imants tillers # michael riley # james rosenquist

Transcription

artonview
14 July – 16 October 2006
artonview
ISSUE
N o . 4 6
I S S U E N o . 4 6 w in t e r 2 0 0 6
w i n t e r
2 00 6
N A T I O N A L G A L L E R Y O F A U S TR A L I A
imants tillers • michael riley • James Rosenquist
SPECIAL MEMBERS’ VIEWING
9 – 30 August Wednesdays 6pm
This annual lecture series showcases the latest work
of renowned Australian architects.
9 August
Andrew Andersons from Peddle, Thorpe and Walker, Sydney
16 August
Luigi Rosselli, Sydney
23 August
Tim Jackson from Jackson Clements Burrows, Melbourne
30 August
Shaun Lockyer from Arkhefield, Brisbane
$60 Series; $50 members/RAIA/concession
$20 Single; $15 members/RAIA/concession
Presented in association with the ACT Chapter RAIA
Sponsored by BCA Solutions
Bookings essential James O Fairfax Theatre
National Gallery of Australia, Canberra
Mr Ron Radford AM, Director
National Gallery of Australia
requests the pleasure of your company at a Members Viewing of
Saturday 15 July 2006 6pm
The evening will commence with an introduction to the exhibitions
in the James O Fairfax Theatre by
Followed by a viewing of the exhibitions
Members /guests $40
Light refreshments
Limited tickets – bookings essential
RSVP 5 July 2006 (acceptances only)
Phone 02 6240 6528
Imants Tillers The hyperborean and the speluncar 1986 oilstick, oil and synthetic polymer paint on 130 canvasboards Cruthers collection, Perth
Michael Riley Untitled, from the series Cloud [feather] taken 2000 printed 2005 pigment prints, ultrachrome chromogenic inks on Ilford Gallery Pearl
photographic paper Purchased 2005 National Gallery of Australia, Canberra Reproduced courtesy of the Michael Riley Foundation and VISCOPY, Australia
Photo: John Gollings Richmond House, Jackson Clements Burrows
Dr Deborah Hart, Senior Curator, Australian Paintings and Sculpture
and
Brenda L Croft, Senior Curator, Aboriginal & Torres Strait Islander Art
contents
artonview
Publisher
nga.gov.au
Editor
Alistair McGhie
Designer
Sarah Robinson
4
Interview with Rupert Myer, Chairman of the National Gallery
of Australia Council
6
Imants Tillers: one world many visions
16 Michael Riley: sights unseen
Designed and produced
in Australia by the
Printed in Australia by
Pirion Printers, Canberra
issn
Director’s foreword
14 Imants Tillers discusses Terra incognita & Terra negata
Photography
Eleni Kypridis
Barry Le Lievre
Brenton McGeachie
Steve Nebauer
artonview
2
1323-4552
Published quarterly:
Issue no. 46, Winter 2006
© National Gallery of Australia
Print Post Approved
pp255003/00078
All rights reserved. Reproduction without
permission is strictly prohibited. The
opinions expressed in artonview are
not necessarily those of the editor or
publisher.
Submissions and correspondence
should be addressed to:
The editor, artonview
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artonview.editor@nga.gov.au
21 Michael Riley Kristina 1986
24 Rosenquist: Welcome to the water planet
32 Right here right now: Recent Aboriginal and Torres Strait
Islander acquisitions
38 New acquisitions
46 The Anton Bruehl Gift
50 Come rain or shine
52 Indian art: New acquisitions, directions and display
56 Conservation: The Mermaid’s Tale
58 Faces in view
60 Collection study room
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front cover: Michael Riley Darrell (detail) 1989 gelatin silver photograph National Gallery of Australia, Canberra
Reproduced courtesy of the Michael Riley Foundation and VISCOPY, Australia
back cover: Imants Tillers installing Terra incognita 2005 at the National Gallery of Australia, Canberra 2005
direc tor’s foreword
Ron Radford with
internationally renowned
American artist James Turrell
2
From my office window, Lake Burley Griffin is looking
more like Constable’s Stormy sea, Brighton 20 July 1828
which puts me in no doubt that three frosty yet clear-skied
months of winter lie ahead of us and that there are only
two weeks left to see Constable: Impressions of land, sea
and sky here in Canberra before it heads across the pond to
the Museum of New Zealand Te Papa Tongarewa in – dare I
say it – windy Wellington.
Often, once exhibitions are up and have been on display
for a while, connections between them become more
apparent than may have been anticipated at their inception
or planning. The concurrent displays over the past months
of Crescent Moon: Islamic art and civilisation in Southeast
Asia and Constable: Impressions of land, sea and sky
– although from historically and culturally disparate sources
– had indisputable connections. Constable showed not only
the work of the master of the English landscape tradition,
but also reminded us of many Australian landscapes and
his influence on so many Australian artists from the 19th
century to today, as demonstrated by the accompanying
exhibition Constable and Australia. In Crescent Moon we
witnessed the influence not of a single artist but of Islam in
Southeast Asia from the 14th through to the 19th century
and its effect on the development of the cultural history of
our region and our nearest neighbours. Both exhibitions
have been extremely popular, well exceeding targets. I’d like
to express my thanks to the Gallery’s Voluntary Guides for
their preparation and hard work and for being available to
show the many thousands of visitors through these highly
popular exhibitions over the past three months.
national gallery of australia
Following on from the success of Crescent Moon and
Constable, for the winter season at the Gallery we present
three significant single-artist shows: Imants Tillers: One
world many visions; Michael Riley: Sights unseen; and
the paper works by American artist James Rosenquist,
Welcome to the water planet. Again, it is felicitous to
present the work of Riley and Tillers concurrently as
these two Australian artists have made such significant
contributions to the landscape and dialogue of art in this
country. Michael Riley (1960–2004) through photography,
film and video has challenged our perceptions of Indigenous
Australia, and Imants Tillers in his continuing, numbered
canvasboard panel works investigates the themes of identity
and displacement, origins and originality, and language
and landscape. I commend these two highly interesting
exhibitions of contemporary Australian art to you.
On display in the Orde Poynton Gallery is the
monumental paper work series Welcome to the water
planet and two related works by James Rosenquist
produced with printer publisher Ken Tyler from September
1988 to December 1989. When you see this exhibition I’m
sure Rosenquist’s journey from billboard painter in the 50s
to key figure in America’s Pop Art movement in the 60s will
be apparent in the scale and subject of the works. Massive,
impressive and a further demonstration of the depth of the
National Gallery’s premier American print collection.
Our other current collection-based exhibition in the
Project Gallery, Right here right now, displays for the
first time more than 80 new acquisitions to the Gallery’s
Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Collection purchased
over the past two years. These largely contemporary works,
including canvas paintings, bark painting, fibre works,
prints, drawings, and sculpture covering themes ranging
from the ancestral and ancient to politics and contemporary
Australian society, fully demonstrate the great diversity and
vitality of Indigenous Australian art and culture.
The lower level Asian Galleries will be closed over the
winter months for re-slating and de-cladding in order to
restore this very large space to its original function as a
sculpture gallery featuring the iconic Brancusi Birds in Space.
By the end of August, we will have opened our new Indian
and South Asian Gallery on the entrance level. This special
Indian Gallery will be the first of its kind in Australia. By
the end of September we will also have opened a larger
Southeast Asian Gallery adjoining the Indian Gallery.
We are acquiring many major works for these new Asian
displays, which will be revealed at the opening. The new
credit lines
complex and integrated displays in these Asian Galleries on
the principal level of the Gallery will be a significant step
towards our stated aim of helping to place the art of our
region centre stage in the National Gallery of Australia.
Major new Australian acquisitions, both 19th and 20th
century, will also be revealed this winter. For instance, we
take great pleasure in presenting Sydney Long’s Flamingoes
c. 1906 as the Masterpieces for the Nation acquisition.
This is a strikingly decorative oil painting by the leading
proponent of the art nouveau movement in Australia at
the turn of the 19th century. Further information on both
Long’s work and the appeal is enclosed in this edition of
artonview. Masterpieces for the Nation is the National
Gallery of Australia Foundation’s annual appeal to raise
funds to acquire a major work that will become part of
our permanent display. Over the past two years this appeal
has been extraordinarily successful and has enabled the
Gallery to acquire two significant Australian paintings: WC
Piguenit’s Near Liverpool, New South Wales (purchased with
funds raised from the 2005 appeal) and William Robinson’s
Creation landscape – fountains of the earth (purchased
with funds raised from the 2004 appeal). Please consider
being a part of this exciting initiative to assist in building the
National Collection for the enjoyment of future generations.
I hope you had a chance to participate in the Gallery’s
autumn events such as the James Turrell lecture, the
Constable symposium, the Crescent Moon cultural day,
Sculpture Garden Sunday, or the innovative Forecast: art
and fashion collaboration between CIT fashion designers,
the Quantum Leap Youth Choreographic Ensemble, video
artists, Next Hair hairdressers and makeup artists from the
Canberra Makeup Academy. The winter calendar of events
provides more outstanding opportunities for you to engage
with artists, curators and educators, through special events
developed in conjunction with our exhibitions and around
the National Collection.
There is much that is new and exciting to see and hear
at the National Gallery of Australia this winter.
Donations
Belinda Barrett
Sheila Bignell
Peter Farrell AM
Andrew Gwinnett
Robyn Jenkins
Judith Roach
Rotary Belconnen
John Schaeffer AO
Gene Sherman
Kerry Stokes AO
Bruce and Daphne Topfer
Foundations
Gordon Darling Foundation
Wolfensohn Foundation
Gifts
Aranday Foundation
Josephine Bayliss
Anton Bruehl Jr
Ann Burge
Carolyn Cameron
Michael Chaney AO
Janet Dawson and Michael Boddy
Eleanor Hart
Bridget McDonnell Gallery
Lila McGrath
Ron Radford AM
William Robinson
Kenneth Tyler and Marabeth Tyler
Sanong Wattanaurangkul
Grants
Australia Council for the Arts
Australia-Malaysia Institute
Australia Indonesia Institute
Visions of Australia
Sponsors
Casella Wines
Hyatt Hotel
Ron Radford
Director
artonview
winter 2006
3
Interview with Rupert Myer, Chairman of the
National Gallery of Australia Council Alistair McGhie
In 2001 the government asked you to chair an
independent inquiry into the visual arts in Australia.
What was a concern that arose for you regarding the
role of the visual arts or artists in our society?
The Inquiry considered many issues about the circumstances
of artists and the institutional context in which they work.
The status of the artist in Australia is still a very relevant
consideration as visual artists don’t enjoy the same visibility
as other artists. By and large, it’s a solitary profession and
there is no equivalent to an audience’s applause at the
end of the creation of a piece of work. Interaction with
an audience has a very different character to it than the
interaction that performing artists have with their audience.
There are financial risks that have to be taken by
performing arts companies that relate to the magnitude
of the task and the need to bring collaborative efforts
together into performances. There is a very different funding
model for a visual artist’s practice and the financial risks
that are undertaken are on an individual level. Prior to the
Inquiry, many in the sector had sought an examination of
the circumstances in which artists were finding themselves
and, more broadly, the institutions around the country that
supported their practice.
The model of support for contemporary arts practice
through government funding, as undertaken by the three
levels of government in Australia, is widely accepted
internationally. That model is often under-recognised and we
don’t often see it portrayed as a necessary part of a creative
society. The arts are given limited media coverage and are
regularly presented as an elitist activity, with the term elitist
having implied derogatory connotations. Yet we have the
common experience here of rushing off at weekends to pay
a lot of money to watch elite sports men and women whose
elite status is celebrated. The difference is that elite sports
men and women now pull in six and seven figure salaries
whereas elite artists don’t.
So the media play a role in this?
Many people can imagine what it might be like to be a
sportsperson. I don’t think it’s easy for people to imagine
what it must be like to be an artist. While exposure to
and involvement in the arts by Australians at a young age
is perhaps more limited compared to sport, the media
contribute to this by not attempting to explore the ‘artistic
life’ with the same urgency of inquiry as they choose to
explore the ‘sporting life’. Many artists wouldn’t be prepared
to share with a wider audience what it is that they do and
how they do it, nor to share with audiences the lives that
they lead. So it’s not surprising in a way that we remain
unexposed to creative lives. There is a mystery associated
4
with creative processes and certainly creative individuals.
We need to count ourselves fortunate that we are able to
see the end product and enjoy that. We are more likely to
recognise an artist by their work than if they walked past us
in the street but I’m sure that there are many that would like
some more personal recognition than they get.
If artists did receive more exposure would we then be
able to relate better to the final product?
One observation that I’d make from a personal collector’s
perspective is that it certainly adds enormously to the
experience of collecting to know something about the
person and to have met and discussed the work with the
artist. Discourse is a really important part of collecting and
the opportunity for the artist, having produced the work, to
then participate in some discussion about what it is and the
ideas and to also be part of feedback and response actually
is really valuable for the audience and the arts community.
What’s your view on the best balance between popular
exhibitions aimed at generating attendance and more
speculative shows?
The Gallery has a responsibility to have a decent balance of
exhibitions, some of which are going to be more speculative
and less popular and others that are going to generate large
audiences that enjoy coming to galleries for those sorts of
exhibitions, and indeed look forward to them. On the more
speculative ones I think that is actually one of the assertive
roles that this institution can take. The Director’s recent
Vision Statement envisages the Gallery as an assertive,
relevant, national cultural institution that might pursue a
curatorial idea or a view about an individual or a group of
artists whose work may not be so well known. And, yes,
we should try and get sponsorship for that and, yes, we
should try to be financially responsible about putting them
on, but we should be able to balance an overall exhibition
program that allows us to do that and at the same time have
extremely popular shows. Interestingly some exhibitions that
you’d expect might not be popular become popular, and in
that sense it’s sometimes hard to know what drives audience
numbers. There are often surprises about what will draw
people to the Gallery.
How do you know the Gallery’s Council is doing a
good job?
One of the measures is a collaborative collegial working
environment – but not so collegial that if someone wants to
say something discordant that they feel uncomfortable in
doing so. Another is the way in which the Council manages
two very important relationships: one with the Director
who has a critical role to play in the success of the Gallery;
and the other with the Commonwealth Government.
The government appoints the Council so part of the role
is representing the institution back to the government
particularly in matters of recurrent funding, building
programs and other policy issues. We spend quite a lot of
time at the meetings reviewing the operational reports and
the broader strategy issues, the financial circumstances of
the institution, the process of the Acquisition Committee and
adding to the Gallery’s collection. We also work on reviewing
exhibition schedules, the role of development, sponsorship
and benefaction. Many of these have long term horizons and
outcomes may not be known for many years.
At the end of your time as Chairman what would you
like to have achieved?
I’d like to have the institution really celebrate its 25th
anniversary because it will have many achievements of
which it can be proud. It’s unusual to think that it’s not
yet 25 years old. It is the only Australian gallery of its type
created in the last century. It is worthy of celebration. I’d
like also to think that we’ll be completing or have opened
the new Indigenous Galleries with the new entrance and
have completed the reconfiguration of the gallery spaces
with the new presentation of Australian art. I’d also like to
think that any visitor to the Gallery as a matter of course will
visit the Sculpture Garden and that it becomes an integral
and integrated part of the experience. We are a national
institution derived from an Act of Parliament so we have
a responsibility to service the national capital well, but
the idea of a national gallery extends beyond the national
capital. It is both a place and an idea. The ‘place’ aspect is
obvious: it’s everything that happens here, it’s the building
and the collections, the programs and the staff. In fact, you
can’t make a comment on this institution without talking
about the outstanding staff. The ‘idea’ aspect is sometimes
less obvious. I’d really like to think that it will become a
more assertive national cultural institution where what
actually happens at the National Gallery really matters in
a broader cultural sense. In order to achieve this, it means
lending works from the collection, including the touring
of important parts of the permanent collection, like some
of the Old Masters. We recognise any such works will be
missed by those who live in Canberra, but what we’re doing
is creating an opportunity for those works to be seen in the
context of other collections. That is something that adds
enormously to the appreciation of those objects within the
broader context of all of the collections around the nation.
The Gallery has had a long association with a number
of very generous benefactors in the past and we should
be continuing to find ways to honour that benefaction
and create an environment where further acts of
benefaction will occur. One of the obvious areas is in the
continued development of the collection through strategic
acquisitions. The NGA’s own acquisition funds require
additional benefaction so that we can continue to acquire
the major works necessary as envisaged in the Director’s
recent Vision Statement. a
artonview
Director, Ron Radford and
Chairman, Rupert Myer
in front of a set of late
19th-century ornamented
doors before the official
opening of Crescent Moon:
Islamic art and civilisation in
Southeast Asia
winter 2006
5
exhibitions galleries
Imants Tillers: one world many visions
Imants Tillers and Jennifer
Slatyer installing Terra
incognita 2005
National Gallery of Australia,
Canberra 2005
photograph: Patrice Riboust
Diaspora 1992
oilstick, gouache and
synthetic polymer paint on
228 canvasboards
Museum of New Zealand
Te Papa Tongarewa
Izkliede 1994
292 canvasboards Gene and
Brian Sherman Collection,
Sydney Courtesy of Sherman
Galleries
Paradiso 1994
299 canvasboards
The Chartwell Collection,
Hamilton, New Zealand
Farewell to reason 1996
292 canvasboards
Canberra
6
Introduction: one and many
Imants Tillers is one of Australia’s most acclaimed
contemporary artists, who established a national and
international reputation in the early 1980s. This survey
exhibition will provide the opportunity to trace the high
points of Tillers’ artistic development over more than
two decades. The exhibition includes paintings shown in
the Venice Biennale in 1986 when Tillers was selected to
represent Australia along with other key works from the
1980s, through to the remarkable Diaspora series of the
1990s, to evocative works such as the Nature speaks series
1998–2006 and a major new work Terra incognita 2005.
The works have been carefully selected to convey
Tillers’ personal approach in his particular artistic
processes and his ongoing interest in issues of identity
and displacement. The presence and absence of self is at
the heart of Tillers’ work. It is bound up with concerns
about origins and originality that are implicit in his
quotation of images from reproductions of artworks and
other sources and the re-working of them. While issues
of authorship may be challenging, an Imants Tillers
work is easily recognisable. The personal aspects of his
approach reside in his distinctive canvasboard system
and in the specificity of his choices – be they visual,
intellectual or intuitive. The personal aspects appear
in correspondences he discovers between the sources
and his own experience; in unexpected juxtapositions
to form new realities; in the sensuous, layered surfaces
and subtleties of tone and luminous colour; in the
transformations and presence of the art.
Tillers has written that the life of an artist is
essentially a solitary one. Yet the world he inhabits in
the work itself is connected with a rich repository of
ideas and imagery. The idea of one and many, of the
unit and the multiple, of an interconnecting web-like
whole, relates to the remarkable system that Tillers
has developed for his art. Since 1981 this has involved
working on small amateur painters’ canvasboards that
come together in grid-like structures to form a work.
A single work can contain anywhere from three to 300
panels. This method has provided a way for Tillers to
work in relatively small studios and still create large
paintings, even though he has often not been able
to view an entire work until it is exhibited in a larger
gallery space. After coming up with the initial idea and
creating a working ‘map’ as a guide, the making of a
painting is quite intimate; the artist sitting at his studio
desk to work on individual panels which subsequently
get placed on the floor as one layer after another is left
to dry. The process of work evolving from table to floor
is performative, mirroring the subsequent installation of
the work on the wall as one panel is applied after the
next. After being shown on the wall (held on by Velcro
tabs), the canvasboards come apart again, stacked in
beacon-like formations that have a sculptural presence.
In some instances the stacks have become works in their
own right, like his recent installation Art is an action
2006 in the exhibition.
The hyperborean and the
speluncar 1986 oilstick,
oil and synthetic polymer
paint on 130 canvasboards
Cruthers collection, Perth
8
Conversations across time
Tillers’ painting The hyperborean and the speluncar 1986,
with its visual and poetic resonances of the sea, the wind
and the cave, was the perfect work to show at the Venice
Biennale. Hyperborean refers to Greek mythology and the
people who lived in a land beyond Boreas, the north wind;
speluncar refers to one who explores caves. The dominant
sources are de Chirico’s The mysterious animal 1975 and
a painting by the 19th-century British artist, Frederick
Leighton, Greek girls picking up pebbles by the sea 1871.
In his work Tillers establishes a meeting place for artists of
different time-frames and stylistic approaches who adopted
a similar approach to his own. In both instances these
artists borrowed from classical Greek sources and adapted
them to their own ends.
Tillers has in turn edited the Leighton image for his
own ends, extracting a single figure from the group of
women, while still locating her on a beach. In keeping with
the sensuality of the original, the woman is like a figure
on a classical Greek vase: poised in her tender gesture
of collecting, invested with a sense of drama in the folds
of the drapery that wrap around her body and billow
above her head. In the more direct quotation of the de
Chirico image, classical references to houses, temples and
acropolises are treated in the manner of the 16th-century
artist Giuseppe Arcimboldo inhabiting the horse’s head that
has become the mysterious, symbolic bearer of the past.
In the spectrum of Tillers’ work de Chirico has been a
continuing source of fascination. Since the 1970s he has
been drawn to de Chirico’s interest in the metaphysical
and apparently coincidental occurrences across time and
place. A quite personal connection with this artist is found
in Tillers’ work Inherited absolute 1992, based on de
Chirico’s The painter’s family 1926. The work incorporates
a reference to a drawing by his first-born daughter
Isidore as a child. In the re-making of the work Tillers retraced the formation of the letters of a child learning to
write – learning, tentatively, how each letter is shaped
– observing his offspring’s early interest in numbers and
repetition. Isidore Tillers recalls that as a child she often
spent time with her father in his studio, like her younger
sister Saskia later on, she often had a go at making her
own canvasboard works. In Tillers’ adaptation of de
Chirico’s intimate family group, the added lines across the
surface suggest the passing of time. There is also a shared
connection with the processes of making art (in references
to the painter’s materials) and with architecture – in the
figures that do not inhabit the buildings but are inhabited
by them. In Tillers’ correspondence with de Chirico there is
always a shared fascination with serendipity and with the
idea of the past being alive in the present.
The Diaspora works
Although born in Australia, Tillers’ experience growing
up as a child of Latvian refugees who migrated from a
Displaced Persons camp in Germany in 1949, left him
with a sense of fragmentation and an awareness of
psychic exile. The feeling of his own ‘in-betweenness’
– belonging partly to two cultures and not fully to either
– has informed his art and life. When he was growing up
in Sydney Tillers attended Latvian school on weekends
in addition to his normal schooling during the week. As
much as he may have felt some ambivalence as he moved
from his parental home into the wider world, at times
wanting to free himself from the shadows of a past he
could only imagine, as a child of refugees he had a sense
of responsibility to his parents’ memories.
Tillers described his Diaspora series of the 1990s
as introducing ‘a new paradigm’ in his work. The four
major paintings in the series collectively represent an epic
statement relating to diasporas – to the dislocation of
peoples from their original homelands (including within
their own lands due to colonisation) and the coming
together of disparate cultures that is so much part of
the stories and legacies of communities in the 20th and
21st centuries. Seen collectively the Diaspora works are,
to quote Pierre Restany, like a vast ‘epigraphic fresco’
enfolding many visions.1 Taking into account the broad
sweep of the series from the first painting Diaspora 1992,
through Izkliede 1994 (Latvian for diaspora), to Paradiso
1994 (an anagram for diaspora), to Farewell to reason
artonview
Inherited absolute 1992
synthetic polymer paint
on 115 canvasboards
Orange Regional Gallery,
Gift of the Friends of the
Orange Regional Gallery
winter 2006
9
1996, the most striking change in Tillers’ art appears in the
way that he includes many small paintings nesting within
each large work. Another distinctive element of these
paintings is that they include more text references than
previous works, locating language as a potent source of
identity: suppressed, fractured, regained and reworked as
poetry, political activism, performance art, ritual and lament.
Tillers’ monumental painting Diaspora 1992 came about
in part as a response to dramatic political events. After
growing up with the view that the fate of Latvians was to be
perpetually subsumed by a colonising culture or to go into
exile in Siberia, the newfound freedom of the Baltic States
that occurred with the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991
seemed to Tillers to be remarkable, a sudden turnaround.
The first small painting that he included in Diaspora was
a reference to The Madonna Oriflamma 1926 by Nicholas
Roerich, a Russian artist inspired by Tibetan mysticism,
theosophy and Russian icons. He was also the originator of
the Roerich Peace Pact, signed by President Roosevelt and
other world leaders in 1935, that sought the preservation of
cultural institutions around the world in times of war. The
flag held by the Madonna in the painting is The Banner of
Peace, the symbol of the Pact. In contrast, the trauma of
shared memory is alluded to in the section containing four
pale heads on long flexible necks probing space like radars,
10 national gallery of australia
inspired by Georg Baselitz’s Oberon 1963–64 and reinscribed with the word RIGA; the red and white reflecting
the colours of the Latvian flag. This segment refers in part
to the suppression of the Latvian language under Soviet
annexation and the loss of a public voice.
The title of the fourth work in the Diaspora series
Farewell to reason (p.7) 1996 comes from a book by
Paul Feyerabend. The anchoring power of the work is
the dignified presence of the Aboriginal man locating
the centre of the work in Australia and suggesting the
displacement of indigenous peoples. The work also
incorporates multiple voices and visions from other places
(New Zealand, France, Latvia, South America and Germany,
to mention a few). There are numerous symbols relating to
mortality and ritual across different cultures including the
cross in Colin McCahon’s The five wounds of Christ no.3
1977–78 and another symmetrically placed cross on the
vibrant green chasuble (a vestment worn at mass) originally
designed by Matisse for the chapel at Vence. The word
‘Nezinams’ refers to a tombstone for unknown Latvian
soldiers set amongst several other funerary images.
On the one hand patterns of rupture are present in
large and intimate signs of remembrance. On the other
hand the cycles of nature are metaphors for regeneration:
in allusions to rocks and clouds in McCahon, in the spiky
yellow flowering details on the Matisse vestment, in the
unexpected inclusion of four superimposed panels of leaf
imagery based on photocopies of actual leaves that Tillers
made and repainted, and in a cut-out shape of a flowering
iris that is one of the first references to the German
Romantic artist Philipp Otto Runge. In the epic picture of
Farewell to reason the Runge image is a modest inclusion.
Yet his interest in this artist who found new ways of reconceptualising landscape through nature symbolism would
flow in wave upon wave through the next phase of Tillers’
art: in works such as the Nature speaks series 1998–2006.
Nature speaks: when locality prevails
By 1998 the groundwork was set for a dynamic
interweaving of two aspects of Tillers’ approach to
painting: the web of interconnections between all things
and an increasing recognition of the significance of
place. The shift in subject matter towards locality was
inseparable from the move Tillers made with his family
to Cooma in late 1996 where he became inspired by the
varied local environment: the garden at their family home
Blairgowrie; the expansive terrain of the surrounding
Monaro region; and the proximity to the Snowy Mountains.
Correspondences with landscape make their presence felt
in a non-literal way – as evocations of nature through text
references including place names and excerpts of poetry
and sensuous layered visual elements.
Drawing upon a poetic analogy of symbolist poets and
artists, the title Nature speaks suggests that nature has its
own voice or language. In particular Tillers was referring
to the Latvian poet Ilze Kalnãre who wrote: ‘The rock
speaks, the mountain speaks, every ear of corn speaks,
every tree and field, in a language so intimate and familiar.’2
The Nature speaks series comprises over one hundred
sixteen-panel works that contain multiple variations as
well as certain constants. As Tillers noted: ‘At first glance
the series appears to proceed like an algorithm because of
the repetition of certain elements within each work – like
the word “horizon”; the Mallarméan mantra “A throw of
the dice will never abolish chance”; the Tau cross of Colin
McCahon’s “load-bearing structures”; and the ubiquitous
cherubim of Philipp Otto Runge from his unfinished
Gesamtkunstwerk “The Times of Day”.’3
In the Nature speaks series some works allude to Tillers’
ongoing connection with a German Romantic tradition
as in Nature speaks (Kosciusko) and Nature speaks: D.
Both include a figure that closely resembles Caspar David
Friedrich’s Wanderer above a misty sea c.1818. If Tillers
allows the cool romantic light of the Snowy Mountains
to envelop the dream-like atmosphere of Nature speaks
artonview
Diaspora 1992 oilstick,
gouache and synthetic
polymer paint on 228
canvasboards
Museum of New Zealand
Te Papa Tongarewa,
Wellington
winter 2006
11
Nature speaks: AU 2002
synthetic polymer paint,
gouache on 16 canvasboards,
Private collection, Melbourne
Nature speaks: D 2000
Private collection
Nature speaks: AT 2002
Canberra Museum and
Gallery
Nature speaks (Kosciusko)
1999 synthetic polymer
paint, gouache on 16
canvasboards,
Private collection, Melbourne
Imants Tillers and Michael
Jagamara Nelson
Nature speaks: AD 2002
Private collection, Brisbane
Nature speaks: AQ 2001
Australian National University,
Canberra
(Kosciusko), in Nature speaks: D he also reminds us that
painting is an illusion. The abstracted dot-screen over the
landscape suggests different ways of seeing and thinking
about art, evoking constellations piercing the night sky. In
other works in the series there is an almost Dada sense of
absurdity, as in Nature speaks: AU where the silhouette
of a man on a bicycle perched on a weather vane over
the horizon suggests the variability and strangeness of
existence as we try to navigate through the labyrinth of
memory and contemporary experience.
In a series that reflects upon the significance of
landscape Tillers felt that he could not overlook the power
of much contemporary Aboriginal art. While Nature
speaks: VI recalls the paintings of Emily Kam Ngwarray,
works such as Nature speaks: AD are the result of
collaborations with Michael Jagamara Nelson. In these
works space is seen from above. In contrast to repeated
references to the horizon, the alternative inscription
appears in a number of works: ‘There is no horizon’,
conveying an alternative way of conceptualising place.
In Nature speaks: AT, Tillers locates us in the landscape
through glowing yellow tones and through place names
such as The ‘Jenny’ Brothers, Cooroo, Kybeyan and on to
Myalla, Nimmitabel and Gaerloch in the region around
Tillers’ home. With the additional inscription of ‘out)back’
in this work we are reminded of a journey that he made
into the interior of Australia in 2000 (also recalled in Nature
speaks: BK 2004). The experience was an enlivening one
for him, coming at a time when his deepening feeling for
place was resonating in his art. As he wrote, ‘it was an
exhilarating and panoramic experience that changed my
perception of our vast and beautiful continent’.4
Throughout the Nature speaks series, the mantra from
Mallarmé’s late daring poem Un coup de dés, ‘A THROW
OF THE DICE WILL NEVER ABOLISH CHANCE’, inscribed in blue
around the edges of the works is a continual reminder
of the importance of chance correspondences that run
through all of his works. The exhibition Imants Tillers: one
world many visions reveals that it is possible to engage
with multiple correspondences and transformations on a
journey through different stages and aspects of the artist’s
works from 1984 to the present. It opens up intriguing
possibilities for our engagement with a distinctive and
intriguing approach to art-making in Tillers’ canvasboard
system: in stacks on the ground; in an intimate installation
of the boards on music stands titled Telepathic music
1994, in the fluctuating rhythms of the Nature speaks
series and in some of the largest and most accomplished
paintings undertaken in Australia. a
Telepathic music 1994
gouache
9 double-sided canvasboards
9 K brand music stands,
randomly grouped
Collection of the artist
Deborah Hart
Senior Curator, Australian Painting and Sculpture
notes
1 Pierre Restany in Diaspora in context: connections in a fragmented
world, Pori Art Museum, Finland, 1995, p. 73
2 Imants Tillers, ‘When locality prevails’, Heat 8, new series, ed. Ivor
Indyk, Giramondo Publishing Company, Artarmon NSW, p. 115
3 Imants Tillers, ‘When locality prevails’, Heat 8, new series, p. 114
4 Imants Tillers quoted in Ashley Crawford, ‘Centre grounds Tillers’,
The Age, sighted in the following website on 5 December 2005:
www.theage.com.au/articles/2003/12/05
artonview
winter 2006
13
Imants Tillers discusses Terra incognita & Terra negata
Terra incognita 2005
and gouache on 288
canvasboards
As Heiner Bastian has pointed out, Mallarmé wanted
to write poetry similar in concept to the composition of
a painting: ‘Painting – not the thing, but the effect it
creates. Verse should not be composed of words, but
of intentions, and should destroy all words for the sake
of sensation.’ Thus the meaning of a poem can only be
evoked by an inner reflection of the words themselves.
In my own works, particularly over the last decade,
words, phrases and sentences (some of which come from
Mallarmé) float not on the white space of a page but
in and amongst the colours, the forms and the imagery
of a painting. As in Mallarmé, they are not there to be
decoded, to arrive at a precise meaning predetermined
by the author or the artist but rather to generate allusions
and sensations in the reader/viewer.
During the 1980s I was very fortunate to be making
frequent visits to New York and on several notable
occasions I found myself standing in front of one of
Jasper Johns’ masterpieces: Map 1961 in the collection
of the Museum of Modern Art. What appealed to me
particularly was how the structure of the boundaries and
names of the 52 states of the United States (together
sometimes with adjoining bits of Canada and Mexico)
allowed Johns a new kind of freedom with his gestural
brushstrokes. Here, by virtue of some novel constraints,
the Abstract Expressionism of de Kooning was given
a new twist, a new life and a new relevance. It is
perhaps not surprising, given my postmodern bent at
the time, that this work gave me the idea of doing my
own series of Johns’ ‘maps’ (both the paintings and
the prints), a repainting and reconfiguring of his work
from an Antipodean viewpoint. I only completed two
works: Prophecy 1989 and Mystic America 1989 which
I exhibited in my fourth and last solo exhibition at the
Bess Cutler Gallery in New York in 1989. (Bess was
disappointed that neither work contained the name of
her birthplace: Saskatchewan.)
Subsequently I experimented with the map of
Australia but found its contour too distinctive and its
subdivisions too few and too plain. It was only with the
discovery of David Horton’s Map of Aboriginal Australia at
the beginning of the new millennium that I found a way
to go forward on this front – for here was not only an
alternative map to the familiar, boring one I had grown up
with at school but the 460 subdivisions demonstrated the
rich diversity of the language/tribal/nation groups of the
Indigenous people of Australia – a fact which had been
largely invisible or unknown to most white Australians
and the rest of the world. Here also, was the palpable
lie to the misguided colonial idea of terra nullius – the
so-called empty, unoccupied continent of 1788. While
the regional divisions on Horton’s map were panoramic,
diverse and fascinating (the Northwest, Southwest,
Desert, Spencer, Kimberley, North Arnhem, Fitzmaurice,
Gulf, West Cape, Torres Strait, East Cape, Rainforest,
Northeast, Eyre, Riverine, Southeast and Tasmania to
name them all), it was the individual names themselves
that most attracted me. I recognised words like Ngarigo,
Arrernte, Luritja, Badjala, Wiradjuri, Adnyamathanha as
a kind of eloquent readymade poetry that I would like to
include in my future paintings.
After about three years’ work on this project, I have
completed two major paintings, both composed of 288
canvasboard panels and measuring 120” x 336” each:
Terra incognita in March 2005 and Terra negata in
November 2005. Terra incognita is of a golden hue and
described by my friend, the semiotician Anne Hénault,
as being ‘syntactical’ while Terra negata is of a red
bronze hue and described as being ‘paradigmatic’. In
Terra incognita I have isolated just the Aboriginal names
themselves (without their defining boundaries) from
Horton’s map and distributed them spatially across the
painting so that they correspond approximately to their
actual geographical locations within the continent of
Australia. In Terra negata the same names are arranged
in the form of an alphabetical list from A to Y, beginning
with the name Alyawarre and ending with Yiman. The
background image in both works – the tangled network
or web of lines derives from a famous painting by the
Aboriginal artist Emily Kam Ngwarray who appeared on
the art scene like a cloudburst in the early 1990s. Her Big
yam dreaming 1995 in the National Gallery of Victoria in
Melbourne is a work to rival Blue Poles or indeed the best
of American Abstract Expressionism be it Pollock or de
Kooning. Furthermore, her painting is a kind of psychic
and yet geographical mapping of the land and in this has
a strange and unexpected affinity with the Jasper Johns
Map 1961 that once had me spellbound in New York.
Thus both Terra incognita (shown for the first time
in this exhibition) and Terra negata (selected for the
Sydney Biennale in 2006) are for me a kind of homage to
Indigenous Australia, a lament for the tragedies of all the
lost tribes, languages and cultures of Australia but also,
simultaneously, a kind of honour roll for the spectacular
resurgence of their culture. This has been revealed to the
wider world largely through art and especially through the
medium of painting – an amazing phenomenon to which
all Australians have borne witness over the last 30 years. a
Terra negata 2005 (details)
and gouache on 288
canvasboards
Emily Kam Ngwarray
Big yam dreaming 1995
on canvas National Gallery
of Victoria, Melbourne
Presented through the Art
Foundation of Victoria by
Janet and Donald Holt and
family, Governors, 1995
Imants Tillers
artonview
winter 2006
15
exhibitions galleries
Michael Riley: sights unseen
Wiradjuri/Kamilaroi artist Michael Riley (1960–
2004) was one of the most important Indigenous visual
artists of the past two decades. His film and video work
challenged our perceptions of Indigenous experience,
particularly the experience of disenfranchised
communities in rural and remote eastern Australia,
which he brought to the forefront of international
contemporary art. Riley’s work gained increasing critical
acclaim in the early 21st century, highlighted by his
selection for the 2003 Istanbul Biennial. Riley has been
selected as one of eight artists who will be represented
in the significant Australian Indigenous Art Commission
at the new Musée du quai Branly, due to open in Paris
in June 2006.
Riley’s work draws on both European and North
American traditions – as well as his Indigenous heritage
in Australia. He studied film-making and photography
and was concerned by the contradictions imposed by
European beliefs on the Indigenous people in Australia.
His early photographs are imbued with an aesthetic
beauty, and his subjects possess a sense of dignity and
grace. The black-and-white portraits, with their sensitive
styling and ambient lighting, are the very opposite of the
gritty, socio-political documentary style that emanated
from the Black Power and Indigenous self-determination
movements of the 1970s and ‘80s, often taken by nonIndigenous photographers.
These sensitive informed portraits of families and
communities are the antithesis of the bleak photojournalist
studies of contemporary Aboriginal life in towns and
cities favoured by the media. There is an obvious warmth
between subject and photographer. It is evident that the
photographer knew his subjects well and shared their
experiences. Throughout all Riley’s work is a sense of
exploration, of using the media of film and photography
to represent the diverse aspects of contemporary
Aboriginal life accurately and to get away from the
stereotype of the drunk in the streets or marching in
protests, and not being involved in everyday life.
artonview
All Michael Riley images
reproduced courtesy of the
Michael Riley Foundation and
VISCOPY, Australia
Untitled from the series cloud
[cow] 2000 (detail) printed
2005 chromogenic pigment
photograph National Gallery
of Australia, Canberra
Purchased 2005
Untitled from the series
flyblown [galah] 1998 Epsom
ultrachrome ink on Ilford
Gallerie Gloss photographic
paper
Canberra Purchased 2005
flyblown [gold cross] 1998
Epsom ultrachrome ink
on Ilford Gallerie Gloss
photographic paper
winter 2006
17
Michael Riley was born in Dubbo, western New South
Wales, and spent his early childhood on Talbragar
Aboriginal Reserve outside Dubbo, moving to Sydney
in 1976. He was represented in the first Indigenous
photographic exhibition, the NADOC ‘86 Exhibition
of Aboriginal and Islander Photographers, held at the
Aboriginal Artists Gallery in Sydney in September 1986.
In 1987, with nine other Sydney-based Indigenous artists,
he founded Boomalli Aboriginal Artists Co-operative,
a seminal force in the contemporary Indigenous visual
arts movement throughout the 1990s. A number of his
films and photo-media work won major national and
international awards. Riley’s work is also represented in
various major public and private collections throughout
Australia, and his early black-and-white photography is
highly sought after by collectors.
His first conceptual body of work was the languidly
beautiful series of 15 gelatin silver images comprising
Sacrifice 1993. It is in this series that the symbol of
the cross – that most potent of Christian icons – first
appeared, looming large against a turbulent sky. Riley
returned to the subject of Christianity in later work, such
as the series flyblown, 1998 and the video Empire, 1997.
Riley’s images reflect what he has described as the
‘sacrifices Aboriginal people made to be Christian’.
They resonate with loss – experienced not only by the
individual, but also by entire Indigenous communities
– loss of culture and land in an enforced or sometimes
embraced exchange for Christianity. Biblical elements
abound in Sacrifice: the cross laid on the chest and
standing out sharp against the sky in an unseen cemetery;
the shimmering skin of the fish is in stark contrast to the
parched earth; the oozing liquid in the dark palms of the
black Christ-like figure evoking his struggle on the cross;
and the granules of sugar, flour and coffee echoing the
rations meted out to Aboriginal people on missions and
hinting at the struggles present-day communities face with
the onslaught of drugs.
In early 1998 Riley was diagnosed with renal failure
and this debilitating illness impacted on his professional
and personal life. Riley’s last and most significant body
of work, cloud, 2001, shifted from terra firma to other
worldly locations, including the paranormal. A dream-like
quality is evoked in the seductive, digitally manipulated
images of the Magritte-like bovine seraph from the
Mission as it floats in mid-air against a background of
clouds; the flight of the boomerang (or barrgan/balgarrn
in Wiradjuri), which is echoed in the wings of the angel, its
back turned to the viewer, face averted; and again in the
splayed wings of the blackbird, the eaglehawk or crow,
and in the crucifix-like span of the native Galang-galang,
or locusts’ wings. There is irony and wit in this image.
Michael Riley: sights unseen reveals the prolific
talents of a quiet observer. Riley’s video, film and
photomedia works continue to have a profound effect
on contemporary representation and comprehension
of Indigenous Australia. The exhibition draws together
a comprehensive body of work, chronicling a period of
intense cultural development and achievement. a
Sacrifice [single fish,
cracked earth] 1993
gelatin silver photograph
Canberra Purchased with
the assistance of the KODAK
(Australasia) PTY LTD Fund
1993
cloud [angel with full
wings], taken 2000, printed
2005 pigmented prints,
ultrachrome chromogenic
inks on Ilford Gallery Pearl
photographic paper
Brenda L Croft
Senior Curator, Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Art
artonview
winter 2006
19
Michael Riley Darrell 1989
Canberra
Michael Riley Kristina 1986
In September 1986 Michael Riley’s moody Hollywoodstyle glamour portrait of Kristina (Nehm), a Sydneybased Black Australian woman, was used on the
invitation card for the opening of the NADOC ‘86
Exhibition of Aboriginal and Islander Photographers at
the Aboriginal Artists Gallery in Clarence Street, Sydney.
The exhibition was part of NADOC ’86, the annual
National Aboriginal Day of Commemoration programs –
now known as NAIDOC Week (National Aboriginal and
Islander Day Observance Committee). The 1986 NADOC
photographic exhibition included some 60 works by
Riley and nine other Indigenous photographers: Mervyn
Bishop, Brenda L. Croft, Tony Davis, Ellen José, Darren
Kemp, Tracey Moffatt, Chris Robinson, Terry Shewring
and Ros Sultan. The style and form varied from artist
to artist across portraiture, landscape, protest marches
and press photographs, including images by Bishop, the
eldest of the group and then the only long-established
professional who had made a famous 1975 Aboriginal
land rights recognition image with then Prime Minister
Gough Whitlam pouring soil in to the hands of Gurindji
traditional owner Vincent Lingiari, at Daguragu in the
Northern Territory. The prints were mostly black and
white and the content addressed a wide range of issues
and notions of Aboriginality. Riley and Tracey Moffatt
presented staged portraits that turned upside down
the stereotypes that inhibit the lives and futures of
Indigenous people. For them identity involved issues of
dress and undress and reduction would be dependent
on inserting the unfamiliar dark face and body in the
familiar white scenario. Both Moffatt and Riley worked
outside what they saw as constraints of ‘straight’
photography preferring to stage their images and evoke
earlier types of stereotyped photographic images of
Aboriginal people. Both would also later work in film.
Photographs taken at the opening by Sydney
photographer William Yang show there were indeed
plenty of beautiful and chic Black women and men
present. It was in fact an historic event; the first
exhibition ever held of contemporary art exclusively by
Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander photographers. It
was an art opening like any other but that note of style
artonview
Kristina 1986
printed 2001
Image exhibited at the
NADOC ‘86 Exhibition of
Aboriginal and Islander
Photographers, Aboriginal
Artists Gallery, Sydney 1986
winter 2006
21
and confidence in that inviting image set the tone of the
show and the future role of Indigenous photographers
in Australian and international art. Riley, Moffatt, Bishop,
Croft and José in particular developed high profile
national and international careers over the next decade.
The NADOC ’86 show was preceded by Koori Art
’84, the pioneering show of Indigenous urban-based
artists which had included several photographers
including Riley and Shewring.
Of the photographers in the 1986 Aboriginal Artists
Gallery show the photographer and nascent film-maker
Tracey Moffatt, attracted the most media attention. She
showed a complex but coolly classic black and white
portraits of dancers from the Islander Dance company
called the Some Lads series and a now iconic colour
portrait of dancer/actor David Gulpilil sprawled on a
car bonnet at Bondi Beach with tinnie in hand, ghetto
blaster at his side and traditional white painted body
markings. Regarding this image the artist made a rare
categorical statement to the media: ‘Why shouldn’t
Aboriginal people go to the beach like anyone else’.
The point was lost on some. Moffatt was to receive quite
a bit of flak for allegedly representing an Aboriginal
person as a drinker of alcohol in a public setting.
One of Riley’s first major works was prominent in
the NADOC ’86 exhibition. This was the dark-toned
head and shoulders portrait of young woman wearing
a luminous white shell or bone necklace which was
marked by an elegiac beauty and other-worldliness
which would become the artist’s signature. It recalled,
and at the same time overwrote, the well-known 19thcentury photographs of Tasmanian Aboriginal woman
Truganinni wearing the maireener shell necklace unique
to the Islander’s craft. After Truganinni’s death her shell
necklace and bracelet were acquired by the Royal Exeter
Museum in England and repatriated to Hobart in 1997,
along with another maireener shell necklace held in
the South Australian Museum. Riley would have been
aware of the issues of violation of Trugannini’s body and
repatriation of her remains from museums. The image
also recalled a 19th-century image by German-born
photographer JW Lindt of a beautiful Grafton Aboriginal
woman wearing a white bone necklace which was
widely reproduced. Lindt made his name and fortune
in the 1870s with sales of staged tableaux photographs
taken in his Grafton studio of local Aboriginal people in
‘authentic’ ethnographic settings.
Riley’s images of Kristina (with and without
sunglasses) in the 1986 exhibition were selected from
a number taken throughout the mid to late 1980s. The
exhibition notice image shows Kristina in a languid
pose leaning on her crossed arms. It seems ‘retro’,
recalling 1930s images of Black American Blues singers
hanging over the piano player. The sunglasses she wears
accentuate the hung-over, I-cant-stand-the-light look of
that genre. Anthony (Ace) Bourke, then Director of the
Aboriginal Artists Gallery, and co-curator of the show
with Moffatt, recalls the picture ‘was very political, black
girls weren’t meant to be seriously chic’. Looking again
at the image, we can’t see her eyes and despite her
small frown imparting a note of anxiety, Kristina oozes
confidence and spirit, no victim here, she flaunts her
sunglasses as a fashionable, not functional artefact. Yet
no Australian fashion magazine then would have hired
a Black model despite the profile of Black singers and
models overseas.
The NADOC ’86 show marked the beginning of
a public profile within the art world for contemporary
Indigenous photographers. The National Gallery acquired
a 2001 print of Kristina 1986 and another portrait
from slightly later, Darrell 1989 in 2005, the latter is
very enigmatic with the young man’s soft-lit face, eyes
lowered and closed, in a Zen-like meditation. At this
time Riley had become a professional artist, he had
taken classes at the Tin Sheds in photography and was
working as Assistant to teacher Bruce Hart at Sydney
College of the Arts. In the 1993 Riley would make his
Sacrifice series of overtly symbolic tableaux ramping up
the spiritual and multilayered readings of his work.
An earlier generation of Australian non-Indigenous
photographers in the seventies had imagined themselves
taking up a ‘new’ medium. For this first generation
of highly directed Indigenous artist-photographers
to begin meant inevitably that first there would be
some backtracking. The medium had a history as an
accomplice to injustice which needed rewriting. Other
Indigenous photographers shows followed in the next
five years aided by the establishment of other dedicated
venues such as Boomalli Aboriginal Artists Co-operative
in 1987. New Indigenous photo-based artists and
curators appeared. Issues of dress and undress, which
are central to how the native is seen (and not seen),
remained topical for many. a
Gael Newton
Senior Curator, Australian and International Photography
Kristina (no glasses) 1984
Vintage print exhibited Koori
Art ‘84, Artspace, Sydney
orde poynton galler y
Rosenquist: Welcome to the water planet
10 June – 12 September 2006
‘All I have to be is brilliant’
James Rosenquist
represented by VAGA and
VISCOPY, Australia
Sky hole 1989
33 colour pressed paper pulp
with lithographic collage
on white, handmade, handcoloured, TGL paper and
white, mould-made Rives
BFK paper
published by Tyler Graphics
Ltd
Purchased with the assistance
of the Orde Poynton Fund
2002
The American artist James Rosenquist was pleased he was
now exhibiting with the prestigious New York Gallery,
Acquavella. ‘All I have to be now is brilliant’, he recently
mused in conversation. In his career the elusive ‘need to
be brilliant’ is something the artist has constantly searched
for. Sometimes it seemed he was successful, sometimes
he wasn’t, and he could never quite work out why, other
than it sold.1 Rosenquist has an unusual modus operandi
to achieve his goal, art historian Judith Goldman calls it a
‘taste for a convoluted idea’.2 He likes to draw together
visual elements or notions that fascinate or intrigue, which
he then places together to form a complex composition.
With this process, whether the artist is brilliant or not can
only be judged on completion.
In the mid 1980s, when Rosenquist agreed to work at
the print studio at Tyler Graphics Ltd at Mount Kisco, in
New York State, he was required ‘to be brilliant’. The artist
had been invited by Ken Tyler, printer and publisher, to
explore the idea of making some paper pulp works. These
came to form the series Welcome to the water planet
and the works House of fire and Time dust which were
produced in 1988 and 1989. Rosenquist had been a longtime admirer of Tyler and his working methods. ‘Ken liked
to get his hands dirty’; he was ‘voracious’ in the studio
in his enthusiasm for new ideas about printmaking, new
techniques, new materials.
Tyler’s approach was in stark contrast to Rosenquist’s
early experience in printmaking, when he made his first
lithographs in 1965 and 1966 with publisher Tatanya
Grosman at Universal Limited Art Editions, West Islip,
New York. He found the atmosphere of the studio ‘old
fashioned’ with more traditional technical methods used,
leisurely lunches and no sense of urgency.
As a young man Rosenquist had long desired to
become an artist. Born in provincial Grand Forks in
North Dakota in 1933, he studied at the University
of Minnesota, supporting himself by painting Phillips
66 Gasoline signs as he travelled to the border of the
State of Iowa. Rosenquist then graduated to painting
billboards, including the billboards advertising Davy
Crockett, ‘King of the Wild Frontier’, the film first released
in 1954. He painted two versions of this up and down
the highways leading to Minneapolis. The following year
he left the Midwest for New York to pursue an artistic
career, winning a scholarship to attend the Art Students
League in New York. There he continued painting
billboards to support himself. His work now graced the
skyline of New York’s Times Square and Brooklyn and
Rosenquist gained a certain notoriety when he was
featured in an article published on 6 June 1960 and
dubbed, ‘Broadway’s biggest artist’. In this article, not
noted for its understatement, the overly enthusiastic UPI
journalist commented further that while ‘bigness isn’t
always greatness, his creations nonetheless dwarf the
most grandiose artistic accomplishments of Rivera and
Michelangelo’.3
By the 1960s, the experience of painting on a large
scale influenced his own art. Rosenquist began working
on huge canvases and incorporating figures from the mass
media. Because of their very size, the individual forms
became abstracted when viewed close-up. The effect that
scale changed figures from realistic images to abstract
ones was something Rosenquist delighted in.
Rosenquist’s growing popularity as an artist had him
regularly showing at Pop Art’s mecca, the Leo Castelli
Gallery in New York. The Castelli stable of artists included
Roy Lichtenstein, Robert Rauschenberg, Jasper Johns
and Andy Warhol. All were in some way associated with
Pop Art. This was a movement which evolved in the late
1950s, which embraced ideas, subjects and techniques of
Time dust 1992
82 colour pressed paper pulp,
lithograph, screenprint, relief,
etching, stamping and collage
printed from one copper
plate, 59 aluminium plates,
four magnesium plates and
12 screens on seven sheets
of white, handmade, handcoloured, TGL paper; white,
mould-made Rives BFK paper;
black/gold marble Dri-Print
metalized foil
published by Tyler Graphics Ltd
Purchased with the assistance
of the Orde Poynton Fund
2002
popular culture. Pop saw the adoption of forms, colours
and methods of mass culture drawn from advertising,
television, film, music, comics, pulp novels and magazines.
Rosenquist was one of the central artists who drew
inspiration from such sources. However, unlike other Pop
artists, Rosenquist’s art method of the convoluted idea
made his imagery not immediately clear. It was an art of
fragments juxtaposed in often apparently bizarre, but at
the time oddly pleasing, sequences.
Rosenquist’s association with Ken Tyler goes back
many years to the time when he was keen to be further
involved in printmaking to reach a wider audience through
using new media. The artist and printer had planned
to work at Gemini GEL in Los Angeles decades earlier.
However, as fate would have it, Rosenquist had a car
accident in 1971 in which the artist, his wife and child
were seriously injured and so nothing came of their first
attempt to work together in the early 1970s. In 1974 they
met in Bedford New York when Tyler had moved to the
east coast of the USA, but again nothing eventuated.4 The
1970s were a testing time for Rosenquist, both personally
and as an artist, and he said of these years that they were
‘not a very good time in my art work at all’.5
As Rosenquist’s career advanced both as a painter and
maker of prints, his progress in each medium was decidedly
uneven. In fact, the artist had become disillusioned with
printmaking. He found painting more immediate, on a
larger scale, and a more inventive way of making art. In
contrast, he came to consider that prints were too small,
too rigid in technique and lacked spontaneity. When, in
1987, Tyler wrote to Rosenquist inviting him to work at his
new purpose-built workshop at Mount Kisco in upstate
New York, he needed to be convinced the experience
would be worthwhile – that making paper works and
lithography with Tyler would be different from his earlier
experiences. In response, Tyler promised Rosenquist that he
would provide handmade paper as big as the artist could
imagine and then sent him sketches of his premises and
equipment. By the next year, Rosenquist had agreed to
work at Tyler’s studio.
The new premises at Mount Kisco were established to
further Tyler’s desire to provide the utmost assistance for
artists who worked with him on print projects. In discussion
it became apparent that the intention was that Rosenquist
and the printer would develop a project – perhaps to make
some paper pulp works. Tyler had a long held an interest in
handmade papers. He had worked on collaboration in 1973–
74 with Robert Rauschenberg at the Richard de Bas paper
mill in France, where the artist made 12 paper works. Tyler
then continued with paper pulp projects in the 1970s with
artists Elsworth Kelly, Keith Noland and later, in 1979, David
Hockney. Hockney produced spectacular paper pulp works,
notably in his Paper Pools series, which brought paper works
to new heights in terms of scale, colour and textures.
When he arrived, Rosenquist had an idea, a convoluted
one, which he hoped would develop as an image – slow
heating popcorn taking its time – and tying this notion
together with his growing concern about the state of
planet earth – the only water planet known in existence
in the universe at this time. Arriving at the workshop,
Rosenquist had the same need ‘to be brilliant’. He mulled
over such disparate thoughts. Telling Ken of his initial idea,
Tyler joked, ‘Well, that was one idea, where are the rest
of your ideas?’. As an artist Rosenquist liked to work with
fluid concepts initially for what became the Water planet
project, which would then take shape during his time at
the Tyler studio: ‘So then we’re getting into this print called
The bird of paradise approaches the hot water planet. He
says, “What’s the next idea?” So I brought them the next
idea. He says, “Oh great! That’s fabulous. Where’s the next
one?” I said, “I don’t have any idea yet”.’6
In fact, Rosenquist wished to remain as spontaneous
as he could, untrammelled by long-held or preconceived
ideas. ‘I wanted them to come right out of the air’.7 To
work in this manner required a print workshop which could
be innovative and on the spot. Rosenquist was pleased
to be working with Tyler on such a momentous project
because he considered him ‘probably the best printing
technician in the world’. Unlike other printers who, when
faced with a difficult task put to them by the artist, would
shake their heads and say sorry they couldn’t deal with the
new ideas, ‘with Ken – he’d look at you, walk away and
the next day he would have devised something to make
the new idea work. Nothing would stop him … he would
go to any length … He would never say no.’ For the project
Tyler devised a huge deckle box to make hand-made
papers some 150 x 305 cm, and a giant printing press for
lithography and etching (305 x 610 cm).
Over the months as the pair worked together a series of
large-scale paper pulp works evolved, using huge sheets of
handmade paper made on the TGL premises. The project
was inspired by the exotic vegetation of Florida where his
studio was in Aripeka on the Gulf of Mexico and reflected
Rosenquist’s disquiet with what was happening to the
earth. All this combined to project Rosenquist’s concern,
‘We all live on the water planet’, the artist discussed at an
interview, ‘John Glenn [the first American astronaut to orbit
the earth] said when he went into space he turned around
and looked at Earth, and he wondered why so many people
were spending so much money on blowing it up, and they
actually lived on it. It seems very bizarre’.8 Rosenquist’s
series of paper works were intended to act both as a
celebration and a warning to what might happen to the
water planet.
Rosenquist included imagery which evoked the
colourful and sensual riches of the earth and brilliant
flora from Florida, set within a wondrous star-lit universe.
This he combined with the contrasting ideas about the
artonview
artonview autumn
winter 2006
27
previous page:
Space dust 1989
20 colour pressed paper
pulp with lithographic
collage
on white, handmade, handcoloured, TGL paper and
BFK paper
Ltd
Purchased with the
assistance of the Orde
Poynton Fund 2002
James Ronsenquist working
with Ken Tyler on Skull
Snap, state I at Tyler
Graphics Ltd, 1989
The bird of paradise
approaches the hot water
planet 1989
33 colour pressed paper
pulp with lithographic
collage on two sheets
of white, handmade, handcoloured, TGL paper and
BFK paper
Ltd
Purchased with the
assistance of the Orde
Poynton Fund 2002
mistreatment and destruction of the earth represented
by detritus, pots and pans, rocket ships, fighter planes or
missiles of destruction with the addition of torpedos in
the form of ruby red lipsticks or jet engines as acid green
pencils. ‘The water planet is earth. A visitor from another
universe comes by, and we say, “hey, welcome to this
mess! It’s hell, it’s burning up, but come on in!”’9
The first idea Rosenquist came to form was The bird
of paradise approaches the hot water planet. From his
early days as a billboard artist it was Rosenquist’s habit
to work from a small drawing, often a collage of various
images, and upscale the composition and develop this
to be a gargantuan size. Deconstructing the image into
its component parts, artist and printer decided to make
the curved lines of cross-hatching, so characteristic of
Rosenquist’s work in general at this time, and it would
then be printed in colour lithography. These lithographic
elements would then form a collage which would be
laid for a brilliantly coloured paper pulp sheet. The
separate colours were made by filling different moulds
with paper pulp placed on top of the large sheets of
handmade paper which were cut out in metal according
to Rosenquist’s design.
At the initial stages of the project the method of
using metal moulds, or ‘cookie cutters’, was clumsy, timeconsuming, and the paper pulp lacked consistency – it
was just ‘so awful’, Rosenquist remembered. The paper
pulp was messy and not easy to control.  Rosenquist was
also frustrated by the lack of spontaneity in the whole
procedure. He was loosing momentum. To counteract these
problems, Tyler worked on the consistency of the pulp and
the shapes of the moulds, but still there were problems
in translating Rosenquist’s designs into paper form. The
artist developed a group of templates which took a great
deal of time to make, based on his drawings and cut for
each form he wanted. Tyler drew on his own technical
expertise and the constant desire for experimentation and
innovation to solve problems in the workshop. For the
large areas of graded colour, impossible to achieve using
mould shapes, Tyler proposed to use a spray gun, used for
applying stucco to walls in houses which could spray the
gradations of brilliant and unusual colour across the pulp
on which the lithographic elements were collaged. The
technique was a success and the results were glorious with
a look of apparent spontaneity and effortlessness, which
belied the hours of preparation and a technique born of
experimentation.
Rosenquist was delighted with his paper pulp works.
‘The wonderful thing about paper pulp is the colour. If
you take a magnifying glass, you’ll see a little fuzz rising
like smoke off the surface of this handmade paper – like
doing giant watercolours and letting this watercolour seep
together at the perfect moment … ’10 a
Jane Kinsman
Senior Curator, International Prints, Drawings and
Illustrated Books
notes
1 James Rosenquist in conversation with Jane Kinsman, 9 March 2006.
All quotes with text refer to this interview unless otherwise indicated.
2 Judith Goldman, ‘Whenever you’re ready, let me know’, in James
Rosenquist: Welcome to the water planet and house of fire 1988–
1989, Mount Kisco, United States: Tyler Graphics Ltd, 1989, p. 13. For
further reading see Constance W. Glenn, Complete Graphic Works
1962–1992, New York: Rizzoli, 1993, cat. nos. 214–23, Time dust,
illustrated, pp. 160–68.
3 United Press International, 6 June 1960, quoted in Judith Goldman,
James Rosenquist, New York: Viking Penguin, 1985, p. 25.
4 Ken Tyler in correspondence with Jane Kinsman, 18 April 2006.
5 James Rosenquist referring to the years 1971 to 1977, quoted in
Constance W. Glenn, Time dust: James Rosenquist, Complete
Graphics: 1962–1992, New York: Rizzoli, 1993, p.51.
6 James Rosenquist in Welcome to the water planet (Documentary film)
(New York: Seven Hills Production, 1989)
7 James Rosenquist (Documentary film) 1989
9 James Rosenquist quoted in Walter Hopps and Sarah Bancroft, James
Rosenquist: A retrospective, New York: Guggenheim, c. 2003, pp.
126–27.
projec t galler y
Right here right now
Recent Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander acquisitions
13 May – 13 August 2006
13 May – 13 August 2006
Unknown Maker
Rainforest people
Jawun basket [bicornual]
1900s lawyer cane
Julie Dowling
Badimaya/Yamatji people
Laid in his tomb
oil on canvas
Right here right now: Recent Aboriginal and Torres Strait
Islander acquisitions presents a selection of works from
across the breadth and depth of Indigenous visual art and
culture in Australia over the past two centuries, acquired
during the last two years, which have not yet been on
public display. Media include bark painting, fibre-work and
textiles, print-making, drawing, painting and sculpture,
with themes ranging from the ancestral and ancient in
Indigenous and European time, to the cutting edge of
political society in Australia today.
Works are by leading contemporary artists such as
bark painter and lorrkon (hollow log) maker, Kuninjku
artist John Mawurndjul, whose work has been selected
for the prestigious Australian Indigenous Art Commission
(AIAC) at the new Musée du quai Branly in Paris; a series
of oils on canvas with a specifically Indigenous perspective
on Christianity by Julie Dowling (Yamatji/Badimaya
people), the edgy satire of Waanyi/Waanjiminjin artist
Gordon Hookey; to memento mori in the work of Kuku/
Erub artist Clinton Nain, in a stunning series of panels
by Ungkum artist Rosella Namok and a recent canvas by
renowned Waanyi artist Judy Watson, whose work is also
represented in the AIAC.
A group of paintings by emerging Kudjla/Gangalu
artist Daniel Boyd, visually pun on the concepts of
terra nullius, buccaneering and stolen wealth, drawing
inspiration from 18th-century portraiture filtered through
the artist’s 21st-century perspective.
These works are shown alongside a stunning body
of canvases by established and emerging Papunya
Tula artists; paintings by emerging artist Ngoia Pollard
Napaltjarri from Utopia in central Australia; Bidyadanga
and Parnggurr communities in north-east Western
Australia, and Peppimenarti in the Northern Territory; and
superb lorrkon and larrikitj [hollow logs] by rising artists
from Maningrida and Yirrkala, Timothy Wulanjbirr and
Naminapu Maymuru-White, respectively, whose work
has gained increasing notice in the past year. Tiwi artists
Jean Baptist Apuatimi and Timothy Cook present their
distinctive vision rendered in ochre.
Works on paper by foremost Torres Strait Islander
print-maker, Dennis Nona (Kala Lagaw Ya people), are
highlighted by the innovative approach to working with a
diversity of media on paper by senior Arnhem Land artist
Paddy Fordham Wainburranga (Rembarrnga people).
A whimsical approach is evident in the objects of
south-eastern artist Lola Ryan, and Blackstone, Western
Australian artist Kantjupayi Benson (Ngaanyatjarra people),
whose individual approaches to their work encompass
intimate and recent history. Other objects and textile
works include two rare late 19th-century bicornual baskets
from Far North Queensland, a magnificent burial basket
by renowned Ngarrindjeri weaver, Yvonne Koolmatrie,
textiles by local and regional artists, and a series of vibrant
weavings by Maningrida artists.
Such contemporary works complement recent
acquisitions of historical works, which include a stunning
19th-century Torres Strait Islander mask by an unknown
maker; a wonderful carving of the wife of Gurrmirringu,
the ancestral hunter by David Malangi Daymirringu; a
series of spectacular painted boards created in the early
1970s by Wadeye (Port Keats) artists; and paintings by
renowned Warmun artists, the late George Mung Mung
and his contemporary, Hector Jandany, elder statesman in
the community today. a
Brenda L Croft
Daniel Boyd
Kudjla/Gangalu people
Captain no beard
oil on canvas
Dennis Nona
Kala Lagaw Ya people
Awai Yithuyil (Badu Island Story)
relief
Unknown Maker
Torres Strait Islander people
Mask wood, shell, resin,
human hair, fibre string,
white pigment
Doreen Reid Nakamarra
Pintupi people, Nakamarra
subsection
Untitled synthetic polymer
paint on canvas
© Doreen Reid Nakamarra
and Papunya Tula Artists
artonview
winter 2006
37
new acquisition Australian Painting and Sculpture
Shane Cotton Three-quarter view
Shane Cotton
Three-quarter view 2005
acrylic on canvas
purchased 2005
In recent years Shane Cotton has emerged as one of
Aotearoa New Zealand’s most significant contemporary
painters. Working within postmodern and post-colonial
frameworks, Cotton combines appropriated imagery from
Maori and pakeha (non-indigenous New Zealanders) sources
to create hybrid, poetic paintings, which investigate the
shared experience of the country’s two cultures.
Three-quarter view is dominated by the moko (facial
tattoo) of 19th-century British flax trader, Barnet Burns. The
striking physical transformation of the Englishman resulted
from his extraordinary decision to live amongst the Maori
from the 1830s. Cotton used a 19th-century etching of
Burns as his source, yet his painting process transforms the
original. Removing all signs of Burns’ Englishness, the artist
has reproduced only his moko in two-tone blues. Hovering
around the disembodied face are targets, sparrows and
a goldfinch. The avian motif has particular importance
in Maori cosmology and the goldfinch symbolises the
passion of Christ in western religious art. The captivating
combination alludes to the complex relationship between
Christianity, colonialism, and contemporary culture.
Three-quarter view is the final painting in a series of
three works based on historic etchings and photographs.
Each work presents a portrait painted from a different angle:
a frontal view, a profile view, and a three-quarter view. The
first painting depicts the carved self-portrait of 19th-century
Maori chief, Hongi Hika. Hika displayed great interest in
European culture and travelled to England in 1820. The
interrelation between the narratives of Hika and Burns is of
particular interest to Cotton: ‘it reflects ideas associated with
gain and loss, which encircle racial and cultural exchange.
Between the spaces of the frontal and profile view, is the
three-quarter view; a space of difference: a space of change’
(‘Trans-former’, Keynote address, AAANZ conference, Power
Institute, 2005). In this way, Three-quarter view creates
a ‘liminal’ space in which colonial narratives are blurred
and new cultural possibilities are engendered. Cotton’s art
questions the notion of indivisible cultural identity, looking
instead to the indeterminate space between Maori and
pakeha perspectives.
Olivia Sophia
Intern, Australian Painting and Sculpture,
from the Australian National University
new acquisition Australian Print s, Drawings and Illustrated Book s
John Lewin Studies of a remora fish
In the early decades of the colony watercolour was one of
the few media for recording Australia’s natural history and
landscape. One of the most successful artists of this period
was John Lewin, the first professional artist to reside in
Australia as a free settler, who arrived in the fledgling
colony in January 1800. Trained by his ornithologist father
in England, Lewin was skilled in the art of natural history
painting. He rarely had the luxury of painting subjects of
his choice, but readily accepted commissions from those
interested in the natural oddities of flora and fauna or
those who wanted ‘portraits’ of their houses as proof of
their success in this strange new land. The National Gallery
holds several watercolours by Lewin and his Government
House Parramatta. December 1806 is the earliest
watercolour painted in Australia in the collection. Lewin
was fortunate to come under the successive patronage
of governors Hunter, King, Bligh and Macquarie, and
accompanied field expeditions, documenting many natural
history subjects, including the first known depiction of a
koala following an 1801 expedition to the Hunter River.
The most recent addition of Lewin’s work to the
collection is his Studies of a remora fish c. 1807. This
watercolour shows two studies of a remora fish – one is a
full-length view from above and the other is the underside
of the head. The fish is painted in a monotone grey
watercolour in delicate detail, with particular attention
given to the head and mouth and underside of the head.
There is no background to distract from this faithfully
rendered natural history study. The work is inscribed
across the top of the sheet “16 inches in length & 5 in
Girth – Black on the Back with a Black Stripe on the side”
and “Under side of the Head” above the view of the
fish’s head. This work was originally in the collection of
Governor William Bligh and was held by the family until
recent times.
John Lewin
Studies of a remora fish
c. 1807
watercolour on paper
Anne McDonald
Curator, Australian Prints and Drawings
artonview
winter 2006
39
new acquisition International Photography
Shinzo Fukuhara Beautiful West Lake: the light with its harmony
Shinzo Fukuhara
photogravure plate from
Beautiful West Lake: the light
with its harmony Tokyo:
Nihon Sashin-kai [Japan
Photographic Society] 1931
Shinzo Fukuhara was the most prominent and influential
amateur art photographer in Japan between the world
wars and the driving force behind various camera societies,
exhibitions and publications. He was very western in
business having completed his education in America as well
as having spent time in Paris in 1913 where he mixed with
avant-garde artists and pursued his own art photography.
Recalled to Japan at the advent of the First World War,
Fukuhara took over direction of the old family pharmacy
business, and during the 1920s created the international
cosmetics corporation Shiseido. His personal art, however,
was very romantic and his first photobook – published in
Japan in 1922 – was of soft-focus impressionistic studies
from his pre-war sojourn in Paris.
In 1930 Fukuhara travelled to China and photographed
the long-established tourist destination of the West Lake
at Hangzhou. The sub-title came from his influential 1923
essay ‘The Light with its harmony’ in which Fukuhara
promoted a manifesto for photographic art reflecting
national character (Japaneseness) based on the abstract
qualities of light merged with the aesthetics of traditional
arts and culture. Fukuhara’s various photobooks were very
other-worldly, usually about places by water with literary
associations. His last published book The Sunny Hawaii
(1935) embraced a more modernist clarity of light and form.
Fukuhara’s advocacy of an international style of
Pictorialist art photography while seeking to define a
national character parallels the activities of Harold Cazneaux
and his Australian contemporaries in founding the Sydney
Camera Circle in 1916 to promote an Australian school of
sunshine photography expressing the national character.
Gael Newton
Senior Curator, Australian and International Photography
new acquisition International Print s, Drawings and Illustrated Book s
The Chapman Brothers Disasters of war
Since 1990, Jake and Dinos Chapman have successfully
worked as a sculptural team who employ shock tactics
to make statements about, amongst other things, the
warmongering of the capitalist West. When the Chapman
Brothers decided to produce a series of prints in 1999 the
result was a portfolio of 83 exquisitely executed etchings
that takes both its name, and its inspiration, from Francisco
Goya’s famous cycle of prints Los desastres de la guerra
[The disasters of war], 1810–20.
In a highly skilled but idiosyncratic application of
aquatint, drypoint and hard and soft-ground etching,
The Disasters of war seems to herald a return to the timehonoured techniques and perfection of process found
in traditional etchings. However, this intimate aesthetic
contrasts profoundly with the relentless repetition of
swastikas, mutilated bodies, scenes of torture and devilish
figures that the Chapmans present as subject matter.
Their view of the world is that it is one that has gone
completely mad, a dystopia of human depravity and moral
deterioration. Re-translating Goya’s war imagery and recontextualising their own sculptural works, the Chapman
Brothers have created nightmarish image upon nightmarish
image, the culmination of which is a powerful statement
about human evil in the 21st century. If you feel sick, you’re
supposed to. If you want to look away, but can’t, the
Chapmans have succeeded again.
In many of the etchings, the postmodernist combination
of infantile humour and profound horror allows the artists
to simultaneously seduce and revolt their audience. Not an
easy task when you consider, as the Chapmans do, that
the audience is made up of desensitised spectators. The
Chapmans’ tactic is to position their audience as voyeurs,
only to disgust them with the depravity of the world in which
they live. As a result, the Disasters of war portfolio affects
the viewer with the full force of a visual slap across the face.
Offensive? Distressing? Yes. And that’s the point.
Jake and Dinos Chapman
plate 14 from the Disasters
of war portfolio 1999
etching, drypoint and
aquatint
The Orde Poynton Bequest,
2005
Jaklyn Babington
Assistant Curator, International Prints, Drawings
and Illustrated Books
artonview
winter 2006
41
new acquisition A sian Ar t
Last rites: funerary bird from Vietnam
possibly Jarai people,
Vietnam
Funerary bird
early 20th century
teak
While the great architectural complexes of Angkor Wat and
Borobodur have ensured that the Hindu-Buddhist sculpture
of Southeast Asia is well known, the art created for rituals
related to the earlier but enduring animist beliefs of the region
is often overlooked. This is especially the case for the sculpture
of Vietnam which has always been eclipsed in western art
collections by the arts of neighbouring Cambodia.
This striking stylised image of a bird, probably representing
a peacock, was made for a burial site of one of the ethnic
minorities, primarily dry rice cultivators, who inhabit the
forested highland areas of central and northern Vietnam. Left
to disintegrate after the graves are ritually abandoned, few
such sculptures have survived. This fine example has been in
a private collection in France since it was collected in the early
20th century. As a result, unlike most Jarai funerary sculpture,
which is often badly eroded and grey in colour from being
exposed to the elements, the surface of the bird is polished
and well preserved.
For the animist Jarai, a year or so following a death,
an elaborate ceremony is performed when a large houselike tomb structure of wood and basketry is constructed.
The grave site in the village of the dead is surrounded by
sculptures of birds, animals and, more commonly, human
figures, sometimes with overt genitalia and depicted in sexual
acts. Two fretwork wooden panels from the top of such a
tomb-house, in the Gallery’s collection of ancestral art once
belonging to the Surrealist artist Max Ernst, depict birds and
human figures in erotic poses. This starkly angular bird is
perched on a pair of oxen horns or tusks, the tips of which are
now missing. A small cavity on the top of its head indicates a
missing crest.
Unlike many Southeast Asian cultures, figurative sculpture
is only created by the Jarai for these secondary funerary rites.
Also unusual for a region where pilgrimages to the grave
sites of ancestors are considered vital to the wellbeing of the
spirit of the deceased and the living descendants, the Jarai
neglect the village of the dead with its tombs and surrounding
sculptures after the ceremony of closure. Both the dead and
the living move on, the community returning to the village
of the living and its everyday activities, while the spirit of the
dead moves westward, perhaps to return in the future as dew
at the birth of a child to the family of the deceased.
Ron Radford
Director
new acquisition Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Ar t
19th-century Torres Strait Island mask
The maker of this extremely rare and highly significant
cultural object is unknown, but it is immediately
recognisable as being from the Torres Strait Islands, and
as having been created during the 19th century, if not
earlier. The majority of Torres Strait Islander masks were
used and worn during sacred ceremonies, initiations,
sorcery and other customary rituals. This particular mask
may have come from the north-western part of the Torres
Strait, possibly Saibai Island, or been traded from a nearby
coastal village in Papua New Guinea.
Nineteenth-century Torres Strait Islander objects
are rarely found in either private or public collections in
Australia due to the destruction of cultural material that
occurred as a result of the arrival of Christian missionaries
in the late 1800s. Torres Strait Islanders faced significant
historical, cultural and social change when Reverend
Samuel MacFarlane of the London Missionary Society
brought Christianity to the Torres Strait on 1 July 1871.
This is referred to by the Islanders as ‘Coming of the
Light’ and is celebrated annually on 1 July by all Torres
Strait Islander communities throughout the Torres Strait
and mainland Australia.
Examples of 19th-century Torres Strait Islander masks
are held in the collections of the Cambridge University of
Archaeology and Anthropology, UK (Haddon Collection);
the Metropolitan Museum, New York, USA; the de Young
Fine Arts Museum of San Francisco, USA; Horniman
Museum, London, UK; the Pitt-Rivers Museum, Oxford,
UK; and the Museum of New Zealand Te Papa Tongarewa,
Wellington, NZ.
This acquisition emphasises the importance of building
upon Torres Strait Islander representation within the
National Collection. The work is on display in Right here
right now: Recent Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander
acquisitions, Project Gallery, National Gallery of Australia
13 May – 13 August 2006.
Brenda L Croft
Simona Barkus
Trainee Curator, Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Art
Unknown Maker
Torres Strait Islander
Mask – 19th century Torres
Strait Islander 19th century
wood, shell, resin, human
hair, fibre string, white
pigment purchased 2006
artonview
winter 2006
43
new acquisition International Decorative Ar t s and Design
Sergei Isupov To be object of attentions
Combining engaging and surreal subject matter with
consummate craftsmanship, Sergei Isupov’s painted figural
ceramics alarm us at first glance, as we realise that they
are revealing only one of several contradictory faces to
the viewer. In the theatre of his imagination, heads sprout
secondary figures, horns and hybrid animal limbs while faces
and bodies become screens for a flotilla of painted figures
that seem to have escaped from the world of Hieronymous
Bosch. Isupov’s subjects exude calm repose, making the
theatre of anguished humanity painted on them even more
poignant as bizarre figures play out themes of birth, love,
sex, jealousy, anxiety and death.
Each porcelain work is hand-built and painted with
stained porcelain slip and glazes before being fired, a
time-consuming and exacting process that Isupov tackles
with equal measures of playfulness and discipline. Born
in Stavropole, Russia in 1963 and trained in classical
painting and ceramics in Kiev, Ukraine, and Tallin, Estonia,
before taking residency in the United States of America
in 1993, Isupov has personal experience of two very
different cultures. His graphic visualisation of that duality
is encapsulated in To be object of attentions, with its two
faces looking in opposite directions, apparently unaware
of each other but linked by figures that seem to have
materialised from a shared imagination.
Sergei Isupov’s ceramics were first seen in Australia
in the National Gallery of Australia’s 2005 exhibition,
Transformations: the language of craft, during which he
spoke on his work at the Gallery before undertaking a
studio residency at the JamFactory Contemporary Craft
and Design Centre in Adelaide. This work, one of the mostdiscussed in the exhibition, was acquired in 2005, adding a
new dimension to the Gallery’s collection of contemporary
ceramics.
Sergei Isupov
To be object of attentions
2004
painted and glazed porcelain
Purchased 2005
Photograph: Katherine
Wetzel, courtesy Ferrin
Gallery
Robert Bell
Senior Curator, Decorative Arts and Design
travelling exhibitions winter 20 0 6
Place made: Australian Print Workshop
Supported by Visions of Australia, an Australian
Government Program supporting touring exhibitions
by providing funding assistance for the development
and touring of cultural material across Australia
Tim Maguire Hollyhocks 1991
(detail) National Gallery of
Australia, Canberra Australian
Print Workshop Archive 2,
purchased with the assistance of
the Gordon Darling Australasian
Print Fund 2002
This exhibition is a snapshot of the involvement
of Australian artists in the production of prints
and their concerns stylistically, technically and
politically produced at the Australian Print
Workshop between 1981 and 2002. The works
are selected from an archive of 3,500 works
acquired by National Gallery of Australia in 2002
through the assistance of the Gordon Darling
Australasian Print Fund. nga.gov.au/Placemade
Seated Ganesha Sri Lanka
9th–10th century (detail) from
Red case: myths and rituals
Canberra
Geelong Gallery, Geelong Vic.,
7 April – 4 June 2006
Kenneth Macqueen
Summer sky c. 1935 (detail)
watercolour and pencil on paper
Purchased 1965 National Gallery
of Australia, Canberra
© The Macqueen family
MOIST: Australian watercolours
Moist is a rare glimpse into the National Gallery
of Australia’s extraordinary collection of
Australian watercolours. While the title refers
to the liquid nature of watercolour, the word
‘moist’ elicits images of an atmospheric, physical
or emotional state of being. The watercolours
in Moist will demonstrate how Australian artists
have created visual representations of such
states, from the highly figurative to the purely
abstract and intensely emotional. While each
has its own story there are also common threads
that draw them together. nga.gov.au/Moist
Red case: Myths and Rituals and Yellow
case: Form, Space and Design
Australian Embassy in Washington,
Washington DC, USA,
10 April – 25 June 2006
David Wallace
Stockman and horse 1997
recycled materials including wire,
fabric, plastic, buttons
Canberra
An artist abroad: the prints of James
McNeill Whistler
James McNeill Whistler was a key figure in
the European art world of the 19th century.
Influenced by the French Realists, the Dutch,
Venetian and Japanese masters Whistler’s
prints are sublime visions of people and the
places they inhabit. nga.gov.au/Whistler
James McNeill Whistler
Portrait of Whistler 1859
(detail) etching and drypoint
Canberra
University Art Museum, University
of Queensland, St Lucia QLD,
6 August – 1 October 2006
Coffs Harbour City Gallery,
10 July – 24 September 2006
Blue case: Technology
Washington DC, USA,
10 April – 25 June 2006
Barossa Regional Gallery, Barossa SA,
3 July – 30 July 2006
Caloundra Regional Art Gallery,
Caloundra QLD,
7 August – 17 September 2006
Perc Tucker Regional Art Gallery, Townsville QLD,
26 May – 9 July 2006
Mornington Peninsula Regional Gallery,
Mornington Vic.,
25 July – 24 September 2006
The Elaine & Jim Wolfensohn Gift
Travelling Exhibitions:
The 1888 Melbourne Cup and three suitcases
of works of art: Red case: Myths and Rituals
includes works which reflect the spiritual
beliefs of different cultures; Yellow case: Form,
Space, Design reflects a range of art making
processes; and Blue case: Technology. The
suitcases thematically present a selection of
art and design objects for the enjoyment of
children and adults in regional, remote and
metropolitan centres that may be borrowed
free-of-charge. nga.gov.au/Wolfensohn
Karl Lawrence Millard
Lizard grinder 2000 (detail)
brass, bronze, copper, sterling
silver, money metal, Peugeot
mechanism, stainless steel screws
Canberra
The 1888 Melbourne Cup
Washington DC, USA,
10 April – 25 June 2006
Exhibition venues and dates are subject to
change. Please contact the gallery or venue before
your visit. For more information please contact
(612)6240 6556 or email: travex@nga.gov.au.
The 1888 Melbourne Cup (detail)
The Elaine and Jim Wolfensohn
Gift National Gallery of Australia,
Canberra
The National Gallery of Australia Travelling
Exhibitions Program is generously
supported by Australian airExpress.
artonview
winter 2006
45
new acquisition
The Anton Bruehl Gift
Gallery of Australia. The Anton Bruehl Gift is the highest
in value ever to have been presented to the photography
collection. Now in the art store at the Gallery, Anton
Bruehl’s work keeps company with that of his Australian
contemporary Max Dupain, as well as a gem-like
collection of mid 20th-century American advertising
photography.
While in Australia in 2001, Anton Bruehl Jr visited
the National Gallery of Australia after hearing of the
Gallery’s purchase of a selection of iconic Bruehl prints,
in part with funds from Dr Peter Farrell. We viewed the
Gallery’s collection of American advertising photography
and maintained contact through the following years. In
2004 I visited the Bruehls in San Francisco where, sitting
all works Gift of Anton
Bruehl Jr, 2006, through
the American Friends of the
Anton Bruehl Lexington
Avenue New York studio logo
Martin Bruehl
Portrait of Anton Bruehl in
the studio, New York 1937
as published in a Condé Nast
magazine article on ‘Cinema
Arts’ in 1937
Anton Bruehl
Swimsuit advertisement
1950s dye transfer colour
photograph
From the late 1920s in New York, Anton Bruehl
on their couch, I first heard that Anton Jr wanted his
(1900–1982) was the doyen of advertising photography.
collection to come to Australia. The Bruehl Gift of 112
He is best known today as a pioneer of brilliant colour
photographs including some 20 original colour images
photography produced under exclusive contract to the
covers Bruehl’s career from the 1920s through to the
Condé Nast magazine group. Bruehl also specialised
figure studies of the 1950s. Although he has travelled to
in theatre studies, often recreating sets and scenes
Australia a number of times on business, Anton Bruehl
from musicals in his studio for absolute quality
Jr has no strong connections with Australia; his singular
control. He was equally acclaimed internationally in art
gesture is in recognition of his father’s birthplace, simply
photography salons and in 1933 published an award-
saying ‘it felt right’.
winning book of photographs of Mexico in a classic
straight documentary style.
teenager after his older brother Martin gave him a box
camera. He developed his skills in Melbourne where
Despite his German name, Anton Bruehl was not
Anton Bruehl first took up photography as a
one of the many European photographers drawn or
he trained as an electrical engineer and worked for an
driven to America in the 1930s; instead he was from
American engineering firm with colleagues who were
the dry regions of South Australia, born in Hawker in
also interested in camera art. Bruehl immigrated to New
1900. His German-born father was a well-respected
York in 1919 to work for Western Electric. Some years
and technically inventive medical doctor, a skill passed
after his arrival in New York, Bruehl was inspired to make
on, as Anton was a meticulous technician and skilled
photography his vocation after studying and teaching at
craftsman.
Clarence White’s School of Photography in New York.
In February this year, businessman and San Francisco
Bruehl was in partnership briefly with Ralph Steiner,
art collector Anton Bruehl Jr presented his personal
who worked with Bruehl on launching a hugely popular
collection of his father’s work to the National Gallery of
series of photographic tableaux advertisements for
Australia through the American Friends of the National
Weber and Heilbroner fabrics in the pages of the New
artonview
winter 2006
47
Yorker in 1927–30. In these images cut-out paper figures
of three men in suits were seen carrying on through
various travels and adventures throughout which their
clothing triumphed. The ‘Fabric Group’ ads won Bruehl
the Art Directors Club Medal for 1928. Bruehl opened
his second, larger studio on Lexington Avenue in 1927
and persuaded his brother Martin, a structural engineer
in Australia, to immigrate to New York. The brothers
then brought their parents to live in America.
The Bruehl studio began to supply images regularly
for the Condé Nast publications – Vogue, Vanity Fair
and House and Garden. At Nast’s instigation and despite
the cutbacks in most magazines during the Depression,
Bruehl worked with photo-technician Fernand Bourges
on developing very high quality colour photographs. The
first of 195 Bruehl–Bourges process colour photographs
appeared in the May 1932 issue of Vogue. The cost of
production was enormous but so were the meticulous
and inventive tableaux Bruehl designed for each job.
Bruehl became an American citizen in 1940 when he
married journalist Sara Barnes. They had three children,
Steven, David and Tony (the donor of the Bruehl Gift).
The Bruehl studio remained in operation until 1966.
Anton retired to Florida in the 1970s and died in San
Francisco in 1982. The Bruehl family never returned to
Australia, but, interestingly, Anton named the beloved
sailboat he built, the Yarra. The National Gallery is
undertaking a major retrospective and publication on
Bruehl’s career.
a
Gael Newton
Senior Curator, Photography
Anton Bruehl
Christmas pageant
advertisement 1950s dye
transfer colour photograph
Anton Bruehl
‘Four Roses’ Whiskey
advertisement c. 1950 dye
transfer colour photograph
Anton Bruehl
Unidentified man in
workshop c. 1925 gelatin
silver photograph
development of fice
Crescent Moon: Islamic art and civilisation in
Southeast Asia
The Gallery has been delighted with the partnership
formed with Santos – the major sponsor of Crescent
Moon: Islamic art and civilisation in Southeast Asia. The
Managing Director, John Ellice-Flint spoke at the opening
and demonstrated a keen interest in and a support for
Southeast Asian Art.
The Gallery would also like to take this opportunity
to thank the Gordon Darling Foundation for providing a
grant towards the curator’s research for the catalogue.
Without this generous contribution, the production of this
exquisite catalogue would not have been possible. The
Myer Foundation also provided a grant for the educational
resource that has been received with much enthusiasm
from teachers and students and public program events.
I hope you were able to attend the Crescent Moon
Cultural Day on 13 May. This unique and exciting occasion
was kindly supported by the Myer Foundation, AustraliaMalaysia Institute and the Australia-Indonesia Institute.
Constable: Impressions of land, sea and sky
We would also like to thank Booz Allen Hamilton who
supported the exhibition through a contra arrangement
and have been providing consulting services to the Gallery.
Once again, we thank our committed and long-term
supporters: Qantas Freight and Channel Seven for assisting
with transport and promotion of the exhibition.
The National Gallery of Australia Foundation
The Gallery relies heavily on the financial support of
individuals to assist in acquiring works of art for the
National Collection. Most donations to assist collection
development are channelled through the National
Gallery of Australia Foundation. Other fundraising
initiatives include the ongoing Treasure a Textile program,
supporting the conservation of the Gallery’s renowned
collection of Southeast Asian textiles and the annual
Masterpieces for the Nation Appeal. For more information
on the Foundation please contact the Development Office
on (02) 6240 6454.
Ron Radford and John
Ellice-Flint at the opening of
Crescent Moon: Islamic Art and
Civilisation in Southeast Asia
Sculpture Garden Sunday
The Rotary Club of Belconnen has been a continuing
supporter of the Gallery. We would like to thank them for
the Children’s Easels that were purchased for use on the
Sculpture Garden Sunday on 5th March 2006, they will
also be used at other children’s events held by the Gallery.
Masterpieces for the Nation Appeal
This year an oil painting by Sydney Long, Flamingoes
c. 1906, has been selected for our Masterpieces for
the Nation Appeal 2006. Enclosed with this edition of
artonview is information about the work and the Appeal.
This is your opportunity to make a donation and share
the excitement of knowing this exceptional work will
bring pleasure to many future generations. All donors
will be invited to an event, hosted by the Director, to
celebrate this acquisition. Please forward your donation
(on the enclosed form) to Silvana Colucciello in the
Development Office or telephone her on (02) 6240 6454
with payment details.
Farewell to Lyn Conybeare
Lyn Conybeare, Head of Development and Sponsorship
(and previous author of this column), worked at the
Gallery for 14 years and had devoted the last five years to
expanding the Sponsorship and Development programs
at the Gallery. Lyn has moved to Sydney and her ideas,
energy and dedication will be greatly missed by all staff,
donors and sponsors of the Gallery.
Annalisa Millar
Coordinator, Development and Sponsorship
artonview
winter 2006
49
children’s galler y
Come rain or shine
Until 16 July 2006
Mitec culture, Mexico
Tlaloc the Rain God
1200–1300 Veracruz / Mexico
ceramic, earthenware,
pigment
Canberra
Curating an exhibition for children is always a challenge.
Firstly curators, educators and exhibition designers get
together to consider what it might be like to be a child
visiting this large grey cement building in search of
something friendly, small, interactive and fun. Secondly
we take a concept, often related to an exhibition at the
Gallery or a theme that we hope will appeal to a young
audience. Then, using works of art from the collection,
we design an interactive environment that takes the
experiences of children as the starting point: the under
fives love three-dimensional objects that remind them of
their fantasies and engender wonder or intrigue, whereas
older children might prefer two-dimensional or more
conceptually challenging works.
The theme of Come rain or shine is the weather and
is linked to the major exhibition, Constable: Impressions
of land, sea and sky. Many of John Constable’s paintings
have skies full of cumulous storm clouds, grey sheets of
rain coming or going, or rainbows, sunshine and shade.
Through the process of examining how artists represent
weather conditions using paint, video and sculpture,
young children are prompted to become more aware of
the world around them, to imagine what clothes they
should wear for protection and comfort and to create their
own artistic works at home or at school.
To select the works for the show, we trawled
through hundreds of contact sheets of black-and-white
photographs of works in the National Collection, works
that are often seldom if ever on display. We selected
works of art that have a connection with weather and
that would appeal to children. For Come rain or shine we
found dramatic 19th-century paintings of ships foundering
on rocky shores; a huge video of a skilful skateboarder
dancing on his board against a stormy sky; a massive
snowscape; two ‘hot’ paintings, one dusty and one
green; a small naïve painting of a monsoonal storm; and
the amazing 800-year-old rain god, Tlaloc, from Mexico
whose snake-ridden head forms a neat connection with
the Rainbow Serpent from Arnhem Land, installed next
to him. Tlaloc sits at the entrance to the exhibition, arms
folded, teeth bared. A push of a button enables children
to hear his story accompanied by the sounds of thunder,
rain and wind.
Works of art are displayed with questions on
accompanying labels that encourage a Gallery mini visitor
to explore the way artists create the sense of weather
in their paintings. For example, the monsoonal storm in
the small painting The channel country no. 3, by James
Fardoulys is graphically represented by cyclonic clouds and
windswept trees and the heat of Russell Drysdale’s Emus
in a Landscape is almost palpable.
Although the exhibits have been carefully chosen to
connect with three- to seven-year-olds, the interactive
components also enrich the experience for children of any
age. Pressing buttons that change coloured light on the
Constable landscape print demonstrates how an artist can
use colour to enhance the mood of a landscape, a magnet
board demonstrates how artists create an illusion of space
in their landscapes and flip boards encourage children to
think further about how we must wear the right clothes or
we will get sunburnt, wet or cold.
We enjoy the task of transforming the Children’s
Gallery into a magical experience for these special
visitors. And, of course, we hope that they will have fun,
remember the magic and bring their own children to the
Gallery in the future. a
James Fardoulys
The channel country no. 3
1965 oil on canvas on
plywood
Canberra
Jenny Manning
Acting Manager, Education
artonview
winter 2006
51
collec tion focus
Indian art: new acquisitions, directions and display
Eastern Rajasthan, India
Lotus ceiling
11th – 12th century stone
Canberra
Kota school, Rajasthan, India
Temple hanging (pichhavai)
Krishna’s fluting summons
the entranced gopis c.1840
opaque watercolour, gold
and silver on cotton
Canberra
The opening of a new Indian Gallery off the entrance
foyer in August provides a perfect opportunity to reveal
recent additions to the National Collection. It also
refocusses attention on works of art from South Asia
acquired over 30 years of collecting Asian art. One of
the most spectacular of the recent additions is a series
of massive wooden brackets which act as a major
architectural feature drawing visitors into the newly
refurbished spaces and creating a series of niches within
which to display small miniature paintings, illuminated
manuscript folios and small textiles. The angles of the
intricately carved late 15th–16th century teak brackets echo
the structure of the Gallery building, while the combination
of Hindu and Mughal and Persian inspired ornamentation
is a subtle introduction to the works displayed within. In
fact a number of sculptures, such as the white marble Jain
arch which surrounds the seated jina provide elaborate
depictions of very similar architectural structures and
ornamentation. Both the brackets themselves and their
recurrence in many sculptures attest to the centrality of
temple and palace architecture for South Asian artists.
A stone ceiling panel in the form of a lotus further
demonstrates the way in which key decorative elements
are shared by the major religions of India: even the eight
grotesque kirtimukha faces of glory, with bulging eyes,
small pointed horns, and distinct fangs are found in the
temple architecture of Jainism, Buddhism and Hinduism.
Forming an introduction to the antiquity of certain
key images in South Asian art is an image of the nagaraja
serpent king, depicted in anthropomorphic form sheltering
beneath the seven hoods of a cobra-like snake. A rare
instance of a three-dimensional stone sculpture in the
Gallery’s collection, the intermeshed coils of the serpent
are sinuously depicted down the back of the red sandstone
image. While derived from early nature worship, the naga
serpent is a recurring image in Indian art, sheltering the
meditating Buddha or buoying up the reclining Vishnu.
A smooth oval egg shaped rock – a self born lingam – is
also testament to the continuity of primal sexual imagery,
restated in terms of the worship of the great god Shiva.
Inside the entrance to the new gallery, Buddhist
and Jain art predominates. Among the earliest surviving
sculptures from the Indian subcontinent are those from
the great Buddhist stupas, and the marble frieze from the
vicinity of the Amaravati stupa in central east India shows
the adoration of the empty throne, an iconic image of the
earthly Buddha dating from the 3rd century ad. Another
early image is an imposing standing figure of a richly
apparelled bodhisattva from Gandharan Pakistan revealing
a very different early Buddhist style. Dating from around
300 ad, the powerful influence of the forays of Alexander
the Great into this region of South Asia is evident in the
strong Hellenistic features of the saviour, his drapery and
stance. Also in white marble, the tall figure is a superb
example of the syncretism of Greek and local iconography.
Other Gandharan objects already in the collection include
a fine stupa gable depicting a scene from one of the Jataka
tales of the previous lives of the Buddha.
artonview
winter 2006
53
While the Gallery’s collection of Jain objects is small,
two sculptures of serene enlightened conquerors or
liberators (jina) provide a fine introduction to the intricacy
of Jain temple art: the serene white marble seated image
of a simply robed jina and the stark standing ‘sky-clad’
figure, completely unadorned in the abandonment pose,
represent the two main orders of Jainism. In contrast the
Gallery’s internationally renowned Indian textile holdings
includes a number of Jain works, the most famous of
which shows a series of female courtiers in sumptuous
costume. The hand-drawn 5 metre long cloth, dated
1500, echoes on a large scale the imagery of illuminated
Jain manuscripts of medieval west India. Textiles in
various techniques – double ikat, mordant painting, and
pigment printing – are displayed throughout the new
Gallery.
Also prominent are large pigment paintings which
have been a recent collection development. The pichhvai
hangings are created for rituals celebrating the Hindu
deity Krishna. They contain some of the most charming
images in Indian art – the popular blue god Krishna
(an avatar of Vishnu) surrounded by adoring milkmaids
and their herds of cows. Other subjects for the very
large Indian paintings are scenes of royal progress,
such as the Maharana’s hunt, vibrant maps of popular
pilgrimage centres and tantric cosmological diagrams. The
dimensions of the Gallery building are ideally suited to the
display of such large paintings.
The collection of Hindu sculpture has also grown
over the past year with the addition of a number of
important works from the southern Indian 9th–13th
century Chola period. Arguably the pinnacle of Indian
bronze sculpture, the recent acquisitions of a fine large
image of the child saint Sambandar and a delicate
rendition of the fierce deity Kali seated beneath the large
trident of the god Shiva add significantly to the Gallery’s
existing collection of Chola bronzes which includes the
popular dancing Shiva Nataraj. However, the Chola
also were famed for their stone images, and the recent
addition to the collection of the voluptuous lion-headed
goddesss Pratyangira demonstrates the superb skills of
early Tamil Nadu artisans.
The Gallery’s collection of Hindu art has been enriched
by the addition of these images of the Great Goddess,
one of the most revered deities who takes a wide variety
of forms, both benign and threatening. The centrality of
female deities, alone or paired with male gods as consorts
and shaktis, has been surprisingly under-represented in
the Gallery’s collection. The Chola sculptures join works
in paper, textile and stone featuring Durga, the demon
slaying goddess. In another recent purchase, Lakshmi,
the Goddess of Abundance is shown in a lithe sensual
embrace with her consort Vishnu.
Another aspect of the art of the Indian sub-continent
which has been a target of recent acquisitions is Islamic art.
The Gallery has good holdings of richly decorated textiles
displaying Mughal designs, ornamentation which is also
present in Islamic architecture and other arts. An intricate
openwork pierced stone screen from the 17th century
reign of great Mughal emperor-architect Shah Jahan
– remembered best for his architectural masterpiece, the
Taj Mahal – demonstrates the shared imagery: the design
of floral buds within a diagonal grid, subtly set within a
mihrab arch is found on numerous early Indian textiles in
the collection, examples of which will be displayed in this
section of the Indian Gallery. The jali screen is presented so
that visitors can appreciate the quality of the stone carving
on both front and back surfaces.
In the new entrance-level Indian Gallery recent
acquisitions join old favourites. In juxtaposing works of
different media – stone, wood, paper, metal and cloth
– visitors are introduced the spectacular art of South Asia
through fine examples of key images from the major
strands of Indian culture and religion. In this process
existing holdings in the collection are enhanced by
conversations with new works located close by, such as
the huge 12th-century Pala dynasty stone stele depicting
a majestic Vishnu flanked by two diminutive images of
his consorts Lakshmi and Sarasvati, now shown beside
the newly acquired panel showing Vishnu and Lakshmi
in a dynamic embrace of more earthly proportions. The
addition of recently acquired works also encourages a
deeper appreciation of the range of cultural, religious
and stylistic representation and imagery in the art of the
Indian sub-continent. Along with the physical move to a
more central and accessible location off the main foyer,
it is hoped that the displays in the new Indian Gallery will
more successfully engage, excite and inform visitors about
the arts of Asia. a
Gandhara region, Pakistan
Standing bodisattva
300ad stone
Canberra
Vijayanagara period,
Tamil Nadu, India
Door guardian (dvarapala)
15th century stone
Canberra
Shah Jahan period,
Mughal empire, India
Open-worked pierced
screen (jali) 1628-1658
red sandstone
Canberra
Robyn Maxwell
Senior Curator, Asian Art
artonview
winter 2006
55
conser vation
The Mermaid’s Tale
Dr H Maulana Pangkuningrat,
Sultan Sepuh of Cirebon,
Indonesia with the Skirt cloth
at the opening of Crescent
Moon: Islamic art and
civilisation in Southeast Asia
Cirebon, Indonesia
Skirt cloth
19th century
commercial cotton fabric,
natural dyes; hand-drawn
batik
Conserved with the
assistance of the Maxwell
family in memory of Anthony
Forge 2005
Situated on the north coast of west Java, the royal
palace Kraton Kasepuhan in Cirebon is one of the
oldest surviving royal centres in Indonesia. The art of
the sultanate incorporates an exciting range of regional
and international motifs. The distinctive Cirebon designs
draw on ancient indigenous symbols, Hindu Javanese
narratives, and a strong Chinese influence in compositions
of layered rocks and clouds. Fanciful landscapes are
often depicted in carving, stone, metalwork, textiles,
and painted on the sheaths of ceremonial keris daggers.
Such scenes are thought to have been inspired by the
18th-century royal retreat Sunyaragi in Cirebon, although
they also appear on intricately carved panels in the royal
palace collection dating from as early as the 16th century.
This rocky landscape, however, is most often depicted on
cotton batiks of the Cirebon region. The fragrant garden
designs (taman sari or taman arum) comprise horizontal
bands of rocky mountains, filled with a mixture of real
and mythical creatures. Shrines for pilgrims and grottos
for meditation can often be found among the mountain
peaks and forest groves.
Worn by men and women of the royal court, this
rare 19th-century skirt cloth displays the distinctive
blues, purples and pinks of Cirebon natural dyes. Close
inspection reveals elephants, spotted kijang deer, snakes
and serpents, rabbits, monkeys, other quadrupeds
– possibly the kancil mouse-deer or babi rusa wild
boar – various types of birds and, in between, fish and
crustaceans swim in pools among the lotuses. The most
prominent figure in the design is the shrimp mermaid
archer, Dewi Urang Ayu, daughter of a great sea god and
the wife of the Mahabharata hero Bima. The appearance
of shrimps on local batik may be an allusion to the name
of the port city, Cirebon, which translates as Shrimp River.
In Java different batik-making regions developed
distinctive styles and dye combinations. This textile is
typical of the area around Cirebon, which was renowned
for the quality of its hand-drawn wax batik. During much
of the 20th century, however, Cirebon batik production
was in decline and it was only in the 1960s and 70s that
the region’s distinctive batik styles, especially the fragrant
garden designs, were revived.
When the Gallery purchased this extraordinary textile
in 1989 it was stained and had many holes as well as
extensive splits and 28 cobbled repairs throughout the
work. While small sections of the textile’s unusual design
have been published, its display was hampered by its
poor physical condition. In 2003 it was possible to display
only a section of the cloth in the Gallery’s exhibition Sari
to Sarong: 500 years of Indian and Indonesian textile
exchange.
Seven different types of stitch repairs, in a range of
threads and executed with varying sewing ability, were
identified on the batik. Close examination of these repairs
allowed us to formulate a textile repair history, piecing
together its use by different owners. The repairs, although
holding the textile together, caused additional problems
of creasing and distortion and were removed as part of its
treatment. The initial conservation of the work focussed
primarily on cleaning and realignment, and was followed
by extensive structural repair of splits and holes. The
entire top third of the cloth was found to be completely
detached from the rest of the textile.
Early on, spot treatment of isolated stains was
undertaken and then all original repairs were carefully
removed, releasing the areas of puckering. The textile was
then placed on a suction table and, section by section,
flushed with cleaning solution. While this washing method
removed the overall discolouration from the fibres, it also
enabled the creases to be carefully relaxed and flattened,
allowing the distorted areas of the design to be realigned.
Then it was possible to join the sections of the textile and
to fill in areas of loss by fixing patches of cotton fabric
to the back of the textile using a fully reversible adhesive
heat set method.
The spectacular textile, fondly known by the
conservation department at the Gallery as the mermaid
batik, was a centrepiece of the recent exhibition, Crescent
Moon: Islamic art and civilisation in Southeast Asia, shown
at the Art Gallery of South Australia, in Adelaide and the
National Gallery of Australia, Canberra. a
Before treatment
long horizontal tears and
loss in top right-hand corner
Before treatment (detail)
old stitch repairs, tears
and in-ground grime
After treatment (detail)
textile cleaned and new
adhesive fabric repair
Charis Tyrrel
Textile Conservator
Robyn Maxwell
Senior Curator, Asian Art
artonview
winter 2006
57
1
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15
faces in view
1 Barbara Poliness, Maria Gravias and Leanne Burrows from the Department of Communications, Information Technology and the Arts at the opening
of Crescent Moon: Islamic art and civilisation in Southeast Asia
Impressions of land, sea and sky
2 Senators Bob Brown and Christine Milne with guests at the opening of Constable:
3 AGSA Curator of Asian Art and Crescent Moon curator James Bennett with Richard and Mary Owens at the
Crescent Moon Members night
4 Constable co-curators Anna Gray, NGA Assistant Director, Australian Art and British art scholar John Gage at
the media launch of Constable
5 NGA Senoir Curator, Photography Gael Newton and Assistant Director, Access Services Adam Worrall with artists
Paula Dawson and David Sequeira at the opening of Constable
6 Gallery Council Members Lee Liberman, Roslynne Bracher and Roslyn Packer at
the opening of Crescent Moon
7 NGA Director Ron Radford, Prime Minister of New Zealand Helen Clark and Senior Curator, Aboriginal and Torres
Strait Islander Art Brenda Croft
8 AGNSW Head Curator of Asian Art Jackie Menzies with QAG Head of Asian, Pacific and International Art Suhanya
Raffel at the opening of Crescent Moon
opening of Crescent Moon
12 Forecast: Art and Fashion
9 Former Ambassador of the Republic of Korea HE Mr Cho Sang-hoon and Mrs Cho with guests at the
10 Anna Gray presenting Helen Clark with a Constable exhibition catalogue
13 Forecast: Art and Fashion
Chairman Tony Berg and Carol Berg
11 Sculpture Garden Sunday
14 Gallery Council Member Ashley Dawson-Damer with former Gallery Foundation
15 Sculpture Garden Sunday
Bremner at the farewell dinner for Tony Berg
14
16 NGA Voluntary Guide Rosanna Hindmarsh, Jennifer Prescott and Maureen
access ser vices
The Collection Study Room
Voluntary Guides,
Els Sondaal and Phoebe
Jacobi, and Collection Study
Room Officer, Joanne TuckLee, view an illustrated book
by Gilbert and George in
the Collection Study Room
Voluntary Guides, Sylvia
Shanahan, Setsuko Kennedy
and Jan Smith, view a
collection of works by
Gilbert and George in the
Collection Study Room
As set out in the Director’s Vision Statement for
the Gallery, ‘the collections have long outgrown the
building and lack of display space is overwhelmingly the
Gallery’s greatest problem’. Meeting public demand for
access to a collection of over 110,000 works in a building
originally designed to house only a thousand leads to
an increasing reliance on resources such as travelling
exhibitions, the internet and storage study facilities.
With over ninety per cent of the National Collection
now in storage, the Collection Study Room (CSR) remains
one of the Gallery’s most popular research facilities since
its establishment in 1984. It is a free service for anyone
wishing to view works of art not on display or on loan.
The number of collection study rooms in Australia and
overseas is increasing and involve staff from curatorial,
conservation, art storage, education, public programs
and visitors’ services departments. Many institutions
provide specialist services. For example, they might
concentrate on works on paper or limit access to tertiary
students or qualified researchers. However, the nature of
a collection that belongs to the nation justifies an attempt
to process as many collection access requests as possible.
The Gallery’s study room adjoins the on-site storage
facilities and is utilised by staff, researchers, curators from
other galleries, student groups, art and craft societies
and members of the public. The most frequent request
for the CSR is The Rajah quilt, an iconic work produced
by convict women on board The Rajah, during its journey
towards Hobart Town in 1841. The quilt, which has
captured the imagination of visitors since its acquisition
in 1989, is too light-sensitive for regular exhibition and
has only been accessible through CSR request. At 325.0
x 337.2 cm in size, it is too large for the study room
tables and remains folded in its box during viewings. The
Gallery’s textile conservation staff, having spent several
years researching the techniques and fabrics used in the
quilt, recently advised that it will only be brought out
once a year for public requests due to its fragility and
the resources involved in transporting and displaying it.
‘Unfolded: the Rajah Quilt on view’ is a CSR initiative,
whereby the quilt will be unfolded and displayed for
viewing between 11am and 12pm daily, 7–13 August 2006
(additional talks will be advertised in the events calendar).
Public talks are regularly held in the CSR, allowing
visitors to learn about the collection, particularly those
works of art, such as illustrated books, that are difficult
to view in their entirety when on display. Visitors are
encouraged to refer to the Gallery’s online catalogue
and publications (many of which are also available
online) to select the works that they wish to view, and
will be referred to the appropriate curator if specialist
expertise is required. Some works of art will be too
large, fragile or light-sensitive to be available for private
viewings, but it is always worth asking. To closely inspect
the detail of a watercolour that is not under glass, or
a rare book of botanical prints in its original box, is
all part of the Collection Study Room experience. a
Joanne Tuck-Lee
Collection Study Room Officer
For Collection Study Room bookings, phone
(02) 6240 6524 or email csr@nga.gov.au. The catalogue
is available online at nga.gov.au/CollectionSearch
reawaited
refurbished
B A R T O N
• Canberra’s Premier
Boutique Heritage
Hotel (est 1927)
• 4 Star Property
• Located within
the Parliamentary
Triangle
• Close to All Major
Attractions
• Bar & Licensed
Restaurant
• Foxtel (Heritage
Rooms only)
• 24 Hour reception
refreshed
regard
open seven days
lunch
12.00–2.30 pm
weekend brunch
9.30–11.30 am
available for private events
t: 02 6240 6666
John Constable: Impressions of Land, Sea and Sky
National Gallery of Australia until 12th June 2006
2 IMPRESSIONS AT ONCE!
PICASSO AND PASTA PACKAGE.
Stay in a fully self contained apartment in the heart of Lygon
Street Carlton – Australia’s Restaurant capital - with over 300
restaurants, cafes, coffee shops and boutiques at your door.
Walk off the extra calories around the National Gallery of
Victoria Picasso Exhibition.
Salisbury Cathedral
from Bishops grounds
1863
The National Gallery
is a short Walk away.
The Brassey of Canberra
Belmore Gardens and Macquarie Street, Barton ACT 2600
Telephone: 02 6273 3766 • Facsimile: 02 6273 2791
Toll Free Telephone: 1800 659 191
Email: info@brassey.net.au http: //www.brassey.net.au
CANBERRAN OWNED AND OPERATED
Package includes:
2 nights accommodation in a 1 bedroom apartment
2 adult passes to the Picasso exhibition
1st July – 8th October 2006
Subject to availability (No availability during AFL Finals)
When booking please quote – “Picasso and Pasta”
$350.00 all inclusive
Phone: 03 9349 9700 Email: questclocktower@questapartments.com.au
255 Drummond Street, Carlton Vic 3053
THE FINE ART OF
HOSPITALITY
FOR AN INDULGENT GETAWAY
CALL 13 1234 OR BOOK AT HYATT.COM
C OMMONWEALTH AVENU E YAR R ALUMLA ACT
TELEPH ONE
the bell gallery proudly presents our 2006 ‘winter’
exhibition with a special selection of fine paintings
and sculpture starting sunday 18th june from 11am
02 6270 1234 EMAIL c anb er ra@ hyatt.co m.au
c anb er r a. p ar k . hyat t . c om
4 AUGUST – 3 SEPTEMBER 2006
HEREAFTER
IMANTS TILLERS
Chapman Gallery Canberra
31 Captain Cook Crescent Manuka 2603
Hours: Wed to Sun 11am–6pm
Tel: 02 6295 2550 www.chapmangallery.com.au
Imants Tillers Portrait of a thought 101.6 x 213.36 cm 2005
Indigenous arts and craft * books and
catalogues * calendars and diaries * prints
and posters * gifts * jewellery * fine art cards
* accessories * desirable objects * toys
Gallery Shop open 7 days 10am–5pm
Phone 02 6240 6420
ngashop.com.au
New bags from Melbourne Designer Nicola Cerini $105 - $140
S E E A M A S T E R P I E C E C O M E T O L I F E.
A magnificent expression of modern architecture, The Waterfront has already
experienced unprecedented demand. Construction is now underway, so this
is the ideal time to secure your place at Canberra’s most prestigious address,
located on the banks of Lake Burley Griffin.
To learn more about this residential work of art, visit The Waterfront
Marketing Suite today.
View The Waterfront Marketing Suite and Display Apartment, open daily 1-5pm.
6668_2
On The Lake - Cnr Wentworth Avenue & Telopea East, Kingston Foreshore
Call 1800 098 831
w w w.the-water front.com.au
SPECIAL MEMBERS’ VIEWING
9 – 30 August Wednesdays 6pm
This annual lecture series showcases the latest work
of renowned Australian architects.
9 August
Andrew Andersons from Peddle, Thorpe and Walker, Sydney
16 August
Luigi Rosselli, Sydney
23 August
Tim Jackson from Jackson Clements Burrows, Melbourne
30 August
Shaun Lockyer from Arkhefield, Brisbane
$60 Series; $50 members/RAIA/concession
$20 Single; $15 members/RAIA/concession
Presented in association with the ACT Chapter RAIA
Sponsored by BCA Solutions
Bookings essential James O Fairfax Theatre
National Gallery of Australia, Canberra
Mr Ron Radford AM, Director
requests the pleasure of your company at a Members Viewing of
Saturday 15 July 2006 6pm
The evening will commence with an introduction to the exhibitions
in the James O Fairfax Theatre by
Followed by a viewing of the exhibitions
Members /guests $40
Light refreshments
Limited tickets – bookings essential
RSVP 5 July 2006 (acceptances only)
Phone 02 6240 6528
Imants Tillers The hyperborean and the speluncar 1986 oilstick, oil and synthetic polymer paint on 130 canvasboards Cruthers collection, Perth
Michael Riley Untitled, from the series Cloud [feather] taken 2000 printed 2005 pigment prints, ultrachrome chromogenic inks on Ilford Gallery Pearl
photographic paper Purchased 2005 National Gallery of Australia, Canberra Reproduced courtesy of the Michael Riley Foundation and VISCOPY, Australia
Photo: John Gollings Richmond House, Jackson Clements Burrows
Dr Deborah Hart, Senior Curator, Australian Paintings and Sculpture
and
Brenda L Croft, Senior Curator, Aboriginal & Torres Strait Islander Art
artonview
artonview
ISSUE
N o . 4 6
I S S U E N o . 4 6 w in t e r 2 0 0 6
w i n t e r
2 00 6
N A T I O N A L G A L L E R Y O F A U S TR A L I A
imants tillers • michael riley • James Rosenquist

imants tillers # michael riley # james rosenquist

Transcription

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