An Opening Read online

  An opening

  Born in Melbourne, Stephanie Radok has worked in Adelaide as an artist, freelance visual art writer and editor since 1988. She first exhibited her art at the Experimental Art Foundation in Adelaide in 1977 and her writing about art was first published in Unreal City in Canberra in 1986.

  Stephanie Radok has a reputation as one of Australia’s most lucid, fearless and best respected art writers, with over twenty years of extensive reviewing and critical writing for The Adelaide Review, Artlink, Art Monthly and other magazines. She has written many catalogue essays and was awarded a major New Work grant by the Australia Council in 2002. She was a Visiting Fellow in 2001 at the Centre for Cross-Cultural Research at the Australian National University. Over the last twenty years she has edited many issues of Artlink magazine discovering and encouraging new writers and artists and in 2011 co-edited the new series Artlink Indigenous breaking new ground in the appreciation of Aboriginal art in Australia.

  As an artist, Stephanie Radok trained in Canberra and has exhibited widely. Her work has been collected by the National Gallery of Canberra, the National Gallery of Victoria, Flinders University Art Museum and private collections. Her art practice includes painting, printmaking, objects and installation. She has shown her work at Greenaway Art Gallery, the Art Gallery of South Australia, the National Gallery of Victoria, the Adelaide Festival Centre, the South Australian Museum, the Royal Adelaide Showgrounds and the Museum of Economic Botany. In 2011 a survey exhibition of her artwork The Sublingual Museum was shown at Flinders University City Gallery.

  An opening

  twelve love stories about art

  Stephanie Radok

  Wakefield Press

  1 The Parade West

  Kent Town

  South Australia 5067

  www.wakefieldpress.com.au

  First published 2012

  This edition published 2012

  Copyright © Stephanie Radok, 2012

  All rights reserved. This book is copyright. Apart from any fair dealing for the purposes of private study, research, criticism or review, as permitted under the Copyright Act, no part may be reproduced without written permission. Enquiries should be addressed to the publisher.

  Front cover illustration: Dingo, 1982, woodcut print, Stephanie Radok

  National Library of Australia Cataloguing-in-Publication entry

  Author: Radok, Stephanie.

  Title: An opening [electronic resource]: twelve love stories about art / Stephanie Radok.

  ISBN: 978 1 74305 043 9 (ebook: epub).

  Subjects: Art in literature.

  Dewey Number: 831.912

  Contents

  Preface

  Introduction

  JANUARY the dignity of objects

  FEBRUARY the presence of the garden

  MARCH he is my relative

  APRIL finding water

  MAY the place of the dead

  JUNE a leaf from my book

  JULY measuring the world

  AUGUST a new language

  SEPTEMBER written on the skin

  OCTOBER reconstituting the ordinary

  NOVEMBER heart country

  DECEMBER the drawing of correspondences

  References

  for Jerome

  There is a discourse about the arts, rarely written and at times unspoken which is neither that of historians so deeply tied to time and space nor that of critics concentrating on personal views about the arts… It is a discourse of sensibilities affected by the excitement of visual impressions. It is the discourse of love.

  Oleg Grabar

  Preface

  When we are young we live in no-time and all-time, when we get older we see that we are located in a specific time though we may not adopt the easy division of our lives into the decades and categories that are so smoothly described in newspapers and magazines. There is no dress rehearsal, no practice, no repeat performance, often no warning about the end of the show, so why do we store up experience, try to collect parts of our lives into patterns and examine them if not to learn something from them that we can use? We are made from memories of weather, pieces of paper and cloth, vegetables, fruit, days and moments strung together across blood, sinew and bone. Maybe some of us are made quite simply from the earth of one place, we taste strongly of one thing and belong to it. But most of us are made from many substances. We tend often to sum others up by their national or gender or racial or age or shape characteristics, yet truly each of us is a complex piece of embroidered cloth with different types of stitching and beading and threads and patterns and fringes, with a back and a front and an in-between. Or even a piece of cloth so full of holes that the background is also a part of us. And sometimes, someone or something reaches through the holes.

  Like people art is made of complex patterns. The use we make of art depends on how we come across it in our lives – if it is around us everyday it can be especially transforming. It is an ordinary thing to buy or be given a calendar of twelve images to accompany the year. There is always something enthralling about a calendar – because it is not as precious as a book it can be dismantled without a sense of desecration, yet the images are in the format of a book, a closed object that opens up and contains revelations that can’t be seen from the outside. We live with each calendar image for a month, it hangs on the wall marking the days of the week, the passage of time, both routine and special days, and observes us as we observe it, in good moods and bad, in tears or in laughter, celebration and commiseration. The month begins blank and then is filled with reminders and appointments. The image hangs calmly above all the days.

  The power of an image or object to give comfort and thus somehow to give love is most mysterious and perhaps a certain amount of loneliness or at least solitude is required to really sense it. When we are reflected in the loving eyes of another person we may not see our more quiet reflection in a picture on the wall but on the other hand there is much loneliness and solitude within human relationships. The German artist Paula Modersohn-Becker, whose artwork is full of the weight of objects, the solid bodies of people, animals and flowers, and the palpability of light, expressed it thus:

  I have cried a lot in my first year of marriage… I feel as lonely as I did in my childhood… It is my experience that marriage does not make one happier. It destroys the illusion that has been the essence of one’s previous experience, that there existed something like a soul-mate. The feeling of not being understood is heightened in marriage by the fact that one’s entire life beforehand had the aim of finding a being who would understand one. But isn’t it better to exist without such an illusion and look this great lonely truth straight in the eye.

  And how does love get into or out of images? Is it the same as cooking, where love somehow gets in as part of the process of making and then emanates from the food and makes it good? Good food contains love; I know this to be true from experience because when I concentrate on making art my cooking goes awkward because the love has gone into the art. Of course not every meal is made with overwhelming love, nor is every artwork. The ongoing popularity and appeal of Vincent van Gogh’s work stems from the sense of love that emanates from his art; this is love in the form of the intense attention and energy he applied to his work, it is like electricity and can make your heart move in your chest. The question of how an emotion finds its way into a line, a shape, a colour or a substance, a piece of music or a movie, is deeply mysterious, but it does happen. There is no recipe for it but only a few works made by any person are truly full of it.

  Images of artworks that I have torn or cut from calendars and attached to the wall over the years have had a great influence on me. In them I hang onto some deep reflective experience that they offer, these creations, the
se companions, some of which have accompanied me for years. Many are now lost but live on in my memory.

  I remember a photograph of a sun-drenched small wooden jetty jutting into a lake surrounded by trees covered with summer-fresh green leaves and itself covered with reflections of leaves. The jetty was almost invisible in the light greens, the dark greens and the blackness of shadow. The photo was from a Russian calendar and was an archetypal Russian summer image; such fresh greens must be ephemeral and balanced by long months of cold and darkness. I remember a Paul Klee painting on coarse hessian in which a red balloon ascended through a sky of yellow triangles. A sense of simplicity, lightness, release, elevation and tranquillity shone out from the texture and colour of this image.

  Another memorable one that I still have is a detail from Hieronymous Bosch’s The Garden of Earthly Delights. A sense of wonder in this work, its colours, the proliferation of animals in it, has made it particularly precious to me. It has travelled from place to place and its edges are now tattered and discoloured. I once photocopied it at the local library with a lot of other images but somehow left it behind on the glass. When I got home and felt rather than saw the empty space on the wall and realised what I had done, I rushed back to ask for it, ‘A picture of God with Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden’, and when they handed it over I saw it for a moment as what it was, a very ragged piece of paper, something they may have easily thrown away but which they must have been able to tell was valuable to someone.

  Printed on this now worn but precious piece of paper is just part of the left-hand side of the triptych by El Bosco, as he is called in Spain, an artwork that hangs in the Prado in Madrid. This month, along with many other pilgrims, I finally saw the original. There were so many other visitors I was amazed as I thought my obsession with this work was private. What does everyone get from seeing these things, ticking off cultural treasures, touchstones, making them theirs? We’ve done that, goes the phrase: well, I’ve done the Primavera, and so on. And what do we do when finally we are there in front of the work we have gazed at in reproduction and dreamed of seeing in real life? Do we photograph it if we are allowed, do we memorise it inch by inch, go as close as possible to the surface of the work and try to see what can only be seen in the flesh? That’s what I do, as well as making notes which gives me something to reread in order to re-visit the experience, to form my own idea of it from my own perception and, most urgently, to use the experience to create something of my own.

  What we think are our private obsessions are not really private, or rather our private obsessions belong to many other people as well. Yet on this recent trip rather than being annoyed by the global nature of cultural tourism in the twenty-first century, the perennial crowds that make buying tickets on the internet necessary, that mean queues to see certain works, that mean travelling in crowds, that even meant missing seeing things I wanted to see, I found it alright. It meant that as a solo traveller I was not completely alone but somehow part of a large anonymous family from many different countries who had travelled from our homes to see certain works of art. Thus the experience was solitary and individual but communal. Along with the works I could examine my fellow viewers and identify their languages and countries. How will each of us patch these sights into our lives, and are people really interested in art or mostly in fame or infamy? What does seeing artworks mean? Does viewing of contemporary art differ from viewing old art? What makes a work of art important, its place in history, its personal meaning, its financial value?

  I was amazed to see the size of Bosch’s painting (I had always imagined it to be tiny, a microscopic miracle, but it is as tall as me and much much wider). And I was enthralled to see the astonishing brightness of its colours – the reds, the yellows, the blues. What a miracle this painting must have seemed when it was first painted around 1500 and what a miracle it is now, Bosch’s extraordinary imagination wedded to his skill, for the central image of the triptych is that amazing and endlessly fascinating The Garden of Earthly Delights of maybe five hundred playing naked male and female bodies, mostly white but some black, having adventures, couples standing on their heads next to giant owls, dancing and singing, or sailing along in giant berries rocked by lizards and so on in endless permutations, games and confabulations. The right-hand side of the triptych is Hell, a place of burning, humiliation, elaborate torture and pain. But the painting that I once collected from a calendar and have been looking at for many years, The Creation of Eve, the left-hand side of the triptych, is about neither pleasure nor pain but the peaceful heart of creation and the calm and curiosity of forms coming into being. Maybe after all I am one of the only ones for whom this least spectacular side of the painting is the most precious.

  It is the contemplation of this painting that has given rise to this book as a place to pull together experiences and ideas, responses to art and the thoughts aroused by it, in order to partake of the miracle of creation and to add something to the world. The writing for each month begins with an artwork that is close to my heart. Many of them came to me as calendar pages, some as postcards, some in art galleries, others in books. As I wrote about them resonances kept cropping up – rivers that escape their beds, the colour yellow, birds – this seems to confirm some consistency in my thinking though I would not go so far as to call it a theory, more a calling.

  Typically art exhibitions begin with an opening, a social event at which free drinks are served and friends come to congratulate the artist. The potential in every art exhibition, every artwork, is present at this point of opening, a point of potential expansion of the world, of surprise, celebration, learning and illumination. In taking An opening as the title for this book I wish to refer both to all the openings at which art is introduced to its audience, and to the bright clear light that characterises Australia which can be seen as potentially leading to an opening of the mind.

  Introduction

  At the beginning of his book Modern Asian Art about modernism in contemporary Asian art as neither a reflection nor a secondhand version of European art but a movement in its own right, John Clark quotes C.P. Cavafy’s poem Waiting for the Barbarians in which the Greek poet asks: ‘What will become of us without barbarians?’ and answers: ‘They were a kind of solution.’ In his own words Clark describes the current opening up of the world through the changing of historical hierarchies thus: ‘Byzantium is gone and the lands beyond it and the lands beyond them. We now begin to see each other, and no longer only the figments of force or imagination.’

  The city of Byzantium stood at the geographical and cultural centre of the European and Middle Eastern worlds for more than one thousand years. It has long been used as a symbol of complexity and sophistication in art as well as an exemplar of cross-cultural fertilisation. In his poem Sailing to Byzantium W.B. Yeats described its essence as the song of a finely crafted gold and enamel bird. German artist Anselm Kiefer discussed the idea of Byzantium in Boundaries, tracks, traces, songs, a talk he gave in 1999 in Adelaide. The talk was illustrated by a single projected image of his 1989 painting Abendland (Twilight of the West) in which an embossing of a manhole cover represents the sun which sinks in a sky made of an immense battered sheet of lead. Beneath this literally heavy sky a ravaged whitened and scorched land surrounds a central image of receding train tracks and somehow we know that these tracks lead to Auschwitz, that the train has gone and that more trains will come, and that the tracks can never be erased and that the earth is scarred with the memory of such eternally recurring tragedies, akin to the time when Demeter lost Persephone to the underworld and the ensuing winter turned the earth white.

  Kiefer’s talk was filled with a brooding Weltschmerz of nostalgia and longing. He contrasted Western culture to Aboriginal culture which ‘knows how to sing the land’. Strongly informed by the interpretations of Aboriginal culture he found in Bruce Chatwin’s 1987 book The Songlines, Kiefer poetically mourned the decline of the West. Looking for a reference in his experience for Aboriginal d
ot paintings he compared them to Byzantine mosaics but queried the fate in them of the characteristic Byzantine sky that represents infinity and is typically composed of gold foil beneath clear glass. He asks:

  But where is the sky, the golden background sky?…

  Coming from the Occident,

  From an ever sinking world,

  We do not have (the vault of) a golden sky above us any longer.

  And we never know how to recreate the land.

  I think there is a mistranslation in this last line and that Kiefer meant not ‘know’ but ‘knew’; thus he means to say ‘we never knew how to recreate the land’ a version of the idea that Europeans destroy the land while indigenous people create or recreate it. The elegiac tone of Kiefer’s words is typical of many self-accusatory Western voices. This self-disparagement ignores the richness and strength of Western culture, its admittedly sometimes ambivalent achievements, its long history of creativity and diversity, its strong connections to other cultures and its perennial potential for reinvention, rearrangement and rejuvenation; and indeed the recurring syncretism of all cultures. In answer to Kiefer’s question about Aboriginal dot paintings – where is the sky? where is infinity? – as many such paintings are aerial views of the land made by people who spend much time reading tracks on the ground, it is possible to declare that both the artist and the viewers are the sky, or at least in the position of the sky. The infinite gold is in us, in our understanding or gathering of knowledge, the relationships and life we develop when we use it. We are the sky. Think of the fairy story in which the three sons dig the field looking for treasure; the outcome they discover is that the digging is the reward.

  This book brings together some artworks that remain in my memory and continue to stimulate my ideas. It is what artworks make people feel or think that is important, not how much they cost or even who made them. Yet art is never placeless or timeless. The last twenty or so years in Australia, during which I have been both making art and writing about it, is the significant time in which Aboriginal art has blossomed in new ways. I have lived through this development, thought and written about it a lot, as well as about art made by non-Aboriginal people. I discern three main ways people have responded to Aboriginal art – ethnographically, formally and with rapture. The first concerns itself with stories and context, the second with abstract qualities while the third is haptic, visceral, emotional and ultimately about love.