Marioni // Macpherson

MARIONI

MACPHERSON

Foreword Campbell Gray .................................................................................................. 3 From MacPherson to Marioni and Back Again Rex Butler ................................................ 7 A Rectangle is a Container Ingrid Periz ........................................................................... 24 Joseph Marioni, Rose Art Museum, Brandeis University Michael Fried .......................... 30 Artists’ Biographies .......................................................................................................... 47 List of Works .................................................................................................................... 50 Authors’ Biographies ........................................................................................................ 51 Acknowledgements .......................................................................................................... 52

First published in 2013 by The University of Queensland Art Museum on the occasion of the exhibition Marioni/MacPherson, 13 April – 23 June 2013 ISBN

978-1-74272-072-2 – PAPERBACK

© 2013 The University of Queensland, the artists and authors.

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inside front cover: Joseph Marioni Blue Painting (detail) Acrylic and Linen on Stretcher 2000 no. 15 Collection of The University of Queensland, purchased 2001.

C A M P B E L L G R AY

A small number of artworks by American, Joseph Marioni and Australian, Robert MacPherson, are brought together for the purpose of detailed comparison and analysis. On the surface (a phrase that carries material and metaphoric value in this exhibition), and despite an apparently stark difference, a certain kind of compatibility can be discerned between the works. Both are intensely concerned with material properties, the physicality of the ‘mark’, its autonomy and its significance; and both artists are seeking for the essential in the work’s production and in its reception.

FOREWORD

However, beyond the surface, both artists interrogate some of the fundamental questions of art and its making: How much and what is intended and controlled? What is the relationship between image, support, context and the intellectual ‘frame’ in which it is viewed? What does the work articulate? And perhaps, what is the work?

While this is the first time that these artists have been presented together, both of these artists have been exhibited at the UQ Art Museum. Twenty years ago in 1993, Nancy Underhill curated an exhibition of MacPherson’s work entitled Robert MacPherson: A Proposition to Draw 1973–78. In 2000, David Pestorius, Brisbane curator and dealer, curated the exhibition Joseph Marioni: Four Paintings. The educational power of the comparison between them now is increased exponentially.

I wish to thank UQ Associate Professor, Rex Butler, for the exhibition’s concept and for his guidance of its curatorial development. Both Joseph Marioni and Robert MacPherson have been personally involved with the exhibition. I have had the distinct pleasure of meeting with each of the artists and I express gratitude to each one for his willingness to engage in the lengthy and frank conversations we have had. I am also grateful for the great contribution of the writers Rex Butler, Michael Fried and Ingrid Periz, the latter two having given permission for us to reprint their essays in the exhibition’s publication. In a more abstract sense, I am very grateful for the university context that makes these kinds of focussed exhibitions possible and important.

Finally, my sincere thanks go to those who have loaned artworks to the exhibition. I also express my gratitude to each member of the team here at the Art Museum, who creatively, intelligently and skilfully have worked to execute this project.

Dr Campbell Gray Director UQ Art Museum

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Joseph Marioni Blue Painting Acrylic and Linen on Stretcher 2000 no. 15 Collection of The University of Queensland, purchased 2001.

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Robert MacPherson Sarah’s Merles 1976–1977 synthetic polymer paint on canvas various collections installation view from the exhibition Robert MacPherson, Art Gallery of Western Australia, Perth, 2001 6

REX BUTLER

FROM MACPHERSON TO MARIONI AND BACK AGAIN

Like most bad things – and some good things – this show began with an act of forgetfulness. When I was originally asked by Campbell Gray and Michele Helmrich to curate an exhibition for the Art Museum, I immediately thought of doing something on the American Colour Field painter Joseph Marioni, in whose work I had been interested for a number of years. But Campbell and Michele pressed me harder. Couldn’t I incorporate some works from the University’s collection, and couldn’t I include the work of an Australian or even a Queensland artist to make the exhibition more relevant for local audiences? I then thought of the Brisbane artist Robert MacPherson, whose work I had also been following for some time. More particularly, to justify my choice, I had in mind an “opposition” between the two artists: Marioni an artist who comes after and rejects Minimalism, MacPherson an artist who starts with a certain reading of Greenbergian modernism and then turns to the readymade; Marioni an artist whose work is described as “exquisite” and in terms of its aesthetic “rightness”,1 MacPherson an artist who once in a catalogue for an exhibition at this Museum had said that he wanted to avoid beauty.

In fact, MacPherson said no such thing. I think I must have had in mind the well-known story of de Kooning describing his work as “too beautiful”, before proceeding to mess it up again. Indeed, the closest I can get to MacPherson saying something like this is his remark in the catalogue for the exhibition above that “my work is facility-ridden and not, as it appears, facility-free”.2 And what he is speaking about is a series of works on paper in which, in a self-reflexive way, he makes

drawings about the procedures of drawing. Thus, in Seven Drawings (Pen and Pencil) 1975, MacPherson systematically covers seven large sheets of drawing paper with vertical lines from left to right, more and more densely each time until the paper turns black. In Charcoal (Side and Point) 1976, he covers first one sheet with charcoal using the side of the stick and then the other with charcoal using the point. Finally, in Hand Ritual (Ricochet Group) 1977, he puts pieces of charcoal between two sheets of paper and crushes them with a hammer, gradually adding more pieces as the series goes on. The idea in these works is that, through a reduction of artistic means, we would somehow see the “essence” of drawing. By doing away with the artist’s hand and even any manual control, they would attempt to make clear the minimal conditions necessary for a drawing to be a drawing. But what MacPherson discovers is that he is unable to strip away all of the traditional qualities of drawing. No matter how limited and constrained the means, there is always something in the execution of the drawings that arises in excess of them: some style, some individuality, some idiosyncrasy of application or even arrangement that speaks of a certain subjectivity, intentionality or authorship that lies behind the work.

Of course, the artist best known for this kind of procedural reductiveness – and to whom MacPherson is often compared – is the American Minimalist painter Robert Ryman. Since the late 1950s, Ryman has systematically explored every material and technical constituent of painting: the paint, the brush, the way the paint is applied, the canvas, the frame, even the way

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the work is installed and lit within the gallery. Thus we might have a work that is made up of a series of strokes made by a brush loaded with paint, which continue until the canvas is covered (Untitled 1965). Or we might have a work that is composed of a series of horizontal bands made by pulling a paintbrush across the canvas, one beneath the other, until the bottom is reached (Windsor 1966). Or we might have a work where the canvas has been roughly cut out, with threads dangling down into the painting, and the lines and staple marks in the cloth clearly indicating the frame from which it has been taken (Untitled #1005 1962). The idea of Ryman’s work is that it would isolate and render transparent the various materials and techniques that make up the medium of painting. An initial set of decisions as to how to execute the piece is undertaken and the finished canvas would be nothing else than the playing out of this determination. The means by which the painting is made are effectively rendered visible and the intention of Ryman is to have the spectator, looking at the work, effectively retrace the logic that underpins its production.

The art critic Yve-Alain Bois speaks of the listing and adding up of the different material and technical elements with which every critic writing on Ryman must begin. He writes: An aesthetic of causality is reintroduced [in Ryman’s work], a positivist monologue that we thought modern art was supposed to have gotten rid of: A (paintbrush) + B (paint) + C (support) + D (the manner in which these are combined) give E (painting). There would be nothing left over in this equation. Given E, ABCD could be deciphered, absolutely.3

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Crucially, however, immediately after beginning with this checklist, Bois insists that it does not definitively account for Ryman’s work, that there is always something in it that is in excess of any such predictive accounting.

Bois’ example of this in his essay is Ryman’s Stretched Drawing 1963, in which Ryman first unstretches and then restretches a canvas on which he has drawn a grid in pencil, in order to bring about something that he could not have achieved in any other way. And, strangely enough, we might even begin to think of this excess as something like “beauty”. For in another essay on Ryman, Bois concludes with a certain evocation of beauty, although it is a beauty, it appears, that is always withheld, deferred, unable actually to be elaborated.

As he writes in dialogical fashion in the final words of ‘Surprise and Equanimity’: “– And what about beauty?

You didn’t speak about beauty in Ryman’s work. – That is a most important, most difficult question. But that will be for another time”.4 But in order to understand what Bois might mean by beauty as that which cannot be spoken of, we might turn to another essay by him in which he speaks of an even earlier attempt to produce a totally self-reflexive work of art, in which each element of the work would be, to use Bois’ word, “motivated”. It is an essay on a by-now fairly obscure group of Polish artists of the 1920s and ‘30s – the so-called Unists – entitled ‘Strzemiński and Kobro: In Search of Motivation’.

This group of artists, inspired by Russian Constructivism, attempted to produce entirely rational works of art, in which no element of the composition would be arbitrary or unexplained, but justified and elaborated by some other element. As Bois explains:

The ‘law of organicity’ stipulates that the work of art must be engendered from its ‘primary given’, according to its ‘first principles’… As far as painting is concerned, these ‘first principles’ belong to three different orders, all of which are indissolubly linked to the fact that ‘a picture is, or rather ought to be, a thing designed for looking at only’: flatness, deduction of forms from the shape of the frame, abolition of the figure/ground opposition.5

But, again, as Bois explains, this attempt logically to justify every element of the work inevitably fails. In the artistic equivalent of putting-a-finger-in-the-dyke, the artist would no sooner close down one perceived arbitrariness than another would open up. Or, we might even say, to close down one is to open up another; we can close down one only because we have already opened up another. Again, as Bois writes: This kind of reintroduction in extremis of the ‘arbitrary’, of the artist’s subjectivity, must have been problematic for [the Unist] Strzemiński (to repeat: it is the impossibility of eradicating entirely the ‘arbitrariness’, except if one chooses the solution of the monochromes – and maybe not even then – that is at the base of our current mourning of modernism).6

So far, we might say, so much like Ryman. In both cases, the attempt to make work that is self-justifying and self-reflexive fails. There is always something that escapes the control of the artwork, always something else that arises that is unexplained or unjustified. But the difference might be that, if for the Unists this was a failure and what led to a kind of despair, for Ryman it is the very aim or intention of the work, a failure that the artist seeks to bring about. To say this more slowly: the paradox of Ryman’s method might be that it attempts to

bring about something it cannot foresee; but it cannot do this directly, by simply giving up the attempt to control the work, but only by attempting as much as possible to control its process, knowing that something in the end will always escape it.

This is why in an excellent recent book on Ryman, Robert Ryman: Used Paint, Suzanne Perling Hudson can speak of his work in terms of that distinctively American philosophy of “pragmatism”. Pragmatism might be summarised as saying that, although we will never reach our final goal, we are always getting closer and should never give up.7 (It is perhaps for this reason also that Bois can use Ryman as a figure for the inexhaustible “mourning” of modernism, which is the refusal to give up on a certain something.8) And there is, indeed, a serene “endlessness” or, to use Bois’ word, “equanimity” about Ryman’s project, which has proceeded for some 60 years now on very meagre rations, as opposed to the short-lived Unists, for whom the impossibility of total artistic control was understood as a defeat. This “failure” is undoubtedly why one of the privileged subjects of artistic investigation throughout Ryman’s career has been the signature, as in for example such works as To Gertrud Mellon 1958 and Untitled 2000, in which the artist reproduces either his own authenticating signature or the letter “R” in enormous scale on the front of the canvas, making it the subject of the work. For the contradictory logic of the signature is like that of Ryman’s work: the signer has to try to copy or reproduce their signature, but every attempt to do so will produce something different. We are never exactly able to reproduce a

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copy of our signature, every copy is always different; but it is precisely in this “difference”, this inability to be reproduced, that the authority of the signature lies.

And this is like Ryman’s work, in which this excess or divergence we speak of is not to be arrived at directly but only indirectly, only by trying to reproduce the work, to make it a copy or logical outcome of its preceding components. And, again, it is in this unpredictable and unreproducible excess that the “beauty” of Ryman’s work is to be found.

How does all of this relate first of all to MacPherson and then to Marioni? As we have suggested, MacPherson’s work also raises the same limit to this project of selfreferentiality. The more he tries to “motivate” every aspect of his work, the more something intrudes, which is not reflective and is not to be seen in the original constituents of the work. We can see this from the very beginning of MacPherson’s career with Black White Vertical Stroke 1976, which plays out all the possible ways of applying black paint on a white surface and white paint on a black surface, or the long-running Scale from the Tool series 1976–77, in which MacPherson seeks to record all of the different ways in which paint might be applied by a paintbrush in a single vertical stroke of paint. In both cases, an incredible diversity of outcomes is produced from the simplest of opening conditions. A continual element of the arbitrary or contingent is introduced into what should be the organic or uninterrupted. We see this perhaps most clearly in the series of Sarah’s Merles 1976–77, in which MacPherson lets paint splatter from a top brushed panel, with the bottom panel originally being placed horizontally on the

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floor to collect what fell there.9 MacPherson’s point here in breaking up the original gesture or flow of the paint, and with the bottom panel having a different status from the others, is that the various elements that make up the work can be reordered – effectively like the words in a sentence – so that they can be moved around, or even, as in the Swanboro series 1976–77, arranged horizontally against the gravity of the drip and with only a hidden or cryptic relationship between panels.10 And this has the retrospective effect that even the integral fall of paint can no longer be taken for granted, but must be understood only as an effect of its organisation.

The original integral gesture has no privileged status but is henceforth merely one particular combination of elements that could always be put together another way.11 Precisely in all of this the wall between the panels, either in the studio in which the work is made or in the gallery in which it is shown, introduces the “world” into the work. It is what prevents the work entirely playing out or making clear its own procedure in an act of artistic transparency or self-reflexivity. In an uncanny kind of way, it would be at once the true indexicality of the gesture beyond any self-reflexivity and the very rule of the game, the place from where the protocols of MacPherson’s art are articulated. And the “object” begins progressively to intrude into MacPherson’s work after this moment, for example, in My Shoes are Paintings! 1982, in which he regards a pair of polished shoes as paintings, and Three Paintings 1981 and I See a Can of Paint as a Painting Unpainted 1982, in which he sees respectively a paintbrush and an unopened can of paint as paintings. Importantly, however, these readymade objects are not seen directly or do not arise

Robert MacPherson Scale from the Tool 1976–1977 synthetic polymer paint on canvas various collections installation view from the exhibition Robert MacPherson, Art Gallery of Western Australia, Perth, 2001 11

in an unmediated fashion, but only through the attempt of painting at self-definition, to include nothing outside of itself.12

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It is from this time that we see the “readymade” proper enter MacPherson’s work with, for example, the longrunning series of Frog Poems 1982–94 or the even longer-running Mayfair series of roadside signs (1993 to the present). In many readings of MacPherson’s work, the two types of work are seen as opposed: the paintings as modernist, materialist and Greenbergian and the readymades as post-modern, conceptual and Duchampian. But, in fact, the real subject or outcome of

both is the excess of, or the object brought about by, a self-referential language. For what is it exactly that we see in a series like the Frog Poems? In them we have a variety of ordinary, everyday objects of no special distinction paired with the Latin names for particular Australian frog species. Thus we might have a pink plastic lobster matched with a panel bearing the words “Litoria cloris” or a pair of leather shoes stuffed with paper matched with the words “Limnodynastes peroni”.

The work is obviously a parody on biological and more particularly zoological classification, and more generally addresses the different way names work in art and science. But how? Exactly because, as MacPherson’s

Robert MacPherson My Shoes are Paintings!! (20 Frog Poems) 1982–1988 ‘Litoria Cloris’ Metl-Stik on wood panel and plastic lobster courtesy of the artist and Yuill|Crowley, Sydney

Robert MacPherson My Shoes are Paintings!! (20 Frog Poems) 1982–1988 ‘Limnodynastes Peroni’ Metl-Stik on wood panel and black shoes courtesy of the artist and Yuill|Crowley, Sydney

more astute commentators have pointed out, despite the apparent mismatch between object and caption, a metaphor is produced. No matter how disparate the relationship between object and word, some kind of connection between them is always found. As Ingrid Periz writes in her text for the exhibition Robert MacPherson: The Described the Undescribed: Litoria cloris comprised a red plastic lobster with a signboard of the same name. Like the lobster when it is uncooked, the frog belonging to this species is green. Litoria phyllochroa, a tree-dwelling species, was suggested a little mordantly by the accompanying chain saw, and Limnodynastes peroni, literally ‘lord of the marshes’, was paired with a pair of shoes stuffed with brown paper (a domestic remedy for waterlogged footwear).13

The uncanny thing here, however, is that every such combination of object and classification would produce another metaphor. It is not that MacPherson is making any special effort to put together unexpected combinations – that would be the Surrealist unconscious or objet trouvé. Rather, what the works testify to is the power of language to bring something out of any object. And to keep on bringing out different qualities from the same object through successive combinations, as though it contained within it a potential infinity of qualities waiting to be released. We see this, for example, in MacPherson’s 17 Frog Poems (For G.N. and A.W., Who by Example Taught the Kinder Way) 1987–89, in which he lays out seventeen

identical camp stretchers, each paired with its own frog species, as though each particular combination would bring out something different in what otherwise appeared the same.

But let us try to be as clear as possible here in speaking about the relationship between the two sides of MacPherson’s practice. In the paintings, the object arises through the attempt to produce a self-referential language. The “thingness” of things is seen not directly but only through the failure of language (either verbal or artistic) to account for itself. In the readymades, it is not so much the object as something in the object that is produced through its attempted description. We might say that it is a certain quality of the thing that is seen not directly but only through language. In the first case, it is as though there is an excess of the object over language. In the second, it is as though there is an excess of language over the object. But in neither is there a direct match between the object and language.

There is always a gap between them, which produces either the object or something in the object. And in both cases it is this “excess” that means there is something in MacPherson’s work that takes it out of his control. He is subject to a language that is always producing either new things or new qualities in things. (And if in relation to his paintings we can compare MacPherson to Ryman, in relation to his readymades we might compare him to René Magritte. In Magritte’s work too, starting on the basis of a mismatch between word and object – “This is not a pipe” – there is a systematic exploration of the ability of language to bring out different qualities in objects through the power of metaphor. We only have

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to recall here the endless series of objects Magritte matched the bike with in his preliminary drawings before settling on a cigar in the finished version of his State of Grace 1959, or his vision of the object as a “cluster” of qualities, almost like a Leibnizian monad, in The Traveller 1937.)

How does all of this relate to Marioni? Marioni we might say is a painter out of time, who continues to make Colour Field painting when it appears to have been overruled by Minimalism. He makes his paintings – often incorrectly described as monochromes – by running slightly differently coloured layers of paint, initially applied by a lamb’s wool roller, down a canvas from top to bottom. Because of the force of gravity, the paint ends up slightly thinner towards the top of the canvas and collects in small pools at the bottom. In order to help the paint fall, Marioni mixes his acrylic medium in various proportions with water before adding the pigment, shaves his canvases or selects canvases with finer or coarser weaves, slightly tapers the canvas from top to bottom to counteract the paint merging towards the middle as it runs down, and bevels the lower edge of the canvas so that the drops do not so obviously hang there when they reach the bottom. As each layer runs down, Marioni subtly diverts it, either with his fingers, the handle of a brush or the roller with which he applied the paint. In this regard, he might remind us of an artist like Morris Louis, who similarly attempted to redirect his pours of coloured paint by tilting his canvas with his hands. The degree to which Marioni’s painterly interventions remain, however, depends on the viscosity of his paint and, indeed, on the number of subsequent

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layers on top of them. The effect when looked at in the right light – and the lighting of his work is a major part of Marioni’s considerations – is of a very intricate and almost imperceptible interplay between the colour or colours chosen, the degree to which we can look through one layer to the one below it, how the paint sits in relation to the canvas edge and the disposition of the various flows and bubbles visible on the surface.

Marioni started painting in the early ‘70s, and soon became aligned – lacking a receptive audience in then-contemporary America – with a group of German abstractionists who called themselves “concrete” or “radical” painters.14 Coming out of a lineage of Russian Constructivism and, to some extent, the Polish Unists, they attempted to pare back their paintings to produce a reductive, highly controlled, anti-aesthetic and we might almost say anti-visual abstraction. (Certainly, in many of their graphite-laden works the surface of the canvas is barely visible.) But as Marioni’s work developed and he no longer made paintings by simply rolling a stripe of stippled colour down an uninflected monochrome but began to work in a diverse range of colours, he moved away from this strictly materialist conception of what he was doing. Indeed, in his various writings and interviews – and Marioni is a consistent and articulate advocate for his practice – he more and more frequently began to refer to himself as a colourist. Critically, however – and here we can see the difference from MacPherson’s conception of colour as already being on a paintbrush or in an unopened can of paint – it is colour not as it exists in a jar but colour as it is seen in a painting. It would be colour, we might say, not as an idea or even a material,

Joseph Marioni Blue Painting (detail) Acrylic and Linen on Stretcher 2000 no. 19 Private collection, Brisbane.

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Joseph Marioni Green Painting (detail) Acrylic and Linen on Stretcher 2013 no. 4 Courtesy of The Painter.

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but only as it is expressed in a painting. In fact, there would not only be a difference between colour as it exists in a jar and colour as it is expressed in a painting, but there would also be a difference between the various expressions of the “same” colour in a painting. As Marioni says in an interview with the German art curator Hannelore Kersting in 1994: The problem for me is how to find the depth of expression of colour without losing the concrete reality of the painting.

The painting should reveal the full expression of the colour, but it is not the simple fact of the colour, it is how the colour functions as an image.15

All of this, however, raises a decisive – and perhaps unexpected – aspect of Marioni’s practice. It might be thought that Marioni has little or no control over the way his canvases turn out. It might be understood that he simply runs the paint down the canvas in a classic instance of process art, so that there is effectively no difference between his work and something like MacPherson’s Sarah’s Merles. And, certainly, we must admit, there is a limit to the degree of control that Marioni can exert over his work. There is a limit to the amount of time Marioni has to effect any changes in the running of the paint before it gets to the bottom of the canvas; there is a limit, depending on the viscosity of the paint and the number of layers on top of it, to the extent to which he can alter the course of the paint and have it afterwards remains fixed and visible; and there is a limit, finally, to the scale at which he can work, not only horizontally but also vertically, insofar as there is a maximum size the individual drops of paint can

attain and thus the scale of the pictorial “incident” he can impart to the canvas. And yet, despite all of this, Marioni takes total responsibility for all aspects of the work. That is to say, he both intends his work and wants to make us see that it is intended. Unlike Ryman, there is no point at which he gives up control of the work or seeks to bring about something that he cannot predict.

Unlike MacPherson, there is no sense of a language that effectively brings about an object or brings out some new quality in the object in a manner that is unexpected and potentially serendipitous.

But what does this actually mean? In what sense is intention to be understood with regards to Marioni? And in what ways does what we understand of Marioni’s intention affect how we engage with his work? Certainly, this intentionality is something that both Marioni and his critics see at stake in his work. Marioni, for instance, says in a witty, almost provocative, formulation that the favourite part of the process for him is watching the paint dry at the end and that “I control the painting with my mind”.16 In one way, of course, this idea of watching the paint dry might be understood as the painter looking on at the small and yet unforeseen changes that take place as the paint attains its final colour; but, in fact, Marioni means it to speak of the realisation of all he has planned, that this notion of the artist controlling the painting with his mind is consonant with the whole “hands off” attitude towards painting that has been evidenced throughout.17 And this attitude is echoed by Marioni’s better critics. In an important essay on his work, literary scholar Henry Staten seeks to capture the

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simultaneous absence and presence of Marioni at all stages of his practice, the fact that he at once disdains any direct self-expression and yet every aspect of the painting is intended and acknowledged by him: “So these paintings are at once full of expressive moments and also impersonal. As has been said of Shakespeare, Marioni is ‘everywhere present, but nowhere visible’”.18 And the art critic Michael Fried in a review of a Marioni retrospective grasps the antithetical, perhaps even anachronistic, aspect of Marioni’s project, which he characterises as a certain return to or reassertion of painting after or even through its erasure in the processes and procedures of Minimalism. As he writes: The great and thought-provoking surprise [Marioni’s] art has given me is not only that it transcends the previous limitations of the monochrome, but also that it is the first body of work I have seen that suggests that the Minimalist intervention may have had productive consequences for painting of the highest ambition. Simply put, the Minimalist hypostatization of objecthood, which called for and indeed presumed the surpassing of painting largely on the grounds of its manifest relationality, seems to have led in Marioni’s art to a new, more deeply founded integration of color, amateriality, and support.

But, again, what does this really mean? What is ultimately at stake in the idea that Marioni intends all of his work and not just part of it? What might Fried mean by speaking of the way that Marioni’s work comes after the “Minimalist intervention”, and that this allows a “more deeply founded” interplay of its various material constituents? We might begin by looking at the exact nature of Fried’s description of Marioni’s paintings, what he says is to be seen in them. There

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is an interplay between the physicality of the support and the materiality of the pigment that gives rise to a sense of “seamlessness” or “aesthetic harmony”, and this interplay also compels a recognition of the “separation of the elements” or the “composite nature” of the painting. In other words, Fried is suggesting, it is this seamlessness or aesthetic harmony that compels a recognition of the painting’s separateness and compositeness, almost as though these could not have been seen before. But, equally, we might contend, this seamlessness or harmony can itself be seen only through the act of recognising separateness and compositeness. Indeed, in a way – it is this we would suggest that Fried means by speaking of Marioni coming after the “Minimalist intervention” – this seamlessness or harmony is only this separateness and compositeness.

For the extraordinary thing we would say about Marioni’s work is that, for all of the critics’ attempts to describe how it appears ordered, composed and intended by the artist, there is – and there can be – no evidence for this.

Marioni does not allow himself visibly to intervene in his work or to have himself seen in it. For him, chance, contingency, the taking away of the artist’s hand and the handing over of the work to process, is the default, the de facto, state of art today after Minimalism. And yet, we would say, despite this, in fact, almost through it, Marioni wants to intend his work and to have us see that it is intended.

We might speak of a certain faith or belief here, but it can be seen only through doubt and scepticism. It is what Fried means by saying that the “literal” and “depicted” are in “total, mutually motivated attunement”

in Marioni’s work;19 but we might push this to the limit by suggesting that depicted shape – the form that the artist can be seen to be giving their work – is nothing outside of its literal shape – the physical fact of the work. Depicted shape henceforth is only literal shape.

Put simply, Marioni’s paintings are nothing outside of Minimalism, but only the place from where its literality is spoken of or recognised. In a way, Marioni remakes monochromes, and that ultra-thin space distinguishing his work from the monochrome – indicated in his paintings by the paint not quite reaching the edges of his canvas – is not so much a space allowing colour to “subsume” its container within its “expressive life” as a kind of blank space that allows their equivalence to be remarked.20 Depicted shape is not outside of literal shape, but is rather its doubling. This is the late turn that Fried’s long-running argument concerning art and objecthood has taken. But, of course, from our present point of view the past now comes into a new light. In his recent book on Caravaggio, Fried proposes a brilliant and unconventional reading of Caravaggio’s The Incredulity of St Thomas 1601–02. The usual reading, of course, is that Christ tells Thomas not to touch the wound in Christ’s side that is proof of his resurrection, but to trust the evidence of his eyes. A certain faith, as figured by sight, is to overcome doubt, as figured by touch. But in Fried’s reading, playing on the extraordinary ambiguity of Thomas’s hand in Caravaggio’s painting, which appears at once to be entering and withdrawing from Christ’s wound, it is not sight that replaces touch but sight that doubles and makes possible touch.21 Faith, in other words, is not opposed to doubt, but is the very perceiving and thinking

of doubt. And we see this also in Marioni’s own version of “Noli me tangere”, which was the title of an exhibition he held at the Art Museum of the Archdiocese of Cologne in 2010, for the true outcome of his work is not a simple immateriality, but at once an immateriality that can be seen only through the material and a materiality that can be seen only because of the immaterial.22 And, to conclude, what is this then to say of MacPherson? It is easy to suggest – and in one way it is true – that he “falls short” of Marioni. It would be as though what is at stake in MacPherson is more fully felt, more fully meant, more fully intended in Marioni. Or we could construct an opposition between the two. This would be a version of the debate between modernism and post-modernism, aesthetics and anti-aesthetics and art and anti-art that has raged over the past 40 years without producing a result. But we would argue that this is not really a debate or at least the two parties to it are not really contesting the same ground. It is true that, in some way, the “absorption” of modernist painting is an overcoming of the “theatricality” of the Minimalist object, even if in Marioni’s case it is only through a thinking of this objecthood itself. But, in another way, Minimalism is also a thinking of the conditions of possibility of absorption, the social and historical creation of a subject that seeks to be absorbed or convinced by a work of art. For Minimalism does not take it for granted that we want to be absorbed or convinced by a work of art. On the contrary, it historicises the project of modernism by putting it in its proper time and place. It does not take the aesthetic as universal or even universalisable, but rather asks what particular training and work on the self

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would be required for the subject to have an aesthetic experience. What kind of comportment or disposition would be necessary for the spectator to begin the task of responding to the “feeling” supposedly expressed in Marioni’s work?23 In this regard, the theatrical is not opposed to absorption but sets out the social and historical conditions that would allow absorption to take place.

Where do we see this in MacPherson, who of course has his own ambiguous relationship to modernism and Greenberg? (An artist statement for the 1979 Biennale of Sydney, for which he was selected, reads: “anything can be made into art/art can be made out of anything/ art can’t be made into anything/art can be made into anything/art can be made into art/art can be made out of art/anything can be made out of art…/art was invented by taste/there is no bad taste.”24) In fact, running across virtually all of MacPherson’s career – particularly as he gets older, no longer quite an artist of his time – is a whole thematics of dedication and memorialisation.

There is a series of works named after friends, both still alive and dead (Two Blacks (Norden) for M.M. 1975, 20 Frog Poems: Distant Thunder (A Memorial) for D.M. 1987–89) and for a whole range of practices and ways of life that are no longer current, many of which MacPherson engaged in while undertaking the many different jobs he held over his life either before becoming an artist or to support his art (the drovers of the Murranji series (1996–97), the painting of container ships in Scale from the Tool). There is also a number of works in which MacPherson records and celebrates obscure lexicons, associated with either a particular place or activity (the Australian rural vernacular of 14 20

Paintings (Naming) 1993–96, the dense vocabulary of Holden car aficionados in Mayfair: Thirty Five Paintings 1993–94, the intricate instructions as to how to make a good salmon sandwich in I Always Buy My Lunch at the Mayfair Bar 1983). But, in fact, behind all of these – and MacPherson makes this clear in his various statements on the subject – lies the comparison with the highly specialised vocabularies of art and art appreciation, which might be itself just another out-of-date or endangered pastime, and certainly only of interest and comprehensible to very few.25 MacPherson may have a reactive or oppositional stance to Greenberg, and perhaps his work even constitutes something of a “misreading” of Greenberg’s writings insofar as it reduces it to a series of rules or procedures for the making of art, but there is nevertheless in his work an elegiac lament for a time (and an art) now past. In some sense, MacPherson’s work still requires the modernism and aesthetics it protests against.26 But today all of this seems increasingly irrelevant or forgotten. There is no longer even the historical analysis of the spectator of Minimalism and Conceptualism, but simply the parodic replay of society in “relational aesthetics”.27 To recall what we began with here: if once we could chide ourselves for a loss of memory, today we do not even remember that we forget.

Rex Butler 1.

2.

Michael Fried, ‘Joseph Marioni, Rose Art Museum, Brandeis University’, Artforum 37(1), September 1998, p. 149. Because Fried’s review is reprinted in this catalogue, all future references are to this text, unless otherwise specified.

Robert MacPherson, in Nancy Underhill (ed.), Robert MacPherson: A Proposition to Draw 1973–78, University Art Museum, Brisbane, Queensland, 1993, np.

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Yve-Alain Bois, ‘Ryman’s Tact’, in Painting as Model, MIT Press, Cambridge, Mass., 1990, p. 216.

Yve-Alain Bois, ‘Surprise and Equanimity’, in Vittorio Colaizzi and Karsten Schubert (eds.), Robert Ryman: Critical Texts since 1967, Ridinghouse, London, 2009, p. 242.

Bois, ‘In Search of Motivation’, in Painting as Model, p. 137.

‘In Search of Motivation’, p. 143.

See Suzanne Perling Hudson, Robert Ryman: Used Paint, MIT Press, Cambridge, Mass., 2009, pp. 253–56.

Yve-Alain Bois, ‘Painting: The Task of Mourning’, in Painting as Model, pp. 231–32.

This idea of something unexpected resulting from the following of a rule is indicated by the title of MacPherson’s work, for a “merle” is a rare kind of cocker spaniel prized for its blue colouration, produced by the interbreeding of two ordinary black-coated specimens. Importantly, these “merles” cannot breed with each other, and the recessive blue gene cannot be passed on.

In the Swanboro series, the largely black panels to the left were originally painted white and then painted over (although sometimes the order is reversed). The only indication of this process is to be found in the paint-spattered panels to the right, each of which was originally mounted under one of the “monochromes” and records on its surface the particular order in which it was painted.

And, indeed, on rare occasions MacPherson has even reordered the panels, for example, in the Sarah’s Merle that he keeps at his house, where he has hung it horizontally and added panels to the left and right to fill up the wall space.

On this idea of an (artistic) language producing its own object, it is notable that MacPherson once produced works that featured paired shearers’ blankets hung next to each other, each stencilled with one word of the distinctively Australian double names that formed their title: Wagga Wagga: 2 Frog Poems for N.Y. 1992–95 and Gang Gang: 2 Frog Poems for B.N. 1992–95. Ingrid Periz writes of this series: “Hung as a diptych, the pair of blankets echoes the structure of the name to which they refer materially and nominally, while this doubling within the name authorises MacPherson’s choice of arrangement”, ‘Close Your Eyes’, in Robert MacPherson: 1975–95, National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne, 1995, np.

Ingrid Periz, ‘The Described the Undescribed’, in Robert MacPherson: The Described the Undescribed, Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney, 1994, p. 10.

See on this, for example, Joseph Marioni and Günter Umberg, ‘The Radical Place of Painting (Without Pictures)’, Kunstforum International, March/April 1987, p. 76.

‘Joseph Marioni/Hannelore Kersting: A Dialogue’, in Joseph Marioni: Painter, Städtisches Museum Abteiberg, Mönchengladbach, 1994, p. 13.

Ingrid Goetz, ‘Written Interview with Joseph Marioni’, in Monochromie Geometrie, Sammlung Goetz, Munich, 1996, p. 66.

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Marioni says in his dialogue with Kersting: “If [personal acts of selfexpression] were the painter’s only intention, why bother to become a painter or why would anyone be interested in looking at such selfindulgence?”, ‘A Dialogue’, p. 13.

Henry Staten, ‘Painting Beyond Narrative’, Kunstforum International, March/April, 1987, p. 84.

Michael Fried, Four Honest Outlaws: Sala, Ray, Marioni, Gordon, Yale University Press, New Haven, 2011, p. 159.

Fried writes in Four Honest Outlaws that the colour in Marioni “never presents itself as cut short – one’s conviction is rather of color fitting itself perfectly to its container… in effect subsuming the latter in its expressive life” (p. 159). But – dare we say it? – this seems to go against Fried’s earlier insight regarding the mutuality of the literal and the depicted in Marioni’s work, proposing in effect the final “triumph” of the depicted.

Fried writes: “Thomas himself strains forward with wide-open eyes as if to look as closely as possible at what he is himself doing and feeling, as if he cannot quite believe he is witness of his sense of touch without the further confirmation of sight, a brilliant trumping of the conventional understanding of the event [in which touch would confirm sight]”, The Moment of Caravaggio, Princeton University Press, New Jersey, 2010, p. 84.

Marioni writes in the short text ‘Painting 1993’: “If we are capable of understanding the theology of the icon, we should then be able to apply its aesthetic directly to the concept of painting as an independent identity – that is, to understand a painting as being materially embodied as a painting. The true image of a painting can only be the visual embodiment of its own material”, in Kaspar König and Hans-Ulrich Obrist (eds.), Der zebrochene Spiegel: Positionen zur Malerei, Vienna, 1993, np.

For a similar exercise in thinking the conditions of possibility of “theory”, see Ian Hunter, ‘The History of Theory’, Critical Inquiry 33, Autumn 2006.

Reproduced in Trevor Smith (ed.), Robert MacPherson, Art Gallery of Western Australia, Perth, 2001, p. 42.

MacPherson writes in a short text ‘White Angels: 8 Frog Poems’ (1994): “My milieu has taught me, as I’ve moved in and out of different strata of society from base (or so-called base) society to so-called higher levels, each level has its own jargon… this jargon I find beautifully descriptive, rich, wonderful: metaphorically, poetic”, in Robert MacPherson, p. 53.

Trevor Smith recalls MacPherson as saying that Greenberg’s theories of modernist painting are like a “wet paper bag that he remains inside, constantly poking his finger through without wanting to tear his way out”, in Robert MacPherson, p. 53. Incidentally, we might say that MacPherson sees the world through these holes or, more precisely, these holes are the objects in MacPherson’s art.

See on this Claire Bishop’s recently published Artificial Hells: Participatory Art and the Politics of Spectatorship, Verso, London, 2012.

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Robert MacPherson Scale from the Tool (Sabco) 1977 paintbrush, enamel and foil on wood panels Courtesy of the artist and Yuill|Crowley, Sydney.

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Since its first exhibition, the work of Robert MacPherson has been structured by a number of recurrent concerns.

Chief among these has been an exploration of the painterly process. MacPherson’s early work (1975–1982) focused on the discrete and specialized activities that comprise the system of painting. Attention was paid to the formal qualities of paint and surface, touch and gesture, while “painting” was examined as both noun (object) and verb (process). Much of this work exists in series as MacPherson progressed systematically through the limitations demanded by Greenbergian modernism, eschewing referentiality and the illusion of depth and exploring in turn flatness, the shape of the support and the nature of paint. Whereas others saw in Greenberg’s dictates the operation of a prescriptive law that came to assume the force of dogma, MacPherson worked through these limitations. While appearing loyal to this system, he was able to arrive at a number of conclusions that tested the system’s solipsism and made gentle fun of the moral imperative held to be at stake in painting’s historical mission. These conclusions can be expressed as follows: given the presence of paint as one of the determining conditions for painting to exist qua painting, might not paint in its most immediate form as liquid in a container be sufficient unto itself to exist as “painting”? Any and all painted surfaces can thus be viewed as a painting and all actions by which paint is applied – rolling, dripping, splashing, etc. whether random, controlled or the result of a mechanical process – equally valid as painterly activity.

Having pushed one of the so-called irreducible conditions of painting to its extreme, MacPherson questions the continued operability of the remaining one. Flatness

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and shape of the support can no longer function as determinants once the “fact of paint” is allowed its logical conclusion.

In this way, MacPherson pursues the modernist logic of reduction to a point of exhaustion. Such a process does not occur without an element of risk for, having seen an unpainted painting in a can of paint and a painterly gesture in the act of cleaning shoes, one risks losing the specificity that provided the initial object of inquiry. MacPherson has never mourned the loss.

Inasmuch as painting was valued by being the chosen term in his inquiry, it was not a privileged activity for, as his work indicates, the painterly mark-making process is indistinguishable from a number of other, less exalted activities. The emphasis on process and the use of systems as a means of generating work have consequences for the role of the artist. MacPherson posits the artist’s body as a system of determinations and limits rather than a site of spontaneous expressivity guaranteeing gestural authority. The artist’s body is no more than a tool-wielding instrument, instrumentalised by the painting process. MacPherson produced many works whose dimensions were determined by the length of his reach and the breadth of the particular brush used. Such a process restricts the element of choice, offering the canvas as a given shape that will be systematically marked or filled by the brush. While this procedure has the effect of emptying any residue of artistic volition from the painterly act, in treating the body as a rule-generating system, the figure of the artist is reinscribed physically as a relational principle

INGRID PERIZ A R E C TA N G L E I S A C O N TA I N E R

determining size. MacPherson has extended this principle of determination much further, arriving at a notion of inherency whereby artistic choices are limited by the nature of the tools at hand. (MacPherson’s paintings constantly remind us that the hand is the first tool.) This limitation of choice provides a systematic means of generating work, while the notion of inherency has been used to explore, often with some humour, the material bases of painting. MacPherson will thus exhibit brushes, whose handles have been dipped in paint as part of their process of manufacture, as paintings along with paint samples and all types of signage. Scrutinising the brush as the principal tool of the painter, he finds in microcosm the elemental world – the animal (in the bristle), vegetable (in the handle) and mineral (in the banding). The relationship of artist to brush is one of mammal to mammal, most often the pig. MacPherson makes these observations matter-of-factly with no trace of a mythologizing intent. Rather than attempt to invest in painting some legacy of spirit by way of recourse to essences, MacPherson presents this work as a slightly wry statement of fact in which the workman-like nature of painting, whether that of the artist, the ship painter or the sign writer, is shown to have its basis in shared gestures and materials.

Ingrid Periz Excerpt from “20 Frog Poems: Distant Thunder (a Memorial) for D.M.” 1987–1989, exhibition catalogue, Institute of Modern Art, Brisbane, 1989.

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Joseph Marioni Green Painting Acrylic and Linen on Stretcher 2013 no. 4 Courtesy of The Painter.

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Joseph Marioni Yellow Painting Acrylic and Linen on Stretcher 2000 no. 20 Courtesy of David Pestorius Projects, Brisbane.

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Joseph Marioni is an American painter in his midfifties who makes monochrome paintings. Until now I have never been attracted to the monochrome, which inevitably has struck me, in the many instances of it I have come across over the years, as artistically inert, or to use the language of ‘Art and Objecthood’, as merely and depressingly literal. And in fact the monochrome fully emerged as a genre of artmaking in the wake of Minimalism, as a way of not severing the final tie with painting – of not quite moving “beyond” painting into the realm of objecthood as such – while nevertheless professing allegiance to the literalist aesthetic with its sweeping deprecation of the pictorial. So it was a shock when I visited Joseph Marioni: Paintings 1970–1987, A Survey organized by Carl Belz at the Rose Art Museum at Brandeis University, and realized after a few minutes in their midst that the artist’s monochromes were paintings in the fullest and most exalted sense of the word. How could that be? How could a type of work that I considered simply a vehicle for a hackneyed theoretical/ideological stance, a stance that at its freshest I regarded as mistaken, have been made to yield paintings of beauty and power?

Much of the answer lies in Marioni’s color: for him the monochrome is precisely that, a painting of a single color, though to say this scarcely suggests the complexity of his procedures or the richness of his results. Take a recent work characteristically entitled Blue Painting, 1998, which I saw in Marioni’s New York studio while on a visit several weeks after my first encounter with his art at Brandeis. On a stretched canvas of modest dimensions (ca. 23 5/8” x 19 11/16”; 30

all his paintings are vertical in format), Marioni, using a large roller, laid down four separate waves of acrylic paint: an indathrone ground, blue-black; a layer of ultramarine, a reddish blue, thin, completely transparent, virtually substanceless; a layer of thalo blue, a greenblue, relatively thick; and finally an extremely thin layer of cobalt blue, an opaque color but at that degree of dilution rendered translucent, almost but not quite a glaze. Throughout the process the canvas was upright so that the liquid pigment, once applied, flowed toward the bottom of the picture; indeed the colored field reveals itself, when we look closely, as vertically striated, as though the sheer density – probably not the right word – of the paint layers led to a kind of internal curtaining.

(When we look even more closely, the horizontal weave of the stretched linen is also in evidence.)

In all his works of the past two decades we find that same downward flow, not only within the painted fields but also at their limits, toward the edges of the canvas, particularly the bottom and the sides, where drips are allowed to form, lower layers are permitted to show through, and an impersonal but exquisite touch makes itself felt (the effect is not unlike that in certain Chinese and Japanese ceramics). Another feature of his paintings is that the rectangular canvases are ever so slightly narrowed toward the bottom, to match the tendency of the downward-flowing paint to draw in from the sides; in the same spirit, the bottoms of the stretchers are rounded so as to avoid a build-up of paint along the lower edge of the canvas. The result of this highly refined interplay between the physicality of the support and the materiality of the pigment is double:

MICHAEL FRIED

JOSEPH MARIONI, ROSE ART MUSEUM, BRANDEIS UNIVERSITY

it gives rise to a sense of seamlessness, of aesthetic harmony, that, again, is almost Eastern in its affective resonance; at the same time, the interplay compels a recognition of the separateness of the elements or, say, of the composite nature of the painting as a whole (as in Robert Ryman’s paintings but in a wholly different spirit). Some of this can be seen in reproduction, but no illustration can begin to capture the absolute specificity, which in this case also means the transfixing intensity, of the ultimate hue, or the tensile integrity of the paint surface, or the sheer rightness of the color in relation to the size and shape of the support, or the suggestion of depth within or behind the paint surface, an effect that has become increasingly important to his art. In Blue Painting that suggestion of depth is largely the work of the layer of transparent ultramarine, which functions as a kind of “spacer” within the material substance of the colored field.

which called for and indeed presumed the surpassing of painting largely on the grounds of its manifest relationality, seems to have led in Marioni’s art to a new, more deeply founded integration of color, amateriality, and support, which is to say to an affirmation of the continued vitality of painting that has something of the character of a new beginning.

Michael Fried Originally published in Artforum 37(1), September 1998. © Artforum, September 1998, Focus Review: ‘Joseph Marioni’,

by Michael Fried.

The Rose Art Museum exhibition – not quite a full retrospective but nevertheless a compelling account of the evolution of Marioni’s art over almost thirty years – was masterfully chosen and mounted by Belz, who also contributed an acute and moving essay to the catalogue.

On the strength of that exhibition, I consider Marioni to be one of the foremost painters at work anywhere at the present, and the great and thought-provoking surprise his art has given me is not only that it transcends the previous limitations of the monochrome but also that it is the first body of work I have seen that suggests that the Minimalist intervention may have had productive consequences for painting of the highest ambition.

Simply put, the Minimalist hypostatization of objecthood,

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Joseph Marioni Red Painting Acrylic and Linen on Stretcher 2000 no. 18 Courtesy of David Pestorius Projects, Brisbane.

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Joseph Marioni Blue Painting Acrylic and Linen on Stretcher 2000 no. 19 Private collection, Brisbane.

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Robert MacPherson Hand Ritual (Strike Group) 1977 pencil on cartridge paper Collection of The University of Queensland.

Gift of Robert MacPherson, 1983.

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Robert MacPherson Hand Ritual (Ricochet Group) 1977 graphite stick on cartridge paper Collection of The University of Queensland.

Gift of Robert MacPherson, 1983.

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right: Joseph Marioni Yellow Painting (detail) Acrylic and Linen on Stretcher 2000 no. 20 Courtesy of David Pestorius Projects, Brisbane. following page: Joseph Marioni Red Painting (detail) Acrylic and Linen on Stretcher 2000 no. 18 Courtesy of David Pestorius Projects, Brisbane.

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JOSEPH MARIONI BIOGRAPHY

Born in Cincinnati, Ohio, USA in 1943, Joseph Marioni studied at the Cincinnati Art Academy (1962–66) and the San Francisco Art Institute (1966–70). Marioni cites the year 1970 as the point at which he “found his identity as a painter”.1 He has lived and worked in New York since 1972, with a studio in Tamaqua, Pennsylvania, since 2005. He exhibits his work extensively in Europe, as well as the United States. In 1997 he received the Berwanger Award, and in 2010 the Art Academy of Cincinnati presented him with a Doctor of Fine Arts Honorary degree. In 1998, the Rose Art Museum, Brandeis University, Waltham, Massachusetts, USA, held the survey exhibition Joseph Marioni – Paintings 1970–1998, and Michael Fried’s major essay on Marioni’s work appears in Fried’s book Four honest outlaws: Sala, Ray, Marioni, Gordon (New Haven & London: Yale University Press, 2011).

Recent solo exhibitions include Joseph Marioni – Paintings, Hengesbach Gallery, Berlin, Germany (2012); 90 Years of New: Eye to Eye - Joseph Marioni, The Phillips Collection, Washington D.C., USA (2011); Joseph Marioni, Wade Wilson Art, Houston, Texas, USA (2010); Liquid Light – A Sanctuary for Light, Art Unlimited Project Art/40/Basel, Basel, Switzerland, hosted by Galerie Mark Müller (2009); Joseph Marioni – Artmatters #13, The Marion Koogler McNay Art Museum (The McNay Art Museum), San Antonio, Texas, USA (2008); LIQUID LIGHT / Joseph Marioni Painter, Wade Wilson ART, Houston, Texas, USA (2007); Joseph Marioni, University Art Gallery, University of Massachusetts Dartmouth, New Bedford, Massachusetts, USA (2007); Joseph Marioni, Peter Blum Chelsea, New York, USA (2006); Joseph Marioni Paintings, Galerie Xippas, Paris, France (2005); Joseph Marioni, Larry Becker Contemporary Art, Philadelphia, USA (2004); Joseph Marioni: IRO, Amarillo Museum of Art, Amarillo, Texas, USA (2003); Joseph Marioni : Blue Paintings, Howard Yezerski Gallery, Boston, USA (2002); Joseph Marioni, Galerie Mark Müller, Zürich, Switzerland (2001) and Joseph Marioni: Four paintings, University Art Museum, The University of Queensland, Brisbane, Australia (2000).

Marioni has exhibited in numerous group exhibitions, including Farbe im Fluss/Colour in Flux, Museum Weserburg, Bremen, Germany (2012); 20 YEARS, Hengesbach Gallery, Berlin, Germany (2012); Abstract now, Berkley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive, Berkeley, California, USA (2011); The origin of space, Kunstmuseum Wolfsburg, Germany (2010); Extreme possibilities/ New modernist paradigms, The Painting Center, New York, USA (2009); There is desire left (Knock, knock), Kustmuseum Bern, Switzerland and touring Museum Wiesbaden, Germany (2008); Paragons: New abstraction from the Albright-Knox Art Gallery, Doris McCarthy Gallery, University of Toronto Scarborough, Toronto, Canada (2007); Contemporary Masterworks: St Louis Collects, Contemporary Art Museum, St Louis, Missouri, USA (2006); The Natalie and Irving Forman Collection, Albright-Knox Art Gallery, Buffalo, New York, USA (2005); Monocromos – Variaciones Sobre El Tema, Museo Nacional Centro de Arte, Reina Sofia, Madrid, Spain (2004); Seeing red, Hunter College Art Galleries, New York, USA (2003); John Zurier, Robert Ryman, Joseph Marioni: Painting, Larry Becker Contemporary Art, Philadelphia, USA (2002); Claude Monet…up to digital impressionism, Fondation Beyeler, Basel, Switzerland (2002), Gerhard Richter, Joseph Marioni, Yves Klein, Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney, Australia (2001) and Whitney Biennial 2000, Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, USA (2000).

Joseph Marioni’s paintings are held in many major public collections internationally, including Baltimore Museum of Art, Baltimore, Maryland, USA; Basel Kunstmuseum, Basel, Switzerland; Berkeley Art Museum, Berkeley, California, USA; Cincinnati Art Museum, Cincinnati, Ohio, USA; Museum of Modern Art, Vienna, Austria; Fogg Museum, Harvard Art Museums, Harvard University, Cambridge, Massachusetts, USA: Fonds National d’Art Contemporain, Paris, France; San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, San Francisco, California, USA; Städtisches Museum Abteiberg, Mönchengladbach, Germany; The University of Queensland Art Collection, Brisbane; and the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, USA. 1.

Joseph Marioni | The Painter, http://www.thepainter.net.

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Robert MacPherson 17 Frog Poems for G.N. + A.W. (Who By Example Taught The Kinder Way) 1987–1989 Installation at Yuill|Crowley, Sydney 48

ROBERT MACPHERSON BIOGRAPHY

Born in Brisbane, Queensland, Australia in 1937, Robert MacPherson continues to live and work in that city. He has exhibited since the early 1970s. MacPherson was the second artist to exhibit at Brisbane’s Institute of Modern Art in 1975, his solo exhibition held during the IMA’s official launch; he has since held ten solo exhibitions at the IMA, including a survey exhibition of his work in 1985. In 2001, the major survey exhibition Robert MacPherson was held at the Art Gallery of Western Australia, Perth, and toured to the Museum of Contemporary Art, Sydney. In 1992, MacPherson was awarded an honorary doctorate (DUniv) from Griffith University, Brisbane. In 1997, he was presented with the prestigious Emeritus Award (now known as the Laureate Award) by the Visual Arts Board of the Australia Council, the Federal Government’s arts funding and advisory body, in recognition of his significant contribution to Australian visual arts and culture.

Selected solo exhibitions include Robert MacPherson: Works from the Archive, Yuill/Crowley, Sydney (2012); Robert MacPherson, Yuill/Crowley, Sydney (2009); Mayfair: Peerless 2002–2007, Yuill/ Crowley, Sydney (2008); Popov and the Lost Constructivists 1982–2007, Institute of Modern Art (IMA), Brisbane (2007); Iconografias Metropolitanas, 25th Bienal de São Paolo, São Paolo, Brazil (2002); Robert MacPherson: Murranji at Australian Centre for Contemporary Art, Melbourne (2000); Murranji, Artspace, Sydney and touring IMA, Brisbane; John Curtin Gallery University of Technology, Perth; Experimental Art Foundation, Adelaide and the University of South Australia Art Museum, Adelaide (1998); Robert MacPherson: 1975–1995, National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne (1995); Robert MacPherson: The described the undescribed, Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney (1994), and Robert MacPherson: a proposition to draw 1973–1978, University Art Museum, Brisbane (1993).

MacPherson has exhibited extensively in group shows both in Australia and internationally. Recent group shows include 100 Years: Highlights from The University of Queensland Art Collection, The University of Queensland Art Museum, Brisbane (2010); Provisions For The Future, 9th Sharjah Biennial, Sharjah, United Arab Emirates (2009); 1+1+1=3: Robert MacPherson, Manfred Pernice, Kate ina Šedá’, Culturgest, Lisbon, Portugal (2008); Repeat that again! – The serial impulse in art since the ‘sixties, The University of Queensland Art Museum, Brisbane (2008); Contemporary Australia: Optimism, Queensland Art Gallery/ Gallery of Modern Art, Brisbane (2008–09); De Overkant Down Under, Den Haag Sculptuur 07, The Hague, The Netherlands (2007); Art, Life & Confusion, The 25th of May Museum, Belgrade, Serbia (2006); Home sweet home, works from the Peter Fay Collection, National Gallery of Australia (2004); and Conceptualism in Brisbane, Queensland Art Gallery, Brisbane (2003). In 1979 –1980 his work was included in MacPherson, Shepherdson, Staunton, University Art Museum, Brisbane and touring nationally.

Additionally, MacPherson’s work has represented in the Biennale of Sydney six times: The beauty of distance, 17th Biennale of Sydney (2010); (The world may be) Fantastic, 13th Biennale of Sydney (2002); Landfall, Ivan Dougherty Gallery, satellite exhibition, 12th Biennale of Sydney (2000); every day, 11th Biennale of Sydney (1998); The readymade boomerang: Certain relations in 20th century art, 8th Biennale of Sydney (1990), and European dialogue, 3rd Biennale of Sydney (1979).

Robert MacPherson’s art is represented in most major public collections, including Australian Stockman’s Hall of Fame and Outback Heritage Centre, Longreach, Queensland; Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney; Art Gallery of South Australia, Adelaide; Art Gallery of Western Australia, Perth; Museum of Contemporary Art Australia, Sydney; National Gallery of Australia, Canberra; National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne; Queensland Art Gallery/Gallery of Modern Art, Brisbane; and The University of Queensland Art Collection, Brisbane.

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Joseph Marioni

Robert MacPherson

Blue Painting Acrylic and Linen on Stretcher 61 x 51 cm 2000 no. 15 Collection of The University of Queensland, purchased 2001.

Swanboro II 1976 synthetic polymer paint on canvas 12 panels, each 30.5 x 30.5 cm Collection of The University of Queensland, purchased 1977.

Blue Painting Acrylic and Linen on Stretcher 60 x 50 cm 2000 no. 19 Private collection, Brisbane.

Red Painting Acrylic and Linen on Stretcher 72 x 62 cm 2000 no. 18 Courtesy of David Pestorius Projects, Brisbane.

Yellow Painting Acrylic and Linen on Stretcher 91 x 86.5 cm 2000 no. 20 Courtesy of David Pestorius Projects, Brisbane.

Green Painting Acrylic and Linen on Stretcher 120 x 124 cm 2013 no. 4 Courtesy of The Painter.

Images reproduced courtesy of The Painter and David Pestorius Projects, Brisbane.

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Scale from the Tool (Group 2) 1976-77 synthetic polymer paint on canvas three parts, each 176.5 x 10.5 cm Private collection, Sydney.

Hand Ritual (Ricochet Group) 1977 graphite stick on cartridge paper ten parts, each 56.0 x 76.5 cm Collection of The University of Queensland.

Gift of Robert MacPherson, 1983.

Hand Ritual (Strike Group) 1977 pencil on cartridge paper ten parts, each 76.5 x 56.0 cm Collection of The University of Queensland.

Gift of Robert MacPherson, 1983.

Scale from the Tool (Sabco) 1977 paintbrush, enamel and foil on wood panels overall 27.0 x 86.0 cm Courtesy of the artist and Yuill|Crowley, Sydney.

Images reproduced courtesy of the artist and Yuill|Crowley, Sydney.

AUTHORS’ BIOGRAPHIES EXHIBITION CHECKLIST

Rex Butler is Associate Professor and Reader in Art History in the School of English, Media Studies and Art History at The University of Queensland. He writes on Australian art, contemporary art and critical theory. He has written previously on Joseph Marioni in ‘The Touch Between the Optical and Material’, in Joseph Marion: Four Paintings, University Art Museum, The University of Queensland, 2000, and on Robert MacPherson in ‘Parallax View: Robert MacPherson’, Broadsheet 40(1), 2011.

Michael Fried is the J.R. Herbert Boone Professor of Humanities and the History of Art at the Johns Hopkins University, Baltimore, USA. He writes on 18th- and 19th-century French art, literature, modern art and contemporary photography. He has written reviews of the work of Joseph Marioni in Artforum 37(1), September 1998, and Artforum 45(1), September 2006.

He has a chapter on Marioni’s work in his recent book Four Honest Outlaws: Sala, Ray, Marioni, Gordon (Yale University Press, 2011).

Ingrid Periz has written extensively on Robert MacPherson and curated several exhibitions of his work, among them The Described the Undescribed (1994) at the Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney, and Murranji (1998) for Artspace, Sydney, which toured nationally. The author of the monograph Adam Cullen: Scars Last Longer (Thames & Hudson, 2004), she writes regularly about contemporary art and the art market.

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Exhibition curator

Rex Butler

Professor Alan Rix, Pro-Vice-Chancellor (Chairperson)

Authors

Rex Butler, Michael Fried and Ingrid Periz

Professor Deborah Terry, Senior Deputy Vice Chancellor

Design

Brent Wilson and Gordon Craig

Clare Pullar, Pro-Vice-Chancellor (Advancement)

Editor

Michele Helmrich

Dr Jane Wilson, Member of Senate

Photography

Carl Warner, and Tony Nathan (pp. 6,11); Shane Higson (p. 12); Fenne Hinchcliffe (p. 48)

Professor Joanne Tompkins, Head, School of English, Media Studies and Art History Louise Doyle, Director, National Portrait Gallery, Canberra

Printed by Cornerstone Press, Brisbane

Dr Campbell Gray (ex officio)

The University of Queensland Art Museum personnel:

Curator’s acknowledgements

Dr Campbell Gray, Director

I would like to thank Campbell Gray and especially Michele Helmrich for their enthusiasm for and assistance in putting on this show. I would also like to thank the artists, Joseph Marioni and Robert MacPherson (ordered only for the purposes of euphony), for their trust and goodwill. My thanks go also to Michael Fried and Ingrid Periz for allowing me to reproduce their texts, and the original publishers of those texts, Artforum and the Institute of Modern Art respectively. I’d like to thank those who have generously lent works for the exhibition, and the artists’ representative galleries, particularly Kerry Crowley of Yuill|Crowley and David Pestorius of David Pestorius Projects. Special thanks also to Charles Abdoo, The Painter’s assistant.

Finally, I would like to thank all the staff of the UQ Art Museum who have worked on the exhibition and associated publication and public programs, and those who have assisted in the conservation, installation and photography of the works of art.

Michele Helmrich, Associate Director (Curatorial) Nick Ashby, Exhibitions/Collections Assistant Gordon Craig, Exhibitions Coordinator Christian Flynn, Exhibitions/Collections Assistant Dr Allison Holland, Coordinator of Academic Relations & Lecturer Art History Brendan Irwin, Senior Personal Assistant Kath Kerswell, Collections Coordinator Samantha Littley, Curator Matt Malone, Registration Officer Sebastian Moody, Digital Communications Officer Beth Porter, Finance and Administration Coordinator Mariko Post, Visitor Services Officer Gillian Ridsdale, Curator Public Programs Vivien Thompson, Curatorial Assistant Brent Wilson, Technical Officer Exhibition Installers: Nick Ashby, Chris Bennie, Christian Flynn, Liam O’Brien, Stephen Russell

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The University of Queensland Art Museum Board:

Coordinating curator Michele Helmrich

UQ Art Museum

The University of Queensland Art Museum The James and Mary Emelia Mayne Centre The University of Queensland St Lucia Queensland 4072 Australia www.artmuseum.uq.edu.au right: Robert MacPherson Swanboro II 1976 synthetic polymer paint on canvas 12 panels, each 30.5 x 30.5 cm Collection of The University of Queensland, purchased 1977.