AN INCOMPLETE WORLD

AN INCOMPLETE WORLD

WORKS FROM THE UBS ART COLLECTION

EDUCATION KIT

ART GALLERY OF NEW SOUTH WALES 19.05.07 – 29.07.07NATIONAL GALLERY OF VICTORIA 28.09.07 – 06.01.08

1AN INCOMPLETE WORLD EDUCATION KIT AGNSW

EDUCATION KIT OUTLINEThis education kit highlights the key themes and nine works from the exhibition An incomplete world:works from The UBS Art Collection. The kit aims to provide a context for using the exhibition andartworks as a resource for K–6 and 7–12 education audiences. It may be used in conjunction with avisit to the exhibition or as pre-visit or post-visit resource material.

The kit has been written with reference to the New South Wales K–6 Creative Arts and 7–12 VisualArts syllabus. The kit specifically targets teachers and student audiences but may also be of interest toa general audience.

Acknowledgements• Education kit coordinated by Danielle Gullotta• Focus essay, commentary and quotes in Section II have been selected from An Incomplete world: works from the UBS Collection,exhibition catalogue.• Art of our time, Look magazine April 2007 was published by the Art Gallery Society of New South Wales, by permission.• K–6 Looking and making activities and 7–12 framing questions written by Leeanne Carr, coordinator secondary school and Asianeducation programs, Victoria Collings, coordinator K–6 & family programs and Danielle Gullotta, coordinator K–6 programs.• Edited by Jonathan Cooper, manager of information and website• Designed by Analiese Cairis

Produced by the Public Programs Department © 2007 Art Gallery of New South WalesArt Gallery Road, The Domain, [email protected]

cover detail: Naoya Hatakeyama Blast 5416 1998 © 2007 Naoya Hatakeyma, courtesy L.A. Galerie – Lothar Albrecht, Frankfurt

CONTEMPORARY GALLERIES WITH UBS

SECTION 1IntroductionEssay: On locationCommentary: Art of our timeList of artistsCollection connectionsGlossarySelected references

SECTION 2Works in profileColour imagesCommentary: text from An incomplete world,exhibition catalogueK–6 Looking and making activities7–12 Framing questions

AN INCOMPLETE WORLD

ARTGALLERY

NSW


“This exhibition brings together great works of art from the last thirtyyears, the majority of which have not been seen in Australia before.UBS’s three year commitment to supporting the Gallery’s contemporarycollection programs and this exhibition are together the most importantsponsorship of contemporary art that the Gallery has received.” Wayne Tunnicliffe, senior curator Contemporary art, Art Gallery of New South

“We are delighted that we can bring to Australia for the first time aselection of our contemporary art for pubic viewing. The curators haveselected works that provide an insight into the variety and depth of TheUBS Art Collection.”Brad Orgill, Chairman and CEO, UBS

An incomplete world considers ideas in art about our world as it is today and the ways in whichwe live in it. As the title suggests, this is a partial and fragmentary view, reflecting the reality ofboth individual experience and artistic practice. It has three broad thematic groups: portraits andpeople; mapping place and the natural and created environments. The works selected datefrom the early 1960s to the present and connections are traced across these decades.

This exhibition is selected from one of the world’s finest and most distinguished corporate artcollections, The United Banks of Switzerland (UBS) Art Collection. UBS have amassed animpressive selection of international contemporary art in the spirit which reflects the dynamicsof pace and change that characterise our modern world. Works from the collection aregenerously and regularly lent to museums and galleries. In the last three years exhibitionsselected from the collection have been presented at the Museum of Modern Art in New York,the Fondation Beyeler in Basel and at the Tate Modern in London.

The exhibition An incomplete world is co-curated by the Art Gallery of New South Wales and theNational Gallery of Victoria. The selection was made by Wayne Tunnicliffe, curator contemporaryart, Art Gallery of New South Wales, and Jason Smith, curator contemporary art, NationalGallery of Victoria. Over 50 works have been selected by 31 artists to represent the three broadthematic groups.

Highlights of the exhibition include:

American pop artist Andy Warhol’s unique early work Cagney 1963, depicts the film actorfamous for his gangster roles. This dates from when Warhol first began to make silkscreenpaintings and to concentrate on movie stars and film-making. Another Warhol in the exhibition ishis iconic portrait of German artist Joseph Beuys from 1984.

British artist Lucian Freud’s Head of a naked girl 1999, is a searingly intimate close-up portrait,while Double portrait 1988–90, depicts a woman lying with a hound. As Freud has said, “I paintpeople not because of what they are like, not exactly in spite of what they are like, but how theyhappen to be.”

Damien Hirst, one of the highest profile contemporary British artists, is represented with a largepainting of coloured dots on a white ground. Entitled Albumin, human, glycated 1992, it is fromhis series of randomly arranged spot paintings with titles that refer to pharmaceuticals. Hirst hasdescribed this series as happy paintings, and yet that joy has a chemical reference.

A substantial group of influential recent European photography includes such luminaries asThomas Ruff with enigmatic large-scale colour portraits, Andreas Gursky with his spectaculardigitally altered store interior 99 cent 1999, and sublime image of a glacier, Aletschgelscher1993, and a series of Candida Hofer’s enigmatic, empty, public rooms.

Japanese photographers Miyamoto and Hatakeyama have ominous but impressive works.Miyamoto’s black and white photographs document the damage inflicted on buildings in Kobeafter the earthquake in 1995 and Hatekeyama’s abstract, violently beautiful images are ofexploding rocks and soil.

INTRODUCTION / SECTION 1

1


ON LOCATION‘Where am I?’ is such a simple but profound question, one which asks for a physical location butwhich can also require a more philosophical response: if you need to ask you are likely to havefound yourself out of place and in unfamiliar territory, whether that is geographical, political, culturalor psychological. You could have lost your way or it could be that the familiar no longer seems thesame as it once did. It is a question that suggests how a sense of self and place are intimatelylinked, and how self is experienced through place.

What constitutes place beyond the physical boundaries of a site can be hard to define, but it isusually somewhere where experience, memory and history overlay each other — a sense of placeevolves from these elements in conjunction with the topography of the site with which they areassociated.1 Though hard to define, place paradoxically tends to be specific and is shaped by ourengagement with it. Even though the concept of place immediately suggests the local, it isessential to how we conceive of regional, national and global perspectives. These larger conceptsare composed of many places, locations and sites which add up to a sense of place that may beas large as ‘Australia’. This move from the particular to the national involves an epic elision ofdetail, an ontological shorthand that eliminates complexity and promotes stereotypes, but at itsbest retains a sense of what is particular within a much greater conception of place.

The places in which we live and work, the cities we build, the political, geographic and financialborders, the natural environment and changing perceptions of our place in the world are all subjectsof the art in An incomplete world. Many artists work ‘on location’, an appropriate film metaphorwhich means to work outside of the studio on a site that will appear in a film, whether that site isitself or is standing in for somewhere else. In this exhibition the artists ‘on location’ addressspecific places and either have made work that more generally reflects how we live and interactwith our environment, whether constructed or natural, or the art itself is a symptom of the greaterchanges that have occurred to how we regard and experience place over the last four decades.

One of these changes has undoubtedly been the fact that many people are more likely toexperience more places than previous generations have. While there are specific economic,cultural and political factors which have resulted in the mass movement of tourists, workers,business travellers and exiles over recent decades, it is perhaps inevitable this would occur asjourneying is so fundamental to how we conceive of human life. Moving through space and timeis one of the most primary ways we describe human experience, with our life span often beingconceived as a journey, whether someone actually travels anywhere or not. The fundamentalconnection between journeys, human experience, the passage of time and how we account forthese things to ourselves has lead to claims such as Michel de Certeau’s that ‘… every narrativeis a travel narrative’.2 The journey is one of the most prevalent forms of cultural metaphor, one inwhich the traveller is changed for better or worse by the experience, as they traverse territory,proceed through time and encounter an ‘other’ — whether people, place or mythological creature.However, the voyager ‘travels not only geographic locations, but also interior, ontological spaces,territories of negotiation between the psychological, the sexual and the social.’3

As opposed to the voyager of a great historic epic, the contemporary tourist has a much saferexperience, generally in which the outcomes of encounter and change are much more predictable.While the experience of the tourist may be very different from that of the traveller, when thetourist returns home they have generally brought back something from their experience even if itis the reassurance that their place is indeed the best place to be. The narrating and experiencingof place in time is a movement which can be forwards or backwards however, though this issomewhat dependent on whether you find yourself in or out of place: ‘The opposite of tourism isnot “staying at home”, but the involuntary travel associated with the predicament of the immigrant.If the tourist travels, for the most part, backwards in time, then the immigrant, the exile and thediasporic travel forwards in time with no promise of a restored home.’4 Place can also seem to

SECTION 1

1 For a discussion of what constitutesplace and its relationship to artpractice, see Tacita Dean & JeremyMillar, Place, Thames & Hudson,London 2005

2 Certeau quoted in Georges Van Den Abbeele, Travel as metaphor from Montaigne to Rousseau,University of Minnesota Press,Minneapolis 1992, p xix

3 Nancy Spector, Felix Gonzalez-Torres, Guggenheim Museum, New York 1995, p 55

4 Barry Curtis & Claire Pajaczkowskaquoted in Cornelia Butler, Flightpatterns, Museum of ContemporaryArt, Los Angeles 2000, p 52


stand outside of time if we look at great natural sites: to be timeless and enduring and independentof human regard. Place in this instance puts us in our place as nature and natural laws overwhelmhuman agency and remind us that our desire to control our environment can be so much hubris.

While every place has a location, not every location is a place. In contrast to what we may regardas places are what anthropologist Marc Augé has termed ‘non-places’ — the shopping malls,motorways, airports, hotels and computer screens that have facilitated the rapidity, speed andmass transit of ‘super- modernity’.5 In contrast to how place has a memory, these are places withno apparent history or in which history is purely spectacle and which instead encourage anerasure of memory or experience; they are self-contained and always present. These are morethan just actual spaces, they are also a type of experience in which ‘the space of non-placecreates neither singular identity nor relations; only solitude, and similitude.’6 As opposed to placewhich encourages a sense of self and social relations, in non-places we find ourselves both aloneand the same: being in these spaces is a homogenous experience which is isolating and disallowsindividual identity. The internet is in some ways an exemplary non-place, and yet the interactionenabled by the internet, texting and other digital screen-mediated communications, has become a prevalent form of encounter. In cyber-space ‘… as in the city, you may keep to those that shareyour faith, ethnicity or social location: yet there are moments when you cannot avoid a momentaryencounter with an “Other”’.7 The new communities of cyber-space point to a decreasedimportance in the social relations encouraged by place, something which can cause anxiety dueto the loss of face to face social interaction or can be incredibly liberating as like-minded peoplecan be found who may not exist within the actual community in which you live.

Location is a useful term as it bridges place and non-place, geographical site and metaphoricalexperience, and situates us in all these spaces often simultaneously. In finding ourselves in or outof any of these ‘places’ there has seldom been anything more useful than a map. Mapping, thescaled down representation in two dimensions of the earth’s surface through a system of signs,symbols and words, began to fascinate some artists in the 1960s with the development ofconceptual art practices which explored language and meaning. As maps embody territory, politics,geography and economic flows they are always more than an abstracted representation oftopography and space. Within this exhibition are two distinct artist’s maps, both of which predatethe revolutionary changes in cartography that have occurred in recent years with new digitalmapping technologies.

Alighiero e Boetti’s Mappa del mundo 1978 is easily recognisable as Mercator’s projection inwhich Europe and America are towards the centre and upper zones and the rest of the worldfloats to the top or sinks below. It is the world as we knew it, with everything in its place includingfamiliar hierarchies of scale and importance. Boetti has represented each nation’s landmass withits flag, whereby concepts of nationhood reduced to a symbol become territorial markers,reflecting the often arbitrary national divides and political instabilities which are more telling thangeographical features. Guillermo Kuitca’s map of northwest Germany, Nordrhein 1992, paintedonto a mattress takes us in a different direction. Rather than global politics, there is a personalimperative to this work as the map locates places where Kuitca has lived and the mattresssuggests the often vulnerable and private experiences of sleep, birth, death and sex. A mattressitself becomes a form of map over time, with the sweat, bodily fluids and excretions as well asbodily mass leaving stains and imprints on the mattress, a trace of the body that has spent time inthat bed. The inability of a map to convey a personal experience of place and the particularmeanings and memories that it may have is suggested in the tension between the expression ofthe hand painting, the mattress as a private and personal site, and the seemingly objective codedsystems of mapmaking.

The examining of systems, signs and ‘language’ integral to many conceptual art practices isreflected in the work of the photographers who studied at the Düsseldorf Academy in the 1970sunder Bernd and Hiller Becher. Candida Höfer, Thomas Ruff, Andreas Gursky and Thomas Struthtransformed art photography in the 1980s and 90s, with portraits of people and throughexamining the spaces and places in which we live, work and spend leisure time. Candida Höfer’sphotographs of public spaces are often disconcertingly empty of people. They are ordered spaces,

ON LOCATION / SECTION 1

5 Marc Augé, Non-places, anintroduction to an anthropology ofsupermodernity, trans John Howe,Verso, London 1995

6 Augé 1995, p 103

7 Olu Oguibe, ‘The digital other, thevirtual third world’, Flash Art, vol xxxii,no 206, May–June 1999, p 63


designed for people’s use and yet the necessity of human presence to animate these formalspaces becomes apparent. While a sense of control and ideology is exerted by institutional publicspace, this is balanced by the fact that they are created to reflect and enhance human aspirationand endeavour. The absence of people leaves a palpable sense of melancholy and a feeling ofloss, perhaps leading to thoughts about the current role of these public institutions and the idealsand functions they represent.

Institutional space is also the subject of Thomas Struth’s National Gallery London 11989, fromhis museum interiors series in which he photographs rooms in museums and art galleries andincludes the objects or art displayed, as well as the people viewing the art and each other. Theseare public spaces and yet the experience of viewing art is generally considered to be a relativelyprivate, contemplative experience. The postures of the people in front of the large central paintingin National Gallery London 1, and the colour of their clothes, seem to unconsciously echo thefigures in the painting itself and its narrative content of doubting spirituality. The art museum as asite of cultural tourism, which offers an experience of the best of human creative endeavour farremoved from that of ordinary life, is conveyed in these photographs in an ambivalent way. Thephotographs seem to embody what is exceptional about art while reflecting our uncertainties asto what it is we expect from the experience of viewing it.

Struth and Gursky both utilised technological advances in the 1980s enabling colour photographsto be printed on a size and scale which could compete on the gallery wall with the presence ofpaintings. Gursky’s work in particular reaches a level of spectacle at times comparable to thesubjects he photographs. Gursky’s 99 cent 1999 depicts a discount store in America: ranks ofshelves of food and goods fill the image, seeming to extend beyond the photograph andpotentially forever, an image of overwhelming consumer abundance and an exemplary generic‘non-place’. Gursky’s examination of the spaces of global capitalism has included photographs ofluxury stores, retail displays, stock exchanges and trading floors. These are as much symbolicspaces for consumer desire and demand as actual locations through which money moves,suggesting both the non-locatable nature of contemporary financial flows while echoing the factthat the world financial centres are still located in a few privileged countries. Sarah Morris’Midtown – PaineWebber (with neon) 1998 a seemingly abstract painting, takes its form fromjust such a site, the glass and steel facade of generic international modernist corporatearchitecture. The viewpoint looking up at the building conveys something of the blankimpenetrability of this type of architecture, which dominates urban centres across the world.

The experience of place sought in tourism and leisure activities is apparent in photographs byOlivo Barbieri, Walter Niedermayr and in another image by Gursky. The assertion that ‘… the touristtravels, for the most part, backwards in time …’ finds expression in Barbieri’s two large-scalephotographs taken from an elevated viewpoint of what seems to be a model of a medieval townsquare with a crowd of little figures, perhaps a stage set for a Hollywood historical epic. These arein fact documentary images of Siena’s renowned civic space, the Piazza del Campo. The crowd oflocals and tourists, a commingling that paradoxically defines the experience of place in most ofthe historical cities and towns of Europe, has gathered for the famous Palio de Siena, the horserace conducted through the city streets and town square each year. The reversal of focus in eachprint however makes this anticipation of a historically accurate spectacle a vertiginous anddisorienting affair.

The desire for an authentic unmediated experience extends to the wilderness and particularly fornature in its more impressive forms. Gursky’s Aletschgletscher 1993 is a sublimely beautifulimage of the largest glacier in Switzerland. However, the viewpoint on a hiking trail from which hehas chosen to take this photograph, is one from which many adventurous tourists take snaps.While Gursky’s image is beautiful it also points to the ubiquitous ways in which we construct‘landscape’ from nature. Walter Niedermayr’s Tokyo skidome II 2000 is another photograph of anexpanse of ice and snow, but this environment is entirely manufactured, a human-madelandscape for sport and entertainment. It is the physical equivalent of a virtual environment, a safepod in which to have an experience that emulates nature but one where there can be no suddenblizzards, avalanches or ice melts.



Both landscape and the built environment come apart in the work of the two photographers RyujiMiyamoto and Naoya Hatekeyama. Miyamoto’s series of photographs Kobe1995 after theearthquake 1995, document the destruction this earthquake wrought on city buildings andstreets. Nature has intervened in devastating fashion in the order of town planning and urbanhuman enterprise. Buildings sit slumped, tilted, cracked and split open. The seemingly enduringsolidity of our built worlds is suddenly fragile, ephemeral and exposed. And yet, like CandidaHöfer’s photographs, there are no people to be seen in any of these images. This deliberatedecision to exclude human presence gives an eerie ghost-town quality to these streets, as if thecity has been abandoned and hope lost in a modern day equivalent to great ruined cities ofantiquity. Hatakeyama’s Blast 1998 series of photographs show the earth literally exploding.Great shards and fragments of rock and soil erupt into the photograph and straight towards us.These images record the mining of limestone which has been used in building many Japanesecities, however, the erupting, disintegrating earth also seems portentous, an image of violentbeauty which suggests our world may at any stage come apart.

While post-conceptual photography is one important strand in An incomplete world, another isthat of painting mediated by photography and other technologies of reproduction, and whichparticipates in a form of mass media or screen space. There is a particularly interesting groupingfrom the early 1960s of works by Richard Artschwager, Andy Warhol and Gerhard Richter, whosesubject matter is derived from pre-existing photographs or film images. For some artists duringthis period the pervasive everyday imagery of snap shot photography, comic books, advertisinggraphics, brand designs, film images, photo magazines and the then new medium of televisioncould no longer be ignored. These works presage the emergence of pop art and introduce anarray of ideas which dispute the purity and self-referentiality of forms of high modernist art suchas abstract expressionism and, later, minimalism. They are also a precursor to post-modernism’sfascination with film and mass media culture’s construction of identity and erasure of authorialoriginality.

The space in these works has a correlative in the flatness and immediacy of filmic screen space,not the illusion of a projected image but the screen once the movie has finished. This can be seenin the space without depth in the Warhol silk screen Cagney 1962, the non-space in Richter’sHelen 1963 where the figure emerges from a monochromatic ground, or the space we see in themuch later works by Ed Ruscha and Roy Lichtenstein, both of whom established their distinctivepractices during the 1960s. Ruscha’s The end 1991 emulates a scratched film credit sequence:flickering up on the screen, the image is caught between two frames which slices across bothsentences. The work depicts and fractures film space; the choice of text rather than an illusionisticimage makes the two-dimensional nature of screen space doubly evident. In Brother sister 1987two fully rigged sailing ships appear from a gothic gloom, where sky, sea and atmosphere allmerge; but two small white rectangles draw attention to the illusion of the scene depicted, as ifthe canvas itself is a projection screen. Lichtenstein in Post visual 1993 transforms a loungeroom, a place of daily intimacy, into one of his distinctly recognisable pop art icons. The roomsuggests comfort and safety, but is also little more than a graphic cipher for a lounge, a space tohost the irony of the title. ‘Post-visual’ was a short-lived catch phrase at the beginning of the ’90sused to describe a world after post-modernism where the visual had been down-graded in moretheory dependent art practices in favour of skeins of encoded references.

Dreaming and reverie have a place in this exhibition as well, in works such as Tony Cragg’sassemblage Grey moon 1985 or Vija Celmins’ exquisite painting Night sky #5 1992. From acollection of discarded plastic refuse, Cragg has created a waxing crescent moon. As atransformative gesture it seems almost redemptive: the means and its execution remain modestand yet it evokes something which, as the nearest mass to earth, has had great significance to thehuman race, from ancient mythologies to symbolising human agency in conquering space andtime. In Vija Celmins’ paintings and drawings of the night sky, points of painted light emerge froma deep black background, stars with their different intensities and hues shimmering inconstellations. As only a small fragmentary view of the night sky, the impossibility of representingboundless space and a seemingly infinite number of stars seems as much the subject matter of



these works as what they actually depict. Concepts of place and particular locations diminishwhen faced with space, not the mapping of the space between places through which we locateourselves, but the overwhelming space and time of the infinite — somewhere where we havealways been prone to lose both a sense of place and a sense of self.

The art works in An incomplete world chart some of the evolving ways we have experienced andconceived of place over the last four decades. These changes have been closely connected withthe prevalence of mass media and screen culture since the 1960s and the developing digitalworld since the 1990s. Writing in the 1990s on place meant that it could be compared to thevirtual zones of cyber-space; now virtual and actual experiences of place closely inform eachother. Augé’s linking of digital space with concepts of non-place remains accurate however, butincreasingly a distinction between place and non-place becomes more difficult to maintain.Although place as a site of layered history, memory and experience associated with a specifictopography continues to coexist with non-place, the experience of the later grows incrementallyeach year as more of our lives are spent in transit zones, shopping malls and airport lounges, astouristic spectators or on the internet. However, a desire for both being in place and forexperiencing other places on a more profound level remains a very human need. That place maybe a familiar environment that is experienced on a daily basis; it can be traveling to another placeand engaging closely with its people, history and culture; it can be a natural site, where the historyand geography of the earth itself engenders a specific sense of place; or it may be an impossibledesire to return to the place you regard as home while experiencing the trauma of being displacedand in exile. In all of these places we may find our selves.

WAYNE TUNNICLIFFESenior curator Contemporary art, Art Gallery of New South Wales



COMMENTARY: ART OF OUR TIME / SECTION 1


LIST OF ARTISTS / SECTION 1

ARAKI ARTSCHWAGER

BALDESSARI BARBIERI BOETTI

CELMINS CLEMENTE

CLOSE CRAGG

CRAIG-MARTIN FREUD

GURSKY GUSTON

HATAKEYAMA HIRST HÖFER KATZ

KONTIS KUITCA

LICHTENSTEIN MIYAMOTO MORIMURA

MORRIS NIEDERMAYR

RICHTER RUSCHA

RUFF SHERMAN

SMITH STRUTH WARHOL


COLLECTION CONNECTIONS / SECTION 1

TONY CRAGG

Spyrogyra 1992

glass and steel

220 x 210 cm

LUCIAN FREUD

After Chardin 2000

print

etching on Somerset

textured white paper

59.7 x 73 cm platemark;

78 x 96 cm sheet

Eli 2002

print

etching

66.0 x 84.5cm platemark;

77.5 x 95.3cm sheet

Girl sitting 1987

print

etching on Somerset Satin

white paper

52.7 x 70 cm platemark;

61 x 77.5 cm sheet

Head on a pillow 1982

print

etching

10.2 x 12.7 cm platemark;

23.0 x 24.5 cm sheet

Man resting 1988

print


white paper



Man posing 1985

print


white paper


89 x 74 cm sheet;

123 x 103.0 x 3 cm frame

Self portrait: reflection 1996

print

etching on Somerset textured

white paper

60 x 43.5 cm platemark;

87.5 x 70 cm sheet

PHILLIP GUSTON

East Tenth 1977

oil on canvas

203.2 x 255.3 cm

Fist 1975

drawing

ink


Gulf 1979–80

print

lithograph

81.5 x 108 cm sheet

Painter 1979–80

print

lithograph

81.5 x 108 cm sheet

Untiltled 1980

drawing

ink

57.5 x 72.5 cm sight;

78.5 x 104 x 3.3 cm frame

YASUMASA MORIMURA

Slaughter Cabinet II 1991

photograph

sculpture

wood, lightbox, gelatin silver

photograph

58 x 43 x 43 cm

Seasons of passion/A Requiem: Mishima 2006

DVD

DVD, wooden (paulownia) box

duration: 7 minutes, 47 seconds

38 x 31 x 4.5 cm box

GERHARD RICHTER

Abstract painting (812) 1994

painting

oil on canvas

250 x 200 cm

Ema 1992

photograph

Cibachrome photograph

227.5 x 153.5 cm frame

Hotel Diana 1967

print

colour photo lithograph

29.5 x 40.2 cm image;

59.6 x 84 cm sheet

The following artists focused on within this education kit are held in the collection of the ArtGallery of New South Wales. Research the collections of the Art Gallery of New South Waleswww.artgallery.nsw.gov.au and the National Gallery of Victoria www.ngv.vic.gov.au for worksby other artists exhibited in An incomplete world.

Compare the types and scale of works in the exhibition to works collected by the the Art Galleryof New South Wales and the National Gallery of Victoria. Consider the range of issues effectingthe collection of key contemporary artists for state institutions. Discuss the implications.


GLOSSARY / SECTION 1

KEY WORDS AND THEIRDEFINITIONS THAT RELATE TOTHE ARTISTS AND ARTWORKSSELECTED FOR AN INCOMPLETE WORLD.

abstract expressionism:a form of abstract art and

expressionism which allows the

subconscious to express itself. It is

freed from the portrayal of

everyday subject matter.

appropriation: incorporating an

existing image or images into a

context different to the original in

order to alter their meaning and to

comment on originality.

arte povera: an Italian art

movement from the mid-to-late

1960s made from poor or cast-off

materials. Artists include Giulio

Paolini, Jannis Kounellis and Eva

Hesse.

candid: not posed or rehearsed.

cinematic: refers to qualities

specific to motion pictures, films

or movies.

commercial: prepared, done, or

acting with sole or chief emphasis

on saleability, profit, or success

consumerism: attachment to

materialistic values or possessions.

composition: the arrangement of

the elements of art in a work,

connected to the principles of design,

as well as to the relative emphasis

of the composition’s parts.

conceptual art: conceptual art

emerged as an art movement in

the 1960s. Crucial to any under-

standing is the influence of Marcel

Duchamp and the profound

questioning of culture and

institutions at that time. Simply,

the traditional object disappears.

The ideas become more important

than the objects.

documentary: based on or re-

creating an actual event, era, life

story, etc., that purports to be

factually accurate and contains

no fictional elements.

editing: to modify or adapt so as

to make suitable or acceptable.

figurative art: the straightforward

representation of life and individual

objects as seen purely by the eye

and with no artistic interpretation.

found object: a natural or

manufactured object that is

perceived as being aesthetically

satisfying and exhibited as such.

icon: an object of devotion or

intense admiration.

identity: the sense of self,

providing sameness and continuity

in personality over time.

ironic: a rhetorical effect in which

the real meaning (or intention) is

the opposite of the surface

meaning.

mass media: any of the means of

communication, as television or

newspapers, that reach very large

numbers of people.

metaphor: one thing representing

another; symbol.

minimalism: art where the work

– predominantly three dimensional

and reductive in form- takes the

look of industrial manufacture.

pop: pop art emerged in the mid

1950s in England but realised

its fullest potential in New York.

Media and advertising were

favourite subjects for pop artist’s

witty celebrations of consumer

culture.

pop culture: the opposite of high

art, with its origins in the church

and the royal courts. Newspapers,

comics, advertising and movies

are relatively modern things that

emerged in cities in the late 1800s

when people stated to have more

leisure time. Artists, who up till

then had elitist audiences, started

to put mass-media references in

their work, like Picasso and Braque

with newspapers cut-up into their

paintings.

portraiture: the representation

of a person or a group of people

in a work of art.

pose: position in which the body

is held in place without moving.

post-minimalist: a term coined

by an American critic to refer to

work that was more embellished

and pictorial compared to the cold,

industrial look of minimalism.

random: without definite aim,

purpose, method, or adherence

to a prior arrangement; in a

haphazard way

ready made: a kind of found art

that uses common manufactured

objects. The term was first used to

describe the work of Marcel

Duchamp.

representation: a creation that is

a visual or tangible rendering of

someone or something

romantic: in art, romanticism is

characterised by an emotionally

intense and subjective approach.

Though not identified by a single

style or technique, its attitude is

often visionary or elusive and

shows an affinity with nature in

its wild or awesome

satire: a literary technique of

writing or art which exposes the

follies of its subject (for example,

individuals, organizations, or

states) to ridicule, often as an

intended means of provoking or

preventing change.

scale: a progressive classification,

as of size, amount, importance,

or rank.

spontaneity: a state that is

unplanned, impulsive.

staged: contrived for a desired

impression.

stereotype: a conventional,

formulaic, and oversimplified

conception, opinion, or image.

subjectivity: expressions of

the individuality and personal

experiences and perceptions of

an artist or author.

surreal: having the disorienting,

hallucinatory quality of a dream

or fantasy.

taxonomy: a system of naming,

classifying and arranging

everything on a database.

traditional: the handing down

of statements, beliefs, legends,

customs, information etc,

from generation to generation,

especially by word of mouth or

by practice.

unique: being the only one of

its kind.


RESOURCES / SECTION 1

An incomplete world Works from The UBS Art Collectionexhibition catalogueManaging editor: Wayne Tunnicliffe

© 2007 Art Gallery of New South Wales &

National Gallery of Victoria

ContemporaryArt Gallery of New South Walescontemporary collection Commissioning editors: Anthony Bond and

Wayne Tunnicliffe

© 2006 Art Gallery of New South Wales

Encounters with contemporary art An education kit for the contemporary collection

Public Programs Department


Focus on photography An education kit for the photographycollectionPublic Programs Department

Art Gallery of New South Wales


Art Gallery of New South Wales on-lineresources:Self-portrait: Renaissance to ContemporaryPublic Programs Department


For further resources, information andprograms related to An incomplete worldsee the following on-line resources:

Art Gallery of New South Wales

www.art gallery.nsw.gov.au/collectionwww.contemporary-art.com.au

National Gallery of Victoria

www.ngv.vic.gov.au

The UBS Art Collection

www.ubs.com/4/artcollection


WORKS IN PROFILE / SECTION 2

PEOPLE AND PORTRAITS

LUCIAN FREUD

Double portrait 1988–90

YASUMASA MORIMURA

Daughter of art history: princess B 1989

GERHARD RICHTER

Helen 1963

MAPPING PLACE

OLIVO BARBIERI

Siena (3) 2002

PHILIP GUSTON

In the studio 1975

ROY LICHTENSTEIN

Post visual 1993

NATURAL AND

CREATED ENVIRONMENTS

TONY CRAGG

Grey moon 1985

ANDREAS GURSKY

Aletschgletscher 1993

NAOYA HATAKEYAMA

Blast 5707 1998

2

LUCIAN FREUD / WORKS IN PROFILE / SECTION 2


It is hard to imagine any artist of recent times who hasapproached figure painting with the same intensity as British artistLucian Freud. A slow painter who learned his craft by trial anderror, Freud’s portrait sessions extend over months, with thepainter carefully wiping his brush after every stroke. The artistspeaks of literally willing his materials and technique to yield upthe psyche of his sitters, which he perceives as inherent in theirflawed physiques.

Freud’s subjects are usually drawn from the artist’s circle ofintimates: children, lovers, friends or fellow artists. While hisexposure of vulnerable flesh might at times seem almost clinical, itcannot be said that Freud lacks empathy with his subjects. ‘I’monly interested in painting the actual person’, he has stated, ‘not inusing them to some ulterior end’.1 Paradoxically it is throughassuming this disinterested stance that Freud enables his sitters’‘essence’ to emerge.

Double portrait 1988–90 features two of the artist’s favouritemodels: his daughter Bella and her whippet Pluto, which heinitially bought for her and later came to care for on a permanentbasis. A ‘good sleeper’, Pluto’s companionable presence in Bella’sarms serves to highlight the tension in the young woman’s angularframe. Pluto appears in a number of other portraits painted duringthe 1980s and ’90s. As Freud (a dog-lover from boyhood) oncestated, ‘I’m really interested in people as animals ... I like people tolook as natural and as physically at ease as animals, as Pluto, mywhippet’.2

In Double portrait a restricted palette — of greys, blues and blacksat the cool end of the spectrum, and pinks and browns at the other— brings out vital similarities between dog and woman. Veins andsinews are visible beneath the delicate skin of both creatures;breathing, body heat and even thoughts seem as one. ElsewhereFreud has spoken of the subtle role of colour in producing sucheffects. ‘I don’t want any colour to be noticeable. I want the colourto be the colour of life ... I don’t want it to operate in the modernistsense as colour, something independent ... Full, saturated colourshave an emotional significance that I want to avoid.’3

Painted 14 years after Double portrait, Head of a naked girl 1999features the novelist Nicola-Rose O’Hara. Freely painted with boldgestural strokes, this small but powerful study, along with the full-length portrait of O’Hara which succeeded it, reveals a new degreeof intimacy that Freud — now in old age — has begun seeking withhis subjects. His inspiration was John Constable’s Study of thetrunk of an elm tree 1821, a painting whose portrait-like qualitieshave intrigued Freud since student days. In painting Nicola, Freudconsciously tried to get as close to his sitter as Constable hadstood to the elm tree in Dedham two centuries earlier.4

Despite his commitment to portraying the seen world ‘as it is’ andhis known dislike of contrived poses, Freud does not aspire torecord images in a camera-like way. As he freely admits, anyrandom effects of pose and subject in his canvases tend to be theresult of careful selection. ‘When I look at a body I know it givesme choices of what to put in a painting; what will suit me andwhat won’t.’5 Nor does Freud’s rejection of theatrical devices in hisworks mean that the artist himself lacks a sense of showmanship.‘What do I ask of a painting?’ he once remarked. ‘I ask it toastonish, disturb, seduce and convince!’6 SM

K–6 LOOKING AND MAKING ACTIVITIESVISUAL ART: Compare Freud’s handling of the different texturesof skin, fur and fabric. Observe the wide range of colours andbrush strokes used to reproduce these textures. Look in a mirrorand identify the various colours you can see in your face.Experiment mixing skin tones using only the primary colours andwhite. Paint your self-portrait using a mirror and apply variouslayers of skin tones.

ENGLISH: Imagine interviewing Bella, the artist’s daughter whoposed several times for this double portrait. Consider questionsexamining her expression, clothing and relationship with her dog.Explore how she felt modelling for this painting. Who decided onthis informal pose? Debate.

SCIENCE & TECHNOLOGY: Research the chemistry of oilpainting and its role in western art history. List the materialsrequired by the artist. Discuss some of the occupational healthand safety issues for an artist using this medium. What impact didthe introduction of oil paint in tubes have for artists in the mid19th century?

7–12 FRAMING QUESTIONSDoes oil paint still play an important role in contemporary artpractice? Research Freud’s progression from a draughtsman to amaster painter. Explore his oil painting techniques. Why doesFreud require extended periods of time to complete his paintings?Examine the importance of Freud’s friendship with Francis Bacon.Compare the work of Bacon and Freud. Discuss how each artistapproaches the figure and depiction of flesh.

How does Freud present a bold and contemporary approach toportraiture? Do you find Freud’s work confronting? Freud’smeticulous and intensely subjective portraits have been describedas realist art. Research realist art. Do you agree with thisclassification of Freud’s work?

Freud has been quoted as saying, ‘What do I ask of a painting? Iask it to astonish, disturb, seduce and convince!’ Explain whatFreud means by this quote. What implications does it have for hispractice? Suggest how Double portrait reflects Freud’s approach tohis art-making process.

1 Freud quoted by Robert Hughes in LucianFreud paintings, Hirshhorn Museum andSculpture Garden, Smithsonian Institution,Washington 1987, p 20

2 Conversation with William Feaver, Third ear,BBC Radio 3, 10 December 1991, reproducedin William Feaver, Lucian Freud, Tate Gallery,London 2002, pp 41–42

3 Hughes 1987, p 16

4 Feaver 1991, p 47

5 Hughes 1987, p 20

6 Feaver 1991, p 37. Feaver is quoting from Theartist’s eye: Lucian Freud, National Gallery,London 1987

YASUMASA MORIMURA / WORKS IN PROFILE / SECTION 2


MORIMURA’S OWN MALE JAPANESE FACE TRANSPOSED ONTOTHESE ICONIC AND IDEALISED IMAGES OF FEMALES FROMWESTERN ART HISTORY ASKS FURTHER QUESTIONS ABOUT THEREPRESENTATION OF GENDER AND THE ASSUMPTION THATWESTERN CULTURE IS A GLOBAL HISTORY.

Wayne Tunnicliffe, senior curator Contemporary art, Art Gallery of New South Anincomplete world, catalogue p57

From the late 1970s photographer-artists such as Cindy Shermanexplored how visual identity and a sense of self are shaped byimages in the popular media, for example films, magazines andtelevision. Through photographing themselves in the guise ofalready familiar ‘types’, such as ‘the secretary’ or the ‘pin up girl’,and in common media genres, it was as if the artist was an actorin so many pre-ordained movie plots, TV serials or photo-essays.Traditional ideas of the self-portrait as revealing an essentialidentity were turned on their head and selfhood became adeferred series of self-images that could be exchanged at will.Simultaneously, other artists such as Sherrie Levine wereexploring the legacy of art history, through rephotographingimages by earlier photographers such as Edward Weston, andthereby examining how the experience of the unique artwork hadbeen affected by the endless reproductions that photography andthe mass media had made possible, a critique that had been pre-figured by Walter Benjamin’s highly influential essay from 1936,‘The work of art in the age of mechanical reproduction’. Manyother artists also began appropriating images from earlier paintersand reworked them in their own art to question originality and theways in which culture participated in certain exclusionary powerrelationships, such as the absence of women and other races fromWestern art history. These strands of self-representation, media-influenced imagery, appropriation and a critical examination of arthistory come together in Yasumasa Morimura’s photographs.

Daughter of art history: Princess B 1989 is a photograph based onone of Diego Velázquez’s last paintings, Infanta Margarita in blue1659. Typically, Morimura’s version stars himself, standing behindthe improbable cut-out version of the Infanta’s dress heconstructed in his studio. What is even more improbable is thedetail in the image: the Infanta’s left hand now has beautifullymanicured long red nails while her right hand holds a parasol. Onthe stand behind her, the small sculpture of what appears to be adog in the original has been replaced with two modern soft toys.On the wall behind these is a very recent looking clock. In Angelsdescending a staircase 1991, Morimura has depicted himself asthe angels in Edward Burne-Jones enigmatic painting The goldenstairs 1880. Morimura, however, has doubled the originalcomposition and now the angels descend both sides of thestaircase as if in an over-the-top Busby Berkeley choreographedHollywood musical number.

Both these works call upon the ‘aura’ and beauty of the originalpaintings, and at a passing glance they could be seen as being theheirs to this art history. But at a second glance the gold frames,stagy drama, thick varnish over the surface to emulate a painterlyquality and ‘incorrect’ contemporary elements add to a sense ofpost-pop kitsch, anathema to any traditional sense of beauty.Morimura’s own male Japanese face transposed onto these iconicand idealised images of females from Western art history asksfurther questions about the representation of gender and theassumption that Western culture is a global history. WT

K–6 LOOKING AND MAKING ACTIVITIESVISUAL ART: Find an image of Diego Velázquez’s painting InfantaMargarita 1659. Compare the painting with Morimura’s stagedphotograph. Identify the elements that the artist did not includefrom Velazquez’s painting. Draw a picture of yourself as Daughterof art history: princess B in your own contemporary environment.Consider the objects that are important to you and include themin your artwork.

SCIENCE & TECHNOLOGY: Locate photographic portraits takenin the late 19th century. Compare the poses and facialexpressions to the work of Velazquez and Morimura. Researchphotographic techniques from the late 19th century. Explore whyearly photographic portraits seem so serious. Stage your ownportraits and photograph yourself and classmates in similar poses.

MUSIC: Research composers of the 17th and late 20th century.Listen to music from these periods and compare. Imagine thesounds you could hear if you were sitting next to the Daughter ofart history: princess B. Compose a piece of music. Includeelements of music you have collected and incorporate sounds youmay hear from the objects in the artwork.

7–12 FRAMING QUESTIONSIdentify how Morimura has constructed this image. Why hasMorimura deliberately created a composition that looks kitsch?Discuss how Morimura draws our attention to the nature ofconstructed histories and gender stereotypes. Can you define thisimage as a self-portrait or is the artist placing himself in the role ofthe subject to make a particular statement? Discuss.

Survey Morimura’s photographic practice. Explore how Morimurauses irony and parody in the appropriation of iconic artworks ofWestern art history. Does the success of his photographs rely onthe audience being familiar with the original artwork? Debate inclass.

Research the work of Sherrie Levine, who photographedreproductions of paintings and photographs and presented theseas her own works of art. Compare Levine’s work with the work ofMorimura. How does the work of these artists challenge thenotion of the original idea in contemporary art practice?

GERHARD RICHTER / WORKS IN PROFILE / SECTION 2


Gerhard Richter grew up in Dresden and studied there after thewar while it was a part of the Soviet block. Before the Iron Curtainmade travel impossible, Richter visited the groundbreakingexhibition Documenta in Kassel, where he was exposed to thework of Joseph Beuys and other Avant Garde artists from theWest. This experience convinced him to leave Dresden in 1961 tocomplete his studies at Düsseldorf. Richter, along with severalother artists who escaped from Eastern Germany, brought acritical attitude to the analysis of contemporary art. They alsobenefited from an academic training in drawing and painting thatgave them options not always available to Western students forwhom pop art and abstraction short circuited traditional skills.Richter has used his traditional training to mount a masterlyinvestigation into the structure of paint and optics.

Richter’s early paintings such as Helen 1963 gave pop art apolitical edge. His subject matter was often based on newspaperphotographs, mimicking the blurring of surveillance images takenfrom a moving car. He has continued to explore the effects ofphotography in all his painting even though his choice of imagecontinuously shifts between landscape, historical paintings andapparently minimalist abstraction. It is not realism or abstraction assuch that interests him but the possibility of photographic error,with the potential for blurring and loss of focus, which he skilfullyreproduces in the painted surface. The sense of motion generatedby his images makes us sensitive to the process of seeing andinterpreting paint as surface and as illusion.

Richter has accumulated an enormous repertoire of photographsof colours, textures and patterns found in nature and the builtenvironment. These elements invariably show up in his brushworkand use of colour. His paint is often dragged with a squeegee orblurred out with a brush creating a broken surface that can betranslated into a painterly tradition that is connected to Titian andVelázquez. This tradition is typified by the Baroque tendency tobreak the surface of the paint and blur the image to stimulateimaginative interpretation and active seeing. Richter has taken thisBaroque tendency to a new level of conceptual and opticalsophistication. His works constitute an analysis of the fundamentalstructures that determine how we see painting.

Helen is an early example of his figurative painting that simulatesa shaky camera lens or possibly a faulty print. While this referenceto mass media has been interpreted as a pop art tendency, it isalso the basis of a conceptual strategy in his work, whereby themanipulation of paint emulates incidents in mass reproduction.The effect is to suggest movement within the picture but it alsoimplicates the viewer in the motion as the eye attempts to still themotion of the camera. TB

K-6 LOOKING AND MAKING ACTIVITIESVISUAL ART: Discuss how Richter documents movement inHelen. Create three small paintings and experiment with wipingyour work to create a blurred image when the paint is still wet.Are you pleased with the results? Is there an element of chance inthis technique? Press your wet painting onto another surface andcompare to your previous experiments. Try to perfect thistechnique.

HISE: Richter directly experienced the effects of living in a country(Germany) that was divided after World War II. Find out about thedivision of East and West Germany. Explore the effects of thisdivision on the population of Germany

SCIENCE & TECHNOLOGY: Examine the process of printingblack and white photographs in a darkroom. What chemicalreactions occur in this process? Experiment with takingphotographs that include movement, either by varying yourshutter speed, by asking people to move or by moving the cameraitself. Discuss your results.

7-12 FRAMING QUESTIONSDescribe the woman in the painting. What is she doing? Is thesubject aware she is being observed? What connotations does theblurring have? Examine the painted surface closely. Whattechniques and equipment has Richter utilised?

Investigate Richter’s desire to make a photograph with paint.Consider Richter’s interest in the possibility for photographic errorand his desire to replicate these effects in paint. Research therelationship between painting and photography in contemporaryart.

Examine Richter’s body of work. Assess the influence of Richter’sacademic training in drawing and painting. Discuss how Richterapplied his training to mount an investigation into the structure ofpaint and optics.

MAPPING PLACE


OLIVO BARBIERISIENA (3) 2002TYPE C PHOTOGRAPH100 X 126CM© 2007 Courtesy of the artist and Isabella Brancolini Arte Contemporanea, Florence

OLIVO BARBIERI / WORKS IN PROFILE / SECTION 2


Olivo Barbieri has photographed urban landscapes for 30 years.His portraits of cities include views of skyscrapers, aerialphotographs and, most recently, short films that show Rome, LasVegas and Shanghai from a bird’s eye perspective. The moststriking characteristics of these two Siena 2002 photographs arethe unusual camera angle and selective focus. At first glance, theimages seem to depict an artificially lit miniature model of a citysquare crowded with small figures. However, these are aerialphotographs of a real event: a crowd gathered in Siena’s Piazzadel Campo during the traditional Palio horse race. Barbieri takeshis aerial photographs from a helicopter flying at around90–150m above ground. He uses a camera fitted with a tilt-shiftlens, which allows the photographer to control perspective linesand to alter the angle between the lens and the film, therebycontrolling which parts of the image are in focus.

Rather than showing the horse race, the artist has chosen thecrowd of spectators as his subject. The presence of people is rarein Barbieri’s work, and when they are included, they are shown ingroups where individuals are indiscernible. In one of the Sienaphotographs, some figures are separated from the crowd, castinglong shadows reminiscent of a Giorgio de Chirico painting.Barbieri cites the modernist painter as an inspiration, and hisinfluence is particularly apparent in Barbieri’s non-naturalisticrepresentation of space and light. The blurring and overexposurethat are normally accidental and unwanted side effects inphotography are deliberately produced to heighten the sense ofthe surreal in Siena.

In his depiction of the world in miniature Barbieri subverts thecommon purpose of aerial photography, namely to record detailedvisual data and to map landscapes and cities as clearly andobjectively as possible. In the Siena photographs recognition isdeliberately obscured. The artist shows the familiar as somethingunfamiliar, he makes the real appear unreal. His aim is to represent‘the world as a temporary site-specific installation, structures andinfrastructures, the foundation of our sense of belonging and ouridentity, seen from afar, as a great scale model: the city as anavatar of itself’.1 Barbieri’s distanced, unfamiliar view of the worldprompts us to re-examine our surroundings, and to navigate thespaces we inhabit with a more curious and perceptive eye. PK

K–6 LOOKING AND MAKING ACTIVITIESVISUAL ART: Identify what you can see. Imagine you arestanding in the crowd. List the sights and sounds you experience.Discuss why the artist has used a bird’s eye view. Use a camerato document your school playground from unusual perspectivesand at different times of the day. Print and exhibit your classphotographs and discuss.

HISE: Locate Siena on a map of Italy. Search the Internet forimages of Piazza del Campo and compare them to Barbieri’sphotograph. Research the historic Palio horse race that occurs inthis piazza. Explore how the Palio has changed over severalcenturies.

MATHEMATICS: Find out the dimensions of the Piazza delCampo. Calculate the area. Devise a formula to calculate thenumber of spectators that could stand in the piazza to view thePalio. Discuss your results.

7–12 FRAMING QUESTIONSView Siena (3) in light of Barbieri’s aim to represent ‘the world as atemporary site-specific installation’. Deconstruct the meaning ofthis quote. Debate whether Barbieri has succeeded in thisphotograph.

Identify how Barbieri subverts the common purpose of aerialphotography in Siena (3). Research Barbieri’s photographictechniques. How has this photograph been taken? How does theperspective, short depth of field and colour saturation affect theaudience’s interpretation of the photograph?

Search the Internet for images of Siena’s Piazza del Campo duringthe Palio horse race. Compare these images to the manipulatedimages by Barbieri. Does the Palio seem to be occurring? Whatspectacle is Barbieri actually documenting? The presence ofpeople in Barbieri’s work is rare. Discuss the treatment of thespectators.

1 Olivo Barbieri, artist’s statement,www.yidalinian.org/english/2006/09/barbieris_site_specific_shangh.php

MAPPING PLACE


PHILIP GUSTONIN THE STUDIO 1975OIL ON CANVAS208.28 X 200.66 CMTHE MUSEUM OF MODERN ART, NEW YORK. PARTIAL AND PROMISED GIFT OF UBS, 2002© 2007 The Estate of Philip Guston; Courtesy McKee Gallery, New York

PHILIP GUSTON / WORKS IN PROFILE / SECTION 2


‘I GOT SICK AND TIRED OF ALL THAT PURITY! ... I WANTED TO TELL STORIES.’

Philip Guston, An incomplete world, catalogue p77

A ‘tug-of-war’ between the opposing calls of abstraction andfiguration brought Philip Guston to an artistic standstill for twoyears in the late 1960s. Frustrated and unable to paint, Gustonspent 1966 and 1967 working on monochrome ink and charcoaldrawings. Finally, out of this impasse, burst a series of paintings inwhich the common object reasserted itself: crude and insistent,cartoon-like in all its bathos and vulgar narrative thrust. Thisbreakthrough of 1968 coincided with Guston’s retreat from NewYork into a studio he had recently built for himself in ruralWoodstock. The new cinder-block studio, described as ‘grim, andgrey as a factory on the outside, but huge and light on the inside’,rapidly became the centre of Guston’s world.1 It housed hiscollection of found objects and provided a refuge from theManhattan art scene.

Painting at night with acrylics applied to small squares of sawnmasonite, Guston produced numerous studies of single objects —a shoe, a book, a ball. This outpouring soon gave way in 1969 tolarger, more complex works in which the same motifs wereorchestrated into images of the studio world that the artist nowinhabited. ‘I got sick and tired of all that purity!’ he later remarkedof this period. ‘I wanted to tell stories.’

In the studio 1975 is the culmination of that series, commencedsix years before. Notably it is one of the few works in whichGuston portrays himself without disguise. We see him in profile,grey-haired, wrinkled and liver-spotted: in failing health. The simpleobjects which Guston first painted in 1968 have now become thecomponents of a resolved autobiography. A naked light bulbevokes Guston’s night-time painting sessions, but also theilluminated closet in which he spent hours as a boy, after hisfather’s suicide. An eyeball pressed against the tacked edge of acanvas alludes to Guston’s well-known habit of working so closeto the canvas that paint would splash back into his eyes. But it isthe Camel cigarette portrayed not once but twice in the paintingwhich reveals the depth of Guston’s concern with self-inscription.

Few gestures could have been so calculated to incense the priestsof abstract expressionism as Guston’s ‘regression’ toautobiographical painting. Having committed the cardinal sin ofliteralism, Guston was accused of joining the pop art bandwagon,with his clownish lolly-coloured figures and swipes at ‘high art’.But such comparisons were at best only superficial in the case ofGuston’s late works. Guston’s post-1968 oeuvre reveals, above all,his abiding reverence for Rembrandt and the Old Masters, for it istheir position that he ultimately adopted. Put simply, ‘the visibleworld, I think, is abstract and mysterious enough, I don’t think oneneeds to depart from it to think about art.’2 SM

1 Musa Mayer, Night studio: a memoir of Philip Guston by his daughter Musa Mayer, Penguin, London 1988, p 147

2 Philip Guston, lecture, University of Minnesota, March 1978. Reproduced in Phillip Guston, Timothy Taylor Gallery, London 2004, p 27

K–6 LOOKING AND MAKING ACTIVITIESVISUAL ART: Guston has drawn himself in his studio. List theobjects you can see. Examine his use of perspective, or lack of it.Can you tell what is in the background, middle-ground andforeground? Make drawings of parts of your classroom. Using avariety of materials, draw individual objects on separate pieces ofpaper and layer them together to create a collage.

ENGLISH: Write an acrostic poem using the letters of In thestudio. Include references to the painting’s textures, colours,objects and space. Hold a poetry reading in class.

PDHPE: Guston is depicted with what appears to be a cigarette inhis hand and mouth. Discuss the health issues related to smoking.Use this image to create an adverising campaign warning againstthe dangers of smoking.

7–12 FRAMING QUESTIONSThis autobiographical work maps Guston’s experience of hisstudio. Assess the composition of this painting. What has heincluded and eliminated? Identify the various personal symbols.Why has Guston compressed so much into the picture plane?

Examine the tug-of-war Guston experienced between figurationand abstraction in the mid 1960s. Survey Guston’s career.Compare the painterly abstract works associated with AbstractExpressionism with his later, bold, figurative paintings. Identify theelements in his later work that have led critics to classify him as aPop artist. Do you agree with this labelling of his work? Discuss.

‘I got sick and tired of all that purity!… I wanted to tell stories.’Explore this artist’s statement. Find examples of Guston’spaintings and write a critique on his body of work for an artsjournal. Discuss why sections of the artworld were critical of hisreturn to figuration, accusing his work of being regressive.

MAPPING PLACE


ROY LICHTENSTEINPOST VISUAL 1993OIL AND MAGNA ON CANVAS243.84 X 203.2 CM© Estate of Roy Lichtenstein. Licensed by Viscopy, Australia

ROY LICHTENSTEIN / WORKS IN PROFILE / SECTION 2


Along with his contemporaries, Claes Oldenburg, JamesRosenquist and Andy Warhol, Lichtenstein embraced the newtechnologies and mass-production of post-war America as areaction against abstract expressionism. These artists combined a new witty and quotational visual language with mass-consumption images such as cartoons and advertising.

Influenced by the cubists, Lichtenstein’s reductive imagery, orwhat he referred to as visual shorthand, takes familiar subjectsfrom 20th century art masterpieces or urban contemporary livingincluding television, dating or graphic novels. These subjects arereduced into strict painting structures and systems such as figure,background, foreground, line, shape and colour as formalelements that reference rather than represent reality. At the basisof all his paintings was a laborious process of initially composingthe structures and subjects in a drawing that was then used as aconceptual and compositional device to inform the final work. Inthe 1990s when he commenced his Interiors series he began touse collage as an additional process in devising components suchas the Benday (dot matrix) patterns, with dots graduated in bothsize and colour. This approach continued his interest in eliminatingboth the artist’s hand and the painterly gesture from the work,despite the fact that the image was completed in his slowmethodical way of painting with a brush.

Post visual 1993 is from his Interiors project, which began in the early 1990s and continued through to his death in 1997. Thispainting combines his interest in the formal or classicist approachto form and surface, his analytical and ironic reflection of art itselfand a sense of play with the visual field. Lichtenstein made ironicpaintings about art, images and vision throughout his career: fromthe early 1960s with Image duplicator 1963, appropriatingcartoons, Pablo Picasso, Paul Cézanne or Henri Matisse; throughthe Painting series that combined comments on abstractexpressionism and cartoons in the 1980s; to the Interiors series in the 1990s that play with spatial ambiguity and self-reflexivity.His interiors are also generally close to life-size giving the viewer a bodily relationship to the scale of the work, illusively implying anability to enter the room depicted, yet visually confining the spacewith contrasting elements. The disjunction that is set up byLichtenstein, between the image and its perspective, the depth of the visual field and the flatness of the canvas itself, questionsthe process of image-making in our contemporary and visuallyliterate society. Pop art may be seen as insouciant and gimmicky,yet there is clearly a trajectory from Dutch still life and interiors to pop art’s formalist structures, particularly in Lichtenstein’spaintings, in the way that they play with traditional pictorialprocesses and conventions such as perspective and chiaroscuro.This observation led art critic David Sylvester to considerLichtenstein to be the heir to Jean-Baptiste-Siméon Chardin orNicolas Poussin in his classicist approach to form and surface. DB

K–6 LOOKING AND MAKING ACTIVITIESVISUAL ART: How is this lounge room similar to your own? List all the things you can see. What would it be like to live in this house? Use felt markers to draw another view of this room.Continue the use of dots and diagonal lines within yourcomposition.

VISUAL ART: Lichtenstein is considered to be a Pop artist. Pop artists often use everyday objects and advancements intechnology as subject matter. Research other Pop artists andcompare their art and what they choose to paint. Are theyresponding to their environment in a positive way. Why? Discuss.

ENGLISH: Invent an advertising campaign for modern livingusing this painting as a starting point. Compose a jingle and plan a thirty second television commerical. Video yourcommerical and play them all in class. Discuss the variousapproaches taken by students.

7–12 FRAMING QUESTIONSDiscuss how Lichtenstein has transformed the familiar space of an interior into a survey of 20th century art. Examine thereferences made in the three artworks depicted on the wall in the painting and identify the styles illustrated. How hasLichtenstein used irony?

Survey Lichtenstein’s body of work. Lichtenstein rose toprominence in the 1960s and continued practicing in a Pop Artstyle until his death in 1997. What did Lichtenstein mean when he said he wanted his paintings to look as if they had beenprogrammed?

Define the term Pop Art. Discuss why artists of the 1960sembraced images of commercial and consumer society theyworked within. Is Pop Art relevant to a 21st century audience?Debate in class.

NATURAL AND CREATED ENVIRONMENTS


TONY CRAGGGREY MOON 1985GREY AND WHITE PLASTIC FOUND OBJECTS218.44 X 132.08CMTHE MUSEUM OF MODERN ART, NEW YORK. PARTIAL AND PROMISED GIFT OF UBS, 2002© 2007 Anthony Cragg

TONY CRAGG / WORKS IN PROFILE / SECTION 2


CRAGG’S TENDENCY TO SEEK ASSOCIATIONS AND LAYERS OFMEANING FROM BOTH CULTURAL AND NATURAL SOURCESMAKES HIS WORK MUCH MORE AKIN TO EUROPEAN ARTEPOVERA THAN TRANSATLANTIC CONCEPTUALISM.

Anthony Bond, director of Curatorial Services, Art Gallery of New South Wales, Anincomplete world, catalogue p57

Tony Cragg first began his studies as a scientist and worked as alaboratory assistant before going on to art school. He also workedin a steel foundry as a student and it was this that stimulated hislove of materials and processes. He was greatly impressed by themassive energy of molten metal and the sparks that showered thespace as the metal was poured from the crucible into the mould.The time Cragg spent as a scientist stimulated an enquiringapproach to the natural world and the man-made environment.This way of seeing is still fundamental to all of his work.1

Cragg was to be a key figure in the reinvention of British sculpturein the 1980s and he has since become one of the most persistentand powerful innovators in modern European sculpture. Since theearly 1980s he has used traditional sculptural techniques such asmodelling and casting alongside assemblages of modified foundobjects. Grey moon 1985 is part of an early series where Craggcollected fragments of a consumer society including discardedplastic toys and packaging, pieces of furniture, linoleum andpainted boards. These objects were configured as wall drawingswhich often had political or poetic resonance.

The use of plastic fragments often retrieved from the flotsam andjetsam along the Thames embank-ment in London was in itself apolitical comment on Thatcher’s materialistic culture and itsattitude of short term gain at the expense of the environment andgenuine quality of life. Grey moon is a more poetic work thatsuggests the passage of time or the partial occlusion of the lightof the moon. A number of the found objects that make up thequarter moon are disc-shaped, such as a toy wheel and variouslids and jars etc. In this way the full shape of the moon is hintedat. In Cragg’s work this kind of suggestion is often inspired by hisscientific training. In this case, the discs may be thought of asparts that contain the whole — for example, the genetic code heldin a single cell or even the fragment of a hologram that can bemade to project an image of the intact original.

Cragg’s tendency to seek associations and layers of meaning fromboth cultural and natural sources makes his work much more akinto European arte povera than transatlantic conceptualism.Although Cragg’s work has always been subject to rigoroussystematic processes typically used by conceptualist artists, therewas always room within this order for random variation, just asthere is in nature. The moon, itself a powerful symbolic andmaterial force in the world, is undoubtedly invoked by Cragg to create many associations with the climate and the human mindas well as romantic traditions of natural observation. TB

1 Cragg gave a recorded lecture at AGNSW at the time of his exhibition here in 1997 in which he discussed these early influences.

K–6 LOOKING AND MAKING ACTIVITIESVISUAL ART: Identify the various objects or fragments that makeup this work. Where do you think Cragg collected these materialsfrom? What system did Cragg use to order this work? Whatimpact does colour have on the work? What does the geometricshape represent?

VISUAL ART: Make your own collection of small objects that areall the same colour. Compare the shades of colour when youplace them together. Arrange your objects into a specific shape ofyour choosing and either stick them down or photograph them asan art installation.

SCIENCE & TECHNOLOGY: Research the invention of plastic.How has plastic influenced the modern world? List all the items inyour classroom which are made of plastic. Are they soft or hard?Create a table to document your findings.

7–12 FRAMING QUESTIONSConsider why Cragg creates work out of discarded material.Consider the political connotations suggested by the materials inGrey moon. Do the materials utilised by an artist impact on themeaning of a work? Define the term found object. Research otherartists who incororate found objects in their practice.

Examine how Cragg’s practice is influenced by his earlier career asa scientist. Discuss the layering of references Cragg makes to theartificial and organic worlds in Grey moon. What role dosystematic processes play in Cragg’s work?

Survey Cragg’s sculptural practice. Explore the range of sculpturaltechniques utilised in his body of work. Research the group ofartists whose work was referred to by critics in the 1980s as NewBritish Sculpture. Assess the role Cragg played in reinventingBritish sculpture.

ANDREAS GURSKY / WORKS IN PROFILE / SECTION 2


Andreas Gursky’s 99 cent 1999 has become an iconic contemporaryphotograph. In this large scale image of the interior of a discountstore in America where nothing is priced over 99 cents, ranks ofshelves of food and goods fill the photograph, seeming to extendout of the frame and potentially forever. The shelves andarchitecture provide a grid structure across which the highlycoloured goods are displayed in groupings, giving the photographan abstract appearance from a distance. The only randomelements in this somewhat chaotic order are the heads of thebrowsing shoppers which float above the aisles. While Gursky wasinfluenced by the objectivity practised by his Düsseldorf Academyteachers Bernd and Hiller Becher in the 1970s, he moved awayfrom their typographic groupings of black and white photographsof a single subject matter to individual colour photographs withsubjects ranging across landscapes, architecture, crowd scenesand interiors. Gursky embraced developments in colour photo-graphy in the 1980s, which enabled images to be photographedand printed on a previously impossible scale, rivalling the size andpresence of paintings on the gallery wall. 99 cent is typically sharplyfocussed, highly detailed, taken from an elevated viewpoint andepic in scale, involving the viewer in the image as they approachmore closely to view the detail. While Gursky’s photographs havebeen described as cinematic, the intense stillness of this scene ispurely photographic.

One strand of Gursky’s photography since the early 1990s hasbecome an anthropology of the spaces of global capital, trade andconsumption such as stock exchanges, trading floors andconsumer displays. Gursky’s photographs participate in thesespectacular zones: their immersive scale, sense of order and coollydisorienting excess emulate the conditions of the architecture andenvironments photographed. While these images may at firstglance appear documentary, the choices Gursky has made in howhe portrays these sites are further enhanced through digitalmanipulation. Gursky does not usually specify what changes hehas made; rather the digital enhancement seems the inevitablecorrelative of desire for more and better things, adding in 99 centto the sense of an unreal and cheap plenitude. This image ofdiscount largesse embodies the excesses of consumer capitalism:who could possibly need all this? That the discount store hasbecome the subject of the art is even more ironic as anotherphotograph from this edition is one of the most expensivephotographs to be sold at auction.

In contrast to this intensely urban interior, Gursky’s Aletschgletscher1993 is a sublimely beautiful image of the largest glacier inSwitzerland. The vast landscape, elevated viewpoint, subtle mutedcolours and broiling clouds have the appearance of a painting fromthe heyday of 19th-century German romanticism. However,Gursky’s seeming romanticism is not unalloyed, as the viewpointfrom which he has chosen to take the photograph (and this imagehas not been digitally altered) is one from which many touriststake snaps of this glacier, so while his image is still spectacular italso points to the ubiquity of how landscapes are perceived andphotographed and how these images circulate and in turn shapeour view of the landscape. There is an element of poignancy tothis photograph as well, as glaciers the world over are meltingrapidly and this sublime photograph is as much a memorial as adocument. WT

K–6 LOOKING AND MAKING ACTIVITIESVISUAL ART: Imagine what it would be like to travel to thislandscape. What can you see, hear and smell? Write a travelarticle promoting this region and make illustrations of places ofinterest.

HISE: What is a glacier? Define. Research where they are locatedin the world. Are these areas easily accessible? How have theseenvironments been affected by humans? Investigate.

PDHPE: Imagine you are planning a three to four day expeditionto this icy landscape. Consider the conditions and stresses uponyour body. List the items you require to protect yourself from theelements. What will you need to carry for this expedition? Writean extract from your travel diary describing how you coped.

7–12 FRAMING QUESTIONSReflect on the dimensions of this photograph. Does the scale ofthis photograph enhance your viewing experience? Would yourespond differently to this image if it were the standard size of aphotograph? Assess the impact of Gursky’s practice on theperception of photography as on par with the practice of painting.

Gursky has taken this photograph from a popular tourist walk. Onemay assume that hundreds of similar shots have been taken fromthe same vantage point. Explore the notion of uniqueness incontemporary art practice.

Research 19th century German Romanticism and explore theconcept of the sublime.

Romanticism celebrated the awe and power of nature overhumanity. Yet Gurky’s Aletchgletscher documents the effects ofman’s dominance over nature. Gursky’s awareness of theshrinking glacier becomes a memorial to a transforminglandscape. How does our awareness of global warming affect ourinterpretation of this photograph?

NAOYA HATAKEYAMA / WORKS IN PROFILE / SECTION 2

The mining of raw materials from the earth and their use in theconstruction of urban Japan is the subject of Naoya Hatakeyama’sphotographic series Blast 1998. The expansion of the built worldand its transformation of the natural landscape has been thethematic and conceptual foundation of his work for about twodecades. In a number of distinct but related series, Hatakeyamahas scrutinised: the subterranean city; the subjugation of naturalriver systems to concrete watercourses; quarries and theirgouging of the earth; and the enigmatic but terrifying blight ofindustrial landscapes packed with imposing structures, chaoticnetworks of pipes, conveyor belts and smokestacks.

Hatakeyama has achieved international acclaim as one of severalinfluential contemporary Japanese photographers whose work —particularly over the past decade — has redefined a style ofdocumentary narrative, and revealed aspects of everyday experienceto be simultaneously mundane and extra-ordinary, culturallyspecific yet able to strike a universal chord.

If the built world is one of the signs of civilisation, Hatakeyama’sphotographs redirect our attention to the material and structuralfoundations of civilisation and its inherent instabilities. The Blastseries, commenced in 1995, followed important long-termprojects in which Hatakeyama photographed limestone landscapesand quarries throughout Japan. Limestone is an abundant mineralresource in Japan and is the raw material that has fed its concreteurban development.

The Blast images depict spectacular explosions to mine limestonefrom the earth. Using a high-speed, remote control camera tocapture the moment of detonation, Hatakeyama combines highresolution with high drama. Blast has become one of Hatakeyama’smost acclaimed and recognisable series because through itspowerful allusions to disintegration, Blast melancholicallyreiterates the finite resources of the earth, while configuringsurreal pictorial spaces that project the viewer from an earthly to acosmological realm. What appear to be seemingly straightforwarddocumentations of an industrial moment capture, also, infinite,primordial space.

For Hatakeyama the interrelationship of the landscape and city isone of constant tension. Where civilisation begins and ends isunder question as we come to understand the increasing fragilityof the organic world. Commenting on his images of limestonequarries and processing plants, Hatakeyama has poetically stated:

‘... When I learned that Japan was a land of limestone, myappreciation of its cityscape underwent a subtle change. Japanis dependent on imports for most of the minerals it uses, butwhen it comes to limestone it is totally self-sufficient. Everyyear some two hundred million tons of limestone are cut fromthe quarries scattered about the country.

In the texture of concrete I can feel the trace of corals andfusulinas that inhabited warm equatorial seas two hundred tofour hundred million years ago ... If the concrete buildings andhighways that stretch to the horizon are all made of limestonedug from the hills, and if they should all be ground to dust andthis vast quantity of calcium carbonate returned to its precisepoints of origin, why then, with the last spoonful, the ridgelines of the hills would be restored to their original dimensions.The quarries and the cities are like negative and positiveimages of a single photograph ...’1 JS

1 Naoya Hatakeyama, lecture, Victoria and Albert Museum, London 2001

K–6 LOOKING AND MAKING ACTIVITIESVISUAL ART: Observe the series of Blast photographs. Note thediagonals of smoke through the landscape and the texture of therock. Use these images as reference material for a series oflandscape paintings representing earth, sky and atmosphere innatural and artificial environments. Focus on your use of colourand texture and how they help to convey the mood andenvironment you depict.

SCIENCE: Research how limestone is formed. Investigate theprocess involved in mining for limestone. How important islimestone in the production of concrete? Assess Japan’s supply oflimestone. How has Japan’s access to limestone impacted on itspace of urban development.

ENGLISH: Imagine witnessing this blast. Write a story toaccompany this photograph. Construct the events before andafter the blast. Present your work to the class in a dramaticreading.

7–12 FRAMING QUESTIONSAnalyse your initial response to this work. Write a list of words todescribe the event photographed. Do you think this is a natural orartificial event being documented? Discuss your conclusions withthe class. Read the title of the work. Does the title alter yourinterpretation of the photograph? What impact does the title Blast5707 have on the overall effect of this image?

Hatakeyama utilises a high-speed remote control camera tocapture fleeting moments. Assess the importance of chance in thecreation of these images.

Observe the series of Blast photographs and imagine the processand stages undertaken by Hatakeyama in order to create them.The allusions to disintegration and explosions almost seemcontradictory to the concept of creating an artwork. Debate.

Research the work of Hatakeyama. Examine how the expansion ofthe built world and the transformation of the natural landscapehave been a thematic concern for the past two decades. Definethe term ’documentary narrative’. Assess why Hatakeyama’s workis classed as redefining documentary narrative.

AN INCOMPLETE WORLD EDUCATION KIT AGNSW 36

AN INCOMPLETE WORLD

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