Curator insights - Contemporary galleries

Richard Serra is a New York Minimalist who emerged in the late 1960s and 1970s. Typical of that movement he uses industrial materials in simple unmodified modules as does Carl Andre. Contrary to the commonly held view that Minimalism is without emotion or feeling it is the physical properties of the object that affect the viewer. The emotion expressed is not that of the artist but that of the viewer encountering the object. The sheer massiveness of the steel that leans heavily against the wall makes us doubly conscious of the effects of gravity. The work incorporates the wall and the floor as essential components heightening the experience of fundamental vertical and horizontal planes and of their interaction with gravity.

Like many of his generation, Richard Deacon adopted Marcel Duchamp’s proposition that titles were an extra colour on the artist’s palette. In using language in this way the younger artists of the 1970s put distance between themselves and the abstract artists who came before them (who often labelled everything ‘Untitled’). ‘Listening to reason’ is a case in point.1 The shape of the work describes five double loosely ear-shaped curves, connected by twisting pieces of laminated wood to make one continuous line. The title encourages us to think of a circle of people listening to an argument, each connected to the other but all slightly differently. It is far from being a symmetrical form; each section is joined by twisting connections that appear to be arranged at random. The line is made up of multiple layers of laminated ply, which have been glued together in sections and clamped onto forms that give them their twisting motion. Deacon has left the hardened glue that squeezed out of the laminations as a trace of the process, thereby adhering to a principle of truth to materials and processes. The plain, glowing yellow surface of the ply against the beige colour of the glue in the side grain of the wood helps to reveal the twisting body of the loops. The sections were then bolted together through offset joints, once again making a virtue out of the visible process to articulate the form.

The resulting curves and loops defy imagination. The piece is like a five-fold moebius strip but some-how it all comes together into a convincing whole. When asked how he had visualised this complex form in order to be able to make up the necessary jigs and formwork, he acknowledged that he never visualised it as a whole. It seems that he had the twisting straight sections lying around waiting to become a star-shaped work. On the other side of the studio were the five ear shapes destined for another work. Living with these forms, he eventually realised that they would fit together with a few minor modifications and the resulting sculpture is what we see here.2 There is an interesting parallel between this accidental juxtaposition and the working methodology of assemblage artists such as Haim Steinbach or Janet Laurence. Sculptors of this kind accumulate objects and materials in the studio and one day bring them together to make something new. This aspect of chance encounters belies the purely formal aesthetic that most American art aspired to at this time and leans towards a history of European surrealism, in particular to Duchamp’s theory of chance.3

1. This work was first reserved by the AGNSW in 1986 but only acquired when it was brought out for the 1988 Biennale of Sydney

2. Conversation noted by the author after a studio visit with Deacon in 1987

3. Duchamp believed in allowing chance to play a part in the creation of his works, for example the accumulation of dust that he used to colour the sieves in his ‘The large glass’ 1915–23

© Art Gallery of New South Wales Contemporary Collection Handbook, 2006

Encountering Ron Mueck’s sculptures is like suddenly being in a contemporary version of ‘Gulliver’s travels’: everything looks real and familiar but the scale is wrong. Giant boys and pregnant women tower over us, small men row boats and lie dead, a swaddled baby is shrunk to miniature size. In ‘Untitled (old woman in bed)’ a frail elderly woman lies under a blanket on a gallery plinth, her small scale increasing her vulnerability as we loom over her. This is one of Mueck’s most poignant works: the woman seems only to have a tenuous hold on life as she shrinks from this world into whatever comes next. It is imbued with the pathos of our own experiences of the death of elderly friends and relatives just as it foretells our own inevitable demise.

As with all of Mueck’s sculpture, this figure is more than life-like. The moist eyes, veins just below the skin and flushed cheeks all add up to an near palpable sense of life, or in this work of life ebbing. We almost expect to hear a rattling breath as we look at the work for signs of the life that is about to end. The realism of his sculptures is like a series of three-dimensional freeze frames taken from the world, life momentarily paused but still fully evident. This filmic metaphor is not inappropriate as Mueck has worked as a modelmaker for television and film. While we know these people are sculptures, it is almost impossible not to touch them to make sure that they are indeed not real. Mueck’s deployment of scale distances this realism just as it entices us by the sense of wonder it evokes. The expressions of his sculptural subjects are subtly exaggerated to increase their emotional impact; indeed their heightened emotional and psychological states and the response this triggers in the viewer is the subject of Mueck’s art rather than their extraordinary verisimilitude. His figures are almost always alone and there is a strong sense of isolation and vulnerability to many of his works.

Mueck’s realism is perhaps sculpture’s riposte to the virtual reality that digital technologies have made possible. Filmic and digital photographic recreations of past worlds, mythical places and future possibilities have stretched the real in so many directions as to make it no longer a viable visual category. There is no digital sleight of hand to Mueck’s work, however, as he makes his sculptures traditionally, applying clay to a framework, modelling the figure until he has the form to create a mould and then casting the final work. It is a labour-intensive and highly skilled process. The resulting works seem to have the weight of the history of sculptural realism behind them, just as they seem to mark its end by leaving it with nowhere further to go.

© Art Gallery of New South Wales Contemporary Collection Handbook, 2006

'Cash Crop' consists of a vitrine filled with little sculptures of fruit and vegetables carved from a variety of natural soaps. These pieces of 'fruit' are accompanied by labels and painted bank notes. The terms appearing on the labels are taken from the language of economic activity. The juxtapositions are both amusing and sharply critical: 'liquid asset' is a grape; 'share market float' is a lotus; 'tax return' is a peanut; 'global liquidity' is a cola nut.

In 'Cash Crop', Fiona Hall explores the connections between trade, natural resources and botany. These concerns have been central to Hall's body of work since the 1970s. Soap is destroyed by water: it is ephemeral and changing. Commerce and trade, too, change with the slides in 'global liquidity'. Botany, like trade, is a system: of classification and collection. Botany is a science developed in order to 'collect' the world of nature. Cash Crop is about the exploitation of natural resources for commercial interests and the artifice of classification.

Julie Ewington writes, "Sir Joseph Banks created elaborate cabinets for the exploration voyages of James Cook, in which numerous specimens of plants were taken back to England, studied, dissected, analysed and planted. Later, the economic uses of collected plants were investigated, for medicine, cosmetics, prophylactics and profit... Fiona Hall has selectively emphasised the tendency towards conjoined terms in systems of Western classification. This is not a merely whimsical rubbing together of similarities, differences, binaries: it is a purposeful play between different orders of things, set up to embrace, pull apart, to slip and to slide".

When he arrived in New York in 1965, Joseph Kosuth was a 20-year-old recent graduate from art school, yet he quickly established himself as a founding member of the conceptual art movement in the United States. At this time Kosuth was inspired by philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein’s investigations of language. Wittgenstein’s posthumously published book ‘Philosophical investigations’ was a radical departure from previous philosophical texts, presented as a series of aphorisms that proposed assumptions from the traditional Augustine view of language and then deconstructed them, exposing the impossibility of using any set of rules to explain how we learn and use language.1

In 1965 Kosuth conceived a number of works using words written in neon that conveyed nothing more than what they were: ‘Five words in red neon’, for example, consisted of the five words of the title written in red neon lights, while ‘One and eight – a description (pink)’ consisted of the words ‘Neon Electric Light English Glass Letters Pink Eight’ written in pink neon lights.2 The next year he started his ‘Art as idea as idea’ series, in which he printed enlarged dictionary definitions of words in negative (white text on black ground). He deliberately chose words that commonly appear within the lexicon of art writing, words such as ‘original’, ‘meaning’ and ‘material’.

In the series ‘One and three’ Kosuth poses the question, ‘What do we mean by a specific word such as “table”?’ He placed a pre-existing object in a gallery space next to a photograph of that object taken in situ, and a dictionary definition of the word used to describe, generically, that object. The viewer is led to compare the levels of accuracy in communicating meaning through both visual and verbal means. The dictionary definition is more accurate as a generic description of a table, whereas the photograph is more accurate as a description of this specific table. Yet removed from its functional context and placed in a gallery, even the table itself is only a sign: a three-dimensional and generic ‘example’ of what might be meant by the word ‘table’.

Displayed as a triptych, the three signs for ‘table’ are all ultimately unsatisfactory as signifiers of the word if shown to an individual who had never before come across the notion of ‘table’. By exposing the limitations of language in such seemingly simple and concrete words as ‘chair’, ‘table’ or ‘broom’, Kosuth questions the possibility of using any language, and specifically, the language of the visual arts, to convey the meaning of more abstract phenomena such as ‘love’, ‘spirituality’ or even the meaning of the word ‘art’ itself.

1. Ludwig Wittgenstein, ‘Philosophical investigations’, GEM Anscombe (trans), Basil Blackwell, Oxford 1953

2. This work is in the collection of the National Gallery of Australia, Canberra

© Art Gallery of New South Wales Contemporary Collection Handbook, 2006

During the 1980s Anish Kapoor, along with his British counterparts Richard Deacon, Tony Cragg, Antony Gormley and others, significantly challenged prevailing sculptural practices. Referred to as New British Sculpture, their respective work (although largely unrelated) shifted away from the purely conceptual or minimal art that had dominated the previous decades to embrace lyricism and metaphor, and to reconfigure the relationship between subject, object and viewer. Kapoor was an influential figure in this development. From brightly coloured pigments spread over abstract bodily forms to concave mirror pieces and enormous sculptural installations, Kapoor’s sculpture is about sensory experiences. He makes sculptural forms which pervade or hold physical space and which deliberately explore metaphysical dualities such as light and darkness, earth and sky, mind and body. For Kapoor, space is not empty; rather it is full of meaning and potential, and it is this paradox that he explores in material and abstract terms.

Since the 1990s Kapoor’s work has been concerned with the expression of negative space: openings and cavities which are often referred to as voids. While his earlier pigment works were shapes with luminously coloured surfaces, ‘Void field’, a sculptural installation of four craggy blocks of quarried Northumbrian sandstone, elaborates an internal space of darkness. At the centre of each stone is a deep velvety hole coated with black pigment, which figuratively signifies a threshold, a space that portends to infinity. Peering into the aperture of each stone, the space within appears beyond measure, revealing a balanced tension between the earthly weight of rock and the nothingness suggested by the dark opening, or void. Kapoor’s voids have been likened both to wombs and to contemporary notions of the sublime. About his understanding of a ‘modern sublime’ Kapoor has said: ‘I have always been drawn toward some notion of fear in a very visual space, towards sensations of falling, of being pulled inwards, of losing one’s sense of self’.1 The black holes at the centre of each stone in ‘Void field’ function in this way; their darkness is conspicuous and entrancing, denoting the amorphous margins between human perception and cognition.

Similar sensations are invoked by Kapoor’s suite of prints ‘Blackness from her womb’ 2001 (AGNSW collection). Here, the void is literally associated with the womb, whose function is to harbour life. The yellows and reds that dominated Kapoor’s early work return, transformed more obviously into abstracted female sexual iconography. The aquatint bleeds into forms, dissolving and sometimes imploding their structure. In the unresolved play and metamorphosis between interior and exterior spaces and darkness and light, ‘Blackness from her womb’ is a graphic synthesis of Kapoor’s ideas.

1. Martin Caiger-Smith, ‘Anish Kapoor’, Hayward Gallery, London 1998, unpaginated

© Art Gallery of New South Wales Contemporary Collection Handbook, 2006

Rebecca Horn was born in Germany in the last years of World War II. Like Kiefer she was influenced by Joseph Beuys but it is Marcel Duchamp who seems to be most present in her machines and fabulous erotic installations, even in her strange and magical feature-length films. It was Duchamp who once said it is better to invent machines and do things to them than to do them to people. He also invented that great erotic machine-like masterpiece ‘The large glass’, also known as ‘The bride stripped bare by her bachelors, even’ of 1915–23. Many of Horn’s installations take the form of kinetic apparatus that somehow enact a sexual encounter.

Some of Horn’s earliest performance works involved body extensions. In ‘Finger gloves’ 1972 she created preposterously extended fingers with which she tried to pick up some objects from the floor. In another work her extended fingers scratched the walls on either side of a room; yet another included pencils attached to a face mask which she used to draw an inchoate muddle of lines on paper. All of these body extension pieces seem to somehow struggle with the impossible; the extended fingers hopelessly search out spaces and objects but fail to control the unruly world. She has also built drawing machines where long, jointed spears mechanically jerk around creating scratchy arbitrary compositions on the floor or wall. In nearly all of her works there is an exacerbated kinaesthetic sensibility. We are made acutely aware of our own space and we can easily enough slide into her dreamlike world, where our grasp on things slips away.

‘Pendulum with emu egg’ consists of an emu egg that sits on a precarious, almost invisible, support near the floor. The egg is of course a very powerful symbol of femininity and procreation. Hanging above the egg is a long javelin attached to a mechanism at ceiling height. The point of the javelin at rest sits just above the egg, almost but not quite touching it. Suddenly the javelin swings back jerkily, driven by a timed mechanism aloft. It seems destined to smash the egg as it swings past but it slowly settles down into a gently declining arc till it almost seems to caress the egg with its tip. The piece is at once threatening, humorous and an intensely erotic evocation of feminine pleasure, beyond the blossoming of Duchamp’s bride stripped bare and tickled by the breeze that ruffles her lingering veils.

‘Love thermometer’ 1988 (AGNSW collection) on the other hand is an image of male pleasure. It is a functioning thermometer with a large globe filled with red-coloured alcohol. At room temperature the fluid stays in the globe but if the object is picked up and held it responds to the viewer’s body warmth and the fluid runs up the stem, visibly engorging the form of the instrument. The enormous globe and stem of the thermometer nestle in a beautifully constructed case, like that designed for a musical instrument, while the lining is padded silk, again reminding us of Duchamp’s love of the mould and its cast, positive and negative, and the inevitable sexual allusion to male and female genitalia.

© Art Gallery of New South Wales Contemporary Collection Handbook, 2006

‘In the 1950s and 60s Frank Stella was a leading advocate for American artists who were attempting to break with the tradition of European painting that made reference to the world of visual effects beyond the canvas beyond art. Stella wanted to make an art form that was complete in itself, with as little internal division of its form as possible. His early paintings were determined by certain givens, such as the width of the canvas or paintbrush, or the nature of the paint itself. Stella said he wanted to to ‘keep the paint as good as it was in the can’. He had a favourite house-painting brush 2¾ inches wide and stretched his canvas over stretcher bars that were also 2¾ inches wide – both determining the width of the stripes painted parallel to the stretcher. This structural premise can be considered as the trigger for American minimalism.’

Spanning a broad array of material practices and media, Ugo Rondinone’s works are often unsettling and deal with themes of isolation and disenchantment. At once distinct and interrelated, the works installed in this room cross-pollinate, shaping a single narrative. The looped conversation of the wall and sound installation ‘what do you want?’ suggests a relationship permeated with miscommunication, doubt and loneliness. Coupled with this soundtrack, the reclining clown in ‘if there were anywhere but desert. wednesday’ appears bored and disaffected. In a similar vein of inversion and directionlessness, ‘all MOMENTS stop here and together we become every memory that has ever been.’ resembles a window, yet rather than opening onto a view, it reflects the interior space back onto itself in sombre black tones.

Carl Andre nearly always works in a grid, with the dimensions of his finished works determined by multiples of a basic module – such as a brick, metal plate or house beam. The shape of each work depends entirely on the number and configuration of modules. The works are often laid out on the floor like carpet and can in fact be walked on. Although not site-specific, the works emphasise and respond to the planes of the space they occupy. While the minimalist use of industrial materials on a grand scale is often regarded as overtly masculine and assertive, Andre’s work, in contrast, is modest and quietly poetic.