There is a condition in art, a condition when artists are in such a state of surrender, that they are able to get to places not available through the normal transport systems.
What are the normal transport systems?
Thought is one, planning, a program, time set aside, an idea that really needs to be expressed, discussed, making something for a show.
They’re all very well and get us by when we’re not guided by the state of surrender.
What are some examples of an artist in a state of surrender?
Locally.
Late Tony Tuckson, he was deputy director of the AGNSW. He had integrated twentieth century European innovation. He had immersed himself in Aboriginal culture. When he did his late work, there was nothing to lose.
A bit, not much, of paint on a sheet of 6 x 4 Masonite, smeared as much as painted.
All of Tuckson’s followers are accolites, designers in comparison. Yes, that’s you, sorry.
We none of us can be as loose as that again. The market can’t take too many adventurers for one. Also, it is not often that artists have so little to lose, to take so little care, to such great effect.
Sidney Nolan had nothing to lose. In love with Sunday Reid, a virtual conscientious objector, with all the guilt that brought with it in 1940. When soldiers were heroes what was he to become? To be worthy in his own mind, but to be bigger in life than his contemporaries? He made war more than he made art. He made war against the prevailing mediocrity. He shaped post nuclear reality.
He and Tony Tuckson synthesised Picasso better that anybody. In fact if you could draw a line through the old ‘evolution’ of art from classicism through impressionism and Cezanne to Cubism, you would get to early Nolan as the pointy end of the arrow. Cubism had collapsed into mannerism through its other practitioners.
There’s Adam Cullen, street wily, had his bait out for ten years before he caught the death he craved. In the process, again, when nothing is at stake, when nothing can be lost, when standards can be flaunted even if they were not entirely understood, it kind of doesn’t matter. Cullen took the utmost care to take so little.
What do we have when nothing really matters? We have what we want.
Hany Armanius thirty years ago was full of hate and fun in equal measure. He was the embodiment of rebellion against art. Everything he did eschewed the values of art and the systems that processed it. Quite quickly though, the world caught on and assimilated his thinking and you really can’t be both in and out at the same time.
There’s a limit for an appetite for end game art, even if that’s what we crave.
It’s hard to live out and maintain a state of surrender. You have to be self destructive, helps. To be at the end of one’s innings with nothing to lose is useful.
Plodders can be winners if they cover their tracks.
And there’s Emily. She more or less started painting at 80 with a golden flush every hand. She left a universe.
Even if we can’t maintain that state of terminal surrender, we still know the space. We wait for it to emerge and see it straightaway, as if it was the most obvious thing.
You just have to keep the prospect of that space alive, in your mind, and not be too tamed by the demands survival makes on us to be lame.
This state of surrender is a condition to which members of the SSS adhere as a condition of their membership.