John Graham Memorial

The following was my contribution to the John Graham Memorial at The National Gallery.

John and his partner Deirdre and their son Walter, have been lifelong friends since John designed our house in Balmain.

When I left art school in 1972, I was fortunate to have the use of the old fish markets in Paddington as a studio. It was a vast half open area that overlooked the quarry in Cascade Street. It was the ideal studio. It was the best studio. One day, the builders for the owner arrived to occupy the space and I was completely devastated.

I was so traumatised by the loss of it, I was determined to find a place I would not lose again.

We found a bird seed factory in Balmain which was affordable.

David Earle introduced Jacqueline and me to John. David thought John could help us convert the factory into somewhere we could live.

The age in which we found ourselves then, was the age of The Revolution.

The time for change was not only a political slogan. It was a universal theme and everything we did was political before it was ‘useful’.

You would think we would outgrow such a notion of being the children of the revolution but we then became the adults of the revolution.

Many of us here today are the adults of the revolution.

We can paper over it with comfort, wealth and experience,  but it cannot be erased.                                                                                                                                                       

Our house, the house that John built, with the enormous assistance of Bruce, thank you Bruce, I never thanked you enough, became one of the hubs of the revolution.

It was uncommon then, to conceive of living in a factory. That would mean you were what you did. A home that divided work from leisure was untenable. It did not exist.

At Golden Cob, the use of a hand saw was the consequence of a lack of funds to buy a circular saw on the one hand. It was also the means of restraining the pace of construction to let the material yield its voice. There were no power tools to overwhelm the sound of discussion and laughter. The background for the contemplation of detail when needed, was silence.

There was no un-tuned radio turned right up, to drown out the screaming power tools of today’s building sites. We built before build was a noun.

We straightened nails from timber extracted from demolition sites to use again. Recycled hardwood was virtually free-wood. We grew the house.

Being that we started with a limited budget there could be no budgetary constraints. As the budget entirely disappeared, the building process became more abstract.

Those endless days only lasted seven months but the outcome of what we built, was and remains the best house in Australia.

How can that be said? Just ask everyone.

The house that John (and Bruce) built has provided Jacqueline and me with a platform on which to build our lives over nearly fifty years.

Artists are fortunate when they find the world a welcome place. The advantage we had to have a home quite young meant we have been able to commit to a life in art which is often thankle$$.

In order to keep the world alive, in order to even build on the voice you speak, is to undermine the voice with which you spoke yesterday.

The only light there is the light that emerges from darkness.

This is the nature of continuous revolution which our time advocated.

That wasn’t a gold rush of ideas out of which the Golden Cob was furnished.

That was the state of play that remains our challenge.

This recognition of John today serves to bring us back to ourselves.

Thank you.

The Flag

This letter was sent to the editor of The Sydney Morning Herald today.

Dear Editor.

Having not ceded sovereignty, the flag for Australia is the Aboriginal flag.

Whether The Voice is enshrined in the constitution or not,

There is no better way to show respect to our First Nations People

Than to adopt the Aboriginal flag as the Australian flag.

The values embedded in the flag

Represent the values shared across the Australian community

With respect to Country and to all living creatures on that Country.

Those values extend to every place and to every community everywhere.

This is their Country.

This is their flag

They have accepted our presence.

We thank them.

The Aboriginal Flag

Brown Furniture, Brown Sculpture

My parents living in London in 1962 found they could furnish our house with antique furniture affordably.

Our house was modest but full of quality old crafted furniture. As a child I marvelled at the elaborate carving and elegant proportions of the pieces we had.

When our family returned to Australia, the furniture came with us and my chest of drawers at home remains from that time.

My partner’s family also collected antique furniture and the austerity of the harsh buildings in which we live is softened and lifted by all these beautiful antique pieces.

I suppose it was twenty years ago that antique furniture came to be known as ‘brown furniture’. It was not seen for what it was, but for what it represented. The brown furniture was space and light consuming. It was less functional than ‘built-ins’ and new lighter equivalent pieces. It also represented a set of unsustainable values, of furniture as signifiers of class or privilege.

The end of ‘wood’, which the antique represented was disregarded by the more pressing ‘functionalist’ considerations of the times.

The range of the quality of pieces was rendered flat by all of it identified as ‘brown’. It had become affordable but this time round (about 1990) the fashion circuit, nobody wanted it.

*

In the 1970’s when steel was the material of choice for young sculptors, it was seen as a permanent material. It reflected the still certainty of the industrial age. It was durable, affordable and immediate. No secondary casting process was required. That steel might corrode over time was not evident when it first appeared as the material of choice. In that fast changing world, time did not ‘pass’ because the present was so compelling, so pervasive.

It was quite a rude awakening then that in about 1980 steel sculpture became ‘brown sculpture’. Suddenly all the steel sculptures were the same sculpture. The brown sculpture was limited by the inherent language within the material and the ‘formalist’ philosophy apparently embodied there, or so it was percieved.

The sculpture connoisseur would see through this uniformity to particular qualities of works but the shock and freshness of steel that it first emanated in the sixties and early seventies had evaporated. To overcome this ‘brown’ fatigue sculptors painted works with industrial paints. The implication was that industrial materials required industrial finishes to represent their pure nature. The painted sculptures presented themselves as equivalents to the other luxury items available to consumers, such as cars and other goods.

Paint too is a time blocker. The painted surface reflects newness and time is paint’s enemy. Sculptors started using stainless steel to overcome the ‘brown’ problem. All that glitters surely has some value, the sculptures mused. The third alternative to escape the browning of sculpture was to come indoors to avoid the outcome of being outside. The sculptures conformed to the demands of indoor living by shrinking. There is a strong movement towards ‘modesty of means’, to justify this move. The recent miniature show at Defiance Gallery is the tip of this particulat iceberg.

*

The brown furniture and the brown sculpture shared many qualities.

Initially desirable, both quickly became seen as taking up space. By 1990 space was a diminishing asset. With an increasingly mobile population, brown furniture and brown sculpture were anchors that would impede mobility and therefore progress.

Both the brown furniture and the brown sculpture were scaled to the human figure. Both depended on being inhabited by the body either literally or metaphorically.

Both the sculpture and the furniture drew light. Nether emanated it. In the age of the flickering light so much brown was shadow.

I remarked to my daughter about this brown phenomenon of sculpture and furniture. She responded, ‘You neglected the brown house you have lived in for 45 years’.

Our formative years leave a deep stain time is reluctant to shift. Are we at our best when we build upon our formative experience towards a mature language as the masters have indicated is a wise course of action?

Or should we pay heed to what others, outsiders see, to what we see, afresh?

Letter from Paul Hopmeier 'The New Gallery'

The following letter was written by Paul Hopmeier to friends about his response to the Sydney Modern. He has kindly agreed to share the letter here. Please stay posted for other reflections on The Sydney Modern.

‘The New Gallery’

This building is low-density, lots of space and little art. Art per cubic metre feels about a quarter of the old gallery. I have observed some architects who for some reason suffer from painting/sculpture envy. I think of Architecture as an entirely different discipline. Architecture has, or used to have, the role of not only lifting our spirits but fulfilling a function. However, the joke used to be that if a building didn’t have leaks, it wasn’t good architecture. There have been comparisons of the new gallery with the Opera House. Architecture usually has an interior and an exterior. The exterior of the Opera House just gets better. The interior was disturbed by political interference but I love the views looking up the stairs at the insides of the shells. The function starts with getting us to our seats, but the eminence of the building stays present here. With the new gallery on that sloping site, it can never have the exterior presence of the Opera House. Could it possibly improve with age? The spaces in the Opera house, except for the views onto the harbour, are generally functional. The new gallery has sumptuous architectural views where you might have considered places for viewing art. Maybe I am being curmudgeonly, why shouldn’t architecture and art share the space more equally?

Photo: Robyn Powell Davies

My first experience of ‘Democracy Curating’ was at the Pompidou in 2014, Salon hangs with framed newspapers, children’s art and Matisse all muddled together. Neither doing any of the others any favours. This is the curating style of the new gallery. Exhibitions ranging from the gaudiest popular culture to subtle inclusions of Han sculpture, Ukiyo-e woodblocks and a few very fine barks. This is how you can claim this is ‘Art for all’, but maybe it results in being for no-one in particular. The intention is blatantly to get bums on seats because that is what scores in the end if you are an administrator.

I started in the tank and what a wank. Theatricality is not theatre. This is a drama and humour free zone. Dada encrustations carefully designed, an oxymoron, to fit in a container when dismantled and move through the secret door to the tank on built in wheels. The lighting by its random patchiness creates a curiosity that would never exist if you could see the bloody things but in the end is just annoying. The lights run on tracks across the ceiling and are computer controlled to maintain obscurity not clarity. They come on for a very short time and only ever light part of the accretions. You never get to see the whole thing. The blurb explaining this is hilarious. This is the best part, truly fabulous as in fables, except fables have a whiff of truth to them. Remember Wittgenstein, ‘Things are what they are’, no matter how you try and sell them. 

The title is, ‘The End of Imagination’ yet the blurb says these things came from very wild imagining. If you were asked to create a monument to, ‘the end of postcolonial struggles for independence’ on the Moon in 34,340 (presumably) CE, what would you come up with? Neither this nor 500 years on Mars or wind in 7,376023 BCE when apes were around, and man was about to separate from Chimpanzees came to my mind when walking through the tank. Yes, these are all unanswerable but are these ‘sculptures’ answers to the unanswerable or is the blurb wondrous pretension? I obviously lack any poetry because rather than be made aware of the closeness of human extinction, which I think I was supposed to feel, I considered how these things were fabricated, transported from Argentina, set up here and how annoying the lighting was.

Writing

I write because I get ideas. When you take an idea into writing it travels much further than it does if you just keep thinking.

An idea then, is a starting point for writing. The object in writing is to clarify the idea. Get it out and solid.

Sometimes you get an idea and expand it into writing and it goes way away from the idea into either another idea or something else entirely.

If we can call the action of writing like walking and when we get to being really lucid in the writing the walking along becomes jogging.

When the idea doesn’t get clarified, or when the idea doesn’t change clearly, when the writing starts to skip along or dance or fly, the writing becomes poetry.

You would like, I would like for the writing to morph into poetry more often than it does because when the writing becomes poetry it seems to be able to carry much more meaning, more substance than just writing.

You want, I want the world fuller of this expanded meaning because culture grows faster with poetry than it does with prose.

Poetry allows for cultural transformation. It feeds into the collective unconscious like Seasol boosts the growth of plants more than just plain water does.

Also as a bonus but not a primary motivation is that when the writing does take off into something else it promotes the release of chemicals in the brain which causes pleasure for the writer.

Poetry can release endorphins or whatever they are and also, in my case, I get to have a sense of completion, fulfilment, identity. This feeling allows me to get to sleep quicker.

 Note: Sometimes you have to get to the end of reading before you know what the thing you just read is.

Annie's Wearable Landscapes

When Annie sent this image of her recent creation, I asked that she wear it to my opening at Australian Galleries.

Sometimes when we find our voice it is a collective undercurrent as much as a personal one.

Annie attributes my encouragement to the production of this series of worn landscapes, but she was unstoppable anyway.

They were beautifully presented at a gala event in her home by her and her extended family.

I wrote this piece below, which I read at the event.

Annie is a resident of heaven on earth.

That earth is not heaven is by the by. When you are by nature heaven bound, as Annie is, no other destination is possible.

And so we find ourselves here today in a slice of Annie’s heaven she is generous enough to share.

That earth should position itself to be a more complex place is of no account.

That we should find ourselves here tonight proves that too many glimmers make the idea of hope unnecessary.

Annie doesn’t want to sell any of these works, which would be a negative consequence of exhibiting them.

We are too privileged tonight. Some further exhibition is necessary to share what we have enjoyed.

How we best manifest ourselves is an eternal conundrum, as it should be!

Art v Not-Art : A Late Modern War Cry

A Draft, for publication in an art journal.

If you don’t keep interrogating what art is, if you just make art as if there is such a thing, then you will always make ‘not- art’.

If you think you can make ’art’ and then sell it as if there is some imbued value in your considerations in making it, then you’re wrong.

There is no such thing as ‘art’ and that means that everything shown, sold or not sold that has masqueraded as ‘art’ is not art.

It’s not bad art. It’s just ‘not-art’. There’s art and ‘not-art’.

Such a notion does not serve the art industry that thrives on ‘not-art’. The art industry is not obliged to question what art is, if, in the process of asking, it undermines its foundations.

Art is always an inconvenient truth because it undermines everything because that’s what art does!

‘Art’ is that which the artist retrieves from darkness, which was not previously visible.

There used to be scouts who would spot art as it emerged from the dark, to confirm it was real. There were astute collectors who were themselves half steeped in darkness to qualify. There were curators, trained in the interpretation of heritage material to be Johnnies on the spot.

And there were the critics.

Historically, when newspapers were widely read, the art critic was feared and loved in equal measure. They were necessarily solitary in their lives and in their profession. They were even lonely to guard against compromise, against the prospect of favours ill- dispensed.

Now, they are a side dish.

And there was the journal, which promotes art and artists and that is good and necessary, but it needs to be hot as well, too hot to casually pick up and flick through, while the flicker seeks distraction. 

Like art does, the journal needs to interrogate itself as it does here, by publishing this.

The heat this short piece brings makes the paper of the magazine hot and all the other articles here sheepish.

Please watch this space for further deliberations on Art v Not Art.

Open letter to John McDonald. Art Critic. Sydney Morning Herald

Dear John,

An art critic has a responsibility to make an account of the visual arts made in the city or state in which the newspaper for which they write appears.

A good critic applies the highest standards to assess the art they encounter. A good critic persists with this even in the face of the futility of that endeavour.

A good critic applies rigorous standards to see through prevailing fashions to reveal what is more enduring than fleeting.

A good critic does not have a disclosure statement at the end of the review to mark a lack of impartiality. Impartiality and art criticism go hand in hand.

We know from all of your past writing, that you are ambivalent to these grand public art events both here and overseas. You have ‘declared’ your ambivalence and yet, you can also not resist attending these events upon invitation. When you are enthusiastic about aspects of these shows, that enthusiasm seems often forced or obligatory on your part and is not in line with your previously expressed values.

As a reader, when I read these offshore reviews I get a sense of where you are headed from the first paragraphs, and that with each subsequent paragraph the text becomes more like wallpaper than newspaper. This can have a pleasing hypnotic effect but ultimately leaves the reader undernourished.

Sometimes I get a sense of the fuzz induced in your thinking by having had to travel so far to see the show. I can hear the drone of the jet engines echoing in your ears as you plod through the art halls of wherever you happen to end up.

It’s the editors! They send me. I don’t really want to go, I hear you protest.

Perhaps this is a letter to the editor as much as it is to yourself.

As I see it, the other critics at The Sydney Morning Herald better serve their brief. The theatre critics review local theatrical productions. Classical music, jazz, pop all have reviewers that reflect on local productions. A movie critic for example will not review a movie screened where it cannot be seen.

The community benefits from a regular critical discourse about what is being shown in the galleries. The absence of a regular forum might suggest little work warrants critical attention however, quality is even between the arts and the other arts reviews pages are bulging.

It is extraordinary to me John, that I would be the first to articulate these concerns. There would be others, more thoughtful and articulate than I am, to present a similar view.

There would be a queue jostling to mount a sustained argument. All those graduates from the fine arts departments must be champing at the bit to knock you off your perch and yet are strangely mute.

Apart from the reduced carbon footprint from less travel, your accounts of what happens here is more profound, more needed and much missed!

Yours sincerely,

Michael Snape

Silence on The Blog

When I go quiet here, on the blog, it’s a good thing.

A lot of thinking, crafted here, is ok, occasionally insightful, but mostly it’s chatter, when I would do better talking materially, making material prose, making material poetry.

Quiet here, on the blog speaks of noise elsewhere. A silent blog speaks loudly. My silence here is elsewhere noisy with hammering, chiselling, sawing, thinking out loud with machinery.

This silence here is a pregnant pause. I am busting with a big litter of pups that will bark and scramble for attention when they come.

This silence is the hint of light before dawn when the birds think they have the stage alone.

This silence is the end of the music, or is it, and you clap and the music starts again?

When does the silence stop? It stops when anticipation is exhausted, when we are exhausted from false hope.

Silence is never tenured.

(ME)

‘ME” 1980

We are not accountable for the things we do.

If you step out you suffer the consequences whether what you do is endorsed or not. Mistakes and triumphs sit side by side and are weighed against each other like profit and loss on the ledger.

At the end of life and afterwards, judgements can be made to determine the merit of contributions made.

‘(Me)’ was made in 1980 when I was 30 and full of confidence.

The making of ‘(Me)’ overlapped a new redundancy of authorship and a condition that predicted ‘chronic fatigue’ which was endemic in the early eighties, which was known as ME.

‘Then’, was just as confusing as ‘now’ has become. Where once the individual held the power to speak on behalf of the broader community, that notion needed to be upended. The ‘author’ now needed to step aside, to clear the air, to leave space for more universal, less subjective themes a visible author might impose.

The word ‘me’ in the sculpture was surrounded with shameful brackets, with the word also underlined and the whole sculpture painted red. To accentuate these features, the sculpture was also cumbersome. It was hard to lug around, a burden more than a gift to the world. I was happy to surrender, what not quite ready to hand over my metaphorical pen. Also, at this time I was inspired a work by Colin McCahon called ‘I Am’ or ‘1 am’ .

My current perspective sees this work as ‘clunky’. It fails to find purchase with ‘sculptural values’ and any idea is only as good as it serves to articulate a ‘sculptural’ voice, which it doesn’t appear to do here.

We are not accountable for the things we do, so I will leave for later on to make the final call.

This photo was taken by ……. and shows ‘(ME)’ being moved to its above site. The photographer’s keen eye has observed how well the work stands out against the white truck and employs the crane to magnify its voice.

Leo Loomans, Sculptor

Leo Loomans is a graduate of The National Art School sculpture department from the late 1980’s. His work is a living extension of that tradition. His work employs the values promoted at the school. His unique experience brings life to that voice.

 Of the staff Leo encountered at the school, Ian McKay had the greatest influence. Ian was determined the innate qualities in the raw material provided a sculptural language to generate the deepest meaning. Leaving oneself out of the picture ironically provided the best opportunities for expression. Be open, be surprised, be prepared to have your expectations and desires upended. One’s voice came from without.

Leo’s curiosity about an alternative position is necessarily absent, to bring strength to that position. His alertness, excitability and sensitivity could find no better application.

Leo, without intending to be or desires to be, is pure Sydney School of Sculpture.

His work is rough and unglamorous. It is both funny and serious. It is modest, in scale and intent. It catches and a-braids the landscape’s light. It is thorny and sings more crow than swallow.

Leo is alive, or ‘alert’ to opportunities as they arise. Out of chaos harmony rises supreme.

Leo’s commitment and focus is second to none. His life is a privilege of sculpture without the distractions of ease, comfort and mediocrity. He is an old-fashioned artist. The notion of ‘garret’ was deemed quaint and irrelevant in the age of ‘an informed and sophisticated art audience’. This is where Leo lives.

Having taught Leo for several years at The National Art School, I am afraid to say I left no mark on his practice.

It remains to be seen whether the purity of Leo’s approach was the ultimately more fruitful path or whether my agnosticism opened other opportunities.

The Sydney School of Sculpture is good when exponents are loyal to its principles.

As Ian was fond of repeating, ‘sculpture is slow’. It moves beyond the needs and desires of individuals.

Leo seemed forever at the beginning of something but suddenly we are witnessing a sculptor with a voice and maturity worthy of attention. His upcoming exhibition at The Drill Hall Gallery in Canberra is timely and well deserved.

‘Cooperative Atmospheres’ Leo Loomans

‘Culture Traps’ 2022 Leo Loomans

Paul McGillick's Catalogue Essay for 'Here'.

Please go to ‘Writing’, to view catalogue essay for ‘Here’, my upcoming exhibition at Australian Galleries.

UFFs

Unidentified Flying Friends

 

We can discuss UFOs or UAPs now without being conspiratorial.

The SSS (Sydney School of Sculpture) brief has a wide brief and is able to entertain notions outside sculpture .

We sculptors are equipped to grapple with the uncertainty of UFOs, more than other disciplines.

A condition of excellence for sculpture is that it hasn’t been seen before and that it presents itself in space cohesively. At its best sculpture is a UAP.

My thinking about sculpture qualifies me to speculate on these other alien activities as being not that different from our own.

We can understand on observing the behaviour of these aircraft or spacecraft, that they are far in advance of our technical and probably social capacity.

“It’s official. Science and the military confirm the presence of alien activity throughout the world!”

Such is the scope of these craft and their pilots, that they far exceed the most advanced human science.

They ‘re so beyond a threat as to make the idea of military power, an absurd notion.

Being that these craft are more advanced we should also understand by extension that the pilots or passengers will be more advanced in every way.

They will understand, for example that we are messing up our environment, that we are developing technologies over which we have no control or understanding.

These aliens have shown they are benign and have no notion of conquering us or defeating us even if we might go there by default as a response to their presence here.

These aliens have already shown themselves to be on our side, by keeping us in the relative dark, of their existence.

These aliens, we might call them ‘friends’, have shown themselves to be so far advanced as to be loving and caring for us, and even protecting us from ourselves.

These ‘friends’ are so advanced that they will interfere in our determination to destroy ourselves. So technically advanced are they, that they will redirect carelessly flung missiles away from nuclear reactors.

They will apply their technical superiority to cooling the ice in Antarctica that has been allowed to warm for too long.

We are finally ready, collectively, to acknowledge the presence of UAP’s as we have never been before.

Finally!

We are ready because we are not immediately compelled to fight them as if they are determined to defeat us, and ‘take’ what we have, (taken already).

We are ready to confirm the reality of these life forms because we need to be. In the absence of the old guiding lights, we are ready for new illuminations.

Not only do ‘UFF’s have extraordinary technical and scientific knowledge they also speak English and read blogs.

Hello, and welcome!

Swearing Notes

Plein Air Sculpture 2020 Painted timber c. 90cm x 90cm x 160cm

There’s no grounds for speculation on swearing. Ironically, the interrogation of swearing is taboo. Any interrogation of swearing will be perceived as uncool.

Swearing is king. It is part of the woke upgrade. There is a universal endorsement of swearing, which is trans-cultural, trans-racial, trans-continental. Watch any film made anywhere in the world in the last ten years and swearing is an important tool employed in communication, even in the gentler cultures of South-East Asia. There’s just five or six words, available in all languages. Each word relates to body functions that occur as far from the brain as you can get. The words refer to reproduction and the tools employed for reproduction. They refer to human waste in both solid and liquid form. Strangely both birth and death offer no prospects for strong language, even though both conditions might offer scope for an equivalent strength. I guess they’re not body parts enough.

Everyone is on the swearing bus. We were collectively, universally, in the need for release, given the collapse of old world certainty, apparently.

It’s not that I don’t swear. I swear as a bodily response to shock, mainly, and it works really well, like a shock absorber works. I immediately feel better after swearing, good medicine wisely used.

For me though, day to day employment of strong language is lazy. Minute to minute swearing is like watching a crowd of high vis workers clocking on or off, assembled together. At a certain point high viz is no viz. It’s better to find scope for high viz in the the usual rainbow spectrum.

Please see attached image.

We all breathe and swear and swear and breathe, to get by though.

I came back to Sydney as a fourteen year old, from five years in Europe and England. On my first day at school, I had the usual first day at a new school anxiety, but all the boys were swearing as they had not done in England. It hurt my Englished ears and caused a pain I was required to use to make myself strong. ‘Toughen up’ was what was implied.

Thanks, but no. I will make my own way, find a strength somewhere else.

I will never forget. The boy next to me in English asked me whether I was a deadshit. I see him sometimes still, in Balmain, a retired barrister, doesn’t recognise me. He asked me dead pan. I had no idea what a deadshit was, at the time. It’s gone out of use a bit now, but it’s quite a good word. A deadshit is someone who tries and fails. I believe I said no I wasn’t, but it was only a hunch.

Australians were the first to toughen up in this way. The coming here from England made it necessary to come to terms with the different weather and trees and the other criminals and their enforcers.

It turns out we were scouts on an emerging global condition that required everyone everywhere to toughen up in the same way. We led the swearing way and we are now a world of Australians.

When I was learning about art, I even learnt it at school, you don’t use black to divide colours to make them bright. You need to establish relations between the colours on their own terms. Using black to make colours strong was cheating. Naturally, rules are made to be broken, but as a general rule, I try to make language flow without using black. Even telling the deadshit story crossed the line a bit, the word jumping out on the page like a pimple on an adolescent.

This account of swearing will inevitably find little sympathy, such is the depth to which we have collectively swum.

It was important for me to make an account of the idea. Any idea, good or bad, gives rise to form, which is the task of this blog, to explore.

Plein Air Sculpture 2020 Painted timber c. 90cm x 90cm x 160cm at The Sawmiller’s Sculpture Prize 2021

Background sculpture by Ron Robertson-Swann

Sydney Secondary College Art Show Opening

2nd August, 2022

I’ve known Marissa Zaknich for a very long time. She has been teaching here at the college for longer than I’ve known her. I did not hesitate to say yes when she asked me to open your show. I have written some notes on these two pieces of paper.

At 2pm on Sunday I am writing a piece to read at the exhibition of year 12 art students at what I understand incorrectly to be Leichhardt High School.

I say this in ignorance being that I have failed to keep up with many changes in the world. For example, if I drive through the White Bay intersection, the space cannot be understood, because, while it is made from concrete and steel, it is in a state of flux and defies understanding. An imminent stage of conclusion may appear to offer more substance however, that will be illusory too, because it will be already hinting at a future perceived failure and need for improvement.

I opened this show before, possibly when today’s students were not yet born, when Marissa still had black hair, when I was unimproved, and less able to make the sense I am able to make today.

Between my last opening this show and now, my daughter Agatha opened another show here and would have made much more sense than I do today or did before.

Time moves deliciously around in beautiful circles and we artists are lucky to be able to inscribe those circles in the sand or whatever material comes to hand, or mind.

I think maybe, when I spoke before I would have spoken about the show and what a privilege it is, to begin to be a part of the Art World. The two words, art world, have been disfigured by the actual art world, which is a slippery and dangerous place.

My Art World comes with caps and is in fact a glorious world of opportunities, discoveries, illuminations and rewards. It is a place where ‘life’ provides the best possible medium in which those activities occur. Life was invented to provide a studio to make art.

‘Life’ is a studio.

I think when I spoke before I was not yet fully disillusioned. I still had foolish hopes for myself and for art. I think, if I was eighteen again and heard myself talking today, I would be deaf to my wisdom, and say, this guy is bad, not in a good way.

I remember when I was eighteen, I was probably full of whatever it was that was about to make me a fully entitled prepossessed white male entity and I apologise for that as much as I can , which is sadly not much, as a consequence of the power of that programming.

If I was eighteen though again, despite that disadvantage, I would not hear a word of what I’m saying, or maybe one or two I would hear, which I would apply to suit my fantasy.

I think before, when I opened this show, I would have spoken of glorious light and hope and adventure. I would have wanted to open your hearts, to hear you speak, and I do feel for that optimism still. The reality is though, that darkness brings us more alive. Oppression makes us initially weak but ultimately strong. Culture, new culture, a real voice breaks through cracks laid in concrete laid by master builders, who were well meaning!

The more horrible life is, the more beautiful art becomes. These are, ironically, beautiful times.

At my last opening speech I recited a poem, ‘The Balmain Traffic Poem’, which has been taken down from being installed at White Bay for twenty years.

Agatha and I recently installed ‘Become The Part’ at Camperdown, outside the RPA. It’s another poem, a shorter one, quick to recite, but covers themes explored here today.

Go well dear graduates into the night, to sleep, or stay awake, as you decide.

BECOME THE PART LAUNCH

This speech was delivered for the launch of a new sculpture, Become The Part, which is a collaboration between my Daughter Agatha and myself. The sculpture is outside St. Andrews College, Sydney University, on the corner of Missenden Road and Carillon Avenue, Camperdown.

18 June 2022

Firstly, Agatha and I would like to say what a pleasure it has been to engage with the St Andrews community from our first meeting to today. I would especially like to thank Eleanor Cheetham for her very early enthusiasm for a collaborative work with Agatha and myself. Thanks too to Barbara Flynn, whose early contributions made the machinery turn. The broader college community, led by Wayne Erickson has proceeded to place no obstacles in the path to the realisation of that proposal.

Thank you, St Andrews.

The following statement is a quote from our initial proposal.

“This project will be our first formal collaboration. Our mutual influence and shared lineage will create a fertile ground for the process of making Become the Part. Bound by a common interest in the relationship between the opacity and transparency of poetic language; the formal manifestation of letterforms and an ongoing enquiry into the body’s relationship to the sculptural, Become the Part reflects a moment of cross-generational dialogue and play. Further, engaging with the college community as a father-daughter collaboration has enabled us to create a sense of familial intimacy with the college, and ask challenging and incisive questions of both each other and our commissioner.”

We can look back now from that early overview.

Despite the usual hiccups in executing commissioned works, there has been a smooth transition between first response and final execution. Lee Tunks, as The Man of Steel, has overseen the task of cutting, welding and bringing the parts together onto the site and not leave anything but Agatha’s and my mark. Martyn Rathbone and Marsupial, in the wet, have kept their humour to frame the work to Natalie McEvoy’s, Maria Martinez’ and more recently Phil Black’ FJMT’s landscape vision. Matthew Molder initially and Sam Wolff-Gillings from Spectrum have more broadly overseen all of the above. Douglas Knox from KPH has assured us that no part will tilt or drop or bend. Katrina Dunn-Jones from our team has steered Agatha and I through all the traffic and been there with us to enjoy the progress as it was made. Amanda Rowell from The Commercial Gallery who represents Agatha and Stuart Purves from Australian Galleries who represents me are here today to support their artists as they reliably do. Thank you everybody who has contributed.

***

Agatha can’t be here today. I can’t speak for her. Well, perhaps I can. We are all, at best, only a part of something bigger.

We can’t be anything unless we are buoyed and carried along by a current. A singular voice cannot be sustained.

The fact of the matter is that Agatha and I come from a long line of letter mongerers. We cannot help ourselves. My mother was a world renowned calligrapher and typographer. What we witness over our parent’s shoulders is what we become, for better and worse. We might like to justify what we do with immediate considerations however, mostly, what you get is what you are, we find.

My life personally, as a sculptor is the result of having given myself to the great history of Sydney sculpture over the last century. Collectively identified as The Sydney School of Sculpture, my voice is a small contribution to that history, that voice.

We are at a time when a singular pursuit has been found to be mostly problematic, destructive even in the wider world. From the singular pursuit of profit and gain we have seen the world come to a perilous place. Safe from danger is elsewhere in our thinking. We have to work together.

We are beginning to register the Indigenous voice that shows us how listening can be more productive than speaking. Listening occupies a shared space.

Sydney University is ready to open its arms to the world, not to hide behind its hallowed walls, but be more transparent. The new opening is the lungs through which the university can breathe new air.

The sculpture is more or less free-standing and placed on a corner, at a powerful intersection. The sculpture is framed by the landscaping and the voice of each gives to the other to make both voices audible. The sculpture itself is the product of a conversation between Sydney City Council and St. Andrews College.

The culture of St Andrews specifically, places emphasis on being part of a community. To not be a part is not to be strong and not belong.

From whichever perspective the words can be read, the already large words expand. They are wrought here from molten earth and through the letters you can walk, or rest, or take shelter. The walls of steel blend with the shapes of stone walls of the college, bringing the background forward into the shared space.

That ART as part of PART should find itself to have a final singular dedicated plate in this space is coincidental.

When things come together however, you don’t argue.

Wayne Erickson described the work as a ‘provocative’ sculpture by Agatha and me. The fact of the matter is that we are all in this together, so that whatever mischief or glory ensues, Agatha and I are happy to share.

Thank you.

Become The Part 2022

St. Andrews College, Sydney University

Agatha Gothe-Snape and Michael Snape 20m x 10m x 3m

Become The Part Agatha Gothe-Snape and Michael Snape 2022

Become The Part Agatha Gothe-Snape and Michael Snape 2022

Become The Part Agatha Gothe-Snape and Michael Snape 2022

Become The Part Agatha Gothe-Snape and Michael Snape 2022

Become The Part Agatha Gothe-Snape and Michael Snape 2022

Become The Part Agatha Gothe-Snape and Michael Snape 2022

Nigel Lendon Memorial

These notes are an extended version of the video presentation with my partner Jacqueline Gothe, at Nigel Lendon’s memorial service at the Kambri Cinema, Australian National University on 7th May, 2022

Jacqueline’s and my presence today has been informed by our contracting Covid. While we present ourselves as ghosts, we have not suffered the same fate as Nigel just yet.

We only knew Nigel once we arrived at Wamboin.

The parallel tracks laid by Picasso and Duchamp before the first world war meant that our paths had never crossed, nor would ever, such was the quality of cultural engineering from the early twentieth century.

In the rarefied atmosphere of Wamboin however, those parallel lines were suddenly one line. That separation had been caused by a cultural stigmatism and there was just the one track, the art track, down which we all rambled.

That’s what I thought anyway, but Nigel would not budge. Measured differences would not so quickly be dismantled for social ease.

Nigel was belligerent, but in the most civilised and friendly way. His Adelaidian gentility was well instilled and so many years in education and in his writing, this nature had been well applied.

I first encountered Nigel’s work in 1971, at Watters Gallery. He had erected scaffolding throughout the gallery not as a preparatory activity for further construction for which scaffolding in normally employed. The beginning of it was the end of it. We were left to imagine what might arise from this structural introduction.

I was still a student then. I remember being annoyed by the work and it was only twenty years later, that I appreciated the scaffolding mounted in the gallery made the gallery itself the artwork. The gallery was under imaginary repair as if it was in need of reinvention.

Even if we have asked the question, ‘what is art?’ a multitude of times, the question still needs to be asked every morning. It is the artist’s morning  prayer. It was this determination that was shared, without question.

Nigel had been preparing for his show with Alex Danko at Milani which he sadly missed. He had in his time at Wamboin reinvented himself as a full-time artist. He was doing work which was still dry and as fresh as it had been, still annoyingly devoid of any applied sensuousness.

He mocked the notion of ‘sculptural values’, as if their presence might induce substance automatically.

The jury is out still. The jury is famously in a state of permanent deliberation nowadays. Our task is to keep it there, to keep us alive to possibilities as they emerge, or don’t!

In that spirit and, speaking of parallel lines, I’ve just now had another look at that scaffolding work on the internet. It’s called ‘Structure for a specific site’. It’s not a conceptual work at all. It is a beautifully realised spatial improvisation that doesn’t interrogate the function of the gallery at all. You don’t need to think. You only need to look and be apprehended by it. The gallery is divided and subdivided into a sequence of harmonising shapes and kind of reeks, sorry Nigel, of ‘sculptural values’.

The task for the sculptor traditionally, is to transform the block so that one can’t see the shape from which that block was carved. In this instance Nigel has completely transformed the space of the gallery.

I commend you all who don’t know the work to have a look on his excellent website, built by Axel, nigel.lendon.art.

Yes. That’s actually the website address. It’s like a second coming in that it brings Nigel back to life.

Structure for a Specific Site 1971

Structure for a Specific Site 1971

Structure for a Specific Site 1971

The Background of Friends of The National Art School

I have written these notes in response to Deborah Beck’s invitation to make an account of the early history of FONAS. Deborah Beck is Collections Manager at The National Art School.

The Fight for the Independence of the National Art School (NAS) and the formation of FONAS (Friends of the National Art School) 1992-1996.

Michael Snape April 2022.

It is over twenty-five years since the art school achieved independence from TAFE. These events took place in 1995 and directly led to the independent art school that now stands in 2022 as The National Art School (NAS). It doesn’t seem that long ago because nothing much changes in 26 years, no matter how compelling technological and political changes may be. We can only hope that the changes made then, were so deeply rooted that mischief cannot come again to undermine the strength and independence of the school.   

1995 saw the beginning of the implementation of Competency Based Training (CBT) in the Department of Technical and Further Education (TAFE). As part of TAFE the art school was subjected to this curriculum reform.

CBT broke down the teaching of art into discrete units which the teachers ‘knew’ and which the students ‘learnt’. With the accruing of these units of knowledge, the students would then have the necessary tools to make art. That may be the case in a technical school, but this was East Sydney Tech, aka ‘The National Art School’. It was different here.

The approach of the TAFE reformers showed their ignorance of a different culture which had been in place at the art school for generations and had been effective and did not need to be reformed. The culture involved the student being ‘immersed’ in the school culture to find their place and voice within that tradition. Being scant of traditions here in Australia, the artists and art students decided what had accrued needed to be protected at all costs.

What was intrinsic to the culture at the school was the voice of the part-timer, the practising artist, who came directly from their studio into the art school to share their knowledge and experience. This was the strength of the culture, the sharing of lived experience between artist and art student in a studio context.

Making art could not be made out of a set of ‘learning units’, instead it is a way of seeing and being. The role of the full time staff was to facilitate and create the environment in which that process was fostered.

The National Art School had always imagined itself as a separate entity from TAFE, with its own history and philosophy. With these proposed initiatives from TAFE Head Office seeking to undermine that history, immediate action was required to enforce that identity formally and forcefully.

Strangely the voice of resistance to these reforms was so low, nobody heard what was happening at the school. It was critical that the wider arts community understood that this tradition was under threat.

To that end, I took news of these changes at the art school to the broader art world. Most of these people had been to the school or had long-standing associations with it. They included the most respected artists, gallery directors and critics at the time. They signed a petition, ‘Public Notice, the extent of the threat to this valued part of our culture’*. Their response was immediate and strong.

This backing ultimately provided the support to a group of part-time teachers, students and one full-time teacher and we formed Friends of The National Art School. We had found our voice.

Initially the group constituted Geoff Ireland and me, with sculpture students Hopi Steiner, Megan Hewitt and painting student Emma Walker. When Ron Robertson–Swann joined with Jacques DelaRuelle and John Peart we officially formed FONAS, with John Peart being the first president. Kevin Norton, Peter Godwin, Liz Cummings, Richard Goodwin, also joined the group.

(From left) Megan Hewitt, Hopi Steiner, Michael Snape, Emma Walker, Bernadette Boscacci and Gria Shead 1995

FONAS was formally instituted and would become what it remains today.

Our aims were consolidated in the attached statement.**

Being employees of TAFE, the full time teaching staff were not able to speak out against these reforms, with one exception, who was Head of Sculpture, Geoff Ireland. It was the Sculpture Department in fact, who were initially, the strong voice.

The Sculpture Department had enjoyed a proud continuous history of sculptural thinking over the twentieth century. From Bertrand McKennel, Raynor Hoff, Jean Broom-Norton, Lyndon Dadswell, through to Ian McKay, Ron Robertson-Swann, Jan King and Clara Harli, the school had a firm foundation of sculptural thinking that refused to be undone by short term thinking from outside.

FONAS strength grew from this history within the sculpture department to hold the arguments, to bring about change. It was the voice of this history that made the voices loud.

A demonstration by students and staff took place at Parliament House in February, 1995. It was here that the FONAS committee met with the then leader of the state opposition, Bob Carr. At that meeting he made a commitment to make the art school independent from TAFE, should he win the election, which he duly did, on both counts.

Following these events, the struggle was not won, but the weight of argument had shifted. The intervening years have passed to produce the current school, which in 1996 would have been perceived as a most fanciful outcome.  

Michael Snape Personal Reflections and Reservations:

With the new independent art school, the structures of the old school were abandoned and the full-timer took the power the part-timer previously had. Where the strength of the part-timer had been initially argued by FONAS, their role in the new school was weakened. They became known as ‘sessional’ staff, which is a way of silencing those artists and facilitating a precarious relationship between the institution, the artist and the student. They were no longer part of the continuum, part of the culture of the school in the way they had been that was so successful previously. Sessional staff would appear briefly within a set period of time and then leave until another ‘session’ became available.

I was perceived by some of my FONAS colleagues to be an ‘incurable revolutionary’. I continued to be outspoken about FONAS members accepting tenured employment in the new school when I assumed our commitment to the school had been more altruistic. I was also not convinced about the choice of the first director of the school, who ultimately had a short tenure.

The school’s vision was to accrue status and respectability through University equivalence, which I still believe is anathema to art. From my perspective making art has never been an academic activity conferred through undergraduate, post-graduate and research degrees. These are bourgeois aspirations designed to protect the parents of children who might otherwise be devoured by a life in thankless art without a life jacket.

The traditions we had sought to protect ultimately have been eroded by the employment of graduates from university art education and aligning with University practices. The urge to be ‘contemporary’ is not long sighted.

Success is fabulous but usually comes before a fall. I do not wish this but one should be wary.

Philip Cox’ show

Philip Cox Paintings at Simon Chan

Architects imagine themselves custodians of ‘the mother of all arts’. Very few architects dare to apply their thinking outside their chosen discipline. 

A degree of confidence, a calling, will drive results to a degree however, without sufficient experience in handling material, no cohesive visual language will emerge with that intent.

In viewing Philip Cox’s paintings, the viewer is immediately struck by the landscapes themselves but also the way in which those landscapes are viewed, experienced and felt by the artist. 

A painting represents the way in which the experience of looking at a landscape is ‘synthesised’. 

The paintings employ observation which is wrought gesturally. Subject is not spelt out or illustrated. 

The use of gesture allows the artist to be immersed, to be at one, to have surrendered to the landscape as an insider. They are not trying to own it by naming it as their colonising aunts and uncles may have done. 

Philip Cox is not owning this land by painting it. He is listening to it and feeling it.  It is cold or hot, still and breezy. If it is not filled with birdsong one can at least hear the leaves rustling, the distant waves thumping the sand.  

All art stands for what it has achieved. It also acts as a promise for what will follow while the artist remains alive.

‘’Menindi’

This work is courageously unsightly with its crude blue and red sky and land demarcations. The scratchy vegetation shows the determination of plants to leave an unfavourable impression on the viewer. We are grateful for shade provided. We only wish the ground on which we lay brought some pleasure from shelter provided..

The paintings in this exhibition are modestly scaled and are painted on paper. Modest ambition mostly proves to be the most productive however, these paintings provide the scope for a hand and wrist gesture. Scaled up they would give scope to what the arm and the body might bring to the discussion in terms of ‘embodying’ the landscape and I look forward to seeing the way in which those actions are employed, perhaps.

The works in this exhibition are an account of the experience of being in the landscape. Also they are an account of the influences of other artists that guided these results. 

There is a history here of trying to understand what it is for us to be here, in this place, pictorially. Any contribution to this discussion is much appreciated. 

‘Thubbul Garden

This painting is more than the description of a place. It shows what it feels like to be in it, to walk through it, to be at one, with it. One senses the artist’s smile.

Painting

Dam 2022 oil on canvas 90 x 60cm

What we see is where we are now and where we have ever been. We bring to this moment all of the other moments that came before.

All of this prior experience gets stuck to what is in front of us. It’s bodily and in no way intellectual. Try and steer. Try to navigate. They are all dead ends compared to this driver.

We are at best, part of the medium with which we work. We are part of material’s plasticity. If paint is wet or dry, thick or thin, red or green, it is the task of the artist to spread paint’s word.

it is not so much that we think with our gut or heart. It’s that we digest with our brain. The brain is a filter that extracts simultaneously the goodness and badness of life and synthesises it.

If our brain is required at all, it is to persuade this governing process not to be interrupted.

Don’t stuff things up, we tell ourselves.