'From thunder and summer rains on the high South African veld to a day’s work in Sydney. A terracotta clay and water work made with a fast hand. I make one part of the image, and the forces of nature make the rest. The macro-scale and the micro-scale, deliberation and chance. I walk away with bats flying high over the Domain.' Richard Long 2011 Richard Long has made the act of walking in remote and extraordinary landscapes into an art form. It is during these walks that he arranges natural objects such as rocks into geometric forms which he then photographs. ‘Southern gravity’ was commissioned by John Kaldor specially for the John Kaldor Family Gallery. Long’s mud drawings relate to the water lines poured over rock shelves that he often makes on his walks. Like the artist’s stone works, ‘Southern gravity’ is based on a geometric shape but the application of the mud is done with such an intensely energetic movement – akin to a ritual dance – that striking traces of the artist’s hand gestures are left behind. The wet mud splashes, drips and sprays over the underlying geometry, expressing not only the speed of execution but also the effects of gravity. The finer drips create the impression of a shower that is almost like the rain in a Hokusai print.

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Southern gravity

Since 1959 Bernd and Hilla Becher have produced photographs of industrial and domestic architecture. Their ordered images (which they call ‘typologies’) of blast furnaces, cooling towers, silos and workers’ houses record the monuments of a rapidly diminishing industrial era. However, the Bechers were equally driven by aesthetic considerations, with photographs of like objects assembled into groups where precise lighting and tonal density give equivalent weight to each visual element. The Bechers’ typological practice has been associated with the formal and serial repetition espoused by minimal and conceptual art of the 1960s. Despite these connections, however, their photography has sat largely outside trends in art practice, the artists maintaining a rigorously systematic approach to their chosen subject matter. The Bechers belong to a distinguished tradition of early 20th-century German photography exemplified by the work of August Sander, Albert Renger-Patzsch and Karl Blossfeldt, all of whom contributed in different ways to the definition of ‘objective’ photography.

Framework houses

Nam June Paik was a pioneer of video installation in the early 1960s. Associated with the international conceptual movement Fluxus, Paik regularly collaborated with other Fluxus artists such as Joseph Beuys and George Maciunas. In 1976 John Kaldor invited Paik and his collaborator, the cellist Charlotte Moorman to create a Kaldor Public Art Project in Australia. As part of the project Moorman played the ‘TV cello’. Made from three televisions removed from their sets so that their inner workings can be seen, with an attached cello bridge, tailpiece and strings forming a cello-like instrument. ‘TV Buddha’ was also made in Sydney in 1976 using an old wooden Maitreya (Buddha of the future) from the Kaldor collection. ‘Kaldor candle’ was made in 1996 for John Kaldor, who remained friends with Paik until the artist’s death in 2006. Both ‘TV Buddha’ and ‘Kaldor candle’ employ a conceptual use of video – first developed by Paik – in which a camera and a monitor loop in real time, blurring the object–subject distinction. This feedback idea was used by leading conceptual artists in the 1970s, including Bill Viola, Dan Graham and Mike Parr.

TV cello

Adopting both historical and contemporary motifs – from the baroque to glossy magazine advertisements – Jeff Koons’s work disrupts the distinctions between high and low art forms. ‘White terrier’ was the model for Koons’s floral sculpture ‘Puppy’ 1995, a Kaldor Public Art Project that stood 12.5 metres high on the lawn of the Museum of Contemporary Art in Sydney.

White terrier

Christo began working with the landscape as a student employed to beautify the landscape of his native Bulgaria as seen from the Orient Express. He later moved to Paris and associated with Nouveau Réalisme, a group of artists who used found materials and responded to everyday situations in their work. Christo’s ambition for larger projects was established when he moved to New York in 1964 with his wife and collaborator Jeanne-Claude. In 1960 John Kaldor invited Christo to Australia, a visit which resulted in ‘Wrapped Coast, One Million Square Feet, Little Bay, Sydney, Australia 1968-69', Christo and Jeanne-Claude’s first major environmental work and one of the most ambitious land-art events in the world at the time. It was during his visit to Australia that Christo wrapped two Australian eucalypts to make ‘Two Wrapped Trees’.

Two Wrapped Trees

First drawn by: Kazuko Miyamoto First installation: Panza di Biumo residence, Varese, Italy, June 1980      Sol LeWitt’s wall drawings are executed by professional draughtspeople from sets of instructions generated by the artist. LeWitt emphasised the idea or concept of an artwork over its visual realisation, hence his assertion that his instructions are themselves the work of art. ‘Wall drawing #337’ and ‘Wall drawing #338’ exemplify this process: both works are drawn by professional draughtspeople following LeWitt’s instructions. The artist’s methodology has been likened to that of a composer: the works are manifested by others, and no single drawing is ever the definitive version. In a 1971 interview LeWitt commented: ‘I try to make the plan specific enough so that it comes out more or less how I want it, but general enough that [the draughtspeople] have the freedom to interpret. It’s as though I am writing of piece of music and somebody else is going to play it on the piano.’

Wall drawing #1091: arcs, circles and bands (room) 2003

Through photographs, objects and installations Simryn Gill considers how we experience a sense of place and how both personal and cultural histories inform our present moment. Her work also suggests how culture becomes naturalised, an almost invisible part of our physical environment. Gill often works with books, narratives and texts that provide a framework through which we order and describe the world around us. 'Forest', has the appearance of an etymological proposition where Gill quite literally takes printed words back to roots. Not their roots, as in the source of their meaning, but rather the growing, evolving, decaying nature from which the raw material for books is derived. Gill tore up the fibrous matter of book pages and grafted fragile strips of text into the natural environment. Attached to tropical plants, they look like natural forms, becoming exuberant banana florescences, dangling aerial roots on fig trees, mangroves emerging from mudflats, variegations on the leaves of lush tropical foliage and decaying vegetation at the base of epiphytic ferns. The original plant interventions occurred in places where a tamed nature was in the process of becoming wild again, in decrepit gardens and decaying buildings in Malaysia and Singapore. There is something of a 'lost cities' quality to these works, as nature is in the process of reclaiming culture if not civilisation. Gill's photographic records of her interventions recall botanical drawings and are printed in subtle tones of gray. In keeping with their observational purpose, they depict space up close and there are no vistas, faraway horizons or the distant sublime. They have something of the claustrophophic closeness and rank fecundity of tropical vegetation, which taxed the romantic imaginations of the 19th century. Gill's text has only a brief life out in the landscape as, if it is not eaten by insects, it rapidly rots away under the onslaught of the elements. While we may suspect that culture is impermanent, evolving and probably contingent, we do not really expect such classics as 'Frankenstein, The origin of species or Robinson Crusoe' to become 'cultural compost'. Gill has developed a form of wood-pulp fiction in which she 'literalises the landscape', stories and legends have taken root off the pages of books and grown into a fantastic local flora of transplanted narratives.

Forest

In 'Killing time' Ricky Swallow has synthesised his interests in time passing, personal and collective memory, everyday experiences and the history of art. Swallow's earlier sculptures were often carefully crafted duplicates of recently retro items, such as beatboxes and BMX bikes, or reworked record turntables with scaled-down narrative scenarios that blend science fiction and scientific fact. More recently he has made carvings of the animate and inanimate conceived and realised at a ratio of 1:1. 'Killing time' is the most ambitious work that Swallow has made to date and is likely to remain so for some time due to the onerous and time-consuming physical task of working in such detail on this scale. It was the centrepiece of Swallow's solo exhibition at the Australian Pavilion in the 2005 Venice Biennale. While 'Killing time' visually recalls 17th-century Dutch still-life painting and even the work of such a virtuoso illusionist woodcarver as Grinling Gibbons, the subject matter is derived from Swallow’s personal experience. The son of a fisherman, he has faithfully depicted every sea creature that he recalls capturing, killing and eating during his life. The various fish, lobsters, oysters, crabs and others are displayed on a table which duplicates the table around which Swallow’s family ate dinner. While 'Killing time' uses the visual language of a particular genre of painting and wood-carving, it is also an intensely personal act of remembering; it is another 'evaporated self-portrait' as Swallow has described his sculptures, which call on specific personal memories while also having a commonly recognisable subject matter. 'Killing time' is carved mainly from laminated jelutong, a pale coloured hardwood used commercially for prototypes and pattern-making but also by woodworking hobbyists for whittling. The illusionism of the sculpture is emphasised by the attention to detail in the lobster, the lemon peel that hangs over the edge of the table and the rippling folds of the tablecloth pushed to one end. However the monochromatic timber and the dramatic side-lighting, devised by Swallow to create strong shadows and highlights, point to the inherent unreality of transcribing animate form into inanimate materials. There is a loop of commemoration and death that permeates this work, both in the references to the still-life genre and in the fact that the sculptor killed these creatures in the first place, long before carving this de facto memorial. In the 17th century, vanitas still-life paintings portrayed the abundance of natural life and worldly goods to celebrate this abundance while pointing to the fact that it was only transient, just as life itself is. The title 'Killing time' refers to this sense of life stilled in art, to the act of remembering and recording something from the artist’s past, and to the time spent on carving this labour-intensive sculpture. © Art Gallery of New South Wales Contemporary Collection Handbook, 2006

Killing Time

For the past 30 years Tony Cragg has consistently produced original ideas and a remarkable diversity of forms employing a vast array of materials and techniques. It is difficult to characterise his work within a specific style or art movement. In the early 1970s a new generation of British sculptors celebrated a certain freedom from the snares of style which had bedevilled their immediate predecessors. Under the influence of conceptual art, a pluralist environment in which almost anything could happen began to flourish. Conceptual artists proclaimed the subservience of material form to content, thereby allowing any material or method to be employed in their service. Some artists took this dictum to devalue the material properties of ‘fine art’ and began privileging media associated with popular culture, including text, photography and video over more traditional materials. Cragg, by contrast, was among those who translated this freedom into an infinite possibility for systems and material processes with which to conjure new and provocative objects. In this he had more in common with the European arte povera artists than with Transatlantic conceptualism. His early works included materials such as coloured plastic fragments found along the Thames embankment, old furniture and machine parts. These were always ordered according to precise systems reflecting both his scientific orientation and the working ethic of rigorous systems and logical processes that prevailed in British art schools at the time. In Cragg’s work, however, there was always room within this order for random variation, just as there is in nature. Paradoxically the limitation imposed by these systems was liberating because they replaced the constraints of reproducing appearances on the one hand and the formal recipes of basic design on the other. Working within these systems, artists could incorporate all manner of material, even celebrating excesses of material diversity without losing the logic of the form. ‘Spyrogyra’ captures the general good humour of Cragg’s sculpture while embodying some of the most profound aspects of his work as a whole. The bottle rack is of course a reference to Duchamp’s famous Readymade, ‘Egouttoir’ (bottle rack) 1914 1; this alludes to the playful conceptual aspect of Cragg which so often makes witty allusions to art history. The structure is however far more open and intuitive than Duchamp’s original. The spiral immediately suggests DNA and organic couplings, which are ubiquitous in Cragg’s forms. Each rod attached to the spiral can take certain kinds of bottles, not a unique bottle but one of a general kind. As a result every time it is assembled it changes in the particular but maintains its essential form. In this way it mimics the genetic accommodation of kind and individuality. The reference to scientific structures is invariably a key theme in Cragg’s work. 1. Or, literally ‘detaster’, a play on the idea of the readymade as a challenge to taste in art © Art Gallery of New South Wales Contemporary Collection Handbook, 2006

Spyrogyra

Callum Morton’s sculptures combine incisive social observation, ideas about urban design and contemporary living, and an interest in the legacy of minimal sculpture. ‘Motormouth’ continues his consideration of the intersections between public and private space and in particular the ‘non-spaces’ of urban design such as freeways, shopping centres, service stations, cinemas and convenience stores. These are the generic buildings and sites that are designed as transit zones between destinations or as backdrops to their intended function. We don’t usually notice their architecture except as an indicator of this function. Morton’s sculptural versions reintroduce narratives that are at odds with the social design of these places and yet are somehow entirely appropriate for the setting. ‘Motormouth’ is a sculpture of two freeways, scaled 1:10 and perfect in detail down to the dirty realism of their distressed, water-stained concrete marked with graffiti. It appears to be a realistic model but is in fact an elaborate representation of what a generic freeway should look like rather than being a copy of an existing structure. The freeways are raised on pylons above eye height, frustrating our desire to see what is on the superstructure, though logically it should only be scaled-down cars. Freeways are designed to move people efficiently and rapidly between city centres and satellite suburbs, from home to work, from boardroom to bedroom, or at the very least to get you across town in time for your meeting. They are the key people conduits of modern urban design and, as with other mid 20th-century projects, they had a progressive utopian agenda to make life more time efficient and productive. And on a good day they still do this. On others they are a battleground where the tensions between the private and public functions of cars and freeways erupt. In ‘Motormouth’ you can hear the sound of a traffic jam on the lower freeway. Inevitably in the frustration at being kept waiting, anger boils over and conflict ensues. Cars are a private, personal zone in which we move through a public arena, one in which we feel empowered and in control. Despite the social contract that keeps us on the correct side of the road and heading in the same direction, in our car our rules count as we adjust the seats, the climate, the music, to create a pod between us and the world. However road rage is a rapidly growing social issue and while studies have come up with several interlocking reasons for this phenomenon, it seems to hinge on the tension between the collective rules we need to regulate cars, roads and driving and our rampant individualism. There is no doubt that contemporary city life is faster: we have more to do, so we don’t expect to be kept waiting. As the title puns, we are the inevitable product of our own social and technological designs. © Art Gallery of New South Wales Contemporary Collection Handbook, 2006

Motormouth

Guilio Paolini came to international note as a leading member of the arte povera group in Italy in 1967. Like the others, he uses found materials and often introduces historical and literary references into his imagery. Works such as this have a poetic quality that is common with arte povera and yet there is a strong conceptual and critical streak that is not normally associated with the group. Many of his installations directly critique assumptions about art history and play with the rules of perspective to disclose their paradoxical illusionism. ‘L’altra figura’ (the other figure) is a deceptively simple play on the classical theme. The two heads raised on plinths to the height of a modestly sized viewer are identical plaster casts of a Roman copy of an earlier Hellenistic bust. The busts show the heads slightly at an angle to the body, their faces turned to reflect each other precisely. This slightly sideways glance lends a degree of animation to what would otherwise be a static mirroring. It is as if they have both just turned to catch the other's gaze; perhaps it is the dramatic incident that has just occurred between them. On the floor surrounding the two plinths is the manifest evidence of a minor disaster. Another bust that seems to have crashed to the floor, shattering into multiple pieces of plaster, is just barely recognisable as the third of a kind. The twins may be thought of as a related pair or a mirroring of one but three is the beginning of an indefinite number, suggesting infinite reproducibility or endless cloning. A common theme of Paolini’s work investigates representational strategies in art since the Renaissance, including modernist aspirations to find the essence of things. Mirroring is the most immediate form of mimetic representation so it is reasonable to begin to see this as a work that follows this line. The Greco-Roman heads also incline us to suspect narratives from antiquity. Could the smashed figure lying on the ground, in a more-or-less circular arrangement, be the rippled effect of the reflection in a pool disturbed by Narcissus reaching out to caress his own loved image? This would certainly be a poetic take on the impossibility of possessing the desired object in representation. The degree of fragmentation of the third head also suggests a fall from a great height; could this be the mythical Icarus, who ignored his father’s warning not to fly too close to the sun? This pragmatic warning masks a greater peril since the sun is Apollo riding across the sky in his chariot. Apollo for Plato was the ultimate source of pure form, something representation could never capture, although neo-Platonists and modernists dreamt of doing so. Poor Icarus got carried away and soared towards this great source but was struck down by the jealous god for his presumption. © Art Gallery of New South Wales Contemporary Collection Handbook, 2006

L'altra figura

Purchased by the Art Gallery of New South Wales Foundation in 1994, 'Woman of Venice VII' is the first sculpture by Alberto Giacometti to enter a public art collection in Australia. It is one of nine bronze figures that were created as 'states' of a single figure modelled in clay on a single armature over a period of about three weeks and cast in plaster by the artist's brother, Diego. The hands held at the side of the figure's broad body emphasise the corporeality of the figure and recall Giacometti's early experiments with female spoon-like forms. As in other works in this series the tension created between the heavy wedge-shaped pedestal and the figure's tiny head endows the piece with a sense of the visionary that the artist favoured. The heavily textured quality of this work and original patination make this one of Giacometti's most distinctive and successful female figures. This work perfectly embodies Giacometti's ambivalent attitude towards women whom he idolised but whom he also found suffocating and incomprehensible. 'Woman of Venice VII' encourages the viewer to engage imaginatively with its mysterious subject. Whether we interpret her as a goddess or prostitute, Egyptian cult figure or decomposing corpse, one cannot remain unmoved by Giacometti's powerful interpretation of humanity. No.5 in an edition of 6.

Woman of Venice VII

'Von den Verlorenen gerührt, die der Glaube nicht trug, erwachen die Trommeln im Fluss' is the title of each of two works, one painting and one floor installation. It is not uncommon for Kiefer to use the same titles again and again. This is because of his sustained commitment to certain themes that he pursues over many years. These two works represent two such themes in Kiefer's development and although they look very different as objects they are two sides of one key idea in his mature work. The horizon in Kiefer's work is always more than a landscape feature, it is highly charged symbolically. 'Glaube, Hoffnung, Liebe' 1984-86 in the Gallery's collection includes a propeller which has the potential to fly over the horizon transcending the boundary between heaven and earth. In many of Kiefer's paintings and sculptures there are ladders, wings, rockets, Ziggurats, snakes and rainbows that all in some way suggest the idea of transcendence. The broken stairs in 'Von den Verlorenen gerührt...' correspond to the broken propeller suggesting the dream of climbing above the horizon and yet it is a dream that is doomed to fail. This ambivalence towards transcendental aspiration is common to much art of the late twentieth century. For example Ken Unsworth's sculpture 'Rapture' 1994 in the Gallery's collection takes the form of a stairway to heaven frustrated when the stairs made of the keyboards of a grand piano arrive at the body of the piano which is stuffed with straw and will never sound the music of the spheres. The floor installation belongs to a body of works that reverse the passage between heaven and the earth. This is often represented by emanations from above sometimes in the form of poured lead attached to a painting or hanging in space like the finger of God. Many of Kiefer's recent works have more to do with the stars which according to the 16th century philosopher Robert Fludd each have their equivalent in a flower on the earth. Here we see a pile of glass plates that have fallen as a shower over piles of human hair (material human presence). Inscribed with one of 9000 star numbers, each piece of glass represents a heavenly intervention or emanation. Human hair is woven throughout the glass in a reference to the Egyptian Queen Berenice, who often appears in Kiefer’s works in the form of long locks of hair. Berenice was famous for her beauty and as an offering to the gods to bring her husband safely back from war, she cut her tresses and placed them on the temple altar. The Gods were so pleased with the offering that they took the hair into the sky where it became the constellation Coma Berenices (Berenice’s hair). The constellation of Coma Berenices is centred between Canes Venatici to the north, Virgo to the south, Bootes on the east and Leo on the west border. The following text is taken from the 2005 exhibition literature when these works were first shown in London: Kiefer's elegiac oeuvre is based on a vast system of themes and references relating to the human condition, explored through a highly emotive use of material and medium. In his muscular artistic language, physical materiality and visual complexity are equal to the content itself, which ranges over sources as diverse as Teutonic mythology and history, alchemy, apocalypse, and belief. As corollary to this breadth of content, Kiefer employs an almost bewildering variety of materials including - in addition to the thick oil paint that is the base of all his large-scale works - dirt, lead, models, photographs, woodcuts, sand, straw and all manner of organic material. By adding 'real' materials to the illusionistic painted surface of his gigantic tableaux, he has invented a compelling 'third space' between painting and sculpture. Few contemporary artists match Kiefer's epic reach; the provocative and paradoxical nature of his work suggests that he embraces the notion of the modern artist who stands resolutely outside society, flaunting its histories, its taboos and its myths. By assimilating and utilizing the conventions and traditions of history painting, he goes beyond them, mingling viewpoints and presenting contradictory interpretations while emulating the genre's grandiloquence. Anselm Kiefer was born in 1945 in Donaueschingen. As a young artist in a Germany reeling from the after-shocks of the Second World War, he opted for a thoroughly and obviously indigenous art, of native subjects, values and symbols that contended with the fraught territory of German history and identity. In the late 1970s he started to make large, highly worked books that began with photographs staged in his studio, gradually gaining body through the application of lead, paint and other collage elements. These impressive objects indicated the way to the complex, process-oriented works of his mature period. In 1991 Kiefer left Germany, eventually settling in the south of France. In the same year he made an exhibition of paintings stacked randomly on top of each other as if discarded. This led to a hiatus in his art production that lasted more than three years. After this he began making new work with a wholly new subject matter, themes and references, dealing with central spiritual and philosophical concerns of our time. Over the past four decades, Kiefer has exhibited his work extensively throughout the world and is included in the world's most prestigious public and private collections.

Von den Verlorenen gerührt, die der Glaube nicht trug, erwachen die Trommeln im Fluss

Noh robes are the ultimate statement in quality, luxury and skilful weaving. This one is an 'atsuita', a robe used as an outer robe primarily for male roles. It is boldly decorated with alternating squares of eddy or whirlpool ('uzumoyo') motifs, and dragon roundels. In addition the backgrounds within the squares are enriched with trellis and 'Bishamon' diaper pattern; and the ikat dyed warps are arranged to form blocks of colour. The result is a superbly vibrant and impressive design. Asian Art Department, AGNSW, August 2006.

Nô theatre costume

Japanese art sword and court mount 1751

Explore a world of art, including Australian art from colonial to present day, Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander art, old masters, Asian and contemporary art. Suitable for 5-12 year olds (with an adult).

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