NICK WATERLOW ON CARL PLATE

From "Curating the COFA Collection", 2009

Carl Plate (1909-1977) was born in Perth, to a German father and English born mother, moving to Sydney in 1913. He studied under Raynor Hoff and Fred Leist at East Sydney Technical College, and his sister Margo Lewers was also an artist to achieve prominence. In 1935 he travelled to Europe via Cuba, Mexico and USA. In London he mixed with many influential artists and writers including Henry Moore, TS Eliot and Herbert Read. Whilst in France in 1940 he was detained as a suspected German spy; on release he reached England from where he returned to Sydney. There he set up the Notanda Gallery in Rowe Street and exhibited many of the foremost European and Australian artists of the time, as well as promoting the literature of modernism, until the Gallery's close in 1974. Plate, an active member of the Contemporary Art Society, lived in the hills behind the Woronora River outside Sydney.

In London he saw the 1936 International Surrealist Exhibition which changed his view of the world. "Life itself is surreal. Its essential quality has always appealed. Not as a style but an attitude"(1). It is primarily in his collages , shown at Hazelhurst Regional Gallery in 2009, that this is revealed. His better known painting practice, from the 1930s to the 1970s, was largely forged in abstraction with at times vestiges of cubism and abstract expressionism. "Each picture is a fresh exploration of form, not of a repetitious formula," wrote Daniel Thomas in 1963 (2). And much later, in 2009, ADS Donaldson expressed his admiration: "Carl Plate was one of Australia's most distinguished and accomplished mid-century artists. The galleries he showed in, the exhibitions he was part of, and the artists he he was hung beside were the bright lights of their day"(3).

'Dark forms light segments', 1964, is a substantial and imposing painting, a generous gift of the late James Agapitos and Ray Wilson, that exemplifies Plate's oeuvre. Fissured shapes abound, amidst the disarming presence of imagined and shifting tectonic plates, as if seen from above. The landscape and its myriad appearances certainly inform this vision but the unique abstract language he developed combined a European awareness and sensibility with an acute understandingof the psyche of the place he lived. His work was quite unlike any other artist in Australia of his generation, as difficult as that of Clyfford Still and similar in its relationship to the art prevailing. The recent revelation of his collages and their pioneering of the vertical slice foreshadowed Daniel Crooks' videos, maintaining Plate's relevance today.

1. Carl Plate, interview with Richard Haese, 29 June 1974, State Library of Victoria.
2. Daniel Thomas, Sunday Telegraph, Sydney,17.11.63, unpaginated.
3. ADS Donaldson, Carl Plate, Collage 1938-1976, Hazelhurst Regional Gallery, 2009, p63.

Reproduced with the permission of the USW College of Fine Arts.
'Curating the COFA Collection' at Ivan Dougherty Gallery, 2009, by Nick Waterlow.

Sea Snow/PMC No. 35, 1975
Magazine paper collage on paper
215mm x 263mm

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MICHAEL CALLAGHAN

Opening remarks by Associate Professor Anthony Burke at the ANU School of Art Gallery, 7 May 2010.

It is an honour to be asked to open this exhibition. I recall as a young human rights activist in Sydney seeing some of Michael’s posters – especially the very striking one he did for Amnesty International’s 25th anniversary – and so its interesting to see the longer survey of his work, especially how its book-ended by the early anti-militarist concrete poems and the recent work on Iraq. As someone who has travelled a strange route, from being a human rights activist to teaching at a military academy - where I have a strange role as a kind of embedded critical theorist – seeing Michael’s new work on Iraq and the war on terror is fascinating.

I thought of it this week when I bought a copy of the March Foreign Policy magazine, which is a kind of American version of TIME for international policy wonks. To illustrate a major section on the future of war, its cover it had an iPhone in camouflage print, with a series of icons onscreen named ‘surge’, ‘shock and awe’, ‘dronewar’, ‘hearts and minds’, ‘blackops’, ‘sitroom’ and more. Beneath it ran the title, “Killer Apps”.

I could see how the designer was striving for the irony and humour of pop or conceptual art, but the result was flippant and shallow. The effect was not helped by some of the content, which was narrowly concerned with the effectiveness of US power and included a piece by the strategist Edward Luttwak, who argued that while the US military’s new counterinsurgency focus on the protection of populations, good governance, minimum use of force, etc. was all very nice, we need to rediscover the virtues of strategic bombing. While Michael’s work is part of a global movement of dissent that has had an appreciable impact on the US military – not the least because some influential officers had the same concerns we did - Luttwak’s intervention suggests that even if the US Army and Marine Corps have moved on from ‘Shock and Awe’ in admirable ways, there are still enough dangerous and influential thinkers about to make this kind of artwork a very important form of public critique and memory.

Like the “Killer Apps” cover, Michael’s work is clearly working the space between advertising aesthetics and conceptual art, but in a far more profound and critical way. There is a depth there that provokes thought and moral reflection, that can’t be reduced to a simple set of meanings.

Depth is evoked in the way that the work is constructed – using layers in Photoshop and Illustrator – and in the way the pieces layer widely separated historical experiences into a common reality, whether its medieval poems evoking contemporary Arab revolt and anger, the resurgence of medieval torture techniques in the Bush administrations practices of rendition and water boarding, and the ghostly reappearance of a medieval image of the all powerful sovereign who can make war and dispose of the lives of his subjects at whim. This was the darker edge to Bush’s ‘forward strategy of freedom’ in the Middle-East, which was never able to shake off the sense that it was a kind of medieval crusade in another form.

In other ways the work plays with surface and depth, combining the rich historical associations of Arabic script with game icons, weapons schematics and flags. Yet even here the icons are subtly subverted – the flags indicate distress – and while the cartoonish quality of the work evokes the cartoonish contrasts of too much international policy – where Bush and Saddam are latter day versions of the Roadrunner and the Wile E. Coyote – the work shows us the layers of history, suffering, and violence that would quickly disturb the policymakers’ grand plans and produce such tragedy.

The new work also think of the claims of Jean Baudrillard and Fredric Jameson in the 1980s that contemporary culture would become all surface and simulacrum, and cultural productions would be little more than a depthless form of pastiche. In its play of surface and depth, Michael’s work reflects these claims but stands a gentle and serious form of rebuke to both the Bush neocons and the prophets of postmodernism.

The Bush Neocons did in part play this out the simulacral future, with their confidence that they could conduct ‘perception management’ and ‘create a new reality’; however, as Michael’s great “Shock and Awe” piece suggests, they would quickly find that in today’s post-modern conflicts, the real lives and real suffering of real people will always complicate and resist our grand and violent abstractions. Consider the first lines of text on one of remarkable new Iraq pieces: ‘Regime change. Meeting friends.’

We can all congratulate Michael on a great career achievement and some brilliant new works. I hope they meet with the attention and success they deserve.

Anthony Burke is Associate Professor of International Politics in the University of New South Wales at the Australian Defence Force Academy. He is the author of Fear of Security: Australia’s Invasion Anxiety (Cambridge UP, 2008) and Beyond Security, Ethics and Violence: War Against the Other (Routledge, 2007), and is currently writing a book entitled Postmodern Conflict: Global Security and Asymmetric War.

Antara, 2009-10
Digital print, Canson Photographique Archival
310 gsm, 111cm x 200 cm
Edition of 30

TONY TWIGG AND CHRIS CAPPER- 28 APRIL TO 22 MAY, 2010- OPENING REMARKS

It is an honour to be presenting two mature mid career artists tonight and delighted in the knowledge that both these bodies of work sit comfortably in the two rooms and will sustain a viewer’s attention for the next month in the gallery.

CHRIS CAPPER, in the Project Room, presents 11 new works that he started working on in 2007.

I recently became aware of a group called Slow Art where, (inspired by the slow food movement), guests are invited to sit in front of one masterpiece in a museum and whilst having a meal look and discuss only that one painting for a number of hours.

The slow peeling back of references, techniques, possibilities is something worth doing with any of Chris’ work.

When you stop and really look at Chris Capper paintings it becomes obvious they are not pictures depicting bunches of flowers, nor are they really about the refined balancing of figurative and abstract elements. They are all of those things and more.

So how do you then define the ‘more’?

I really enjoy my conversations with Chris and this afternoon we were both recalling how much we enjoyed the Simon Schama’s TV documentary on Mark Rothko last Sunday.

Schama was talking about one of the words Rothko most often used about his art; he was always concerned whether it was ‘poignant’, the inevitable passing of things.

All good artists spend a lifetime determined to trap their fugitive visions.

I wish I had Schama’s beautiful turn of phrase, but I will quote from him about Rothko as it will allow us to understand some of the reasoning behind Chris Capper’s art:

“It is impossible not to be touched by that poignancy: of our comings and goings, entrances and exits, womb, tomb and everything in between.”

Now we come to the main exhibition tonight, TONY TWIGG.

I realised only tonight that Tony exhibited at the Gary Anderson Gallery in 1985, so we are somewhat honoured to be passed on the baton of showing Tony’s art as Anderson is fondly remembered by many gathered here tonight as a seminal and influential aesthete.

This is Tony’s first exhibition in Sydney since 2004.

During that time he has embarked on a journey into Asia, where he has now become better known and respected in Kuala Lumpur, Singapore, Manila than here in his home town, Sydney.

It is not that surprising as Tony has found an audience which culturally accepts abstraction for what it is….it just is. Here with the inheritance of a western aesthetic we still searching for a narrative or conceptual springboard to deconstruct or construct the ‘real’ meaning.

When you view Tony’s work tonight, think of that journey.

Whilst walking on a journey you become aware of your breathing.

Air going into your body, air going out.

This is something intrinsic when viewing the series of work known as discs and accordions.

Some of the ‘shards’ and vertical sharp contract shoulder to shoulder into a tight visual space, breathing in.

Then others, offering the same design, breathe out, with the expanse of negative space allowing them to stretch out along the wall.

Breathe in and out.

When viewing Tony Twigg’s work you sense design within interiors, the architecture of built objects shaping environments and living spaces.

Breathe in and each work has a sense of collage, a collection of juxtaposed objects, lines, shapes.

Breathe out and each work has a feel of being a painting. The surfaces are treat with subtle variable tones soaking into the wooden plane.

Breathe in and each work becomes a drawing, the line of nature drifting and then pushing.

Breathe out and each work contains a history of the artist looking and observing for many, many years.

Look at the main sculpture Five Sticks, and your senses immediately trigger into non specific indigenous references, Tiwi pukamani poles, Javanese carvings and then our modern western tradition of Brancusi and Arp.

Twigg has spent a lifetime of inquiry and observation. This is evoked in the book we launch tonight, ‘Encountering the Object’ edited by Gina Fairley. Flicking through it alongside the substantial essays are images of Tony’s work sitting next to urban or rural photographs that echo the source and intent of the work.

Tonight we also congratulate and celebrate the contribution Gina Fairly, has made to Tony’s art practice. Since being in relationship with Gina there has been a shift in Twigg’s work, a calmness and repose echo in the lines and shapes.

When talking about Twigg’s journey we must also articulate his almost forensic research into the life and time of the artist Ian Fairweather in Asia.

From finding apartments he once stayed in; to landing on the beach where Fairweather’s raft was washed up, Twigg continues to make a valuable contribution to our knowledge of this great artist.

In return, Fairweather’s journey has allowed Tony to embark on his own quest as an Australian artist engaging in Asia.

As the exhibition title, Ricochet, suggests, you can see and feel this artist’s journey…..Kuala Lumpur, Manila, Singapore and now for the first time in many years, Sydney.

 

Tony Twigg

5 Sticks in any order (standing), 2004/10

Enamel on timber construction in 5 parts

265cm x 140cm x 130cm

THREE SELECTED FOR THE PLEIN ART

Congratulations to the finalists of the Plein Air Art Prize, 2010.

Three exhibiting artists, Tom Carment, Gabrielle Collins and Isabel Gomez, have been selected as finalists for the Plein Air Art Prize, this year judged by Anita Taylor, director of the National Art School.

The artworks are available for viewing at the NSW Parliament, Macquarie St, Sydney from 3 May - 3 June, 2010.
 

Tom Carment
Port Botany, March 2010
70cm x 118cm
oil on wooden panels


















Gabrielle Collins
Harbour I
30cm x 21cm
oil on board

Isabel Gomez
From Under the Bridge
47cm x 37cm
oil on canvas

Isabel Gomez
Newcastle Ports
64.5cm x 32.5cm
oil on canvas

PAUL MCGILLICK ON TONY TWIGG

AN EXCERPT FROM AN ESSAY IN THE BOOK
'TONY TWIGG, ENCOUNTERING THE OBJECT'

For Tony Twigg the journey (of his work) has been crucial in the way his work demonstrates an integrity of purpose over a long time, and in a very literal sense, namely his ceaseless travelling through Southeast Asia. But more interesting are the encounters along the way which have acted like lightning rods, moments of explosive concentrations of artistic insight, precipitating major shifts in the work. For Twigg, this movement has exposed him to culturally embedded visual experiences which helped him to make sense of what he had been trying to do before he began his travels.

With the timber constructions Twigg was aiming to create a single image that would stand for the entire story. 'I was looking,' he says, 'for a history that corresponded to an emotion... perhaps I didn't find it, but I found a city that did- Manila.' Living, working and exhibiting in Manila, the Australian narrative content was clearly no longer relevant, so Twigg abandoned the figurative element in his work and began working with abstraction. If this decision was triggered by a realisation that his earlier Australian narratives would not make sense to a Filipino audience, it was equally the result of his encounter with Filipino culture and beyond.

Twigg collects images as he moves through Asia, especially of the layering of materials such as bamboo on timber; that kind of arm wrestle between the organic and the urge to achieve some order. There is a tenuousness and provisionality about this built environment. Walls and fences are made up of loosely connected elements that seem to be permanently at the point of falling apart. The form, in other words, is a product of the materials at hand. In a similar way, Twigg's ovoid forms combine found eucalypt branches with off-cuts of milled timber in reductive compositions, which summarise his collected images.

Although Twigg abandoned figuration, the narrative and figurative hover fugitive and furtive in the background. The verticals have a 'portrait format' and we reads in heads, arms and legs. The are totemic in feel and conjure up visual memories of Cycladic art, Alberto Giacometti and David Smith. The ovoids, on the other hand, remind me of those transitional landscapes of Piet Mondrian, except that in Twigg's constructions the ovoid perimeters counteract the figurative.

Excerpt from Paul McGillick, "Material Encounter: The art of of Tony Twigg" published in
Tony Twigg: Encountering the Object, 2009.
Paul McGillick is Editor of Indesign and Habitus (Australia).   

To view work from the exhibition TONY TWIGG: RICOCHET 28 APRIL TO 22 MAY 2010, CLICK HERE

Tony Twigg:  The Accordian (small), 2010
oil paint on timber construction, 300 x 315 x 25mm

AN ODE TO MALCOLM MCLAREN 1946 – 2010

“DUCHAMP CHOSE A URINAL. I CHOSE JOHNNY ROTTEN”

A text message comes surging through from the Oxford Art Factory, Malcolm McLaren is dead.

Searching online over the last few days for stories on McLaren’s life a few things become really clear to me. If you want to make a difference in rock’n’roll go to art school.

Like so many others I have been entertained and influenced by McLaren’s antics, attitude and actions since 1977 when he was the manager of The Sex Pistols.

I recall attending his press conference at the Art Gallery of NSW when he was an invited ‘artist’ at the Sydney Biennale. Nothing much really happened, yet all who crashed the event absorbed the electricity generated by his physical presence.

It was his Svengali like weaving between art history and popular culture that will always captivate me.

“I didn’t create it (punk) alone or out of nothing.  Duchamp chose a urinal. I chose Johnny Rotten”, is a quote I read in The Times newspaper obituary.

He understood that the notion of challenging and unsettling the dominant idea of common sense, proper behaviour and logic was best achieved by having an appreciation of the past.

“I learnt all my politics and understanding of the world through the history of art. Plagiarism is what the world’s about. If you didn’t start seeing things and stealing because you were so inspired by them, you’d be stupid.”

When you read about McLaren’s history in the brilliant book, ‘England’s Dreaming, Sex Pistols and Punk Rock' by Jon Savage you get an idea of where McLaren got the notion to propel the Sex Pistols into more than just being a snotty arrogant rock’n’roll act.

McLaren has always been linked with the art movement in the sixties, the Situationist International.

Although formed in 1957, it was the galvanising times of the Paris uprising in 1968 that made these artists come into their own.

It was one of those crossroad events where political gesture and aesthetics became one.

The Situationists were interested in breaking down the divisions between individual art forms, to create situations; to construct encounters and stage lived moments in urban settings.

The art was disseminated through magazines, manifestos, broadsheets, montages, slogans and happenings.

“Demand the Impossible”

“Imagination is Seizing Power”

“Never work”

The playful techniques of challenging what is perceived to be ‘proper and right’ where taken up by McLaren in the punk days.

Having been to St Martin’s, Harrow and Goldsmith’s art schools McLaren was an activist on campus and part of an Situationist type group called King Mob who did things like dress up as Santa’s Claus, go into a department stores and start handing out toys for free to passing children.

Frivolous, stupid and harmless maybe, but the poignancy of the act is there, politics is in the everyday.

It is the sort of strategies and pranks I remember from the days of the Pistols, and beyond. He was at his best challenging assumptions and status, always manoeuvring himself into a position of causing trouble.

He once ran for Mayor in London on a manifesto that included selling alcohol in libraries.

A maverick that shall be missed, I think.

I’ll end with a McLaren quote I sourced online. He was talking about the author William Burroughs (but was really talking about himself!)

“I think all great artists are separated from ordinary artists by one thing. They are magicians. They are people who really change the culture. They have an alchemy that few of us possess and Burroughs was one of these.”

No quite, but I reckon Malcolm goes pretty close!

STUART SPENCE- 'WHAT GIVES' OPENING REMARKS

DAMIEN MINTON AT THE OPENING OF THE STUART SPENCE EXHIBITION, ‘WHAT GIVES’ ON THE 6TH APRIL 2010

Welcome to the gallery this evening and we appreciate your support of the second solo exhibition at the gallery by artist Stuart Spence.

The first thing you will notice for those who came along last year is there is no Tim Freedman or Peter O’Doherty performing tonight, nor are there any MP3 players accompanying the images with a soundtrack.

It is purely and simply the artwork of Stuart Spence. The images stand proud and tall all by themselves, ready to judged on their own merit, which in my opinion consolidates Stuart as an artist rather than a photographer.

When you read or listen to Stuart talk about his work there are many analogies to music. Like Stuart, the explosion of music that occurred around 1977 to 1982/84 informed me. It was a time of enormous energy coming from the street and with it came an independent ‘do it yourself’ attitude.

What was important was the attitude, the passion. What was swept aside was the obsession with technical perfection, the overproduced, over embellished self-congratulatory rock genre that dominated the musical landscape at the time.

I think Stuart has reinvigorated for himself that ‘do it yourself’ stance with this show.

Every image has that Ramones ‘1,2,3,4’ feel to it. It is a desire to capture the moment, to consolidate a mood or potential narrative in a single frame. It isn’t forced or pushed; there is a sombre reflective nature to them. They are fleeting and could be gone with a single gush of wind.

One of our guests earlier tonight remarked in good humour that the photos are all out of focus. Quick off the mark his son fired back, ‘you’re so 20th century”.

Indeed, the art of making a photograph has changed dramatically in the last decade. Digital technology has dropped one industry of image making and replaced it with another that is based on manipulation and speed.

What I like about Stuart’s work is he messes with all of that.

The breaking up of the pixilation is deliberate and an attempt to merge form, shape, colour. It suggests a painter’s eye capturing the essence rather than a professional photographer’s desire for crisp detail.

He often describes his approach to his work as strumming on a guitar and ‘jamming’, mucking around. Sitting around and searching for riffs and melodies through the process of doing it. From the doing, something happens.

It shows the maturity of Stuart as an artist to be able to let go of all his maturity and depth of photographic knowledge.

He doesn’t force the issue but he is always ready to record that glance just out of reach.

It is about being wise enough to let the serendipitous moment occur.

The ease in which he constructs and frames the shot comes from years of practice and the subsequent cropping or colour shifts enhance rather than butcher the initial click.

It is refreshing to see a series of photographic images talk about serendipity rather than forced conceptual simulacra. We are constantly fed in the visual arts yet another wave of self referenced ‘cultural studied’ digital imagery which yet again falls flat back into its own two dimensional plane.

This exhibition, ‘What Gives’, is different to that. It is a series of images produced by a maturing artist who has the history and skill to let the images breath…and sing! So Stuart, congratulations from all of us on the exhibition.

In Waves, 2005, 532mm x 856mm
Edition 1 of 8, Kodak Supra Endura archival paper