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(Exhibition catalogue essay
1997)
In 1993, a comet
named Swift-Tuttle came hurtling across our skies. Astronomers have
ascertained that it passes us by regularly (about every 133 years)
and they have stated that it could quite easily collide with earth.2.
This is not a typical rocky object like the ones that usually
penetrate our atmosphere. Swift-Tuttle is up to 15 kilometres in
diameter, weighs tens of millions of tonnes and could hit earth at a
velocity of over 200,000 kmh. If it does collide with earth on one
of its orbits, it will completely obliterate all life. I
am interested in this phenomena because it succinctly summarises
something we know about ourselves but rarely discuss - and it puts
Darwin’s theory of natural selection into perspective. If we can be
‘selected’, we can also be ‘de-selected’ as fast as you can click
the cursor on your computer.
I introduce this
truism here because I feel it helps to establish a context for the
whole body of Douglas Kirwan’s work, at least over the past seven
years since I have known him. His recent sculptures, to my eye,
further reinforce this; the sense of the underlying ephemerality of
existence (for us). They are beautifully crafted forms, clearly
figurative, yet poised between states, like matter reconstituting
itself. They convey to me this sense of our mutability, the
precariousness with which we ‘are’ or ‘aren’t’ according to the
whims of cosmic processes which clearly have no interest in us at
all.
Kirwan’s new
paintings, on the other hand, move away from his past concerns.
There is still the subtext of a temperamental matter-world but the
human presence within it is now an active participant rather
than a casualty. This means that the paintings are contextually
unlike the sculptures. The fact that both are developed
simultaneously is testimony to Kirwan’s conviction that art practice
can be many things at the same time. “I have a big problem with
‘single-mindedness’ - an artist who has worked across the timespan
that I have, is more than one person,” he says. This is a valid
point and is consistent with a range of post-structuralist traits
that influence us: multiplicity, fragmentation, diversity,
difference and so on.
Kirwan’s paintings
are unlike anything I have seen. They originate from an abiding
concern on his part, to reinvigorate painting for himself and
not as a counter to subdue painting’s critics. He seems to be
confronting a predicament similar to that of a group of American
painters in the 40’s. Barnett Newman, recounting that period said,
“In 1940, some of us woke up to find ourselves without hope - to
find that painting did not really exist,” that painting “was dead”.
“The awakening inspired the aspiration . . . to start from scratch,
to paint as if painting never existed before.”3.
One senses that
Kirwan, like Newman, doesn’t see an end to painting but that it has
the potential to move laterally towards another objective. Kirwan’s
success depends on his ability to shift our perception of the known.
To achieve this he seems to navigate a world ‘between’; a kind of
mental cyberspace where he can inscribe unnamed ideograms on a
shallow field of colour and texture and effectively form a conduit
between what we do in the world and what we think
about it.
Kirwan’s paintings
seem to oscillate between these two conditions, between an outward
world that is modelled and modified by the human subject and the
more obscure regions of unquantifiable experience. Art of this
nature can never be a simple narrative of recognisable objects.
Instead, his forms work on the periphery of language, relating to it
but resisting any of its assigned meanings.
Kirwan is not alone
in this area. He shares it in various ways with a diverse group of
artists which may include Hugh O’Donnell, Prunella Clough, Gunther
Forg, Brice Marden, Terry Winters, Jake Berthot among others. But
where these artists invariably create an unnamed sentient space that
is organically connected to the world we inhabit, Kirwan
takes a different path.
At this juncture, his
work swings away from nature and towards a revisionist site which
has more in common with the late Manhattan paintings of Mondrian.
This is evident on at least two levels. One involves Kirwan’s
recognition of the grid as culture’s natural state, and the other
is his use of colour. Yve-Alain Bois says of Mondrian, “He was
attempting . . . to formulate an “achromatic” theory of colour, to
find an articulation of colours that would borrow nothing from the
natural order . . .”
4.
Kirwan also seems to
distrust the comfortable iconography of nature. His blues, yellows,
greens and maroons do not come from the garden. They are
synthesised in the way that a Moog synthesiser transforms a
bird’s song. He uses water-based acrylics and a hair-dryer. This
enables him to keep his colour ‘pure’. “To blend the colours would
ruin them”, he says.
It is this desire to
free painting of its earthy origins, to present a pure form within a
cool framework which is not ‘weathered’ by the world of expectation,
that distinguishes his work. He is thoroughly aware that this
process produces an alien aesthetic. It is part of his strategy to
culturally and aesthetically open a new file for art, to perhaps
reassess Barnet Newman’s desire “to paint as if painting never
existed before”.
Kirwan’s polygonal
figures further reinforce this process. They do not represent
anything you can touch - in some works where the ‘box ‘or ‘house’
shape appears, it is not this accidental referent that interests him
but the structure and what it can imply. He sees these shapes much
more as directional indicators or ‘pointers’ than objects. They
assemble for a moment on Kirwan’s underlying matrix of gridded dots
and a curious dialogue seems to form between them, like electricity
arcing between points. They ‘speak’ to one another, sometimes
humorously, often awkwardly.
In some works, they
warp and twist in odd polymorphous configurations and strangely,
seem defective and purposeful at the same time. It is this dichotomy
of character that furthers Kirwan’s intentions; to examine things
anew. Seen collectively, the work presents a complex field of
anti-rules and anti-aesthetics - which of course is the point.
Inevitably, they create their own program, their own internal logic.
In a society like
ours which is tranquillised by the market forces’ packaged taste, it
is refreshing that some artists are mining for something deeper, no
matter how uncertain the ground. Importantly, these artists sustain
the possibility of disclosing something that might transport us for
a moment, away from the abyss of style-consciousness and towards
something that will engage us longer than the customary quick turn
around the gallery. Douglas Kirwan is one of them.
© Robert Hollingworth
NOTES
1. A
term used by Umberto Eco “The open work assumes the task of giving
us an image of
discontinuity. It does not narrate it; it is it. It takes on
the task of a mediating role between the abstract
categories of science and the living matter of our sensibility..” -
The Open Work, 1989, P 96.
2. The
Bulletin. January 12, 1993, P30-33.
3. Art
News. April 1967, P 29.
4. Yve-Alain
Bois - Painting As Model, 1993, P175. |