definition of an attitude to art making and a reverence for the underlying ground that supports this attitude. And it has the overlay of a remembered work, the only trace of which is the artifact of the black and white photo above. It’s like the feeling I get when walking into a local gallery in Paddington, and seeing (maybe it’s behind the counter where the minders sit) a small study or drawing by the current artist, setting the theme for the show; and having the feeling that the paintings for sale on the walls are “blow-ups” of that single, energised study – that the sum of the energy in the entire gallery space exactly equals, and is determined by, the energy generated by the single dense study, that ur-work. A good metaphor, for me, of how the noumenal field, the original ur-work, explicates.

On the Field, Part 2 of 4: John Berger
On the Field, Part 1 of 4: Robert Duncan

Luminous is part of the Vivid festival that currently happening, and it also includes Lighting the Sails, in which the sails of the Opera House are bathed with Eno’s light effects. The Telegraph (UK) has a great album of photos. And here are two photos I took last night:


This Sydney Time Out article has an interesting interview with Eno on Luminous and his interests in general (including the new Bloom application for the iPhone):

The overarching aesthetic [for Luminous] is “things I like or want to see”.

Berger’s understanding of the noumenal nature of that field which is the template for all fields is clear in this memory from his childhood:

Into the silence, which was also at times a roar, of my thoughts and questions forever returning to myself to search there for an explanation for my life and its purpose, into this concentrated tiny hub of dense silent noise, came the cackle of a hen from a nearby garden, and at the moment of that cackle, its distinct sharp-edged existence beneath a blue sky with white clouds, induced in me an intense awareness of freedom. The noise of the hen, which I could not even see, was an event … in a field which then had been awaiting a first event in order to become itself realisable. I knew that in that field I could listen to all sounds, all music.

Here is Berger attempting to describe in language experiences that “exist at a level of perception and feeling that is probably pre-verbal” (as he later says). And he goes on to show how certain correlates of this experience can be found in nature – there are actual fields that (given they have the right physical characteristics, which he is generous enough to list for us) can invoke this remembrance of the “field that I have always known”. We are even supplied in this essay with a picture of such a field:

This accords with my own experience. And I add that for me personally, along with the shock of such re-discovery there is often the heaviness of grief for those extended periods of my life during which I’ve been without this awareness.

In the shock of re-recognition of the field there’s a merger of the temporal and the spatial. Berger speaks of this: “time and space conjoin”. He finishes the essay with this beautiful sentence:

The field that you are standing before appears to have the same proportions as your own life.

This is to say that there’s a deep recognition that we are in fact the extent of the field we observe, we are moment by moment arising from this extent, are, at an essential level, no different from this extent.

Perhaps it is Berger’s deep connection to the field that enabled him at age 80 to make the following statement (on ABC radio’s The Book Show, last year):

I live the present moment as though it perhaps is the last. Okay, at my age now that is not a surprising thing to say, but I felt like that and acted like that when I was 16 and when I was 30 and when I was 42. You name the year and I was living like that.

On the Field, Part 1 of 4: Robert Duncan

This post’s a personal reflection on Robert Duncan’s exquisite poem Often I Am Permitted to Return to a Meadow, which appeared in his 1960 book The Opening of the Field:

as if it were a scene made-up by the mind,
that is not mine, but is a made place,

that is mine, it is so near to the heart,
an eternal pasture folded in all thought
so that there is a hall therein

that is a made place, created by light
wherefrom the shadows that are forms fall.

Wherefrom fall all architectures I am
I say are likenesses of the First Beloved
whose flowers are flames lit to the Lady.

She it is Queen Under The Hill
whose hosts are a disturbance of words within words
that is a field folded.

It is only a dream of the grass blowing
east against the source of the sun
in an hour before the sun’s going down

whose secret we see in a children’s game
of ring a round of roses told.

Often I am permitted to return to a meadow
as if it were a given property of the mind
that certain bounds hold against chaos,

that is a place of first permission,
everlasting omen of what is.

The phrase “an eternal pasture folded in all thought” has me thinking of David Bohm’s implicate order, unfolding in time to form the explicate order of which we are usually only aware. And “eternal pasture” is a lovely poetic form for what I usually refer to as the noumenal field, “so near to the heart”.

“Wherefrom fall all architectures I am” has the sense of that place from which the constructions of selfhood occur, the developments of self-representations, those patternings with which we then subsequently live, mistakenly taking them to be our real selves. As A.H. Almaas says:

The experience of the self is actually determined by the self-representation. The phenomenology of the self’s experience presents itself through this representation, and hence, what the self perceives and experiences as itself, in its present experience, is greatly determined by it. The self-representation actually sculpts the forms that arise as the phenomenological particulars of the self’s experience of itself. (A.H. Almaas, The Point of Existence, p59)

“as if it were a given property of the mind / that certain bounds hold against chaos” speaks to me of that noumenal place – we can see it in Unica Zürn’s work and I mentioned it in my previous post – that place which for many of us is a creative centre – which holds the psyche against dissolution. Duncan puts it so beautifully, “a place of first permission.” And this is a “made place”, a place we make for ourselves by giving it (finally!) the importance it deserves.

This is merely a series of notes – the poem stays alive and available to me as a source of inspiration, always more rich than any attempt I might make to analyse.

(There’s a more literary reading of the poem at the Poetry Foundation.)

For all this difficult background, I find the work poetic, light and imaginative – speaking of a place I can only think of as having been solace and centre for her in what was obviously a challenging life. Despite her eventual suicide, I see in her works a triumph for the grounded, embodied sense of self that inhabits a centre, rather than being banished to the periphery – an alternative in which life (for all of us) is unmanageable.

More works from the exhibition are at The Drawing Centre.

I’m interested in glorifying something that we in the world would say doesn’t deserve being glorified. Something that’s forgotten, focused on as though it were some sort of sacred object. That’s the mystery of it all: what it is that will catch my attention. In this case it’s a homely little metal can of car polish.

It’s an appealing approach, and one that I want to bring more into my own picture making. Here’s Ruscha’s photo:

Whether Louden is an “outsider” or not is a matter of debate, but visiting the Louden show at Callan Park Gallery today I felt I was certainly experiencing an art of internal necessity (to use Herbert Read’s term). I also had a great time talking to Peter Fay, gallery minder for the day and source of interesting insights into Louden and his art.
Peter sees Louden’s figurative couples as disconnected, and there’s a strong sense of this for me as well. Some of these couples seem to engage in a visual crossover – as though forming an “X” mark against the relationship depicted; a mark against its disconnection, its dysfunctional nature? Pure conjecture on my part of course, but there seems no Buberian I-Thou here.
And from this 2000 Observer article on his work: “Louden calls them his ‘internal landscapes’ and says he has no idea where they come from or what they mean. ‘I think they’re odd,’ he says, ‘but not depressing. I’ve destroyed sackfuls of them in the past because they came out vicious or nasty.’”

And these possibly complex and enigmatic relationships and dispositions that Louden depicts reside in flowing, colourful landscapes, often with an attention to horizons and expressive skies, helping the works’ strong dream associations.

I’m left with the sense of psychic dances or dramas unfolding.

Then there’s his abstracts (or are they all abstracts?), in which the characters seem to have become atomised into bubbling fields of psychic energies and “selflets”. They’re complex works – see the detail below from one of these tortuous meanderings.
There’s lots more on this man and his art on the web – and debates as to whether someone’s still an outsider when he’s been (after working for 20 years) suddenly embraced by the establishment (as happened to Louden upon his 1985 exhibition at the Serpentine Gallery); and subsequently dropped by that same establishment. But Louden evidently works the same way he always has – making works in quite humble conditions, and leaving them untitled and undated, driven more by internal concerns than those of the market.

Clear Light, High Country – A Ten Day Drive in New Zealand’s South Island

I’m pleased to announce that my SoFoBoMo ‘09 book Clear Light, High Country is now on the SoFoBoMo site.

I’ve experienced a range of energies on this project – from the exuberance of picture taking, every day, in the beautiful South Island of New Zealand (during a period of unseasonal late-autumn cold and snow – the light dazzlingly beautiful); to the photo selection process (assisted by the cool and unrelenting eye of my lovely wife Karima); and to the hard slog of putting the PDF book together.

The latter part was where the big learning came for me – next time I hope to be using InDesign, which I don’t currently have (but it seems to be the tool of choice for the professionals). There were certainly deficiencies in the way I did it – multiple Open Office Writer documents with linked images, each exported to PDF, then the resulting documents stitched together with PDF Split and Merge. (It was Open Office Writer with the linked images that struggled.) That’s what the project is about I guess, the experience of completing it in a short time (in my case, 18 days) and doing something I haven’t done before (which was the book production.)

Now what was I blogging on before I started SoFoBoMo? Time to get back into the old rhythm. On Saturday I’ll check out Albert Louden at Callan Park Gallery, and hope to write on that next week. And there’s interesting stuff out there at the moment on Unica Zürn that I also want to investigate…

I started photographing on 02 May, so that gives me two weeks or so left. I will of course post when I’ve uploaded my completed book to SoFoBoMo ‘09.

Landing field in a state of expectation

As the NY Times article says, “Picasso, as usual, painted for his life”, and in this work there’s a level of disarray and possibly even panic at the realisation that this extraordinary life would not continue forever. (Picasso died in 1973, just 10 months after making the work.)

Pablo Picasso
Étreinte (The Embrace) 1972
Oil on canvas

Picasso also said (again, according to the NY Times article) “unless your picture goes wrong, it will be no good” and there’s a sense here of the man, as always, pushing the limits of what art is understood to be, prepared to take big risks.

There’s also a great NY Times slideshow on the exhibition (audio by Roberta Smith): A Staggering Final Act.

And a comment from the German Atlantic Times on Étreinte:

Blue and rose were the fundamental keys of his art. The playful “rose period” represented the blush of life, while the “blue period” was more melancholic, representing death. Their bodies entwine in the height of passion, their body parts a jumble. A blue wave of death is approaching the couple. The curtain falls. The game is over. The background is white nothingness. But at the same time this painting is the epitome of cubism’s modern perspective.

Take, for example, the juxtaposition of the African Hippopotamus (”large tusks with all teeth intact”)…

An African Hippopotamus, c. 1950
50cm X 41cm x 69cm

…the Over Modeled Head (”coconut fibre, clay, tree sap and spider web over human skull”)…

Over Modeled Head (detail)
Malekula, Vanuatu 20th C, 90cm x 16cm x 16cm

…and Peter Booth’s Head…

Peter Booth
Untitled 2008 (Head)
Oil on canvas, 36 x 51cm

Booth’s work connects so well with the other two – it’s got a primitive, animal, skull-bone feel to it, with a thickset neck that could also be a sturdy pillar directly to the earth; the void of the missing tooth counterpointing the intact set of the Hippopotamus (itself a highly complex assemblage of bone and teeth, the latter arrayed like foundation stones).

I’m left with a sense of how Booth taps into these primitive places of bone, skull, teeth – an early view, an existential view, of man, not so far from the neolithic.