Driving Through History: Driving the Future

By William Tillyer


Once painting came down from the wall its ideas were vulnerable and of course no longer considered ' painting'. They were not in the space frame of illusion which was the canvas. Out in the world they became indistinguishable from their surroundings, and were thus vulnerable to manipulation by that everyday world, where they would find greater currency and accolades in the white and black box spaces of the gallery. These ideas expressed through all manner of materials, equipment and fabrication; devised orchestrated, performed and installed, were in the outer world, occupying a real space but in a perverse way, limited by that space. These new Duchampian influenced works took centre stage and, for the viewer became 'interactive led', apart perhaps from cinematic, video, or photographic works. Now the art world took on the mantle of an industry, the closed and exclusive world of 'The Fine Arts', painting drawing and sculpture, became fractured.

Fearful Symmetries

In Kerry, as I turn to go indoors I notice the reflection of the fading sunset in the windscreen of my car, so reminiscent of Arizona that I recall a much earlier car journey in the States, driving from coast to coast Los Angeles to New York. Being at the steering wheel for long hours the windscreen, with its distant vanishing point on the road ahead, had reminded me of similar hours in the studio in front of the canvas. The drive became significant for me, since it had allowed plenty of time to ruminate on, what were then, a new group of paintings/constructions. ' The Fearful Symmetries' 1992. I recall driving the Los Angeles grid listening to a piece of music by John Adams the American composer, entitled 'Fearful Symmetries'. I also subsequently used this William Blake inspired title, which spoke to me of strong opposing yet apparently connected forces.

The drive was memorable because it allowed me to formulate a view of Art History which had a real significance for my work. Although we often think of Los Angeles as ultra modern and certainly of 'today' my visit had caused me to see it as a flat frontal place, so many buildings in the USA are frontal very 'Main Street' as in filmed Westerns. The whole place was illusory and made for effect and this was making fast connections for me in art history terms to Italy, Sienna and Florence and the paintings of the Quattrocento; where as New York, my final destination, I saw as representing the 20th century. So, as I drove on through Church and Kensett like storms, these polarities became my bookends.

A Map of Paintingds History

I was about to drive my time machine, my big Buick, my allegory, along an imaginary line, from the picture plane, at the inception of the Renaissance to the late 20th century. When I started my trans America drive this strange metaphor became stronger. If Florentine painting, or Los Angeles in my metaphor, was to be set on the picture plane of my imaginary canvas, then Seinesse painting and the Byzantine world must be set this side of it and away from the imaginary vanishing point on the canvas, since this was prior to the discovery of perspective. After all, the artist/craftsman of the 13thcentury, although not enamoured of the physical rendering of image, icon, through paint and its modelling, was expected to make his images have a physical presence by applying decoration, shaping of the support, the application of gold leaf, and even real jewels to the figure or frame.

To illustrate my painters view of Art History and clarify my view, I set out my metaphor with an illustrated graph.

This represents the canvas picture plane as a horizontal line with a curved line crossing it. The points of the curve furthest away from the horizontal i.e. the picture plane, are at the top representing a perspective vanishing point, and a movement toward illusion. The lower curve, moving away from the picture plane, is a point representing reality, non illusion, and the gallery space. On this curved line I've placed the names of various artists whose work represents a movement during the early Renaissance away from the Byzantine and Siennese view to one of greater illusion, the Florentine and Venetian worlds, and a greater understanding of the vanishing point. The downward curve has the names of artists still within the world of illusion, but through their paint show an increasing awareness of the physical. Still illusion, still a surrogate, but through the gesture of pigment and its impasto, moving the image and its rendering increasingly forward onto the picture plane, towards the gallery, toward the viewer. As the curve crosses the horizontal picture plane it carries names of those artists who now expressed their ideas through a total reality, and are strictly outside of painting. However, I include them, since it was through painting that their stance was developed. As the curve starts its return to the picture plane and of course back into the world of illusion, the names of those artists becomes more contentious, we are in the present with only history as a guide. Contention has a place at other points on my curved journey in and out of the painter's space.. I do not for instance place Caravaggio 1583-1610 at the very pinnacle of my graph, on the vanishing point, as some may. Caravaggio's understanding or use of recessional space I find for my argument to be too shallow and closed and is more akin to a latter 20thcetury use of a constructed space. Albeit that this is rendered by illusion to space and form. The dark spaces are ambiguous but serve Caravaggio. well in creating dramatic essays like 'Super at Emmaus'. This great tour de force has a box like space, only as deep as the outstretched arms of the figure at the right of the canvas. Carravagio does not care to puncture his space and send us off into a deeper 'virtual reality', nor does he care to make his paint resonate. This is theatre made still.

The Visual Continuum

During the early Renaissance in Italy and Northern Europe as with the later Renaissance, whether the painting be a portrait, a bible narrative, or an allegorical piece, the infinite space available to the painter is constantly alluded to. As in the landscape to the left and right of the Leonardo de Vinci 'Mona Lisa' portrait or his 'Holy Family With St. Anne'. And again in Girlandaio's 'Old Man and Boy', Bellini's 'Madonna of the Fields', Durer's 'Self Portrait', Piero della Francesca's 'Fredrigo da Montefeltro'. This list can go on and on, all adopt the landscape space as a backcloth and a way of sending our gaze out into infinity. Rubens particularly in his paintings 'Summer' 1618 and 'Landscape With Rainbow' 1636 opened the illusion out to even greater spaces and creates depth beyond the figurative drama of the foreground. Velazquez 1599-1660 in 'Surrender at Breda' creates a vast light filled landscape in which to set his military drama. Yet in his interior painting 'Las Meninas' this distant space is still referenced by a light filled doorway with figure, this device manages to break the dark space, and sends our gaze leaping across the foreground action to an aperture which if we were to enter, would send us full circle to the back of the canvas to meet ourselves once again looking at the painting. Velazquez also references this ',looking back' by placing a reflective mirror next to the aperture, with two figures returning our gaze. In this respect this continuum was discussed by Tim Fairfax in the notes he wrote to accompany my 'Victorian Canvas Paintings' in 1982. With these works the' Victorian Facades', of Melbourne Australia with their reflected skies and sunsets, were among so many devices I used as a means of articulating this loop system of viewer, canvas, wall, viewer. This was made possible by piercing the canvas thus bringing the gaze hard onto the wall and back. to the viewer, to the canvas, and the narrative. This all embracing system I continue to employ in my 'Encounter Works'.

As the list of artists on my graph moves closer to the picture plane and into the 20th century, Picasso Braque and Mondrian come up hard onto the picture plane and as stated Duchamp moves this side of it and into the gallery space, along with El Lissitzky 1890-1941 Van Doesburg 1883-1931 and Malevich 1878-1935 and the many artist at this time exploring a painters ideas through abstraction and three dimensional construction.

The Luminist Meets the Constructivist

For a moment in mid century America there is a pause to the movements I attempt to track. Paint becomes supreme and hovers just inside the picture plane. This is almost a recap of paintings energy and position in respect to the first half of the 20th century, and a movement back to a position on my curved line, which logically is inside the canvas picture plane.

The artists Louis, Hofmann, Pollock, De Kooning, and Still, among others, are saying, they are painters, and pure canvas painter at that, wishing to make images as physical, as real, and as analytical as the Cubists and De Sijls constructivists. To do this they would work their images through abstraction and a painted presence which endorsed the surface. They were engaged on the outward journey to the picture plane, doing everything except enter the gallery arena. They were painters, painting in a very physical way. Hofmann and Pollock in particular arriving at their stance through a need to deal with issues in European painting, and Picasso in particular. It was Pollock's wish, I suspect, to 'hold hands', with Picasso as it were. This was his driving force, his engine. In moving their paint ever closer to the picture plane Hofmann and Pollock were able to capitalise on the work of the first wave of abstract Painters, Mondrian, Kandinsky, Malevich, and the de Stijl group. After all, figuration and narrative was an encumbrance for painters wishing to express themselves through a sheer joy in paint and its gesture. The early abstract artists, succeeded in this respect, leaving the Abstract Expressionists in a unique position; with a loaded paint brush wishing only to be itself.