What of machines?
Catalogue Essay by Imogen Dixon-Smith, 2023
…art is something that gives you something that you need for your life.
…art is something that makes you breathe with a different kind of happiness.
Anni Albers, 1968 (1)
The thought that a computer might know us better than we know ourselves sounds like a hard one to swallow. It sounds like a plot to a psychological thriller. It sounds like a goal that should be impossible. And if not impossible, surely at least off-limits. But for a sci-fi-turned-plausible trope, in some contexts it actually enthrals us. It grabs on to our attention and doesn’t let go.
Take Tiktok as an example. While people across the world were locked down and trying to maintain a sense of self-worth by baking bread, they also found increasing solace on their screens with apps that simulated the feeling of belonging to a community, despite being physically isolated from each other. Boasting 1.2 billion monthly active users by the end of 2021, with 90% using the app daily, Tiktok saw a meteoric rise over this unprecedented blip in world history. One cult corner of Tiktok which saw a significant uptick in engagement was the women-loving-women community.(2) Women who previously identified as straight were starting to be fed more and more lesbian content. Lingering on a thirst trap or a montage of a loved up queer couple for one second too long led to an influx of videos breaking down the signs that you might in fact be attracted to women. Then these women started contributing their own content, confessing that it seemed Tiktok had alerted them to an inner truth that they hadn’t yet considered themselves. And they were more than happy to embrace, accept and even start celebrating it on the app.
Even though the parameters of the algorithm that dictate what content is fed to us is still considered a (proprietary) mystery, common sense suggests that the equation involves action plus duration. The time taken to perform the simple gesture of swiping your thumb upwards across the screen to signal you are ready to move to the next video provides a key to your likes and dislikes, and the rapid fire of videos become more and more targeted until our attention is fully absorbed in content that is highly specific and highly addictive.
Tony Curran’s paintings are brimming with the remnants of swipes, taps and flicks, or what he terms the ‘digital wiggle’. Starting with a unique set of parameters for each generation of code, Curran conjures a coalescence of aesthetic outcomes in the programmatic domain of his computer. He then performs a process of translation to express these spawned gestures onto the canvas. After working in the collaborative environment of print workshops including Megalo and Cicada Press, Curran has been encouraged to think closely about this process of translation. The need in printmaking to anticipate a finished work and break down each element into the composite colour separations that will be printed from different plates underscores the layered, cumulative nature of the technologically driven gesture. Each canvas is driven by a
certain set of parameters chosen by the artist. It therefore takes on a personality of its own, in the same way the durational dance of our fingers flitting across our screens encompass some distilled form of our inner psyche when mediated through an app’s algorithm.
Curran’s interest in the attention grabbing capacity of social media commenced during the 2016 US election, when Donald Trump mobilised these tactics to polarise voters to his great advantage. The real and immense political repercussions of this digital manipulation are undeniable and set the tone for meaningful engagement with the issue. Interestingly, Curran’s immersion in new ways of making has somewhat redirected the development of his practice and brought about less of an antagonistic, deconstructive approach to the algorithm and its use/abuse. Rather, the mental work required to think through the marriage of instruction, operation, composition, aesthetic harmony and meaning has triggered a desire to question what it is we actually want from art that embraces the dominant language of our time. He continues to drill down into the casual and more insidious effects of algorithms that lull us into a continuous scroll, but instead of simply revealing the negative, Curran starts to consider productive solutions—an antidote, if you will.
The proficient interplay of form, colour and translucency resulting from his material and process driven reflections summon in his paintings the movement they so aptly reference. Extending his medium specific repertoire again and turning back to the screen as his canvas, Curran presents his Chromatic Attention Machines. These works jitter away, generating new compositions in real time, which exist only in the glitch of a moment, and then continue on according to an underlying coded design. Fundamental to our experience of the work is the exacted jitter rate set by the artist. Digital wiggles squirm and jolt like tiny organisms under a microscope. Their speed is absorbing, calculated by Curran to mimic the mesmerising spell of a crackling fire. There seems to be something fundamental, almost primal, about this steady yet staccato action, something deeply connected to creative forces that take us into a mindful space. Can art then use the language of code to help undercut its perceived dangers?
The twentieth century avant-garde brought to us the idea that art could serve a function beyond mere decoration. It could be more than a show of wealth or power. It could embrace new technology and materials, understand them, and put them to use. This project may have been lofty and utopian, but it has continued to reverberate through the canon. As contexts shift and technologies evolve, artists face the same question armed with new tools and new concerns – how do they create art with a purpose, and what do they believe that purpose should be?
On a fundamental level, the objective of the internet is to make information widely accessible and open up channels for communication on a scale that is both unprecedented and unrestricted. But like any technology born from and in to capitalism, its existence rests on its commercial potential. What follows is a constant drive to convince us that code-base technology is central and essential to contemporary life. Tony Curran’s practice starts with the acceptance that code-based technologies are the dominant machinery of the day and, by harnessing their fundamental materiality, he starts to unpick the social and economic hold they have on us. His work considers ways to use the aesthetic outcomes of code to provide a space that helps to open up
our minds rather than shut them down—our peripheries are clear and ready for contemplation, no longer subject to the narrow tunnel vision of echo chambers.
Imogen Dixon-Smith.
Kenneth E. Tyler Curator of International Prints and Drawings, National Gallery of Australia, Canberra
Anni Albers, ‘Oral history interview with Anni Albers, 1968, July 5,’ Smithsonian Archives of American Art, https://www.aaa.si.edu/collections/interviews/oral-history-interview-anni-albers-12134
Julia Naftulin, ‘TikTok’s algorithm is making women who’ve only dated men realise they’re queer,’ Insider, 23 March 2022, https://www.insider.com/tiktok-lesbians-queer-women-coming-out-algorithm-why-2022-3
Attention Seeking Machines
Catalogue Essay by Emerson Radisich, 2021
Everyone needs attention. In 1943 the psychologist Abraham Maslow positioned belonging, defined as ‘positive attention from those you know well’, third in his famous hierarchy of needs. Topped only by physical safety and physiological needs, social needs and the desire for attention are hugely impactful to human life. Attention provides us with a sense of place, connection and community, while making significant contributions to our happiness. The catch however is that humans also hold the power over their own attention, deciding where or to whom to direct theirs, placing them in a position that is at once vulnerable and powerful.
Currently we are in the third industrial revolution and arguably the most important period in the information era since Johannes Gutenberg’s invention of the printing press in the early 15th century. Shoshana Zuboff, Harvard Business School’s first female professor, claims in Surveillance Capitalism that our attention is paramount and might be being used against us. As we are vying for attention ourselves, so are tech companies. Zuboff states that multinational corporations such as Facebook harvest and sell the attention of 1.4 billion people every day through devices that ‘claim human experience as a free raw material into behavioural data’.
Computers and digital businesses then, much like humans, rely on attention. They captivate our attention, rely on improvements made by assessing the processes which capture or lose our focus, and in many commercial circumstances, are being used for the profit of corporations at the expense of users. In addition, as more and more companies join the digital market, competition becomes fierce and methods are increasingly cunning in their design to capture and hold the attention of their users.
Colour Separations, Tony Curran’s latest body of work, examines the capability printmakers have to create digitally generated false impressions – in other words, the dubious truthfulness of printmakers and their ability to convey the language of computers. These false impressions are a consistent trope in Curran’s work: human interaction with facets of the digital realm.
The etching Growth Potential #1, which marks the beginning of this series, came about during a residency at the Wagga Wagga Art Gallery. Curran was invited to draw portraits of gallery visitors on an iPad, where one sitter, a baby who was around one-year old, was handed a mobile phone by their mother to keep them occupied, still and content while Curran drew. The experience of sitting in front of an infant unable to speak but able to become entirely engrossed in the device they held provoked reflection around the digital language and our devices’ ability to control emotions. Titled Attention Machines, the works in Colour Separations explore this concept through colour, rigidity, form and placement in Curran’s familiar visual language. This idiom captures the emotions generated by various digital pieces of stimulation and, in turn, creates a rudimentary analogue roadmap of its process.
Over the past decade Curran’s practice has examined different intersections between digital artmaking, physical artmaking and the emotions generated when imagery reminiscent of the digital experience is translated into a physical format. For me, Tony’s work playfully evokes the fable of the blind men describing an elephant. You see a line or shape that possibly reminds you of a single swipe on a touch-screen device, however, you’re never presented with its full context. Curran transmogrifies his art through decontextualization and abstraction, giving one the feeling of familiarity and understanding, yet taking away viewers’ ability to fully grasp the whole picture. As if we’re supposed to deduce the entire elephant when only able to touch a hoof, tail or trunk.
Colour Separations presents works reminiscent of the patterns created when swiping or navigating touch-screen devices, presented digitally through rendered abstractions in RGB colourations and two emotions: hot and cold. These aesthetic motifs, which Curran describes as colours, wiggles and blobs, serve to represent digital culture in a simplistic visual form. The works utilise an entirely RGB colour palette, the building blocks of all digital colour. This facilitates the potential for capturing our attention either by hot excitement or by cool relaxation, similar to the colours and frequencies that occur on popular applications vying to immerse us.
These dopamine-driven feedback colours that Curran references are categorised by Tristan Harris, former product developer & design ethicist at Google, as a reinforcing weapon in the arsenal of companies that strive to keep users on their platforms. Likened to a slot machine, bright, red tri-colour patterns excite the brain and blue dulcet colourations make users feel calm, relaxed and secure. These trigger a form of addiction or reliance on their consistent and predictable emotional reactions. Curran’s work asks us to question whether this addiction is benign, or, as Shoshana Zuboff would suggest, negatively altering. If we are attracted or emotionally responsive to Curran’s paintings, which hold no faithful visual representation or context, it confirms the latter through our conditioning of the stimulus he evokes.
Curran has explored the feeling that digital stimulation provokes in a number of past exhibitions, including LOOP in 2017 at galerie pompom. There, from digitally drawn portraits he selected brushstroke data which were then abstracted and used as the building blocks of physical oil paintings. The result was physical images that looked digital; familiar yet unrecognisable. The Attention Machines work in reverse. These artworks carry the physical notions of touch and sound but combine the colours and locations of digital excitement as if they were in a phone, app or computer.
Colour Separations translates Curran’s digital language into the medium of print. The exhibition showcases works made in collaboration with etchings produced collaboratively with Cicada Press at UNSW, lithographs made with VCA Editions in Melbourne and screen-prints and etchings made during an artist residency at Megalo Print Studio in Canberra.
Curran’s collaborative approach draws from the legacy of Tyler Graphics and the 1960s context of photorealism where artists such as Chuck Close developed quasi-abstract artworks taken from photographic imagery through systematic grid processes. Limited to RGB colours, Curran’s screen prints and experimental lithographs showcase the contemporary outcomes of printmaking through etching, lithography and screen-printing, seeking to assess the potentials and limitations of each of these traditional methods of reproduction.
1. Maslow, A. H. ‘A Theory of Human Motivation’, 1943. Psychological Review, 50, 430 – 437.
2. Zuboff, S. The age of surveillance capitalism: The fight for a human future at the new frontier of power, 2015. Cambridge University Press.
Solastalgia: a review
For many of us, the 2019-20 summer marked a turning point for our awareness of climate change. Canberra, where I live, was cloaked in smoke for most of December and January. Over the Christmas period, my partner and I existed in a perpetual crepuscular gloom, unable to step outside. This, combined with the heat, left us wondering whether we will be able to continue living in Australia.
Australian environmental philosopher Glenn Albrecht has coined the phrase ‘solastalgia’ to describe the homesickness brought about by environmental destruction, particularly climate change, that is a legacy of the Anthropocene. The term Anthropocene denotes the way humans have completely colonised the earth, leaving the marks of industry everywhere in the form of contaminated soil and waterways, atmospheric pollution, biological degradation and changed weather patterns. Albrecht contrasts solastalgia with ‘nostalgia’, the original definition of which referred to homesickness, which could be cured by returning home. With solastalgia, a return home is not possible. Instead, we have to radically reorient our way of life to transform the Anthropocene into what Albrecht terms the ‘symbiocene’: a new period of human history which “has its origins in the idea of the companionship of life” and “offers the possibility of complete reintegration of the human body, psyche, and culture with the rest of life.”
Artists play a critical role in imagining this new world into being. In a prescient programming decision taken in the middle of 2019, Tuggeranong Arts Centre, in Canberra’s south, made solastalgia its theme for 2020. The first three exhibitions on show are bushfire photos by SMH photographer Nick Moir, landscape paintings by Tony Curran and Waratah Lahy and a video work by Indigenous artist Hannah Bronte.
Moir has been photographing fires and natural phenomena for most of his 25-year career. The pictures on show were taken throughout the recent national bushfire emergency and capture the destruction in places including the Blue Mountains, Bundanoon and Green Wattle Creek. They are eerie and exude such fierce orange light you can almost feel heat radiating from them. One shows a rowboat burning; another, a group of firefighters under ember attack; others capture the behaviour and weather systems of the fires, including a flammagenitus cloud.
One day in early February when the fire in Namadgi National Park was threatening to encroach on the ACT’s southern suburbs, it gave off a picturesque plume of purple smoke, with a slither of orange sky visible between it and the horizon. Canberrans flocked to photograph the beauty that fires exude when you’re observing them from a distance. Many parked on the sides of main roads to snap away with their smart phones. Some, criticised by police as ’disaster tourists’, went as close as they could to the fire zone. At the time I was panicking about the possibility of falling embers and was consumed with disbelief and irritation at the number of cars pulled over, the glow of mobile phones visible at the windows.
So, when I viewed Moir’s photographs, I was initially torn. Was he unnecessarily putting himself or fire crews at risk or glamourising the disaster? When I considered his images in light of Albrecht’s concept of solastalgia, however, I came to see them as an essential record of the effects of climate change. The photo of the burning boat, in particular, is iconic of the crisis defining our historical moment.
The work by Lahy and Curran remind us where can redirect our energy in this time of crisis. Lahy’s work centres on everyday magic, drawing our attention to the objects and experiences that are hidden in plain sight. Her paintings of houses are recognisably Canberran; boxy, brick veneer dwellings with a front window granting the outsider a view into someone else’s living room. These three bedroom-one-bathroom affairs are one of the things I loved about Canberra when I moved here from Perth, where the McMansion is ubiquitous. They represent a time when life was less explicitly consumerist, and children could play outside without being overcome by bushfire smoke.
Other paintings more overtly illustrate the effects of climate change, including Playing In the Apocalypse, which depicts a small child kicking a soccer ball against the backdrop of a red sky. On previous visits to and from the Arts Centre, I had witnessed children at cricket practice in the nearby playing fields. Such scenes had cheered me, evoking childhood innocence and the comfort of domestic routine and the familiar, known world. But that red glow does not depict an ordinary sunset, and this summer, many children were unable to play outside.
Lahy also exhibited light boxes inspired by nineteenth century ‘magic lanterns;’ small wooden boxes each framing an illuminated painting of a house or front garden. I was drawn to these miniature pockets of light; up close the cosiness gives way to an uncanny evocation of a disappearing way of life. I used to know this place, I thought to myself as I made my way around the exhibition.
Curran’s work, grounded in algorithmic techniques, is popping with colour. He often works with red, blue and green, the colours that make up pixels. This is a link with Curran’s work more broadly, in which he seeks to draw attention to the ways in which our attention has been colonised by technology and by capitalism. His work, including the aptly named Horizontal Attention Machine, draw attention to the way technology and devices limit, rather than expand, the possibilities for living. A number of his landscapes deal with the transition of light and colour across gradients, which bring to my mind dawn and dusk, also periods of transition and reflection.
The idea of the archive is also present. In previous portrait work Curran has undertaken using an iPad, the software has recorded his brushstrokes, allowing the work to be reconstructed. Similarly, in the solastalgia exhibition, digital works shown on iPads rearrange themselves, conveying the idea of a landscape in flux. While Moir’s photographs document the destruction that characterises the Anthropocene, Curran’s work prompts us to imagine new possibilities.
Bronte’s video work, Umma’s Tongue Molten at 6000°, is modelled on music videos and references hip hop culture in its contemplation of the themes of retribution and atonement. Lyrics are performed by women of Pacific, Aboriginal and African descent, and explicitly link the impacts of colonisation on women of colour with our collective assault against the earth, personified as mother nature. The women performing the lyrics are superimposed over diverse backgrounds that show the natural environment, a burning city, rubble, and a pit mine. Unlike some of Bronte’s other works, such as Heala (2018), which portrays the innate healing powers of women, Umma’s Tongue explicitly suggests that a revolution is needed; while our earth mother may have given us everything we need, her ‘own children are the curse’ and not much is left ‘once you’ve devoured your mother.’
The works on show document the impact of climate change and challenge distinctions between the categories of natural and man-made. Taking the concept of the Anthropocene to its logical conclusion, we should no longer apply the term natural disaster to bushfires. Along with a framework for thinking about how we might create the symbiocene, the exhibition also provides a space for the community to grieve. In an era when paying attention is a political act, it also reminds us that we can work to create a better world.
pine | copper | lime
Leaving the Body
Catalogue Essay by Gregory Hodge, 2017
The first time I saw the work of Tony Curran he was the Visiting Artist in the painting department at the Australian National University in 2015. In a light-filled studio, he was working on a portrait of Dr Doris Mcllwain. The painting’s composition responded directly to a digital drawing that was made on an iPad and positioned next to the easel. It was a split portrait. The subject appeared as a central figure superimposed over a loosely described interior and again, like an apparition, in the bottom right edge corner. A series of overlapping shapes, varying in scale and painted with a flat chromatic intensity, suggested facial features, limbs, and torsos while also appearing to have just flown off the body to surround it like a pulsing aura.
Curran’s recent work includes paintings, animations, drawings, and screen-prints which have evolved out of his early investigations into portraiture. He continues to develop and expand his complex visual language that traverses between representation and abstraction: conflating the relationship between technology and the handmade. Imagery from previous digital animations morph and mutate into the new paintings, drawings and prints in a loopy rhythmical interplay between the tangible and the immaterial.
A recent digital animation, The Unconscious is a Rectangle (2015-ongoing) has become an expanding digital database of over two thousand individual shapes and gestures, extracted from his previous digital portraits and figure studies, that are then transformed into a looped animation. Curran has coded the software to select and insert previous marks randomly into the database in seemingly infinite variations, eliminating any decision making in the order of each frame. It acts as an archive of source material for recent paintings, drawings and screen-prints. Compositions are developed either from a single frame of the animation or by extracting a number of elements from various points in its duration. Viewing this animation for any length of time gives some insight into the rich visual world of Curran’s recent work. The interconnected digital marks that made up previous portraits are no longer bound to representation and instead appear as intensely coloured amorphous shapes in a complex animated abstraction.
Curran consciously works with digital drawing and painting software in an almost rudimentary manner in comparison to Post-Internet concerns with the constant upgrade of technologies. While Post-Internet Abstraction employs digital techniques to create slick and seductive surfaces that simulate painting, (1) Curran moves confidently from the screen to the painted surface and back again resisting the urge to conflate these mediums, never confusing the handmade with the digital.
I have visited Curran’s studio a number of times over the past twelve months and spent time with him looking and talking about his paintings. Curran’s ability to match the colour of his digital animations is masterly. When viewed side by side on a screen one of the digital wiggles in an oil painting passes most convincingly for the same wiggle in an iPad drawing. Someone only familiar with Curran’s work online might be misled into believing there is little deviation from the digital animations to the surface of his oil paintings.
The amorphous shapes in Curran’s recent paintings have the same silhouette as the digital drawings, which resemble residue left behind by a finger moving through fog on a window. The digital gestures appear never to lose momentum as the constant pressure of the finger releases colour in opaque and unbroken intervals. Curran articulates in paint the seamlessness of his digital source material with nuanced moments of translucency and opacity. The internal structure of the painted forms in a painting such as River System, Generations in the Making (2017), vary from flat colour to a textured web, created by moving a brush through wet oil paint. The subtle variations in tone, from one colour sitting next to another along with the complex blacks that vary in sheen, such as in Sorry (2017), become apparent only when viewing the work in physical space.
While the gestures remain mediations, a recording of a previous digital iteration, they are enlivened through actions of painting. Where the digital drawings are compressed as if each mark is pushed hard up against the surface of the screen, the translucency and materiality in Curran’s recent painting breathes air into the compositions, opening up space from one mark to the next.
A recent series of screen-prints, made with the artist and printmaker Ben Rak, combine technical precision with a playful irregularity that arises out of experimenting with the subtle inconsistencies and slippages throughout the printing process. Laying bare these often veiled processes reveal the artist’s hand and decision making, evoking the language of abstract painting. In an oil pastel drawing such as Velvet Pop (2016), biomorphic forms float in fields of densely applied colour that run to the edge of the paper support. Ridges of built-up oil pastel meet at the junction of one colour and another appearing on the surface of the paper with the same humid density as the skin of oil paint.
Hanging in my living room is an inkjet drawing by American artist Amy Sillman. (2) The drawing of two figures in an embrace is made by the artist scrolling her little finger across the screen of her iPhone. It is such a simple and effortless line drawing that you can count the number of times the finger left the screen to make a new mark. The drawing is all limbs, as the arms of the two figures appear to extend beyond their own bodies, merging into each other at the moment of touch. The round-ended lozenge mark is the same signature digital gesture at the core of Curran’s visual language. Amy Sillman has been influential to a generation of contemporary painters – including Curran – who work with digital technologies alongside traditional means of painting. Laura Hoptman’s introductory essay for the exhibition The Forever Now (Museum of Modern Art 2013) claims that contemporary artists, including Sillman and others such as Laura Owens and Michael Williams (whose work relates directly to Curran’s fluid approach to figuration and abstraction), take a hybrid and trans-historical approach to painting. Hoptman argues that many contemporary artists today are approaching history as a very broad network of possibilities and move in a horizontal motion, across expansive passages of time, picking and choosing elements of the past to resolve a problem or task at hand. (3)
Curran’s work responds to a gamut of visual and historical references. In the recent oil painting Sleeping to Remember You Existed (2017) fragmented overlapping forms are suggestive of figures or objects, superimposed over multiple diagonal planes of flat colour, which allude to table tops and interior space. It shares its internal structure and restricted muted palette with analytical cubism. The bulging anamorphic shapes resemble the wooden cut-out reliefs of Dadaist Hans Arp and a whimsical light-heartedness akin to comic books and cartoons. This humour is not to be mistaken for coolness, or an ironic poke at painting. Curran’s approach to the project of painting leaves no room for sarcastic one-liners or punch lines. His fastidious and demanding practice balances the present day desire for the glowing immediacy of touch screen and digital devices with the pure joy of working with the material presence of painting.
The gestures in Curran’s new paintings, once articulations of human form, now occupy a place that is neither a concrete reality nor absent of representation of the body. The allusion to the body and the paintings all over composition relate to De Kooning who once said of his figurative drawings and paintings that ‘[t]he figure is nothing unless you twist it around like a strange miracle’. (4) The miracle of De Kooning’s figures is that they exist in the one moment as a representation of a physical body and in another a force of painted gestural dynamism. In his essay ‘Hybrids’, writer David Ryan compares paintings that morph and mutate between representation and abstraction to the uncanny and monstrous found in cinematic genres such as horror and vampire films. Successful characters in these films, Ryan explains, rely on their ability to appear simultaneously material and immaterial. (5) Like a cinematic vampire and the miraculous figures of De Kooning, Curran’s work embodies these dual states.
The digital gestures in The Unconscious is a Rectangle shift and morph on the screen. The animation has the uncanny resemblance of the ghost of an action painter, manifested by the apparition of shapes appearing and disappearing in an infinite loop. We see anguished attempts to resolve the painting by erratically overlapping forms, which then continually cover up previous compositions with an altogether new set of marks.
One of the rewarding aspects of seeing an exhibition by Tony Curran is experiencing the way in which he hangs a digital animation next to a grid of drawings, or paintings alongside a series of screen-prints. This creates a reverberation within the room as the viewer discovers a shape in one work and finds it again in a different medium: its surface transformed with a renewed materiality. It is like seeing something for the first time but with a strange hint of familiar recognition.
Footnotes
1 Wes Hill “What is Zombie Formalism”, Eyeline 84 (2015): 23.
2 Amy Sillman Thumb Cinema 2011 inkjet print on hahnemuhle paper 76cm x 56cm. Included in the exhibition Thumb Cinema Galerie Capitain Petzel Berlin November 5 – December 23 2011.
3 Laura Hoptman, The Forever Now: Contemporary Painting in an Atemporal World (New York: Museum of Modern Art New York, 2014), 13–21.
4 Roberta Smith, “The Figure: Movement and Gesture,” The New York Times, June 16 2011. http://www.nytimes.com/2011/06/17/arts/design/willem-de-kooning-the-figure- movement-and-gesture.html (accessed December 1 2017).
5 David Ryan, “Hybrids”, http://www.david-ryan.co.uk/hybrids5.html (accessed December 1 2017).
PREVIEW
Aura: Repitition, Reproduction and the Mark of the Artist
Art Guide Australia
Jane O’Sullivan
Preview, 27 July 2017
How does that old Joseph Heller quote go? Just because you’re paranoid doesn’t mean they aren’t after you. Ben Rak, the printmaker behind Aura: Repetition, Reproduction and the Mark of the Artist at the Manly Art Gallery & Museum, does seem a little touchy. Why else would you take on all the things that have traditionally dogged printmaking as a medium?
It was Walter Benjamin who said that artworks have an aura: a quality to do with imagined closeness to the artist. There was more to it, of course, but the nuances in Benjamin’s argument about how mechanical reproduction diminished this aura are perhaps beside the point. As Tim Gregory points out in his catalogue essay for Aura, the idea soon became a capitalist strategy to preserve the value of art objects. It reinforced a hierarchy of originals and second bests.
In the following decades, as the conceptual swept through the global art world, we’ve accepted readymades, studio assistants, fabricators and any number of other aura-troubling phenomena. And yet, printmaking is still regularly pitched as the affordable entry point to collecting and prints by contemporary artists rarely show up in the major Australian art auctions.
Rak’s rebuttal is to gather 10 artists, himself included, whose works turn on the supposed shortcomings of printmaking and use them as conceptual strategies. The works on show in Aura are diverse. The most traditional is perhaps Michael Kempson’s Child’s Play series: 52 etchings of soft toys. Each is a mascot for a different country and together they form a darkly satirical sort of animal kingdom. The reproach in the eyes of the bald eagle (the stand-in for the United States) is brilliant. This is a toy that knows it’s about to be left behind at the servo, and only remembered 100km down the road. In Kempson’s work reproduction is used for both dramatic effect and satire. The next leader, the next toy, will be out of the factory soon.
Erica Seccombe takes up the issue of reproducibility. in her large anaglyphic print of a toy octopus, Ocularanagluphos, from 2012. This little toy, writ large, asks us to consider how we visualise and engage with our natural world. It looks sharply sci-fi until you put on the flimsy 3D glasses. The blue and red cello lenses smudge the detail, and give little in the way of extra dimension. But what they do instead is peel the blurry sea monster off the wall, hovering it in space and untethering it from any reality.
This floating quality appears again in Anna Kristensen’s Crazy Wall II. It’s an image of paving stones with the mortar painted an iridescent copper. The pavers appear to hang in some sort of unearthly, magicked space, an effect that’s undercut as you step closer and see that the paver images are tiny printed dots. Suddenly the stones have no weight; gravity is reconfigured again. Formally, the dots also flip the work from representational to flat abstraction.
Gary Carsley is another artist who loves upsetting the old binaries. His installation Still Life with Landscape centres around a lenticular print of a vase of flowers, an image composed of obsessively-sourced patterns and colours, virtually jig-sawed together like a parquetry floor. It is simultaneously flat and textured, still and moving, craft and art.
Tony Curran is a bit of a leftfielder. Usually considered a painter, he is included here for the way he takes digitally constructed images and reproduces them in paint. Rak calls him a human printer. Also in Aura are Milan Milojevic, Alison Alder, Samuel Tupou, Judy Watson and, of course Ben Rak. Print diehards might be disappointed by the light information about each artist’s process. But the message is clear enough: these are conceptual artists, not craftspeople.
Aura: Repetition, Reproduction and the Mark of the Artist
Manly Art Gallery & Museum 14 July – 3 September
Wagga Wagga Art Gallery 9 December – 4 March 2018
Patterns of paint and program
Exhibition text by Samantha Court April, 2016
Painting is grounded in the traditional. Being a largely dominant form in Western/European art history, it’s inescapably attached to the past. However as artists continue to paint today, it also has the capacity to examine the present and imagine the future.
Tony Curran uses informed digital attitudes to explore contemporary viewer engagements with paintings. Utilising traditional and digital tools, he is interested in examining technological mediation, contemporary expressionism and how we experience authenticity.
Instances of fixed proportions considers the abstract in the context of the connected world – how digital attitudes can re-present abstract representation to communicate relatable ideas and narratives. Taking form as three paintings and a video work, the digital and the painterly are mutually concerned with the use of the surface and their influence on each other.
Sourcing visual material from previous portrait investigations, Curran isolates colour and shapes into fragments that are treated as gestural data. Using a program called The unconscious is a rectangle, the algorithms generate possible painterly compositions, making connections and patterns as a form of data-visualisation. By outsourcing the artist’s imagination to a program, Curran challenges the viewer to consider where the painter’s authenticity lies.
As a method to actualise these images as finalised artworks, Curran then translates selected compositions into paintings. Entertaining the idea of the viewer holding a unique interpretive engagement with the canvas, he uses colour and texture to re-present the digital as a personal experience. The paintings consider the abstract in their reference to styles of expressionism, but also through the processes and concepts in the forming of these works.
In the program’s computational processes, the gestural fragments are catalogued as data to be reconfigured into new visual information. In order for humans to communicate with the system, images are used in the input and output of information. In much the same way our minds have abstracted modes of thinking that are translated into speech when communicating, The unconscious is a rectangle occurs in an alternate space of algorithms and code and expresses itself through the surface of the screen.
Functioning as a work itself in the gallery, the program provides reference for the processes involved, but also acts as its own disassociated temporal composition, constantly in flux. Its form is also physical through its inherent machinery, but instead of pigment, communicates with the viewer through the light of the screen. These varied forms of exhibition invite the audience to consider the surface as a point of communication and as a potential site for ideas and forms to mediate.
When painting is traditionally informed by reality, Curran considers how reality is affected by the digital. The surface of the screen informs our decisions and ideas on a daily basis, projecting and creating structures of representation that fragment the way we view ourselves and reality. Instances of fixed proportions presents the coming together of surfaces of paint and technology in the form of abstraction. Where the digital abstracts the nature of our existence, these works communicate our adapted attitudes in an artistic context. In today’s culture, the digital is not just a tool, but a method of thinking and imagining.
References: The Post Digital Constellation, David M. Berry, 2015. Samantha Court is an Artist/ Writer from Brisbane, currently living in Melbourne.
ALMOST ILLEGIBLE
David Broker, October 2016
The history of portraiture has been framed by distortion and delusion. Even photographic portraits will often reflect how we would like to be seen rather than how we actually look. Almost Illegible is the latest installment in Tony Curran’s history of experimentation with the portrait in which he has called to question every aspect of the relationship between artist and subject - a relationship as old as the history of art. In this new exhibition Curran presents portraits as paintings, as digital video and drawings. With each step he closes in on details of the original imagery while moving further away from the tradition of a “good likeness”. It is significant that, notwithstanding David Hockney and Lucien Freud, Curran cites variously abstract influences such as Jan Arp, Sol LeWitt, and Sean Scully; and yet he never quite abandons the special affiliation between artist and sitter.
In a series of five paintings the faces of subjects are integrated with what appears to be a chaotic mire of brightly coloured abstract forms. While figuration is almost overwhelmed by the advance of abstraction, the traditions of likeness, however faint, remain within the work. Each face, emerging or disappearing, is like a vestige of Curran’s developing processes that have determinedly disrupted the curious conventions of portraiture. In Stay (2012) he invited members of the public to stay in the Wagga Wagga Gallery to have their portrait painted, firstly on an iPad, to be uploaded to a Flickr page for participants to download. Importantly in projects such as this Curran is not simply capturing and manipulating an image of the sitter but ultimately a whole community.
Curran’s paintings are transcribed from their digital source where his intitial encounter with the sitter is essentially photographic in that the first steps rely on technology. Digital colours are carefully matched to pigment colour in the production of compositions where figuration and abstraction are delicately balanced and based on the ‘performance’ that takes place during the making of a portrait. The sitter is not necessarily still and their movement might be incorporated into the image along with marks that represent a true rendition of the artist’s experience of meeting and engagement with the sitter. Thus the works have immediacy, a life that is communicated to the audience via the arrangement of colour, form and figuration.
Works on paper in paint and oil pastels are related to the portraits in that they focus on the details of what happens during production and thus they comprise a data-base mined from marks produced in the portraits. Creating his own App, Curran created a personal archive where each individual shape and colour performs a “composition generator” that is predominantly abstracted while remaining true to the form of original meetings and impressions. After multiple sittings with individuals the database of gestural information on people under observation creates what Curran refers to as “an impotent form of big-data surveillance”.
Developing an entire practice around the deconstruction of portraiture it is important to note that Curran does attempt to capture that elusive essence of the character before him. What sets him apart is the many ways he finds to achieve this end and present the results – successful or not. His portraits are exercises in edge-blurring not only between figuration and abstraction but also in his use of media or technologies. While Almost Illegible questions the limits of representation, it also collapses notions of hand-made and machine-made. Curran would prefer that his audience struggle to distinguish between drawing, painting and computer application. Setting the scene for disintegrating genres he also dexterously denies his tools the powers of exclusive expression. In doing so his exhibitions assure audiences that in the hands of an intrepid innovator, painting and drawing have vital new roles to play within the dynamic biosphere of new technologies.
Tony Curran - Artist Profile
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Secrets of a portrait master
Being perfectly still is harder than it looks and in the digital age the art of sitting for a portrait is almost a forgotten skill.
But now the foyer of the National Portrait Gallery has been tuned into a digital studio with artist Tony Curran using an i-pad to draw anyone who sits in a brown chair in front of him.
The interactive work will see Curran return every day for 33 days- Friday was day 24.
So far he has ‘‘completed’’ more than 140 portraits. The work As Long As You’re Here, is part of Curran’s PhD research.
‘‘I draw for as long as the person wants to sit...theoretically a portrait is never done, there is always more to do,’’ Curran said. He said the most common question from his subjects was ‘‘Is it done?’’
‘‘It’s done when the subject says it’s done.’’
One subject who was still sitting when the gallery closed at 5pm returned the next morning wearing the same clothes to have the portrait ‘‘completed’’.
‘‘I’ve had people sit for as long as three hours or as short as five minutes,’’ Curran said.
About 70 per cent of the subjects have been women. ‘‘I think that reflects the gender divide at gallery audiences.’’
And it’s a bargain- at a recent Sydney exhibition Curran’s digital portraits were selling for $1650, while those attending the NPG are emailed a copy of the work for free.
Richard Miller, 63, from Brisbane visited the National Portrait Gallery on Thursday. The line for a portrait was too long so he returned the next morning. ‘‘It’s just serendipity... I’ve never had my portrait done and it will be wonderful for the kids,’’ Mr Miller said.
Curran started using his i-pad as easel, paints and brush about 18 months ago.
‘‘I was working on a portrait for someone in Sydney and I was living in Wagga Wagga- carrying around paints was impractical.’’
He said the juxtaposition of a dry portraiture and new forms of contemporary art intrigued him.
Curran is self-funding the project at the gallery. He finishes the work at 5pm on Sunday November 10, but will be at the gallery every day between 10am to 1pm and 2pm to 5pm until then.
Parts of you are dying
In Tony Curran’s exhibition Parts of You Are Dying the artist has taken digital drawings and adapted them to the canvas, then further taken them into the realm of animation in digital video works. Is this drawing, painting or some form of new media, or even perhaps, eep, expanded painting? If it is the latter then it’s the most pleasurable form of post-painting imaginable, with an emphasis on colour and line, careful application and modest scale.
Based in part on the artist’s “collecting” of sitter’s body parts – that is, drawing sessions where Curran will invite a subject to sit but only make a drawing an ear or nose etc and then combine them in various works – the paintings float between figuration and abstraction in a manner that seems immediately modern and colourful with a strong flavour of British painting of the 1980s informing the work. That vibe flows into the video works with a faint suggestion of Julian Opie’s painting to animations. But wherever Curran is drawing his influence from the show is a remarkably different show in art world blighted by sameness.
Until August 3
Art Atrium, Bondi Junction.
Pic: Tony Curran, Banou, 2013. Oil on linen, 30 x 40 cm.