Transformations 1967 - 2012

Sorry regular viewers you may have seen a few of these works before but I'm contributing to a discussion hosted by Regional Arts Victoria called Small Town Transformations. Someone enthusiastically mentioned Candy Chang in connection with transformative works, it made me smile a little as I made many of these before she was born. She may have been in primary school when I did the one above, Two Gates (obviously this is a detail!) in the Foyer of 101 Collins St, for the Australian Sculpture Triennial.

1967, Fragments of a larger system, yep, you can go to any hardware store and add them to your own collection if you like and yours will be just like the ones in the NGV, this work of mine along with several others from the same exhibition are the first conceptual works ever made and exhibited in Australia - which is funny really because in 1967 the word was not in common usage.

1971 transforming Queensland Uni and much of St Lucia with  military grade smoke bombs, we also did it in Uni NSW and the McClelland Gallery.

This is actually very pertinent to this project, first done for the Adelaide Festival in 72 (I think) this version in Carlton 73 pretends to sell off one of their favourite squares; nothing makes people think about their towns quicker than the thought that some developer is going get control of their favourite park!

1995 Temple of the Southern Cross, a touring installation for small country halls and disused buildings (it actually went to RMIT Gallery as well, the flag you see on it's portable pole was called Night Sky. Shown here outside the Boisedale Hall.  

2011 - Sara Delaney - a head of her time, seen here in Fed Square as part of the Melbourne Prize for Urban Sculpture, first shown in 2010 McClelland prize. It's pretty much where I'm at today........from the catalogue essay. "It is a sculpture that challenges conventional concepts about site specifics and urban sculpture by concentrating not on the aesthetics and narrative of space but on the people for whom that space was originally designed. Each person's mind is a specific site.

By claiming air rather than ground this work activates an urban spacial area with no built baggage."

more on Minimal

I've spent quite a lot of time in this blog doing what I always do, being pre-occupied with what I'm doing right now, but I bought a new scanner a little while back and have had some fun digging up old slides and prints from the very early days. News of the Heide Minimal show had me ferreting about in the photo draw,  finding a few golden oldies and jogging the memory. While letting smoke bombs off, Sydney 1970, Brisbane 1971, Melbourne, McClelland Gallery 1972, I was busy doing things like these domes, my first commission, for Monash University 1969-70, aptly called Two domes.

Like many sculptures in this country, this work eventually wound up at the tip. Damage caused by ride-on lawn mowers had put so many dints in them that they looked pretty bad. They have been replaced by another work that was designed at the same time but so far I've not got round to taking a picture of it. 

To round this little set off, here are a couple of my favourite works from my very first show in 1967, Clive Murray-White's Coloured Balls, above is Fragments of a larger System, 1967, apart from it being what I think of as a thesis work containing the idea I've worked on ever since, it was not for sale, anybody who liked it could go down to the hardware store and get their own. You can get your version too if you like. It did throw up an interesting little side issue, when the National Gallery of Victoria wanted it, they were quite happy to pay for it and got quite distressed that they couldn't buy it from me, a compromise was reached, I would go to the hardware store, buy them 4 pipes and charge them exactly what they cost on the day, everybody was content! I think the issue had something to do with "authenticity".

In today's language the whole show would have been seen as an installation, a term that wasn't used 'til many years later. Whilst we're on the topic of terms, even minimal and conceptual weren't in our vocabularies back then, the smokeworks were usually called examples of "environment art" and for items like the pipes the term "Duchampian" was often used! Above is another work from that show, Ball, 1967. (The dictionary definition of ball) These works bring up a few interesting historical questions, my personal view is that the argument about the rise of this kind of art has not been accurately recorded in this country, could even say it may have been stridently highjacked by a few over enthusiastic Sydneysiders. Researchers into the history of Australian art would do well to look very carefully at 2 Melbourne galleries from the 60's, The Argus and Pinocotheca.

Smokework Brisbane 1971

A touch of nostalgia! brought on by a cold, meaning I have to entertain myself because I can't go out into the studio - sorting through my draws I came across a couple of old slides of the best known of my Smokeworks, organised by the Contemporary Art Society of Queensland in 1971, top pic is the well known print, next is a slide of mine used for the cover of Art and Australia, April - June 1976 and the bottom one amuses me a little because if we didn't know what it was, it could easily be some awful disaster.

In 2006 David Pestorius was organising an ambitious exhibition for the University of Queensland Art Museum, titled, Turrbul - Jagera, in the process of researching the old Smokework he came across 2 films of it, the B&W was an ABC news film that Roy Churcher had, but for me the Brian Hatch super 8 in colour was an extremely surprising find 35 years after the event - some people must keep everything and I guess the world is better for it. So here's a couple of vintage YouTubes.

Seiko the wonder watch, the sculptor's watch

Here’s my dear old watch, bought at a duty free shop just as I was setting off on my first Australia Council Travel Grant - to America and Europe in 1976. It’s silver face has tarnished (maybe I should say attractively patinated), its glass is scratched and chipped, the watch still runs perfectly, well nearly, day and date just decided that they’d had enough and wouldn’t let me adjust them anymore. You really can’t blame the poor old thing, I wear it right next to the hand I use to hold my chisels, grinders and all sorts of power tools so over 36 years it’s been jolted and shaken millions upon millions of times.

I've decided to let it have a quiet and well deserved retirement so I've started looking for a new watch that I can abuse and I'm beginning to find it quite frustrating. Ruggedly shockproof just isn't something that watch makers list as important qualities, it's implied somehow by associating their products with activities like Formula one racing - sitting in a car isn't exactly going to give your watch a hard time, Yachting - much the same but a bit damp sometimes and Diving - constantly damp but not rugged. I want a SCULPTORS watch guaranteed to work for 30 years, being constantly vibrated in a dusty environment - Ah! as I write this I googled "tough watches" and found a whole bunch of steam punk indestructable military monsters - but militaristic isn't a good look for an artist, so come on someone make me a new SCULPTOR'S watch. 

Studio as gallery - priceless

Just had a big group through the studio - a bus load + several cars, all from Bairnsdale, members of Probus and while I was doing my "show and tell" Carolyn was taking a few snaps, I cropped this priceless moment out of a much bigger picture. It sort of says it all, all dressed up for the outing, this lady got herself nicely covered in dust, settled-in at the end of my workbench and proceeded to "experience" the tools - given half a chance I reckon she would have happily missed lunch at the pub to spend an afternoon belting the living daylights out any lump of marble that she could have got her hands on.

Totally immersed in her activities she was blissfully unaware that she had attracted quite an audience - aren't the guys great, hands thrust deep into pockets or tightly clasped around themselves - I'm sure I can detect at least one of them with that tell-tale "I wish I had the courage to do that" look written all over his face. 

Real Slow Art

I was doing a bit of research the other day, I'd got in my head that maybe my sculpture was something like the equivalent of slow or real food so I Googled  Slow art and this came up.

From a Robert Hughes dinner speech at the Royal Academy of Arts: 

“What we need more of is slow art: art that holds time as a vase holds water: art that grows out of modes of perception and making whose skill and doggedness make you think and feel; art that isn’t merely sensational, that doesn’t get its message across in ten seconds, that isn’t falsely iconic, that hooks onto something deep-running in our natures.”

Sounded OK too me, I could sign up to that but I looked bit further and started to mutter a few expletives as I saw what was masquerading as slow art, there was some very smooth laboured mock 19c bourgeois realism promoting itself as the bees knees in slow art, it probably took a long time to do (dogged) but it was falsely iconic, very easy to understand but had far too much cholesterol for my taste.

And then came the Slow Art Collective from Melbourne who'd gone as far as to supply this manifesto, my comments in colour.

- Take time to observe everyday life carefully. I'll go along with this

- Choose simple materials that connect with the artist’s life. I'll go along with this as well but we are beginning to slide away from the slow food idea of great natural ingredients.

- Focus on a process of art making rather than object making. The work always changes subtly, and grows like a living organism. And this one too, but why "living organism"? I don't know.

- Create art works on site from zero. Spend time on site to experience the space, physically and internally. When the exhibition finishes, go back to zero. Seek the meaning of artwork that doesn’t last. Now this one slips off the dinner table all together - sure slow food advocates can scrounge around the roadside for free salad but what's the point of making food you mustn't eat?

- Interact with other artists and society. Blur the boundaries between artist and audience. This one is just too elitist for me, sure engagement with the public is an essential part of art but the boundaries are in the artist's minds not the public's.

Shame that drawing a link between Real/Slow Food and Art has been high jacked by stuff that's way  off the mark

CIA influence on the history of art, has got me thinking

Hacking away at large lumps of marble day in day out seems to provoke the mind to wander especially when you stumble over articles like this.

http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/modern-art-was-cia-weapon-1578808.html

It kicks off with this, "For decades in art circles it was either a rumour or a joke, but now it is confirmed as a fact. The Central Intelligence Agency used American modern art - including the works of such artists as Jackson Pollock, Robert Motherwell, Willem de Kooning and Mark Rothko - as a weapon in the Cold War. In the manner of a Renaissance prince - except that it acted secretly - the CIA fostered and promoted American Abstract Expressionist painting around the world for more than 20 years."

No I'm not going to go along the lines of the stereotypical wowser shock, horror, outrage, but instead to accept that governments, the church and monarchies have manipulated the course of the history of art to suit their own ends since the year dot. It's just I hadn't thought how extensive it could have been in my life time and that's when my own alarm bells started ringing.

As a UK 60's art student I had first hand experience of the new artworld being completely besotted with all things American - American Modern Art was simply the coolest thing around so it was easy to promote, especially with unlimited US government backing. The most disturbing thing about the American model was that it was adversarial, not only did it promote itself but it backed it up with insidious criticisms of all other cultures and that's probably where the greatest manipulation occurred. Leaving us to wonder which non-American art or ideas suffered most from this approach.

Following this along we notice that initially the CIA promoted an art that was being made with no outside influence but some time in the 70's its not hard to notice that things started to change; the idea of fairness and politically correct issues crept in as desirable values in contemporary art - possibly with other government agencies becoming involved. Whether this was good or bad doesn't really matter but it flies in the face of any notion of supporting genuine artistic freedom. 

It would take some scholarship to unearth the effect of Australian government agencies on the history of Australian art but its not hard to see the pro-British Menzies era iron fist of William Dargie Arts control and the equally vigorous Whitlam Australia Council as prime candidates for history biasing precedents.

And I suspect that the practice of government interference has become so entrenched that we don't even notice it. 

Melbourne Prize - what next?

As the dust settles on 2011, and everything else in my studio for that matter!! I thought we should kick off the new year with a snapshot of what's causing the dust. Nicknamed big-i for the moment, it weighs in at about 3x as much as i-luru  (the largish sculpture in profile) doubtless this one will have a few kgs knocked off her before long!

Time to put reflecting about the Melbourne Prize and the state of contemporary Australian sculpture to one side and get on making it - have a great year - more as the 2012 evolves.