Au s t r a l i a n Ga l l e r i e s SYDNEY
peter neilson
Au s t r a l i a n Ga l l e r i e s SYDNEY
invites you to the opening
peter neilson Toys Tuesday 3 May 2016 6pm to 8pm 15 roylston street paddington nsW 2021 Current until sunday 22 May 2016 open 7 days 10am to 6pm t 02 9360 5177 sydney@australiangalleries.com.au australiangalleries.com.au peterneilson.net Cover : Newly old technology (1) 2015 charcoal and pastel on paper 74 x 53 cm photography: Viki petherbridge
Toying with eternity (off to visit each and every star) 2015 charcoal and pencil on paper 53 x 73.5 cm
Frisbeeee! 2014 charcoal and pencil on paper 54 x 73.5 cm
Naughty Max and dear little Don 2015 charcoal on paper 55.5 x 75 cm
pEtEr NEilSoN 1. What is there, there at the heart of drawing? this question brings drawing into a confrontation with itself. it demands that drawing itself, that which is there with drawing, as drawing, be addressed. addressed not as though it were an abstract question of identity, rather as though there is, in fact, a question of drawing. note here the insistence of the question and thus an insistence on questioning. to allow drawing to remain a question, one with its own set of exigencies, is to resist, if only at the outset what might be described as a rush to definition. While drawing is already implicated within the problem of genre – and thus of generic distinctions between drawing and painting, or linguistic distinctions between drawing, dessiner, zeichen, etc. - what continues to endure at the outset is the problem of the particular. a problem that is far from mysterious. it is always possible to start with a drawing – anyone of these recent drawings by peter neilson – and begin with a direct question: in what way are these drawings, in fact, drawings? to allow for this question to provide a way in, is to begin in a way that is unexpected. What would have been expected will have been suspended. an instance of the latter, the expected, is the following: plato refers to drawing in the sophist (266C). there are two ways of making a house. one is the house itself and which results from the techné of building; the other emerges as a result of the techné of drawing (γραφικός). the latter will always be limited by its relation to the former. of the drawing, or rather of drawing thus conceived, all that could be said would have been expected in advance. the presence of the drawing lies in its difference not just on the level of techné but in terms of the object presented. that is why plato goes to describe the drawing as a ‘manmade dream’. It is as though drawing is defined not by its provisional status but by the inevitability of the separation that yields the drawing as a ‘dream’. even if the one who drew understood what a house was the drawing would always stand at a distance. there is an absence within plato’s account. What is left out of any consideration is what the drawing draws; the consideration at the heart of drawing. If defined in terms of a relation to another techné – here house
Drawing, the Worlds of Toys building – while it may be possible to disagree with plato on the grounds that all his argument does is reiterate a certain resistance to art what is far more significant is what cannot be posed within such a framework. What cannot emerge is the question of the drawn, and thus the possibility of drawing itself. that question, indeed the litany of questions that emerge with drawing, are themselves only possible if modes of self-referentiality are maintained. Cy twombly wrote that ‘each line... explains nothing, but is the event by which it is itself given concrete shape.’ With each line therefore no one thing is to have been expected. What is, what is there, will have been given. While each line will not have been foreseen, in the precise way that it is unexpected, it would be naive to think that a description that insisted merely on drawing’s unforeseen quality was itself satisfactory. While lines defy expectation, there is a context. Drawings do not just occur, nor are they mere occurrence. Drawings are a staging. Form is always informed. However, the significant point is that they are not a staging of what is already – already there – such that any presentation is a re-presentation. Were that to be case then the relation between ‘before’ and ‘after’, and where each has a determined image, creates the framework within which they are to be understood and judged. the contrary is the case. the ‘coming after’ endures. it endures as a sense of futurity without image. there are drawings and as a result what ‘comes after’ is a quality of the work and thus as the inscription of a potentiality within the work. inscribing that potentiality is drawing. Drawing is the inscription of potentialities. the suspension of expectation is therefore not a negative occurrence. the refusal of the foreseen does not trap drawing within an oscillation between visibility invisibility. suspending expectations – allowing for the unexpected – is a formal quality of the work. this is a twofold possibility within allowing that undoes abstract formalism. the possibility is what allows for the drawn; equally, it is what the drawn allows. 2. peter neilson’s recent drawings are preoccupied with toys. More accurately toys have a twofold determination
within those drawings. In the first instance they are concerned with toys that have been superseded. now – the ‘now’ that is the moment of drawing, the drawn event - those toys refer to a past. in the second, the drawings are concerned to allow for the complexity that is already there within the structure of play to emerge. Both of these determinations inform these drawings. taken generally toys mark limit conditions. they mark moments of transition. they mark as much an engagement with the world, as they do the creation of a world and the world’s refusal. Worlds rather than world. the complex position in which the toy is located, a position in which the toy is defined by its relation to a set of limits, is always there. the child can only view the toy within the world they both inhabit and which the toy helps create; a world that is of course pressured. For any observer however the toy is already outmoded. one consequence is that it may become a locus of nostalgia and thus of longing. What remains is both a continuity of withdrawal – accounting for the feeling of nostalgia - and an idealisation which, while unreal, would only ever have been real for the child. Worlds are created and invented. Creation and invention occur both in the now of play, and as that which results from the evocation of a world having been lost. they are, of course, lost worlds in which future possibilities were imagined. (to which it should be added that this sense of the future, in its refusal to succumb to pressure, is intensely political because of the link between the future and the imagination, and yet apolitical precisely because it limits the future to the imagined. as such the future would have lost its unpredictability.) the toy demands drawing. not because the drawings are toys. rather, it would emerge from the results of a confrontation between what could be described – inevitably too quickly - as the temporality of drawing and the complications presented by that philosophical consideration of the toy in which the latter are defined by their relation to worlds. 3. neilson’s drawings are of toys. an elephant looks at stars; one figure reaches for another; the monstrous is
contained; a duck cycles: interstellar travel is a possibility; the boy as soldier is outlined; redundant technology is placed in contexts that resist time but stage the object as outmoded, thus as presenting worlds already gone (only there, returning, in an image). the possible and the improbable combine. and yet, every world is pressured from the start. if drawing is the inscription of a potentiality – a potentiality in which what is opened is not already presented within the image - then the future is there, in the now of the drawing to the extent that it is yet-tobe-imagined. the promise of drawing lies in the opening it creates. in what it allows. it is an opening that gestures, as an image, to the possibility of an image to come. a drawing therefore is the image of an image to come. (the latter is always yet-to-be.) the toy on the other hand charts both the impossibility of there being an image of the future and thus the futility of that promise. the toy is already past. not merely passed over, that possibility, though now a necessity, inheres within it. What then is the drawing of toys? each of these drawings presents toys. they present worlds that, in being continually outmoded, gesture towards a past now vanished (or vanishing) and a promise; a promise however that is predicated on its own impossibility. if drawing knows that the future cannot have an already present image; the toy marks that possibility precisely because the image of the toy is the image of a possible future of which the toy is not the image. the toy marks impossibility and the closure (closing) of worlds. the drawing of toys is therefore an exposure. What emerges is a limit. Drawn toys, in identifying the failure of a promise, do so within a medium that is itself a promise. the drawing of toys is therefore art’s least nostalgic act. andrew Benjamin 2016 professor of philosophy and Jewish thought at Monash university, and Distinguished professor of philosophy and the Humanities at Kingston university
The box it came in 2015 charcoal and pastel on paper 54 x 74 cm
Into the light! 2015 charcoal on paper 53.5 x 74 cm
Newly old technology (2) 2015 charcoal and pastel on paper 75.5 x 56.5 cm
Newly old technology (3) 2015 charcoal and pastel on paper 73 x 53.5 cm
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