The Robertson Park Group.
catalogue essay by Dr David Bromfield
Recent attitudes to art miss the point. Artists make art because they must. Fish gotta swim, birds gotta fly, artists gotta to make art. But how to go about it?
A good way is to work as a group in a cooperative studio. It helps pay the rent and sorts out all those petty inhibitions and pretensions quicker than you can say Moet and Chandon. A few years back this was obvious to all - most innovation and energy in Australian art came from independent collaborative artistic communities. They not only took their immediate presence in the community seriously but thought art impossible without it.
Somehow this ended. Art became an industry. Government grants, once a timely helping hand, are now a subsidised drip, barely maintaining life when a quick and merciful death might be more fitting. Artists, even radical artists, are a rambling herd of independent minds, only mustered together by bureaucrats for special occasions. They drink and work alone.
From this point of view the Robertson Park group, based here in Halverson Hall, might seem a naive, if happy, throw back. They have a long history of mutual support including several years in a workshop/warehouse space in Wellman Street, behind a William street brothel. They have always been supported by the businesses and communities close at hand - this exhibition too has been sponsored by generous local traders. Above all, Graham Hay and his colleagues have always paid their way, by teaching, commissions, busking, labouring, borrowing each other's paints, brewing their own beer and many other ingenious strategies.
On the other hand, these artists make art work on their own terms. They deliver their “product" direct to the community in a way that specially targeted grants and initiatives fail to achieve. The relationship between piper and payee remains as strong as ever. Artistic independence is vital. Art always precedes and determines theory.
Without this priceless independence, artists become mere illustrators, whether of the latest career building theoretical position, the most convenient political or managerial orthodoxy or current curatorial fashion. When artists work the system, the system works them. They become boring, predictable and too dependent to make original judgements. The public face of contemporary art is now as boring as the worst FM pop station and for the same reason.
Paradoxically, the Robertson Park group turn out to be dangerous radicals who believe that art is for everyone and are prepared to pay for their belief. Their accessible, enjoyable work is delightfully free of the stodgy stew of half baked ideas, ill digested techniques and come- ons for bureaucrats served up at most alternative spaces. If there is hope for the social future of art it will come from neighbourhood groups like this, close to the ground and to the only audience that matters.
Artists must be independent but they can never be "free" in the way a Mitsubishi driver is free on TV racing horses in a storm, skidding pointlessly through the waves with no one else in sight. The act of making art is about experiencing limits, defining not denying them, acknowledging that we ourselves are produced by limits. Unlike consumer goods, the thing we enjoy most about works of art is their imperfections, the particular ways the artist has adapted ideas to the media, found a way to use technical limits to authenticate a particular vision, a unique point of view.
A shiny new electric fan, for instance bears a superficial relationship to some of Graham Hay's ceramic sculptures. Both have a pedestal supporting a complex variation on a cylinder in which space and solids shift in a perplexing array. The fan, however, soon fades to the background, once one realises it has a single, well defined function and that its materials are shaped by a need to achieve that as cheaply as possible. This is not how art works.
Hay's clay forms are generous, excessive even explosive in their configuration. They cling in diverse clusters, sometimes like intergalactic seedpods, sometimes a soft turbine, a bundle exotic fruits, split second angel wings made from plasma, an alien ray gun, the vortex round a black hole. The irregularity of their forms lends itself to all kinds of associations limited only by experience and memory. Any and all are relevant. More to the point the artist's struggles with the imperfections of the clay form come alive when placed in close relationship to an audience with freedom to respond to them. This can only be found in the context of a collaborative art group and the free flowing social relationships generated by places like the Halverson Hall studio. The group's work pays some respect to modernist norms. Most modernist sculpture hovers between two poles, the organic and the mechanical, biology and engineering. Once again, however, the palpable degeneration of his media sets these secure landmarks of the modern at odds with each other and questions them, not from the distant horizons of deconstruction but the immediate familiarity, the existential presence, of the exhausted objects piled round your garbage bin. This is the true post-modern as redundancy, same as it always was. The radicalism of the collective has always stemmed fron, its ability to shift attention away from "this goes with that" categories and straight line novelties to complex questions of relative presence (-How is that there? Why and when am 1 here? Why not there?) in which the work of art acts as a question mark or a key to the pattern of experience rather than as an object in itself, lodged,; alone in time and space.
Every member of the Robertson Park group makes art in a unique way. They are, however, united in their realisation that art is primarily about presence in the comununity. The small brightly coloured shallow relief panels of Victoria Nadas rely a great deal on one's sense that they are artefacts, made through a determined struggle to maintain the rigid congealed surface qualities of the panels in relation to the intense presence of the image of human action that each presents. A scaffolding of black lines surrounding, green, brown and scarlet patches produces a dense antique quality, to which the troughs left by the carting tools contribute a sense of the crude hand work found in third world industrial products - peasant carvings, fruit wrappers or religious icons. This unique sense of presence and probable origin appears clearly in a panel showing a tennis player about to serve the squat body stretched diagonally from the lower left to the upper right corner of the panel arms rhythmically balanced. This dynamic figure is trapped in a diagonal black grid over green so that the action extends over an infinite time. In another panel, a child-like figure in an Asian loin cloth dances with arms flung upwards, one leg bent double at the knee and raised at right angles to the ground. This could be classical dance pose or a conventional hieroglyphic for joy. In either event the figure is congealed within a more distant net of black lines over dark antique green. Behind the figure is an object that could be a windsock or a bamboo water pipe.
The ambivalence of Nadas imagery sits in an uneasy tension with the consistent powerful presence produced by the form of each panel. As with Hay's clay auroras it is the possibility of very different responses to the limits of her medium, the crude but tightly controlled carving that gives each panel such power.
Variations of presence in the landscape are Carol Rowling's chief concern in her complex coloured patterns. It is very difficult to work with landscape painting and avoid associations with other painters. Rowling's work has some strong formal associations with the resonant purples and oranges, and multiple panels of Fred Williams. Unlike Williams, however, she bases her work on the juxtaposition of streaming textures and blocks of colour and tone rather than lines patterns and marks. This optical smearing and skidding has the effect of showing the landscape in perpetual motion across retina and memory. Metaphysical winds and torrents flow across every image, vertical and horizontal blocks of purple brown shadow sometimes exert an impregnable absence, a contrasting negative presence to energies in every view. In some smaller works it as if the stamp of the image on the retina has been directly transferred to canvas. The implicit viewing distance from the land is reduced almost to zero. As elsewhere in the group, ambivalent possibilities within Rowling's imagery produce a tension with her robust use of the medium and a strong sense of the presence in the work and the land.
Recently Alexander Hayes has been working on old walls and ceilings. His pieces are not inspired by the elaborate variations on the grid to he seen in galleries all over the world but by the lath and plaster structures they reveal. The raw quality of the wood, its broad grain and the rough crumbing materials crammed in behind it suggest a view through to sky or water. Rubbish and ruins can often act as an informal short cut to the infinite. One work has the lathes painted a lumpen tacky emerald green that congeals over the rough grain while the rough grided doodles and rubbish beyond bulk up like the clouds of heaven, awaiting a see through saint. Again the immediacy of his materials and ambivalence of the imagery invokes an extraordinary presence.
Finally, Diokno Pasilan's panel of wooden framed metal plates bitten and splattered with elegant brown faces cancelled by black crosses epitomises the relationship between humble materials and sophisticated imagery that runs throughout the group. Pasilan is an artist from Negros in the Philippines. His work embodies both the recent radical history of the Philippines and the inescapable imagery of its Christian legacy. On each side of the central panel single lines of small bitten deeply panels spread out like wings bearing complex alchemical landscapes of black pitch, silver and gold. This is in itself a religious framework an accessible invitation to ritual way of looking. Pasilan is also a musician. He works with everyone who wants to play, invoking community through daily action. On opening day music will bind the artists and their audience together in full expression of their community.
Dr David Bromfield
Brown Art Consultants
Read more of his writing...
Read more reviews of the studio...
A good way is to work as a group in a cooperative studio. It helps pay the rent and sorts out all those petty inhibitions and pretensions quicker than you can say Moet and Chandon. A few years back this was obvious to all - most innovation and energy in Australian art came from independent collaborative artistic communities. They not only took their immediate presence in the community seriously but thought art impossible without it.
Somehow this ended. Art became an industry. Government grants, once a timely helping hand, are now a subsidised drip, barely maintaining life when a quick and merciful death might be more fitting. Artists, even radical artists, are a rambling herd of independent minds, only mustered together by bureaucrats for special occasions. They drink and work alone.
From this point of view the Robertson Park group, based here in Halverson Hall, might seem a naive, if happy, throw back. They have a long history of mutual support including several years in a workshop/warehouse space in Wellman Street, behind a William street brothel. They have always been supported by the businesses and communities close at hand - this exhibition too has been sponsored by generous local traders. Above all, Graham Hay and his colleagues have always paid their way, by teaching, commissions, busking, labouring, borrowing each other's paints, brewing their own beer and many other ingenious strategies.
On the other hand, these artists make art work on their own terms. They deliver their “product" direct to the community in a way that specially targeted grants and initiatives fail to achieve. The relationship between piper and payee remains as strong as ever. Artistic independence is vital. Art always precedes and determines theory.
Without this priceless independence, artists become mere illustrators, whether of the latest career building theoretical position, the most convenient political or managerial orthodoxy or current curatorial fashion. When artists work the system, the system works them. They become boring, predictable and too dependent to make original judgements. The public face of contemporary art is now as boring as the worst FM pop station and for the same reason.
Paradoxically, the Robertson Park group turn out to be dangerous radicals who believe that art is for everyone and are prepared to pay for their belief. Their accessible, enjoyable work is delightfully free of the stodgy stew of half baked ideas, ill digested techniques and come- ons for bureaucrats served up at most alternative spaces. If there is hope for the social future of art it will come from neighbourhood groups like this, close to the ground and to the only audience that matters.
Artists must be independent but they can never be "free" in the way a Mitsubishi driver is free on TV racing horses in a storm, skidding pointlessly through the waves with no one else in sight. The act of making art is about experiencing limits, defining not denying them, acknowledging that we ourselves are produced by limits. Unlike consumer goods, the thing we enjoy most about works of art is their imperfections, the particular ways the artist has adapted ideas to the media, found a way to use technical limits to authenticate a particular vision, a unique point of view.
A shiny new electric fan, for instance bears a superficial relationship to some of Graham Hay's ceramic sculptures. Both have a pedestal supporting a complex variation on a cylinder in which space and solids shift in a perplexing array. The fan, however, soon fades to the background, once one realises it has a single, well defined function and that its materials are shaped by a need to achieve that as cheaply as possible. This is not how art works.
Hay's clay forms are generous, excessive even explosive in their configuration. They cling in diverse clusters, sometimes like intergalactic seedpods, sometimes a soft turbine, a bundle exotic fruits, split second angel wings made from plasma, an alien ray gun, the vortex round a black hole. The irregularity of their forms lends itself to all kinds of associations limited only by experience and memory. Any and all are relevant. More to the point the artist's struggles with the imperfections of the clay form come alive when placed in close relationship to an audience with freedom to respond to them. This can only be found in the context of a collaborative art group and the free flowing social relationships generated by places like the Halverson Hall studio. The group's work pays some respect to modernist norms. Most modernist sculpture hovers between two poles, the organic and the mechanical, biology and engineering. Once again, however, the palpable degeneration of his media sets these secure landmarks of the modern at odds with each other and questions them, not from the distant horizons of deconstruction but the immediate familiarity, the existential presence, of the exhausted objects piled round your garbage bin. This is the true post-modern as redundancy, same as it always was. The radicalism of the collective has always stemmed fron, its ability to shift attention away from "this goes with that" categories and straight line novelties to complex questions of relative presence (-How is that there? Why and when am 1 here? Why not there?) in which the work of art acts as a question mark or a key to the pattern of experience rather than as an object in itself, lodged,; alone in time and space.
Every member of the Robertson Park group makes art in a unique way. They are, however, united in their realisation that art is primarily about presence in the comununity. The small brightly coloured shallow relief panels of Victoria Nadas rely a great deal on one's sense that they are artefacts, made through a determined struggle to maintain the rigid congealed surface qualities of the panels in relation to the intense presence of the image of human action that each presents. A scaffolding of black lines surrounding, green, brown and scarlet patches produces a dense antique quality, to which the troughs left by the carting tools contribute a sense of the crude hand work found in third world industrial products - peasant carvings, fruit wrappers or religious icons. This unique sense of presence and probable origin appears clearly in a panel showing a tennis player about to serve the squat body stretched diagonally from the lower left to the upper right corner of the panel arms rhythmically balanced. This dynamic figure is trapped in a diagonal black grid over green so that the action extends over an infinite time. In another panel, a child-like figure in an Asian loin cloth dances with arms flung upwards, one leg bent double at the knee and raised at right angles to the ground. This could be classical dance pose or a conventional hieroglyphic for joy. In either event the figure is congealed within a more distant net of black lines over dark antique green. Behind the figure is an object that could be a windsock or a bamboo water pipe.
The ambivalence of Nadas imagery sits in an uneasy tension with the consistent powerful presence produced by the form of each panel. As with Hay's clay auroras it is the possibility of very different responses to the limits of her medium, the crude but tightly controlled carving that gives each panel such power.
Variations of presence in the landscape are Carol Rowling's chief concern in her complex coloured patterns. It is very difficult to work with landscape painting and avoid associations with other painters. Rowling's work has some strong formal associations with the resonant purples and oranges, and multiple panels of Fred Williams. Unlike Williams, however, she bases her work on the juxtaposition of streaming textures and blocks of colour and tone rather than lines patterns and marks. This optical smearing and skidding has the effect of showing the landscape in perpetual motion across retina and memory. Metaphysical winds and torrents flow across every image, vertical and horizontal blocks of purple brown shadow sometimes exert an impregnable absence, a contrasting negative presence to energies in every view. In some smaller works it as if the stamp of the image on the retina has been directly transferred to canvas. The implicit viewing distance from the land is reduced almost to zero. As elsewhere in the group, ambivalent possibilities within Rowling's imagery produce a tension with her robust use of the medium and a strong sense of the presence in the work and the land.
Recently Alexander Hayes has been working on old walls and ceilings. His pieces are not inspired by the elaborate variations on the grid to he seen in galleries all over the world but by the lath and plaster structures they reveal. The raw quality of the wood, its broad grain and the rough crumbing materials crammed in behind it suggest a view through to sky or water. Rubbish and ruins can often act as an informal short cut to the infinite. One work has the lathes painted a lumpen tacky emerald green that congeals over the rough grain while the rough grided doodles and rubbish beyond bulk up like the clouds of heaven, awaiting a see through saint. Again the immediacy of his materials and ambivalence of the imagery invokes an extraordinary presence.
Finally, Diokno Pasilan's panel of wooden framed metal plates bitten and splattered with elegant brown faces cancelled by black crosses epitomises the relationship between humble materials and sophisticated imagery that runs throughout the group. Pasilan is an artist from Negros in the Philippines. His work embodies both the recent radical history of the Philippines and the inescapable imagery of its Christian legacy. On each side of the central panel single lines of small bitten deeply panels spread out like wings bearing complex alchemical landscapes of black pitch, silver and gold. This is in itself a religious framework an accessible invitation to ritual way of looking. Pasilan is also a musician. He works with everyone who wants to play, invoking community through daily action. On opening day music will bind the artists and their audience together in full expression of their community.
Dr David Bromfield
Brown Art Consultants
Read more of his writing...
Read more reviews of the studio...
