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the art life

"...it's just like saying 'the good life'".

Well Fancy That #10

Monday, May 28, 2007
"The free-form patchwork of [Kitty] Kantilla's paintings, the sheer delight in mark-making, can, for instance, remind one of Van Gogh's landscape drawings, with their idiosyncratic profusion of dashes and dots applied without predetermined formulas. The trembling lines that fade in and out, meanwhile, can make one think of the hesitant outlines and ambivalent spatial effects of Giorgio Morandi...

[...]

"...[Judith] Ryan, whose curating of the show and catalogue essay are otherwise brilliant, to compare Kantilla's aesthetic to Western minimalism, to Western modernism's interest in grids, and to ideas such as "the integrity of the surface" and the "autonomy of art"; she even speaks of Kantilla's "greatness as a conceptual artist".

"This sort of talk may be reassuring to some, but it makes me deeply uneasy. Art is done a disservice when too much is claimed for it. Elaborate arguments can be made to back the kinds of claims Ryan makes, but in the end, who does it benefit? Why does the art need it? Does it not, in fact, stretch credulity and risk having a counterproductive effect?"


Sebastian Smee, Remembrance of things past, The Australian, May 26-27.

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Say What



Pulp Fiction In Typography by Jarratt Moody. From YouTube.

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Well Fancy That #9

"[An Incomplete World: Works from the UBS Art Collection] is dominated by fashionable photo-artists such as Morimura, Andreas Gursky, Thomas Ruff, Thomas Struth and Cindy Sherman. All have made their names in the arena of contemporary art, where their large, glossy pictures are valued for their conceptual qualities, or perhaps the way they fill a wall in a modern apartment.

Most professional photographers are mystified by the success of these banal or grossly theatrical images. Gursky's 1999 photograph of an American 99 cent store may have sold for more than $US3 million at auction but it is the kind of picture anyone with a good camera and a passing acquaintance with Photoshop could have taken. The art lies in the laboratory, which has allowed the artist to produce a print more than three meters long."

John McDonald, Money slips into the picture, Spectrum, Sydney Morning Herald. May 26-27, 2007.

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Art Life On Your TV

Friday, May 25, 2007


The Art Life is now a three-part TV series. The first episode Out There will screen on your ABC, at 10pm on Tuesday, June 12th. Episode 2 - Millions of Images - on June 19 and Episode 3 - Always Busy Dying - on June 26. We've just been informed that there will be a number of press reviews leading up to the screening of the first ep in the usual places including - uh oh - in the Review section of The Australian. Remember all those things we said about The Oz, Seb Smee and all the others? Well, we were drunk - yes, drunk!

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Noh New York

Wednesday, May 23, 2007
Regular Art Life reader Ian Houston is now our semi-official New York correspondent. For a follow up to his previous postings, Mr. Houston writes to us on the exhibition High Times Hard Times New York Painting 1967 –1975 at National Academy of Art NYC, curated by Katy Siegel.

Where did it all go wrong? There was a time when canvas painting was the highest expression of contemporary art. We knew this because Clement Greenberg told us so. But nothing lasts forever. The history of Greenberg’s theory of formalism and the extraordinary hold it took on world art is well known. What is not so widely discussed is what happened to painting in the aftermath of Greenberg’s fall from grace, as it faced the challenges of minimalism, conceptualism and the rise of sculpture as the critically acknowledged “pre-eminent” art form. Which is a shame, because as we all know, most parties are much more interesting once the last wine cask bladders have been emptied and people start eyeing the cooking sherry. Desperation takes hold and people try things they would never have dreamed of at the start of the evening. That’s the way it was at the end of the sixties, as painters, freed from the straightjacket of Greenbergian formalism and in response to the political foments of Vietnam, Kent state and the Summer of Love™, tried to make painting matter again. Sure they failed, but what a glorious failure it was. High Times Hard Times is an exhibition devoted to examining this explosion of method, technique and theory as painters and painting tried to make sense of a “new world order” that seemed to have left it behind.


Alan Shields, Whirling Dervish, 1968-70.
Acrylic and thread on canvas over wood, 38x107" d.


The National Academy of Art on Park Ave is the loneliest place on museum mile. No surprise really, given that its across the road from the Met, next door to the Guggenheim and a block away from about half a dozen other galleries, all showing blockbuster artists with mega million dollar paintings whilst its rooms are filled with a bunch of paint stained rags by some drug addled hippies. Which is why the staff here are probably all so surprised to see me. Once they have ascertained that I am actually here to look at a lot of very obscure abstract art from the seventies, they practically fall over themselves to make my trip as comfortable as possible, stuffing my hands with brochures, discount cards and maps whilst privately shaking their heads at the foolishness of my passion.


Cesar Paternost, El Sur, 1969.
Acrylic on canvas, 48in x 48in x 4 3/4".

Sadly, despite the help offered by the staff, the venue itself is wildly inappropriate for these kind of works, with the curves of its neo baroque walls leaving larger canvases jutting uncomfortably from the surface and the rooms being too small to give some of the more expansive works the kind of space they’re insane aesthetics require. But that’s alright I tell myself, because many of these pieces would have been completely forgotten, stuffed in the archive warehouses of public and private collections across the land, were it not for this show.

The exhibition is arranged in a rough chronology grouped around responses to general themes, be that political interventions, abstract formalism or the impact of video as a new medium, though the sheer randomness of some of the work makes them close to unclassifiable. But this is the least we should expect from the “Brown acid” generation. After all this crazy group of kids were working in the shadow of one of the great flowerings of American culture, from the development of Be Bop, free jazz, the poetry of the beats right through to the New York school of abstraction, New York had become the cultural capital of the world. Yet this legacy had been secured through a series of shattering academic shifts that, at the same time as ensuring the avant garde’s legitimacy, would have to be paid for with a kind of theoretical end game that would eventually herald the nihilism of Post Modernism. So it is easy to view this collection, with the benefit of hindsight as a kind of last gasp art of desperation by people who had become marginalised by theories ascent to instigation rather than investigation.


Ree Morton, Untitled (stretcher piece), 1971-73.
Mixed media 21in x 21 1/2 in x 66in.


The first room starts gently enough. Here we see the initial stirring of dissent at the strictures of Greenbergian formalism. Unsurprisingly, given the literalness of the theory they seek to usurp, they are a very literal form of rebellion. Cesar Paternosto refused to paint on the front surface of the canvas instead decorating the edges of the stretcher frame with hard edge compositions. As juvenile as it at first seems, this refusal to dignify Greenberg’s ideal of the flat picture plane leads to works such as El Sur whose oblique beauty is found as you negotiate its “four sides” (though I would have needed a step ladder to see the upper side). This attack on the ideal of “flatness” was continued vigorously through a variety of modes. There are tent like canvases erected on the floor such as Alan Shield’s Whirling Dervish, or his Put a Name on it Please which consists of string, cotton belting and beads tied in fragile netting that maps the space of a canvas painting. Then there are paintings that refute the ideal notion of the canvas space by using stretchers that are made of things such as rough untreated pine logs – #13 by Peter Young or are literally hospital stretchers, Ree Morton's Untitled (stretcher piece) 1971. Other canvases feature punctures, cuts, bare stretchers or paint and medium applied directly to the wall or floor. Indeed every possible means of refuting Greenberg’s idea of purity seems to have been taken. Which must have made Clement feel kind of angry.


Harmony Hammond, Floorpiece V, 1973.
Fabric and Acrylic 59" d.

Feminism, naturally enough, was one of the primary motivational forces in this reappraisal of painting. Greenberg and the New York school painters were rightfully considered a bunch of prigs from the patriarchy, so the sisters would take any chance of upsetting the apple cart they could. To begin with many of these efforts were concerned with “flatness” and the Greenbergian ideal. But they soon took in a whole host of other concerns, including notions of gendered craft, the feminine body, the phallus and the materiality of the work. Harmony Hammond’s work was created from rags blankets and hand me downs. This included “Paintings" that were made from twisted rags woven into circular mats and then left to lie on the floor in a manner that looked very like a rug. Mary Heilman also used rags sewn together to make a “book” which she then spray painted black, The Book of the Night 1970, a particularly beautiful piece. Dorothea Rockburne, sought to make work that was intensely sensual and emotive as a revolt against the perceived intellectual rigour of Abstract Expressionism’s Platonic ideals. Her Intersection 1971, is a standout, crude oil is sandwiched between two very large sheets of plastic and left to lie on the floor. The smell of the crude fills the room whilst the oil lies inscrutable and black, bubbling with rainbow sheens at the edges of the work.


Carol Schneeman performing Body Collage in her loft on west 29th st NYC.


Film was also used as a means of inspiring and recontextualising painting’s practise. Painting performances were filmed in which tribalism, ritualistic behaviour, Dionysian frenzy and wah wah guitar were all encouraged in the kind of psychedelic frenzy that has kept “the summer of love” alive in the minds of teenage boys everywhere. Carol Schneeman’s Body Collage is emblematic of the period’s values. Schneemann paints her body with wall paper paste and molasses, runs, leaps, falls into and rolls through shreds of white printer's paper to create a scary hippy monster, which she relates to the moving image of a flayed body as standing for the devastation of Vietnam. Interestingly, she remained intent on holding onto these pieces of filmed art as “paintings”. She refers to this work as “as an exploded canvas, units of rapidly changing clusters.” Similarly Yayoi Kusama’s 1967 film Self Obliteration made with Jud Yalkut is a collection of scenes from indoor “happenings” cut through with footage filmed in New York’s central park, the whole being brought together with Kusama’s signature use of dots, which cover people and objects. The film features the orgiastic sexuality of the hippie peace and love culture in a performance of “painting” in which the bodies gestures and movement is linked to the notion of the abstract painting.


Roy Colmer, no 102, 1973.
Acrylic on canvas 75x60 inches.


The impact of video was huge. Not only in terms of its possibilities as a new medium but in terms of the aesthetic its grainy pixelated screen could reveal. A number of painters experimented with recreating these colours and tones with a painting that used “interference fields”, spray painted tonal works that replicate the texture of the video screen and its strangely luminous hypnotic appeal. Roy Colmer’s work explored the abstract qualities of video feedback both in video installation and on the canvas with a series of spray painted works that sought to replicate the “flow” of this phenomenon. Michael Venezia painted enormous canvases with Aluminum pigments and black enamel that resemble television static. Lawrence Stafford used spray guns to paint horizontal stripes across the canvas that would “interfere” with each other as they spread across the surface, creating bands of “static”.


Richard Tuttle, Diagram of 11th paper octagonal, 1973.

Perhaps my favourite work in the exhibition, if such a hegemonic perspective can be allowed, is Richard Tuttle’s 11th Paper Octagonal 1973, a piece of paper that has been cut out according to the instructions he had sent to the gallery and then stuck to the wall in a place that the curators found pleasing. There it was, a piece of white bond paper in a pleasing octagonal form, sitting peacefully on the wall, unaware of the ferment of ideas and politics that had elevated it to that place. It seemed to me to truly be an ineffable signifier, a white on white hole that led to a space of sublime implausibility. A rabbit hole to 1968, a world where ideas mattered in ways that we can no longer understand, though we wear their clothes, play their guitars and smoke their drugs.

It is peculiar to think of how this sentimentality for the idea of the painting, and the desire of these artists to hang onto it co-existed with a tremendous surge of rebellion in which the same artists would do whatever they could to contest the idea of it. It was as if, through the simple idea of making the term “Painting” all encompassing, they could ensure its legitimacy as a practise. This contested site could then become the metaphorical extension of their “thinking through” of the world. The work itself mattered less than its expansion into the theoretical domain and from there, into what could almost, be understood as a “praxis”. A place where their actions mattered because they had politicised the theoretical underpinnings of their practise. This perhaps is the great irony of Greenberg’s work, by invoking teleology he actually wakes Hegel from his slumber and gives birth to a whole generation of artists, who in a frenzy of antithetical gesture contradict Greenberg’s conclusions, yet make the dialecticism of his premise seem sound. If only I had of been there, with some flowers in my hair. Peace man.

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Watch this space




RULES OF ENGAGEMENT

Danius Kesminas (Aus)
Patrick Pound (NZ)
Gabrielle de Vietri (Aus)
Antoine Prum (Lux)
Dane Mitchell (NZ)
Azlan McLennan (Aus)

curated by Mark Feary

25 May - June 16 2007
Opening Thursday 24 May 6-8pm

West Space
Level 1 15 - 19 Anthony Street
Melbourne
Victoria 3000


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MOP
7th June - 24th June 2007
Opening Thursday 07 06 07 6 - 8 pm

GALLERY

A badge of musical devotion

Vicky Browne




PROJECT ROOM

Motion sickness: corpus music

Vera Hong
Craig Bender




MOP Projects
Hours: Thursday – Saturday 1 – 6 pm Sunday 1 – 5 pm
Room 16, Level 2, 617 Elizabeth Street Redfern Sydney

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Hannah Furmage

EVERYTHING IS UNDER CONTROL

June 2 - 30, 2007
Opening reception: Saturday June 2, 7-10pm

Raid Projects
602 Moulton Ave, Los Angeles, California 90031
Gallery Phone; 323 441 9593 email; raidprojects@yahoo.com

www.raidprojects.com
www.hannahfurmage.com


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Click to enlarge


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JAMES DORAHY PROJECT SPACE
is pleased to present

Frances Tatarovic / Ana Young
Yellowing to Black
29 May - 10 June 2007

Opening 30 May 2007 6pm - 8pm

JAMES DORAHY PROJECT SPACE Suite 4, 1st Floor, 111 Macleay St Potts Point NSW 2011 ph 0433 300 725
(enter 1st door in Orwell St) www.jamesdorahy.com.au Tuesday - Sunday 11am - 6pm Wednesday 2pm - 8pm


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Exhibition Opening: Barcelona Two Step
Sculpture & Installation by Mona Ryder

Horus and Deloris Contemporary Art Space
Opening Night: Wednesday 30th May, 6-8pm. Please join us for drinks!
Exhibition Dates: 31st May – 20th June, 2007

Address: Level 2, 102 Pyrmont Street,
Pyrmont New South Wales, 2009
Telephone/Facsimile +61 2 9660 6071
Gallery Director: Caroline Wales

"I'm Sorry, I Made A Mistake"



A 'film clip' was an ancient form of promotional video for pop groups. This film clip for David Byrne/Brian Eno's 's Mea Culpa [1981] is by the grandpappy of the found footage film, Bruce Conner. From YouTube.

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Can You Dance Like The Crew?

Monday, May 14, 2007

TEAM Art Life as they appeared in the 1983 smash hit Wild Style.


The Art Life returns on May 25th...

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One Door Closes...


Some people enjoying Loose opening nite April 5 2006


As Loose projects approaches it's closing exhibition in June, our friendly neighbour & landlord dLux Media Arts is seeking a new tenant for the room Loose has occupied.

The space can be used as a studio/workshop or gallery, with an internet connection included in the rent. rent: $220/wk plus gst Lease ends: 26 March 2008 but can be possibly extended. Lease: duration negotiable.

If interested please contact Solange Kershaw at dLux Media Arts

solange@dlux.org.au
t/ 02 0267 4777

meanwhile stay posted for Loose's climactic closing!

Loose projects

level 2
168 Day St
Darling Harbour, Sydney

gallery hours.
thursday and friday 12-5pm
saturday 1-6pm


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Portraits of Seminal Significance to the Aboriginal Movement
Juno Gemes Exhibits at Gosford Regional Gallery from 25 May


On the Eve of the 40th Anniversary of the 1967 Referendum Proof- Portraits from the Movement - by Juno Gemes will be opened at Gosford Regional Gallery by Indigenous Historian John Maynard and Founder of Link Up Oomera Edwards.



Photographer Juno Gemes will exhibit her unique collection of black and white photographs of Aboriginal people, documenting events and people over the past 30 years that have been of seminal significance to their empowerment. They will be exhibited at Gosford Regional Art Gallery from 25 May until 22nd July 2007.

A highly successful international and local touring exhibition, Juno Gemes website contains photographs on display along with catalogue essays pointing out the significance of her work.

Juno’s work is motivated by the desire to foster cultural respect for Aboriginal people, and promote Aboriginal culture and ideas that are of value to mainstream Australia. Her work is proof that a Aboriginal Movement for cultural respect existed. It is a visual history of this from her perspective.

Juno covered events in Northern Territory (e.g. the handing back of Uluru 1985); Alice Springs (a huge gathering of traditional people for ceremony in 2000 when a smoking ceremony by Uncle Max Stewart was performed to welcome back all those who had been stolen from their families); Central Australia (travel with aboriginal artists e.g. early Papunya painters); Mornington Island (working for 2 years with famous touring islander dancers); Brisbane (first national land rights action in 2000 on the eve of the Commonwealth Games); country NSW (significant community/political events e.g. debate about the Green Paper draft of Aboriginal Land Rights Legislation and documenting the famous Les Coe Memorial Football Match at Cowra); Sydney, (Redfern 1978 - the NADOC Day of Settlement- celebrated in a street fair in Redfern). There are also many portraits of inspirational figures from Aboriginal culture and politics e.g. Mum Shirl (Mrs Shirley Smith), Professor Marcia Langton, Gary Foley, Charles ( Kumajay) Perkins, Wandjuk Marika, Ernie Dingo.

Juno has wonderful support from members of the Aboriginal community throughout Australia and is highly regarded by historians and art historians for the work she has done photographically to document key events in their history.

“In Gemes images of protest and survival can be found an important part of the visual history of Aboriginal Australia in the late twentieth century.” David Hansen - Art - Australia.

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On behalf of WINNER PROJECTS i would like to invite you to make a short video for THE DAY JOB FILM FESTIVAL..(will be shown for one night in August 2007 at PACT theatre as part of quarterbred) I'm interested with what creatives do to pay their bills. So cut loose!

DETAILS: You must save the video as a Quicktime (.mov) file

THEME: Anything related to your dayjob.

STYLE: Any style you like... cynical, funny, serious, animation, interview, made up etc etc..whatever you do i am sure it will be rad...

DURATION: No more than 4 minutes

DUE DATE: 17 JULY 2007 all videos to be sent to me by the above date to give us ample time to put them all onto one disc..

SEND TO: Vicki Papageorgopoulos, Winner projects, 77 beaconsfield st, Revesby NSW 2212

MY EMAIL: vickipapa[at]gmail.com

DONT' FORGET: to send me a paragraph about your work when you send it to me...

Thank you
Vicki
[Winner projects]

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Art Galleries: As New, Hardly Used

Wednesday, May 09, 2007
Marcus Trimble, editor of top architecture blog Gravestmor completes his three part guest blog for The Art Life with this installment on new art galleries around the world. Please join us in thanking Mr. Trimble for his fine efforts and please enjoy...



Kunsthaus Bregenz, Peter Zumthor, Bregenz, Austria.


Sitting on the Austrian edge of Lake Bodensee, this gallery is a perfectly crafted little glass and concrete box by swiss uber dude, Peter Zumthor.



The exterior is clad in overlapping glass shingles sitting in stainless steel clips, giving the building an ephemeral, transparent quality. This forms a loosefit screen that allows daylight and into the gallery spaces within. This being a Swiss building built by Austrians, not one bit of glass or steel or anything is out of place. At night the building glows.



Within the glass facade are a series of concrete boxes forming the gallery spaces. Each floor is separated from the one below and above to allowing daylight to penetrate into the gallery spaces. The daylight is diffused through the space by a suspended glass ceiling. The galleries themselves are massive rooms without columns, the walls left in their raw concrete, providing a neutral backdrop - not unlike photoshop grey - to the art. Seen here during a Cindy Sherman show:



The Storefront for Art and Architecture, by Steven Holl and Vito Acconci, New York City


You art people may know Vito Acconci as that guy that used to masturbate under the ramp in the gallery, but here, in collaboration with architect Steven Holl he was responsible for creating a most interesting gallery space. The gallery is situated in the undercroft of a building, and is a wedge of space that is about 4m wide at its widest and narrows down to half a metre at its end.

Acconci and Holl, put up a long fibro-clad wall to the street enclosing the space. This wall has a series of variously shaped cutouts that spin along their horizontal and vertical axis. In the closed position, they form a wall to the street, and completely enclose the gallery space, and in the open position they open out onto the street, effectively doubling the gallery space by inhabiting the street.



The effect is rather nice.




Incidentally, May 29th sees the beginning of a week long event, Postopolis, will be taking place at the Storefront where a bunch of architecture bloggers get crazy in the rotating planes.

The Museum of 21st Century Art, by SANAA in Kanazawa.


This is the awesome. Bearing in mind that it is a pretty fluid list; this is probably on my top five buildings of all time list. The literature tells us that it is a gallery devoted to art of the 21st Century, however when we visited, there was a retrospective of Gerhard Richters work so go figure.



The Kanazawa Museum sits in a park over the road from the Kenrokuen gardens - noted as being one of Japans Top 3 Gardens. It is a large cylinder with a bunch of blocks thrown in and a couple of courtyards punched out for good measure. Like much of SANAA's work, this building is a built diagram. The boxes are the gallery spaces, the glass cylinder that surrounds them forms the circulation space.



As each of the boxes is a separate entity, the curators of the shows may devise how the galleries are filled and how people move between them according to each show, thereby making each visit to the gallery a new experience.



Like, the Kunsthaus in Bregenz and unlike the Storefront, this is a meticulously crafted building. In order to maintain the clarity of the diagram, of the idea, it has to be. The slightly curved glass and ultrafine steel structure give the building the sense of being a model, something made of paper.

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Spiral Jetty [1970]

Monday, May 07, 2007


Robert Smithson's Spiral Jetty film, 1970. From Youtube [and perhaps not for much longer, so hurry...]

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Fairs Fare

Friday, May 04, 2007
This is our second last, or if you prefer, "penultimate" guest blog until we return full time in mid May. It's from a long time reader of the our blog. Please enjoy


Carl Andre, Floor Piece, Art Cologne.




Dear the art life,

As you are, at the moment accepting unsolicited postings to your Blog I thought I would use this as an opportunity to inveigle your readers with some impressions and images of my recent trip to Germany. I was there, as were many colleagues, curators and collectors to participate in among other things, ART Cologne. This annual event is according to its own publicity the world’s oldest Art Fair and currently includes hundreds of galleries, numerous museums, publishers and magazines. This year it was one of several similarly organised fairs taking place in and around the city such as ‘dc’ an abbreviation of Düsseldorf Contemporary and Liste Cologne. It is very difficult to convey accurately a sense of the scale of these extravaganzas to an audience unfamiliar with them except by stating that the foyer of ART Cologne is about the size of the new Gallery of Modern Art in Brisbane. The visitor enters by ascending a vast set of stairs, proceeding down equally gigantic marble floored halls where ultimately they are greeted by what seems like a flock of Lufthansa hostesses, who pass the admittance ticket (20 euros if you don’t have a freebie) through a scanner before checking bags for incendiary devices, purloined artworks or other proscribed material.


Tickets please... entrance to Art Cologne


Inside unfolds a series of displays; some are museum standard curated overviews of very recent art. More usually it is one or two works from artists represented by those galleries with sufficient financial resources to enable participation in what, when ones totals up transport costs, the hire and fitting out of the stand, travel and accommodation must be a very, very expensive undertaking. This year from Australia those galleries were STILLS and Conny Dietzschold both from Sydney and each presenting a selection of artists represented by them. As approximately half the work in all the fairs dealt in one way or another with photography, video or other similar technologically based art forms the broad selection of positions advocated by the artists represented at STILLS found an enthusiastic audience, with strong works by Pat Brassington, Peter Volich and Merilyn Fairskye.

I suppose that what seemed really evident to most visitors was that currently interest in photographs of events or things has been more or less eclipsed by an engagement with events or things that take the form of photographs. There were, as you would expect some really fantastic examples of the former with massive, absolutely drop dead gorgeous works by Candida Hoffer including a series of images from Buenos Aries at Galeri K from Oslo. These sumptuous images however looked like money on the wall: but old money and not in the way in which this expression is usually used. I mean ‘old money’ in the sense of redundant currency: valuable historically but unspendable like pounds, shillings and pence became after the introduction of the dollar.


Jakob Koerfer, Capitol Theatre, Dortmund, 1950



The feeling that an epoch in the photographically negotiated picture (for want of a better term) is over was heightened not only by the presence of much more conceptually interesting digital work or painstakingly realized faux photographs, usually some sort of montage but also prescient selections of vintage material such as Jacob Koerfer’s Capitol Theatre Dortmund (1950) shown at Sabine Schmidt Galerie, which worked to contextualize much photography of the past 20 years as a form of heightened technical competency: albeit beautiful but still something caught in the glass of the camera lens in the way in which Jurassic insects were fossilized in amber. Either way references to the moment of photography’s origin and the potential of what Foucault describes as pseudo-paintings were evidence of the new literacy coalescing around the digital image, contributing to the increasing sentiment that it’s day in the sun was dawning.

There were plenty of paintings and sculptures covering the wide range of stylistic and formal positions that have been elaborated over millennia of these activities and some imagery usually (again) montaged photographs, maps, newspapers or other form of printed matter that in one way or another endeavored to expand upon this rich inheritance - or poison chalice - depending on which way you look at the accumulation of historical material that constitutes the western tradition.


Hiroyuki Masuyama, Caspar David Friedrich.


A characteristic example of this would be Hiroyuki Masuyama’s Caspar David Friedrich series in which the he took several hundred photographs of the same locations painted by Friedrich, which the Japanese conceptual artist then used to re-create the paintings in every detail as light-boxes in the exact size of the Friedrich paintings. An exercise that in no way exceeded in complexity or originality the average higher school certificate art work which probably explains both why most real people are more interested in the dynamic and innovative imagery generated by gaming programmers than artists and why conceptualists would be advised to read more literature and fewer texts. Which is not to say that the old dudes were not pumping out some interesting décor as Carl Andre’s funky metallic tape floor environment at Konrad Fischer’s stand at Düsseldorf Contemporary evidenced. Proving once at for all if disco is not dead than at least it is no longer mortal.

Hey thanks. Take care and like Lassie… come home soon.

Gary Carsley

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This Is Modern Art

Thursday, May 03, 2007
Radio National’s arts program Art Works recently asked The Art Life to contribute to their series of essays on paintings that have had an influence on writers. We didn’t have to think for very long to know exactly which painting we wanted to write about. Here is an expanded version of the piece which will go to air in the very near future:


George Stubbs A Lion Attacking A Horse was painted sometime around 1765. The title describes exactly what’s happening in the picture - a white stallion is being torn apart by a ferocious lion. The action takes place in a starkly theatrical landscape of willowy, wind swept trees and distant hazy mountains. The horse is majestic but doomed, the lion, a ravaging monster. It’s Claude Lorraine meets Lord of The Rings. The painting is in the collection of the National Gallery of Victoria and that’s where we first encountered it in the early 1980s.



George Stubbs, A lion attacking a horse, c. 1765.
Oil on canvas, 60x100 cms.
Collection of the National Gallery of Victoria.


A Lion Attacking A Horse isn’t a masterpiece and it’s not the greatest Stubbs. The famed equestrian artist – who lived between 1724 and 1806 - painted this scene 17 times over the course of three decades while working on his bread and butter jobs of painting his patron’s horses, dogs and families. These somewhat atypical paintings were an attempt by Stubbs to tackle a serious subject - and to be taken seriously by the English art world of the Enlightenment. A Lion Attacking A Horse was intended as an elaborate metaphor of the sublime - an artful deployment of 18th century special effects. Upon looking at this scene the viewer was supposed to experience feelings of dread, apprehension and fear - and from this a further sensation of guilty pleasure - rather like watching the Titanic sink on the cinema screen, the audience experiencing a weird mixture of horror and sick fascination. As the catalogue for the exhibition Stubbs - A Celebration explained:


"Edmund Burke’s popular concept of the Sublime [was that] the thrill engendered by violent subjects [...] were awesome in their terrible beauty. When it showed terror, the horse — powerful, beautiful, and noble as man himself — exemplified the Sublime. The horse’s shock at encountering the lion reflected the viewer’s own. [...] In Stubbs’s time, the horse was regarded as a noble creature, closest to man in physical perfection and sensibility. The lion symbolized the primeval forces of unbound, often brutal nature. Stubbs’s series unusually presents a moral theme: it is the struggle, not the inevitable defeat that matters. Because he fights to the end, the noble, unyielding horse ultimately prevails."


Meaning in an artwork isn’t fixed –it changes over time as one idea or concept drops out of fashion as another takes over. For us, when we first saw it, A Lion Attacking A Horse, was a fantasy picture, a literal Surrealist nightmare. Now we look at it as a picture with a wealth of hidden meanings and metaphors. It was created partly in the tradition of Enlightenment painting, looking to classical subjects for inspiration and moral guidance, yet it has strong Romantic overtones. Stubbs is said to have been inspired by an ancient pre-Hellenistic sculpture he had seen on a visit to Rome. But some art historians have suggested his picture is more likely the result of something he had seen in reproduction. In that regard, A Lion Attacking A Horse is a precursor of modern painting, an idea or concept given form without regard to reality, even if - by coincidence - the landscapes in his horse and lion paintings comes from a real place called Creswell Crag in Nottinghamshire. Stubbs mixed Romanticism and Neo Classicism together to come up with his signature image, a hybrid picture that doesn’t fully belong to any single tradition but instead betrays the peculiar imagination of an artist who wanted to be part of the bigger picture of concept and fashion.


George Stubbs, A Horse Frightened by a Lion, 1770.
Oil on canvas.
Collection: Walker Art Gallery.
National Museums Liverpool

Stubbs was an artist with whom many contemporary artists working today could identify. His work was unfashionable because although he was recognised as a master craftsman, his work didn’t properly conform to the Royal Academy’s hierarchy of genres – which was basically history painting at the top, pictures of animals and nature at the bottom. If you were to prove yourself as an academy artist, then you would need to not only paint in a particular style to demonstrate you had the skills, you would also need to include a set of prescribed visual cues such as a suitable historical subject chosen to metaphorically illustrate a contemporary event, and you would need to populate your paintings with people, not animals. Stubbs and his horses just didn’t rate.

The artist had made a number of career gaffs too. Stubbs didn’t live in London because his patron’s were out in the country so he was far from the action of the art world. He didn’t belong to the Royal Academy because although he had been technically accepted as a member, he just couldn’t bring himself to send in an example of his work for final approval. Instead, he chose to remain a member of the Society of Artists which was more like a trades union than a club for art world aristocracy. Stubbs was unfashionable in both art and attitude, and seems more like a loveable maverick more interested in doing things his way than the goofy country bumpkin he’s so often portrayed as having been. For artists working today who find themselves outside the fashionable art world, the parallels between Stubbs’s time and now are remarkable.


George Stubbs, White Poodle in a Punt, c. 1780.
Paul Mellon Collection


Stubbs has proven enduringly popular with the punters. Although he couldn’t break out of his commercial success – his career did offer him the dividends of loyal and generous patrons – he struggled to create much besides his equestrian art and his lions and horses. Although Stubbs made forays into quasi-Romantic subjects it’s interesting to note how his work and life were interpreted in the time after his death. He died without having had a biography written during his life time so much of his life’s detail was a speculative feast for future writers. The counter Romantic sentiment of the 19th Century cast Stubbs as a “real man” [read – not gay, not a fop] who not only painted horses, but he was a man who could carry a horse carcass on his back up three flights of stairs to his studio to draw it in various stages of dissection. His work was thought to have had a sort of utilitarian realism that eschewed frippery and metaphor. A horse was a horse in a Stubbs painting, or in the case of his paintings of pets, a dog was a dog. One biographer valorizing Stubbs’s ability to 'realistically' portray an animal without recourse to metaphor remarked “[Stubbs] never found an immortal soul in a poodle’s eye.” Oh dear, good dogs don’t get into heaven.


George Stubbs, Horse Attacked by a Lion. 1763
Oil on canvas.
Collection of Tate, London.

Postcards of the NGV’s version of A Lion Attacking A Horse have been on offer since it was purchased in 1949 and takes pride of place in the racks of the newly renovated NGV bookshop. Stubbs’s work still reaches out to people who like their art accessible and figurative. And this was more or less the way the painting was thought of when it was bought. The NGV had, in the late 19th and 20th century, gone on a purchasing program aimed at buying as many masterpieces as they could get their hands on. Thus works by Tintoretto, Van Dyck, Tiepolo, Reynolds, Gainsborough, Turner, Constable, Monet, Pissarro and Modigliani would up in Melbourne [along with the fake Rembrandt… oops.] The Felton Bequest – named for the rich Melbourne pharmaceutical dealer and art gallery benefactor Alfred Felton – used agents in Europe to spot works as they came up for sale. Working for the NGV in the late 1940 was none other than Lord Sir Kenneth Clarke who wrote to the then director of the NGV Daryl Lindsay saying that he had a purchase to recommend. "Pursuing our policy of buying minor English pictures,” Clarke wrote, “I have persuaded [gallery agent] A.J. L. McDonell to buy the Stubbs...There is rather too much space round the central group, but the group itself is marvellous, and had a great influence on the Romantic Movement; Gericault actually did a copy of it. I think it was cheap at 500 pounds, and personally would rather have it than a second rate Braque at 2,000 pounds.”

We were raised as devout Modernists, but A Lion Attacking A Horse has been for us a window through which we could discover the vast landscapes of pre-20th century art. When we tell people we love Stubbs they think we’re insane – isn’t he the guy who just painted horses? Sure, he was, but A Lion Attacking A Horse is a work of art whose metaphors are just as relevant now as they were in 1765. The metaphor of civilisation being destroyed by nature is about as topical as it gets. Oh – and one last thing: masterpieces are boring. Their meaning is circumscribed, your enjoyment of them overly determined by others. Non-canonical art works – modest works like A Lion Attacking A Horse – offer another history of art that’s waiting to be discovered. Forget Picasso, forget Rembrandt – go Stubbs.

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