Fifty years after The Field: Still Painting: group exhibition curatorial essay

Fifty years after The Field Still Painting

The Field, 1968. An exhibition described by its curators as biased, directional and indicative of but a moment in time.i Yet ever since it has had a profound effect on nonobjective abstract practice - variously seen as a seminal, breakout and mythologised - it has been restaged and referenced many times; making it, paradoxically, a long and enduring 50-year moment of influence. The ultimate restaging took place earlier this year with the NGV’s The Field Revisited 2018, a detailed re-creation of the original.

Frequent restagings are perhaps a result of The Field being a historical moment (or as has been suggested, a historical trauma) that has not yet worked out its rightful place.ii Still, its enduring controversy is an affirmation of the place of a visual language whose basic lexicon, jargon and inflections maintain relevance to artists who continue to develop and extend the vocabulary. Like any well-used language it is adaptable, flexible and attuned to the concerns of successive practitioners over the half-century since.

A sense of The Field’s legacy was evident in a clustering of so-called satellite exhibitions that popped up recently in Melbourne, excluded from but purposively timed to coincide with the institutional revisitation.iii These showed an enormous diversity of contemporary abstract work, presented inclusively and critically. Their very presence, outside the NGV, synchronous with its offering, can be seen as an implied critique of the institution’s position. For Fifty Years after The Field, Factory 49 has invited a number of Melbourne artists, and some Sydney artists, to consider the value and place of The Field in their contemporary non-objective practice. If, as one of its artists claimed, The Field was the only exhibition that ever opened a gallery and closed an art movement, what now?iv

This is an exhibition of paintings and so confines itself to that specific medium (and inevitably, a consideration of Greenberg’s ideas at the time). Flatness and its delimitation do link the works and if that momentary movement back in 1968 had to be described, the same Field curators (albeit reluctantly) suggested hard edge, unit pattern, colour field, flat abstraction, conceptual and minimal, with a transition already taking place into organic, or more complicated forms, or more painterly modes.v While these descriptors may be formalist modernist paradigms, optically accurate to describe these paintings, and arguably self-sufficient, they do not take into account the conceptualisation and diverse narratives that lie behind much contemporary work, and of painting in particular.

Fifty years after The Field at Factory 49, (Image: Molly Wagner) Works left to right: Sara Lindsay, Adrian Corke, Jessica Pearless, Robin Kingston, Susie Leahy Raleigh, Stephen Wickham, Suzanne Moss

Sara Lindsay’s practice as a weaver informs this series of intimately made works on paper. A residency in Sri Lanka, familial history and relationships have similarly found their way into the grid lines of warp and weft, where objects and paint become surrogates for the constructed materiality of cloth. These are Letters from a Mother to her daughter and the series of Weave drawings.

Adrian Corke’s pairing, The Threshold Between 1 and 2 are conceived as syntheses between the formal and the intuitive. Corke describes the clarity of forms and specificity of colour as having the effect of visual tropes, such that layers, textures and placement give way to the familiarity of influences and forms derived from the world.

Fifty years after The Field at Factory 49, (Image: Molly Wagner) Works left to right: Sara Lindsay, Adrian Corke

Jessica Pearless’ interest in geometric abstraction plays out against a narrative of afters – there is After Painting; a self-referential discourse addressing painting’s demise embodied in its continuance. There is After Kauri, suggesting a colonial tale of influence and homage. Another after is Mannerism, in which a prior style is exaggerated.vi

Robin Kingston has researched the role of intuition, rational thought and site in the construction of abstract paintings. Her Untitled, but precisely dated series of small paintings are temporal samplings but also a continuous movement between known patterns, highly keyed colour and structural vagaries.

Fifty years after The Field at Factory 49, (Image: Molly Wagner) Works left to right: Jessica Pearless, Robin Kingston

In Outflow Susie Leahy Raleigh composes a collision between the chaos of the pour and the transparent containment of a clear plastic surface. Spreading and pooling inks enact active flows within the restricted colour palette; a tonal harmony of pinks and reds, their liquidity now static on a bed of flatness.

Stephen Wickham’s Vertical Triptych. Cruciform in Pink [Remembering Maria RenÊe Jeanne Falconetti] alludes to the possibility of a formal allegorical. The bracketed [veiled?] reference to a poignant performance from the silent-film era suggests the work itself is a conflation; in which geometry, colour and symbols of religious passion act out or alternate with those from art and popular history. The collapsing of these diverse elements with a non-objective mode of painting condenses interpretations.

Fifty years after The Field at Factory 49, (Image: Molly Wagner) Works left to right: Susie Leahy Raleigh, Stephen Wickham

Suzanne Moss paints from an understanding that a constructed geometric painting, like a mandala, poem or music, can house poetic human experience. The Hearth series was begun in a Hill End residency, with temporal observations derived from a shared tiled hearth made by a prior occupant, the painter Margaret Ollie.

Lindy Patterson’s recent works are underpinned by her interest in Stoic philosophy. The schism between control and chance is emblematised in the process of Red Painting. This is itself realised as an aggregation of the material forces of thick paint on the format of flat surface.

For Elefteria Vlavianos, the concept of the field is historical and formal but also references a field of battle. Other days of Memory and Movements in Translation utilise culturally derived Armenian formats, motifs and colours to chronicle the trauma of war, denial and displacement.

Fifty years after The Field at Factory 49, (Image: Molly Wagner) Works left to right: Suzanne Moss, Lindy Patterson, Elefteria Vlavianos

Tracey Coutts’ painting Shift arrives from the use of digital media, enabling a shifting of the non-objective picturing beyond two-dimensional presentation. Like an animation that has been halted or frozen, its restraint suggests multiple perspectives and movement, almost as if the flat canvas were a screen, undermining its traditional role.

Lila Afiouni’s gridded group of Colour Studies began with motifs and colour relationships from the urban environment. Isolated from their usual meaning and pared back in these reductive visual exercises, they oscillate between sign and aesthetic experience.

Fifty years after The Field at Factory 49, (Image: Molly Wagner) Works left to right: Tim Bass, Lila Afiouni, Tracey Coutts

And so, Fifty years after The Field, here we are, painting still. As much as this is an exhibition pointing to the survival and adaptability of the two-dimensional visual idiom celebrated in that 1968 show,vii it is a survey of contemporary painters and still painting.

As much as the medium can be said to have expanded, in this room it is contracted. All these works continue to deploy stilled pigment acting on and within flat rectilinearity.

Abstraction is a wide and encompassing term. A critical difficulty with it is its breadth; it is often used to indicate degrees of abstraction as against representation. Within the generic of the abstract there is a significant thread of reductive or non-objective visual language with diverse socio-cultural, historical, and sometimes spiritual referents. It is a language connected to its art and cultural history and precursors, as well as adaptive to contemporary narrative-based practice. And then there is simply, still, painting, all of it done in the hushed silence of colour on an immobilized surface,viiiso that I am tempted to hush, delete that last sentence, be silent, and leave the last words to artist Tim Bass.

Lisa Sharp, Curator August 2018

Abstract

not something

no story

unnatural

who stole the content?

the dark patch

where the picture

used to hang

just a surface

in the early morning

before

the narratives

arrive

Tim Bass

i Brian Finemore, Curator, and John Stringer, Exhibitions Officer, Introduction, The Field, Exhibition

Catalogue, Melbourne: National Gallery of Victoria, 1968, 3 ii

Rex Butler and A.D.S. Donaldson, The Field at 50. Sydney: pushpress, 2018, 1

iii

Abstraction 2018 featured over 125 artists collectively exhibiting at Five Walls Projects, Langford 120 and Stephen McLaughlan galleries, in addition to a plethora of The Field related exhibitions. iv

Alan Oldfield in Katrina Noorbergen, ‘Profile: Col Jordan’ in Artist Profile, Issue 42, 2018, 106 Finemore and Stringer, Ibid. vi Peter Shand, ‘After After Painting’ in Jessica Pearless at SNO 104 Exhibition Catalogue, 2014: Jessica v

Pearless, NZ vii

The Field 1968 was an exhibition of painting and sculpture Mark Titmarsh, Expanded Painting, 2017, Bloomsbury: London, 1 (such is the pull of painting that even

viii

proponents of expanded painting describe contracted painting poetically).