What APY Artists and other Indigenous Artists Give

We often use newspaper to light a fire. Greg Bearup used The Australian to light a fire, and it went off.  After a while though, it didn’t take. What he said just wasn’t true.

Just so you know, as artists, we all get help.

Sometimes, as a sculptor, I don’t touch a work until it’s finished. I haven’t lost control if I don’t make all the changes to execute it. Sometimes a suggestion made by another person will help me see the work more objectively, to lead me out of a fog I have wandered into. Assistance may offer technical skills that I lack, but need. I don’t forfeit authorship at these times. My work is always drawn from a wide catchment and grows from it. This is how art works. It’s how art is made.

It was disappointing therefore that The Australian gave space to the Bearup story. He wasted our time with notions of deceit and counterfeit when none existed.  In the process, hearts were broken. Livelihoods were threatened.  Let’s add stress to the dispossessed.

Culturally, we have such a fear of being duped, that we were initially, collectively, taken in. Even the most respected art institutions in the country drew themselves away from the support of this work. Sales stalled significantly. Exhibitions were postponed.

We are so fortunate in Australia to witness this work, drawn as it is from such a deep well of experience and history. Why would we want to reject this gift by throwing a pall over it? It expands our view that a Western perspective otherwise contracts. The views these APY and other indigenous works open us to opportunities no other culture has. These works thrill us and significantly add to what we are. They partly make us. The extraordinary privilege of shared culture should be treasured.

We, and all of the world are captivated by these works because we see in them a past that has a future, whereas our own seemingly lacks one.

We should Growup.

 

2019 Bio

This ‘Bio’ was written in 2019, just three years ago.

This is not useful as a bio, to be used professionally. The truth cannot be employed in the businesss of art. This bio may find a happy residence, application, here on the blog.

Michael Snape mostly works in sculpture. Other activities such as painting, music and writing reinforce this practice. The sculptural work is mostly in steel and is characterised by being consistently variable, from working with text, abstraction and figuration. He works for commission, is challenged by a brief, but is also assertively independent. A consistent thread is the lack of a governing aspect.

Success in one’s career depends upon providing an even consistency at a high standard. An experimental approach cannot guarantee an even outcome. Given variable parameters, failure is as likely as success. It is not that success has eluded Snape, but that Snape has eluded success. Success is the death trap for emerging, mid-career and late career artists.

Culture can never be guaranteed as a given but is something that emerges from time to time as a consequence of random collisions.

 

Sculpture Commissions

‘Public Art’, or ‘Public Sculpture’, doing ‘Sculpture Commissions’ is fraught.

Generally speaking, these activities are automatic indications of failure, or having sold out, of having compromised core values for ulterior motives or to have ben subjugated by fashion.

And it’s a good point, especially when correctly observed. Most of the work produced by these activities fails to deliver the best work by that artist. No process delivers reliably good results.

What is true elsewhere also applies here. That is, that rules are made where observations have been successfully applied. Most commissioned work extracts a diluted version of the best that an artist can produce. The argument goes that by responding to a brief, one has inevitably compromised one’s highest values. To make a work ‘safe’, it forgoes the right to be edgy, both literally and metaphorically.

I have found doing commissioned work enjoyable and productive. I have found a brief can ‘concentrate’ my voice rather than dilute it. A brief can ignite what is otherwise dormant, hidden by my usual preoccupations. Rather than suffocate, a brief is fresh air.

Just as performing live can extract the best performance by a singer, so is it true for the sculptor. I will support any process that makes me ‘shine’.

In the meantime and for the duration of my life, I shall accept the power of the prevailing taste opinions.

The opininion mongers have an important role to keep order.

Rose Nolan at Central Station

This was sent to me by J & C Harding. They are long standing occupants of the art world and have agreed for their comments on Rose Nolan’s new work at Central Station to be published here on the blog.

In line with the humour embedded in their writing below, it seems only fair to provide a platform for their considerations.....

 

The new Central Railway concourse has been opened and it’s not bad at all - but it does have the obligatory inclusion of public art - here it is -

For legibility reasons the text on the floor is reproduced on the image.

Is it just me or is this art as mental-health-therapy kitsch of a very high order - (low order actually, since it's on the floor) - part Hallmark greeting card gush, part Victorian embroidered sampler homily, part wellness industry mission statement - why not include 'do unto others as you would be done unto' and ‘brush your hair and don't forget a clean hanky' and 'have you got your ticket?' - even Rose Nolan doesn’t seem to have much confidence in the stuff - she admits that even with practice your ‘inner balance’ might only develop to a 'lesser degree' - so mind the gap...

At the new Central we’re promised another of Rose Nolan’s works later in the year - perhaps she’ll do a riff on a couple of the old classics - the sort of thing you see in coffee shops where Rose may have spent too much time - "This train is the first train of the rest of your life” or “Your train on platform 2 is what happens while you’re making other plans” - but frankly I’d rather have another bronze Queen Victoria…

Maybe the Victorian Tapestry Workshop could do a very, very big version of this - or have I gone off the rails?

Art Criticism: The Silenced Witness

Art criticism has changed over the last forty years. Previously, art criticism appeared regularly in several newspapers and magazines. The critic was esteemed and if not feared, then respected. They spoke with not only knowledge and experience, but also with a clarity and sharpness the ordinary art viewer lacked. They occupied the anteroom just outside the main theatre of art. They had a privileged view. Since that time art criticism has been replaced by art writing which is mainly promotional.

Making art is fun.

Art is the icing on the cake of life.

But it’s also a serious business.

Making art is wondering about the nature and meaning of life.

It’s an experiment, a postulation, a proposal.

Having made the work, the bold artist puts it out into the world in order for their view of the world to be assessed.

 

There are different grades of assessment, different ways to determine whether we have fulfilled our objectives as artists.

The sale of work can define whether what we’ve made is good.

The extent that a large audience is drawn to the work is another.

The critic plays a part.

It is the critic who lifts the fog off the artist’s subjectivity.

 

The role of the critic has changed over my lifetime.

The critic was mostly read in the newspaper.

The critic was fearsomely independent and unreachable.

One did not compromise the independence of the critic by having a personal relationship with them.

The artist’s determination about the work was irrelevant.

 

This independence of the critic changed with post-modernism and conceptual art. This new work had no meaning until it was explained by the artist. When art ceased to be free-standing, both metaphorically and physically, the critic was obsolete.

 

The critic now became the means of promotion, for advertising the work.

The critic became just a writer and lost the power associated with the word ‘critic’.

With relativism all the edges were now blurry. Any judgement only exposed prejudice. The critic now spoke only of the ‘perspective’ from which they looked at a work. A critic’s work in a relativist world was not now broad but only narrow.

 

We see in the dailies now therefore, art writing, as opposed to art criticism. We see art writing on the internet, which also is not ‘criticism’. Criticism requires traction and the internet is slippery. Writing about art is a trade that provides income. The critic no longer occupies the anteroom.

 

The art critic now is a function only of the publisher’s need. Because they surrendered the power of judgement, that power has been removed.

 

Critical judgement of books, films, plays, music persists.

 

It’s not all bad though. There’s a queue waiting at the empty post, pencils sharpened.

More on Art v Non-Art.


In a recent post (December 8, 2022) I discussed two ‘arts’. They were  art and ‘not-art’. 

I argued that anything that presents itself as ‘art’ by displaying features typically found there, is probably not art but only ‘bad art’. 

The only art there is, is art that does not display features of earlier art. You cannot impersonate art as if by acting it out, that you will magically come to it. 

It is more mysterious than that, more miraculous, and more difficult. 

The only art is the art from which you cannot decipher the head from the tail.

My earlier post was summarily dismissed as unsustainable and ridiculous by avid blog readers, so I wanted to post the idea again, to show the idea cannot be summarily dismissed. 

My editors here are rigorous but also open. 

It’s a threatening idea, after all. It threatens the thinking of most artists whose practice is governed by conditional thinking. 

Some art is so glorious, so irresistible, one cannot avert one’s eyes from it. Surely that would qualify, and yet,

No. 

We are too easily persuaded to be pleased or agreeable or impressed by good efforts, by the presence of coherent structure, by high craft.  

Surely we do not need to be more rigorous. 

Yes. 

It’s hard to hold the line, to not go soft and lose the track. 

You always have to start from the beginning because all progress is delusional. There is only ever one point on the map and that is the beginning.  

Only from the beginning do we have no idea where or how to proceed. 

A lack of progress might be disappointing. We would prefer to imagine a journey had taken place along the road.

Just as we cannot imagine the point from which we begin, so also must we overlook the experience we have had, as if that was a guide.  

PS. Everything that appears here on the blog is an attempt to articulate my experience.


Open Letter to NSW Department of Planning and Environment

Dear Sir/Madam,

Imagine digging up the ground and uncovering 250 years of settlement to find the tank stream, just up from Circular Quay.

Miraculously, the arched roof of the stream is intact and when that is removed, underneath is the actual original tank stream.

It's not a pipe at all, or a canal, but a creek bed, with its rocks intact, lying there as if nothing had changed above.

To add to that imagined miracle, between the rocks, a mangrove root, gleamingly alive, waiting for opportunities that may miraculously occur, to grow into the air, and water, to provide breeding grounds for fry or larvae to prosper again to keep the harbour alive.

Imagine finding that and covering it up again, because its presence may impact a glorious new financial opportunity. 

Imagine the roof was not built over the tank stream  to keep the water fresh from being fouled by the new settlers but to preserve the creek bed.

Imagine the roof was built to preserve the whole length of the creek bed. No museum could have taken such immaculate care.

Imagine this then when it was true, all of this, and it happened yesterday.

Imagine that it happened and was witnessed and was allowed to be swallowed up in all the other lost memories.

Imagine again.

Sincerely, 

Michael Snape

John Graham Memorial

The following was my contribution to the John Graham Memorial at The National Gallery.

John and his partner Deirdre and their son Walter, have been lifelong friends since John designed our house in Balmain.

When I left art school in 1972, I was fortunate to have the use of the old fish markets in Paddington as a studio. It was a vast half open area that overlooked the quarry in Cascade Street. It was the ideal studio. It was the best studio. One day, the builders for the owner arrived to occupy the space and I was completely devastated.

I was so traumatised by the loss of it, I was determined to find a place I would not lose again.

We found a bird seed factory in Balmain which was affordable.

David Earle introduced Jacqueline and me to John. David thought John could help us convert the factory into somewhere we could live.

The age in which we found ourselves then, was the age of The Revolution.

The time for change was not only a political slogan. It was a universal theme and everything we did was political before it was ‘useful’.

You would think we would outgrow such a notion of being the children of the revolution but we then became the adults of the revolution.

Many of us here today are the adults of the revolution.

We can paper over it with comfort, wealth and experience,  but it cannot be erased.                                                                                                                                                       

Our house, the house that John built, with the enormous assistance of Bruce, thank you Bruce, I never thanked you enough, became one of the hubs of the revolution.

It was uncommon then, to conceive of living in a factory. That would mean you were what you did. A home that divided work from leisure was untenable. It did not exist.

At Golden Cob, the use of a hand saw was the consequence of a lack of funds to buy a circular saw on the one hand. It was also the means of restraining the pace of construction to let the material yield its voice. There were no power tools to overwhelm the sound of discussion and laughter. The background for the contemplation of detail when needed, was silence.

There was no un-tuned radio turned right up, to drown out the screaming power tools of today’s building sites. We built before build was a noun.

We straightened nails from timber extracted from demolition sites to use again. Recycled hardwood was virtually free-wood. We grew the house.

Being that we started with a limited budget there could be no budgetary constraints. As the budget entirely disappeared, the building process became more abstract.

Those endless days only lasted seven months but the outcome of what we built, was and remains the best house in Australia.

How can that be said? Just ask everyone.

The house that John (and Bruce) built has provided Jacqueline and me with a platform on which to build our lives over nearly fifty years.

Artists are fortunate when they find the world a welcome place. The advantage we had to have a home quite young meant we have been able to commit to a life in art which is often thankle$$.

In order to keep the world alive, in order to even build on the voice you speak, is to undermine the voice with which you spoke yesterday.

The only light there is the light that emerges from darkness.

This is the nature of continuous revolution which our time advocated.

That wasn’t a gold rush of ideas out of which the Golden Cob was furnished.

That was the state of play that remains our challenge.

This recognition of John today serves to bring us back to ourselves.

Thank you.

The Flag

This letter was sent to the editor of The Sydney Morning Herald today.

Dear Editor.

Having not ceded sovereignty, the flag for Australia is the Aboriginal flag.

Whether The Voice is enshrined in the constitution or not,

There is no better way to show respect to our First Nations People

Than to adopt the Aboriginal flag as the Australian flag.

 

The values embedded in the flag

Represent the values shared across the Australian community

With respect to Country and to all living creatures on that Country.

Those values extend to every place and to every community everywhere.

 

This is their Country.

This is their flag

They have accepted our presence.

We thank them.

 

The Aboriginal Flag

Brown Furniture, Brown Sculpture

My parents living in London in 1962 found they could furnish our house with antique furniture affordably.

Our house was modest but full of quality old crafted furniture. As a child I marvelled at the elaborate carving and elegant proportions of the pieces we had.

When our family returned to Australia, the furniture came with us and my chest of drawers at home remains from that time.

My partner’s family also collected antique furniture and the austerity of the harsh buildings in which we live is softened and lifted by all these beautiful antique pieces.

I suppose it was twenty years ago that antique furniture came to be known as ‘brown furniture’. It was not seen for what it was, but for what it represented. The brown furniture was space and light consuming. It was less functional than ‘built-ins’ and new lighter equivalent pieces. It also represented a set of unsustainable values, of furniture as signifiers of class or privilege.

The end of ‘wood’, which the antique represented was disregarded by the more pressing ‘functionalist’ considerations of the times.

The range of the quality of pieces was rendered flat by all of it identified as ‘brown’. It had become affordable but this time round (about 1990) the fashion circuit, nobody wanted it.

*

In the 1970’s when steel was the material of choice for young sculptors, it was seen as a permanent material. It reflected the still certainty of the industrial age. It was durable, affordable and immediate. No secondary casting process was required. That steel might corrode over time was not evident when it first appeared as the material of choice. In that fast changing world, time did not ‘pass’ because the present was so compelling, so pervasive.

It was quite a rude awakening then that in about 1980 steel sculpture became ‘brown sculpture’. Suddenly all the steel sculptures were the same sculpture. The brown sculpture was limited by the inherent language within the material and the ‘formalist’ philosophy apparently embodied there, or so it was percieved.

The sculpture connoisseur would see through this uniformity to particular qualities of works but the shock and freshness of steel that it first emanated in the sixties and early seventies had evaporated. To overcome this ‘brown’ fatigue sculptors painted works with industrial paints. The implication was that industrial materials required industrial finishes to represent their pure nature. The painted sculptures presented themselves as equivalents to the other luxury items available to consumers, such as cars and other goods.

Paint too is a time blocker. The painted surface reflects newness and time is paint’s enemy. Sculptors started using stainless steel to overcome the ‘brown’ problem. All that glitters surely has some value, the sculptures mused. The third alternative to escape the browning of sculpture was to come indoors to avoid the outcome of being outside. The sculptures conformed to the demands of indoor living by shrinking. There is a strong movement towards ‘modesty of means’, to justify this move. The recent miniature show at Defiance Gallery is the tip of this particulat iceberg.

*

The brown furniture and the brown sculpture shared many qualities.

Initially desirable, both quickly became seen as taking up space. By 1990 space was a diminishing asset. With an increasingly mobile population, brown furniture and brown sculpture were anchors that would impede mobility and therefore progress.

Both the brown furniture and the brown sculpture were scaled to the human figure. Both depended on being inhabited by the body either literally or metaphorically.

Both the sculpture and the furniture drew light. Nether emanated it. In the age of the flickering light so much brown was shadow.

I remarked to my daughter about this brown phenomenon of sculpture and furniture. She responded, ‘You neglected the brown house you have lived in for 45 years’.

Our formative years leave a deep stain time is reluctant to shift. Are we at our best when we build upon our formative experience towards a mature language as the masters have indicated is a wise course of action?

Or should we pay heed to what others, outsiders see, to what we see, afresh?

Letter from Paul Hopmeier 'The New Gallery'

The following letter was written by Paul Hopmeier to friends about his response to the Sydney Modern. He has kindly agreed to share the letter here. Please stay posted for other reflections on The Sydney Modern.

‘The New Gallery’

This building is low-density, lots of space and little art. Art per cubic metre feels about a quarter of the old gallery. I have observed some architects who for some reason suffer from painting/sculpture envy. I think of Architecture as an entirely different discipline. Architecture has, or used to have, the role of not only lifting our spirits but fulfilling a function. However, the joke used to be that if a building didn’t have leaks, it wasn’t good architecture. There have been comparisons of the new gallery with the Opera House. Architecture usually has an interior and an exterior. The exterior of the Opera House just gets better. The interior was disturbed by political interference but I love the views looking up the stairs at the insides of the shells. The function starts with getting us to our seats, but the eminence of the building stays present here. With the new gallery on that sloping site, it can never have the exterior presence of the Opera House. Could it possibly improve with age? The spaces in the Opera house, except for the views onto the harbour, are generally functional. The new gallery has sumptuous architectural views where you might have considered places for viewing art. Maybe I am being curmudgeonly, why shouldn’t architecture and art share the space more equally?

 

Photo: Robyn Powell Davies

My first experience of ‘Democracy Curating’ was at the Pompidou in 2014, Salon hangs with framed newspapers, children’s art and Matisse all muddled together. Neither doing any of the others any favours. This is the curating style of the new gallery. Exhibitions ranging from the gaudiest popular culture to subtle inclusions of Han sculpture, Ukiyo-e woodblocks and a few very fine barks. This is how you can claim this is ‘Art for all’, but maybe it results in being for no-one in particular. The intention is blatantly to get bums on seats because that is what scores in the end if you are an administrator.

 

I started in the tank and what a wank. Theatricality is not theatre. This is a drama and humour free zone. Dada encrustations carefully designed, an oxymoron, to fit in a container when dismantled and move through the secret door to the tank on built in wheels. The lighting by its random patchiness creates a curiosity that would never exist if you could see the bloody things but in the end is just annoying. The lights run on tracks across the ceiling and are computer controlled to maintain obscurity not clarity. They come on for a very short time and only ever light part of the accretions. You never get to see the whole thing. The blurb explaining this is hilarious. This is the best part, truly fabulous as in fables, except fables have a whiff of truth to them. Remember Wittgenstein, ‘Things are what they are’, no matter how you try and sell them. 

The title is, ‘The End of Imagination’ yet the blurb says these things came from very wild imagining. If you were asked to create a monument to, ‘the end of postcolonial struggles for independence’ on the Moon in 34,340 (presumably) CE, what would you come up with? Neither this nor 500 years on Mars or wind in 7,376023 BCE when apes were around, and man was about to separate from Chimpanzees came to my mind when walking through the tank. Yes, these are all unanswerable but are these ‘sculptures’ answers to the unanswerable or is the blurb wondrous pretension? I obviously lack any poetry because rather than be made aware of the closeness of human extinction, which I think I was supposed to feel, I considered how these things were fabricated, transported from Argentina, set up here and how annoying the lighting was.

Writing

I write because I get ideas. When you take an idea into writing it travels much further than it does if you just keep thinking.

An idea then, is a starting point for writing. The object in writing is to clarify the idea. Get it out and solid.

Sometimes you get an idea and expand it into writing and it goes way away from the idea into either another idea or something else entirely.

If we can call the action of writing like walking and when we get to being really lucid in the writing the walking along becomes jogging.

When the idea doesn’t get clarified, or when the idea doesn’t change clearly, when the writing starts to skip along or dance or fly, the writing becomes poetry.

You would like, I would like for the writing to morph into poetry more often than it does because when the writing becomes poetry it seems to be able to carry much more meaning, more substance than just writing.

You want, I want the world fuller of this expanded meaning because culture grows faster with poetry than it does with prose.

Poetry allows for cultural transformation. It feeds into the collective unconscious like Seasol boosts the growth of plants more than just plain water does.

Also as a bonus but not a primary motivation is that when the writing does take off into something else it promotes the release of chemicals in the brain which causes pleasure for the writer.

Poetry can release endorphins or whatever they are and also, in my case, I get to have a sense of completion, fulfilment, identity. This feeling allows me to get to sleep quicker.

 Note: Sometimes you have to get to the end of reading before you know what the thing you just read is.

Annie's Wearable Landscapes

When Annie sent this image of her recent creation, I asked that she wear it to my opening at Australian Galleries.

Sometimes when we find our voice it is a collective undercurrent as much as a personal one.

Annie attributes my encouragement to the production of this series of worn landscapes, but she was unstoppable anyway.

They were beautifully presented at a gala event in her home by her and her extended family.

I wrote this piece below, which I read at the event.

Annie is a resident of heaven on earth.

That earth is not heaven is by the by. When you are by nature heaven bound, as Annie is, no other destination is possible.

And so we find ourselves here today in a slice of Annie’s heaven she is generous enough to share.

That earth should position itself to be a more complex place is of no account.

That we should find ourselves here tonight proves that too many glimmers make the idea of hope unnecessary.

Annie doesn’t want to sell any of these works, which would be a negative consequence of exhibiting them.

We are too privileged tonight. Some further exhibition is necessary to share what we have enjoyed.

How we best manifest ourselves is an eternal conundrum, as it should be!

Art v Not-Art : A Late Modern War Cry

A Draft, for publication in an art journal.

If you don’t keep interrogating what art is, if you just make art as if there is such a thing, then you will always make ‘not- art’.

If you think you can make ’art’ and then sell it as if there is some imbued value in your considerations in making it, then you’re wrong.

There is no such thing as ‘art’ and that means that everything shown, sold or not sold that has masqueraded as ‘art’ is not art.

It’s not bad art. It’s just ‘not-art’. There’s art and ‘not-art’.

Such a notion does not serve the art industry that thrives on ‘not-art’. The art industry is not obliged to question what art is, if, in the process of asking, it undermines its foundations.

Art is always an inconvenient truth because it undermines everything because that’s what art does!

‘Art’ is that which the artist retrieves from darkness, which was not previously visible.

There used to be scouts who would spot art as it emerged from the dark, to confirm it was real. There were astute collectors who were themselves half steeped in darkness to qualify. There were curators, trained in the interpretation of heritage material to be Johnnies on the spot.

And there were the critics.

Historically, when newspapers were widely read, the art critic was feared and loved in equal measure. They were necessarily solitary in their lives and in their profession. They were even lonely to guard against compromise, against the prospect of favours ill- dispensed.

Now, they are a side dish.

And there was the journal, which promotes art and artists and that is good and necessary, but it needs to be hot as well, too hot to casually pick up and flick through, while the flicker seeks distraction. 

Like art does, the journal needs to interrogate itself as it does here, by publishing this.

The heat this short piece brings makes the paper of the magazine hot and all the other articles here sheepish.

Please watch this space for further deliberations on Art v Not Art.

 

 

Open letter to John McDonald. Art Critic. Sydney Morning Herald

Dear John,

An art critic has a responsibility to make an account of the visual arts made in the city or state in which the newspaper for which they write appears.

A good critic applies the highest standards to assess the art they encounter. A good critic persists with this even in the face of the futility of that endeavour.

A good critic applies rigorous standards to see through prevailing fashions to reveal what is more enduring than fleeting.

A good critic does not have a disclosure statement at the end of the review to mark a lack of impartiality. Impartiality and art criticism go hand in hand.

We know from all of your past writing, that you are ambivalent to these grand public art events both here and overseas. You have ‘declared’ your ambivalence and yet, you can also not resist attending these events upon invitation. When you are enthusiastic about aspects of these shows, that enthusiasm seems often forced or obligatory on your part and is not in line with your previously expressed values.

As a reader, when I read these offshore reviews I get a sense of where you are headed from the first paragraphs, and that with each subsequent paragraph the text becomes more like wallpaper than newspaper. This can have a pleasing hypnotic effect but ultimately leaves the reader undernourished.

Sometimes I get a sense of the fuzz induced in your thinking by having had to travel so far to see the show. I can hear the drone of the jet engines echoing in your ears as you plod through the art halls of wherever you happen to end up.

It’s the editors! They send me. I don’t really want to go, I hear you protest.

Perhaps this is a letter to the editor as much as it is to yourself.

As I see it, the other critics at The Sydney Morning Herald better serve their brief. The theatre critics review local theatrical productions. Classical music, jazz, pop all have reviewers that reflect on local productions. A movie critic for example will not review a movie screened where it cannot be seen.

The community benefits from a regular critical discourse about what is being shown in the galleries. The absence of a regular forum might suggest little work warrants critical attention however, quality is even between the arts and the other arts reviews pages are bulging.

It is extraordinary to me John, that I would be the first to articulate these concerns. There would be others, more thoughtful and articulate than I am, to present a similar view.

There would be a queue jostling to mount a sustained argument. All those graduates from the fine arts departments must be champing at the bit to knock you off your perch and yet are strangely mute.

Apart from the reduced carbon footprint from less travel, your accounts of what happens here is more profound, more needed and much missed!

Yours sincerely,

Michael Snape

Silence on The Blog

When I go quiet here, on the blog, it’s a good thing.

A lot of thinking, crafted here, is ok, occasionally insightful, but mostly it’s chatter, when I would do better talking materially, making material prose, making material poetry.

Quiet here, on the blog speaks of noise elsewhere. A silent blog speaks loudly. My silence here is elsewhere noisy with hammering, chiselling, sawing, thinking out loud with machinery.

This silence here is a pregnant pause. I am busting with a big litter of pups that will bark and scramble for attention when they come.

This silence is the hint of light before dawn when the birds think they have the stage alone.

This silence is the end of the music, or is it, and you clap and the music starts again?

When does the silence stop? It stops when anticipation is exhausted, when we are exhausted from false hope.

Silence is never tenured.

 

 

(ME)

‘ME” 1980

We are not accountable for the things we do.

If you step out you suffer the consequences whether what you do is endorsed or not. Mistakes and triumphs sit side by side and are weighed against each other like profit and loss on the ledger.

At the end of life and afterwards, judgements can be made to determine the merit of contributions made.

‘(Me)’ was made in 1980 when I was 30 and full of confidence.

The making of ‘(Me)’ overlapped a new redundancy of authorship and a condition that predicted ‘chronic fatigue’ which was endemic in the early eighties, which was known as ME.

‘Then’, was just as confusing as ‘now’ has become. Where once the individual held the power to speak on behalf of the broader community, that notion needed to be upended. The ‘author’ now needed to step aside, to clear the air, to leave space for more universal, less subjective themes a visible author might impose.

The word ‘me’ in the sculpture was surrounded with shameful brackets, with the word also underlined and the whole sculpture painted red. To accentuate these features, the sculpture was also cumbersome. It was hard to lug around, a burden more than a gift to the world. I was happy to surrender, what not quite ready to hand over my metaphorical pen. Also, at this time I was inspired a work by Colin McCahon called ‘I Am’ or ‘1 am’ .

My current perspective sees this work as ‘clunky’. It fails to find purchase with ‘sculptural values’ and any idea is only as good as it serves to articulate a ‘sculptural’ voice, which it doesn’t appear to do here.

We are not accountable for the things we do, so I will leave for later on to make the final call.

This photo was taken by ……. and shows ‘(ME)’ being moved to its above site. The photographer’s keen eye has observed how well the work stands out against the white truck and employs the crane to magnify its voice.

Leo Loomans, Sculptor

Leo Loomans is a graduate of The National Art School sculpture department from the late 1980’s. His work is a living extension of that tradition. His work employs the values promoted at the school. His unique experience brings life to that voice.

 Of the staff Leo encountered at the school, Ian McKay had the greatest influence. Ian was determined the innate qualities in the raw material provided a sculptural language to generate the deepest meaning. Leaving oneself out of the picture ironically provided the best opportunities for expression. Be open, be surprised, be prepared to have your expectations and desires upended. One’s voice came from without.

Leo’s curiosity about an alternative position is necessarily absent, to bring strength to that position. His alertness, excitability and sensitivity could find no better application.

Leo, without intending to be or desires to be, is pure Sydney School of Sculpture.

His work is rough and unglamorous. It is both funny and serious. It is modest, in scale and intent. It catches and a-braids the landscape’s light. It is thorny and sings more crow than swallow.

Leo is alive, or ‘alert’ to opportunities as they arise. Out of chaos harmony rises supreme.

Leo’s commitment and focus is second to none. His life is a privilege of sculpture without the distractions of ease, comfort and mediocrity. He is an old-fashioned artist. The notion of ‘garret’ was deemed quaint and irrelevant in the age of ‘an informed and sophisticated art audience’. This is where Leo lives.

Having taught Leo for several years at The National Art School, I am afraid to say I left no mark on his practice.

It remains to be seen whether the purity of Leo’s approach was the ultimately more fruitful path or whether my agnosticism opened other opportunities.

The Sydney School of Sculpture is good when exponents are loyal to its principles.

As Ian was fond of repeating, ‘sculpture is slow’. It moves beyond the needs and desires of individuals.

Leo seemed forever at the beginning of something but suddenly we are witnessing a sculptor with a voice and maturity worthy of attention. His upcoming exhibition at The Drill Hall Gallery in Canberra is timely and well deserved.

‘Cooperative Atmospheres’ Leo Loomans

‘Culture Traps’ 2022 Leo Loomans