The Contemporary Art Blog from Canberra

Harold Lightburn was an visionary who got his timing wrong. In the sixties his plastic runabout with its tiny two-stroke motor was an idea ahead of its time. Or behind its time, if indeed it was inspired by one of those weird post-war British austerity vehicles with a motorbike engine (the Anzani Astra) that went broke in the fifties. When he decided to launch himself into manufacturing automobiles, Lightburn was already successfully making washing machines, cement mixers and fiberglass boats in his factory in Adelaide.

Your exmodernist discovered these two 1963 Zetas in a hayshed near Wedderburn in central Victoria. Modernity, you ask? Well they do have vestigial fins, along the top edge… And, being true to modernity, they had no reverse gear! You had to switch off, and restart the engine going the other way, in order to access the (four) reverse gears! Theoretically, it was as fast (60mph) in reverse as going foward! Read the links to discover some of their other (hilarious and death-defying) “features“.

The 1963 Lightburn Zeta was launched in the same year as the Morris Mini, but was only 80 pounds cheaper… So which would you prefer? You could race the Mini! Remarkably, the Zeta got an award for just finishing the Ampol rally… Approximately 400 were produced in two models. The mechanically unrelated Zeta “Sport” was even cuter than the Goggomobile Dart, but only sold 28 units…

Photography Makes It Real. At first glance. Or rather ghostly when you take a second look… Reconsider your Picnic Plans.

Or as Tory Maguire observes maybe you can photograph your way out of danger…

Thanks to Iain McG for making the heroic u-turn to enable me to capture this image.

P.S If I was more adept at Photoshop, I would have inverted the photograph for you…

Ivan Solotaroff writes in The Guardian: Philadelphia is a city of murals. More than 2,800 have been commissioned by the civic Mural Arts Program, which itself grew out of the city’s Anti-Graffiti Network. Typically, murals here celebrate ethnic traditions or Philly mainstays like jazz, or basketball legend Julius “Dr J” Erving; but these messages are far closer to graffiti, their boldness drawing attention to their huge words and whimsically postmodern cartoons and motifs. Unlike traditional graffiti, however, where the message is often simply the artist’s street-name, these are consistently positive and amusing, equally thought-provoking and eye-pleasing.

They are romantic, too: visible from the commuter train, as if one is riding through a billet-doux. A Love Letter for You is a collaboration between the Mural Arts Program and Stephen Powers, a 42-year-old artist who emerged on West Philly walls and rooftops 25 years ago, under the street-name ESPO. As a 17-year-old hoodlum then, Powers was inspired by Cornbread, the seminal graffiti writer who covered Philadelphia with his name to catch a girl’s attention. Cornbread spraypainted not only walls but police cars, the visiting Jackson 5′s private jet and an elephant in the city zoo. Love Letter reads like a series of notes left on a bedside table or refrigerator…

See the series here

“German art collector Julia Stoschek poses in the video installation ‘Destroy she said’ by Monica Bonvicini in her exhibition at Deichtorhallen art hall in Hamburg, Germany.” See this “this very young private collection” at ArtDaily.com

I’d love to be able to say: “seen in London recently”. But thanks to the volcano, I’ll have to show you one of those anonymous viral images instead: Iconophilia offers a prize to the best title lodged as a comment in the next week. Go for it! The prize? Don’t let it put you off!

Internalising the frame renders ambiguous the boundary between art and the everyday. Here’s two examples to chew on. First see how Jack Featherstone, the Magic Realist of Braidwood, has a way of positioning the viewer weightless above him as (as we imagine) he sits on a vantage point committing this scene of the Deua Valley, in southern New South Wales, to memory, and to his sketchbook? Then see how he has employed another pictorial device in the way he has framed the distant view of the mountains with the two groups of trees, to the left and right of his primary subject matter. These groups of trees are formally distinctive, strangely synthetic, and yet inviting. They form parallel bands, like saplings planted too closely together, but they are somehow out of scale, sitting in the middle distance. They act like curtains, framing the scene ahead of us, yet allowing the continuity of the landscape behind this plane to show through. To this viewer, they suggest a mobile vantage point, a capacity to look around corners. Very seductive.

The surface of this painting, (painted in 2007, in acrylic and oil on bark, 270 x 770) renders the depiction of these and other formal elements in minute detail with tiny dots and blobs of pigment. His perspectival control of deep space is enhanced by the intensification of blue as the far distant mountain ranges roll on past the bush-covered middle ground. There are introductory figures in the foreground (Jack’s family), and the viewer is invited to follow as the group sets off along the road as it twists and turns through the pictorial space.

By contrast, consider this painting by the late Micky Dorrng (b. ca. 1940, d. 2006), of the Liyagawumirr clan, who lived on Milingimbi and Elcho Islands in Central Arnhem Land. Sure, I accept that it’s an extreme example to choose for a comparison of the manipulation of form and space, nevertheless, there are commonalities to be teased out. Micky Dorrng’s painted abstract motifs are derived from ceremonial body painting designs, the referent for which is the djirrididi (kingfisher) narrative. As abstract as you can get. Yet some have claimed that the horizontal marks are the marks left by the tide on Mangrove tree trunks. Be that as it may, when painted on the body, these bold parallel brush strokes vary between vertical, horizontal and diagonal configurations, painted on the chest and upper thighs. Rendered on canvas or bark, they have the capacity to produce complex visual ambiguities, which we read through the lens of abstraction. It has been suggested (by Howard Morphy, and others) that the capacity for Yolngu painting to confuse the eye relates to their invocation of ancestral power.

This example, a small (life-size) canvas, was painted in 2001, (520 x 415, in ochres and acrylic on canvas). The viewer’s attention to the geometry of its forms oscillates between the framing bands and the central panel. Like the architecture of a theatre stage, the bottom panel (six colours: red, white, yellow, white, red, and white) establishes a foreground, mirrored by the upper lintel-like panel above. These top and bottom panels overlap the curtain-like panels on either side (painted in a different sequence: yellow, white, red, white, yellow, and white). When seen together with the side panels, you see how the artist has created the effect of a proscenium, the perfect illusion of inside-outside space.

When you analyse the central panel, you find it is composed of twenty five bands, starting and finishing top and bottom with yellow, and with yellow in the central horizontal axis. The eye plays tricks on the viewer: not only via the spatial effects of framing, foreground and background, but schematically. Why are the colours sequenced differently, horizontally and vertically, one asks? Then experience the excitement of discovery as you decode the sequence, realising that the different order of the bands above and below, and on the sides, also recur in the central panel, from different starting points. It’s harder than it seems. Your eye plays hopscotch as it searches for the starting point for each sequence.

And now ask: how is it that his geometry works so perfectly, given the irregularity of the lines of colour, drawn freehand, twelve lines up and twelve lines down from the horizontal axis, then six and six on the sides, then six and six above and below? The artist’s command over colour, material, and form, apparently so simple, is amazingly engaging. The eye never tires of decoding its rhythms. The surface never stops moving. The spatial ambiguities never stay still.

As with the Jack Featherstone, the viewer is imaginatively drawn into the central space, equally curious, no matter how different the referents may be. The first draws us into a detailed recounting of memorable experiences – almost as if the artist can’t believe his own eyes. The latter painting persuades us that the painted surface is permeable, and, as it references its origins as body paint, how such a painting may be experienced from the other side by the person who wears the painting on his chest.

In each case, pictorial and abstract, each operating within their own poetic code, one sees a process of layering of space, and a control over spatial ambiguity. Each sits at opposite ends of a spectrum of representational intent, cultures apart, and yet each employs pictorial devices that share common effects. Familiarity breeds… wonder.

P.S. The question of “Aboriginal abstraction” is discussed in more detail on ArtWranglers.

Life imitates art – or is it the other way round? If “that flower pot thing” above is the subject of genuine disbelief in dinner party conversations, then surely “the challenger” below is worthy of our aesthetic attention? If the dinner party consensus is that the pylon for the new Gungahlin Drive Extension Bridge over Belconnen Way “looks better” than the “flower pot”, then what does that tell us about the quality of decision-making which leads to the installation of public art works on the streets of Canberra? Read on…

If, like me, you wonder about the art status of such things, in Canberra, it’s art once it’s been launched by the Chief Minister. Skip the guff, check the final line in the plaque below. And all the other plaques around town. Unlike London, we specialise in a scattergun approach, where we set minor works free on every street corner. But each new artwork has to be officially set adrift… This piece of street decor was personally selected by the Chief Minister, and launched as marker for the nonexistent Latin American Quarter! Thus we take extra pleasure when we encounter unofficial readymades like this Pylon above, which has no political or cultural stigma to carry.

P.S. Dear Minister for the Arts and Heritage. Stop work on the bridge! Iconophilia wishes to nominate The Pylon for Instant Heritage Status.

London’s Lord Mayor Boris Johnson announces Anish Kapoor’s sculpture ArcelorMittal Orbit, to be built in time for the Olympic Games. (See The Guardian video here). Apparently funded by Britain’s wealthiest individual, its title advertising his business identity, its 21st century character could hardly be further from Vladimir Tatlin’s dream of nearly a century ago.  Why Tatlin? His proposed Monument to the IIIrd International was far more ambitious, and despite its impossible futurism, given the technology available to him, there’s an echo here in form and structure, yes? And yes, I have nothing against an art which pays homage to its antecedents… If indeed, that is the case…

The Independent’s Jay Merrick says “It’s anti-bling, and its brusque form will be either loved or hated.” How very English. It’s an unfortunate choice of words, unless anti-bling means pro-spin? Either way, there’s an art-hyperbole thesis in it for somebody… And what will ArcelorMittal Orbit be saying in 95 years time?

Here’s a relevant post on another blog – and I’m sure there will be more! See Kapoor on the BBC,  Tom Dyckhoff. Farah Nayeri. Someone who calls themselves “live toad”.

Why does this WW2 Luftwaffe wind-up motor drive RoBoT II have such a suspiciously cheery logo, if it was made for the German Air Force? Answer: Once you’re safely back on terra firma its right-angle viewfinder (which allows you to shoot (sic) downwards while up in the sky) also means you can photograph the girl/boy/thing beside you without being spotted. In action. As it were. It’s all about body language. See? You hold it sideways, and peek through that little round knurled thingo on the side. Clever, eh? And pretty, as far as  Functionalism allows us…

“Don’t worry mein liebchen. See? That Überkanonen Hans is photographing all those other nice people.”

Etymology? The word “robot” (from robota, Czech for “forced labor”) made its public debut in 1921, when it premiered on stage in Karel Capek’s play R.U.R. (Rossum’s Universal Robots). The play told of a world in which humans relaxed and enjoyed life while robots – imitation humans – happily did whatever labor needed to be done. Not unexpectedly, the robots eventually rebelled and took over the world. The term “robot” achieved its own world domination in 1923, when the play was translated into English; it quickly overran its competition, its  precursors being “android” and “automaton.” It “quickly overran its competition” eh? Its human minders, presumably…

Want to buy this RoBoT? Go here.

In his own relentless trajectory towards the dark side, Nicolas Rothwell can’t help evoking the loss of “depth” and “knowledge” in contemporary Aboriginal art. This time, referencing the master printmaker Basil Hall, once again the Roth plays his trump card:

“But there is another, darker evolution that he sees inevitably at work. Something is passing in remote area Aboriginal art as the artists raised in the bush, from largely traditional backgrounds, die and younger artists come to the fore… “The old art was special,” [Hall] says; then, rather tantalisingly: “The surface layer of the new art from the next generation may look the same but that other, deeper layer of knowledge and authority is perhaps changing.” And then, Hall again: “You get the strong sense that every mark they make has a reason for being there. In certain images where the marks may be very close to those used in body-painting you realise the artists aren’t playing around, everything is in its place, it’s not just an amusing hobby for them. With newer work, it’s more art for art’s sake. There might still be indigenous themes, but it’s a different, more contemporary animal.” And then the Roth again: “And so things pass: the fixed marks of tradition in all their rigid beauty fade; newer works, perhaps freer, perhaps more adventurous, come in their place.”

Is just this a throwaway line? Or has “salvage anthropology” now morphed into “salvage art history”? No, the Roth has been at it for years.  Read on…