Print of the Oblique Shadows Catalogue www.Oblique Shadows
"Suddenly I see myself as another, as another would be seen, outside myself, available to all, available to all eyes, in circulation for cities, journeys, desire..."
Marguerite Duras, The Lover
"I see that the world is divided into 'European and American', and 'Oriental and African'. Discussing with a colleague where to locate Australia in such a map, we agree that it must be 'East of Suez'; equally that it cannot be 'Oriental." 1
Locating Australia on a map, it appears on the fringe of the AsiaPacific. This unusual island continent, stands at no obvious geographical crossroads, and yet its society bears all the hallmarks of a cultural emporium. This characteristic is a result of Australia being a major destination of the 20th century phenomenon of migration. A place where people the world over have come and settled, bringing their cultures and arts with them. Moreover, within the last hundred years Australia has transformed itself from a notably insular society into one whose fate is increasingly entwined within the region itself, This shift of attitude has caused it to confront the paradox 2 of its own identity, something that arts practice has also begun to address. 'Oblique Shadows' presents Australian artists engaging with the influences of the region. These artists deal with aspects of difference, spirituality, material and form that characterise their experience of the region, and increasingly the nation from which they have emerged.
Indigenous Australians, with their unique cultures, have had a pronounced cultural influence on everything from the symbolism of the nation to the use of Australian English. The slow appropriation of these cultural forms from the eighteenth century onwards defined a slight shift from a predominantly eurocentric society to an incipient , Australian' culture. However, to characterise Australia as a mixture of European cultures existing alongside a symbolically appropriated but essentially marginalised Aboriginal one is to overlook the influence that Australia's regional neighbours have had and are having upon the nation. An influence that has only begun to flourish within the last 20 years. The presence of an Asian culture in Australia can be traced back to the early post settlement Chinese who flocked to Australia as miners during the gold rush of the 1800s. Their cultural legacy today is also an archaeological one, and is evidenced in the collections of museums and galleries throughout Victoria: these include the collections in Ballarat, Bendigo's Chinese Museum and the Chinese graveyard of Beech worth retains the original Chinese towers. On a mundane level, Melbourne's Chinatown offers an entire simulation of an elaborate and fantastic Asian emporium.
Today's cultural influences spring from the beginning of the post-colonial period. Following the war in Vietnam, thousands of refugees sought and gained asylum in Australia. Similarly, the recent turmoil in the Middle East has seen the influx of Muslim Arabs. The Vietnamese precinct in Richmond offers a bustling commercial centre that trades in 'exotic' Asian goods. The presence of Asian peoples brings this exotic cultural influence to the artist's doorstep. From the ambience of the streetscapes to the availability of unusual materials, the artist's milieu is reinvented. This is not meant to homogenise Asian culture into one monolithic entity. The cultural diversity of the Asian region is evident in major cities like Singapore, which have their own Chinatown, Malay Village, Little India, there is even an Arab Street, and of course a reflection of the West.
The Afro-Asiatic influence that heralded Modern Art in the 1880s had a profound effect upon the West. African and Asian ornament and spiritualism provided not only subjects for the sober and secular Occident but another way of interpreting the world. Painters such as Delacroix and Gerome and paintings such as The Death of Sardanapulus (c1827), or Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres' The Turkish Bath, the coming celebration of 19th century Japanese prints, and Gauguin's Pacific (mis)adventures all inspired a renewal of Western art. 3 This renewal provided the premise for Modernism, which left its imprint upon Australian art, for any serious Antipodean artist of the period felt compelled to study in London, Rome or Paris, 4 where these developments began to resonate and disperse. Conversely it was also a time when Australian artists were to create images that utilised the distinct palette and subject matter which was to describe the Australian experience. This evidenced a shift from a European romanticism of an 'arcadia' to an incipient and localised nationalism. As Robert Hughes would later write:
"During the 1890s, artists constantly speculated on what made up the soul of the landscape. What spiritual quality made the Australian Bush unlike the Black Forest... They supposed it lay in an immaterial spirit, an allegorised essence of place, which could take physical form." 5
There was not only a physical distance which separated the West from the Orient, there was a philosophical one. Many Japanese could not understand Western enthusiasm for their lurid Ukiyo-e woodcuts, or how influential they were to Western 'high culture'6, Similarly the capacity to render a likeness was little esteemed for the artisans of China, who until late into the 19th century, privileged the vitality of the brush, not the accuracy of resemblance. 7
Today, as worlds increasingly overlap, it is Asia that Australian artists and institutions clamour to. Journeys to explore and discover Bangkok, Beijing, Calcutta or Tokyo are viewed with the same importance as the once obligatory trip to Paris. Perhaps this shift can be traced back to the 1960s when many, disenchanted with Western life styles, increasingly embraced Eastern philosophies as alternatives. Many Australians, privileged by their proximity to the region, sought the pilgrimage to India and other parts of Asia.
Returning to a regional practice of sculpture, Australian artists have presided over a recent shift of sensibilities, from the demands of tradition and a defined mode of sculptural practice to a practice of autonomous means and meanings. The engagement of sculpture with space and form, coupled with its capacity to embody ideas and attitudes, are the constants of sculptural practice. 8 The context within this region is the paradox of the interplay between traditional influences and the modes of international and contemporary art practice. An example of this is Rosalie Gascoigne (1917-1999) whose formal study of Japanese Ikebana informed a practice which utilised distinctly Australian materials and subjects. The transposition of materials and ideas as utilised by artists of this exhibition provide a further overlapping context, another mode of negotiation through this impasse. A mode characterised by like sensibilities, the fascination with 'exotic' form, or simply an engagement with paradox.
For many years Jock Clutterbuck has studied Eastern Philosophy, especially Sufism. The indirect cultural assimilation of other forms is apparent in his work, which attempts a physical manifestation of spiritual inquiries His linear works seem almost to spring from the celestial form of the Shiva, but one from which the figurative has been stripped, and in its place the embodiment of the cosmos, manifest in European abstract form. He describes the motives behind his work, Columns of my Breathing.
"During meditation an image of a column popped into my head, in mid-breath. An image of a column of round spheres, with the centre one the point of interval between breathing in and breathing out. The three sculptures are variations on this theme, the coming and going of breath and the interval in between".
The work of Adrian Mauriks springs from an analogous spiritual pool, inspired by an ongoing interest in Tibetan Buddhism. His vocabulary is clouds, the Buddha eye, a snake, birds and various plant forms such as the lotus. Building upon and yet departing from the Minimalist sensibilities of steel sculpture through his current use of polystyrene, Mauriks has displayed a decorative flamboyance that feeds upon the spirit of the Tantric. His works of lightweight structures, a vocabulary reminiscent of the patterning of Oriental friezes defy the gravity of machine age aesthetics with a creative energy suggesting the regenerative forces of nature, not bound by material but transformed by spirit.
A highly developed sense of design may also be found in the work of Kate Ellis. Ambivalence is a central concern in her work - the tensions created from the juxtaposition of the scientific with the nostalgic, the medical and objective with the personal and emotional, desire and beauty placed next to the abject There is an interest in the poodle as a sentimentalised, fetishised icon of femininity. The disembodied poodle paw suggests violence, but has been carefully bound, evoking conflicting notions of protection and constraint, revelation and concealment The objects are presented in boxed frames which have a certain museum like quality. The spiralling silk patterning alludes to traditional notions of women's craft, but also has an organic sense perhaps evocative of spreading illness and decay.
Louise Paramor's work can be read as artefacts from a religious ceremony. Her recent work stems from ideas and influences gathered from a residency at the Bharat Bhavan Arts Complex in Bhopal, India. Her work has increasingly utilised ubiquitous and ephemeral materials, like paper, cellophane and wire. Pink Fit evokes associations with decoration and geometric abstraction. Her paper works suggest Chinese lanterns and associated images of replicated household objects used in ritual/festival contexts throughout Asia; and yet this visual trash and glittering party equipment also refers to sweet nothingness, to an endless chain of delirious signs which celebrate their festivity for themselves alone.
The use of paper is also prevalent in the work of Elizabeth Presa, who uses the material to explore the poetics of literary texts. In taking the first draft of Jacques Derrida's text entitled Le Toucher, Presa explores the theme of translation from the written language (French) into the tactile language of sculpture. Employing the meticulous and meditative process of folding and sewing, she constructs paper garments, including kimonos, from thousands of sheets of Derrida's own typescript. The hybrid nature of her work, where form and content intersect, is reminiscent of the works of Marguerite Duras. While romantic, French is paradoxically both a language of colonialism and, ironically, the language of an influential branch of Western philosophy which critiques the power relationships of the past century.
Greg Deftereos looks directly at the engagement between entities, be they people, nations or worlds. His piece, Kiss of Compulsions Like Gravity is an observation on the processes of power and hegemony inherent within relationships. The two globes/worlds embracing may be anthropomorphised as lovers, they may be the First and Third Worlds, or the East and West. Whatever their status, they are drawn together for better or worse by the gravity of attraction, and ironically by their need for each other. Deftereos draws his inspiration from repeated archaeological field trips to Cyprus and the Middle East, where he confronts this process first hand.
The work of Richard Stringer is similarly focused. For Stringer archaeology and history function to form a psychological profile of the present. This serves to contextualise his sculpture. While working in Singapore in 1986, he was directly exposed to Asian art forms, which, coupled with his ongoing study of the art of the Middle East, further informed his practice. Untitled (landscape with bees) is an investigation into notions of fertility and colony. The Oriental harmonies and lightness of form belie a work brooding with ambiguity and mixed readings.
Philip Faulks' work refers also to devotional work through a use of frontality and stillness, yet these works owe more to the folk traditions of Asian art than to the official temple sculptures of metal or stone. His use of painted polystyrene as a working medium, coupled with the depiction of household objects and other 20th Century artefacts, imbues these works with a reverence for the domestic spirituality of home. These works are again reminiscent of temple or church offerings made across the Orient and the Mediterranean, where the stricken part of the body is made into a tiny totem and then placed in a religious sanctuary to be miraculously healed.
Carolyn Eskdale takes the premise of the domestic in other directions. Since 1995 she has been working on a series of related Untitled Room works. These rooms were originally motivated by a desire to communicate the sense of concurrent time and events, primarily concerned with present space in tension with remembered space. The notion of the screen, and the partitioning of space, from private to public, is enacted in the making of the work. This is evident in a work previously exhibited in Singapore in Rapport at the Singapore Art Museum, in 1998. The work that is exhibited in this exhibition, Untitled Room 11.2000, seems to be both a room and an object. The relation between the external surface and the internal perspective of the form, creates a sense of spatial compression, a tense relation of threshold and duality.
The influential shadow cast by Australia's Asian neighbours is a long one, and it falls across all the works of the artists presented in this exhibition. This is not merely a mimetic influence, these works are not appropriations, but rather involve an engagement or dialogue in material, form and sensibility. These works engage Eastern sensibilities and yet no artist claims any cultural inheritance These artists have been tourists, workers, or pilgrims to countries in the region, perhaps sometimes simply in their imaginings. The works of Oblique Shadows are not, as Said 9 would stipulate, base 'representations' of other cultures. These works do not violate, contain, or even attempt to collapse difference. They are simply the products of an eclipse, an overlapping shadow at a specific intersection of time and place.
Dr Sian E. Jay Singapore Richard Stringer Melbourne