questionnaire3

Ken Whisson

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.

The editors devise the questions asked in the Artist's Questionnaire. While certain standard questions are put to each artist, other questions are tailored to suit the individual. Furthermore, the artist is not obliged to answer every question. The intention of the Questionnaire is not to provide a comparative gauge of artists' responses, but to give as full an insight as possible into each artist's thoughts and motivations.