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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.

Some of the ideas outlined here, more guardedly qualified and referenced, have already appeared in print as ‘The Undoing of Art History (Parts I and 2)’ in Artlink 21 (No.4, 2001): 66-69 and in Artlink 22 (No.1, 2002): 70-73. Also, as ‘Art and History,’ in Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 60 (No.4, 2002): 331-340, further developed as ‘Art History?’ (forthcoming).
This is an outline of a rather intricate argument. It is a sketch, not an ordnance survey map.

Cultural kinds

The conclusions that are summarised as the title of this essay can not be argued for independently; they hang together on an intricate skein of ideas. Pivotal among them is the notion of a cultural kind, and of the historically shaping power of a generative principle of kindedness.

Kinds are collections. They are not abstract or ‘philosophical’ non-particulars like types or classes. They are more like herds or tribes, enjoying a relatively concrete and precarious temporal existence, buffeted by fate. To invoke the word that distinguishes them most sharply from classes: kinds have histories. A great deal of nonsense is attributable to theorists who have explicitly asserted, or who have implicitly condoned, the proposition that the word art is correctly used when it is used as the name of a kind, of which conventionally so called works of art are (allegedly) the items.

Cultural kinds such as the condom, the piano accordion and the Archibald portrait, are not biological kinds like the broad bean and the fruit bat; although, like biological kinds, they each have a history. Every work of conventionally so called art is an item of some cultural kind. It would be merely truistic to say that each still life with fruit is an item of the still life with fruit kind, if it were it not for the profound implication that the still life with fruit kind has a history. But, as I shall argue, the history that the still life with fruit kind has is a cultural history; it is not an art history. With cultural kinds (just as it is with biological kinds) it does not follow from the fact that each so called work of art is an item of some cultural kind that all so called works of art are items of the same cultural kind, and that this kind is distinguishable from other kinds in such a way that all of the items of all of the cultural kinds have a role to play in a single history.

Biological kinds such as the broad bean and the fruit bat have histories. Nevertheless, they are different biological kinds, and they have different histories. What their histories have in common—what sustains their histories as histories and not as mere stories standing autonomously upon independent foundations—is a common intelligibility given by appeal to a set of common or transcending explanatory principles.

For biological kinds the basis of the common intelligibility of their different histories is located in evolutionary theory. To qualify as a relevant consideration in the history of a biological kind a candidate event must be compatible with a set of generative assumptions: notably, that the history of each biological kind has been shaped by the imperfect replication of parental DNA and by the exposure of items of the kind to environmental contexts within which faithful and variant copies differentially survive to replicate themselves in their turn. The history of the bean is not the history of the bat, but the intellectual constraints upon the teller of their histories are constant. For the biological kinds these constraints are generally Darwinian and are handily collected together under the rubric of evolutionary theory. It is the generative principle of biological kindedness—the chemically coded replication of DNA and the constraints of the environment—that shapes the history of each kind; with different results, case by case.

If we are to speculate as coherently about the histories of cultural kinds—the screwdriver, the wedding ceremony and the Hellenistic terracotta—as we speculate about the histories of the cauliflower and the redback spider we shall need to draw upon a generative principle of cultural kindedness that is fairly comparable to the biological generative principle of kindedness, both in its explanatory power and in the restriction of its range to the appropriate domain of application.

Of course, the generative principle that shapes the histories of cultural kinds can not be the same Darwinian principle as that which shapes the biological kinds. We can not draw upon the imperfect replication of DNA—the genetic story—to account for the shaping of cultural kinds without collapsing together our distinct ideas of biological nature and of culture. Moreover—and more pragmatically—items of the refrigerator kind manifestly have no genes. We are quite sure that this is not a kind that perpetuates itself in the whitegoods factory by sexual congress, or by spontaneous division.

The differential adaptive responses of cultural items to their environments is another matter. The shaping power of context is as influential in the cultural domain as it is in the biological. In a propitious environment such items of a cultural kind as a greeting (for example) can easily be generated. One of the varieties of the greeting kind is constituted by occurrent items in each of which noses are rubbed together. There are unresponsive cultural contexts in which this greeting kind is either unknown or else it is so indignantly discouraged that it finds no foothold. One, at least, of the factors determining the history of a cultural kind—the projection of its items into a propitious context—is in direct analogy with the workings of the generative principle of biological kindedness. Despite this analogy, however, we need an answer to the parallel question of replication. How are relevantly similar items of a cultural kind perpetuated in such a way that new items, replete with onward-transmissible imperfections and variations, come to be reproduced generation after generation?

Imitation

The answer to this question is in one way obvious; in another way it is obscure. Plainly, the persistence of cultural kinds is somehow attributable to imitation. Something is imitated by those cultural participants who are the users of items of cultural kinds. Imitation is the key, but what lock does it turn? It is far from obvious what it is, precisely, that is imitated by cultural participants. Theorists in this domain—the domain that is now fashionably called memetics—are inclined to make one or the other of two disastrous mistakes. They are likely to say that cultural kinds are imitated by cultural participants, and that cultural kinds are the imitable and imitated memes—let us take advantage of Dawkins’ felicitous term—whose onward transmission perpetuates the kinds and gives them their histories. Or else these theorists—and sometimes, inconsistently, they are the very same theorists—say that items of the various cultural kinds are imitated by cultural participants and that these things—the items themselves—are the imitable and imitated memes whose replication perpetuates the kinds.

Both of these claims are incoherent. Kinds, conceived as memes, can not possibly be held responsible for their own perpetuation. In spite of this, such cultural kinds as the screwdriver and the calendar feature prominently among the examples given by respondents when they are called upon to exemplify a meme. The suggestion that the screwdriver is a meme is an inchoate category error, comparable to the claim that the fruit bat is the very gene whose replication perpetuates the fruit bat kind. Nor can memes be identified with items of cultural kinds. To make short work of the argument we need only substitute demonstrative terms in an otherwise identical reductio. The suggestion that this (holding a screwdriver aloft for inspection) is a screwdriver meme is precisely analogous to the absurd suggestion that this (holding a fruit bat aloft) is a fruit bat gene.

Memes

I propose, quite differently, that the meme is a behaviour-in-context such that an item of an identifiable cultural kind is, as matter fact, normally generated by performing it. For example: there is a context (a very complicated context, certainly, and difficult to specify in detail) such that, as I know, if I raise my hand in just this context I shall more often than not succeed in generating an item of the cultural kind that we call a greeting. There is a quite different sort of context such that, as I know, if I raise my hand in this (other) context I shall more often than not generate an item of the cultural kind that we call a vote. There may not be any differences, obvious to a spectator, in the way I seem to be raising my hand in the two cases; and the unwary may even be tempted to say that my behaviour is the same. But this temptation should be resisted. Behaviours-in-context are by no means mere behaviours. The internal and generally unseen bodily components of the progress of such different performances as greeting by, and voting by, hand-raising, as the progress of each is internally monitored by the performer, are radically different.

It is my contention that memes are intimately related behaviours-in-context, performed in such a way as to sustain a justifiable expectation among cultural co-participants that an item of an identifiable and predictable cultural kind will thereby be generated. For a clear case: the handraising-in-context that is regularly generative of a greeting is a meme that we might call (if we insist upon having a name for it) the greeting-by-handraising meme. The different behaviour of handraising that is, in its own context, generative of a vote is another meme entirely, that we might characterise as the voting-by-handraising meme. Both memes are learnt by imitation. As participants we are tireless watchers and copiers of our co-participants in the shared culture. The successful teaching of children is massively achieved by displaying memes and by encouraging their imitation. ‘Look! This is how we make a sandwich. This is how we make a primed canvas. This (raising an eyebrow) is how we make an ironic face’. And so on.

A competently participating child will imitatively acquire many thousands, perhaps millions, of memes. By adulthood she will have acquired the knack of combining sequences and combinations of memes so seamlesslessly that she is able to generate, intentionally, not only an item of an elementary cultural kind such as a greeting by handraising. She may well have the sophistication to generate an item of such a rare cultural kind as an altarpiece in three panels in the manner of Pietro Lorenzetti, dedicated to the virgin in parody of the cult of Kylie Minogue. Similarly—to reinforce the analogy with biological kinds—do a myriad of genetic bases on strings of DNA combine and sequence themselves to generate a cabbage.

Skill, intention and accident

Memes are behaviours-in-context that are regularly, reliably (and hence predictably) generative of items of established cultural kinds. A purposeful command of the common stock of memes is learnt by imitation, and the cultural kinds are perpetuated by competent cultural participants. A cultural kind may be rigid to the extent that its memes are simple and lend themselves to quasi-mechanical copying with little variation. The assimilation of memes may, indeed, be so regular and widespread that in relation to a few of them—for example, in the generation of such cross-cultural kinds such as the eyebrow-flash of recognition—there may well be a case for conceiving of their acquisition as a genetically hard-wired disposition, rather than as a purely memetic acquisition.

But let us try to keep the question simple; first distinguishing biology from culture before seeking to re-join them. Cultural history would be a less interesting topic than biological history were it not that the perpetuation of cultural kinds is at no less subject to variation. Indeed, because of an element of arbitrariness in the adoption or rejection of new memes (shall we or shall we not decide to make a fashion statement by preferring pastel colours this year?) culture might be regarded as more radically plastic than nature. For a variety of reasons and in a variety of ways memes can be inexactly imitated, and cultural kinds can be perpetuated with such florid variations that emergent kinds may speciate more profusely even than plants and animals. Cultural histories are probably more— and certainly more rapidly—marked by innovation than are biological histories.

It is a corollary of this conception of the meme that the intentional use of memes (in the commonsense meaning of the term ‘intentional,’ equivalent to deliberate) is possible. We can make an omelette intentionally just because, and only because, we know that we are very likely to generate an item of the omelette kind if we begin by breaking eggs.

Simple skills, using elementary memes, are combined into more broadly based and elevated skills. At the tops of memetic pyramids there are the superlative skills of virtuoso pianists, portrait painters and microsurgeons. Products of skill are recognised, and they are widely admired, as evidence of their performers’ ability to marshal imitatively acquired memes toward the generation of items of the most sophisticated cultural kinds. In spite of this we are well aware that a great blessing of life—its creative unpredictability—is attributable not so much to the exercise of skilful deliberation as to the accident of discovery. To borrow the sense of the title of a painting by Joseph Wright of Derby: it is the alchemist in search of the philosophers’ stone who discovers phosphorus, not the mediaeval phosphorus-seeker (who knows of no such element).

In the mode of intentional action we use those memes that we expect will yield an item of the X-kind and we occasionally discover, to our gratified astonishment, that some accidental variation of behaviour has occurred, or there has been some anomaly of context, such that an unintended, unexpected, item of the Y-kind has instead been generated. And very occasionally the Y-kind may qualify not as a mere variant of the intended X-kind but as a new kind entirely. Nobody—or anyhow, none of our co-participants in the local culture—knew that things of this kind could be made. But now they know how. A new meme has emerged.

New memes

Discoveries are not made memetically, although once they are made the productive new memes are freely available for exploitation. Discoveries are not, as is sometimes claimed on their behalf, the products of skills so high and fine that their authors deserve adulation as the possessors of an inimitable genius. Discoveries are necessarily accidental. The secret of creativity is not after all so very mysterious. We stumble upon the possibility of new behaviours-in-context with unexpected but regular consequences. We do this incidentally to the purposeful doing of something else. Important discoverers no doubt deserve to be celebrated, but not for their display of inimitable skill. There are no inimitable skills.

What is it, then, that makes intentional, memetic, action possible? Standing behind every meme we must suppose that there are universal regularities without which repetitive behaviours-in-context would not have predictable consequences. Part of the delight that attaches to the discovery of a new meme is surely attributable to the contribution that each one makes to our practical and intellectual grasp of the mysterious regularities of the universe. It is essentially a metaphysical delight, and it is no wonder that creativity—when it is understood in this way—is much appreciated. We should rather wonder why it is that theorists have tried to associate creativity distinctively with conventionally so called art, when it is so clearly manifest in every domain of human interest.

Entertainments

A possible explanation comes to mind. It is a plausible thought that memetic innovation is most likely to occur when the standard use of memes to generate familiar cultural items is observed by spectators who are free—as the performers are relatively unfree—to ‘misread’ what is being intentionally made and done. Such ‘misreadings’ may well be repudiated by the performers, but in spite of this they may be no less viable accounts of what might have been done, and of what might therefore be done again, than are the performers’ own readings upon which their claims to have acted deliberately rest.

Those activities and products of action around which bystanders are assembled with an assumption of personal detachment have a general name. They are called entertainments. Classic entertainments make provision for a non-participatory audience, quarantined in the auditorium of a stadium, a theatre, a concert hall, a gallery or circus tent. Entertainments are prime sites of memetic innovation precisely because the bystanders’ productive readings—or, as one might prefer to say, their felicitous mis-readings—of what has been made or done and of how it might be made or done again is significantly out of collusion with the entertainers’ intentions.

A story of this kind about the potency of entertainments is to some extent consistent with the familiar post-Kantian art-theoretical dogma of disinterestedness; but it parts company with such teachings in that it does not pretend to offer a criterion by which the artistic domain is to be distinguished from the scientific or the economic or the political or any other domain. Why, indeed, should we expect to find such a criterion? Why should we not instead abandon the use of the term ‘art’ that is currently conventional and revert to an older and more general use, in which its application is indifferent as between domains? Demotic speech still encourages us to speak of the surgeons, chefs and criminals who stumble upon powerful new memes as artists; and there is no reason why this usage should not be restored to its earlier, still vestigial, status as the literal and not the metaphorical use of the word.

Art is what it always was

In short, current linguistic practice had much better be modified in the following ways. First: the word ‘art’ should not be used as the name of a kind for the absolutely knock-down reason that there is no such kind. It should be used instead as the name of the category of memetic innovation.

I offer the word ‘category’ here because, although its meaning is contested among philosophers, it is at least clear that a category is not a kind and that, unlike kinds, categories do not have histories. Memetic innovation—the discovery of new ways in which the regularities of the universe can be consistently and predictably exploited—is what it always was. Memetic innovation is, was and always will be, memetic innovation. Without memetic innovation we should live in a culturally frozen universe, just as without genetic innovation we should live in a biologically frozen universe. Hence, in my proposed use of the term: art is what it always was. It has no history. Art history is bunk. When she ruminates upon the history of the archaic Kouros or of American-type abstract expressionism the so called ‘art historian’ is functioning as a cultural historian, elucidating the histories of cultural kinds all shaped by a common generative principle of cultural kindedness. She should be free to do this without the impossible burden of elucidating concurrently the history of something else that has no history, popularly mis-called the history of art.

This adjustment to our use of the term ‘art’ forces upon us the need for a better way of dealing with the cognate expression ‘work of art’. Currently we try, incoherently, to speak of works of art as if they were items of an art kind despite the fact that because there is no such kind there are no such items. I suggest instead that we should understand ‘work of art’ in the following way:

Works of art are those things to which attention is paid in the hope that reflection upon them may deliver up to a disengaged contemplator the prospect of some memetic innovation.

The conventionally so called works of art that are collected for many different reasons in the art galleries and the art museums are not, of course, disqualified absolutely by their status as works of art conventionally so called from counting as works of art properly so called. In the same way, objects of innumerable cultural kinds bundled together in various ways beyond the domain of conventionally so called art are not disqualified by their exclusion from counting as works of art properly so called.

This was Duchamp’s point, I imagine; although he did not spell it out explicitly. Or if after all this was not his point, then it should have been.

Return to the real world: a reply to Richard Larter

In our last issue Richard Larter offered some thoughts on the art world, politics and thought itself. Here, Chris Jones responds.

“We guess by analogy” (1).

To answer the question “Is the real world real?" Richard Larter created his own and termed it the “art world”. In a muddled flip of writerly irony, he sought to expose the benefit of perception active within the practices of art by gleaning authority from the abstract world of “scientific facts”; a rigid domain of static perception functioning antithetically to lively acts of artistic perception. In a manner reflecting the argument structures used by economic and political bureaucracies so rightly raising his ire, Larter engineered an “art world” by manufacturing an argument filled with abstract “societies” and fictitious “theys”. To do so, he first poured into the argument’s mould the great unwashed “ours”, “us” and “we” of conventional analytic research, (characters who only befriend fictive analysts tenured high within ivory towers: see Jean Baudrillard et al). When full, he then sculpted each new resident into neat and trimmed points arranged carefully within the growing body of his text. When ready, he rounded the finished piece to form an article finally representing the shiny sphere of an “art world”. But Richard, to whom were you referring when describing the ”we”, “suffering from being considered unimportant”? Who were the “we” of the “art world” that “stupidly imagine” democracy for instance? (To stupidly imagine is perhaps the first step in any worthwhile artistic project, and an effective technique whilst engaging seriously un-stupid, un-imaginative, political practices). And who were the “our” whose collective “mental activity” you claim to know the “truth” about? Finally, who were the “us” you perceived continually lied to by “fourth rate Presidents, Prime Ministers, Ministers and Government officials”? When was the last time Bush, Howard, Kemp or Keating lied to you; when was the last time they even spoke to you? The “art world” you created to succeed as an argument certainly doesn’t include me and I consider myself one of the many gallery ghosts who’d expect a swift invite to its opening. By couching your claims within rhetoric floating high upon clouds of assumption, you raise serious, challenging and I hope popular issues, surrounding the vital topic of perception within the practices of contemporary art. To point out just a few of these issues, and hopefully generate discussion around this topic, I will refer to your article that raised them, (published in vol.1, no.2 of A Public of Individuals), as case study for mine.

Throughout your argument you privileged the elitist mode of perception sustained by Cartesian dualism, an inherently authoritarian structure raising intellectual minds above the ambiguities of their supposedly unthinking, untrustworthy bodies. For example, from the fixed locality of your writing station you perceived “our extremely ignorant and imperfect world”. How did you do this from the fixity of a seat? Only with a detached mind’s eye perceiving information through a telescope, forged by the hand of Galileo perhaps, could you survey with such a broad vision. Extending this privilege to dualism you added, “We do not know how we think – this is a scientific fact”. Scientific fact is thought, what else could it be? Scientific facts are thoughts written as words into books and computers. They present as terms demarcating abstract themes and authoritative explanations; they are concepts and ideas interpreting, and wholly distorting, the sensational world of things and objects. To argue “we do not know how we think” because this is what science thinks is to extend self-reflexive, circular arguments spun by rationalists installed high inside towers of academe, set fast to their seats in long forgotten postures, warmed through by the romantic glow of a two-bar heater and pumped full with the rarefied oxygen of idealism. What these and other examples from your article expose is a lack of subjective awareness in the process of analytic perception; in other words, you disregard the I in your eye. This disregard, all too common within analytic research and writing, forms a gap between the perceiver and the perceived creatively filled by abstract thought and concepts; concepts which are wholly divorced from the details of life in order to sustain bold discussions about manufactured “worlds” dis-located far from their actions therein. These actions, full of blood, shit, sweat and moments of real reality manifest paintings, installations, interactive environments, photographs, textiles and performances. These are the responsible marks from the grounds of the living earth; embodied interactions of subjective dialogue presented within the moving acts of artistic practices, not practice concretised within the fixity of an abstract “art world”.

My want to expose your body from the process of thoughtful perception may seem a rather odd intention. But it is only by admitting the multi-sensorial function of the body into the process of perception that one can responsibly and accurately analyse phenomena perceived: it is also the only way to fully embrace perception within the processes of art. By admitting the body to the process of perception you, as analyser of objects perceived, are compelled to a direct and lively relation with the “facticity” of the object as Maurice Merleau-Ponty would write. Consequently, during perception, you become bound to an awareness of all the influences effecting that facticity as they correspondingly interact with your nearby perceiving body; influences affecting the process of remembering as it brings to mind thoughts of childhood sight for instance. These influences might involve the colour, speed and proximity of the locality in which you’re remembering; the shape, line and contour of your body whilst in the posture of remembering; perhaps the temperature surrounding and interacting with you as each memory arises; or even the mood in which you’re in whilst remembering. By admitting your wide and lively body to the process of perception - your I to your eye - you are bound within a fascinating and responsible interaction within the variegated life of the object’s perception. If, on the other hand, recourse to the fiction of rational authority is relied upon to attain meaning from the thing, all you will perceive, as layers added to the thing, will be hackneyed dusty themes; concepts regurgitated from a tome or google searched web-site destined to “excite the mind” of your reader, as Descartes would write. This application to the thing with abstract interpretation is the antithesis of artistic perception, sensing momentary freshly essences within the lively living “thingness of the thing” as Heidegger would write. Instead, like fetish applied to an old wooden cross, it is the essential project of power.

Power’s project is the control of the perceived thing through authoring its explanation and interpretation. It relies upon talking loud and effectively to others about things unperceived, in the way I’m writing here and now with this buzzing screen through words about intimate thoughts and feelings that, as marks on the distant page you now perceive, control your attention whilst reading. Power is inserted between perceiver-thing relations by an author controlling explanation and interpretation of the thing perceived. This control, usually inserted as the filter of language, allows an author with intent to authorise the process of explanation and interpretation and thereby argue that what is perceived is actually an example of something else or, in certain cases, is something completely different. An example of this process is evident when a “salesman” explains an assemblage of metal and paint as interpreting a dream machine fuelled by freedom. Similarly, it was evident when “The Australian Government”, (abstraction par excellence), explained images of what appeared as people, motionless in a small area of water, as interpreting illegal acts involving a particular racial group of men “throwing children overboard”. These images, in their thingness, were simply photographs that, if perceived as such and without the filter of authority; that is, in an aesthetic manner, would have read as such. Consequently, the “readers” of the images would not have been engulfed by a redneck tide, interpreting them as proof of murder, and thereby voting accordingly. By explaining the “children overboard” images as interpreting murderous activity, the government displayed a clear act of attempting to authorise perception, thereby exposing a desperate attempt to claim the reins of power. But, if the readers had perceived them in an embodied manner as signs laden with significant and immediate meaning triggering a direct personal response; not an indirect impersonal response controlled by government, destined perhaps for presentation on a canvas, on a textile, on a video-wall or through action at the gates of Woomera, the mind-games of control exercised by the government would not have gained control of any personal, embodied perception and actions that follow.

But it’s these mind-games that sustain your argument Richard. By claiming a meaning exists out there somewhere in an “arts world” is to repeat an idealistic, intellectual and therefore dis-embodied analytic process of perception, authorised on high from the vestige of some crumbling ivory tower. When the presence of an ideal is presented as replacement for an absence in meaning at the object perceived, in the form of an image of “child murderers” or a group of “us” and “we” termed an “art world”, it suggests the presenter of that ideal perceives the bodily-perception-of-individual-subjectivities under analysis; people that is, as unnecessary to that process. Consequently, the people under analysis need not exist to be written about. This wholly unethical and arrogant process of creating meaning for the purpose of argument, dis-located completely from the field of people’s experience, enables authoring systems to control the explanation and interpretation of non-existent things within that field, indefinitely. Consequently, if the systems of idealistic manufacture are maintained by the language machines of religion, economics, politics and conventional academe, they will argue perpetually, with heightened power as their target, there’s always more to life than meets with the body; it’s just that you can’t see it. And to this convenient equation they will perpetually add, as they already do, if there is more to meaning than perceived by the body then it’s controlled by an unperceivable entity on high; a god, a profit margin, a truth or ideal; all meta-authors of unperceivable contexts installed within the dwelling of some meta-unperceived. But how can there be more than is perceived? How can there be more to a perceivable world than meets with a perceiving body?

1. Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception, Routledge, 2002, p.481.

Missionary Man: Matthew Collings at the Museum of Contemporary Art
by Chris Jones

"Hell is other people" bemoaned the lonesome Jean Paul-Sartre, peering through a blinkered perspective a world in constant conflict with his own. No connection did he feel with the intelligent scores warming his big clever bed, or succor did he glean from the thousands listening close to each provocative lecture. By perceiving relations with the other from the disconnected place of objective argument, formed textually on pages atop a desk, Sartre missed the warmth and reality of a lived interaction with those about whom he wrote. He disregarded the lively life of people outside his study that cared enough to listen, to think then riotously act, in direct response to his ideas. Through a comparably objective purview, the amiable Matthew Collings shared with his proximate audience at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Sydney, a similarly disconnected attitude.

As a thinking but unpolished Rodin, Collings sat carefully on a small leather chair perched low and spot lit upon a diminutive black platform, thereby into surrounds reflecting the brilliantly lit, high-mod chair and white plinth arrangement, from where he launched himself to the art world in This is Modern Art’s uberrific introduction. As with the highly influential television series, Collings spoke to the $25 a head audience at the MCA through a batch of intelligently clipped and carefully coordinated sound bites, pronounced clean and sharp without hint of a slip. Each utterance was trimmed nice and precisely to form short knockabout sentences crammed full of deft analytic observations, building what became a carefully formed, but altogether brief, informal lecture, presented precisely without script from the hip. Unfortunately, without the guidance of an essay or documentary slides, the free-form content of the lecturette delved only as deep as Collings’ memory allowed, thereby meandering somewhat untethered through a broad, nostalgic return to YBAism plus problems arising from it. Like his hero Clement Greenberg, but without the balance of cigarette, vodka and bald arrogance, Collings relied purely upon a subjective recall of events and a witty corral of anecdotal evidence, all qualified by a scientifically inflected belief in the objective authority of art history and theory. Ironically, these exalted realms were relied upon all too infrequently to guide his meander: The term aesthetic was used only once to describe a tantalizing area of discussion deemed too broad for the limited parameter of the presentation, as were a host of potentially fruitful discursive avenues traversed only tentatively before being deserted. Instead, and in order to enlighten the congregation of ‘The Role of Seriousness in Contemporary Art’, Collings chose to present himself as the art work under analysis, and not the provocative set of “ideas and events” alluded to between memoirs.

As art analyzer opened for analysis, Collings presented an ironic figure; less a centralized Rodin, more a decentralized Anthony Gormley, with scatterings of miniature people cast about the floor reliant upon the determining role of a proximate viewer. On one side of the ironic coin Collings revealed a Sartrean intention to “philosophize the moment” in a role characterized valiantly as “describer of events and ideas”. Whilst in this role, Collings intends to penetrate the “edifice of theory” through a self-proclaimed “mission of enlightenment”. On the other side of the coin, and jarring wholly against the independence of his lonesome modernist mission, he admitted complete dependence upon the guidelines of “objectivity” in order to authorize his soon to be televised quest to analyze the history of painting. Consequently, by extending himself schizophrenically into the super-crucial role of neutral describer -- super-crucially needed in an over-interpreted, under-thought contemporary art world -- disconnected from the sway of opinion, whilst at the same time interpreting what he analyses with reference to opinions which in fact are objective art history, Collings claims for himself a role completely frustrated. The heroic denial of obligatory interaction characterizing his televisual missionary role was illustrated precisely in the fragmented content of the over-priced lecturette.

As mentioned above, Collings presented himself to the crowd as a charmingly descriptive mouth-piece of YBAism: Short, sharp and comfortably reclined, he lionized tigerishly the like of Emin, Hirst and Lucas, whilst rebuking the tide of “soft art-writing” and the “vacuity” of “popularity based art, bubbling along its wake. But, were not these descriptions, of both the good and the bad, garnered from experiential interaction with the analyzed art world, and the artworks and artists therein? Was not this three-way object further analyzed through televised interviews with living, breathing artists standing nearby? Was not this same triadic object analyzed, explained and interpreted in comparison to similarly formed precedents included to the lineages of art history by previous living writers; that is, were not Emin, Hirst and Lucas understood in connection to previously described interpretations of pop, conceptual and post-conceptual art? In reality, the contemporary art world Collings inhabits, experiences then analyses, is replete with tender webs of interaction; living proximities and closenesses which characterize each object beneath analysis. To claim that through this seamless web yet another objective “mission of enlightenment” is worthwhile is pure mythical fiction: An autoerotic jab in the long arm of the BBC. All an enlightened mission through the history of painting will provide is simply more idealistic claims that continually, and blindly, disregard the lived world from where the object of analysis continually comes, in order that yet another groaning grand narrative can be absolved upon screen. This disregard for the subtleties and groundedness of perception is a serious absence in any descriptive analyst’s tool-kit.

According to Maurice Merleau-Ponty, probably the finest writerly describer of the delicacies of lived perception, “He who looks must not himself be foreign to the world that he looks at”. [2] I for one hope that Collings will admit the fine and lively connections which link the art world that he looks at, before launching himself into another televisual mission. The results could be the admission of a network of frustrated aesthetic interests lurking as lively connections between anecdotes.

[1] A. de Saint Exupery, in, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception, Routledge, London, England, 2002, p.530.
[2] Maurice Merleau-Ponty, The Visible and Invisible, trans. Alphonso Lingis, pb. Northwestern University Press, Evanston, America, 1968, p.134.

Robert Cleworth Three different types of abstraction Legge Gallery, 20 August - 7 September
Del Kathryn Barton Drawings and Objects Ray Hughes Gallery, 30 August - 25 September

In an address to students at the National Art School in 2000, Luc Tuymans suggested that the proliferation of images of sex - in popular culture and pornography as well as art - has rendered it an almost impossible subject for the painter. Tuymans, a painter who has been keenly attuned to the effects of photography on the way we see, told of his repeated efforts to depict sex, and of how the human figure became gradually less visible, eventually disappearing from his painting altogether and leaving an image of a motel room, its bed in disarray. Like many artists, Tuymans found inference and suggestion more powerful - or perhaps simply more viable - than the type of outright exposition that has become so common in our culture.

However, the expansion in sexual imagery made available by the camera has been received by some painters as a liberation. Robert Cleworth has worked with explicit sexual imagery consistently over the last ten years. He is above all a painter, but one who uses drawing, photography and digital imaging, sometimes in combination with oil paint. His paintings' origins in pornographic material are unmistakable, but Cleworth brings a painterly sensitivity - an astonishing richness of surface - to his images. The results can be intriguing. On entering his recent exhibition Three different types of abstraction one was met by a small but extremely confronting painting of a penis entering a vagina, with no detail spared. While for many viewers such a graphic image would be difficult to look at - it certainly was for me - the material qualities of Cleworth's painting and its fine-grained illusionism are absorbing. Compulsion and repulsion were thus simultaneous. While wanting to look away, I was drawn to peer more closely to understand how this painting had been made.

It is this knife-edge of uncertainty on the part of the viewer that Cleworth aims for. His work does not depict his particular experience of sex, or present a coherent view of the place of sex in human experience. Rather, it confronts the viewer with the bare, physical facts of sex and aims to allow for whatever response results.

Cleworth's usual strategy is to set pornographic imagery next to other, less provocative elements: landscapes and non-representational forms. Untitled Satellite Fragments is such a work. This painting's dominant forms are non-representational: swathes of grey and splashes of liquid blue rolling across the white canvas. It is only on looking into this field of colour that one finds a finely painted penis, erect and seeming to emerge from a dark slit of shadow. Adjacent to this, the name 'Chloe' is painted in tidy lettering. Without a narrative context or coherent figurative space in which to account for these elements, the viewer is left to make sense of the fragments for themselves: to respond, once again, as they will.

But is it possible to respond conclusively to paintings in which such provocative imagery is left unhinged? Cleworth avoids creating self-explanatory relationships between forms because he wants his paintings' content to remain open-ended - to be resolved only when the viewer brings their values and experiences to bear upon the painting. His repeated use of the words 'untitled fragments' in titles confirms this beyond doubt. But the non-specific and fragmentary nature of these compositions precludes the possibility of response. The artist weaves his fragmentary elements into a composition that is visually satisfying, but their conceptual sparking-off against each other is not strong enough to allow for a substantial interpretation. The viewer is thus left with two unsatisfying conclusions: to respond to the images for their shock value or as marvels of oil painting technique. Cleworth's ambitions are clearly much higher than that, and given the highly contentious nature of the concerns he has taken on, it may be that for other viewers his work realises those aims. I, however, found it difficult to meet the artist halfway when he remained so coolly absent from his work.

Del Kathryn Barton is situated at the other end of the temperature scale. Her drawings, recently exhibited with assorted sculptural objects at Ray Hughes Gallery, depict a cast of characters - both human and animal - in sexual narratives that draw on everyday situations, but exaggerate them to the level of the bizarre. In one very large drawing a woman lies spread-eagled on a tearoom floor, exhorting a dog to "take me to your leader". The dog's tail curls into her underpants and out again, while on the floor beside them a pair of milk cartons seem poised for whatever type of congress inanimate objects engage in. While this work set the tone for most of the large-scale drawings in the exhibition, many of the smaller drawings did not carry worded narratives, functioning more as straightforward erotica.

Elements of Barton's work are irredeemably silly. Most conspicuously her trite titles ("May your spirit rest in peace, and the fact that I adore you is but one of my truths") and the way she draws the human head. While accepting that her figures are not intended to be actual, credible personages, I nevertheless found it difficult to take them seriously as artistic propositions. Endowed with impossibly large and lengthened eyes, glam-rock make-up and hairstyles that incorporate shaving, crimping and dreadlocking all at once, they look like scaled-up versions of a talented adolescent's exercise book jottings. Psychologically and emotionally stunted, Barton's figures come across as little more than mannequins, which is a problem in works that seek to draw the viewer into an empathetic relationship with the characters they depict.

But if the fantasy world in which Barton locates her figures frequently descends into the ridiculous, it enables her a creative latitude that in some respects she uses well. The persistent placement of animals alongside sexualised human beings could be mistaken as the manifestation of a strange urge on the artist's part. Rather, it evinces a deep and significant human identification with the animal realm. Animals are the real life forces in Barton's work. She draws them as vital presences, possessed of a dignity that rarely comes through in her human figures. While the eyes of Barton's cats and dogs are afflicted by a similar stylisation to their human counterparts, somehow they radiate intelligence and alertness. I found the series of small drawings of cats, entitled Pussy Love, some of the strongest works in the exhibition. Drawn with a vigorous line and beautifully augmented with tone and colour, these felines regard the viewer with ravenous, almost frightening curiosity. There is no overt sexual content to these drawings, but their mystery and allure is greater as a result.

The other strength of this exhibition, which suggests that Barton is capable of substantial things, were the strange and inventive hybrid forms that appear in some of the drawings. In "May your spirit rest in peace..." a tesselating web, structurally reminiscent of snakeskin and tyre treads and with its culminating point in a row of Barton's hexagonal eye-shapes, winds its way down the left hand side of the image. Pointing equally to natural and manufactured sources, this highly expressive form underlines Barton's attentiveness to the visual echoes running through different realms of experience. It shows the artist moving to an intuitive abstractness that complements the figurative elements of her work.

Elisabeth Cummings New Paintings King Street Gallery On Burton, 24 September - 19 October

There is no illusion in Elisabeth Cummings' paintings, the history of marks and colours are exposed as warranty for the finished products. It is left for the viewer to decide which elements constitute the picture.

The physicality and substance of paint takes precedence in her work, it is not paint pretending to be a lounge room. Paint is left to be paint with all the approximations and idiosyncrasies native to the medium. The resulting tension in the works comes out of the struggle between the vehicle of expression, an interior scene for example, and the paint itself. The play between these two elements each trying to capitulate the other leads to a great complexity within the finished works, ultimately giving them a highly evolved sense of history and experience.

The paintings are charged with all the self-critical re-evaluations inherent in making a painting, leading them to an organic finalization rather than a calculated end. Jasper Johns keenly articulated this lack of control an artist has over their own work in an interview with David Sylvester in 1965; “I think paintings by the time they are finished, tend to take on a particular characteristic. That is one of the reasons they are finished, because everything has gone in that direction, and there is no recovery. The energy, the logic, everything which you do takes a form in working; the energy tends to run out, the form tends to be accomplished or finalized. Then either it is what one intended (or what one is willing to settle for) or one has been involved in a process which has gone in a way that perhaps one did not intend, but has been done so thoroughly that there is no recovery from that situation. You have to leave that situation as itself, and then proceed with something else, begin again, begin a new work.”(1)

Mainly interior scenes or views of the landscape from inside looking out, the paintings reminded me, with their chaotic assemblage of forms, of the late studio paintings of Braque. In Currumbin interior with mango the landscape comes indoors in a collision of muted greens and greys with elements loosely drawn over solid shapes adding a fleeting naivety to the sophisticated paint - work underneath. In Early morning, Currumbin there is a saturation of colour that pays homage to Bonnard as shapes and colour snake their way through an open window. Some of the works have an almost geometric structure that pits itself against the amorphous nature of the compositions. In others such as Grey day from the verandah, Currumbin and Red and white the recognizable forms have been abstracted right out of the canvas.

To work with such open-ended criteria for making a painting must be as satisfying for the artist as it is for the viewer. It also seems a good way of insuring you do not just reproduce a self styled product to order, which has become somewhat of an epidemic with mid-career artists.

1. BBC Interview between David Sylvester and Jasper Johns, 1965
in Art in Theory, 1900-1990, edited by Charles Harrison and Paul Wood, Blackwell, London, 1992, p. 721.

Arte Povera: Art from Italy 1967-2002 Museum of Contemporary Art, 23 August -10 November.

After the lightweight, possibly amusing but ultimately forgettable trivia of the Sydney Biennale at the Museum of Contemporary Art, a breath of fresh air swept through that institution in the form of the historically significant Arte Povera: Art from Italy 1967-2002. Judith Blackall from the MCA, the curator of the exhibition, has worked at the Prato Museum of Contemporary Art, Tuscany, Italy which has given her firsthand insight into the ongoing movement, its art and theory. Through personal contact and direct knowledge of all the artists and their champion Germano Celant, Blackall brings a depth of considerable understanding to this exhibition. The exhibition is everything the lamentable Biennale wasn't.

Celant's book, Arte Povera of 1969, was one of the first English publications on the fledgling movement. At that stage he cast an international net to include Minimalists such as Carl Andre, Joseph Beuys's performance/installations, Eva Hesse, whose major and significant piece in the ANG is rarely seen, Robert Smithson and a bevy of similar 'earth' artists and conceptualists such as Joseph Kosuth.

Since 1969, with the making of many reputations through the defining of new stylistic boundaries, Celant has weeded out all but the Italian exponents. The English translation of Arte Povera, 'poor art', does not adequately define this movement of still-productive artists thirty-odd years on. It is their use of humble materials that unites them. It seems that the conceptualisation of the work, a paring down to a choice of just two or three contrasting materials, the site specific installation of the work, be it in an architectural context or a natural environment, and its subsequent documentation were new strategies and practices for artists to be undertaking in the early 1960s. No suggestion of painting in its purest form is to be seen anywhere within their works.

One may see this paring down as a minimalist concern and indeed it was but the sensibilities of the Italians' practices were far removed from the Americans who were to claim that movement as their own. The Italians' humanism is what is different. Their choice of materials and their purposeful contrasting of surfaces and textures are loaded with meaning and suggestion whereas the Americans such as Donald Judd stood for purely reductive and geometric exploration. In this exhibition you could smell the huge lump of timber of Penonne's Albero di 11 metri (11 metre tree, 1969 - 1989) that was carved back to expose the core of the towering tree within, and also the caged laurel leaves in his more recent installation. Marisa Merz's bubbling water emanating from its wax violin was its 'music' and even the rich hues in Kounellis' steel and cloth ensemble smells of remnants of fire and dying heat. This is possibly where the late twentieth century passion for alchemy and mystery started.

Then there is the question of elegance. The Italians dominated the 20th century in terms of style and design. In a fine art context this exhibition is so fresh, clean, crafted, elegant and sophisticated without being overly design conscious or sentimental. The contradiction now is that at the time this loose movement was about anti-consumerism and 1960's Utopianism. This can be readily appreciated in the 'mirror' works of Michelangelo Pistoletto. His partially framed and overlapping sections of mirrors casually resting against the wall are realised by walking through, past, and in front of the works. There is an ordinary but beautiful, ephemeral nature to the mirror works whose geometric placement is a reminder of what Frank Stella was to produce as conventional paintings in his later Protractor series. There is nothing too conventional about the beauty and lingering subtleties to be found in all of the works in this exhibition. Except for a touch of a machine aesthetic in the work of Gilberto Zorio, with his stars made of javelins and electric fibre light, nothing is without connections to a universal inner consciousness or the history of Italy itself.

The developing theories and experiences of Post Modernism as applied to the visual arts had its earnest beginnings in these seminal works. One cannot conceive that a younger generation of artists could be tolerated and/or lauded without the ground-breaking work of the Arte Povera artists of Italy.

Jimmy Rix facade BBA Gallery, 14 August - 7 September

The recently closed Robert Klippel retrospective at the Art Gallery of New South Wales led many people to conclude that he is one of the best sculptors of the twentieth century. As Geoffrey Legge, one of Klippel's longtime dealers reflected, there will surely not be a better sculpture exhibition mounted anywhere in the world this year.

It can be difficult to extract a lesson from the work of an artist as accomplished as Klippel. His sculptures are complete. They do not tolerate being pulled apart. But there is one conclusion that can easily be drawn from Klippel's example, and arguably from any major artist: that visual form offers infinite scope for creative exploration; that the developmental path of the artist who relates intelligently to the world of form need never go astray or reach an end. As Henri Focillon put it in the 1930s: "the life of forms is renewed over and over again...far from evolving according to fixed postulates, constantly and universally intelligible, it creates various new geometries even at the heart of geometry itself. Indeed, the life of forms is never at a loss to create any matter, any substance whatsoever of which it stands in need."(1) Focillon attributed to form a life of its own, and on walking through room after room of such varied and adventurous sculptures one could certainly believe that Klippel's formal play issued from a deeper, more powerful source than his own conscious will.

But formal play is not an end unto itself. Art reflects back on lived experience, and in Klippel's case the machine parts from which his strangely organic structures were wrought allowed him to express a simple but significant response to life in his time. "I seek the interrelationship of the cogwheel and the bud", Klippel said. In other words, his work was a response to the very human plight of sensing one's origin in the natural world, but at the same time feeling the impulse to invent and build another reality. And as so many of Klippel's sculptures showed, when the 'other reality' in question is art it often overlaps with nature, that ultimate and inexhaustible repository of forms.

It was a pleasure to go from the Klippel retrospective to facade, the solo exhibition of Jimmy Rix, a young sculptor whose formal universe has entered its first moment of balance. Rix has been producing sculpture for less than five years and this exhibition included several different kinds of work, suggesting that he has not yet settled on a certain path. But happily, most of the pieces in the exhibition belonged to the more sophisticated strain of his work.

The sculptures to which I refer, rarely larger than fifty centimetres in any dimension, appear from a distance to be bronzes, elegant abstractions that recall the shapes and rhythms of modernism. Their varied and unconventional sense of balance suggests that Rix has been riding a similar wave of creativity to that which Klippel routinely enjoyed. But on closer approach they turn out to be something else altogether. Built from parts of plastic toys (guns, train sets, Tonka trucks etc.) and painted to look like bronze, Rix's sculptures are imposters, at once concealing and taking advantage of the toyland identities of their constituent parts. Robocop's grounding form is a fat-tyred wheel. Atop it the upright shaft of a gun leads elegantly to a trigger and handle that invite action only to frustrate it, for this gun points directly to the ground, its muzzle lost amid axles and clutter. Navigate presents another artful mishmash of form and function, its steering wheel and gun sights crying out for movement but going nowhere. That these playful reconfigurations are achieved with such a refined sculptural sensibility is the success of the best works in facade.

Rix's other styles of work were represented by a trio of neo-expressionist helmets destined for stone-age heads, and some circus-style shooting galleries with titles referring to current social issues (W.A Bikie Wars, The United Prozac States of America). The former works are cliched, and the social commentary of the latter is achieved in a less laboured manner in the toy-based sculptures described above. But I wait to see whether Rix does pursue this more overt form of comment, and whether he will bring to it the formal and conceptual sophistication of his best work.

1. Henri Focillon, The Life of Forms in Art, Zone Books, New York, 1992, p.94.

Born in 1927, Ken Whisson has been one of Australia's foremost artists over the last fifty years. His pictures defy painting's conventional genres, representing landscapes, people, animals and objects in a common space that refers to the social and political dimensions of life, at the same time registering a sense of wonder at the world. Whisson is currently staging a solo exhibition of new paintings and drawings at Melbourne's Niagara Galleries and is represented by Watters Gallery in Sydney.

Why do you make art?
William Faulkner has said that he became a writer when he realised that by means of writing he could "make a man stand on his hind legs and cast a shadow". And he surely meant by this, not as they do in real life, but as they do not, or do not seem to do, in reality. And I believe that the reason for making art, art in general, is that it gives to the world, not just to human beings, some more profound dimension, something nearer to the reality that we feel it surely must have, but does not seem to have.

Who is your audience?
For the above reason, an artist's audience will come into being, will be won or created, very slowly. The artist cannot ask for or strive after favour and applause, or even comprehension, if he or she does so, it will be at the expense of becoming integrated into the world of shadows, into the ever more widespread, mass-mediated unreality.

You painted through the seventies, the decade of the 'death of painting'. What was this like?
For me, and I'm sure for many others, the black period was the fifties and early sixties, and came with the realisation, somewhere deep within us, that the war had not ended and was not going to end. It had been followed, as John Middleton Murray, of all people, had predicted in 1944, by a long period - he had predicted 50 years - of endemic war.

And in the visual arts, this period, these two decades, were marked by the death of ideas and imagination in art; and my first trip to Europe, that of 1953 to 1955 was, probably - I'm not certain of this, it's a long way back - to see if there was anyone in England or France who might be making some attempt to relate to the general condition - this is no exaggeration - of profound despair. And the answer to that not clearly formulated need was fairly precise: Francis Bacon and Jean Dubuffet.

The next trip was in mid 1968, and the essential reason for it was to be nearer to the rebirth of politics, meaning of course extra-parliamentary politics, symbolised and in part exemplified by the1968 French May.

And what I found in Europe, as far as art is concerned, was not the death of painting, well who knows, perhaps that as well, but what interested me was the return of ideas into art, in the work of Robert Smithson, Robert Morris, Barry Flanagan and many others. Concepts, intelligence and intuition had re-entered the world of visual art, along with, even side by side with, the rebirth of ideas and imagination in politics.

The above does not mean, it's of some importance to make this clear, that conceptual art was, or even could have been, a new modern form of art for our brave new modern form of world. For the love of heaven no. On the contrary, it was a rebellion against the nihilistic commercialisation of art. And so for a painter like myself, it created a cultural space in which to work, and also a socio-cultural atmosphere in which a few serious dealers' galleries could come into being, and thereby - to return to Question 2 - made possible a genuine interaction between artist and public.

And so my dream would, in fact, be for another seventies, meaning a worldwide explosion of grass roots political consciousness, alongside a widespread diffusion of honesty, intelligence and imagination in art, and these re-enforcing and interacting one with the other so as to lay the basis for something other than another fifty years of unilateral war.

Could you name an artist who has been important to you and say why?
If this refers to the so-called formative years, Vasilieff, Tucker, Nolan and others of that group, because I saw them close up and was able to relate their work to their lives. Of those whose work one could only know through books of prints, like all young artists, I was enthralled by a small forest of 19th and 20th century artists, from Georges Rouault, of whom nowadays I'm chiefly impressed by the vast proportion of very bad, overworked paintings that he did, to Paul Klee, who remains, for me, an artist of immense value.

But one in whom it would seem to me that there is not nearly as much interest as there might be is Paul Nash, an artist of profound, unusual and wonderfully concentrated sensibility. He painted the only first-rate representations of the horror and stupidity of the First World War, and having lived and digested this experience, went on to give us, whether that was his intention or not, reasons for wanting to go on living in this desperate self-destructive world.

Kurt Schwitters's total rejection - the recent, vast Amsterdam Stedelijk exhibition made clear just how total and unremitting - of modernity is more rational and realistic. Nevertheless I feel that there are good reasons for being thankful for the existence of Paul Nash.

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