Ron Dowd
Un – (Heart’s Desire)
Lino cut, collage
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Art
I love Ed Rusha’s work (having first encountered it in a major show of drawings and prints at the Auckland Art Gallery way back in 1978) and have been impressed with his energy and creativity over a really long period of art making – 50 years. The U.K. Telegraph has a great article and interview on his current retrospective at the Hayward Gallery, London.
But I laughed at this little gem from the interview. (Ruscha is speaking of LA in the 1950s.):
What it didn’t have was much in the way of indigenous art. ‘The LA art scene was very small in those days. New York was capital of the art world without a doubt in the 1950s and 1960s. Los Angeles at that time was a cultural dry spot, the Australia of the art world – way out there, very small and undeveloped. There were two or three people who actually collected art and we young artists had no idea about how to reach them.’
Ok, we’re not LA, we’re not the USA, but what immediately springs to mind (seeing as we’re talking “indigenous”) is the wonderful recent Tommy Watson show, and the current Early Papunya Paintings at the Grey Gallery . Outside that realm, (in fact, “Outsider”) I think of the huge Cunningham Dax collection in Melbourne (12,000 works), as well as the myriad outsider and mainstream artists making their work from just where they happen to be in Australia.
This proves nothing of course, it’s all about where you’re looking from. Here though, we’re not “way out there”. There’s a danger, when you’re at an assumed epicentre, of missing other points of view.
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My friend Philip (who’s associated with the Grey Art Gallery) recently alerted me to their marvellous show of Early Papunya Paintings currently on at the Gallery: Icons of the Desert, Early Aboriginal Paintings from Papunya.
(Pictured on the left is Rainbow and Water Story, ca. August 1972, by Old Walter Tjampitjinpa (Pintupi, ca. 1912–1981) – Synthetic polymer paint on composition board, 61 x 52 cm.)
If you click through to the show (go first to Grey Art Gallery) there’s a wonderful set of images, plus reviews and video clips. The show contains 50 works, almost all of them produced during the first years of Papunya painting. For a good review and images, try the Aboriginal Art and Culture: an American Eye site. And, for a good summary of the complex social-political issues engendered by the work and by Aboriginal Art in general, see this review by Nicolas Rothwell in The Australian:
Almost four decades after the initial creative burst at Papunya settlement, the first deep, detailed catalogue of desert boards reveals in unvarnished fashion a key, all-shaping feature of our relationship to western desert art: what we think we know about the dreamings and the sacred traditions, and the ancestral creators and the rites encoded in the boards is at best a surface gloss. Not only is the tradition full of ambiguity, not only are the accounts given of the art cryptic, mere coded hints at secret material: the explanations of the works that we have from many of the artists are often concealed behind a veil of imperfect communication. And the pattern goes wider: with such ambiguity at the wellspring of the painting movement, what outside accounts of later desert art can be taken as fixed, literal truth?
At this time when there is growing resistance from some Aboriginal elders to the depiction of secret and sacred knowledge, it seems best to me to attempt to stay close to the visual, to appreciate what traces have been made available to us from a ancient culture, as yet further evidence of the profound riches of the human psyche.
And on the left, another (more recent) work from the show.
Untitled, 2003
Ronnie Tjampitjinpa (Pintupi, born 1943)
Acrylic on linen, 151 x 183 cm
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I recently came across this UK Guardian slide-show (Saatchi artists at the Michael Hoppen gallery) on artists who manipulate photographs, or otherwise involve them in their art. All of this work’s interesting – and I particularly liked the work of Maurizio Anzeri, two examples of which are below.
Maurizio Anzeri
Giovanni and Leo 1953
Found photographs and coloured thread
There’s autobiographical information about the artist at Furini Contemporary Art and three more large images at art splash.
I’ve been thinking about the mask formed by the threads on these portraits – concealing yet always allowing us a possibly more intimate connection with the eyes (and often with the mouth) of the subject than what we might have had without that mask.
Then there’s the chords formed by the threads – a musical aspect that has me thinking of the scroll paintings of the Dada artists Viking Eggeling and Hans Richter, in which they tried to determine the principles of “rhythm in painting”. (To the left, stills from Viking Eggeling’s 1924 Symphonie Diagonale).
As Luca Tanzini says in this rich Music to Colours selection from the University of Siena:
the rhythm images hit the eye
like the rhythm of sounds reach the ear
Scroll down on the Music to Colours page for more on Viking Eggeling. And his Symphonie Diagonale is on YouTube.)
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