Kids audio tour

'From thunder and summer rains on the high South African veld to a day’s work in Sydney. A terracotta clay and water work made with a fast hand. I make one part of the image, and the forces of nature make the rest. The macro-scale and the micro-scale, deliberation and chance. I walk away with bats flying high over the Domain.'

Richard Long 2011

Richard Long has made the act of walking in remote and extraordinary landscapes into an art form. It is during these walks that he arranges natural objects such as rocks into geometric forms which he then photographs.

‘Southern gravity’ was commissioned by John Kaldor specially for the John Kaldor Family Gallery. Long’s mud drawings relate to the water lines poured over rock shelves that he often makes on his walks. Like the artist’s stone works, ‘Southern gravity’ is based on a geometric shape but the application of the mud is done with such an intensely energetic movement – akin to a ritual dance – that striking traces of the artist’s hand gestures are left behind. The wet mud splashes, drips and sprays over the underlying geometry, expressing not only the speed of execution but also the effects of gravity. The finer drips create the impression of a shower that is almost like the rain in a Hokusai print.

Since 1959 Bernd and Hilla Becher have produced photographs of industrial and domestic architecture. Their ordered images (which they call ‘typologies’) of blast furnaces, cooling towers, silos and workers’ houses record the monuments of a rapidly diminishing industrial era. However, the Bechers were equally driven by aesthetic considerations, with photographs of like objects assembled into groups where precise lighting and tonal density give equivalent weight to each visual element.

The Bechers’ typological practice has been associated with the formal and serial repetition espoused by minimal and conceptual art of the 1960s. Despite these connections, however, their photography has sat largely outside trends in art practice, the artists maintaining a rigorously systematic approach to their chosen subject matter. The Bechers belong to a distinguished tradition of early 20th-century German photography exemplified by the work of August Sander, Albert Renger-Patzsch and Karl Blossfeldt, all of whom contributed in different ways to the definition of ‘objective’ photography.

Adopting both historical and contemporary motifs – from the baroque to glossy magazine advertisements – Jeff Koons’s work disrupts the distinctions between high and low art forms.

‘White terrier’ was the model for Koons’s floral sculpture ‘Puppy’ 1995, a Kaldor Public Art Project that stood 12.5 metres high on the lawn of the Museum of Contemporary Art in Sydney.

Nam June Paik was a pioneer of video installation in the early 1960s. Associated with the international conceptual movement Fluxus, Paik regularly collaborated with other Fluxus artists such as Joseph Beuys and George Maciunas.

In 1976 John Kaldor invited Paik and his collaborator, the cellist Charlotte Moorman to create a Kaldor Public Art Project in Australia. As part of the project Moorman played the ‘TV cello’. Made from three televisions removed from their sets so that their inner workings can be seen, with an attached cello bridge, tailpiece and strings forming a cello-like instrument.

‘TV Buddha’ was also made in Sydney in 1976 using an old wooden Maitreya (Buddha of the future) from the Kaldor collection. ‘Kaldor candle’ was made in 1996 for John Kaldor, who remained friends with Paik until the artist’s death in 2006. Both ‘TV Buddha’ and ‘Kaldor candle’ employ a conceptual use of video – first developed by Paik – in which a camera and a monitor loop in real time, blurring the object–subject distinction. This feedback idea was used by leading conceptual artists in the 1970s, including Bill Viola, Dan Graham and Mike Parr.

Christo began working with the landscape as a student employed to beautify the landscape of his native Bulgaria as seen from the Orient Express. He later moved to Paris and associated with Nouveau Réalisme, a group of artists who used found materials and responded to everyday situations in their work. Christo’s ambition for larger projects was established when he moved to New York in 1964 with his wife and collaborator Jeanne-Claude. In 1960 John Kaldor invited Christo to Australia, a visit which resulted in ‘Wrapped Coast, One Million Square Feet, Little Bay, Sydney, Australia 1968-69', Christo and Jeanne-Claude’s first major environmental work and one of the most ambitious land-art events in the world at the time. It was during his visit to Australia that Christo wrapped two Australian eucalypts to make ‘Two Wrapped Trees’.

First drawn by: Kazuko Miyamoto

First installation: Panza di Biumo residence, Varese, Italy, June 1980     

Sol LeWitt’s wall drawings are executed by professional draughtspeople from sets of instructions generated by the artist. LeWitt emphasised the idea or concept of an artwork over its visual realisation, hence his assertion that his instructions are themselves the work of art.

‘Wall drawing #337’ and ‘Wall drawing #338’ exemplify this process: both works are drawn by professional draughtspeople following LeWitt’s instructions. The artist’s methodology has been likened to that of a composer: the works are manifested by others, and no single drawing is ever the definitive version. In a 1971 interview LeWitt commented: ‘I try to make the plan specific enough so that it comes out more or less how I want it, but general enough that [the draughtspeople] have the freedom to interpret. It’s as though I am writing of piece of music and somebody else is going to play it on the piano.’

Through photographs, objects and installations Simryn Gill considers how we experience a sense of place and how both personal and cultural histories inform our present moment. Her work also suggests how culture becomes naturalised, an almost invisible part of our physical environment.

Gill often works with books, narratives and texts that provide a framework through which we order and describe the world around us. 'Forest', has the appearance of an etymological proposition where Gill quite literally takes printed words back to roots. Not their roots, as in the source of their meaning, but rather the growing, evolving, decaying nature from which the raw material for books is derived. Gill tore up the fibrous matter of book pages and grafted fragile strips of text into the natural environment. Attached to tropical plants, they look like natural forms, becoming exuberant banana florescences, dangling aerial roots on fig trees, mangroves emerging from mudflats, variegations on the leaves of lush tropical foliage and decaying vegetation at the base of epiphytic ferns. The original plant interventions occurred in places where a tamed nature was in the process of becoming wild again, in decrepit gardens and decaying buildings in Malaysia and Singapore. There is something of a 'lost cities' quality to these works, as nature is in the process of reclaiming culture if not civilisation.

Gill's photographic records of her interventions recall botanical drawings and are printed in subtle tones of gray. In keeping with their observational purpose, they depict space up close and there are no vistas, faraway horizons or the distant sublime. They have something of the claustrophophic closeness and rank fecundity of tropical vegetation, which taxed the romantic imaginations of the 19th century. Gill's text has only a brief life out in the landscape as, if it is not eaten by insects, it rapidly rots away under the onslaught of the elements. While we may suspect that culture is impermanent, evolving and probably contingent, we do not really expect such classics as 'Frankenstein, The origin of species or Robinson Crusoe' to become 'cultural compost'. Gill has developed a form of wood-pulp fiction in which she 'literalises the landscape', stories and legends have taken root off the pages of books and grown into a fantastic local flora of transplanted narratives.

In 'Killing time' Ricky Swallow has synthesised his interests in time passing, personal and collective memory, everyday experiences and the history of art. Swallow's earlier sculptures were often carefully crafted duplicates of recently retro items, such as beatboxes and BMX bikes, or reworked record turntables with scaled-down narrative scenarios that blend science fiction and scientific fact. More recently he has made carvings of the animate and inanimate conceived and realised at a ratio of 1:1. 'Killing time' is the most ambitious work that Swallow has made to date and is likely to remain so for some time due to the onerous and time-consuming physical task of working in such detail on this scale. It was the centrepiece of Swallow's solo exhibition at the Australian Pavilion in the 2005 Venice Biennale.

While 'Killing time' visually recalls 17th-century Dutch still-life painting and even the work of such a virtuoso illusionist woodcarver as Grinling Gibbons, the subject matter is derived from Swallow’s personal experience. The son of a fisherman, he has faithfully depicted every sea creature that he recalls capturing, killing and eating during his life. The various fish, lobsters, oysters, crabs and others are displayed on a table which duplicates the table around which Swallow’s family ate dinner. While 'Killing time' uses the visual language of a particular genre of painting and wood-carving, it is also an intensely personal act of remembering; it is another 'evaporated self-portrait' as Swallow has described his sculptures, which call on specific personal memories while also having a commonly recognisable subject matter.

'Killing time' is carved mainly from laminated jelutong, a pale coloured hardwood used commercially for prototypes and pattern-making but also by woodworking hobbyists for whittling. The illusionism of the sculpture is emphasised by the attention to detail in the lobster, the lemon peel that hangs over the edge of the table and the rippling folds of the tablecloth pushed to one end. However the monochromatic timber and the dramatic side-lighting, devised by Swallow to create strong shadows and highlights, point to the inherent unreality of transcribing animate form into inanimate materials. There is a loop of commemoration and death that permeates this work, both in the references to the still-life genre and in the fact that the sculptor killed these creatures in the first place, long before carving this de facto memorial. In the 17th century, vanitas still-life paintings portrayed the abundance of natural life and worldly goods to celebrate this abundance while pointing to the fact that it was only transient, just as life itself is. The title 'Killing time' refers to this sense of life stilled in art, to the act of remembering and recording something from the artist’s past, and to the time spent on carving this labour-intensive sculpture.

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

For the past 30 years Tony Cragg has consistently produced original ideas and a remarkable diversity of forms employing a vast array of materials and techniques. It is difficult to characterise his work within a specific style or art movement.

In the early 1970s a new generation of British sculptors celebrated a certain freedom from the snares of style which had bedevilled their immediate predecessors. Under the influence of conceptual art, a pluralist environment in which almost anything could happen began to flourish. Conceptual artists proclaimed the subservience of material form to content, thereby allowing any material or method to be employed in their service. Some artists took this dictum to devalue the material properties of ‘fine art’ and began privileging media associated with popular culture, including text, photography and video over more traditional materials. Cragg, by contrast, was among those who translated this freedom into an infinite possibility for systems and material processes with which to conjure new and provocative objects. In this he had more in common with the European arte povera artists than with Transatlantic conceptualism. His early works included materials such as coloured plastic fragments found along the Thames embankment, old furniture and machine parts. These were always ordered according to precise systems reflecting both his scientific orientation and the working ethic of rigorous systems and logical processes that prevailed in British art schools at the time. In Cragg’s work, however, there was always room within this order for random variation, just as there is in nature. Paradoxically the limitation imposed by these systems was liberating because they replaced the constraints of reproducing appearances on the one hand and the formal recipes of basic design on the other. Working within these systems, artists could incorporate all manner of material, even celebrating excesses of material diversity without losing the logic of the form.

‘Spyrogyra’ captures the general good humour of Cragg’s sculpture while embodying some of the most profound aspects of his work as a whole. The bottle rack is of course a reference to Duchamp’s famous Readymade, ‘Egouttoir’ (bottle rack) 1914 1; this alludes to the playful conceptual aspect of Cragg which so often makes witty allusions to art history. The structure is however far more open and intuitive than Duchamp’s original. The spiral immediately suggests DNA and organic couplings, which are ubiquitous in Cragg’s forms. Each rod attached to the spiral can take certain kinds of bottles, not a unique bottle but one of a general kind. As a result every time it is assembled it changes in the particular but maintains its essential form. In this way it mimics the genetic accommodation of kind and individuality. The reference to scientific structures is invariably a key theme in Cragg’s work.

1. Or, literally ‘detaster’, a play on the idea of the readymade as a challenge to taste in art

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

Callum Morton’s sculptures combine incisive social observation, ideas about urban design and contemporary living, and an interest in the legacy of minimal sculpture. ‘Motormouth’ continues his consideration of the intersections between public and private space and in particular the ‘non-spaces’ of urban design such as freeways, shopping centres, service stations, cinemas and convenience stores. These are the generic buildings and sites that are designed as transit zones between destinations or as backdrops to their intended function. We don’t usually notice their architecture except as an indicator of this function. Morton’s sculptural versions reintroduce narratives that are at odds with the social design of these places and yet are somehow entirely appropriate for the setting.

‘Motormouth’ is a sculpture of two freeways, scaled 1:10 and perfect in detail down to the dirty realism of their distressed, water-stained concrete marked with graffiti. It appears to be a realistic model but is in fact an elaborate representation of what a generic freeway should look like rather than being a copy of an existing structure.

The freeways are raised on pylons above eye height, frustrating our desire to see what is on the superstructure, though logically it should only be scaled-down cars. Freeways are designed to move people efficiently and rapidly between city centres and satellite suburbs, from home to work, from boardroom to bedroom, or at the very least to get you across town in time for your meeting. They are the key people conduits of modern urban design and, as with other mid 20th-century projects, they had a progressive utopian agenda to make life more time efficient and productive. And on a good day they still do this. On others they are a battleground where the tensions between the private and public functions of cars and freeways erupt.

In ‘Motormouth’ you can hear the sound of a traffic jam on the lower freeway. Inevitably in the frustration at being kept waiting, anger boils over and conflict ensues. Cars are a private, personal zone in which we move through a public arena, one in which we feel empowered and in control. Despite the social contract that keeps us on the correct side of the road and heading in the same direction, in our car our rules count as we adjust the seats, the climate, the music, to create a pod between us and the world. However road rage is a rapidly growing social issue and while studies have come up with several interlocking reasons for this phenomenon, it seems to hinge on the tension between the collective rules we need to regulate cars, roads and driving and our rampant individualism. There is no doubt that contemporary city life is faster: we have more to do, so we don’t expect to be kept waiting. As the title puns, we are the inevitable product of our own social and technological designs.

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