by Natalie Bennett
There’s both irony and inevitability that my introduction to a great Australian artist, Fred Williams, should have been not during my first 25-odd years in Australia, but much later in London, today at the Tate Modern. I read there that for the art world he emerged in the 50s and 60s, but when I was at school in the 80s in Sydney the continuing cultural cringe ensured that “Art” meant long-dead white males – the European masters.
Williams had taken the inevitable path for the talented post-war Australian, coming to London to art school, and there’s one of his early works on show in the “Sign and Texture” exhibition at the Tate Modern, in which he is the dominant artist. There’s an early piece from London in 1955, “Coal Delivery”, displaying a murky, peasouper palette. Back in Australia, his “St George River” from 1960 traces of that influence remain – the richness of the brown is distinctly European.
By “Dry Creek Bed” (1977) his palette has evolved to perfectly capture the washed-out, tired tones of Australia’s ancient soils, combined with the dangerous reds of a leaping bushfire and the drained olive of a eucalypt in mid-summer. And he’s perfectly evocative of the landscape despite the abstraction of form: this semi-aerial view of in this narrow, mindlessly meandering, river through the sharply cut sandstone cliffs, exposing the bones of this ancient fragile ecology instantly took me back to a landscape of my youth – the dangerous wildlands around Fitzroy Falls just south of Sydney.
Nearby at the Tate is “Burnt landscape II”, its great sweeping horizon managing to convey the immensity of the fire’s power, its overwhelming textured blackness firmly routed in reality.
That Wlliams didn’t make it into my art curriculum might not have only been because of nationality. There’s something dangerously radical in his way of seeing the river as it really is, not in photographic form but its skeleton, its essence. Just looking at this painting took me back to hearing Tim Flannery, Australia’s foremost scientific public intellectual, saying that this fragile, damaged land could sustainable support just a few million rapacious humans.
Williams’s works occupy the central room of this small show of recent Tate acquisitions of works from 50s and 60s. He’s holding his own in some powerful company, classed here as Abstract Impressionism in the us and Art Informel in Europe. In these works, the commentary suggests: “Encrustation suggests a conscious indeterminancy between matter and image, text and sign.” That sounds rather too much like an essay for which I once got an A in postmodernism, but when you look at Shozo Shimamoto’s “Holes” 1954, begun during the American occupation when all depiction of Hiroshima was banned, it makes powerful sense. The layers of plastered newspaper have been careful textured and formed, like a traditional Japanese pot, then pierced, ripped, shattered.
Another piece from 1953 with the same title is a Rosetta stone in which the artist tries to decipher his damaged, occupied culture. It was made with a hole punch on foil swet wrappers which he pasted down and washed with black ink (the material of course of a traditional painting).
In the room on the other side of the Williamses is the Hungarian Judit Reigl’s “Mass Writing” from 1961. A dense mat of orange paint overlaid with black is cut into with single, sweeping blades, revealing the tempestuous reality beneath the calmly puddled surface. In feel if not form she anticipates Cindy Sherman.
Sign and Texture continues at the Tate Modern until October 19.
June 14, 2008 at
“during the American occupation when all depiction of Hiroshima was banned”: I’ve never come across this claim before. Do you have any source for it, or is it just an assumption?
June 14, 2008 at
That came from the Tate caption, which I would expect to be very well-researched.