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A Public of Individuals

A Sydney-based art journal offering an alternative view of contemporary art to that provided by the mainstream press and official art bodies. A Public of Individuals aims to foster dialogue amongst artists and those interested in art, by providing a forum for reviews, articles and correspondence. It is available as a printed publication from selected art galleries and art supplies shops in Sydney, Australia.

A Public of Individuals is a bi-monthly, released on the last Wednesday prior to the two-month period covered. Proposed contributions should be sent to the editorial board, by email or mail. Features should not exceed 2,500 words. For reviews, around 400 words per exhibition. We welcome letters to the editor.

Joint Editors: Joe Frost, John Bokor
email: apublicofind@hotmail.com Postal address: Level 1/88 Foveaux St Surry Hills 2010

Originally delivered as the keynote address of the Double Dialogue conference in Melbourne, November 1997.

A few years ago, I was involved in the Art History/Theory Foundation program that was run at the College of Fine Arts of the University of New South Wales. There was a very large intake of first-year students and no adequate lecture hall. So every week, the Foundation lecture took place in a near-by cinema. It soon became apparent that there was, among students and staff, a sense of occasion and excitement about the event. I too enjoyed it, even if my feelings were ambivalent. For there was something wrong about the circus-like ambience of these mass-lectures. I remember standing as I now stand, on the edge of a stage, hoping to disappear behind what I had to say. My unease, not a matter of stage fright, came rather from the fact that it was both show time and time for thought: “thought which (in the words of Hannah Arendt) is invisible and never comes into being except through a deliberate withdrawal from appearances.” (1)

As one tries to think aloud before a small audience, it is easy to vanish in such a manner and let the ideas or the work speak for themselves. But as one faces a larger number of people, it is more difficult to concentrate on the internal consonance between one’s words and one’s thought. Though I do not wish to ground my argument on the traditional antagonism between thinking and being, or thinking and doing, I believe that we must remain aware of their separate history, especially if we wish to posit a common ground between them. So even if, at long last, the hostility towards the body that runs through the history of thought is coming to an end, we still need to make the distinction between theory and practice. The confusion between them is not equivalent to their synthesis and does not, as far as I can tell, imply a liberation from old taboos and fears concerning 'the body.'

There is no denying that most thinkers who are worth their salt are also performers. To embody one’s thoughts is a necessary aspect of both research and teaching. We need to live our ideas and nothing could be less indifferent than the telling of certain stories by means of which we try to transmit our values, our knowledge and whatever insight we may have. It is indeed unadvisable to establish strict boundaries between theoretical and artistic disciplines, yet it is necessary to distinguish between their respective method and vocation. I would, however, be most grateful if you did not hasten to interpret this last proposition as some kind of hang-up from my French (and therefore assumedly Cartesian) education. My ambition is not to isolate a pure subject and a pure object in order to define precise, measurable and immutable truths. And my insistence at setting theory and practice apart has nothing to do with the inevitable duality between what people are actually doing and what people believe they are doing either. A first reason why the line between theory and practice must be drawn is that the mutation of thinkers into performers, or its opposite, implies a loss of concern for the invisibility of thought, which is symptomatic of a society having reduced the whole communicative process to a kind of visual happening.

Another reason why theory and practice ought to be, if not disassociated, at least understood in their complex relationship is that if both the artist and the theorist think at work, their thinking is not of the same kind. In Harold Rosenberg’s words: “art is a different way of thinking” and the assimilation of the artist’s performance to the demonstrable logic of an academic thesis is bound to debase them both. Creative artists do not follow theoretical formulae. And when they put a drop of theory into their practice, or the opposite, they only produce what the chemist calls an unstable emulsion. Think of an unsuccessful mayonnaise, or try to put oil in water: the atoms do not mix. It is more or less the same with theory and art. Why then, is such a mixture still forced down everybody’s throat? For reasons which have nothing to do with art and everything to do with the superstition of the dominant tribe. Namely: Economic Rationalism and the principles of management that have come to define the functioning of our cultural life. My advocacy today is merely that we, performers, artists or intellectuals of whatever kind, recognise what is currently happening to our field and cease to pretend about the reasons that have forced the migration of the Visual and Performing Arts into the fold of bureaucratic institutions.

As the Public Sphere shrinks, so does art’s horizon of possibility, and only a few places are left where it is still possible to base one’s artistic (or intellectual) practice on the basis of its tradition and history. We know that the academic scholar too has to justify his or her existence as a public servant and waste a lot of time playing tedious political “games” in order to remain in employment. Most of us have had to compromise and accommodate procedures or rules that had been defined without the slightest regard for the specific nature of our métier. Most of us have had to hide in the different niches that pretend to shelter the arts against the constructed indifference of our times. But does the university system still possess the required independence to be a genuine haven for artists (or intellectuals)? Having lost its former privileges, it too has to justify its existence in ways that do not always allow for the kind of hospitality it claims to be giving!

The problem is that to judge a work of art or a performance is not a matter of measurement, but of participation in its movement or of experiencing of its presence with a feeling of pleasure. The specific value of this feeling is the outcome. Pleasure is the outcome, and by 'pleasure', all I mean is 'that which increases activity'. A 'good' work of art or a 'good' performance is above all one which defeats our indifference and rekindles our curiosity for the particular, for the actually-lived experience not just of art, but of being alive at a given moment. There undoubtedly is an aesthetic element in the work of certain scientists, but it is not on it that the judgement of their peers is based. It is on the manner in which proof is established that certain phenomena can be repeated (in the laboratory) or understood as being identical with themselves (i.e. have a conceptual existence). The trend of the Hybrid created by the exodus of the arts into a mutating Academe obfuscates the distinction between two manners of thinking that tend to be mutually exclusive. The fact that the gap between them ought to be transcended is not in doubt here, only the manner in which theory-driven art purports to 'subvert' this incompatibility.

In my field, the visual arts, a number of reasons make practitioners suspicious of theorists. The most common of them is that a central function of ideas in art is to place artists under the authority of non-artists. Beside plumbing the depths of aesthetic phenomena, ideas in art have a normative function. They implicitly suggest what artists should or should not do. More dramatically still, they imply what they should or should not be. It is this overseeing of the artistic task that practitioners oppose with a feeling of urgency that increases in proportion to the number of agencies involved. And as one witnesses this often speechless reticence towards Academe in the studio, one is reminded of the effort by Modernist artists to emancipate themselves from more ancient patronages. For it is not so much the signified content of ideas about art which is thus rejected by the most independent makers or performers, but the social relationship implied by them. Though infrequently argued in the academic manner, this rejection amounts to a critical response by practitioners who, in the quietest hour of their night, must realise their metamorphosis into ancillary workers merely illustrating other people’s beliefs or ideas.

There is an even more basic cause for the hostility felt by practicing artists towards theory: a basic conflict of interest between the few who benefit from the hegemony of Academe in the field and the many who, on the contrary, must labour under it. Such a social division of labour makes the proposition that theory-driven practice is of itself subversive or, on the side of the oppressed, self-contradictory in the most obvious sense that it reproduces the old hierarchy at the bottom of which lies manual labour. Historical memories may obscure the issue, especially since at the origin of this hypertrophy of the theoretical in the creative arts, one finds the redefinition of the artist as a member of the intelligentsia. From the time of its first metamorphosis from crafts person to para-scientific experimenter, from trusted servant of the Church or the State to their most conspicuous enemy, the figure of the artist acquired its intellectual dimension by adhering to the programme of thought known as the Enlightenment. I am not implying that the ongoing re-definition (or de-definition) of the artistic task has gone too far. Yet it is painfully clear that after a whole century of innovation and crisis, the artistic activity has lost a great deal of its affirmative powers and become virtually incapable of reasserting the prerogatives of its tradition.

Naturally the aversion of practicing artists to the condition of government employees has led a good many of them to compensate for the loss of freedom typical of their new working condition with a dream of return to the terra firma of the studio. The 'back to the studio' campaign must be understood as a response to a lasting offensive against traditional values and the politics of de-skilling implemented in the name of dubious ideologies. But the propensity amongst practitioners to immerse themselves in the practical difficulty of their work does not constitute a sufficient response to the impasse of their cultural situation. As a kind of knee-jerk reaction to the conspicuous triumph of both Technism and Conceptualism, such a retreat from the world also suggests that practitioners are prone to forget the obligation of integrating critical self-awareness in their activity. Because artists tend to view our technocratic society as hostile, their work often concentrates on formal relationships whilst showing definite preference for sentimental (i.e. ideological) generalities. No matter how different their genre may be, a great many art practices thus conjure up a picture of life based on general ideas. It matters little what those ideas are, what matters is that they are nothing but ideas, emanations from a realm where no-one ever works, plays, sleeps or wakes up for that matter.

Again, we must insist that art is a different form of thinking, and one in which conception cannot precede execution. Its “executory understanding” (O. Mandelstam) is neither outcome based, nor a matter of theoretical knowledge only. It will never be quite at home in the Academic system, or in the world for that matter. What is signified by works of art cannot be the translation of a clear thought without becoming an illustration of that thought and consequently a non-thought. I do not mean to suggest that communicable thoughts about art are devoid of referential value, or more radically still that, art is an incommunicable experience. On the contrary, art is communicative action par excellence. As Merleau-Ponty explains:
“If a new theory of physics can be proven, it is because calculations connect the idea or meaning of it with standards of measurement already common to all men. (But) it is not enough for a painter like Cézanne, an artist or a philosopher, to create and express an idea; they must also awaken the experiences which will make their idea take root in the consciousness of others. A successful work has the strange power to teach its own lesson.”

It is rare that theoretical knowledge makes us view things for what they are, but often the experience of seeing things generates knowledge. In a fascinating passage of The Twilight of the Idols, Nietzsche takes the above thought a little further: “One has to learn to see, habituating the eye to repose, to patience, to letting things come to it; learning to defer judgement (…) this is the first preliminary schooling in spirituality, not to react immediately to a stimulus….” Such an apprenticeship is, in its nascent state, a process of attunement and a realisation of belonging to a kind of natura naturans, the creative process that defines both being and doing. To say anything worthwhile about this realisation is difficult and one of the most depressing features of art writing is precisely the silence it maintains about it. It is as if art could not exist as an actually lived experience, but only as a social construct begging to be dismantled in the name of higher rationality.

The poets give us a better sense of the reality of art. The words of Keats, Baudelaire, Rilke, Apollinaire, Char, Paz, Stephens et tutti quanti, bear witness to this reality and have long since convinced me that the best art theory is actually art itself.
Poetry lets us touch the impalpable and hear the tide of silence that covers a landscape devastated by insomnia. Poetic testimony reveals to us another world within this world, the other world that is this world. Inasmuch as it is a matter of formulation, the task of the poet consists in finding the verbal equivalent for that realisation of presence, for that which has no name because it is not yet known as such, since no word yet exists for it. The task of the art theorist is also to allow with words for the establishment of a contact with art that will trigger the double experience of feeling and understanding. Only then does it become possible to speak about the integration of theory and practice. Initially, only one person is beholding the new 'thing', is alone in understanding it, or more exactly, as Ortega Y Gasset put it, alone in understanding it in its new poetic name.

“The poetic name is the one we employ when inwardly referring to something, when talking to ourselves in secret endophasia (inner speech). Ordinarily, however, we do not have the ability to create those secret inner names whereby we would understand ourselves with respect to things, and we would say what they authentically are to us. We suffer in our soliloquies from muteness.” (2)

The poet’s role hinges upon his ability to create that inner tongue, that wondrous slang comprised only of authentic names.
Such a unique parlance gives poets the means to tell us something about art that is actually connected with the experience of it. It permits them to approach the mode of thinking in which the body provides the vital information that emerges in doing. But for this to happen, Octavio Paz tells us, “language (must) cease to crawl and rise to its feet and teeters above empty spaces.” (3) What do poets say about the artistic experience? We can not tell unless we ourselves desert the field where meaning is produced along the lines of ordinary speech. A leap of faith is required to believe that in its present state the University system can house such forms of communication and thinking. Thus my conviction is that the Creative Arts need their own place to be themselves again and re-establish the vital contact with their tradition of practice and thinking. After all, “no bird has the heart to sing in a thicket of questions” (René Char).

Notes
1. Hannah Arendt, The Life of the Mind, “Invisibility and withdrawal”, a Harvest Book, NY, 1971, pp 76-77.
2. Jose Ortega Y Gasset, The Origins of Philosophy, Norton, NY ,1967, pp 62-63.
3. Octavio Paz, The Double Flame, Essays on Love and Eroticism, trans. Helen Lane, Harvill Press, London, 1995, p 3.

The Archibald Prize has come to occupy a curious position in Australian art. It is the most prominent public face of contemporary painting in Sydney, and will be many people's only face-to-face contact with contemporary art. Yet as a gauge of what good painters are doing it is, at best, uninformative and likely to actually mislead its audience. Many entrants are once-a-year portraitists, seemingly lured by the prospect of the cash prize or exposure, and straining to adapt a style formed within one genre to the problems of painting a portrait. The full-time portraitists are not, for the most part, an artistically adventurous bunch, and the Archibald thus becomes notable not for artistic achievement, but as a merry-go-round of hype, celebrity and controversy. One returns year after year hoping for the best, but expecting nothing.

I know of only a few portraitists working anywhere in the world today who have managed to invest the genre with life and direct it to a significant artistic end. With its emphasis on a particular individual, often in a specific environment, the portrait could be used as a counter to the forces of cultural homogenisation and dehumanisation, but it would take a painter of considerable insight and spirit to achieve this. This year's Archibald Prizewinner, Cherry Hood, is not that painter. Her portrait, Simon Tedeschi unplugged, is a facile painting, a capitulation to the sales-and-marketing aesthetic that dominates our culture. The lighting and cropping, the pose and demeanour of the sitter, indeed the tenor of the image, bring to mind the stylishly damaged faces of models in fashion advertisements. The clean white backdrop conforms to the contemporary equating of antiseptic minimalism to visual sophistication, and yet the saccharine dribbles of watercolour will probably evoke for many the aura of artistic risk. An unmistakable indication of Hood's intent to paint a winning portrait, as opposed to a good portrait, is the scaling-up of the sitter to billboard proportions, which serves no other purpose than to impress by gigantism. Most portraits in the western tradition, particularly bust-length portraits, are smaller than a square metre. Rembrandt's Self-Portrait at the age of 34 measures 93 x 80 cm; Manet's Berthe Morisot is a tiny 50 x 40 cm. The sense of being at one with another human presence, so masterfully achieved in these works, is aided by the humanity of their scale. Hood's work is closer in methodology to the murals of Saddam Hussein one sees in footage of Baghdad. Simon Tedeschi unplugged is not, to borrow from contemporary art parlance, an 'interactive piece'. The communication is one-way, from artist to throng.

The portrait that should have won this year's Archibald is, in my opinion, Angus Nivison's Annie Lewis, September 2001. Nivison is best known for landscapes, but he brings to portraiture a highly evolved conception of painterly form and a depth of feeling that sets his painting apart from almost all other entries. Using shapes and marks in a subdued palette, Nivison presents a visage at the edge of naturalism, brimming with life and thought. While many of this year's entrants seem uncertain of how to relate the human form to a depicted environment and the picture plane, Nivison uses the picture plane as a screen on which to project his subject. His realisation of Annie Lewis as a dynamic spatial entity lends this portrait great intensity, notwithstanding the stillness of her seated pose.

Only four or five other entries in this year's Archibald convince me that the encounter between painter and sitter has been artistically fruitful. Tom Carment's small, dappled head of Richard Neville, Neil Evans's Reflective self-portrait and David Fairbairn's expressionistic drawings of Dr. Vincenzo Blefari (which use enlargement to advantage) are among them. Adam Cullen's portraiture is the art of matching style and process to subject, and his droll painting of "Chopper" Read finds just the right pitch, between deadpan delivery and expressive excitement. Finally, Brent Harris's Leo Schofield is a beautiful, unexpected painting that presents a striking and good-humoured likeness. Its graphic simplicity is a refreshing counterpoint to the dry realism and emotive slather characteristic of many entries.

As landscape painting remains a living tradition in Australian art, the Wynne Prize would be a more likely forum than the Archibald to offer a positive reflection of contemporary painting. In this year's exhibition, though, many of Australia's best painters of landscape - Joe Furlonger, Don Heron, Idris Murphy and Ken Whisson, for example - aren't present, raising the question of whether entering the big prizes is inconsistent with making serious art.

In the Wynne exhibition a room is devoted to works that purport to reconstitute the artist's experience of landscape as an all-over field of painterly incident. The risk with this type of painting is that the drive towards simplification and abstraction can leave a hollow shell, a painting that has ceased to be concerned with anything other than manipulating paint. This year's winner, Angus Nivison's Remembering Rain, marries the all-over tendency to a structure derived from trees and landforms. It is a beautiful painting, but it wants for some disruptive element to break the uniformity of its resolution, and convince the viewer that its generalisations are founded on something tangible. The rightful winner might be John Walker. His Crossing the Shoalhaven envelops the viewer in a scene that, through its shifting, stretching form, conveys a profound sense of time's passage. The success of Walker's painting is its use of the landscape to account for the perceptive act.

The Sulman Prize was won by Guan Wei's silly Gazing into deep space no. 9, a lightweight contender if ever there was one. John Walker's entry (three fleshy nude drinkers) and Elisabeth Cummings's Early morning, Currumbin displayed greater originality and spirit than the Wei; Tim Johnson or Bernard Ollis would also have been more deserving winners. However, one has to question the meaning of a prize that ranges across figure composition, narrative episodes, gestural abstraction, construction and just about anything else that isn't a portrait or landscape.

It would have been hard to pick a winner in the Dobell Prize for Drawing. There isn't a single drawing that asserts itself as 'the one', or takes the viewer by surprise. With most of the drawings tending either towards broad mark-making or fine rendering, one wonders what happened to linear drawings. Perhaps they were among the rejected works. The winner, Mary Tonkin's Rocky Outcrop, Werribee Gorge is at the scale we have come to associate with winning entries, and its resolution of a complex subject is, on a certain level, ambitious; but what a drab image. For sheer strength and vigour, David Fairbairn's large portrait head stood out, and Joe Furlonger's The coal loader, an ascending view of a sea port in brush and ink, broke free from conventional perspective. At the other end of the spectrum, Jenny Sages's finely drawn Red shoes from Vinnies was an absorbing suite of works.

Historically, artists have used imagery or stimuli from their 'small worlds' as a vehicle of expression. It is within the meeting of common boundaries or the intersection of these microcosms with those of other individuals (the viewers) that the ideas or feelings of the artist are shared. These works come out of a personal environment and are received on a personal level. What is garnered by the viewer may not be what the artist consciously offered but what the individual saw, or moreover what related to them.

It is quite obvious when viewing Jon Cattapan's exhibition that he does not paint his own world. Cattapan paints the global experience of the world a la CNN, which is a very impersonal standpoint. The works cosmetically tell of the human experience, but lack intimate knowledge and are thus like Esperanto, full of good intentions but meaningless to most people.

The paintings are structured in two very distinct parts - the underpainting or ground and the overpainting, the two areas bearing little or no relation to one another. The underpainted images are snapshot-like vignettes that have the scent of photojournalism. It would not surprise me to learn that these were sourced from magazines and newspapers. The painting is, in itself, quite beautiful, filled with accidental smears, loose brushwork and a cathartic painterly concern for mark making. The images are groups of protesters, students and asylum-seekers rendered as ambiguous backdrops to the cage-like superstructure of the overlaid cityscape. These incidental vessels lend the work a political flavour, with shadowy protesters being handcuffed by faceless police officers, picket lines shifting amongst the paint and people crammed onto boats, sinking into the sea of abstraction. However the second part of Cattapan's painting process, the overlaid light patterns of a nocturnal city, is used as a cure-all picture solving device. Whilst it was once an interesting and novel idea it is wearing a little thin four or five years on.

The notable exception amongst these works is Pink. Painted in 2001, it seems to be an early experiment whereby Cattapan is trying to break with his long-established formula. In this painting the city is abandoned in an anarchic display of destruction as dots and daubs of paint are applied over the image in a haphazard and exciting way. I was reminded of the origins of the dot technique, which Aboriginal artists first used to hide the secret images from those who shouldn't see them. This technique, although abandoned by Cattapan in favour of a return to the well-known, seems to issue a way forward which must have been apparent to him at least subconsciously since he allowed this painting to be used as the image on the invitation.

It will be interesting to see what developments Cattapan makes in the future and if experimentation like that in Pink makes a return to the fabric of his work.

The predominant feature of Guan Wei's latest works is their pervasive sense of serenity. This is not the serenity of a Bonnard still life, but more that of Prozac. I found the works to be aesthetically underwhelming in a very overwhelming way. This is not to say that Wei is a bad painter - no, he is meticulous and his work carries the stamp of the perfectionist. It is merely that the works are so stylistically refined as to immure the creative process in its embryonic state.

The centrepiece of the exhibition was an installation of forty-eight canvas panels in a grid (forming one huge picture), with an island of sand and miscellaneous objects lying in front of it. The painting depicted various groups of naked figures, virtually identical in their cartoon depiction, leaving sinking boats for the dubious safety of barren, cartographically rendered islands, bearing names such as "Aspiration Island", "Trepidation Island" and "Calamity Island". At the bottom of the work sat the "Enchanted Coast", guarded by languid ravens. This almost surely is a political commentary concerning the recent asylum-seekers controversy in Australia. The paint has been handled in a manner so as to mimic printmaking techniques and is so clearly within the realm of illustration as to treat the surface and medium (acrylic on canvas) as obstacles rather than integral parts of the resultant works.

These thinly veiled metaphors and simplistic devices lack the necessary power for this type of social commentary. The installation (sculptural) component of the piece, which was set to resemble an island had, imbedded in the sand, items (shoes, a hair brush, a telephone..?), presumably belonging to the doomed passengers. Atop of this stood a television (the mainstay of contemporary installation) playing video images of waves crashing on a beach (Maroubra?). These additions, apart from creating very real problems for the cleaners post-show, had precious little to offer the paintings they shadowed.

Wei's use of these cartoon-like figures (which have become his trademark) as a pictorial panacea, and their imperviousness to emotional content, may ultimately impede the growth of his visual vocabulary, rendering him unable to ever gain the fluency to voice his ideas.

I do not wish to sound so harsh as to pass judgement on an artist on one exhibition, for if history has shown us anything it is that an artist's work is never a finite product. Guan Wei is obviously creative, for he has developed a style that is recognisably his own, I only hope he hasn't also created too small a niche in which to work.

In a society to which art is peripheral, it is unsurprising that many artists will choose to negate art's capacity to address concerns of basic human interest, in favour of playing formalist games. A relatively new development is that the art world itself has come to constitute the form with which some artists work. Hughbris, an exhibition by Danias Kesminas, was a recent example.

Kesminas is a conceptual artist. In Hughbris, he turned his attention to art critic Robert Hughes's recent and notorious car accident in Western Australia. Almost in the manner of a forensic investigation, Kesminas had presented a clutch of newspaper reports on the crash and ensuing court case, and displayed page after page of court transcript around the gallery walls. This dry, unmediated material was set against more mischievous artefacts, whose authenticity was open to question. A compacted cube of steel, once a red, W.A.-registered Nissan, rested on a plinth as the show's centrepiece. This, we were assured, was the actual car in which Hughes crashed; the newspaper reports confirmed that Kesminas had bought it at a scrapyard for the price of three slabs of beer. Its transformation into a $20,000 sculpture did entail some work, for the paperback copy of The Fatal Shore poking out between folds of metal was surely a cheeky addition of the artist, setting up the recurring theme of Hughes's egotism. (Who but an egotist would have at hand, at every moment, their critically acclaimed bestseller?) Hung near the car-sculpture, a framed replica of an enormous fish alluded to the prize catch apparently retrieved from the wreck, complete with gold-lettered inscription boasting of the art critic's fishing prowess.

Aside from poking fun at Hughes's perceived pomposity, Kesminas's intention did not seem to be to pass comment on the incident. The artefacts had been assembled less as illustrations of an argument than as the agents of a conceptual turnaround. The exhibition returned Hughes's art-meets-life controversy (know-it-all critic who defines Australia from afar literally crashes back to reality) to the realm of art. Here, though, a prickly question arose: what insight or enjoyment did Kesminas's exhibition offer that could not have been gleaned from the event itself and its media coverage? There may have been a glimmer of imagination in the works purporting to be x-rays from Hughes's medical examination, which revealed the critic's anatomy to be inhabited by figures from the paintings of his beloved Goya. There was some ghoulish intrigue in seeing the car in which Hughes crashed, now scrap metal. Yet apart from these fairly cheap thrills, all Hughbris delivered to its art-world audience was the smug satisfaction of being in on the joke, an artistic achievement whose shallowness was probably equaled by much of that audience's eagerness to lap it up. Kesminas's work embodied much that is wrong with conceptual art in its current incarnations: its exclusive appeal to an audience of art-initiates, the frequent failure of the artist to make their source material add up to more than the sum of its parts, a banal aesthetic (demonstrating the hollow triumph of concept over form) and the retreat into a completely self-defined practice of art, as an alternative to the considerably greater challenge of relating positively to a tradition.

Every issue, A Public of Individuals will send a sheet of questions to an artist and publish the answers. This issue's artist is Idris Murphy, a landscape painter who has said that through his work he would like "to encounter, not just to observe" the landscape. Murphy (or Idris, as he prefers to sign his work) lives in Sydney, where he was born in 1949. He is represented by King Street Gallery on Burton, and is one of five featured artists in Two Thirds Sky, artists in desert country, a documentary which will be screened on SBS TV in August.

Why do you make art?
My first response to this written question is to say that it is not an easy question, and in a slightly belligerent way I should answer 'I don't know, I just do!', although maybe that is too easy. On reflection, I am at once flattered that I seem to be the first to be asked to respond to these questions in A Public of Individuals, and at the same time apprehensive that what one says is often misconstrued (a.k.a. making a fool of oneself).
However, in the spirit of the project I will give it a go.
It seems to me that art needs no justification; it is what people have done for thousands of years.
Personally, it may be that it was the only thing that I was any good at.
Why do I continue to make art? Because it sustains me, and in the definition of sustainable as 'exploiting natural resources without destroying the natural ecological balance of an area', this may be a useful definition.
The process of and in making, allows insight into the creative process and hence what it is to be human. An insight into myself and the view I hold of the world, without destroying either. Art persuades me to rethink these views and continually re-assess reality.

What attracted you to landscape painting?
Is this the same question as 'what attracted me to painting the landscape?' Chicken and egg? Is the question to answer first, 'what attracted me to the landscape?'
My early memories of the bush, to use the vernacular.
My father was a forest officer when he was young and his attachment to the land rubbed off on me. Along with my holidays spent fishing up and down the coast, and a particular set of feelings for the landscape on and around my aunt's farm at Wyong, NSW, this would appear to guarantee the importance of the first question.
What attracted me to landscape painting?
Other landscape paintings, i.e. art.
Arriving back in Australia in 1981 after nearly four years' study, mostly in Britain and France, the question many young artists seemed to be asking was 'what should I paint?' This seemed pertinent as the European interiors that I had produced seemed out of place. I had not considered the possibility that the Australian landscape painters had anything to offer in the way of serious art and, indeed, on my return to Sydney it seemed that no other young artists had any intention of taking on this politically incorrect subject. But having fallen in love with images painted about the landscape, from Cezanne to Rembrandt, Bomberg to Morandi to mention just a few, I started to look for those artists in the Australian landscape tradition who had some similar substance, artistic intelligence and formal structure to what I had found in Europe.
A small Fred Williams, a work on paper of a fallen tree with obvious cubist influence and a Cezanne-like formal structure (not unlike some Morandi works), exhibited at the Art Gallery of New South Wales, set up the first possible serious response to the Australian landscape as a motif. Another way in to the defining of this non-European landscape that I was just starting to recognise.

Do you paint particular places?
I do not believe I set out to paint particular places. In fact, that raises further questions of what does 'particular place' mean for the paintings that I am now making? Taken at face value, the answer might be that there are places that I am drawn to in the northwest of New South Wales. These have an effect on me which makes me want to continually go back, somewhat like going back to visit great paintings.

What draws you to these places?
In an answer to a similar question, which I have been considering for the catalogue to the SBS documentary Two Thirds Sky, I wrote the following:
The first word that comes to mind would be solitude. However, it is more complex than that and it may be that it is a 'sense of solitude' or the 'scent of solitude'. 'Tas' Drysdale talked about the freedom of the outback, which I agree is an important element, but I hasten to say that it is not about running away from anything. Solitude. A sense of being without interruption, maybe better stated as interrupted by being.
Beauty, the scent of the place, the colour, all of these come readily to mind and remind me of John Berger's The White Bird, of which I am a fan. "If the Creation was purposeful, its purpose is a hidden one which can only be discovered intangibly within signs, never by the evidence of what happens. It is within this bleak natural context that beauty is encountered and the encounter is by its nature sudden and unpredictable." The desert for me is such a place. However, in the end it is from the works themselves that my reasons may be best known.

Do you think your relationship to the landscape - your use of it as a basis for art - differs from that of past artists?
I must say that again this will, over time, be evident in the work. I will say, however, that at this time the coming into being of indigenous works on paper and canvas, and the contradistinction this has set up for my work, is producing something which is a new mixture (if I were an art historian I might give this a title). It may be analogous to the early modernist movement, or as I would rather like to think, analogous to the beginnings of Jazz in the USA.

Of peoples' responses to your work, which have you found most satisfying?
What comes immediately to mind is the response that I have received from young painters, who in some cases have borrowed money to buy one of my paintings. This amazed me, and it has been very encouraging, especially early on when I felt that I was making little progress. http://www.art.cofa.unsw.edu.au/staff/staff_names/murphy/murphy.html

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