Ron Dowd – Art and Psyche

I checked out the current Peter Booth exhibition at Rex Irwin Gallery last weekend, and it did not disappoint. Here’s Man in cardboard, which I’d been surveying (on the invitation that’s currently gracing our fridge) for a few weeks before visiting the show.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Tags: art

Tags: art, photography

Tags: art, photography

Finally, in this series of four posts on the field, here’s a painting of my own from 2005, painted during a period of strong interest in the noumenal field.

Ron Dowd
Field Painting 2005 (40 x 40 cm)

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

a cambered green
fringed by dark trees

field of luminous shoots
delicate, massed

bright spring growth
lit from the soil

signal low and mute

a swathe of soft light radiating

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

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

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

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

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

Tags: art, noumenal field

Last weekend I visited Ken Unsworth’s moving tribute to his wife Elizabeth – a self-funded installation encompassing several gallery spaces and a complete ballroom – all built inside the Turbine Shop at Sydney’s Cockatoo Island. The show started with a private function for nearly 200 people, involving performance pieces and a banquet, on 28 May 2009.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Tags: art

The Guardian (UK) is abuzz at present with articles on Richard Long, the British sculptor whose “time has come” as one of them says. (You can read three of these articles here, here and here.) Plus there’s a slide-show of his impressive current retrospective at the Tate Britain, which really shows the international standing of this “sleeper” in the world of sculpture.

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

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

And here is that photograph:

Richard Long
A Line Made by Walking, 1967

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

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

Tags: art, noumenal field

I visited Brain Eno’s Luminous at and around the Sydney Opera House yesterday and loved the experience. Spending an hour at 77 Million Paintings (in the Opera Studio) I found the proof of the pudding was in the eating: forms of rich and vibrant colour morphed subtly in a beautiful dark space, accompanied by a haunting, signature Eno ambient soundscape. Like playing with a child’s kaleidoscope, without the effort and with the quality turned up a hundred-fold. And meditative – after the hour I felt at home, I’d just run out of time. I’ll be going back today, and it will be different!

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


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

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

Tags: art

The final little essay in John Berger’s About Looking is the exquisite, the personal, Field (1971). It’s a meditation really, on Berger’s understanding of the “field that I have always known”.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

On the Field, Part 1 of 4: Robert Duncan

Tags: noumenal field

Nineteen Caravans is a small book of photographs I took on a beautiful afternoon at Wanaka, New Zealand, in May. You can view the book on Issuu by following the link below.

Tags: art, photography, place

Tags: art, photography

Here’s the first of four short posts on the field, a topic dear to my heart.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Tags: noumenal field, poetry

This NY Times article alerted me to the fascinating ink on paper works by Unica Zürn at New York’s The Drawing Centre. Zürn suffered from repeated depressive illnesses for much of her life. She lived for a period with Hans Bellmer, taking her life in 1970, within 6 months of splitting up with him. The show takes its title of one her novels, Dark Spring, in which, according to the Kirkus review at Amazon “Preadolescent sexuality merges with depressive fantasy – to devastating (if ineffably morbid) effect”.

Unica Zürn
Untitled, 1961, ink on paper

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

More works from the exhibition are at The Drawing Centre.

Tags: art

Tags: art, photography

(after Edward Ruscha)

Tags: art, photography

I chanced upon this little Guardian post yesterday Ed Ruscha’s best shot about his 1961 photo of the Wax and Seal can of car polish. Quoting Ruscha:

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

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

Tags: art, photography