Notes in response to the work of Julian Twigg
(Exhibition
catalogue essay 2001)
Julian was a student of mine at RMIT
University. But ask any art tutor, there is something about making
art that no education system can teach. This property if you
like, can easily be pointed out to students of the subject, yet very
many may never grasp that the materials they use or the subject they
choose cannot in themselves generate a single worthwhile work. So it
could be said that the property in question is the work’s ability to
overcome both subject and medium; a line becomes something
else, not merely a line, a colour not a colour, a form not a form.
Perhaps we can say that a successful work opens a kind of portal
within
the subject and medium which takes us onto a new field of possibility.
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Once upon a time all pictures were the medium through which
stories were told, and pictorial conventions were devised to relay these
pre-organised narratives. Today, other media fulfil this task
perfectly well – TV documentaries for instance - and art has moved
on. Perhaps art has always been nomadic; it moves to ever-newer
ground, both disregarding and capitalising on the social environment
that sustains it. But if most new art doesn’t tell stories what then
is it useful for? The fact is, not much art is intended to be
useful. Some may see art as a way to advance a cause of some kind
but most recognise that there may be better mediums for the purpose, just
like there may be better mediums to tell stories.
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Art has no meaning in itself, meaning
resides entirely with the viewer - an idea championed by Joseph
Beuys. This German artist’s ideology has since gone out of fashion
along with ideology itself, but his popular concept has permeated
our psyche: today no-one sensibly expects art to tell them anything.
So it’s up to the spectator, but let us recognise that the work also
plays an active part in this. If a work of art - even for a second -
manages to transport us somewhere we haven’t been before, if it
manages to evade the conventionally segmented world we usually
inhabit, then it is a remarkable work.
++
If we look out onto Port Phillip Bay, there is something we will
never see - it is an image. Neither is what we see a composite of
images. For an image to exist, life must be absent. Time and space
must be eradicated by some device – a camera for instance. What we
really see out on the bay are perceptions mediated by the brain and
the imperfect organ of sight. As one’s eye moves across the view, an
infinite number of complex elements inseparably flow through our
consciousness and some aspects of the whole are committed to the
storehouse of experience. How can an artist convey this
ever-fluid, imperfect experience without resorting to ‘images’?
++
In the early 90’s when it was still the
proper thing to do, I learned a lot about French deconstruction
theory. (Interestingly, my Word program still tells me
‘deconstruction’ isn’t a word). I studied Gilles Deleuze among
others, and of all the things I gleaned from him, one continues to
be of lasting value. While all the cultural theorists around him
seemed consumed by negativity, it was Deleuze’s belief in art’s
potential through the condition of becoming that interested
me. I interpreted this complex idea in my own way and it has come to
mean something crucial. It is the notion that if art has a future if
must avoid our way of arresting things - it can only be an
active force if it locates a station where language cannot colonise
it.
++
Perspective, that masterstroke of
Renaissance thought to create the illusion of depth, is excellent
for eliminating any semblance of reality. Proficient draftsmanship,
that beacon in the tower of Western art, is the perfect means to cut
out objects and isolate them from the world where they are truly
active. Julian Twigg doesn’t use either device. And he doesn’t paint
ships and ocean either. He paints shipness and oceanity.
He paints these things in the process of ‘becoming’, and this, I
believe, is a very real situation indeed. Julian knows what painting
itself proffers. And on that subject, here is a quote from NY:
Some say painting is dead. Too much mouth not enough eyes.
© Robert Hollingworth
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