The End of Trump

We have seen everything of Trump but the end of him.

In the absence of that end, here it is.

The work is related to recent ‘blackboards’ but here applied to steel, where, unprotected from rain, the words will be erased, unless the chalk be replaced with a greasy chalk to emulate the chalk.

Alternatively the letters could be cutout and removed, but can politics enter art that far?

The End 2004 - 2025

The End 2004 - 2025

Gaza. People as Architecture

 

We have been startled recently by video footage and images of Gaza in ruins.

People are moving around as if they still are able to live there despite the devastation. 

It is as if walls and rooves intact are not the precondition for living there. These people are moving around in a grim acceptance of, ‘This is our life and it remains our home’. 

That ‘ruins’ can still function as ‘home’ interrogates what home is.

Gaza now

These broken environments draw the eye for reasons other than shock and horror.

As a result of the bombings, the usual divisions between boundaries is broken. The roads no longer divide the houses from each other. Boundaries between properties no longer exist because they are no longer there. The dominating vertical and horizontal lines that are a feature of most built environments, are absent. As a result there is a new unity in the images, between the people  and the broken buildings.

These broken buildings can still present themselves as ‘home’ to the Gazans. They are clearly determined to stay.

Gaza now

Perhaps Israel and the US believes that with destruction comes abandonment, but this increasingly does not seem to be the case.

It is as if the Palestinians themselves become the surrogate architecture, to become the dominant vertical feature, to replace the buildings.

Note: These images are drawn from the internet from various sources. We should be wary of manipulation but also trust our interpretive capacity.

Blackboards

Sculptor Michael Legrand describes occasional deviations from his central practice as ‘aberrations’. I’m not sure if he still entertains such urges.

My practice sometimes seems governed by ‘aberrative’ inclinations.

When one finds oneself compelled to do something and the intellect has no power to overpower or contextualise that urge to desist, you do it.

My blackboard works counter my usual art practice by being ephemeral. They occupy outside an art context. They are realised without my usual appetite for weight and scale and the pleasure of physical effort.

My blackboard works are ‘slight’. They are also conspicuously unnoticed. They seem to tire quite quickly, needing to be renewed every month or so.

Having said that, I am motivated to keep doing them. I rejoice in doing them. Their futility and commodity independence liberates them and me. That they are erased and to find only a modest afterlife in the blog, seems adequate and fair.

YAY and Still Alive is the first ‘blackboard’ that uses both panels, to make a dialogue across the dividing door to the other panel.

Many thanks to Courtney at Ciao Thyme, Darling Street, Balmain, for providing this platform.

Wamboin Postcard

I am fortunate to have space here at Wamboin to explore the different ways that works can be placed to show their best aspects. I am fortunate also to have been able to keep works and to have retrieved works that were purchased. The works here are in rotation, moving, looking for their resting spots where they can be their best selves.

The works sometimes enjoy each other’s company and at other times prefer to stand alone to take up the whole space to find their voice.

These photos show works where they currently stand, at particular times of the day and in different light, with and without shadows. The works change as they are moved. With each siting, they are remade.

The assembly of all of them make up one work, which, for better or worse. is my life’s work.

These Wamboin Postcards show the state of flux that exists in the ‘solidity’ which sculpture promised.

Slow Turn 2, 2024

Installation Wamboin

Boat, 1978, Flower, 2016 (middle ground), 3 Fold 2019 (background)

Slow Turn 2, again.

The Arena is an open-air workshop where finished works compete with accidental and long-term experiments

Spine, 2020 with Brooch 2011 in background

Broken Tunnel, 2017, renamed from The Moment

The Room 1990- 2020

Third World 2018

The Miner 2019

Air

The Sydney School of Sculpture. Further Notes

In the nineteen seventies, when we were on top of the world and invincible as sculptors, we had measures in place to determine the success of our work. 

We had independent judges, unaligned and principled, who supported clarity above loyalty. We were a machine, unparalleled, unequivocal. The standards established by our predecessors at The National Art School, namely Lynden Dadswell, Bertrand McKennell and Raynor Hoff were sketches for the sculptures we were making. 

Our mission saw no limits.

We were The Sydney School of Sculpture which was without parallel anywhere. Nowhere was there such a sustained conversation about what sculpture had been, and what it could be. In the context of the long conversation about sculpture, this one hundred years extension of that discussion has continued and remains relatively unacknowledged.

The sculptors then were a sculpture family. Like with all families we laughed and loved, we argued and cried. We broke like families do. We formed allegiances that lasted and didn’t, then did again. Over fifty years there were many permutations available for different relations however the sculptural conversation continued.

Those of us then who were young have been joined by young sculptors now. Our program has exposed the folly of a generational zeitgeist. This business we mean is for all time and sculpture serves to slow an unsustainable flow of time. Even from within the group, some of us have died and this thing we are part of, is outside of us. It is its own animal.

None of us much are in love with the material of choice. The shaping of steel makes us deaf and dirty. Neighbours shun us and even ask us to move away. When work is complete it is heavy to move, expensive even, which makes it not the darling of the curatorial profession, which is shaped by budget above taste.

The work we make is often big, too big for internal spaces, it is mostly placed outdoors where it is exposed to human and other nature. We remain sometimes too much a product of a particular appetite for large scale work inherited from American ambition. Some of us, many of us have adopted an appetite for a more sensible, modest scale. Watch this shrinking space!

For the community at large what has been consistent over fifty years is the appetite for material has been ‘anything at all’ so long as it is not steel! It is ironic, this ambivalence for steel when steel is the innocent bystander and is more the space divider. There is talk, art historically of ‘negative space’, when in fact what brings all the sculptors together in the sculptural language is the sharing of positive air.  

It is air we share more than steel.

To recognise a work belongs to the SSS movement, it will be the shape of air you admire or despise, not the steel. The steel is the messenger. If you find yourself looking at the material of the sculpture rather than the air, it probably belongs to a different family of sculpture.   

New Commission

I have this week installed a new commissioned screen in Surry Hills.

The client gave an open brief which allowed me to be informed by his collection of paintings. Without losing my voice, I made a work which was informed and informed other works in the home.

The work was to function as a screen to contain the space and to provide some light but not too much.

I made a model which I showed the client to confirm my direction.

Paper model 40 × 30cm

Cutting in process

Plasma-cut, and bent using oxy-acetylene.

Because of the restricted access, the work needed to be light. Being light, to limit distortion the plate was framed, which would also provide a fixing point. The drawing was done in chalk and cut with a plasma.

Suspended, to indicate level of transparency

The aim always is to make something authentic. Authentic ‘denotes an emotionally appropriate, significant, purposive and responsible model for human life’, according to existentialist philosophy. It is always evident when a work lacks authenticity.

I still don’t have a title for the work. Most often by now a title has occurred to me. The title needs to be simple, memorable and descriptive to aid memory.

The light spills into the courtyard dropping shadows randomly appropriately.

Shadows

You want to make a tight work, a taut work, but it has to be a bit open too, to find its place, to make its shape legible.

Water, Fat and the letter U.

With the sound of the flow of water 

The water inside me wants to be with that water. “Let me out of here!”, the water inside me says. “I want to go home”.

All the water wants to band together to be part of a puddle, a pond, a lake. 

It is water’s way and cannot be overcome. 

There’s a queue to get out of me and a queue to get in. 

The fat in the milk, the cake, that roll with dinner. They’re all calling out  to join me, to come into me, to become part of the fat castle.

The fat colludes to overpower my appetite to be thin. 

The fat is empowered by my desire of it. The engine of my desire draws it to me. I am its lord and saviour. 

I am the fat magnet.

There’s a third queue, words with U.

TBC

.

The Appetite for The Sculptor's Supper Club

There’s talk of starting up the old Sculpture Supper Club again.

For those who didn’t know of it or never went, the club consisted of a group of sculptors who shared similar hopes and sculptural values.

The aim was to have a civil discussion about sculpture with comments filtered through a chair. Discussions would be interspersed with entrée, main and dessert, with alcohol consumed at a level to reduce inhibitions without losing them.

We had met from the mid-eighties to the late nineties, often monthly, but probably ten times a year.

Ultimately for one reason or another, nobody knows which, the dinners stopped.

Some of those sculptors now are older. Others have no horizon over which to peer. Some sculptors will relish the prospect of the dinners starting again while others, smarting still, may restrain themselves.

There remains an appetite for discussion and for the meals we enjoyed at Tetsuya initially and for the last several years at Bon Riccordo in Paddington. Where and how and when we may meet soon is yet to be determined.


*

The Choir 2024

 

Outsiders and other sculptors wondered at our commitment to the dinners. The dinners seemed more inward looking than genuinely inquisitive. That is often the way when groups gather and by gathering differentiate themselves from others.

When I was a young sculptor in the early seventies, it was a moment of great hope and vision in our collective cultural voice. Our predecessors had not had the advantage of this optimism and had gone off to Europe mostly, or America where they could find opportunities to realise their personal ambition, where eyes and ears were open and curious to register meaning when it was presented.

By the mid-seventies we were confident we had both the scope to speak and listen, without leaning into a foreign culture, a foreign voice.

In the mid-seventies we were confident that we could synthesise our being here in this new and different place to which our forebears had brought us.

It is conceivable that those aspirations were exhausted by the end of those dinners in the last days of the twentieth century. It is possible that our hopes and vision had come to nothing or that by then there should have been some cultural recognition of our presence. Our awakening had not brought all of us alive to the same opportunities.

Recently ambitious younger sculptors have seen the light and gone away. The recognition of an absence of discerning ears and eyes and the limited dollars on offer was clear and obvious.

What is remarkable about Australia is that we have made work and continue to make work because we can. The making of work is the support of it. Because of the limited appetite for our work, we have had to be responsible for the work we make. This aspect can be challenging however, we should not lose sight of the fact that we are privileged.

Recently, in the last ten years or so, I have come to see that my voice is not a singular activity. I have recognised in fact that if I do not see my voice as being part of a collective choir of voices, then I have no voice at all. Individual strength is always group sourced.

Stay posted.

 

 

Armed

Cars often conceal their occupants with their tinted windows. Some activities however, necessitate an open window.

There are two innocent subjects here. There’s the hand that shows it has not yet been employed, and there’s the new beautiful yet unsmoked cigarette.

A brand new cigarette is a thing of beauty. Held by such a hand as this, what could go awry?

By Five Dock, from Iron Cove Bridge, this newness already will have passed. All that whiteness will have gone away. There will be nothing much to spin between the fingers.

2 Queues

With the sound of the flow of water 

The water inside me wants to be with that water. “Let me out of here!”, the water inside me says. “I want to go home”.

All the water wants to band together to be part of a puddle, a pond, a lake. The water inside me has no sense of belonging only a need to betray me. 

It is water’s way and cannot be overcome. 

Water is in a queue to get out of me.

There’s another queue.

Water in Darwin 2022

The fat in the milk, the cake, that roll with dinner. They’re all calling out to join me, to come into me, to become part of the fat castle.

This fat colludes to overpower my appetite to be thin. 

The fat is empowered by my desire of it. The engine of my desire draws it to me. I am its lord and saviour. I am the fat magnet. While the water is disloyal, the fat’s lingering presence is unwelcome.

Thin arm

2 into 3

2 into 3

Panda sleeping

“The extent that I am relaxed or asleep belies the considerable effort made to get me here.”

“It was not only through the deliberate deployment of limbs that I could achieve this state of physical surrender.”

“I also needed to conceive the idea.”

“This physical and mental effort was required to draw the admiration from my hosts, my family, my love, on which I depend.” 

         Panda 7th September, 2024

Polystyrene Dog 110 x 35 x 5cm

The Number's Loss

Against the numbers we cannot argue. 

Sometimes though numbers add up to more than sums. 

Sometimes they are less than they subtract. 

Sometimes numbers just change into something else, incalculably. 

When the number ceases to behave  numerically it can become anything at all. 

As soon as it ceases to function numerically, it flies. 

A constant theme in all numbers is mobility. Numbers always seem to be on the run. Numbers are always in a race to get to the end as fast as possible. 

From counting with very handy fingers early, we moved to the Abacus. Then slide rules softened our mental arithmetic. Calculators, computers, and IT now.

Against IT, nothing will compete, we argued. 

The function of numbers is to Calculate. 

The ‘calculation’ is the equivalent of a ‘conclusion’ one derived from thinking. 

It would be remiss of the user of numbers or words to deny themselves the richness of the best outcome of their endeavours. 

On the way to Bungendore tonight, the dash lit up to reveal this. 

It’s not a round number.

The numbers have all lost their curves.

These are just stiches to sew my journey together.

My truck is a sewing machine.

To all writers out there

‘Keeping’ is the term employed for those who write blogs. They keep them in the way diaries are ‘kept’, for mainly private and personal reasons. They are kept close to the chest and not given out at arms length. A book is written and offered more at arm’s length.

On the one hand a blog is more public than a diary however, the readership is only marginally larger than what a diary attracts. This is what my ‘traffic’ records testify most days of the week.

I keep a blog to cultivate my thoughts but they are not honed in the way a broader publication requires. ‘Publication’ requires filters, editorial control and an overview. Publication exposes the writing to  a harsher light. The writing needs to survive the scrutiny of more critical readers.

The blog writer is an amateur writer and cannot accept a ‘writer’ status.

I will never be ‘publication ready’ as I have run out of time to grow there.

Open and closed options

I would like to have had the patience and focus to write a book, write and illustrate children’s books as Norman Lindsay was able to do. And others.

Instead, with the blog writing I have only cultivated my thinking from which I can better grow sculpture.

It doesn’t really matter what I think, or anybody thinks and even ‘time’, which had previously been the most reliable examiner is not having the best century.

We only do the things we do because we fail to pause long enough to ask ourselves why we do them.